Rulers of the Darkness

"Aye, he's right," Corporal Kun agreed. Kun always looked more like what he had been- a mage's apprentice- than a proper soldier. He was thin- downright scrawny for a Gyongyosian- and his spectacles gave him a studious seeming. He went on, "Istvan and I had to put up with this same kind of nonsense of Obuda, out in the Bothnian Ocean, when the Kuusamans had enough men to get the jump on us."

"And me," Szonyi said. "Don't forget about me."

"And you," Istvan agreed. They'd all been on Obuda together. Istvan went on, "We've seen the kinds of things you have to do when you haven't got enough men to do everything you want. You sit and you wait for the other bugger to make a mistake and then you try and kick him in the balls when he does."

Kun and Szonyi nodded. The two of them- weedy corporal and burly common soldier with tawny hair and curly beard that made him look like a lion- understood how to play the game. So did Istvan. The rest of the men in the squad… he wasn't so sure of them. They listened. They nodded in all the right places. Did they really know what he was talking about? He doubted it.

"We are a warrior race. We shall prevail, no matter what the accursed Unkerlanters do." That was Lajos, one of the new men. He was as burly as Szonyi, a little burlier than Istvan. In the small bits of action he'd seen since coming up to the front, he'd fought as bravely as anyone could want. He was nineteen, and sure he knew everything. Who was there to tell him he might be wrong? Would he believe anyone? Not likely.

Istvan took off his gloves and looked at his hands. His nails were raggedly trimmed, with black dirt ground under them and into the folds of skin at his knuckles. He turned his hands over. Thick calluses, also dark with ground-in dirt, creased his palms. Scars seamed his hands, too. His eyes went, as they always did, to one in particular, a puckered line between the second and third fingers of his left hand.

Kun had a scar as near identical to that one as made no difference. So did Szonyi. So did several other squadmates, the men who'd served under Istvan for a while. Captain Tivadar had cut them all. The company commander would have been within his rights to kill them all. They'd eaten goat stew. They hadn't known it was goat; they'd killed the Unkerlanters who'd been cooking it. But knowledge didn't matter. They'd sinned. Istvan still didn't know if his expiation was enough, or if the curse on those who ate of forbidden flesh still lingered.

Someone approached the timber-reinforced redoubt in which Istvan and his squad waited. "Who comes?" he called softly.

"The fairy frog in the fable, to gulp you all down."

With a chuckle, Istvan said, "Come ahead, Captain."

Tivadar did, slipping from tree to tree so he didn't show himself to any Unkerlanter snipers who might be lurking nearby. Nodding to Istvan, he slid down into the redoubt. "Anything that looks like trouble?" he asked.

"No, sir," Istvan answered at once. "Everything's been real quiet the past couple of days."

"That's good." Tivadar checked. He wasn't much older than Istvan- he couldn't have been thirty- but he thought of everything, or as close to everything as he could. "I hope that's good, anyhow. Maybe Swemmel's boys are brewing up something nasty out of sight." He turned to Kun. "Anything that feels like trouble, Corporal?"

Kun shook his head. "Nothing I can sense, Captain. I don't know how much that's worth, though. I was only an apprentice, after all, not a mage myself." In the squad, he put on airs about the small spells he did know. Putting on airs with the company commander didn't pay.

"All right," Tivadar said. "The last time they struck us with sorcery, even our best mages didn't know what they'd do till they did it, curse them."

He was all business. Having purified Istvan, Kun, Szonyi, and the rest, he acted as if they were ritually pure, and never mentioned that dreadful night. Neither did any of them, not where anybody not of their number might hear. The shame was too great for that. Istvan thought it always would be.

Kun usually mocked whenever he saw the chance. He was a city man, and his ways often seemed strange and slick and rather repellent to Istvan, who like most Gyongyosians came from a mountain valley where the people were at feud with some neighboring valley when they weren't at feud among themselves. But Kun didn't mock now. In tones unwontedly serious, he said, "That was an abomination. The stars will not shine on men who murder their own to power their magecraft."

"Aye, you're right," Lajos boomed. "The Unkerlanters fight filthy. It's worse than eating goat's flesh, if you ask me."