Jaws of Darkness (73 page)

“You constables!” one of the Algarvians soldiers said to Bembo and Oraste. “You know what to do with captives. Take these buggers away.”

“Right.” Bembo grunted as he got to his feet. That
was
something he knew how to do.
And, while I’m away from the lines, I’ll see how I go about asking for that wound badge, too.

Sixteen

L
eudast had served in the Unkerlanter army for a long time. He’d been fighting in the Elsung Mountains in what was then King Swemmel’s desultory border war with Gyongyos when the Derlavaian War first broke out between Algarve and most of her neighbors. He’d been part of the Unkerlanter force that gobbled up western Forthweg while the redheads were smashing most of King Penda’s army. And he’d spent a demon of a lot of time fighting the Algarvians himself.

Two leg wounds weren’t so very much to show for all that. He’d started out a common soldier, with no hope of rising higher, and here he was, a lieutenant.

In all those years in the army, he’d never been particularly eager to go into a fight. In fact, he’d always been happiest during the brief spells of quiet he’d found. And here he was now, forced to stay quiet as he recovered from this second wound well behind the fighting front.

He hated it. He hated every minute he had to lie on his back. He hated every minute the healers used to poke and prod at his blazed leg, and hated the wise things they muttered back and forth in a language that hardly seemed to be Unkerlanter at all.

“When will you let me go?” he demanded. “When will you let me get back to my men? When will you let me get back to the fighting?”

Am I really saying that?
But he was. Now, at last, after so much terror, he could begin to smell victory against the Algarvians. They still fought bravely. They still fought cleverly—more cleverly than his own countrymen, most of the time. But there weren’t enough of them to hold back the rising Unkerlanter tide no matter how bravely and cleverly they fought. And, having gone through all the black days when the Algarvians seemed sure to overwhelm Unkerlant, Leudast wanted to be there to help beat them. How much he wanted that amazed him.

But the healers shook their heads. “You will not be ready for some weeks, Lieutenant,” one of them said, and they went on to their next patient.

Alone in his cot, Leudast quietly laughed to himself. The last time he’d been wounded, down in Sulingen, his treatment had been a lot rougher than this. As soon as he could hobble around, they’d put a fresh stick in his hands and thrown him back into the fight.

Of course, he’d been only a sergeant then. Even the Unkerlanter army took better care of its officers than of its other ranks. And Sulingen had been as dreadful a struggle as any the war had seen. They’d needed everybody they could find. But even so …

He asked the healers again the next day when he could go back to the fight. They gave him another evasive answer. “Count your time here as a leave of sorts, Lieutenant,” one of them said.

“I don’t want this sort of leave,” Leudast said, whereupon all the healers looked at him as if he were daft. “If I get leave, I want it to be with my sweetheart.” They nodded then, but they still didn’t take him seriously.
I’ve got strings to pull,
he thought.
I’m not quite an ordinary lieutenant, even if they think I am. Time to remind them otherwise.
“Please get me pen and paper. I want to write to Marshal Rathar and request an immediate return to duty.”

Now the healers looked at him as if he might be dangerous. Cautiously, one of them asked, “How do you know Marshal Rathar?”

“He commissioned me after I captured false King Raniero of Grelz,” Leudast replied.
Take that.

The healers didn’t seem to know how to take it. They put their heads together and muttered among themselves. At last, one of them said, “You really are not fit to return to duty yet, you know. That leg will not support you.”

“Well, all right,” said Leudast, who could not disagree with what was obviously true. “But it doesn’t seem to me like you people are doing much to get me back to duty. You’re just letting me lay here.”

“You do need to rest and recuperate, you know, Lieutenant,” the healer said.

“If I got any more rested, I’d be bored to death,” Leudast returned. “You’re a bunch of mages. Isn’t there anything you can do to send me back faster?”

They put their heads together again. Leudast hadn’t really expected anything else. They seemed unable to do anything without consulting among themselves. The one who served as their spokesman said, “You mean, use more sorcerous energy to expedite your recovery?” He sounded faintly scandalized.

Leudast didn’t care how he sounded. “That’s just what I mean,” he said.

“You’re healers, aren’t you? What the demon good are you if you won’t do any real healing?”

They all looked indignant. He wanted to laugh. They thought that would impress him. After all the time he’d spent in the field, nothing this side of a stick aimed at his face impressed him. The fellow who did their talking said, “I hope you realize we have only so much sorcerous energy to expend.”

“Aye, I’ve noticed that.” Leudast sounded as sardonic as he could. “Common soldiers get next to nothing, officers get as little as you think you can get away with giving. Fetch me that paper. I
do
need to write to Marshal Rathar.”

He knew he was being unfair. The healers were desperately overworked men. But he’d told a good-sized chunk of truth, too. A man who wasn’t important or well-connected—often the same thing—or whose wound wasn’t either as easy as possible to treat or in some way interesting got short shrift.

Once upon a time, Leudast had been a man without connections. He wasn’t any more, though, and he intended to keep hitting the healers over the head with such importance as he had till they did what he wanted.

They knew it, too. Glaring, their spokesman said, “You wish us to give you preferential treatment.” He might have been a Gyongyosian accusing Leudast of wanting him to eat goat.

“That’s right,” Leudast said cheerfully. “You do it all the time. I want you to do it for me.”

They put their heads together yet again. When they separated, the man who did the talking said, “You realize this may cause you some considerable pain?”

Leudast shrugged. The healers blinked. They didn’t know what to think of a man whom pain didn’t horrify, which only went to prove they’d never been up to the front. He said, “How much pain do you think you’ll get once I tell the marshal you wouldn’t treat me even after I asked you to?”

They winced. Leudast didn’t think he’d prove able to do much to them, but they didn’t have to know that. Plainly, they didn’t feel like taking chances. In their shoes, Leudast wouldn’t have felt like taking any, either. “Let us review your case,” said the one who spoke for them. “If we find some sorcerous therapy that might help you, we shall apply it tomorrow.”

“I hope you do,” Leudast said, which seemed to him wiser than,
You’d cursed well better.

Then he had another day of waiting flat on his back. He would sooner have been in a trench waiting to start an attack, which proved how bored he was.
Either that or it does prove I’ve lost my mind,
he thought.

The next morning, the healers appeared with a wheeled chair and a couple of muscular attendants who manhandled Leudast into it. Other wounded soldiers stared curiously at him as they took him off. The healers had a tent of their own, well away from the wounded they attended. It was almost alarmingly quiet in there.

“What are you going to do to me?” Leudast asked, wondering if browbeating them had been such a good idea after all.

Before any of them answered, their attendants hauled Leudast out of the wheeled chair and propped him up on a table. Then the mages draped his leg—all of it except the area of the wound—with gauze made from a glistening fabric he had never seen before.

“What are you going to do?” he asked again.

“Treat your leg—or rather, the wounded portion of it, and no other— thus the insulating cloth,” a healer told him, which left him no wiser. Then the fellow condescended to explain: “We are going to age the flesh that has been blazed, so that, being a month older than the rest of you, it will also have already healed.”

“That’s wonderful!” Leudast exclaimed. “I didn’t know you could do such things.”

“You will not enjoy it so much while it is happening,” the healer replied. “Also, once the month has passed, you would be very wise to have the sorcery reversed. I will give you a letter authorizing the reversal. Hold on to it and do not forget to have the second sorcery done.”

“All right,” Leudast said. “But why?”

The look the healer gave him was anything but cheery. “Because if you fail to have it done, if you should forget, that flesh will die a month before the rest of you—and I promise you, it will make your last month alive much less pleasant than it would have been otherwise.”

Leudast thought about that. He gulped. “Oh,” he said in a small voice.

“We begin,” the healer declared. He and his colleagues started to chant. Burning heat coursed through Leudast’s wound. He gasped and tried to jerk away. The attendants grabbed him, making sure he couldn’t move. “This is what you asked for,” the healer told him. “This is what you get.”

And you’ll enjoy every moment of giving it to me, won’t you?
Leudast thought. But he refused to give the healer the satisfaction of knowing he understood that. In a voice as steady as he could make it, he said, “Get on with it, then.” The healer eyed him and nodded in reluctant approval.

Before long, Leudast was panting and trying not to curse or scream. The healers hadn’t told him he would feel all the pain of a month’s worth of healing, distilled down into the few minutes the sorcery took. He clenched his fists. The smaller hurts of nails digging into palms and of biting down hard on the inside of his lower lip helped distract—a little—from the torment in his leg.

Then, suddenly, that torment eased. Leudast let out a long, astonished sigh of relief. The healer said, “You were brave. We do few such procedures where the patient does not cry out.”

“I believe it.” Leudast sounded shaky, even to himself. But the gnawing pain in his leg
had
eased. That was what he’d wanted. “Can I put my weight on it?”

“You may,” the healer replied, precise as a schoolmaster. “I hope you can—that was why we performed the sorcery.”

“Well, let’s find out.” Leudast swung down off the table. One of the attendants who’d hauled him up onto it reached out to steady him. He waved the man away. The leg wasn’t perfect, but it would do. He could use it. He nodded to the healers. “Thanks. I’m ready to go back into the line.”

“We shall fill out the necessary papers,” one of them said. Another very carefully peeled the shining cloth from Leudast’s leg. The healer who was doing the talking went on, “Make sure you have this sorcery reversed in a month’s time. As I said, if you forget, your last month will be nothing but torment to you.”

“I understand,” Leudast said, and he did. The mere idea of knowing a month ahead of time that he would be dead … He shuddered. Even war against the Algarvians seemed clean next to that. And he was suddenly more eager than ever to get back to the field. If he died in battle, at least it would be over fast—he hoped.

Merkela glared at Skarnu and at the underground fighter who called himself “Tytuvenai” after the town where he was based. She said, “I don’t think you ought to be talking with the Algarvians. I think you ought to be blazing them.”

“Oh, we’ll do some of that even yet,” “Tytuvenai” said lightly. He winked at Skarnu. “Eh, ‘Pavilosta’?”

“Aye, no doubt,” Skarnu answered. He glanced over to Merkela. “Like it or not, we have to talk with them now.”

“Give me one good reason,” she snapped.

“They hold the towns. They hold the roads. If they want to, they can start slaughtering Valmierans the same way they’ve been slaughtering the Kaunians from Forthweg,” Skarnu said. “They can do it any time they please.

Merkela winced. Reluctantly, she nodded. “There is that.”

“Aye, there is,” “Tytuvenai” agreed. “If we want to have a kingdom left when this cursed war finally ends, we have to walk a little softer than we might like right now. And so …” He nudged Skarnu. “We’d better get moving.”

“Right,” Skarnu said without any great enthusiasm. Whether he recognized the need or not, he wasn’t thrilled at the idea of talking with the Algarvians, either. But he kissed Merkela and went out to the horses “Tytuvenai” had waiting outside the farmhouse. As he mounted and rode off, he grumbled, “Why don’t the people up in the north handle this themselves?”

“They do,” “Tytuvenai” answered. “But we have to do our part, too.” As usual, he was cheerfully cynical: “You can’t expect those fellows up there to count on their fingers and get the same answer twice running.” Skarnu laughed, though he was sure the northern Valmierans said the same thing about him and “Tytuvenai” and the other irregulars here in the south.