tossers against targets on the ground, but ever so much more useful against dragons. Their thick, strong beams seared the air. Several dragons fell. One, though, smashed into two behemoths as it struck the ground, killing them in its own destruction.
Leudast stopped cheering. He was too awed to see how many of his countrymen had survived the ferocious Algarvian bombardment. But the Algarvians showed no awe. They went about their business with the air of men who'd done it many times before. A charge of behemoths tore an opening in the first defensive line. Footsoldiers swarmed through the gap. Then some of them wheeled and attacked the line from the rear. Others pushed on toward Leudast.
'They did that too fast, curse them,' Lieutenant Recared said from a hole not far from Leudast's. 'They should have been hung up there longer.'
'They're good at what they do, sir,' Leudast answered. 'They wouldn't be here in our kingdom if they weren't.'
'Powers below eat them,' Recared said, and then, 'Ha! They've just found the second belt of eggs.' He shouted toward the redheads: 'Enjoy it, you whoresons!'
But the Algarvians kept coming. In two years of war against them, Leudast had rarely known them to be less than game. They were game here, sure enough. After a few minutes, he started to curse. 'Will you look at what those buggers have done? They're using that dry wash to get up toward our second line.'
'That's not good,' Recared said. 'They weren't supposed to go that way. They were supposed to be drawn toward the places where we have more men.'
'I wish it would rain,' Leudast said savagely. 'They'd drown then.'
'I wish our dragons would come and flame them to ruins and drop eggs on the ones left alive,' Recared said.
'Aye.' Leudast nodded. 'The redheads' dragons would do that to us, down in Sulingen.'
Recared sounded worried. 'I don't think our men up there in the second line can see what the Algarvians are doing.' He shouted, 'Crystallomancer!' When no one answered, he shouted again, louder.
This time, he did get a reply. 'He's dead, sir, and his crystal smashed,' a trooper said.
'Sergeant.' Recared turned to Leudast. 'Go down there and let them know. With everything else that's going on, I really don't think they have any idea what Mezentio's men are up to. If a regiment of redheads erupts into the middle of that line, it won't hold. Get moving.'
'Aye, sir.' Leudast scrambled out of his hole, got to his feet, and started trotting toward the line ahead. If he hadn't, Recared would have blazed him on the spot. As things were, all he had to do was run across perhaps half a mile of field and grassland full of buried eggs. If he went up like a torch in a blaze of sorcerous energy, the second line wouldn't know its danger till too late.
He looked back over his shoulder. Three or four more Unkerlanter soldiers came trotting after him. He nodded to himself. Recared was minimizing the risk. The pup made a pretty fair officer.
Leudast trotted on. One foot in front of the other. Don't think about what happens if a foot comes down in the wrong place. Odds are, it won't happen. Don't think about it. Odds are, it won't. And the insistent, rising scream in his mind- Oh, but what if it does?
It didn't. He still had trouble finding the Unkerlanter field fortifications. Then a nervous soldier in a rock-gray tunic popped up and almost blazed him. Panting, he stammered out his message. The soldier lowered his stick. 'Come on, pal,' he said. 'You'd better tell my captain.'
Tell him Leudast did. The captain's crystallomancer was still alive. He got the word to soldiers nearer the dry wash. An attack went in. It didn't stop the Algarvians, but it slowed them, rocked them back on their heels.
'Your lieutenant did well to send you,' the captain told Leudast. He handed him a flask. 'Here. Have a taste of this. You've earned it.'
'Thanks, sir.' Leudast swigged. Spirits ran hot down his throat. He wiped his mouth on his sleeve. 'Are we winning?'
The captain answered with a broad-shouldered shrug. 'We're just getting started.'
Twelve
Major Spinello had thought the fighting in Sulingen the worst warfare possible. Now, as his regiment fought its way east toward other, far-off, Algarvian forces fighting their way west, he saw Sulingen re-created across miles of rolling plains. The Unkerlanters had been waiting for this assault. There didn't seem to be an inch of their salient where they hadn't either built a redoubt or buried an egg. By now, most of the dowsers who'd picked out paths through those buried eggs were dead or wounded, either from their own mistakes or from Unkerlanter beams or eggs.
Five days into the fighting, the Algarvians on the western edge of the bulge around Durrwangen had advanced perhaps half a dozen miles. They were far behind where they should have been. Spinello knew as much. Every Algarvian officer- and probably every Algarvian common soldier, too- knew as much. Spinello counted it a minor miracle that his countrymen were still moving forward at all.
He lay behind a dead Unkerlanter behemoth that was starting to stink under the hot summer sun. Captain Turpino lay at the other end of the dead beast. Turpino turned a filthy, haggard, smoke-blackened face to Spinello and asked, 'What now… sir?'
'We're supposed to take that hill up ahead.' Spinello's hand shook as he pointed. He was every bit as filthy and haggard as his senior company commander. He couldn't remember the last time he'd slept.
Cautious, Turpino peered up over the carcass. 'What, the regiment by itself?' he demanded. 'That hill's got Unkerlanter behemoths- live ones- the way a dog has fleas.'
'No, not the regiment by itself. Our army. However much of it we can aim at the high ground.' Spinello yawned. Powers above, he was tired. It was like being drunk; he didn't care what came out of his mouth. 'I don't think our regiment's in any shape to take a gumdrop away from a three-year-old.'
Turpino stared at him, then laughed as cautiously as he'd looked at the hill ahead. Spinello's answering grimace might have been a smile. Along with the rest of the great force the Algarvians had mustered, the regiment had hammered its way through five successive Unkerlanter lines- and, in the hammering, had burned away like wood in the fire.
He wondered if he still had half the men who'd gone forward when he first blew the whistle. He doubted it. The three companies plucked from occupation duty in Jelgava had suffered particularly hard. It wasn't that they weren't brave. They were, to a fault. They went forward when they should have hesitated, and had got themselves and their comrades into a couple of desperate pickles simply because they'd lacked the experience to see traps they should have. Well, they had that experience now- the survivors, anyhow.
Turpino turned his head. 'More of our behemoths coming up, and-' He stiffened. 'Who're those buggers in the wrong-colored tunics? Are the Unkerlanters trying to pull another fast one?'
After looking back toward the footsoldiers, Spinello shook his head. 'That's Plegmund's Brigade. They're on our side- Forthwegians in Algarvian service.'
'Forthwegians.' Turpino's lip curled. 'We are throwing everything we've got left into this fight, aren't we?'
'Actually, they're supposed to be brave,' Spinello said. Turpino looked anything but convinced.
On came the behemoths. They started tossing eggs at the Unkerlanter beasts on the hill the Algarvians needed to take. The Unkerlanters answered, but they still didn't handle their beasts or their gear as well as Mezentio's men. Spinello cheered when an Algarvian behemoth crew used the heavy stick mounted on their beast to burst the eggs an Unkerlanter behemoth carried, and then, a moment later, repeated the feat and took out another behemoth and crew.
But the Unkerlanters' eggs and beams knocked down Algarvian behemoths, too. And more beasts with Unkerlanters aboard trotted over the crest of the hill. Captain Turpino cursed. 'How many fornicating behemoths do Swemmel's fornicators have?' he demanded, or words to that effect.
'Too many,' Spinello answered, looking from the beasts on the hill to the Algarvian behemoths moving against them. He sighed. 'Well, we'll just have to get them off of there, won't we?' He blew his whistle as he got to his feet. 'Forward!' he shouted, waving his arm to urge on his troops- what was left of them.
Turpino stayed beside him as they advanced. Turpino still wanted the regiment if Spinello fell, and he also wanted to show he was at least as brave as the man who held it now. Spinello grinned as he ran past craters and corpses and dead beasts. He'd expected nothing less. Algarvians were like that.
