Rathar nodded. A good many officers who'd failed to meet King Swemmel's exacting requirements were no longer among those present. Rathar had come close to seeing the inside of a stew pot a couple of times himself.
But when he looked at the map, he made a discontented noise. "That was a stupid order: the one to hold Durrwangen at all costs, I mean. The redhead may have paid with his job, but he saved an army the Algarvians will be able to use against us somewhere else."
"Would you have disobeyed?" Vatran's voice was sly.
"Don't ask me things like that," Rathar said irritably. "I'm not an Algarvian, and I'm cursed glad I'm not, too."
But he kept worrying at the question, as he might have at a bit of gristle stuck between two back teeth. Mezentio gave his officers more freedom to use their judgment than did Swemmel, who trusted no one's judgment but his own. Not even the Algarvians, though, tolerated direct disobedience: the man who'd retreat from Durrwangen had got the sack. And yet… Rathar studied the map one more time, trying to remember how things had been a few weeks before. He couldn't make himself believe that redhead had been wrong.
A commotion in the street outside the plundered bank distracted him- or rather, he let it distract him, not something he usually did. Vatran, now, Vatran liked excitement. "Let's see what's going on," he said, and Rathar followed him out.
Men and women pointed and hooted at three men led up the street by soldiers carrying sticks. "You're going to get it!" somebody shouted at the glum-looking men. Somebody else added, "Aye, and you'll deserve it, too!"
"Oh. Is this all?" Vatran looked and sounded disappointed.
"Aye. Collaborators." The word left a sour, nasty taste in Rathar's mouth. He'd seen and heard of too many men and women willing- even eager- to go along with the Algarvian invaders. Things weren't so bad here as they were over in Grelz, but they were bad enough. But when the Unkerlanters retook a town, people sometimes settled scores with enemies by calling them collaborators. He'd seen and heard of too much of that, too.
None of these men was crying out that he'd been wrongly accused. Even the guilty often did that. The silence here said these fellows had no hope of being believed, which meant they must have been in bed with the redheads.
Vatran must have been thinking along similar lines, for he said, "Good riddance to bad rubbish. We might as well get back to work."
"Fair enough." No one ever had to urge Rathar back to work twice.
When they returned, Vatran pointed to the map and said, "The more I look at it, the worse the trouble Mezentio's men are in."
"Here's hoping you're right." Rathar tapped the pins that showed how far the columns advancing out of Durrwangen had got. "What we have to do is, we have to make sure we push the Algarvians back as far as we can before the spring thaw gets this far south. Then we'll be properly set up for the battles this summer."
For two summers in a row, King Swemmel had wanted to hit the Algarvians before they hit him. The first year, he'd flat-out failed; King Mezentio beat him to the punch. The second year, Vatran had launched an attack against the redheads south of Aspang- right into the teeth of their own building force. Attack all too soon became retreat.
This coming summer… Rathar dared look ahead to the battles of this coming summer with something approaching optimism.
And then Vatran said, "The other thing I wonder is what new sorceries the Algarvian mages will come up with."
That sank Rathar's optimism as if it were an egg bursting on a fishing boat. With an angry grunt, the marshal answered, "Those whoresons'll fight the war to the very last Kaunian. There will be a reckoning for that. By the powers above, there will be."
Vatran grunted, too. "Oh, there's a reckoning, all right. Every time they slaughter their Kaunian captives to power magecraft against us, we have to reckon how many of our own peasants we've got to kill to block their sorcery and to make matching magics of our own."
"Aye." A lot of kingdoms, Rathar suspected, would have folded up and yielded when the Algarvians started aiming murder-powered magecraft at them. He'd been horrified himself; no one had fought wars like that for centuries. The Twinkings War had been as savage a struggle as any in the world, but neither Swemmel nor Kyot had started massacring people for the sake of potent sorcery.
But Swemmel hadn't hesitated here, not for a heartbeat. As soon as he'd learned what the Algarvians were doing, he'd ordered his own archmage to match Mezentio's men murder for murder. He'd come right out and said that he didn't care if he ended up with only one subject… so long as no Algarvians were left by then.
In a way, Marshal Rathar had to admire such ruthless determination. Without it, the Algarvians probably would have taken Cottbus, and who could guess whether Unkerlant would have been able to continue the fight without its capital? Cottbus had held, Sulingen had held, and now Rathar's men were moving forward.
In another way, though, Swemmel's complete indifference to what happened to his kingdom as long as he held the throne chilled the marshal to the marrow. If Rathar failed, he might end up in a camp with his throat slit to fuel the magic backing the attack some other marshal would make.
Before he could go on with that gloomy thought, a dowser rushed into the headquarters and cried, "Dragons! Dragons heading this way out of the north!"
"How many?" Rathar rapped out. "How soon?"
"I don't know, lord Marshal," the man answered. "They're throwing out those cursed strips of paper again." Dowsers had a sorcerous gift- sometimes the only sorcerous gift they had- for sensing motion: water through ground, ships on water, dragons through the air. But Algarvian dragonfliers had taken to throwing out bits of paper as they flew. The motion of those scraps helped mask the motion of the dragons themselves.
"Won't be long," Vatran predicted gloomily. Rathar could only nod, because he thought the general was right. Vatran went on, "Well, what'll it be when they do get here? Will they go after the ley lines again, or will they try and drop those eggs on our heads? Place your bets, folks."
"If they have any sense, they'll go after the ley lines," Rathar replied. "If their eggs can smash up the depot or hit a line itself and overload it with energy, that really hurts us. But if they knock headquarters flat, so what? Swemmel chooses a couple of new generals, and the war goes on the same as it would have."
Vatran chuckled. "You don't give yourself enough credit, Marshal- or me, either, come to that."
Before Rathar could answer, eggs started bursting not far away. "Maybe the redheads are being stupid," the marshal said. "In any case, I move we adjourn."
"I've heard worse ideas," Vatran admitted.
They both went down into what had been the vault. A faint metallic smell lingered in the air, a monument of coins now vanished. In the meanwhile, artisans attached to the Unkerlanter army had further shored up the ceiling with crisscrossing timbers. If an egg burst directly on top of it, those timbers might not- probably wouldn't- hold out all the sorcerous energy. Otherwise, the men down there were safe enough.
Rathar cursed in a mild sort of way. "What's eating you now?" Vatran asked.
"When I'm down here, I can't tell where the eggs are bursting," Rathar complained. "They all just sound like they're up there somewhere."
"You couldn't do much about them right this minute, except maybe get caught by one," Vatran pointed out. He was right, too, however little Rathar cared to admit it. After a while, Vatran went on, "I don't know where all those eggs are bursting, but sounds like there's a lot of them."
"Aye, it does." Rathar didn't like that, either. "The Algarvians shouldn't be able to put so many dragons in the air against Durrwangen."