Harry Turtledove - Into the Darkness

There in Fernao’s hideaway, he flipped rapidly through the journals, slowing down when he found an article that interested him. After he’d put aside the Annual Sorcerous Compendium, he noticed he’d hardly slowed down at all while going through it.

“That’s odd,” he murmured, and turned to the table of contents at the rear of the volume to see if he’d missed something. He hadn’t, and scratched his head. Before he’d gone away, the Kuusamans had been doing some very interesting work at the deep theoretical level. Siuntio—who was world-famous, at least among mages—and younger theoreticians like Raahe and Pekka had asked some provocative questions. He’d hoped they might have come up with some answers by now, or at least some more new and interesting questions.

If they had, they weren’t publishing them in the Annual Sorcerous Compendium. Its pages were full of articles on horticultural magecraft, ley-line engineering, and improvements in crystallomancy: interesting, significant, but not at the cutting edge of the field. With a shrug, he set the volume aside and went on to a Jelgavan journal, which also proved to cut off abruptly with the previous spring’s fascicule.

He was three articles into the Royal Lagoan Journal when he suddenly sat up very straight and slammed the heavy volume closed. It made a loud, booming noise; someone somewhere else in the third floor exclaimed in surprise. Fernao sat still; to his relief, nobody came looking to see what had happened.

“If they’ve found any new answers, if they’ve found any new questions, they aren’t publishing them,” he muttered under his breath. He set his hand on the leather binding of the Annual Sorcerous Compendium. His first assumption was that the Kuusamans hadn’t found anything, but how likely was that? Would all of their best theoretical sorcerers have fallen silent at once?

Maybe. He didn’t know. He couldn’t know. But maybe, too, maybe they’d found something interesting and important: so interesting and so important, they didn’t care to tell anyone else about it.

“And maybe your head’s full of moonbeams, too,” Fernao told himself, his voice barely above a whisper.

But could he afford to take the chance? Kuusamo and Lagoas, once upon a time, had fought like cats and dogs. They hadn’t fought in a couple of hundred years. He knew that didn’t mean they couldn’t fight again, though. If the Kuusamans ever decided to stop the halfhearted island war they were waging against Gyongyos, what would keep them from jumping on Lagoas’s back? Nothing Fernao could see, the more so as his own kingdom couldn’t give over the war against Algarve without becoming King Mezentio’s vassals.

Reluctant as a lover having to leave his beloved too soon, he set the journals on their shelves and went downstairs. “The Guild may know more about this than I,” he muttered under his breath, and then, “I hope the Guild knows more about this than I.”

Both guards nodded to him as he hurried past them. Now that he was going away, they were content. He didn’t laugh till they couldn’t see his face. They might be better than nothing; he remained unconvinced they were a lot better than nothing.

He waited at the caravan stop for a car to take him back to Setubal. He had to change to a different ley line downtown, not far from the harbor. His second journey was shorter: less a mile. He got out of the caravan car across the street from the Grand Hall of the Lagoan Guild of Mages.

It was a grand hall, built of snowy marble in severe neoclassical style. The statuary group in front of it might have been snatched straight out of the heyday of the Kaunian Empire, too. The only thing that would have been odd to a veritable classical Kaunian was that the statues, like the hall, remained unpainted. Temporal sorcery had proved that the Kaunians, in the old days, slapped paint on everything that didn’t move. But builders hadn’t known that in the days when the guild hall went up. Most people still didn’t realize it. And, by the time anyone at all knew it, pristine marble had become as much a neoclassical tradition as painted stone had been in Kaunian days.

Inside the hall, Fernao exchanged greetings with half a dozen mages. Some had heard he was back and were glad to see him; others hadn’t, and were astonished to see him. Lagoans weren’t inveterate gabbers like Algarvians or Yaninans, but he still needed longer than he’d wanted to make his way to the guild secretary’s office.

“Ah, Master Fernao!” exclaimed that worthy, a plump, good-natured fellow named Brinco. “And how may I help you this, I fear, not so lovely day?”

“I should like to see Grandmaster Pinhiero for a few minutes, if such a thing be possible,” Fernao answered.

Brinco’s frown suggested that the mere thought he might have to tell Fernao no was enough to devastate him. “I cannot say with certainty whether it be possible or not, my lord,” the secretary said. He got to his feet. “If your Excellency would have the generosity to wait?”

“Of course,” Fernao answered. “How could I refuse you anything?”

“Easily, I doubt not,” Brinco replied. “But bide a moment, and we shall see what we shall see.” He vanished behind an elaborately carved oaken door. When he emerged, smiles filled his face. “Your desire shall be granted in every particular. The grandmaster says his greatest pleasure would lie in seeing you for as long as you desire.”

Fernao had known Pinhiero a fair number of years. He doubted the grandmaster had said any such thing; a grumpy Oh, all right was much more likely. When it came to giving pleasure, Brinco liked to set his thumb on the scale. Sometimes that annoyed Fernao. Not today. Getting any of what he wanted suited him fine. “I thank you,” he said, and went into the grandmaster’s office.

Pinhiero was about sixty, his sandy hair and mustaches going gray. He peered up at Fernao through reading glasses that made his eyes look enormous. “Well,” he growled, “what’s so important?” In public ceremonies, he could be dignity, learning, and magnificence personified. Among his colleagues, he didn’t bother with any such mask, and simply was what he was.

“Grandmaster, I’ve come across something interesting in the library—or rather, I’ve come across nothing interesting in the library, which is interesting in and of itself,” Fernao said.

“Not to me, it isn’t,” Pinhiero said. “You get as old as I am, you don’t have time for riddles any more. Spit it out or leave.”

“Aye, Grandmaster,” Fernao said, and explained what he’d found—and what he hadn’t. Pinhiero listened with no change of expression. He was famous for that. Fernao finished, “I can’t prove this means anything, Grandmaster, but if it does mean something, it means something important.” He waited to see whether Pinhiero thought it meant anything.

“Kuusamans won’t give you the time of day unless they feel like it,” the grandmaster said at last. “Come to that, they won’t give each other the time of day, either. Seven princes—cursed silly arrangement.” He glared at Fernao. “You know how much trouble you can get into by trying to reason from something that isn’t there?”

“Aye, Grandmaster,” Fernao said, wondering if that was dismissal.

It wasn’t. Pinhiero said, “Here. Wait.” He pulled from a desk drawer an unfashionably large and heavy crystal. Staring down into it, he murmured a name: “Siuntio.” Fernao’s eyes widened. The grandmaster went on, now in classical Kaunian: “By the brotherhood we share, I summon thee.” Fernao’s eyes got wider still.

The image of a white-haired, wrinkled Kuusaman formed in the crystal. “I am here, my bad-tempered brother,” he said, also in Kaunian.