Harry Turtledove - Jaws of Darkness

And the Unkerlanters did not have to catch Mezentio’s men to make bad things happen to them. Bembo grabbed Oraste’s arm. “Dragons!” he shouted. They both dove for cover as the rock-gray beasts swooped down on Eoforwic from Unkerlanter dragon farms on the far side of the river.

“Powers below eat them,” Oraste said, his face buried in the dirt. Bembo lay perhaps a foot away from him. Between them, some sort of nasty mushroom thrust up from the ground. Bembo was amazed some Forthwegian hadn’t picked it and taken it off as a prize.

A moment later, as eggs began bursting uncomfortably close by, he found more urgent things about which to be amazed. “The whoresons pretty much left us alone while we were fighting the Forthwegians here,” he said. “Why in blazes are they bothering us now?”

“Of course they left us alone then-we were doing them a favor,” Oraste said. “Now we aren’t killing Forthwegians who might cause ‘em trouble further down the ley line, so they don’t have to bother being nice to us anymore.”

That exercise in cynicism might have upset Bembo more if he hadn’t come to a similar conclusion himself. “We need to get to a shelter,” he bawled.

“Go ahead, if you want to,” Oraste said. “Me, I think you’ll get your stupid self killed if you stand up.”

Again, he had a point. Bembo stayed where he was. Enough piles of wreckage lay around to do a good job of shielding him and Oraste unless an egg burst right on top of them. Somebody much too close by started screaming. Bembo couldn’t tell if he was Algarvian or Forthwegian. Agony, the constable had discovered, sounded the same in any language.

Bembo rolled from his belly to his back. He saw no dragons, but eggs, more of them than ever, kept bursting all over Eoforwic. “They’ve got their tossers limbered up, too,” he said in dismay.

“Well, if they’re going to pound on us, odds are they’ll pound on us with everything they’ve got, eh?” Oraste said.

“There won’t be anything left of this place by the time they’re through with it,” Bembo said. “There wasn’t much left of it before they started.”

“Aye, we took care of that,” Oraste said. “And I’m sure it breaks the Unkerlanters’ hearts to knock the capital of Forthweg flat.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Bembo asked, punctuating the question with a yelp as a brick or a stone bounced off his belly. He rolled back over onto his back.

“Don’t you remember?” Oraste said. “Back before the Six Years’ War, we split Forthweg with the Unkerlanters. Eoforwic used to belong to them. As far as old Swemmel’s concerned, there shouldn’t ought to be any such thing as a Kingdom of Forthweg.”

“Well, there won’t be if his men keep doing this to Eoforwic,” Bembo said. “Or if there is, there won’t be any Forthwegians left alive in it.”

“After what they put us through, who’d miss ‘em?” Oraste said.

“A point,” Bembo said. Then new fear ran through him, fear different from the simple, elementary terror caused by knowing that sorcerous energy might sear him at any moment. The only way he could find to exorcise it was to name it aloud: “You don’t suppose Swemmel’s men are pounding us like this because they’re getting ready to cross the Twegen, do you?”

“How in blazes should I know?” Oraste answered crossly. “If you want to find out something like that, why don’t you swim across the river and askMarshalRathar? He’s over there somewhere.”

“Oh, good idea. Really good idea.” Bembo’s voice dripped sarcasm. “Maybe I should ask for leave again. Then I wouldn’t be here when the avalanche came down on our heads.”

“Futter you,” his partner told him. “Everybody in Gromheort wanted to kill you when you got leave once. If you got it again, somebodywould up and murder you. And besides, by the time you got to Tricarico, how do you know the stinking Lagoans and Kuusamans wouldn’t be holding it?”

“I don’t,” Bembo admitted. “But if you had to get captured, who’d be your first choice to nab you: one of the islanders or an Unkerlanter?”

“My first choice to capture me? A redheaded gal with big tits,” Oraste said. “Second choice’d be a blond wench with big tits. It’s all downhill from there.”

That wasn’t what Bembo had meant, which didn’t stop him from laughing. Anything that could make him laugh when the world was coming to pieces all around him was something to be cherished. Only later did it occur to him to wonder just how far his standards had fallen. When it did, he wished it hadn’t.

MarshalRathar, as it happened, was not right across the Twegen River from Eoforwic at that moment. He’d been summoned back to Cottbus, and left the fight in the north inGeneralGurmun ’s capable hands. “Don’t strike till everything is ready,” he’d warned the general of behemoths. “The worst mistakes we’ve made in this war, we’ve made by hitting too soon.”

“Aye, lord Marshal,” Gurmun had said. Rathar had wondered if he could trust the younger man to hold himself in. IfKingSwemmel ordered Gurmun to attack, he would, whether the situation called for it or not. Gurmun had also said, “I envy you.” He assumed Swemmel was recalling Rathar to confer some new high command on him.

Going through papers as the ley-line caravan glided west, Rathar hoped Gurmun was right. He hoped so, but he had no guarantee of it. For all he knew, the king was summoning him to have him blazed outside the royal palace as a warning to others. You never could tell with Swemmel.

Mile after mile of plain, first Forthwegian and then Unkerlanter, slid past before Rathar’s eyes. Every time the ley line took him through or past a village, he winced. No village remained intact. Hardly any buildings remained intact. What the war hadn’t wrecked, the Algarvians had often deliberately smashed in their long, slow, stubborn withdrawal toward the east. If we can’t keep it, you won’t get any use from it, either, they seemed to say.

And the villages-the whole ruined landscape-looked the same from early morning, when Rathar left the western suburbs of Eoforwic, till the sun set. It would have gone on looking the same, too, had he been able to see longer. All the way to the suburbs of Cottbus, the devastation would have continued-did continue, though shrouded now in darkness. How many years, how many generations, will Unkerlant need before she is again what she was? But that was a question beyond the ken even of marshals.

Rathar’s caravan car boasted a couch. He fell asleep on it. An aide shook him awake, saying, “Sir, we’re in the capital.”

“Are we?” He yawned, stretched, and sat up. The ley-line caravan depot remained dark. No Algarvian dragon could reach Cottbus these days-or so Rathar hoped with every fiber of his being-but the fear remained. Unkerlanters had always feared and suspected and admired the energetic redheads from the east. These past three and a half years, the Algarvians had given them fresh reasons for all three.

Descending from the caravan car gave Rathar another anxious moment. Who would be waiting for him down on the ground? His adjutant, Major Merovec? Or some of Swemmel’s hard-eyed, dead-souled guards, there to haul him away to torment or death for some slight the king had imagined? Again, you never could tell.

“Good evening, Marshal.” The voice was thin and high and would have been inconsequential, but… “We have a new task for you.”

Of all the things MarshalRathar had expected, thatKingSwemmel himself would meet him at the depot was among the last. He wasted no time in going flat on his belly before his sovereign. The slates of the floor were chilly. So was the air; autumn in Cottbus was a different business from the mild days he’d enjoyed outside of Eoforwic.