Out of the Darkness

As if to underscore his words, a flight of Unkerlanter dragons, all painted the same rock-gray as his uniform tunic and cloak, flew low over the river to pound the Algarvian positions on the eastern side. The soldiers nodded approvingly. If the redheads were catching it, they would have a harder time dishing it out.

And when the Algarvian strike at the bridge came, Leudast didn’t even notice it at first. One dragon, flying so high that it seemed only a speck in the sky? He was tempted to laugh at Mezentio’s men. A few of the heavy sticks blazed at it. Most didn’t bother. They had no real hope of bringing it down, not from that height.

He didn’t see the two eggs the dragon dropped, either, not till they fell far enough to make them look larger. “Looks like they’ll land on the redheads,” one of his men said, pointing. “Serve ‘em right, the bastards.”

But it did not do to depend on the Algarvians to be fools. As the eggs neared the ground, they suddenly seemed to swerve in midair, and those swerves brought them down square on the bridge over the Skamandros. A long length of it tumbled into the river. “What sort of sorcery is that?” Leudast howled.

He got no answer till that evening, when he put the same question to Captain Drogden. “The redheads have something new there,” the regimental commander replied, with what Leudast reckoned commendable calm. “Steering eggs by sorcery is hard even for them, so they don’t do it very often, and it doesn’t always work.”

“It worked here,” Leudast said morosely. Drogden nodded. The Unkerlanters stayed on the west bank of the Skamandros a while longer.

Hajjaj was glad to return to Bishah. The Zuwayzi foreign minister was glad he’d been allowed to return to his capital. He was glad Bishah remained the capital of the Kingdom of Zuwayza, and that Unkerlant hadn’t chosen to swallow his small, hot homeland after knocking it out of the Derlavaian War. But, most of all, he was glad to have escaped from Cottbus.

“I can understand that, your Excellency,” Qutuz, his secretary, said on the day when he returned to King Shazli’s palace. “Imagine being stuck in a place where they wear clothes all the time.”

“It’s not so much that they wear them all the time,” Hajjaj replied. Like Qutuz, he was a lean, dark brown man, though his hair and beard were white rather than black. And, like Qutuz, like almost all Zuwayzin, he wore only sandals and sometimes a hat unless meeting with foreigners who would be scandalized at nudity. He groped for words: “It’s that they need to wear them so much of the time, that they would really and truly die if they didn’t wear them. Until you’ve been down to the south, you have no idea what weather can do-none, I tell you.”

Qutuz shuddered. “That probably helps make the Unkerlanters what they are.

“I wouldn’t be surprised,” Hajjaj answered. “Of course, other Derlavaians, ones who don’t live where the weather’s quite so beastly, wear clothes, too. I wouldn’t care to guess what that says about them. And the Kuusamans have a climate every bit as beastly as Unkerlant’s, and they are, by and large, very nice people. So you never can tell.”

“I suppose not,” his secretary said, and then, in musing tones, “Kuusamans. We haven’t seen many of them in Zuwayza for a while.”

“No, indeed,” Hajjaj agreed. “A few captives from sunken ships, a few more from leviathans killed off our shores, but otherwise. .” He shook his head. “We’ll have a lot of closed ministries opening up again before long.”

“Ansovald is already back at the Unkerlanter ministry,” Qutuz observed.

“So he is,” Hajjaj said, and let it go at that. He despised the Unkerlanter minister to Zuwayza, who was crude and harsh even by the standards of his kingdom. He’d despised him when Ansovald served here before Unkerlant and Zuwayza went to war, and he’d despised him down in Cottbus, when Ansovald had presented King Swemmel’s terms for ending the war to him. Ansovald knew. He didn’t care. If anything, he found it funny. That only made Hajjaj despise him more.

“Kuusamans,” Qutuz repeated. “Unkerlanters.” He sighed, but went on, “Lagoans. Valmierans. Jelgavans. New people to deal with.”

“We do what we can. We do what we must,” Hajjaj said. “I’ve heard that Marquis Balastro did safely reach Algarve.”

“Good news,” Qutuz said, nodding. “I’m glad to hear it, too. Balastro wasn’t a bad man, not at all.”

“No, he wasn’t,” Hajjaj agreed, wishing the same could be said of the cause for which Algarve fought.

Having the Algarvian ministry standing empty felt as strange as imagining the others filled. Not even Hajjaj could blame Swemmel of Unkerlant for requiring Zuwayza to renounce her old ally and cleave to her new ones. He’d never liked many of the things Algarve had done; he’d loathed some of them, and told Balastro so to his face. But any kingdom that could help Zuwayza get revenge against Unkerlant had looked like a reasonable ally. And so … and so Zuwayza had gambled. And so Zuwayza had lost.