Into the Darkness (5 page)

“It seems I was wrong,” Mezentio repeated, bringing his right fist down on the waist-high marble balustrade. “The Kaunians and their jackals sought any excuse for war, and now they think they have one. My countrymen, my friends, mark my words: if we lose this struggle, they will ruin us. Jelgava and Forthweg will join hands in the north across the corpse of our kingdom, cutting us off forevermore from the Garelian Ocean. In the south, the Treaty of Tortusso gave barely a taste of what Valmiera and Sibiu, aye, and Lagoas, too, would do to us if only they could.”

Sabrino frowned a little. Since the Lagoans had not declared war on Algarve, he would not have mentioned them. He did not for a moment think King Mezentio wrong about what Lagoas wanted, merely a trifle impolitic.

Mezentio went on, “As I speak here, our enemies burn our fields and farms and villages. Their dragons carry eggs of devastation and destruction and death to our towns and cities. My friends, my countrymen, shall we do what is in our poor power to throw them back?”

“Aye!” Again, Sabrino yelled as loud as he could. Again, he could hardly hear himself for the outcry around him.

“Valmiera has declared war on us. Jelgava has followed like a dog on a leash. Forthweg has declared war. So has Sibiu.” This time, Mezentio raised his fist in the air. “They seek to chop us off at the knees. My friends, my countrymen, people of Algarve, here is my vow to you:
it shall not be!”

Sabrino yelled yet again. He too pumped his fist in the air. A woman beside him stood up on tiptoe to kiss him on the cheek. He gathered her into his arms and made a proper job of the kiss.

King Mezentio held both hands high, palms out toward the crowd. After a little while, quiet returned. Into it, he spoke with simple determination: “We
shall
defend Algarve.”

“Algarve! Algarve! Algarve!” The chant echoed through the square, through all of Trapani, and, Sabrino hoped, throughout the kingdom. Mezentio bowed stiffly from the waist, acknowledging in his own person the cheers for his kingdom. Then, with a final wave, he withdrew from the balcony. Sabrino saw one of his ministers come forward to clasp his wrist in congratulation.

“You’ll help save us, Colonel,” said the woman who’d kissed him.

“Milady, I shall do what I can,” Sabrino answered. “And now, much as I would sooner linger with you”—she dropped him a curtsy for that—“I must go and do it.”

The dragon farm lay well outside Trapani, so far outside that Sabrino had to take a horse-drawn carriage for the last leg of the journey, as no ley caravan reached such a distance from the power point at the heart of the capital. “Good of you to join us,” said General Borso, the farm commandant, giving Sabrino a jaundiced stare.

“My lord, I am not tardy, not by my orders, and I had the honor of hearing with my own ears King Mezentio casting defiance in the face of all those who wrong Algarve,” Sabrino said, respectfully defiant of higher authority.

Higher authority yielded, Borso saying, “Ah, my friend, in that case I envy you. Being confined here on duty, I heard him through the crystal.

He spoke very well, I thought. The Kaunians and their friends would be wrong to take us lightly.”

“That they would,” Sabrino agreed. “The crystal is all very well when required, but everything in it is tiny and tinny. In person, the king was magnificent.”

“Good, good.” Borso bunched his fingertips and kissed them. “Splendid. If he was magnificent, we too must be magnificent, to live up to his example. In aid of which, my dear fellow, is your wing fully prepared for action?”

“My lord, you need have no doubts on that score,” Sabrino said. “The fliers are in fine fettle, every one of them eager for duty. And we are well supplied with meat and brimstone and quicksilver for the dragons. My report of three days past goes into full detail on all these matters.”

“Reports are all very well,” Borso said, “but the impressions of the men who write them are better. And I have orders for you, since all is in such excellent readiness. You and your entire wing are ordered northwest to Gozzo, from which point you are to resist the invading Forthwegians with every power you command.”

“Gozzo? If I remember the place rightly, it is a miserable excuse for a town,” Sabrino said with a sigh. “Will they be able to keep us supplied there?”

“If they cannot, the count’s head will roll, and so will the duke’s, and so will the quartermaster’s,” Borso answered. “We are as ready for this war as we can be, I assure you of that.”

“Our foes surround us,” Sabrino said. “They tried to destroy us in the Six Years’ War, and came too close to succeeding. We need to be ready, for we have always known they would try again.”

He saluted the farm commandant, then went out to his wing. The dragons were tethered in long rows behind Borso’s office. When they saw him, they hissed and raised their scaly crests—not in greeting, he knew, but in a dragonish mix of anger and alarm and hunger.

Some people romanticized unicorns, which were beautiful and quite bright as animals went. Some people romanticized horses, which were pretty stupid. And, sure as sure, some people romanticized dragons, which were not only stupid but vicious to boot. Sabrino chuckled. Nobody, as far as he knew, romanticized behemoths—and a good thing, too.

He shouted for an orderly. When the young subaltern came running up, Sabrino said, “Summon the men of my wing. We are ordered to Gozzo, to defend against the cursed Forthwegians, as soon as may be.” The subaltern bowed and hurried away.

A moment later, a trumpeter blared out half a dozen harsh, imperative notes: the opening notes to the Algarvian national hymn. As he played them over and over again, men spilled from tan tents and ran, kilts flapping, to form an eight-by-eight square in front of Sabrino, four captains standing out ahead of it. The dragons hissed and moaned and spread their enormous wings. Stupid though they were, they’d learned an assembly meant they were likely to fly soon.

“It’s war,” Sabrino told the fliers in his wing. “We are ordered to Gozzo, to fight the Forthwegians. Is every man, is every beast, ready to depart within the hour?” A chorus of
Aye!
rang out, but one flier, misery on his face, raised a hand. Sabrino pointed to him. “Speak, Corbeo!”

“My lord,” Corbeo said, “I regret to report that my dragon’s torn wing membrane has not yet healed enough to let her fly.” He hung his head in shame. “Had the war but waited another week—’

“It was not your fault, and it can’t be helped,” Sabrino said, adding, “Cheer up, man! A week’s not such a long time. You’ll see our share of action, never fear. They may even throw you aboard a fresh mount before then, if they decide they need trained fliers in a hurry.”

Corbeo bowed. “May it be so, lord!”

Sabrino shook his head. “No, for that would show our beloved kingdom was in great danger. I hope you relax and drink wine and pinch the pretty girls till your dragon heals.” Corbeo bowed again, grinning now. Pleased with himself, Sabrino addressed the whole wing: “Men, prepare to fly. My captains, to me.”

One of the captains, Domiziano, asked the question Sabrino was about to address: “My lord, will we have force enough to turn back the invaders?”

“We must,” Sabrino said simply. “Algarve depends on us. We yield as little ground as we can. Whatever we do”—he remembered Mezentio’s words from the balcony—“we don’t let Forthweg and Jelgava join hands. To block that, our lives mean nothing. Do you understand?” Domiziano and the other three squadron commanders nodded. Sabrino slapped each of them on the back. “Good. Splendid. And now we needs must ready ourselves as well.”

When he was mounted at the join of his dragon’s neck and shoulders, when he spurred the soft skin there and the beast sprang into the air, when the ground fell away beneath him and the dragon’s wings thundered, he could understand for a moment why some people sighed over the great beasts. When the dragon twisted and tried to bite till he whacked it in the snout with a long-handled goad, he cursed those people, who knew nothing about real dragons, as a pack of fools.

The Elsung Mountains formed the land border between Unkerlant and Gyongyos. Precisely where they formed the border was a matter on which King Swemmel of Unkerlant and Ekrekek Arpad of Gyongyos had trouble agreeing. Because they had trouble agreeing, some thousands of young men from each of the two kingdoms were settling the question for them.

Leudast wished he were back on his farm, not far from the Forthwegian border, rather than sitting around a campfire here in the rock-strewn middle of nowhere. As far as he was concerned, Arpad was welcome to every one of these boulders if he was crazy enough to want them.

He didn’t mention his opinion. Sergeants took a dim view of such sentiments. Officers took an even dimmer one. From what people said (whispered, actually), King Swemmel took the dimmest view of all. Having finally won the long civil war with his twin brother, Kyot, Swemmel thought anyone who disagreed with him a traitor. A lot of people had disappeared because Swemmel held that opinion. Leudast did not want to add his name to the list.

He leaned forward to toast a piece of sausage skewered on a stick over the fire. He twirled the stick between the palms of his hands to get the hard, peppery sausage done on all sides. His sergeant, a veteran named Magnulf, nodded approval, saying, “Very efficient, Leudast.”

“Thank you, Sergeant.” Leudast beamed. That was high praise. He’d never heard the word
efficiency
before the impressers pulled him off his farm and put him in a rock-gray uniform tunic, but King Swemmel was wild for it, which meant everyone beneath Swemmel was wild for it, too. Along with learning how to slaughter the foes of Unkerlant, Leudast had learned to mouth the phrases: “Time and motion—least and fewest.”

“Least and fewest,” Magnulf agreed around a mouthful of his own sausage. Leudast had a little trouble understanding him, but waiting to swallow would have been inefficient. Magnulf scratched his formidable nose—though it was less formidable than those of Leudast and half the other troopers in his squad—and went on, “The stinking Gongs are liable to try something tonight. That’s what we hear from prisoners, anyhow.”

Leudast wondered how they’d squeezed out the news. Efficiently, without a doubt. His stomach did a slow flipflop as he thought about how efficient interrogators could be.

One of his squadmates, a fellow named Wisgard who was slim by Unkerlanter standards, spoke up: “Back home, it would be midnight or so, and here the sun’s barely down.”

“We are a great kingdom.” Magnulf thumped his broad chest with a big, thick-fingered fist. “And we are going to be a greater kingdom still, once we drive the Gongs off the mainland and over to the islands they’ve taken to infesting.”

“That’d be easier if they hadn’t stolen this stretch of land from us during the Twinkings War,” a trooper named Berthar said.

“Proves how important efficiency is,” Magnulf said. “A kingdom gets on fine with one king—that’s efficient. Try to put two in the space meant for one, and everything goes to pieces.”

That wasn’t efficiency, not the way Leudast saw things. It was just common sense. If either Swemmel or Kyot had admitted he was the younger twin, Unkerlant would have been spared a lot of grief. Armies had marched and countermarched across Leudast’s farm—it had been his father’s then, for he’d been born just as the civil war was finally petering out—stealing what they could and burning a lot of what they couldn’t. The countryside had been years recovering.

And now, when it finally had recovered, here was another war on the far frontier of the kingdom. For the life of him, Leudast couldn’t see the efficiency of that. Again, though, he could see the inefficiency of saying so.

Captain Urgan came up to the fire and said, “Be alert, men. The Gyongyosians are planning something nasty.”

“I’ve already warned them, sir,” Magnulf said.

“Efficient,” Urgan said crisply. “I have more news, too: over in the far east, all of Algarve’s neighbors have jumped on her back.”

“His Majesty was as efficient as all get-out to stand aside from that war,” Magnulf said. “Let all those tall bastards kill each other.”

“Forthwegians aren’t tall bastards,” Berthar said with fussy precision.

Magnulf gave him a glare undoubtedly practiced in front of a mirror. “They may not be tall bastards, but they’re bastards just the same,” the sergeant growled. “If they weren’t bastards, they wouldn’t have thrown off Unkerlanter suzerainty during the Twinkings War, now would they?”

His tone strongly suggested that giving any kind of answer would be inefficient. Berthar didn’t need to be a first-rank mage to figure that out. He kept his mouth shut. Captain Urgan added, “And Forthweg has its own share of Kaunians.
They’re
tall bastards, every bit as much as the lousy Algarvians.”

Berthar did his best to look as if he’d never been so rash as to open his mouth. Leudast wouldn’t have been so rash himself. He did ask, “Sir, any word on what the Gongs have in mind?”

“I’m afraid not,” Urgan said. “I don’t look for anything overwhelming, though—with so few ley lines charted in this powersforsaken stretch of the world, and with even fewer properly improved, they have as much trouble moving men and supplies as we do. This isn’t the most efficient war ever fought, but Gyongyos started it, so we’ve got to respond.”

A brief hiss of cloven air was the only warning Leudast had before an egg burst about fifty yards from the campfire. The blast of light and heat from the energies it released knocked him off his feet and made him wonder if he’d been blinded: all he saw for a moment were purple smears in front of his eyes.

He did not need to hear the screech of a swooping dragon to know it would attack the men around the fire. Nor did he need to see it to know it would be able to see him if he stayed close by the flames. He rolled away, bumping over rocks and over little spiky-leafed mountain shrubs whose name he did not know: before the impressers took him away, he’d always been a man of the flatlands.

He saw the flame that burst from the dragon’s jaw, saw it and smelled the brimstone reek, too. Somewhere behind him, Wisgard shrieked. A moment later, a pale, thin beam of light shot from the ground toward the dragon. Leudast wished he’d had his own stick slung on his back. Then he could have blazed at the enemy, too, instead of seeking only to hide.