Out of the Darkness

Less than a week after the great attack began, the Unkerlanters burst out of the vast forest and into the more open country that led to the foothills of the Elsung Mountains. Behind them, Leudast knew, pockets of Gongs still held out. So what? he thought. Pockets of Unkerlanters had still held out as the Algarvians swarmed west, too. The redheads had mopped them up at their leisure.

Peering ahead at the mountains, Leudast wondered how close he was to where he’d been when the Derlavaian War-what everybody but Unkerlant reckoned the Derlavaian War-broke out. He shrugged. He couldn’t tell. One set of peaks looked much like another to a man raised on the broad plains of northeastern Unkerlant.

He was settling his company for the night when Captain Dagaric called him and the other company commanders together. Dagaric took them out onto the meadow, well away from the common soldiers’ campfires. “What’s gone wrong, sir?” Leudast asked. Obviously, something had, or Dagaric wouldn’t have acted as he was doing.

He said, “I just got word from the regimental crystallomancer-Gyorvar’s been destroyed. Gone. Vanished. Off the map. Disappeared.” He snapped his fingers to show how thoroughly wrecked the capital of Gyongyos was.

“Well, that’s good, isn’t it, sir?” another lieutenant asked. “If we smashed the place up, that’ll hurt the Gongs, won’t it?”

“Oh, the Gongs are hurting, all right,” Dagaric said. “Ekrekek Arpad’s dead, and so is everybody in his clan, as far as anyone can tell. The whoresons who’re left are all running around like chickens after the axe.”

“Then what’s wrong, sir?” the other junior officer repeated. “If we got rid of Gyorvar, of Arpad-”

“That’s what’s wrong,” Dagaric broke in. “We didn’t do it. We didn’t have anything to do with it. The Kuusamans smashed Gyorvar, with some newfangled sorcery they came up with.”

“Powers below eat them,” Leudast said softly. He remembered how lucky he’d been to come through alive after the Algarvians started murdering Kaunians the first autumn of their war with Unkerlant. The only answer his kingdom had found was killing its own people-a solution, he thought, no one but Swemmel would have imagined.

Another company commander, a sergeant, asked, “Can we match this magic?”

Dagaric shook his head. “No. The slanteyes know how to do it, and we don’t.”

“That’s not good.” Leudast thought he was the first to speak, but three or four company commanders said the same thing at more or less the same time.

“Of course it’s not,” Dagaric said. “Those whoresons ’ll hold it over our head like a club, you see if they don’t. But that hasn’t got anything to do with our job here. Our job here is kicking the stuffing out of the Gongs, and it’s more important than ever that we do it up good and proper.”

“How come, sir?” somebody asked.

The regimental commander made an exasperated noise. “The more we grab now, the better off we’ll be. For now, we’re still officially friends with Kuusamo. How long will that last, though? Anybody’s guess. So we grab with both hands while the grabbing’s good.”

“Makes sense,” Leudast said. “And the Gyongyosians were falling to pieces against us even before this happened. Now that it has, they ought to turn to mush.”

“I hope they do,” Dagaric said. “Other chance is that they might decide to make us pay as much as they can from here on out because everything’s lost. I hope they don’t try to do that, but we’ve got to be alert for it. I want you to let your men know it could happen. Don’t tell them about Gyorvar, not yet. I haven’t got any orders on how we’re supposed to present that to them.”

Leudast felt foolish warning his troopers the Gongs might turn desperate without telling them why. Nobody asked questions, though; curiosity was not encouraged in the Unkerlanter army. He did say, “We’ll know better when we see how things go in the morning.”

Lying there wrapped in a blanket, listening to eggs burst not so far away- but almost all of them off to the west, falling amongst the Gyongyosians-he realized that might not be so. Dagaric had ordered him to keep the news of the destruction of Gyorvar from his men. Would officers on the other side also keep it from the shaggy soldiers they led? He wouldn’t have been surprised.

“Forward!” he shouted when first light came. Forward the men went. The Gongs continued to crumble. Their disintegration was so quick and thorough, in fact, that Leudast couldn’t tell whether they knew some dreadful sorcery had claimed their capital. Unkerlant had been hammering their armies before the news came, and went right on hammering them now.