Darkness Descending

No more. If Lagoas didn’t have an army fighting on the mainland, she did have one fighting in the land of the Ice People. And she and Kuusamo were assuredly on the same side now--and what had happened to Yliharma made everyone in Setubal shudder. The Algarvians could have attacked the capital of Lagoas instead. For that matter, they could attack Setubal yet. Maybe they were just pausing to gather more Kaunians to kill.

“It is good to see the Lagoans worried,” Cornelu said to Vasiliu, another exile, as they sat together in the barracks assigned to Sibian naval men who’d managed to escape their kingdom.

“It is always good to see Lagoans worried,” his countryman answered. They both chuckled, neither with much humor. Lagoas had stayed neutral in the Derlavaian War till the Algarvians overran Sibiu. That rankled. And, though Lagoas and Sibiu had fought on the same side in the Six Years’ War, they were old enemies and rivals, being too much alike to make good friends. Lagoas, however, had for the past couple of hundred years been bigger and stronger.

“To be just, we should be worried here, too,” Cornelu said. “If these Algarvians unleash their sorcery against Setubal, do you think it will spare us because we were born in Sibiu?”

“Nothing Mezentio does is meant to spare Sibians,” Vasiliu snarled. Like Cornelu, like most from the five islands off the southern coast of Algarve, he had a long, dour face, a face on which anger and worry fit more readily than good cheer. He was scowling now. “What I wonder is whether the happy-go-lucky Lagoans are doing anything to stop Mezentio from serving them as he served Yliharma.”

“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.