Читать «Rulers of the Darkness (хвв-4)» онлайн - страница 426

She took the almonds and the onions and the bream into the kitchen. Then she poured herself a full mug of wine and gulped it down. It would probably make her go to sleep in the middle of the day. She didn't care. She would probably look like a Kaunian when she woke up, too. She didn't care about that, either- not now. What difference did it make, here inside the flat where she was safe?

Twenty

Unkerlanter dragons swarmed above Herborn. Unkerlanter mages swarmed inside the reclaimed capital of Grelz and to the east of it. They had plenty of Unkerlanter victims ready to sacrifice if the Algarvians chose a sorcerous strike at Herborn during King Swemmel's moment of triumph. Common sense said nothing could go wrong.

Marshal Rathar had learned not to trust common sense. "I'm worried," he told General Vatran.

Vatran, to his relief, didn't pat him on the shoulder and go, Everything will be fine. Instead, the veteran officer screwed up his face and said, "I'm worried, too, lord Marshal. If the Algarvians get wind of what's going on here this afternoon, they'll turn this place upside down to stop it." Looking around, he added, "Of course, between the two sides, they and we've pretty much turned Herborn upside down already- and inside out, too, come to that."

"True enough." Rathar looked around, too. Herborn was one of the oldest towns in Unkerlant. An Algarvian merchant prince- or, some said, an Algarvian bandit chief- had set himself up here as king in the land more than eight hundred years before. Ever since, the city had had an Algarvian look to it, though a native dynasty soon supplanted the foreigners. Extravagantly ornamented, skyward-leaping towers always put visitors in mind of places farther east.

In the battles for Herborn, though- when the Algarvians took it from Unkerlant in the first months of the war, and now when King Swemmel's soldiers took it back- a lot of those skyward-leaping towers had been ground-ward-falling. Others yet stood but looked as if they'd had chunks bitten out of them. Still others were only fire-ravaged skeletons of what they had been.

The stink of stale smoke lingered in the air. So did the stink of death. That would have been worse had the weather been warmer.

It was still too warm to suit Rathar. "I wish we'd have a blizzard," he grumbled. "That'd make his Majesty put things off." He cast a hopeful eye westward, the direction from which bad weather was likeliest to come. But none looked like coming today.

Vatran shook his head. "For one thing, his Majesty doesn't give a fart if all the Algarvian captives he's got- well, all but one- freeze to death while he's parading 'em."

"I know that," Rathar said impatiently. "But he wouldn't care to go up on a reviewing stand and watch 'em in the middle of a snowstorm."

"Mm, maybe not," Vatran allowed. "Still and all, though, if he put things off, it'd give the redheads longer to find out what we're about."