Into The Darkness

The Unkerlanters called the tunic's color rock gray, but it didn't match any of the rocks hereabouts, which were various ugly shades of yellow.

That also struck Leudast as inefficient, but he kept his mouth shut about it. Magnulf went on, "I'll even answer your question. The king wants this land back because it used to belong to Unkerlant, and so it ought to again.

And the Zuwayzin don't want us to have it on account of it blocks our path toward better country farther north."

"Is there better country farther north?" Leudast asked, again speaking more freely than he should have. "Or does this miserable desert go on forever?"

"There's supposed to be better country," Magnulf said. "I suppose there must be better country - otherwise, the Zuwayzin couldn't raise so many soldiers against us."

That made sense. Along with the rest of the men in his company,

Leudast slogged north. Thornbushes grew here and there among the rocks. Very little else did. Very little lived here, either - snakes and scorpions and a few little pale foxes with enormous ears. Scavenger birds circled overhead, their wings looking as wide as those of dragons. They thought the Unkerlanter army would come to grief in the desert. Leudast remained far from sure they were wrong.

He tramped past a dead behemoth. The big beast hadn't been blazed; its corpse bore no mark he could see. Maybe it had just keeled over from trying to haul the weight of its armor and weapons and riders through the desert. Since he felt like keeling over himself, Leudast knew a certain amount of sympathy for the poor brute. The army had its own scavengers; they'd already taken away the ironmongery the behemoth had carried on its back.

Magnulf pointed. "There's the line," he said: Unkerlanters crouching and sprawling behind stones, blazing away at the Zuwayzin who blocked their path. As Leudast got down behind a rock himself so he could crawl forward, one of his countrymen shrieked and clutched at his shoulder.

This terrain was made for defense. A handful of men could hold up an army here - and had.

"Come on, you reinforcements, take your places," an officer shouted.

"We'll get those black bastards out of there soon enough - see if we don't." He ordered some of the soldiers already in line forward to flank out the Zuwayzin who'd stalled the advance.

Leudast blazed away at the rocks behind which the enemy sheltered.

He had no idea whether his beams hit anyone. At the least, they made the Zuwayzin keep their heads down while his comrades slid around by the night flank.

But more Zuwayzin waited on the right. They hadn't been blazing, perhaps hoping to draw the very attack the officer had commanded. They broke it. After a few minutes, Unkerlanters came streaming back to the main line, some of them helping wounded comrades escape the enemy's beams.

When the Zuwayzin attacked in turn, the Unkerlanters threw them back. That cheered Leudast - till he heard an officer say, "We're the ones who are supposed to be moving forward, curse it, not the black men."

"Tell it to the Zuwayzin - maybe they haven't heard," somebody not far from Leudast muttered. That struck him as dangerously inefficient speech, but he wasn't inclined to report it. For the moment, he was con tent to be able to hold his position and not have to retreat.

He swigged from his water bottle. That wouldn't last indefinitely, and, except for the known water holes, the dowsers hadn't had any luck finding new supplies. Leudast found himself unsurprised: if no water was out there to find, the best dowsers in the world couldn't find it. That meant the army had to depend on the familiar holes and on what ley-line cara vans and animals could bring for-ward. By the knots of mages Leudast had seen working along the ley lines, the Zuwayzin had done their best to make them impassable. That did nothing to add to his peace of mind.

And then he stopped worrying about such minor details as perhaps dying of thirst in a few days. Off to the left, the west, eggs smashed against stone. Leuclast automatically hugged the ground. Hard on the heels of those roars came exultant cn'es in a language he did not know and despaining ones in a language he did: "The Zuwayzin! The Zuwayzin are on our flank!"

"Camels!" Sergeant Magnulf used the word as vilely as Leudast had used efficiency before. "Bastards snuck around our cavalry again." He bit out a few curses of a more conventional sort, then gathered himself

"Well, no help for it." He looked westward to gauge how close the attackers were. "Fall back!" he shouted. "Fall back - form a line so we're not enfiladed any more. Whatever happens, we have to hang on to that water hole back there."