When the cruiser stopped a couple of miles off the beaches of Becsehely, the Kuusamans summoned all their Gyongyosian passengers to the deck. The island looked as flat and unlovely as Istvan remembered it. It also looked extraordinarily battered, as if it had been fought over only the other day, not some months before. A Kuusaman officer spoke in Istvan’s language: “Watch what we do here. When we give you back to your own people, tell the truth about it.”
Back on Obuda, Lammi had said almost exactly the same thing. By the looks on the faces of the men who hadn’t come from Obuda, they’d heard the speech before, too. Kun raised an eyebrow and murmured, “The same old song.”
But then the Kuusaman added a new verse: “Remember, this could be Gyorvar, or any other place we choose.”
As if his words were a cue, a lash of fire fell on Becsehely from a clear blue sky. It wasn’t lightning; it was flame, as if from a dragon a mile long. But there was no dragon, nothing at all in the sky over Becsehely but air. The lash fell again and again and again. Even across a broad stretch of sea, it was too brilliant to look at directly; Istvan had to squint and hold a hand up to his face to protect his eyes. Even across that stretch of sea, he could feel the heat, too. And, where the flame slid off the battered land and into the Bothnian Ocean, great clouds of steam rose up.
“Stars preserve us,” muttered the captain with whom he’d spoken at supper. “That could be Gyorvar.” Despite the heat coming from the tormented island, a chill seized Istvan and wouldn’t let him go.
As if for variety, the flames eased and bursts of sorcerous energy, as if from great eggs, pounded Becsehely. Istvan marveled that the island didn’t sink beneath the sea. At last, as abruptly as it had begun, the magecraft ended. Shimmering waves of heat still rose from Becsehely.
“We will set you free now,” the Gyongyosian-speaking officer said. “Tell your people the truth. Tell them what could happen to them if they go on with the war. Tell them it has gone on too long. It will end soon.”
The ley-line cruiser glided east, away from Becsehely and toward the few islands in the Bothnian Ocean Gyongyos still held. Down in the bowels of the ship, a crystallomancer would, Istvan supposed, try to arrange a truce to hand over the captives. I might go back to Kunhegyes, to my own valley, he thought. Then he looked down at the scar on his hand. As long as I bear this, do I want to go home at all?
Marshal Rathar had always liked to have his headquarters as far forward as he could. With his army battering its way into the very heart of Trapani, he’d set up shop in a large house in the northern suburbs of the city, just out of reach of the last few Algarvian egg-tossers. He and General Vatran pored over a map of the city looted from a book dealer’s, stabbing pins with rock-gray heads into one landmark after another.
“They can’t hold on much longer,” Vatran said.
“They’ve already held out longer than they had any business doing,” Rathar said. He knew how many of his brigades the redheads had bled white. If they had to do much more fighting after this, they would have a hard time of it. But this was--this had to be--the end.
No sooner had that thought crossed his mind than a crystallomancer rushed into the dining hall that was doing duty as a map room. “Marshal Rathar!” he shouted. “Marshal Rathar!”
“Aye, that is my name,” Rathar agreed mildly. Vatran snorted.
But the crystallomancer was too full of himself, too full of his news, to pay any attention to a feeble joke. “Marshal Rathar, sir, an Algarvian general’s come out from what the redheads hold of the palace, sir, and he wants to yield up the soldiers the redheads still have fighting!” He leaped in the air with glee.
“Oh, by the powers above,” General Vatran whispered.
Back in the village where he’d grown up, Rathar had thought no moment in his life could surpass lying down with a woman--actually, she’d been a girl, a couple of summers younger than he--for the first time. Now, all these years later, he discovered he’d been wrong. “It may be over,” he murmured, and that sounded sweeter than I love you had back then.
“Aye, sir,” the crystallomancer said, and then, “Shall I have the redhead brought here, sir? And he’s asking for a truce while you dicker. Shall I say we grant him that?”
Fussing over details spoiled some of the glory, but it needed doing. “Aye, have him brought here,” Rathar replied. “And aye, he can have a truce till he returns to his own lines.” The marshal’s right hand folded into a fist. “That shouldn’t take long. He hasn’t got much to bargain with. Send out the necessary orders.”
Saluting, the crystallomancer hurried away. General Vatran straightened up over the map table. He too saluted. “Congratulations, sir.”
“Thank you.” Rathar felt as if he’d gulped a bottle of spirits: half numb, half exalted. Over the next quarter of an hour, he listened to the egg-tossers falling silent, one battery at a time. Quiet seemed eerie, unnatural. He hadn’t heard much of it, not these past four years. Somewhere not far away, a cuckoo began to sing. Maybe it had been singing before, but he hadn’t been able to hear it then.
There was a small commotion outside his headquarters when the Algarvian general got there. Rathar’s sentries tried to remove the redhead’s sword before allowing him into the marshal’s presence. The officer proved to speak good Unkerknter, and hesitated not at all about making his view clear: “Are you uncivilized, uncultured? You do not take the weapon of a brave foe who is still negotiating his army’s surrender!”
“Let him keep the blade for now,” Rathar called. The sentries brought the Algarvian into the map room. The fellow wore a grimy, wrinkled uniform and looked as if he hadn’t slept for a couple of days. He came to attention and gave Rathar a salute. Returning it, Rathar named himself and introduced General Vatran.
“I am General Oldrade,” the Algarvian replied. “I have the honor to command my kingdom’s forces in and around Trapani. I must tell you, Marshal, that we can no longer offer resistance against your armies.” He looked about to burst into tears.
“Has King Mezentio sent you forth with this word?” Rathar asked. “You must understand, General, that my sovereign will require Mezentio’s personal surrender. King Swemmel has left me no discretion whatsoever in this matter.”
Oldrade shrugged. “I cannot give you what I do not have, sir. After defending the royal palace to his last breath, his Majesty perished yesterday. I have seen the king’s body with my own eyes, and know this to be true.”
“Lucky bastard,” Vatran muttered. Oldrade didn’t react, so perhaps Vatran had been quiet enough to keep him from hearing.
Rathar was inclined to agree with his general. Compared to what Swemmel had wanted to do to Mezentio, dying in battle was the quick, easy way out. “You understand, General, that we shall have to be fully satisfied on this point.” Swemmel wasn’t going to be fully satisfied no matter what. He’d wanted his sport with, his vengeance on, Mezentio.
“You may examine the king’s body,” Oldrade said.
“My understanding is that Mainardo, having abdicated as King of Jelgava, now succeeds his older brother as King of Algarve,” General Oldrade answered. “King Mainardo is now arranging the surrender of Algarvian forces in the northeast to the Kuusaman army.”
Swemmel won’t get his hands on Mainardo, was what that meant. The Kuusamans were unlikely to boil the new King of Algarve alive or give him any of the other interesting and lingering ends he might deserve. Too bad, Rathar thought, but he didn’t see what he or Unkerlant could do about it. Maybe the Jelgavans will take care of it for us. They have almost as many reasons to hate Mainardo as we do--we did--to hate Mezentio.
“What terms are you prepared to give us, Marshal?” Oldrade asked.
“Assuming that what you say about Mezentio is true, will will grant your soldiers’ lives,” Rathar said. “We offer no more than that.”
Oldrade drew himself up, the picture of affronted dignity. “This is mean-spirited in the extreme!” he said indignantly.
“Too b
ad,” Rathar said. “If you like, I will send you back to your lines, and we can take up the fight again. See how many of your men come away with their lives then.”
“You are a hard, cruel man,” Oldrade said. “And your king--”
“Say what you like about me,” Rathar broke in. “You insult King Swemmel at your peril. Now, then--do you accept these terms, or not?”
“For the sake of my men, I must accept them.” Tears ran down Oldrade’s face. Rage? Humiliation? Sorrow? Rathar couldn’t say. All he knew was, no Unkerlanter would have thus bared himself before a foe. Vatran turned away, embarrassed to look at the Algarvian.
“I will have a secretary write out the terms, in Unkerlanter and Algarvian,” Rathar said. Oldrade, still weeping, nodded. The Marshal of Unkerlant went on, “I will also send out men with flags of truce and mages to magnify voices, letting everyone know the fighting here is over. When you pass back into your own lines, you do the same.” Oldrade nodded again. Rathar guessed the battle wouldn’t end at once, but would sputter out over several days. People would die for no reason whatever. He shrugged, hoping he was wrong but knowing he wouldn’t be able to stop such things.
“You have given us harsh terms,” Oldrade said. “I hope that, as tempers cool, you will be more generous in your triumph.”
The Algarvian general was three or four inches taller than Rathar. The marshal had to tilt his head back to look down his nose at Oldrade, and he did. “What sort of terms would you have offered if you had taken Cottbus?” he asked. General Oldrade flushed and did not answer. He didn’t have to; they both knew the truth there.
Vatran said, “We ought to send a mage to check Mezentio’s body, make sure it’s not somebody else wearing a sorcerous disguise.”
“A good point,” Rathar said. “I will have the secretary put that in the surrender document.”
“You are the conquerors.” Oldrade didn’t try to hide his bitterness. “You may do as you please.”
“That’s right,” Rathar said, and called his secretary. He told the young lieutenant what he wanted. The secretary was fluent in both his own language and Algarvian, which Rathar also spoke and read. He skimmed through both texts, then passed them to Oldrade.
After reading them, the redhead nodded. He pulled a pen from a tunic pocket. Rathar pushed a bottle of ink toward him. The pen scratched across both instruments of surrender. Oldrade said, “Would you please have your mages make copies for me to take back to ... what is left of my command?”
“Of course, General.” In small matters, Rathar could afford courtesy. “With the fall of Trapani, this war is as near over as makes no difference. May we never fight another one.”
“May it be so,” Oldrade agreed. With a sigh, he unbuckled his sword and held it out to Rathar. “Now it is yours, sir, the negotiations being complete.”
“I accept it in the name of my king,” Rathar said. “Go now, and make the surrender known to your men. Your escort will take you back through the lines.” General Oldrade bowed, spun on his heel, and left the headquarters.
“Congratulations, lord Marshal,” Vatran said again. “We’ve done it.”
Rathar returned the general’s salute. “So we have,” he said. “And now to let his Majesty know we’ve done it.” He went off to the crystallomancers’ room. Arranging an etheric connection back to Cottbus didn’t take long. He hadn’t thought it would; the crystallomancers had to have been waiting for this moment. As soon as King Swemmel’s image appeared in the crystal before the marshal, he said, “Your Majesty, the Algarvians in Trapani have yielded, the surrender to spare their lives but nothing more. The enemy’s capital is yours.”
“And what of the enemy’s king?” Swemmel demanded. “We want Mezentio.”
“He is said to have died in the fighting, your Majesty,” Rathar answered. “I am sending a sorcerer to make sure the corpse is his.”
King Swemmel snorted contemptuously. “Mark our words--he turned coward at the end. He dared not face what we would have done to him for all that he did to our kingdom.” Rathar thought his sovereign likely to be right. In Mezentio’s place, he wouldn’t have cared to endure Swemmel’s wrath, either. The king went on, “Who now claims the throne of Algarve, if Mezentio is truly dead?”
“His brother Mainardo, your Majesty,” Rathar said. “He is said to have yielded himself up to the Kuusamans in the northeast.”
“They will not kill him, as he deserves. No.” Swemmel sounded worried, almost frightened. His eyes flicked back and forth, back and forth, as if watching demons only he could see. “No. They will leave him alive, leave him on what they call the throne of Algarve. The stinking whoresons, they will use him for a cat’s paw, a stalking horse, against us.”
“They want Algarve beaten as much as we do, your Majesty,” Rathar said.
“Algarve is beaten,” the king said. “Now they want us crushed as well. They think they can loose their sorceries in the middle of the Bothnian Ocean without our knowing it, but they are wrong--wrong, we tell you!” Swemmel’s voice rose to something close to a scream.
Rathar knew nothing about sorceries in the middle of the Bothnian Ocean. He wondered if Swemmel did, or if the king were only imagining them. “We’ve won here,” he said. King Swemmel nodded, but with none of the joy Rathar had hoped he’d show. And Rathar’s own joy, in turn, died before being fully born. He wondered if he would ever find a way to forgive Swemmel for that.
Gyorvar, the capital of Gyongyos, lay where four rivers came together near the coast to form a single stream. A ley line went up that stream from the sea to Gyorvar, so the cruiser Csikos, after skirting the Balaton Islands, could take the men it had received from its Kuusaman counterpart straight to the city.
“Home,” Kun murmured as the tall buildings came into sight.
It wasn’t home to Istvan. So many houses and shops and enormous structures whose use he didn’t know all jammed together were as alien to him as the forests of western Unkerlant or the low, flat expanse of Becsehely--Becsehely as it had been when he’d served there, not the scarred and burnt and ruined place the island had become.
“My own people,” Istvan said, as close as he could come to agreeing with the former mage’s apprentice.
Behind the lenses of his spectacles, Kun’s eyes gleamed. “You’re going to see more of your own people than you want to for a while, unless I miss my guess.”
“Huh,” Istvan said. “I never would have imagined.”
As soon as the Csikos tied up at a quay, swarms of men in clean uniforms with the badges of Eyes and Ears of the Ekrekek swarmed aboard. “Istvan, Sergeant!” one of them shouted, reading from a list.
“Here!” Istvan waved his hand.
“You come with me,” the fellow said, and checked off his name. “Petofi, Captain!”
“Here!” The officer waved as Istvan had. He was tall and gaunt, with a nasty scar on his left cheek that stopped just short of his eye.
“Good. You two are mine.” The Eye and Ear of the Ekrekek checked off Petofi’s name, too. “Come along with me, both of you. We’ve got carriages waiting to take you to interrogation headquarters.”
Istvan wasn’t sure he liked the sound of that. In fact, he was sure he didn’t like the sound of it. But he was only a sergeant. What could he do but obey? Captain Petofi had some ideas on that score. “One moment,” he said dryly. “A long time ago, I learned never to go anywhere with a stranger.”
“I am not a stranger.” The Eye and Ear tapped his badge to show what he meant. Captain Petofi just stood where he was. With a grimace, Ekrekek Arpad’s man said, “You may call me Balazs, if it makes you happy.”
“After what we have seen, it will take a good deal more than that to make us happy, Balazs,” Petofi said. “Is it not so, Sergeant?”
“Uh, aye, sir, it is.” Istvan stammered a little, surprised the scarred officer had bothered speaking to him.
“Well, part of my job is finding out about all that,” Balazs said ea
sily. “Now that you know who I am, you come along with me, and we’ll see what you think you know.”
Captain Petofi bristled anew at that. Istvan didn’t rise to it; he was watching another Eye and Ear leading Kun away. Now he was alone, all the comrades with whom he’d gone through so much stripped away. He was back among his countrymen, true, but how could the smooth, slick, smug Balazs or the dour Petofi understand what had happened to him these past six years? Petofi might, some: he’d seen war and he’d been a Kuusaman captive, too. But he was an officer and, no doubt, a nobleman, and thus a breed apart from a man who’d come out of a village in a mountain valley.
“Come along, come along,” Balazs repeated: it seemed to be his favorite phrase. Istvan and Petofi followed him down the gangplank and over to one from among the swarm of carriages waiting at the base of the pier. The Eye and Ear held the door open for the two returning captives. When he shut it, it clicked as if locking. There were no handles on the inside, and the windows were too small to crawl through. Balazs got up with the driver. The carriage began to move.
Petofi’s face twisted into what Istvan belatedly recognized as a wry smile; the officer’s scar made his expressions hard to read. “Here we are, captives again,” Petofi said. “The fools think they will sit on what we know, as a duck sits on an egg, and the egg will never hatch--or burst. A billy goat’s cock up their arses couldn’t make them pay heed to what needs doing.”
“Aye, sir,” Istvan answered, but he’d only half heard the captain. The carriage’s windows might be small, but they let him see more of Gyorvar than he ever had before. Individual houses looked familiar: gray stone buildings, mostly of two stories, all vertical lines, with steep slate roofs to help keep snow from sticking. But he’d never seen so many--never seen a tenth so many--all together. And there were so many buildings that, though done in the same style, dwarfed those houses. How many households could inhabit a building eight stories high and half a block wide? How did they keep from feuding with one another? From things Kun had said, he knew clan ties were looser here in the city than they were back in his valley, but he had no feel for what that meant. He also couldn’t imagine why Gyorvar needed so many shops, and so many different kinds of shops. They sold more things than readily came to mind.
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