Darkness Descending

Marshal Rathar was used to smelling wood smoke and coal smoke as he walked through the streets of Cottbus. For the past couple of days, he’d been smelling a new, sharper odor with diem: paper smoke. Frightened clerks in the Unkerlanter capital were starting to burn their records lest they fall into Algarvian hands. They thought Cottbus would fall. Even if they proved right, Rathar doubted getting rid of their files would do them much good. King Mezentio’s men would still have them, after all.

Some of the clerks--and some higher officials, too--seemed to have come to the same conclusion, and seemed determined not to let the Algarvians catch them. Every ley-line caravan heading west was full of important-looking people with official-looking orders urgently requiring their presence away from Cottbus. Some few of those orders might even have been genuine. Rathar wouldn’t have bet more than a couple of coppers on it, though.

He kicked his way through a knee-high snowdrift as he neared the great open plaza around the royal palace. As far as he was concerned, Cottbus was better off without functionaries who skedaddled when trouble came near. He wanted people around him who could keep their heads. But if King Swemmel ever found out how many people were fleeing, a lot of them were liable not to keep their heads, in the most literal sense of the words imaginable.

A team of horses was dragging the body of a dragon painted in Algarvian colors across the square. Mezentio’s dragonfliers kept trying to drop eggs on the palace. They had no easy time of it; heavy sticks all around made the immense building perhaps the toughest target in all of Unkerlant.

One of the men in charge of the horses waved to Rathar. He waved back. Seeing men going about their business as if the Algarvians were two hundred miles away--as if there were no war at all--cheered him.

“Good morning, lord Marshal,” his adjutant said when he strode into his office.

“Good morning, Major Merovec,” Rathar answered, hanging his cloak on a hook. The colder it got outside, the warmer the palace was heated. That was the ancient Unkerlanter way of doing things. Doctors said it helped lead to apoplexy, but who listened to doctors? Glancing toward the map, Rathar asked, “What change in the situation since last night?”

Merovec often looked gloomy. Today he looked like midwinter midnight on the far side of the Barrier Mountains. Pointing, he said, “In the north, sir, the Algarvians have pushed us out of Lehesten. And in the south”--he pointed again--”they’re threatening Thalfang.” With a certain somber satisfaction, he added, “We do seem to be holding them in the center.”

“That’s not good enough,” Rathar said. “Curse it, Lehesten should have held. I thought it would hold. . . longer than this, anyhow. And Thalfang? Powers above, you can see Thalfang from the tops of the palace spires! If they take it and sweep west from there, they can put a ring around Cottbus, the same way they put a ring around Herborn down in Grelz. We have to hold them out of Thalfang, no matter what. Draft orders to shift troops south.”

“Lord Marshal, everything we have in the vicinity is already committed,” Merovec answered worriedly. “I don’t know where we’re going to come up with more.”

“If we don’t come up with more in the next few days, we won’t have the chance to do it later,” Rathar said, and Merovec nodded; he understood the problem as well as the marshal of Unkerlant did. Rathar smacked a fist into the palm of his other hand. “We have a lot of things we’re right on the edge of trying. If we can’t buy a little time to finish getting them ready, we’ll lose the war before we have the chance to use them.”

“Aye,” Merovec nodded again. “But we have so many men committed on other fronts, I don’t know where we can find more for this one.”

“King Swemmel won’t turn enough men loose for this front. That’s what you mean,” Rathar said, and his adjutant nodded once more. The marshal sighed. “I’d better have a talk with him, hadn’t I?”

“Lord Marshal, someone had better, anyhow,” Merovec answered. He opened his mouth to say something more, then shut it again. Rathar knew what would have come out--something like, He might listen to you, and he probably won’t listen to anybody else. That was true, and Rathar knew it as well as Merovec. But with the war going as it was, Swemmel might also decide he wanted his marshal’s head. Rathar had no way to know beforehand.

Even so, he said, “I’ll do it. Anyone else would have to work up his nerve before he tried, and we don’t have the time to wait. Better to do it now than before everybody has to run west for his life.”

He walked out of that part of the sprawling palace where the high officers in the Unkerlanter army worked and into the core of the building, the king’s residence. “I don’t know if he will see you, Lord Marshal,” a servitor said doubtfully. “I don’t know if he will see anyone.”