Oraste walked on for a few paces, then nudged him in the ribs. Oraste being who and what he was, the nudge sent Bembo staggering sideways and almost knocked him flat. Oraste grabbed him and held him up. “Come over here with me,” he said, steering Bembo away from the Forthwegian laborers.
“Why?” Bembo asked. “Do you want to murder me in privacy?”
“Only sometimes,” Oraste said patiently. “Not right now. Now I want to make a bet with you.”
“Ah?” That got Bembo’s notice, all right. “What do you have in mind?”
Before answering, Oraste looked around to make sure nobody but Bembo was in earshot. Then he said, “Name however much you want, and I’ll lay you two to one that none of those Forthwegians who gave up ever comes home again. I figure it serves ‘em right if we use ‘em just like Kaunians.”
“We said we’d treat ‘em like war captives,” Bembo reminded him.
“I know what we said,” his partner answered. “And if you think we’ll really do it, put your money where your mouth is.”
Bembo thought it over. Oraste suggestively jingled his belt pouch. But Bembo hesitated only a couple of seconds before shaking his head. “Find another sucker, Oraste. I won’t touch that one. I think you’re too likely to be right.”
Oraste snapped his fingers. “There, you see? You’re not as dumb as you look, and all this time I thought you were.”
“Funny,” Bembo said. “Ha, ha. Very funny.” He paused. “What do you want to bet that the Unkerlanters are getting rid of all the Forthwegians they don’t like, too?”
“I’ll bet on it, if you want,” Oraste said. “Will you bet against it?”
“Me? Are you crazy?” Bembo shook his head again, even more decisively this time. “That’s not a sucker bet. That’s an idiot bet.”
“Never can tell,” Oraste said. “Plenty of idiots running around loose in Algarve. A lot of em wear fancier uniforms than we ever will.”
“And isn’t that the sad and sorry truth?” Bembo agreed. “The way things are these days, I don’t care if I ever get promoted. All I want to do is get back to Tricarico in one piece.”
“Why not wish for the moon while you’re at it?” Oraste waved toward the west. “You suppose the Unkerlanters want any of us to get home?” He seemed to have forgotten saying he didn’t want to think about Swemmel’s men.
Instead of answering, Bembo just sighed. He didn’t suppose anything of the sort. He wished he did. He said, “I never wanted to meet those Unkerlanter whoresons up close like this.”
“You haven’t met ‘em up close yet-they’re still on the other side of the Twegen,” Oraste said. “Well, most of them are, anyway. When they’re close enough to yell, ‘Swemmel!’ and blaze at you, that’s up close. By all the stories, they do worse than that if they catch you, too.”
Bembo’s shiver was no littlefrisson of horror, such as he might have known while hearing a scary story at an evening’s entertainment with plenty of food and good northern wine around. It was too large, too robust, for that. And it had nothing to do with the weather. It was plain, honest fear. If the Unkerlanters caught you, bad things happened. That, to Algarvians in the west, was an obvious truth.
And the Unkerlanters did not have to catch Mezentio’s men to make bad things happen to them. Bembo grabbed Oraste’s arm. “Dragons!” he shouted. They both dove for cover as the rock-gray beasts swooped down on Eoforwic from Unkerlanter dragon farms on the far side of the river.
“Powers below eat them,” Oraste said, his face buried in the dirt. Bembo lay perhaps a foot away from him. Between them, some sort of nasty mushroom thrust up from the ground. Bembo was amazed some Forthwegian hadn’t picked it and taken it off as a prize.
A moment later, as eggs began bursting uncomfortably close by, he found more urgent things about which to be amazed. “The whoresons pretty much left us alone while we were fighting the Forthwegians here,” he said. “Why in blazes are they bothering us now?”
“Of course they left us alone then-we were doing them a favor,” Oraste said. “Now we aren’t killing Forthwegians who might cause ‘em trouble further down the ley line, so they don’t have to bother being nice to us anymore.”
That exercise in cynicism might have upset Bembo more if he hadn’t come to a similar conclusion himself. “We need to get to a shelter,” he bawled.
“Go ahead, if you want to,” Oraste said. “Me, I think you’ll get your stupid self killed if you stand up.”
Again, he had a point. Bembo stayed where he was. Enough piles of wreckage lay around to do a good job of shielding him and Oraste unless an egg burst right on top of them. Somebody much too close by started screaming. Bembo couldn’t tell if he was Algarvian or Forthwegian. Agony, the constable had discovered, sounded the same in any language.
Bembo rolled from his belly to his back. He saw no dragons, but eggs, more of them than ever, kept bursting all over Eoforwic. “They’ve got their tossers limbered up, too,” he said in dismay.
“Well, if they’re going to pound on us, odds are they’ll pound on us with everything they’ve got, eh?” Oraste said.
“There won’t be anything left of this place by the time they’re through with it,” Bembo said. “There wasn’t much left of it before they started.”
“Aye, we took care of that,” Oraste said. “And I’m sure it breaks the Unkerlanters’ hearts to knock the capital of Forthweg flat.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Bembo asked, punctuating the question with a yelp as a brick or a stone bounced off his belly. He rolled back over onto his back.
“Don’t you remember?” Oraste said. “Back before the Six Years’ War, we split Forthweg with the Unkerlanters. Eoforwic used to belong to them. As far as old Swemmel’s concerned, there shouldn’t ought to be any such thing as a Kingdom of Forthweg.”
“Well, there won’t be if his men keep doing this to Eoforwic,” Bembo said. “Or if there is, there won’t be any Forthwegians left alive in it.”
“After what they put us through, who’d miss ‘em?” Oraste said.
“A point,” Bembo said. Then new fear ran through him, fear different from the simple, elementary terror caused by knowing that sorcerous energy might sear him at any moment. The only way he could find to exorcise it was to name it aloud: “You don’t suppose Swemmel’s men are pounding us like this because they’re getting ready to cross the Twegen, do you?”
“How in blazes should I know?” Oraste answered crossly. “If you want to find out something like that, why don’t you swim across the river and askMarshalRathar? He’s over there somewhere.”
“Oh, good idea. Really good idea.” Bembo’s voice dripped sarcasm. “Maybe I should ask for leave again. Then I wouldn’t be here when the avalanche came down on our heads.”
“Futter you,” his partner told him. “Everybody in Gromheort wanted to kill you when you got leave once. If you got it again, somebodywould up and murder you. And besides, by the time you got to Tricarico, how do you know the stinking Lagoans and Kuusamans wouldn’t be holding it?”
“I don’t,” Bembo admitted. “But if you had to get captured, who’d be your first choice to nab you: one of the islanders or an Unkerlanter?”
“My first choice to capture me? A redheaded gal with big tits,” Oraste said. “Second choice’d be a blond wench with big tits. It’s all downhill from there.”
That wasn’t what Bembo had meant, which didn’t stop him from laughing. Anything that could make him laugh when the world was coming to pieces all around him was something to be cherished. Only later did it occur to him to wonder just how far his standards had fallen. When it did, he wished it hadn’t.
MarshalRathar, as it happened, was not right across the Twegen River from Eoforwic at that moment. He’d been summoned back to Cottbus, and left the fight in the north inGeneralGurmun ’s capable hands. “Don’t strike till everything is ready,” he’d warned the general of behemoths. “The worst mistakes we’ve made in this war, we’ve made by hitting too soon.”
“Aye, lord Marshal,” Gurmun had said. Rathar had wondered if he could trust the younger man to hold himself in. IfKingSwemmel ordered Gurmun to attack, he would, whether the situation called for it or not. Gurmun had also said, “I envy you.” He assumed Swemmel was recalling Rathar to confer some new high command on him.
Going through papers as the ley-line caravan glided west, Rathar hoped Gurmun was right. He hoped so, but
