Darkness Descending Read online

  “They’re the enemy,” Pesaro said with assurance. “You always hit the enemy as hard as you can. That’s the rules.”

  Almonio shook his head. “They’re just people. Men and women and children with blond hair and a funny language out of old times. A few of’em were soldiers, aye, but we don’t do anything special to the Forthwegians who yielded, or not to most of’em, anyway. The women and children sure never hurt us.”

  “All Kaunians are out to get us,” Pesaro said. “The Kaunians in Jelgava almost took Tricarico away from us, in case you forgot. They’ve hated us ever since we knocked their dusty old Empire flat all those years ago, and they’ve really hated us since the Six Years’ War. That’s what King Mezentio says, and I think he’s dead right.”

  But Almonio only shook his head again. Then he folded his arms on the table, bent forward, and fell asleep. Bembo said, “He’ll be better when he comes around--till the next time he gets drunk, anyhow.”

  “Take him back to the barracks and pour him into his cot,” Pesaro said.

  “What, by myself?” Bembo said.

  Pesaro grunted. He knew Bembo put no more effort into anything than he had to. But at the last minute, the sergeant relented. “Oh, all right. There’s Evodio over there by the wall. Hey, Evodio! Aye, you--who’d you think I was talking to? Come on and give Bembo a hand.”

  Evodio gave Bembo two fingers, at any rate: an Algarvian obscene gesture at least as old as any Kaunian ruins. Bembo cheerfully returned it. They draped one of Almonio’s limp arms across each of their shoulders and half dragged, half carried him across the street.

  “We ought to leave him here,” Bembo said while they were crossing the cobbles. “Maybe a wagon running over his head would pound some sense into him.”

  “It’s a dirty business we’re in,” Evodio said. “Maybe even dirtier than soldiering, because soldiers have real enemies who can blaze back in front of’em.”

  Bembo stared at him in some surprise. “How come you weren’t crying your head off with him, if you feel like that?”

  Evodio shrugged, almost dropping his half of Almonio. “I can take it. I don’t think we’ve got anything to be proud of, though.”

  Since Bembo didn’t think the Algarvian constables had anything to be proud of, either, he kept quiet. Between them, they got the sodden Almonio into his cot. One of the constables in a dice game on the floor of the barracks looked up with a grin. “He’s going to be miserable when he wakes up, the poor, sorry son of a whore,” he predicted.

  “He was pretty miserable already, or he wouldn’t have gotten this drunk,” Bembo answered.

  “Ah, one of those, eh?” the other constable said. “Well, let him spend a while longer in this business and he’ll figure out you’re wasting your time if you get upset over stuff you can’t do anything about.” The next roll of the dice went against him, and he cursed furiously.

  With a laugh, Bembo began, “You’re wasting your time if you get upset--”

  “Oh, shut up,” the other constable said.

  When Bembo stuck his nose outside the barracks the next morning, he shivered. Most of the time, Gromheort wasn’t that much cooler than Tricarico. But the wind that blew out of the southwest today had a nasty chill reminiscent of the broad plains of Unkerlant from which it had come. “Just my luck,” Bembo grumbled as he headed out on patrol. He was always ready to pity himself, since no one else seemed interested in the job.

  He took some consolation in seeing that the Forthwegians and Kaunians on the street looked as unhappy and put upon as he felt. Some of them had mufflers wrapped around their necks and heavy cloaks over their tunics or trousers, but more, like Bembo, simply had to make do. When a particularly nasty gust blew in under his kilt, he envied the Kaunians their trousers.

  By now, he’d found a number of places whose proprietors were good for a handout. He stopped in at one of them for a mug of tea sweetened with honey. He drank it so fast, it burned his mouth. He didn’t much care. It put some warmth in his belly, too, which was what he’d had in mind.

  As he started tramping the pavement again, a wagonful of laborers clattered past, its iron-tired wheels loud on the cobbles. Most of the laborers were Forthwegians, a few Kaunians. The blonds looked even scrawnier and more ragged than the Forthwegians. They didn’t get paid as much for the same work. Bembo’s sympathy was fleeting at best. Those Kaunians could have been a lot worse off, and he knew it.

  “Good morning to you, Constable,” one of the laborers called. He was a Forthwegian, but used classical Kaunian--a good thing, too, because Bembo still hadn’t learned more than a handful of words in the Forthwegian language.

  After a moment, he recognized the laborer as the fellow who’d helped him find the barracks when he was new to Gromheort and very lost. He didn’t want to speak Kaunian where a lot of people could hear him doing it. He did take off his hat and wave it to the Forthwegian. That seemed to do the job; the black-bearded young man waved a hand in return.

  A couple of blocks later, Bembo heard a man and a woman shouting at each other in Forthwegian. Setting a hand on the bludgeon he wore on his belt, he turned a corner and tramped down a muddy alley to find out what was going on. “What’s all this about?” he said loudly, in Algarvian. Whether anybody would understand him was liable to be a different question, but he’d worry about that later.

  Sudden silence fell. The man, Bembo saw, was a prosperous-looking Forthwegian, the woman a Kaunian who had strumpet written all over her. Strumpet or not, she turned out to speak Algarvian. Pointing to the man, she said, “He cheated me. I gave him what he wanted, and now he won’t pay.”

  “This bitch lies,” the Forthwegian said, also in Algarvian--maybe he’d done business across the border before the war broke out. “I ask you, Officer--do you think I’d want a drab like this?”

  “Never can tell,” Bembo said--he’d heard of plenty of rich Algarvians with peculiar tastes, so why not a Forthwegian, too? Turning to the woman, he asked, “What do you say he wanted from you?”

  “My mouth,” she answered at once. “I know him--he’s too lazy to screw.”

  Ignoring the Forthwegian’s bellow of fury, Bembo glanced at the knees of the Kaunian woman’s trousers. They had fresh mud on them. He hefted the bludgeon. “Pay up,” he told the Forthwegian.

  The man cursed and fumed, but reached into his belt pouch and slapped silver into the Kaunian woman’s hand. He stomped off, still muttering under his breath. The Kaunian woman eyed Bembo. “Now I suppose you’ll take half of this--or maybe all of it,” she said.

  “No,” he answered, and then wondered why. A small offering to make up for all the blonds he’d herded into caravan cars? He didn’t know. Then he had a new thought. “There’s something else you might do....”

  “I wondered if you’d say that,” she answered with weary cynicism. “Well, come here.” When he walked out of the alley a few minutes later, he was whistling. This had all the makings of a fine morning.

  Retreat again, retreat through heavy snow even this far north. Leudast shivered and cursed and tugged at the hem of his white smock as he stumbled along what might have been the road running back toward Cottbus. Algarvian dragons thought it was the road; eggs kept falling out of the sky along with the snow. Every so often, Unkerlanter soldiers would shriek as one of the eggs burst close enough to wound.

  “Sir,” Leudast called out Captain Hawart when the regimental commander came close enough to recognize, “sir, are we going to be able to hold them out of the capital?”

  “They won’t take Cottbus till every last man defending it is dead,” Hawart said.

  For a moment, that reassured Leudast. Then he realized that all those deaths might not be enough. He trudged past a small field littered with corpses: Unkerlanter peasants slain by Unkerlanter mages in a desperate effort to blunt the power of the murderous sorcery the redheads aimed at their kingdom.

  What sort of funeral pyre would King Swemmel light to hold the Algarvians o
ut of Cottbus? Thinking about it made Leudast’s blood run colder than the miserable winter weather around him. He hoped it wouldn’t come to that. If it didn’t, he and his battered comrades would have to be the ones who kept it from happening.

  Some great shapes came lumbering across a field toward him. He started to bring up his stick, an automatic--and mostly futile--reaction whenever he saw behemoths. From behind him, Sergeant Magnulf called, “Don’t blaze at those buggers. They’re ours.”

  The behemoths were indeed moving east, to oppose the advancing Algarvians. “We do keep sending ‘em into the fight,” Leudast allowed. “Now if only they’d last a little longer, we’d be better off.”

  He didn’t realize a village lay ahead till he was marching through its outskirts.

  “Peel off!” Hawart shouted to his men. “Peel off! We’re going to make a stand here. We’re going to make a stand at every village we come to from now on. We’re going to keep making stands till none of us is left standing.”

  Leudast went into a peasant hut much like the one in which he’d lived till King Swemmel’s impressers dragged him into the army. Being out of the wind made him feel warmer. He peered through a window, then nodded. He had a good view to the east, though with the snow he didn’t know how soon he’d see the Algarvians. But they would see him no sooner.

  He’d hardly found a spot he liked before the Algarvians started tossing eggs at the village. The flimsy walls of the hut shook around Leudast; he wondered if the roof beams were going to come down on his head. “Efficiency,” he said, with no small bitterness. King Swemmel preached it. The Algarvians seemed to know what it really meant. All through the war, their egg-tossers had kept up with the fighting better than Unkerlant’s. One more reason we’ve got our backs to Cottbus, Leudast thought.

  He knew what was coming next. After they’d softened up the position with eggs, the Algarvians would probe it and try to outflank it. He didn’t know what sort of defenses lay to either side. He did know the redheads would get a bloody nose if they tried pounding straight through.

  “Here they come!” somebody shouted.

  Leudast peered through the window. Sure enough, little dark shapes were moving toward him through the snow. The Algarvians hadn’t thought to use white smocks and hoods of their own to make themselves less conspicuous against an equally white background. Knowing Mezentio’s men could overlook something like that made Leudast feel oddly better.

  He rested his stick on the bottom of the window frame and waited. Keeping it there would steady his aim. Before the Algarvians got close enough for him to start blazing, Captain Hawart’s rear guard east of the village sent beams their way. A few redheads fell. The rest had to slow down and develop the Unkerlanter position, to see what sort of opposition they faced.

  Eggs started falling again, this time in front of the village. Leudast cursed. The Algarvians also had far more crystals than did his countrymen, had them and used them. Leudast wished the Unkerlanter egg-tossers were so flexibly directed--far from the first time he’d made that wish.

  And then, as if to prove even an Unkerlanter corporal could get lucky once in a while, a great torrent of eggs rained down on the advancing Algarvians. Snow and dirt flew. So did bodies. Leudast whooped. He yelled himself hoarse. Someone, for once, had done the right thing at the right time. “See how you like that, you stinking whoresons!” he shouted in delight. “You don’t buy anything cheap today.”

  He wondered if the Algarvians would have to murder another few dozen or few hundred Kaunian captives to get the magical boost they needed to push forward. He wondered if his own kingdom’s mages would have to murder more Unkerlanter peasants to withstand that magic and even to hurl it back on its creators. He wondered if anything would be left of Unkerlant by the time the two armies and the two sets of mages were done with the kingdom.

  Instead of magic, the Algarvians chose behemoths. Half a dozen of the big beasts lumbered toward the village. An egg had to burst almost on top of one of them to do it much harm. Twice Leudast shouted when a behemoth was knocked off its feet. Each time, he moaned a moment later when the animal staggered up and came on once more. The behemoths’ advance was all the more frightening for being so slow and deliberate; enough snow lay on the ground to hamper their movements.

  Hawart’s rear guard had no real chance to do anything against the behemoths. They were so heavily armored, the only way a footsoldier with an ordinary stick could hope to bring one down was with a blaze through the eye. That was possible. It was very far from likely.

  As they usually did, the Algarvian behemoths paused well outside the village. Four of them carried egg-tossers, which they used to pound the place some more. The other two bore heavy sticks. When they blazed, the beams they sent forth were like swords of light. They quickly set a couple of houses afire. Had one of those beams pierced Leudast, he would have died without knowing what struck him. There were worse ways to go in war. He was convinced of that; he’d seen too many, seen them and listened to them, too.

  But before a heavy stick could swing his way, the behemoths and their crews were distracted by something off to their left. Leudast couldn’t tell what it was without sticking his head out the window, which struck him as a good way to get a hole blazed through it. He stayed where he was and waited. With peasant patience, he understood he’d find out sooner or later what was going on.

  And he did. Several Unkerlanter behemoths advanced against their Algarvian counterparts. They started tossing eggs at the behemoths on which King Mezentio’s men rode. The Algarvian crews knew they were a greater danger than whatever footsoldiers might be defending the village.

  When artists illustrated battles among behemoths, and when people talked about them, they always depicted and described the beasts charging full tilt at one another so they could use their horns to deadly effect. That did happen--in mating skirmishes, when the bulls fought without crews and without man-made weapons mounted on their backs. In war, such charges were all but unknown. Eggs and sticks did the bulk of the righting, not the animals themselves.

  A beam from a heavy stick tore through the chainmail an Algarvian behemoth wore. Leudast could hear the beast’s agonized bellow. He cheered as the behemoth tottered and fell. Then a great blast of noise announced that an egg had indeed landed right on top of an Unkerlanter behemoth, not only slaying the beast but also touching off the eggs it carried. Leudast groaned as loudly as he’d cheered a moment before.

  As the long-range duel among the behemoths went on, Leudast noticed something strange. The Algarvian beasts and their crews fought as if they were the fingers on a single hand, while each Unkerlanter behemoth might have been the only one on the field. He didn’t know whether the redheads had crystals aboard all their behemoths or whether they were simply better trained to work together than the Unkerlanters, but the difference told. They lost two more of their behemoths, but after a while none of the Unkerlanter beasts remained in the fight.

  The surviving Algarvian behemoths went back to pounding the village. An egg burst just behind the house in which Leudast was sheltering. The sudden release of sorcerous energies knocked him to his knees. He scrambled up again, his ears ringing; the next Algarvian assault wouldn’t wait long.

  “Here they come!” That dreaded shout rang out again. This time, though, Leudast knew at least a little relief to go with the dread: someone besides him had survived.

  He cautiously peered out the window once more. Sure enough, the redheads were moving forward in loose open order. No beam, no egg, would slay more than one of them.

  None of the rear guard Hawart had set was still fighting. The Algarvians’ advance remained unhindered till they got within range of the Unkerlanter soldiers holed up and waiting for them. “Mezentio! Mezentio!” The yell raised Leudast’s hackles.

  “Urra!” he cried as he began to blaze. “King Swemmel! Urra!” He picked off one Algarvian after another. He seemed unable to miss. Every time he blazed, another redhead fell. H
e’d never had such a run of luck.

  But he couldn’t kill the whole Algarvian army by himself. The soldiers he didn’t kill kept on toward the village. Idly, he wondered what the name of this place was. If he died, he would have liked to know where he was doing it.

  A beam almost as thick as his thigh struck the hut from which he was fighting. He stared in astonishment at the hole it made. The edges of that hole began to burn merrily. Leudast swatted at the flames with a rag, but couldn’t put them out. They licked hungrily at the old dry boards of the wall.

  Smoke started to choke him. He realized he couldn’t stay were he was, not unless he wanted to burn, too. Reluctantly, he ran out into the street.

  “Over here!” Sergeant Magnulf shouted, and waved to show where he was. “Come on--this is a good hole.”

  Leudast needed no further invitation. He dove into the hole. He didn’t know how good it was, but it was very welcome. “We’re still here,” he said, and Magnulf nodded.

  But the Algarvians were still there, too, and still there in large numbers. And their behemoths kept sending powerful beams through the village and tossing eggs into it. One of those eggs burst right in front of the hole.

  Magnulf’s head had been up above the edge. He shrieked and clutched at his face. Blood poured around the edges of his mittens. After a moment of standing there swaying, he slowly crumpled. His hands fell away from the hideous wounds. His eyes were gone, as if he’d never had any. His nose was burned away, too, leaving only a gaping hole in the middle of his face. Leudast grimaced. He’d seen a lot of horrors since the fighting started, but few close to this.

  Magnulf likely wouldn’t live, not with those wounds. If by some chance--some mischance--he did, he likely wouldn’t want to. Leudast pulled a knife from his belt and drew it across the sergeant’s burned and blistered throat. More blood fountained, but not for long. Even before Magnulf drew in his last bubbling breath, Leudast was peering out as his friend had done, hoping he wouldn’t be unlucky as his friend had been, and getting ready once more to fight to hold the Algarvians out of the village.