Out of the Darkness

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.