Darkness Descending

by Harry Turtledove

  “Kajaani,” he muttered. “Where in blazes is Kajaani?” Then he laughed at himself. He’d been guilty of the crime for which he’d taxed Xavega: he’d thought of Lagoas first, to the exclusion of everyplace else. As soon as he stopped doing that, he knew perfectly well where Kajaani was. And, with only a little more thought, he knew who was likely to be writing him from the Kuusaman town, though the envelope bore no return address.

  He almost tore that envelope open there in the lobby, but made himself wait till he’d gone upstairs to his flat. There he flung the useless sheets of paper onto the sofa and opened the one that mattered. Sure enough, the letter--written in excellent classical Kaunian--was on the stationery of Kajaani City College, and from the theoretical sorcerer named Pekka.

  My dear colleague, she wrote, I thank you for your interest in my work and your inquiries into my research. Unfortunately, I must tell you that much of my recent silence in the journals has sprung from nothing other than the demands on my time my son takes. I do eventually hope to publish more, but when that may be I cannot say. Meanwhile, my life is busy in many different ways. Hoping this finds you well and your own work flourishing, I remain--Pekka, Professor of Theoretical Sorcery.

  Fernao’s excitement dissolved like a little ink in a lot of water, leaving his mood duller and darker than it had been before. He had to fight to keep from crumpling the letter and tossing it over with the rest of the mail he’d received. He’d got similar bland missives from other Kuusaman theoretical sorcerers to whom he’d written. Had the letters been identical and not merely similar, he would have known for a fact that the mages were acting in concert. As things were, he had to infer it, but it wasn’t the subtlest inference he’d ever drawn.

  “They know something, all right,” he muttered. “They don’t want anyone to know they know it, either. That means it’s big, whatever it is.” So much had been obvious since his meeting with Ilmarinen, the meeting that should have been with Siuntio. It was even more obvious now.

  He wondered what the Kuusamans had found. Something that had to do with the relationship between the laws of contagion and similarity, plainly. But what? Lagoan mages, more often than not of a more practical bent than their Kuusaman counterparts, hadn’t explored the question in depth.

  “Maybe we should have,” Fernao muttered under his breath. If the Guild of Lagoan Mages were to try to catch up with the Kuusamans, to discover whatever they were hiding, how best to go about it? The only answer that occurred to Fernao was getting some talented sorcerers together and having them proceed from the point where Siuntio and Pekka and the rest of the Kuusamans had, for whatever reason, fallen silent.

  He laughed an unhappy laugh. Even Grandmaster Pinhiero would have a hard time getting a group of Lagoan mages to work on a project he proposed rather than on whatever they felt like doing themselves. Fernao was about to throw the notion into his mental trash bin when he suddenly stiffened. He wondered if, in Trapani or some other Algarvian town, another group of mages was already hard at work going down that same path. If so, how could Lagoas afford to ignore it?

  He glanced at Pekka’s note again. Maybe, just maybe, she was telling the truth and he’d been starting at shadows all along. With the note in his hand, he could--or maybe he could--make a fair stab at finding out. He set the note on the table and went to the cabinet of sorcerous gear that stood next to the stove in the kitchen. Had he been a better cook, he would have had a cabinet full of spices there instead. From the cabinet, he took a lens mounted in a polished brass ring and a dried lapwing’s head: the lapwing, being a sharp-eyed bird, was to a mage a sovereign remedy against deception.

  Holding the lapwing’s head between a lamp and the lens that focused its power on the note, he chanted a cantrip in classical Kaunian. If the writing on the note was true, he would see the black ink as bright blue. If the writing was false, he would see it as burning red.

  But he continued to see it simply as black. Frowning, he wondered if he’d somehow botched the charm. He didn’t think so, but ran through it again, this time with special care. The ink continued to seem black to his eyes. It shouldn’t have, not after that spell, not unless. . . .

  “Why, the tricksy minx!” Fernao exclaimed. “If she hasn’t magicked the note against this very sorcery, I’m an addled apprentice.”

  Shaking his head at Pekka’s forethought, he put away the lens and the bird’s head. Now he couldn’t be sure whether the Kuusaman theoretical sorcerer had been lying or telling the truth, not by any objective means. But he could still draw inferences. That Pekka hadn’t wanted him to know whether or not she was telling the truth strongly suggested she wasn’t. If she wasn’t, the Kunsamans were indeed likely to be hiding something important.

  He’d already believed that. “One more bit of evidence,” he murmured, and then kicked at the carpet. Evidence of what? Something. That was as much as he knew. He wondered if some dapper, clever young mage in Trapani, a fellow with waxed mustachios and a hat worn at a jaunty angle, knew more.

  For his sake, for his kingdom’s sake, he hoped not. But when he looked north and west, toward the Algarvian capital, he knew he had fear in his eyes.

  East of Cottbus, a half ring of dowsers did their best to detect Algarvian dragons so they could give the capital of Unkerlant some warning against attack from the air. Marshal Rathar swung off his horse at one such post, a crude hut in the middle of a forest of birch trees. Letting soldiers see him, letting them see he was still in the fight and still thought Unkerlant could win, was one reason he went out to the field as often as he could. Another reason was learning as much as he could about all aspects of the war.

  Still another was escaping King Swemmel for a while. Soon enough, he’d have to go back to the palace and see what sort of advice the king would give. Sometimes, Rathar was convinced, Swemmel saw further than any other man living. Sometimes he could not see past the end of his pointed nose. Telling which was which on any given day, though, was anything but easy, and King Swemmel remained as convinced about the virtues of his bad ideas as he was about his good ones.

  Rathar shook his head as a horse bedeviled by flies might flick its tail. He’d come out here to get away from Swemmel, and the king had come with him in his mind. Where was the relief in that? When the dowsers came tumbling out of their hut to salute him, he was glad to nod to them. As long as he talked with them, he could get away from the mental presence of his sovereign.

  “Aye, lord Marshal,” said one of the off-duty dowsers, a lieutenant named Morold, “we’ve had pretty good luck feeling out the redheads so far.” He hefted his forked rod. “A dragon’s wings will disturb the air, you know, and that’s what we sense. But the Algarvians are getting better at masking what they’re up to, curse ‘em.”

  “I’ve read somewhat of this in the reports coming back to Cottbus,” Rathar replied. “But, as you say, a dragon must flap its wings now and again. How do the Algarvians propose to prevent that?”

  Morold’s strong-nosed peasant face crinkled into a grin of reluctant admiration. “The sneaky buggers don’t even try, sir, may the powers below swallow ‘em down. What they do instead is, they have some of their dragons carry baskets full of folded-up strips of paper. When they get close enough that we’re right on the edge of spotting ‘em”--he held up the dowsing rod again--”they spill the baskets out into the air, and these thousands of strips of paper all start fluttering down. The rods pick up those flutters, too, so trying to tell what’s dragons and what isn’t is like trying to see a white horse in a blizzard. Do you follow what I’m saying?”

  “Aye,” Rathar said, “and I thank you. You’ve made it clearer than the reports ever did. You still can find the dragons, then?”

  “We know something’s up, sir,” Morold told him, “but not exactly what or exactly where, the way we would have before.”

  “You must do better. Unkerlant must do better,” Rathar said. “If you’d been into Cottbus lately and seen the burnt-out blocks, you wo
uld know Unkerlant must do better.” He did not want to blame the dowsers, who were trying as hard as they could--and whose work had led to a good many Algarvian dragons knocked out of the sky. Something else occurred to him: “Are our dragons using these strips of paper, too, to confuse the Algarvian dowsers?”

  “Lord Marshal, you’d have to ask the dragonfliers, for I’m sure I can’t say,” Morold replied.

  “I’ll do that,” Rathar said. Maybe I’ll do that. If I remember, I’ll do that. He scrawled a note. He’d scrawled a lot of notes on the little pad of paper he carried in his belt pouch. Eventually, he hoped to do something about each and every one of them. The way things had been going lately, he wrote new notes faster than he could deal with old ones.

  The dowsers’ spirits seemed high, which cheered the marshal of Unkerlant. As long as the soldiers thought the war could be won, it could. That was not to say it would be won, not with the Algarvians still advancing in the north, the south, and in the center--in the direction of Cottbus. But if the Unkerlanter army despaired of throwing back the redheads, the fight was lost without hope of recovery

  Morold said, “We need more crystals, lord, and more heavy sticks to blaze down the enemy’s dragons. The Algarvians talk back and forth among themselves more than we do, and it shows in all the fighting.”

  “I know that.” Rathar did not take out the little pad again. He’d scribbled that note before. “The mages are doing everything they can. We need too many things at the same time, and have not enough mages to make all of them at once.”

  Morold and the other dowsers looked unhappy to hear that. Rathar was none too happy to say it, either. But he did not want to lie to them, either. News sheets put out plenty of pleasing lies, and put the best face they could on the truth. That was fine for townsmen. Soldiers, Rathar thought, deserved the truth unvarnished.

  He commandeered a fresh horse from among those tied near the dowser’s hut and rode back toward Cottbus. A single bodyguard rode with him. He would have done without even the one retainer, but the idea scandalized every other general--and Rathar’s adjutant. At least he’d made sure he had a solid veteran at his side, not a relative he was holding away from the fighting or some pretty boy.

  Heading to Cottbus, he passed a troop of behemoths trotting east, toward the battle lines. They kicked up a great cloud of dust. Because they were still far from the fighting, they did not wear their heavy mail, but carried it in carts they pulled behind them. Whatever color their long, shaggy hair had been before, it was dust-brown now. A couple of the soldiers mounted on them waved to Rathar. Coughing, he waved back. His tunic was scarcely fancier than theirs; they more likely thought him just another soldier than the highest-ranking officer in the Unkerlanter army.

  He rode past a dead Algarvian dragon. An old man--too old to go to the front--was stripping the harness from it. Rathar nodded. Anything his kingdom could steal from the redheads was one thing fewer its artisans would have to make.

  Few people, and most of them women, were on the streets of Cottbus. As he trotted through a market square, he saw a long queue to buy pears and plums, and an even longer one in front of a stern-faced woman with a basket of eggs. There looked to be plenty of fruit; the eggs were going fast, and the people at the end of that line would have to do without.

  When Rathar strode into his office, his adjutant hurried up to him with a worried look on his face. “Lord Marshal, his Majesty urgently requires your presence,” Major Merovec told him.

  “Of course the king shall have what he requires,” Rathar replied. “Do you know why he requires me?” Merovec shook his head. Rathar let out a silent sigh. He wouldn’t know whether King Swemmel intended merely to confer with him or to sack him or to take his head till he got to the audience chamber. “I shall go see him at once then.”

  Swemmel’s guardsmen in the antechamber were as meticulous as ever, but did not seem hostile to Rathar. The marshal took that as a good sign. No more guards awaited him in the audience chamber. He took that as a better sign.

  “Arise, arise,” King Swemmel said after Rathar completed the ritual prostrations and acclamations before his sovereign. Swemmel sounded impatient and angry, but not angry at the marshal. “Do you know what that swaggering popinjay of a Mezentio has done?” he demanded.

  King Mezentio had done any number of things to Unkerlant’s detriment. Evidently, he’d just done one more. Rathar answered with simple truth: “No, your Majesty.”

  “Curse him, he has raised up a false King of Grelz down in Herborn,” Swemmel snarled.

  Ice ran through Rathar. That was one of the nastier things Mezentio might have done. A good many people in the Duchy of Grelz still resented the Union of Crowns that had bound them to Unkerlant even though it was almost three hundred years old. If Algarve restored the old Kingdom of Grelz under a pliant local noble, the Grelzers might well acquiesce in Algarvian control. “Which of the counts or dukes did the redheads pick as their pretender?” Rathar asked.

  “Duke Raniero, who has the dishonor to be Mezentio’s first cousin,” King Swemmel answered.

  Rathar stared. “King Mezentio named an Algarvian noble to be King of Grelz?”

  “Aye, he did,” Swemmel said. “None of the local lickspittles seemed to suit him.”

  “Powers above be praised,” Rathar said softly. “He could have struck a harder blow against us with a Grelzer than with a man the folk down there will see as ... a foreign usurper.” He’d almost said another foreign usurper. Swemmel would not have been grateful for that, not even a little.

  “You may be right.” Swemmel sounded almost indifferent to what was in Rathar’s eyes a blunder big as the world. A moment later, the king explained why: “But the insult is no less here. If anything, the insult is greater, for Mezentio to presume to set an Algarvian as king on Unkerlanter soil.”

  “He did the same thing in Jelgava, when he made his brother Mainardo king there,” Rathar said. “The Algarvians have always been an arrogant lot.”

  “Aye,” King Swemmel agreed. “If the Jelgavans are spineless enough to take Mezentio’s worthless brother as their sovereign, they deserve him. Unkerlanters will never accept an Algarvian for a king.” He looked sly; Rathar knew from long experience that he was never more dangerous--to his foes or sometimes to himself--than when he wore that expression. “We shall make certain that Unkerlanters do not accept an Algarvian for a king.”

  “May it be so, your Majesty.” Rathar thought the course of the fighting itself more urgent than any political machinations. He pointed to a large map in the audience chamber. “We had better make sure Mezentio has no chance to proclaim a redheaded King of Unkerlant in Cottbus.”

  “Even if he does, we will fight on from the west,” Swemmel said.

  Would anyone follow orders from a king who’d fled to a provincial town one jump ahead of the Algarvians? Rathar had no idea. He didn’t want to have to learn by experiment either. He looked toward the map himself. The bites Gyongyos was taking in the far west were annoyances. In the north, Zuwayza hadn’t gone far beyond the borders she’d had before her first clash with Unkerlant. But the Algarvians aimed to tear the heart from the kingdom and keep it for themselves.

  “We also have to hold Cottbus because of all the ley lines that converge here,” Rathar said. “If the capital falls, we’ll have a cursed hard time moving caravans from north to south.”

  “Aye,” Swemmel said. “Aye.” His nod was impatient, absent-minded; ley-line caravans weren’t the topmost thing in his thoughts, or anywhere close to it. He walked over to the map. “We still have a corridor open to Glogau. The Lagoans have sent us some prime bull behemoths to improve our herds, and they came through.”

  “So they did.” Rathar had heard that. It still left him faintly bemused. “The Zuwayzin could have pressed their attack on the port’s defenses harder than they have.”

  “They love Mezentio little better than they love us,” Swemmel said, which evidently seemed clear to him but
did not to his marshal. The king went on, “Were the black men but a little wiser, they would love Mezentio less than they love us.

  “Had we treated them a little better, that might also be true,” Rathar remarked.

  “We did not give them a tenth part of what they deserve,” Swemmel said. “Nor have we yet given the Algarvians a tenth, nor even a hundredth, part of what they deserve. But we shall. Aye, we shall.” Whatever else one said of Swemmel, he had no yielding in him. Maybe Unkerlant, or what remained of Unkerlant, would go right on obeying him even if the Algarvians ran him out of Cottbus. Marshal Rathar still hoped with all his heart he wouldn’t have to find out.

  Dressed in holiday finery--ordinary trousers worn under embroidered tunics--Skarnu, Merkela, and Raunu came into the village of Pavilosta to witness the installation of Simanu, the late Enkuru’s son, as count over the local countryside. Neither Skarnu nor Raunu had a tunic that fit as well as it might; both theirs had formerly belonged to Gedominu. Merkela had altered them, but they remained tight.

  “Waste of our time to come here,” Raunu grumbled, as a true farmer might have. “Too much work to do to care who’s over us. Whoever it is, he’ll take too cursed much of what we make.”

  “Aye, that’s so,” Merkela agreed. “And Simanu’s been squeezing as hard as Enkuru ever did. He sucks up to the Algarvians as hard as his father did, too. That’s the only reason they finally decided to let him take over as count instead of putting in one of their own men.”

  She didn’t bother keeping her voice down. People who heard her shied away. One of them hissed, “Powers above, you fool of a woman, put a shoe in it before Simanu’s men or the redheads drag you up into the count’s keep. Going in is easy. Coming out’s a different story--aye, it is.”

  She lifted her chin. “It wouldn’t be, if the men around here deserved the name.”