Rulers of the Darkness Read online

  Then they were close enough to make targets even Werferth couldn’t criticize. Sidroc thrust his right forefinger out through a hole in his mitten; his stick required the touch of real flesh to blaze. He stuck his finger into the opening at the rear of the stick and blazed at an Unkerlanter a few hundred yards away. The man went down, but Sidroc had no way to be sure his beam had hit him. He blazed again, and then cursed, for he must have missed his new target.

  The Unkerlanters were blazing, too, as they had been for some little while. A beam smote the peasant hut only a foot or so above Sidroc’s head. The sharp, tangy stink of charred pine made his nostrils twitch. In drier weather, a beam like that might have fired the hut. Not so much risk of that now, nor of the fire’s spreading if it did take hold.

  “Mow’em down!” Werferth said cheerfully. Down the Unkerlanters went, too, in great swaths, almost as if they were being scythed at harvest time. Sidroc had long since seen Swemmel’s soldiers cared little about losses. If they got a victory, they didn’t count the cost.

  “They’re going to break in!” he said, an exclamation of dismay. They might pay a regiment’s worth of men to shift the company’s worth of Forthwegians in Hohenroda, but that wouldn’t make the detachment from Plegmund’s Brigade any less wrecked. It wouldn’t make Sidroc any less dead.

  “We have three lines of retreat prepared,” Werferth said. “We’ll use all of them.” He sounded calm, unconcerned, ready for anything that might happen, and ready to make the Unkerlanters pay the highest possible price for this miserable little place. In the abstract, Sidroc admired that. When fear rose up inside him like a black, choking cloud, he knew he couldn’t hope to match it.

  And then, instead of swarming in among the huts of Hohenroda and rooting out the defenders with beams and with knives and with sticks swung clubwise and with knees in the crotch and thumbs gouging out eyes, the Unkerlanters had to stop short of the village. More eggs fell among Swemmel’s men, these from the northeast. Heavy sticks seared down half a dozen men at a time. Algarvian behemoths, fighting as they had in the old days before sticks and eggs were so much of a much, got in among the Unkerlanters and trampled them and gored them with iron-encased horns.

  And the Unkerlanters broke. They hadn’t expected to run into behemoths around Hohenroda. When they fought according to their plans, they were the stubbornest soldiers in the world. When taken by surprise, they sometimes panicked.

  Sidroc was heartily glad this proved one of those times. “Run, you buggers, run!” he shouted, and blazed a fleeing Unkerlanter in the back. Relief made him sound giddy. He didn’t care. He felt giddy.

  “They’ve got snowshoes,” Werferth said. “The Algarvian behemoths, I mean. They didn’t last winter, you know. The Algarvians hadn’t figured they’d have to fight in the snow. It cost’em.”

  Werferth didn’t just like fighting, he liked going into detail about fighting. Sidroc didn’t think that way. He’d joined Plegmund’s Brigade mostly because he hadn’t been able to get along with anybody back in Gromheort. A lot of the men in the Brigade were similar misfits. Some of them were out-and-out robbers and bandits. He’d led a sheltered life till the war. Things were different now.

  Some of the behemoth crews waved to the defenders of Hohenroda, urging them out in pursuit of King Swemmel’s men. Sidroc had no intention of pursuing anybody unless his own officers gave the order. He muttered under his breath when shouts rang out from inside the village: “Forward! South!”

  Those shouts were in Algarvian. Algarvian officers commanded Plegmund’s Brigade, and all orders came in their tongue. In a way, that made sense: the Brigade had to fight alongside Algarvian units and work smoothly with them. In another way, though, it was a reminder of who were the puppets and who the puppeteers.

  “Let’s go,” Werferth said. He would never be anything more than a sergeant. Of course, had Forthweg’s independent army survived, he would never have been anything more than a sergeant, either, for he had not a drop of noble blood.

  Sidroc winced and cursed as the icy wind tore at him when he left the shelter of the peasant’s hut. But he and his comrades were grinning at one another as they formed up and advanced toward the behemoths and toward the tumbled Unkerlanter corpses in the snow.

  The Algarvian behemoth crews weren’t grinning. “Who are these whoresons?” one of them shouted to a recognizably Algarvian lieutenant among the Forthwegians. “They look like a pack of Unkerlanters.”

  “We’re from Plegmund’s Brigade,” the lieutenant answered. Sidroc followed Algarvian fairly well. He’d learned some in school, mostly beaten in with a switch, and more since joining the Brigade, which had ways of training harsher yet.

  “Plegmund’s Brigade!” the redhead on the behemoth burst out. “Plegmund’s bloody Brigade? Powers above, we thought we were rescuing real Algarvians.”

  “Love you too, prickface.” That was a trooper named Ceorl, like Sidroc in the squad Werferth led. He always had been and always would be more a ruffian than a soldier. Here, though, Sidroc completely agreed with him.

  Major Spinello eyed the approaching Algarvian physician with all the warmth of a crippled elk eyeing a wolf. The physician either didn’t notice or was used to such glances from recuperating soldiers. “Good morning,” he said cheerfully. “How are we today?”

  “I haven’t the faintest idea about you, good my sir,” Spinello replied—like a lot of Algarvians, he was given to extravagant flights of verbiage. “As for myself, I’ve never been better in all my born days. When do you propose to turn me loose so I can get back into the fight against the cursed Unkerlanters?”

  He’d been saying the same thing for weeks. At first, the healing mages had ignored him. Then he’d been turned over to mere physicians … who’d also ignored him. This one said, “Well, we shall see what we shall see.” He pressed a hearing tube against the right side of Spinello’s chest. “If you’d be so kind as to cough for me … ?”

  After taking a deep breath, Spinello coughed. He also had the Algarvian fondness for overacting; with the energy he put into his coughs, he might have been at death’s door from consumption. “There, you quack,” he said when he let the racking spasm end. “Does that satisfy you?”

  Perhaps fortunately for him, the physician was harder to offend than most of his countrymen. Instead of getting angry—or instead of continuing the conversation through seconds, as some might have done—the fellow just asked, “Did that hurt?”

  “No. Not a bit.” Spinello lied without hesitation. He’d taken a sniper’s beam in the chest—powers above, a sniper’s beam right through the chest—down in Sulingen. He had the feeling he’d hurt for years to come, if not for the rest of his life. That being so, he could—he had to—deal with the pain.

  “I was listening to you,” the physician said. “So that you know, I don’t believe you, not a word of it.”

  “So that you know, sirrah, I don’t care what you believe.” Spinello hopped down from the infirmary bed on which he’d been sitting and glared at the physician. He had to look up his nose, not down it, for the doctor overtopped him by several inches: he was a bantam rooster of a man, but strong for his size and very quick. He also had a powerful will; under his gaze, the physician gave back a pace before checking himself. Voice soft and menacing, Spinello demanded, “Will you write me out the certificate that warrants me fit to return to duty?”

  To his surprise, the physician said, “Aye.” He reached into the folder he’d set on the bed and pulled out a printed form. “In fact, I have filled it out, all but the signature.” He plucked a pen and a sealed bottle of ink from the breast pocket of his tunic, inked the pen, and scrawled something that might have been his name or might equally have been an obscenity in demotic Gyongyosian. Then he handed Spinello the completed form. “This will permit you to return to duty, Major. It doesn’t warrant you as fit, because you aren’t fit. But the kingdom needs you, and you’re unlikely to fall over dead at the first harsh breeze. Powers a
bove keep you safe.” He bowed.

  And Spinello bowed in return, more deeply than the physician had. That was an extraordinary courtesy; as a count, he surely outranked the other man, who was bound to be only a commoner. But the physician had given him what he wanted most in all the world. He bowed again. “I am in your debt, sir.”

  With a sigh, the physician said, “Why a man should be so eager to rush headlong into danger has always been beyond me.”

  “You said it yourself: Algarve needs me,” Spinello replied. “Now tell me at once: is it true the last of our brave lads have had to yield themselves in Sulingen?”

  “It’s true,” the physician said grimly. “The crystallomancers can’t reach anyone there, and the Unkerlanters are shouting themselves hoarse at the victory. Not a word about the price we made them pay.”

  Spinello cursed. The Algarvians had fought their way into Sulingen the summer before—fought their way into it and never fought their way out again. South beyond the Wolter River lay the Mamming Hills, full of the cinnabar that made dragonfire burn so hot and fierce. Take Sulingen, storm over the Wolter, seize the mines in the hills—it had all seemed so straightforward.

  It would have been, too, had the Unkerlanters not fought like demons for every street, for every manufactory, for every floor of every block of flats. And now, even though Swemmel’s men had, as the physician said, surely paid a great price, an Algarvian army was gone, gone as if it had never been.

  “I hope they send me west again in a tearing hurry,” Spinello said, and the physician rolled his eyes. Spinello pointed to the closet at the far end of the room. “I’m sick of these cursed hospital whites. Is my uniform in there?”

  “If you mean the one in which you came here, Major, no,” the physician replied. “That one, as I hope you will understand, is somewhat the worse for wear. But a major’s uniform does await you, aye. One moment.” He went over to the closet, set a hand on the latch, and murmured softly. “There. Now it will open to your touch. We couldn’t very well have had you escaping before you were even close to healed.”

  “I suppose not,” Spinello admitted. They’d known him, all right. He walked over to the closet and tried the latch. It did open. It hadn’t before; he’d tried a good many times. With a squeak of dry hinges, the door opened, too. There on hooks hung a tunic and kilt of severe military cut. The tunic, he saw to his pride, had on it a wound ribbon. He was entitled to that ribbon, and he would wear it. He got out of the baggy infirmary clothes and put on the uniform. It was baggy, too, baggy enough to make him angry. “Couldn’t they have found a tailor who wasn’t drunk?” he snapped.

  “It is cut to your measure, Major,” the physician answered. “Your former measure, I should say. You’ve lost a good deal of flesh since you were wounded.”

  “This much?” Spinello didn’t want to believe it. But he couldn’t very well call the physician a liar, either.

  Also hanging in the closet was a broad-brimmed hat with a bright feather from some bird from tropical Siaulia sticking up from the leather hatband. Spinello clapped it on. His head hadn’t shrunk, anyhow. That was a relief.

  The physician said, “I have a mirror in my belt pouch, if you’d like to see yourself. We don’t keep many in infirmaries. They might dismay patients like you, and they might do worse than dismay others, the ones unlucky enough to receive head wounds.”

  “Ah.” Contemplating that was enough to make Spinello decide he hadn’t come out so bad after all. In unwontedly quiet tones, he said, “Aye, sir, if you’d be so kind.”

  “Of course, Major.” The physician took it out and held it up.

  Spinello whistled softly. He had lost flesh; his cheekbones were promontories just under the skin, and the line of his jaw sharper than it had been since he left his teens—an era more than a dozen years behind him now. But his green eyes still gleamed, and the attendants who’d trimmed his coppery mustache and little chin beard and side whiskers had done a respectable job. He tilted the hat to a jauntier angle and said, “How ever will the girls keep their legs closed when they see me walking down the street?”

  With a snort, the doctor put the mirror away. “You’re well enough, all right,” he said. “Go back to the west and terrorize the Unkerlanter women.”

  “Oh, my dear fellow!” Spinello rolled his eyes. “A homelier lot you’d never want to see. Built like bricks, almost all of them. I had better luck when I was on occupation duty in Forthweg. This little blond Kaunian, couldn’t have been above seventeen”—his hands shaped an hourglass in the air—“and she’d do anything I wanted, and I do mean anything.”

  “How many times have you told me about her since you’ve been in my care?” the physician asked. “Her name was Vanai, and she lived in Oyngestun, and—”

  “And every word of it true, too,” Spinello said indignantly. He took a cloak from the closet and threw it on, then dealt with shoes and stockings. He was panting by the time he finished dressing; he’d spent too long flat on his back. But he refused to admit how worn he was, even to himself. “Now, then—what formalities must I go through to escape your lair here?”

  He presented the certificate of discharge to the floor nurse. After she signed it, he presented it to the nursing station downstairs. After someone there signed it, Spinello presented it to the soldier at the doorway. The man had won the soft post with a right tunic sleeve pinned up short. He pointed along the street and said, “The reassignment depot is three blocks that way, sir. Can you walk it?”

  “Why? Is this a test?” Spinello asked. Rather to his surprise, the one-armed soldier nodded. He realized it made a certain amount of sense: you might browbeat a doctor into giving you a certificate, but no one who couldn’t walk three blocks had any business going off to the front. The soldier signed the certificate quite legibly. Spinello asked him, “Were you lefthanded … before?”

  “No, sir,” the fellow answered. “I got this in Forthweg, early on. I’ve had two and a half years to learn how to do things over again.”

  With a nod, Spinello left the infirmary for the first time since being brought there and headed in the direction the disabled soldier had given him. Before the war, Trapani had been a gay, lively city, as befit the capital of a great kingdom. The gray gloom on the streets now had only a little to do with the overcast sky and the nasty, cold mist in the air: it was a thing of the spirit, not of the weather.

  People hurried along about their business without the strut and swagger that were as much a part of Algarvian life as wine. Women mostly looked mousy, which wasn’t easy for Spinello’s redheaded compatriots. The only men in the streets who weren’t in uniform were old enough to be veterans of the Six Years’ War a generation before or else creaking ancients even older than that.

  And everyone, men and women alike, looked grim. The news sheets the vendors sold were bordered in black. Sulingen had fallen, all right. It had been plain for a long time that the town would fall to the Unkerlanters, but no one here seemed to have wanted to believe it no matter how plain it was. That made the blow even harder now that it struck home.

  Big signs outside the entrance named the reassignment depot. Spinello bounded up the marble steps, threw the doors wide, and shouted, “I’m fit for duty again! The war is won!”

  Some of the soldiers in there laughed. Some of them snorted. Some just rolled their eyes. “No matter who you are, sir, and no matter how great you are, you still have to queue up,” a sergeant said. Spinello did, though he hated lines.

  When he presented the multiply signed certificate of discharge to another sergeant, that worthy shuffled through files. At last, he said, “I have a regiment for you, Major, if you care to take it.”

  That was a formality. Spinello drew himself up to stiff attention. “Aye!” he exclaimed. The catch in his breath was partly from his healing, partly excitement.

  The sergeant handed him his orders, as well as a list of ley-line caravans that would take him to the men who held the line somewhere in nor
thern Unkerlant. They were waiting for him with bated breath. They just didn’t know it yet. “If you hurry, sir, there’s a caravan leaving from the main depot for Eoforwic in half an hour,” the sergeant said helpfully. “That’ll get you halfway there.”

  Spinello dashed out of the reassignment depot and screamed for a cab. He made the ley-line caravan he needed. As he glided southwest out of Trapani, he wondered why he was in such a hurry to go off and perhaps get himself killed. He had no answer, any more than the physician had. But he was.

  Marshal Rathar wished with all his heart that he could have stayed down in southern Unkerlant and finished smashing the Algarvian invaders there. They were like serpents—you could step on them three days after you thought they were dead, and they’d rear up and bite you in the leg. Rathar sighed. He supposed General Vatran could handle things till he got back. King Swemmel had ordered him to Cottbus, and when King Swemmel ordered, every Unkerlanter obeyed.

  As it was, Rathar wouldn’t reach Cottbus as fast as Swemmel hoped and expected. Now that the Algarvians had been crushed in Sulingen and driven back from it, more direct ley-line routes between the south and the capital were in Unkerlanter hands once more. The trouble was, too many of them weren’t yet usable. Retreating Algarvian mages had done their best to sabotage them. Retreating Algarvian engineers, relentless pragmatists, had buried eggs along the ley lines that traveled them after the Algarvian mages’ efforts were overcome.

  And so, Rathar had to travel almost as far out of a straight line to get from the vicinity of Sulingen to Cottbus as he had when coming south from Cottbus to Sulingen when things looked blackest the summer before. The steersman for the caravan kept sending flunkies back to Rathar with apologies for every zigzag. The marshal’s displeasure carried weight. After Swemmel—but a long, long way after Swemmel (Rathar was convinced only he knew how far)—he was the most powerful man in Unkerlant.