Jaws of Darkness (36 page)

“That means going into a village,” Obilot said. “Going into a village means getting noticed. And getting noticed means trouble for you. It’s liable to mean trouble for me, too. You’re higher up on the inspectors’ lists, aye, but who’s to say I’m not on ‘em with you? After all, I was fighting against the Algarvians without taking orders from any of King Swemmel’s precious soldiers just the same as you were.”

“Every word of that is true,” Garivald said, “but none of it matters. If we’re going to starve for sure, then we have to take our chances with the villagers and with the inspectors, powers below eat ‘em all. They might recognize us, but they might not, too, and that’s the gamble we’re stuck with.”

He waited for her to tell him he was wrong, and for her to tell him exactly how he was wrong. They’d had this argument several times before. Obilot had always stayed dead set against stirring from this hut in the middle of nowhere. Now …

Now, with a long sigh, she said, “Maybe we do have to try. I still wish we didn’t. For one thing, we haven’t got much money—not enough for an ox, sure as sure.”

“We’ll make some,” Garivald said. “I was doing odd jobs in Tolk before Tantris, curse him, came sniffing around. Chopping wood, mucking out barns—there’s always work people would sooner pay somebody else to do than do inemselves. And you’re a fine hand with a needle. I saw that in the wood, where you had next to nothing to work with. If you have decent cloth, proper thread …”

Obilot sighed again. “All that helps, aye. But do you know what will help even more?”

“Tell me.” Now that Garivald had talked her around, or thought he had, he was more than willing to yield on as many of the little details as he could. Obilot wasn’t pleasant to be around when she was brooding about losing an argument.

“Remembering the names we’ll be using,” she said. Garivald laughed, but it wasn’t really funny. The less his own name was heard these days, the better off he would be. And the same was liable to be true for Obilot as well; without a doubt, she was right about that.

They took such silver as they had and headed for Linnich, the nearest surviving village. It was three or four hours away. Garivald discovered he’d lost the knack for marching. “Not like it was when we’d go out of the woods to pay a call on some village that got too friendly with the redheads,” he remarked as he sat down on a stump to rest.

“No. Not even close.” Obilot sat down beside him. She looked glad to take the weight off her feet, too. Suddenly, though, she snapped her fingers in alarm. “The redheads! We’ve still got some of false King Raniero’s money. If we pass it …” She slashed a finger across her throat.

“Maybe—but maybe not, too,” Garivald answered. “Some people will still take it: some people figure silver is silver. Aye, we have to be careful; I know. I brought it along, but I’ve got it wrapped in a rag so it’s not mixed in with Swemmel’s money.”

Obilot pursed her lips, then nodded. Garivald grinned. He seldom got the chance to feel he was one step ahead of her, and enjoyed it when he did.

Like almost every peasant village in the Duchy of Grelz that Garivald had seen—and he’d seen more villages than he’d imagined he would back in Zossen before the war—Linnich was battered. Neither the Unkerlanters nor the Algarvians had dug in there, or the village wouldn’t hive still stood. But craters showed where eggs had fallen, and ruins or sudden empty places like missing teeth in a jaw marked what had been houses.

A lot of the peasants were already in the fields; it was planting season for them, too. When Garivald walked up to a fellow guiding a plow behind an ox, the other peasant seemed glad enough to stop. He shook his head though, when Garivald asked if anyone had a beast he might sell. “Don’t know about that, stranger,” he said. “Them as still has ‘em left alive are mighty glad to be using ‘em, you hear what I’m saying?”

“I hear,” Garivald answered.
Stranger.
He would have used the word back in Zossen. Then, though, he wouldn’t have known how being on the wrong end of it burned. He let coins jingle. “I can pay.” He didn’t say he couldn’t pay enough. He wouldn’t say anything like that till he had to.

“Like I say, money’s not the only thing going on,” the other peasant told him. Then he snapped his fingers, as if reminding himself of something. “Dagulf s got a mule, though. He’s been hiring it out and drinking up the money he makes. Maybe he’d sell.”

“Dagulf,” Garivald echoed. It wasn’t an unusual name, but… He pointed at the peasant from Linnich. “Is this Dagulf a short, skinny fellow with sort of a sour smile and with a scar on his face?”

“Aye.” The local nodded. “You know him?”

“Never heard of him,” Garivald said solemnly.

The other peasant stared, scratched his head, and at last decided it was a joke and laughed. Then he nodded. “So you know him, do you? He’s some of the riffraff that’s been coming through here ever since the war stirred things up.” That he’d just, in effect, called Garivald and Obilot riffraff, too, never entered his mind. Garivald gave a mental shrug. He’d been called worse than that.

He said, “So Dagulf drinks up his money, does he? Would I find him in the tavern?”

“It’s a good bet.” The man from Linnich flicked his ox’s back with a long springy branch and started it down the furrow. He’d done all the talking he intended to do.

“This Dagulf is from your village?” Obilot asked as she and Garivald started off toward Linnich itself.

“That’s right. He’s a friend of mine.” Garivald checked himself. “He used to be a friend of mine, anyway.”

Obilot thought about that, then nodded. “Do you want him to know you’re still alive? Is it safe for him to know you’re still alive?”

“Before the war, it would have been,” Garivald answered. “Before the war, though, he wouldn’t have spent all his time in the tavern.” But he kept walking toward the village. For one thing, any Unkerlanter man was likely to spend a good deal of time in a tavern. For another …

“It he’s from your village, he’ll know what happened to your family, won’t he?” Obilot said.

“Maybe.” That thought had been uppermost in Garivald’s mind, too. Almost apologetically, he went on, “I do want to find out, you know.”

“Do you? Are you sure?” Obilot’s voice was harsh, her eyes bleak and far away. “Sometimes you’re better off not knowing. Believe me, you are.”

That was as much as she ever said about what had happened to her before she joined Munderic’s band of irregulars. “I want to find out,” Garivald repeated. Obilot only shrugged, as if to say she’d done her best to warn him. By then, they were walking into Linnich. Eyes bright with suspicion, women looked up at them from their vegetable plots. Dogs barked. Garivald stooped and picked up a stone, ready to throw it in case any of the dogs did more than bark. None did. The whole scene achingly reminded him of Zossen; only the faces were different.

He had no trouble finding the tavern. It stood by the village square, and was one of the two biggest buildings in Linnich, the other being the smithy across the square from it. The drunk passed out a few feet from the entrance was another strong clue. Garivald could have seen men drunk into a stupor in Zossen, too.

“Do you want me to go in and try to get the mule?” Obilot asked once more. “That way, he wouldn’t have to see your face.”

Garivald shook his head. “No. It will be all right.” Obilot looked at him, then shrugged and let him walk into the tavern ahead of her.

His eyes needed a moment to adjust to the gloom and to the smoky air— not all the smoke from the hearth went up the chimney. Four or five men and a couple of women looked up from their mugs to give him and Obilot a onceover. Sure enough, one of them was Dagulf.

Garivald walked up to him, hand outstretched. “You recall your old friend Fariulf, don’t you?” He bore down heavily on the false name he was using; he didn’t want his real one blurted out for everybody to hear.

Dagulf had never been a fool. His eyes narrowed now, but then he smiled and nodded. “Fariulf, by the powers above!” he exclaimed. “It’s been awhile. I didn’t know if you were alive or dead.” He pointed to Obilot. “Who’s your friend?”

She answered for herself: “I’m Bringane.”

“Bringane,” he repeated. Waving to the fellow behind the bar, he called, “Spirits for my friends here.” The tapman nodded and waved back. Dagulf eyed Garivald. “I really thought you
were
dead. What do you want?”

As he sank down onto a stool by Dagulf, Garivald answered, “Somebody told me you’ve got a mule you hire out or that you might sell. I could use one.”

“Could you?” Dagulf said. “Ever since I got out of Zossen, that mule’s helped keep me alive. You have a plow?” He took it for granted that Garivald was working an abandoned farm somewhere.

“No, but I can slap something together,” Garivald answered. “I’ve got enough iron to hammer something into a plowshare, or I could have the smith here do a better job for me. The woodwork is just woodwork; I can handle that. But I can’t plant enough ground to get a decent crop without a mule or an ox.”

“I might hire him to you,” Dagulf said. “I won’t sell him. I make more letting him out for a few days at a time.”

He slid silver across the table to the taverner when the man brought mugs for Garivald and Obilot. “Thanks,” Garivald said, and Obilot nodded. After sipping the fiery stuff, Garivald asked, “What
did
happen in Zossen?”

He phrased it no more directly than that, but Dagulf understood what he meant. “The redheads dug in, that’s what. They had a few behemoths and maybe a company’s worth of men, and they made a stand. I was lucky: I was out chopping wood when our heroes hit ‘em.” He sounded patriotic, not sarcastic—that was the safe way to sound. “I had the mule along to haul the wood back, but I got the blazes out of there instead. From what I hear, nothing’s left of the old village.”

“That’s true. I’ve seen it.” Garivald gulped his spirits and then slammed a fist down on the table. Obilot set a hand on his shoulder. He wanted to shake her off, but he didn’t. Scowling at Dagulf, he said, “Curse it, I was hoping you knew more.”

“Sorry, Gar—
Fanuli,”
Dagulf said. “I don’t think the news is good, though.” Garivald scowled again, both at the slip and because he didn’t think the news was good, either. Unperturbed, Dagulf went on, “Now, do you want to hire the mule or not?”

They haggled for a while. Garivald let Obilot take most of the burden. She was better at dickering than he was, anyhow. And his heart wasn’t in the haggle. To have his hopes of learning what had happened to his wife and children raised, raised and then not fulfilled … it was very hard indeed. Obilot got a bargain with Dagulf. Garivald knew he should have been pleased, but all he wanted to do was drink himself blind.

But that is not possible!” the Kuusaman mage said in classical Kaunian rather less fluent than Fernao’s. Plainly, he wasn’t so used to speaking the international language of sorcery and scholarship. A practical mage out in the provinces wouldn’t have to use it very often. Gathering himself—and perhaps also gathering the vocabulary he needed—he went on, “It violates every known law of magecraft.”

Six or eight other Kuusaman wizards in the class of twenty nodded in solemn agreement. Most of the rest looked as if they agreed, too, even if they were too polite to say so. A class full of Lagoan mages hearing similar things would have been an argument. A class full of Algarvian mages hearing similar things would have been a riot.

Fernao was glad, then—mostly glad, at any rate—to be teaching stolid Kuusamans. Smiling, he said, “Some of the laws now known are not the ones you learned when you were training.” Since gray streaked the Kuusaman’s hair, he might well have trained back before the Six Years’ War.

He looked indignant nonetheless. “If what you say is true, why has none of this been published? It is too important to be kept a secret.”

“No, sir.” Fernao shook his head. “It is too important to be published. What would the Algarvians have done, had they got their hands on a couple of journal articles?”

To his astonishment, the Kuusaman got to his feet and bowed. “You are correct. I was mistaken. Please go on.” He sat down again.

I
would never have heard that from Lagoans,
Fernao thought.
No one has heard that from Algarvians since the beginning of the world. They’re always right. If you don’t believe it, just ask them.

He brought himself back to the business at hand. “Gentlemen, ladies”— not quite half the sorcerers in the class were women—”you do not need to learn much of the theory behind what you will be doing. In fact, if would be better if you did not, because what you do not know, you cannot tell the enemy if captured. You will need to know how to cast the spells as given to you, how to protect yourself from the things likeliest to go wrong, and how to teach these same things to classes of your own. You are the first cadre. Many more will come after you.”

Some of the mages dutifully wrote that in their notebooks. The notebooks stayed in the lecture hall—a part of the hostel of whose existence Fernao had been ignorant till the classes began, and one that showed good planning on the Kuusamans’ part. No one took anything in writing out of that hall.

“We shall try small demonstrations today,” Fernao continued. “Even the smallest will show the large amounts of sorcerous energy that can be liberated by exploiting the inverse relationship between the laws of similarity and contagion.”

He went through the chant and passes in the demonstration, working slowly and carefully to show the students how the spell operated and also to make sure he didn’t slip up. Even with this toned-down spell, a mistake could be dangerous.

A glass beaker of water suddenly began to boil. A couple of the Kuusamans applauded. Fernao felt he ought to bow, as if he were a stage conjurer rather than a real wizard. Instead, he said, “As you see, I produced the desired result with much less effort than I would have had to use with more conventional sorcery. Now each of you will try it. Kaleva, please come forward.”

As the woman rose and walked up behind the counter, Fernao set up the sorcerous materials she would need, and also put a fresh beaker of water on the stand for her. She went through the spell competently enough, and set the water boiling about as fast as he had. “Very good,” she said. “However strange the theory, it
does
work.”