Out of the Darkness d-6

by Harry Turtledove

  Only Kun and me, sure enough, Istvan thought. His eyes slid toward the ex-mage’s apprentice. He wished no one else knew what he’d done. He wished it with all his soul. But, on the other hand, how much difference did a wish like that make? He knew he’d had goat’s flesh on his tongue, and its mark scarred his spirit as Tivadar’s knife had scarred his hand.

  Perhaps deliberately changing the subject, Kun said, “Just as well the Kuusamans didn’t ask us too many questions after Frigyes loosed his spell.”

  “Why should they have?” Istvan returned. “We didn’t have anything to do with it. We’d both come down with the runs hours before it happened.”

  Kun walked a little straighter for a couple of paces. He’d found the leaves that turned their guts inside out. But then he said, “If I’d been the one picking up the pieces after that sorcery, I’d’ve wondered why a couple of men just happened to get sick right then. I’d’ve wondered whether they knew more than they were letting on.”

  “By the stars, you’ve got a nasty, suspicious mind,” Istvan said.

  “Thank you,” Kun answered, which spoiled the insult. Kun went on, “If I’m the fellow investigating something like that, I’m supposed to have a nasty, suspicious mind, eh?”

  “Maybe,” Istvan said. “I guess so. Somehow, I get the feeling Kuusamans aren’t as suspicious as they ought to be.”

  “You may be right.” Kun thought it over as they neared their barracks. “Aye, sure enough, you may be right. It doesn’t mean they’re not dangerous, though.”

  “I never said it did,” Istvan replied. “We fought them here on Obuda, you and I, but it’s their island now. Most of the islands in the Bothnian Ocean are theirs now.”

  “I know,” Kun said. “I can’t help but know, can I? And what does that tell you?”

  “What, that you know? It tells me you’re not a complete fool-just mostly.”

  Kun gave Istvan a sour look. “You’re being stupid on purpose. You’re not nearly so funny when you do that as when you’re stupid because you don’t know any better. What does it tell you that the Kuusamans hold most of the islands in the Bothnian Ocean, and that we aren’t taking any back the way we would when the war was new?”

  The barracks loomed ahead: an ugly, leaky building of raw timber. The cots inside, though, were better and less crowded than had been the cots in the Gyongyosian barracks where Istvan had stayed before while stationed on Obuda. But that wasn’t why the barracks felt like a refuge now. If he got inside, maybe he wouldn’t have to answer his comrade’s question.

  Kun coughed sharply. Again acting as if his rank were higher than Istvan’s, he said, “You know the answer as well as I do. Why won’t you say it?”

  “You know why, curse it,” Istvan mumbled.

  “Is the truth less the truth because you don’t name it?” Kun asked inexorably. “Do you think it will go away? Do you think the stars won’t shine their light on it? Or do you just want me to have to do the dirty work and say it out loud?”

  That’s exactly what I want. But Istvan didn’t want anyone to say it out loud, because he did feel that somehow made it more real. But if he’d gone forward against the Kuusamans, if he’d gone forward against the Unkerlanters, couldn’t he go forward against the truth, too? Almost as if he were attacking Kun, he shouted into the smaller man’s face: “They’re taking the fornicating islands because we’re losing the fornicating war! There! Are you fornicating happy now?”

  Kun gave back a pace-a couple of paces, in fact. Then he had to rally, and he did. “You’re honest, at any rate,” he said. “The next question is, what do we do if we keep on losing?”

  “I don’t know,” Istvan answered. “And you don’t know, either. It’s been a long time since Gyongyos lost a war.” He spoke with the pride to be expected of a man from a warrior race.

  “That’s because we haven’t fought a whole lot of them lately,” Kun said. “When you think about what all’s gone on in this one, that’s not so bad, is it?”

  Istvan started to reply, then realized he had no good reply to give. What was the point of being a man from a warrior race without any wars to fight? On the other hand, what was the point of fighting a war and losing it? Shaking his head and muttering to himself, Istvan went into the barracks.

  Some of the captives already inside nodded to him. Most of the men he’d known best, the men from his own company, were dead thanks to Captain Frigyes. Most of the faces here now, the men lounging on cots, the fellow putting more wood on the stove, were strangers to him. But they were of his kind. They looked like him. They spoke his tongue. Maybe in a captives’ camp he was a sheep among sheep with them, not a wolf among wolves. Still, he was with his own. That would do. It would have to.

  Two

  Bembo strutted through the ravaged streets of Eoforwic twirling his bludgeon by its leather strap, as if he were the king of the world. Once upon a time, Algarvians on occupation duty in Forthweg might as well have been kings of the world. The constable sighed, pining for the good old days. He put on his show at least as much to keep up his own spirits as to impress the Forthwegians around him.

  From behind him, somebody called out in pretty good Algarvian: “Hey, tubby, the Unkerlanters’ll press you for oil when they cross the Twegen!”

  By the time Bembo and his partner, Oraste, had whirled, nobody back there looked to have opened his mouth. None of the Forthwegians on the street so much as smiled. That left the constable with nobody to blame. “Smartmouthed son of a whore,” Bembo said. He started to set his free hand on his belly, as if to deny he had too much of it. Then, as if afraid the gesture would call attention to his ample flesh, he left it uncompleted.

  Oraste, unlike Bembo, was not the typical high-spirited, excitable Algarvian. He was, in fact, dour as an Unkerlanter most of the time. But he was laughing now, laughing at Bembo. “He got you good, he did.”

  “Oh, shut up,” Bembo muttered. He didn’t say it very loud. Oraste had a formidable temper, and Bembo didn’t care to have it aimed at him. One of the reasons he enjoyed being a constable was that it meant he could dish out trouble without having to take it.

  All that had broken down during the Forthwegian uprising here. Constables and soldiers had fought side by side then, what with the rebels giving almost as much trouble as they were getting. And, with the Unkerlanters indeed just on the other side of the river, nobody could feel safe at night-or, for that matter, during the daytime. If they started tossing eggs again.. Bembo looked around for the closest hole into which to jump. As he’d expected, he wouldn’t have to run far. Eoforwic, these days, was little but holes and rubble.

  He and Oraste turned a corner. A couple of Forthwegians had been shouting at each other. When they saw the constables, they abruptly fell silent. Bembo let out a small sigh. He might have had the chance to shake them down if they’d kept squabbling. Oraste sighed, too. He probably would sooner have beaten them up than put a bribe in his belt pouch, but no accounting for taste.

  A squad of Algarvian soldiers tramped by, on their way down to the Twegen. One of them pointed to Bembo and Oraste and called, “You constable bastards thought you were lucky, all safe and comfy back here in Forthweg away from the western front. Well, now the Unkerlanters have bloody well come to you since you didn’t have the balls to go to them.” His pals laughed.

  There were a dozen of them. Because there were a dozen of them, Bembo replied in a whisper only Oraste could hear: “If you soldier bastards hadn’t got run out of Unkerlant, we wouldn’t be worrying about Swemmel’s buggers now.”

  His partner grunted and nodded and said, “If I ever see that particular son of a whore by himself, he’ll be sorry his mother let the next-door neighbor in for a quickie whenever her husband went to work.”

  Bembo guffawed. A couple of soldiers looked back suspiciously. “Come on, you lugs, get moving,” called the corporal in charge of them. “What do we care about a couple of fornicating constables?”

  “I wish I
was a fornicating constable right now,” Bembo said. “It’d be a lot more fun than what I am doing.”

  Oraste laughed less than Bembo thought the joke deserved. That made Bembo sulk instead of strutting as he and Oraste paced off their beat. A lot of Algarvians would have jollied him along till he was in a good humor again. Oraste, a sullen fellow himself, didn’t care-indeed, didn’t notice-what sort of humor the people around him were in.

  “They ought to send us all back to Algarve,” Bembo said after a while, looking for something new to complain about. “All us constables, I mean.”

  That made Oraste laugh, but not in the way Bembo had intended. “Oh, aye, the soldiers would really love us then,” he said. “Wake up, fool. Sleepy time’s over.”

  “But what good are we doing here?” Bembo demanded. Now that he’d started, his complaints made perfect sense-to him, at least. “This whole miserable city is under military occupation and martial law. What are constables good for, then?”

  “For whatever soldiers don’t feel like doing,” Oraste answered. “I know what’s eating you, old pal. You can’t fool me. You just don’t want to be here when Swemmel’s bastards finally get around to swarming over the Twegen.”

  “Oh, and you do?” Bembo retorted. “I’ll just bet you do, sweetheart.”

  Oraste didn’t answer that. Because he didn’t, Bembo concluded he had no answer. There was no answer. No Algarvian in his right mind-probably no crazy Algarvian, either-wanted to be in a town the Unkerlanters overran. If you were in there then, either you wouldn’t come out or you’d come out a captive. Bembo wondered which was worse. He hoped he wouldn’t have to find out.

  A Forthwegian labor gang went by, herded by a couple of Algarvians with sticks. “Wonder how many of those whoresons are Kaunians in sorcerous disguise,” Bembo said.

  “Too many,” Oraste answered. “One’d be too many. However this stinking war turns out, we’ve got rid of a whole great raft of blonds. That was worth doing.”

  Bembo shrugged. Back before the war, he hadn’t thought much about Kaunians one way or the other. A few blonds had lived in Tricarico, as a few- sometimes more than a few-had lived in a lot of cities in the north of Algarve: reminders of where the Kaunian Empire had once stretched. But they’d been taken away while the war was new. Bembo supposed that made sense. How loyal would blonds in Algarve be when King Mezentio was at war with Jelgava and Valmiera, both Kaunian lands, and with Forthweg, a kingdom where blonds had more than their share of money and power?

  His own notions about Kaunians had changed after the Derlavaian War broke out. He remembered that, now that he thought about it a little. How could they have helped but change, when the bookstores were filled with romances about the slutty blond women of imperial days and other choice bits, and when every fence and wall sprouted broadsheets telling the world-or at least the Algarvian part of it-what a pack of monsters Kaunians were?

  He blinked. “You know something?” he said to Oraste. “We were made to hate the blonds. It didn’t just happen.”

  His partner’s shoulders, broad as a Forthwegian’s, went up and down in a businesslike shrug altogether different from the usual Algarvian production. “Speak for yourself,” Oraste said. He jabbed a thumb at his own chest. “Me, I never needed any help.”

  A lot of Algarvians-and, from everything Bembo had seen, even more Forthwegians-felt the same way. “Before the war,” Bembo began, “what was the-?”

  He didn’t finish, for bells began clanging all over Eoforwic. “Dragons!” Oraste exclaimed. “Futtering Unkerlanter dragons!” He looked around, his eyes wild, as did Bembo. “Now where in blazes is a cellar?”

  “I don’t see one.” Bembo wasn’t the least ashamed of the fear in his voice.

  Most, almost all, the buildings hereabouts were wrecks, their cellars, if they’d ever had them, buried under rubble. He moaned. “But I see the dragons.”

  They flew low, as they usually did on raids like this, only a couple of hundred feet above the waters of the Twegen. The rock-gray paint Swemmel’s men gave them made them all the harder to spot, but Bembo could see how many of them there were, and that no Algarvian beasts rose to challenge them. One or two tumbled out of the sky, hit by beams from heavy sticks, but the rest came on, eggs slung under their bellies.

  “No cellars,” Oraste said as some of those eggs began to fall and to release bursts of the sorcerous energy trapped inside them.. “Next best thing is the deepest hole in the ground we can find.” He started to run.

  So did Bembo, his belly jiggling. Oraste jumped into a hole, but it was plainly too small for a pair of good-sized men. Bembo kept running, while the roars from bursting eggs came closer and closer as the Unkerlanter dragons penetrated deeper and deeper over Eoforwic. Bembo spotted a likely hole and dashed towards it. He was only a couple of strides away when an egg burst much too close-and then he wasn’t running any more, but flying through the air.

  It wasn’t anything like his dreams of flying. For one thing, he had no control over it whatever. For another, it didn’t last more than half a heartbeat-and when he hit a pile of rubble, he hit hard. He felt something snap in his leg. He heard it, too. That was almost worse-at least till the pain reached his mind, which took a couple of extra heartbeats.

  Somebody close by was screaming. Whoever he was, he had to be close by: Bembo could hear him through the din of the eggs. After a moment, he realized those screams came from his own mouth. He tried to make them stop, but it was like trying to recork a fizzing bottle of sparkling wine-once that stopper was out, no getting it in again. He bawled on and on, and hoped an egg would burst on him and kill him. Then, at least, it would be over.

  No such luck. What did I ever do to deserve this? wondered some small part of his brain still able to think. Unfortunately, he had no trouble coming up with answers. Few Algarvians who’d served in Forthweg would have.

  The dragons kept dropping eggs for what seemed like forever. Bembo kept screaming all that while, too. And he kept screaming after the Unkerlanter dragons flew back toward the west.

  “Oh, shut up,” Oraste told him. “Let’s have a look at you.” He did, with rough competence, the accent being on rough. When he finished, he said, “Well, Bembo my lad, you are one lucky son of a whore.”

  That startled Bembo enough to make him stop screaming for a moment. “Lucky?” he howled. “Why, you-” He called Oraste every name he knew.

  Considering the decade or so he’d spent in the constabulary, he knew a lot of names.

  Oraste slapped him in the face. “Shut up,” he said again, this time in a flat, angry voice. “I said lucky, and I meant fornicating lucky. You’re hurt bad enough, they won’t keep you around here, on account of you won’t be good for a fornicating thing for a long time. That means you won’t be here when the Unkerlanters finally do come over the Twegen. And if that’s not lucky, what in blazes is? You want me to try splinting your leg, or you want me to wait for a healer?”

  Bembo cursed him again, not quite so savagely as before. Then the pain made everything blurry for some little while. When he fully returned to himself, someone he didn’t recognize was leaning over him, saying, “Here, Constable, drink this.”

  He drank. It tasted nasty-a horrible blend of spirits and poppy seeds. After a bit, the pain ebbed-or he felt as if he were floating away from it. “Better,” he mumbled.

  “Good,” the healer said. “Now I’m going to set that leg.” Go ahead, Bembo thought vaguely. I won’t care. But he did. The decoction he’d drunk wasn’t strong enough to keep him from feeling the ends of the broken bone grinding against each other as the healer manipulated them. Bembo shrieked. “Almost done,” the healer assured him. “And you’ll be going back to Algarve to get better after that. They’ll take good care of you.”

  “Oraste was right,” Bembo said in drowsy, drugged wonder. A couple of Forthwegians put him on a litter-and hauled him off toward the ley-line caravan depot. When he got there, another healer poured more
of the decoction down him. He never remembered getting carried aboard the caravan. When he woke up, he was on his way back to Algarve.

  Outside the royal palace in Patras, a blizzard howled. Marshal Rathar had little use for the palace or for the capital of Yanina. He wore a heavy cloak over his knee-length rock-gray tunic, and was none too warm even with it. “Why do you people not heat your buildings in the wintertime?” he growled at King Tsavellas.

  The king of Yanina was a skinny little bald man with a big gray mustache and dark, sorrowful eyes. “We do,” he answered. “We heat them so we are comfortable. We do not turn them into ovens, as you Unkerlanters like to do.”

  Both the King of Yanina and the Marshal of Unkerlant spoke Algarvian. It was the only tongue they had in common; classical Kaunian was much less studied in their kingdoms than farther east on the continent of Derlavai. Rathar savored the irony. Tsavellas had had no trouble talking with his erstwhile allies, the redheads. Now he could use his command of their language to talk with the new masters of Yanina.

  “If you are indoors, you should be warm,” Rathar insisted. He enjoyed telling a king what to do, especially since Tsavellas had to listen to him. King Swemmel. . This time, Rathar’s shiver had nothing to do with the chilly halls through which he walked. The King of Unkerlant was a law unto himself. All Kings of Unkerlant were, but Swemmel more so than most.

  “Warm is one thing,” Tsavellas said. “Warm enough to cook?” His expressive shrug might almost have come from an Algarvian.

  Rathar didn’t answer. He was eyeing the painted panels that ornamented the walls. Yaninans in old-fashioned robes-but always with pompoms on their shoes-stared out of the panels at him from enormous, somber eyes. Sometimes they fought Algarvians, other times Unkerlanters. Always, they were shown triumphant. Rathar supposed the artists who’d created them had had to paint what their patrons wanted. Those patrons had lost no sleep worrying about the truth.

  He couldn’t read the legends picked out in gold leaf beside some of the figures on the walls. He couldn’t even sound them out. Yanina used a script different from every other way of writing in Derlavai. Rathar reckoned that typical of the Yaninans, the most contrary, fractious, faction-ridden folk in the world.