Into The Darkness

Then he and the rest of the Jelgavans got in among the pear tree themselves, flushing out the Algarvians like so many partridges. Some the redheads, their positions overrun, threw down their sticks and threw up their hands in token of surrender. They were no more anxious to do than their Jelgavan counterparts.

Smilsu cursed. "My beam's run dry!" he shouted angrily. A moment later, nothing happened when Talsu thrust his finger into the touch-ho of his own stick. Like Smilsu, he'd used up all the power in it whith reaching the pear orchard. Now, when he needed it most, he did n have it.

"Where's that cursed dowser?" he called. "He can give us a hand. haven't sent all the captives to the rear yet, have we?"

"No," Vartu said from behind him. "We've still got a few of them le with us." He raised his voice to a furious bellow, a good imitation of th of the late, unlamented (at least by Talsu) Colonel Dzirnavu: "Stake'em out! Tie'em down! Let's get some good out of'em, anyway, the filthy redheads."

Some of the Algarvian captives understood Jelgavan, either because they came from near the border or because they'd studied classic Kaunian in school and could get the drift of the daughter language. They howled fearful protests. The Jelgavans ignored those, flinging a couple redheaded soldiers down on to their backs and tying their arms and legs to stakes and tree trunks.

"You'd do the same to us if your sticks were running low," a Jelgavan soldier said, not without some sympathy. "You know it cursed too."

"Where's that dowser?" Talsu called again. The fellow shambled up just then, still looking very much like an unmade bed. Seeing the spread eagled Algarvians, he nodded. He was no first-rank mage, but he didn't need to be, not for the sorcery the Jelgavan soldiers had in mind.

"Set your dead sticks on them," he said, and Talsu and the others who could not blaze obeyed. The dowser drew a knife from his belt and stooped beside the nearer Algarvian captive. He yanked up the Algarvian's chin by the coppery whiskers that grew there, then cut his throat as if butchering a hog. Blood fount [..i d forth Th d..] chanted in classical Kaunian. When he was through - and when the Algarvian soldier he'd sacrificed had quit [.wrii.] thing - some of the Jelgavans snatched up their sticks from the dead man's chest.

Talsu's stick lay on the second Algarvian. The dowser sacrificed him, too. Such rough magic in the field wasted a good deal of the captives' life energy. Talsu cared not at all. What mattered to him was that enough of the energy had flowed into his stick to recharge it full As soon as the dowser nodded, he grabbed the stick and humied forward to do more fighting. It blazed just as it should have.

Before long, the two-pronged Jelgavan attack drove the Algarvians from the pear orchard. But, just as victory became assured, a cry rose from the men who'd made the assault on the front of the orchard: "The colonel's down! The stinking redheads blazed Colonel Adomu!"

"Powers above!" Talsu groaned. "What sort of overbred fool will they foist on us now?" He didn't know, He couldn't know, not yet. He was afraid of finding out.

Brivibas gave Vanai a severe look, as he'd been doing for the last couple of weeks. "My granddaughter, I must tell you yet again that you were too forward, much too forward, with that barbarian boy you met in the woods."

Vanai rolled her eyes. Brivibas had trained her to dutiful obedience, but his carping was wearing thin. No: by now, his carping had worn thin.

"AD we did was swap a few mushrooms, my grandfather. We were polite while we did it aye. You have taught me to be polite to everyone have you not?"

"And would he have stayed polite to you, had I not happened to come up when I did?" Brivibas demanded.

"I think so," Vanai answered with a toss of her head. "He seemed perfectly well behaved - better than some of the Kaunian boys here in Oyngestun."

That distracted her grandfather, as she'd hoped it would. "What?" said, his eyes going wide. "What have they done to you? What have they tried to do to you?" He looked furious. Was he, could he possibly had been, remembering some of the things he'd tried to do to girls before met Vanal's grandmother? That was hard to imagine. Even harder imagining him doing things like that u4th her grandmother.

"They've tried more than that Ealstan ever did," she said. "They couldn't have tried less, because he didn't try anything at all. He spent lot of time talking about his brother, who's an Algarvian captive."

"I do pity even a Forthwegian in Algarvian hands," Brivibas said. This tone, he pitied Kaunians in Algarvian hands far more. But, again, found himself distracted, this time by a historical parallel: "The Algarvi have always been harsh on their captives. Recall how, under their chieftain Ziliante, they so cruelly sacked and ravaged the city of Adutiski[..]."

He spoke as if the sack had happened the week before rather than in the waning days of the Kaunian Empire.