Through the Darkness d-3

by Harry Turtledove

  Ealstan hadn’t thought anything could make up for the shabby ceremony-no ceremony at all, really-and for the goons who’d tried to make sure he and Vanai weren’t Kaunians in sorcerous disguise. But that double handful of words did the job. He kissed her again, this time for the sake of the kiss, not for anything else. Then he said, “I bet there’s one part of the wedding-or right after the wedding-that’s the same for Forthwegians and Kaunians.”

  Vanai cocked her head to one side. “Oh?” she said. “Which part do you mean?

  He wanted to grab her. He wanted to take her hand and set it on the part of him he had in mind. He did neither. He’d seen she didn’t care for such things-in fact, she sometimes froze for a moment when he did them. He still didn’t know exactly what had happened to her before they came together, but he thought something bad had. One day, she might decide to tell him. If she did, fine. If she didn’t… he would live with that, too.

  And she was still standing there smiling, waiting for his answer. “Come into the bedchamber,” he said, “and I’ll show you.”

  He did. She showed him, too. They lay side by side, waiting for him to rise for another round. He was eighteen; it wouldn’t take long. Stroking her, he said, “That’s better magic than any the sorcerers work.”

  “It is, isn’t it?” Vanai said. “I wonder if it was the very first magic, and everything else grew out of it.”

  “I don’t know. I don’t suppose anyone else knows, either,” Ealstan said. After a little while, they began again. The oldest magic of all, if that was what it was, had them well and truly-and happily-ensnared.

  Talsu got up from the supper table. “I’m off,” he said in Jelgavan, and then, in classical Kaunian, “I go to learn my lesson.”

  Gailisa beamed at him. “You sound so smart when you speak the old language.”

  “Only goes to show you can’t always tell,” Ausra remarked.

  Trying to smile at his wife and glare at his sister at the same time, Talsu feared he ended up looking foolish. “Don’t bother waiting up for me,” he said, and went downstairs, out the front door, and onto the dark, quiet streets of Skrunda.

  With the winter solstice not long past, nightfall came early. So it seemed to Talsu, at any rate. From what he’d read about how things worked down in places like Kuusamo and southern Unkerlant, though, he knew they had it worse. And in the land of the Ice People, the sun didn’t come up for days- sometimes for weeks, if you went far enough south-at a time. He tried to imagine that, tried and felt himself failing.

  A constable strode past, twirling his truncheon. He was a Jelgavan, but no Jelgavan before the war would have swaggered that way. Learned something from the Algarvians who give you orders? Talsu thought.

  Almost as if the constable had heard the thought, he barked at Talsu: “Curfew’s coming soon. You’d better be off the streets!”

  “Aye, sir. I will,” Talsu said. That was true. He’d get to the house of Kugu the silversmith before the curfew hour. And then, because Skrunda would only get darker to foil any dragons that might fly overhead, he would sneak home again. The constables hadn’t caught him yet, and he didn’t expect that they would.

  Even in the dark, he knew the way to Kugu’s. He’d been there many times now. When he rapped on the door, Kugu opened it and peered out into the gloom through his thick spectacles. “Ah, Talsu Traku’s son,” he said in the classical tongue. “Come in. You are very welcome.”

  “I thank you, sir,” Talsu answered, also in classical Kaunian. “I am glad to be here. I am glad to learn.”

  And that was true. He hadn’t worried much about Kaunianity before the war. As far as he’d thought about such things-which wasn’t very far-Jelga-vans were Jelgavans, Valmierans were Valmierans (and not to be trusted because they talked funny), and the blond folk left in the far west were mere unfortunates (and they talked even funnier: they still used the classical tongue among themselves).

  But if many of the Algarvians knew classical Kaunian, and if they were so eager to destroy monuments from the days of the Kaunian Empire in Jelgava and Valmiera, didn’t that have to mean there was something to the matter of Kaunianity, of all folk of Kaunian descent being in some sense one? That was how it looked to Talsu, and he wasn’t the only one in Skrunda to whom it looked that way.

  As usual, he sat down at the big table bedecked with dice and with stacks of coins. If the Algarvians suddenly burst in, it would look as if the students were in fact nothing but gamblers. Talsu wondered if Mezentio’s men-or the Jelgavan constables who served under Mezentio’s men-would care. He doubted it. If the redheads or their stooges came bursting in, someone would have betrayed Kugu and those who learned from him.

  He exchanged nods and greetings, sometimes in Jelgavan, sometimes in the old speech, with the others who visited Kugu every week. Everyone watched everyone else. Talsu wondered which of his fellow students had painted slogans on the walls of Skrunda in classical Kaunian. He wondered if they had any real organization. He rather thought so. Most of all, he wondered how to join it, how to say he wanted to join it, without running the risk of betrayal to the Algarvians.

  “Let us begin,” Kugu said, and Talsu knew that verb form was a hortatory subjunctive, a bit of knowledge he couldn’t have imagined having a year earlier. The silversmith went on, still in classical Kaunian, “We shall continue with indirect discourse today. I shall give a sentence in direct speech, and your task will be to turn it into indirect discourse.” His eyes darted from one man to the next. “Talsu, we shall begin with you.”

  Talsu sprang to his feet. “Sir!” He knew Kugu wouldn’t take a switch to him if he erred, but memories of his brief schooling lingered even so.

  “Your sentence in direct speech is, ‘The teacher will educate the boy,’ “ Kugu said.

  “He said. . the teacher … would educate … the boy,” Talsu said carefully, and sat down. He was beaming. He knew he’d done it right. He’d shifted teacher into the accusative case from the nominative, and he’d remembered to make would educate a future infinitive because the conjugated verb in the original sentence was in the future tense.

  And Kugu nodded. “That is correct. Let us try another one. Bishu!” This time he pointed at a baker. Bishu botched his sentence. Kugu didn’t take a switch to him, either. He patiently explained the error Bishu had made.

  Around the room the sentences went. Talsu did make a small mistake on his second one. Since others had done worse before him, he didn’t feel too embarrassed. He didn’t think he’d make that mistake again, either.

  No one wrote anything down. That wasn’t because instruction in the days of the Kaunian Empire had been oral, though it had. But if there were no papers, the Algarvians would have a harder time proving the men at Kugu’s house were learning what the occupiers did not want learned. Talsu’s memory, exercised as it had never been before, had put on more muscles than he’d known it could. He’d also noticed he was speaking better, more educated-sounding, Jelgavan than he had before. Learning classical Kaunian gave him the foundation in the grammar of the modern language he’d never had.

  At last, Kugu lapsed into Jelgavan: “That will do for this evening, my friends. My thanks for helping to keep the torch of Kaunianity alive. The more the Algarvians want us to forget, the more we need to remember. Go home safe, and I’ll see you again next week.”

  His students, about a dozen all told, drifted out by ones and twos. Talsu contrived to be the last. “Master, may I ask you a question?” he said.

  “A point of grammar?” the silversmith asked. “Can it keep till our next session? The hour is not early, and we both have to work in the morning.”

  “No, sir, not a point of grammar,” Talsu replied. “Something else. Something where I trust you to know the answer.” He put a little extra stress on the word trust.

  Kugu, a sharp fellow, heard that. Behind the lenses of his spectacles, his eyes-a pale gray-blue-widened slightly. He nodded. “Say on.” Sometimes, even when speakin
g Jelgavan, he contrived to sound as if he were using the old language.

  Taking a deep breath, Talsu plunged: “I trust you, sir, where I wouldn’t trust any of the other scholars here. You’re no fool; you know what the Algarvians are like.” Kugu nodded again, but said nothing more. Talsu went on, “I wish I knew some kind of way I could hit back at them-I mean, not by myself, but one of a bunch of people working together. Do you know what I’m saying?”

  “Aye, I know what you’re saying,” the silversmith answered slowly. “What I don’t know is how far to trust you, if at all. These are dangerous times. Even if I knew something, you might be trying to learn it to betray me to the redheaded barbarians, not to strike at them.”

  Talsu yanked up his tunic and showed Kugu the long, fresh scar on his flank. “An Algarvian knife did this to me, sir. By the powers above, I have no reason to love Mezentio’s men: no reason to love them, and plenty of reasons to hate them.”

  Kugu rubbed his chin. He wore a little goatee, so pale as to be almost invisible in some light. He sighed. “You are not the first to approach me, you know. Whenever someone does, I always wonder if I am sowing the seeds of my own downfall. But, now that you bring it to my mind, I remember hearing of what you suffered, and how unjustly, at that Algarvian’s hands. If anyone may be relied upon, I believe you to be that man.”

  “Sir,” Talsu said earnestly, “I would lay down my life to see Jelgava free of the invaders.”

  “No.” Kugu shook his head. “The idea is to make the Algarvians lay down theirs.” At that, Talsu grinned ferociously. Eyeing him, the silversmith smiled a thin smile of his own. “Do you know the street where the arch from the days of the Kaunian Empire once stood?”

  “I had better. I was there when the Algarvians wrecked the arch,” Talsu answered.

  “All right. Good. On that street, half a dozen houses past where the arch used to be-going out from the town square, I mean-is a deserted house with two dormers,” Kugu said. “Come there night after next, about two hours after sunset. Come alone, and tell no one where you are going or why. Knock three times, then once, then twice. Then do what I or the other men waiting inside tell you to do. Have you got all that?”

  “Night after next. Two hours past sunset. Don’t blab. Knock three, one, two. Follow orders.” Talsu reached out and pumped the silversmith’s hand. “I can do all that, sir. Thank you so much for giving me the chance!”

  “You’ve earned it. You deserve it,” Kugu answered. “Now go back to your own home, and don’t let the constables nab you on the way.”

  “Don’t you worry about that,” Talsu said. “I can slide around those buggers.”

  Slide around them he did. He was very full of himself the next two days, but he was often full of himself when he came back from his lessons in classical Kaunian. He wanted to tell Gailisa where he would be going, what he would be doing, but he remembered Kugu’s warning and held his peace.

  On the appointed night, he said, “I have to go out for a bit. I should be back before too long, though.”

  “A likely story.” Gailisa winked. “If you come back reeking of wine, you can sleep on the floor.” The kiss she gave him suggested what he’d be missing if he were rash enough to stagger home drunk.

  Thoughts of what he didn’t intend to miss made him extra careful to dodge patrolling Jelgavan constables. He had no trouble finding the house Kugu had named; its whitewashed front made it seem to glow in the dark. No light showed in either of the dormers. Talsu knocked. Three. Pause. One. Pause. Two.

  The door opened. Starlight gleamed off the lenses of Kugu’s spectacles. He carried no lamp, nor even a candle. “Good,” he said. “You are punctual. Come with me.” He turned and started into the pitch-black interior of the house. Over his shoulder, he added, “Close the door behind you. We don’t want to let anyone know this building is in use.”

  Talsu obeyed. As he shut the door, he felt rather than hearing someone moving toward him. He started to whirl, but something smacked into the side of his head. He saw a brief burst of light, though there was no true light to see. Then darkness more profound than any in the dark, dark house washed over him and swept him away.

  When he woke, pain and nausea filled him. He needed a while to realize not all the rattling and shaking were inside his battered head; he lay in a wagon clattering along over cobbles. He tried to sit, and discovered his hands and feet were tied.

  Someone slipped the hood off a lantern. That little beam pierced him worse than the fiercest sun after the nastiest hangover he’d ever had. “Kugu?” he croaked.

  Laughter answered him. The fellow holding the lantern said, “No, the silversmith is trolling for more foolish fire-eaters. You deal with us now.” He spoke Jelgavan with an Algarvian accent. Partly from the anguish of the betrayal that implied, partly from physical misery, Talsu heaved up his guts. His Algarvian captor let him lie in it.

  As the reindeer-drawn sleighs carried Pekka and her comrades through a stretch of southeastern Kuusamo where no ley lines ran, she began to grasp how little of her own homeland she’d seen. Sitting beside her in the sleigh, both of them bundled beneath thick fur robes, Fernao might have magicked that thought right out of her head. In classical Kaunian, he said, “This might almost be southern Unkerlant, or even the land of the Ice People.”

  “I do not know those places,” she answered, also in Kaunian. “And until now, I did not know the district of Naantali, either.” She stuck a mittened hand out from under the furs for a moment to wave.

  “On a map, this is nothing but a blank spot,” Fernao said.

  “Of course,” Pekka said. “That is why we are here, after all… wherever exactly here might be.”

  One stretch of low, rolling, snow-covered hills looked much like another. Here, not even the forests of pine and spruce and larch and fir that clothed the hills around Kajaani could survive. She shook her head. No, that wasn’t quite true, as she’d seen at a recent stop. But the trees on these hills weren’t trees at all, but bushes, stunted things the eternal cold and wind would not suffer to grow above the height of a man.

  “Does anyone actually live here?” Fernao asked. As Pekka’s had, his wave encompassed the whole Naantali district.

  “If you mean, are there towns here, or even villages, the answer is no,” Pekka told him. “If you mean, do some of our nomads drive their herds through this country every now and again-well, of course they do.”

  Beneath the fox-fur hat that was close to the coppery shade of his own hair, Fernao’s narrow eyes-sure proof of Kuusaman blood-narrowed further. “They had better not, not while we are here,” he said.

  “They will not,” Pekka said reassuringly. “We have soldiers on snowshoes and skids patrolling a perimeter wider than any we could possibly need for this experiment.” She suspected some nomads could slip past patrolling soldiers even if the troopers went arm in arm, but didn’t mention that to Fernao.

  His thoughts, this time, glided along a different ley line: “A perimeter wider than any we could need for this experiment unless things go badly wrong.”

  “If they go that badly wrong,” Pekka answered, “none of us will be in any condition to worry about it.”

  “A point,” Fernao admitted. “A distinct point.” He started to say something else, then pointed ahead instead. “Is that where we are going?”

  “I think so,” Pekka said. “So far as I know, it is the only real building in this whole district.”

  “Was it once a hunting lodge?” Fernao asked.

  “No. I do not think there is anything to hunt in these parts-there has not been since we cleaned out the last of the wolves hundreds of years ago,” Pekka answered. “You have Master Siuntio to thank for the building. He went to the Seven Princes and told them we might need a headquarters in some isolated place for our experiments. Here is a headquarters in an isolated place.”

  “Isolated is hardly the word,” the Lagoan mage said. “Desolate might come closer.”

&n
bsp; He had a point, but Pekka didn’t feel like admitting it. To her, this structure here in the middle of nowhere was a sign of Kuusamo’s might, and also a sign of the importance of the work in which they were engaged. But she was glad wolves had been hunted out of the land of the Seven Princes. Were any still here, she felt sure she would have heard them howling of nights.

  Fernao said, “Our experiments had better go well. If they do not, the sleighs will stop coming, we shall quietly starve, and no one will ever find us again, no matter how hard people may look.”

  “Stop that!” Pekka told him. “This is a civilized land. No one would do any such thing, and you know it.”

  He dipped his head to her. Mischief glinted in his eyes. “I will believe it, but only because you say it.”

  Their driver, who up till then might have been operated by sorcery or clockwork, chose that moment to speak up: “Here we are.” He used Kuusaman, of course. Pekka wondered if he understood classical Kaunian. Most sleigh drivers wouldn’t have, but he might have been chosen for something other than how well he could handle reindeer.

  The hostel-for lack of a better word, Pekka thought of it as such-did nothing to remind guests of the Principality or of any other fine establishment back in Yliharma. It had been hastily built from yellow pine, the timber so fresh it hadn’t yet aged and weathered even in this harsh climate. The roof climbed steep, to keep snow from clinging. Smoke rose from the red-brick chimney, though the wind swept it away almost at once. Soot here didn’t stain the snow, as it would have in a town; there wasn’t enough of it to matter.

  “How cold do you think it is?” Fernao asked as he unswaddled himself and climbed out of the sleigh.

  “Not cold enough to freeze quicksilver, I don’t think.” Pekka also descended, taking Fernao’s hand to steady herself on the way down (the injured mage shifted his crutches for courtesy’s sake). With both of them wearing thick mittens, it was hardly a touch at all.