Harry Turtledove - Jaws of Darkness

“Go ahead and try,” Pybba said. “Most of the time, your old man’d be right. But they’ve tightened up about the blonds. They need ‘em too bad to want to turn any more of’em loose.” He shrugged. “It’s a sign they’re in trouble. If you think that breaks my heart, you’re daft.”

He had a point there, too. Ealstan didn’t want to admit it, not when Pybba was talking about Vanai. “But-” he began.

“Shut up,” Pybba said flatly. “I’ve listened for as long as I’m going to listen. Get your arse back to work. What you try by yourself, you try, that’s all. But if anything goes wrong, you can bet I’ll kill you before the stinking redheads get the chance to squeeze you. You know too bloody much.”

“I don’t know enough to do what I need to do,” Ealstan said, though that wasn’t what Pybba meant.

“You didn’t know enough to keep from getting the hots for a blond girl,” the pottery magnate told him, though that wasn’t what he’d meant before, either. Pybba jerked a thumb at the door that led out of his inner office. “Go on. Get out of here. I haven’t got the time to waste on you, and you haven’t got the time to waste, with all the work piled on your desk.”

If Ealstan said he was caught up on his work, Pybba would just give him more. He knew that. He had no choice but to leave. He slammed the door behind him. Pybba only laughed. Plenty of people slammed the door coming out of his office. It was usually a sign he’d got his way.

“Not this time,” Ealstan muttered. A couple of people in the outer office glanced at him, but not with any enormous surprise. Plenty of people muttered to themselves coming out of Pybba’s office, too.

To make things worse, one of the first items Ealstan had to enter in Pybba’s ledgers was the payment the Algarvians had made for another large shipment of Style Seventeen sugar bowls. The potter magnate made plenty of money from the redheads-money he turned around and used against them. But would he do anything for Vanai? Ealstan shook his head. What you try by yourself, you try, that’s all.

“Powers below eat you,” Ealstan whispered. He clenched his fist till his nails bit into the palm of his hand, I willtry. And I will get her out, too.

Mechanically, he worked through the day, as he’d worked through every day since coming home to find Vanai vanished. At last, quitting time came. He hurried out of Pybba’s establishment and onto the streets of Eoforwic.

He didn’t go straight home. He saw no point in going straight home. Without Vanai there, his flat was only a place to eat and sleep. He didn’t want to spend time there, not any more. Spending time there reminded him of what he was missing, and that hurt too much to bear.

Instead, as he often did these days, he hurried to the edge of the Kaunian district. Prominently posted signs outside it declared that any Forthwegians caught inside the district would be blazed without warning, thus we THWART THE KAUNIANS’ VILE SORCERIES, the signs proclaimed. THEY SEEK TO

CONCEAL THEIR EVIL, BUT WE SHALL NOT LET THEM MASQUERADE AS DECENT PEOPLE.

As Forthwegians, was what that meant. Most of the guards patrolling the edge of the quarter were Forthwegians themselves; Pybba had been right about that. He’d also been right that they seemed enthusiastic about their work. Did that make them decent people? Ealstan couldn’t see it.

One of the guards saw him. The fellow swung his stick Ealstan’s way, not quite pointing it at him but ready to do just that. “You keep sniffing around here,” the guard said. “I catch you again, you’ll be sorry. You got that?”

“Aye,” Ealstan said, and beat a retreat. He cursed and kicked at pebbles all the way back to his fiat, wishing each one of them were the guard’s face. How could he get into the Kaunian quarter to bring Vanai out when his own countrymen were so determined to keep her and all the other blonds in there till the Algarvians needed them?

Once he got home, he ate bread and olive oil and almonds and a chunk of smoked pork, washing them down with red wine. He hadn’t bothered fixing himself anything fancier than that since the redheads had seized Vanai. He probably would have botched things anyhow. He’d never had to learn to cook for himself.

She’s going to have a baby, he thought as he washed his few dishes. Don’t the Algarvians care? Unfortunately, he knew the answer to that only too well.

He thought about pouring himself more wine, about drowning his worries in it. But then he shook his head, as if someone had suggested the idea to him out loud. As far as a lot of Kaunians were concerned, Forthwegians were a bunch of drunks. Ican’t afford to get drunk now. If I’m drunk, I know I won’t come up with any way to get my wife free.

The only trouble with that was, even sober he couldn’t find any way to get Vanai free. He’d tried and tried, and had no luck. He wandered out of the kitchen and into the front room. Like the bedroom, it had several cheap bookcases filled with secondhand books. Back before Vanai had come up with the spell that let her look like a Forthwegian, she’d had to stay in the flat all the time, with words on paper her only escape from boredom.

Ealstan’s eye fell on the slim book calledYou Too Can Be a Mage. He scowled at it. “Miserable, useless thing,” he said. Vanai had tried to use a charm in it to make herself look like a Forthwegian. The one time she cast that spell, all she’d accomplished was the opposite of what she’d intended: for a little while, she’d made Ealstan look like a Kaunian.

Fortunately, she’d figured out how to reverse that. But then she’d had to take apart the spell inYou Too Can Be a Mage, see where the bumbling author must have mistranslated from classical Kaunian into Forthwegian, and reconstruct what the original Kaunian had been. That gave her a spell she could really use, not one that offered hope and then immediately betrayed it.

Ealstan had heard her use the spell dozens of times. With a couple of bits of yarn, he could have cast it himself. But so what? He already looked like a Forthwegian. Turning himself into one wouldn’t do him any good.

He tookYou Too Can Be a Mage off the shelf and found the sorcery Vanai had modified. In its original, unchanged form, it would let him look like a Kaunian. For a moment, excitement blazed in him. That would get him into the Kaunian quarter. It would let him see Vanai. It would let him be with her.

But it wouldn’t let him bring her out. That was what he needed, above all else. Going into the Kaunian district to keep her company was romantically splendid but altogether useless. All it would accomplish, in the long run- maybe in the not-so-long run-was getting both of them sent west.

“That won’t do,” he said, as if someone-someone inside himself, perhaps-had suggested it would. The idea wasn’t for him to die looking like a Kaunian. The idea was for Vanai to live looking like a Forthwegian… or whatever else she had to look like to go on living. Ealstan nodded. He did clearly see what had to be done. He was the practical son of a practical father. Hestan would never have wasted time on a futile romantic gesture, either.

Fair enough, Ealstan thought. Isee what doesn‘t work. What does, though? The Algarvians had set things up so that no Forthwegians could go into the Kaunian quarter and no Kaunians could pass out of it into the rest of Eoforwic-not unless they seized them and took them to the ley-line caravan depot. Their system wasn’t slipshod, as it had been before. These days, they couldn’t afford to waste Kaunians. With the war in Unkerlant not going well, they needed every blond they could catch and hold.

No Forthwegians inside. No Kaunians outside. Ealstan hurledYou Too Can Be a Mage across the room. He slammed his fist down on the little table in front of the sofa on which he sat. Pain blazed up his arm. That left… nothing.