Gurmun said, “Pity we’ve never bothered going up into the mountains of central Ortah and teaching the Ortahoin a proper lesson, too. They deserve it, perching up there and trading with both sides and thinking they can just sit out the whole war.”
“No.” Now Rathar shook his head. “Concentration, Gurmun. We hit what’s troubling us. The Ortahoin aren’t going to come down out of their mountains and give us a hard time. We took enough of a bite out of their kingdom to get men through the lowland swamps. We don’t need more trouble with them, not with two pushes going against the redheads and another one up in Zuwayza.”
“And the war against the Gongs out in the far west,” Gurmun added. “Fair enough, lord Marshal. I see your point.” Getting Gurmun to admit that to anyone was no small feat.
“The war against the Gongs is like a one-legged fat man walking,” Rathar said. “It’s not going anywhere any time soon. We’ve made sure they can’t break out of the woods, and they’re not really trying any more, either. Their big fight is against the Kuusamans in the islands of the Bothnian Ocean.”
“They’re losing that one, too,” Gurmun said with somber satisfaction.
“Good. If they were winning in the island war, they would have more energy to put into the fight against us,” Rathar said. “And the Kuusamans and Lagoans are really running the Algarvians out of Jelgava.”
“Of course they are-the cursed Algarvians are fighting us a lot harder than they’re fighting the islanders,” Gurmun said.
“We owe them more than the Kuusamans and Lagoans do,” Rathar said. “They know it, too, and they don’t want to pay off. Look at it from their eyes, and their strategy makes pretty good sense.”
Gurmun screwed up his face. “I don’t want to look at anything from Algarvian eyes. Powers below eat all the redheads.”
“Powers below eat ‘em, aye,” Rathar said. “But sometimes you have to try to see things through their eyes. If you don’t, you won’t understand what they’re trying to do, and you’ll have a harder time beating them.” That made Gurmun look thoughtful. He did want to beat the Algarvians. Rathar could fault him for a few things, but never for lack of desire.
“The next interesting question-” Gurmun began.
Before he could say what he thought the next interesting question would be, a crystallomancer came running into the headquarters calling, “MarshalRathar! MarshalRathar!”
“I’m here,” Rathar said. “What in blazes has gone wrong now?” By the young mage’s tone, something had.
Sure enough, the fellow said, “Sir, we’ve just lost two of the bridges into the bridgehead south of Eoforwic. We almost lost the third one, too.”
“What?” Rathar and Gurmun said together, in identical tones of angry disbelief. Rathar went on, “How the demon did the redheads get so fornicating lucky?”
“Sir, it wasn’t luck,” the crystallomancer said. “They’ve got some new sorcery that’s letting them really aim some of the eggs they drop from dragons. The people down at the bridgehead don’t know just how they’re doing it, but they’ve watched eggs swerve in midair and land on the bridges or right by them in the river.”
MarshalRatharspent the next little while cursing Algarvian ingenuity. Then he turned toGeneralGurmun and said, “We have to let Addanz know about this. If the redheads can figure out a way to steer dropping eggs, our mages can figure out a way to stop them.”
“They’d better be able to, anyhow,” Gurmun said. “If they can’t, KingSwemmel will find himself a new archmage in one demon of a hurry, and Addanz will likely find himself down in the cinnabar mines in the Mamming Hills: the king’ll squeezesome use out of him, anyhow.”
Rathar reckoned the commander of behemoths almost surely right. Swemmel had a low tolerance for failure. Swemmel, come to that, had a low tolerance for almost everything. Rathar and Gurmun followed the crystallomancer down the street to the house where he and his comrades worked. With Rathar in overall command of all of Unkerlant’s fighting fronts, the crystallomancers didn’t fit into the house where he worked and slept.
When Addanz’s image appeared in a crystal, Rathar explained what had happened. The Archmage of Unkerlant nodded. “I have heard somewhat of this from the Kuusamans,” he said. “Apparently, even Mezentio’s men have trouble doing what they do. Only a handful of their mages are capable of such rapid kinetic sorcery. It may prove a nuisance, but no worse.”
“If they knock down our last route into that bridgehead, it’ll be a lot worse than a nuisance,” Rathar growled. “And if you know what Mezentio’s mages are up to, why aren’t you trying to stop it?”
“We have already begun work on countermeasures,”ArchmageAddanz said. “But these things do take a certain amount of time, and-” He blinked. “Powers above, what was that?”
Rathar didn’t answer him. That had been an egg bursting close by, close enough to startle him into biting his tongue. He tasted blood. He andGeneralGurmun dashed out of the crystallomancers’ headquarters, leaving it to the mages to break the etheric connection. Rathar needed only an instant to see what had happened: an egg had burst squarely on the building where he’d been living.
“Was that one of their steered eggs?” Gurmun asked.
“How should I know?” Rathar trotted toward his headquarters. “Let’s see if anyone’s left alive in there.
“They don’t wantyou left alive,” Gurmun said.
“That’s all right,” Rathar told him. “I don’t want them left alive, either- and I’m going to get my wish.”
Seventeen
Summer was fading fast in the Naantali district. Fernao had watched that happen before. Setubal, the capital of Lagoas and his home town, didn’t have the best weather in the world. Not even the most ardent Lagoan patriot could have claimed otherwise-not when, in peacetime, COME TO BALMY BALVl! broadsheets sprouted like mushrooms on walls and fences every autumn. But even Setubal looked subtropical when measured against the wastelands of southeastern Kuusamo.
Even before nights turned longer than days, the grass started going from green to yellow. Birds began flying north, first by ones and twos and then in enormous flocks. More and more clouds boiled up from the south, so that even when it was daylight, gloom held sway more often than not.
The worsening weather perfectly fit Fernao’s mood. The rattle and scrape and bang of hammers and saws and chisels and other tools as Kuusaman construction crews raced to repair the hostel after the Algarvians dropped their steerable egg on it did little to improve his spirits, either.
“Don’t worry about a thing,” Ilmarinen told him at supper one evening. “If they aren’t ready before the snow starts falling, I’m sure all of us Kuusaman mages know the ancient art of building snow houses. We’d be happy to teach it to you, so you can stay as warm and cheerful as we do.”
“Thank you so much.” Fernao cast about for a word in Kuusaman, didn’t find it, and switched to classical Kaunian: “Can you quantify exactly how warm and cheerful you will be?”
“Oh, of course,” Ilmarinen said. “Can you provide me with an appropriation to investigate it with all the latest sorcerous techniques?”
Fernao took a tiny copper bit from his belt pouch. “Here you are.”
“Excellent!” Ilmarinen scooped up the coin. “You may expect your answer in about ten thousand years.”
He laughed uproariously. Fernao laughed, too. Glum or not, he couldn’t help it. Ilmarinen worked hard at being outrageous, and was good at what he did.
“What’s funny?” Pekka asked as she sat down at the table with them. Fernao explained. Pekka gave Ilmarinen a severe look. “Snow houses, indeed,” she said. “When was the last time you made a snow house or herded reindeer like our ancestors?”
“Day before yesterday,” he answered, as seriously as if it were true.
Noise from down the hall covered Fernao’s snort and Pekka’s cough. She said, “I’ll tell you what worries me: all those carpenters. I’m sure the Algarvians will have tri
ed to put spies among them.”
“Hard for an Algarvian to look like a Kuusaman,” Fernao said. That gave him an excuse to look at her and to admire the way she looked. When the steerable egg burst by the hostel, all he’d worried about was whether she was all right. The sorcery they were working on hadn’t mattered a bit.
But Pekka and Ilmarinen both shook their heads. “Plenty of masking sorceries,” Pekka said.
“A good many of them used against the Algarvians here and there,” Ilmarinen added, speaking with considerable authority. He had knowledge and sources for knowledge at which Fernao couldn’t begin to guess. “Wouldn’t be too surprising if they tried to get some of their own back.”
“There are ways to look behind such masks, I’m sure,” Fernao said.
“Oh, aye.” Ilmarinen spoke with authority again. “Anything one mage can figure out how to make, another mage can figure out how to break.”
Pekka gave her order to a serving girl even as she nodded. “That’s right. It leaves me with two worries on my mind: that Mezentio’s mages haven’t done something particularly clever that we don’t notice, and that we do our checks on all the workmen and don’t let any slip past unexamined.”
Fernao called for a mug of ale. When it came, he sipped slowly. The ale gave him an excuse to pick at his supper. Ilmarinen, on the other hand, ate as if he were stoking a roaring fire. Rising from his seat just as the girl brought Pekka’s food, he leered down at Fernao. “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t enjoy,” he said, and went off whistling.
“He’s a nuisance,” Fernao said.
One of Pekka’s eyebrows quirked upward. “You just noticed?” she said, and applied herself to her chop.
Well, you got what you wanted, Fernao thought. You ‘re alone with her, or as alone as you can be inside the refectory with a lot of other people eating, too. Now what are you going to say?
He didn’t say anything. He couldn’t say anything. He felt as callow and nervous as he had when a youth calling on a girl for the first time. He just sat there, still picking at his food, sipping the ale, and enjoying her company as much as he could. After a bit, she started talking shop. He had no trouble doing that, save for the occasional word that, likequantify, came out in classical Kaunian because he couldn’t come up with it in Kuusaman.
He called for more ale and for a mouth-puckeringly tart gooseberry pastry so he wouldn’t have to get up and leave as Ilmarinen had. Then he left the pastry half eaten when Pekka finished her supper faster than he’d expected. Getting to his feet in a hurry wasn’t easy or comfortable, but he did it anyway.
Pekka noticed, of course. “Are you following me?” she asked, sounding somewhere between amused and alarmed.
“I can’t very well leave the refectory without following you,” he answered, which had the twin advantages of being true and not requiring him to sayaye.
It also got a smile from Pekka, who said, “All right.”
But Fernao, suddenly bold, went on, “Will you come back to my chamber with me?”
“What? Why?” Now Pekka definitely sounded alarmed. “Are you planning on stopping more scandal? Remember what happened the last time. We just started some-and made our lives more… complicated.”
“I know,” Fernao said. By then, they were out in the hall, away from the crowd inside the eating chamber. “Come or not, however you like. I’m not going to try to molest you. I think you know that much. If you don’t, you’d better not come.”
He limped on toward his chamber. He still hadn’t got used to limping. He didn’t know why-he was going to limp for the rest of his life-but he hadn’t. He looked down at his feet and at the rubber tip to his cane. He didn’t want to look over his shoulder to see whether Pekka was following- part of him didn’t want to, anyhow. But he couldn’t keep his eyes from sliding toward where she would be if she was… and she was. He breathed a silent sigh of relief, then wondered if he should have. He was, he knew, liable to make things worse, not better.
After opening the door to the bare little room, he stood aside to let Pekka in before him. “Sit down,” he said, shutting the door behind them. “Make yourself comfortable.”
Pekka didn’t. She stood there in the middle of the floor like a nervous bird that would fly away the instant it saw the slightest motion. The comparison, Fernao feared, was liable to be all too apt.
“What is it?” Pekka asked in tones as brittle as her stance. “What did you need to bring me here to say? Should we have anything to say to each other that we can’t say where everyone can hear?”
“I don’t know. By the powers above, I don’t.” But Fernao remembered how they’d clung after the Algarvian egg burst by the hostel, when each had feared the other dead. He took a deep breath and went on in a rush: “By the powers above, though, I do know that I love you. I’ve never felt like this about any other woman before, and I’m not interested in feeling like this about any other woman ever again. There. That’s all.”
Pekka turned and took a long step toward the door. Fernao thought she was going to flee on the instant. If she did… What would he do if she did? Get drunk and stay drunk for a week was the first thing that came to mind.
But she stopped and turned back so suddenly, it was more like a whirl.
Her face was as pale as he’d ever seen it. “Why did you have to go and say a thing like that?” she demanded, and she sounded furious.
“Because it’s the truth, curse it,” Fernao answered stubbornly, hopelessly. “Because I didn’t care whether I lived when that egg came down till I saw you were all right. If that isn’t reason enough, what is?” He sounded angry, too, and he was-angry at the world that wouldn’t let him have what he wanted most.
Pekka stared at him. She’d gone even whiter, and he hadn’t thought she could. Tears glistened in her eyes, as they had after she’d made love with him that first-and only-time. In a tiny voice, hardly more than a whisper, she said, “If I told you I felt the same way, what would you do?”
Fernao’s cane almost slipped from his fingers. Having hoped for words like those, he had trouble believing he’d really heard them. He also had trouble coming up with an answer. Almost too late, he realized words weren’t what he needed. He did let the cane fall, but only because he’d taken Pekka in his arms. He bent down to her at the same time as she was tilting her face up to him.
Not very much later, and without another word between them, they lay down close together on his bed. They had to lie close together; the bed was too narrow for anything else. Pekka sighed as Fernao went into her. But her eyes were shut. Then, though, with what Fernao thought a deliberate act of will, she opened them and looked up at him from a distance of only a couple of inches. And then, for a little while, Fernao stopped thinking at all.
Afterwards, he wondered if she would bolt from his chamber as she had the first time. They’d surprised themselves by becoming lovers then. This time, they’d known what they were doing. And Pekka understood as much, for she asked, “What are we going to do now?” It was a serious question, not the dismay-filled one she’d asked after they joined before.
“Whatever you like,” he answered. “I know you’re the one with the hard choices to make. You need to know I’d be glad to marry you and live with you in Kajaani or Setubal or wherever you please, if that’s what you want to do. I hope it is.”
“I don’t know,” Pekka said. “Right now, I have no idea what I’m going to do. I have to th-”
Fernao knew what he was going to do right then, and he did it: he kissed her. That not only kept her from talking, it kept her-and him-from thinking for some time longer. He hadn’t known he could make love twice in such quick succession, not in his mid-thirties and not after the battering his body had taken.
But, no matter how pleasantly worn he and Pekka were after gasping their way to delight for a second time, Pekka asked her question over again: “What are we going to do now?”
“We’ll just have to see,” Fernao said. Pekka frowned
thoughtfully, then nodded.
ColonelSabrinohad never been in Yanina before. When the war against Unkerlant began, he’d been stationed in the north, flying out of Forthweg. He wished with all his heart he weren’t in Yanina now. Had the Algarvians and Yaninans and Grelzers and the soldiers from Plegmund’s Brigade and the Phalanx of Valmiera been able to haltKingSwemmel ’s latest bludgeon of an assault, he wouldn’t have been in Yanina. As things were…
As things were, the tattered remnants of his wing of dragonfliers and the equally ragged remains of MajorScoufas ’ were flying out of a makeshift dragon farm on the outskirts of the town of Kastritsi, north and west of Patras, KingTsavellas ’ capital. The Unkerlanters had paused only a couple of miles outside of Kastritsi; the people there fled east as fast as they could go, on foot or in wagons or on unicorns and horses and donkeys. They clogged the roads, making it harder for the soldiers trying to hold back Swemmel’s men to get where they needed to go.
Some of the men fleeing Kastritsi should have been in Tsavellas’ army. Some of them, almost without a doubt, were in Tsavellas’ army, but had somehow got their hands on civilian clothes.
When Sabrino remarked on that, CaptainOrosio nodded. “Next thing’ll be, they’ll start running without bothering to take their uniforms off first.” He spat. “It won’t be long, I bet.”
“I wish I thought you were wrong,” Sabrino said.
“So what in blazes are we going to do about it?” the squadron commander asked.
Before answering, Sabrino looked toward the center of Kastritsi. The taller buildings-those still standing, anyway-sported strangely painted onion domes that reminded him he was in a foreign kingdom. He sighed. “I don’t think wecan do anything about it except to go on fighting the Unkerlanters as hard as we can for as long as we can. Have you got any better ideas?”
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