Rulers of the Darkness d-4

by Harry Turtledove

  "Since they are here in my kingdom, King Shazli's kingdom, they are no concern of yours," Hajjaj said: the position Zuwayza had held ever since Kaunians from Forthweg began sailing to her eastern shore. "And I have repeatedly ordered them to stay here in Zuwayza and under no circumstances to return to Forthweg."

  "You are the soul of virtue," Balastro said sourly. "You know as well as I, your Excellency, that any order you have to give repeatedly is an order that is not working."

  "Would you rather I gave no such order at all?" Hajjaj returned.

  "I would rather that you put some teeth in the order you have given," Balastro said. "String up a few blonds and the rest will get the point."

  "I shall consider it." Hajjaj wondered if he would have to do more than consider it. If the Algarvian minister insisted boisterously enough, he might have to follow through.

  Balastro grunted. "That's more than I thought I'd get out of you. You're a stubborn old crow, Hajjaj- you know that?"

  "Why, no, your Excellency." Hajjaj's eyes widened in almost convincing surprise. "I had no idea."

  "Prevaricating old porcupine, too," Balastro said. "Your father was a tortoise and your mother was a thornbush."

  "Have you got any more compliments to pay me, or are we through till the next session of teeth-pulling?" Hajjaj asked, but less gruffly than he would have liked- on the whole, he took Balastro's words for compliment rather than insult.

  "Not quite through," the Algarvian minister answered. "My military attachй has asked me to ask you if Zuwayza can do without a good many of the behemoths and dragons we've sent you over the past couple of years."

  "I am not the one to respond to questions on matters military," Hajjaj said, trying to hide the alarm he couldn't help feeling. "If your attachй does not care to do so himself, I shall raise the issue with General Ikhshid and pass on to you his reply." Assuming he doesn't have an apoplexy and fall down frothing on the floor. "May I tell him why you would consider withdrawing this aid?" You can't be that angry about our harboring the Kaunians… can you?

  "I'm no soldier, either," Balastro said, "but what it amounts to is this: we aim to force a decision in Unkerlant, and we'll need everything we can scrape together when we do it. We don't aim to lose a fight because we didn't strike a blow with all our strength."

  "I… see," said Hajjaj, who was not altogether sure he did. "Well, would you have me inquire of Ikhshid, or would your attachй sooner do it directly?"

  "If you'd be so kind, I'd be grateful," Balastro answered, suave and smooth as if he'd never called Hajjaj a porcupine in all his born days.

  "As you wish, of course," the Zuwayzi foreign minister said.

  "Good." Balastro heaved himself to his feet, which meant Hajjaj had to rise, too. The Algarvian made his farewells and departed with the air of a man well pleased with himself.

  Hajjaj was pleased to be able to shed the clothes he despised. He was much less pleased when he called Qutuz and said, "Would you be so kind as to inquire of General Ikhshid if he would give me the pleasure of his company for a few minutes as soon as he conveniently can?"

  What that meant in plain language was, Get Ikhshid here this instant. Qutuz, a good secretary, recognized as much. "Of course, your Excellency," he said, and hurried away.

  As Hajjaj had hoped he would, he had General Ikhshid with him when he returned. Ikhshid was not far from Hajjaj's age: a stocky, white-haired soldier who'd served in the Unkerlanter army during the Six Years' War and, rare for a Zuwayzi, had gained captain's rank there. After bows and hand-clasps, Ikhshid spoke with almost Unkerlanter bluntness: "All right, what's gone and got buggered up now?"

  "Nothing yet," Hajjaj said. "Marquis Balastro asked me to inquire of you how the buggering might go forward at some future date." He relayed the Algarvian minister's remarks to the general.

  Ikhshid's shining eyebrows were like signal flags, astonishingly visible against his dark skin. They twitched now, twitched and then descended and came together. "Sounds like they're thinking of staking everything on one throw of the dice. You don't really want to do that, not if you're fighting a war."

  "I wouldn't want to do it no matter what I'm doing," Hajjaj said. "Why would King Mezentio?"

  "Algarvians are better soldiers than Unkerlanters," Ikhshid remarked, not quite responsively. "Put a company of redheads up against a company of Swemmel's men and the Algarvians will come out on top. Put a company of Algarvians against two companies of Unkerlanters and they still might come out on top. Put them up against three…" He shook his head.

  "Ah." Hajjaj inclined his head. "There's always the third Unkerlanter."

  "Aye, there is. There is indeed," Ikhshid agreed. "The Algarvians didn't take Cottbus. They didn't take Sulingen. They don't have that many more chances left. It's not just men, either, your Excellency. It's horses and unicorns and behemoths and dragons, too. Skill counts, or the redheads wouldn't have got as far as they did. But weight counts, too, or they'd've got farther."

  "And so the Algarvians are aiming to put all their weight into whatever blow they choose to strike next," Hajjaj said slowly. "Balastro said as much."

  Ikhshid nodded. "That's how it looks to me, and it'd look that way even if Balastro hadn't said so."

  "Can we afford to let them take dragons and behemoths out of Zuwayza to strike this blow?" the foreign minister asked.

  "That comes down to two questions," Ikhshid answered. "First, can we stop 'em if they choose to do it? I doubt it. And second, of course- when they strike this blow, will it finally go to the heart?"

  "Aye." Hajjaj let out a long, slow sigh. "We have to hope for the best, then." He wondered what the best was, and if, in this cursed war, it even existed.

  Eight

  Fernao found his Kuusaman getting better day by day. More Kuusaman mages had come to the hostel: not just Piilis and Raahe and Alkio, all of whom spoke excellent classical Kaunian, but several others who didn't know so much. Those less fluent newcomers weren't directly involved in the experiments the theoretical sorcerers were making, but were important even so. Their duty was to repel, or at least to weaken, any new assaults Algarvian mages might launch against the experiments.

  "Can you do it?" Fernao asked one of them, a woman named Vihti. "Much force. Many killings."

  "We can try," Vihti answered. "We can fight hard. They are not close. Distance-" She used a word Fernao didn't know.

  "Distance does what?" he asked.

  "At-ten-u-ates," Vihti repeated, as to a child, and then used a synonym: "Weakens. If you had been working in the north of Kuusamo and not down here in the south, the last attack would have done you all in."

  "You need not sound so happy," Fernao said.

  "I am not happy," Vihti said. "I am telling you what is." That was something Kuusamans were in the habit of doing. Vihti went off muttering under her breath, probably about flighty, overimaginative Lagoans.

  When Fernao went out to the blockhouse with Pekka and Ilmarinen and the three newly arrived theoretical sorcerers, he didn't think he was the overimaginative one. The Kuusamans had done things that no one else would have dreamt of for years.

  The blockhouse was new, and stronger than the one the Algarvians had wrecked. But a few of the timbers were charred ones salvaged from the old blockhouse. Pointing to them, Pekka spoke in classical Kaunian: "They help remind us why we continue our work."

  Where nothing else lately seemed to have, that got Ilmarinen's notice. "Aye," he growled with something of the fire he'd had before the Algarvian attack. "Every one of those boards has Siuntio's blood on it."

  "We shall have our revenge." Piilis was a careful man who spoke careful Kaunian. "That is what Siuntio would have wanted."

  Pekka shook her head. "I doubt it. He saw what needed doing against Algarve, but vengeance was never any great part of his style." Her eyes flashed. "I do not care. Regardless of whether he would have wanted me to take revenge, I want it for my own sake. I do not think he would have approved. Again,
I do not care."

  "Aye." Hot eagerness filled Fernao's voice. He believed in vengeance, too, probably more so than any of the Kuusamans. Elaborate revenge was part of the Algarvic tradition Lagoas shared with Sibiu and Algarve herself. Kuusamans were generally calmer and more restrained. Siuntio had been. But calm and restraint, however valuable in peacetime, grew less so after war began.

  Fewer secondary sorcerers had accompanied Fernao and his colleagues to the blockhouse this time. With the coming of spring, the experimental animals shouldn't freeze unless magecraft kept them warm. But the secondary sorcerers still did have to transfer the spell Pekka would recite to the racks of cages that held the rats and rabbits.

  "Remember, we are trying something new this time," Pekka said. "If all goes as planned, most of the sorcerous energy we unleash today will strike at a point well removed from the animals. We have to learn to do this if we are to turn our magecraft into a proper weapon. The Algarvians can do it with their murderous magic. We must be able to match them."

  "And if things don't go quite right, we'll bring it down on our own heads, and that will put paid to this project once for all," Ilmarinen said.

  Oddly, his gloom didn't bother Fernao so much. The master mage had been making cracks like that for as long as Fernao had been in Kuusamo… and undoubtedly for a lot of decades before that. Getting him back to sounding like his sardonic self was if anything an improvement.

  "Are we ready?" Pekka's voice had steel in it, warning that anyone who wasn't ready would face her wrath. She didn't even come up to the top of Fernao's shoulder, but he wouldn't have wanted to have to do that. No one admitted he wasn't ready. Pekka's gaze flicked around the blockhouse. After a sharp, abrupt nod, she quietly recited the ritual sentences with which Kuusamans began any sorcerous operation.

  Raahe and Alkio and Piilis spoke the words with her. So did the secondary sorcerers and Vihti and the other protective mages. And so did Ilmarinen, who had about as little concern for most forms of ritual correctness as any wizard Fernao had ever known. Fernao himself stood mute. Pretending he shared the Kuusamans' belief would have been useless, perhaps even dangerous, hypocrisy.

  No one insisted that he join the recitation. But when it was through, Pekka glanced toward him. "In my class at Kajaani City College, you would have had to say the words," she remarked.

  "We are all learning here," Fernao answered.

  That seemed to please her. She nodded again, more relaxed, less jerky, than she had been. Then, after a couple of deep breaths, she turned to the secondary sorcerers and asked again in Kuusaman if they were ready. Fernao knew a certain amount of pride at understanding the question. He understood the answer, too- they confirmed they were. Pekka inhaled once more, then spoke first in her language and afterwards in classical Kaunian: "I begin."

  And begin she did, with the same quiet authority Fernao had seen again and again in her incanting. She was rougher at her work than a mage who spent day after day refurbishing rest crates would have been at his, but such a mage barely touched the surface of sorcery, while Pekka understood it down to the very roots, down deeper, in fact, than anyone before her had imagined those roots ran. Watching her, listening to her attack the spell, Fernao could have loved her not for who she was but for what she knew, a distinction of a sort he'd never imagined making.

  He felt rather less proud of the spell she was using. All the Kuusamans had joined together in crafting it, and it had the smoothed corners and shapelessness characteristic of a work formed by committee. Even with his imperfect grasp of Kuusaman, he could tell as much from the feel of the air in the blockhouse as she worked. He did not doubt the spell would do what it was designed to do. But it had no elegance to it. Had Siuntio drafted it, it would have been half as long and twice as strong; Fernao was sure of it. He had no proof, though. He would never have proof, not anymore, not with Siuntio dead.

  Force built- not the blood-tasting force the Algarvians had brought down on their heads, but potent nonetheless. Potent enough to confront Mezentio's murder-powered magic? Fernao wouldn't have thought so, not from what was in the air, but he'd seen what this energy release could do. Transferring it from one site to another seemed far easier than finding out how to elicit it had been.

  And then, as matter approached a climax, Pekka made the sort of mistake that could befall any mage working through a long, complex, difficult spell: she dropped a line. Ilmarinen jumped. Piilis exclaimed in horror. Raahe and Alkio seized each other's hands as if they never expected to touch anything else again.

  Fernao knew a certain amount of pride at recognizing the problem as fast as any of the Kuusamans. He also knew the same fear that gripped them: Ilmarinen's joke about bringing the sorcerous energy down on their own heads wasn't funny anymore. When things went wrong at this stage…

  "Counterspells!" Ilmarinen rapped out, and began to chant with sudden harsh urgency. So did Raahe and Alkio, their two voices merging into one. So did Pekka, trying to reverse what she'd unleashed. Dismay still seemed to freeze Piilis.

  Not so Fernao. For a long time, he'd had nothing to do but draft and refine counterspells. Because he wasn't fluent in Kuusaman, he'd been only an emergency backstop, a firewall. The spell he raced through now wasn't in Kuusaman, or even classical Kaunian. It was in Lagoan: his birthspeech, he'd long since decided, would be best for such magic, for he could use it faster and more accurately than any other.

  And he, like the rest of the mages, was incanting for his life now. He knew as much. The sorcerous energies that would have torn a new hole in the landscape were poised now to do the same to the mages who had unleashed them. If the mages couldn't divert those energies, weaken them, spread them fast enough, they wouldn't get a second chance.

  Past, present, and future seemed to stretch very thin- all too fitting for the sort of sorcery they'd been using. Fernao felt an odd rush of memories: from his youth, from his childhood, from what he would have taken oath were his father's and grandfather's childhoods as well- but all recalled or perhaps relived with as much immediacy, as much reality, as his own. And, at the same time (if time had any meaning here), he knew also memories from years he hadn't yet experienced: from himself as an old man; from one of the children he did not at this moment have, also old; and from that child's child.

  He wished he could have held those memories instead of just being aware that he'd had them. All the Kuusaman mages around him were exclaiming in awe and dread as they used their counterspells, so he supposed they were going through the same thing he was. And then, at last, when he thought the chaos in the timestream would cast them adrift in duration- or perhaps cast them out of it altogether- the counterspells began to bite.

  Now suddenly took on meaning again. His consciousness, which had been spread over what felt like a century or more, contracted back to a single sharp point that advanced heartbeat by heartbeat. He remembered things that had happened to him before that point, but nothing more. No, not quite nothing more: he remembered remembering other things, but he could not have said what they were.

  "Well, well," Ilmarinen said. Sweat beaded his face and soaked the armpits of his tunic. Even so, he didn't forget to use classical Kaunian: "Wasn't that interesting, my friends?" He didn't forget his ironic tone, either.

  Pekka, who had been standing while she cast the spell that went awry, slumped down onto a stool and began to weep, her face hidden in her hands. "I could have… us all," she said in a broken voice. Fernao didn't know the Kuusaman verb, but he would have been astonished if it didn't mean killed.

  He limped over to her and put a hand on her shoulder. "It is all right," he said, cursing the classical tongue for not letting him sound colloquial. "We are safe. We can try again. We shall try again."

  "Aye, no harm done," Ilmarinen agreed. "Any spell you live through is a spell you learn something from."

  "Learn what?" Pekka said with a laugh that sounded more like hysterics than mirth. "Not to miss a line at the key moment of the incantation?
I was already supposed to know that, Master Ilmarinen, thank you very kindly."

  Fernao said, "No, I think there is more to learn here than that. Now we know from the inside out what our spell does, or some of what it does. If our next version is not better on account of that, I shall be surprised. The method was drastic, but the lesson is worthwhile."

  "Aye," Ilmarinen repeated. "The Lagoan mage has the right of it." He glanced over at Fernao. "Accidents will happen." Fernao smiled and nodded, as if at a compliment. Ilmarinen glared at him, which was exactly what he wanted.

  ***

  Every time a peasant sneaked into the woods and sought out the battered band of irregulars Garivald was leading these days, he almost wished the newcomer would go away. He'd heard a great many tales of woe, some of them horrible enough to move him close to tears. How could he resist bringing such people into the band? He couldn't. But what if one of them was lying?

  "What do I do?" he asked Obilot. "Let in the wrong man- or woman- and the Grelzers will know everything about us a day later."

  "If we don't get new blood, they won't care about us one way or the other," she answered. "If we didn't take chances, none of us would be irregulars in the first place."

  Garivald grunted. That held an unpleasant amount of truth. But he said, "It's not on your shoulders. It's on my shoulders. And you're one of the people who helped dump it there." He glowered at her with none of the interest, none of the liking- why lie? none of the desire- he usually felt.

  Obilot met the glare with a shrug. "Munderic got killed. Somebody had to lead us. Why not you? Thanks to your songs, people have heard your name. They want to join Garivald the Songmaker's band."

  "But I don't want to lead them!" Garivald said in a sort of whispered scream. "I never wanted to lead anybody. All I ever wanted to do was raise a decent crop and stay drunk through the winter and- lately- make songs. That's all, curse it!"

  "I wanted this and that, too," Obilot said. "The Algarvians made sure I wouldn't have any of that." She'd never said just why she'd joined the irregulars, but she hated the redheads with a passion that made what her male comrades felt toward them seem mere mild distaste by comparison. "And now you can't have the things you always wanted, either. Isn't that one more reason to want to do everything you can to make them suffer?"