Darkness Descending (32 page)

Swemmel’s burning gaze swung toward the chief sorcerer of Unkerlant. “Aye, we will have the details, Addanz,” he said, even more harshly than he had spoken to Rathar. “Tell us how you and yours failed Unkerlant in her hour of need.”

Addanz bowed his head. Like Rathar, he was in the flower of his middle years. Most of the old men who might have served Swemmel were dead. Some, the lucky ones, had died of natural causes. Others had chosen the wrong side in the Twinkings War or displeased Swemmel afterwards. Their ends, commonly, were harder.

“Your Majesty,” Addanz said, still not looking up, “I did not expect the Algarvians to do as they did. None of us expected the cursed Algarvians to do as they did.” He freighted the adjective with more than its usual mild weight of meaning. “When they did as they did, the world shuddered, for those with the wit and training to sense such things. By the powers above, your Majesty, the first time they did as they did, I almost fell over dead.”

“Better if you had,” Swemmel snarled. “Then we could appoint someone of some wit in your place.” He turned back toward Rathar. “And yours.”

“Mine?” Rathar said—yelped, rather. He’d hoped that, with the king’s wrath turned on the archmage, he might escape unscathed. No such luck, he saw. He let out a muted protest, the only kind safe around King Swemmel: “What did I do?”

“Nothing—which is why you are in part to blame,” the king answered. “You should have known the stinking redheads would try some such ploy when straightforward war began to fail ‘em.”

“Your Majesty, none of us dreamt they would do—this,” Addanz said. Rathar nodded to him in grateful surprise. For the archmage to defend him took more courage than he’d known the other man to possess. Addanz went on, “You surely know, your Majesty, how life energy is a very potent source of power for magecraft—how soldiers whose sticks run low on blazes may recharge them with the death of a captive or of a brave comrade.”

“Aye, we know this,” Swemmel said. “How could we not know it? The soldiers in the far west, particularly, have used the life energy of some few of their number to help the rest hold back the louse-ridden, fuzzy-bearded Gongs.”

Addanz nodded. “Even so.
Of some few of their number,
your Majesty, is the critical phrase. For life energy is the most potent, most concentrated form of sorcerous energy. And the Algarvians, you might say, went suddenly from the retail to the wholesale use of such energy. They gathered together a couple of thousand Kaunians in one place—in each of several places, actually—and slew them all together, all at once, and their mages turned the energy from those slaughters against our armies.”

“That is the way of it,” Rathar agreed. “The mages who aid our soldiers against the foe did everything they could to hold back the great storm of sorcery raised against ‘em”—as Addanz had defended him, he returned the favor—”but they were overwhelmed.”

“It is a great wickedness, the greatest of wickednesses,” Addanz said in a voice filled with dread. “To take men and women who have done nothing, to use them so, to slay them so as to steal their life energy... I did not think even Algarvians could stoop to such a thing. They fought hard in the Six Years’ War, but they used no more vileness than anyone else. Now . . .” He shook his head.

King Swemmel heard him out. Indeed, Swemmel listened intently. That relieved Rathar, who had feared the king would burst into one of his rages and start shouting for executioners. Then Swemmel’s eyes swung back to him, and he wondered if relief had come too soon. “How do we stop ‘em?” the king asked. Now his voice was calm, dangerously calm.

It was the right question. It was, at the moment, the only question. Still, Marshal Rathar wished his sovereign had not asked it. Though he knew it might cost him his head, he answered with the truth: “I do not know. If the Algarvians will massacre by the thousands those they’ve conquered, we facing them are like a man in a tunic with a knife facing another in chainmail with a broadsword.”

“Why?” Swemmel asked in startled curiosity—so startled, it took Rathar by surprise.

“Because they have no scruples about doing what we will not,” the marshal replied, setting forth what seemed obvious to him.

Swemmel threw back his head and laughed. No, more: he howled. A small drop of spittle flew across the table at which he and his subjects sat and struck Rathar in the cheek. Tears of mirth rolled down the king’s face. “You fool!” he chortled when at last he could do anything but laugh. “Oh, you milk-fed fool! We never knew we had a virgin leading our armies.”

“Your Majesty?” Rathar said stiffly. He hadn’t the faintest notion what King Swemmel meant. He glanced over to Addanz. The archmage’s face held horror of a different sort—to Rathar’s amazement, horror of a worse sort—than it had while Addanz was explaining what the Algarvians had done: That deeper horror told Rathar everything he needed to know. He stared at Swemmel. “You would not—”

“Of course we would.” Laughter dropped from the king like a discarded cloak. He leaned forward in his seat and brought the full weight of his presence to bear on Rathar. “Where else, how else, shall we get chainmail and a broadsword of our own?”

That was another question Rathar wished Swemmel had not asked. Having fallen into the abyss themselves, the Algarvians would now pull him in after them.

He had never been a man to look away from trouble, but he looked away now, trying to distract King Swemmel from a large concern with small ones: “Where would we get the victims?” he asked. “We had but a handful of Kaunians on our soil, and even if you thought to use them for such purposes, they’re in Algarvian hands now. And if we start slaying redheaded captives, they’ll murder ours in place of the Kaunians.”

Swemmel’s shrug chilled the marshal with its indifference. “We have plenty of peasants. We care nothing—nothing at all—if only one of them is left alive when the fighting’s over, so long as the very last Algarvian is dead.”

“I don’t know if we can quickly match them in their magecraft,” Addanz said. “As with so much else, they have been readying themselves for long and long. Even if we are forced to this thing to survive”—he shuddered—”we have much learning to do.”

“Why did you not begin learning before?” the king demanded.

His archmage looked back at him in harassed fury. “Because I never imagined—no one ever imagined—the Algarvians would be so vile. I never imagined anyone could be so vile. And I three times never imagined
I
could be forced to be so vile.”

Rathar had seen that defiance sometimes got Swemmel’s notice in a way nothing else could. Sometimes a defiant man found he didn’t want Swemmel’s notice once he had it, but that didn’t happen here. In surprisingly mild tones, the king asked, “And would you rather go down to ruin because the redheads were vile and you couldn’t stomach matching them?”

“No, your Majesty.” Addanz had to know his head would answer for any other reply.

“Nor would we,” King Swemmel said. “Go, then. You and your mages had better learn how to do as the Algarvians do, and you had better learn it soon. We promise you, Archmage: if we do fall before the redheads, you will not last long enough for Mezentio’s men to finish off. We shall make certain of that. Do you understand us?”

“Aye, your Majesty,” Addanz said. Swemmel made a peremptory gesture of dismissal. Addanz fled. Rathar did not blame him. The marshal would have liked to flee, too. But the king had not dismissed him.

Swemmel said, “Your task, Marshal, is to make sure the Algarvians cannot finish us before we find out how best to fight back. How do you aim to do that?”

Rathar had been thinking of little else since word of the disasters reached him. He began ticking points off on his fingers: “We are spreading our men thinner, so the Algarvians cannot catch so many of them with one sorcerous stroke. We are making our positions deeper, so we can attack the redheads even if they pierce our front.”

“This will slow Mezentio’s bandits. It will not stop them,” Swemmel observed. He wasn’t stupid. Often, he would have been easier to deal with had he been stupid. He was shrewd, just shrewd enough to think himself smarter than he really was.

Here, however, he was also right. Rathar said as much, and then continued, “The weather also works for us. Try as they will, the Algarvians cannot go forward as fast as they would like. We trade space for time.”

“We have less space to trade than we did,” the king growled.

And you were on fire for charging straight at King Mezentio.
Rathar thought. He couldn’t say that. He did say, “Winter is coming. Advancing will get no easier for them. And, your Majesty, we are also doing all we can to send parties behind the enemy’s position to sabotage the ley lines coming out of Forthweg. If the cursed redheads can’t bring the Kaunians forward, they can’t very well kill them.”

Rathar seldom won out-and-out approval from Swemmel, but this was one of those times. “Now that is good,” the king said. “That is quite good.” He paused; his approval never lasted long. “Or is it? Can the redheads not slay them back in Forthweg and bring the power of the magic forward?”

“You would do better asking Addanz than me,” Rathar said. “My answer is only a guess, but it would be no. If the Algarvians could do that, why would they put the Kaunians in camps near the front?”

Swemmel fingered his narrow chin. But for being dark of hair and eye, he
did
look like an Algarvian. He grunted. “It could be so. And if we overrun any of those camps, we can dispose of the Kaunians in them instead of using our own folk. That would be funny, having the redheads do our gathering work for us.”

He had a rugged sense of humor. Rathar had seen as much over the course of many years. The marshal said, “We might do better to turn them loose and let them try to get back to Forthweg.”

“Why would we want to do such a wasteful thing as that?” King Swemmel said.

“If any of them make it back to their own land and tell the truth about what the Algarvians are doing to them, don’t you think Forthweg might rise against Mezentio?” Rathar asked.

“Maybe, but then again maybe not,” the king replied. “Forthwegians love Kaunians hardly better than the redheads.” Swemmel shrugged. “We suppose it might be worth a try. And it would embarrass Mezentio, which is all to the good. Aye, you have our leave to do it.”

“Thank you, your Majesty.” Something new occurred to Rathar. “If the Algarvians slaughter their thousands for the sake of sorcery and we slaughter as many to stop them, the war will come down to soldier against soldier once more. I wonder if Mezentio thought of that before he set this fire.”

“We do not care,” King Swemmel said. “Whatever fires he sets, we shall set bigger ones.”

Try as she would, Pekka could not enjoy the Principality. She knew Master Siuntio had meant nothing but kindness when he booked her into Yliharma’s finest hostel after calling her to the capital. But she would have come to the capital whether he’d summoned her or not. The cold fear and horror in her would have pushed her out of Kajaani.

She hadn’t been the only mage riding the ley-line caravan north to Yliharma.

She’d spotted three or four other women and men with set, worried faces. They’d nodded when they saw her and then gone back to their private woes, which were, no doubt, much like hers.

But Siuntio had arranged to have the Seven Princes of Kuusamo also gather in Yliharma. Pekka could not have done that on her own. She was glad the Seven Princes took the business as seriously as their mages did. She’d been far from sure they would.

A knock on the door sent her hurrying to open it. There in the hallway stood Siuntio. “A good day to you,” he said, bowing. “I have a carriage waiting to take us to the princely palace. Ilmarinen will ride with us, too, unless he’s gone off chasing a barmaid while I came up to get you.”

“Master Siuntio, you didn’t need to come here to bring me to the palace,” Pekka said sternly. “I could have found my own way. I intended to find my own way.

“I wanted the three of us to come before the Seven Princes together,” the elderly theoretical sorcerer answered. “Prince Joroinen, I know, has been keeping his colleagues apprised of our progress, when we have any. If we join together in a show of alarm, it will have weight for all of the Seven.”

“You flatter me beyond my worth,” Pekka said. His face as serious as she’d ever seen it, Siuntio shook his head. Flustered, she turned and took a thick wool cloak from the cabinet that stood in the little entry hall. As she settled it on her shoulders, she spoke in a rough voice to cover her own embarrassment: “Let’s go, then.”

When she got downstairs, she discovered Siuntio hadn’t been joking. Ilmarinen was chatting up a pretty young woman whose slanted eyes, swarthy skin, and broad cheekbones were all Kuusaman, but who had auburn hair far more typical of a Lagoan. He blew her a kiss as he went off to join Siuntio and Pekka. “Just making certain she’s not a spy sent out from Setubal,” he said airily.

“Of course you were,” Siuntio answered. “I’m certain you intended to probe her very deeply.”

Ilmarinen started to nod, but Pekka’s giggle told him he’d missed something. After a heartbeat, he gave Siuntio a dirty look. “You think you’re funny,” he growled. “I think you’re in your second childhood, is what I think.”

“I almost wish I were,” Siuntio said. “Then I could have gone on living my life instead of screaming like a man on the rack at the supper table a few days ago. I alarmed the whole eatery, but not so badly as I alarmed myself.”

Ilmarinen grimaced. “Aye, it was bad,” he said. Pekka nodded. The memory of that moment would stay with her all her days. Ilmarinen sighed and went on, “We’d best be at it. The wench will wait. This business won’t.”

Chill air smote Pekka as she and Siuntio and Ilmarinen left the warmth of the Principality. A little snow lay on the sidewalks and in the streets of Yliharma. It was half melted and gray with soot. Kajaani lay on the southern side of the Vaattojarvi Hills. It took the full brunt of the storms rolling up from the land of the Ice People. The snow there was unlikely to melt till spring.