Jaws of Darkness (3 page)

Leino’s shiver had nothing to do with the ice on which he trod or with the chilly quartering breeze. Facing the impersonal forces of magecraft was hard enough. They would kill you only if you abused them or made a mistake with them. Dragons, now, dragons might kill you out of malice or simply because they forgot what a command meant. With plum-sized brains, they were better at forgetting than remembering. Leino didn’t think there was enough silver in the world to make him train to become a dragonflier.

But his countryman aboard the descending dragon handled his dangerous job with nonchalant competence. He brought the beast down right where a gang of handlers waited for it. One of the handlers chained the dragon to a stout iron stake fixed deep in the ice. Another tossed it chunks of meat yellow with crushed brimstone or scarlet from a coating of powdered cinnabar, both of which helped the dragon flame strong and far. The dragonflier unhooked himself and went off to report to his superior.

Leino went below, too. The stairways and the corridors were cut from ice. So were all the chambers opening onto the corridors. The doors and their fittings were ordinary doors and fittings, and some of the chambers had wall hangings inside to lend more privacy to what went on in them.

When Leino walked into one of those chambers, the four mages already inside looked up and nodded to him. “Good morning,” Leino said in classical Kaunian. Two of the other wizards were Kuusamans like himself, the other two Lagoans. They shared the great island off the southeastern coast of the Derlavaian mainland, but did not share a language. But every educated man who hailed from eastern Derlavai or the island could use classical Kaunian, the common language of sorcery and scholarship.

“And a good morning to you,” answered his countrywoman Essi. She pointed to a teapot above a spirit stove. “Get yourself a cup, if you care to.”

“I think I will.” Leino smiled. “Being inside all this ice makes me want to have something warm inside myself.”

Essi nodded. “We all feel that way now and again.” Like Leino, like Pekka his wife—of whom she reminded him more than a little—she was short and slim, with golden skin, coarse black hair, and a broad, high-cheekboned face with dark, narrow eyes set at a slant. A steaming mug of tea sat on the table in front of her.

“Aye, so we do.” That was Ramalho, the senior Lagoan mage of the pair here. He’d worked with Leino on the
Habakkuk
down in the land of the Ice People. Lagoans sprang from Algarvic stock: Ramalho was tall and fair and redheaded, though a flattish nose said he might bear a little Kuusaman blood. He went on, “Of course, there is warmth, and then there is warmth.” He took a swig from the flask on his hip. His coppery ponytail bobbed at the base of his neck as he drank. He’d done that down in the austral continent, too, but never to the point where it interfered with his work.

After pouring himself a mug of tea, Leino sweetened it with honey and took a couple of big swallows before it started getting cold. Then he sat down at the place waiting for him at the table. “Shall we begin?” he said.

“We could have begun some little while ago, had you got here on time,” said Xavega, the other Lagoan mage.

“I am so sorry, Mistress,” Leino said, inclining his head to her. “I did not realize you had an urgent engagement elsewhere.”

“Really, Xavega, it was no more than a minute or two,” said Aalbor, the last Kuusaman mage in the chamber. He was in his early forties, a decade or so older than Leino, and was more inclined to be patient than sardonic.

Patience didn’t help here, not least because Xavega had so little herself. She glared first at Leino, then at Aalbor. “I might have known one Kuusaman would stick up for another.”

“Oh, let it be, by the powers above.” That wasn’t Aalbor—it was Ramalho. “Have you never been late in all your born days?”

Xavega glared at him, too. “Things should run properly,” she insisted, by which she no doubt meant,
The way I want them to run.

Leino sighed. He didn’t point that out aloud, and wondered why. Well, actually he didn’t wonder—he knew. He took another sip of tea to make sure the knowledge didn’t show on his face: Xavega was too pretty for him to want to antagonize her too badly. She had hair the color of burnished copper, fine, regular features, large green eyes, and a lush figure that seemed all the more spectacular to him because he was used to the sparer build of Kuusaman women. He was married, aye, and happily so, but he owned an imagination that worked perfectly well.

“Let it lie,” Ramalho repeated, a little more sharply.

“Oh, very well,” Xavega said with poor grace. “Some people, though …”

Now Leino had all he could do not to laugh out loud. Every time Xavega opened her mouth, she showed him how absurd his fantasies were. She was one of those Lagoans with no use at all for their eastern neighbors. Over the years, Lagoas and the land of the Seven Princes had quarreled a fair number of times, as neighboring lands will. When the Derlavaian War broke out, some few Kuusamans had wanted to fight Lagoas and not Algarve.
Fools,
Leino thought.

He stole another glance at Xavega. Odds were she’d never look at him, but he still enjoyed looking at her. It might even have been better that she did despise him. He was in less danger of landing himself in trouble this way.

“Do you suppose we might actually work the magic we all came here to work?” Essi asked.

“Oh, very well,” Aalbor said, imitating Xavega’s petulant tone so closely that Leino, Essi, and Ramalho all laughed. Xavega sent the senior Kuusaman mage a glare more venomous than any she’d given Leino. As for Leino himself, he sighed. However luscious Xavega’s body might be, in getting it one also had to deal with her mind. That came close to making it more trouble than it was worth.

Before the three wizards from Kuusamo began to incant, they joined in a small, not quite sorcerous ritual, reciting, “Before the Kaunians came, we of Kuusamo were here. Before the Lagoans came, we of Kuusamo were here. After the Kaunians departed, we of Kuusamo were here. We of Kuusamo are here. After the Lagoans depart, we of Kuusamo shall be here.”

That little chant was in Kuusaman, not classical Kaunian. Mages from the land of the Seven Princes had prefaced sorcerous operations with it for centuries. Leino had trouble imagining working deliberately planned magic without it.

Ramalho and Xavega knew what it was, of course, even if they didn’t understand it. As he usually did, Ramalho raised an amused eyebrow. Xavega said something in Lagoan. Leino didn’t speak much of the neighboring kingdom’s language, but both the sound of the words and Ramalho’s dismayed expression made him doubt she’d paid Kuusamo a compliment.

Aalbor returned to classical Kaunian: “Let us begin.” All five mages pulled off the amulets they wore and held them in their hands. Leino’s, like those of Essi and Aalbor, was of silver set with moonstones and pearls. Xavega and Ramalho used gold charms with lodestones and amber to feel for and tap the power of the ley lines. Lagoan sorcery was of the Algarvic school, more closely related to that of Sibiu and Algarve itself than to that of Lagoas’ island neighbor.

But the style and substance of the amulets and the charms the mages used to activate them were only means to an end. However much the means differed, they could and did work together toward the same end. As Leino drew sorcerous energy from the ley line and applied it to keeping the
Habakkuk’s
icy structure solid and secure, he felt the energy also flowing into Essi and Aalbor, into Ramalho—aye, and into Xavega, too. They channeled it to the ship, sensing what was, comparing that to the pattern they all held in their minds of what should be, and correcting the discrepancies they found.

They weren’t the only team with such a responsibility. Keeping the
Habakkuk
afloat took a lot of magecraft. Leino shook his head as that thought occurred to him. It wasn’t strictly true. Ice floated. But keeping the
Habakkuk
afloat as something more than a slowly melting lump of ice took a lot of magecraft.

At last, Leino and his comrades looked at one another.
Have we done all that wanted doing?
they asked one another without words.
Have we shored up the ship for another day?
Again without words, they agreed they had.
Will anything go wrong because of something we have failed to do?
That was a clear negative.

Xavega was the first to speak aloud, with unmistakable relief: “We are finished. We have finished.” She pushed back her chair and strode out of the chamber. Almost of their will rather than his, Leino’s eyes followed her. Like other Algarvic peoples, Lagoans wore kilts. Xavega’s showed off quite a lot of elegantly turned leg.

With another sigh, Leino got up, too … and poured himself a fresh cup of tea. It wasn’t what he wanted—well, it wasn’t all of what he wanted—but it would have to do.

Four hundred years before, King Plegmund of Forthweg had been the mightiest monarch in eastern Derlavai. His armies went from triumph to triumph in Algarve to the east and in Unkerlant to the west. Even nowadays, his name was one to conjure with in Forthweg.

And the Algarvians had conjured with it, recruiting Plegmund’s Brigade from Forthwegians who still wanted to go to war despite their kingdom’s defeat. Sidroc wondered what he would be doing if the redheads hadn’t organized the Brigade. Something boring with his father Hengist back in Gromheort, he supposed.

Whatever else he was down here in the Duchy of Grelz in southern Unkerlant, he wasn’t bored. One of the Algarvian officers who led Plegmund’s Brigade blew a piercing blast on his whistle and shouted, “Forward!”—in Algarvian, of course.

Forward Sidroc went, on snowshoes because some of the drifts were higher than his head. His sigh briefly raised a young fogbank around his face. In Gromheort, whole winters would go by without snow on the ground. In Unkerlant, it sometimes seemed a day couldn’t pass without a new blizzard.

“Mezentio!” Sidroc shouted as he slogged forward. “Hurrah for King Mezentio!” He yelled in Algarvian, not Forthwegian. Plegmund’s Brigade might have been named for a Forthwegian king, but it used the occupiers’ language. Yelling in Algarvian also lessened the chances that a redhead would take him for an Unkerlanter and blaze him by mistake. He and his countrymen looked more like the enemy than they resembled their allies and paymasters.

The Unkerlanters holed up in the hamlet ahead didn’t intend to be run out. They had a couple of egg-tossers in there, and hurled death back at the men of Plegmund’s Brigade and the Algarvians with them. The eggs burst when they struck, releasing blasts of sorcerous energy and sending fragments of their metal eggshells whistling through the air like flying scythe blades.

When eggs started bursting close to Sidroc, he flopped down on his belly in the snow. Chunks of sharp metal screeched past above his head. Not far away, somebody shrieked and then started cursing in Forthwegian. Cursing was something not subject to military discipline.

“Urra!” shouted the Unkerlanters in the village. “Swemmel! King Swem-mel! Urra!” Their word for
king
wasn’t much different from Sidroc’s; he understood it. The Unkerlanters sounded raucous and drunk. Sidroc had some spirits in a flask on his belt, too. He wish he were drunk stupid and mean. He didn’t have enough in the flask for that, worse luck.

“Forward!” the Algarvian officer shouted again. “We have to keep moving. We have to drive them back. Herborn
will be
ours again.”

Herborn was the capital of the Duchy of Grelz. Herborn had been the capital of the Algarvian puppet Kingdom of Grelz till Swemmel’s soldiers recaptured it a couple of months before. They’d captured King Raniero, too—the cousin Mezentio had put on the throne of Grelz: captured him and boiled him alive.

“Mezentio!” Sidroc yelled, and got to his feet again.

“Mezentio!” Ceorl snowshoed forward beside him. Like more than a few men who’d joined Plegmund’s Brigade, he’d been a robber, a bandit, before. The Algarvians weren’t fussy about such things, not even a little.

Eggs fell on the village, too, kicking up fountains of snow. Sidroc whooped when some of the thatch-covered roofs caught fire, sending columns of black smoke into the gray sky. Unkerlanter soldiers ran through the streets. They were awkward and bowlegged on their snowshoes, just as Sidroc was on his. He raised his stick to his shoulder, thrust his right index finger out through the open seam in his mitten, and rammed it into the stick’s activation hole. The beam leaped forth from the other end. He hoped it bit an Unkerlanter.

Swemmel’s soldiers were blazing back at the men of Plegmund’s Brigade and the Algarvians, too. Puffs of steam rose from the snow where their beams missed Sidroc and his comrades. The screams that rang out said not all the beams had missed. Sidroc did his best not to think about that, even when a beam zipped past his head so close, he smelled thunderstorms for a moment.

A few inches more to the left, and … Sidroc shook his head.
I’m
not
thinking about that, curse it.

He spied more movement in the village. He raised his stick again, then lowered it, swearing as vilely as he could.

Sergeant Werferth saw that movement, too, and also knew it for what it was. “Behemoths!” he shouted in Algarvian, and followed that with his own foul Forthwegian. Werferth was no youngster looking for adventure like Sidroc, nor a ruffian two jumps ahead of the constables like Ceorl. He’d been a sergeant in the Forthwegian army before the Algarvians smashed it. As far as Sidroc could see, he’d joined Plegmund’s Brigade simply because he liked being a soldier. He would never make officer’s rank, not in the Brigade—he wasn’t an Algarvian. Of course, he wouldn’t have made officer’s rank in the Forthwegian army, either—he wasn’t a nobleman.

But Sidroc didn’t have much time to worry about Werferth. The behemoths, now, they were really something to worry about. They lumbered forward, each one with enormous snowshoes on its feet, each one with a surcoat that made it harder to spot flapping over its chainmail, each one with its great curved horn sheathed in iron to make it all the more sharp and deadly—and each one mounting a crew of armored Unkerlanters who served either a heavy stick or an egg-tosser that made the behemoth deadly far beyond the reach of its horn.