Jaws of Darkness (86 page)

“Aye, we took care of that,” Oraste said. “And I’m sure it breaks the Unkerlanters’ hearts to knock the capital of Forthweg flat.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Bembo asked, punctuating the question with a yelp as a brick or a stone bounced off his belly. He rolled back over onto his back.

“Don’t you remember?” Oraste said. “Back before the Six Years’ War, we split Forthweg with the Unkerlanters. Eoforwic used to belong to them. As far as old Swemmel’s concerned, there shouldn’t ought to be any such thing as a Kingdom of Forthweg.”

“Well, there won’t be if his men keep doing this to Eoforwic,” Bembo said. “Or if there is, there won’t be any Forthwegians left alive in it.”

“After what they put us through, who’d miss ‘em?” Oraste said.

“A point,” Bembo said. Then new fear ran through him, fear different from the simple, elementary terror caused by knowing that sorcerous energy might sear him at any moment. The only way he could find to exorcise it was to name it aloud: “You don’t suppose Swemmel’s men are pounding us like this because they’re getting ready to cross the Twegen, do you?”

“How in blazes should I know?” Oraste answered crossly. “If you want to find out something like that, why don’t you swim across the river and ask Marshal Rathar? He’s over there somewhere.”

“Oh, good idea. Really good idea.” Bembo’s voice dripped sarcasm. “Maybe I should ask for leave again. Then I wouldn’t be here when the avalanche came down on our heads.”

“Futter you,” his partner told him. “Everybody in Gromheort wanted to kill you when you got leave once. If you got it again, somebody
would up
and murder you. And besides, by the time you got to Tricarico, how do you know the stinking Lagoans and Kuusamans wouldn’t be holding it?”

“I don’t,” Bembo admitted. “But if you had to get captured, who’d be your first choice to nab you: one of the islanders or an Unkerlanter?”

“My first choice to capture me? A redheaded gal with big tits,” Oraste said. “Second choice’d be a blond wench with big tits. It’s all downhill from there.”

That wasn’t what Bembo had meant, which didn’t stop him from laughing. Anything that could make him laugh when the world was coming to pieces all around him was something to be cherished. Only later did it occur to him to wonder just how far his standards had fallen. When it did, he wished it hadn’t.

Marshal Rathar, as it happened, was not right across the Twegen River from Eoforwic at that moment. He’d been summoned back to Cottbus, and left the fight in the north in General Gurmun’s capable hands. “Don’t strike till everything is ready,” he’d warned the general of behemoths. “The worst mistakes we’ve made in this war, we’ve made by hitting too soon.”

“Aye, lord Marshal,” Gurmun had said. Rathar had wondered if he could trust the younger man to hold himself in. If King Swemmel ordered Gurmun to attack, he would, whether the situation called for it or not. Gurmun had also said, “I envy you.” He assumed Swemmel was recalling Rathar to confer some new high command on him.

Going through papers as the ley-line caravan glided west, Rathar hoped Gurmun was right. He hoped so, but he had no guarantee of it. For all he knew, the king was summoning him to have him blazed outside the royal palace as a warning to others. You never could tell with Swemmel.

Mile after mile of plain, first Forthwegian and then Unkerlanter, slid past before Rathar’s eyes. Every time the ley line took him through or past a village, he winced. No village remained intact. Hardly any buildings remained intact. What the war hadn’t wrecked, the Algarvians had often deliberately smashed in their long, slow, stubborn withdrawal toward the east.
If we can’t keep it, you won’t get any use from it, either,
they seemed to say.

And the villages—the whole ruined landscape—looked the same from early morning, when Rathar left the western suburbs of Eoforwic, till the sun set. It would have gone on looking the same, too, had he been able to see longer. All the way to the suburbs of Cottbus, the devastation would have continued—did continue, though shrouded now in darkness.
How many years, how many generations, will Unkerlant need before she is again what she was?
But that was a question beyond the ken even of marshals.

Rathar’s caravan car boasted a couch. He fell asleep on it. An aide shook him awake, saying, “Sir, we’re in the capital.”

“Are we?” He yawned, stretched, and sat up. The ley-line caravan depot remained dark. No Algarvian dragon could reach Cottbus these days—or so Rathar hoped with every fiber of his being—but the fear remained. Unkerlanters had always feared and suspected and admired the energetic redheads from the east. These past three and a half years, the Algarvians had given them fresh reasons for all three.

Descending from the caravan car gave Rathar another anxious moment. Who would be waiting for him down on the ground? His adjutant, Major Merovec? Or some of Swemmel’s hard-eyed, dead-souled guards, there to haul him away to torment or death for some slight the king had imagined? Again, you never could tell.

“Good evening, Marshal.” The voice was thin and high and would have been inconsequential, but… “We have a new task for you.”

Of all the things Marshal Rathar had expected, that King Swemmel himself would meet him at the depot was among the last. He wasted no time in going flat on his belly before his sovereign. The slates of the floor were chilly. So was the air; autumn in Cottbus was a different business from the mild days he’d enjoyed outside of Eoforwic.

“Your Majesty!” he cried, and poured out Swemmel’s required praises, with his forehead knocking the cold stone again and again. Failure to give the king his due would have been as immediate and thorough a disaster for Rathar—though not for the kingdom—as losing Cottbus in the first desperate winter of the war.

“Arise,” Swemmel said when the ritual was done. Rathar got to his feet. The king went on: “Marshal, we are well pleased in you.”

“Thank you, your Majesty,” Rathar said. If the king praised him in public, he probably wouldn’t get knocked over the head.

“Come with us to the palace,” Swemmel said. “We have a good many things to discuss with you, and they will not wait.”

“As you say, your Majesty, so shall it be.” Swemmel was a notorious insomniac, and if he felt comfortable staying busy half the night, his subjects had to accommodate themselves to his rhythms and his whims. He would not accommodate himself to them. He’d proved that, again and again.

Rathar had wondered if he would ride in the royal carriage. Swemmel had granted only a handful of men that privilege throughout his reign; he’d executed about half of them shortly thereafter. Getting a carriage of his own did not unduly upset the marshal.

Back at the palace, King Swemmel said, “In the matter of Eoforwic, you have done as we desire in all particulars.”

“Thank you, your Majesty,” Rathar said. Had he not done as the king desired, Gurmun would have gone into command in the north long before this. And if Gurmun dared go off and try things on his own and had something go wrong, none of his past accomplishments was likely to save him from the royal wrath.

But now Swemmel seemed in as benign a mood as Rathar had ever seen him. Even the king’s smile held little of the malice that usually informed it. Swemmel said, “That being so, we purpose transferring you to the south, that you may lead our armies there as they drive into Algarve and drive toward Trapani. When you take Mezentio’s capital, it is our desire that you leave not a single stone piled upon another. Do we make ourself clear?”

“Aye, your Majesty.” Rathar bowed low. “Thank you, your Majesty. Thank you from the bottom of my heart.” He’d thanked Swemmel a moment before, too. This time, he really meant it. “Mezentio started this fight. I want to be there when we finish it.”

“You shall have your chance, Marshal,” the king said. “For all your hesitation early in the campaign, you have served us well since, and we are willing to acknowledge that.”

For Swemmel to acknowledge service to anyone else was no small step, as Rathar knew full well. Swemmel was convinced he
was
Unkerlant, and all his officers and servitors merely extensions of his will. Rathar didn’t even feel particularly aggrieved at the king’s slighting comment. As
he
remembered things, he hadn’t been hesitant—Swemmel had been too eager. But he wasn’t surprised his sovereign recalled those days differently. Even an ordinary man often remembered things to his own best advantage. How not a king, especially one to whom nobody dared say no?

I dare, every now and again,
Rathar thought.
Aye, I dare
—
and every time I dare, I come away shaking, and with my armpits soaked with the stinking sweat of terror.
Telling Swemmel anything he didn’t want to hear was no work for the faint of heart.

“How long?” the king asked suddenly.

“Your Majesty?” Rathar said: whatever King Swemmel was talking about, he hadn’t been able to follow the sudden leap.

“How long?” Swemmel repeated in sharp, impatient tones. Then, grudgingly, he explained: “How long till we get to use King Mezentio as we desire? And of how much of our victory will Lagoas and Kuusamo rob us?”

“Your Majesty, I wouldn’t even hazard a guess about the first,” Rathar replied, which made King Swemmel glare at him. “It does not depend on us alone, you see. It also depends on the Algarvians, as you say, and on our allies. Mezentio, right now, faces choices we never had to make, for which I praise the powers above.”

“Never?” Swemmel said. “Not even when we had to choose how much of our kingdom we would yield to the redheads and how much to the Gongs?”

“Not even then,” Rathar said. “The Gyongyosians were never—well, hardly ever—more than a nuisance to us. The Algarvians were the deadly threat. But Mezentio faces dreadful danger from both west and east: if we don’t move on Trapani, the islanders—and, for all I know, the Jelgavans and the Valmierans—will.”

He thought that was obvious. But, by the alarm flaring in Swemmel’s eyes, it hadn’t been obvious enough. “No!” the king said hoarsely. “They mustn’t! They can’t! Trapani shall be ours. Ours, do you hear me?” His voice rose to a frightened shout. A bodyguard peered into the audience chamber to make sure he was all right. Cursing, he waved the man away.

Marshal Rathar did his best to calm the king: “As I say, your Majesty, we have only so much control over all this. If Mezentio’s men fight us with everything they have but go easy in the east…” Had he been King of Algarve, he might have given orders like that. Fighting the Lagoans and Kuusamans remained a polite, civilized business. But the war between Algarve and Unkerlant had seen no quarter asked or given since the moment it began.

“If they steal our victory so …” Swemmel’s voice was low, low but full of deadly fury. “If they think they can batten on the blood we spill, we shall show them they are wrong even if it takes us a thousand years.”

Rathar wasn’t worried about what would happen a thousand years from now; he couldn’t do anything about that. What would happen in the next few days, the next few weeks, the next few months, was his province. He said, “Your Majesty, always remember: the Algarvians are our greatest danger. Once we crush them, we can worry about other things. Until we crush them, we have to keep them first in our thoughts.”

“A thousand years,” Swemmel muttered. But then, to Rathar’s vast relief, he nodded. “Algarve first, aye. But we do not forget anything else. Lagoas and Kuusamo may steal some of our glory, but we shall take it back.”

“When the time comes, your Majesty,” Rathar said soothingly. Then he changed the subject: “Er, your Majesty—is it true the islanders have some new strong sorcery, of a different sort from what the redheads—and we— have been using? The reports I’ve received haven’t been clear.” He hoped it was true; he loathed the murderous magecraft the Algarvians had devised and Unkerlant had had to copy.

“We are not surprised the reports have been unclear,” the king said with a scornful sniff. “We doubt whether Archmage Addanz understands everything he hears of these matters. We often doubt whether he understands anything he hears of these matters, come to that. There is some new sorcery, and it has been used in Jelgava and perhaps on the sea. Past that, we know little— but we are working to learn more.”

“Good,” Rathar said. Worried about everyone around him, Swemmel had built up a highly efficient corps of spies.

“Not so very good,” Swemmel grumbled. “Addanz should have seen to this some time ago, without our urging.” Rathar only shrugged. Addanz was a fine courtier, but no great shakes as a mage. Expecting him to act like what he wasn’t asked too much. After a moment, Swemmel went on, “You should also know that Hajjaj of Zuwayza has come to Cottbus.”

“Has he?” Rathar said. “Aye, your Majesty, you’re right—I
should
know that. For what purpose has he come?”

“For what purpose would you think?” King Swemmel demanded. “To yield himself to us, of course.”

Nineteen