Out of the Darkness

by Harry Turtledove

  Krasta looked from the ornate parchment to the Valmieran official who’d given it to her. “What is this?” she asked in distaste; those seals and stamps meant little to her.

  “It is what it says it is, milady,” the flunky replied. “It summons you to appear before his Majesty’s court day after tomorrow to testify as to your dealings during the time of occupation with a certain accused Algarvian, namely one Captain Lurcanio.”

  “Why on earth would I want to do that?” Krasta demanded. She didn’t want to do it; she couldn’t think of anything she wanted to do less.

  But the official said, “By the laws of the kingdom, your desires here are irrelevant and immaterial. Having been served with this summons, you are required to appear. Failure to do so will--not may, milady, but assuredly will--result in your being fined or imprisoned or both. Good day.”

  He turned and strode down the walk, away from Krasta’s mansion. She started to shout an obscenity after him, but ended up whispering it instead. She still hoped for something like a pardon from King Gainibu. Insulting one of his servants wouldn’t help her get it.

  She glared down at the summons. She wanted to tear it to pieces. As if it knew what she wanted and were mocking her, a couple of sentences in amongst the legalese leaped out. This document must be presented at your court appearance, she read. It will be counterstamped to document the said appearance. As she’d whispered curses at the man who’d brought the summons, so she aimed more at the document itself.

  No help for it, though. She put on the most demure outfit she could find-- the trousers were so baggy, they might have done duty for a Forthwegian-style long tunic (or so she imagined, anyhow). Again, her wig was a confection of piled blond curls: it shouted her Kaunianity to the world. The hair underneath that was still growing out shouted something else altogether, but she refused to pay any attention to that.

  The last thing she expected when she got to the royal courthouse was a pack of news-sheet scribblers standing outside. They shouted rude questions at her: “How good was the redhead, Marchioness?” “That’s really his baby, isn’t it?” “Will you tell the judges you fell in love with him?”

  Nose in the air, she stalked past them as if they didn’t exist. A bailiff led her to the courtroom and had her sit in a row of chairs reserved for witnesses. Lurcanio himself sat not far away. He grinned and blew her a kiss. Her nose went up higher. He laughed, outwardly as brash as ever. To her dismay, more reporters in the courtroom scribbled notes about the byplay.

  A panel of judges came in. Two of them wore black tunics and trousers of a cut even baggier than the ones she had on. They were supposed to be dressed as ancient Kaunian judges, she thought. The third was a soldier. His uniform glittered. He had two rows of medals on his chest. He sat in the middle, between the other two.

  Everyone rose and bowed when the judges took their places. Krasta was a beat behind most people, because she didn’t know she was supposed to. “Be seated,” the soldier said in a voice that sounded as if he’d used it on the battlefield.

  To Krasta’s indignation, she wasn’t the first witness summoned to the box. A weedy little commoner stood there and droned on and on about captured documents. It would have had to be more exciting to rise to dullness. Krasta yawned, buffed her nails, and yawned again. The judges kept on questioning the fellow for what seemed like forever. Then, when they finished, Lurcanio started in on him. She didn’t like that. If he could ask her questions, too . . .

  At last, the military judge dismissed the boring commoner. “Marchioness Krasta, you will come forward,” he said. “The clerk will administer the oath.”

  Forward Krasta came. The clerk took away her summons and stamped it. Then, in a monotone, he said, “Do you swear the testimony you give here today and in any subsequent appearances will be the truth and nothing but the truth, knowing you may be sorcerously monitored and you are subject to the kingdom’s statutes pertaining to perjury?”

  “Aye,” Krasta said.

  People tittered. One of the judges in old-fashioned black said, “The customary response, milady, is, ‘I do.’“

  “I do, then,” Krasta said with a toss of her head.

  “Having sworn, the witness may enter the box,” the military judge intoned. When Krasta had taken her place, he went on, “You are the Marchioness Krasta, sister to Marquis Skarnu?”

  “That’s right,” she answered.

  “And, during the late war, you were mistress to the Colonel Lurcanio, the defendant here?”

  However much Krasta wished she could deny it, she had to nod and say, “Aye, I was.” Lurcanio could give her the lie if she did say no, and doubtless would take malicious glee in doing just that. She scowled at him. She’d been so sure Algarve had won the Derlavaian War. Mezentio’s men had beaten Valmiera, hadn’t they? What else was there? Five years ago, she hadn’t thought there was anything else. She’d learned differently since.

  After rustling a couple of leaves of paper to find the name, the chief judge asked, “And Colonel Lurcanio is the father of your son, Gainibu?”

  If Krasta had wished she could deny the one, she wished even more that she could deny the other. But it wasn’t Lurcanio who would give her the lie if she did: it was her own son’s sandy, all too un-Valmieran hair. As venomously as she could, she said, “Aye,” again.

  “I note, milady, you are not on trial here,” the judge said. “We seek information against the Algarvian. Now, to resume: being Lurcanio’s mistress, you yielded yourself to him of your own free will?”

  . “Not always,” Krasta exclaimed. “Why, there was this one time when he--”

  Lurcanio burst out laughing, a coarse, rude, raucous laugh. “You deserved that, you miserable bitch,” he said. “I caught you rubbing up against Valnu. He must have been tired of boys that day, but I wanted to remind you he liked them at least as well as he liked you.”

  All three judges rapped furiously with their gavels. All three of them were red-faced. One of the civilians said, “The recorder will expunge that from the transcript of this proceeding.”

  “For the most part,” the military judge resumed, “you did yield yourself of your own free will to Colonel Lurcanio? Is that correct, Marchioness?”

  “I suppose so,” Krasta said, most unwillingly.

  “Very well, then,” the judge said. “You being his willing mistress, do you believe you were in his confidence? Did he trust you enough to talk to you of his affairs?”

  “If he’d had affairs and I found out about them, I wouldn’t have let him touch me, the miserable whoreson.” Krasta tossed her head again. Did they think she had no pride at all?

  Several people laughed, which puzzled and angered her. The judges gaveled them to silence. The senior man, the one in uniform, said, “That is not what I meant. What I meant was, did he talk to you about his duties during the occupation?”

  “To her!. Powers above, sir, do I look so foolish?” Lurcanio said. “I am affronted that you should ask such a thing.”

  His tone told Krasta she should have been angry at him again, but she couldn’t see why. He’d told the truth. “No, he didn’t talk to me about anything like that,” she answered. “Why would he have? I can’t imagine anything more boring.”

  The judges put their heads together. Krasta leaned toward them, as she would have tried to eavesdrop on any conversation near which she found herself. Here, she had no luck. One of the civilian judges asked, “Did this Algarvian ever mention to you his work in transporting Kaunians to the south coast of this kingdom for the purpose of slaying them and utilizing their life energy?”

  “Oh. That!” Krasta said. If I tell them he talked about it, I can hurt him. She saw that very clearly. “Aye, he told me all about that. He bragged about it, in fact, over and over again.”

  “That is not the truth,” said a nondescript little man in the front row.

  “Marchioness Krasta, you swore an oath of truthfulness and were informed of the penalties involved in v
iolating the said oath,” the military judge said. “The mage has informed us that response was untruthful. Perhaps your error was accidental. I shall give you one--and only one--chance to revise your testimony, if you care to do so.”

  “What was the question again?” Krasta asked. The judge repeated it. Resentfully, Krasta said, “I suppose I was wrong. I suppose he didn’t talk about it.” The boring little man nodded.

  With almost simultaneous sighs, the judges put their heads together again. The man in uniform asked, “Did Colonel Lurcanio ever speak to you about the Algarvian edict called Night and Fog?”

  “No,” Krasta said after giving the mage a dirty look.

  “Did he ever speak to you about the way Algarve treated captives from the underground it captured?”

  “No,” Krasta said. “But he wouldn’t do anything to save the Kaunian Column of Victory when the redheads knocked it over.”

  “That is also a crime against Kaunianity,” one of the civilian judges said. “Still, evidence suggests he was not a primary perpetrator.”

  “We had hoped the Algarvian might have been more forthcoming with you,” the other judge in black said.

  “I was forthcoming in her, not with her,” Lurcanio said with a nasty grin.

  “And you weren’t half as good as you think you were, either!” Krasta squealed furiously, while the judges banged their gavels again and again. That little mage in the first row stirred, but Krasta fixed him with such a glare, he kept his mouth shut.

  “That will be quite enough of that,” the military judge declared. “Very well, Marchioness Krasta, you may stand down from the witness box. As my colleague said, we hoped you might have more to offer.”

  “Oh, I have plenty to offer,” Krasta said. “I hope you blaze him. He has his nerve, dragging my name through the dirt.”

  “Marchioness, when you chose to sleep beside him for four years, you dragged your own name through the dirt to a degree greater than anyone else could have done. You are dismissed.”

  Outside the courtroom, Krasta expected another swarm of vicious news-sheet scribblers. But they had vanished, as if a wind had risen and blown away a pile of rubbish. Instead, news-sheet hawkers were out in force, all screaming out the identical headline: “Gyongyos surrenders! Derlavaian War ends!”

  “Isn’t it splendid, milady?” Krasta’s driver said as he handed her up into the carriage. “The war’s finally over!”

  “Aye, splendid,” she said. Part of her really meant it. The rest was irked: the end of the war had forced her out of public notice. True, the notice would have been unflattering. But if no one noticed her at all, how could she be sure she really existed?

  Fernao peered down from his perch behind the dragonflier. Once this journey was done, he hoped with all his heart never to travel on dragonback again. He’d set out from Kihlanki in easternmost Kuusamo six days before, and had island-hopped his way east across the Bothnian Ocean. He wasn’t quite saddlesore, but he wasn’t far from it, either. The dragons and dragonfliers had changed several times a day. He lacked that luxury, and remained his weary self.

  They’d flown over the Balaton Islands earlier in the day. Now, at last, they passed above the narrow sea separating the Balatons from the Gyongyosian mainland. Gyorvar lay not far ahead.

  A Gyongyosian dragon rose to meet the newcomer. Seeing the beast, gaudy in red and yellow and blue and black, relieved Fernao and alarmed him at the same time. The Gongs were supposed to send up a dragon to meet him and guide him to a working dragon farm outside shattered Gyorvar. They were supposed to, aye. But what if this weren’t the appointed beast, but a lone-wolf dragonflier intent on whatever revenge he could get from a Kuusaman dragon and a Lagoan mage? Because the Gyongyosians were a warrior race, such worries went through Fernao’s mind as the other dragon neared. They’d surrendered, but did they really mean it?

  Then the Gong on the dragon’s back waved and pointed southeast. Fernao and his dragonflier waved back. The dragonflier whacked his mount with a goad. After a couple of bad-tempered screeches, it followed the Gyongyosian beast.

  Tawny-bearded dragon handlers secured the Kuusaman beast to a spike: dragon farms the world around operated on similar principles. Fernao slid down from his perch on the dragon’s back and looked around. The grass under his feet was . . . grass. Some of the bushes a little farther away looked unfamiliar to him, but he would have had to be an herbalist to recognize the differences. The buildings on the edge of the dragon farm . . .

  They had steeply pitched roofs. In that, they resembled buildings in Kuusamo and Lagoas and Unkerlant, which also saw a lot of snow. But they didn’t look like houses or hostels. They looked like gray stone fortresses. They were spaced well apart from one another, too, as if the Gyongyosians didn’t think it safe to have them too close together. When the Gongs weren’t warring with their neighbors, they often fought among themselves. Their architecture showed it, too.

  A man emerged from the nearest of those fortresslike buildings and walked toward Fernao. He wore a sheepskin jacket over wool leggings. Gray streaked his beard and hair. “You are the mage from Kuusamo?” he called in slow, oddly accented, but understandable classical Kaunian.

  “I am Fernao, a mage of the first rank, aye. Actually, I represent both Lagoas, my own kingdom, and Kuusamo,” Fernao replied. “And you are, sir ... ?”

  “I am called Vorosmarty, a mage of five stars,” the Gyongyosian said. “It is a rank more or less equal to your own. How can you be trusted to represent two kingdoms?”

  “I am from Lagoas, as I said. And I am engaged to be married to a Kuusaman mage. Neither kingdom feels I would betray its interests,” Fernao said. That wasn’t strictly true. Grandmaster Pinhiero was less than delighted to have him representing Lagoas. But he was the best bargain Pinhiero could get, and so the grandmaster had had to make the best of it.

  Vorosmarty shrugged. “Very well. This is not truly my concern. I am ordered to show you Gyorvar, to show you what your magecraft has done. I obey my orders. Come with me. A carriage waits for us.”

  He didn’t, he couldn’t, know that Fernao was one of the mages who’d unleashed that sorcery. His your had to mean your kingdoms’. Fernao didn’t intend to enlighten him, either. He said, “You are ordered? Who gives orders in Gyongyos these days?” With Ekrekek Arpad and his whole family dead, how were the Gyongyosians running their affairs?

  “Marshal Szinyei, who ordered our surrender, has announced that the stars commune with his spirit, and has declared himself our new ekrekek.” Vorosmarty’s voice was studiously neutral. Fernao judged he would be unwise to ask the Gyongyosian wizard how he felt about Szinyei’s elevation.

  As he got into the carriage, he did ask, “How far to Gyorvar?”

  “Perhaps six miles,” Vorosmarty replied. “No dragon farm closer than this one survived in working order.” His gray eyes flicked over to Fernao. “In the name of the stars, what did your wizards do?”

  “What we had to,” Fernao said.

  “That is no answer,” the Gyongyosian said.

  “Did you expect one?” Fernao replied. “Even if I knew how this wizardry was made”--no, he wouldn’t admit it--”I could not tell you.”

  Vorosmarty grunted. “I am sorry. I do not know how to act like a defeated man. No such disaster as this has ever befallen my kingdom.”

  “Lagoas and Kuusamo tried to warn your sovereign,” Fernao said. “He would not believe the warnings, but we were telling the truth.” Vorosmarty only grunted again. Had he been one of the advisors telling Ekrekek Arpad the islanders couldn’t do as they claimed? If he had, he wouldn’t want to admit that.

  Gyongyosian farmhouses also looked like strongpoints, designed as much for defense as for comfort. Since they were of stone, their exteriors showed little damage. But the fence rails were wood. Before the carriage had got even halfway to Gyorvar, Fernao saw that the sides of the rails facing the city were scorched. Vorosmarty noticed his gaze and nodded. “Aye, your spell did
that, even this far away.”

  Before long, fruit trees showed leaves sere and brown, as if autumn had come early. But something worse than autumn had come to Gyorvar. After another half mile or so, even stone farmhouses looked as if they had been through the fire. And the trees weren’t just scorched--they were burnt black on the side facing the Gyongyosian capital, and then, a little later, burnt black altogether.

  The air stank of stale smoke. Here and there, smoke still rose from one place or another. A different stench also rode the breeze: the stench of death. “You threw this whole city on a pyre,” Vorosmarty said as they passed a party of workers taking bodies out of a block of flats.

  “You would not yield,” Fernao said. “This was the way we saw to make you know you were beaten.”

  Vorosmarty shuddered. “When you raise your children, do you spank them with swords?”

  “No, but our children are not trying to kill us,” Fernao replied. “When our children grow up to be murderers, we do hang them.” The Gyongyosian mage sent him a resentful look. He pretended not to see.

  As they got closer to the heart of Gyorvar, devastation grew worse. Only a few upthrusting charred sticks showed where wooden buildings had stood. Stone structures were more common. They went from looking burnt to looking slagged, as if the stone blocks from which they were built had begun to melt. A little later on, there was no doubt of what had happened to them: they looked like butter sculptures starting to sag on a hot day. The death stink got stronger.

  “This was a great city once,” Vorosmarty said. “How long shall we be rebuilding it?” The carriage rattled over something in the middle of the road. Wreckage? A burnt body? Fernao didn’t want to know.

  He said, “You should have thought of the risks you were taking when you went into this war. You should have had the sense to yield when you saw yourselves losing it.”

  “Risks?” the Gyongyosian rumbled. “War has risks, aye. But this?” He shook his head. His beard seemed to bristle with indignation.