Darkness Descending

“I hope so, your Majesty.” Rathar wondered if any Unkerlanter peasants had escaped the clutches of their own kingdom’s mages and brought tales of woe back to their villages. He doubted it. Swemmel preached efficiency more readily than he practiced it, but he’d been most efficient about killing since the days of the Twinkings War.

Somewhere in the middle distance, eggs started bursting: Algarvian dragons over Cottbus again. Swemmel turned and stared east. “Curse you, Mezentio,” he whispered. “You I trusted, and you betrayed me, too.”

How had he trusted Mezentio? To be unready to fight when the time for fighting came? So it had seemed then. It also seemed, as it always had to Rathar, a dreadful miscalculation. The marshal said, “Give me the men, your Majesty. Give me the men and the dragons and the behemoths. We can throw them back.” He didn’t know if Unkerlant could, but he wanted the chance to try.

“Who will protect us?” the king said again. But then, jerkily, he nodded. “Take them. We give them to you. Throw them into the fire, and may they smother it with their bodies. And now, we dismiss you.” Rathar went through the ceremonial involved in leaving the chamber without a shadow of unhappiness. Swemmel had given him the chance. How could he make the most of it?

A blizzard howled around Istvan and his squadmates and all the other Gyongyosian soldiers trying to carry the war in the stars-forsaken mountains to Unkerlant. Wool and sheepskin went only so far in warding them. Flaps from Istvan’s sheepskin cap protected his ears, but his beaky nose had long since gone numb. He hoped it wasn’t frostbitten.

“Even my valley doesn’t have weather like this,” he said: no small admission, when Gyongyosians from the interior would sometimes come to blows over whose home valley suffered through the nastier winters.

“What’s that, Sergeant?” Szonyi asked. He tramped along only a few feet from Istvan, but the shrieking wind blew words away.

“Never mind.” Istvan’s next complaint had more substance to it: “How are we supposed to fight a war in weather like this?”

“We’re a warrior race,” Szonyi answered.

“You’re a warrior blockhead,” Istvan said, but not too loud. He didn’t want Szonyi to hear him. Even if the other soldier wasn’t too bright, he was a good man to have along when a squad of Unkerlanters burst out from behind snow-covered rocks yelling “Urra!” at the top of their lungs.

The path--Istvan hoped it was the path, though he had trouble being sure--rose toward the outlet of yet another pass. Istvan wondered what lay beyond. Actually, he could make a pretty good guess: another valley not worth holding, with plenty of snow-covered rocks behind which Unkerlanters could hide. Every now and again, he wondered why Gyongyos wanted this miserable country. He shrugged inside his coat. That wasn’t his concern. All he had to worry about was taking the mountains away from the Unkerlanters and staying alive while he was doing it.

Somewhere back behind him was the whole intricate structure even a warrior race like the Gyongyosians needed to wage war in this day and age: baggage train, supply dumps, roads, and ley-line caravans eventually reaching back to Gyongyos itself. Istvan seldom thought about that structure, not least because it was behind him. He and his comrades were the very tip of the Gyongyosian spearpoint piercing the kingdom of Unkerlant.

Downhill. He’d been walking downhill for some little while before he realized he was doing it. Either he’d found the top of the pass and was heading down into the next valley or ... “Kun!” he shouted, breathing out almost as much smoke as if he were a dragon. “You frozen to death yet, Kun?”

“Aye, a couple of hours ago, Sergeant,” Kun answered, appearing at his elbow.

“Heh,” Istvan said. “All right, then. What I want to know is, are we still marching east, or have we gotten turned around in the snow? If we’re heading back toward our own men, they’ll cursed well blaze us for Unkerlanters.”

“Wind’s still blowing from behind us,” replied the corporal who had been a mage’s apprentice.

Istvan hadn’t thought of that, but it didn’t fully reassure him, either. “Here in the mountains, the wind blows all sorts of crazy ways.”

“That’s so.” Kun plucked at his tawny beard. Like Istvan’s, it was covered with rime. Unlike Istvan’s full, shaggy one, it grew by patches and clumps, and so did less to keep Kun’s cheeks and chin warm. “I can’t do anything about the wind, you know.”

“I don’t want you to do anything about the accursed wind,” Istvan snapped. “I told you, I want to know if I’m going east or west.”

“Oh, aye. So you did.” Kun plucked at his beard some more, as if hoping to find the answer there. After a few paces, he spoke again: “Have to see where the sun is.”