Assailing a position like the one he and his comrades held, he would have wanted to be drunk, too.
An Unkerlanter fell, and another. Trasone had no idea whether his beam was the one that had knocked either of them over. A lot of Algarvian troopers had popped up from their shelters at the same time as he had from his.
And then another Unkerlanter went down, this one with a hole in him you could have thrown a dog through. No footsoldier’s weapon could have made such a wound, only a heavy stick mounted on the back of a behemoth. That stick found one foe after another. When the Unkerlanters dove for cover, it blazed right through the boards and sheet metal some of them chose.
The rest of the behemoths carried egg-tossers. They rained death down on the Unkerknters: not death at random, but death precisely aimed, death that pursued them, death that found them. The charge faltered. When his comrades lay broken and bloodied all around him, not even a bellyful of raw spirits would take a man forward any more.
Along with the behemoths, fresh troops in Algarvian uniform came up on the right of Trasone’s regiment. For a moment, he didn’t recognize the patch each newcomer wore on his left sleeve: a sea-green shield with five gold crowns. Then he did, and his jaw dropped. “Powers above!” he exclaimed. “They’re fornicating Sibs!”
Folvo nodded. “Didn’t you hear about that?” he said. “They’ve recruited a couple of regiments’ worth of men on the five islands. They’re supposed to be tough enough to suit anybody.”
“What’s the world coming to?” Trasone shook his head. “Yaninans for flank guards, now these Sibs right alongside us-and I did hear tell we’ve got Forthwegians doing something or other, too. What’s next? Are we going to start setting up regiments of Kaunians?”
“I’d sooner there were Kaunians here than me,” Folvo said.
“Oh, aye, but all the same…” Trasone turned and called to one of the Sibians: “Hey, pal, you speak my language?”
“At least as well as you do,” the Sibian answered in cold, precise Algarvian. “Probably better.”
“Well, you can go futter yourself, too,” Trasone muttered, but not so loud as to make the newcomer-who was, after all, supposed to be on his side- notice.
Officers’ whistles screeched and wailed, both among the Sibians and in his own regiment. At the same time, the Algarvian behemoths lumbered forward, the heavy stick blazing Unkerlanter after Unkerlanter, the egg-tossers making the enemy burrow for his life instead of fighting back. “Let’s go!” Major Spinello shouted. “One more good push and we’re at the Wolter. That’s where we want to be. That’s where we have to be, if we’ve ever going to go any farther. Mezentio!” As usual, the battalion commander was the first man out of his whole, the first man rushing toward the enemy.
“Mezentio!” Trasone shouted. Bent at the waist, he scuttled forward, too, dashing from one pile of rubble to the next, blazing any Unkerlanters he ran past in case they were playing dead and would rise up to blaze his countrymen if they got the chance. He knew the men of his regiment would go forward, too. They always had. He trusted them with his life, and they trusted him with theirs.
He wasn’t so sure about the Sibians. They were foreigners, after all, so what could you expect from them? The Algarvians had licked them, too, which automatically made them suspect in his eyes. They shouted something in their own language instead of “Mezentio!” or “Algarve!” That would get some of them blazed by their allies if they weren’t careful or lucky. But everything Folvo had said about them looked to be true. They went forward just as fast and just as hard as the Algarvians on their left. And their companies and battalions, unlike Trasone’s, were at full strength, which gave their attack extra weight.
“There it is!” Trasone said. He didn’t need Folvo’s contraption to see the Wolter up ahead now. There was the river, and there were the piers sticking out into it at which boats coming from the far side unloaded Unkerlanter reinforcements. If he and his comrades-or even the Sibians fighting alongside them-could take those piers and hold them or burn them, how would Swemmel’s soldiers bring new men up into Sulingen?
But it wouldn’t be easy. He didn’t take long to discover that. Advancing over the ground on which the Unkerlanters had attacked was easy. Past that ground, though, they had their own field works, starting in the mean little workmen’s hovels in front of the great ironworks and extending back line after line, all the way to the river. Unkerlanter soldiers popped up out of cellars to blaze at the Algarvians, then disappeared again. Even more than Mezentio’s men, they lived like moles, tunneling from one hut to the next and only showing themselves above ground to blaze or to charge.
Major Spinello’s whistle squealed. “Come on, boys! Reach out and grab it, the way you’d grab a pretty Kaunian girl’s tits!”
Again, the Algarvians and Sibians went forward in a desperate push toward the riverbank. But the Unkerlanters were desperate, too. They funneled more and more men into the fight. For all Trasone knew, they had tunnels leading all the way back to the ironworks and the granary, strongpoints Mezentio’s men had yet to clear. The Algarvian advance stalled.
Trasone glanced toward the sky. Seen through shifting plumes of smoke, the sun had slid a long way down toward the western horizon. It was setting earlier now than it had not so long before. The start of fall couldn’t be more than a few days away. And after fall came winter. The thought of another winter in southern Unkerlant chilled Trasone to the marrow.
“We’d better win now, then,” he muttered, and crawled a few feet farther forward, into the crater a bursting egg had left.
A beam started a fire in the pile of rubble he’d just vacated-the beam from a heavy stick. It had come from up ahead. Somewhere up there, an Unkerlanter behemoth prowled. One of the Algarvian beasts had already gone down, blazed in the vulnerable belly by an Unkerlanter who came out of a hole below it and then ducked down again.
Dragons dove flaming. They were Unkerlanter beasts. Screams rang out among the Sibians. Trasone didn’t blame them. No troops had an easy time facing dragons. The sun set. Night fell. The Algarvians huddled in the ruins of Sulingen, only a couple of furlongs, maybe only one, from the Wolter. “We’ll get ‘em tomorrow!” Spinello called cheerfully.
In his gullyside headquarters, Marshal Rathar turned to General Vatran. “Can we hold them?” the marshal asked anxiously.
“We have to hold them,” Vatran answered. “If we don’t hold the buggers, we don’t hold Sulingen. And if we don’t hold Sulingen …”
“We get boiled alive, and so does the kingdom,” Rathar said. Vatran’s grunt might have been laughter. The only trouble was, Rathar wasn’t joking. The Algarvians had been advancing through Sulingen street, by street- slowly, but with grim persistence. Unkerlant had few streets left to lose.
Eggs burst not far from the mouth of the cavern in which Rathar and Vatran made their headquarters. The Unkerlanters moved soldiers up from the river through the gullies piercing Sulingen, and the Algarvians knew it. Their egg-tossers and dragons kept pounding away at those gullies. They took a horrible toll, but it would have been worse had Swemmel’s men gone forward any other way.
“If we lose those piers, we’re ruined,” Vatran said. “What have we got there to keep the redheads from reaching the river?”
“One behemoth and a couple of battalions, or whatever’s left of them by now,” Vatran told him. The general scowled at the map. “There are a lot more Algarvians in that part of town right now.”
“Our men have to hold anyway,” Rathar said. “We’ve got three good brigades waiting on the southern bank of the Wolter. They can’t get over the river till nightfall. If they try, the Algarvian dragons will have a field day. So we have to hang on to that landing area no matter what. Who’s in command there?”
“Powers above only know,” Vatran answered. “Whoever’s seniormost and hasn’t taken a beam through the brisket.”
“Aye, no doubt you’re right about that,” Rathar said. He turned his head and raised his voice to a shout: “Crystallomancer!”
“How may I serve you, lord Marshal?” asked one of the military mages in charge of keeping the cave in touch with the battle raging all through Sulingen.
Rather pointed to the map. “Get me the senior officer in this sector. I don’t know who he’ll be. I only hope his crystallomancer’s still breathing.”
