Out of the Darkness Read online

  “Warm is one thing,” Tsavellas said. “Warm enough to cook?” His expressive shrug might almost have come from an Algarvian.

  Rathar didn’t answer. He was eyeing the painted panels that ornamented the walls. Yaninans in old-fashioned robes--but always with pompoms on their shoes--stared out of the panels at him from enormous, somber eyes. Sometimes they fought Algarvians, other times Unkerlanters. Always, they were shown triumphant. Rathar supposed the artists who’d created them had had to paint what their patrons wanted. Those patrons had lost no sleep worrying about the truth.

  He couldn’t read the legends picked out in gold leaf beside some of the figures on the walls. He couldn’t even sound them out. Yanina used a script different from every other way of writing in Derlavai. Rathar reckoned that typical of the Yaninans, the most contrary, fractious, faction-ridden folk in the world.

  “Here we are,” Tsavellas said, leading him into a room with more Yaninans painted on the walls and with maps on the tables. A Yaninan officer in a uniform much fancier than Rathar’s--his short tunic over kilt and leggings glittered with gold leaf, and even his pompoms were gilded--sprang to his feat and bowed. Tsavellas went on, “I present to you General Mantzaros, the commander of all my forces. He speaks Algarvian.”

  “He would,” Rathar rumbled. He was hardly fifty himself--burly, vigorous, and dour. Any man who’d spent so much time dealing with King Swemmel had earned the right to be dour. When he held out his hand, Mantzaros clasped his wrist instead, in the Algarvian style. Rathar raised an eyebrow. “Have you forgotten whose side you’re on these days, General?”

  “By no means, Marshal.” Mantzaros drew himself up to his full height, which was a couple of inches less than Rathar’s. “Do you seek to insult me?” Yaninans were some of the touchiest people on earth, too, without the style Algarvians brought to their feuds.

  “No. I seek to get some use out of the rabble you call an army,” Rathar said brutally.

  That made both Mantzaros and King Tsavellas splutter. The general found his voice first: “Our brave soldiers are doing everything they can to aid our allies of Unkerlant.”

  “You have not got more than a handful of brave soldiers. We saw that when you were fighting against us,” Rathar said. Ignoring the Yaninans’ cries of protest, he went on, “Now that you are on our side, you had better get your men moving against the cursed redheads. That was the bargain you struck when you became our allies”--our puppets, he thought--”and you are going to live up to it. Your men will spearhead several attacks we have planned.”

  “You will use them to weaken the Algarvians so you can win on the cheap,” Tsavellas said shrilly. “This is not war. This is murder.”

  “If you try to go back on your agreement, your Majesty”--Rathar used the title with savage glee--”you will find out what murder is. I promise you that. Do you understand me?”

  Tsavellas and Mantzaros both shivered and turned pale beneath their swarthy skins. The Algarvians killed Kaunians for the life energy that powered their strongest, deadliest sorceries. To fight back, Swemmel ordered the deaths of criminals, and of the old and useless of Unkerlant. But, now that his soldiers held Yanina in a grip of iron, what was to stop him from killing Tsavellas’ folk instead? Nothing at all, as anyone who knew him had to realize.

  “We are ... loyal,” Tsavellas said.

  “To yourselves, perhaps,” Rathar answered. The king looked indignant-- indeed, almost shocked. No Yaninan would have dared speak to him so. But Marshal Rathar was no Yaninan--for which he thanked the powers above--and had to deal with a king ever so much more fearsome than Tsavellas. He went on, “King Swemmel still recalls how you would not turn over King Penda of Forthweg to him when Penda fled here early in the war.”

  General Mantzaros said something in Yaninan. If it wasn’t, I told you so, Rathar would have been mightily surprised. Tsavellas snapped something pungent in his own language, then returned to Algarvian: “King Penda escaped my palace. I still do not know how he came to Lagoas.”

  On the whole, Rathar believed him. But that had nothing to do with anything. In a voice like sounding brass, he said, “But you had Penda here in Patras, here in your palace, and you would not give him to Swemmel when my sovereign demanded his person.”

  “He was a king,” Tsavellas protested. “He is a king. One does not surrender a king as one does a burglar.”

  “Is a king who has no kingdom still a king?” Rathar asked.

  “I did not give him to Mezentio of Algarve, either, and he wanted him, too.”

  Rathar’s shrug held a world of indifference. “You did not surrender him to King Swemmel. Swemmel reckons that a slight. I speak no secrets when I tell you King Swemmel’s memory for slights is very long indeed.”

  Tsavellas shivered again. “It is easy for your king to have a long memory. He is strong. For a man who rules a small kingdom, a weak kingdom, trapped between two strong ones, things are not so easy.”

  “Unkerlant was--is--trapped between Gyongyos and Algarve--and Yanina,” Rathar said. “You may redeem yourself, but you will pay whatever price King Swemmel demands. If you balk, you shall not redeem yourself, and you will pay much more. Do you understand that, your Majesty?” Once more, he enjoyed using the king’s formal title as he dictated to him.

  King Tsavellas wilted. Rathar had expected nothing less. The King of Yan-ina found himself in an impossible situation. He’d saved his throne by switching sides at just the right moment, but he’d left himself a hostage to Unkerlant in doing so. If he didn’t obey, Swemmel could easily find some pliant Yaninan noble--or an Unkerlanter governor--who would. “Aye,” Tsavellas said sullenly. “Tell us what you require, and we shall do it. Is it not so, General?”

  “It is so,” General Mantzaros agreed. “It will bleed our kingdom white, but it is so.”

  “Do you think Unkerlant has not been bled white?” Rathar said. “Do you think Yanina did not help bleed Unkerlant white? This is what you bought, and this is the price you will pay for it. You know the Algarvians are holding along the line of the Skamandros River?”

  “Aye,” the king and his general said together.

  Rathar wasn’t so sure how much they knew, but accepted their word for the time being. He said, “I intend to throw Yaninan armies across the river here and here”--he pointed to the spots he had in mind--”in three days’ time. You will have them ready, or it will go hard for you and your kingdom.”

  “In three days?” Mantzaros croaked. “That is not possible.”

  “This is your last chance to keep Yaninan armies under Yaninan officers, General,” Rathar said coldly. “If you do not move the men as we require, we shall do it for you. That will be the end of your army as an army. We will use it as part of ours--as a small part of ours. Have you any questions?”

  “No,” Mantzaros whispered. He spoke in Yaninan to King Tsavellas, who replied in the same tongue. Mantzaros dipped his head, as Yaninans usually did in place of nodding. Returning to Algarvian, he said, “We obey.”

  “Good. That is what is required of you, no more--and no less.” He turned his back on the general and the king and strode out of the map room. The painted Yaninans on the hallway walls stared reproachfully from their big, round, liquid eyes. He ignored them, as he had ignored the king and the general once they gave him what he wanted. He also ignored the anxious Yaninan courtiers who tried to get him to tell them what was going on. After fawning, they cringed.

  Rathar’s carriage waited outside the palace. “Take me to our headquarters,” he told the driver. The soldier, a stolid Unkerlanter, nodded and obeyed without a word. That suited Rathar fine.

  The headquarters was an appropriated house, quite fine, in a district full of fancy shops--certainly fancier than any in Cottbus. The Yaninans couldn’t fight worth a lick, but they lived well. When Rathar walked in, he smelled a pungent, smoky odor he’d never met before and heard General Vatran coughing. “Powers above, what’s that stink?” he demanded.


  “I’m breathing the smoke of these leaves I got from the grocer across the street,” Vatran answered between wheezes. He was stocky and white-haired, almost twenty years older than Rathar: one of the few truly senior officers to have survived a generation of Swemmel’s rages, but a solid soldier nonetheless. “Varvakis says they come from some island in the Great Northern Sea, and the natives there all swear by them.”

  “For what?” Rathar asked. “Fumigation?”

  “No, no, no. Health,” Vatran said. “None of these natives ever dies before he’s a hundred and fifty years old, if you believe Varvakis. And even if you cut what he says in half, that doesn’t sound too bad to me.” He coughed again.

  So did Rathar. “Nasty stench,” he said. “If you have to breathe this cursed smoke all the time, I think I’d sooner die. It’ll probably rot your lungs. And if these natives are so bloody wonderful, why do they belong to some Derlavaian kingdom nowadays? All those islands do, you know.”

  “You haven’t got the right attitude,” Vatran said reproachfully.

  “I don’t care,” Rathar answered “I’ll tell you this, though: Tsavellas and Mantzaros would agree with you.”

  “I’ll bet they would,” Vatran said. “You got what you wanted from them, I expect?”

  “Of course I did,” Rathar told him. “It was that or pull this kingdom down around their ears. We’ll throw Yaninans over the Skamandros till they bridge it with their bodies if we have to. Then we’ll clean out the stinking redheads ourselves.” He paused. “They don’t stink any worse than those leaves.”

  “Sorry, sir.” Vatran didn’t sound sorry. He was grinning. So was Rathar. Why not, when they were pushing the Algarvians back?

  Rain blew out of the west, into Colonel Spinello’s face. It could be worse, the Algarvian officer thought as he peered from his riverfront hole in the ground in Eoforwic across the Twegen toward the Unkerlanter positions on the west bank. When he said that aloud, one of the men in his brigade gave him an odd look. “How could it be worse, sir?” the trooper asked, real curiosity in his voice.

  “For one thing, it could be snowing.” Spinello had no trouble coming up with reasons. He’d seen the worst the Unkerlanters and the weather could do. “Down in the south, it would be snowing. It probably is, right this minute. And Swemmel’s whoresons could have us surrounded, the way they did down in Sulingen. They could have snipers as close to us as you are to me. One of those bastards blazed me down there, straight through the chest. I’m lucky I’m here. So you see, things aren’t so bad.”

  He was a prancing, handsome little gamecock of a man, one who stayed dapper even when things were at their worst. As always, he spoke with great conviction. He believed what he was saying when he said it, and usually made others believe it, too. That was one of the reasons he had such good luck with women. That and technique, he thought smugly.

  Every once in a while, of course, even conviction didn’t pay off. The trooper said, “Oh, aye, some luck, sir. You were so lucky, they got you repaired and sent .you up here to give the Unkerlanters another chance at doing you in. You can call that luck if you want, but it’s the kind of luck you can keep, if you ask me.”

  “Well, who did ask you?” Spinello said. But that was a gibe, not a reprimand. Freeborn Algarvians, even common soldiers, would speak their minds. That was part of what made them better soldiers than Unkerlanters, who were liable to end up sacrificed if they talked out of turn.

  And if we’re such splendid soldiers, what are we doing fighting way back here in the middle of Forthweg? he asked himself. He knew the answer perfectly well: enough indifferent soldiers could overwhelm a smaller number of good ones. They could, aye. But, when King Mezentio ordered the Algarvian army into Unkerlant, who had imagined that they might? Mezentio hadn’t. Spinello was sure of that.

  Shouldn’t he have? Spinello wondered. He just assumed Unkerlant would fall to pieces, the way all our other enemies did when we hit them. He peered across the river again. He couldn’t see any Unkerlanter soldiers stirring about, but he knew they were there. It didn‘t work out quite the way Mezentio and the generals thought it would. Too bad.

  A few eggs burst on this side of the Twegen, but not close enough to make him do anything but note them. It was, on the whole, a quiet day. Before long, he feared, Swemmel’s men would burst out of their bridgeheads north and south of Eoforwic. They would probably try to cut off and surround the city, as they had with Sulingen. He wondered if the battered Algarvian forces in the neighborhood could stop them. He had his doubts, though he would have gone on the rack before admitting as much.

  And if the Unkerlanters do cut us off? Well, then things will be. . . pretty bad.

  Motion he caught out of the corner of his eye made him whirl, stick swinging up ready to blaze. But it was only a couple of Hilde’s Helpers, the Forthwegian women who worked hard to keep the Algarvians in Eoforwic fed. Some of them--not all--kept the Algarvians happy other ways, too. But a man had to listen if one of them said no. Offending them might mean going hungry, and that would have been very bad.

  They wore hooded cloaks over their long, baggy tunics. One of them came up to Spinello and the trooper in the hole with him. She took a loaf from under the cloak and gave it to Spinello. “Bread with olive,” she said in bad Algarvian. “I myself to bake.”

  “Thank you, sweetheart.” Spinello bowed as if she were a duchess. He tried talking with her for a little while, but she didn’t speak enough of his language to follow much, and he had next to no Forthwegian.

  We could probably get along in classical Kaunian, he thought. He was fluent in the language of scholarship and sorcery, and in Forthweg, as nowhere else, it remained a living language, too. Many Forthwegians had learned it to deal with their Kaunian neighbors.

  But Spinello didn’t try it. Most Kaunians who had lived in Forthweg were dead by now, slain to fuel Algarve’s sorcerous onslaught against Unkerlant. And most Forthwegians weren’t particularly sorry about that. Had they been, the Algarvians would have had a much harder time doing what they’d done. So no, classical Kaunian didn’t seem like a good idea.

  He tore the loaf in half and gave one piece to the soldier in the hole with him. They both ate greedily. “Powers above, that’s good!” Spinello exclaimed. The trooper nodded, his cheeks as full of bread as a dormouse’s could get full of seeds.

  The clouds were thick enough that nightfall took Spinello by surprise. He hadn’t expected it to get dark for some little while yet, and hadn’t seen anything in the least resembling a sunset. “Have to keep our eyes open,” he called to his men. “Swemmel’s buggers are liable to try to sneak raiders across the river.” They’d done that a couple of times lately, and created more chaos than the small number of soldiers who’d paddled across the Twegen should have been able to spawn.

  But, a couple of hours later, two Algarvians came up to the river not far from where Spinello still kept his station. When he climbed out of his hole to find out what they were doing, one of them shook his head. “You haven’t seen us,” the fellow said. “We’ve never been here.”

  “Talk sense,” Spinello snapped. “I command this brigade. If I say the word, you bloody well won’t have been here.”

  Muttering, the man who’d spoken stepped closer to him, close enough to let him see the mage’s badge on the fellow’s tunic. “If you command this brigade, get us a little rowboat. I have work to do,” he said. “And if you try interfering with me, you’ll end up envying what happens to the cursed blonds, I promise you.”

  Spinello almost told him to go futter himself. Outside the army, he would have. He’d come close to a couple of duels in his time. But discipline and curiosity both restrained him. “What are you going to do?” he asked.

  “My job,” the mage answered, which stirred Spinello’s temper all over again. “Now get me that boat.”

  “Aye, your Highness,” Spinello said. The wizard only laughed. Spinello called orders to his men. They came up with a rowboat.
It was, undoubtedly, stolen from a Forthwegian. Spinello cared nothing about that. He bowed to the mage and to the fellow with him, who’d said not a word. “Welcome to the Royal Algarvian Navy.”

  He got not even a smile, let alone a laugh, and set them down for a couple of wet blankets. The mage began to incant. Some of his charms were in old-fashioned Algarvian, others in classical Kaunian, still others in what sounded like Unkerlanter. Spinello could follow the first two, not the third. The mage finished, cocked his head to one side, and nodded. “The confusion spell should hold for a while--they aren’t expecting it,” he said. “Now let’s tend to you.” His comrade only nodded. He got to work again, this time with a simple charm in classical Kaunian. Before Spinello’s eyes, the silent Algarvian’s appearance changed--he took on the seeming of an Unkerlanter. He then stripped off his own uniform and took from his pack that of an Unkerlanter major. He got into the rowboat and started rowing west across the Twegen.

  “Good luck,” Spinello called after him. “Bite somebody hard.” Why send a man in sorcerous disguise into Unkerlanter-held territory if not to bite somebody hard?

  From the boat, the fellow gave back the only three words Spinello ever heard from him: “I intend to.” Then he vanished from sight, sooner than Spinello expected. The confusion spell, he thought. He looked around for the mage to show off his own cleverness, but the fellow had already disappeared.

  Spinello wondered if the disguised Algarvian would return to his stretch of the riverfront, but he never saw the man again. The next day, the Unkerlanters stirred and milled around in a way that made him hope the fellow had accomplished something worth doing, but no one to whom he talked seemed to know.

  More of Hilde’s Helpers came by to give the Algarvians dishes they’d cooked. A rather pretty girl--pity she’s got that blocky Forthwegian build, Spinello thought--with a blue-and-white armband gave him a bowl with a spoon stuck in it. He sniffed and nodded. “Smells good, darling. What’s in it?”