Out of the Darkness

He still had trouble getting used to being called sir. But that wasn’t the reason he answered, “Oh, nothing important.” All at once, he understood why the Gongs were acting as they were. The Unkerlanter army had behaved exactly the same way when the Algarvians swarmed over the border more than four years earlier. They’d been hit by a force not just stronger than they were but also almost beyond their comprehension. Gyongyos had never expected a blow like this.

Unkerlant, thanks to its vast spaces and dreadful winters, had managed to ride out the Algarvian storm. Leudast didn’t think the Gongs would be able to do the same. They didn’t have so much land to yield, and they did have another war to worry about: the fight on the Bothnian Ocean came closer to the offshore Balaton Islands, closer to Gyorvar itself, every day.

And so, while the Unkerlanters swarmed forward, a lot of Gyongyosian soldiers simply threw up their hands, threw down their sticks, and went off into captivity. Some of them looked relieved, some looked resigned. One, who spoke a little Unkerlanter, asked, “What you do, move here so fast?”

He got no answer. The guards leading him and his countrymen back toward the camps that would house them kept them moving. Even if someone had sat him down and explained exactly what the Unkerlanters were doing, he might not have understood it. Leudast wouldn’t have understood exactly what the redheads were doing just after they started doing it. All he would have known--all he had known at the time--was that something dreadful had happened to his countrymen.

Less than a week after the great attack began, the Unkerlanters burst out of the vast forest and into the more open country that led to the foothills of the Elsung Mountains. Behind them, Leudast knew, pockets of Gongs still held out. So what? he thought. Pockets of Unkerlanters had still held out as the Algarvians swarmed west, too. The redheads had mopped them up at their leisure.

Peering ahead at the mountains, Leudast wondered how close he was to where he’d been when the Derlavaian War--what everybody but Unkerlant reckoned the Derlavaian War--broke out. He shrugged. He couldn’t tell. One set of peaks looked much like another to a man raised on the broad plains of northeastern Unkerlant.

He was settling his company for the night when Captain Dagaric called him and the other company commanders together. Dagaric took them out onto the meadow, well away from the common soldiers’ campfires. “What’s gone wrong, sir?” Leudast asked. Obviously, something had, or Dagaric wouldn’t have acted as he was doing.

He said, “I just got word from the regimental crystallomancer--Gyorvar’s been destroyed. Gone. Vanished. Off the map. Disappeared.” He snapped his fingers to show how thoroughly wrecked the capital of Gyongyos was.

“Well, that’s good, isn’t it, sir?” another lieutenant asked. “If we smashed the place up, that’ll hurt the Gongs, won’t it?”

“Oh, the Gongs are hurting, all right,” Dagaric said. “Ekrekek Arpad’s dead, and so is everybody in his clan, as far as anyone can tell. The whoresons who’re left are all running around like chickens after the axe.”

“Then what’s wrong, sir?” the other junior officer repeated. “If we got rid of Gyorvar, of Arpad--”

“That’s

what’s wrong,” Dagaric broke in. “We didn’t do it. We didn’t have anything to do with it. The Kuusamans smashed Gyorvar, with some newfangled sorcery they came up with.”

“Powers below eat them,” Leudast said softly. He remembered how lucky he’d been to come through alive after the Algarvians started murdering Kaunians the first autumn of their war with Unkerlant. The only answer his kingdom had found was killing its own people--a solution, he thought, no one but Swemmel would have imagined.

Another company commander, a sergeant, asked, “Can we match this magic?”

Dagaric shook his head. “No. The slanteyes know how to do it, and we don’t.”

“That’s not good.” Leudast thought he was the first to speak, but three or four company commanders said the same thing at more or less the same time.

“Of course it’s not,” Dagaric said. “Those whoresons ’ll hold it over our head like a club, you see if they don’t. But that hasn’t got anything to do with our job here. Our job here is kicking the stuffing out of the Gongs, and it’s more important than ever that we do it up good and proper.”

“How come, sir?” somebody asked.

The regimental commander made an exasperated noise. “The more we grab now, the better off we’ll be. For now, we’re still officially friends with Kuusamo. How long will that last, though? Anybody’s guess. So we grab with both hands while the grabbing’s good.”

“Makes sense,” Leudast said. “And the Gyongyosians were falling to pieces against us even before this happened. Now that it has, they ought to turn to mush.”