Jaws of Darkness Read online

  “Stay safe, Colonel!” Jadwigai called in good Algarvian, and blew him a kiss. He waved his hat to her as he went forward. He would have thought more of her good wishes had she not sent kisses to other soldiers who went past her. He shrugged. That was how things were. She didn’t belong to him. She belonged to the brigade.

  “Mezentio!” Spinello yelled. “Algarve!” He still favored his wounded leg a little as he trotted forward. He could use it, though, which counted for more. A lot of Algarvians with wounds of one sort or another were back in active service these days. The kingdom needed them too much for them to stay back a moment longer than they had to.

  Major Rambaldo, he of the fancy clockwork, trotted along beside Spinello. He was half a head taller, and correspondingly longer of leg. He was also whipcord lean, where Spinello was stocky by Algarvian standards, and so seemed to be hanging back when he could have gone faster. “I wish we’d hit them yesterday, or even the day before,” he said, not breathing hard.

  “We wouldn’t have had the behemoths then,” Spinello answered. “We wouldn’t have had the dragons, either, or the Kaunians to kill.” With Jadwigai out of earshot, he spoke frankly.

  Rambaldo’s shrug was a work of art even among Algarvians, who could say more with their hands and bodies than most folk could with words. “The Unkerlanters wouldn’t have had the extra day or two to dig themselves into Pewsum, either.”

  Spinello grunted. An Unkerlanter detachment new in a place might be easily routed out. A day later, the job got harder. Two days later, it could become impossible. He’d seen as much in Sulingen and at the Durrwangen bulge and a good many other places besides. He hoped he wouldn’t see it again here.

  Eggs burst in front of the advancing Algarvians. Moments later, eggs burst among them; Swemmel’s soldiers in Pewsum had no intention of being dislodged. Algarvian behemoths lumbered forward to deal with the Unkerlanters’ less mobile egg-tossers. And then the terrible beam from a heavy stick blazed through white surcoat and armor and flesh of three behemoths in quick succession. The rest milled about in dismay before pulling back out of range. The heavy stick’s crew didn’t bother burning down individual foot-soldiers with it; that would have been like smashing cockroaches with an anvil.

  Feeling very much like a cockroach, Spinello scuttled forward, cherishing whatever cover he could find.

  Dragons painted in Algarvian green, red, and white swooped down on Pewsum. That horrible heavy stick waited for them, and swatted first one and then another out of the sky. Then more eggs burst around it, and it fell silent. But the dragons couldn’t silence all the sticks and egg-tossers around Pewsum, any more than the behemoths had, and Spinello’s brigade stalled just outside the town, taking casualties and unable to advance any farther.

  Huddled in a hole behind what was left of a stone fence, Spinello cursed the stubborn Unkerlanter defenders. “Well, you were right, Major,” he called to Rambaldo, who sprawled not far away. “Now we have to see what else we can do about it.” He raised his voice to a shout: “Crystallomancer!”

  One of the young mages attached to the brigade hurried up. “Aye, sir?”

  “Put me through to the mages at the special camp,” Spinello said. “We’re going to need the strong magic.”

  “Aye, sir,” the crystallomancer repeated, and took the glass globe from his pack. After activating it, he pushed it to Spinello: “Go ahead, sir.” Spinello spoke to the wizard whose image appeared in the crystal. The mage nodded. Then he vanished. The crystal flared and went inert. Spinello gave it back to the crystallomancer.

  “Will we get what you want?” Rambaldo asked.

  “We’ll get what we need,” Spinello answered, and the regimental commander nodded.

  The sorcerers at the special camp had had such requests many times before over the past two and a half years. Swemmel of Unkerlant preached efficiency; the Algarvian mages practiced it. Rounding up however many Kaunians they needed and slaying them didn’t take long.

  Peering out from behind the stone wall, Spinello watched the ground shake in Pewsum, as if it were being visited by its own private earthquake. But the magic the Algarvians powered with Kaunian life energy was potent beyond any mere temblor. Not only did buildings shudder and collapse, but great fissures in the ground opened and closed, gulping down men and even an Unkerlanter behemoth. And lambent purple flames shot up from the ground, engulfing still more enemy soldiers and beasts.

  Spinello’s whistle screeched, along with those of the rest of the Algarvian officers still able to advance. “Forward!” he shouted, and sprang to his feet himself. “Now that the mages have staggered ‘em, let’s knock ‘em flat!”

  With a cheer, the brigade went forward again. The men had confidence, no doubt of that. Some of them shouted, “Jadwigai!” along with “Mezentio!” and “Algarve!” Again Spinello wondered what the pretty little Kaunian mascot thought. She was close enough to Pewsum to have seen, even to have felt, the magecraft. How could she not know whence it came? But if she did, how could she stay friendly to the Algarvians who kept her? Could she pretend so well, just to stay alive? Spinello didn’t know. He wondered if he ever would.

  He also discovered, not for the first time, that counting on the Unkerlanters to stay stodgy was no longer a paying proposition. No sooner had his brigade burst from cover and rushed toward Pewsum than King Swemmel’s mages unleashed against them the same sorcery the town’s defenders had just suffered. The Unkerlanters didn’t kill Kaunians. They got rid of their own old and useless and condemned. But life energy was life energy. The spell wreaked as much havoc on the Algarvians as it had on the Unkerlanters.

  Spinello fell to the ground as it shuddered beneath him. Algarvian soldiers shrieked as violet flames devoured them. Not twenty feet from Spinello, the earth opened up, swallowing Major Rambaldo. An instant later, the crack slammed shut, crushing him and his fancy, ever so expensive windup clock. Spinello staggered to his feet once more, but he could see at a glance that the assault on Pewsum had failed.

  He hung his head and kicked at the frozen dirt. Algarve had seen too many failures lately, some small like this one, some very great indeed. When, he wondered, would his kingdom start seeing successes again?

  Leudast had spent a lot of time commanding a company while still a sergeant. He was far from the only Unkerlanter underofficer who’d done that. Unkerlant often gave responsibility without giving rank to go with it. That saved the paymasters money—it saved them more than just the monthly difference between a sergeant’s rate and a lieutenant’s, too, for everyone’s pay was chronically in arrears.

  But now Leudast was a lieutenant himself. It would have taken capturing a fugitive would-be king to get a born peasant bumped up to officer’s rank, but he’d done exactly that. Mezentio’s cousin Raniero, who’d styled himself King of Grelz, had gone into Swemmel’s stewpot, and Leudast wore two little brass stars on each of his tunic’s collar tabs.

  He still commanded a company.

  Marshal Rathar had promised him five pounds of gold for capturing Raniero. He hadn’t seen any of it yet. If he lived through the war, maybe he would. As a born peasant, he knew better than to complain. If he let people see he was unhappy, he didn’t know exactly what he’d get, but he had a good idea it wouldn’t be the missing five pounds of gold.

  At the moment, he stood inside a peasant hut not much different from the one he’d grown up in, save that one wall and half the thatched roof had burned away. With him stood the other lieutenants and sergeants commanding the companies in his regiment, and Captain Recared, the regimental commander. Recared looked preposterously young to be a captain; the previous summer, before the great battles in the Durrwangen salient, Recared had looked preposterously young to be a lieutenant.

  “You know what we have to do, men,” Recared said in the abrupt tones that marked him not only for a city man but for an educated city man to boot. “We’ve stopped the redheads’ drive on Herborn. They’re not going to take it back from us, n
o matter how much they want to. And they’ve stretched themselves thin trying, too. Now we see if we can bite off the columns they used for their push.”

  “We’ll hurt ‘em if we do,” Leudast remarked. His own accent said he came from the northeast, not far from the Forthwegian border, and sounded particularly out of place down here in Grelz.

  Recared smiled at him. “That’s the idea, Sergeant—uh, Lieutenant. The worse that happens to the Algarvians, the better for Unkerlant.”

  “Oh, aye, sir.” If anything, Leudast knew that better than his superior. He was one of what couldn’t be more than a handful of men who’d fought the redheads since the first day of the war against them. Most of the soldiers who’d served King Swemmel on that now long-vanished day were dead or captured or crippled. Leudast had been wounded only twice, and put out of action for a few weeks of the slaughter around Sulingen. If that wasn’t good luck, what was?

  “All right, then,” Recared said. “We’ve got plenty of behemoths. We’ve got plenty of dragons. And if we need sorcery, we’ll manage that, too. When I shout, ‘Forward!’ we shall go forward. We shall not halt until I shout, ‘Stop!’ Gentlemen, I do not intend to shout, ‘Stop!’ “

  Leudast and the rest of the company commanders looked at one another. Slow grins spread over their poorly shaved faces. One of their number, a sergeant, said, “Curse me if that’s not an Algarvian kind of thing to say. Makes it into a riddle, like.” The others nodded.

  Recared said, “The Algarvians have taught us some lessons in this war, no doubt about it. But that time is passing. By the powers above, it is. Now we’re the schoolmasters, and we’ll give them stripes for not learning.”

  The lieutenants, all of them but Leudast, nodded again. He and the sergeants looked blank. They were peasants, and knew little of schoolmasters.

  “Let’s go, then,” Recared said. “We can do it. We will do it. Nothing is more efficient than victory.”

  King Swemmel had been trying to make Unkerlanters efficient throughout his reign. As far as Leudast could see, the king hadn’t had a lot of luck. Also as far as Leudast could see, saying the king hadn’t had much luck was about the least efficient thing one of his subjects could do.

  He pulled his cloak more tightly around him as he left the farmhouse. He’d known hard enough winters in the north of Unkerlant. Down here in the Duchy of Grelz—the Kingdom of Grelz no more, not after what had happened to Raniero once Swemmel had his way—the wind seemed full of icy knives.

  “Do we hit the redheads, Lieutenant? The redheads and the traitors, I mean?” Sergeant Kiun asked. He’d been a common soldier when Leudast’s company captured Raniero, just as Leudast had been a sergeant. But Kiun had been the one who’d recognized that Mezentio’s cousin wasn’t just the Algarvian colonel his uniform proclaimed him to be. He’d been promised a pound of gold along with his promotion. He hadn’t seen it yet, either.

  “Aye, we do,” Leudast answered. “High time we finish breaking out of this box they’ve tried to put us in.” He’d had to break out of Algarvian encirclements before, and counted himself lucky to have escaped with his life. But this was different. For one thing, he and his comrades weren’t altogether cut off; the redheads hadn’t been able to slam the lid down on the box. And, for another, there was more power here inside this box than was out there trying to contain it.

  Egg-tossers began hurling their loads of death at the Algarvians. Watching the bursts kick up snow and smoke in the distance, Leudast nodded to himself. He’d seen heavier poundings—especially down in Sulingen, where his countrymen and the Algarvians had hammered at each other till the redheads finally broke—but he’d also seen what the Algarvians were capable of in this particular fight. They’d never flung so many eggs at the Unkerlanter trenches.

  Dragons painted Unkerlanter rock-gray swooped down out of the sky, dropping more eggs on the redheads and flaming men and behemoths they caught in the open. Few gaudy Algarvian dragons rose to challenge them.

  Captain Recared blew his whistle. “Forward!” he shouted. “Swemmel and Unkerlant! Urra!”

  “Forward!” Leudast echoed. Only then did he remember he’d finally got his hands on an officer’s whistle. He shrugged. Shouting would do. “Forward! Urra!”

  And forward they went, all of them shouting so they wouldn’t blaze one another by mistake. Some of them didn’t go forward very far, but stopped beams as soon as they broke from cover. Some of the shouts turned to screams. Red flowed here and there on white snow, flowed and quickly began to freeze.

  Back when things had gone well for the Algarvians, they’d always had a knack for flanking Unkerlanter units—sometimes squads, sometimes whole armies—out of position. Even after things started going not so well for them, the redheads had kept that gift for showing up exactly where they would make the most trouble. If they hadn’t had it, King Swemmel’s soldiers would long since have run them out of Unkerlant.

  Leudast wished his countrymen showed a similar knack. No matter what he wished, the Unkerlanters seemed to lack it. As far as he could see, Unkerlanter forces too often hit the Algarvians where they were strong and tried to bull through instead of hitting them where they were weak and going around. Had he been a general, that was what he would have tried to do. Maybe the Unkerlanter generals were trying to do it. If so, they didn’t have it down yet.

  On the other hand, if you hit anything hard enough and often enough, it would eventually fall over. The Unkerlanters had more egg-tossers and dragons than their foes. And they had many more behemoths. Behemoths on snowshoes were cursed awkward beasts, going forward at an aggressive waddle and kicking up little clouds of snow at every stride. But they went forward, which was the point of the exercise. Wherever the Algarvians tried to rally— and, with their usual skill and dash, they tried again and again—eggs from the tossers most behemoths carried, and beams from the heavy sticks the rest bore on their backs, smashed up strongpoints.

  “Mezentio!” Leudast had heard that defiant war cry more often than he could recall. This time, it came from a tiny village near the edge of a forest of snow-covered firs. The enemy soldiers holed up in the village blazed at the advancing Unkerlanters. Misses boiled steam from snow. Hits sent men sprawling bonelessly in death. “Mezentio!” The shout rang out again and again.

  But it didn’t sound right. Algarvians yelled their king’s name almost as if they were singing it. These soldiers simply shouted it, the same as they might have shouted, “Swemmel!”

  The very same as they might have shouted, “Swemmel!” … Leudast stiffened. He shouted, too: “Those aren’t redheads! Those are fornicating Grelzers!”

  Men who’d served the Algarvian puppet Kingdom of Grelz couldn’t very well shout, “Raniero!” any more, not after Swemmel had boiled Raniero alive. A lot of the soldiers who’d chosen to wear dark green tunics instead of rock-gray had sneaked away from the fighting, doing their best to pretend they’d been nothing but peasants or shopkeepers while the Algarvians occupied Grelz. Few who tried to surrender to Swemmel’s soldiers succeeded. None had joy of it afterwards.

  But here some stubborn souls still did what they could to help Mezentio’s cause. “Forward!” Leudast shouted again. This time, he remembered to blow the whistle. “Let’s give the traitors what they deserve.”

  Kilted soldiers slipped away through the trees: the Grelzers were buying time for their Algarvian comrades to get away. Maybe the men who’d followed Raniero and the dream of Grelz as a kingdom of its own realized how little their lives were worth with the duchy back in Swemmel’s hands and the king’s inspectors sure to be hunting them down. Or maybe the Algarvians were simply selling out their erstwhile allies.

  Leudast didn’t care why the Grelzers fought. He just wanted to be rid of them as fast as he could so he could go after the escaping redheads. His men converged on the village from three sides. Some of them had a shout of their own: “Death to the traitors!”

  By the way the Grelzers blazed, there weren’t v
ery many of them. They didn’t look like holding up the pursuit for long. But, as the men from Leudast’s company came close to the tumbledown shacks in which the enemy fought, they got a nasty surprise: What looked like small pottery jugs flew toward them and burst like miniature eggs when they hit the ground. Several soldiers howled as flying shards scored their flesh. Others hesitated, and the attack wavered.

  “Come on, curse it!” Leudast shouted. “I don’t care what sort of toys they’ve got—there can’t be more than a dozen of them!” He got up and went on toward the hamlet. If his men didn’t follow, he wouldn’t last long.

  Follow they did. The Grelzers proved to have only a few of those small, throwable eggs. Leudast would have liked to ask them where they’d got the few they did have, but, by the time the fight was over, no Grelzers remained alive to ask.

  His broad shoulders rose and fell in a shrug. If the Grelzers had this particular toy, the Algarvians would, too. He was liable to find out more about it than he wanted to know. He shrugged again. “Are we going to let those Algarvians get free of us? We’d cursed well better not!” He plunged into the woods after the redheads. Again, his men followed.

  More often than not, Marchioness Krasta worried about no one’s feelings but her own. Thus, when her maidservant, Bauska, came into her bedchamber one morning to help her decide what to wear that day—in Krasta’s mind, always a vitally important choice—she greeted the woman with, “How’s your little bastard doing?”

  Bauska’s lips tightened. She’d had a daughter by one of the Algarvian officers billeted in Krasta’s mansion on the outskirts of Priekule. Carefully, she said, “She’s doing very well, milady.”