Through the Darkness

The leviathan didn’t answer. It just kept on swimming. That was the purpose for which the powers above had shaped it, and it admirably fulfilled its purpose.

Not long after the sun rose, he had his first anxious moment. The leviathan came upon a fishing boat flying the red-and-white banner of Yanina. It was a sailboat, and used no sorcerous energy, so Cornelu didn’t detect it till he saw it. His mouth tightened. The Algarvians, sneaky whoresons that they were, had invaded Sibiu with a great fleet of sailing ships, and sneaked into his kingdom’s harbors precisely because no one had imagined an assault not based on magecraft.

But the Yaninans, even though they didn’t use the world’s energy grid, proved to have some sorcery aboard their boat. As soon as they saw him--or, more likely, saw his leviathan--they ran to an egg-tosser at the stern of the fishing boat, swung it toward him, and let fly.

It wasn’t much of an egg-tosser; the boat wasn’t big enough to carry much of an egg-tosser. The egg the Yaninans lobbed fell far short, bursting about halfway between the boat and Cornelu’s leviathan. They didn’t seem to care-- they promptly launched another one at him.

“All right!” he exclaimed. “I believed you the first time.” He swung the leviathan on a course that steered well clear of the fishing boat. The Yaninans couldn’t possibly have been worrying about Lagoans in these waters. Maybe they feared he was an Unkerlanter. But, for all they knew, he might have been one of their own. They hadn’t tried to find out. They’d just tried to get rid of him. And they’d done it, too.

Once he’d left them behind, he laughed. They were probably telling themselves what a great bunch of heroes they were. By everything the war had shown, the Yaninans were better at telling themselves they were heroes than at really playing the role.

Early the next morning, the leviathan brought Cornelu into the Unkerlanter port of Rysum. A ley-line patrol boat and a couple of Unkerlanter leviathans paced him into the harbor. A dragon flew overhead, eggs slung under its belly. He’d told King Swemmel’s men who he was and where he’d come from. They were supposed to know he was coming. Considering the war they were fighting with Algarve, he didn’t suppose he could blame them for suspecting him, but he thought they were carrying those suspicions further than they had to.

Rysum wasn’t much of a port. None of Unkerlant’s ports on the Narrow Sea was much, not by the standards prevailing farther east. They all iced over several months a year. That kept them from matching their counterparts in Yanina and Algarve, which lay more to the north. Rysum wouldn’t stay clear much longer.

As soon as Cornelu climbed a rope ladder up onto the pier by which his leviathan rested, a squad of soldiers ran up and aimed sticks at him. “I am your friend, not your enemy!” he said in classical Kaunian--he spoke not a word of Unkerlanter.

Anywhere in eastern Derlavai--even in Algarve, which slaughtered Kaunians to fuel its sorceries--he would have found someone who understood the old language. Not here; the Unkerlanters, squat and dumpy in their long, baggy tunics, jabbered back and forth in their own guttural tongue.

He could have spoken to them in Algarvian. He held back, fearing that would get him blazed down on the spot. And then an Unkerlanter officer spoke Algarvian to him: “Do you understand me?”

“Aye,” he answered in some relief. “I am Commander Cornelu of the Sibian Navy, an exile serving out of Setubal in Lagoas. Are you not expecting me? Why are you all acting like I’m an egg that’s about to burst and fling this place to those hills yonder?” He pointed north and west, toward the low hills that crinkled the horizon there.

“What do you know of the Mamming Hills?” the Unkerlanter rapped out.

“Nothing,” Cornelu said. After a moment, he remembered the cinnabar mines in those hills, but he got the idea that changing his answer would not make the officer glowering at him happy. He kept quiet.

That proved a good idea. The Unkerlanter said, “What have you brought us?”

“I don’t even know. What I don’t know, I couldn’t have told Mezentio’s men,” Cornelu said. “I did hear the Kuusamans gave it to the Lagoans. The Lagoans gave it to me, and now I am giving it to you.”

“The Kuusamans, you say?” The Unkerlanter officer brightened; this time, Cornelu had managed to say the right thing. “Aye, that accords with my briefing. We will take it from your leviathan.” He started giving orders to the soldiers in his own language.”

Cornelu didn’t know what he was saying, but could make a good guess. “They’ll get eaten if they try,” he warned.

“Then we will kill the leviathan and take it anyhow,” the Unkerlanter answered, as if it were all the same to him--and it probably was.