Darkness Descending

For the first time since an egg from an Algarvian dragon killed Eforiel, Cornelu was back in his element: riding a leviathan in search of the most harm he could do to King Mezentio’s followers. The leviathan, a Lagoan beast, wasn’t trained up to the standards of the Sibian navy, but she was still young, and she could learn. He’d already seen as much.

True, these days Cornelu patrolled the Strait of Valmiera, not the narrower channel that separated Sibiu from the mainland of Derlavai. His own kingdom remained under Algarvian occupation. Powers above, his own wife remained under Algarvian occupation. But he was fighting back again.

He tapped the leviathan in a pattern the same in the Lagoan service as it had been in that of Sibiu. Obediently, the great beast raised the front part of her body out of the water, lifting Cornelu with it so he could see farther. If an Algarvian ship glided down a ley line without his seeing it, he could hardly try to sink it.

Even with the added range to his vision, he saw nothing but sea and sky. He tapped the leviathan again, and it sank back down into the water. By the way the beast quivered under him, he knew it thought rearing was part of an enjoyable game. That was all right with him. He would enjoy the game if it led him to Algarvians. King Mezentio’s men wouldn’t, but sending them to the bottom would only make Cornelu happier.

“Now,” he muttered, “I think we’ve been traveling along a ley line, but I’d better make sure.”

Like the skintight suit he wore, his belt was made of rubber. He took from one of the pouches on the belt an instrument of bronze and glass. Inside the hollow glass sphere that made up the bulk of it were two vanes of thinnest gold leaf. They stood well apart from each other.

Cornelu let out a satisfied grunt. That the vanes repelled each other showed they were in the presence of sorcerous energy--and the only sources of sorcerous energy out on the ocean were the ley lines that formed a grid on sea and land alike. If Cornelu waited here long enough, a ship was sure to pass close by.

But he had no idea how long long enough might be. And, loathing the Algarvians as he did, he was not in the mood to wait. He wanted to hunt. He was a coursing wolf, not a spider sitting in a web waiting for a butterfly to blunder along and give him a meal.

He turned his instrument this way and that in his hands, watching the gold-leaf vanes flutter as he did. He knew they spread wider when parallel to a ley line than when perpendicular to it. As he’d thought, the line on which he’d positioned himself and his leviathan ran from northeast to southwest. Without hesitation, he urged the leviathan in the latter direction, toward the coast of Algarvian-occupied Valmiera and of Algarve itself.

“If you don’t go where the bees are, you won’t get any honey,” he told the leviathan. Talking to this new beast wasn’t like talking with Eforiel. He’d told his old leviathan everything. With this one, he still felt a certain reserve. He wasn’t sure how much it understood, either--after all, it spoke Lagoan, not Sibian. Cornelu knew that was an absurd conceit, but he couldn’t get it out of his mind.

The leviathan swam along happily enough. It was doing what it would have done had it never made the acquaintance of mankind: foraging. When it got into a school of mackerel, its long toothy jaws opened and closed, snapping up fish after fish. The only notice it took of Cornelu on its back and of the eggs strapped beneath its belly was that they made it swim a little slower and more awkwardly than it would have otherwise. That let a couple of mackerel it should have caught get away. But it still caught plenty and didn’t seem aggrieved.

“Come on, my beauty,” Cornelu urged it. “Come on. Bring me to a ship. It doesn’t have to be a great big ship. Just bring me to a ship.”

He was lying. He knew the kind of ship to which he wanted the leviathan to bring him: to a great Algarvian floating fortress, all bristling with heavy sticks and with egg-tossers. Sending a vessel like that to the bottom would be the beginning of revenge for everything Algarve had done to his kingdom and to his life.

But sending a vessel like that to the bottom wouldn’t be easy. He knew as much. He would have to be sly. He would have to be sneaky. He would have to be lucky. The sailors aboard a floating fortress would always be alert against attack by leviathans. So would the mages aboard such a ship, though he didn’t worry so much about them as he would have on land. He had his instrument for detecting sorcerous energy, but wasn’t using any to speak of. That made his own sorcerous footprint very small and hard to note.