Harry Turtledove - Jaws of Darkness

She wished she had some way to gauge things inside the closet. She feared her guesses weren’t worth much. It already seemed as if she’d been trapped inside here forever.

She was about to come out and see if she could sneak upstairs when she heard new voices in the hallway. An Algarvian spoke in his own language: “Look at the crosses on the doorways, sir. They’ve already searched this building.”

The fellow who answered did so with aristocratic scorn: “You are looking with your eyes. I look with more than that. I look with senses you haven’t got. And I shall find what you’ve missed, too-you wait and see.”

A mage, Vanai thought, with terror dulled only because she’d already been through so much other terror. She wasn’t warded. She hadn’t imagined she would need to be warded. If he started incanting-no, when he started incanting-she was ruined. It’s not fair. That was probably true, but it would do her no good at all.

Out in the street-Vanai thought it was out in the street, anyhow-a shout rang out: the same word, repeated over and over. Hidden in the blind dogleg closet, she couldn’t make out what the word was. Neither could the Algarvian mage. “How am I supposed to concentrate with this racket?” he snapped, his voice peevish.

“You don’t need to concentrate, sir,” the constable with him answered. “They’re yelling that they’ve got their quota. They don’t need any more blonds this time around.”

“Oh,” the mage said. “Is that so? Well, if I don’t have to work, I’m bloody well not going to work. That’s fair enough-better than fair enough, by the powers above.” He began to whistle. His footsteps, along with those of the constable who’d come into the block of flats with him, faded in the distance as the two men left again.

Vanai didn’t move for a long time. By then, she wasn’t sure shecould move. At last, a bladder that threatened to burst drove her to her feet.

She came out of the closet ever so cautiously. She came out of the flat even more cautiously. When she saw someone come up the stairs and into the block of flats, she almost jumped out of her skin. But it was only another Kaunian. He waved to her. “So I’m not the only one they missed here, eh?” he said, sounding more cheerful than he had any business doing. “Well, good.”

He saw Vanai, who’d survived the roundup, and resolutely didn’t see all the people who hadn’t. She couldn’t think like that.

When she went back up to her flat, she found that the Algarvians had turned it inside out. She wasn’t upset; she’d expected nothing less. She had little that could be broken, and even less that she minded losing. Before long, she had the flat set to rights again.

And, before long, just as if the roundup hadn’t happened, bells clanged in the Kaunian quarter, summoning the blonds who’d come through uncaught to get their food so they could stay strong and healthy till the Algarvians needed more of them. Vanai didn’t go, in case it turned out to be another trap, another betrayal. The Algarvians who’d gone through the flat had been after her person, not the couple of small chunks of stale bread and dried fruit she’d secreted there. She didn’t have a lot to eat, but she had some.

As she nibbled a dried apricot, she looked out the window and down onto the street below. Not many Kaunians could have escaped in this neighborhood, but she saw a fair number of people heading for the feeding stations the Algarvians had set up. She grimaced. If they’re that stupid, they deserve to be caught. Then she grimaced again, this time at herself. Why do they deserve to get caught for having empty stomachs?

And then she spotted the Algarvian constable who came down the street chatting up every young woman who passed. She muttered the foulest curses she knew, and wished she knew worse ones. Even though she couldn’t hear him, she could guess what he’d be saying. Come with me, sweetheart. Give me what I want, and you won’t go west, the same sort of vicious bargainMajorSpinello had struck with her back in Oyngestun. The redheads were great ones for deals like that. Vanai shrank back from the window, lest he see her. When she peeked out again, a few minutes later, he was gone. She let out a long, heartfelt sigh of relief.

Night in the Strait of Valmiera: a nasty night, with rain and even a little sleet beating down. Wind-whipped waves slapped against theHabakkuk’s port side as she slid north along a ley line toward the Derlavaian mainland. Secure in the bowels of the great, sorcerously enhanced iceberg, Leino hardly noticed the motion.

When the Kuusaman mage remarked on that, Xavega raised a scornful, elegant eyebrow. “Ina proper ley-line ship, we would not feel the waves at all,” she said, using classical Kaunian as he had. “We would glide above the water, and not be subject to it.” She didn’t add, You ignorant Kuusaman oaf, but she might as well have.

Leino sighed and didn’t answer. Why did my fancy fix on someone who despises me and all my people? He wondered. One of his own eyebrows quirked, in wry amusement. Because I’ve been away from Pekka too long, that’s why. And because Xavega packs her bile in such a nicely shaped container.

Ramalho was every bit as Lagoan as Xavega, but he shook his head. “In aproper ley-line ship, those waves might capsize us or push us off the ley line and then sink us,” he said. “Plenty of hulks on the bottom of the sea hereabouts, and not all of them from the days when ships went by sail.”

Xavega glared at him. She didn’t just disagree with Leino; she was ready to take on the whole world. “What do you know about it?” she demanded of Ramalho.

“Before the war, I was a ship’s mage,” he said calmly. “My father spent some time as a ship’s mage, and so did his father before him. I might ask you the same question.”

He might ask it, but Xavega didn’t answer it. She just tossed her head, sending wavy, copper-colored locks flying back from her face, and went over to the tea kettle to pour herself a fresh cup. She slammed the kettle back onto its iron stand almost hard enough to shatter it.

“Rain is a worse nuisance forHabakkuk than for ordinary ships,” Leino said, trying to find something the mages could talk about without quarreling. “We always have to work to keep the sea from melting us, but worrying about the air, too, makes the sorcery twice as complicated.”

“Well, that is true enough,” Ramalho said. Xavega just sniffed and sipped at her tea. She couldn’t very well argue with what Leino had said, but she didn’t care to agree with it, either. Ramalho went on: “If we sailedHabakkuk into Setubal harbor back in the days of the Six Years’ War, all the mages in Lagoas would be going mad trying to figure out how we have done all this.”

“Now, there is a picture,” Leino said, rather liking it. “The same would have been true in Kuusamo a generation ago-or, for that matter, any time before the Derlavaian War started.”

“A picture of nonsense,” Xavega said. “A daft conceit.” Ramalho had offered the conceit, but she sounded as if she blamed Leino for it.

With another sigh Leino said, “I hope the dragonfliers will be able to leave the ship in this weather.” How would Xavega take exception to that?

“The storm will help shield them from the Algarvians,” she said, whichwas disagreement, but of a relatively tepid sort. She continued, “Dowsers start tearing their hair when they have to find moving dragons in the midst of millions of moving raindrops.”

“True,” Leino said.

“Also less true than it would have been in the days of the Six Years’ War, though,” Ramalho said. “Our motion-selectivity spells are much better than they used to be.”