Rulers of the Darkness Read online

  “All right, scum—back you go,” the guard sergeant said when the exercise period was over. Now Talsu stared down at the stone paving blocks so the guards couldn’t see his glare. The Algarvians hadn’t built this prison, or the others much like it scattered over the face of Jelgava—Jelgavan kings had done that, to keep their own subjects in line. But the redheads were perfectly willing to use the prisons—and the guards, as long as they kept their jobs, didn’t care whom they were guarding, or for whom, or why.

  Talsu sat back down on his cot and waited for the bowl of mush that would be dinner. It might even have a couple of bits of salt pork floating in it. Something to look forward to, he thought. The worst part of that was noticing how seriously he meant it.

  But a guard strode up to the cell before dinnertime. “Talsu son of Traku?” he demanded.

  “Aye, sir,” Talsu said.

  The guard made a check on his list. He unlocked the door and pointed a stick at Talsu’s chest. “You will come with me,” he said. “Interrogation.”

  “What about my dinner?” Talsu yelped. He really had been looking forward to it. They wouldn’t save it for him. He knew that all too well. Instead of answering, the guard jerked his stick, as if to say Talsu wouldn’t need to worry about dinner ever again if he didn’t get moving right now. Having no choice, he got moving.

  Even his interrogator was a Jelgavan, a man who wore the uniform of a constabulary captain. He did not invite Talsu to sit down. Indeed, but for his stool and those on which two armed guards perched, the room had nowhere to sit. One of the guards rose and positioned a lamp so it shone straight into Talsu’s face. It was bright enough to make him blink and try to look away.

  “So,” the constabulary officer said. “You are another one who betrayed his lawful sovereign. What have you got to say for yourself?”

  “Nothing, sir,” Talsu answered. “Nothing I could say would get me out of the trouble I’m in, anyhow.”

  “No. There you are wrong,” the interrogator said. “Give us the names of those who plotted with you and things will start looking better for you in short order. You may rest assured of that: I know whereof I speak.”

  “I don’t know any names,” Talsu said, as he had the first time they’d bothered questioning him. “How could I know any names? Nobody did any plotting with me. I was all by myself—and your man got me.” He didn’t try to hide the self-reproach in his voice.

  “You assert, then, that your father knew nothing of your treason.”

  It wasn’t treason, not in Talsu’s eyes. How could turning on the Algarvians be treason for a Jelgavan? It couldn’t. He didn’t think the constable felt that way, though, so all he said was, “No, sir. You ask around in Skrunda. He’s made more clothes for the Algarvians in town than anybody else there.”

  The interrogator didn’t pursue it, from which Talsu concluded he’d already asked around, and had got the same answers Talsu had given. Now he tried a new tack: “You also assert your wife knew nothing of this.”

  “Of course I do,” Talsu exclaimed in alarm he didn’t try to hide. “I never said anything about it to Gailisa. By the powers above, it’s the truth.”

  “And yet, she has plenty of reasons for disliking Algarvians—is that not so?” the interrogator went on. “Is it not so that she saw an Algarvian soldier stab you before you were married?”

  “Aye, that is so.” Talsu admitted what he could hardly deny. “But I never told her about anything. If I had told her about anything, she probably would have wanted to come with me. I didn’t want that to happen.”

  “I see,” the Jelgavan in Algarvian service said in tones suggesting Talsu hadn’t helped himself or Gailisa with that answer. “You are not making this easy. You could, as I have said, if only you would name names.”

  “I haven’t got any names to give you,” Talsu said. “The only name I know is Kugu the silversmith’s, and he’s been on your side all along. I can’t very well get him into trouble, can I?” I would if I could, he thought.

  “Perhaps we can refresh your memory,” his interrogator said. He rang a bell. A couple of more guards strode into the chamber. Without a word, they started working Talsu over. He tried to fight back, but had no luck. One against two was bad odds to begin with, and the fellows with the sticks would have intervened had he got anywhere. He didn’t. The bruisers had learned their trade in a nastier school than he’d known even in the army, and learned it well. They had no trouble battering him into submission.

  When the battering was done, he could hardly see out of one eye. He tasted blood, though no teeth seemed broken. One of his feet throbbed: a guard had stamped down hard on it. His ribs ached. So did his belly.

  Calmly, the interrogator said, “Now, then—who else knew that you were plotting treason against King Mainardo?”

  “No one,” Talsu gasped. “Do you want me to make up names? What good would that do you?”

  “If you want to name some of your friends and neighbors, go ahead,” the interrogator said. “We will haul them in and question them most thoroughly. Here is paper. Here is a pen. Go ahead and write.”

  “But they wouldn’t have done anything,” Talsu said. “I’d just be making it up. You’d know I was just making it up.”

  “Suppose you let us worry about that,” the interrogator said. “Once you make the accusations, things will go much easier for you. We might even think about letting you go.”

  “I don’t understand,” Talsu said, and that was true: he had trouble understanding anything but his own pain. The Jelgavan constabulary captain didn’t answer. He just steepled his fingertips and waited. So did the guards with sticks. So did the bully boys who’d beaten Talsu.

  It would be so easy, Talsu thought. I could give them what they want, and then they wouldn’t hurt me anymore. He started to ask the interrogator to hand him the pen and paper. What happened to the people he might name didn’t seem very important. It would, after all, be happening to someone else.

  But what would happen to him? Nothing? That didn’t seem likely. All at once, he saw the answer with horrid clarity. If he gave the Algarvians—or rather, their watchdog here—a few names, they would want more. After he gave them a first batch, how could he refuse to give them a second, and then a third? How could he refuse them anything after that? He couldn’t. Had Kugu the silversmith started by making up a few names, too? Talsu gathered himself. “There wasn’t anybody else,” he said.

  They beat him again before frog-marching him back to his cell. He’d expected they would. He’d hoped his armor of virtue would make the beating hurt less. It didn’t. And he didn’t get the bowl of mush he’d missed when they took him away. Even so, he slept well that night.

  The blizzard screamed around the hostel in the barren wilderness of southeastern Kuusamo. It left Pekka feeling trapped, almost as if she were in prison. She and her fellow mages had come here so they could experiment without anyone else but a few reindeer noticing. That made good sense; some of the things they were doing would have wrecked good-sized chunks of Yliharma or Kajaani even if they went perfectly. And if some of those experiments escaped control … Pekka’s shiver had nothing to do with the ghastly weather.

  But, while the blizzards raged, Pekka and her colleagues couldn’t experiment at all. If the rats and rabbits they were using froze to death the instant they went out of doors in spite of the best efforts of the secondary sorcerers, they were useless. That limited the amount of work the mages could do.

  When Pekka said as much over supper one evening, Ilmarinen nodded soberly. “We should use Kaunians instead,” he declared. “No one cares whether they live or die, after all: the Algarvians have proved as much.”

  Pekka winced. So did Siuntio and Fernao. That Ilmarinen spoke in classical Kaunian to include Fernao in the conversation only made his irony more savage. After a moment, Siuntio murmured, “If we succeed here, we’ll keep the Algarvians from slaughtering more Kaunians.”

  “Will we? I doubt it.�
� But Ilmarinen checked himself. “Well, maybe a few, and will we also keep Swemmel of Unkerlant from slaughtering his own folk to hold back the Algarvians ? Maybe a few, again. What we will do, if we’re lucky, is win the war this way. It’s not the same thing, and we’d be fools to pretend it is.”

  “Right now, winning the war will do,” Fernao said. “If we do not do that, nothing else matters.”

  Siuntio nodded in mournful agreement. He said, “Even if we do win the war, though, the world will never again be what it was. Too many dreadful things have happened.”

  “It will be worse if we lose,” Pekka said. “Remember Yliharma.” A sorcerous Algarvian attack had destroyed much of the capital of Kuusamo, had slain two of the Seven Princes, and had come too close to killing her and Siuntio and Ilmarinen.

  “Everyone remembers wars.” Siuntio still sounded sad. “Remembering what happened in the last one gives an excuse for fighting the next one.”

  Not even Ilmarinen felt like trying to top that gloomy bit of wisdom. The mages got up from the table and went off to their own chambers as if trying to escape it. But Pekka soon discovered, as she had before, that being alone in her room was anything but an escape.

  Sometimes the mages would stay in the dining hall after supper, arguing about what they had done or what they wanted to do or simply chatting. Not tonight. They drifted apart and went upstairs to their chambers as if sick of one another’s company. There were times when Pekka was sick of her comrades’ company, most often of Ilmarinen’s, then of Fernao’s, and occasionally even of Siuntio’s. Tonight wasn’t one of those angry times. She just didn’t want to talk to anyone.

  Instead, she worked on two letters side by side. One was for her husband, the other for her son. Leino would be able to read his own, of course. Her sister Elimaki, who was taking care of Uto, would surely read aloud most of the one written to him, even though he was learning his letters.

  The letter to Uto went well. Pekka had no trouble writing the things any mother should say to her son. Those were easy, and flowed from her pen as easily as they flowed from her heart. She loved him, she missed him, she hoped he was being a good little boy (with Uto, often a forlorn hope). The words, the thoughts, were simple and straightforward and true.

  Writing to Leino was harder. She loved him and missed him, too, missed him with an ache that sometimes made her empty bed seem the loneliest place in the world. Those things were easy enough to say, even though she knew other eyes than his would also see them: functionaries serving the Seven Princes studied all outgoing correspondence to make sure no secrets were revealed.

  But she wanted to tell her husband more. She couldn’t even name the mages with whom she was working, for fear that knowledge would fall into the Algarvians’ hands and give them clues they shouldn’t have. She had to talk about personalities in indirect terms, a surprisingly difficult exercise. She had to talk about the work in which they were engaged in even more indirect terms. She hadn’t been able to tell Leino all that much about it even when they’d been together. He hadn’t asked, either. He’d known when silence was important, and respected the need for it.

  We’ve had simply appalling weather lately. she wrote. If it were better, we could do more. That seemed safe enough. Most of Kuusamo had appalling weather through most of the winter. Hearing about it wouldn’t tell an Algarvian spy where she was. And bad weather could interfere with any number of things, not all of them things in which a spy would be interested.

  I hope to be able to see you before long. She’d been told she might be able to leave for a little while in the not too indefinite future. But even if she did manage to get away, could Leino escape his training as a proper military mage at the same time? She thought he should have stayed in a sorcerous laboratory, improving the weapons Kuusaman soldiers would take into battle. But the Seven Princes thought otherwise, and their will counted for more than hers.

  Sighing, she stared down at the page. She wanted to tear it up and throw the pieces in the wastebasket. She had to be able to do better than the words she’d put down, the words that seemed so flat, so useless, even so stupid. What would Leino think when he saw them? That he’d married a halfwit?

  He’ll understand, she thought. I’m sure he’s learning plenty of things he can’t tell me, too. Most of her believed that. Just enough had doubts, though, to leave all of her upset and worried.

  She jumped when someone knocked on the door. Springing away from her letters was something of a relief. Even arguing abstruse theoretical calculations with Ilmarinen seemed more appealing than trying to say things she couldn’t say without having them cut out of her letter before Leino ever saw it.

  But when she opened the door, she found Fernao standing there, not Ilmarinen. The Lagoan mage leaned on his stick and had his crutch stuck under his other arm. “I hope I am not disturbing you,” he said in careful classical Kaunian.

  “Not even a little bit,” Pekka said in Kuusaman. She started to repeat that in the scholarly tongue, but Fernao’s nod showed he’d followed her. “Come in,” she went on, in Kaunian now. “Sit down. What can I do for you?”

  “I thank you,” he said, and made his slow way into her chamber. She took a couple of steps back, not only to get out of his way but to keep him from looming over her quite so much: Lagoans were almost uncouthly tall.

  Maybe Fernao sensed what she felt, for he sank onto one of the stools in the room. Or maybe he’s just glad to get off his feet, Pekka thought. Had she been injured as Fernao was, she knew she would have been. She turned the chair on which she’d been sitting to write away from the desk. “Shall I make you some tea?” she asked. She couldn’t be much of a hostess here, but she could do that.

  Fernao shook his head. “No, thank you,” he said. “If you do not mind, I can talk with you without thinking I am once more a student bearding a professor in his den.”

  Pekka laughed. “I often have that feeling myself around Siuntio and Ilmarinen. I think even the Grandmaster of your kingdom’s Guild of Mages would have it around them.”

  “Grandmaster Pinhiero is not the most potent mage ever to come out of our universities,” Fernao said, “but he would speak his mind to anyone, even to King Swemmel of Unkerlant.”

  Lagoans had always had a reputation for speaking their minds, regardless of whether doing so was a good idea. Pekka asked, “Would that make Grandmaster Pinhiero a hero or a fool?”

  “Without a doubt,” Fernao answered. Pekka chewed on that for a little while before deciding it was another joke and laughing again. Fernao continued, “Every time I see how far you Kuusamans have come, it amazes me.”

  “Why is that?” Pekka knew her tone was tart, but couldn’t help it. “Because you Lagoans do not think Kuusamo worth noticing at all most of the time?”

  “That probably has something to do with it,” he said, which caught her by surprise. “We did notice you when it came to declare war against Algarve—I will say that. We would have done it sooner had we not feared you might take Mezentio’s side and assail us from behind.”

  “Ah.” Pekka found herself nodding. “Aye, I knew people who wanted to do exactly that.” She remembered a party at Elimaki’s house. Some of the friends of Elimaki’s husband, Olavin the banker, had been eager to take on Lagoas. Olavin was serving the Seven Princes these days. Pekka suspected most of those friends were doing the same thing.

  “Did you?” Fernao said, and Pekka nodded again. He shrugged. “Well, I can hardly say I am surprised. It would have been … unfortunate had that happened, though.” Even as Pekka wondered how he meant the word, he explained: “Unfortunate for Lagoas, unfortunate for the whole world.”

  “Aye, you are likely to be right.” Pekka glanced over her shoulder at the letters to Leino and Uto, then back to Fernao. “May I ask you something?”

  As if he were a great noble, he inclined his head to her. “Of course.”

  “How do you stand it here, cut off not just from your family but from your kingdom a
s well?”

  Fernao said, “For one thing, I have not got much in the way of family: no wife, no children, and I am not what you would call close to either of my sisters. They never have understood what being a mage means. And, for another, the work we are doing here matters. It matters so much, or may matter so much, I would sooner be here than anywhere else.”

  That was a more thoughtful answer than Pekka had expected. She wondered how long Fernao had been waiting for someone to ask a question like hers. Quite a while, she guessed, which might also be a measure of his loneliness. “Why have you not got a wife?” she asked, and then, realizing she might have gone too far, she quickly added, “You need not answer that.”

  But the Lagoan didn’t take offense. Instead, he started to laugh. “Not because I would rather have a pretty boy, if that is what you mean,” he said. “I like women fine, thank you very much. But I have never found one I liked enough and respected enough to want to marry her.” After a moment, he held up his hand. “I take it back. I have found a couple like that, but they were already other men’s wives.”

  “Oh,” Pekka said, and then, half a beat slower than she might have, “Aye, I can see how that would be hard.” Was he looking at her? She didn’t look over at him, not for a little while. She didn’t want to know.

  “You have things you were doing, I see.” Awkwardly, Fernao levered himself to his feet. “I shall not keep you. May you have a pleasant evening.” He made his slow way to the door.

  “And you,” Pekka said. She had no trouble looking at his back. But, when he had gone, she found she couldn’t continue the letter to Leino. She put it aside, hoping she’d have more luck with it in the morning.

  Ealstan enjoyed walking through the streets of Eoforwic much more these days than he had a few weeks before. True, the Algarvians still occupied what had been the capital of Forthweg. True, King Penda still remained in exile in Lagoas. True, a Kaunian whose sorcerous disguise as a Forthwegian was penetrated still had dreadful things happen to him. And yet …