Into the Darkness

6.

Pekka was working, and working hard, though no one could have proved it by looking at her. She sat at the desk in her office at Kajaani City College, staring out the window at the driving rain. Every once in a while, her eyes would slip down to the sheets of paper spread across the desk.

Once, as the rain kept drumming down, she reached out, inked a pen, and wrote a couple of lines below what was already on the last of the sheets. She didn’t look at them again for several minutes. When she did, she blinked in surprise, as if someone else’s hand, not her own, had done that writing.

Partly recalled to herself, Pekka wondered what the students in her theoretical sorcery class would think if they could see her now. They would probably laugh like loons. Comics had been making jokes about absent-minded mages since the days of the Kaunian Empire. Some of the Kaunian jokes had survived to the present day, and sounded remarkably like their modern equivalent. Some of them had doubtless been ancient in Kaunian times, too.

And then Pekka drifted away again, back into the haze of concentration that was the next thing to a trance. She noticed the rain only as background noise. Somewhere down at the root of things, the laws of similarity and contagion were connected. She was morally certain of it, though wizards had been treating them as separate entities for as long as men had been working magic. If she could link them together…

She had no idea what would happen if she could link them together. She would know something she hadn’t known. She would know something no one in the world had ever known. That was enough. That was more than enough.

She scribbled another line. She wasn’t close to an answer. She had no idea how long she would need to get close to an answer. She was getting closer to designing a sorcerous experiment that might tell her whether she was on the right track.

Someone knocked on the door. Pekka did her best not to hear. Her best was not good enough. She’d been about to write another line. Whatever she’d been on the point of setting down vanished from her mind.

Fury roared in to take its place. Kuusamans were as a rule easygoing, especially when set alongside the proud and touchy folk of the kingdoms of Algarvic stock. But every mage had to keep in mind the difference between the rule and the exception.

Springing to her feet, Pekka dashed to the door and flung it wide. “What are you doing interrupting me?” she screeched, even before it had opened all the way.

Her husband, fortunately, lived up to the Kuusaman reputation for calm. “I’m sorry, dear,” Leino said. His narrow eyes didn’t widen; no surprise showed on his broad, high-cheekboned face. He’d seen Pekka burst like a large egg before. “It is time to head home, though.”

“Oh,” Pekka said in a small voice. The real world returned with a rush. She wouldn’t unify contagion and similarity this afternoon, nor even figure out how to take that one step closer to finding out whether unifying them was even possible. With the real world’s embrace came acute embarrassment. Looking down at her shoes, she mumbled, “I’m sorry I shouted at you.”

“It’s all right.” Leino’s shrug made water drip from the brim of his hat and the hem of his heavy wool rain cape; his office was in a different building from Pekka’s. “If I’d known you were thinking hard, I’d have stood out here a while longer. We’re not in that big a hurry, not that I know of.”

“No, no, no.” Now Pekka turned briskly practical. She was that way most of the time: except when thinking hard, as her husband put it. She pulled on rubber overboots, took her cap from the peg on which it hung, and jammed her own broad-brimmed hat down over her straight black hair. “You’re right—we’d better get back. My sister’s been trying to corral Uto long enough—I’m sure she’d say so.”

“She loves him,” Leino said.

“I love him, too,” Pekka said. “That doesn’t mean he isn’t a handful—or two handfuls, or three. Come on. We can catch the caravan at the edge of the campus. It’ll take us most of the way there.”

“Good enough.” Amusement danced in Leino’s eyes: watching Pekka go in the space of a few breaths from wooly-headed scholar to a planner who might have served on the Kuusaman General Staff never failed to tickle him.

Raindrops pelted down on Pekka as soon as she stepped outside. She hadn’t gone ten paces before her hat and cape were as wet as Leino’s. She ignored the rain in a different way from the one she’d used while off in the realm of theory back in her office. Any Kuusaman who couldn’t ignore rain had had the misfortune of being born in the wrong land.

“How was your day?” she asked, squelching along beside her husband.

“Pretty good, actually,” Leino answered. “I think we’ve made a breakthrough on strengthening behemoth armor against beams from heavy sticks.”

“They’ve had you working on that for a while,” Pekka said. “I haven’t heard you talk about breakthroughs before.”

“This is a whole new idea.” Leino looked around to make sure no one was close enough to overhear before going on, “Ordinary armor’s just iron, of course, or steel. It can reflect a beam if it’s polished enough, or spread the heat around so the beam won’t burn through if it doesn’t stay right in the same spot long enough.”

Pekka nodded. “That’s how people have always done it, sure enough. You’ve found something different?” She cocked her head to one side and looked at her husband with approval, glad she wasn’t the only one in the family straying off the beaten track.

“That’s what we’ve done, all right.” Leino also nodded, enthusiastically. “It turns out that, if you make a sort of sandwich of steel and then a special porcelain and then steel again, you get armor that’s a lot stronger than what we’re using now without weighing any more.”

“You don’t mean a sandwich with three separate layers, do you?” Pekka asked with a small frown. “I can’t think of any kind of porcelain so special that it wouldn’t be easy to break in large, thin sheets.”

“You’re absolutely right. I think that’s why nobody’s taken this approach before,” Leino said. “The trick is sorcerously fusing the porcelain to the steel on either side of it, and doing it so we don’t wreck the temper of the steel in the process.” He grinned at her. “We’ve wrecked a lot of other tempers in the process, I’ll tell you that. But now I think we’re getting the hang of it.”

“That will be good,” Pekka said. “It will be especially good if we get drawn into the madness on the mainland of Derlavai.”

“Aye, though I hope we don’t,” Leino said. “But you’re right again—not much place for behemoths in the island-hopping kind of war we’re fighting against Gyongyos.”

“Oh!” Pekka muttered something worse than Oh! under her breath. “There goes the caravan. Now we’ll have to wait a quarter of an hour for the next one.”

“At least we’ll be out of the rain,” Leino said. Every caravan stop in Kajaani—so far as Pekka knew, every stop in Kuusamo—was roofed against rain and sleet and snow. The stops wouldn’t have been worth having if they weren’t.

A news-sheet vendor was taking advantage of the shelter when Pekka and Leino came in to get out of the wet. He waved a sheet at them, saying, “Want to read about the ultimatum Swemmel of Unkerlant has handed Zuwayza?”

“Something unfortunate should happen to Swemmel of Unkerlant,” Leino said. That didn’t keep him from handing the vendor a couple of square copper coins and taking a sheet. He sat down on a bench, Pekka beside him.

They read together. Pekka’s eyebrows rose. “Swemmel doesn’t ask for much, does he?” she said.

“Let’s see.” Leino ran his hand down the page. “All the border fortifications, all the power points halfway from the border to Bishah, the right to base a fleet at the harbor of Samawa—and to have the Zuwayzin pay for it. No, not much: not much he deserves, I mean.”

“And all that on pain of war if Zuwayza refuses,” Pekka said sadly. “If he were an ordinary man instead of a king, he’d be up before a panel of judges on extortion charges.”

Leino had read a little more than she had. “Looks like another war, sure enough. Here, see a crystal report from Bishah quotes their foreign minister as saying that yielding to an unjust demand is worse than making one. If that doesn’t sound like the Zuwayzin intend to fight, I don’t know what does.”

“I wish them well,” Pekka said.

“So do I,” her husband answered. “The only thing I’m sorry about is that, if they’d given in, Swemmel might have gone back to war with Gyongyos. As is, the Gongs are only fighting us, and that makes them tougher.”

“If a few islands out in the Bothnian Ocean were in different places, if a few ley lines ran in different directions, we’d have no quarrel with Gyongyos,” Pekka said.

“Gyongyos would probably have a quarrel with us, though,” Leino answered. “The Gongs enjoy fighting, seems like.”

“I wonder what they say about us,” Pekka said in musing tones. Whatever it was, it did not appear in the Kajaani Crier or any other Kuusaman news sheet.

A caravan hummed up to the stop. The conductor opened the door. A couple of people in hats and capes got off. Pekka preceded Leino up the steps and into the car. They both plopped eight-copper silver bits in the fare box. Nodding, the conductor waved them back to the seats, as if it were only through his generosity that they had so many from which to choose.

As the caravan began to move, Pekka said, “My grandmother said that, when she was a little girl, her grandmother told her how frightened she was when she was a little girl, the first time she got up on the step to go into a ley-line caravan. There it was, floating on nothing, and she couldn’t see why it didn’t fall down or tip over.”

“Can’t expect a child to understand the way complex sorceries work,” Leino answered. “For that matter, back in those days ley lines were a new thing in the world, and nobody understood them very well—though people thought they did.”

“People always think they know more than they do,” Pekka said. “It’s one of the things that make them people.”

They got off at the road that led up to their house. No butterflies flitted now. No birds sang. Rain fell. Rain dripped from trees. Wet branches slapped them in the face as they slogged uphill to pick up Uto from Pekka’s sister.

When Elimaki came to the door, she looked harried. Uto, on the other hand, seemed the picture of innocence. Pekka did not need grounding in theoretical sorcery to know appearances could deceive.

“What did you do?” she asked him.

“Nothing,” he answered sweetly, as he always did.

Pekka glanced to her sister. Elimaki said. “He went climbing in the pantry. He knocked over a five-pound canister of flour, and then tried to tell me he hadn’t. He might have gotten away with it, too, if he hadn’t left a footprint right in the middle of the pile of flour on the pantry floor.”

Leino started to laugh. So did Pekka, in spite of herself. She and her husband weren’t the only ones in the family straying off the beaten track, either. Ruffling Uto’s hair, she said, “You’ll go a long way, son—if we decide to let you live.”

Colonel Dzirnavu was not a happy man. So far as Talsu could tell, Dzirnavu was never a happy man. Like a lot of common people, the Jelgavan count took out his unhappiness on everyone around him. Since he was an officer and a noble, the soldiers in his regiment couldn’t tell him to jump off a cliff, as they surely would have if he’d been a commoner like themselves.

“Vartu!” he shouted one morning—he shouted the way singers went through the scales, to warm up his voice. “Confound it, Vartu, where have you gone and hidden yourself? Get your whipworthy arse into my tent this instant!”

“Confound it, Vartu!” Talsu echoed as Dzirnavu’s servant came by on the dead run. Vartu gave him a dirty look before ducking under the tent-flap and facing his principal’s wrath.

“How may I serve you, my lord?” he asked, his words clearly audible through the canvas.

“How may you serve me?” Dzirnavu bellowed. “How may you serve me? You may get me that rascally cook, that’s how, and serve me his guts for tripe at my luncheon today. Will you look at this? Will you look at this, Vartu? The ham-fisted thumbfingered son of a whore had the gall to serve me a plate of runny scrambled eggs. How in the names of the powers above am I supposed to eat runny scrambled eggs?”

Talsu looked down at his own tin plate, which contained the usual breakfast scoop of mush and the equally usual length of cheap, stale sausage. He glanced over to his friend Smilsu, who was sitting on a rock close by. In a low voice, he asked, “How in the names of the powers above am I supposed to eat runny scrambled eggs?”

“With a spoon?” Smilsu suggested. His breakfast ration was no more prepossessing than Talsu’s.

“I’ve got one of those, sure enough.” Talsu held it up. “Now if I only had some eggs, I’d be in business.”

Smilsu sadly shook his head. “If you’re going to grouse and grumble about every least little thing, my boy, you’ll never get to be a colonel like our illustrious regimental commander.” He set a finger by the side of his nose. “Of course, if you don’t grouse and grumble, you’ll never get to be a colonel, either. You haven’t got the bloodlines for it.”

“Bloodlines are fine, if you’re a horse.” Talsu let his eyes slide toward Count Dzirnavu’s tent. “Or even some particular part of a horse.” Smilsu, who was in the middle of swallowing a mouthful of mush, almost choked to death on it. Talsu went on, “For picking soldiers, though…” Now he shook his head. “If we had real soldiers leading us, we’d be down in Tricarico this time, instead of still slogging our way through these cursed hills.” He snapped his fingers. “I bet that’s why the stinking Algarvians haven’t really counterattacked.”

He’d got a jump ahead of Smilsu. “What’s why?” his friend asked. “What are you talking about?”

Talsu dropped his voice to hardly more than a whisper, so only Smilsu would hear: “If the redheads hit us hard, they’d be bound to kill off a lot of officers. Sooner or later, we’d run out of nobles to take their places. Then we’d have to start using men who knew what they were doing instead. We’d be sure to lick Algarve after that, so they’re just playing it safe and smart.”

“I’d be sure you were right, if only I thought the Algarvians had that much upstairs.” Without doing anything more than sitting a little straighter, Smilsu managed to convey the Algarvians’ swaggering pomposity. As he slumped back down, he went on, “And you’d better not say anything like that around anybody you’re not sure of, either, or you’ll be sorry for a long time.”

Vartu came out of Dzirnavu’s tent just then. Talsu and Smilsu both fell silent. Talsu liked the colonel’s servant, and trusted him fairly far, but not far enough to speak treason in front of him.

Mumbling under his breath, Vartu stalked past the two soldiers. A moment later, Talsu heard him yelling at a cook. The cook yelled back. Smilsu’s snicker was amused and sympathetic at the same time. “Poor Vartu,” he said. “He gets it from both sides at once.”

“So do all of us,” Talsu answered, “from our officers and from the Algarvians.”

“Someone put vinegar in your beer this morning, that’s plain,” Smilsu said. “Why don’t you go over there and scream at the cooks, too?”

“Because they’d stick a carving knife in me or hit me over the head with a pot,” Talsu said. “I can’t get away with things like that. I’m not a count, or even servant to a count.”

“Aye, you’re a no-account, all right,” Smilsu said, whereupon Talsu felt like hitting him over the head with a pot.

After their less than magnificent breakfast, the Jelgavan soldiers cautiously advanced. Exhortations from King Donalitu to move faster kept coming forward. Colonel Dzirnavu would read them out whenever they did, and would blame the men for not living up to their sovereign’s requests. Then he and his superiors would order another tiptoeing step ahead, and would seem surprised when King Donalitu found it necessary to exhort the troops again.

The Algarvians did their best to make life unpleasant for their foes, too. The country through which Talsu and his comrades moved was made for defense. One stubborn soldier with a stick who found a good hiding place could hold up a company. There were plenty of good hiding places to find, and plenty of stubborn Algarvians to fill them. Each redhead had to be flanked out and flushed from cover, which made what would have been a slow business slower.

And the Algarvians had taken to burying eggs in the ground, and attaching to them trips lines that would rupture their shells. A soldier who didn’t watch where he put his feet was liable to go up in a great gout of sorcerous fire. That slowed the Jelgavans, too, till dowsers could find the eggs and mark paths past them.

Most of the redheads who lived in the mountain country had fled to lower ground farther west. A few people, though, were obstinate, as Jelgavan mountain folk also had a name for being. Talsu captured an old Algarvian with a bald head, a big white mustache, and knobby knees and hairy calves sticking out from under the hem of his kilt. “Come on, gramps,” he said, and gestured with his stick. “I’m going to take you back to our encampment so they can ask you some questions.”

“A dog should flitter you,” the old man growled in accented Jelgavan.

He added a couple of other choice oaths in Talsu’s language, then fell back on Algarvian. Talsu didn’t know any Algarvian, but he didn’t think the captive was paying him compliments. All he did was gesture with the stick again. Cursing still, the old man got moving.

Back at the camp, a bored-looking lieutenant who spoke Algarvian started questioning Talsu’s captive. The old man kept right on cursing, or so Talsu thought. The lieutenant stopped looking bored and started looking harassed. Talsu hid a smile. He didn’t mind seeing an officer sweat, even if it was because of an Algarvian.

He was about to head off toward the front line again when a trooper from a different company brought in another cursing captive. Talsu stopped and stared. Everyone who heard those curses stopped and stared. The other soldier’s captive (you lucky bastard, Talsu thought) was a good-looking—a very good-looking—woman of about twenty-five. Coppery hair flowed halfway down her back. Her knees were not knobby, nor her calves hairy. Talsu examined them carefully to make sure of those facts.

Her curses even drew from his tent Colonel Dzirnavu, who had been in there alone except, perhaps, for a bottle of what his servant called restorative. By the lurch in his stride, he was quite thoroughly restored. His eyes needed a moment before they lit on the captive. “Well, well,” he said when they finally did. “What have we here?”

“That’s what they call a woman,” a soldier near Talsu muttered. “Haven’t you ever seen one before?” Talsu coughed to keep from laughing out loud.

Dzirnavu advanced on her at a ponderous waddle. He looked her up and down, plainly imagining everything the tunic and kilt concealed. She looked him up and down, too. Her face also showed what she was thinking. Talsu would not have wanted anyone, let alone a good-looking woman, thinking such things about him.

“Where did you find her?” Dzirnavu asked the soldier who had brought her back to camp. “Spying on us, unless I miss my guess.”

“Lord, she was going into a little cottage up ahead.” The trooper pointed. “My thought is, she was trying to take away a few last things before she fled for good.”

The Algarvian woman pointed at Dzirnavu. “Where did you find him?” she asked the soldier who had captured her. Her Jelgavan was accented but fluent. “I would say under a flat rock, but where would you find a flat rock big enough to hide him?”

Like most Jelgavans, Dzirnavu was quite fair. That let Talsu watch the flush mount from his beefy neck to his hairline. “She is a spy,” he snapped. “She must be a spy. Take her to my tent.” A murky light kindled in his bloodshot gray eyes. “I shall attend to her interrogation personally.”

Talsu could think of only one thing that might mean. He knew a moment’s pity for the Algarvian woman, even if he wouldn’t have minded having her himself. Dzirnavu’s “interrogation,” though, was liable to crush her to death—and he wouldn’t learn anything while he was doing it.

After a while, the soldier who’d captured the woman came out of the tent. His face bore a curious mixture of excitement and disgust. “He had me cover her while he tied her to the bed,” he reported, and then, “He made her lie on her belly.”

Along with his comrades, Talsu sadly shook his head. “Waste of a woman, especially one so pretty,” he said. “If that’s what he’s got in mind, he could do it with a boy instead.”

“Officers have all the fun,” the other soldier said, “and they get to pick what kind of fun they have.”

Since Talsu couldn’t argue with that, he started back toward the front line. He hadn’t gone far before the Algarvian woman screamed. It sounded more like outrage than anguish. Whatever it was, it was none of his business. He kept walking.

When he returned to the encampment at suppertime, no one had been into or out of the regimental commander’s tent since he’d left. “You should have heard what he called me when I asked him if he needed anything an hour ago,” Vartu said.

“Is the redhead still screaming in there?” Talsu asked. Dzirnavu’s servant shook his head. Talsu sighed. Maybe she’d seen screaming did her no good. Maybe, too, she was in no shape to scream any more. From what he knew of Dzirnavu, he found that more likely. He stood in line for supper. If Dzirnavu was skipping a meal for the sake of his pleasure, it wouldn’t hurt him a bit. No sound at all came from the tent. Eventually, Talsu rolled himself in his blanket and went to sleep.

Dzirnavu’s tent was still quiet when Talsu woke up the next morning. When Vartu cautiously asked whether the count wanted breakfast, no one answered. Even more cautiously, the servant stuck his head in through the flap. He recoiled, clapping a hand to his mouth. He choked out one word: “Blood!”

Talsu dashed toward the tent. So did everyone else who’d heard Vartu. There lay the naked and unlovely Count Dzirnavu, half on the bed, half off, his throat cut from ear to ear. Blood soaked the sheets and the ground below. There was no sign of the Algarvian woman, no sign she’d ever been there but for the length of rope tied to each bedpost.

“An assassin!” Vartu gasped. “She was an assassin!”

No one argued with him, not out loud, but expressions were eloquent. Talsu’s guess was that Dzirnavu had fallen asleep because of his exertions, the woman had managed to work a hand free, and then had found a tool to take her revenge. He did wonder how she’d managed to escape afterwards. Maybe she’d been able to sneak past the sentries. Or maybe, in exchange for silence, she’d given out some of what Dzirnavu had taken by force. Any which way, she was gone.

Smilsu had the last word. He saved it till he and Talsu were heading up to the front: “Powers above, the Algarvians wouldn’t want to murder Dzirnavu. They must have hoped he’d live forever. Now we’re liable to get a regimental commander who knows what he’s doing.” Talsu considered that, then solemnly nodded.

Garivald’s worn leather boots squelched through mud. The fall rains in southern Unkerlant turned everything into a swamp. Spring, when a winter’s worth of snow melted, was even worse—though the peasant did not think of it that way. The weather did what it did every year. For Garivald, it was simply part of life.

As a matter of fact, he was on the whole pleased with the way the year had gone. King Swemmel’s inspectors had gone away and not come back, and no impressers had arrived in their wake. The villagers of Zossen had got in the harvest before the rains came. Waddo the obnoxious first-man had fallen off the roof while he was rethatching it, and had broken his ankle. He was still hobbling around on two sticks. No, not such a bad year after all.

The pigs approved of the year, too, or at least of the ram. The whole village might have been a wallow for them now. They approved of Garivald, too, when he threw them turnip tops from a wicker basket.

The only trouble was, each seemed to think its neighbors had got a better selection of greens, which made for snortings and snappings and loud grunts and squeals.

Garivald had grain for the chickens, too. The chickens did not like rain, as their draggled feathers attested. A lot of them had taken shelter inside one peasant’s house or another. Some of them were making a racket and a mess inside his house. If they annoyed his wife enough, Annore would avenge herself with hatchet and chopping block.

When the blizzards came, all the animals would crowd into the houses. If they didn’t, they’d freeze to death. The warmth they gave off helped keep the villagers alive, too. After a while, the nose stopped noticing the stink. Garivald chuckled. Had those hoity-toity inspectors come in winter, they would have stuck their noses into any old house, taken one whiff, and fled back to Cottbus with their tails between their legs.

Syrivald was playing in the mud when Garivald got back to his family’s house. “Does your mother know you’re out here?” he demanded.

Syrivald nodded. “She sent me out. She said she was sick of the way I was driving the chickens crazy.”

“Did she?” Garivald let out a grunt of laughter. “Well, I believe it. You drive your mother and me crazy sometimes, too.” Syrivald grinned, mistaking that for a compliment.

Rolling his eyes, Garivald ducked inside. Even with Syrivald out getting filthy, the chickens remained in an uproar. Leuba was crawling around on the floor, doing her best to catch them and pull out their tail feathers. Garivald’s little daughter thought that great sport; the chickens had a different opinion.

“You’re going to get pecked,” Annore warned Leuba.

Two years from now, Leuba might, on a good day, pay some attention to a warning. Now she didn’t even understand it. Her mother’s tone might have meant something, but not when she was intent on her game. “Ma-ma!” she said happily, and went right on after the closest chicken.

The chickens were a lot faster than she was, but she had a singleminded determination they lacked. Garivald was heading toward her to pick her up when she did manage to grab a hen by the tail. The hen let out a furious squawk. An instant later, Leuba started crying: Sure enough, it had pecked her.

“There, see what you get?” Garivald scooped her off the ground. Leuba, of course, saw nothing of the sort. As far as she was concerned, she’d been having a high old time, and then one of her toys unaccountably went and hurt her. Garivald examined the injury, which was minor. “I expect you’ll live,” he said. “You can stop making noises like a branded calf.”

Eventually, she did settle down, not so much because he’d told her to as because he was holding her. When he set her down again, she started after the nearest chicken. This time, luckily for her and the fowl, it spied her and escaped.

“She’s a stubborn thing,” Garivald said.

Annore looked at him sidelong. “Where do you suppose she gets that?” Garivald grunted. He didn’t think of himself as stubborn, except insofar as a man had to work hard to scrape a living from the soil. “What’s for dinner tonight?” he asked his wife.

“Bread,” she answered. “What’s left of last night’s stew is still in the pot: peas and cabbage and beets and a little salt pork thrown in for flavor.”

“Any honey for the bread?” he asked. Annore nodded. He grunted again, this time in satisfaction. “Well, that won’t be too bad. And the stew was good last night, so it should be good again today.” He sat down on a bench along the wall. “Get me some.”

Annore had been stuffing guts with ground meat for sausages. She set aside what she was doing, got a bowl and a spoon, went over to the iron pot hanging above the fire, ladled the bowl full, and brought it to Garivald. Then she went back to the counter, tore off a chunk of black bread, and carried that and the honey pot over to him, too.

He broke the bread, dipped some in the honey, and ate it. Annore went back to work. Garivald spooned up some of the stew, then ate another piece of bread. “In the cities,” he said, “they make fancy flour so they can have white bread, not just black or brown.” His broad shoulders went up and down in a shrug. “I wonder why they bother. By what I hear from people who’ve eaten it, it’s no better than any other kind.”

“City people will do anything to be in fashion,” Annore said, and Garivald nodded. People in the farming villages where most Unkerlanters lived were deeply suspicious of their urban cousins. Annore went on, “I’m glad we live in the same way our grandparents did. Why borrow trouble?”

Garivald nodded again. “That’s right. I’m not sorry there aren’t any ley lines close by, or that Waddo hasn’t been able to put a crystal in his house. What can you hear on a crystal? Only bad news and orders from Cottbus.”

“Orders from Cottbus are bad news,” his wife said, and he nodded once more.

“Aye. If somebody there could tell Waddo what to do without coming here, Waddo would just up and do it, no matter how hard it was on the village,” he said. “Waddo’s one of those people who kicks every arse below him and kisses every arse above him.”

He waited for Annore to answer. She didn’t; she was peering through tiny gaps in the shutters drawn tight against the rain. After a moment, she opened them wide so she could see better. Surprise in her voice, she said, “Herpo the spice man’s here. I wonder what possessed him to come in the middle of the rains.”

“Some of those people just have itchy feet—they go when and where they choose,” Garivald said. “Never could see the sense of it myself; I’ve always been happy to stay right where I am.” But he finished eating in a hurry, while Annore was plopping Leuba in her crib and putting on her own rain cape and hat. They started to go out together to see Herpo. Leuba squalled angrily. Annore gave a martyred look and went back to pick up the baby.

Half the people in the village were out to see Herpo. Despite what Garivald had said about not wanting a crystal nearby and about being content where he was, he craved the news and gossip the spice seller had, and he was far from the only one.

And Herpo had news: “We’re at war again,” he said.

“Who is it now?” somebody asked. “Forthweg?”

“No, we already fought Forthweg,” somebody else said, and then, doubtfully, “Didn’t we?”

“Let Herpo speak his piece,” Garivald said. “Then we’ll know.”

“Thank you, friend,” the spice man said. “I will speak my piece, and then I’ll hold my peace. We are at war with”—he paused dramatically—“the black people up in Zuwayza.” He pointed north.

“Black people!” a granny said scornfully. “Save your lies for folks who believe them, Herpo. Next thing you know, you’ll tell us we’re at war with the blue people over there or the green people over there.” Laughing at her own wit, she pointed first to the east and then to the west.

But a gray-haired man said, “Nay, Uote, these black men are real.

There were a couple of’em in my company in the Six Years’ War. Brave enough, they were, but would you believe it, they had to learn to wear clothes. Their country is so hot, they said, that everybody there goes bare naked all the time, even the women.” He smiled, as at the memory of something pleasant he hadn’t thought of in a while.

Uote’s face looked like curdled milk. “You shut up, Agen! The very idea!” she said. Garivald wasn’t sure whether she disapproved of Agen’s having the nerve to tell her she was wrong or of people—especially women—running around naked. Probably both, he thought.

Herpo said, “I don’t know about this naked business myself, but I know we’re fighting ’em. I expect we’ll lick ’em pretty cursed quick, too, just like we did the Forthwegians.” He looked at Uote out of the corner of his eye. “You going to tell me the Forthwegians ain’t real, too?”

She looked as if she wished he weren’t real. Instead of answering him, though, she showered more abuse on Agen. He was the one who’d embarrassed her in front of her fellow villagers. He bent his head and let her curses run off him like the rain. Under the wide brim of his hat, he was grinning.

“Along with the news,” Herpo said, “I’ve got cinnamon, I’ve got cloves, I’ve got ginger, I’ve got dried pepper that’ll make your tongue think it’s on fire, and all for cheaper than you’d ever guess.”

Garivald had tasted fire peppers a couple of times, and didn’t fancy them. He bought a couple of quills of cinnamon and some powdered ginger and slogged back to his house. Herpo was still doing a brisk business when he left.

“Those will perk up the winter baking,” Annore said when he showed her what he’d bought. Leuba had calmed down by then, and was after the hens again. His wife went on, “What was this great news? I was making the baby shut up, so I didn’t get to hear it.”

“Nothing very important.” Garivald gave another shrug. “We’re at war again, that’s all.”

Istvan walked along the beach on the island of Obuda. Scavengers had taken most of the meat from the skeleton of the Kuusaman dragon that had fallen. It skull stared at him out of empty eye sockets. He bared his teeth in a fierce grin; a Gyongyosian might feel fear, but he wasn’t supposed to show it.

A lot of the dragon’s fangs were missing. Some of Istvan’s comrades wore one or more as souvenirs of having thrown back the Kuusamans. More, though, had sold them to the Obudans. Since the islanders did not know the art of dragonflying, they had an exaggerated notion of how much magic it required and how potent a talisman a dragon’s tooth was.

Chuckling, Istvan scaled a flat stone into the sea. Anyone who’d ever shoveled dragon shit would know better. He had. He did. The Obudans, in their ignorance, didn’t.

He wondered if he should have used the stone to knock out a couple of the remaining fangs for himself. After a moment, he shrugged and kept on walking down the beach. Money mattered little to him here on Obuda; he couldn’t buy much with it. And the women, he’d heard, wouldn’t put out for dragon’s teeth: it was their menfolk who wanted them.

A wave ran farther up the gently sloping sand than most of its fellows. He had to skip aside to keep it from splashing his boots. It still wasn’t very big. Out on the sea, Obudan fishing boats bobbed. Their sails were dyed in bright colors to make them visible from a long way off. Watching the wind push them along bemused Istvan. He’d never imagined such a thing, not while he was growing up in a mountain valley.

The Bothnian Ocean was calm now, but he’d never imagined what it could be like in a storm, either. Then the waves leapt like wild things and went down the beach only sullenly, as if they wanted to drag Obuda down under the water with them. They seemed to have teeth then, great white teeth of foam that sought to tear chunks out of the land.

He shook his head—he was getting as foolish as the Obudans. Their language had endless words to name and describe different kinds of waves. Gyongyosian, like any sensible speech, made do with one. Snow, now, Istvan thought, snow was something worth describing in detail. But the Obudans seldom saw snow.

A red and yellow and black shell caught Istvan’s eye. He stooped and picked it up. Obuda boasted any number of colorful snail shells, all with different patterns. He didn’t think he’d seen this one before. Back in his valley, snails had plain brown shells. The only good thing he had to say about those snails was that they made fine eating when fried with garlic and wild mushrooms.

Coming down from the barracks on the slopes of Mt. Sorong had been easy. Going back up took more work, even though the climb wasn’t too steep. Leaving the beach and returning to the barracks also transformed Istvan from tourist back into soldier, a transformation he would just as soon not have made.

Sergeant Jokai descended on him like a mountain avalanche. “Good to have you back with us, your splendiferous magnificence,” the veteran sergeant growled. “Now you can go fix your bunk the way the army taught you, not the way your mama taught you—if she was the one who taught you, and not some goat in a pen.”

Istvan fought to keep his face expressionless. By main force of will, he succeeded. Gyongyosians did not keep goats, reckoning them unclean because of their eating habits and their lasciviousness. Had Jokai offered Istvan such an insult in civilian life, it would have started a brawl if not a clan feud. But the sergeant was Istvan’s superior—thus his effective clan senior—and so he had to endure.

“I am very sorry, Sergeant,” he said in a voice as empty as his features. “I thought I left everything in good order before I went on my morning’s leave.”

Jokai rolled his eyes. “Sorry doesn’t get the cart out of the mud. Thinking doesn’t get the cart out of the mud, either, especially when you’re not good at it—and you’re not. A week’s labor policing up the dragon pens might do a better job of keeping your tiny little mind on what it’s supposed to be doing. If it doesn’t, we’ll find something really interesting for you.”

“Sergeant!” Istvan said piteously. Jokai had come down on him before, but never like this. Something else had to be irking the sergeant, Istvan thought. Whatever it was, Jokai was taking it out on him. He could, too, because he had the rank.

“You heard me,” he said now. “A week, and thank the stars it isn’t more. A mountain ape could have done a neater job here than you did.”

Arguing more would only have got Istvan in deeper. With a sigh, he went into the barracks to inspect and repair the damage. None of his comrades wanted to look at him. He understood that. If they showed him any sympathy, Sergeant Jokai might land on them with both feet, too.

As Istvan had expected, pulling straight a tiny crease in his blanket took but an instant. Had Jokai been in a decent humor, he wouldn’t even have noticed it. Maybe his emerods were bothering him. He was likely to have big emerods, because he was certainly a big…

Istvan sighed. He could think Sergeant Jokai as much of a billy goat as he liked, and it wouldn’t change a thing. All that mattered was that Jokai was a sergeant and he wasn’t.

Jokai inspected the repairs, then grudgingly nodded. “Now report to Turul. He’d better give you a good character at the end of the week, too, or you’ll wish you’d never been born.” Istvan was already inclining in that direction. Jokai added, “And I’ll have my eye on you, too—don’t think I won’t. Do you understand what I’m telling you, soldier?”

“Aye, Sergeant.” Istvan said the only thing he possibly could. Jokai stomped off. Istvan hoped he would find someone else with whom to be furious. Misery loved company. Besides, he might get stuck with less work that way.

Turul cackled like a laying hen when Istvan came slouching up to him. “I was waiting for Jokai to find somebody to give me a hand with the beasts,” the old dragonkeeper said. “How’d he happen to choose you this time?”

“I was there,” Istvan answered bitterly.

“That’ll do, that’ll do,” Turul said. “Now you’re here. The world won’t end, even if it will stink for a while. And after you’ve been on this duty for a bit, you won’t hardly even notice that.”

“Maybe you don’t,” Istvan said, at which the dragonkeeper laughed again. Istvan didn’t think he’d been joking; after so much time around quicksilver and brimstone, dragon fire and dragon dung, how could Turul have any sense of smell left at all?

At the moment, Istvan’s own sense of smell was working altogether too well to suit him. He and Turul stood down-wind of the pens of the dragon farm. Along with the brimstone reek of their fodder and droppings, he also inhaled the strong reptilian musk that was their own distinctive scent.

Two of the beasts, both big males, began hissing and then shrieking at each other. They reared up and spread their wings, each trying to look as enormous and impressive as he could. The chains that secured them to their iron tethering posts rattled and clanked.

Other dragons started hissing, too. Through the growing commotion, Istvan asked, “Can they break loose? Will they start flaming?” He knew he sounded anxious. He couldn’t help it. From everything he could see, anxiety made perfect sense.

“They’d better not,” Turul said indignantly. He picked up an iron-shod goad, similar to the ones dragonfliers used but with a longer handle, and advanced on the closer male. The dragon swiveled its unlovely head on its snaky neck and stared at him out of cold golden eyes. In spite of his protective clothing, it could have flamed him to a cinder.

It did nothing of the sort. He shouted at it, a shout without words but with strong overtones of the shrieks dragons aimed at one another. The male hissed and flapped its wings; Istvan wondered why the blast of wind from them didn’t knock Turul over.

The old dragonkeeper shouted again. He whacked the dragon on the end of its scaly nose with the goad. And, as a big fierce hound will yield to a pampered lapdog that learned to dominate it when it was a puppy, so the dragon, trained from hatchlinghood to obey puny men, subsided now.

Istvan admired Turul’s nerve without wanting to imitate it. The dragonkeeper picked his way between pens and walloped the other contentious dragon, too. A tiny puff of smoke burst from its mouth. Turul hit it again, harder this time. “Don’t you do that!” he yelled. “Don’t you even think of doing that! You do that when your flier tells you, not any other time. Do you hear me?” Whack!

Evidently, the dragon did hear him. It crouched down, almost like a puppy that knew it had made a mess in the house. Istvan watched in fascination. Turul sent a few more yells at it, these wordless. Only after he was sure he’d established his mastery did he stamp back towards Istvan.

“I didn’t think they were smart enough to obey like that,” Istvan said. “You really made them behave themselves.”

“Smart hasn’t got a whole lot to do with it,” Turul answered. “Dragon’s aren’t very smart. They never were. They never will be. What these bastards are is trained. They’re almost too stupid to be trained, too. If they were, we couldn’t fly ’em at all. We’d have to hunt ’em down and kill ’em, same as we do with any other vermin. Curse me if I don’t sometimes think that’d be for the best.”

“But you’re one of the people who do train them,” Istvan exclaimed. “Would you want to be out of a job?”

“Sometimes,” Turul said, surprising Istvan again. “You put in so much work training dragons, and what do you get back? Shit and fire and screeches, that’s all. If you didn’t train ’em so hard, the cursed things’d eat you. Oh, I’m good at what I do, and I make no bones about it. But when you get right down to it, lad, so what? Even a horse, which isn’t the smartest beast that ever came down the pike, will make friends with you. A dragon? Never. Dragons know about food and they know about the goad, and that’s about it. It wears thin now and again, that it does.”

“What would you do if you weren’t a dragonkeeper?” Istvan asked.

Now Turul stared at him. “Been a while since I thought about that. I don’t rightly know, not now. I expect I’d have ended up a potter or a carpenter or some such thing. I’d be settled down in some little town with a fat wife getting old like me, and children, and maybe—likely—grandchildren by now, too. Don’t have any get I know of, not unless my seed caught in one of the easy women I’ve had down through the years.”

Again, Istvan had got more answer than he’d bargained for. Turul liked to talk, and didn’t look to have had anyone to listen to him for a while. Istvan asked another question: “Would that have been better or worse than what you have now?”

“Blaze, how do I know?” the old dragonkeeper said. “It would have been different, that’s all I can tell you.” The net of wrinkles around his eyes shifted as they narrowed. “No, it’s not all I can tell you. The other thing I can tell you is, there’s lots and lots of dragon dung out there, and it won’t go away by itself. Put on your leathers and get to it.”

“Oh, aye,” Istvan said. “I was just waiting for you to finish up here.” That was close enough to true to keep Turul from calling him on it. With a stifled sigh, he went to work.

Hajjaj stood in front of the royal palace in Bishah, watching a parade of Unkerlanter captives shambling past. The Unkerlanters still wore their rock-gray tunics. They looked astonished that the Zuwayzin had captured them instead of the other way round. Being herded by naked Zuwayzi soldiers seemed as demoralizing to them as being jeered by naked Zuwayzi civilians.

Following the captives came Zuwayzi soldiers marching in neat ranks. The civilians cheered them, a great roar of noise in which Hajjaj delightedly joined. It picked him up and swept him along, as if it were the surf coming up the beach at Cape Hadh Fans, the northernmost spit of land in all Derlavai.

A woman turned to him and said, “They’re pretty ugly, these Unkerlanters. Do they wear clothes because they’re so ugly: to make sure no one can see?”

“No,” the Zuwayzi foreign minister answered. “They wear clothes because it gets very cold in their kingdom.” He knew the Unkerlanters and other folk of Derlavai had more reasons for wearing clothes than the weather, but, despite his study and his experience, those reasons made no sense to him, and surely would not to his countrywoman, either.

As things turned out, he might as well have not bothered speaking. The woman followed her own caravan of thought down its ley line: “And they’re not just ugly, either. They’re pretty puny fighters, too. Everyone was so afraid of them when this war started. I think we can beat them, that’s what I think.”

Plainly, she did not know to whom she was speaking. Hajjaj said only, “May the event prove you right, milady.” He was glad—he was delighted—the Zuwayzin had won their first engagement against King Swemmel’s forces. Unfortunately for him, he knew too much to have an easy time thinking one such victory would translate into a victorious war. Only a few times in his life had he wished to be more ignorant than he was. This was another of those rare occasions.

Another swarm of captives tramped glumly past the palace. People cursed them in Zuwayzi. The older men and women in the crowd, those who’d been to school while Zuwayza remained a province of Unkerlant, cursed the captured soldiers in rock-gray tunics in their own language. The old folks had had Unkerlanter rammed down their throats in the classroom, and plainly enjoyed using what they’d been made to learn.

More Zuwayzi troops followed, these mounted on camels. From the reports that had come into Bishah, the camel riders had played a major part in the victory over Unkerlant. Even in the somewhat cooler south, Zuwayza was a desert country. Camels could cross terrain that defeated horses and unicorns and behemoths. Appearing on the Unkerlanters’ flank at the critical moment, the riders had thrown them first into confusion and then into panic.

Someone tapped Hajjaj on the shoulder. He turned and saw it was one of King Shazli’s servants. Bowing, the man said, “May it please your Excellency, his Majesty would see you in his private reception chamber directly the parade is ended.”

Hajjaj returned the bow. “His Majesty’s wish is my pleasure,” he replied, courteously if not altogether accurately. “I shall attend him at the time named.” The servant nodded and hurried away.

As soon as the last captured egg-tosser had trundled past the palace, Hajjaj ducked inside and made his way through the relatively cool dimness to the chamber where he so often consulted with his sovereign. Shazli awaited him there. So, inevitably, did cakes and tea and wine. Hajjaj enjoyed the rituals and rhythms of his native land; to him, Unkerlanters and Algarvians always moved with unseemly haste. There were times, though, when haste was necessary even if unseemly.

Shazli felt the same way. The king broke off the polite small talk over refreshments as soon as he decently could. “How now, Hajjaj?” he said. “We have given King Swemmel a smart box on the ear. Whatever the Unkerlanters aim to extract from us, we have shown them they will have to pay dearly. We have shown the rest of the world the same thing. May we now hope the rest of the world has noticed?”

“Oh, aye, your Majesty, the rest of the world has noticed,” Hajjaj replied. “I have received messages of congratulations from the ministers of several kingdoms. And each of those messages ends with the warning that it is but a personal note, and not meant to imply any change of policy on the part of the minister’s sovereign.”

“What must we do?” Shazli asked bitterly. “If we march on Cottbus and sack the place, will that get us the aid we need?”

Hajjaj’s voice was dry: “If we march on Cottbus and sack the place, the Unkerlanters will be the ones needing aid. But I do not expect that to happen. I did not expect such good news as we have already had.”

“You are a professional diplomat, and so a professional pessimist,” Shazli said. Hajjaj inclined his head, acknowledging the truth in that. His sovereign went on, “Our officers tell me the Unkerlanters attack with less force than they expected. Maybe they were trying to catch us by surprise. Wherever the truth lies there, they failed, and have paid dearly for failing.”

“Swemmel has a way of striking before he is fully ready,” Hajjaj replied. “It cost him in the war against his twin brother, it made him start the pointless war against Gyongyos, and now it hurts him again.”

“Only against Forthweg did striking soon serve him well,” Shazli said.

“Algarve did most of the hard work against Forthweg,” Hajjaj said. “All Swemmel did there was jump on the carcass and tear off some meat. This is, of course, also what he seeks to do against us.”

“He has paid blood,” Shazli said, sounding fierce as any warrior prince in Zuwayza’s brigand-filled history. “He has paid blood, but has no meat to show for it.”

“Not yet,” Hajjaj said. “As you say, we have blooded one Unkerlanter army. Swemmel will send others after it. We cannot gather so many men together, try as we will.”

“You do not believe we can win?” The king of Zuwayza looked wounded.

“Win?” Hajjaj shook his graying head. “Not if the Unkerlanters persist. If any of your officers should tell you otherwise, tell him in return that he has smoked too much hashish. My hope, your Majesty, is that we can hurt the Unkerlanters enough to keep more of what is ours than they demand, and not to let them gobble us down, as they did before. Even that, I judge, will not be easy, for has not King Swemmel shouted he aims to rule in Bishah?”

“The generals do indeed speak of victory,” Shazli said.

Hajjaj bowed in his seat. “You are the king. You are the ruler. You are the one to decide whom to believe. If my record over the years has caused you to lose faith in me, you have but to say the word. At my age, I shall be glad to lay down the burdens of my office and retire to my home, my wives, my children, and my grandchildren. My fate is in your hands, as is the kingdom’s.”

No matter what he said, he did not want to retire. But he did not want King Shazli carried away by dreams of glory, either. Threatening to resign was the best way Hajjaj knew to gain his attention. If the ploy failed—then it failed, that was all. Shazli was a young man. Dreams of glory took root in him more readily than in his foreign minister. To Hajjaj’s way of thinking, that was why the kingdom had a foreign minister. Of course, Shazli might think otherwise.

“Stay by my side,” Shazli said, and Hajjaj inclined his head in obedience—and to keep from showing the relief he felt. The king went on, “I shall hope my generals are right, and shall bid them fight as fiercely and cleverly as they can. If the time comes when they can fight no more, I shall rely on you to make the best terms with Unkerlant you may. Does that suit you?”

“Your Majesty, it does,” Hajjaj said. “And I, for my part, shall hope the officers are right and I wrong. I am not so rash as to reckon myself infallible. If the Unkerlanters make enough mistakes, we may indeed emerge victorious.”

“May it be so,” King Shazli said, and gently clapped his hands in the Zuwayzi gesture of dismissal. Hajjaj rose, bowed, and left the palace. When he was sure no one could see him, he let out a long sigh. The king still had confidence in him. Without that, he was nothing—or nothing more than the retired diplomat he had said he might want to become. He shook his head. Whom else could King Shazli find to do such a good job of lying for the kingdom?

One of the privileges the foreign minister enjoyed was a carried at his beck and call. Hajjaj availed himself of that privilege now. “Be so good as to take me home,” he told the driver, who doffed his broad-brimmed hat in token of obedience.

Hajjaj’s home lay on the side of a hill, to catch the cooling breezes. Bishah had few cooling breezes to catch, but they did blow in spring and fall. Like many houses in the capital, his was built of golden sandstone. Its wings rambled over a good stretch of the hillside, with gardens among them. Most of the plants were native to Zuwayza, and not extravagant of water.

The majordomo bowed when Hajjaj went inside. Tewfik had been a family retainer longer than Hajjaj had been alive; he was well up into his eighties, bent and wrinkled and slow, but with wits and tongue still unimpaired. “Everyone’s still going mad with celebrating, eh, lad?” he croaked.

He was the only man alive who called Hajjaj lad. “Even so,” the foreign minister said. “We have won a victory, after all.”

Tewfik grunted. “It won’t last. Nothing ever lasts.” If anything refuted that, it was himself. He went on, “You’ll want to see the lady Kolthoum, then.” It was not a question. Tewfik did not need to make it a question. He knew his master.

And Hajjaj nodded. “Aye,” he said, and followed the majordomo. Kolthoum was his first wife, the only person in the world who knew him better than Tewfik. He’d wed Hassila twenty years later, to cement a clan tie. Lalla was a recent amusement. One day before too long, he’d have to decide whether she’d grown too expensive to be amusing any more.

For now, though, Kolthoum. She was embroidering with one of Hassila’s daughters when Tewfik led Hajjaj into the room. One look at her husband’s face and she told the girl, “Run along, Jamila. I’ll show you more about that stitch later. Right now, your father needs to talk with me. Tewfik—”

“I shall fetch refreshments directly, senior wife,” the majordomo said.

“Thank you, Tewfik.” Kolthoum had never been a great beauty, and had put on flesh as she aged. But men paid attention to her because of her voice, and also because she made it very plain that she paid attention to them. As soon as Tewfik shuffled away, she said, “It’s not as good as the crystal makes it sound, is it?”

“When is anything ever as good as the crystal makes it sound?” Hajjaj returned. His senior wife laughed. He went on, “You aren’t the only one who thinks it is, though, and you have friends in high places.” He told her about his conversation with King Shazli, and about what he’d had to do; when speaking with his wife, he did not need to wait through the ritual of tea and wine and cakes.

“A good thing he didn’t take you up on it!” Kolthoum said indignantly. “What would you do, underfoot here all day? And what would we do, with you underfoot here all day?”

Hajjaj laughed and kissed her on the cheek. “Powers above be praised that I have a wife who truly understands me.”

“Well, of course,” Kolthoum said.

Fernao had visited Yanina a couple of times before what news sheets in Setubal were calling the Derlavaian War broke out. Unless his memory had slipped, Patras, the capital, hadn’t been so frantic then. Yaninans were frantic—or, at least, they looked that way to foreigners—but they’d seemed less on edge then.

Of course, he thought, being a small kingdom sandwiched between Algarve and Unkerlant went a long way toward helping to make a folk frantic. Having King Penda of Forthweg cooped up somewhere in the royal palace couldn’t have helped matters, either, not with King Swemmel breathing down King Tsavellas’s neck to get his hands on Penda.

And so broadsheets sprouted on every wall. Fernao couldn’t read them; the Yaninans used a script all their own—as much to be difficult as for any other reason, as far as the Lagoan mage was concerned. But they were full of pictures of soldiers and dragons and red ink and the punctuation marks for excitement and urgency that a lot of scripts shared. If they didn’t mean something like LOOK OUT! WE’RE GOING TO BE IN A WAR!—if they didn’t mean something like that, Fernao understood nothing of symbols.

Two Yaninans were quarreling on the plank sidewalk in front of the doorway to the shop Fernao wanted to enter. They were going at it hammer and tongs, getting madder by the minute. In Fernao’s ears, Yaninan sounded like wine pouring out of a jug too fast, glug, glug, glug. He knew only a handful of phrases of it; it wasn’t a tongue closely related to any other.

A crowd gathered. Arguing and watching arguments seemed to be the Yaninan national sports. Men in tunics with puffy sleeves and tights and women with kerchiefs on their heads egged on the two combatants. At last, one of the skinny, swarthy men grabbed the other’s bushy side whiskers and yanked. With a shriek, the second man hit the first in the belly. They grabbed each other and rolled into the street, clawing and gouging and cursing. The crowd surged after them.

With a sigh of relief, Fernao slid through the now vacant doorway of the gourmet-foods shop. Varvakis supplied King Tsavellas with delicacies; selling him a shipment of smoked Lagoan trout gave Fernao an innocuous reason for coming to Yanina. The foodseller spoke fluent Algarvian, for which Fernao gave thanks. “Just another day,” the mage remarked, pointing to the commotion outside.

“Oh, indeed,” Varvakis answered. He was a short, bald man with a big black mustache and the hairiest ears Fernao had ever seen. Fernao’s irony went past him; as far as he was concerned, it was just another day. Patras was like that.

Fernao glanced around the shop. Varvakis did business with the whole world. Jars of Algarvian liver paste stood beside hams and sausages from Valmiera, Jelgavan wines next to Unkerlanter apricot brandy, Kuusaman lobsters and oysters by chewy strips of dried conch from Zuwayza, mild red peppers from Gyongyos alongside fiery ones out of tropic Siaulia. The mage pointed to some large brown dried leaves he didn’t recognize. “What are those?”

“I just got them in, as a matter of fact,” Varvakis answered. “They’re from one of the islands of the north, I forget which one. The natives crumble them in a pipe and smoke them like hashish. But they speed you up instead of slowing you down, if you know what I mean.”

“That might be interesting,” Fernao said. “But now—” Before he could get down to business, a plump woman with a distinct mustache walked in. Varvakis fawned on her. They walked over to a bin of prunes and had a long discussion of which Fernao followed not a word. The woman finally condescended to buy a few ounces’ worth. Varvakis gave her a couple of coppers in change with the air of a man conferring a kingdom-saving loan upon his sovereign. Fernao let out a muffled snort. Even more than Algarvians, Yaninans overacted.

“But now—” Varvakis said when the plump woman had left. Yaninans also had—and needed—a gift for picking up the threads of interrupted conversation. “But now, my friend, I have, or think I have, good news for you. A steward of my acquaintance tells me that—” He bowed himself double when a man came in and went over to examine the lobsters. At the prices he was charging for them, only a rich customer could have afforded any. Fernao quietly fumed till the transaction was done.

“A steward of your acquaintance tells you what?” the mage asked when Varvakis remembered he was there—he was learning to handle multiple interrupted conversations, too, although not to enjoy them. In some exasperation, he added, “Could you let a clerk handle people till we’re done here?”

“Oh, very well.” The fancy grocer sounded testy. “But customers want to see me. They come to deal with me.” He puffed out his chest with pride—and with air, which he used to shout, “Gyzis!” The clerk emerged from the back room, wearing a leather apron over a Yaninan-style puffy-sleeved tunic. Grudgingly, Varvakis put him in charge of the front of the shop and took Fernao into the back room.

More delicacies lined the shelves there, some in jars, others kept fresh in rest crates. “About this steward—” Fernao prompted.

“Aye, aye, of course.” Varvakis’s eyes flashed. “Do you take me for a halfwit? For a price, he says, he can get you in to see King Penda—maybe Penda can moan that he’s pining for smoked trout. What you do once you see Penda, I know nothing about. I wish to know nothing about it.”

He held an arm in front of his head, so that his sleeve drooped down and covered his eyes.

“I understand that,” Fernao said patiently. “Money shouldn’t be any trouble.” By all the signs, Shelomith had money coming out of his ears. He’d given Fernao a goodly sum, and he’d given Varvakis a goodly sum, too: Varvakis did not strike the mage as a man who would be very cooperative without a well-greased palm.

He proved that again, saying, “What I give to Cossos does not come from my fee. It will be redeemed.”

“I agree,” Fernao said at once. Why not? He wasn’t spending his own money. “Set up the meeting. Pay whatever you have to pay. We will reimburse you.”

Varvakis dipped his head in agreement. “Go, then. Take yourself out of here. We should not be seen together. When the meeting is arranged, you will hear from me. You will also hear how much you owe. You will pay before you see Cossos.”

Was that the edge of a threat? Probably. Varvakis could pocket the money and let Fernao walk into a trap. For that matter, he could pocket it and set up a trap for Fernao. The unpleasant possibilities were almost endless.

Back at the nondescript—indeed, dingy—hostel where he and Fernao were staying, Shelomith waxed enthusiastic. “This is just the chance we need!” he said, clapping Fernao on the back. “I knew that, sooner or later, one of my contacts would survey a ley line to his Majesty for us.”

Fernao mentally substituted I hoped for I knew. Aloud, he said, “Whatever this Cossos wants, he won’t work cheap.” Shelomith only shrugged. They were staying at a hostel less than of the finest to keep from drawing notice to themselves. Shelomith had plenty of gold—just how much, Fernao didn’t know. Plenty for all ordinary and most extraordinary purposes, that was certain.

And so, with Varvakis along as a go-between, Fernao approached King Tsavellas’s palace a couple of days later. Yaninan architecture ran to tall, thin watchtowers and to onion domes, all very exotic to a practical Lagoan. The guards at the entrance wore tights with red and white stripes and red pompoms on their shoes, but looked tough and determined despite the absurd costume. Recognizing Varvakis, they bowed in greeting, and accepted Fernao because he accompanied the purveyor of fancy foods.

Paintings on the walls showed Yaninan kings with odd domed crowns; long somber faces; and robes so thick with gold and silver threads, they had to be almost too heavy to wear. Other paintings celebrated the triumphs of Yaninan arms. Judging by those paintings, Yanina had never lost a battle, let alone a war. Judging by the map, those paintings didn’t tell the whole story.

“We can talk here,” Cossos said, escorting Fernao and Varvakis into a small chamber. Like Varvakis, he spoke good Algarvian. The Yaninans had learned a great deal from their eastern neighbors. Not all the lessons had been pleasant.

Varvakis said, “The two of you talk. What you talk about, I don’t want to hear. If I don’t hear it, I don’t have to tell lies about it.” He bowed first to Fernao, then to Cossos, and departed before either of them could say a word.

“No stones to that man,” Cossos remarked, tossing his head in a Yaninan gesture of scorn. He was about forty-five, wiry, shrewd-looking, with a nose like a swordblade. “Now, my friend, what can I do for you?”

“I doubt I am your friend,” Fernao said. “If all goes well, I may be your benefactor, though.”

“That will do well enough,” Cossos said briskly. “I ask you once again: what can I do for you?”

Fernao hesitated. Here was where the jaws of the trap might close on him. If someone besides Cossos was listening… If that was so, Fernao might find out more about the dark places of Yanina than he ever wanted to know. He could not sense anyone listening, but he could not gauge whether Yaninan wizards were masking a spy from his powers, either.

But he had not come here to be cautious. Taking a deep breath, he said, “I would like half an hour alone with Penda of Forthweg, with no one to know I have come to see him. I also require your studied forgetfulness that you ever arranged such an appointment for me.”

“Studied forgetfulness, eh?” Cossos bared his teeth in what was almost, but not quite, a smile of genuine amusement. “Aye, I can see how you would. Well, I can manage that. In fact, I’d better, or my head would answer it, after the other. But it’ll cost you.” He named a sum in Yaninan lepta.

After Fernao converted it into Lagoan sceptres, he whistled softly.

Cossos did not think small. But Shelomith had gold aplenty. “Agreed,” the mage said, and Cossos blinked, evidently having expected him to haggle. Fernao added, “I will take any oath you like that I mean Penda no harm.”

Cossos shrugged. “It’d cost you less if you did mean him harm,” he said. “King Tsavellas would just as soon see him dead. Then he wouldn’t have to worry about him any more. Bring me the money and—”

“I’ll bring you the first half,” Fernao broke in. “The other half comes afterwards, in case you’d just as soon see me dead.” Cossos bared his teeth. Fernao stood firm against all his complaints, saying, “You need a reason not to betray me.” In the end, grumbling, the steward gave in.

Well pleased with himself, Fernao headed back to the hostel. Shelomith would pay without blinking; he was sure of that. He was less sure he could walk out of the palace with Penda and with no one the wiser, but he thought so. Lagoan mages knew more than those in this benighted corner of the world. He’d already had a couple of good ideas, and more would come to him.

He rounded the last corner and stopped dead. Green-uniformed constables surrounded the hostel like ants at an outdoor feast. A couple of them carried a body out on a litter. Fernao knew it would be Shelomith’s before he got close enough to recognize it, and it was. The constables were laughing and joking, as if they’d found treasure. They probably had found treasure—Shelomith’s treasure. Fernao gulped. Now all he had was the money in his own pouch, and he was alone and friendless in a foreign town.