“Aye, Sergeant. That’s not the worst notion I ever heard.” By the way Kun said it, he managed to imply that Istvan had come out with most of the worst notions he’d heard.
“Don’t get clever with me,” Istvan snapped. He paused, appalled at how much like Sergeant Jokai he sounded. After a moment, he shrugged: where else to learn how to be a sergeant than from a sergeant? He hoped tlie stars treasured Jokai’s spirit. Whether they did or not, he had things to attend to here. “Squad halt!” he shouted over the howl of the wind. “All right, Kun--do what you need to do.”
“Aye,” Kun repeated, and set about it. “Whatever passes he made, his mittens hid. The wind blew away the words of his spell. After a couple of minutes, he turned to Istvan and said, “Sergeant, no Unkerlanters are moving toward us.”
“Well, that’s something,” Istvan said. “But you can’t be sure we’re not about to stumble over them?”
Kun shook his head. “The spell detects an enemy’s motion toward us, and nothing else. I wish I knew more.”
I wish you knew more, too, and not just about magic, Istvan thought. But Kun, this time, had done nothing to deserve an insult. “You tried your best,” Istvan said, “and we know more than we did, even if we don’t know as much as we’d like. Come on, lads--forward again. If we find the foe by falling over him, then we do, that’s all.”
“How do we even know we’re going in the right direction?” Szonyi asked. “With all this snow flying every which way, who can say where east is?”
“If we keep the wind almost at our backs, we won’t go too far wrong,” Istvan answered, but he didn’t sound happy about the reply even to himself. Nothing easier than for the wind to shift. He turned to Kun. “Do you know any spells for finding out which way we’re headed?”
“There is one, quite a good one, but it depends on a bit of lodestone, and I have none,” the mage’s apprentice answered regretfully.
“Anyone have any lodestone?” Istvan asked. No one admitted to it. He wasn’t surprised. He hadn’t seen lodestone more than a couple of times in his life, both when traveling mountebanks did astonishing things with it. He turned back to Kun. “Any other ways?”
“I’m sure there are, Sergeant, but I don’t know how to use them,” Kun replied.
Istvan sighed through the muffler over his mouth. “All right, then. We’ll just have to keep on and see what happens. Stars be praised, we’re through the worst of the really rugged country. Not so much risk of blowing off a cliff here.”
“If we can hold where we are till spring, we’ll be in a place where we can stab deep into Unkerlant’s vitals,” Kun said.
“I thought you were a mage’s apprentice, not a news-sheet scribbler’s,” Istvan said. Kun was too swaddled in fur and fabric for Istvan to see if he changed expression, but he turned away and kept quiet for a while.
And then, up ahead, someone called a challenge--in Unkerlanter. Istvan knew no more than a handful of words of the language. Neither did anyone else in the squad. The challenge came again, sharper and more peremptory. “What do we do, Sergeant?” somebody asked.
“Get down, you fools!” Istvan shouted, suiting action to word. As he thumped down into the snow himself, he added, “Balogh, back to the rest of the company. Tell ‘em we’ve found the enemy!”
Actually, the Unkerlanters had found them. Beams hissed overhead, blasting snowflakes to steam. Istvan worried about them less than he would have in clearer weather; snow attenuated their force even faster than rain did. But how large an Unkerlanter position lay ahead there, shielded by the blizzard? If he’d uncovered a regiment of King Swemmel’s soldiers, they’d wipe out his squad as casually as he swatted a fly ... provided they knew he had only a squad.
He blazed at the Unkerlanters a couple of times, not so much in the hope of hurting them as to make them believe he led a good-sized force. “Kun!” he hissed. “Hey, Kun! You all right?”
“Aye, for the time being,” the mage’s apprentice answered from over to his left.
“Can you make the Unkerlanters think we’ve got more men here than we really do?” Istvan asked.
For a moment, he didn’t think the mage’s apprentice heard him. Then a voice--Kun’s voice, he realized, but bigger and deeper and more resonant than it had any business being--answered, “Aye, Colonel!” Istvan looked around to see where so exalted a figure as a colonel might have sprung from, but then started to laugh. Kun was doing his best to follow orders.
And his best turned out to be better than Istvan had expected. Other voices came out of the snow from different directions: nonexistent captains positioning equally nonexistent companies for a charge. Mythical sergeants who sounded much fiercer than Istvan ever had gave their mythical squads orders.
Off to the east, the Unkerlanters started shouting, nerving themselves for an attack: “Urra! Urra! Urra!” Istvan’s shiver had nothing to do with the snow on which he lay. From the sound of those shouts, he hadn’t stumbled over a regiment: That had to be at least a brigade. He wished Kun had given him an imaginary brigade of his own. He would have enjoyed being a brigadier, even an imaginary one, for the few brief moments till the Unkerlanters overran him.
Amid the calls and the shouts, Kun spoke in his own voice: “What next, Sergeant? This can’t last--they’re bound to test it, all the men they have over there.”
He was right, curse him. Balogh must have got lost, or else Captain Tivadar would have brought up real reinforcements. But Istvan, having begun the game, did not want to give it up. He got to his feet, advanced on the Unkerlanter position, and shouted a couple of the Unkerlanter phrases he knew: “You surrender! Hands high!”
King Swemmel’s men didn’t blaze him down out of hand. The shouts of “Urra! Urra!” died away. Only the wind spoke, the wind and Kun’s conjured-up officers and sergeants. And then, dejectedly, an Unkerlanter shouted back: “We surrender!”
Istvan gaped. He’d known how colossal a bluff he was running and was astonished past words that the Unkerlanters had fallen for it. If he showed that, though, everything was ruined. “Hands high!” he yelled again, not caring if he rasped his throat raw so long as he made his voice pierce the gale.
He aimed his stick eastward. He could do no more than that; the snow was blowing too hard to let him find a sure target. Out of that swirling snow came Unkerlanters in long, thick wool tunics with leggings beneath and long, hooded cloaks over them. They carried no weapons; their hands were above their heads. Catching sight of Istvan, the first one in the line repeated, “We surrender.”
Gesturing with his stick, Istvan sent them back toward his comrades. As they glumly tramped past him, he counted them. Only twenty men were marching into captivity. Had more stayed behind or . .. ? Sudden suspicion flowered in him. “Kun!” he shouted. “You’ve got to have more of their language than I do.”
“Maybe, Sergeant, though I haven’t got much,” the mage’s apprentice answered, sounding more respectful than he usually did.
“Tell ‘em you’re a first-rank mage who’ll know if they lie, then ask ‘em if all those cursed ‘ Urrafs were magic to scare us off,” Istvan said.
“I’ll try.” Kun sounded doubtful, but he spoke to the Unkerlanters. Istvan listened to gutturals going back and forth and watched gestures till Kun returned to Gyongyosian: “That’s what they were doing, all right. They knew the jig was up when they heard our regiment forming for the attack.”
Istvan laughed till tears came. The tears promptly started freezing his eyelashes together. He swiped at his face with his mittens. Then he heard shouts from the west: Captain Tivadar at last, bringing reinforcements against the Unkerlanter host. . . the Unkerlanter host Istvan had just captured. He made his way over to Tivadar. Saluting, he said, “Sir, the enemy position is ours,” and laughed again at the flabbergasted expression on his company commander’s face.