Out of the Darkness

I could meet other people who care whether I live or die. After everything she’d been through, that thought struck her as strange. Then she shook her head. The Algarvians had cared whether she lived or died, too. The trouble was, they’d wanted her dead. Hestan and his wife-Elfryth, that was her name-wouldn’t. Presumably, Conberge wouldn’t, either. The same might even hold true for her husband, whose name Vanai couldn’t have remembered had her life depended on it.

She went over and picked up Saxburh and gave her a big, loud, smacking kiss. Saxburh thought that was the funniest thing in the world. Vanai carried the baby to the window. She needed all the sunshine she could find.

A moment later, she pulled back again. If that wasn’t Guthfrith coming up the street.. But it was, and she didn’t want him seeing her up here. Why aren‘t you playing music? she thought angrily. If he walked into this block of flats, her anger was going to turn to fear.

To her relief, he walked past instead. But under the relief, unease remained. She went looking for a leaf of paper with which to answer Hestan. Before too long, civilian ley-line caravans would again be running between Eoforwic and Gromheort. Maybe she would do well to go east just as soon as she could.

Ahead of Leudast, Trapani burned. He could see the capital of Algarve now, see the tall buildings that marked the heart of the great city. Some of them were plainly shorter than they had been before dragons started dropping eggs on them. If they all fell over, Leudast didn’t care.

He just wanted to be there at the end of the fight, when-if-that finally came. The Unkerlanters had fought their way into the suburbs of Trapani. They’d surrounded the city. But the last couple of rings of defenses still lay ahead. So did whatever nasty magecraft the redheads had left.

A storm of eggs fell on the Algarvian positions in front of Leudast’s men. A couple of behemoths lumbered toward them and flung more eggs at whatever the tossers behind the lines hadn’t flattened. Leudast blew a blast from his officer’s whistle. “Forward!” he yelled.

Not all the Algarvians were dead, however much he wished they would have been. They knew everything there was to know about taking shelter. As soon as the Unkerlanters broke cover to rush toward them, they popped up and started blazing. Men in rock-gray tunics fell, some hit, some diving for cover.

“Hands high!” Leudast shouted in Algarvian. “Sticks down!”

An Algarvian emerged from behind a wall. He did have his hands high. Leudast gestured with the business end of his stick. The redhead hurried away. Leudast doubted he was more than fifteen years old. King Mezentio was scraping the bottom of the barrel.

Of course, so was King Swemmel. Some of the men Leudast led had no more years on them than the new captive. Had the Algarvians been strong enough to keep the war going another couple of years, neither they nor the Unkerlanters would have had any men at all left alive.

Seeing that the first redhead who surrendered didn’t get killed out of hand, more of Mezentio’s men-or rather, Mezentio’s boys-came out of hiding with their hands above their heads. Leudast and his countrymen sent them off to the rear, too. But then beams from closer to the center of Trapani knocked down several of the kilted soldiers who were trying to get out of the fight. Leudast dove for cover again, but the diehards up there seemed more interested in blazing Algarvians who yielded than the Unkerlanters who made them give up.

In Swemmel, such men would have served as behind-the-lines inspectors whose job was to get rid of any man seeking to retreat without orders. Leudast had always despised them-despised them and feared them, too. He wasn’t sorry to see the other side also had them. If nothing else, it proved his kingdom wasn’t the only one where such whoresons grew.

Behemoths tossed eggs at the buildings and piles of rubble from which the diehards were blazing. As the Unkerlanter footsoldiers rushed toward the strong-points, the surviving redheads popped out of their holes and blazed away at them, shouting, “Algarve!” and “Mezentio!”

The fight didn’t last long. Not all that many Algarvians were stubborn enough to fight so fiercely for a cause now hopeless, and Swemmel’s men were there in large numbers. But the Algarvians who did fight refused to take a step back, dying in place instead. And they made the Unkerlanters pay full price- pay more than full price-for digging them out.

More Algarvian soldiers did give up once the knot of diehards was gone: fear of them had kept others fighting. But Mezentio’s soldiers had turned a park and a few nearby houses into a strongpoint. They had some egg-tossers there, and a behemoth mounting a heavy stick that took advantage of the rubble to blaze from cover again and again, knocking over several Unkerlanter beasts.