Through the Darkness

What he did have was a hard time making his way into the south, where the worst of the fighting was. The Algarvians, having punched through the Unkerlanter defenses, now stood astride most of the direct routes from Cottbus to the south. To get where he was going, Rathar had to travel along three sides of a rectangle, taking a long detour west to use ley lines still in Unkerlanter hands.

When he got to Durrwangen, he wondered if he’d come too late. Algarvian eggs were bursting just outside the city, and some inside it as well. “We have to hold here as long as we can,” he told General Vatran. “This is one of the gateways to the Mamming Hills and the cinnabar in them. We can’t just give it up to the redheads.”

“I know how to read a map, too,” Vatran grunted. “If we don’t hold ‘em here, there’s nowhere else good to try and stop ‘em this side of Sulingen. But the whoresons have the bit between their teeth again, the way they did last summer. How in blazes are we supposed to make ‘em quit?”

“Keep fighting them,” Rathar answered. “Or would you sooner let them have all the cinnabar they need?”

Would you sooner lie down and give up? was what he really meant. He studied Vatran. He’d urged Swemmel to keep the officer in charge down here. Now he was wondering if he’d made a mistake. Vatran’s attack south of Aspang had failed. There were reasons it had failed; neither Vatran nor any other Unkerlanter had realized the Algarvians were concentrating so many men in the south. But Vatran hadn’t covered himself with glory since, either. The question was, could anyone else have done better?

Vatran understood that question behind the question. He glared up at Rathar, who stood a couple of inches taller. Vatran’s nose was sharp and curved as a sickle blade; had it been one in truth, he might have used it to cut the marshal down. “If you don’t care for the job I’m doing,” he ground out, “give me a stick, take the stars off my collar, and send me out against the Algarvians as a common soldier.”

“I didn’t come here to put you in a penalty battalion,” Rathar answered mildly. Officers who disgraced themselves sometimes got the chance for redemption by fighting as ordinary soldiers. Penalty battalions went in where the fighting was hottest. Men who lived got their rank back. Most didn’t.

“Well, then, let’s talk about how we’re going to hold on to what we can down here,” Vatran said.

That was a good, sensible suggestion. Before Rathar could take him up on it, eggs crashed down around the schoolhouse Vatran was using for a headquarters. Rathar threw himself fiat. So did Vatran and all the junior officers in the chamber. Most of the glass in the windows had already been shattered. What was left flew through the air in glittering, deadly arcs. A spearlike shard stuck in the floorboards a few inches from Rathar’s nose.

“Never a dull moment,” Vatran said when the eggs stopped falling. “Where were we?”

“Trying to stay alive,” Rathar answered, getting to his feet. “Trying to keep our armies alive, too.”

“If you know a magic to manage it, I hope you’ll tell me,” Vatran answered. “The Algarvians have more skill than we do; the only thing we can do to stop ‘em is put more bodies in their way. We’re doing that, as best we can.”

“We have to do it better,” the marshal said. “Down here now, it’s the way things were in front of Cottbus last fall; we haven’t got a lot of room to fall back. If we do, we lose things we can’t afford to lose.”

“I know that,” Vatran said. “I need more of everything--dragons, behemoths, men, crystals, you name it.”

“And you’ll have what you need--or as much of it as we can get to you, anyhow,” Rathar told him. “Moving things down from the north isn’t easy these days, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

“I’ll bet you did.” By the look Vatran gave Rathar, he would have been just as well pleased if the marshal hadn’t been able to come down from Cottbus.

In a way, Rathar sympathized with that. No general worth his salt should have been eager to have a superior looking over his shoulder. Had the fight in the south been going well, Rathar would have stayed up in the capital, even if that meant enduring King Swemmel. But, with the Algarvians bulling forward, Vatran could hardly expect to have everything exactly as he wanted.

Rathar asked the question that had to be asked: “Will we hold Durrwangen?”

“I hope so,” General Vatran answered. Then his broad shoulders moved up and down in a shrug that held none of the jauntiness an Algarvian would have given it. “I don’t know, Marshal. To tell the truth, I just don’t know. The cursed redheads have been moving awful fast. And...” He hesitated before going on, “And the soldiers aren’t as happy as they might be, either.”

“No?” Rathar’s ears pricked up. “You’d better tell me more about that, and you’d better not waste any time doing it, either.”