Darkness Descending (37 page)

A horn call, thin in the distance, drove such thoughts from his mind. He peered toward Count Simanu’s castle, squinting to try to make his vision sharper. “Is that the drawbridge coming down?”

“Aye,” Raunu said. “I can’t hardly read at all without spectacles on my nose, but I don’t have any trouble with what’s far away.”

“Here he comes,” Merkela breathed. “Oh, here comes the whole band of hunters.” Her voice was soft, but the passion it held matched—outdid—even her wildest moanings when she lay joined to Skarnu in the bedchamber she had shared with Gedominu.

Skarnu had no trouble seeing that, either: every one of the hunters’ mounts was a brilliant, gleaming white, a white that glowed even under this dark, lowering sky. “Those aren’t horses,” he said. “They’re unicorns, for swank.”

“Aye,” Dauktu said. “You didn’t know about the herd the counts keep?” He shrugged. “Well, can’t be helped, I suppose. You’re not from here.”

If Skarnu lived out all his remaining days in this stretch of the kingdom, people would, he knew, be saying,
You’re not from here,
even when he was a doddering old man. He put that out of his mind. “It makes our job harder,” he said. “Unicorns are faster than horses, and they’re smarter than horses, too.”

“Aye, and all of those riders will have sticks of their own, and they’ll know what to do with them,” Raunu said. “Don’t know about Simanu, but Algarvian cowards are few and far between, whatever else you say about the redheads.”

“If you haven’t got the stomach for the game, you can still go back to the farm,” Merkela told him.

“You know better.” The veteran underofficer locked eyes with Merkela. She looked away first, with a grudged nod. Skarnu’s respect for Raunu, already high, went up another notch. Very few people were able to make Merkela give ground. He’d had scant luck there himself, and he was her lover.

Another horn call sounded. Simanu and his cronies drew nearer. Some wore trousers, others kilts. They were all fine riders, handling their unicorns with effortless ease. The lead rider—Skarnu thought it was Simanu himself—pointed in the direction of the thicket where the raiders waited.

Raunu chuckled mirthlessly. “Now we find out who’s sold whom.”

“Aye,” Skarnu agreed. “Did that groom tell us the count would come this way today because he couldn’t stand his master, or was he taking Simanu’s money to suck us into the redheads’ web?”

One of the peasants nodded in the direction of the fortress. “I don’t see any more soldiers coming forth there, and we’d know if the Algarvians had men in these woods. They’d already be at us.” What he meant by that was,
We’d already be dead.
Since Skarnu thought the fellow was right, he didn’t argue.

Simanu shouted something. The count was still too far away for Skarnu to make out his words, but he sounded carefree. Maybe that meant he was a good actor. Skarnu hoped it meant he suspected nothing.

“We don’t start blazing too soon,” he warned his comrades—Merkela in particular. “This is likely to be the best chance we’ll ever have. If we waste it, we’re stuck with the bugger forevermore.”

He wondered if he ought to be talking like that. Simanu was a reprobate, but he was also a member of Skarnu’s class. Nobles who maligned their fellows to commoners got themselves a bad name. But what of nobles who went to bed with the Algarvians? What did they get?
Not half what they deserve,
Skarnu thought. He’d do his best to fix that.

Simanu shouted something else. This time, Skarnu caught a phrase—”after a wild boar”—though the breeze blew away the rest. One of the Algarvians answered in his own language. Then Simanu said something in Algarvian, too; the rhythms and trills were unmistakable. Skarnu didn’t know why that should have surprised him, but it did, and infuriated him, too.

“Closer,” Raunu said softly. “Let ‘em come closer.” He might have been watching a wary doe approaching a deadfall. “We don’t want to spook ‘em by—”

Before he could finish, one of the peasants at the far end of their little line started blazing. The Kaunian behind Simanu threw up his hands and slid bonelessly off his unicorn. It was a very fine blaze. Skarnu didn’t think he could have matched it, not at that range.

“Oh, you cursed fool,” he muttered under his breath. Because it was such a fine blaze, who else would have the chance to get an easier one? No help for it now; Simanu and his henchmen were already shouting in alarm. Skarnu shouted, too: “Let’s get them!” He raised his stick to his shoulder, aimed at Simanu, and blazed.

The collaborationist count’s unicorn reared, let out a horrid shriek, and then toppled. Skarnu and his friends cheered. Then they cried out again, this time in dismay. Simanu had managed to kick free. Now he lay behind the beast’s thrashing body and started blazing toward the woods.

Most of his henchmen galloped back toward the safety of the keep. A couple of men, though—both Algarvians, Skarnu saw with mixed admiration for their courage and shame that they had no Valmierans with them—spurred their unicorns straight for the woods. They blazed as they came, buying time for their comrades to get away. They couldn’t have known how many foes they faced, or just where among the trees those foes hid, but they attacked anyhow.

Several beams converged on them, Merkela used Gedominu’s hunting stick for all it was worth. As each redhead fell, she grunted breathily, as she might have done while building toward her peak of pleasure with Skarnu atop her. When they both lay unmoving, she nodded to him. “You were right,” she said. “They are brave. Now these two are brave and dead, which is better yet.”

“Aye,” Skarnu said. A hole appeared in a branch too close to his head for comfort. “But Simanu’s not dead, curse him, and he’s got some cover.”

“We’d best do something about him quick, too,” Raunu said. “They’ve seen something’s wrong, back there in the castle. We’ll have all of Simanu’s cursed retainers coming down on us if we hang around too long.”

“Aye.” Skarnu called quick orders to Dauktu and the other raiders at the far end of the line.

They didn’t obey automatically, as true soldiers would have had to do. “And while we’re up to that, what’s your part of the game?” Dauktu demanded.

“You’ll see,” Skarnu said. “I won’t shrink, I promise. Now—do you want Simanu dead or don’t you?” That decided the peasants. They started blazing at the count without taking so much trouble about their cover. One of them cried out in pain a moment later, too, for Simanu was alert and no bad blazer himself.

But while he traded beams with the raiders, Skarnu burst from cover a good ways away and rushed toward him. As soon as the unicorn’s body no longer shielded the count, Skarnu raised his stick and blazed. He was almost too late; Simanu had already started to swing back toward him. But his beam caught Simanu in the face. The count wailed and went limp. Skarnu waited to see no more, but dashed back toward the trees.

When he stood panting by Merkela again, she kissed him as ferociously as she had when he’d shouted against Simanu in Pavilosta’s market square. “Let’s get out of here,” he said when, after some long and mostly enjoyable time, he broke free. She didn’t argue with him. Neither did any of the other raiders—he’d won his spurs today. But even as he fled, he wondered what the Algarvians would do tomorrow, or the day after that.

Officially, Leudast remained a corporal. No one had bothered with the paperwork that would have promoted him. Unkerlant had neither time nor energy to spare on paperwork these days. Unkerlant had neither time nor energy to spare for anything save survival, and even survival looked to be too much to hope for.

Unofficially, Leudast led a couple of squads in the company Sergeant Magnulf just as unofficially commanded. Captain Hawart headed the regiment of which that company was a part. None of them had the rank for his job. They were all still alive and still fighting back against the Algarvians—a less formal qualification, but good enough.

Cold, wet, filthy, and frightened, Leudast peered east out of the hole in the ground he shared with Magnulf. One thought was uppermost in his mind: “When are they going to do it again?”

“Curse me if I know,” Magnulf answered wearily. He looked as worn and disheveled as Leudast felt. Spitting into the mud at the bottom of the hole, he went on, “I could fight the redheads. Aye, they kept coming forward, but they paid for every inch of ground they stole from us. But this . . .” He shook his head, a man caught in the grip of horror.

“This,” Leudast echoed. He shook his head, too. “And what are we doing to fight back? We keep bringing up more men, but so what? The Algarvians murder another raft of poor whoresons who never did ‘em any harm, and they smash right through us again.” He looked over his shoulder, toward the southwest. “If they smash through us two or three times more, they’re in Cottbus, and what do we do then?”

He only half heard Magnulf s reply; he’d spotted a soldier trudging through the pitted muck toward them. The fellow called, “Captain Hawart’s coming up to the front, and he’s got some big blaze with him.”

Leudast glanced over at Magnulf, who still outranked him. With an angry gesture, Magnulf said, “Aye, tell ‘em to come ahead. We’ll give ‘em pheasant under glass, just like we’re having, and they can sleep on the same featherbeds we use.”

With a couple of chunks of stale, moldy bread in his wallet and a grimy blanket for a mattress, Leudast couldn’t help snickering. The soldier shrugged and trotted away. He’d delivered his message. Past that, he didn’t care what happened.

In a lazy sort of way, the Algarvians started lobbing eggs at the line the Unkerlanters held. A couple landed close enough to the hole in which Leudast and Magnulf sheltered to splash fresh mud onto them. “The captain would come forward in this,” Leudast said, “but any big blaze’d turn up his toes—or else pick ‘em up and run away.” He paused, considered, and corrected himself: “Any big blaze but Marshal Rathar. He was right there in the thick of it up in Zuwayza.”

“He’s not afraid to mix it,” Magnulf agreed. Now he looked back toward the rear, and a moment later let out a low whistle of surprise. “Turns out you’re wrong. Here comes the captain, and he’s got somebody in a clean tunic with him.”

Hawart got down into the hole with Leudast and Magnulf without hesitation; he knew it could keep him alive. The fellow with him, a clever-looking man of middle years, got into it with wrinkled lip, as if fearing his tunic wouldn’t stay clean.

“Sir,” Hawart said to him, “let me present to you Magnulf and Leudast. They’ve been in this fight from the start, and they want to stay in it to the finish. Boys, this is Archmage Addanz, the top wizard in the whole kingdom.”

“King Swemmel has seen fit to honor me with the highest rank,” Addanz said. “Whether I have the highest skill in all the land may perhaps be a different question.”

Leudast wasn’t inclined to quibble. “Then you can stop the Algarvians when they hurl their magic at us?” he asked eagerly.

“That’d be wonderful,” Magnulf exclaimed. “Let us fight the redheads man against man, and we’ll lick ‘em.” The Unkerlanters hadn’t licked King Mezentio’s men even before they started using their blood-soaked magecraft, but they’d fought hard enough to lend Magnulf’s words some weight.

One look at Addanz’s face told Leudast his first wild hope was indeed too wild. “You can’t do it,” he said. He didn’t mean it to sound like an accusation, but that was how it came out.

“I cannot do it, not yet,” the archmage said. “I do not know if I will ever be able to do such a thing. What I can do, what I hope to do now, is to drop an egg on them of the same sort as they have been dropping on us.”

“What do you—?” Leudast broke off. He didn’t need to have Addanz draw him a picture. Like anyone else who’d grown up in an Unkerlanter peasant village, he knew how hard life could be. He asked only one question: “Will it work?”

Sergeant Magnulf, who’d grown up close to the Duchy of Grelz—now again the Kingdom of Grelz under Mezentio’s cousin—found another one: “Can you do that and not have the people rise up against King Swemmel and for the Algarvians?” People who knew Grelzers well always thought in terms of uprisings.

“I can do it,” Addanz answered. “My mages and I, under the orders of the king, have already begun to do it. The Algarvians will make far harsher masters than King Swemmel, so of course the people will follow him.”

That meant he didn’t know, and no one else did, either. Another egg burst near the hole, splattering the soldiers and the mage with more mud. Unkerlanter egg-tossers, slow as usual, began throwing sorcerous energy back at the Algarvians. “About time,” Leudast growled. “Sometimes I think we’ve forgotten about fighting back since the redheads started doing this to us.” That wasn’t fair, and he knew it, but he didn’t much care about being fair. He’d come too close to dying too many times to care about being fair.

Addanz clucked reproachfully. Leudast remembered he had King Swemmel’s car. If he chose to remember a name, if he chose to mention that name to the king ... if he chose to do that, Leudast would regret saying what he thought.

Perhaps the archmage of Unkerlant was about to reprove him. If he was, he never got the chance. He stiffened, his mouth hanging open. Then he groaned, as if a beam had burnt its way through his body. “They die,” he croaked in a voice that suggested he might be dying himself. “Oh, they die.”

“Mezentio’s men at their butchery again?” Captain Hawart demanded.

Addanz managed to nod. “Aye,” he gasped. “And we have not gathered enough men behind our line to try to block them altogether.” He gasped again, as if he’d run a long way. “Didn’t. . . expect them to smite again so soon.”

Leudast knew what that had to mean, but didn’t want to dwell on it. He didn’t have time to dwell on it, either. He spoke urgently: “We’d better get out of this hole. When the Algarvians start their spells, places like this have a way of closing up all of a sudden.”

“He’s right,” Magnulf said. He, Leudast, and Hawart started to scramble out. So did Addanz, but his effort was feeble and plainly hopeless. With a curse, Leudast jumped back into the mud at the bottom of the hole and heaved the archmage up to Magnulf and Hawart. Then he got out again himself.