Darkness Descending

by Harry Turtledove

  He couldn’t see much of Vanai’s face: she still kept the hood pulled forward.

  But the way she sat told him she was anything but entranced with the music. He sighed. He wanted her to enjoy what he enjoyed.

  The first several songs the band played were old favorites. One of them, King Plegmund’s Quickstep, went back four hundred years, back to the days when Forthweg was mightier than either Unkerlant or Algarve. Hearing it made Ealstan proud and worried at the same time: this was the Plegmund after whom the Algarvians had named their puppet brigade. Now Ealstan didn’t want to know what Vanai was thinking.

  But after the Quickstep was done, Ethelhelm grinned and called, “Enough of the stuff they put your granddad to sleep with. Do you want to hear something new now?”

  “Aye!” This time, the crowd roared even louder than it had when asking the band to begin. Again, though, Vanai sat on her hands.

  She stayed indifferent through the first couple of new tunes, even though they were the ones that had put the band on the map. But then, as Ethelhelm flailed away at his drums, his voice went low and raspy as he broke into a brand-new song, one so new Ealstan had never heard it before:

  “Doesn’t matter, the color of your hair.

  Doesn’t matter, the kind of clothes you wear.

  Doesn’t matter--believe me, they don’t care.

  They’re gonna grab you, and they’ll send you over there.”

  The beat was strong and insistent, about as close to a Kaunian style as Forthwegian music came. People who wanted to could lose themselves in that beat and pay no attention to the words Ethelhelm was singing. Ealstan almost did, but only almost. And Vanai... Vanai leaned forward as if drawn by a lodestone.

  She turned to Ealstan. “He can’t say that!” she exclaimed. “What’s going to happen to him if he says things like that? Doesn’t he think the Algarvians are listening? Doesn’t he think some of the people in here will tell them every word he sings? He’s mad!” But she was smiling. For the first time in the performance, she was smiling. “He’s mad, aye, but, oh, he’s brave.”

  “I hadn’t thought of it like that,” Ealstan said. But then, he wasn’t a Kaunian or even part Kaunian. To Vanai, a song that said whether you were blond or dark didn’t matter had to hit with the force of a bursting egg. And such a song had to hit hard in Eoforwic, too: Forthwegians and Kaunians had both rioted against the redheads here.

  When the song ended, Vanai cheered louder than anyone though she stayed careful of her hood. She turned and gave Ealstan a quick kiss, saying, “You were right after all. I’m very glad I came.”

  Setubal felt different from the way it had during Cornelu’s last time of exile there. Then Lagoas had been at war with Algarve, aye, but hadn’t seemed to take the fight seriously. Her navy and the Strait of Valmiera protected her from invasion, and she’d been looking east as well as toward Sibiu and the mainland of Derlavai, fearful lest Kuusamo spring on her back if she committed herself to the fight against Mezentio. It had been enough to drive Cornelu and his fellow Sibian refugees wild.

  No more. If Lagoas didn’t have an army fighting on the mainland, she did have one fighting in the land of the Ice People. And she and Kuusamo were assuredly on the same side now--and what had happened to Yliharma made everyone in Setubal shudder. The Algarvians could have attacked the capital of Lagoas instead. For that matter, they could attack Setubal yet. Maybe they were just pausing to gather more Kaunians to kill.

  “It is good to see the Lagoans worried,” Cornelu said to Vasiliu, another exile, as they sat together in the barracks assigned to Sibian naval men who’d managed to escape their kingdom.

  “It is always good to see Lagoans worried,” his countryman answered. They both chuckled, neither with much humor. Lagoas had stayed neutral in the Derlavaian War till the Algarvians overran Sibiu. That rankled. And, though Lagoas and Sibiu had fought on the same side in the Six Years’ War, they were old enemies and rivals, being too much alike to make good friends. Lagoas, however, had for the past couple of hundred years been bigger and stronger.

  “To be just, we should be worried here, too,” Cornelu said. “If these Algarvians unleash their sorcery against Setubal, do you think it will spare us because we were born in Sibiu?”

  “Nothing Mezentio does is meant to spare Sibians,” Vasiliu snarled. Like Cornelu, like most from the five islands off the southern coast of Algarve, he had a long, dour face, a face on which anger and worry fit more readily than good cheer. He was scowling now. “What I wonder is whether the happy-go-lucky Lagoans are doing anything to stop Mezentio from serving them as he served Yliharma.”

  “I wonder if they can do anything--short of slaughtering people, I mean,” Cornelu said. “And if they start slaughtering people, how are they different from Mezentio’s cursed mages?”

  “How? I’ll tell you how, by the powers above: they’re on our side,” Vasiliu answered. “Swemmel won’t let the Algarvians kick him without kicking back. Why should anyone else?”

  “We’ll all be monsters by the time this war ends, if it ever does.” Cornelu rose from his cot. With training that had been enforced with switches during his cadet days, he smoothed the blanket so no one could see the wrinkles his backside had made. “And the Lagoans won’t kill Kaunians like Mezentio, and they won’t kill their own like Swemmel. So what does that leave them?”

  “A kingdom in trouble,” Vasiliu said at once.

  Cornelu paced back and forth, back and forth. “They ought to be able to do something? he said, though he knew that wasn’t necessarily so: sometimes--too often--there was no help for a situation. The image of Costache burned through his mind. He wondered which of the Algarvian officers quartered on her she was sleeping with. He wondered if she was sleeping with all of them. He wondered if he would have to greet a bastard or two when he came back to Tirgoviste, if he ever did.

  Vasiliu pulled him back to the here-and-now by bluntly asking, “What?”

  “Curse me if I know. I’m no mage,” Cornelu replied. “And if I were a mage with an answer, I’d go to King Vitor, not to you.” He paused. “I knew a Lagoan mage who might give me answers, though, if he’s got any. I brought him back from the land of the Ice People on leviathan-back.”

  “If he doesn’t give you anything you want after that, visiting the austral continent has frozen his heart,” Vasiliu exclaimed. “A ghastly place, by everything I’ve ever heard and read.”

  “What I saw of it doesn’t make me want to argue with you,” Cornelu agreed. “I’ll see if I can hunt up this Fernao.”

  Cornelu remained a puzzle piece that didn’t fit after his long-delayed and unexpected return from Tirgoviste. Till the Lagoans figured out how they were going to try to get him killed next, his time was his own. He sighed as he left the barracks where the Sibian exiles were quartered. Inside, he had his own language, his own countrymen. Outside was another world, one where he didn’t feel he belonged.

  Even the signs were strange. Aye, Lagoan was an Algarvic language like Sibian and Algarvian, but unlike its cousins it had borrowed heavily from both Kaunian and Kuusaman and swallowed most of the declensions and conjugations the other two languages used. That meant Cornelu could pick out words here and there, but had trouble deciphering whole sentences.

  He went up to a constable, waited to be noticed, and asked, “Guild of Mages?” He would have had no trouble putting the question in Algarvian, but that probably would have got him arrested as a spy. Whenever he tried speaking Lagoan, he had to hope he was making himself understood.

  The kilted constable frowned, then brightened. “Oh, the Guild of Mages,” he said. To Cornelu, the Lagoan’s words sounded the same as his own. Evidently, they didn’t to the constable. The fellow launched into a long explanation, of which Cornelu got perhaps one word in five.

  “Slowly!” he said, in more than a little desperation.

  For a wonder, the Lagoan did slow down. In fact, he began speaking as if to an idiot child. No doubt tha
t was patronizing. Cornelu didn’t mind. After two or three repetitions, he learned which caravan line he needed to take to get to the Guild’s headquarters. He bowed his thanks and went off to the corner--three blocks up, one block over, as the constable had said, and said, and said--at which the ley-line caravan would stop.

  More ley lines came together in and around Setubal than anywhere else in the world. That was one reason why Setubal was the commercial capital of the world. But Setubal had been the greatest trading city in the world even back in the days of sailing ships and horse-drawn wains. It boasted a grand harbor, the Mondego River offered communication inland, and the Lagoans were not in the habit of disrupting their kingdom with internecine strife.

  Too bad, Cornelu thought. Sibiu would have been stronger if they were. It was a relief when the caravan car came gliding up; he didn’t have to go on with such gloomy reflections. He stepped up into the car, threw a copper in the fare box--the conductor’s watchful eye made sure he did--and sat down on one of the hard, not particularly comfortable seats.

  Ten minutes later, he got off the caravan car and crossed the street to the Grand Hall of the Lagoan Guild of Mages. It was a splendid white marble building in uncompromising neoclassical style, as were the statues in front of it. Had they and the hall been painted instead of remaining pristine, they might have come straight from the heyday of the Kaunian Empire.

  The splendor inside the Grand Hall proclaimed louder than words that the Guild of Mages had been very successful for a very long time. When Cornelu asked the first mage he saw in what he thought was Lagoan how to find Fernao, the fellow stared at him in incomprehension, then put a return question to him: “Sir, do you speak Kaunian?”

  “Badly,” Cornelu answered. Scholars kept it alive to use among themselves, but he was a navy man and had forgotten most of what he’d learned. Frowning in concentration, he tried to ask the question in the classical tongue.

  He was sure he’d made a hash of the grammar, but the mage didn’t criticize him. Instead, still speaking Kaunian, the Lagoan said, “I think you had better come with me.” Cornelu wasn’t sure he’d got that, but then the fellow turned and gestured, a language more universal even than Kaunian.

  Instead of getting his question answered, Cornelu found himself conducted to a very impressive office with an even more impressive door, at the moment closed. Sitting in front of it, behind a desk wide as a ship’s desk, was a clever-looking man going through papers. He looked up and exchanged words in Lagoan with Cornelu’s guide. The Lagoan mage turned back and spoke in Kaunian: “Sir, this is Brinco, secretary to Grandmaster Pinhiero. He will help you.”

  Cornelu bowed. “My thanks.”

  He’d spoken only a couple of words, but Brinco looked alert. “Sibian?” he asked, and Cornelu nodded. Brinco switched languages, saying, “You will speak Algarvian, then,” and Cornelu nodded again. This time, so did the secretary. “Good. We can talk. I read your tongue, but can’t claim to speak it, and you have trouble with mine. What is it that you want with Fernao?”

  “It does not have to be him, your Excellency--” Cornelu began.

  “I am not an excellency,” Brinco said. “Grandmaster Pinhiero is an Excellency.”

  “However you like,” Cornelu answered. “But Fernao and I have met each other, so I thought I could ask him how you Lagoans will keep Algarve from doing to Setubal what she did to Yliharma.”

  “It is a good question,” Brinco agreed. “But Fernao is not here to answer it; he is with his Majesty’s forces on the austral continent.”

  “Ah,” Cornelu said. “He was there, and came off, and now is back. I pity him. All right, sir, since I have been brought before you, I will ask you the question I would have asked him and hope to learn from your answer.”

  “My answer is, we are doing everything we can, and we think it will help,” Brinco said. “And my further answer is that I have no further answer. I pray you will forgive me, sir, for pointing out that, until my distinguished colleague brought you hither, I had not had the honor of making your acquaintance, even if Fernao did mention you in the report he prepared on his return to Lagoas.”

  “You do not trust me, you mean,” Cornelu said slowly.

  Brinco inclined his head. “It grieves me to say that is exactly what I mean. I intend no disrespect, but I will not put my kingdoms secrets in the hands of those whose trustworthiness I know less well than I might like. Such is life in these troubled times, I fear.”

  By his expression, he half expected Cornelu to take the matter further, perhaps through seconds. But the exiled Sibian officer gave back the same sort of seated bow he had received. “You make good sense, sir,” he said, to Brinco’s obvious relief. “Lagoans have a name among us for loose talk.” Lagoan women had a name for looseness, too--but, after Costache, Cornelu preferred not to dwell on that. He went on, “I am glad to see this name is not altogether deserved.”

  “No, not altogether.” Brinco’s voice was dry. “We do the best we can.”

  “May it be good enough,” Cornelu said. His best back home hadn’t been good enough. Now he was back in the war. For that, at least, he’d been trained.

  Back in Kajaani, Pekka wished she’d never gone north to Yliharma. It wouldn’t have made any difference, of course: the Algarvians would have sorcerously assailed the capital of Kuusamo even if she hadn’t been there to try her experiment. When she thought logically, she understood that. But logic went only so far. She still had the prickles-on-the-back-of-the-neck feeling that King Mezentio’s mages had known what she was doing and timed their attack to foil her.

  “That’s nonsense,” her husband said. “If they’d been after you then, they’d still be after you. They haven’t been, so they weren’t.”

  Leino was calm and logical, excellent traits in a mage--and an excellent mage he was, too, of a far more practical bent than Pekka. Most of the time, his solid good sense would have reassured Pekka, as it was meant to do. Now, though, it irritated her. “I know that,” she snapped. “Up here, I know it.” She tapped her forehead. “Down here, though”--she rubbed her belly--”it’s a different business.”

  Wisely, Leino changed the subject. “When do you think you’ll be ready to run your experiment again?”

  “I don’t know,” she answered. “I just don’t know. I’ll need Siuntio and Ilmarinen to back me up, and powers above only know when they’ll both be able to get down here. And even if they do . . .” Her voice trailed away. She looked unhappy.

  “Things would be better if the fall of the palace up there hadn’t caught Prince Joroinen, wouldn’t they?” Leino asked gently.

  Pekka nodded. That was part of what ate at her, sure enough. “He was the one who really brought us all together,” she said. “He was the one who believed we could do it, and who made other people believe it, too. Without him, our funds are liable to dry up.” She rolled her eyes. “Without him, I’m already starting to have trouble with the distinguished Professor Heikki again.”

  The mage who presided over thaumaturgical studies at Kajaani City College was a specialist in veterinary sorcery. The next new idea she had would be her first. Irked that she couldn’t learn more about the work Pekka was doing, she’d tried to cut off the theoretical sorcerer’s experimental budget. Prince Joroinen had put a stop to that and made Heikki remember for a moment that there was more to being a mage than attending departmental meetings. With him gone, the department head was already starting to reexert her petty authority.

  Before Pekka could say anything more, a crash from the other end of the house sent her and Leino running to see what had made it. They almost ran over their son--Uto was coming their way as fast as they were going his. He barely had the chance to assume his usual look of almost supernatural innocence before his father snapped, “What was that noise?”

  “I don’t know,” he answered, sounding as self-righteous as only a six-year-old could.

  Pekka took up the challenge: “Well, what were you doing in
the kitchen?”

  “Nothing,” Uto replied.

  Leino took him by the shoulder and turned him around, saying, “That’s what you always tell us, and it’s never true. Let’s go have a look.”

  Everything looked fine .. . till Pekka opened the pantry door. Somehow or other, a whole shelf had fallen down there, with all the groceries on it, and made quite a mess. “How did this happen?” she asked in tones of mingled horror and admiration.

  “I don’t know,” Uto repeated in tones like a silver bell.

  “You’ve been climbing again,” Leino said. “You knew what would happen if you went climbing again.”

  Of course, Uto knew. Of course, he’d never thought it would matter. He’d no doubt managed to convince himself he’d never get caught no matter how often he did what he wasn’t supposed to do. Amazing how much like grownups children are some ways, Pekka thought.

  And, now that he had been caught, Uto reacted just as an adult would have. “Don’t do it, Father!” he wailed, recalling all too well the promised punishment. “I’ll be good. I promise I will.”

  “You’ve already promised,” Leino told him. “You broke your promise after you made it. That’s not something Kuusamans should ever do. And so your stuffed leviathan will go up on the mantel for a week.” He started for his son’s bedchamber.

  “No!” Uto howled, and burst into tears. “It’s not fair!”

  “Aye, it is,” Pekka said. “You didn’t keep your word. How can we trust you if you don’t keep your word?”

  Uto was paying no attention to her or to anything but his catastrophic loss. “I can’t sleep without my tiny leviathan under my chin!” he cried. “How can I go to sleep without my leviathan?” He stamped his foot.

  “You’ll have to find out, won’t you?” Pekka said evenly. She dreaded putting him to bed without his special toy, too, but she didn’t want him to see that. “Maybe next time you’ll think a little more before you do something we’ve told you not to.”