Out of the Darkness

“I hope so,” Fernao said. “I think so, too.” He knew little more about getting along with one special person for years and years than he did about raising a child. But Pekka knew both those things well. As long as I’ve got a good teacher, Fernao thought, I can learn anything.

Twelve

All the regular news sheets in Trapani were dead. But the Algarvians still turned out something they called The Armored Wolf.

Printed on small leaves of cheap, sour-smelling paper, it kept right on screaming shrill defiance at all of King Mezentio’s enemies and declaring that victory lay just around the corner.

Crouched behind a barricade only a couple of hundred yards in front of the royal palace, with Unkerlanter eggs bursting all around him, Sidroc was certain the only thing lying around the next corner was a swarm of Unkerlanter footsoldiers and behemoths. He folded his copy of The Armored Wolf and. stuffed it into his belt pouch.

Ceorl asked, “Why are you wasting time with that horrible rag? Seeing it once is bad enough. Nobody’d want to look at it twice.”

“I’m not going to look at it twice,” Sidroc said. “I’m almost out of arsewipes, though, and it’ll do well enough for that.”

“Ah. All right.” Ceorl’s big head bobbed up and down. “You’re not as dumb as I thought you were when you came into the Brigade. If you were, you’d’ve been dead a long time ago.”

Sidroc shrugged and spat. “Dumb doesn’t matter--you’re

still breathing, for instance.” Ceorl’s fingers twisted in an obscene gesture. Laughing, Sidroc gave it back. He went on, “You’re still here, and I’m still here, and Sergeant Werferth, who made a better soldier than both of us put together, what happened to him? He stopped a beam in Yanina, that’s what. Bad futtering luck, nothing else to it.”

Before Ceorl could answer, smoke on the breeze set him coughing. Whole great stretches of Trapani burned, with no one doing much to try to put out the fires. The Algarvians couldn’t, and the Unkerlanters didn’t care.

Slowly, the smoke cleared. Ceorl’s face was as black with soot as his beard. Sidroc doubted his own was any cleaner. Ceorl said, “Not fornicating likely we’re going to end up any different.”

“No,” Sidroc agreed. “This stretch around the palace is about what’s left. Maybe a few other little patches, but they don’t do anybody any good. Everything else, Swemmel’s buggers have got it.”

“And they want Mezentio,” Ceorl said. “They want that whoreson bad.”

Being a corporal, Sidroc could--should--have reproved him. Instead, he nodded. The Unkerlanters did

want Mezentio. Their dragons dropped leaflets promising not just safety but enormous rewards for any Algarvians who gave them the king. Sidroc supposed the same applied to the men of Plegmund’s Brigade. He didn’t care. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust the Unkerlanters, though he didn’t. But, after spending the past two and a half years battling them, he didn’t want to have anything to do with them except over the business end of a stick.

A couple of men in rock-gray tunics darted out from a doorway and dashed toward rubble in front of the barricade. Using the business end of his stick, Sidroc blazed one of them. The other made it and started blazing back.

Sidroc scuttled along the barricade to find a new place from which to blaze at the foe. Stay anywhere very long and you asked for a sniper’s beam through the head. Behind him, an Algarvian declared, “I will deal with these cursed savages.”

That was interesting enough to make Sidroc turn his head. “Who in blazes are you?” he asked the redhead standing there--standing there, Sidroc noted, with no regard whatsoever for his own safety. Considering what was going on all around--considering that Trapani was, not to put too fine a point on it, falling--that took even Algarvian arrogance a bit far.

“I am Major Almonte,” the fellow replied. With his left hand, he brushed the mage’s badge he wore on his left breast. “I have the power to hurl the Unkerlanters back in dismay.”

“Oh, you do, do you?” Sidroc grunted. Almonte nodded. He believed what he was saying. Sidroc didn’t, not for a minute. “If you’re such hot stuff, pal, what are Swemmel’s buggers doing within blaze of the royal palace here?”

“It’s not my fault,” Almonte said. “My superiors would not listen to me, would not let me show the full reach of my genius.”

From not far away, Ceorl said, “Another fornicating crackpot.” Sidroc laughed. Almonte might be an Algarvian and an officer by courtesy, but what difference did that make here and now?

The redhead glared at both Forthwegians. “You are nothing but mercenaries,” he said. “You have no business criticizing me.”

“Talk is cheap, pal,” Sidroc said.

“Futter yourself,” Almonte said crisply. “By the powers above, I will show you--I will show the world--what I can do.” He scrambled over the barricade and faced the Unkerlanters without the least shred of cover.