Jaws of Darkness (77 page)

Gurmun asked, “Do you know what the king plans to do here in Forthweg? He’s not going to let that son of a whore of a Penda come back and king it, is he?”

“His Majesty has not told me what he plans for Forthweg,” Rathar said carefully. “The only order he has given me in that regard is to make no settlement on my own. He holds everything in his own hands.”

“As a king should do.” Gurmun was one of Swemmel’s men in a way even Rathar wasn’t: he’d been a boy, not a man, when the king came to power, and had no standards of comparison. Whatever Swemmel decided was automatically right for him.

And Marshal Rathar dared not show he disagreed. Even if Gurmun didn’t betray him in the hope of becoming Marshal of Unkerlant in his place, someone else was liable to. Unkerlant—especially Unkerlant under King Swemmel—ran on betrayals and denunciations.

“What would you do here if you were king?” Gurmun asked.

Watch my back,
Rathar thought. Aloud, he answered, “I’m not king. I don’t want to be king. How about you, Gurmun? What would
you
do?”
How do you like the boot on the other foot, Gurmun?

“Me? I don’t know anything about running a kingdom. I don’t much care, either,” Gurmun answered, as any Unkerlanter who wanted to live to a ripe old age had to do. “All I want is the chance to let my behemoths loose and smash on through the Algarvians again.” He pointed across the river once more. “And I can see my odds of doing that will be better later on than they are right now.” He wasn’t smooth as a courtier, but he got the job done: he didn’t criticize Swemmel and he didn’t show ambition, at least not of the dangerous sort.

“You’ll get your wish, I expect,” Rathar said. “We’ve got that bridgehead over the Twegen north of Eoforwic, and the other one south of the city. The Algarvians haven’t a chance of breaking either one of those, not with the Forthwegians inside Eoforwic keeping them so busy.”

“That’s right.” Gurmun nodded. “And we can really use the lull, to get our supply lines straightened out. We outran everything when we chased the Algarvians out of Unkerlant this summer, and the redheads did a cursed good job of sabotaging the ley lines and burning the fields and planting eggs in the roads as they fell back. Powers above only know how we managed to keep bringing things forward.”

“We did it,” Rathar said. “That’s what matters. I’ll tell you something else, too: I’d rather manage moving things forward than moving them back.”
I had too much practice doing that the first two years of the war.
He almost said so out loud, but held back. He would have told that to General Vatran, whom he trusted, but not to Gurmun. Gurmun was probably a better soldier—Rathar wondered if even the Algarvians had a finer commander of behemoths—but Vatran knew a confidence when he heard one, while the younger officer didn’t.

Strangely, or perhaps not so strangely, Gurmun’s thoughts ran on an almost parallel ley line: “Vatran’s moving forward down in the south, too. He’s into Yanina here and there, isn’t he? I bet King Tsavellas is pissing on his pompom shoes.”

Picturing that, Rathar laughed out loud. “I wouldn’t be a bit surprised.”

“And we’re giving the Zuwayzin what they deserve,” Gurmun added.

“They should never have caused us so much trouble the last time we fought them.”

“You’re probably right,” Rathar said.
If the king hadn’t insisted on attacking them before we’d made ail our preparations, they might not have, either.
That, of course, was one more thing he couldn’t say. No one who blamed King Swemmel out loud for any of Unkerlant’s shortcomings could look forward to anything save prison or hard labor or, things being as they were in this war, becoming a sacrificial victim. Rathar knew he enjoyed no more immunity from that rule than did the lowliest common soldier in the Unkerlanter army.

Gurmun said, “Pity we’ve never bothered going up into the mountains of central Ortah and teaching the Ortahoin a proper lesson, too. They deserve it, perching up there and trading with both sides and thinking they can just sit out the whole war.”

“No.” Now Rathar shook his head. “Concentration, Gurmun. We hit what’s troubling us. The Ortahoin aren’t going to come down out of their mountains and give us a hard time. We took enough of a bite out of their kingdom to get men through the lowland swamps. We don’t need more trouble with them, not with two pushes going against the redheads and another one up in Zuwayza.”

“And the war against the Gongs out in the far west,” Gurmun added. “Fair enough, lord Marshal. I see your point.” Getting Gurmun to admit that to anyone was no small feat.

“The war against the Gongs is like a one-legged fat man walking,” Rathar said. “It’s not going anywhere any time soon. We’ve made sure they can’t break out of the woods, and they’re not really trying any more, either. Their big fight is against the Kuusamans in the islands of the Bothnian Ocean.”

“They’re losing that one, too,” Gurmun said with somber satisfaction.

“Good. If they were winning in the island war, they would have more energy to put into the fight against us,” Rathar said. “And the Kuusamans and Lagoans are really running the Algarvians out of Jelgava.”

“Of course they are—the cursed Algarvians are fighting us a lot harder than they’re fighting the islanders,” Gurmun said.

“We owe them more than the Kuusamans and Lagoans do,” Rathar said. “They know it, too, and they don’t want to pay off. Look at it from their eyes, and their strategy makes pretty good sense.”

Gurmun screwed up his face. “I don’t want to look at anything from Algarvian eyes. Powers below eat all the redheads.”

“Powers below eat ‘em, aye,” Rathar said. “But sometimes you have to try to see things through their eyes. If you don’t, you won’t understand what they’re trying to do, and you’ll have a harder time beating them.” That made Gurmun look thoughtful. He did want to beat the Algarvians. Rathar could fault him for a few things, but never for lack of desire.

“The next interesting question—” Gurmun began.

Before he could say what he thought the next interesting question would be, a crystallomancer came running into the headquarters calling, “Marshal Rathar! Marshal Rathar!”

“I’m here,” Rathar said. “What in blazes has gone wrong now?” By the young mage’s tone, something had.

Sure enough, the fellow said, “Sir, we’ve just lost two of the bridges into the bridgehead south of Eoforwic. We almost lost the third one, too.”

“What?” Rathar and Gurmun said together, in identical tones of angry disbelief. Rathar went on, “How the demon did the redheads get so fornicating lucky?”

“Sir, it wasn’t luck,” the crystallomancer said. “They’ve got some new sorcery that’s letting them really aim some of the eggs they drop from dragons. The people down at the bridgehead don’t know just how they’re doing it, but they’ve watched eggs swerve in midair and land on the bridges or right by them in the river.”

Marshal Rathar spent the next little while cursing Algarvian ingenuity. Then he turned to General Gurmun and said, “We have to let Addanz know about this. If the redheads can figure out a way to steer dropping eggs, our mages can figure out a way to stop them.”

“They’d better be able to, anyhow,” Gurmun said. “If they can’t, King Swemmel will find himself a new archmage in one demon of a hurry, and Addanz will likely find himself down in the cinnabar mines in the Mamming Hills: the king’ll squeeze
some
use out of him, anyhow.”

Rathar reckoned the commander of behemoths almost surely right. Swemmel had a low tolerance for failure. Swemmel, come to that, had a low tolerance for almost everything. Rathar and Gurmun followed the crystallomancer down the street to the house where he and his comrades worked. With Rathar in overall command of all of Unkerlant’s fighting fronts, the crystallomancers didn’t fit into the house where he worked and slept.

When Addanz’s image appeared in a crystal, Rathar explained what had happened. The Archmage of Unkerlant nodded. “I have heard somewhat of this from the Kuusamans,” he said. “Apparently, even Mezentio’s men have trouble doing what they do. Only a handful of their mages are capable of such rapid kinetic sorcery. It may prove a nuisance, but no worse.”

“If they knock down our last route into that bridgehead, it’ll be a lot worse than a nuisance,” Rathar growled. “And if you know what Mezentio’s mages are up to, why aren’t you trying to stop it?”

“We have already begun work on countermeasures,” Archmage Addanz said. “But these things do take a certain amount of time, and—” He blinked. “Powers above, what was that?”

Rathar didn’t answer him.
That
had been an egg bursting close by, close enough to startle him into biting his tongue. He tasted blood. He and General Gurmun dashed out of the crystallomancers’ headquarters, leaving it to the mages to break the etheric connection. Rathar needed only an instant to see what had happened: an egg had burst squarely on the building where he’d been living.

“Was that one of their steered eggs?” Gurmun asked.

“How should I know?” Rathar trotted toward his headquarters. “Let’s see if anyone’s left alive in there.

“They don’t want
you
left alive,” Gurmun said.

“That’s all right,” Rathar told him. “I don’t want them left alive, either— and I’m going to get my wish.”

Seventeen

S
ummer was fading fast in the Naantali district. Fernao had watched that happen before. Setubal, the capital of Lagoas and his home town, didn’t have the best weather in the world. Not even the most ardent Lagoan patriot could have claimed otherwise—not when, in peacetime, COME TO BALMY BALVl! broadsheets sprouted like mushrooms on walls and fences every autumn. But even Setubal looked subtropical when measured against the wastelands of southeastern Kuusamo.

Even before nights turned longer than days, the grass started going from green to yellow. Birds began flying north, first by ones and twos and then in enormous flocks. More and more clouds boiled up from the south, so that even when it was daylight, gloom held sway more often than not.

The worsening weather perfectly fit Fernao’s mood. The rattle and scrape and bang of hammers and saws and chisels and other tools as Kuusaman construction crews raced to repair the hostel after the Algarvians dropped their steerable egg on it did little to improve his spirits, either.

“Don’t worry about a thing,” Ilmarinen told him at supper one evening. “If they aren’t ready before the snow starts falling, I’m sure all of us Kuusaman mages know the ancient art of building snow houses. We’d be happy to teach it to you, so you can stay as warm and cheerful as we do.”

“Thank you so much.” Fernao cast about for a word in Kuusaman, didn’t find it, and switched to classical Kaunian: “Can you quantify exactly how warm and cheerful you will be?”

“Oh, of course,” Ilmarinen said. “Can you provide me with an appropriation to investigate it with all the latest sorcerous techniques?”

Fernao took a tiny copper bit from his belt pouch. “Here you are.”

“Excellent!” Ilmarinen scooped up the coin. “You may expect your answer in about ten thousand years.”

He laughed uproariously. Fernao laughed, too. Glum or not, he couldn’t help it. Ilmarinen worked hard at being outrageous, and was good at what he did.

“What’s funny?” Pekka asked as she sat down at the table with them. Fernao explained. Pekka gave Ilmarinen a severe look. “Snow houses, indeed,” she said. “When was the last time you made a snow house or herded reindeer like our ancestors?”

“Day before yesterday,” he answered, as seriously as if it were true.

Noise from down the hall covered Fernao’s snort and Pekka’s cough. She said, “I’ll tell you what worries me: all those carpenters. I’m sure the Algarvians will have tried to put spies among them.”

“Hard for an Algarvian to look like a Kuusaman,” Fernao said. That gave him an excuse to look at her and to admire the way she looked. When the steerable egg burst by the hostel, all he’d worried about was whether she was all right. The sorcery they were working on hadn’t mattered a bit.

But Pekka and Ilmarinen both shook their heads. “Plenty of masking sorceries,” Pekka said.

“A good many of them used against the Algarvians here and there,” Ilmarinen added, speaking with considerable authority. He had knowledge and sources for knowledge at which Fernao couldn’t begin to guess. “Wouldn’t be too surprising if they tried to get some of their own back.”

“There are ways to look behind such masks, I’m sure,” Fernao said.

“Oh, aye.” Ilmarinen spoke with authority again. “Anything one mage can figure out how to make, another mage can figure out how to break.”

Pekka gave her order to a serving girl even as she nodded. “That’s right. It leaves me with two worries on my mind: that Mezentio’s mages haven’t done something particularly clever that we don’t notice, and that we do our checks on all the workmen and don’t let any slip past unexamined.”

Fernao called for a mug of ale. When it came, he sipped slowly. The ale gave him an excuse to pick at his supper. Ilmarinen, on the other hand, ate as if he were stoking a roaring fire. Rising from his seat just as the girl brought Pekka’s food, he leered down at Fernao. “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t enjoy,” he said, and went off whistling.