Darkness Descending

“So he will. There’s always work to be done in the mines.” Hajjaj gestured to the column of captives. “They may go on now.”

Muhassin spoke to the guards. The guards shouted at the captives. The captives shambled forward again. Muhassin turned back to Hajjaj. “And now, your Excellency, shall we go on toward the old frontier, the frontier we are restoring?”

“By all means, Colonel,” the foreign minister said. His camel wasn’t so interested in going on, but he managed to persuade it.

“Here and there, we’re already in position to cross the old frontier,” Muhassin said. As if to underscore his words, a squadron of dragons flew by overhead, going south. Muhassin pointed to them. “We couldn’t have come so far so fast without help from the Algarvians. Unkerlant hasn’t got but a few dragons up here in the north country.”

“Cross the old frontier?” Hajjaj frowned. “Has King Shazli authorized the army to invade Unkerlant itself? I had not heard of any such order.” He wondered if Shazli had given the order but not told him for fear of angering or alarming him. That would have been courteous of the king--courteous, aye, but also, in Hajjaj’s view, deadly dangerous.

To his vast relief, Muhassin shook his head. “No, your Excellency: as yet, we have received no such orders. I merely meant to inform you that we have the ability, should the orders come. A fair number of folk south of the old frontier--and east of it, too--have dark skins.” He ran a dark finger along his own arm.

“That is so,” the foreign minister agreed. “Still, if a small kingdom can take back what rightfully belongs to it, it should count itself lucky, the more so in these days when great kingdoms are so mighty. We would need something of a miracle to come away with more than we had at the beginning.”

“It is with feuds among kingdoms as it is with feuds among clans,” Muhassin replied. “A small clan with strong friends may come out on top of a large one whose neighbors all hate it.”

“What you say is true, but the small clan often ends up becoming the client of the clan that befriended it,” Hajjaj said. “I do not want us to become Algarve’s clients, any more than I wanted us to be Unkerlant’s clients back in the days before the Six Years’ War, when Zuwayza was ruled from Cottbus.”

“No man loves this kingdom more than you, your Excellency, and no one has served her better,” Colonel Muhassin said, by which flowery introduction Hajjaj knew the colonel was about to contradict him. Sure enough, Muhassin went on, “We have had the accursed Unkerlanters on our southern border for centuries. Our frontier does not march with Algarve, and so we have less to fear from King Mezentio than from King Swemmel. Is this not your own view as well?”

“It is, and Mezentio is a far more sensible sovereign on his worst day than Swemmel on his best,” Hajjaj said, which made the colonel laugh. But the Zuwayzi foreign minister continued, “If the war goes on as it has been going, would you not say our frontier is liable to march with Algarve’s before long?”

“Hmm.” Now the corners of Muhassin’s mouth turned down. “Something to that, I shouldn’t wonder. The Algarvians are moving west at a powerful clip, aren’t they? Still and all, they’ll make better neighbors than Unkerlanters ever did. Aye, they wear clothes, but they have some notion of honor.”

Hajjaj chuckled under his breath. It wasn’t that Muhassin was wrong. It was just that what the Zuwayzin and the Algarvians had in common was a long tradition of fighting their neighbors when those neighbors were weak and fighting among themselves when their neighbors were strong. It wasn’t that the Unkerlanters didn’t fight; they did. Zuwayza would not have been free but for the Unkerlanters’ Twinkings War, when both Swemmel and his brother, Kyot, claimed to be the elder, and so deserving of the throne. But Unkerlanters did not fight for the sport of it, as both Zuwayzin and Algarvians were wont to do.

“Come on, your Excellency,” Muhassin said. “The encampment is over that rise there.” He pointed and then booted his camel back into motion. The beast’s complaints at having to work once more sounded as if it had been given over to the king of Jelgava’s torturers. Hajjaj also got his camel going again. It too sounded martyred. He had little sympathy for it. Though descended from nomads, he greatly preferred ley-line caravans to obstreperous animals.

But the Zuwayzin had done their best to sabotage the ley lines as the Unkerlanters drove northward. King Swemmel’s sorcerers had repaired some of the lines, only to sabotage them in turn when the Zuwayzin began pushing south once more. These days, naked black mages worked to undo what Swemmel’s wizards had done. Nobody could sabotage a camel; the powers above had already taken care of that. However revolting the beasts were, though, Hajjaj would rather have gone by camel’s back than by shank’s mare.