Through the Darkness

By the time the ground stopped shaking and breaking apart, by the time the flames stopped spurting and the fires they started stopped spreading, the spearpoint of the Gyongyosian advance had been blunted. The Unkerlanters got enough breathing space to bring more soldiers forward . . . and the fight went back to being hard again. Glad he’d lived through the sorcerous onslaught, Istvan resigned himself to more time in the forest.

One of Trasone’s comrades pointed south. “Look,” he said. “You can see the Wolter from here. We can’t be more than half a mile away.”

“I think you’re lying through your teeth, is what I think,” Trasone said. “Here, give me that stinking thing.”

The other Algarvian trooper handed him the contraption he’d made from a board and a couple of pieces of a broken mirror. Trasone stuck the top of the contraption above the lip of the trench in which he huddled. By looking at the lower mirror, Trasone could use the upper one to show him what lay ahead. Without a doubt, he would have been blazed if he’d poked up his head to look.

“Well, I’ll be a son of a whore,” he said softly. “You’re right, Folvo. There it is--or the bluffs on this side of it, anyhow. We get there, we get over to the other side, and we can put this lousy war in our belt pouch.”

“Aye--if we get there,” Folvo answered. “What’s ahead doesn’t look like a whole lot of fun, though.”

And that, worse luck, was nothing but the truth. A couple of enormous buildings lay between the leading Algarvians in Sulingen and the river. One was a granary. It had been built of massive bricks and blocks of stone to hold vermin at bay, but that also made it a powerful fortress. The other was larger still, though of somewhat less sturdy construction: far and away the biggest iron manufactory in Sulingen. Sometimes the Unkerlanters would bring behemoths across the Wolter into the city, load them with armor and weapons, and throw them straight into the fight. Some of the behemoths lay dead not far from the manufactory. Others, unfortunately for Mezentio’s soldiers, got farther and did worse.

A flight of dragons painted in bright Algarvian colors swooped down on the ironworks, dropping eggs as they dove. The eggs burst on and around the building. Some more of the roof came down. Trasone didn’t get excited about that, as he might have a couple of weeks earlier. He knew all too well that the Unkerlanters, those whom the bursts didn’t slay, went right on working in the ruins.

And they kept fighting back, too. They had a lot of heavy sticks crowded into the parts of Sulingen they still held--beams stabbed into the sky after the dragons. Those beams might have done more harm than they did if the smoke that rose from countless fires hadn’t spread and weakened them. As things were, one of the dragons staggered in the air. It didn’t plummet, as Trasone had seen so many plummet, but it couldn’t go on with its flightmates, either. It did manage to come to earth in Algarvian-held territory. Trasone hoped the dragonflier wasn’t badly hurt. He had to be better off than Algarvian dragon-fliers who fell into Unkerlanter hands.

Then Trasone stopped worrying about dragonfliers. The Unkerlanters had dragons, too, flying north from farms on the far side of the Wolter. They seldom fought the Algarvians in the air; most of them lacked the skill for that. But, as Mezentio’s men pounded their positions, they returned the disfavor.

Eggs fell around Trasone. He rolled himself into a ball in the trench, as if he were a pillbug. But he didn’t even have an armored exterior to present to the world. All he could do was make himself small and hope. A shard of something bit into his little finger. He yelped and pulled out a sliver of glass--Folvo’s improvised periscope was no more.

Trasone braced himself for the shouts of “Urra!” that were bound to follow the rock-gray dragons. He’d long since lost track of how many Unkerlanter counterattacks he and his friends had beaten back. Too many of his friends were wounded or dead because of them, though--he knew that.

Beneath him, the ground shook slightly. He cursed and braced himself again, this time to withstand sorcery--whether from his own side or the Unkerlanters he couldn’t yet guess. But it wasn’t the onset of magecraft: instead, it was four or five Algarvian behemoths lumbering up to the battle line. “Huzzah!” Trasone shouted. He waved his hat--though not very high. He didn’t want to get blazed while celebrating, after all.

“Here they come!” That was Sergeant Panfilo’s shout. Trasone couldn’t see his sergeant, which was all to the good. He hoped the Unkerlanters couldn’t see Panfilo, either.

He peered up out of his own hole, peered up and whooped with glee. “They waited too stinking long this time,” he said, and settled down and started to blaze.