Darkness Descending

Addanz bowed his head. Like Rathar, he was in the flower of his middle years. Most of the old men who might have served Swemmel were dead. Some, the lucky ones, had died of natural causes. Others had chosen the wrong side in the Twinkings War or displeased Swemmel afterwards. Their ends, commonly, were harder.

“Your Majesty,” Addanz said, still not looking up, “I did not expect the Algarvians to do as they did. None of us expected the cursed Algarvians to do as they did.” He freighted the adjective with more than its usual mild weight of meaning. “When they did as they did, the world shuddered, for those with the wit and training to sense such things. By the powers above, your Majesty, the first time they did as they did, I almost fell over dead.”

“Better if you had,” Swemmel snarled. “Then we could appoint someone of some wit in your place.” He turned back toward Rathar. “And yours.”

“Mine?” Rathar said--yelped, rather. He’d hoped that, with the king’s wrath turned on the archmage, he might escape unscathed. No such luck, he saw. He let out a muted protest, the only kind safe around King Swemmel: “What did I do?”

“Nothing--which is why you are in part to blame,” the king answered. “You should have known the stinking redheads would try some such ploy when straightforward war began to fail ‘em.”

“Your Majesty, none of us dreamt they would do--this,” Addanz said. Rathar nodded to him in grateful surprise. For the archmage to defend him took more courage than he’d known the other man to possess. Addanz went on, “You surely know, your Majesty, how life energy is a very potent source of power for magecraft--how soldiers whose sticks run low on blazes may recharge them with the death of a captive or of a brave comrade.”

“Aye, we know this,” Swemmel said. “How could we not know it? The soldiers in the far west, particularly, have used the life energy of some few of their number to help the rest hold back the louse-ridden, fuzzy-bearded Gongs.”

Addanz nodded. “Even so. Of some few of their number, your Majesty, is the critical phrase. For life energy is the most potent, most concentrated form of sorcerous energy. And the Algarvians, you might say, went suddenly from the retail to the wholesale use of such energy. They gathered together a couple of thousand Kaunians in one place--in each of several places, actually--and slew them all together, all at once, and their mages turned the energy from those slaughters against our armies.”

“That is the way of it,” Rathar agreed. “The mages who aid our soldiers against the foe did everything they could to hold back the great storm of sorcery raised against ‘em”--as Addanz had defended him, he returned the favor--”but they were overwhelmed.”

“It is a great wickedness, the greatest of wickednesses,” Addanz said in a voice filled with dread. “To take men and women who have done nothing, to use them so, to slay them so as to steal their life energy... I did not think even Algarvians could stoop to such a thing. They fought hard in the Six Years’ War, but they used no more vileness than anyone else. Now . . .” He shook his head.

King Swemmel heard him out. Indeed, Swemmel listened intently. That relieved Rathar, who had feared the king would burst into one of his rages and start shouting for executioners. Then Swemmel’s eyes swung back to him, and he wondered if relief had come too soon. “How do we stop ‘em?” the king asked. Now his voice was calm, dangerously calm.

It was the right question. It was, at the moment, the only question. Still, Marshal Rathar wished his sovereign had not asked it. Though he knew it might cost him his head, he answered with the truth: “I do not know. If the Algarvians will massacre by the thousands those they’ve conquered, we facing them are like a man in a tunic with a knife facing another in chainmail with a broadsword.”

“Why?” Swemmel asked in startled curiosity--so startled, it took Rathar by surprise.

“Because they have no scruples about doing what we will not,” the marshal replied, setting forth what seemed obvious to him.

Swemmel threw back his head and laughed. No, more: he howled. A small drop of spittle flew across the table at which he and his subjects sat and struck Rathar in the cheek. Tears of mirth rolled down the king’s face. “You fool!” he chortled when at last he could do anything but laugh. “Oh, you milk-fed fool! We never knew we had a virgin leading our armies.”

“Your Majesty?” Rathar said stiffly. He hadn’t the faintest notion what King Swemmel meant. He glanced over to Addanz. The archmage’s face held horror of a different sort--to Rathar’s amazement, horror of a worse sort--than it had while Addanz was explaining what the Algarvians had done: That deeper horror told Rathar everything he needed to know. He stared at Swemmel. “You would not--”