Out of the Darkness

by Harry Turtledove

  Slowly, the smoke cleared. Ceorl’s face was as black with soot as his beard. Sidroc doubted his own was any cleaner. Ceorl said, “Not fornicating likely we’re going to end up any different.”

  “No,” Sidroc agreed. “This stretch around the palace is about what’s left. Maybe a few other little patches, but they don’t do anybody any good. Everything else, Swemmel’s buggers have got it.”

  “And they want Mezentio,” Ceorl said. “They want that whoreson bad.”

  Being a corporal, Sidroc could--should--have reproved him. Instead, he nodded. The Unkerlanters did want Mezentio. Their dragons dropped leaflets promising not just safety but enormous rewards for any Algarvians who gave them the king. Sidroc supposed the same applied to the men of Plegmund’s Brigade. He didn’t care. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust the Unkerlanters, though he didn’t. But, after spending the past two and a half years battling them, he didn’t want to have anything to do with them except over the business end of a stick.

  A couple of men in rock-gray tunics darted out from a doorway and dashed toward rubble in front of the barricade. Using the business end of his stick, Sidroc blazed one of them. The other made it and started blazing back.

  Sidroc scuttled along the barricade to find a new place from which to blaze at the foe. Stay anywhere very long and you asked for a sniper’s beam through the head. Behind him, an Algarvian declared, “I will deal with these cursed savages.”

  That was interesting enough to make Sidroc turn his head. “Who in blazes are you?” he asked the redhead standing there--standing there, Sidroc noted, with no regard whatsoever for his own safety. Considering what was going on all around--considering that Trapani was, not to put too fine a point on it, falling--that took even Algarvian arrogance a bit far.

  “I am Major Almonte,” the fellow replied. With his left hand, he brushed the mage’s badge he wore on his left breast. “I have the power to hurl the Unkerlanters back in dismay.”

  “Oh, you do, do you?” Sidroc grunted. Almonte nodded. He believed what he was saying. Sidroc didn’t, not for a minute. “If you’re such hot stuff, pal, what are Swemmel’s buggers doing within blaze of the royal palace here?”

  “It’s not my fault,” Almonte said. “My superiors would not listen to me, would not let me show the full reach of my genius.”

  From not far away, Ceorl said, “Another fornicating crackpot.” Sidroc laughed. Almonte might be an Algarvian and an officer by courtesy, but what difference did that make here and now?

  The redhead glared at both Forthwegians. “You are nothing but mercenaries,” he said. “You have no business criticizing me.”

  “Talk is cheap, pal,” Sidroc said.

  “Futter yourself,” Almonte said crisply. “By the powers above, I will show you--I will show the world--what I can do.” He scrambled over the barricade and faced the Unkerlanters without the least shred of cover.

  When they didn’t blaze Almonte down in the first instant, Sidroc knew he had some--more than a little--power. Beams flew toward him, but none bit. It was as if they were beneath the redhead’s notice. He raised both hands above his head and began a spell. It was, Sidroc noted, not in Algarvian but in classical Kaunian: he’d learned enough in school to recognize the language. He snickered. Hearing it now, of all times, and in the heart of Trapani, of all places, was pretty funny.

  But then the laughter curdled in his mouth. The hair on his arms and at the back of his neck tried to prickle up in fear. Almonte’s magecraft seemed to draw darkness from beneath the flagstones on which he stood and cast it at the Unkerlanters. Sidroc briefly heard them cry out in alarm before that darkness--did he really see it, or sense it with something older and even more primitive than sight?--washed over them. Then they fell silent. Sidroc was somehow certain none of them would ever cry out again.

  Major Almonte did, in pride and triumph. Sidroc leaned over and threw up. Ceorl looked green, too. “I’d sooner lose than use a magic like that,” he muttered. Sidroc nodded.

  Almonte shook his fist at the sudden silence in front of the palace. “Die, swine!” he cried. “If the stinking dragonfliers had let me take my spells aloft, I’d have done more and worse to you. But even now . . .” He resumed the incantation. That cold, dark, deadly silence spread farther. Unkerlanter lives went out liked snuffed candle flames.

  Swemmel’s men might not have known exactly what was happening to them, but they knew something was, and they knew whence the trouble came. They hurled eggs at Almonte from tossers beyond the reach of his sorcery. Sidroc threw himself flat. Eggs bursting all around Almonte burst too close to him.

  The Algarvian mage had had a spell for turning aside beams. When Sidroc lifted his head again, he discovered Almonte had owned no such warding against bursts of sorcerous energy and the metal from egg shells they flung about. The mage was down and screaming and bleeding. He looked more like a piece of butchery than a man.

  Sidroc could have blazed him to put him out of his misery. What with the sort of magic Almonte had been using, he was more than glad to let him suffer.

  “They’ll come after us as soon as they realize he can’t do anything to them anymore,” he warned Ceorl.

  “I know,” the ruffian said.

  Come the Unkerlanters did, behind a fresh barrage of eggs. “Urra!” they shouted, more in relief, Sidroc thought, than anything else. “Urra! Swemmel! Urra!” Despite good blazing from the barricades and from the palace itself, they gained lodgments here and there and began blazing down the Algarvians and the men from Plegmund’s Brigade and the Phalanx of Valmiera who still stood against them.

  “Fall back!” Sidroc yelled. “We’ll be cut off if we don’t!” He’d done enough in this fight--he’d done enough in his whole term of service in Plegmund’s Brigade--that no one could accuse him of cowardice. He ran back toward the royal palace, his men--those still on their feet--with him.

  As he ran, he hoped the redheads inside wouldn’t take the soldiers of Plegmund’s Brigade for Unkerlanters and blaze them down. That would have been the ultimate indignity. In the end, though, how much did it matter? He didn’t think he would last very long any which way.

  He made it into the palace unblazed, and took up a new position at a window that had offered a magnificent view but was really too long, too open, to give good cover. To his right knelt Ceorl and a blond Valmieran from the Phalanx, to his left a redhead from the Popular Assault who couldn’t have been above fifteen and an older Algarvian, a bald fellow with a beaky nose.

  The old man could handle a stick. “There’s another one down,” he said, stretching an Unkerlanter lifeless in front of the palace. “But it won’t last. It can’t last, powers below eat them all.”

  Sidroc shuddered. Major Almonte, he thought, had dealt much too intimately with the powers below. “We’ll hold on a while longer,” he said, and then took another look at the man crouching there beside him. His voice rose to a startled squeak: “Your, uh, Majesty.”

  King Mezentio nodded briskly. “I will ask the same favor of you, Corporal, that I’ve asked of a good many men already: when you see this place falling, have the courtesy to blaze me down. I do not care to fall into Swemmel’s hands alive.”

  “Uh, aye, sir.” Sidroc nodded. He wouldn’t have wanted the King of Unkerlant to get his hands on him, either.

  “Meanwhile . . .” Mezentio blazed again. He nodded, but then grimaced. “I should have won Algarve should have won. This kingdom proved itself weak. It doesn’t deserve to live.”

  And who led it to where it is? Sidroc thought. But he didn’t see how he could say such a thing to the King of Algarve. Even as he cast about for ways that wouldn’t sound too blunt, the moment passed. A great racket of bursting eggs and crumpling masonry and shouting men arose from the rear of the palace.

  A redhead dashed up to Mezentio, crying, “Your Majesty! Your Majesty! The whoresons are inside! We have some barricades in the corridors, but powers above only know how long they’ll hold.�
� Crashes and more screams said one of them had just gone down.

  “All over,” Mezentio said, his voice soft and sad. “We came so close, but it’s all over. We weren’t strong enough. We all deserve to go into the fire.” He bowed to Sidroc. “Will you do the honors?” As Sidroc numbly nodded, the king spoke to the messenger: “Know that this man slays me at my request. Let him be rewarded for it, and in no way punished. Do you understand?”

  “Aye, your Majesty.” Tears ran down the redhead’s face.

  Mezentio bowed to Sidroc again. “Do what needs doing. Try to blaze true, to make it as quick as you can.” He closed his eyes and waited.

  Sidroc did it. He’d done it for wounded comrades more than once before. Seeing King Mezentio slump over dead raised no special horror in him. It was as if he had nothing at all left inside. Ceorl set a hand on his shoulder. “Powers above,” the ruffian whispered.

  Fresh shouts came from the back of the palace, these much closer. Sidroc got to his feet. “Come on,” he said savagely. “There’s still some fighting left.” As he and the men he led ran forward, panic-stricken Algarvians ran back toward them. “Cowards!” he shouted, and ran on. With nothing left inside him, what did he have to lose?

  A beam took him in the side as he came round a corner. He went down, but kept blazing. Another beam bit, this one deep. He tasted blood in his mouth as his stick slipped from fingers that would not hold it. He was still moving a little when an Unkerlanter lieutenant paused, saw he wasn’t quite dead, and put a beam through his temple before charging on.

  Though he got better food and better lodging in his new quarters outside the main captives’ camp on Obuda, Sergeant Istvan missed the company of his fellow Gyongyosians. When he grumbled about that to Lammi, the Kuusaman forensic mage raised a thin black eyebrow. “But they beat you,” she said. “And they would do it again if they had the chance.”

  Istvan’s broad shoulders went up and down in a shrug. “I know. But they’re my own folk even so. You Kuusamans”--he shrugged again--”I don’t think the stars shine on you.”

  One of his own people would have been furious at such an insult. Lammi only shrugged in her turn, which proved how foreign and alien she was. She knew Gyongyosian customs well, but they didn’t bind her. That made her more alarming to him, not less. She said, “I am willing to take my chances on it.”

  Few, if any, Gyongyosians would have been so willing. Lammi didn’t talk about the scar on Istvan’s left hand, or about what it meant. Had his fellow captives known what it meant, they would have done worse to him than they would have for mere suspected treason. What could make treason mere! Goat-eating could, and Istvan knew it all too well.

  His captors let him see Kun now and then. Each of them was wary with the other, for each knew the other had, however unwillingly, confessed to the abomination they’d both committed. Kun seemed more content away from his countrymen than Istvan did. “They’re a pack of fools, most of them,” he said loftily.

  “Oh, and you’re not?” Istvan said.

  “Not that kind, anyhow,” the former mage’s apprentice replied. “I got sick of men from mountain valleys long before those louts set on me.”

  “I’m a man from a mountain valley,” Istvan reminded him, his big hands balling into fists.

  “Proves my point, wouldn’t you say?” Kun grinned at Istvan’s flabbergasted expression. “And you, my dear fellow, you put up with me far better than most.”

  Istvan thought about that for a little while. He said, “We’ve been through too much together. If the two of us don’t put up with each other, no one ever will.”

  Kun grimaced. “And if that isn’t a judgment on both of us, stars go dark if I know what would be.”

  A couple of days after that, Lammi summoned both of them. That surprised Istvan. They’d never been questioned together. Nor were they this time. The Kuusaman mage spoke briskly: “How would the two of you like to be free to return to your own land?”

  “Don’t play with us,” Istvan said roughly. “That isn’t going to happen, and you know it. We’re here till the war is over.” And who knows for how long after that?

  But Lammi shook her head. “Not necessarily. And I ask no treason of you. By the stars, I do not. All I ask is that you go on board ship, go back to the waters off Becsehely, watch a certain something, and then, when you are released, tell your own superiors exactly what you saw.” She held up a hand to forestall questions. “You would not be the only men doing this--far from it.”

  “Why us?” Kun asked.

  “Because you are in a certain amount of difficulty here,” Lammi answered, “and because you have shown more than a certain amount of wit. We feel confident you would tell those set above you the truth.”

  “Why shouldn’t we just keep quiet?” Istvan asked. “And what’s off Becsehely?” They both knew the miserable little island east of Obuda better than they wanted to; they’d been captured there.

  Lammi said, “You will see what is off, and on, Becsehely. And you will, I think, find good reason for telling the truth as you see it. Of course, if you would rather stay here on Obuda . . .”

  “I’ll go,” Istvan said. Kun hesitated, but only briefly.

  Lammi smiled. “I thought that might prove persuasive. Pack whatever gear you have. The ley-line cruiser will be here tomorrow at first light.”

  Istvan had a duffel bag ready in good time. No captive had much in the way of belongings. Kun’s duffel was heavier, but Kun cared more about books than Istvan ever had. A carriage took both of them to the harbor, which had been repaired since Captain Frigyes’ bloodthirsty magic did its work. The cruiser was long and sleek and deadly, somehow more dangerous-looking than a Gyongyosian ship. “When they boarded the vessel, a Kuusaman military clerk checked their names off a list. A fellow in greenish Kuusaman naval uniform escorted them to a cabin.

  “You two stay here,” the Kuusaman said in Gyongyosian. Like most of his countrymen who spoke the language, he used the plural rather than the dual.

  The cabin was big enough to boast two cots side by side. Istvan and Kun wouldn’t even have to quarrel over who got the top bunk. Istvan said, “If this is what the slanteyes do for captives, they must live mighty soft themselves.”

  “They do,” Kun said. “They’re richer than we are. They’ve had modern magecraft longer than we have, and they do more with it than we do.”

  “But we are the warrior race,” Kun said with pride in his countrymen still diminished only a little from what he’d felt when summoned into Ekrekek Arpad’s service.

  Kun sighed. “I suppose I’d waste my time asking you how much good that’s done us or who’s winning the war, and so I won’t.”

  By “not asking” in that particular way, of course, he put the question all the more effectively. Istvan chewed on it for some little while. He liked the flavors of none of the answers he found. To keep from showing how little he liked them, he peered out the porthole. To his surprise, Obuda was already receding in the distance. “We’re moving!” he exclaimed.

  “Well, what if we are?” Kun seemed determined to stay contrary. “Stars above, this is a ley-line ship. Did you expect to hear sails flutter and the wind howl in the rigging? Use your head before you use your mouth.”

  “Oh, go bugger a goat,” Istvan said. Coming from a valley far back in the mountains, he knew little about ships, ley-line or otherwise. The only times he’d been aboard them were on journeys across the Bothnian Ocean during the war. He’d never been in a two-man cabin then, but down in the hold with a lot of other soldiers, most of whom were just as ignorant of the sea and its ways as he was.

  He did remember the meal gong. Either the Kuusamans had the same signal or they’d got a gong so they could use something with which their Gyongyosian passengers were familiar. Armed Kuusamans directed Istvan and Kun and the other Gyongyosians who emerged from cabins along the corridor to the iron chamber where they would eat. A large sign on the wall declared, WE DO NOT SERVE
GOAT ABOARD THIS SHIP. YOU MAY EAT FREELY, WITH NO FEAR OF POLLUTION. Istvan hoped the slanteyes were telling the truth. If they weren’t. . . The scar on his hand throbbed. He’d already learned more about ritual pollution and the way it ate at a man than he’d ever wanted to know.

  Perhaps three dozen Gyongyosians queued up to take trays and utensils and bowls of the stew a couple of bored-looking Kuusaman cooks served up. The food was better than he’d got in the captives’ camp, but not so good as the guards’ rations he’d eaten since being extracted from among the rest of the captured Gyongyosians. The cooks gave each man one mug of ale and as much tea as he wanted.

  Most of the other captives aboard the ley-line cruiser were officers. Istvan saw one man in a brigadier’s uniform, a couple of colonels, and a lot of majors and captains. One of those captains turned to him and asked, “Well, Sergeant, why did they pick you for this charade?”

  “I have no real idea, sir,” Istvan answered cautiously. “Maybe because I fought on Becsehely.”

  With a laugh, the officer said, “Well, that makes some sense. I don’t know why they chose me, I’ll tell you that. My guess is, the slanteyes drew my name out of a hat or a pot or whatever they use for such things.”

  Corporal Kun asked, “Sir, do you have any idea what they’re going to show us when we get there?”

  “Not the slightest clue.” The captain shook his head. “I speak some Kuusaman, and I’ve asked, but the slanteyes won’t say. They haven’t talked out of turn where I could hear ‘em, either, worse luck. Stars above be dark for them forever, they’re keeping their mouths shut tight.”

  The ley-line cruiser stopped at another island east of Obuda and picked up four men from a captives’ camp there. Istvan wondered just how many Gyongyosian captives the Kuusamans held. Too many was the first answer that occurred to him.