Through the Darkness d-3

by Harry Turtledove

  “No,” Ealstan agreed. Did the baker really eat the same bread he sold his customers? Ealstan doubted it. From everything he’d seen, anyone who got a position privileged in any way took advantage of it as best he could. Ealstan chuckled mirthlessly. If that wasn’t an Algarvian way of looking at the world, he didn’t know what was.

  When he got back to his own part of town, he paused and marveled that all the buildings on his block had come through intact. Oh, some new windows on the bottom couple of stories were boarded up, but a lot of windows had been boarded up for a long time; glass, these days, was expensive and hard to come by.

  Feet and hooves and wheels had worn away the fresh bloodstains from the crowns of the cobbles, but the red-brown still lingered between the gray and yellow-brown stones. Someone had left a bloody handprint on the wall of the building next to Ealstan’s, too. He wondered what had happened to that fellow. Nothing good, he feared.

  He paused in the lobby to get his mail from the brass bank of boxes against the wall opposite the door. The lock on his box was as stout and fancy as he could afford; he had one key, the postman the other. The rest of the boxes sported similar impressive pieces of the locksmith’s art. Few people hereabouts trusted their neighbors’ good intentions.

  When Ealstan saw his father’s precise, familiar script on an envelope, he grabbed it with a mixture of excitement and alarm. He didn’t hear from home very often, and wrote back even less. But news, he’d discovered when he got the letter telling of Leofsig’s death, could be bad as easily as good.

  I’ll open it upstairs, he told himself. Iwon’t be able to do anything about it down here, anyhow. He laughed at himself, again without amusement. He wouldn’t be able to do anything about it after he got up to his flat, either.

  He had to set down the ledgers so he could knock on the door. Vanai let him in. “What have you got there?” she asked, pointing to the envelope.

  “It’s from home,” he answered. “That’s all I know right now.” He held up the envelope to show her he hadn’t opened it, then added, “I didn’t have the nerve to do it down in the lobby.”

  Vanai bit her lip as she nodded. “Let me pour some wine.” She hurried off to the kitchen. Ealstan clenched his jaw. He’d needed numbing after other letters from home, and knew too well he might need it again.

  He waited till Vanai came back with two full glasses before he tore open the envelope and took out the letter inside. He unfolded it, started to read- and let out a chuckle that was shaky with relief. “Oh!” he said. “Is that all?”

  “What is it?” Vanai asked, a wineglass still in each hand.

  “My sister’s married,” Ealstan answered. That seemed strange-Conberge had been a part of the household his whole life-but he’d known it was likely to happen one day. “My father says everything went very well. Powers above be praised for that! Wouldn’t it have been fine if Sidroc walked in right in the middle of the ceremony?”

  “No,” Vanai said, and handed him one of the glasses. She raised the other. “Here’s to your sister. May she be happy.”

  “Aye. Conberge deserves to be happy.” Ealstan drank. The wine was nowhere near so fine as the fancy vintages Ethelhelm served, but it would do. He finished reading the letter, then winced in sympathy. “My father says he and my mother are just rattling around in the house. They never expected it to empty out so soon.”

  Vanai stepped up and held him for a moment. He’d had to flee Gromheort, his brother was dead-at least Conberge had left the way she should have.

  And something else occurred to him: something, he realized, he should have thought of quite a while before. He slipped his arm around Vanai. “I wish I could marry you properly,” he said. “If I ever get the chance, I will, I promise.”

  She looked up at him and started to cry. He wondered if he’d said the wrong thing. Vanai spent the rest of the night finding ways to show him he hadn’t.

  Down below Sabrino, Heshbon burned. In a few spots among the ruins, Algarvian and Yaninan holdouts still struggled against the advancing Lagoan army. Most of the men who’d survived the sorcerous debacle in the land of the Ice People, though, had long since surrendered.

  Being a dragonflier, Sabrino enjoyed more choices than surrender or hopeless resistance. Along with his wing, along with all the dragons on the austral continent, he’d been recalled to Derlavai. The order still left him more than a little startled. He’d expected King Mezentio to send another army across the Narrow Sea to take the place of the one his mages, in their bloodthirsty arrogance, had thrown away. But the king had chosen to cut his losses instead. That wasn’t like Mezentio. It wasn’t like him at all. Sabrino wondered what had happened in Trapani to persuade Mezentio to take such a course.

  He’d find out before long. His wing was ordered to the great dragon farm outside the capital of Algarve: they’d get their next assignment there. He assumed they would also get a few days of rest and recuperation, during which he intended to learn all he could. He knew he had a lot of catching up to do; down on the austral continent, he might as well have been cut off from what went on in the wider world.

  His dragon eagerly flew north over the gray-green waters of the Narrow Sea: toward the sun, toward the warmth, toward civilization-though of course the beast cared nothing for that last. Sabrino glanced back over his shoulder. No, the Lagoans and Kuusamans weren’t pursuing. They kept on pounding Heshbon with eggs. If the Algarvians wanted to leave the land of the Ice People, they would let them.

  Before long, Sabrino spied a black line ahead: land crawling up over the edge of the world to mar the smooth horizon between land and sea. The swamps and forests of southern Algarve, though the homeland of his folk, were not the part of the kingdom of which he was fondest. They’d always struck him as dull and gloomy. No wonder the ancient Algarvic tribes had waged endless war against the Kaunian Empire-the Kaunians held most of the land worth living in.

  Sabrino wasn’t in the habit of talking to his dragon, as leviathan-riders often did with their beasts; he knew too well that dragons neither knew nor cared about words. But he broke his own rule now, saying, “Do you know, after the land of the Ice People this doesn’t look so bad.”

  In among the woods and the swamps, farmers grew turnips and parsnips and beets, and grain along with them. Little by little, the trees thinned out, the land got drier, and fields of wheat and barley supplanted the root crops. With every few miles farther north Sabrino flew, the greens of growing things got brighter.

  Trapani lay still within the swampy belt, but toward its northern edge. One after another, the dragons in Sabrino’s wing spiraled down out of the sky. Handlers took charge of them, exclaiming at how thin and ill-used they were.

  Tapping himself on the chest, waving toward his weary men, Sabrino demanded, “And how ill-used do you think we are?” The handlers stared at him. That a dragonflier could be as ill-used as a dragon had never crossed their minds.

  One of them asked, “Colonel, uh, lord Count”-Sabrino, as usual, wore his badge of nobility on his tunic-”what went wrong, down there in the land of the Ice People?”

  It was a good question. Sabrino pondered it for a moment, then answered, “We did.” The handler started to ask him something more. He pushed past the fellow and strode toward the commandant’s office.

  He got no satisfaction there. A captain told him, “I’m very sorry, sir, but General Borso didn’t come in today, due to an unfortunate indisposition.”

  In bed with his mistress, or with a hangover? Sabrino wondered. He was almost indiscreet enough to do his wondering out loud. In the end, all he asked was, “Have you any idea why we were summoned home from the austral continent?”

  “Me, sir?” The captain shook his head. “No, sir. No one tells me anything like that, sir.”

  Sabrino’s scornful glance withered him hardly less than dragonfire might have done. “Well, young fellow, did anyone tell you where to get hold of a carriage for me, so I can get to the nearest ley-line car
avan and head for Trapani, where they are in the habit of telling people things?”

  Flushing, gnawing at the inside of his lower lip in mortification, the captain spat out one word: “Aye.” But then, noting Sabrino’s towering temper, he hastily added two more: “Aye, sir.”

  Neither Sabrino’s wife nor his mistress knew he was in Trapani; he was sure of that. He wondered what the news sheets had said of the Algarvian disaster in the land of the Ice People, and how worried Gismonda and Fronesia were. Then he wondered if Fronesia was worried at all, except about finding a new lover with enough money to keep her in her fancy flat.

  But she and his wife could both wait. When the ley-line caravan reached the center of Trapani, Sabrino made for neither his home nor the one he maintained for Fronesia. Instead, he strode into the building near the royal palace that housed the Ministry of War: a building so severely classical in line, it wouldn’t have looked at all out of place in the Kaunian Empire. He wondered if the soldiers serving there ever pondered that irony. Probably not, and too bad, too.

  He hadn’t bothered freshening up; his stubbled chin and cheeks and wrinkled, dirty uniform drew startled looks from the spruce young officers hurrying through the halls. But none of them had rank enough to call him on his appearance. Presently, he ducked into an office where a much neater colonel was peering from a map to a long column of figures and back again and swearing under his breath. Sabrino said, “Hello, you old fraud. They haven’t got wise to you and shipped you off to Unkerlant yet, eh? Don’t worry-they will.”

  The other colonel sprang to his feet, enfolded him in a muscular embrace, and kissed him on both cheeks. “Why, you son of a whore!” he said affectionately. “I figured they’d left you down there to freeze, or else for dragon food.”

  “Dragons’ll eat almost anything, Vasto, but even they draw the line somewhere,” Sabrino answered. He cocked his head to one side. “You look as ugly as ever, curse me if you don’t.”

  Vasto bowed low. “I’ll curse you any which way, and you bloody well know it.” He and Sabrino were both grinning enormously. They’d fought side by side in the Six Years’ War, and been fast friends ever since. “Sit down, sit down,” Vasto said. “You see me ashamed-you’ve caught me without a bottle of brandy in my desk, so I can’t give you a nip the way I usually do.”

  “I’d probably fall asleep right here if you did,” Sabrino told him. “But if you can give me a couple of straight answers, they’ll go down smoother than brandy anyhow.”

  Vasto pointed a forefinger at him as if it were a stick. “Go ahead-blaze,” he said. They’d been giving each other straight answers for almost thirty years, too, and the usual rules of military secrecy had very little to do with what they said.

  “All right.” Sabrino took a deep breath. “Why did they pull us off the austral continent instead of sending in more soldiers after our sorcery went awry? The Lagoans haven’t got that many men down there, may the powers below eat them. We could have held them off for a cursed long time.”

  For the first time in many years, he saw Vasto reluctant to answer. “I wish you hadn’t asked me that,” the other colonel said slowly. “I’ll tell you, but you swear first on your mother’s name you’ll never let anyone know where you heard it. Anyone, you hear me? Even Mezentio.”

  “Powers above!” Sabrino said. Seeing his friend was serious, though, he twisted the fingers of his left hand into a sign Algarvians had used since they skulked through the southern forests, living in fear of imperial Kaunian soldiers and sorcerers. “On my mother’s name I swear it, Vasto.”

  “Good enough.” Vasto said, although he still didn’t sound happy. Leaning toward Sabrino across his desk, he spoke in a rasping whisper: “It’s simple, when you get down to it. We’ve got the men to go on fighting the Unkerlanters, or we’ve got the men to send a proper new army down to the land of the Ice People. What we haven’t got are the men to do both those things at once.”

  Sabrino had thought he’d escaped the austral continent for good. The chill that ran up his spine at Vasto’s words made him wonder if he was wrong. “Are things as bad as that?” He discovered he was whispering, too.

  “They are right now.” But Colonel Vasto held out a hand and waggled it, palm down, to show they might not stay that way. “Once we get past this Sulingen place, once we get down into the Mamming Hills and seize those cinnabar mines, then we’ll have old Swemmel where we want him. Then we can start thinking about the austral continent again. You know as well as I do, it’s not as if the Lagoans can give us much trouble from there.”

  “Well, that’s true enough,” Sabrino said. “Nobody can do much with that country; it’s too bloody poor. If it weren’t for furs and cinnabar, the hairy savages could keep it and welcome. But still. . We can’t afford to send any men at all?”

  “Not a one,” Vasto answered. “That’s what they’re saying, anyhow. Swemmel’s pulling out all the stops down in Sulingen. He’s no fool-he’s crazy, but he’s no fool. He knows as well as we do that if we get across the Wolter and into the hills, he’s ruined. So we have to give it everything we’ve got down there, too.”

  Sabrino spat on the carpeted floor of Vasto’s comfortable office, as he might have out in the field. His disgust was too great for any smaller gesture. Bitterly, he said, “They told us slaughtering the Kaunians would crack the Unkerlanters like an almond shell. They told us we had plenty of men, plenty of dragons, to lick the Lagoans off the land of the Ice People and still whip Swemmel, too. And they believed it, too, every time they said it. And now it comes down to this?”

  “Now it comes down to this,” Vasto agreed. “But if we break the Unkerlanters this time, they’re broken for good. You can take that to the bank, Sabrino.”

  “Well, you know more about the big picture than I do,” Sabrino said. “I never worried much about anything but my piece of it, whatever that happened to be. So here’s hoping you’re right.”

  “Oh, I am.” Vasto spoke in his normal tone of voice for the first time. “Once we take Sulingen and the Mamming Hills, the Unkerlanters won’t be able to lick us. We’ll roll ‘em up the way you do a ball of yarn.”

  “All right.” Sabrino held up a forefinger. “Now let me guess. I bet I can see the future without being any kind of mage at all. I predict”-he tried to sound mystical, and had no doubt he ended up sounding absurd-”I predict my wing will be flying west before long.”

  Vasto said, “I haven’t seen your orders-I didn’t even know you were back on the mainland of Derlavai. But I wouldn’t bet an olive pit against you. They say southern Unkerlant is lovely this time of year. But they say it gets pretty cold in another couple of months, too.”

  “I’ve seen all the cold I want, thanks,” Sabrino said. “We’ll just have to beat the Unkerlanters before then, that’s all.”

  Sergeant Pesaro looked over with something less than delight the squad of Algarvian constables he led in Gromheort. “Come on, you lugs-let’s do it,” he said. “The sooner we take care of it, the sooner we can get back to our everyday business.”

  Standing there listening to Pesaro, Bembo leaned toward Oraste and murmured, “He doesn’t much like this, either.”

  Oraste’s answering shrug showed none of the usual Algarvian playfulness. It was as indifferent as it was massive: a mountain might have shrugged that way. “What difference does it make? He’s going to do it, and so are we.”

  As if to underscore Oraste’s words, Pesaro went on, “We go in there; we grab our quota, and we get out. Has everybody got that?”

  “Permission to fall out, Sergeant?” Almonio asked. The young constable never had been able to stand rounding up Kaunians.

  But Pesaro shook his head. “Not this time. You’re coming along with us, by the powers above. This isn’t some little village in the middle of nowhere. This is the Kaunian quarter in the middle of Gromheort. You never can tell who’s liable to be watching. Any other questions?” He looked around. Nobody said anything. Pesaro stuck
out a meaty forefinger. “All right. Let’s go.”

  Off they went, bootheels clattering on cobbles. Almonio muttered to himself and swigged from a hip flask as they tramped along. Pesaro affected not to notice that. So did Bembo, though he wished he’d thought to equip himself with a hip flask, too.

  They weren’t the only squad of constables on the march, either. Most of the Algarvians who kept order in Gromheort were moving toward the Kaunian quarter. With a chuckle, Bembo said, “Any Forthwegian crooks who know what we’ve got laid on could rob this town blind while we’re busy.”

  “They could try,” Oraste said. “You ask me, though, there’s not much here worth stealing.”

  A couple of Kaunians saw what amounted to a company of constables bearing down on their quarter. The blonds ran back toward the miserable market square they’d set up in the middle of the district, calling out in alarm. “Don’t worry about it, boys,” said the constabulary lieutenant in charge of the Algarvians. “Don’t you worry about it one little bit. You know what you’re supposed to do, don’t you?”

  “Aye, sir,” the constables chorused.

  “All right, then.” The lieutenant wore a whistle on a silver chain around his neck. He raised it to his lips and blew a long, piercing blast. “Go do it, then!”

  “My squad-perimeter duty!” Pesaro bellowed, for all the world as if the constables were assaulting a fortified position down in southern Unkerlant. “Move! Move! Move! Don’t let the blond buggers get past you.”

  Bembo never liked moving fast. Here, though, he had no choice. Along with the rest of the constables from Tricarico-and several other squads besides-he trotted two blocks into the Kaunian quarter, then moved along a street parallel to the one marking the district’s outer border. More constables fanned out through the couple of square blocks thus cut off, crying, “Kaunians, come forth!”

  Some Kaunians did come forth. The Algarvian constables pounced on them and hustled them away toward the edge of the district, where more Algarvians took charge of them. Other blonds tried to hide. Wherever no one came forth, the constables broke down the doors and went through flats and shops. Bembo listened to shouts and screams and the sound of blows landing.