Jaws of Darkness d-5 Read online

  “Let it lie,” Ramalho repeated, a little more sharply.

  “Oh, very well,” Xavega said with poor grace. “Some people, though …”

  Now Leino had all he could do not to laugh out loud. Every time Xavega opened her mouth, she showed him how absurd his fantasies were. She was one of those Lagoans with no use at all for their eastern neighbors. Over the years, Lagoas and the land of the Seven Princes had quarreled a fair number of times, as neighboring lands will. When the Derlavaian War broke out, some few Kuusamans had wanted to fight Lagoas and not Algarve. Fools, Leino thought.

  He stole another glance at Xavega. Odds were she’d never look at him, but he still enjoyed looking at her. It might even have been better that she did despise him. He was in less danger of landing himself in trouble this way.

  “Do you suppose we might actually work the magic we all came here to work?” Essi asked.

  “Oh, very well,” Aalbor said, imitating Xavega’s petulant tone so closely that Leino, Essi, and Ramalho all laughed. Xavega sent the senior Kuusaman mage a glare more venomous than any she’d given Leino. As for Leino himself, he sighed. However luscious Xavega’s body might be, in getting it one also had to deal with her mind. That came close to making it more trouble than it was worth.

  Before the three wizards from Kuusamo began to incant, they joined in a small, not quite sorcerous ritual, reciting, “Before the Kaunians came, we of Kuusamo were here. Before the Lagoans came, we of Kuusamo were here. After the Kaunians departed, we of Kuusamo were here. We of Kuusamo are here. After the Lagoans depart, we of Kuusamo shall be here.”

  That little chant was in Kuusaman, not classical Kaunian. Mages from the land of the Seven Princes had prefaced sorcerous operations with it for centuries. Leino had trouble imagining working deliberately planned magic without it.

  Ramalho and Xavega knew what it was, of course, even if they didn’t understand it. As he usually did, Ramalho raised an amused eyebrow. Xavega said something in Lagoan. Leino didn’t speak much of the neighboring kingdom’s language, but both the sound of the words and Ramalho’s dismayed expression made him doubt she’d paid Kuusamo a compliment.

  Aalbor returned to classical Kaunian: “Let us begin.” All five mages pulled off the amulets they wore and held them in their hands. Leino’s, like those of Essi and Aalbor, was of silver set with moonstones and pearls. Xavega and Ramalho used gold charms with lodestones and amber to feel for and tap the power of the ley lines. Lagoan sorcery was of the Algarvic school, more closely related to that of Sibiu and Algarve itself than to that of Lagoas’ island neighbor.

  But the style and substance of the amulets and the charms the mages used to activate them were only means to an end. However much the means differed, they could and did work together toward the same end. As Leino drew sorcerous energy from the ley line and applied it to keeping theHabakkuk’s icy structure solid and secure, he felt the energy also flowing into Essi and Aalbor, into Ramalho-aye, and into Xavega, too. They channeled it to the ship, sensing what was, comparing that to the pattern they all held in their minds of what should be, and correcting the discrepancies they found.

  They weren’t the only team with such a responsibility. Keeping theHabakkuk afloat took a lot of magecraft. Leino shook his head as that thought occurred to him. It wasn’t strictly true. Ice floated. But keeping theHabakkuk afloat as something more than a slowly melting lump of ice took a lot of magecraft.

  At last, Leino and his comrades looked at one another. Have we done all that wanted doing? they asked one another without words. Have we shored up the ship for another day? Again without words, they agreed they had. Will anything go wrong because of something we have failed to do? That was a clear negative.

  Xavega was the first to speak aloud, with unmistakable relief: “We are finished. We have finished.” She pushed back her chair and strode out of the chamber. Almost of their will rather than his, Leino’s eyes followed her. Like other Algarvic peoples, Lagoans wore kilts. Xavega’s showed off quite a lot of elegantly turned leg.

  With another sigh, Leino got up, too… and poured himself a fresh cup of tea. It wasn’t what he wanted-well, it wasn’t all of what he wanted-but it would have to do.

  Four hundred years before, KingPlegmund of Forthweg had been the mightiest monarch in eastern Derlavai. His armies went from triumph to triumph in Algarve to the east and in Unkerlant to the west. Even nowadays, his name was one to conjure with in Forthweg.

  And the Algarvians had conjured with it, recruiting Plegmund’s Brigade from Forthwegians who still wanted to go to war despite their kingdom’s defeat. Sidroc wondered what he would be doing if the redheads hadn’t organized the Brigade. Something boring with his father Hengist back in Gromheort, he supposed.

  Whatever else he was down here in the Duchy of Grelz in southern Unkerlant, he wasn’t bored. One of the Algarvian officers who led Plegmund’s Brigade blew a piercing blast on his whistle and shouted, “Forward!”-in Algarvian, of course.

  Forward Sidroc went, on snowshoes because some of the drifts were higher than his head. His sigh briefly raised a young fogbank around his face. In Gromheort, whole winters would go by without snow on the ground. In Unkerlant, it sometimes seemed a day couldn’t pass without a new blizzard.

  “Mezentio!” Sidroc shouted as he slogged forward. “Hurrah forKingMezentio!” He yelled in Algarvian, not Forthwegian. Plegmund’s Brigade might have been named for a Forthwegian king, but it used the occupiers’ language. Yelling in Algarvian also lessened the chances that a redhead would take him for an Unkerlanter and blaze him by mistake. He and his countrymen looked more like the enemy than they resembled their allies and paymasters.

  The Unkerlanters holed up in the hamlet ahead didn’t intend to be run out. They had a couple of egg-tossers in there, and hurled death back at the men of Plegmund’s Brigade and the Algarvians with them. The eggs burst when they struck, releasing blasts of sorcerous energy and sending fragments of their metal eggshells whistling through the air like flying scythe blades.

  When eggs started bursting close to Sidroc, he flopped down on his belly in the snow. Chunks of sharp metal screeched past above his head. Not far away, somebody shrieked and then started cursing in Forthwegian. Cursing was something not subject to military discipline.

  “Urra!” shouted the Unkerlanters in the village. “Swemmel! KingSwem-mel! Urra!” Their word forking wasn’t much different from Sidroc’s; he understood it. The Unkerlanters sounded raucous and drunk. Sidroc had some spirits in a flask on his belt, too. He wish he were drunk stupid and mean. He didn’t have enough in the flask for that, worse luck.

  “Forward!” the Algarvian officer shouted again. “We have to keep moving. We have to drive them back. Herbornwill be ours again.”

  Herborn was the capital of the Duchy of Grelz. Herborn had been the capital of the Algarvian puppet Kingdom of Grelz till Swemmel’s soldiers recaptured it a couple of months before. They’d capturedKingRaniero, too-the cousin Mezentio had put on the throne of Grelz: captured him and boiled him alive.

  “Mezentio!” Sidroc yelled, and got to his feet again.

  “Mezentio!” Ceorl snowshoed forward beside him. Like more than a few men who’d joined Plegmund’s Brigade, he’d been a robber, a bandit, before. The Algarvians weren’t fussy about such things, not even a little.

  Eggs fell on the village, too, kicking up fountains of snow. Sidroc whooped when some of the thatch-covered roofs caught fire, sending columns of black smoke into the gray sky. Unkerlanter soldiers ran through the streets. They were awkward and bowlegged on their snowshoes, just as Sidroc was on his. He raised his stick to his shoulder, thrust his right index finger out through the open seam in his mitten, and rammed it into the stick’s activation hole. The beam leaped forth from the other end. He hoped it bit an Unkerlanter.

  Swemmel’s soldiers were blazing back at the men of Plegmund’s Brigade and the Algarvians, too. Puffs of steam rose from the snow where their beams missed Sidroc and
his comrades. The screams that rang out said not all the beams had missed. Sidroc did his best not to think about that, even when a beam zipped past his head so close, he smelled thunderstorms for a moment.

  A few inches more to the left, and… Sidroc shook his head. I’m notthinking about that, curse it.

  He spied more movement in the village. He raised his stick again, then lowered it, swearing as vilely as he could.

  SergeantWerferthsaw that movement, too, and also knew it for what it was. “Behemoths!” he shouted in Algarvian, and followed that with his own foul Forthwegian. Werferth was no youngster looking for adventure like Sidroc, nor a ruffian two jumps ahead of the constables like Ceorl. He’d been a sergeant in the Forthwegian army before the Algarvians smashed it. As far as Sidroc could see, he’d joined Plegmund’s Brigade simply because he liked being a soldier. He would never make officer’s rank, not in the Brigade-he wasn’t an Algarvian. Of course, he wouldn’t have made officer’s rank in the Forthwegian army, either-he wasn’t a nobleman.

  But Sidroc didn’t have much time to worry about Werferth. The behemoths, now, they were really something to worry about. They lumbered forward, each one with enormous snowshoes on its feet, each one with a surcoat that made it harder to spot flapping over its chainmail, each one with its great curved horn sheathed in iron to make it all the more sharp and deadly-and each one mounting a crew of armored Unkerlanters who served either a heavy stick or an egg-tosser that made the behemoth deadly far beyond the reach of its horn.

  Sidroc threw himself down in the snow again. A footsoldiercould blaze down a behemoth-if he put a beam right in its eye. What were the odds? Not worth betting. He tried to knock over the Unkerlanter footsoldiers who ran forward with the beasts. He had a better chance of that.

  “Where areour behemoths?” he shouted. Eggs burst around the Unkerlanter animals, but only a direct hit was likely to slay one. The best way to fight behemoths was with other behemoths.

  “Whereare our behemoths?” That was Ceorl, and that was alarm in his voice. The summer before, Algarve had lost far more behemoths than she could afford to lose, trying to smash the Unkerlanter salient around the town of Durrwangen. Since then, the redheads hadn’t had enough to meet the Unkerlanters’ onslaught-which was one great reason Swemmel’s soldiers had pushed so far east since the battles around Durrwangen. The Algarvians had come up with a fair number of behemoths for the counterattack aimed at Herborn-which was one great reason Mezentio’s soldiers had been able to head west again. juvs of

  If, however, they didn’t get some behemoths right here pretty soon, some of Mezentio’s soldiers and a good many Forthwegians who’d been rash enough to join them were going to have a very thin time of it indeed.

  An egg burst right on top of an Unkerlanter behemoth. All the eggs it had been carrying for its tosser burst, too: a great flash of light, an enormous clap of thunder. Only a hole in the ground-a shallow hole in the ground, for it was frozen hard-showed where the beast had been. The Unkerlanters who served that egg-tosser couldn’t have known what hit them. Sidroc cheered. He didn’t raise his head to do it, though. Plenty ofKingSwemmel ’s soldiers remained alive.

  Flame enveloped another behemoth and its crew. This time, Sidroc saw the dragon that flamed the beast. It was painted in green, red, and white: Algarvian colors. He cheered again. The redheads had been short of dragons since Durrwangen, too, though not to the same degree as they’d been short of behemoths.

  But the Unkerlanter behemoth crews who served heavy sticks also blazed at the Algarvian dragons. Their beams were strong enough to burn through silvery belly paint and the armoring scales beneath. A dragon slammed into the snow. It thrashed for a long time before it died; its great tail sent a couple of Unkerlanters spinning, smashed and broken, to their deaths. The dragon-flier, though, had surely died at that first crushing impact.

  With most of the enemy behemoths dead, Algarvian officers blew their whistles. Their imperative cry rang out again: “Forward!”

  Sidroc would sooner have stayed where he was and let somebody else take the chances. But, along with the other troopers from Plegmund’s Brigade- and along with the Algarvians, too; no denying the redheads had spirit-he scrambled to his feet and went forward. Even as he did, he wondered why. He didn’t particularly care about clearing the Unkerlanters from the village ahead. He didn’t even particularly care about retaking Herborn; he’d seen enough battered Unkerlanter villages and towns and cities to last him the rest of his days.

  WhatdoIcare about, then? he wondered, blazing at an Unkerlanter in a snow smock not much different from his own. The Unkerlanter toppled. Sidroc whooped and slogged on. Why am I giving these buggers the chance to do to me what I just did to that poor whoreson?

  He whooped again when Ceorl blazed an Unkerlanter. He didn’t even like Ceorl, and he knew full well the ruffian had no use for him when they weren’t up against Swemmel’s soldiers. Oddly, that gave him an answer of sorts: Ican’t let the fellows who are in this with me down. If he stayed behind, they’d think he was a coward, and their opinions were the only ones that mattered to him these days. His mother was dead, killed when the Algarvians took Gromheort. His father remained back in Forthweg, and had no real understanding of what he was doing here. He’d killed his cousin Leofsig in a brawl. He’d brawled with Leofsig’s brother Ealstan, too-and Ealstan, from what he gathered, had run off with a Kaunian tart. Leofsig and Ealstan’s father and mother and sister hated him. Who was left, then, but the men alongside whom he fought?

  More Algarvian dragons swooped down on the Unkerlanters. Behemoths died under the eggs they dropped and from the flame that burst from their jaws. The handful of behemoths that survived had had enough, and lumbered off toward woods beyond the village. The trees helped shelter them from dragon attacks.

  “Forward!” shouted the Algarvian officers, and forward went the Algarvian footsoldiers and the men of Plegmund’s Brigade.

  They overran the villageKingSwemmel ’s troopers had defended so fiercely. Some of the redheads had weapons Sidroc hadn’t seen before: small pottery jugs that they flung at their foes, and that burst like miniature eggs. “I want some of those. When can we get ‘em?” he askedSergeantWerferth.

  “When the Algarvians have enough to spare for their poor relations,” Werferth answered. Sidroc swore and kicked at the snow; the sergeant was bound to be right.

  Some soldiers pushed on down the snow-covered road toward Herborn. Others-the less lucky-were ordered into the woods to go after the last few Unkerlanter behemoths and the footsoldiers with them.

  Werferth had never been given to wild flights of optimism-what veteran sergeant was? But now he said, “Maybe we really will drive these sons of whores out of Herborn. Looks like we’ve got a lot of ‘em in a pocket here.”

  “I wouldn’t mind,” Sidroc said. “But what’ll the Algarvians do for a new King of Grelz? Who’d be daft enough to want the job after what happened to the old one?”

  Before the sergeant could answer, the Algarvian officers’ whistles started screeching again. But instead of yelling, “Forward!” as they had since the drive on Herborn began, the redheads shouted, “By the left flank! Crystallomancers say there’s an Unkerlanter attack coming in. We have to hold. We can’t let Swemmel’s men out of the box we’ve shoved ‘em into. By the left flank!”

  “By the left flank!” Werferth echoed loudly. Then he sighed. “Something’s gone wrong somewhere.”

  Sidroc only shrugged. “Not like it’s the first time.” He too turned to the left.

  CountSabrinohad fought as a footsoldier during the Six Years’ War, which ended almost thirty years before the Derlavaian War broke out. That put the colonel of dragonfliers well up into his fifties these days. He was more than twice the age of most of the men in the wing he commanded. When the wing worked hard, as it was working hard now, he felt the weight of every one of those years, too.

  I’m still strong, he thought as he spooned up boiled oats with onions an
d carrots and chunks of meat cooked into them. Like every Algarvian fighting in Unkerlant, he’d long since given up asking what the meat was. Better not to know, /amstill strong, curse it. In a standup fight, I can take most of my men.

  But that wasn’t what left him feeling like an antiquity in the museum back in Trapani. The youngsters he led could get by with irregular meals and not enough sleep-and much of that at odd hours-and stay fresh. He couldn’t, not any more. A hard stretch of flying left him feeling as if he were moving underwater. He had trouble trusting himself to make the right decisions when he was too worn to see straight.

  Captain Orosio, one of his squadron leaders-the only one who’d been with the wing when the war was new-gave him a sympathetic look when he complained. “My guess is, your wound’s still troubling you, sir,” Orosio said.

  “You’re a gentleman,” Sabrino said, and gave Orosio a seated bow. By his pedigree, Orosio wasn’t much of a gentleman, or he would have been a colonel with a wing of his own. Sabrino flexed his shoulder. Itdid still pain him; his wounded dragon had come down behind Unkerlanter lines, and he’d got blazed escaping Swemmel’s men. “Aye, you’re a gentleman, but it’s more than that. I can’t stand having my life turned upside down a new way every day as easily as I could when I was your age, and that’s all there is to it.”

  “That’s not so good, sir.” Orosio lacked much of the spirit of fun that most Algarvians had. Serious and sober as usual, he went on. “War does what it wants to do, not what you want it to do.”

  “Really?” Sabrino did his best to look astonished. “I never would have noticed.”

  He hoped Orosio would laugh. He feared Orosio would believe him. He never found out either way. Before the squadron leader could react, a crystal-lomancer stuck his head into the tent, nodded to Sabrino, and said, “Sir, Brigadier Blosio from army headquarters would speak to you.”

  “Would he?” Sabrino said. The crystallomancer nodded. With a sigh, Sabrino got to his feet. “The next interesting question is, would I speak to him?” He didn’t scandalize the young mage any further, but got up and followed him off to his tent.