Through the Darkness d-3

by Harry Turtledove

  “Aye, that’s the way of it,” Leino agreed. “I hope I didn’t knock right in the middle of an inspiration, the way I have a few times.”

  “No, it wasn’t too bad,” she said. “I’d just written something down, so I have a fair notion of where I ought to be going when I pick up in the morning.” She sighed. “Now I have to hope the ley line I’m traveling actually leads somewhere.”

  “I don’t think you need to worry about that,” Leino said. “If it led anywhere more important, dear Professor Heikki would have to worry about a whole new laboratory wing, not just a chunk of wall.”

  “Don’t say that.” Pekka looked around anxiously, though none of the other students and scholars on the walks was paying any attention to her husband and her. “Anyway, it’s not so much what we’re doing as controlling what we’re doing that’s turning into the biggest problem--aside from the department chairman, of course. And even she wouldn’t be so bad if she’d just leave me alone.”

  “You’ll manage.” Leino sounded more confident than Pekka felt. A fair-sized crowd of people was waiting at the caravan stop. He fell silent. He didn’t worry about spilling secrets quite so much as she did, but he was no blabbermouth.

  Somebody at the stop was waving a news sheet and exclaiming about what a splendid job Kuusaman dragons were doing against the Algarvians down in the land of the Ice People. “There’s good news,” Pekka said.

  “Aye-for now,” Leino replied. “But if we poke the Algarvians down there, what will they do? Send more men across the Narrow Sea, most likely- they can do it easier than we can.” He paused. “Of course, everybody they send to the austral continent is somebody they can’t use against the Unkerlanters, so that might not be so bad after all.”

  “Then again, it might,” Pekka said. “I know Swemmel’s an ally these days, but we’re mad if we fall in love with him. The only reason he’s better than Mezentio is that he wasn’t the one who started slaughtering people to make his magic stronger. But he didn’t wait very long before he started doing it, too, did he?”

  “If he had waited, Cottbus probably would have fallen,” Leino said, and held up a hand before his wife could snap at him. “I know, he’s no great bargain. But we’d be worse off if the Algarvians weren’t fighting him, too, and you can’t tell me that isn’t so.”

  Since Pekka, however much she wished she could, truly couldn’t tell him that, she pointed down the ley line and said, “Here comes the caravan.”

  “I hope we’ll be able to get seats and not have to wait for the next one,” Leino said.

  As things turned out, Pekka got a seat. Her husband stood beside her, hanging onto the overhead rail, till a good many people got out at the downtown stops and not so many came aboard. Then he sat down beside her. They rode together as the caravan glided along the energy line of the world’s grid to their stop. When they got out, they climbed the hill that led up to their house hand in hand.

  Before they got home, they stopped next door to pick up their son from Elimaki. “And how was Uto today?” Pekka asked her sister.

  “Not so bad,” Elimaki answered, which, given Uto, wasn’t the smallest praise she might have offered.

  “Have you heard from Olavin lately?” Leino asked. Elimaki’s banker husband had gone into the service of the Seven Princes, to keep the army’s finances running smoothly.

  “Aye-I got a letter from him in the afternoon post,” Elimaki said. “He’s complaining about the food, and he says they’re trying to work him to death.” She laughed a little. “You know Olavin. If he said everything was fine, I’d think someone had ensorceled him.”

  Pekka took her son’s hand. “Come on, let’s get you home. I’m going to give you a bath after supper.” That produced as many piteous howls and groans and grimaces as she’d expected. Indifferent to all of them, she gave her sister relief from Uto and took charge of him herself.

  “What’s for supper tonight?” Leino asked as they went into the house.

  “I have some nice mutton chops in the rest crate, and a couple of lobsters, too,” Pekka answered. “Which would you rather have? If you’re starving, I can do the chops faster than the lobsters.”

  “Let’s have the mutton chops, then,” Leino said.

  “No, let’s have lobster,” Uto said. “Then I won’t have to have a bath so soon.”

  “Maybe I could use the hot water from the lobsters to bathe you in,” Pekka suggested. Uto fled, squalling in delicious horror. “Mutton chops,” Pekka said to remind herself. She shook her head. If she wasn’t acting like one of the absent-minded mages comics made jokes about, what was she doing?

  She took the lid off the rest crate, which broke the spell that kept the crate’s contents from aging at the same rate as the world around them. In a different way, the crate did some of the same things as her experiments, but it did them undramatically, by conserving sorcerous energy rather than releasing it in bursts. She reached into the crate for the mutton chops, which lay wrapped in butcher paper and string.

  A moment later, she called for her husband. When Leino came into the kitchen, she thrust the package of chops at him. “Here,” she said. “You can throw these in a pan as well as I can. I need to do some calculating.”

  “You’ve had an idea,” Leino said in accusing tones.

  “I certainly have,” Pekka answered. “Now I want to get some notion of whether I’m right or not.”

  “All right,” Leino said. “If you’re not going to worry about whether they come out half done or burnt, I won’t, either. Is there anything else I can do for you?”

  “Aye, there is,” Pekka said. “Keep Uto quiet. I’m going to need to be able to hear myself think.”

  “I’ll try,” Leino said. “I make no guarantees.” Pekka blazed him a look that warned he’d better do his best to offer a guarantee. His grimace said he understood that, even as Pekka understood life-and Uto-could include the unexpected.

  She went into the bedchamber she shared with her husband, took out pen and paper, and began to calculate. She knew the parameters of rest crates well; it wasn’t as if she were stumbling around half in the dark, as she so often was while calculating implications of the still-murky relationship between the laws of similarity and contagion.

  “It could work,” she breathed. “By the powers above, it truly could.” She hadn’t been more than half serious when she gave her husband the chops. By the time he called that they were ready, she’d found most of what she needed to know. The results startled her.

  “You’ve got something,” Leino said as he served up mutton chops and a salad of spinach and scallions. “I can see it on your face.”

  “I do,” Pekka agreed, still sounding surprised. “And I want to kick myself for being such a fool, I didn’t see it before. I want to get on the crystal and talk with Ilmarinen and Siuntio. They might have better notions of where to go with this than I do.”

  “Either be vague or send them a letter,” Leino answered. “You never can tell who’s liable to be listening.”

  “That’s true enough. It’s too true, in fact,” Pekka said. Absently, she added, “These chops are good.” That surprised her almost as much as the possible new use for rest crates had.

  “Thanks.” Leino turned to Uto. “There. Do you see? I wasn’t trying to poison everybody after all. Now eat up.”

  “Did he really say that?” Pekka asked. Leino nodded. Pekka wagged a forefinger at their son. “Don’t say things like that again, or you’ll spend some more time sleeping without your stuffed leviathan.”

  That was a threat to make Uto behave himself, at least for a little while. If only the Algarvians were so easy, Pekka thought. But they weren’t, and wouldn’t be. Despite her new idea, the war was a long way from won. She laughed, not very happily. She needed some more progress on some of the other ideas she’d had before the new one would be worth anything at all.

  As Skarnu buried the egg in the middle of the ley line that ran between the farm on which
he lived and Pavilosta, he wondered where the Valmieran underground had come up with it. “Jelgavan army issue,” he remarked, leaning on his spade for a moment. “How did it get down here from the north?”

  In the darkness, he couldn’t see the expression on Raunu’s face. But what the veteran sergeant said made his feelings plain: “Don’t worry about hows and whys, sir. Somebody got hold of it, somebody else got it to us, and now we’re going to make the redheads’ lives miserable with it.”

  “That’s good enough, all right,” Skarnu agreed. He peered both ways along the ley line. If an unscheduled caravan should come gliding up before he and Raunu had the egg buried, they wouldn’t get a second chance to do the job properly. The same held true if an unexpected Algarvian patrol picked the wrong time to make sure the ley line stayed safe and secure.

  But everything was quiet. Crickets chirped. Somewhere in the distance, an owl hooted. Breathing a little easier, Skarnu started digging again. So did Raunu. Twinkling stars watched them work. There was no moon.

  “Think that’s deep enough?” Skarnu asked after a bit.

  “Aye, should do,” Raunu answered. Grunting, he picked up the egg and lowered it into the hole. “It had better have the proper spell on it, so it’ll burst when a caravan goes over it,” he said. “Otherwise, we’d be doing just as much good hiding a rock down here.”

  “They said it did,” Skarnu reminded him. “Of course, they’ve probably been wrong before.”

  “Huh,” Raunu said: a sound of reproach. “Your lady wouldn’t care to hear you talk like that, and you can’t tell me different.”

  What would Merkela have to say? Probably something on the order of, Shut up and dig. It was good advice, even if it came from Skarnu’s own mind. He shut up and dug. When he and Raunu had filled in the hold and tamped down the dirt, he said, “Now let’s get out of here. We don’t want the Algarvians to find us toting spades back to the farm.”

  “That’d take a bit of explaining, wouldn’t it?” Raunu yawned, there in the darkness. “Getting late for explanations, too.” He shouldered his shovel as if it were a stick and started off toward Merkela’s farm. Skarnu followed.

  They hadn’t gone more than a quarter of a mile before Skarnu heard the soft whoosh of a caravan sliding down the ley line. He turned to Raunu in surprise. “Must be a special. They haven’t got anything scheduled for this time of night.” Had the Algarvians had anything scheduled, he and Raunu would have picked a different time to visit the ley line.

  Before Raunu could answer, the caravan passed over the egg Skarnu and he had buried. The egg released its energy in a short, sharp roar. The rattles and bangs that followed were caravan cars crashing to the ground. Shouts and screams pierced the nighttime quiet.

  Skarnu turned to Raunu. Solemnly, the two Valmieran soldiers who hadn’t given up the fight against Algarve clasped hands. Then they hurried away, moving faster than they had before. King Mezentio’s men would surely flood the area around the ley line with soldiers, both to help the injured on the caravan and to search for the folk who’d planted the egg beneath it.

  When they got back to Merkela’s farm, Raunu went off to sleep in the barn, as he always did. Skarnu went into the farmhouse, barred the door behind him, and climbed the stairs to the bedchamber he shared these days with Merkela. She’d been lying in bed, but she hadn’t been asleep. “Did I hear the egg burst?” she asked, sitting up. “I thought I did.”

  “You were right,” Skarnu said. “It was a special caravan, too-had to be. That means it was probably packed full of Algarvian soldiers. We might have struck them an even better blow than we’d hoped.”

  “Whatever you did to them, it’s less than they deserve.” Merkela’s voice held a purr. She flipped back the blankets that covered her. Beneath them, she was bare. “And so-would you sooner celebrate or sleep?”

  Skarnu had swallowed a yawn as he went up the stairs. Now, around another one, he said, “My sweet, I mean no disrespect when I say I’d sooner sleep. We’ll have to get up with the sun, and there’s always too much work to do.”

  “This is what life is on a farm,” Merkela said. Skarnu didn’t answer. He knew she knew how ignorant he’d been when he first came to the farm. She also knew he’d been an officer, which meant he was a nobleman-which, she would doubtless think, meant he’d never done any work to speak of before he came to the farm. She wasn’t so far wrong, but he didn’t care to be reminded of it.

  He took off his boots, stripped to his drawers, and lay down beside her. The next thing he knew, sure enough, the sun was shining through the window. He dressed again, feeling as if he’d gone to bed only moments before. Bread and honey and a mug of ale sent him out of the house still trying to rub sleep from his eyes. I’ll stumble through the day, he thought, and sleep like a stone tonight.

  Raunu looked worn, too. Seeing that salved Skarnu’s pride. The sergeant wasn’t far from twice his age, but had the endurance of granite. If he showed the strain of the night’s work, Skarnu didn’t need to be ashamed of his own exhaustion.

  “My day to go weeding, too,” Raunu said mournfully.

  “You can tend the livestock, if you’d rather,” Skarnu told him. Minding the cattle and sheep was easier work-or was most days, anyhow.

  But Raunu shook his head. He had a stubborn pride of his own. “I won’t fall over,” he said. With that, he went back to the barn and came out with a hoe. As he had with the shovel, he carried it with a military precision he would have used with a stick. By the determined look on his face, he would have taken argument as insult. Raunu waved him out to the fields and went to get a long staff with a crook for himself.

  As he drove the animals out to the meadow, he shaded his eyes with his free hand and looked over toward Raunu, who bent his back to grub weeds out of the ground. Skarnu sighed. The sergeant would ache tonight. Skarnu would also have ached had he gone weeding today, but he would have got over it faster than his comrade.

  And the animals didn’t look as if they would give him any trouble today. They grazed contentedly, the cows not very far away from the sheep. By all the signs, they’d be content to keep on doing it till Skarnu drove them back into their pens when the sun set. For all they needed him, he could have lain down in the tall, thick grass and caught up on his sleep.

  Then the first two men stumbled out of the woods that marked the border of the meadow.

  They were both Kaunians: they had yellow hair and wore tunics and trousers, though of a cut that hadn’t been stylish in Valmiera since not long after the end of the Six Years’ War. They were also both filthy and unshaven and so scrawny that their old-fashioned clothes hung loosely on them.

  Seeing Skarnu, they hurried toward him, arms outstretched beseechingly. They called out to him, their voices harsh, dry-throated croaks. He stared, clutching the staff, half ready to use it as a weapon, for he understood not a word they said.

  But then, after a moment, he did, or thought he did. They weren’t speaking Valmieran. What came from their mouths was classical Kaunian, though with an accent different from the one he’d learned in school. They’re Kaunians from Forthweg, he realized, and a shiver ran through him.

  He tried to remember the classical tongue, which he’d used little since his schooling stopped. “Repeat yourselves,” he said. “You are from the caravan?”

  “Aye.” Their heads bobbed up and down together. “The caravan.” Then they both started talking at the same time, too fast for Skarnu to follow when they used what was for him a foreign tongue, and one spoken with an intonation he’d hardly ever heard before.

  “Slowly!” he said, proud that he’d remembered the word. He pointed to the taller of them. “You. Talk.” Too late, he realized he’d used the intimate rather than the formal pronoun and verb form. His schoolmaster would have striped his back.

  But the Kaunian from Forthweg didn’t criticize his grammar. Talk he did, though not so slowly as Skarnu would have liked. Out of the corner of his eye, Skarnu saw Raun
u scramble over the fence that kept the livestock out of the crops and trot toward him, the hoe most definitely a weapon now.

  After listening for a bit, Raunu asked, “What’s he saying? I can make out a word here or there, but that’s all.” As a sausage-seller’s son, he’d never had occasion to learn the classical language.

  “I’m only getting about every other word myself,” Skarnu answered. Distracted by the veteran’s question, he didn’t even follow that much for a couple of sentences. But he thought he had the gist. “Unless I’m wrong, the redheads were sending them somewhere so they could kill them to draw their life energy for magic.”

  As he understood bits and pieces of classical Kaunian, so the blonds from Forthweg could follow scraps of Valmieran. “Aye,” they said. One of them drew his thumb across his throat.

  Raunu grunted. “Like they did against Yliharma this past winter, eh?” He nodded. “Sounds likely, powers below eat Mezentio and all his people. Wonder if they aimed to have another go at Kuusamo or hit Setubal in Lagoas.”

  “They would know. I don’t,” Skarnu answered. His gaze met Raunu’s for a moment. They’d done more and better than they could have guessed by wrecking this ley-line caravan. Skarnu remembered the one he’d seen with Merkela not long before the attack on Yliharma, the one with shutters over all the windows. Had it been hauling doomed Kaunians down to the edge of the Strait of Valmiera?

  “Help us,” one of the men from the caravan said. “Feed us.”

  “Hide us,” the other one added.

  Before Skarnu could answer, a man and a woman came out of the woods hand in hand. Seeing their countrymen, they pointed back toward the caravan. “Algarvian soldiers!” the woman exclaimed.

  “Hide us!” the Kaunian man in the meadow said again.

  But, before Skarnu could answer, all the Kaunians from Forthweg began running. They couldn’t stand the idea of being anywhere near King Mezentio’s soldiers. “Stop!” Skarnu and Raunu called after them, but they wouldn’t stop. And, when three more blonds burst out of the woods, they pelted past Skarnu and Raunu, too.