Jaws of Darkness Read Online Free

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    Xavega was the first to speak aloud, with unmistakable relief: “We are finished. We have finished.” She pushed back her chair and strode out of the chamber. Almost of their will rather than his, Leino’s eyes followed her. Like other Algarvic peoples, Lagoans wore kilts. Xavega’s showed off quite a lot of elegantly turned leg.
    With another sigh, Leino got up, too … and poured himself a fresh cup of tea. It wasn’t what he wanted—well, it wasn’t all of what he wanted—but it would have to do.
     
    Four hundred years before, King Plegmund of Forthweg had been the mightiest monarch in eastern Derlavai. His armies went from triumph to triumph in Algarve to the east and in Unkerlant to the west. Even nowadays, his name was one to conjure with in Forthweg.
    And the Algarvians had conjured with it, recruiting Plegmund’s Brigade from Forthwegians who still wanted to go to war despite their kingdom’s defeat. Sidroc wondered what he would be doing if the redheads hadn’t organized the Brigade. Something boring with his father Hengist back in Gromheort, he supposed.
    Whatever else he was down here in the Duchy of Grelz in southern Unkerlant, he wasn’t bored. One of the Algarvian officers who led Plegmund’s Brigade blew a piercing blast on his whistle and shouted, “Forward!”—in Algarvian, of course.
    Forward Sidroc went, on snowshoes because some of the drifts were higher than his head. His sigh briefly raised a young fogbank around his face. In Gromheort, whole winters would go by without snow on the ground. In Unkerlant, it sometimes seemed a day couldn’t pass without a new blizzard.
    “Mezentio!” Sidroc shouted as he slogged forward. “Hurrah for King Mezentio!” He yelled in Algarvian, not Forthwegian. Plegmund’s Brigade might have been named for a Forthwegian king, but it used the occupiers’ language. Yelling in Algarvian also lessened the chances that a redhead would take him for an Unkerlanter and blaze him by mistake. He and his countrymen looked more like the enemy than they resembled their allies and paymasters.
    The Unkerlanters holed up in the hamlet ahead didn’t intend to be run out. They had a couple of egg-tossers in there, and hurled death back at the men of Plegmund’s Brigade and the Algarvians with them. The eggs burst when they struck, releasing blasts of sorcerous energy and sending fragments of their metal eggshells whistling through the air like flying scythe blades.
    When eggs started bursting close to Sidroc, he flopped down on his belly in the snow. Chunks of sharp metal screeched past above his head. Not far away, somebody shrieked and then started cursing in Forthwegian. Cursing was something not subject to military discipline.
    “Urra!” shouted the Unkerlanters in the village. “Swemmel! King Swem-mel! Urra!” Their word for king wasn’t much different from Sidroc’s; he understood it. The Unkerlanters sounded raucous and drunk. Sidroc had some spirits in a flask on his belt, too. He wish he were drunk stupid and mean. He didn’t have enough in the flask for that, worse luck.
    “Forward!” the Algarvian officer shouted again. “We have to keep moving. We have to drive them back. Herborn will be ours again.”
    Herborn was the capital of the Duchy of Grelz. Herborn had been the capital of the Algarvian puppet Kingdom of Grelz till Swemmel’s soldiers recaptured it a couple of months before. They’d captured King Raniero, too—the cousin Mezentio had put on the throne of Grelz: captured him and boiled him alive.
    “Mezentio!” Sidroc yelled, and got to his feet again.
    “Mezentio!” Ceorl snowshoed forward beside him. Like more than a few men who’d joined Plegmund’s Brigade, he’d been a robber, a bandit, before. The Algarvians weren’t fussy about such things, not even a little.
    Eggs fell on the village, too, kicking up fountains of snow. Sidroc whooped when some of the thatch-covered roofs caught fire, sending columns of black