"We ought to do that," Pekka said, and scribbled a note to herself. "We ought to find out what our magic does in the field rather than on the testing range, as we have been using it here."
"When do you suppose we really shall start using it in the field?" Fernao asked. He passed the back of his hand across his forehead, as if wiping away sweat. "I do not know how often any one mage would want to serve as the channel through which that energy runs. Once was plenty for me, I thi nk."
"This strike was a makeshift," Pekka said. "It might be easier if we planned it more beforehand."
"It might." But Fernao did not sound convinced.
Pekka went on, "I cannot answer your question yet, not altogether. I can say this, though: before we start work in the field, we shall have to train more mages to use these spells-ordinary practical mages, I mean, not theoretical sorcerers like the ones we have gathered here. That will take some time." She scribbled another note. "It is something we ought to think about beginning, though, is it not?"
Fernao nodded. "It may well be."
She only half heard the answer. Ordinary practical mages, she thought. Mages like Leino, to whom I just happen to be married. Could he have done what Fernao did there today? He might have-he likely would have-had the presence of mind. Would he have had the strength, the will?
Angry at herself for raising the question in those terms, she knocked back the rest of her brandy. Fernao raised an eyebrow. And what does that mean? she asked herself. Is he surprised to see me guzzle so, or is he hoping I'm doing it to give myself an excuse to do something with him?
Is that why I'm doing it?
Pekka got to her feet-indeed, almost sprang to her feet. The refectory swayed a little when she did: sure enough, she'd had more brandy than she thought. "I," she declared, "am going upstairs to bed. To sleep," she added, so as not to leave Fernao in any possible doubt about what she meant.
If he offered to escort her... I'll have to pretend to be angrier than I am, Pekka thought. But Fernao nodded. "I intend to do the same thing in a little while," he said. "I have not drunk quite enough yet, though."
"Try not to have too thick a head come morning," Pekka warned. "You will need to draft a report on what we did today."
"I remember," Fernao answered, and Pekka had to fight against a giggle. The Lagoan mage might have been Uto dutifully saying, Aye, Mother. Pekka got to her feet and hurried away. She'd had that thought about Ilmarinen a good many times. What did it mean when she also started having it about the other mages with whom she worked? That you think being in charge of them means mothering them? She wasn't sure she liked that. She was sure they wouldn't if they found out about it.
She almost ran to the stairway, as if running from her own thoughts. Had she had long legs like Fernao's, she would have gone up the stairs two at a time. As things were, she just climbed them as fast as she could. That proved plenty fast to startle two people embracing halfway up to the second floor.
Ilmarinen and... Linna? Pekka wondered if she'd drunk enough to start seeing things. Then Ilmarinen demanded, "Did you have to come by at the most inconvenient possible moment?" and his annoyance convinced her her imagination hadn't run wild after all.
"I didn't intend to," Pekka answered. "I am allowed to go up to my own room, you know."
"I suppose so." Ilmarinen sounded as if he supposed nothing of the sort. He turned back to the serving girl. "And how would you like to go up to my own room?"
"Better that than blocking the stairway," Pekka said.
Linna didn't say anything right away. Pekka hoped she wouldn't have to listen to Ilmarinen begging. That didn't suit her image of the way a master mage should act. Of course, a lot of the things Ilmarinen did failed to suit her image, and he cared not a fig. But humiliation seemed somehow worse than outrageousness.
Then Linna answered, "Well, why not? I've already come this far." Ilmarinen beamed and kicked up his heels like a frisky young reindeer. Pekka thought he would have carried Linna up the stairs if she'd shown any sign of wanting him to. The next question was, would he measure up once he lay down beside her? For his sake, Pekka hoped so. If he didn't, he was liable to be devastated.
She let the two of them go up the stairs ahead of her. Now that she'd escaped Fernao, any more rushing seemed pointless. She walked past Ilmarinen's chamber on the way to her own, but made a point of not listening to whatever was going on in there. Officially, it was none of her business. And Ilmarinen's attitude the next time she saw him would tell her everything she needed to know, anyhow.
The inside of her own room, bare and spare, was not the most welcoming place in which she'd ever found herself. Hoping to lose herself in the intricate business of trying to record events exactly as they'd happened, she inked a pen and began
to write. But, after she'd set down a couple of sentences, she shook her head and pushed the leaf of paper away.
"He's saved your life twice, maybe three times now," she said aloud, as if someone had denied it. "This last time, he may have saved everything. Why are you running away from him, then?"
Part of her knew the answer to that. The rest, the larger part, proved not to want to think about it. Looking out the window, she saw it was snowing again. She ran a finger under the collar of her tunic. It felt unpleasantly warm inside the hostel-certainly inside her room. She set down the pen. With a sigh that was the next thing to a sob, she got up and headed for the refectory.
When she walked past Ilmarinen's room, Linna's giggle gave her pause. Indeed, it almost sent her running back to her own chamber. But she shook her head and kept going. She wondered if she would bump into Fernao on the stairway, and what would happen if she did.
She didn't. And when she went back into the refectory and looked around, she didn't see him there, either.
She stood in the entranceway looking around till one of the serving women came up to her and asked, "May I help you with anything, Mistress Pekka?"
Pekka jumped as if the woman had asked her something shameful. "No," she said, louder and more sharply than she'd intended. "I was just... looking for someone, that's all."
"Ah." The serving woman nodded. "Master Fernao went up to his chamber a couple of minutes ago."
"Did he?" Pekka said, and the woman nodded again. She knows whom I'd be looking for, does she? She probably knows why I'd be looking for him, too. And she probably knows why better than I do myself.
"Aye, he did." The woman nodded again. She sounded very certain-more certain than Pekka was herself. Oh, she understood why she might be-no, why she was- looking for Fernao. What she didn't know was whether she wanted to do anything about her understanding.
The serving woman eyed her curiously, as if to say, I told you where he was. Why are you wasting your time here? When Pekka turned to go, out of the corner of her eye she spied the other woman nodding. She shook her own head. You may think you know everything that's going on, but you're wrong this time.
She did go back upstairs, but not to Fernao's room. Whatever she was thinking, she wasn't ready to be so brazen as that. Not quite, she told herself, whether with relief or disappointment even she couldn't tell. When she attacked the report again, in earnest this time, she got a lot of work done.
***
Captain Recared had a new cry now: "Hold them!" It was one Sergeant Leudast was delighted to echo. The Unkerlanters had drawn their ring all the way around Herborn. If they could keep it shut tight, the Algarvian forces trapped inside would beat themselves to death trying to break out.
"Hold them!" Leudast shouted. Along with the rest of the men in the regiment, he'd done a prodigious lot of marching to move east as far and as fast as he had. Now he faced west again, to keep the redheads and their Grelzer puppets from pulling the stopper out of the bottle that contained them.
Eggs kicked up clouds of snow when they burst in and around the Grelzer village his company was holding. Fragments of metal from the eggshells whined through the air. But instead of cratering the grou
nd, as they would have in summertime, the eggs only knocked holes about the size and depth of a small washtub in it; it was frozen too hard for anything more.
"Here they come!" somebody shouted.
Leudast peered out from the hut in which he sheltered. Sure enough, the Algarvians and Grelzers were trying to press home their attack against the village. They had better gear now than they'd used the first winter of the war in Unkerlant: they all wore white snow smocks, and almost all of them snowshoes. Some of them shouted, "Mezentio!" Others, presumably the Grelzers, yelled, "Raniero!"
"Plenty of time," Leudast called to his men as the enemy slogged across the snow-covered fields outside the village. "Make sure you've got a good target before you start blazing."
Before the Algarvians and Grelzers even got into stick range of the village, Unkerlanter egg-tossers started pounding them. Leudast knew a moment's abstract pity for the foe. With the ground hard as iron, the soldiers out there couldn't very well dig holes in which to shelter from the eggs. They had to take whatever the Unkerlanters could dish out.
Rock-gray dragons dropped out of the sky on the redheads and the traitors who fought on their side. More eggs burst, these delivered with pinpoint precision and released only a few feet above the enemy's heads. Flame yellow as the sun- and far hotter than the winter sun down here in Grelz-burst from the dragons' jaws. Leudast watched a kilted Algarvian blacken and writhe and shrink in on himself like a moth that had just flown into a campfire.
Recared's whistle screamed. "Forward-now!" the regimental commander shouted. "If we hit them hard, we can break them."
A bit more than a year earlier, battling down in the wreckage of Sulingen, Leudast would have laughed at the thought of breaking Algarvians. Overwhelming them, certainly. But breaking them? Maki ng them run? It would have seemed impossible. A lot had happened since then. "Aye!" he shouted. "We can do it, by the powers above! Urra! King Swemmel! Urra!"
The Unkerlanters burst from the village and rushed at the redheads. Eggs kept falling on the enemy, helping to pin him in place. Some of the Algarvians tried to flee anyway, and were flung aside when eggs bust near then. Others threw their sticks down in the snow, raised their hands, and went willingly enough into captivity. And some of the redheads, good, stubborn, resourceful soldiers that they were, held on as long as they could to let their comrades escape.
Fighting alongside Mezentio's soldiers were men who looked like Leudast and his comrades, but who wore dark green tunics rather than rock-gray under their snow smocks. Few Grelzers tried to surrender. Few of those who did try succeeded. The men who'd chosen Raniero over Swemmel had discovered the Unkerlanters weren't much interested in taking them alive.
"Keep your eyes and ears open," Leudast warned the soldiers in his company. "You see somebody you don't know, watch him, especially if he talks with a Grelzer accent. The traitors will strip our dead for their tunics so they get the chance to sneak out of the fight."
He knew he wasn't the only Unkerlanter passing along that warning. He also knew a few perfectly loyal Unkerlanter soldiers who chanced to spring from Grelz would get blazed because their countrymen went for sticks without bothering to ask questions first. His broad shoulders moved up and down in a shrug. As long as the Grelzers got rooted out, he didn't much care what else happened.
Captain Recared hadn't been the sole commander to order a counterattack. Shouting "Urra!" and King Swemmel's name, Unkerlanter soldiers stormed forward all along the line. Instead of trying to break out of the cauldron around Herborn in which they were trapped, the Algarvians and Grelzers had to try to hold back a foe who outnumbered them in men, in egg-tossers, in horses and unicorns, in behemoths, and in dragons.
They tried. They tried bravely. But they could not hold. Here and there, they would form a line and battle the Unkerlanters in front of them to a standstill- for a while. But then Swemmel's soldiers would find a way around one flank or the other, and the Algarvians and Grelzers would have to give ground again: either that or be slaughtered where they stood.
The progress Leudast's countrymen made left him slightly dazed. That evening, he sat down to barley cakes and garlicky sausage filched from an Algarvian sergeant he'd captured. Toasting a length of sausage over a fire on a stick, he said, "Curse me if they're not starting to fall apart."
Captain Recared had some sausage, too. He pulled it away from the flames, examined it, and then thrust it back to cook some more. "Aye, they are," he agreed while the sausage sizzled and dripped grease into the fire. "By this time tomorrow, they'll have figured out that they can't pound their way through our ring. They'll start trying to sneak through in small bands. We have to smash as many of them as we can. Every soldier we kill or capture now is one more we won't have to worry about later on."
"I understand, sir," Leudast said. "And when they're hungry and scared and their sticks are low on charges, they're a lot easier to deal with than when they've got their peckers up."
"That's right. That's just right." Recared nodded. He took his sausage off the fire and looked at it again. With another nod, he began to eat.
He proved a good prophet, for over the next couple of days the spirit did leak out of the Algarvians, like water leaking from a cracked jar. They stopped standing up to the Unkerlanters and started trying to escape whenever and however they could. When they couldn't run and couldn't hide, they surrendered in a hurry, glad to do it before something worse happened to them.
After a couple of days of that, Leudast was as rich as he'd ever been in all his born days. He didn't suppose it would last; when he came to a place where he could spend the money he was taking from captured Algarvian officers, he probably would. But a heavy belt pouch wasn't the worst thing in the world, either.
One of his men asked, "Sergeant, what do we do with the coins we take that have false King Raniero on 'em?"
"Well, Kiun, if I were you, I'd lose the Grelzer copper," Leudast answered. "It'll never be worth anything on its own, if you know what I mean. But silver's silver, even if it is stamped with Raniero's pointy-nosed face. Somebody'll melt it down for you and give you what it's worth in metal, even if not in coin."
"Ah." The soldier nodded. "Thanks. That makes good sense."
The next morning, Leudast's company came on the tracks of a squad of men trying to make their way east. With snow on the ground, following the trail was child's play. Before long, his troopers caught up with the fleeing Algarvians. A couple of men started blazing at the redheads. As soon as steam puffed up from the smoke around them, the Algarvians raised their hands in surrender.
"Aye, you have us," one of them said in pretty good Unkerlanter as Leudast and his men came up: a bald fellow in his late middle years who wore a colonel's uniform. "We can run no more."
"You'd best believe it, pal." Leudast cocked his head to one side. "You talk funny." The officer's accent wasn't a typical Algarvian trill, but something else, something familiar.
"I was, in the last war, colonel of a regiment of Forthwegians in Algarvian service," the redhead answered.
"That's it, sure enough." Leudast nodded. His own home village, up in the north, wasn't so far from the Forthwegian border. No wonder he thought he'd heard that accent before-he had.
"Sergeant-" Kiun, the fellow who'd asked him about Grelzer money, plucked at his sleeve. "Sergeant, powers below eat me if that's not Raniero his own self."
"What?" Leudast shook himself free. "You're out of your fornicating..." But his voice trailed away. He shuffled a couple of paces sideways so he could look at the Algarvian in profile. His lips pursed in a soundless whistle. The captive in the colonel's uniform certainly had the right beaky nose. "Are you Raniero?"
A couple of the captive's comrades exclaimed in Algarvian. But he shook his head and drew himself up very straight. "I have that honor, aye." He bowed. "And to whom do I present myself?"
Numbly, Leudast gave his own name. He gestured with his stick. "You come along with me." What would they give the man who'd
just captured the King of Grelz? He didn't know-he had no idea-but he looked forward to finding out. He also waved to a couple of his own men, who were all staring wide-eyed at Raniero. "You boys come along, too." He didn't want his prisoner stolen out from under him. He made sure he included Kiun-the trooper also deserved a reward.
A lieutenant well back of the line glared at him. "Why didn't you just send your captive to the rear, Sergeant?" he growled, meaning, Why do you think you deserve to get out of the fight for a while?
"Sir, this isn't just any captive," Leudast answered. "This is Raniero, who calls himself King of Grelz." The lieutenant's glare turned to a gape. He didn't have the presence of mind to ask to accompany Leudast.
Turtledove, Harry - Darkness 04 - Rulers Of The Darkness Page 72