Harry Turtledove - Into the Darkness

General Gurmun appeared in the crystal. “How may I serve you, my lord?” He was younger than either Droctulf or Rathar, younger and, in some indefinable way, harder. No, not indefinable after all: he looked as if he really believed in King Swemmel’s efficiency campaign rather than giving it polite lip service.

“You are familiar with the plan of attack?” Rathar asked. Gurmun nodded, a single up-and-down motion. “You can be certain your half of it goes in at the proper time and at full strength?” Gurmun nodded again. So did Rathar. “Very well, General. That half of the army is yours. Unkerlant expects nothing but victory from us, and has already been disappointed too often.”

“I shall serve the kingdom as efficiently as I may,” Gurmun said.

Rathar nodded to his crystallomancer, who broke the link with the eastern army. Here in the field, away from King Swemmel, Rathar was supreme. Everyone yielded to his will, even a veteran campaigner like Droctulf. Droctulf had survived all of Swemmel’s massacres during and after the Twinkings War. But he could not survive his own inefficiency.

The next morning, precisely on schedule, both wings of the Unkerlanter army attacked. The racket from the thump of bursting eggs reached back to Rathar’s headquarters. He had a swarm of dragons in the air, both to drop still more eggs on the Zuwayzin and to keep an eye out for yet another of their assaults against his flanks. On camelback or afoot, they ranged through the desert like ghosts.

Despite the pummeling his egg-tossers gave the enemy, Zuwayzi resistance remained fierce. He had expected nothing less. Both Werpin and Gurmun started screaming for reinforcements. Rathar had expected nothing less there, either. He had the reinforcements ready and waiting—his logistics had finally caught up with King Swemmel’s impetuosity—and fed them into the fight.

The Zuwayzin did everything they could to hold the line of the Wadi Uqeiqa. Rathar had been sure they would; if he could secure a lodgement north of the dry riverbed, that would set him up to take a long step toward the valley in which Bishah lay. As he’d looked for the black men to do, they sent out a flanking column of camel riders to hit his reinforcements before the Unkerlanters could reach the front.

Dragons rose with a thunder of wings. For once, the Zuwayzin weren’t going to catch him with his drawers down in this desert country. He didn’t have so many crystals with the troops as he would have liked; with more, he could have done a better job of coordinating his attacks. The Algarvians had shown themselves dangerously good at that.

This time, though, he had enough. One of the dragonfliers reported raking the Zuwayzin with eggs and with the dragons’ own fire. The blacks pressed the attack anyhow, those who were left. His reinforcing column, forewarned, gave them a savage mauling and pressed on toward the Wadi Uqeiqa.

And, while the Zuwayzin threw everything they had into stopping Werpin’s army, they didn’t have enough to stop Gurmun’s force at the same time. Getting them to that point had taken longer and cost much more than Rathar expected, but now it was done. He ordered Gurmun to swing his advance to the west and come in behind the Zuwayzin who still stalled Werpin. Droctulf might have done brilliantly—or he might have botched things altogether. Gurmun handled everything with matter-of-fact competence, which, under the circumstances Rathar had worked so hard to create, proved more than adequate.

Studying the maps, Rathar smiled a rare smile. “We’ve broken them,” he said.

Ignoring the weight of the heavy pack on his back, Istvan watched in fascination as the dowser prowled the west-facing beach on the island of Obuda. The dowser, whose name was Borsos, aimed his forked branch out toward the sea. “I thought dowsers found water,” Istvan said. “Why did they bring you out here, into the middle of all the water in the world?”

Borsos threw back his head and laughed; his tawny yellow curls bounced in rhythm to his mirth. “A man from the days when the Thököly Dynasty ruled Gyongyos might have asked the same question,” he said, where a man from the far east of Derlavai would have spoken of the days of the Kaunian Empire. “Dowsers are much more than water-sniffers nowadays, believe you me.”

“Well, sir, I do understand that,” Istvan replied, a trifle testily. “Even in my little valley up in the mountains, we had dowsers who’d look for lost trinkets, and others who’d point herders after a lost sheep. But if things went missing in water or near it, they wouldn’t find them: the water kept them from sensing anything else. Why doesn’t that happen to you?”

“A different question altogether,” Borsos said. “A better one, too, if you don’t mind my saying so. You can understand I can’t give you all the details, not unless you promise to take off your head and throw it away after I’m done. Military sorcery has even more secrets than any other kind.”

“Aye, that’s plain enough,” Istvan said. “Tell me what you can, if you’d be so kind. It’ll be more than I know now, that’s sure.” He hadn’t been so curious before coming to Obuda. But there wasn’t much to do here, and his underofficers didn’t give him much time to do what he could. Without quite intending to, he’d picked up a lot of dragon lore. Learning about dowsing might be interesting, too.

Borsos said, “Ever since the early days, the days of stone and bronze, dowsing has stood apart from the rest of magecraft. Dowsers have done what they could do, and no one thought much about how they did it.

That isn’t so any more. The past few generations, people have started applying the laws of sorcery to dowsing, the same as they have to other kinds of magic.”

Istvan scratched his head. “How? If a magic works, aren’t you likely to ruin it by looking at it too close?”

Borsos laughed again. “You do come from back in the mountains, don’t you, soldier? That’s old doctrine, outmoded, disproved. It’s all in the way you look at things, not in the act of looking. And, by turning the law of similarity on its head, modern magecraft lets a dowser look for anything in water but the water itself, if you take my meaning.”

“Maybe,” Istvan said. “None of the dowsers in my valley knew anything about that, though. Water stymied them.”

“It doesn’t stymie me,” the dowser said. “All of this chatter, though, this is liable to be another story.”

He wore the three silver stars of a captain on each side of his collar, which meant he could have been much ruder than that. Knowing as much, Istvan shut up. Borsos went about his business. He aimed his dowsing rod—the straight length wrapped with copper wire, one fork with silver, the other with gold—at an Obudan fishing boat out near the edge of visibility. The rod quivered in his hand. He grunted, presumably in satisfaction.

“Seems to be performing as it should,” he said. “I got rushed out here in a hurry, you know, after Algarve jumped on Sibiu with sailing ships. Nobody wanted anyone pulling the same trick on us. The ordinary mages are good enough to spot ships coming down the ley lines, but those galleons slid right past them. They won’t get past me.”

“That’s good,” Istvan answered easily. “Of course, I don’t expect a lot of Algarvian warships out here in the Bothnian Ocean.”

Borsos wheeled on him and started to scorch him for an idiot. Then the dowser caught the gleam in his eyes. “Heh,” Borsos said. “Heh, heh. You’re a funny fellow, aren’t you? I’ll bet all your friends think you’re the funniest fellow around. What does your sergeant think when you get funny?”

“Last time it happened, sir, he put me to shoveling dragon shit for a week,” Istvan answered, doing his best not to gulp. He really did have to remember to keep his mouth shut. Borsos wasn’t merely a sergeant. If he so desired, he could make Istvan’s life most unpleasant indeed.