Authors: Harry Turtledove
“Ah, but if you doubt everything, how can I know how much weight to place on any particular doubt?” Shazli asked with a smile.
Hajjaj smiled, too. “There you have me, I must admit.”
“Explain your doubts here, then, your Excellency, if you would be so kind,” Shazli said. “That we want, that we are entitled to, revenge on Unkerlant cannot be doubted. What better way to get it than by making common cause with Algarve? The Algarvians have proved willing—nay, eager—to make common cause with us.”
“Oh, indeed,” Hajjaj said. “Count Balastro has been accommodating in every possible way. And why not? We serve his interests, as he serves ours.”
“Well, then!” Shazli said, for all the world as if Hajjaj had just completed a geometric proof on the blackboard.
But Hajjaj knew all too well that kingdoms did not behave so neatly as circles and triangles and trapezoids. “Algarve is a great kingdom,” he said, “but Unkerlant is also a great kingdom. Zuwayza is not a great kingdom, nor shall it ever be. If the small involve themselves in the quarrels of the great, they may be sorry afterwards.”
“We are already sorry. Unkerlant has made us sorry,” Shazli said. “Do you deny this? Can you deny it?”
“I do not. I cannot,” Hajjaj said. “Indeed, I was glad to begin conversations with the Algarvians, as your Majesty surely knows.”
“Well, then,” Shazli said again. This time, he amplified it: “How can we go wrong here, Hajjaj? Algarve does not border us. She can make no demands upon us, as Unkerlant can and does. All she can do is help us get our own back, and get our own back we shall.”
“She will be able to make demands afterwards, for we shall owe her a debt,” Hajjaj replied. “She will remember. Great kingdoms always do.”
“Here, I think, you start at shadows,” the king said. “Perhaps she can make demands. How can she enforce them?”
“How many dragons did Algarve hurl against Valmiera?” Hajjaj asked. “How many against Jelgava? They could fly against us, too. How do you propose to stand against them, your Majesty, come the evil day?”
“If you would have us withdraw from the alliance we have made, say so now and say so plainly.” Shazli spoke with a hint of anger in his voice.
“I would not,” Hajjaj said with a sigh. “But neither am I certain all will go as well as we hope. I have lived a long time. I have seen that things rarely go as well as people hope they will.”
“We shall take back the land Swemmel stole from us,” Shazli said. “Perhaps we shall even take more besides. Past that, I am willing to let the future fend for itself.”
It was a good answer. It was, at the same time, a young man’s answer. Hajjaj, who would probably see far less of the future unfold than would his sovereign, worried about it far more. “Indeed, I think we shall take it,” he said. “I only hope we shall keep it.”
Shazli leaned forward, staring at him in surprise. “How can we fail? The only way I can imagine our failing would be for Unkerlant to defeat Algarve. How likely do you suppose that to be?” He threw back his head and laughed, which gave Hajjaj his view on the subject.
“Not very likely, else I would have warned you not to follow this course,” the Zuwayzi foreign minister said. “But how likely would we have reckoned it that Algarve could overthrow Valmiera and Jelgava in bare weeks apiece?”
“All the more reason to think the redheads will give King Swemmel the thrashing he deserves,” Shazli said, not quite taking Hajjaj’s point. “Efficiency!” His lip curled. “Not in Unkerlant. Will you tell me otherwise?” He looked a challenge at Hajjaj.
“I will not. I cannot,” Hajjaj said. Shazli nodded, an I-told-you-so look in his eye. Then he nodded again, in a different way. Hajjaj rose, knowing he had been dismissed. “We have only to wait for spring, to see what comes then. May it prove good for the kingdom, as I hope with all my heart it does.”
When he got back to his own office, he found his secretary arguing with a fellow who wore several amulets and lockets that clanked together whenever he moved. “No,” Shaddad was saying when Hajjaj walked in, “that is
not
acceptable. His Excellency would—” He turned. “Oh. Here you are, your Excellency. Powers above be praised! This bungler proposes to undertake sorcery in and around your office.”
“I am not a bungler, or I hope I am not.” The fellow with the amulets bowed, which produced more clinkings and clankings. “I am Mithqal, a second-rank mage, with the honor of serving in his Majesty’s army. My orders, which your secretary now has, request and require me to do my best to learn whether any other mages have been sorcerously spying on you.”
“Let me see these orders,” Hajjaj said, and put on his spectacles to read them. When he was through, he looked over the tops of the spectacles at Shaddad. “Captain Mithqal appears to be within his rights.”
“Bah!” his secretary said. “For all we know, he just wants to snoop about. Why, for all we know, he could be—”
“Do not say something you may regret.” Hajjaj did not like to bring Shaddad up so sharply, but his secretary sometimes got an exaggerated notion of his own importance. And having a mage, especially a mage who was also a soldier, angry at Shaddad would not do the secretary any good. Hajjaj went on, “Use the crystal to consult with this man’s superiors. If they have indeed sent him here, well and good. If not, then by all means raise the alarm.”
“I tried to suggest this very course to him, but he would not hear me,” Mithqal said.
Shaddad sniffed. “As if I should take seriously any mountebank who sets himself before me.” He bowed to Hajjaj. “Very well, your Excellency. Since
you
require it of me—” He turned his back on Mithqal to use the crystal, bending low over it to speak in a quiet voice. After a moment, his shoulders slumped further. When he turned around again, he looked as embarrassed as Hajjaj had ever seen him. “My apologies, Captain Mithqal. I seem to have been mistaken.”
“May I now proceed?” Mithqal asked, a sardonic edge to his voice. He was looking at Hajjaj, who nodded. Shaddad nodded, too, which the mage affected not to notice. Hajjaj bit the inside of his lip to keep from smiling.
Shaddad sidled up to the Zuwayzi foreign minister. “I must confess, I am mortified,” he murmured.
“We are all foolish now and then,” Hajjaj said. What he was thinking was,
Well you might be,
but that would only have flustered Shaddad further.
Mithqal said, “Your Excellency”—he kept right on ignoring Shaddad—“I aim to check two things: first, to learn whether anyone is spying on your office from a distance; and second, to learn whether anything has been secreted hereabouts to send word or your doings to whoever may be listening: a clandestine crystal, perhaps, though that is not the only way to achieve the effect.”
“No one could have placed such a thing here,” Shaddad said. “Had someone brought such an object during a meeting with his Excellency, it would have been noted, and we do have sorcerous wards in place to keep out unwelcome guests when his Excellency and I are not present.”
“What one mage can do, another can undo,” Mithqal said. “That is as basic a law of sorcery as those of similarity and contagion, though I own that many mages are loth to admit as much.”
He took from the large pouch he wore on his belt a candle of black beeswax, which he set on Shaddad’s desk, and used ordinary flint and steel to light it. The glow that came from it, though, was anything but ordinary. Hajjaj rubbed at his eyes. Not only could he see Shaddad and Mithqal, but also, in an odd sort of way, into them and through them as well. He could also see into and through Shaddad’s desk.
Mithqal took out a six-sided crystal. “The iris stone,” he said, and held it up. Rainbows appeared on all the walls of the office. “Thus you note its chiefest property.” He might have been delivering a lecture. “Should the rainbows be agitated, that will show the influence of some other magic.”
He carried the iris stone all around the desk. The rainbows shifted and swirled, but he accepted that, so Hajjaj supposed he was seeking some larger derangement. And, sure enough, Mithqal put down the crystal with every sign of satisfaction. He blew out the candle, carried it into Hajjaj’s chambers, and lighted it again, repeating the ritual he had used in the outer office.
Once more, the rainbows swirled on the walls as Mithqal carried the iris stone around the candle. Once more, that was the only thing that happened. The mage nodded to Hajjaj, “Your Excellency, as best I can tell, no one is spying on you from without.”
“I am glad to hear it,” Hajjaj said.
“I could have told you as much, your Excellency,” Shaddad said. Hajjaj glanced at him. He coughed a couple of times. “Er—not with such certainty, perhaps.”
“Indeed,” Mithqal said, and mercifully let it go at that. “Now to see if anyone has been listening from within.” He drew a couple of withered objects from his pouch, one small and looking rather like a bean, the other resembling a thick, curled brown leaf, but hairy on one side. “I have the heart of a weasel, with which to seek out treachery, and also the ear of an ass, to signify treachery in respect to hearing.” As an aside, he remarked, “Perhaps I might have done without the latter.” Shaddad suffered another coughing fit.
Holding the heart in one hand and the ass’ ear in the other, Mithqal began to chant. The ear started writhing and twitching, as it would have done were it attached to a living animal. Shaddad jumped; he might never have seen magecraft before. Hajjaj watched in the fascination he gave any workman manifestly good at his craft. “Something?” he asked in a low voice, so as not to disturb the mage.
“Something, aye,” Mithqal breathed. He stalked out to the outer office, in the direction toward which the ear pointed. Hajjaj followed. So did Shaddad, his eyes round and white and staring in his dark face. Guided by the ass’ ear, Mithqal moved toward the secretary’s desk.
Shaddad cried out in despair and fled.
Mithqal threw down his sorcerous implements and pursued. He was younger and lighter on his feet than Hajjaj’s secretary. After a moment,
Hajjaj heard more shouts, and then a thud. He sank to a cushion and buried his face in his hands. He had trusted Shaddad, and here was his trust repaid with treason. But anguish was only half of what he felt. The other half was fear. How long had Shaddad been suborned, and how much had he passed to Unkerlant?
The secretary cried out once more, this time in pain. Hajjaj winced. Those questions would have answers, and soon. Shaddad would not like giving them. That no longer mattered. He would give them whether he liked to or not.
“What one mage can do, another can undo.” Pekka quoted the adage loud. She preferred talking to herself to listening to the icy winds from the south howling around her Kajaani City College office. The only trouble was, she was lying to herself. Her laugh came bitter. “What one mage can do, even the same mage can’t undo—or figure out how she did it in the first place.”
Her only consolation was that she wasn’t the only baffled theoretical sorcerer in Kuusamo. Raahe and Alkio hadn’t been able to discover where the missing acorn from the pair in her experiment had gone. Neither had Piilis. Neither had Master Siuntio, and neither had Ilmarinen, so far as she knew, though he was worse than any of her other colleagues at telling everyone what he was up to.
Pekka looked at her latest stab at an explanation. It wasn’t going anywhere. She could feel it wouldn’t go anywhere, and had to fight back the strong impulse to crumple up the sheet of paper and throw it away. She’d tried explanations based on the assumption that the laws of similarity and contagion had a direct relationship. They’d failed. She’d also tried explanations based on the assumption that the laws of similarity and contagion had no direct relationship. They’d failed, too.
That left … “Nothing,” Pekka said. “Nothing, curse it, nothing, nothing, nothing.”
Again, she resisted the urge to tear up her latest set of calculations. She wished she’d never got involved in theoretical sorcery in the first place. Her husband, a practical man if ever there was one, kept making progress in useful applications of magecraft that strengthened Kuusamo and delighted the Seven Princes.
“I didn’t want to be practical,” Pekka muttered. “I wanted to get down to the bottom of things and understand them, so that other people could be practical with them. And what happened? I’ve gotten down to the bottom of things, I don’t understand them, and other people are doing just fine being practical without them.”
Temptation, twice resisted, came back stronger than ever and won. She made a very small ball of her latest set of calculations and threw the ball toward the wastepaper basket. She missed. Shrugging, she got up and went over to retrieve the wadded-up sheets. She’d missed with the calculations. She supposed it made sense that she should miss in getting rid of them, too.
She’d just dropped the ball of paper into the wire basket—it had plenty of company there—when someone knocked on the door. She frowned. It was early for Leino to have finished his latest round of experiments.
Of course he works late,
Pekka thought.
His work is actually getting somewhere.
And that had to be the most peculiar knock she’d ever heard. It sounded more as if someone had kicked the door, but much too high up to make that likely, either.
Frowning still, she pulled the door open—and jumped back in alarm. Of all the things she’d expected to see in the hallway, a man standing on his head was the last. “Powers above!” she burst out, all the while thinking,
Well, that explains how he knocked on the door.
“And a fine good day to you, Mistress Pekka,” the man said with a grin his being upside down tried to transmogrify into a frown.
Only then did Pekka realize she knew him. “Master Ilmarinen!” she exclaimed. “What are you doing there?”
“Waiting for you to open the door,” the elderly theoretical sorcerer replied. “Wondering if I was going to fall over before you did open the door.” With a spryness that gave that the lie, he went from upside down to right side up. His face, which had been quite red, resumed its natural color.