Rulers of the Darkness d-4

by Harry Turtledove

  "No, sir," the crystallomancer said, and activated his crystal. When a face appeared in it, he passed it to Recared. "Go ahead, sir."

  Recared spoke quickly and to the point. The mage on the other end of the etheric connection listened, then said, "I cannot decide this. Wait." He disappeared.

  A moment later, another face appeared in the crystal. "I am Addanz, archmage of Unkerlant. Say your say." Recared did, as concisely as he had before. He even gave Leudast credit, not that Leudast much wanted any such thing. Leudast had met the archmage once before, in trenches not far outside of Cottbus. Perhaps fortunately, Addanz didn't seem to remember that. He said, "Tell me how far east of Braunau the Kaunians are."

  "Just outside of egg-tosser range, sir," Recared replied.

  "Very well," Addanz said, and then shook his head. "No, not very well- very ill. But no help for it. You'll have your magecraft, Lieutenant."

  "Quickly then, sir, or you waste it," Recared said.

  "You'll have it," Addanz repeated, and his image vanished like a blown-out candle flame.

  Leudast imagined Unkerlanter mages lining up Unkerlanter peasants and miscreants so Unkerlanter soldiers could slay them. He wished he hadn't; the picture in his mind was all too vivid. And here, for once, Swemmel's endless talk of efficiency proved true. Hardly five minute passed before the ground shuddered under those luckless Kaunians, before fissures opened and flames shot forth.

  Recared pounded Leudast on the back. "Well done, Sergeant, by the powers above!" he shouted. "Let's see the redheads make their cursed magic now. If we live, you'll get a decoration for this."

  All Leudast said was, "I feel like a murderer." He'd caused his own countrymen- for all he knew, maybe his own kinsmen- to die so their life energy could go into killing Kaunians so the Algarvians couldn't kill the Kaunians to kill him. That wasn't war, or it shouldn't have been. He stared east, toward the Algarvian trenches. If he knew Mezentio's men, they wouldn't let a setback stop them for long. They never had yet.

  ***

  Colonel Sabrino had rarely seen an army brigadier so furious. The Algarvian officer looked about ready to leap out of the crystal and strangle somebody- King Swemmel by choice, no doubt, but Sabrino thought he might do himself at a pinch.

  "Do you know what those fornicating Unkerlanters did?" the brigadier howled. "Have you got any idea?"

  "No, sir," Sabrino said around a yawn- he grabbed what sleep he could between flight, and didn't take kindly to interruptions. "But you're going to tell me, I expect."

  The brigadier went on as if he hadn't spoken, which might have been lucky for him: "We had our Kaunians all ready to slay, to rout Swemmel's buggers out of that stinking Braunau place, and the Unkerlanter whoresons killed most of 'em by magic before we got to use their life energy. The attack went in anyhow, and we got thrown back again. We've got to get past there if we're ever going to join hands with our men on the other side of the enemy salient."

  "Aye, sir, I know that," Sabrino said, wondering if the Algarvians on the western flank of the bulge were doing any better than the eastern army to which he was attached. He wished his countrymen hadn't started using murder-powered magecraft. Now both sides used it ever more freely, which added to the death toll without changing much else. He also suspected the brigadier shouldn't have attacked Braunau once the sorcerous backing for the assault collapsed. Suggesting such things to a superior was a tricky business. He didn't try; he knew he was too worn to be tactful. Instead, he asked, "What would you have me do, sir?"

  "If we can't knock Braunau out from under those buggers with dead Kaunians, next best thing is to pound it flat- flatter- with dragons," the brigadier answered. "You've got the edge on 'em there in this side of the salient."

  "For now, anyway," Sabrino said. "They've put more dragons in the air today than they did yesterday, and still more than the day before. They've got more dragons than we thought they did."

  "They've got more of everything than we thought they did," the brigadier said. "But we can still lick 'em. We can, curse it." He sounded as if Sabrino were arguing with him.

  "We'd better," was all Sabrino did say about that. He went on, "Tell me when you want us there, sir, and we'll be there." Colonel Ambaldo is probably sleeping, too, he thought. That means I get to wake him up. There were prospects he might have enjoyed less. Ambaldo, after all, had spent a lot of the war in the comfortable east. He hadn't had his full share of the delights of Unkerlant- or any share at all in the different delights of the land of the Ice People.

  "An hour," the brigadier said. When Sabrino nodded, the army officer's image vanished from the crystal. It flared, then went back to being a simple globe of glass.

  Sabrino strode out of his tent and shouted for dragon handlers. The men came running, their kilts flapping at each long stride. He said, "Get the dragons ready, and start kicking the men awake. We're going after Braunau again."

  "Just your wing, sir, or both of them at this farm?" a handler asked.

  "Both," Sabrino answered. "But I'll wake Ambaldo myself." His face must have worn an evil grin, because several of the handlers snickered.

  Colonel Ambaldo awoke with several loud, fervent curses. He also woke grabbing for the stick by his cot. Sabrino got it first. Grabbing and missing seemed to restore something like reason to Ambaldo. He glowered at Sabrino and asked, "All right, your Excellency, who's gone and pissed in the soup pot this time?"

  "King Swemmel's little friends, who else?" Sabrino said. "Not that it doesn't sound like some hamfisted generalship from us went into the mix, too." He quickly explained what had gone wrong in front of Braunau.

  Ambaldo grunted and rubbed his eyes. "This whole business of killing Kaunians is filthy, if anybody wants to know what I think," he said as he sat up. He looked defiance at Sabrino. "And I don't care what you may believe about it."

  "No?" Sabrino said mildly. "I told King Mezentio the same thing before we really started doing it. His Majesty didn't care what I believed about it."

  "Really? You said that to Mezentio? To his face?" Ambaldo asked. Sabrino nodded. Ambaldo let out a soft whistle. "I will be dipped in dung. I knew you for a brave man, your Excellency, but still, you surprise me."

  "If I weren't a brave man, I wouldn't have come in here to get you," Sabrino said. "Shall we be at it?"

  Ambaldo got to his feet and bowed. "I wouldn't miss it for the world."

  When Sabrino went out to his dragon, he found it loaded with eggs. The handler was tossing chunks of meat to it. The dragon caught them out of the air one after another. "How's the cinnabar holding out?" Sabrino asked the handler.

  He got no more reassuring answers, as he had earlier in the fight. The fellow spread his hands and said, "If they'd known this stinking battle was going to last so bloody long, they should've given us more." Before Sabrino could say anything to that, the dragon handler added, "Of course, maybe they didn't have any more to give." On that cheerful note, he went back to feeding the dragon.

  Sabrino climbed aboard the great scaly beast and fastened himself into his harness at the base of its neck. Distracted by raw meat, the dragon didn't even raise a fuss. Then the handler stopped feeding it and undid its chain from the iron spike driven deep into the soil of Unkerlant. Sabrino whacked the dragon with his goad, urging it into the air.

  The dragon bellowed in fury at the idea that it should work for a living. As far as it was concerned, it had been hatched to sit on the ground so people could feed it to the bursting point. No matter how often Sabrino tried to give it other ideas with the goad, it was surprised and outraged every time.

  It sprang into the air as much from fury as for any other reason. As usual, Sabrino didn't care why. As long as the dragon rose, he'd take that. The other dragons in his wing were every bit as offended at having to earn their keep as was his. They all screeched as they spiraled upward.

  Colonel Ambaldo's dragons were flying, too. Sabrino, of necessity his own crystallomancer while on dragonback, murmured the
charm that attuned the emanations of his crystal with that of the other wing commander. When Ambaldo's image appeared in his crystal, Sabrino said, "Now that you're awake, your Excellency, how do you want to handle the strike at Braunau? If you like, we'll go in first and then fly cover for your wing."

  "Aye, good enough," Ambaldo said, and Sabrino cursed under his breath. He'd made the offer for form's sake, no more. Ambaldo's dragons had been worked hard in this fight, but were still fresher than Sabrino's. They would have made a better covering flight than Sabrino's wing. Ambaldo should have been able to see that for himself. If he couldn't, though, Sabrino had too much pride to point it out to him. Ambaldo did say, "We'll cover you on the way in."

  "Thank you so much." Sabrino knew how little he meant that. Ambaldo was brave, but bravery didn't matter much, not here on the western front. The Unkerlanters were brave, too. What really set the Algarvians apart from them was brains. Without a guiding wit behind the fighting, it turned into nothing but a slugging match. King Swemmel's men could afford that better than Algarve could.

  Sabrino's mouth turned down in discontent as he steered the dragon east toward Braunau. By the look of the battlefield far below, it had already turned into a slugging match. No more lightning thrusts around Unkerlanter positions to flank them out. The Algarvian attack had gone straight into the heart of the toughest and deepest set of field fortifications Sabrino had ever seen- on the eastern side of the Durrwangen salient and, by all the signs, on the western side as well.

  No wonder progress was so painfully slow. No wonder so many dead men and horses and unicorns and behemoths lay on the ground. Where, Sabrino wondered, would their replacements come from? One thought ran through his mind. We'd better win here. If we don't, if we've thrown all this away with nothing to show for it, how are we going to carry the war to the Unkerlanters from here on out?

  "Powers above," he muttered as his wing flew over what would have been the place where the Kaunians were sacrificed in front of Braunau, "we're even running out of blonds." King Swemmel's mages had helped there, too. Sabrino cursed softly, and the wind blew his words away. All things considered, maybe he should have called on the powers below instead.

  And then he had no more time for such worries, for there lay battered Braunau, corking the Algarvians' advance. He spoke into his crystal again, this time to his own squadron leaders: "We'll dive to drop our eggs on the village, then climb quick as we can and cover Ambaldo's wing while they do the same."

  "Here's hoping the Unkerlanters don't hit us," Captain Orosio said. "We've got tired beasts. We'll have trouble giving our best."

  Because Sabrino knew that, too, he made his voice harsh as he answered, "It's what we're going to do." He never asked his dragonfliers to do anything he wouldn't do himself, so he was the first to urge his own mount into a dive over Braunau. Footsoldiers down there blazed at him. So did the crew of heavy sticks. If one of those hit his dragon, the beast wouldn't gain height again, and Sabrino's mistress and his wife might miss him. Just above rooftop height, he loosed his eggs, then beat his dragon as hard as he could to make it pull up.

  He cursed again when a couple of dragonfliers didn't follow him back up into the sky. Maybe Ambaldo's fresher, faster dragons would have made the men at the heavy sticks miss. No way to know. Sabrino looked back over his shoulder. Ambaldo's dragons were delivering their load of death over Braunau, going in with as much indifference to danger as any Algarvian could want to show.

  Sabrino thought he was the first one to spot the swarm of rock-gray Unkerlanter dragons racing toward Braunau from the southwest. He hadn't even the time to grab for his crystal and shout out a warning before the Unkerlanters swooped down on Ambaldo's wing, slicing through his own almost as if it didn't exist.

  The Unkerlanters treated Ambaldo and his dragonfliers about as rudely as the Algarvians had treated the Unkerlanter attack on their dragon farms earlier in the battle. Dragon after dragon painted in green and red and white tumbled out of the sky, beset from above. Sabrino wasted no time ordering his own men back into the fray. But the enemy, having struck hard and fast, flew off. Sabrino's dragons were too weary to make much of a pursuit.

  Worse, he feared flying into another Unkerlanter trap. With the tired beasts his men were flying, that would be the end of them. Ambaldo's dragons, or those of them that were left, aligned on his. When he shouted the other wing commander's name through the crystal, he got no answer. He didn't think anyone would get answers from Ambaldo again.

  "Back to our dragon farm," he told his own squadron leaders. "We'll put the pieces back together as best we can and go on." He didn't know where more dragons- or, for that matter, more dragonfliers- would come from. He didn't know how long the wing could keep going without them, either. All at once, without warning, he felt old.

  ***

  "Come on!" Major Spinello shouted as he led his troopers east. "We can still do it. By the powers above, we can! But we've got to keep moving."

  He wasn't commanding his own regiment anymore. The battered formation he headed was about as big as his regiment had been at the start of the battle of Durrwangen, but it consisted of the mixed-up remnants of three or four different regiments. As cooks threw leftovers together to get another meal out of them, so Algarvian generals stirred together broken units to get one more fight from them. Battle Group Spinello, they called this one. Spinello would have been prouder if he hadn't been so tired.

  He pointed ahead. "If we get over that ridge line and onto the flat land up there, we can tear Swemmel's whole position open. It's only a couple of miles now. We can do it!"

  Was anybody listening to him? Was anybody paying any attention at all? He looked around to see. What he saw were men as filthy and unshaven and weary as he was. He looked ahead. Even the Algarvian behemoths seemed worn unto death. A couple of wedges of them led Battle Group Spinello ahead. Without them, every footsoldiers would have been wounded or killed by now.

  More behemoths led more Algarvian footsoldiers toward that ridge line. Here and there, they dueled at long range with Unkerlanter behemoths. Spinello had never imagined that Unkerlant had bred so many behemoths. He'd never imagined that Swemmel's men would handle them so well, either.

  When a well-placed Algarvian egg knocked over one of those behemoths, he let out a cheer. "See, boys?" he said. "We can still lick 'em. No point in running if you see a couple of enemy beasts and you haven't got any of your own close by."

  That had happened a few times in this battle. The Algarvians were used to sending their foes fleeing in panic with their behemoths. They were anything but used to being on the receiving end of panic. But any army's nerve wore thin if its men were fought as hard as they could be and then three steps more besides. Every so often, troops would scream, "Behemoths!" and run the other way when a couple of Unkerlanter beasts showed themselves over the top of a rise.

  Captain Turpino limped up to Spinello. His left calf was bandaged; he'd taken a blaze between the top of his boot and the bottom of his kilt. But he refused to leave the field. Spinello was glad to have him here. Turpino was about as far from lovable as a man could get, but he knew his business.

  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 wa
y 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.