time fuming about Master Ilmarinen, too, so he is entitled to fume about me.”
“Don’t tell me what I’m entitled to,” Ilmarinen snapped; like Siuntio, he could use classical Kaunian not just to get ideas across but almost as if it were his birthspeech.
“Shall we proceed to the experiment?” Siuntio said. “In every moment we quarrel among ourselves, the Algarvians gain.”
“Oh, aye, this one will solve everything,” Ilmarinen said. “We’ll have Mezentio hiding under his bed in no time flat.”
“Maybe we can confirm the actual consequences of the divergent series on the half of the specimens on the negative axis,” Siuntio said.
“You know what they are,” Ilmarinen said. “You all know what they are. You just don’t want to admit it. Even when you’ve had your noses rubbed in it, you don’t want to believe it. Bloody cowards, the lot of you.”
“I believe it,” Fernao said. “I want to find out what we can do with it.”
To Pekka’s surprise, Ilmarinen beamed. “Well, what do you know? Maybe you’re not worthless after all.” The only thing different Fernao had done was agree with him for two sentences. Contemplating that, Pekka had all she could to not to laugh out loud. Aye, in many ways, Ilmarinen and her little son Uto were very much alike.
Cornelu’s leviathan snapped up a squid. Life of all sorts teemed in the chilly waters of the Narrow Sea. Despite his rubber suit, despite the magecraft that helped ward him, those waters felt unusually chilly today. Maybe that was his imagination. Imagination or not, the Sibian exile wished his Lagoan masters had picked a warmer season of the year to send him forth.
Whenever the leviathan surfaced, Cornelu looked around warily. In these waters, the Algarvian navy and Algarvian dragonfliers reigned supreme. Sailors and men on dragons who served King Mezentio might well take him for one of their own. He hoped they would, but he intended to do his best to disappear if they didn’t.
He was particularly careful when he crossed a ley line. Whenever his amulet detected the thin stream of sorcerous energy that formed part of the world grid, he used it to search for nearby ships. He hadn’t found one yet, but that didn’t make him stop looking. If he wanted to get back to Setubal, being careful was a good idea.
“And I do want to get back to Setubal,” he told his leviathan. The great beast kept on swimming; had it been a man, it would have shrugged. Without a doubt, it was happier out in the open ocean.
But then, it wasn’t seeing Janira. When he was in Setubal, Cornelu went back to the eatery where she worked every chance he got. He’d taken her to a music hall and to the unicorn races. He’d kissed her-once. Only now that he was going to be away from her for a long time did he realize how smitten he’d become.
It wasn’t just that he could speak his own language and have her understand. It wasn’t just that he was desperately looking for a woman after Costache’s betrayal. He told himself it wasn’t, anyhow. He hoped it wasn’t.
With a tap, he urged the leviathan to stand on its flukes, to extend his horizon as it lifted its front end-and him-out of the water. There to the north was the mainland of Derlavai. He knew the little spit of land that stuck out toward him-it lay just west of Lungri, a coastal town in the Duchy of Bari. After the Six Years’ War, Bari had been split off from Algarve and made self-ruling, but it was Algarvian again now. Its return to Algarvian allegiance had touched off the Derlavaian War.
Cornelu urged the leviathan farther south. He wanted to be sure he gave the headlands of Yanina, which thrust far out into the Narrow Sea, a wide berth. The closer he came to land, the closer he was likely to come to trouble. He didn’t want trouble, not on this journey. He wasn’t hunting downed Algarvian dragonfliers, or Algarvian floating fortresses, either. He had a delivery to make. Once he did, he could hurry back to Setubal.
As he’d hoped he would, he got round the Yaninan headlands before the sun set in the northwest. It stayed above the horizon less every day, an effect magnified by the high southerly latitudes in which he found himself. Farther south, down in the land of the Ice People, it would stop rising at all before long.
His leviathan slept in catnaps. He wished he could do the same, but no such luck. Long journeys on leviathan back often got longer because the beasts went their own way when the men who rode them slept. Sometimes they carried two riders on long voyages, to make sure that didn’t happen. The Lagoans hadn’t seen fit to give Cornelu a comrade. He wondered what that said about the importance of the mission they’d given him.
Even more to the point, he wondered what the Unkerlanters would think it said about the importance of the mission the Lagoans had given him. Nothing good, unless he missed his guess. He shrugged. He was following the orders he’d been given. The Unkerlanters were and always had been great ones for following orders. How could they blame him?
After he woke, the first thing he did was look for the moon. It was setting in the west ahead of him, casting a silvery streak of radiance across the sea. He patted the leviathan. “Have you been swimming this way all the time I’ve been asleep?” he asked it. “I hope you have. It’ll make things easier.”
The leviathan didn’t answer. It just kept on swimming. That was the purpose for which the powers above had shaped it, and it admirably fulfilled its purpose.
Not long after the sun rose, he had his first anxious moment. The leviathan came upon a fishing boat flying the red-and-white banner of Yanina. It was a sailboat, and used no sorcerous energy, so Cornelu didn’t detect it till he saw it. His mouth tightened. The Algarvians, sneaky whoresons that they were, had invaded Sibiu with a great fleet of sailing ships, and sneaked into his kingdom’s harbors precisely because no one had imagined an assault not based on magecraft.
But the Yaninans, even though they didn’t use the world’s energy grid, proved to have some sorcery aboard their boat. As soon as they saw him-or, more likely, saw his leviathan-they ran to an egg-tosser at the stern of the fishing boat, swung it toward him, and let fly.
It wasn’t much of an egg-tosser; the boat wasn’t big enough to carry much of an egg-tosser. The egg the Yaninans lobbed fell far short, bursting about halfway between the boat and Cornelu’s leviathan. They didn’t seem to care- they promptly launched another one at him.
“All right!” he exclaimed. “I believed you the first time.” He swung the leviathan on a course that steered well clear of the fishing boat. The Yaninans couldn’t possibly have been worrying about Lagoans in these waters. Maybe they feared he was an Unkerlanter. But, for all they knew, he might have been one of their own. They hadn’t tried to find out. They’d just tried to get rid of him. And they’d done it, too.
Once he’d left them behind, he laughed. They were probably telling themselves what a great bunch of heroes they were. By everything the war had shown, the Yaninans were better at telling themselves they were heroes than at really playing the role.
Early the next morning, the leviathan brought Cornelu into the Unkerlanter port of Rysum. A ley-line patrol boat and a couple of Unkerlanter leviathans paced him into the harbor. A dragon flew overhead, eggs slung under its belly. He’d told King Swemmel’s men who he was and where he’d come from. They were supposed to know he was coming. Considering the war they were fighting with Algarve, he didn’t suppose he could blame them for suspecting him, but he thought they were carrying those suspicions further than they had to.
Rysum wasn’t much of a port. None of Unkerlant’s ports on the Narrow Sea was much, not by the standards prevailing farther east. They all iced over several months a year. That kept them from matching their counterparts in Yanina and Algarve, which lay more to the north. Rysum wouldn’t stay clear much longer.
As soon as Cornelu climbed a rope ladder up onto the pier by which his leviathan rested, a squad of soldiers ran up and aimed sticks at him. “I am your friend, not your enemy!” he said in classical Kaunian-he spoke not a word of Unkerlanter.
Anywhere in eastern Derlavai-even in Algarve, which slaughtered Kaunians to fuel its sorceries-he would have found someone who understood the old language. Not here; the Unkerlanters, squat and dumpy in their long, baggy tunics, jabbered back and forth in their own guttural tongue.
He could have spoken to them in Algarvian. He held back, fearing that would get him blazed down on the spot. And then an Unkerlanter officer spoke Algarvian to him: “Do you understand me?”
“Aye,” he answered in some relief. “I am Commander Cornelu of the Sibian Navy, an exile serving out of Setubal in Lagoas. Are you not expecting me? Why are you all acting like I’m an egg that’s about to burst and fling this place to those hills yonder?” He pointed north and west, toward the low hills that crinkled the horizon there.
“What do you know of the Mamming Hills?” the Unkerlanter rapped out.
“Nothing,” Cornelu said. After a moment, he remembered the cinnabar mines in those hills, but he got the
