Out of the Darkness

He wondered if he had any family left alive. All he could do was hope. Before long I’ll find out. People said the Unkerlanter army down in the south had finally launched its great attack on Trapani. He didn’t know whether that was true or just one more rumor. He suspected it held some truth, though, because the fight around Gromheort was heating up again, too.

Dragons dropped eggs on the city and swooped down to rooftop height to flame any enemy soldiers they could catch away from cover. Egg-tossers punished Gromheort still more. Behemoths came forward, assembling almost contemptuously outside the city to let the Algarvians know what would be heading their way.

An Unkerlanter officer went into Gromheort under flag of truce to demand surrender one last time. The Algarvians sent him back. He happened to walk past Ealstan’s regiment shaking his head. Somebody called to him, “We’ll have to squash the whoresons, eh?”

“That’s right,” the envoy answered. Ealstan followed Unkerlanter fairly well these days. The officer added, “We can do it, too.” Maybe he expected the soldiers to burst into cheers. If he did, he was disappointed. They’d seen too much fighting to be eager for more.

Before dawn the next morning, more dragons swooped down on Ealstan’s poor, beleaguered city. Egg-tossers pummeled Gromheort anew. He grimaced at the chaos and destruction ahead. How could anyone, Algarvian soldier or Forthwegian civilian, have survived the pummeling the Unkerlanters had given the place?

As soon as the sunrise painted the sky with pink, whistles shrilled all around Gromheort. Officers and sergeants shouted, “Forward!” Clutching his stick, doing his best not to be afraid and not to let himself worry, forward Ealstan went.

Watching behemoths going forward, too, was reassuring. For one thing, they fought vastly better than individual footsoldiers could. For another, they drew blazes from the enemy, who knew how well they fought at least as well as Ealstan did. If the redheads were blazing at behemoths, they weren’t blazing at him.

And redheads blazing there were. Regardless of whether Ealstan thought the Unkerlanter pounding should have killed them all, it hadn’t. They plainly intended to make the attackers pay for every inch of the journey into Gromheort.

Perhaps fifty yards off to Ealstan’s left, a behemoth’s massive foot came down on an egg buried in the ground. The egg burst. An instant later, so did all the smaller eggs the behemoth was carrying. The blast of sorcerous energy knocked Ealstan off his feet and left him half stunned, his ears ringing. When he looked over there, he saw no sign the behemoth or its crew had ever existed except for a crater gouged in the earth.

“Forward!” The shout seemed to come from very far away now. But Ealstan knew what Swemmel’s men would be yelling regardless of how well he heard them. And, again, he went forward. The Algarvians might blaze him if he did. The Unkerlanters would surely blaze him if he didn’t.

An Algarvian--a filthy, scrawny fellow in the rags of a tunic and kilt--threw up his hands and came out of his hole as Ealstan and a couple of Unkerlanters drew near. “I surrender!” he shouted in his own language.

Ealstan’s formal Algarvian was better than his formal Unkerlanter, in which he guessed at the meaning a lot of the time and sometimes guessed wrong. “Keep your hands high and go to the rear,” he told the redhead. “If you are lucky, no one will blaze you.” Mezentio’s trooper knew how lucky he was not to have been blazed down on the spot. Babbling thanks, he hurried off toward whatever captivity might hold for him.

“You really speak some of their language,” an Unkerlanter said admiringly. “It’s not just ‘Hands high!’ and ‘Drop your stick!’ with you.” He brought out the couple of phrases almost any Unkerlanter soldier could say.

Ealstan shrugged. “The Algarvians made me learn it in school.”

“No, no, it’s good you know it,” the soldier in the rock-gray tunic said. “Maybe you can talk more of the whoresons into giving up.” He didn’t want to get blazed, either. The more of Mezentio’s men who surrendered, the fewer who would fight to the end. That made good sense to Ealstan, too.

He didn’t need long to see that this push was going to be different. Before, when the Unkerlanters probed at Gromheort, they’d eased off on running into stiff resistance. Not now. Now, the behemoths pounded Algarvian strongpoints outside the shattered walls. Footsoldiers pushed forward between those strong-points. Mezentio’s men were brave. Ealstan, who hated them as much as any man in Forthweg did, had seen that for himself, both during the dreadful fighting in Eoforwic and in his involuntary stay in King Swemmel’s army. But courage wasn’t going to do them any good, not this time. A starved cat forced to fight a mastiff might be brave, too. Its bravery wouldn’t do it any good: the mastiff would kill it just the same.