Darkness Descending

Ten

Skarnu hiked past Pavilosta toward Dauktu’s farm. He carried a headless chicken by the feet. If an Algarvian patrol questioned him, he’d say he owed it to the other farmer. He didn’t expect to be stopped--the Algarvians were spread thin in Valmiera these days, with the war sucking soldiers to the west--but he didn’t believe in taking chances.

He’d never tramped country roads in wintertime till coming to the farm that had been Gedominu’s and now was Merkela’s--and, in an odd way, his. The leather jacket he wore had been Gedominu’s, too. It didn’t fit very well, but kept warm those parts of him it did cover. He’d had to buy new boots; he couldn’t squeeze his feet into Gedominu’s. After a couple of walks along country roads, the boots had got muddy and battered enough not to look new any more.

But for the mud and the cold, the countryside had a certain austere beauty. His sister would have sneered at it, but his sister was in the habit of sneering at everything. Bare trees and empty fields were not so much in and of themselves, but they held the promise of future growth. Looking at them as they were, he could see them as they would be. He hadn’t been able to do that before.

A squirrel with a nut in its mouth scurried up the trunk of an oak tree. It knew to keep the tree trunk between itself and Skarnu. Living in a mansion down in Priekule, he would have turned up his nose at the idea of squirrel stew. Merkela had taught him it could be surprisingly tasty.

“Not today, little fellow,” he told the squirrel as he walked past the oak. The squirrel chattered indignantly; it had to think he’d prove a liar if he got the chance, and it was very likely right.

He’d skirted Pavilosta, and saw no one on the road before he got to Dauktu’s farm. Winter for the peasantry, he’d found, was a time of pulling back, offending one’s own, of preparing for the spring sowing. It was not a time for dances and feasts, as it was among the nobles of Valmiera. Skarnu kicked a pebble in a show of defiance. Count Simanu would give no dances this winter, host no feasts for his Algarvian friends and overlords. I made sure of that, Skarnu thought.

Triumph filled him, which meant he needed longer than he should have to notice that no smoke curled up from the chimney of Dauktu’s farmhouse. When he did notice that, he frowned; on a day like this, he would have wanted a good fire roaring in the fireplace. And Dauktu had plenty of firewood: a big pile, covered by a canvas tarpaulin, stood by the barn.

Still, Skarnu didn’t think much of it. If Dauktu and his wife and their daughter preferred bundling themselves to the eyebrows, that was their business. Swinging the chicken as he walked, Skarnu drew near the farmhouse.

Then he noticed the front door standing open. He stopped in his tracks.

“Something’s wrong,” he muttered, and stood irresolute, not knowing whether to go forward or to flee. In the end, warily, he went forward.

When he got closer still, he saw the door had something written on it. Scratching his head, he took step by cautious step till he could read it. It was five words in all, daubed on with whitewash that had run: SIMANU’S VENGEANCE--NIGHT AND FOG.

He scratched his head again. “What’s that supposed to mean?” he asked the winter air. He got no answer. He raised his voice and called Dauktu’s name. Again, no answer. Wondering if he should go back, he went forward again.

All at once, the quiet seemed eerie. When Skarnu set foot on the wooden steps leading up to the porch, the thunk of his bootheel made him start in alarm. He called Dauktu’s name once more. Not a sound came from the house. He went inside, though half of him was warning that he ought to turn tail. Too late for that anyway, he thought.

Something in the front room moved. Skarnu froze. So did the red fox that had been eating from the plate spilled on the floor. The fox darted under a rough-hewn chair. Skarnu went into the kitchen. The oven was as cold and dead as the fireplace. When he walked back into the front room, the fox had scurried away.

“Dauktu?” he called up the stairway. Only silence answered him. Normally, he would never have presumed to go up to the farmer’s bedchamber uninvited. Now... Now he didn’t think it would matter.

The bedchamber was neat and empty. So was the smaller one across the hall, which had to belong to Dauktu’s daughter. As far as Skarnu could see by anything up there, the other farmer and his family might just have stepped away for a moment. They’d stepped away, all right. The spilled plate of food downstairs argued that they weren’t ever coming back.

“Night and fog,” Skarnu murmured. He’d never seen the phrase before. He didn’t know exactly what it meant, but it couldn’t have meant anything good for Dauktu and his wife and daughter.

Skarnu went back downstairs, and then back out of the farmhouse. He stared at the words painted on the doorway. Ever so slowly, he shook his head. Still carrying the chicken, he started the long walk back to the farmhouse where he lived. It seemed much longer than the walk out to Dauktu’s house had. He’d been bubbling with ideas on how to strike another blow against the Algarvian occupiers of Valmiera. Unless he was dreadfully wrong, they’d struck a blow of their own.

Again, the road might have been deserted but for him. Everyone else might have vanished--vanished into night and fog, he thought uneasily, and his shiver had nothing to do with the weather.

When he got back, he breathed a silent sigh of relief to see Merkela scattering chicken feed in front of the barn. If disaster had struck Dauktu’s farm, it might have struck here, too. But no: there stood Raunu not far away, nailing a fence rail to a post. Skarnu waved to both of them.

They waved back. Raunu called, “What’s the matter? Dauktu didn’t want that scrawny old hen, so you had to bring it back?”

Merkela laughed. Skarnu knew he would have laughed, too, had he found things different at Dauktu’s farm. But he said, “He wasn’t there.” His voice came out as flat as if he were reciting a lesson in a primer.

Merkela went on feeding the chickens. She didn’t know what that flat tone meant. Raunu, who’d seen combat since before Skarnu was born, did. Instead of asking where the other peasant had gone, he found the right question on the first try: “What happened to him?”

That made Merkela stop scattering grain and come to alertness herself. Skarnu answered, “Night and fog.” He explained how he’d found the words painted on Dauktu’s door, and what he’d discovered when he went into the farmhouse.

“Simanu’s vengeance, eh?” Raunu looked unhappy. “Did they pick him because he was one of us, or just because they pulled his name out of a hat? And if they wanted to avenge Simanu, why didn’t they leave his body there, and his family dead with him?”

“I don’t know the answer to either of those.” Skarnu felt as unhappy as Raunu looked. “I’d like to, especially the first.”

“If people get killed, everyone knows how it happened,” Merkela said. “If they just disappear, everybody wonders. Did the redheads take them away and murder them somewhere else? Or are they still alive and suffering because the Algarvians don’t want to let them die?”

“There’s a pleasant thought,” Skarnu said. After a bit of thought, he admitted, “It makes better sense than anything I came up with on the way back here.”

“Aye.” Raunu nodded. “It’d be like the Algarvians to try and put us in fear.”

“If they are torturing Dauktu and his kin, they’ve put me in fear,” Skarnu said. “Who knows what a man’s liable to blab when they’re pulling out his toenails or working over his daughter in front of him?”

“They won’t take me alive,” Merkela declared. Like any farm woman, she wore a knife on her belt. She caressed its hilt as she might have caressed Skarnu. “Powers below eat me if I’ll give them any sport or let them squeeze anything out of me.”

“We’d all be smart to go armed some way or another for a while,” Raunu said. Skarnu nodded, wondering if he’d be able to find the courage to slay himself. To save himself from Algarvian torment, he thought he might.

He slept close by his stick that night. But the Algarvians did not come, as they--or perhaps Simanu’s henchmen, acting with their leave--had come to Dauktu’s farm. The next morning, Raunu went into Pavilosta to buy salt and nails and, with luck, sugar: things the farm couldn’t make for itself. The veteran under-officer took along a blade of his own, long enough to reach his heart.

After he’d vanished around a bend in the road, Skarnu and Merkela, without a word spoken, set aside their chores, hurried upstairs to her bedchamber, and made love. This time, he was as desperately urgent as she usually was; he wondered if it might be the last, and did his best to give himself something to savor for however long he had. When pleasure drowned him, he groaned as he might have under an Algarvian torturer’s whip.

Drained, emptied, numb, he and Merkela went back out to the endless farm-work. He did it at about half speed, waiting for Raunu or King Mezentio’s men: whoever chanced to come to the farm first.

It was Raunu, a little bent under the weight of the pack on his back but his face glowing with news. “There must be a dozen of those ‘Simanu’s vengeance--night and fog’ signs in town,” he said as he set down his burden. “Not a one that I could tell was on the door of anybody who’s fighting the redheads. They just picked people, powers above knows how, and now nobody knows what’s become of’em.”

“That’s good to hear,” Skarnu said. “Good for anybody except the folk who had it happen to them, I mean.”

“Night and fog,” Merkela repeated musingly. “They want people to wonder what’s happened to whoever they took, all right. Are they dead? Are they under torture, like we said before? Or are the redheads doing . . . what the stories we hear talk about?”

Skarnu’s lips pulled back from his teeth in a horrid grimace. “One more thing I hadn’t thought of. One more thing I wish you hadn’t thought of, either.”

“There may not be any Kaunians left alive in the world if the Algarvians have their way,” Merkela said.

“They haven’t taken anyone from Valmiera or Jelgava,” Skarnu said. “We’d have heard if they started doing anything like that.”

“Would we?” That was Raunu, not Merkela. He added three words: “Night and fog.”

“We’re still fighting,” Skarnu said. “I don’t know what else we can do. They won’t get anything cheap, not from this county they won’t.”

“Aye.” Merkela’s angry nod sent a lock of her pale hair flipping down over her eyes. Brushing it back with a hand, she went on, “They say Simanu’s had his revenge. We haven’t even started taking ours yet.”

“Keeping ourselves alive, staying in the fight--that’s a kind of victory all by itself,” Skarnu said. He wouldn’t have thought so, not when the war was new and his noble blood entitled him to don shiny captain’s badges. He knew better now.

Bembo lifted a glass of wine in salute to Sergeant Pesaro. “Here’s to some time well spent in Gromheort,” the constable said.

“Aye.” Pesaro tilted his head back to upend his own glass, giving Bembo a splendid view of several of his chins. He waved to the busy barmaid. “Two more glasses of red here, sweetheart.” The Forthwegian woman nodded to show she’d heard him. He turned back to Bembo. “I’m glad not to spend all day on my feet marching, I’ll tell you that.”

“That’s the truth, sure enough,” Bembo agreed. The barmaid came by with an earthenware pitcher and refilled their glasses. Since Bembo had bought the last round, Pesaro set a small silver coin down on the table. The barmaid took it. As she went off to serve someone else, Pesaro reached out and pinched her backside.

She sprang in the air and gave him a dirty look. “You shouldn’t have done that,” Bembo said mournfully. “Now she’ll spend the rest of the day pretending not to notice us.”

“She’d better not,” Pesaro growled. “Besides, it’s not like I’m the only one in this tavern who’s ever got his hands on that arse.”

Looking around, Bembo had to nod. Because it was across the street from their barracks, the tavern was always full of Algarvian constables--and Algarvians had never been shy about putting their hands on women, their own or those of the kingdoms they’d overrun. “Will she sleep with you for silver?” Bembo asked.

“Curse me if I know,” Pesaro answered. “I never thought she was pretty enough to try and find out. The blond wenches in the soldiers’ brothels look a lot better to me.”

“Well, I won’t tell you you’re wrong about that,” Bembo said. “All these Forthwegian women are built like bricks.” He started to say something more, but then pointed to another constable a couple of tables away. “Oh, powers above! Almonio’s gone and drunk himself into another crying jag.”

Pesaro cursed as he twisted on his stool. He had to push it back to get his belly past the front of the table. He too watched the young constable sitting there with tears streaming down his face. Almonio was very drunk; a pitcher like the one the barmaid carried lay on its side, empty, on the table in front of him. “Miserable bugger,” Pesaro said, shaking his head. “I don’t know why he ever thought he could be a constable.”

“Sergeant, you never should have let him beg off hauling Kaunians out of their houses with the rest of us,” Bembo said. “I don’t like it, either--that’s another reason I’m glad I’m back in Gromheort, aside from all the marching I’m not doing--but I pull my weight.” He looked down at himself. “And I’ve got a deal of weight to pull, too.” If he hadn’t said it, Pesaro would have, though he carried even more weight than Bembo.

As things were, Pesaro emptied his new glass of wine before asking, “You think he’d be better if I made him do it?”

“You’re the one who always says things like there’s nothing like a boot in the arse to concentrate the brain,” Bembo answered.

“I know, I know.” Pesaro waved for the barmaid again. Sure enough, she pretended not to see him. Muttering, the constabulary sergeant said, “He hasn’t got the stomach for the job as is. I just thought I’d make things worse if I held him to it, so I didn’t.”

“Me, I haven’t got the stomach for hard work,” Bembo said.

“Never would have noticed,” Pesaro said in tones that made Bembo wince. Pesaro called out to Almonio: “Powers above, man, pull yourself together.”

“I’m sorry, Sergeant,” the young constable replied. “I can’t help thinking about what happens to the Kaunians when we ship ‘em west. You know it as well as I do. I know you know. Why doesn’t it drive you mad, too?”

“They’re the enemy,” Pesaro said with assurance. “You always hit the enemy as hard as you can. That’s the rules.”

Almonio shook his head. “They’re just people. Men and women and children with blond hair and a funny language out of old times. A few of’em were soldiers, aye, but we don’t do anything special to the Forthwegians who yielded, or not to most of’em, anyway. The women and children sure never hurt us.”

“All Kaunians are out to get us,” Pesaro said. “The Kaunians in Jelgava almost took Tricarico away from us, in case you forgot. They’ve hated us ever since we knocked their dusty old Empire flat all those years ago, and they’ve really hated us since the Six Years’ War. That’s what King Mezentio says, and I think he’s dead right.”

But Almonio only shook his head again. Then he folded his arms on the table, bent forward, and fell asleep. Bembo said, “He’ll be better when he comes around--till the next time he gets drunk, anyhow.”

“Take him back to the barracks and pour him into his cot,” Pesaro said.

“What, by myself?” Bembo said.

Pesaro grunted. He knew Bembo put no more effort into anything than he had to. But at the last minute, the sergeant relented. “Oh, all right. There’s Evodio over there by the wall. Hey, Evodio! Aye, you--who’d you think I was talking to? Come on and give Bembo a hand.”

Evodio gave Bembo two fingers, at any rate: an Algarvian obscene gesture at least as old as any Kaunian ruins. Bembo cheerfully returned it. They draped one of Almonio’s limp arms across each of their shoulders and half dragged, half carried him across the street.

“We ought to leave him here,” Bembo said while they were crossing the cobbles. “Maybe a wagon running over his head would pound some sense into him.”

“It’s a dirty business we’re in,” Evodio said. “Maybe even dirtier than soldiering, because soldiers have real enemies who can blaze back in front of’em.”

Bembo stared at him in some surprise. “How come you weren’t crying your head off with him, if you feel like that?”

Evodio shrugged, almost dropping his half of Almonio. “I can take it. I don’t think we’ve got anything to be proud of, though.”

Since Bembo didn’t think the Algarvian constables had anything to be proud of, either, he kept quiet. Between them, they got the sodden Almonio into his cot. One of the constables in a dice game on the floor of the barracks looked up with a grin. “He’s going to be miserable when he wakes up, the poor, sorry son of a whore,” he predicted.

“He was pretty miserable already, or he wouldn’t have gotten this drunk,” Bembo answered.

“Ah, one of those, eh?” the other constable said. “Well, let him spend a while longer in this business and he’ll figure out you’re wasting your time if you get upset over stuff you can’t do anything about.” The next roll of the dice went against him, and he cursed furiously.

With a laugh, Bembo began, “You’re wasting your time if you get upset--”

“Oh, shut up,” the other constable said.

When Bembo stuck his nose outside the barracks the next morning, he shivered. Most of the time, Gromheort wasn’t that much cooler than Tricarico. But the wind that blew out of the southwest today had a nasty chill reminiscent of the broad plains of Unkerlant from which it had come. “Just my luck,” Bembo grumbled as he headed out on patrol. He was always ready to pity himself, since no one else seemed interested in the job.

He took some consolation in seeing that the Forthwegians and Kaunians on the street looked as unhappy and put upon as he felt. Some of them had mufflers wrapped around their necks and heavy cloaks over their tunics or trousers, but more, like Bembo, simply had to make do. When a particularly nasty gust blew in under his kilt, he envied the Kaunians their trousers.

By now, he’d found a number of places whose proprietors were good for a handout. He stopped in at one of them for a mug of tea sweetened with honey. He drank it so fast, it burned his mouth. He didn’t much care. It put some warmth in his belly, too, which was what he’d had in mind.

As he started tramping the pavement again, a wagonful of laborers clattered past, its iron-tired wheels loud on the cobbles. Most of the laborers were Forthwegians, a few Kaunians. The blonds looked even scrawnier and more ragged than the Forthwegians. They didn’t get paid as much for the same work. Bembo’s sympathy was fleeting at best. Those Kaunians could have been a lot worse off, and he knew it.

“Good morning to you, Constable,” one of the laborers called. He was a Forthwegian, but used classical Kaunian--a good thing, too, because Bembo still hadn’t learned more than a handful of words in the Forthwegian language.

After a moment, he recognized the laborer as the fellow who’d helped him find the barracks when he was new to Gromheort and very lost. He didn’t want to speak Kaunian where a lot of people could hear him doing it. He did take off his hat and wave it to the Forthwegian. That seemed to do the job; the black-bearded young man waved a hand in return.

A couple of blocks later, Bembo heard a man and a woman shouting at each other in Forthwegian. Setting a hand on the bludgeon he wore on his belt, he turned a corner and tramped down a muddy alley to find out what was going on. “What’s all this about?” he said loudly, in Algarvian. Whether anybody would understand him was liable to be a different question, but he’d worry about that later.

Sudden silence fell. The man, Bembo saw, was a prosperous-looking Forthwegian, the woman a Kaunian who had strumpet written all over her. Strumpet or not, she turned out to speak Algarvian. Pointing to the man, she said, “He cheated me. I gave him what he wanted, and now he won’t pay.”

“This bitch lies,” the Forthwegian said, also in Algarvian--maybe he’d done business across the border before the war broke out. “I ask you, Officer--do you think I’d want a drab like this?”

“Never can tell,” Bembo said--he’d heard of plenty of rich Algarvians with peculiar tastes, so why not a Forthwegian, too? Turning to the woman, he asked, “What do you say he wanted from you?”

“My mouth,” she answered at once. “I know him--he’s too lazy to screw.”

Ignoring the Forthwegian’s bellow of fury, Bembo glanced at the knees of the Kaunian woman’s trousers. They had fresh mud on them. He hefted the bludgeon. “Pay up,” he told the Forthwegian.

The man cursed and fumed, but reached into his belt pouch and slapped silver into the Kaunian woman’s hand. He stomped off, still muttering under his breath. The Kaunian woman eyed Bembo. “Now I suppose you’ll take half of this--or maybe all of it,” she said.

“No,” he answered, and then wondered why. A small offering to make up for all the blonds he’d herded into caravan cars? He didn’t know. Then he had a new thought. “There’s something else you might do....”

“I wondered if you’d say that,” she answered with weary cynicism. “Well, come here.” When he walked out of the alley a few minutes later, he was whistling. This had all the makings of a fine morning.

Retreat again, retreat through heavy snow even this far north. Leudast shivered and cursed and tugged at the hem of his white smock as he stumbled along what might have been the road running back toward Cottbus. Algarvian dragons thought it was the road; eggs kept falling out of the sky along with the snow. Every so often, Unkerlanter soldiers would shriek as one of the eggs burst close enough to wound.

“Sir,” Leudast called out Captain Hawart when the regimental commander came close enough to recognize, “sir, are we going to be able to hold them out of the capital?”

“They won’t take Cottbus till every last man defending it is dead,” Hawart said.

For a moment, that reassured Leudast. Then he realized that all those deaths might not be enough. He trudged past a small field littered with corpses: Unkerlanter peasants slain by Unkerlanter mages in a desperate effort to blunt the power of the murderous sorcery the redheads aimed at their kingdom.

What sort of funeral pyre would King Swemmel light to hold the Algarvians out of Cottbus? Thinking about it made Leudast’s blood run colder than the miserable winter weather around him. He hoped it wouldn’t come to that. If it didn’t, he and his battered comrades would have to be the ones who kept it from happening.

Some great shapes came lumbering across a field toward him. He started to bring up his stick, an automatic--and mostly futile--reaction whenever he saw behemoths. From behind him, Sergeant Magnulf called, “Don’t blaze at those buggers. They’re ours.”

The behemoths were indeed moving east, to oppose the advancing Algarvians. “We do keep sending ‘em into the fight,” Leudast allowed. “Now if only they’d last a little longer, we’d be better off.”

He didn’t realize a village lay ahead till he was marching through its outskirts.

“Peel off!” Hawart shouted to his men. “Peel off! We’re going to make a stand here. We’re going to make a stand at every village we come to from now on. We’re going to keep making stands till none of us is left standing.”

Leudast went into a peasant hut much like the one in which he’d lived till King Swemmel’s impressers dragged him into the army. Being out of the wind made him feel warmer. He peered through a window, then nodded. He had a good view to the east, though with the snow he didn’t know how soon he’d see the Algarvians. But they would see him no sooner.

He’d hardly found a spot he liked before the Algarvians started tossing eggs at the village. The flimsy walls of the hut shook around Leudast; he wondered if the roof beams were going to come down on his head. “Efficiency,” he said, with no small bitterness. King Swemmel preached it. The Algarvians seemed to know what it really meant. All through the war, their egg-tossers had kept up with the fighting better than Unkerlant’s. One more reason we’ve got our backs to Cottbus, Leudast thought.

He knew what was coming next. After they’d softened up the position with eggs, the Algarvians would probe it and try to outflank it. He didn’t know what sort of defenses lay to either side. He did know the redheads would get a bloody nose if they tried pounding straight through.

“Here they come!” somebody shouted.

Leudast peered through the window. Sure enough, little dark shapes were moving toward him through the snow. The Algarvians hadn’t thought to use white smocks and hoods of their own to make themselves less conspicuous against an equally white background. Knowing Mezentio’s men could overlook something like that made Leudast feel oddly better.

He rested his stick on the bottom of the window frame and waited. Keeping it there would steady his aim. Before the Algarvians got close enough for him to start blazing, Captain Hawart’s rear guard east of the village sent beams their way. A few redheads fell. The rest had to slow down and develop the Unkerlanter position, to see what sort of opposition they faced.

Eggs started falling again, this time in front of the village. Leudast cursed. The Algarvians also had far more crystals than did his countrymen, had them and used them. Leudast wished the Unkerlanter egg-tossers were so flexibly directed--far from the first time he’d made that wish.

And then, as if to prove even an Unkerlanter corporal could get lucky once in a while, a great torrent of eggs rained down on the advancing Algarvians. Snow and dirt flew. So did bodies. Leudast whooped. He yelled himself hoarse. Someone, for once, had done the right thing at the right time. “See how you like that, you stinking whoresons!” he shouted in delight. “You don’t buy anything cheap today.”

He wondered if the Algarvians would have to murder another few dozen or few hundred Kaunian captives to get the magical boost they needed to push forward. He wondered if his own kingdom’s mages would have to murder more Unkerlanter peasants to withstand that magic and even to hurl it back on its creators. He wondered if anything would be left of Unkerlant by the time the two armies and the two sets of mages were done with the kingdom.

Instead of magic, the Algarvians chose behemoths. Half a dozen of the big beasts lumbered toward the village. An egg had to burst almost on top of one of them to do it much harm. Twice Leudast shouted when a behemoth was knocked off its feet. Each time, he moaned a moment later when the animal staggered up and came on once more. The behemoths’ advance was all the more frightening for being so slow and deliberate; enough snow lay on the ground to hamper their movements.

Hawart’s rear guard had no real chance to do anything against the behemoths. They were so heavily armored, the only way a footsoldier with an ordinary stick could hope to bring one down was with a blaze through the eye. That was possible. It was very far from likely.

As they usually did, the Algarvian behemoths paused well outside the village. Four of them carried egg-tossers, which they used to pound the place some more. The other two bore heavy sticks. When they blazed, the beams they sent forth were like swords of light. They quickly set a couple of houses afire. Had one of those beams pierced Leudast, he would have died without knowing what struck him. There were worse ways to go in war. He was convinced of that; he’d seen too many, seen them and listened to them, too.

But before a heavy stick could swing his way, the behemoths and their crews were distracted by something off to their left. Leudast couldn’t tell what it was without sticking his head out the window, which struck him as a good way to get a hole blazed through it. He stayed where he was and waited. With peasant patience, he understood he’d find out sooner or later what was going on.

And he did. Several Unkerlanter behemoths advanced against their Algarvian counterparts. They started tossing eggs at the behemoths on which King Mezentio’s men rode. The Algarvian crews knew they were a greater danger than whatever footsoldiers might be defending the village.

When artists illustrated battles among behemoths, and when people talked about them, they always depicted and described the beasts charging full tilt at one another so they could use their horns to deadly effect. That did happen--in mating skirmishes, when the bulls fought without crews and without man-made weapons mounted on their backs. In war, such charges were all but unknown. Eggs and sticks did the bulk of the righting, not the animals themselves.

A beam from a heavy stick tore through the chainmail an Algarvian behemoth wore. Leudast could hear the beast’s agonized bellow. He cheered as the behemoth tottered and fell. Then a great blast of noise announced that an egg had indeed landed right on top of an Unkerlanter behemoth, not only slaying the beast but also touching off the eggs it carried. Leudast groaned as loudly as he’d cheered a moment before.

As the long-range duel among the behemoths went on, Leudast noticed something strange. The Algarvian beasts and their crews fought as if they were the fingers on a single hand, while each Unkerlanter behemoth might have been the only one on the field. He didn’t know whether the redheads had crystals aboard all their behemoths or whether they were simply better trained to work together than the Unkerlanters, but the difference told. They lost two more of their behemoths, but after a while none of the Unkerlanter beasts remained in the fight.

The surviving Algarvian behemoths went back to pounding the village. An egg burst just behind the house in which Leudast was sheltering. The sudden release of sorcerous energies knocked him to his knees. He scrambled up again, his ears ringing; the next Algarvian assault wouldn’t wait long.

“Here they come!” That dreaded shout rang out again. This time, though, Leudast knew at least a little relief to go with the dread: someone besides him had survived.

He cautiously peered out the window once more. Sure enough, the redheads were moving forward in loose open order. No beam, no egg, would slay more than one of them.

None of the rear guard Hawart had set was still fighting. The Algarvians’ advance remained unhindered till they got within range of the Unkerlanter soldiers holed up and waiting for them. “Mezentio! Mezentio!” The yell raised Leudast’s hackles.

“Urra!” he cried as he began to blaze. “King Swemmel! Urra!” He picked off one Algarvian after another. He seemed unable to miss. Every time he blazed, another redhead fell. He’d never had such a run of luck.

But he couldn’t kill the whole Algarvian army by himself. The soldiers he didn’t kill kept on toward the village. Idly, he wondered what the name of this place was. If he died, he would have liked to know where he was doing it.

A beam almost as thick as his thigh struck the hut from which he was fighting. He stared in astonishment at the hole it made. The edges of that hole began to burn merrily. Leudast swatted at the flames with a rag, but couldn’t put them out. They licked hungrily at the old dry boards of the wall.

Smoke started to choke him. He realized he couldn’t stay were he was, not unless he wanted to burn, too. Reluctantly, he ran out into the street.

“Over here!” Sergeant Magnulf shouted, and waved to show where he was. “Come on--this is a good hole.”

Leudast needed no further invitation. He dove into the hole. He didn’t know how good it was, but it was very welcome. “We’re still here,” he said, and Magnulf nodded.

But the Algarvians were still there, too, and still there in large numbers. And their behemoths kept sending powerful beams through the village and tossing eggs into it. One of those eggs burst right in front of the hole.

Magnulf’s head had been up above the edge. He shrieked and clutched at his face. Blood poured around the edges of his mittens. After a moment of standing there swaying, he slowly crumpled. His hands fell away from the hideous wounds. His eyes were gone, as if he’d never had any. His nose was burned away, too, leaving only a gaping hole in the middle of his face. Leudast grimaced. He’d seen a lot of horrors since the fighting started, but few close to this.

Magnulf likely wouldn’t live, not with those wounds. If by some chance--some mischance--he did, he likely wouldn’t want to. Leudast pulled a knife from his belt and drew it across the sergeant’s burned and blistered throat. More blood fountained, but not for long. Even before Magnulf drew in his last bubbling breath, Leudast was peering out as his friend had done, hoping he wouldn’t be unlucky as his friend had been, and getting ready once more to fight to hold the Algarvians out of the village.

Fernao was wishing he’d never been born. That failing, he was wishing he’d never studied magecraft. And, that failing, he was wishing he’d never, ever, set foot in the land of the Ice People. Had he escaped that, Colonel Peixoto wouldn’t have thought to include him in the Lagoan expeditionary force cruising the ley lines toward the austral continent.

“A plague of boils on King Penda’s pendulous belly,” Fernao muttered as the Implacable bucked beneath his feet like a unicorn gone mad. Had he not set out to rescue Penda, he wouldn’t have had to go to the land of the Ice People. Setubal could be a dreary place during the winter. Next to a cramped cabin on a ship implacably gliding farther south and east every moment, dreariness seemed most attractive.

The ley-line cruiser’s bow pitched down into a trough. That pitched Fernao off his feet. Fortunately, he landed on his bunk, not on his head.

“Gliding,” he said, packing the word with enough loathing to suit a major curse. On land, a caravan traveling along a ley line stayed a fixed distance above the ground, and the ground stayed fixed, too. But the surface of the sea wasn’t fixed--was, in these southern waters, anything but fixed. The Implacable, like the rest of the ships in the Lagoan fleet, drew from the ley line the energy she used to travel. She couldn’t possibly hope to draw enough energy to stay steady when the sea refused to do the same.

Rubbing his shin, which had banged off the bunk’s iron frame, Fernao got up and left the cabin. He felt trapped in there. If anything happened to the Implacable, he’d die before he found out what was wrong. And if you go up on deck, you’ll die knowing exactly what’s wrong, his mind gibed. Is that an improvement?

In an odd sort of way, it was. The ship’s corridors and stairs had handrails that helped in a fierce sea. Fernao used them. Had he not used them, he would have suffered far worse than a barked shin.

When he came out on deck, sleet blew into his face. Sailors ran about doing their jobs with no more concern than if the cruiser had been tied up at a quay in Setubal. Fernao envied them their effortless ease--and kept a hand on a rail or a rope at all times. The wind howled like a hungry wolf.

Captain Fragoso came up to Fernao, walking along the slanting deck as casually as the sailors did. “A fine morning, sir mage,” he shouted cheerily. “Aye, a fine morning.” If he noticed the sleet, he gave no sign of it.

“If you say so,” Fernao answered, also raising his voice to make himself heard above the gale. “I must tell you, though, Captain, I have more than a little trouble discerning its charms.”

“Do you? Do you indeed?” Fragoso’s hat was secured by a chin strap. The wind almost blew it away anyhow. After settling it back on his head, he went on, “If you like, then, I will tell you why it is a fine morning.”

“If you would be so kind,” the mage said.

“Oh, I will, I will, never you fear,” Fragoso said, cheerful still. “It’s a fine morning because, during this past long, black night, we sailed by Sibiu--as close as we were ever going to come--and the Algarvians didn’t spot us. If that doesn’t make it a fine morning, curse me if I know what does.”

“Ah,” Fernao said, and then gravely nodded. “You’re right, Captain; it is a fine morning. Of course, the Algarvians probably weren’t looking for us very hard, either, being under the impression no sane men would sail in such a sea. I confess, I was under the same impression myself.”

“Aye, well, such is life,” Captain Fragoso said. “But they could have hurt us if they’d seen us. The one great disadvantage of ley-line ships is that they can only dodge where the lines cross. We wouldn’t enjoy it if dragons started trying to drop eggs on us, not even a little we wouldn’t.”

Fernao shivered at the prospect. He was shivering anyhow, but this was something new and different. But then, looking up toward the dark, scudding clouds overhead, he remarked, “I don’t think the dragonfliers would enjoy going up in weather like this, either.”

“Something to that, I shouldn’t wonder,” Fragoso said. A wave smacked the Implacable broadside, sending spray and water over the rail and drenching the naval officer and Fernao. Fernao cursed and shuddered; Fragoso took it in stride. “Part of my business, sir--just part of my business.”

“Along with chilblains and pneumonia, I suppose.” Something else occurred to Fernao. “We may well be able to get through all right, Captain. We’re a surprise.” He was surprised the fleet had sailed in dead of winter, so he didn’t wonder that the Algarvians were, too. “But we won’t be able to keep it a secret once we’ve landed on the austral continent. If we need reinforcements, King Mezentio’s men will be on the lookout for them.”

“Ah, I see what you’re saying.” Fragoso shrugged. “They’ll just have to do the best they can, that’s all.” No one had thought about anything past this first fleet was what that meant. Fernao had hoped for better but hadn’t really expected it.

Up in the crow’s nest atop the only mast the Implacable carried, the lookout let out a screech: “Ice! Ice off the port bow!”

Fernao had hoped for better than that, too, but hadn’t really expected it. In sailing to the land of the Ice People, he would have been a fool not to expect ice drifting in the water. But the fleet still was farther north than drifting bergs commonly came so early in the season. Aren’t we lucky? the mage thought.

Fragoso shouted into a speaking tube, ordering the mages who drew energy from the ley line to bring the Implacable to a halt and let the ice float past. Then he shouted into another tube, this one sending his voice to the crystallomancer: “Warn the other ships in the fleet what we’ve seen--and warn them not to ram us while we’re stopped, too.”

Fernao hurried toward the bow to get a good look at the iceberg. He’d seen them before, but the fascination remained. That great, silent mass, far larger than the ley-line cruiser, looked as if it had no business existing, let alone being dangerous. But it did and it was; it could smash in the Implacable’s sides as if they were made of eggshells rather than iron. As the ship slowed, Fernao remembered what Fragoso had said about ley-line ships’ inability to dodge. He wished he hadn’t.

Closer and closer drifted the mountain of ice, its surface rocking slightly in the surging sea. Fernao gripped the rail as hard as he could. The iceberg came close enough to let him see a gull--or perhaps it was a petrel--strolling about on the ice as casually as a man might stroll down the Boulevard of Kings in Setubal. If the iceberg hit the cruiser, the bird would fly away. The Implacable^ sailors wouldn’t be so lucky. Neither would Fernao.

A sailor loosed a triumphant shout: “It’s past!” Sure enough, Fernao had to look to his right--to starboard, he reminded himself--to see it. It couldn’t have missed the ley-line cruiser by more than fifty yards. He wondered how many more bergs the fleet would have to evade before drawing up to the ice shelf that formed even on the northernmost fringes of the austral continent every winter. He hoped finding the answer to that question wouldn’t be too expensive.

In the middle of the following night, an iceberg did hit another cruiser. The berg’s weight and momentum carried the stricken ship off the ley line, leaving it helpless and the rest of the fleet unable to go after it for a rescue. The cruiser did have lifeboats. If by oars or sails or current they reached another ley line, the men who managed to board them might live. If not. . . Fernao grimaced.

“How long till we near the land of the Ice People?” he asked at breakfast the next morning. Tables and benches in the galley were mounted on gimbals, to minimize the chance of porridge and smoked pork and wine flying every which way.

Commander Diniz was in charge of the Implacable^, egg-tossers. “Tomorrow morning, if all goes well,” he answered, spooning up porridge as if immune to the ship’s motion. “If we strike ice first, we’ll take a little longer.”

Fernao admired his easygoing good humor. He also admired the way the officer ate. His own stomach seemed uncertain whether it was supposed to cower between his feet or crawl hand over hand up his throat. The mage finished his own porridge and pork with grim determination. Food in the Royal Lagoan Navy was made to be tolerated, not relished. Compared to what lay ahead on the austral continent. . .

“Have you ever eaten boiled camel’s flesh?” he asked Diniz.

“No, sir mage, can’t say that I have,” the officer replied. “Of course, I won’t be going ashore, so it’s a treat I’ll just have to do without.”

“Oh, that’s right,” Fernao said in a hollow voice. He’d forgotten that. Misery loved company, and here he had to be alone. His gloom didn’t last long. Few others from the Implacable would be going ashore, but she and her fellow warships escorted freighters full of soldiers. They would soon discover the joys of cuisine in the land of the Ice People.

He wondered what the Ice People themselves would make of the Lagoan expeditionary force. From everything he’d seen, civilization meant little to them. But his brief contempt faded. No one would deny Algarve was a civilized kingdom, but the Ice People could never have done what King Mezentio s mages had used the tools and spells of civilization to accomplish.

He also wondered how Algarve would respond to the Lagoan thrust. Mezentio couldn’t well afford to lose his main source of cinnabar, but could he well afford to send an army across the Narrow Sea to help Yanina fight the Lagoans? If Cottbus falls, he can, Fernao thought uneasily. But the capital of Unkerlant hadn’t fallen yet. Maybe it won’t. He wondered if he was whistling in the dark.

There was plenty of dark in which to whistle. This far south, just past the winter solstice, the sun hardly peeped above the northern horizon before setting again. Clouds turned what little light it sent into dusk.

And yet, the Lagoan fleet came up to the edge of the ice shelf jutting out from the austral continent on schedule and without further mishap. Fernao tipped his hat to Colonel Peixoto and the colonel’s comrades back in Setubal. He wouldn’t have believed such a thing had he not seen it with his own eyes.

“Over the side you go.” Captain Fragoso seemed happy about the business. As Commander Diniz had said, he didn’t have to climb down that rope ladder.

Fernao did. Once he got down on the ice, he promptly slipped and fell despite the spiked shoes he was wearing. The sight of a fair-sized army descending from the freighters--and of the soldiers there also stumbling on the ice--went further to console him than he’d expected. Sure enough, misery did love company.

He had plenty of company. He was plenty miserable, too. Night had already begun to fall by the time the Lagoan army began its slow, awkward slog across the ice in the direction of the Barrier Mountains. The army didn’t reach land till dawn the next day. A couple of men of the Ice People sat mounted on their hairy, two-humped camels, watching the Lagoans approach. Fernao peered at them through a spyglass he borrowed from an officer. They were laughing. Fernao fell down on the ice for about the twentieth time. He decided he couldn’t blame them..

Marshal Rathar was used to smelling wood smoke and coal smoke as he walked through the streets of Cottbus. For the past couple of days, he’d been smelling a new, sharper odor with diem: paper smoke. Frightened clerks in the Unkerlanter capital were starting to burn their records lest they fall into Algarvian hands. They thought Cottbus would fall. Even if they proved right, Rathar doubted getting rid of their files would do them much good. King Mezentio’s men would still have them, after all.

Some of the clerks--and some higher officials, too--seemed to have come to the same conclusion, and seemed determined not to let the Algarvians catch them. Every ley-line caravan heading west was full of important-looking people with official-looking orders urgently requiring their presence away from Cottbus. Some few of those orders might even have been genuine. Rathar wouldn’t have bet more than a couple of coppers on it, though.

He kicked his way through a knee-high snowdrift as he neared the great open plaza around the royal palace. As far as he was concerned, Cottbus was better off without functionaries who skedaddled when trouble came near. He wanted people around him who could keep their heads. But if King Swemmel ever found out how many people were fleeing, a lot of them were liable not to keep their heads, in the most literal sense of the words imaginable.

A team of horses was dragging the body of a dragon painted in Algarvian colors across the square. Mezentio’s dragonfliers kept trying to drop eggs on the palace. They had no easy time of it; heavy sticks all around made the immense building perhaps the toughest target in all of Unkerlant.

One of the men in charge of the horses waved to Rathar. He waved back. Seeing men going about their business as if the Algarvians were two hundred miles away--as if there were no war at all--cheered him.

“Good morning, lord Marshal,” his adjutant said when he strode into his office.

“Good morning, Major Merovec,” Rathar answered, hanging his cloak on a hook. The colder it got outside, the warmer the palace was heated. That was the ancient Unkerlanter way of doing things. Doctors said it helped lead to apoplexy, but who listened to doctors? Glancing toward the map, Rathar asked, “What change in the situation since last night?”

Merovec often looked gloomy. Today he looked like midwinter midnight on the far side of the Barrier Mountains. Pointing, he said, “In the north, sir, the Algarvians have pushed us out of Lehesten. And in the south”--he pointed again--”they’re threatening Thalfang.” With a certain somber satisfaction, he added, “We do seem to be holding them in the center.”

“That’s not good enough,” Rathar said. “Curse it, Lehesten should have held. I thought it would hold. . . longer than this, anyhow. And Thalfang? Powers above, you can see Thalfang from the tops of the palace spires! If they take it and sweep west from there, they can put a ring around Cottbus, the same way they put a ring around Herborn down in Grelz. We have to hold them out of Thalfang, no matter what. Draft orders to shift troops south.”

“Lord Marshal, everything we have in the vicinity is already committed,” Merovec answered worriedly. “I don’t know where we’re going to come up with more.”

“If we don’t come up with more in the next few days, we won’t have the chance to do it later,” Rathar said, and Merovec nodded; he understood the problem as well as the marshal of Unkerlant did. Rathar smacked a fist into the palm of his other hand. “We have a lot of things we’re right on the edge of trying. If we can’t buy a little time to finish getting them ready, we’ll lose the war before we have the chance to use them.”

“Aye,” Merovec nodded again. “But we have so many men committed on other fronts, I don’t know where we can find more for this one.”

“King Swemmel won’t turn enough men loose for this front. That’s what you mean,” Rathar said, and his adjutant nodded once more. The marshal sighed. “I’d better have a talk with him, hadn’t I?”

“Lord Marshal, someone had better, anyhow,” Merovec answered. He opened his mouth to say something more, then shut it again. Rathar knew what would have come out--something like, He might listen to you, and he probably won’t listen to anybody else. That was true, and Rathar knew it as well as Merovec. But with the war going as it was, Swemmel might also decide he wanted his marshal’s head. Rathar had no way to know beforehand.

Even so, he said, “I’ll do it. Anyone else would have to work up his nerve before he tried, and we don’t have the time to wait. Better to do it now than before everybody has to run west for his life.”

He walked out of that part of the sprawling palace where the high officers in the Unkerlanter army worked and into the core of the building, the king’s residence. “I don’t know if he will see you, Lord Marshal,” a servitor said doubtfully. “I don’t know if he will see anyone.”

Rathar fixed him with a stare that would have chilled the heart of every Unkerlanter breathing--except King Swemmel. “Well, go find out,” he growled, and folded thick arms across his broad chest, as if to say he wouldn’t move from where he stood till he got an answer. The servant eyed him, then fled.

He came back looking very unhappy. Rathar would have bet Swemmel had scorched him, too. But he said, “His Majesty will receive you in the audience chamber in a quarter of an hour.” Rathar nodded, a single sharp jerk of his big head. He cared not a copper for the servitor’s feelings. Getting to see King Swemmel . . . aye, he cared about that.

In the anteroom in front of the audience chamber, the marshal endured removing his sword and permitting the guards their intimate search of his person. He endured the prostrations and acclamations he had to make before Swemmel once admitted to the royal presence. At last, with security and ritual satisfied, the king rasped, “Get up and say whatever it is you have to say. “We shall listen, though why we should, with the kingdom in such straits, is beyond us.”

“Your Majesty, I ask you one question,” Rathar said: “Would the kingdom be in better straits with another man commanding your armies? If you think so, give him my sword and my baton and give me a stick, so I can go out and fight the Algarvians as a common soldier.”

Swemmel stared down at him from his high seat. The king’s eyes glowed. His shoulders hunched forward, giving him the aspect of a vulture peering around for carrion. His embroidered robe, encrusted with pearls and jewels, seemed hastily thrown on for this audience. “Rest assured, Marshal: did we think that, you would long since have gone forward thus.”

“Good,” Rathar said. A sour odor came to him from Swemmel. Was the king drunk? Or, worse, was he hung over? Were his wits working at all, or would he blindly lash out at whatever displeased him? Rathar took a deep breath. He’d find out.

“What do you propose now?” the king demanded. “You could not defend the border, you could not hold Herborn--and now you must defend Cottbus. How will you go about it?”

“Your Majesty, the enemy has taken Lehesten. He threatens Thalfang. We must retake the one and keep the other from falling, or else we are ruined and Cottbus falls.” There. Now it was said. How would Swemmel take it?

“Cowards,” Swemmel muttered. “Cowards and traitors. They’re everywhere--everywhere, curse it.” His gaze paralyzed Rathar as readily as the marshal had overawed the servant. “How are we to overcome tliem?”

“We’d better beat Mezentio’s men first,” Rathar answered. “If we don’t do that, nothing else matters. We need every soldier now--every soldier, your Majesty, and every dragon, and every behemoth, and our little surprise for the Algarvians as well. Such things are best saved for when they are needed most, and this is the time.”

“Can our person be properly protected if these men and beasts are taken away?” Swemmel asked anxiously.

“Can your person be properly protected if you have to try to flee for your life from Cottbus with the redheads closing a ring around it after they push on from Thalfang and Lehesten?” Rathar returned.

King Swemmel grunted, a sound full of pain. “Traitors,” he muttered again. “Who will save us from traitors?” He glared at Rathar.

“One way or another, my head will answer for this, your Majesty,” the marshal said. “Whatever happens, I am not going west from Cottbus. If we have to fight here in the city, then here I will fight.”

“If only this whole kingdom had but a single neck!” Swemmel cried. “Then I’d take its head and use its energy to build a magical fire that would burn Mezentio in his palace in Trapani--aye, and all his kingdom with him.”

Rathar believed every word. Could Swemmel have done it, he would joyously have swung the sword. Rathar said, “Your Majesty, we have . . . reduced the power of their magecraft.” He wondered how many Unkerlanter peasants had paid with their lives for that reduction. Better not to know. Aye, better by far. War of a more ordinary sort was his proper business, and he stuck to it: “It’s more nearly man against man and beast against beast than it was for a time. But we need the men and beasts. We need all the men and beasts.” He realized he was pleading. King Swemmel seldom listened to pleas.

After a long pause, the king said, “We have learned there were riots against the Algarvians in Eoforwic yesterday.”

“That’s good news!” exclaimed Rathar, who hadn’t heard it. “Anything that keeps the redheads from using all they have against us is good news.”

“Aye,” Swemmel agreed, though he sounded almost indifferent. “Kaunians and Forthwegians went into the streets together, we have heard. Perhaps your notion of sending Kaunians back to Forthweg with their tales of woe bore fruit after all.”

“I hope so, your Majesty.” Rathar wondered if any Unkerlanter peasants had escaped the clutches of their own kingdom’s mages and brought tales of woe back to their villages. He doubted it. Swemmel preached efficiency more readily than he practiced it, but he’d been most efficient about killing since the days of the Twinkings War.

Somewhere in the middle distance, eggs started bursting: Algarvian dragons over Cottbus again. Swemmel turned and stared east. “Curse you, Mezentio,” he whispered. “You I trusted, and you betrayed me, too.”

How had he trusted Mezentio? To be unready to fight when the time for fighting came? So it had seemed then. It also seemed, as it always had to Rathar, a dreadful miscalculation. The marshal said, “Give me the men, your Majesty. Give me the men and the dragons and the behemoths. We can throw them back.” He didn’t know if Unkerlant could, but he wanted the chance to try.

“Who will protect us?” the king said again. But then, jerkily, he nodded. “Take them. We give them to you. Throw them into the fire, and may they smother it with their bodies. And now, we dismiss you.” Rathar went through the ceremonial involved in leaving the chamber without a shadow of unhappiness. Swemmel had given him the chance. How could he make the most of it?

A blizzard howled around Istvan and his squadmates and all the other Gyongyosian soldiers trying to carry the war in the stars-forsaken mountains to Unkerlant. Wool and sheepskin went only so far in warding them. Flaps from Istvan’s sheepskin cap protected his ears, but his beaky nose had long since gone numb. He hoped it wasn’t frostbitten.

“Even my valley doesn’t have weather like this,” he said: no small admission, when Gyongyosians from the interior would sometimes come to blows over whose home valley suffered through the nastier winters.

“What’s that, Sergeant?” Szonyi asked. He tramped along only a few feet from Istvan, but the shrieking wind blew words away.

“Never mind.” Istvan’s next complaint had more substance to it: “How are we supposed to fight a war in weather like this?”

“We’re a warrior race,” Szonyi answered.

“You’re a warrior blockhead,” Istvan said, but not too loud. He didn’t want Szonyi to hear him. Even if the other soldier wasn’t too bright, he was a good man to have along when a squad of Unkerlanters burst out from behind snow-covered rocks yelling “Urra!” at the top of their lungs.

The path--Istvan hoped it was the path, though he had trouble being sure--rose toward the outlet of yet another pass. Istvan wondered what lay beyond. Actually, he could make a pretty good guess: another valley not worth holding, with plenty of snow-covered rocks behind which Unkerlanters could hide. Every now and again, he wondered why Gyongyos wanted this miserable country. He shrugged inside his coat. That wasn’t his concern. All he had to worry about was taking the mountains away from the Unkerlanters and staying alive while he was doing it.

Somewhere back behind him was the whole intricate structure even a warrior race like the Gyongyosians needed to wage war in this day and age: baggage train, supply dumps, roads, and ley-line caravans eventually reaching back to Gyongyos itself. Istvan seldom thought about that structure, not least because it was behind him. He and his comrades were the very tip of the Gyongyosian spearpoint piercing the kingdom of Unkerlant.

Downhill. He’d been walking downhill for some little while before he realized he was doing it. Either he’d found the top of the pass and was heading down into the next valley or ... “Kun!” he shouted, breathing out almost as much smoke as if he were a dragon. “You frozen to death yet, Kun?”

“Aye, a couple of hours ago, Sergeant,” Kun answered, appearing at his elbow.

“Heh,” Istvan said. “All right, then. What I want to know is, are we still marching east, or have we gotten turned around in the snow? If we’re heading back toward our own men, they’ll cursed well blaze us for Unkerlanters.”

“Wind’s still blowing from behind us,” replied the corporal who had been a mage’s apprentice.

Istvan hadn’t thought of that, but it didn’t fully reassure him, either. “Here in the mountains, the wind blows all sorts of crazy ways.”

“That’s so.” Kun plucked at his tawny beard. Like Istvan’s, it was covered with rime. Unlike Istvan’s full, shaggy one, it grew by patches and clumps, and so did less to keep Kun’s cheeks and chin warm. “I can’t do anything about the wind, you know.”

“I don’t want you to do anything about the accursed wind,” Istvan snapped. “I told you, I want to know if I’m going east or west.”

“Oh, aye. So you did.” Kun plucked at his beard some more, as if hoping to find the answer there. After a few paces, he spoke again: “Have to see where the sun is.”

“If I could see where the sun is, would I need to ask you stupid questions?” Istvan shouted. Kun could make him as ready to burst with fury as an egg was with sorcerous energy. But having burst, he calmed again. “I can’t see the sun. If you can, tell me where it’s at.”

Kun wore heavy wool mittens. He took them off so he could fumble in his belt pouch. He finally pulled out a piece of what looked to Istvan like murky, milky glass. He held it in front of his right eye and peered through it now at one part of the sky, now at another.

“What are you doing?” Istvan asked.

“Looking for the sun,” Kun replied, as if to an idiot child. After a moment, he condescended to explain more: “The property of this spar, as it is called after a ship’s pole, is to let in light of a certain sort only.”

“What?” Istvan frowned. “Light is light, eh?”

“Not to a mage,” Kun said loftily. Then he gnawed at his lower lip and admitted, “I do not understand the theory as well as I wish I did. But a man does not need to know how a knife cuts to know that it cuts. And so I can use this spar and tell you more light shows ahead of us, which means the sun lies in that direction. Since it is surely after noon, we are marching west.”

“That’s what I wanted to find out,” Istvan said. “Thanks.” The wind shifted, blowing snow into his face. He let out a couple of weary curses and went on, “Fine to know I’m liable to be blazed by the Unkerlanters and not by our own men.”

“I’m glad to know I relieved your mind,” Kun replied. Istvan made a crack about relieving some part of himself a long way removed from his mind.

He and Corporal Kun both laughed. So did Szonyi, who was close enough to hear. He said, “I wish the stars wouldn’t let things like getting blazed by your own side happen. If they’re as wise and strong and all-knowing as everybody says, why do they let things like that happen sometimes?”

“That’s for them to know, not for the likes of us,” Istvan said, which was what his family and other people in his home valley had told him when, as a boy, he’d asked such questions.

Kun said, “Why isn’t it for us to know? We know a lot more than our grandparents and even more than their grandparents. Why shouldn’t we know things like that?”

“Because we aren’t meant to,” Istvan answered.

“Who told you that?” Kun asked. “How did he know? How do you know he knew?”

Istvan grappled with those unfamiliar questions for a little while. Not having any good answers for them, he said, “If you go on talking that way, you might as well not believe the stars have any power at all.”

Kun shook his head; snow flew from his hat. “I have to believe, because I’ve seen spells that call on them work.” He slogged on for another couple of paces. In thoughtful tones, he added, “But the Unkerlanters’ spells work, too, and they’re goat-eating savages who reverence the invisible powers above that aren’t even there.”

Now Istvan asked the hard question, not Kun: “What does that mean?”

“May I be accursed if I know,” the former mage’s apprentice answered. “I’m going to have to think about that for a while.”

“Think about Unkerlanters blazing you instead,” Istvan said. “Think about mountain apes sneaking down and carrying you off before you even know they’re there. Think about avalanches. Think about things you can do something about.”

“What can I do about an avalanche?” Kun asked.

“You can walk soft and try not to start one. And you might be able to run to the side of one if it isn’t too big and you see it soon enough,” Istvan said. Kun trudged on for another few paces, then nodded, yielding the point. Istvan felt proud of himself. He knew Kun was smarter than he was, and knew Kun knew it, too. When they fenced with words, the sergeant seldom made his corporal back up. He had this time.

Sometimes, in clear, quiet weather, you could hear an egg sighing through the air toward you. In the middle of the snowstorm, the first Istvan knew that the Unkerlanters had started tossing was when the egg burst in front of his squad. Even then, the wind muffled the roar and the deep snow in which the egg landed helped muffle the blast of sorcerous energy that came from it. The snow the burst threw up masked the flash of that energy, too.

Before the second egg landed, Istvan was down on his belly in a snowdrift, crawling toward the nearest rocks he could find. “Stagger your cover if you can,” he shouted to his men. “Those Unkerlanter goat-buggers’ll be coming after us as soon as they think we’re in enough trouble.”

Between the bursting eggs and the shrieking wind, he didn’t know how many soldiers in his squad heard him. He worried less than he would have with a squad of men seeing battle for the first time. His troopers were all blooded; they didn’t need him to do their thinking for them. Some of them--Kun, for instance--resented it when he tried.

“Urra! Urra!” Through the wind, through the thunderstorm of bursting eggs, came the Unkerlanter battle cry. Istvan bared his teeth: now he was worried. It sounded as if King Swemmel’s men outnumbered the Gyongyosians who faced them. Their hoarse, angry shouts grew louder.

Istvan shouted, too: “Here they come!”

He blazed at the first figure in rock-gray he saw through the swirling snow. He heard his beam hiss and cursed the sound: every snowflake the beam seared weakened it before it got to its target, and there were a lot of snowflakes in the air. The Unkerlanter went down, but Istvan didn’t think he was out of the fight.

A beam burned a furrow in the snow not far from him. That reminded him he needed to roll away, to make sure he didn’t make a fat, juicy target by staying in one place too long. As he rolled, he also made sure his knife was loose in its sheath. With sticks so weakened, this little battle would be fought at close quarters.

Rolling did one more thing--it coated his long sheepskin jacket with snow, making him all but invisible. Sure enough, an Unkerlanter ran right past him, not having any idea he was there. Istvan rose from the snowy ground like one of the mountain apes he’d been talking about a little while before. But he had better weapons than a mountain ape’s teeth and muscles, better even than the club the ape he’d killed might have been carrying.

He stabbed the Unkerlanter in the back. The fellow let out a scream that held almost as much surprise as pain. He threw out his arms. His stick flew from his hand. Red stained the snow as he fell. Istvan sprang onto him and slashed his throat, spilling more scarlet onto white.

“Arpad! Arpad! Arpad!” Those were Gyongyosians, coming to the rescue of their beleaguered comrades. Istvan feared the Unkerlanter egg-tossers would take a heavy toll on them, but King Swemmel’s men back at the tossers had trouble spying them because of the blizzard, and they made short work of the Unkerlanter footsoldiers.

“Forward!” a Gyongyosian officer shouted.

“Stay spread out,” Istvan added. “Don’t bunch up and let one egg take out a lot of you.” That proved good advice: the Unkerlanters finally realized their attacking party had failed and started lobbing more eggs toward the mouth of the pass. By then, it was too late. Istvan’s countrymen began the business of taking another valley away from Unkerlant. The only thing that could have made Istvan happier was thinking anybody would want the valley once Gyongyos had it.