Out of the Darkness

The men in and around the outlying house started blazing at Swemmel’s soldiers first. Sidroc could hear the Unkerlanters’ howls and curses, and even make sense of a few of those oaths. His men sat quietly in their holes, waiting and watching. They all expected the same thing. And they got it: the Unkerlanters wheeled toward the house, intent on flushing out their tormentors.

That that might expose their backs to another set of tormentors never seemed to cross their minds. “Now!” Sidroc shouted, and started blazing. One enemy soldier after another went down. For a couple of minutes, Swemmel’s men couldn’t even figure out where the beams wreaking such havoc among them were coming from. Sidroc laughed. “Easy!”

But then more Unkerlanters came forward, and they had some idea that danger lurked among the trees. Danger also lurked, though, by the tumbledown barn, and that hadn’t occurred to them. The men from Plegmund’s Brigade posted there worked the same kind of slaughter as Sidroc’s squad had a few minutes earlier.

With that, the entire Unkerlanter advance came unglued. Swemmel’s men had been hit from unexpected directions three times in a row. When they could follow orders exactly as they got them, they made fine soldiers. Having spent more than two years in the field against them, Sidroc knew exactly how good they could be. But when they got surprised, they sometimes panicked.

They did here. They streamed back toward the west, dragging some wounded men with them and leaving others, along with the dead, lying on the muddy snow. Sidroc let out a long sigh of relief. “Well, that wasn’t so bad,” he said. “I don’t think we got even a scratch here.”

“Only one trouble,” Sudaku said. “They will come back.”

“Which means we’d better move,” Sidroc said. “They know where we are, so they’ll be sure to give this place a good pounding.” No sooner were the words out of his mouth than a messenger came up from Lieutenant Puliano, ordering the squad to shift to a new position in and around another outlying house. Sidroc preened. “Do I know what’s what?”

“Let me kiss your boots,” Ceorl said, “and you can kiss my--” The suggestion was not one a common soldier usually made to a corporal.

“If we’re both still alive tonight, you’re in trouble,” Sidroc said. Ceorl gave him an obscene gesture, too. Sidroc laughed and shook his head. “You’re not worth punishing, you son of a whore. That would just take you away from the front and make you safer than I am. I won’t let you get away with it. Come on, let’s move.”

They’d just started digging new holes when a storm of eggs fell on the grove they’d abandoned. The house and barn where other squads had taken shelter also vanished in bursts of sorcerous energy. Sudaku spoke in his Valmieran-flavored Algarvian: “Now they think it will be easy.”

“It would be easy--if they were fighting more Unkerlanters,” Sidroc said. “But the redheads are smarter than they are.” If the redheads are so cursed smart, what are they doing with their backs to the wall here in their own kingdom? And if you’re so fornicating smart, what are you doing here with them?

But, in the short run, on the small scale, what he’d said turned out to be the exact truth. On came the Unkerlanters once more, plainly confident they’d put paid to the men who’d tormented them. On they came--and again got caught from the flank and rear and ignominiously fled before setting so much as a foot in the village they were supposed to take.

“This is fun,” Ceorl said. “They can keep the whoresons coming. We’ll kill ‘em till everything turns blue.”

A long pause followed. We’d better move again, before they start pounding this place, too, Sidroc thought. Before he could give the order, though, another runner from the village came up. “Lieutenant Puliano says to pull back,” the man said.

“What? Why?” Sidroc asked irately. “Doesn’t he think the blockheads in rock-gray will fall for it again? I sure do.”

“But he gives the orders, and you sure don’t,” the messenger replied.

Since that was true, Sidroc had no choice but to obey. When he and his men--who still hadn’t lost anybody, despite the slaughter they’d worked on the Unkerlanters--got back into the Algarvian village, he burst out, “Why are you bringing us back here? We can hold ‘em a long time.”

“Aye, we could hold ‘em a long time here.” Puliano didn’t sound or look like a happy man. “But they’ve broken through farther north, and if we don’t pull back a little ways they’ll nip in behind us and cut us off.”