Free Into the Darkness by Harry Turtledove Page A

his pack. With a sigh of relief, she did the same with hers. “Now, my granddaughter,” Brivibas said, “if you would be good enough to fetch me the green medius stone, we may begin.”
    You may begin, you mean, Vanai thought. But she rummaged through the pack till she found the weathered green stone. “Here you are,” she said, and handed it to him.
    “Ah, thank you, my granddaughter. The medius stone, when properly activated, removes the blindness from our eyes and lets us see what otherwise could no longer be seen,” Brivibas said. But, as he chanted, and as Vanai unobtrusively wiped her hands on her trousers—handling the stone irritated her skin—she wondered if, when the spell was complete, it would show only ancient thorn bushes as opposed to modern ones. No matter what the fluttering gold leaves declared, she doubted any power point had ever existed here.
    Her mind was elsewhere, anyhow. When Brivibas paused between spells, she asked, “My grandfather, how can you so calmly investigate the past when all the world around you is going up in flames?”
    Brivibas shrugged. “The world will do as it will do, regardless of whether I investigate or not. And so—why should I not learn what I can? Adding some small bits to the total of human knowledge may perhaps keep us from going up in flames, as you put it, some time in the future.” His mouth twisted. “I would have hoped it had done so already, but no one sees all his hopes granted.” After fiddling with the latitude screw and the leveling vernier on his portable sundial, he grunted softly. “And now, back to it.”
    And now, Vanai, shut your trap, she thought. But her grandfather was expert at what he did. She watched closely as he evoked power from a power point forgotten since the days of the Empire. It was here after all, she thought. And then, at his word of command, the scene before her suddenly shifted. She clapped her hands together: she was looking back at the long-vanished days when the Kaunian Empire stretched over a great part of northeastern Derlavai.
    Naturally, Brivibas’s use of power had summoned up the image of another time when power was used here. Vanai stared at ancient Kaunians. They went on about their business; they could not sense her or her grandfather. If she walked over the front edge of the stretch of cleared ground that had appeared before her, she wouldn’t be able to turn around and see the other side of the scene from long ago. She would just see the scrub through which she’d trudged to get here.
    The ancient Kaunians wore woolen trousers, baggier than hers; some had on tunics of wool, too, others of linen. Some of the tunics and trousers were undyed, some dark blue or muddy brown: no bright colors anywhere. Almost all the clothes were visibly dirty, and so were a fair number of the Kaunians. People who’d worked with archaeological magic tended to be less romantic about the glories of the past than the bulk of the populace.
    Brivibas sketched the scene, rapidly and accurately. Skill with a pencil was part of fieldwork. “The men are wearing beards,” he remarked, “and the women have their hair piled high on their heads with curls,” he remarked. “From what period would that make this scene date?”
    Vanai frowned as she thought. “About the reign of Verigas II,” she replied at last.
    Her grandfather beamed. “Very good! Yes, about two hundred years before the Algarvian Irruption—so-called—wrecked the Empire. Ah!” He readied a new leaf for sketching. “Here we have the action, I think.”
    Four Kaunian men carried in a woman who was lying on a litter. She looked not far from the point of death. A fifth man, in cleaner clothes than the litter-bearers, led a sheep after them. He drew a knife from his belt and tested the edge with his thumb. Evidently being satisfied, he turned so that his back was to the modern observers and began magic of his own.
    Brivibas exclaimed in frustration: “I wanted to read