Out of the Darkness

With a dismissive gesture, Dagaric said, “A drowning man thrashes his arms and flails. Whoreson still drowns, though. The Algarvians send these stupid spells of theirs at us before they find out what the magic can do, or even if it works at all. No wonder most of it goes sour.”

That made sense-up to a point. “Even the spells that maybe don’t do everything they’re supposed to can still hurt us,” Leudast said. “We’ve seen it.”

“They’d hurt us worse if the redheads really knew what they were doing,” Dagaric said. That made Leudast blink. Like most Unkerlanters, he took it almost for granted that the Algarvians were cleverer than his own folk. They’d proved their wit in Unkerlant too often for him to think anything else. But Dagaric stubbornly plowed ahead: “Think how much trouble they could cause if all their fancy magic really worked. It mostly doesn’t, though, and I’ll tell you why. A couple-three years ago, the redheads figured they could lick us with what they already had, and they didn’t worry about anything else. Then, when they started getting into trouble, that’s when they decided to make the fire under their mages hotter. So they have all these spells that would do this, that, or the other thing-if only they worked right. But they cursed well don’t, and we’ll have licked Algarve before the redheads ever do get ‘em right.”

After Leudast thought that over, he slowly nodded. “The one thing Mezentio’s men always foul up is, they always think they’re smarter than they really are and they can do more than they can really do.”

Dagaric nodded, too, most emphatically. “You’ve got it, Lieutenant. You’ve got it just right, matter of fact. And how fornicating smart does that make them? If they were anywhere near as smart as they want everybody else to think they are, would we be here halfway between the Yaninan border and Trapani? Would the stinking islanders be coming up the Algarvians’ arse from the east?”

“No, sir,” Leudast said. “They made everybody hate ‘em and they made everybody afraid of ‘em and now they’ve made everybody gang up on ‘em, too. You look at it that way, maybe they really aren’t so smart.” He heard the wonder in his own voice. We’re winning the war. We’re not only winning it, we’ve got it almost won. I can’t quite see Trapani from here, but it won’t be long.

He wondered what would happen then. Maybe Swemmel would put everything he could into the war against Gyongyos. Leudast shook his head, marveling. He’d been fighting the Gongs when the Derlavaian War broke out. Maybe things would come full circle, and he’d fight them some more. If Unkerlant went after them now, he thought his kingdom would smash them.

But what then? Suppose Unkerlant didn’t have an enemy left in the world. Suppose he got out of the army. What would I do then? I’ve been fighting for a long time. I hardly know anything else any more.

Go home. I suppose that’s the first thing I have to do. See if anything is left of the village. See if I have any kin left alive. And then. . There was that girl back in Grelz, that Alize. If I can find her again, that might turn into something. I wonder how much different farming is down there. I could find out.

He laughed at himself. A couple of minutes’ thought, and he had the rest of his life neatly laid out. One thing the war had taught him was that plans mostly didn’t work the way people thought they would ahead of time.

Dagaric slapped him on the shoulder, stopping his ley-line caravan of thought. “Things look pretty quiet up here for now,” the regimental commander said. “We can get back to our men.”

“Aye, sir,” Leudast said. They slipped away from the Scamandro’s western bank. As they went off, the loon loosed its mad, laughing call once more. Leudast’s shiver had nothing to do with the chilly weather. Nobody hearing that cry for the first time would think it came from a bird’s throat. That it presaged some nasty Algarvian sorcery still struck him as much more likely.

Sentries challenged them twice on the way back to the Algarvian village in which the regiment was resting. The men weren’t taking victory for granted, which struck Leudast as the best way to insure it. Another officer was heading up to the Scamandro for a look of his own at the enemy.