Through the Darkness

of Merkela’s that broke sunlight up into rainbows. Seeing Skarnu’s curious stare, he condescended to explain: “The yellow of the egg symbolizeth the generacy-nay, the birth, you would say-of the new, whilst, as this pendant here spreadeth the one light into many, so shall my magecraft spread your fair copy here to all these blank leaves.” He patted the ream of paper Raunu had brought back from Pavilosta.

“You know your business best,” Raunu said, wondering whether Vatsyunas knew it at all.

Then the Kaunian from Forthweg began to chant. He was, Skarnu realized ruefully, more at home in the classical tongue than any Valmieran Kaunian, no matter how scholarly, could ever hope to be. For him, it was birthspeech, not a second language drilled in with a schoolmaster’s switch. He could make classical Kaunian do things Skarnu would never have imagined, because it was his.

And when he cried out, when he laid the palm of his left hand on the ream of blank sheets, Skarnu could feel the power flowing through him. A moment later, the ex-dentist lifted his hand, and the sheets were blank no longer. Skarnu saw his story set forth on the topmost one, line for line, word for word, letter for letter as he had written it. Vatsyunas riffled through the ream. Every sheet was identical to the first, identical to the copy Skarnu had given him.

Skarnu saluted him, as if he were a superior officer. “You did better than I thought you could,” he said frankly. “Now we have to get these out where people can see them, and be sneaky enough while we’re doing it so they can’t be traced back to us.”

“This I leave to you.” Vatsyunas staggered, yawned, and caught himself by main force of will. “You will, I pray, forgive me. I am spent, fordone.” He lay down on the straw and went to sleep, just like that. As he snored, Skarnu saluted him again. The sheets he’d made would hurt the redheads far more than ambushing a nighttime patrol. Skarnu hoped so, anyhow.

All things considered, Fernao would as soon have died down in the land of the Ice People. His comrades had saved him-for what? For more torment was the only answer that came to him in the intervals when he was both awake and undrugged.

He’d never been interested in medical magecraft, which meant he knew less about the various distillations of the poppy than he might have. Some left him more or less clear-headed, but did less than they might have against the pain of his broken bones and other wounds. Others took the pain away, but took him away with it, so that he seemed to be standing outside himself, perceiving his battered body as if it belonged to someone else. Sometimes, he felt ashamed to need such drugs. More often, he welcomed them and even began to crave them.

He got them less often as his body began to mend. He understood the reasons for that and resented them at the same time. “Would you rather stay in so much pain, you need the poppy juice to take you out of it?” a nurse asked him.

From flat on his back, he glared up at the earnest young woman. “I’d rather have stayed whole in the first place,” he growled. She shrank away, fright on her face. The war, or Lagoas’ part of it, was still new. Not many wounded men had come back to Setubal to remind the folk who stayed home of what fighting really meant.

Get used to it, he thought. You’d better get used to it. You’ll see-you’ll hear-worse than me.

The next day-he thought it was the next day, anyhow, but the distillations sometimes made time waver, too-he got a visitor he hadn’t expected to see. The Lagoan officer still seemed absurdly young to be wearing a colonel’s rank badges. “Peixoto!” Fernao said. “Planning to send me back to the austral continent again?’

“If you’re well enough, and if the kingdom needs you, I’ll do it in a heartbeat,” the young colonel answered. “Or I’ll go myself, or I’ll send a fisherman, or I’ll do whatever I think needs doing or my superiors tell me to do. That’s my job. But I did want to say I’m sorry you were hurt, and I’m glad you’re on the mend.”

He meant it. Fernao could see as much. That obvious sincerity helped some-but only some. “I’m sorry I was hurt, too,” the mage answered, “and the mending …” He stopped. Peixoto hadn’t gone through it. How could he understand?

“I know,” Peixoto said sympathetically. Fernao didn’t rise from the bed to brain him, but only because he couldn’t. What did Peixoto know? What could he know? Then the officer undid the top few buttons of his tunic, enough to let Fernao see the edges of some nasty scars. Fernao’s rage eased. He couldn’t guess how Peixoto had picked up those wounds, but the soldier did know something about pain.

“I hope you can keep me out of the land of the Ice People when I’m on my feet again,” Fernao said. On his feet again! How far away that seemed. “I have something else in mind, something where I might serve the kingdom better.”

“Ah?” Colonel Peixoto raised an eyebrow, almost as elegantly as if he were an Algarvian. “And that is?”

By his tone, he didn’t think it could be important, whatever it was. He was itching to ship Fernao back to the austral continent; the mage could see as much. But Fernao said, “The Kuusamans know something about theoretical sorcery that we don’t. I’m not sure what it is-one reason I’m not sure is that they’ve done such a good job of keeping it a secret. They wouldn’t be doing that if it weren’t important.”

Peixoto pursed his lips, then slowly nodded. “Aye,” he said at last. “I know somewhat of that, though not the details, which are none of my business. Well, if the Guild Grandmaster agrees you should be doing this, I doubt anyone from his Majesty’s army will quarrel with him.”

Grandmaster Pinhiero had already visited Fernao a couple of times. The mage made up his mind to make sure the grandmaster knew what he wanted. Pinhiero thought it was important, too; he wouldn’t have sent Fernao to Kuusamo to try to learn about it if he hadn’t. And hadn’t Pinhiero said he’d gone himself? Fernao thought, so, but he’d been too dazed and drugged to trust his memory. If he could escape eating roasted camel’s flesh ever again … he wouldn’t shed a tear.

Thoughtfully, Peixoto went on, “And you may be needed here to help ward Setubal against the Algarvians’ magic. We blocked one of their assaults when we broke up that captives’ camp near Dukstas. You know about that?”

“I’ve heard a thing or two, the times I’ve been fully among those present,” Fernao answered.

“It could have been very bad. They might have served Setubal as they served Yliharma this past winter,” Peixoto said. “This time, we got wind of it and stopped them before they could get well started. But who knows if we’ll have good luck or bad the next time?”

Fernao knew all about bad luck, knew more than he’d ever wanted to learn about it. Before he could answer Peixoto, a physician in a white tunic and kilt came into the chamber. “Time for your next procedure,” he said cheerfully, gesturing for the colonel to leave. Peixoto did, waving to Fernao as he went. The mage hardly noticed. He was scowling at the physician. Why shouldn’t the whoreson sound cheerful? It wasn’t as if anything were going to happen to him.

Two attendants moved Fernao from his bed to a stretcher. They were well practiced and gentle; he cried out only once. That tied his record; he’d never yet been shifted without at least one howl of anguish. Down the hall he went, and into a clean, white room with a piece of sorcerous apparatus resembling nothing so much as a large rest crate. The spell powering it wasn’t identical to the one that kept mutton chops fresh in his flat, but it wasn’t far removed, either.

Both the attendants and the physician draped themselves with elbow-length rubber gloves covered in silver foil to insulate themselves from the effects of the spell. Then the men who’d borne him here lifted him once more and set him in the crate.

The next thing he knew, they were lifting him out of the crate again. He had a new pain in his broken leg, and a new one in his flank, too, with no memory of how he’d got them. He also had no sure way of knowing whether they’d left him in there an hour or a couple of weeks. One of the attendants offered him a little glass cup filled with a viscous, purplish fluid. He gulped it down. It tasted nasty. He’d expected nothing different. After what seemed forever but couldn’t really have been too long, the pain drifted away-or rather, it stayed and he drifted away from it.

He dimly recalled taking the purplish stuff a few more times. Then, instead, a nurse gave him a thinner yellow liquid that didn’t taste quite so vile. Some of the pain returned, though without the raw edge it would have had absent the yellow stuff. Some of his wits returned, too.

He didn’t notice Grandmaster Pinhiero coming into his room, but did recognize him after realizing he was there. “How are you today?” Pinhiero asked, worry on his wrinkled, clever face.