As he’d hoped he would, he got round the Yaninan headlands before the sun set in the northwest. It stayed above the horizon less every day, an effect magnified by the high southerly latitudes in which he found himself. Farther south, down in the land of the Ice People, it would stop rising at all before long.
His leviathan slept in catnaps. He wished he could do the same, but no such luck. Long journeys on leviathan back often got longer because the beasts went their own way when the men who rode them slept. Sometimes they carried two riders on long voyages, to make sure that didn’t happen. The Lagoans hadn’t seen fit to give Cornelu a comrade. He wondered what that said about the importance of the mission they’d given him.
Even more to the point, he wondered what the Unkerlanters would think it said about the importance of the mission the Lagoans had given him. Nothing good, unless he missed his guess. He shrugged. He was following the orders he’d been given. The Unkerlanters were and always had been great ones for following orders. How could they blame him?
After he woke, the first thing he did was look for the moon. It was setting in the west ahead of him, casting a silvery streak of radiance across the sea. He patted the leviathan. “Have you been swimming this way all the time I’ve been asleep?” he asked it. “I hope you have. It’ll make things easier.”
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.
It wasn’t all the same to Cornelu. If anything happened to the leviathan, he’d be stuck in southern Unkerlant for the rest of his days. Comparing exile in Setubal to exile in Rysum reminded him of the difference between bad and worse. “Wait!” he exclaimed. “If you let me, I’ll go down there and get it for you myself.”
“You should have brought it up with you,” the officer said grumpily.
“You might have thought it was an egg and blazed me,” Cornelu said. “Now will you trust me to do what needs doing?”
Every line of the Unkerlanter’s body proclaimed that trusting a foreigner- especially a foreigner who spoke Algarvian and looked like an Algarvian-was the last thing he wanted to do. But, his heavy features clotted with suspicion, he gestured toward the rope ladder and said, “All right, go on-do this. But do it with great care, or I am not liable for what will happen to you next.”
Moving slowly and carefully, Cornelu climbed down the rope ladder. His leviathan swam toward him as he dropped into the cold water. He took the small pack attached to the leviathan’s harness. It was small, aye, but it was heavy; Cornelu had to swim hard to get back to the ladder with it strapped to his back. Climbing up with the added weight wasn’t any fun, either, but he managed.
He set the oiled-leather pack on the pier. “Move away from it!” the Unkerlanter officer said sharply. Cornelu obeyed. The Unkerlanter spoke in his own language again. One of the soldiers came up and put the pack on his own broad back while the rest covered him. He walked up the pier and onto dry land.
Once the soldier got off the weathered planks, the officer relaxed a little. He even unbent so far as to ask, “Do you need food for your voyage east?” When Cornelu nodded, the officer barked orders. Another soldier ran off and returned with smoked fish and hard sausage-the sort of fare that wouldn’t suffer much from salt water.
“My thanks,” Cornelu said, though he already had enough to do well unless the leviathan wandered very badly while he slept. He had fresh water and to spare. Waving in the direction the Unkerlanter with the pack had gone, he asked the officer, “Do you know what’s supposed to be in there?”