Darkness Descending (83 page)

“That’s right,” Leudast answered. He would have said the same thing had the driver asked him if he were part of some regiment he’d never heard of. Supplies didn’t come forward so often that he could afford to let them slip through his fingers. Lying to get his hands on them seemed no sin at all.

These, which were actually meant for his unit, didn’t come forward in a hurry. Mud wagons didn’t move quickly; what set them apart from every other vehicle was that they could move at all during the thaw. Leudast had plenty of time to shout for soldiers to help unload them before they actually arrived.

“What have you got for us?” he asked as his men swarmed over the wagons.

“Oh, some of this, some of that,” the lead driver answered. “Bandages, potted meat, charges for your sticks so you won’t have to cut a captive’s throat to keep blazing, all sorts of good things.”

“I should say so,” Leudast exclaimed. Such bounty hadn’t come his way in quite a while. “Powers above, we’ve been living hand-to-mouth for so long, I don’t know what we’ll do with all this stuff.”

“Well, pal, if you don’t want it, I figure there’s plenty who do,” the driver said. He laughed to show he didn’t intend to be taken seriously. A good thing for him, too: several of Leudast’s soldiers were about to turn their sticks in his direction. They weren’t going to let him and his fellow drivers get away before they’d gone through the wagons, either.

Captain Hawart himself squelched up before the plundering was quite complete. “You can’t keep all the goodies for your own company, you know,” he told Leudast. He wasn’t laughing as he said it.

“Sir, I wouldn’t do that,” Leudast assured him.

“Of course you wouldn’t,” Hawart answered. “I’ve got my eye on you. Amazing how well people behave when somebody’s watching, isn’t it?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Leudast did laugh. So did Hawart, now. They understood each other pretty well.

Hawart said, “You
are
going to share this stuff, Leudast, because we’re ordered forward against the redheads in Lautertal up ahead past the woods there.” He pointed.

“Are we?” Leudast said tonelessly. “They’ll have had a deal of time to get ready for us, won’t they? And we won’t be able to come at ‘em quick and flank ‘em out, like we did so often in the snow.”

“That’s all true, every word of it,” his superior agreed. “But we’re ordered in anyhow, and so we’ll go. They aren’t supposed to have that many men holed up in the place. That’s the word coming back to us, anyhow.”

He didn’t sound as if he believed it. He didn’t look as if he believed it, either. Casting about for ways to ask how big a fiasco the ordered assault was likely to be, Leudast found one: “How hard are you going to push the attack, sir?”

“We’re going forward till we can’t go forward anymore,” Hawart answered. Spoken one way, that meant one thing; spoken another way, it meant something altogether different.

Leudast had no great trouble figuring out Captain Hawart’s tone. “Aye, sir,” he said. “You don’t need to worry about my company. We always do our best.”

“I know you do,” Hawart said. “If they haven’t killed us yet, they probably can’t kill us at all, don’t you think?”

“Aye,” Leudast said, knowing he was lying, knowing Hawart knew he was lying. But if he lied to the captain, maybe he could lie to himself, too. He went on,

“What help can we count on when we go at this Lautertal place? Egg-tossers? Behemoths? Magecraft?”
Magecraft
was a euphemism for slaughtered Unkerlanters, but he might be able to lie to himself about that, too.

In any case, Hawart shook his head. “Tossers are mostly stuck in the mud ten miles behind us. Same with the behemoths. And this isn’t a big enough attack to deserve magecraft. Can’t say I’m too sorry about that.” He was probably lying to himself, too.

“Now we hope the Algarvians feel the same way about holding the place,” Leudast said, and Hawart nodded. Leudast went on, “I’ll let my men know what they’ll be doing. No wonder the powers above”—by which he meant the Unkerlanter quartermasters, not the abstract powers beyond the sky—”decided to let us have enough supplies for a change.”

After Hawart left, Leudast broke the news to the company he commanded. His veterans nodded in resignation. The new recruits exclaimed and grinned excitedly. They knew no better. They would, those who didn’t pay an irredeemable price for the instruction the Algarvians were about to give them.

As soon as Leudast advanced out of the trees and on toward Lautertal, he knew the attack was in trouble. The town had a couple of buildings with tall spires that hadn’t been knocked down. That meant the Algarvians would have lookouts in those spires, men who could see a long way.

They also proved to have egg-tossers in the town. Eggs began bursting among the Unkerlanters slogging across the liquid fields toward the town. The mud absorbed some of the sorcerous energy those eggs released—some, but far from all. Men shrieked as they were burned, or as bits of the egg casings scythed into them.

“Keep going!” Leudast shouted. “We can do it!” He didn’t know whether the Unkerlanters could do it or not, but he did know they couldn’t if they didn’t think they could. “Urra!” he yelled. “Swemmel! Urra!”

“Urra!” the Unkerlanters shouted. They were game. They’d stayed game all through the dreadful summer and fall, when the Algarvians pushed them back almost at will. Leudast still marveled at that. Throwing down his stick and throwing up his hands would have been so easy. But he’d kept fighting, and so had his countrymen. Ever since fall gave way to winter, they’d been the ones advancing. That was enough to keep a man going all by itself.

But it wasn’t enough to let the Unkerlanters take Lautertal. The Algarvians had indeed had some time in which to get ready and they’d used it well. They’d dug and then cleverly concealed blazing pits all around the town. They must have reinforced them, too, or the pits would have turned to muck during the thaw. The pits hadn’t; King Mezentio’s men took a steady toll on the Unkerlanters from them. And the egg-tossers kept dropping death on Leudast and his comrades.

He saw an egg spinning through the air toward him, saw it and flung himself face down in the muck before it burst. Fragments of the casing hissed malignantly over his head. The soggy ground under him shuddered as if in torment. But he’d known worse than that when the Algarvians started slaughtering Kaunian captives. Then the ground didn’t merely shudder: trenches and holes closed on the soldiers unlucky enough to shelter in them, and flames burst up to catch men scrambling free. Algarvian magecraft was nothing to despise.

Since they had so many other defenses cunningly prepared, Leudast feared King Mezentio’s men would also be ready to use Kaunians’ life energy against the Unkerlanter attack. If they were ready, they didn’t bother killing the captives. They had no need for anything so drastic. Leudast and the other Unkerlanters had no chance to break into Lautertal, let alone to run the Algarvians out of it.

Wiping mud from his eyes, Leudast looked around. During the winter, King Swemmel’s soldiers had taken to using the Algarvian tactic of flanking die enemy out of his position rather than smashing straight into it. With behemoths on snowshoes adding punch and speed to Unkerlanter attacks, the ploy had worked well. Now . . .

Leudast shook his head. Soldiers half drowned in muck were not going to produce a powerful flanking maneuver, not around Lautertal, not even if the Algarvians had no further unpleasant surprises waiting for them. The Unkerlanters couldn’t go around, they couldn’t go forward, and they were having an even harder time staying where they were.

“What do we do, sir?” one of Leudast’s men cried, as if certain he would have the answer. “What
can
we do?”

Nothing,
was the first thought that sprang into Leudast’s mind.
Stay where we are and keep getting pounded,
was the second. He liked it no better, though doing it would have meant obeying orders to the letter.

He looked around again, trying to find any way in which the attack on Lautertal might succeed. Had he seen one, he would have ordered his men to keep trying: no war ever got won without casualties. But no war ever got won by throwing men into a meat grinder to no purpose, either. As far as he could see, that was all the Unkerlanters were doing here.

“Fall back!” he shouted. “Back to our own lines! We’ll take another blaze at these buggers later on.” He didn’t know whether the Unkerlanters would or not. He did know this attack had failed.

Getting away from Lautertal proved almost as expensive as assailing the place had been. The Algarvians, fortunately, could no more pursue than the Unkerlanters had been able to attack, but their egg-tossers punished the retreating soldiers all over again. Back at the soggy trenches from which they’d begun the assault on Lautertal, King Swemmel’s men reckoned up their losses. Leudast had seen worse, which was the most he could say.

“Who ordered the withdrawal?” Captain Hawart demanded.

“I did, sir,” Leudast answered, and wondered if an avalanche of official wrath would fall on his head.

But Hawart only nodded and said, “Good. You waited long enough.” Leudast let out a long, weary sigh of relief.

In all his years as a dragonflier, Count Sabrino had never faced such determined enemies in the air as the ones he met here in the land of the Ice People. Try as he would, he could not escape them. And all the wing he led suffered from their ferocious onslaughts.

He turned to Colonel Broumidis, who commanded the handful of Yaninan dragons on the austral continent. “Can we do nothing against them?” he cried out in torment. “Are we powerless?”

Broumidis’ shrug had none of the panache an Algarvian would have given it. The Yaninan officer, a short, skinny man with an enormous black mustache that didn’t suit his narrow face, seemed rather to be suggesting that fate had more to do with it than he did. All all he said was, “What can we do but endure?”

“Go mad?” Sabrino suggested, no more than a quarter in jest. He slapped, then cried out in triumph. “There’s one mosquito dead. That leaves only forty-eight billion, as near as I can reckon. The cursed things are eating me alive.”

Colonel Broumidis shrugged again. “It is spring on the austral continent,” he said, sounding even more doleful in his accented Algarvian than he would have in his own language. “All the bugs hatch out at once, and they are all hungry. What can we do but slap and light stinking candles and suffer?”

“I’d like to drop enough eggs on all the swamps to kill the wrigglers before they grow up, that’s what,” Sabrino said savagely. Broumidis raised a bushy black eyebrow and said nothing. Sabrino felt himself flush. He knew he’d been absurd. When the ice down here finally melted, half the countryside turned into a bog. And, as the Yaninan colonel had said, the bugs swarmed forth, intent on packing a year’s worth of life into the few weeks of mild weather the austral continent gave them.

Sabrino looked back over his shoulder at Heshbon, the Yaninan outpost he and his dragonfliers had to help protect.
Miserable little place,
he thought.
I’ve flown over plenty of Unkerlanter peasant villages where I’d rather settle down, and I wouldn’t be caught dead in an Unkerlanter peasant village.

“Cinnabar,” he muttered under his breath, making it into a curse.

“Aye, cinnabar,” Broumidis agreed, mournful still. “It draw warriors as amber draws feathers. Us, the Lagoans—may the powers below swallow those wide-arsed whoresons—and now you.”

“I would have been just as well pleased to stay on the other side of the Narrow Sea, I assure you,” Sabrino said.

Colonel Broumidis sent him a hurt look. The Yaninan’s large, dark, liquid eyes were made for such expressions. Sabrino sighed. He could have said a good deal more, but he didn’t want to offend his ally. Shouting,
If you buggers had done any fighting on your own, I
could
have stayed on the other side of the Narrow Sea,
struck him as impolitic.

“Well, we shall have to carry on the war as best we can.” Broumidis sighed, too. The Yaninans were hardly happier witJh the Algarvians than the other way round. They were a proud and touchy folk, and all the more touchy because of their failures in the field. Broumidis pointed. “Here comes the food for our dragons.”

Several camels bore panniers full of chunks of meat. The meat came from other camels; cutting them up struck Sabrino as the best thing that could happen to them. They were almost as disagreeable as dragons. Sabrino know no higher dispraise.

Mosquitoes didn’t care about cut-up meat. They wanted theirs live. Flies and gnats and midges weren’t so fussy. They swarmed round the panniers in buzzing, swirling clouds. They were perfectly willing to torment the camels carrying the panniers, too. And, because the camels had started shedding their heavy winter coats, they suffered badly.

Not so the Ice People who led them. The natives of the austral continent remained swaddled in furs and robes, and offered the bugs few targets. Sabrino rather wished he were wearing something that covered more than a kilt; his legs looked hardly better than the meat the dragons were getting. And. ... “Before I came here, I thought the Ice People were hairy because that helped keep them warm. Now I wonder whether their being so hairy helps keep the mosquitoes away, too.”

“It does,” Broumidis said with assurance. “I have seen as much in my service here.” He inhaled, choked on a gnat, and spent the next minute or so coughing. When he could speak again, he went on, “Even so, I would not care to be among their number.”

“No indeed, my dear fellow!” Sabrino exclaimed. His own groundcrew men took the camel meat from the Ice People. They dusted it with brimstone and lavishly with cinnabar before feeding it to the dragons. Sabrino said, “We need not stint here, at any rate. That’s all to the good.”

“Aye, dragons down here burn hot and flame far,” his Yaninan counterpart agreed. “Not for nothing do we need what the Ice People trade us.”

Before Sabrino could answer, an insect bit him on the back of the neck. It wasn’t a mere mosquito; it felt as if it had driven a red-hot nail an inch into his flesh. He yelled and leaped in the air and slapped at himself, all at the same time. Something squashed under the palm of his hand. When he looked, he saw blood and bug guts. He scrubbed his palm on the new green grass shooting up now that the snow had melted. Like the bugs, like everything on the austral continent, the grass was speeding through its life as if it knew it had not a moment to waste.