Through the Darkness Read online

  Would Mezentio make good on such a threat? He might, and Hajjaj knew it; the Zuwayzi foreign minister dared not underestimate the hatred the King of Algarve had for Kaunians. “How long ago were you begging us for more help here in the north?” Hajjaj asked. “Not very, as I recall.”

  “We didn’t get much of it, as I recall.” Balastro leaned forward again, this time with keen interest. “Might we get more, in exchange for looking the other way at certain things you do?”

  Algarvians were good at looking the other way when there were things they didn’t want to see. Hajjaj usually found that trait dismaying. Now he might be able to use it to Zuwayza’s advantage. “That could be a bargain, or the start of one,” he said, hoping to escape this dilemma with honor after all.

  Skarnu’s world had shrunk to the farm where he lived with Merkela and Raunu, the hamlet of Pavilosta, and the roads between those places. He’d had little reason and less chance to go far astray since washing up on the farm, one more piece of flotsam tossed adrift as Valmiera foundered.

  By now, though, he’d made a name for himself as one of the leaders of the fight against Algarve in his country. He wasn’t sure how he felt about that. On the one hand, he was flattered that other Valmierans knew he was one of those who hadn’t despaired of the kingdom. On the other, their knowing he remained a rebel against the occupiers made it more likely the redheads would find out, too.

  And so, when he strode into the town of Tytuvenai, he looked around to make sure no Algarvians were paying him any undue attention. To his surprise, he saw hardly any of King Mezentio’s men on the streets. Valmieran constables as blond as Skarnu patrolled them instead. In smart uniforms that reminded him of the one he’d worn in the army, they eyed his homespun tunic and baggy trousers with almost as much scorn as nobles in Priekule would have aimed at him.

  “Come to see the bright lights, farmboy?” one of them called to Skarnu. The fellow’s partner laughed.

  “Aye,” Skarnu answered with a wide, foolish grin. The role he played amused him: a city man pretending to be a country yokel to fool a couple of other city men. But if the new audience criticized his performance, he wouldn’t get a bad notice in the local news sheet. He’d get killed.

  He’d never been in Tytuvenai before, and so some of his curiosity was genuine. The town, he’d heard, had some monuments that dated back to the days of the Kaunian Empire. He saw none. He did see some plots of ground that looked as if they’d recently held something or other but were now empty. He wondered if Algarvian wreckers had got rid of monuments they didn’t fancy, as he knew they’d done elsewhere in Valmiera.

  After some searching, he found the tavern called the Drunken Dragon. The dragon on the signboard above the door certainly looked as if it had had several too many. Skarnu smiled up at it. Before he went inside, he checked to make sure no one had picked his pockets: the Drunken Dragon lay in that kind of neighborhood. Valmieran constables didn’t come hereabouts.

  Inside, the place was dark and smoky and crowded. People gave Skarnu, a stranger, a once-over as he made his way to the bar. “What’ll it be?” asked the taverner, a man missing a couple of fingers from his right hand—probably from a wound in the Six Years’ War, for he was old enough.

  “Ale and roasted chestnuts,” Skarnu answered, as he’d been told to do.

  The taverner eyed him, then slowly nodded. After giving him what he’d asked for, the fellow said, “Why don’t you take ’em over to that table by the fireplace? Looks like it’s got room for a couple more.”

  “All right, I’ll do that,” Skarnu said. The men sitting at that table didn’t look much different from the rest of the crowd. Some were old. Some were young. None looked rich. One or two looked a good deal shabbier than Skarnu did. A couple, but only a couple, looked as if they’d be nasty customers in a fight.

  “Where you from?” one of the tough-looking fellows asked.

  That was the question he’d been waiting for. “Pavilosta,” he answered.

  “Ah,” the tough said. Several of the men nodded. One of them lifted a glass of wine in salute. “Simanu. That was a nice piece of work.”

  Skarnu had never heard an assassination praised in such matter-of-fact terms. This was the crowd he’d come to meet, all right. He hoped none of the blonds at the table was an Algarvian spy. By coming to Tytuvenai, he’d bet his life none of them was.

  A balding fellow with silver-rimmed spectacles said, “We’re just about all here now. I don’t know if Zarasai will be able to come.” That was not the name of a man but the name of a town: a sensible precaution, Skarnu judged. The bespectacled man went on, “Those people talk all the way across Valmiera. They can act all over the kingdom at the same time, too. We have to be able to do the same if we’re going to make their lives interesting.”

  “It sounds good,” the ruffian said, “but how do we go about it? The post is slow, and the whoresons read it. Where are we going to get enough crystals? And how do we keep their mages from listening in on them? Emanations will leak, and we can’t afford it, not if we want to keep breathing we can’t.”

  “Those are good questions,” the man with the silver spectacles said, nodding. “But we can’t go on as we have been, either. A good blow like the one at Count Simanu went half wasted because we didn’t make those people sweat all over the place at the same time. And we could have. But we didn’t, because we didn’t know it would happen till after it did.”

  Nobody talked about Algarvians or redheads, or named King Mezentio. That, Skarnu judged, was also wise: no telling who might be trying to listen at some of the nearby tables. Skarnu said, “Only trouble is, if you’d known ahead of time, they might have known ahead of time, too.”

  “Aye.” That was the tough again, his voice gone savage. “We’ve spawned enough traitors and to spare, that’s certain. And it’s not just the nobles who go riding with . . . those people, or the noblewomen who let those people go riding on them, either.” Skarnu thought of his sister, the Marchioness Krasta—an Algarvian colonel’s lover these days—but not for long, for the fellow was continuing, “There’s traitors all the way down. When our time comes round again, we’ll have some fancy killing to do.” He sounded as if he looked forward to every bit of it.

  “We must be ruthless, but we must be fair,” the bespectacled man said. “This isn’t Unkerlant, after all.”

  The tough tossed his head. “No, it sure isn’t, is it? Unkerlant is still in the fight. Don’t you wish we could say the same?”

  Skarnu winced. That hit home, painfully hard. He said, “We’re still in the fight.”

  “A whole table’s worth of us,” the tough said. “Speaks well for the kingdom, that it does. But you’re right, Pavilosta. We’re what Valmiera’s got, and we’re the ones who are going to set her to rights when the day is ours.”

  One of the other irregulars was about to say something when the tavern door opened. The fellow with the silver-rimmed spectacles nodded to himself. “Maybe that will be Zarasai after all.”

  But it wasn’t yet another Valmieran who hadn’t given up on the fight against Algarve. Instead, it was a kilted Algarvian officer, backed by a handful of his own countrymen and quite a few more Valmieran constables. He spoke in a loud voice: “I am hearing there is an unlawful assembling here. You are all under arresting for questioning.”

  Somebody threw a mug at him—not somebody from the table at which Skarnu sat. It caught the redhead in the face. He went down with a yowl, clutching at his smashed face. A moment later, all the mugs in the Drunken Dragon seemed to be flying. Skarnu wasn’t sure the Valmieran army had tossed so many eggs at the redheads while it was still a going concern.

  But mugs were less deadly than eggs, and these Algarvians and their Valmieran stooges surged into the tavern. Some of them had bludgeons, and started beating on anyone they could reach. Some of them had sticks. To Skamu’s shame, the redheads trusted the Valmieran constables with such weapons, sure they would use them against their
own countrymen.

  Except for the fire, all the lights in the tavern went out. That just made the brawl more confusing. Skarnu sprang off his chair and laid about him. The chair slammed into somebody’s ribs. Whoever it was went down with a groan. Skarnu hoped he’d flattened a foe, not a friend.

  “Back here!” That was the bespectacled man’s voice. It came from the direction of the bar. Skarnu fought his way toward it. Someone close by him took a beam in the chest and toppled. When Skarnu smelled burnt flesh, he went down, too, and crawled the rest of the way. The Valmieran army had failed against Algarve, but he’d learned how to fight in it.

  Behind the bar, he almost crawled over the tough. The fellow grinned at him and said, “Come on, pal. I know the back way.”

  “Good,” Skarnu said. “I hoped there was one.” He also hoped the Algarvians and the constables who did their bidding weren’t watching it and scooping up fleeing foes one by one.

  The tough scrambled into the little room in back of the bar. Skarnu followed him. The little room had a door that opened on the alleyway behind the Drunken Dragon. The tough hurried through it. Skarnu would have peered out first. But when the tough didn’t get blazed, he followed again.

  Nobody looked to be watching the alley. Maybe the Algarvians didn’t know it was there, and maybe the Valmieran constables hadn’t bothered telling them about it. Skarnu hoped the constables weren’t cooperating so enthusiastically as they seemed to be, anyhow. After looking this way and that, he said, “Now we split up.”

  “Aye, I was going to tell you the same thing, Pavilosta,” the other Valmieran answered. “You’ve got a pretty good notion of what you’re doing, looks like. Powers above keep you safe.”

  “And you,” Skarnu said. The tough hadn’t waited for his reply, but was already strolling down the alley as if he didn’t have a care in the world. Skarnu strolled up it, trying to act similarly nonchalant. He felt easier when he ducked into another alleyway that ran into the one behind the tavern. That second alley led him to a third, and the third to a fourth. Tytuvenai seemed to have a web of little lanes going nowhere in particular. By the time Skarnu emerged onto a real street, he was several blocks away from the Drunken Dragon. He hoped more of the men who kept on resisting the Algarvians had got out after the tough and him.

  “You, there!” The call was sharp and peremptory. Skarnu turned. A constable was pointing at him. “Aye, you, bumpkin. What are you doing here?”

  If he was trying to panic Skarnu, he failed. For all the world as if he were nothing but a bumpkin, the marquis jingled coins in his pocket. “Sold some eggs,” he answered. “Now I’m heading home.”

  “Well, go on, then,” the constable growled. He might not have caught hold of foes of the Algarvians, but he had exercised his petty authority. That was enough to satisfy him.

  Skarnu hurried out of Tytuvenai. He breathed easier once he was out in the countryside. Most people on the roads outside the towns looked like farmers—which made sense, because most of them were farmers.

  He wondered how the Algarvians had got word of the meeting their enemies were having. Someone betrayed us. The thought was inescapable. And everyone who’d sat around that table now knew what he looked like and near which village he lived. If the Algarvians caught his comrades and squeezed them, would they send a company of soldiers—or a couple of officers and a company of Valmieran constables—looking for him on the farms round Pavilosta? In their boots, he would have. That worried him more than anything.

  “Come on!” Sergeant Pesaro boomed to the squad of Algarvian constables he led west from Gromheort. “Keep moving! You can do it!”

  Bembo lifted off his hat and wiped sweat from his forehead with his other sleeve. “Fat old bugger,” he grumbled. “Why doesn’t he have an apoplexy and fall over dead?”

  “He’s not even as fat as he used to be,” Oraste said.

  “I know.” Bembo didn’t like that, either, and wasn’t shy about saying why: “It’s all this fornicating marching we’re doing. Powers above, even I’m starting to get skinny.”

  “Not so you’d notice, you’re not,” Oraste answered, which made Bembo send him a wounded look and tramp along for some little while in silence.

  Sergeant Pesaro wasn’t shy about filling silences. “Keep it moving,” he repeated. “Won’t be much longer before we get to that stinking Oyngestun place.”

  “Oh, aye, and won’t they be glad to see us when we get there?” Bembo said. “We’ve already taken one lot of Kaunians out of the lousy dump. What’ll they do now that we’re coming back for more?”

  “Forthwegians’ll cheer, just like I would,” Oraste said. “As far as the blonds go, well, who cares?”

  No one cared what happened to the Kaunians in Forthweg—except those Kaunians themselves, and there weren’t enough of them to matter. That was why dreadful things kept happening to them. If the Kaunian kingdoms were winning the war, what would they be doing to Algarvians? Bembo wondered. Nothing good—he was sure of that.

  Another thought crossed his mind: if the Unkerlanters do win the war, what will they do to Algarvians? He didn’t care to imagine that. He was ever so glad to be marching through eastern Forthweg rather than through Unkerlant, even if King Mezentio’s men were moving forward again there. The Forthwegians might not love Algarvian constables, but some of the rumors that came drifting out of Unkerlant made the hair on the back of his neck try to prickle up.

  “Here we are,” Pesaro said, lifting him out of his unhappy reverie. “Beautiful Oyngestun, the garden spot of all Forthweg.”

  “Huh,” Oraste said, looking at the small, decrepit village with his usual scorn. “If Forthweg needed a good purging, this is where they’d plug in the hose.”

  Bembo thought about that, then snorted. As long as Oraste was making jokes about villages and not about him, he thought his squadmate was a pretty funny fellow.

  Oyngestun’s two or three Algarvian constables were waiting for the squad from Gromheort. So were a couple of dozen Kaunians, all standing glum and dejected in the village square. “Powers above, you lazy buggers,” Pesaro shouted to the local constables. “Where’s the rest of ’em?”

  “We haven’t got enough men to do a proper roundup,” one of the men posted to Oyngestun answered. “Miserable blonds start sliding away whenever our backs are turned.”

  “You should have blazed a couple. That would have given the rest the idea.” Pesaro threw his hands in the air, as if to say, What can you do? “All right, all right. Well take care of it.” He turned to his squad. “Come on, boys. It’ll be a little more work than we figured, but we’ll live through it. Remember, we want to make a clean sweep—no more Kaunians left in Oyngestun. We’re going to take ’em all back to Gromheort with us.”

  A young constable named Almonio asked, “Permission to fall out, Sergeant?”

  He didn’t have the stomach to seize Kaunians and put them on ley-line caravans to certain death. To Bembo’s surprise, Pesaro had let him get away with hanging back. But the sergeant shook his head this time. “Only place they’re going is Gromheort, kid. You can cursed well help us get ’em there.”

  “You know what’ll happen to them afterwards, though, same as I do,” Almonio protested.

  “No.” Pesaro shook his head again. The wattle under his chin, a flap of skin that had been filled with fat when he was heavier, flopped back and forth. “The same thing’d happen to them if they stayed here. We’re just moving ’em so we can keep track of ’em easier, and you’ll help or I’ll report you. Have you got that?”

  “Aye,” Almonio answered miserably.

  “You’d better.” Pesaro raised his voice to a parade-ground roar: “Kaunians, come forth! Come forth or it will be worse for you!”

  He spoke only Algarvian. A constable named Evodio, who remembered the classical Kaunian that had been beaten into him in school, translated Pesaro’s bellows into the language the blonds were more likely to understand.

  But, regardless
of the language in which they were hailed, no Kaunians came forth. As Bembo had said, they remembered what had happened the last time the Algarvian constables from Gromheort visited Oyngestun.

  “If that’s the game they want to play, by the powers above, we’ll play it,” Pesaro said. “By pairs, men. Go through the houses and bring them out.”

  As he and Oraste got started, Bembo said, “We went down this street the last time we were here.”

  “Did we?” Oraste shrugged. “Why bother remembering?” He pounded on a door and shouted, “Kaunians, come forth!”

  To Bembo’s surprise, the door opened. The elderly Kaunian who stood in the entry hall spoke slow, clear Algarvian: “I am here. What do you want?”

  “Come with us, grandpa,” Bembo said, and jerked a thumb back toward the village square. “All you blonds are going back to Gromheort.”

  “We’ve seen this old buzzard before,” Oraste said.

  “So we have, by the powers above,” Bembo said, nodding. “He’s the one with the cute granddaughter, right?” He didn’t wait for his partner to agree, but turned back to the Kaunian. “Come on, grandpa. Where is she?”

  “Vanai is not here,” the old man answered. “She has not been here since the early winter. She ran off with a Forthwegian lout. I do not know where they went.”

  “A likely story,” Oraste said with a sneer.

  Bembo was inclined to believe the Kaunian; the fellow would have had trouble sounding so indignant were he lying. But you never could tell. “We’re going to have to search your place,” he said.

  “Go ahead. You will not find her,” the Kaunian said, and then, “If I am to be taken to Gromheort, what may I bring with me?”

  “You’re not going to be taken, pal—you’re going to walk,” Oraste answered. “You can take whatever you can carry, but if you don’t keep up, you’re going to get what’s coming to you, and that’s for sure.” He looked as if he would enjoy giving the old man what he thought was coming to him.