Out of the Darkness d-6

by Harry Turtledove

  Balazs’ smile was far smoother than that of the wounded captain. “How do you know this?” he asked. “Again, did they tell you? Did they, perhaps, make a point of telling you?”

  “How else could it have been?” Istvan said. “There was just the island, and us watching what happened to it.” He shuddered at the memory of the fire, and of the clouds of steam rising from the tormented sea.

  “They could have had mages in the bowels of the very ship you rode, casting these fearsome spells,” the Eye and Ear said. “Or, for that matter, what they said was destruction could have been nothing but illusion. Either of those is easier to believe than that they really have these powers they claim.”

  He doesn‘t believe because he doesn‘t want to believe, and because he didn‘t see with his own eyes, Istvan thought. He said, “Sir, anybody who’s fought the slanteyes-or who’s been in one of their captives’ camps-knows they’re stronger mages than we are. By the stars, they really did this thing.”

  “So speaks a sergeant from back in the Ilszung Mountains,” Balazs said. “Do you claim to know everything of what is possible and what is not when it comes to sorcery?”

  “No, sir,” Istvan answered. “All I claim is, I know what happened right in front of my own eyes. If you don’t believe me-if none of you people believe the captives the Kuusamans set free-our land will be sorry on account of it.”

  “You should know, Sergeant,” Balazs said, his voice growing cold, “that the laws against treasonous talk and defeatism have been tightened up lately, as they should have been. You would be wise to have a care in what you say.”

  Captain Petofi spoke up: “And you, wretch, you would be wise to listen to the underofficer. He spoke with a warrior’s courage, telling nothing but the truth, and you mock him and scorn him and answer him with threats. By the stars, with goatheads like you set over us, it’s no wonder we’re losing the war.”

  Like most Gyongyosian men, Balazs let his shaggy, tawny beard grow high on his cheeks. It didn’t grow high enough to hide his flush of anger, though. “You have no business talking to me that way, Captain. I tell you what Ekrekek Arpad has told the land: we shall win this fight against the stars-detested savages of Kuusamo. If the Ekrekek of Gyongyos says a thing is so, how can a couple of ragged captives say otherwise?”

  Istvan gulped. If Arpad said something was so, then it was bound to be so. Everything he’d ever learned proclaimed the truth of that. The stars spoke to Arpad, and Arpad spoke to Gyongyos. So it had ever been; so it would ever be.

  But Petofi said, “If Ekrekek Arpad had been on that Kuusaman cruiser, he would have known the truth, the same as we did. And if we’re winning the war, how did the slanteyes ravage an island that used to belong to us?”

  “I give you one last warning, Captain,” the Ekrekek’s Eye and Ear said. “We have places where we send defeatists, to keep them out of the way so their cowardice can’t infect the true warriors of Gyongyos.”

  Petofi bowed. “By all means, send me to one of those places. The company and the wit are bound to be better there than here.”

  “You’ll get your wish,” Balazs promised. He rounded on Istvan. “What about you, Sergeant? I trust you have better sense?”

  That could only mean, Say what I want you to say, and things will go easy for you. Istvan gulped again. I just got out of a captives’ camp, he thought with something not far from despair. Petofi eyed him without saying a word. Sell yourself, wretch, his eyes seemed to say. Sighing, Istvan said, “How can you ask me to lie when the stars looking down on me know I tell the truth?”

  “Another fool, eh?” Balazs scribbled a note on a leaf of paper in front of him. “Well, I already told you-we have places for fools.”

  Ilmarinen was not a hunter. He had no qualms about eating game or meat. He just saw no sport in killing beasts. Men were supposed to be smarter than animals, so where was the contest? (The way men had behaved during the Derlavaian War did make him wonder about his assumption, but he’d still never heard of a deer or a wolf picking up a stick and blazing back at a hunter.) Still and all, though, one hunting phrase he’d heard stuck in his mind: in at the death. With Trapani fallen, he wanted to be in at the death of Algarve.

  If that meant leaving Torgavi, he wasn’t altogether sorry to go. He hadn’t had much fun there anyhow, not since the Unkerlanters figured out he was a mage and ordered him to stay on his own kingdom’s side of the Albi. He went instead to Scansano, where Mainardo, once King of Jelgava and now King of Algarve, headed what passed for his kingdom’s government these days.

  Kuusaman and Lagoan soldiers-and a few Jelgavans-patrolled the streets of Scansano these days. Mainardo had ordered the Algarvian soldiers fighting in the northeast of his kingdom to lay down their sticks even before his brother, King Mezentio, died in the fall of Trapani. All that was left now was for Mainardo to order all the Algarvians still fighting to do the same.

  Mainardo reigned not from a palace, not even from the local count’s mansion, but from a hostel, as if to underscore how temporary his power was likely to prove. Ilmarinen managed to arrange a room in the very same hostel for himself.

  “How did you do that?” a Kuusaman news-sheet writer asked him at a tavern across the street. “They told me they were full up.”

  “It wasn’t hard,” the mage answered. “I bribed them.”

  “That really worked?” The writer’s narrow eyes widened. “I know they say Algarvians are like that, but I didn’t believe it.”

  “Believe it,” Ilmarinen said. “It’s true.” He laughed at the look on the news-sheet writer’s face. Kuusamans were straightforward in their dealings with one another. When they said aye or nay, they commonly meant it. Offer one of Ilmarinen’s countrymen a little money on the side to change his mind about something, and he was much more likely to shout for a constable. Algarvians weren’t like that. They used bribes the same way mechanics used grease.

  “Will the surrender come today?” the writer asked. “That’s what everybody is saying, anyhow.”

  “I’ll tell you how you’ll know,” Ilmarinen answered. The writer leaned toward him. He said, “When there’s a ley-line caravan from out of the west, then you’ll know it’s really over.”

  “Out of the west?” Now the young news-sheet writer looked confused.

  Ilmarinen wondered how the fellow was allowed to run around without a nursemaid. As gently as he could, he spelled things out: “Mainardo has to surrender to the Unkerlanters, too, you know.”

  “Oh. Aye.” The writer thought. “Do you suppose they’ll send Marshal What’s-his-name to the ceremony?”

  “Marshal Rathar,” Ilmarinen said, holding on to his patience with both hands. The news-sheet scribbler gave him a bright nod. The name meant hardly more to him than that of some half-forgotten Kaunian Emperor. Unkerlant might have been-much of Unkerlant was-on the other side of the world as far as most Kuusamans were concerned. “He does have business here,” Ilmarinen pointed out.

  “I suppose so.” The writer sounded magnanimous in agreeing to that much. With further magnanimity, he said, “They did do some of the fighting, too.”

  “Some?” Ilmarinen choked on his wine. He had a notion of what Swemmel’s kingdom had paid first to halt the Algarvians short of Cottbus and then to drive them back-a small notion, a foreigner’s notion, a notion he was sure was ludicrously inadequate. Unkerlant had beaten the Algarvians, aye. How many years-how many generations-would she take to recover from her triumph? “Son, they did more of it than the Lagoans and us put together. Three times as much, easily.”

  The writer stared at him. “You’re joking.”

  Ilmarinen’s patience dropped and broke. “And you’re an idiot,” he snapped. “Do they really let you run loose without diapers? How do you keep from making messes on the floor?”

  “Who do you think you are?” the news-sheet writer said indignantly.

  “Someone who knows what he’s talking about,” Ilmarinen answered. “Obviously
something you’ve never had to worry about.” He finished his wine and stalked out.

  As he’d predicted, Marshal Rathar’s ley-line caravan came in the next morning. The caravan had had to pass through a few regions where the Algarvians were still supposed to be fighting. It wasn’t scratched. That, to Ilmarinen, was a telling sign that the war, at least here in the east of Derlavai, had almost come to an end.

  When Rathar descended from the caravan car, Ilmarinen contrived to be in the first rank of those waiting to greet him. He would, he thought, have used sorcery if he’d had to, but it hadn’t proved necessary. His colonel’s emblems, his mage’s badge, and a few judicious elbows did the trick.

  Rathar turned out to be younger than he’d expected. And, also to his surprise, the Marshal of Unkerlant paused and pointed to him. “You are the mage Ilmarinen, is it not so?” Rathar asked in Algarvian. Classical Kaunian wasn’t widely taught in his kingdom, and he must have known Ilmarinen wouldn’t speak his language.

  “That’s right,” Ilmarinen answered in the same language as officers and dignitaries stared at him. “What can I do for you, sir?”

  “What does Kuusamo do in the Bothnian Ocean?” Rathar asked.

  “Fight the Gongs,” Ilmarinen answered. “Fish. Things like that. What anyone else does in an ocean.”

  Rathar shook his head. He looked like a dissatisfied bear. “That is not what I meant. What magic does Kuusamo do in the Bothnian Ocean?”

  “None that anyone’s told me about,” Ilmarinen said, which had the virtue of being technically true. He had some ideas about the sorts of things his colleagues back in the Naantali district of Kuusamo might be doing, but he couldn’t prove them. He hadn’t heard much from those colleagues since leaving to fight-which made sense, for if captured he couldn’t tell what he didn’t know.

  “I do not believe you,” the Unkerlanter marshal said. Ilmarinen shrugged. So did Rathar. His shoulders were twice as wide as Ilmarinen’s. One of the junior officers accompanying him, a man with bodyguard written all over him, tapped Rathar on the shoulder. Rathar nodded impatiently. Flanked by his entourage, he walked on.

  The surrender ceremony took place that afternoon in the hostel’s dining room, the only chamber big enough to hold even a respectable fraction of all the people who wanted to be there. King Mainardo sat behind a table at one end of the room. A couple of Algarvian officers stood at his right and left hands, both of them looking extraordinarily glum. Grand General Nortamo of Kuusamo, Marshal Araujo of Lagoas, and Marshal Rathar of Unkerlant faced him. Their entourages crowded behind them. Ilmarinen stood among Nortamo’s followers, and had to go up on tiptoe to see over some of them.

  Along with the soldiers of the three kingdoms that had done the bulk of the work in beating Algarve were smaller contingents from Valmiera and Jelgava and Sibiu. And Rathar had a man in Forthwegian uniform in his party. Ilmarinen looked to see if he also had a Yaninan in tow. He didn’t.

  Nortamo spoke in Algarvian: “The Derlavaian War has gone on too long and cost too much. The allied kingdoms have prepared the instrument of surrender I hold for Algarve. Having caused so much torment for all surrounding kingdoms, having lost her own king in the fight, Algarve now acknowledges defeat and accepts responsibility for the consequences of her own dark deeds.” He walked over to Mainardo and set the surrender document in front of him.

  “May I speak before I sign this paper?” the new King of Algarve asked.

  “Say what you will,” Nortamo replied. “You must know, though, that it will not change the terms, which are no less than your complete and unconditional surrender.”

  “Oh, aye, I know that,” Mainardo answered. Mezentio had been a fiery leader. His younger brother only seemed tired. With a nod, Mainardo said, “I cannot help but recognize that we are beaten. It is a truth. It is plain to all. But I say to you all that our courage, our sacrifice, our suffering, shall not be in vain. You may defeat us, but we shall rise again one day.” He inked a pen, signed the surrender, and handed it back to the Kuusaman commander.

  Nortamo also signed it. He gave it to Marshal Araujo. After the Lagoan leader affixed his signature, he ceremoniously carried it to the table at which Marshal Rathar was sitting.

  “I thank you,” Rathar said. “On behalf of my sovereign, I too have a word to say. Algarve did its best to murder Unkerlant. It is not sorry it fought this war. It is only sorry it lost.” In that, Ilmarinen judged, he was absolutely right. Rathar continued, “We intend to make Algarve sorry for a long, long time.”

  He wrote his name, then called up the Forthwegian officer with him to add another signature. That done, he passed the document on to the minor kingdoms of the east-not that Valmiera would have reckoned itself such before the war began. At last, everyone had signed the surrender.

  Nortamo spoke to the Algarvian officers: “You gentlemen will be so kind as to give up your swords. You are now war captives.”

  Looking daggers at him, the officers obeyed. King Mainardo said, “What of me?”

  “For the moment, you are king of however much of Algarve we decide to let you rule,” the Kuusaman commander replied. “You would be wise to hope you continue in this role, even if you reckon it less than exalted. King Donalitu has already submitted a request for your extradition to Jelgava.”

  Ilmarinen happened to know that Donalitu had demanded-loudly demanded-Mainardo’s extradition to Jelgava. As far as Ilmarinen could tell, Donalitu had never in all his days done anything so demeaning as submitting a request.

  Marshal Rathar said, “King Swemmel also has a claim on your person, you to represent King Mezentio and receive punishment for all Algarve did to Unkerlant.”

  Now there’s an interesting choice, Ilmarinen thought. If I had to go to either Donalitu or Swemmel, whom would I pick? The Kuusaman mage shook his head. Choices like that made suicide look downright attractive.

  Mainardo might have had more complaints or protests. If he did, hearing he was sought as a guest-in a manner of speaking-by both Jelgava and Unkerlant shut him up in a hurry. Marshal Araujo of Lagoas held up the instrument of surrender and said, “Let us all, on both sides, praise the powers above. The war in the east of Derlavai is over.”

  Ilmarinen would have praised the powers above more if they’d never let the Derlavaian War start in the first place. But no one had asked his opinion there, and he had to admit that a finished war was better than one still going on. Well, a half-finished war, anyhow, he thought, and looked east, in the direction of Gyongyos. Then he looked west. The Gongs were closer in that direction, even if it wasn’t the one by which Kuusamo got at them.

  Talsu was amazed at how readily he adjusted to a new round of life as a captive. Bad food and not enough of it, occasional beatings, interrogations that went nowhere-indeed, that seemed pointless-he’d been through them all before. He didn’t enjoy any of them. But they didn’t come as a shock this time, the way they had during his first stretch of time in a dungeon. The questions were somewhat different. The answers the interrogators-including his old unfriend, the major-wanted from him weren’t the same, either. All the principles behind them remained identical.

  He had just been out in the yard-the most precious hour of a captive’s day, when he was reminded that fresh air and sunshine and birds and trees still existed-and was then, as usual, marched back to his cell. The gloom and the stink and the cold hard stone all around were doubly hard to bear after blue sky and bright sun and the scent of something growing. Talsu lay down on his pallet. Something was growing in the straw, too: mildew. As a tailor’s son would, he knew the musty odor only too well. He also knew better than to complain. If he did, he would sleep on stone.

  With a squeal of hinges, the door flew open. Alarm blazed through him. Whenever guards came in when they weren’t supposed to, trouble was on the way. He’d learned that lesson when he’d been locked away at Algarvian orders. Having King Donalitu in charge hadn’t changed things a bit.

  “Come with us,” one of
the guards growled. Two others pointed sticks at Talsu, to make sure he wouldn’t suddenly leap on them and pound them all into the ground. Being thought more dangerous than he really was had seemed flattering the first time it happened. Now it just struck him as absurd.

  If he didn’t get up, they would beat him and drag him. He knew that. As he rose, he couldn’t help asking, “What is it this time?” Sometimes they gave him a hint about which way the questioning would go.

  Sometimes-but not today. “Shut up,” one of them told him. “Come along,” a second added. “You stinking son of a whore,” the third one said.

  Had they let him bathe, he wouldn’t have stunk. He didn’t say anything of the sort. They seemed in an evil temper, even for guards in a dungeon. He hoped that didn’t mean another beating was coming. The bruises from his last one were only just starting to go from purple to yellow.

  They frogmarched him down the corridor, up a flight of stairs, and into an interrogation chamber. There waiting for him sat the major who’d been a captain when in Algarvian service. The major was a professional. He did his job without mercy, but also without malice: Talsu had seen as much. That made the look of fury on his face all the more frightening.

  “You stinking son of a whore,” he said, and Talsu’s testicles tried to crawl up into his belly. Whatever was coming, for whatever reason it was coming, would be very bad. He didn’t know why, but he did know that why often didn’t matter. They had him. They could do as they pleased with him.

  “Sir, do we really have to do this?” a guard asked, and all hope within Talsu died. If it worried the guards, it would be dreadful indeed.

  “Aye, we do, powers below eat him,” the major replied. He yanked open a desk drawer and pulled out the clothes Talsu had been wearing when he was arrested and the contents of his pockets. Glaring at Talsu, he demanded, “Are these goods yours? Is this everything you had in your possession when you were taken into the custody of King Donalitu’s security personnel?”