Darkness Descending

Balastro gave him a sour look, got to his feet, and departed with much less ceremony than was customary. Hajjaj stood in the doorway and watched his carriage start back toward the Algarvian ministry back in Bishah. As soon as it rounded a corner--but not an instant before--the Zuwayzi foreign minister let himself smile.

Istvan eyed the pass ahead with something less than delight. “There’ll be Unkerlanters up yonder,” he said, with as much gloomy certainty as a man eyeing dark clouds billowing up from the horizon might use in saying, There’s a storm on the way.

“Aye, no doubt.” That was Szonyi. “And we’ll have to pay the bill for digging them out, too.”

“There won’t be very many of them.” Kun, of all people, was looking on the bright side of things.

“There won’t need to be very many of them.” Istvan waved a hand at the steep-sided jumble of rocks to right and left. “This is the only way forward. As long as they hold it, we aren’t going anywhere.”

Szonyi nodded, looking no more happy than Istvan felt. “Aye, the sergeant’s right, Kun. Ever since the Unkerlanters decided they were going to fight after all, this is the game they’ve played. They aren’t trying to stop us. They’re trying to slow us down, to give us as little as they can till winter comes.”

“And winter in this country won’t be any fun at all.” Istvan eyed the sun. It still stood high in the northern sky at noon, but a tiny bit lower each day. Winter was coming, as inexorably as sand ran through the neck of a glass and down into the bottom half.

Trouble was coming, too. From the strong position they’d set up for themselves in that pass, the Unkerlanters started tossing eggs at the advancing Gyongyosians. Their aim wasn’t particularly good; many of the eggs, instead of bursting on the paths Istvan and his countrymen were using, smote the mountainsides above them. Before long, Istvan discovered the Unkerlanters knew what they were doing after all. One of those bursts touched off an avalanche that swept several soldiers and several donkeys off a path and down to their doom.

“Whoresons!” Istvan shook his fist toward the east. “That’s a coward’s way to fight.”

“They have no honor,” Kanizsai said. “They do nothing but toss eggs and blaze at us from ambush.”

“That’s because there aren’t very many of them here,” Kun said, as if explaining things to an idiot child. “They can’t afford a big standup fight with us, because they’re in the middle of a big standup fight with Algarve.”

“No honor,” the young recruit repeated.

“Whether they do or whether they don’t, we still have to shift the goat-buggers,” Istvan said. As if to underscore his words, an egg burst close by, hurling a big chunk of stone past his head.

Kun asked a question Istvan wished he would have kept to himself: “How?”

Since the whole squad was looking at him, Istvan had to answer. Since he didn’t know, he said, “That’s for the officers to figure out.”

“Aye, but it’s for us to do,” Szonyi said. “We do the work, and we do the bleeding, too.”

“We are warriors,” said Kanizsai, who, not yet having been in any big fights, didn’t realize how quickly most of them could become dead warriors if they rushed a strong position manned by stubborn troops.

The officers set over them did seem to realize that, for which Istvan blessed the stars. Instead of the headlong rush he’d dreaded, the commanders in charge of the advance into Unkerlant sent dragons against the enemies blocking the pass ahead. Eggs fell from under the bellies of the great beasts. Having endured more rains of eggs on Obuda than he cared to remember, Istvan knew a sort of abstract sympathy for the Unkerlanters there to the east.

Szonyi had endured attack from the air, too. If he knew any sympathy for the Unkerlanters, he concealed it very well. “Ball the whoresons,” he said, over and over again. “Smash ‘em up. Squash ‘em flat. Don’t leave enough of any one of’em to make a decent ghost.”

Kun cleared his throat. “The notion that a ghost resembles a body at the moment of its death is only a peasant superstition.”

“And how many ghosts have you seen with your beady little eyes there, Master Spectacles?” Szonyi demanded.

“Stuff a cap in it, both of you,” Istvan said, rolling his eyes. “We’re supposed to be fighting the Unkerlanters, not each other.”

And the Unkerlanters, to his dismay, kept fighting back. They must not have saved all their heavy sticks for the fight against Algarve: they blazed a pair of Gyongyosian dragons out of the air as the beasts stooped low to drop their eggs precisely where their fliers wanted them to go. The rest of the men flying the brightly painted dragons urged them higher into the sky.

“Stars guide the souls of those two,” Szonyi murmured, and glanced over to Kun as if expecting the mage’s apprentice to argue with him. Kun simply nodded, at which Szonyi relaxed.