“I wish it had been,” Istvan said unhappily. “Now we’re going to have to hunt the bugger down and find out who he is.” He waved to his squad. “Into the woods, boys. No help for it.”
Some of the troopers cursed, not at him but at their luck. Kun said, “I hope it’s one of our officers, some popinjay of a captain or even a colonel.” By his tone, he didn’t hope that because he feared to fight an Unkerlanter. No, he hoped to get a chance to give an officer a hard time without fear of punishment.
And Istvan chuckled and said, “Aye,” hoping for the same chance himself. But he stopped chuckling the instant he stepped off the track. If the man he’d spotted was an Unkerlanter, as seemed more likely, he’d have to hunt the fellow down. He would almost have sooner gone unarmed after a tiger. In this trackless forest, the Unkerlanters were better at moving unseen and unheard than most Gyongyosians.
If that was an Unkerlanter there, why had he let Istvan see him? Had he made a mistake? Swemmel’s men seldom made that kind of mistake. If it wasn’t a mistake, what was the Unkerlanter trying to lure him into?
The first thing he found himself lured into was mud up to his knees once more. Cursing wearily, he dragged himself out. After a considerable search, he and his comrades found nothing. “Are you sure your magic knows what it’s talking about?” he asked Kun.
“Aye,” the sorcerer’s apprentice answered. “Someone was moving around here, Sergeant, but I don’t know who and I don’t know where.”
“Oh, huzzah,” Istvan said sourly. “The son of a whore could be sitting somewhere close by gnawing on a big chunk of goat meat, and we’d never know the difference, eh?”
“That’s about the size of it,” Kun said. “I can cast the spell again, if you like. If he’s still moving toward us, I’ll know. But I don’t think it’s very likely.”
Istvan didn’t think it was very likely, either. But, since he couldn’t think of anything better to do, he said, “Go ahead.”
Kun went ahead. After a couple of minutes, he spread his hands. “Nothing. Nothing I can find, anyhow.”
“Huzzah,” Istvan repeated. “So he’s past us, is he?”
“Either that or he’s sitting tight and not moving toward us,” Kun answered. He slapped at a fly that landed on the back of his hand, then asked, “What now?”
It was a good question. Istvan wished he had a good answer for it. He wanted to say, Let’s go back to the path and keep on and forget about it. Then this whoreson, if he is an Unkerlanter, will be someone else’s worry. He wanted to say that, but discovered he couldn’t. He had a stubborn streak that refused to let the words pass his lips. What came out instead was, “We keep looking.”
Kun nodded. A chance streak of sunlight glittered off the gold frames of his spectacles. “All right, Sergeant, we keep looking.” That wasn’t perfect submission, as it would have been in a different tone of voice. As things were, Kun couldn’t have been more emphatic about calling Istvan an idiot if he’d held up a sign.
Istvan knew he was probably wasting his time, and his squad’s as well. What with all the ferns and brambles and thorn bushes on the ground, the Unkerlanter had so many places to hide that the only way to find him would be to stumble over him.
That thought had hardly crossed his mind before one of his troopers gave a shout that abruptly turned into a cry of pain. “Come on!” Istvan said, and scrambled toward the soldier.
The Gyongyosian was down on the ground, but not badly hurt. “That way!” he said, and pointed east. Istvan heard someone running through the woods. He blazed in the direction of the noise. It kept on, so he must have missed. The wounded soldier said, “I never would have known the goat-bugger was there, but I tripped over his foot.”
“Luck,” Istvan muttered. It hadn’t been good luck for the soldier, but it had been for the Gyongyosians as a group. Istvan raised his voice: “After him! Keep him running and we’ll run him down!”
Either that or we’ll run straight into trouble, he thought. But the Unkerlanter was fleeing, whatever he’d planned disrupted. And so Istvan and his comrades pounded after him.
A beam hissed through the forest. Steam spurted from a pine bough not too far above Istvan’s head. He threw himself flat-and landed on his belly in a bramble bush. “There!” Szonyi shouted from off to his left. “I saw where he blazed from.”
“Well, blaze him, then,” Istvan shouted back. No sooner were the words out of his mouth than he crawled through the brambles and briars as fast as he could go. If the Unkerlanter blazed at the sound of his voice, he wanted the fellow blazing in the wrong place.
Again, he wondered if the enemy soldier was leading his comrades and him into a trap. He’d seen no signs of it, but he wouldn’t, not if the Unkerlanter knew what he was doing. In an odd way, it didn’t matter. With the chase on, he and his men could hardly abandon it.
He scuttled over to a tree, ignoring the scratches on his face and arms and the burrs clinging to his tunic and leggings. Cautiously, he peered out from behind the trunk-only for an instant before jerking his head back. He wasn’t so foolish as to peer twice from the same place; that was asking for a beam right between the eyes. Instead, he crawled over to another tree and took a look from behind that one.
He got lucky: he spied the flash from a stick, and it wasn’t aimed at him. He threw his own stick to his shoulder and blazed. A harsh voice cried out in pain. Istvan didn’t break cover to finish off the wounded Unkerlanter. He wasn’t sure the fellow really was wounded, and he wasn’t sure the enemy soldier didn’t have friends close by, either. The most he would do was hurry to another tree closer to the bushes among which the Unkerlanter had hidden himself.
Something thrashed in those bushes, something the size of a man. Istvan blazed again. His was not the only beam biting the bushes, either: here and there, they withered and turned brown, as if stricken by the drought that never came to this forest. After a while, the thrashing stopped.
“Got him!” somebody said in Gyongyosian.
Istvan wasn’t so sure. He’d seen too many wounded Unkerlanters who stayed alive for no other reason than the hope of taking a couple of Gyongyosians with them. King Swemmel’s subjects weren’t a warrior race-as the stars proclaimed, no folk but the men of Gyongyos were true warriors-but they weren’t soldiers to be despised, either. Gyongyos was learning that the hard way.
Kun strode forward. Before Istvan could shout a warning, the mage’s apprentice went in among the bushes, stooped, and then rose and waved. “He’s dead,” he called.
“Where are his friends, though, you fool?” Istvan called back. Kun started as if jabbed by a pin, then dropped down into the bushes again. This time, he didn’t get up right away.
But no Unkerlanters hot for revenge came charging at him. He made his way back to the rest of the squad. “Just one of the goat-eaters,” Szonyi said. “Just one, and now he’s not there anymore, either.”
“Just one,” Istvan agreed. “But he tied us up for quite a while. He wounded one man, and we’ll have to hustle to get back to the path, and hustle even harder to catch up with the rest of the company. He caused almost as much trouble as if he’d blazed us all, may the stars be dark on his spirit.” He trudged back toward the path. No one would ever put this down in a history of the war. He didn’t even know whether to reckon it a success. He didn’t know whether the war was a success, either. Success or not, it went on.
Sunlight sparkled off the greenish blue waters of the Strait of Valmiera. To the north lay the Algarvian-occupied mainland of Derlavai, to the south the great island that held Lagoas and Kuusamo. Cornelu looked up into the sky, watching for dragons.
For the moment, he saw none. He and his Lagoan leviathan might have been alone in the ocean, and that ocean might have stretched unchecked to the end of the world. He wished that were so. He knew too well it wasn’t.