Leudast glanced over at Magnulf, who still outranked him. With an angry gesture, Magnulf said, “Aye, tell ‘em to come ahead. We’ll give ‘em pheasant under glass, just like we’re having, and they can sleep on the same featherbeds we use.”
With a couple of chunks of stale, moldy bread in his wallet and a grimy blanket for a mattress, Leudast couldn’t help snickering. The soldier shrugged and trotted away. He’d delivered his message. Past that, he didn’t care what happened.
In a lazy sort of way, the Algarvians started lobbing eggs at the line the Unkerlanters held. A couple landed close enough to the hole in which Leudast and Magnulf sheltered to splash fresh mud onto them. “The captain would come forward in this,” Leudast said, “but any big blaze’d turn up his toes--or else pick ‘em up and run away.” He paused, considered, and corrected himself: “Any big blaze but Marshal Rathar. He was right there in the thick of it up in Zuwayza.”
“He’s not afraid to mix it,” Magnulf agreed. Now he looked back toward the rear, and a moment later let out a low whistle of surprise. “Turns out you’re wrong. Here comes the captain, and he’s got somebody in a clean tunic with him.”
Hawart got down into the hole with Leudast and Magnulf without hesitation; he knew it could keep him alive. The fellow with him, a clever-looking man of middle years, got into it with wrinkled lip, as if fearing his tunic wouldn’t stay clean.
“Sir,” Hawart said to him, “let me present to you Magnulf and Leudast. They’ve been in this fight from the start, and they want to stay in it to the finish. Boys, this is Archmage Addanz, the top wizard in the whole kingdom.”
“King Swemmel has seen fit to honor me with the highest rank,” Addanz said. “Whether I have the highest skill in all the land may perhaps be a different question.”
Leudast wasn’t inclined to quibble. “Then you can stop the Algarvians when they hurl their magic at us?” he asked eagerly.
“That’d be wonderful,” Magnulf exclaimed. “Let us fight the redheads man against man, and we’ll lick ‘em.” The Unkerlanters hadn’t licked King Mezentio’s men even before they started using their blood-soaked magecraft, but they’d fought hard enough to lend Magnulf’s words some weight.
One look at Addanz’s face told Leudast his first wild hope was indeed too wild. “You can’t do it,” he said. He didn’t mean it to sound like an accusation, but that was how it came out.
“I cannot do it, not yet,” the archmage said. “I do not know if I will ever be able to do such a thing. What I can do, what I hope to do now, is to drop an egg on them of the same sort as they have been dropping on us.”
“What do you--?” Leudast broke off. He didn’t need to have Addanz draw him a picture. Like anyone else who’d grown up in an Unkerlanter peasant village, he knew how hard life could be. He asked only one question: “Will it work?”
Sergeant Magnulf, who’d grown up close to the Duchy of Grelz--now again the Kingdom of Grelz under Mezentio’s cousin--found another one: “Can you do that and not have the people rise up against King Swemmel and for the Algarvians?” People who knew Grelzers well always thought in terms of uprisings.
“I can do it,” Addanz answered. “My mages and I, under the orders of the king, have already begun to do it. The Algarvians will make far harsher masters than King Swemmel, so of course the people will follow him.”
That meant he didn’t know, and no one else did, either. Another egg burst near the hole, splattering the soldiers and the mage with more mud. Unkerlanter egg-tossers, slow as usual, began throwing sorcerous energy back at the Algarvians. “About time,” Leudast growled. “Sometimes I think we’ve forgotten about fighting back since the redheads started doing this to us.” That wasn’t fair, and he knew it, but he didn’t much care about being fair. He’d come too close to dying too many times to care about being fair.
Addanz clucked reproachfully. Leudast remembered he had King Swemmel’s car. If he chose to remember a name, if he chose to mention that name to the king ... if he chose to do that, Leudast would regret saying what he thought.
Perhaps the archmage of Unkerlant was about to reprove him. If he was, he never got the chance. He stiffened, his mouth hanging open. Then he groaned, as if a beam had burnt its way through his body. “They die,” he croaked in a voice that suggested he might be dying himself. “Oh, they die.”
“Mezentio’s men at their butchery again?” Captain Hawart demanded.
Addanz managed to nod. “Aye,” he gasped. “And we have not gathered enough men behind our line to try to block them altogether.” He gasped again, as if he’d run a long way. “Didn’t. . . expect them to smite again so soon.”
Leudast knew what that had to mean, but didn’t want to dwell on it. He didn’t have time to dwell on it, either. He spoke urgently: “We’d better get out of this hole. When the Algarvians start their spells, places like this have a way of closing up all of a sudden.”
“He’s right,” Magnulf said. He, Leudast, and Hawart started to scramble out. So did Addanz, but his effort was feeble and plainly hopeless. With a curse, Leudast jumped back into the mud at the bottom of the hole and heaved the archmage up to Magnulf and Hawart. Then he got out again himself.
“My thanks,” Addanz said. He looked as if he’d just gone through a four-day battle. “You have no notion of what it is like for a mage to feel the trapped death throes of so many at once. How the Algarvian sorcerers do what they do without blazing out their minds is beyond me. Their hearts are surely colder than winter in Grelz.”
However the Algarvian mages did what they did, they chose that moment to loose their latest sorcerous onslaught. The ground shuddered beneath Leudast like the body of a man shackled to the whipping post when the lash bites. He imagined he heard it groan like a man under the lash, too.
Flames sprang upward all around, as if fire mountains were erupting all over the field. Here and there, men caught in those flames screamed--but not for long. With a wet, sucking noise, the lips of the hole in the ground by Leudast’s feet pulled together. They would have been pulled together had they been down in the hole, too.
“You were right to get us out of there,” Hawart said. “I hope we didn’t have too many men trapped this time.”
Addanz groaned once more, as he had a couple of minutes before. “Are they doing it again, sir mage?” Sergeant Magnulf asked. Leudast understood the alarm in his voice. The Algarvians had never struck two such sorcerous hammer blows back to back. Going through one was bad enough. Could flesh and blood--to say nothing of earth and stone--stand two?
But the archmage of Unkerlant shook his head. Speech, just then, seemed beyond him. His head was turned back toward the west, toward land Unkerlant still held, not toward the east and the Algarvians. “Oh, by the powers above,” Leudast whispered.
“No,” Addanz croaked--he could talk after all. “By the powers below. Murder piled on murder, and where shall it end?” Tears trickled through the dirt on his face: he was dirty by now, almost as dirty as the soldiers around him.
Captain Hawart spoke as gently as he could: “We’re only doing it because the redheads did it first. We’re doing it to try to defend ourselves. If Mezentio hadn’t done it, we would never have taken it up.”
All that was surely true. None of it seemed to console the archmage. He swayed back and forth, back and forth, as if mourning something he would never see again--a cleaner time, perhaps.
Leudast started to reach out, to set a hand on his shoulder. But he stopped with the motion stillborn. Sooner than it had under any of the Algarvians’ earlier sorcerous onslaughts, the ground steadied beneath him. The flames shrank. Most of them, though not all, vanished. “I think, sir mage, your comrades back there did us a good turn.”