Into the Darkness (63 page)

“Come on.” Hestan shook Ealstan out of bed. “Get moving, sleepyhead. If you don’t go to school, what will you be?”

“Asleep?” Ealstan suggested, yawning.

His father snorted. “If you won’t wake up for me, you will when the master for your first class brings the switch down on your back because you were tardy. The choice is yours, son: my way or the master’s.”

“Forthweg has a choice, too, these days: Algarve’s way or Unkerlant’s,” Ealstan said as he got to his feet and stretched. “If they had a true choice, the Forthwegians would take neither the one nor the other. If I had a true choice, I would go back to bed.”

“Forthweg has no true choice. Neither do you, however well you argue.” Hestan no longer sounded amused. “You are the last one in the house up and moving. If you don’t make up for it, you may get my way and the master’s switch both.”

Thus encouraged, Ealstan put on a clean tunic and his sandals and hurried to the kitchen. Conberge gave him porridge with almond slivers stirred through it and a cup of wine flavored with enough resin to put fur on his tongue, or so he thought. “If I can’t speak Algarvian today, I’ll blame it on this horrible stuff,” he said.

“Better to blame it on not studying enough,” Hestan said.  “You should be learning Kaunian instead, but you
can
learn whatever your master sets before you.” He turned to Ealstan’s cousin. “The same applies to you, young man.”

With his mouth full, Sidroc had an excuse for not answering. He took advantage of it. Ealstan’s marks had always been higher than his. Lately, they’d been a good deal higher than his. Sidroc’s father was imperfectly delighted with that.

Despite having sat down later than Sidroc, Ealstan finished his porridge and wine before his cousin did. He did not rub that in, which rubbed it in more effectively than anything else could have done. Hengist almost threw Sidroc out the door after him. They hurried off to school together.

They’d gone only a couple of blocks when they passed four or five Algarvian soldiers half leading, half dragging a Kaunian woman into an empty building. One of them held a hand over her mouth. Sidroc chuckled. “They’ll have a good time.”

“She won’t,” Ealstan said. Sidroc only shrugged. Angry at his cousin’s indifference, Ealstan snapped, “Suppose it was your mother.”

“You keep my mother out of your mouth, or I’ll put my fist in it,” Sidroc said hotly. Ealstan thought he could lick his cousin, but this wasn’t the time or place to find out. He didn’t know why he bothered trying to make Sidroc see things as he did. Sidroc didn’t and wouldn’t care about Kaunians.

Ealstan stopped caring about Kaunians for the time being the moment he walked into Master Agmund’s class. On the blackboard, someone had written—in what looked to him like grammatically impeccable Algarvian—KING MEZENTIO HAD NINE PIGLETS BY THE ROYAL SOW. “Powers above!” he cried. “Get rid of that before the master sees it and beats us all to death.” He tried to figure out whose script it was, but couldn’t; whoever had written it had done so as plainly as possible.

Echoing that thought, one of his classmates said, “It was up there when we started coming in. Somebody must have snuck in during the night and put it up.”

Maybe that was true; maybe it wasn’t. Either way, though … “It doesn’t matter who wrote it. Erase it!”

“You think we haven’t tried?” Three boys said it at the same time.

“Haven’t tried what?” Master Agmund strode into the classroom. Nobody answered. Nobody needed to answer. When the master’s head turned, he naturally saw the message on the blackboard. Despite his swarthy skin, he turned red. “Who wrote this seditious trash?” he rumbled. His finger shot toward Ealstan. “Was it you, young man?”

That meant he judged Ealstan did not love the Algarvian occupiers. He was right, but Ealstan would sooner not have made such an obvious target. He was lucky here; he had only to tell the truth: “No, Master. My cousin and I just came in now, and saw it there as you did. I said we ought to erase it.”

Agmund’s thick, dark eyebrows lowered like stormclouds, but several of Ealstan’s classmates spoke up in support of him. “Very well, then,” the master of Algarvian said. “Your suggestion was a good one. Those who came in earlier should have acted on it.” He seized the eraser and rubbed vigorously.

But, however hard he rubbed, the message refused to disappear. If anything, the white letters got more distinct against their dark background. “Magecraft,” someone said softly.

Agmund also spoke softly, but his quiet words held only danger. “Anyone daring to use magecraft against Algarve will pay dearly, for the occupiers reckon it an act of war. Someone—perhaps someone in this chamber now—will answer for it, and may answer with his head.” He stalked out.

“Maybe we ought to run,” somebody said.

“What good would it do us, unless we took to the hills?” Ealstan said. “Master Agmund knows who we are. He and the headmaster will know where we live.”

“Besides, if anyone runs, Agmund will think he did it,” Sidroc added. He had a gift for intrigue, if not for scholarship. Once he’d spoken, everyone could hear the likely truth in his words.

Footfalls in the hall warned that Agmund was returning. The students sprang to their feet, not wanting any show of disrespect to feed his suspicions. That proved wise, for with him came Swithulf, the headmaster of the academy. Agmund looked as if he disapproved of everything and everyone. So did Swithulf; as he’d practiced the expression for twenty or twenty-five more years, his gaze was downright reptilian.

He read the graffito aloud to himself. Had he been a student, Agmund would have corrected his pronunciation, probably with a switch. As things were, the master of Algarvian said only, “The students deny responsibility.”

“Aye—they would,” Swithulf grunted. As Agmund had, he tried to erase the rude words. As Agmund had, he failed.

“Because of the magecraft I mentioned and you have now seen for yourself, sir, I tend to believe them in this instance.” Agmund sounded anything but happy at having to admit such a thing. That he admitted it anyhow made Ealstan, though equally reluctant, give him some small credit.

Swithulf spoke to the scholars for the first time: “No gossip about this, mind you.” Ealstan and his classmates all nodded solemnly. He worked hard to keep his face straight. Swithulf might as well have ordered the boys not to breathe.

“What shall we do about this, sir?” Agmund asked. “I can hardly instruct with such a crude distraction behind me.”

“I shall go get Ceolnoth, the magecraft master,” Swithulf answered. “He is no first-rank mage, true, but he should be sorcerer enough to put paid to this. And he is discreet, and he will charge no fee.” The headmaster departed as abruptly as he’d arrived.

Agmund made a good game try at teaching in spite of the comment about King Mezentio’s taste in partners—or, perhaps, his taste in pork. With nine piglets in back of the master, though, verbs irregular in the imperfect sense did not sink deep into the students’ memories.

Master Ceolnoth stuck his head into the chamber. “Well, well, what have we here?” he asked. “The headmaster didn’t say much.” Agmund pointed to the blackboard and explained. Ceolnoth came all the way inside so he could read the offending words. “Oh, dear,” he said. “Aye, we need to be rid of that, don’t we? I doubt anyone in Gromheort would be in a position to know any such thing, I do, I do.”

Ealstan looked at Sidroc. That was a mistake. It meant he had even more trouble not snickering than he would have otherwise. Sidroc looked about ready to burst like an egg.

“That doesn’t matter,” said Agmund, whose sense of humor had been strangled at birth. “Just get the filth of my blackboard.”

“Quite, quite.” Ceolnoth started out the door.

“Where are you going?” Agmund demanded.

“Why, to get my tools, of course,” Ceolnoth replied. “Can’t work without ‘em, no more than a carpenter can work without his. Swithulf just told me to come in here and look at what you had. Now I’ve looked at it. Now you’ve told me what the trouble is. Now I know I need to do something about it. So.” Out he went.

“More comings and goings here than I’ve seen since the redheads ran the Forthwegian army out of town,” Ealstan whispered to Sidroc.

His cousin nodded and whispered back: “I wonder if Ceolnoth worked that sorcery himself. He could look important that way, and say what he thought about the Algarvians at the same time.”

Ealstan hadn’t thought of that. He didn’t get much chance to think of it, either, for the smack of Master Agmund’s switch coming down on Sidroc’s back made him jump. “Silence in the classroom,” Agmund snapped. Sidroc glared at Ealstan, who’d spoken first but hadn’t got caught. The glare grew more pained when Agmund went on, “Since you enjoy talking so much, conjugate for me the verb
to bear
in all tenses.”

Sidroc floundered. Ealstan would have floundered, too; the verb was one of the most irregular in Algarvian, its principal parts seeming unrelated from one tense to another. Agmund kept after Sidroc till Ceolnoth returned. After that, he apparently decided Ealstan’s cousin had an excuse for being distracted and left off grilling him.

“Let’s see, let’s see,” Ceolnoth said cheerily. He produced a couple of stones, one pale green, the other a dull, grayish pebble. “Chrysolite to drive away fantasies and foolishness, and the stone called
adamas
in the classical tongue to overcome enemies, madness, and venom.”

“Adamas”
Agmund echoed. “What would that be in Algarvian?”

“I neither know nor care,” Ceolnoth answered. “Not a very useful language, not for magecraft it isn’t.” Agmund looked furious. If the master of magecraft noticed, he didn’t care. Ealstan snickered, but took care to snicker silently.

Ceolnoth rattled the two stones together and began to chant in classical Kaunian. That made Agmund look even angrier. The mage pointed to the offending graffito and cried out a word of command. The letters on the blackboard flared brightly. Ealstan thought they would disappear. Instead, they kept right on flaming, in the most literal sense of the word. Smoke began to pour from the blackboard, or from the timbers on which it was mounted.

Ceolnoth cried out again, in horror. So did Agmund, in rage. “You blundering idiot!” he bellowed.

“Not so,” Ceolnoth said. “This was a spell set under a spell, so that quelling the first one set off the second.”

They would have gone on arguing, but Sidroc shouted “Fire!” and dashed out of the room. That broke a different sort of spell. All his fellow scholars and the two masters followed him. Everyone was shouting “Fire!” by then, that and “Get outside!” As Ealstan ran, he got the idea that he wouldn’t have to worry about the Algarvian imperfect tense for some time to come.

Fourteen

G
ARIVALD HATED inspectors on general principles. Any Unkerlanter peasant hated inspectors on general principles. Tales that went back to the days when the Duchy of Grelz was a kingdom in its own right had inspectors as their villains. If any tales had inspectors as their heroes, Garivald had never heard of them. As far as he was concerned, inspectors were nothing but thieves with the power of King Swemmel’s army behind them.

He particularly hated the two inspectors who had come to Zossen to put a crystal in Waddo’s house. For one thing, he did not want Waddo getting orders straight from Cottbus. For another, the inspectors were swine. They ate and drank enough for half a dozen men, and paid nothing. They leered at the village women, and even pawed at them.

“They might as well be Algarvians,” Annore said after one of the inspectors shouted a lewd proposition at her while she was walking home from visiting a friend. Unkerlanters were convinced Algarve was a sink of degeneracy.

“If they touch you, I’ll kill them,” Garivald growled.

That frightened his wife. “If anyone in a village murders an inspector, the whole village dies,” she warned. That wasn’t legend; it was law and somber fact. Some kings of Unkerlant had been known to show mercy in applying it, but Swemmel was not one of them.

“They deserve it,” Garivald said, but inside he was glad Annore had reminded him of the law. That gave him a chance to back away from his threat without sounding like a coward.

“I just wish they’d go away,” Annore said.

“We all wish they’d go away,” Garivald answered. “Waddo may even wish they’d go away by now. But they won’t. Any day now, we’re going to have to start making a cell to hold prisoners in till they get round to cutting the bastards’ throats to make the crystal work.”

“And that’s another thing,” his wife said. “What if these robbers or murderers or whatever they are get loose somehow and start robbing and murdering us? Will the inspectors care? Not likely!”

“I asked Waddo about that very thing the other day,” Garivald said. “He told me they’re going to bring in a couple of guards to make sure that doesn’t happen.”

“Oh,” Annore said. “Well, that’s a little better.”

“No such thing!” Garivald exclaimed. “A crystal to tie us to Cottbus, guards here all the time … We couldn’t breathe very free before. We won’t be able to breathe free at all now.”