Agmund’s thick, dark eyebrows lowered like stormclouds, but several of Ealstan’s classmates spoke up in support of him. “Very well, then,” the master of Algarvian said. “Your suggestion was a good one. Those who came in earlier should have acted on it.” He seized the eraser and rubbed vigorously.

  But, however hard he rubbed, the message refused to disappear. If anything, the white letters got more distinct against their dark background. “Magecraft,” someone said softly.

  Agmund also spoke softly, but his quiet words held only danger. “Anyone daring to use magecraft against Algarve will pay dearly, for the occupiers reckon it an act of war. Someone—perhaps someone in this chamber now—will answer for it, and may answer with his head.” He stalked out.

  “Maybe we ought to run,” somebody said.

  “What good would it do us, unless we took to the hills?” Ealstan said. “Master Agmund knows who we are. He and the headmaster will know where we live.”

  “Besides, if anyone runs, Agmund will think he did it,” Sidroc added. He had a gift for intrigue, if not for scholarship. Once he’d spoken, everyone could hear the likely truth in his words.

  Footfalls in the hall warned that Agmund was returning. The students sprang to their feet, not wanting any show of disrespect to feed his suspicions. That proved wise, for with him came Swithulf, the headmaster of the academy. Agmund looked as if he disapproved of everything and everyone. So did Swithulf; as he’d practiced the expression for twenty or twenty-five more years, his gaze was downright reptilian.

  He read the graffito aloud to himself. Had he been a student, Agmund would have corrected his pronunciation, probably with a switch. As things were, the master of Algarvian said only, “The students deny responsibility.”

  “Aye—they would,” Swithulf grunted. As Agmund had, he tried to erase the rude words. As Agmund had, he failed.

  “Because of the magecraft I mentioned and you have now seen for yourself, sir, I tend to believe them in this instance.” Agmund sounded anything but happy at having to admit such a thing. That he admitted it anyhow made Ealstan, though equally reluctant, give him some small credit.

  Swithulf spoke to the scholars for the first time: “No gossip about this, mind you.” Ealstan and his classmates all nodded solemnly. He worked hard to keep his face straight. Swithulf might as well have ordered the boys not to breathe.

  “What shall we do about this, sir?” Agmund asked. “I can hardly instruct with such a crude distraction behind me.”

  “I shall go get Ceolnoth, the magecraft master,” Swithulf answered. “He is no first-rank mage, true, but he should be sorcerer enough to put paid to this. And he is discreet, and he will charge no fee.” The headmaster departed as abruptly as he’d arrived.

  Agmund made a good game try at teaching in spite of the comment about King Mezentio’s taste in partners—or, perhaps, his taste in pork. With nine piglets in back of the master, though, verbs irregular in the imperfect sense did not sink deep into the students’ memories.

  Master Ceolnoth stuck his head into the chamber. “Well, well, what have we here?” he asked. “The headmaster didn’t say much.” Agmund pointed to the blackboard and explained. Ceolnoth came all the way inside so he could read the offending words. “Oh, dear,” he said. “Aye, we need to be rid of that, don’t we? I doubt anyone in Gromheort would be in a position to know any such thing, I do, I do.”

  Ealstan looked at Sidroc. That was a mistake. It meant he had even more trouble not snickering than he would have otherwise. Sidroc looked about ready to burst like an egg.

  “That doesn’t matter,” said Agmund, whose sense of humor had been strangled at birth. “Just get the filth of my blackboard.”

  “Quite, quite.” Ceolnoth started out the door.

  “Where are you going?” Agmund demanded.

  “Why, to get my tools, of course,” Ceolnoth replied. “Can’t work without ’em, no more than a carpenter can work without his. Swithulf just told me to come in here and look at what you had. Now I’ve looked at it. Now you’ve told me what the trouble is. Now I know I need to do something about it. So.” Out he went.

  “More comings and goings here than I’ve seen since the redheads ran the Forthwegian army out of town,” Ealstan whispered to Sidroc.

  His cousin nodded and whispered back: “I wonder if Ceolnoth worked that sorcery himself. He could look important that way, and say what he thought about the Algarvians at the same time.”

  Ealstan hadn’t thought of that. He didn’t get much chance to think of it, either, for the smack of Master Agmund’s switch coming down on Sidroc’s back made him jump. “Silence in the classroom,” Agmund snapped. Sidroc glared at Ealstan, who’d spoken first but hadn’t got caught. The glare grew more pained when Agmund went on, “Since you enjoy talking so much, conjugate for me the verb to bear in all tenses.”

  Sidroc floundered. Ealstan would have floundered, too; the verb was one of the most irregular in Algarvian, its principal parts seeming unrelated from one tense to another. Agmund kept after Sidroc till Ceolnoth returned. After that, he apparently decided Ealstan’s cousin had an excuse for being distracted and left off grilling him.

  “Let’s see, let’s see,” Ceolnoth said cheerily. He produced a couple of stones, one pale green, the other a dull, grayish pebble. “Chrysolite to drive away fantasies and foolishness, and the stone called adamas in the classical tongue to overcome enemies, madness, and venom.”

  “Adamas” Agmund echoed. “What would that be in Algarvian?”

  “I neither know nor care,” Ceolnoth answered. “Not a very useful language, not for magecraft it isn’t.” Agmund looked furious. If the master of magecraft noticed, he didn’t care. Ealstan snickered, but took care to snicker silently.

  Ceolnoth rattled the two stones together and began to chant in classical Kaunian. That made Agmund look even angrier. The mage pointed to the offending graffito and cried out a word of command. The letters on the blackboard flared brightly. Ealstan thought they would disappear. Instead, they kept right on flaming, in the most literal sense of the word. Smoke began to pour from the blackboard, or from the timbers on which it was mounted.

  Ceolnoth cried out again, in horror. So did Agmund, in rage. “You blundering idiot!” he bellowed.

  “Not so,” Ceolnoth said. “This was a spell set under a spell, so that quelling the first one set off the second.”

  They would have gone on arguing, but Sidroc shouted “Fire!” and dashed out of the room. That broke a different sort of spell. All his fellow scholars and the two masters followed him. Everyone was shouting “Fire!” by then, that and “Get outside!” As Ealstan ran, he got the idea that he wouldn’t have to worry about the Algarvian imperfect tense for some time to come.

  14.

  Garivald hated inspectors on general principles. Any Unkerlanter peasant hated inspectors on general principles. Tales that went back to the days when the Duchy of Grelz was a kingdom in its own right had inspectors as their villains. If any tales had inspectors as their heroes, Garivald had never heard of them. As far as he was concerned, inspectors were nothing but thieves with the power of King Swemmel’s army behind them.

  He particularly hated the two inspectors who had come to Zossen to put a crystal in Waddo’s house. For one thing, he did not want Waddo getting orders straight from Cottbus. For another, the inspectors were swine. They ate and drank enough for half a dozen men, and paid nothing. They leered at the village women, and even pawed at them.

  “They might as well be Algarvians,” Annore said after one of the inspectors shouted a lewd proposition at her while she was walking home from visiting a friend. Unkerlanters were convinced Algarve was a sink of degeneracy.

  “If they touch you, I’ll kill them,” Garivald growled.

  That frightened his wife. “If anyone in a village murders an inspector, the whole village dies,” she warned. That wasn’t legend; it was law and somber fact. Some kings of Unkerlant had been known to show mercy in applying it, but Swemmel was not one of them.

  “They deserve it,” Garivald said, but inside he was glad Annore had reminded him of the law. That gave him a chance to back away from his threat without sounding like a coward.

  “I just wish they’d go away,” Annore said.

  “We all wish they’d go away,” Garivald answered. “Waddo may even wish they’d go away by now. But they won’t. Any day now, we’re going to have to start making a cell to hold prisoners in till they get round to cutting the bastards’ throats to make the crystal work.”

  “And that’s another thing,” his wife said. “What if these robbers or murderers or whatever they are get loose somehow and start robbing and murdering us? Will the inspectors care? Not likely!”

  “I asked Waddo about that very thing the other day,” Garivald said. “He told me they’re going to bring in a couple of guards to make sure that doesn’t happen.”

  “Oh,” Annore said. “Well, that’s a little better.”

  “No such thing!” Garivald exclaimed. “A crystal to tie us to Cottbus, guards here all the time… We couldn’t breathe very free before. We won’t be able to breathe free at all now.”

  Annore found another question: “Well, what can we do about it?”

  “Not a cursed thing,” Garivald said. “Not a single cursed thing. The only thing we could ever do about orders from Cottbus was pretend we never got them. Now we won’t even be able to do that.”

  A couple of days later, he was one of the villagers the inspectors commandeered to build the cell to hold the condemned prisoners whose life energy would power the crystal. He couldn’t work in the fields. He couldn’t tend his garden or his livestock. The inspectors didn’t care. “This has to be done, and it has to be done on time,” one of them said. “Efficiency.”

  “Efficiency,” Garivald agreed. Whenever anyone said that word, everyone who heard it had to agree with it. Dreadful things happened to those who failed to agree. Garivald worked on the cell with a will, sawing and hammering like a man beset by demons. So did the other peasants dragooned into building it. The sooner they got it done, the sooner they could get back to work that really needed doing, work that would keep them fed through the winter. That was the sort of efficiency Garivald understood.

  After a couple of hours of offering suggestions that didn’t help, the inspectors wandered off to find something to drink, and maybe something to eat, too. Garivald wouldn’t have expected anything different; since the inspectors weren’t devouring their own substance, they made free with the village’s.

  He said, “The really efficient thing to do would be to put the criminals in Waddo’s house. He’s the one who wants the crystal so much, so we ought to let him deal with what having it means.”

  “Aye,” said one of the other peasants, a scar-faced fellow named Dagulf. He glanced over toward the firstman’s home, which stood out from the others in Zossen, and then spat on the ground. “Would hardly put him out, even. After all, he built that cursed second story, didn’t he? He could put the captives up there and slit their throats right by the cursed crystal.”

  “Now, that would be efficient,” somebody else said.

  “Who’s going to be the one to tell Waddo to do it, though?” Garivald asked. Nobody answered. He hadn’t expected anybody to answer. He went on, “He’d bawl like a just-gelded colt if anybody had the nerve to tell him he ought to do that. All that precious space is for his family, don’t you know?”

  “Like anybody needs that much space,” Dagulf said, and spat again.

  Everyone working on the cell grumbled and complained and called curses down on Waddo’s head and the heads of the inspectors. But all the curses were so low-voiced, no one more than a few feet away could have heard them. And no one would have guessed the peasants were complaining from the way they worked.

  Not even the inspectors could find anything to complain about over the speed with which the cell went up. “There, you see?” one of them said when it got done two days sooner than they’d demanded. “You can be efficient when you set your minds to it.”

  Neither Garivald nor his fellow carpenters chose to enlighten them. Annore had been doing much of Garivald’s work along with her own. The work had to get done. Who did it mattered less. That was efficiency, too, efficiency as the peasants of Unkerlant understood it.

  Once built in such a driving hurry, the jail cell stayed empty for three weeks. Every time Garivald walked past it, he snickered. That was efficiency as King Swemmel’s men understood it: do something fast for the sake of nothing but speed, then wait endlessly to be able to do whatever came next.

  At last, a column of guards marched up the road from the market town. There were a dozen of them to protect the villagers from four scrawny captives whose chains clanked and rattled with every step they took. Half the guards headed back toward the market town. The others prepared to settle down in Zossen. The first meal the villagers served them showed they were even more ravenous than the inspectors.

  “Now all you need is the crystal and the mage to work the sacrifice and give it life, and you’ll be connected with the rest of the world,” one of the inspectors said, his tone somewhat elevated by strong drink. “Won’t that be grand for you?”

  Garivald thought it would be anything but grand. The inspectors, however, had long since made it plain they cared nothing for his opinion or that of anyone else in Zossen. He kept quiet.

  Sharp-tongued old Uote, though, was moved to speak up: “You mean you haven’t got a crystal here?”

  “Of course we haven’t,” the inspector answered. “Do we look like mages?”

  Uote rolled her eyes. “Call that efficiency?” she said. Maybe she’d had a good deal to drink herself, to dare to ask such a question.

  Both inspectors and all six guards stared at her. A great silence fell over the village square. The inspector who’d spoken before snapped, “Efficiency is what we say it is, you ugly old sow.”

  “Sow, is it?” Uote said. “You’re the pigs in the trough.”

  The silence got louder and more appalled. “Curb your tongue, old woman, or we shall assuredly curb it for you. When the crystal does come here, would you have King Swemmel learn your name?” The inspector’s smile said he looked forward to informing on her.

  Garivald had no use for Uote; even sober, she was a nag and a scold. But she was from his village. Hearing that gloating anticipation from the inspector—the king’s man, the city man—made him feel like a piece of livestock, not a man. And Uote crumpled like a scrap of paper. She sneaked away from the gathering in the village square and stayed inside her house for several days afterwards. Garivald did not think it would do her any good, not unless the crystal came so late, the inspector found other villagers at whom to be angry in the meanwhile.

  When the crystal did arrive a week or so later, it too was escorted by a squad of guards. So many strangers didn’t come to Zossen in the course of an ordinary year. Along with the guards came a mage. His red nose and cheeks and red-tracked eyes said he had a fondness for spirits. So did the way he gulped from the flask at his belt.

  Annore watched in distaste. “They’ve sent us a wreck, not a wizard.”

  “Must be all they think we deserve,” Garivald answered. He shrugged. “It doesn’t take much of a mage to sacrifice a man.”

  He never found out how they chose which condemned prisoner to sacrifice first. He’d done his best to pretend the prisoners and the guards and the mage weren’t anywhere near the village. Some of the villagers had got friendly with the condemned men, bringing good food to the cell instead of just enough swill to keep them alive till they were used up. He thought that pointless; odds were the guards ate the meat and jam instead of giving them to the captives.

  The guards staked the prisoner out in the middle of the village square. “I didn’t do anything,” he said over and over. “I really didn’t do anything.” No one paid any attention to his feeble protests. Garivald stood and watched along with a lot of other villagers. No one had been sacrificed in Zossen for a long time. What was strange was always interesting.

  Up came the wizard, wobbling as he walked. He set the crystal on the condemned criminal’s chest, then took a knife from his belt. Garivald wouldn’t have wanted to handle a knife while that drunk. He would have been as likely to cut himself as what he was supposed to be cutting.

  “I really didn’t do—” The condemned man’s words faded into a wet, choking gurgle. Blood spurted from his neck, just as it did from that of a butchered hog. The mage chanted, hiccuping in between the words. Garivald wondered if he was too drunk to get the spell right, but evidently not: through the blood that covered it, the crystal began to glow.

  One of the inspectors picked it up and carried it over to a bucket of water to wash it off. The other inspectors pointed to the criminal’s body, which was occasionally twitching. “Bury this carrion,” he said, and pointed to several men. “You, you, you, and you.”

  Garivald was the second you. As he pulled up one of the stakes to which the condemned man had been tied, the inspector with the crystal said, “I’ve got Cottbus inside there.” He sounded pleased. Garivald wasn’t. That he wasn’t pleased changed things not at all. He picked up the dead man’s leg and helped carry him away.

  Leudast tramped along the western bank of a small stream that marked some of the border between the part of Forthweg Unkerlant occupied and the part Algarve held. On the other side of the river, an Algarvian patrol mounted on unicorns drew near his squad.

  One of the Algarvians waved to his squad. Not knowing whether to wave back, he glanced toward Sergeant Magnulf. Only when the squad leader raised a hand did he do the same. The Algarvians reined in. Their mounts were painted in splotches of dull brown and green. Unkerlant did the same thing, as had Forthweg when Forthweg had unicorns with which to fight. It made the beasts harder to see and to blaze. It also made them much uglier.