Rulers of the Darkness

Now he said, "Sir, looks like that little tiny rise there" -he pointed- "will screen us from the worst of what the Unkerlanters can throw at us and still let us move east toward the real high ground."

Spinello considered. His nod, when he gave it, was hesitant. "Aye, unless the Unkerlanters see that, too, and they've got a brigade lying in wait for us."

With a shrug, Turpino answered, "Sir, they've been lying in wait for us ever since we started this attack. You want to know what I think, somebody's head ought to roll for that."

"I'm not saying you're wrong, but you ought to have a care there," Spinello told him. "People I believe tell me this attack went in at the orders of his Majesty himself."

"Mezentio's a good king. That doesn't necessarily make him a good general," Turpino said. "And what's he going to do to me? Boil me alive the way Swemmel might? Not likely! Besides, what can he do to me that's worse than what we've gone through these past two weeks?"

"Good question," Spinello admitted. "The sort of question, though, where you may not want to find out the answer."

"I'll worry later," Turpino said. "Right now, the only thing I'm going to worry about is staying alive through this cursed fight. If I manage that, King Mezentio is welcome to whatever's left of my carcass afterwards."

Nodding, Spinello shouted for a crystallomancer. When an officer-by-courtesy with a crystal trotted over to him, he said, "Can you get hold of the fellow commanding the behemoths in front of us?"

"I can try, sir," the crystallomancer said. "You've got to remember, though, in a field as crowded as this, that Swemmel's men are liable to pick up some of our emanations, the same way we steal theirs every chance we get."

"I'll keep it in mind," Spinello said. "Now get him."

"Aye, sir." The crystallomancer murmured the charm. After his crystal flared with light, an officer on a behemoth appeared in it. Actually, Spinello couldn't see much of him, for the brim of his iron helmet almost covered his eyes, while cheekpieces hid most of the rest of his face. Spinello knew he'd be wearing chain and plate on his body, too. He didn't have to haul the weight around; his behemoth did.

He listened to Spinello, then eyed the ground ahead himself. After a moment, he nodded. "All right, Major, we'll go that way. Once we make it up to the top of the big rise, then we'll see what we see."

"How do you like our chances?" Spinello asked.

"We're short a few behemoths, or maybe more than a few, down in the southeast," the other officer answered. "Swemmel's whoresons held 'em up longer than we expected. But we ought to be able to do the job just the same."

"Good," Spinello said.

"It'll have to do," said the fellow on the behemoth. "And now- farewell." He vanished from the crystal. The crystallomancer put it back into his pack.

The behemoths turned to use the track Captain Turpino had suggested. Spinello blew his whistle. "Follow me!" he shouted- a cry that made Algarvian footsoldiers respect and obey the men who led them. Then he added another cry that was more likely to keep the men of Battle Group Spinello alive: pointing to the behemoths, he yelled, "Follow them!"

For half a mile or so, everything went very well- so well, in fact, that Spinello started to get suspicious. His eyes went back and forth, back and forth. He kept expecting hordes of drunken Unkerlanters to leap from trenches on either flank and rush toward his men with shouts of, "Urra!"

But the trouble, when it came, came from the front. The Unkerlanters crouched in their holes and waited till the wedges of behemoths were almost upon them. Some of those holes were so hard to spot, Spinello guessed they had sorcery covering them. When Swemmel's men did pop up and start blazing, even they weren't so rash- or so drunk- as to charge. Instead, they ducked down again and waited for the Algarvian onslaught.

They didn't have long to wait. The behemoths tossed eggs into their trenches. "Forward!" Spinello shouted again. "Loose order!" The men he led probably could have done the job without commands. They'd done it before, some of them countless times. Having behemoths along to help was, if anything, an unusual luxury. They advanced by rushes, some soldiers blazing while others moved ahead. The Unkerlanters had an unpleasant choice: keep their heads down till they were slaughtered in their holes or come out and try to get away.

More often than not, most of them would have died in place. Here, rather to Spinello's surprise, most of them fled. Maybe it's the behemoths, he thought. If we can be twitchy about theirs, no reason they shouldn't be twitchy about ours.

Whatever the reason, running did the Unkerlanters little good. More eggs from the Algarvian behemoths burst among them, flinging them this way and that like broken toys. When the beam from a heavy stick caught a man in the back, he didn't just go down. He also went up- in flames.