He wasn't too inclined to take one anyhow; he had more sympathy for Swemmel's men than he'd had when the war was new. But, a moment later, the Unkerlanter crumpled with a yowl of pain- Szonyi, evidently, had a better spot and less sympathy. 'Back now!' Istvan called, and headed off toward the redoubt. If Swemmel's men had hoped to catch the Gyongyosians hereabouts napping, they'd just been disappointed.
Captured by the Algarvians the summer before, retaken by Unkerlant only a couple of months earlier, the starting point from which Marshal Rathar had sent out his attacking columns to ravage the redheads further, Durrwangen was under Algarvian attack again.
Now that it was too late to do him any good, Rathar understood the lesson Mezentio's men had taught him. 'We just pushed them back here and there,' he said to General Vatran. 'We didn't pinch in behind them and destroy them, the way they did to us so many times.'
'You wanted to make them fight in front of rivers and such,' Vatran said. 'We thought they were panicked, or else turning coward, when they wouldn't stand and fight, but fell back instead.'
'Never trust an Algarvian retreat,' Rathar said solemnly- mournfully, when you got down to it. 'They saved their men, they concentrated them- and then they went and hit us with them.'
'Disgraceful, deceitful thing to go and do,' Vatran said, as if the Algarvians had pulled off some underhanded trick instead of one of the more brilliant counterattacks Rathar had ever seen. He would have appreciated it even more had it not been aimed at him.
'We were almost up to Hagenow,' he said, pointing to the map. His voice grew more mournful still. 'We'd driven east all the way up to the border of Grelz. And then, curse them, the redheads bit back.' He kicked at the floor of the battered bank that housed his headquarters. 'I knew they'd try. I didn't think they could bite so hard, or with such sharp teeth.'
As if to underscore that, more eggs burst in Durrwangen, some of them close to the headquarters. He didn't have to worry about splinters of glass flying through the air like shining knives to pierce him; by now, he doubted whether any building in Durrwangen kept glazed windows. He knew perfectly well that the headquarters didn't.
'Shall we go down to the vault?' Vatran asked.
'Oh, very well.' Rathar's voice was testy. He seldom suggested such a thing himself; he was too proud for that. But he wasn't too proud to acknowledge common sense when he heard it.
Down in the vault, everyone- commanders, subordinate officers, runners, crystallomancers, secretaries, cooks, what have you- was crowded together as tightly as sardines in a tin. People didn't even have oil to lubricate the spaces between them. They elbowed one another, trod on one another's toes, breathed in one another's faces, and, without intending to at all, generally made themselves as unpleasant for one another as they could.
Above them, around them, the ground shuddered as if in torment. And that was only from the sorcerous energy the Algarvian eggs released when they burst. If Mezentio's mages decided to start killing Kaunians… Turning to Vatran, Rathar asked, 'Are our special sorcerous countermeasures in place?'
Special sorcerous countermeasures was a euphemism for the peasants and condemned criminals Unkerlanters had available and ready to slay to blunt Algarvian magics and to power spells against the redheads. Rathar was no more comfortable than anyone else- always excluding King Swemmel, whose many vices did not include hypocrisy- about calling murder by its right name.
Vatran nodded. 'Aye, lord Marshal. If they try and bring the roof down around our ears with magecraft, we can try to hold it up the same way.'
'Good,' Rathar said, though he was anything but sure it was. He wished the Algarvians hadn't turned loose the demon of slaughter. It might have won them the war if Swemmel hadn't been so quick to adopt it for his own, but Swemmel, as he'd proved in the Twinkings War, would do anything survival called for. Now both sides slaughtered, and neither gained much by it.
More eggs fell, these closer still. Ysolt the cook, who'd been steady as a rock in the cave by the Wolter River even when the fighting for Sulingen was at its worst, let out a shriek that tore at Rathar's eardrums. 'We'll all be killed,' she blubbered. 'Every last one of us killed.' Rathar wished he were convinced she was wrong.
And then Vatran asked him a truly unwelcome question: 'If they try to throw us out of Durrwangen, can we stop 'em?'
'If they come straight at us out of the north, aye, we can,' Rathar replied. But that wasn't exactly what the general had asked. 'If they try to flank us out… I just don't know.'
Vatran replied with what the whole Derlavaian War had proved: 'They're cursed good at flanking maneuvers.'
Before Rathar could say anything to that, Ysolt started screaming again. 'Be silent!' he roared in a parade- ground voice, and the cook, for a wonder, was silent. He wished once more, this time that he could control the Algarvians so easily. Since he couldn't, he answered Vatran, 'Up until a few days ago, I was hoping for a late thaw this spring, so we could grab all we could before everything slowed to a crawl. Now I'm hoping for an early one, to do half- powers above, more than half- our fighting for us.'
Vatran's chuckle was wheezy. 'Oh, aye, Marshal Mud's an even stronger master than Marshal Winter.'
'Curse the Algarvians,' Rathar ground out. 'We had them on the run. I never dreamt I was fighting circus acrobats who could turn a somersault and then come forward as fast as they'd gone back.'
'Life is full of surprises,' Vatran said dryly. An egg burst close enough to the headquarters to add a deafening emphasis to that. Chunks of plaster slid between the boards that shored up the ceiling and came down on people's heads. Ysolt started screaming again, and she wasn't the only one. Some of the cries were contralto, others bass.
And, at that most inauspicious moment, a crystallomancer shouted, 'Lord Marshal, sir! His Majesty would speak to you from Cottbus!'
Rathar had a long list of people to whom he would sooner have spoken than Swemmel just then. Having such a list did him no good whatever, of course. 'I'm coming,' he said, and then had to elbow his way through the insanely crowded vault to get to the crystal.
When he did, the crystallomancer murmured into it, presumably to his colleague back in Cottbus. A moment later, Swemmel's long, pale face appeared in the crystal. He glared out at Rathar. Without preamble, he said, 'Lord Marshal, we are not pleased. We are, in fact, far from pleased.'
'Your Majesty, I am far from pleased, too,' Rathar said. Another handful of eggs burst on Durrwangen, surely close enough to the headquarters for Swemmel to hear them through the crystal. In case he didn't recognize them for what they were, Rathar added, 'I'm under attack here.'
'Aye. That is why we are not pleased,' Swemmel answered. Rather's safety meant nothing to him. The disruption of his plans counted for far more. 'We ordered you to attack, not to be attacked.'
'You ordered me to attack in every direction at once, your Majesty,' Rathar said. 'I obeyed you. Now do you see that an attack in every direction is in fact an attack in no direction at all?'
Swemmel's eyebrows rose in surprise, then came down in anger. 'Do you presume to tell us how to conduct our war?'
'Isn't that why you pay me, your Majesty?' Rathar returned. 'If you want a cake, you hire the best cook you can.'
'And what sort of sour, burnt thing do you set on the table before us?' Swemmel demanded.
'The kind you ordered,' Rathar said, and waited. Swemmel was more likely to make the roof cave in on him than were Algarvian eggs.
'You blame us for the debacle of Unkerlant's arms?' the king said. 'How dare you? We did not send the armies out to defeat. You did.'
'Aye, so I did,' Rathar agreed. 'I sent them out according to your plan, at your order, and against my better judgment- the Algarvians were not so weak as you supposed, and they have proved it. If you put sour milk, rancid butter, and moldy flour into a cake, it will not be fit to eat. If you joggle an officer's elbow when he tries to fight an army, the fighting it gives you will not be what you had in mind, either.'
Swemmel's eyes opened very wide. He wasn't used to frank speech from those who served him, not least because of the horrible things that often happened after someone was rash enough to speak his mind. In most of
