Into the Darkness (59 page)

“If you cannot live at peace with your neighbors, or if the peace forced upon you is unjust, what better to do than take your revenge?” Balastro asked.

“In this, you Algarvians are much like my folk,” Hajjaj said, “though we are more likely to feud by clans than either as individuals, as you do, or as a united kingdom. But tell me, if you will, how Unkerlant has offended. King Swemmel, curse him, did not move a step over the border Unkerlant shared with Algarve before the Six Years’ War.”

“But he wickedly prevented King Mezentio from conquering all of Forthweg, which Algarve might easily have done after we smashed the armies King Penda sent into our northern provinces,” Balastro replied.

That struck Hajjaj as a flimsy pretext. But a man looking for a fight needed no more than a flimsy pretext, if any at all. Unless Hajjaj altogether misread Balastro, the hot-blooded Algarvians were looking for a fight with Unkerlant, and looking for friends as well. Hajjaj did not know how friendly to Algarve Zuwayza ought to be. But Zuwayza was Unkerlant’s enemy—he did know that. If Unkerlant had more enemies …
That will do,
he thought.

Thirteen

T
ALSU DUG like a man possessed. Beside him, his friend Smilsu also made the dirt fly. A few men over, Vartu, the late Colonel Dzirnavu’s former servant, used his shovel with might and main. By the way they dug, all the men in the regiment might have suddenly imagined themselves turned into moles. All along the western foothills of the Bratanu Mountains, the Jelgavan army was digging in.

“So much for meeting Forthweg halfway across Algarve,” Talsu said, flinging a spadeful of dirt over his shoulder. “So much for taking Tricarico.” Another spadeful went. “So much for doing anything but waiting for the Algarvians to come and hit us.” Another spadeful.

Smilsu looked around to make sure no officers were within earshot. Then he said, “Powers above know I think our nobles are a pack of fools. This time, though, they may be right. What if the stinking redheads come and hit us the way they hit Valmiera? We’d better be ready for them, don’t you think?” Like Talsu, he kept digging as he spoke.

“How can they hit us the way they hit Valmiera?” Talsu demanded. He pointed back toward the east. “We’ve got the mountains to shield us, in case you didn’t notice. I’d like to see the Algarvians try and go through them in a hurry.”

Vartu put down his spade for a moment and rubbed his palms on his trousers. “That’s what the Valmierans said about their rough country, too,” he observed. “They were wrong. What makes you think you’re right?”

“More to the Bratanus than ‘rough country’,” Talsu answered. “How are they going to move fast through those passes?”

“I don’t know,” Vartu said. “I’d bet a good deal that our generals don’t know, either. What I wouldn’t care to bet is that the Algarvians don’t know.”

“They aren’t mages,” Talsu said, and then amended that: “They aren’t
all
mages, anyhow, any more than we are.” Now he looked around. “Even with the stupid nobles we’ve got commanding us, we’ve pushed them back till now. Why should things change?”

Smilsu gnawed at the rough skin by one fingernail. “They can aim their whole cursed army at us now, near enough. They beat Forthweg. They beat Sibiu. They just got done beating Valmiera and chasing all the Lagoans off the mainland of Derlavai. That leaves them—and us.”

“Hmm.” Talsu hadn’t looked at things from quite that angle. All at once, he started digging harder than ever. Smilsu laughed, took a swig of sour beer from the flask he wore on his hip, and also went back to digging.

If the Algarvians were about to fall on the Jelgavan army that had moved, however tentatively, into their territory, they gave no sign of it. Every now and then, a dragon would fly by from out of the west. No doubt the redhead aboard was looking down to see what the Jelgavans were up to. But no eggs fell on the trenches Talsu and his friends were digging. No kilted Algarvian troopers trilling out barbarous battle cries swarmed into the trenches, blazing or flinging little hand-tossed eggs or laying about them with knives. It was about as peaceful a war as Talsu could imagine.

Like any sensible soldier, he enjoyed that while it lasted. He still wondered how long it would last. That wasn’t up to him. And, very plainly, his superiors had decided it wasn’t up to them, either. That left it up to the Algarvians, a notion Talsu enjoyed rather less.

But the lull did have its advantages. Mail came up to the front line for the first time in weeks. Talsu got a package from his mother: socks and drawers she and his sister had knitted for him. He also got a letter from his father, urging him, in harsh, badly spelled sentences, to go forth and conquer Algarve singlehanded.

“What am I supposed to do with this?” he asked his friends. “My old man didn’t fight in the last war. He doesn’t know what things are like.”

“I wouldn’t lose any sleep over it if I were you,” Smilsu said. “They tell all sorts of lies to the people back home. You can’t blame the poor fools for believing some of them. During the last war, my mother told me, they were saying the Algarvians would slaughter everybody with blond hair if they won.”

“That’s pretty stupid, all right,” Talsu agreed. “I wonder what the Algarvians have to say about us.”

“Nothing good, that’s for cursed sure,” Smilsu said softly. “You ask me, though, it doesn’t much matter to the likes of us which side wins the war, as long as we don’t get blazed while it’s going on.”

Talsu looked around again, to make sure he was the only one who’d heard that. “And you say I’m careless about the way I talk,” he murmured. “Do you want to find out how dungeons work from the inside?”

“Not so you’d notice,” his friend answered. “But I don’t think anybody would turn me in for the sake of licking some noble’s backside.” His mouth twisted into what looked like a smile. “Of course, I could be wrong. In that case, I’d probably have to try and kill the bastard before the nobles’ watchdogs dragged me away.”

“How would you know who it was?” Talsu asked.

“I’d have a pretty good notion,” Smilsu said darkly. “Anyhow, I can think of a couple of people here who nobody would miss.”

“Don’t look at me like that,” Talsu said, which made Smilsu laugh. Then Talsu looked back over his shoulder. He started whispering again, and urgently: “Here. Stuff one of the socks from my mother in it. An officer’s coming.”

Smilsu’s mouth had been open to say more. He shut it with a snap and, alarm on his face, also turned to get a look at the newcomer. After a moment, he relaxed, at least to a degree. “It’s not exactly an officer,” he said. “It’s only a mage.”

“Ah, you’re right,” Talsu said. Mages serving in the Jelgavan army wore officer’s uniform to show they had the authority to command ordinary soldiers, but did not wear officer’s badges, which would have shown they enjoyed that authority by right of birth. Instead, they used smaller, plainer badges that put them midway between true—noble—officers and the common herd of soldiers. Their authority was not a birthright, but rather a privilege granted by King Donalitu.

Some sorcerers Talsu had seen enjoyed aping the arrogance of the nobility. Others realized they were just jumped-up commoners, and didn’t take themselves so seriously. This mage seemed a chipper enough fellow. As he drew near, he said, “You get on with your work, fellows, and I’ll do mine, and we’ll all stay happy.”

Even Smilsu couldn’t find anything to complain about there. “Not so bad,” he muttered out of the side of his mouth, and went back to digging.

Grinning, the mage went on, “Of course, we’d all be happier still if the war weren’t on and we were sitting in a tavern drinking ale or wine laced with orange juice, but there’s cursed little we can do about that, eh?”

“Powers above,” Talsu whispered in astonishment. “He’d better be careful, or people will think he’s a human being.”

“What have they sent you up to the front for, sir?” Vartu asked the mage. By his tone, he wondered if the mage had been forced to come up as a punishment.

If the sorcerer noticed that, he gave no sign, answering, “I’m going to see what I can do to make it harder for the Algarvians to detect exactly where these forward positions are. Can’t promise it’ll do any enormous amount of good, because the redheads will have mages, too, and what one mage can do, another can undo, but it may help some. The generals back on the other side of the mountains think so, anyhow.”

“Fat lot of good magecraft did Valmiera,” Smilsu said, but the soldierly gripe came out sounding halfhearted: this was more, and friendlier, attention than the front-line soldiers had got up till now from the high nobles who led them.

And Talsu answered, “That’s the point, I think. The king’s got to be scared green that what happened to Valmiera will happen to us, too. If he can find anything that’ll keep Algarve from riding roughshod over us, looks like he’s going to try it.”

“Hitting the redheads harder from the start would have been nice, but you’ve been complaining about that for months,” Smilsu said. He pointed at the mage with his short-handled spade. “What’s he doing out there?”

“Working magic, I expect,” Talsu said. “That’s what they pay him for, anyhow.” Smilsu snorted and flipped dirt on to his boots.

Out in front of the trench line, the mage paced back and forth. Had the Algarvians been in an aggressive mood, they would have had their line up close to that of the Jelgavans, and could easily have blazed the blond sorcerer. But, for the time being, King Mezentio’s men were busy elsewhere, and seemed content to let the Jelgavans settle down in the foothills.

As the Jelgavan mage paced, he waved a large, fine opal that gleamed blue and green and red as the sun struck it at different angles. The charm he chanted was in a Kaunian dialect so archaic that Talsu, who had learned the classical tongue as part of what schooling he’d had, could make out only a few words. That impressed him: great virtue would surely fill such an ancient spell.

If it did, he couldn’t discern it. When the mage stopped chanting and returned the jewel to a trouser pocket, nothing seemed to have changed. Talsu still saw the rolling hills ahead of him, and out beyond them the plains of northern Algarve, the plains the Jelgavan army hadn’t quite reached.

He wasn’t the only one who saw them, and saw they remained as they had been. A soldier farther down the trench line called, “Begging your pardon, sir, but what did you just do?”

“Eh?” The sorcerer seemed worn, as his kind commonly did after working some considerable magic. Then he brightened. “Ah. Of course—you can’t see it from that side. Come out here and look at your position, those of you who care to.”

Looking at the trenches was easier and more enjoyable than digging them. Talsu scrambled up on to level ground. So did a good many of his comrades. He walked backwards toward the mage, staring at the entrenchments. They kept right on looking like entrenchments. He wondered whether the wizard was as smart as he thought he was.

Then Talsu’s backward peregrination carried him past the sorcerer. He and several other soldiers exclaimed, all more or less at the same time. He could still see the trenches he’d helped dig, but at the same time he also saw the ground undisturbed. He took another couple of steps away from the entrenchments, and they grew less distinct to his eye. He took a few more steps, and they almost vanished.

“There’s a clever device—a Kuusaman discovery, actually—called a half-silvered mirror,” the mage said. “If what’s in front of it is brighter than what’s in back, it reflects like any other mirror. But if what’s in back of it is brighter than what’s in front, it lets light through and turns into a window instead. This is sorcery on the same principle.”

Talsu said, “Pity we didn’t have something like this to protect us when we were moving forward against the Algarvians.”

“No one’s ever been able to make it a kinetic sorcery,” the mage said. Seeing that Talsu didn’t understand, he explained: “One that can move along with a party of soldiers. It’s better suited to static defense. Even here, it’s far from perfect. At too close an approach or at strong search sorcery, it fails. But it’s better than nothing.”

“Aye,” Talsu said. He walked back toward the entrenchments, which returned to clear view as he stepped within the inner limit of the spell. It was indeed better than nothing. It was certainly better than any protection he and his comrades had had up till now. More than anything else, that told him how worried King Donalitu and his counselors were.

On the mainland of Derlavai, spring was giving way to summer. In the country of the Ice People, winter reluctantly admitted spring might be coming. Such chill, gloomy weather perfectly fit Fernao’s mood. He’d managed to smuggle King Penda of Forthweg out of Yanina, but the only ship on which he’d been able to gain passage for them had been one sailing south across the Narrow Sea to Heshbon, the chief town—indeed, almost the only town—in the seaside stretch of the austral continent that Yanina controlled.

Here, Fernao was not Fernao. He styled himself Fernastro, and spoke Algarvian rather than Lagoan. Penda had shaved his beard and was going by the name of Olo, an Unkerlanter appellation. Forthwegian was close enough to the northeastern dialects of Unkerlanter to let him pass for one of King Swemmel’s subjects. Fernao had also worked small sorceries on them, so neither looked quite as he had in Yanina.