Rulers of the Darkness Read online

  From behind her, someone called, “Congratulations on still having any money to spend, milady!”

  She turned. Up the street toward her came Viscount Valnu. He was strikingly handsome, and would have been even more so had he not looked quite so much like a genial skull. He was one of the first men Krasta knew who’d started wearing kilts. She looked him up and down, then shook her head. “You’ve got knobby knees,” she said in the tones of one passing sentence.

  Nothing fazed Valnu. His grin grew more impudent yet. “I’ve got a baby’s arm holding an apple, too, sweetheart.”

  “In your dreams,” Krasta said with a snort; she knew the truth there. She waited for Valnu to come up to her. “And what are you doing here, if you haven’t got any money?” Nobody came to the Avenue of Equestrians without money; the street offered poor folk nothing.

  Valnu patted her on the backside. She couldn’t decide whether to slap him or start laughing. In the end, she didn’t do anything. The viscount made outrageousness part of his stock in trade. Blue eyes flashing, he answered, “Oh, I manage to scrape a couple of coppers together every now and then. I have my ways, so I do.”

  He might have meant he was a gigolo. He might have meant he was something with a harsher name; everyone who knew him knew his versatility. But he might just have meant he’d had a good run at dice, or that some rents from properties out in the provinces had come in. You never could tell with Valnu.

  Needling him a little, Krasta asked, “And what’s new with the Algarvians?”

  “How should I know, darling?” he said. “You see more of them than I do. That house of yours is swarming with beefy redheads in kilts. Do you like their legs better than mine? Or will Lurcanio fling you in a dungeon if you even look at anyone but him?” He bared his teeth in happy, even friendly, malice.

  Since she couldn’t tell what Colonel Lurcanio might do, she was usually circumspect when she looked at anyone but him. “I don’t invite them to grand, gruesome orgies at my mansion,” she said.

  “You don’t need to. They’re screwing all the maidservants anyhow,” Valnu answered. Krasta’s chief serving woman had had a baby by Lurcanio’s former adjutant, so she couldn’t very well deny that. At least Valnu hadn’t come right out and said that Lurcanio was screwing her. From him, that was unusual delicacy.

  Krasta had trouble holding her thoughts on any one thing. Her wave encompassed the Avenue of Equestrians and the whole city. “I’m so sick of dreariness!” she burst out.

  “Things could be better,” Valnu agreed. He waited till a couple of more plump, staring Algarvian soldiers enjoying leave in the captured capital of Valmiera went by and got safely out of earshot before adding, “Things could be worse, too. Those fellows are probably in from Unkerlant, for instance. It’s a lot worse there.”

  Unkerlant, to Krasta, might as well have been a mile beyond the moon. “I’m talking about places where civilized people go,” she said with a sneer.

  “Kaunians go to Unkerlant, the same as Algarvians do,” Valnu said in a low voice, almost a whisper. “The difference is, some Algarvians come out again.”

  The ice that ran through Krasta had nothing to do with the patch that had made her slip. “I saw that news sheet—broadsheet—whatever you want to call it.” She shuddered. “I believe it. I believe everything it says.”

  One of the reasons she believed the horrors the sheet described was that it was written in her brother’s hand. She hadn’t told Valnu about that, nor Lurcanio, either. A lifetime of cattiness had taught her the importance of keeping some things secret. Lurcanio was after Skarnu as things were.

  And you still let him sleep with you? she wondered, as she did every so often. But Algarve was stronger than Valmiera, and Lurcanio had proved himself stronger than she was—a shock that still lingered. What choice had she had? None she’d seen then, none she saw now.

  As if to rub salt in the wound, Valnu said, “The redheads keep on falling back in southern Unkerlant. I don’t think Durrwangen will hold.”

  “Where did you hear that?” Krasta asked. “It’s not in any of the news sheets.”

  “Of course it’s not.” Valnu bared his teeth, mocking her naïveté. “The Algarvians aren’t fools. They don’t want anybody here finding out things aren’t going quite so well. But they know—and they talk among themselves. And sometimes they talk where other people can listen. Me, for instance.” He struck a pose so absurd, Krasta couldn’t help laughing.

  But that laugh congealed on her face as a couple of constables came up the Avenue of Equestrians toward Valnu and her. They weren’t Algarvians; they were the same Valmierans who’d patrolled the city before the kingdom fell. They wore almost the same dark green uniforms they had then. Their cap badges, though, were crossed axes, and crossed axes were also stamped on the brass buttons that held their tunics closed. Something seemed stamped on their features, too: a hard contempt for their own kind. They glared at her as they tramped past.

  She glared, too, but only at their backs. Turning to Valnu, she complained, “They have no respect for rank.” However angry her words, she didn’t speak very loud: she didn’t want those grim-looking men to hear.

  “You’re wrong, my sweet,” Valnu said, and Krasta gave him a sour look as well. He blithely ignored it, as he blithely ignored so many things. Wagging a finger in her face, he went on, “They do indeed respect rank. As far as they’re concerned, the Algarvians have it, and everyone else is scum. The Algarvians agree with them, of course.”

  “Of course,” Krasta said dully. That wasn’t too far removed from her own thoughts of a moment before. The Algarvians had strength, and if strength didn’t give rank, what did? Blood, she thought, but the redheads had the strength to ignore that if they chose. “They will win the war, in spite of everything,” she murmured. Now her glance toward Valnu was almost beseeching; she wanted him to tell her she was wrong.

  He didn’t. He said, “They may. They may very well. They’ve already taken more knocks than they ever expected, but they’re still strong, too. And their mages don’t care what they do—we know about that. If they win, there’s liable not to be a Kaunian left alive in Forthweg by the time they’re through.”

  Before the war, Krasta hadn’t thought much about the Kaunians in Forthweg. When she did think of them, it was as backwoods bumpkins in a distant, backward kingdom. They were blood of her blood, aye, but distant cousins she would just as soon have forgotten. Poor relations. But the Algarvians seemed bound and determined to teach the lesson that even poor relations were relations after all.

  Something crossed Krasta’s mind. She didn’t like thinking about these things—truth to tell, she didn’t like thinking at all—but she couldn’t help it. And she blurted forth the horrid notion as if to exorcise it: “What if they run out?”

  Valnu patted her on the head. “My occasionally dear, you must not say these things, lest you risk losing your proud reputation as a featherbrain.” She let out an indignant squawk. He ignored her and leaned forward so that his mouth was right by her ear. He teased her earlobe with his tongue for a moment, then whispered three words: “Night and fog.”

  “What?” The teasing tongue distracted her. She was easily distracted. “What’s that got to do with anything?” She’d seen NIGHT AND FOG painted on the windows or doors of shops that suddenly closed for no reason anyone could find, but found no connection between the phrase and her own frightened question.

  Viscount Valnu patted her again and gave her a sweet smile, as if she were a child. “I take it back,” he said, fond indulgence in his voice. “You really are a featherbrain.”

  “I ought to slap your face,” she snapped. She didn’t know why she didn’t. Had anyone else spoken to her so (except Colonel Lurcanio, who hit back), she would have. But Valnu made a habit of saying and doing preposterous things, to her and to everyone he knew. His panache had kept him out of trouble so far, and kept him out of trouble now.

  He said, “Here, let’s do some
thing that’s more fun instead,” took her in his arms, and gave her a thoroughly competent kiss. Then, bowing as extravagantly as an Algarvian, he turned and sauntered up the Avenue of Equestrians as if he had not a care in the world. Knees aside, he looked better in a kilt than most redheads.

  Krasta hadn’t bought anything—a shockingly unusual trip to the Avenue of Equestrians. Even so, she went back to her carriage, which waited in a side street. Her driver, surprised at her coming back so soon, hastily hid a flask. “Take me home,” she told him. But would she find any shelter there, either?

  Three

  Winter was the rainy season in Bishah. The capital of Zuwayza rarely got much in the way of rain, but what it got, it got in winter. Sometimes, at this season, it also got cool enough at night to make Hajjaj think wearing clothes might not be the worst idea in the world.

  The Zuwayzi foreign minister’s senior wife patted his hand when he presumed to say that out loud. “If you want to put on a robe, put on a robe,” Kolthoum told him. “No one here will mind if you do.” Her tone suggested than anyone living in Hajjaj’s home who did mind any eccentricity he happened to show would answer to her, and would not enjoy doing it.

  But he shook his head. “My thanks, but no,” he said. “No for two reasons. First, the servants would be scandalized, no matter what they said. I’m an old man now. I’ve been through too many scandals to invite another one.”

  “You’re not so old as all that,” Kolthoum said.

  Hajjaj was far too courteous to laugh at his senior wife, but he knew better. His hair, having gone from black to gray, was now going from gray to white. (So was Kolthoum’s; they’d been yoked together for almost fifty years. Hajjaj didn’t notice it in her, for he saw her through the eyesight of a shared lifetime, where today and the lost time before the Six Years’ War could blur into each other at a blink.) His dark brown skin had grown wrinkled and leathery. When it did rain here, his bones would ache.

  He went on, “The second reason is even more compelling: so far as I know, we haven’t got any clothes here. I have this style and that—short tunics and long ones and kilts and trousers and who knows what useless fripperies—in a closet next to my office down in the city, but I don’t need to bother with such foreign nonsense in my own home.”

  “If you’re feeling chilly, it isn’t nonsense,” Kolthoum said. “I’m sure we could have a maidservant fix you something out of a blanket or curtains or whatever would suit you.”

  “I’m fine,” Hajjaj insisted. His senior wife looked eloquently unconvinced, but stopped arguing. One of the reasons they’d got on so well for so long was that they’d learned not to push each other too far.

  Tewfik, the majordomo, walked into the chamber where they were sitting. Next to him, Hajjaj truly wasn’t so old as all that: Tewfik had served his father before him. Bowing, the clan retainer said, “Sorry to disturb you, lad”—he was the only man Hajjaj knew who could call him that—“but a messenger from the palace just brought you this.” He handed Hajjaj a roll of paper sealed with King Shazli’s seal.

  “I thank you, Tewfik,” Hajjaj replied, and the majordomo bowed again. Hajjaj wasn’t upset that he hadn’t heard the messenger arrive; sheltering behind thick sandstone walls, his home, like any clanfather’s, was a compound well on its way to being a little village. He put on his spectacles, broke the royal seal, unrolled the paper, and read.

  “Can you speak of it?” Kolthoum asked.

  “Oh, aye,” he said. “His Majesty summons me to his audience chamber tomorrow morning, that’s all.”

  “But you’d see him tomorrow anyhow,” his senior wife observed. “Why does he need to summon you?”

  “I don’t know,” Hajjaj admitted. “By tomorrow morning, though, I should find out, don’t you think?”

  Kolthoum sighed. “I suppose so.” She reached out and patted her husband on the thigh, a gesture having more to do with sympathy than with desire. It had been a long time since they’d made love. Hajjaj couldn’t remember just how long, in fact, but their companionship hardly needed physical intimacy anymore. One of these days, he would have to wed a new junior wife if he sought such amusements. Lalla, recently divorced, had been more expensive and more temperamental than she was worth. One of these days. As he neared seventy, lovemaking seemed less urgent than it had a couple of decades earlier.

  He fortified himself with strong tea the next morning before his driver took the carriage down from the foothills and into Bishah proper. It hadn’t rained lately, which meant the road wasn’t muddy. It also wasn’t dusty, a more common annoyance.

  Men shouted back and forth on the roof of the royal palace. They weren’t guards; the Zuwayzin liked King Shazli well. They were roofers: when the rains came, even the royal roof leaked. Unlike his citizens, Shazli didn’t have to wait his turn to get things set right.

  As he’d said he would, the king awaited his foreign minister in the audience chamber, a less formal setting than the throneroom. Shazli was about half Hajjaj’s age. Hajjaj thought well of him: for a man so young, he was no fool. Only a gold circlet showed the king’s rank—the Zuwayzi custom of nudity made display harder.

  Bowing, Hajjaj said, “How may I serve your Majesty?”

  “Before we talk business, we can take refreshment,” Shazli answered, by which Hajjaj knew the business wasn’t a desperate emergency—the king, unlike his subjects, could put aside the rules of hospitality if he chose. Shazli clapped his hands. A serving woman brought in tea and date wine and honey cakes enlivened with chopped pistachios.

  While they nibbled and sipped, Shazli and Hajjaj were limited to polite small talk. Presently, the wine drunk and the cakes diminished, the maidservant came back and carried off the silver tray on which she’d fetched them. Hajjaj watched her swaying backside with appreciation but without urgency. That wasn’t just his years; he’d seen so much bare flesh, it didn’t inflame him as it did most Derlavaian folk.

  “You will be wondering why I summoned you.” Rituals completed, Shazli could with propriety get down to business.

  “So I will, your Majesty,” Hajjaj agreed. “As always, though, I expect you will enlighten me.”

  “Always the optimist,” King Shazli said. Hajjaj raised an eyebrow. He’d been his kingdom’s foreign minister since Zuwayza regained her freedom from an Unkerlant embroiled in the Twinkings War after the earlier ravages of the Six Years’ War. Few men who’d spent their whole careers as diplomatists retained much in the way of optimism by the time they got old. Shazli’s wry chuckle said he did know that. He reached under a pillow next to the one against which he reclined and pulled out a sheet of paper. Passing it to Hajjaj, he said, “This was brought to our line under flag of truce and, once its import was recognized, flown straight here by dragon.”

  Like any Zuwayzi, Hajjaj carried a large leather wallet to make up for his dearth of pockets. As he had for Shazli’s summons, he took out his spectacles so he could read the document. When he was through, he peered over the lenses at his sovereign. “Unkerlant has never been a kingdom renowned for subtlety,” he remarked. “The Unkerlanters would always sooner order than persuade, and they would sooner threaten than order … as we see here.”

  “As we see here,” the king agreed. “All-out war against us—‘war to the knife’ was the phrase they used, wasn’t it?—unless we leave off fighting them and go over to their side against Algarve. They graciously allow us three days’ time before our reply is due.”

  Hajjaj read the document again. Shazli had accurately summarized it. Inclining his head, the foreign minister inquired, “And what would you have of me in aid of this, your Majesty?”

  “Can Swemmel do as he threatens?” Shazli demanded. “If he can, can we hope to withstand him if he hurls everything he has against us?”

  “I hope you are also asking General Ikhshid these same questions,” Hajjaj said. “I am not a soldier, nor do I pretend to be.”

  “I am consulting Ikhshid, aye.” King Shazli nodded.
“And I have some notion of what you are and what you are not, your Excellency. I’d better, after all these years. I want your view not as a man of war but as a man of the world.”

  Reclining against cushions didn’t make even a seated bow easy, but Hajjaj managed. “You do me too much credit,” he murmured, thinking nothing of the sort. After a few seconds, he shook his head. “I don’t believe King Swemmel can do it,” he said. “Aye, the Unkerlanters crushed Algarve at Sulingen, but they’re still locked with Mezentio’s men from the Narrow Sea in the south to the Garelian Ocean here in the tropic north. If they pull enough men from their lines to be sure of crushing us, the Algarvians are bound to find a way to make them pay. Algarve can hurt them worse than we’d ever dream of doing.”

  “Ikhshid said the same thing when I asked him last night, which does somewhat relieve my mind,” Shazli said. “Still … My next question is, is Swemmel so mad for revenge against us that he’d do anything to harm us, not caring what might happen to his own kingdom?”

  Hajjaj clicked his tongue between his teeth and sucked in a long, thoughtful breath. No, his sovereign was no fool. Far from it. Though a rational man himself, Shazli knew Swemmel of Unkerlant wasn’t, or wasn’t always. Swemmel did some unbelievably foolish things, but he also did some unexpectedly clever ones, not least because nobody else could think along with him.

  After a second longish pause, Hajjaj said, “I don’t believe Swemmel will forget the war against Algarve just to punish us. I would not swear by the powers above, but I don’t believe so. The Algarvians, over the past year and a half, have made themselves very hard for any Unkerlanter to forget.”

  “This is also General Ikhshid’s view,” King Shazli said. “I am glad the two of you speak with a single voice here, very glad indeed. If you disagreed, I would have more hesitation about rejecting the Unkerlanter demands out of hand.”

  “Oh, your Majesty, you mustn’t do that!” Hajjaj exclaimed.