Jaws of Darkness

by Harry Turtledove

  Ealstan’s eye fell on the slim book called You Too Can Be a Mage. He scowled at it. “Miserable, useless thing,” he said. Vanai had tried to use a charm in it to make herself look like a Forthwegian. The one time she cast that spell, all she’d accomplished was the opposite of what she’d intended: for a little while, she’d made Ealstan look like a Kaunian.

  Fortunately, she’d figured out how to reverse that. But then she’d had to take apart the spell in You Too Can Be a Mage, see where the bumbling author must have mistranslated from classical Kaunian into Forthwegian, and reconstruct what the original Kaunian had been. That gave her a spell she could really use, not one that offered hope and then immediately betrayed it.

  Ealstan had heard her use the spell dozens of times. With a couple of bits of yarn, he could have cast it himself. But so what? He already looked like a Forthwegian. Turning himself into one wouldn’t do him any good.

  He took You Too Can Be a Mage off the shelf and found the sorcery Vanai had modified. In its original, unchanged form, it would let him look like a Kaunian. For a moment, excitement blazed in him. That would get him into the Kaunian quarter. It would let him see Vanai. It would let him be with her.

  But it wouldn’t let him bring her out. That was what he needed, above all else. Going into the Kaunian district to keep her company was romantically splendid but altogether useless. All it would accomplish, in the long run— maybe in the not-so-long run—was getting both of them sent west.

  “That won’t do,” he said, as if someone—someone inside himself, perhaps—had suggested it would. The idea wasn’t for him to die looking like a Kaunian. The idea was for Vanai to live looking like a Forthwegian … or whatever else she had to look like to go on living. Ealstan nodded. He did clearly see what had to be done. He was the practical son of a practical father. Hestan would never have wasted time on a futile romantic gesture, either.

  Fair enough, Ealstan thought. I see what doesn‘t work. What does, though? The Algarvians had set things up so that no Forthwegians could go into the Kaunian quarter and no Kaunians could pass out of it into the rest of Eoforwic—not unless they seized them and took them to the ley-line caravan depot. Their system wasn’t slipshod, as it had been before. These days, they couldn’t afford to waste Kaunians. With the war in Unkerlant not going well, they needed every blond they could catch and hold.

  No Forthwegians inside. No Kaunians outside. Ealstan hurled You Too Can Be a Mage across the room. He slammed his fist down on the little table in front of the sofa on which he sat. Pain blazed up his arm. That left… nothing.

  There has to be something. He shook his head. He wanted there to be something. That didn’t mean it had to be. How many Kaunians had thought there had to be something? How many of those Kaunians were dead now? Too cursed many. Ealstan knew that.

  Wearily, he got to his feet and picked up You Too Can Be a Mage. The pages were almost ready to part company with the binding: this wasn’t the first time he or Vanai had flung the book. With a curse, Ealstan put it back on the shelf.

  “There has to be something.” He said it aloud, even if he’d already figured out it wasn’t true. The redheads had closed off every possibility involving Forthwegians and Kaunians, and what else was there? “Nothing. Not a stinking thing.” He said that aloud, too, to remind himself not to be a fool. Then he went to bed.

  When he woke up, he was smiling. At first, still half asleep, he didn’t understand why. But as full awareness came, the smile only got broader. He knew what he had to do. A moment later, he paused and shook his head. He knew what he had to try. It might not work. If it didn’t work, he was ruined. But if it did, he had a chance.

  His breakfast was much the same as his supper had been, only with olives as a relish instead of almonds. He hurried downstairs, hurried out of the block of flats, hurried to the pottery works, hurried into Pybba’s sanctum.

  He’d been sure the pottery magnate would be there before him. And he’d been right. Pybba sat behind his desk, sorting through papers and muttering unhappily to himself. He looked up at Ealstan with no great liking. “What do you want?”

  Before answering, Ealstan closed the door behind him. Pybba’s eyebrows rose. They rose higher when Ealstan told him exactly what he wanted.

  “You’re out of your bloody mind, boy,” the pottery magnate said when he was through.

  “Probably,” Ealstan agreed. “Can you get it for me? No—I’m sure you can. Will you get it for me?”

  “I’d be crazy if I did,” Pybba answered. Ealstan folded his arms across his chest and waited. Pybba said, “Anything goes wrong …” and sliced his thumb across his throat. Ealstan didn’t move. Then Pybba said, “Odds are I’d be well rid of you anyhow,” and Ealstan knew he had won.

  Ukmerge had one park—or, at least, Skarnu hadn’t been able to find more than one. In winter, with the weather cold and the grass dead and the trees bare-branched, not so many people came there. He could still walk through it, though, or sit down on one of the benches without drawing notice from the constables, if he came at noon. Even in the wintertime, some workers escaped from the nearby shoe manufactory to eat their dinners in the park.

  The air stank of leather. In Ukmerge, the air stank of leather so much that Skarnu had almost stopped noticing it. Almost. He still found himself wrinkling his nose every now and again.

  Most of the benches in the park faced a broad expanse of bare ground without trees, without even much in the way of dead grass. “Did something used to be here?” Skarnu asked the underground leader who called himself “Tytuvenai” after his hometown one noontime. “Something worth looking at, I mean?”

  “Tytuvenai” nodded. “An arch from the days of the Kaunian Empire. The Algarvians put eggs under it and knocked it down, same as they did with the Column of Victory in Priekule, same as they’ve done all over Valmiera— all over Jelgava, too, if half what we hear from there is true.”

  “Powers below eat them,” Skarnu growled. “They’re trying to make us forget our Kaunianity.”

  “Aye, no doubt,” “Tytuvenai” said. “They’re trying to make themselves forget it, too—that we were civilized while they were just woodscrawlers. But that’s not why I asked you to meet me here today.”

  “No, eh?” Skarnu tried to imagine what the arch had looked like. He had no trouble getting a general idea; he’d seen plenty of imperial monuments in Priekule and elsewhere. But he didn’t know what this one had been for, what reliefs and statuary and inscriptions it had borne. He wouldn’t be able to find out now, either. Nor would anyone else. That growl still in his voice, he said, “Maybe it should have been.”

  “Maybe.” “Tytuvenai” didn’t sound convinced. He explained why: “One of these days, when we have time, we’ll worry about arches and columns and tombs. We don’t have that kind of time now. We’ve got to worry about putting the Algarvians in tombs, and keeping them from putting any more of us into them. Isn’t that more important than old marble and granite?”

  “I suppose so,” Skarnu said grudgingly. “It’s more urgent, anyhow. Whether urgent is the same thing as important is something we can argue about another day.”

  “It’s something we’d better argue about another day,” “Tytuvenai” told him. “I called you here to ask if you were ready to get back to work.”

  “Ah,” Skarnu said. That certainly was more urgent than marble. As his comrade had done, he got straight down to business: “Here in Ukmerge? What have you got in mind, planting eggs inside the shoe manufactories?”

  “You laugh,” “Tytuvenai” said, and he was smiling himself. “If you knew how many shoes this town’s made for Mezentio’s men, you’d laugh out of the other side of your mouth, believe you me you would. It’d be a shrewd blow against the Algarvians. If we can bring it off, it will be a shrewd blow against the Algarvians. But it isn’t what we have in mind for you.”

  “What do you have in mind for me?” Skarnu knew he sounded relieved. The shoe manufactories, the who
le town of Ukmerge, oppressed him almost as badly as they did Merkela. He would have loved to see the manufactories go up in smoke, but he didn’t want to have anything to do with them himself.

  “You’ll know, better than most, how the Algarvians will bring Kaunians from Forthweg through Valmiera down to the coast of the Strait when they want to strike a sorcerous blow against Lagoas or Kuusamo,” “Tytuvenai” said.

  Skarnu’s answering nod was grim. “Aye, I know about that. I’d better. I sabotaged one of those ley-line caravans before it could get where it was going, and a lot of those Kaunians escaped before the redheads got the chance to sacrifice them.” He spoke with more than a little pride.

  “Tytuvenai” nodded, too. “Aye, I’d heard that. And when you find a Valmieran who’s disappeared, a Valmieran who’s got ‘Night and Fog’ scrawled on his doorway, he’s off to be sacrificed, too. The Algarvians want it to seem like a mystery, but that’s what happens.”

  “Is it?” Skarnu said, and the other underground leader nodded again. Skarnu went on. “I didn’t know that, but I’d be lying if I said I was surprised. You still haven’t told me what it’s got to do with me, though, or what you want me to do about it.”

  “I’m coming to that,” “Tytuvenai” said. “Not so long ago, in spite of everything we could do, the redheads got a couple of caravanloads of Kaunians from Forthweg down to the coast, out about as far east as they could go. It’s pretty plain they were aiming their sacrifice at Kuusamo, not Lagoas. And they made the cursed sacrifice, and they stole the Kaunians’ life energy, and they used it to power their stinking sorcery, and … something went wrong.”

  “Good!” Skarnu exclaimed. “What happened? Did one of their mages botch the spell, so that it came down on their own heads? By the powers above, that’d be sweet—and fitting, too.”

  But now “Tytuvenai” shook his head. “That was our first guess. It doesn’t seem to be so, though, not from the way the Algarvians have been running around down there by the sea like so many ants whose anthill just got kicked. No, what it looks like is, they made the sacrifice—made the murders—and cast the spell, and everything went just the way it was supposed to … except that the Kuusamans somehow turned the spell around and made it land on the redheads who’d cast it: either that, or they had a counterspell waiting that was even more potent.”

  “How could they?” Skarnu asked. Then, one obvious—and dreadful— possibility occurred to him. “Are they sacrificing people for the sake of their life energy, too, the way the Unkerlanters are doing?”

  “No.” “Tytuvenai” spoke with great certainty. “They aren’t doing that, powers above be praised. If they were, we’d know about it. The mages say they can feel those sacrifices, and they haven’t felt anything like that out of Kuusamo. But the Kuusamans threw back whatever Mezentio’s men sent them, and the Algarvians are jumping out of their kilts trying to figure out how.”

  “Mmm, I can see why they would be,” Skarnu said. “If there’s something out there that can master their magecraft, that’s got to be plenty to set them shivering and shaking.”

  “Now you’re getting the idea,” the other underground leader said. “We’re going to send you there, you and Palasta, to see if you can’t make them shiver and shake a little harder.”

  “Palasta?” Skarnu knew he’d heard the name before, but where? Then he remembered. “Oh. The little mage who hid my trail when the Algarvians were after Merkela and Gedominu and me in Erzvilkas.”

  “That’s right,” “Tytuvenai” said. “I know she looks like she’d blow away in a strong breeze, but she’s as good as we’ve got: the best.”

  “All right,” Skarnu said. “I won’t be sorry to see the last of Ukmerge, and I’d be a liar if I said anything different. And Merkela will be even happier to get away from here than I am.”

  A bell rang in the nearby shoe manufactory. The workers who’d been eating their dinners in the park hurried away. If they weren’t back before the bell rang again, they might lose their positions. All at once, Skarnu and “Tytuvenai” seemed conspicuous. Skarnu looked around nervously. He saw no constables, Algarvian or Valmieran. He relaxed—a little.

  And then he noticed the expression “Tytuvenai” was wearing. The other man didn’t say anything, but he didn’t have to. Skarnu did it for him: “You don’t want Merkela to come along with me.”

  “Well, now that you mention it, no,” “Tytuvenai” admitted. “I don’t see what she can do to help you once you get down there. And the redheads will be looking for a fellow traveling with his wife and baby, not for somebody with a girl who could be his almost-grown daughter or his kid sister. Everybody would be better off if Merkela stayed behind.”

  “Everybody except her and me,” Skarnu pointed out.

  “Tytuvenai” shrugged. “This is still a war. Back before our army fell apart, you went where you were ordered and you did what you were told, and you didn’t think twice about any of it. Now you’ve got a new set of orders, my lord Marquis. Will you follow them, or won’t you?”

  “It’s not the same,” Skarnu said. In a certain sense, that was true. The formal structure of the Valmieran army no longer existed. Back in the days when he was a captain, his colonel had had authority to give him orders that they both recognized. “Tytuvenai” didn’t. He could request. But he wasn’t Skarnu’s superior officer. He couldn’t command, not unless Skarnu let him.

  Despite that, the other man from the underground had weapons, had them and didn’t hesitate to use them: “I’m not asking for myself, you know. This is for the sake of the kingdom. This is for the sake of the war.”

  “Curse you,” Skarnu said wearily; he had no good argument against that. He pointed a finger at “Tytuvenai.” “I’m going to bargain with you.”

  In the Valmieran army, that would have got him cashiered. “Tytuvenai” just nodded and said, “Go on.”

  “First, before I disappear, I’m going to go back to the flat and say goodbye,” Skarnu said. He knew what “Tytuvenai” would say to that, and forestalled him: “I know better than to tell her where I’m going or what I’ll be doing.”

  “All right,” the other man said mildly. “But ‘first’ has ‘second’ on its trail. What else do you want?”

  “Get Merkela and the baby out of Ukmerge,” Skarnu answered. “She can’t stand it here, and I can’t say I blame her. Find her some place out in the country where she can stay. She’s lived on a farm all her life. She’s going crazy, cooped up in a flat. Do that and …” He sighed. “Do that and I’m your man.”

  “Agreed,” “Tytuvenai” said at once. “There. You see how easy that was?”

  “Futter you,” Skarnu said. “Tytuvenai” laughed.

  Except for having to climb out of his cot earlier than he would have liked, Bembo faced each new day in Gromheort with more zest that he would have imagined possible when he came west from Tricarico. As his unhappy leave back in Algarve had reminded him, he felt more at home here these days than he did in his own hometown.

  Of course, constables back in Tricarico didn’t get rich. Plenty of graft came their way, aye, but it was all petty graft: constables just weren’t important enough to get any more. Things were different here in occupied Forthweg. Here, Algarvian constables often held the power of life and death over Forthwegians and Kaunians. Even with dour, brutal Oraste for a partner, Bembo had done amazingly well for himself.

  He found himself grinning at Oraste as they queued up for rolls and olive oil and red wine for breakfast. “No, this isn’t such a bad place after all,” he said.

  Oraste only grunted. He wasn’t at his best before he’d had something to eat, and especially before he’d had something to drink. He’s not always at his best after he’s had something to eat and something to drink, either, Bembo thought, and his grin got wider.

  “What’s so fornicating funny?” Oraste demanded.

  “Er—nothing.” Bembo didn’t want to quarrel with his partner. In a brawl, Oraste woul
d tear him in two with no remorse and with no great effort.

  “Better not be,” Oraste said. He then clamped his jaw shut till he’d got his food and his wine. Bembo kept quiet, too, though he liked to talk. Intimidation cast almost as powerful a spell as magecraft. Only after Oraste had gulped down his wine and gone back for a second mug did he speak again: “That’s more like it.”

  Bembo sipped from his own mug. He smacked his lips together, as if he were a connoisseur. “We can afford better, you know. Powers above, we can afford anything we want.” He blinked. Back in Tricarico, he’d never imagined being able to say anything like that. But it was true.

  Oraste grunted again. “Well, so what?” he answered. “I still say we should’ve turned in that Hestan item. He’s trouble. He’ll go on being trouble.”

  “Aye, no doubt,” Bembo said. “But if we had turned him in, what would he have done? Paid off somebody else, that’s what, and you know it as well as I do. Go on—tell me I’m wrong.” Oraste let out one more grunt. Bembo wagged a ringer at him. “See? You can’t do it. That’s how the world works.

  And since that’s how the world works, I’d sooner see his money in my belt pouch than anybody else’s. The clowns who give us orders have too much money already.”

  One of Oraste’s eyebrows twitched—not much, but enough for Bembo to notice. He glanced back over his shoulder. One of the people who gave him orders, Sergeant Pesaro, was heading his way. Fortunately, the fat sergeant couldn’t have heard him; he’d had the sense to keep his voice down. Had Pesaro ever found out how much his two constables had squeezed out of Hestan, he would have demanded a good-sized cut.

  A large, meaty hand fell on Bembo’s shoulder, another on Oraste’s. “I want to see you boys in my office as soon as you’re done with breakfast,” Sergeant Pesaro said, and then went on his way, his big belly wobbling as he walked.

  Alarm and anger blazed through Bembo. “Oh, that son of a whore!” he whispered fiercely. “That stinking son of a whore! He knows, I bet. If that turd of a Hengist rang the bell on us, he’s going to be one dead Forthwegian.”