Out of the Darkness

Might as well be Sulingen, Leudast thought. He’d been through the block-by-block fighting there, perhaps the worst of the whole war. A moment later, he wished the comparison hadn’t occurred to him. He’d been wounded in Sulingen, too. He didn’t want that to happen again. He’d picked up another wound later on, in the Duchy of Grelz. As far as he was concerned, two pale, puckered scars for the sake of his kingdom were quite enough.

Clearing the redheads from their little redoubt took all day. Not till dragons swooped down from above and killed that behemoth did the job get done. Things were easier in that regard here than in Sulingen. The Algarvians had hardly any dragons left now. Back then, Leudast had spent plenty of time cowering in holes in the ground as Algarvian beasts flamed and dropped eggs from above.

Not that holes in the ground were any too pleasant now. Leudast dragged a dead Algarvian out of a good one in the middle of the park and settled down for the night. He’d just gone to sleep when he had to come out of the hole and fight again: using darkness as their cloak, Mezentio’s men made a ferocious counterattack, and almost drove the Unkerlanters from the ground they’d taken. More dragons and behemoths finally threw the redheads back.

“These buggers don’t know how to quit, do they, sir?” asked a young soldier named Noyt. His voice broke in the middle of the question; he didn’t need to scrape a razor across his cheeks to keep them smooth. He’d been a little boy when the war started.

“They’re like snakes,” Leudast agreed. “They’ll fight you till you cut the head off-and if you pick up the head a couple of hours later, it’ll twist around and bite you even though it’s dead.”

He rolled himself in his blanket and fell asleep-and woke again in short order when a mosquito bit him on the end of the nose. The Algarvians might not have many dragons left in the air, but Trapani lay in the middle of a marsh. Plenty of things with wings came forth to attack the Unkerlanters.

When morning came, Leudast woke again, this time with the feeling something was badly wrong somewhere, even though he couldn’t put his finger on what. He was an officer these days, and entitled to sniff around and try to find out (he’d done the same thing as a sergeant, and as a common soldier, too, but fewer people could squelch him now). He walked up to Captain Dagaric and asked, “What’s going on, sir? Something is, sure as sure, and I don’t think it’s anything good.”

“You think so, too, eh?” the regimental commander answered. “I hadn’t noticed anything myself, but I saw a couple of mages putting their heads together and muttering a few minutes ago.”

“That doesn’t sound good,” Leudast said. “What are the fornicating Algarvians going to throw at us now?”

“Who knows?” Dagaric said with weary cynicism. “We’ll have to find out the hard way, I expect. That’s what we’re for, after all.”

“Huh,” Leudast said. “I’ve had to find out too cursed many things the hard way. Once in a while, I’d like to know ahead of time.”

He went off in search of the mages his superior had seen, and found them under an oak whose trunk was badly scarred with beams. As Dagaric had said, they were talking in low voices, and both looked worried. Leudast stood around waiting for them to notice him. He waited more ostentatiously with each passing minute. At last, one of the sorcerers said, “You want something, Lieutenant?”

“I want to know what the redheads are brewing up,” Leudast answered. “They’ve got something ready to pop, sure as blazes.” Both wizards wore captain’s rank badges, but he didn’t waste much military courtesy on them. They were only mages, after all, not real officers.

They looked at each other. One of them asked, “Have you wizardly talent?”

“Not that I know of,” Leudast said. “Just a bad feeling in the air.”

“Very bad,” the mage agreed. “Something is coming, and we don’t know what. All we can do is wait and see.”

“Can we send dragons to drop eggs on the heads of the whoresons cooking up whatever it is?” Leudast asked. “If they’re trying not to get smashed into strawberry jam, they can’t very well cast spells.”

The wizards brightened. “Do you know, Lieutenant, that isn’t the worst idea anyone has ever had,” said the one who did the talking.

“You boys are the ones to take care of it,” Leudast said, hiding a smile. “You’re the ones who deal with crystals and such.” The mages might outrank him, but he could see what needed doing. They sometimes put him in mind of bright children: they could come up with all sorts of clever schemes, but a good many of those had nothing to do with the real world.