Out of the Darkness

“Those things are a stinking nuisance.” Rathar felt like kicking someone whenever he thought of them. For most of the past year, Mezentio had been bellowing that Algarve’s superior sorcery would yet win the war. Most of the time, those claims seemed nothing more than so much wind and air. Things like steer-able eggs, though, made the marshal wonder what else Mezentio’s mages might come up with, and how dangerous it would prove. For now, he stuck to the business at hand: “All we can do is all we can do. We need to concentrate heavy sticks around bridges, and our dragons need to keep the Algarvians away from them.”

“Aye, sir. Will you draft an order to that effect?” the crystallomancer asked.

“Pass it on orally for now. I’ll assign it to some bright young officer as soon as I get the chance,” Rathar replied. “There are other things going on right now, you know.” The crystallomancer saluted and hurried away.

Winter nights came early in southern Algarve, as they did in the south of Unkerlant. It was cold here, too, though southern Unkerlant got colder. Rathar felt a certain gloomy pride in that. Unkerlant’s appalling fall and winter weather had played no small part in helping to hold the redheads out of Cottbus.

The marshal had just gone up to bed--again, without a redheaded girl to keep him company--when the eastern horizon lit up. The glare was so bright, he wondered for a moment if the sun hadn’t hurried round behind the world to rise again much sooner than it should have. He’d seen the night sky brightened by bursting eggs more times than he could count. This wasn’t like that. That was a flicker, a ripple, of light along a whole great stretch of the horizon. Here, all the light came from one place, and it really did seem almost bright enough for a sunrise.

It lasted about five minutes. Then, as abruptly as it had begun, it winked out. A sharp bellow of noise, as of an egg bursting not far away, rattled the window. Darkness and relative quiet returned.

For a moment. Someone dashed up the stairs and pounded on Rathar’s door. “Lord Marshal, it’s Brigadier Magneric, up by the Scamandro,” a crystallomancer said.

“I’ll come,” Rathar answered, and did. When he sat down before the crystal, he asked the brigadier, “What in blazes was that just now?”

“In blazes is right, sir.” Magneric, a solid officer, sounded like a man shaken to the core. “That was ... a stick, I guess you’d call it. An Algarvian stick. But it was to the heaviest stick a floating fortress carries as the floating fortress’ stick would be to a footsoldier’s. A superstick, you might say. It blazed down, it blazed through, every fornicating thing it could reach. Men, behemoths, fieldworks--it went through them like a sword through a pat of lard. It was a sword, a sword of light. How can you fight something like that, lord Marshal?”

“I don’t know. There’s bound to be a way.” Rathar sounded more confident than he felt. Then he said, “It stopped, you know.”

“So it did, sir. Something must’ve gone wrong with it. But when will it start up again, and how bad will it be then?”

“I don’t know.” Rathar didn’t relish admitting that, but he wouldn’t lie to Brigadier Magneric. “Powers below eat the redheads. I hope they ate a good many of them just now.” What I really hope is that we can beat them before they get all their fancy new magecraft working the way it’s supposed to. What if they’d started trying to do something like this two years sooner? He shivered. Then a new thought occurred to him, a really horrible one. If we ever fight another war after this, will anyone at all be left alive by the time it’s done? He had his doubts.

Marchioness Krasta got out of her pyjamas and stood naked in front of the mirror, examining herself. She shook her head in dismay. She’d always prided herself on her figure, and the way men responded to it told her she had every reason to do so (although she likely would have prided herself on it any which way, simply because it was hers). But now . . .

“I’m built like a tuber,” she muttered. “Just like a fornicating tuber.” She laughed, though it wasn’t exactly funny. If not for fornicating, she wouldn’t have been built this way.

Inside her belly, the baby kicked. She could see her skin stretch. Every so often, a hard, round protuberance would surface, as it were. That had to be the baby’s head. She thought she’d identified knees and elbows, too.

Looking at herself in the reflecting glass, she saw something she hadn’t noticed before. It had to have happened in the night, while she was sleeping—not that sleep came easy these days, not with the baby pressing half her insides down onto the saw blade of her spine.