Out of the Darkness

“Ah. All right.” Ceorl’s big head bobbed up and down. “You’re not as dumb as I thought you were when you came into the Brigade. If you were, you’d’ve been dead a long time ago.”

Sidroc shrugged and spat. “Dumb doesn’t matter-you’re still breathing, for instance.” Ceorl’s fingers twisted in an obscene gesture. Laughing, Sidroc gave it back. He went on, “You’re still here, and I’m still here, and Sergeant Werferth, who made a better soldier than both of us put together, what happened to him? He stopped a beam in Yanina, that’s what. Bad futtering luck, nothing else to it.”

Before Ceorl could answer, smoke on the breeze set him coughing. Whole great stretches of Trapani burned, with no one doing much to try to put out the fires. The Algarvians couldn’t, and the Unkerlanters didn’t care.

Slowly, the smoke cleared. Ceorl’s face was as black with soot as his beard. Sidroc doubted his own was any cleaner. Ceorl said, “Not fornicating likely we’re going to end up any different.”

“No,” Sidroc agreed. “This stretch around the palace is about what’s left. Maybe a few other little patches, but they don’t do anybody any good. Everything else, Swemmel’s buggers have got it.”

“And they want Mezentio,” Ceorl said. “They want that whoreson bad.”

Being a corporal, Sidroc could-should-have reproved him. Instead, he nodded. The Unkerlanters did want Mezentio. Their dragons dropped leaflets promising not just safety but enormous rewards for any Algarvians who gave them the king. Sidroc supposed the same applied to the men of Plegmund’s Brigade. He didn’t care. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust the Unkerlanters, though he didn’t. But, after spending the past two and a half years battling them, he didn’t want to have anything to do with them except over the business end of a stick.

A couple of men in rock-gray tunics darted out from a doorway and dashed toward rubble in front of the barricade. Using the business end of his stick, Sidroc blazed one of them. The other made it and started blazing back.

Sidroc scuttled along the barricade to find a new place from which to blaze at the foe. Stay anywhere very long and you asked for a sniper’s beam through the head. Behind him, an Algarvian declared, “I will deal with these cursed savages.”

That was interesting enough to make Sidroc turn his head. “Who in blazes are you?” he asked the redhead standing there-standing there, Sidroc noted, with no regard whatsoever for his own safety. Considering what was going on all around-considering that Trapani was, not to put too fine a point on it, falling-that took even Algarvian arrogance a bit far.

“I am Major Almonte,” the fellow replied. With his left hand, he brushed the mage’s badge he wore on his left breast. “I have the power to hurl the Unkerlanters back in dismay.”

“Oh, you do, do you?” Sidroc grunted. Almonte nodded. He believed what he was saying. Sidroc didn’t, not for a minute. “If you’re such hot stuff, pal, what are Swemmel’s buggers doing within blaze of the royal palace here?”

“It’s not my fault,” Almonte said. “My superiors would not listen to me, would not let me show the full reach of my genius.”

From not far away, Ceorl said, “Another fornicating crackpot.” Sidroc laughed. Almonte might be an Algarvian and an officer by courtesy, but what difference did that make here and now?

The redhead glared at both Forthwegians. “You are nothing but mercenaries,” he said. “You have no business criticizing me.”

“Talk is cheap, pal,” Sidroc said.

“Futter yourself,” Almonte said crisply. “By the powers above, I will show you-I will show the world-what I can do.” He scrambled over the barricade and faced the Unkerlanters without the least shred of cover.

When they didn’t blaze Almonte down in the first instant, Sidroc knew he had some-more than a little-power. Beams flew toward him, but none bit. It was as if they were beneath the redhead’s notice. He raised both hands above his head and began a spell. It was, Sidroc noted, not in Algarvian but in classical Kaunian: he’d learned enough in school to recognize the language. He snickered. Hearing it now, of all times, and in the heart of Trapani, of all places, was pretty funny.

But then the laughter curdled in his mouth. The hair on his arms and at the back of his neck tried to prickle up in fear. Almonte’s magecraft seemed to draw darkness from beneath the flagstones on which he stood and cast it at the Unkerlanters. Sidroc briefly heard them cry out in alarm before that darkness-did he really see it, or sense it with something older and even more primitive than sight? — washed over them. Then they fell silent. Sidroc was somehow certain none of them would ever cry out again.

Major Almonte did, in pride and triumph. Sidroc leaned over and threw up. Ceorl looked green, too. “I’d sooner lose than use a magic like that,” he muttered. Sidroc nodded.

Almonte shook his fist at the sudden silence in front of the palace. “Die, swine!” he cried. “If the stinking dragonfliers had let me take my spells aloft, I’d have done more and worse to you. But even now. .” He resumed the incantation. That cold, dark, deadly silence spread farther. Unkerlanter lives went out liked snuffed candle flames.

Swemmel’s men might not have known exactly what was happening to them, but they knew something was, and they knew whence the trouble came. They hurled eggs at Almonte from tossers beyond the reach of his sorcery. Sidroc threw himself flat. Eggs bursting all around Almonte burst too close to him.

The Algarvian mage had had a spell for turning aside beams. When Sidroc lifted his head again, he discovered Almonte had owned no such warding against bursts of sorcerous energy and the metal from egg shells they flung about. The mage was down and screaming and bleeding. He looked more like a piece of butchery than a man.

Sidroc could have blazed him to put him out of his misery. What with the sort of magic Almonte had been using, he was more than glad to let him suffer.

“They’ll come after us as soon as they realize he can’t do anything to them anymore,” he warned Ceorl.

“I know,” the ruffian said.

Come the Unkerlanters did, behind a fresh barrage of eggs. “Urra!” they shouted, more in relief, Sidroc thought, than anything else. “Urra! Swemmel! Urra!” Despite good blazing from the barricades and from the palace itself, they gained lodgments here and there and began blazing down the Algarvians and the men from Plegmund’s Brigade and the Phalanx of Valmiera who still stood against them.

“Fall back!” Sidroc yelled. “We’ll be cut off if we don’t!” He’d done enough in this fight-he’d done enough in his whole term of service in Plegmund’s Brigade-that no one could accuse him of cowardice. He ran back toward the royal palace, his men-those still on their feet-with him.

As he ran, he hoped the redheads inside wouldn’t take the soldiers of Plegmund’s Brigade for Unkerlanters and blaze them down. That would have been the ultimate indignity. In the end, though, how much did it matter? He didn’t think he would last very long any which way.

He made it into the palace unblazed, and took up a new position at a window that had offered a magnificent view but was really too long, too open, to give good cover. To his right knelt Ceorl and a blond Valmieran from the Phalanx, to his left a redhead from the Popular Assault who couldn’t have been above fifteen and an older Algarvian, a bald fellow with a beaky nose.

The old man could handle a stick. “There’s another one down,” he said, stretching an Unkerlanter lifeless in front of the palace. “But it won’t last. It can’t last, powers below eat them all.”

Sidroc shuddered. Major Almonte, he thought, had dealt much too intimately with the powers below. “We’ll hold on a while longer,” he said, and then took another look at the man crouching there beside him. His voice rose to a startled squeak: “Your, uh, Majesty.”

King Mezentio nodded briskly. “I will ask the same favor of you, Corporal, that I’ve asked of a good many men already: when you see this place falling, have the courtesy to blaze me down. I do not care to fall into Swemmel’s hands alive.”

“Uh, aye, sir.” Sidroc nodded. He wouldn’t have wanted the King of Unkerlant to get his hands on him, either.

“Meanwhile. .” Mezentio blazed again. He nodded, but then grimaced. “I should have won Algarve should have won. This kingdom proved itself weak. It doesn’t deserve to live.”

And who led it to where it is? Sidroc thought. But he didn’t see how he could say such a thing to the King of Algarve. Even as he cast about for ways that wouldn’t sound too blunt, the moment passed. A great racket of bursting eggs and crumpling masonry and shouting men arose from the rear of the palace.