Into The Darkness

We have to keep them back on their heels!"

"Listen to the captain!" Sergeant Panfilo bellowed, almost in Teal ear. "He knows what he's talking about." Panfilo shook his head spoke again, this time in a much lower voice: "Never thought I'd say about an officer."

The strongpoint Larbino's company had been trained to cap turned out to be the naval offices at Tirgoviste. Till he flopped [..d.] behind some rubble not far away, Tealdo hadn't known what the [.ta.] was, nor cared much, either. His superiors told him what to do, an went out and did it. The arrangement struck him as equitable.

"Covering blazes!" Larbino roared, and Tealdo aimed his stick second-story window from which a Sibian was liable to do some blaze of his own. No sooner had he done so than he saw, or thought he s motion behind that window. His stick sent a beam into the offices.

Sibian blazed at the Algarvians from that spot, so Tealdo concluded hadn't been imagining things after all.

Under the protection of the storm of blazes, a couple of men ran ward and set an egg against the iron door of the naval offices. One them fell as he dashed away from the doors. His comrade stopped picked him up and started to carry him toward something more safety. Then he too went down.

Tealdo cursed to see such courage wasted. He hoped somebody try to get him away if he got hurt. He hoped whoever it was would h e en the ture

Own target [..nd he at a zing e saw, es. No dcd he an for One of ed..] and more like would have better luck than the fellow from the egg crew, too.

The egg burst then. Tealdo blinked frantically, trying to clear away the fuzzy, glowing green-purple spot in the center of his field of vision.

When he could see straight ahead again, he whooped: the doors had not been able to withstand the energies unleashed against them. One leaned drunkenly on its hinges, while the other had been hurled into the build ing, with luck smashing a good many Siblans in the corridor behind it.

"Forward!" Larbino and Panfilo cn'ed the order at the same time.

Larbino, added "Follow me!" and dashed toward the opening torn in the naval offices. Tealdo scrambled to his feet and did follow the captain. An officer who [..d.] from the front could pull his men after him: that was a lesson as old as war. An officer who led from the front was also horribly likely to die before his time: that was a lesson driven home during the Six Years' War.

It held here, too. Larbino got through the given doorway, but no more than a couple of strides farther. Then he crumpled bonelessly, blazed through the head. But the soldiers on his heels killed the Sibian who'd blazed him. Howling like wolves and calling Larbino's name along with King Mezentio's, the Algarvians fought their way into and through the naval offices.

"Hold it night there!" Tealdo screamed as a Sibian hurried toward a window to escape. Firelight coming in through the window showed a lot of -old braid on the fellow's sleeves: an officer, but one intent on leaving the front, not leading from it.

For a moment, Tealdo thought he would try to jump out the window.

That would have been a mistake, a particularly fatal mistake. The Sibian officer must have realized it. He raised his hands. I am Count Delfinu; ray rank is commodore," he said in slow, clear Algarvian. I expect to be used with all the dignity due my rank and station."

"That's nice," Tealdo said. He might have to act polite around his own nobles. He didn't care a fig for the fancy tides foreigners carried, though. Gesturing with the stick, he went on, "You come along with me, pal. Somebody'll figure out what to do with you." A captive commodore was an excuse plenty good enough to let him leave the fighting for a little while. And if the rest of the fight was going as smoothly as this," Tealdo laughed. "Come on, pal," he repeated. "Tirgoviste's ours. Way it looks to me, your whole cursed kingdom's ours."

Cornelu cursed. He and Efori'el had been out on a routine patrol, find ing nothing much. When the leviathan brought him back toward Tirgoviste harbor, though… He cursed again, cursed and wept mingling his salty tears with the salt sea. "The harbor is theirs," he groaned. "The city is theirs."

Fires burning up in Tirgoviste silhouetted the masts and spars of the

Algarvian invasion fleet. Cornelu did not need long to figure out what

King Mezentio's men had done. In an abstract way, he admired their nerve. Had a couple of Sibian ley-line cruisers happened on that fleet of sailing ships, they could have worked a ghastly slaughter. But they hadn't.

The galleons, or whatever the old-fashioned name for them was, had ghosted across the ley lines with no one the wiser. The rest of the Algarvian navy, no doubt, would follow now.

"Costache," Cornelu said: another groan. All he could do was hope his wife remained safe, and the child to whom she would soon give birth.

He didn't think the Algarvians would deliberately outrage her - were they not civilized men? - but anything could happen during a battle.