Into the Darkness

3.

Bembo had never seen so many stars in the sky above Tricarico. But, as the constable paced through the dark streets of his home town, he did not watch the heavens for the sake of diamonds and the occasional sapphire or ruby strewn across black velvet. He kept a wary eye peeled for the swift-moving shapes of Jelgavan dragons blotting out those jewels.

Tricarico lay not far below the foothills of the Bradano Mountains, whose peaks formed the border between Algarve and Jelgava. Every so often, Bembo could spy flashes of light—momentary stars—in the mountains on the eastern horizon: the soldiers of his kingdom and the Jelgavans blazing away at one another. The Jelgavans, so far, had not pushed their way through the foothills and down on to the southern Algarvian plain. Bembo was glad of that; he’d expected worse.

He’d also expected the Jelgavans to send more dragons over Tricarico than they had. He’d been a boy during the Six Years’ War, and vividly remembered the terror dropped eggs had spawned. There hadn’t been so many then, but even a few were plenty and to spare. Jelgava’s dragon farms had bee anything but idle since.

A caravan hummed slowly past, sliding a couple of feet above the ground along its ley line. The lamps at the front of the coach had dark cloth wrapped around them so they gave out only a little light: with luck, too little to be spotted by Jelgavan dragonfliers high in the air.

The caravan steersman doffed his plumed hat to Bembo. Bembo swept off his own to return the compliment. He smiled a little as he set the hat back on his head. Even in wartime, the courtesies that made Algarvian life endured.

When he rounded a corner, the smile disappeared. A wineshop was not so securely shuttered as it might have been; light spilled out through the slats to puddle on the pavement. Bembo took the club off his belt and whacked the door with it. “Close up in there!” he called. A moment later, after a couple of startled exclamations, the shutters creaked as someone adjusted them. The betraying light disappeared. Nodding in satisfaction, Bembo walked on.

A Kaunian column of pale marble gleamed even by starlight. In ancient days, Tricarico, like a lot of northern Algarve, had belonged to the Kaunian Empire. Monuments lingered. So did occasional heads of blond hair among the red- and auburn- and sandy-haired majority. Bembo would just as soon have shipped blonds and monuments alike over the Bradano Mountains. The Jelgavans thought they gave a kingdom of Kaunian blood a claim to what Kaunians had once ruled.

A woman leaned against the column. Her legs gleamed like its marble; her kilt was very short, scarcely covering the swell of her buttocks. “Hello, sweetheart,” she called, peering toward Bembo as he approached. “Feel like a good time tonight?”

“Hello, Fiametta,” the constable said, lifting his hat. “Go peddle it somewhere else, or I’ll have to notice you’re here.”

Fiametta cursed in disgust. “All this dark is terrible for business,” she complained. “The men can’t find me—”

“Oh, I bet they can,” he said. He’d let her bribe him with her body a time or two, in the easy-going days before the war.

She snorted. “And when somebody does find me, who is it? A constable! Even if you want me, you won’t pay for it.”

“Not with money,” Bembo allowed, “but you’re out here on the job, not sitting in Reform sewing tunics or something.”

“Reform would pay me better than this—and I’d meet more interesting people, too,” Fiametta came over and kissed Bembo on the end of his long, straight nose. Then she flounced off, putting everything she had into it, and she had quite a lot. Over her shoulder, she called, “See? I’m going somewhere else.”

Somewhere else was probably no farther than the other side of the column, but Bembo didn’t follow her. She’d done what he’d told her, after all. One of these days, he might feel like telling her to do something different again.

He turned on to a side street, one with houses and apartment houses on it, not shops and offices. Once or twice every block, he had to rap on a window sill or a doorway and shout for people to let lamps die or cover their windows better. Everyone in Tricarico surely knew the new regulations, but every Algarvian was born thinking regulations applied to the other fellow, not to him. A rotund man, Bembo fumed when he had to trudge up to the fourth floor of an apartment house to get some fool to draw his curtains.

When he came out of the apartment house, someone disappeared down the dark street with remarkable haste. Bembo thought about running after the footpad or whatever he was, but not for long. With his belly, he wouldn’t have had a prayer of catching him.

He came up to another house with a hand’s breadth of open space between the edges of the curtains. He raised his club to whack the sill, then froze, as if suddenly turned to stone. Inside, a pretty young woman was getting out of her clothes and into a loose kilt and tunic for the night.

Bembo had never felt so torn. As a man, he wanted to say nothing and keep watching: the more he saw of her, the better she looked. As a constable, though, he had his duty. He waited till she was sliding the night tunic down over herself before he rapped the wall and called, “Darken this house!” The woman jumped and squeaked. The lamp died. Bembo strode on. Duty had triumphed—and he’d had a good peek.

He used the club several more times—though never so entertainingly—before emerging on to the Avenue of Duchess Matalista, a broad street full of fancy shops, barristers’ offices, and the sort of dining establishments the nobility and rich commoners patronized. When he saw light leaking from places like those, he had to be more polite with his warnings. If a baron or a well-connected restaurateur complained about him, he’d end up on permanent night duty in the nasty part of town.

He had just asked—asked! it graveled a proud man—a jeweler to close his curtains tighter when a hiss in the air made him look up. He saw moving shadows against the stars. Before he could fill his lungs to shout, the egg he’d heard falling burst a couple of hundred yards behind him. Others crashed down all around Tricarico.

Bursts of light as their protective shells smashed sent shadows leaping crazily and chopped motion into herky-jerky bits. The bursts were shatteringly loud. Bembo clutched at his ears. Blasts of suddenly released energies knocked him off his feet. The pavement tore his bare knees.

Howling with pain, he scrambled up again and ran toward the nearest burst. The egg had come to earth on the Avenue of Duchess Matalista in front of an eatery where a supper for two cost about a week of Bembo’s pay It had blown a hole in the cobblestones and had blown in the front of the restaurant; he didn’t know how the roof was staying up.

The egg had also blown in the front of the milliner’s shop across the street, but Bembo didn’t worry about that: the milliner’s was closed and empty. Screaming, bleeding people came staggering out of the restaurant. A woman got down on her hands and knees and vomited an expensive meal into the gutter.

Fire was beginning to lick at the exposed roof timbers. Careless of that, Bembo dashed into the restaurant to help whoever hadn’t managed to escape. Shards of glass crunched under his boots. That glass had been almost as deadly as the raw energy of the egg itself. The first person the flickering flames showed him had had his head almost sliced from his body by a great chunk that still glittered beside the corpse.

Someone farther in groaned. Bembo yanked up the table that pinned an old woman, stooped, got her arm around his shoulder, and half-dragged, half carried her out to the street. “You!” he snapped to the woman who’d thrown up. “Bandage this cut on her leg.”

“With what?” she asked.

“Your kerchief, if you’ve got one. Your scarf there. Or cut cloth off her tunic or yours—you’ll have a paring knife in your bag there, won’t you?” Bembo turned to a couple of men who didn’t look too badly hurt. “You and you—in there with me. She’s not the only one left inside.”

“What if the roof caves in?” one man asked.

“What if an egg falls on us?” the other added. More eggs were falling. Sticks bigger and heavier than a man could carry had been set up along some of Tricarico’s ley lines. They blazed spears of light up into the sky at the Jelgavan dragons, but there weren’t enough of them, not nearly enough.

That didn’t matter, not to Bembo. “We’ll be very unhappy,” he answered. “Now come on, or I curse you for cowards.”

“If you weren’t a constable and immune, I’d call you out for that,” growled the fellow who’d fretted about eggs.

“If you’d come without arguing, I wouldn’t have had to say it,” Bembo returned, and plunged back into the eatery without waiting to see whether the two men would follow. They did; he heard them kicking through the broken glass that covered the floor.

They worked manfully, once they got down to it. They and Bembo dragged out customers and servitors and, from the kitchens, a couple of cooks. As the flames began to take hold and the smoke got thicker, Bembo had to make his last trip out crawling and dragging a man after him. He couldn’t breathe if he stood upright. He could hardly breathe while he crawled; his lungs felt scorched and filled with soot. The glass sliced the palms of his hands.

A horse-drawn pumper clattered up and began pouring water on the flames. Hacking and spitting up lumps of thick black phlegm, Bembo wished the crew could turn the hoses on the inside of his chest.

They were fighting a losing battle here; the eatery was going to burn. Before long, the crew realized as much. They began playing water on the buildings to cither side, neither of which had yet caught fire. Maybe they wouldn’t, now. Even if they didn’t, though, the water would damage whatever they held.

“I thank you, sir,” the old woman Bembo had first rescued said from the sidewalk.

He reached for his hat, only to discover he wasn’t wearing it. It had to be back in the eatery, which meant it was gone for good. Bembo instead, he said, “Milady, it was my duty and”—another coughing spasm cut off his words—“my duty and my honor.”

“That’s well said.” The old woman—a noble, by her manners—inclined her head to Bembo.

He bowed again. “Milady, I just hope we’re giving the Jelgavans worse than we’re getting. The news sheets say we are. Every braggart blabbing out of a crystal says we are, but how do we know? The Jelgavans’ news sheets are bound to be telling them they’re beating the stuffing out of us.”

“How long have you been a constable, young fellow?” the woman asked, a hint of amusement in her voice.

Bembo wondered what was funny. “Almost ten years, milady.”

The old woman nodded. “That appears to be enough to have left you a profoundly cynical man.”

“Thank you,” he said. She laughed out loud. For the life of him, he couldn’t figure out why.

With the dawn, Talsu peered down from the Bratanu Mountains into Algarve. Smoke rose from the burning town of Tricarico. He smiled. His officers had assured him that Jelgava was doing far more damage to Algarve than the cowardly Algarvian air pirates were inflicting on his own kingdom.

His officers had also assured him that soon, very soon, Jelgava’s ever-victorious forces would sweep out of the mountains and across the plains of Algarve. The Jelgavan army had visited fire and devastation on those plains in the last months of the Six Years’ War. He saw no reason why Jelgava should not do the same thing again.

He saw no reason why Jelgava should not already have done it again, in fact. All of Algarve’s neighbors hated her. All of them that mattered were at “war against her. They were many. She was one, and beset from east and west and south. Why, then, were his countrymen not yet out of the mountains and racing to join hands with the Forthwegians? He scratched at his almost invisibly pale mustache, which he wore close-trimmed, not in any wild Algarvian style. It was a puzzlement.

A delicious smell distracted him. Turning his head, he saw Colonel Dzirnavu’s servant carrying a covered silver tray toward the regimental commander’s tent. “Ha, Vartu, what have you got there?” he asked.

“His lordship’s breakfast—what else?” the servant answered.

Talsu made an exasperated noise. “I didn’t think it was the chamber pot,” he said. “What I meant was, what will the illustrious count enjoy for his breakfast?”

“Not much, if I’m any judge,” Vartu said, rolling his eyes. “But if you mean, What is he having for breakfast?—I’ve got fresh-baked blueberry tarts here, and poached eggs and bacon on toasted bread with butter sauce poured over them, and some nice ripe cheese, and a muskmelon from by the seashore. And in the pot—not a chamber pot, mind you—is tea flavored with bergamot leaves.”

“Stop!” Talsu held up a hand. “You’re breaking my heart.” His belly rumbled. “You’re breaking my stomach, too,” he added.

“See what you miss because the blood in your veins isn’t blue enough?” Vartu said. “Red blood’s good enough to spill for our dear Jelgava, so it is, but it won’t get you a breakfast like this at the front, no indeed. And now I’ve got to get moving. If the hot stuff gets cold or the cold stuff warms up, the other thing his lordship will bite off is my head.”

Neither soldier had spoken loudly; the colonel’s tent lay only fifteen or twenty feet away. Vartu ducked inside. “Curse you, what took you so long?” Dzirnavu shouted. “Are you trying to starve me to death?”

“I humbly crave pardon, your lordship,” Vartu answered, abject as a servant had to be in the face of a noble’s wrath. Talsu jammed his own face against the brownish green sleeve of his uniform tunic so no one would hear him giggle. Dzirnavu was as round as a kickball. He looked as if he’d take years without food to starve to death.

With the regimental commander’s breakfast attended to, the cooks could get around to feeding the rest of the soldiers. Talsu lined up with the other men in tunics and trousers of the same horse-dung color as his. When he finally got up to the kettles, he held out a tin plate and a wooden cup. One bored-looking cook plopped a ladleful of barley mush and a length of grayish sausage on the plate. Another poured sour beer into the cup.

“My favorites,” Talsu said: “dead man’s cock and what he pissed through it.”

“Listen to the funny man,” said one of the cooks, who’d probably heard the stale joke two or three times already. “Get out of here, funny man, before you end up wearing this pot.”

“Your sweetheart’s the one who knows about dead man’s cock,” the other cook put in.

“Your wife, you mean.” Laughing, Talsu sat down on a rock, took the knife from his belt, and cut off a bite-sized chunk of sausage. It was greasy, and would have been flavorless except that it was heading toward stale. Along with the porridge, it filled his belly. That was the most he would say for it. He wondered if Colonel Dzirnavu had ever tasted what his men ate. He doubted it. If Dzirnavu tasted sausage like that, the Algarvians in Tricarico would hear him screaming.

Presently, the regimental commander deigned to emerge from the tent. With green-brown tunic and trousers stretched tight to cover his globular frame, with bejeweled medallions of nobility glittering on his chest, with rank badges shining from his shoulder straps, he resembled nothing so much as a heroic coconut. “My men!” he said, and the sagging flesh under his chin wobbled. “My men, you have not advanced far enough or fast enough to satisfy our most magnificent sovereign, his Radiant Splendor, King Donalitu V. Press ahead more bravely henceforward, that he may be more pleased with you.”

One of Talsu’s friends, a tall, skinny chap named Smilsu, murmured, “You don’t suppose it’s ever crossed the king’s mind that one of the reasons we haven’t gone farther and faster is that we’ve got Colonel Dzirnavu commanding, do you?”

“He’s Count Dzirnavu, too, so what can you do?” Talsu answered. “The only thing that would happen if we moved fast against the Algarvians is that we’d leave him behind.” He paused for a moment. “Might be the best thing that could happen to the regiment.”

Smilsu snickered, hard enough to draw a glare from a sergeant. Talsu loathed sergeants and pitied them at the same time. They made themselves as hateful as possible to the men of their own estate under them, knowing all the while that the officers above them despised them for their low birth, and that, however heroically they might serve, they could not hope to become officers themselves.

Colonel Dzirnavu, perhaps exhausted at having addressed his soldiers, retreated behind canvas once more. Smilsu said, “You notice the king is displeased with us, not even with us and the colonel?”

“So it goes,” Talsu said resignedly. “When we win the war, though, he’ll be pleased with the colonel and then, if he happens to recollect, with us, too.”

From inside the tent, Dzirnavu let out a bellow. Vartu hurried in to see what his master required. Then he hurried out again. When he returned, he was carrying a small, square bottle of dark green glass.

“What have you got there?” Talsu asked. He knew the answer, but wanted to see what Dzirnavu’s servant would say.

Sure enough, Vartu had a word for it: “Restorative.”

Talsu laughed. “Make sure he’s good and restored, then. If he’s back here snoring while the rest of us fight the Algarvians up ahead, we’ll all be better off.”

“No, no, no.” Smilsu shook his head. “Just restore him enough to get him fighting mad, Vartu. I want to see him go charging between the rocks, straight at the Algarvians. They’ll run like rabbits—like little fluffy bunnies they’ll run. They won’t have figured we’d be able to bring a behemoth through the mountains.”

Vartu snickered. He almost dropped the dark green bottle, and had to make a desperate lunge for it. Fortunately for him, he caught it. Unfortunately for him, Colonel Dzirnavu chose that moment to bellow again: “Confound it, Vartu, you worthless turd, what are you doing out there, fiddling with yourself?”

“If you were fiddling with yourself, you’d be having more- fun than you are now,” Talsu told the servant. With a sigh, Vartu went off to deliver the therapeutic dose to his master.

“If he liked the illustrious count better, we couldn’t talk to him the way we do,” Smilsu said.

“If he liked the illustrious count better, we’d probably like the illustrious count better, too, and we wouldn’t have to talk to him the way we do,” Talsu said.

His friend chewed on that, then slowly nodded. “Some nobles do make good officers,” Smilsu admitted. “If they didn’t, we never would have won the Six Years’ War, I don’t suppose.”

“I don’t know about that,” Talsu said. “I don’t know about that at all. The Algarvians have noble officers, too.”

“Heh.” Smilsu shook a fist at Talsu. “Now look what you’ve gone and done, you lousy traitor.”

“What are you talking about?” Talsu demanded.

“You’ve made me feel sorry for the stinking enemy, that’s what.” Smilsu paused, as if considering. “Not too sorry to blaze away at him and put him out of his misery, I guess. Maybe I won’t have to report you after all.”

Talsu started to say it would be softer back of the front than at it, but held his tongue. The dungeon cell waiting for anyone reported as a traitor would make the front feel like a palace. Worse things would happen to a traitor back there than to a soldier at the front, too.

By midafternoon, the regiment had taken possession of a little valley, in which nestled a village whose Algarvian inhabitants had fled, taking their sheep and goats and mules with them. Colonel Dzirnavu promptly established himself in the largest and most impressive house there.

His men, meanwhile, fanned out through the valley to make sure the Algarvians had not yielded it to set up an ambush. Talsu looked up at the higher ground to either side of the valley. “Hope they haven’t got an egg-tosser or two stashed away up there,” he remarked. “That sort of thing could ruin a night’s sleep.”

“That’s not in our orders,” one of his comrades said.

“Getting myself killed for no good reason isn’t in my orders, either,” Talsu retorted.

In the end, a couple of platoons did sweep the mountainside. Talsu made sure he got part of that duty, thinking, If you want something done right, do it yourself. But he soon discovered even the whole regiment couldn’t have done the job right, not without working on it for a week. Near the valley floor, the mountainsides were covered with scrubby bushes. He might have walked past an Algarvian company and never known it. Farther up, tumbled rocks offered concealment almost equally good. The sweep found no one, but none of the Jelgavans—save possibly their captain, a pompous marquis—had any illusions about what that proved.

When Talsu got back to the village, he set out his bedroll as far from the handful of buildings as he could. He noted that Smilsu was doing the same thing not far away. The two men shared a wry look, shook their heads, and went on about the business of getting ready for the night.

Talsu woke up at every small noise, grabbing for his stick. No soldier who wanted to live to get old could afford to be a heavy sleeper. But he did not wake for the egg flying past till it slammed into the farming village. Three more followed in quick succession: not big, heavy, immensely potent ones, but the sort a crew might hurl with a light tosser a couple of men could break out and carry in and out with them on their backs.

They knocked down three houses and set several others afire. Talsu and his company went out into the fields to keep the Algarvians from getting close enough to blaze at their comrades, who labored to rescue the men trapped in the building the egg had wrecked. Looking back, Talsu saw the house Colonel Dzirnavu had taken as his own now burning merrily. He wondered whether or not he should hope the illustrious colonel had escaped.

Leofsig trudged east along a dirt road in northern Algarve, in the direction of the town of Gozzo. That was what his officers said, at any rate, and he was willing to take their word for it. The countryside looked much as it did back in Forthweg: ripening wheatfields, groves of almonds and olives and oranges and limes, villages full of houses built from whitewashed sun-dried brick with red tile roofs.

But the stench of war was in his nostrils, as it had not been around Gromheort. Smoke blew in little thin wisps, like dying fog: some of the wheatfields behind him were no longer worth admiring. And dead horses and cows and unicorns lay bloating by the roadside and scattered through the fields, adding their sickly-sweet reek to the sour sharpness of the smoke. Forthwegians and Algarvians lay bloating in the fields and by the roadside, too. Leofsig did his best not to think about that.

When he’d found himself included in King Penda’s levy, he’d been proud, eager, to serve the king and the kingdom. Ealstan, his little brother, had been sick with jealousy at being too young to go off and smash the Algarvians himself. Having seen what went into smashing a foe—and how the foe could smash back—Leofsig would have been just as well pleased to return to Gromheort and help his father cast accounts the rest of his days.

What would please a soldier and what he got were not one and the same.

A trooper mounted on a brown-painted unicorn came trotting back toward the column of which Leofsig was a tiny part. He pointed over his shoulder, gesturing and shouting something Leofsig couldn’t understand. The gestures were plain enough, though. Turning to the soldier on his left, Leofsig said, “Looks like the Algarvians are going to try to hold us in front of Gozzo.”

“Aye, so it does,” answered his squadmate, whose name was Beocca. Leofsig envied him his fine, thick beard. His own still had almost hairless patches on his cheeks and under his lower lip. When Beocca scratched his chin, as he did now, the hairs rustled under his fingers. “We’ve pushed ’em back before—otherwise, we wouldn’t be here. We can do it again.”

Before long, officers started shouting orders. The column deployed into skirmish lines. Along with his comrades, Leofsig tramped through the fields instead of between them. The grain went down under the feet of thousands of men almost as if cut by a reaper.

“One way or another, we’ll make the redheads go hungry,” Beocca said, stamping down the ripening grain with great relish. Leofsig, sweating in the hot sun, hadn’t the energy to stamp. He just nodded and kept marching.

More shouts produced lanes between blocks of men. Unicorn and horse cavalry trotted forward to screen the footsoldiers who would do the bulk of the fighting. Forthwegian dragons flew overhead, some so high as to be only specks, others low enough to let Leofsig hear their shrill screeches.

“I hope they drop plenty of eggs on Gozzo,” Beocca said.

“I hope they keep the Algarvians from dropping eggs on us,” Leofsig added. After a moment, Beocca grunted agreement.

As the Forthwegians drew nearer to Gozzo, Leofsig kept cocking his head and looking up into the sky every so often. Even so, he was cautiously skirting a hedgerow when the Algarvian dragons came racing out of the east to challenge those of his kingdom.

The first he knew of the battle overhead was when a dragon fell out of the sky and smashed to earth a hundred yards or so in front of him. The great beast writhed in its death agony, throwing now its silvered belly, now its back—painted Forthwegian blue and white—uppermost. Its flier lay motionless, a small, crumpled heap, a few feet away. Flame spurted from the dragon’s jaw, cremating the man who had taken it into action.

Leofsig looked up again: looked up and gasped in horror. He had seen very few Algarvian dragons till now. That had led him to believe the enemy had very few, or very few they could commit against the Forthwegians, at any rate. Since they were also fighting Jelgava and Valmiera and Sibiu, that made sense to him.

It might have made sense, but it proved untrue. Suddenly, two or three times the Forthwegians’ numbers beset them. Dragons tumbled to earth, burned or even clawed by their foes. Most were marked in blue and white, not Algarvian green, red, and white. Other dragons, their fliers killed by an enemy’s stick, either flew off at random or, mad with battle, struck out at friends and foes alike.

In what seemed the twinkling of an eye, the Forthwegian dragon-swarm was shattered. The remnant not sent spinning to their doom or flying wild without a man to guide them fled back toward Forthweg. They might fight another day. Against overwhelming odds, they would not fight above this field. Inside half an hour, Algarve, not Forthweg, ruled the skies.

Beocca made a rumbling noise, deep in his throat. “Now we’re in for it,” he said. Leofsig could only nod. The same thought, in the same words, had gone through his mind, too.

Most of the dragons that had driven off the Forthwegian swarm had flown without eggs, making them faster and more maneuverable in the air. Now still more flew in from the direction of Gozzo. Some of their fliers released their eggs from on high, as was the usual Forthwegian practice—the usual practice everywhere, so far as Leofsig knew.

But the enemy, with Algarvian panache, had also found a new way. Some of the Algarvian fliers made their dragons stoop on the Forthwegian forces below like a falcon stooping on a mouse. They loosed the eggs the dragons carried at what seemed hardly more than treetop height, then pulled out of their dives and flew away, no doubt laughing at their foes’ discomfiture.

One of them, off to Leofsig’s right, misjudged his dive and smashed into the ground. The egg he carried erupted, searing flier and dragon both in its burst of flame. “Serves you right!” Leofsig shouted, though the flier was far beyond hearing. But the Algarvian’s swooping comrades kept on, placing their eggs far more precisely than did those who did not dive; they tore terrible holes in the Forthwegians’ ranks.

“Forward!” an officer shouted. Leofsig heard him through stunned and battered ears. “We must go forward, for the honor of King Penda and of Forthweg!”

Forward Leofsig stumbled. Around him, men raised a cheer. After a moment, he joined it. Turning to Beocca, he said, “Once we close with the Algarvians, we’ll crush them.”

“Aye, belike,” Beocca answered, “if there are any of us left to do the closing.”

As if to underscore that, more eggs started falling among the advancing Forthwegians. Not all of them—not even most of them—came from the dragons overhead. The army had come into range of the egg-tossers outside Gozzo. Dragons carried larger eggs than the tossers flung, but could not carry nearly so many; Leofsig, head down and hunched forward as if walking into a windstorm, trudged past a broken-backed unicorn, one side of its body all over burns, that dragged itself along on its forelegs and screamed like a woman.

Forthwegian egg-tossers answered the rain of fire as best they could. But they’d had trouble keeping up with the rest of the army: horse-drawn wheeled tossers clogged roads and moved slowly going crosscountry, while the retreating Algarvians had sabotaged ley lines as they fell back. Forthwegian mages had reenergized some, but far from all. And, to make matters worse, the diving dragons paid special attention to the egg-tossers that were on the field.

Up ahead, Forthwegian cavalry was skirmishing with Algarvian troopers on horses and unicorns. Leofsig cheered when a Forthwegian officer’s white unicorn gored an enemy horseman out of the saddle. He squatted down behind a bush and blazed at the Algarvian cavalry. The range was long, and he could not be sure his was the beam that did the job, but he thought he knocked a couple of redheads out of the saddle.

And then, when he blazed, no beam shot from the business end of the stick. He looked around for a supply cart, spied none, and then looked around for a casualty. On this field, casualties were all too easy to find. Leofsig scurried over to a Forthwegian who would never need his stick again. He snatched up the stick and dashed back to cover. An Algarvian beam drew a brown line in the grass ahead of him, but did not sear his flesh.

As more Forthwegian footsoldiers came forward to add their numbers to those of the cavalry, the Algarvian horsemen and unicorn riders began to fall back. Leofsig grunted in somber satisfaction as he advanced toward a large grove of orange trees. This skirmish, though bigger than most, fit the pattern of the fights that had followed Forthweg’s invasion of Algarve. The Algarvians might have won the battle in the air, but they kept on yielding ground even so.

Under the shiny, dark green leaves of the orange trees, something stirred. Leofsig was too far away to blaze at the motion, too far away even to identify what caused it till a great force of behemoths came lumbering out of the grove. Their armor glittered in the sun. Each great beast bore several riders. Some behemoths had sticks larger and heavier and stronger than a man could carry strapped on to their backs. Others carried egg-tossers instead.

Forthweg used behemoths to help break into positions infantry could not take unaided, parceling the animals out along the whole broad fighting line. Leofsig had never seen so many all gathered together before. He did not like the look of them. He liked that look even less when they lowered their heads, pointing their great horns toward the Forthwegian force, and lumbered forward. They moved slowly at first, but soon built up speed.

They smashed through the Forthwegian cavalry as if it hadn’t been there, trampling down horses and unicorns. As they charged, the crews of soldiers on their backs blazed and flung eggs, spreading havoc far and wide. The behemoths were hard to bring down. Their armor warded them against most blazes, and, while they were moving, the men on their backs—who, Leofsig saw, were also armored—were next to impossible to pick off.

The cavalry, or as much of it as could, fled before them, as the Forthwegian dragons had fled before those of Algarve. The Algarvian dragons now redoubled their attacks against the Forthwegians on the ground as the behemoths broke in among them. Leofsig blazed at the warriors aboard the closest one—blazed and missed. An egg burst close by him, knocking him off his feet and scraping his face against the dirt.

He scrambled up again. Algarvian footsoldiers were advancing now, rushing toward the great hole the behemoths had torn in the Forthwegian line. He saw an officer close by—not a man he knew, but an officer. “What do we do, sir?”

“What do we do?” the captain echoed. He looked and sounded stunned, bewildered. “We fall back—what else can we do? They’ve beaten us here, the bastards. We have to be able to try to fight them again, though how we’re supposed to fight this—” Shaking his head, he stumbled off toward the west, toward Forthweg. Numbly, Leofsig followed.

Without false modesty, Marshal Rathar knew he was the second most powerful personage in Unkerlant. None of the dukes and barons and counts could come close to matching the authority of the man who headed King Swemmel’s armies. None of the courtiers at Cottbus was his equal, either, and none of them had made the king believe Rathar a traitor, though many had tried.

Aye, below Swemmel he was supreme. Envy filled men’s eyes as he marched through the fortresslike palace on the high ground at the heart of the capital. The green sash stretching diagonally across his rock-gray tunic proclaimed his rank to any who did not recognize his hard, stern features. Women the world called beautiful called those features handsome. He could have had many of them, including some whose courtier husbands sought to bring him down. Had he been able to judge with certainty which of them wanted him for himself, as opposed to for his rank, he might have enjoyed himself more.

Or he might not have. Enjoyment, as most men understood it, he did not find particularly enjoyable. And he knew a secret no one else did, though some of his own chief underlings and some of King Swemmel’s other ministers might have suspected. He could have told the secret without danger. But he knew no one would believe him, and so kept silent. Silence suited his nature anyhow.

Before he went in to confer with his sovereign, he unbuckled his sword and set it in a rack in the anteroom outside the audience chamber. King Swemmel’s guards then searched him, as thoroughly and intimately as if he’d been taken captive. Had he been a woman, matrons would have done the same.

He felt no humiliation. The guards were doing their duty. He would have been angry—and King Swemmel angrier—had they let him go through unchallenged. “Pass on, sir,” one of them said at length.

Rathar spent another moment adjusting his tunic, then strode into the audience chamber. In the presence of the king of Unkerlant, his stern reserve crumbled. “Your Majesty!” he cried. “I rejoice to be allowed to come into your presence!” He cast himself down on his hands and knees, knocking his forehead against the strip of green carpet that led to the throne on which King Swemmel sat.

Any chair on which Swemmel sat was by definition a throne, since it contained the king’s fundament. This one, while gilded, was far less spectacular than the bejeweled magnificence of the one of the Grand Hall of Kings (Rathar reckoned that one insufferably gaudy, another secret he held close).

“Rise, Marshal,” Swemmel said. His voice was rather high and thin. Rathar got to his feet and honored the king yet again, this time with a low bow. Swemmel was in his late forties, a few years younger than his marshal. For an Unkerlanter’s, his features were long and lean and angular; his hairline, which retreated toward the crown of his head, accentuated that impression.

What hair he had left was dark—these days, probably dyed to stay so. But for that, he looked more like an Algarvian than a typical Unkerlanter. The first kings in Unkerlant, down in what was now the Duchy of Grelz, had been of Algarvic blood. Algarvic bandits, most likely, the marshal thought. But those dynasties were long extinct, often at one another’s hands. And Swemmel was an Unkerlanter through and through—he just didn’t look like one.

Rathar shook his head, clearing away irrelevancies. He couldn’t afford them, not dealing with his sovereign. “How may I serve you, your Majesty?” he asked.

Swemmel folded his arms across his chest. His robe was gorgeous with cloth-of-gold. Pearls and emeralds and rubies caught the light and winked at Rathar one after another as the king moved. “You know we have concluded a truce with Arpad of Gyongyos,” Swemmel said. The we was purely royal—the king had done it on his own.

“Aye, your Majesty, I know that,” Rathar said. Swemmel had fought a savage little war with the Gongs over territory that, in the marshal’s view, wasn’t worth having in the first place. He’d fought it with great determination, as if the rocks and ice in the far west, land only a mountain ape could love, were stuffed to bursting with rich farms and quicksilver mines. And then, after all the lives and treasure spent, he’d thrown over the war with no gains to speak of. Swemmel was a law unto himself.

He said, “We have found another employment for our soldiers, one that suits us better.”

“And that is, your Majesty?” Rathar asked cautiously. It might have been anything from starting another war to helping with the harvest to gathering seashells by the shore. With Swemmel, there was no way to tell beforehand.

“Gyongyos is far from the only realm that wronged us during our recent difficulties,” Swemmel said, adding with a scowl, “Had the nursemaids been efficient, Kyot would have known from birth we were the one destined for greatness. His destiny would have been the headsman’s axe either way, but he would have spared the kingdom much turmoil had he recognized it sooner.”

“Aye, your Majesty,” Rathar said. He had no way of knowing whether Swemmel or Kyot was the elder of the twins born to their mother. He’d joined the one army rather than the other because Swemmel’s impressers passed through his village before Kyot’s could get to it. He’d been an officer within months, and a colonel by the time the Twinkings War ended.

What would he be now, had Kyot dragged him into the fight instead? Dead, most likely, in one unpleasant way or another.

Again, he cleared might-have-beens from his mind. Dealing with what was gave him trouble aplenty. “Is it now your will, your Majesty, to turn our might against Zuwayza? The provocations along the border they have offered”—he knew perfectly well that Unkerlant had offered them, but saying so was not done—“give us every reason for punishing them, and—”

Swemmel made a sharp, chopping gesture. Rathar fell silent and bowed his head. He had misread the king, always dangerous to do. Swemmel said, “We can punish the Zuwayzin whenever we like, as we can resume the war with Gyongyos whenever we like. More efficient to strike where the opportunity will not come round again so soon. We aim to lay Forthweg low.”

“Ahh,” Rathar said, and nodded. No one could tell what Swemmel would come up with next. A lot of people had guessed wrong over the years. Not many of them were still breathing. Most of those who did survive were refugees. Anywhere within Unkerlant, Swemmel could—and did—reach.

Not all the king’s notions were good. That was Rathar’s private opinion. He remained safe because it remained private. But when Swemmel’s notions were good, they could be very good indeed.

Rathar’s smile had a predatory edge to it, as it often did. “What pretext shall we offer for stabbing the Forthwegians in the back?”

“Do you really think we need one? We hadn’t intended to bother,” Swemmel said indifferently. “Forthweg, or most of Forthweg, is our domain by right, and stolen away by rebels and traitors.”

Rathar said nothing. He raised an eyebrow and waited. Even such small disagreement with the king might mean his ruin. No one could tell what Swemmel would come up with—in anything.

In a testy voice, Swemmel said, “Oh, very well—if you like. You can dress up a couple of our men in Forthwegian frontier guards’ uniforms and have them blaze a couple of soldiers or inspectors in a border town. We don’t think it even remotely necessary, but if.you will, you may.”

“Thank you, your Majesty,” Rathar said. “Advancing a reason for war is customary, and the one you’ve given will do the job splendidly.” Rathar doubted he would have thought of anything so devious himself. Swemmel did have a gift for double-dealing. His marshal asked, “As we move forward against the Forthwegians”—Rathar had no doubt the Unkerlanters would move forward, not when they were hitting their new foes from behind and by surprise—“shall we move into land that belonged to Algarve before the Six Years’ War?”

“No.” Swemmel shook his head. “In no way do we intend to do that. We expect the Algarvians to take back their old dominions, and we do not wish to give them any excuse to attack our kingdom.”

“Very well, your Majesty,” Rathar said, not showing how relieved he was. This truly did look to be one of Swemmel’s good days, when the king was taking everything into account. Having fought the Algarvians in the Six Years’ War before his regiment had mutinied and he’d gone home, Rathar was less than eager to face the redheads again. He went on, “By the accounts of the battle outside Gozzo, the Algarvians are liable to be invading Forthweg any day themselves.”

“Even so,” King Swemmel said. “Nor do we judge that King Mezentio would halt his forces at the old frontier. Thus, if Unkerlant is to take back what is ours, we must move swiftly. King Mezentio, in our view, will not halt at anything, save where he is compelled.”

“Even by ley-line caravan, transferring our forces from the far western frontier to the border with Gyongyos will take some little while, your Majesty,” Rathar warned. He did not disagree with Swemmel about Mezentio—on the contrary—but did not believe his own sovereign knew where to stop, either: another opinion he held close. “Your Majesty’s wide domains prove your might, but they also make movement slower than it would be otherwise.”

“Waste not a moment.” Anticipation filled Swemmel’s laugh. “Curse us, but we wish we could be a mosquito in Penda’s throne room in Eoforwic, to see his face when he hears Forthweg is invaded from the west. They will have to clean a stain off the throne under him.”

“I obey, your Majesty.” Rathar bowed. “Also, by your leave, I shall send some troops into the desert in the direction of Zuwayza, both to frighten the naked brown men and to mislead the Forthwegians.”

“Aye, you may do that,” King Swemmel said. “We shall be in closest touch with you, ensuring that all motions are carried out with the utmost celerity. In this matter, we shall brook no delay. Do you understand, Marshal?”

“Your Majesty, I do.” Rathar bowed very low. “I obey.”

“Of course you obey,” Swemmel said. “Unfortunate things happen to people who disobey me. Even more unfortunate things happen to their families. Obedience, then, is efficient.” He waved a hand, a brusque Unkerlanter gesture rather than an airy Algarvian one. “Go, and see to it.”

Rathar went down on his hands and knees and knocked his head on the green carpet again. He could feel the fear-sweat on his skin as he did so Swemmel commanded fear both by virtue of his office and by virtue of his person. Swemmel commanded fear—and fear obeyed.

After escaping the audience chamber, Rathar reclaimed his sword from the bowing attendants in the anteroom. His spirit strengthened with every step away from his sovereign he took.

His own aides bowed low and called him lord when he returned to his offices. They hurried to obey the orders he issued, and exclaimed in excitement as they worked. He took a quiet pride in his own competence. But all the while, the secret stayed in the back of his mind: being the second most powerful man in Unkerlant was exactly like being the next greatest whole number before one. Zero he was, and zero he would remain.

Cornelu stood on the pier in Tirgoviste harbor, listening to last-minute orders. Commodore Delfinu sounded serious, even somber: “Do as much damage to the wharves at Feltre as you can, Commander. Do as much as you can, but come home safe. Sibiu has not got so many men that we can afford to spend them lavishly.”

“I understand.” Cornelu bowed to Delfinu, who was not only commodore but also count. “I will do what needs doing, that’s all. The mission is important, else you would not send me on it.”

Delfinu returned the bow, then took Cornelu’s face in his hands and kissed him on both cheeks. “The mission is important. That you return is also important—you will undertake more missions as the war goes on.” Afternoon sun glittered from the six gold stripes on the sleeves of Delfinu’s sea-green uniform tunic and from the gold trim on his kilt. Had Cornelu been in uniform, his tunic sleeves would have borne four stripes each. Instead, he wore a black rubber suit whose only marking was the impress of the five crowns of Sibiu above his heart. A rubber pack thumped on his back.

He walked awkwardly to the edge of the pier; his feet bore rubber paddles that let him swim more swiftly than he could have without them. Waiting in the water for him was a medium-sized dark gray leviathan: the beast was five or six times as long as he was tall, as opposed to the great ones, which might reach twice that size.

One of the leviathan’s small black eyes turned toward him. “Hello, Eforiel,” he said. The leviathan let out a grunting snort and opened a mouth full of long, sharp teeth. They were shaped for catching fish. If they closed on a man, though, she could swallow him in about two bites.

Cornelu slid into the water and grasped the harness wrapped around Eforiel’s body and held in place by the leviathan’s fins. He patted the beast’s smooth skin, whose texture was not much different from that of his own rubber suit. It was not a pat that gave any order, merely one of greeting. He was fond of Eforiel. He’d named her after the first girl he’d bedded, but he was the only one who knew that.

Under Eforiel’s belly, the harness supported several eggs in streamlined cases partly filled with air so as to make them no heavier than a corresponding volume of water. Cornelu bared his teeth in a fierce smile. Before long, he would deliver those eggs to Feltre. He hoped the Algarvians would be glad to have them.

Commodore Delfinu leaned out over the edge of the pier and waved. “Good fortune go with you.”

“For this I thank you, sir,” Cornelu said.

He tapped Eforiel, more firmly than before. The leviathan’s muscles surged under him. With a flick of the tail, Eforiel left Tirgoviste harbor and the five chief islands of Sibiu behind and set out across more than fifty miles of sea for the Algarvian coast.

“Surprise,” Cornelu muttered. He had trouble hearing himself; water kept slapping him in the face. Before he set out, Sibian wizards had set a spell on him that let him get air from water like a fish (actually, the savants insisted the spell worked differently from fishes’ gills, but the effect was the same, and that was what mattered to Cornelu).

Algarvian ships no doubt patrolled the ley lines, to keep the Sibian navy and that of Valmiera from raiding Feltre, which had been by far the most important Algarvian port on the Narrow Sea till King Mezentio got his hands on Bari. The Duchy boasted a couple of excellent harbors. With them under Algarvian rule, containing Mezentio’s fleet got a lot harder.

“But I’m not coming up a ley line,” Cornelu said, and chuckled wetly. Unlike ships, Eforiel did not depend on the earth’s energy matrix to take her from one place to another. She went under her own power, which meant she chose her own path. No one would be looking for her till she’d been there and gone.

That thought had hardly crossed Cornelu’s mind before he got a nasty jolt: a spout rising from the sea a few hundred yards ahead of Eforiel. Had his path, by strangest chance, crossed that of an Algarvian leviathan rider intent on working mischief at Tirgoviste or one of Sibiu’s other harbors?

Then the animal leapt out of the water. Cornelu sighed with relief to see it was only a whale. The leviathan’s cousin was stocky, even chunky, and resembled nothing so much as an overgrown fish with an even more overgrown head. Eforiel and her kin were far slimmer and smaller-skulled, almost serpentlike except for their fins and tail flukes.

“Come on, sweetheart.” He tapped the leviathan again. “Nothing for us to worry about—only one of your poor relations.”

Eforiel snorted again, as if to say she too looked down her pointed nose at whales. Then she swam through a school of mackerel. Cornelu had a hard time keeping her on a straight course and not letting her swim every which way after the fish. She got plenty as things were, but seemed convinced she would have eaten many more if he’d let her go where she wanted.

She could have gone, disobeying his commands, and he would have been able to do nothing about it. She never realized that. She was a well-trained beast, raised from the time she was a calf to do as the small, weak creatures who rode her ordered.

Cornelu’s greatest worry was not her going off in pursuit of mackerel but her diving deep after one. The spell would keep him breathing under water, but a leviathan could dive deeper than a man’s body was designed for, and could rise from the depths so fast that the air in his blood would bubble. Leviathans were made for the sea in a whole host of ways men were not.

After a while, though, the mackerel thinned out, and Eforiel swam steadily on. Once, in the distance, Cornelu caught sight of a ship sliding along a ley line. He could not tell whether it came from Sibiu or Algarve. In the waters where he was then, it might have belonged to either kingdom.

Whosever ship it was, no one aboard noticed him or Eforiel. The two of them did not disturb the ley lines in any way. Had the ancient Kaunians thought of something like this, they might have done it, though they’d known nothing of eggs and lacked the sorcery to keep a man from drowning underwater.

Some few in Sibiu would sooner have joined with Algarve than with the Kaunian-descended kingdoms. Cornelu’s snort sounded very much like Eforiel’s. Some few in Sibiu were fools, as far as he was concerned. A small kingdom joined a large one in much the same way as a leg of mutton joined a man dining off it. And after his repast, only the bones would be left.

No, Valmiera and Jelgava made better allies. If they sat down at the supper table with Sibiu, they thought of the island kingdom as a fellow guest, not as the main course. “If Sibiu sat off the Valmieran coast, things might be different,” Cornelu told the leviathan. “But we don’t. We are where we are, and we can’t do anything about it.”

Eforiel did not argue, a trait Cornelu wished were more common among the people with whom he dealt. He patted the leviathan’s side in approval. And then, as if to prove him right even had Eforiel argued, he spied the southern coast of Algarve. He had to pause to get his bearings. He and Eforiel had come a little too far to the east. The leviathan swam along the coast till in the distance Cornelu spotted the lighthouse outside Feltre harbor.

He let Eforiel rest then. Daylight was fading from the sky. He intended to enter the harbor at night, to make the leviathan as hard to see as he could. She would have to spout every now and then, of course, but in the darkness she would be easy to mistake for a porpoise or dolphin. People had a way of seeing what they wanted to see, what they expected to see. Cornelu smiled. He intended to take full advantage of that.

No lamps began to glow as night fell over Feltre. The town got darker and darker along with the surrounding countryside. Cornelu’s smile got broader. The locals were doing their best to protect Feltre against dragon raids from Sibiu and Valmiera. What helped there, though, would hurt against attack from the sea.

When the night had grown dark enough to suit Cornelu, he took a glass-fronted mask from the pack he wore and slid it on to his face. Then he tapped Eforiel, urging her ahead into the harbor. The leviathan’s tail pumped up and down, up and down, propelling her and the man who rode her forward.

Cornelu slid off her back and clung to the harness from beside her. That way, he would be harder for the Algarvian patrol boats to notice. He knew they had swift little vessels sliding along the ley lines in the sheltered water inside the harbor. Every kingdom protected its ports the same way.

But he had to stick his head out of the water to see where the most valuable targets were berthed, and also to make certain he did not attach an egg to a trading ship from Lagoas or Kuusamo. He wanted to grind his teeth at the arrogance the folk on the great island displayed, assuming no one would dare stop them from trading with Algarve for fear of bringing them into the war on King Mezentio’s side. The trouble was, they were right.

He wished he could spot unquestioned naval vessels, but, save for the flitting patrol boats, he saw none. He did see three large freighters with the rakish lines the Algarvians so loved. They would do: not the haul he’d hoped for, but one that would hurt the enemy. He guided Eforiel up to within a couple of hundred yards of them, then gave her the signal that meant hold still. She lay in the water as if dead, the top of her head awash so she could breathe.

She would be vulnerable if the Algarvian patrol boats spotted her. Cornelu’s command would hold her in place while she should be fleeing. He knew he had to work as fast as he could. Slipping under the water, he detached the four eggs his leviathan had brought to Feltre harbor and swam toward the merchant vessels.

He had to lift his head above the surface a couple of times to get his bearings. Had the Algarvians on those freighters been keeping good watch, they might have spotted him. But they seemed confident nothing could harm them here inside Feltre harbor. Cornelu aimed to show them otherwise.

Everything went as smooth as a caravan down a ley line. He attached one egg to the first merchant ship, two to the second—the largest—and one to the third. The sorcery in the shells would make them burst four hours after they touched iron. By then, he would be long gone. He swam back to Eforiel.

They cleared the harbor even more easily than they had entered. None of the Algarvian patrol boats came near them. Not long after they reached the open sea, the moon rose, spilling pale light over the water. Along with the wheeling stars, it helped Cornelu guide the leviathan across the sea and back to Sibiu. They reached Tirgoviste harbor as the sun was rising once more.

Commodore Delfinu waited on the pier. As soon as the weary Cornelu climbed out of the water, his superior kissed him on both checks. “Magnificently done!” Delfinu exclaimed. “One of those ships was full of eggs itself, and wrecked a good stretch of the harbor when it went up. Our mages have picked up nothing but fury in the Algarvian crystal messages they steal. You are a hero, Cornelu!”

“Sir, I am a tired hero.” Cornelu smothered a yawn.

“Better a tired hero than a dead one,” Delfinu said. “We also sent leviathans to the Barian ports, and have no word of success from them. If they failed they probably did not survive, poor brave men.”

“How strange,” Cornelu said. “The Algarvians hardly kept any sort of watch over the approaches to Feltre. Why should they do any differently at the Barian ports?”

Men going off to war had a sort of glamour to them. So thought Vanai, at any rate. Forthwegians in uniform had seemed quite splendid to her as they tramped east through Oyngestun on their way toward Algarve. Had she seen them in their ordinary tunics, she would not have given them a second glance—unless to make sure they weren’t seeking to molest her.

No such glamour attached itself to men retreating from war. Vanai quickly discovered that, too. Retreating, they did not move in neat columns, all their legs going back and forth together like the oars of a war galley from the Kaunian Empire. They weren’t all nearly identical, with only the occasional blond Kaunian head among the dark Forthwegians distinguishing a few from the rest.

Retreating, men skulked along in small packs, as stray dogs did. Vanai feared they were liable to turn on her, as stray dogs might. They had that look, wild, half fierce, half fearful another rock or another blow from a club might knock them sprawling.

They didn’t look identical any more, either. Their tunics were variously torn and tattered, with spots of dirt and grease and sometimes bloodstains mottling the cloth. Some of them had bandages on arms or legs or head. They were almost uniformly filthy, filthier than the ancient Kaunians Vanai had viewed with Brivibas’s archaeological sorcery. The nose-wrinkling odor that clung to them put her in mind of the farmyard.

Like the rest of the folk of Oyngestun, Forthwegians and Kaunians alike, Vanai did what she could for them, offering bread and sausage and water and, while it lasted, wine. “My thanks, lass,” said a Forthwegian lance-corporal who was well-spoken enough but who hadn’t bathed in a long, long time. He lowered his voice: “You folk here may want to get on the road to Eoforwic. Gromheort’s not going to hold, and if it doesn’t, this wide spot in the road won’t, either.”

He spoke to her as an equal, not looking down his curved nose at her because she was of Kaunian blood. She found even the casual assumption that he was as good as she on the offensive side, but not nearly so much as the leering superiority so many Forthwegians displayed. Because of that, she answered politely enough: “I don’t think you could pry my grandfather out of Oyngestun with a team of mules.”

“What about a team of behemoths?” the Forthwegian soldier demanded. For a moment, naked fear filled his face. “The Algarvians have more of the horrible things than you can shake a stick at, and they hit hard, too. What about a team of dragons? I’ve never imagined so many eggs could fall out of the sky on us.” He gulped the mug of water Vanai had given him dry. She refilled it, and he gulped once more.

“He’s very stubborn,” Vanai said. The lance-corporal finished the second mug of water and shrugged, as if to say it wasn’t his problem. He wiped his mouth on his sleeve, gave the mug back to Vanai with another word of thanks, and trudged off toward the west.

Brivibas came out of the house as Vanai was slicing more bread. “You were unduly familiar with that man, my granddaughter,” he said severely. Reprimands sounded much harsher in Kaunian than in Forthwegian.

Vanai bowed her head. “I am sorry you think so, my grandfather, but he was giving me advice he thought good. I would have been rude to scorn him.”

“Advice he thought good?” Brivibas snorted. “I daresay he was: advice on which haystack to meet him behind, I shouldn’t wonder.”

“No, nothing like that, my grandfather,” Vanai said. “His view is that we might be wise to abandon Oyngestun.”

“Why?” Her grandfather snorted again. “Because staying would mean we had Algarvians lording it over us instead of Forthwegians?” Brivibas set hands on hips, threw back his head, and laughed scornfully. “Why this should make a difference surpasses my poor understanding.”

“But if the fighting goes through here, my grandfather, whoever holds Oyngestun will be lording it over the dead,” Vanai answered.

“And if we flee, the Algarvian dragons will drop eggs on us from above. A house, at least, offers shelter,” Brivibas said. “Besides, I have not yet finished my article refuting Frithstan, and could scarcely carry my research materials and references in a soldierly pack on my back.”

Vanai was sure that was the biggest reason he refused even to think of leaving the village. She also knew argument was useless. If she fled Oyngestun, she would flee without Brivibas. She could not bear that. “Very well, my grandfather,” she said, and bowed her head once more.

Another soldier came up. “Here, sweetheart, you have anything for a hungry man to eat?” he asked, adding, “My belly’s rubbing my backbone.” Wordlessly, Vanai cut him a length of sausage and a chunk of bread. He took them, blew her a kiss, and went on his way munching.

“Disgraceful,” Brivibas said. “Nothing short of disgraceful.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Vanai said judiciously. “I’ve heard ten times worse from the Forthwegian boys in Oyngestun. Twenty times worse—he was just… friendly.”

“Again, unduly familiar is the term you seek,” Brivibas said with pedantic precision. “That the local louts arc more disgusting does not make this trooper anything but disgusting himself. He is bad; they are worse.”

Then a soldier of unmistakable Kaunian blood came by and asked for food and drink. He poured down a mug of water, tore off a big bite of sausage with strong white teeth, and nodded to Vanai. “I thank you, sweetheart,” he said, and walked off toward the west. Vanai glanced over to Brivibas. Her grandfather seemed to be studying the stitching in his shoes.

Two soldiers came running into Oyngestun within a few seconds of each other, one from the north, the other from the south. They both shouted the same phrase: “Behemoths! Algarvian behemoths!” Each of them pointed back the way he had come and added, “They’re over there!”

Shouts of alarm rose from the Forthwegian soldiers. Some dashed off to the north, others to the south, to force open the ring the Algarvians were closing around Gromheort and, incidentally, around Oyngestun. Others, despairing, fled westward, to escape before the ring closed.

Some of the folk of Oyngestun fled with them, bundling belongings and small children into wheelbarrows and handcarts and carriages and clogging the highway so soldiers had trouble moving. Rather more Forthwegians than folk of Kaunian blood ran off in the direction of Eoforwic. As Brivibas had said, Kaunians were under alien rule regardless of whether Forthwegian blue and white or Algarvian green, white, and red flew above Oyngestun.

“Should we not leave, my grandfather?” Vanai asked again. She trotted out the strongest argument she could think of: “How will you be able to go on with your studies in a village full of Algarvian soldiers?”

Brivibas hesitated, then firmly shook his head. “How will I be able to go on with my studies sleeping in the mud by the side of the road?” He stuck out his chin and looked stubborn. “No. It cannot be. Here I stay, come what may.” He looked eastward in defiance.

But then, with a thunder of wings, Algarvian dragons flew by low overhead. A few Forthwegian soldiers blazed at them, but did not seem to bring any down. Flames spurted from the dragons’ jaws as they swooped down on the roadway packed with soldiers and villagers. Screams rose, faint in the distance but hardly less horrifying for that. The breeze from out of the west wafted the stench of burning back into Oyngestun. Some of what burned smelled like wood. Some smelled like roasting meat. It might have made Vanai hungry, had she not known what it was. As things were, it almost made her sick.

More Algarvian dragons fell from the heavens like stones, dropping eggs on the road out of Oyngestun. The bursts smote Vanai’s ears. She brought up her hands to cover them, but that did little good. Even though she could not see most of it, even if she muffled her hearing, she knew what was happening off to the west.

“It is for this that you waved at the Forthwegian dragonfliers when we went to examine the ancient power point, my granddaughter,” Brivibas said. “This is what King Penda sought to visit upon the kingdom of Algarve. Now that he finds it visited upon his own kingdom instead, whom has he to blame?”

Vanai looked for such philosophical detachment inside herself: looked for it and found it not. “These are our neighbors who suffer, my grandfather, our neighbors and some of them folk of our blood.”

“Had they but stayed here rather than foolishly fleeing, they would be safe now,” Brivibas said. “Shall I then praise them for their foolishness, cherish them for their want of wisdom?”

Before Vanai could answer, the first eggs began falling inside Oyngestun. More screams rose, these close and urgent. Algarvian dragons ruled the sky above the village; none painted in Forthwegian colors came flying out of the west to challenge them. More and more eggs fell. “Get down, you lackwits!” a Forthwegian soldier shouted at Vanai and Brivibas.

Before Brivibas could move, a shard of glass or brickwork scored a bleeding line across the back of his hand. He stared at the little wound in astonishment. “Who is the fool now, my grandfather?” Vanai asked, speaking to him with more bitterness than she’d ever used before. “Who now wants wisdom?”

“Get down!” the soldier yelled again.

This time, Brivibas did, though still a beat behind his granddaughter. Cradling the injured hand to his chest, he said, “Who would have imagined, after the Six Years’ War, that folk would be eager for more such catastrophes?” His voice was plaintive and without understanding.

A Forthwegian officer called, “Build the rubble into barricades! If those redheaded whoresons want this place, they’re going to have to pay for it.”

“That’s the spirit!” Vanai shouted in Forthwegian. The officer waved to her and went on directing his men.

In pungently sardonic Kaunian, Brivibas said, “Splendid! Encourage him to endanger our lives as well as his own.” Still angry, Vanai ignored him.

The Forthwegian soldiers briskly went about turning Oyngestun into a strongpoint. They beat back the first Algarvian probe at the town that afternoon. Wounded Algarvians, Vanai discovered, screamed no differently from wounded Kaunians or Forthwegians. But then, toward sunset, the Forthwegian crystallomancer cried in fury and despair. “The Unkerlanters!” he yelled to his commander—and to anyone else who would hear. “The Unkerlanters are pouring over the western border, and there’s no one to stop them!”