Harry Turtledove - Jaws of Darkness

“I look forward to having them down, too,” Skarnu said. “But I also look forward to knocking them down. It won’t be the same if a pack of foreigners does it all for us.”

“I don’t care how it happens,” Merkela said. “I just want it to happen.”

“I want to have something to do with it,” Skarnu said stubbornly. “I want to march into Priekule at the head of an army and go back to my mansion and clean out my sister and every sign the Algarvians were ever there. I want to do that myself, with my countrymen. I don’t want a bunch of foreigners telling me, ‘All right, little boy, it’s safe to go home now.’ “

“Priekule. Mansion.” Merkela spoke the words as if they were foreign to her. And so they were, even if they were in Valmieran. Skarnu had discovered that the capital and what went on there didn’t seem real to a lot of Valmierans from the countryside. As for the other… Merkela murmured, “Most of the time, I forget what blood you bear.”

Before the war, being a marquis had mattered more to him than almost anything else. Now he said, “Our son bears my blood, and he bears yours, too. And when the war is over, I intend to wed you and set you up in that mansion… unless you decide you’d sooner dwell somewhere else. In that case, wherever it is, I’ll live there with you.”

She shook her head. “It’s like something out of a fairy tale. Nobles don’t come to farms and want to marry peasant girls, not in real life they don’t.”

“No, they don’t get that lucky,” Skarnu said, which brought a smile to her face. He went on, “Having the Algarvians swallow up the whole kingdom isn’t something out of a fairy tale, either. It’s out of a nightmare.”

Merkela nodded. Before she could say anything, someone knocked on the door. At a good many times over the past couple of years, that would have brought panic to Skarnu. No more. Merkela walked to the door and opened it. “Raunu!” she exclaimed, real pleasure in her voice. “Come in. Let me pour you a mug of ale.”

“Don’t mind if I do,” Skarnu’s veteran sergeant said. “Don’t mind if you do, either.” He looked down at Gedominu, who had drool on his chin-he was cutting a tooth. “He’s just about big enough to march.”

“Seems that way,” Skarnu agreed. Merkela came back with not one but three mugs of ale on a wooden tray, and a pitcher from which to refill them, too. Skarnu eyed Raunu. “But you didn’t come here to tell me what a big boy I’ve got, not unless I miss my guess.”

“No.” Raunu took a pull at his ale, then nodded to Merkela. “Now this is your own brewing-I can taste it.”

“Aye.” She looked pleased, but not for long. “Skarnu’s right. You wouldn’t be here if you didn’t need him to do something. A while ago, you would have needed us both to do something. That’s not so simple anymore.” Her glance toward Gedominu was fond, but also wistful. She missed the days when she could easily go forth against the redheads, too.

“Well, I’m always glad to come here,” Raunu said, “but you’re right-it’s got to do with business.” He nodded to Skarnu. “We’ve had some practice wrecking the redheads’ ley-line caravans, you and me-and you to, milady,” he added, as if Merkela were already a marchioness. “But you’ve got other things on your mind for a spell.” She nodded. Her eye kept going back to Gedominu.

“Where?” Skarnu asked. “What needs doing?”

“Up in the north,” Raunu answered. “They’ll be moving a good many caravans before long, using the ley lines through that rugged country to get soldiers to Jelgava by the shortest way. It’d be nice if some of ‘em didn’t get there.”

“It would be nice if a lot of them didn’t get there,” Skarnu said, and both Raunu and Merkela muttered agreement. He added, “Fitting if we give them a hard time up in the north, too.” That puzzled his lover and the sergeant. He didn’t try to explain, but still thought he was right. Four years earlier, Mezentio’s men had moved footsoldiers and, more important still, masses of behemoths through country Valmiera had thought too rough for such maneuvers. The Valmierans, full occupied with another Algarvian attack down in the south, hadn’t noticed the stroke till it had already slipped between their ribs and into their heart. Revenge, even a small measure of revenge, would be sweet.

“You’ll come, then?” Raunu asked. He meant it seriously; the underground wasn’t like the army, even if most of its members had been soldiers.

“Of course I will,” Skarnu answered.

As he’d gone down to the southern seacoast, so he rode the ley-line caravan from the little town of Ramygala up to the wooded hills and gullies of northern Valmiera. He felt like a stranger there, half a foreigner, wary of opening his mouth: the local dialect was a long way from the brand of Valmieran he spoke. “Don’t worry about it,” Raunu told him when he worried out loud. “The cursed Algarvians can’t tell the difference between how they talk here and the right way.”

“No, the Algarvians can’t,” Skarnu agreed, “but there are bound to be traitors here. There are traitors everywhere.” If he’d seen one thing in occupied Valmiera, that was it.

“Some of them have had accidents,” was all Raunu said to that. “The rest of the whoresons… they’re thoughtful, you might say.” Skarnu hoped he was right.

Right or wrong, they both had work to do. The locals had got them papers showing they were foresters, and other papers-which they were not to display-that gave them enough jargon to pass as the real article unless questioned by someone who really knew what he was talking about. With luck, that wouldn’t happen. The papers gave them the excuse they needed for going out into the woods.

As Skarnu tramped those hills and valleys, as he eyed the narrow, winding roads-in the stretches of the landscape where there were any roads at all-he grew to admire more and more what the Algarvians had accomplished by making a thrust through such terrain. “No matter how much you hate them, you can’t ignore them,” he told Raunu.

“No. They’re too dangerous for that-like any other snakes,” Raunu said. Skarnu laughed and nodded, though the veteran underofficer hadn’t been joking.

In all that contorted country, the only straight lines were the ley lines.

The world’s energy grid ran where it would. Once mages learned to exploit the ley lines, men had to hack down trees if caravans were to glide where they needed to go. And so many long, narrow stretches of cleared ground marked the ley lines’ paths through the woods. Algarvian patrols marched along the ley lines, too. The redheads were no fools; they knew the underground would try to disrupt their movements.

But knowing and being able to do anything about it were liable to prove two different things. Here as elsewhere in Valmiera, as elsewhere throughout the east of Derlavai, Mezentio’s men were stretched too thin to do everything that wanted doing. They couldn’t patrol all the ley lines all the time, or even most of them most of the time.

“I think this seems a likely spot,” Skarnu said at last. “The ley-line caravan will be just coming over that rise”-he pointed-”and won’t have the time to stop even if the conductor should notice anything wrong about the line. What say you?”

Raunu considered briefly. “Aye, it suits me.”

“Good enough, then. See how simple it is?” Skarnu suspected-indeed, he was sure-Raunu could have found the spot as readily as he had. But he was here. He took a crystal from his trouser pocket, activated it, and spoke briefly, using code phrases to give the bearings of the stretch of ley line they’d chosen while not calling it that. Then he and Raunu left in a hurry. He didn’t know the redheads had overheard him, but had to act as if they were tracking every emanation around.