Through the Darkness Read online

  “Ah,” the Algarvian officers said, almost in one breath. They could accept a twist of fate as an explanation, where mere animal attraction would have offended them. Krasta had to work not to laugh in their faces. As she’d known more about Valnu than Lurcanio did, so she also knew more about him than did these fellows.

  He took her by the arm. “Let’s get something to drink, and you can tell me how you’ve been since.” The pretty Algarvian officers rolled their eyes; again, Krasta had to hold in a laugh.

  As Valnu steered her toward the bar, she stroked his cheek and archly murmured, “Are you going to sneak me out of here a minute before this place goes up in flames, too?”

  He stopped, which rather surprised her. “I hadn’t planned on it, no,” he replied in unwontedly serious tones. Then he grinned and added, “If that happens tonight, it’ll catch both of us by surprise—and a lot of other people, too.” He waved to one of the tapmen. “Ale for me.”

  “Aye, sir—ale,” the fellow said. “And for you, milady?”

  “Brandy with wormwood,” Krasta told him. After a couple of shots of that, she would have an excuse for any sort of outrageous behavior. She’d been pretty outrageous the last time she drank it with Valnu, back in the days when Valmiera was still a kingdom in its own right and not an Algarvian appanage.

  Having at last been eased from the receiving line, King Gainibu had made a beeline for the bar. He waved to the man behind it. “The same for me as the lady here is having,” he said. Only the slow precision of his diction marked how much he’d already poured down. As the bartender handed him the glass of blue-green spirits, he remarked, “Soon I will find a chair and go to sleep. Then the Algarvians will be happy, and so will I.”

  Valnu steered Krasta away from the sodden king, as he’d steered her away from the Algarvian officers. “That’s not the way a sovereign should talk,” he said. “That’s not the way a sovereign should have to talk.”

  “No, I don’t think so, either,” Krasta said. “He’s a laughingstock for the redheads. The worst part is, he knows it.” Sensitive to slights herself—or at least to being on the receiving end of them—she had some notion of how poor drunken Gainibu had to feel.

  “Every now and then, my dear, you do succeed in surprising me,” Valnu said. “This makes twice in one night.”

  “Really?” Krasta laughed; sure enough, the spiked brandy was mounting straight to her head. “Lurcanio said the same thing, though I think I only surprised him once.”

  “Well, he is bound to be harder to surprise than I am,” Valnu said. “Practically everything surprises me, including my being here at this doleful gathering. It’s like the bloodied ghost of what one of these affairs should be.”

  Krasta thought about that. She wasn’t used to figures of speech—those that hadn’t ossified into cliches, at any rate—but she had no trouble figuring out what this one meant. “Hard times,” she agreed, nodding. “But what can we do? The Algarvians are stronger than we are. The Algarvians, as far as I can see, are stronger than everybody else is.”

  “So they want you to think,” Valnu said. “So they want everybody to think. It’s part of their magic: thinking them stronger than everybody else helps make them stronger than everybody else. But there are some faces I’ve seen before in these crows that aren’t here tonight.”

  “So?” Krasta said vaguely. Sure enough, the brandy was making her thoughts spin. Before long, she might be looking for a chair just like her sovereign.

  Valnu bowed himself almost double. “I’m so relieved to discover you don’t know everything there is to know after all. Where, I ask you, are the Algarvian officers who were here but are no more? Why, gone to Unkerlant, of course. King Swemmel, you see, isn’t yet convinced the Algarvians are stronger than everybody else.”

  “Captain Mosco!” Krasta exclaimed. He wasn’t here because he’d had to go there. That seemed sensible enough. She wished Valnu wouldn’t try to make something important and meaningful out of it. She wasn’t up to dealing with complications right now.

  “Who is Captain Mosco?” Valnu asked. Krasta stared owlishly at him; how could he not know?

  “Captain Mosco was my aide, a very good fellow,” Colonel Lurcanio said in his precise, almost unaccented Valmieran. “He has gone to fight in the west; powers above grant that he stay safe.”

  “I didn’t notice you come up,” Krasta told Lurcanio. She hadn’t noticed a good many things since drinking the laced brandy. One of the things she hadn’t noticed was how many things she hadn’t noticed.

  Lurcanio said, “Seeing a friend is all very well, milady, but I did want to remind you that you came here with me and will also be going home with me.”

  Valnu shrieked laughter and patted Lurcanio on the arm. “Why, my dear Colonel, I do believe you’re jealous.”

  Lurcanio’s answering laugh was smug, the laugh of a man certain he had nothing to fear. Krasta’s laugh was wild and dangerous—and so drunken that Lurcanio didn’t let it worry him in the least. If Valnu’s laugh was relieved, neither Krasta nor Lurcanio noticed.

  “Did you have a good time?” Lurcanio asked as they went home through the dark, quiet streets of Priekule later that evening.

  “The poor king,” Krasta answered. She would have a dreadful headache in the morning. King Gainibu, though, would surely have a worse one. Krasta slumped over against Lurcanio and fell asleep.

  How long would the good weather last? On the austral continent, people started asking that not long after the summer solstice. Before long, the birds would start flying north. Fernao wished he could fly north, too, but the war against Yanina and Algarve pinned him to the land of the Ice People.

  “Just think,” he said to Affonso. “If everything had gone as we’d hoped it would—the way everybody back in Setubal said it would—we could be enjoying the fleshpots of Heshbon right now.”

  The second-rank mage raised a gingery eyebrow. “I thought you told me Heshbon was a miserable hole in the ground.”

  “Oh, it is,” Fernao assured him. “It is. But what, I pray you, do you think you’re sitting in now?”

  Affonso laughed, though it wasn’t really funny. Lagoan attacks and Algarvian counterattacks had chewed up a good deal of the coastal country in the land of the Ice People. Fernao and Affonso had both taken refuge in the crater a bursting egg from some earlier fight had left in the ground. At the bottom of it were a little grass, a little water, and much more muddy ice.

  “Next to a literal hole in the ground,” Fernao said in meditative tones, “a metaphorical hole in the ground doesn’t look so bad any more. Or will you tell me I’m wrong?”

  Affonso shook his head. “I wouldn’t dream of it. How could I? You outrank me. But I will say that, if we’d taken Heshbon, it probably would have got wrecked in the fighting.”

  “That depends,” Fernao said. “If we’d taken it from the Yaninans, they would have handed it over and been glad to do it. With the Algarvians, though, you’re right. Those whoresons would have fought us block by block—not that Heshbon has a whole lot of blocks—and there wouldn’t have been one brick left on top of another by the time the battle was through.”

  Now Affonso nodded, though gloomily. “Who would have thought a pack of swaggering fops could make such good soldiers?”

  “They did in the Six Years’ War, too,” Fernao said. “They are brave; no one’s ever said otherwise. But they don’t know when to stop. They never know when to stop. That’s why we have to beat them: to make sure they don’t go on doing just as they please all over the world, I mean.”

  “I understood you,” his colleague said. “Whenever they slaughter another batch of Kaunians, the whole world seems to tremble, for those who can feel it. And they’ve got the Unkerlanters imitating them, too. I think I’ll have nightmares for the rest of my life.”

  “War was a filthy business before,” Fernao said. “It’s filthier now, and we’ve got Mezentio’s men to blame for it.” Many of his worst nightmar
es centered on camels and all the ways it could be cooked. He kept dreaming he would be asked to judge which was worst, and to sample them all till he made a choice. He had some camel baked in clay in his pack, and thought it the most dreadful thing in the world . . . save only hunger.

  Whatever Affonso might have said about war or about camel meat or about anything else, he didn’t, for a lookout shouted one of the words the Lagoans in the austral continent least wanted to hear: “Dragons!”

  Fernao looked to the west. The number of dragons winging toward the Lagoan encampment made him curse. “The whoresons have flown more of the beasts across the Narrow Sea,” he said in dismay. He looked at the hole in which he squatted, wishing it were deeper, wishing it had a good strong roof, wishing most of all that the Algarvians would turn around and fly back toward Heshbon.

  As usual, he got none of his wishes. Several Lagoan and Kuusaman dragons flew above the Lagoan army. With a whistling thunder of wings—and with their usual hoarse, angry shrieks—more rose from the dragon farm near the camp to challenge the beasts painted in red, green, and white.

  Watching, Affonso said, “Makes you feel helpless, doesn’t it?”

  “What, because I can’t do anything about the dragons?” Fernao asked, and Affonso nodded. Fernao considered, then shrugged. “Less than I thought it would, as a matter of fact. There are too many things in this campaign I can’t do anything about to get upset over any one in particular. I’ll just watch the sport and hope I don’t get killed.” He leaned back and did just that.

  “Algarvians are trying something new, looks like,” Affonso said.

  “Aye,” Fernao answered absently. The lead dragons flying out of the west engaged the Lagoan and Kuusaman defenders with the usual ferocity Mezentio’s men brought to the attack. Dragons wheeled and whirled and twisted and snapped and flamed all over the sky above the Lagoan army. Whenever the Lagoans’ heavy sticks on the ground found targets, they blazed at the Algarvian dragons. When one of those beasts tumbled toward the earth, Fernao couldn’t tell whether a stick or a dragon on his side had laid it low.

  But Mezentio’s men had more dragons than they’d been able to bring to the fight before. Some of them kept the Lagoan and Kuusaman dragons busy. The rest started dropping eggs on the Lagoan army. Only a few dragons from his side broke free to attack the ones carrying eggs.

  Once the eggs started falling, Fernao stopped watching the action overhead. He did what everyone else on the ground was doing: he buried his face in the dirt and tried to mold himself to the side of the hole in which he lay. Affonso jumped into one nearby. Such precautions had kept them alive and no worse than scratched till now. That they should do so one more time didn’t strike Fernao as unreasonable.

  Then a line of eggs, probably all dropped by the same dragon, walked straight toward the crater in which he huddled. Each burst was louder than the one before; each made the ground shake worse. When one hit quite close to that crater, Fernao screamed. He couldn’t help himself. He was still screaming when the next egg burst. The world around him went blinding white, then black.

  And when he woke, he screamed again. Every inch of him cried out in agony. The worst of it was concentrated in a couple of places: his right leg, his left arm.

  “Take it easy, friend,” somebody told him—far and away the most useless advice he’d ever heard. He would have said so, but he needed all his breath for screaming. His mouth tasted of mud and, increasingly, of blood.

  He hadn’t thought he could shriek louder than he was shrieking, but discovered he was wrong when they went about setting his leg and bandaging some of his other wounds. “No!” he howled, but they wouldn’t listen. He choked out two coherent sentences: “Let me die! Kill me!”

  They wouldn’t listen to that, either. They talked above him as if he weren’t there. “He’s not going to make it,” one of them said, “not with the kind of healing we can give him in the field.”

  “He’s a first-rank mage,” another one answered. “The kingdom can’t afford to lose him.” They didn’t ask Fernao’s opinion. He’d given it, and they’d ignored it.

  “How are we supposed to get him back to Lagoas, though?” the first voice said. “A dragon can’t fly that far, not without somewhere to rest on the way.”

  “We’ve got ships down south of Sibiu,” the second voice replied. “They were going to fly more dragons here. I wish they’d done it sooner, but we can send him that way, and then east from there.”

  “I wouldn’t bet on him to last long enough to get slung under a dragon,” the first voice said. Fernao devoutly hoped he wouldn’t last that long.

  But the second voice said, “Get a mage and slow him down. It’s the only chance he’s got.” They both went away after that.

  The next voice Fernao heard was Affonso’s. “I’ll do what I can,” he was saying to somebody off to the side. “Just fool luck he isn’t doing the same for me. The burst picked him up and flung him into a rock. . . . Fernao! Can you hear me?”

  “Aye,” Fernao answered. The next scream quivered in his throat, as eager to be loose as a racing unicorn.

  “I’m going to slow you down,” Affonso said. “I have to hope the spell will last long enough to get you to a ship where the dragon can rest. They’ll have a mage there to renew it, so just give yourself to the magic. Let it take you, let it sweep you away. . . .” Fernao wished it would sweep him into oblivion. After what seemed far too long, it did.

  But when he woke, he was in just as much torment as he had been before Affonso began the spell. For a moment, he forgot the magic altogether, lost as he was in his own pain. Then he realized that, added to all his other torments, he was swaying suspended in space. Instead of Affonso, he saw a dragon’s scaly belly above him. When he turned his head—actually, when it flopped to one side—he got a view of iron-gray ocean far below.

  He never knew how long the dragon kept flying. Long enough for him to wish several times he were dead—he knew that. Thanks to, or rather on account of, Affonso’s spell, no time seemed to have passed for him between the magic and his awakening. He hadn’t healed a bit in the interim.

  At last, after what seemed like a little longer than forever, the dragon glided down to a ship sliding along a ley line. As dragons had a way of doing, it landed clumsily. The pallet on which he’d been lashed thudded down onto the deck. The jolt made him shriek and faint. Unfortunately—or so he thought of it—he woke up again.

  When he did, a man he’d never seen before was staring down at him. “I’ll soon have you out again,” the stranger promised. “I hope my spell will hold long enough to get you back to Lagoas. They’ll put you together again. Powers above willing, you’ll be good as new again in a while.”

  Fernao couldn’t imagine being as good as new again. He had trouble even imagining being conscious and out of pain. “Hurts,” he groaned.

  “Oh, I bet it does,” the ship’s mage said. “Now, just give yourself to the magic. Let it take you, let it sweep you away. . . .”

  Again, oblivion descended on Fernao. Again, it swept over him so abruptly, he had no idea it was there. Again, he woke to agony—but agony of a different sort, for now he found himself on a soft bed with a cast on his leg, another on his arm, and a bandage round his battered ribs. When he whimpered, a nurse said, “Here. Drink this.”

  Drink it he did, hoping it was poison. It wasn’t; it tasted overwhelmingly of poppy seeds. It was so concentrated, he wondered if he could keep it down. Somehow, he did. After a while, the pain receded. No, he thought dreamily. It’s still there, but I’ve floated away from it. With the drug in him, it didn’t seem to matter so much. Nothing seemed to matter very much.

  “Where am I?” he asked. He didn’t particularly care about the answer, either, but asking about anything but the pain that had crushed him seemed a delightful novelty.

  “Setubal,” the nurse told him.

  “Ah,” Fernao said. “With any luck at all, I’ll never leave again.” Then the po
ppy juice made him sleep, a natural sleep different from the time-frozen comas the emergency sorcery had brought on. Little by little, his body began to repair itself.

  King Swemmel’s long, pale face stared out of the crystal, straight at Marshal Rathar. Everywhere in the broad kingdom of Unkerlant—everywhere the Algarvians hadn’t overrun, at any rate—peasants and soldiers and townsfolk who could get to a crystal were listening to the king.

  “Durrwangen has fallen,” Swemmel said without preamble. “Unkerlant is in danger. We tell you that some of the soldiers who were posted there ran away instead of doing all they could against the invaders who want to enslave us. They have been punished as they deserve for their cowardice, and shall never have the chance to betray the kingdom again.”

  General Vatran, who shared an abandoned peasant hut with Rathar, grimaced. “He executed more men than he needed to,” Vatran said. “A lot more men than he needed to.”

  Rathar agreed with him, but waved him to silence all the same. He counted himself lucky not to be among the executed, and counted Vatran even luckier. And he wanted to hear what Swemmel had to say.

  “Not one step back!” the king shouted, his tiny image clenching a tiny fist. “Not one step back, we say again. We shall never yield another inch of our sacred soil to the Algarvian savages. If they advance, they shall advance only over the bodies of our warriors, warriors who will never again turn their backs to the barbarous foe. Attack, we say! Attack and triumph!”

  King Swemmel’s image vanished from the crystal, which flashed and went dark. With another grimace, Vatran said, “I wish it were as easy as he makes it sound.”

  “So does the whole kingdom,” Rathar answered. “But he’s right about one thing: if we don’t fight the Algarvians, we won’t drive them away. We haven’t got much room for retreat, not any more.”

  “I don’t care what Swemmel says,” Vatran declared, a reckless statement from any Unkerlanter. “I don’t see how we’re going to stop the redheads this side of Sulingen. Do you, lord Marshal?” He made Rathar’s title half a challenge, half a reproach.