Rulers of the Darkness Read online

  And so he, too, said, “No. We’re going to take this fellow in and deal with him.”

  “You are making a serious mistake,” the old man said. “I tell you, I am as much a Forthwegian as Hestan here.”

  Hestan there didn’t say another word. He didn’t call the old man who looked like a Forthwegian a liar, but he didn’t claim he was telling the truth, either. Oraste started hauling the fellow off toward Gromheort’s gaol, which was more crowded now than it had been when Forthweg ruled the city.

  “What have we got here?” an Algarvian gaoler asked when the constables frog-marched their prisoner into the building. “You catch him filching somebody’s false teeth?” He laughed at his own wit.

  Bembo said, “Suspicion of Kaunianity. Lock him up and see if he still looks the same tomorrow. The magic isn’t even good for a day at a time, from everything I’ve heard.”

  “Aha—one of those.” The gaoler brightened. “How’d you catch him? Can’t tell much by his hair, I’d say—white’s still white.”

  “I recognized his voice,” Bembo said proudly. “I’d run into him before, when he looked like what he really is. He made himself enough of a nuisance that he stuck in my mind.”

  “I am a Forthwegian,” the old man said. “I am not a Kaunian.”

  “Shut up,” the gaoler told him. “We’ll find out what you are.” He turned to a couple of his assistants, who looked to have been shooting dice before Bembo and Oraste came in with their captive. “Strip him—don’t leave him anything he can use to make more magic and make more work for us. Then throw him in a cell. Like the constable says, we’ll find out what he is.”

  “Aye,” one of his assistants said. They did as they were told. The old man squawked protests and tried to fight back, but he might have been a three-year-old for all the good it did him. The assistant gaolers led him away. Even though he was naked, he kept on squawking.

  “Now …” The gaoler reached into a desk drawer and pulled out some forms. “The paperwork. If he really is a Kaunian, you’ll get the credit. If he’s not, you’ll get the blame.”

  “Blame? For what?” Bembo clapped a hand to his forehead in melodramatic disbelief. “For bothering a miserable Forthwegian? Where’s the blame in that?”

  “There’s no blame for bothering a Forthwegian,” the gaoler agreed. “But if that old bugger turns out not to be a Kaunian, you get the blame for bothering me.” He favored the constables with a singularly unpleasant smile, the sort of smile that made them scurry out of the gaol in a hurry.

  Once they’d got outside, Oraste gave Bembo the same kind of smile. “You’d better not be wrong,” he said. Bembo wanted to scurry away from his partner, too, but he couldn’t. He had to smile himself, and nod, and go on with his shift.

  As soon as they came on duty the next day, they hurried to the gaol. The gaoler didn’t start cursing the moment he set eyes on them, which Bembo took for a good sign. “Well, you boys got it straight,” the gaoler said. “He was a Kaunian.”

  Oraste thumped Bembo on the shoulder, hard enough to stagger him. Bembo heard something Oraste missed. “Was?” he asked.

  “Aye.” The gaoler looked sour. “Sometime during the night, somebody gave him drawers and a tunic so he wouldn’t freeze. He twisted ‘em up and hanged himself with’em. That killed the spell along with him. Like I say, he was a Kaunian, all right.”

  “Filthy bastard,” Oraste said. “We could have got some use out of his life energy.”

  “That’s right,” Bembo said. “Killing yourself like that ought to be punishable by death.” He laughed. After a moment, Oraste and the gaoler did, too.

  “I’ve sent the forms off to the constabulary barracks,” the gaoler said. “You deserve the credit, like I told you yesterday. That turned out to be a nice bit of work.” Bembo beamed and preened and strutted. He hadn’t much minded hearing that the longwinded old Kaunian was dead. Now that he knew he’d get the credit for capturing him, he didn’t mind at all.

  Back in the days when he was a peasant like any other peasant in the Unkerlanter Duchy of Grelz, Garivald had looked forward to winter. With snowdrifts covering the fields, he’d spent most of his time indoors and a lot of that time drunk. Aside from taking care of the livestock that always shared the hut with his family and him, what else was there to do but drink?

  But he had no home now, only a miserable little shelter, not even worth dignifying with the name of hut, in the middle of the forest west of Herborn, the capital of Grelz. Munderic’s band of irregulars still held the woods, still held away the Algarvians who’d overrun Grelz and the Grelzer puppets who served them, but irregulars had a harder time of it in winter than they did in summer.

  Garivald came out of his shelter to look up through the pines and the bare-branched birches to the sullen gray sky overhead. It had snowed the day before. He thought it was done for a while, but you never could tell. He took a couple of steps. At each one, his felt boots left a clear track in the snow.

  “Footprints,” he growled, vapor puffing from his mouth at the word. “I wish there were a magic to make footprints go away.”

  “Don’t say things like that,” Obilot exclaimed. She was one of a handful of women in Munderic’s band. The women who ran off to fight the redheads and their local cat’s-paws commonly had reasons much more urgent than those of their male counterparts. Obilot went on, “Sadoc’s liable to get wind of it and try to cast a spell to be rid of them.”

  “That might not be so bad,” Garivald said. “Odds are, whatever magecraft he tried wouldn’t do anything.”

  “Aye, but it might go wrong so badly, it’d bring the Algarvians down on our heads,” Obilot said.

  Neither of them spoke of the benefits that would follow if Sadoc’s spell succeeded. Neither of them thought Sadoc’s spell, if he made one, would succeed. He was the closest thing to a mage Munderic’s band boasted. As far as Garivald was concerned, he wasn’t close enough. He had no training whatever. He was just a peasant who’d fiddled around with a few charms.

  “If only he knew when to try and when not to,” Garivald said mournfully. “He might be good enough for little things, but he won’t stay with those. He won’t even take a blaze at them. If it isn’t huge, he doesn’t want to bother with it.”

  “Who doesn’t want to bother with what?” Munderic asked. The leader of the irregulars was a big, hard-faced, burly man. He looked the part he played. His temper suited him to it, too. Scowling, he went on, “Who doesn’t, curse it? We all have to do whatever we can.”

  Obilot and Garivald looked at each other. Garivald owed Munderic his life. If the irregulars hadn’t plucked him from Algarvian hands, Mezentio’s men would have boiled him alive for making songs that mocked them. Even so, he didn’t want to give Munderic this particular idea, and neither, evidently, did Obilot.

  Munderic saw as much, too. His bushy eyebrows formed a dark bar over his eyes as he scowled. “Who doesn’t want to bother with what?” he repeated, an angry rumble in his voice. “You’d better tell me what you were talking about, or you’ll be sorry.”

  “It wasn’t anything, really.” Garivald didn’t want to antagonize Munderic, either. They’d already had a couple of runins. To his relief, Obilot nodded agreement.

  But they didn’t satisfy their leader. “Come on, out with it!” he barked. “If we’re going to make the invaders and the traitors howl, we’ve got to do everything we can.” His glare was so fierce, Garivald reluctantly told him what he and Obilot had been talking about. To his dismay, Munderic beamed. “Aye, that’d be just what we need. Footprints in the snow make it hard for us to raid without giving ourselves away. I’ll talk to Sadoc.”

  “There’s no guarantee he’ll be able to do anything like that, you know,” Obilot said. This time, Garivald was the one who nodded.

  “I’ll talk to him,” Munderic said again. “We’ll see what he can do. If we’ve got a mage here, we bloody well ought to get some use out of him, don’t you think?” He st
amped away without waiting for an answer.

  “If we had a mage, we could get some use out of him,” Garivald said after the irregulars’ leader was out of earshot. “But we’ve got Sadoc instead.”

  “I know,” Obilot said. They exchanged wry smiles. Garivald knew a certain amount of relief. He’d quarreled with Obilot not so long before, too.

  I never wanted to quarrel with anybody, he thought. I just wanted to live out my life back in Zossen with my wife and my son and my daughter. But Zossen lay a long, long way to the west—fifty miles, maybe even sixty. He didn’t know if he’d ever see his family again. Obilot was no great beauty, but she wasn’t homely, either. He didn’t want her angry at him.

  He’d been away from Annore for most of a year now. Had Obilot decided to slip under the blankets with him, he wouldn’t have thrown her out. But she hadn’t. She didn’t slip under the blankets with anyone, and she’d knifed a man who tried too persistently to slip under the blankets with her. The other women in the band of irregulars acted much the same way. Garivald looked toward her, but glanced away before their eyes met. What’ll you do next? he thought sourly. Start coming up with love songs?

  Obilot said, “Maybe nothing’ll come of it.” She didn’t sound as if she believed that.

  “Aye. Maybe.” Garivald didn’t sound as if he believed it, either.

  A couple of days later, Munderic gathered the irregulars together in the clearing at the heart of their forest fastness. “We’ve got to go out and sabotage a ley line.” he said. “There’s heavy fighting around Durrwangen, south and west of here. If the regular army can take it back, they strike the Algarvians a heavy blow. And the redheads know it, curse’em. They want to keep Durrwangen, same as they wanted to keep Sulingen. But they’ve got real supply lines into this place. The more we can do to keep men and behemoths and eggs from getting there, the better we serve Unkerlant. Have you got that?”

  “Aye,” the irregulars chorused, Garivald among them.

  “We’ve found a stretch of ley line the Grelzer traitors don’t guard well,” Munderic went on. “We’ll plant our eggs there. And we’ve got a new way of making sure the bastards who call Mezentio’s precious cousin Raniero King of Grelz can’t follow us. Sadoc will hide our tracks in the snow.” He waved to the man who would be a mage.

  “That’s right,” Sadoc said. He was a bruiser himself, maybe as much a bruiser as Munderic. “I’m sure it’ll work.” He stared from one of his comrades to another, challenging them to disagree with him.

  Nobody said anything. Garivald wanted to, but Sadoc already knew what he thought of his magecraft. Maybe he won’t make a hash of it this time, Garivald thought, his mind almost echoing Obilot’s words. Unfortunately, it also echoed his own mournful coda. Aye. Maybe.

  When night came, the irregulars left the forest and crossed the farm country around it. Garivald hoped Munderic was right when he said he knew about a length of ley line that wasn’t well guarded. Some of the men supposed to be serving King Raniero really stayed loyal to King Swemmel of Unkerlant, and aided them when and as they could. But others hated Swemmel worse than the Algarvians; those Grelzers, as he’d found to his dismay, made fierce, determined foes.

  Clouds scudded across the sky. Every so often, he got a glimpse of the moon, riding high in the northeast. Stars appeared, twinkled for a moment, and then vanished again. Obilot came up alongside Garivald. “Sadoc had better be able to hide our trail,” she said in a low voice. “If he can’t, the traitors will follow us home.”

  Garivald nodded. The earflaps on his fur cap bobbed up and down. “I’ve been thinking the same thing. I wish I hadn’t.”

  Sometimes, the snow was deep, drifted. The irregulars had to bull through the drifts or else find a way around them. Garivald kept muttering under his breath. Even if Sadoc could sorcerously erase footprints, could he get rid of these signs of passage, too? Had Munderic thought about that? Had Munderic thought about anything but hitting the Algarvians a good lick? Garivald doubted it.

  If a Grelzer company on patrol caught them out here in the open, they’d get slaughtered. He hung on to his stick—which had once belonged to a redhead who now had no further use for it—and hoped that wouldn’t happen.

  After what seemed like forever but the moon insisted was well before midnight, the irregulars came to the lines of shrubbery that marked the path of the invisible ley line. The shrubs kept men and animals from blundering into the path of an oncoming caravan. Garivald’s heart thudded as the irregulars pushed through them. This time, no Grelzer guards shouted a challenge. Munderic had known whereof he spoke there, anyhow.

  Some of the irregulars carried picks and spades as well as their sticks. They started digging a hole in which to conceal the egg they’d. brought to destroy the caravan. The ground was frozen hard; they had a demon of a time excavating. Garivald could have told them they would. They probably knew it for themselves, too, but had to do the best they could. They planted the egg and heaped snow over it. With luck, the Algarvians in the lead caravan car wouldn’t see it till too late.

  “Let’s go,” Munderic said when the job was done well enough—and when he didn’t feel like waiting anymore.

  “Back the way we came, as near as we can,” Sadoc added. “I’ll get rid of all the footprints at once.”

  “He’d better,” Garivald murmured to Obilot as they started off toward the forest. “We’re in trouble if he doesn’t, unless a blizzard blows up and sweeps our tracks away.”

  “I don’t think one’s coming,” she said. “This isn’t a hard winter, the way last year’s was. Just—cold.” Garivald nodded. It felt the same way to him. That didn’t mean he couldn’t freeze to death out here, only that freezing would take longer.

  He was weary by the time the irregulars got back to the edge of the woods. Twilight hadn’t touched the edge of the sky, but couldn’t be far away. He hadn’t heard the egg burst. Neither had Munderic, who was unhappy about it. “Something’s gone wrong,” the leader of the band kept saying. “Powers below eat me if something hasn’t gone wrong.”

  “Maybe the caravan got stuck in a snowdrift,” someone suggested.

  “No, I’m sure something’s buggered up somewhere,” Munderic said fretfully. Garivald feared he was right. Munderic rounded on Sadoc. “Even if it didn’t work, we don’t want the foe to know we’ve been out. Get rid of those tracks, like you said.”

  “Aye.” Sadoc nodded. He stooped in the snow and began to chant. The tune was one children used in a hide-and-seek game. Did that mean Sadoc was a fool, or that he truly could hide the footprints? Garivald waited and hoped. Sadoc chanted and made passes. With a last dramatic one, he cried out in a loud, commanding voice.

  He’d gathered power to him. Garivald could feel it in the air, as if lightning were building. All at once, it was released—and every footprint, all the way back to the ley line (or at least as far as the eye could reach) began to glow with a soft, shimmering iridescence.

  Munderic stared, then howled like a wolf. “You idiot!” he roared. “You dunderhead, you turd-witted son of a poxed sow, you—” He leaped at Sadoc. The only thing that kept him from murdering the inept mage was realizing—after he’d been pulled off—that glowing tracks in the snow weren’t too much more visible than ordinary ones. The irregulars fled for their shelters in the clearing. Their new tracks didn’t glow, for which Garivald thanked the powers above. He didn’t think Sadoc would be working more magic any time soon. He thanked the powers above for that, too.

  Krasta’s foot came down on an icy patch on the sidewalk of the Avenue of Equestrians. She sat down on the pavement suddenly and very hard. An elderly Valmieran man started toward her to help her up, but she was cursing so foully, he beat a hasty, embarrassed retreat.

  Her curses didn’t bother a couple of Algarvian soldiers on leave in Priekule. The kilted redheads hurried over to her and hauled her to her feet. “You being all right, lady?” one of them asked in Valmieran with a trilling Algarvian
accent.

  “I am very well. And I thank you.” Krasta was very conscious—even smugly conscious—of her own good looks. She was also very conscious that the redheads, given an inch, would cheerfully take a mile. If she were old and homely, they might well have walked right past her. Giving them her most haughty stare, she went on, “I am the Marchioness Krasta, and the companion to Colonel Lurcanio.”

  Her own rank probably meant very little to the soldiers in kilts. The Algarvian colonel’s rank meant they couldn’t take any liberties. They weren’t too drunk to realize it, either. “You being careful, milady,” one of them said. They both bowed, sweeping off their broad-brimmed hats in unison. And then they went away, perhaps in search of a woman who had no way, polite or otherwise, to tell them no. They probably wouldn’t have to search too far.

  Rubbing her tailbone, Krasta walked on in the opposite direction. The Avenue of Equestrians had always been Priekule’s main shopping thoroughfare, with shops of all sorts catering to the most fastidious—and expensive—tastes. It still was, but now only a shadow of its former self. The Algarvian occupiers had methodically plundered Valmiera for more than two and half years. It showed.

  They’d been methodically doing other things for more than two and a half years, too. Another Algarvian soldier came by, his arm around the waist of a blond Valmieran girl. He, of course, wore a kilt. But so did she, one that didn’t come close to reaching her knees. A lot of Valmieran women—and a fair number of Valmieran men—had adopted their conquerors’ fashions.

  Krasta sniffed. She kept right on wearing trousers. She’d occasionally worn kilts before the war—as much to shock as for any other reason—but never since. Despite the Algarvians who used the west wing of her mansion as their own, despite an Algarvian lover, in some ways she felt her Kaunian blood more acutely these days than ever before. That was odd, especially since she’d long been convinced Algarve would win the Derlavaian War.