Jaws of Darkness

Spinello tapped his wound badge. “My pals didn’t let me down when I got hurt. Time to pay them back.” The common soldier only nodded. He wore a wound badge, too, and already had two ribbons under it.

When they lifted the crystallomancer, he shrieked like a cursed soul.

Then, mercifully, he did pass out. They half carried, half dragged him back to a battered building-more battered now than Spinello remembered it- where healers were hard at work. The place smelled of smoke and unwashed men and the butcher-shop odor of blood and the latrine stink of pierced entrails. Spinello did his best to hide his shudder. He’d been in places like this before, when he was the one who suffered. The smells made his body remember, and remember too well.

“Hey, quacks!” the trooper said, perhaps hiding his own unease with bravado. “We’ve got another one for you to practice on.”

A harried healer hurried over. He took one look at the crimsoned, soaking bandages and winced. “Belly wound, eh? We can’t do much with that here. We’ll have to put him on ice and ship him back to Algarve. Maybe they can help him back there, maybe not. He’ll have some kind of chance, anyway.”

With a nod, Spinello said, “That’s about what I thought.” A dragon had flown him out of Sulingen after a sniper put a beam through the right side of his chest. Now he could take a more detached interest in the proceedings.

A couple of eggs burst close enough to make the ground shake under his feet. Irritably, the healer said, “Don’t they ever run out of those cursed things?”

Almost on cue, the pounding of Eoforwic eased. “Who knows?” Spinello said in glad surprise. “Maybe they do.”

“Not bloody likely.” The healer put on a pair of long, thick, obviously insulated gloves. He called for a colleague, who did the same thing. The two men lifted the crystallomancer and set him down in a box that looked something like a coffin and something like a rest crate. Without the gloves, the spell inside the box would have sorcerously frozen their hands and arms in short order, too. The healer muttered a charm over the box. Then he scrawled on the outside a diagnosis in the much-abbreviated classical Kaunian medical men used. With a nod to Spinello, he said, “We’ll get him out of here. What happens after that is in the hands of the powers above.”

“I hope he comes through all right,” Spinello said. “We’ll need all the mages of any sort we can get our hands on.”

“I wish I could say you were wrong,” the healer answered. “When we start using our secret sorceries-”

“Aye, by the powers above!” Spinello broke in eagerly. “You’re a sorcerer yourself. How soon do you think that will be?”

“I don’t know,” the healer said. “I wish I did. But only Mezentio and, I suppose, a few of our first-rank mages could tell you for certain. I will say this, though-it had better be soon.”

“It certainly should,” Spinello said. “We’ve lost everything we ever got in Unkerlant, and so many men to go with that. We’re practically back to the point where we were when we started fighting Swemmel. And the east…” He didn’t want to think about the east. He didn’t want to think about the Unkerlanters’ not being checked here in the west, either-they were only gathering themselves for the next leap forward.

“All true, every word of it.” The healer sounded glum. “But that’s not the worst. The worst is, where are we going to get the blonds to make the secret sorceries work?”

“I don’t know,” Spinello answered. “I wish I did. We can start grabbing ordinary Forthwegians, I suppose-or Yaninans, those filthy traitors.”

On that gloomy note, he took his leave. He saw some ordinary Forthwegians going through the ruins of Eoforwic. Every so often, one of them would stoop and put something in a basket. Gathering mushrooms, he thought, and made a face at the very idea. Algarvians didn’t eat mushrooms. As far as Spinello was concerned, people who did deserved whatever happened to them.

Snow already lay thick on the ground in the Naantali district. Pekka wasn’t surprised; it would be snowing down in Kajaani, too, and Kajaani had the sea to moderate its climate. Some of the mages from the northern, more temperate parts of Kuusamo and Lagoas complained about the weather. They couldn’t do anything about it-what mage could?-but that didn’t stop them from complaining.

“Me, I’ve come to like it better this time of year,” Fernao said. “You can go outside without the mosquitoes’ eating you alive.”

“It’s only weather,” Pekka said, ignoring snowstorms in mid-autumn with the ease of someone who took hard winters for granted. “What I have to complain about isn’t the snow. It’s those!’

She pointed first to one of the heavy sticks now emplaced around the hostel and the blockhouse, then to another and another. When she looked up to the sky, she caught a glimpse of a patrolling dragon through a break in the clouds overhead. The dragon was painted in a pattern of sky blue and sea green, the colors of Kuusamo.

“We have a saying in Lagoas.” Fernao paused, probably translating it into Kuusaman from his own language. “Trying to make soup after the dog has stolen the bone.”

“Exactly,” Pekka said. “How are the Algarvians going to reach us now? They’ve left most of Valmiera. Their dragons can’t possibly fly here from the lands they still hold. And none of these things were in place when that cursed dragon did attack us.”

Fernao took her hand. She squeezed his. When Leino came home, she would have a lot of things to worry about, a lot of choices to make. She knew as much. Meanwhile, she enjoyed each day-and each night-as if tomorrow would never come. Later? What was later?

Slowly, Fernao said, “Saying what the Algarvians can’t possibly do worries me a little. They’ve already done too many things nobody thought they could do.”

“Too many things nobody thought they would do,” Pekka said, which wasn’t quite the same thing. “Too many things nobody thought anyone would do.”

Now Fernao squeezed her hand. “What we’ve done here has gone a long way toward keeping people from doing things like that again. That’s mostly thanks to you, you know, to you and your experiments.”

Pekka shook her head. “ Master Siuntio is the one who really deserves the credit. And Master Ilmarinen. I just did the work. They were the ones who saw I’d stumbled onto something important and figured out what it meant.”

“You don’t give yourself enough credit,” Fernao said. “You never have.”

“Nonsense,” Pekka said, and then, “I got a letter from my sister this morning.”

She’d wanted to change the subject, and she succeeded. Fernao walked along in silence for a little while, kicking up snow at every step. At last, he asked, “And what does she have to say?”

“Nothing too much,” Pekka answered. “Olavin’s solicitors paid a call on her. She wasn’t very happy about that.”

“I believe it.” In Fernao’s long, pale Lagoan face, his slanted eyes were usually a reminder that he had a little Kuusaman blood in him, too. Now, though, they just made his expression harder to read. After a few more silent paces, he said, “Are we going to have to worry about that one of these days?”

Pekka had forced the future out of her purview. Now Fernao brought it back. She wished he hadn’t. “I don’t know,” she said. “I just don’t know.” She kicked up some snow of her own-kicked it at Fernao, in fact. “Let’s go back to the hostel.” She turned and started off without waiting to see whether he followed.

He did, and went up the steps only a pace behind her. “Whatever happens, we’ll see it through,” he said.

“What else can we do?” she said, wishing he would keep quiet. Weren’t men supposed to be the ones who didn’t want to commit themselves? That didn’t fit Fernao. He wanted to run away with her. She was the one full of doubts, full of complications. She sighed. Why couldn’t things be simpler?