Out of the Darkness

Seven

Colonel Lurcanio was not happy to find himself back in Algarve. But for a few brief leaves, he’d been away from his home kingdom for almost five years. Had the war gone better, he would have remained in Priekule, too. Nothing would have pleased him more. Here he was, though, in southeastern Algarve, doing his best to hold back the Kuusamans and Lagoans who’d swarmed through the Marquisate of Rivaroli and were pushing farther west every day.

His own brigade left a good deal to be desired. It had lost far too many men and behemoths and egg-tossers in the failed counterattack against the islanders in western Valmiera. Lurcanio screamed to his superiors for replacements. Those superiors, when they didn’t scream back, laughed in his face.

“Replacements?” a harried lieutenant general said. “We couldn’t afford to give you what we gave you the last time. How do you think we’re going to be able to make losses good now?”

“How do you think I can stop the enemy with what I’ve got left?” Lurcanio retorted. “I can’t remember the last time I saw an Algarvian dragon overhead.”

“Believe me, Colonel, you’re not the only one with troubles,” the lieutenant general replied. “Make do the best you can.” His image in the crystal in front of Lurcanio looked down at some papers on his desk. “There are several regiments of Popular Assault soldiers not far from your position. Feel free to commandeer them and add them to your force.”

“Thank you for nothing. . sir,” Lurcanio said. “I’ve already seen Popular Assault regiments. The men who aren’t older than I am are too young to have hair on their balls-some of them haven’t even been circumcised yet. They can’t stand up to real soldiers. They couldn’t even if they had anything more than hunting sticks to blaze with.”

He waited for the lieutenant general to call him insubordinate or to say the soldiers in question were better than he claimed. Back in Trapani, a lot of men still clung to illusions that had died at the front line. But the officer only sighed and said, “Do the best you can, Colonel. I don’t know what else to tell you, except you’re not the only one with troubles.”

“I understand that, sir, but-” The crystal flared and then went blank before he could get his protest well begun. He said something sulfurous under his breath. He surely wasn’t the only one with troubles. As best he could tell, the whole Kingdom of Algarve was falling to pieces before his eyes.

Things hadn’t been this bleak even at the end of the Six Years’ War. Then Algarve had asked for armistice while her armies still mostly stood on enemy soil. Now. . He imagined asking Swemmel of Unkerlant for an armistice. Swemmel didn’t want one. Swemmel wanted every Algarvian in the world dead. The way things were going, he was liable to get his wish, too. And the Lagoans and Kuusamans showed no sign of being in a dickering mood, either.

Of course they don’t want to dicker with us, Lurcanio thought. We came too close to beating them all this time. They don’t want us getting another chance any time soon. They want to smash us flat instead. Had he been a Kuusaman, he supposed he would have felt the same way. Had he been an Unkerlanter. . Lurcanio shook his head. Some things were altogether too depressing to contemplate.

He strode out of the barn where his crystallomancer had set up shop. It was raining outside, a cold, driving rain on the edge of turning into sleet. Lurcanio pulled his hat down low to keep the rain out of his face. Eggs were bursting in the neighborhood, but not too many of them. The rain slowed down the enemy, too.

A sergeant came up to him, a plump little man in civilian tunic and kilt at the underofficer’s heels. “Sir, allow me to present Baron Oberto, who has the honor to be the mayor of the town of Carsoli,” the sergeant said.

Carsoli was the town just west of the brigade’s present position, the one Lurcanio was currently trying to hold. He bowed to Oberto. “Good day, your Excellency,” he said. “And what can I do for you this afternoon?”

By the expression on Oberto’s face, it wasn’t a good day and was unlikely to become one. “Colonel,” he said, surprising Lurcanio by correctly reading his rank badges, “I hope you will not find it necessary to fight inside my fair city. When the time comes, as we both know it must, I beseech you to pull back through Carsoli, so that the islanders can occupy it without doing it too much harm.”

Lurcanio gave him a long, measuring stare. Oberto nervously looked back. “So you think the war is lost, do you?” Lurcanio said at last.

Oberto’s head bobbed up and down, as if on a spring. “Of course I do,” he said. “Any fool can see as much.”

Any fool could have seen as much two years earlier, when the Unkerlanters drove the Algarvians back from Sulingen. Lurcanio bowed again, then backhanded Oberto across the face. The mayor of Carsoli cried out and staggered. “Be thankful I don’t order you blazed on the spot. Get out of my sight. I have a war to fight, whether you’ve noticed it or not.”

“You’re a madman,” Oberto said, bringing a hand up to his cheek.

“I’m a soldier,” Lurcanio answered. In his own mind, he wasn’t so sure the two were different, but he would never have admitted that to the luckless, cowardly mayor of Carsoli. Admitting it to Oberto might have meant admitting it to himself.

Hand still pressed to his face, Oberto staggered away. I wonder if I ought to draft an order of the day reminding the men they are still obliged to do their duty, Lurcanio thought. If they give up, what hope have we? A moment later, he grimaced and kicked at the muddy ground. Even if they don’t give up, what hope have we?

He had been thinking about pulling back through Carsoli if enemy pressure grew too great. Now he resolved to fight in the place till not one brick remained atop another. That’s what you get, Oberto, curse you. You would have done better to keep your mouth shut, but what Algarvian could ever manage that?

In a perfectly foul temper, he stormed off toward the farmhouse where he made what passed for his headquarters. Before he got there, though, another soldier called, “Colonel Lurcanio!”

“What is it?” he snarled.

“Er-” As the sergeant had done, this fellow had a civilian in his wake: no, not one civilian, but half a dozen or so. “These. . people need to speak with you, sir.”

“Oh, they do, do they?” Lurcanio snapped. “What in blazes do they want? And why do I need to say one fornicating word to them?” But then he got a good look at who came behind the soldier, and his fiery temper cooled. “Oh,” he said, and, “Oh,” again. He nodded. “Them. Aye, I’ll talk to them.”

The four men and two women who came up to Lurcanio wore tunics and kilts in the Algarvian style, but they were blonds, their hair soaked and falling down stringily over their faces. “You have to help us, Colonel!” the tallest man exclaimed, his Algarvian fluent enough but accented with the more guttural consonants and flat vowels of Valmieran. “By the powers above, you have to!”

Lurcanio had known him well enough back in Priekule. “I have to, eh? And why is that, Smetnu?” For a refugee without a kingdom to give him orders really was a bit much.

Smetnu had an answer for him, though: “I’ll tell you why. Because I spent four years-more than four years-helping you, that’s why. Didn’t my news sheets sing King Mezentio’s song all over Valmiera?”

“And my broadsheets!” another man added.

“And my plays,” said a third.

“And our acting,” one of the women and the fourth man said together.

The other woman, whose name was Sigulda and who was either married or at least thoroughly attached to Smetnu, said, “If you don’t help us, they’ll catch up with us. And if they catch up with us. .” She drew a thumb across her throat. Her nails were painted red as blood, which added to the effect of the gesture.

And the Valmierans were right. That was all there was to it. Lurcanio bowed. “Very well, my friends. I will do what I can. But I can do, perhaps, less than you think. You will have noticed, Algarve is falling deeper into ruin and disaster with each passing day.”

They nodded. Their own kingdom-the Algarvian version of Valmiera they’d promoted and upheld-had already fallen into ruin. And now that Algarve was breaking under hammer blows from west and east, few of Mezentio’s subjects could spare them any time or aid or effort. If anything, they were an embarrassment, a reminder of what might have been. They were, in spite of everything, Kaunians, and somehow not quite welcome even to watch Algarve’s death throes. The destruction of a great kingdom was, or at least should have been, a private affair.

Unlike most of his countrymen, Lurcanio did feel a certain obligation toward them. He’d worked with them for a long time. Baldu, the playwright, had done some splendid work during the occupation. His dramas deserved to live- unless the Valmierans flung them all into the fire because he’d written them under Algarvian auspices and because some of his characters (not all, by any means) had friendly things to say about the men who’d occupied his kingdom.

Bowing again, Lurcanio asked, “Where would you go?”

“Any place where they won’t hang us or burn us or blaze us!” The actor made as if to tear his hair, which struck Lurcanio as overacting.

“Very good,” he said. “And where might that be, pray tell?”

Silence fell over the Valmierans-a gloomy, appalled silence. Not many places on the continent of Derlavai would be safe for them after Algarve finished losing the war, because all her neighbors would be eager for revenge against anyone and everyone who’d helped her.

“Siaulia?” Lurcanio suggested, and then shook his head. “No, if we lose here, what we hold on the tropical continent will be yielded to the victors. That’s how these things work, I fear.”

“Gyongyos?” Baldu suggested. “Can you get us there?”

It wasn’t an impossible notion. Gyongyos was losing the war, too, but mountains shielded its heartland, and it was a long, long way from the greatest strength of its enemies. That same, unfortunately, didn’t hold true for Lurcanio’s own kingdom. He saw one other problem: “I can probably make sure you reach a port. But the ports in the south are mostly closed because of enemy dragons flying out of Sibiu, and in the north. . It’s a long, long way to Gyongyos. Not many of our ships-or those of the Gongs-get through. The enemy prowls the sea lanes, too. You might have a better chance of reaching some island in the Great Northern Sea. No one would come looking for you there, probably not for years.”

The Valmieran collaborators looked even less happy than before. Lurcanio didn’t suppose he could blame them. Those distant islands were ratholes, nothing else but. Then Smetnu asked, “Can you get us to Ortah?”

“I don’t know,” Lurcanio said thoughtfully. The neutral kingdom was much closer than Gyongyos. Even so … “I don’t know what things are like in the west of Algarve right now. If you try to get to Ortah, you’re liable to run right into the Unkerlanters’ arms. You wouldn’t like that.”

“It’s the best chance we have, I think,” Smetnu said. The other Valmierans nodded. The news-sheet man went on, “We have a better chance with the Unkerlanters than with our own folk or the islanders.”

He was probably-almost certainly-right. “Very well,” Lurcanio said. He went into the farmhouse and wrote out a ley-line caravan pass for all six of them, explaining who they were and how they’d served Algarve. They took it and made for Carsoli’s caravan depot. Lurcanio hoped it would do some good. His own honor, at least in this small matter, remained untarnished. His kingdom’s honor? He resolutely refused to think about that.

Somewhere not far from Garivald, a wounded man moaned. Garivald wasn’t sure whether he was an Unkerlanter or an Algarvian. Whoever he was, he’d been moaning for quite a while. Garivald wished he would shut up and get on with the business of dying. The noise he was making wore on everyone’s nerves.

Dragons dropped eggs on the Algarvian town ahead, a place called Bonorva. It lay south and east of Gromheort. The plains of northern Algarve weren’t much different from those of Forthweg. The Algarvians themselves had fought just as hard in Forthweg as they were here in their own kingdom. Indeed, they were still fighting in Forthweg: Gromheort stubbornly held out against everything King Swemmel’s men could throw at it.

Lieutenant Andelot nodded to Garivald. “Well, Fariulf, even with their fancy steerable eggs, they weren’t able to throw us back. Not enough men, not enough behemoths, not enough anything.”

“Looks that way, sir,” Garivald agreed. With ingrained peasant pessimism, he added, “We don’t want it to rain right at harvest time, though. It’d be a shame to get killed with the war about won-or any other time, come to that.”

Andelot nodded. “We can’t get slack, though. The redheads are still fighting. It’s good we’re on their soil-they should know what they put us through, powers below eat them-but these are their homes. They won’t want us to take them away, any more than we wanted them to take away our homes in Unkerlant.”

He spoke like a man from Cottbus. Odds were, he hadn’t lost his home to the Algarvians. He knew that would be bad, but he didn’t know how bad it was. Garivald had watched the invaders storm into, storm past, his home village. He’d lived under their boot. He’d watched them hang a couple of irregulars in the market square. They might have hanged him there, when they found he was putting together patriotic songs. Instead, they’d hauled him off to Herborn to boil him alive, and the irregulars had rescued him before he got there.

“Better for everybody if this cursed war had never happened,” he said.

“Aye, of course,” Andelot replied. “But it’s a little too late to wish for that now, wouldn’t you say?”

Garivald only grunted. Andelot was right, no doubt about it. But Garivald could still wish, even if he knew what he wished for had no chance of coming true.

The next morning, he trudged past a column of Algarvian refugees Unkerlanter dragons had caught on the road. It wasn’t pretty. It must have happened only the day before. The bodies didn’t stink yet, but the almost cheerful odor of burnt meat lingered in the air. The dragonfliers had dropped eggs first, then come back so their beasts could flame the redheads the eggs hadn’t knocked over-and, he was sure, some they had.

“Good riddance,” was all Andelot said, and, “When the civilians run from us, they clog the roads. That makes it harder for Mezentio’s soldiers to get where they need to go.”

“Aye,” Garivald answered. He’d hated the Algarvians ever since they broke into his kingdom. He’d killed his share of them-more than his share, very likely. He should have wanted all of them dead. A substantial part of him did want all of them dead, or thought it did. But. . some of the scattered, twisted, charred corpses were very small. He thought of Syrivald and Leuba, his own son and daughter, no doubt as dead as these Algarvians. Thinking of them didn’t make him want to see more redheads dead. It just made him wish no more children had to die, regardless of what color hair they had.

Somewhere not far away, a woman started screaming. Garivald had heard women scream on that particular note before. So had the men in the squad he led. Some of them, he was sure, had made Algarvian women scream on that note. They grinned and nudged one another.

“Keep moving,” Garivald called to them. “We haven’t got time to stop and have fun.” They nodded and tramped on, but the grins stayed on their faces.

He’d thought his countrymen would run the Algarvians out of Bonorva that afternoon. So had Andelot, who’d said, “We’ll be sleeping on real beds tonight, men.” They all got a rude surprise. As they neared the outskirts of the city, Algarvian egg-tossers greeted them with a heavier pounding than any in which Garivald had been on the receiving end.

Unkerlanter egg-tossers quickly answered back; they were more efficient now than they had been when Garivald got dragooned into King Swemmel’s army. From what the handful of men who’d been in the fight a good deal longer than he said, they were much more efficient now than they had been in the early days of the war.

It didn’t do them much good, not here. Alarmed cries rang out: “Behemoths! Algarvian behemoths!”

Hearing that was plenty to make Garivald throw himself down on his belly in the middle of a muddy field. Sure enough, a column of behemoths with redheads atop them came lumbering up out of the south. Footsoldiers in kilts loped along with the behemoths to keep the Unkerlanters from getting close enough to have an easy time harming the beasts.

Garivald looked around for Unkerlanter behemoths to blunt the head of that column. He didn’t see very many. An Algarvian crew flung an egg that burst too close to him for comfort. The blast of sorcerous energy picked him up and slammed him to the ground. Clods of dirt rained down on him.

Orders were to stand your ground no matter what. Garivald looked around. If he and his men stood their ground here no matter what, they would all end up dead in short order. Lieutenant Andelot had praised his initiative before. He used it again, this time to shout, “Fall back!”

Some of the Unkerlanters had begun to retreat even without orders. The din of bursting eggs was loud off to the east, too, suggesting the Algarvians had another force of behemoths on the move there. King Swemmel’s army had stormed across northeastern Unkerlant and Forthweg and into Algarve. Mezentio’s men struck back when and as they could, but Garivald had never seen a counterattack like this before.

There was Andelot, trying to rally his men. Garivald shouted, “Sir, we’re going to have to give back a little ground. They’ve got too many men and too many behemoths for us to hold them off right now.”

He waited to see if Andelot would order him to try to hold at all hazards. He wondered if the company commander might have to suffer an unfortunate accident so someone with real sense could take over and do his best to lead the men to safety. But, biting his lip, Andelot nodded. “Aye, Sergeant, you’re right, worse luck.” He snapped his fingers. “I know what’s gone wrong, curse it.”

“Tell me,” Garivald urged.

“There are some little cinnabar mines south of Bonorva,” Andelot said. “You get quicksilver for dragonfire from cinnabar. The Algarvians haven’t got much left. No wonder they’re fighting like madmen to hold on to what they do have.”

Garivald managed a haggard grin. “So much nicer to know why you’re about to get killed.”

“Isn’t it, though?” Andelot replied. “Let’s see what we can do about making the Algarvians do the dying instead.”

What a company of footsoldiers could do on a battlefield swarming with behemoths was depressingly obvious: not much. More Unkerlanter behemoths did come down from out of the north to challenge the Algarvian beasts, but not enough. As if it were the early days of the war, the redheads had the bit between their teeth.

A week later, spring was in the air. Garivald was sure it would still be snowing down in the Duchy of Grelz, but northern Algarve was a long, long way from home. The wind blew warm from the sea. Birds started chirping in the trees. Fresh green grass sprang up; a few flowers bloomed. It would have been beautiful… if so much of the countryside hadn’t been wrecked by war’s fiery rake. And that rake had gone across the landscape first one way, then the other.

By that time, Garivald counted himself lucky to be alive. He’d never seen such a sustained Algarvian push before. It had driven his countrymen and him back a good thirty miles from the outskirts of Bonorva. He’d had to fight his way out of two encirclements, and sneak past Algarvian footsoldiers to escape a third. A lot of Unkerlanters hadn’t made it.

“They’re bastards, aren’t they?” he said to Lieutenant Andelot as the two of them sprawled by the bank of a little stream. They were both filthy and unshaven and desperately in need of sleep.

“We knew that from the start,” Andelot answered. “They’ve pushed us back some, aye, but look at the price they’ve paid. And they’re just about stopped now-we’re hardly lost any ground today. When we start moving forward again, what will they use to stop us?”

“I don’t know.” Garivald didn’t care about such things. I’m no officer. I don’t want to be an officer, he thought. Let them worry about where the fornicating war is going. I just want to stay alive till it finally gets there and stops, so I can get off.

By all the signs, Andelot knew what he was talking about. Streams of Unkerlanter soldiers and behemoths were moving up toward the front. Rock-gray dragons swarmed overhead, with few in Algarvian colors in the air to hold them back. The redheads had done everything they could to drive back the men of Unkerlant, and it hadn’t been enough.

More dragons flew by, all of them heading northeast to strike the enemy. Some had eggs slung under their bellies; others carried only dragonfliers. They protected the ones with the eggs, fought off the handful of Algarvian beasts that rose to oppose them, and swooped low to flame soldiers and civilians on the ground.

“They’ll make Mezentio’s men wish they were never born,” Garivald said smugly.

But then, as he watched, the whole flight of Unkerlanter dragons tumbled out of the sky. It wasn’t as if they’d been blazed down. It was more as if they’d run headlong into an invisible wall. Some of the eggs they carried burst while they were still in the air, others when they hit the ground.

“What in blazes-?” Garivald exclaimed.

Andelot took things more in stride. “Curse them, they made it work again,” he said. Garivald’s questioning noise held no words. Andelot went on, “The redheads keep coming up with new sorceries, powers below eat ‘em. This one congeals the air some sort of way. Don’t ask me how-I’m no mage. I don’t think our mages know how this spell works, either, come to that. The one thing we do know is, for every ten times the Algarvians try it, they bring it off once, twice if they’re lucky.”

“That’s too often,” Garivald said.

“I know,” Andelot said. “But it’s only a toy. It won’t change the way the war turns out, not even a copper’s worth. Most of the time, our dragons do get through.”

Garivald nodded. Looked at from the perspective of the war as a whole, that did make perfect sense. Looked at from the perspective of the dragonfliers who’d just run into the Algarvian sorcery. . He tried not to think about that. Before long, the regiment was moving forward again, so he didn’t have to.

Ilmarinen stood in one of the passes that cut through the Bratanu Mountains. The air was as clear as mountain air was said to be. Finding a cliche that turned out to be true always amused him. Looking west-and looking down-he could see a long way into Algarve. There not too far away lay the town of Tricarico, with olive groves and almond orchards and rolling fields of wheat sweeping away till detail was lost even with this clear, clear air.

Beside Ilmarinen stood Grand General Nortamo, the commander of Kuusaman soldiers in Jelgava. He was, in fact, the overall commander of the Lagoans in Jelgava, too, however little they cared to acknowledge it. Grand general was not a usual rank in the Kuusaman army; it had been created especially for this campaign, to give Nortamo rank to match that of the Lagoan marshal who led King Vitor’s men.

Nortamo was tall by Kuusaman standards; he might have had a little Lagoan blood in him. That would have helped explain his baldness, too. Most Kuusaman men, Ilmarinen among them, kept their hair. Nortamo hadn’t. He wore hats a lot. Up here in the chilly mountains, nobody could smile at him because of it.

He was one of the blandest men Ilmarinen had ever met. How did you get your job? wondered the sardonic mage, who was a great many things, but none of them bland. By making sure you never offended anybody? Seems more trouble than it’s worth.

“We took a little longer than we should have, getting through the mountains,” Nortamo said. “But now, sorcerous sir, we are going to finish driving the Algarvians, and I don’t see how they can stand in our way.”

He also had a nearly infallible gift for stating the obvious. Ilmarinen sighed. Is that what it takes to lead lots of men? A good smile and no surprises? Powers above be praised, all I ever wanted was to go off by myself and cast spells.

“They probably won’t stand in our way,” he remarked now. “They’ll probably hide behind things and blaze at us.”

“Er-aye,” Grand General Nortamo said. As befit a man with a gift for the obvious, he also owned a remorselessly literal mind. “Well, we’ve got the men and the behemoths and the dragons to root ‘em out if they do. And we’ve got you wizardly types, too, eh?” He patted Ilmarinen on the back.

Ilmarinen had never been called a wizardly type in his entire life. He hoped with all his heart never to be called such again, either. “Right,” he said tightly.

Oblivious to any offense he might have caused, Nortamo went on, “And you’ll shield us from whatever funny sorceries Mezentio’s men fling our way, won’t you?”

“I do hope so,” Ilmarinen answered. “It’s my neck on the line, too.”

“We’ll do just fine.” Nortamo spoke not so much in response to what he heard as to what he expected to hear. A lot of people were like that now and again. He had the disease worse than most.

He’s brave, Ilmarinen reminded himself. He’s not particularly stupid. The men like him. They rush to do what he tells them. They think it’s an honor. He repeated that to himself several times. It kept him from trying to strangle Grand General Nortamo. Murdering the commanding general would get him talked about, however much satisfaction it might bring. And some people probably wouldn’t understand at all.

In lieu of throttling Nortamo, Ilmarinen said, “As soon as I can, I’ll want to talk with some captured Algarvian mages. The more I find out about what they’re up to, the better the chance I have of stopping it.”

“That makes sense,” Nortamo said, though he didn’t sound as if it had made enough sense to occur to him before Ilmarinen mentioned it. “I’ll do my best to arrange it for you, sorcerous sir. I’ll do my best to forget about it, and to make you nag, was what that sounded like. Ilmarinen’s hands twitched. Could I strangle him before anyone noticed? Tempting, tempting. Nortamo gave him a cheery little wave. “Now if you’ll excuse me. .” Off he went, unthrottled. Ilmarinen sighed.

Flashes of light in front of and then inside Tricarico showed where eggs were bursting-and where, Ilmarinen presumed, Kuusaman soldiers either were going forward or would be soon. He’d never been in Tricarico. He wondered how many Kuusamans had, back in more cheerful days. Not many, or he missed his guess. The provincial town didn’t look to have much to recommend it.

No ley line ran through this pass. The road that did go through left a good deal to be desired. It might have been better before the war. In fact, it surely had been better. As Ilmarinen jounced along in a buggy, a second-rank mage gave him a happy wave and said, “Good to see you, sir. We’re just about sure we’ve found all the eggs the Algarvians planted by now.”

“That’s nice,” Ilmarinen answered. “If you turn out to be wrong, I’ll write you a letter and let you know about it.” The other wizard laughed. Occasional craters in the surface of the road said some of the Algarvian eggs had found Kuusaman soldiers before they were found. If one of them found him, he probably wouldn’t be interested in writing letters for a while.

At some point in the descent, the driver paused to look back over his shoulder and remarked, “Well, we’re in Algarve now.”

Ilmarinen would argue with anybody at any time for any reason. “And how, precisely, do you know that?” he demanded. By way of reply, the driver jerked a thumb off to the right. Ilmarinen turned to look. An enormous dragon done in white, green, and red adorned a boulder. It was partly defaced; Kuusaman soldiers had added several rude scrawls to it. But it was unquestionably an Algarvian dragon. Ilmarinen nodded. “You’re right. We’re in Algarve.”

A thin but steady stream of wounded soldiers came back from the fighting. The ones who weren’t too badly hurt still had plenty of spirit. “We’ll get ‘em,” said a fellow with his hand wrapped in a bloody bandage. “They haven’t got hardly any behemoths left. Pretty cursed hard to win a war without ‘em.”

That made sense to Ilmarinen. What made sense, though, wasn’t necessarily true. By that afternoon, the Kuusamans were over the river both north and south of Tricarico, pushing hard to cut the city off and surround it. And then, just as the sun was setting on the broad Algarvian plain, the world suddenly seemed to hold its breath. Ilmarinen didn’t know how else to put it. He’d felt the Algarvians’ murderous magic so many time, he’d grown inured to it, as had most other mages. This. . This was something else.

What are they doing? flashed through his mind when the sorcerous storm broke. A heartbeat later came another, perhaps even more urgent thought: how are they doing it? He’d heard that the Algarvians were pulling out all sorts of desperate spells, but hadn’t really encountered one till now.

Their murderous magecraft had been bad. This was worse. That had used life energy in a straightforward way, even if Mezentio’s men had no business stealing it as they’d done. This. . Whoever the wizard essaying the spell was, he’d opened his spirit to the powers below. He didn’t just aim to kill his foes. He aimed to torment them, to horrify them, to make death itself seem clean by comparison.

Ilmarinen felt Kuusaman sorcerers in the field try to throw up counterspells against the dark cantrip. He felt them fail, too, and felt the extinguishment of some of them. That was the only word he could find. They didn’t die, at least not right away. They would have been better off if they had.

He essayed no counterspells. He had no idea whether that blackness could be countered, in any conventional sense of the word. He wasn’t much interested in finding out, either. Instead, he hurled a bolt of sorcerous energy of the sort Pekka had discovered straight at the Algarvian attacking his countrymen.

The enemy mage hadn’t expected that. His spell was so vicious, so dreadful, he might have assumed other wizards would attack it, not him. A lot of wizards would have. Ilmarinen didn’t think like most of his professional colleagues. His own sorcerous stroke went home, a lightning bolt piercing the darkness. He felt the Algarvian sorcerer’s outraged astonishment as the fellow died.

For a nasty moment, Ilmarinen feared that wouldn’t be enough. The spell, once unleashed, seemed to want to go on by itself. It did crumble at last, but only slowly and reluctantly. Then the day seemed to brighten, though the sun was touching the western horizon.

Weary, shaken, disgusted as he was, Ilmarinen stormed off to Grand General Nortamo’s headquarters, which he found in a farmhouse on this side of the river from Tricarico. A sentry tried to block his progress. He pushed past as if the man didn’t exist. Nortamo was conferring with several of his officers. Ilmarinen ignored them, too. In a voice that brooked no contradiction, he said, “I need to talk to those captive mages, Nortamo. Now.”

Nortamo looked at him. He was not a fool; he didn’t argue. “Very well, sorcerous sir. You have my authorization. I will give it to you in writing, if you like.”

“Never mind. We haven’t time to waste.” Ilmarinen hurried off to the small captives’ camp where mages were housed and securely guarded by other mages. He had several of the highest-ranking captives brought before him. “How could any of you do … that?” he demanded in classical Kaunian. He spoke fluent Algarvian, but chose not to.

“How?” one of the Algarvians answered in the same tongue. “We are fighting to save our kingdom, that is how. “What would you have us do, roll over and die?” “Sooner than that?” Ilmarinen shuddered. “Aye, by the powers above.”

“No,” the mage said. “No one will enslave us, not while we still live to fight.”

“Doing that, you enslave yourselves,” Ilmarinen answered. “Better to be

ruled by foreigners, don’t you think, than by the powers below?”

“My wife and daughters are in the west,” the Algarvian said. “I sent them word to flee. I do not know whether they could. If they did not, and the Unkerlanters have caught them. . They are raping their way through my kingdom, you know.”

“And what did you do to them?” Ilmarinen returned. “What did you do to the Kaunians in Forthweg?”

“This is a Kaunian war,” the Algarvian mage declared. His comrades solemnly nodded. “Everyone picks on Algarve, and so of course we have to fight back in any way we can.” The other wizards nodded again.

“War is bad enough. You made it worse,” Ilmarinen said. “You made it much worse. Is it any wonder that every other kingdom has joined together to knock you down and make sure you can never do it again? By all you’ve done, you deserve it. You almost killed me when you loosed your attack on Yliharma.”

“Too bad we failed, old man.” The Algarvian didn’t lack for nerve-but then, lacking for nerve had never been an Algarvian characteristic. “So long as we can fight back, we will, any way we can.”

“Then you had better not complain about what happens to you afterwards,” Ilmarinen said. Since he was on the side of the captors and not the captives, he took advantage of having the last word and walked out.

As soon as Bembo could get around with crutches and his splint, the healers in Tricarico threw him out of the sanatorium. He’d expected nothing else; wounded people kept flooding into the place. If the healers didn’t need to keep an eye on him, they did need the cot he was filling.

He had no flat, of course, not any more. But finding a new one wasn’t hard, not when he had silver to spend. And he did; he hadn’t used much of his salary in all the time he’d been in Forthweg, and he’d done pretty well for himself shaking down the locals. He would have landed a place even sooner than he did if he hadn’t insisted on living on the ground floor.

“Everybody wants those flats,” a landlord with none to let told him. “Fast and easy to get to the cellar when the eggs start falling.”

“I can’t go anywhere fast and easy,” Bembo said. Using crutches made it harder for him to gesture while he talked, and an Algarvian who couldn’t talk with his hands was hardly alive. “You think I want to go up and down stairs with these things?”

The landlord shrugged. “Sorry, pal. I can’t give you what I ain’t got.”

Bembo went off in a huff. He finally got a flat the next morning. Then he took a ley-line caravan over to his old constabulary station to find out where Saffa was staying these days. That took some doing; a lot of the constables there didn’t remember him and didn’t want to tell him anything. He finally got what he needed from Frontino, the warder at the gaol.

“Read any spicy romances lately?” Bembo asked him.

Frontino reached into his desk. “I’ve got a good one right here, matter of fact.” The romance, called Empress’ Passion, certainly looked good to Bembo. The cover showed a naked Kaunian woman, presumably the Empress in question, with her legs wrapped around an ancient Algarvic warrior with an improbable set of muscles. “The Kaunian Emperor, see, is going to sacrifice a bunch of Algarvian captives, till this guy”-Frontino tapped the warrior-”horns the Empress into talking him out of it. Then the captives get free and the blood really spills. I’m done-want to borrow it? The Empress, she screws up a storm.” He held the book out to Bembo.

Almost to his own surprise, Bembo shook his head. “That whole business of sacrificing …” He looked around to make sure nobody but Frontino could hear him. “Everything they say about the Kaunians in Forthweg. .”

“Pack of lies,” the warder said. “Enemy dragons have been dropping little broadsheets about it, so it has to be a pack of lies. Stands to reason.”

But Bembo shook his head again. “It’s all true, Frontino. Everything everybody says is true, and nobody says even a quarter of what all really went on. I ought to know. I was fornicating there, remember.”

Frontino didn’t believe him. He could see as much. He thought about arguing. He thought about breaking one of his crutches over the warder’s head, too, to let in a little sense. But that would have just landed him in the gaol. Muttering under his breath, he made his slow, hitching way out of the constabulary station and back to the ley-line caravan stop.

The block of flats next to Saffa’s and one across the street were only piles of wreckage. Bembo had to go up three flights of stairs to get to her flat. He was puffing and sweating when he finally got there. A baby wailed behind the door he knocked on.

When Saffa opened it, she looked harried-maybe her brat had been crying for a while. “Oh,” she said. “You.”

He didn’t quite know how to take that. “Hello, Saffa. I’m on my feet- sort of.”

“Hello, Bembo.” Her smile still had some of the sour tang he remembered. So did her words: “I’m glad to see you-sort of.”

“Will you go to supper with me tomorrow night?” he asked, as if the whole Derlavaian War, including his broken leg, had never happened.

“No,” she said. But she wasn’t spitting in his eye, as she’d warned she might, for she went on, “I haven’t got anyone to watch my son then. But three nights from now, my sister isn’t working. I’ll go then.”

“All right,” Bembo said. “Pick an eatery, and we’ll go there. I’ve been away so long, I don’t know what’s good these days, or even what’s standing.” He’d got around by night in Gromheort and Eoforwic with no lights showing; he expected he could manage in his own home town.

But he turned out to be wrong. Tricarico fell to the Kuusamans two days later.

He’d heard that the enemy was coming down out of the Bradano Mountains, of course. The news sheets couldn’t very well deny that. But they did their best to claim the slanteyes would never cross the river, would never threaten the city. Bembo probably should have had more doubts than he did; he’d seen such optimistic twaddle in Forthweg, too. But the assault on Tricarico took him by surprise.

So did the feeble resistance his own countrymen put up inside the city. That left him half relieved-he had, after all, been in the middle of a city convulsed by fighting-and half ashamed. “Why aren’t you giving them a battle?” he called to a squad of soldiers heading west, plainly intending to leave Tricarico.

“Why? I’ll tell you why, porky,” one of the men answered. Bembo squawked indignantly, and with some reason; he’d lost much of the paunch he’d once carried. Ignoring him, the trooper went on, “We’re getting the blazes out on account of the slanteyes have already got men past this rotten place to north and south, and we don’t want to get stuck here, that’s why.”

From a military point of view, that made good enough sense. Out in the west, fighting against the Unkerlanters, all too many garrisons had stayed in their towns too long, and got cut off and destroyed. Gromheort, where Bembo was stationed before transferring to Eoforwic, was going through such a death agony now. But even so … “What are we supposed to do?”

“Best you can, pal,” the soldier answered. “That and thank the powers above it ain’t the Unkerlanters coming into town.” He trotted away, dodging craters in the street and jumping over or kicking aside bits of rubble nobody had bothered to clear away.

Had Bembo had two good legs, he would have kicked at rubble, too. As things were, he made his own slow way down the street. The trooper was right. The Kuusamans wouldn’t rape or massacre everyone they saw just for the sport of it. At least, Bembo hoped they wouldn’t. I’m going to find out, he realized.

He was back in his flat, with the shutters tightly drawn, when the Kuusamans did come into Tricarico. One of the windows in the flat had had glass in it when he rented the place; the landlord had tried to charge him more because of it. He’d laughed in the man’s face, asking, “How long do you expect it to last?” And he’d proved a good prophet, for an egg bursting not far away soon shattered the pane into tinkling shards. He’d had a demon of a time cleaning up afterwards, too. Trying to handle crutches and broom and dustpan was more an exercise in frustration than anything else.

But Bembo couldn’t stay in his flat forever, or even very long. He had to come out to look for something to eat. He’d never done much cooking for himself, even back when he’d been living in Tricarico. A constable with an eye for the main chance could get most of his meals from the eateries on his beat. In Forthweg, he’d done the same thing a lot of the time, and eaten in barracks like a soldier when he hadn’t. And, with crutches, he would have been as awkward in the kitchen as he had been chasing slivers of glass around the floor. Of course, he was pretty awkward in the kitchen without crutches, too.

A few eggs were still bursting inside Tricarico when he emerged from his block of flats. At first, he thought that meant the Kuusamans hadn’t yet come into the city after all. But then he saw several of them setting up sandbags so they could cover all sides of an intersection. They looked like runts; he was several inches taller than the biggest of them, and he wasn’t exceptionally tall by Algarvian standards. But they had sticks and they had the same sort of urgent, disciplined wariness he’d seen in Algarvian soldiers in Forthweg. Any civilians who tried trifling with them would be very sorry very fast. He was sure of that.

More eggs burst. He realized his retreating countrymen were tossing them at his home town. They didn’t care what happened to the people who lived in Tricarico as long as they killed or maimed a few Kuusamans. Bembo turned toward the west and scowled. See if I do anything for you any time soon, he thought, the you being either the departed soldiers or King Mezentio himself: even Bembo wasn’t quite sure which. It amounted to the same thing either way.

“You!” someone said sharply, and for a moment Bembo thought the word remained in his own mind, not the world outside him. But then the fellow who’d spoken went on: “Aye, you-the chubby fellow with the crutches. Come here.”

Bembo turned. There gesturing at him stood a skinny old Kuusaman with a few little wisps of white hair sprouting from his chin. He wore greenish-gray Kuusaman uniform, with a prominent badge that had to be a mage’s emblem. “What do you want, uh, sir?” Bembo asked cautiously.

“I already told you what I wanted,” the Kuusaman said in his almost unaccented Algarvian. “I want you to come here. I have some questions for you, and I expect to get answers.” I’ll turn you into a leech if I don’t, lay behind his words.

“I’m coming,” Bembo said, and made his slow way over to the mage. Refusing didn’t cross his mind, not because of the implied threat but simply because one did as this man said first and then wondered why afterwards, if at all. Still, Bembo was not easily overawed, and had his own full measure of Algarvian cheekiness. He asked a question of his own: “Who are you, old-timer?”

“Ilmarinen,” the mage answered. “Now you know as much as you did before.” He eyed Bembo. Bembo didn’t like the way he did it; it seemed as if Ilmarinen were looking right into his soul. And maybe the mage was, for the next thing he said, in tones of genuine curiosity, was, “How could you?”

“Uh, how could I what, sir?” Bembo asked.

“Round up Kaunians and send them off to what you knew was death and then go back to your bed and sleep at night,” the Kuusaman mage answered.

“How did you know that? I mean, I never-” But Bembo’s denial faltered. Ilmarinen would know if he lied. He was grimly certain of that. And so, instead of denying, he evaded: “I saved some, too, by the powers above. Plenty of my pals didn’t.”

Ilmarinen looked into him again. Grudgingly, the mage nodded. “So you did-a handful, and usually for favors. But you did, and I cannot deny it. A tiny weight in the other pan of the scales. Now answer what I asked before-what of all those you did not save?”

Bembo had spent years not thinking about that. He didn’t want to think about it now. Under Ilmarinen’s eye, though, he had no choice. At last, he mumbled, “The people set over me told me what to do, and I went and did it. They were the ones who were supposed to know what was going on, not me. And what else could I have done?”

Ilmarinen started to spit into his face. Bembo was sure of it. At the last instant, the mage checked himself. “A tiny weight of truth there, too,” he said, and spat at Bembo’s feet instead, then turned and walked away.

“Hey! You can’t-” Bembo broke off as a sense of just how narrow his escape had been flowed through him. The last thing in all the world he wanted was for that terrible old Kuusaman wizard to come back and look into his eyes again.

As soon as Istvan walked into the barracks, he knew he was in trouble. All eyes swung his way. Somebody got up and closed the barracks door behind him. “Well, well,” somebody else said, “if it isn’t the Kuusamans’ little pet goat.”

“Maaa! Maaa!” somebody else said shrilly. Several of his countrymen got off their cots and came toward him, hands bunching into fists.

Fear chilled him. Men occasionally got stomped or beaten to death here in the captives’ camp on Obuda. Once in a while, the Kuusaman guards found out who did it and punished them. More often than not, though, they didn’t. That sort of fate looked to be about to befall him.

He didn’t turn and run. That wasn’t so much because he came from a warrior race as because he felt sure more Gyongyosians were closing in behind him. Instead, he drew himself up very straight. “I have kept my honor,” he said. “The stars shine on my spirit, and they know I have kept my honor.”

“Liar,” three men said together.

“Maaa! Maaa!” That hateful, mocking goat-bleat rang out again.

“I am no liar,” Istvan declared. “Come on, all of you. I will fight you one at a time till I can fight no more. I will say nothing to the guards about what happened. By the stars, I swear it. Or show yourselves goat-eating cowards and mob me all at once.”

They hesitated. He hadn’t been sure he would get even that much. Then a burly man stepped out of the group and advanced on him, saying, “My fists and feet are better than you deserve.”

Istvan didn’t answer. He just waited. The other captive was bigger than he, and looked to know what he was doing. The fellow surged forward, head down, fists churning. Istvan blocked a blow with his arm, struck a stomach hard as oak, took a boot in the hip instead of in the crotch, and also lashed out with his foot. A buffet to the side of the head made him see stars that had nothing to do with the ones he reverenced. He grabbed his foe and threw him to the floor. The other captive tripped him on the way down.

But Istvan was the one who got up. He spat red on the floor. “Who’s next?” he said, squinting a little because his left eye was half swollen shut.

Another Gyongyosian strode toward him. He won that fight, too, and waved for a third challenger. By then, every part of him hurt. He didn’t think he would win the third fight, and he didn’t. The other captive thumped his head against the floor, once, twice. . That was the last thing he remembered.

They could have killed him after he was out. When he woke up again, he rather wished they had. They’d kicked him around some. He could feel that. But it was almost lost in the thudding, nauseating pain in his head. He’d had his wits scrambled for him, sure as sure. He had trouble remembering where he was and even who he was. He did remember how three other captives in the barracks had got pretty good sets of lumps of their own, though. That gave him a certain small satisfaction, when he wasn’t hoping his own head would fall off.

Corporal Kun walked into the barracks perhaps half an hour after Istvan came to. He took one look at Istvan and realized what must have happened to him. He had time for one horrified yelp before somebody said, “All right, squealer-your turn now.” The captives fell on him and beat him bloody, but he was still breathing when they stopped. Maybe Istvan had won enough respect to keep them from wanting to kill his comrade any more.

At the roll call that evening, the Kuusaman guards stared at Istvan. “What you to do?” one of them asked.

“Nothing,” he said stolidly. Where he had trouble recalling his name, he did remember the oath he’d sworn. The guards eyed Kun. He didn’t look quite so bad as Istvan-and, somehow, he’d managed to keep his spectacles from shattering- but he was no beauty. Neither were the men who’d fought Istvan one after the next.

The guards shook their heads and shrugged. They’d seen such things before. This time, at least, they weren’t carrying corpses from the captives’ camp.

A couple of days later, Istvan got summoned out of the camp for another interrogation with Lammi, the forensic sorcerer. By then, some of his bruises had turned truly spectacular colors. His ribs looked like a sunset. His face was no bargain, either. When he made his way into Lammi’s tent-ducking through the flap hurt, too-the mage’s jaw dropped. “By the stars!” she exclaimed in her good Gyongyosian. “What happened to you?”

No matter how well she spoke his language, Istvan didn’t like to hear her use such oaths-what regard would the stars have for a foreigner like her? He answered as he’d answered the guard: “Nothing.”

Lammi shook her head. “A little more nothing like that and they would lay you on a pyre. Now-tell me at once what happened to you.”

“Nothing,” Istvan repeated.

“You are a stubborn man. I have seen that,” she said. “But you know I have ways to get answers from you.”

“Nothing happened,” Istvan said. As he’d expected, his command of his senses disappeared. Lammi might have miscalculated there. Taking away his senses took away his pain, too, the first relief he’d had from it since the fights. And she’d robbed him often enough, he was starting to get used to it. He didn’t mistake her voice for that of the stars any more.

Presently, she brought him back to himself. “You are a very stubborn man,” she said.

“Thank you,” he answered, — which made her blink.

She needed a moment to rally. “I think,” she said, “we would do well not to send you back to your barracks.” She picked up a crystal and spoke into it in Kuusaman, which Istvan didn’t understand. Whoever was on the other end of the etheric connection answered in the same language. The crystal flared, then went inert. Lammi looked back to Istvan. “Corporal Kun, it seems, is also sporting bruises. How did that happen?”

“I don’t know,” he answered, and waited to go back to the unworld of no sight, no hearing, no smell, no taste, no touch. He looked forward to losing the sense of touch once more: indeed he did.

Lammi made an exasperated noise. “How can we find and punish the men who beat you if you will not tell us who they are?”

“What men?” Istvan said. The forensic sorcerer made another, louder, exasperated noise. With a shrug, Istvan went on, “I told you, nothing happened.”

“Aye, that is what you told me,” Lammi agreed. “And I am telling you once more, Sergeant, that, had a little more of such nothing happened, you would now be dead, and we would not be having this discussion.” Istvan shrugged again. She was probably-no, certainly-right. She glowered at him. “We will be removing you from the captives’ camp for your own protection. You do understand that?”

With one more shrug, Istvan answered, “You are the captors. I am the captive. You can do as you like with me. If you do too much, and word gets back to Gyongyos, your own captives will suffer.”

The Kuusaman mage drummed her fingers on her notepad. She muttered something in her own tongue, then translated it into Gyongyosian: “Very difficult, too.” Istvan inclined his head, as at another compliment. That made Lammi mutter again. When she returned to Gyongyosian once more, she said, “Very well, Sergeant. If you will not discuss this, you will not. Let us turn to something else, then.”

“You are the captor,” Istvan repeated.

“I do wonder,” Lammi murmured. Istvan understood the words, but not everything behind them. She gathered herself and went on, “You have a scar on your left hand, Sergeant.”

Istvan had been afraid in a physical sense of what the Kuusamans might do to him. Now, for the first time in the interrogation, he knew real terror. He had to force a one-word answer out through numb lips: “Aye.”

“Sergeant Kun, your comrade, has an identical scar,” Lammi continued.

“Does he?” Istvan said, shrugging yet again. “I hadn’t noticed.”

The world disappeared once more. Lammi, he remembered, knew when he lied. After some endless-but, happily, also painless-time, she allowed him to return to the sensible world. “I point out,” she said, “that one of the men who was slain in the unfortunate incident, a certain,”-she checked her notes-”a certain Szonyi, aye, had an identical scar, duly noted on his identity documents. He too was a comrade of yours.”

“He was,” Istvan said. He couldn’t very well deny it. Saying anything else- such as how much he missed his friend-would have just given Lammi another handle on him.

She waited for something more. When it didn’t come, she shrugged and said, “How do you explain these three identical scars, Sergeant?”

“We all got them at the same time in Unkerlant,” Istvan said. Again, he said no more. He fought against trembling. His heart pounded in his chest. He would sooner have gone through a dozen beatings than this.

Lammi peered at him through her spectacles. Try as he would to hide it, he feared she saw his agitation. “Why?” she asked softly.

She can tell when I lie. To Istvan, that was the most terrifying thought of all. Instead of lying, he said nothing at all. Whatever she chose to do to him would be better than a truthful answer to that question.

“Why?” Lammi asked once more. Istvan still did not answer. The inside of the tent was cool-the island of Obuda never got very warm, especially not in late winter-but sweat ran down his face. He could smell his own fear. He didn’t know if Lammi could, but she could hardly miss the sweat. Still softly, she asked, “Is it a scar of expiation?”

“I don’t know what that word means,” Istvan said.

She could tell when he gave her the truth, too. That didn’t do him much good, though. She simplified: “A scar, a wound, to wash away a sin?” Istvan still sat mute, which looked to be answer enough by itself. Lammi asked, “What sort of sin?”

“One I never meant to commit!” Istvan burst out. The Kuusaman mage just sat there, waiting. Again, he said no more. Again, it didn’t seem to matter. Lammi looked at him, looked through him, looked into his heart. She knows. By the stars, she knows, he thought, and despair overwhelmed even terror. A Kuusaman, a foreigner, knew he’d eaten goat. She knew what it meant, too. She knew altogether too much about Gyongyos and its ways. She owns me, he thought hopelessly.

If Lammi did, she didn’t seem anxious to take possession. “We will find you other housing, safer housing,” she said, and spoke to the guards in Kuusaman. They led Istvan out of the tent.

Likely not by coincidence, Kun came out of the other interrogation tent at just the same time. He walked toward Istvan as Istvan headed toward him. The guards didn’t interfere. Istvan looked at Kun’s battered face, and at the devastated expression on it, the same expression he wore himself. The two men embraced and burst into tears. No matter how bright the night sky might be, Istvan didn’t think the stars would ever shine on him again.

Very cautiously, Leudast stuck his head up from behind a shattered wall and peered across the Scamandro. He had reason for caution. The Algarvians had snipers on the east bank of the river, and they were very alert. A man who wasn’t careful would have a beam go in one ear and out the other.

True, eggs were bursting over there, but that wouldn’t make the redheads quit blazing. Leudast knew what sort of men he faced. They’d driven through Unkerlant to the outskirts of Cottbus. Had the war gone just a little differently..

“It’s a good thing there weren’t more of the whoresons,” he muttered.

“What’s that, Lieutenant?” asked Captain Dagaric, who’d taken over as regimental commander after Captain Drogden hadn’t been careful enough while raping an Algarvian woman. Dagaric had efficiency written all over him. He was a good soldier, in a cold-blooded way. Nobody would love him, but he wouldn’t throw men away out of stupidity, either. Given some of the things Leudast had seen, solid professionalism was nothing to sneeze at.

He repeated himself, adding, “Powers below eat ‘em.”

“They will.” Dagaric spoke with assurance. “We are going to hammer them flat when we cross the river. That will be the last fight, because we will take Trapani once we get rolling.”

“May it be so, sir,” Leudast said. “This war. . We had to win it. If we didn’t, they’d’ve held us down forever.”

“I only wish we could get rid of every last one of the buggers,” Dagaric said. “If we treated them the way they treated the Kaunians up in Forthweg, we really wouldn’t have to worry about Algarve for a long time to come.”

Leudast nodded. He didn’t think even King Swemmel would massacre all the redheads in the lands he was overrunning, but you never could tell with Swemmel. Any Unkerlanter would have said the same. And. . “We’ve had to use our own people the way the Algarvians used the Kaunians from Forthweg. Mezentio’s men deserve something extra to pay for that.”

“You bet they do,” Captain Dagaric said. “I expect they’ll get it, too.”

A weird wailing, laughing, gobbling noise came out of the east. Leudast grabbed for his stick. “What in blazes is that? Does it go with some new Algarvian magic?”

Dagaric pointed out to the Scamandro, where a big bird was swimming, its back checked in black and white, its beak a fish-catching spear. “No, it’s just a loon-and you’re another one, for letting the call spook you.”

“They must be birds of the south,” Leudast said. “They don’t live on any streams up near the village I come from.” More than half to himself, he added, “I wonder if anything’s left of the place these days.” Then he spoke to the regimental commander again: “And I don’t see how you can blame me for being jumpy about the fornicating redheads and their magecraft, sir. With all the weird new spells they’re throwing at us these days. .”

With a dismissive gesture, Dagaric said, “A drowning man thrashes his arms and flails. Whoreson still drowns, though. The Algarvians send these stupid spells of theirs at us before they find out what the magic can do, or even if it works at all. No wonder most of it goes sour.”

That made sense-up to a point. “Even the spells that maybe don’t do everything they’re supposed to can still hurt us,” Leudast said. “We’ve seen it.”

“They’d hurt us worse if the redheads really knew what they were doing,” Dagaric said. That made Leudast blink. Like most Unkerlanters, he took it almost for granted that the Algarvians were cleverer than his own folk. They’d proved their wit in Unkerlant too often for him to think anything else. But Dagaric stubbornly plowed ahead: “Think how much trouble they could cause if all their fancy magic really worked. It mostly doesn’t, though, and I’ll tell you why. A couple-three years ago, the redheads figured they could lick us with what they already had, and they didn’t worry about anything else. Then, when they started getting into trouble, that’s when they decided to make the fire under their mages hotter. So they have all these spells that would do this, that, or the other thing-if only they worked right. But they cursed well don’t, and we’ll have licked Algarve before the redheads ever do get ‘em right.”

After Leudast thought that over, he slowly nodded. “The one thing Mezentio’s men always foul up is, they always think they’re smarter than they really are and they can do more than they can really do.”

Dagaric nodded, too, most emphatically. “You’ve got it, Lieutenant. You’ve got it just right, matter of fact. And how fornicating smart does that make them? If they were anywhere near as smart as they want everybody else to think they are, would we be here halfway between the Yaninan border and Trapani? Would the stinking islanders be coming up the Algarvians’ arse from the east?”

“No, sir,” Leudast said. “They made everybody hate ‘em and they made everybody afraid of ‘em and now they’ve made everybody gang up on ‘em, too. You look at it that way, maybe they really aren’t so smart.” He heard the wonder in his own voice. We’re winning the war. We’re not only winning it, we’ve got it almost won. I can’t quite see Trapani from here, but it won’t be long.

He wondered what would happen then. Maybe Swemmel would put everything he could into the war against Gyongyos. Leudast shook his head, marveling. He’d been fighting the Gongs when the Derlavaian War broke out. Maybe things would come full circle, and he’d fight them some more. If Unkerlant went after them now, he thought his kingdom would smash them.

But what then? Suppose Unkerlant didn’t have an enemy left in the world. Suppose he got out of the army. What would I do then? I’ve been fighting for a long time. I hardly know anything else any more.

Go home. I suppose that’s the first thing I have to do. See if anything is left of the village. See if I have any kin left alive. And then. . There was that girl back in Grelz, that Alize. If I can find her again, that might turn into something. I wonder how much different farming is down there. I could find out.

He laughed at himself. A couple of minutes’ thought, and he had the rest of his life neatly laid out. One thing the war had taught him was that plans mostly didn’t work the way people thought they would ahead of time.

Dagaric slapped him on the shoulder, stopping his ley-line caravan of thought. “Things look pretty quiet up here for now,” the regimental commander said. “We can get back to our men.”

“Aye, sir,” Leudast said. They slipped away from the Scamandro’s western bank. As they went off, the loon loosed its mad, laughing call once more. Leudast’s shiver had nothing to do with the chilly weather. Nobody hearing that cry for the first time would think it came from a bird’s throat. That it presaged some nasty Algarvian sorcery still struck him as much more likely.

Sentries challenged them twice on the way back to the Algarvian village in which the regiment was resting. The men weren’t taking victory for granted, which struck Leudast as the best way to insure it. Another officer was heading up to the Scamandro for a look of his own at the enemy.

Another officer. . Leudast stiffened to attention when he saw the big gold stars embroidered on the collar tabs of the oncoming man’s cape. Only one soldier in all of Unkerlant wore those stars. Dagaric might all at once have turned to rigidly upright stone, too.

“Marshal Rathar, sir!” the two junior officers exclaimed together.

“As you were, gentlemen,” Rathar said. “I always like to see officers doing their own reconnaissance. That’s what I’m doing myself, as a matter of fact.”

“There’s what’s left of a wall by the riverbank, sir.” Leudast turned and pointed. “You have to be careful, though-the redheads have snipers on the far bank.”

“Thanks.” Rathar started to go on, then paused and gave him a quizzical look. “I know you, don’t I?” Before Leudast could speak, Rathar answered his own question: “Aye, I do. You’re the fellow who brought in Raniero, you and that other soldier.”

“That’s right, sir,” Leudast said. “You made me a lieutenant and him a sergeant.”

“What happened to him? Do you know?”

“Afraid I do, sir,” Leudast answered. “An Algarvian sniper got him. Kiun never knew what happened. There are worse ways to go.”

“You’re right. We’ve all seen too many of them.” Marshal Rathar grimaced.

“So many good men gone. That’s the worst thing about this stinking war. What will become of Unkerlant once it’s finally over?”

Captain Dagaric presumed to speak: “Lord Marshal, sir, whatever it is, we’ll be better off than these fornicating Algarvians.”

“We’d better be, Captain.” Rathar was polite enough, but didn’t bother to ask Dagaric’s name. With a nod to Leudast, he went on, “Good to see you again, Lieutenant. Stay safe.” He went on toward the Scamandro.

“Thank you very much, sir,” Leudast called after him. “You, too.”

Rathar didn’t answer. He just kept walking. Even so, Dagaric stared at Leudast as if he’d never seen him before. In accusing tones, he said, “You never told me the marshal knew you.”

“No, sir,” Leudast agreed.

“Why in blazes not?” the regimental commander burst out. “A connection like that-”

Leudast shrugged. “You wouldn’t have believed me. Or if you did, you’d’ve thought I was bragging. So I just kept my mouth shut.” For anybody raised in an Unkerlanter peasant village, keeping one’s mouth shut almost always looked like a good idea. No telling who might be listening.

“A lieutenant in my regiment. . knows the Marshal of Unkerlant.” Dagaric still sounded dazed, disbelieving.

“No, sir. You had it right the first time,” Leudast answered. “He knows me, some. I’ve met him a couple of times, that’s all: once up in Zuwayza, in the first fight there, and then when Kiun and I got lucky with Raniero a little this side of Herborn.”

Dagaric grunted. “I think you’re too modest for your own good. If the Marshal of Unkerlant knows you, why are you only a lieutenant?”

“Only a lieutenant?” Leudast gaped. That wasn’t how he looked at it-just the opposite, in fact. “Sir, you’ve got to remember-I come out of a peasant village. I didn’t expect to be anything but a common soldier after the impressers got. . uh, after I joined King Swemmel’s army. I got to be a sergeant because I was lucky enough to stay alive when a lot of people didn’t, and I got to be an officer because I was the fellow-well, one of the fellows-who nabbed the false King of Grelz when he was trying to get away.”

“In my regiment,” Dagaric muttered. Leudast stifled a sigh. His superior hadn’t paid any attention to him. He didn’t know why he was surprised. Superiors didn’t have to listen to subordinates. Not having to listen was part of what made them what they were. Every so often, an exception came along. Leudast tried to be one himself, but knew he didn’t always succeed.

He glanced east, toward the riverbank. Rathar squatted there behind what was left of the stone fence, just as he and Dagaric had done a few minutes before. The marshal showed both nerve and good sense in coming up to the front alone. The Algarvians had no idea he was there. He got the look he wanted and then came away. Leudast sighed with relief. He couldn’t imagine the war without the marshal.