Darkness Descending

“My lord Marshal, get out while you can,” the young captain called to Rathar. “We’ll hold them off here while you get away.” A cheer rose from the Unkerlanter line. One of the troopers had been lucky enough to blaze a behemoth in the eye. As the beast toppled, it crushed a couple of the Algarvians who’d been riding it.

Rathar realized the captain was right. If he was going to get out, he had to do it now. He saluted the soldiers who would cover his retreat, then remounted and rode off toward the west. A couple of Algarvian behemoth crews lobbed eggs after him. They burst close enough to frighten his horse, but not close enough to knock it over.

More Algarvian dragons flew overhead. Again, they had the sky to themselves. They did not bother with a lone man on horseback, but saved their attention for larger groups of soldiers and horses and unicorns. Rathar had seen the gruesome results of that tactic on the ride up from Wirdum. Now, as he retreated along with the mass of Unkerlanter soldiery, he saw those results again, rather fresher this time.

On came the Algarvians behind him. All through their fights against earlier foes, they’d advanced as smoothly as a ley-line caravan. Nothing he’d seen here made it look as if things would be any different--till he thought of that young captain. And there, ahead of him, another officer was shouting at the men around him to form up for another rear-guard action. The men obeyed, too, though they must have known they were unlikely to last long.

This far south, darkness came late. A little bit further on toward summer and it would hardly have come at all. When at last twilight deepened, Marshal Rathar lay down in a hole in the ground and slept like a worn animal. The Algarvians hadn’t come far enough to scoop him up before he woke. Nor, for a wonder, had anyone stolen his horse, which he’d tied to a bush close by. He rode west again.

General Ortwin greeted him with a cry of glad surprise when he rode up to the headquarters. “Powers above be praised you’re here, my lord Marshal,” the general said. “We’ve got to pull back soon--can’t hold here much longer with the redheads over the Klagen; I told you that already--and you’re urgently ordered back to Cottbus.”

“What?” Rathar said irritably. “Why?” Only too late did he wonder if he really wanted to know.

Want to or not, he found out. “I’ll tell you why,” Ortwin said. “The Gongs have stabbed us in the back, that’s why. They’ve started up the war in the far west again.”

Two

After so long on the island of Obuda, the Ilszang Mountains, the borderland between Gyongyos on the one hand and Unkerlant on the other, seemed almost like home to Istvan. As a matter of fact, the valley where he’d been born and raised lay only a couple of hundred miles northwest of the hillside path along which he marched now. He scratched at his long, thick, tawny beard. Stars above! He could even think about going home on leave, something unimaginable out in the middle of the vast Bothnian Ocean.

“Come on, you mangy sons of goats,” he called to the men in his squad. “The stars have never once looked down on such a pack of lazy wastrels as you.”

“Have a heart, Sergeant,” Szonyi said. “Back on Obuda, you were a common soldier yourself, you know.”

Istvan raised a hand to brush its back against the single white hashmark embroidered on his collar tab. Sure enough, on Obuda he’d hated Sergeant Jokai’s petty tyranny. He still wasn’t so harsh as Jokai had been, but now, with rank of his own bestowed on him for good service, he better understood why Jokai had acted as he did. “The boot was on the wrong foot then,” he answered. “It’s on the right one these days--so step lively.”

“I don’t know why you’re worrying, Sergeant.” That was scrawny, bespectacled Kun, still as argumentative, as fussily precise, as he had been back on the island. His wide wave almost knocked Istvan off the path and down the hillside. “I don’t think there are any Unkerlanters for miles around.”

“I’m worrying because worrying is my job,” Istvan told him. “And that’s why we’re moving forward so easy, too: because the lousy goat-eaters have their hands full way off in the east, I mean. Pick up your clumsy feet, like I told Szonyi. Let’s grab with both hands while we can.”

Not even the former mage’s apprentice had a good comeback for that. On he tramped, with Istvan, with the rest of the squad, with the rest of the company, with the rest of the regiment, with the baggage train of horses and mules. Istvan wished there were a ley line anywhere close by. But ley lines were few and far between in this stars-forsaken country, country so little traveled that wizards surely hadn’t yet mapped all the ones there were.

Szonyi grinned at Kun, and at the other troopers in the squad from the coastal lowlands or from the Balaton Islands off the coast. “Even if there aren’t any Unkerlanters around here, you’ve got to look sharp. Otherwise, a mountain ape’ll sneak down, tuck you under his arm, and walk off with you.”