not far away, too: Fernao exclaimed as dragons painted in red and white and green streaked out of the west, driving a handful of Kuusaman and Lagoan beasts before them.
Nor did the Algarvians content themselves with that. Their dragons threw themselves at those flying above the Lagoan army. Whenever the Algarvians did anything, they did it with all their might. Fernao watched dragons wheel and twist and flame in the sky-and watched some of them fall out of the sky, too, broken and burning.
Then a unicorn out ahead of the army toppled to the ground, pinning its rider beneath it. A great gout of steam rose from its body: it had been blazed by a heavy stick. Fernao’s gaze went to the top of the rise. Coming over it were behemoths that didn’t belong to the Lagoan army. Lagoan beasts tramped forward to meet them. Both sides began tossing eggs.
“They’ve got more behemoths than I thought they did,” Affonso said in worried tones.
“Aye.” Fernao was worried, too. “If they’ve been reinforced …” His voice trailed off. If the Algarvians had brought more behemoths to the austral continent, they’d surely brought more men down here, too.
Footsoldiers swarmed over the ridge behind and between the enemy behemoths. Affonso cursed. “Yaninans haven’t come forward like that in all the days of the world,” he said bitterly.
“I won’t tell you you’re wrong, however much I wish I could,” Fernao replied. “King Swemmel ought to thank us. Every one of those whoresons we slay is one the Unkerlanters won’t have to worry about.”
“I’m more worried about the Algarvians who’re liable to slay us,” Affonso answered. Fernao didn’t see how he could fault his friend’s thinking there.
He peered nervously toward the south. If the Algarvians had brought in enough behemoths to confront the Lagoan army, had they brought in enough to outflank King Vitor’s men, too? But no cries of alarm rose there, and he saw no great shapes pounding across the plain to cut off the Lagoans. With more than a little relief, he turned his attention back to the battle ahead.
With more relief still, he saw that the Lagoan behemoths were holding their own against the Algarvian animals. There weren’t so many of the Algarvian behemoths as he’d thought at first frightened glance, even if there were plenty to have routed the Lagoan scouts. Indeed, the Lagoan behemoths were starting to push the Algarvians back.
“Vitor!” A great shout rose from the Lagoan ranks. “King Vitor and victory!” The soldiers surged forward. Fernao and Affonso went with them. The Algarvians began falling back faster now. Maybe they’d been running a monster bluff. Sometimes they paid a price for their arrogance.
“Every so often, this business is easier than you think it would be,” Fernao said to Affonso.
“Aye.” The second-rank mage nodded. “Remember how we were worried about the Yaninans the first time they tried to hit us? We didn’t know then they’d run every chance they got.”
“I’m not sorry they did.” Fernao slogged up the rise. The Lagoan foot-soldiers, most of them younger than he and Affonso, moved faster than the mages. They hurried to catch up with their behemoths, which were just reaching the crest of the rise and disappearing as they went down the other side. Panting a little, or more than a little, Fernao went on, “Nice of the Algarvians to do the same.”
“So it is,” Affonso agreed. He was breathing hard, too. “You wouldn’t expect it of them, the way you would of the Yaninans.”
“No. You wouldn’t.” Fernao peered thoughtfully toward the top of the rise. “I wonder if they’ve got something in mind.”
Hardly had the words left his mouth before several behemoths came back over the top of the rise, heading east toward the Lagoan force. “What’s this?” Affonso said, skidding to a halt.
“Nothing good,” Fernao replied. A moment later, he exclaimed, too-in dismay. “Those are our animals. But where are the rest of them?”
“What have Mezentio’s whoresons gone and done?” Affonso asked. Fernao couldn’t answer him, not this time. Whatever they’d done, though, it had worked. Their behemoths thundered after the Lagoan beasts that were advancing no more. This time, the Lagoan behemoths couldn’t halt their charge.
A third of the way up that long slope, Fernao took out his short-handled shovel and began digging himself a hole. He couldn’t dig so deep as he would have liked; he soon found that the soil, as in so many places on the austral continent, was frozen solid the year around only a couple of feet below the surface. But any kind of scrape in the soil was better than none. He heaped up the dirt in front of the scrape and then half jumped, half lay in it. Cold started seeping into his body.
Soldiers were going to earth, too, and so was Affonso. And none too soon, for the Algarvian behemoths started plastering them with eggs again. Some of those behemoths bore heavy sticks instead of egg-tossers. As a beam from one of them could bring a unicorn crashing to the ground, so it could also blaze straight through two or three men before becoming too attenuated to be deadly any more.
A few at a time, King Vitor’s men began falling back from the rise to the flat ground below. As they retreated, Fernao found out what had gone wrong beyond the crest of the rise, on the side he hadn’t been able to see.
“Who’d have thought those buggers would have hauled those really heavy sticks all this way?” one disgruntled trooper said to another.
“Well, they did, curse ‘em,” the second Lagoan trooper answered. “You get a stick that’s heavy enough, and not even a behemoth’s armor will stand up to it.”
The two footsoldiers tramped past before Fernao could hear any more, but he’d heard enough and to spare. Turning to Affonso, he said, “They outfoxed us.”
“It doesn’t do to trust the Algarvians,” Affonso said mournfully. He leaned up on an elbow to peer out over the top of the dirt he’d piled up in front of his own miserable excuse for a hole in the ground. With a grunt, he added, “They’re going to overrun us if we stay here much longer.”
“And they’ll have an easier time killing us if we get up and run,” Fernao said. But Affonso was right. If he didn’t want to be captured or slain in place, he’d have to run. And run he did, abandoning the rise far more quickly than he’d gone up it. Having won their victory, the Algarvians didn’t pursue hard. That was some consolation for Fernao, but not much. He knew too well that Mezentio’s men could come after the Lagoan army any time they chose.
Count Sabrino had strolled through a good many Algarvian camps in Unkerlant the first summer of the war there, when things were going well. The stroll he was making through this encampment on the austral continent put him in mind of those. The encampment was smaller, but filled with the same sense of quiet confidence he’d known before.
In Unkerlant, that confidence was dead, buried by a resistance far stronger and more ferocious than the Algarvians had imagined when they started on the-bad-roads west. Here in the land of the Ice People, it still lived. The Algarvian force here was tiny compared to the armies that had gone into Unkerlant, but it wasn’t facing the whole of Swemmel’s vast kingdom, either.
Algarvian soldiers sat on stones or on the grass, tending to their boots or packs or sticks as if they were so many craftsmen practicing their trades. Behemoth crews tinkered with their animals’ armors or fiddled with their egg-tossers to make them fling a little farther. It was all very businesslike.
Even the wounded, who were tended by mages and surgeons, did their best to make light of their injuries. In best Algarvian style, one cracked a joke so funny, it made the fellow sewing up his leg pause to laugh out loud. Sabrino had seen the same sort of thing in Unkerlant. It had made him proud then. Here, it left him sad.
At last, he found his way to the tent of Brigadier Zerbino, the officer King Mezentio had appointed to command the Algarvian forces in the land of the Ice People. Zerbino, a big, bluff fellow who was marquis of a small domain in southern Algarve, greeted him with a bear hug and a flagon of wine. “We smashed them!” he declared. “Positively smashed them!”
“So we did, sir,” Sabrino agreed; Zerbino held the higher military and social ranks. “Now we can keep the cinnabar going across the Narrow Sea.”
“Oh, aye,” Zerbino said, swigging from his own flagon. “And we can drive the cursed Lagoans right off the austral continent. Traitors to the Algarvic race, that’s what they are. Might as well be Kaunians.” He swigged again. “I’ve sent messages by crystal, asking the king for more. . more of everything, by the powers above. Enough to let us finish the job.”
“Is that a fact, sir?” Sabrino said tonelessly, hoping that tonelessness disguised the alarm he felt.
It didn’t, or not well enough. “What’s biting you, Colonel?” Zerbino demanded. “It’s something besides these
