Jaws of Darkness (10 page)

One man dared, and no one in Unkerlant, not even Marshal Rathar— perhaps particularly not Marshal Rathar—presumed to disobey King Swemmel’s express command. And so Rathar found himself back in Cottbus, far from the fighting, all too close to the king. The maps in his office—the maps whose moving gray- and red-headed pins showed the fight going well in the south and not badly in the north—did little to ease his spirit. If anything, they reminded him what he was missing.

Running a hand through his iron-gray hair, he glared at his adjutant. “I feel like a caged wolf, Major, nothing else but.”

Major Merovec shrugged. “I’m sorry, lord Marshal,” he replied, not sounding sorry at all. He’d spent the whole war in Cottbus, in the vast royal palace. Rathar didn’t doubt his courage, but he’d never had to show it. He went on: “The king will surely be glad to have your advice.”

Swemmel was never glad to have anyone’s advice. Major Merovec and Marshal Rathar both knew that perfectly well. They both also knew how deadly dangerous saying anything else would have been.

A young lieutenant whose clean, soft rock-gray tunic and clean, soft features said he’d never done any real fighting, either, came into the office and saluted Merovec and Rathar. He said, “Lord Marshal, his Majesty bids you sup with him this evening, an hour past sunset.” Having delivered his message, he saluted again, did a smart about-turn, and strode away.

“A signal honor,” Major Merovec murmured, “and a signal indication of the king’s trust in you.”

“Aye.” Rather against his will, Rathar found himself nodding. Supping with Swemmel meant being trusted enough to hold a knife (no doubt it would prove a small, dull, blunt knife, but a knife nonetheless) in his presence. Considering how the guards searched everyone granted audience with the king, considering how Rathar had to leave his marshal’s sword on hooks in the antechamber before passing through, Swemmel had chosen to show him favor. By evening, the palace would be buzzing with the news.

Rathar shrugged.
Maybe I misjudged him,
he thought.
My guess was that he recalled me from Grelz to keep me from winning too many victories, to keep me from getting too popular. I don’t want his throne, curse it. But if I tell him I don’t want it, he’ll only worry more that I do.

When he walked through the hallways of the palace on his way to supper, courtiers bowed low before him. They were smooth, sleek, confident creatures these days, altogether unlike the frightened lot of two and a half years before. When Cottbus looked like falling to the Algarvians, a lot of them had fled west. For good or ill, they were back. To those of lower rank, being second most powerful in the kingdom seemed little different from being most powerful. Rathar knew better, but also knew no one would believe he knew better.

Pretty women dropped him curtsies as he went by. Had he put forth a little effort, he supposed he could have had a good many of them. His passions didn’t run toward seduction, though. The only woman but his wife with whom he’d lain recently was Ysolt, his headquarters cook. That hadn’t been a seduction: more on the order of a molestation, of him by her. He grimaced. He wasn’t proud of being conquered rather than conqueror.

King Swemmel’s dining room, like his private audience chamber and the throne room, had an antechamber attached to it. The guards in the antechamber took Rathar’s ceremonial sword from him. Then they patted him more intimately than Ysolt had, though he enjoyed their attentions rather less. Only after satisfying themselves that he carried nothing more lethal than his hands did they let him go on to the king.

In the dining room, he fell to his knees and then to his belly, knocking his forehead against the carpet. He sang Swemmel’s praises, and his own love, awe, and loyalty for his sovereign. Some of the ritual phrases were as old as the Unkerlanter monarchy. Swemmel and his henchmen had devised most of them, though.

At last, the king said, “We give you leave to rise, and to sit at our table.”

“Thank you, your Majesty. Powers above bless you and keep you, your Majesty.” Rathar sat at the foot of the long table, Swemmel at the head. The king had a long, pale face, made longer by a receding hairline. His hair, going gray now, had begun dark; his eyes, of course, still were. Save for that, he looked more like an Algarvian than one of his own people.

But he was an Unkerlanter through and through. “Bring in the spirits!” he shouted to a servitor. Rathar had seen the man before, in bodyguatd’s uniform rather than waiter’s. Once Swemmel and Marshal Rathar were served, the king raised his glass. “Death to Algarve!” he cried, and gulped down the potent stuff as if it were water.

“Death to Algarve,” Rathar echoed—King Swemmel had chosen a toast he liked. He, too, had to empty his glass, and he did, though his gullet felt as if he’d swallowed a dragon while it was flaming. Impassively, the servitor poured both glasses full again.

“Death to traitors!” Swemmel shouted, and drained the second glass.

“Death to traitors!” Rathar agreed, and matched him. The dining room began to spin a little. When in command out in the field, Rathar couldn’t afford to drink like an Unkerlanter peasant holed up in his hut for the winter. But, when summoned before his sovereign, he couldn’t afford not to drink a toast against traitors—for King Swemmel saw traitors everywhere, and would surely see one in a marshal’s uniform if he refused to condemn them.

As if to prove that very point, Swemmel muttered, “We are surrounded by traitors. Traitors everywhere.” Two big glasses of potent spirits had put a hectic flush in his cheeks, but his eyes were wild and staring. “Everywhere,” he repeated. To Rathar’s relief, the king was looking up at the ceiling, not right at him.

Bowing his own head, the marshal said, “Thank you, your Majesty, for doing me the honor of inviting me here.”

“Oh, aye,” Swemmel said carelessly. He gestured to the servitor, who filled the glasses yet again. Rathar wondered what outrages the king might commit while drunk, and also whether he himself would be fit for duty in the morning. If an Algarvian mage were somehow keeping track of Swemmel’s drinking bouts … Rathar shook his head. Mezentio’s men could have worked far worse outrages than they had if that were so. The king, meanwhile, leaned toward the servitor and commanded, “Bring on the supper.”

“Aye, your Majesty,” the fellow replied, and went off to the kitchens.

Now King Swemmel did turn his bloodshot gaze full on Marshal Rathar. “Tomorrow or the next day, we shall have somewhat to say to the ministers from Lagoas and Kuusamo. They claim they are Algarve’s foes, but leave to our kingdom the burden of fighting and dying.”

“They
have
taken Sibiu back from the redheads,” Rathar said, “and their dragons visit Algarve’s towns by day and night.”

Swemmel snapped his fingers. “This for the islands of Sibiu!” He snapped them again. “And this for dragonfliers! If our so-called allies would reckon themselves men before their mothers, let them come forth to fight on the mainland of Derlavai. ‘Soon,’ they say. ‘Before long,’ they say.” He made his voice a piping, mocking falsetto to show what he thought of that.

“Well, all right, then, your Majesty,” Rathar said. King Swemmel had a point. Had the Algarvians not chosen to grapple with Unkerlant to the death, they could have worked far more mischief in the east than they had. Were King Vitor of Lagoas and Kuusamo’s Seven Princes grateful for the burden Unkerlant had so unwillingly assumed? So far as Rathar could see, only in the sense of being glad they hadn’t had to shoulder it themselves.

The servitor came back from the kitchen with a large iron pot, the lid still on. He had cloths wrapped around the handles so he wouldn’t burn his fingers. Setting the pot down on a trivet in the middle of the table, he bowed to the king. “Supper, your Majesty,” he announced unnecessarily.

Or perhaps not so unnecessarily; Swemmel started as if he’d forgotten all about food. Once reminded, he nodded and said, “As a mark of our favor, you may serve Marshal Rathar first.”

“As you say, Your Majesty.” The servitor took the lid off the pot. A great cloud of savory steam rose from it.

“You do me too much honor, your Majesty,” Rathar said, and not for politeness’ sake alone. When the king sobered up tomorrow, would he remember what he’d done, remember and regret it? He might.
If I let Rathar eat before I did,
he might think,
my cursed marshal might decide he deserves first place in the kingdom all the time.
Other men, famous in their day, had vanished when such thoughts occurred to King Swemmel.

But Swemmel seemed unconcerned now. As the servitor spooned meat from the pot, the king said, “We give you what you have earned, Marshal.”

When the first whiff of that savory steam reached Rathar’s redoubtable nose, he recoiled in something worse than mere horror. When Raniero went into the stewpot in Herborn, Rathar had smelled this precise odor of cooked flesh. He was sure of it. Swemmel wouldn’t, couldn’t, serve him … The servitor set the plate in front of him. Just as he was about to push it away and flee the table, heedless of what the king might think, the man murmured, “I hope the stewed pork pleases you, lord Marshal.”

“Stewed … pork,” Rathar said slowly. He looked down the length of the table to his sovereign.

Swemmel rarely laughed. He was laughing now, laughing till tears gleamed in his eyes and slid down his hollow cheeks. “Well, Marshal?” he said, dabbing at his face with a snowy linen napkin. “Well? Did you think we were serving you up a ragout of boiled traitor?” More laughter shook him. It hit him hard, as spirits smote a man who seldom drank.

“Your Majesty, I must say it crossed my mind,” Rathar replied. Most courtiers would have denied the very idea. Rather had found the king could— sometimes—take more truth than most people thought.

Swemmel shook his head. “It may be that we shall eat of Mezentio’s roasted heart, but we would not share that dish with any subject. It is
ours.’“
Was he still joking? Or did he mean every word of it? For the life of him, Rathar couldn’t tell. Swemmel wagged a forefinger at him. “Before that day comes, though, we needs must drive the redheaded robbers from all our land, not merely from the south. How do you propose doing what we require?”

Rathar sighed with relief at dealing with a purely military matter. “I have some thoughts along those lines, Your Majesty,” he replied, and took a bit of pork. He hoped it was pork, anyhow.

At the isolated hostel in the rustic Naantali district of southeastern Kuusamo, Fernao felt like a pine in a forest of poplars. He was the only Lagoan mage— the only Lagoan at all—there. The rest of the theoretical sorcerers, all the secondary sorcerers, and all the servitors were Kuusamans: short, golden-skinned, black-haired, flat-featured, slant-eyed. As a tall, fair, straight-nosed, ponytailed redhead, he could hardly have stood out more.

No, that isn ‘t quite true,
he thought, and nodded to himself.
My eyes are set on a slant, too, even if they’re green, not black.
Lagoans were of mostly Algarvic stock, descendants of the invaders who’d settled in the northwest of the large island off the Derlavaian mainland after the Kaunian Empire collapsed. But they’d intermarried with the folk they found there, and a fair-sized minority showed some Kuusaman features. Similarly, some few who lived under the Seven Princes, especially in lands near the Lagoan border, had the inches or the nose or the bright hair that spoke of foreign stock grafted onto the roots of their family tree.

Fernao waved to one of the serving women in the refectory. She came over to him and asked, “What is it you want?”

She spoke Kuusaman. Fernao answered in the same tongue: “An omelette of smoked salmon and eggs and cheese, and bread and honey, and a mug of tea, Linna.” When he first came to Kuusamo, he’d known not a word of the local language. But he’d always had a good ear, and now he was getting close to fluent.

Linna nodded. “Aye, sir mage,” she said. “I’ll bring them to you as soon as they’re done.” She hurried off toward the kitchens.

“Thank you,” Fernao called after her.

A hand fell on his shoulder. He looked up in surprise. “What are you thanking her for?” Ilmarinen demanded in coldly precise classical Kaunian.

“My breakfast,” Fernao answered, also in the international language of magecraft and other scholarship.

“Is that all?” Ilmarinen said suspiciously. By his wrinkles and white, wispy little chin beard, the Kuusaman master mage carried twice Fernao’s years, but he sounded like an angry young buck. He’d been chasing Linna ever since this hostel in the wilderness went up, and he’d been annoying doing it. Not long before, she’d finally let him catch her. He’d been much more annoying since.

With what patience Fernao could muster, he nodded. “As sure as I am of my own name. If you care to, you may sit down beside me and watch me eat it. And if you care to”—he paused, as if about to make a radical suggestion— “you may even get one for yourself.”

“I think I’ll do just that,” Ilmarinen said, and slid into a chair.

“How are you this morning?” Fernao asked.

“Why, my usual sweet, charming self, of course,” the older mage replied. Like most educated folk, Fernao had no trouble using classical Kaunian to communicate—at first, he’d used it all the time after coming to Kuusamo, since it was the only tongue he’d had in common with the locals. But, again like most educated folk, he spoke it with a certain stiffness. Not so Ilmarinen. He was so fluent in the ancient language, it might almost have been his birth-speech.

Fernao eyed him. “I must say, you did not seem particularly sweet and charming.” Ilmarinen reveled in irony and crosstalk, but he hadn’t seemed ironic, either. What he’d seemed like was a jealous lover of the most foolish and irksome sort.

Perhaps he even knew as much, for the smile he gave Fernao was more sheepish than otherwise. “But did I seem my usual self?” he asked.

“If you mean your usual self lately, aye,” Fernao answered, not intending it as a compliment.

Before Ilmarinen could say anything, Linna came out again. She waved to the master mage, then walked over and ruffled his hair. Ilmarinen beamed. As long as she was happy with him, all seemed right with his world. Fernao wondered what would happen if—no, when—she tired of him. For the sake of the work on which so many mages were engaged, he hoped he wouldn’t have to find out any time soon.