Darkness Descending (48 page)

“Ah,” Fernao said, and then gravely nodded. “You’re right, Captain; it is a fine morning. Of course, the Algarvians probably weren’t looking for us very hard, either, being under the impression no sane men would sail in such a sea. I confess, I was under the same impression myself.”

“Aye, well, such is life,” Captain Fragoso said. “But they could have hurt us if they’d seen us. The one great disadvantage of ley-line ships is that they can only dodge where the lines cross. We wouldn’t enjoy it if dragons started trying to drop eggs on us, not even a little we wouldn’t.”

Fernao shivered at the prospect. He was shivering anyhow, but this was something new and different. But then, looking up toward the dark, scudding clouds overhead, he remarked, “I don’t think the dragonfliers would enjoy going up in weather like this, either.”

“Something to that, I shouldn’t wonder,” Fragoso said. A wave smacked the
Implacable
broadside, sending spray and water over the rail and drenching the naval officer and Fernao. Fernao cursed and shuddered; Fragoso took it in stride. “Part of my business, sir—just part of my business.”

“Along with chilblains and pneumonia, I suppose.” Something else occurred to Fernao. “We may well be able to get through all right, Captain. We’re a surprise.” He was surprised the fleet had sailed in dead of winter, so he didn’t wonder that the Algarvians were, too. “But we won’t be able to keep it a secret once we’ve landed on the austral continent. If we need reinforcements, King Mezentio’s men will be on the lookout for them.”

“Ah, I see what you’re saying.” Fragoso shrugged. “They’ll just have to do the best they can, that’s all.” No one had thought about anything past this first fleet was what that meant. Fernao had hoped for better but hadn’t really expected it.

Up in the crow’s nest atop the only mast the
Implacable
carried, the lookout let out a screech: “Ice! Ice off the port bow!”

Fernao had hoped for better than that, too, but hadn’t really expected it. In sailing to the land of the Ice People, he would have been a fool not to expect ice drifting in the water. But the fleet still was farther north than drifting bergs commonly came so early in the season.
Aren’t we lucky?
the mage thought.

Fragoso shouted into a speaking tube, ordering the mages who drew energy from the ley line to bring the
Implacable
to a halt and let the ice float past. Then he shouted into another tube, this one sending his voice to the crystallomancer: “Warn the other ships in the fleet what we’ve seen—and warn them not to ram us while we’re stopped, too.”

Fernao hurried toward the bow to get a good look at the iceberg. He’d seen them before, but the fascination remained. That great, silent mass, far larger than the ley-line cruiser, looked as if it had no business existing, let alone being dangerous. But it did and it was; it could smash in the
Implacable
’s sides as if they were made of eggshells rather than iron. As the ship slowed, Fernao remembered what Fragoso had said about ley-line ships’ inability to dodge. He wished he hadn’t.

Closer and closer drifted the mountain of ice, its surface rocking slightly in the surging sea. Fernao gripped the rail as hard as he could. The iceberg came close enough to let him see a gull—or perhaps it was a petrel—strolling about on the ice as casually as a man might stroll down the Boulevard of Kings in Setubal. If the iceberg hit the cruiser, the bird would fly away. The
Implacable^
sailors wouldn’t be so lucky. Neither would Fernao.

A sailor loosed a triumphant shout: “It’s past!” Sure enough, Fernao had to look to his right—
to starboard,
he reminded himself—to see it. It couldn’t have missed the ley-line cruiser by more than fifty yards. He wondered how many more bergs the fleet would have to evade before drawing up to the ice shelf that formed even on the northernmost fringes of the austral continent every winter. He hoped finding the answer to that question wouldn’t be too expensive.

In the middle of the following night, an iceberg did hit another cruiser. The berg’s weight and momentum carried the stricken ship off the ley line, leaving it helpless and the rest of the fleet unable to go after it for a rescue. The cruiser did have lifeboats. If by oars or sails or current they reached another ley line, the men who managed to board them might live. If not. . . Fernao grimaced.

“How long till we near the land of the Ice People?” he asked at breakfast the next morning. Tables and benches in the galley were mounted on gimbals, to minimize the chance of porridge and smoked pork and wine flying every which way.

Commander Diniz was in charge of the
Implacable^,
egg-tossers. “Tomorrow morning, if all goes well,” he answered, spooning up porridge as if immune to the ship’s motion. “If we strike ice first, we’ll take a little longer.”

Fernao admired his easygoing good humor. He also admired the way the officer ate. His own stomach seemed uncertain whether it was supposed to cower between his feet or crawl hand over hand up his throat. The mage finished his own porridge and pork with grim determination. Food in the Royal Lagoan Navy was made to be tolerated, not relished. Compared to what lay ahead on the austral continent. . .

“Have you ever eaten boiled camel’s flesh?” he asked Diniz.

“No, sir mage, can’t say that I have,” the officer replied. “Of course, I won’t be going ashore, so it’s a treat I’ll just have to do without.”

“Oh, that’s right,” Fernao said in a hollow voice. He’d forgotten that. Misery loved company, and here he had to be alone. His gloom didn’t last long. Few others from the
Implacable
would be going ashore, but she and her fellow warships escorted freighters full of soldiers. They would soon discover the joys of cuisine in the land of the Ice People.

He wondered what the Ice People themselves would make of the Lagoan expeditionary force. From everything he’d seen, civilization meant little to them. But his brief contempt faded. No one would deny Algarve was a civilized kingdom, but the Ice People could never have done what King Mezentio s mages had used the tools and spells of civilization to accomplish.

He also wondered how Algarve would respond to the Lagoan thrust. Mezentio couldn’t well afford to lose his main source of cinnabar, but could he well afford to send an army across the Narrow Sea to help Yanina fight the Lagoans?
If Cottbus falls, he can,
Fernao thought uneasily. But the capital of Unkerlant hadn’t fallen yet.
Maybe it won’t.
He wondered if he was whistling in the dark.

There was plenty of dark in which to whistle. This far south, just past the winter solstice, the sun hardly peeped above the northern horizon before setting again. Clouds turned what little light it sent into dusk.

And yet, the Lagoan fleet came up to the edge of the ice shelf jutting out from the austral continent on schedule and without further mishap. Fernao tipped his hat to Colonel Peixoto and the colonel’s comrades back in Setubal. He wouldn’t have believed such a thing had he not seen it with his own eyes.

“Over the side you go.” Captain Fragoso seemed happy about the business. As Commander Diniz had said, he didn’t have to climb down that rope ladder.

Fernao did. Once he got down on the ice, he promptly slipped and fell despite the spiked shoes he was wearing. The sight of a fair-sized army descending from the freighters—and of the soldiers there also stumbling on the ice—went further to console him than he’d expected. Sure enough, misery did love company.

He had plenty of company. He was plenty miserable, too. Night had already begun to fall by the time the Lagoan army began its slow, awkward slog across the ice in the direction of the Barrier Mountains. The army didn’t reach land till dawn the next day. A couple of men of the Ice People sat mounted on their hairy, two-humped camels, watching the Lagoans approach. Fernao peered at them through a spyglass he borrowed from an officer. They were laughing. Fernao fell down on the ice for about the twentieth time. He decided he couldn’t blame them..

Marshal Rathar was used to smelling wood smoke and coal smoke as he walked through the streets of Cottbus. For the past couple of days, he’d been smelling a new, sharper odor with diem: paper smoke. Frightened clerks in the Unkerlanter capital were starting to burn their records lest they fall into Algarvian hands. They thought Cottbus would fall. Even if they proved right, Rathar doubted getting rid of their files would do them much good. King Mezentio’s men would still have them, after all.

Some of the clerks—and some higher officials, too—seemed to have come to the same conclusion, and seemed determined not to let the Algarvians catch them. Every ley-line caravan heading west was full of important-looking people with official-looking orders urgently requiring their presence away from Cottbus. Some few of those orders might even have been genuine. Rathar wouldn’t have bet more than a couple of coppers on it, though.

He kicked his way through a knee-high snowdrift as he neared the great open plaza around the royal palace. As far as he was concerned, Cottbus was better off without functionaries who skedaddled when trouble came near. He wanted people around him who could keep their heads. But if King Swemmel ever found out how many people were fleeing, a lot of them were liable not to keep their heads, in the most literal sense of the words imaginable.

A team of horses was dragging the body of a dragon painted in Algarvian colors across the square. Mezentio’s dragonfliers kept trying to drop eggs on the palace. They had no easy time of it; heavy sticks all around made the immense building perhaps the toughest target in all of Unkerlant.

One of the men in charge of the horses waved to Rathar. He waved back. Seeing men going about their business as if the Algarvians were two hundred miles away—as if there were no war at all—cheered him.

“Good morning, lord Marshal,” his adjutant said when he strode into his office.

“Good morning, Major Merovec,” Rathar answered, hanging his cloak on a hook. The colder it got outside, the warmer the palace was heated. That was the ancient Unkerlanter way of doing things. Doctors said it helped lead to apoplexy, but who listened to doctors? Glancing toward the map, Rathar asked, “What change in the situation since last night?”

Merovec often looked gloomy. Today he looked like midwinter midnight on the far side of the Barrier Mountains. Pointing, he said, “In the north, sir, the Algarvians have pushed us out of Lehesten. And in the south”—he pointed again—”they’re threatening Thalfang.” With a certain somber satisfaction, he added, “We do seem to be holding them in the center.”

“That’s not good enough,” Rathar said. “Curse it, Lehesten should have held. I thought it would hold. . . longer than this, anyhow. And Thalfang? Powers above, you can see Thalfang from the tops of the palace spires! If they take it and sweep west from there, they can put a ring around Cottbus, the same way they put a ring around Herborn down in Grelz. We have to hold them out of Thalfang, no matter what. Draft orders to shift troops south.”

“Lord Marshal, everything we have in the vicinity is already committed,” Merovec answered worriedly. “I don’t know where we’re going to come up with more.”

“If we don’t come up with more in the next few days, we won’t have the chance to do it later,” Rathar said, and Merovec nodded; he understood the problem as well as the marshal of Unkerlant did. Rathar smacked a fist into the palm of his other hand. “We have a lot of things we’re right on the edge of trying. If we can’t buy a little time to finish getting them ready, we’ll lose the war before we have the chance to use them.”

“Aye,” Merovec nodded again. “But we have so many men committed on other fronts, I don’t know where we can find more for this one.”

“King Swemmel won’t turn enough men loose for this front. That’s what you mean,” Rathar said, and his adjutant nodded once more. The marshal sighed. “I’d better have a talk with him, hadn’t I?”

“Lord Marshal, someone had better, anyhow,” Merovec answered. He opened his mouth to say something more, then shut it again. Rathar knew what would have come out—something like,
He might listen to you, and he probably won’t listen to anybody else.
That was true, and Rathar knew it as well as Merovec. But with the war going as it was, Swemmel might also decide he wanted his marshal’s head. Rathar had no way to know beforehand.

Even so, he said, “I’ll do it. Anyone else would have to work up his nerve before he tried, and we don’t have the time to wait. Better to do it now than before everybody has to run west for his life.”

He walked out of that part of the sprawling palace where the high officers in the Unkerlanter army worked and into the core of the building, the king’s residence. “I don’t know if he will see you, Lord Marshal,” a servitor said doubtfully. “I don’t know if he will see anyone.”

Rathar fixed him with a stare that would have chilled the heart of every Unkerlanter breathing—except King Swemmel. “Well, go find out,” he growled, and folded thick arms across his broad chest, as if to say he wouldn’t move from where he stood till he got an answer. The servant eyed him, then fled.

He came back looking very unhappy. Rathar would have bet Swemmel had scorched him, too. But he said, “His Majesty will receive you in the audience chamber in a quarter of an hour.” Rathar nodded, a single sharp jerk of his big head. He cared not a copper for the servitor’s feelings. Getting to see King Swemmel . . . aye, he cared about that.

In the anteroom in front of the audience chamber, the marshal endured removing his sword and permitting the guards their intimate search of his person. He endured the prostrations and acclamations he had to make before Swemmel once admitted to the royal presence. At last, with security and ritual satisfied, the king rasped, “Get up and say whatever it is you have to say. “We shall listen, though why we should, with the kingdom in such straits, is beyond us.”

“Your Majesty, I ask you one question,” Rathar said: “Would the kingdom be in better straits with another man commanding your armies? If you think so, give him my sword and my baton and give me a stick, so I can go out and fight the Algarvians as a common soldier.”