Before long, pillars of smoke rose into the sky from Hwiterne. Under cover of that barrage, Unkerlanter troops pushed through the patchily inhabited suburbs and into the town itself. Leudast discovered he had not only Forthwegian soldiers but also townsfolk blazing at him. He blazed back. He blazed at anyone he spied in Hwiterne who wasn't wearing Unkerlanter rock-gray. He suspected he might have wounded innocent bystanders. That was inefficient, but not nearly so inefficient as letting himself izet killed.

He flopped down in the rubble that had been a house. A woman with a bandage on her head lay not far away from him. He didn't blaze her down; he could see she had no weapon. "Why?" she asked him. "Why did you cursed Unkerlanters come here? Why didn't you leave us alone?"

Lendist followed that well enough. "We came to take back what's ours" he answered.

She glared at him. "Can't you see we don't want you? Can't you see we" - a word he didn't know - "King Swemmel?" Whatever the word meant he doubted it was praise.

"If you're not strong enough to stop us, what difference does that [...]"

She cursed him then, her voice full of bitter hopelessness. He could have killed her for it. No one would have been the wiser. No one who [..iiiattcrcd..] to Leudast would have cared at all. She had to know as much.

She cursed anyhow, as if defying him to do his worst.

He shrugged his broad shoulders. She cursed again, harder than ever.

His indifference seemed more wounding to her than rage would have been. Shruaging once more, he said, "You didn't curse when King Penda invaded Algarve. What business have on [..ot doino..] it now?"

She stared at him. "The Algarvians deserve everything that happens to them. We won't deserve any of this."

"That's not what King Swemmel thinks," Leudast said. "He's my king. I obey him." Dreadful things happened to Unkerlanters who didn't obey King Swermuel Leudast preferred not to dwell on those [..].

A Forthwegian egg burst not far away. Chunks of wood and mud bn*ck rained down on him and the woman with the bandaged head.

Dreadful things, he realized, could also happen to Unkerlanters who did obey King Swemmel. For a moment he wondered why in that case he [..].

He didn't have to search hard for the answer. Dreadful things might not happen to him if he fought the Gongs or the Forthwegians. Nothing too dreadful had happened to him yet. If, on the other hand, he set his own will against the king's… Swemmel had shown over the years that disaster surely befell anyone rash enough to do such a thing.

The Unkerlanters rained eggs on the center of Hwiteme, from which resistance was fiercest. Officers blew whistles. Sergeants shouted. Leudast scrambled to his feet and dashed forward. For a couple of heartbeats, he heard the Forthwegian woman cursing him yet again. Then her voice was lost in the greater din of battle.

He ran past the corpse of a behemoth, killed with most of its crew by a Forthwegian egg. A moment later, he dove for cover behind another dead behemoth. A strong stink of burnt meat rose from this one: the Forthwegians had concealed a stick heavy enough to blaze through the beast's armor in a building now wreckage. Leudast warily looked around for more such traps, though the Unkerlanters had driven the foe from this part of Hwiteme. Trying to use behemoths in the middle of a built-up area struck him as inefficient. He wondered if it would strike his officers the same way.

Hwiterne fell. So did the keep at its heart, smashed to ruins by the miracles of modem sorcery. Filthy, dejected Forthwegian captives shambled off into the west, a handful of Unkerlanters guarding them. A good many corpses wearing civilian-style tunics rather than those of the Forthwegian army lay in the streets, each dead man with a neat hole blazed in the center of his forehead. Someone had painted a sign in Unkerlanter and what Leudast presumed to be Forthwegian (the Forthwegians used an alphabet different from his): IF YOU ARE NOT A SOLDIER, THIS IS WHAT YOU GET FOR BLAZING AT KING SWEMMEL'S MEN.

Some few of the prisoners in Forthwegian uniform were tall, yellow haired men, not short, swarthy ones. Pointing at them, a soldier in Leudast's company exclaimed, "Powers below! How did the cursed Gyongyosians get over here to the other side of the kingdom to help the Forthwegians?"

"Those aren't Gongs, Nantwin, you goose," Leudast answered.

"They're just Kaunians. They've been here since dirt."

"What's a Kaunian?" Nantwin asked. He had a strong Grelzer accent, which meant he came from the far south of Unkerlant. No Kaunians in that part of the world, sure enough.

"They used to run a whole lot of the northeast," Leudast said, "back before the Algarvians and Forthwegians smashed up their empire.,,

"How come they look like Gongs?" Nantwin said.

"They don't, really," Leudast said. "Aye, they're blond, but that's about it." The differences seemed obvious to him; there were Kaunians not far from his farming village. Not only were they tall and skinny, but their hair lay flat on their heads, where the Gyongyosians' sprang out wildly in all directions. Kaunians' hair ran to silver gilt, too, while that of the Gongs was a tawny yellow.

Such subtleties were lost on Nantwin, who said, "Curse them, they look like Gyongyosians to me."

"Fine," Leudast said. "They look like Gongs to you." Life was too short for arguments over things that didn't matter. "Inefficient," he muttered.

A prisoner of Kaunian blood stared at him - through him. By the expression on the fellow's face, Leudast looked like scum to him. Leudast laughed. The Kaunian jerked as if he'd stepped on a thorn. Leudast couldn't have cared less about a worthless captive's opinion of him.

"Why are you wasting your time gaping at these miserable bastards?"

Sergeant Magnulf demanded. "Odds are King Swemmel will put'em to work mining brimstone and quicksilver, and they'll never come out from the holes again. They might as well be dead already. You get moving."

"Sorry, Sergeant," said Leudast, who knew he would be wasting his time if he tried to explain to Magnulf that he'd been trying to show

Nantwin the Kaunians of Forthweg were different from Gyongyosians.

Magnulf didn't want explanations. Obedience was all he craved.

He grunted now, satisfied that he'd got it. "Come on," he said. "We'll be breaking into Eoforwic in another few days." Leudast tramped after him- He would rather have been back on his farm. If he had to find himself in the middle of a war, though, he was just as well pleased to find himself in the mid e of an ea-v one

Colonel Sabrino, ducked out of his tent. One of the tethered dragons at ffie temporary farm north of Gromheort flapped its wings and hissed at the Algarvian dragonflier stopped in his tracks, as if a human foe had insulted him. He sent the most obscene gesture he knew back at the dragon, which hissed again; it might have been insulted in turn.

Laughing, Sabrino swaggered off toward the officers' club.

That too was housed in a tent. The tapman bowed when Sabrino came inside. "How may I please you, my lord?" he asked.

"If you'd turn into a beautiful woman, that would give you a head start on the j ob, no doubt about it," Sabrino answered. A couple of fliers from his wing who were sitting around with drinks in front of them laughed.

So did the tapman, though he remained resolutely male and on the homely side. With a sigh, Sabrino said, "I suppose I'll have to content myself with a glass of port. Put it on my scot."

"Aye, my lord." The tapman pulled cork from bottle and poured.

Sabrino sipped. The fortified wine was not of the best, but it would have to do. Wartime meant sacrifice.

"Join us, Colonel, if you would," Captain Domiziano said. He tapped the stool beside him. Senior Lieutenant Orosio, who shared the table with Domiziano, nodded to show the invitation came from him, too.