Into the Darkness (15 page)

Delfinu returned the bow, then took Cornelu’s face in his hands and kissed him on both cheeks. “The mission is important. That you return is also important—you will undertake more missions as the war goes on.” Afternoon sun glittered from the six gold stripes on the sleeves of Delfinu’s sea-green uniform tunic and from the gold trim on his kilt. Had Cornelu been in uniform, his tunic sleeves would have borne four stripes each. Instead, he wore a black rubber suit whose only marking was the impress of the five crowns of Sibiu above his heart. A rubber pack thumped on his back.

He walked awkwardly to the edge of the pier; his feet bore rubber paddles that let him swim more swiftly than he could have without them. Waiting in the water for him was a medium-sized dark gray leviathan: the beast was five or six times as long as he was tall, as opposed to the great ones, which might reach twice that size.

One of the leviathan’s small black eyes turned toward him. “Hello, Eforiel,” he said. The leviathan let out a grunting snort and opened a mouth full of long, sharp teeth. They were shaped for catching fish. If they closed on a man, though, she could swallow him in about two bites.

Cornelu slid into the water and grasped the harness wrapped around Eforiel’s body and held in place by the leviathan’s fins. He patted the beast’s smooth skin, whose texture was not much different from that of his own rubber suit. It was not a pat that gave any order, merely one of greeting. He was fond of Eforiel. He’d named her after the first girl he’d bedded, but he was the only one who knew that.

Under Eforiel’s belly, the harness supported several eggs in streamlined cases partly filled with air so as to make them no heavier than a corresponding volume of water. Cornelu bared his teeth in a fierce smile. Before long, he would deliver those eggs to Feltre. He hoped the Algarvians would be glad to have them.

Commodore Delfinu leaned out over the edge of the pier and waved. “Good fortune go with you.”

“For this I thank you, sir,” Cornelu said.

He tapped Eforiel, more firmly than before. The leviathan’s muscles surged under him. With a flick of the tail, Eforiel left Tirgoviste harbor and the five chief islands of Sibiu behind and set out across more than fifty miles of sea for the Algarvian coast.

“Surprise,” Cornelu muttered. He had trouble hearing himself; water kept slapping him in the face. Before he set out, Sibian wizards had set a spell on him that let him get air from water like a fish (actually, the savants insisted the spell worked differently from fishes’ gills, but the effect was the same, and that was what mattered to Cornelu).

Algarvian ships no doubt patrolled the ley lines, to keep the Sibian navy and that of Valmiera from raiding Feltre, which had been by far the most important Algarvian port on the Narrow Sea till King Mezentio got his hands on Bari. The Duchy boasted a couple of excellent harbors. With them under Algarvian rule, containing Mezentio’s fleet got a lot harder.

“But I’m not coming up a ley line,” Cornelu said, and chuckled wetly. Unlike ships, Eforiel did not depend on the earth’s energy matrix to take her from one place to another. She went under her own power, which meant she chose her own path. No one would be looking for her till she’d been there and gone.

That thought had hardly crossed Cornelu’s mind before he got a nasty jolt: a spout rising from the sea a few hundred yards ahead of Eforiel. Had his path, by strangest chance, crossed that of an Algarvian leviathan rider intent on working mischief at Tirgoviste or one of Sibiu’s other harbors?

Then the animal leapt out of the water. Cornelu sighed with relief to see it was only a whale. The leviathan’s cousin was stocky, even chunky, and resembled nothing so much as an overgrown fish with an even more overgrown head. Eforiel and her kin were far slimmer and smaller-skulled, almost serpentlike except for their fins and tail flukes.

“Come on, sweetheart.” He tapped the leviathan again. “Nothing for us to worry about—only one of your poor relations.”

Eforiel snorted again, as if to say she too looked down her pointed nose at whales. Then she swam through a school of mackerel. Cornelu had a hard time keeping her on a straight course and not letting her swim every which way after the fish. She got plenty as things were, but seemed convinced she would have eaten many more if he’d let her go where she wanted.

She could have gone, disobeying his commands, and he would have been able to do nothing about it. She never realized that. She was a well-trained beast, raised from the time she was a calf to do as the small, weak creatures who rode her ordered.

Cornelu’s greatest worry was not her going off in pursuit of mackerel but her diving deep after one. The spell would keep him breathing under water, but a leviathan could dive deeper than a man’s body was designed for, and could rise from the depths so fast that the air in his blood would bubble. Leviathans were made for the sea in a whole host of ways men were not.

After a while, though, the mackerel thinned out, and Eforiel swam steadily on. Once, in the distance, Cornelu caught sight of a ship sliding along a ley line. He could not tell whether it came from Sibiu or Algarve. In the waters where he was then, it might have belonged to either kingdom.

Whosever ship it was, no one aboard noticed him or Eforiel. The two of them did not disturb the ley lines in any way. Had the ancient Kaunians thought of something like this, they might have done it, though they’d known nothing of eggs and lacked the sorcery to keep a man from drowning underwater.

Some few in Sibiu would sooner have joined with Algarve than with the Kaunian-descended kingdoms. Cornelu’s snort sounded very much like Eforiel’s. Some few in Sibiu were fools, as far as he was concerned. A small kingdom joined a large one in much the same way as a leg of mutton joined a man dining off it. And after his repast, only the bones would be left.

No, Valmiera and Jelgava made better allies. If they sat down at the supper table with Sibiu, they thought of the island kingdom as a fellow guest, not as the main course. “If Sibiu sat off the Valmieran coast, things might be different,” Cornelu told the leviathan. “But we don’t. We are where we are, and we can’t do anything about it.”

Eforiel did not argue, a trait Cornelu wished were more common among the people with whom he dealt. He patted the leviathan’s side in approval. And then, as if to prove him right even had Eforiel argued, he spied the southern coast of Algarve. He had to pause to get his bearings. He and Eforiel had come a little too far to the east. The leviathan swam along the coast till in the distance Cornelu spotted the lighthouse outside Feltre harbor.

He let Eforiel rest then. Daylight was fading from the sky. He intended to enter the harbor at night, to make the leviathan as hard to see as he could. She would have to spout every now and then, of course, but in the darkness she would be easy to mistake for a porpoise or dolphin. People had a way of seeing what they wanted to see, what they expected to see. Cornelu smiled. He intended to take full advantage of that.

No lamps began to glow as night fell over Feltre. The town got darker and darker along with the surrounding countryside. Cornelu’s smile got broader. The locals were doing their best to protect Feltre against dragon raids from Sibiu and Valmiera. What helped there, though, would hurt against attack from the sea.

When the night had grown dark enough to suit Cornelu, he took a glass-fronted mask from the pack he wore and slid it on to his face. Then he tapped Eforiel, urging her ahead into the harbor. The leviathan’s tail pumped up and down, up and down, propelling her and the man who rode her forward.

Cornelu slid off her back and clung to the harness from beside her. That way, he would be harder for the Algarvian patrol boats to notice. He knew they had swift little vessels sliding along the ley lines in the sheltered water inside the harbor. Every kingdom protected its ports the same way.

But he had to stick his head out of the water to see where the most valuable targets were berthed, and also to make certain he did not attach an egg to a trading ship from Lagoas or Kuusamo. He wanted to grind his teeth at the arrogance the folk on the great island displayed, assuming no one would dare stop them from trading with Algarve for fear of bringing them into the war on King Mezentio’s side. The trouble was, they were right.

He wished he could spot unquestioned naval vessels, but, save for the flitting patrol boats, he saw none. He did see three large freighters with the rakish lines the Algarvians so loved. They would do: not the haul he’d hoped for, but one that would hurt the enemy. He guided Eforiel up to within a couple of hundred yards of them, then gave her the signal that meant
hold still.
She lay in the water as if dead, the top of her head awash so she could breathe.

She would be vulnerable if the Algarvian patrol boats spotted her. Cornelu’s command would hold her in place while she should be fleeing. He knew he had to work as fast as he could. Slipping under the water, he detached the four eggs his leviathan had brought to Feltre harbor and swam toward the merchant vessels.

He had to lift his head above the surface a couple of times to get his bearings. Had the Algarvians on those freighters been keeping good watch, they might have spotted him. But they seemed confident nothing could harm them here inside Feltre harbor. Cornelu aimed to show them otherwise.

Everything went as smooth as a caravan down a ley line. He attached one egg to the first merchant ship, two to the second—the largest—and one to the third. The sorcery in the shells would make them burst four hours after they touched iron. By then, he would be long gone. He swam back to Eforiel.

They cleared the harbor even more easily than they had entered. None of the Algarvian patrol boats came near them. Not long after they reached the open sea, the moon rose, spilling pale light over the water. Along with the wheeling stars, it helped Cornelu guide the leviathan across the sea and back to Sibiu. They reached Tirgoviste harbor as the sun was rising once more.

Commodore Delfinu waited on the pier. As soon as the weary Cornelu climbed out of the water, his superior kissed him on both checks. “Magnificently done!” Delfinu exclaimed. “One of those ships was full of eggs itself, and wrecked a good stretch of the harbor when it went up. Our mages have picked up nothing but fury in the Algarvian crystal messages they steal. You are a hero, Cornelu!”

“Sir, I am a tired hero.” Cornelu smothered a yawn.

“Better a tired hero than a dead one,” Delfinu said. “We also sent leviathans to the Barian ports, and have no word of success from them. If they failed they probably did not survive, poor brave men.”

“How strange,” Cornelu said. “The Algarvians hardly kept any sort of watch over the approaches to Feltre. Why should they do any differently at the Barian ports?”

Men going off to war had a sort of glamour to them. So thought Vanai, at any rate. Forthwegians in uniform had seemed quite splendid to her as they tramped east through Oyngestun on their way toward Algarve. Had she seen them in their ordinary tunics, she would not have given them a second glance—unless to make sure they weren’t seeking to molest her.

No such glamour attached itself to men retreating from war. Vanai quickly discovered that, too. Retreating, they did not move in neat columns, all their legs going back and forth together like the oars of a war galley from the Kaunian Empire. They weren’t all nearly identical, with only the occasional blond Kaunian head among the dark Forthwegians distinguishing a few from the rest.

Retreating, men skulked along in small packs, as stray dogs did. Vanai feared they were liable to turn on her, as stray dogs might. They had that look, wild, half fierce, half fearful another rock or another blow from a club might knock them sprawling.

They didn’t look identical any more, either. Their tunics were variously torn and tattered, with spots of dirt and grease and sometimes bloodstains mottling the cloth. Some of them had bandages on arms or legs or head. They were almost uniformly filthy, filthier than the ancient Kaunians Vanai had viewed with Brivibas’s archaeological sorcery. The nose-wrinkling odor that clung to them put her in mind of the farmyard.

Like the rest of the folk of Oyngestun, Forthwegians and Kaunians alike, Vanai did what she could for them, offering bread and sausage and water and, while it lasted, wine. “My thanks, lass,” said a Forthwegian lance-corporal who was well-spoken enough but who hadn’t bathed in a long, long time. He lowered his voice: “You folk here may want to get on the road to Eoforwic. Gromheort’s not going to hold, and if it doesn’t, this wide spot in the road won’t, either.”

He spoke to her as an equal, not looking down his curved nose at her because she was of Kaunian blood. She found even the casual assumption that he was as good as she on the offensive side, but not nearly so much as the leering superiority so many Forthwegians displayed. Because of that, she answered politely enough: “I don’t think you could pry my grandfather out of Oyngestun with a team of mules.”

“What about a team of behemoths?” the Forthwegian soldier demanded. For a moment, naked fear filled his face. “The Algarvians have more of the horrible things than you can shake a stick at, and they hit hard, too. What about a team of dragons? I’ve never imagined so many eggs could fall out of the sky on us.” He gulped the mug of water Vanai had given him dry. She refilled it, and he gulped once more.

“He’s very stubborn,” Vanai said. The lance-corporal finished the second mug of water and shrugged, as if to say it wasn’t his problem. He wiped his mouth on his sleeve, gave the mug back to Vanai with another word of thanks, and trudged off toward the west.

Brivibas came out of the house as Vanai was slicing more bread. “You were unduly familiar with that man, my granddaughter,” he said severely. Reprimands sounded much harsher in Kaunian than in Forthwegian.

Vanai bowed her head. “I am sorry you think so, my grandfather, but he was giving me advice he thought good. I would have been rude to scorn him.”

“Advice he thought good?” Brivibas snorted. “I daresay he was: advice on which haystack to meet him behind, I shouldn’t wonder.”