Darkness Descending

Thirteen

Priekule was a gray, unhappy town after more than a year and a half of Algarvian occupation. Krasta still frequently left her mansion to visit the shops and cafes in the heart of the city, but what she found there satisfied her less and less often.

The food in the cafes seemed to get nastier every week. Sometimes a mere sniff after she went inside one was enough to send her stalking out again, elegantly straight nose high in the air. Jewelers hardly ever showed anything new. And the clothes. . . She’d occasionally worn kilts back in the days when Valmiera and Algarve were at peace, but only trousers--proper, traditional Kaunian garments--ever since. These days, though, more and more clothiers were showing kilts for both men and women. She knew people who wore them. She couldn’t make herself do it.

After walking out of one such display, she angrily strode along the Boulevard of Horsemen: tall, lean, arrogant. A news-sheet vendor called, “Fierce Algarvian counterattack in Unkerlant! Read all about it!”

Krasta stomped past him. She didn’t care two figs about Unkerlant. Out there in the distant west, it might have been on the far side of the moon as far as she was concerned (the same held true for virtually the entire world outside of Priekule). She did know mild surprise that the Algarvians hadn’t conquered it yet, as they had every other kingdom they’d assailed. But the details of the fighting mattered not at all to her.

A few days farther on, she paused, staring at three words whitewashed onto the window of a confectioner’s shop: NIGHT AND FOG. The shop was closed. It looked to have been closed for some little while. She wondered when, or if, it would open again.

Another vendor, peddling a different news sheet, waved it in her face. Krasta impatiently pushed past him and strode on down the sidewalk. She decided she wished after all that the Algarvians had taken Cottbus. Then the war would have been over, or as near as made no difference. After that, maybe the world could have started coming back to normal.

A couple of Algarvian soldiers, cloaked against the chill of Priekule’s winter, strode up the street toward her. They both leered shamelessly; as far as the occupiers were concerned, any woman was fair game. Krasta stared straight through them, as if they didn’t exist. They doubtless didn’t know she was a noblewoman and wouldn’t have cared had they known--what were the ranks of the conquered to the conquerors?

One of them proved as much: still undressing Krasta with his eyes, he spoke in bad Valmieran: “Sleeping with me, sweetheart?” He reached under his cloak and shook his belt pouch. Coins jingled and clinked.

Krasta’s temper kindled, as it had a way of doing. “Powers below eat you, you son of a whore,” she said, slowly and distinctly--she wanted to make sure he understood. “May it rot. May it fall off. May it never stand again.”

She started by the soldiers. The one who hadn’t spoken grabbed her by the arm--maybe he understood some Valmieran, too. He did; he said, “Not talking like that, bitch.” His trilling accent grated on her ears.

“Take your hands off me,” she told him, ice in her voice.

“I don’t thinking so,” he said with a nasty smile. “You insulting us. You paying for that.”

He was one of the conquerors, all right, used to doing whatever he wanted with and to Valmieran women. Later, Krasta realized she should have been afraid. At the time, only fury filled her. “Take your hands off me,” she repeated. She had a trump to play, and played it without hesitation: “I am the woman of Colonel Lurcanio, the count of Albenga, and not for the likes of you.”

That did the trick. She’d been sure it would. The Algarvian soldier let go of her arm as if magecraft had suddenly turned it red-hot. He and his comrade both hurried away, babbling ungrammatical apologies.

Nose in the air again, Krasta went on down the Avenue of Horsemen. Triumph filled her narrow soul--hadn’t she just given those boors a lesson in whom they might annoy? Had she been more introspective, she might have realized that defending herself by proclaiming she was a prominent occupier’s mistress only showed how low Valmiera had fallen. Such insight, though, was beyond her, and probably would be for all her days to come.

She kept on walking to the end of the boulevard full of expensive shops: farther than she’d intended, but she needed to burn off the rage with which the arrogant Algarvians had filled her. Arrogant herself, she recognized no one else’s right to be that way--except Lurcanio’s, and he intimidated her far more than she was willing to admit.

At the end of the Boulevard of Horsemen was one of Priekule’s many parks, the grass dead and yellow now, with muddy ground showing through here and there. Trees sent bare branches reaching toward the cloudy sky, as if they were so many skeletons supplicating the powers above. Pigeons and sparrows begged for crumbs from the few people who sat on benches by the brick walkways, probably because they had nowhere better to go.

In the center of the park towered the Kaunian Column of Victory. The marble column had stood there for more than a thousand years, since the days of the Kaunian Empire. How many years more than a thousand it had stood there, Krasta couldn’t have said. She hadn’t done well in history--or in many other subjects--at the series of finishing schools and academies she’d attended till everyone gave up on her education. She did know the victory it celebrated was of civilized imperials over the Algarvian barbarians who even in those ancient days had swarmed out of their forests to attack the Empire. Algarvian eggs had damaged the column during the Six Years’ War, but it had been restored since.

Now, a good many kilted Algarvians stood at the base of the Column of Victory. They gestured with the theatrical enthusiasm of their kind. Life, to Algarvians, was melodrama. A couple of Valmierans looked to be arguing with them. A tan-clad soldier knocked down one of Krasta’s countrymen.

Because she gave herself to Colonel Lurcanio, no redhead of lower rank could cause her much trouble. Conscious of that near-immunity, she strode down the sidewalk toward the column. “What on earth is going on here?” she demanded in a loud, harsh voice.

The Valmieran who’d been knocked down got to his feet. One trouser knee was torn, though he seemed not to notice. He had a pinched, intelligent face--not the sort of man Krasta would normally have looked at twice, or even once. He was intelligent enough to recognize her rank, saying, “Milady, these men mean to topple the column.”

“What?” Krasta stared not at the Algarvians but at her fellow Valmieran. “You must be out of your mind.”

“Ask them.” The man pointed to the redheads. Some were ordinary soldiers, like the one who’d pushed him to the bricks. Some were officers, including, Krasta saw, a brigadier. She wondered if she was as immune from trouble as she’d thought. And a couple had the indefinable air of mages about them, the air of seeing and knowing things ordinary people didn’t see and couldn’t know. They set Krasta’s teeth on edge.

She turned to the Algarvians. “You can’t be thinking of doing what he says.”

“Who are you to say we can’t?” That was the brigadier, a big-bellied fellow in his mid-fifties--twice her age, more or less--with graying red mustachios and chin beard all waxed to spikelike points. He spoke Valmieran well--almost as well as Lurcanio did.

She drew herself up to her full height, which came close to matching his. “I am the Marchioness Krasta, and this is my city.” She sounded as if she were King Gainibu’s queen--although, as she’d seen herself, Priekule wasn’t really even Gainibu’s city anymore.

No sooner had that thought crossed her mind than the Algarvian proceeded to rub it in. Turning back to the Column of Victory, he said, “These cursed carvings tell lies. They make my ancestors, my heroic ancestors”--he drew himself up, too, though with his bulging belly it wasn’t so impressive--”out to be cowards and robbers, which every honest man knows to be a base and vile lie. Now we have the chance to correct this, and correct it we shall.”

“But it’s a monument!” Krasta exclaimed.

“A monument of lies, a monument of curses, a monument of humiliation,” the fat brigadier said. “It does not deserve to stand. Now we are the victors, and it shall not stand. Two days from now, my lads here”--he pointed to the mages--“will set eggs by the base, burst them, and topple it like an old pine.”

“You can’t do that,” Krasta said. The Algarvian brigadier laughed in her face. She started to slap him, but then remembered the unfortunate things that had happened after she was rash enough to slap Lurcanio. This redhead outranked her lover. She spun on her heel and hurried away.

“Do what you can, milady,” the clever-looking Valmieran man called after her. Then he cried out in pain--the Algarvian soldiers had set on him again.

Krasta found her carriage waiting on a side street. Seeing her approach, the driver corked a small flask and stuck it in his pocket. Krasta ignored that. “Take me back to the mansion,” she snapped. “This instant, do you hear me?”

“Aye, milady,” the driver answered, and prudently said no more.

The mansion lay on the outskirts of Priekule; it had been a country estate when it was built almost four centuries before. These days, Algarvian administrators of Valmiera’s conquered capital used and dwelt in the west wing, leaving the rest for Krasta. Her brother would have shared it with her, but Skarnu had never come home from the war. She occasionally missed him.

Now, though, he didn’t enter her mind. She stormed through offices that had been drawing rooms and salons, taking no notice of the Algarvian clerks who filled them. Only when she neared the smaller chamber where Lurcanio worked did she slow. She had to snarl her way past Captain Mosco before she could see him. Snarl she did, and see Lurcanio she did, too.

He looked up from his paperwork--sometimes he reminded Krasta more of a clerk than of a colonel--and smiled. That made his wrinkles shift without removing them; he wasn’t too much younger than the Algarvian brigadier in the park. “Hello, my dear,” he said in his excellent Valmieran. “What is it? It must be something, by your face.”

Bluntly, Krasta answered, “I want you to keep them from wrecking the Column of Victory.”

“I wondered when you would learn of that.” Lurcanio shrugged an extravagant Algarvian shrug. “I can do nothing about it. And”--his voice hardened--”I would not if I could. That column affronts Algarve’s honor.”

“What about Valmiera’s honor?” Krasta demanded.

“Well, what about it?” Lurcanio said. “If Valmiera had honor, you would have held the Algarvian army in check. That we have this conversation here in the heart of a conquered kingdom, that you welcome me to your bed rather than my wife welcoming a Valmieran conqueror to hers, proves whose honor has more weight. Now do please let me work. I have too much to do, and not enough time in which to do it. Close the door when you go out.”

Furious, Krasta slammed the door so hard, the whole mansion shook. Unable to do anything more than that to take out her wrath on Lurcanio, she screamed at her servants instead. That did no good. Two days later, the Kaunian Column of Victory came crashing down. She heard the roar of the bursting eggs and the falling stone and cursed with a fluency a teamster might have envied.

When Lurcanio sought her bed that night, she welcomed him with a barred bedchamber door. She kept the door barred for another week. But then she relented, partly because she craved pleasure and partly because she feared that, if she kept on rejecting Lurcanio, he would simply find someone else. She didn’t care to be without an Algarvian protector, not with Priekule as it was these days. What that had to say about honor never once crossed her mind.

Garivald was well on the way to being drunk when someone pounded on the door to his house. “Who’s that?” he growled irritably. Like most of the peasants in Zossen, he’d managed to hide plenty of spirits from the Algarvians who occupied the village. When winter came, what else was there to do but drink?

The pounding came again, louder than before. “Opening up or we breaking down!” an Algarvian shouted.

“Open it, Annore,” Garivald said. He was sitting on a bench closer to the door than his wife, but he was also drunker than she. He didn’t feel like getting up and moving just then.

Annore sent him a dark look, but rose and unbarred the door. After a few heartbeats, Garivald did get up after all and stand behind her--you never could tell what an Algarvian might be after. The redheads glaring at him looked miserably cold; their capes weren’t up to the weather here. One of them said, “You coming to die village square.”

“Why?” Garivald asked.

Both Algarvians were carrying sticks. With a chill that had nothing to do with winter, Garivald realized they weren’t men who garrisoned Zossen, but real combat soldiers, mean as wild boars. He wished he hadn’t given them any back-talk. The one who’d spoken aimed his stick at Garivald’s face. “Why? Because I saying so.”

“Aye,” Garivald said hastily, ducking his head in submission as he would have to an Unkerlanter inspector. He took out his fear by shouting at Annore: “Come on, curse it! Don’t just stand there. Grab our cloaks.”

Annore did as he asked without arguing. They threw on the thick wool garments; Garivald hoped the Algarvians wouldn’t steal them. “Syrivald, watch the baby,” Annore said. Syrivald nodded, eyes wide. Leuba, playing happily on the floor, was the only one who didn’t know anything was wrong.

When Garivald and Annore got to the square, it had already started filling. Under the sticks of more Algarvian combat soldiers, several villagers were putting up an odd-looking wooden frame. After a moment, Garivald realized what it was: a gibbet. Another icy pang of fright ran through him.

A couple of Unkerlanter men he’d never seen before stood near the gibbet, their hands tied behind them. They were scrawny and ill-shaven and looked to have seen hard use--blood covered the face of one of them, while the other had an eye swollen shut. More redheads kept watch on them.

Waddo, the firstman, limped into the village square. Close behind him came the Algarvians stationed in Zossen. They looked almost as alarmed at what was going on as the villagers did.

One of the newly come Algarvians proved to speak pretty good Unkerlanter. Pointing to the captives, he growled, “Are these miserable whoresons from this stinking hole of a village? We caught them in the woods. Anybody know them? Anybody know their names?”

For a moment, nobody spoke. Then all the men and women in Zossen started talking at once. With a single voice, they denied ever setting eyes on the men before. They know what happened to a village that harbored men who kept fighting against the Algarvians.

So did the redhead who’d asked the questions. With a sneer, he demanded, “Why should I believe you? You’d lie and say your mothers weren’t whores. We ought to wreck this place just for the sport of it.” By his tone, he wasn’t more than a finger’s breadth away from ordering his troopers to do just that.

Everyone’s eyes swung toward Waddo. The firstman looked about ready to burst into tears. But he did what he had to do--in the most abject tones Garivald had heard even from his lips, he cried, “Have mercy, sir!”

“Mercy?” The Algarvian threw back his head and laughed. He spoke one word in his own language--probably translating for his men. They laughed, too, and their laughter was like the baying of wolves. “Mercy?” the redhead repeated. “What have any Unkerlanters ever done to deserve mercy?”

“These are not men of our village.” Waddo pointed at the captives as the Algarvian had. “By the powers above, they aren’t! If you don’t believe me, ask your own men who have been here for months. They will know.”

“He’s selling those two poor buggers to the Algarvians,” Garivald whispered to his wife.

“If he didn’t, he’d be selling all of us,” Annore whispered back. Reluctantly, Garivald nodded. He wouldn’t have wanted to stand in Waddo’s felt boots, not for all the money in the world.

And he wondered if Waddo’s betrayal of the Unkerlanter irregulars caught in the forest would go for naught. The Algarvian still seemed poised to order his men to start blazing. But the soldiers stationed in Zossen spoke up. They spoke up, naturally, in Algarvian, which Garivald didn’t understand. But his hopes rose when he saw how unhappy the leader of the combat troops looked. Algarvians always seemed to show just what was in their minds--one more reason they struck Garivald as strange, hardly human.

At last, the bad-tempered redhead who spoke Unkerlanter threw his hands in the air. He shouted something in his own language at the garrison troops. They all grinned. Garivald knew they’d helped save Zossen, not least because they wanted to go on living here, but why didn’t matter. What they’d done did.

“We’ll still hang these lousy bandits,” the combat leader said. He jerked a thumb toward Waddo. “You! Aye, you, fat and ugly--you with the big mouth. Fetch me a coil of rope and be quick about it.”

Waddo gulped. He had no choice, not if he wanted Zossen to stay standing. “Aye,” he whispered, and limped away as fast as he could go. If he’d said he had no rope, the Algarvian would have blazed him on the spot--him and who could say how many others? He came back in a hurry, clutching a coil.

The hangings were worse than Garivald had imagined they could be. The Algarvians simply fastened nooses around their captives’ necks and tossed the ropes up over the top beam of the gibbet. Then they hauled the captives up off the ground to kick their lives away.

“This is what comes to anyone who tries to fight against Algarve,” the combat leader shouted while the Unkerlanters were still thrashing. “These swine deserved it. You’d better not deserve it. Now get out of here!”

Several people--not all women, by any means--had fainted in the snow. Garivald and Annore didn’t wait to see them revived. They fled back to their own hut as fast as they could. “What was it?” Syrivald asked. “What did they do?” Fear and curiosity warred on his face.

“Nothing,” Garivald mumbled. “They didn’t do anything.” His son would find out it was a lie as soon as he went outside; the Algarvians had been wrapping the ropes around and around the top beam of the gibbet, to keep the corpses hanging on display. But Garivald couldn’t bring himself to talk about what had happened, not yet.

Syrivald turned to his mother. “What did they do? You can tell me!”

“They killed two men,” Annore answered bleakly. “Now don’t ask me any more questions, do you hear?” Her voice warned what would happen if Syrivald did. He nodded. He understood that tone.

Annore found the jar of spirits and took a long pull at it. “Leave some for me,” Garivald warned. He wanted to drink himself into oblivion, too. After another swig, Annore passed him the jar. They kept passing it back and forth till they fell asleep side by side.

When Garivald woke, he almost wished the Algarvians had hanged him. His head pounded like a hammer on the smith’s anvil. His mouth tasted the way it would have if the livestock had fouled it. When he took a sip from the jar, his stomach loudly told him what a bad idea that was.

And, as soon as he was conscious, visions of the dead irregulars came flooding back. He couldn’t find a better reason for drinking himself blind again. He wanted to stay blind drunk till spring came, and maybe after that, too.

Annore looked no happier than he felt when she opened her eyes. She reached for the jar. He handed it to her. She drank as desperately as he had. With a grimace, she wiped her mouth on the sleeve of her tunic. “It really happened,” she said.

“Aye, it did.” Garivald didn’t care for the sound of his own voice. He didn’t care for the answer he had to give her, either.

“I knew we didn’t want them here, but I didn’t think they’d do--that,” his wife said.

“Neither did I,” Garivald answered. “Now we don’t have to listen to the tales people older than we are to tell of the Twinkings War. Now we know, too.”

Another song began to form in his mind, a song of how the two Unkerlanter irregulars had met their deaths without a word. Even more than most of the songs he shaped, he would have to be careful where he sang that one. But those two men had had friends in the woods, friends the Algarvians hadn’t caught. They would want to hear such songs--the dead men were their comrades. And thinking of rhymes and rhythms distracted him from his hangover.

Later that day, when he had to go out, he found more details to add to the song. Having hanged their captives, the Algarvian troop of combat soldiers had pulled out of Zossen. They’d left the gibbet behind. The bodies on it still swayed in the breeze. No one had dared cut them down.

Each corpse had a new placard tied round its neck. The characters were those of the Unkerlanter language. Garivald knew that much, even if he couldn’t read them. They probably told about the dead men, and said what fools they were to fight the Algarvians. He couldn’t think what else Mezentio’s soldiers would have had to say.

He hurried back to his hut, words spinning in his head. Once inside, he barred the door and started drinking again. By her slack features, Annore had hardly stopped. Staying indoors through the winter shielded people from the worst the weather could do, just as staying in the village had shielded them from knowing the worst war could do. But the war had come home to them now. The Algarvians had brought it home.

“Curse them,” he muttered.

His wife didn’t need to ask whom he meant. “Aye, curse them,” she said. “Powers below eat them.”

“Curse!” Leuba said cheerfully. She didn’t know what the word meant, only that her parents stressed it when they spoke.

Tears--the easy tears of drunkenness--sprang out in Garivald’s eyes. He seized his daughter and fiercely hugged her to him. She squealed, then wiggled to get free. Such shows of affection didn’t come her way very often. But Garivald had looked death in the face, and knew how afraid he was.

More than half of Pekka wished she could have performed this experiment down in Kajaani, her hometown, rather than coming to Yliharma. Failure in the capital of Kuusamo, failure with all the Seven Princes hoping for success, would be far more humiliating than all the failures she’d known back home.

Both the senior mages who’d invited--for all practical purposes, ordered--her to Yliharma met her at the caravan depot. They laughed when she spoke of her fears. “Nonsense, my dear,” Siuntio said. His smile lit up his wide, high-cheek-boned face. With his hair graying toward white, he looked far more like a kindly grandfather than the leading theoretical sorcerer of his generation. “I’m sure everything will go splendidly.”

Pekka brushed back a few strands of straight black hair that the frigid breeze kept blowing into her eyes. Yliharma had a milder climate than Kajaani, but no one would ever mistake it for the nearly tropical beaches of northern Jelgava. She said, “This is the first time we’ll have tried a divergent series. Too many things can go wrong.”

That set Ilmarinen laughing. Where Siuntio looked like a kindly grandfather, he put Pekka in mind of a disreputable great uncle. But his record was second only to Siuntio’s, and a fair number of people--himself emphatically included--would have argued about that.

Leering at Pekka, he asked, “Which are you more afraid of, having nothing happen, or having too much?”

He had a knack for unpleasantly pointed questions. “Having nothing happen would mortify me,” Pekka said after a little thought. “If too much happens, it’s liable to kill me.”

“Don’t think small,” Ilmarinen said cheerfully. “If too much happens, you’re liable to take out half of Yliharma--maybe even all of it, if you get lucky.” Pekka didn’t think she would call that luck, but contradicting Ilmarinen only encouraged him.

Siuntio gave his longtime colleague a severe look. “That is most unlikely, as you know full well. We do have some notion of the parameters involved. It’s not as if we were back in the days of the Kaunian Empire, when mages were ignorant of the theoretical underpinnings of their craft.”

“We’re ignorant of these underpinnings,” Ilmarinen said with unfortunate accuracy. “If we weren’t, we’d be using them; we wouldn’t be experimenting.”

Pekka thought he was right and hoped he was wrong. Siuntio simply declined to be drawn into the argument, saying, “Let’s get Mistress Pekka settled at the Principality--you needn’t fret, my dear: the Seven Princes are footing the bill--and make her as comfortable as we can, so she’ll be well rested for tomorrow’s conjurations.”

They insisted on carrying her bags, though she was less than half the age of either one of them. A hired carriage waited just outside the depot. Had the driver looked any more bored, he would have been dead. The horse didn’t seem very excited about the business, either. With slow and reluctant steps, it started for the hostel, the finest one Yliharma boasted.

Sitting at a window, Pekka stared out at the town. Though dwarfing Kajaani, Yliharma didn’t compare to Setuba or to Trapani. Still, Yliharma had started as a hill fort before either of the other capitals was settled.

Most of the people on the streets looked like Pekka and her sorcerous companions. Some, though, were taller and fairer. A few sported beaky noses or auburn hair--marks of Lagoan blood. Some few of the folk in Setubal were short and black-haired rather than rangy and redheaded, too.

At the Principality, Pekka unpacked, then indulged in the steam room and cold plunge attached to her chamber. Invigorated, she sent down a supper order by the dumbwaiter and demolished the poached salmon in dill sauce when it arrived. If she was staying at the Seven Princes’ expense, she would eat well.

She wished she could activate the crystal in the room and talk with her husband. But a talented mage could pick emanations out of the air, and Kuusamo was at war with Algarve. Leino would understand why she didn’t try to reach him. He knew secrets needed keeping.

Instead of calling him, she studied. Most of the mathematics behind what she would attempt tomorrow was Ilmarinen’s; anything he did demanded careful study. Siuntio, after whom Pekka tried to model herself, was clear and straightforward. Ilmarinen’s thoughts writhed like an adder with a broken back--and, like an adder, could bite to deadly effect when least expected.

She checked and rechecked, examined and reexamined. A mage who attempted any conjuration unprepared was a fool. A mage who attempted a conjuration aimed at drawing energy from the place where the two laws of similarity and contagion met would be a dead fool if she tried it unprepared. Pekka knew she might die anyhow; that was what exploring the unknown entailed. But she intended to know as much as she could.

Because she studied so long and so hard, she got less sleep than she wanted. A breakfast of rolls and hot tea with plenty of honey helped make up for that. As ready as she’d ever be, she went downstairs and found another carriage waiting for her. “The university, isn’t it?” the driver asked.

“Aye,” Pekka said. She didn’t want to try this magic in the Seven Princes’ palace. If it got away from her at the university, it wouldn’t slay all of Kuusamo’s lords, or as many as were in town. She hoped it wouldn’t, anyhow.

Again, Siuntio and Ilmarinen greeted her when she arrived. “Welcome to my lair,” Ilmarinen said with a grin displaying irregular teeth. “Now we’ll see what we’ll see--if we see anything.”

“We will.” Siuntio sounded perfectly confident. “With your brilliant theorizing and Mistress Pekka’s inspired experiments, how can we do anything but wring the truth from nature?”

Pekka said, “As if you had nothing to do with this, Master Siuntio. You’ve done more work, and more important work, on the two laws and the relationship between them than anyone else. You deserve the bulk of the credit.”

Ilmarinen looked as if he might be inclined to argue that, but said only, “Or the bulk of the blame.”

“Aye, that is so,” Siuntio agreed imperturbably. “Power, any power, is not evil in itself, but surely may be used to evil ends.”

That soft answer also seemed to irk Ilmarinen. He said, “That’s why we do the experiment: to see how we can keep from wringing the truth from nature, I mean.”

Busy checking cages of rats, Pekka did her best to ignore the bickering. It wasn’t easy; Ilmarinen craved as much attention as her little son, Uto, and had as few scruples as Uto about going after it. She chose a pair of cages showing that the rat in one was the grandson of the animal in the other. If all went well, these rats would become as famous as the ones with which she’d experimented down in Kajaani. She shook her head. They’d become as important as those other rats. They’d be in no position to appreciate their fame. Pekka hoped she would be. If things went wrong . . .

Resolutely, she shoved that thought out of her mind, or at least down to its basement. She’d been working toward this moment her whole professional career. If she could draw useful sorcerous energy from the fusion of the laws of similarity and contagion, she would prove theoretical sorcery had some eminently practical uses. And, if she did get into difficulties, Siuntio and Ilmarinen would get her out of them if anyone could.

What if no one can? She forced that thought into the basement of her mind, too.

Turning to the senior mages, she asked, “Are we ready?” Siuntio nodded. Ilmarinen leered. She took that for an affirmative. Dipping her head to each of them in turn, she said, “I begin, then.”

Don’t make a mistake. She thought that whenever she went from her desk to the laboratory. No matter what Siuntio said about her experimental technique, she knew she was theoretician first, practical mage a distant second. Perhaps that made her more careful than a more practical mage would have been. She hoped so.

As she chanted the carefully crafted spell, as she made pass after intricate pass, confidence began to rise in her. She saw Siuntio smiling approval, silently cheering her on. Maybe she was borrowing the confidence from him. She didn’t care where it came from. She was glad to have it.

And then everything went wrong.

At first, as the chamber began to sway around her, Pekka thought she’d made a mistake after all. Even while she wondered whether she’d die in the next instant, she reviewed all she’d done. For the life of her--literally, for the life of her--she couldn’t see what she’d done wrong.

A heartbeat later, she realized the disaster had come from without, not from within. At that same moment, Siuntio gasped, “The Algarvians!” and Ilmarinen howled, “Murderers!” like a wolf in ultimate anguish.

When the Algarvians murdered Kaunians by the hundreds, perhaps by the thousands, to fuel their military sorcery against Unkerlant, Pekka had felt it, as had sorcerers throughout the world. She’d felt it, too, when the Unkerlanters fought back by murdering their own. But those slaughters, however horrific, had been far to the west. The massacre she felt now was close, close. It was like the difference between feeling an earthquake far away and one right under her feet.

She was feeling an earthquake right under her feet. Even as the building groaned, as cages flew through the air and shelves toppled, her mind leaped. “The Algarvians!” she cried, as Siuntio had before her. She could hardly hear herself through the din. “The Algarvians are turning their death-powered magic against us!”

The war against King Mezentio hadn’t come home to Kuusamo till now. Oh, a handful of Algarvian dragons flying from southern Valmiera had dropped a few eggs on the coast, and ships clashed in the Strait of Valmiera that severed Kuusamo and Lagoas from the mainland of Derlavai. But the Seven Princes had thought--as what Kuusaman had not?--they could prepare behind the Strait and strike at Algarve when they were ready. Algarve, unfortunately, had other ideas.

As earthquakes will, this one seemed to last forever. How long it really went on, Pekka couldn’t have said. At last, it stopped. Rather to her surprise, it hadn’t shaken the building down around her ears. The lamps had gone out, though. Everything in the chamber lay on the floor. Some cages had broken open; rats were scurrying for hiding places. The tremor had knocked Siuntio and Ilmarinen off their feet. Pekka had no idea how or why she was still standing.

Ilmarinen got up without help. He and Pekka pulled some shelves off Siuntio so he could rise. Siuntio was bleeding from a cut above one eye, but that wasn’t why anguish filled his face. “Our city!” he cried. “What the Algarvians have done to our city!”

“We had better find out what they’ve done to our city,” Ilmarinen said grimly. “We had better get out of here, too, before the building falls down on us.”

“I don’t think it will, not if it hasn’t already,” Pekka said. “This isn’t like a natural earthquake--I’ve been through some. There are no aftershocks.” But she hurried out with Ilmarinen and Siuntio.

When she was standing on the snow-dappled dead grass in front of the thaumaturgical laboratory, Pekka gasped. She could see a great deal of Yliharma, and much of what she could see had fallen down. Pillars of smoke rose here and there from rapidly spreading fires. And, when she looked toward the high ground at the heart of the city, she let out an agonized wail: “Not the palace, too!”

“They have struck us a heavy blow,” Siuntio said, wiping blood from his face as if he’d just realized it was there: “heavier than I ever dreamt they could.”

“That they have.” Ilmarinen still sounded like a wolf, a hungry wolf. “Now it’s our turn.”

“Aye,” Pekka said fiercely.

King Swemmel paced back and forth, back and forth, in Marshal Rathar’s office. With his body hunched forward and his jewel-encrusted robe swirling out behind him, the king of Unkerlant put his marshal in mind of a hawk soaring over a field, waiting for a rabbit to show itself.

The difference was that, unlike a hawk, King Swemmel wasn’t inclined to wait. He stabbed out a long, thin finger at the map tacked to the wall. “We’ve got the redheads on the run now!” he gloated. “All we have to do is hit them hard everywhere, and they’ll shatter like a dropped plate.”

Swemmel’s moods swung wildly; he could despair--or grow furious--as readily as he exulted. One of the things Rathar had to do, along with the small task of commanding Unkerlant’s armies, was to try to keep the king on something close to an even keel. “Aye, we have forced them back some, your Majesty,” he said, “but they’re still fighting hard, and they’re still too close to Cottbus.”

Now he pointed toward the map. Gray-headed pins showed Unkerlanter positions, green-headed ones Algarvian forces. He hardly looked at the pins; he knew where the armies were at the moment. He looked at the pinholes west of the present positions, the pinholes that showed how far the Algarvians had come. There was a hole in the middle of the dot labeled Thalfang, terrifyingly near the capital of Unkerlant. On a clear day, you could see Thalfang from the spires of Swemmel’s castle. The redheads had fought their way into the town, but they hadn’t fought their way through it.

“Aye, they are still too close to Cottbus,” the king agreed. “They were too close the instant they crossed our border. That is why we have to hammer them hard all along the line, to drive them from our kingdom.”

Rathar chose his words with great care: “Hammering them all along the line may not be--I do not think it is--the best way to beat them back.”

“Say on.” Suspicion gleamed in Swemmel’s dark eyes. Had he not had those eyes and dark hair, he would have looked more like an Algarvian than an Unkerlanter. But in his ability to smell plots whether they were there or not, he was very much a man of his kingdom. And like every king of Unkerlant since its earliest days, he didn’t fancy contradiction.

Knowing that, Marshal Rathar kept on speaking carefully: “Look how the Algarvians attacked us, your Majesty. They didn’t just swarm across the border from south to north.”

“No?” Swemmel growled. “Then why does the fighting run all the way from the icy Narrow Sea up to the desert the treacherous Zuwayzin infest?”

Rathar vividly remembered the sorts of things King Swemmel did to those who displeased him. But more than any other courtier who served Swemmel, he also remembered what Unkerlant needed. He spoke more frankly to the king than did anyone else in the palace. One day, that would probably cost him his head. Meanwhile ... “Don’t look only at what the Algarvians did, your Majesty. Look at how they did it.”

“Vile, treacherous dogs,” Swemmel muttered. “Traitors everywhere. They will pay. How diey will pay! How everyone will pay!”

Pretending not to hear, Rathar went on, “They used behemoths and dragons massed together to tear holes in our lines, then met behind the front and cleaned out the pockets they made. If they’d attacked all along the line, they wouldn’t have been able to find or make so many weak places.”

“And you want us to imitate them.” By King Swemmel’s tone, he wanted to do anything but.

“If we aim to beat them back, we’d better,” Rathar said. “Whatever else they are, man for man they’re the best warriors in Derlavai.”

Whatever else they are. The Algarvians had also turned out to be the most accomplished murderers in Derlavai. They wouldn’t have come so far so fast without their murders, either. That sickened Rathar. Swemmel hadn’t been shy about imitating them there--not a bit. That sickened his marshal, too.

“Are they?” Swemmel said. “We doubt it. If they were, how could our armies have beaten them back?” He sniffed contemptuously.

“Because we have more men than they do. Because we put snowshoes on our behemoths, where they didn’t think of that. Because we had the sense to give our soldiers white smocks. Because we understand winter better than they do.” Rathar ticked off the points on his fingers one by one. He went on, “But you must recall, your Majesty, they’re learning, too. Unless we can hurt them badly while they’re still off balance, our job gets harder.”

He wished King Swemmel would trust him to command Unkerlant’s armies and would stay out of his way. While he was at it, he wished for the moon. He had about as much chance of getting one as the other. Swemmel stayed strong not least because he allowed no subjects too much strength. Rathar was, without a doubt, the second most powerful man in Unkerlant. To those looking up, that made him great and mighty. But if the king crooked a finger, the kingdom would have a new marshal the next instant. Rathar understood that all too well.

“Oh, we want to hurt them, too.” Swemmel’s voice was a low, hungry croon. “We want to see their armies fall apart and fall to ruin. We want to see Algarvian soldiers frozen in the snow. We want to see our borders restored before spring comes.”

“Unless they fall to pieces, I don’t think we can do so much,” Rathar warned. Because Swemmel could get anything he wanted in the palace just by crooking his finger, he too often thought he could do the same in the wider world. His inspectors and impressers made him all-powerful in those parts of the kingdom he still ruled. King Mezentio’s men, though, put up a stiffer fight than did Unkerlanter peasants. Swemmel needed to grasp that.

He looked petulant. “Why do we have armies, if we cannot get the best use from them?” he demanded.

“Your Majesty, you are getting the best use from them,” Rathar answered. “If you expect more than men and beasts can give, you are doomed to disappointment.”

“We are always doomed to disappointment.” Swemmel wasn’t deaf to the bittersweet songs self-pity sang. “Even our own twin betrayed us. But we had revenge on Kyot--aye, we did.”

King Guntram, Swemmel and Kyot’s father, had died just after the end of the Six Years’ War. Neither twin would admit he was the younger, and the other thus the rightful heir. The Six Years’ War had cost Unkerlant a dreadful price. But the Twinkings War that followed made its toll seem light by comparison. In the end, Swemmel had boiled Kyot alive.

Coming back to the here-and-now, the king said, “Very well, Marshal. If you think we must fight like the Algarvians, fight like the Algarvians we shall. You have our leave to make it so. But our arms had best meet with success, or you will be judged for your failures.” Robes flapping behind him, he swept out of Rathar’s office.

Momentarily alone, the marshal allowed himself the luxury of a long, loud sigh of relief. He’d just finished it when his adjutant came into the office. Major Merovec’s strong-boned face bore an anxious expression, as any officer’s might have after a visit from the king.

“We go on, Major,” Rathar said, understanding him completely.

“Powers above be praised,” Merovec said, and said no more. Suddenly, he looked anxious in a different way, as if realizing even that little might have been too much. Only Rathar had heard him, but the comment gave the marshal a hold on him he hadn’t had before. Such was life in the Unkerlanter royal palace.

“His Majesty wants us to keep pressing the Algarvians hard,” Rathar said. “He is not the only one who wants that, of course. The discussion was about the means, not the end.”

“And?” Major Merovec asked. He knew as well as Rathar that sometimes Swemmel would give orders and would insist they be obeyed. Unkerlant had had its share of disasters over the years because of that.

“And we are to continue as we have been doing,” Marshal Rathar replied. Merovec didn’t let out a noisy sigh of relief, but the urge to do so was written all over his face.

“Any more word out of Kuusamo?” Rathar asked, glad to talk about anything, even bad news, that had nothing to do with Swemmel.

“Two princes dead, they say, and half the capital wrecked,” Merovec told him. “I wonder how many Kaunians the redheads had to kill to bring that off. Powers above be praised they didn’t try to do it to Cottbus.”

“No promise they won’t,” Rathar said, and his adjutant, looking sour, nodded. The marshal of Unkerlant went on, “Of course, when they’re fighting us, they have to worry about our soldiers. There aren’t any Kuusaman soldiers in the fight yet, not to speak of.”

“Aye, though I wish there were.” Merovec sounded sour, too. “After this, it’ll take longer for the Kuusamans to get into the fight, too.”

“You’re likely right,” Rathar said. “But they’re liable to fight harder once they are finally in. Now they know what sort of foe they’re up against. I hope Mezentio’s men don’t decide to do the same to Setubal. That would hurt us.”

“Aye, Lagoas truly is in the fight, even if it’s only in the land of the Ice People,” Merovec said.

“And on the sea,” Rathar added. His adjutant grunted dismissively. ““We don’t pay the sea enough attention,” Rathar insisted. “We didn’t start worrying about losing Glogau, up in the north, till almost too late, but where would we be without it? In a cursed mess that’s where.”

“That’s so.” Merovec’s admission was grudging but real. “Still and all, though, you win wars or you lose them on land.”

“I think so,” Rathar said. “If you asked Mezentio’s marshals, odds are they’d think so, too. But if you asked in Sibiu or Lagoas or Kuusamo, you’d hear some different answers.”

“Foreigners,” Merovec muttered under his breath. Far and away the largest kingdom on Derlavai, Unkerlant was and always had been to some degree a world unto itself. Like Rathar’s adjutant, a lot of Unkerlanters had little use for anyone from outside that world.

But the Algarvians had stormed into it and were doing their best to tear it to pieces--and their best had proved terribly, terrifyingly, good. “His Majesty hopes we can win the war this winter,” he said, wanting to learn what Merovec thought of that.

As a marshal’s chief aide, Merovec was at least as much a political animal, a courtier, as he was a soldier. Whatever he thought, he wasn’t about to show much of it. All he said was, “I hope his Majesty is right.”

Rathar sighed. He hoped King Swemmel was right, too, but he wouldn’t have bet a broken tunic toggle on it. Sighing again, he said, “Well, we’ll just have to do our best to make sure he is right.”

“Aye, so we will.” Merovec could agree with that, and he did, enthusiastically.

“First things first.” Rathar started to pace, then stopped in his tracks: what was he doing but imitating the king? He needed a moment to recover his caravan of thought: “We have to push the redheads as far back from Cottbus as we can. That will make it harder for them to do to us what they did to Kuusamo. And we have to keep the corridor to Glogau open, and we have to take back as much of the Duchy of Grelz as we can. We have to do that if we intend to keep eating next year, anyhow.”

“All true,” Major Merovec said. Then, thinking like a political animal, he added, “The more of Grelz we take back, the bigger the black eye we give Mezentio and his puppet king, too.”

“That’s so,” Rathar agreed. “He could have hurt us much more if he’d named one of the local nobles King of Grelz instead of his own cousin. The peasants won’t want to do anything for an Algarvian with a fancy crown on his noggin.”

After the Twinkings War, after Swemmel’s years of harsh rule, he’d feared the peasants and townsfolk of Unkerlant would welcome the Algarvians as liberators.

Some had. More would have, he suspected, had the redheads not made it so very plain they came as conquerors.

“If the foe makes mistakes, we had better take advantage of them,” he said. “He hasn’t made enough, curse him. And we’ve made too many of our own.”

No one else at Swemmel’s court would have said such a thing. Merovec looked horrified that Rathar had. “Be careful, lord Marshal,” he said. “If word of that got back to the king, either he would blame you for what goes wrong or he would think you were blaming him.”

Either of those, from Rathar’s point of view, would be equally disastrous. Nodding brusquely to acknowledge the point, the marshal of Unkerlant studied the map. An attack into Grelz was already underway. He examined the disposition of his forces. He could also attack to the northeast of Cottbus, which would keep the Algarvians from shifting troops to the south. Nodding again, he began giving orders.

Rank, or at least some rank, had finally caught up with Leudast. He was, at last, officially a sergeant. He was also commanding a company: a handful of veterans like himself, fleshed out with recruits who no longer deserved to be called fresh-faced--a few days in the line and they were as grimy and disreputable-looking as anybody else.

He wondered how many other sergeants in King Swemmel’s army were commanding companies. A lot of them, or else he was a black Zuwayzi in disguise. He also wondered when the extra pay that went with his new rank would start catching up with him. He didn’t intend to hold his breath.

Thinking about money made him laugh, anyhow. What could he do with it, up here at the front, but gamble? He couldn’t buy much--there wasn’t much to buy. And he wouldn’t hold his breath waiting for leave, either. Every man who could carry a stick was in the line these days, or so it seemed.

But, for the first time in the fight against Algarve, the Unkerlanter armies were moving forward. Leudast was almost inclined to cheer every time snow or freezing rain came pelting down, even if he had to endure them out in the open. He knew Marshal Winter had done as much to stop the redheads as Marshal Rathar had.

Somewhere not far away, eggs began bursting. The Algarvians holed up in the village northeast of the trench in which he huddled weren’t about to give up without a fight. They had plenty of egg-tossers and, no doubt, plenty of stubborn soldiers, too. A wounded man started screaming not far away. Leudast clicked his tongue between his teeth. The Algarvians might be retreating, but they weren’t making life easy for their foes.

Captain Hawart came up to Leudast, leaving tracks behind him in the snow. Hawart had started out commanding the company Leudast now led. These days, the captain was in charge of a brigade’s worth of men. He hadn’t been promoted at all and was doing a senior officer’s work on a junior officer’s pay.

He’d also grown forgetful like a senior officer, for he called, “A good day to you, Magnulf.”

“Magnulf’s dead,” Leudast said. Had he been looking out of the hole he’d shared with his sergeant when the egg burst in front of it, he would have been the one who didn’t come out. Luck, he thought. Nothing but luck. “I’m Leudast.”

“Well, so you are.” Hawart took off his fur hat and whacked himself in the side of the head. “And I’m Marvefa, the fairy who makes new leaves grow every spring.”

“Wouldn’t surprise me a bit, sir--you look just like her,” Leudast said, and Captain Hawart rocked back on his heels and laughed. He was a pretty good officer, and didn’t slip very often. Leudast went on, “What now?”

Hawart pointed ahead, toward the village from which the Algarvians were still tossing occasional eggs. “Tomorrow morning, we’re going to throw them out of that Midlum place,” he answered. “We’re supposed to have behemoths coming up to give us a hand, but we’ll take a whack at it whether they do or not.”

“Aye, sir,” Leudast said resignedly, and then, because he couldn’t help himself, “If they don’t show up, we’re going to leave a lot of dead men in the snow in front of Midlum.”

“I know.” Captain Hawart sounded resigned, too. “But those are the orders I got, so that’s what I’m going to do. Even if we get slaughtered, we help the kingdom.”

“Huzzah,” Leudast said in tones that sounded like anything but celebration.

More often than not, Hawart would have laughed again and agreed with him. Today, the captain said, “Like it or not, it’s true. We’re doing our best to shove our way back into Grelz. This attack--and we’re just part of it--is supposed to keep the Algarvians from moving reinforcements down there.”

“All right, sir,” Leudast said. “Once I’m dead, I’m sure I’ll be glad to know it was for some good reason.”

“Probably because I hit you over the head with a rock.” But Captain Hawart was laughing again. He slapped Leudast on the back. “Have your men ready. We move before sunup, with the behemoths or without “em.”

“Aye, Captain.” Leudast didn’t expect the behemoths. The whole course of the war had taught him not to expect them. There were rarely enough to go around; more stretches of line needed the great beasts than could have them. He got his company ready to attack Midlum without them. For once, he was glad he had only a handful of veterans. The new troops would go forward without knowing how unlikely they were ever to get into the village.

And then, in the middle up the chilly night, the behemoths did come up to the front, chainmail clinking below the heavy blankets that helped their shaggy fur keep them warm. Starlight glittered off their long, sharp, iron-shod horns. Thanks to the great snowshoes attached to their feet, they had little trouble making their way over the drifts.

Real hope--a strange feeling--began to rise in Leudast. “We’re going to do this,” he told his men. “We’re going to kick the redheads out of that village, we’re going to chase them across the fields, and we’re going to slaughter them. This is what they bought for coming into Unkerlant and trying to take away our homes. Now they’ll pay full price--every last copper.”

His own home village, not too far from what had been Unkerlant’s border with Forthweg, lay far to the east of where he squatted now. He wondered how his kinsfolk fared under Algarvian occupation. The only thing he could do to help them was hurt Mezentio’s men as much as he could.

In the darkness, his men’s heads bobbed up and down. They listened earnestly. Most of them lacked the experience to know what they were getting into. After the coming day’s fighting, though, they’d be veterans, too--the ones who wouldn’t be corpses strewn across the frozen ground.

Almost on time, Unkerlanter egg-tossers started pounding Midlum. “Get ready, boys,” Leudast said. “It won’t be long now.” He peered across the fields toward the bursts of sorcerous energy ahead. Now the Algarvians would know something was coming their way. With luck, the bursting eggs would keep them from doing too much about it. With luck . . .

They were alert, there in Midlum. Leudast had never known the Algarvians when they weren’t alert. He wished this might be one of those times, but it wasn’t. Eggs began flying back toward his own position. Fortunately, the Algarvians were tossing a little long, so they didn’t hurt too badly the men gathered to attack them.

Whistles blew, all along the Unkerlanter line: officers ordering their men forward. Leudast was doing an officer’s job, but he didn’t have the formal rank, so he didn’t have a whistle, either. A shout had to do: “Let’s go!”

The behemoths went forward, too. They paused outside of Midlum. Some, the ones that mounted egg-tossers on their backs, joined in pounding the village and the Algarvians inside. Others sent beams from their heavy sticks against the houses to the east. Fires began to burn, lighting up the eastern sky as if dawn were coming too soon.

Leudast flopped down behind what he thought was a snow-covered boulder. But boulders didn’t have hair: it was a dead behemoth--a long-dead behemoth, which meant it had probably belonged to the Algarvians. “Blaze and move!” he shouted. “Blaze and move!”

His men knew what they were supposed to do: some were to blaze to make the Algarvians keep their heads down while others advanced into new cover. Then the two groups would reverse roles. But knowing what to do and doing it right the first time you tried it were two different things. Leudast had expected no better than he got.

He wondered if the Algarvians had any behemoths in Midlum. If they did, the beasts needed to come out and fight: the only thing with much hope of stopping one behemoth was another. But no behemoths came forth from the village. Maybe they’d all frozen to death. Leudast hoped so.

When it was his turn, he ran forward, toward the burning village. He pounded passed a young man lying in the snow clutching both hands to his belly. Those hands couldn’t keep the Unkerlanter soldier’s lifeblood from pouring out. Steam rose from the pool it formed. Leudast shook his head and ran on.

He’d fought to hold the Algarvians out of a good many villages. He knew how the job was done. So did they, worse luck, and they proved as stubborn in defense as they ever had on the attack. But they couldn’t simply stay in Midlum and fight it out to the last man there, for the Unkerlanters were not only assailing the strongly held village but also sending men around it to either side to cut it off from other territory the redheads held.

You taught us that trick, you whoresons, Leudast thought. How do you like having it pulled on you?

He didn’t know what he would have done in the Algarvian commander’s predicament. The redhead sent some of his men east toward their comrades and used the rest to make a stand. Unkerlanter behemoths lumbered after the Algarvians struggling through the snow. With the eastern sky now going gray with true dawn, the retreating Algarvians made easy targets.

Inside Midlum, though, the enemy kept on fighting hard. A beam zipped past Leudast’s head. He threw himself flat and blazed back. A scream answered him. He grunted in satisfaction, but didn’t rise too soon. Any Algarvians who’d come this far were likely veterans and full of the tricks veterans knew.

Well, Leudast had a few tricks, too. “Surrender!” he shouted in his own language and then in what he thought was Algarvian. Returning to Unkerlanter--he had no choice--he went on, “You can’t get away.”

Maybe some of Mezentio’s men understood Unkerlanter. Maybe they didn’t need to understand it--maybe they could see what was so for themselves. Little by little, the blazing died away. Algarvians started coming out of battered huts and holes in the grounds. They carried no sticks. Their hands were high. Fear filled their faces.

“Powers above,” Leudast whispered in something approaching awe. He’d never seen so many redheads surrender, not all at once. After staring, he rushed forward with the rest of his men to plunder the Algarvians.

As Trasone stumbled south and east through the snow, he thought about what might have been. “Hey, Sergeant!” he called, his breath making a bank of mist around his head. “Did we really see the towers of stinking Swemmel’s stinking palace?”

“Don’t know about you, but I sure as blazes did,” Sergeant Panfilo answered, his voice coming muffled through the wool scarf he’d wrapped around the lower part of his face. “You were there in the market square at Thalfang, same as me. If we could have made it across to the other side ...”

“Aye. If.” Trasone shrugged his broad shoulders; he was almost as thickly built as an Unkerlanter. He was hard to faze, too, or else too stubborn to admit that any trouble could be so very bad. “I’ll tell you something, Sergeant: a lot of good lads went into that cursed square. A lot fewer came out again.”

“That’s the truth.” Panfilo’s big head went up and down, up and down. “Captain Galafrone was maybe the best officer I’ve ever known, and I’ve seen plenty. I’d say as much to the king’s face, even if Galafrone hadn’t a drop of noble blood in him.”

“You ought to say it, on account of it’s true.” Trasone tramped past the stiff carcass of a unicorn that had frozen to death. Its coat was whiter than the snow in which it lay. He jerked a thumb at it. “Somebody ought to butcher that beast. Plenty of good meat on it, if we ever get to a place where we can make a fire and cook it.”

“Aye.” Panfilo liked to eat, but that wasn’t what was on his mind. “I had this company--powers above, I had this whole fornicating battalion--for a few days, but will they make me an officer? Not bloody likely, not when my old man made shoes for a living.”

“I don’t know about that, Sergeant,” Trasone said. “The way they’re using up nobles these days, before long there won’t be enough of ‘em to fill all the slots that need filling. Stay alive and you may get your chance yet.”

“Won’t have one if I’m dead, that’s certain.” Panfilo twisted his head this way and that. Trasone knew what he was doing: looking for Unkerlanter behemoths with snowshoes or Unkerlanter footsoldiers wearing them. In this cursed weather, Swemmel’s soldiers were more mobile than the Algarvians they pursued. Trasone kept his eyes open all the time, too.

He didn’t see any foes now, for which he thanked the powers above. When he trudged past the frozen corpse of an Algarvian soldier, he started to laugh.

“What’s funny about him?” Panfilo asked.

“Poor whoresons in the same pose as that unicorn we went by a little while ago,” Trasone answered.

“Heh,” Panfilo said, and then, “Heh, heh.” Trasone shrugged and kept on walking. That was about as much credit as the comment deserved.

From up ahead came the sharp crack of bursting eggs. A moment later, Trasone heard a dragon screaming high in the air. “Got to be an Unkerlanter beast,” he said wearily. “Where are our own dragons, curse the lazy buggers who fly ‘em?”

Panfilo tried to look on the bright side: “They come over now and again. But they’re stretched thin along so much front.”

“The Unkerlanters have dragons to drop eggs on us,” Trasone said resentfully. “The front’s no shorter for them.” He waved before Panfilo could speak. “I know, I know--somewhere along the line, we’re dropping eggs on them, too. But they’re doing it here, curse them, and one of those stinking eggs is liable to come down on my head.”

“They weren’t worrying about us--we’re small fry.” Panfilo pointed ahead, to a burning town. “Unless we’re even more lost than I think we are, that’s Aspang. A ley line runs through it. How are we going to get men and supplies forward if it’s going up in flames around us?”

For an Algarvian, Trasone was a stolid man. Still, his shrug would have been extravagant for someone from any other kingdom. He said, “Who knows? Odds are, we won’t. Powers below have been eating at our supply system ever since the snow started coming down.”

When the battered company got into Aspang, Trasone discovered he would have made a good prophet. Several of the eggs the Unkerlanter dragons dropped had landed squarely on the ley-line caravan depot. It was burning merrily. So was a caravan that had stopped there. And so were mountains of supplies that had just come off the caravan and hadn’t yet been loaded onto wagons for the trip to the front--not that wagons had an easy time moving through the snow, either.

His stomach didn’t care about troubles with wagons. But it growled like a starving wolf--an all too apt figure--to see food burning. The bursting eggs had knocked one car off the ley line and down to the ground on its side. It was, for the moment, safe from the flames. A crowd of Algarvian soldiers had gathered around it.

Trasone hurried toward the caravan car. “That’s got to be something to eat,” he called over his shoulder to his comrades. “I’m going to get some, and you’d better do the same.” He waited for Sergeant Panfilo to curse and bully him back into the line. Instead, without a word, the sergeant followed him. More than anything else Trasone had seen, that told of the troubles the Algarvian army had known since winter came to Unkerlant.

One of the soldiers already at the caravan car looked up with a laugh. “More starving rats, eh? Well, come on and get your share.”

“What’s to get?” Trasone asked.

By way of reply, the other soldier tossed him a square block of orange stuff that had to weigh a couple of pounds. Automatically, Trasone caught it. “Cheese!” said the fellow who’d thrown it. “If you’re going to be a rat, you may as well be a fat rat, eh?”

“Aye.” Trasone broke a corner off the block and stuffed the cheese into his mouth. With it still full, he went on, “Toss me a couple more of those, pal, will you? It’s not the greatest stuff in the world, but it’ll keep a man going for a while.”

“Help yourself--stuff your pack full,” the other Algarvian said. “If we don’t haul it away with us, it’s not going anywhere.” Trasone took him up on that. So did Sergeant Panfilo. They both ate as they loaded up, too. Trasone guessed a lot of the soldiers at the caravan car had been garrisoning Aspang. They didn’t have the abraded look of men who’d been fighting and marching and fighting again for much too long.

Eggs began bursting once more, this time west of Aspang. Trasone looked up, but saw no dragons. That meant the Unkerlanters had brought their egg-tossers almost far enough forward to start hitting the town. Trasone cursed under his breath. He’d hoped the rear guard would have done a better job of holding back King Swemmel’s men than that.

“To me!” shouted the officer who’d taken over the battalion, or what was left of it, after Sergeant Panfilo brought it out of Thalfang. “Come on--we have to hold this place. Can’t let the Unkerlanters have it, come what may.”

Trasone was more than willing to ignore the dapper little nobleman, but Panfilo, after stuffing a last brick of cheese into his pack, turned away from the caravan car. “Come on,” he told Trasone. “Major Spinello’s not so bad, as officers go.”

“Not so bad,” Trasone agreed grudgingly. “But I’d got used to being commanded by commoners--first Galafrone, then you. Nobles just aren’t the same after that. Harder to take ‘em seriously, if you know what I mean.”

“Oh, aye,” Panfilo said. “Don’t worry, though. I’m still commanding you. Now get moving.”

Get moving Trasone did. Major Spinello was still flitting every which way at once and talking like a man possessed: “Come on, my dears. If the Unkerlanters are going to pay us a call, we must be ready to receive them in the style they deserve. After all, we wouldn’t want to disappoint them, now would we?”

He sounded like a bad caricature of every noble officer Trasone had ever known. Even the dour veteran couldn’t help snickering. Up till very recently, Spinello hadn’t been a combat soldier; he kept going on and on about the Forthwegian village whose garrison he’d headed till the war here in the west yanked him out of it. Not all of his orders made the best sense in the world. But Trasone had already seen that he was recklessly brave. As long as he listened to Panfilo and others who actually knew what they were doing, he’d shape pretty well.

What needed doing here was obvious, and Major Spinello saw it. He posted his battalion in among the ruins at the western edge of Aspang. “Find yourselves some good holes,” he urged the soldiers. “Make sure they’re as tight and as deep as a Kaunian trollop’s twat.” He sighed. “Ah, the one I was laying before duty called me here.” He sighed again and kissed his fingertips.

Trasone would sooner have been laying a pretty blonde than lying in wait for some ugly Unkerlanters, too. Nobody’d given Spinello a choice, and nobody was giving him one, either. He found cover behind a waist-high wall that was all that remained of a house or shop and settled in. Looking around, he spied a couple of other places to which he could withdraw in a hurry if he had to.

Unkerlanter eggs fell closer and closer to the town, then began bursting around him and his comrades. He kept his head down and huddled close to the wall. Before long, the storm of sorcerous energy moved deeper into Aspang. Trasone knew what Swemmel’s men were doing: they were going after the Algarvian egg-tossers. He also knew that meant the attack was on its way.

He looked out over the ruined wall and steadied his stick on it. Sure enough, the Unkerlanters were forming up just out of stick range: row upon close-ranked row of blocky men in white smocks over rock-gray tunics. It was, in its way, an awe-inspiring sight.

To his surprise, he could hear the command the Unkerlanter officer shouted. The enemy soldiers stormed forward, some of them arm in arm. “Urra!” they shouted: a deafening roar. “Urra! Swemmel! Urra!”

Almost at once, eggs began bursting among them, tearing holes in their neat ranks--they hadn’t succeeded in knocking out the Algarvian tossers after all. Still shouting, more Unkerlanters hurried up to fill the gaps. Along with his comrades, Trasone started blazing at them. Soldiers went down as if scythed. The ones who didn’t go down, though, kept on coming, roaring like demons.

Trasone’s mouth went dry. If that human wave broke over his battalion . . . He looked around at his lines of retreat again. Would he have time to use them?

He wished Algarvian mages back of the front would slaughter some Kaunians to get the sorcerous energy for a spell to stop the Unkerlanters in their tracks.

No spell came. But King Swemmel’s men didn’t break into Aspang, either. Some prices were higher than flesh and blood could bear. Just outside the edge of town, the Unkerlanters broke and fled back across the snowy fields, leaving even more dead behind. Major Spinello did not order a pursuit. Trasone nodded somber approval. The major might be raw, but he wasn’t stupid.