Darkness Descending (72 page)

As if to echo that, Raunu said, “This Negyu’s a bad egg, no doubt about it. He tells the Algarvians everything he hears, and everything his wife hears, too.

“And his daughter’s carrying a redhead’s bastard, the little slut,” Merkela added. “And she doesn’t even have the decency to be ashamed. I heard her bragging in the market square at Pavilosta about all the presents her man gives her. I bet she gave him one, too—the clap.” No, she didn’t need to look hard to hate.

“We’ll take care of ’em,” Raunu said.

“We ought to make it look as much like an accident as we can,” Skarnu said. Blazing Negyu didn’t bother him. Blazing Negyu’s wife and his pregnant daughter felt different, even if they were as much hand in glove with the Algarvians as Negyu.

“Why?” Merkela shook her head, making her golden hair fly back and forth. “We ought to paint something like DAY AND SUNSHINE on their door to give the redheads something new to think about.”

“If we do, they’ll take hostages and they’ll blaze them,” Skarnu said. That was why her husband Gedominu was no longer among the living.

But she said, “The more hostages they blaze, the more the people will hate them.” Anything that made Valmierans hate the occupiers was fine by her. She looked to Raunu for support, since it didn’t seem forthcoming from her lover.

But the veteran shook his head. “The more hostages they blaze, the more people will fear them, too.” The glare Merkela gave him said he’d betrayed her. Raunu stood up under it without flinching; as a longtime sergeant, he’d stood up under more than his share of sour looks. Seeing that she couldn’t sway him, she flounced off. Raunu glanced at Skarnu and muttered something under his breath. Skarnu could not quite make it out, but thought it was,
Better you than me.

Sometimes farm work made the day pass swiftly. Sometimes, the sun seemed nailed to one place in the sky. This was one of those latter days. Skarnu felt he’d been working for a week before he went into a supper of ale and cheese and a porridge of beans and sour cabbage and parsnips. Merkela was a good cook, but not even her skill could make the bland supper very lively.

Once it was done, once she’d washed the bowls and mugs and silverware, she took Gedominu’s hunting stick from its hiding place by the hearth. “Let’s go,” she said.

Skarnu kept their sticks—infantry weapons that blazed heavier beams farther than the one Merkela carried—hidden in the barn. After reclaiming them, they started south down the road toward Negyu’s farm. They were all ready to dive off the road and into the undergrowth to either side at the least hint of trouble. The Algarvians had declared a curfew after the murder of Count Simanu and did sometimes patrol the roads to enforce it.

About halfway to Negyu’s farm, the road passed through a wood of mixed elms and chestnuts. They weren’t in leaf yet, but they would be soon. Out of the darkness came a soft challenge: “King Gainibu!”

“The Column of Victory,” Skarnu replied—not the most original challenge and answer for Valmieran patriots, but easy for them to remember. Getting the right response, four more men stepped out into the roadway. After handclasps, Skarnu said, “Single file down the road. Raunu, you’re the best of us—you walk point. Let’s go do what needs doing.”

They obeyed without argument. To the farmers, Skarnu deserved to be obeyed because he’d been an officer in JQng Gainibu’s army. They assumed he knew what he was doing. Raunu, who’d taught him everything he did know about fighting, understood how ignorant he remained. But he’d given the right order this time, and so the sergeant kept quiet.

The night was crisp, but not so cold as it had been earlier in the winter. It said spring would come, even if not quite yet. Skarnu was warm enough and to spare in the sheepskin jacket that had been Gedominu’s even if that jacket fit him worse than it might have.

As they drew near Negyu’s farm, Raunu halted them. “All I can do is take us straight up the road,” he said. “One of you fellows who’ve lived here forever will know of some little deer track that’ll lead us right to the whoreson’s back door without the Algarvians’ ever being the wiser about how we got there.”

That produced a low-voiced argument between two of the locals, each convinced he knew the best shortcut. Finally, resentfully, one of them yielded and let the other take Raunu’s place at the head of the little column. “Leave it to me,” the farmer said proudly. “Curse me if I don’t get you there all right.”

Maybe the powers above were listening harder than they were in the habit of doing. In the middle of another dark stretch of wood, a new challenge rang out—this one in Algarvian. Skarnu and his men froze, doing their best not even to breathe. Could he have done so in perfect silence, he would have throttled their know-it-all guide.

“Who going there?” This time, the challenge came in bad, willingly accented Valmieran. Again, Skarnu and his comrades stayed perfectly still. Maybe the Algarvians would decide they’d imagined whatever they’d heard, and would go on their way.

No such luck. After a muttered colloquy, the men from the redheads’ patrol began moving toward the Valmierans who’d come to hurt their pet collaborator. Closer and closer came the footsteps, though Skarnu wasn’t sure he could see the enemy soldiers.

“Who going there?” another redhead called.
No one,
Skarnu thought loudly.
Go away.
But the Algarvians kept coming. With a moan of fright, one of the farmers who’d joined Raunu and Merkela and him—the very fellow who’d wanted and won the privilege of leading them to Negyu’s farm—broke and ran. Naturally, the Algarvians started blazing at him. As naturally, the flash from their beams revealed to them that he wasn’t the only Valmieran out breaking the curfew.

Those beams also revealed where some of the Algarvians were. Merkela was the first to blaze at them. A redhead fell with a groan. “Take cover!” Skarnu shouted to his followers, and was proud that his yell came out a split second before Raunu’s.

Then Raunu yelled something else: “Reinforcements, come in from the left!” For a moment, that made no sense to Skarnu, who knew too well that he had no reinforcements. Then he realized the redheads didn’t know he had none.

Fighting by night was a terrifying, deadly dangerous business. Every time anyone blazed, he gave away his position. That meant blazing and then rolling away at once, before an enemy looking for your beam could send one of his own at you. Skarnu had done it at the front against Algarve, back in the days—how distant they seemed now!—when Valmiera could hold a front against Algarve.

He wished he knew about how many Algarvians he was facing now. Not a company, or anything of the sort, or they would have rolled over his little band of raiders without a second thought. His comrades and he had probably been unlucky enough to stumble across a patrol with about as many in it as they had. But the Algarvians, curse them, would be carrying a crystal. They’d have more men here all too soon.

“We’ve got to break away!” he shouted. But he couldn’t slide off into the woods by himself, not without Merkela and Raunu. Keeping low, keeping to what cover he could, he scuttled toward where he thought they were, softly calling, “King Gainibu!”

After a moment, Merkela answered, “Column of Victory.” Then, in no small anger, she added, “You idiot—I almost blazed you.”

“Well, it’s not if you’re the only one trying to,” he answered. “We’d better find Raunu and slide away. We won’t get to Negyu’s tonight, or any time soon.”

“No.” Merkela’s whisper held both ice and fire. “And how did they come upon us just when we were getting so close? Who let them know we were going to visit the traitor?”

That hadn’t occurred to Skarnu. On the battlefield, he’d worried about incompetence and cowardice, not betrayal. But Merkela was right. This was—or could be—a different sort of war.

“King Gainibu!” From the darkness came Raunu’s voice.

This time, Skarnu answered, “Column of Victory.” He went on, “We won’t have a victory this time, though. We’d better disappear—if the redheads let us.”

“No arguments from me,” Raunu said. Had he argued, Skarnu would have thought hard about staying and fighting. But Raunu only let out a glum sigh. “Cursed bad luck we ran into that patrol.”

“Bad luck—or treason?” Merkela asked, as she had with Skarnu. Raunu grunted, almost as if he’d been blazed. Like Skarnu, he’d thought of war as a business where the sides were easy to tell apart. Skarnu realized he’d have to do some new thinking.

After the dreadful weather and hard fighting he’d gone through in Unkerlant, Colonel Sabrino found the mild air and bright sunshine above Trapani a great relief. An even greater relief was knowing that Algarve’s enemies were all hundreds of miles away from the kingdom’s borders, pushed back by the might of King Mezentio’s soldiers—and by the might of his mages, though Sabrino did not like thinking about that so well.

He waved to the dragonfliers of his wing, who’d flown back to Trapani with him, then pointed down toward the dragon farm on the outskirts of the capital. In good weather, with no enemies close by, he didn’t bother using the crystal he carried. Hand signals were plenty good, as they had been back in his great-grandfather’s days when men first began to master the art of flying dragons.

Down spiraled the wing. One after another, the dragons settled to earth. Ground crewmen ran up to chain the fierce and stupid beasts to their mooring stakes. That would keep them from fighting one another for food (foolish, for they all got plenty) or for no reason at all (even more foolish, but then they were dragons).

Sabrino undid his harness and dismounted. His dragon was too busy screaming at the ground crewmen to pay him any attention. Ground felt good under his feet. Being home felt good, too, even if only for a little while. The sunlight, the color of the sky, the green of the new grass that was beginning to sprout—all seemed right to him at a level far below thought. So did the smell of the air, even if one part of the smell was the rank reek of dragonshit.

Captain Domiziano came up to Sabrino. Saluting, the squadron commander said, “Good to get away from the front for a little while, and I’d be the last to deny it. Still and all, I wish we were going back soon. Powers above know the footsoldiers need the help of every dragon they can get in the sky above ‘em.”

“We have different orders,” Sabrino said, and said no more about that: he liked those orders no better than Domiziano did. Instead, he went on, “Almost two and a half years since we flew our dragons out of here to fight the Forthwegians. I stood in the square below the palace balcony listening to the king declare war, then hurried down here fast as I could go. Some way, things have hardly changed since then. Others . . .”

“Aye.” Domiziano’s head bobbed up and down. Pride lit his handsome features. “Then we were the oppressed, the victims of the greed of the Kaunian kingdoms. Now we’re the masters of Derlavai.”

That wasn’t what Sabrino had meant, but it wasn’t wrong, either. He didn’t explain what he had meant; he didn’t feel like wasting time talking about it. “I’m going into the city,” he said. “I want to freshen up—I smell like a stinking dragon—and pay some calls. We don’t fly out of here till three days from now. Things shouldn’t fall apart without me around till then.”

“Oh, no, sir,” said Domiziano, who, as senior surviving squadron leader, would command the wing till Sabrino returned.

“Good.” Sabrino slapped him on the back, then headed for the stables to commandeer a carriage to take him to a ley-line caravan stop: the dragon farm didn’t lie on a ley line. That could occasionally be a nuisance. Now, though, Sabrino enjoyed the chance to relax as he headed toward town.

He was tempted to go to his mistress’ flat and freshen up there. Fronesia would be glad to see him. Since he paid for the flat and gave her lavish presents besides, it was her duty to be glad to see him. But he had duties of his own. If he called on Fronesia before he saw his wife, Gismonda would be furious when she found out, and how could he blame her? She would know he’d go see Fronesia later, but that would be later. He didn’t want to hurt her pride, and so, with an inward sigh, decided to keep up appearances after all.

Trapani, set as it was on a broad, swampy plain in central Algarve, had never belonged to the Kaunian Empire. No one could have guessed that by the public buildings, though. Many of them were in the classical style, most with the marble painted, some left cool and white in the more modern mode. In days gone by, the Algarvians had envied and imitated their Kaunian neighbors. No more. The sharp verticals and extravagant ornamentation of native Algarvian architecture seemed far more natural to Sabrino than anything the blonds had ever built.

He hadn’t sent a message ahead to let his household know he was coming. He hadn’t known he was coming till he got the order to bring his wing east and had had as few stops as he could manage since then. He chuckled as he walked up to his own front door. If the household couldn’t stand a surprise every now and then, too bad. He grabbed the bellpull and yanked with all his might.

“My lord Count!” exclaimed the maidservant who let him in. “My lord Count!” exclaimed one of the kitchen wenches, who, fortunately, didn’t drop the tray she was carrying toward the stairs. “My lord Count!” exclaimed the butler, who, with Gismonda, ran the household when Sabrino was away. Over and over, Sabrino kept agreeing that he was who he was.

“My lord Count!” Gismonda said when he went upstairs with the kitchen wench. “This is an unexpected pleasure.”

Sabrino bowed and kissed her hand. “Good of you to say so, my dear,” he replied. His wife was a handsome, determined-looking woman not far from his own age. He respected her and liked her well enough. As Algarvian nobles went, they had a tranquil marriage, not least because neither pretended to be in love with the other.

“With things as they are in the west, I truly didn’t expect to have you back in Trapani any time soon,” Gismonda said. No, she was anything but a fool.

“I have new orders. They take me out of Unkerlant,” Sabrino said. His wife asked no more questions. That was only partly because she understood that, as a soldier, he couldn’t tell her everything. More had to do with the polite pretenses and silences noble husbands and wives used to keep their lives tolerable.