Jaws of Darkness (35 page)

To Skarnu’s relief, she waited till they’d got out of earshot of the guard to ask, “Can we sneak around to the camp some other way?”

“I doubt it,” he answered regretfully. “They’re bound to have more than one man keeping an eye on it. If they send us away from it once, that probably won’t mean much to them. If they catch us trying to get there once they’ve told us no, that’s liable to be a different story.” He hesitated. “Unless you think you really have to get inside. If it’s that important, I’ll do my best to get you past the guards. You might have to use some of your magecraft, too.”

“No,” Palasta said after brief thought. “I’ve learned enough—and perhaps the biggest thing I’ve learned is how much I don’t know.” She spoke in riddles, but she sounded pleased doing it, so Skarnu supposed he should be pleased, too. And he was, for his own reasons: now he could go back to Merkela and little Gedominu.

Eight

N
ot for the first time, Marshal Rathar reflected on how glad he was to get out of Cottbus, to get away from the direct influence of King Swemmel. Away from the capital, he was his own man. Inside Cottbus, inside the palace, he might have been fitted for strings at the wrists and ankles, at the elbows and knees, for he knew himself to be nothing more than the king’s puppet.

Even in getting away from Cottbus, though, Rathar followed Swemmel’s will rather than his own. He would sooner have gone back to the Duchy of Grelz, to finish driving the Algarvians from it. But Swemmel was convinced Unkerlant had the battle in the south well enough in hand to entrust it to General Vatran. Vatran was a capable commander; he and Rathar had worked well together down in the south for a couple of years. Still, Rathar wanted to finish what he’d started.

As usual, King Swemmel cared nothing for what his subjects wanted. He’d sent Rathar up to the north, to a region where he hadn’t laid his hand on the fighting. And he’d sent with him General Gurmun, who’d proved himself the best commander of behemoths Unkerlant had.

The two of them rode horses east toward Pewsum, a town the Unkerlanters had taken back from Algarve and then held in spite of counterattacks delivered with the redheads’ usual skill and ingenuity. Looking around at the devastation through which he rode, Rathar said, “Nothing comes easy fighting Mezentio’s men. It never has. By the time we drive them off a piece of ground, it’s not worth having any more.”

Gurmun pondered that. He was younger than Rathar—in his early forties—with hard, blunt features and cold, cold eyes. He’d risen through the ranks despite, or perhaps because of, King Swemmel’s purges. He said, “They’re tough, aye, but we can whip them. We’ve done it before; we’ll do it again. And every time we do whip them, we leave them that much less to fight back with.”

Ten months ago, his behemoths had stopped the Algarvians’ last desperate push in the Durrwangen bulge, the push that might have torn the whole position open had it succeeded. Hundreds of the great beasts from both sides were left dead on the field. Unkerlant had been able to make good its losses. The Algarvian behemoth force hadn’t been the same since the battles by Durrwangen.

Rathar said, “I just wonder how much of our kingdom will be standing by the time the war ends.”

Gurmun shrugged. “As long as some of it’s standing and there’s nothing left of Algarve.” That was also Swemmel’s attitude. Rathar could hardly disagree with it.

In fact, he didn’t disagree with it. But he did say, “The more we have left standing, the better.”

“Well, of course,” Gurmun said. “The better we keep our secrets, the more we’ll be able to manage there. The redheads couldn’t have been plainer about what they had in mind around Durrwangen if they’d hung up a sign—WE’RE GOING TO ATTACK HERE. Stupid buggers.” He spat in the muddy roadway.

His scorn made Marshal Rathar blink. To Rathar, the Algarvians were the touchstone of the military art. He’d spent the first couple of years of the war against them learning how they did what they did well enough to imitate it. Had he failed, Unkerlant would have gone under. That Gurmun could show contempt for the redheads proved he’d succeeded. It still disconcerted him, though.

Ropes dyed red warned soldiers and surviving locals away from a field by the side of the road. Rathar said, “One of these days, we’ll have to clear out all the eggs we and the Algarvians have buried.” The red ropes said that field was sown with Algarvian eggs. A crater not far from the road said some luckless fellow had discovered at least one of them the hard way.

Gurmun spat again. “It can wait. Right now, we haven’t got the dowsers to spend clearing the buried eggs we’ve already passed. We’ve hardly got enough dowsers to clear the ones that are still in front of the redheads.”

“I said, one of these days,” Rathar answered. As far as Gurmun was concerned, the waste of having dowsers go up in bursts of sorcerous energy while clearing unimportant fields made that not worth doing. As long as they died doing something important, he didn’t worry at all. A lot of the younger officers, the men who’d lived their entire adult lives during King Swemmel’s reign, thought the same way. Since Swemmel thought that way, too, Rathar knew he shouldn’t have been surprised, but every so often he still was.

“If we had more dowsers,” Gurmun went on, “I wouldn’t have to run peasants across fields ahead of my behemoths, the way I’ve done a couple-three times. That doesn’t always work as well as you’d like—sometimes the Algarvian mages make their buried eggs sensitive to behemoths, not people.” His horse walked on for a few paces before he added, very much as an afterthought, “And it’s wasteful, too.”

“So it is.” Rathar had used such tactics himself; he didn’t know many Unkerlanter generals who hadn’t. But he didn’t take them for granted, the way Gurmun did. With a sigh, he went on, “I wonder if the kingdom will have any peasants at all left by the time this war finally ends.”

“It doesn’t matter if we only have a few, so long as Algarve hasn’t got any,” Gurmun said once more. Aye, those words might have come straight from King Swemmel’s lips.

At the outskirts of Pewsum, a sentry stepped into the roadway, stick in hand, and snapped, “This is a forward area. Show me your pass.”

General Gurmun undid the top couple of buttons on his rock-gray greatcoat, so that the general’s stars on his collar tabs showed. “Are these pass enough?”

The sentry deflated like a pricked pig’s bladder. He lorded it over those beneath him and groveled to those above. Such was life in Unkerlant. “Aye, sir,” he muttered, and got out of the way in a hurry.

“Powers above help the next couple of common soldiers he lands on,” Rathar remarked as he and Gurmun rode past. Gurmun laughed and nodded. He was on top almost all the time, so he found such things funny.

Inside Pewsum, Unkerlanter artisans and mages still labored to repair the ley-line caravan depot. Before pulling out, the Algarvians had done their ingenious best to make sure their foes would get as little use from the town as possible; and that best, as usual, proved quite good. “Stinking redheads,” Gurmun growled. “That depot had better not slow us down, come the day. If it does, some of those worthless wizards will join these beauties here.”

He pointed to a couple of corpses hanging from a gibbet in the market square. They’d been hanging for some time. By now, they were more bone than meat, and didn’t stink too badly. Each was draped with a placard reading, COLLABORATOR. Soldiers and civilians walked past them without so much as a glance.

“They caught two,” Gurmun said. “I wonder how many are still running loose.”

“A good many, odds are,” Rathar answered. “The inspectors will root them out.” General Gurmun nodded, as Rathar had been sure he would. Swemmel’s inspectors were trained to sniff out treason whether it was there or not. When it really was…

A soldier was reading a news sheet, one prepared by the local army headquarters. He started to wad it up and throw it away. Gurmun called, “Here, fellow, let me have a look at that.”

“Sure, pal,” the trooper said agreeably. His rock-gray tunic had faded almost to white. A scar seamed his cheek, another his leg below the hem of the tunic. More than any of that, though, his eyes marked him as a veteran. They never stopped moving. Had the Algarvians flown dragons over Pewsum, he would have known exactly where to dive for cover.

Gurmun reined in to look at the news sheet. Rathar also stopped, and leaned toward him so he could see some of it, too. Gurmun read aloud: “ ‘In the north, the strong defense the brave soldiers of Unkerlant have shown under the glorious leadership of King Swemmel against the savage Algarvian invader has kept the enemy from making progress, and has tied down his forces so that he cannot move men to the south to hold off our victorious thrusts there.’ “

“That’s good,” Rathar murmured. “That’s very good.”

General Gurmun nodded. “I’ve seen worse. Here, wait—there’s more. ‘Constant vigilance is vital in these hard defensive struggles. Although we often fight with the odds against us, our sacrifice ensures victory elsewhere. Always remember that a victory in the south is a victory for the whole kingdom.’ “

“Someone should get a commendation for that,” Marshal Rathar said. He called up the map in his head. “Headquarters should be—over there.” He pointed. He and Gurmun rode in the direction he’d chosen. His gift for turning map into terrain didn’t let him down.

At the headquarters—a battered building that had once been a greengrocer’s—another officious sentry tried to stop Rathar and Gurmun. This time, Rathar was the one who flashed his collar tabs. At the sight of the big stars he wore, the sentry turned pale. He couldn’t step away, as the one on the road had, but he did his best to disappear in plain sight.

Inside, Brigadier Sigulf saluted. “An honor to make your acquaintance, gentlemen,” he said. “You’ve done great things for the kingdom.”

“More needs doing,” Gurmun said, his voice flat, almost hostile.

Sigulf looked alarmed, though he made a good game try at holding his face still. He was some years younger even than Gurmun.
Except for Vatran, all our generals are years and years younger than I am,
Rathar thought. The war had killed some of his contemporaries. King Swemmel had killed many more.

He took the news sheet from Gurmun and waved it. “This is a fine piece of work.”

“Thanks, lord Marshal,” Sigulf answered. “We’ve done our best to follow the directives we got from Cottbus. We’ve followed all the directives from Cottbus as closely as we could.” That too was the Unkerlanter way.

“Good,” Gurmun said. Like Sigulf, he was steeped in the idea that orders should always be followed exactly. Rathar sometimes wondered. One of the reasons the Algarvians got better results with fewer men was that their officers thought for themselves, and didn’t feel paralyzed when they had no one above them telling them what to do. But that was how they were trained. Rathar wished his commanders were better at seizing the initiative, but that seemed beyond the mental horizon of most of them.

Sigulf went on, “We are making sure we move only at night. And our crystallomancers are sending more messages to regiments that aren’t in place than to ones that are. It gets confusing sometimes, but we’re doing our best.”

“Those are important orders to follow.” Rathar meant every word of it. “You can bet anything you care to name that the Algarvians are stealing as many of our emanations as they can. If your men are confused, think what it must be like for the redheads.”

“Aye, sir,” Brigadier Sigulf said earnestly. “I do think about that. I think about it all the time. If it weren’t for confusing the redheads, all this would be more trouble than it was worth.”

“Don’t say that,” General Gurmun growled. “Don’t even think it. You’ve been told what to do, and you’ll bloody well do it. If you don’t feel like doing it, there are plenty of penal companies that can always use one more stupid fool with a stick. Have you got that?”

“Aye, sir,” Sigulf repeated, this time with a distinct quaver in his voice. He sent Marshal Rathar a look of appeal.

Rathar stared back stonily. Gurmun was an iron-arsed son of a whore, no doubt about it. But he got results. In war, that counted for more than anything else. “This is important, Brigadier,” Rathar said. “If everything goes well, it may prove as important as Sulingen. Have you got
that?”
Wide-eyed, Sigulf nodded. So did Rathar. “Good. See that you do. Gurmun’s right— you’d better not get in the way of this. Nothing and nobody will get in the way of this.”

Garivald kicked at the dirt. He was worn and sweaty and filthy and more frustrated than he’d ever been in his entire life. “It’s no good,” he said. “It’s just no cursed good.”

“We’ve done a lot,” Obilot said. She was every bit as tired and grimy as he was. “We can do more. Every day is longer than the one before. Planting time is always like this.”

“No.” Garivald shook his head. “I don’t care how much we do with hoes and spades and such. We’ll never get enough planted to bring in a crop we can live on—not all by ourselves, we won’t. We’ve got to have a donkey or an ox to pull a plow.”