Out of the Darkness

by Harry Turtledove

  “What is there?” Pekka asked.

  “I’m going to the war,” Ilmarinen answered. “I’m going to Jelgava, if you want me to be properly precise, and I’m sure you do--you’re like that. If those fornicating Algarvian mages start killing Kaunians and aiming all that sorcerous energy at me, I aim to boot ‘em into the middle of next week. Time to really use all this sorcery we’ve dreamed up. Time to see what it can do, and what more we need to do to fancy it up even more.”

  “But. . .” Pekka floundered. “How will we go on without you?”

  “You’ll do pretty well, I expect,” the master mage said. “And I’ll have a chance to play with my own ideas. Maybe I really will figure out a way to knock the Algarvians into the middle of next week. I still say the potential for that lies at the heart of the experimental work we’ve done.”

  “And I still say you’re out of your mind,” Pekka answered automatically.

  “Of course you do,” Ilmarinen said. “You’re the one who opened this hole in the ice, and now you don’t want to fish in it for fear a leviathan will take hold of your line and pull you under.”

  “Those are the kinds of forces you’re talking about,” Pekka said. “Even if you were right--and you’re not, curse it; you almost killed yourself and took half of Kuusamo with you because you’d miscalculated, if you recall--even if you were right, I tell you, you’d never be able to come up with a usable sorcery. Paradoxes would prevent it.”

  “Whenever a mage says a spell is possible, he’s likely right,” Ilmarinen replied. “Whenever he says a spell is impossible, he’s likely wrong. That’s an old rule I just made up, but it covers the history of pure and applied sorcery over the past hundred and fifty years pretty well, I think.”

  He had a point, though Pekka didn’t intend to admit it. She said, “I think you’re being very foolish. You were talking about second-rank mages, Master. What will you be able to do in Jelgava that any second-rank mage can’t?”

  “I don’t know,” he answered cheerfully. “That’s why I’m going there: to find out. I know everything I can do here and”--he yawned with almost as much theatrical flair as an Algarvian might have--”I’m bored.”

  “That shouldn’t be reason enough to abandon something of which you’re such an important part,” Pekka insisted.

  “Maybe it shouldn’t, but for me it is.” Ilmarinen’s foxy features donned that leer once more. “If I happen to run into your husband while I’m in Jelgava, what shall I tell him?”

  Not a thing! Not a fornicating thing! Pekka wanted to shout. Just before she did, she realized that was the worst thing she could possibly say. With studied indifference, she answered, “Tell him whatever you please. You will anyway.”

  That took the leer off his face. It got her what might have been a respectful glance. “You’re cooler about the whole business than I thought,” Ilmarinen said.

  Pekka, just then, felt anything but cool. Letting him know that, though, didn’t strike her as a good idea. She said, “If you’re bound and determined to do this, powers above keep you safe.”

  “For which I thank you,” Ilmarinen said. “I will miss you, curse me if I won’t. Your heart’s in the right place, I think, even if I can’t imagine what you see in that overgrown Lagoan mage.”

  “He’s not overgrown!” Indignation crackled in Pekka’s voice. “And you’re a fine one to talk. What do you see in Linna the serving girl?”

  “A pretty face and a tight twat,” he answered at once. “I’m a man. Men aren’t supposed to need any more than that, are they? But women, now, women should have better sense, don’t you think?”

  Actually, Pekka did think that, or something like that, anyway. But Ilmarinen was the last person with whom she wanted to talk about it. Instead of talking, she hugged him hard enough to make him wheeze as the air came out of him. Then, for good measure, she kissed him, too. “I still think you’re being a fool, but you’re a fool I’m fond of.”

  “You’re stuck with me a while longer,” he said, “till this accursed weather eases up. But then I’m flying--or more likely sailing--north for the winter.” Off he went down the hallway. Pekka wondered why she’d even tried to change his mind. He was no more inclined to listen to her than she was to pay attention to the advice she got from a clerk at a grocer’s shop. He did what he wanted, and reveled in it.

  If he wants to tell Leino, I’ll kill him, she thought. But that worried her less than it had when he first asked his sardonic question. Had Ilmarinen really intended to blab to her husband if he saw him, he wouldn’t have teased her about it first. She was sure--well, she was pretty sure--of that.

  Still shaking her head in astonishment, she went back to the paperwork. A few minutes later, another knock on the door interrupted her. This time, it was Fernao: tall and redheaded and, but for his eyes, most un-Kuusaman looking. Even the neat ponytail in which he wore his hair shouted that he was a Lagoan.

  But, over the past couple of years, he’d got pretty fluent in Kuusaman. “You’ll never guess what,” he said now. He even had something of a Kajaani accent, which only showed he’d done a lot of talking and listening to Pekka.

  “About Ilmarinen disappearing?” she said, and watched his jaw drop. “He came to me first,” she told him. “How did you find out about it?”

  “He’s in the refectory, pouring down ale and boasting about the wires he pulled to get away,” Fernao answered.

  “That sounds like him,” Pekka said sourly.

  “He’s really off to Jelgava?” Fernao asked.

  “That’s what he says,” Pekka replied. “He has connections with the Seven Princes that go back longer than either one of us has been alive, so I suppose he is. I haven’t seen the paperwork, but he wouldn’t carry on like that without it.”

  “No, he wouldn’t.” Fernao didn’t sound particularly happy. After a moment, he showed Pekka why: “If he goes to Jelgava, if he sees your husband there, will he talk? You Kuusamans are such a straitlaced folk, I fear he might.”

  “We’re no such thing!” Pekka exclaimed. Then, a little sheepishly, she asked, “Is that how Lagoans see us?”

  “A lot of the time, aye,” he said. “You . . . often take such things too seriously.”

  “Do we?” Pekka suddenly remembered fleeing his bedchamber in tears after the first time they’d made love. “Well, maybe we do. But I don’t think Ilmarinen will talk too much to Leino. He’s not an ordinary Kuusaman, you know.”

  “Really?” Fernao’s voice was dry. “I never would have noticed. What did you do, tell him you’d put a lifetime itching spell on his drawers if he ever opened his mouth?”

  Pekka giggled. “It’s a pretty good idea, but no. If I’d threatened him, he would blab to Leino if he ever saw him. He may not see him, of course. He probably won’t, in fact--Jelgava is a good-sized kingdom. But when he teased me about it, I told him to do whatever he wanted, so he won’t feel he has to run off at the mouth.”

  “Good thinking.” Fernao quirked up an eyebrow. “And what do you want to do?”

  “It’s more fun than paperwork,” Pekka said. Realizing a heartbeat too late how imperfect that was as praise, she did her best to show him--and herself-- exactly how much more fun than paperwork it really was.

  A new broadsheet went up all over the Jelgavan town of Skrunda. Talsu read a copy pasted to the front wall of the crowded block of flats where he and his family had moved, exchange of currency, the headline read. Below it, in almost equally large characters, it declared, All coins bearing the impress of the false king, usurper, and vicious tyrant, Mainardo the cursed Algarvian, must be exchanged for those minted under the auspices of his glorious Jelgavan Majesty, Donalitu III, by--the date named was less than two weeks away. The broadsheet continued, Any attempt to pass the monies of the false king and vicious tyrant after the date aforesaid shall be punished with the greatest possible severity. By order of his glorious Jelgavan Majesty, long may he reign.

  Talsu, his wife Gail
isa, his younger sister, and his mother and father shared one room, none too large, and a tiny, cramped, kitchen. Bathroom and toilet were at the end of the hall. That was, Talsu supposed, better than sharing a tent, as they’d done after a Lagoan or Kuusaman dragon raid burned down Traku’s tailor’s shop and the rooms above it where the family had lived. Still, it did produce its share of friction.

  When Talsu climbed the stairs to the flat, he found his father doing some hand stitching on a pair of trousers before using a spell to extend the stitchery down along the entire length of the hem. Traku set the work down when Talsu came in.

  “Hello, son,” he said in his gravelly voice: he looked--and sounded--more like a bruiser than a tailor. “What’s new in the outside world? I don’t get to see it much.”

  “A new broadsheet went up,” Talsu answered, and explained what was on it.

  From the kitchen, his mother called, “That’s good. That’s very good, by the powers above. If I never see Mainardo’s cursed pointy nose on another piece of silver, I’ll stand up and cheer. The faster we forget the redheads ever conquered us, the happier I’ll be.”

  “I don’t know, Laitsina,” Traku said. “Did you hear what Talsu said they’ll do to you if you make a mistake? We’ll have to sift through all our silver. I don’t want to spend a stretch in the dungeons just because I was careless.”

  “King Donalitu is still King Donalitu,” Talsu said, and he didn’t mean it as praise. “If the redheads had picked one of our nobles instead of Mezentio’s brother, they would have had an easier time getting people to put up with them.”

  “They didn’t care a fart whether we put up with ‘em or not,” Traku said. “They thought they had the world by the short hairs, and that what we thought didn’t matter. What were we? Just a pack of Kaunians. That’s why the arch on the far side of the square isn’t standing any more, even though it had been there since the days of the Kaunian Empire.”

  “That’s right,” Talsu said. “I was taking some clothes across town when the redheads wrecked the old arch. They said it insulted them, because it talked about how the Kaunians of long ago beat the old-time Algarvians.”

  “They did things like that all over Jelgava--all over Valmiera, too.” Traku lowered his voice. “And they did a lot worse to the Kaunians of Forthweg, by what everybody says.”

  Talsu’s sister Ausra came out of the kitchen wearing an apron over her tunic and trousers and said, “What do you want to bet they find some way to cheat us when we turn in the money the Algarvians issued?”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised,” Talsu said.

  “Neither would I,” Traku agreed. “I’m glad we don’t have King Mainardo and the redheads running things any more, but I’d be almost gladder if we didn’t have Donalitu back.”

  That was treason. If anybody besides his family heard it, Traku might end up in a dungeon regardless of whether he exchanged Mainardo’s coins for Donalitu’s. Back before the Algarvians ran Donalitu out of Jelgava, his dungeons had had an evil reputation all over Derlavai. He wasn’t a madman or the next thing to it, as Swemmel of Unkerlant was said to be, but no one loved him.

  Wistfully, Talsu said, “The Kuusamans have seven princes. Maybe they could spare one for us? The Kuusaman soldiers I dealt with when I was with the irregulars were all good people. They didn’t act like they were afraid of their officers, either.”

  “Neither did the redheads, come to that,” Ausra said.

  “No, they didn’t,” Talsu admitted unhappily. “But they had other things wrong with them--starting with thinking everybody who had yellow hair was fair game. Donalitu’s bad. They were worse.”

  Neither his sister nor his father argued with him. Traku said, “They aren’t gone yet, either, the whoresons. They’re still hanging on in the western part of the kingdom. The sooner we’re rid of them forever, the better.”

  “But if they leave, they know the Lagoans and Kuusamans will follow them right into Algarve,” Talsu said.

  Traku grunted. “Good. I wish we’d gone deeper into Algarve, back before we got beat. Then maybe all this never would have happened to us.”

  For a long time, Talsu’s father had blamed him almost personally for Jelgava’s lost war against Algarve. Traku had been too young to fight in the Six Years’ War, and didn’t know what the army--especially the Jelgavan army--was like. Talsu said, “If our officers had been any good, we would have gone deeper. But if our officers were any good, a lot of things about this kingdom would be different.” That was about as much as he cared to say about that, even in the bosom of his family.

  Ausra said, “They’re putting together a new army for the kingdom, now that we have our own king back again. That was the last set of broadsheets, before this one about exchanging Mainardo’s money.”

  “I saw it,” Talsu said. “It won’t be a new army--you wait and see. It’ll be the same old army, with the same old noble officers who don’t know their--” He broke off before using a phrase from that same old army in front of his sister. In spite of having to stop, he’d got out what had been wrong with the Jelgavan army in which he’d served. As in most armies, nobles held almost all officers’ slots. . . and Jelgavan nobles, from King Donalitu on down, were some of the most hidebound, stubborn, backwards-looking men the world had ever seen.

  Gailisa came into the flat then. Talsu was glad to break off and give her a hug and a kiss. She returned them a little absently. She hadn’t been quite the same since her father got killed when Kuusaman and Lagoan dragons dropped eggs on Skrunda about a week before the Algarvians had to clear out of the town for good. Talsu had shown Kuusaman footsoldiers and behemoths an undefended way through the redheads’ lines. He wished he’d done it sooner. Maybe the islanders’ dragons wouldn’t have flown that night.

  His late father-in-law had been a grocer. Gailisa had helped him. These days, she was working for another grocer, one named Pumpru, whose shop had survived. She said, “Do you know about the new money-changing decree?”

  “We were just talking about it a few minutes ago,” Talsu answered. “I saw the broadsheets on my way home from delivering a cloak.”

  “It’s a cheat,” Gailisa said.

  “What? Have they turned out light coins that are supposed to be worth the same as the older, heavier ones?” Talsu asked. “That’s what Mainardo did. Donalitu’s not too proud to steal tricks from an Algarvian, eh?”

  “Close, but not quite,” Gailisa said. “Pumpru took some of Mainardo’s money in to be changed as soon as he saw one of the broadsheets. If King Donalitu told everybody to jump off a roof, he’d do that just as fast--he’s one of those people. But he wasn’t happy when he came back to the store. He wasn’t happy at all.”

  “What’s wrong with the new money?” Traku asked.

  “It is new money.” Gailisa nodded. “If they’d given old silver, weight for weight, that would have been fair. But all the coins Pumpru got are shiny new. And they’re too hard, and they don’t sound right when you ring them on a counter. You don’t have to be a jeweler to figure out there’s not as much silver in them as there’s supposed to be.”

  “And Donalitu puts the difference in his pocket,” Talsu said. Gailisa nodded again. Talsu made as if to pound his head against the wall of the flat. “What a cheap trick! He didn’t waste much time reminding people what he is, did he?”

  “He’s the king, that’s what he is,” Traku said. But he didn’t blindly follow King Donalitu, the way Pumpru the grocer did, for he went on, “And if you get on his wrong side, you’ll find yourself in a nice, cozy dungeon cell, too, so watch what you say.”

  “I will, Father,” Talsu promised. “I’ve already spent more time in a dungeon cell than I ever want to.”

  “But that was for making the Algarvians angry, not the proper king,” Ausra said.

  “Same dungeon,” Talsu replied dryly. “And it wasn’t the redheads running it, either--it was Jelgavans just like you and me. They’d worked for Donalitu before Mainardo
came in. One of them said he’d go back to working for Donalitu if Mainardo ever got thrown out. He meant it.”

  “That’s terrible!” his sister exclaimed.

  “Son of a whore ought to be dragged out of his fornicating dungeon and blazed,” his father growled.

  “Of course he should,” Talsu said. “But what do you want to bet he was right? What do you want to bet he’s still just where he always was, except now he’s making things hot for people who got in bed with the Algarvians instead of for people who wanted us to get our own rightful king back?”

  Slowly, one at a time, Gailisa, Traku, and Ausra nodded. Talsu’s wife said, “Ausra’s right. That is terrible. It isn’t the way the world’s supposed to work.”

  “Do you know what the worst part of all is, though?” Talsu said. This time, his family shook their heads. He went on, “The worst part of all this is, none of you argued with me. No matter how terrible it is, you think it’s pretty likely, too, the same as I do.”

  “It shouldn’t be this way,” Gailisa insisted. But then her courage wilted. “It always seems to be, though--here in Jelgava, anyhow. The people who have a lot keep grabbing more and more.”

  “That’s the story of this kingdom, sure enough,” Traku said. “Always has been, just like you said, Gailisa. Powers below eat me if I think it’ll ever change. And it’s likely the same way everywhere. When Mezentio’s buggers were holding us down, they weren’t shy about grabbing everything they could get their hands on.”

  “From what I saw of the Kuusamans, they’re different,” Talsu said. “Their officers and men seemed to be friends, and the ones with the higher ranks didn’t ride roughshod over the ordinary soldiers. Come to think of it, I even had one regimental commander like that, back when we were still in the war.”

  “What happened to him?” Gailisa asked.

  “Colonel Adomu?” Talsu said. “About what you’d expect--he actually went out to do some real fighting, so he got killed pretty quick. I never knew another officer like him: not in our army, anyhow.” The Algarvians had had a fair number of that stripe, too, but he didn’t care to say so out loud. He didn’t want to praise the redheads, not after everything they’d done.