Out of the Darkness

“What’s that, Lieutenant?” asked Captain Dagaric, who’d taken over as regimental commander after Captain Drogden hadn’t been careful enough while raping an Algarvian woman. Dagaric had efficiency written all over him. He was a good soldier, in a cold-blooded way. Nobody would love him, but he wouldn’t throw men away out of stupidity, either. Given some of the things Leudast had seen, solid professionalism was nothing to sneeze at.

He repeated himself, adding, “Powers below eat ‘em.”

“They will.” Dagaric spoke with assurance. “We are going to hammer them flat when we cross the river. That will be the last fight, because we will take Trapani once we get rolling.”

“May it be so, sir,” Leudast said. “This war . . . We had to win it. If we didn’t, they’d’ve held us down forever.”

“I only wish we could get rid of every last one of the buggers,” Dagaric said. “If we treated them the way they treated the Kaunians up in Forthweg, we really wouldn’t have to worry about Algarve for a long time to come.”

Leudast nodded. He didn’t think even King Swemmel would massacre all the redheads in the lands he was overrunning, but you never could tell with Swemmel. Any Unkerlanter would have said the same. And . . . “We’ve had to use our own people the way the Algarvians used the Kaunians from Forthweg. Mezentio’s men deserve something extra to pay for that.”

“You bet they do,” Captain Dagaric said. “I expect they’ll get it, too.”

A weird wailing, laughing, gobbling noise came out of the east. Leudast grabbed for his stick. “What in blazes is that? Does it go with some new Algarvian magic?”

Dagaric pointed out to the Scamandro, where a big bird was swimming, its back checked in black and white, its beak a fish-catching spear. “No, it’s just a loon--and you’re another one, for letting the call spook you.”

“They must be birds of the south,” Leudast said. “They don’t live on any streams up near the village I come from.” More than half to himself, he added, “I wonder if anything’s left of the place these days.” Then he spoke to the regimental commander again: “And I don’t see how you can blame me for being jumpy about the fornicating redheads and their magecraft, sir. With all the weird new spells they’re throwing at us these days . . .”

With a dismissive gesture, Dagaric said, “A drowning man thrashes his arms and flails. Whoreson still drowns, though. The Algarvians send these stupid spells of theirs at us before they find out what the magic can do, or even if it works at all. No wonder most of it goes sour.”

That made sense--up to a point. “Even the spells that maybe don’t do everything they’re supposed to can still hurt us,” Leudast said. “We’ve seen it.”

“They’d hurt us worse if the redheads really knew what they were doing,” Dagaric said. That made Leudast blink. Like most Unkerlanters, he took it almost for granted that the Algarvians were cleverer than his own folk. They’d proved their wit in Unkerlant too often for him to think anything else. But Dagaric stubbornly plowed ahead: “Think how much trouble they could cause if all their fancy magic really worked. It mostly doesn’t, though, and I’ll tell you why. A couple-three years ago, the redheads figured they could lick us with what they already had, and they didn’t worry about anything else. Then, when they started getting into trouble, that’s when they decided to make the fire under their mages hotter. So they have all these spells that would do this, that, or the other thing--if only they worked right. But they cursed well don’t, and we’ll have licked Algarve before the redheads ever do get ‘em right.”

After Leudast thought that over, he slowly nodded. “The one thing Mezentio’s men always foul up is, they always think they’re smarter than they really are and they can do more than they can really do.”

Dagaric nodded, too, most emphatically. “You’ve got it, Lieutenant. You’ve got it just right, matter of fact. And how fornicating smart does that make them? If they were anywhere near as smart as they want everybody else to think they are, would we be here halfway between the Yaninan border and Trapani? Would the stinking islanders be coming up the Algarvians’ arse from the east?”

“No, sir,” Leudast said. “They made everybody hate ‘em and they made everybody afraid of ‘em and now they’ve made everybody gang up on ‘em, too. You look at it that way, maybe they really aren’t so smart.” He heard the wonder in his own voice. We’re winning the war. We’re not only winning it, we’ve got it almost won. I can’t quite see Trapani from here, but it won’t be long.