Into the Darkness (36 page)

With a rumbling blast from the tuba player and a thunder of drumbeats, the band started up again. The rhythm seemed to be inside her, filling her to the brim; the laced brandy kicked like a wild ass. As if from very far away, Valnu asked, “Do you want to go out on the floor again?”

“No.” Krasta shook her head. The room seemed to keep moving after she stopped. “Let’s ride around the town in my carriage—or even out into the country.”

“In your carriage?” Valnu frowned. “What will the coachman think?”

“Who cares?” Krasta said gaily. “Powers above! He’s only a coachman.”

Valnu silently clapped his hands. “Spoken like the true woman of nobility you are,” he exclaimed, and got to his feet. So did Krasta, hoping the process looked smoother to him than it felt to her. They retrieved their cloaks from the little antechamber just outside the main room—the night had its full share of autumn chill—then went upstairs and out into the darkness.

That darkness was well-nigh absolute. Though no Algarvian war dragons had yet appeared over Priekule, the city encaped itself in black. A good many carriages waited outside the Cellar while their noble owners reveled the night away. Krasta had to call several times before she could sort out which one was hers.

“Where to, milady?” her driver asked when she and Valnu climbed up into the seat behind him. “Back to the mansion?”

“No, no,” Krasta said. “Just drive about for a while. If you happen to come on a road that leads out of the city—well, so much the better.”

The coachman stayed quiet longer than he should have. When at last he spoke, all he said was, “Aye, milady. It shall be as you command.” He clucked to the horses and flicked the reins. The carriage began to move. Krasta hardly noticed his words. Of course it would be as she commanded. How could it be otherwise, when she was dealing with her own servitors? She turned to Valnu, a vague shape in the darkness beside her. She reached out for him as he was reaching out for her. The coachman paid no attention. He knew better than to pay attention … or, at least, to be seen paying attention.

Under the cover of their cloaks, Valnu’s hand found the bone toggles that held her tunic closed. He undid a couple of them and reached inside the tunic to fondle her bare breast. Careless of the coachman, Krasta moaned. When her mouth met Valnu’s this time, the kiss was so fierce, she tasted blood: his or hers, she could not tell.

His hand slid out of her tunic. He rubbed at the crotch of her trousers. She thought
she
would burst like an egg then. Valnu chuckled. His hand dived under her waistband. His fingers, long and slim and clever, knew ‘exactly where to go and exactly what to do when they got there. Krasta gasped and shuddered, for a moment blind with pleasure. Valnu chuckled again, as pleased with himself as he was with having pleased her. The horses plodded on, hooves clopping on cobbles. Stolid as the animals he drove, the coachman minded the reins.

Krasta thought of ordering Valnu out of the carriage now that he’d given her what she wanted. But, sated and tipsy, she felt more generous than usual. She rubbed him through the wool of his trousers. After an abrupt inhalation, he murmured, “I do hope you won’t make me explain myself to my laundryman.”

She laughed and rubbed harder. Nothing could have made her more inclined to do just that than his hoping she wouldn’t. After a moment, though, still in that uncommonly kindly mood, she unbuttoned his fly and drew him forth. She stroked him some more.

“Ahhh,” he said softly.

Had Krasta gone on for another minute or two, she would have made

Valnu explain himself to his laundryman: of that she had no doubt. Instead, she lowered her head, saying, “Here. I will give you a treat you could have only from a noblewoman.” She took him in her mouth. His flesh was hot and smooth.

His fingers tangled in her hair. Above her busy lips and tongue, he laughed. “You are quite a lot of woman, my sweet,” he said, “but what you’re doing there hasn’t been a secret of the nobility for a long, long time, if it ever was. Why, only last week this pretty little shopgirl—”

In spite of his hands, she raised up so suddenly that the back of her head caught him in the chin. “What?” she hissed as he yelped in pain. Fury filled her as quickly and completely as lubriciousness had. Before he could even start to set himself to rights, she pushed him with all her strength. He had time for only a startled squawk before he tumbled out on to the cobbles.

“Milady, what on earth —?” he began.

“Shut up!” Krasta snarled. Careless of her left breast peeping out from the undone tunic, she leaned forward and tapped the driver on the shoulder. “Take me home this instant. Make your stupid beasts move or you’ll be sorry for it, do you hear me?”

“Aye, milady,” the coachman answered: not a word more, which was wise of him. He flicked the reins. After what sounded like surprised snorts, the horses moved up into a trot. Krasta looked back over her shoulder. Valnu took a couple of steps in pursuit of the carriage, then gave up. He vanished in the darkness behind her.

Absently, Krasta did up the toggles he had opened. She wiped her mouth on her sleeve, again and again. Disgust filled her, so much that she almost had to lean out of the carriage and vomit it forth into the roadway. It wasn’t what she’d been doing; she’d done that before, and always been amused how such a small thing could make a man behave as if treacle filled his veins.

But that her mouth had gone where a commoner’s—
a pretty little shopgirl’s,
Valnu had said—mouth went before … She could imagine nothing more revolting. She felt ritually unclean, like a man of the Ice People who had accidentally slain his fetish animal.

After she got back to the mansion, she routed Bauska out of bed and had the servant fetch her a bottle of brandy. She rinsed her mouth several times, then imperiously thrust the bottle back. Bauska took it away without a word. Like the coachman, she’d learned better than to ask questions of her mistress.

With his comrades, Tealdo tramped along the wooden quay in the harbor of Imola toward the
Ambuscade,
from whose flagpole fluttered the Algarvian banner. All the army that had spent so long training was now filing aboard the ships that filled the harbor in the former Duchy of Bari.

Tealdo marveled to see the men all together. He marveled even more to see the ships all together. “We haven’t put together a fleet like this for a cursed long time,” he said over his shoulder to Trasone, who marched along behind him.

“Not for a thousand years, the officers say,” his friend agreed.

“Silence in the ranks there!” Sergeant Panfilo bellowed. Someone—fortunately, someone well away from Tealdo—made a noise that probably came from his mouth but sounded as if it had a different origin. Panfilo stormed off to see if he could catch and terrorize the miscreant.

Up the gangplank Tealdo went. His feet thudded on the timbers of the deck. The sailors scurrying around there and the men who traveled the lines of the rigging like outsized spiders did not strike him as an ordinary naval crew. That was only fair—they weren’t an ordinary naval crew, nor anything close to it. Every one of them was a highly trained yachtsman, adept at the otherwise obsolete art of sailing.

But that art was no longer obsolete, thanks to the ingenuity of Algarve’s generals and admirals. Tealdo wished he would be able to watch the great sails fill with wind as the fleet weighed anchor. Instead, he went down to a poorly lit compartment with whose cramped dimensions he was all too familiar. There he and his company would stay till their journey ended … or till something went wrong.

Maybe Captain Larbino had something similar on his mind, for he said, “Men, what we do here tonight will go a long way toward winning the war for Algarve. The Sibians shouldn’t realize we’re coming till we shop up on their doorstep—we’ll catch them with their kilts down. Nobody has gone to war with a fleet of sailing ships for hundreds of years. They’ll never expect it, and their mages likely won’t be able to give ‘em much warning, either. If we sail over a ley line … so what? We don’t draw any energy from it, so they won’t notice us. We’ll be as safe as we would on dry land till we get into Tirgoviste harbor. Make yourselves comfortable and enjoy the trip.”

Tealdo made himself as comfortable as he could, which wasn’t very. He listened to more soldiers tramping into their assigned compartments, and to sailors running around and shouting things the thick oak timbers that surrounding him kept him from understanding. But tone carried, even if words didn’t. “They sound like they’re having a mighty good time, don’t they?” he said to Trasone.

“Why shouldn’t they?” Trasone answered. “Once they get us to Sibiu, their job is done. They can sit back and drink wine. We’re the ones who get to pay the bill after that.”

He wasn’t quite being fair. If the Sibs got the chance, they’d blaze at ships as well as soldiers. Before Tealdo could point that out, the motion of the
Ambuscade
changed. The pitching from bow to stern became more emphatic, and the ship began to roll from side to side as well. “We’re off,” Tealdo said.

His stomach took the ship’s motion in stride. Before long, though, he discovered that, as painstaking as the company’s combat rehearsals had been, they hadn’t covered everything. Several soldiers started puking. The compartment did have buckets to cope with such emergencies, but the emergency often arrived before the bucket did. In spite of everyone’s best efforts, the compartment became a very unpleasant place.

The amused contempt the yachtsmen showed as they carried buckets away did not endear them to their passengers. “If I could move, I’d kill those bastards,” a sufferer groaned.

Nobody could move much. The compartment held too many men for that. Tealdo hoped no one would heave up dinner on to his shoes. Past that, he squatted and chatted with the men around him and took breaths as shallow as he could.

Time dragged on. He supposed it had grown dark outside. He couldn’t have proved it, not down here. Every so often, someone fed the lantern oil. Those flickering flames were all the light he and his comrades had. For all he knew, they were below the waterline, which would have made portholes a bad idea.

He wished he were a horse or a unicorn, so he could sleep while he wasn’t lying down. A couple of soldiers did start to snore. He envied them. Because he envied them, he laughed all the louder when a roll bigger than usual made them topple over.

After what seemed like forever, the
Ambuscade
heeled sharply. Sailors shouted in excitement. “Get ready, boys,” Sergeant Panfilo said. “I think the shop is about to open for business.”

While Captain Larbino was saying the same thing in more elegant words, the
Ambuscade
proved him right by thudding against a quay -Tealdo hoped that was what had happened, at any rate, and that the ship hadn’t struck a rock instead. The door to the compartment flew open. “Out! Out! Out!” a yachtsman screamed.

Out the company went, and up the narrow stairway that led to the deck. “Nobody falls!” Panfilo bellowed. “Nobody falls, or he answers to me.” And nobody did fall. The men had rehearsed going up stairs like these so many times, they might have been stairs to the houses in which they’d grown up.

Cold, fresh air smelling of sea salt and smoke slapped Tealdo in the face. Not far away, another Algarvian ship burned brightly, lighting up the darkened harbor of Tirgoviste. Tealdo hoped the soldiers had been able to get off the ship. Every man counted in this assault. If the Algarvians did not conquer Sibiu, they would not be going home again.

After that, he stopped worrying about anything except what he was supposed to do. He followed the man in front of him over the gangplank and on to the quay. That too went off as it should have done. No one fell into the water. Had anybody done so, the weight of his kit would quickly have dragged him under.

“Move!” Captain Larbino shouted. “We have to move fast! Don’t stand there gaping. We’ve still got the headquarters building to take.”

No one was standing around gaping, either. That would have been handing the Sibians an invitation to blaze the men. Nobody with sticks had set up at the landward end of the quay, and Tealdo and his comrades didn’t propose to wait till someone did. “Easier than practice, so far,” he said.

“So far, maybe,” Trasone answered. “But nobody who got killed in practice stayed dead. Won’t be like that here.”

Sure enough, the Sibians began to wake up. They started blazing at the invaders from buildings by the port. But it was too late then, with Algarvians flooding into Tirgoviste from all their ships. Tealdo wondered how things were going at the other Sibian ports. Well, he hoped. Hope was all he could do.

Shouts rose, up ahead. He could understand most of them. Sibian was very close to the southern dialects of Algarvian, and not tremendously far removed from his own more northerly accent. The Sibs were yelling about stopping his pals and him. “Good luck,” he snarled, a carnivorous grin on his face.

He hadn’t realized how meticulously his superiors had reproduced the environs of Tirgoviste harbor at the rehearsal sites near Imola. When Sibians popped up to blaze at his comrades and him, they did so in the places from which Algarvian “defenders” had fought during those long, tedious practice runs. Tealdo knew where they would be almost before they got there. He knew where to take cover, and where to aim his stick. He didn’t have to think. He just had to do, and to go on doing.

“Keep moving!” Larbino yelled. “Don’t let them gather themselves. Don’t let them make a stand. If we press them hard now, they’ll break. We have to keep them back on their heels!”

“Listen to the captain!” Sergeant Panfilo bellowed, almost in Tealdo’s ear. “He knows what he’s talking about.” Panfilo shook his head and spoke again, this time in a much lower voice: “Never thought I’d say that about an officer.”

The strongpoint Larbino’s company had been trained to capture turned out to be the naval offices at Tirgoviste. Till he flopped down behind some rubble not far away, Tealdo hadn’t known what the target was, nor cared much, either. His superiors told him what to do, and he went out and did it. The arrangement struck him as equitable.