Jaws of Darkness Read online

  The Forthwegian gave him a curious look. “You’re arresting me, but you sound like you hate him.”

  “Don’t let it worry you,” Bembo said. “Oraste hates everybody.” Oraste scowled but didn’t deny it; it was as near true as made no difference. Bembo felt that way himself a good deal of the time. It was an easy attitude for a constable to take. Constables saw the worst of people—when people were at their best, they didn’t need constables. And Algarvian constables in Gromheort not only saw the worst of people, they saw the worst of people who hated them as occupiers.

  “I haven’t really done anything, you know.” Hestan, somehow, still managed to sound mild and thoughtful. “Even if your superiors decide that everything my dear brother says is true—which it isn’t—I haven’t done anything much.”

  Bembo thought him likely to be right. But he said, “That’s for them to decide, not for us.”

  “Well, I can’t tell you what to do, that’s certain,” the Forthwegian said. “But wouldn’t you rather have the silver I end up paying stick in your belt pouches? Otherwise, it will just end up with people who have too much already.”

  That sort of argument made perfect sense to Bembo. He sent Oraste a look of appeal. Oraste said, “If Bembo here and me take you into that alley and beat you to death, you don’t pay anybody anything.”

  Hestan licked his lips. Some constables made threats like that to run up the price. Oraste meant his. Hestan had the sense to realize as much. He spoke carefully: “I’ve never harmed Algarve. The most I’ve tried to do is keep my family safe.” His laugh was bitter. “Look how well that worked out. One son dead, one vanished off the face of the earth.”

  “One son who’s a Kaunian-lover,” Oraste said. Odds were, he reckoned murder a lesser crime.

  But Bembo said, “Come here.” He drew Oraste aside, all the while eyeing Hestan to make sure he didn’t take off. He spoke in a low but urgent voice: “We can’t just kill this fellow. He’s a big blaze. There’d be riots, maybe. Our heads could roll. And he’s got the loot to pay his way free once we hand him over. Don’t you want some?”

  He didn’t usually have the nerve to argue with Oraste like that. Because he argued this time, his partner seemed more than usually impressed. “Oh, all right,” Oraste said gruffly. “But we’ll squeeze him till his eyes pop.”

  “Well, of course,” Bembo said. After that, it was just a matter of haggling over the price.

  Two

  Every day the sun rose on Vanai, she thanked the powers above for one more day of life. After two Algarvian constables in Eoforwic seized her when the spell that let her look like a Forthwegian wore off before she could get back to her flat, she’d expected to be shipped west and slaughtered right away. The redheads saw the Kaunians of Forthweg as no more than a convenient source of life energy to fuel the sorceries they used to fight their evermore-desperate war against King Swemmel of Unkerlant.

  But all they’d done so far was throw her into the Kaunian quarter in Eoforwic. It was as if they were saying, We don’t need you in particular right this minute. Now that we’ve got you, you’re not going to get away again.

  Or maybe they were saying something worse. Maybe they were saying, We can wait till you have your baby. They we’ll slay you both, and get twice the life energy from you.

  She walked out of the flat in which they’d stuck her—a flat, ironically, bigger and finer than the one she’d shared with Ealstan, and she had it all to herself—and went down to the street. Not too many people showed themselves in the Kaunian quarter these days. Some of those who did had hair like hers: formerly dyed black but now showing its blond roots. They’d been caught trying to live their lives like anyone else, too.

  She walked toward the edge of the Kaunian district. It wasn’t far: only a couple of blocks. But it was clearly marked and strongly guarded. A constable pointed his stick at her and snarled, “Get away from me or you’re dead, you stinking blond whore.”

  He wasn’t even one of Mezentio’s men. He was young, stocky, swarthy, black-bearded, big-nosed—a Forthwegian among Forthwegians. He even looked a little like Ealstan, whom she loved with all her heart. But this fellow didn’t love her. The Algarvians found plenty of Forthwegians ready, even eager, to help hold down the Kaunians. That let the redheads send more of their own soldiers off to fight the Unkerlanters. How convenient for them, Vanai thought.

  “Go on, get away!” The Forthwegian was so young, his voice cracked. But he was easily old enough to blaze her down. “Or else keep coming.” He sounded as if he wanted her to.

  “I’m leaving,” she said hastily, so as not to give him an excuse to do just that. She turned and retreated, letting out a sigh of relief as she put a building between her and the hothead. She’d had guards, Algarvian and Forthwegian, growl at her before, but never an encounter like this.

  I could escape, she thought. I could. It would be easy, if… She still knew the spell that would let her look like a Forthwegian. She should have known it. She was the one who’d devised it, reconstructed a botched charm in a cheap, stupid book called You Too Can Be a Mage into sorcery that really did something. She always kept a bit of dark brown yarn and a bit of yellow with her, in case she got the chance.

  But the guards wouldn’t growl and snarl and curse if she approached the edge of the Kaunian quarter while looking like a Forthwegian. They would blaze without warning. They’d done it before. No Forthwegians were supposed to be inside the district, and no Kaunians were supposed to go outside it unless they were ushered forth to go to their doom.

  Since the redheads had stopped letting Kaunians out, Vanai had wondered what she would do inside the quarter. But the Algarvians didn’t bother with Kaunian-manned manufactories. Maybe they should have. Had they been as efficient as Swemmel of Unkerlant claimed he was, maybe they would have. Or maybe not. They valued the Kaunians only for the life energy they gave up on dying, not for what they might accomplish alive. And so, whether the Kaunians worked or not didn’t seem to matter to Mezentio’s men.

  A young Kaunian who’d never dyed his hair nodded to Vanai and said, “So you got caught on the outside, did you?”

  “Aye.” She nodded, then rested a hand on her bulging belly. “I think carrying a baby made the spell wear off faster than it should have. Whatever it was, the spell gave out and I got nabbed.”

  “Too bad for you,” the young blond man said. “Being a Kaunian these days isn’t much fun.”

  “Being a Kaunian in Forthweg never was much fun,” Vanai answered. “But you’re right, of course—it’s worse now.” She paused in some surprise. “I’ll tell you one thing, though: speaking my own language again feels good.” She’d used Forthwegian, not classical Kaunian, whenever she talked with anyone but Ealstan out in Eoforwic, and more and more with him once she assumed her Forthwegian disguise.

  “Sure enough.” The young man scowled. “We can even write in our own language in here. Why not? The penalty for writing in classical Kaunian is death, and the redheaded barbarians are going to kill us anyhow.” He laughed without any great mirth, but then scowled again. “Couldn’t you speak Kaunian with your man?” He pointed at her abdomen.

  “Some,” she said. “But he was—he is—a Forthwegian.”

  “Oh.” The young blond fellow looked revolted for a moment. Then his face froze. He walked away from Vanai as if she didn’t exist.

  Back in Oyngestun, her home village, both Forthwegians and Kaunians would have reacted the same way to the thought of a union between their people. Here in Eoforwic, in what had been the capital and most sophisticated city of Forthweg, such marriages and other alliances had been more readily tolerated back before the Algarvians overran the kingdom. So Vanai had heard, anyhow. Maybe the fellow she’d been talking with had been dragged here from a little village of her own. Or maybe, like some Kaunians, he was as blindly prejudiced against Forthwegians as so many Forthwegians were against Kaunians.

  She wandered aimlessly through the Kaunian qu
arter for a while. When the Algarvians first herded the Kaunians they hated into this little district, it had been disastrously crowded. It wasn’t any more. A lot of Kaunians had already been shipped west—and only the tiny handful of them lucky enough to escape their captors had ever come back to Forthweg. A lot had slipped out of the Kaunian quarter sorcerously disguised as Forthwegians before the redheads started getting wise to them.

  Vanai took a certain somber pride in that. Even though she’d been caught, she’d helped a lot of her people go free. But, on the other hand, even though she’d helped a lot of her people go free, she’d been caught. It all depended on how you looked at things.

  A bell began to clang in a little square a couple of blocks away. She hurried toward it. So did plenty of other Kaunians, men, women, and children, spilling out of blocks of flats and houses. Seeing all those blond heads around her, Vanai was very conscious of belonging to a separate people. Not for the first time, she wondered what it would be like to live in Valmiera or Jelgava far to the east, where almost everyone was of Kaunian blood.

  Whatever the Algarvians were doing to the Jelgavans and Valmierans, they couldn’t possibly stuff them into tiny districts and have their neighbors help keep them there. She was sure of that.

  And they couldn’t possibly set up feeding stations in the middle of the district. That bell might have summoned cattle on a farm. The only difference was, Kaunians knew how to queue up.

  “Here,” an Algarvian said when Vanai got to the head of the queue. He gave her a chunk of barley bread, a chunk of crumbly white cheese, and some salted olives. It wasn’t fancy food, but it was enough to keep her going till the next time the bell rang. She’d feared the redheads would starve the Kaunians they’d trapped, but that turned out not to be so. The Algarvians didn’t care if Forthwegians starved. But if Kaunians died of hunger before they could be sacrificed, they were wasted as far as Algarve was concerned. And so they got something close to enough to eat.

  Vanai was just spitting out an olive pit when more bells began to chime, these not in the Kaunian quarter but all over Eoforwic. She needed a moment to understand what that meant. Then someone close by spelled it out for her, exclaiming, “Dragons! Unkerlanter dragons!”

  King Swemmel’s dragonfliers didn’t come over Eoforwic very often; the capital of Forthweg lay a long way east of land Unkerlant still held, and Swemmel’s forces had trouble sparing dragons from the more urgent fight against Algarve. But every once in a while they would load eggs under some of their stronger beasts and pay a call on the city and the ley-line junctions it contained.

  The day was cool and cloudy, with a threat of rain. That made the Unkerlanter dragons, painted rock-gray, all the harder to spot. Only after Vanai watched eggs fall from beneath a dragon’s belly and heard them burst not far from the Kaunian quarter did she realize that standing in the street and watching wasn’t the smartest thing she could do.

  She ran into a block of flats and then down into the cellar. Even if an egg landed on the building, that was the safest place she could go. She wasn’t the only one to see as much, either. Plenty of other Kaunians had got there ahead of her. She wondered whether they lived in the block of flats or had fled there from the street, as she had.

  “I hope every one of those eggs comes down right on an Algarvian’s head,” an old woman said.

  “Powers above, make it so,” Vanai exclaimed.

  “I wouldn’t even mind too much if an egg came down on me,” a man said. “Then the redheads couldn’t use my life energy.”

  “No!” Vanai said. “I want to outlive them. I’m going to have a baby. I want my baby to outlive them, too.”

  “That’s right.” The old woman nodded vigorously, though Vanai could hardly see her in the gloomy, shadow-filled cellar. “That’s the best revenge. They lose their life energy and we keep ours.”

  That would have been the best revenge. The only trouble was, Vanai hadn’t the slightest idea how to make it real. If the Algarvians seized her, if they took her from the Kaunian quarter and threw her onto a ley-line caravan and sent her to the barbarous wilds of Unkerlant and slew her … how could she fight back? She couldn’t. She knew it too well.

  Unkerlanter eggs kept thudding down. Every so often, one nearby would make the ground shake under her feet and the block of flats shake over her head. King Swemmel’s dragonfliers still didn’t come over Eoforwic all that often, no. These last few raids, though, they were coming in larger numbers than before. Vanai hoped that meant they were doing more damage than before, too.

  She heard a different sort of thud—not the harsh roar of a bursting egg, but the sound of something large hitting the ground after falling from a great height. “They blazed down a dragon,” the old woman said.

  “Too bad,” Vanai said. “Oh, too bad.”

  “Their eggs might kill us,” the man said, “and we’re sorry when they die.”

  “Of course,” Vanai told him. “They’re trying to hurt the Algarvians, and that’s the most important thing.” Nobody in the crowded cellar presumed to disagree with her.

  Snow blew out of the west, into Colonel Spinello’s face. Winters in the north of Unkerlant were less savage than in the south, though still bad enough. The Algarvian officer had fought in both, and had standards of comparison. He also had a wound badge with a ribbon to show he’d been blazed twice, and puckered scars on his chest and his leg to prove he hadn’t got it by paying off a clerk.

  If anything, he welcomed the snow. It meant the ground got hard enough for proper maneuvering, and he was convinced that gave the advantage to the brigade he commanded. Unkerlanter warfare was that of the bludgeon, not the rapier. Yet the rapier could be more deadly, slipping between a man’s ribs to pierce his heart and kill him while hardly leaving a mark on his body.

  “Listen to me!” he called to the soldiers within earshot—and they did listen to him. He was a bantam rooster of a man, not very tall but proud and swaggering even by Algarvian standards. When he spoke, men paid attention … and so did women. Just for a moment, he let himself think of Fronesia, the mistress he’d acquired while recovering from his latest wound in Trapani.

  But his mistress was a distraction now. The Algarvian capital was a distraction, too. “Listen to me,” he repeated, louder this time, and more troopers in the muddy, half-frozen trenches and holes in the ground turned their heads his way. “We’ve got to take Pewsum back, boys, and we’re going to do it.”

  He pointed ahead, toward the battered Unkerlanter town a couple of miles to the west. When he’d first taken command of the brigade, Algarve had still held Pewsum; he’d made his headquarters in the village of Ubach, a few miles farther west still. King Swemmel had spent a lot of lives pushing the front this far; Spinello hoped to spend far fewer repairing it. He shook his head. He had to spend far fewer repairing it, for he couldn’t spare that many Algarvian lives.

  “We need Pewsum,” he went on. “We need the ley-line caravan depot there, and we need the junction with other ley lines running north and south.” Algarvian soldiers weren’t peasants too ignorant to write their names. The more they knew about what wanted doing and why, the better they fought.

  “We’ve got some behemoths.” Spinello waved at the big, white-draped beasts. “I had to yell and scream and jump up and down to get ‘em, but I did it.” Some of his soldiers grinned, but he wasn’t kidding. The north had been the quiet front in Unkerlant for quite a while; most Algarvian behemoths had been moved down to the south, where the fighting was harder. “We’ve got some dragons laid on, too.”

  That drew whoops from the men. Dragons were even harder to come by up here than behemoths were. A trooper shouted, “And we’ve got our luck, Colonel!”

  “Well, of course we’ve got our luck,” Spinello answered. “She’s standing right here next to me.”

  The soldiers cheered as fiercely as if they were attacking right then. The pretty young Kaunian girl named Jadwigai—who looked quite fetching in a broad-bri
mmed Algarvian hat and a heavy cloak over her tunic and trousers—blushed and smiled and waved to the men.

  They cheered again, harder than ever. They’d brought her along with them after overrunning her village in western Forthweg when the war against Unkerlant was new and triumphant. The brigade had always fought well since, and Jadwigai had become a sort of mascot for it. Nobody’d ever tried to force her into Algarvian-style kilts. Nobody’d ever tried to force himself on her, either. Had anyone been so rash, his own comrades would have put paid to him—and, odds were, gruesomely.

  Spinello sighed, fog trickling from his mouth and nostrils. Fronesia was a long way away. He wanted Jadwigai. He’d had a Kaunian to keep his bed warm, a girl named Vanai, when he was stationed in the Forthwegian village called Oyngestun. Jadwigai was even younger and even prettier. But Spinello kept his hands to himself. He didn’t want trouble—and he did want to keep the brigade fighting hard.

  He added, “And we’ll have some … special sorcery to help us when the attack goes in.”

  That was all he said about that. He glanced over at Jadwigai. Did she know that the Algarvians who treated her like a princess slaughtered Kaunians from Forthweg by hundreds, by thousands, by tens of thousands, to power the magics they hurled against the Unkerlanters? How could she not know? But if she did, she kept it to herself. What went on in the mind behind that blue-eyed, smiling face? Spinello couldn’t tell. Not being able to tell excited him, too.

  The brigade comes first, he thought, and then, curse it. He turned to Major Rambaldo, one of his regimental commanders, and asked, “What is the time, Major?”

  Rambaldo pulled from his belt pouch an egg-shaped windup clock smaller than his fist, a triumph of the watchmaker’s art. After glancing at the glass-protected dial, he answered, “Sir, it is the very hour set for the attack.”

  “Then put your clock away and keep it safe—and yourself, too, of course.” As Rambaldo stowed away the little mechanical treasure, Colonel Spinello drew from his own pouch a less complex tool: a brass whistle. He took a childish delight in loud noises, and the whistle certainly made one. A moment later, he made another all by himself, shouting, “Forward, you lazy whoresons!” at the top of his lungs.