Harry Turtledove - Jaws of Darkness

There has to be something. He shook his head. He wanted there to be something. That didn’t mean it had to be. How many Kaunians had thought there had to be something? How many of those Kaunians were dead now? Too cursed many. Ealstan knew that.

Wearily, he got to his feet and picked upYou Too Can Be a Mage. The pages were almost ready to part company with the binding: this wasn’t the first time he or Vanai had flung the book. With a curse, Ealstan put it back on the shelf.

“There has to be something.” He said it aloud, even if he’d already figured out it wasn’t true. The redheads had closed off every possibility involving Forthwegians and Kaunians, and what else was there? “Nothing. Not a stinking thing.” He said that aloud, too, to remind himself not to be a fool. Then he went to bed.

When he woke up, he was smiling. At first, still half asleep, he didn’t understand why. But as full awareness came, the smile only got broader. He knew what he had to do. A moment later, he paused and shook his head. He knew what he had to try. It might not work. If it didn’t work, he was ruined. But if it did, he had a chance.

His breakfast was much the same as his supper had been, only with olives as a relish instead of almonds. He hurried downstairs, hurried out of the block of flats, hurried to the pottery works, hurried into Pybba’s sanctum.

He’d been sure the pottery magnate would be there before him. And he’d been right. Pybba sat behind his desk, sorting through papers and muttering unhappily to himself. He looked up at Ealstan with no great liking. “What do you want?”

Before answering, Ealstan closed the door behind him. Pybba’s eyebrows rose. They rose higher when Ealstan told him exactly what he wanted.

“You’re out of your bloody mind, boy,” the pottery magnate said when he was through.

“Probably,” Ealstan agreed. “Can you get it for me? No-I’m sure you can. Will you get it for me?”

“I’d be crazy if I did,” Pybba answered. Ealstan folded his arms across his chest and waited. Pybba said, “Anything goes wrong…” and sliced his thumb across his throat. Ealstan didn’t move. Then Pybba said, “Odds are I’d be well rid of you anyhow,” and Ealstan knew he had won.

Ukmerge had one park-or, at least, Skarnu hadn’t been able to find more than one. In winter, with the weather cold and the grass dead and the trees bare-branched, not so many people came there. He could still walk through it, though, or sit down on one of the benches without drawing notice from the constables, if he came at noon. Even in the wintertime, some workers escaped from the nearby shoe manufactory to eat their dinners in the park.

The air stank of leather. In Ukmerge, the air stank of leather so much that Skarnu had almost stopped noticing it. Almost. He still found himself wrinkling his nose every now and again.

Most of the benches in the park faced a broad expanse of bare ground without trees, without even much in the way of dead grass. “Did something used to be here?” Skarnu asked the underground leader who called himself “Tytuvenai” after his hometown one noontime. “Something worth looking at, I mean?”

“Tytuvenai” nodded. “An arch from the days of the Kaunian Empire. The Algarvians put eggs under it and knocked it down, same as they did with the Column of Victory in Priekule, same as they’ve done all over Valmiera- all over Jelgava, too, if half what we hear from there is true.”

“Powers below eat them,” Skarnu growled. “They’re trying to make us forget our Kaunianity.”

“Aye, no doubt,” “Tytuvenai” said. “They’re trying to make themselves forget it, too-that we were civilized while they were just woodscrawlers. But that’s not why I asked you to meet me here today.”

“No, eh?” Skarnu tried to imagine what the arch had looked like. He had no trouble getting a general idea; he’d seen plenty of imperial monuments in Priekule and elsewhere. But he didn’t know what this one had been for, what reliefs and statuary and inscriptions it had borne. He wouldn’t be able to find out now, either. Nor would anyone else. That growl still in his voice, he said, “Maybe it should have been.”

“Maybe.” “Tytuvenai” didn’t sound convinced. He explained why: “One of these days, when we have time, we’ll worry about arches and columns and tombs. We don’t have that kind of time now. We’ve got to worry about putting the Algarvians in tombs, and keeping them from putting any more of us into them. Isn’t that more important than old marble and granite?”

“I suppose so,” Skarnu said grudgingly. “It’s more urgent, anyhow. Whether urgent is the same thing as important is something we can argue about another day.”

“It’s something we’d better argue about another day,” “Tytuvenai” told him. “I called you here to ask if you were ready to get back to work.”

“Ah,” Skarnu said. That certainly was more urgent than marble. As his comrade had done, he got straight down to business: “Here in Ukmerge? What have you got in mind, planting eggs inside the shoe manufactories?”

“You laugh,” “Tytuvenai” said, and he was smiling himself. “If you knew how many shoes this town’s made for Mezentio’s men, you’d laugh out of the other side of your mouth, believe you me you would. It’d be a shrewd blow against the Algarvians. If we can bring it off, itwill be a shrewd blow against the Algarvians. But it isn’t what we have in mind for you.”

“Whatdo you have in mind for me?” Skarnu knew he sounded relieved. The shoe manufactories, the whole town of Ukmerge, oppressed him almost as badly as they did Merkela. He would have loved to see the manufactories go up in smoke, but he didn’t want to have anything to do with them himself.

“You’ll know, better than most, how the Algarvians will bring Kaunians from Forthweg through Valmiera down to the coast of the Strait when they want to strike a sorcerous blow against Lagoas or Kuusamo,” “Tytuvenai” said.

Skarnu’s answering nod was grim. “Aye, I know about that. I’d better. I sabotaged one of those ley-line caravans before it could get where it was going, and a lot of those Kaunians escaped before the redheads got the chance to sacrifice them.” He spoke with more than a little pride.

“Tytuvenai” nodded, too. “Aye, I’d heard that. And when you find a Valmieran who’s disappeared, a Valmieran who’s got ‘Night and Fog’ scrawled on his doorway, he’s off to be sacrificed, too. The Algarvians want it to seem like a mystery, but that’s what happens.”

“Is it?” Skarnu said, and the other underground leader nodded again. Skarnu went on. “I didn’t know that, but I’d be lying if I said I was surprised. You still haven’t told me what it’s got to do with me, though, or what you want me to do about it.”

“I’m coming to that,” “Tytuvenai” said. “Not so long ago, in spite of everything we could do, the redheads got a couple of caravanloads of Kaunians from Forthweg down to the coast, out about as far east as they could go. It’s pretty plain they were aiming their sacrifice at Kuusamo, not Lagoas. And they made the cursed sacrifice, and they stole the Kaunians’ life energy, and they used it to power their stinking sorcery, and… something went wrong.”

“Good!” Skarnu exclaimed. “What happened? Did one of their mages botch the spell, so that it came down on their own heads? By the powers above, that’d be sweet-and fitting, too.”

But now “Tytuvenai” shook his head. “That was our first guess. It doesn’t seem to be so, though, not from the way the Algarvians have been running around down there by the sea like so many ants whose anthill just got kicked. No, what it looks like is, they made the sacrifice-made the murders-and cast the spell, and everything went just the way it was supposed to… except that the Kuusamans somehow turned the spell around and made it land on the redheads who’d cast it: either that, or they had a counterspell waiting that was even more potent.”