Jaws of Darkness Read Free

Dully, he wondered what the nonsense word meant. Nothing in Forthwegian, Algarvian, or classical Kaunian; he was sure of that.
    Pybba glared when he got to work. “You’re late,” he rasped, as he did most mornings whether Ealstan was or not. Then he took a longer look at his bookkeeper. “Powers above! Who hit you over the head with a rock?”
    “I wish somebody had,” Ealstan answered. He wasn’t late. Anything but—he and Pybba had the offices to themselves. “My wife wasn’t home when I got there. She still isn’t. I think the redheads have grabbed her.”
    “Why in blazes would they want her?” the pottery magnate demanded. “You two didn’t just have a fight or something?”
    “No,” Ealstan said flatly. “Why would they want her? She’s Kaunian, that’s why.” He’d never told his boss that. Pybba hated Algarvians, aye, but he had no great use for blonds.
    Now Pybba stared at him, eyes big as the saucers he turned out by the tens of thousands. “Oh, you fool!” he cried. “You great stupid fool!”
     
    Habakkuk —the first Habakkuk, the nameship of what would be a growing class—glided east along a ley line not far from the island kingdom of Sibiu. The hobnails in the soles of Leino’s boots dug into the great vessel’s icy deck. The Kuusaman mage smiled—no, he grinned. He was as proud of Habakkuk as if he’d invented her. Along with a good many other Kuusaman and Lagoan mages, he had.
    Ships had sailed the seas for centuries uncounted: ships, aye, but none like Habakkuk. Ships had been wood and canvas, riding wind and wave.
    Then, as magecraft and manufacturing grew more sophisticated, they’d been iron and steel, traveling the ley lines of the world’s energy grid in defiance of wind and wave. Now … Leino took another step. His hobnailed boots bit into the icy deck again.
    Habakkuk was a thing of ice, ice and a little sawdust for strength. Leino and his fellow mages had planed the top of an iceberg flat, down in the iceberg-ridden seas bordering the frigid austral continent. They’d hollowed out chambers in the ice, chambers that held men and supplies and—the point of the exercise—far more dragons than any ordinary ship could haul.
    Magecraft had shaped the Habakkuk. More magecraft propelled it along the ley lines. And still more magecraft kept it from melting away to nothing as it sailed these warmer (though still far from warm) waters farther from the land of the Ice People. Leino wondered what the natives of the tropical continent of Siaulia would think if the Habakkuk ever had occasion to sail there. Most of them had never seen any ice in all their lives, let alone a great floating mountain of it that refused to disappear even in that blood-warm sea.
    High overhead, a dragon screeched. Leino glanced up not in fear but in wariness, lest it prove an Algarvian beast diving to the attack. But it wasn’t; it was painted in the Kuusaman colors of sky-blue and sea-green, which made it hard to spot for a moment against the drifting clouds. Down it spiraled: long, snaky body; short, clawed limbs; great batwings now gliding, now beating; long neck and fearsome, big-eyed head. So much ferocity, all governed by a brain the size of a plum—and by the dragonflier who sat strapped into his harness at the base of the beast’s neck.
    Leino’s shiver had nothing to do with the ice on which he trod or with the chilly quartering breeze. Facing the impersonal forces of magecraft was hard enough. They would kill you only if you abused them or made a mistake with them. Dragons, now, dragons might kill you out of malice or simply because they forgot what a command meant. With plum-sized brains, they were better at forgetting than remembering. Leino didn’t think there was enough silver in the world to make him train to become a dragonflier.
    But his countryman aboard the descending dragon handled his dangerous job with nonchalant competence. He brought the beast down right where a gang of