Darkness Descending

by Harry Turtledove

  He thought of that, too. “If the child has hair the color of straw, it can starve for all of me,” he growled. But then, with a sour look at Krasta, he went on, “If I see signs I did in truth sire it, it shall not lack, nor shall its mother. This I would do for my own honor’s sake, but--”

  “Men speak of honor more often than they show it,” Krasta said.

  “You do not know Algarvians as well as you think,” Mosco snapped.

  “You do not know men as well as you think,” Krasta retorted, which drew a startled gasp of laughter from Bauska and a couple of harsh chuckles from Lurcanio.

  “I was trying to tell you--if that is so, the child and mother shall not lack,” Captain Mosco said. “And, if they do not lack, not a word of this shall go back to Algarve. Is it a bargain?”

  “It is a bargain,” Krasta said at once. She did not ask Bauska’s opinion; Bauska’s opinion meant nothing to her. When her maidservant nodded, she scarcely noticed. Her contest was with the Algarvians--and she had done better against this pair than the Valmieran army had done against Mezentio’s men. If only we might have blackmailed the redheads instead of fighting them, she thought.

  Lurcanio sensed that he and Mosco had come off second best. Waggling a finger under Krasta’s nose, he said, “Do remember, you have made this bargain with my aide, who has his own reasons for agreeing to it. If you seek to play such games with me, you shall not be happier for it afterwards, I promise you.”

  Nothing could have been more nicely calculated to make Krasta want to try to punish him for his Algarvian arrogance .. . though having his child struck her as going too far. And Lurcanio had shown her he was not in the habit of bluffing. Disliking him for the steadfastness she was also compelled to respect, she made her head move up and down. “I understand,” she said.

  “Good.” He was arrogant indeed. “You had better.” And then his manner changed. He could take off and put on charm as readily as he took off and redonned his kilt up in Krasta’s bedchamber. “Shall we go out this evening, milady, as well as tomorrow? Viscount Valnu, I hear, has promised one of his entertainments on the spur of the moment.” He raised an eyebrow. “If you are irked at me, I can always go alone.”

  “And bring some ambitious little tart back here?” Krasta said. “Not on your life!”

  Lurcanio laughed. “Would I do such a thing?”

  “Of course you would,” Krasta said. “Mosco may not know men, but I do.” Lurcanio laughed again and did not presume to contradict her.

  Pekka hurried around the house flicking at imaginary specks of dust. “Is everything ready?” she asked for the dozenth time.

  “As ready as it can be,” her husband answered. Leino looked around the parlor. “Of course, we haven’t stuffed Uto into the rest crate yet.”

  “You told me I’d get in trouble if I went in the rest crate,” Uto said indignantly. “That means you can’t put me in there either. It does, it does.” He drew himself up straight, as if defying Leino to deny it.

  “Big people can do all sorts of things children can’t,” Leino said. Pekka coughed; she didn’t want this issue complicated. Leino coughed, too, in embarrassment, and yielded the point: “This time, you’re right. I’m not supposed to put you in the rest crate.” Under his breath, he added, “No matter how tempted I am.” Pekka heard that, and coughed again; Uto, fortunately, didn’t.

  Before any new arguments could start--and arguments accreted around Uto as naturally as nacre around of bit of grit inside an oyster--someone knocked on the front door. Pekka jumped, then hurried to open it. There stood Ilmarinen and Siuntio. Pekka went down on one knee before them, as she would have before one of the Seven Princes of Kuusamo. “Enter,” she said. “Your presence honors my home.” It was a commonplace greeting, but here she meant it from the bottom of her heart.

  As the two elderly theoretical sorcerers stepped over the threshold, Leino also bowed. So did Uto, a beat slower than he should have. He stared at the mages from under his thick mop of black hair.

  Ilmarinen laughed at that covert inspection. “I know about you, young fellow,” he said. “Aye, I do. And do you know how I know?” Uto shook his head. Ilmarinen told him: “Because I was just the same way when I was your size, that’s how.”

  “I believe it,” Siuntio said, “and you haven’t changed much in all the years since, either.” Ilmarinen beamed, though Pekka wasn’t sure Siuntio had meant it as a compliment.

  Gathering herself, she said, “Masters, I present to you my husband, Leino, and my son, Uto.” She turned to her family. “Here we have the mages Siuntio and Ilmarinen.”

  Leino and Uto bowed again. Leino said, “It is indeed an honor to have two such distinguished men as my guests.” He smiled wryly. “It would be an even greater honor were I privileged to hear what they discuss with my wife, but I understand why that cannot be. Come on, Uto--we’re going next door to visit Aunt Elimaki and Uncle Olavin.”

  “Why?” Uto had his eye on Ilmarinen. “I’d rather stay and listen to him. I already know what Auntie and Uncle will do.”

  “We can’t listen to these mages and your mother talk, because they’ll be talking about secret things,” Leino said. Pekka thought that only more likely to make Uto want to stay, but her husband retrieved the situation by adding, “These things are so secret, even I’m not supposed to hear about them.”

  Uto’s eyes widened. He’d known his parents didn’t--couldn’t--tell each other about everything they did, but he’d never seen that brought home so dramatically. He went with Leino to Pekka’s sister’s house without another word of protest.

  “A likely lad,” Ilmarinen said. “Likely to make you want to pitch him into the sea a lot of the time, I shouldn’t wonder, but likely the other way, too.”

  “I think you’re right on both counts,” Pekka said. “Sit. Make yourselves comfortable, I pray you. Let me bring refreshments.” She hurried into the kitchen, then returned with bread, sliced smoked salmon and onions and pickled cucumbers, and a pot of ale from Kajaani’s best brewer.

  By the time she got back, Siuntio had spectacles on his nose and a Lagoan journal in his hand. He set it aside willingly enough to eat and to accept a mug of golden ale, but his eyes kept sliding over to it. Pekka noticed and said nothing. Ilmarinen noticed and twitted him: “The Lagoans watch us, and so you feel compelled to watch the Lagoans?”

  “And what if I do?” Siuntio asked mildly. “This does, after all, touch upon our reason for coming to Kajaani.”

  Not even Ilmarinen could find a way to disagree with him. “The vultures gather,” he said. “They clawed at the scraps of what we published. Now that we’ve stopped publishing, they claw at the scraps of what isn’t there.”

  “How good a mage is this Fernao?” Pekka asked. “From the questions he asked me in his letter, he knows as much as I did a couple of years ago. The question is, can he ferret out the direction I’ve taken since then?”

  “He is a first-rank mage, and he has Grandmaster Pinhiero’s ear back in Setubal,” Siuntio said, sipping at his ale.

  “He is a sneaky dog, and would have stolen everything in Siuntio’s belt pouch had the two of them met,” Ilmarinen said. “He tried slitting mine, too, but I’m an old sinner myself and not so easy to befool.”

  “He came to us openly and innocently,” Siuntio said. Ilmarinen made a rude noise. Siuntio corrected himself: “Openly, at any rate. But how many mages from how many kingdoms are sniffing at the trail of what we have?”

  “Even one could be too many, if he served King Swemmel or King Mezentio,” Pekka said. “We don’t know yet how much power lurks at the heart of this link between the two laws or how to unleash whatever there is, but others with the same idea might pass us on the way, and that would be very bad.”

  Ilmarinen looked east. “Arpad of Gyongyos has able mages, too.” He looked west. “And Fernao is not the only good one in the stable of Vitor of Lagoas. Gyongyos hates us because we block her way across the islands of the B
othnian Ocean.”

  “Lagoas does not hate us,” Siuntio said.

  “Lagoas doesn’t need to hate us,” Ilmarinen answered. “Lagoas is our neighbor, so she can covet what we have without bothering to get excited about it. And we and the Lagoans have fought our share of wars over the years.”

  “Lagoas would have to be mad to fight us at the same time as she wars with Algarve,” Pekka said. “We outweigh her even more than Mezentio’s kingdom does.”

  “If she were ahead of us on this path you mentioned, that might not matter so much,” Siuntio said.

  “And she is at war, and kingdoms at war do crazy things,” Ilmarinen added. “And the Lagoans are cousins to the Algarvians, which gives them a good head start on craziness by itself, if anyone wants to know what I think.”

  “Kaunians are proud because they’re an old folk, as we are,” Siuntio said. “Algarvic peoples are proud because they’re new. That doesn’t make them crazy, but it does make them different from us.”

  “Anyone who’s enough different from me is surely crazy--or surely sane, depending,” Ilmarinen said.

  Pekka declined to rise to that. She went on with Siuntio’s though: “And Unkerlanters are proud because they aren’t Kaunian or Algarvic. And Gyongyosians, I think, are proud because they aren’t like anyone else at all. When it comes to that, they’re like us, but no other way I can think of.”

  “They’re much uglier than we are,” Ilmarinen said. Siuntio sent him a reproachful look. He bore up under it. “They cursed well are--those overmuscled bodies, that tawny yellow hair sprouting every which way like dried-out weeds.” He paused. “Their women do look better than their men, I will say that.”

  And what do ou know of Gyongyosian women? The question stood on the end of Pekka’s tongue, but she didn’t ask it. Something in Ilmarinen’s expression warned her that he would tell her more than she wanted to hear. He had, after all, been attending mages’ meetings longer than she’d been alive. Instead, she said, “We have to learn more ourselves, and we have to be careful while we’re doing it.”

  “Oh, indeed,” Siuntio said. “There you have in the compass of an acorn shell one of the reasons for our journey from Yliharma.”

  Ilmarinen glanced over to him. “Aside from gulping down Mistress Pekka’s excellent food and guzzling her ale, I thought that was the reason we came to Kajaani.”

  “Not quite,” Siuntio said. “I have been pondering the implications of your truly astonishing insight into the inverse nature of the relationship between die laws of similarity and contagion.” He bowed in his seat. “I would never have thought of such a thing, not if I examined the results of Mistress Pekka’s experiment for a hundred years. But once furnished with the insight that sprang from a mind more clever than mine, I have tried to examine some of the avenues down which we may hope to follow it.”

  “Look out,” Ilmarinen said to Pekka. “The more humble he sounds, the more dangerous he is.”

  Siuntio took no notice of Ilmarinen. Pekka got the idea that Siuntio had a lot of practice taking no notice of Ilmarinen. From his belt pouch, Siuntio drew out three sheets of paper. He kept one and gave one to each of his fellow theoretical sorcerers. “I hope you will not hesitate to point out any flaws you may find in the reasoning, Mistress Pekka,” he said. “I do not give Ilmarinen the same warning, for I know he will not hesitate.”

  “Truth is truth,” Ilmarinen said. “Everything else is fair game.” He donned a pair of spectacles to help him read. After a little while, he grunted. After another little while, he grunted again, louder, and looked over the tops of the spectacles at Siuntio. “Why, you old fox.”

  Pekka made slower going of the lines of complex symbols Siuntio had given her. About a third of the way down the closely written sheet, she exclaimed, “But this would mean--” and broke off, for the conclusion to which Siuntio was leading her seemed one only a maniac could embrace.

  But he nodded. “Aye, it would, or I think it would, could we but find a way to do it. Believe me, I was quite as surprised as you.”

  “You old fox,” Ilmarinen repeated. “This is why you’re the best in the business. Nobody pays attention to the details the way you do--nobody. If I had a hat on, I’d take it off to you.”

  Pekka worked her way down to the bottom of the sheet. “This is amazing,” she said. “It’s elegant, too, which argues that it ought to be true. I find no flaws in the logic, none whatever. But that I don’t find them doesn’t mean they aren’t there. Experiment is an even better test of truth than elegance.”

  She hoped she hadn’t offended the master mage, and breathed a sigh of relief when Siuntio grinned. “Truly you will go far in your craft,” he told her, and she inclined her head in thanks. He went on, “Some of the required experiments may--will--be difficult to formulate.”

  “I shouldn’t think so,” Pekka said. “Why--” She explained an idea that had come to her while she was nearing the end of Siuntio’s work.

  Now Siuntio dipped his head to her. To her surprise, so did Ilmarinen, who said, “Well, well. I wouldn’t have come up with that.”

  “Nor I,” Siuntio agreed. “You deserve to be the one to try it, Mistress Pekka. In the meanwhile--for I can see that it will take some preparation--Ilmarinen and I will acquaint Raahe and Alkio and Piilis with our progress, for the three of us seem to have drawn somewhat ahead of them. Is that agreeable to you?”

  “Aye.” Pekka knew she sounded dazed. The two finest theoretical sorcerers in Kuusamo had just let her know they thought she belonged in their company. All things considered, she decided she’d earned the right to sound a little dazed.

  Back in his study, Brivibas labored over yet another article on the bygone days of the Kaunian Empire. By immersing himself in the past, Vanai’s grandfather did what he could to ignore the unpleasant present. Vanai wished she could find such an escape for herself.

  She longed for escapes of all sorts, escape from Major Spinello chief among them. She glanced back toward the study. Brivibas would not come out till suppertime and would do his best to ignore her while they ate. She had hours in which to try her spell, the casting of which would take only a few minutes. Her grandfather would be none the wiser, and what he did not know he could not tell.

  As Vanai opened the book of classical Kaunian sorcerous lore, she laughed without much humor and bowed in the direction of the study. “You have not trained me in vain, my grandfather,” she murmured, “even if I use my knowledge to ends different from yours.”

  Though she was no trained mage, the spell before her looked simple enough. She’d had no trouble getting daffodil root from Tamulis the druggist; to this day, the boiled root was a simple preventive against bladder pains, and Brivibas had reached an age where it was easy to imagine him suffering from such. And Vanai’s mother had owned a set of silver earrings, necklace, and bracelet set with sea-green beryls. Taking an earring from the dusty jewelry case without her grandfather noticing had been simplicity itself.

  “Now,” she said, gathering herself, “to hope this proves a true spell.” There lay the rub, as she knew only too well. However loath Brivibas was to admit it, the ancient Kaunians had been a superstitious lot, believing in all manner of demons modern thaumaturgy proved nonexistent. Some of what they’d reckoned magic, too, was nothing but imagination run wild. Too many of their spells gave no results when worked by--or against--skeptical moderns.

  Vanai shrugged. One way or another, she’d learn something. I can write a paper afterwards, she thought. But she did not want to write a paper. She only wanted Major Spinello gone.

  As the classical text recommended, she’d made a crude straw image of her Algarvian tormentor. Soaking the top of the image’s head in red ink showed its model came from Mezentio’s kingdom. Now that the ink had dried, Vanai held the image in her left hand. With her right, she stirred a bowl of water in which she’d boiled the daffodil root. As she cast the image into the bowl, she called out the classical Kaunian invocation
from the text: “Devil, begone from my house! Devil, begone from my door!”

  Devil, begone from my bed, she thought. She wanted to say that aloud--she wanted to scream it. But the charm said, Follow exactly what is written, and thou shalt surely gain thy desire: and this hath been proved in our time. She would not deviate, not yet. If the charm failed her (which she knew to be only too likely), she would think about what to do next.

  For now, she took the image out of the bowl of infused water and dried it on a rag. Some of the red ink had smeared, which made the straw man look badly wounded. Vanai’s lips skinned back from her teeth in a predatory grin. She didn’t mind that. No, she didn’t mind that at all.

  Once the image was dry enough to suit her, she laid the beryl on its ink-stained chest. “Beryl is the stone that driveth away enemies,” she intoned. “Beryl is the stone that maketh them meek and mild and obedient to the operator’s will.” And my will is that he go away and never trouble me again, or any other Kaunian either.

  When she was done, she threw the image and the rag on which she’d dried it into the cookfire. For one thing, she hoped that would hurt Spinello, too. For another, it got rid of the evidence. Like conquerors since the days of the Kaunian Empire, King Mezentio’s men took a dim view of those they had defeated practicing sorcery against them. After the image had gone up in smoke, she poured down the privy the daffodil root and the water in which she had boiled it. The earring went back into the case from which it had come, the book of charms onto its shelf.

  As she set about peeling and slicing parsnips to add to the pot of bean soup simmering above the fire, she wondered if she’d just wasted her time. Also like conquerors since the days of the Kaunian Empire, King Mezentio’s men were warded against their enemies’ magecraft. And she didn’t know whether she’d truly practiced magecraft or simply tried to use one of her ancestors’ outworn, mistaken beliefs.