Through the Darkness

The first thing he found himself lured into was mud up to his knees once more. Cursing wearily, he dragged himself out. After a considerable search, he and his comrades found nothing. “Are you sure your magic knows what it’s talking about?” he asked Kun.

“Aye,” the sorcerer’s apprentice answered. “Someone was moving around here, Sergeant, but I don’t know who and I don’t know where.”

“Oh, huzzah,” Istvan said sourly. “The son of a whore could be sitting somewhere close by gnawing on a big chunk of goat meat, and we’d never know the difference, eh?”

“That’s about the size of it,” Kun said. “I can cast the spell again, if you like. If he’s still moving toward us, I’ll know. But I don’t think it’s very likely.”

Istvan didn’t think it was very likely, either. But, since he couldn’t think of anything better to do, he said, “Go ahead.”

Kun went ahead. After a couple of minutes, he spread his hands. “Nothing. Nothing I can find, anyhow.”

“Huzzah,” Istvan repeated. “So he’s past us, is he?”

“Either that or he’s sitting tight and not moving toward us,” Kun answered. He slapped at a fly that landed on the back of his hand, then asked, “What now?”

It was a good question. Istvan wished he had a good answer for it. He wanted to say, Let’s go back to the path and keep on and forget about it. Then this whoreson, if he is an Unkerlanter, will be someone else’s worry. He wanted to say that, but discovered he couldn’t. He had a stubborn streak that refused to let the words pass his lips. What came out instead was, “We keep looking.”

Kun nodded. A chance streak of sunlight glittered off the gold frames of his spectacles. “All right, Sergeant, we keep looking.” That wasn’t perfect submission, as it would have been in a different tone of voice. As things were, Kun couldn’t have been more emphatic about calling Istvan an idiot if he’d held up a sign.

Istvan knew he was probably wasting his time, and his squad’s as well. What with all the ferns and brambles and thorn bushes on the ground, the Unkerlanter had so many places to hide that the only way to find him would be to stumble over him.

That thought had hardly crossed his mind before one of his troopers gave a shout that abruptly turned into a cry of pain. “Come on!” Istvan said, and scrambled toward the soldier.

The Gyongyosian was down on the ground, but not badly hurt. “That way!” he said, and pointed east. Istvan heard someone running through the woods. He blazed in the direction of the noise. It kept on, so he must have missed. The wounded soldier said, “I never would have known the goat-bugger was there, but I tripped over his foot.”

“Luck,” Istvan muttered. It hadn’t been good luck for the soldier, but it had been for the Gyongyosians as a group. Istvan raised his voice: “After him! Keep him running and we’ll run him down!”

Either that or we’ll run straight into trouble, he thought. But the Unkerlanter was fleeing, whatever he’d planned disrupted. And so Istvan and his comrades pounded after him.

A beam hissed through the forest. Steam spurted from a pine bough not too far above Istvan’s head. He threw himself flat--and landed on his belly in a bramble bush. “There!” Szonyi shouted from off to his left. “I saw where he blazed from.”

“Well, blaze him, then,” Istvan shouted back. No sooner were the words out of his mouth than he crawled through the brambles and briars as fast as he could go. If the Unkerlanter blazed at the sound of his voice, he wanted the fellow blazing in the wrong place.

Again, he wondered if the enemy soldier was leading his comrades and him into a trap. He’d seen no signs of it, but he wouldn’t, not if the Unkerlanter knew what he was doing. In an odd way, it didn’t matter. With the chase on, he and his men could hardly abandon it.

He scuttled over to a tree, ignoring the scratches on his face and arms and the burrs clinging to his tunic and leggings. Cautiously, he peered out from behind the trunk--only for an instant before jerking his head back. He wasn’t so foolish as to peer twice from the same place; that was asking for a beam right between the eyes. Instead, he crawled over to another tree and took a look from behind that one.

He got lucky: he spied the flash from a stick, and it wasn’t aimed at him. He threw his own stick to his shoulder and blazed. A harsh voice cried out in pain. Istvan didn’t break cover to finish off the wounded Unkerlanter. He wasn’t sure the fellow really was wounded, and he wasn’t sure the enemy soldier didn’t have friends close by, either. The most he would do was hurry to another tree closer to the bushes among which the Unkerlanter had hidden himself.