Darkness Descending

“I’ll do my best, sir,” Wimar said as he also got up. He followed Rathar away from the fire. The eyes of the men he commanded followed them both. Rathar hid a smile. No one would give the sergeant any back talk for a while, not after the marshal of Unkerlant asked for his opinions.

Pointing east toward the front not too far away, Rathar asked, “What sort of shape are the Algarvians in right now?”

“Cold, frostbitten, miserable,” Wimar answered at once. “They never once expected to have to do this kind of fighting. You’ll know about that better than I do, sir. But they don’t break to pieces, powers below eat them. You make the least little mistake against ‘em and they’ll cut off your dick and hand it to you with a ribbon tied around it. Uh, sir.” By his expression, he didn’t think he should have been that frank. By his breath, he’d had enough, he’d had enough spirits to talk before he did a whole lot of thinking.

“I’m not angry,” Rathar said. “They’ve come too cursed close to cutting off the kingdom’s dick, Sergeant, and they may do it yet unless we figure out how to stop them once and for all. Any notions you have, I’ll gladly listen to.”

Wimar needed a moment to believe what he was hearing. At last, he said, “I don’t know how we’ll fare when spring comes.”

“All the more reason to push hard now, while we still hold the advantage, don’t you think?” Rathar asked.

“Oh, aye,” Wimar answered. “We push them back now, then see how far they push us back later.”

King Swemmel had demanded that the Algarvians be pushed out of Unkerlant altogether by the coming of spring. That hadn’t happened. It wouldn’t happen. Not a quarter of it would happen. In the palace, Swemmel could demand whatever he pleased, and it would be his at once. Here in the real world, unfortunately, the redheads also had a good deal to say about the business.

Made bold by Rathar’s forbearance, Wimar said, “Ask you something, sir?” Forbearing still, Rathar nodded. The sergeant licked his lips, then continued, “Sir, can we really beat ‘em?”

“Aye, we can.” The marshal spoke with great conviction. “We can. But we have no promise from the powers above that we will. The Algarvians may have been too confident when the fighting started.” The dismal way some Unkerlanter armies had performed would have gone a long way toward making them overconfident, but he didn’t mention that. “I think I can guarantee that the redheads won’t be too confident this spring. We’d better not be, either.”

“Anybody who thinks anything against Mezentio’s buggers will ever be easy is a cursed fool, anybody wants to know the way it looks to me,” Wimar said. When he was expressing strong emotion, his Grelzer accent got thicker.

Before Rathar could answer, the Algarvians started tossing eggs into the area, as if they’d decided to underscore the sergeant’s words. Rathar had huddled behind burning rocks when he went up to Zuwayza to get that bungled campaign moving forward once more. Now he dove into a hole with a dusting of snow on the mud at the bottom. He knew a certain amount of pride that he got in there before Wimar could.

The sergeant cursed in disgust. “Their tossers have been short of eggs lately. They must have got a couple of caravans through.”

An egg burst close enough to make the ground shudder under Rathar. “Be glad it was eggs and not Kaunian captives,” he said as dirt rained down on the sergeant and him.

“Oh, aye, there is that,” Wimar answered. “Of course, they might have brought eggs and Kaunians both. Have we got any old folks and convicts ready to slaughter in case they did bring up some of those poor whoresons--or even if they didn’t, come to that? Every little bit helps, is what folks say.”

“Every little bit helps,” Rathar repeated in a hollow voice. Wimar thought of his countrymen the same way Swemmel did: as weapons, or perhaps tools, in the struggle against Algarve, nothing more. Rathar wondered what the people the king’s inspectors routed from their villages thought. Whatever it was, it did them no good. Unkerlanter mages used their life energy as readily as the redheads stole that of the Kaunians.

More eggs fell, a heavier plastering than before. Wimar cursed again. “If I didn’t know better, I’d say the stinking redheads were getting their ducks in a row for a counterattack,” he said.

“Why do you know better?” Rathar asked, genuinely puzzled. “They’ve done plenty of counterattacking this winter.”

“If they were going to counterattack, I expect they’d already be killing Kaunians,” the sergeant answered. “We’d have to get out of this hole, too. It’d be a death trap.”

“Ah.” The marshal inclined his head. “I should have thought of that. But you have more experience in the field against them than I do.”

“More than I want, sir--I’ll tell you that,” Wimar said.

Before the marshal could reply, cries rang out from the front: “The redheads!” “The Algarvians!” And another shout, more alarmed and more alarming than the rest: “Behemoths!”