Darkness Descending

brutes like Unkerlanters.”

Kun was proud of his little bit of magecraft. Istvan hoped he wasn’t prouder of it than it deserved. But it had worked, and more than once; no denying that. It wouldn’t work, though, if he didn’t use it. Istvan said, “Maybe you’d better check now, just on the off chance. Those goat-eating buggers could be half a blaze away, and we’d never know it, not through this.”

“Aye, Sergeant. That’s not the worst notion I ever heard.” By the way Kun said it, he managed to imply that Istvan had come out with most of the worst notions he’d heard.

“Don’t get clever with me,” Istvan snapped. He paused, appalled at how much like Sergeant Jokai he sounded. After a moment, he shrugged: where else to learn how to be a sergeant than from a sergeant? He hoped tlie stars treasured Jokai’s spirit. Whether they did or not, he had things to attend to here. “Squad halt!” he shouted over the howl of the wind. “All right, Kun--do what you need to do.”

“Aye,” Kun repeated, and set about it. “Whatever passes he made, his mittens hid. The wind blew away the words of his spell. After a couple of minutes, he turned to Istvan and said, “Sergeant, no Unkerlanters are moving toward us.”

“Well, that’s something,” Istvan said. “But you can’t be sure we’re not about to stumble over them?”

Kun shook his head. “The spell detects an enemy’s motion toward us, and nothing else. I wish I knew more.”

I wish you knew more, too, and not just about magic, Istvan thought. But Kun, this time, had done nothing to deserve an insult. “You tried your best,” Istvan said, “and we know more than we did, even if we don’t know as much as we’d like. Come on, lads--forward again. If we find the foe by falling over him, then we do, that’s all.”

“How do we even know we’re going in the right direction?” Szonyi asked. “With all this snow flying every which way, who can say where east is?”

“If we keep the wind almost at our backs, we won’t go too far wrong,” Istvan answered, but he didn’t sound happy about the reply even to himself. Nothing easier than for the wind to shift. He turned to Kun. “Do you know any spells for finding out which way we’re headed?”

“There is one, quite a good one, but it depends on a bit of lodestone, and I have none,” the mage’s apprentice answered regretfully.

“Anyone have any lodestone?” Istvan asked. No one admitted to it. He wasn’t surprised. He hadn’t seen lodestone more than a couple of times in his life, both when traveling mountebanks did astonishing things with it. He turned back to Kun. “Any other ways?”

“I’m sure there are, Sergeant, but I don’t know how to use them,” Kun replied.

Istvan sighed through the muffler over his mouth. “All right, then. We’ll just have to keep on and see what happens. Stars be praised, we’re through the worst of the really rugged country. Not so much risk of blowing off a cliff here.”

“If we can hold where we are till spring, we’ll be in a place where we can stab deep into Unkerlant’s vitals,” Kun said.

“I thought you were a mage’s apprentice, not a news-sheet scribbler’s,” Istvan said. Kun was too swaddled in fur and fabric for Istvan to see if he changed expression, but he turned away and kept quiet for a while.

And then, up ahead, someone called a challenge--in Unkerlanter. Istvan knew no more than a handful of words of the language. Neither did anyone else in the squad. The challenge came again, sharper and more peremptory. “What do we do, Sergeant?” somebody asked.

“Get down, you fools!” Istvan shouted, suiting action to word. As he thumped down into the snow himself, he added, “Balogh, back to the rest of the company. Tell ‘em we’ve found the enemy!”

Actually, the Unkerlanters had found them. Beams hissed overhead, blasting snowflakes to steam. Istvan worried about them less than he would have in clearer weather; snow attenuated their force even faster than rain did. But how large an Unkerlanter position lay ahead there, shielded by the blizzard? If he’d uncovered a regiment of King Swemmel’s soldiers, they’d wipe out his squad as casually as he swatted a fly ... provided they knew he had only a squad.

He blazed at the Unkerlanters a couple of times, not so much in the hope of hurting them as to make them believe he led a good-sized force. “Kun!” he hissed. “Hey, Kun! You all right?”

“Aye, for the time being,” the mage’s apprentice answered from over to his left.

“Can you make the Unkerlanters think we’ve got more men here than we really do?” Istvan asked.