Darkness Descending (92 page)

“Now that he won’t have Sidroc staying with him, he ought to move out of here and find a place of his own,” Leofsig said.

“Do you think so?” His father sounded genuinely curious. “My notion has always been that it’s better to have him where we can keep an eye on him than to let him go off on his own and brood. Am I wrong?”

Leofsig considered. “No, I don’t suppose you are. I wish you were, but I don’t think you are.”

From the hallway, Conberge called, “Are you decent in there? If you are, Mother and I would like to finish cooking.”

“Come ahead,” Leofsig said. “I have a better appetite for pork stew than I do for quarreling right now.” His father raised an eyebrow, then solemnly nodded.

Twenty

F
or the first time since an egg from an Algarvian dragon killed Eforiel, Cornelu was back in his element: riding a leviathan in search of the most harm he could do to King Mezentio’s followers. The leviathan, a Lagoan beast, wasn’t trained up to the standards of the Sibian navy, but she was still young, and she could learn. He’d already seen as much.

True, these days Cornelu patrolled the Strait of Valmiera, not the narrower channel that separated Sibiu from the mainland of Derlavai. His own kingdom remained under Algarvian occupation. Powers above, his own wife remained under Algarvian occupation. But he was fighting back again.

He tapped the leviathan in a pattern the same in the Lagoan service as it had been in that of Sibiu. Obediently, the great beast raised the front part of her body out of the water, lifting Cornelu with it so he could see farther. If an Algarvian ship glided down a ley line without his seeing it, he could hardly try to sink it.

Even with the added range to his vision, he saw nothing but sea and sky. He tapped the leviathan again, and it sank back down into the water. By the way the beast quivered under him, he knew it thought rearing was part of an enjoyable game. That was all right with him. He would enjoy the game if it led him to Algarvians. King Mezentio’s men wouldn’t, but sending them to the bottom would only make Cornelu happier.

“Now,” he muttered, “I think we’ve been traveling along a ley line, but I’d better make sure.”

Like the skintight suit he wore, his belt was made of rubber. He took from one of the pouches on the belt an instrument of bronze and glass. Inside the hollow glass sphere that made up the bulk of it were two vanes of thinnest gold leaf. They stood well apart from each other.

Cornelu let out a satisfied grunt. That the vanes repelled each other showed they were in the presence of sorcerous energy—and the only sources of sorcerous energy out on the ocean were the ley lines that formed a grid on sea and land alike. If Cornelu waited here long enough, a ship was sure to pass close by.

But he had no idea how long
long enough
might be. And, loathing the Algarvians as he did, he was not in the mood to wait. He wanted to hunt. He was a coursing wolf, not a spider sitting in a web waiting for a butterfly to blunder along and give him a meal.

He turned his instrument this way and that in his hands, watching the gold-leaf vanes flutter as he did. He knew they spread wider when parallel to a ley line than when perpendicular to it. As he’d thought, the line on which he’d positioned himself and his leviathan ran from northeast to southwest. Without hesitation, he urged the leviathan in the latter direction, toward the coast of Algarvian-occupied Valmiera and of Algarve itself.

“If you don’t go where the bees are, you won’t get any honey,” he told the leviathan. Talking to this new beast wasn’t like talking with Eforiel. He’d told his old leviathan everything. With this one, he still felt a certain reserve. He wasn’t sure how much it understood, either—after all, it spoke Lagoan, not Sibian. Cornelu knew that was an absurd conceit, but he couldn’t get it out of his mind.

The leviathan swam along happily enough. It was doing what it would have done had it never made the acquaintance of mankind: foraging. When it got into a school of mackerel, its long toothy jaws opened and closed, snapping up fish after fish. The only notice it took of Cornelu on its back and of the eggs strapped beneath its belly was that they made it swim a little slower and more awkwardly than it would have otherwise. That let a couple of mackerel it should have caught get away. But it still caught plenty and didn’t seem aggrieved.

“Come on, my beauty,” Cornelu urged it. “Come on. Bring me to a ship. It doesn’t have to be a great big ship. Just bring me to a ship.”

He was lying. He knew the kind of ship to which he wanted the leviathan to bring him: to a great Algarvian floating fortress, all bristling with heavy sticks and with egg-tossers. Sending a vessel like that to the bottom would be the beginning of revenge for everything Algarve had done to his kingdom and to his life.

But sending a vessel like that to the bottom wouldn’t be easy. He knew as much. He would have to be sly. He would have to be sneaky. He would have to be lucky. The sailors aboard a floating fortress would always be alert against attack by leviathans. So would the mages aboard such a ship, though he didn’t worry so much about them as he would have on land. He had his instrument for detecting sorcerous energy, but wasn’t using any to speak of. That made his own sorcerous footprint very small and hard to note.

Sea . . . sky . . . sea . . . sky. Still nothing but sea and sky, as far as he could see. He muttered in frustration. And then he spied something neither sky nor sea, but not something to delight him as a hunter. Instead, he cursed and ordered his leviathan to dive. He hoped the dragon gliding through the air far above had not spied him.

His rubber suit and sorcery kept the cold of the southern seas from slaying him by stealth. Another sorcery let him get air from the water around him, so that he could stay down as long as the leviathan could. No mage had ever successfully applied that latter spell to a leviathan, to let it stay submerged without ever needing to come up and breathe. Nor had any mage ever made a spell to let a man dive as deep as a leviathan could without the weight of the water above him crushing out his life.

He had the leviathan stay submerged as long as it could. When it finally had to rise to spout, he anxiously scanned the heavens. If that dragonflier had spotted him before he took cover below the surface of the sea, an egg might fall out of the sky at any moment, or the dragon might come skimming low over the waves to flame him off his leviathan. He hated dragons and dragonfliers not least because they could hurt him and he couldn’t hit back.

But, once more, he saw nothing but sea and sky. He breathed a sigh of relief at what had annoyed him only minutes before. He hated ley-line warships, too, but he hated them because they belonged to Algarve. Aye, they could hurt him. He could hurt them, too, though, if only he got the chance.

Patting the leviathan, Cornelu asked, “Now, which way did you swim when you went under?” The leviathan couldn’t answer—and, by his own silly logic, wouldn’t even have understood the question, being a Lagoan beast.

He pulled out the instrument he used to detect sorcerous energy. Both gold-leaf vanes hung limp, which meant the leviathan had swum away from the ley line. Cornelu turned the instrument in his hands. The vanes stayed limp. Cornelu cursed, loudly and foully. Why not? No one was around to hear him.

With a couple of taps, he ordered the beast to swim south. After what he judged to be about half a mile, he stopped the leviathan and examined the instrument again. If anything, the vanes hung closer together than they had before.

Cornelu grunted. He hadn’t found the ley line, but he’d found where it wasn’t. That gave him a better idea of where it was. He turned the leviathan back toward the north and swam past—he hoped he swam past—the point where he’d begun trying to reacquire it. Then he checked the instrument once more and nodded to himself. The vanes were separating.

Before long, he’d found the ley line again. He sent the leviathan southwest down it. These were Algarvian-controlled waters. Where were the warships with which the Algarvians controlled them?

Most patrols, by the nature of things—the ocean was vast, the targets upon it few and small and far between—ended in futility. Cornelu’s whole war up till now had been futile. He didn’t know how much more futility he could stand.

That thought had hardly crossed his mind before he spotted a speck on the horizon. Hope flooded into him. If he could bring his leviatJhan back to Setubal after sinking an Algarvian ship, even the haughty Lagoans would have to give him his due.

Haughty
wasn’t quite fair. The Lagoans thought they were better than anybody else, but they didn’t flaunt it the way, say, Valmierans did. For his part, Cornelu remained convinced one Sibian was worth three Lagoans any day. Nobody who talked through his nose the way King Vitor’s subjects did was altogether to be trusted.

Well, now Cornelu had the chance to prove that of which he was convinced. He urged the leviathan toward the ship—and the ship was coming toward him, too. He couldn’t have caught it from behind, not unless it was just lazing along.

He pulled a brass spyglass off his belt. A minor magic kept its lenses dry so he could peer through it right away. The ship seemed to leap toward him. He gasped. For a moment, he thought it
was
a floating fortress. Then he realized it was the next class down, a ley-line cruiser. His lips skinned back from his teeth in a savage smile. “It will have to do,” he said.

Through the spyglass, he saw sailors on the deck of the cruiser. A jack of green, white, and red snapped in the breeze. Cornelu nodded. He wouldn’t be attacking a Lagoan ship by mistake. That would be biting the hand that fed him.

Those sailors would be on the lookout for leviathans. If they spied him, he would never get close enough to plant his egg against the cruiser’s flank. He fought the Algarvians, ironically, by keeping his mount at the surface. Mezentio’s men would be watching for the big plumes of vapor that rose when a leviathan came up from the depths. So long as his beast kept breathing steadily, it wouldn’t give itself away too soon.

Cornelu had to gauge when to dive for his attack. If he waited too long, Mezentio’s men
would
spot him. If he dove too soon, his leviathan wouldn’t be able to come alongside the cruiser. He would have to surface before it got there, and then he would really be in trouble.

When he judged the moment ripe, he tapped the leviathan, which slipped beneath the waves and sped toward the ley-line cruiser. It knew it had to swim alongside or under the ship long enough to let him attach the egg. He’d sometimes wondered if leviathans had any true notion why men did such things. The beasts fought among themselves, over mates and sometimes over food. Did they know their masters fought, too?

And then Cornelu had no more time to wonder, for the leviathan brought him up right below the cruiser. His lost Eforiel could not have done a finer job. All he had to do was pick the moment to signal the leviathan to swim belly-up beneath the Algarvian warship, so he could slide along the harness and release an egg. The egg clung to the hull of the ley-line cruiser. As soon as its shell touched the ship, a spell began to bring it to life.

Cornelu regained his position near the leviathan’s blowhole. Urgently now, he ordered his mount away from the ship. The egg would burst whether he was close or far. He didn’t want to have to endure a burst close by: this egg was far heavier and more potent than any a dragon could haul into the air. He also wanted to get far enough from the ley-line cruiser to let the leviathan surface safely.

He didn’t quite manage that. The leviathan had to spout a little sooner than he’d expected. The Algarvians flashed mirrors in his direction. They weren’t sure to which side he belonged. He took a mirror from his belt pouch and flashed back. His signal would be wrong, but, as long as they kept playing with mirrors, they wouldn’t be lobbing eggs at him. And his leviathan swam farther from the cruiser with every heartbeat.

Before long, the Algarvians realized he wasn’t one of their own. Eggs began flying through the air toward the leviathan. The first couple fell short, but the enemy’s aim was liable to improve in a hurry.

Then the egg he’d planted burst. The ley-line cruiser staggered in the water, as if it had collided with an invisible wall. The Algarvians forgot all about him as they tried to save their ship. They couldn’t. Its back broken, it plunged beneath the sea. Cornelu’s bellow of triumph might have burst from the throat of a warrior from five hundred years before: “For King Burebistu! For Sibiu!” This time, he’d struck the enemies of his kingdom a heavy blow.

About every other Algarvian officer who came into the tailor’s shop Traku ran took one look at Talsu working beside his father and told him, “You are lucky to be alive.” Each time, he had to nod politely and say something like, “Aye, I know it.” However polite he acted, he wasn’t always sure it was a good thing that he was alive. The wound in his left side still pained him. When he walked, he wanted to bend his body to favor it as much as he could. When he sat, he kept twisting to find the position where it hurt least. He couldn’t find a position where it didn’t hurt at all. By what the healer said, that would be awhile yet, if it ever came.