Darkness Descending

“I wonder if they can do anything--short of slaughtering people, I mean,” Cornelu said. “And if they start slaughtering people, how are they different from Mezentio’s cursed mages?”

“How? I’ll tell you how, by the powers above: they’re on our side,” Vasiliu answered. “Swemmel won’t let the Algarvians kick him without kicking back. Why should anyone else?”

“We’ll all be monsters by the time this war ends, if it ever does.” Cornelu rose from his cot. With training that had been enforced with switches during his cadet days, he smoothed the blanket so no one could see the wrinkles his backside had made. “And the Lagoans won’t kill Kaunians like Mezentio, and they won’t kill their own like Swemmel. So what does that leave them?”

“A kingdom in trouble,” Vasiliu said at once.

Cornelu paced back and forth, back and forth. “They ought to be able to do something? he said, though he knew that wasn’t necessarily so: sometimes--too often--there was no help for a situation. The image of Costache burned through his mind. He wondered which of the Algarvian officers quartered on her she was sleeping with. He wondered if she was sleeping with all of them. He wondered if he would have to greet a bastard or two when he came back to Tirgoviste, if he ever did.

Vasiliu pulled him back to the here-and-now by bluntly asking, “What?”

“Curse me if I know. I’m no mage,” Cornelu replied. “And if I were a mage with an answer, I’d go to King Vitor, not to you.” He paused. “I knew a Lagoan mage who might give me answers, though, if he’s got any. I brought him back from the land of the Ice People on leviathan-back.”

“If he doesn’t give you anything you want after that, visiting the austral continent has frozen his heart,” Vasiliu exclaimed. “A ghastly place, by everything I’ve ever heard and read.”

“What I saw of it doesn’t make me want to argue with you,” Cornelu agreed. “I’ll see if I can hunt up this Fernao.”

Cornelu remained a puzzle piece that didn’t fit after his long-delayed and unexpected return from Tirgoviste. Till the Lagoans figured out how they were going to try to get him killed next, his time was his own. He sighed as he left the barracks where the Sibian exiles were quartered. Inside, he had his own language, his own countrymen. Outside was another world, one where he didn’t feel he belonged.

Even the signs were strange. Aye, Lagoan was an Algarvic language like Sibian and Algarvian, but unlike its cousins it had borrowed heavily from both Kaunian and Kuusaman and swallowed most of the declensions and conjugations the other two languages used. That meant Cornelu could pick out words here and there, but had trouble deciphering whole sentences.

He went up to a constable, waited to be noticed, and asked, “Guild of Mages?” He would have had no trouble putting the question in Algarvian, but that probably would have got him arrested as a spy. Whenever he tried speaking Lagoan, he had to hope he was making himself understood.

The kilted constable frowned, then brightened. “Oh, the Guild of Mages,” he said. To Cornelu, the Lagoan’s words sounded the same as his own. Evidently, they didn’t to the constable. The fellow launched into a long explanation, of which Cornelu got perhaps one word in five.

“Slowly!” he said, in more than a little desperation.

For a wonder, the Lagoan did slow down. In fact, he began speaking as if to an idiot child. No doubt that was patronizing. Cornelu didn’t mind. After two or three repetitions, he learned which caravan line he needed to take to get to the Guild’s headquarters. He bowed his thanks and went off to the corner--three blocks up, one block over, as the constable had said, and said, and said--at which the ley-line caravan would stop.

More ley lines came together in and around Setubal than anywhere else in the world. That was one reason why Setubal was the commercial capital of the world. But Setubal had been the greatest trading city in the world even back in the days of sailing ships and horse-drawn wains. It boasted a grand harbor, the Mondego River offered communication inland, and the Lagoans were not in the habit of disrupting their kingdom with internecine strife.

Too bad, Cornelu thought. Sibiu would have been stronger if they were. It was a relief when the caravan car came gliding up; he didn’t have to go on with such gloomy reflections. He stepped up into the car, threw a copper in the fare box--the conductor’s watchful eye made sure he did--and sat down on one of the hard, not particularly comfortable seats.

Ten minutes later, he got off the caravan car and crossed the street to the Grand Hall of the Lagoan Guild of Mages. It was a splendid white marble building in uncompromising neoclassical style, as were the statues in front of it. Had they and the hall been painted instead of remaining pristine, they might have come straight from the heyday of the Kaunian Empire.