Through the Darkness

“What have Mezentio’s whoresons gone and done?” Affonso asked. Fernao couldn’t answer him, not this time. Whatever they’d done, though, it had worked. Their behemoths thundered after the Lagoan beasts that were advancing no more. This time, the Lagoan behemoths couldn’t halt their charge.

A third of the way up that long slope, Fernao took out his short-handled shovel and began digging himself a hole. He couldn’t dig so deep as he would have liked; he soon found that the soil, as in so many places on the austral continent, was frozen solid the year around only a couple of feet below the surface. But any kind of scrape in the soil was better than none. He heaped up the dirt in front of the scrape and then half jumped, half lay in it. Cold started seeping into his body.

Soldiers were going to earth, too, and so was Affonso. And none too soon, for the Algarvian behemoths started plastering them with eggs again. Some of those behemoths bore heavy sticks instead of egg-tossers. As a beam from one of them could bring a unicorn crashing to the ground, so it could also blaze straight through two or three men before becoming too attenuated to be deadly any more.

A few at a time, King Vitor’s men began falling back from the rise to the flat ground below. As they retreated, Fernao found out what had gone wrong beyond the crest of the rise, on the side he hadn’t been able to see.

“Who’d have thought those buggers would have hauled those really heavy sticks all this way?” one disgruntled trooper said to another.

“Well, they did, curse ‘em,” the second Lagoan trooper answered. “You get a stick that’s heavy enough, and not even a behemoth’s armor will stand up to it.”

The two footsoldiers tramped past before Fernao could hear any more, but he’d heard enough and to spare. Turning to Affonso, he said, “They outfoxed us.”

“It doesn’t do to trust the Algarvians,” Affonso said mournfully. He leaned up on an elbow to peer out over the top of the dirt he’d piled up in front of his own miserable excuse for a hole in the ground. With a grunt, he added, “They’re going to overrun us if we stay here much longer.”

“And they’ll have an easier time killing us if we get up and run,” Fernao said. But Affonso was right. If he didn’t want to be captured or slain in place, he’d have to run. And run he did, abandoning the rise far more quickly than he’d gone up it. Having won their victory, the Algarvians didn’t pursue hard. That was some consolation for Fernao, but not much. He knew too well that Mezentio’s men could come after the Lagoan army any time they chose.

Count Sabrino had strolled through a good many Algarvian camps in Unkerlant the first summer of the war there, when things were going well. The stroll he was making through this encampment on the austral continent put him in mind of those. The encampment was smaller, but filled with the same sense of quiet confidence he’d known before.

In Unkerlant, that confidence was dead, buried by a resistance far stronger and more ferocious than the Algarvians had imagined when they started on the--bad--roads west. Here in the land of the Ice People, it still lived. The Algarvian force here was tiny compared to the armies that had gone into Unkerlant, but it wasn’t facing the whole of Swemmel’s vast kingdom, either.

Algarvian soldiers sat on stones or on the grass, tending to their boots or packs or sticks as if they were so many craftsmen practicing their trades. Behemoth crews tinkered with their animals’ armors or fiddled with their egg-tossers to make them fling a little farther. It was all very businesslike.

Even the wounded, who were tended by mages and surgeons, did their best to make light of their injuries. In best Algarvian style, one cracked a joke so funny, it made the fellow sewing up his leg pause to laugh out loud. Sabrino had seen the same sort of thing in Unkerlant. It had made him proud then. Here, it left him sad.

At last, he found his way to the tent of Brigadier Zerbino, the officer King Mezentio had appointed to command the Algarvian forces in the land of the Ice People. Zerbino, a big, bluff fellow who was marquis of a small domain in southern Algarve, greeted him with a bear hug and a flagon of wine. “We smashed them!” he declared. “Positively smashed them!”

“So we did, sir,” Sabrino agreed; Zerbino held the higher military and social ranks. “Now we can keep the cinnabar going across the Narrow Sea.”

“Oh, aye,” Zerbino said, swigging from his own flagon. “And we can drive the cursed Lagoans right off the austral continent. Traitors to the Algarvic race, that’s what they are. Might as well be Kaunians.” He swigged again. “I’ve sent messages by crystal, asking the king for more . . . more of everything, by the powers above. Enough to let us finish the job.”

“Is that a fact, sir?” Sabrino said tonelessly, hoping that tonelessness disguised the alarm he felt.