Jaws of Darkness d-5

by Harry Turtledove

  “Not safe,” Palasta said, and he could hardly disagree.

  Shaggy green fields, rich and lush, stretched down toward the sea. A circle of tall, crudely shaped stones stood in one of those a few hundred yards away: a monument a thousand years older than the Kaunian Empire, maybe more. Lichen scrawled red and yellow-green patterns up the sides of the stones.

  Palasta pointed toward the monument. “That’s a power point. Even all those years ago, they knew about such things.”

  “Whoeverthey were,” Skarnu said; that was another riddle archaeological mages still labored to unravel. Some ofthem, at least, had not been of Kaunian stock. That much seemed plain. Even nowadays, a few folk here showed signs of blood more like that of the Kuusamans than of Valmiera’s Kaunian majority. Southeasterners had a way of staying on their land. Skarnu hadn’t seen many before coming to this part of the kingdom. Dark hair, slanted eyes, and high cheekbones showed up often enough to disconcert him: they were certainly more common than he’d thought.

  Between him and Palasta and the monument, a woman drove a couple of goats toward a farmhouse. She was a Kaunian; her yellow hair peeped out from under the white lace cap she wore. But that cap set her apart from most Valmierans. Every tiny district here in the southeast had its own particular style, each striving to be more ornate than its neighbors. The goats were of a peculiar breed, too-shaggier than the ones he’d known around Pavilosta, and with thicker, more twisted horns.

  But he couldn’t keep eyeing the local landscape forever, even if he wanted to. His eyes rose to the gray beach and the gray-green, rock-studded sea beyond, and to what had been the camp where the Algarvians housed their Kaunian captives before killing them to capture their life energy.

  Some of the fences that had surrounded the camp still stood. Others were flat, or had been hurled some distance away by the force of the magic that had come back from Kuusamo. As far as he could see at this distance, none of the buildings inside the perimeter still stood, neither those that had housed the redheads nor those where their victims had dwelt.

  “What do you see?” he asked Palasta. The young mage was the one who’d needed to make this journey. Skarnu was along because he’d been fighting for a long time to keep Mezentio’s men from massacring Kaunians from Forthweg, and because sending a girl on her own-even a girl who was also a mage-had risks the underground hadn’t felt like facing.

  “Power,” she answered absently. “Great power.”

  “The kind the Algarvians get from killing?” Skarnu asked.

  “Oh, that, too,” Palasta said, though she sounded as if she needed to be reminded of it. “Aye, that, too. But something else, something brighter… cleaner.” She frowned, groping for the word she wanted.

  “Can you tell what it is?”

  Palasta shook her head. “It’s nothing I’ve run into before. I don’t think it’s anything anybody ever ran into before.”

  She seemed very certain. Skarnu studied not the camp where the Kaunians from Forthweg had been but Palasta. She couldn’t have been more than sixteen. How could she know about what trained mages had run into over the years, over the centuries, over the millennia? (Those lichen-splashed standing stones made Skarnu think in longer stretches of time than he might have otherwise.) Carefully-he didn’t want to offend her-he asked, “How can you be sure of that?”

  “Suppose you’ve eaten beef and pork and mutton and chicken,” Palasta said. “If someone serves you fresh oysters, will you be sure you’ve never had them before?”

  “Aye.” Skarnu nodded. “But I won’t be sure no one’s eaten them in all the history of the world.”

  “Ah. I see what you’re saying.” Palasta looked at him as if he were a bright pupil in primary school. Absurdly, that affectionate, forgiving glance made him proud, not angry. The young mage said, “I know what I know. What I know is based on what all the sorcerers before me have known, all the way back to the people who raised those stones, whoever they were.” They were on her mind, too. She went on, “I can tell what’s new and what isn’t. Whatever did that”-she pointed to the ruined camp-”is something new.”

  “All right. And I see what you’re saying, too.” Now Skarnu believed her. She sounded as sure about what she knew and what she didn’t asSergeantRaunu ever had. As it had with the veteran underofficer, her conviction carried weight with Skarnu. He asked, “Do you want to get closer, if we can? Do you think it would do any good?”

  “I’d like to try,” Palasta answered. “I don’t see any Algarvians around there right now, or sense any of their wizards, either. If we spot soldiers when we come up to the camp, we can always walk off in some other direction.”

  “Fair enough.” Skarnu started down the slope that led to the camp.

  Palasta stayed at his side. After a few steps, she said, “We may not need to do this, after all, now that I think about it. The answers I’m looking for are probably on the other side of the Strait of Valmiera. So if you want to go back…”

  Skarnu kept walking. “Let’s try it. We’ve come all this way”-”Tytuvenai” yanked me away from my wife and son-”to try to find out what happened here, and whether we can use it against the redheads, too. It would be a shame to stop half a mile short.”If we do stop half a mile short, I’ll wring “Tytuvenai’s” neck the next time I see him.

  “That makes good sense.” Palasta sent him a speculative look. “You seem to have a very logical mind. Why didn’t you ever think about becoming a mage?”

  “I don’t know,” Skarnu answered. “I never did, that’s all. I’ve never seen any signs I’d have the talent for it, either.” As a marquis, of course, he’d never had to worry about making a living. Since his parents’ untimely death, he’d never had to worry about anything till he took command of his company when war broke out. He’d done that as well as he could, and done a lot of other things since. Krasta, now-Krasta hadn’t worried about anything but shops and lovers her whole life long. The corners of his mouth turned down as he thought about his sister’s latest, Algarvian, lover.

  “Talent does count,” Palasta said, “but only so much.”

  “As may be,” Skarnu said. “It’s too late for me to worry about it now.” Palasta looked at him as if he’d suddenly started speaking Unkerlanter. Too late meant little to her: a telling proof of how young she was. More roughly than he’d intended to, Skarnu continued, “Come on. Let’s see how close we can get you.”

  Palasta didn’t say anything as they walked on toward the ravaged camp. She didn’t have to. Watching her face was fascinating. She either didn’t know how to or else didn’t bother with hiding anything she thought or felt. She seemed to grow more astonished, more interested, more excited with every step they took. She also grew more puzzled. “I don’t know what they did,” she said. “I don’t know how they did it. But I don’t think magecraft will ever be the same.”

  Skarnu wanted to laugh at her. She was much too young to speak with such self-assurance. But she was also too self-assured for him to dwell too much on her youth. She’d shown him she knew what she was talking about. What would she sense, what would she learn, if she could walk through the heart of the shattered camp?

  He didn’t get to find out. About a quarter of a mile short of the camp, an Algarvian soldier popped out of a hole in the ground so well hidden by bushes that Skarnu had no idea he was there till he emerged. “No going farther,” he said in accented Valmieran. “Forbidden military area, by ordering ofGrand DukeIvone.”

  Ivone was the highest-ranking Algarvian in Valmiera. As a man of the underground, Skarnu knew that. Would he have known it if he were as ordinary as he wanted to seem? Maybe-but maybe not, too. He said. “My sister and me, we just want to go on down to the beach to hunt for crabs.” He deliberately tried to sound none too bright.

  The soldier shook his head. “Not here. Forbidden. You wanting crabs, you going back to town, finding wrong girlfriend.” He guffawed at his own wit.

  Try to bribe him? Skarnu wondered
. He decided against it. More redheads were surely lurking around the camp. “Plenty of good crabs on this beach,” he grumbled, for the Algarvian’s benefit. “Lobsters, too.” When the soldier shook his head again, Skarnu took Palasta’s arm. “Come on, sis. We’ll find ‘em somewheres else.”

  “You leaving her with me, you go looking,” the Algarvian suggested. That made Skarnu retreat in a hurry. The redhead had thrown out the notion in a casual way. Skarnu hustled Palasta away from him before he decided she ought to be his because he was an occupier and he had a stick in his hands.

  To Skarnu’s relief, she waited till they’d got out of earshot of the guard to ask, “Can we sneak around to the camp some other way?”

  “I doubt it,” he answered regretfully. “They’re bound to have more than one man keeping an eye on it. If they send us away from it once, that probably won’t mean much to them. If they catch us trying to get there once they’ve told us no, that’s liable to be a different story.” He hesitated. “Unless you think you really have to get inside. If it’s that important, I’ll do my best to get you past the guards. You might have to use some of your magecraft, too.”

  “No,” Palasta said after brief thought. “I’ve learned enough-and perhaps the biggest thing I’ve learned is how much I don’t know.” She spoke in riddles, but she sounded pleased doing it, so Skarnu supposed he should be pleased, too. And he was, for his own reasons: now he could go back to Merkela and little Gedominu.

  Eight

  Not for the first time, MarshalRathar reflected on how glad he was to get out of Cottbus, to get away from the direct influence ofKingSwemmel. Away from the capital, he was his own man. Inside Cottbus, inside the palace, he might have been fitted for strings at the wrists and ankles, at the elbows and knees, for he knew himself to be nothing more than the king’s puppet.

  Even in getting away from Cottbus, though, Rathar followed Swemmel’s will rather than his own. He would sooner have gone back to the Duchy of Grelz, to finish driving the Algarvians from it. But Swemmel was convinced Unkerlant had the battle in the south well enough in hand to entrust it toGeneralVatran. Vatran was a capable commander; he and Rathar had worked well together down in the south for a couple of years. Still, Rathar wanted to finish what he’d started.

  As usual, KingSwemmel cared nothing for what his subjects wanted. He’d sent Rathar up to the north, to a region where he hadn’t laid his hand on the fighting. And he’d sent with himGeneralGurmun, who’d proved himself the best commander of behemoths Unkerlant had.

  The two of them rode horses east toward Pewsum, a town the Unkerlanters had taken back from Algarve and then held in spite of counterattacks delivered with the redheads’ usual skill and ingenuity. Looking around at the devastation through which he rode, Rathar said, “Nothing comes easy fighting Mezentio’s men. It never has. By the time we drive them off a piece of ground, it’s not worth having any more.”

  Gurmun pondered that. He was younger than Rathar-in his early forties-with hard, blunt features and cold, cold eyes. He’d risen through the ranks despite, or perhaps because of, KingSwemmel ’s purges. He said, “They’re tough, aye, but we can whip them. We’ve done it before; we’ll do it again. And every time we do whip them, we leave them that much less to fight back with.”

  Ten months ago, his behemoths had stopped the Algarvians’ last desperate push in the Durrwangen bulge, the push that might have torn the whole position open had it succeeded. Hundreds of the great beasts from both sides were left dead on the field. Unkerlant had been able to make good its losses. The Algarvian behemoth force hadn’t been the same since the battles by Durrwangen.

  Rathar said, “I just wonder how much of our kingdom will be standing by the time the war ends.”

  Gurmun shrugged. “As long as some of it’s standing and there’s nothing left of Algarve.” That was also Swemmel’s attitude. Rathar could hardly disagree with it.

  In fact, he didn’t disagree with it. But he did say, “The more we have left standing, the better.”

  “Well, of course,” Gurmun said. “The better we keep our secrets, the more we’ll be able to manage there. The redheads couldn’t have been plainer about what they had in mind around Durrwangen if they’d hung up a sign-we’re going to attack here. Stupid buggers.” He spat in the muddy roadway.

  His scorn madeMarshalRathar blink. To Rathar, the Algarvians were the touchstone of the military art. He’d spent the first couple of years of the war against them learning how they did what they did well enough to imitate it. Had he failed, Unkerlant would have gone under. That Gurmun could show contempt for the redheads proved he’d succeeded. It still disconcerted him, though.

  Ropes dyed red warned soldiers and surviving locals away from a field by the side of the road. Rathar said, “One of these days, we’ll have to clear out all the eggs we and the Algarvians have buried.” The red ropes said that field was sown with Algarvian eggs. A crater not far from the road said some luckless fellow had discovered at least one of them the hard way.

  Gurmun spat again. “It can wait. Right now, we haven’t got the dowsers to spend clearing the buried eggs we’ve already passed. We’ve hardly got enough dowsers to clear the ones that are still in front of the redheads.”

  “I said, one of these days,” Rathar answered. As far as Gurmun was concerned, the waste of having dowsers go up in bursts of sorcerous energy while clearing unimportant fields made that not worth doing. As long as they died doing something important, he didn’t worry at all. A lot of the younger officers, the men who’d lived their entire adult lives duringKingSwemmel ’s reign, thought the same way. Since Swemmel thought that way, too, Rathar knew he shouldn’t have been surprised, but every so often he still was.

  “If we had more dowsers,” Gurmun went on, “I wouldn’t have to run peasants across fields ahead of my behemoths, the way I’ve done a couple-three times. That doesn’t always work as well as you’d like-sometimes the Algarvian mages make their buried eggs sensitive to behemoths, not people.” His horse walked on for a few paces before he added, very much as an afterthought, “And it’s wasteful, too.”

  “So it is.” Rathar had used such tactics himself; he didn’t know many Unkerlanter generals who hadn’t. But he didn’t take them for granted, the way Gurmun did. With a sigh, he went on, “I wonder if the kingdom will have any peasants at all left by the time this war finally ends.”

  “It doesn’t matter if we only have a few, so long as Algarve hasn’t got any,” Gurmun said once more. Aye, those words might have come straight fromKingSwemmel ’s lips.

  At the outskirts of Pewsum, a sentry stepped into the roadway, stick in hand, and snapped, “This is a forward area. Show me your pass.”

  GeneralGurmunundid the top couple of buttons on his rock-gray greatcoat, so that the general’s stars on his collar tabs showed. “Are these pass enough?”

  The sentry deflated like a pricked pig’s bladder. He lorded it over those beneath him and groveled to those above. Such was life in Unkerlant. “Aye, sir,” he muttered, and got out of the way in a hurry.

  “Powers above help the next couple of common soldiers he lands on,” Rathar remarked as he and Gurmun rode past. Gurmun laughed and nodded. He was on top almost all the time, so he found such things funny.

  Inside Pewsum, Unkerlanter artisans and mages still labored to repair the ley-line caravan depot. Before pulling out, the Algarvians had done their ingenious best to make sure their foes would get as little use from the town as possible; and that best, as usual, proved quite good. “Stinking redheads,” Gurmun growled. “That depot had better not slow us down, come the day. If it does, some of those worthless wizards will join these beauties here.”

  He pointed to a couple of corpses hanging from a gibbet in the market square. They’d been hanging for some time. By now, they were more bone than meat, and didn’t stink too badly. Each was draped with a placard reading, collaborator. Soldiers and civilians walked past them without so much as a glance.

>   “They caught two,” Gurmun said. “I wonder how many are still running loose.”

  “A good many, odds are,” Rathar answered. “The inspectors will root them out.”GeneralGurmun nodded, as Rathar had been sure he would. Swemmel’s inspectors were trained to sniff out treason whether it was there or not. When it really was…

  A soldier was reading a news sheet, one prepared by the local army headquarters. He started to wad it up and throw it away. Gurmun called, “Here, fellow, let me have a look at that.”

  “Sure, pal,” the trooper said agreeably. His rock-gray tunic had faded almost to white. A scar seamed his cheek, another his leg below the hem of the tunic. More than any of that, though, his eyes marked him as a veteran. They never stopped moving. Had the Algarvians flown dragons over Pewsum, he would have known exactly where to dive for cover.

  Gurmun reined in to look at the news sheet. Rathar also stopped, and leaned toward him so he could see some of it, too. Gurmun read aloud: “ ‘In the north, the strong defense the brave soldiers of Unkerlant have shown under the glorious leadership of King Swemmel against the savage Algarvian invader has kept the enemy from making progress, and has tied down his forces so that he cannot move men to the south to hold off our victorious thrusts there.’ “

  “That’s good,” Rathar murmured. “That’s very good.”

  GeneralGurmunnodded. “I’ve seen worse. Here, wait-there’s more. ‘Constant vigilance is vital in these hard defensive struggles. Although we often fight with the odds against us, our sacrifice ensures victory elsewhere. Always remember that a victory in the south is a victory for the whole kingdom.’ “

  “Someone should get a commendation for that,”MarshalRathar said. He called up the map in his head. “Headquarters should be-over there.” He pointed. He and Gurmun rode in the direction he’d chosen. His gift for turning map into terrain didn’t let him down.

  At the headquarters-a battered building that had once been a greengrocer’s-another officious sentry tried to stop Rathar and Gurmun. This time, Rathar was the one who flashed his collar tabs. At the sight of the big stars he wore, the sentry turned pale. He couldn’t step away, as the one on the road had, but he did his best to disappear in plain sight.