Darkness Descending

“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.