Darkness Descending

As black night gave way to gray twilight, the ground shook beneath him. He leaped up, ready to scramble out of the trench for his life if the shaking got worse. It didn’t. Peering over the lip of the trench, he saw purplish flames spurting up from the ground he and his comrades would have to cross. These were Unkerlanter mages plying their trade, not Algarvians. Leudast muttered under his breath, hoping the sacrifice from his countrymen would help the army win victory.

Whistles shrilled, all along the line. Still not officially an officer, Leudast couldn’t add another strident note. Instead, he shouted, “Come on, you buggers! They wanted to quarrel with us, and now they’re going to pay the price.”

“Urra!” his troopers roared as they burst from the sheltering trenches. “Urra! King Swemmel! Swemmel! Urra!”

Yelling himself, Leudast ran forward, too, one tiny drop in a rock-gray wave. However many of their own they’d killed to make the magic against Mezentio’s men, the Unkerlanter mages hadn’t got rid of all Algarvian resistance. Eggs fell among the advancing Unkerlanter troopers, making holes in their lines that reserves had to fill. Redheaded soldiers blazed down Unkerlanters, too.

But, try as they would, they couldn’t stop or even seriously slow King Swemmel’s men. Here and there along the shattered line, an Algarvian trooper would throw up his hands and try to surrender. Sometimes, the redheads managed to do it. Rather more often, they got blazed down.

“Forward!” Leudast shouted to his men, echoing Captain Hawart, who was doing his best to be everywhere at once for his regiment.

Unkerlanter magic had done dreadful things to the Algarvian trenches, so dreadful that Leudast and his countrymen had trouble pushing across the shattered ground. Flames still sullenly flickered every few feet. Resistance from the redheads stayed light.

“This is almost too easy,” Leudast called to Hawart the next time he saw him.

“I like it,” said Alboin, who chanced to be close by.

But Hawart looked worried. “Aye, it is,” he said. “I haven’t seen enough dead Algarvians to satisfy me, nor anything close. Where are they, curse them?”

“Buried when their trenches all caved in?” Leudast suggested.

“I hope so,” the officer answered. “If they aren’t, we’re going to run into them pretty soon, and they won’t be glad to see us.”

“Powers below eat them, we weren’t glad to see them, either,” Leudast said. He ran and scrambled on, wondering how deeply the Algarvians had fortified their positions: there seemed to be no end to trenches and foxholes and barricades.

And then, as Hawart had worried about, the Algarvians started popping up out of holes beyond the reach of the Unkerlanters’ magecraft. After that, nothing was easy anymore.

Along with the rest of his company, Trasone stood at stiff attention in front of the barracks in Aspang. Major Spinello strode down the line with a box of medals. He paused in front of each man to pin one onto him, kiss him on the cheek, and murmur a few words before moving on.

When he got to Trasone, he said, “For making it through this cursed winter,” and presented the decoration. After the ritual kiss that accompanied it, he pinned an identical decoration on Clovisio.

At last, everybody had his medal. Spinello strutted away. Trasone looked down at the decoration. It was stamped with a map of eastern Unkerlant and two words: WINTER WAR. He tapped Sergeant Panfilo on the shoulder. “Isn’t that grand? We’ve all got frozen-meat medals to call our own.”

Panfilo laughed, but not for long. “There’re a lot of dead men only thawing out now,” he said. “If you want to trade places with one of’em, I doubt he’d complain.”

“I like being alive just fine, thanks, Sergeant,” Trasone said. “But twenty years from now I’m going to look at this cursed chunk of polished brass, and my feet’ll start to freeze, and I’ll taste behemoth that’s starting to go bad. Once I get home, that’s the stuff I want to forget, not remember.”

“Now you do, aye,” Panfilo agreed. “But how many times have you listened to veterans of the Six Years’ War going on and on about everything they went through?”

Trasone grunted. That had the unpleasant feel of probability to it. “Good,” he said. “My old man always bored me. Now I’ll have an excuse to bore my kids, if I ever have any.” He glanced west, in the direction of the Unkerlanters who still tossed eggs at Aspang. They wanted to make sure he wouldn’t. So far, they’d had no luck.

When he woke up before dawn the next morning, he thought they’d smuggled more egg-tossers up close enough to strike at Aspang. But the rumbling roar, he discovered, came from the south, not from the west, and, while there were a great many bursts, none seemed close to the city.

“What’s going on?” he asked around a yawn as he got up from his cot. “Are the Unkerlanters kicking up their heels, or have we got something laid on down south?”