Darkness Descending

and do it from the back. Fits the buggers, doesn’t it?”

Panfilo laughed. “So it does. Now we have to find out if they get anywhere. If they don’t, we can sit tight here. But if they do, we’re liable to have to go out and work for a living again.”

“Oh, aye, this is a rest cure, this is.” Trasone snorted. “Come to beautiful Aspang for your health. The garden spot of southern Unkerlant, only eight months of winter a year. Don’t fancy the weather? Wait a bit. It’ll get worse.”

“If you got any worse, they’d fling you in the bloody guardhouse,” Panfilo said. “Too cursed early to be carrying on like that.”

All the rest of the day, Trasone kept an ear on the racket from the south. It didn’t fade; if anything, it got louder. He drew his own conclusions. Quietly and without any fuss, he made sure his kit was ready to sling onto his back at a moment’s notice. He wasn’t the only veteran doing the same thing, either.

Major Spinello burst into the barracks the next morning. “Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go!” he shouted, full of energy as usual. “Swemmel’s boys are getting rowdy, and it’s up to us to show ‘em that’s our job.”

He screamed at the men who weren’t ready to move on the instant, and cursed the ones who were because they hadn’t made sure their comrades were, too. That meant all the other officers and sergeants started screaming, too. If they’d wanted the battalion ready to move at a moment’s notice, they could have started screaming earlier. For one thing, they weren’t screaming at him, because he was ready. For another, he’d heard a lot of screaming in his time. It didn’t faze him.

Under the lash of Spinello’s tongue, the soldiers in the battalion tramped to the ley-line caravan depot and filed aboard cars that looked to have had better lifetimes. “We’re going down to hit the Unkerlanters in the flank,” Spinello said as they boarded. “Swemmel’s boys are as nervous about their flanks as so many virgins, and we’re going to screw ‘em.”

As they glided south out of Aspang, they passed the wreckage of several caravans lying by the side of the ley line. “Cursed Unkerlanters are a pack of nervous virgins,” Trasone remarked, and got a laugh. If the Unkerlanters had managed to plant one more egg along the ley line, he and his comrades wouldn’t have the chance to do much in the way of seduction.

But the ley-line caravan stopped where its operator wanted it to, not at the whim of some Unkerlanter irregulars. Trasone and his fellow troopers tumbled out. Again, Major Spinello was shouting, “Let’s go! What are you waiting for? We have to move, curse it.”

Maybe the major had been talking by crystal while on the caravan because he seemed to know just where he was going. After Spinello led the battalion out of a stretch of woods, Trasone exclaimed in delight: “Behemoths!”

“Our behemoths,” Clovisio said. “Where did they come from?”

“I don’t know, and I don’t care,” Trasone said. “They’re here, and the ground is nice and solid, so they can move. And when we’ve got behemoths than can do what they’re supposed to do, the Unkerlanters had better watch out.”

As if to underscore that, the behemoths trotted forward. Spinello shouted, “Come on, you lazy buggers, give ‘em a hand. You know what to do.” Not that many months off garrison duty, he didn’t have any experience of what to do himself. But he was right, not only in his tactics, but in being sure the veterans he commanded knew what to do. They hurried along with and behind the behemoths, ready both to protect them and to swarm through any holes they punched in the enemy’s lines.

Unkerlanter egg-tossers kept pounding away at the Algarvian positions to the south and now to the southeast; by the sound of the fighting, King Swemmel’s men had pushed the Algarvians back. That worried Trasone. But Sergeant Panfilo heard the same thing and grinned from ear to ear. “Those whoresons’ll be so busy looking straight ahead of’em, they won’t even think about peering sideways till it’s too late.”

Trasone thought about that. “Here’s hoping you’re right, Sergeant.”

By the affronted pose he struck, Panfilo might have been standing on the street of some Algarvian town rather than trotting across a wheatfield that was coming up rank with weeds. “Of course I’m right. Have you ever heard me wrong?”

“Only when you talk,” Trasone assured him. Panfilo’s glare deserved to go up on the stage. After a moment, though, the sergeant chuckled and got going again.

And Panfilo did turn out to be right. Half an hour later, the crews on the backs of the behemoths started lobbing eggs at swarthy soldiers in rock-gray. “Mezentio!” Major Spinello shouted, and all the troops echoed him: “Mezentio!”

The Unkerlanters had been moving forward against the Algarvians to the east of them. When doing what they were ordered to do, whether that was making an attack or defending a position, they were