Into the Darkness (66 page)

“Your reasoning is elegant, as always,” Spinello said. “I have, however, another question for you: do you view the present order of things as beneficial to yourself and your charming granddaughter, as compared to other Kaunians here in Forthweg? Think hard before you answer, sir.”

Vanai sighed. So this was what Spinello had been after all along. She’d had a pretty good notion he was after something. Turning her grandfather into an Algarvian tool made excellent sense from his point of view. But Brivibas’s integrity, while on the fusty side, was real—and Brivibas had never cared for redheads.

How much did he care for a full belly? Vanai wondered how much she cared for a full belly herself. She’d learned all she cared to about hunger before Major Spinello started paying court to her grandfather. Maybe it was just as well Spinello hadn’t asked her.

Brivibas said, “Good day, sir. If you care to discuss the past, we may perhaps have something to say to each other. We do not appear to view the present in the same light, however.”

“You will come to regret your decision, I fear,” Spinello said. “You will regret it very soon, and very much.”

“That is also part of life,” Brivibas answered. “Good day.” Spinello threw his hands in the air, then bowed and departed.

As the door to the street closed behind him, Vanai said, “My grandfather, I am proud of you. We are free again.”

“We are free to starve again, my granddaughter,” Brivibas said. “We are free to endure worse than hunger, too, I fear. I may have made a mistake that will cost us dear.”

Vanai shook her head. “I’m proud of you,” she repeated.

Her grandfather smiled a small, slow smile. “Though it may be unbecomingly immodest to say so, I am also rather proud of myself.”

Cornelu wished the land ahead of him were one of the five islands of Sibiu. Had the Lagoans ordered him to strike a blow at the Algarvians occupying his own kingdom, he would have felt more useful. He tried to console himself with the thought that any blow against Algarve was a blow toward eventually freeing Sibiu. He had never before realized what a melancholy word
eventually
was.

He patted Eforiel, bring the leviathan to a halt a couple of hundred yards from the southern coast of Valmiera. If she came any closer to land, she ran the risk of beaching herself. That would have been a disaster past repair—not for the war, no doubt, but for Cornelu.

He turned and spoke in a low voice: “You go now.” The words were in Lagoan, a command he had carefully memorized.

“Aye.” That word was almost identical in Lagoan and Sibian and, for that matter, Algarvian, too. Half a dozen Lagoans with rubber flippers on their feet let go of the lines wrapped around Eforiel to which they had clung while the leviathan ferried them across the Valmieran Strait. Eforiel also carried some interesting containers under her belly. No one had told Cornelu what those held. That was sound doctrine; what he didn’t know, he couldn’t reveal if captured. The Lagoans undid the containers and swam with them toward the beach.

No shouts of alarm and anger rose from the land. Whatever the Lagoans were going to do, they could at least begin it without interference. In a way, that made Cornelu glad, as would anything that hurt the Algarvians. Still, he sighed as he urged Eforiel back out to sea. Had something gone wrong, it would have given him an excuse to ignore his orders to return to Setubal. He wanted an excuse to fight King Mezentio’s men, and resented the Lagoans for making war out of what seemed no more than a sense of duty.

“Why should they care?” he asked Eforiel. “War has not come to their kingdom. I do not think war can or will come to their kingdom unless Kuusamo attacks them from the east. How Algarve would get an army across the Strait of Valmiera is beyond me.”

Then he slapped the surface of the sea in his own alarm and anger. No one in Sibiu had imagined the Algarvians could get an army across the sea to overrun their islands. Algarvian imagination, Algarvian ingenuity, had proved more flexible, more capacious, than those of King Burebistu’s generals and admirals. Could a like misfortune befall Lagoas?

“Powers above grant that it not be so,” Cornelu muttered. Exile was bad. How bad exile was, he knew to the bottom of his soul. However bad it was, conquest would be worse. He knew that, too.

Beneath him, Eforiel’s muscles surged as the leviathan swam south. Every now and then, the leviathan would twist away from the exact course back to Setubal to pursue a mackerel or squid. She’d fed well on the way up to Valmiera; had Cornelu wanted to keep her strictly to her work, he could have done so without harming her in the least. But he let her have her sport. If he returned to his cold, gray barracks an hour later than he might have otherwise, what of it?

One of those twists probably saved his life. He watched the sea for leviathans with Algarvian riders and for Algarvian ships sliding along the ley lines. He looked up at the sky, too, but only when he thought to do it, which was less often than it might have been. When he rode Eforiel, the water was his element. The air was not. Had he wanted to be a dragonflier, he would never have gone to sea.

Some Algarvian youth who had wanted to be a dragonflier released an egg from a great height. Had Eforiel not turned aside to go after squid, it would have burst on top of Cornelu and her, whereupon the small creatures of the sea would have feasted on them rather than the other way round.

As things were, they almost did. Even a near miss from an egg could kill, the outward pressure from the burst jellying a man—or a leviathan—the burst of energy itself did not reach. Cornelu did not quite know how close he and Eforiel came to being jellied, but he and the leviathan could not have escaped by much.

Eforiel gave a pained, startled, involuntary grunt when the egg burst, as a man might have done if suddenly and unexpectedly hit in the pit of the stomach. Cornelu felt as if he were being crushed in an olive press, but only for one brief, horrifying instant. Then, as she had been trained, Eforiel dove and swam away from the burst as fast as she could. Cornelu had only to hang on to the lines that moored him to the leviathan; Lagoan spells for breathing underwater were quite as effective as those Sibiu used.

Another egg burst, this one farther away. Eforiel swam harder—and deeper—than ever. Cornelu’s guiding signals grew more urgent. Even with his sorcerous aids, the weight of the sea would crush him before it harmed the leviathan. If Eforiel gave way to panic and forgot that, the egg might as well have done its work, at least as far as he was concerned.

But the trainers at Tirgoviste had known their business, and Eforiel was a clever beast, little given to panic. After the first few frantic flaps from her flukes, she realized Cornelu was giving her signals, realized and obeyed. Her plunge to the depths of the sea slowed, then stopped. She angled up toward the surface once more.

Cornelu wished the Lagoan mages had used a spell to let the leviathan breathe underwater. So far as he knew, no such spell existed, though adapting the one the mages had used on him didn’t strike him as likely to be difficult. Till this war, though, no one had seen the need, just as no one had seen the need to keep watch against sailing ships or to mass swarms of behemoths or …

When Eforiel spouted, Cornelu twisted his body to look up at the sky. He let out a startled grunt of his own, and ordered the leviathan to dive once more. That Algarvian dragon was stooping like a hawk, trying to get close enough to flame. He did not know whether dragonfire could kill a leviathan. He knew all too well that it could kill him.

He’d hoped the dragon would flame even though he and Eforiel had already submerged. If it ran out of flame, the leviathan and he would be safer. But no blast of flame boiled the sea above his head. He mumbled curses. The Algarvian up there, unfortunately, knew what he was about. And he would be able to watch for Eforiel to rise, where Cornelu would not, could not, know where he was until already exposed to danger.

Exposed or not, though, sooner or later Eforiel would have to breathe. Cornelu ordered her to swim north; going back the way he had come seemed likeliest to put distance between her and that cursed dragon. North and south, east and west, were all one to the leviathan. Cornelu sometimes thought his insistence on going this way or that way as opposed to any which way annoyed Eforiel. Sometimes, by the wiggle she gave when obeying his commands, he thought it amused her.

He let her swim as far as she could before surfacing. When she spouted, Cornelu looked around anxious for the dragon and the Algarvian flying it. He spotted the creature and its rider well off to the south, and nodded in no small satisfaction: he’d outguessed the dragonflier this time.

But his satisfaction did not last long. He’d wanted to give Eforiel a little while to rest, but the dragonflier spotted her almost as soon as Cornelu saw him. On came the great beast, the thunder of its wingbeats growing in Cornelu’s ears above the plashing of the strait.

He sent Eforiel down below the surface well before the dragon got close enough to flame—and was glad he did, for a couple of sharp hisses above him said beams from the Algarvian’s stick were boiling bits of ocean. They would have burned through him and the leviathan, too.

Cornelu sent Eforiel east this time, now worrying in earnest. Children in every kingdom played hiding games. When they lost them, though, the worst that happened was that they had to search next. If Cornelu lost this game, tiny fish would nibble the flesh from his bones.

After a long run under the protecting mantle of the sea, Eforiel came up to breathe once more. Cornelu looked around, trying to scan every direction at once. He spied the dragon off to the north. The Algarvian riding the stupid creature was anything but stupid himself. He hadn’t stayed around and waited to see what Cornelu would do, and had nearly guessed right—Cornelu had thought hard about having Eforiel swim north again.

This time, the Sibian exile took the leviathan underwater as soon as she had breathed. He didn’t know whether the dragonflier had spotted this surfacing or not. With a little luck, he would lose the Algarvian in the immensity of the sea.

Eforiel swam southeast; Cornelu wasn’t yet ready to return to the straight course toward Setubal, the likeliest track on which the dragon would be hunting for him. So long as he reached the Lagoan coast anywhere, he could find his way back to the capital and its harbor.

But the dragonflier, realizing he’d been outfoxed, had gained altitude so he could survey a broad stretch of ocean. And, when he spotted Eforiel and Cornelu, he sent his mount winging after them.

Why doesn’t he give up?
Cornelu thought resentfully.
It’s not as if I’ve done anything to him personally, the way he has to me, the way his kingdom has to mine.
Back in Tirgoviste, he had a son or daughter. He did not know which. He did not know how his wife was. Not knowing ate at him; it left an empty place where his heart should have been.

When Eforiel twisted and turned after fish, he let her. If he didn’t know in which direction she was going, how could the dragonflier guess?

Logically speaking, that was perfect. Logical perfection didn’t keep Cornelu and the leviathan from almost dying a few minutes later. When Eforiel surfaced, her spout nearly soaked the dragon’s tail. However he’d done it, that cursed Algarvian had gauged almost perfectly where the leviathan would rise.

Cornelu watched the dragon’s head start to twist on its long, snaky neck, back under its body. He sent Eforiel diving, hard and fast as he could. The sea above them turned to a sheet of flame. That terrified the leviathan, which, a creature of water, knew nothing of fire. She swam farther and faster than Cornelu would have dreamt she could.

Her fear might have saved her, for the hunting dragon could not draw near enough to flame or for its rider to blaze when she surfaced again, and guessed wrong on the direction of her next run, so Cornelu was at last able to escape the stubborn dragonflier’s pursuit.

“Routine,” he said back in Setubal, when his Lagoan superiors asked how the swim to Valmiera had gone. “Nothing but routine.” He did not think they were able to tell he was lying.

Bembo peered east, toward the Bradano Mountains, with nothing but relief. The Jelgavans didn’t look like breaking out on to the plains after all, which meant the emergency militia wasn’t drilling any more. Not marching under the eye of that fearsome sergeant warmed Bembo’s heart.

If Algarve needed a pudgy constable to help hold back her foes, the kingdom was in desperate straits indeed.

A broadsheet showed one blond in trousers running away from an Algarvian on a behemoth, with another blond cowering in a trench. The first trousered soldiers was labeled VALMIERA, the second JELGAVA. COWARDLY KAUNIANS, declared the legend below the picture.

Hardly knowing he was doing it, Bembo nodded as he swaggered by the broadsheet. Kaunians had always been cowards, even back in the ancient days. If they hadn’t been, Tricarico would still be a city of the Kaunian Empire, and the Algarvians pinned back in the forests of the far south.

He kept an eye out for blonds who weren’t on posters. Orders to take nothing for granted when it came to Kaunians had gone out to every constable in town—and, Bembo suspected, to every constable in the kingdom. Such orders made sense to him. It was, he supposed, possible for folk of Kaunian blood to be loyal to King Mezentio. Possible, aye -but how likely? Not very, in his judgment.

That Balozio, for instance, remained locked up. He hadn’t been able to prove he wasn’t a Jelgavan spy, and nobody felt like taking a chance on him. That also made sense to Bembo. How loyal would Balozio be after spending a while in a cell? Again, not very, not so far as the constable could see.

Bembo’s eyes flicked back and forth, back and forth. He spied only a couple of blonds on the street: Kaunians weren’t going out much these days. One was an old man hobbling along with the help of a cane, the other one of the ugliest, dumpiest women he’d ever seen in his life. He didn’t bother either of them. The old man would have had trouble being dangerous to a snail, let alone a kingdom. As for the woman—had she been pretty, he probably would have found some questions to ask her. Since she was anything but, he pretended—and did his best to pretend to himself, too—he hadn’t noticed her.