Darkness Descending

The captain stopped and gave him a baleful look. “I wouldn’t pay you a counterfeit copper for a whole army of those chicken thieves. They think we’re supposed to do the fighting while they steal anything that isn’t spiked down. Only thing they’re good for is holding down quiet stretches of the line--and they’re not much good for that, either. Come on. We’ve wasted too much time here.”

Out they went. The rain was still coming down hard; Tealdo felt as if he’d been slapped in the face with a wet towel. More bedraggled Algarvians emerged from the farmhouse, which had taken an even worse beating than the barn. Still others were resting in haystacks and under trees. Like Tealdo, they all squelched forward toward Tannroda and, somewhere beyond it, Cottbus.

Every step was an effort. Tealdo, like most of the company, stayed on what was called the highway for lack of a suitably malodorous word. Others insisted moving through the fields to either side was easier. It probably didn’t make much difference, one way or the other. Mud was mud.

They slogged past a ley-line caravan whose forwardmost several cars no longer floated above the ground but lay on it, canted at drunken angles. The Algarvian soldiers who’d been riding in those cars now stood around in the mud--except for the ones who lay in it, hurt when the caravan went awry.

“Poor dears,” Tealdo said. “They’ll get wet.”

Trasone’s laughter had a nasty edge. “They look like new men--probably never saw an Unkerlanter in all their born days. They’ve been drinking wine and pinching pretty girls back in Algarve while we’ve had to go out and work for a living. Whoresons might as well find out what it’s like over here.” He spat into the muck. The drumming rain drowned his spittle.

They hadn’t gone much farther before the reason the caravan had come to grief became obvious. Three or four Algarvian mages stood around and in a large hole in the ground that was rapidly turning into a pond. A colonel shouted at them: “Hurry up and fix the damage to this ley line, powers below eat you all! I have men to move, and how am I supposed to move them with the line broken?” He stamped his booted foot, which only made it sink into the soggy ground.

“Try walking,” Tealdo called, confident the rain would cloak him. And, sure enough, the colonel whirled in his direction, but couldn’t pick him out from among the other vague, dripping shapes.

In any case, the officer was more concerned with the mages, and they with him. One of them said, “My lord Colonel, the egg the cursed Unkerlanters buried and then burst did too good a job of wrecking the line for us to repair it right away. It wasn’t meant to try to absorb so much energy all at once. And the Unkerlanters use different spells from ours to maintain the line--and they’ve done their best to obscure those, too. It’ll be awhile before you’re gliding again.”

“How long awhile?” the colonel ground out.

Before answering, the mage put his head together with his colleagues. “A day, certainly,” he said then. “Maybe two.”

“Two?” the colonel yelped. He waved his arms and stamped his foot again and loosed some extravagant curses, as any Algarvian might have. None of that did him any good. Being under his command, the mages had to try to soothe him instead of telling him what they thought of him, which Tealdo knew he would have wanted to do had he been in their place.

“Come on,” Galafrone said. “They may be stuck, but we’re not--quite.”

On the footsoldiers went, leaving the sabotaged ley line behind them. After another mile or so, the road became an even worse bog than it had been. Dragging himself out of the ooze, Tealdo discovered the going was better--not good, nowhere close to good, but better--in the field to one side.

“Something else is buggered up ahead,” Trasone predicted. “You wait and see--we’ll find out what it is.”

They’d gone only a little farther when the wide-shouldered bruiser proved himself a good prophet. There ahead were half a dozen behemoths stuck belly-deep in the clinging mud. “Hurrah,” Tealdo said. “First they ruined the road for us, then they went and ruined it for themselves, too.”

“They’re in so deep, they’re liable to drown there,” Trasone said. One of the trapped behemoths evidently thought the same, for it lifted its head and let out a loud, frightened bellow. It thrashed in the mud, trying to get free, but succeeded only in miring itself even worse.

“There, precious, there.” One of the behemoth-riders was down in the mud with the beast, doing his best to keep it calm. Tealdo would not have wanted that fellow’s job, not for anything. The behemoths’ crews had already done everything they could to lighten their animals, stripping off not only egg-tossers and heavy sticks but also the chainmail coats the behemoths wore. As far as Tealdo could tell, none of that had done much good.