“Forward!” Tivadar shouted. “We’ve punched a hole in their line. If the stars shine bright, we can unravel them like a cheap pair of leggings.”
“You heard the captain!” As a sergeant, one of the things Istvan had to do was back up his superior’s orders. “Keep moving, you lazy lugs! No time to stop and rest now. We’ve got to keep pushing the Unkerlanters.”
Earlier in the campaign, he would surely have called the men of his squad a pack of useless goat-eaters or some similar sergeant’s endearment. Not now. They wouldn’t have taken it the right way. He wouldn’t have felt right saying it, either.
Szonyi emerged from behind the trunk of a stout spruce a few yards away from Istvan. “We really are driving them this time, aren’t we, Sergeant?” he said.
“Aye, for now,” Istvan answered. “We’d better enjoy it while it lasts, on account of it probably won’t.”
Szonyi nodded and ran on, his stick ready to blaze, his eyes moving back and forth, back and forth, to make sure he didn’t run past any Unkerlanter who might still be alive. Istvan nodded to himself. Szonyi was about as good a common soldier as he’d ever seen-surely a better warrior than he’d been when he was a common soldier himself.
And, for once, the Unkerlanters didn’t look to have three or four separate lines waiting for the Gyongyosians. With every step Istvan moved forward, his confidence grew. Aye, Swemmel’s men had put up a good fight for a long time, but could they really hope to withstand a warrior race forever? It didn’t seem likely.
Ever more Gyongyosian troopers flooded into the gap Istvan’s squad had forced. For three days, he and his countrymen had everything their own way. He thought they moved farther in those three days than they had in the whole month before. The Unkerlanters who did keep fighting began to grow desperate. Some of them began to lose hope. Instead of fighting on after their positions were overrun, they began throwing down their sticks and surrendering.
Istvan wanted to go forward day and night. “I wonder where this accursed forest ends,” he said to Kun as they paused-only for a moment-to stand in front of a tree. “I wonder what’s on the other side of it. Maybe we’ll find out.”
Instead of laughing at him, Kun nodded. “Maybe we will,” the mage’s apprentice said slowly. “Maybe the stars will show us.”
“War out in the open again,” Istvan said dreamily. “We’d truly trample the Unkerlanters then.”
He was setting his leggings to rights when Kun cried out in-alarm? It sounded more like terror. Istvan was about to ask what was wrong when the ground began to shake under his feet. Not far away, someone shouted, “Earthquake!”
“No!” Kun screamed. “Worse!”
As far as Istvan was concerned, hardly anything could be worse than a big earthquake. The valley were he’d grown up had known a couple of them, and till he’d been in combat he hadn’t dreamt anything could be more terrifying.”
Kun screamed again: “Vileness! Filth! They defile themselves! They defile the world!”
For a moment, Istvan didn’t know what his comrade was talking about. Then livid purple flames shot from the ground only a few feet in front of him. Some of the trees the temblor had shaken down caught fire. Some Gyongyosians caught fire, too. “Magecraft!” Istvan cried.
“Foul magecraft!” Kun shouted back. “They slay their own to power it. Thank the kindly stars you can’t sense what that felt like. I wish my head would fall off.” He looked like a man with a ghastly hangover.
By the time the ground stopped shaking and breaking apart, by the time the flames stopped spurting and the fires they started stopped spreading, the spearpoint of the Gyongyosian advance had been blunted. The Unkerlanters got enough breathing space to bring more soldiers forward. . and the fight went back to being hard again. Glad he’d lived through the sorcerous onslaught, Istvan resigned himself to more time in the forest.
One of Trasone’s comrades pointed south. “Look,” he said. “You can see the Wolter from here. We can’t be more than half a mile away.”
“I think you’re lying through your teeth, is what I think,” Trasone said. “Here, give me that stinking thing.”
The other Algarvian trooper handed him the contraption he’d made from a board and a couple of pieces of a broken mirror. Trasone stuck the top of the contraption above the lip of the trench in which he huddled. By looking at the lower mirror, Trasone could use the upper one to show him what lay ahead. Without a doubt, he would have been blazed if he’d poked up his head to look.
“Well, I’ll be a son of a whore,” he said softly. “You’re right, Folvo. There it is-or the bluffs on this side of it, anyhow. We get there, we get over to the other side, and we can put this lousy war in our belt pouch.”
“Aye-if we get there,” Folvo answered. “What’s ahead doesn’t look like a whole lot of fun, though.”
And that, worse luck, was nothing but the truth. A couple of enormous buildings lay between the leading Algarvians in Sulingen and the river. One was a granary. It had been built of massive bricks and blocks of stone to hold vermin at bay, but that also made it a powerful fortress. The other was larger still, though of somewhat less sturdy construction: far and away the biggest iron manufactory in Sulingen. Sometimes the Unkerlanters would bring behemoths across the Wolter into the city, load them with armor and weapons, and throw them straight into the fight. Some of the behemoths lay dead not far from the manufactory. Others, unfortunately for Mezentio’s soldiers, got farther and did worse.
A flight of dragons painted in bright Algarvian colors swooped down on the ironworks, dropping eggs as they dove. The eggs burst on and around the building. Some more of the roof came down. Trasone didn’t get excited about that, as he might have a couple of weeks earlier. He knew all too well that the Unkerlanters, those whom the bursts didn’t slay, went right on working in the ruins.
And they kept fighting back, too. They had a lot of heavy sticks crowded into the parts of Sulingen they still held-beams stabbed into the sky after the dragons. Those beams might have done more harm than they did if the smoke that rose from countless fires hadn’t spread and weakened them. As things were, one of the dragons staggered in the air. It didn’t plummet, as Trasone had seen so many plummet, but it couldn’t go on with its flightmates, either. It did manage to come to earth in Algarvian-held territory. Trasone hoped the dragonflier wasn’t badly hurt. He had to be better off than Algarvian dragon-fliers who fell into Unkerlanter hands.
Then Trasone stopped worrying about dragonfliers. The Unkerlanters had dragons, too, flying north from farms on the far side of the Wolter. They seldom fought the Algarvians in the air; most of them lacked the skill for that. But, as Mezentio’s men pounded their positions, they returned the disfavor.
Eggs fell around Trasone. He rolled himself into a ball in the trench, as if he were a pillbug. But he didn’t even have an armored exterior to present to the world. All he could do was make himself small and hope. A shard of something bit into his little finger. He yelped and pulled out a sliver of glass-Folvo’s improvised periscope was no more.
Trasone braced himself for the shouts of “Urra!” that were bound to follow the rock-gray dragons. He’d long since lost track of how many Unkerlanter counterattacks he and his friends had beaten back. Too many of his friends were wounded or dead because of them, though-he knew that.
Beneath him, the ground shook slightly. He cursed and braced himself again, this time to withstand sorcery- whether from his own side or the Unkerlanters he couldn’t yet guess. But it wasn’t the onset of magecraft: instead, it was four or five Algarvian behemoths lumbering up to the battle line. “Huzzah!” Trasone shouted. He waved his hat-though not very high. He didn’t want to get blazed while celebrating, after all.
“Here they come!” That was Sergeant Panfilo’s shout. Trasone couldn’t see his sergeant, which was all to the good. He hoped the Unkerlanters couldn’t see Panfilo, either.
He peered up out of his own hole, peered up and whooped with glee. “They waited too stinking long this time,” he said, and settled down and started to blaze.
He would never have made a general. The officers set over him had decided he wouldn’t even make a good corporal. He’d long since stopped worrying about not getting promoted. All he wanted to do was stay alive and make sure a good many Unkerlanters didn’t. But he was no fool. When it came to measuring a narrow little battlefield, he could do the job as well as any nobleman with fancy rank badges.
Here came Swemmel’s soldiers, picking their way through the rubble toward the trenches the Algarvians held. They were shouting “Urra!”-and their king’s name, too. As always, they were game. Trasone wondered how many of them were drunk. He knew their officers served up raw spirits before sending the men to the attack.
