Out of the Darkness

Forthweg will go forward to victory.”

He stepped back. More silence followed: no curses, no boos, but no cheers or applause, either. Quietly, Vanai said, “Well, it could be worse, you know.”

And she was right. Swemmel could simply have annexed Forthweg. Maybe rule from a puppet would prove better than direct rule by a puppet-master like the King of Unkerlant. Maybe. Ealstan wondered if he dared hope for even that much.

People started filing out of the square. They had to file past more Unkerlanter soldiers, men who hadn’t been there when the square filled. “What are they doing?” Vanai said, alarm in her voice. “They can’t be checking for Kaunians. They don’t do that… do they?”

“Your spell is fine,” Ealstan told her, and squeezed her hand. “And you dyed your hair not so long ago. You’ll get by.”

Not everyone got by. The Unkerlanters-there were a surprising lot of them-pulled people out of the crowd and let others through. They didn’t listen to the cries of protest that started rising. But nobody did more than shout. The Unkerlanters all had sticks, and likely wouldn’t hesitate to use them. Most people seemed to get through. Having no choice, Ealstan and Vanai went forward.

An Unkerlanter soldier looked Ealstan up and down. He paid Vanai no attention whatever. In what was probably his own language rather than Forthwegian, he asked, “How old are you?”

Ealstan got the drift; Forthwegian and Unkerlanter were cousins. “Twenty,” he said.

“Good.” The Unkerlanter gestured with his stick. “You come here with us.”

Ice ran through Ealstan. “What?” he said. “Why?”

“For the army,” the Unkerlanter answered. “Now come, or be sorry.”

“King Beornwulf will have an army?” Ealstan asked in surprise.

“No, no, no.” The Unkerlanter laughed. “King Swemmel’s army. Plenty of Algarvians to kill. Now come.” By the way he gestured with the stick this time, he’d use it if Ealstan balked. Numbly, Ealstan went. He didn’t even get to kiss Vanai goodbye.

Colonel Lurcanio had spent four happy, useful years in Priekule, helping to administer the occupied capital of Valmiera for King Mezentio of Algarve. He’d seen a great many other Algarvians leave Valmiera to fight in Unkerlant, a fate not worse than death but near enough equivalent to it. After the islanders landed in Jelgava, he’d seen other countrymen go north to fight there.

At last, with the Valmierans ever more restless under Algarvian control, there simply weren’t enough Algarvians left to hold down the occupied kingdom any more. And so Mezentio’s men had withdrawn from most of it, the bargain being that the Valmieran irregulars wouldn’t harass them so long as they were pulling back. Both sides had stuck to it fairly well.

And so I’ve become a real soldier again, Lurcanio thought. A tent in the rugged upland forests of northwestern Valmiera was a far cry from a mansion on the outskirts of Priekule. If he wanted his cot warmed, he could put stones by the campfire and wrap them in flannel. They were a far cry from Marchioness Krasta. Lurcanio sighed for pleasures now lost. Krasta hadn’t a brain in her head, but the rest of her body more than made up for that. Not for the first time, Lurcanio wondered if she was indeed carrying his child.

He had no time to dwell on the question. Instead of keeping Priekule running smoothly for Grand Duke Ivone, he had command of a brigade of footsoldiers these days. And they were about to strike. As soon as the Algarvians abandoned the northern coast of the Strait of Valmiera, Kuusamo and Lagoas promptly started pouring men and behemoths and dragons across the arm of the sea separating their island from the Derlavaian mainland. Algarvian dragons and leviathans did what they could to hinder that, but what they could was less than their commanders had expected-less than they’d promised, too.

“As if anyone with sense would believe our promises nowadays,” Lurcanio muttered. Too many of them had been broken. And so Kuusaman and Lagoan soldiers rampaged west through southern Valmiera, a few brigades of Valmierans with them. They were heading straight for the border of the Marquisate of Rivaroli, which had been Algarvian before the Six Years’ War, Valmieran between the Six Years’ War and the Derlavaian War, and was now Algarvian once more. How long it would stay that way. .

Is partly up to me, Lurcanio thought. He turned to his adjutant, Captain Santerno. “Are we ready?”

“As ready as we can be, sir,” Santerno answered. He was a young man, with perhaps half Lurcanio’s fifty-five years, but he wore two wound badges and what he called a frozen-meat medal that showed he’d fought in Unkerlant through the first dreadful winter of the war there. He had a scarred face and hard, watchful eyes. “Now we get to find out how good the islanders really are.”

His tone said he didn’t expect the Lagoans and Kuusamans to be very good. After what he’d seen in the west, his attitude proclaimed, nothing the islanders did was likely to impress him. And his eyes measured Lurcanio. He didn’t say, You ‘ve been sitting on your arse in Priekule, screwing blond women and living high on the hog, but what kind of warrior do you make? He didn’t say it, but he thought it very loudly.

What kind of warrior do I make? Lurcanio wondered. After four years of being a military bureaucrat, he was going to find out. “Do you think we can slice south through them, all the way to the sea?” he asked.

“We’d cursed well better, wouldn’t you say, Colonel?” Santerno replied. “Cut ‘em off, chew ‘em up. That’ll buy us the time we need here, maybe let us set things right against the Unkerlanters.” He didn’t sound convinced. A moment later, he explained why: “We’ve scraped a lot together to make this attack. We might have done better to throw it all at Swemmel’s bastards.”

“How would we stop the islanders then?” Lurcanio asked.

“Powers below eat me if I know, sir,” his adjutant said. “All I can tell you is, we haven’t got the men in the west to keep the Unkerlanters out of Algarve the way things are. I got to Valmiera just a couple of weeks before we pulled back. That was supposed to free up more men for the west, but they’ve been sucked up into Jelgava, or else they’re here in the woods. Seems like we can’t stop everybody.” He rolled his eyes. “Seems like we can’t hardly stop anybody.”

Stretched too thin, Lurcanio thought sorrowfully. Safe and warm and cozy in Priekule, he’d wondered about that. He’d sometimes even wondered about it lazy and sated in Krasta’s bed. But he’d been only a military bureaucrat, and so what was his opinion worth? Nothing, as his superiors had pointed out several times when he’d tried to give it.

“Tomorrow morning,” he said, “we’ll see what we can do.”

“Right,” Santerno said, and gave him that measuring stare once more. What will you do, Colonel, when you really have to fight?

They moved south out of the forest a little before dawn, under clouds and mist. The Lagoans and Kuusamans still hadn’t got accustomed to fighting in Valmiera. They hadn’t realized how big a force the Algarvians had built up, there in the rugged northwest of the kingdom, and had only a thin screen of pickets warding the men moving west on what they reckoned more important business. Bursting eggs and trampling behemoths and dragons painted in green and red and white announced that they’d miscalculated.

“Forward!” Lurcanio shouted all through the first day. Forward the Algarvians stormed, just as they had in the glorious early spring of the war when Valmiera fell. Disgruntled Lagoan and Kuusaman captives went stumbling back toward the rear, disbelief on their faces. Algarvian soldiers relieved them of whatever money and food they had on their persons. “Keep moving!” Lurcanio yelled to his men. “We have to drive them. We can’t slow down.”

“That’s right, Colonel,” Santerno said. “That’s just right.” He paused. “Maybe you haven’t done a whole lot of this stuff, but you seem to know what’s going on.”

“My thanks,” Lurcanio said, on the whole sincerely. He didn’t think Santerno paid compliments for the sake of paying them-not to a man twice his age, anyhow.

That first day, the Algarvians raced forward as hard and as fast as any of Mezentio’s generals could have hoped. A spear driven into the enemy’s flank, Lurcanio thought as he lay down in a barn to snatch a few hours’ sleep. Now we have to drive it home.

The roar of bursting eggs woke him before sunup the next morning. The bursts came from the south: Algarvian egg-tossers already up into new positions to pound the enemy. “You see, sir?” Santerno said, sipping from a mug of tea he’d got from a cook. “The islanders aren’t so much of a much.”