Jaws of Darkness d-5

by Harry Turtledove

  “I can understand some of what they’re saying,”Kun answered. “Not a lot-Kuusaman is a peculiar language, if anyone wants to know what I think: much worse than Unkerlanter-but enough.”

  All Istvan had ever learned of either were such phrases as, Hands high! andCome out of there! “I’ll take your word for it,” he said.

  A Kuusaman guard charged into their chamber, stick at the ready. He looked at them, saw they were where they were supposed to be and not making trouble, and relaxed a little. Sounding innocent, Kun asked, “What happened?”

  “Magic,” the guard answered. “Bad magic. Many to be dead.” His Gyongyosian was halting but understandable. “To kill themselves to make magic. Bad. Very bad.” Shaking his head, he backed out of the room.

  Istvan sniffed. “I smell smoke.”

  “Aye, something’s burning,”Kun agreed. He sniffed, too. “Not close, I don’t think. Nothing we have to worry about.” He paused, then went on, “That guard was right, you know. Itwas bad magic, and I don’t care that our allies used it first.”

  “Neither do I,” Istvan said, and did his best to believe he was telling the truth.

  When the sun rose, he peered eagerly out the window. Sure enough, most of the walls were down, but the Kuusamans had posted an armed man every ten feet or so to prevent escapes. The ley-line depot was also wrecked, and the smoke, he found, came from the direction of the port the Kuusamans had built: he could see as much through the gaps in what had been the palisade. But he could also see that the Kuusamans remained in firm control of the island of Obuda, regardless of what Frigyes and Borsos and the redheads and-most important-Szonyi and the other Gyongyosians who’d laid down their lives had done.

  “It was a waste of magic,” he said, and would have felt vindicated if he hadn’t felt so bad.

  “Halt!” Garivald called. “What are you doing?” Seeing any movement was enough to make him swing his stick toward it.

  What he saw in the bridgehead by Eoforwic wasn’t an Algarvian soldier, but a gray-bearded Forthwegian with a stooped back. When the old man smiled a placating smile, he showed a mouth full of bad teeth. “Nothing, sir,” he said. “I’m only… mushrooms.”

  Garivald didn’t know the missing word, but had no trouble figuring out what it meant. Even a Grelzer could follow bits and pieces of Forthwegian, just as the locals could understand a little of what he said. “Come with me,” he commanded. “Come with me to my lieutenant.”

  “Why?” the Forthwegian asked. His smile got wider. He said something else. Garivald couldn’t understand it, but could make a good guess-probably something like, Iwasn‘t doing any harm.

  He shrugged. “Come,” he repeated. “Orders. All civilians to be questioned when they’re found where they’re not supposed to be.”

  “Only mushrooms,” the Forthwegian said. He held up his basket, then held it out to Garivald. “I’ll give them to you.”

  “No.” Garivald liked mushrooms, but not so much as the locals did- certainly not enough to let himself be bribed with them. “Come along right now, or you’ll be sorry.”

  Muttering under his breath, the old man came. None of what he said sounded like a compliment. As they went deeper into the bridgehead, he spoke a few words Garivald could understand: “Need to piss.”

  “Later.” With a stick in his hand, Garivald could afford to be heartless.

  But the old man whined, “Need topiss,” again with such dramatic urgency that Garivald relented. He pointed to a stout tree somehow still standing despite all the eggs that had landed on the bridgehead.

  The old man disappeared behind it. Perhaps a heartbeat slower than it should have, that roused Garivald’s suspicions. “Hey! What are you doing back there?” he barked, and hurried over to find out for himself. The old man wasn’t standing there easing himself. He was loping toward a fallen tree not far away, keeping the still-standing one between himself and where Garivald had been. “Halt!” Garivald shouted again.

  The old man ran harder than ever. Nobody, though, nobody could outrun a beam. Garivald’s caught him in the middle of the back just as he was about to dive behind the tree trunk. He shrieked and went over on his face.

  He was still moving feebly when Garivald trotted up to him. With a glare, he said something Garivald couldn’t understand: the blood running from his mouth garbled it. Whatever it was, it didn’t sound like Forthwegian. Garivald wished he hadn’t blazed to kill-but that, he’d found, was almost always what a soldier intended to do. He hadn’t thought of doing anything else till much too late.

  With a last unintelligible mumble, the old man died. Garivald knew the exact instant life left his body, for his looks changed in that instant. Suddenly, he no longer looked like a Forthwegian, but like an Algarvian who’d let his beard grow out, as Forthwegians were in the habit of doing.

  “Magic!” Garivald exclaimed. His hands twisted in the sign Grelzers used when they ran across magecraft where they didn’t expect to. In an abstract way, he admired the redhead’s thoroughgoing imposture. It wasn’t just the beard: the fellow had spoken good, maybe perfect, Forthwegian, and had even acted as if he liked mushrooms, which Mezentio’s men weren’t in the habit of doing.

  “What have you got, Corporal?” somebody called from behind Garivald: an Unkerlanter. At least, I think he’s an Unkerlanter, Garivald thought dizzily. Nothing in the world seemed so certain as it had a moment before.

  “What have I got?” he echoed. “I’ve got a spy, that’s what. Go fetchLieutenantAndelot right away. He needs to see this, and to hear about it, too.” The Unkerlanter soldier’s eyes widened. He took off at a run. Garivald was only a corporal, but common soldiers obeyed him as if he wereMarshalRathar. Of course, he had to obey sergeants and real officers the same way, while Rathar had to obey only the king, with everyone else in Unkerlant obeying him. The marshal has it easy, Garivald thought.

  Andelot came trotting back with the trooper. “A spy?” he said, and stared down at the dead Algarvian. “How in blazes did he get so far inside our lines, Fariulf?”

  “Because he looked just like a fornicating Forthwegian till I blazed him, sir,” Garivald answered, and explained what had happened.

  “I’ve heard of such sorcery,” Andelot said when he was finished. “Some of the Kaunians here in Forthweg used it to keep the redheads from finding them and killing them. But this is the first time I’ve heard that the Algarvians are using it to try to make themselves look harmless while they come snooping around.”

  “I hadn’t heard of it at all, sir,” Garivald said. “Like I told you, I was taking this fellow back to you so you could question him-he wasn’t supposed to be inside the perimeter.”

  “He must have thought we had a wizard waiting to test him,” Andelot said. “He panicked, and got himself killed, and gave the game away. If he looked like an old Forthwegian, probably I would have just cursed him and told him to make himself scarce. I wouldn’t have guessed he was anything but what he seemed to be.”

  “I sure didn’t, sir,” Garivald said. “I was never so surprised in my life as when I saw him change as soon as he died.”

  “But you did what you were supposed to do by bringing him in,”LieutenantAndelot said. “And you did what you were supposed to do by blazing him when he tried to escape. No one could possibly have asked for more from you, SergeantFariulf.”

  “Serge…” Garivald saluted. “Thank you very much, sir!” He didn’t much want to be promoted. The higher he rose, the more likely people were to take a long look at him, a look he couldn’t afford. But he would also draw long looks if he seemed unhappy about getting a higher rank.

  “You’re welcome. You’ve earned it. Eventually, your pay will show that you’re getting it, too.” Andelot made a wry face. The men who gave out money in the Unkerlanter army plainly didn’t think efficiency was anything they had to worry about. “Do you think you could write me a report of everything that happened here, Sergeant?”

  “Write you a report?�
� Garivald was more alarmed than he had been when he saw the sorcerously disguised Algarvian trying to get away from him. “Sir, you only showed me my letters a few weeks ago. How in blazes am I supposed to write a report?”

  “Just write down what happened, the same as if you were telling it to me,” the company commander answered. “Don’t worry about your spelling, or anything fancy like that. You would be amazed at how many men who went to good schools can’t spell some simple words to keep the powers below from eating them. Believe me, you would. I won’t care about that, I promise. But you are the eyewitness. I want the facts down on paper in your words, not mine.”

  “I’ll try, sir,” Garivald said dubiously. He pointed to the Algarvian’s body. “What do we do with that?”

  “Leave him here,” Andelot answered. “I’ll want a mage to look at him just the way he is. I don’t know if he’ll be able to learn anything, but I want to give him a chance.”

  “All right, sir. That makes sense,” Garivald said.

  “Get some paper, Sergeant-I’ll give you some if you can’t find it anywhere else-and go write that report,” Andelot told him. “Get everything down while it’s still fresh in your mind. Don’t leave anything out. Maybe it’ll help if you pretend you’re talking to me instead of writing.”

  “Maybe.” Garivald knew he still didn’t sound convinced. He did have to get paper from the lieutenant. Once he got it, he sat apart from his men and started to work. He wrote awkwardly, as a child might have. That annoyed him. It also made his writing harder to read, he knew. He guessed at the spelling of about every other word, and found he had to imitate a conversational style, as Andelot had suggested: it was the only one within his grasp. He couldn’t very well imitate other things he’d read, because he hadn’t read anything to speak of.

  At last, after what seemed like forever and was in fact two leaves of paper, he finished. When he broughtLieutenantAndelot the report, he trembled even more than he had when first going into battle. No man relishes the feeling that he’s just made a fool of himself. He had to force his voice to steadiness to say, “Here you are, sir.”

  “Thank you, Sergeant,” Andelot replied. His mention of Garivald’s new rank made Garivald feel better and more nervous at the same time. “Let’s see what we’ve got here.” He began to read, then looked up and nodded. “You make your letters very clearly.”

  “You’re too kind,” Garivald muttered. He had the feeling that was the kind of compliment you got when no others seem to present themselves.

  And, sure enough, Andelot said, “Anyone would know, though, that you haven’t had much in the way of formal schooling.”

  “I haven’t had any, sir, and you know it,” Garivald said.

  “Well, so I do.” Andelot kept reading. He put down the first leaf and methodically worked his way through the second. When he finished that one, too, he glanced up at the nervously waiting Garivald. He tapped the report with his index finger. “This isn’t at all what I expected, Sergeant.”

  “I’m sorry, sir,” Garivald said. “I did the best I could.”

  Andelot looked surprised. “Sorry? Powers above, what for? Do you think I meant you did a bad job?… Oh, I see you do. No, no, no, Sergeant-just the opposite, in fact. This is splendid work. Except for the spelling-which you can’t help, of course-I would be sure you’d been writing reports for years.” He shook his head. “No, that’s not true. I would think you’d been writing romances or poems, not reports. Reports aren’t made to be interesting, and most of them aren’t. This, though”-he tapped again-”this makes me feel it happened to me, not to you. Only a real storyteller, a born storyteller, has that gift. You’ve got it.”

  “I-I don’t know what to say, sir,” Garivald said. Maybe I really can write down my songs, or write new ones. That would have been a safer ambition in almost any other kingdom besides Unkerlant, but he had it even so.

  “You don’t need to say anything,” Andelot told him. “You do need to know that I’m going to have you write more reports whenever you happen to need to. That will give you good practice writing, and I’ll have the fun of reading them.”

  He had to mean it. He wouldn’t say something like that just to make Garivald feel good. Real officers didn’t much care how underofficers felt. Why should they? They could tell underofficers what to do, and what else mattered? Garivald said, “I’ll try it again, sir, but I don’t want the kind of surprise that stinking redhead gave me.”

  “I don’t blame you a bit, Fariulf,” Andelot said. “The cursed Algarvians have given us too many surprises, all through this fight. That’s the way Algarvians are. They always come up with new things. But we gave them a surprise, too, you know. We did-we stodgy old Unkerlanters.”

  “We did?” Garivald asked in honest amazement. “What kind of surprise?”

  “We didn’t fall over and die when they hit us, and they thought we would,” Andelot said. “The Forthwegians did, and the Sibs, and the Valmierans, and the Jelgavans-and they chased the Lagoans right off the mainland of Derlavai with their tails between their legs. But they hit us, and we kept hitting back-and look where we are now.”

  Garivald didn’t particularly want to be in a bridgehead in the middle of Forthweg. Even so, though, he nodded. Andelot had a point.

  Fernao plowed through a Kuusaman news sheet as he ate an omelette for breakfast. By now, after a couple of years reading Kuusaman, he took it almost as much for granted as he did Lagoan. Some of the mages from his kingdom grumbled about it, but Lagoans always grumbled whenever they had to pay more attention to Kuusamo and its ways than they wanted to.

  “Anything interesting?” Ilmarinen asked from across the table. He was working his way through a plate of smoked salmon and onions and capers and pickled cucumbers.

  “I don’t know about interesting, but this report on something that went wrong on the island of Obuda is strange,” Fernao answered. He passed the sheet to Ilmarinen, who put on spectacles to read it. “It sounds like something happened there that was too big to ignore, and bigger than the writer really wanted to admit.”

  “Oh. That.” The Kuusaman master mage’s voice went hard and flat. “I know about that.” Fernao believed him; he knew all sorts of things he had no business knowing. “Some of the people who ran our captives’ camp for the Gongs made a big mistake there. Most of them are too dead to court-martial now, but we would if we could. Stupidity is usually its own punishment. It was here.”

  “Now you’re going to have to tell me, you know,” Fernao said.

  “Or else what?” But Ilmarinen was grinning. He loved to gossip, and made no bones about it. After an odorous bite of salmon and onions, he went on, “Well, for one thing, they let some sort of mage get in with the ordinary captives.”

  “Uh-oh,” Fernao said.

  “Uh-oh, indeed,” Ilmarinen agreed. “And then they put some Algarvian leviathan-riders into the camp, too. And, just in case you haven’t heard, the Gongs have figured out how to work the sorceries that make me hope Algarve and Unkerlant end up destroying each other-but we’re never that lucky, are we?”

  “Er-no,” Fernao said. “From what I know of the Gyongyosians, that surprises me. They’re warriors, aye, but not murderers.”

  “You’re right. They aren’t murderers-not that kind of murderers, any- how. But so what?” Ilmarinen paused for another bite. Fernao remembered to eat, too. The Kuusaman master mage continued, “They’re warriors, sure enough-and they volunteer, they really and truly do volunteer, to put their necks to the knife for the greater glory of Gyongyos and for the stars that don’t give a fart about them.”

  “Oh.” Fernao wished he hadn’t started eating again. “And that’s what happened on Obuda?”

  “That’s what happened on Obuda, all right,” Ilmarinen said. “Smashed things up pretty well-about like a real earthquake, say.” He shrugged. “Now we’re putting the pieces back together, and we won’t let it happen again. A bad nuisance, but only a nuisance.”


  “And a lot of dead Gyongyosians,” Fernao said. “Dead for nothing.”

  Ilmarinen nodded. “For nothing much, anyhow. I gather the officer who led this thought doing something was better than sitting around doing nothing and waiting for the war to end. Only goes to show that sometimes sitting around isn’t so bad.”

  “You should have thought of that before you went to the blockhouse by yourself,” Fernao said.

  After impressive deliberation, Ilmarinen made a face at him. “If we were all as smart as we knew how to make everyone else… very likely the world would be as much of a mess as it is right now.”

  “Aye, very likely.” Fernao had wondered if the old man would be able to get an aphorism out of his cynical start. He’d had his doubts when Ilmarinen paused there, but the theoretical sorcerer had come through. “Are you ready for the experiment tomorrow?”

  “I am always ready for experiments,” Ilmarinen answered. “Sometimes, unfortunately, experiments are not ready for me.” He popped more onions and capers and soft pink-orange fish into his mouth. “I tell you this: I’d a hundred times sooner experiment than stand in front of a chamber full of eager second-raters and tell them what I know.”

  “I rather like to teach,” Fernao said.

  “I haven’t minded teachingyou” Ilmarinen said; Fernao realized only later the size of the compliment he’d got. The old man went on, “But these people who want it spelled out and have to have it that way because they can’t see it if it isn’t… They’d make a lovely rock garden, don’t you think? Don’tthey think? They don’t, and that’s the trouble.”

  Fernao finished his own breakfast and went off to teach a class of mages-mostly Lagoans, with a few Kuusamans to fill out the twenty. Sure enough, the questions he got were of the sort Ilmarinen disliked: “Show me how these two verses work.” “What does this formula mean?” “Do we really need to know that?”

  “No, you don’t really need to know that,” he answered, his own temper fraying. “If you want to kill yourself when you try this spell, go ahead and forget it.”