Darkness Descending (49 page)

Swemmel stared down at him from his high seat. The king’s eyes glowed. His shoulders hunched forward, giving him the aspect of a vulture peering around for carrion. His embroidered robe, encrusted with pearls and jewels, seemed hastily thrown on for this audience. “Rest assured, Marshal: did we think that, you would long since have gone forward thus.”

“Good,” Rathar said. A sour odor came to him from Swemmel. Was the king drunk? Or, worse, was he hung over? Were his wits working at all, or would he blindly lash out at whatever displeased him? Rathar took a deep breath. He’d find out.

“What do you propose now?” the king demanded. “You could not defend the border, you could not hold Herborn—and now you must defend Cottbus. How will you go about it?”

“Your Majesty, the enemy has taken Lehesten. He threatens Thalfang. We must retake the one and keep the other from falling, or else we are ruined and Cottbus falls.” There. Now it was said. How would Swemmel take it?

“Cowards,” Swemmel muttered. “Cowards and traitors. They’re everywhere—everywhere, curse it.” His gaze paralyzed Rathar as readily as the marshal had overawed the servant. “How are we to overcome them?”

“We’d better beat Mezentio’s men first,” Rathar answered. “If we don’t do that, nothing else matters. We need every soldier now—
every
soldier, your Majesty, and every dragon, and every behemoth, and our little surprise for the Algarvians as well. Such things are best saved for when they are needed most, and this is the time.”

“Can our person be properly protected if these men and beasts are taken away?” Swemmel asked anxiously.

“Can your person be properly protected if you have to try to flee for your life from Cottbus with the redheads closing a ring around it after they push on from Thalfang and Lehesten?” Rathar returned.

King Swemmel grunted, a sound full of pain. “Traitors,” he muttered again. “Who will save us from traitors?” He glared at Rathar.

“One way or another, my head will answer for this, your Majesty,” the marshal said. “Whatever happens, I am not going west from Cottbus. If we have to fight here in the city, then here I will fight.”

“If only this whole kingdom had but a single neck!” Swemmel cried. “Then I’d take its head and use its energy to build a magical fire that would burn Mezentio in his palace in Trapani—aye, and all his kingdom with him.”

Rathar believed every word. Could Swemmel have done it, he would joyously have swung the sword. Rathar said, “Your Majesty, we have . . . reduced the power of their magecraft.” He wondered how many Unkerlanter peasants had paid with their lives for that reduction. Better not to know. Aye, better by far. War of a more ordinary sort was his proper business, and he stuck to it: “It’s more nearly man against man and beast against beast than it was for a time. But we need the men and beasts. We need all the men and beasts.” He realized he was pleading. King Swemmel seldom listened to pleas.

After a long pause, the king said, “We have learned there were riots against the Algarvians in Eoforwic yesterday.”

“That’s good news!” exclaimed Rathar, who hadn’t heard it. “Anything that keeps the redheads from using all they have against us is good news.”

“Aye,” Swemmel agreed, though he sounded almost indifferent. “Kaunians and Forthwegians went into the streets together, we have heard. Perhaps your notion of sending Kaunians back to Forthweg with their tales of woe bore fruit after all.”

“I hope so, your Majesty.” Rathar wondered if any Unkerlanter peasants had escaped the clutches of their own kingdom’s mages and brought tales of woe back to their villages. He doubted it. Swemmel preached efficiency more readily than he practiced it, but he’d been most efficient about killing since the days of the Twinkings War.

Somewhere in the middle distance, eggs started bursting: Algarvian dragons over Cottbus again. Swemmel turned and stared east. “Curse you, Mezentio,” he whispered. “You I trusted, and you betrayed me, too.”

How had he trusted Mezentio? To be unready to fight when the time for fighting came? So it had seemed then. It also seemed, as it always had to Rathar, a dreadful miscalculation. The marshal said, “Give me the men, your Majesty. Give me the men and the dragons and the behemoths. We can throw them back.” He didn’t know if Unkerlant could, but he wanted the chance to try.

“Who will protect us?” the king said again. But then, jerkily, he nodded. “Take them. We give them to you. Throw them into the fire, and may they smother it with their bodies. And now, we dismiss you.” Rathar went through the ceremonial involved in leaving the chamber without a shadow of unhappiness. Swemmel had given him the chance. How could he make the most of it?

A blizzard howled around Istvan and his squadmates and all the other Gyongyosian soldiers trying to carry the war in the stars-forsaken mountains to Unkerlant. Wool and sheepskin went only so far in warding them. Flaps from Istvan’s sheepskin cap protected his ears, but his beaky nose had long since gone numb. He hoped it wasn’t frostbitten.

“Even my valley doesn’t have weather like this,” he said: no small admission, when Gyongyosians from the interior would sometimes come to blows over whose home valley suffered through the nastier winters.

“What’s that, Sergeant?” Szonyi asked. He tramped along only a few feet from Istvan, but the shrieking wind blew words away.

“Never mind.” Istvan’s next complaint had more substance to it: “How are we supposed to fight a war in weather like this?”

“We’re a warrior race,” Szonyi answered.

“You’re a warrior blockhead,” Istvan said, but not too loud. He didn’t want Szonyi to hear him. Even if the other soldier wasn’t too bright, he was a good man to have along when a squad of Unkerlanters burst out from behind snow-covered rocks yelling “Urra!” at the top of their lungs.

The path—Istvan hoped it was the path, though he had trouble being sure—rose toward the outlet of yet another pass. Istvan wondered what lay beyond. Actually, he could make a pretty good guess: another valley not worth holding, with plenty of snow-covered rocks behind which Unkerlanters could hide. Every now and again, he wondered why Gyongyos wanted this miserable country. He shrugged inside his coat. That wasn’t his concern. All he had to worry about was taking the mountains away from the Unkerlanters and staying alive while he was doing it.

Somewhere back behind him was the whole intricate structure even a warrior race like the Gyongyosians needed to wage war in this day and age: baggage train, supply dumps, roads, and ley-line caravans eventually reaching back to Gyongyos itself. Istvan seldom thought about that structure, not least because it
was
behind him. He and his comrades were the very tip of the Gyongyosian spearpoint piercing the kingdom of Unkerlant.

Downhill. He’d been walking downhill for some little while before he realized he was doing it. Either he’d found the top of the pass and was heading down into the next valley or ... “Kun!” he shouted, breathing out almost as much smoke as if he were a dragon. “You frozen to death yet, Kun?”

“Aye, a couple of hours ago, Sergeant,” Kun answered, appearing at his elbow.

“Heh,” Istvan said. “All right, then. What I want to know is, are we still marching east, or have we gotten turned around in the snow? If we’re heading back toward our own men, they’ll cursed well blaze us for Unkerlanters.”

“Wind’s still blowing from behind us,” replied the corporal who had been a mage’s apprentice.

Istvan hadn’t thought of that, but it didn’t fully reassure him, either. “Here in the mountains, the wind blows all sorts of crazy ways.”

“That’s so.” Kun plucked at his tawny beard. Like Istvan’s, it was covered with rime. Unlike Istvan’s full, shaggy one, it grew by patches and clumps, and so did less to keep Kun’s cheeks and chin warm. “I can’t do anything about the wind, you know.”

“I don’t want you to do anything about the accursed wind,” Istvan snapped. “I told you, I want to know if I’m going east or west.”

“Oh, aye. So you did.” Kun plucked at his beard some more, as if hoping to find the answer there. After a few paces, he spoke again: “Have to see where the sun is.”

“If I could see where the sun is, would I need to ask you stupid questions?” Istvan shouted. Kun could make him as ready to burst with fury as an egg was with sorcerous energy. But having burst, he calmed again. “
I
can’t see the sun. If you can, tell me where it’s at.”

Kun wore heavy wool mittens. He took them off so he could fumble in his belt pouch. He finally pulled out a piece of what looked to Istvan like murky, milky glass. He held it in front of his right eye and peered through it now at one part of the sky, now at another.

“What are you doing?” Istvan asked.

“Looking for the sun,” Kun replied, as if to an idiot child. After a moment, he condescended to explain more: “The property of this spar, as it is called after a ship’s pole, is to let in light of a certain sort only.”

“What?” Istvan frowned. “Light is light, eh?”

“Not to a mage,” Kun said loftily. Then he gnawed at his lower lip and admitted, “I do not understand the theory as well as I wish I did. But a man does not need to know how a knife cuts to know that it cuts. And so I can use this spar and tell you more light shows ahead of us, which means the sun lies in that direction. Since it is surely after noon, we are marching west.”

“That’s what I wanted to find out,” Istvan said. “Thanks.” The wind shifted, blowing snow into his face. He let out a couple of weary curses and went on, “Fine to know I’m liable to be blazed by the Unkerlanters and not by our own men.”

“I’m glad to know I relieved your mind,” Kun replied. Istvan made a crack about relieving some part of himself a long way removed from his mind.

He and Corporal Kun both laughed. So did Szonyi, who was close enough to hear. He said, “I wish the stars wouldn’t let things like getting blazed by your own side happen. If they’re as wise and strong and all-knowing as everybody says, why do they let things like that happen sometimes?”

“That’s for them to know, not for the likes of us,” Istvan said, which was what his family and other people in his home valley had told him when, as a boy, he’d asked such questions.

Kun said, “Why isn’t it for us to know? We know a lot more than our grandparents and even more than their grandparents. Why shouldn’t we know things like that?”

“Because we aren’t meant to,” Istvan answered.

“Who told you that?” Kun asked. “How did he know? How do you know he knew?”

Istvan grappled with those unfamiliar questions for a little while. Not having any good answers for them, he said, “If you go on talking that way, you might as well not believe the stars have any power at all.”

Kun shook his head; snow flew from his hat. “I have to believe, because I’ve seen spells that call on them work.” He slogged on for another couple of paces. In thoughtful tones, he added, “But the Unkerlanters’ spells work, too, and they’re goat-eating savages who reverence the invisible powers above that aren’t even there.”

Now Istvan asked the hard question, not Kun: “What does that mean?”

“May I be accursed if I know,” the former mage’s apprentice answered. “I’m going to have to think about that for a while.”

“Think about Unkerlanters blazing you instead,” Istvan said. “Think about mountain apes sneaking down and carrying you off before you even know they’re there. Think about avalanches. Think about things you can do something about.”

“What can I do about an avalanche?” Kun asked.

“You can walk soft and try not to start one. And you might be able to run to the side of one if it isn’t too big and you see it soon enough,” Istvan said. Kun trudged on for another few paces, then nodded, yielding the point. Istvan felt proud of himself. He knew Kun was smarter than he was, and knew Kun knew it, too. When they fenced with words, the sergeant seldom made his corporal back up. He had this time.

Sometimes, in clear, quiet weather, you could hear an egg sighing through the air toward you. In the middle of the snowstorm, the first Istvan knew that the Unkerlanters had started tossing was when the egg burst in front of his squad. Even then, the wind muffled the roar and the deep snow in which the egg landed helped muffle the blast of sorcerous energy that came from it. The snow the burst threw up masked the flash of that energy, too.

Before the second egg landed, Istvan was down on his belly in a snowdrift, crawling toward the nearest rocks he could find. “Stagger your cover if you can,” he shouted to his men. “Those Unkerlanter goat-buggers’ll be coming after us as soon as they think we’re in enough trouble.”

Between the bursting eggs and the shrieking wind, he didn’t know how many soldiers in his squad heard him. He worried less than he would have with a squad of men seeing battle for the first time. His troopers were all blooded; they didn’t need him to do their thinking for them. Some of them—Kun, for instance—resented it when he tried.

“Urra! Urra!” Through the wind, through the thunderstorm of bursting eggs, came the Unkerlanter battle cry. Istvan bared his teeth: now he was worried. It sounded as if King Swemmel’s men outnumbered the Gyongyosians who faced them. Their hoarse, angry shouts grew louder.

Istvan shouted, too: “Here they come!”

He blazed at the first figure in rock-gray he saw through the swirling snow. He heard his beam hiss and cursed the sound: every snowflake the beam seared weakened it before it got to its target, and there were a lot of snowflakes in the air. The Unkerlanter went down, but Istvan didn’t think he was out of the fight.

A beam burned a furrow in the snow not far from him. That reminded him he needed to roll away, to make sure he didn’t make a fat, juicy target by staying in one place too long. As he rolled, he also made sure his knife was loose in its sheath. With sticks so weakened, this little battle would be fought at close quarters.

Rolling did one more thing—it coated his long sheepskin jacket with snow, making him all but invisible. Sure enough, an Unkerlanter ran right past him, not having any idea he was there. Istvan rose from the snowy ground like one of the mountain apes he’d been talking about a little while before. But he had better weapons than a mountain ape’s teeth and muscles, better even than the club the ape he’d killed might have been carrying.