Into the Darkness

15.

Sergeant Jokai clanged a gong that sounded like the end of the world. Gyongyosian soldiers tumbled out of the barracks, rubbing sleep from their eyes. Istvan clutched his stick, wondering what sort of new and fiendish drill his superiors had come up with this time.

“Come on, you lugs, down toward the beach,” Jokai shouted. “The cursed Kuusamans are paying us another call.”

Istvan looked around for Borsos. The dowser was nowhere to be seen. Maybe he was the one who’d raised the alarm. Whether he was or not, Istvan had no time to find him, not with Jokai and the officers set above Jokai screaming at the top of their lungs for every soldier to hurry down to the beaches and throw back the invaders. The Kuusaman attack had turned him into an ordinary warrior again. For that if for no other reason—and he had plenty of others—he cursed the Kuusamans as vilely as he could.

Along with his comrades, he stumbled down a path toward the sea. Stumbled was the operative word; the eastern sky behind him had gone gray with the beginnings of morning twilight, but dawn still lay most of an hour away. The Gyongyosians could hardly see where they were putting their feet. Every so often, someone would go down with a thump and a howl. As like as not, somebody else would trip over the luckless soldier before he made it to his feet again.

And then, before the Gyongyosians had got off the wooded slopes of Mt. Sorong, eggs began falling around them. “The stinking slanteyes have brought another dragon transport with them,” somebody yelled.

When Istvan came out from under the trees for a moment, he looked up into the heavens. It was still too dark for him to see much, but he did spy a couple of spurts of fire. That meant Gyongyosian dragons had got into the air, too, and were contesting the sky above Obuda with the Kuusamans.

He came down on to the flatlands that led to the Bothnian Ocean. He knew exactly which trenches his company had to occupy. Serving Borsos had got him out of a lot of exercises, but not all of them. He discovered he still remembered such basics as taking cover and making sure no dirt fouled the business end of his stick.

“By the stars!” said one of his comrades, a burly youngster named Szonyi. “Will you look at all the ships!”

Istvan did look, and then cursed some more. “The Kuusamans brought everything they’ve got this time, didn’t they?” he said. He couldn’t begin to guess how many ships were silhouetted against the brightening sky, but he was certain of one thing: that fleet was larger than the one the Gyongyosians had in local waters.

“Don’t despair!” an officer down the trench shouted. “Never despair! Are we not men? Are we not warriors?” In more practical tones, he went on, “Have we not got our great garrison on this island as well as our ships?”

That did help steady Istvan. He stopped feeling as if he were alone and facing the Kuusaman fleet without anyone to aid him. Egg-tossers on and near the beach began flinging their deadly cargo at the foe. Plumes of water mounting high in the air told of near misses. A burst of fire and a plume of smoke told of a hit. Istvan yelled himself hoarse.

But the Kuusamans had brought heavy warships east along the ley lines to Obuda. They carried egg-tossers that matched any the Gyongyosians had mounted on the island. Eggs came whistling in, some aimed at the tossers opposing the Kuusamans, others at the trenches where Istvan and his comrades crouched. He felt trapped in an earthquake that would not end. Not far away, wounded men wailed.

Like any others, Kuusaman cruisers also mounted sticks far heavier than a soldier or even a behemoth could bear. Where their mighty beams smote, smoke sprang skyward. A soldier caught in one of them burned like a moth flying through a torch flame. Istvan hoped the poor fellow hadn’t had time to realize he was dead.

“Look!” Szonyi pointed. “Some of our dragons have broken through!”

Sure enough, several dragons were diving on the Kuusaman fleet. Szonyi wasn’t the only one to have spotted them. But those great sticks could point to the sky as well as toward Obuda. Dragons could not withstand their beams, as they could the ones from the common soldiers’ sticks. One after another, Gyongyosian dragons plunged burning into the sea.

Yet the dragons were fast and agile. Their fliers were fearless, they themselves too stupid to be afraid. Not all were struck before the fliers could release their eggs and even pass low above the warships’ decks. The dragons flamed, enveloping Kuusaman sailors in fire, then flapped away.

“For all the good we’re doing here, we might as well have stayed asleep in the barracks,” Istvan said. “It was like that the last time the Kuusamans tried to take Obuda away from us, too.”

“I don’t think it will stay that way this time,” Sergeant Jokai said. “I wish it would, but I don’t think it will. Those sons of goats have brought a lot more ships and a lot more dragons than they did last time.”

The offshore battle went on for most of the morning. The Gyongyosian admiral in command at Obuda threw in his ships a few at a time, which meant they were defeated a few at a time. Had he hurled the whole fleet at the Kuusamans, he might have accomplished more. As things were, the would-be invaders slowly beat down the Gyongyosian defenses.

Somewhere around noon, a new cry arose, one in which Istvan joined: “Here come the boats!”

Not all the Gyongyosian egg-tossers had been wrecked. Indeed, some had not taken part in the earlier fight against the Kuusaman naval expedition, and so had given the foe no clue about their position. Istvan shouted with glee as eggs fell among the boats carrying Kuusaman soldiers, wrecking some and overturning others.

Gyongyos painted her dragons in gaudy stripes of red and blue, black and yellow. They dove on the invaders. The small boats carried no sticks strong enough to slay them as they dove, and some of those boats began to burn.

But most kept on coming toward the beaches of Obuda. A few, the larger ones, glided swiftly along the ley lines whose convergence at the island made it a bone of contention between Gyongyos and Kuusamo. The rest advanced as they might have in the ancient days of the world, pushed by the wind or pulled by oars.

Small, stocky, dark-haired soldiers crowded the boats. “They don’t look so tough,” said Szonyi, who hadn’t been on Obuda long enough to have seen Kuusamans before. “I could break one of them in half.”

He was on the weedy side as Gyongyosians went, but that didn’t mean he was wrong. It also didn’t mean being right would do him any good, which he didn’t seem to realize. Istvan made things as plain as he could: “As long as the slanteyes have sticks and know what to do with them—and they do, curse ’em, they do—you won’t get close enough to break ’em in half.”

“That’s the truth.” Sergeant Jokai sounded surprised to be agreeing with Istvan instead of harassing him, but he did. “Don’t think for even a minute that those ugly little bastards can’t fight, because they cursed well can. And don’t think they can’t take this stinking island away from us, because they’ve done that, too. The thing is, we’d better not let ’em do it again, not if we want to go on looking up at the stars.”

The Kuusaman captives the Gyongyosians had taken when they last seized Obuda were slave laborers back on the mainland of Derlavai or on the other islands Ekrekek Arpad ruled. Something similarly unpleasant no doubt befell captured Gyongyosians in Kuusaman hands. An enslaved captive might still look up at the stars, but how much joy could he take in doing it?

Istvan hoped he would not have to find out. Kuusaman boats began beaching. Soldiers jumped out of them and ran for what cover they could find. Istvan and his comrades blazed away at them, and knocked down a good many. But not all the Kuusamans came ashore in front of positions that hadn’t been too badly knocked about. Cries of alarm warned that some of the invaders were outflanking the Gyongyosian defenders.

“Fall back!” an officer shouted. “We’ll make a stand on Mt. Sorong.”

Retreat was galling to any troops, and more galling to the Gyongyosians, who fancied themselves a warrior race, than to most. If the choice was retreating or being attacked from the front and flanks at the same time, though, even the fiercest fighters saw where sense lay.

Eggs burst not far from Istvan and his comrades as they fell back. “Curse the Kuusamans all over again,” Jokai snarled. “They’ve gone and fetched light tossers along with ’em.”

“We did the same thing when we took Obuda back,” Istvan said.

“Curse ’em anyway,” his sergeant replied, a sentiment with which he could hardly disagree.

More eggs burst ahead of them, these large, throwing up great columns of riven earth. High in the sky, a dragon screeched harshly. Jokai had been right; the Kuusamans were indeed far better prepared for this attack than they had been for the one the year before.

Kuusaman eggs had already wrecked some of the defensive positions on the lower slopes of Mt. Sorong. As Istvan wearily stumbled into an undamaged trench, he asked the question surely uppermost in his comrades’ minds as well: “Will we be able to hold out here?”

Whatever else Sergeant Jokai was, he was forthright. He answered, “It doesn’t really depend on us. If the stinking slanteyes can hold the sea around this miserable island, they’ll be able to bring in enough soldiers to swarm over us and enough dragons to flame all of ours out of the sky. If our ships drive theirs away, we’ll be the ones who can reinforce and they’ll be out of luck.”

That made sense, even if Istvan didn’t care for the notion that his fate rested in hands other than his own. Now that he wasn’t on the move any more, he realized he was hungry. He had a couple of small rounds of flat-bread in his belt pouch, and wolfed them down. His belly stopped growling. Some of his comrades had already eaten everything they’d brought from the barracks. No one from higher up on Mt. Sorong showed up with more in the way of supplies.

Istvan wondered if Borsos was safe, and if the dowser had given the Gyongyosians such warning as they’d had. Maybe Borsos was having to fight as a real captain would. Maybe, too, he was dead or captive by this time. Many Gyongyosians surely were.

“Nothing I can do about it now,” Istvan muttered. It was getting dark. Where, he wondered, had the day gone? Unlike most on Obuda, it hadn’t evaporated in boredom. He wrapped his blanket around himself and did his best to sleep.

By the way Skarnu swung a hoe, anyone who knew anything about farming and looked closely would have known he hadn’t spent much time working in a field. Some of the Algarvian soldiers trudging along the dirt road surely came from farms themselves. But they didn’t expect to sec anything but farmers in the Valmieran fields, and so they didn’t look closely.

After the soldiers had vanished behind some walnut trees, Skarnu leaned the hoe against his hip and looked at his hands. They too would have shown he was no farmer. The calluses on his palms weren’t years old and yellowed and hard as horn; he still got blisters at their edges and sometimes even under them.

His back ached. So did his shoulders and the backs of his thighs. He sighed and spoke in a low voice: “Maybe we should have surrendered after all, Sergeant. It would have been easier.”

Raunu spread his own hands. They were as raw as Skarnu’s. He was a commoner and a longtime veteran, but he’d never done work like this, either. “Easier on the body—oh, aye, no doubt about it,” he said. “But if it were easier on the spirit, we would have done it when most of the army gave up.”

“I couldn’t stomach it,” Skarnu said, “so I suppose that proves your point.”

His coarse wool tunic and trousers itched. Back when he was living the life of a marquis, he would never have let such rough cloth touch his skin. But he could not have kept up the fight against the Algarvians from a captives’ camp, and they would never have let him out of one unless they were sure he had no fight left in him. He didn’t think he could have fooled them into releasing him—and so here he was, pretending to be a peasant instead of pretending to be a collaborator.

In a matter-of-fact way, Raunu said, “If they catch us now, they’ll blaze us, of course.”

“I know. They did that in the parts of Valmiera they occupied during the Six Years’ War,” Skarnu said. “I learned about it in school.”

“Aye, so they did,” Raunu answered. “And afterwards, when we were holding some of the marquisates east of the Soretto, we paid ’em back in the same coin. Anybody even looked at us sideways, we figured the son of a whore was a soldier who hadn’t had enough, and we gave it to him.”

Skarnu hadn’t learned about that in school. In his lessons, Valmiera had always had right and justice on her side. He’d believed that for a long time. He still wanted to believe it.

He stretched and twisted, trying to make his sore muscles relax. He hadn’t learned farm work in school, though. Only a noble addled far past mere eccentricity would have thought learning to till the soil in the least worthwhile.

He swung the hoe again, and did manage to uproot weed rather than wheat. “Good to know there are some folk besides us who stay loyal to king and kingdom,” he said, and knocked down another weed.

“Oh, aye, there are always some,” Raunu said. “What’s really lucky is that we found one. If we’d asked for help from half the peasants around these parts—more than half, I shouldn’t wonder—they’d have turned us in to the redheads faster than you can spit.”

“So it seems,” Skarnu said grimly. “That’s not the way it should be, you know.”

Raunu grunted and went back to weeding for a while, attacking the dandelions and other plants that didn’t belong in the field with the same concentrated ferocity he’d shown the Algarvians. At last, at the end of a row, he asked, “Sir—my lord—do I have your leave to speak what’s in my mind?”

He hadn’t called Skarnu my lord in a long time. The title, in his mouth, carried more reproach than respect. Skarnu said, “You’d better, Raunu. I don’t suppose I’ll last long if you don’t.”

“Longer than you think, maybe, but never mind that,” Raunu said. “From everything I’ve been able to piece together, though, Count Enkuru, the local lord, is a right nasty piece of work.”

“Aye, I think there’s a deal of truth to that,” Skarnu agreed. “But what has it got to do with—?” He broke off, feeling foolish. “The peasants would sooner have the Algarvians for overlords than Count Enkuru—is that what you’re saying?”

Raunu nodded. “That’s what I’m saying. Some of the nobles I’ve known, they never would have figured out what I meant.” He took a deep breath. “And that’s part of the trouble Valmiera’s been having, too, don’t you see?”

“Peasants should be loyal to the nobles, as nobles should be loyal to the king,” Skarnu said.

“No doubt you’re right, sir,” Raunu said politely. “But the nobles should deserve loyalty, don’t you think?”

Skarnu’s sister would have said no in a heartbeat. Krasta would have thought—did think—her blood alone was plenty to command loyalty. She would have wanted Raunu flogged for presuming to think otherwise. Skarnu’s attitude had differed only in degree, not in essence, till he took command of his company.

Slowly, he said, “That does make a difference, doesn’t it? Men will go as far as their leaders take them, and not a step farther.” He’d seen that throughout the recent disastrous campaign.

“Aye, sir.” Raunu nodded. “And they’ll go as far in the other direction if their leaders push ’em to it—which is why we’ve got our little game laid on for tonight. We have to show ’em what we’re against along with what we’re for.”

Toward evening, the farmer who’d given them shelter came out to look over the work they’d done. Gedominu hobbled on a cane, and had ever since the Six Years’ War. Maybe that was what made him dislike the Algarvians enough to keep working against them. Skarnu couldn’t have proved it, though; Gedominu said little about himself.

He looked over the field now, rubbed his chin, and said, “Well, it’s not too much worse than if you hadn’t done anything at all.” With that praise, such as it was, ringing in their ears, he led them back to the farmhouse.

His wife served up a supper of blood sausage and sauerkraut, bread and home-brewed ale. Merkela, a second wife, might have been half Gedominu’s age, which put her not far from Skarnu’s. Skarnu wondered how the half-lame farmer had wooed and won her. He also wondered certain other things, which he hoped he was gentleman enough to keep Gedominu from noticing.

After full darkness, Gedominu slowly climbed the stairs and as slowly came down again, his cane in his right hand a stick in his left. It wasn’t so potent a weapon as the ones Skarnu and Raunu had brought to the farm, being intended more for blazing vermin and small game for the pot than for men. But a man who met that beam would go down, and might not get up again.

Gedominu tucked the stick under his arm to blow Merkela a kiss, then led Skarnu and Raunu out into the night. They got their own sticks from the barn. Gedominu moved well enough when he needed to, and took them along winding paths they couldn’t have followed themselves at night. Skarnu doubted he could have done it in broad daylight.

At a crossroads, someone softly called out, “King Gainibu!”

“Valmiera!” Gedominu answered. Skarnu would have come up with a more imaginative challenge and countersign; those would the first ones to cross the Algarvians’ minds. But that could wait for another time. Now, four or five men joined his comrades and him. Moving as quietly as they could, they hurried on toward the village of Pavilosta.

“Pity we can’t pay this kind of call on Count Enkuru himself,” Skarnu said. Seven or eight men were not enough to storm a noble’s keep, not if his guards were alert—and Enkuru’s, by all accounts, were.

“His factor will do well enough,” one of the locals answered. “His factor will do better than well enough, as a matter of fact. He’s the one who collects the taxes Enkuru screws out of us, and as much more besides to make him near as rich as the count. And you can hear for yourself that he’s in bed with the redheads. Everybody for miles around’ll be glad to see the bastard dead.”

Before the war, such talk about a noble and his factor would have been treason. Technically, Skarnu supposed it still was. But it was also a chance to strike a blow at Algarve. That counted for more.

Gedominu underlined the point, saying, “Folks have got to learn they don’t just go ahead and do whatever some turd in a kilt tells ’em to—not without they pay the price for doin’ it.”

“Let’s be at it, then,” Raunu said. He pointed to positions that covered the factor’s house—much the largest and finest in the village—but remained in shadow. “There and there, and over there, too. Move!” The locals hurried to obey. Skarnu let his sergeant give orders. Raunu had proved he knew what he was doing. Nodding to Skarnu, he said, “Now we’ll give ’em what-for.” He pried a cobblestone out of the ground and flung it through one of those invitingly large windows.

Furious shouts followed the crash of broken glass. The door flew open. A man in velvet tunic and trousers—surely the factor—and a couple of Algarvians ran out on to the street, as ants might run out of their nest if a boy stirred it with a twig. They probably thought some brat was bothering them.

They soon discovered how wrong they were, but kept the knowledge only momentarily. The raiders blazed them down. They fell without a sound: so quickly and quietly, in fact, that no one else came out to investigate. Raunu solved that by pitching another stone through a different window.

Two more Algarvians and another cursing Valmieran hurried out. They stopped in the doorway when they saw their friends lying in the street. That was a little too late. Skarnu blazed one of them; a couple of his comrades knocked down the others.

“Might be more inside,” Raunu remarked. “Shall we go look?” That was strategy, not tactics, so he asked his superior instead of leading.

After brief thought, Raunu shook his head. “We’ve done what we came to do. This isn’t the sort of business where we want to take losses, I don’t think.”

“Aye—makes sense,” Raunu said. “All right, let’s disappear.”

As silently as they’d entered Pavilosta, the raiders slipped out of the village. Behind them, more shouts and a woman’s shrill scream said their handiwork had been discovered. “I think that other bugger in trousers might have been Enkuru his own self, come to visit the factor,” Gedominu said. “Here’s hoping it was.”

“Aye, that’d be a good blow,” Skarnu agreed. “Whatever we do next, we won’t have such an easy time of it. They weren’t wary this time. They will be.”

“Let ’em be wary,” Gedominu said. “We’ll just go back to being peasants, that’s all. Nobody ever pays peasants no mind. When the fuss dies down, we’ll hit the redheads another lick.” He looked over his shoulder. “Keep moving, there. I want to get home to Merkela tonight.” Move Skarnu did. Gedominu could not have given him a more effective goad.

When Pekka went up to Yliharma this time, her colleagues didn’t put her up at the Principality. Instead, Master Siuntio lodged her in his own home. That he would even think of doing such a thing left her limp with astonishment and awe. Staying in the Principality was a distinction. Staying with the greatest theoretical sorcerer of the age was a privilege.

“Oh, you think so, do you?” Siuntio said when Pekka couldn’t hold that in after they walked into his parlor from the street. “And what of your husband, young Leino? Is he back in Kajaani, fretting that I, being a widower, would try and seduce you?”

“He would never imagine such a thing, Master!” Pekka exclaimed. “Never!”

“No?” Siuntio clicked his tongue between his teeth. “What a pity. I’m not so old as all that, you know.”

Pekka’s ears got hot. Trying to salvage something from the embarrassing exchange, she said, “He knows you are a man of honor.”

“He’s a clever young fellow, your husband,” Siuntio said. “He’d have to be, to hold you to him. But is he clever enough to imagine what I was like when I was his age, or maybe even younger? I doubt it; the cleverness of the young seldom runs in such directions.”

As an exercise, Pekka tried to imagine Siuntio as a man her own age. She filled in wrinkles, darkened hair, added vigor… and whistled softly. “Ah, Master, you must have cut a swath.”

Siuntio smiled and nodded. His eyes sparkled. Just for a moment, Pekka thought he might try to seduce her—and, for that same moment, wondered if she might not let him. Then he smiled in a different way, and she relaxed (with, perhaps, the tiniest twinge of disappointment). “I would not seek the favors of a guest in my own house: that were unsporting,” he said. “Next time, perhaps, you will stay at the Principality once more.”

“Perhaps I will—or perhaps I will come back to stay with you, where I know I am safe,” Pekka answered with a sassy grin.

She blessed Siuntio for letting it lie there. After a last chuckle, he said, “That might be for the best this time, too, as the lot of us will have a great deal to discuss when we assemble tomorrow.”

“Aye,” Pekka said. “I do not deny being surprised to learn that you duplicated my experimental results.”

“Every one of us has done so,” Siuntio replied. “Every one of us has done so repeatedly. If we repeated the experiment often enough, we might, I daresay, rid the world of a great many surplus acorns.”

He still sounded easy, amused, very much as he had when he’d teased her. Under that, she thought, eagerness quivered, the eagerness of a hound on a scent. Pekka could hear it. She felt it herself. Like called to like, as surely as under the law of similarity. She asked, “What do you think is causing it, Master?”

“Mistress, I do not know,” Siuntio said gravely. “You have found something new and unexpected. It is another reason, aside from purposes of lechery, that I wish I were younger: I would have more time to go down this track. For now, I know it is there, and that is all I know of it.”

“I have tried my best to account for it, but it fits into no theoretical model with which I am familiar.”

“All this means, my dear, is that we shall need some new theoretical models by and by,” Siuntio said. “There are dull times, when the sages were sure they know everything there is to know. The days of the Kaunian Empire were such a time, though it would not do to say so in Valmiera or Jelgava. We had another one a couple of hundred years ago, all over eastern Derlavai and on our island as well. Then we discovered ley lines, and nothing has been the same since. Now things will be different again, different in a different way.”

“Different in a different way,” Pekka echoed. “I like that. When will the others gather here?”

“Midmorning, or perhaps a bit before,” Siuntio answered carelessly. “Meanwhile, make yourself at home. It won’t be the Principality, not for the bed and not for the food, either, but you may perhaps find something or other to read here that the Principality does not offer.”

Pekka knew she’d been eyeing her host’s bookshelves. “You’d better search my bags before you take me back to the caravan station,” she said. “I am tempted to wreak havoc here, as the Sibian pirates used to do along our coast.” Boldly, she pulled out a classical Kaunian text on growth spells and began looking through it. Maybe someone had found the answer to her riddle back in the days of the Empire Siuntio had just mocked.

He had to call her twice to supper; she’d got engrossed. The text did not have the answer—she hadn’t really believed it would—but was interesting for its own sake. And Kaunian was such an elegantly precise language, even the most blatant nonsense sounded as if it ought to be true.

Supper turned out to be mutton chops and mashed parsnips with butter: closer to what she would have made at home than to the delicacies in which the Principality specialized, but far from bad. “You do me too much credit,” Siuntio said when Pekka praised him for it. “I stick to simple things, where even a bungler like me has trouble going wrong.”

“I don’t give you too much credit,” Pekka said. “You don’t give yourself enough.”

“Pah!” Siuntio waved that away, which annoyed her. Then he wouldn’t let her help him clean up, which annoyed her even more. “You are my guest,” he said. “You would not work for your supper at a hostel, and you will not work here.” With an old man’s mulishness, he got his way.

Next morning, she rose before he did (the bed wasn’t all that comfortable, and she wasn’t used to it) and had herrings grilling when he came into the kitchen. He glared at her. She smiled back sweetly. “Have some bread and honey,” she said, pointing to the table. “That will make you look less sour.”

It didn’t. Pekka made a point of eating faster than he did, and then springing up while he had a mouthful so she could set the kitchen to rights. He started glaring again, but took a swig from his pot of beer and laughed instead. “If you must do things, go ahead and do them,” he said. “I suspect it means your husband works you too hard, but it’s his affair, and yours.” Pekka refused to dignify that with even so much as a sniff.

Piilis came to Siuntio’s house first, followed a couple of minutes later by Alkio and Raahe. All the theoretical sorcerers were full of praise for Pekka. “You’ve given us something we’ll be arguing about for year,” Raahe said with a smile so wide, she didn’t seem capable of arguing about anything.

“Where is Ilmarinen?” Siuntio grumbled, pacing back and forth across his parlor. “If anyone can unravel a phenomenon too strange to be believed, he is the man. He thinks left-handed.”

“If anyone can unravel this, Master, I think you are the one,” Pekka said.

But Siuntio shook his head. “I think more widely than Ilmarinen. I think more deeply than Ilmarinen. Ilmarinen, though, Ilmarinen thinks more strangely than I do. Ilmarinen thinks more strangely than anyone does. Ilmarinen”—he sighed—“likely thinks it amusing to be late.”

After most of an hour, the missing mage did arrive. He offered no apologies. Pekka thought he smelled of wine. If the others thought so, too, they said nothing.

“Well, here we are,” Ilmarinen said loudly. “Theoretical sorcerers without any theories. Isn’t that grand? And it’s your fault.” He leered at Pekka. “You turned the world upside down, and you didn’t even know you were going to do it.”

“If anyone knew he was about to turn the world upside down, he would not do it,” Siuntio said. “I hope he would not do it.”

“You’re right,” Alkio said. “When we look for things that extend what we know, we take small steps. It’s only when we stumble and almost fall that we need long strides to help us get our balance.”

“Very pretty,” Ilmarinen said. “It would be all the better if it meant something, but very pretty just the same.”

“Speaking of meaning,” Piilis said with acid in his voice, “I suppose you’re ready to tell us now what Mistress Pekka’s experiment means.”

“Of course I am,” Ilmarinen said, which made everyone stare at him. Pekka wondered if Siuntio had known exactly what he was talking about. Ilmarinen went on, “It means we aren’t so smart as we thought we were before she made it. I already told you that, but you weren’t listening.”

Piilis glowered. Ilmarinen grinned, no doubt having hoped to provoke him into glowering. Siuntio said, “In my opinion, we shall advance faster by discussing what we do know of this phenomenon than what we do not.”

“Since we don’t know anything about this cursed phenomenon, we haven’t got anything to discuss,” Ilmarinen pointed out. “In that case, this meeting has no point.” He turned as if to go.

Raahe, Alkio, and Siuntio all exclaimed. When Ilmarinen turned back, he was grinning again. Pekka said, “Now that you’ve had your sport, Master, have we your leave to get on with things?”

“I suppose so,” Ilmarinen answered, something like approval in his eyes. Now Pekka smiled. So Ilmarinen needed to be handled like Uto, did he? She knew how to take a firm line, whether with a crotchety four-year-old or an even more crotchety theoretical sorcerer.

“Unfortunately, Master Ilmarinen is too close to being right,” Raahe said. “We know what happens in Mistress Pekka’s fascinating experiment, but we do not know why, which is of the essence. Nothing in present theory indicates that one of those paired acorns should disappear.”

“Nothing in the theory unifying similarity and contagion we have been struggling to develop indicates such an outcome, either,” Piilis said.

Ilmarinen laughed. “Time to stand theory on its head, then, wouldn’t you say? That’s what you do when things like this happen.”

“I should also point out that there is no proof similarity and contagion can be unified,” Siuntio said. “If anything, Mistress Pekka’s experiment seems to argue against unification.”

“I fear I must agree with you,” Pekka said sadly. “I thought the mathematics showed otherwise, but anyone who chooses mathematics over experiment is a fool. With no unity underlying the two laws, there seems little point even to these informal gatherings.”

She waited for Ilmarinen’s sardonic agreement. The sour mage said, “Anyone who chooses mathematics over experiment has done the mathematics wrong or the experiment wrong. The experiment is right. That means the mathematics have to be wrong. Sooner or later, somebody will find the right mathematics. The only reason I can see that it shouldn’t be us is that we’re too stupid.”

“Maybe,” Siuntio said, “just maybe, we aren’t so stupid as all that. Whether we are or not might be worth finding out, don’t you think?” Maybe, Pekka thought, just maybe, what I feel is hope.

Lagoans had a saying: out of the pot and on to the stove. That would have fit the way Fernao felt about Mizpah, save only that he did not believe in stretching metaphor far enough to compare the land of the Ice People with anything having to do with heat. Even if Mizpah did lie under Lagoan domination, it was even smaller and slower and duller than Heshbon, something the mage would have had a hard time imagining had he not seen it with his own eyes.

Where he was bored and restive, King Penda, having gone from exile to exile, seemed not far from snapping. “Will we have to spend the winter here?” he demanded.

He’d been demanding that since the day Doeg’s caravan reached Mizpah. Fernao had expressed his own opinion of the caravan journey by buying a dressed ptarmigan carcass, roasting it, and devouring it, even if the flesh did taste of pine needles. By now, though, he was as sick of Penda’s nagging as he had been of Doeg’s swaggering savagery. He pointed to the harbor that was Mizpah’s reason for being and said, “Jump right in, your Majesty. You shouldn’t need more than a month to swim to Setubal, provided the Algarvians patrolling out of Sibiu don’t catch you as you splash past.”

Penda was slower on the uptake than he might have been; as king, he probably hadn’t been exposed to much irony. He answered, “Lagoas should send out a ship to take us to Setubal instead of leaving us here to rot.”

“It’s cold enough that we’re rotting very slowly,” Fernao said.

“Enough—powers above, a surfeit—of your feeble jests and japes!” Penda cried.

That did nothing to endear him to Fernao. Nothing could have done much to endear him to Fernao, not when they’d had as much trouble putting up with each other as was the case. The mage snapped, “Your Majesty, Lagoas knows we are here. Getting a ship here is another matter. My kingdom is, I remind you, at war with Algarve. I also remind you—again, since you did not seem to hear me the first time—that Algarve holds Sibiu. Getting a ship into and out of Mizpah would be very difficult even in the best of times—and, as you point out, winter is coining, which will add drift ice to other difficulties.”

Penda’s shiver struck Fernao as overdramatic. But then, Forthweg was a northern kingdom with a mild northern climate. Contemplating ice in any liquid larger than a bowl of sherbet had to feel wrong to Penda. “What is winter like here?” the exiled king whispered.

“I do not know for a fact,” Fernao said, “for I have never been here before. But I have heard it said that winter in this country makes an Unkerlanter winter balmy by comparison.”

Was that a whimper, down there deep in King Penda’s throat? If it was, he quickly choked it back. Fernao felt more sympathy for him than he was willing to show. In Forthweg, in Jelgava, in northern Algarve and Valmiera, summer lingered yet. Even in Sibiu, in Lagoas, in Kuusamo, the weather would still be mild, perhaps even warm.

Here at Mizpah, days remained above freezing and nights, as yet, seldom dropped far below it. A hearty Lagoan merchant, a few days before, had stripped to his drawers, gone swimming in the Narrow Sea, and emerged from the chilly water to find a crowd of Ice People, men and women both, gathered on the rocky beach staring at him. It wasn’t so much that he was nearly naked in a land where the natives swaddled themselves: far more that he had plunged into the water and not come out a block of salty ice.

But Penda, as Fernao had already seen, was not interested in a dip in the Narrow Sea. He said, “You being a first-rank mage, can you not whisk us over the water to your homeland by sorcery?”

“If I could do that, so could many other mages,” Fernao answered. “If many others could do it, all our wars would have seen soldiers popping out of midair in unexpected places. I work magic, not miracles.”

He’d known Penda would scowl at him, and the king did. Like most laymen, Penda did not distinguish between the two. Some arrogant mages didn’t, either. Because of those who refused to acknowledge the distinction, sorcery had advanced since the days of the Kaunian Empire. The vast majority of them, though, had failed, and a lot had paid for their arrogance with their lives.

Sulkily, Penda said, “What do you suggest that we do, then, sir mage?”

Fernao sighed. “When there’s nothing we can do, your Majesty, we may as well make the best of doing nothing.”

“Bah!” Penda said. “I had nothing to do in Patras, for I might as well have been a prisoner. I had nothing to do in Heshbon, for there was nothing to do in Heshbon. I have nothing to do here, for there is less than nothing to do here. In Setubal, I would still be an exile, aye, but there, at least, I could work toward the liberation of my kingdom. Do you wonder that I pine?”

Do you wonder that I tire of your pining? Fernao could not give the answer that first sprang to mind. Aloud, he said, “You cannot swim to Lagoas. You cannot hire a caravan to take you thither. Lagoas cannot send a ship hither, as I have already said. That leaves nothing I can think of. I assure you, I am also anxious to return.”

Penda exhaled in exasperation; no doubt Fernao wore on his nerves, as he wore on Fernao’s. “You are but a Lagoan,” he said, as if to a backwards child. “I am not merely a Forthwegian: I am Forthweg. Do you now see the difference between us?”

What Fernao saw was that, if he had to spend another moment with Penda just then, he would smash a chamber pot over the exiled king’s head. He said, “I am going down to the market square, to see what I might learn.”

“You will learn that it is cold and bleak and nearly empty,” Penda said, carping still. “Is that not something you already knew?” Perhaps fortunately, Fernao left instead of screaming at him or performing an earthenware coronation.

Unfortunately for Fernao, Penda had spoken the truth. Mizpah’s market square was cold and bleak and nearly empty. Ships still put in at Heshbon, because they could trade with Yanina or Algarve or Unkerlant. Algarvian ships were not welcome here—although, had they not been busy in places more urgent to King Mezentio, they could have snapped up the little town easily enough. Heshbon was far closer to Yanina and Unkerlant. And so Mizpah’s harbor remained as empty as a poor man’s cupboard.

Without overseas trade, the overland trade that went through the market square also suffered. Doeg had taken one look around before shaking his shaggy head and faring back toward the west, and no caravan even close to the size of his had come in since. Fernao saw neither cinnabar nor furs on display, and cinnabar and furs were the only reasons Lagoans and men from Derlavai came to the land of the Ice People.

A tinker repaired a pot. A buyer and seller dickered over a two-humped camel, as a buyer and seller might have dickered over a mule in a Lagoan back-country village. A woman remarkable only for her hairy cheeks was selling eggs from a bowl that looked a lot like the chamber pot Fernao hadn’t broken over King Penda’s head. The market square would have seemed far less lonely had it not been six times as large as it needed to be for such humble trading.

Another woman of the Ice People sauntered past Fernao. She had drenched herself in enough cheap Lagoan perfume to mask the smell of her long-unwashed body; what she was selling seemed obvious enough. When Fernao showed no interest in buying, she screeched insults at him in her language and then in his. He bowed, as if at compliments of similar magnitude. That only made her more irate, which was what he’d had in mind.

Looking around the forsaken square, he wished he hadn’t come. But when he thought about going back to the hostel and enduring more of King Penda’s endless complaints, he realized he couldn’t have done anything else—unless he wanted to head inland and climb the Barrier Mountains, that is.

And then, to his surprise, the square stopped being forsaken. The small force of garrison troops Lagoas maintained in Mizpah paraded across it in uniform tunics and kilts—with heavy wool leggings beneath the kilts as a concession to the climate. It did not look like an exercise; the men’s faces were grimly intent, as if they were marching to war.

“What’s toward?” Fernao called to the officer tramping along beside his men.

He watched the fellow working out what to say—and, indeed, whether to say anything at all. A shrug meant the Lagoan decided keeping the news to himself didn’t matter. “The cursed Yaninans have come over the border between their claim and ours,” he answered. “King Tsavellas has declared war on Lagoas, and may the powers below eat him for it. We’re off to see how many of his men we can gobble down, to teach him treachery has a price.”

“Can you hold the Yaninans back?” Fernao asked.

Now the officer didn’t answer. Maybe he was too full of his own thoughts to reply. Maybe he didn’t feel like telling the truth where his men could hear it but was too proud to lie. Whatever the reason, he just kept marching.

Yanina would have no trouble shipping troops by the hundreds—by the thousands—across the Narrow Sea. Fernao needed to be neither general nor admiral to see that at a glance. Lagoans would have endless trouble getting any troops into Mizpah. Even if the local garrison beat back the first Yaninan assault, what then?

What then? had another significance for Fernao, too. What would he and Penda do if the Yaninans triumphantly marched into Mizpah? All of a sudden, climbing the Barrier Mountains didn’t seem like such a bad idea. King Tsavellas would not remember with joy and glad tidings the mage who had spirited Penda out of his palace and out of his kingdom. He probably would not be so glad to see Penda again, either.

Fernao did not give way to panic. Being a mage, he had more ways to disguise himself—and King Penda, too, he thought with a certain amount of reluctance—than the ordinary mortal. He’d already used some. He could use more. But disguises were of less use here in Mizpah than they would have been in crowded Patras or Setubal. Mizpah was woefully short on strangers. If he and Penda (or Fernastro and Olo, as they still called themselves) disappeared and a couple of other men with new appearances started strolling around the town, people would notice. They might be encouraged to talk.

When Fernao looked south, he saw black clouds spilling over the Barrier Mountains. Without the news he’d just got, the idea of a storm blowing up out of the interior of the austral continent so early in the year would have appalled him. As things were, he smiled benevolently. King Tsavellas’s troopers wouldn’t be able to move cast very fast through driving rain, or more likely sleet and snow.

“Maybe I have time,” he murmured. He’d have to speak by crystal with Setubal. Maybe, now that Yanina and Lagoas were at war, King Vitor would find King Penda—and, not quite incidentally, Fernao—more worth rescuing. Fernao did wish he hadn’t explained to Penda in such exacting detail why rescue seemed so unlikely.

After a triumphal procession through the streets of Trapani and a reception hosted by King Mezentio, after another triumphal procession through Priekule, capital of downfallen Valmiera—after those high points to his soldierly career, Count Sabrino found Tricarico, a provincial city with a long history of unimportance behind it, distinctly uninteresting.

The women were plain, the food was dull, the wine… the wine, actually, was not bad at all. The dragonflier wished he had the chance to drink more of it.

But he and the wing he commanded were in the air as often as their mounts could stand it. When they weren’t flying, other wings were. Before long, no Jelgavan dragons could drop eggs on Tricarico or, for that matter, on the Algarvian soldiers defending the kingdom east of Tricarico.

“Easy work, this,” Captain Domiziano said after another tour of flying where not a single Jelgavan dragon had risen to challenge them. “More Kaunian cowardice, that’s what it is.”

Sabrino shook his head and waggled a forefinger at the squadron commander. “It’s not so simple. I wish it were. The Valmierans were brave enough, but they didn’t figure out what we were doing till it was too late for them. I don’t see any reason to think the Jelgavans are different.”

“Why aren’t they fighting us, then, Colonel?” Domiziano asked. “They’re like a turtle with its head and its legs pulled into its shell.” He shrugged his own head down as far as it would go and hunched up his shoulders, too.

Laughing, Sabrino said, “You should mount the stage, not a dragon. But consider, my dear fellow: together, Valmiera and Jelgava are almost as big as we are. During the Six Years’ War, they stuck together and made us pay. This time, we knocked one of them out of the fight in a hurry. Do you wonder that the other kingdom is none too bold by its lonesome?”

Domiziano considered, then gave Sabrino a seated bow. “Put that way, sir, no, I don’t suppose I do.”

“They’ll make us come to them,” Sabrino said. “They’ll make us pay the butcher’s bill, the way the fellow who attacked did in the last war.” He looked east toward the Bradano Mountains from the dragon farm, one of many that had sprouted around Tricarico over the past few weeks. He chuckled softly. “One day before too long, they may just find out they’re not so clever as they think they are.”

“Aye, sir.” Domiziano’s eyes glowed. “If this goes as it should, a thousand years from now they’ll be writing romances about us, the same way everybody who can scribble nowadays is churning out stories about the Algarvian chieftains who overran the Kaunian Empire.”

“Bad stories—or the ones I’ve seen are, anyhow.” Sabrino’s lip curled: he fancied himself a literary critic. He slapped his subordinate on the shoulder. “A thousand years from now, you’ll be dead, and you won’t know and you won’t care what they’re writing about you. The trick of it is, you don’t want to be dead two weeks from now, not knowing or caring what they write about you.”

“Aye—you’re right again.” Domiziano laughed the robust laugh of a healthy young man who was at the same time a healthy young animal. “I aim to die at the age of a hundred and five, blazed down by an outraged husband.”

“And here’s hoping you make it, my lad,” Sabrino said. “Such ambition should not go unrewarded.”

A sentry came trotting up. “Begging your pardon, Colonel, but Colonel Cilandro is here to see you.”

“Well, good,” Sabrino said. “Cilandro and I have a lot of things to talk about. We’re going to be in each other’s pouches for the next little while.”

Colonel Cilandro walked with a limp. “The Valmierans gave me a present,” he said when Sabrino remarked on it. “It’s not blazed down to the bone, so it’ll heal before too long. All it means is, I can’t very well run away if we get into trouble. Since I wasn’t going to run away anyhow, it doesn’t matter.”

Sabrino bowed. “A man after my own heart!”

The infantry colonel returned the bow. “And I have heard good things of you, my lord count. Let us hope we work well together. We haven’t much time.”

“We can’t hope to hold anything like this secret for very long,” Sabrino agreed, “and what point to going on with it if it’s not secret?” He pointed back toward his tent, one of many that had sprouted on the meadow—a flock of sheep were probably annoyed at King Mezentio’s forces. “I have some wine in there, and, as long as we’re drinking, we can look at the maps.”

“Well put,” Cilandro said. “Oh, well put!” He bowed again. “To the wine, then, Colonel—and, while we’re at it, the maps.”

He took a glass of red. As Sabrino had expected—as Sabrino had certainly hoped—he contented himself with the one glass, nursing it to make it last. Sabrino pointed to the map he’d tacked down on a light folding table. “As I understand things, you’ll be moving here.” He pointed.

Cilandro bent over the map. “Aye, that’s about right. If we can go in right there”—now he pointed—“everything will be perfect.” He chuckled. “Last time I thought anything like that was when I was about to lose my cherry. But back to business, eh? This is the narrowest stretch, which means it’ll be the easiest to hold, and it’s also got a power point right there, so we’ll be able to recharge our sticks and egg-tossers without cutting throats to do it.”

“Aye.” Sabrino put his finger down on the star that symbolized the power point. “You won’t find a lot of Jelgavan throats to cut there. You’d better not find a lot of Jelgavan throats to cut there, or else you’ll be cutting your own throats.”

“And isn’t that the sad and sorry truth, my dear Colonel?” Cilandro said. “No denying it’s better to give a surprise than to get one, eh?” He tapped a fingernail against his wine glass. “The question that keeps eating at me is, can you get enough of my men into the right place fast enough to let us do what we’re ordered to do?”

“We’ll do our best,” Sabrino said. “And we’ll keep on doing our best as long as you have men on the ground there. We don’t talk away from what we start—we aren’t Unkerlanters, after all. But that’s just if thing go wrong. I think they’ll go right. King Mezentio has had all the answers so far.”

Colonel Cilandro nodded. “That he has.” He raised his glass. “Here’s to a king who knows what he’s doing. If we’d had one like that during the Six Years’ War, we wouldn’t be fighting this one now.” He drained the last of the wine.

Sabrino emptied his goblet, too. “And that’s also the truth. Well, day after tomorrow, if the weather holds, you’ll bring your regiment on over here—and then we’ll find out exactly how smart King Mezentio is.”

“Aye and aye and aye again.” Cilandro clasped Sabrino’s hand, then swept him into an embrace. “Day after tomorrow, Colonel.” He shook a fist at the sky—or Sabrino supposed it was at the sky, anyhow, rather than at the canvas roof of the tent. “And the weather had better hold.”

It did. Cilandro’s regiment tramped up to the dragon farm a little before dawn. At a good many places along the border between Algarve and Jelgava, regiments were marching up to wings of dragons. Along with its flier, a dragon could carry about half a ton of eggs to drop on the foe’s head. If, instead of carrying eggs, each dragon carried five troopers…

“First three companies forward!” Colonel Cilandro commanded. The men of the dragons’ ground crews had been frantically mounting harnesses on their charges’ long scaly torsos. The dragons had liked that no better than they liked anything else. Cilandro gave Sabrino a cheery wave as he took his place just behind the dragonflier. “If we live through this, it will be jolly,” the infantry colonel said. “And if we don’t, we won’t care. So let’s be off.”

“My crystal man is waiting for the signal,” Sabrino answered, hoping he sounded calmer than he felt. “Everyone will move at the same time. We don’t want the Jelgavans getting too many ideas beforehand.”

Maybe Cilandro would have had something suitably impolite to say about the likelihood of Kaunians getting ideas. He never got the chance. A man came running up to Sabrino’s dragon. He paused just out of range of the creature’s long, scaly neck, raised to his lips the trumpet he was carrying, and blew a long, untuneful blast.

Sabrino whacked his dragon with the goad. The dragon let out a screech and began to flap its wings. It screeched again when it didn’t take off quite so soon as it had expected; it was used to carrying only Sabrino’s weight. But the great wings beat faster and faster, harder and harder. Dust flew up in choking clouds. And then, at last, the dragon flew up, too, still letting the world know it was indignant at having to work so hard. Behind Sabrino, Cilandro whooped.

As the dragon gained height, Sabrino also whooped, half with joy, half with awe. The whole wing was rising. All the other wings were rising. Almost all the dragons in Algarve, save for those flying against Lagoas and some patrolling the sky on the border with Unkerlant in the west, were rising. Sabrino knew he could not see them all. The ones he could see were by themselves more dragons than he’d ever seen gathered together before.

Seven main passes pierced the Bradano Mountains. Cut the Jelgavan army west of the mountains off from the kingdom that supported it … do that and, with any luck at all, the Algarvians would be able to roll it up and then parade through the rest of the kingdom. The plan was audacious enough to work. Whether it was good enough to work, his men and Cilandro’s would soon find out.

Over the lines they flew, not so high as Sabrino might have liked. A squadron of Jelgavan dragons with only their own fliers aboard could have wreaked havoc among the heavily laden Algarvian beasts. Almost all of them were freighted with soldiers, leaving only a scant handful to serve as escorts.

One dragon did tumble out of the sky, blazed from below. But the rest of the men and mounts in Sabrino’s flight kept going, up into the Bradano Mountains and through the pass Colonel Cilandro and his soldiers were charged with sealing. Sabrino’s head swiveled back and forth as he gauged the landmarks. Even before Cilandro shouted at him, he was urging his dragon downward. The others in the flight followed. As soon as the dragon’s claws touched the stone of the road through the narrowest part of the pass, Cilandro and his fellow soldiers sprang off. Other flights brought in the first companies of other regiments.

“We’ll go back for your friends now,” Sabrino shouted to Cilandro.

“Aye, do,” Cilandro answered. “And we’ll start plugging the pass here.” He waved.

Waving back, Sabrino urged his dragon into the air once more. How swiftly, how effortlessly, he and his unburdened comrades flew back to the dragon farm outside Tricarico. Three more companies of infantry boarded them, to be leapfrogged over the Jelgavans and into the pass. Then they, almost all of them, returned yet again, and transported the rest of their assigned regiments.

Once the last contingent of footsoldiers was on the ground astride Jelgava’s lifeline, Sabrino ordered his flight into the air once more. By now, the Jelgavans were beginning to wake up to what Algarve had done. Egg-carrying dragons came winging out of the east to attack the men the Algarvians had placed behind most of Jelgava’s army. But they were, in Sabrino’s judgment, far too few, and, being burdened with eggs, no swifter than the tired mounts he and his men were flying. Not more than a handful got to drop those eggs on the Algarvians.

Sabrino howled with glee and shook his fist. “The bottle is corked, curse you!” he shouted to the foe. “Aye, by the powers above, the bottle is corked!”

“Buggered!” Talsu said bitterly. “That’s what’s happened to us. We’ve been buggered.”

“Aye.” His friend Smilsu sounded every bit as bitter. “That’s what happens when you keep looking straight ahead. Somebody sneaks around behind you and gives it to you right up the—”

“Pass,” Talsu broke in. Smilsu laughed, not so much because it was funny as because it was either laugh or weep. Talsu went on, “We’d better do something about it pretty cursed quick, too, or this war goes straight into the chamber pot.”

“You think it hasn’t gone there already?” Smilsu demanded.

Talsu didn’t answer right away. He did think it had gone there already. As long as the redheads held the passes—held all the passes, by what panicky rumor said—how were the Jelgavans to get food and other supplies and charges for their weapons up to the soldiers who needed them? The plain and simple answer was, they couldn’t.

At last, Talsu said, “Maybe we should have pulled more men out of the front-line trenches to break through the Algarvian cork.”

Smilsu gave him an ironic bow. “Oh, aye, General, that’d be splendid. Then they’d have pushed us back even farther than they already have.”

Talsu waved his arms in exasperation. He stood behind a boulder big enough to make the gesture safe: no Algarvian could see him do it and blaze him for it. “Well, what did you expect? Of course the fornicating whoresons hit us from the front, too. They don’t want to just cut us off—they want to bloody well massacre us.” He lowered his voice. “And odds are we’d have done a lot better and gone a lot further in this stinking war if our own officers thought the same way.”

“Only one I ever saw who even came close was Colonel Adomu,” Smilsu answered, “and look what it got him.”

He also spoke quietly, which was wise on his part, for Colonel Balozhu, who had taken over for the able, energetic, but unlucky Adomu, came walking by to look over their position. Talsu shook his head. Walking was probably too strong a word to describe what Balozhu was doing. Wandering came closer. Balozhu looked dazed, as if somebody had clouted him in the side of the head with a brick. Talsu had the nasty suspicion that most Jelgavan officers looked the same way these days. Algarve had clouted the whole kingdom in the side of the head with a brick.

Balozhu nodded to him and Smilsu. “Courage, men,” he said, though he hadn’t shown any enormous amount of it himself. “Before long, the Algarvians’ attacks must surely lose their impetus.”

“Aye, my lord count,” Talsu answered, though Balozhu hadn’t given any reason why the Algarvians should slow down. Talsu and Smilsu both bowed low; Balozhu might not have been a bold soldier, but he was a stickler for military punctilio. Satisfied, he went on his way, that mildly confused expression still spread across his bland features.

Very, very softly, Smilsu said, “Aye, he’ll lead us to victory.” In a different tone of voice, that might have been praise for Balozhu. As things were, Talsu looked around to make sure no one but him had heard his friend.

He too spoke in a whisper: “I don’t know why we bother keeping up this fight when it’s already lost.”

“Another good question,” Smilsu allowed. “Another question you’d better not ask our dear, noble colonel. The only answer he’d come up with has a dungeon in it somewhere, you mark my words.”

“I can do better than that for myself, thanks,” Talsu said. “Staying alive comes to mind. You throw down your stick and throw up your hands in front of an Algarvian, it’s not better than even money he lets you surrender. He’s about as likely to blaze you down instead.”

“Aye, the redheads are savages,” Smilsu said. “They always have been. I expect they always will be.” He spat in glum emphasis.

“That’s the truth,” Talsu said. But he recalled slitting Algarvian’s throats when sticks needed charging. Not all the savagery lay on the Algarvian side.

And then he stopped caring where the savagery lay, for the Algarvians started tossing eggs at his regiment’s position. Dragons appeared overhead, dropping more eggs and also swooping low to flame Jelgavans rash enough to be caught away from cover. Shouting like demons in their coarse, trilling tongue, the redheads swarmed forward.

They flitted from rock to rock like the mountain apes of the distant west. But mountain apes were not armed with sticks. Mountain apes did not bring heavy sticks and egg-tossers forward on the backs of armored behemoths. Mountain apes did not have dragons diving to their aid.

Along with the rest of the regiment, Talsu retreated. It was that or be outflanked, cut off, and altogether wrecked. Spotting Vartu not far away, a cut on his forehead sending blood dripping down the side of his face, Talsu called, “Don’t you wish you’d gone home to serve Dzirnavu’s relations?”

“Powers above, no!” the former regimental commander’s servant answered. “There, they’d be paying me to let them abuse me. Here, if these stinking Algarvians want to do me a bad turn, I can blaze back at them.” He dropped to one knee and did just that. Then he retreated again, falling back like the veteran he’d become.

Talsu was unhappily aware that his comrades and he couldn’t retreat a great deal farther, not with the Algarvians still blocking the pass through which the main line of the retreat would have to go. He wondered what Colonel Balozhu and the men above him would have them do once they were well and thoroughly trapped. Whatever it was, it would probably be some half measure that didn’t come close to solving the real problem, which was that the Algarvians had more imagination than they knew what to do with and the Jelgavans … the Jelgavans didn’t have nearly enough.

More eggs rained down on the beleaguered regiment. More Algarvians pushed forward against its crumbling front, too. Talsu began to wonder whether the officers above Balozhu would have much chance to do anything with the regiment at all. It seemed to be breaking up right here. Maybe his chances of living through an attempted surrender were better than those of living through much more fighting after all.

Dragons stooped like falcons, flaming, flaming. Not far away from Talsu, a man turned into a torch. He kept running and shrieking and setting bushes ablaze till at last, mercifully, he fell. Talsu made up his mind to yield himself up to the first Algarvian who wasn’t actively trying to kill him the instant they saw each other.

Then Smilsu shouted, “Over here! This way!” Talsu, just then, would have taken any way out of the trap in which the regiment found itself. The stink of his comrade’s charred flesh in his nostrils, he ran toward the little path leading up into the mountains that Smilsu had found.

He wasn’t the only one, either. Vartu and half a dozen others sprinted toward that path. None of them, Talsu was sure, had the least idea where it led, or if it led anywhere. None of them cared, cither; he was equally sure of that. Wherever it went could not be worse than here.

That was what he thought till another dragon painted in white and green and red swooped toward his comrades and him. On that narrow track, they had nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. He threw his stick up to his shoulder and blazed away. He gave a sort of mental shrug even as he did so. If he was going to die, he’d die fighting. Given a chance, he would have far preferred not dying at all. Soldiers didn’t always get choices like that.

Sometimes—not nearly often enough, especially not among Jelgavans these days—soldiers did get lucky. Talsu wasn’t the only one blazing at the dragon, but he always insisted his was the beam that caught the great beast in the eye and blazed out its tiny, hate-filled brain. Instead of turning him into another human torch, the dragon and its flier slammed into the ground not twenty feet from him, cutting off the mouth of the path. The dragon’s carcass began to burn then. The flier didn’t move; the fall of his dragon must have killed him.

Talsu was not about to complain. He had his life back when he’d expected to lose it in the next instant. “Let’s go!” he said. He still didn’t know where he was going. He didn’t care, either. He could go, and so he would.

“Blazed down a dragon!” Smilsu cried. “They’d give us a decoration for that, if only they knew about it.”

“Bugger the decorations,” Talsu said. He looked around. No, he had no officers, nor even any sergeants, to tell him what to do. He felt absurdly free, cut off not only from whatever was left of the rest of the regiment but also from the army and Jelgava as a whole. “Come on. Let’s see if we can get away.”

“We’ve already gotten away,” Vartu said, which also held a great deal of truth. The ex-servant turned an eye to the sky, no doubt fearing another dragon might turn that truth into a lie.

But the Algarvians had more to worry about than a few fleeting foot-soldiers. Their dragons rained death down on the Jelgavans still trying to push through their force plugging the pass. Talsu and his companions, out of the main tight, were quickly forgotten.

“Do you know,” Smilsu said after they trudged east, or as close to east as they could, for a couple of miles, “I think this track is going to let us out into the foothills on the other side of the mountains.”

“If you’re right,” Vartu said, “it sure as blazes doesn’t look like anybody in a fancy uniform knows it’s here. If the dukes and counts and what have you did know, they’d be moving men along it.”

Smilsu nodded. “Aye. If we come out the other side, we could be heroes for letting the dukes know about it.”

They walked on a while longer. Then Talsu said, “If I had my choice between being a hero and being out of the cursed war …” He took another couple of steps before realizing that might be exactly the choice he had. He spat. “What have the dukes and counts and what have you ever done for me? They’ve done plenty to me. They’ve done their cursed best to get me killed. Let them sweat.” He kept going. None of the others said a word to contradict him.