Into the Darkness (8 page)

“Where now, Captain?” asked Raunu, the company’s senior sergeant. He was senior enough to have a lot of silver threads in the gold of his hair, senior enough to have fought as a youth in the Six Years’ War. But his father sold sausages for a living, so he was unlikely ever to rise above senior sergeant. If he resented that, he hid it very well.

After scratching his head, Skarnu pointed west and answered, “Forward to the edge of open country. If there are any more Algarvians lurking here in the woods, we need to flush them out.” He scratched again. He itched all the time. He wondered if he was lousy. The idea made his flesh crawl, but he knew it could happen to soldiers in wartime.

Raunu considered, then nodded. “Aye, about the best thing we can do, I reckon.” He turned Skarnu’s notion into precise, cautious reality, ordering scouts ahead and to either side and sending the rest of the company forward by sections along three different game tracks.

In fact, as Skarnu had quickly realized, Raunu ran the company. He knew how to do the job, whereas Skarnu’s presence, while ornamental, was anything but necessary. That had mortified the marquis, seeming an offense against both propriety and honor.

“Don’t fret yourself about it, lord,” Raunu had said when he broached the issue. “There’s three kinds of noble officers. Some don’t know anything and stay out of their sergeants’ way. They’re harmless. Some don’t know anything and give forth with all sorts of orders anyhow.” He’d shuddered. “They’re dangerous. And some don’t know anything and try and learn. Give ‘em time, and they’re apt to make pretty fair soldiers.”

Skarnu had never before heard such a blunt appraisal of his class. None of the servants back at his mansion would have dared speak to him thus. But he was not Raunu’s master and employer; King Gainibu was. That made the sergeant’s relationship with a noble also serving the king different from that of a cook or butler. Skarnu was doing his best to fall into the third class of officer. He hoped he was succeeding, but hadn’t had the nerve to ask.

Now, stick at the ready, he paced along the gloomy track. The Algarvians hadn’t offered much resistance at the border, falling back before the advancing Valmierans toward the line of forts they’d built about twenty miles inside their territory. The Duke of Klaipeda, who commanded the Valmierans, was exultant; he’d published an order of the day reading, “The enemy, beset by many foes, ingloriously flees before our triumphant advance. Soon he must either give battle on our terms or yield his land to our victorious arms.”

That sounded splendid to Skarnu till he thought about it for a little while. If the Algarvians were ingloriously fleeing, why didn’t the illustrious Duke of Klaipeda put more pressure on them? Skarnu knew himself to be imperfectly trained in the military arts. He hoped the same did not hold true for the illustrious duke.

A beam from a stick struck the trunk of an elm a couple of feet above his head. Steam spurted from the tree, smelling of hot sap. Though imperfectly trained in the military arts, Skarnu knew what to do when people started blazing at him: he threw himself flat and crawled on his belly toward some bushes by the side of the track. If the Algarvian couldn’t see him, he couldn’t shoot.

Another Valmieran went down, too, this one with a harsh cry of pain. From cover, Skarnu shouted, “Hunt the enemy down!” He got up into a crouch and then dashed forward, diving down on to his belly behind a stout pine.

Another beam slammed into the tree. Its resinous sap had a tangy odor very different from that of the elm. Skarnu was. glad the woods were moist; the fight would have fired drier country. He peered up over the top of a gnarled root. Spying a bit of tan among green bushes, he stuck his finger into the stick’s recess and blazed away at it.

The leaves the beam touched went sere and brown in an instant, as if winter had come all at once to that corner of the world. An Algarvian soldier had been hiding in those bushes, too. He let out a horrible cry in his ugly, trilling native tongue. Another Valmieran blazed at him from off to one side of Skarnu. That cry abruptly cut off.

“Come on, men!” Skarnu shouted. “Forward! King Gainibu and victory!”

“Gainibu!” his men shouted. They did not rush straight at the Algarvians lurking among the trees. Such headlong dash was all very well in an entertainment. In real war, it brought nothing but gruesome casualties. The Valmierans darted from tree to tree, from bush to rock, one group blazing to make the enemy keep his head down while another advanced.

A couple of soldiers went staggering back with wounds, one with an arm over the shoulder of a healthy comrade. One or two men went down and would not get up again. The rest, though, drove the Algarvians, who did not seem present in any great numbers, before them. Once, by the shouts—no, the screams—the fighting came to such close quarters that it went on with knives and reversed sticks rather than with beams, but that did not last long. Valmieran voices soon rang out in triumph.

Pushing forward as he did, paying more heed to what the enemy soldiers in tan kilts were trying to do than to exactly where he was, Skarnu was surprised when he burst out of the woods. He stood a moment, blinking in the bright afternoon sun that beat into his face. Ahead lay fields of barley and oats going from green to gold, and beyond them an Algarvian farming village. The sturdy buildings would have looked more picturesque had he not been able to make out Algarvian troops moving among them.

Algarvian troops rather closer by could make him out. One of them blazed at him from the cover of the growing grain. The beam went wide. Cursing, Skarnu ducked back among the trees. He went some little distance along the edge of the forest before peering out again. This time, he was careful to keep a screen of leaves and branches in front of his face.

As if by sorcery, Sergeant Raunu silently materialized beside him. “Wouldn’t want to try crossing that without a lot of friends along,” Raunu remarked in matter-of-fact tones. “Truth is, I wouldn’t want to cross that even with a lot of friends along, but some of us might get to the other side if we did it like that.”

Skarnu’s voice was dry: “I hadn’t planned on ordering us to cross those fields and seize that village.”

“Powers above and powers below be praised,” Raunu muttered.

Not knowing whether he was supposed to have heard him, Skarnu pretended he hadn’t. He pulled a map out of a tunic pocket. “That should be the village of Bonorva,” he said. “It’s past those woods on the other wide that the Algarvians are supposed to have their main belt of fortifications.”

Raunu nodded. “Aye, that makes sense, lord. The forts are too far back for us to fling eggs at ‘em from our side of the border.”

Skarnu whistled thoughtfully. That hadn’t occurred to him. Raunu might be a sausage-seller’s son, but he was no fool. Many Valmieran nobles assumed all those below them to be fools: Skarnu chuckled, thinking of his sister. He had less of that attitude in him, but he wasn’t free of it, either.

“They’ll have to bring everyone up for the assault on the forts,” he said. “That will make taking Bonorva look like a walk in Two Rivers Park by comparison.”

“It’ll cost a deal of blood, all right,” Raunu agreed. “I wonder how many who hit the forts from this side will make it through to the other.”

“However many they are, they’ll be in position to peel the shell off Algarve, the way you do with a plump lobster,” Skarnu said.

“I wouldn’t know about that, sir,” Raunu said. “It’s bread and sausage and fruit for the likes of me. But you can’t peel anything if you
don’t
get through. Anybody who fought in the Six Years’ War would tell you that.”

All of Valmiera’s generals, like those of any other kingdom, were veterans of the war a generation earlier. But Skarnu was not thinking of other kingdoms; he was thinking of his own.
“That’s
why we haven’t pressed our attacks harder!” he exclaimed with the air of a man who’d had a revelation. “The commanders dread the casualties they’d cost.”

“Commanders who don’t dread casualties don’t stay in command, either,” Raunu said. “After a while, the troops won’t stand any more. Jelgava had mutinies during the Six Years’ War. The Unkerlanter armies that were fighting Algarve mutinied so they could go off and fight each other—Unkerlanters are fools, you ask me. And finally the Algarvians mutinied, too. That’s what won the war for us, more than anything else.”

It was history to Skarnu; Raunu had lived it. Skarnu said, “May they mutiny again, then. If they didn’t want a war, they shouldn’t have gone tramping into Ban.”

“I suppose that’s so, sir.” Raunu sighed, then chuckled. “I’m an old soldier at heart, and I make no bones about it. I’d sooner be back in the barracks drinking beer than here in the middle of this powersforsaken country.”

“Can’t blame you for that, but when the king and his ministers order, we obey,” Skarnu said, and the sergeant nodded. Skarnu withdrew deeper into the woods, then scribbled a note describing his company’s position and called for a runner. When a man came up, Skarnu gave him the note and said, “Take this back to headquarters. If they plan on bringing reinforcements forward, hurry back to let me know. That will tell me whether to prepare another attack or to settle in and defend what we’ve gained here.”

“Aye, sir —just as you say.” The runner hurried off.

“The Algarvians will have something to say about whether we attack or defend, too, sir,” Raunu observed, pointing west.

“Mm, that’s true,” Skarnu said, not altogether happily. “That’s one reason I wish we’d pressed this opening attack harder: the better to impose our will on the enemy.”

Raunu grunted. “The Algarvians have plenty of will of their own. I’m surprised they haven’t tried imposing theirs on us.”

“They’re beset from four sides at once,” Skarnu said. “Before long, they’ll break somewhere.” Raunu grunted again. A few minutes later, the runner came back with orders for Skarnu’s men to consolidate their position. He obeyed, as he was obliged to obey. If he muttered under his breath, that was his business, and no one else’s.

High above Vanai’s head, a dragon screamed. She craned her neck, trying to find the tiny dot in the sky. At last, she did. The dragon was flying from west to east, which meant it belonged to Forthweg, not Algarve. Vanai waved, though the man aboard the dragon could not possibly have seen her.

Brivibas walked on for several steps before realizing she was no longer beside him. He looked back over his shoulder. “The work won’t wait,” he snapped, exasperated enough to speak Forthwegian instead of Kaunian without even knowing he’d done it.

“I am sorry, my grandfather.” Vanai spoke Kaunian. Her grandfather would have given her much more of the rough side of his tongue if she’d made his slip. He was so confident of his inalterable Kaunianity, he could slip its bounds now and then. If anyone younger slipped, though, he would fret for days about dilution.

Vanai hurried to catch up with him. Her short, tight tunic and close-fitting trousers rubbed at her as she ran. She envied the Forthwegian girls her age their comfortable, loose-fitting long tunics. Such clothes suited Forthweg’s warm, dry climate far better than what she wore. But the folk of the Kaunian Empire had worn short, tight tunics and trousers, and so their descendants perforce did likewise.

“My grandfather, are you certain you know where this old power point lay?” she asked after a long, sweaty while. “We’ve walked more than halfway to Gromheort, or so it seems.”

“Say not Gromheort,” Brivibas replied. “Say rather Jekabpils, the name the city knew in more glorious times.” On he went, tireless for an old man: he had to be nearly sixty. To Vanai, at sixteen, that certainly seemed ancient.

Her grandfather took from the pack he wore on his back an instrument of his own design: two wings of gold leaf suspended inside a glass sphere by gold wire. He murmured words of command in a Kaunian dialect archaic even when the Empire was at its height.

One of the wings twitched. “Ah, good. This way,” Brivibas said, and set off across a meadow, through an almond grove, and then into a nasty stretch of bushes and shrubs, most of which proved well equipped with spines and thorns. At last, after what seemed to Vanai far too long, he stopped. Both gold wings were fluttering, neither higher than the other, Brivibas beamed. “Here we are.”

“Here we are,” Vanai agreed in a hollow voice. She had her doubts anyone else had ever been here before. In lieu of stating them more openly, she asked, “Did the ancient Kaunians truly know of this place?”

“I believe they did,” Brivibas answered. “The evidence from inscriptions at the King’s University in Eoforwic strongly suggests they did. But, so far as I know, no one has yet performed the sorcery which alone can transform supposition into knowledge. That is why we are here.”

“Yes, my grandfather,” Vanai said resignedly. He was very good to her; he’d raised her since her parents had died in a wrecked caravan when she was hardly more than a baby. He’d given her a splendid education in both Kaunian and modern subjects. She found his work as an archaeological mage interesting, sometimes even fascinating.
If only he didn’t treat me like nothing but an extra pair of hands when we’re in the field,
she thought.

He set down his pack. With a sigh of relief, she did the same with hers. “Now, my granddaughter,” Brivibas said, “if you would be good enough to fetch me the green medius stone, we may begin.”

You may begin, you mean,
Vanai thought. But she rummaged through the pack till she found the weathered green stone. “Here you are,” she said, and handed it to him.

“Ah, thank you, my granddaughter. The medius stone, when properly activated, removes the blindness from our eyes and lets us see what otherwise could no longer be seen,” Brivibas said. But, as he chanted, and as Vanai unobtrusively wiped her hands on her trousers—handling the stone irritated her skin—she wondered if, when the spell was complete, it would show only ancient thorn bushes as opposed to modern ones. No matter what the fluttering gold leaves declared, she doubted any power point had ever existed here.