Rulers of the Darkness

by Harry Turtledove

  Force built—not the blood-tasting force the Algarvians had brought down on their heads, but potent nonetheless. Potent enough to confront Mezentio’s murder-powered magic? Fernao wouldn’t have thought so, not from what was in the air, but he’d seen what this energy release could do. Transferring it from one site to another seemed far easier than finding out how to elicit it had been.

  And then, as matter approached a climax, Pekka made the sort of mistake that could befall any mage working through a long, complex, difficult spell: she dropped a line. Ilmarinen jumped. Piilis exclaimed in horror. Raahe and Alkio seized each other’s hands as if they never expected to touch anything else again.

  Fernao knew a certain amount of pride at recognizing the problem as fast as any of the Kuusamans. He also knew the same fear that gripped them: Ilmarinen’s joke about bringing the sorcerous energy down on their own heads wasn’t funny anymore. When things went wrong at this stage …

  “Counterspells!” Ilmarinen rapped out, and began to chant with sudden harsh urgency. So did Raahe and Alkio, their two voices merging into one. So did Pekka, trying to reverse what she’d unleashed. Dismay still seemed to freeze Piilis.

  Not so Fernao. For a long time, he’d had nothing to do but draft and refine counterspells. Because he wasn’t fluent in Kuusaman, he’d been only an emergency backstop, a firewall. The spell he raced through now wasn’t in Kuusaman, or even classical Kaunian. It was in Lagoan: his birthspeech, he’d long since decided, would be best for such magic, for he could use it faster and more accurately than any other.

  And he, like the rest of the mages, was incanting for his life now. He knew as much. The sorcerous energies that would have torn a new hole in the landscape were poised now to do the same to the mages who had unleashed them. If the mages couldn’t divert those energies, weaken them, spread them fast enough, they wouldn’t get a second chance.

  Past, present, and future seemed to stretch very thin—all too fitting for the sort of sorcery they’d been using. Fernao felt an odd rush of memories: from his youth, from his childhood, from what he would have taken oath were his father’s and grandfather’s childhoods as well—but all recalled or perhaps relived with as much immediacy, as much reality, as his own. And, at the same time (if time had any meaning here), he knew also memories from years he hadn’t yet experienced: from himself as an old man; from one of the children he did not at this moment have, also old; and from that child’s child.

  He wished he could have held those memories instead of just being aware that he’d had them. All the Kuusaman mages around him were exclaiming in awe and dread as they used their counterspells, so he supposed they were going through the same thing he was. And then, at last, when he thought the chaos in the timestream would cast them adrift in duration—or perhaps cast them out of it altogether—the counterspells began to bite.

  Now suddenly took on meaning again. His consciousness, which had been spread over what felt like a century or more, contracted back to a single sharp point that advanced heartbeat by heartbeat. He remembered things that had happened to him before that point, but nothing more. No, not quite nothing more: he remembered remembering other things, but he could not have said what they were.

  “Well, well,” Ilmarinen said. Sweat beaded his face and soaked the armpits of his tunic. Even so, he didn’t forget to use classical Kaunian: “Wasn’t that interesting, my friends?” He didn’t forget his ironic tone, either.

  Pekka, who had been standing while she cast the spell that went awry, slumped down onto a stool and began to weep, her face hidden in her hands. “I could have … us all,” she said in a broken voice. Fernao didn’t know the Kuusaman verb, but he would have been astonished if it didn’t mean killed.

  He limped over to her and put a hand on her shoulder. “It is all right,” he said, cursing the classical tongue for not letting him sound colloquial. “We are safe. We can try again. We shall try again.”

  “Aye, no harm done,” Ilmarinen agreed. “Any spell you live through is a spell you learn something from.”

  “Learn what?” Pekka said with a laugh that sounded more like hysterics than mirth. “Not to miss a line at the key moment of the incantation? I was already supposed to know that, Master Ilmarinen, thank you very kindly.”

  Fernao said, “No, I think there is more to learn here than that. Now we know from the inside out what our spell does, or some of what it does. If our next version is not better on account of that, I shall be surprised. The method was drastic, but the lesson is worthwhile.”

  “Aye,” Ilmarinen repeated. “The Lagoan mage has the right of it.” He glanced over at Fernao. “Accidents will happen.” Fernao smiled and nodded, as if at a compliment. Ilmarinen glared at him, which was exactly what he wanted.

  Every time a peasant sneaked into the woods and sought out the battered band of irregulars Garivald was leading these days, he almost wished the newcomer would go away. He’d heard a great many tales of woe, some of them horrible enough to move him close to tears. How could he resist bringing such people into the band? He couldn’t. But what if one of them was lying?

  “What do I do?” he asked Obilot. “Let in the wrong man—or woman—and the Grelzers will know everything about us a day later.”

  “If we don’t get new blood, they won’t care about us one way or the other,” she answered. “If we didn’t take chances, none of us would be irregulars in the first place.”

  Garivald grunted. That held an unpleasant amount of truth. But he said, “It’s not on your shoulders. It’s on my shoulders. And you’re one of the people who helped dump it there.” He glowered at her with none of the interest, none of the liking—why lie? none of the desire—he usually felt.

  Obilot met the glare with a shrug. “Munderic got killed. Somebody had to lead us. Why not you? Thanks to your songs, people have heard your name. They want to join Garivald the Songmaker’s band.”

  “But I don’t want to lead them!” Garivald said in a sort of whispered scream. “I never wanted to lead anybody. All I ever wanted to do was raise a decent crop and stay drunk through the winter and—lately—make songs. That’s all, curse it!”

  “I wanted this and that, too,” Obilot said. “The Algarvians made sure I wouldn’t have any of that.” She’d never said just why she’d joined the irregulars, but she hated the redheads with a passion that made what her male comrades felt toward them seem mere mild distaste by comparison. “And now you can’t have the things you always wanted, either. Isn’t that one more reason to want to do everything you can to make them suffer?”

  “I suppose so,” he admitted. “But it doesn’t mean I want to lead. Besides, we aren’t strong enough to do anything much right now.”

  “We will be.” Obilot sounded more confident than Garivald felt.

  He didn’t have to answer. Rain had been falling steadily for a while. Now lightning flashed and thunder bellowed, drowning out anything he might have said. Nobody could do anything much in such weather: the Grelzers couldn’t push into the woods, as they had when snow lay on the ground, but the band of irregulars couldn’t very well sally forth by squelching through the mud.

  After another peal of thunder rumbled and subsided, Obilot said, “Would you rather be taking orders from Sadoc?”

  “That’s not fair,” Garivald answered, though he couldn’t have said why it wasn’t. As a matter of fact, he had no desire whatever to take orders from Sadoc; the idea scared him worse than going up against the Algarvians in battle. But no one had proposed the inept would-be mage to succeed Munderic. No one had proposed Garivald, either, or not exactly. People had just looked at him. They hadn’t looked at anyone else, and so the job ended up his.

  But the irregulars couldn’t very well stay holed up in the woods forever, either. A fellow named Razalic came up to Garivald while the rain was still falling and said, “You know, boss, we’re almost out of food.”

  “Aye,” Garivald agreed, not altogether happily. “We’d better pay a call
on one of those villages outside the forest—maybe on more than one of them.” Some of the peasant villages in these parts collaborated with the irregulars and gave them grain and meat. Others had firstmen who worked hand in glove with the Grelzer authorities and with their Algarvian puppet masters.

  But when Garivald led a couple of dozen men out of the woods, he found the peasants from even the friendliest villages imperfectly delighted to see him. He’d expected nothing better. Early spring was the hungry time of year for everybody. Living on the end of the supplies that had brought them through the winter, the peasants had little left over to share with anyone.

  “What do you want us to do?” he asked the firstman of a hamlet named Dargun. “Dry up and blow away and leave you at the mercy of the redheads and the Grelzer dogs who sniff their arses?”

  “Well, no,” the firstman answered, but he didn’t sound pleased. “Don’t want the brats here to starve, either, though.”

  Garivald set his hands on his hips. He knew a trimmer when he heard one. “You can’t have it both ways,” he said. “We can’t farm and fight the Algarvians at the same time. That means we’ve got to get food from somewhere. This is somewhere.” Even to him, though, it looked like nowhere. Next to Dargun, Zossen—nothing out of the ordinary as villages went—looked like a metropolis.

  The firstman’s sigh was close to a wail. “What I really wish is, things were back the way they were before the war started. Then I wouldn’t have to … worry all the time.”

  Then I wouldn’t have to make hard choices. That, or something close to it, had to be what he meant. And what hard choices was he contemplating? Feeding the irregulars or betraying them to the soldiers who followed false King Raniero? That was one obvious possibility.

  “Everything gets remembered,” Garivald remarked, keeping his tone casual. “Aye, that’s so—everything gets remembered. When King Swemmel’s inspectors come back to this part of the realm, they’ll know who did what, even if something goes wrong with us. Somebody will tell them. Or do you think I’m wrong?”

  By the look the firstman gave him, he was certainly loathsome, regardless of whether he was right or wrong. “If the inspectors ever get this far again,” the fellow said.

  Munderic would have blustered and bellowed. Garivald pulled a knife from his belt and started cleaning dirt from under his fingernails with the point. “Chance you take,” he agreed, doing his best to stay mild. “But if you think the inspectors aren’t ever coming back, you never should have started feeding us in the first place.”

  The firstman bit his lip. “Curse you!” he muttered. “You don’t make things easy, do you? Aye, I want the Algarvians out, but—”

  “But you don’t want to do anything to make that happen,” Garivald finished, and the firstman bit his lip again. Garivald went on, “You’re not fighting. Fair enough—not everybody can fight. But if you won’t fight and you won’t help the folk who are fighting, what good are you?”

  “Curse you,” the firstman repeated, his voice weary, hopeless. “It almost doesn’t matter who wins the stinking war. Whoever it is, we lose. Take what you need. You would anyhow.” Back before the Algarvians had hauled him out of Zossen, Garivald hadn’t felt much different. He’d just wished the war would go away and leave him and his alone. But it hadn’t worked like that. It wouldn’t work like that here in Dargun, either.

  Along with his irregulars and several pack mules borrowed from the village, he trudged toward the woods. One peasant from Dargun came along, too, to lead the mules back after they weren’t needed anymore. The mules were heavily laden with sacks of beans and barley and rye. So were the men—as heavily laden as they could manage and still walk through the mud. Garivald, his back bent and creaking, didn’t want to think about what would happen if a Grelzer patrol came across them. Because he didn’t want to think about it, he had trouble thinking about anything else.

  More irregulars met them at the edge of the woods and took the sacks the mules carried. The peasant headed off to Dargun. Garivald wondered if he should have kept him behind. Munderic might have. But Garivald didn’t see much point to it. Everybody knew the irregulars denned somewhere in this forest. The peasant wouldn’t find out where. As far as Garivald could see, that meant he was no great risk.

  When he got back to the clearing the irregulars had reclaimed after the Grelzer raiders left the wood, he expected applause from the men and women who hadn’t gone along to bring in the supplies. After all, he’d done what he set out to do. If anything, he’d done better than he expected. They wouldn’t have to worry about food again for two or three weeks, maybe even a month.

  And, indeed, people were staring at him and the men he led as they came into the clearing. Among the people staring were a couple of men Garivald had never seen before. He wondered if he ought to shrug the beans off his back and grab for his stick. But the irregulars who hadn’t gone out to Dargun seemed to take the newcomers for granted. They wouldn’t have if they’d thought the strangers meant trouble.

  Obilot came up to one of those strangers and pointed toward Garivald. “That’s our leader,” she said, her voice not loud but very clear. A couple of the other irregulars nodded. Garivald straightened with pride despite the weight he carried.

  Both newcomers strode toward him. They had on rock-gray tunics. At first, that meant little to him; a lot of the men in his band still wore the ever more threadbare clothes they’d used while serving in King Swemmel’s army. But these tunics weren’t threadbare. They weren’t particularly clean, but they were new. Garivald didn’t need long to realize what that meant. He let the sacks of beans down to the ground and stuck out his hand. “You must be real soldiers!” he exclaimed.

  The two men looked at each other. “He’s quick,” one of them said.

  “Aye, he is,” the other agreed. “That’s efficient.” But, by the way one of his thick eyebrows rose, he might have thought Garivald too quick for his own good.

  “Wonderful to see real soldiers here,” Garivald said. He knew the real fighting still lay far to the west, which led to an obvious question: “What are you doing here?”

  “Being efficient.” The Unkerlanter soldiers spoke together. The one who might have thought Garivald too efficient continued, “We’ve brought you a crystal.”

  “Have you, now?” Garivald wondered how efficient that was. “Can I keep it activated without have to sacrifice somebody every month or two, the way a mage had to do back in my home village?”

  Before the soldiers could answer, Sadoc’s big head bobbed up and down. “Aye, you can,” he said. “There’s a power point in these woods—not a very big one, but it’s there. If it wasn’t, I couldn’t work any magecraft at all.”

  In Garivald’s view, that would have been an improvement, but he didn’t say so. Instead, he gave a sharp, quick nod and turned back to the soldiers. “All right. I guess I can run a crystal. Now what will I do with it?”

  “Whatever his Majesty’s officers tell you to do, by the powers above,” answered the one who’d mentioned the crystal. “We’re getting these things out to as many bands behind the Algarvian line as we can. The more you people work with the regular army, the more efficient the fight against the redheads becomes.”

  That made a certain amount of sense. It also fit in with everything Garivald knew about King Swemmel: he wanted control as firmly in his fists as he could make it. The other Unkerlanter soldier said, “We’ll also bring you weapons and medicines whenever we can.”

  “Good. I’m glad to hear it. We can use them.” Garivald eyed the two regulars. “And you’ll tell us what to do whenever you can.”

  They looked at each other for a moment. Then they both nodded. “Well, of course,” they said together.

  Bembo walked up to Sergeant Pesaro in the constabulary barracks and said, “Sergeant, I want some leave time.”

  Pesaro looked him up and down. “I want all sorts of things I’m not going to get,” the fat sergeant said. “After a while, I
get over it and go about my business. You’d better do the same, or you’ll be sorry.”

  “Have a heart!” Bembo exclaimed—not a plea likely to win success when aimed at a superior. “I haven’t been back to Tricarico in forever. Nobody’s got out of Forthweg in a demon of a long time. It’s not fair. It’s not right.”

  Pesaro opened a drawer of the desk behind which he sat. “Here.” He handed Bembo a form—a form for requesting leave, Bembo saw. “Fill this out, give it back to me, and I’ll pass it on up the line … and it’ll bloody well get ignored, the way every other leave-request form gets ignored.”

  “It’s not fair!” Bembo repeated.

  “Life’s not fair,” Pesaro answered. “If you don’t believe me, go dye your hair blond and see what looking like a Kaunian gets you. They aren’t taking many leave requests from soldiers, and they aren’t taking any from constables. But if you want to volunteer to go fight in Unkerlant so you have a little chance of getting leave, I’ve got a form for that, “too.” He made as if to reach into the desk drawer again.

  “Never mind,” Bembo said hastily. “I feel better about things already.” Compared to leave in Tricarico, patrolling the streets of Gromheort wasn’t so good. Compared to fighting bloodthirsty Unkerlanter maniacs, it wasn’t so bad.

  “There, you see?” Pesaro’s round, jowly face radiated as much goodwill as a sergeant’s face was ever likely to show. But he didn’t keep on beaming for long. The scowl that spread over his countenance was much more in character. “What in blazes are you doing now?”

  “Filling out the leave form,” Bembo answered, doing just that. “You never can tell. Lightning might strike.”