Into The Darkness

Unkerlanter officers would go forward under flag of truce to urge surrenders, pointing out that the Forthwegians could not possibly hope to resist. Their foes sent them back and kept fighting as long as they could.

"Inefficient," Magnulf said as his squad encamped one evening after pushing another fifteen or so miles into Forthweg - a typical day's advance. "They aren't stopping us. They're hardly slowing us down.

"What's the point to throwing their lives away "Stubborn fools," Leudast said. "They should see they're beaten and give up.

"I heard one of them shout, 'Better to die under King Penda than to live under King Swemmel!"' Magnulf said, mimicking the Forthwegian tongue as well as he could. The sergeant shrugged. "I think that's what he said, anyhow. And now he's dead, and it's not going to keep the Forthwegians from living under King Swemmel, not one little bit it's not. We'll be knocking on the door at Eoforwic in another few days."

Leudast looked east. "We don't quarrel with the Algarvians, though?"

"Not if they stay on their side of what used to be the border before the

Six Years' War," Magnulf answered. "We won't cross it - we're just taking back what was ours, not stealing from anybody else."

That night, Forthwegian dragons dropped eggs on the Unkerlanters' forward positions. The noise from the bursts kept Leudast awake, but none of them came particularly close.

The next morning, the Unkerlanters approached Hwiterne, a city whose stone keep would have been a formidable defense in the days before eggs were flung for miles or fell from dragons. Again, King Swemmel's officers went ahead to ask the town to surrender. Again, the Forthwegian garrison refused.

Before long, pillars of smoke rose into the sky from Hwiterne. Under cover of that barrage, Unkerlanter troops pushed through the patchily inhabited suburbs and into the town itself. Leudast discovered he had not only Forthwegian soldiers but also townsfolk blazing at him. He blazed back. He blazed at anyone he spied in Hwiterne who wasn't wearing Unkerlanter rock-gray. He suspected he might have wounded innocent bystanders. That was inefficient, but not nearly so inefficient as letting himself izet killed.

He flopped down in the rubble that had been a house. A woman with a bandage on her head lay not far away from him. He didn't blaze her down; he could see she had no weapon. "Why?" she asked him. "Why did you cursed Unkerlanters come here? Why didn't you leave us alone?"

Lendist followed that well enough. "We came to take back what's ours" he answered.

She glared at him. "Can't you see we don't want you? Can't you see we" - a word he didn't know - "King Swemmel?" Whatever the word meant he doubted it was praise.

"If you're not strong enough to stop us, what difference does that [...]"

She cursed him then, her voice full of bitter hopelessness. He could have killed her for it. No one would have been the wiser. No one who [..iiiattcrcd..] to Leudast would have cared at all. She had to know as much.

She cursed anyhow, as if defying him to do his worst.

He shrugged his broad shoulders. She cursed again, harder than ever.

His indifference seemed more wounding to her than rage would have been. Shruaging once more, he said, "You didn't curse when King Penda invaded Algarve. What business have on [..ot doino..] it now?"

She stared at him. "The Algarvians deserve everything that happens to them. We won't deserve any of this."

"That's not what King Swemmel thinks," Leudast said. "He's my king. I obey him." Dreadful things happened to Unkerlanters who didn't obey King Swermuel Leudast preferred not to dwell on those [..].

A Forthwegian egg burst not far away. Chunks of wood and mud bn*ck rained down on him and the woman with the bandaged head.

Dreadful things, he realized, could also happen to Unkerlanters who did obey King Swemmel. For a moment he wondered why in that case he [..].

He didn't have to search hard for the answer. Dreadful things might not happen to him if he fought the Gongs or the Forthwegians. Nothing too dreadful had happened to him yet. If, on the other hand, he set his own will against the king's… Swemmel had shown over the years that disaster surely befell anyone rash enough to do such a thing.

The Unkerlanters rained eggs on the center of Hwiteme, from which resistance was fiercest. Officers blew whistles. Sergeants shouted. Leudast scrambled to his feet and dashed forward. For a couple of heartbeats, he heard the Forthwegian woman cursing him yet again. Then her voice was lost in the greater din of battle.