“Tell, tell!” That wasn’t just Bembo. Several of his comrades spoke up, too. Disliking the men in command was one thing. Wanting to see all of them dead was something else again—at least, Bembo supposed it was.
With the self-importance of a man who knows he has important news, the other constable said, “Well, what happened is—or the big blazes think what happened is—the fornicating Forthwegians have worked out a spell that makes them look like us. What could be better for assassins?”
“Like the cursed Kaunians looking like Forthwegians, by the powers above!” Bembo exclaimed.
“Aye, it sounds wonderful,” Oraste said. “Now all we need is a spell that makes us look like Kaunians, so we can go off and cut our own throats and save the Forthwegians and the Unkerlanters the trouble.”
“That isn’t much of a joke,” one of the soldiers said, echoing Bembo’s thought.
“Who says I was joking?” Oraste’s face and voice were cold as winter in the south of Unkerlant.
The soldier glared back at him. That was enough to intimidate most Algarvian constables pressed into combat duty. It would have been plenty to intimidate Bembo, who knew perfectly well that he was softer than the men who went to real war. But Oraste glared right back—anyone who reckoned himself the harder man would have to prove it by beating him. And the soldier looked away first. Bembo was impressed.
He was also worried. “How in blazes are we supposed to know the whoresons with us are proper Algarvian whoresons and not disguised Forthwegian whoresons just waiting to cut our throats?” he asked the fellow who’d brought the bad news.
“They’re still working on that,” the other constable answered. “Some of the Forthwegians don’t trim their beards enough before they go into disguise, so they end up looking fuzzier than we usually do. And some of them have that foul accent of theirs when they try and speak Algarvian. But some of em … We wouldn’t have so many dead men if they were all easy to spot. If you don’t know the fellows around you, keep an eye on ‘em.” He sketched a salute and hurried off to spread the news further.
“Well, that’s jolly,” Bembo said. “Can’t trust the Forthwegians, can’t trust the Kaunians”—and didn‘t we do that to ourselves? he thought—”and now we can’t trust each other, either.”
“Probably just what the stinking rebels want—us blazing us, I mean,” one of the soldiers said. Bembo wished he could have argued with that, but it seemed pretty self-evidently true.
He would have said so, but the Algarvians chose that moment to start tossing eggs at the Forthwegians just in front of his companions and him. He’d found out in a hurry that a certain number of such eggs were liable to fall short of where they were aimed. He threw himself into a hole some earlier burst had made and hoped none would land on him.
“I hate this!” he shouted to anybody who would listen. But how likely was it that anybody would? And even if somebody would, how likely was it that he could hear one man’s cry of protest through the endless roar of bursting eggs?
As soon as that roar let up, someone shouted, “Forward!” Bembo scrambled to his feet and went forward with the rest of the soldiers and constables. He was no hero. He’d never been a hero. But he couldn’t bear to have his comrades reckon him a coward.
Would you rather have them reckon you a dead man? he asked himself as he advanced. The answer was evidently aye, because he kept going. Sometimes saving face counted for as much as saving his neck.
The houses and blocks of flats ahead had been battered before. They were more battered now, with smoke and dust rising from them in great clouds. Broken glass glittered in the streets and on the slates of the sidewalks. It could slice right through a boot. Bembo noticed it as he ran, but it was the least of his worries. That thunderstorm of eggs hadn’t got rid of all the Forthwegian fighters up there: someone was blazing at the Algarvians from a building ahead.
Bembo threw himself flat behind what had been a chimney before it came crashing down in ruin. He was used to going after people who tried to get away from him, not after men who stood their ground and blazed back. No one cared what he was used to. He stuck up his head and waited to see where the Forthwegian’s beam came from. When he did spot it, he blazed, and was rewarded with a howl of pain.
More eggs started bursting ahead. Bembo hunkered down again. Every block of Eoforwic the Algarvians took from the rebels had to get pounded flat before they could be sure of holding on to it.
“Forward!” That hateful shout again. Forward Bembo went, cursing under his breath.
From a doorway twice its natural size, somebody stepped out and flung what looked like a cheap sugar bowl. The Forthwegian fell an instant later, blazed by three beams. But then the bowl landed among the oncoming Algarvians, and the burst of sorcerous energy trapped inside flung pottery fragments in all directions.
Something bit Bembo’s leg. He yelped and looked down at himself. Blood trickled along his calf, but the leg still bore his weight. He ran on toward a doorway. When he dashed into the meager shelter it gave, he discovered he shared that shelter with Oraste. “I’m wounded!” he cried dramatically.
His old partner glanced down at the cut on his leg. “Go home to mama when this is done,” Oraste said. “She can kiss it and make it better.”
“Well! I like that!” Bembo struck a heroic pose—carefully, so as not to expose any of his precious person to lurking foes. “Here I am, injured in service to my kingdom, and what do I get? Mockery! Scorn!”
“About what you deserve,” Oraste said. “I’ve seen people get hurt worse if they scratch themselves while they’ve got a hangnail.”
“Powers below eat you!” Bembo cried. “I’m going to put in for a wound badge when we come off duty.”
“You’ll probably get one, too. From what I’ve seen, the only way you can keep from getting a wound badge is if you get killed—and then they probably give the bastard to your next of kin.” Oraste’s cynicism knew no bounds.
Before Bembo could let out another indignant squawk, somebody up ahead yelled, “Forward!” again. Oraste left the shelter of the doorway without the least hesitation. Bembo had to follow him. On he ran, puffing, marveling that the fear of looking bad in front of his comrades once more proved stronger than the fear of death.
A Forthwegian’s head appeared in a second-story window. Bembo blazed at the Forthwegian, who toppled. Bembo ran on. He had no idea whether the man he’d just blazed was a fighter or an innocent bystander. He didn’t care, either. The fellow had shown up in the wrong place at the wrong time. He had to pay for that. If the penalty was death, too bad. Better his than mine or one of my pals’, Bembo thought.
More Forthwegians were holed up in a furniture shop not far ahead. No chance they were innocent bystanders: they blazed at the oncoming soldiers and constables. Bembo wasted no time ducking for cover. He wasn’t ashamed to do it, for he was far from the only one doing it.
Then several eggs crashed down around the furniture shop, and one right on it. “Surrender!” an Algarvian yelled to the Forthwegians still inside. “You can’t win!” He switched to Forthwegian so rudimentary, even Bembo could follow it: “Coming out! Hands high!”
“You no to kill we?” one of the Forthwegians called back in equally bad Algarvian.
“Not if you give up right now,” the soldier answered. “Make it snappy— this is your last chance.”
To Bembo’s surprise, half a dozen Forthwegians did come out of the wrecked shop, their faces glum, their hands up over their heads. When more eggs burst not far away, they all flinched. Not one of them tried to take shelter, though. They must have been sure the Algarvians would blaze them if they did. And they were, without a doubt, right.
“You constables!” one of the Algarvians soldiers said to Bembo and Oraste. “You know what to do with captives. Take these buggers away.”
“Right.” Bembo grunted as he got to his feet. That was something he knew how to do. And, while I’m away from the lines, I’ll see h
ow I go about asking for that wound badge, too.
Sixteen
Leudast had served in the Unkerlanter army for a long time. He’d been fighting in the Elsung Mountains in what was then King Swemmel’s desultory border war with Gyongyos when the Derlavaian War first broke out between Algarve and most of her neighbors. He’d been part of the Unkerlanter force that gobbled up western Forthweg while the redheads were smashing most of King Penda’s army. And he’d spent a demon of a lot of time fighting the Algarvians himself.
Two leg wounds weren’t so very much to show for all that. He’d started out a common soldier, with no hope of rising higher, and here he was, a lieutenant.
In all those years in the army, he’d never been particularly eager to go into a fight. In fact, he’d always been happiest during the brief spells of quiet he’d found. And here he was now, forced to stay quiet as he recovered from this second wound well behind the fighting front.
He hated it. He hated every minute he had to lie on his back. He hated every minute the healers used to poke and prod at his blazed leg, and hated the wise things they muttered back and forth in a language that hardly seemed to be Unkerlanter at all.
“When will you let me go?” he demanded. “When will you let me get back to my men? When will you let me get back to the fighting?”
Am I really saying that? But he was. Now, at last, after so much terror, he could begin to smell victory against the Algarvians. They still fought bravely. They still fought cleverly—more cleverly than his own countrymen, most of the time. But there weren’t enough of them to hold back the rising Unkerlanter tide no matter how bravely and cleverly they fought. And, having gone through all the black days when the Algarvians seemed sure to overwhelm Unkerlant, Leudast wanted to be there to help beat them. How much he wanted that amazed him.
But the healers shook their heads. “You will not be ready for some weeks, Lieutenant,” one of them said, and they went on to their next patient.
Alone in his cot, Leudast quietly laughed to himself. The last time he’d been wounded, down in Sulingen, his treatment had been a lot rougher than this. As soon as he could hobble around, they’d put a fresh stick in his hands and thrown him back into the fight.
Of course, he’d been only a sergeant then. Even the Unkerlanter army took better care of its officers than of its other ranks. And Sulingen had been as dreadful a struggle as any the war had seen. They’d needed everybody they could find. But even so …
He asked the healers again the next day when he could go back to the fight. They gave him another evasive answer. “Count your time here as a leave of sorts, Lieutenant,” one of them said.
“I don’t want this sort of leave,” Leudast said, whereupon all the healers looked at him as if he were daft. “If I get leave, I want it to be with my sweetheart.” They nodded then, but they still didn’t take him seriously. I’ve got strings to pull, he thought. I’m not quite an ordinary lieutenant, even if they think I am. Time to remind them otherwise. “Please get me pen and paper. I want to write to Marshal Rathar and request an immediate return to duty.”
Now the healers looked at him as if he might be dangerous. Cautiously, one of them asked, “How do you know Marshal Rathar?”
“He commissioned me after I captured false King Raniero of Grelz,” Leudast replied. Take that.
The healers didn’t seem to know how to take it. They put their heads together and muttered among themselves. At last, one of them said, “You really are not fit to return to duty yet, you know. That leg will not support you.”
“Well, all right,” said Leudast, who could not disagree with what was obviously true. “But it doesn’t seem to me like you people are doing much to get me back to duty. You’re just letting me lay here.”
“You do need to rest and recuperate, you know, Lieutenant,” the healer said.
“If I got any more rested, I’d be bored to death,” Leudast returned. “You’re a bunch of mages. Isn’t there anything you can do to send me back faster?”
They put their heads together again. Leudast hadn’t really expected anything else. They seemed unable to do anything without consulting among themselves. The one who served as their spokesman said, “You mean, use more sorcerous energy to expedite your recovery?” He sounded faintly scandalized.
Leudast didn’t care how he sounded. “That’s just what I mean,” he said.
“You’re healers, aren’t you? What the demon good are you if you won’t do any real healing?”
They all looked indignant. He wanted to laugh. They thought that would impress him. After all the time he’d spent in the field, nothing this side of a stick aimed at his face impressed him. The fellow who did their talking said, “I hope you realize we have only so much sorcerous energy to expend.”
“Aye, I’ve noticed that.” Leudast sounded as sardonic as he could. “Common soldiers get next to nothing, officers get as little as you think you can get away with giving. Fetch me that paper. I do need to write to Marshal Rathar.”
He knew he was being unfair. The healers were desperately overworked men. But he’d told a good-sized chunk of truth, too. A man who wasn’t important or well-connected—often the same thing—or whose wound wasn’t either as easy as possible to treat or in some way interesting got short shrift.
Once upon a time, Leudast had been a man without connections. He wasn’t any more, though, and he intended to keep hitting the healers over the head with such importance as he had till they did what he wanted.
They knew it, too. Glaring, their spokesman said, “You wish us to give you preferential treatment.” He might have been a Gyongyosian accusing Leudast of wanting him to eat goat.
“That’s right,” Leudast said cheerfully. “You do it all the time. I want you to do it for me.”
They put their heads together yet again. When they separated, the man who did the talking said, “You realize this may cause you some considerable pain?”
Leudast shrugged. The healers blinked. They didn’t know what to think of a man whom pain didn’t horrify, which only went to prove they’d never been up to the front. He said, “How much pain do you think you’ll get once I tell the marshal you wouldn’t treat me even after I asked you to?”
They winced. Leudast didn’t think he’d prove able to do much to them, but they didn’t have to know that. Plainly, they didn’t feel like taking chances. In their shoes, Leudast wouldn’t have felt like taking any, either. “Let us review your case,” said the one who spoke for them. “If we find some sorcerous therapy that might help you, we shall apply it tomorrow.”
“I hope you do,” Leudast said, which seemed to him wiser than, You’d cursed well better.
Then he had another day of waiting flat on his back. He would sooner have been in a trench waiting to start an attack, which proved how bored he was. Either that or it does prove I’ve lost my mind, he thought.
The next morning, the healers appeared with a wheeled chair and a couple of muscular attendants who manhandled Leudast into it. Other wounded soldiers stared curiously at him as they took him off. The healers had a tent of their own, well away from the wounded they attended. It was almost alarmingly quiet in there.
“What are you going to do to me?” Leudast asked, wondering if browbeating them had been such a good idea after all.
Before any of them answered, their attendants hauled Leudast out of the wheeled chair and propped him up on a table. Then the mages draped his leg—all of it except the area of the wound—with gauze made from a glistening fabric he had never seen before.
“What are you going to do?” he asked again.
“Treat your leg—or rather, the wounded portion of it, and no other— thus the insulating cloth,” a healer told him, which left him no wiser. Then the fellow condescended to explain: “We are going to age the flesh that has been blazed, so that, being a month older than the rest of you, it will also have already healed.”
“That’s wonderful!” Leudast exclaimed. “I didn�
�t know you could do such things.”
“You will not enjoy it so much while it is happening,” the healer replied. “Also, once the month has passed, you would be very wise to have the sorcery reversed. I will give you a letter authorizing the reversal. Hold on to it and do not forget to have the second sorcery done.”
“All right,” Leudast said. “But why?”
The look the healer gave him was anything but cheery. “Because if you fail to have it done, if you should forget, that flesh will die a month before the rest of you—and I promise you, it will make your last month alive much less pleasant than it would have been otherwise.”
Leudast thought about that. He gulped. “Oh,” he said in a small voice.
“We begin,” the healer declared. He and his colleagues started to chant. Burning heat coursed through Leudast’s wound. He gasped and tried to jerk away. The attendants grabbed him, making sure he couldn’t move. “This is what you asked for,” the healer told him. “This is what you get.”
And you’ll enjoy every moment of giving it to me, won’t you? Leudast thought. But he refused to give the healer the satisfaction of knowing he understood that. In a voice as steady as he could make it, he said, “Get on with it, then.” The healer eyed him and nodded in reluctant approval.
Before long, Leudast was panting and trying not to curse or scream. The healers hadn’t told him he would feel all the pain of a month’s worth of healing, distilled down into the few minutes the sorcery took. He clenched his fists. The smaller hurts of nails digging into palms and of biting down hard on the inside of his lower lip helped distract—a little—from the torment in his leg.
Then, suddenly, that torment eased. Leudast let out a long, astonished sigh of relief. The healer said, “You were brave. We do few such procedures where the patient does not cry out.”
“I believe it.” Leudast sounded shaky, even to himself. But the gnawing pain in his leg had eased. That was what he’d wanted. “Can I put my weight on it?”
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