Into the Darkness (91 page)

“Aye,” the three of them said, one after another. They slipped off the lines to which they’d clung while the leviathan brought them across the sea. Cornelu wondered if the toys under Eforiel’s belly were of the same sort the riders going into Valmiera had used or something altogether different. He hadn’t asked. It was none of his business.

“Here. Wait,” he said as the Lagoan raiders got ready to swim off. Treading water, they looked back at him. From inside his rubber suit, he pulled out a thin tube of oiled leather, tightly sealed at both ends. He spoke Lagoan phrases he’d carefully memorized: “Envelope in here. Please put in post box. For my wife.”

He had not fled Sibiu with any such envelopes—printed in advance to show the proper postage fee had been paid—in his possession. Neither had any of his fellow exiles from the island kingdom. But Lagoas had hobbyists who collected such things. He’d been able to buy what he wanted from a shop that catered to them, and hadn’t paid above twice what he would have at his own post office.

One of the Lagoans took the waterproof tube. “Aye, Commander, we’ll take care of it,” he said in Algarvian. That was a two-edge sword; it would let him be understood by most Sibians, but might make him seem an occupier rather than someone fighting the occupiers.

Cornelu shrugged as he said, “I thank you.” Few Lagoans really spoke his language. Most thought Algarvian was close enough, and most of the time, up till the war, they’d been right. Now, though, a man who used -o endings instead of u-endings and trilled his “r”s instead of gargling them showed he did not come from the unlucky islands King Burebistu had ruled.

With a last wave, the Lagoans swam toward the shore, pushing their canister full of trouble ahead of them. They vanished into the mist almost at once. Cornelu had everything he could do not to slip away from his leviathan and swim after them. To come so close to Tirgoviste and not be allowed to go ashore was cruel, cruel. And yet, if he disobeyed his orders and left Eforiel behind, how could he strike more blows against Algarve? If all he wanted was to stay home, he could have surrendered after King Mezentio’s men seized Sibiu. He had not. He would not.

“Costache,” he murmured. And, somewhere up there in Tirgoviste town, he had a son or daughter he’d never seen. That was hard, too.

Eforiel let out a questioning grunt. Leviathans were smarter than animals had any business being, and Eforiel and he had been together almost as long as he and Costache. She knew something was wrong, even if she couldn’t quite fathom what.

Cornelu sighed and stroked her smooth, pliant skin. It wasn’t the lover’s caress he wanted to give his wife, but had satisfactions of its own. “I cannot abandon you, either, can I?” he said. Eforiel grunted again. She wanted to tell him something, but he was not clever enough to know what.

His orders were to make for Setubal once more as soon as he had dropped off the raiders or saboteurs or whatever they were. Obeying those orders exactly as he’d got them proved impossible. He was a warrior disciplined enough to keep from abandoning the fight and trying to sneak home to his wife. But not all the discipline in the world could have kept him from lingering for a while outside the harbor in the hope of at least getting a long, bittersweet look at the land he loved.

He knew the mist might lay on the sea all day; it often did, in wintertime. If it did today, he promised himself he would guide Eforiel southeast again when evening came. Till then, he would wait. The Lagoans could not complain about when he returned. As he reluctantly admitted to himself, they were seamen, too; they understood the sea was not always a neat, tidy, precise place.

He looked west, in the direction of distant Unkerlant. King Swemmel’s commodores probably timed their leviathan-riders with water clocks, and docked their pay for every minute they were late coming into port. That was what they called efficiency. Cornelu called it madness, but the Unkerlanters cared no more for his opinion than he did for Swemmel’s.

Eforiel lunged off to one side after a pilchard or a squid, almost jerking Cornelu out of his harness. He laughed; while he was thinking about Unkerlant, an unprofitable pleasure if ever there was one, the leviathan was worrying about keeping her belly full. “You have better sense than I,” he said, and patted her again. She wriggled under his hand, as if to answer,
Well, of course.

Little by little, the mist did lift. Cornelu peered into Tirgoviste harbor. The warships there were Algarvian now, save for a few captured Sibian vessels. Cornelu cursed in a low voice to see the sailing ships that had brought the Algarvian army to Tirgoviste still in port, their masts and yards as bare of canvas as trees were of leaves in this season of the year.

Tirgoviste rose steeply from the harbor. Cornelu tried to make out the house he shared with Costache. He knew where it would be, but it was just too far away for him to let himself pretend he could spy it. In his mind’s eye, though, he saw it plain, and Costache in front of it holding their—son? daughter? The mental picture blurred and grew indistinct, like a watercolor left out in drizzle.

Fog and clouds still lingered on the slopes of Tirgoviste’s central mountains. Not for the first time, Cornelu hoped remnants of the Sibian army still carried on the fight against the Algarvians. Someone had to be carrying on the fight, else the Lagoans would not have sent their men to lend a hand.

A couple of little ley-line patrol boats moved around inside the sheltered waters of the harbor. Cornelu didn’t think anything much about that till the boats, both flying Algarve’s banner of green, white, and red, emerged from the harbor and sped toward him and Eforiel at a clip the leviathan could not come close to matching. Then he cursed again, in good earnest this time: while he’d been eyeing Tirgoviste, King Mezentio’s men on the island had spotted him, too.

Maybe they thought he was one of their leviathan-riders, coming in with news. He dared not take the chance. Besides, even if they did, he could not continue that masquerade for long, not in a rubber suit still stamped over the breast with Sibiu’s five crowns. He urged Eforiel down into a dive.

He had played games with patrol boats before, during exercises against his own countrymen and during the war against the Algarvians. In exercises and in action, he’d always managed to evade them. That left him confident he could do it yet again. He was annoyed at himself for letting the Algarvians spy him, but he wasn’t anything more than annoyed.

Eventually, Eforiel gave the wriggle that meant she needed to surface. Cornelu let her swim back up toward the air. He’d guided her as closely parallel to the shoreline as he could. Surface sailors had little imagination. They would assume he’d fled straight out to sea, terrified at the sight of them. Odds were they wouldn’t even notice Eforiel when she spouted. If they did, one more underwater run and he’d shake free of them. That was how things worked.

Or so he thought, till Eforiel did come up to breathe. Then, to his horror, he discovered that the patrol boats had ridden down a ley line very close to the path the leviathan had taken. They’d overran her by a little, but they plainly had a good notion of how far and how fast she was likely to travel under the sea.

When she spouted, sailors at the sterns of the patrol boats cried out. They were close enough to let Cornelu hear those shouts, thin over the water. He forced Eforiel into another dive as fast as he could. He knew she hadn’t fully refreshed her lungs, but he also knew the Algarvian boats were going to start flinging eggs any minute. He refused to give them a target they could not miss.

Fling eggs they did. He heard them splash into the sea. The Algarvian mages had come up with something new, too, for they did not burst as soon as they hit the water, but sank for a while before suddenly releasing their energy far below the surface.

The deep bursts terrified Eforiel, who swam faster and harder than ever, and barely under Cornelu’s control. He knew she would have to surface sooner because of it, but he couldn’t do anything about it. No—he could and did hope that, when she surfaced this time, she would have evaded the patrol boats.

And so she had. Oh, one of them was fairly close, but out of egg-tosser range. It did not turn and move toward her when she spouted. Maybe the boat couldn’t. Maybe she’d come up for air in a stretch of ocean well away from any ley lines. Ships that pulled their energy from the world grid were swifter and surer than those that did not, but they could travel only where the grid let them. Where it did not… Cornelu thumbed his nose at the patrol boat. “Here, my dear, we are safe,” he told Eforiel. “Rest as you will.”

He never saw the dragon that dropped the egg toward Eforiel. He never saw the egg, either, though its splash drenched him. It sank below the surface of the sea, as the ones the patrol boats tossed had done, and then it burst.

Eforiel’s great body shielded Cornelu from the worst of the energies. The leviathan writhed in torment. Blood crimsoned the sea. Cornelu knew—and the knowledge tore at him—he could not save her; too much blood was pouring forth. He also knew it would draw sharks.

That left him one choice. Cursing the Algarvians—and cursing himself for not doing a better job of watching the air—he struck out for Tirgoviste. He wasn’t close to the town that bore the name, not after Eforiel’s desperate flight, but he could still reach land. Whether the Lagoans liked it or not, he was coming home.

Twenty

W
HEN THE hard knock came on the door, Vanai shivered. She thought -she feared—it had an Algarvian sound. Maybe, if she didn’t answer, whoever was out there would go away. It was, of course, a forlorn hope. The knock sounded again, sharper and more insistent than ever.

“Powers above, Vanai! Go see who that is, before he breaks down the door,” Brivibas called irritably. In a softer voice, he went on, “How is a person to think with distractions that never cease?”

“I am going, my grandfather,” Vanai said, resignation in her own tone. Brivibas didn’t deal with distractions. That was her job.

She unbarred the door and threw it wide. Then she shivered again—not only was the day about as chilly as weather ever got in Oyngestun, but there stood Major Spinello, a squad of Algarvian soldiers behind him. “Good day,” he said in his fluent Kaunian, looking her up and down in a way she did not like. But, despite his eyes, he kept his voice businesslike: “I require to see your grandfather.”

“I shall fetch him, sir,” Vanai said, but she could not resist adding, “I still do not think he will aid you.”

“Perhaps he will, perhaps he won’t.” Spinello sounded indifferent. Vanai did not believe he was, not for a moment. He went on, “I have, I admit, discovered a new inducement. Bring him here, that I may speak of it.”

“Please wait.” Vanai did not invite him into the house. If he came in uninvited, she could not do anything about that. Going into Brivibas’s study, she said, “My grandfather, Major Spinello would have speech with you.”

“Would he?” Brivibas said. “Well, I would not have speech with him.” The expression on Vanai’s face must have been eloquent, for, with a grimace, he set down his pen. “I gather the choice is not mine?” Vanai nodded. Brivibas sighed and rose. “Very well, my granddaughter. I shall accompany you.”

“Ah, here you are,” Spinello said when Brivibas appeared before him. “The next question is, why are you here?”

“Men have been looking to answer that question since long before the days of the Kaunian Empire, Major,” Vanai’s grandfather said coldly. “I fear that no satisfactory response has yet come to light, though philosophers do continue their work.”

“I was not speaking of philosophy,” the Algarvian officer said. “I was asking why you, Brivibas, are here, at this house. We have been recruiting laborers in this district for some time. Only an oversight can have kept you from being one of them. I have been ordered to correct the said oversight, and I shall. Come along with me, old man. There are roads that need building, bridges that need repairing, piles of rubble that need clearing. Your scrawny Kaunian carcass isn’t worth much, but it will have to do. Come on. Now.”

Brivibas looked down at his hands. They were pale and soft and smooth; the only callus he had was by the nail of his right middle finger: a writer’s callus. He turned to Vanai. “Take care of my books, if you possibly can—and of yourself, of course.” In character to the last, she thought—books first, then her. Before she could say anything, Brivibas nodded to Major Spinello. “I am ready.”

Spinello and the soldiers led him away. He did not look back at Vanai, who stood in the doorway. The Algarvian major did look back. Just before he and Brivibas and the troopers turned a corner, he waved gaily to her. Then they were gone.

She stood there for another couple of minutes, letting heat leak out of the house through the open door, before she finally closed it. The chill around her heart made the weather hardly worth noticing. She didn’t know exactly how old her grandfather was, but he had to be up past sixty. He’d never done a day’s labor—not the kind of labor Spinello was talking about—in his life. How long would he, how long could he, last? Not long. She was sure of that.