When he woke the next morning, rain was drumming against the bedchamber windows. Winter was the rainy season in Forthweg, as in most northerly lands. Yawning, Ealstan opened one eye. Rain, sure enough. He opened the other eye and glanced over at Vanai.
He frowned. Her features had... changed. Her hair remained dark. It would: she regularly dyed it. But it looked straight now, not wavy. Her face was longer, her nose straight, no t proudly hooked. Her skin had matched the swarthy tone of his. Now it was fairer, so the blood underneath showed through pink.
Before long, the rain woke her, too. As soon as her eyes opened, Ealstan said, "Your spell's worn off." Those eyes should have seemed dark brown, but they were their true grayish blue again.
Vanai nodded. "I'll fix it after breakfast. I don't think anyone will come bursting in to catch me looking like a Kaunian till then."
"All right," Ealstan said. "Don't forget."
She laughed at him. "I'm not likely to, you know."
And she didn't. After they'd washed down barley bread and olive oil with more red wine, Vanai took a length of yellow yarn and a length of dark brown, twisted them together, and began to chant in classical Kaunian. The spell was of her own devising, an adaptation of a Forthwegian charm in a little book called You Too Can Be a Mage that hadn't worked as it should have. Thanks to the training she'd had from her scholarly grandfather, the one she'd made did.
As soon as she spoke the last word of the charm, her face-indeed, her whole body-returned to its Forthwegian appearance. Kaunians in Eoforwic and throughout Forthweg used that same spell now. A lot of them had escaped from the
districts in which the redheads had sealed them so they'd be handy when Algarve needed the life energy they could give. Mezentio's men weren't happy about that.
Ealstan was. He kissed Vanai and said, "If these were imperial times, you'd come down in history as a great heroine."
She answered in Kaunian, something she seldom did since taking on a Forthwegian seeming: "If these were imperial times, I wouldn't need such sorcery." Her voice was bleak.
Ealstan wished he could disagree with her. Since he couldn't, he did the next best thing: he kissed her again. "Whether you are remembered or not, you are still a heroine," he said, and had a demon of a time understanding why she suddenly started to weep.
***
Bembo cursed under his breath as he prowled through the streets of Gromheort. Oraste, his partner, didn't bother keeping his voice down. Gromheort lay in eastern Forthweg, not far from the border with Algarve, and a good many locals understood Algarvian. The constable kept cursing anyway.
"Miserable Kaunians," he growled. "Powers below eat them, every stinking one. They ought to have their throats cut, the filthy buggers, what with all the extra work they've piled on our backs."
"Aye, curse them," Bembo agreed. He was tubbier than he should have been, no braver than he had to be, and heartily disapproved of anything resembling work, especially work he'd have to do.
Oraste, for his part, disapproved of almost everything. "They're liable to cost us the war, the lousy, stinking whoresons. How are we supposed to scoop 'em up and send 'em west when they start looking like everybody else in this fornicating kingdom? The way things are going over in Unkerlant, we need all the help we can get."
"Aye," Bembo repeated, but on a less certain note. The idea of rounding up Kaunians and sending them toward the battlefront to be killed made his stomach turn unhappy flipflops. He did it-what choice did he have but to obey the sergeants and officers set over him? -but he had trouble believing it was the right thing to do.
Oraste had no doubts. Oraste, as far as Bembo could see, never had any doubts about anything. He waved now, not the usual extravagant Algarvian gesture but a functional one, one that took in the street ahead and the people on it. "Any of these bastards-any of 'em, by the powers above! -could be a Kaunian wrapped in magic cloaking. And what can we do about it? What can we do about it, I ask you?"
"Nothing much," Bembo answered mournfully. "If we start using Forthwegians the way we use the Kaunians here, this whole kingdom'll go up in smoke. We haven't got the men to hold it down, not if we want to go on fighting the Unkerlanters, too."
"It's war," Oraste said. "You do what you have to do. If we need Forthwegians, we'll take 'em. We can sell it to the ones we don't take: if the Kaunians weren't wolves in sheep's clothing, we can say, we wouldn't have to do this. The Forthwegians'll buy it, or enough of 'em will. They hate the blonds as much as we do."
"I suppose so." Bembo didn't particularly hate anybody-save, perhaps, people who made him work more than he cared to. Those people included Sergeant Pesaro, his boss, as well as the miscreants he all too often failed to run to earth.
"Look at 'em!" Oraste waved again, this time with a sort of animal frustration. "Any one of them could be a Kaunian. Any one, I tell you. You think I like the notion of those lousy blonds laughing at me? Not on your life, pal." He folded his beefy hands into fists. When he didn't like something, his notion of what to do next was pound it to pieces.
And, whenever he got into that kind of mood, he'd sometimes lash out at his partner, too; he wasn't always fussy about whom or what he hurt, so long as he was hurting someone or something. To try to placate him, Bembo pointed to a man whose beard was going gray. "There. That fellow's a genuine Forthwegian, no doubt about it."
"How d'you know?" Brooding suspicion filled Oraste's voice.
"Don't you remember? He's the one who had a son disappear off to powers above know where, and his nephew murdered his other son. He couldn't get anybody to do anything about it, because the nephew was in Plegmund's Brigade."
"Oh. Him. Aye." The fire in Oraste's hazel eyes faded a little. "Well, I can't say you're wrong-this time."
Bembo swept off his plumed hat and bowed as deeply as his belly would permit. "Your servant," he said.
"My arse," Oraste said. He pointed to the man with whom the assuredly genuine Forthwegian was speaking. "How about him? You going to tell me you know for sure he's no Kaunian, too?"
"How can I do that?" Bembo asked reasonably as he and Oraste came up to the two men. The other fellow certainly looked like a Forthwegian: a white-haired, white-bearded, rather dissolute-seeming old Forthwegian. "But what else is he likely to be? He's a blowhard, I'll tell you that."
Sure enough, the old man was doing most of the talking, his companion mostly listening and then trying to get a word or two in edgewise. As Bembo and Oraste came up to them, the geezer waved his forefinger in the other man's face and spoke in impassioned Forthwegian. Bembo couldn't understand more than one word in four, but he knew an irate, hectoring tone when he heard one. The fellow the old man was talking to looked as if he wished he were elsewhere.
Oraste rolled his eyes. "Blowhard, nothing. He's a stinking windbag, is what he is."
"Aye, that's the truth." Instead of walking past the windbag, Bembo slowed and cocked his head to one side, frowning and listening hard.
"Are you daft?" Oraste said. "Come on."
"Shut up." Bembo was usually a little afraid of his partner, and wouldn't have dared speak to him like that most of the time. But a moment later he gave a decisive nod. "It is. By the powers above, it is!"
"Is what?" Oraste asked.
Bembo started to point, then thought better of it. "That old Forthwegian-he's not a Forthwegian, or I'll eat my club. Remember that noisy, smartmouthed old
Kaunian whoreson we first ran into in Oyngestun? We've bumped into him a few times here in Gromheort, too."
After another couple of paces, Oraste nodded. "Aye, I do. He's the one with the good-looking granddaughter-or he said she was his granddaughter, anyway."
"That's the one. And that's him," Bembo said. "I recognize his voice. Whatever magecraft he's using, it doesn't change that."
Oraste took one more step, then spun on his heel. "Let's snag the son of a whore."
Had Bembo seen two constables bearing down on him, he would have made himself scarce. Maybe the sor
cerously disguised Kaunian didn't see him and Oraste; the fellow was still doing his best to talk the other man's ear off. He looked absurdly astonished when the Algarvians laid hold of him. "What is the meaning of this?" he demanded-in good Algarvian.
That made Bembo beam. That smartmouthed Kaunian spoke Algarvian-he was supposed to be some sort of scholar. Bembo said, "You're under arrest on suspicion of being a Kaunian."
"Do I look like a Kaunian?" the old man said.
"Not now," Bembo answered. "We'll take you back, throw you in a cell, and wait and see if the magic wears off. If you still look ugly this same way tomorrow, we'll turn you loose. How much you want to bet we don't have to?"
To his surprise, the other Forthwegian, the genuine Forthwegian, tapped his belt pouch. Coins rang in there. "Gentlemen," he said, also in fluent Algarvian, "I'll make it worth your while if you forget you ever saw this fellow."
"No." Oraste spoke before Bembo could. Bembo, like a lot of Algarvians, didn't mind making some money on the side; his constable's salary didn't go very far. But he nodded now. He didn't want money. No, that wasn't quite true-he wanted money, but he wanted this old Kaunian's head more.
And so he, too, said, "No. We're going to take this fellow in and deal with him."
"You are making a serious mistake," the old man said. "I tell you, I am as much a Forthwegian as Hestan here."
Hestan there didn't say another word. He didn't call the old man who looked like a Forthwegian a liar, but he didn't claim he was telling the truth, either. Oraste started hauling the fellow off toward Gromheort's gaol, which was more crowded now than it had been when Forthweg ruled the city.
"What have we got here?" an Algarvian gaoler asked when the constables frog- marched their prisoner into the building. "You catch him filching somebody's fals e teeth?" He laughed at his own wit.
Bembo said, "Suspicion of Kaunianity. Lock him up and see if he still looks the same tomorrow. The magic isn't even good for a day at a time, from everything I've heard."
"Aha-one of those." The gaoler brightened. "How'd you catch him? Can't tell much by his hair, I'd say-white's still white."
"I recognized his voice," Bembo said proudly. "I'd run into him before, when he looked like what he really is. He made himself enough of a nuisance that he stuck in my mind."
"I am a Forthwegian," the old man said. "I am not a Kaunian."
"Shut up," the gaoler told him. "We'll find out what you are." He turned to a couple of his assistants, who looked to have been shooting dice before Bembo and Oraste came in with their captive. "Strip him-don't leave him anything he can use to make more magic and make more work for us. Then throw him in a cell. Like the constable says, we'll find out what he is."
"Aye," one of his assistants said. They did as they were told. The old man squawked protests and tried to fight back, but he might have been a three-year- old for all the good it did him. The assistant gaolers led him away. Even though he was naked, he kept on squawking.
"Now..." The gaoler reached into a desk drawer and pulled out some forms. "The paperwork. If he really is a Kaunian, you'll get the credit. If he's not, you'll get the blame."
"Blame? For what?" Bembo clapped a hand to his forehead in melodramatic disbelief. "For bothering a miserable Forthwegian? Where's the blame in that?"
"There's no blame for bothering a Forthwegian," the gaoler agreed. "But if that old bugger turns out not to be a Kaunian, you get the blame for bothering me." He favored the constables with a singularly unpleasant smile, the sort of smile that made them scurry out of the gaol in a hurry.
Once they'd got outside, Oraste gave Bembo the same kind of smile. "You'd better not be wrong," he said. Bembo wanted to scurry away from his partner, too, but he couldn't. He had to smile himself, and nod, and go on with his shift.
As soon as they came on duty the next day, they hurried to the gaol. The gaoler didn't start cursing the moment he set eyes on them, which Bembo took for a good sign. "Well, you boys got it straight," the gaoler said. "He was a Kaunian."
Oraste thumped Bembo on the shoulder, hard enough to stagger him. Bembo heard something Oraste missed. "Was?" he asked.
"Aye." The gaoler looked sour. "Sometime during the night, somebody gave him drawers and a tunic so he wouldn't freeze. He twisted 'em up and hanged himself with 'em. That killed the spell along with him. Like I say, he was a Kaunian, all right."
"Filthy bastard," Oraste said. "We could have got some use out of his life energy."
"That's right," Bembo said. "Killing yourself like that ought to be punishable by death." He laughed. After a moment, Oraste and the gaoler did, too.
"I've sent the forms off to the constabulary barracks," the gaoler said. "You deserve the credit, like I told you yesterday. That turned out to be a nice bit of work." Bembo beamed and preened and strutted. He hadn't much minded hearing that the longwinded old Kaunian was dead. Now that he knew he'd get the credit for capturing him, he didn't mind at all.
***
Back in the days when he was a peasant like any other peasant in the Unkerlanter Duchy of Grelz, Garivald had looked forward to winter. With snowdrifts covering
the fields, he'd spent most of his time indoors and a lot of that time drunk. Aside from taking care of the livestock that always shared the hut with his family and him, what else was there to do but drink?
But he had no home now, only a miserable little shelter, not even worth dignifying with the name of hut, in the middle of the forest west of Herborn, the capital of Grelz. Munderic's band of irregulars still held the woods, still held away the Algarvians who'd overrun Grelz and the Grelzer puppets who served them, but irregulars had a harder time of it in winter than they did in summer.
Garivald came out of his shelter to look up through the pines and the bare- branched birches to the sullen gray sky overhead. It had snowed the day before. He thought it was done for a while, but you never could tell. He took a couple of steps. At each one, his felt boots left a clear track in the snow.
"Footprints," he growled, vapor puffing from his mouth at the word. "I wish there were a magic to make footprints go away."
"Don't say things like that," Obilot exclaimed. She was one of a handful of women in Munderic's band. The women who ran off to fight the redheads and their local cat's-paws commonly had reasons much more urgent than those of their male counterparts. Obilot went on, "Sadoc's liable to get wind of it and try to cast a spell to be rid of them."
"That might not be so bad," Garivald said. "Odds are, whatever magecraft he tried wouldn't do anything."
"Aye, but it might go wrong so badly, it'd bring the Algarvians down on our heads," Obilot said.
Neither of them spoke of the benefits that would follow if Sadoc's spell succeeded. Neither of them thought Sadoc's spell, if he made one, would succeed. He was the closest thing to a mage Munderic's band boasted. As far as Garivald was concerned, he wasn't close enough. He had no training whatever. He was just a peasant who'd fiddled around with a few charms.
"If only he knew when to try and when not to," Garivald said mournfully. "He might be good enough for little things, but he won't stay with those. He won't even take a blaze at them. If it isn't huge, he doesn't want to bother with it."
"Who doesn't want to bother with what?" Munderic asked. The leader of the irregulars was a big, hard-faced, burly man. He looked the part he played. His temper suited him to it, too. Scowling, he went on, "Who doesn't, curse it? We all have to do whatever we can."
Obilot and Garivald looked at each other. Garivald owed Munderic his life. If the irregulars hadn't plucked him from Algarvian hands, Mezentio's men would have boiled him alive for making songs that mocked them. Even so, he didn't want to give Munderic this particular idea, and neither, evidently, did Obilot.
Munderic saw as much, too. His bushy eyebrows formed a dark bar over his eyes as he scowled. "Who doesn't want to bother with what?" he repeated, an angry rumble in his voice. "You'd better tell me what you were talking about, or you
'll be sorry."
"It wasn't anything, really." Garivald didn't want to antagonize Munderic, either. They'd already had a couple of run-ins. To his relief, Obilot nodded agreement.
But they didn't satisfy their leader. "Come on, out with it!" he barked. "If we're going to make the invaders and the traitors howl, we've got to do
everything we can." His glare was so fierce, Garivald reluctantly told him what he and Obilot had been talking about. To his dismay, Munderic beamed. "Aye, that'd be just what we need. Footprints in the snow make it hard for us to raid without giving ourselves away. I'll talk to Sadoc."
"There's no guarantee he'll be able to do anything like that, you know," Obilot said. This time, Garivald was the one who nodded.
"I'll talk to him," Munderic said again. "We'll see what he can do. If we've got a mage here, we bloody well ought to get some use out of him, don't you think?" He stamped away without waiting for an answer.
Turtledove, Harry - Darkness 04 - Rulers Of The Darkness Page 7