Darkness Descending (2 page)

One

T
ealdo slogged west across what seemed an endless sea of grass. Every so often, he or his Algarvian comrades would flush a bird from cover. They’d raise their sticks to their shoulders and blaze at it as it fled. They were ready to blaze at anything.

Sometimes they would flush an Unkerlanter from cover. Unlike the birds, the Unkerlanters had a nasty habit of blazing back. The Unkerlanters also had an even nastier habit of staying in cover till a good-sized party of Algarvian soldiers had gone by, and then blazing at them from behind. The ones Tealdo and his comrades caught after stunts like that did not go east into captives’ camps, even if they tried to surrender.

“Stubborn whoreson,” Sergeant Panfilo said, dragging one such soldier in rock-gray out of his hole once he’d been stalked and slain. His coppery side whiskers and waxed mustachios were sadly draggled. “Don’t know what he thought he was doing, but he isn’t going to do it anymore.”

“He wounded two of ours, one of them pretty bad,” Tealdo said. “I suppose he figured—or his commanders figured—that’s fair exchange.” His own mustache and little chin beard, about as red as Panfilo’s, could also have used sprucing up. No matter how fastidious you wanted to be, you couldn’t stay neat in the field.

From up ahead, Captain Galafrone called, “Come on, you lazy bastards! We’ve got a long way to go before we can take it easy. Unkerlant isn’t much of a kingdom, but it’s cursed big.”

“And that’s the other thing this fellow was doing,” Tealdo said, stirring the dead Unkerlanter with his foot: “Slowing us down, I mean.”

Panfilo swept off his hat and gave Tealdo a sardonic bow. “I thank you for your explanation, my lord Marshal. Or are you perhaps pretending to be the king?”

“Never mind,” Tealdo said. Arguing with his sergeant didn’t pay. Neither did showing Panfilo up.

They started marching west again, toward a column of smoke that marked a burning village. A young lieutenant with soot streaking his face came up to Galafrone and said, “Sir, will you order in your men to rout out the last of those miserable Unkerlanters in there?”

Galafrone frowned. “I don’t much like to do it. I’d sooner leave ‘em behind and push on. If we fight for every miserable little village, we’ll run out of men before King Swemmel does.”

“But if we pass them all by, they’ll harass us from behind,” the lieutenant said. Then he noticed that Galafrone, while wearing a captains badges, had none that proclaimed him a noble. The young officer’s lip curled. “I don’t suppose commoners can be expected to have the spirit to understand such things.”

Galafrone knocked him down. When he started to get up, the veteran knocked him down again, and kicked him for good measure. “I don’t suppose they teach juniors to respect their superior officers these days,” he remarked in conversational tones. “But you’ve just learned that lesson, haven’t you?”

“Sir?” the lieutenant wheezed, and then, “Aye, sir.” When he got up again, Galafrone let him. He took a deep breath before resuming, “Sir, you may not care for my tone”—which was, Tealdo judged, a pretty fair understatement—”but the question remains: how can we leave the Unkerlanters behind us?”

“They’ll wither on the vine once we pass them by,” Galafrone said. “We’ve got to knock this whole kingdom flat, not fight through it one village at a time.”

“If we don’t capture the villages, sir”—the young lieutenant was careful now to speak with all due military formality, but did not back away from his own view—”how are we going to knock the kingdom flat?”

Despite the fellow’s earlier insolence, Tealdo thought it a decent question. Galafrone didn’t hesitate in answering it. Galafrone, as far as Tealdo could see, rarely hesitated about anything. “We’ve got to smash the big armies,” he said. “These little village garrisons are just nuisances, and they’ll be bigger nuisances if we let them.” He waved to indicate a path around the village. “Come on, men,” he called, raising his voice. “We’ve got to press on.”

“Captain,” the lieutenant said stiffly, “I must protest, and I shall report your conduct to higher authority.”

Galafrone gave him a wave of invitation so elegant, any noble might have envied it. “Go right ahead. If you care to let people know your favorite way to knock down a stone wall is by ramming it with your head, that’s your affair.” He waved again, this time getting his company moving in the direction he judged best. The lieutenant watched them go, his hands on his hips, the picture of exasperated frustration.

Coming up alongside of Trasone, Tealdo said, “I hope those Unkerlanters don’t break out of there and kick us in the arse when we’re looking the other way.”

“Aye, I can think of things I’d like better,” Trasone agreed. He pointed ahead toward a tangled wood of oaks and elms. “I can think of things I like better than heading through that, too. Powers above only know what the Unkerlanters have got lurking in there.”

Several unpleasant possibilities crossed Tealdo’s mind. Evidently, they crossed Galafrone’s mind, too, for the captain ordered a halt. Now he looked unhappy. “They could have a whole regiment in among those trees,” he said. “I don’t care to bypass them, not even a little I don’t.” His face grew longer still. “Maybe that cursed lieutenant wasn’t as stupid as I thought.”

Now Tealdo did see him have trouble making up his mind. Before he could give any orders, a man emerged from the woods. Tealdo threw himself flat and had his stick aimed, ready to send a beam at the fellow, before noticing he wore tunic and kilt of light brown—Algarvian uniform—not an Unkerlanter’s rock-gray long tunic.

“It’s all right,” the soldier called in Algarvian with a northwestern accent much like Tealdo’s. “They threw us out of here day before yesterday, but not for long. A few of the whoresons may still be running around loose off the paths, but you shouldn’t have any trouble getting through.”

“That sounds good enough,” Galafrone said. He waved his company forward. “Let’s go! The sooner we’re through, the sooner we can hit the Unkerlanters another lick.”

Tealdo rapidly discovered the Algarvian soldier who’d told him the woods were mostly clear of Unkerlanters was a born optimist. Some paths through the woods were clear. The Algarvians already in among the trees kept those paths clear by posting guards along them. One of the guards called, “You go off the road to squat in the bushes, you’re liable to get blazed or get your throat cut or have something worse happen to you.”

“Who does hold these stinking woods, then?” Tealdo called back.

“Wherever we are, we hold,” the guard answered. “Eventually, they’ll run out of food and they’ll run out of charges for their sticks. Then they’ll either surrender or try and pretend they were peasants all along. In the meantime, they’re a cursed nuisance.”

Galafrone swore. “Aye, maybe that lieutenant did have a point.” A moment later, though, he snorted and added, “Besides the one on top of his head, I mean. Thought he was a noble, so his shit didn’t stink.” He turned back to his men. “Hurry along, you chuckleheads, hurry along. Got to keep moving.”

“Got to keep moving is right,” Trasone grumbled. “Sounds like we’re nothing but targets if we don’t.”

They turned out to be targets even when they did keep moving. A beam slammed into the trunk of an oak in front of Tealdo. Steam hissed out of the hole charred in the living wood. It would have hissed out of a hole charred in his living flesh the same way.

He threw himself off the track and behind a log. Somewhere behind him, a comrade was screaming. Off to the other side of the path, the Unkerlanters were shouting: hoarse cries of “Urra! Urra!” and King Swemmel’s name repeated again and again. More beams hissed through the air above Tealdo’s head, giving it the smell it had just after lightning struck.

From behind a nearby bush, Trasone called, “I’m sure glad we cleared the whoresons out of these woods. They must have been standing on each other’s shoulders in here before we came through and did it.”

“Oh, aye.” Tealdo hunkered down lower behind his log as the shouting on the other side of the path got louder. “And now they’re going to try and throw us out again.”

Still shouting “Urra!” Unkerlanters swarmed across the path. Tealdo blazed one down, but then had to scramble back frantically to keep from being cut off and surrounded. All at once, he understood how the Forthwegians and Sibians and Valmierans and Jelgavans—aye, and the Unkerlanters, too—must have felt when King Mezentio’s armies struck them. He would sooner have done without the lesson.

Mezentio and the Algarvian generals had outplanned their foes as well as beaten them on the battlefield. The Unkerlanters here in this stretch of wood showed no such inspired generalship. All they had were numbers and ferocity. Tealdo tripped over a root and fell headlong. Those were liable to be enough.

“Rally by squads!” Captain Galafrone shouted, somewhere not too far away.

“To me! To me!” That was Sergeant Panfilo. Never had his raucous voice seemed so welcome to Tealdo.

As Tealdo made his way toward Panfilo, Galafrone shouted again, this time for his crystallomancer. Tealdo’s lips skinned back from his teeth. One way or another, the Unkerlanters were going to catch it.

He only hoped he didn’t catch it first. Along with Trasone, he found Sergeant Panfilo. They all had to keep falling back, though, ever deeper among the trees. Tealdo began to wonder if they would run into still more Unkerlanters there. He would hear cries of “Urra!” and “Swemmel!” in his nightmares as long as he lived. He hoped he lived long enough to have nightmares.

He cheered when eggs started falling among the Unkerlanters who’d broken the Algarvian grip on the path. He cheered again when shouts of “Mezentio!” rang out from the east, and yet again when the Unkerlanters started yelling in dismay rather than in fury.

As Algarvian reinforcements struck the Unkerlanters, the pressure on Galafrone’s company eased. “Powers above be praised for crystallomancers,” Panfilo said, wiping sweat from his face.

“Aye.” Tealdo and Trasone spoke together. Trasone went on, “Say whatever you want about these cursed Unkerlanters, but going up against them isn’t like fighting the Jelgavans or the Valmierans. We’ll lick ‘em, aye, but they don’t know they’re licked yet, if you know what I mean.”

“That’s the truth.” Tealdo turned around, still nervous lest some Unkerlanters come at him from behind. “Uh-oh.” He caught a glimpse of light brown kilt behind a bush. By the way the Algarvian soldier lay, Tealdo knew the fellow had to be dead. He looked around, but all his companions—all the men who’d rallied to Sergeant Panfilo—were still standing. He took a few steps forward, then stopped in his tracks.

Panfilo and Trasone followed him. Trasone gulped. “Powers above,” Panfilo said softly.

The Algarvians, half a dozen of them, looked to have been dead for a couple of days. Maybe they’d been caught in the earlier Unkerlanter counterattack in the woods. The guard on the path had had the right of it. They hadn’t been blazed. They hadn’t had their throats cut. They’d been gruesomely and systematically mutilated. Most of them had their kilts hiked up. What the Unkerlanters had done down there ...