Out of the Darkness

“My understanding is that Mainardo, having abdicated as King of Jelgava, now succeeds his older brother as King of Algarve,” General Oldrade answered. “King Mainardo is now arranging the surrender of Algarvian forces in the northeast to the Kuusaman army.”

Swemmel won’t get his hands on Mainardo, was what that meant. The Kuusamans were unlikely to boil the new King of Algarve alive or give him any of the other interesting and lingering ends he might deserve. Too bad, Rathar thought, but he didn’t see what he or Unkerlant could do about it. Maybe the Jelgavans will take care of it for us. They have almost as many reasons to hate Mainardo as we do-we did-to hate Mezentio.

“What terms are you prepared to give us, Marshal?” Oldrade asked.

“Assuming that what you say about Mezentio is true, will will grant your soldiers’ lives,” Rathar said. “We offer no more than that.”

Oldrade drew himself up, the picture of affronted dignity. “This is mean-spirited in the extreme!” he said indignantly.

“Too bad,” Rathar said. “If you like, I will send you back to your lines, and we can take up the fight again. See how many of your men come away with their lives then.”

“You are a hard, cruel man,” Oldrade said. “And your king-”

“Say what you like about me,” Rathar broke in. “You insult King Swemmel at your peril. Now, then-do you accept these terms, or not?”

“For the sake of my men, I must accept them.” Tears ran down Oldrade’s face. Rage? Humiliation? Sorrow? Rathar couldn’t say. All he knew was, no Unkerlanter would have thus bared himself before a foe. Vatran turned away, embarrassed to look at the Algarvian.

“I will have a secretary write out the terms, in Unkerlanter and Algarvian,” Rathar said. Oldrade, still weeping, nodded. The Marshal of Unkerlant went on, “I will also send out men with flags of truce and mages to magnify voices, letting everyone know the fighting here is over. When you pass back into your own lines, you do the same.” Oldrade nodded again. Rathar guessed the battle wouldn’t end at once, but would sputter out over several days. People would die for no reason whatever. He shrugged, hoping he was wrong but knowing he wouldn’t be able to stop such things.

“You have given us harsh terms,” Oldrade said. “I hope that, as tempers cool, you will be more generous in your triumph.”

The Algarvian general was three or four inches taller than Rathar. The marshal had to tilt his head back to look down his nose at Oldrade, and he did. “What sort of terms would you have offered if you had taken Cottbus?” he asked. General Oldrade flushed and did not answer. He didn’t have to; they both knew the truth there.

Vatran said, “We ought to send a mage to check Mezentio’s body, make sure it’s not somebody else wearing a sorcerous disguise.”

“A good point,” Rathar said. “I will have the secretary put that in the surrender document.”

“You are the conquerors.” Oldrade didn’t try to hide his bitterness. “You may do as you please.”

“That’s right,” Rathar said, and called his secretary. He told the young lieutenant what he wanted. The secretary was fluent in both his own language and Algarvian, which Rathar also spoke and read. He skimmed through both texts, then passed them to Oldrade.

After reading them, the redhead nodded. He pulled a pen from a tunic pocket. Rathar pushed a bottle of ink toward him. The pen scratched across both instruments of surrender. Oldrade said, “Would you please have your mages make copies for me to take back to … what is left of my command?”

“Of course, General.” In small matters, Rathar could afford courtesy. “With the fall of Trapani, this war is as near over as makes no difference. May we never fight another one.”

“May it be so,” Oldrade agreed. With a sigh, he unbuckled his sword and held it out to Rathar. “Now it is yours, sir, the negotiations being complete.”

“I accept it in the name of my king,” Rathar said. “Go now, and make the surrender known to your men. Your escort will take you back through the lines.” General Oldrade bowed, spun on his heel, and left the headquarters.

“Congratulations, lord Marshal,” Vatran said again. “We’ve done it.”

Rathar returned the general’s salute. “So we have,” he said. “And now to let his Majesty know we’ve done it.” He went off to the crystallomancers’ room. Arranging an etheric connection back to Cottbus didn’t take long. He hadn’t thought it would; the crystallomancers had to have been waiting for this moment. As soon as King Swemmel’s image appeared in the crystal before the marshal, he said, “Your Majesty, the Algarvians in Trapani have yielded, the surrender to spare their lives but nothing more. The enemy’s capital is yours.”

“And what of the enemy’s king?” Swemmel demanded. “We want Mezentio.”

“He is said to have died in the fighting, your Majesty,” Rathar answered. “I am sending a sorcerer to make sure the corpse is his.”

King Swemmel snorted contemptuously. “Mark our words-he turned coward at the end. He dared not face what we would have done to him for all that he did to our kingdom.” Rathar thought his sovereign likely to be right. In Mezentio’s place, he wouldn’t have cared to endure Swemmel’s wrath, either. The king went on, “Who now claims the throne of Algarve, if Mezentio is truly dead?”

“His brother Mainardo, your Majesty,” Rathar said. “He is said to have yielded himself up to the Kuusamans in the northeast.”

“They will not kill him, as he deserves. No.” Swemmel sounded worried, almost frightened. His eyes flicked back and forth, back and forth, as if watching demons only he could see. “No. They will leave him alive, leave him on what they call the throne of Algarve. The stinking whoresons, they will use him for a cat’s paw, a stalking horse, against us.”

“They want Algarve beaten as much as we do, your Majesty,” Rathar said.

“Algarve is beaten,” the king said. “Now they want us crushed as well. They think they can loose their sorceries in the middle of the Bothnian Ocean without our knowing it, but they are wrong- wrong, we tell you!” Swemmel’s voice rose to something close to a scream.

Rathar knew nothing about sorceries in the middle of the Bothnian Ocean. He wondered if Swemmel did, or if the king were only imagining them. “We’ve won here,” he said. King Swemmel nodded, but with none of the joy Rathar had hoped he’d show. And Rathar’s own joy, in turn, died before being fully born. He wondered if he would ever find a way to forgive Swemmel for that.

Gyorvar, the capital of Gyongyos, lay where four rivers came together near the coast to form a single stream. A ley line went up that stream from the sea to Gyorvar, so the cruiser Csikos, after skirting the Balaton Islands, could take the men it had received from its Kuusaman counterpart straight to the city.

“Home,” Kun murmured as the tall buildings came into sight.

It wasn’t home to Istvan. So many houses and shops and enormous structures whose use he didn’t know all jammed together were as alien to him as the forests of western Unkerlant or the low, flat expanse of Becsehely- Becsehely as it had been when he’d served there, not the scarred and burnt and ruined place the island had become.

“My own people,” Istvan said, as close as he could come to agreeing with the former mage’s apprentice.

Behind the lenses of his spectacles, Kun’s eyes gleamed. “You’re going to see more of your own people than you want to for a while, unless I miss my guess.”

“Huh,” Istvan said. “I never would have imagined.”

As soon as the Csikos tied up at a quay, swarms of men in clean uniforms with the badges of Eyes and Ears of the Ekrekek swarmed aboard. “Istvan, Sergeant!” one of them shouted, reading from a list.

“Here!” Istvan waved his hand.

“You come with me,” the fellow said, and checked off his name. “Petofi, Captain!”

“Here!” The officer waved as Istvan had. He was tall and gaunt, with a nasty scar on his left cheek that stopped just short of his eye.

“Good. You two are mine.” The Eye and Ear of the Ekrekek checked off Petofi’s name, too. “Come along with me, both of you. We’ve got carriages waiting to take you to interrogation headquarters.”