Vanai was no exception. After she was captured and brought into the Kaunian district, she’d expected something like this to happen sooner or later-probably sooner. And so she’d gone exploring in the block of flats where the redheads had put her. Waiting quietly in her flat for them to come get her and take her away… She shook her head. By the powers above, I’m not going to make it easy for them, she thought.
Exploring had been easier because so many of the flats stood empty. She didn’t like to think about that. But it gave her a lot more choices than she would have had otherwise.
She’d found a good spot in a vacant ground-floor flat: a closet that had a lot more room than it seemed to, and one where a searcher peering in, even with a lamp, wouldn’t be able to spy her. He would have to step all the way into the closet to notice it took an unexpected dogleg. Whoever’d made it that way might have had a hidey-hole in mind.
When the first terrified cries rang out, Vanai knew at once what they meant, what they had to mean. She wasted not an instant. She had to get downstairs and into her hiding place before constables started swarming through the building. If she didn’t, she was ruined. The baby she carried made her awkward and slow, but she forced herself to hurry downstairs anyhow.
More Kaunians, many more, were going up than down. “You fool, it’s death on the streets!” a man said as she pushed past him, moving against the tide.
He was bound to be right, of course. But Vanai wasn’t heading for the streets, though she didn’t say so. She burst out of the stairwell and went down the hallway toward that empty flat at a lumbering trot.
Just outside the open door, panic nearly froze her. What if someone else has found this place, too? It won’t hold two, and I won’t have time to go looking anywhere else.
Almost moaning in terror, she dashed back to the closet. No one cried out in fear even greater than hers, believing her to be one of the hunters rather than the hunted. And no one shouted for her to go away, either. She still had the place to herself.
“Powers above be praised,” she gasped, making herself as comfortable as she could in the little hidden niche.
Only then did another bad thought strike her: if this hiding place was so splendid, why did this flat stand empty? The redheads must have caught whoever had been living here before. Would constables come casually walking in, check the closet, and take her away? She couldn’t run, not any more. It was too late for that.
Footsteps in the hallway and loud Algarvian voices said she had indeed made her choice. Now she would have to live-or die-with it. “Miserable blonds,” a man growled, his voice sounding as if it came from right outside the doorway to the flat in which she cowered. “Finding the lousy buggers is getting to be like pulling teeth.”
“We’ve got to do it, though,” another Algarvian answered. He might have been talking about any hard, not particularly pleasant job… till he went on, “The Forthwegians here won’t miss them, anyhow.”
“Well, of course they won’t,” the first constable said, as if his friend were belaboring the obvious. And then that first redhead’s voice came frominside the flat: “Let’s see what we’ve got here.” Vanai shivered. She forced herself to stop-it might make a noise. She tried not even to breathe.
“Not bloody likely we’ll flush anybody out of this place-Kaunians usually like to run upstairs, not hide down low.” The second Algarvian spoke now as the voice of experience.
“I know, I know,” his pal said. “We’ve got to go through the motions, though.” A piece of furniture went over with a crash. The Algarvian grunted. “Nothing there. Let me check this closet here, and then we can go on upstairs, like you said.”
He spoke his last few words just outside the closet where Vanai hid. The baby growing inside her chose that moment to kick. The unexpected motion within her made her want to jump. It made her want to scream. She did neither. She bit down hard on her lower lip and waited in dark, dusty silence.
Then she wanted to scream again; for the silence, while it remained dusty, was no longer so dark. That Algarvian had a lamp, which he used to illuminate as much of the closet as he could from the entrance to it. Just for a moment, light touched the tip of Vanai’s right shoe. She started to jerk it back, but checked herself. Motion and sound could betray her, too.
“Anything?” the second Algarvian asked.
“Doesn’t look like it,” the first one answered. The hateful light receded. “Now we can go on upstairs and get down to business.”
“Right,” his friend said, “Here, I’ll paint a cross on the front door to keep anybody else from wasting his time.” The two sets of footsteps receded.
I’m safe, Vanai thought dizzily. For a little while, I’m safe. Now she could shake. Once she started, she discovered she had a hard time stopping.
And, just because she’d escaped the roundup for the time being didn’t mean the other Kaunians in the block of flats were so lucky. She heard Algarvians hauling them downstairs, heard men cursing and begging, heard women shrieking in despair. Neither curses nor pleas nor shrieks had the slightest effect on the constables, except to annoy them. Then Vanai heard bludgeons striking flesh-which, if they didn’t quiet the curses and pleas, did turn them to shrieks.
“Well, that’s not a bad bag,” one Algarvian said to another in the ground-floor hallway.
“Not too bad, anyhow,” his companion agreed. “How close to quota are we?”
“How should I know?” the first man answered. “You think our officers tell me anything more than they tell you?”
“Fat chance,” the second man said. “Screw ‘em all.”
They’re just doing their job, Vanai thought again. They don’t much like the people who give them the work, but they do it. How can the? I don’t understand. Could anyone understand?
Silence returned. Vanai didn’t dare move. They’d said they were done with this block of flats, but had all of them left? If she came out before they had, she was sure they would be happy enough to scoop her up. How would she know? When could she be sure? She shook her head. She couldn’t be sure. When would she have to take a chance?
She wished she had some way to gauge things inside the closet. She feared her guesses weren’t worth much. It already seemed as if she’d been trapped inside here forever.
She was about to come out and see if she could sneak upstairs when she heard new voices in the hallway. An Algarvian spoke in his own language: “Look at the crosses on the doorways, sir. They’ve already searched this building.”
The fellow who answered did so with aristocratic scorn: “You are looking with your eyes. I look with more than that. I look with senses you haven’t got. And I shall find what you’ve missed, too-you wait and see.”
A mage, Vanai thought, with terror dulled only because she’d already been through so much other terror. She wasn’t warded. She hadn’t imagined she would need to be warded. If he started incanting-no, when he started incanting-she was ruined. It’s not fair. That was probably true, but it would do her no good at all.
Out in the street-Vanai thought it was out in the street, anyhow-a shout rang out: the same word, repeated over and over. Hidden in the blind dogleg closet, she couldn’t make out what the word was. Neither could the Algarvian mage. “How am I supposed to concentrate with this racket?” he snapped, his voice peevish.
“You don’t need to concentrate, sir,” the constable with him answered. “They’re yelling that they’ve got their quota. They don’t need any more blonds this time around.”
“Oh,” the mage said. “Is that so? Well, if I don’t have to work, I’m bloody well not going to work. That’s fair enough-better than fair enough, by the powers above.” He began to whistle. His footsteps, along with those of the constable who’d come into the block of flats with him, faded in the distance as the two men left again.
Vanai didn’t move for a long time. By then, she wasn’t sure shecould move. At last, a bladder that threatened to burst drove her to her feet.
He saw Vanai, who’d survived the roundup, and resolutely didn’t see all the people who hadn’t. She couldn’t think like that.
When she went back up to her flat, she found that the Algarvians had turned it inside out. She wasn’t upset; she’d expected nothing less. She had little that could be broken, and even less that she minded losing. Before long, she had the flat set to rights again.
And, before long, just as if the roundup hadn’t happened, bells clanged in the Kaunian quarter, summoning the blonds who’d come through uncaught to get their food so they could stay strong and healthy till the Algarvians needed more of them. Vanai didn’t go, in case it turned out to be another trap, another betrayal. The Algarvians who’d gone through the flat had been after her person, not the couple of small chunks of stale bread and dried fruit she’d secreted there. She didn’t have a lot to eat, but she had some.
As she nibbled a dried apricot, she looked out the window and down onto the street below. Not many Kaunians could have escaped in this neighborhood, but she saw a fair number of people heading for the feeding stations the Algarvians had set up. She grimaced. If they’re that stupid, they deserve to be caught. Then she grimaced again, this time at herself. Why do they deserve to get caught for having empty stomachs?
And then she spotted the Algarvian constable who came down the street chatting up every young woman who passed. She muttered the foulest curses she knew, and wished she knew worse ones. Even though she couldn’t hear him, she could guess what he’d be saying. Come with me, sweetheart. Give me what I want, and you won’t go west, the same sort of vicious bargainMajorSpinello had struck with her back in Oyngestun. The redheads were great ones for deals like that. Vanai shrank back from the window, lest he see her. When she peeked out again, a few minutes later, he was gone. She let out a long, heartfelt sigh of relief.
Five
Night in the Strait of Valmiera: a nasty night, with rain and even a little sleet beating down. Wind-whipped waves slapped against theHabakkuk’s port side as she slid north along a ley line toward the Derlavaian mainland. Secure in the bowels of the great, sorcerously enhanced iceberg, Leino hardly noticed the motion.
When the Kuusaman mage remarked on that, Xavega raised a scornful, elegant eyebrow. “Ina proper ley-line ship, we would not feel the waves at all,” she said, using classical Kaunian as he had. “We would glide above the water, and not be subject to it.” She didn’t add, You ignorant Kuusaman oaf, but she might as well have.
Leino sighed and didn’t answer. Why did my fancy fix on someone who despises me and all my people? He wondered. One of his own eyebrows quirked, in wry amusement. Because I’ve been away from Pekka too long, that’s why. And because Xavega packs her bile in such a nicely shaped container.
Ramalho was every bit as Lagoan as Xavega, but he shook his head. “In aproper ley-line ship, those waves might capsize us or push us off the ley line and then sink us,” he said. “Plenty of hulks on the bottom of the sea hereabouts, and not all of them from the days when ships went by sail.”
Xavega glared at him. She didn’t just disagree with Leino; she was ready to take on the whole world. “What do you know about it?” she demanded of Ramalho.
“Before the war, I was a ship’s mage,” he said calmly. “My father spent some time as a ship’s mage, and so did his father before him. I might ask you the same question.”
He might ask it, but Xavega didn’t answer it. She just tossed her head, sending wavy, copper-colored locks flying back from her face, and went over to the tea kettle to pour herself a fresh cup. She slammed the kettle back onto its iron stand almost hard enough to shatter it.
“Rain is a worse nuisance forHabakkuk than for ordinary ships,” Leino said, trying to find something the mages could talk about without quarreling. “We always have to work to keep the sea from melting us, but worrying about the air, too, makes the sorcery twice as complicated.”
“Well, that is true enough,” Ramalho said. Xavega just sniffed and sipped at her tea. She couldn’t very well argue with what Leino had said, but she didn’t care to agree with it, either. Ramalho went on: “If we sailedHabakkuk into Setubal harbor back in the days of the Six Years’ War, all the mages in Lagoas would be going mad trying to figure out how we have done all this.”
“Now, there is a picture,” Leino said, rather liking it. “The same would have been true in Kuusamo a generation ago-or, for that matter, any time before the Derlavaian War started.”
“A picture of nonsense,” Xavega said. “A daft conceit.” Ramalho had offered the conceit, but she sounded as if she blamed Leino for it.
With another sigh Leino said, “I hope the dragonfliers will be able to leave the ship in this weather.” How would Xavega take exception to that?
“The storm will help shield them from the Algarvians,” she said, whichwas disagreement, but of a relatively tepid sort. She continued, “Dowsers start tearing their hair when they have to find moving dragons in the midst of millions of moving raindrops.”
“True,” Leino said.
“Also less true than it would have been in the days of the Six Years’ War, though,” Ramalho said. “Our motion-selectivity spells are much better than they used to be.”
Leino waited for Xavega to start squabbling about that, too. Instead, to his astonishment, she burst into tears. “No one ever lets me say anything without arguing!” she wailed, and fled the chamber in which they’d been sitting.
“What on earth-?” Leino said to Ramalho.
“I was hoping you might explain it to me,” the Lagoan mage answered. “You are the married man, after all. Does that not mean you understand more of women than we bachelors do?”
“I understand my wife fairly well, I think,” Leino said. “Understanding one woman, though, does not mean I understand all women, any more than understanding one man means I understand all men.”
“Too bad,” Ramalho said. “I was hoping it would be simpler than that.” He shrugged and rolled his eyes. “Of course, asking anyone to understand Xavega is probably asking too much.”
“Ah?” Leino said, his voice as neutral as he could make it. “I wondered if it was just me.”
“Oh, no,” Ramalho assured him. “She can be difficult. In fact, there are times when I wonder if she can be anything else. I knew her in Setubal, and she was the same way there.”
“Was she?” Leino asked. Ramalho nodded solemnly. Leino said, “How interesting,” and left the icy chamber.
Interesting, he jeered at himself as he walked down an equally icy corridor. Is that really the word you want to use? The woman is trouble, nothing else but. Even if you got her into bed, she’d be nothing but trouble. She’d be more trouble then, most likely. The only reason you care about her is the way she looks.
And isn’t that reason enough? a different, rather deeper, part of his mind asked in return.
He shook his head, as if he were arguing with someone else and not with himself. No, it isn’t, he insisted. Pekka would laugh at you if she knew you were mooning over a bad-tempered Lagoan, just because she has long, shapely legs and fills out her tunic nicely.
That deeper part of his mind didn’t answer. Maybe that meant he’d convinced it. Somehow, he didn’t think so. Those legs and the way Xavega filled out her tunic stayed with him no matter how bad-tempered she was. Aye, Pekka would laugh at him, but Pekka wasn’t a man.
And a good thing, too, he thought. There, at least, both parts of his mind agreed completely.
He headed toward one of the chambers where the mages worked to keepHabakkuk going-as opposed to the chambers where they gathered when they weren’t
working. He wasn’t due back on duty for another couple of hours, but he had the feeling they would welcome him if he came in early. Rain really did put a lot of extra strain onHabakkuk ’s structural integrity, and he’d done a lot of work while the ship was building to find out how best to foil the raindrops.
He’d almost got there when the iceberg-turned-dragon-hauler jerked and shuddered under his feet, as if it had run into a wall. The next thing he knew, he was on his backside in the hallway and all the lights had gone out. Somewhere in the distance, an urgent bell began clanging.
“What in blazes-?” Leino exclaimed as he scrambled to his feet, his spiked shoes biting into the ice. He laughed at himself once upright again. He was a true mage, all right: even then, he’d spoken in classical Kaunian. All around him, though, men and women were crying out in Lagoan and Kuusaman. Pain filled some of those cries. He realized he was liable to be lucky to have come away with nothing worse than a bruised bottom.
He hadn’t thought about why something as immense asHabakkuk might stagger in midocean. That also proved him a mage: a mage, not a sailor. Some of the outcries in the dark had words in them, too. When those words were in Kuusaman, he could follow them. Two he heard most often were, “Egg!” and, “Leviathan!”
“Powers above, Iam an idiot!” he said-still in classical Kaunian. The dragonsHabakkuk carried had done nothing but give Algarve grief ever since the strange craft first went into action when Lagoas and Kuusamo took Sibiu away from KingMezentio and restoredKingBurebistu to the rule over his own island kingdom. Of course the Algarvians would strike at the sorcerously enhanced iceberg if they got the chance-and an Algarvian leviathan-rider evidently had got it.
Now Leino knew he urgently needed to make his way to the chambers where his fellow wizards worked. But how? The darkness in the bowels ofHabakkuk’was absolute. He hadn’t thought about how completely the strange vessel depended on magecraft to sustain it in every way till it was suddenly deprived of that magecraft.
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