Out of the Darkness

Watching behemoths going forward, too, was reassuring. For one thing, they fought vastly better than individual footsoldiers could. For another, they drew blazes from the enemy, who knew how well they fought at least as well as Ealstan did. If the redheads were blazing at behemoths, they weren’t blazing at him.

And redheads blazing there were. Regardless of whether Ealstan thought the Unkerlanter pounding should have killed them all, it hadn’t. They plainly intended to make the attackers pay for every inch of the journey into Gromheort.

Perhaps fifty yards off to Ealstan’s left, a behemoth’s massive foot came down on an egg buried in the ground. The egg burst. An instant later, so did all the smaller eggs the behemoth was carrying. The blast of sorcerous energy knocked Ealstan off his feet and left him half stunned, his ears ringing. When he looked over there, he saw no sign the behemoth or its crew had ever existed except for a crater gouged in the earth.

“Forward!” The shout seemed to come from very far away now. But Ealstan knew what Swemmel’s men would be yelling regardless of how well he heard them. And, again, he went forward. The Algarvians might blaze him if he did. The Unkerlanters would surely blaze him if he didn’t.

An Algarvian-a filthy, scrawny fellow in the rags of a tunic and kilt-threw up his hands and came out of his hole as Ealstan and a couple of Unkerlanters drew near. “I surrender!” he shouted in his own language.

Ealstan’s formal Algarvian was better than his formal Unkerlanter, in which he guessed at the meaning a lot of the time and sometimes guessed wrong. “Keep your hands high and go to the rear,” he told the redhead. “If you are lucky, no one will blaze you.” Mezentio’s trooper knew how lucky he was not to have been blazed down on the spot. Babbling thanks, he hurried off toward whatever captivity might hold for him.

“You really speak some of their language,” an Unkerlanter said admiringly. “It’s not just ‘Hands high!’ and ‘Drop your stick!’ with you.” He brought out the couple of phrases almost any Unkerlanter soldier could say.

Ealstan shrugged. “The Algarvians made me learn it in school.”

“No, no, it’s good you know it,” the soldier in the rock-gray tunic said. “Maybe you can talk more of the whoresons into giving up.” He didn’t want to get blazed, either. The more of Mezentio’s men who surrendered, the fewer who would fight to the end. That made good sense to Ealstan, too.

He didn’t need long to see that this push was going to be different. Before, when the Unkerlanters probed at Gromheort, they’d eased off on running into stiff resistance. Not now. Now, the behemoths pounded Algarvian strongpoints outside the shattered walls. Footsoldiers pushed forward between those strong-points. Mezentio’s men were brave. Ealstan, who hated them as much as any man in Forthweg did, had seen that for himself, both during the dreadful fighting in Eoforwic and in his involuntary stay in King Swemmel’s army. But courage wasn’t going to do them any good, not this time. A starved cat forced to fight a mastiff might be brave, too. Its bravery wouldn’t do it any good: the mastiff would kill it just the same.

As he ran toward a wrecked gate, he wondered how many times he’d come this way before. He knew the one he remembered best: walking back to Gromheort after the first time he’d made love with Vanai. He’d been dazed by joy then. He was dazed now, too, but that was because the buried egg and the load on the behemoth’s back had burst too close to him. The oak grove where he’d lain with her was smashed to kindling; he’d been through it.

Redheads still fought, using the rubble of the wall and the gateway for cover. Beams scorched tracks of black through the grass near Ealstan’s feet. Behemoths started tossing eggs at the gate. Ealstan saw pieces of a soldier fly through the air. A few more eggs bursting by the gateway meant far fewer blazes came back at the onrushing Unkerlanters.

With a whoop, Ealstan scrambled over the gray stones of the wall and into Gromheort. “Home!” he yelled. Then a beam flicked past his ear, so close he smelled lightning in the air. So much for exultation. He threw himself down behind another stone and blazed back.

Nothing was going to come easy. Mezentio’s men had had weeks to fortify Gromheort, and they’d made the most of them. They’d probably used the luckless civilians as laborers. Every street seemed to have a barricade across it every block. Behemoths broke into the city and started knocking down barricades with their egg-tossers, but redheads in the buildings on either side of the street dropped eggs on them from rooftops and upper stories. Ealstan had seen in Eoforwic how expensive street fighting could be.

He’d thought-he’d hoped-he could simply head for the Avenue of Countess Hereswith, where his family lived. Things weren’t so simple. The way Mezentio’s men were fighting, his home might as well have been on the far side of the moon.