Out of the Darkness

“Some of ‘em won’t be ready to fight till the next one, either.” Drogden spat again. “Little buggers like that are dangerous, too. It’s like a game to them, not anything real. You and me, we’re afraid to die. Those kids, they don’t think they can. They’ll do crazy things on account of it.”

“They’re Algarvians,” Leudast said. “That means they’re all dangerous, as far as I’m concerned.”

“Something to that-something, but not everything,” Drogden answered. “The women, now. . Mezentio’s whoresons had fun with our girls when they came into Unkerlant. Now it’s our turn. Redhaired pussy’s as good as any other kind.”

“I expect it would be,” Leudast agreed. Drogden sounded as if he was speaking from experience. No one among the Unkerlanters’ commanders would say a word if their soldiers and officers raped their way through Algarve. Leudast hadn’t indulged himself yet. He didn’t know whether he would or not. Go without long enough and you didn’t much care how you got it.

“They’re all sluts anyway-Algarvian women, I mean,” Drogden said. “They deserve it-and they’re going to get it, too.”

“A lot of ‘em are running away from us as fast as they can go, for fear of what we’ll do to them,” Leudast said.

“That’s fine. I don’t mind a bit.” Drogden had a nasty chuckle when he chose to use it. “The more they clog their nice paved roads for their own soldiers, the more trouble they end up in. And when our dragons fly over, don’t they have fun?”

“Don’t they just?” Now Leudast spoke with the same savage enthusiasm as his regiment commander. “The redheads would do that to our peasants and townsfolk when they jumped on our back. Nice to let ‘em know what it feels like.”

Funny, he thought. I don’t mind seeing Algarvians torn to pieces by sorcerous energy from our eggs or flamed into charcoal by our dragons. I don’t mind that at all, except for the stink of the burnt meat. So why am I squeamish about throwing a woman down and stabbing her between her legs with my lance?

Before he could dwell on that, eggs burst close enough to make him flatten out on the ground like a snake. “They do keep trying to hit back,” Drogden said. “Well, they’ll pay for it. They’ll pay for everything.”

He was soon proved right. The Unkerlanters had many more egg-tossers up near the fighting front than the Algarvians did, and soon pounded the redheads into silence again. The push into western Algarve went on-till the redheads made a stand in a town called Ozieri. Instead of swarming into the town and fighting house to house, as they would have done earlier in the war, the Unkerlanters swept around it-a lesson they had learned from their Algarvian foes. Once Mezentio’s men inside Ozieri were cut off from help, the Unkerlanters could pound them and their strongpoint to bits at leisure and at minimum expense.

That didn’t bring out the Algarvian defenders. They’d learned their lessons in the long, bitter war, too. Their soldiers dug in among the ruins. Sooner or later, they would make the Unkerlanters pay the price for winkling them out. Sooner or later, we’ll throw second-line soldiers at them, Leudast thought. Losing those fellows won’t matter so much-and we’ll get rid of the Algarvians. Sometimes the game had steps almost as formal as a dance.

But the Algarvian civilians in Ozieri didn’t understand how the game was played. They’d never expected to have to learn; they’d left that lesson for the people of all the kingdoms bordering their own. When eggs started bursting among the homes and shops they’d cherished for generations, many of them didn’t know enough to go down to their cellars and try to wait out the attack. Those people grabbed whatever they could and fled east with it in their arms or on their backs.

What they didn’t realize was that it was too late for such flight. By the time the eggs started falling heavily, the Unkerlanters had already surrounded Ozieri. Civilians fleeing the place found themselves in just as much danger as soldiers would have-if anything, in more, because they couldn’t blaze back and didn’t know how to take cover.

Leudast blazed an old man with a duffel bag slung over one bent shoulder. He wasn’t happy about doing it, but he didn’t hesitate. For all he knew, the old Algarvian was one of the soldiers recently dragooned into the army, and the canvas sack was full of those nasty little throwable eggs the redheads had got so much use from the past few months.