Jaws of Darkness d-5

by Harry Turtledove

  More behemoths came up during the night. Before dawn the next morning, they rumbled forward, tearing a hole in the Algarvian line through which footsoldiers swarmed. Garivald had done that again and again. He almost got the feeling he-or rather, the Unkerlanter army-could do it any time.

  Almost. He’d already seen that Mezentio’s men, even when outnumbered and outflanked, fought hard for every foot of ground. And they didn’t fight with sticks and behemoths alone. He’d heard about the magic that shook the ground and tore fissures and sent lambent purple flames shooting up from it. Now his squad met that magecraft at first hand.

  Men screamed when the earth opened and then closed on them. Men whom the flames caught had no chance to scream, and simply ceased to be. One burst of flame not only charred a behemoth but also touched off the eggs it carried, spreading ruin through the footsoldiers closest to it.

  But then the magic ebbed, almost as swiftly as it had sprung up. Lieutenant Andelot happened to be crouched by Garivald as it faded. The officer said, “That’s our mages, sacrificing our people to beat down their wizardry.”

  “Is there any other way to beat it?” Garivald asked.

  “If there is, we haven’t found it yet,” Andelot answered. “Life energy gives mages a lot of force to work with.”

  Life energy: a bloodless way to saykilling people. Garivald found exactly what it meant that afternoon, when he and the survivors from his squad pushed past the sacrifice the Algarvian mages had made to try to stop them: row upon row of blond men and women, all blazed through the head. “No wonder that Kaunian wanted to join up,” Garivald said. “If the Algarvians had done this to us, I’d want to kill every Algarvian ever born.”

  “No wonder at all,” Rivalin said. Like Garivald’s, his eyes kept coming back to the dead blonds in sick fascination.

  But then Garivald reflected that Mezentio’s men hadn’t lined up Unkerlanters row on row and sacrificed them. Their own mages had done that. He wished he hadn’t thought of it in such terms. They only do it because the Algarvians are killing these blonds. That was true, but eased his mind only so much. They were doing it, andwhy counted little. Sooner or later, a day of reckoning would have to come… Wouldn’t it?

  Whenever Bembo went out on the streets of Eoforwic these days, he found himself looking west. That was the direction rain came from, not that rain was likely in the Forthwegian capital in the middle of summer. But, despite heat and bright blue skies and dazzling sun, a storm was brewing in the west, and he knew it.

  The Algarvian constable noticed he wasn’t the only one glancing that way. With a distinct effort of will, he turned his gaze away from the west and onto his partner. “It’s on your nerves, too, eh, Delminio?” he said.

  “Aye,” Delminio answered, not needing to ask whatit was. “Who would’ve thought things could just fall apart like that?”

  “Not me,” Bembo said. “And tell me, what difference will it make to the cursed Unkerlanters, powers below eat ‘em, if I’m toting a long stick like a soldier and not the regular short one? This miserable thing is heavy.” He could always find something to complain about, even though he’d carried an army-issue stick going into the Kaunian quarter.

  Despite the long stick slung on his own back, Delminio had no trouble shrugging an elaborate Algarvian shrug. “No, it probably wouldn’t make much difference to Swemmel’s bastards, if they ever get here,” he allowed.

  “Powers above grant that they don’t,” Bembo said. “Powers above grant that the army stops ‘em somewhere, anywhere.” He’d never imagined sounding plaintive and worried about the Algarvian army, but that was how he felt.

  Delminio went on as if he hadn’t spoken, repeating, “It won’t matter much to the Unkerlanters, no. But suppose these Forthwegian whoresons here in town start feeling frisky. Wouldn’t you rather be toting something that’ll knock ‘em over from more than a hundred feet away?”

  “Urk,” Bembo said, and meant it most sincerely. “D’youthink it’ll come to that?”

  “Who knows?” Delminio shrugged again. “But I’ll tell you this: there’s an awful lot of Forthwegians walking around with their peckers up because they know we’re hurting. Or do you think I’m wrong?”

  He sounded as if he hoped Bembo would tell him he was just imagining things. Bembo wished he could do that, but he couldn’t. Before, the Forthwegians on the streets had scrambled out of the way when they saw constables coming. They might not have loved them (Who ever loves a constable? Bembo wondered, not wasting a chance for self-pity), but they feared them, which would do.

  Now… If they weren’t laughing behind the constables’ backs, Bembo would have been astonished. Some of them had the nerve to laugh in the constables’ faces. Bembo wouldn’t have minded teaching them a lesson, but he didn’t. Orders were not to do anything that might touch off a riot. The Algarvians had enough to worry about in Forthweg these days without adding the Forthwegians to the mix.

  Delminio’s grunt might have meant he thought Bembo’s silence proved his point. Since Bembo thought the same thing, he didn’t push his partner. The stinking Unkerlanters were getting close to the Twegen River, the stream that flowed north to the sea right past the western edge of Eoforwic.

  “Do they think they’ll have a happy time if Swemmel’s whoresons take this place away from us?” Bembo asked no one in particular. “Not likely.”

  “No, not likely at all,” Delminio agreed. “Other question is, do they care? And that’s not likely, either. Most of’em don’t think about Unkerlanters one way or the other, except that Swemmel’s men are giving us a hard time. They think King Penda will come back if they throw us out, and they’ll all be happy again.”

  “Don’t hold your breath,” Bembo said. “Wasn’t Swemmel about ready to boil somebody alive because whoever it was wouldn’t hand Penda over to him?”

  “Tsavellas of Yanina had him,” Delminio said.

  Bembo snapped his fingers. “That’s right. Thanks. I’d forgotten who it was. When I was back in Tricarico, reading about all this stuff in the west in the news sheets, it didn’t seem to matter so much.”

  “Only goes to show, you can’t tell ahead of time,” Delminio said, and Bembo nodded. He hadn’t thought much about Forthweg at all, not in the days before the war started. He’d never imagined he would have the bad luck to get stuck in this miserable kingdom for years.

  A Forthwegian with a gray-streaked black beard reaching halfway down his chest came out of his shop and shouted at the constables in bad Algarvian: “When you catch villains who theft from me? How I make living, they theft my trunks?”

  “Well, however you make a living, it won’t be as an elephant,” Bembo answered. Delminio snickered.

  The shopkeeper, who sold luggage, didn’t speak Algarvian well enough to get the joke. “Elephant? What you talk about, elephant?” he said. “Powers below eat elephant. Go catch thefts. What you good for? All you Algarvians, you nothing but crazy peoples.”

  Bembo swept off his plumed hat and bowed, as if at a compliment. “Thank you,” he said. Delminio snickered again. The shopkeeper said something in sonorous, guttural Forthwegian. Whatever it was, Bembo didn’t think it was praise. The fellow turned around and stumped back into his shop.

  “If the bugger who stole from him starts selling those trunks, maybe we’ll nab him,” Delminio said. “If he doesn’t, how can we get our hands on him?”

  “And why should we care?” Bembo added. “You think I want to work hard for somebody who calls me names? If he’d dropped a little silver, now, that’d be a different story.”

  “Sure enough,” Delminio agreed. “Far as I’m concerned, the powers below are welcome to all these Forthwegians. I wouldn’t shed a tear if we started shipping them west along with the blonds.”

  “Trouble with that is, it’d really spark off an uprising,” Bembo said.

  After pondering for a couple of paces, Delminio nodded. “Aye, you’re probably right.” He took another step. “Of
course, the uprising’s liable to come anyway. If it does, these buggers ought to be fair game, you ask me.”

  “You talk like Oraste,” Bembo said.

  “Who?” Delminio waggled a finger. “Oh, your old partner. He seems like a pretty good man to have at your back.”

  “He is.” Bembo let it rest there. Along with being a good man to have at one’s back, Oraste believed the way to settle problems was to settle the people who made them-by choice, permanently.

  The shift was long and slow and dull. Another argument with a Forthwegian right at the end made it even longer. Delminio was furious, and didn’t even try to hide it. He was all for arresting the local, who was unhappy because somebody’d flung a rock through a window he’d just replaced. Bembo didn’t want to arrest him. He wanted him to shut up and go away. Then his partner and he could go back to the barracks and relax.

  “If we drop on him, we have to drag him over to the gaol and fill out all the cursed forms,” he said. “That always takes hours, and we’re already late getting back, and I’m hungry.” He patted his belly. To him, that argument, like the belly in question, carried considerable weight.

  In the end, it carried weight for Delminio, too. He contented himself with taking hold of his stick and starting to swing it toward the Forthwegian. That stopped the argument in the middle of the ley line: the Forthwegian turned pale and fled. “We ought to shiphim west,” Delminio said. “Nobody’d miss him a bit.”

  “Powers below eat him,” Bembo said. “Let’s go home and see if there’s anything left in the refectory. Those other greedy buggers better not eat everything in sight.” He was almost hungry enough to hurry back to the barracks to make up for lost time-almost, but not quite.

  He and Delminio were still three or four blocks away, and squabbling good-naturedly over what the evening’s entree would be, when a great roar ahead staggered them both. The ground shook under Bembo’s feet. Windows shattered without rocks pitched through them.

  Bembo listened for the bells that warned of Unkerlanter dragons, but didn’t hear them. He had trouble hearing much of anything. “They somehow snuck one through, the bastards,” he shouted, and even had trouble hearing his own voice.

  Delminio’s words came to Bembo as if from very far away: “Was that the barracks?” Bembo’s eyes opened wide. He hadn’t thought of that. He and Delminio started to run.

  When they rounded the last corner, Bembo skidded to a stop. Broken glass and pebbles skritched under his boots. The whole front of the barracks was gone. Not far from him, a big chunk of stone had come down on someone-a Forthwegian, by his tunic. The result wasn’t pretty.

  “This must have been an enormous egg.” Delminio had to shout it two or three times before Bembo’s battered ears caught it.

  He nodded. “Too big for a dragon to carry, you’d think.” He had to do some shouting of his own to get his partner to understand. “And I still don’t hear any warning bells.” Someone came staggering out of the barracks: an Algarvian, badly burned and bleeding. How anyone could have lived through that blast of sorcerous energy was beyond Bembo, but he ran toward the other constable to give him what help he could.

  Before he reached his countryman, the fellow clapped both hands to his chest and toppled. He might almost have been blazed. Then a beam burned the ground by Bembo’s feet, and he realized the other Algarvianhad been blazed.

  He wasn’t a soldier. He’d never been a soldier. He had no interest in becoming a soldier. He had a great deal of interest innever becoming a soldier. All of which, when someone started blazing at him, meant exactly nothing. He dove for cover as if he’d been fighting in the west against the Unkerlanters for years.

  “Get down!” he shouted to Delminio, who still stood there staring as if he hadn’t the slightest idea what was going on. Maybe Delminio didn’t. A moment later, Bembo’s partner clutched at his shoulder and went down, so he’d got his lesson. Bembo hoped it wouldn’t prove too expensive.

  Other shouts started piercing the ringing in Bembo’s ears. They weren’t in his language, but in raucous Forthwegian. He couldn’t understand a word of them. No, that wasn’t true after all. One word he understood very well: Penda.

  Stupid buggers have gone and risen up, sure as blazes, he thought, peering out from behind the smoking rubble in back of which he sprawled. They’ll pay for that. Oh, how they‘ll pay.

  Someone in a half-shattered building across the street from the barracks moved. Bembo didn’t know exactly what the motion was or just who’d made it. Whoever it was, though, was bound to be a Forthwegian, which meant- which suddenly meant-an enemy. Bembo raised his stick to his shoulder and blazed. He heard a shriek. He heard it very clearly, and shouted in fierce triumph. All at once, he was delighted he had that long, heavy army-issue stick.

  “You want us, you’ll have to pay for us!” he yelled. A beam seared the air inches above his head. He smelled thunder and lightning. Exultation trickled out of him as he realized the Forthwegian rebels were liable to be willing to do just that.

  Saxburh wailed in her cradle. Vanai hurried to pick up the baby and put her on her breast. That was what Saxburh wanted. Her cries ceased. She sucked and gulped contentedly. Vanai stroked her fine, soft hair. It was dark, as Ealstan’s was, but the baby’s skin was too fair, too pale, for a full-blooded Forthwegian’s. Sure enough, Saxburh showed both sides of her family.

  Eggs burst, not far away. The windows rattled. They hadn’t shattered yet; powers above only knew why. Vanai felt like shrieking, too, but who would comfort her if she did? No one she could think of. Not even Ealstan could do that.

  Vanai cursed softly, desperately. Was Ealstan here, staying close by her side while she took care of their daughter? She shook her head. “He had to go fight,” she told Saxburh. “He had to try to kick the redheads out of Eoforwic. He thought that was more important.”

  Her daughter stared up at her out of eyes darkening from blue toward brown. The baby had just learned how to smile. She tried to smile and nurse at the same time. Milk dribbled down her chin.

  “He’s a fool,” Vanai went on in classical Kaunian, dabbing at Saxburh’s face with a rag. “He’s nothing but a fool. He thinks the Algarvians will go away just like that.” She snapped her fingers. The sound startled the baby, who jerked her head-and tried to take Vanai’s breast with it. Vanai yelped. That made Saxburh look back toward her, again without letting go. Her moving that way hurt less.

  After a little while, Saxburh grunted and made a mess in her drawers. Vanai changed them, cleaned the baby off and rubbed olive oil on her bottom, and then nursed her some more. Saxburh’s eyes sagged shut. Vanai slid the nipple out of her mouth, hoisted the baby to her shoulder, and got a sleepy belch out of her. A couple of minutes later, she set Saxburh back in the cradle and closed the toggles on her tunic.

  She went to the kitchen and poured herself a cup of wine. Nursing always left her thirsty. As she drank, she looked out the window. She wasn’t afraid anyone on the street would recognize her as a Kaunian. For one thing, the Forthwegians held this part of Eoforwic. And, for another, her masking spell worked as well as it always had, now that she wasn’t pregnant any more. She looked like a Forthwegian, and she would for hours yet.

  Dark brown bloodstains marred the gray slates of the sidewalk. Vanai couldn’t tell which ones came from Algarvians and which from Forthwegians. No Algarvians were left alive hereabouts, not now.

  Smoke’s sharp scent filled the air. So did the nastier dead-meat stench from unburied bodies. Looking west, Vanai saw fresh smoke rising from a dozen fires inside Eoforwic and even more smoke, huge black columns of it, on the far side of the Twegen River. The Unkerlanters were closing in on Eoforwic, moving so fast that not even the news sheets, which had to give forth with Algarvian lies, could cover up the magnitude of the disaster that had befallen Mezentio’s men here in the north.

  Vanai’s mouth twisted. If the Unkerlanters hadn’t come so far so fast, the Forthwegian underground wouldn’t
have risen up. Vanai didn’t much care whether Forthwegians or Unkerlanters gave orders in these parts-anyone but Algarvians suited her fine.

  But Ealstan cared. Though he differed from most of his countrymen in his views about Kaunians, Ealstan was a Forthwegian patriot. He wanted King Penda back. He wanted the Forthwegians to free their own kingdom, or as much of it as they could. And he was willing-no, he was horribly eager- to risk his life to help bring that about.

  “He’s an idiot,” Vanai whispered-she didn’t want to disturb Saxburh. But she meant it all the way down to the depths of her soul. The baby was real. The baby was there. Set against Saxburh’s reality, what did the kingdom of Forthweg matter? Nothing, not so far as Vanai could see. But Ealstan thought differently.

  Men are stupid, went through Vanai’s mind, not for the first time. She’d done everything she could to keep Ealstan here in the flat. Nothing had worked: not argument, not pleading, not tears. Pybba told him there was going to be a fight, and after that he might as well have been deaf and blind. Vanai had no trouble at all hating the pottery magnate.

  More eggs burst, all in one sector of the city north of the flat. Vanai cursed again, in classical Kaunian and in Forthwegian. The Algarvians had far more egg-tossers than Pybba’s ragtag and bobtail. True, Mezentio’s men needed everything they could scrape together against the Unkerlanters, but they also couldn’t afford to lose Eoforwic. They were fighting back hard.

  Footsteps in the hallway. Vanai’s heart beat faster. She didn’t have to fear Algarvian constables, not for a while. That thudding heart meant hope. And, at the coded knock, she jumped in the air and squeaked for joy.

  Carrying a stick with the Algarvian green-red-and-white shield enameled on near the touch-hole, Ealstan strode into the flat. His tunic was filthy. So was he. He wore an armband, also grimy now, that said free forthweg-as close as the irregulars came to having real uniforms. “Home for a little while,” he said around a yawn. “Then I have to go back.”