Rulers of the Darkness

Twelve

Major Spinello had thought the fighting in Sulingen the worst warfare possible. Now, as his regiment fought its way east toward other, far-off, Algarvian forces fighting their way west, he saw Sulingen re-created across miles of rolling plains. The Unkerlanters had been waiting for this assault. There didn't seem to be an inch of their salient where they hadn't either built a redoubt or buried an egg. By now, most of the dowsers who'd picked out paths through those buried eggs were dead or wounded, either from their own mistakes or from Unkerlanter beams or eggs.

Five days into the fighting, the Algarvians on the western edge of the bulge around Durrwangen had advanced perhaps half a dozen miles. They were far behind where they should have been. Spinello knew as much. Every Algarvian officer- and probably every Algarvian common soldier, too- knew as much. Spinello counted it a minor miracle that his countrymen were still moving forward at all.

He lay behind a dead Unkerlanter behemoth that was starting to stink under the hot summer sun. Captain Turpino lay at the other end of the dead beast. Turpino turned a filthy, haggard, smoke-blackened face to Spinello and asked, "What now… sir?"

"We're supposed to take that hill up ahead." Spinello's hand shook as he pointed. He was every bit as filthy and haggard as his senior company commander. He couldn't remember the last time he'd slept.

Cautious, Turpino peered up over the carcass. "What, the regiment by itself?" he demanded. "That hill's got Unkerlanter behemoths- live ones- the way a dog has fleas."

"No, not the regiment by itself. Our army. However much of it we can aim at the high ground." Spinello yawned. Powers above, he was tired. It was like being drunk; he didn't care what came out of his mouth. "I don't think our regiment's in any shape to take a gumdrop away from a three-year-old."

Turpino stared at him, then laughed as cautiously as he'd looked at the hill ahead. Spinello's answering grimace might have been a smile. Along with the rest of the great force the Algarvians had mustered, the regiment had hammered its way through five successive Unkerlanter lines- and, in the hammering, had burned away like wood in the fire.

He wondered if he still had half the men who'd gone forward when he first blew the whistle. He doubted it. The three companies plucked from occupation duty in Jelgava had suffered particularly hard. It wasn't that they weren't brave. They were, to a fault. They went forward when they should have hesitated, and had got themselves and their comrades into a couple of desperate pickles simply because they'd lacked the experience to see traps they should have. Well, they had that experience now- the survivors, anyhow.

Turpino turned his head. "More of our behemoths coming up, and-" He stiffened. "Who're those buggers in the wrong-colored tunics? Are the Unkerlanters trying to pull another fast one?"

After looking back toward the footsoldiers, Spinello shook his head. "That's Plegmund's Brigade. They're on our side- Forthwegians in Algarvian service."

"Forthwegians." Turpino's lip curled. "We are throwing everything we've got left into this fight, aren't we?"

"Actually, they're supposed to be brave," Spinello said. Turpino looked anything but convinced.

On came the behemoths. They started tossing eggs at the Unkerlanter beasts on the hill the Algarvians needed to take. The Unkerlanters answered, but they still didn't handle their beasts or their gear as well as Mezentio's men. Spinello cheered when an Algarvian behemoth crew used the heavy stick mounted on their beast to burst the eggs an Unkerlanter behemoth carried, and then, a moment later, repeated the feat and took out another behemoth and crew.

But the Unkerlanters' eggs and beams knocked down Algarvian behemoths, too. And more beasts with Unkerlanters aboard trotted over the crest of the hill. Captain Turpino cursed. "How many fornicating behemoths do Swemmel's fornicators have?" he demanded, or words to that effect.

"Too many," Spinello answered, looking from the beasts on the hill to the Algarvian behemoths moving against them. He sighed. "Well, we'll just have to get them off of there, won't we?" He blew his whistle as he got to his feet. "Forward!" he shouted, waving his arm to urge on his troops- what was left of them.

Turpino stayed beside him as they advanced. Turpino still wanted the regiment if Spinello fell, and he also wanted to show he was at least as brave as the man who held it now. Spinello grinned as he ran past craters and corpses and dead beasts. He'd expected nothing less. Algarvians were like that.

The Unkerlanters not only had behemoths on that hill, they had footsoldiers there, too. Spinello watched beams flash from places where he would have sworn no squirrel, let alone a man, could have hidden. Beams burned brown lines in the green grass, some very near him. Here and there, little grass fires sprang up. He almost welcomed them. The smokier the air, the more it spread beams and the more trouble they had biting. But bite they still did; men fell all around him.

He dove into a hole in the ground. It was big enough to hold two, and Spinello's dour shadow dove in right behind him. Turpino said, "They're going to make us pay a demon of a price for that high ground."

"I know," Spinello answered. "We've got to have it, though."

"The army's melting the way the snow did this spring," Turpino said.

"I know that, too" Spinello said. "I'm not blind." He raised his voice to a shout again: "Crystallomancer!" A moment later, he shouted it once more, and louder: "Crystallomancer!"

"Aye, sir?" The Algarvian who scrambled over to Spinello didn't belong to his regiment. He'd never seen the fellow before. But he had a crystal with him, and that was good enough.

"Get me the mages at Special Camp Four," Spinello said: the fourth special camp was attached to his division.

"Aye, sir," the crystallomancer repeated, and went to work. In bright daylight, Spinello could hardly see the flash of light that showed the crystal's activation, but he couldn't miss the image of the mage that formed in it. The crystallomancer said, "Go ahead, sir."

"Right." Spinello spoke into the crystal: "Major Spinello here. My regiment and a good part of this army, footsoldiers and behemoths both, are pinned down in front of the hill at map grid Green-Seven. We need that hill if we're going to go on, and we need the special sorceries if we're going to take it."

"Are you certain?" the mage asked. "Demand for the special sorceries has been very high, far higher than anyone expected when we began this campaign. I am not sure we'll have enough to sustain us if we keep using up our resources at this rate."

Spinello abruptly dropped the language of euphemism: "If you don't start killing Kaunians pretty cursed quick, there won't be any campaign left to worry about. Have you got that, sorcerous sir? If the Unkerlanters halt us here, what's to stop them from rolling forward? What's to stop them from rolling over you and all the precious Kaunians you're hoarding?"

"Very well, Major. The point is taken." The Algarvian mage looked and sounded affronted. Spinello didn't care, so long as he got results. The mage said, "I shall consult my colleagues. Stand by to await developments."

His image winked out. The crystallomancer said, "That's it, sir."

Turpino said, "You made him angry when you reminded him what he was really doing back there."

"What a pity," Spinello growled. "If he's unhappy about it, let him come to the front and see what we're really doing up here." That earned him one of the few looks of unreserved approval he'd ever had from Turpino. He went on, "Besides, if he's not getting screams from every other officer on this field, I'm a poached egg."

Regardless of whether he was a poached egg, the mages back at the special camp must have decided the Algarvian army did need help. Spinello knew to the moment when the sacrifices began. A great cloud of dust rose from the hillside as the ground shook there. Cracks opened, then slammed shut. Flames shot up from the ground.

"Now we're in business," Turpino said happily. "Cursed Kaunians are good for something, anyhow." This time, he rose and ran forward first, leaving Spinello to hurry after him. Spinello did. So did the crystallomancer, evidently glad to have someone giving him orders even if it wasn't his proper commander.

But they hadn't gone far before the ground trembled under their feet. A huge crack opened under the crystallomancer. He had time for a terrified shriek before it smashed him as it closed. Violet flame engulfed two behemoths and their crews not far from Spinello, and more men and beasts elsewhere on the field.

Spinello fell. He clutched the ground, trying to make it hold still. "Powers below eat the Unkerlanters," cried Turpino, who had also fallen. "Their mages are hitting back harder and faster than they ever did before."

"Can they spend more peasants than we can spend Kaunians?" Spinello asked- a question on which the fate of the battle might turn. He gave the only answer he had for it: "We'll find out."

Even before the mage-made earthquake ended, he fought his way back onto his feet. He hauled Turpino up, too. "Thanks," the company commander said.

"My pleasure," Spinello said, and bowed. He looked behind him. "I think we've got more still standing than the Unkerlanters do." After blowing his whistle, he yelled, "Come on! Aye, all of you- you Forthwegians, too! We can take that hill!"

Take it they did, though the Unkerlanters who hadn't been overwhelmed by Algarvian magecraft sold themselves dear and weren't finally driven back or killed till after sunset. By then, nobody on the blood-soaked field had any doubts left about whether the men of Plegmund's Brigade could fight. Algarvians and bearded Forthwegians sat down together and shared food and wine and water and lay down side by side to rest and ready themselves for the next day's horrors.

Spinello found himself trading barley bread he'd taken from a dead Unkerlanter for the sausages a couple of men from Plegmund's Brigade had. One of them looked more like a bandit than a soldier. The other was younger, but might have been grimmer. Speaking pretty good Algarvian, he said, "I hope they get rid of all the Kaunians. It's the only thing they're good for."

"Oh, not the only thing." Tired as he was, Spinello still laughed. "I was posted in Forthweg before I came here, in a little pisspot village named Oyngestun."

"I know it," the man from Plegmund's Brigade said. "I am from Gromheort."

"All right, then," Spinello said. "I found this Kaunian tart there named Vanai, who…" He'd been telling stories about her since coming to Unkerlant.

Tonight, to his astonishment, he was interrupted. "Vanai! By the powers above! I remember now," the Forthwegian exclaimed. "My cousin, the cursed fool, was sweet on a Kaunian bitch named Vanai, and she was from Oyngestun. Could it be…?"

"Don't ask me, for I don't know," Spinello said. "But I do know this: I was in there first." And he got to tell his bawdy stories after all, there in the brooding night filled with the stink of fire and the far worse stink of death.

Even in his dreams, Count Sabrino flew his dragon against the Unkerlanters. He had few dreams. He had little time for sleep. He and the men of his wing and Colonel Ambaldo's wing and all the other Algarvian dragonfliers on the eastern side of the Unkerlanter salient around Durrwangen had been flying as often as their flesh and that of their mounts would stand, or perhaps rather more than that.

But Sabrino was dreaming now. He'd blazed an Unkerlanter dragonflier and made the man's beast fly wild when suddenly his own beast was flamed from behind. It stumbled in midair, trying to right itself, but could not. It stumbled, it staggered, it shook. It shook…

Sabrino's eyes came open. He discovered a dragon handler shaking him awake. Sabrino groaned and tried to roll away. The handler was inexorable. "Colonel, you've got to get up," he said urgently. "The wing's got to fly. You've got to fly now."

"Powers below eat you," Sabrino said.

"Dowsers have spotted a great swarm of Unkerlanter dragons flying our way," the dragon handler said. "They'll want to catch us on the ground, drop their eggs all over the dragon farms hereabouts. But if we get into the air first…"

Sleep, and the need for sleep, fell away from Sabrino like an abandoned kilt. "Get out of the way," he growled, springing off his cot. He checked himself, but only for an instant. "No. Run and sound the alarm."

Before the dragon handler could ever begin to turn, horns blared in the predawn darkness. Sabrino grunted in satisfaction. He pulled on his boots, donned the heavy coat he'd been using as a blanket, and put his goggles on his head. Then he ran past the dragon handler and toward his own stupid, evil-tempered mount.

Other dragonfliers, from his wing and Ambaldo's, were dashing to their dragons, too. Sabrino grudged a quarter of a minute to cry out, "If we get into the air, we slaughter the Unkerlanters who are coming to call. If they catch us on the ground, the way they want to, we're dead. Come on. Mezentio!"

"Mezentio!" the dragonfliers shouted.

Behind them, in the east, the sky was going pink. Off to the west, the direction from which those rock-gray dragons would be coming, stars still shone and night still ruled. But not securely, not even there. Purple-black had lightened to deep blue, and the dimmer stars winked out one by one. Day was coming. By all the signs, trouble would get here first.

A handler released the chain that held Sabrino's dragon to the spike driven deep into the black soil of southern Unkerlant. Sabrino whacked the dragon with his goad. It screamed at him. He'd known it would. He whacked it again, and it bounded into the air as much from sheer rage as for any other reason.

Sabrino didn't care why the dragon flew. He only cared that it flew. As the ground fell away below them, he spoke into his crystal to his squadron commanders: "Get as high as you can. We don't want Swemmel's boys to know we're up here till we drop on them."

"Aye, Colonel." That was gloomy Captain Orosio. He was the senior squadron commander left alive. He'd been juniormost when the war started- or had he even had a squadron then? After close to four years, Sabrino couldn't remember anymore. He marveled that he himself still survived. If fighting on the ground in the Six Years' War didn't kill me, nothing here will, he thought.

Light spread in the sky as he urged his dragon ever higher. Before long, he spied the sun, low and red in the east. Its rays hadn't yet reached the ground, and wouldn't for some little time to come. He might have been on a mountaintop, looking down into some still-dark valley.

And then, as he'd hoped he would, he saw things moving in the air below his squadron. He whooped with glee. "There they are!" he shouted into the crystal, and pointed for good measure.

"Aye, Colonel." That was Orosio again. "I saw 'em a little while ago." Dour, laconic- he hardly seemed like an Algarvian, but he was a good officer. Had he come from a more prominent family, he would have had a better chance to prove it. No matter how fierce the casualties among dragonfliers, he wasn't likely to rise above his present rank.

Flashes of light from the ground said the Unkerlanters were plastering the dragon farm with eggs, no doubt thinking they were wreaking havoc on the Algarvian beasts. Sabrino hoped the handlers had found holes. King Swemmel's dragonfliers would do some damage down below, but they hadn't yet awakened to the realization that they were about to take damage, too.

With astonishing speed, the Unkerlanter dragons swelled beneath Sabrino. He had his pick of targets; sure enough, the enemy had no idea he and his comrades were above them. This time, the dowsers had been right on the money. "And now the Unkerlanters will pay," Sabrino muttered. "How they will pay."

The wind from his dive swept the words away. For once, it mattered not at all. Sabrino blazed not just one Unkerlanter dragonflier, as he had dreamt, but two in quick succession. Even as the beasts they'd ridden went wild and useless, his own dragon flamed another Unkerlanter's mount. Sabrino brought his dragon in as close as he dared before letting it flame. Quicksilver was in short supply, and without it a dragon's flame grew short, too. But his mount had enough. The dragon painted rock-gray fell out of the air.

Sabrino looked around the brightening sky, looked around and howled with savage glee. Almost every Algarvian dragonflier was having luck to match his. The Unkerlanters had hoped to catch them by surprise, but ended up caught themselves. In hardly more than the twinkling of an eye, the air was free of them. The ones left alive flew back toward the salient as fast as their dragons' wings would take them.

"Pursuit, sir?" Captain Orosio's voice came from the crystal.

Reluctantly, Sabrino said, "No. We take the dragons down, we get them fed- we get ourselves fed, too, while we're at it- and then we go back to hammering the Unkerlanter positions on the ground. I wish we could rest them more, but we haven't got the time. We land." He emphasized the words with hand signals, so all the dragonfliers could see what he meant.

They obeyed him. He would have been astonished- horrified- if they hadn't. Down they went. Now the sun had reached the Unkerlanter plains. Dead dragons, almost all of them painted rock-gray, cast long shadows across those plains. Sabrino whistled softly to see how many he and his comrades had knocked out of the sky.

"A good morning's work," he said to the handler who started tossing his dragon gobbets of meat. "The dowsers gave us a hand today."

"Aye," the handler agreed. "Wouldn't have been much fun if those buggers had caught us unawares."

"No." Sabrino shuddered at the thought of it. As he freed himself from his harness and slid to the ground, he asked the handler, "How's the cinnabar holding out?"

"All right so far," the fellow told him. "We'll get through this fight without any trouble, I think. Don't know what we'll do about the next one, though."

"Worry about it later. What else can we do?" Sabrino hurried off toward the mess tent. He would rather have gone back to his cot, but that wouldn't do. He yawned enormously. Falling asleep aboard his dragon wouldn't do, either. He gulped hot, strong tea, gulped it and gulped it till it pried his eyelids open. Breakfast was more of the stew that had been in the pot for supper the night before. He recognized barley, buckwheat, carrots, celery, onions, and bits of meat. He couldn't tell what the meat was. Maybe that was for the best.

Colonel Ambaldo raised his mug of tea in salute, as if it held wine. "Here's to the Unkerlanters outsmarting themselves," he said.

"I'll gladly drink to that," Sabrino said. "This morning's ours. Till they can bring more dragons forward, we'll pound 'em to our hearts' content."

"Sounds good to me, by the powers above," Ambaldo said. "The lads down on the ground need all the help they can get."

In Sabrino's eyes, Ambaldo wasn't too much more than a lad himself. That didn't make him wrong. Sabrino said, "Swemmel's men have been waiting for us too cursed long in these parts. Row on row of fieldworks, and they fight to hold every miserable, stinking little village as if it were Sulingen."

"Too right they do," Ambaldo agreed. "Brigades go into those places and companies come out. It's butchery, is what it is."

"Never saw anything like this in Valmiera, did you?" Sabrino couldn't resist the jab.

Colonel Ambaldo shook his head. "Never once. Not even close. They're madmen, these Unkerlanters. They fight like madmen, anyhow. No wonder we started killing Kaunians to shift 'em. Though from what I hear, we're using up the blonds so fast, we're liable to run short."

"Swemmel won't ever run short on people to kill to power his magecraft," Sabrino said gloomily. "Unkerlant has more peasants than it knows what to do with." He scowled. "That's not quite right. Swemmel knows too bloody well what to do with them- and to them."

Both wing commanders slammed down their empty mugs at the same time. They hurried out of the mess tent, shouting for their men to join them. Sabrino spent a little while cursing because the dragon handlers hadn't finished securing the eggs under all the dragons in his wing.

But the delay was only short. It might even have worked to the dragonfliers' advantage, though Sabrino wouldn't have admitted that to the handlers. Feeling how his dragon labored under him, Sabrino knew it needed rest, rest it couldn't have. A few more quiet minutes on the ground had surely done it some good.

Not having many fresh Unkerlanter dragons to face did the Algarvians a lot of good, too. Most of Swemmel's dragonfliers wouldn't have been allowed to mount an Algarvian beast, but they had more dragons than did Sabrino and his countrymen. A bad dragonflier on a fresh beast could match a master aboard a worn, overworked dragon.

A fresh Algarvian attack was just going in against the village of Eylau. The wreckage of a couple of previous assaults still lay outside the place: dead men and behemoths. By all the signs, the new brigades assailing the Unkerlanter strongpoint would have had no easier time of it. But, after two wings of Algarvian dragons delivered an all but unopposed attack on Eylau, the strongpoint wasn't so strong anymore. The footsoldiers and behemoths battled their way into the village.

They fought their way in, but would they fight their way out? Already, more Unkerlanter soldiers were moving forward to try to hold them there. Even if the Algarvians did advance, how much good would it do them? Eylau was less than ten miles west of the point from which the assault had begun. At that rate, how long would this army take to join the one pushing east toward it? And would either of them have any men left alive by the time they joined?

Sabrino had no answers. All he could do was command his wing as best he could and hope those set over him knew what they were about. He ordered his dragonfliers back to the farm. More meat for the dragons, more eggs loaded under them, a little food and a lot of tea for the men, and back into the fight once more.

Sidroc wondered why he still breathed. Everything he'd been through before this great fight on the flank of the Durrwangen bulge, however horrid and terrifying it seemed at the time, was as nothing beside reality here. He'd always thought a fight would start, and then it would end. This one had started, aye, but it showed no sign of ever wanting to end.

"A week and a half," he said to Sergeant Werferth, who by some miracle also had not been blazed or gone up in a burst of sorcerous energy or been butchered by a flying fragment of egg casing or flamed by a dragon or had any other lethal or disabling accident befall him. "Have we won? Are we winning?"

"Futter me if I know. Futter me if I know anything any more." Werferth scratched his hairy chin. "I've got lice in my beard. I know that."

"So do I," Sidroc said, and scratched like a Siaulian monkey.

Smoke stained the sky above them. Somewhere not far away, eggs burst: Unkerlanter eggs, pounding the Algarvians, pounding the men of Plegmund's Brigade who fought at their side. Werferth said, "Every time we think we've knocked those buggers flat, they pop up again."

"If we kill enough Kaunians-" Sidroc began.

But Werferth shook his head. "What good would it do us? They'd just kill some more of their own, and we'd be back where we started. We've seen that happen too cursed often already."

Sidroc wanted to argue. He wanted Kaunians dead. What else were they good for? -except the enjoyment that Algarvian major had taken from the one his cousin was sweet on. "Vanai," Sidroc muttered under his breath. It had gone clean out of his head till the Algarvian spoke- knocked out when Cousin Ealstan slammed his head against the wall while they were fighting. But he remembered now. Aye, the pieces fit together again.

He laughed, a sound not far from honest mirth. He wondered what had happened, up there in Forthweg. Had the Algarvians gone in and cleaned the Kaunians out of Oyngestun, the way they should have? Or was dear old Ealstan still getting that redhead's sloppy seconds?

"We might as well kill some more Kaunians," he said, thinking of a new argument. "You think the Unkerlanters'll stop slaying their own if we quit? Not bloody likely, you ask me. They'll keep right at it, they will. Even if we don't kill blonds to strike, we'll need to do it to shield ourselves." He stuck out his chin. "Go on. Tell me I'm wrong."

Werferth grunted. "I'll tell you you talk too cursed much, that's what I'll do." He yawned so wide, the hinge at the back of his jaw cracked like a knuckle. "I want to sleep for a year. Two years, with any luck at all."

"I'm with you there." Sidroc had never known a man could be so worn. "I don't think I've slept more than a couple of hours at a stretch since this cursed fight started. I feel drunk half the time."

"I wish I were drunk," Werferth said. "Haven't even had a nip since I found that one dead Unkerlanter with a canteen half full of spirits." He stretched himself out on the torn ground. A couple of minutes later, he was snoring.

A couple of minutes after that, Sidroc was probably snoring, too. His comrades said he did. Since he'd never heard himself, he couldn't have proved it one way or the other. Snoring or not, he was certainly asleep, the deep, almost deathlike sleep that comes from complete exhaustion.

And, a couple of minutes after that, he and Werferth were both awake and both digging like men possessed as Unkerlanter eggs burst all around them. Sidroc felt as if he were moving underwater. He kept dropping the little short-handled shovel. "Cursed thing," he muttered, as if his clumsiness were its fault.

The Algarvians finally started tossing eggs back at King Swemmel's men. "Took 'em long enough," Werferth growled. "I figured they'd wait till we were all dead and then give back a little something."

"I'm not all dead," Sidroc said. "I'm just mostly dead." He and the sergeant both found that very funny, a telling measure of how tired they were. They laughed without restraint, till tears rolled down their faces. And then, in spite of the eggs that kept bursting all around them, they lay down in the hole they'd dug and went back to sleep.

An officer's whistle woke Sidroc a little before dawn. Lieutenant Ercole looked as grimy and beat as any of the Forthwegians he commanded; not even Algarvian vanity let him steal a few minutes for primping, not on this field. But he sounded far livelier than Sidroc felt. "Up, you lugs!" he cried. "Up! Up and forward! We've got a long way to go before we can be lazy again."

"What does he mean, again?" Werferth mumbled, staggering to his feet as if he'd suddenly aged forty or fifty years. "We've never once been lazy. Powers above, when have we had the time for it?"

"I'd like to have the time to be lazy," Sidroc said. He reached into his belt pouch and pulled out a chunk of stale barley bread. He gnawed it as he listened to Ercole.

The company commander pointed ahead. "You see that wedge of behemoths in front of us?" Sure enough, a couple of dozen of the great shapes were silhouetted against the lightening sky. Lieutenant Ercole went on, "We are going to form up behind them. They will pound a breach in the next Unkerlanter line for us. We will go in behind them. We will go into the enemy line. We will go through the enemy line. We will go on toward our brothers who are fighting their way west toward us. Mezentio and victory!"

"Mezentio and victory!" The men of Plegmund's Brigade tried their best, but couldn't raise much of a cheer. Too many of them were dead, too many wounded, too many of the unhurt survivors shambling in an exhausted daze like Sidroc and Werferth.

Dazed or not, exhausted or not, Sidroc trudged forward to find his place behind the behemoths. Not only Forthwegians from Plegmund's Brigade were assembled there, but also Algarvian footsoldiers. The redheads didn't sneer at the Forthwegians anymore; ties of blood bound them together.

Other wedges of behemoths were coming together along the Algarvian line. "They've thought of something new," Sidroc remarked.

"Good for them," Werferth said. "And we get to be the ones who find out whether it works." He kicked at the dirt. "If we live, we're heroes." He kicked again, then shrugged. "And if we don't live, who gives a futter what we are?"

At shouts from the men who crewed them, the behemoths tramped off toward the rising sun. They didn't advance at a full, thunderous gallop, which would have left the footsoldiers far behind, but did move with an implacability that suggested nothing would stop them. Sidroc hoped the suggestion held truth.

From on high, Algarvian dragons dropped eggs on the Unkerlanter trenches and redoubts ahead. The crews of the behemoths with egg-tossers also began pounding the enemy position as soon as they drew within range. The Unkerlanters had dug ditches to keep behemoths away from their trench line, but the rain of eggs caved in the edges to a lot of those ditches. And behemoths, even armored, even carrying men and egg-tossers or heavy sticks, were surprisingly nimble beasts. They had little trouble finding ways to go forward.

Just before the behemoths reached the first trench line, both Algarvian and Unkerlanter wizards used sacrifices to get the life energy they needed for their potent spells. Lieutenant Ercole wasn't twenty feet from Sidroc when violet flame shot up from the ground and consumed him. He had time for one brief, agonized shriek before falling silent forever. Sidroc smelled burnt meat. Absurdly, dreadfully, the smoke-sweet scent made his mouth flood with spit.

As soon as the ground stopped shaking beneath him, he got up and moved on. From not far away, Ceorl called to Werferth, "You're in charge of the company now."

"Aye, so I am." Werferth sounded surprised, as if he hadn't thought of that.

"The redheads won't let you keep it," Sidroc predicted. "After all, you're just a lousy Forthwegian."

"I've got it now, though," Werferth said. "Don't see anything to do but keep on going forward. Do you?"

Sidroc stared at him. "You're not supposed to ask me what to do. You're supposed to tell me what to do. You're supposed to tell all of us what to do."

"Aye," Sergeant Werferth said again. He pointed ahead. "There's a little rise. Let's take it, and then we'll figure out what to do next."

Like any high ground on this field, the little rise had Unkerlanters on it. The men of Plegmund's Brigade were able to get closer to the foe than Algarvians would have before the Unkerlanters started blazing. For once, being Forthwegians helped them- King Swemmel's men thought for a little too long that they were on the same side. By the time they realized their mistake, Sidroc and his countrymen were already on top of them.

From the crest of the rise, they could see more high ground farther east. Pointing again, Werferth said, "If we can get up there, I think we can tear this whole position open."

"We?" Sidroc echoed. "Do you mean this company? Do you mean Plegmund's Brigade, whatever's left of it?"

Wearily, Werferth shook his head. "No and no. I mean the whole army. The behemoths will have to do most of the work. I can't see footsoldiers making it all that way without help. Must be another five, six miles."

In ordinary marching, that would have taken the soldiers a couple of hours- a good deal less than that, if they were in a hurry. Sidroc wondered how long it would take with what had to be all the Unkerlanters in the world between his army and that precious ground.

Swemmel's soldiers weren't inclined to let Plegmund's Brigade move another inch forward, let alone five or six miles. As soon as the Unkerlanters realized they'd lost the rise, they started tossing eggs at it. Sidroc and his comrades huddled in the holes from which they'd driven the enemy.

"Here they come!" Ceorl shouted. Sure enough, Unkerlanters in rock-gray tunics swarmed up the eastern slope of the rise, intent on retaking it. Sidroc blazed down several of them. The other Forthwegians did as well, but the Unkerlanters kept coming.

Then eggs started bursting among Swemmel's soldiers. A beam from a heavy stick blazed down two Unkerlanters unlucky enough to be in line with it. "Behemoths!" Sidroc yelled, his throat raw with excitement and smoke. "Our behemoths!"

Caught by surprise, the Unkerlanters ran away. They would sometimes do that when facing the unexpected, though not often enough for anyone ever to count on it. Sidroc waited for Werferth to order a pursuit. The order didn't come. Instead, Werferth said, "Let's wait till we get some more troops up here. Then we'll go after the whoresons."

Sidroc couldn't very well argue with that. More eggs began falling on the men from Plegmund's Brigade. Sidroc looked out toward the high ground in the distance. How could they hope to advance when it was all they could do not to retreat?

Once upon a time, probably, the village of Braunau hadn't been much different from any other Unkerlanter peasant village. That was before the Algarvians pushing west collided here with the Unkerlanters who had no intention of letting them go any farther. Now whatever was left of the village once the fighting finally went somewhere else would be remembered forever. How it would be remembered… The answer to that question was being written in blood in and around the place.

Again, Leudast thought of Sulingen. The Unkerlanters defending Braunau fought with the same determination their countrymen farther south had shown. Every hut, every barn, every well was defended as if it were the gateway to King Swemmel's palace in Cottbus. No one counted the cost. The determination was there: the Algarvians would not get past the village.

For their part, King Mezentio's soldiers remained stubborn and resourceful. No sooner would the defenders of Braunau chew up one brigade than another went into the fight. As always, the redheads were brave. Here, that ended up hurting them at least as much as it helped.

"They can't get at Braunau any other way than from straight ahead, do you see?" Recared said. "The ground won't let them try any of their fancy Algarvian tricks and come up our backside."

"That's the way it looks, anyhow," Leudast agreed. He wasn't so sure about what Mezentio's men could or couldn't do. He'd been wrong too many times.

Recared had fewer doubts- but then, he hadn't been in the fight as long as Leudast had. "Do they play the game called 'last man standing' in your village?" he asked.

"Aye, sir," Leudast answered. "They play it everywhere, I think. It helps if you're drunk." Two men stood toe to toe, taking turns hitting each other as hard as they could. Eventually, one of them wouldn't be able to get up any more, and the other fellow was the winner.

"Well, that's what we've got here," Recared said. "Either we end up on our feet here in Braunau, or the Algarvians do."

"Something to that," Leudast said. "But whether we're standing or the redheads are, Braunau won't be."

Not much of Braunau was standing at the moment. Leudast and Recared both peered out of a trench between a couple of ruined houses on the eastern edge of the village. A dead Algarvian lay in front of them; a couple more lay behind them. The redheads had twice got into Braunau, but they hadn't been able to stay. Their trenches, right this minute, lay a couple of hundred yards outside it.

From behind Leudast, Unkerlanter egg-tossers on the ridge in back of Braunau began pounding the Algarvian positions. Algarvian egg-tossers answered. Leudast said, "Better to have the redheads aiming at them than at us."

"Oh, they'll get to us, never fear," Recared said. "They always do." Leudast wished he thought the regimental commander were wrong.

Algarvian dragons flew by. They also dropped eggs on the Unkerlanter tossers. Some of them dropped eggs on Braunau, too. "Where are our dragons?" Leudast demanded. "Haven't seen many of them since this fight was new."

"Something went wrong," Recared answered. "I don't quite know what, but something did. We were supposed to hit the Algarvians a hard blow, but they did it to us instead."

Leudast sighed. "How many times have we heard that sort of story before?" he said. "How many of us are going to end up dead on account of it? They ought to blaze whoever fouled things up for us."

"Odds are, the Algarvians killed him, whoever he was," Recared said.

But Leudast said, "No. Somebody behind the line will have forgotten something or overlooked something. That's how it is with us. He's the one who deserves to get boiled alive."

"Maybe you're right," Recared said. "But even if you are, we can't do anything about it. All we can do is hold on here and not let the redheads through."

"No, sir." Leudast shook his head. "There's one other thing we can do. We can pay the price for that cursed fool's mistake. We can. And it looks like we will."

Lieutenant Recared scowled at him. "Sergeant, if you'd said something like that to me this past winter, I'd have given you up to the inspectors without a qualm."

He might not have had any qualms; the idea was plenty- more than plenty- to send a chill through Leudast. Leudast had the feeling that anybody turned over to the inspectors today would be sacrificed tomorrow, or the day after at the latest, and his life energy turned against the Algarvians. But Recared wasn't proposing to give him up now. Cautiously, he asked, "What makes you think different these days?"

"Well, a couple of things," the young regimental commander answered. "For one, I've seen that you're a brave man and a good soldier. And…" He sighed. "I've also seen that not all our higher officers are everything they might be."

With that, Recared had just put his own life in Leudast's hands. If Leudast chose to denounce him, the regiment would have a new leader immediately thereafter. That it was in the middle of a desperate battle, a battle where the future of Unkerlant hung in the balance, would not matter at all. After saluting, Leudast spoke with great solemnity: "Sir, I didn't hear a word you said there."

"No, eh?" Recared wasn't a fool. He knew what he'd done, too. "Well, that's probably for the best."

Leudast shrugged. "You never can tell. It might not have mattered any which way. I mean, what are the odds that either one of us is going to come out of Braunau in one piece? Let alone both of us?"

"If it's all the same to you, I'm not going to answer that question," Recared said. "And if you've got any sense, you won't spend much time thinking about it, either."

He was right. Leudast knew as much. Most of the time, he didn't worry about getting wounded or killed. Worrying wouldn't help, and it was liable to hurt. You had to do what you had to do. If you spent too much time thinking and worrying, that might make you slow when you most needed to be fast. But here in Braunau, as in Sulingen, you were only too likely to get hurt or killed regardless of whether you were a good soldier. Too many eggs, too many beams, too many Algarvian dragons overhead.

Recared pulled out a spyglass and peered down the charred slopes toward the redheads' positions. "Careful, sir," Leudast warned. "That's a good way to get yourself blazed. They've got plenty of snipers who could put a beam right through your ear at that range."

"We have to see what's going on," Recared said peevishly. "If we fight blind, we're bound to lose. Or will you tell me I'm wrong there, too?"

Since Leudast couldn't tell him any such thing, he kept his mouth shut. Going into the fight, about half the regiment's companies had been commanded by lieutenants junior to Recared, the other half by sergeants like Leudast. He didn't know how many of those junior lieutenants were left alive. He did know he didn't want to have to try commanding a regiment himself if an Algarvian sniper did pick off Recared.

Recared stiffened, though not because he'd taken a beam. "Uh-oh," he said, and pointed out beyond the redheads' front line. "They're bringing blonds forward."

"Powers above," Leudast said hoarsely. "That means they're going to aim that filthy magecraft of theirs right at us, from as close as they can."

"That's just what it means." Recared's voice was grim. It got grimmer: "And we haven't got much in the way of dragons to stop them, either- we've seen that. They'll keep out of range of our egg-tossers, too. By now, they'll have that measured to the yard. So they'll turn Braunau inside out with their magic, and we can't do a thing to stop 'em. All we can do is take it."

That's what Unkerlanters do best anyhow, Leudast thought. But then he had another thought, one that appalled him with its monstrous cold-bloodedness but might keep him breathing. He grabbed Recared by the arm, an unheard-of-liberty for a sergeant to take with an officer. "Sir, if our own mages send some of that same kind of magic at those poor Kaunian buggers, Mezentio's men won't be able to use their life energy against us."

By send some of that same kind of magic, he meant, of course, having Unkerlanter mages kill some of their own countrymen for their life energy. He couldn't stomach saying it in so many words, even if killing was part of his line of work, too.

Recared stared at him, then shouted, "Crystallomancer!"

The regiment had a new one, replacing the minor mage slain in the first day of the battle for the Durrwangen salient. "Aye, sir?" he said, making his way up through the maze of trenches to Recared's side. When Recared told him what he wanted, the crystallomancer hesitated. "Are you sure, sir?" His eyes were round and fearful.

Mind made up, Recared didn't hesitate. "Aye," he said. "And hurry, curse you. If we don't do what we have to do, and if we don't do it fast, the Algarvians will work their magic on us. Would you sooner sit still for that?"

"No, sir," the crystallomancer said, and activated his crystal. When a face appeared in it, he passed it to Recared. "Go ahead, sir."

Recared spoke quickly and to the point. The mage on the other end of the etheric connection listened, then said, "I cannot decide this. Wait." He disappeared.

A moment later, another face appeared in the crystal. "I am Addanz, archmage of Unkerlant. Say your say." Recared did, as concisely as he had before. He even gave Leudast credit, not that Leudast much wanted any such thing. Leudast had met the archmage once before, in trenches not far outside of Cottbus. Perhaps fortunately, Addanz didn't seem to remember that. He said, "Tell me how far east of Braunau the Kaunians are."

"Just outside of egg-tosser range, sir," Recared replied.

"Very well," Addanz said, and then shook his head. "No, not very well- very ill. But no help for it. You'll have your magecraft, Lieutenant."

"Quickly then, sir, or you waste it," Recared said.

"You'll have it," Addanz repeated, and his image vanished like a blown-out candle flame.

Leudast imagined Unkerlanter mages lining up Unkerlanter peasants and miscreants so Unkerlanter soldiers could slay them. He wished he hadn't; the picture in his mind was all too vivid. And here, for once, Swemmel's endless talk of efficiency proved true. Hardly five minute passed before the ground shuddered under those luckless Kaunians, before fissures opened and flames shot forth.

Recared pounded Leudast on the back. "Well done, Sergeant, by the powers above!" he shouted. "Let's see the redheads make their cursed magic now. If we live, you'll get a decoration for this."

All Leudast said was, "I feel like a murderer." He'd caused his own countrymen- for all he knew, maybe his own kinsmen- to die so their life energy could go into killing Kaunians so the Algarvians couldn't kill the Kaunians to kill him. That wasn't war, or it shouldn't have been. He stared east, toward the Algarvian trenches. If he knew Mezentio's men, they wouldn't let a setback stop them for long. They never had yet.

Colonel Sabrino had rarely seen an army brigadier so furious. The Algarvian officer looked about ready to leap out of the crystal and strangle somebody- King Swemmel by choice, no doubt, but Sabrino thought he might do himself at a pinch.

"Do you know what those fornicating Unkerlanters did?" the brigadier howled. "Have you got any idea?"

"No, sir," Sabrino said around a yawn- he grabbed what sleep he could between flight, and didn't take kindly to interruptions. "But you're going to tell me, I expect."

The brigadier went on as if he hadn't spoken, which might have been lucky for him: "We had our Kaunians all ready to slay, to rout Swemmel's buggers out of that stinking Braunau place, and the Unkerlanter whoresons killed most of 'em by magic before we got to use their life energy. The attack went in anyhow, and we got thrown back again. We've got to get past there if we're ever going to join hands with our men on the other side of the enemy salient."

"Aye, sir, I know that," Sabrino said, wondering if the Algarvians on the western flank of the bulge were doing any better than the eastern army to which he was attached. He wished his countrymen hadn't started using murder-powered magecraft. Now both sides used it ever more freely, which added to the death toll without changing much else. He also suspected the brigadier shouldn't have attacked Braunau once the sorcerous backing for the assault collapsed. Suggesting such things to a superior was a tricky business. He didn't try; he knew he was too worn to be tactful. Instead, he asked, "What would you have me do, sir?"

"If we can't knock Braunau out from under those buggers with dead Kaunians, next best thing is to pound it flat- flatter- with dragons," the brigadier answered. "You've got the edge on 'em there in this side of the salient."

"For now, anyway," Sabrino said. "They've put more dragons in the air today than they did yesterday, and still more than the day before. They've got more dragons than we thought they did."

"They've got more of everything than we thought they did," the brigadier said. "But we can still lick 'em. We can, curse it." He sounded as if Sabrino were arguing with him.

"We'd better," was all Sabrino did say about that. He went on, "Tell me when you want us there, sir, and we'll be there." Colonel Ambaldo is probably sleeping, too, he thought. That means I get to wake him up. There were prospects he might have enjoyed less. Ambaldo, after all, had spent a lot of the war in the comfortable east. He hadn't had his full share of the delights of Unkerlant- or any share at all in the different delights of the land of the Ice People.

"An hour," the brigadier said. When Sabrino nodded, the army officer's image vanished from the crystal. It flared, then went back to being a simple globe of glass.

Sabrino strode out of his tent and shouted for dragon handlers. The men came running, their kilts flapping at each long stride. He said, "Get the dragons ready, and start kicking the men awake. We're going after Braunau again."

"Just your wing, sir, or both of them at this farm?" a handler asked.

"Both," Sabrino answered. "But I'll wake Ambaldo myself." His face must have worn an evil grin, because several of the handlers snickered.

Colonel Ambaldo awoke with several loud, fervent curses. He also woke grabbing for the stick by his cot. Sabrino got it first. Grabbing and missing seemed to restore something like reason to Ambaldo. He glowered at Sabrino and asked, "All right, your Excellency, who's gone and pissed in the soup pot this time?"

"King Swemmel's little friends, who else?" Sabrino said. "Not that it doesn't sound like some hamfisted generalship from us went into the mix, too." He quickly explained what had gone wrong in front of Braunau.

Ambaldo grunted and rubbed his eyes. "This whole business of killing Kaunians is filthy, if anybody wants to know what I think," he said as he sat up. He looked defiance at Sabrino. "And I don't care what you may believe about it."

"No?" Sabrino said mildly. "I told King Mezentio the same thing before we really started doing it. His Majesty didn't care what I believed about it."

"Really? You said that to Mezentio? To his face?" Ambaldo asked. Sabrino nodded. Ambaldo let out a soft whistle. "I will be dipped in dung. I knew you for a brave man, your Excellency, but still, you surprise me."

"If I weren't a brave man, I wouldn't have come in here to get you," Sabrino said. "Shall we be at it?"

Ambaldo got to his feet and bowed. "I wouldn't miss it for the world."

When Sabrino went out to his dragon, he found it loaded with eggs. The handler was tossing chunks of meat to it. The dragon caught them out of the air one after another. "How's the cinnabar holding out?" Sabrino asked the handler.

He got no more reassuring answers, as he had earlier in the fight. The fellow spread his hands and said, "If they'd known this stinking battle was going to last so bloody long, they should've given us more." Before Sabrino could say anything to that, the dragon handler added, "Of course, maybe they didn't have any more to give." On that cheerful note, he went back to feeding the dragon.

Sabrino climbed aboard the great scaly beast and fastened himself into his harness at the base of its neck. Distracted by raw meat, the dragon didn't even raise a fuss. Then the handler stopped feeding it and undid its chain from the iron spike driven deep into the soil of Unkerlant. Sabrino whacked the dragon with his goad, urging it into the air.

The dragon bellowed in fury at the idea that it should work for a living. As far as it was concerned, it had been hatched to sit on the ground so people could feed it to the bursting point. No matter how often Sabrino tried to give it other ideas with the goad, it was surprised and outraged every time.

It sprang into the air as much from fury as for any other reason. As usual, Sabrino didn't care why. As long as the dragon rose, he'd take that. The other dragons in his wing were every bit as offended at having to earn their keep as was his. They all screeched as they spiraled upward.

Colonel Ambaldo's dragons were flying, too. Sabrino, of necessity his own crystallomancer while on dragonback, murmured the charm that attuned the emanations of his crystal with that of the other wing commander. When Ambaldo's image appeared in his crystal, Sabrino said, "Now that you're awake, your Excellency, how do you want to handle the strike at Braunau? If you like, we'll go in first and then fly cover for your wing."

"Aye, good enough," Ambaldo said, and Sabrino cursed under his breath. He'd made the offer for form's sake, no more. Ambaldo's dragons had been worked hard in this fight, but were still fresher than Sabrino's. They would have made a better covering flight than Sabrino's wing. Ambaldo should have been able to see that for himself. If he couldn't, though, Sabrino had too much pride to point it out to him. Ambaldo did say, "We'll cover you on the way in."

"Thank you so much." Sabrino knew how little he meant that. Ambaldo was brave, but bravery didn't matter much, not here on the western front. The Unkerlanters were brave, too. What really set the Algarvians apart from them was brains. Without a guiding wit behind the fighting, it turned into nothing but a slugging match. King Swemmel's men could afford that better than Algarve could.

Sabrino's mouth turned down in discontent as he steered the dragon east toward Braunau. By the look of the battlefield far below, it had already turned into a slugging match. No more lightning thrusts around Unkerlanter positions to flank them out. The Algarvian attack had gone straight into the heart of the toughest and deepest set of field fortifications Sabrino had ever seen- on the eastern side of the Durrwangen salient and, by all the signs, on the western side as well.

No wonder progress was so painfully slow. No wonder so many dead men and horses and unicorns and behemoths lay on the ground. Where, Sabrino wondered, would their replacements come from? One thought ran through his mind. We'd better win here. If we don't, if we've thrown all this away with nothing to show for it, how are we going to carry the war to the Unkerlanters from here on out?

"Powers above," he muttered as his wing flew over what would have been the place where the Kaunians were sacrificed in front of Braunau, "we're even running out of blonds." King Swemmel's mages had helped there, too. Sabrino cursed softly, and the wind blew his words away. All things considered, maybe he should have called on the powers below instead.

And then he had no more time for such worries, for there lay battered Braunau, corking the Algarvians' advance. He spoke into his crystal again, this time to his own squadron leaders: "We'll dive to drop our eggs on the village, then climb quick as we can and cover Ambaldo's wing while they do the same."

"Here's hoping the Unkerlanters don't hit us," Captain Orosio said. "We've got tired beasts. We'll have trouble giving our best."

Because Sabrino knew that, too, he made his voice harsh as he answered, "It's what we're going to do." He never asked his dragonfliers to do anything he wouldn't do himself, so he was the first to urge his own mount into a dive over Braunau. Footsoldiers down there blazed at him. So did the crew of heavy sticks. If one of those hit his dragon, the beast wouldn't gain height again, and Sabrino's mistress and his wife might miss him. Just above rooftop height, he loosed his eggs, then beat his dragon as hard as he could to make it pull up.

He cursed again when a couple of dragonfliers didn't follow him back up into the sky. Maybe Ambaldo's fresher, faster dragons would have made the men at the heavy sticks miss. No way to know. Sabrino looked back over his shoulder. Ambaldo's dragons were delivering their load of death over Braunau, going in with as much indifference to danger as any Algarvian could want to show.

Sabrino thought he was the first one to spot the swarm of rock-gray Unkerlanter dragons racing toward Braunau from the southwest. He hadn't even the time to grab for his crystal and shout out a warning before the Unkerlanters swooped down on Ambaldo's wing, slicing through his own almost as if it didn't exist.

The Unkerlanters treated Ambaldo and his dragonfliers about as rudely as the Algarvians had treated the Unkerlanter attack on their dragon farms earlier in the battle. Dragon after dragon painted in green and red and white tumbled out of the sky, beset from above. Sabrino wasted no time ordering his own men back into the fray. But the enemy, having struck hard and fast, flew off. Sabrino's dragons were too weary to make much of a pursuit.

Worse, he feared flying into another Unkerlanter trap. With the tired beasts his men were flying, that would be the end of them. Ambaldo's dragons, or those of them that were left, aligned on his. When he shouted the other wing commander's name through the crystal, he got no answer. He didn't think anyone would get answers from Ambaldo again.

"Back to our dragon farm," he told his own squadron leaders. "We'll put the pieces back together as best we can and go on." He didn't know where more dragons- or, for that matter, more dragonfliers- would come from. He didn't know how long the wing could keep going without them, either. All at once, without warning, he felt old.

"Come on!" Major Spinello shouted as he led his troopers east. "We can still do it. By the powers above, we can! But we've got to keep moving."

He wasn't commanding his own regiment anymore. The battered formation he headed was about as big as his regiment had been at the start of the battle of Durrwangen, but it consisted of the mixed-up remnants of three or four different regiments. As cooks threw leftovers together to get another meal out of them, so Algarvian generals stirred together broken units to get one more fight from them. Battle Group Spinello, they called this one. Spinello would have been prouder if he hadn't been so tired.

He pointed ahead. "If we get over that ridge line and onto the flat land up there, we can tear Swemmel's whole position open. It's only a couple of miles now. We can do it!"

Was anybody listening to him? Was anybody paying any attention at all? He looked around to see. What he saw were men as filthy and unshaven and weary as he was. He looked ahead. Even the Algarvian behemoths seemed worn unto death. A couple of wedges of them led Battle Group Spinello ahead. Without them, every footsoldiers would have been wounded or killed by now.

More behemoths led more Algarvian footsoldiers toward that ridge line. Here and there, they dueled at long range with Unkerlanter behemoths. Spinello had never imagined that Unkerlant had bred so many behemoths. He'd never imagined that Swemmel's men would handle them so well, either.

When a well-placed Algarvian egg knocked over one of those behemoths, he let out a cheer. "See, boys?" he said. "We can still lick 'em. No point in running if you see a couple of enemy beasts and you haven't got any of your own close by."

That had happened a few times in this battle. The Algarvians were used to sending their foes fleeing in panic with their behemoths. They were anything but used to being on the receiving end of panic. But any army's nerve wore thin if its men were fought as hard as they could be and then three steps more besides. Every so often, troops would scream, "Behemoths!" and run the other way when a couple of Unkerlanter beasts showed themselves over the top of a rise.

Captain Turpino limped up to Spinello. His left calf was bandaged; he'd taken a blaze between the top of his boot and the bottom of his kilt. But he refused to leave the field. Spinello was glad to have him here. Turpino was about as far from lovable as a man could get, but he knew his business.

Now he said, "Sir, looks like that little tiny rise there" -he pointed- "will screen us from the worst of what the Unkerlanters can throw at us and still let us move east toward the real high ground."

Spinello considered. His nod, when he gave it, was hesitant. "Aye, unless the Unkerlanters see that, too, and they've got a brigade lying in wait for us."

With a shrug, Turpino answered, "Sir, they've been lying in wait for us ever since we started this attack. You want to know what I think, somebody's head ought to roll for that."

"I'm not saying you're wrong, but you ought to have a care there," Spinello told him. "People I believe tell me this attack went in at the orders of his Majesty himself."

"Mezentio's a good king. That doesn't necessarily make him a good general," Turpino said. "And what's he going to do to me? Boil me alive the way Swemmel might? Not likely! Besides, what can he do to me that's worse than what we've gone through these past two weeks?"

"Good question," Spinello admitted. "The sort of question, though, where you may not want to find out the answer."

"I'll worry later," Turpino said. "Right now, the only thing I'm going to worry about is staying alive through this cursed fight. If I manage that, King Mezentio is welcome to whatever's left of my carcass afterwards."

Nodding, Spinello shouted for a crystallomancer. When an officer-by-courtesy with a crystal trotted over to him, he said, "Can you get hold of the fellow commanding the behemoths in front of us?"

"I can try, sir," the crystallomancer said. "You've got to remember, though, in a field as crowded as this, that Swemmel's men are liable to pick up some of our emanations, the same way we steal theirs every chance we get."

"I'll keep it in mind," Spinello said. "Now get him."

"Aye, sir." The crystallomancer murmured the charm. After his crystal flared with light, an officer on a behemoth appeared in it. Actually, Spinello couldn't see much of him, for the brim of his iron helmet almost covered his eyes, while cheekpieces hid most of the rest of his face. Spinello knew he'd be wearing chain and plate on his body, too. He didn't have to haul the weight around; his behemoth did.

He listened to Spinello, then eyed the ground ahead himself. After a moment, he nodded. "All right, Major, we'll go that way. Once we make it up to the top of the big rise, then we'll see what we see."

"How do you like our chances?" Spinello asked.

"We're short a few behemoths, or maybe more than a few, down in the southeast," the other officer answered. "Swemmel's whoresons held 'em up longer than we expected. But we ought to be able to do the job just the same."

"Good," Spinello said.

"It'll have to do," said the fellow on the behemoth. "And now- farewell." He vanished from the crystal. The crystallomancer put it back into his pack.

The behemoths turned to use the track Captain Turpino had suggested. Spinello blew his whistle. "Follow me!" he shouted- a cry that made Algarvian footsoldiers respect and obey the men who led them. Then he added another cry that was more likely to keep the men of Battle Group Spinello alive: pointing to the behemoths, he yelled, "Follow them!"

For half a mile or so, everything went very well- so well, in fact, that Spinello started to get suspicious. His eyes went back and forth, back and forth. He kept expecting hordes of drunken Unkerlanters to leap from trenches on either flank and rush toward his men with shouts of, "Urra!"

But the trouble, when it came, came from the front. The Unkerlanters crouched in their holes and waited till the wedges of behemoths were almost upon them. Some of those holes were so hard to spot, Spinello guessed they had sorcery covering them. When Swemmel's men did pop up and start blazing, even they weren't so rash- or so drunk- as to charge. Instead, they ducked down again and waited for the Algarvian onslaught.

They didn't have long to wait. The behemoths tossed eggs into their trenches. "Forward!" Spinello shouted again. "Loose order!" The men he led probably could have done the job without commands. They'd done it before, some of them countless times. Having behemoths along to help was, if anything, an unusual luxury. They advanced by rushes, some soldiers blazing while others moved ahead. The Unkerlanters had an unpleasant choice: keep their heads down till they were slaughtered in their holes or come out and try to get away.

More often than not, most of them would have died in place. Here, rather to Spinello's surprise, most of them fled. Maybe it's the behemoths, he thought. If we can be twitchy about theirs, no reason they shouldn't be twitchy about ours.

Whatever the reason, running did the Unkerlanters little good. More eggs from the Algarvian behemoths burst among them, flinging them this way and that like broken toys. When the beam from a heavy stick caught a man in the back, he didn't just go down. He also went up- in flames.

"Forward!" Spinello shouted. Every step took Battle Group Spinello- and the behemoths with it- closer to the high ground at the heart of the salient. If the Algarvians could get up there in numbers, if they could move quickly once they did, this great, bloody grapple might yet turn out to have been worthwhile.

But one of the Unkerlanter officers must have had a crystal, and must have used it before he fell. The Algarvians hadn't gone far past the Unkerlanter trench line before eggs began dropping among them. Spinello curled himself into a ball behind a boulder. The big gray rock shielded him from the energies of eggs bursting in front of it. It would do him no good if eggs burst in back of it. He preferred not to dwell on that.

Somewhere not far away, an Unkerlanter was down and shrieking for his mother in a high, shrill voice. His cries went on and on, then cut off abruptly. Somebody, Spinello supposed, had put him out of his agony. He hoped someone would do the same for him if the need arose. Even more, he hoped it never would. He aimed to die in bed, preferably with company.

Despite the eggs falling among its men and behemoths, Battle Group Spinello fought its way forward. Spinello noticed the ground rising more sharply under his feet than it had before. "We're getting where we need to go," he called, pointing ahead. "If we can get up there in strength, if we can drive the Unkerlanters back once we do it, nothing we've been through will have mattered. We'll rip Swemmel's boys a new arsehole, and then we'll go on and win this war. Mezentio and victory!"

"Mezentio and victory!" the soldiers shouted. They were veterans. They knew he was telling them the truth. As long as they could keep going forward, they would finally battle their way past the last Unkerlanter defensive line. Then it would be fighting in open country, and Swemmel's soldiers had never been able to match them in that. Destroy the Durrwangen bulge, destroy the Unkerlanter armies here, and who could say what might happen after that?

The Unkerlanters might have drawn the same conclusion. If they had, they liked it less than Spinello had. More eggs fell on the advancing Algarvians, forcing footsoldiers to go to earth and separating them from the behemoths, which made life more difficult for all of Mezentio's men. Algarvian egg-tossers and Algarvian dragons went hunting the enemy's tossers.

But Algarvian dragons didn't have everything their own way, not here. Dragons painted rock-gray swooped down on Battle Group Spinello. Unkerlanter dragons had contested the sky west of here ever since this battle began. Some of them tried to flame behemoths. Others dropped still more eggs on the Algarvian footsoldiers.

Spinello was running toward the crater one egg had blown in the ground when another burst close by. All at once, he wasn't running anymore, but flying through the air. He landed in a thornbush, which tore at him but probably saved him from the worse damage he would have got slamming into the ground.

Not till he freed himself, tried to go on, and put weight on his right leg did he realize a chunk of metal egg casing had wounded him. He went down in a heap. Unlike Turpino's, his leg wouldn't support him anymore. Blood poured from a gash above the knee. Pain poured from the gash, too, now that he knew he had it.

"Stretcher-bearers!" he bawled, hoping some of them would hear him. "Stretcher-bearers!" He took a bandage from his belt pouch and bound up the wound as best he could. He also gulped down a little jar of poppy juice. That made the pain retreat, but couldn't rout it. Battle Group Turpino now, he thought.

"Here we are, pal," an Algarvian said. He and his comrade lifted Spinello and set him on their stretcher. "We'll get you out of here- that or die trying." It wasn't a joke, even if it sounded like one.

"I wanted to see the fight on the high ground," Spinello grumbled. But he wouldn't, not now.