Into the Darkness

19.

King Shazli beamed at Hajjaj. “We shall have vengeance!” he exclaimed. “King Swemmel, may demons tear out his entrails and dance with them, will wail and gnash his teeth when he thinks of the day he sent his armies over the border into Zuwayza.”

“Even so, your Majesty,” Hajjaj replied, inclining his head to the young king. “But the Unkerlanters are suspicious of us; Swemmel, being a treacherous sort himself, sees treachery all around him. As I have reported to you, my conversations with the Algarvian minister have not gone unnoticed.”

By Shazli’s expression, he started to make some flip comment in response to that. He checked himself, though, at which Hajjaj nodded somber approval. Shazli could think, even if he remained too young to do it all the time. “Do you doubt the wisdom of our course, then?”

“I doubt the wisdom of all courses,” the foreign minister said. “I serve you best by doubting, and by admitting that I doubt.”

“Ah, but if you doubt everything, how can I know how much weight to place on any particular doubt?” Shazli asked with a smile.

Hajjaj smiled, too. “There you have me, I must admit.”

“Explain your doubts here, then, your Excellency, if you would be so kind,” Shazli said. “That we want, that we are entitled to, revenge on Unkerlant cannot be doubted. What better way to get it than by making common cause with Algarve? The Algarvians have proved willing—nay, eager—to make common cause with us.”

“Oh, indeed,” Hajjaj said. “Count Balastro has been accommodating in every possible way. And why not? We serve his interests, as he serves ours.”

“Well, then!” Shazli said, for all the world as if Hajjaj had just completed a geometric proof on the blackboard.

But Hajjaj knew all too well that kingdoms did not behave so neatly as circles and triangles and trapezoids. “Algarve is a great kingdom,” he said, “but Unkerlant is also a great kingdom. Zuwayza is not a great kingdom, nor shall it ever be. If the small involve themselves in the quarrels of the great, they may be sorry afterwards.”

“We are already sorry. Unkerlant has made us sorry,” Shazli said. “Do you deny this? Can you deny it?”

“I do not. I cannot,” Hajjaj said. “Indeed, I was glad to begin conversations with the Algarvians, as your Majesty surely knows.”

“Well, then,” Shazli said again. This time, he amplified it: “How can we go wrong here, Hajjaj? Algarve does not border us. She can make no demands upon us, as Unkerlant can and does. All she can do is help us get our own back, and get our own back we shall.”

“She will be able to make demands afterwards, for we shall owe her a debt,” Hajjaj replied. “She will remember. Great kingdoms always do.”

“Here, I think, you start at shadows,” the king said. “Perhaps she can make demands. How can she enforce them?”

“How many dragons did Algarve hurl against Valmiera?” Hajjaj asked. “How many against Jelgava? They could fly against us, too. How do you propose to stand against them, your Majesty, come the evil day?”

“If you would have us withdraw from the alliance we have made, say so now and say so plainly.” Shazli spoke with a hint of anger in his voice.

“I would not,” Hajjaj said with a sigh. “But neither am I certain all will go as well as we hope. I have lived a long time. I have seen that things rarely go as well as people hope they will.”

“We shall take back the land Swemmel stole from us,” Shazli said. “Perhaps we shall even take more besides. Past that, I am willing to let the future fend for itself.”

It was a good answer. It was, at the same time, a young man’s answer. Hajjaj, who would probably see far less of the future unfold than would his sovereign, worried about it far more. “Indeed, I think we shall take it,” he said. “I only hope we shall keep it.”

Shazli leaned forward, staring at him in surprise. “How can we fail? The only way I can imagine our failing would be for Unkerlant to defeat Algarve. How likely do you suppose that to be?” He threw back his head and laughed, which gave Hajjaj his view on the subject.

“Not very likely, else I would have warned you not to follow this course,” the Zuwayzi foreign minister said. “But how likely would we have reckoned it that Algarve could overthrow Valmiera and Jelgava in bare weeks apiece?”

“All the more reason to think the redheads will give King Swemmel the thrashing he deserves,” Shazli said, not quite taking Hajjaj’s point. “Efficiency!” His lip curled. “Not in Unkerlant. Will you tell me otherwise?” He looked a challenge at Hajjaj.

“I will not. I cannot,” Hajjaj said. Shazli nodded, an I-told-you-so look in his eye. Then he nodded again, in a different way. Hajjaj rose, knowing he had been dismissed. “We have only to wait for spring, to see what comes then. May it prove good for the kingdom, as I hope with all my heart it does.”

When he got back to his own office, he found his secretary arguing with a fellow who wore several amulets and lockets that clanked together whenever he moved. “No,” Shaddad was saying when Hajjaj walked in, “that is not acceptable. His Excellency would—” He turned. “Oh. Here you are, your Excellency. Powers above be praised! This bungler proposes to undertake sorcery in and around your office.”

“I am not a bungler, or I hope I am not.” The fellow with the amulets bowed, which produced more clinkings and clankings. “I am Mithqal, a second-rank mage, with the honor of serving in his Majesty’s army. My orders, which your secretary now has, request and require me to do my best to learn whether any other mages have been sorcerously spying on you.”

“Let me see these orders,” Hajjaj said, and put on his spectacles to read them. When he was through, he looked over the tops of the spectacles at Shaddad. “Captain Mithqal appears to be within his rights.”

“Bah!” his secretary said. “For all we know, he just wants to snoop about. Why, for all we know, he could be—”

“Do not say something you may regret.” Hajjaj did not like to bring Shaddad up so sharply, but his secretary sometimes got an exaggerated notion of his own importance. And having a mage, especially a mage who was also a soldier, angry at Shaddad would not do the secretary any good. Hajjaj went on, “Use the crystal to consult with this man’s superiors. If they have indeed sent him here, well and good. If not, then by all means raise the alarm.”

“I tried to suggest this very course to him, but he would not hear me,” Mithqal said.

Shaddad sniffed. “As if I should take seriously any mountebank who sets himself before me.” He bowed to Hajjaj. “Very well, your Excellency. Since you require it of me—” He turned his back on Mithqal to use the crystal, bending low over it to speak in a quiet voice. After a moment, his shoulders slumped further. When he turned around again, he looked as embarrassed as Hajjaj had ever seen him. “My apologies, Captain Mithqal. I seem to have been mistaken.”

“May I now proceed?” Mithqal asked, a sardonic edge to his voice. He was looking at Hajjaj, who nodded. Shaddad nodded, too, which the mage affected not to notice. Hajjaj bit the inside of his lip to keep from smiling.

Shaddad sidled up to the Zuwayzi foreign minister. “I must confess, I am mortified,” he murmured.

“We are all foolish now and then,” Hajjaj said. What he was thinking was, Well you might be, but that would only have flustered Shaddad further.

Mithqal said, “Your Excellency”—he kept right on ignoring Shaddad—“I aim to check two things: first, to learn whether anyone is spying on your office from a distance; and second, to learn whether anything has been secreted hereabouts to send word or your doings to whoever may be listening: a clandestine crystal, perhaps, though that is not the only way to achieve the effect.”

“No one could have placed such a thing here,” Shaddad said. “Had someone brought such an object during a meeting with his Excellency, it would have been noted, and we do have sorcerous wards in place to keep out unwelcome guests when his Excellency and I are not present.”

“What one mage can do, another can undo,” Mithqal said. “That is as basic a law of sorcery as those of similarity and contagion, though I own that many mages are loth to admit as much.”

He took from the large pouch he wore on his belt a candle of black beeswax, which he set on Shaddad’s desk, and used ordinary flint and steel to light it. The glow that came from it, though, was anything but ordinary. Hajjaj rubbed at his eyes. Not only could he see Shaddad and Mithqal, but also, in an odd sort of way, into them and through them as well. He could also see into and through Shaddad’s desk.

Mithqal took out a six-sided crystal. “The iris stone,” he said, and held it up. Rainbows appeared on all the walls of the office. “Thus you note its chiefest property.” He might have been delivering a lecture. “Should the rainbows be agitated, that will show the influence of some other magic.”

He carried the iris stone all around the desk. The rainbows shifted and swirled, but he accepted that, so Hajjaj supposed he was seeking some larger derangement. And, sure enough, Mithqal put down the crystal with every sign of satisfaction. He blew out the candle, carried it into Hajjaj’s chambers, and lighted it again, repeating the ritual he had used in the outer office.

Once more, the rainbows swirled on the walls as Mithqal carried the iris stone around the candle. Once more, that was the only thing that happened. The mage nodded to Hajjaj, “Your Excellency, as best I can tell, no one is spying on you from without.”

“I am glad to hear it,” Hajjaj said.

“I could have told you as much, your Excellency,” Shaddad said. Hajjaj glanced at him. He coughed a couple of times. “Er—not with such certainty, perhaps.”

“Indeed,” Mithqal said, and mercifully let it go at that. “Now to see if anyone has been listening from within.” He drew a couple of withered objects from his pouch, one small and looking rather like a bean, the other resembling a thick, curled brown leaf, but hairy on one side. “I have the heart of a weasel, with which to seek out treachery, and also the ear of an ass, to signify treachery in respect to hearing.” As an aside, he remarked, “Perhaps I might have done without the latter.” Shaddad suffered another coughing fit.

Holding the heart in one hand and the ass’ ear in the other, Mithqal began to chant. The ear started writhing and twitching, as it would have done were it attached to a living animal. Shaddad jumped; he might never have seen magecraft before. Hajjaj watched in the fascination he gave any workman manifestly good at his craft. “Something?” he asked in a low voice, so as not to disturb the mage.

“Something, aye,” Mithqal breathed. He stalked out to the outer office, in the direction toward which the ear pointed. Hajjaj followed. So did Shaddad, his eyes round and white and staring in his dark face. Guided by the ass’ ear, Mithqal moved toward the secretary’s desk.

Shaddad cried out in despair and fled.

Mithqal threw down his sorcerous implements and pursued. He was younger and lighter on his feet than Hajjaj’s secretary. After a moment, Hajjaj heard more shouts, and then a thud. He sank to a cushion and buried his face in his hands. He had trusted Shaddad, and here was his trust repaid with treason. But anguish was only half of what he felt. The other half was fear. How long had Shaddad been suborned, and how much had he passed to Unkerlant?

The secretary cried out once more, this time in pain. Hajjaj winced. Those questions would have answers, and soon. Shaddad would not like giving them. That no longer mattered. He would give them whether he liked to or not.

“What one mage can do, another can undo.” Pekka quoted the adage loud. She preferred talking to herself to listening to the icy winds from the south howling around her Kajaani City College office. The only trouble was, she was lying to herself. Her laugh came bitter. “What one mage can do, even the same mage can’t undo—or figure out how she did it in the first place.”

Her only consolation was that she wasn’t the only baffled theoretical sorcerer in Kuusamo. Raahe and Alkio hadn’t been able to discover where the missing acorn from the pair in her experiment had gone. Neither had Piilis. Neither had Master Siuntio, and neither had Ilmarinen, so far as she knew, though he was worse than any of her other colleagues at telling everyone what he was up to.

Pekka looked at her latest stab at an explanation. It wasn’t going anywhere. She could feel it wouldn’t go anywhere, and had to fight back the strong impulse to crumple up the sheet of paper and throw it away. She’d tried explanations based on the assumption that the laws of similarity and contagion had a direct relationship. They’d failed. She’d also tried explanations based on the assumption that the laws of similarity and contagion had no direct relationship. They’d failed, too.

That left… “Nothing,” Pekka said. “Nothing, curse it, nothing, nothing, nothing.”

Again, she resisted the urge to tear up her latest set of calculations. She wished she’d never got involved in theoretical sorcery in the first place. Her husband, a practical man if ever there was one, kept making progress in useful applications of magecraft that strengthened Kuusamo and delighted the Seven Princes.

“I didn’t want to be practical,” Pekka muttered. “I wanted to get down to the bottom of things and understand them, so that other people could be practical with them. And what happened? I’ve gotten down to the bottom of things, I don’t understand them, and other people are doing just fine being practical without them.”

Temptation, twice resisted, came back stronger than ever and won. She made a very small ball of her latest set of calculations and threw the ball toward the wastepaper basket. She missed. Shrugging, she got up and went over to retrieve the wadded-up sheets. She’d missed with the calculations. She supposed it made sense that she should miss in getting rid of them, too.

She’d just dropped the ball of paper into the wire basket—it had plenty of company there—when someone knocked on the door. She frowned. It was early for Leino to have finished his latest round of experiments. Of course he works late, Pekka thought. His work is actually getting somewhere. And that had to be the most peculiar knock she’d ever heard. It sounded more as if someone had kicked the door, but much too high up to make that likely, either.

Frowning still, she pulled the door open—and jumped back in alarm. Of all the things she’d expected to see in the hallway, a man standing on his head was the last. “Powers above!” she burst out, all the while thinking, Well, that explains how he knocked on the door.

“And a fine good day to you, Mistress Pekka,” the man said with a grin his being upside down tried to transmogrify into a frown.

Only then did Pekka realize she knew him. “Master Ilmarinen!” she exclaimed. “What are you doing there?”

“Waiting for you to open the door,” the elderly theoretical sorcerer replied. “Wondering if I was going to fall over before you did open the door.” With a spryness that gave that the lie, he went from upside down to right side up. His face, which had been quite red, resumed its natural color.

“Master Ilmarinen…” Pekka repeated his name with such patience as she could muster. “Let me ask a different question, Master: why were you standing on your head while you waited for me to open the door?”

“You are a true theoretical sorcerer, Mistress Pekka,” Ilmarinen said, bowing. “No sooner do you observe an unexplained phenomenon than you seek the root cause behind it. Most commendable indeed.”

That kind of mocking praise infuriated Pekka as nothing else could have done. “Master,” she said tightly, “shall we see if the constabulary reckons your untimely demise an unexplained phenomenon? If you don’t start talking sense, we can experimentally test the notion very soon.”

Ilmarinen laughed, breathing spirit fumes into her face. She glared at him, really tempted to perform that experiment. Powers above, had he got drunk, hopped aboard a ley-line caravan coach, and traveled down to Kajaani in the middle of a Kuusaman winter for no better reason than to drive her mad? For anyone but Ilmarinen, the notion would have been absurd. Even for him, it should have been. The large rational part of her mind still insisted it was. But her large rational part also recognized that Ilmarinen’s rational part wasn’t anywhere near so large.

He kept on laughing for another couple of heartbeats. Pekka looked around for the blunt instrument nearest to hand. Maybe murder, or something like it, did show in her eyes, for Ilmarinen went from laugh to chuckle to a smile that only set her teeth on edge. Then he reached into a pocket. When he didn’t find what he wanted, the smile fell off his face, too. He started going through his other pockets, and growing more and more frantic as whatever he was after remained elusive. Now Pekka laughed, in sardonic delight.

Ilmarinen looked harried. “However much it may amuse you, Mistress, it is not funny, I assure you.”

“Oh, I don’t know. It seems funny enough to me.” Pekka pointed to a folded-up piece of paper behind the heel of Ilmarinen’s left boot. “Is that by any chance what you seek?”

He turned, stared, and scooped it up. “Aye, it is,” he answered, more sheepishly than she was used to hearing him speak. “It must have fallen out while I was standing on my head.”

“You still have not explained why you were standing on your head,” Pekka reminded him.

And Ilmarinen went right on not explaining, at least with words. Instead, with a flourish, he presented Pekka the paper, as a sommelier in a fancy eatery up in Yliharma might have proffered an expensive bottle of Algarvian wine.

“You were standing on your head because of this piece of paper,” she said in the now-tell-me-another-one tones she used after listening to Uto spin out some outrageous fabrication. Sure as sure, her son and Ilmarinen had the same imp indwelling in them.

But Ilmarinen, this time, seemed immune. “As a matter of fact, Mistress Pekka, I truly was standing on my head because of that piece of paper.”

Pekka studied him. He was serious. He sounded serious. That only made her distrust him more than ever. But, after so much farce, what choice had she but to unfold the sheet and see what was on it? Only later did she wonder what Ilmarinen’s expression would have been had she torn it up and thrown it in his face. There, in a nutshell—not an acorn—was the difference between the two of them. Ilmarinen would have had the thought at once, and might have acted on it.

Once opened, the sheet wasn’t blank, as she’d half expected it to be. Calculations in Ilmarinen’s sprawling script filled it. She glanced down at them for a moment. She started to look up at Ilmarinen again, but her eyes, of themselves, snapped back to the arcane symbols. Her mouth fell open. She held the paper in one hand and traced the logic, traced the symbolic path, with the forefinger of the other.

When, at last, she was finished, she bowed very low to Ilmarinen. “Master Siuntio had the right of it,” she said, her voice a breathy whisper. “He told me that if anyone could find the meaning hidden in my experiment, you would be the mage, for you have the most original cast of mind. And he knew whereof he spoke. I would never in a thousand years have thought as you did.”

Ilmarinen shrugged. “Siuntio is smarter than I am. Siuntio is smarter than anybody is, as a matter of fact. But he isn’t crazy. You need to be a little bit crazy—or it doesn’t hurt, anyhow.” He eyed Pekka like a master eyeing a student who might have promise. “And now do you understand why I was standing on my head?”

“Inversion,” Pekka answered, so absently that Ilmarinen clapped his hands together in delight.

“Just so!” He almost cackled with glee, sounding like a laying hen.

“I never would have thought of such a thing,” Pekka said again. “Never. When I began to try to learn whether similarity and contagion were related, I always thought the relationship I found, if I found any at all, would be a direct one. When I failed to show a direct one, I thought that meant there was none at all—only that didn’t work, either.”

“If the experiment works and the mathematics don’t, the mathematics are wrong,” Ilmarinen said. “I told you—I told all of you—as much before, but you did not heed me. Now we have numbers that suggest why your cursed acorns acted as they did, and what happened to them as well.”

That wasn’t explicit in the sheet he’d given Pekka. She looked through the sprawling lines of symbols again. She had to look twice; even the implications were subtle. Once she found what Ilmarinen was driving at, though, she could work them out for herself. She looked up from the sheet to the theoretical sorcerer. “But that’s impossible!”

“It’s what happened.” His voice was peculiarly flat. After a moment, she realized she’d angered him. She’d seen him play at anger before, when he ranted and blustered. This was different. This made her feel as if he’d caught her doing something vicious and rather nasty.

In a small voice, she said, “I suppose the classical Kaunians would have said the same thing if they saw the spells that went into making a ley-line caravan go.”

“Not if they had any sense, they wouldn’t,” Ilmarinen said, but now in something close to his usual sardonic tones. He reached out and tapped the paper with a gnarled finger. “If you can show me an alternative explanation, then you may tell me this one is impossible. Till then, wouldn’t it be more interesting to try to come up with more experiments to see whether we’re crazy or not?” He shook his head and held up that finger again. “Of course we’re crazy. Let’s see if we’re right or not.”

“Aye.” Ideas rose to the top of Pekka’s mind from below like bubbles in a pot of water coming to a boil. “If this is right”—she shook the paper—“we have a lifetime’s worth of experiments waiting ahead for us. Two lifetimes’ worth, maybe.”

“That’s so, Mistress Pekka.” Ilmarinen sighed.

He was old. He did not have a long lifetime ahead of him, let alone two. “I’m sorry, Master,” Pekka said quietly. “I was tactless.”

“What?” Ilmarinen stared, then laughed. “Oh, no, not that, you silly lass. I’ve known for a long time that I wouldn’t be here forever, or even too much longer. No. I was thinking that, if things keep going as they have over there, over yonder”—he pointed north and west, toward the mainland of Derlavai—“we’d better pack those two lifetimes’ worth of experiments into about half a year.”

Pekka though about that and slowly nodded. “And if we can’t?”

“We’d better do it anyway,” Ilmarinen said.

Leofsig dipped his straight razor into the bowl of hot water he’d begged from his mother to get the soapsuds off it, then went back to trimming the lower edge of his beard. With his head tilted so far back, he had trouble seeing the mirror he’d propped on the chest of drawers in the room he now had to share with Ealstan.

Sidroc stuck his head in, perhaps to find out of Ealstan was there. When he saw what Leofsig was doing, he grinned unpleasantly. “Don’t cut your throat, now,” he said, almost as if he meant to be helpful.

In one smooth movement, Leofsig was off the stool he’d been using and halfway across the room. “You want to think about what you say to a man with a razor in his hand,” he remarked pleasantly.

“Eep,” Sidroc said, and disappeared faster than he would have had a first-rank mage enspelled him. Had a first-rank mage enspelled him, though, he would have stayed disappeared. That, Leofsig thought, was too much to hope for.

Laughing a little, he went back to the mirror and finished shaving. Then he put on his best tunic and his best cloak. A fussy grammarian would have called it his better cloak, for he had only two. He’d had more before the war started, but they were on Sidroc and Uncle Hengist’s backs these days.

This one, of dark blue wool, would do well enough. His father had one very much like it, and so did Ealstan. “You can’t go wrong with dark blue wool,” Hestan had said, ordering all three of them at the same time. When the tailor delivered them, Ealstan had called them a proof of the law of similarity. Leofsig smiled, remembering.

“Let me see you,” his mother said before he could get out the door. Obediently, he stood still, Elfryth brushed away an almost-visible speck of lint, smoothed down the hair he’d just combed, and finally nodded. “You look very nice,” she said. “If your young lady isn’t swept off her feet, she ought to be.” She’d been saying that as long as he’d been taking young ladies out. She added something newer: “Don’t try sneaking in after curfew. It’s not worth the risk.”

“Aye,” he said. His father would have told him exactly the same thing, and his father’s advice, he knew, was nearly always good. Even so, he sounded at best dutiful, at worst resigned, rather than enthusiastic.

Elfryth stood on tiptoe to kiss him on the cheek. “Go on, then,” she said. “If you must get home sooner than you’d like, you won’t want to waste your time standing around chattering with the likes of me.”

That being true, Leofsig nodded and left. He’d walked half a block before he realized he should have denied it for politeness’ sake. Too late now, he thought, and kept going.

By then, he’d already pulled the cloak tight around him and fastened the polished brass button that closed it at the neck. A raw wind blew up from the southwest. There might be frost on the windows, maybe even on the grass, come morning. As Gromheort went, that made it a chilly evening.

A couple of Algarvian soldiers on patrol rode past him. They didn’t look twice. To them, he was just another subject. Maybe they knew how much he hated them. If they did, they didn’t care.

The sun was low in the northwest when he knocked on a door a few blocks from his own. A plump man a few years older than his own father opened it. “Good day, Master Elfsig,” Leofsig said. “Is Felgilde ready?”

“She won’t be but a moment,” his companion’s father said. “Step on in, Leofsig. You have time for a cup of wine, I think, but only a quick one.”

“I thank you, sir,” Leofsig said. Elfsig led him to the parlor and brought the wine himself. Felgilde’s little brother, whose name Leofsig always forgot, made faces at him from the doorway—though only when Elfsig’s back was turned. Leofsig ignored him. Ealstan had been only a bit too big to play such games when young men started coming to Hestan’s house to take Conberge out.

Leofsig hadn’t quite finished his wine when Felgilde came into the parlor. Elfsig said. “You’ll want to bring her home before curfew, so we don’t have trouble with the redheads.” His eyes twinkled. “Maybe you won’t want to do it—I recall what it’s like being your age, believe it or not—but you will, for her sake.”

“Aye, sir,” Leofsig said, so mournfully that Elfsig laughed. He would cheerfully have disobeyed his own mother; evading the wishes of Felgilde’s family was harder. Putting the best face on it he could, he turned to her. “Shall we be off?”

“Aye.” She kissed Elfsig, who wore rather a bushy beard, on the end of his nose. Leofsig offered her his arm. She took it. Her maroon cloak went well with his blue one. She’d done up her black hair in a fancy pile of curls. She looked like her father, but in her Elfsig’s rather doughy features were sharply carved. She said, “I hope the play is good.”

“It’s supposed to be very funny,” Leofsig answered as they headed for the door. Most of the plays that ran in Gromheort these days were farces. Real life was grim enough to make serious drama less attractive than it would have been in better times.

People streamed toward the playhouse, which stood a couple of doors down from the public baths. Leofsig saw two or three couples come right out of the men’s and women’s wings of the baths, meet, and head for the theater. One such pair all but ran to get in line ahead of Felgilde and him. “I hope we’ll have decent seats,” Felgilde said.

If you’d been ready when I got there, we’d have a better chance. But Leofsig, like any other swain with an ounce of sense in his head, knew better than to say that out loud. He paid for two seats. He and Felgilde both held out their hands so a fellow could stamp them to prove they’d paid. Thus marked, they went inside.

Leofsig bought wine for both of them, and also bread and olives and roasted almonds and cheese. A stew of some sort bubbled in a pot, too, but he knew it wouldn’t be much more than gruel. The playhouse had no easier time getting meat than anyone else in Gromheort. Spitting out olive pits as they walked, he and Felgilde headed for the benches in front of the stage.

At the entranceway, a sign that hadn’t been there the last time he came to the theater announced, KAUNIANS IN REAR BALCONY ONLY. “Oh, good!” Felgilde exclaimed. “More seats for the rest of us.”

He looked at her. Most of what he wanted to say, he couldn’t, not unless he also wanted to betray himself. Felgilde and her family didn’t know he’d escaped from the Algarvian captives’ camp, or how he’d escaped, or with whose help. Like most people, they thought the redheads had released him. The fewer folk who knew any different, the better.

He did say, “They’re people, too.”

“They’re not Forthwegians, not truly,” Felgilde said. “And the trousers their women wear—well, I mean really.” She tossed her head.

As he’d grown toward manhood, Leofsig had eyed a good many trousered Kaunian women. He didn’t know of a Forthwegian man who hadn’t—including, he had no doubt whatever, Felgilde’s father. Saying anything about that also struck him as unwise. He pointed. “There’s a spot wide enough for two, I think,” he said. “Come on—let’s hurry.”

The spot proved barely wide enough for two. That meant Felgilde had to squeeze in close behind him. He didn’t mind. She leaned her head on his shoulder. He didn’t mind that, either. She was wearing a floral scent that tickled his nose. When he slipped an arm around her, she snuggled closer. He should have been very happy. Most of him was very happy. Even the small part that wasn’t very happy made excuses for Felgilde: if she didn’t care for Kaunians, how was she different from most Forthwegians? She wasn’t, and Leofsig knew it.

“Ah,” she said as the lights dimmed and the curtains slid back from the stage. Leofsig leaned forward, too. He’d come here to forget his troubles and his kingdom’s, not to dwell on them.

Out came an actor and actress dressed as Forthwegian peasants from a couple of centuries before: stock comic figures. “Sure is hard times,” the actor said. He looked at the actress. “Twenty years ago, now, we had plenty to eat.” He looked at her again. “Twenty years ago, I was married to a good-looking woman.”

“Twenty years ago, I was married to a young man,” she retorted.

He winced, as from a blow. “If I had red hair, I bet my belly’d be full.”

“If you had red hair, you’d look like an idiot.” The actress looked out at the audience, then shrugged. “Wouldn’t change things much, would it?”

They took things from there, poking fun at the Algarvian occupiers, at themselves, and at anything else that happened to get in their way. The villain of the piece was a Kaunian woman—played by a short, squat, immensely fat Forthwegian actress in a blond wig; she looked all the more grotesque in tight-fitting trousers. Leofsig wondered what the real Kaunians in the rear of the balcony thought of her. Felgilde thought she was very funny. So did Leofsig, when he wasn’t think about how laughing at her helped estrange Forthwegians and Kaunians.

In the end, she got what she deserved, being married off to a drunken swineherd, or perhaps to one of his pigs. The Algarvians in the paly went off to harass some other fictitious village: the sort of relief Gromheort wanted to see but never would. And the two peasants who’d opened the show stood at center stage. The man of the pair addressed the audience:

“So you see, my friends, things can turn out all right.”

“Oh, shut up, you old fool,” said the actress who’d played his wife. The curtain slid out and hid them both, then parted so they and the rest of the company could take their bows and get their applause. The loudest cheers—and a lot of howls of counterfeit lust—went to the fat woman who’d played the Kaunian. She twitched her hips, which raised more howls.

“That was fun,” Felgilde said as she and Leofsig filed out of the playhouse. “I enjoyed it. Thank you for taking me.” She smiled up at him.

“You’re welcome,” he answered, more absently than he should have. He’d enjoyed the play, too, enjoyed it and at the same time been embarrassed at himself for enjoying it. He’d never known that peculiar mix of feelings before, and kept at them in his head, as a child will pick at a scab until it bleeds anew.

Out on the street, Felgilde said, “I’m cold,” and shivered, as fine a dramatic performance as any back at the theater. Leofsig spread his cloak so it covered both of them, as he knew she wanted him to do. Under that concealment, they could be bolder than they would have dared without it. She put her arm around his waist, so they walked as close together as they had sat during the play. He caressed her breast through the fabric of her tunic. She hadn’t let him do that before. Now she sighed and put her other hand on top of his, squeezing him against her soft, firm flesh.

Walking thus, they hardly walked at all, and got back to Felgilde’s house only a few minutes before curfew. In front of the door, where her family might see, she let Leofsig chastely kiss her on the cheek. Then she hurried inside.

Leofsig hurried, too, back toward his own home. As he trotted through the dark streets of Gromheort, half of him wanted to ask her out again as soon as he could. Maybe I’ll get my hand under her tunic next time, that half thought. The other half never wanted to see her again. On he ran, at war within himself.

Fernao reveled in the pleasure of a ley-line caravan. Traveling through Setubal in a snug, water-tight coach with a stove at the far end was infinitely preferable to a caravan across the land of the Ice People on camelback, to say nothing of his journey across the ocean on leviathanback. Fernao was perfectly willing to say nothing of that journey; he kept trying to forget it. Its sole virtue, as far as he was concerned, was that it had brought him back to Lagoas.

He stretched luxuriously—so luxuriously that he brushed against the man who shared the bench with him. “Your pardon, I crave,” he murmured.

“It’s all right,” the fellow said, hardly raising his eyes from his news sheet.

To Fernao, that casual forbearance felt like a luxury, too. King Penda would have complained endlessly about being bumped. King Penda, as the mage knew to his sorrow, complained endlessly about everything. These days, King Vitor and his courtiers were nursemaiding Penda; the fugitive King of Forthweg was no longer Fernao’s worry.

Setubal seemed little changed from the way it had looked before Fernao set out for Yanina to pluck Penda from King Tsavellas’s palace. Had he not already known, he would have been hard pressed to tell Lagoas was a kingdom at war. Or so he thought, till he saw one of his favorite restaurants and several other buildings on the same block reduced to charred rubble.

His exclamation must have held surprise as well as dismay, for his seat-mate gave him a quizzical stare. “Where have you been, pal?” the man asked. “Mezentio’s stinking dragons gave us that little present a couple months ago.”

“Out of the kingdom,” Fernao answered mournfully. He sighed. “The best fried prawns, the best smoked eel in Setubal—gone.”

“You won’t find eel any more smoked than it was the night those eggs fell, and that’s a fact,” the other man said before starting to read again.

He got out of the caravan coach a couple of stops later. No one took his place. Out here past Vinhaes Park, fewer people were traveling away from the center of the city. More would be going back when the caravan returned.

“University!” the conductor called. “All out for the university.”

The mage hurried across the campus of Varzim University toward its beating heart: the library. Having finally put his own affairs in order after his long absence, he could begin to find out how his profession had changed, had grown, while he wasn’t looking.

Students in their yellow tunics and light blue kilts eyed him curiously as he passed them. “What’s that old man doing here?” one of them muttered to another, although Fernao was hardly old enough to have sired either of them.

“Maybe he’s a lecturer,” the other student said.

“Nah.” The first one shook his head. “When did you ever see a lecturer move so fast?” That seemed an incontrovertible argument, or maybe Fernao had just hurried out of earshot before the second student replied.

In front of the library stood an excellent reproduction of a classical Kaunian marble statue of a philosopher. The original had been carved in a sunnier clime; in his light tunic and trousers, the philosopher looked miserably cold. The little icicle hanging off the end of his nose only added to the effect.

Two guards at the top of the stairs leading into the library looked miserably cold, too. If they’d had icicles on the ends of their noses, though, they’d knocked them off recently. Fernao started to stride past them, but one moved quickly to block his way. “Here, what’s this?” he demanded, drawing himself up in indignation.

“A library is a weapon of war, sir,” the guard said. “You’ll need to show us what manner of man you are before you pass within.”

“You don’t suppose the Algarvians have libraries of their own?” Fernao asked, acid in his voice. But perhaps they did not have any one that matched Varzim University’s. And worrying about knowledge as a weapon of war was, he supposed, better than ignoring it. From his belt pouch he took the small card certifying him as a first-rank member in good standing of the Lagoan Guild of Mages (he was glad he’d bought a life membership after making first rank; otherwise, his affiliation would have lapsed while he was on his journey, and he surely wouldn’t have got round to renewing it yet). “Here. Does this satisfy you?”

Both guards solemnly studied the card. They looked at each other. The one who hadn’t tried to block his way nodded. The one who had tried stepped aside, saying, “Aye, sir. Pass on.”

Pass on Fernao did. Had he been an Algarvian spy, he might have forged or stolen his card. He did not mention that to the guard. Had he done so, odds were that no one would ever have been admitted into the library again.

He hurried upstairs to the third floor. When he got there, he was glad to discover the librarians hadn’t gone through one of their periodic reshelving frenzies while he was far away. Otherwise, he would have had to hurry right back down again, to find out where the journals he wanted were hidden. Reshelving probably would have done as much as the guards did to keep Algarvians from ferreting information out of the library.

As things were, he found new numbers of such tomes as The Royal Lagoan Journal of Pure and Applied Magecraft, Kaunian Sorcery (the past year’s last two fascicules were missing: either the fall of Priekule had prevented their publication or copies hadn’t been able to make it across the Strait of Valmiera), and the Annual Sorcerous Compendium of the Seven Princes of Kuusamo. Having found them, he carried them to a battered old chair behind the shelves, a chair in which he’d done a lot of reading over the years.

There in Fernao’s hideaway, he flipped rapidly through the journals, slowing down when he found an article that interested him. After he’d put aside the Annual Sorcerous Compendium, he noticed he’d hardly slowed down at all while going through it.

“That’s odd,” he murmured, and turned to the table of contents at the rear of the volume to see if he’d missed something. He hadn’t, and scratched his head. Before he’d gone away, the Kuusamans had been doing some very interesting work at the deep theoretical level. Siuntio—who was world-famous, at least among mages—and younger theoreticians like Raahe and Pekka had asked some provocative questions. He’d hoped they might have come up with some answers by now, or at least some more new and interesting questions.

If they had, they weren’t publishing them in the Annual Sorcerous Compendium. Its pages were full of articles on horticultural magecraft, ley-line engineering, and improvements in crystallomancy: interesting, significant, but not at the cutting edge of the field. With a shrug, he set the volume aside and went on to a Jelgavan journal, which also proved to cut off abruptly with the previous spring’s fascicule.

He was three articles into the Royal Lagoan Journal when he suddenly sat up very straight and slammed the heavy volume closed. It made a loud, booming noise; someone somewhere else in the third floor exclaimed in surprise. Fernao sat still; to his relief, nobody came looking to see what had happened.

“If they’ve found any new answers, if they’ve found any new questions, they aren’t publishing them,” he muttered under his breath. He set his hand on the leather binding of the Annual Sorcerous Compendium. His first assumption was that the Kuusamans hadn’t found anything, but how likely was that? Would all of their best theoretical sorcerers have fallen silent at once?

Maybe. He didn’t know. He couldn’t know. But maybe, too, maybe they’d found something interesting and important: so interesting and so important, they didn’t care to tell anyone else about it.

“And maybe your head’s full of moonbeams, too,” Fernao told himself, his voice barely above a whisper.

But could he afford to take the chance? Kuusamo and Lagoas, once upon a time, had fought like cats and dogs. They hadn’t fought in a couple of hundred years. He knew that didn’t mean they couldn’t fight again, though. If the Kuusamans ever decided to stop the halfhearted island war they were waging against Gyongyos, what would keep them from jumping on Lagoas’s back? Nothing Fernao could see, the more so as his own kingdom couldn’t give over the war against Algarve without becoming King Mezentio’s vassals.

Reluctant as a lover having to leave his beloved too soon, he set the journals on their shelves and went downstairs. “The Guild may know more about this than I,” he muttered under his breath, and then, “I hope the Guild knows more about this than I.”

Both guards nodded to him as he hurried past them. Now that he was going away, they were content. He didn’t laugh till they couldn’t see his face. They might be better than nothing; he remained unconvinced they were a lot better than nothing.

He waited at the caravan stop for a car to take him back to Setubal. He had to change to a different ley line downtown, not far from the harbor. His second journey was shorter: less a mile. He got out of the caravan car across the street from the Grand Hall of the Lagoan Guild of Mages.

It was a grand hall, built of snowy marble in severe neoclassical style. The statuary group in front of it might have been snatched straight out of the heyday of the Kaunian Empire, too. The only thing that would have been odd to a veritable classical Kaunian was that the statues, like the hall, remained unpainted. Temporal sorcery had proved that the Kaunians, in the old days, slapped paint on everything that didn’t move. But builders hadn’t known that in the days when the guild hall went up. Most people still didn’t realize it. And, by the time anyone at all knew it, pristine marble had become as much a neoclassical tradition as painted stone had been in Kaunian days.

Inside the hall, Fernao exchanged greetings with half a dozen mages. Some had heard he was back and were glad to see him; others hadn’t, and were astonished to see him. Lagoans weren’t inveterate gabbers like Algarvians or Yaninans, but he still needed longer than he’d wanted to make his way to the guild secretary’s office.

“Ah, Master Fernao!” exclaimed that worthy, a plump, good-natured fellow named Brinco. “And how may I help you this, I fear, not so lovely day?”

“I should like to see Grandmaster Pinhiero for a few minutes, if such a thing be possible,” Fernao answered.

Brinco’s frown suggested that the mere thought he might have to tell Fernao no was enough to devastate him. “I cannot say with certainty whether it be possible or not, my lord,” the secretary said. He got to his feet. “If your Excellency would have the generosity to wait?”

“Of course,” Fernao answered. “How could I refuse you anything?”

“Easily, I doubt not,” Brinco replied. “But bide a moment, and we shall see what we shall see.” He vanished behind an elaborately carved oaken door. When he emerged, smiles filled his face. “Your desire shall be granted in every particular. The grandmaster says his greatest pleasure would lie in seeing you for as long as you desire.”

Fernao had known Pinhiero a fair number of years. He doubted the grandmaster had said any such thing; a grumpy Oh, all right was much more likely. When it came to giving pleasure, Brinco liked to set his thumb on the scale. Sometimes that annoyed Fernao. Not today. Getting any of what he wanted suited him fine. “I thank you,” he said, and went into the grandmaster’s office.

Pinhiero was about sixty, his sandy hair and mustaches going gray. He peered up at Fernao through reading glasses that made his eyes look enormous. “Well,” he growled, “what’s so important?” In public ceremonies, he could be dignity, learning, and magnificence personified. Among his colleagues, he didn’t bother with any such mask, and simply was what he was.

“Grandmaster, I’ve come across something interesting in the library—or rather, I’ve come across nothing interesting in the library, which is interesting in and of itself,” Fernao said.

“Not to me, it isn’t,” Pinhiero said. “You get as old as I am, you don’t have time for riddles any more. Spit it out or leave.”

“Aye, Grandmaster,” Fernao said, and explained what he’d found—and what he hadn’t. Pinhiero listened with no change of expression. He was famous for that. Fernao finished, “I can’t prove this means anything, Grandmaster, but if it does mean something, it means something important.” He waited to see whether Pinhiero thought it meant anything.

“Kuusamans won’t give you the time of day unless they feel like it,” the grandmaster said at last. “Come to that, they won’t give each other the time of day, either. Seven princes—cursed silly arrangement.” He glared at Fernao. “You know how much trouble you can get into by trying to reason from something that isn’t there?”

“Aye, Grandmaster,” Fernao said, wondering if that was dismissal.

It wasn’t. Pinhiero said, “Here. Wait.” He pulled from a desk drawer an unfashionably large and heavy crystal. Staring down into it, he murmured a name: “Siuntio.” Fernao’s eyes widened. The grandmaster went on, now in classical Kaunian: “By the brotherhood we share, I summon thee.” Fernao’s eyes got wider still.

The image of a white-haired, wrinkled Kuusaman formed in the crystal. “I am here, my bad-tempered brother,” he said, also in Kaunian.

“You old fraud, we’re on to you,” Pinhiero growled.

“You dream,” Siuntio said. “You dream, and imagine yourself awake.” His image disappeared, leaving the crystal only a sphere of stone.

Pinhiero grunted. “It’s big, all right. If it were smaller, he’d have done a better job of denying it. What have they gone and done—and will they do it to us next?” He scowled at Fernao. “How would you like to go to Kuusamo?”

“Not much,” Fernao answered. The grandmaster ignored him. He was already making plans.

Bembo assumed a hurt expression. It was, he knew, a good hurt expression. Every once in a while, it even softened the heart of Sergeant Pesaro. Any hurt expression that could soften the heart of a constabulary sergeant had to be a good one.

But it did nothing to soften Saffa’s heart. “No,” the sketch artist said. “I don’t want to take supper with you again, or go to the playhouse with you, or go strolling in the park, or do anything with you. I really don’t, Bembo. Enough was enough.”

“But why not?” Bembo thought the question was, and sounded, perfectly reasonable. An impartial listener, of which there were none outside the constabulary station, would assuredly have called it whining.

“Why?” Saffa took a deep breath. “Because even though you had a good idea and Captain Sasso liked it, you still haven’t been promoted. That’s one reason: I don’t want to waste my time with a man who isn’t a winner. And the other is, you only want one thing from a girl, and you don’t even bother hiding it.”

“I am a man.” Bembo struck an affronted pose. “Of course I want that.”

“You aren’t listening—and why am I not surprised?” Saffa said. “It’s the only thing you really want from me. You wouldn’t care about anything else I did, as long as I gave you that. And because you’re like that, it’s the one thing you’ll never, ever get from me.”

She turned away from him and headed for the stairs, putting a little something extra in her walk to give him a hint about what he might be missing. “How about next week?” Bembo called after her. “Suppose I ask you again next week?”

Saffa climbed the stairs. Bembo automatically tried to look up her kilt, but she kept her arms close to her sides to hold it down. She went into the station and closed the door. Then she opened it, looked out at him, smiled sweetly, and said, “No.” Still smiling, she closed the door again.

“Bitch,” Bembo muttered. “Miserable bitch.” He trudged toward the stairway himself. What I really need, he thought, is a Kaunian hussy like the ones in the romances I’ve been reading. They don’t tell a man no. All they ever do is beg for more. They can’t get enough of a strong Algarvian man.

He scowled. All the Kaunians in Tricarico had gone into camps. He’d helped put them there, and he hadn’t even had the chance to have any fun while he was doing it. Life wasn’t fair, no doubt about it. Those Kaunian sluts were probably giving the camp guards all they wanted and then some, in exchange for whatever tiny favors they could get out of them.

When Bembo came into the station, Sergeant Pesaro laughed at him. He’d have bet the sergeant would. “She flamed you down like a dragon attacking from out of the sun, didn’t she?” Pesaro said.

“Ahh, she’s not as fancy as she thinks she is,” Bembo growled. “Tell me one thing she’s got that any other broad doesn’t.”

“You by the short hairs,” Pesaro said, which was crude but unfortunately accurate. The sergeant went on, “Well, my boy, you can do your mooning over her on patrol today.”

“I thought I could get caught up on my paperwork!” Bembo exclaimed in dismay. “If I don’t get caught up on my paperwork cursed soon, Captain Sasso’s going to have me for supper.”

“Not as much fun as Saffa having you for supper, that’s certain,” Pesaro said, “but it can’t be helped. I’ve got a couple of men down with the galloping pukes, and somebody’s got to go out there and make certain none of our wonderful law-abiding citizens decides to walk off with the Kaunian Column in his belt pouch.”

“Have a heart, Sergeant.” Bembo gave Pesaro the famous wounded look.

It didn’t work this time. “You’re going out,” the sergeant said implacably. “You’re my first replacement in, though, so you do get to pick whether you want to head over to the west side or to Riversedge.”

Bembo was almost indignant and glum enough to choose to patrol the thieves’ nest down by the waterfront—almost, but not quite. “I’ll take the west side,” he said, and Pesaro nodded, unsurprised. Pointing to the city map on the wall behind the sergeant, Bembo asked, “Exactly which route am I stuck with?”

“You’ll get stuck with Riversedge if you don’t quit your griping,” Pesaro said. He turned his swivel chair, which squeaked under him. “You get number seven.” He pointed. “Plenty of fancy houses, and you shouldn’t have too much to do unless you flush out a sneak thief.”

“Could be worse,” Bembo admitted. “Could be better, but could be worse, too.” From him, that was no small concession. “Better than Riversedge, anyhow.” And that, as he knew fair well, was no small understatement.

Pesaro wrote Bembo’s name on a scrap of paper and pinned it to patrol route number seven. “Get moving,” the sergeant told him. “That part of town, they want to know they’ve got a constable on the job all the time. If they don’t, they get on the crystal and start breathing fire at us.”

“I’m going, I’m going,” Bembo said. In a way, he was glad to escape the station. If he sat at a desk and did paperwork, he’d keep watching Saffa and she’d keep sneering at him. But the paperwork really did need doing. If he didn’t get caught up soon, Captain Sasso would have some pointed and pungent things to say to him. Curse it, I was going to get it done—well, most of it, anyhow, he thought. No help for that now.

His breath smoked when he went outside. Snow gleamed on the peaks of the Bradano Mountains to the east, but rarely got down to Tricarico. Before the war, rich people had gone up into the mountains for the privilege of playing in the snow. Now that Algarve ruled on both sides of the mountains, they could go up again. Folk from farther south would wonder why they bothered, though. As a matter of fact, Bembo wondered why they bothered. He’d seen just enough of snow to know he didn’t want to see more.

Muttering at his unfortunate fate, he trudged west. A team of gardeners with long-handled shears trimmed the branches of the trees surrounding a home that probably cost as much as he would make in twenty years. He sighed. He lived in a flat even less prepossessing than Saffa’s.

He started to walk by the tree trimmers, then stopped and took a second look at them. He whistled, a low note of surprise, and stepped off the sidewalk and on to the expanse of close-cropped grass that fronted the mansion. Swinging his club as he advanced on the gardeners, he did his best to put on a brave show.

They didn’t need long to notice him; he wanted to be noticed. The boss of the crew came toward him. “Something wrong, Constable?” he asked. His shears, when you got down to it, made a more formidable weapon than Bembo’s bludgeon.

“Wrong? I don’t know about that, pal,” Bembo answered. “But some of those people you’ve got working for you”—he pointed to the ones he meant—“they’re women, aren’t they? I’ve got pretty fair eyes, I do, and I know a woman when I see one. I know I’ve never seen one trimming trees till now, too.”

“Well, maybe you haven’t,” the gardener allowed. “Half my workers have gone into the army. The work doesn’t go away, even if the men do. And so—” He turned to the women he’d hired. “Dalinda, Alcina, Procla—knock off for a bit and come say good day to the constable here.”

“Good day, Constable,” they chorused, smiling at him.

“Good day, fair ladies,” he answered, sweeping off his hat and bowing to each of them in turn. Dalinda wasn’t particularly fair, and was brawnier than most of the men still working for the master gardener. Procla wasn’t anything special, either. Alcina, now, Alcina was worth bowing to. Seeing her sweaty from pruning branches made Bembo wish he’d got her sweaty in a different way. Smiling back at all of them, but at her in particular, he asked, “And how do you like men’s work?”

“Fine,” they said, all together again, so much in unison that Bembo wondered if the gardener had hired them from a singing group that had fallen on hard times.

“Isn’t that something?” the constable said, and gave the head gardener a poke in the ribs with his elbow. “Tell me, pal—does your wife know how you’ve managed to keep your crew going?”

“Now, Constable,” the fellow answered with a nudge and a wink of his own, “do I look that foolish?”

“Not a bit of it, friend, not a bit of it,” Bembo said, chuckling. “But, of course, the municipal business licensing bureau does know you’ve changed the conditions under which you’re operating?”

Had the master gardener said aye, Bembo would have given up and gone on with his patrol. But the man only frowned a little and said, “I hadn’t imagined that would be necessary.”

Bembo clicked his tongue between his teeth and looked doleful. “Oh, that’s too bad. That’s really too bad. Those boys are sticklers, aye, they are. Why, if they were to find out what you were up to, if I were to tell them …” He looked up at the sky, as if he’d forgotten what he was saying.

“Perhaps we can come to an understanding,” the master gardener said, hardly even sounding resigned. He knew how the game was played, and he’d given Bembo an opening. Taking the constable aside, he asked, “Would ten suit you?”

They haggled for a while before meeting at fifteen. Bembo said, “By the powers above, I’ll settle for ten if that one wench—Alcina—feels like being friendly.”

“I didn’t hire her out of a brothel, so I’ll have to ask her,” the gardener said. “If she turns you down, I’ll pay you the extra silver and you can buy what you want.”

“That’s fair,” Bembo agreed.

The gardener went back to Alcina and spoke to her in a low voice. She looked back toward Bembo. “Him?” she said. “Ha!” She tossed her head in fine contempt.

“That costs you another five,” Bernbo growled at the gardener, his ears burning. The other man knew better than to argue with him. He paid out the silver without another word. Bembo took it and stalked off, pleased and angry at the same time. He’d made a profit, but if he’d been a little luckier, he could have had fun, too.

At last, as much by accident as any other way (or so it seemed to him), the Lagoans had given Cornelu an assignment he actually wanted to have. Looming out of the mist ahead of him and Eforiel was Tirgoviste harbor.

He thanked the powers above for the mist. Without it, he would have had a much harder time approaching his home island. The Algarvians patrolled much more alertly than the Sibian navy had—which was one huge reason why King Mezentio’s men ruled in Sibiu these days.

Turning back to the Lagoans Eforiel carried, he asked, “All good?” He would never be truly fluent in their language, but he was beginning to be able to make himself understood.

“Aye,” the three of them said, one after another. They slipped off the lines to which they’d clung while the leviathan brought them across the sea. Cornelu wondered if the toys under Eforiel’s belly were of the same sort the riders going into Valmiera had used or something altogether different. He hadn’t asked. It was none of his business.

“Here. Wait,” he said as the Lagoan raiders got ready to swim off. Treading water, they looked back at him. From inside his rubber suit, he pulled out a thin tube of oiled leather, tightly sealed at both ends. He spoke Lagoan phrases he’d carefully memorized: “Envelope in here. Please put in post box. For my wife.”

He had not fled Sibiu with any such envelopes—printed in advance to show the proper postage fee had been paid—in his possession. Neither had any of his fellow exiles from the island kingdom. But Lagoas had hobbyists who collected such things. He’d been able to buy what he wanted from a shop that catered to them, and hadn’t paid above twice what he would have at his own post office.

One of the Lagoans took the waterproof tube. “Aye, Commander, we’ll take care of it,” he said in Algarvian. That was a two-edge sword; it would let him be understood by most Sibians, but might make him seem an occupier rather than someone fighting the occupiers.

Cornelu shrugged as he said, “I thank you.” Few Lagoans really spoke his language. Most thought Algarvian was close enough, and most of the time, up till the war, they’d been right. Now, though, a man who used o-endings instead of u-endings and trilled his “r”s instead of gargling them showed he did not come from the unlucky islands King Burebistu had ruled.

With a last wave, the Lagoans swam toward the shore, pushing their canister full of trouble ahead of them. They vanished into the mist almost at once. Cornelu had everything he could do not to slip away from his leviathan and swim after them. To come so close to Tirgoviste and not be allowed to go ashore was cruel, cruel. And yet, if he disobeyed his orders and left Eforiel behind, how could he strike more blows against Algarve? If all he wanted was to stay home, he could have surrendered after King Mezentio’s men seized Sibiu. He had not. He would not.

“Costache,” he murmured. And, somewhere up there in Tirgoviste town, he had a son or daughter he’d never seen. That was hard, too.

Eforiel let out a questioning grunt. Leviathans were smarter than animals had any business being, and Eforiel and he had been together almost as long as he and Costache. She knew something was wrong, even if she couldn’t quite fathom what.

Cornelu sighed and stroked her smooth, pliant skin. It wasn’t the lover’s caress he wanted to give his wife, but had satisfactions of its own. “I cannot abandon you, either, can I?” he said. Eforiel grunted again. She wanted to tell him something, but he was not clever enough to know what.

His orders were to make for Setubal once more as soon as he had dropped off the raiders or saboteurs or whatever they were. Obeying those orders exactly as he’d got them proved impossible. He was a warrior disciplined enough to keep from abandoning the fight and trying to sneak home to his wife. But not all the discipline in the world could have kept him from lingering for a while outside the harbor in the hope of at least getting a long, bittersweet look at the land he loved.

He knew the mist might lay on the sea all day; it often did, in wintertime. If it did today, he promised himself he would guide Eforiel southeast again when evening came. Till then, he would wait. The Lagoans could not complain about when he returned. As he reluctantly admitted to himself, they were seamen, too; they understood the sea was not always a neat, tidy, precise place.

He looked west, in the direction of distant Unkerlant. King Swemmel’s commodores probably timed their leviathan-riders with water clocks, and docked their pay for every minute they were late coming into port. That was what they called efficiency. Cornelu called it madness, but the Unkerlanters cared no more for his opinion than he did for Swemmel’s.

Eforiel lunged off to one side after a pilchard or a squid, almost jerking Cornelu out of his harness. He laughed; while he was thinking about Unkerlant, an unprofitable pleasure if ever there was one, the leviathan was worrying about keeping her belly full. “You have better sense than I,” he said, and patted her again. She wriggled under his hand, as if to answer, Well, of course.

Little by little, the mist did lift. Cornelu peered into Tirgoviste harbor. The warships there were Algarvian now, save for a few captured Sibian vessels. Cornelu cursed in a low voice to see the sailing ships that had brought the Algarvian army to Tirgoviste still in port, their masts and yards as bare of canvas as trees were of leaves in this season of the year.

Tirgoviste rose steeply from the harbor. Cornelu tried to make out the house he shared with Costache. He knew where it would be, but it was just too far away for him to let himself pretend he could spy it. In his mind’s eye, though, he saw it plain, and Costache in front of it holding their—son? daughter? The mental picture blurred and grew indistinct, like a watercolor left out in drizzle.

Fog and clouds still lingered on the slopes of Tirgoviste’s central mountains. Not for the first time, Cornelu hoped remnants of the Sibian army still carried on the fight against the Algarvians. Someone had to be carrying on the fight, else the Lagoans would not have sent their men to lend a hand.

A couple of little ley-line patrol boats moved around inside the sheltered waters of the harbor. Cornelu didn’t think anything much about that till the boats, both flying Algarve’s banner of green, white, and red, emerged from the harbor and sped toward him and Eforiel at a clip the leviathan could not come close to matching. Then he cursed again, in good earnest this time: while he’d been eyeing Tirgoviste, King Mezentio’s men on the island had spotted him, too.

Maybe they thought he was one of their leviathan-riders, coming in with news. He dared not take the chance. Besides, even if they did, he could not continue that masquerade for long, not in a rubber suit still stamped over the breast with Sibiu’s five crowns. He urged Eforiel down into a dive.

He had played games with patrol boats before, during exercises against his own countrymen and during the war against the Algarvians. In exercises and in action, he’d always managed to evade them. That left him confident he could do it yet again. He was annoyed at himself for letting the Algarvians spy him, but he wasn’t anything more than annoyed.

Eventually, Eforiel gave the wriggle that meant she needed to surface. Cornelu let her swim back up toward the air. He’d guided her as closely parallel to the shoreline as he could. Surface sailors had little imagination. They would assume he’d fled straight out to sea, terrified at the sight of them. Odds were they wouldn’t even notice Eforiel when she spouted. If they did, one more underwater run and he’d shake free of them. That was how things worked.

Or so he thought, till Eforiel did come up to breathe. Then, to his horror, he discovered that the patrol boats had ridden down a ley line very close to the path the leviathan had taken. They’d overran her by a little, but they plainly had a good notion of how far and how fast she was likely to travel under the sea.

When she spouted, sailors at the sterns of the patrol boats cried out. They were close enough to let Cornelu hear those shouts, thin over the water. He forced Eforiel into another dive as fast as he could. He knew she hadn’t fully refreshed her lungs, but he also knew the Algarvian boats were going to start flinging eggs any minute. He refused to give them a target they could not miss.

Fling eggs they did. He heard them splash into the sea. The Algarvian mages had come up with something new, too, for they did not burst as soon as they hit the water, but sank for a while before suddenly releasing their energy far below the surface.

The deep bursts terrified Eforiel, who swam faster and harder than ever, and barely under Cornelu’s control. He knew she would have to surface sooner because of it, but he couldn’t do anything about it. No—he could and did hope that, when she surfaced this time, she would have evaded the patrol boats.

And so she had. Oh, one of them was fairly close, but out of egg-tosser range. It did not turn and move toward her when she spouted. Maybe the boat couldn’t. Maybe she’d come up for air in a stretch of ocean well away from any ley lines. Ships that pulled their energy from the world grid were swifter and surer than those that did not, but they could travel only where the grid let them. Where it did not… Cornelu thumbed his nose at the patrol boat. “Here, my dear, we are safe,” he told Eforiel. “Rest as you will.”

He never saw the dragon that dropped the egg toward Eforiel. He never saw the egg, either, though its splash drenched him. It sank below the surface of the sea, as the ones the patrol boats tossed had done, and then it burst.

Eforiel’s great body shielded Cornelu from the worst of the energies. The leviathan writhed in torment. Blood crimsoned the sea. Cornelu knew—and the knowledge tore at him—he could not save her; too much blood was pouring forth. He also knew it would draw sharks.

That left him one choice. Cursing the Algarvians—and cursing himself for not doing a better job of watching the air—he struck out for Tirgoviste. He wasn’t close to the town that bore the name, not after Eforiel’s desperate flight, but he could still reach land. Whether the Lagoans liked it or not, he was coming home.