Through the Darkness Read online

  Garivald finished his ale. Now came the tricky part: sliding out of Pirmasens under the noses of those Algarvian soldiers, and under Rual’s, too. He got to his feet. “Good to find a friendly face,” he said. “Aren’t many of ’em left these days.”

  “Where are you heading?” Rual asked.

  “Somewhere that got hurt worse than you seem to,” Garivald answered. “Maybe somewhere I can find a farm nobody’s working and get things going again. That’d keep me too busy to worry about anything else for a while, I expect.”

  “And I expect you’re right,” Rual said. “Good luck to you.”

  “Thanks.” Garivald took a couple of steps toward the doorway. One of the redheads sitting in the tavern spoke to him in Algarvian. He froze in alarm entirely unfeigned. Turning to Rual, he asked, “What did that mean? I don’t know any of their language.”

  “He told you to count yourself lucky you’re still breathing,” Rual said.

  “Oh, I do,” Garivald answered, feeling the sweat start out under his arms once more. “Every day, I do.” He stood there for a moment, wondering whether the Algarvians were going to try to wring him dry. But the fellow who’d spoken just nodded and waved him away. Trying not to let out a sigh of relief, he went out into the hot sunshine.

  He didn’t just turn around and go back the way he’d come. That would have roused suspicions. Instead, he kept walking east, toward Herborn. Eventually, when he judged it safe, he’d make a wide circle around Pirmasens and double back toward the forests where Munderic, not false King Raniero, was lord and master. For now, he felt like a traveling mountebank who’d stuck his head into a dragon’s mouth and pulled it back unscathed.

  Dragons were stupid beasts, though. Every once in a while, no matter how you trained them, they would bite down.

  Dragons flew south overhead: hundreds of them, maybe even thousands, some high, some low. All were painted in one variant or another of Algarve’s green, red, and white. To Sergeant Leudast’s horrified gaze, they seemed to cover the whole sky.

  “And not a single one of ours to try to flame them down,” he said bitterly.

  “They’ll have a fight on their hands sooner or later,” Captain Hawart said. “They’d better, anyhow, or the game is as good as over.”

  Leudast wondered if the game was as good as over. He’d wondered that before, back last summer when the Algarvians smashed and encircled Unkerlanter armies again and again, then toward the end of fall when Mezentio’s mages first unleashed their slaughter-filled sorceries. When winter came, Unkerlant fought back hard. But now it was summer again, and . . . “Cursed redheads have got more lives than a cat,” he grumbled.

  “They’re nasty buggers, no two ways about it,” Hawart agreed. Like every man in his regiment, he looked worn and battered.

  Still another wave of Algarvian dragons passed overhead. “At least they’re not dropping their eggs on us,” Leudast said. “Where do you suppose the whoresons are headed?” Coming out of a peasant village in northern Unkerlant, he knew little about the geography of the south—and, till the fighting started, had cared less.

  “Sulingen.” Captain Hawart spoke with great authority. “Has to be Sulingen on the Wolter. That’s the last city in front of the Mamming Hills, the last city in front of the cinnabar mines, the last place where we can keep them from breaking through.”

  “Sulingen.” Leudast nodded. “Aye, I’ve heard the name. But after a pounding like that, there won’t be one stone in the town left standing on another.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” the regimental commander said, sticking a long stalk of grass in the corner of his mouth so he looked like a peasant from a village in the back of beyond rather than the educated man he was. “Sulingen’s a good-size place, and towns take a deal of knocking down before there’s nothing left of them. Powers above know we’ve seen that.”

  “Well, I won’t say you’re wrong, sir,” Leudast admitted. “Rubble’s as good to fight from as buildings are, too, maybe even better. But still . . .” He didn’t go on. He and Hawart had been through a lot together, but not so much that he cared to tag himself with the label of defeatist.

  Hawart understood where his ley line of thought was going. “But still,” he echoed. “You don’t want them to drive you back to your last ditch, because you don’t have anywhere to go if they push you out of it.” The stalk of grass bobbed up and down as he spoke. He tried to sound reassuring: “They haven’t even driven us back into it yet.”

  “No, sir.” Leudast wasn’t about to argue, but he still wanted to say what was in his mind: “You can see it from here, though.”

  Off to the east, Leudast could also see columns of smoke marking the latest Algarvian thrust into Unkerlant. He turned his head and looked west. No new smoke there. Leudast let out a small sigh of relief. The regiment wasn’t about to be cut off and surrounded any time soon, anyhow.

  A starling hopped through the grass, chirping metallically. It pecked at a worm or a grub, then flew away when Leudast shook his fist at it. “Those things are cursed nuisances,” he said. “They’ll eat the fruit right off a tree and the grain right out of the fields.”

  “They might as well be Algarvians,” Hawart said. Leudast laughed, though it was at best a bitter joke.

  A runner trotted up, shouting for an officer. When Hawart admitted he was one, the other Unkerlanter said, “Sir, you’re ordered east with as many men as you command, to try and hold back the Algarvians.”

  Captain Hawart sighed. Leudast knew how he felt. Simply lying in the grass for a little while, without eggs bursting close by or beams sizzling past overhead, was sweet. It couldn’t last; Leudast knew that all too well. But he wished it would have lasted a little longer.

  “Aye, we’ll come, of course,” Hawart said, and started shouting for his men to get to their feet and get moving. The runner saluted and hurried off, likely to haul some more weary footsoldiers into the fight. Hawart sighed again. “We’ll see if we go out again once we’re done, too.”

  “Won’t have so many dragons dropping eggs on us, anyhow,” Leudast said as he heaved himself upright. “They’re all off pounding that Sulingen place.”

  “Well, so they are,” Hawart said. “Maybe we’ll be able to catch Mezentio’s men in flank, too. From where the smoke’s rising, their spearpoint’s gone past us. With a little luck, we’ll chop it off.”

  “Here’s hoping.” Leudast wasn’t sure he believed the Unkerlanters could do that; they’d had as little luck down here in the south this fighting season as they’d had all along the front the summer before. But it was worth trying.

  He wondered how many miles he’d marched since the war against Algarve started. Hundreds, he knew—most of them heading west. He was moving east now, toward Algarve. Back during the winter, that had mattered a great deal. Now . . . He supposed it still did, but what mattered even more was that he could be blazed just as dead heading this way as the other.

  “Open order!” he called to the men he led. “Stay spread out. You don’t want them to be able to get too many of you all at once.”

  The veterans in his company already knew that, and were doing it. But he didn’t have a lot of veterans left, and every fight claimed more. Most of his men were not long off farms or city streets. They were brave enough, but a lot of them would get killed or maimed before they figured out what they should be doing. Only luck had kept Leudast from going that way, and he knew it.

  A good-size counterattack against the western flank of the Algarvian drive looked to be building. Behemoths trotted forward along with Unkerlanter footsoldiers. More behemoths hauled egg-tossers too heavy to fit on their backs. Teams of horses and mules urged on by sweating, cursing teamsters and hostlers hauled even more.

  Leudast looked up into the sky, hoping to spot dragons painted in rock-gray. When he didn’t, he grunted and kept marching. He knew he couldn’t have everything. The support the footsoldiers were getting on the ground was already more than he’d expected.


  Eggs started bursting in front of the regiment sooner than he’d hoped, though not really sooner than he’d thought they would. As usual, the Algarvians were alert. They could be beaten, but seldom surprised. Some soldier on the flank with a crystal had seen something he didn’t like, talked to the redheads’ egg-tossers, and then, no doubt, ducked back down into the tall grass.

  “Come on,” Leudast said. “They’re trying to scare us off. Are we going to let them?” He was scared every time he went into a fight. He hoped his men didn’t know it. He knew too well he did.

  As he’d hoped, Mezentio’s soldiers didn’t have that many egg-tossers here on their flank. Most of them would be down at the head of the attack, at what Captain Hawart called the spearpoint. Leudast would have put them there, too, if he’d wanted to break through deeper into Unkerlant. But now he and his comrades were trying to break through, and he thought they might do it.

  Then, just after he’d tramped through the fields around a ruined, abandoned peasant village, somebody blazed at him. The beam missed, but charred a line through the rye that struggled against encroaching weeds. Leudast threw himself down on his belly. The smell of damp dirt in his nostrils brought back his own days in a peasant village.

  “Advance by squads!” he shouted to his men. Again, the veterans already knew what to do. He heard them shouting instructions to the new men. Would the raw recruits understand? They’d better, Leudast thought, if they want to have the chance to get any more lessons. Soldiers said you’d last a while if you lived through your first fight. If you didn’t, you surely wouldn’t.

  Up he came, running heavily toward a boulder a hundred feet ahead. He dove behind it as if one step ahead of the inspectors, lay panting for a moment, then peered around the chunk of granite. The enemy was blazing from an apple orchard that, like the fields around the abandoned village, had seen better years. Leudast spotted a man in there who wasn’t wearing Unkerlanter rock-gray. He brought his stick to his shoulder and thrust his forefinger into the beaming hole. The foeman toppled. Leudast let out a growl of triumph.

  Two more rushes brought him into the grove. As he crouched behind a tree trunk, he made sure the knife on his belt was loose in its sheath. He knew from bitter experience that Algarvians didn’t go backwards without leaving a lot of dead, theirs and those of their enemies, as monuments to where they’d been.

  “Urra!” he yelled as he ran forward again. “Swemmel! Urra!” His countrymen echoed him. He waited for the answering cries of “Mezentio!” and “Algarve!” to give him some idea of how many redheads he faced.

  Those cries didn’t come. Instead, the enemy soldiers yelled a name he hardly knew—“Tsavellas!”—and other things in a language he’d never heard before. In brief glimpses, he saw that their uniforms were a darker tan than those of the Algarvians, and they wore tight leggings, not kilts.

  Realization smote. “They’re Yaninans!” he called to his men. From everything he’d heard, the Algarvians’ allies didn’t have the stomach for the fight that Mezentio’s men brought to it. Maybe that was so, maybe it wasn’t. It might be worth finding out. “Yaninans!” he yelled as loud as he could, and then a couple of phrases of Algarvian he’d learned: “Surrender! Hands high!”

  For a moment, the enemy’s shouts and blazing went on as they had before. Then silence fell. And then, from behind trees and bushes and rocks, skinny little men with big black mustaches began emerging. When the first ones weren’t blazed down out of hand, more and more came forth. Leudast told off troopers of his own to take charge of them and get them to the rear.

  One of those troopers looked at him in something approaching awe. “Powers above, Sergeant, we’ve just bagged twice as many men as we’ve got.”

  “I know.” Leudast was astonished, too. “It’s not so easy against the Algarvians, is it? Go on, get ’em out of here.” He raised his voice and addressed the rest of his men: “They’ve given us a chance. We’re going into that hole fast and hard, like it belongs to some easy wench. Now come on!”

  “Urra!” shouted the Unkerlanters, the new men loudest among them: they thought it would be this easy all the time. Leudast didn’t try to tell them anything different. Pretty soon, they’d run into Algarvians and find out for themselves. Meanwhile, they—and he—would go forward as fast and as far as they could. Maybe, if they got lucky enough, they’d cut off the spearhead after all.

  Among the books Ealstan had brought home to help keep Vanai amused in the flat she dared not leave was an old atlas. It was, in fact, a very old atlas, dating back to the days before the Six Years’ War. As far as that atlas was concerned, Forthweg didn’t exist; the east belonged to a swollen Algarve, while the west was an Unkerlanter grand duchy centered on Eoforwic here.

  Vanai’s chuckle had a bitter edge. Algarve was a great deal more swollen these days than it had been when the atlas was printed. And the news sheets kept announcing new Algarvian victories every day. Down in the south of Unkerlant, their spearheads reached toward the Narrow Sea.

  She looked back from the atlas to the news sheet. In fierce fighting, she read, the town of Andlau fell to Algarve and her allies. An enemy counterblow against the flank of the attacking column was turned back with heavy loss.

  Andlau, she saw, was well beyond Durrwangen, three quarters of the way from where the fighting had begun in spring to Sulingen. Sure enough, Mezentio’s men seemed to be moving as fast as they had the summer before.

  “But they can’t,” Vanai said out loud, defiantly using her Kaunian birthspeech. “They can’t. What will be left of the world if they do?”

  What would be left of the world for her if the Algarvians won their war was nothing. But they kept right on rolling forward all the same. The news sheet went on, in the boasting Algarvian style even though it was written in Forthwegian, Algarvian dragons hammered Sulingen on the Wolter, dropping eggs by the thousand and leaving the city, an ungainly sprawl stretched along the northern bank of the river, burning in many places. Casualties are certain to be very heavy, but King Swemmel continues his useless, senseless resistance.

  “Good for him,” Vanai muttered. Forthwegians despised their Unkerlanter cousins, not least for being stronger and more numerous than they were. Living in Forthweg, Vanai had picked up a good deal of that attitude. And her grandfather despised the Unkerlanters for being even more barbarous—which is to say, less under Kaunian influence—than the Forthwegians. She’d picked up a good deal of that attitude, too.

  But now, if the Unkerlanters were giving King Mezentio’s men a run for their money, Vanai would cheer them on. She wished she could do more. If she left the flat, though, she was all too likely to end up sacrificed to fuel the Algarvian mages’ assault on Unkerlant. And so she stayed hidden, and thought kinder thoughts about King Swemmel than she’d ever imagined she would.

  From the atlas and the news sheet, her eyes went to the little book called You Too Can Be a Mage. She wondered why she hadn’t pitched it into the garbage. She’d worked magic with it, all right: magic that had almost got her in more trouble than she’d known before. If you were already a mage, the spells in You Too Can Be a Mage might be useful . . . but if you were already a mage, you wouldn’t need them, because you’d already know better.

  She complained about that to Ealstan when he came home that evening. He laughed, which made her angry. Then he held up a placating hand. “I’m sorry,” he told her, though he didn’t sound very sorry. “It reminds me of something my father would say sometimes: ‘Any child can do it—as long as he has twenty years of practice.’ ”

  Vanai worked through that, then smiled in spite of herself. “It does sound like your father, or what you’ve said about him,” she answered. Then her smile faded. “I wish we’d hear from him again.”

  “So do I,” Ealstan said, his own face tight with worry. “With Leofsig gone, he must be going mad. My whole family must be, come to that.”

  She reached across the small supper table to set her hand on
his. “I wish you’d been able to do something about your cousin.”

  “So do I,” he growled. “But his regiment or whatever they call it had left the camp outside Eoforwic just before I got the news. And even if it hadn’t . . .” He grimaced. “What could I have done? Sidroc’s worth more to the Algarvians than I’ll ever be, so they’d surely back him, curse them. Powers below eat them and leave them in darkness forever.”

  “Aye,” Vanai whispered fervently. But the Algarvians had to be immune to curses. So many had been aimed their way since the Derlavaian War started, but none seemed to bite.

  “I think this may be what growing up means,” Ealstan said, “finding out there are things you can’t do anything about, and neither can anybody else.”

  In one way, Vanai was a year older than he. In another, she was far older than that. The second way didn’t always show itself, but this was one of those times. “Kaunians in Forthweg suck that up with their mothers’ milk,” she said. “They have ever since the Kaunian Empire fell.”

  “Maybe so,” Ealstan said. “But it’s not bred in you, any more than it’s bred in us. You learn it one at a time, too.”

  Vanai remembered Major Spinello. “Aye, that’s so,” she said softly, hoping the redhead who’d taken his pleasure with her to keep her grandfather from working himself to death had met a horrible end in Unkerlant. Then she burst out with what she couldn’t hold in any more: “What will we do if Algarve wins the war?”

  Ealstan got up, went over to the pantry, and came back with a jug of wine. After pouring, he answered, “I heard—Ethelhelm says—Zuwayza is letting Kaunians land on her shores.”

  “Zuwayza?” Vanai’s voice was a dismayed squeak. “They’re—” She caught herself. She’d been about to say the Zuwayzin were nothing but bare black barbarians. Her grandfather would surely have said just that. She tried something else: “They’re allied with Mezentio, so how long can that last?”