Rulers of the Darkness Page 6

  SULINGEN was scrawled in chalk or charcoal or whitewash or paint on one or two walls or fences in almost every block. Up till now, a lot of Forthwegians had been sullenly resigned to Algarvian occupation. King Mezentio’s men looked like winning the war; most people—most people who weren’t Kaunians, anyhow—had got on with their lives as best they could in spite of that ugly weight hanging over them. Now, even though the Algarvians still held every inch of their kingdom, some of them didn’t.

  A couple of Algarvian constables strode past Ealstan. Their height and red hair separated them from the Forthwegians their kingdom had overcome. So did the pleated kilts they wore. And so did their swagger. No matter what had happened to their countrymen down in Sulingen, they showed no dismay.

  But a Forthwegian behind Ealstan shouted, “Get out of here, you whoresons! Go home!”

  Both Algarvians jerked as if stuck with pins. The shout had been in Forthwegian, but they’d understood. They whirled, one grabbing for his club, the other for his stick. For a dreadful moment, Ealstan thought they thought he’d yelled. Then, to his vast relief, he saw they were looking past him, not at him. One of them pointed toward a Forthwegian whose black beard was streaked with gray. They both strode purposefully by Ealstan and toward the older man. He stared this way and that, as if wondering whether flight or holding still was more dangerous.

  Before he had to find an answer, someone from farther up the street—someone behind the constables now, someone they couldn’t see—cried out, “Aye, bugger off!”

  Again, the Algarvians spun. Again, they hurried past Ealstan. Again, they seized no one, for more insults rained down on them whenever they turned their backs. Algarvians often had tempers that burst like eggs. These redheads proved no exception. One of them shook his fist and shouted in pretty fluent Forthwegian: “You fornicating bigmouths, you yell much more, we treat you all like stinking Kaunians!” To leave no doubt about what he meant, his partner stuck his chin in the air and drew a forefinger across his throat.

  “Shame!” Ealstan yelled. That might have got him into trouble, but other Forthwegians were also yelling, and yelling worse things. As Ealstan knew too well, most of them cared little about what happened to the Kaunian minority in Forthweg, but they all cared about what happened to them.

  The constable who’d shouted the threat was the one who’d taken the stick off his belt. Cursing now in his own language, he blazed between a couple of Forthwegians standing not far from him. His beam missed them both, but bit into the wooden wall of the wineshop behind them. The wall began to smolder. The Forthwegians fled.

  So did everyone else on the street. Ealstan wasted no time ducking around the first comer he came to. He kept on running after that, too, the hem of his long wool tunic flapping just below his knees. “Those bastards have gone daft!” another man making himself scarce said.

  “What’s daft about it?” Ealstan. returned bitterly. “They probably get a bonus for anybody they blaze.”

  When the other fellow didn’t argue with him, he decided he’d made his point. Having made it, he went right on trotting. He didn’t know whether a new round of rioting was about to flare up in Eoforwic, and didn’t care to stay around to find out. That was the trouble with people feeling feisty: no matter how much trouble they stirred up, they still couldn’t get rid of the Algarvians.

  “One of these days, though,” Ealstan murmured. “Aye, one of these days …” He heard the longing in his own voice. Mezentio’s men had been sitting on Forthweg for three and a half years now. He smiled when he passed another scribbled SULINGEN. Surely they couldn’t hold down his kingdom forever.

  His own block of flats lay in a poor part of town, one already scarred again and again by rioting. He wouldn’t have minded seeing another round of that if it meant throwing Mezentio’s men out of Eoforwic. Since he didn’t think it would, he was glad things seemed quiet.

  The stairwell smelled of stale cabbage and staler piss. He sighed as he trudged up toward his flat. He’d been used to better in Gromheort before he had to flee the eastern town and come to the capital. As a matter of fact, he could afford better here. But staying in a district where no one cared about you or what you were and no one expected you to be anybody much had advantages, too.

  He walked down the hall and knocked on the door to his flat—once, twice, once. A scraping noise came from inside as Vanai lifted the bar that held the door closed. His wife worked the latch and let him in. He gave her a hug and kissed her. The magecraft that hid her Kaunianity and made her look Forthwegian made her look astonishingly like a particular Forthwegian: his older sister, Conberge. He’d needed a while before that stopped bothering him.

  “We could stop using the coded knock, you know,” he said. “Now that you don’t look Kaunian anymore, there’s not much point to it.”

  “I still like to know it’s you at the door,” she answered.

  That made Ealstan smile. “All right,” he said, and sniffed. “What smells good?”

  “Nothing very exciting,” Vanai told him. “Just barley porridge with a little cheese and some of those dried mushrooms I got from the grocer the other day.”

  “Must be the mushrooms,” Ealstan said, which made Vanai smile and nod in turn: both Forthwegians and the Kaunian minority in Forthweg were mad for mushrooms. Ealstan reached out and stroked her hair. “You must be glad to be able to go to the grocer’s yourself.”

  “You have no idea,” Vanai said. Ealstan couldn’t argue with her. Until she no longer looked like what she was, she’d had to stay holed up inside the flat. Had an Algarvian spotted her on the street, or had a Forthwegian betrayed her to the redheads, she would have been taken off to the Kaunian district—and then, all too likely, shipped west so her life energy could help power the sorceries the Algarvians used in their war against Unkerlant.

  Ealstan went into the kitchen, pulled the stopper from ajar of wine, and filled two cups. He carried one of them back to Vanai and raised the other in salute. “To freedom!” he said.

  “Or something close to it, anyhow,” Vanai answered, but she did drink to the toast.

  “Aye, something close to it,” Ealstan agreed. “Maybe something getting closer, too.” He told her how the Forthwegians had given the Algarvian constables a hard time.

  “Good!” she said. “I wish I’d been there.” After a moment, the fierce smile slipped from her face. “Of course, if I’d been there looking the way I really do, they’d have been just as happy to throw rocks at me and yell, ‘Dirty Kaunian!’”

  Her eyes held Ealstan’s, as if challenging him to deny it. He looked away. He had to look away. The most he could do was mumble, “We’re not all like that.”

  Vanai’s gaze softened. “Of course not. If you were like that, I’d be dead now. But too many Forthwegians are.” She shrugged. “Nothing to be done about it, or nothing I can see. Come on. Supper should be ready.”

  After supper, Ealstan read a book while Vanai cleaned the dishes and silverware. He’d brought a lot of books home while she was trapped in the flat—reading was almost the only thing she’d been able to do while he went out and cast accounts and got them enough money to keep going. He read them, too. Some—the classics he’d had to study in his academy in Gromheort—proved much more interesting when he read them because he wanted to than when they were forced down his throat.

  When Vanai came out of the kitchen, she sat down on the sofa beside him. She had a book waiting on the rickety table in front of the sofa. They read side by side for a while in companionable silence. Presently, Ealstan slipped his arm over Vanai’s shoulder. If she’d gone on reading, he would have left it there for a while and then withdrawn it; one thing he’d learned was that she didn’t care to have affection forced on her.

  But she smiled, set down her book—a Forthwegian history of the glory days of the Kaunian Empire—and snuggled against him. Before long, they went back to the bedchamber together. Making love was the other thing they’d been able to do fre
ely when Vanai was trapped in the flat—and, because Ealstan was only eighteen even now, they’d been able to do it pretty often.

  Afterwards, they lay side by side, lazy and happy and soon to be ready to sleep. Ealstan reached out and ran his fingers through Vanai’s hair. Some people, he’d heard, eventually grew bored with making love. Maybe that was true. He pitied those people if so.

  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, not 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, smartmo
uthed 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 sorcerously 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.