Jaws of Darkness (18 page)

“Powers below eat you,” Ealstan whispered. He clenched his fist till his nails bit into the palm of his hand,
I
will
try. And I will get her out, too.

Mechanically, he worked through the day, as he’d worked through every day since coming home to find Vanai vanished. At last, quitting time came. He hurried out of Pybba’s establishment and onto the streets of Eoforwic.

He didn’t go straight home. He saw no point in going straight home. Without Vanai there, his flat was only a place to eat and sleep. He didn’t want to spend time there, not any more. Spending time there reminded him of what he was missing, and that hurt too much to bear.

Instead, as he often did these days, he hurried to the edge of the Kaunian district. Prominently posted signs outside it declared that any Forthwegians caught inside the district would be blazed without warning, THUS WE THWART THE KAUNIANS’ VILE SORCERIES, the signs proclaimed. THEY SEEK TO CONCEAL THEIR EVIL, BUT WE SHALL NOT LET THEM MASQUERADE AS DECENT PEOPLE.

As Forthwegians,
was what that meant. Most of the guards patrolling the edge of the quarter were Forthwegians themselves; Pybba had been right about that. He’d also been right that they seemed enthusiastic about their work. Did that make them decent people? Ealstan couldn’t see it.

One of the guards saw him. The fellow swung his stick Ealstan’s way, not quite pointing it at him but ready to do just that. “You keep sniffing around here,” the guard said. “I catch you again, you’ll be sorry. You got that?”

“Aye,” Ealstan said, and beat a retreat. He cursed and kicked at pebbles all the way back to his fiat, wishing each one of them were the guard’s face. How could he get into the Kaunian quarter to bring Vanai out when his own countrymen were so determined to keep her and all the other blonds in there till the Algarvians needed them?

Once he got home, he ate bread and olive oil and almonds and a chunk of smoked pork, washing them down with red wine. He hadn’t bothered fixing himself anything fancier than that since the redheads had seized Vanai. He probably would have botched things anyhow. He’d never had to learn to cook for himself.

She’s going to have a baby,
he thought as he washed his few dishes.
Don’t the Algarvians care?
Unfortunately, he knew the answer to that only too well.

He thought about pouring himself more wine, about drowning his worries in it. But then he shook his head, as if someone had suggested the idea to him out loud. As far as a lot of Kaunians were concerned, Forthwegians were a bunch of drunks.
I
can’t afford to get drunk now. If I’m drunk, I know I won’t come up with any way to get my wife free.

The only trouble with that was, even sober he couldn’t find any way to get Vanai free. He’d tried and tried, and had no luck. He wandered out of the kitchen and into the front room. Like the bedroom, it had several cheap bookcases filled with secondhand books. Back before Vanai had come up with the spell that let her look like a Forthwegian, she’d had to stay in the flat all the time, with words on paper her only escape from boredom.

Ealstan’s eye fell on the slim book called
You Too Can Be a Mage.
He scowled at it. “Miserable, useless thing,” he said. Vanai had tried to use a charm in it to make herself look like a Forthwegian. The one time she cast that spell, all she’d accomplished was the opposite of what she’d intended: for a little while, she’d made Ealstan look like a Kaunian.

Fortunately, she’d figured out how to reverse that. But then she’d had to take apart the spell in
You Too Can Be a Mage,
see where the bumbling author must have mistranslated from classical Kaunian into Forthwegian, and reconstruct what the original Kaunian had been. That gave her a spell she could really use, not one that offered hope and then immediately betrayed it.

Ealstan had heard her use the spell dozens of times. With a couple of bits of yarn, he could have cast it himself. But so what? He already looked like a Forthwegian. Turning himself into one wouldn’t do him any good.

He took
You Too Can Be a Mage
off the shelf and found the sorcery Vanai had modified. In its original, unchanged form, it would let him look like a Kaunian. For a moment, excitement blazed in him. That would get him into the Kaunian quarter. It would let him see Vanai. It would let him be with her.

But it wouldn’t let him bring her out. That was what he needed, above all else. Going into the Kaunian district to keep her company was romantically splendid but altogether useless. All it would accomplish, in the long run— maybe in the not-so-long run—was getting both of them sent west.

“That won’t do,” he said, as if someone—someone inside himself, perhaps—had suggested it would. The idea wasn’t for him to die looking like a Kaunian. The idea was for Vanai to live looking like a Forthwegian … or whatever else she had to look like to go on living. Ealstan nodded. He did clearly see what had to be done. He was the practical son of a practical father. Hestan would never have wasted time on a futile romantic gesture, either.

Fair enough,
Ealstan thought.
I
see what doesn‘t work. What does, though?
The Algarvians had set things up so that no Forthwegians could go into the Kaunian quarter and no Kaunians could pass out of it into the rest of Eoforwic—not unless they seized them and took them to the ley-line caravan depot. Their system wasn’t slipshod, as it had been before. These days, they couldn’t afford to waste Kaunians. With the war in Unkerlant not going well, they needed every blond they could catch and hold.

No Forthwegians inside. No Kaunians outside. Ealstan hurled
You Too Can Be a Mage
across the room. He slammed his fist down on the little table in front of the sofa on which he sat. Pain blazed up his arm. That left… nothing.

There has to be something.
He shook his head. He wanted there to be something. That didn’t mean it had to be. How many Kaunians had thought there had to be something? How many of those Kaunians were dead now? Too cursed many. Ealstan knew that.

Wearily, he got to his feet and picked up
You Too Can Be a Mage.
The pages were almost ready to part company with the binding: this wasn’t the first time he or Vanai had flung the book. With a curse, Ealstan put it back on the shelf.

“There has to be something.” He said it aloud, even if he’d already figured out it wasn’t true. The redheads had closed off every possibility involving Forthwegians and Kaunians, and what else was there? “Nothing. Not a stinking thing.” He said that aloud, too, to remind himself not to be a fool. Then he went to bed.

When he woke up, he was smiling. At first, still half asleep, he didn’t understand why. But as full awareness came, the smile only got broader. He knew what he had to do. A moment later, he paused and shook his head. He knew what he had to try. It might not work. If it didn’t work, he was ruined. But if it did, he had a chance.

His breakfast was much the same as his supper had been, only with olives as a relish instead of almonds. He hurried downstairs, hurried out of the block of flats, hurried to the pottery works, hurried into Pybba’s sanctum.

He’d been sure the pottery magnate would be there before him. And he’d been right. Pybba sat behind his desk, sorting through papers and muttering unhappily to himself. He looked up at Ealstan with no great liking. “What do you want?”

Before answering, Ealstan closed the door behind him. Pybba’s eyebrows rose. They rose higher when Ealstan told him exactly what he wanted.

“You’re out of your bloody mind, boy,” the pottery magnate said when he was through.

“Probably,” Ealstan agreed. “Can you get it for me? No—I’m sure you can.
Will you
get it for me?”

“I’d be crazy if I did,” Pybba answered. Ealstan folded his arms across his chest and waited. Pybba said, “Anything goes wrong …” and sliced his thumb across his throat. Ealstan didn’t move. Then Pybba said, “Odds are I’d be well rid of you anyhow,” and Ealstan knew he had won.

Ukmerge had one park—or, at least, Skarnu hadn’t been able to find more than one. In winter, with the weather cold and the grass dead and the trees bare-branched, not so many people came there. He could still walk through it, though, or sit down on one of the benches without drawing notice from the constables, if he came at noon. Even in the wintertime, some workers escaped from the nearby shoe manufactory to eat their dinners in the park.

The air stank of leather. In Ukmerge, the air stank of leather so much that Skarnu had almost stopped noticing it. Almost. He still found himself wrinkling his nose every now and again.

Most of the benches in the park faced a broad expanse of bare ground without trees, without even much in the way of dead grass. “Did something used to be here?” Skarnu asked the underground leader who called himself “Tytuvenai” after his hometown one noontime. “Something worth looking at, I mean?”

“Tytuvenai” nodded. “An arch from the days of the Kaunian Empire. The Algarvians put eggs under it and knocked it down, same as they did with the Column of Victory in Priekule, same as they’ve done all over Valmiera— all over Jelgava, too, if half what we hear from there is true.”

“Powers below eat them,” Skarnu growled. “They’re trying to make us forget our Kaunianity.”

“Aye, no doubt,” “Tytuvenai” said. “They’re trying to make themselves forget it, too—that we were civilized while they were just woodscrawlers. But that’s not why I asked you to meet me here today.”

“No, eh?” Skarnu tried to imagine what the arch had looked like. He had no trouble getting a general idea; he’d seen plenty of imperial monuments in Priekule and elsewhere. But he didn’t know what this one had been for, what reliefs and statuary and inscriptions it had borne. He wouldn’t be able to find out now, either. Nor would anyone else. That growl still in his voice, he said, “Maybe it should have been.”

“Maybe.” “Tytuvenai” didn’t sound convinced. He explained why: “One of these days, when we have time, we’ll worry about arches and columns and tombs. We don’t have that kind of time now. We’ve got to worry about putting the Algarvians in tombs, and keeping them from putting any more of us into them. Isn’t that more important than old marble and granite?”

“I suppose so,” Skarnu said grudgingly. “It’s more urgent, anyhow. Whether urgent is the same thing as important is something we can argue about another day.”

“It’s something we’d better argue about another day,” “Tytuvenai” told him. “I called you here to ask if you were ready to get back to work.”

“Ah,” Skarnu said. That certainly was more urgent than marble. As his comrade had done, he got straight down to business: “Here in Ukmerge? What have you got in mind, planting eggs inside the shoe manufactories?”

“You laugh,” “Tytuvenai” said, and he was smiling himself. “If you knew how many shoes this town’s made for Mezentio’s men, you’d laugh out of the other side of your mouth, believe you me you would. It’d be a shrewd blow against the Algarvians. If we can bring it off, it
will
be a shrewd blow against the Algarvians. But it isn’t what we have in mind for you.”

“What
do
you have in mind for me?” Skarnu knew he sounded relieved. The shoe manufactories, the whole town of Ukmerge, oppressed him almost as badly as they did Merkela. He would have loved to see the manufactories go up in smoke, but he didn’t want to have anything to do with them himself.

“You’ll know, better than most, how the Algarvians will bring Kaunians from Forthweg through Valmiera down to the coast of the Strait when they want to strike a sorcerous blow against Lagoas or Kuusamo,” “Tytuvenai” said.

Skarnu’s answering nod was grim. “Aye, I know about that. I’d better. I sabotaged one of those ley-line caravans before it could get where it was going, and a lot of those Kaunians escaped before the redheads got the chance to sacrifice them.” He spoke with more than a little pride.

“Tytuvenai” nodded, too. “Aye, I’d heard that. And when you find a Valmieran who’s disappeared, a Valmieran who’s got ‘Night and Fog’ scrawled on his doorway, he’s off to be sacrificed, too. The Algarvians want it to seem like a mystery, but that’s what happens.”

“Is it?” Skarnu said, and the other underground leader nodded again. Skarnu went on. “I didn’t know that, but I’d be lying if I said I was surprised. You still haven’t told me what it’s got to do with me, though, or what you want me to do about it.”

“I’m coming to that,” “Tytuvenai” said. “Not so long ago, in spite of everything we could do, the redheads got a couple of caravanloads of Kaunians from Forthweg down to the coast, out about as far east as they could go. It’s pretty plain they were aiming their sacrifice at Kuusamo, not Lagoas. And they made the cursed sacrifice, and they stole the Kaunians’ life energy, and they used it to power their stinking sorcery, and … something went wrong.”

“Good!” Skarnu exclaimed. “What happened? Did one of their mages botch the spell, so that it came down on their own heads? By the powers above, that’d be sweet—and fitting, too.”

But now “Tytuvenai” shook his head. “That was our first guess. It doesn’t seem to be so, though, not from the way the Algarvians have been running around down there by the sea like so many ants whose anthill just got kicked. No, what it looks like is, they made the sacrifice—made the murders—and cast the spell, and everything went just the way it was supposed to … except that the Kuusamans somehow turned the spell around and made it land on the redheads who’d cast it: either that, or they had a counterspell waiting that was even more potent.”

“How could they?” Skarnu asked. Then, one obvious—and dreadful— possibility occurred to him. “Are they sacrificing people for the sake of their life energy, too, the way the Unkerlanters are doing?”

“No.” “Tytuvenai” spoke with great certainty. “They
aren’t
doing that, powers above be praised. If they were, we’d know about it. The mages say they can feel those sacrifices, and they haven’t felt anything like that out of Kuusamo. But the Kuusamans threw back whatever Mezentio’s men sent them, and the Algarvians are jumping out of their kilts trying to figure out how.”