Out of the Darkness

by Harry Turtledove

  The captain nodded. “You two,” he said, using the plural where he should have used the dual, “to come with me.”

  “Why, sir?” Istvan asked. “What have we done?”

  “Not know,” the Kuusaman answered with a shrug. “You to come for interrogation.”

  He pronounced the word so badly, Istvan almost failed to understand it. When he did, he wished he hadn’t. Gyongyosian interrogations were nasty, brutal things. The Kuusamans were the enemy, so he couldn’t imagine they would play the game by gentler rules.

  But it was their game, not his. Under the sticks of the guards, he could obey or he could die. I should have let Captain Frigyes cut my throat after all, he thought. It would have been over in a hurry then, and my life energy might have done something extra to the slanteyes. Now the stars are having their revenge on me.

  One of the guards gestured with his stick. Numbly, Istvan started forward, Kun at his side. Kun’s face was a frozen mask. Istvan tried to wear the same look. If the Kuusamans thought he was afraid, it would only go worse for him. And if they don’t think I’m afraid, they’re fools.

  But he would do his best to act like a man from a warrior race as long as he could. “You ought to give us breakfast before you question us,” he told a guard as the fellow led him toward one of the gates in the stockade.

  “To shut up,” the guard answered.

  Outside the gate, the Kuusamans separated him from Kun, leading him towards one tent on the yellow-brown grass and Kun to another. Istvan grimaced. That made telling lies harder.

  He ducked his way into the tent. A couple of guards already stood in there. The Kuusamans didn’t believe in taking chances. One of the men who’d led him out of the captives’ camp walked in behind him. No, the slanteyes didn’t believe in taking chances at all. A moment later, he realized why: the bright-looking Kuusaman sitting in a folding chair waiting for him was a woman. She wore spectacles amazingly like Kun’s. It had barely occurred to him that the Kuusamans had to have women among them as well as men, or there wouldn’t have been any more Kuusamans after a while. He wished there hadn’t been.

  “Hello. You are Sergeant Istvan, is it not so?” she said, speaking better Gyongyosian than any other slanteye he’d ever heard. She waited for him to nod, then went on, “I am called Lammi. May the stars shine on our meeting.”

  “May it be so,” Istvan mumbled; he felt confused, out of his depth, but he’d be accursed if he would let a foreigner act more politely than he did.

  “Sit down, if you care to,” Lammi said, pointing to another folding chair. Warily, Istvan sat. The Kuusaman woman--she was, he guessed, somewhere around forty, for she had a handful of silver threads among the midnight of her hair, the first fine wrinkles around her eyes--went on, “You were taken before breakfast, eh?”

  “Aye, Lady Lammi,” Istvan answered, unconsciously giving her the title he would have given a domain-holder’s wife back in his home valley.

  She laughed. “I am no lady,” she said. “I am a forensic sorcerer--do you know what that means?”

  Forensic sounded as if it ought to be Gyongyosian--it wasn’t the funny sort of noises Kuusamans used for a language--but it wasn’t a word Istvan had heard before. He shrugged broad shoulders. “You’re a mage. That’s enough to know.”

  “All right.” She turned to one of the guards and spoke in her own language. The man nodded. He left the tent. Lammi returned to Gyongyosian: “He is fetching you something to eat.”

  What Istvan got must have come from the guards’ rations, not the captives’: a big plate full of eggs and smoked salmon scrambled together, with fried turnips swimming in butter off to the side. He ate like a starving mountain ape. Kuusaman interrogations certainly didn’t seem much like those his countrymen would have used.

  While he shoveled food into his mouth, Lammi said, “What it means is, after something has happened, I investigate how and why it happened. You can probably guess what I am here to investigate.”

  Istvan’s stomach did a slow lurch, as if he were aboard ship in a heavy sea. “Probably,” he said, and let it go at that. The less he said, the less Lammi could use.

  She gave him back a brisk nod. Behind the lenses of her spectacles, her eyes were very sharp indeed. “It means one thing more, Sergeant: if you lie, I will know it. You do not want that to happen. Please believe me--you do not.”

  Another lurch. Istvan almost regretted the enormous breakfast he was demolishing. Almost, but not quite. He’d eaten mush--and thin mush at that--for too long. Lammi waited for him to say something. Reluctantly, he did: “I understand.”

  “Good.” The forensic mage waited till he’d chased down the last bit of fried turnip and given his plate to the guard who’d fetched it before beginning by asking, “You knew Captain Frigyes, did you not?”

  “He was my company commander,” Istvan replied. She had to have already learned that.

  “And you also knew Borsos the dowser?” Lammi asked.

  “Aye,” Istvan said--why not answer that? “I fetched and carried for him here on Obuda, as a matter of fact, back when the war was young. And I saw him again when I was fighting in Unkerlant.”

  Lammi nodded once more. “All right. He never should have come to an ordinary captives’ camp, but that was our error, not yours.” She had a pad of paper in her lap, and drummed her fingers on it. “Tell me, Sergeant, what do you think of what your countrymen did here?”

  “It was brave. They were warriors. They died like warriors,” Istvan answered. Lammi sat there looking at him--looking through him--with those sharp, sharp eyes. Under that gaze, he felt he had to go on, and he did: “I thought they were stupid, though. They could not do you enough harm to make their deaths worthwhile.”

  “Ah.” Lammi scribbled something in the notepad. “You are a man of more than a little sense, I see. Is that why you did not offer your throat to the knife?”

  Istvan felt the ice under his feet getting thin. “I was ill that night,” he said. “I was in the infirmary that night. I couldn’t have done anything about it even if I’d thought it was a good idea.”

  “So you were, you and Corporal Kun,” Lammi said. “And how did the two of you manage to be so, ah, conveniently ill?”

  The ice crackled, as if he might fall through. And what was Kun saying, over in the other tent? “I had the shits,” Istvan said. Maybe the raw word would keep her from digging further.

  He should have known better. He realized that even before her eyes blazed. “Did you think I was bluffing?” she asked quietly. “An evasion is also a lie, Sergeant. I will let you try again. How did you come to have the shits?” She spoke the word as calmly as a soldier might have. He supposed he should have guessed that, too.

  But he evaded even so: “It must have been something I ate.”

  Lammi shook her head, as if she’d expected better of him. He braced himself for whatever the guards would do to him. He hoped it wouldn’t be too bad. The slanteyes really were softer than his own folk. He saw Lammi raise her left hand and start to twist it--and then he suddenly stopped seeing. Everything went, not black, but no color at all. He stopped hearing. He stopped smelling and feeling and tasting. As far as he could prove, he stopped existing.

  Have I died? he wondered. If he had, he knew none of the stars’ light. Or is it her wizardry? Thinking straight didn’t come easy, not when he was reduced to essential nothingness. His mind began to drift, whether he wanted it to or not. How long before I go mad? he wondered. But even time had no meaning, not when he couldn’t gauge it.

  After what might have been moments or years, he found himself back in his body, all senses intact. By the way Lammi eyed him, it hadn’t been long. She said, “I can do worse than that. Do you want to see how much worse I can do?”

  “I am your captive.” Istvan tried to calm his pounding heart. “You will do as you do.”

  To his surprise, she gave him a nod of obvious approval. “Spoken like a warrior,” she said, just as a G
yongyosian might have. She went on, “I have studied your people for many years. I admire your courage. But, with war the way it is these days, courage is not enough. Do you see that, Sergeant?”

  Istvan shrugged. “It’s all I have left.”

  “I know. I am sorry.” Lammi gestured. The world disappeared for Istvan once more. He tried to get to his feet to spring at her, but his body would not obey his will. It was as if he had no body. After some endless while, his mind did drift free of the moorings of rationality. And when he heard a voice speaking to him, it might have been the voice of the stars themselves, leading his spirit toward them. He answered without the slightest hesitation.

  The world returned. There sat Lammi, looking at him with real sympathy in her dark, narrow eyes. Realization smote. “It was you!” he exclaimed.

  “Aye, it was me. I am sorry, but I did what was needful for my kingdom.” She studied him. “So you and this Kun knew ahead of time. You knew, and you did nothing to warn us.”

  “I thought about it,” Istvan said, and the admission made Lammi jerk in surprise. “I thought about it, but, no matter how stupid I thought the sacrifice was, I might have been wrong. And I could not bring myself to betray Ekrekek Arpad and Gyongyos. The stars would go dark for me forever.”

  Lammi scribbled notes. “That will do for now. I must compare your words to those of this other man, this Kun. I shall have more to ask you about another time.” She spoke to the guards in Kuusaman. They took Istvan back to the camp. He wondered if the forensic mage would feed him so well the next time she asked him questions. He hoped so.

  Marshal Rathar lay in a warm, soft Algarvian bed in an Algarvian house in the middle of an Algarvian town. He could have had a warm, soft Algarvian woman in the bed with him. Plenty of Unkerlanter soldiers were avenging themselves, indulging themselves, with rape or other, less brutal, arrangements. He understood that. A lot of revenge was owed. A lot would be taken. But, as marshal, he found rape beneath his dignity, and he hadn’t seen a redheaded woman he really wanted, either.

  Mangani--that was the name of the town. It lay not too far west of the Scamandro River, which was what the Algarvians called this reach of the Skamandros. The Scamandro flowed into the South Raffali. On the marshy ground between the South Raffali and the North Raffali lay Trapani. Mezentio’s men had pushed almost as far as Cottbus. Now King Swemmel’s soldiers were getting close to the Algarvian capital.

  And we aren‘t the only ones, Rathar thought discontentedly as he got out of the warm, soft bed and went downstairs. General Vatran was already down there, eating porridge and drinking tea as he peered at a map through spectacles that magnified his eyes.

  “Be careful,” Rathar said. “King Mezentio is watching.”

  “Huh?” Vatran’s bushy white eyebrows rose. “What are you talking about, sir?”

  Rathar pointed to the far wall of the dining room, where a reproduction of a portrait of Mezentio hung at a distinctly cockeyed angle. Vatran eyed the image of the King of Algarve, then spat at it. His spittle fell short and splatted on the floor. Rathar laughed, saying, “May we get the chance to try that in person soon.”

  “That would be good,” Vatran agreed. “But it won’t be quite so soon as we’d like, curse it. The redheads have a pretty solid line set up on the east bank of the Scamandro. They’re good with river lines, the buggers.”

  “They’ve had plenty of practice making them,” Rathar said, “but we’ve smashed every one they’ve made. We’ll smash this one, too . . . eventually.”

  “Eventually is right,” Vatran said. “Maybe it’s just as well they did slow us down for a while. We could use a little time to let our supplies catch up with our soldiers.”

  Marshal Rathar grunted. He knew how true that was. No other army could have come so far so fast as the Unkerlanters had, for no other army was so good at living off the countryside. But, while Unkerlanters could find more food than other forces and so needed to bring less with them, they couldn’t find eggs growing on trees or in fields. They had indeed run short. Had the redheads had more themselves, they could have put in a nasty counterattack. But, while they remained brave and highly professional, they were far more desperately short of everything--men, behemoths, dragons, eggs, cinnabar--than their foes. And every mile King Swemmel’s men advanced was a mile from which the Algarvians could no longer draw any of those essentials.

  But King Swemmel’s men weren’t the only ones advancing in Algarve these days. Worry in his voice, Rathar asked, “How far west have the islanders come?”

  “Just about all of the Marquisate of Rivaroli is in their hands, sir,” Vatran answered. “That’s what the crystallomancers say. The really bastardly part of it is, the fornicating Algarvians aren’t putting up much of a fight against them.”

  “Of course they aren’t. Whatever they have left, they’re throwing it at us.” Rathar understood why. The redheads knew to the copper how much Unkerlant owed them. They were doing everything they could to keep Unkerlant from paying.

  “But if they fight us like madmen and if they don’t hardly fight Kuusamo and Lagoas at all. . .” Vatran sounded worried, too. “If the islanders take Trapani and we don’t, King Swemmel will boil both of us alive.”

  Rathar would have argued about that, if only he could. Since he couldn’t, he went back to the kitchen and got a bowl of porridge and some tea for himself, too. He brought them out to the dining room and ate while he, like Vatran, studied the map. His army had no bridgeheads over the Scamandro. A couple of crossings had been beaten back. The redheads had learned, too. They knew how disastrous Unkerlanter bridgeheads could be.

  Finishing his breakfast, he walked out onto the sidewalk and looked northeast toward Trapani. Mangani bustled with Unkerlanter soldiers. Some of them were marching east, toward the front. Their sergeants kept them moving in the profane way of sergeants all over Derlavai. Others, though, just milled about. Some were walking wounded who’d needed healing and weren’t quite ready to return to the fighting line yet. Some were probably evading orders to move east. And some were queued up in front of a building with a chunk bitten out of its fancy facade: a soldiers’ brothel. Rathar didn’t know how the quartermasters had recruited the redheaded women in the brothel. Even the Marshal of Unkerlant was entitled to squeamishness about a few things.

  A soldier came past Rathar carrying something or other. “What have you got there?” Rathar asked him.

  The youngster stiffened to attention when he saw who’d spoken to him. He held up his prize. “It’s a lamp, sir, one of those sorcerous lamps the redheads use.

  Unkerlanters used them, too, in towns and cities. By his accent, though, this soldier, like so many of his countrymen, came from a peasant village. Gently, Rathar asked, “What are you going to do with it?”

  “Well, lord Marshal, sir, I’m going to see if I can’t take it on home with me,” the young man answered. “The light it’s got inside of it is an awful lot finer nor a torch nor a candle nor even an oil lantern.”

  Rathar sighed. A sorcerous lamp wouldn’t work without a power point or a ley line close by. Those were dense in Algarve, much less so in Unkerlant. He started to tell the soldier as much, but then checked himself. What were the odds the fellow would live to go back to his village? What were the odds the lamp would stay unbroken even if he did? Slim and slimmer, no doubt about it. Rather reached out and clapped him on the shoulder. “Good luck to you, son.”

  “Thank you, lord Marshal!” Beaming, the soldier went on his way.

  What will the world look like after this cursed war finally ends? Rathar wondered. How can Unkerlant take its proper place among the kingdoms of the world if so many of our people are so ignorant? We’re like a dragon, all strength and claws and fire and not a bit of brain.

  Shaking his head, Rathar watched a column of Algarvian captives trudging gloomily off into the west. Some were too young to make good soldiers, others too old. The Algarvians had all the brains in the world. And if you don’
t believe it, just ask them, Rathar thought, one corner of his mouth quirking up in a wry smile. Brains weren’t enough all by themselves, either. Mezentio’s men hadn’t had quite the brawn they needed to do everything they wanted--for which the marshal gave the powers above fervent thanks.

  Almost no Algarvian civilians showed themselves. How many huddled in their houses and how many had fled, Rathar didn’t know. From everything he’d seen, the town held next to no unwounded men between the ages of fourteen and sixty-five. As for women ... If he were an Algarvian woman, he wouldn’t have wanted Unkerlanter soldiers to know he was around, either.

  He went back into the house he was using as a headquarters. In the few minutes he was outside, someone had taken down the picture of King Mezentio and put up one of King Swemmel. Rathar found his own sovereign’s cold stare no more pleasant to work under than that of the King of Algarve.

  A crystallomancer came up to him and said, “Sir, the redheads have taken out a couple of important bridges with those steerable eggs of theirs.”

  “Those things are a stinking nuisance.” Rathar felt like kicking someone whenever he thought of them. For most of the past year, Mezentio had been bellowing that Algarve’s superior sorcery would yet win the war. Most of the time, those claims seemed nothing more than so much wind and air. Things like steer-able eggs, though, made the marshal wonder what else Mezentio’s mages might come up with, and how dangerous it would prove. For now, he stuck to the business at hand: “All we can do is all we can do. We need to concentrate heavy sticks around bridges, and our dragons need to keep the Algarvians away from them.”

  “Aye, sir. Will you draft an order to that effect?” the crystallomancer asked.

  “Pass it on orally for now. I’ll assign it to some bright young officer as soon as I get the chance,” Rathar replied. “There are other things going on right now, you know.” The crystallomancer saluted and hurried away.