Harry Turtledove: Into the Darkness

Leudast wished he were back on his farm, not far from the Forthwegian border, rather than sitting around a campfire here in the rock-strewn middle of nowhere. As far as he was concerned, Arpad was welcome to every one of these boulders if he was crazy enough to want them.

He didn’t mention his opinion. Sergeants took a dim view of such sentiments. Officers took an even dimmer one. From what people said (whispered, actually), King Swemmel took the dimmest view of all. Having finally won the long civil war with his twin brother, Kyot, Swemmel thought anyone who disagreed with him a traitor. A lot of people had disappeared because Swemmel held that opinion. Leudast did not want to add his name to the list.

He leaned forward to toast a piece of sausage skewered on a stick over the fire. He twirled the stick between the palms of his hands to get the hard, peppery sausage done on all sides. His sergeant, a veteran named Magnulf, nodded approval, saying, “Very efficient, Leudast.”

“Thank you, Sergeant.” Leudast beamed. That was high praise. He’d never heard the word efficiency before the impressers pulled him off his farm and put him in a rock-gray uniform tunic, but King Swemmel was wild for it, which meant everyone beneath Swemmel was wild for it, too. Along with learning how to slaughter the foes of Unkerlant, Leudast had learned to mouth the phrases: “Time and motion—least and fewest.”

“Least and fewest,” Magnulf agreed around a mouthful of his own sausage. Leudast had a little trouble understanding him, but waiting to swallow would have been inefficient. Magnulf scratched his formidable nose—though it was less formidable than those of Leudast and half the other troopers in his squad—and went on, “The stinking Gongs are liable to try something tonight. That’s what we hear from prisoners, anyhow.”

Leudast wondered how they’d squeezed out the news. Efficiently, without a doubt. His stomach did a slow flipflop as he thought about how efficient interrogators could be.

One of his squadmates, a fellow named Wisgard who was slim by Unkerlanter standards, spoke up: “Back home, it would be midnight or so, and here the sun’s barely down.”

“We are a great kingdom.” Magnulf thumped his broad chest with a big, thick-fingered fist. “And we are going to be a greater kingdom still, once we drive the Gongs off the mainland and over to the islands they’ve taken to infesting.”

“That’d be easier if they hadn’t stolen this stretch of land from us during the Twinkings War,” a trooper named Berthar said.

“Proves how important efficiency is,” Magnulf said. “A kingdom gets on fine with one king—that’s efficient. Try to put two in the space meant for one, and everything goes to pieces.”

That wasn’t efficiency, not the way Leudast saw things. It was just common sense. If either Swemmel or Kyot had admitted he was the younger twin, Unkerlant would have been spared a lot of grief. Armies had marched and countermarched across Leudast’s farm—it had been his father’s then, for he’d been born just as the civil war was finally petering out—stealing what they could and burning a lot of what they couldn’t. The countryside had been years recovering.

And now, when it finally had recovered, here was another war on the far frontier of the kingdom. For the life of him, Leudast couldn’t see the efficiency of that. Again, though, he could see the inefficiency of saying so.

Captain Urgan came up to the fire and said, “Be alert, men. The Gyongyosians are planning something nasty.”

“I’ve already warned them, sir,” Magnulf said.

“Efficient,” Urgan said crisply. “I have more news, too: over in the far east, all of Algarve’s neighbors have jumped on her back.”

“His Majesty was as efficient as all get-out to stand aside from that war,” Magnulf said. “Let all those tall bastards kill each other.”

“Forthwegians aren’t tall bastards,” Berthar said with fussy precision.

Magnulf gave him a glare undoubtedly practiced in front of a mirror. “They may not be tall bastards, but they’re bastards just the same,” the sergeant growled. “If they weren’t bastards, they wouldn’t have thrown off Unkerlanter suzerainty during the Twinkings War, now would they?”

His tone strongly suggested that giving any kind of answer would be inefficient. Berthar didn’t need to be a first-rank mage to figure that out. He kept his mouth shut. Captain Urgan added, “And Forthweg has its own share of Kaunians. They’re tall bastards, every bit as much as the lousy Algarvians.”

Berthar did his best to look as if he’d never been so rash as to open his mouth. Leudast wouldn’t have been so rash himself. He did ask, “Sir, any word on what the Gongs have in mind?”

“I’m afraid not,” Urgan said. “I don’t look for anything overwhelming, though—with so few ley lines charted in this powersforsaken stretch of the world, and with even fewer properly improved, they have as much trouble moving men and supplies as we do. This isn’t the most efficient war ever fought, but Gyongyos started it, so we’ve got to respond.”

A brief hiss of cloven air was the only warning Leudast had before an egg burst about fifty yards from the campfire. The blast of light and heat from the energies it released knocked him off his feet and made him wonder if he’d been blinded: all he saw for a moment were purple smears in front of his eyes.

He did not need to hear the screech of a swooping dragon to know it would attack the men around the fire. Nor did he need to see it to know it would be able to see him if he stayed close by the flames. He rolled away, bumping over rocks and over little spiky-leafed mountain shrubs whose name he did not know: before the impressers took him away, he’d always been a man of the flatlands.

He saw the flame that burst from the dragon’s jaw, saw it and smelled the brimstone reek, too. Somewhere behind him, Wisgard shrieked. A moment later, a pale, thin beam of light shot from the ground toward the dragon. Leudast wished he’d had his own stick slung on his back. Then he could have blazed at the enemy, too, instead of seeking only to hide.

But the Gyongyosians, like the folk of most other realms these days, were sly enough to silver their dragons’ bellies and the undersides of their wings. The beam that would have burned a hole in man was harmlessly reflected away. The dragon belched forth fire again. Another scream arose. No one blazed back at the beast as it flew off to the west. The wind from its great wingbeats blew Leudast’s hair all awry.

Blinking frantically, he scrambled toward the sticks. As he groped for his own, Magnulf and Berthar came crawling up. “Where’s the captain?” Leudast asked.

“Back there, toasted like bread you forget over the fire,” Magnulf answered. Somewhere west of them, someone kicked a rock. Magnulf cursed. “And here come the Gongs. Let’s see how expensive we can make ourselves. Spread out—we don’t want them getting around our flank.”

Leudast scuttled toward a boulder fifteen or twenty feet away. A beam like the one poor Captain Urgan had aimed at the dragon zipped close to him, but did not strike. He dove behind the boulder, almost knocking the wind out of himself. Then, peering out into the night, he tried to find the spot from which the enemy had blazed at him.

The big disadvantage to using a stick at night was that, if you missed, the flash of light could tell the enemy where you were. If you were smart, you didn’t stay there long. If you moved, though, you were liable to expose yourself, or to make some noise.

Leudast heard some noise off to his right: running footsteps. He whirled. Straight at him came a Gyongyosian trooper who must have noted the thud and clatter he’d made diving for cover. With a gasp, Leudast thrust his forefinger into the recess at the base of his stick.