Rulers of the Darkness d-4

by Harry Turtledove

  "Ah." The serving woman nodded. "Master Fernao went up to his chamber a couple of minutes ago."

  "Did he?" Pekka said, and the woman nodded again. She knows whom I'd be looking for, does she? She probably knows why I'd be looking for him, too. And she probably knows why better than I do myself.

  "Aye, he did." The woman nodded again. She sounded very certain- more certain than Pekka was herself. Oh, she understood why she might be- no, why she was- looking for Fernao. What she didn't know was whether she wanted to do anything about her understanding.

  The serving woman eyed her curiously, as if to say, I told you where he was. Why are you wasting your time here? When Pekka turned to go, out of the corner of her eye she spied the other woman nodding. She shook her own head. You may think you know everything that's going on, but you're wrong this time.

  She did go back upstairs, but not to Fernao's room. Whatever she was thinking, she wasn't ready to be so brazen as that. Not quite, she told herself, whether with relief or disappointment even she couldn't tell. When she attacked the report again, in earnest this time, she got a lot of work done.

  ***

  Captain Recared had a new cry now: "Hold them!" It was one Sergeant Leudast was delighted to echo. The Unkerlanters had drawn their ring all the way around Herborn. If they could keep it shut tight, the Algarvian forces trapped inside would beat themselves to death trying to break out.

  "Hold them!" Leudast shouted. Along with the rest of the men in the regiment, he'd done a prodigious lot of marching to move east as far and as fast as he had. Now he faced west again, to keep the redheads and their Grelzer puppets from pulling the stopper out of the bottle that contained them.

  Eggs kicked up clouds of snow when they burst in and around the Grelzer village his company was holding. Fragments of metal from the eggshells whined through the air. But instead of cratering the ground, as they would have in summertime, the eggs only knocked holes about the size and depth of a small washtub in it; it was frozen too hard for anything more.

  "Here they come!" somebody shouted.

  Leudast peered out from the hut in which he sheltered. Sure enough, the Algarvians and Grelzers were trying to press home their attack against the village. They had better gear now than they'd used the first winter of the war in Unkerlant: they all wore white snow smocks, and almost all of them snowshoes. Some of them shouted, "Mezentio!" Others, presumably the Grelzers, yelled, "Raniero!"

  "Plenty of time," Leudast called to his men as the enemy slogged across the snow-covered fields outside the village. "Make sure you've got a good target before you start blazing."

  Before the Algarvians and Grelzers even got into stick range of the village, Unkerlanter egg-tossers started pounding them. Leudast knew a moment's abstract pity for the foe. With the ground hard as iron, the soldiers out there couldn't very well dig holes in which to shelter from the eggs. They had to take whatever the Unkerlanters could dish out.

  Rock-gray dragons dropped out of the sky on the redheads and the traitors who fought on their side. More eggs burst, these delivered with pinpoint precision and released only a few feet above the enemy's heads. Flame yellow as the sun- and far hotter than the winter sun down here in Grelz- burst from the dragons' jaws. Leudast watched a kilted Algarvian blacken and writhe and shrink in on himself like a moth that had just flown into a campfire.

  Recared's whistle screamed. "Forward- now!" the regimental commander shouted. "If we hit them hard, we can break them."

  A bit more than a year earlier, battling down in the wreckage of Sulingen, Leudast would have laughed at the thought of breaking Algarvians. Overwhelming them, certainly. But breaking them? Making them run? It would have seemed impossible. A lot had happened since then. "Aye!" he shouted. "We can do it, by the powers above! Urra! King Swemmel! Urra!"

  The Unkerlanters burst from the village and rushed at the redheads. Eggs kept falling on the enemy, helping to pin him in place. Some of the Algarvians tried to flee anyway, and were flung aside when eggs bust near then. Others threw their sticks down in the snow, raised their hands, and went willingly enough into captivity. And some of the redheads, good, stubborn, resourceful soldiers that they were, held on as long as they could to let their comrades escape.

  Fighting alongside Mezentio's soldiers were men who looked like Leudast and his comrades, but who wore dark green tunics rather than rock-gray under their snow smocks. Few Grelzers tried to surrender. Few of those who did try succeeded. The men who'd chosen Raniero over Swemmel had discovered the Unkerlanters weren't much interested in taking them alive.

  "Keep your eyes and ears open," Leudast warned the soldiers in his company. "You see somebody you don't know, watch him, especially if he talks with a Grelzer accent. The traitors will strip our dead for their tunics so they get the chance to sneak out of the fight."

  He knew he wasn't the only Unkerlanter passing along that warning. He also knew a few perfectly loyal Unkerlanter soldiers who chanced to spring from Grelz would get blazed because their countrymen went for sticks without bothering to ask questions first. His broad shoulders moved up and down in a shrug. As long as the Grelzers got rooted out, he didn't much care what else happened.

  Captain Recared hadn't been the sole commander to order a counterattack. Shouting "Urra!" and King Swemmel's name, Unkerlanter soldiers stormed forward all along the line. Instead of trying to break out of the cauldron around Herborn in which they were trapped, the Algarvians and Grelzers had to try to hold back a foe who outnumbered them in men, in egg-tossers, in horses and unicorns, in behemoths, and in dragons.

  They tried. They tried bravely. But they could not hold. Here and there, they would form a line and battle the Unkerlanters in front of them to a standstill- for a while. But then Swemmel's soldiers would find a way around one flank or the other, and the Algarvians and Grelzers would have to give ground again: either that or be slaughtered where they stood.

  The progress Leudast's countrymen made left him slightly dazed. That evening, he sat down to barley cakes and garlicky sausage filched from an Algarvian sergeant he'd captured. Toasting a length of sausage over a fire on a stick, he said, "Curse me if they're not starting to fall apart."

  Captain Recared had some sausage, too. He pulled it away from the flames, examined it, and then thrust it back to cook some more. "Aye, they are," he agreed while the sausage sizzled and dripped grease into the fire. "By this time tomorrow, they'll have figured out that they can't pound their way through our ring. They'll start trying to sneak through in small bands. We have to smash as many of them as we can. Every soldier we kill or capture now is one more we won't have to worry about later on."

  "I understand, sir," Leudast said. "And when they're hungry and scared and their sticks are low on charges, they're a lot easier to deal with than when they've got their peckers up."

  "That's right. That's just right." Recared nodded. He took his sausage off the fire and looked at it again. With another nod, he began to eat.

  He proved a good prophet, for over the next couple of days the spirit did leak out of the Algarvians, like water leaking from a cracked jar. They stopped standing up to the Unkerlanters and started trying to escape whenever and however they could. When they couldn't run and couldn't hide, they surrendered in a hurry, glad to do it before something worse happened to them.

  After a couple of days of that, Leudast was as rich as he'd ever been in all his born days. He didn't suppose it would last; when he came to a place where he could spend the money he was taking from captured Algarvian officers, he probably would. But a heavy belt pouch wasn't the worst thing in the world, either.

  One of his men asked, "Sergeant, what do we do with the coins we take that have false King Raniero on 'em?"

  "Well, Kiun, if I were you, I'd lose the Grelzer copper," Leudast answered. "It'll never be worth anything on its own, if you know what I mean. But silver's silver, even if it is stamped with Raniero's pointy-nosed face. Somebody'll melt it down for you and give you what
it's worth in metal, even if not in coin."

  "Ah." The soldier nodded. "Thanks. That makes good sense."

  The next morning, Leudast's company came on the tracks of a squad of men trying to make their way east. With snow on the ground, following the trail was child's play. Before long, his troopers caught up with the fleeing Algarvians. A couple of men started blazing at the redheads. As soon as steam puffed up from the smoke around them, the Algarvians raised their hands in surrender.

  "Aye, you have us," one of them said in pretty good Unkerlanter as Leudast and his men came up: a bald fellow in his late middle years who wore a colonel's uniform. "We can run no more."

  "You'd best believe it, pal." Leudast cocked his head to one side. "You talk funny." The officer's accent wasn't a typical Algarvian trill, but something else, something familiar.

  "I was, in the last war, colonel of a regiment of Forthwegians in Algarvian service," the redhead answered.

  "That's it, sure enough." Leudast nodded. His own home village, up in the north, wasn't so far from the Forthwegian border. No wonder he thought he'd heard that accent before- he had.

  "Sergeant-" Kiun, the fellow who'd asked him about Grelzer money, plucked at his sleeve. "Sergeant, powers below eat me if that's not Raniero his own self."

  "What?" Leudast shook himself free. "You're out of your fornicating…" But his voice trailed away. He shuffled a couple of paces sideways so he could look at the Algarvian in profile. His lips pursed in a soundless whistle. The captive in the colonel's uniform certainly had the right beaky nose. "Are you Raniero?"

  A couple of the captive's comrades exclaimed in Algarvian. But he shook his head and drew himself up very straight. "I have that honor, aye." He bowed. "And to whom do I present myself?"

  Numbly, Leudast gave his own name. He gestured with his stick. "You come along with me." What would they give the man who'd just captured the King of Grelz? He didn't know- he had no idea- but he looked forward to finding out. He also waved to a couple of his own men, who were all staring wide-eyed at Raniero. "You boys come along, too." He didn't want his prisoner stolen out from under him. He made sure he included Kiun- the trooper also deserved a reward.

  A lieutenant well back of the line glared at him. "Why didn't you just send your captive to the rear, Sergeant?" he growled, meaning, Why do you think you deserve to get out of the fight for a while?

  "Sir, this isn't just any captive," Leudast answered. "This is Raniero, who calls himself King of Grelz." The lieutenant's glare turned to a gape. He didn't have the presence of mind to ask to accompany Leudast.

  Raniero's name was the password that got Leudast taken from division headquarters to army headquarters to a battered firstman's house in a village that looked to have changed hands a good many times. The soldier who came out of the house had iron-gray hair and big stars on the collar tabs of his tunic. Marshal Rathar eyed the captive, nodded, and told Leudast, "That's Raniero, all right."

  Leudast saluted. "Aye, sir," he said.

  Rathar seemed to forget about him then. He spoke to Raniero in Algarvian, and King Mezentio's cousin answered in the same language. But Rathar wasn't one to forget his own men for long. After giving Raniero what looked like a sympathetic pat on the back, he turned to Leudast and asked, "And what do you expect for bringing this fellow in, eh, Sergeant?"

  "Sir, whatever seems right to you," Leudast answered. "I've figured you were fair-minded ever since we fought side by side for a little while up in the Zuwayzi desert." He didn't expect the marshal to remember him, but he wanted Rathar to know they'd met before. And he added, "Kiun here was the one who first recognized him."

  "A pound of gold and sergeant's rank for him. And, Lieutenant Leudast, how does five pounds of gold on top of a promotion sound for you?" Rathar asked.

  Leudast had expected gold, though he'd thought one pound likelier than five for himself. The promotion was a delightful surprise. "Me?" he squeaked. "An officer?" Officer's rank wasn't quite so much the preserve of bluebloods in Unkerlant's army as in Algarve's- King Swemmel had killed too many nobles to make that practical- but it wasn't something to which a peasant could normally aspire, either. "An officer," Leudast repeated. If I live through the war, I've got it made, he thought dizzily. If.

  ***

  Vanai had heard that there came a time when a woman actually enjoyed carrying a child. During the first third of her pregnancy, she wouldn't have believed it, not for anything. When she hadn't been nauseated, she'd been exhausted; sometimes she'd been both at once. Her breasts had pained her all the time. There had been days when she'd not cared to do anything but lie on her back with her tunic off and with a bucket beside her.

  This middle stretch seemed better, though. She could eat anything. She could clean her teeth without wondering if she would lose what she'd eaten last. She didn't feel as if she needed to prop her eyelids open with little sticks.

  And the baby moving inside her was something she never took for granted. Maybe, in a way, Ealstan had been right: no matter how emphatically she'd known before that she was with child, its kicks and pokes did make that undeniably real, the more so as they got stronger and more vigorous with each passing week.

  And… "Just as well I'm Thelberge in a Forthwegian-style tunic these days," she told Ealstan over supper one evening. "If I still wore trousers, I'd have to buy new ones, because I wouldn't be able to fit into the ones I had been wearing anymore."

  He nodded. "I've noticed. With the tunic, though, it hardly shows, even yet."

  "With the tunic, no," Vanai said. "Without it…" She shrugged. Her body had stayed much the same ever since she became a woman. To watch it change, to feel it change, almost from day to day was disconcerting, to say the very least.

  Ealstan shrugged, too. "I like the way you look without your tunic just fine, believe me."

  Vanai did believe him. She'd heard of men who lost interest in their wives when the women were expecting a baby. That hadn't happened with Ealstan, who remained as eager as ever. In fact, from the look in his eye now… The supper dishes got cleaned rather later than they might have.

  When they woke up the next morning, Ealstan spoke in classical Kaunian, as if to emphasize his words: "You look like Vanai again, not like Thelberge."

  "Do I?" Vanai spoke Forthwegian, annoyed Forthwegian: "But I renewed the spell just before we went to sleep, and you told me I'd got it right. It really isn't holding as long as it used to."

  "I don't know what to tell you." Ealstan returned to Forthwegian, too. "You need to be careful, that's all." He got out of bed and put on fresh drawers and a clean tunic. "And I need to get going, or Pybba will have me for breakfast when I get to his office. He just about lives there, and he thinks everybody else should, too."

  "I am careful," Vanai insisted. "I have to be." She got out of bed, too. "Here, I'll fix your breakfast."

  It didn't take much fixing: barley bread with olive oil, some raisins on the side, and a cup of wine to wash things down. Vanai ate with Ealstan, and then, while he shifted from foot to foot with impatience to be gone, went through the spell that let her look like a Forthwegian. When she was through, he said, "There you are, sure enough- you look like my sister again."

  She didn't even let that annoy her, not this morning. "As long as I don't look like a Kaunian, everything's fine," she said. "I spent too much time cooped up in this flat. I don't care to do it again."

  "If you have to, you have to," Ealstan answered. "Better that than getting caught, wouldn't you say?" He brushed his lips across hers. "I really do have to go. By the powers above, don't do anything foolish."

  That did make her angry. "I don't intend to," she said, biting the words off between her teeth. "Going out and making sure we don't starve doesn't count as foolish to me. I hope it doesn't to you, either."

  "No," Ealstan admitted. "But getting caught does. I've bought food for us before. I can do it again."

  "Everything will be fine," Vanai repeated. "Go on. You're the one worr
ying about being late." She shoved him out the door.

  Once he was gone, she washed the handful of breakfast dishes. Then, more than a little defiantly, she put money in her handbag and went out the door herself. I won't be caged up anymore. I won't, curse it, she thought.

  No one paid any attention to her when she left the lobby of her block of flats and went down the stairs to the sidewalk. Why should anyone have paid attention to her? She looked as much like a Forthwegian as anyone else on the street.

  How many of the other people on the street also were sorcerously disguised Kaunians? Vanai had no way to tell. In Forthweg as a whole, about one in ten had shared her blood before the Derlavaian War began. More Kaunians had lived in and around Eoforwic than anywhere else. On the other hand, the redheads had already shipped a lot of Kaunians off to Unkerlant, to fuel the Algarvian there with their life energy. How many? Vanai had no way to know that, either, and wished the question had never crossed her mind.

  A pair of Algarvian constables came up the street toward her. One of them reached out, as if to pat her on the bottom. She squeaked indignantly and sidestepped before he could. He laughed. So did his pal. Vanai glared at them, which only made them laugh harder. The fellow who'd tried to feel her up blew her a farewell kiss over his shoulder as he kept on walking his beat.

  So long as he keeps walking, Vanai, thought. It wasn't just that she didn't want him groping her. He might have noticed she felt different to his hand from the way she looked to his eye. Her spell affected only her visual appearance; Ealstan had remarked on that more than once. She couldn't afford to let an Algarvian discover it, no matter how much like a Forthwegian she looked.

  And I have to hurry, she reminded herself. I can't know how long I'm going to keep on looking like a Forthwegian, not anymore. Her hand went to her belly in an involuntary gesture of annoyance. She was convinced her being with child was what weakened the magecraft. It hadn't changed a bit from the day she perfected it till she found herself pregnant. Now… For all she knew, the baby inside her looked as if it were fully Forthwegian, too.