Into the Darkness

12.

Skarnu felt like a man trying to fight back after getting hit in the head with a club. From everything the young captain could see, the whole Valmieran army might have been a man trying to fight back after getting hit in the head with a club. He couldn’t see past his own tiny circle of the war, of course, but nothing inside it looked good.

His men had been coming up from rest and recuperation behind the line when the Algarvian blow fell. Had they gone into the line, no doubt they—or however many of them stayed alive—would be in an Algarvian captives’ camp now. As things were, they’d been caught up in the headlong Valmieran retreat, fighting when they had to, traveling a lot by night so they could slip between the redheads’ scouts. The Algarvians didn’t always have great numbers. Wherever they were, though they had great strength. After a while, footsoldiers despaired of fighting behemoths, of having dragons plummet out of the sky to drop eggs on them.

Sergeant Raunu came up to Skarnu with a grim look on his face. “Sir, another three must have slipped away, on account of they sure as blazes aren’t here.” Pulling a map from his breast pocket, Skarnu spoke in musing tones: “I wonder where exactly here is.” He had some idea—somewhere between their line of farthest advance and the border between Valmiera and Algarve—but couldn’t pin it down within five miles, let alone to dot on the map. All he and his men had done was stumble backwards again and again.

“Sooner or later, we’ll find a village,” Raunu said. “Then we’ll know.” The veteran hesitated. At last, he went on, “By what I’ve heard, sir, desertion’s a lot heavier in the other companies in the regiment than it is with us.”

“Heard from whom?” Skarnu demanded. As far as he could tell, his company might have fallen off the edge of the world to his superiors. He hadn’t had orders for a couple of days.

“People I run into in the woods,” Raunu said with a shrug. He hesitated again. “Our men know you’ve been in there with ’em, sir. That means they aren’t so likely to take off on their own or just sit on a stump and wait for the redheads to pick ’em up.”

“People in the woods, eh?” Skarnu said. His sergeant shrugged again and nodded. He said nothing more. Skarnu had learned to gauge when not to push Raunu. This looked to be one of those times. He asked a different question instead: “Is it really as bad as that?”

“Aye, sir, it is,” Raunu answered stolidly. “The companies, the regiments where the noble officers haven’t pulled their weight, they’re falling to pieces, sir.” He hesitated even longer than he had in either of his earlier pauses, then added, “A lot of companies, a lot of regiments, in that boat, sir.”

“Curse the soldiers for not defending the kingdom!” Skarnu burst out. Raunu stood mute. Skarnu thought for a while before making an addition of his own: “And curse the officers who didn’t give them a better reason to defend the kingdom.”

“Ah,” Raunu murmured—or was it just an exhalation a little louder than usual? “Sir, you don’t mind my saying so, it’s because you’re the kind of captain who’d come out with the first thing and the second both that so many men have stuck by you.”

“Much good it’s done them.” Skarnu’s voice was bitter. Then he sighed. “We can only do what we can do. Let’s get moving.”

“Aye, sir,” Raunu said. “It could be worse, sir. At least we’re moving through countryside that’s pretty much empty—except for Algarvian soldiers, of course. Down in Rivaroli, we’ve got enemy soldiers and the locals hunting us.”

“Aye.” Skarnu sighed once more. “And curse King Mezentio for stirring up rebellion against us down there. Only goes to show a generation isn’t time enough to make Algarvians change their stripes.”

He set off through the forest, walking as softly as he could. He knew Algarvian behemoths had already got ahead of his company. He knew redheaded footsoldiers couldn’t be far behind. He kept scouts out ahead and to all sides of his main body of men. None of them reported anything untoward. He still wished he had eyes in the back of his head.

After about an hour, a man at the van came back and reported that the woods ended and, past some untended fields and vineyards, a village lay ahead. “Any sign of soldiers in it?” Skarnu asked.

“Redheads, you mean?” the scout asked, and Skarnu nodded. The soldier said, “No, sir, but I did see a couple of men in trousers on the street.”

“Did you?” Skarnu made up his mind. “All right. We’ll go forward and scoop them up. People can sort things out later. Right now, I want all the bodies I can get my hands on.”

“Aye, that’s sensible, sir,” Raunu said. Skarnu would have gone on without the sergeant’s approval, but was glad to have it.

The company cautiously moved out of the woods and toward the village. Skarnu supposed they were advancing on it, but could you advance during a retreat? That was a fine point of warfare with which he remained unacquainted.

Sure enough, trousered troopers did tramp along the village streets. One of them shouted when he spied the soldiers approaching in open order. In a twinkling, the men in the village took cover. “Be ready for anything,” Skarnu called to his own men. “They may be Algarvians in our clothes, trying to lure us into a trap.”

Inside the village, the soldiers seemed to have the same fear about Skarnu’s company. They needed a good deal of wary calling back and forth before they decided they were all Valmierans. “Powers above be praised you’re here,” said a young lieutenant who came out to greet Skarnu.

Skarnu took out his map. “Where is here?” he asked.

“This miserable place is called Stornarella, sir,” the lieutenant answered. When Skarnu found it, he whistled softly; the Algarvians had driven him even farther east than he’d thought. The lieutenant went on, “Now we have some sort of a decent guard force for Duke Marstalu.”

“What?” Skarnu stared. “The army commander? Here?”

“Aye, sir.” The lieutenant nodded. “We were falling back from the first Algarvian onslaught when their dragonfliers hit our column. I don’t think they knew his Grace the Duke was part of it. We were just Valmierans on a road, and so they dropped eggs on us. They killed his Grace’s unicorn. He broke his leg when the animal fell on him; we got him to the first shelter we could.”

“Is he still in command?” Skarnu asked.

“As much as anyone is,” the lieutenant said wearily, which summed up the plight of the army as well as anything. “We didn’t think the redheads could do to us what they did to Forthweg last fall. We may have been wrong.”

We may have been wrong. Such a bloodless sentence, to leave so much blood in its wake. Skarnu said, “Algarve didn’t beat us during the Six Years’ War. I expect we’ll manage to halt the redheads again.”

“I hope we do,” the lieutenant said.

The difference between hope and expect spoke volumes. Skarnu did his best not to read them. He turned to Raunu. “Sergeant, have the men form a perimeter around this village. We’ll want to be able to defend it and, if need be, to move out toward the east.” He would not say retreat.

“Aye, sir,” Raunu said, and began giving orders.

“If you will come with me, sir, I know Duke Marstalu will be glad to have your report,” the lieutenant said. Skarnu knew nothing of the sort, but accompanied the other officer into Stornarella.

Close up, the village showed its abandonment. Only shards of glass remained in the windows. Leaves drifted against walls and fenceposts. Flowers and grass grew in rank, untended exuberance. The lieutenant led Skarnu to the biggest, fanciest house in Stornarella. Skarnu had expected nothing less. He hadn’t thought having his expectations confirmed would leave him so sad.

When the lieutenant took Skarnu inside, Marstalu was lying on a sofa, a splint on his leg, giving a crystallomancer orders to relay: “Tell them to hold out as long as they can, curse it, and to counterattack if they see even the slightest chance. We must try to establish some kind of order at the front.” He looked up. “Ah, Marquis Skarnu! So good to see you again.” For a moment, he might have been in his drawing room at Klaipeda rather than a filthy village parlor with trash and leaves on the floor and pictures all askew on the wall.

Then the illusion shattered. Marstalu himself almost seemed to shatter. He’d always reminded Skarnu of a kindly grandfather. Now he reminded him of a kindly grandfather whose wife of many years had just died: Marstalu was suddenly a little old man cast adrift in a world he neither understood nor desired.

“Command me, your Grace!” Skarnu said, trying to put some spirit back into the man who commanded not merely him but the entire Valmieran army struggling to resist the assault from Algarve.

It was no good. He could see it was no good before Marstalu spoke. “Your words prove you noble,” the duke said with a sad, sweet smile. “But what good is nobility in these times? The commoners shun it, as do most even of our so-called nobles. We are beaten, Skarnu, beaten. All that remains is to learn how badly we are beaten.”

“Surely we can yet rally,” Skarnu said.

“Perhaps we can rally in the south—back of the Soretto,” Marstalu said. “Defending true Valmierans may put the heart back in our soldiers. We do have to form a line here in the center. How and where we can do that, I am not so sure. In the north, I admit, things are rather better. The thick forests and rough country along the border there will leave the Algarvians with their work cut out for them.”

“Then we ought to fall back to the Soretto in the south and use the men we save to help strengthen the center here,” Skarnu said.

“What do you think I’ve been trying to do?” Marstalu showed temper for the first time. “But powers above, it’s not been easy. The cursed folk of Rivaroli have raised a guerrilla against our soldiers there, and the Algarvian behemoth brigades smash through everything we can move against them, throwing us into disarray far behind what should be the line.”

“Have we no behemoths of our own, your Grace?” Skarnu asked. In the retreat, he’d seen a handful of dead Valmieran beasts, but none in action.

“Aye, distributed along the line to support our foot,” the Duke of Klaipeda answered. “That is the way sensible men have employed them as long as they have been utilized in warfare.”

Skarnu was about to point out that the Algarvian way seemed to work better and therefore seemed more sensible when shouts came from the street. The young lieutenant dashed outside. When he came back a moment later, smiles wreathed his face. “Your Grace,” he cried, “they have a carriage to take you to the rear.”

“Oh, very good.” Marstalu pointed to his splinted leg, then to Skarnu. “My lord Marquis, will you be so kind as to help my aide get me to the said carriage?”

With one of the duke’s arms draped over each of them, Skarnu and the lieutenant did haul him to the carriage and heave him aboard. The lieutenant stuck his head into the carriage, spoke briefly with Marstalu, and then turned to Skarnu. “You and your company are to continue your stalwart defense, as before.”

“Aye,” Skarnu said in a hollow voice. The lieutenant mounted a unicorn. The carriage began to roll. Marstalu’s followers rode off with it. They left Skarnu and his men behind, to salvage what they could.

Count Sabrino peered down at the ground from atop his dragon. Thick woods hid some of the roughness of the terrain, but could not conceal it all. For generations, generals on both sides had been convinced these uplands on the northern part of the border between Algarve and Valmiera were too rugged for any large operations. King Mezentio’s men aimed to prove those generations of generals mistaken.

Had Sabrino swung his dragon so he could look more to the west, he would have seen the great columns of men and behemoths stretching back into Algarve. He didn’t bother; he knew they were there. His task, and that of his wing, was twofold: to keep Valmieran dragonfliers from spying on them as they deployed and to support them when they come out into the open country east of the uplands.

He had not seen many enemy dragons. Maybe the Valmierans were using all they had in the south, against the Algarvian assault and against the rebellious men of the Marquisate of Rivaroli. Maybe they didn’t have enough to cover all their frontier with Algarve. Maybe both those things were true. Sabrino hoped they were. If they were, Valmiera would soon get a nasty surprise.

“In fact,” Sabrino breathed, “I think the cursed Kaunians may be getting a nasty surprise just about now.” He patted the side of his dragon’s scaly neck, a gesture of affection altogether out of keeping with his usual annoyance at the beast he rode.

Down below, the wooded uplands gradually gave way to the flatter farming country of most of western Valmiera. And now he spied emerging from the woods the heads of the columns whose tails stretched back into Algarve. Behemoths trotted across newly planted fields, marking fresh paths easily visible from the air.

Sabrino whooped. “The blonds will know they’ve been diddled, all right!”

The behemoth crews started tossing eggs into the first villages they reached and blazing at the buildings in them with the heavy sticks the great animals carried. Wooden houses and shops burst into flames. Smoke rose in thick clouds. Sabrino nodded approval. The Valmierans might not think Mezentio’s men able to mount a major assault through the rough country lying between the two kingdoms, but they would have garrisons hereabouts.

And so they did. A behemoth went down, crushing some of the men who rode it. The rest perished when a Valmieran beam blazed through the metal-and-magic shell of an egg it carried. When that egg went up, it touched off the sorcerous energy stored in the others and in the heavy stick. The resulting blast of light made Sabrino close his eyes for a moment. When he opened them again, only a crater in the middle of the field showed where the behemoth and its crew had been.

But most of the others, and the mounted footsoldiers accompanying them, kept right on going forward. The dragoons entered the village. Before long, they came out the other side, rejoining the behemoths that had skirted the built-up area. The men who had held their horses brought them up so they could quickly move forward again. First tiny obstacles overcome, the advance rolled ahead like the oncoming tide.

Also like the tide, it left rubbish in its wake and pushed more along ahead of it. Not all the dots down there on the ground moved with military discipline and precision. Some were peasants and townsfolk, fleeing before King Mezentio’s soldiers as the ancient Kaunians must have fled before the fierce Algarvian invaders of another day—and as Algarvians had assuredly fled when Valmieran troops pushed into eastern Algarve.

Sabrino was tempted to order his wing to swoop down on the Valmieran refugees, to rake them with dragonfire. A less experienced officer would have done it, and would have been raked over the coals for it afterwards. Sabrino knew the Valmierans would finally be discovering they’d worried more about one attack when another was more important. They’d be rushing all the men and behemoths and dragons they could to the north, to try to stanch the breach. He didn’t want those dragons attacking his fliers with the advantage of altitude.

In any case, other, lower-flying, Algarvian dragons began dropping eggs on the roads and on the Valmierans clogging them. Sabrino nodded to himself. He’d been wise to resist temptation. The commanders were prepared for everything.

The first Valmieran dragons came winging their way out of the southeast less than half an hour later. Sabrino nodded again. Some Valmieran soldier in one of those little towns had had a crystal with him, and warned his comrades before he either died or ran away. The blonds had responded pretty quickly.

But they’d sent a boy to do a man’s job. They couldn’t have put more than a squadron of dragons in the air: more a reconnaissance force than one in any shape to fight hard. Sabrino laughed for joy as he signaled his wing to the attack. Even his dragon’s hiss seemed to have a gloating anticipation to it. He knew that was a product of his own imagination; dragons barely had the brains to know they were alive at the moment, and couldn’t possibly anticipate.

When the Valmierans realized how many Algarvian dragons they faced, some of them flew back the way they had come. The others soon wished they had. Sabrino and his men blazed some of the enemy fliers off their dragons’ necks. Other Valmierans perished in the dragon-to-dragon fights that always broke out in spite of everything fliers could do. A couple of his own men perished, too, which made him curse.

Later that afternoon, the Algarvians on the ground bumped into the first defenders who weren’t taken aback to find them there. The blonds held out in a small town and refused to yield. Sabrino laughed to watch the behemoths and mounted infantry simply go around the Valmieran strongpoint. If the enemy chose to come out from the town and fight, fine. If not, the strongpoint would soon wither on the vine. The Valmieran defenders, and the townsfolk with them, would get hungry in short order.

If everything had gone according to plan, ground troops would be laying out a dragon farm on this side of the uplands, so the wing wouldn’t have to fly all the way back to Algarve to land. Soon, he would have to find out if everything had gone as planned. His dragon was soaring more now, flapping less; it would be hard pressed to hold off a rested Valmieran beast.

He began to fly in an expanding spiral, still alert for enemy wardragons but also peering down to see if he could spy the promised dragon farm. When he did, he brought the dragon down to the ground. Handlers chained it to a stake. The rest of the fliers in his wing followed him down.

“We’ll need some beasts in the air,” Sabrino said worriedly to one of the handlers. “Some of my fliers should have mounts fresh enough to go back up.” He wondered if he was telling the truth; his dragon was almost worn enough to be docile, a striking measure of its exhaustion.

“Don’t worry about it, sir.” The fellow in leather protective gear pointed to the sky. Sure enough, more Algarvian dragons were flying up out of the west to take the place of the worn wing. The handler grinned. “So far, everything’s going just like it’s supposed to.”

“Isn’t it, though?” Sabrino murmured. In the Six Years’ War, nothing had gone as it was supposed to, either for Algarve or for her foes. They’d kept banging heads like a couple of rams till one side finally yielded. But the Algarvian army had had its own way in Forthweg, and everything here in Valmiera seemed to be working as the generals had drawn it on the map. Sabrino wondered how long that would last. He wondered how long it could last. For as long as it lasted, he—and Algarve—would enjoy it.

Another handler pushed up a cart full of chunks of meat thickly coated in red-orange powder: ground cinnabar, to give the dragons the quicksilver they needed. Along with the meat, the handler also set out a couple of lumps of yellow brimstone. Sabrino’s dragon stretched out its long, scaly neck and began to eat. The flier nodded; he’d expected nothing less. A dragon that wouldn’t eat wasn’t merely exhausted; it was at death’s door.

Sabrino fed himself, too. Supplies for the men had come forward along with those for their mounts, which proved everything was going according to plan. Gulping rough red wine and gnawing on a roll stuffed with ham and melon, Sabrino said, “I don’t think the yellow-hairs know what’s hit ’em yet.”

“Here’s hoping you’re right, sir.” Captain Domiziano lifted his tin cup to turn the words into a toast. “We’ve got ’em bending way forwards down south. Now we come around behind ’em and give it to ’em straight up the arse.”

“You’re a vulgarian, Domiziano,” Sabrino said, “nothing but a cursed vulgarian.”

“Why, thank you, sir,” the squadron leader said. He and his wing commander laughed together. While they sat on enemy soil drinking wine, life looked monstrous good.

It looked even better the next morning. Dragons were blessed—some would say cursed, for it made them more difficult to handle—with enormous powers of recuperation. When Sabrino climbed aboard his mount in predawn twilight, the beast was as stupid and bad-tempered and ready to fight anything that moved—except possibly him—as ever.

He took his wing of dragonfliers into the heavens before sunup. They flew southeast, in the direction from which day would break. Sabrino scanned the brightening sky ahead. Enemy dragons would be silhouetted against the glow, and easy to see from a long distance. But he spied none. Fighting on the ground had not waited for the sun to come up, either. Flashes from bursting eggs showed where the battle line lay. Sabrino whistled; the wind of his passage blew the sound away. King Mezentio’s men had moved miles since the evening before.

And the Algarvians were still moving forward. Here and there, the behemoths and the fast-moving mounted infantry accompanying them found obstacles: Valmieran fortresses (although not many, for they’d penetrated well beyond the border), garrisoned villages, stubborn companies or occasionally even regiments of Valmierans.

As they’d done the day before, as they’d learned to do in the Forthwegian campaign, they flowed around as many obstacles as they could. Where they had to fight, the behemoths did the bulk of the work. They would stand off from the opposition and use their egg-tossers and heavy sticks to fight at ranges from which the Valmierans, who mostly had weapons individual soldiers could carry, had trouble replying.

Every so often, the Valmierans would keep on fighting in spite of everything the Algarvian warriors on the ground could do. Then the crystallomancers sent out the call for help from above. Dragons would dive out of the sky and drop heavier eggs on the enemy. Few indeed were the times when the dragons had to drop eggs twice on the same target.

Algarvian dragons also swooped on Valmieran egg-tossers that hurled sorcerous energies at King Mezentio’s men. There were more of those as the day wore along, as the Kaunian kingdom slowly—too slowly—awoke to peril in the north. But the Algarvian advance rolled on, roughly paralleling the course of the middle reaches of the Soretto before that river bent from southeast to northeast but in any case well to the east of it: a spearthrust aimed straight at Valmiera’s heart.

Watching it from above, helping to drive off the Valmieran dragons that tried to check it, Sabrino grew sure on the second day of what he’d believed on the first. “They can’t stop us,” he told his dragon, and the beast did not argue with him.

Tealdo looked east across the Soretto River, into land that had belonged to the Kingdom of Valmiera since time out of mind. On the far bank, Algarvian dragons dropped eggs on the enemy. Tealdo felt like cheering each flash of released sorcerous energy and each cloud of dust that rose from it.

Sergeant Panfilo had other things on his mind. “Curse the trousered swine for sending all the bridges into the river,” he growled. “If they hadn’t done that, we’d be halfway to Priekule by now.”

“More than halfway,” Tealdo said. “We went through Rivaroli like a dose of castor oil. The yellow-heads still don’t know what landed on ’em.”

Captain Galafrone was trotting by, as usual more energetic than troopers half his age. Hearing Panfilo and Tealdo, he stopped, threw back his head, and laughed. “Powers above, boys, we only got to the river a couple of hours ago. We’ll be over it by this time tomorrow. Then we drive for Priekule.” He paused, listening to what he’d just said. “We really are moving, aren’t we? Things weren’t like this during the Six Years’ War, believe you me they weren’t.”

“I only hope those bastards coming down from the north don’t beat us to King Gainibu’s palace,” Tealdo said.

Galafrone laughed again. “Those bastards coming down from the north are your fellow soldiers, you know. And they couldn’t be doing what they’re doing if we hadn’t drawn the Valmierans’ notice away from them.”

“Doesn’t seem fair, sir,” Sergeant Panfilo said. “We’re doing as much work—maybe even harder fighting—and they’ll get all the glory. No, that doesn’t seem fair at all.”

He sounded like a little boy with a case of the sulks. Tealdo understood that. He felt much the same way, and chimed in, “That’s right. What’s the point of fighting if you can’t swagger and boast afterwards? Those fellows will be able to, while we’re nothing but afterthoughts.”

“Well, anyone who listened to you would guess you’re an Algarvian, all right,” Galafrone said. “Here’s the way I see it, though: if we lick the Kaunians, there’s plenty of glory for the whole cursed kingdom. When we lost the last war, back when I was your age, there was plenty of shame to go around, I’ll tell you that. But if you get to put on a Conquest of Valmiera ribbon, none of the pretty girls will care whether you fought in the northern army or the southern one.”

Panfilo pointed back toward the west. “Here come the rafts, looks like.”

Sure enough, soldiers aboard a couple of horse-drawn wagons started throwing what looked like large leather pancakes down on to the ground. They also threw down some pumps. Galafrone set his men to inflating the rafts.

“No paddles,” Tealdo observed. “Do they expect us to get across by twiddling our fingers in the river?”

“Use your head, not your mouth,” Panfilo suggested. Tealdo sent him an injured look. Panfilo ignored it. Never in the history of the world had a sergeant proved sensitive to an injured look.

About an hour later, a fellow wearing the insignia of a captain, a badge of the lesser nobility, and a mage’s badge came up, looked over the soldiers at work, and shook his head. “This won’t do,” he said in fussy tones. “No, this won’t do at all. You’ll have to move upstream about a mile, and take these rafts with you.”

“Why?” Galafrone growled. He might have gained captain’s rank himself, but still thought like the common soldier he’d been for so many years. “What in blazes is wrong with where we’re at?”

The mage sniffed at his grammar, and then again when he noted that Galafrone, though also an officer, sported no badge of nobility of any sort. But his answer was not only civil but also informative: “Because, my dear fellow, that’s where the nearest ley line across the Soretto lies.”

“Ah,” Galafrone said, and light also dawned inside Tealdo. Galafrone went on, “No wonder they didn’t issue us any paddles.” He raised his voice: “Come on, boys, time to pack up and move. We have to get to the right doorway before we can pay the Valmierans a call.” Now that he understood the reason for the mage’s order, he complied without the least fuss.

The Valmierans knew that ley line crossed from the Marquisate of Rivaroli into their kingdom proper. They’d flung eggs across the Soretto to keep the Algarvians from concentrating near it till Algarvian dragons put their tossers out of action. More dragons kept working over the eastern bank of the river to make sure the Valmierans didn’t cause any more trouble.

Colonel Ombruno’s whole regiment and a couple of others were assembling near the ley line. So were a couple of companies of heavily armored behemoths. Tealdo smiled when he saw them. The big, ugly beasts pulled their weight and then some. He’d seen how they spread terror and confusion among the Valmierans. He favored fighting foes who were already afraid.

He waited with his comrades till darkness fell. A couple of Valmieran dragons got through the Algarvian squadrons in the air, but the eggs they dropped for the most part fell wide of the gathering force of Mezentio’s men. And, as soon as they had dropped them, the Valmieran dragonfliers fled back to the east as fast as their mounts could carry them.

“Now we take the war to the enemy,” Colonel Ombruno declared magniloquently. “Now we avenge their invasion of our soil, now we avenge their robberies after the Six Years’ War, now we avenge the wicked plots by which they won that war. For King Mezentio!”

Tealdo shouted “Mezentio!” with the rest. So did his friend Trasone, who stood close by, but Trasone raised an eyebrow while he was shouting. Tealdo felt like raising an eyebrow, too. He cared more about living through the next few days than about the king of Algarve. He suspected most Algarvian soldiers felt the same way. Most Valmieran soldiers probably cared more about living through the next few days than about King Gainibu, too.

With any luck at all, a lot of the trousered Kaunians were going to be disappointed.

“Take to your rafts,” Galafrone ordered the men of his company. “We want to hit the yellow-haired whoresons as hard as we can, drive ’em back from the river so we can set up proper bridges—meaning no disrespect to the mage here, of course.”

“Of course,” that worthy said in a voice like ice. He got into the leather raft with the company commander. After that, Tealdo didn’t see him again for a while. He sat in his own raft, doing his best not to wonder what the Valmierans had waiting for him on the other side of the Soretto. All too soon, he’d find out. The rest of the soldiers in Sergeant Panfilo’s squad—most veterans of the conquest of Sibiu, a couple of new men replacing casualties—also sat hunched and quiet.

Whatever they were thinking, they kept it to themselves.

Tealdo heard the waves in the Soretto begin to slap at the sides of some other leather raft. Then his own began to move, pulled straight across the river by the energy the mage was drawing from the ley line.

He wondered what would happen if some Valmieran, alert or just lucky, blazed the mage in the middle of the stream. That was something he would sooner not discover for himself. He looked across the river, toward the side the Valmierans still held. Flashes showed where Algarvian dragons were dropping eggs on the enemy. “Paste ’em,” Tealdo muttered under his breath. “Paste ’em hard.”

Other, smaller flashes showed that not all the Valmierans were slain or cowering in their holes. A beam from a stick struck the water not far from Tealdo’s raft. It raised a hiss and a brief cloud of steam.

Shouts from the eastern bank of the Soretto and more beams stabbing out announced the arrival of the first Algarvians. If the Valmierans could respond quickly, they’d give Tealdo’s comrades a thin time of it. But the one thing the Valmierans hadn’t yet shown they could do was respond quickly.

Gravel grated under the leather raft. It stopped so hard, it almost pitched Tealdo out on his face. “Come on!” Panfilo screamed. “Get moving, curse you! You want to sit around and wait for the Valmierans to blaze you for the pot?” Tealdo’s boots splashed in shallow water. Then he was pounding through gravel-strewn mud, and then up on dry land.

“Mezentio!” he shouted, not so much to demonstrate his love for his sovereign as to keep any other Algarvians from blazing him in the dark. Speed and confusion had worked in the assault on Sibiu. They’d worked thus far in the fight against Valmiera. “Mezentio!” he shouted again. He didn’t want them working against him, especially when he might have to pay with his neck.

He fell in the crater a bursting egg had dug, and then into a trench he hadn’t seen in the dark. Picking himself up, he realized he could break his neck as well as paying with it any other way. A couple of dead Valmierans lay in the bottom of the trench. Had any live enemy soldiers been there with him, he would have stretched out cold and dead himself. But the Kaunians who hadn’t perished had fled. “Mezentio!” Tealdo shouted once more, and stumbled forward.

Before long, he heard thunderous footsteps behind him. A behemoth pounded past, heading east, and then another and another. He cried out the king of Algarve’s name again and again. The behemoth crews, not wanting their own men to blaze them in the night, were also yelling, “Mezentio!”

When dawn came, Tealdo found himself picking his way along the side of a gravel road. Valmierans, some of them soldiers but more civilians, had been retreating down it when Algarvian dragons hit them. The results weren’t pretty: dead Valmierans, dead horses and unicorns that had been drawing carts, the carts themselves and all sorts of other worldly goods scattered and burned and wrecked.

Not all the Valmierans who’d been assailed on the road were dead yet, nor all the beasts of burden, either. Tealdo paused to give a moaning old woman who plainly wouldn’t last much longer a swig of wine from his water bottle. She had trouble swallowing, but at last managed to choke some down. What she said in her own language sounded like thanks. He wondered if she knew he was an Algarvian soldier or took him for a fellow Kaunian.

“Keep moving!” someone called in Algarvian from behind him. “We’ve got to keep moving! If we push them now, maybe we can break them.”

Tealdo shoved the cork back into his water bottle. His knees clicked as he rose from a squat. When he spied dragons flying west a moment later, he threw himself flat again. But the Valmieran dragons paid him no attention. They were streaking toward the Soretto, toward the river crossing the Algarvians had forced. If they could drop some eggs on the ley line, they could put it out of action for a while and trap the Algarvians on this side of the river.

“Keep moving!” someone else yelled—Captain Galafrone this time. “They won’t stop us. They can’t stop us. Nothing Valmiera can do will stop us now.” Tealdo slogged east. He hoped his company commander was right.

Sabrino was working harder these days than he had when the Algarvian army broke through into northern Valmiera the week before. King Gainibu’s men had finally figured out that, if they didn’t halt the Algarvian thrust before it reached the Strait of Valmiera, it would cut off their large force still in eastern Algarve and western Valmiera—and would also keep more help from Lagoas from reaching the mainland of Derlavai.

But the Lagoans, curse them, had already put dragons and behemoths and footsoldiers into southern Valmiera. Lagoan dragonfliers carried a reputation earned in the Six Years’ War. From everything Sabrino had seen, they still lived up to it, too. They were certainly better in the air than their Valmieran counterparts, far better than the Forthwegians Sabrino had fought as last summer passed into autumn.

At the moment, Sabrino was wondering whether the Lagoan he was fighting was better in the air than he was. The fellow put his red-and-gold-painted dragon through maneuvers that should have tied it in knots. He kept trying to get on Sabrino’s tail at a range close enough to let his dragon flame Sabrino’s out of the sky. He kept coming close to doing it, too.

He also had a way of leaning far over his dragon’s neck to make himself as small a target as he could. Sabrino wouldn’t have cared to lean over that far himself, not with so much empty, empty air between him and the ground. He wondered whether the islander had more balls than brains, or whether the Lagoans had come up with a new kind of harness that made falling off harder.

However that was, the enemy dragonflier made a nasty foe. Sabrino felt his own dragon begin to fade beneath him. The beasts could put forth their greatest effort only in short spurts—although the dragon the Lagoan flew seemed tireless. Sabrino blazed at the enemy again, and missed again, too. He cursed, then threw his dragon into a twisting dive to evade the Lagoan.

As he leveled off, the islander still pursuing him, one of the fliers from his wing dove at the Lagoan. The enemy had to break off his attack on Sabrino to defend himself. Algarvian doctrine stressed always keeping an eye on what was happening in back of you. Faster than the Lagoan must have imagined he could, Sabrino resumed the attack himself. His dragon roared to see the one painted in red and gold straight ahead of it.

Behind Sabrino, the dragon’s powerful wings beat hard. Closer and closer it drew to the Lagoan’s mount, which was part of a smaller force than the Algarvian count’s. The embattled Lagoan could not fight two at once. Sabrino tapped the side of his dragon’s neck. Flame burst from its mouth, enveloping the flank and right wing of the Lagoan dragon.

“That’s my beauty!” Sabrino cried. For the moment, he didn’t despise dragons at all. His, surely, was the best of the breed ever hatched.

The Lagoan flew a fine dragon, too. Even as it shrieked, horribly burned, even as it began to tumble out of the sky, it twisted its long, limber neck and sent a blast of flame back at Sabrino and his mount. He felt the heat against his cheek, but the fire fell short. Shrieking still, the Lagoan dragon fell.

Sabrino looked around for more foes. Seeing none close by, he waved to the Algarvian flier who’d fatally distracted his opponent. The dragon-flier blew him a kiss, as if to say it was all part of the game.

Down plummeted the Lagoan dragon. Sabrino tried to mark just where it fell. If he got the chance, he wanted to look at the harness the enemy had used. If it turned out to be better than the ones he and his comrades had on their dragons, the saddlers’ guild needed to know about it, and quickly.

There on the ground, Algarvian behemoths continued their push through Valmiera, southeast toward the sea. As they had throughout the campaign thus far, they did meet resistance here and there. The Valmierans were brave enough, even if some of their soldiers had no love for the noble officers who led them. And so were the Lagoan battalions fighting alongside them. But the onslaught of dragons, behemoths, and the dragons who kept right up with the behemoths had thrown the enemy into disarray, so that his units fought individually, not supporting one another so well as they might have done. Against the Algarvians, whose warriors and beasts on the ground and in the air worked together like the fingers on a single hand, that was a recipe for disaster.

A few enemy behemoths came out of a stand of trees. Sabrino could tell at a glance they were Valmieran: King Gainibu’s men loaded them down with so much armor, it made them slow, so much armor that they couldn’t carry as many crewmen or weapons as their Algarvian counterparts. And there were only a few of them. The Valmierans had parceled them out all along the line, while the Algarvians grouped their behemoths into large bands. No one had been sure which was the better way of using them.

“Now people know,” Sabrino gloated.

The fight on the ground didn’t last long. The Algarvians knocked a couple of Valmieran behemoths kicking with well-tossed eggs, and blazed down another despite the thick coat of mail it wore. After that, a Valmieran crew on a behemoth that hadn’t been hurt threw up their hands and surrendered. The last couple of Valmieran behemoths fled back into the woods, pursued by the Algarvians. One Algarvian behemoth was down, too, but Sabrino could see the men who’d ridden it moving around on the ground. They’d come off lucky.

Sabrino flew on to the south. Beyond the front, Valmieran refugees clogged the roads. They fled the advancing Algarvians as if the Kaunian Empire were falling all over again. In their flight, they helped insure that Valmiera would fall, for soldiers could not use the roads they filled edge to edge. Here and there, Algarvian dragons had dropped eggs on them or swooped low to flame them. The havoc the dragons had wreaked only made travel tougher.

That would hurt Gainibu’s soldiers. All the same, Sabrino was glad his wing hadn’t been assigned to attacking civilians on the roads. War was a filthy enough business anyhow. Had he been ordered to drop eggs on women and children and old men, he would have done it. He had no doubt of that. But it would have left a bad taste in his mouth.

At a makeshift dragon farm near a small Valmieran town that evening, Sabrino assembled his squadron leaders and asked, “If you were King Gainibu, what would you do now?”

“Hop on a ley-line cruiser and scoot over to Lagoas while I still have the chance,” Captain Orosio said. He’d inherited a squadron when its commander got badly burned. “If Gainibu doesn’t, we’ll nab him.”

“You’re like right about that,” Sabrino said, “but it isn’t quite what I meant. If the Valmierans and Lagoans are going to stop us before we get to the sea, how do they do it?”

“They’d have to strike back across our front lines from east and west at once,” Captain Domiziano said: “with some of the force they sent into Algarve, and with whatever they can scrape up to the north and east. If they can open up a corridor and pull out most of their striking force, they might hold us out of Priekule, the way they did during the Six Years’ War.”

“That would be very bad,” Orosio said.

“Aye, it would.” Sabrino nodded. “Domiziano, I agree with you—that is their best hope. I don’t think they can do it, though. Have you seen—have you seen anywhere—the kind of force they’d need to crack us off to the east? I haven’t. They sent most of their best troops to the border against us, and they’re under attack along the border, too. They won’t be able to pull much without asking for disaster there.”

“They’re under attack behind the border, too,” Orosio said. “The folk of Rivaroli still remember whose kingdom they rightly belong to.”

“So they do,” Sabrino said, “and the Kaunians are paying the price for greed. Well, our job is to make sure it’s a big price.”

“There’s the truth, sir,” Domiziano said. “We’ve waited a long time to have our revenge on them. Now that it looks like we finally do, they’ll be paying plenty, they will.” His eyes shone with anticipation. Algarvians savored vengeance almost as much as Gyongyosians did, and took it—or so Colonel Sabrino was convinced, at any rate—with far more panache.

“Oh, indeed,” Sabrino said now. “We have to make sure they can’t get back up on their hind legs and hit us again for a long time to come. They tried to do that to us a generation ago, but they couldn’t quite bring it off. We will, though; King Mezentio won’t make the mistake of being too mild.”

Out at the edge of the dragon farm, a sentry called a challenge. A woman answered in Valmieran. Orosio started to laugh. The sentry asked, “What did she say, sir? I don’t speak a word of their bloody language!”

“You must be a handsome fellow,” Orosio answered, chuckling still. “If it means the same in Valmieran as it does in classical Kaunian, she just asked if you wanted to marry her.”

“She’s not too bad, sir, but no thanks all the same,” the sentry said.

Sabrino also laughed. “That verb has changed meaning since the days of the Kaunian Empire,” he said. “What she really asked was whether you wanted to screw her.”

“Oh,” the sentry said, suddenly thoughtful. “It’s the best offer I’ve had tonight, anyway.”

“You’re on duty, soldier,” Sabrino said. With women involved, his countrymen often needed reminding of such things. Sabrino went on, “You’d have to pay to get what you want, and she’s liable to give you something you don’t want along with it.”

The woman let out an indignant screech; evidently she understood Algarvian even if she didn’t speak it. “She’s gone,” the sentry said, his voice mournful.

“Just as well,” Sabrino called to him. By the sentry’s sniff, he had a different opinion. Well, even if he did, he couldn’t do anything about it… tonight.

When Sabrino took his dragon into the air the next morning, he discovered that the Valmierans were trying to do what Domiziano had predicted: they mounted a fierce attack from the west against the Algarvian behemoths and dragoons blocking their line of retreat. They’d loaded eggs on to every dragon that could carry them, too, to drop on the Algarvians.

But egg-carrying dragons were slow because of the extra weight they bore, slow and awkward in the air. Sabrino’s wing of wardragons flamed many of them out of the sky and blazed many of the fliers who controlled them. Only a few got through to add their weight to that of the attack on the ground.

That ground attack came only from the west. Sabrino grinned when he saw how little the Valmierans to the east of the Algarvians could do. If his countrymen could contain the Valmieran effort to break out now, they would swallow the rest of the Kaunian kingdom at their leisure.

Contain it the Algarvians did, over another couple of days of hard fighting. Reinforcements came up along the roads and by ley-line caravan. The retreating Valmierans had disrupted the ley-line network here and there, but only here and there: an effort of a piece with the way they’d fought most of the war. King Mezentio’s men had little trouble working around the gaps.

By the end of the third day, it was plain the Valmierans would not, could not, break out. When Sabrino brought his dragon to the ground that evening, every part of him but his smile was exhausted. “Bring me wine!” he shouted to the first dragon handler who came up to him. “Wine, and quickly! We have them! They are ours!”

“They’ve beaten us,” Skarnu said dully. He leaned back against the trunk of a chestnut tree. He was so worn, he couldn’t have sat up straight without the tree behind him. “We’re trapped between two blazes, and we can’t get out.”

“They move so cursed fast,” Sergeant Raunu said. Though many years older than the Valmieran marquis who commanded him, he seemed fresher—not that that was saying much. “They’re always there a day before you think they can be, and they always have twice as many men there as you expect. It wasn’t like this during the Six Years’ War.” He’d said that before during this disastrous campaign, any number of times.

“More of our men are running off now, or just throwing down their sticks and surrendering to the first redhead they see,” Skarnu said.

Raunu nodded. “Aye, they see there’s not much hope, sir. After a while, you start asking why you should get killed when it won’t do the kingdom any good. At that, we still have more men in the line and ready to fight than most companies. Powers above, we’ve got more men in the line and ready to fight than a lot of regiments. Some of the officers had given up, too, and the men know it.”

“And some of the commoners don’t want to fight for the nobility anyhow,” Skarnu added.

“Sir, I wouldn’t have said that,” Raunu replied. “But, since you have gone and said it, I’m cursed if I can tell you you’re wrong.”

“Would they rather serve the Algarvians?” Skarnu knew his voice was bitter, but he couldn’t help it. “If they think the redheads will treat them any better than their own rulers do, they’ll be disappointed.”

Raunu said nothing. He’d been a sergeant since the Six Years’ War. He would never rise above sergeant’s rank in King Gainibu’s army, not if he stayed in till he was a hundred years old. He might possibly have had a view different from Skarnu’s, but that didn’t occur to the young marquis till much later.

For the moment, his own immediate problem had more weight. “We can’t break out, not as an army we can’t,” he said, and Raunu nodded again. Skarnu went on, “Since we can’t break out, we’re going to have to surrender or else get pounded to pieces right where we are.”

“Aye, sir, I’d say that’s so,” Raunu responded.

“But there aren’t Algarvians everywhere, especially to the cast of us,” Skarnu continued, as much to himself as to the veteran sergeant. “There are plenty of them where they really need to be, but their line has thin spots, too.”

“That’s so,” Raunu said. “Wasn’t like that in the last war, either. Then everything on both sides was sewn up right. But the Algarvians can move so much force so fast, they don’t have to be strong everywhere at once—just where it counts, like you say.”

“Which means that, if we slide through a few men at a time, we ought to have a decent chance of getting past them and into country they don’t hold,” Skarnu said. “Then we can go on fighting them.”

“Worth a try, I suppose,” Raunu said. “We can’t do much more here; that’s plain. Maybe, just maybe, they’ll be able to put something together farther east. If the redheads spot us, they spot us, that’s all. In that case, we either die fighting or we spend the rest of the war in a captives’ camp.”

Neither of those alternatives held any appeal for Skarnu. But they were the only ones he faced if he stayed here. If he kept moving, he had at least some chance of staying free and giving Algarve more trouble.

“Assemble the company, or what you can find of it,” he told Raunu. “I’ll put the choices to the men, too. I can’t order anyone to come along with us, because I don’t think our chances are very good.”

“Better with you, sir, than with some other officers I can think of, and a lot of ’em carrying higher rank than yours,” Raunu answered. “I’ll round up the men.”

Perhaps half the number of soldiers who’d been with the company when the Algarvians launched their counterattack came together to listen to Skarnu. Not all of them had started the campaign with his company; some, cut adrift from their own units, had jointed his because even during the worst of the retreat he’d kept giving orders that made sense.

Now he set forth what he planned to do, finishing, “However you choose, this is farewell. I won’t be with you any more. I don’t think we move even by squads. It’ll be every man for himself, or every couple of men, if you choose to go. Powers above grant that you come through safe to land where King Gainibu still rules.”

Raunu added, “Night’s coming soon. Probably the best time to move, because the redheads will have the most trouble spotting us.”

“Aye, that makes sense,” Skarnu agreed. He turned to the men he’d been leading. “You’ll leave in separate groups, half an hour or so apart. Keep in loose order, as I said. If you head northeast, you’ll cut across the land the redheads have grabbed at a right angle; that’ll be the shortest way. Good luck.”

“What about you, sir?” one of the soldiers asked.

“Oh, I’m going to try it, never fear,” Skarnu answered. “But I’ll wait till the last squad’s out before I leave.”

“You hear that, you lugs?” Sergeant Raunu growled. “Let’s give a cheer for the captain. If we had more officers like him, if we had more nobles like him, we wouldn’t be in this mess right now.”

The cheer warmed Skarnu. That Raunu had proposed it warmed him even more; the veteran hadn’t had to do anything like that.

As twilight deepened, Skarnu sent soldiers out, group by group. At last, only a dozen or so men remained. Some of them didn’t bother getting up when he formed a new group. “Might as well stay here,” a trooper said. “War’s as good as over, looks like to me.”

Skarnu didn’t bother arguing. He just said, “Everyone who cares to, follow me.” Four or five men did. The rest sprawled on the ground and waited for Algarvians to come along and scoop them up.

He hadn’t gone far when a man stepped out from behind a tree. “Decided I’d come along with you, sir, but I figured you’d raise a fuss if I stayed back there,” Raunu said. “So I did it this way.”

“You’re insubordinate,” Skarnu said, and the veteran sergeant nodded. Skarnu laughed. “Curse me for a liar if I say I’m not glad to see you. Let’s get moving. The night won’t last forever.”

They stuck to the woods whenever they could, but the woods didn’t last forever, either. When they had to travel open country, they spread out even wider than before and kept to the fields, avoiding roads even when they led in the right direction. That quickly proved wise: Algarvians on foot or on unicorns—which saw far better at night than horses—patrolled the roads in large numbers.

“I’d like to blaze some of them,” Skarnu said as a patrol passed without spotting him or his comrades. “It would bring all the whoresons down on us, though. They carry a lot of crystals, curse them. We should do the same; it would help us move faster.”

If he got through to the other side, he’d have some things to say about that. One thing at a time, he thought. For now, worry about getting through. Every so often, he had to cross roads running perpendicular to his direction. He and the other Valmierans would dash across, getting to cover as fast as they could.

Unlike the fields, which were mostly undamaged, many of the roads and roadsides showed the marks of war: ditches, egg craters, dead men and animals lying bloated and stinking under the starlight. The Algarvians had stormed along roads in their attack from out of the badlands. Why not? Roads let them move faster than they could cross-country. Skarnu’s countrymen had fought them on and along the roads, too, fought them and been beaten.

More by the lingering stench of war than anything else, Skarnu realized he was still in Algarvian-held country when dawn began to paint the sky ahead of him with pink. He and Raunu and a couple of other men still with them lay up for the day in the thickest patch of woods they could find. They shared the biscuits and hard cheese and chunks of blood sausage they had. Skarnu took the first watch. Midway through the morning, he shook one of the soldiers awake and lay down himself.

Next thing he knew, his dream of an earthquake turned into Raunu’s hand on his shoulder. “Sun’s down, sir,” the veteran reported. “Time to get moving again.”

“Aye.” Yawning, Skarnu wearily climbed to his feet. “If you hadn’t got me up there, I could have slept another day around, I think.”

Raunu’s chuckle was dry. “Couldn’t we all, sir? But we’d better not.”

They went on as they had the night before. Once, they had to dive on to their bellies when a ley-line caravan full of Algarvian soldiers sped past, heading southeast. “They shouldn’t be able to do that,” Skarnu said angrily after the caravan had passed. “We should have done a better job of wrecking the grid.”

“We should have done a better job of a lot of things, sir,” Raunu said, and Skarnu could hardly have disagreed with him.

“How wide a sickle slice have they cut through us, sir?” one of the troopers asked, as the sickly-sweet smell of meat dead too long and the dangerous reality of Algarvian patrols went on and on and on.

“Too wide,” Skarnu answered: a truth as obvious as Raunu’s.

After another hour or so, he spotted yet one more patrol, this one, unusually, in a field rather than going down a road. He needed a moment to realize these soldiers wore trousers, not kilts. When he did, his heart leapt within him. Without coming out from behind the bush that concealed him, he called softly: “King Gainibu!”

The soldiers started. “Who goes there?” one of them rapped out—in Valmieran.

Skarnu’s own language was sweet in his ears. He gave his name, adding, “My men and I have come across the Algarvian lines from the frontier force.”

“You’re lucky, then, because cursed few have made it,” the soldier answered. Bleakly, he added, “Cursed few have tried, come to that. Show yourselves, so we know you aren’t redhead raiders.”

Skarnu emerged from cover ahead of his men. He did it ostentatiously, so the Valmierans wouldn’t take alarm and blaze him. One of the soldiers came up, looked him over, talked with him, and called, “I think he’s the real thing, Sergeant.”

“All right,” the fellow in charge of the patrol answered. “Lead his pals and him back to headquarters, then. We can use every man we find, and that’s a fact.”

Headquarters gave Skarnu hope. When he reached them, though, he discovered the senior officer there was an overage, overweight captain named Rudninku, whose command consisted of three understrength companies.

“Haven’t got anything,” he moaned. “Not enough men, not enough behemoths, not enough armor or weapons for half the ones we do have, not enough horses, no unicorns. I’m supposed to hold a couple of miles of front with this. I can’t attack, not unless I want to kill myself. I can’t stop the redheads if they turn on me, either.”

“What can you do?” Skarnu demanded, hoping Rudninku would, if prodded, come up with something useful.

He didn’t. All he said was, “Sit tight and wait to see what happens in the south. If we win, maybe I can pitch into the Algarvians’ flank. If we lose—and things don’t look good down there—I’ll surrender. What else can I do?”

“Go on fighting,” Skarnu said. Rudninku looked at him as if he’d lost his mind.

Some of the reports Hajjaj used to mark the progress of the Derlavaian War on the map in his office came from the Zuwayzi ministries in Trapani and Priekule. The two sets of reports didn’t always gibe; the Algarvians had a way of announcing good news for their side days before the Valmierans admitted it was true.

And some of Hajjaj’s reports came from the news sheets here in Bishah. Every once in a while, those were spectacularly wrong. More often than not, though, they got news from the far east faster and more accurately than either ministry there.

Hajjaj thrust a brass pin with a green glass head into the map east of the Valmieran town of Ventspils. Seeing just where Ventspils was made him whistle softly: it lay well to the east of Priekule, and was almost as far north. The Algarvians had reached the Strait of Valmiera and made the Lagoans pull their men and dragons out of King Gainibu’s land or see them cut off and killed or captured. The Lagoans had had to slaughter a lot of their behemoths, too, to keep them from falling into Algarvian hands.

And the Algarvians, having knocked Lagoas out of the fight for the time being, having trapped and reduced to impotence the main Valmieran army, were now executing a grand wheeling movement to the north and east against… against not much, as far as Hajjaj could tell.

Shaddad, his secretary, came in and interrupted his contemplation. Shaddad, unusually for a Zuwayzi, was wearing a tunic and kilt that would have been stylish during Hajjaj’s university days in Trapani before the Six Years’ War. Bowing to Hajjaj, the secretary said, “Your Excellency, I remind you that the Marquis Balastro will be here in less than half an hour.”

“Meaning I had better shroud myself, eh?” Hajjaj said.

Shaddad nodded. “Even so, sir. It were better not to scandalize the Algarvian minister.”

“Oh, Balastro wouldn’t be scandalized,” Hajjaj said as he walked toward the closet from which he sometimes had to pull out clothes. “He is an Algarvian: he enjoys leering at the women here whenever he has occasion to come out on business. I admit he wouldn’t be so glad to stare at my scrawny old carcass, though, and so I shall deck myself out for him.” He put on a tunic and kilt of somewhat more modern cut than Shaddad’s.

Being of light, gauzy cotton, the clothing couldn’t have made him much warmer than he was already. He imagined himself sweating more all the same. His body felt confined, clammy. Clucking sorrowfully, he endured.

Marquis Balastro strutted in at precisely the appointed hour. The strut said he was happy with the world. The gleam in his eye said he had indeed enjoyed the journey from the Algarvian ministry to King Shazli’s palace. A serving woman dressed Zuwayzi-style—which is to say, in sandals and jewelry—brought tea and cakes and wine for him and Hajjaj. The gleam in his eye got brighter.

A cultivated man, Balastro accommodated himself to Zuwayzi rhythms. Only after the serving woman had taken away the tray—and after he’d finished ogling her while she did it—did he say, “I have news of moment, your Excellency.”

“By all means, then, tell me what it is,” Hajjaj said. To his annoyance, he’d spilled a drop of wine on his tunic. Another reason not to care for cloth—it was harder to clean than skin.

Balastro’s eyes gleamed now in a different way. Leaning forward, away from the piled cushions against which he sat, he said, “Valmiera has asked for the terms on which we would consent to ending the war against her. She has, to put it another way, yielded.”

King Mezentio’s minister spoke of Gainibu’s kingdom as if it were a woman. Aye, very much an Algarvian, Hajjaj thought. Valmiera had yielded—yielded to force. Aloud Hajjaj said, “This is a great day for Algarve.”

“It is. It truly is.” Balastro’s smile held anticipation no Valmieran would have found pleasant. “We have plenty of scores to settle with the Kaunians, reaching back over many years. And settle them we shall.”

“What terms will you impose?” Hajjaj asked. He knew more than he liked about imposed terms. Unkerlant had given him painful lessons on the subject.

“I am not privy to them all,” Balastro replied. “I am not sure all have yet been set. Of a certainty, however, they shall not be light. Rivaroli will return to its rightful allegiance, that I know.” He pointed to the map behind Hajjaj.

Hajjaj also turned to look at the map. The Zuwayzi foreign minister sighed as he faced Balastro once more. “Algarve is fortunate, to have a lost marquisate returned to her. We of Zuwayza, on the other hand, have had provinces torn away from their rightful sovereign.”

“I know that. King Mezentio knows that,” Balastro said gravely. “The injustice you suffered grieves him. It surely rankles the spirit of every Algarvian who loves honor and right dealing.”

“If this be so”—Hajjaj was glad he recalled how to use the Algarvian subjunctive, for he wanted Balastro to know he thought the proposition contrary to fact—“if this be so, I say, King Mezentio might have done a great deal more to show his grief. Forgive me for sounding tart, I beg you, but expressions of sympathy, however gracious, win back no land.”

“I know that, too, and so does my sovereign.” Balastro spread his hands in an extravagant Algarvian gesture. “But what would you have had him do? When Unkerlant began bullying you, we were at war with Forthweg and Sibiu, with Valmiera and Jelgava. Should we have added King Swemmel to our list of foes?”

“You have knocked out three of your foes now, even if you added Lagoas to the list,” Hajjaj said. “And Jelgava’s fight against you, by all accounts, has been halfhearted at best.”

“Kaunians fear us.” Balastro sounded very fierce. “Kaunians have good reason to fear us. We have won our greatest triumph over them since the collapse of the Kaunian Empire.” By the fierce triumph on his face, he might have overthrown the Valmieran army singlehanded. Then he added, “Nor have we finished.”

Hajjaj would never have been so indiscreet. If he passed those words on to the Jelgavan minister… Well, what then? he wondered. Maybe Balastro had told an open secret after all. If the Jelgavans couldn’t figure out that Mezentio would try to deal with them next, they weren’t very bright. Hajjaj didn’t think the Jelgavan minister to Zuwayza was very bright, but that was Jelgava’s problem far more than his.

He had more immediately urgent things to worry about, anyhow. “I also notice that, however grieved King Mezentio may be at what Zuwayza has suffered, he had no trouble sharing Forthweg with Swemmel of Unkerlant.”

“Again, not sharing Forthweg would have led to war with Unkerlant, and Algarve could not afford that,” Balastro answered.

Listening carefully to the way Algarvians said things had its reward. “You could not afford it,” Hajjaj echoed. “Can you afford it now?”

“We are still at war in the east,” the Algarvian minister replied. “Algarve fought in the east and west at the same time during the Six Years’ War. The kingdom learned a lesson then: not to be so foolish twice.”

“Ah,” Hajjaj said, and then, “Suppose Algarve were not at war in the east? What might she do in that case?” He did not want to ask the question. It made him into a mendicant, hand out for alms. For his kingdom’s sake, he asked it anyhow.

Balastro said, “For the time being we are at peace with Unkerlant. It would hardly be fitting for me to speak of an end to peace, which often proves so hard to come by. For that reason, I shall say nothing.” He winked at the Zuwayzi foreign minister as if Hajjaj were a young, shapely, naked woman.

“I see,” Hajjaj murmured. “Aye, that is the proper practice.” Balastro nodded, rectitude personified. Hajjaj went on, “Perhaps, though, you might send your attaché here to the palace, on the off chance that he should have something of interest to say to certain of our officers.”

“I find it very unlikely that he would,” Balastro said, which disappointed Hajjaj—had he misread the Algarvian minister? Balastro continued, “I think they should meet at some quiet place—a tearoom or a cafe or maybe a jeweler’s—so they can have something pleasant to do should it turn out that their conversation is not mutually interesting.”

“It shall be as you say, of course,” the Zuwayzi foreign minister replied, inclining his head. “You do realize, of course, that any meeting between one of your countrymen and one of mine will be hard to keep secret, however much we try.”

“Oh? Why is that?” Balastro asked, so innocently that Hajjaj started to laugh. Balastro looked mystified, which made Hajjaj laugh harder. With coppery hair and skins ranging from pink to tawny, Algarvians stood out in Zuwayza even if they went naked. Every once in a while, one of them would, which made them unusual among the pale folk of Derlavai.

Hajjaj said, “A jeweler’s might be a good place to meet, come to think of it. If your attache happened to wear something other than a uniform, and if the officer with whom he spoke left off his ornaments of rank…”

“Oh, certainly,” Balastro said, as if he already took that for granted. “Since they will not be meeting in an official capacity, they need not—indeed, they should not—be dressed, or not dressed, in any formal way.”

“Nicely put,” Hajjaj said.

“I thank you. I thank you very much.” The Algarvian minister performed a seated bow. “All this is moonbeams and shadows and gossamer, of course. Algarve is at peace with Unkerlant. As a matter of fact, Zuwayza is at peace with Unkerlant.”

“So we are.” Now Hajjaj did not try to hide his bitterness. “Would that we had been at peace with Unkerlant this past winter as well.”

“If you cannot live at peace with your neighbors, or if the peace forced upon you is unjust, what better to do than take your revenge?” Balastro asked.

“In this, you Algarvians are much like my folk,” Hajjaj said, “though we are more likely to feud by clans than either as individuals, as you do, or as a united kingdom. But tell me, if you will, how Unkerlant has offended. King Swemmel, curse him, did not move a step over the border Unkerlant shared with Algarve before the Six Years’ War.”

“But he wickedly prevented King Mezentio from conquering all of Forthweg, which Algarve might easily have done after we smashed the armies King Penda sent into our northern provinces,” Balastro replied.

That struck Hajjaj as a flimsy pretext. But a man looking for a fight needed no more than a flimsy pretext, if any at all. Unless Hajjaj altogether misread Balastro, the hot-blooded Algarvians were looking for a fight with Unkerlant, and looking for friends as well. Hajjaj did not know how friendly to Algarve Zuwayza ought to be. But Zuwayza was Unkerlant’s enemy—he did know that. If Unkerlant had more enemies… That will do, he thought.