Rulers of the Darkness

"I don't know all the ins and outs of it." Bembo laughed loudly at his own wit. "If it weren't for her mouthy old grandfather, I might not remember her at all. It's not like I ever laid her or anything."

"All right. All right." Spinello, who had, knew when to give up. He turned, cursing under his breath at a good idea wasted, and went back to the depot.

Before long, the ley-line caravan was gliding west across Forthweg again. It stopped in Eoforwic to pick up more reinforcements, then slid on toward the fighting front. Towns and villages in western Forthweg and in Unkerlant had taken even more damage, and more recent damage, than those farther east. Swemmel's men might not have fought skillfully, but they'd fought hard from the very beginning.

And they- or their brethren who practiced the nasty art of the guerrilla- kept right on making themselves difficult. The caravan had to halt twice before it got to the front, for Unkerlanter irregulars had burst eggs on the ley line and overloaded its energy-carrying capacity. Algarvian mages had to put the damage right, and there weren't enough of them to go around.

At last, a day and a half later than he should have, Spinello got down from the caravan car in the wreckage of a town named Pewsum. A sergeant was standing on the platform at the depot, holding up a leaf of paper with his name printed on it in big letters. "I'm Spinello," he said, cane in one hand, carpetbag in the other.

The sergeant saluted. "Pleased to meet you, sir. Welcome to the brigade. Here, let me get that for you." He relieved Spinello of the carpetbag. "Now if you'll just come with me, I've got a wagon waiting."

"Efficiency," Spinello remarked, and the sergeant grinned at him. Algarvians did their best to practice what King Swemmel preached. But the locally built wagon testified to genuine Unkerlanter efficiency- it was high-wheeled and curve-bottomed, and could go through mud that bogged down anyAlgarvian vehicle. As the sergeant flicked the reins and the horses got moving, Spinello said, "We can't have too many of these wagons, no matter how we get 'em. Nothing like 'em in the fall or the spring."

"That's the truth, sir. Powers above be praised that you see it," the driver said. "Sometimes we can get them from units that think something has to come from Trapani to be any good. If our neighbors want to be fools, it's no skin off our noses."

"No, indeed," Spinello said, but then he checked himself. "The way things are nowadays, nobody Algarvian can afford to be a fool. We have to leave that for the Unkerlanters." After a few seconds of very visible thought, the sergeant nodded.

Brigade headquarters lay in a little village called Ubach, a couple of miles northwest of Pewsum. Getting there took more than an hour; though Unkerlanter wagons could get through the mud, nothing could get through it very fast. The sergeant pointed to the firstman's house. "That'll be yours, sir. I'll let the regimental commanders know you're here, so you can meet them."

"Thanks." Spinello looked around Ubach with something less than overwhelming curiosity. He'd already seen more Unkerlanter villages than he'd ever wanted. A few peasants tramped along the streets, doing their best to keep their long tunics out of the mud. Some nodded to him as the wagon sloshed by. Rather more pretended he didn't exist. He'd seen all that before, too. And then he did a double take. Seeing a pretty young Kaunian girl in Ubach was the last thing he'd expected. She reminded him achingly of Vanai, though she was even younger and, he thought, even prettier. Pointing her way, he asked, "What's she doing here?"

"Oh, Yadwigai?" The sergeant blew her a kiss. He raised his voice: "Hello, sweetheart!"

The blond girl- Yadwigai- waved back. "Hello, Sergeant," she called in good Algarvian. "Is that the new colonel there?"

"Aye, it is," the sergeant answered, and blew her another kiss.

"Is she yours?" Spinello poked the sergeant in the ribs. "You lucky dog."

"Oh, no, sir!" The soldier driving him sounded shocked.

"Ah." Spinello nodded wisely. "A pet for one of the officers, then." He sighed, wishing again that he'd been lucky enough to get his hands on Vanai during the layover at Gromheort.

But the sergeant shook his head once more. "No, sir," he repeated. "Yadwigai isn't anybody's- not any one man's, I mean. She belongs to the brigade."

"Really?" Spinello knew he sounded astonished. He'd seen more camp followers than he'd ever wanted to, too. Yadwigai had none of their hard, bitter look. If anything, she put him in mind of a prosperous merchant's daughter: happy and right on the edge of being spoiled.

"Aye, sir," the sergeant replied, and then, realizing what Spinello had to mean, "No, sir- not like that! She's not our whore. We'd kill anybody who tried doing anything like that with her. She's our… our luck, I guess you might say."