Rulers of the Darkness

The bigger of the two Unkerlanter soldiers who'd come east into the Duchy of Grelz was named Gandiluz. The smaller one was Tantris. They were both back with Garivald's band of irregulars these days. Tantris did most of the talking for them. "Now that the trees are in full leaf again, things favor you," he declared. "You've got to strike the Algarvians and their Grelzer puppets one stinging blow after another."

"We'll do what we can, of course," Garivald answered, "but look around. We're not a big band."

Tantris waved that aside, as if of no account. "And you've got a mage."

"Where?" Garivald asked in real perplexity.

"There." The Unkerlanter regular pointed at Sadoc.

Garivald threw his hands in the air. "Oh, by the powers above!" he howled. "Munderic thought the same bloody thing. Every time Sadoc tried a spell, something would go wrong. Every stinking time. Sometimes it'd be something big, sometimes just something little. But something would always happen." He turned his furious glare on Sadoc. "Tell 'em yourself. Am I right, or am I wrong?"

"Well, aye, you're right," Sadoc said. "But that's only so far. I think I know what I've been doing wrong. I'll be better from here on out."

"A likely story," Garivald growled. He turned back to the pair of Unkerlanter regulars. "Are you both daft? Do you want to get the lot of us killed before you can squeeze any kind of proper use out of us?"

"Of course not," Gandiluz said.

"Shut up," Tantris told him, and shut up he did. Tantris returned his attention to Garivald. "What we want to do should be as plain as the nose on my face." He had a formidable Unkerlanter beak. "We want to do the most harm we can to the Algarvians with this band of irregulars. It stands to reason that we can do more using magecraft than we can without it. If we've got a mage here, we ought to get what we can out of him."

"If we had a mage here, that would be a good idea," Obilot put in. "What we've got is Sadoc, so you can forget about it." Garivald sent her a grateful glance.

"I'm sure he's not a first-rank mage like the ones they've got in Cottbus…" Tantris began.

"He's not even a fifth-rank mage like the worthless drunk they sent to Zossen, my home village," Garivald said. "What he is is a disaster waiting to happen."

"I won't be that bad from now on," Sadoc insisted. "I truly won't. I can do just about anything now. I know I can."

That was one of the more frightening things Garivald had heard. Sadoc scared him almost as much as had the Algarvian officer who'd told him he'd be boiled alive in Herborn, the capital of Grelz. The Algarvian had turned out to be wrong. Garivald was sure Sadoc was wrong, too.

He scowled at the Unkerlanter irregulars who'd encouraged the would-be mage to new dreams of glory. "If you want to get the most out of us, why don't you just cut our throats and use our life energy against the redheads?"

Tantris didn't turn a hair. "We've thought about that. If we have to, we'll do it."

He and Gandiluz were King Swemmel's only formal representatives within the clearing. The irregulars could have blazed them down and buried them with no one outside the woods the wiser. But they didn't. They'd been too accustomed for too long to doing what Unkerlanter inspectors and impressers said- when they couldn't get around it, that is.

Garivald hoped he could get around it here. "You've been in Grelz for a few weeks. We've been doing this ever since the Algarvians came through." He hadn't, not quite, but Swemmel's men didn't need to hear that. "Don't you think we know whether we've got a mage here or not?"

"What we think is, you haven't been using him the right way," Tantris said, and Gandiluz nodded to show he was part of that we. Tantris went on, "It's especially important to hit the Algarvians now, to make it hard for them to bring men and beasts to the fighting front southwest of here."

From behind Tantris, somebody said, "We've heard nothing but how this is especially important and that's especially important and the other thing is especially important, too. When it's all especially important, none of it's especially important."

"Well, this truly is," Tantris said. "If the Algarvians win the summer's fight, we're almost as bad off as we were last year. They might even have another go at Sulingen, curse 'em. But if we win it, then they're the ones who have to worry."

"How is Sadoc's magecraft going to make a copper's worth of difference?" Garivald demanded. "I mean, how would it make any difference if he had any magecraft?"

"He will disguise us as we charge down on the enemy," Tantris declared. Sadoc nodded. He thought he could do it. But Garivald had seen how Sadoc had thought he could do any number of things he couldn't do.