Out of the Darkness

Aloud, he kept giving the same order over and over: “Keep moving! Try to take the high ground east of the Scamandro. Do everything you can to link up our crossings.” The crystallomancers hurried away to take his words to the officers in the front line.

Dawn meant the sorcerers could douse the hideous lights they’d fashioned. It also meant he got some news he would rather not have had: on the far side of the Scamandro, the Algarvians had started fighting back fiercely. “How can they?” Vatran said when the crystallomancers reported that. “We should have squashed them flat as a bug.”

“I think I know what they did,” Rathar said. “I’m not sure, but I think so. I think they pulled back from their frontline positions before we hit them. They did that a few times back in Unkerlant. It would let them save a lot of their men and egg-tossers and behemoths, even if it did cost them land.”

“They can’t afford to lose anything right now,” Vatran said.

“I know.” Rathar nodded. “But if they’d lost the men, they surely would have lost the land, too. This way, they have a chance of counterattacking and driving us back--or they think they do, anyhow.”

“We have to keep throwing men and behemoths at them,” Vatran said.

“We’re doing that. We haven’t been building up here for nothing,” Rathar said. “But it’s going to be harder than we thought it would.”

General Vatran made a sour face. “What isn’t, with Algarvians?”

Rathar had no answer for that. The redheads had come horrifyingly close to conquering his kingdom. Now he was tantalizingly close to conquering theirs. But they hadn’t made any of the fights easy, not a single one. They’d failed not because they weren’t good soldiers, but because there weren’t enough of them and because King Mezentio hadn’t thought he would need to bother conciliating the Unkerlanters his men overran. Arrogance was an Algarvian vice.

It wasn’t one that mattered here, though. There still aren‘t enough of them to stop us, Rathar thought. “Wherever we penetrate, send in reinforcements;” he commanded. Again, crystallomancers relayed his words to the commanders at the front.

He hoped they wouldn’t need the order. It was standard doctrine in Unkerlant. He gave it anyhow. In the heat of the moment, who could guess whether these front-line commanders bothered to remember doctrine?

More dragons flew east, to torment the Algarvians with eggs and with fire. Crystallomancers reported only a handful of enemy beasts rising to challenge them. There was no doubt whatsoever that the Unkerlanters had at last forced the line of the Scamandro. How much more they would be able to do, though, remained an open question.

“Powers below eat the redheads,” Vatran growled as the day wore on with no sign of a breakthrough.

“They will,” Rathar said. “We’re feeding them.”

“Not fast enough,” Vatran grumbled. Rathar wished he could have argued with his general. Unfortunately, he agreed with him. The Algarvians had salvaged more than he’d thought they could, and they were righting not only with their usual cleverness but also with the desperate courage of men who had nothing left to lose. They knew as well as Rathar that only they lay between his army and Trapani.

Another night and day of hammering produced only a little progress, and only a couple of lodgements on the high ground Mezentio’s men were defending. Had everything gone according to plan, Rathar’s behemoths would have been lumbering toward Trapani by then. But the Marshal of Unkerlant wasn’t the only one who’d made plans for this moment, and those of the Algarvians looked to be working a little better than his.

“How long can this go on?” Vatran complained that evening.

“I don’t know,” Rathar answered. “I still think we’re all right, though. We have made them fall back some, and we’ve still got reinforcements pouring in from the west. When they use up what they’ve mustered against us, it’s gone, and gone for good.”

But even he had trouble staying detached and optimistic when his men gained hardly any more ground on the third day of the attack than they had on the second. And that evening, Vatran wasn’t the one doing the complaining. A crystallomancer came up to Rathar and said, “Sir, King Swemmel would speak to you at once.”

Rathar had more than expected such a call. If anything, he was a little surprised the king had waited this long. “I’m coming,” he said. Just for a moment, he imagined ordering the crystallomancer to tell Swemmel he couldn’t come, that he was too busy. But no one had any business being too busy to talk to the King of Unkerlant.