Harry Turtledove - Into the Darkness

“But if I went away, think of all the bribes you would lose,” Fernao answered mildly. Cossos scowled. Bribery was a way of life in Yanina. Talking about it, though, was very bad form.

Fernao did not care. Now he mumbled to himself, at the same time clutching a dried dormouse’s tail he carried in a tunic pocket. Cossos might have taken the mumble for Lagoan. It wasn’t. It was classical Kaunian, a tongue less widely studied in Yanina than in many other kingdoms. The spell was ancient, too: the primitive ancestor of the ones on which rest crates and much of modern medicine depended.

As a dormouse falls asleep for the winter, so Cossos fell asleep now. But it was not a natural sleep. He did not breathe. His heart barely beat. Had he been battling a soldier of the Kaunian Empire, he would have been killed without knowing he was dead. As things were, he merely toppled over. Fernao left the chamber where they’d been talking and hurried toward the wing of the palace in which King Penda was imprisoned.

He walked quickly, confidently. He had reason for his confidence. The servitors and nobles he passed saw him, aye. One or two, those of uncommon cleverness and strong will, even turned to look after him, perhaps to start to speak. Then they, like the rest, forgot about him and went on with their business. He smiled a small, slow smile. Among the Yaninans, as among most peoples, wormwood was a flavoring, and easy enough to obtain. The Valmierans brewed a nasty brandy with it; Varvakis stocked the stuff. But the Yaninans did not use it in sorcery. Lagoans did, not least for spells of temporary oblivion.

Had Fernao passed a mage, the spell would not have sufficed. He assumed Penda’s quarters were sorcerously as well as physically watched and warded. He touched the dormouse tail again. This was a different spell, one only a first-rank Lagoan mage was likely to use (although Fernao did hope Tsavellas relied on native Yaninan wizards; an expert from Algarve might have recognized and countered the sorcery).

People around him slowed down, as if they were dormice settling in for a long winter’s nap. That was an illusion, an inversion of the law of similarity. In fact, he had sped up. It was not a magic to use without great need; under it, he aged twice as fast as usual. But he passed out of the ken of those around him.

He started casting about for Penda like a hound seeking a fox’s scent. The trail was obscure, even though he moved above and beyond, so to speak, the ordinary plane of reality. Maybe Yaninan mages weren’t quite the bunglers he had come to reckon them.

But Penda’s trace was harder to hide than an ordinary man’s would have been. Fernao set his thumb on the obverse of a Forthwegian silver bit he carried with his other specialized sorcerous gear. The coin bore Penda’s tough, blunt profile. Both the law of similarity and, at several removes, the law of contagion linked it to the Forthwegian king.

Fernao found him in a bedchamber. He lay asleep beside a Yaninan woman; his captivity, evidently, was not of the most onerous. Fernao tapped him on the shoulder. At the tap, the Forthwegian king not only woke but also sped to Fernao’s level of living. He had less time to spare than the mage; gray filled his beard. No help for it, though, not now.

“Your Majesty, I have come to get you away from here,” Fernao said in Forthwegian.

“Whither shall we go?” Penda did not seem to care what the answer was, for he sprang naked from the bed and threw on the first clothes he found. “So long as it be not Cottbus or Trapani, I am with you.”

“By no means,” Fernao said. “I aim to bring you to Setubal.”

“It is good.” Now the king of Forthweg did hesitate. “Or rather, it may be good. How do I know I can trust you? I expected to be rescued ere this. Whence came the long delay?”

“How do you know you can trust me? You don’t,” Fernao replied. “If you would rather, I will remove this spell from you and you can go back to bed. And you might have been rescued sooner, your Majesty, had the fellow with whom I came from Lagoas not got himself slightly murdered. He had the connections in Patras. I’ve had to make mine. And so—will you come, or will you not come?”

“I am answered,” Penda said. “I am answered, and I shall come.” He eyed Fernao from under lowered lids. “And I would have known you for a Lagoan not by your looks, not by your accent, but by your studied lack of respect for those set above you.”

“Your Majesty, you are not set above me; you are set above Forthweg,” Fernao answered evenly, refraining from pointing out that, at the moment, Algarve and Unkerlant were set above Forthweg. “And if you will come, you had better come. This spell requires much sorcerous energy. Were we not so close to a power point, I could not use it. Even now, it will not hold long, not for two.”

Penda, for a wonder, argued no further. He followed Fernao out of the bedchamber without a glance back at the woman with whom he’d been sleeping. That told Fernao something he hadn’t known but had suspected about royalty. It made him a little sad. He wondered if the woman would be sad when she woke, sad or just relieved. He knew what he would guess.

As soon as King Penda and he were out of the wing of the palace in which Penda had been held, he relaxed the spell that seemed to slow the rest of the world to the pace of a sleepy dormouse. He sighed with relief of his own; had he not let go of that spell, it would soon have let go of him, with results likely to be unpleasant. The forgetfulness spell with the wormwood he retained. It cost him much less wear and tear than the other—and, had he dropped it, he and Penda would have been captured at once. He was opposed to that.

More Yaninans looked back over their shoulders at Penda and him than had turned back when he walked the corridors alone; spread to cover two men, the magic was a little less effective. But it held. The palace servitors scratched their heads, shrugged shrugs even the melodramatic Algarvians might have envied, and went back to whatever they were doing.

Once out of the palace, Penda peered this way and that, then nodded in slow wonder. “I had almost forgotten there were wider vistas than rooms and hallways,” he remarked.

“Well, your Majesty, if you want to keep on enjoying them, you’d better get moving,” Fernao said, setting a brisk pace away from the palace and into Patras.

King Penda matched him stride for stride. “Tell me now, sir mage,” the fugitive Forthwegian monarch said, “how you purpose spiriting me out of Yanina and into Lagoas, where I may hope to breathe free even if in exile.

Fernao wished Penda had not picked this moment to ask that question. He gave it the only answer he could: “Your Majesty, right now I haven’t the faintest idea.”

Behind a Zuwayzi soldier carrying a spear point downward in token of the truce now in force between his army and that of Unkerlant, Hajjaj advanced across battered, broken ground toward the Unkerlanter lines. Both the soldier and he wore wide-brimmed hats and long mantles, not just to salve Unkerlanter sensibilities but also to ward off the rain that leaked from a dirty-gray sky.

An Unkerlanter soldier in rock-gray hooded cape and tunic came forward to meet them. He too carried a spear with its point aimed at the ground. To Hajjaj’s surprise, the fellow spoke Zuwayzi: “Your Excellency, you come with me,” he said, his speech slow but clear. “I take you to Marshal Rathar.”

He seemed stuck in the present indicative. Hajjaj didn’t mind. Hearing his own language from the Unkerlanter was more courtesy than his kingdom had got from King Swemmel’s since the war began. “I will come with you,” Hajjaj said.

Rathar waited less than a blaze behind the forwardmost Unkerlanter positions. As his reputation said he would, he looked solid and steady. After bows and what were, by Unkerlanter standards, polite, leisurely greetings, he spoke in his own tongue: “I am sorry, but I do not know Zuwayzi. Do you speak Unkerlanter?”