Jaws of Darkness d-5 Read online

  It had been cold inside the mess tent. As soon as Sabrino poked his head out the flap, the Unkerlanter winter stabbed icy knives into the marrow of his bones. This wouldn ‘t have bothered me so much when I was half my age, either, he thought bitterly.

  Dragons crouched in the snow, chained to the iron spikes that kept them from flying off and doing something stupid on their own. Dragon handlers moved among them, keeping them fed. This wasn’t a proper dragon farm, not the way the manuals back in Algarve said one should be organized. It was the best worn, overtaxed men could do. Ever since Cottbus failed to fall in the first winter of the campaign against Unkerlant, the whole war in the west had been one improvisation after another, each seeming more desperate than the last.

  The crystallomancer ducked into his own tent. With a sigh of relief, Sabrino followed. A brazier in there warmed the air all the way up to frigid. A certain pungency in the air said the brazier was burning behemoth dung rather than charcoal: one more improvisation.

  Sabrino sat down on what had probably been some Unkerlanter peasant’s milking stool and peered into the crystal. Brigadier Blosio’s image looked out at him. Sabrino took some consolation in noting that Blosio looked miserably cold, too. “Reporting as ordered, sir,” he said. “What do you need from my wing?”

  “You know how our drive for Herborn has cut off a good many Unkerlanter soldiers,” Blosio said, as if doubting Sabrino knew any such thing.

  “Aye, sir,” Sabrino answered stolidly. “Still a good many in front of us, too. We just tore up some behemoths trying to come through a peasant village and smash in the head of our column.”

  With a typically extravagant Algarvian gesture, Brigadier Blosio waved that away, as if it were of no account. He explained why: “They’re trying to break out and smash through our columns.”

  When the Unkerlanters surrounded Herborn, the Algarvians and Grelzers had tried to do the same thing. They’d failed. Sabrino asked the obvious question here: “What do their chances look like?”

  Blosio’s shrug was as unrestrained as his wave had been. “Neither one of our columns is as strong as one might wish, and we’ve cut off a lot of Unkerlanters. But we have to do what we can, you know.”

  “Oh, indeed.” Sabrino nodded. “In case you’re wondering, sir, my wing has twenty-one dragons ready to fly.” Had the wing been at full strength, it would have had sixty-four. It hadn’t been at full strength, or anywhere close, for a couple of years.

  Brigadier Blosio shrugged again. “That’s how things are, Colonel. And they’re not getting any better. Trapani is ordering some of our dragons taken out of the west and brought back home to Algarve. The way things are now, the Lagoans and Kuusamans are pounding our southern cities flat from Sibiu because we’ve hardly any beasts to put in the air against them.”

  “That’s… not good, sir.”CountSabrino reckoned that a commendable understatement. “The way things are now, the Unkerlanters are pounding our armies here flat because we haven’t got enough beasts to put in the air against them.”

  “We have to try there,” Blosio said.

  “We have to try here, too.” Sabrino knew his protest wouldn’t change anything. And Blosio had a point: KingMezentio couldn’t very well let Algarve itself take a beating. For one thing, people back home might sour on the war if they kept getting hit without seeing their countrymen hit back. For another, the eggs the Kuusamans and Lagoans dropped hit manufactories that made things the army needed, and also slew the mages without whom Sabrino’s men would have had no eggs to drop and the Algarvian footsoldiers would have had no sticks with which to blaze.

  “Then go out and try to put paid to that Unkerlanter counterattack,” Blosio said. “That’s the best thing your wing can do for Algarve.” He gave map coordinates.

  “Aye, sir,” Sabrino said resignedly. He wasn’t sure Blosio heard him. The brigadier’s image vanished from the crystal. It flared for a moment before becoming an inert globe of glass. Sabrino nodded to the crystallomancer. “Thanks.” On second thought, he didn’t know why he was thanking the young mage. Because of the crystal, Sabrino now stood a better chance of getting killed.

  Out into the cold again. He shouted for his men. They knew he was giving them no great gift-only the chance to die before their time. But knowing that, they affected not to. They scrambled onto their dragons and fastened the harnesses that held them safe as if they were going on a lark, not into battle. Sabrino also strapped himself into the harness at the base of his dragon’s neck. He knew he could die if any little thing went wrong. How vividly he knew it was another reminder of his years.

  He also knew his dragon, like most Algarvian beasts, hadn’t been getting enough quicksilver. Its flames wouldn’t reach so far as they would have with more of the vital mineral in its system. Had Algarve taken the Unker-lanter city of Sulingen, had Algarve seized the vital cinnabar mines south of Sulingen… Had that happened, Mezentio’s men wouldn’t have been pushed back into Grelz.

  A dragon handler slipped the chain that held Sabrino’s beast to its stake. The colonel of dragonfliers hit his mount in the side of the neck with his goad. The dragon screeched furiously, flapped it’s great, leathery wings, and bounded into the air. Looking back over his shoulder, Sabrino watched the rest of the dragons in the wing-all of them painted in varying patterns of green, red, and white-following him.

  He murmured the charm that activated the crystal he carried with him, so he could give his squadron commanders the map square the wing was ordered to attack. They passed it on to their dragonfliers. So did Sabrino, with gestures and pantomiming. Maybe I’ll go on the stage after the war is over, he thought, and laughed at himself. He laughed doubly: by all appearances, the war would go on forever.

  The landscape below did nothing to contradict that. It was a chiaroscuro blend of snow and smoke and soot. All the villages and a lot of stretches of forest had been fought over two, three, four times. Whoever finally won the war, the Grelzer peasantry would be generations recovering from it.

  Fresh columns of smoke rising into the sky would have told him where the heavy fighting was even without the coordinates he’d got from Brigadier Blosio. He urged his dragon toward those columns. Urqed meant hitting it with the goad, harder and harder, till it did what he wanted. Every once in a while, a dragon would have enough of that and flame its flier off its back. Dragons were trained not to do that from the moment they hatched, but everyone who had anything to do with them knew they were too stupid and too vicious to be very reliable.

  Sabrino’s dragon obeyed now. CaptainOrosio ’s image, tiny but perfect, appeared in the wing commander’s crystal. Orosio said, “By the powers above, sir, that’s a cursed broad front the Unkerlanters have opened up. How many of them are there, anyhow?”

  “I asked Brigadier Blosio the same question,” Sabrino answered. “I gather we’re supposed to find out by experiment.” Orosio said something pungent and abruptly broke the etheric connection.

  As soon as Sabrino spotted swarms of Unkerlanters trying to force their way north and east through a wavering line of Algarvian defenders, he ordered his dragons to the attack. They swooped low on an advancing column of behemoths, dropping eggs among them and flaming down several. Sabrino’s dragon didn’t have to be urged to attack. Restraining it, making it attack when and where he wanted it to, was harder, but he managed.

  It was when he made the beast gain altitude for another pass at the enemy that he gasped in horror. The column of behemoths his wing had assailed was one of dozens, perhaps one of hundreds, all with footsoldiers moving with them and in support of them. The Algarvians hadn’t cut off a few brigades. They’d tried to surround a whole army, and a pugnacious one, too.

  A man who hooked a salmon would eventually pull it to shore. A man who hooked a leviathan would be hauled out to sea and never seen again unless he threw away the line in a hurry. But who would do that soon enough?

  In any case, his countrymen couldn’t throw away the line. KingSwem-
mel ’s soldiers gripped them too closely for that. All they could do was hang on tight and hope for the best. They wouldn’t hold back this Unkerlanter attack. Sabrino could see as much. That meant they wouldn’t recapture Herborn, either.

  Which raised an interesting question, or a couple. Who was fisherman here, who fish? And who’d caught whom?

  Skarnu had discovered it was much harder to join in the underground fight against Algarve with a small baby in tow. He’d been fighting the redheads since the war began: first as a captain in King Gainibu’s army and then, after Algarvian behemoths and dragons shattered the Valmieran forces, in what wasn’t quite battle but could nonetheless have got him killed at any moment.

  Gedominu started to cry. Merkela plucked her son and Skarnu’s out of the cradle. She checked to see if he was wet. Her grunt said he wasn’t. She undid the top three toggles on her tunic and shrugged it off her shoulder to bare a breast. That was what the baby had wanted, sure enough.

  “He’s hungry,” Skarnu remarked.

  Merkela nodded. The motion made some of her blond hair flip down onto the baby’s face; she brushed it aside with her free hand. “He’s getting bigger and stronger every day,” she said. “He needs to get bigger and stronger. Even if we lose the fight against Mezentio’s whoresons-”

  “Powers above forbid it,” Skarnu exclaimed, and his fingers twisted in a protective gesture that went back to the days when Valmiera was a province of the Kaunian Empire and Algarve a woodland full of barbarous tribes.

  Merkela went on as if he hadn’t spoken: “Even if we lose, Gedominu will carry on the fight against the Algarvians when he grows to be a man.” She stroked the baby’s head, which looked bald but in fact had a thin fuzz of fine blond hair even paler than hers or Skarnu’s. “He’s sucking in hatred for the redheads along with my milk.”

  She was implacable as an avalanche. Gedominu was named for her husband. The old farmer-he’d been twice Merkela’s age-had taken in Skarnu and his veteran sergeant when he could have turned them over to the Algarvians after the Valmieran army surrendered. Gedominu (the man, not the boy) had gone raiding against the redheads himself. And he’d been taken hostage and blazed after one of those raids killed an Algarvian cavalryman with a trip line.

  Skarnu wondered whether he would have ended up in Merkela’s arms even if the Algarvians hadn’t killed her husband. She was a farmwoman and he a marquis, but that had nothing to do with the way they were drawn to each other. He didn’t suppose her wedding vows would have had anything to do with it, either.

  But she wasn’t just his lover. Before she’d got pregnant, she’d fought alongside him. CountSimanu, who’d been in bed with the redheads, was dead largely because of the two of them. And now…

  Now Skarnu stared at the walls of the cramped little flat he and Merkela and Gedominu shared. It was a far cry from the mansion in which he and his sister Krasta had lived before the Derlavaian War broke out. And it was almost equally far, in a different way, from the farmhouse whose mistress Merkela had been. With a sigh, Skarnu said, “Ukmerge isn’t much of a town.”

  Merkela’s lip curled. She spoke quietly so she wouldn’t bother Gedominu, but didn’t bother hiding her venom: “I never wanted to live in Pavilosta when I went there on market days, but Ukmerge makes Pavilosta look like it was one of the king’s pleasure palaces.”

  Even had he wanted to, Skarnu would have had trouble arguing with that. Pavilosta was a pleasant little market town, or perhaps village; it still kept much of the air of the countryside that was its reason for being. In Ukmerge, they made shoes. The town stank of leather. People either worked in one of the two big shoe manufactories or sold things to those who did. And the folk who filled the manufactories also filled grim blocks of flats like this one.

  Gedominu let Merkela’s nipple slide out of his mouth. She put a cloth on her shoulder, then raised the baby to it and patted his back. He rewarded her with a belch and a little sour milk. She laughed at him when he spit up. Wiping his mouth, she said, “You thought you were going to ruin my tunic, didn’t you? You thought so, but I fooled you.” Gedominu replied with a series of noises from the other end. Merkela laughed again, ruefully this time. “You can’t stay ahead of a baby, no matter how hard you try.”

  “Give him to me. I’ll change him,” Skarnu said; he’d discovered she scowled at him if he left her to do all the work with the baby. As he cleaned Gedominu’s bottom and put a fresh cloth around it, he went on. “As long as we stay ahead of the Algarvians, that’s what counts.”

  Merkela shook her head. “We’ve got to do more than that. That was good enough when you pulled me off the farm before the redheads grabbed me-powers below eat your cursedCountAmatu for betraying me to them. It was good enough when we got out of Erzvilkas after their mages tracked us there. But it’s not good enough any more. Now I want to hit back again.”

  “So do I,” Skarnu said. “But the underground isn’t very strong here in Ukmerge.”

  Merkela’s lip curled again, this time with contempt as complete and automatic as Krasta could have shown-which was saying a great deal. “Shoemakers,” she sneered as she set her tunic to rights. “They don’t care whether they’re making shoes for their own people or for the Algarvians.”

  That was an unkind judgment on the folk of Ukmerge, but also, Skarnu feared, an accurate one. The shoe manufactories had missed hardly a day’s work after the Valmieran army abandoned the town and the Algarvians marched in. Ley-line caravans carried endless crates of marching boots west to Algarve forKingMezentio ’s soldiers to wear. As Merkela said, the shoemakers got paid no matter who wore what they made.

  Gedominu looked up at Skarnu and smiled. Skarnu smiled back. He could hardly help it. His son hadn’t been smiling very long. Every time Gedominu did, it was as if he’d discovered the idea of being happy for the very first time and wanted everyone around him to be happy, too. Then, smiling still, the baby proceeded to ruin the cloth Skarnu had just pinned into place around his middle.

  Skarnu said something rather more pungent than the odor wafting from Gedominu. Merkela laughed and asked, “Do you want me to change him this time?”

  “It’s all right.” Skarnu shook his head. “I haven’t even washed my hands yet.” He cleaned the baby off again, then tossed the sodden, stinking rag into a pail that held a good many others. The pail, fortunately, had a tight-fitting lid. Skarnu shut it and then did wash up, wondering all the while if Gedominu would make yet another mess.

  Someone knocked on the door. Skarnu and Merkela both froze. Knocks on the door, these days, were all too likely to mean trouble. Skarnu had acquired a small stick from some highly unofficial sources. As a footsoldier, or even as a farmer hunting vermin or after small game for the pot, he would have despised it. But it could knock over a man at short range, and what more did somebody on the run need?

  “Who is it?” he asked. If he didn’t like the answer, he’d find out exactly what the little stick could do.

  “Tytuvenai,” said the man on the other side of the door. That wasn’t a man’s name; it was the name of a town not too far from Ukmerge. Underground leaders often called themselves by the names of the towns where they harassed the Algarvians. It made them harder for the redheads to identify. Skarnu knew a fellow who’d called himself Tytuvenai. The man in the hallway asked, “That you, Pavilosta?”

  “Aye.” Warily, Skarnu opened the door. If “Tytuvenai” was an Algarvian captive, KingMezentio ’s men would get an unpleasant surprise. But the fellow from the underground stood there alone. “Well, come in,” Skarnu said, and closed the door after him.

  “My thanks,” “Tytuvenai” said. He nodded to Merkela. “Hello, milady. I’ve heard somewhat of you. You’ve tweaked the Algarvians a time or two yourself, if even half what they say about you is true.”

  “They deserve worse than tweaking,” Merkela said with a scowl. “By the powers above, they deserve worse than what they’ve given our Kaunian cousins in Forthweg. And I want to
give it to them.” Merkela had no compromise in her, not when it came to the Algarvians and not when it came to anything else, either.

  “What are you doing here?” Skarnu asked his unexpected guest.

  “I have some news that might interest you.” “Tytuvenai” seemed unperturbed at Skarnu’s suspicions. Anyone who wasn’t suspicious these days, of course, was likely either a fool or a dupe.

  “Go on,” Skarnu said.

  “Good news and bad news, actually,” the other man from the underground told him. “The good news is thatCountAmatu, whom I gather you got to know better than you wanted to, is no more. He met with an unfortunate accident in Priekule not long ago.”

  “Thatis good news,” Skarnu exclaimed. It was such good news, he went into the cramped little kitchen, got out three glasses, and poured peach brandy into them. After he brought them out, he raised his and said, “Here’s to Amatu’s untimely demise. If I’d known he would go over to the Algarvians, I’d have killed him myself and saved whoever else it was the trouble.”

  They all drank. Merkela asked, “What’s the bad news, then?”

  Instead of directly answering her, “Tytuvenai” swung his gaze back to Skarnu. “The bad news is, he was killed coming home fromMarchionessKrasta ’s mansion.”

  “From my sister’s mansion,” Skarnu said, and “Tytuvenai” nodded. Skarnu knocked back the rest of the brandy in his glass at a gulp. “I don’t know why it surprises me,” he remarked, and then shook his head. “Itdoesn’t surprise me, curse it. For years, she’s been sleeping with that Algarvian colonel who’s come after me. Whywouldn ‘t she invite Amatu in for tea?”

  “One of these days, you’ll have your revenge against your sister,” Merkela said. “May it be soon. May it be strong.”

  “Aye, may it be so,” Skarnu said. He would never forget the shocked betrayal he’d felt when he saw Krasta’s name and Colonel Lurcanio’s linked in a news sheet that had come down from Priekule to Pavilosta.