Jaws of Darkness

by Harry Turtledove

  And then, three or four paragraphs into the letter, Fronesia got down to business.

  Someone has been ungenerous enough to slander or libel me to Colonel Sabrino, and he, in his ingratitude, has seen fit to cut off the allowance he used to give me. While I know I can rely on your kindness, I wonder if you might be sweet enough to send me just a little more than usual over the next couple of months, to help me wean myself away from Sabrino for ever and always. I promise you, dear, that I will show you just exactly how glad I am to have finally fallen into the arms of a true man, not a cold-hearted calculator who holds the least little thing against me.

  Spinello read that several times. No matter how many times he read it, it always added up to the same thing. “Why, you little tramp!” he said, half annoyed, half admiring. Squeeze indeed, he thought. Mistresses, of course, were and had to be mercenary. They had custom on their side, but the law had never heard of them. Fronesia, though, managed to turn greed into something uncommonly like art.

  To how many other officers was she sending similarly artful letters? In peacetime, having multiple protectors was almost impossibly difficult for a mistress. But the war made it easy. What were the odds that two … friends would come into Trapani wanting to see a woman at the same time? Slim, no doubt about it. A canny woman, or a grasping one, could do very well for herself.

  He had no proof, only the tone of the letter. In his own prewar days, though, he’d studied the Kaunian classics, which left him uncommonly sensitive to tone. If Fronesia didn’t have more than one protector, it wasn’t solely because of love for him. He was sure, very sure, of that.

  Instead of crumpling up the letter and tossing it into the mud, he took it back to his hut. He kept his head up and his stride brisk. He wouldn’t let the men see that Fronesia had written anything to upset him.

  When he got inside, though, he tossed the letter on the embers of the fire. Those were plenty to make it char and crackle and flare and burn. For a moment he smelled, or imagined he smelled, scorched perfume. Then the sharp odor of burning paper overwhelmed it, and then that too was lost in the usual smoky stink of the hearth.

  He sat down at a folding table—Algarvian army issue; Unkerlanter peasant huts didn’t boast such amenities—inked a pen, and began his reply. Halfway through the first paragraph, he set down the pen, shaking his head. If he wrote while angry, he would regret the letter as soon as he posted it. Fronesia didn’t need to hear from him right away. If she didn’t hear from him right away, she might worry a little. That wouldn’t be so bad.

  After a bit, the field-post wagon rattled off to deliver letters and packages to some other brigade. Half noticing the noise, Spinello nodded to himself. The military postmen were good, solid fellows; even footsoldiers respected them. They carried sticks when they got near the front, and they knew what to do with them, too.

  Someone knocked on the door. Colonel Spinello started. He wished one of his regimental commanders would have picked a different time to bother him. He also sniffed a couple of times before going to the door. No, he couldn’t smell the perfume from Fronesia’s letter. That was something, anyhow.

  But when he opened the door, no grimy, poorly shaved Algarvian officer stood there. Jadwigai did. “Oh,” Spinello said in surprise. He managed a bow. “Come in, milady. What can I do for you?”

  He intended to leave the door to the hut open, so the men in the brigade could see he was up to nothing nefarious with their mascot. Jadwigai, though, closed it after herself as she walked in. “Are you all right, Colonel?” she asked in that disconcertingly fluent Algarvian of hers.

  “Why shouldn’t I be?” Spinello asked in return, more surprised than ever.

  “When the field post came, I saw you didn’t like the letter you got,” the Kaunian girl answered. “I was afraid it might be bad news from your family. This is a … very large war.”

  If it hadn’t been a very large war, a Kaunian girl from Forthweg would never have found herself in the wilds of northern Unkerlant. But that wasn’t what Jadwigai had meant. Touched, Spinello said, “No, no, it’s nothing like that.”

  “Really?” She didn’t sound as if she believed him. Maybe she’d heard other Algarvian officers making light of losses.

  But, very firmly, Spinello said, “Really. My father and uncles are too old to fight. My brother and my cousins are all fine, so far as I know. So are my aunts and my sister, for that matter.”

  “All right,” Jadwigai said—actually, the soldiers’ expression she used had a literal meaning a lot more pungent than that. “I’m glad. Even so, though, you can’t tell me that letter made you happy.”

  “No, it didn’t,” Spinello admitted. The Kaunian girl’s face bore an I-told-you-so expression. Hoping to cure her of it, he went on, “If you really must know what the trouble is, my mistress back in Algarve is trying to squeeze more money out of me.”

  “Oh.” She turned red. For a moment, he thought it was embarrassment. Then he realized it was outrage. “The nerve of her, doing something like that when you’re out here where you’re liable to get killed.”

  “That did cross my mind, aye,” Spinello said. “Of course, from Fronesia’s point of view my being out here only makes me a poor long-term investment.”

  Jadwigai said something inflammatory in Algarvian—she’d learned it from soldiers, sure enough. Then she said something even more inflammatory in classical Kaunian. It was the first time Spinello had heard her use her birth-speech.

  He answered in classical Kaunian himself: “Letting such small things pierce one to the heart merely burdens the spirit to no purpose.”

  Jadwigai looked astonished. “I didn’t think you knew my language, not when …” She didn’t go on. She didn’t need to go on. She had to know what happened at the camps the Algarvians politely termed special, sure enough.

  Spinello grimaced. How was he supposed to respond to that? At last, after some thought, he said, “A kingdom will do what it thinks it has to do to win, to survive. Afterwards, maybe, it will look back and count the cost of what it did.”

  To his surprise, and more than a little to his relief, Jadwigai nodded. “Or, if it wins, it won’t bother to count the cost at all.” That jerked a nod from Spinello. The Kaunian girl went on, “It’s the same for people, you know: you do what you have to do first, and then you count the cost later.”

  He nodded again. “Any soldier who’s ever been blazed at, will say the same thing.”

  “Not just soldiers.” Jadwigai stepped up to him and put her hands on his shoulders. She was, if anything, an inch or two taller than he. “You can have me if you want me, you know.”

  “And you’ll count the cost later?” he asked.

  Quite seriously, she nodded. “Of course. If there is a later.”

  Sleeping with you would improve my chances of having a later. Spinello had had no compunctions whatever about making Vanai bribe him with her body to keep her miserable grandfather alive. He hesitated now, and wondered why. The answer wasn’t long in coming, not least because he’d seen so much more soldiering than he had when he was stationed in Oyngestun.

  Gently, he kissed her. She stiffened in his arms. That had excited him with Vanai. Here, it just left him sad. He said, “I’m afraid you’re not my pet—you’re the brigade’s pet.” She stared at him, then started to cry. “Stop that!” he exclaimed, and he wasn’t acting at all. “If the soldiers think I’ve done something to you that you didn’t want, I’m a dead man.”

  Too late, he realized he’d just handed her a weapon. But she didn’t seem interested in using it. “Thank you,” she said. “Oh, thank you.”

  “For what? For being a fool?” he said, and was relieved again when that made her laugh. She was still smiling when she left the hut. Later, he thought, standing there all alone. You count the cost later.

  Skarnu turned to Palasta. “If we go much farther, we fall off the edge of the world,” he said.

  The young mage smiled at him. She looked as
if a strong breeze would blow her away. Here at the southeasternmost reach of Valmiera, there were plenty of strong breezes, most of them off the Strait of Valmiera that separated the Derlavaian mainland from the great island holding Lagoas and Kuusamo. The wind didn’t stagger her, but it did blow her long blond hair into a mare’s nest of tangles. Brushing a strand that escaped her flat knitted wool hat back from her eyes, she said, “Back in the days of the Kaunian Empire, they really thought they would.”

  “I suppose so, sis,” he said, which made Palasta smile again. They’d decided to travel as brother and sister; he would have had to have started very young to claim her as a daughter. He wished she were his sister—he vastly preferred her to the one he really had. Palasta would never have given herself to the Algarvians, not for anything.

  She said, “If we go to the top of that little hill there”—she pointed—”we might be able to see something interesting.”

  “Maybe,” Skarnu said. Up to the top of the hill they went. The path was muddy; Skarnu almost slipped. Once they did get to the top, he shaded his eyes with the palm of his hand and peered south and east toward the beach where the Algarvians had murdered their Kaunian captives to assail the Kuusamans, and where something—no one on this side of the Strait of Valmiera seemed to know what—had gone wrong for the redheads. Even shading his eyes against the wan southern sun, he couldn’t see as much as he would have liked. “I wish I had a spyglass,” he muttered.

  “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.”

  “Whoever they were,” Skarnu said; that was another riddle archaeological mages still labored to unravel. Some of them, 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 as Sergeant Raunu 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 t
o. 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 of Grand Duke Ivone.”

  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.