just costing us too dear.”
“But what about the piers, sir?” Leudast asked in no small alarm. “How are we going to get more men up into Sulingen? If we lose the ironworks here, we can’t hold the piers, and if we can’t hold the piers. ..” He shuddered. “If we hadn’t been able to bring in those three brigades a few nights ago, we would have lost the city by now.”
Hawart nodded. “I know all that, believe me I do. By now, we’ve lost most of the men in those brigades instead. A lot of them went in here, and you know what’s happened to this place. And the rest, or most of the rest, went into the granary, and the Algarvians hold it, or what’s left of it. Those brigades probably saved Sulingen, but they wrecked themselves doing it.”
“Wrecked plenty of Algarvians, too, by the powers above,” Leudast said savagely. Captain Hawart nodded again. Leudast repeated the question the officer hadn’t answered before: “If we give up the ironworks, if we’ve lost the granary, if we lose the piers, too-how do we bring in reinforcements?”
“They’ve run up more piers farther east, in the districts we do control,” Hawart said. “We’ll have to hang on to those. But we can’t hold these any more. Some prices are too high to pay.”
As if to underscore that, the Algarvians started tossing eggs into the ironworks from the west. Leudast and Hawart huddled side by side. Fragments of the eggs shells hissed through the air with malignant whines. So did bricks and boards and chunks of iron hurled by the blasts of sorcerous energy. Here and there, wounded Unkerlanters shrieked. Here and there, wounded Algarvians shrieked, too. The fighting was at quarters too close for either side to toss eggs without hurting some of its own soldiers. That didn’t stop the redheads, and it didn’t stop the Unkerlanters, either.
Even while the eggs were still falling, Leudast and Hawart looked around opposite ends of the forge. Sure enough, the Algarvians were moving forward, taking their chances on being hurt by their own side while the Unkerlanters had to keep their heads down. The redheads were brave. Leudast had seen as much, many times. They were also clever. He’d seen that, too. This time, they were too clever for their own good. He blazed down three of them, one after another.
But his pleasure evaporated when Hawart started shouting orders for the withdrawal from the ironworks. The Unkerlanters knew how to conduct retreats.
“We’re clear,” Leudast said when he left the ruins of the iron manufactory and came out into the ruins of the rest of Sulingen. He stayed in the open not an instant longer than he had to, but dove into the first hole in the ground he saw.
Most of his countrymen did the same thing. One trooper, though, crumpled and fell to the ground, stick slipping from hands that could hold it no more. There was a neat hole in the side of his head, just above and in front of his left ear.
“Cursed sniper!” cried one of the Unkerlanters hiding in the wreckage of what had been a block of ironworkers’ cottages. “That whoreson hides like a viper, and he’s got eyes like an eagle. He’s picked off a couple of dozen of us, maybe more, the past few weeks.”
“Bugger him,” Leudast said. “Bugger him with a straight razor.” No matter how fiercely he spoke, though, he made sure he didn’t expose any part of his person to the Algarvian sniper.
“We ought to bring in a sniper of our own and get rid of him,” Captain Hawart said.
“I hate snipers, theirs and ours, too,” Leudast said. “They aren’t going to change the way the battle goes. All they’re good for is blazing some poor fool who’s squatting somewhere taking a dump. Powers below eat the lot of them.”
“Powers below eat the Algarvians,” Hawart answered. “Can you see the granary without getting killed doing it?”
“I think so.” Leudast wriggled around in his hole. Sure enough, he could make out the top of the tall, strong brick building-and the Algarvian banner lazily flapping above it. Leudast cursed. Before long, those red, green, and white stripes would be flying above the ruins of the ironworks, too.
He trained his stick on the battered manufactory, ready to punish the first of Mezentio’s men who pursued the retreating Unkerlanters. But the Algarvians proved too battlewise for that. Instead of charging straight into the meat grinder, they used their egg-tossers again, to make the Unkerlanters stay down. And their footsoldiers came at the Unkerlanter defenders not straight out of the manufactory but in a pincer movement from north and south of it.
Some of the redheads yelled “Mezentio!” and “Algarve!” Others cried, “Sibiu!” Leudast had seen that the enemy soldier soldiers who raised that shout were uncommonly ferocious. If they got in among his comrades, bad things happened. He turned to blaze at them-and never saw the Algarvian who blazed him.
The beam went straight through his left calf. He did what he’d seen and heard so many other soldiers do-he screamed in pain and clutched at himself, everything else forgotten. A moment later, one of his comrades blazed the redhead, who also screamed. Leudast heard him, but only distantly. His hurt filled the world.
He tried to put weight on the wounded leg, and found he couldn’t. When he looked down, he saw two neat holes in his calf, each about as thick as his middle finger. Some stick wounds were self-cauterizing. Not this one: blood ran down his leg from each hole and began to pool in his boot. He fumbled for the length of bandage he carried in a pouch on his belt. His fingers didn’t want to obey him. He found he did better when he didn’t look at his leg. Even after so much horror on so many battlefields, the sight of his own blood left him queasy.
Somebody shouted, “The sergeant’s been blazed!”
“Can you move, Sergeant?” somebody else asked.
“I can crawl,” Leudast answered. He gulped. That white bandage was turning red fast. And binding up the wound didn’t make the pain go away. If anything, he hurt worse than ever. He tasted blood in his mouth, too; he must have bitten down on the inside of his lip or cheek without even noticing.
“Here, Sergeant. I’ll get you away.” That was Aldrian, stooping beside him. “Can you get your arm over my shoulder?” Leudast wasn’t sure he could. When he tried, he managed. “Go on one leg if you can, Sergeant,” the youngster told him. Leudast tried. He wasn’t sure whether his awkward hops did more good than harm, but Aldrian didn’t complain, so he kept hopping.
They hadn’t got more than a couple of furlongs from the actual fighting line before a grim-faced inspector popped out of a hole in the ground and aimed his stick at both of them. “Show blood,” he said curtly. He looked ready, even eager, to blaze. If neither of them could show a wound, he’d kill them both for cowards.
But Leudast used his free hand to point to the bloody bandage on his leg. With a grudging nod, the inspector gestured with his stick, waving the two soldiers on. Eggs fell around them moments later. Aldrian tried to hold Leudast up as they both dove for cover, but Leudast banged his calf anyhow. Fresh fire ran through it. He howled like a lovesick hound. He could no more have kept himself from howling than he could have kept his heart from beating.
After a journey that seemed endless but was surely less than a mile, they came to one of the gullies than ran down toward the Wolter. Fresh troops were coming up out of the gully and heading for the battle line. Other men- physicians’ orderlies-took charge of Leudast from Aldrian.
“How bad is it?” one of them asked him.
He glared at the fellow. “I died last week,” he snapped.
That startled a laugh out of the orderly, who gave the wound a quick examination and delivered his verdict: “They can patch you up. We’ll get you down to the river, then sneak you over tonight, I expect. You’ll be back at it.” Had the orderly judged Leudast wouldn’t be back at it soon, he got the feeling they would have cut his throat so they wouldn’t have to bother with him.
As things were, they got him through the gully, moving against the stream of men coming up from the river. Algarvian dragons dropped eggs on the gully while they were in it. Most burst to either side, but a couple gave the redheads gruesome successes. Overhanging cliffs hid the spot where the orderlies laid Leudast from Algarvian attention. He had plenty of wounded soldiers for company.
“You’ll go over tonight,” one of the orderlies repeated. Somewhat to his own surprise, he did. As the boat
