Darkness Descending

Oraste nudged Bembo. “All right, smart boy, what are they saying?” he asked. After Bembo told him, he grunted, “That’s about what I thought. What are we going to do about it?”

“Shake ‘em both down,” Bembo answered. He turned to the low-ranking, or more likely amateur, mage, with whom he could converse more readily. “Tell this walking pork chop here that we’re going to haul the both of you up in front of the military governor, and we’ll see if there’s anything left of either one of you when he’s through.”

Looking very unhappy, the bespectacled man translated that into Forthwegian. The fat woman looked even more appalled. Bembo wondered if she was part Kaunian and feared that would come out. She didn’t look it, but you never could tell.

“Ahh . . . Do we really have to do that?” the Forthwegian man asked. Bembo didn’t say anything. The fellow said, “Couldn’t we come to some sort of understanding?”

“What have you got in mind?” Bembo countered. By the time he and Oraste left the block of flats, their belt pouches were full and jingling. If the would-be mage and his dissatisfied customer found themselves unhappy with Algarvian notions of constabulary work, Bembo cared very little. After all, he’d made money on the deal.

Shouldering his axe, Garivald trudged across fields still covered in snow toward the woods out beyond the village of Zossen. Pretty soon, the snow would start to melt. Then the fields would go from frozen to soupy, after which they would dry enough for plowing and sowing. Meanwhile, he still needed firewood.

As he tramped along, he glanced toward a spot in a vegetable plot not far from the house of Waddo, the firstman. Zossen’s crystal lay buried there. Garivald had helped bury it. If Zossen’s Algarvian occupiers ever found out about that, they would bury him. He couldn’t dig up the crystal now, either, because he’d have to do it secretly, and that was impossible. He just had to keep on worrying about it.

“As if I haven’t got enough other things to worry about,” he muttered.

It wasn’t as if the crystal would work now. It wouldn’t, not here in this magic-starved backwater of the Duchy of Grelz, not without blood sacrifices to power it. But it had connected Zossen to Cottbus--which meant it would connect Garivald to Cottbus, and to King Swemmel. He knew what the Algarvians would make of such a connection: they would make an end of it, and of him.

Once he got in among the trees, he breathed easier. He couldn’t see the spot where the crystal lay buried anymore, which took a weight off his mind. And none of the redheads could see him anymore, either, even if they were looking for him. That was also a relief.

For a while, he didn’t have to use the axe much. A lot of big branches had simply fallen off their trees, torn from them by the weight of ice they’d had to bear through the winter. Garivald just needed to trim them and stuff them into the leather sack he was carrying. He found some fine lengths of oak and ash that would burn long and hot in the hearth.

He was trimming the smaller branches from one of those lengths when, all at once, he whirled around, the axe ready to swing. He couldn’t have said what had warned him he wasn’t alone any more, but something had, and, whatever it was, it was right.

Bandits and brigands prowled the woods. That was what the Algarvians called them, anyhow: Unkerlanter soldiers who hadn’t surrendered after Mezentio’s men overran them. Some of them were nothing but bandits; others kept up the fight against the redheads. At first, Garivald thought this fellow came from that latter group. But the soldier--he was plainly a soldier--was too neat and clean for one of those men. And Garivald had never seen a hooded white smock like the one he wore. It was too thin to give any warmth; its only possible purpose was concealment.

Realization smote. “You’re a real soldier!” Garivald blurted.

The fellow in the white smock chuckled. “Well, so I am,” he said. “And what are you, friend? For that matter, what village are you from?”

“Zossen,” Garivald answered, pointing back through the trees. Eagerly, he went on, “Are we going to be running the Algarvians out of here soon?”

To his disappointment, the Unkerlanter soldier shook his head. “No such luck, pal. I squeezed through the redheads’ lines for a look around, that’s all. How big a garrison have they got in your village?”

“Just a squad that’s been there since they took the place,” Garivald said. “But they’ve had other men coming through--a lot of’em moving west lately.”

“I wish you hadn’t told me that,” the soldier said with a grimace. “The hope was that they’d run out of men, and that we’d be able to roll ‘em up and clean ‘em out before the good weather comes back.”

“Powers above make it so!” Garivald exclaimed. “Powers above make our powers grow. Powers above make the redheads go.” More and more these days, he thought in doggerel. Sometimes it came out of his mouth, too.