Through the Darkness

Valnu bowed himself almost double. “I’m so relieved to discover you don’t know everything there is to know after all. Where, I ask you, are the Algarvian officers who were here but are no more? Why, gone to Unkerlant, of course. King Swemmel, you see, isn’t yet convinced the Algarvians are stronger than everybody else.”

“Captain Mosco!” Krasta exclaimed. He wasn’t here because he’d had to go there. That seemed sensible enough. She wished Valnu wouldn’t try to make something important and meaningful out of it. She wasn’t up to dealing with complications right now.

“Who is Captain Mosco?” Valnu asked. Krasta stared owlishly at him; how could he not know?

“Captain Mosco was my aide, a very good fellow,” Colonel Lurcanio said in his precise, almost unaccented Valmieran. “He has gone to fight in the west; powers above grant that he stay safe.”

“I didn’t notice you come up,” Krasta told Lurcanio. She hadn’t noticed a good many things since drinking the laced brandy. One of the things she hadn’t noticed was how many things she hadn’t noticed.

Lurcanio said, “Seeing a friend is all very well, milady, but I did want to remind you that you came here with me and will also be going home with me.”

Valnu shrieked laughter and patted Lurcanio on the arm. “Why, my dear Colonel, I do believe you’re jealous.”

Lurcanio’s answering laugh was smug, the laugh of a man certain he had nothing to fear. Krasta’s laugh was wild and dangerous--and so drunken that Lurcanio didn’t let it worry him in the least. If Valnu’s laugh was relieved, neither Krasta nor Lurcanio noticed.

“Did you have a good time?” Lurcanio asked as they went home through the dark, quiet streets of Priekule later that evening.

“The poor king,” Krasta answered. She would have a dreadful headache in the morning. King Gainibu, though, would surely have a worse one. Krasta slumped over against Lurcanio and fell asleep.

How long would the good weather last? On the austral continent, people started asking that not long after the summer solstice. Before long, the birds would start flying north. Fernao wished he could fly north, too, but the war against Yanina and Algarve pinned him to the land of the Ice People.

“Just think,” he said to Affonso. “If everything had gone as we’d hoped it would--the way everybody back in Setubal said it would--we could be enjoying the fleshpots of Heshbon right now.”

The second-rank mage raised a gingery eyebrow. “I thought you told me Heshbon was a miserable hole in the ground.”

“Oh, it is,” Fernao assured him. “It is. But what, I pray you, do you think you’re sitting in now?”

Affbnso laughed, though it wasn’t really funny. Lagoan attacks and Algarvian counterattacks had chewed up a good deal of the coastal country in the land of the Ice People. Fernao and Affonso had both taken refuge in the crater a bursting egg from some earlier fight had left in the ground. At the bottom of it were a little grass, a little water, and much more muddy ice.

“Next to a literal hole in the ground,” Fernao said in meditative tones, “a metaphorical hole in the ground doesn’t look so bad any more. Or will you tell me I’m wrong?”

Affonso shook his head. “I wouldn’t dream of it. How could I? You outrank me. But I will say that, if we’d taken Heshbon, it probably would have got wrecked in the fighting.”

“That depends,” Fernao said. “If we’d taken it from the Yaninans, they would have handed it over and been glad to do it. With the Algarvians, though, you’re right. Those whoresons would have fought us block by block--not that Heshbon has a whole lot of blocks--and there wouldn’t have been one brick left on top of another by the time the battle was through.”

Now Affonso nodded, though gloomily. “Who would have thought a pack of swaggering fops could make such good soldiers?”

“They did in the Six Years’ War, too,” Fernao said. “They are brave; no one’s ever said otherwise. But they don’t know when to stop. They never know when to stop. That’s why we have to beat them: to make sure they don’t go on doing just as they please all over the world, I mean.”

“I understood you,” his colleague said. “Whenever they slaughter another batch of Kaunians, the whole world seems to tremble, for those who can feel it. And they’ve got the Unkerlanters imitating them, too. I think I’ll have nightmares for the rest of my life.”

“War was a filthy business before,” Fernao said. “It’s filthier now, and we’ve got Mezentio’s men to blame for it.” Many of his worst nightmares centered on camels and all the ways it could be cooked. He kept dreaming he would be asked to judge which was worst, and to sample them all till he made a choice. He had some camel baked in clay in his pack, and thought it the most dreadful thing in the world ... save only hunger.

Whatever Affonso might have said about war or about camel meat or about anything else, he didn’t, for a lookout shouted one of the words the Lagoans in the austral continent least wanted to hear: “Dragons!”