Through the Darkness

by Harry Turtledove

  “You have done very well,” Siuntio said. “Even Master Ilmarinen has told me as much.”

  “He has not told me as much,” Fernao said after a bite of smoked salmon. When he chose to show it, he had a wry grin. “Of course, I am only a Lagoan.” He ate some more of the salmon and onion. “You have no idea how much better than roasted—half charred, really—camel hump that is.”

  He was right; Pekka had never tasted camel, and had no great desire to do so. In something else he’d said, though, he might well have been wrong. “We may have a two years’ start on you,” Pekka told him, “but are you sure we have a two years’ start on the Algarvians? I wish I were.”

  Fernao’s grimace suggested he’d taken a bite of camel after all. “No, I am not sure of that,” he admitted. “I have seen no Algarvian journals dating from since Lagoas declared war, and Mezentio’s mages may not be publishing any more than you were.”

  “My belief is that the Algarvians are not traveling quickly down this ley line,” Siuntio said, not for the first time. “They have put so much work into their murderous magic, I think it occupies most of their mages.”

  “That makes good sense,” Fernao said, “but not everything that makes good sense is true.”

  “I am painfully aware of it,” Siuntio said. “Were I not, IImarinen’s work would be plenty to prove the point.”

  “He will be waiting for us at the university, I suppose?” Pekka said.

  “Aye, unless he’s gone off in a fit of pique,” Siuntio answered. Pekka bit her lip. With Ilmarinen, that was anything but impossible. But Siuntio went on, “I do expect to find him there.”

  Fernao ate fast, as if afraid an Algarvian mage might start experimenting while he savored his smoked salmon. Getting up out of his chair was an even more awkward process than sitting down in it. Pekka signed the chit for all three breakfasts. The Seven Princes could afford it.

  She and Siuntio had to help Fernao up into a cab. He sighed, saying, “I have not got used to being a burden to everyone around me.” Pekka and Siuntio both assured him he was nothing of the sort, but he didn’t seem inclined to listen. He sat glumly for some little while as the cab horse clopped through the streets of Yliharma. At last, he remarked, “I had heard the Algarvians struck you a heavy blow, but I had not realized it was as heavy as this.”

  “It could have happened to Setubal, too,” Pekka said.

  “It nearly did,” the Lagoan mage answered. “Mezentio’s men had set up a murder camp across the Strait of Valmiera from our city, but we raided it and freed most of the Kaunian captives there. We keep close watch, lest they try again.”

  Thinking aloud, Pekka said, “If they work out the proper spells, I wonder if they have to be as physically close as they seem to believe. Could they not transmit the force of the magic along a ley line?”

  She sat squeezed rather tightly between Fernao and Siuntio. Both men sent her looks full of consternation. Fernao said, “They started using their magecraft in Unkerlant, where ley lines are few and far between. It may well be, we have the powers above to thank for that.”

  “And what do the sacrificed Kaunians have for which to thank the powers above?” Siuntio asked. Fernao looked as if he’d bitten down on one of the sour citrus fruits Jelgavans used to flavor wine. He made no reply.

  When they reached the sorcerous laboratory the Algarvian attack had almost destroyed, they did find Ilmarinen waiting for them. He tilted his head back so he could look down—or rather, up—his nose at Fernao. “Come to see how it’s done, have you?”

  “Aye,” the Lagoan mage answered equably. “After all, what else am I but a thief?”

  Ilmarinen started to come back with something sharp. Before he could, Siuntio took him aside and spoke to him in a low voice. By the way he suddenly stared at Pekka, she was able to make a good guess as to what Siuntio told him. Ilmarinen said, “That’s a nasty thought, my dear. I’m the one who should have come up with it.”

  Pekka smiled her most charming smile. “I’m sure you would have, Master Ilmarinen, if you hadn’t been too busy fuming about Fernao here.”

  They’d all spoken Kuusaman, but the Lagoan mage caught his name. “What was that?” he asked. Pekka translated for him. He said, “You need not defend me, Mistress; I can take care of myself. And I have spent some time fuming about Master Ilmarinen, too, so he is entitled to fume about me.”

  “Don’t tell me what I’m entitled to,” Ilmarinen snapped; like Siuntio, he could use classical Kaunian not just to get ideas across but almost as if it were his birthspeech.

  “Shall we proceed to the experiment?” Siuntio said. “In every moment we quarrel among ourselves, the Algarvians gain.”

  “Oh, aye, this one will solve everything,” Ilmarinen said. “We’ll have Mezentio hiding under his bed in no time flat.”

  “Maybe we can confirm the actual consequences of the divergent series on the half of the specimens on the negative axis,” Siuntio said.

  “You know what they are,” Ilmarinen said. “You all know what they are. You just don’t want to admit it. Even when you’ve had your noses rubbed in it, you don’t want to believe it. Bloody cowards, the lot of you.”

  “I believe it,” Fernao said. “I want to find out what we can do with it.”

  To Pekka’s surprise, Ilmarinen beamed. “Well, what do you know? Maybe you’re not worthless after all.” The only thing different Fernao had done was agree with him for two sentences. Contemplating that, Pekka had all she could to not to laugh out loud. Aye, in many ways, Ilmarinen and her little son Uto were very much alike.

  Cornelu’s leviathan snapped up a squid. Life of all sorts teemed in the chilly waters of the Narrow Sea. Despite his rubber suit, despite the magecraft that helped ward him, those waters felt unusually chilly today. Maybe that was his imagination. Imagination or not, the Sibian exile wished his Lagoan masters had picked a warmer season of the year to send him forth.

  Whenever the leviathan surfaced, Cornelu looked around warily. In these waters, the Algarvian navy and Algarvian dragonfliers reigned supreme. Sailors and men on dragons who served King Mezentio might well take him for one of their own. He hoped they would, but he intended to do his best to disappear if they didn’t.

  He was particularly careful when he crossed a ley line. Whenever his amulet detected the thin stream of sorcerous energy that formed part of the world grid, he used it to search for nearby ships. He hadn’t found one yet, but that didn’t make him stop looking. If he wanted to get back to Setubal, being careful was a good idea.

  “And I do want to get back to Setubal,” he told his leviathan. The great beast kept on swimming; had it been a man, it would have shrugged. Without a doubt, it was happier out in the open ocean.

  But then, it wasn’t seeing Janira. When he was in Setubal, Cornelu went back to the eatery where she worked every chance he got. He’d taken her to a music hall and to the unicorn races. He’d kissed her—once. Only now that he was going to be away from her for a long time did he realize how smitten he’d become.

  It wasn’t just that he could speak his own language and have her understand. It wasn’t just that he was desperately looking for a woman after Costache’s betrayal. He told himself it wasn’t, anyhow. He hoped it wasn’t.

  With a tap, he urged the leviathan to stand on its flukes, to extend his horizon as it lifted its front end—and him—out of the water. There to the north was the mainland of Derlavai. He knew the little spit of land that stuck out toward him—it lay just west of Lungri, a coastal town in the Duchy of Bari. After the Six Years’ War, Bari had been split off from Algarve and made self-ruling, but it was Algarvian again now. Its return to Algarvian allegiance had touched off the Derlavaian War.

  Cornelu urged the leviathan farther south. He wanted to be sure he gave the headlands of Yanina, which thrust far out into the Narrow Sea, a wide berth. The closer he came to land, the closer he was likely to come to trouble. He didn’t want trouble, not on this journey. He wasn�
�t hunting downed Algarvian dragonfliers, or Algarvian floating fortresses, either. He had a delivery to make. Once he did, he could hurry back to Setubal.

  As he’d hoped he would, he got round the Yaninan headlands before the sun set in the northwest. It stayed above the horizon less every day, an effect magnified by the high southerly latitudes in which he found himself. Farther south, down in the land of the Ice People, it would stop rising at all before long.

  His leviathan slept in catnaps. He wished he could do the same, but no such luck. Long journeys on leviathan back often got longer because the beasts went their own way when the men who rode them slept. Sometimes they carried two riders on long voyages, to make sure that didn’t happen. The Lagoans hadn’t seen fit to give Cornelu a comrade. He wondered what that said about the importance of the mission they’d given him.

  Even more to the point, he wondered what the Unkerlanters would think it said about the importance of the mission the Lagoans had given him. Nothing good, unless he missed his guess. He shrugged. He was following the orders he’d been given. The Unkerlanters were and always had been great ones for following orders. How could they blame him?

  After he woke, the first thing he did was look for the moon. It was setting in the west ahead of him, casting a silvery streak of radiance across the sea. He patted the leviathan. “Have you been swimming this way all the time I’ve been asleep?” he asked it. “I hope you have. It’ll make things easier.”

  The leviathan didn’t answer. It just kept on swimming. That was the purpose for which the powers above had shaped it, and it admirably fulfilled its purpose.

  Not long after the sun rose, he had his first anxious moment. The leviathan came upon a fishing boat flying the redand-white banner of Yanina. It was a sailboat, and used no sorcerous energy, so Cornelu didn’t detect it till he saw it. His mouth tightened. The Algarvians, sneaky whoresons that they were, had invaded Sibiu with a great fleet of sailing ships, and sneaked into his kingdom’s harbors precisely because no one had imagined an assault not based on magecraft.

  But the Yaninans, even though they didn’t use the world’s energy grid, proved to have some sorcery aboard their boat. As soon as they saw him—or, more likely, saw his leviathan—they ran to an egg-tosser at the stern of the fishing boat, swung it toward him, and let fly.

  It wasn’t much of an egg-tosser; the boat wasn’t big enough to carry much of an egg-tosser. The egg the Yaninans lobbed fell far short, bursting about halfway between the boat and Cornelu’s leviathan. They didn’t seem to care—they promptly launched another one at him.

  “All right!” he exclaimed. “I believed you the first time.” He swung the leviathan on a course that steered well clear of the fishing boat. The Yaninans couldn’t possibly have been worrying about Lagoans in these waters. Maybe they feared he was an Unkerlanter. But, for all they knew, he might have been one of their own. They hadn’t tried to find out. They’d just tried to get rid of him. And they’d done it, too.

  Once he’d left them behind, he laughed. They were probably telling themselves what a great bunch of heroes they were. By everything the war had shown, the Yaninans were better at telling themselves they were heroes than at really playing the role.

  Early the next morning, the leviathan brought Cornelu into the Unkerlanter port of Rysum. A ley-line patrol boat and a couple of Unkerlanter leviathans paced him into the harbor. A dragon flew overhead, eggs slung under its belly. He’d told King Swemmel’s men who he was and where he’d come from. They were supposed to know he was coming. Considering the war they were fighting with Algarve, he didn’t suppose he could blame them for suspecting him, but he thought they were carrying those suspicions further than they had to.

  Rysum wasn’t much of a port. None of Unkerlant’s ports on the Narrow Sea was much, not by the standards prevailing farther east. They all iced over several months a year. That kept them from matching their counterparts in Yanina and Algarve, which lay more to the north. Rysum wouldn’t stay clear much longer.

  As soon as Cornelu climbed a rope ladder up onto the pier by which his leviathan rested, a squad of soldiers ran up and aimed sticks at him. “I am your friend, not your enemy!” he said in classical Kaunian—he spoke not a word of Unkerlanter.

  Anywhere in eastern Derlavai—even in Algarve, which slaughtered Kaunians to fuel its sorceries—he would have found someone who understood the old language. Not here; the Unkerlanters, squat and dumpy in their long, baggy tunics, jabbered back and forth in their own guttural tongue.

  He could have spoken to them in Algarvian. He held back, fearing that would get him blazed down on the spot. And then an Unkerlanter officer spoke Algarvian to him: “Do you understand me?”

  “Aye,” he answered in some relief. “I am Commander Cornelu of the Sibian Navy, an exile serving out of Setubal in Lagoas. Are you not expecting me? Why are you all acting like I’m an egg that’s about to burst and fling this place to those hills yonder?” He pointed north and west, toward the low hills that crinkled the horizon there.

  “What do you know of the Mamming Hills?” the Unkerlanter rapped out.

  “Nothing,” Cornelu said. After a moment, he remembered the cinnabar mines in those hills, but he got the idea that changing his answer would not make the officer glowering at him happy. He kept quiet.

  That proved a good idea. The Unkerlanter said, “What have you brought us?”

  “I don’t even know. What I don’t know, I couldn’t have told Mezentio’s men,” Cornelu said. “I did hear the Kuusamans gave it to the Lagoans. The Lagoans gave it to me, and now I am giving it to you.”

  “The Kuusamans, you say?” The Unkerlanter officer brightened; this time, Cornelu had managed to say the right thing. “Aye, that accords with my briefing. We will take it from your leviathan.” He started giving orders to the soldiers in his own language.”

  Cornelu didn’t know what he was saying, but could make a good guess. “They’ll get eaten if they try,” he warned.

  “Then we will kill the leviathan and take it anyhow,” the Unkerlanter answered, as if it were all the same to him—and it probably was.

  It wasn’t all the same to Cornelu. If anything happened to the leviathan, he’d be stuck in southern Unkerlant for the rest of his days. Comparing exile in Setubal to exile in Rysum reminded him of the difference between bad and worse. “Wait!” he exclaimed. “If you let me, I’ll go down there and get it for you myself.”

  “You should have brought it up with you,” the officer said grumpily.

  “You might have thought it was an egg and blazed me,” Cornelu said. “Now will you trust me to do what needs doing?”

  Every line of the Unkerlanter’s body proclaimed that trusting a foreigner—especially a foreigner who spoke Algarvian and looked like an Algarvian—was the last thing he wanted to do. But, his heavy features clotted with suspicion, he gestured toward the rope ladder and said, “All right, go on—do this. But do it with great care, or I am not liable for what will happen to you next.”

  Moving slowly and carefully, Cornelu climbed down the rope ladder. His leviathan swam toward him as he dropped into the cold water. He took the small pack attached to the leviathan’s harness. It was small, aye, but it was heavy; Cornelu had to swim hard to get back to the ladder with it strapped to his back. Climbing up with the added weight wasn’t any fun, either, but he managed.

  He set the oiled-leather pack on the pier. “Move away from it!” the Unkerlanter officer said sharply. Cornelu obeyed. The Unkerlanter spoke in his own language again. One of the soldiers came up and put the pack on his own broad back while the rest covered him. He walked up the pier and onto dry land.

  Once the soldier got off the weathered planks, the officer relaxed a little. He even unbent so far as to ask, “Do you need food for your voyage east?” When Cornelu nodded, the officer barked orders. Another soldier ran off and returned with smoked fish and hard sausage—the sort of fare that wouldn’t suffer much from salt water.


  “My thanks,” Cornelu said, though he already had enough to do well unless the leviathan wandered very badly while he slept. He had fresh water and to spare. Waving in the direction the Unkerlanter with the pack had gone, he asked the officer, “Do you know what’s supposed to be in there?”

  “Of course not,” the fellow replied. “It is not for me to know such things. It is not for the likes of you to know them, either.” The words weren’t too bad, not coming from a military man. The way he said them . . . All at once, Cornelu felt something he’d never imagined he would: a small bit of sympathy for the Algarvians fighting Unkerlant.

  Fifteen

  For the first time since he’d been injured, Fernao forgot the pain of his hurts without distillates of the poppy to help him do it. Work, exciting work, proved an anodyne as effective as drugs. Ever since Grandmaster Pinhiero gave him that first summary of what the Kuusaman mages had done, he’d burned to take part in their experimental program. And now, at last, here he was in Yliharma. Broken leg? Healing arm? He didn’t much care.

  Courteously, Siuntio and Ilmarinen and Pekka kept speaking mostly classical Kaunian among themselves as they set up their rows of rats in cages. Fernao wished he understood Kuusaman, to catch what they said in asides in their language. Like a lot of Lagoans, he hadn’t taken his neighbors to the west seriously enough.

  He also quickly discovered he hadn’t taken Pekka seriously enough. Siuntio and Ilmarinen? Being in the same sorcerous laboratory as the two of them was an honor in itself. But he didn’t take long to notice that they both deferred—Siuntio graciously, Ilmarinen with bluster masking a peculiar, mocking sort of pride—to the younger theoretical sorcerer.

  She said, “In this experiment, we shall align the cages of the related rats in parallel. In the next—”

  “Assuming we live to make the next,” Ilmarinen put in.