Into the Darkness (43 page)

Cossos studied Fernao with no great friendliness. “I do not know that we will do anything here,” the palace steward said. “I cannot get you in to see Penda: my own head would answer for it. Things have tightened up. And with your kingdom at war with Algarve …” He shook his head. “Why don’t you just go away?”

“But if I went away, think of all the bribes you would lose,” Fernao answered mildly. Cossos scowled. Bribery was a way of life in Yanina. Talking about it, though, was very bad form.

Fernao did not care. Now he mumbled to himself, at the same time clutching a dried dormouse’s tail he carried in a tunic pocket. Cossos might have taken the mumble for Lagoan. It wasn’t. It was classical Kaunian, a tongue less widely studied in Yanina than in many other kingdoms. The spell was ancient, too: the primitive ancestor of the ones on which rest crates and much of modern medicine depended.

As a dormouse falls asleep for the winter, so Cossos fell asleep now. But it was not a natural sleep. He did not breathe. His heart barely beat. Had he been battling a soldier of the Kaunian Empire, he would have been killed without knowing he was dead. As things were, he merely toppled over. Fernao left the chamber where they’d been talking and hurried toward the wing of the palace in which King Penda was imprisoned.

He walked quickly, confidently. He had reason for his confidence. The servitors and nobles he passed saw him, aye. One or two, those of uncommon cleverness and strong will, even turned to look after him, perhaps to start to speak. Then they, like the rest, forgot about him and went on with their business. He smiled a small, slow smile. Among the Yaninans, as among most peoples, wormwood was a flavoring, and easy enough to obtain. The Valmierans brewed a nasty brandy with it; Varvakis stocked the stuff. But the Yaninans did not use it in sorcery. Lagoans did, not least for spells of temporary oblivion.

Had Fernao passed a mage, the spell would not have sufficed. He assumed Penda’s quarters were sorcerously as well as physically watched and warded. He touched the dormouse tail again. This was a different spell, one only a first-rank Lagoan mage was likely to use (although Fernao did hope Tsavellas relied on native Yaninan wizards; an expert from Algarve might have recognized and countered the sorcery).

People around him slowed down, as if they were dormice settling in for a long winter’s nap. That was an illusion, an inversion of the law of similarity. In fact, he had sped up. It was not a magic to use without great need; under it, he aged twice as fast as usual. But he passed out of the ken of those around him.

He started casting about for Penda like a hound seeking a fox’s scent. The trail was obscure, even though he moved above and beyond, so to speak, the ordinary plane of reality. Maybe Yaninan mages weren’t quite the bunglers he had come to reckon them.

But Penda’s trace was harder to hide than an ordinary man’s would have been. Fernao set his thumb on the obverse of a Forthwegian silver bit he carried with his other specialized sorcerous gear. The coin bore Penda’s tough, blunt profile. Both the law of similarity and, at several removes, the law of contagion linked it to the Forthwegian king.

Fernao found him in a bedchamber. He lay asleep beside a Yaninan woman; his captivity, evidently, was not of the most onerous. Fernao tapped him on the shoulder. At the tap, the Forthwegian king not only woke but also sped to Fernao’s level of living. He had less time to spare than the mage; gray filled his beard. No help for it, though, not now.

“Your Majesty, I have come to get you away from here,” Fernao said in Forthwegian.

“Whither shall we go?” Penda did not seem to care what the answer was, for he sprang naked from the bed and threw on the first clothes he found. “So long as it be not Cottbus or Trapani, I am with you.”

“By no means,” Fernao said. “I aim to bring you to Setubal.”

“It is good.” Now the king of Forthweg did hesitate. “Or rather, it may be good. How do I know I can trust you? I expected to be rescued ere this. Whence came the long delay?”

“How do you know you can trust me? You don’t,” Fernao replied. “If you would rather, I will remove this spell from you and you can go back to bed. And you might have been rescued sooner, your Majesty, had the fellow with whom I came from Lagoas not got himself slightly murdered. He had the connections in Patras. I’ve had to make mine. And so—will you come, or will you not come?”

“I am answered,” Penda said. “I am answered, and I shall come.” He eyed Fernao from under lowered lids. “And I would have known you for a Lagoan not by your looks, not by your accent, but by your studied lack of respect for those set above you.”

“Your Majesty, you are not set above me; you are set above Forthweg,” Fernao answered evenly, refraining from pointing out that, at the moment, Algarve and Unkerlant were set above Forthweg. “And if you will come, you had better come. This spell requires much sorcerous energy. Were we not so close to a power point, I could not use it. Even now, it will not hold long, not for two.”

Penda, for a wonder, argued no further. He followed Fernao out of the bedchamber without a glance back at the woman with whom he’d been sleeping. That told Fernao something he hadn’t known but had suspected about royalty. It made him a little sad. He wondered if the woman would be sad when she woke, sad or just relieved. He knew what he would guess.

As soon as King Penda and he were out of the wing of the palace in which Penda had been held, he relaxed the spell that seemed to slow the rest of the world to the pace of a sleepy dormouse. He sighed with relief of his own; had he not let go of that spell, it would soon have let go of him, with results likely to be unpleasant. The forgetfulness spell with the wormwood he retained. It cost him much less wear and tear than the other—and, had he dropped it, he and Penda would have been captured at once. He was opposed to that.

More Yaninans looked back over their shoulders at Penda and him than had turned back when he walked the corridors alone; spread to cover two men, the magic was a little less effective. But it held. The palace servitors scratched their heads, shrugged shrugs even the melodramatic Algarvians might have envied, and went back to whatever they were doing.

Once out of the palace, Penda peered this way and that, then nodded in slow wonder. “I had almost forgotten there were wider vistas than rooms and hallways,” he remarked.

“Well, your Majesty, if you want to keep on enjoying them, you’d better get moving,” Fernao said, setting a brisk pace away from the palace and into Patras.

King Penda matched him stride for stride. “Tell me now, sir mage,” the fugitive Forthwegian monarch said, “how you purpose spiriting me out of Yanina and into Lagoas, where I may hope to breathe free even if in exile.

Fernao wished Penda had not picked this moment to ask that question. He gave it the only answer he could: “Your Majesty, right now I haven’t the faintest idea.”

*

Behind a Zuwayzi soldier carrying a spear point downward in token of the truce now in force between his army and that of Unkerlant, Hajjaj advanced across battered, broken ground toward the Unkerlanter lines. Both the soldier and he wore wide-brimmed hats and long mantles, not just to salve Unkerlanter sensibilities but also to ward off the rain that leaked from a dirty-gray sky.

An Unkerlanter soldier in rock-gray hooded cape and tunic came forward to meet them. He too carried a spear with its point aimed at the ground. To Hajjaj’s surprise, the fellow spoke Zuwayzi: “Your Excellency, you come with me,” he said, his speech slow but clear. “I take you to Marshal Rathar.”

He seemed stuck in the present indicative. Hajjaj didn’t mind. Hearing his own language from the Unkerlanter was more courtesy than his kingdom had got from King Swemmel’s since the war began. “I will come with you,” Hajjaj said.

Rathar waited less than a blaze behind the forwardmost Unkerlanter positions. As his reputation said he would, he looked solid and steady. After bows and what were, by Unkerlanter standards, polite, leisurely greetings, he spoke in his own tongue: “I am sorry, but I do not know Zuwayzi. Do you speak Unkerlanter?”

“Only a few words,” Hajjaj answered in that language. He shifted speeches: “I know Algarvian well enough, and I have heard you also do. Is this so?”

“Aye, it is,” Rathar answered in Algarvian. He was indeed fluent in that speech, continuing, “I wish to congratulate you on the brave resistance you Zuwayzin have offered to the armies under my command.”

“It was not enough.” Hajjaj had been sure from the beginning of the war that it would not be enough, though the Unkerlanters’ blunders had raised even his almost unraisable hopes once or twice. “Now, Marshal, I have come at the bidding of King Shazli to inquire of you what Unkerlant’s terms will be for converting this truce into a peace.”

Rathar looked astonished. “Your Excellency, I have no authority to treat with you in this matter. It took all the authority I had to create the present truce, and even then I had to confirm it with my sovereign. If you seek peace, I must send you to Cottbus, for only there will you obtain it.”

Hajjaj sighed. He had hoped for better, but had not expected it. “If it must be so, so it must be,” he said. “Let me go back to my side of the truce line, that I may use a crystal there to let King Shazli know what you require. I shall return here, I hope, within an hour’s time.”

“Very well,” Rathar said. “A cart will be waiting to take you south to the closest functioning caravan. Efficiency. In aid of which, my compliments to your soldiers on the highly professional way in which they sabotaged the local ley lines. They made our campaign much more difficult than we expected.”

“It was not enough,” the Zuwayzi foreign minister repeated. Rathar struck him as being as efficient as King Swemmel wanted to make everyone in his kingdom. Hajjaj found efficient Unkerlanters even more alarming than the usual sort.

On returning to his own side of the truce line, he had a crystallomancer link him to his sovereign up in Bishah. Shazli’s image, tiny and perfect and unhappy, stared at him out of the crystal. “Go where you must go. Do what you must do. Save what you can,” the king said. “If war resumes, we can still hurt the Unkerlanters, but, my generals warn me, we cannot be certain even of holding them out of Bishah. Therefore, war must not resume.”

“Even so, your Majesty,” Hajjaj said. He remembered the days when Zuwayza was an Unkerlanter province. Shazli, who’d been a child then, really didn’t. He thought an Unkerlanter conquest would be dreadful. Hajjaj knew it would.

As Rathar had promised, a carriage was waiting. It fought its way along a muddy track and over a wooden bridge laid across the roaring torrent now filling the Wadi Uqeiqa. Even with the rain beating down, the stench of death was everywhere. Hajjaj recalled it from the Six Years’ War and the chaos afterwards. He would have been just as well pleased -better than just as well pleased—not to have his memory jogged. The Zuwayzin had indeed fought hard. Would they end up any better off than if they had not fought at all?

At last, after what seemed forever, the carriage reached the ley-line caravan, and Hajjaj seemed to return from the distant past to the present—or, at least, to the not too distant past, for the caravan cars had plainly seen better decades. An Unkerlanter in the lead car spoke to Hajjaj in Algarvian: “I am Zaban, from our foreign ministry. You will be in my charge until you return to Bishah.” He did not say
to Zuwayza;
Zuwayza might not be a kingdom on Hajjaj’s return. Zaban went on, “I see you are wearing nothing warm. Fortunately, I can supply your needs. Efficiency.”

“I thank you, Zaban.” Hajjaj spoke crisply, not with the flowery politeness that would have been automatic were he speaking Zuwayzi. In their arrogance, Unkerlanters took that politeness as weakness and a sign of submission. He was weak and would have to submit, but he did not have to advertise it.

He climbed up into the wagon. The caravan sat where it was for most of another hour before starting to move. “Efficiency,” Hajjaj remarked to Zaban. The official from the foreign ministry gave him a dirty look, but said nothing. That suited Hajjaj fine.

As he traveled south, he found himself moving into winter. The caravan wagon boasted a coal-fired stove. It had been burning even down in Zuwayza, which struck Hajjaj as a typical piece of Unkerlanter “efficiency.” By the middle of the night, though, he was glad of the warmth. Snow had started to dapple the ground before darkness fell. By the time day returned, white blanketed the rolling Unkerlanter prairie. The caravan stirred up the snow as it glided above the ground, making an icy wake that had Hajjaj thinking wistfully of ships on the warm ocean.

He had traveled down to Cottbus before, but not in a good many years and never in winter. Somehow, the snow only made the plains of Unkerlant seem more immense than they did in good weather. Looking out the dirty windows of his caravan car, Hajjaj thought he could see to the edge of the world, or even a little over the edge.

Every so often, the caravan would glide past or through a village or town. However big the place might be, it seemed tiny when set against the vastness of the plain. And when it was gone, it was gone as if it had never been, as if the flatlands had swallowed it up when Hajjaj turned his head for a moment. Even the woods that grew more frequent as the caravan got farther south felt like interlopers on the endless plain.

The caravan reached Cottbus in the late afternoon, a little more than a day after leaving Unkerlantcr-occupied southern Zuwayza. The Unkerlanter capital sat at the junction of Cottbus and Isartal Rivers. Both had ice floating on them, which chilled Hajjaj’s blood. Zaban took it in stride, saying, “The season is early yet. They haven’t frozen over from bank to bank.” The Zuwayzi foreign minister shivered at the mere idea.

He had something like a revelation as a carriage took him from the caravan station to his lodging. He needed it, too, for cold struck at his nose and ears—almost all the flesh he exposed to it—like a viper. “You built your roofs so steep here to let the snow slide off them!” he exclaimed.

“Well, of course,” Zaban replied, giving him an odd look. But it wasn’t
of course
to Hajjaj, any more than making sure you drank plenty of water was
of course
to Unkerlanters in Bishah.