Jaws of Darkness (94 page)

Istvan guessed—and it was only a guess—he fell into an exhausted sleep somewhere around midnight. He knew he hadn’t been asleep very long before getting jolted awake by a short, sharp earthquake. He dove under his bed, as he would have done back in his home valley, and hoped the roof wouldn’t come down on his head.

Although Kun came from Gyorvar, he knew enough to dive under his cot, too; most of Gyongyos was earthquake country. Through the roar of the ground and the shudder of the infirmary all around them, he shouted, “This isn’t just a regular earthquake.”

“So what?” Istvan shouted back. “That doesn’t mean it can’t kill us.” Kun didn’t answer that. Istvan concluded that, for once, he’d out-argued his clever comrade.

Even after the ground stopped shaking, rending and tearing noises went on and on, most of them from outside the captives’ camp. Kun stayed right where he was. Istvan started to come out, but seeing Kun on his belly made him decide not going anywhere might be a good idea. Kun said, “Well, they managed to get the spell to work, no doubt about it.”

“So they did,” Istvan said. “Now, what have they done with it? If they’ve done enough …”
If they’ve done enough, maybe I should have let them cut my throat. Maybe the stars will turn away from my spirit and leave it in eternal darkness. Am I accursed for cowardice?

Kun said, “We won’t find out till morning at the earliest.” If he felt the least bit guilty about remaining alive where his comrades had perished, he showed no sign that Istvan could see.

And a Gyongyosian captive in the next chamber of the infirmary proved him wrong a moment later, calling, “By the stars, half the walls have fallen down!”

“We could escape!” Istvan exclaimed.

“Go ahead,” Kun said. “If you want to skulk through the woods up on the slopes of Mount Sorong till the Kuusamans hunt you down with dogs, go right ahead. Me, I don’t see much point to it. If I thought we could get back to an island we still held, or even one where we were still fighting, that’d be different. As things are …” He shook his head. “No, thanks.”

That made more sense than Istvan wished it would have. Some of his countrymen thought otherwise. Outside the infirmary, booted feet pounded across dirt toward what had been the palisade. A Kuusaman shouted in bad Gyongyosian: “To halt! To halt or to blaze!” Those feet kept running. A moment later, a shriek rang out, and then another one. After that, Istvan heard no more running feet inside the captives’ camp.

And then, a few minutes later—after he and Kun had cautiously emerged from their shelter—he did. All the shouting this time was in Kuusaman, which he didn’t understand. “The slanteyes will have found the bodies,” Kun said.

“Do you know that, or are you just guessing?” Istvan asked. It did strike him as a good guess.

“I can understand some of what they’re saying,” Kun answered. “Not a lot—Kuusaman is a peculiar language, if anyone wants to know what I think: much worse than Unkerlanter—but enough.”

All Istvan had ever learned of either were such phrases as,
Hands high!
and
Come out of there!
“I’ll take your word for it,” he said.

A Kuusaman guard charged into their chamber, stick at the ready. He looked at them, saw they were where they were supposed to be and not making trouble, and relaxed a little. Sounding innocent, Kun asked, “What happened?”

“Magic,” the guard answered. “Bad magic. Many to be dead.” His Gyongyosian was halting but understandable. “To kill themselves to make magic. Bad. Very bad.” Shaking his head, he backed out of the room.

Istvan sniffed. “I smell smoke.”

“Aye, something’s burning,” Kun agreed. He sniffed, too. “Not close, I don’t think. Nothing we have to worry about.” He paused, then went on, “That guard was right, you know. It
was
bad magic, and I don’t care that our allies used it first.”

“Neither do I,” Istvan said, and did his best to believe he was telling the truth.

When the sun rose, he peered eagerly out the window. Sure enough, most of the walls were down, but the Kuusamans had posted an armed man every ten feet or so to prevent escapes. The ley-line depot was also wrecked, and the smoke, he found, came from the direction of the port the Kuusamans had built: he could see as much through the gaps in what had been the palisade. But he could also see that the Kuusamans remained in firm control of the island of Obuda, regardless of what Frigyes and Borsos and the redheads and—most important—Szonyi and the other Gyongyosians who’d laid down their lives had done.

“It was a waste of magic,” he said, and would have felt vindicated if he hadn’t felt so bad.

“Halt!” Garivald called. “What are you doing?” Seeing any movement was enough to make him swing his stick toward it.

What he saw in the bridgehead by Eoforwic wasn’t an Algarvian soldier, but a gray-bearded Forthwegian with a stooped back. When the old man smiled a placating smile, he showed a mouth full of bad teeth. “Nothing, sir,” he said. “I’m only … mushrooms.”

Garivald didn’t know the missing word, but had no trouble figuring out what it meant. Even a Grelzer could follow bits and pieces of Forthwegian, just as the locals could understand a little of what he said. “Come with me,” he commanded. “Come with me to my lieutenant.”

“Why?” the Forthwegian asked. His smile got wider. He said something else. Garivald couldn’t understand it, but could make a good guess—probably something like,
I
wasn‘t doing any harm.

He shrugged. “Come,” he repeated. “Orders. All civilians to be questioned when they’re found where they’re not supposed to be.”

“Only mushrooms,” the Forthwegian said. He held up his basket, then held it out to Garivald. “I’ll give them to you.”

“No.” Garivald liked mushrooms, but not so much as the locals did— certainly not enough to let himself be bribed with them. “Come along right now, or you’ll be sorry.”

Muttering under his breath, the old man came. None of what he said sounded like a compliment. As they went deeper into the bridgehead, he spoke a few words Garivald could understand: “Need to piss.”

“Later.” With a stick in his hand, Garivald could afford to be heartless.

But the old man whined, “Need to
piss,”
again with such dramatic urgency that Garivald relented. He pointed to a stout tree somehow still standing despite all the eggs that had landed on the bridgehead.

The old man disappeared behind it. Perhaps a heartbeat slower than it should have, that roused Garivald’s suspicions. “Hey! What are you doing back there?” he barked, and hurried over to find out for himself. The old man wasn’t standing there easing himself. He was loping toward a fallen tree not far away, keeping the still-standing one between himself and where Garivald had been. “Halt!” Garivald shouted again.

The old man ran harder than ever. Nobody, though, nobody could outrun a beam. Garivald’s caught him in the middle of the back just as he was about to dive behind the tree trunk. He shrieked and went over on his face.

He was still moving feebly when Garivald trotted up to him. With a glare, he said something Garivald couldn’t understand: the blood running from his mouth garbled it. Whatever it was, it didn’t sound like Forthwegian. Garivald wished he hadn’t blazed to kill—but that, he’d found, was almost always what a soldier intended to do. He hadn’t thought of doing anything else till much too late.

With a last unintelligible mumble, the old man died. Garivald knew the exact instant life left his body, for his looks changed in that instant. Suddenly, he no longer looked like a Forthwegian, but like an Algarvian who’d let his beard grow out, as Forthwegians were in the habit of doing.

“Magic!” Garivald exclaimed. His hands twisted in the sign Grelzers used when they ran across magecraft where they didn’t expect to. In an abstract way, he admired the redhead’s thoroughgoing imposture. It wasn’t just the beard: the fellow had spoken good, maybe perfect, Forthwegian, and had even acted as if he liked mushrooms, which Mezentio’s men weren’t in the habit of doing.

“What have you got, Corporal?” somebody called from behind Garivald: an Unkerlanter.
At least, I think he’s an Unkerlanter,
Garivald thought dizzily. Nothing in the world seemed so certain as it had a moment before.

“What have I got?” he echoed. “I’ve got a spy, that’s what. Go fetch Lieutenant Andelot right away. He needs to see this, and to hear about it, too.” The Unkerlanter soldier’s eyes widened. He took off at a run. Garivald was only a corporal, but common soldiers obeyed him as if he were Marshal Rathar. Of course, he had to obey sergeants and real officers the same way, while Rathar had to obey only the king, with everyone else in Unkerlant obeying him.
The marshal has it easy,
Garivald thought.

Andelot came trotting back with the trooper. “A spy?” he said, and stared down at the dead Algarvian. “How in blazes did he get so far inside our lines, Fariulf?”

“Because he looked just like a fornicating Forthwegian till I blazed him, sir,” Garivald answered, and explained what had happened.

“I’ve heard of such sorcery,” Andelot said when he was finished. “Some of the Kaunians here in Forthweg used it to keep the redheads from finding them and killing them. But this is the first time I’ve heard that the Algarvians are using it to try to make themselves look harmless while they come snooping around.”

“I hadn’t heard of it at all, sir,” Garivald said. “Like I told you, I was taking this fellow back to you so you could question him—he wasn’t supposed to be inside the perimeter.”

“He must have thought we had a wizard waiting to test him,” Andelot said. “He panicked, and got himself killed,
and
gave the game away. If he looked like an old Forthwegian, probably I would have just cursed him and told him to make himself scarce. I wouldn’t have guessed he was anything but what he seemed to be.”

“I sure didn’t, sir,” Garivald said. “I was never so surprised in my life as when I saw him change as soon as he died.”

“But you did what you were supposed to do by bringing him in,” Lieutenant Andelot said. “And you did what you were supposed to do by blazing him when he tried to escape. No one could possibly have asked for more from you, Sergeant Fariulf.”

“Serge …” Garivald saluted. “Thank you very much, sir!” He didn’t much want to be promoted. The higher he rose, the more likely people were to take a long look at him, a look he couldn’t afford. But he would also draw long looks if he seemed unhappy about getting a higher rank.

“You’re welcome. You’ve earned it. Eventually, your pay will show that you’re getting it, too.” Andelot made a wry face. The men who gave out money in the Unkerlanter army plainly didn’t think efficiency was anything they had to worry about. “Do you think you could write me a report of everything that happened here, Sergeant?”

“
Write
you a report?” Garivald was more alarmed than he had been when he saw the sorcerously disguised Algarvian trying to get away from him. “Sir, you only showed me my letters a few weeks ago. How in blazes am I supposed to write a report?”

“Just write down what happened, the same as if you were telling it to me,” the company commander answered. “Don’t worry about your spelling, or anything fancy like that. You would be amazed at how many men who went to good schools can’t spell some simple words to keep the powers below from eating them. Believe me, you would. I won’t care about that, I promise. But you are the eyewitness. I want the facts down on paper in your words, not mine.”

“I’ll try, sir,” Garivald said dubiously. He pointed to the Algarvian’s body. “What do we do with that?”

“Leave him here,” Andelot answered. “I’ll want a mage to look at him just the way he is. I don’t know if he’ll be able to learn anything, but I want to give him a chance.”

“All right, sir. That makes sense,” Garivald said.

“Get some paper, Sergeant—I’ll give you some if you can’t find it anywhere else—and go write that report,” Andelot told him. “Get everything down while it’s still fresh in your mind. Don’t leave anything out. Maybe it’ll help if you pretend you’re talking to me instead of writing.”

“Maybe.” Garivald knew he still didn’t sound convinced. He did have to get paper from the lieutenant. Once he got it, he sat apart from his men and started to work. He wrote awkwardly, as a child might have. That annoyed him. It also made his writing harder to read, he knew. He guessed at the spelling of about every other word, and found he had to imitate a conversational style, as Andelot had suggested: it was the only one within his grasp. He couldn’t very well imitate other things he’d read, because he hadn’t read anything to speak of.

At last, after what seemed like forever and was in fact two leaves of paper, he finished. When he brought Lieutenant Andelot the report, he trembled even more than he had when first going into battle. No man relishes the feeling that he’s just made a fool of himself. He had to force his voice to steadiness to say, “Here you are, sir.”

“Thank you, Sergeant,” Andelot replied. His mention of Garivald’s new rank made Garivald feel better and more nervous at the same time. “Let’s see what we’ve got here.” He began to read, then looked up and nodded. “You make your letters very clearly.”

“You’re too kind,” Garivald muttered. He had the feeling that was the kind of compliment you got when no others seem to present themselves.

And, sure enough, Andelot said, “Anyone would know, though, that you haven’t had much in the way of formal schooling.”

“I haven’t had any, sir, and you know it,” Garivald said.

“Well, so I do.” Andelot kept reading. He put down the first leaf and methodically worked his way through the second. When he finished that one, too, he glanced up at the nervously waiting Garivald. He tapped the report with his index finger. “This isn’t at all what I expected, Sergeant.”

“I’m sorry, sir,” Garivald said. “I did the best I could.”

Andelot looked surprised. “Sorry? Powers above, what for? Do you think I meant you did a bad job? … Oh, I see you do. No, no, no, Sergeant—just the opposite, in fact. This is splendid work. Except for the spelling—which you can’t help, of course—I would be sure you’d been writing reports for years.” He shook his head. “No, that’s not true. I would think you’d been writing romances or poems, not reports. Reports aren’t made to be interesting, and most of them aren’t. This, though”—he tapped again—”this makes me feel it happened to me, not to you. Only a real storyteller, a born storyteller, has that gift. You’ve got it.”