furnish me all your Kaunians at once.”
Sidroc didn’t like the sound of that at all. Neither, evidently, did Puliano, who said, “Oh, I will, will I? And why is that?”
“Because it will aid the war, and because I, your superior, order it,” the captain replied.
He wasn’t the only one who made the same translation. Sudaku pushed his way forward. The man from the Phalanx of Valmiera stuck his stick in the mage’s face. “Do you want anything to do with me or my countrymen?” he asked coldly.
“Arrest this man!” the mage gabbled.
“What for?” Lieutenant Puliano said with a smile. “Seems like a pretty good question to me. Maybe you’d better answer it.”
“Do you want anything to do with me or mine?” Sudaku repeated.
The mage had nerve. Whatever Algarvians lacked, that was rarely it. He thought for a long time before finally shaking his head. And even after he did, he shook a fist at Lieutenant Puliano. “It’s because of people like you that our kingdom’s in the state it’s in,” he said bitterly.
“Because of people like me?” Puliano returned. “Have you looked in a mirror any time lately?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” the mage demanded. He really didn’t know. Sidroc could see as much. That was as alarming as anything else that had happened to him lately-a pretty frightening thought, when you got down to it.
Sudaku said, “I think you had better disappear. I think that if you do not disappear, something bad will happen to you.”
Again, even with a stick in his face, the Algarvian wizard seemed on the point of saying no. If he had, the blond from the Phalanx of Valmiera would have blazed his brains out. Sidroc was sure of that. The mage evidently came to the same conclusion. He turned on his heel and stalked away. His stiff back radiated outrage.
“Poor fellow,” the Kaunian said. “He is angry at me because I do not propose to let him kill me. Well, too bad.” He turned to Lieutenant Puliano. “Thank you, sir, for thinking I am worth more to Algarve alive.”
“Mages are a pack of cursed fools,” the redhead said. “If they were half as smart as they think they are, they’d be twice as smart as they really are. I know what a good soldier’s worth. I haven’t got any idea what that bastard’s worth, and why should I waste time finding out?” He looked around at his ragtag followers. “Come on, boys. Let’s get going. Wizards or no wizards, we’ve still got a war to fight.”
Marshal Rathar muttered something vile under his breath. His army had just tried to throw another bridgehead across the Scamandro, and the Algarvians had just crushed it. “Can’t be helped,” General Vatran said philosophically. “We still haven’t built up enough men or supplies to do a proper job yet.”
Logically, Rathar knew that was true. But logic had only so much to do with it. He glanced over at the portrait of King Swemmel on the wall. His imagination had to be running away with him, but he thought the king was glaring at him in particular. “It could have worked,” he said. “It was worth a try.”
“Oh, aye.” Vatran nodded. “That’s why we gave it a blaze. But it wasn’t a sure thing, and it didn’t pan out. Won’t be long now before we can do it right.”
“I know.” But Rathar, still eyeing Swemmel’s portrait, had a bad feeling there would be some unpleasant conversations with the king before that happened. He wondered if he could get away with telling the crystallomancers to tell Swemmel he was indisposed. Probably not, worse luck.
Vatran shuffled through leaves of paper. He pulled one out and handed it to Rathar. “Here, lord Marshal. You said you wanted to see these.”
“I need to see them, if that’s what I think it is. That’s not the same thing as wanting to.” Rathar took the paper and glanced through it. Sure enough, it was what he thought it was. He handed it back to Vatran. “Stinking werewolves.”
Vatran made a sour face. “Trust the Algarvians to come up with a name like that.”
“I don’t care what you call them,” Rathar said. “They’re a pack of cursed nuisances, and no mistake.”
He recognized the irony in his words. While Mezentio’s men occupied great stretches of Unkerlant, his own countrymen had made their lives miserable, raiding their garrisons, sabotaging ley lines, and doing anything else they could to hurt the foe. Now, with Unkerlanter forces inside Algarve, the boot was on the other foot. The redheads behind his lines were doing their best to disrupt his operations.
With a shrug, Vatran said, “When we catch ‘em, we hang ‘em or we blaze ‘em or we boil ‘em. That way, they don’t turn into anything worse than a nuisance.”
A couple of years before, Algarvian generals had to have been saying the same thing about Unkerlanter irregulars. Rathar had the same response they must have had: “Once we win the war, the trouble will go away.” Mezentio’s men hadn’t won the war. If he didn’t win it now, he would deserve whatever Swemmel chose to do to him.
Vatran shuffled more papers. “There’s still trouble with bandits back in the Duchy of Grelz, too.”
Bandits, of course, was another name for irregulars and werewolves. Some of the Grelzers who’d aligned themselves with Mezentio and against Swemmel had been in grim earnest, and kept up their fight against Unkerlant even after the Algarvians were driven east and out of their duchy. But that problem had the same answer as the other one: “If we win here, the bandits will quiet down-and if they don’t, we’ll root ‘em out one at a time if we have to.”
“Aye-makes sense,” Vatran agreed.
“Now, the next question, and the one where losing the bridgehead really hurts,” Rathar said. “How far west have the islanders come, and how close to Trapani have they got?”
One of Vatran’s white eyebrows twitched. “They’re within about eighty miles, sir,” he answered unhappily. “Still moving forward pretty fast, too, curse them.”
“They’re our allies,” Rathar said. “We’re not supposed to curse them. We’re supposed to congratulate them.” He looked east. “Congratulations-curse you.”
Vatran laughed, though it really wasn’t funny. “Of course, one reason they’re moving so fast is that the redheads have all their best soldiers-all the best of whatever they’ve got left-pointed at us.”
“That old, old song,” Rathar said. “We’re beating them anyhow, the bastards. And we’re beating them in spite of all the funny magic they’re throwing at us.”
“Every time they try something new, our mages have fresh hysterics,” Vatran said.
“They’ve been doing that ever since the redheads started killing Kaunians,” Rathar replied. “Sometimes they find an answer, sometimes things just go wrong for the redheads, and sometimes we have so many men and behemoths, it doesn’t matter anyway.”
Vatran let out a long, heartfelt sigh. “I’ll be glad when it’s finally over, and that’s the truth.” He ran a hand through his curly white hair. “I’m too cursed old to go through what the Algarvians have put us through.”
“Not obvious it’ll be over even after we lick Mezentio,” Rathar said. “King Swemmel hasn’t said what he’ll do about Gyongyos then. Maybe we’ll all pack up and head west-a long way west.”
“Maybe,” Vatran agreed. “But do you know what, lord Marshal? Even if we do, I won’t be nervous about it, the way I have been ever since we started fighting the redheads. Even if the Gongs should somehow lick us-and I don’t think they can do it-it wouldn’t be the end of the world. If the Algarvians had beaten us, our kingdom was dead. They’d’ve ruled us like we were some barbarian principality up in Siaulia, and they’d never have let us back up on our feet again.”
Since Rathar thought the older general was right, he didn’t argue with him. The war with Algarve was a war to the knife, no doubt about it. Mezentio’s men might not have treated Unkerlant and its people quite so harshly as they had the Kaunians in Forthweg, but they wouldn’t have made easy masters. They
