Darkness Descending (19 page)

Seen from Setubal, the Derlavaian War had a curious feel, almost as if it were happening in a distant room. The Strait of Valmiera protected Lagoas from invasion. So did Algarve’s enormous fight with Unkerlant; thus embroiled, King Mezentio’s men could not afford to do much against the Lagoans. Occasional dragons dropped eggs on Setubal and the other towns of the northern coast. Occasional warships tried to sneak in and raid the shoreline. Rather more Lagoan dragons flew against the Algarvian-held ports of southern Valmiera. Other than that. . .

“They fear us,” a second-rank mage named Xavega said to Fernao as the two of them sat drinking fortified wine in a dining room of the Grand Hall of the Lagoan Guild of Mages.

Fernao bowed in his seat, an almost Algarvian courtesy. “I thank you, milady,” he said. “You have proved, without leaving the tiniest particle of room for doubt, that being a woman does not keep one from being a fool.”

Xavega glared at him. She was in her early thirties, a few years younger than he, and had a fierce scowl somehow made fiercer by her being quite good-looking. “If Algarve did not fear us,” she said, “Mezentio would have tried settling accounts with us before turning his eye westward.”

“You’ve never traveled outside Lagoas, have you?” Fernao asked.

“As if that should make a difference!” Xavega tossed her head. Her mane of auburn hair flipped back over her shoulders.

“Ah, but it does,” Fernao said. “You may not believe me, but it does. People who’ve never left Lagoas have no sense of... of proportion—I think that’s the word I want. It’s true of anyone who hasn’t traveled, but more so with us, because our kingdom is only the smaller part of an island, but we naturally think it’s the center of the world.”

By Xavega’s expression, no other thought had crossed her mind. And, by her expression, she wasn’t interested in having other thoughts cross her mind. The thought of bedding her later in the evening had crossed Fernao’s mind; he suspected he’d just dropped an egg on his chances. She said, “Setubal contains the world. What need to go farther?”

That held some truth—some, but not enough. “Proportion,” Fernao repeated. “For one thing, Mezentio couldn’t very well jump on us when Swemmel was ready to jump on him from the west. For another, if he did jump us, he’d bring Kuusamo into the war against him, and he can’t afford that.”

“Kuusamo.” Xavega waved her hand, as Lagoans had a way of doing when they thought of their neighbors on the island.

“Kuusamo outweighs us two or three to one,” Fernao said, an unpleasant truth his countrymen preferred to forget. “The Seven Princes look east and north for gain more than they do toward us or toward the mainland—easier pickings in those directions—but they don’t have to.”

“They’re Kuusamans,” Xavega said with a sneer, as if that explained everything. For her, evidently, it did. Pointing to Fernao, she went on, “Just because you have their eyes, you don’t need to take their part.”

Fernao got to his feet and bowed stiffly. “Milady, I think you would find yourself more at home in Mezentio’s kingdom than in your own. I give you good evening.” He stalked out of the dining room, proud he hadn’t flung the last of his wine in Xavega’s face. By her looks, she might have been of pure Algarvic stock. But, like most Lagoans, she also probably had Kaunians and Kuusamans somewhere down the trunk of her family tree. Scorning people for their looks was bad manners in most Lagoan circles—although not, evidently, in hers.

He wondered how many did share her views. If Lagoas became a kingdom where a man with narrow eyes or a woman with blond hair couldn’t go out on the streets without fear of being insulted or worse, would it be the sort of kingdom in which he cared to live? No sooner had that thought crossed his mind than another followed it:
Where else could I go?

Nowhere on the continent of Derlavai, that was certain. He’d been to the austral continent, and heartily hoped never to have anything to do with it again. He hadn’t visited equatorial Siaulia, but had no interest in doing so. It was as backward as the land of the Ice People, and the war that blazed through Derlavai sputtered there, too, as Derlavaian colonists and their native vassals squabbled among themselves.

The scattered islands in the Great Northern Sea were even less appealing, unless a man aimed to forget the world and make sure the world forgot him, too. That was not what Fernao had in mind. If Lagoas went bad . . .

As he left the Grand Hall, his head turned, almost of itself, toward the east. Odd to think of Kuusamo as a bastion of sanity in a world gone mad. It was odd for most Lagoans to think of their short, dark, slim neighbors any more than they had to.

Fernao hurried up the street to the caravan stop. Because of his own interests, he was not like most Lagoans. Maybe his interest in Kuusaman magecraft:—and his curiosity over whatever the Kuusamans weren’t talking about—had led him to take Xavega’s crack about his looks more to heart than he would have otherwise.

A ley-line caravan glided up. A couple of passengers got off; a couple got on. Fernao stayed at the stop—this wasn’t the route he needed.
And maybe she’s just a nasty bitch,
the mage thought sourly. He glanced at the people hurrying past him: regardless of the hour, Setubal never slept. One in five, maybe one in four, had eyes like his. If Xavega didn’t care for them, too cursed bad.

Another caravan car came to the stop. Fernao climbed aboard and tossed a coin in the fare box: this car would take him to within a street of his block of flats. He sat down next to a yawning woman who looked to have a good deal more Kuusaman blood than he did himself.

Coming into his building, he paused at the pigeonholes in the lobby to see what the postman had brought him. Along with the usual advertising circulars from printers, dealers in sorcerous apparatus, nostrum peddlers, and local eateries, he found an envelope with an unfamiliar printed franking mark. He held it up to his face so he could read the postmaster’s blurry handstamp over the mark.

“Kajaani,” he muttered. “Where in blazes is Kajaani?” Then he laughed at himself. He’d been guilty of the crime for which he’d taxed Xavega: he’d thought of Lagoas first, to the exclusion of everyplace else. As soon as he stopped doing that, he knew perfectly well where Kajaani was. And, with only a little more thought, he knew who was likely to be writing him from the Kuusaman town, though the envelope bore no return address.

He almost tore that envelope open there in the lobby, but made himself wait till he’d gone upstairs to his flat. There he flung the useless sheets of paper onto the sofa and opened the one that mattered. Sure enough, the letter—written in excellent classical Kaunian—was on the stationery of Kajaani City College, and from the theoretical sorcerer named Pekka.

My dear colleague,
she wrote,
I thank you for your interest in my work and your inquiries into my research. Unfortunately, I must tell you that much of my recent silence in the journals has sprung from nothing other than the demands on my time my son takes. I do eventually hope to publish more, but when that may be I cannot say. Meanwhile, my life is busy in many different ways. Hoping this finds you well and your own work flourishing, I remain
—
Pekka, Professor of Theoretical Sorcery.

Fernao’s excitement dissolved like a little ink in a lot of water, leaving his mood duller and darker than it had been before. He had to fight to keep from crumpling the letter and tossing it over with the rest of the mail he’d received. He’d got similar bland missives from other Kuusaman theoretical sorcerers to whom he’d written. Had the letters been identical and not merely similar, he would have known for a fact that the mages were acting in concert. As things were, he had to infer it, but it wasn’t the subtlest inference he’d ever drawn.

“They know something, all right,” he muttered. “They don’t want anyone to know they know it, either. That means it’s big, whatever it is.” So much had been obvious since his meeting with Ilmarinen, the meeting that should have been with Siuntio. It was even more obvious now.

He wondered what the Kuusamans had found. Something that had to do with the relationship between the laws of contagion and similarity, plainly. But what? Lagoan mages, more often than not of a more practical bent than their Kuusaman counterparts, hadn’t explored the question in depth.

“Maybe we should have,” Fernao muttered under his breath. If the Guild of Lagoan Mages were to try to catch up with the Kuusamans, to discover whatever they were hiding, how best to go about it? The only answer that occurred to Fernao was getting some talented sorcerers together and having them proceed from the point where Siuntio and Pekka and the rest of the Kuusamans had, for whatever reason, fallen silent.

He laughed an unhappy laugh. Even Grandmaster Pinhiero would have a hard time getting a group of Lagoan mages to work on a project he proposed rather than on whatever they felt like doing themselves. Fernao was about to throw the notion into his mental trash bin when he suddenly stiffened. He wondered if, in Trapani or some other Algarvian town, another group of mages was already hard at work going down that same path. If so, how could Lagoas afford to ignore it?

He glanced at Pekka’s note again. Maybe, just maybe, she was telling the truth and he’d been starting at shadows all along. With the note in his hand, he could—or maybe he could—make a fair stab at finding out. He set the note on the table and went to the cabinet of sorcerous gear that stood next to the stove in the kitchen. Had he been a better cook, he would have had a cabinet full of spices there instead. From the cabinet, he took a lens mounted in a polished brass ring and a dried lapwing’s head: the lapwing, being a sharp-eyed bird, was to a mage a sovereign remedy against deception.

Holding the lapwing’s head between a lamp and the lens that focused its power on the note, he chanted a cantrip in classical Kaunian. If the writing on the note was true, he would see the black ink as bright blue. If the writing was false, he would see it as burning red.

But he continued to see it simply as black. Frowning, he wondered if he’d somehow botched the charm. He didn’t think so, but ran through it again, this time with special care. The ink continued to seem black to his eyes. It shouldn’t have, not after that spell, not unless. . . .

“Why, the tricksy minx!” Fernao exclaimed. “If she hasn’t magicked the note against this very sorcery, I’m an addled apprentice.”

Shaking his head at Pekka’s forethought, he put away the lens and the bird’s head. Now he couldn’t be sure whether the Kuusaman theoretical sorcerer had been lying or telling the truth, not by any objective means. But he could still draw inferences. That Pekka hadn’t wanted him to know whether or not she was telling the truth strongly suggested she wasn’t. If she wasn’t, the Kunsamans were indeed likely to be hiding something important.

He’d already believed that. “One more bit of evidence,” he murmured, and then kicked at the carpet. Evidence of what?
Something.
That was as much as he knew. He wondered if some dapper, clever young mage in Trapani, a fellow with waxed mustachios and a hat worn at a jaunty angle, knew more.

For his sake, for his kingdom’s sake, he hoped not. But when he looked north and west, toward the Algarvian capital, he knew he had fear in his eyes.

East of Cottbus, a half ring of dowsers did their best to detect Algarvian dragons so they could give the capital of Unkerlant some warning against attack from the air. Marshal Rathar swung off his horse at one such post, a crude hut in the middle of a forest of birch trees. Letting soldiers see him, letting them see he was still in the fight and still thought Unkerlant could win, was one reason he went out to the field as often as he could. Another reason was learning as much as he could about all aspects of the war.

Still another was escaping King Swemmel for a while. Soon enough, he’d have to go back to the palace and see what sort of advice the king would give. Sometimes, Rathar was convinced, Swemmel saw further than any other man living. Sometimes he could not see past the end of his pointed nose. Telling which was which on any given day, though, was anything but easy, and King Swemmel remained as convinced about the virtues of his bad ideas as he was about his good ones.

Rathar shook his head as a horse bedeviled by flies might flick its tail. He’d come out here to get away from Swemmel, and the king had come with him in his mind. Where was the relief in that? When the dowsers came tumbling out of their hut to salute him, he was glad to nod to them. As long as he talked with them, he could get away from the mental presence of his sovereign.

“Aye, lord Marshal,” said one of the off-duty dowsers, a lieutenant named Morold, “we’ve had pretty good luck feeling out the redheads so far.” He hefted his forked rod. “A dragon’s wings
will
disturb the air, you know, and that’s what we sense. But the Algarvians are getting better at masking what they’re up to, curse ‘em.”

“I’ve read somewhat of this in the reports coming back to Cottbus,” Rathar replied. “But, as you say, a dragon
must
flap its wings now and again. How do the Algarvians propose to prevent that?”

Morold’s strong-nosed peasant face crinkled into a grin of reluctant admiration. “The sneaky buggers don’t even try, sir, may the powers below swallow ‘em down. What they do instead is, they have some of their dragons carry baskets full of folded-up strips of paper. When they get close enough that we’re right on the edge of spotting ‘em”—he held up the dowsing rod again—”they spill the baskets out into the air, and these thousands of strips of paper all start fluttering down. The rods pick up those flutters, too, so trying to tell what’s dragons and what isn’t is like trying to see a white horse in a blizzard. Do you follow what I’m saying?”

“Aye,” Rathar said, “and I thank you. You’ve made it clearer than the reports ever did. You still can find the dragons, then?”

“We know something’s up, sir,” Morold told him, “but not exactly what or exactly where, the way we would have before.”