He also discovered, not for the first time, that counting on the Unkerlanters to stay stodgy was no longer a paying proposition. No sooner had his brigade burst from cover and rushed toward Pewsum thanKingSwemmel ’s mages unleashed against them the same sorcery the town’s defenders had just suffered. The Unkerlanters didn’t kill Kaunians. They got rid of their own old and useless and condemned. But life energy was life energy. The spell wreaked as much havoc on the Algarvians as it had on the Unkerlanters.
Spinello fell to the ground as it shuddered beneath him. Algarvian soldiers shrieked as violet flames devoured them. Not twenty feet from Spinello, the earth opened up, swallowingMajorRambaldo. An instant later, the crack slammed shut, crushing him and his fancy, ever so expensive windup clock. Spinello staggered to his feet once more, but he could see at a glance that the assault on Pewsum had failed.
He hung his head and kicked at the frozen dirt. Algarve had seen too many failures lately, some small like this one, some very great indeed. When, he wondered, would his kingdom start seeing successes again?
Leudast had spent a lot of time commanding a company while still a sergeant. He was far from the only Unkerlanter underofficer who’d done that. Unkerlant often gave responsibility without giving rank to go with it. That saved the paymasters money-it saved them more than just the monthly difference between a sergeant’s rate and a lieutenant’s, too, for everyone’s pay was chronically in arrears.
But now Leudast was a lieutenant himself. It would have taken capturing a fugitive would-be king to get a born peasant bumped up to officer’s rank, but he’d done exactly that. Mezentio’s cousin Raniero, who’d styled himself King of Grelz, had gone into Swemmel’s stewpot, and Leudast wore two little brass stars on each of his tunic’s collar tabs.
He still commanded a company.
MarshalRatharhad promised him five pounds of gold for capturing Raniero. He hadn’t seen any of it yet. If he lived through the war, maybe he would. As a born peasant, he knew better than to complain. If he let people see he was unhappy, he didn’t know exactly what he’d get, but he had a good idea it wouldn’t be the missing five pounds of gold.
At the moment, he stood inside a peasant hut not much different from the one he’d grown up in, save that one wall and half the thatched roof had burned away. With him stood the other lieutenants and sergeants commanding the companies in his regiment, and Captain Recared, the regimental commander. Recared looked preposterously young to be a captain; the previous summer, before the great battles in the Durrwangen salient, Recared had looked preposterously young to be a lieutenant.
“You know what we have to do, men,” Recared said in the abrupt tones that marked him not only for a city man but for an educated city man to boot. “We’ve stopped the redheads’ drive on Herborn. They’re not going to take it back from us, no matter how much they want to. And they’ve stretched themselves thin trying, too. Now we see if we can bite off the columns they used for their push.”
“We’ll hurt ‘em if we do,” Leudast remarked. His own accent said he came from the northeast, not far from the Forthwegian border, and sounded particularly out of place down here in Grelz.
Recared smiled at him. “That’s the idea, Sergeant-uh, Lieutenant. The worse that happens to the Algarvians, the better for Unkerlant.”
“Oh, aye, sir.” If anything, Leudast knew that better than his superior. He was one of what couldn’t be more than a handful of men who’d fought the redheads since the first day of the war against them. Most of the soldiers who’d servedKingSwemmel on that now long-vanished day were dead or captured or crippled. Leudast had been wounded only twice, and put out of action for a few weeks of the slaughter around Sulingen. If that wasn’t good luck, what was?
“All right, then,” Recared said. “We’ve got plenty of behemoths. We’ve got plenty of dragons. And if we need sorcery, we’ll manage that, too. When I shout, ‘Forward!’ we shall go forward. We shall not halt until I shout, ‘Stop!’ Gentlemen, I do not intend to shout, ‘Stop!’ “
Leudast and the rest of the company commanders looked at one another. Slow grins spread over their poorly shaved faces. One of their number, a sergeant, said, “Curse me if that’s not an Algarvian kind of thing to say. Makes it into a riddle, like.” The others nodded.
Recared said, “The Algarvians have taught us some lessons in this war, no doubt about it. But that time is passing. By the powers above, it is. Now we’re the schoolmasters, and we’ll give them stripes for not learning.”
The lieutenants, all of them but Leudast, nodded again. He and the sergeants looked blank. They were peasants, and knew little of schoolmasters.
“Let’s go, then,” Recared said. “We can do it. We will do it. Nothing is more efficient than victory.”
KingSwemmelhad been trying to make Unkerlanters efficient throughout his reign. As far as Leudast could see, the king hadn’t had a lot of luck. Also as far as Leudast could see, saying the king hadn’t had much luck was about the least efficient thing one of his subjects could do.
He pulled his cloak more tightly around him as he left the farmhouse. He’d known hard enough winters in the north of Unkerlant. Down here in the Duchy of Grelz-the Kingdom of Grelz no more, not after what had happened to Raniero once Swemmel had his way-the wind seemed full of icy knives.
“Do we hit the redheads, Lieutenant? The redheads and the traitors, I mean?”SergeantKiun asked. He’d been a common soldier when Leudast’s company captured Raniero, just as Leudast had been a sergeant. But Kiun had been the one who’d recognized that Mezentio’s cousin wasn’t just the Algarvian colonel his uniform proclaimed him to be. He’d been promised a pound of gold along with his promotion. He hadn’t seen it yet, either.
“Aye, we do,” Leudast answered. “High time we finish breaking out of this box they’ve tried to put us in.” He’d had to break out of Algarvian encirclements before, and counted himself lucky to have escaped with his life. But this was different. For one thing, he and his comrades weren’t altogether cut off; the redheads hadn’t been able to slam the lid down on the box. And, for another, there was more power here inside this box than was out there trying to contain it.
Egg-tossers began hurling their loads of death at the Algarvians. Watching the bursts kick up snow and smoke in the distance, Leudast nodded to himself. He’d seen heavier poundings-especially down in Sulingen, where his countrymen and the Algarvians had hammered at each other till the redheads finally broke-but he’d also seen what the Algarvians were capable of in this particular fight. They’d never flung so many eggs at the Unkerlanter trenches.
Dragons painted Unkerlanter rock-gray swooped down out of the sky, dropping more eggs on the redheads and flaming men and behemoths they caught in the open. Few gaudy Algarvian dragons rose to challenge them.
Captain Recared blew his whistle. “Forward!” he shouted. “Swemmel and Unkerlant! Urra!”
“Forward!” Leudast echoed. Only then did he remember he’d finally got his hands on an officer’s whistle. He shrugged. Shouting would do. “Forward! Urra!”
And forward they went, all of them shouting so they wouldn’t blaze one another by mistake. Some of them didn’t go forward very far, but stopped beams as soon as they broke from cover. Some of the shouts turned to screams. Red flowed here and there on white snow, flowed and quickly began to freeze.
Back when things had gone well for the Algarvians, they’d always had a knack for flanking Unkerlanter units-sometimes squads, sometimes whole armies-out of position. Even after things started going not so well for them, the redheads had kept that gift for showing up exactly where they would make the most trouble. If they hadn’t had it, KingSwemmel ’s soldiers would long since have run them out of Unkerlant.