Out of the Darkness d-6

by Harry Turtledove

  Their murderous magecraft had been bad. This was worse. That had used life energy in a straightforward way, even if Mezentio’s men had no business stealing it as they’d done. This. . Whoever the wizard essaying the spell was, he’d opened his spirit to the powers below. He didn’t just aim to kill his foes. He aimed to torment them, to horrify them, to make death itself seem clean by comparison.

  Ilmarinen felt Kuusaman sorcerers in the field try to throw up counterspells against the dark cantrip. He felt them fail, too, and felt the extinguishment of some of them. That was the only word he could find. They didn’t die, at least not right away. They would have been better off if they had.

  He essayed no counterspells. He had no idea whether that blackness could be countered, in any conventional sense of the word. He wasn’t much interested in finding out, either. Instead, he hurled a bolt of sorcerous energy of the sort Pekka had discovered straight at the Algarvian attacking his countrymen.

  The enemy mage hadn’t expected that. His spell was so vicious, so dreadful, he might have assumed other wizards would attack it, not him. A lot of wizards would have. Ilmarinen didn’t think like most of his professional colleagues. His own sorcerous stroke went home, a lightning bolt piercing the darkness. He felt the Algarvian sorcerer’s outraged astonishment as the fellow died.

  For a nasty moment, Ilmarinen feared that wouldn’t be enough. The spell, once unleashed, seemed to want to go on by itself. It did crumble at last, but only slowly and reluctantly. Then the day seemed to brighten, though the sun was touching the western horizon.

  Weary, shaken, disgusted as he was, Ilmarinen stormed off to Grand General Nortamo’s headquarters, which he found in a farmhouse on this side of the river from Tricarico. A sentry tried to block his progress. He pushed past as if the man didn’t exist. Nortamo was conferring with several of his officers. Ilmarinen ignored them, too. In a voice that brooked no contradiction, he said, “I need to talk to those captive mages, Nortamo. Now.”

  Nortamo looked at him. He was not a fool; he didn’t argue. “Very well, sorcerous sir. You have my authorization. I will give it to you in writing, if you like.”

  “Never mind. We haven’t time to waste.” Ilmarinen hurried off to the small captives’ camp where mages were housed and securely guarded by other mages. He had several of the highest-ranking captives brought before him. “How could any of you do … that?” he demanded in classical Kaunian. He spoke fluent Algarvian, but chose not to.

  “How?” one of the Algarvians answered in the same tongue. “We are fighting to save our kingdom, that is how. “What would you have us do, roll over and die?” “Sooner than that?” Ilmarinen shuddered. “Aye, by the powers above.”

  “No,” the mage said. “No one will enslave us, not while we still live to fight.”

  “Doing that, you enslave yourselves,” Ilmarinen answered. “Better to be

  ruled by foreigners, don’t you think, than by the powers below?”

  “My wife and daughters are in the west,” the Algarvian said. “I sent them word to flee. I do not know whether they could. If they did not, and the Unkerlanters have caught them. . They are raping their way through my kingdom, you know.”

  “And what did you do to them?” Ilmarinen returned. “What did you do to the Kaunians in Forthweg?”

  “This is a Kaunian war,” the Algarvian mage declared. His comrades solemnly nodded. “Everyone picks on Algarve, and so of course we have to fight back in any way we can.” The other wizards nodded again.

  “War is bad enough. You made it worse,” Ilmarinen said. “You made it much worse. Is it any wonder that every other kingdom has joined together to knock you down and make sure you can never do it again? By all you’ve done, you deserve it. You almost killed me when you loosed your attack on Yliharma.”

  “Too bad we failed, old man.” The Algarvian didn’t lack for nerve-but then, lacking for nerve had never been an Algarvian characteristic. “So long as we can fight back, we will, any way we can.”

  “Then you had better not complain about what happens to you afterwards,” Ilmarinen said. Since he was on the side of the captors and not the captives, he took advantage of having the last word and walked out.

  As soon as Bembo could get around with crutches and his splint, the healers in Tricarico threw him out of the sanatorium. He’d expected nothing else; wounded people kept flooding into the place. If the healers didn’t need to keep an eye on him, they did need the cot he was filling.

  He had no flat, of course, not any more. But finding a new one wasn’t hard, not when he had silver to spend. And he did; he hadn’t used much of his salary in all the time he’d been in Forthweg, and he’d done pretty well for himself shaking down the locals. He would have landed a place even sooner than he did if he hadn’t insisted on living on the ground floor.

  “Everybody wants those flats,” a landlord with none to let told him. “Fast and easy to get to the cellar when the eggs start falling.”

  “I can’t go anywhere fast and easy,” Bembo said. Using crutches made it harder for him to gesture while he talked, and an Algarvian who couldn’t talk with his hands was hardly alive. “You think I want to go up and down stairs with these things?”

  The landlord shrugged. “Sorry, pal. I can’t give you what I ain’t got.”

  Bembo went off in a huff. He finally got a flat the next morning. Then he took a ley-line caravan over to his old constabulary station to find out where Saffa was staying these days. That took some doing; a lot of the constables there didn’t remember him and didn’t want to tell him anything. He finally got what he needed from Frontino, the warder at the gaol.

  “Read any spicy romances lately?” Bembo asked him.

  Frontino reached into his desk. “I’ve got a good one right here, matter of fact.” The romance, called Empress’ Passion, certainly looked good to Bembo. The cover showed a naked Kaunian woman, presumably the Empress in question, with her legs wrapped around an ancient Algarvic warrior with an improbable set of muscles. “The Kaunian Emperor, see, is going to sacrifice a bunch of Algarvian captives, till this guy”-Frontino tapped the warrior-”horns the Empress into talking him out of it. Then the captives get free and the blood really spills. I’m done-want to borrow it? The Empress, she screws up a storm.” He held the book out to Bembo.

  Almost to his own surprise, Bembo shook his head. “That whole business of sacrificing …” He looked around to make sure nobody but Frontino could hear him. “Everything they say about the Kaunians in Forthweg. .”

  “Pack of lies,” the warder said. “Enemy dragons have been dropping little broadsheets about it, so it has to be a pack of lies. Stands to reason.”

  But Bembo shook his head again. “It’s all true, Frontino. Everything everybody says is true, and nobody says even a quarter of what all really went on. I ought to know. I was fornicating there, remember.”

  Frontino didn’t believe him. He could see as much. He thought about arguing. He thought about breaking one of his crutches over the warder’s head, too, to let in a little sense. But that would have just landed him in the gaol. Muttering under his breath, he made his slow, hitching way out of the constabulary station and back to the ley-line caravan stop.

  The block of flats next to Saffa’s and one across the street were only piles of wreckage. Bembo had to go up three flights of stairs to get to her flat. He was puffing and sweating when he finally got there. A baby wailed behind the door he knocked on.

  When Saffa opened it, she looked harried-maybe her brat had been crying for a while. “Oh,” she said. “You.”

  He didn’t quite know how to take that. “Hello, Saffa. I’m on my feet- sort of.”

  “Hello, Bembo.” Her smile still had some of the sour tang he remembered. So did her words: “I’m glad to see you-sort of.”

  “Will you go to supper with me tomorrow night?” he asked, as if the whole Derlavaian War, including his broken leg, had never happened.

  “No,” she sa
id. But she wasn’t spitting in his eye, as she’d warned she might, for she went on, “I haven’t got anyone to watch my son then. But three nights from now, my sister isn’t working. I’ll go then.”

  “All right,” Bembo said. “Pick an eatery, and we’ll go there. I’ve been away so long, I don’t know what’s good these days, or even what’s standing.” He’d got around by night in Gromheort and Eoforwic with no lights showing; he expected he could manage in his own home town.

  But he turned out to be wrong. Tricarico fell to the Kuusamans two days later.

  He’d heard that the enemy was coming down out of the Bradano Mountains, of course. The news sheets couldn’t very well deny that. But they did their best to claim the slanteyes would never cross the river, would never threaten the city. Bembo probably should have had more doubts than he did; he’d seen such optimistic twaddle in Forthweg, too. But the assault on Tricarico took him by surprise.

  So did the feeble resistance his own countrymen put up inside the city. That left him half relieved-he had, after all, been in the middle of a city convulsed by fighting-and half ashamed. “Why aren’t you giving them a battle?” he called to a squad of soldiers heading west, plainly intending to leave Tricarico.

  “Why? I’ll tell you why, porky,” one of the men answered. Bembo squawked indignantly, and with some reason; he’d lost much of the paunch he’d once carried. Ignoring him, the trooper went on, “We’re getting the blazes out on account of the slanteyes have already got men past this rotten place to north and south, and we don’t want to get stuck here, that’s why.”

  From a military point of view, that made good enough sense. Out in the west, fighting against the Unkerlanters, all too many garrisons had stayed in their towns too long, and got cut off and destroyed. Gromheort, where Bembo was stationed before transferring to Eoforwic, was going through such a death agony now. But even so … “What are we supposed to do?”

  “Best you can, pal,” the soldier answered. “That and thank the powers above it ain’t the Unkerlanters coming into town.” He trotted away, dodging craters in the street and jumping over or kicking aside bits of rubble nobody had bothered to clear away.

  Had Bembo had two good legs, he would have kicked at rubble, too. As things were, he made his own slow way down the street. The trooper was right. The Kuusamans wouldn’t rape or massacre everyone they saw just for the sport of it. At least, Bembo hoped they wouldn’t. I’m going to find out, he realized.

  He was back in his flat, with the shutters tightly drawn, when the Kuusamans did come into Tricarico. One of the windows in the flat had had glass in it when he rented the place; the landlord had tried to charge him more because of it. He’d laughed in the man’s face, asking, “How long do you expect it to last?” And he’d proved a good prophet, for an egg bursting not far away soon shattered the pane into tinkling shards. He’d had a demon of a time cleaning up afterwards, too. Trying to handle crutches and broom and dustpan was more an exercise in frustration than anything else.

  But Bembo couldn’t stay in his flat forever, or even very long. He had to come out to look for something to eat. He’d never done much cooking for himself, even back when he’d been living in Tricarico. A constable with an eye for the main chance could get most of his meals from the eateries on his beat. In Forthweg, he’d done the same thing a lot of the time, and eaten in barracks like a soldier when he hadn’t. And, with crutches, he would have been as awkward in the kitchen as he had been chasing slivers of glass around the floor. Of course, he was pretty awkward in the kitchen without crutches, too.

  A few eggs were still bursting inside Tricarico when he emerged from his block of flats. At first, he thought that meant the Kuusamans hadn’t yet come into the city after all. But then he saw several of them setting up sandbags so they could cover all sides of an intersection. They looked like runts; he was several inches taller than the biggest of them, and he wasn’t exceptionally tall by Algarvian standards. But they had sticks and they had the same sort of urgent, disciplined wariness he’d seen in Algarvian soldiers in Forthweg. Any civilians who tried trifling with them would be very sorry very fast. He was sure of that.

  More eggs burst. He realized his retreating countrymen were tossing them at his home town. They didn’t care what happened to the people who lived in Tricarico as long as they killed or maimed a few Kuusamans. Bembo turned toward the west and scowled. See if I do anything for you any time soon, he thought, the you being either the departed soldiers or King Mezentio himself: even Bembo wasn’t quite sure which. It amounted to the same thing either way.

  “You!” someone said sharply, and for a moment Bembo thought the word remained in his own mind, not the world outside him. But then the fellow who’d spoken went on: “Aye, you-the chubby fellow with the crutches. Come here.”

  Bembo turned. There gesturing at him stood a skinny old Kuusaman with a few little wisps of white hair sprouting from his chin. He wore greenish-gray Kuusaman uniform, with a prominent badge that had to be a mage’s emblem. “What do you want, uh, sir?” Bembo asked cautiously.

  “I already told you what I wanted,” the Kuusaman said in his almost unaccented Algarvian. “I want you to come here. I have some questions for you, and I expect to get answers.” I’ll turn you into a leech if I don’t, lay behind his words.

  “I’m coming,” Bembo said, and made his slow way over to the mage. Refusing didn’t cross his mind, not because of the implied threat but simply because one did as this man said first and then wondered why afterwards, if at all. Still, Bembo was not easily overawed, and had his own full measure of Algarvian cheekiness. He asked a question of his own: “Who are you, old-timer?”

  “Ilmarinen,” the mage answered. “Now you know as much as you did before.” He eyed Bembo. Bembo didn’t like the way he did it; it seemed as if Ilmarinen were looking right into his soul. And maybe the mage was, for the next thing he said, in tones of genuine curiosity, was, “How could you?”

  “Uh, how could I what, sir?” Bembo asked.

  “Round up Kaunians and send them off to what you knew was death and then go back to your bed and sleep at night,” the Kuusaman mage answered.

  “How did you know that? I mean, I never-” But Bembo’s denial faltered. Ilmarinen would know if he lied. He was grimly certain of that. And so, instead of denying, he evaded: “I saved some, too, by the powers above. Plenty of my pals didn’t.”

  Ilmarinen looked into him again. Grudgingly, the mage nodded. “So you did-a handful, and usually for favors. But you did, and I cannot deny it. A tiny weight in the other pan of the scales. Now answer what I asked before-what of all those you did not save?”

  Bembo had spent years not thinking about that. He didn’t want to think about it now. Under Ilmarinen’s eye, though, he had no choice. At last, he mumbled, “The people set over me told me what to do, and I went and did it. They were the ones who were supposed to know what was going on, not me. And what else could I have done?”

  Ilmarinen started to spit into his face. Bembo was sure of it. At the last instant, the mage checked himself. “A tiny weight of truth there, too,” he said, and spat at Bembo’s feet instead, then turned and walked away.

  “Hey! You can’t-” Bembo broke off as a sense of just how narrow his escape had been flowed through him. The last thing in all the world he wanted was for that terrible old Kuusaman wizard to come back and look into his eyes again.

  As soon as Istvan walked into the barracks, he knew he was in trouble. All eyes swung his way. Somebody got up and closed the barracks door behind him. “Well, well,” somebody else said, “if it isn’t the Kuusamans’ little pet goat.”

  “Maaa! Maaa!” somebody else said shrilly. Several of his countrymen got off their cots and came toward him, hands bunching into fists.

  Fear chilled him. Men occasionally got stomped or beaten to death here in the captives’ camp on Obuda. Once in a while, the Kuusaman guards found out who did it and punished them. More often than not, thoug
h, they didn’t. That sort of fate looked to be about to befall him.

  He didn’t turn and run. That wasn’t so much because he came from a warrior race as because he felt sure more Gyongyosians were closing in behind him. Instead, he drew himself up very straight. “I have kept my honor,” he said. “The stars shine on my spirit, and they know I have kept my honor.”

  “Liar,” three men said together.

  “Maaa! Maaa!” That hateful, mocking goat-bleat rang out again.

  “I am no liar,” Istvan declared. “Come on, all of you. I will fight you one at a time till I can fight no more. I will say nothing to the guards about what happened. By the stars, I swear it. Or show yourselves goat-eating cowards and mob me all at once.”

  They hesitated. He hadn’t been sure he would get even that much. Then a burly man stepped out of the group and advanced on him, saying, “My fists and feet are better than you deserve.”

  Istvan didn’t answer. He just waited. The other captive was bigger than he, and looked to know what he was doing. The fellow surged forward, head down, fists churning. Istvan blocked a blow with his arm, struck a stomach hard as oak, took a boot in the hip instead of in the crotch, and also lashed out with his foot. A buffet to the side of the head made him see stars that had nothing to do with the ones he reverenced. He grabbed his foe and threw him to the floor. The other captive tripped him on the way down.

  But Istvan was the one who got up. He spat red on the floor. “Who’s next?” he said, squinting a little because his left eye was half swollen shut.

  Another Gyongyosian strode toward him. He won that fight, too, and waved for a third challenger. By then, every part of him hurt. He didn’t think he would win the third fight, and he didn’t. The other captive thumped his head against the floor, once, twice. . That was the last thing he remembered.

  They could have killed him after he was out. When he woke up again, he rather wished they had. They’d kicked him around some. He could feel that. But it was almost lost in the thudding, nauseating pain in his head. He’d had his wits scrambled for him, sure as sure. He had trouble remembering where he was and even who he was. He did remember how three other captives in the barracks had got pretty good sets of lumps of their own, though. That gave him a certain small satisfaction, when he wasn’t hoping his own head would fall off.