Rulers of the Darkness

Major Spinello had thought the fighting in Sulingen the worst warfare possible. Now, as his regiment fought its way east toward other, far-off, Algarvian forces fighting their way west, he saw Sulingen re-created across miles of rolling plains. The Unkerlanters had been waiting for this assault. There didn't seem to be an inch of their salient where they hadn't either built a redoubt or buried an egg. By now, most of the dowsers who'd picked out paths through those buried eggs were dead or wounded, either from their own mistakes or from Unkerlanter beams or eggs.

Five days into the fighting, the Algarvians on the western edge of the bulge around Durrwangen had advanced perhaps half a dozen miles. They were far behind where they should have been. Spinello knew as much. Every Algarvian officer- and probably every Algarvian common soldier, too- knew as much. Spinello counted it a minor miracle that his countrymen were still moving forward at all.

He lay behind a dead Unkerlanter behemoth that was starting to stink under the hot summer sun. Captain Turpino lay at the other end of the dead beast. Turpino turned a filthy, haggard, smoke-blackened face to Spinello and asked, "What now… sir?"

"We're supposed to take that hill up ahead." Spinello's hand shook as he pointed. He was every bit as filthy and haggard as his senior company commander. He couldn't remember the last time he'd slept.

Cautious, Turpino peered up over the carcass. "What, the regiment by itself?" he demanded. "That hill's got Unkerlanter behemoths- live ones- the way a dog has fleas."

"No, not the regiment by itself. Our army. However much of it we can aim at the high ground." Spinello yawned. Powers above, he was tired. It was like being drunk; he didn't care what came out of his mouth. "I don't think our regiment's in any shape to take a gumdrop away from a three-year-old."

Turpino stared at him, then laughed as cautiously as he'd looked at the hill ahead. Spinello's answering grimace might have been a smile. Along with the rest of the great force the Algarvians had mustered, the regiment had hammered its way through five successive Unkerlanter lines- and, in the hammering, had burned away like wood in the fire.

He wondered if he still had half the men who'd gone forward when he first blew the whistle. He doubted it. The three companies plucked from occupation duty in Jelgava had suffered particularly hard. It wasn't that they weren't brave. They were, to a fault. They went forward when they should have hesitated, and had got themselves and their comrades into a couple of desperate pickles simply because they'd lacked the experience to see traps they should have. Well, they had that experience now- the survivors, anyhow.

Turpino turned his head. "More of our behemoths coming up, and-" He stiffened. "Who're those buggers in the wrong-colored tunics? Are the Unkerlanters trying to pull another fast one?"

After looking back toward the footsoldiers, Spinello shook his head. "That's Plegmund's Brigade. They're on our side- Forthwegians in Algarvian service."

"Forthwegians." Turpino's lip curled. "We are throwing everything we've got left into this fight, aren't we?"

"Actually, they're supposed to be brave," Spinello said. Turpino looked anything but convinced.

On came the behemoths. They started tossing eggs at the Unkerlanter beasts on the hill the Algarvians needed to take. The Unkerlanters answered, but they still didn't handle their beasts or their gear as well as Mezentio's men. Spinello cheered when an Algarvian behemoth crew used the heavy stick mounted on their beast to burst the eggs an Unkerlanter behemoth carried, and then, a moment later, repeated the feat and took out another behemoth and crew.

But the Unkerlanters' eggs and beams knocked down Algarvian behemoths, too. And more beasts with Unkerlanters aboard trotted over the crest of the hill. Captain Turpino cursed. "How many fornicating behemoths do Swemmel's fornicators have?" he demanded, or words to that effect.

"Too many," Spinello answered, looking from the beasts on the hill to the Algarvian behemoths moving against them. He sighed. "Well, we'll just have to get them off of there, won't we?" He blew his whistle as he got to his feet. "Forward!" he shouted, waving his arm to urge on his troops- what was left of them.

Turpino stayed beside him as they advanced. Turpino still wanted the regiment if Spinello fell, and he also wanted to show he was at least as brave as the man who held it now. Spinello grinned as he ran past craters and corpses and dead beasts. He'd expected nothing less. Algarvians were like that.