Darkness Descending

Still another was escaping King Swemmel for a while. Soon enough, he’d have to go back to the palace and see what sort of advice the king would give. Sometimes, Rathar was convinced, Swemmel saw further than any other man living. Sometimes he could not see past the end of his pointed nose. Telling which was which on any given day, though, was anything but easy, and King Swemmel remained as convinced about the virtues of his bad ideas as he was about his good ones.

Rathar shook his head as a horse bedeviled by flies might flick its tail. He’d come out here to get away from Swemmel, and the king had come with him in his mind. Where was the relief in that? When the dowsers came tumbling out of their hut to salute him, he was glad to nod to them. As long as he talked with them, he could get away from the mental presence of his sovereign.

“Aye, lord Marshal,” said one of the off-duty dowsers, a lieutenant named Morold, “we’ve had pretty good luck feeling out the redheads so far.” He hefted his forked rod. “A dragon’s wings will disturb the air, you know, and that’s what we sense. But the Algarvians are getting better at masking what they’re up to, curse ‘em.”

“I’ve read somewhat of this in the reports coming back to Cottbus,” Rathar replied. “But, as you say, a dragon must flap its wings now and again. How do the Algarvians propose to prevent that?”

Morold’s strong-nosed peasant face crinkled into a grin of reluctant admiration. “The sneaky buggers don’t even try, sir, may the powers below swallow ‘em down. What they do instead is, they have some of their dragons carry baskets full of folded-up strips of paper. When they get close enough that we’re right on the edge of spotting ‘em”--he held up the dowsing rod again--”they spill the baskets out into the air, and these thousands of strips of paper all start fluttering down. The rods pick up those flutters, too, so trying to tell what’s dragons and what isn’t is like trying to see a white horse in a blizzard. Do you follow what I’m saying?”

“Aye,” Rathar said, “and I thank you. You’ve made it clearer than the reports ever did. You still can find the dragons, then?”

“We know something’s up, sir,” Morold told him, “but not exactly what or exactly where, the way we would have before.”

“You must do better. Unkerlant must do better,” Rathar said. “If you’d been into Cottbus lately and seen the burnt-out blocks, you would know Unkerlant must do better.” He did not want to blame the dowsers, who were trying as hard as they could--and whose work had led to a good many Algarvian dragons knocked out of the sky. Something else occurred to him: “Are our dragons using these strips of paper, too, to confuse the Algarvian dowsers?”

“Lord Marshal, you’d have to ask the dragonfliers, for I’m sure I can’t say,” Morold replied.

“I’ll do that,” Rathar said. Maybe I’ll do that. If I remember, I’ll do that. He scrawled a note. He’d scrawled a lot of notes on the little pad of paper he carried in his belt pouch. Eventually, he hoped to do something about each and every one of them. The way things had been going lately, he wrote new notes faster than he could deal with old ones.

The dowsers’ spirits seemed high, which cheered the marshal of Unkerlant. As long as the soldiers thought the war could be won, it could. That was not to say it would be won, not with the Algarvians still advancing in the north, the south, and in the center--in the direction of Cottbus. But if the Unkerlanter army despaired of throwing back the redheads, the fight was lost without hope of recovery

Morold said, “We need more crystals, lord, and more heavy sticks to blaze down the enemy’s dragons. The Algarvians talk back and forth among themselves more than we do, and it shows in all the fighting.”

“I know that.” Rathar did not take out the little pad again. He’d scribbled that note before. “The mages are doing everything they can. We need too many things at the same time, and have not enough mages to make all of them at once.”

Morold and the other dowsers looked unhappy to hear that. Rathar was none too happy to say it, either. But he did not want to lie to them, either. News sheets put out plenty of pleasing lies, and put the best face they could on the truth. That was fine for townsmen. Soldiers, Rathar thought, deserved the truth unvarnished.

He commandeered a fresh horse from among those tied near the dowser’s hut and rode back toward Cottbus. A single bodyguard rode with him. He would have done without even the one retainer, but the idea scandalized every other general--and Rathar’s adjutant. At least he’d made sure he had a solid veteran at his side, not a relative he was holding away from the fighting or some pretty boy.