Out of the Darkness

“You think so, too, eh?” the regimental commander answered. “I hadn’t noticed anything myself, but I saw a couple of mages putting their heads together and muttering a few minutes ago.”

“That doesn’t sound good,” Leudast said. “What are the fornicating Algarvians going to throw at us now?”

“Who knows?” Dagaric said with weary cynicism. “We’ll have to find out the hard way, I expect. That’s what we’re for, after all.”

“Huh,” Leudast said. “I’ve had to find out too cursed many things the hard way. Once in a while, I’d like to know ahead of time.”

He went off in search of the mages his superior had seen, and found them under an oak whose trunk was badly scarred with beams. As Dagaric had said, they were talking in low voices, and both looked worried. Leudast stood around waiting for them to notice him. He waited more ostentatiously with each passing minute. At last, one of the sorcerers said, “You want something, Lieutenant?”

“I want to know what the redheads are brewing up,” Leudast answered. “They’ve got something ready to pop, sure as blazes.” Both wizards wore captain’s rank badges, but he didn’t waste much military courtesy on them. They were only mages, after all, not real officers.

They looked at each other. One of them asked, “Have you wizardly talent?”

“Not that I know of,” Leudast said. “Just a bad feeling in the air.”

“Very bad,” the mage agreed. “Something is coming, and we don’t know what. All we can do is wait and see.”

“Can we send dragons to drop eggs on the heads of the whoresons cooking up whatever it is?” Leudast asked. “If they’re trying not to get smashed into strawberry jam, they can’t very well cast spells.”

The wizards brightened. “Do you know, Lieutenant, that isn’t the worst idea anyone has ever had,” said the one who did the talking.

“You boys are the ones to take care of it,” Leudast said, hiding a smile. “You’re the ones who deal with crystals and such.” The mages might outrank him, but he could see what needed doing. They sometimes put him in mind of bright children: they could come up with all sorts of clever schemes, but a good many of those had nothing to do with the real world.

Whistles shrilled again. Leudast trotted away from the mages without a backwards glance. If the attack was heating up again, he needed to be with his men as they pushed on toward the heart of Trapani. But, as he moved forward, he suddenly discovered that he wasn’t going forward at all: his feet were moving up and down, but each new step left him in the same place as had the one before it.

Cries of alarm said he wasn’t the only Unkerlanter soldier thus afflicted. He didn’t know how the Algarvian mages were doing this, but they plainly were. A glance told him the behemoths were similarly frozen in place. Unkerlanter soldiers started falling as hidden redheads blazed them.

They could still run away from the heart of Trapani. Some of them did. Leudast discovered he could move sideways and, more important, that he could duck. “Get down!” he called to the men closest to danger. “Get into cover! You can do it.” Some people wouldn’t have figured it out for themselves, but would manage to do it once told they could.

Scuttling behind a boulder, Leudast wondered if the entire Unkerlanter assault on Trapani, all the way around the Algarvian capital, had been frozen in its tracks. He wouldn’t have been surprised. Algarvian mages didn’t think small. They never had, not since they started killing Kaunians--and, very likely, not before then, either. Algarvians were flamboyant folk.

Eggs kept on bursting deeper inside Trapani. “They can’t stop everything!” Leudast exclaimed. He’d had the right of it while talking with his own wizards. It was up to the fellows who served the egg-tossers now. If they killed or wounded or at least distracted the sorcerers who made the spell work, the attack could resume again. If not . . .

Leudast looked up. A couple of dragons painted Unkerlanter rock-gray hovered like oversized kestrels, unable to go forward no matter how powerfully they beat their great wings. Even as he watched, a beam from an Algarvian heavy stick tumbled one of them from the sky.

He waited, every now and then blazing from behind that boulder. Maybe the eggs the Unkerlanters hurtled into Trapani finally did what they were supposed to. Maybe Mezentio’s mages could hold their spell for only so long. Maybe--though he wouldn’t have bet much on it--their Unkerlanter counterparts at last beat down their wizardry. Whatever the reason, shouts of, “Urra!” rang out when Swemmel’s soldiers discovered they could go forward again.

Why are we cheering? Leudast wondered as he ran towards a house from which a couple of diehards were blazing. Now we’ve got another chance to get killed.