"Nothing much, Sergeant, doesn't look like," one of his troopers answered. "Real quiet-like over there."
Suspicion flowered in Leudast. "That's not good," he said. "They're up to something. But what? Will it land on our heads, or will it come down on somebody else?"
"Here's hoping it's somebody else," the soldier said.
"Oh, aye, here's hoping." Leudast's voice was dry. "But hope doesn't milk the cow. We'll send extra pickets forward. If the redheads have got something nasty under their kilts, they'll have to work hard to bring it off."
Even with extra men out in front of the main line, he had trouble going to sleep. He didn't like having raw troops to his left. Their commander seemed smart enough, but how good were his men? What would they do if the Algarvians tested them? He dozed off dreaming about it.
When he woke, he thought he was still in the dream: a soldier shook him awake, shouting, "Sergeant, everything's gone south on the left!"
"What do you mean?" Leudast demanded. Somebody had been saying much the same thing to him in his nightmare.
"The redheads hit that new regiment and broke through, Sergeant," the soldier answered, alarm in his voice. "Now they're trying to swing over and attack us from the flank."
"Aye, that sounds like them." After two sentences, Leudast was fully awake. He started shouting orders: "First squad, third squad, fall back and form a front to the left. Runner! I need a runner!" For a wonder, he got one. "Go back to brigade headquarters and tell them we're under attack from the left."
"Aye, Sergeant!" The runner dashed off.
A couple of squads of Leudast's company weren't the only Unkerlanters trying to stem the Algarvian breakthrough. Recared's other company commanders also used some of their men as a firewall against the redheads. Like him, they were all sergeants who'd seen a lot of fighting; they knew what having Mezentio's men on their flank meant, and how much danger it put them in.
The trouble was, telling who was who in the dark wasn't easy. Some of the men running toward the line Leudast and his comrades desperately tried to form were Unkerlanters from Gundioc's shattered regiment, fleeing the Algarvian onslaught. Others were authentic redheads. They didn't yell "Mezentio!" as they came forward, not now- silence helped them sow confusion.
"If it moves, blaze it!" Leudast shouted to his men. "We'll sort it out later, but we can't let the Algarvians get in among us." That was all the more true- and urgent- because the men he'd pulled out to face left didn't have enough holes in which to hide, and the ones they did have weren't deep enough. If it meant some of his countrymen got blazed, it did, that was all. And how are you different from the officers you warned Gundioc about? Leudast wondered. He had no answer, except that he wanted to stay alive.
Someone blazed at him out of the night. The beam hissed as it boiled snow into steam a few feet to his right. He blazed back, and was rewarded with a cry of pain: more to the point, a cry of pain whose words he didn't understand but whose language was undeniably Algarvian. He didn't have to feel personally guilty, not yet.
His runner, or another one from the regiment, must have got through. Eggs started falling where the Algarvians had broken the line. A fresh regiment of Unkerlanter soldiers- all of them shouting, "Urra!" and "Swemmel!" -rushed up to push the redheads back. A couple of troops of behemoths came forward with the reinforcements. Sullenly, the Algarvians withdrew.
After the sun came up, Leudast saw Captain Gundioc's body. He sprawled in the snow with some of his own men and some redheads. Leudast sighed. Gundioc might well have made a good officer with some seasoning. He'd never get it now.
Seven
Wind whipped past Colonel Sabrino's face as his dragon dove on a ley-line caravan coming up into Durrwangen from the south. He didn't know whether the caravan was carrying Unkerlanter soldiers or horses and unicorns or simply sacks of barley and dried peas. He didn't much care, either. Whatever it was carrying would help King Swemmel's men inside Durrwangen- if it got there.
As the dragon stooped like a striking falcon, the caravan swelled from a worm on the ground to a toy to its real size with astonishing speed. "Mezentio!" Sabrino shouted, loosing the eggs slung under his mount's belly. Then he whacked the dragon with his goad to make it pull up. If he hadn't, the stupid thing might have flown itself straight into the ground.
Without the weight of the eggs, it gained height more readily. Behind it, twin flashes of light marked bursts of sorcerous energy. Sabrino looked back over his shoulder. He whooped with glee. He'd knocked the caravan right off the ley line. Whatever it was carrying wouldn't get to Durrwangen any time soon. Flames leaped up from a shattered caravan car. Sabrino whooped again. Some of what that caravan was carrying wouldn't get to Durrwangen at all.
Captain Domiziano's image appeared in the crystal Sabrino carried. "Nicely struck, Colonel!" he cried.
Sabrino bowed in his harness. "I thank you." He looked around. "Now let's see what else we can do to make King Swemmel's boys love us."
No immediately obvious answer sprang to mind. A nice pillar of smoke was rising from the wrecked ley-line caravan now. More smoke, much more, rose from Durrwangen itself. Algarvian egg-tossers and dragons had been pounding the city ever since the late-winter counterattacks pushed this far south. Sabrino hoped his countrymen would be able to break into Durrwangen before the spring thaw glued everything in place for a month or a month and a half. If they didn't, the Unkerlanters would have all that time to fortify the town, and then it would be twice as expensive to take… if it could be done at all.
That wasn't anything about which he could do much. He couldn't even drop any more eggs till he flew back to the dragon farm and loaded up again.
"Sir!" That was Domiziano again, his voice cracking with excitement like a youth's. "Look over to the west, sir. A column of behemoths, and curse me if they aren't stuck in a snowdrift."
After looking, Sabrino said, "You have sharp eyes, Captain. I didn't spot those buggers at all. Well, since you did see them, would you like to give your squadron the honor of the first pass against them?"
"My honor, sir, and my pleasure," Domiziano replied. Not all the rank-and-file dragonfliers had crystals; he used hand signals to point them toward the new target. Off they flew, the rest of Sabrino's battered wing trailing them to ward against Unkerlanter dragons and to finish whatever behemoths they might miss.
Sabrino sang a tune that had been popular on the stage in Trapani the year before the Derlavaian War broke out. It was called "Just Routine," and sung by one longtime lover to another. Smashing up columns of Unkerlanter behemoths was just routine for him these days. He'd been doing it ever since Algarve and Unkerlant first collided, more than a year and a half ago now.
Great wingbeats quickly ate up the distance to the behemoths. Sabrino laughed aloud, saying, "So your snowshoes didn't help you this time, eh?" The first winter here in the trackless west had been a nightmare, with the Unkerlanters able to move through snow that stymied Algarvian men and behemoths. Those odds were more even now: experience was a harsh schoolmaster, but an undeniably effective one.
The snow down there didn't seem all that deep. Sabrino had seen drifts that looked like young mountain ranges, drifts into which you could drop a palace, let alone a behemoth. Of course, gauging the ground from above was always risky business. Maybe snow filled a gully, and the behemoths had discovered it the hard way. Still, although they'd halted, they didn't seem to be in any enormous distress.
He frowned. That thought sent suspicion blazing through him. He peered through his goggles, trying to see if anything else about the behemoths looked out of the ordinary. He didn't note anything, not at first.