Harry Turtledove - Jaws of Darkness

Gently, he kissed her. She stiffened in his arms. That had excited him with Vanai. Here, it just left him sad. He said, “I’m afraid you’re not my pet-you’re the brigade’s pet.” She stared at him, then started to cry. “Stop that!” he exclaimed, and he wasn’t acting at all. “If the soldiers think I’ve done something to you that you didn’t want, I’m a dead man.”

Too late, he realized he’d just handed her a weapon. But she didn’t seem interested in using it. “Thank you,” she said. “Oh, thank you.”

“For what? For being a fool?” he said, and was relieved again when that made her laugh. She was still smiling when she left the hut. Later, he thought, standing there all alone. You count the cost later.

Skarnu turned to Palasta. “If we go much farther, we fall off the edge of the world,” he said.

The young mage smiled at him. She looked as if a strong breeze would blow her away. Here at the southeasternmost reach of Valmiera, there were plenty of strong breezes, most of them off the Strait of Valmiera that separated the Derlavaian mainland from the great island holding Lagoas and Kuusamo. The wind didn’t stagger her, but it did blow her long blond hair into a mare’s nest of tangles. Brushing a strand that escaped her flat knitted wool hat back from her eyes, she said, “Back in the days of the Kaunian Empire, they really thought they would.”

“I suppose so, sis,” he said, which made Palasta smile again. They’d decided to travel as brother and sister; he would have had to have startedvery young to claim her as a daughter. He wished shewere his sister-he vastly preferred her to the one he really had. Palasta would never have given herself to the Algarvians, not for anything.

She said, “If we go to the top of that little hill there”-she pointed-”we might be able to see something interesting.”

“Maybe,” Skarnu said. Up to the top of the hill they went. The path was muddy; Skarnu almost slipped. Once they did get to the top, he shaded his eyes with the palm of his hand and peered south and east toward the beach where the Algarvians had murdered their Kaunian captives to assail the Kuusamans, and where something-no one on this side of the Strait of Valmiera seemed to know what-had gone wrong for the redheads. Even shading his eyes against the wan southern sun, he couldn’t see as much as he would have liked. “I wish I had a spyglass,” he muttered.

“Not safe,” Palasta said, and he could hardly disagree.

Shaggy green fields, rich and lush, stretched down toward the sea. A circle of tall, crudely shaped stones stood in one of those a few hundred yards away: a monument a thousand years older than the Kaunian Empire, maybe more. Lichen scrawled red and yellow-green patterns up the sides of the stones.

Palasta pointed toward the monument. “That’s a power point. Even all those years ago, they knew about such things.”

“Whoeverthey were,” Skarnu said; that was another riddle archaeological mages still labored to unravel. Some ofthem, at least, had not been of Kaunian stock. That much seemed plain. Even nowadays, a few folk here showed signs of blood more like that of the Kuusamans than of Valmiera’s Kaunian majority. Southeasterners had a way of staying on their land. Skarnu hadn’t seen many before coming to this part of the kingdom. Dark hair, slanted eyes, and high cheekbones showed up often enough to disconcert him: they were certainly more common than he’d thought.

Between him and Palasta and the monument, a woman drove a couple of goats toward a farmhouse. She was a Kaunian; her yellow hair peeped out from under the white lace cap she wore. But that cap set her apart from most Valmierans. Every tiny district here in the southeast had its own particular style, each striving to be more ornate than its neighbors. The goats were of a peculiar breed, too-shaggier than the ones he’d known around Pavilosta, and with thicker, more twisted horns.

But he couldn’t keep eyeing the local landscape forever, even if he wanted to. His eyes rose to the gray beach and the gray-green, rock-studded sea beyond, and to what had been the camp where the Algarvians housed their Kaunian captives before killing them to capture their life energy.

Some of the fences that had surrounded the camp still stood. Others were flat, or had been hurled some distance away by the force of the magic that had come back from Kuusamo. As far as he could see at this distance, none of the buildings inside the perimeter still stood, neither those that had housed the redheads nor those where their victims had dwelt.

“What do you see?” he asked Palasta. The young mage was the one who’d needed to make this journey. Skarnu was along because he’d been fighting for a long time to keep Mezentio’s men from massacring Kaunians from Forthweg, and because sending a girl on her own-even a girl who was also a mage-had risks the underground hadn’t felt like facing.

“Power,” she answered absently. “Great power.”

“The kind the Algarvians get from killing?” Skarnu asked.

“Oh, that, too,” Palasta said, though she sounded as if she needed to be reminded of it. “Aye, that, too. But something else, something brighter… cleaner.” She frowned, groping for the word she wanted.

“Can you tell what it is?”

Palasta shook her head. “It’s nothing I’ve run into before. I don’t think it’s anything anybody ever ran into before.”

She seemed very certain. Skarnu studied not the camp where the Kaunians from Forthweg had been but Palasta. She couldn’t have been more than sixteen. How could she know about what trained mages had run into over the years, over the centuries, over the millennia? (Those lichen-splashed standing stones made Skarnu think in longer stretches of time than he might have otherwise.) Carefully-he didn’t want to offend her-he asked, “How can you be sure of that?”

“Suppose you’ve eaten beef and pork and mutton and chicken,” Palasta said. “If someone serves you fresh oysters, will you be sure you’ve never had them before?”

“Aye.” Skarnu nodded. “But I won’t be sure no one’s eaten them in all the history of the world.”

“Ah. I see what you’re saying.” Palasta looked at him as if he were a bright pupil in primary school. Absurdly, that affectionate, forgiving glance made him proud, not angry. The young mage said, “I know what I know. What I know is based on what all the sorcerers before me have known, all the way back to the people who raised those stones, whoever they were.” They were on her mind, too. She went on, “I can tell what’s new and what isn’t. Whatever did that”-she pointed to the ruined camp-”is something new.”

“All right. And I see what you’re saying, too.” Now Skarnu believed her. She sounded as sure about what she knew and what she didn’t asSergeantRaunu ever had. As it had with the veteran underofficer, her conviction carried weight with Skarnu. He asked, “Do you want to get closer, if we can? Do you think it would do any good?”

“I’d like to try,” Palasta answered. “I don’t see any Algarvians around there right now, or sense any of their wizards, either. If we spot soldiers when we come up to the camp, we can always walk off in some other direction.”

“Fair enough.” Skarnu started down the slope that led to the camp.

Palasta stayed at his side. After a few steps, she said, “We may not need to do this, after all, now that I think about it. The answers I’m looking for are probably on the other side of the Strait of Valmiera. So if you want to go back…”

Skarnu kept walking. “Let’s try it. We’ve come all this way”-”Tytuvenai” yanked me away from my wife and son-”to try to find out what happened here, and whether we can use it against the redheads, too. It would be a shame to stop half a mile short.”If we do stop half a mile short, I’ll wring “Tytuvenai’s” neck the next time I see him.