Darkness Descending (38 page)

“My thanks,” Addanz said. He looked as if he’d just gone through a four-day battle. “You have no notion of what it is like for a mage to feel the trapped death throes of so many at once. How the Algarvian sorcerers do what they do without blazing out their minds is beyond me. Their hearts are surely colder than winter in Grelz.”

However the Algarvian mages did what they did, they chose that moment to loose their latest sorcerous onslaught. The ground shuddered beneath Leudast like the body of a man shackled to the whipping post when the lash bites. He imagined he heard it groan like a man under the lash, too.

Flames sprang upward all around, as if fire mountains were erupting all over the field. Here and there, men caught in those flames screamed—but not for long. With a wet, sucking noise, the lips of the hole in the ground by Leudast’s feet pulled together. They would have been pulled together had they been down in the hole, too.

“You were right to get us out of there,” Hawart said. “I hope we didn’t have too many men trapped this time.”

Addanz groaned once more, as he had a couple of minutes before. “Are they doing it again, sir mage?” Sergeant Magnulf asked. Leudast understood the alarm in his voice. The Algarvians had never struck two such sorcerous hammer blows back to back. Going through one was bad enough. Could flesh and blood—to say nothing of earth and stone—stand two?

But the archmage of Unkerlant shook his head. Speech, just then, seemed beyond him. His head was turned back toward the west, toward land Unkerlant still held, not toward the east and the Algarvians. “Oh, by the powers above,” Leudast whispered.

“No,” Addanz croaked—he could talk after all. “By the powers below. Murder piled on murder, and where shall it end?” Tears trickled through the dirt on his face: he was dirty by now, almost as dirty as the soldiers around him.

Captain Hawart spoke as gently as he could: “We’re only doing it because the redheads did it first. We’re doing it to try to defend ourselves. If Mezentio hadn’t done it, we would never have taken it up.”

All that was surely true. None of it seemed to console the archmage. He swayed back and forth, back and forth, as if mourning something he would never see again—a cleaner time, perhaps.

Leudast started to reach out, to set a hand on his shoulder. But he stopped with the motion stillborn. Sooner than it had under any of the Algarvians’ earlier sorcerous onslaughts, the ground steadied beneath him. The flames shrank. Most of them, though not all, vanished. “I think, sir mage, your comrades back there did us a good turn.”

Only then did he think of the peasants—he supposed they were peasants—who must have perished in the Unkerlanter countermagic. He didn’t suppose they thought Addanz’s sorcerous comrades had done them a good turn.

“Here come the redheads,” Magnulf said. Algarvian behemoths lumbered toward the battered Unkerlanter line. Footsoldiers trotted along to help protect them and to take advantage of the holes they tore. Horse and unicorn cavalry, swift but vulnerable, trailed after them. If the holes were big enough, the cavalry would tear through, too, and spread chaos in the Unkerlanter rear.

“Do you know, I think we may just give them a nasty surprise,” Captain Hawart said. “This time, maybe they think they’ve kicked us harder than they really have.”

Leudast wasn’t thinking about that. He was scurrying toward the nearest hole he could find. Over his shoulder, he called, “Get the archmage out of here. This isn’t his kind of fight.”

It was Leudast s kind of fight. He started blazing at the advancing Algarvians. He wasn’t the only one, either—far from it. The redheads started dropping. Even without their magic’s working as well as they would have liked, they kept coming, though. Leudast had fought them for too long to think they were cowards. He wished they had been. Unkerlant would have suffered far less.

“Fall back!” Captain Hawart shouted, as he’d had to shout so many times. Unwillingly, Leudast obeyed lest the Algarvians get behind him. As clashes went these days, the Unkerlanters had done well. By the time nightfall brought fighting to an end, Leudast and his comrades had lost only about a mile of ground.

Every once in a while, a handful of Unkerlanter dragons would appear over Bishah, drop a few eggs, and then flee back toward the south. They did little damage. Hajjaj judged they didn’t come intending to do much damage, but rather to remind the Zuwayzin that King Swemmel hadn’t forgotten about them even if he was involved in bigger fights elsewhere.

After the third or fourth visit, the Zuwayzi foreign minister noticed something else: most of the eggs the Unkerlanters dropped fell near the Algarvian ministry. He remarked on that to Balastro when King Mezentio’s minister to Zuwayza held a reception: “I think you are trying to gather all the diplomats in the city here together to be wiped out at one stroke. Are you sure you’re not in King Swemmel’s pay rather than that of your own sovereign?”

Marquis Balastro threw back his head and laughed uproariously. “Ah, your Excellency, you do both me and the Unkerlanter dragonfliers’ aim too much credit,” he said. Lamplight glittered off his badges of nobility and rank, and also off the silver threads that ran through his tunic. Far from being naked, as he’d come to Hajjaj s hillside estate, tonight he displayed full Algarvian plumage. That was literally true: in his hatband glowed three bright feathers from some bird or another out of tropical Siaulia.

Hajjaj minded clothes tonight less than usual. With the sun almost as low in the north as it ever went, the weather was cool by Zuwayzi standards, mild by those of Algarve. He didn’t feel as if his own tunic and kilt—not nearly so splendid as Balastro’s—were trying to smother him.

“Some date wine, your Excellency?” Balastro asked. “We have what the dealer assured me was an excellent vintage—if that’s the word one uses for date wines—though I hope you will forgive me for admitting I have not sampled it myself.”

“I may forgive you eventually, but not soon.” Hajjaj smiled, and the Algarvian minister to Zuwayza laughed again. Balastro was a charming fellow: good-natured, clever, cultured. Hajjaj eyed him, wondering how he could be all he was and yet. .. But that would wait. It would have to wait.

For now, the Zuwayzi foreign minister ambled over to the bar. The Algarvian servitor behind it bowed and asked, “What may I get you, sir?” in fairly good Zuwayzi. That made him likelier to be a spy than a tapman by trade, but these days Hajjaj assumed everyone a spy till proved otherwise. Painful experience with his secretary had taught him that was safest.

Balastro was eyeing him, to see what he’d choose. As much to humor the redhead as to please his own palate, he did ask for date wine. When the servitor poured it from the jar, Hajjaj’s eyes widened. “Pressed from the golden dates of Shamiyah!” he exclaimed, and the Algarvian nodded. Hajjaj bowed partly to him, partly to the wine. “You do me great honor indeed, and great harm to King Mezentio’s purse.”

He sipped the lovely, tawny stuff. Almost, he went over to grab Balastro by the scruff of the neck and force him to taste the wine himself. In the end, he refrained. Balastro would say all the right things, but he would not mean them. No man who came to dates after grapes could appreciate them as they deserved to be appreciated. Hajjaj could, and did.

Sipping, he eyed the gathering. It was not what it would have been in times of peace. Ansovald, the Unkerlanter minister, had been sent south over the border once more when war between his kingdom and Zuwayza resumed. The ministries of Forthweg and Sibiu and Valmiera and Jelgava stood empty, untenanted. Zuwayza was not formally at war with either Lagoas or Kuusamo, but Algarve was, and Balastro could hardly have been expected to invite his king’s foes.

That left delegations from Algarve, from Yanina, from Gyongyos, from small, neutral Ortah (which no doubt thanked the powers above for the mountains and swamps that let her stay neutral), and, of course, from Zuwayza: Hajjaj was far from the only dark-skinned person making the best of clothes tonight.

The Yaninan minister to Zuwayza was a plump, bald little man named Iskakis. He had the hairiest ears of any man Hajjaj had ever seen. On his arm was his wife, who couldn’t have had more than half his years, and whose elegant, sculpted features bore an expression of permanent discontent. Hajjaj knew—he wasn’t sure whether she did, too—Iskakis had a taste for boys. For a man with that taste to be married to such a woman seemed a sad waste, but Hajjaj could do nothing about it.

Iskakis was telling a Gyongyosian almost twice his size about the triumphs Yaninan soldiers were running up in Unkerlant. Neither he nor the big, yellow-bearded man spoke Algarvian perfectly. Being from the other side of broad Derlavai, the Gyongyosian might not know most of the triumphs Iskakis was describing were as imaginary as the Yaninan’s command of the perfect tense. The Yaninan minister did not brag of his kingdom’s might to Algarvians.

Horthy, the Gyongyosian minister to Zuwayza, made his way over to Hajjaj. He was a big man, too, his beard streaked with gray. “You do not seem joyful, your Excellency,” he said in classical Kaunian, the only tongue he and Hajjaj had in common.

Hearing Kaunian spoke inside the Algarvian ministry and using it himself made Hajjaj s mouth twist. Again, he put that aside, answering, “I have been to too many of these gatherings to let one more overwhelm me. The wine is very good.”

“Ah. Is it so? I understand that. I have not seen so many as you, sir—I honor your years—but I too have seen enough.” Horthy pointed to the goblet. “And you say you esteem that wine?”

“I do.” Hajjaj’s smile held an edge of self-mockery. “But it is made from a fruit of my country”—to his annoyance, he couldn’t come up with the classical Kaunian word for
dates
—”rather than grapes, and is not to everyone’s taste.”

“I shall try it,” the Gyongyosian minister declared, as if Hajjaj had questioned his manhood. He marched over to the bar and returned with a goblet of Shamiyah wine. Raising it to his lips, he said, “May the stars grant you health and many more years.” He sipped, paused thoughtfully, and sipped again. After another pause, he delivered his verdict: “I would not care to drink it and nothing else, but it goes well enough as a change from the usual.”

“Most Zuwayzin say the same of grape wine,” Hajjaj said. “As for myself, your Excellency, I agree with you.”

“Marquis Balastro is a good host: he lays in something to please all of us.” Horthy leaned forward, toward Hajjaj, and lowered his voice. “Now if only he had laid in victory, too.”

“He did invite us here some little while ago,” Hajjaj replied, also quietly. “Perhaps he expected to be celebrating victory tonight. And, in truth, Algarve has won great victories against Unkerlant—as has Gyongyos, of course, your Excellency.” He bowed to Horthy, not wanting to slight his kingdom.

“Our war against Unkerlant is what our wars against Unkerlant have always been,” the Gyongyosian minister replied with a massive shrug: “a slow, hard, halfhearted business. In that countryside, what else can it be?” He laughed, a rumble deep in his chest. “Do you see the irony, sir? We of Gyongyos pride ourselves—and with justice—on being a warrior race, yet the stars have decreed that we are, because of our placement in the uttermost west of Derlavai, hard pressed these days to fight a war worthy of our mettle.”

Hajjaj raised an eyebrow. “I hope you will not take it amiss if I tell you that kingdoms may have troubles far worse than the one you name.”

“I did not expect you to understand.” Horthy sipped again at the date wine. “Few if any outside the dominions of Ekrekek Arpad do. The Algarvians sometimes come near to the thing, but even they ...” He shook his big head.

“I believe they, at the moment, face a problem the opposite of yours,” Hajjaj said. Now Horthy’s eyebrows climbed toward his hairline. Hajjaj explained: “Do you not think Algarve may have undertaken a war beyond her mettle, however great that may be?—and I hasten to add I think it is very great indeed.”

“I mean no offense when I say I believe you are mistaken,” Horthy replied, “and is it not so that you may be speaking too soon? King Mezentio’s armies still move westward.”

“Aye, they do.” Hajjaj let out a sigh far more wintry than even the coolest night in Zuwayza. “But do they move forward by virtue of their mettle or through some other means? Consider the language we use, your Excellency. You spoke before of irony. Do you see no irony here?”

“Ahhh,” Horthy said: a long, slow exhalation. “Now I take your meaning where I did not before. Worse that the Unkerlanters slaughter their own, in my view.”

“We differ,” Hajjaj said politely. As soon as he could do so with propriety, he disengaged himself from the Gyongyosian minister.

“A toast!” Count Balastro called. He had to call several times to gain the attention of all the feasters. When at last he had it, he raised his glass on high. “To the grand and glorious triumph of those united against the vast barbarism that is Unkerlant!”

To refrain from drinking would have made Hajjaj stand out too much.
The things I do in the name of diplomacy,
he thought as he raised his goblet to his lips. He did not sip now, but tossed back the date wine. It was sweet and potent and mounted to his head. He found himself moving through the crowd toward Balastro.

“How now, your Excellency?” the Algarvian minister said with a wide, friendly smile. It faded as he got a good look at Hajjaj’s face. “How now indeed, my friend?” Balastro asked. “What troubles you?”

He
was
Hajjaj’s friend. That made what the Zuwayzi had to say harder. He spoke anyhow, though in a voice he hoped only Balastro would hear: “Shall we also drink a toast to the vast barbarism that is Algarve?”

Balastro did not pretend to be ignorant of what Hajjaj was talking about. For that, Hajjaj gave him reluctant credit. “We do what we must do to win the war,” Balastro said. “And the Kaunians have long oppressed us. You’ve lived in Algarve; you know that for yourself. Why blame us and not them?”

“When your armies broke into the Marquisate of Rivaroli, which Valmiera took from you—unjustly, in my view—after the Six Years’ War, did your foes massacre the Algarvians there to gain the sorcerous power that might have thrown you back?” Hajjaj asked. He answered his own question: “They did not. And they could have, as you must admit.”