Harry Turtledove - Into the Darkness

“I obey, your Majesty.” Rathar bowed. “Also, by your leave, I shall send some troops into the desert in the direction of Zuwayza, both to frighten the naked brown men and to mislead the Forthwegians.”

“Aye, you may do that,” King Swemmel said. “We shall be in closest touch with you, ensuring that all motions are carried out with the utmost celerity. In this matter, we shall brook no delay. Do you understand, Marshal?”

“Your Majesty, I do.” Rathar bowed very low. “I obey.”

“Of course you obey,” Swemmel said. “Unfortunate things happen to people who disobey me. Even more unfortunate things happen to their families. Obedience, then, is efficient.” He waved a hand, a brusque Unkerlanter gesture rather than an airy Algarvian one. “Go, and see to it.”

Rathar went down on his hands and knees and knocked his head on the green carpet again. He could feel the fear-sweat on his skin as he did so Swemmel commanded fear both by virtue of his office and by virtue of his person. Swemmel commanded fear—and fear obeyed.

After escaping the audience chamber, Rathar reclaimed his sword from the bowing attendants in the anteroom. His spirit strengthened with every step away from his sovereign he took.

His own aides bowed low and called him lord when he returned to his offices. They hurried to obey the orders he issued, and exclaimed in excitement as they worked. He took a quiet pride in his own competence. But all the while, the secret stayed in the back of his mind: being the second most powerful man in Unkerlant was exactly like being the next greatest whole number before one. Zero he was, and zero he would remain.

Cornelu stood on the pier in Tirgoviste harbor, listening to last-minute orders. Commodore Delfinu sounded serious, even somber: “Do as much damage to the wharves at Feltre as you can, Commander. Do as much as you can, but come home safe. Sibiu has not got so many men that we can afford to spend them lavishly.”

“I understand.” Cornelu bowed to Delfinu, who was not only commodore but also count. “I will do what needs doing, that’s all. The mission is important, else you would not send me on it.”

Delfinu returned the bow, then took Cornelu’s face in his hands and kissed him on both cheeks. “The mission is important. That you return is also important—you will undertake more missions as the war goes on.” Afternoon sun glittered from the six gold stripes on the sleeves of Delfinu’s sea-green uniform tunic and from the gold trim on his kilt. Had Cornelu been in uniform, his tunic sleeves would have borne four stripes each. Instead, he wore a black rubber suit whose only marking was the impress of the five crowns of Sibiu above his heart. A rubber pack thumped on his back.

He walked awkwardly to the edge of the pier; his feet bore rubber paddles that let him swim more swiftly than he could have without them. Waiting in the water for him was a medium-sized dark gray leviathan: the beast was five or six times as long as he was tall, as opposed to the great ones, which might reach twice that size.

One of the leviathan’s small black eyes turned toward him. “Hello, Eforiel,” he said. The leviathan let out a grunting snort and opened a mouth full of long, sharp teeth. They were shaped for catching fish. If they closed on a man, though, she could swallow him in about two bites.

Cornelu slid into the water and grasped the harness wrapped around Eforiel’s body and held in place by the leviathan’s fins. He patted the beast’s smooth skin, whose texture was not much different from that of his own rubber suit. It was not a pat that gave any order, merely one of greeting. He was fond of Eforiel. He’d named her after the first girl he’d bedded, but he was the only one who knew that.

Under Eforiel’s belly, the harness supported several eggs in streamlined cases partly filled with air so as to make them no heavier than a corresponding volume of water. Cornelu bared his teeth in a fierce smile. Before long, he would deliver those eggs to Feltre. He hoped the Algarvians would be glad to have them.

Commodore Delfinu leaned out over the edge of the pier and waved. “Good fortune go with you.”

“For this I thank you, sir,” Cornelu said.

He tapped Eforiel, more firmly than before. The leviathan’s muscles surged under him. With a flick of the tail, Eforiel left Tirgoviste harbor and the five chief islands of Sibiu behind and set out across more than fifty miles of sea for the Algarvian coast.

“Surprise,” Cornelu muttered. He had trouble hearing himself; water kept slapping him in the face. Before he set out, Sibian wizards had set a spell on him that let him get air from water like a fish (actually, the savants insisted the spell worked differently from fishes’ gills, but the effect was the same, and that was what mattered to Cornelu).

Algarvian ships no doubt patrolled the ley lines, to keep the Sibian navy and that of Valmiera from raiding Feltre, which had been by far the most important Algarvian port on the Narrow Sea till King Mezentio got his hands on Bari. The Duchy boasted a couple of excellent harbors. With them under Algarvian rule, containing Mezentio’s fleet got a lot harder.

“But I’m not coming up a ley line,” Cornelu said, and chuckled wetly. Unlike ships, Eforiel did not depend on the earth’s energy matrix to take her from one place to another. She went under her own power, which meant she chose her own path. No one would be looking for her till she’d been there and gone.

That thought had hardly crossed Cornelu’s mind before he got a nasty jolt: a spout rising from the sea a few hundred yards ahead of Eforiel. Had his path, by strangest chance, crossed that of an Algarvian leviathan rider intent on working mischief at Tirgoviste or one of Sibiu’s other harbors?

Then the animal leapt out of the water. Cornelu sighed with relief to see it was only a whale. The leviathan’s cousin was stocky, even chunky, and resembled nothing so much as an overgrown fish with an even more overgrown head. Eforiel and her kin were far slimmer and smaller-skulled, almost serpentlike except for their fins and tail flukes.

“Come on, sweetheart.” He tapped the leviathan again. “Nothing for us to worry about—only one of your poor relations.”

Eforiel snorted again, as if to say she too looked down her pointed nose at whales. Then she swam through a school of mackerel. Cornelu had a hard time keeping her on a straight course and not letting her swim every which way after the fish. She got plenty as things were, but seemed convinced she would have eaten many more if he’d let her go where she wanted.

She could have gone, disobeying his commands, and he would have been able to do nothing about it. She never realized that. She was a well-trained beast, raised from the time she was a calf to do as the small, weak creatures who rode her ordered.

Cornelu’s greatest worry was not her going off in pursuit of mackerel but her diving deep after one. The spell would keep him breathing under water, but a leviathan could dive deeper than a man’s body was designed for, and could rise from the depths so fast that the air in his blood would bubble. Leviathans were made for the sea in a whole host of ways men were not.

After a while, though, the mackerel thinned out, and Eforiel swam steadily on. Once, in the distance, Cornelu caught sight of a ship sliding along a ley line. He could not tell whether it came from Sibiu or Algarve. In the waters where he was then, it might have belonged to either kingdom.

Whosever ship it was, no one aboard noticed him or Eforiel. The two of them did not disturb the ley lines in any way. Had the ancient Kaunians thought of something like this, they might have done it, though they’d known nothing of eggs and lacked the sorcery to keep a man from drowning underwater.