among the stubbornest warriors in the world; along with so many other Algarvian soldiers, Trasone had found that out the hard way. When taken by surprise . . .
Taken by surprise, the Unkerlanters broke and fled in wild disorder. Some of them threw away their sticks so they could run faster. To complete their demoralization, a squadron of Algarvian dragons swooped out of the sky to drop eggs on some of them, flame down others, and start fires even in the green, damp fields.
After that, some of the Unkerlanters stopped running and threw up their hands in surrender. The Algarvians blazed down a few of them in the heat of the moment, but only a few. Most got relieved of whatever they had worth stealing and sent up in the direction of Aspang.
“Keep moving!” Major Spinello shouted, not just to his own troopers but also to the behemoths’ crews and to anyone else who would listen. “If we just keep moving, by the powers above, maybe we can get ‘em all in a sack, cut ‘em off from their pals, and pound ‘em to pieces. How does that sound?”
“Sounds good to me,” Trasone said, more to himself than to anyone else. He wondered how many other Algarvian officers were shouting the same thing on every stretch of this counterattack. Ruthless speed and drive had taken Algarve deep into Unkerlant. Now the Algarvians could use them again--and the Unkerlanters, Trasone vowed, were going to be sorry.
He also wondered what the Unkerlanter officers were shouting right now. The ones whose orders mattered, the ones with the higher ranks, wouldn’t even know things had gone wrong yet. The Unkerlanters were too cheap or too lazy or too ignorant to give their soldiers as many crystals as they needed. That had cost them before. He hoped it would cost them again.
Because Swemmel’s men didn’t have a lot of crystals, they made elaborate plans ahead of time. Junior officers who changed plans without orders got into trouble. Here, that meant the Unkerlanters kept trying to go east even after the Algarvian counterattack against their northern flank. It also meant the counterattack got a lot farther than it would have otherwise. Not until midaftemoon did Swemmel’s soldiers realize the Algarvians had thrown a lot of men into the fight and really needed to be stopped.
By then, it was too late. Behemoths crushed the first few Unkerlanter regiments that turned from east to north. The Unkerlanters’ strokes came in one after another instead of all at once, which made them easier to break up. The enemy even flung unicorn cavalry into the fight.
Trasone enjoyed blazing down cavalrymen. He enjoyed it even more when they rode unicorns than when they were on horseback. For centuries, unicorns with iron-shod horns had been the dreadful queens of the battlefield, terrorizing footsoldiers with their unstoppable charges. Memories of them lingered in soldiers’ minds to this day, even if sticks had made cavalry charges more dangerous to riders than to the men they attacked.
These days, behemoths ruled the field. They were ugly but strong enough to carry not just soldiers but also egg-tossers and armor. The eggs they flung at the charging unicorns knocked down the splendid, beautiful beasts, sometimes three and four at a time. Wounded unicorns screamed like women in torment. Wounded riders screamed, too. Trasone blazed them once they were off their unicorns with as much relish as while they still rode.
The Unkerlanters were brave. Trasone had seen that ever since the fighting started. Here and now, it did them little good. A scratch force of cavalry couldn’t hope to stop superior numbers of footsoldiers supported by behemoths. King Swemmel’s men fell back in confusion. Trasone slogged after them. He and his fellow Algarvians were going forward again. All was right with the world.
Pekka went down on one knee, first to Siuntio, then to Ilmarinen, as if they were two of the Seven Princes of Kuusamo. Ilmarinen’s chuckle and the leer that went with it said he knew the ancient significance of that particular gesture of obeisance from a woman to a man. Siuntio surely knew it, too, but was too much a gentleman to show he knew.
And Pekka, by this time, was used to ignoring Ilmarinen at need. “Thank you both, from the bottom of my heart,” she said. “Without you, I don’t think I could have persuaded the illustrious Professor Heikki”--she laced the words with as much sardonic venom as she could; Heikki was a nobody even in veterinary sorcery--”to release the funds to go on with the experiment.”
“Always a pleasure to make a fool look foolish,” Ilmarinen said, rolling his eyes. “Oh, and she is, too.”
Siuntio said, “My dear, I only wish our intervention had been unnecessary.
Were Prince Joroinen among the living, you would have had everything you needed in this laboratory here at the crook of a finger.”
“Aye,” Ilmarinen said. “You ask me, it’s amazing you could get any work done at all in this miserable little hole of a laboratory.”
Before she’d seen the elegant facilities at the university up in Yliharma, Pekka would have bristled at that. Till then, she hadn’t thought Kajaani City College was a bad place to do research. She
