Rulers of the Darkness

Some Lagoan was probably peering into the harbor of Tirgoviste town. Cornelu cursed softly again. He didn't even know why he was cursing. Did he really want to lacerate himself by seeing his home town again? Did he really want to stare up the hills of Tirgoviste town to see if he could catch a glimpse of his old home? Did he really want to wonder if the Algarvians had put a cuckoo's egg in his nest?

The trouble was, part of him did: the part that liked to pick scabs off scrapes and watch them bleed again. Most of the time, he could keep that part in check. Every so often, it welled up and got loose.

You're going back to Janira, he reminded himself. That didn't stop him from wanting to see what Costache was up to at this very moment, but it helped him fight the craving down to the bottom of his mind again.

"Come on," he told the leviathan. "We've done what we've come to do. Now let's go… back to Setubal." He'd almost said, Let's go home. But Setubal wasn't home, and never would be. Tirgoviste town was home. He'd just come up with all the good reasons he didn't want to go there. Even so, he knew the place would draw him like a lodestone till the day he died.

Absently, he wondered why a lodestone drew little bits of iron to it. No mage had ever come up with a satisfactory explanation for that. He shrugged. In a way, it was nice to know the world still held mysteries.

His leviathan, of course, made nothing of human speech. He wondered what it thought he was doing. Playing some elaborate game, he supposed, more elaborate than it could have devised on its own. He tapped its smooth skin. That got it moving where words could not have. It turned away from Facaceni town and swam back in the direction from which it had come.

Cornelu kept it underwater as much as he could. He didn't want to draw the notice of those dragons over Facaceni town, and of whatever friends they had down on the ground. Again, the leviathan didn't mind. All sorts of interesting fish and squid swam just below the surface.

He took his bearing whenever it had to surface to blow. That was enough to let him know when he rounded Facaceni island's eastern headland. Someone there spotted him and flashed a mirror at him in an intricate pattern. Since he had no idea whether it was an Algarvian signal or one from local rebels, he kept his leviathan on the course it was swimming and didn't try to answer. Whoever was using it, the mirror was a clever idea. It involved no magic and, if well aimed, could be seen only near its target.

He found out in short order to whom the mirror belonged. An egg flew through the air and burst in the sea about half a mile short of his leviathan. Another one followed a minute later. It threw up a plume of water a little closer than the first had, but not much.

"Nyah!" Cornelu thumbed his nose at the Algarvians on the headland. "Can't hit me! You couldn't hit your mother if you swung right at her face! Nyah!"

That was bravado, and he knew it. Facaceni lay farthest west of Sibiu's main islands. He expected to run a gauntlet before he could escape into the open ocean. The Algarvians would be after him like hounds after a rabbit. He'd had to run from them enough times before. No, not like hounds alone- like hounds and hawks. They'd surely put dragons in the air, too.

And so they did- a couple. They flew search spirals, but didn't happen to spot him. And Mezentio's men sent out a couple of swift little ley-line patrol boats after him, but again, only a couple. He had no trouble making good his escape. It was, in fact, so easy it worried him. He kept anxiously looking around, wondering what he'd missed, wondering what was about to drop on his head.

But nothing did. After a while, the pursuit, never more than halfhearted, simply gave up. He had an easy time returning to the harbor at Setubal.

He almost got killed before he could enter it, though. Lagoan patrol boats were thick as fleas on a dog. They could go almost anywhere in those waters; more ley lines converged on Setubal than on any other city of the world. He got challenged three different times in the course of an hour, and peremptorily ordered off his leviathan when the third captain decided he sounded like an Algarvian. To his surprise, the fellow had a rider on his ship, a man who examined the leviathan, made sure it was carrying no eggs, and took it into the port himself.

"What happened?" Cornelu asked, over and over, but no one on the patrol boat would tell him. Only after Admiralty officials vouched for him was he allowed to learn: the Algarvians on Sibiu had been quiet, but the ones in Valmiera hadn't. They'd sneaked a couple of leviathan-riders across the Strait, and the men had planted eggs on half a dozen warships, including two ley-line cruisers.