Jaws of Darkness

by Harry Turtledove

  Nobody at the next table could have heard a word he said. He went back behind the bar. Obilot asked, “How long have you been carrying that silver bit around?”

  “How should I know?” Garivald shrugged. “Maybe since before King Swemmel’s soldiers broke into Grelz. But maybe I got it yesterday, chopping firewood for that baker.”

  “If you did, he was probably glad to palm it off on you,” Obilot said.

  “I wouldn’t be surprised,” Garivald agreed. “But at least in a place like Tolk, I can find odd jobs to do and make a little money. In a peasant village, I would starve. Everybody hates strangers in a village. I ought to know. I did, back when people I hadn’t seen before came into Zossen. For all I knew, they were inspectors or impressers sneaking around.”

  “It’s not right,” Obilot said savagely. “With your songs, you did as much as anybody to get the Algarvians out of Grelz. The redheads must’ve thought so, or they wouldn’t have wanted to boil you. But what thanks do you get from your own side? Back in the woods, they were going to arrest you or kill you.”

  With another shrug, Garivald answered, “When have you seen a peasant win? Not with our own kings, not with the redheads, not ever.” He didn’t even sound bitter. What point, when he told simple truth?

  A youngster who might have been the tapman’s little brother or son brought in more wood and threw it on the fire. A couple of people in the tavern clapped their hands. The young man grinned, taken by surprise. The wood, well-seasoned pine, burned hot and bright.

  “We’ve got the right table,” Obilot said, and turned toward the flames. Their reflections danced in her eyes. Garivald was about to do the same when somebody new came in from outside.

  “Close the door, curse you,” someone inside said. “You’re letting out the heat.”

  Garivald started to chime in, but the words never passed his lips. Instead, he turned his back on the door and leaned toward the fire, as Obilot had done. In a whisper even he had trouble even he had trouble hearing above the crackling flames, he said, “That’s Tantris who just walked in.”

  “Tantris! What’s he doing here?” Obilot’s face went hard and feral. “He’s supposed to be off in the woods seventy-five miles east of here. The only reason he’d come to Tolk …”

  “Is because he knows what we look like,” Garivald finished for her.

  “He knows what you look like, the whoreson,” Obilot said. “He’s got to be after you. I don’t count for anything, not to the likes of him.”

  She was bound to be right. When Garivald had slipped out of the woods with her and headed back toward Zossen without pursuit, he’d thought the Unkerlanters were willing to let him alone. That seemed a mistake, a bad mistake.

  “I led fighters who didn’t take orders straight from King Swemmel,” he said. “I made songs people liked, songs that made people want to fight the redheads. This is how my own kingdom pays me back.”

  Mezentio’s men had been ready to kill him. Now Swemmel’s were, too. The knowledge tore at him, as if he’d set his foot in a trap. And maybe he had. He sipped spirits and watched Tantris out of the corner of his eye.

  The soldier didn’t want to be recognized for what he was; he wore a dark blue tunic of civilian cut rather than the rock-gray uniform tunic in which Garivald had always seen him in the woods. He glanced Garivald and Obilot’s way, but gave no sign of knowing who they were. After a moment, Garivald realized the two of them were silhouetted against the flames in the fireplace. He stayed where he was. Tantris bought a beaker of ale and stood at the bar drinking it.

  Obilot kept her voice very low. “Is it true,” she said, “that now there are irregulars—Grelzer irregulars, I mean—fighting for the Algarvians in the lands our armies have taken back from them?”

  “I’ve heard it, the same as you have,” Garivald answered. “I don’t know whether it’s true … but I’ve heard it.”

  “Till that cursed Tantris walked thought the door, I wouldn’t’ve believed it,” Obilot said. “But now, do you know, I almost begin to understand.” Considering how she felt about the redheads, that was no small statement.

  “A good many peasants fled east when Mezentio’s men had to retreat,” Garivald said. “I used to think they were the ones in bed with the Algarvians. I guess a lot of them were, but maybe not all.” If he hadn’t got in trouble with the redheads for his songs, his life in Zossen wouldn’t have been too very different under them from what it had been before the war. That was a judgment on Algarve and Unkerlant both, he supposed.

  Obilot turned her head ever so slightly toward Tantris. “What are we going to do about him?”

  “Hope he goes away,” Garivald answered. Tantris drank his ale. He bought a chunk of chewy bread and dipped it into the bowl of coarse salt the tapman kept on the bar. Bite by bite, the bread disappeared. He washed down each bite with another swig of ale. Garivald might have done the same. He had done the same, many times.

  The tavern door opened again. This newcomer, unlike Tantris, did not try to disguise what he was: a military mage. Two troopers tramped in behind him. He strode up to the tapman and snapped, “Let me see your cashbox, fellow.”

  “Why should I?” the tapman asked. “Are you robbing me?”

  “Why?” the mage echoed. “I’ll tell you why. Treason to King Swemmel, that’s why.” He dropped a silver coin on the bar. It rang sweetly. “This is money of Raniero, the false king, the king of traitors. By the law of similarity, like calls to like. This foul coin calls to one in your box. Whoever harbors money of Raniero is a traitor to His Majesty.”

  Garivald’s blood ran cold. The fellow behind the bar had to say no more than, I got it from him, and point, and he would find himself in more trouble than Tantris could give him. What the tapman did say was, “It’s here, under the bar.” He reached down. But what he came out with wasn’t the cashbox, but a stout bludgeon he doubtless used to break up tavern brawls. He didn’t break one up this time. With a shout, he brought the bludgeon down on the military mage’s head.

  With another shout, somebody else threw his mug at one of the Unker-lanter troopers behind the mage. It shattered against the back of the soldier’s skull. He went down with a groan. Somebody shouted, “King Swemmel!” and punched the man who’d thrown the mug. Somebody else shouted, “Powers below eat King Swemmel!”—a shout nobody would have dared to raise before the Algarvian invasion—and kicked the fellow who’d yelled the king’s name.

  In the blink of an eye, the desperate struggle between the Grelzers who’d fought for Swemmel and those who hated him broke out anew in the tavern. The weapons weren’t so fancy as those of the great war still wracking Unkerlant, but that made the battle no less ferocious. People kicked and punched and grappled and bit. Knives flashed in the firelight.

  And Garivald and Obilot made their way through the chaos toward the door as best they could. He punched whoever got in his way, regardless of which side the fellow was on. “Let’s see Tantris track us through this” he told Obilot, who’d just kicked a man where it did the most good. A savage grin on her face, she nodded.

  A jar full of potent spirits flew into the fireplace and smashed. The spirits caught fire as they splashed out. Flames clung to an overturned chair close by. “Fire!” somebody shrieked. Then everybody was fleeing—everybody who could.

  Garivald and Obilot weren’t the only ones who ran not just out of the tavern but away from it as fast as they could. “We got away,” she panted. “This time,” he answered, and ran harder.

  The sun rose earlier and set later these days. Before long, the equinox would come to the Naantali district. In much of the world, that would mean spring, and so it would here—formally. Pekka was from Kajaani, which lay even farther south. She knew the snow and ice wouldn’t start melting for quite a while after that.

  If anything, the weather here was worse than in Kajaani, a port city that had the ocean to soften its climate. In most circumstances, Pekka would have complained about that. N
ot now. As she rode in the sleigh from the hostel to the blockhouse, she turned to Fernao and said, “I dread the spring thaw.”

  She’d spoken Kuusaman. The Lagoan mage nodded and answered in classical Kaunian: “I understand why—all this will turn to mud, and we shall have a demon of a time moving from where we stay to where we need to go to keep on with our experiments.”

  “Exactly,” Pekka said. “And we have to go on with the experiments.” That blazed in her. Next to it, nothing else mattered.

  The track to the hostel curved. As the horse rounded the bend, the sleigh tilted a little. Under the fur robes that warded them against the weather, Pekka slid toward Fernao. She was very much aware of her body pressed against his for a moment, and wished she hadn’t been quite so aware of it.

  It’s harmless, she told herself, not for the first time. Nothing can come of it. That wasn’t quite the same thing, even if it sounded as if it were.

  After the sleigh straightened again, Pekka took an extra moment to move away from Fernao. The Lagoan mage raised an eyebrow when she finally did. His eyes were shaped like hers, but green, not dark brown. Was it the combination of strange and familiar that drew her? Or was it just that she worked closely with Fernao every day, while she’d seen Leino for one brief leave since she came to the Naantali district and her husband went off to work on Habakkuk? Whatever it was, it disconcerted her.

  She almost wished Fernao would do something overt. Then she could tell him no, as forcefully as necessary, and they could readjust as needed and go on. Of course, he’d saved her life two or three times, from Algarvian sorcerous assault and from her own botched spellcasting—and, this last time, he’d hurled strong sorcery back against Mezentio’s mages. Do I really want to tell him no?

  But Fernao hadn’t done anything overt, and didn’t seem likely to. Ambiguity remained. Pekka laughed. It might as well be life, she thought.

  “What’s funny?” Fernao asked.

  “Nothing, really,” she answered, at which he raised that eyebrow again. Ignoring it, she took her mittened hand out from under the robes to point ahead. “We are almost there,” she said in classical Kaunian.

  “So we are,” Fernao agreed. He didn’t expose any part of himself but his eyes to the frigid air. “I wonder how the driver stands it up there, out in the open.”

  “We of Kuusamo do not let the cold trouble us quite so much as you do,” Pekka said, which was true—but only to a degree.

  When the sleigh stopped, as it did a couple of minutes later, Fernao had no choice but to come forth. The furs he wore were of Kuusaman make; he hadn’t had anything in his own wardrobe to contend against winter in the Naantali district. That wasn’t to say he hadn’t known it’s like before. He remarked, “The only difference between this place and the land of the Ice People is that the sun does come up for a little while here, even in the middle of winter.”

  “Er—aye,” Pekka said. The idea that winter could get worse than it did here was horrifying all by itself.

  As soon as she got inside the blockhouse, she started to sweat, and started shedding her outdoor clothes one layer at a time. Braziers and, soon, the press of bodies heated the cramped chamber in which she’d incant.

  Ilmarinen and Piilis came into the blockhouse together. Ilmarinen had always shared a sleigh with Master Siuntio, but Siuntio was dead, slain by murderous Algarvian magecraft. Now Ilmarinen rode with the younger theoretical sorcerer. Pekka didn’t know when she would stop missing Siuntio, or if she ever would. Without him, this project would never have begun, would never had gained the backing of the Seven Princes.

  Alkio and Raahe came in right behind Ilmarinen and Piilis. The married couple—both solid theoretical sorcerers—were about halfway between Pekka and Ilmarinen in age. Solid, Pekka thought. Aye, they ‘re very solid. So is Piilis. Nothing wrong with their work at all. Were the three of them together a match for Siuntio? Pekka shook her head. She knew better. She wasn’t a match for Siuntio as project leader, either. She also knew that. But she was what they had.

  Secondary sorcerers hurried into the blockhouse, too. Some spells protected the animals at the heart of the experiment from freezing before they were needed. Others would transfer the spell Pekka and the other theoretical sorcerers had crafted to the animals when the time came. And with the secondary sorcerers came the protective mages. After two Algarvian attacks, Pekka knew how necessary they were.

  But they didn‘t beat back Mezentio ‘s mages the last time, she thought. Fernao did that, Fernao and Ilmarinen and I. Three theoretical sorcerers who shouldn‘t be allowed to work magic like practical wizards. She smiled, recognizing the ironic pride in her thoughts.

  The blockhouse had been built with theoretical sorcerers and secondary sorcerers in mind. It hadn’t been built to include the protective mages. When the weather got better, perhaps Pekka could prevail upon the Seven Princes to enlarge it. Meanwhile, people shoved and jostled and stepped on one another’s feet and got in one another’s way.

  “Are we ready?” Pekka asked at last. But even her at last proved too soon; the mages were nowhere near ready. When she spoke again, it was in some exasperarion: “Sooner or later, we shall have to go into the field. The Algarvians will not wait for us, and neither will the Gyongyosians.”

  Ilmarinen snapped his fingers. “That for the Gongs. They’re honest foes, which means we can beat them without folderol, knock ‘em back across the Bothnian Ocean one island at a time. As soon as the Algarvians started killing Kaunians to make their magecraft mightier, they put themselves beyond the pale.”

  Privately, Pekka agreed with him. Even so, she said, “Whichever way we aim the magic, we’ll have to be able to do it in our time. The sooner we learn, the better.”

  Not even contrary Ilmarinen could quarrel with that. And Raahe said, “She is right. Let no one complain that we women are slow here.” That made people laugh. More of the mages in the blockhouse were men than women, but only a few more. Kuusamans were emphatically aware of the differences between the sexes but, unlike Lagoans and most folk on the mainland of Derlavai, didn’t think those differences applied to what each sex could do well.

  When Pekka asked, “Are we ready?” again, she found that her colleagues were. “Before the Kaunians came, we of Kuusamo were here …” she said, and her fellow mages—all of them but Fernao—recited the ritual phrases, the phrases that moved them toward readiness for conjuration, along with her.

  He has to feel very much alone, a foreigner, a stranger, whenever he listens to us, she thought. / know I would if I were in Lagoas, say, and mages, just brusquely started to enchant without preparing first.

  But then such small thoughts slipped out of her mind, driven from it when she focused like a burning glass on what lay ahead. She took a deep breath to steady herself, let it out, and said, “I begin.”

  Every time she used the spell, it became sharper, more powerful. All the theoretical sorcerers tinkered with it between experiments. One couplet, one sorcerous pass, at a time, it grew closer to what it had to be. Had she seen this version a year before, it would have astounded her. She couldn’t help wondering how much further they had to go.

  If we come as far in the next year as we have in this past one, I’ll be able to shatter the world like a dropped egg without even lifting a finger. She knew that was an exaggeration, but maybe it wasn’t an enormous one. By the nature of things, spells that exploited the inverted unity she’d helped discover at the heart of the laws of similarity and contagion had the potential to release far more sorcerous energy than cantrips based on one or the other of the so-called Two Laws.

  How close mortal mages could come to tapping that potential was one question. Another, more urgent question was how much attention she could give to such irrelevant quibbles before making a hash of the spell she was casting now and endangering herself and everybody in the blockhouse with her. She didn’t like remembering Fernao had had to save her from the consequences of dropping a line in one of thes
e spells.

  Which is why practical mages make jokes about what happens when theoretical sorcerers go into the laboratory, Pekka thought. Too much of their kidding wasn’t kidding at all, but sober truth.

  But then even embarrassment and worry fell away as she lost herself in the intricacies of the spell she was casting. Getting the words precisely right; making sure the passes matched and reinforced them; feeling the power build as verse after verse, pass after pass, fell into place … It was almost like feeling pleasure build when she made love. And then she made that thought fall away, too—not without regret, but she did it.

  Power built, and built, and built—and then, as she cried, “Let it be released!”, it was released. She felt the secondary sorcerers take hold of what she’d brought into being, felt them hurl it forth to the banks of animal cages set far from the blockhouse, and felt it kindle there.

  And then she needed no occult senses to feel it, for the ground shuddered beneath her feet. A great roar rumbled thought the air. She knew that, when she and the other mages went to examine the site, they would find another huge crater torn in the frozen ground. The Naantali district was starting to look like the moon as seen through a spyglass. Its wide stretches of worthless land were the main reasons experiments had moved here.

  “Nicely done,” Fernao said. “Very nicely done. When we measure the crater, we will be able to calculate the actual energy release and see how close it comes to what the sorcerous equations predicted. My guess is, the discrepancies will not be large. It had the right feel to it.”

  Pekka nodded—wearily, now that the spell was done. “I think you are right,” she replied, also in classical Kaunian.

  Ilmarinen said, “And, when we go out to the crater, we can see how much green grass and other out-of-season bits and pieces we find at the bottom of it.”

  Pekka grimaced. So did Fernao. The spells they were working with twisted time, among other things. The equations made that very clear. Ilmarinen, ever the radical, kept insisting the twist could be exploited for itself, not just for the energy it released. The unanimous opinion of the rest of the theoretical sorcerers was that the energy release came first.