Through the Darkness

The Unkerlanters didn’t think so. How they howled when bursts of sorcerous energy knocked down trees and sent men flying--but not for long. Some of them kept on yelling Swemmel’s name, but they didn’t sound nearly so fierce as they had before.

“Come on! Let’s make them pay!” That was Captain Tivadar. Istvan hadn’t known the company commander was so close by, either. The horrid thought that had sprung up like a toadstool from the rot at the bottom of his mind returned once more. He shook his head again, and asked the stars to hold that idea away from the minds of his squadmates.

Going forward seemed easier. As long as he was fighting, he wouldn’t have to think. That suited him fine. “Ekrekek Arpad!” he cried.

No one asked whether he’d liked the goat he ate, not while the Gyongyosians were advancing. By what seemed another special miracle, the egg-tossers lengthened their range so their eggs didn’t burst on men from their own side. That didn’t happen all the time, either, as Istvan remembered too well from the fighting on Obuda.

He snorted as he ran past a dead Unkerlanter. You could lift that island out of the Bothnian Ocean and throw it down anywhere in this vast forest, and it would vanish without a trace. He wished the stars would lift it from the ocean and throw it down somewhere near here, with luck someplace where it would crush a good many of Swemmel’s soldiers.

“Forward!” Tivadar shouted. “We’ve punched a hole in their line. If the stars shine bright, we can unravel them like a cheap pair of leggings.”

“You heard the captain!” As a sergeant, one of the things Istvan had to do was back up his superior’s orders. “Keep moving, you lazy lugs! No time to stop and rest now. We’ve got to keep pushing the Unkerlanters.”

Earlier in the campaign, he would surely have called the men of his squad a pack of useless goat-eaters or some similar sergeant’s endearment. Not now. They wouldn’t have taken it the right way. He wouldn’t have felt right saying it, either.

Szonyi emerged from behind the trunk of a stout spruce a few yards away from Istvan. “We really are driving them this time, aren’t we, Sergeant?” he said.

“Aye, for now,” Istvan answered. “We’d better enjoy it while it lasts, on account of it probably won’t.”

Szonyi nodded and ran on, his stick ready to blaze, his eyes moving back and forth, back and forth, to make sure he didn’t run past any Unkerlanter who might still be alive. Istvan nodded to himself. Szonyi was about as good a common soldier as he’d ever seen--surely a better warrior than he’d been when he was a common soldier himself.

And, for once, the Unkerlanters didn’t look to have three or four separate lines waiting for the Gyongyosians. With every step Istvan moved forward, his confidence grew. Aye, Swemmel’s men had put up a good fight for a long time, but could they really hope to withstand a warrior race forever? It didn’t seem likely.

Ever more Gyongyosian troopers flooded into the gap Istvan’s squad had forced. For three days, he and his countrymen had everything their own way. He thought they moved farther in those three days than they had in the whole month before. The Unkerlanters who did keep fighting began to grow desperate. Some of them began to lose hope. Instead of fighting on after their positions were overrun, they began throwing down their sticks and surrendering.

Istvan wanted to go forward day and night. “I wonder where this accursed forest ends,” he said to Kun as they paused--only for a moment--to stand in front of a tree. “I wonder what’s on the other side of it. Maybe we’ll find out.”

Instead of laughing at him, Kun nodded. “Maybe we will,” the mage’s apprentice said slowly. “Maybe the stars will show us.”

“War out in the open again,” Istvan said dreamily. “We’d truly trample the Unkerlanters then.”

He was setting his leggings to rights when Kun cried out in--alarm? It sounded more like terror. Istvan was about to ask what was wrong when the ground began to shake under his feet. Not far away, someone shouted, “Earthquake!”

“No!” Kun screamed. “Worse!”

As far as Istvan was concerned, hardly anything could be worse than a big earthquake. The valley were he’d grown up had known a couple of them, and till he’d been in combat he hadn’t dreamt anything could be more terrifying.”

Kun screamed again: “Vileness! Filth! They defile themselves! They defile the world!”

For a moment, Istvan didn’t know what his comrade was talking about. Then livid purple flames shot from the ground only a few feet in front of him. Some of the trees the temblor had shaken down caught fire. Some Gyongyosians caught fire, too. “Magecraft!” Istvan cried.

“Foul magecraft!” Kun shouted back. “They slay their own to power it. Thank the kindly stars you can’t sense what that felt like. I wish my head would fall off.” He looked like a man with a ghastly hangover.