Through the Darkness

The guards there were wide awake. Rathar would have been astonished to find anything else. After they’d searched him, after he’d set the sword on a wall bracket, the men let him enter Swemmel’s presence. He prostrated himself in front of his sovereign and went through the rituals of abasement till Swemmel decided he could rise.

And when he had risen, the king fixed him with the glare that turned the bones of every underling in Unkerlant-which is to say, every other Unkerlanter-to jelly. “You have proved wrong again, Marshal,” Swemmel said. “How shall we keep you at the head of our armies when you keep being wrong” The last word was nearly a scream.

Stolid as usual, Rathar answered, “If you know an officer who will serve the kingdom better than I have, your Majesty, set him in my place.”

For a dreadful moment, he thought Swemmel would do it. But then the king made a disparaging gesture. “Everyone else is a worse fool than you,” Swemmel said. “Why else do the Algarvians keep winning victories? We are sick to death of being served by fools.”

Swemmel had put to death a great many men who were anything but fools, in the Twinkings War against his brother Kyot when neither of them would admit to being the younger and in its aftermath and then all through his reign, whenever he suspected an able, ambitious fellow was able and ambitious enough to look toward the throne. Pointing that out struck Rathar as useless. He said, “Your Majesty, we have to deal with what is. The Algarvians are driving again, down in the south.”

“Aye.” Swemmel glared again, eyes dark burning coals in his long, pale face. “I have here your appreciation. More retreats. I want a general who fights, not one who runs away.”

“And I intend to fight, your Majesty-when the time and the ground suit me,” Rathar said. “If we fight when and where the Algarvians want us to, do we help ourselves or do we help them? Remember, we’ve got ourselves into our worst trouble by striking at them too soon.”

He took his life in his hands with that last sentence. Swemmel had always been the one who’d urged premature attack. No other courtiers would have dared remind the king of that. Rathar dared. One day, he supposed, King Swemmel would take his head for lese majesty. Meanwhile, if Swemmel heard the truth once in a while, the kingdom stood a better chance of coming through the crisis.

“We must save the cinnabar mines in the Mamming Hills,” the king said. “We agree with you in this. Without them, our dragons would be greatly weakened.”

When he said we, did he mean himself or Unkerlant? Did he even separate the two? Rathar didn’t know; fathoming Swemmel’s mind was hazardous at the best of times, which this wasn’t. Pulling his own mind back to the matter at hand, he said, “So they would. And, did the Algarvians have it, their dragon force would be strengthened to the same degree.”

“They must not have it, then. They shall not have it. They shall not!” Swemmel’s eyes rolled in his head. His voice rose to a shrill shout once more. “We shall slaughter them! We shall bury them! Unkerlant shall be Algarve’s graveyard!”

Rathar waited till his sovereign regained some semblance of calm. Then, cautiously, the marshal asked, “Having read the appreciation, your Majesty, do you recall my mention of the town called Sulingen, on the northern bank of the Wolter?”

“What if we do?” Swemmel answered, which might have meant he didn’t recall and might have meant he simply didn’t care. The latter, it proved: “Sulingen is too near the Mamming Hills to suit us.”

“If we can stop the Algarvians before then, so much the better,” Rathar agreed. “But if they break through at Sulingen, then how can we stop them at all?”

Swemmel grunted. “It had better not come to that.” He shook his head. “Sulingen. Too close. Too close. But they can’t pass it. They mustn’t pass it.” Rathar didn’t know if he’d won his point or not. He hadn’t lost it in the first instant, anyhow. With Swemmel, that was something of a victory in itself.

Three

Leofsig toweled water from his beard and used a hand to slick his damp hair back from his forehead. In summer, he used Gromheort’s public baths more often after a day of road building than he had when tlie weather was cool. The baths weren’t heated so well as they had been before the war, but that mattered less when he would have got sweaty even without a hard day’s labor.

He grimaced as he re-donned his old, filthy, stinking tunic. No help for it, though. He had only a few tunics, and no prospect of getting more till the war ended, if it ever did. The Algarvians took almost all the wool and linen Forthweg made. Only people with the best of connections sported new clothes these days.

When Leofsig left the baths, he looked around warily lest he spy Felgilde. He’d seen the girl he’d jilted only once since backing away from their engagement, and that had been coming out of the baths. He didn’t want to see her again. To his relief, he didn’t see her now. That improved his mood as he headed home.

He turned the last corner and started down his street. He hadn’t taken more than a couple of steps before he stopped in surprise: he’d almost run into a Kaunian. “Are you mad?” he exclaimed. “Get back to your own district before a redheaded constable spots you.”

The blond-actually, his hair was more silver than gold-touched a scabby scar on the side of his head. When he spoke, he used his own tongue rather than Forthwegian: “I have already made the acquaintance of those barbarians, thank you.”

“Then you do not want to make it again,” Leofsig answered, also in Kaunian.

That got the old man’s notice. “Your pronunciation is not all it should be,” he said, “but what, in these wretched times, is! Since you do speak this language somewhat, perhaps you will not betray me. May I trouble you with a question before I go my way?”

“Your being here is trouble,” Leofsig said, but then he relented. “Ask. Better you pick me than someone else.”

“Very well, then.” The Kaunian’s voice, like his bearing, was full of fussy precision. “Ask I shall: am I mistaken, or is this the street on which dwells a young man of Forthweg named Ealstan?”

Leofsig stared. “I haven’t seen Ealstan in months,” he answered, startled back into Forthwegian. “He’s my younger brother. What’s he to you?” He wondered if he should have said even that much. Could the Algarvians have persuaded a Kaunian to spy for them? He knew too well they could-the promise of a few square meals might do the job. But if the redheads were after anybody in his family, they were after him, not Ealstan-he was the one who’d escaped from an Algarvian captives’ camp. Maybe this would be all right.

“What is he to me?” the Kaunian repeated in his own language. “Well, I see I must ask another question beyond the one you gave me: did your brother ever mention to you the name Vanai?”

“Aye,” Leofsig said in a faintly strangled voice. He pointed at the old man. “Then you would be her grandfather. I’m sorry-I don’t recall your name.”

“Why should you? I am only a Kaunian, after all.” As Leofsig had gathered from Ealstan, the old fellow carried venom in his tongue. He went on, “In case your memory should by any chance improve henceforward, I am called Brivibas. Tell me at once whatever you may know of my granddaughter.”

How much to tell? How much to trust? After a few seconds’ thought, Leofsig answered, “Last I heard, she was well, and so was my brother.”

Brivibas sighed. “There is the greatest weight off my mind. But, you see, one question does indeed lead to another. Where are they? What are they doing?”

“I’d better not tell you that,” Leofsig said. “The more people who know, the more people who are likely to find out.”

“Do you think I have a tongue hinged at both ends?” Brivibas demanded indignantly.

Before Leofsig could answer, somebody threw a rock that missed Brivibas’ head by scant inches and shattered against the whitewashed wall behind him. A shout followed the rock: “Get out of here, you miserable, stinking Kaunian! I hope the Algarvians catch you and whale the stuffing out of you.”

The look Brivibas sent the raucous Forthwegian should have left him smoking in the street like dragonfire. When it didn’t, Brivibas turned back to Leofsig. “Perhaps you have a point after all,” he said quietly. “My thanks for