Through the Darkness d-3

by Harry Turtledove

  Vatsyunas said, “An you tell me what the game requireth, so shall I right gladly undertake it, though I lay down my life in the doing. For I have seen horrors, and long to requite them.”

  “Aye,” Pernavai said again.

  Neither of them sounded as fierce as Merkela, but she eyed them with nothing but respect. Her hatred for the redheads was personal. So was theirs, but they’d also seen Kaunianity in Forthweg wrecked. They never talked about going home. As best Skarnu could tell, they didn’t think they would have any home to which to return.

  Vatsyunas said, “Is’t true, the tale borne hither from Pavilosta, that Lagoas did smite the Algarvians exceedingly down by the shore of the salt sea?”

  Skarnu shrugged. “There was a fight. That’s all I know. The Lagoans couldn’t have done all that well, or they’d have kept a grip on the mainland.” He still wanted to look down his nose at the islanders. If they’d done more earlier in the war, maybe Valmiera wouldn’t have fallen. And their kingdom still held out, where his had given up two years before. He resented them for being able to shelter behind the Strait of Valmiera. How would they have done against swarms of Algarvian behemoths? None too bloody well, or he missed his guess.

  But Pernavai said, “Methinks you mistake their purpose. For is’t not more likely they came for to hinder the slaughter of more of my kinsfolk than intending invasion of your land?”

  Now Vatsyunas spoke up in support of his wife: “Aye, that’s also my conception of the quarter whence bloweth the wind. For surely the redheaded savages would have drained mine energies of vitality and the aforesaid of my lady’s as well, to hurl a stroke thaumaturgic ‘gainst the isle across the sea.”

  Slowly, Skarnu nodded. Across the table from him, Raunu was nodding, too. Skarnu clicked his tongue between his teeth. The western Kaunians’ suggestion made more sense than anything he’d come up with for himself. He and his comrades had managed to sabotage one ley-line caravan bringing Kaunians from Forthweg toward the shore of the Strait of Valmiera. If others had got through, if the Algarvians were on the point of serving Setubal as they’d served Yliharma…

  Merkela spoke up after unusual silence: “People need to know.”

  “People in these parts do know,” Skarnu said. “A lot of the folks who made it off that caravan are still free. People didn’t turn ‘em back to the Algarvians, any more than we did. And all the Kaunians out of Forthweg have tales to tell.”

  Merkela shook her head. “That’s not what I meant. People all over Valmiera-people all over the world-need to know what the Algarvians are doing. The more reasons they have to hate the redheads, the harder they’ll fight them.”

  Vatsyunas and Pernavai leaned toward each other and whispered back and forth in classical Kaunian, too soft and fast for Skarnu to catch more than a couple of words. Then Vatsyunas asked a blunt, bleak question: “Why think you this news will be of any great import to them that hear it? After all, ‘tis nobbut the overthrow of so many already despised Kaunians. Powers above, ‘tis likelier a matter for rejoicing than otherwise.” He picked up his mug of ale and gulped it dry.

  “We’re Kaunians, too!” Skarnu exclaimed. He’d felt it like a beam through the heart when the Column of Victory was felled in Priekule. If that didn’t make him a proper Kaunian, what could?

  But Pernavai and Vatsyunas looked at each other and didn’t say anything. Skarnu felt a slow flush rise from his neck to his cheeks and ears and on to the very top of his head. Till the war, no one had rubbed his nose in his Kaunianity every day of the year; he’d been one among many, not one among a few. No one had hated him for what he was. Thinking about that made him shake his head, as if trying to fend off invisible gnats.

  “We have to let people know,” Merkela repeated. Once she got an idea, she disliked letting go.

  “How?” Raunu asked. “Does Pavilosta even have a printer’s shop? I don’t recall seeing one.”

  “No news sheet-I know that,” Skarnu said.

  “If we did up one broadsheet, a mage could make copies,” Merkela said, and Skarnu, to his surprise, found himself nodding. Most printing was mechanical, but that was because presses were older and cheaper and needed less skill than the equivalent magecraft, not because sorcery couldn’t mimic what they did.

  “Where do we find a mage we can trust?” Raunu asked. “If he sells us out…” He drew this thumb across his throat. Skarnu nodded again. The rebels he knew were farmers, not wizards. Even Merkela looked glum.

  Vatsyunas said, “Is’t a mage you need? Perhaps I can be of some assistance to you in this undertaking.”

  Skarnu frowned. “Every trade has its own sorcery. I know that.” He didn’t know much more than that; as a rich young marquis, he hadn’t had to have a trade himself. He went on, “How much has dentistry got to do with news sheets?” He couldn’t think of any connection between the two.

  But the Kaunian from Forthweg answered, “Both involve copying, which is to say, the law of similarity. I am most certain sure I can do that which the art requireth, provided I be given ample paper for our needs and an original wherefrom to shape simulacra. For whilst I can make shift to speak somewhat the jargon employed hereabouts, I would not be so daft as to set my hand to writing it.”

  Everyone at the table looked to Skarnu. Raunu could read and write, but he probably hadn’t been able to before he joined the army during the Six Years’ War. Merkela too had only a nodding acquaintance with letters. And Pernavai, like her husband, was hardly at home in modern Valmieran. Time to see whether all my schooling really taught me anything, Skarnu thought. He knew he couldn’t delay, and so said, “I’ll do the best I can.”

  Doing that meant putting together the story of how and why the Algarvians were tormenting and killing the Kaunians from Forthweg. Skarnu understood the redheads’ strategy, but a story that was nothing but strategy turned out to be anything but interesting. He talked with Pernavai and Vatsyunas about what had happened to them and what had happened to people they’d known, people they’d seen. By the time he finished taking notes, he and the ex-dentist and his wife were all in tears.

  Skarnu rewrote the story. When he had it the way he liked it, he read it to Merkela and Raunu. They both suggested changes. Skarnu bristled. Merkela flared up at him. He stomped off, the picture of an offended artist. The next day, after he’d cooled down, he put in some of the changes. Even he had to admit they improved the piece.

  Then, being without a press, he had to write it out as neatly as he could. When he was done, it didn’t look like a proper news sheet, but no one who could read at all would have any trouble making out what it said. He took it to Vatsyunas in the barn. “All yours. Go ahead. Work your magic.” He made a fist, ashamed of his own sarcasm.

  Luckily, Vatsyunas didn’t notice. He inclined his head to Skarnu. “That shall I undertake to do.” His preparations seemed simple, almost primitive. They involved the yolks of half a dozen eggs and a cut-glass bauble of Merkela’s that broke sunlight up into rainbows. Seeing Skarnu’s curious stare, he condescended to explain: “The yellow of the egg symbolizeth the generacy-nay, the birth, you would say-of the new, whilst, as this pendant here spreadeth the one light into many, so shall my magecraft spread your fair copy here to all these blank leaves.” He patted the ream of paper Raunu had brought back from Pavilosta.

  “You know your business best,” Raunu said, wondering whether Vatsyunas knew it at all.

  Then the Kaunian from Forthweg began to chant. He was, Skarnu realized ruefully, more at home in the classical tongue than any Valmieran Kaunian, no matter how scholarly, could ever hope to be. For him, it was birthspeech, not a second language drilled in with a schoolmaster’s switch. He could make classical Kaunian do things Skarnu would never have imagined, because it was his.

  And when he cried out, when he laid the palm of his left hand on the ream of blank sheets, Skarnu could feel the power flowing through him. A moment later, the ex-dentist lifted his hand, and the sheets were blank no long
er. Skarnu saw his story set forth on the topmost one, line for line, word for word, letter for letter as he had written it. Vatsyunas riffled through the ream. Every sheet was identical to the first, identical to the copy Skarnu had given him.

  Skarnu saluted him, as if he were a superior officer. “You did better than I thought you could,” he said frankly. “Now we have to get these out where people can see them, and be sneaky enough while we’re doing it so they can’t be traced back to us.”

  “This I leave to you.” Vatsyunas staggered, yawned, and caught himself by main force of will. “You will, I pray, forgive me. I am spent, fordone.” He lay down on the straw and went to sleep, just like that. As he snored, Skarnu saluted him again. The sheets he’d made would hurt the redheads far more than ambushing a nighttime patrol. Skarnu hoped so, anyhow.

  All things considered, Fernao would as soon have died down in the land of the Ice People. His comrades had saved him-for what? For more torment was the only answer that came to him in the intervals when he was both awake and undrugged.

  He’d never been interested in medical magecraft, which meant he knew less about the various distillations of the poppy than he might have. Some left him more or less clear-headed, but did less than they might have against the pain of his broken bones and other wounds. Others took the pain away, but took him away with it, so that he seemed to be standing outside himself, perceiving his battered body as if it belonged to someone else. Sometimes, he felt ashamed to need such drugs. More often, he welcomed them and even began to crave them.

  He got them less often as his body began to mend. He understood the reasons for that and resented them at the same time. “Would you rather stay in so much pain, you need the poppy juice to take you out of it?” a nurse asked him.

  From flat on his back, he glared up at the earnest young woman. “I’d rather have stayed whole in the first place,” he growled. She shrank away, fright on her face. The war, or Lagoas’ part of it, was still new. Not many wounded men had come back to Setubal to remind the folk who stayed home of what fighting really meant.

  Get used to it, he thought. You’d better get used to it. You’ll see-you’ll hear-worse than me.

  The next day-he thought it was the next day, anyhow, but the distillations sometimes made time waver, too-he got a visitor he hadn’t expected to see. The Lagoan officer still seemed absurdly young to be wearing a colonel’s rank badges. “Peixoto!” Fernao said. “Planning to send me back to the austral continent again?’

  “If you’re well enough, and if the kingdom needs you, I’ll do it in a heartbeat,” the young colonel answered. “Or I’ll go myself, or I’ll send a fisherman, or I’ll do whatever I think needs doing or my superiors tell me to do. That’s my job. But I did want to say I’m sorry you were hurt, and I’m glad you’re on the mend.”

  He meant it. Fernao could see as much. That obvious sincerity helped some-but only some. “I’m sorry I was hurt, too,” the mage answered, “and the mending …” He stopped. Peixoto hadn’t gone through it. How could he understand?

  “I know,” Peixoto said sympathetically. Fernao didn’t rise from the bed to brain him, but only because he couldn’t. What did Peixoto know? What could he know? Then the officer undid the top few buttons of his tunic, enough to let Fernao see the edges of some nasty scars. Fernao’s rage eased. He couldn’t guess how Peixoto had picked up those wounds, but the soldier did know something about pain.

  “I hope you can keep me out of the land of the Ice People when I’m on my feet again,” Fernao said. On his feet again! How far away that seemed. “I have something else in mind, something where I might serve the kingdom better.”

  “Ah?” Colonel Peixoto raised an eyebrow, almost as elegantly as if he were an Algarvian. “And that is?”

  By his tone, he didn’t think it could be important, whatever it was. He was itching to ship Fernao back to the austral continent; the mage could see as much. But Fernao said, “The Kuusamans know something about theoretical sorcery that we don’t. I’m not sure what it is-one reason I’m not sure is that they’ve done such a good job of keeping it a secret. They wouldn’t be doing that if it weren’t important.”

  Peixoto pursed his lips, then slowly nodded. “Aye,” he said at last. “I know somewhat of that, though not the details, which are none of my business. Well, if the Guild Grandmaster agrees you should be doing this, I doubt anyone from his Majesty’s army will quarrel with him.”

  Grandmaster Pinhiero had already visited Fernao a couple of times. The mage made up his mind to make sure the grandmaster knew what he wanted. Pinhiero thought it was important, too; he wouldn’t have sent Fernao to Kuusamo to try to learn about it if he hadn’t. And hadn’t Pinhiero said he’d gone himself? Fernao thought, so, but he’d been too dazed and drugged to trust his memory. If he could escape eating roasted camel’s flesh ever again … he wouldn’t shed a tear.

  Thoughtfully, Peixoto went on, “And you may be needed here to help ward Setubal against the Algarvians’ magic. We blocked one of their assaults when we broke up that captives’ camp near Dukstas. You know about that?”

  “I’ve heard a thing or two, the times I’ve been fully among those present,” Fernao answered.

  “It could have been very bad. They might have served Setubal as they served Yliharma this past winter,” Peixoto said. “This time, we got wind of it and stopped them before they could get well started. But who knows if we’ll have good luck or bad the next time?”

  Fernao knew all about bad luck, knew more than he’d ever wanted to learn about it. Before he could answer Peixoto, a physician in a white tunic and kilt came into the chamber. “Time for your next procedure,” he said cheerfully, gesturing for the colonel to leave. Peixoto did, waving to Fernao as he went. The mage hardly noticed. He was scowling at the physician. Why shouldn’t the whoreson sound cheerful? It wasn’t as if anything were going to happen to him.

  Two attendants moved Fernao from his bed to a stretcher. They were well practiced and gentle; he cried out only once. That tied his record; he’d never yet been shifted without at least one howl of anguish. Down the hall he went, and into a clean, white room with a piece of sorcerous apparatus resembling nothing so much as a large rest crate. The spell powering it wasn’t identical to the one that kept mutton chops fresh in his flat, but it wasn’t far removed, either.

  Both the attendants and the physician draped themselves with elbow-length rubber gloves covered in silver foil to insulate themselves from the effects of the spell. Then the men who’d borne him here lifted him once more and set him in the crate.

  The next thing he knew, they were lifting him out of the crate again. He had a new pain in his broken leg, and a new one in his flank, too, with no memory of how he’d got them. He also had no sure way of knowing whether they’d left him in there an hour or a couple of weeks. One of the attendants offered him a little glass cup filled with a viscous, purplish fluid. He gulped it down. It tasted nasty. He’d expected nothing different. After what seemed forever but couldn’t really have been too long, the pain drifted away-or rather, it stayed and he drifted away from it.

  He dimly recalled taking the purplish stuff a few more times. Then, instead, a nurse gave him a thinner yellow liquid that didn’t taste quite so vile. Some of the pain returned, though without the raw edge it would have had absent the yellow stuff. Some of his wits returned, too.

  He didn’t notice Grandmaster Pinhiero coming into his room, but did recognize him after realizing he was there. “How are you today?” Pinhiero asked, worry on his wrinkled, clever face.

  “Here,” Fernao answered. “More or less here, anyhow.” He took stock. He needed a little while; he could think clearly under the yellow distillate, but he couldn’t think very fast. “Not too bad, all things considered. But there’s a good deal to consider, too.”

  “I believe that,” Pinhiero said. “They tell me, though, they won’t have to do any more really fancy repairs on you. Now you’re truly on the mend.”


  “They tell you that, do they?” Fernao thought some more, slowly. “They didn’t bother telling me. Of course, up till not too long ago I wouldn’t have had much notion of what they were talking about, anyhow.”

  “Well, I’m glad you’re back with us, and not too badly off,” Pinhiero said, which only proved he hadn’t been through what Fernao had. The yellow drug took the edge off Fernao’s anger, as it had taken the edge off his pain. The grandmaster went on, “That army colonel and I have had a thing or two to say to each other lately.”

  “Have you?” That drew Fernao’s interest regardless of whether he was drugged. “What kinds of things?”

  “Oh, this and that.” Pinhiero sometimes delighted in being difficult. Who was the Kuusaman mage who acted even worse? Ilmarinen, that’s what his name was. Dredging it up gave Fernao a brief moment of triumph.

  “For instance?” he asked. He knew he had more patience with the drug than he would have without.

  “For instance? The business the Kuusamans are playing with. You know what I mean. Is that an interesting enough for-instance for you?” Pinhiero waggled a finger at Fernao. “I know more about it now than I did when I sent you east to Yliharma, too.”

  “Do you?” Fernao also knew he should have been more excited, but the drug wouldn’t let him. “What do you know?”

  “I know you were right.” Pinhiero swept off his hat and gave Fernao a ceremonious bow. “The Kuusamans have indeed stumbled onto something interesting. More than that I shall not say, not where the walls have ears.”

  Had Fernao still been taking the purple distillate, he might have seen, or imagined he saw, ears growing out of the walls. With the purple stuff, it wouldn’t even have surprised him. Now his wits were working well enough to recognize a figure of speech. Progress, he thought. “Are they talking more than they were?” he asked.

  “They are.” The grandmaster nodded. “For one thing, we’re allies now. They aren’t neutral any more. But I think the whack Yliharma took counts for more. That’s what showed them they can’t do everything all by themselves.”