Through the Darkness

Twenty

Have you ever smashed in a viper’s head, Tewfik, and then watched it die?” Hajjaj asked.

“Oh, aye, your Excellency-a couple of times, as a matter of fact,” his majordomo answered. “I wouldn’t have lived to get all these white hairs if I hadn’t, especially once: cursed thing was coiled up in my hat.”

The Zuwayzi foreign minister nodded. “All right. You’ll know what I’m talking about. The snake thrashes and thrashes, for what seems like forever. If you get too close, or if you poke it with your finger, you’re liable to get bitten no matter how well you’ve smashed it. Am I right or am I wrong?”

“Oh, you’re right, lad, no doubt about it,” Tewfik said. “That almost happened to me, matter of fact. I was a young man, and not so very patient.”

Tewfik was close to twenty years older than Hajjaj, who had trouble imagining him as a young man. Nodding again, Hajjaj said, “The point is, though, once its head is smashed in, it will die, regardless of how much it thrashes and even if it manages to get in a bite or two.”

“That’s so, your Excellency.” Tewfik cocked his head to one side and studied Hajjaj. “You’re not just talking about vipers, are you?”

“What? You accuse me of allegory?” Hajjaj laughed, but not for long. “No, I’m not just talking about vipers. I’m talking about the Algarvian army down in Sulingen, or what’s left of it.”

“Ah.” Tewfik weighed that. “News from those parts isn’t good, I will say.”

“News from those parts could hardly be worse,” Hajjaj answered. To his majordomo and to his senior wife, he could speak freely. With everyone else, even with King Shazli, he guarded his words. “The Algarvians will soon be crushed. They cannot help being crushed.”

“And what will that do to the course of the war?” Tewfik asked. He had not spent upwards of half a century as majordomo to a leading Zuwayzi house without acquiring a good deal of knowledge and without getting a feel for which questions were the important ones.

No question, right then, was more important for Zuwayza-for the whole of Derlavai, come to that, but Hajjaj naturally put his own kingdom first. “It means the Algarvians are going to have a demon of a time knocking Unkerlant out of the war now,” he answered. “And if they don’t. .”

“If they don’t, Swemmel’s men are going to do some knocking of their own,” Tewfik predicted. He needed no magecraft to see what lay ahead there.

“How right you are,” Hajjaj said. “And how very much I wish you were wrong.”

“What will you do, your Excellency?” Tewfik asked. “I know you will do something to keep us safe.”

Everyone in Zuwayza knew Hajjaj would do some such thing. Hajjaj only wished he knew it himself, or had some idea of where such an escape might lie. He understood why his countrymen relied on him. He had, after all, been the kingdom’s foreign minister throughout its independent history.

“Sometimes,” he said with a sigh, “life offers a choice between good and better. More often, it offers a choice between good and bad. And sometimes the only choice one has is between bad and worse. I fear we are in one of those times now.”

“You’ll lead us through it, lad,” Tewfik said confidently. “I know you will. You got the Unkerlanter garrison out of Bishah, after all. If you can do that, you can do anything.”

In the chaos that followed the Six Years’ War, Hajjaj had indeed persuaded the Unkerlanter officer in charge of Bishah to leave the city in the hands of its own people, who’d promptly raised Shazli’s father to the throne of a newly free Zuwayza. But that case wasn’t comparable to this one. The Unkerlanters had been eager to go so they could throw themselves into the Twinkings War then engulfing their whole vast kingdom. These days, Hajjaj had no such convenient levers with which to manipulate affairs. He saw that only too clearly. Why couldn’t anyone else see it at all?

Eager to escape Tewfik’s unbridled optimism, he said, “I am going down into Bishah. Please have my carriage readied as soon as may be.”

“Of course.” The majordomo gave him a creaking bow. “You will want to be close to the news as it comes in.”

“So I will,” Hajjaj agreed. Some folk down in the city knew better than to think him a master mage of foreign affairs. His mouth twisted. He wished King Shazli were one of those people.

Since it hadn’t rained for a few days-even in winter, rain around Bishah was only intermittent-the road had firmed up. The journey down to the city, in fact, struck Hajjaj as quite pleasant. The road wasn’t dusty, as it always was in summer, and the rains that had fallen made long-dormant plants spring up all over, so the hillsides were green with occasional speckles of orange or red or blue flowers. Bees buzzed everywhere.

Down at the palace, people buzzed everywhere. Hajjaj was not unduly surprised when his secretary said, “Marquis Balastro craves an audience at your earliest convenience, your Excellency.”

“Tell him he may come, Qutuz,” Hajjaj answered. “I will be interested to hear how he turns this latest disaster into a triumph of Algarvian arms.”

“I wish he could, your Excellency,” Qutuz said, and Hajjaj had to nod.

A couple of hour later, the Zuwayzi foreign minister greeted King Mezen-tio’s envoy in Bishah. “You have terrible taste in clothes, your Excellency,” Balastro said.

“Considering how seldom I wear them, that should hardly surprise you,” Hajjaj replied. Qutuz brought in tea and wine and cakes then. Hajjaj didn’t use the refreshments to string things out to the degree he sometimes had; he wanted to find out what was in Balastro’s mind. After hurrying through the ritual sips and nibbles, he asked, “And how fare things with you and your kingdom?”

“We’re making the Unkerlanters pay a fearful price for Sulingen,” Balastro said. Hajjaj inclined his head without answering. The Algarvians hadn’t come to Sulingen for that purpose. And Balastro admitted as much: “It’s not the way we would have had things turn out there, which I can hardly deny. We’ll hit Swemmel more hard licks yet, see if we don’t.”

“May it be so,” Hajjaj murmured. Algarve made an imperious, demanding, unpleasant ally. But if the Unkerlanters took the bit firmly between their teeth, who could guess what they’d do to Algarve.. and to Zuwayza?

Then, to Hajjaj’s surprise, Balastro said, “But that isn’t what I came to discuss with you today.”

“No?” Hajjaj said. “Tell me what is in your thoughts, by all means do.” If he wouldn’t have to listen to Balastro haranguing him about how Algarvian victory was just around the corner despite whatever misfortunes the redheads had suffered at the moment, he would face anything else with heightened equanimity.

Leaning forward a little, Balastro said, “And so I shall, your Excellency. You’ve taxed my kingdom for being first to use certain strong sorceries in the Derlavaian War, is it not so?”

Hajjaj had never before heard multiple murder mentioned so delicately. He almost twitted Balastro about that, but held back. All he said was, “Aye, I have taxed you about it, and with reason, I think. Why do you mention it now?”

“Because my kingdom’s mages tell me that, down in Kuusamo or Lagoas, our foes have done something even more vicious,” Balastro answered.

“They do not even know just where?” Hajjaj asked, and Balastro shook his head. Hajjaj went on, “Do they know just what?” The Algarvian minister shook his head again. Hajjaj stared at him in some exasperation. “Then why should I not believe you are weaving this from whole cloth for no other reason than to make me happier with you and more inflamed against your enemies?”

“Because, if the reports I get from Trapani are anywhere close to true, half the mages in Algarve are tearing their hair out, trying to figure out what in blazes the islanders have gone and done,” Balastro answered.

Hajjaj studied him. He didn’t think Balastro was lying, though the Algarvian minister wouldn’t have let an untruth or six stop him from doing what he judged would serve his kingdom best. Hajjaj asked, “Do your mages think they’ll be able to learn?”

“How should I know?” Balastro returned. “They’ve got a war to fight, too; they can’t very well go haring after everything anybody else does. But this was big enough to set them in a tizzy over it, and I figured you ought to know.”

By which he surely meant he had instructions from Trapani to let Hajjaj know. The Zuwayzi foreign minister said, “I shall consult with my own kingdom’s mages. Depending on what they say, I may or may not have more questions for you.”

“All right, your Excellency.” Balastro got up from the nest of cushions he’d made for himself on the floor of Hajjaj’s office. Hajjaj rose, too. They exchanged bows. Balastro went on, “I’ve come to tell you what I had to tell you, so now I’ll be on my way.” He bowed again and left.

He hadn’t come to talk about the military situation or the politics that sprang from it. He’d come to talk about this Lagoan or Kuusaman magecraft, whatever it was. Isn‘t that interesting? Hajjaj thought. If Balastro had some ulterior motive, he was putting a lot of art and effort into keeping it hidden.

Before Hajjaj could do more than scrawl a note to himself to check with some leading Zuwayzi mages, Qutuz came into his office. His secretary, for once, looked quite humanly astonished. “Well?” Hajjaj said. “Whatever it is, you’d better tell me.”

“I just had delivered to me a letter from Hadadezer of Ortah, requesting a few minutes of your time this afternoon,” Qutuz replied.

“That is something out of the ordinary,” Hajjaj agreed. “Of course I will see the Ortaho minister. How else am I to satisfy my own curiosity? Hadadezer has been minister to Zuwayza for twenty years, and I am not sure I have seen him twenty times in all those years. And I can count the times he has sought an audience on the fingers of one hand.”

“Some kingdoms are lucky in their geography,” Qutuz observed, to which Hajjaj could only nod. Ortah lay between Algarve and Unkerlant, but its mountains and the swamps surrounding them had always made it impossible to invade and overrun. Thanks to them, the Ortahoin had dwelt there undisturbed since before the days of the Kaunian Empire.

Hadadezer came at precisely the appointed hour. He had a white beard that rode high on his cheeks and white hair that came down low on his forehead. Some folk wondered if the Ortahoin were kin to the Ice People. Ethnography, though, would have to wait. After a polite exchange of greetings, Hajjaj spoke in Algarvian: “How may I serve you, your Excellency?”

“I would ask a question,” Hadadezer answered in the same language. Hajjaj nodded. The Ortaho said, “My sovereign, King Ahinadab, sees war all around him. With Algarve in retreat, he sees war coming toward him. It is a very great war. We have not got much skill in diplomacy. For long and long, we have had no need of such. Now.. How do we keep the flames of war from setting our homeland ablaze? You are a most able diplomatist. Perhaps you will be able to tell me.”

“Oh, my dear fellow!” Hajjaj exclaimed. “Oh, my dear, dear fellow! If I knew the answer, I would tell my own king first, and after that would gladly share what I knew with you-and with the whole world. You’ve stayed neutral so far. Perhaps you can keep it up. And if not… if not, your Excellency, be as strong as you can, for strength will let you save more than pity ever would.”

Hadadezer bowed. “That is good advice. I shall convey it to King Ahinadab.” He paused and sighed. “Do not be offended, but I wish you had something better still to offer.”

“Offended? Not I, sir,” Hajjaj replied. “I wish I did, too.”

Leudast had seen the Algarvians running strong, like the floods that sent rivers out of their banks. They’d rolled west across Unkerlant two summers in a row. He’d seen them in stubborn defense, damming up the counterflow of Swemmel’s men the winter before.

Now, here in Sulingen, he saw them in despair. They had to know they were doomed. A man hardly needed the acumen of Marshal Rathar to see they were trapped. Their comrades farther north had tried to reach them, tried and failed. The redheads in Sulingen had tried to break out, tried and failed. Algarvians dragons had tried to bring them the supplies they needed, tried and failed. No real hope remained for them.

Yet they fought on. And they still fought as only Algarvians seemed to know how to fight. Every one of Mezentio’s troopers had his own all but invisible hiding place. Every one of them had comrades sited so they could get in a good blaze at anybody who attacked him. When they died, they died very hard.

But die they did. Leudast stirred a corpse with his foot. The Algarvian, his coppery whiskers all awry, had the look of a scrawny red fox that had been torn by a wolf. “Tough whoresons,” Leudast remarked. The admiration in his voice was grudging, but it was real.

“Aye, they are.” Young Lieutenant Recared spoke with more wonder than admiration. “When we trained, they said the Algarvians weren’t so much.” He shook his head. “I can’t imagine why they told us that.”

Probably didn’t want to make you afraid too soon, Leudast thought. But he didn’t say it out loud. Recared had learned fast, and made a pretty good officer now. If he hadn’t learned fast, he would have been dead by now. Even if he had learned fast, he might well have died. The war didn’t always respect such learning. Leudast had seen that too many times.

He pointed ahead, toward the ruins of what had been a ley-line caravan depot. “A good many of the buggers holed up there,” he remarked. “If we can drive ‘em out of that strongpoint, they’ll have to pull back to right and left, too.”

Recared nodded. “Making their perimeter shrink is a good thing. But by the powers above, Sergeant-the price we’ll pay!” He wasn’t hardened yet; his face still showed a good deal of what he thought. “The poor men!”

Leudast nodded. The regiment had taken a beating cutting off the Algarvians in Sulingen, and another one fighting its way into the city. “We’ve got to make them pay, sir. That’s the idea, you know.”

“Oh, aye.” Recared nodded, but reluctantly. He, too, pointed ahead: carefully, so as not to expose himself to snipers. “Not much cover up ahead there, though. The boys would take a horrible pounding before they could close with the redheads.”

“Can we get ‘em to toss eggs at the ruins while we move forward?” Leudast asked. “That would make the Algarvians keep their heads down, anyhow.”

“Let me go back and ask our brigadier,” Recared said. “You’re right, Sergeant-it would be splendid if we could.” He hurried off through the maze of holes and trenches that led to brigade headquarters.

When he returned, he was grinning from ear to ear. “You got the egg-tossers, sir?” Leudast asked eagerly.

“No, but I got something about as good,” Recared answered. “A penal battalion just came to the front, and they’ll throw it in right here.”

“Ah,” Leudast said. “Good enough. Better than good enough, in fact. Those poor buggers aren’t going to be around at the end of the war any which way. Might as well get something out of them while they’re being used up. Then we go in after they’ve taken the edge off the Algarvians?”

“That’s how I see it,” Recared said. “They’ll start the job, and we’ll finish it.”

The men from the penal battalion started coming up to the front line a little before sunset. Almost all of them were leaner than the poor starveling Algarvian corpse Leudast had kicked. Some wore rags. Some wore the fine cloaks and greatcoats that went only to high-ranking officers, though none showed rank badges. Some wore what had been fine cloaks and greatcoats now reduced to rags. All of them stared ahead in glum, grim silence. An invisible wall seemed to separate them from the ordinary Algarvian soldiers.

And that invisible wall wasn’t the only thing separating them from their countrymen. Coming up to the front with them were a couple of sections of well-fed, well-clothed guards. If the men of the penal battalion tried to go back instead of forward when ordered into action, the guards were there to take care of what the enemy would not.

In a low voice, Recared asked, “Does anybody ever come out of a penal battalion?”

“I think so,” Leudast said. “Fight well enough long enough and you might even get your old rank back. That’s what they say, anyhow. Of course, if you’re the kind of officer who runs away or does something else to get yourself stuck in a penal battalion, how likely are you to fight that well?” He was only a sergeant. If he ran away, they wouldn’t bother putting him in one of those battalions. They’d just blaze him and get on with the war.

It started to snow again during the night. Dawn was a dark gray, uncertain thing. The men of the penal battalion passed flasks back and forth. Leudast had drunk some courage before going into action a good many times himself. Over in the ruins of the caravan depot, what did the Algarvians have to drink?

Whistles shrilled. The broken officers who made up the penal battalion sprang to their feet and grabbed their sticks. Without a word, without a sound but those of their felt boots dully thudding on snow, they swarmed toward the Algarvian strongpoint. No cries of “Urra!”-no cries of “Swemmel!” either. It was the eeriest attack Leudast had ever seen.

Perhaps because it went in so silently, it surprised the redheads more than an ordinary assault might have. The men of the penal battalion got a long way toward the caravan depot before they started to fall. Peering out ever so cautiously from behind what had been an ornamental limestone carving, Leudast watched the Unkerlanters who didn’t fall get in among the Algarvians in the wreckage of the depot. Glancing over toward Recared, he asked, “Now, sir?”

“Not quite yet,” Recared answered. “We’ll let them develop the enemy a little more first, I think.”

Tactically, that made good sense. It was hard on the penal battalion, though. Leudast considered, then shrugged. The battalion was there to be expended. It existed for no other real reason; officers restored to their posts were lucky accidents, nothing more.

They waited. The Algarvians in the ruins of the caravan depot put up a ferocious fight. Leudast had expected nothing less. The Algarvians always fought hard. Here they had even less choice than usual. Those ruins were a linchpin for their line in the northern part of Sulingen. If Mezentio’s men lost them, they would have to pull back on a broad front, and they couldn’t afford that.

Leudast pointed. “Do you see, sir? There, by the wreckage of the tower. That’s one of their strongpoints. The attack’s bogged down in front of it.”

“You’re right, Sergeant,” Recared agreed. “If it weren’t for the penal battalion, we would have found that out the hard way.”

The penal battalion was finding out the hard way. But Leudast understood what Recared meant. Someone always got it in the neck. If you were an Unkerlanter, you knew that. Better somebody else than you. One of these days, your turn would come, no matter what you did.

“Now that we know where they’re strongest, we ought to take another blaze at getting some egg-tossers to give ‘em what for,” Leudast said.

“That’s what the penal battalion’s supposed to do,” Recared said, but then he relented. “You’ve got a point. I’ll send a runner back. We’ll see what we can manage.”

Before long, eggs did start falling on that Algarvian concentration. Unkerlant had plenty of egg-tossers around Sulingen. King Swemmel’s men still didn’t maneuver them as smartly as the redheads, but this wasn’t a war of quick movement, not here it wasn’t. All they had to do was pound at the Algarvians, and pound they did.

After a while, Recared said, “I think we’re about ready now.” There was a little doubt in his mind, as if he was asking Leudast’s opinion. Leudast nodded. He thought they were ready, too. Recared get to his feet and blew a long, ear-splitting blast on his whistle. “Forward, lads!” he shouted, though he was more nearly a lad than most of his soldiers. “Forward for King Swemmel! Urra!” He was brave. Leudast had already seen that. He charged toward the caravan depot at the head of his regiment.

“Urra!” Leudast yelled as he too broke from cover. “King Swemmel! Urra!”

A few eggs burst among the Unkerlanters as they surged forward, but only a few. The Algarvians didn’t have many tossers left, and didn’t have many eggs left to fling from them, either. They’d also buried eggs in front of their position. The penal battalion had discovered that, the hard way. So did a couple of luckless men from Recared’s regiment. Dowsers could have found paths past the buried eggs, but dowsers, like trained men of all sort, were in short supply in Unkerlant. King Swemmel had plenty of footsoldiers, though.

Leudast dashed past dead men from the penal battalion, then flung himself down behind a pile of bricks. Up ahead, the Algarvians were still shouting Mezentio’s name: they had spunk and to spare. But there weren’t enough of them, and they didn’t have enough of anything but spunk. One by one, their battle cries fell silent. A beam struck snow off to Leudast’s left, raising a puff of steam. He scrambled to the right and then, bent low at the waist, forward again.

A man from the penal battalion and an Algarvian thrashed on the ground in a death struggle: two fierce, skinny, miserable creatures, both intent on living, neither with much of anything left to live for. Which one had suffered worse in this war? Leudast wouldn’t have wanted to guess. He knew which one was on his side, though. As soon as he got the chance, he blazed the Algarvian.

“Thank you, friend,” the Unkerlanter from the penal battalion said in educated accents that belied his pinched, half-starved face and his fiercely glittering eyes. He cut the dead redhead’s belt pouch open with his knife, exclaimed in triumph, and stuffed the little chunk of sausage he found there into his mouth. Only after he’d gulped it down did he seem to remember Leudast again. “You have no idea how good that is.”

Leudast started to say he’d been hungry, but something in the other man’s expression warned he’d get only scornful laughter if he did. He contented himself with, “Let’s go get some more of those buggers, then.” A moment later, he did something smarter: he gave the soldier from the penal battalion some of the black bread he had in his own belt pouch. He felt ashamed that he hadn’t thought of it right away.

The other Unkerlanter made it disappear faster than a man should have been able to. Then he warned, “Don’t let an inspector see you do anything like that. You could end up in my outfit, easy as you please.”

Shouts-Unkerlanter shouts-rose in triumph. “We’ve broken them!” Leudast exclaimed.

“Aye, so we have.” The man from the penal battalion sounded pleased, but far from overjoyed. “It only means they’ll kill me somewhere else.” With a nod to Leudast, he ran forward, looking for the place.

Cornelu lay asleep in the Sibian exiles’ barracks next to the harbor in Setubal. The woman he was dreaming about was the most exciting he’d ever imagined; he was sure of it. One moment, she had Costache’s face; the next, Janira’s. He was about to do what he most wanted to do when Algarvian eggs began bursting not far away.

He tried to incorporate those roars into his dream, but had no luck. His eyes came open. He sat up on his cot. The rest of the men from the Sibian navy who’d escaped when the Algarvians overran their island kingdom were likewise sitting up and cursing. “What good does this do them?” somebody said. “They can’t send over enough dragons to make it likely they’ll do Lagoas any real harm.”

“It ruins our sleep,” Cornelu said. As far as he was concerned, that was crime enough at the moment.

“It gives them something to print in their news sheets, too,” somebody else added. “Something besides Sulingen, I mean.”

“My guess is, they stopped printing much about Sulingen a while ago,” Cornelu said. “They don’t like to let bad news out.”

“Poor dears,” the other Sibian said. “Powers above grant them blank news sheets for years to come, then.”

Several Sibians laughed, Cornelu among them. Before Cornelu could say anything more-he would cheerfully go on casting scorn on the Algarvians as long as his body held breath-an egg burst all too close to the barracks. Windows blew in, shards of glass hissing through the air like hundreds of flying knives of all sizes. One sliced the left sleeve of Cornelu’s tunic-and, he realized a moment later, sliced his arm as well. He cursed.

His comrades were cursing, too. Some, those hurt worse than he, were shrieking. He opened and closed his left fist. When he discovered he could do that, he tore a strip from his blanket and bound up his bleeding arm. Then he set about helping his more badly wounded countrymen.

Another egg burst almost on top of the spot where the first one had landed. Hardly any more glass flew; the first egg had taken out most of what was in the windows. But the barracks building itself groaned and shuddered like an old tree in a strong wind. “We’d better get out!” Cornelu shouted. “I don’t know if it’s going to stay up.”

No one argued with him. More than one man shouted, “Aye!” in various tones of agreement and alarm. Cornelu and another officer grabbed a bleeding comrade and half dragged, half carried him out of the barracks. The other officer set to work bandaging the bleeding man. Cornelu ran back into the building to get someone else out.

He had some light by which to see; the Algarvian eggs raining down on Setubal had started fires here and there. He grabbed a man who lay groaning by his cot and dragged him toward the door.

Beams from heavy sticks shot up into the night, seeking the enemy dragons overhead. Cornelu cursed again, this time at how little good they were doing. Mezentio hadn’t sent so many dragons south across the Strait of Valmiera for a long time. Eggs kept falling, some farther away, some closer. Cornelu looked up into the night sky and shook his fist at the foes he could not see. As if in answer, an egg landed on the barracks he’d left only a minute or so before.

The burst of sorcerous energy knocked him off his feet-knocked him head over heels, in fact. A brick shattered on the cobbles inches from his face, spraying chips into his eyes. He rubbed at them till his vision cleared. But he hardly needed to see to know he would never sleep in that barracks hall again. He could feel the heat of flames on his back. The building was burning, burning. As the fire grew, he dragged the wounded man farther from the wreckage.

Lagoans ran this way and that, intent on their own concerns: the barracks was far from the only building afire along the waterfront. Some of Cornelu’s comrades who’d learned more Lagoan in exile than he called out to the locals. After a while, the Lagoans deigned to notice them. Parties of stretcher bearers came and took the men with the worst hurts off to the surgeons and mages who might help them. That done, though, the Lagoans left the exiles alone once more.

“If the barracks weren’t burning down, we’d be freezing, and would they care?” a Sibian demanded indignantly. “Not even a little, they wouldn’t. They toss us at the Algarvians like so many eggs, and it doesn’t matter to them if we burst.”

“Oh, it matters a little,” Cornelu said. “It would even matter to King Swemmel. After all, it’s more efficient when we die while we’re killing Algarvians and after we’ve killed some than here, uselessly, in Setubal.”

Then another Lagoan shouted something incomprehensible at them in his own language. “What’s that you say?” somebody shouted back in Sibian.

The fellow took it for Algarvian; Lagoans had a demon of a time telling the two languages apart. But when he answered, also in Algarvian, the Sibian exiles managed to understand him: “Bucket brigade!”

From then till dawn, Cornelu passed buckets back and forth. He stood between one of his countrymen and a Lagoan with whom he had trouble speaking. The work needed no words at all, though. He just sent full buckets one way and empties the other.

Thick clouds spoiled the sunrise. Only very gradually did Cornelu realize he was seeing by more than the light of the flames the bucket brigade battled. Not long after he did so, a hard, cold rain began to fall. The weary men raised a weary cheer: the rain would do more to stifle the fires than anything they could achieve on their own. Before long, a Lagoan officer blew his whistle and shouted a word even Cornelu understood: “Dismissed!”

He didn’t realize how truly worn he was till he stopped working. He turned his face up to the rain and let it wash sweat and soot from his forehead and cheeks. That felt good-powers above, it felt wonderful-for a little while. Then he realized he was shivering. And no wonder: all he had on were the light tunic and kilt he’d worn to bed, and the rain-which was starting to have pea-sized hail mixed in with it-had already got them good and soaked.

The Lagoan who’d labored beside him for so long put a hand on his shoulder and said, “You-come with me. Food.” He rubbed his belly. “Tea.” He mimed bringing a mug up to his face. “Hot. Good. Come.”

Cornelu understood all that. Every single word of it sounded wonderful. “Aye,” he said, in the best Lagoan he had.

His new friend led him to a mess hall. Most of the men in there were dripping, and more than a few of them wore only nightclothes. Roaring fires heated the hall past what would have been comfortable most of the time, but it felt splendid now. Cornelu queued up for big, salty fried herrings; for buttery oatmeal nearly as thick and sticky as wet cement; and for steaming tea so full of honey, the spoon almost stood up without touching the side of the mug.

He ate as intently as he ever had while in the woodcutting gang back on his home island of Tirgoviste. Herring wasn’t reckoned a breakfast food in Sibiu, but he wouldn’t have complained under any circumstances, not as hungry as he was-and he’d been doing so much hard work for so long, the meal scarcely seemed like breakfast anyhow. He went back for seconds.

So did the Lagoan who’d brought him here. The fellow wore a petty officer’s uniform and had the breezy efficiency-the real sort, not the artificial kind Swemmel tried to instill into the Unkerlanters-of a good underofficer in any navy. He spent a lot of time cursing the Algarvians: not so much for being the enemy in general or even for what they’d just done to Setubal as for costing him half a night’s sleep. After rubbing his belly again, this time in real satisfaction, he glanced across the table at Cornelu and remarked, “Your clothes-fftt!”

That last wasn’t a word in any language Cornelu knew, but he understood it. He liked the sound of it, too. “Aye,” he said. “Clothes fftt.”

The Lagoan got to his feet. “Come with me,” he said again, in the tones of a man giving an order. He couldn’t have known Cornelu was a commander-- clothes went a long way toward making a man, or, in the case of sodden night-clothes, toward unmaking him. On the other hand, he might not have cared had he known; some petty officers got so used to bullying sailors around that they bullied their superiors, too.

Inside of another half hour, he had Cornelu outfitted in a Lagoan sailor’s uniform, complete with a heavy coat and a broad-brimmed hat to shed the rain. “I thank you,” Cornelu said in Sibian; the phrased remained similar in all the Algarvic languages.

“It’s nothing,” the petty officer answered, catching his drift. Then he said something Cornelu couldn’t precisely follow, but it included Mezentio’s name and several obscenities and vulgarities. Having taken care of Cornelu, the Lagoan went on his way.

Cornelu walked back to the crumpled Sibian barracks. The sour smell of wet smoke still hung in the air despite the rain. But Cornelu’s uniform, all his effects, the whole building, were indeed fftt. A Sibian lieutenant still wearing nothing but soaked nightclothes gave him a look full of lacerating jealousy and said, “You seem to have landed on your feet better than anyone, sir. As far as I can see, we’re on our own till the Lagoans get around to providing for us.”

“All right.” That was what Cornelu had hoped to hear. “I’m going into town, then. I want to make sure some friends are all right.” Janira mattered to him. Balio, her father, mattered to him because he mattered to her.

After only a few strides toward the closest ley-line caravan stop, Cornelu paused and cursed himself for a fool. How could he get aboard without money? But when he jammed his hands into the pockets of his new navy coat, he found coins in one of them-plenty of silver, he discovered, for the fare and for a good meal afterwards. Who’d put it there? The petty officer? The quarter-master who’d given him the coat? He had no way of knowing. He did know he’d have a harder time looking down his nose at Lagoans from now on.

He got out of the caravan car at the stop near the Grand Hall of the Lagoan Guild of Mages. He’d passed several new stretches of wreckage on the way there; the Algarvians had hit Setubal hard. But Cornelu knew it could have been worse-Mezentio’s men could have massacred Kaunians instead of coming over and risking themselves.

People were standing around in the street near Balio’s cafe. Cornelu didn’t think that a good sign. He pushed his way through the crowd. A couple of men sent him resentful looks, but gave way when they saw him in Lagoan naval uniform. He grimaced when he got to see the cafe. It was a burnt-out ruin. An egg had burst a few doors down, burst and started a fire.

And there stood Balio, staring at the ruins of his business. “I’m glad to see you well,” Cornelu told him, and then asked the really important question: “Is Janira all right?”

“Aye.” Balio nodded vaguely. “She’s around somewhere. Powers above only know how we’ll make a living now, though.” He cursed the Algarvians in Lagoan and Sibian both. Cornelu joined him. He’d been cursing the Algarvians for years. He expected to go on doing it for years more. And now he had a brand new reason.

News sheets in Eoforwic had stopped talking about the battle for Sulingen. From that, Vanai concluded it was going badly for the Algarvians. The quieter they got, she assumed, the more they had to hide. And the more they had to hide, the better she liked it. “May they all fall,” she said savagely at breakfast one morning.

“Aye, and take all their puppets down with them,” Ealstan agreed. “Powers below eat King Mezentio, powers below eat all his soldiers, and powers below eat Plegmund’s Brigade, starting with my accursed cousin.”

“If the Algarvians are ruined, everyone who follows them will be ruined, too,” Vanai said. She understood why Ealstan hated Plegmund’s Brigade as he did. But one thing her grandfather had taught her that still seemed good was to search for root causes first. The Algarvians had caused Forthweg’s misery. Plegmund’s Brigade was only a symptom of it.

Ealstan thought about arguing with her: she could see it on his face. Instead, he took a last bite of bread and gulped down the rough red wine in his mug. Pausing only to give her a kiss that landed half on her mouth, half on her cheek, he headed for the door, saying, “It’s not worth the quarrel, and I haven’t got time for one anyhow. I’m off to see if I can help some men pay the redheads a little less.”

“That’s worth doing,” Vanai said. Her husband nodded and left.

My husband, Vanai thought. It still bemused her. It would have horrified Brivibas: not just because Ealstan was a Forthwegian, though that alone would have been plenty, but because of the mean little ceremony with which they’d been formally joined. And what her grandfather would have thought about the two woman-loving matrons who’d checked the hair on her secret place. . She laughed, imagining the look on his face if she ever told him about that.

She knew exactly what had let her get through it without smacking them. It was simple: the Algarvians had already shown her worse. What Ealstan wished on his cousin, she wished on Major Spinello.

For a long time after she’d had to start giving herself to him, she’d doubted she would ever feel clean again. Falling in love with Ealstan had gone a long way toward curing her there. But, after the two of them came to Eoforwic, she’d had trouble feeling clean in the literal sense of the word. Washing with a pitcher and basin here in the flat wasn’t a patch even on Oyngestun’s public bath. And Oyngestun was only a village. Eoforwic had the finest baths in all of Forthweg.

Up till very recently, of course, they’d done her no good at all. She hadn’t been able to show her face in public, let alone her body. Now, though, she looked like a Fortliwegian to everyone around her as long as her magic held. When she looked in a mirror, she saw her familiar Kaunian features framed by much less familiar dark hair. What she saw didn’t matter, so long as no one else could see it.

She went through the spell again, to make sure it wouldn’t wear off while she was out and about in Eoforwic. Then she put some coppers in her belt pouch and left the flat. Now that she could head for the public baths, she did, usually every other day. She had trouble thinking of anything she enjoyed more about the freedom she’d sorcerously found.

With a sneer, she walked past the bathhouse closest to her block of flats. Oyngestun’s was better; whoever’d built this one seemed to have thought, Well, it’s plenty good enough for poor people. Here, unlike in Oyngestun, she had other choices.

The bathhouse not far from the farmers’ market was a great deal finer. She strode up the stairs that led to the women’s side, paid her little fee to the bored-looking attendant who sat there with a coin box, and went inside. She stripped off her tunic and gave it and her belt pouch and her shoes to another attendant, who put them on a shelf and handed her a numbered token with which she could claim them when she finished bathing.

A couple of Forthwegian women stripped off as casually as she had. They didn’t give her a second glance, for which she was grateful, but went off chatting with each other. She followed, a little more slowly. In her own eyes, she remained too thin and far too pale to make a proper Forthwegian, and her black bush seemed even more unnatural than the hair on her head. But nobody else could see her fair skin and her pink nipples. Were that untrue, she would have long since been caught.

One of the Forthwegian women slid down into the warm pool. “It’s not what it used to be, is it?” she said to her friend. “Time was when you got in here it didn’t matter how things were outside-you’d be warm. Nowadays…” A curl of her lips said what she thought of nowadays.

Vanai had known warmer pools, too, but this wasn’t so bad. And Eoforwic, like most of Forthweg, had a mild climate even in winter. She was also sure the soap had been finer once upon a time, though that would come later in the bath. It was always harsh and alkaline these days, and varied between a nasty stink and an almost equally nasty, cloying perfume. Today, it was perfumed- Vanai could smell it across the bathhouse. She tried not to notice. That wasn’t too hard. She had plenty of water here, and didn’t need to worry about dripping all over the kitchen floor.

She ducked down under the surface of the warm pool, running her fingers through her hair. When she stood up straight again, the two Forthwegian women in the pool with her were making shocked noises. For a dreadful moment, she feared she’d botched her magecraft and the charm had worn off much too soon. Then she realized the Forthwegians weren’t staring at her but back toward the vestibule. “The nerve!” one of them said.

“The brazen hussies,” the other agreed.

If the two Algarvian women approaching the pool understood Forthwegian, they didn’t show it. Forthwegians-and Kaunians in Forthweg-took nudity in the baths for granted. These women didn’t. They walked-strutted-as if they were on display. . and both of them had a good deal to display, even if the women in the plunge weren’t the ideal audience for their charms. Vanai wondered why they’d come to Eoforwic. Were they officers’ wives? Officers’ mistresses? Wouldn’t Algarvian officers have found new mistresses here?

Whatever they were, they giggled as they slid down into the water. Giggling still, they rubbed each other. That wasn’t the custom in public baths; the Forthwegian women looked scandalized, and hastily got out of the hot pool. Vanai followed. She didn’t want to seem like an abnormal Forthwegian in any way.

Evidently she didn’t, for one of the Forthwegian women turned back to her and said, “Aren’t they disgraceful?” She kept her voice down, but not well enough; if the Algarvian women did know Forthwegian, they would have had no trouble catching the disparaging comment. Vanai just nodded. That wouldn’t get her into any trouble unless the redheads chanced to look straight at her.

She and the Forthwegian women jumped into the cold plunge together. They all yipped. The warm pool had been only indifferently warm; the plunge was anything but indifferently cold. Some people stayed out of the warm pool altogether, and did all their soaking in the cold plunge. Vanai thought such folk were out of their minds. The two Forthwegians must have agreed with her, for they scrambled out as fast as she did. All over gooseflesh, they hurried toward the soaping area.

Up close, the scent of the soap was even more irksome than it had been at a distance. Vanai had a couple of little scrapes; the suds stung fiercely. She was lathering her legs when a splash and a couple of small shrieks came from the cold plunge. “Maybe they didn’t expect that,” she remarked.

“Hope not,” one of the Forthwegian women said. “Serve ‘em right if they didn’t.”

“You don’t suppose …” The other Forthwegian paused with left leg sudsy and right leg not. “You don’t suppose they’ll put soap on each other, too?”

After her unfortunate experience with the Forthwegian matrons, Vanai had no interest in learning more about such things. She finished soaping herself in a hurry. Then she grabbed a bucket with a perforated bottom, filled it in a great tub of lukewarm water, and hung it on a hook that came down from the ceiling. She stood under it to rinse the soap off her skin and out of her hair.

Rubbing at her hair after that first bucket went dry, she discovered she still had some suds in it. With a small sigh, she took the bucket off the hook, refilled it, and got back under it once more.

She was still under it when the two Algarvian women, soapy all over, came up and got their own buckets. The Forthwegian women had already gone off to swaddle themselves in towels. One of the Algarvians nodded to Vanai and asked, “Do you speak this language?” in pretty good Kaunian.

“No,” Vanai answered, more sharply than she’d intended-were they trying to entrap her? She wouldn’t fall for that.

Both redheads shrugged and went back to getting themselves clean. As they filled buckets and stood under them, they talked back and forth in Algarvian. Thanks to her grandfather, Vanai could read it after a fashion, but she didn’t speak much and didn’t understand much when she heard it spoken. But she did hear the word Kaunians several times, mostly in the mouth of the woman who’d asked her if she spoke the classical tongue.

The other one pointed to Vanai and said something more in Algarvian. Vanai thought she knew what it meant: something like, Why expect her to speak it? They’re all gone. If she let on she had any idea what they were saying, it would only land her in trouble. She knew that, and kept rinsing her hair. What she wanted to do was scream at the Algarvians, or, better, bash out their brains with a bucket.

Had only one of them been there with her, she might have tried that. She didn’t think she could kill two, no matter how enraged she was. Both Algarvian women laughed. Why? Because they thought all the Kaunians in Forthweg were dead and gone? She wouldn’t have been surprised. But they were wrong, curse them, wrong. She wanted to scream that, too, wanted to but didn’t. She only finished rinsing and went off to get a towel of her own.

She dried quickly, threw the towel into a wickerwork hamper, and handed her claim token back to the woman in charge of bathers’ clothes. The women gave back her garments, which she put on as quickly as she could. She didn’t want to be there when the Algarvians came out to dress.

But she was; they’d done a faster job of rinsing than she had. Out they came, outwardly conforming to the Forthwegian custom of nudity but in truth flouting it by flaunting their bodies instead of taking no special notice of them in the baths. Even the attendant noticed, and she was as bovine a woman as Vanai had ever seen. She scowled and snapped at the redheads as she passed them their tunics and kilts. They only laughed, as if to say nothing a mere Forthwegian did could matter to them.

And the worst of it was… in ordinary times, as far as the title could be applied to the war, nothing the Forthwegians did would or could let them rise up in numbers that would make them more than a nuisance to Mezentio’s men and women.

In ordinary times. What if times weren’t ordinary? What if the Unkerlanters ran the redheads out of Sulingen? What if the Algarvians didn’t look so much like winning the war? Would the Forthwegians decide they weren’t going to stay quiet under the Algarvian yoke forever? If they did decide that, how much trouble could they cause the redheads?

Vanai didn’t know. She hoped she would get the chance to find out. Meanwhile, she’d go right on cursing the Algarvians.

“Another winter,” Istvan said. Another self-evident truth, too: what else would this be, with snow filtering down through the trees of the trackless, apparently endless forest of western Unkerlant?

Corporal Kun said, “And where would we be if this weren’t another winter? Up among the stars with the other spirits of the dead, that’s where.”

Taking a sergeant’s privilege, Istvan said, “Oh, shut up.” Kun sent him a wounded look; he didn’t usually take such privileges with a man beside whom he’d fought for years. Istvan refused to let that stare bother him. He knew what he’d meant. Since Kun didn’t, he set it out in large characters: “Another winter here. Another winter away from my home valley, away from my clansfolk. I haven’t even had leave in most of a year.”

He held his hands out to the little fire around which he and his men sat, trying to get some warmth back into them. Then he looked down at his palms. The scar from the wound Captain Tivadar had given him remained fresh, easy to see, despite calluses and dirt. He didn’t say anything about it; not all the soldiers crouched around the fire had eaten goat’s flesh with him.

If he came home to the little village of Kunhegyes on leave, his family wouldn’t know what the scar meant. They would welcome him into their bosom with glad cries and open arms, as they had the last time he’d got away from the war for a little while. They would have no idea he was, at best, only marginally purified from the uncleanness into which he’d fallen. If he didn’t tell them, they would never learn. He could live out his life in the valley with no one the wiser.

He looked at the scar again. Whether his kinsfolk knew or not, he would know. He could imagine the knowledge eating away at him, day by day, month by month, year by year. He could imagine himself screaming out the truth one day, just because he couldn’t stand to hold it in any more. What he knew counted for more than what anyone else knew.

Szonyi spat into the flames. His saliva sizzled for a moment and then was gone. He said, “We’re a warrior race. We’re here because we’re a warrior race. Sooner or later, we’ll win because we’re a warrior race. We’re too stubborn to quit, by the stars.”

“Aye,” Istvan said. In a way, that was the other side of the coin to his own thoughts. Gyongyosians did what they did because of what was inside of them, not because of any outside force.

And then Kun spat, too, in utter contempt. “Oh, aye, that’s why we’ll be marching into Cottbus week after next,” he said.

“There aren’t enough of us here,” Istvan protested.

“More of us than there are Unkerlanters,” the onetime mage’s apprentice said.

“Well, but…” Istvan’s wave encompassed the forest, or as much of it as remained visible through the drifting, swirling snow. “I’d call this place the arsehole of the world, but you need to know where your arsehole is once or twice a day. Nobody’s needed to know where these woods are since the stars made them.”

“We wouldn’t have come as far as we have if we weren’t a warrior race,” Szonyi said stubbornly. “Some of us still believe in things, we do. Next thing you know, some of us will say we’ve stopped believing in the stars.” He stared a challenge back at Kun.

But Istvan took him up on it: “No, nobody is going to say anything like that. I didn’t mean anything like that, and Kun didn’t mean anything like that, either.” If Kun did mean something like that, Istvan didn’t want to hear about it, and he didn’t want anybody else to hear about it. He went on, “Even a warrior can have enough of war for a while.”

“I suppose so.” Szonyi’s voice was grudging.

“If you don’t see that that’s true, you’re a bigger twit than anyone gives you credit for,” Kun said. “We’d be fighting among ourselves all the time if it weren’t.”

“Enough,” Istvan said, and used his own rank to make sure it was enough. Still, as far as he was concerned, Kun proved he came from a warrior race by the way he stood up to Szonyi. The hulking common soldier made two of the corporal, but Kun didn’t back away from him.

Off in the distance, a couple of eggs burst. Everyone’s head came up. “Are those ours or theirs?” somebody asked.

“We’ll find out,” Kun said, “probably the hard way.”

Istvan wanted to contradict him, but found he couldn’t. He did say, “Those are more likely to be theirs than ours. The Unkerlanters have an easier time bringing egg-tossers into the forest across the flatlands than we do hauling them over the cursed mountains.” That made it harder for the Gyongyosians to show their full mettle as a warrior race, too, though Istvan didn’t suppose Kun would ever admit as much.

More eggs burst, these closer to the fire. Istvan grimaced, then shoveled snow over the flames. Nobody said anything. The soldiers all looked to their sticks. Some of them took positions behind trees, from which they’d be able to blaze eastward if the Unkerlanters really did have an attack laid on.

Along with the thunder of bursting eggs-rather muffled by the snow- came shouts. Istvan couldn’t tell what language they were in, but they kept getting closer, too. He found a place behind a spruce of his own. Trouble was heading this way. He didn’t know who’d started it, but he doubted whether that mattered.

Out of the snow came the first Unkerlanters, white smocks over their tunics and snowshoes on their feet. Istvan didn’t think they knew he and his men were in place waiting for them. From what he’d heard, the Unkerlanters had the edge against the Algarvians in the far east during the winter. That wasn’t so here. He and his fellow Gyongyosians knew as much about snow and ice and fighting in them as any Unkerlanter ever born.

He waited till the first Unkerlanter was almost on top of him before he started blazing. That way, he made sure he couldn’t miss, and that the blowing snow wouldn’t attenuate his beam. The Unkerlanter gave a startled grunt and toppled.

The rest of the men who fought for Swemmel stopped in alarm. One of them pointed west past Istvan, deeper into the woods. They thought the beam had come from that direction. When no more of them fell for a little while, they started moving forward again.

This time, Istvan wasn’t the only one who blazed at them. Down they went, one after another, like oxen slaughtered for a noble’s wedding feast. A few of them let out howls of pain as they fell. Most simply died, death taking them by surprise. Istvan had the feeling he’d just disrupted the advance of at least a company.

After a bit, the Unkerlanters decided they wanted no part of the position he and his squad were defending. They fell back. He decided not to stay around and try to hold in place. “Back,” he ordered urgently. “Next things they’ll do is, they’ll hit this place with everything they’ve got.”

As he knew winter, so he knew the Unkerlanters. They didn’t withdraw from a position because they’d lost hope of taking it. They withdrew because they wanted to hit it a different, harder, blow. Runners-well, waddlers in this country-were surely going back to their officers with the bad news. Some of those officers would have crystallomancers. Before too long, fury would fall on the fighters who’d presumed to slow Swemmel’s soldiers.

And so, for now, retreat. It galled Istvan; his instinct, like the Unkerlanters’, was to go forward first. But he didn’t know how many of the foe pressed against him. And so he fell back a quarter of a mile. Having advanced through that stretch of the wood, he knew what was there. Before long, he and his men took a position as strong as the one they’d just left.

They’d hardly settled in when eggs started falling on the little clearing they’d abandoned. “The sergeant knows what’s what,” Szonyi said cheerfully. If nothing had happened to that clearing, Istvan would have lost respect. As things were, he gained it. Being no less selfish than any other man, he liked this better.

After a while, silence returned up ahead. “What now, Sergeant?” Kun asked. The question was half serious, half challenging-a demand for Istvan to prove he was as smart as Szonyi said he was.

“Now we go forward again,” Istvan answered at once: both the warrior’s response and, he was sure, the right tactical choice. “They’ll advance again, and they’ll be sure we’re all dead. Here’s our chance to show ‘em they’re wrong. But we’ve got to move fast.”

Moving fast was easy enough till they got near the clearing they’d left. The eggs had knocked down a good many trees, and the Gyongyosians had to scramble over or around them to get close to their previous position.

Istvan didn’t mind, or not very much. “Look at all the fine hiding places they’ve handed us, boys,” he said. “Snuggle down, and then we’ll blaze them right out of their boots.”

“That wouldn’t be bad,” Szonyi said. “Those big felt ones they wear hold the cold out better than anything we issue.” Having seen a fair number of Gyongyosians wearing felt boots whose original owners didn’t need them anymore, Istvan could hardly disagree.

“Here they come!” Kun snarled. Maybe he’d used his little magic for detecting people moving toward him. Maybe he just had good ears and- thanks to his spectacles-sharp eyes.

The Unkerlanters came on openly, confidently-they seemed sure their eggs had cleaned up whatever enemies might be waiting for them. Fools, Istvan thought. They had to be new men, men without much experience in battle. Veterans would have taken less for granted. Some fools lived and learned and became veterans. Istvan was determined that these men wouldn’t.

Again, he chose to wait till the Unkerlanters were almost on top of him before he started blazing. Again, his men imitated him. Again, they worked a frightful slaughter on Swemmel’s troopers. This time, it was too much for the Unkerlanters to bear. They fled, leaving dead and wounded behind them.

“Boots,” Szonyi said happily, and proceeded to strip them off the corpse closest to him and put them on his own feet.

“Those are too big,” Istvan said.

“They’re supposed to be big,” Szonyi insisted. “That way, you can stuff them full of cloth or whatever you’ve got so they keep your feet warm even better.” But whenever he moved, the boots tried to slide off. At last, cursing, he kicked them away and allowed, “Well, maybe they are a little too big.”

“Let me try them,” Istvan said. “I think my feet are bigger than yours.” He sat down on a tree trunk, pulled off his own, Gyongyosian-issue, boots and put on the ones the dead Unkerlanter had worn. They fit him better than they had Szonyi, and they were warmer and more flexible than the ones he’d had on. He walked a few steps. “I’ll keep ‘em.”

“Let me see if I can find a pair to fit me,” Kun said. He had plenty of Unkerlanter corpses from which to choose; Swemmel’s men had paid a heavy price for gaining not an inch of ground. Before long, all the Gyongyosians who wanted felt boots had pairs to suit them. Istvan nodded in no small satisfaction. If you had to fight a war, this was the way to go about it.

Sometimes, things ended as they began. These days, pinned back against the Wolter in the many times ruined wreckage of Sulingen, Trasone had plenty of chances to think about that. He turned to Sergeant Panfilo, who crouched beside him in the remains of what had been an ironworker’s hut. “The last time we were here,” he said, “we were facing south, not north.”

“Aye, so we were,” Panfilo answered. “And we were wondering how we were going to pry the stinking Unkerlanters out of those bloody big ironworks that’re behind us now. Before long, they’ll be wondering how to pry us out.”

“Only thing I’m wondering right now is where in blazes I’m going to get some food,” Trasone said, and Panfilo nodded. Neither of them had eaten for a while. Only a handful of Algarvian dragons made it down to Sulingen these days, and the Algarvian pocket in the city had grown so small, a lot of the supplies they dropped ended up in the enemy’s hands.

In the trenches less than a furlong away, the Unkerlanters had their peckers up. They knew they were going to overwhelm the Algarvians here as surely as Trasone did. Every so often, they would burst into hoarse song. The only thing they didn’t do was stick their heads up out of the trenches to jeer at the Algarvians who had come so far … but not quite far enough. The ones who tried that wouldn’t live long enough to celebrate their victory.

Just as Trasone had learned a few words and phrases of Unkerlanter, so some of Swemmel’s mean had picked up a little Algarvian. “Surrender!” one of them shouted now. In a moment, the cry resounded up and down the line: “Surrender! Surrender! Surrender!”

Here and there, Algarvian soldiers yelled back. Their answers were uniformly negative and mostly obscene. “What do you suppose they’d do to us if we were stupid enough to give ourselves up?” Panfilo asked.

“I don’t much want to find out,” Trasone answered. “As long as I have a choice, I’d sooner die quick and clean-if I can, anyhow.”

“I’m with you,” Panfilo said. “They’d have fun, their mages would have fun….” His shiver had nothing to do with the bitterly cold winter day. “No, I’d sooner make ‘em earn it.”

The Unkerlanters were ready to do just that. As if the Algarvians’ refusal to give up angered them, they plastered the front-line trenches with eggs. They had plenty of tossers and plenty of eggs to toss. The Algarvians couldn’t reply in kind; they had to hoard the few eggs left to them for the moments when those eggs would be most desperately needed.

Huddled in the wreckage of the hut, sorcerous energy searing the air not far from him, deadly fragments of metal and wood and stone hissing every which way, Trasone reckoned the present moment quite desperate enough for all ordinary purposes. And then, just when he thought things could grow no worse, somebody behind him called, “We’ve got soup in the pot!”

He groaned. No matter how hungry he was, nothing could make him enthusiastic about what passed for food among the Algarvians in Sulingen these days. Panfilo made a horrible face, too, and asked, “What’s in it?”

“You don’t want to know that,” Trasone exclaimed.

“About what you’d figure,” the soldier at the soup pot answered. “Old bones, a few turnip peelings.” That meant it was a good batch. A lot of the time lately, it hadn’t had any peelings to thicken it. Sometimes it hadn’t had any bones, either, and was only hot water flavored by whatever had stuck to the sides of the pot from the previous batch.

“What kind of bones?” Panfilo persisted. Trasone shook his head. The less he knew about what he poured down his throat, the better. But Panfilo, morbidly or not, was curious: “And how old are they?”

“Whatever we could dig up,” came the reply. “And they’ve been frozen since whatever beasts they belonged to got killed, so what difference does it make? Come back and have some if you want. Otherwise, you can go on starving.”

“We go on starving even if we’ve got the soup, on account of there’s nothing real in it,” Trasone said. Panfilo nodded; he knew that, too. The trooper went on, “Is it any wonder we sneak out and murder the Unkerlanter pickets for the sake of whatever black bread and sausage they’ve got on ‘em?” He sighed. He was on the front line, which meant he was supposed to get a couple of ounces of bread every day. Sometimes he did. More often, he didn’t.

Panfilo said, “I’m going back there. The way my belly’s gnawing my spine, anything is better than nothing.”

“Not with what’ll be in that pot,” Trasone predicted, but his own belly was growling like one of the wolves that prowled the Unkerlanter plains and forests. Cursing the Unkerlanters and his own officers impartially, he crawled after the sergeant. Eggs continued to burst all around. He was, by now, without fear, or nearly so. If one burst on top of him and finished him off, it wouldn’t be finishing much.

Panfilo was already pouring down a mess tin full of soup when Trasone got back to the hole in the ground that housed the cookfire. The sergeant finished, wiped his mouth on a filthy tunic sleeve, and said, “You’re right-it’s pretty bad. I’m still glad I got it.”

Trasone sniffed the pot. The cook hadn’t told all of the truth. Some of the bones in there had had time to start going bad before they froze. Nothing else could have accounted for the faint reek of corruption that reached his nose. But he held out his mess tin, too. If the soup poisoned him, it wouldn’t be poisoning much, either.

As Panfilo had, he gulped the stuff down. It tasted nasty, but maybe not quite so nasty as he’d expected. And there were turnip peelings in there; he actually had to chew a couple of times. The cook hadn’t been lying after all. The peelings might create some small part of the illusion of fullness. And the soup was hot. That, at least, was real.

When he’d emptied the mess tin, he said, “Powers above, that hit the spot. It sure did. Now where’s the sparkling wine and the beautiful broads to go with it?”

“No such thing as beautiful Unkerlanter broads,” the cook said, and Trasone and Panfilo both nodded. That was an article of faith among Algarvian soldiers in the west. It hadn’t kept Trasone from visiting the brothels his superiors set up in Unkerlant, though he’d usually picked Kaunian women when there were any. No brothels in Sulingen. No women at all in Sulingen, unless a few Unkerlanters still survived in hidden cellars.

“Back to our position,” Panfilo said. Trasone nodded. It was no more dangerous there than here.

They hadn’t been back in the ruined hut for long before the barrage of eggs, already heavy, got worse. Through-perhaps around-the bursts, Trasone heard Unkerlanter officers’ whistles shrilling. “They’re coming!” he shouted, and his was far from the only cry going up along the Algarvian line.

And the Unkerlanters were coming, scampering through the wreckage of what had been a quiet riverside city, diving into holes and behind clumps of rubble and then coming out blazing. Some ran bent at the waist, others straight up and down. Trasone blazed at the men who tried to make themselves smaller targets. They were the ones likely to be veterans, the ones likely to be more dangerous if they got in among the Algarvians.

Swemmel’s soldiers tried one of these assaults every few days. Sometimes Mezentio’s men threw them back with heavy losses. Sometimes they got in among the Algarvians and bit off another chunk of Sulingen. At first, Trasone thought this would be another time when the Unkerlanters spent lives and came away with nothing to show for it. They fell in large numbers; every advance they made came over the bodies of their slain. They spent lives the way he spent his money when he got leave.

He didn’t think he’d get much more leave. And he realized things weren’t going so well as he thought when Algarvian egg-tossers went into action over to his right. Unless things went badly, his countrymen hoarded the eggs they had left.

They might as well have hoarded them, for the Unkerlanters broke into the Algarvian trenches despite the pallid answer to their own almost ceaseless barrage. “Urra!” they shouted. “Swemmel!” Now that the fighting was hot again, they stopped asking if the Algarvians wanted to surrender.

“We have to hold them!” Sergeant Panfilo shouted to as many of the men in his squad as might still be alive. “We have to hold them right here. If they break past us and make it to the Wolter, they cut the army in half.”

“Besides,” Trasone added in a low voice, “we haven’t got anywhere to run to anyway.”

“The ironworks,” Panfilo said, but his heart wasn’t in it. A lot of Algarvian soldiers were already holed up there, as they were in the ruins of the massive granary not far away. But even if the front-line soldiers ran back there, how likely were they to make it before the Algarvians rolled over them? Not very, and Trasone and Panfilo both knew as much.

Turning, Trasone blazed at an Unkerlanter coming at him from the east- sure enough, Swemmel’s men had cracked the Algarvian line. The man went down, whether blazed or only diving for cover Trasone didn’t know. The Unkerlanter didn’t blaze back, so maybe Trasone had nailed him. In a brief stretch of quiet, he asked Panfilo, “Remember Tealdo?”

“Aye, poor bugger,” the sergeant answered. “He’s dead a year now-more than that, I suppose. Why’d you think of him all of a sudden?”

“He was in sight of Cottbus when he went down. That’s how close he came. That’s how close we came,” Trasone added, for no Algarvian had got more than a glimpse of the towers of the capital of Unkerlant. “Here, anyway, we got all the way into Sulingen.”

“Aye, we got all the way in,” Panfilo said. “We got all the way in, but we aren’t coming out again.”

Before Trasone could say anything, several squadrons of Unkerlanter dragons flew low over the embattled Algarvians, dropping more eggs on them and burning soldiers with flames all the stronger because they were fueled with quicksilver from the Mamming Hills-quicksilver that had brought the Algarvians to Sulingen, and that Algarve would never use now. Swemmel’s men were getting better at putting the pieces of their attacks together. They weren’t as good as the Algarvians, but they didn’t have to be. They had more margin for error.

A cleverly concealed heavy stick blazed a couple of dragons out of the sky. The Algarvians still had a few fangs left. In the long run, though, what did it matter? It might make the battle last a little longer. It wouldn’t change who won.

“Behemoths!” Panfilo shouted. The yell held no terror, not any more. The Algarvians left alive in Sulingen were beyond that. It was just a warning. Trasone wondered why Panfilo bothered. Nobody could do much about behemoths, not here, not now.

The great armored beasts lumbered forward. Unkerlanter footsoldiers trotted among them. The behemoths’ crews started tossing eggs at the spots where resistance stayed strong.

One flew straight toward Trasone. He watched it rise. He watched it fall. He dove for cover, knowing there was no cover and he was too slow anyhow. The egg burst. A few minutes later, the Unkerlanter behemoths tramped past and over what had been a strongpoint and slogged on toward the Wolter.