redheads have gone to burying eggs in the roadway again.”
That made several more irregulars skitter off the track. Then Obilot spoke up, her voice a clear bell in the darkness: “Sometimes they bury eggs alongside the roads, too, to get the clever buggers who know enough to get off onto the safe ground-only it isn’t.”
Sadoc said, “I’ll douse out any eggs; see if I don’t.” Carrying a forked stick, he strode boldly down the middle of the road, as if daring an Algarvian egg to burst under him.
“If he doesn’t douse out an egg, we’ll see it, all right,” Garivald murmured to another irregular nearby. The fellow chuckled, though it was funny only in a grisly way. Garivald didn’t think Sadoc could find the sun at noon, with or without a dowsing rod, but he held his tongue. If Sadoc proved him right, everyone would know about it.
He tramped along under the dark, moonless sky. Nights grew ever longer. That gave the irregulars an advantage they lacked in summertime: they could travel farther under cover of darkness at this season of the year. If he were back in Zossen now, he would be wondering if he had enough jars of spirits to keep him drunk through most of the winter. Unless this winter were very different from any that had gone before, he would have enough, too.
But this winter was different, and Zossen a long way away. Instead of the redheads who’d garrisoned his village, Garivald had to worry about whatever Grelzer troops were guarding the ley line for their Algarvian masters.
He wondered how hard the men who served King Raniero would fight. They weren’t Algarvians, which was doubtless all to the good. But they wouldn’t have only the weapons they could steal or scrounge. The Algarvians would want to make sure they could fight, whether they would or not.
Munderic spoke in a low but urgent voice: “We’re getting near the ley line. Keep your eyes skinned, every cursed one of you. We want to slide past the Grelzer traitors; we don’t want to get into a fight with them. If we can plant our eggs and then sneak back to the woods, we’ve done what we came for.”
Somebody said, “We’ll have to kill those whoresons sooner or later. Might as well start now.”
“If we have to, we will,” Munderic answered. “But hurting the Algarvians is more important now. That’s what we aim for first.”
With more than a little reluctance, Garivald admitted to himself that Munderic was right. He paused and peered ahead through the night. In the name of efficiency, King Swemmel had ordered shrubbery planted to either side of a lot of ley lines in Unkerlant, to keep people and animals from blundering unawares into the path of a caravan. How much labor that had taken hadn’t been measured against men or beasts saved. Garivald wondered why not, but not for long.
“Halt!” someone called from the darkness ahead, in accents much like his own. “Who goes there!”
Garivald went down onto his belly. He couldn’t see the man who had challenged, and he didn’t want the fellow seeing him, either. For all he knew, the Grelzer carried a crystal and was calling reinforcements. But Sadoc’s voice rang out, harsh and proud: “Free men of Unkerlant, that’s who!”
A beam came out of the night, aimed at the loudmouthed would-be mage. Garivald and his comrades blazed back, trying to hit the Grelzer before he could hit any of them. By the way he was shouting-screaming-he had no crystal to summon aid. A moment later, the screams changed note, from fear to anguish. A moment after that, most abruptly, they cut off.
From behind the hedge-how had he got there so fast? — Munderic called, “Stinking whoreson’s dead-scratch one traitor. But come on. We’ve got the get these eggs planted fast now. Sadoc, are you hale?”
“Aye,” Sadoc answered.
“Get up here, then,” Munderic snapped as irregulars dug a hole in the dirt between the hedgerows marking the ley line’s path. “Say the words over these eggs and we’ll get out of here.”
“Aye,” Sadoc repeated. Say the words he did, in a rapid singsong. Garivald didn’t think it was in Unkerlanter, but wasn’t sure. With Sadoc saying the words, he wasn’t sure they would work, either. As soon as they were through, he helped his comrades fill in the hole they’d dug. Then they started for the shelter of the woods again. No more Grelzer soldiers came over to see what might have happened or to pursue. That told Garivald more than a little about the quality of the men who served Raniero.
The irregulars were more than halfway back to the forest when a distant roar from behind them made them burst into cheers. If any villagers heard them, they might have taken their noise for the baying of a wolf pack that had killed. They wouldn’t have been far wrong, either. Even Garivald slapped Sadoc on the back.
Just outside the woods, an irregular trod on an egg buried in the meadow. That roar was louder, more intimate. His screams were more dreadful than the Grelzer’s, but faded to nothingness almost as fast. Obilot said, “One of us for one of their caravans-fair exchange.” She was right… but Garivald’s shiver had nothing to do with the cold.
Marshal Rathar and General Vatran had a new headquarters these days; the Algarvians had finally overrun the gully from which they’d directed the fight for Sulingen for so long. This one was also a cave, a cave dug into the side of the bluffs that tumbled down to the Wolter. Runners had to make their way along a narrow, twisting, dangerous path to bring new from the few bits of the city to Unkerlanters still held and to take back orders.
After one runner did make the journey, Vatran started cursing. Rathar had been studying the map; the general’s fury made him look up from it. “What now?” he asked.
“I’ll tell you what,” Vatran growled. “You know Colonel Chariulf?”
“Of course,” Rathar answered. “He finally put paid to that Algarvian master sniper, and a good thing, too-the whoreson was bleeding us white.”
“Aye, well, now he’s had his own letter posted, poor bugger,” Vatran told him. “He got caught away from a hole when the Algarvians started tossing eggs, and there’s not enough of him left to bury in a bloody jam tin.”
He hoped something would be left of Unkerlant by the time this fight was over. His job down here was to help make sure something would be left of his kingdom when the fight was over. If the Algarvians took it all… If that happened, they would make people long for the good old days of King Swemmel, which, to a man who’d lived through those days, was a genuinely frightening thought.
“Poor Chariulf,” he said. “He was good at what he did.”
Vatran grunted. “Aye, he was. And that’s more praise than most of us will get after we’re dead and gone.”
“If you and I don’t get that kind of praise, it’ll mean we lost the war,” Rathar said.
“Maybe,” Vatran answered. “But maybe not, too. Maybe it’ll just mean Swemmel got sick of us, threw us in the soup pot when it was boiling hard, and then went on and won the war anyhow, with whatever other generals he scrounged up.”
“Now there’s a cheerful thought,” Rathar said. “I like to think of myself as indispensable.”
“I like to think of myself the same bloody way,” Vatran replied. “But the way I look at it and the way his Majesty looks at it aren’t necessarily one and the same, however much I wish they were.” He raised his voice: “Ysolt! How about another mug of tea?”
“I’ll fetch you one, General,” the cook answered from the back of the cave. “Do you want one, too, Marshal Rathar?”
“No, thanks,” he said; he had some sour ale in front of him as he examined the map, and that would do well enough.
“Can I get you anything else, then, lord Marshal?” she asked, her voice an inviting croon. If Rathar’s ears didn’t turn as red as the embers of the fire that kept the cave a little warmer than freezing, he would have been astonished. He’d bedded her a couple of times since that first one, or rather, she’d bedded him. He’d discovered he had an easier time resisting the Algarvian army than his own hefty cook.
Vatran chuckled under his breath; he would have had to be a moron not to know what Ysolt’s tone meant. “Don’t worry about it, lord Marshal,” he said in a stage whisper. “Keeps the juices flowing, or that’s what they say.” He chuckled again. “Never a dull moment there, either, even if she’s no beauty.”
