Out of the Darkness

And who led it to where it is? Sidroc thought. But he didn’t see how he could say such a thing to the King of Algarve. Even as he cast about for ways that wouldn’t sound too blunt, the moment passed. A great racket of bursting eggs and crumpling masonry and shouting men arose from the rear of the palace.

A redhead dashed up to Mezentio, crying, “Your Majesty! Your Majesty! The whoresons are inside! We have some barricades in the corridors, but powers above only know how long they’ll hold.” Crashes and more screams said one of them had just gone down.

“All over,” Mezentio said, his voice soft and sad. “We came so close, but it’s all over. We weren’t strong enough. We all deserve to go into the fire.” He bowed to Sidroc. “Will you do the honors?” As Sidroc numbly nodded, the king spoke to the messenger: “Know that this man slays me at my request. Let him be rewarded for it, and in no way punished. Do you understand?”

“Aye, your Majesty.” Tears ran down the redhead’s face.

Mezentio bowed to Sidroc again. “Do what needs doing. Try to blaze true, to make it as quick as you can.” He closed his eyes and waited.

Sidroc did it. He’d done it for wounded comrades more than once before. Seeing King Mezentio slump over dead raised no special horror in him. It was as if he had nothing at all left inside. Ceorl set a hand on his shoulder. “Powers above,” the ruffian whispered.

Fresh shouts came from the back of the palace, these much closer. Sidroc got to his feet. “Come on,” he said savagely. “There’s still some fighting left.” As he and the men he led ran forward, panic-stricken Algarvians ran back toward them. “Cowards!” he shouted, and ran on. With nothing left inside him, what did he have to lose?

A beam took him in the side as he came round a corner. He went down, but kept blazing. Another beam bit, this one deep. He tasted blood in his mouth as his stick slipped from fingers that would not hold it. He was still moving a little when an Unkerlanter lieutenant paused, saw he wasn’t quite dead, and put a beam through his temple before charging on.

Though he got better food and better lodging in his new quarters outside the main captives’ camp on Obuda, Sergeant Istvan missed the company of his fellow Gyongyosians. When he grumbled about that to Lammi, the Kuusaman forensic mage raised a thin black eyebrow. “But they beat you,” she said. “And they would do it again if they had the chance.”

Istvan’s broad shoulders went up and down in a shrug. “I know. But they’re my own folk even so. You Kuusamans”--he shrugged again--”I don’t think the stars shine on you.”

One of his own people would have been furious at such an insult. Lammi only shrugged in her turn, which proved how foreign and alien she was. She knew Gyongyosian customs well, but they didn’t bind her. That made her more alarming to him, not less. She said, “I am willing to take my chances on it.”

Few, if any, Gyongyosians would have been so willing. Lammi didn’t talk about the scar on Istvan’s left hand, or about what it meant. Had his fellow captives known what it meant, they would have done worse to him than they would have for mere suspected treason. What could make treason mere!

Goat-eating could, and Istvan knew it all too well.

His captors let him see Kun now and then. Each of them was wary with the other, for each knew the other had, however unwillingly, confessed to the abomination they’d both committed. Kun seemed more content away from his countrymen than Istvan did. “They’re a pack of fools, most of them,” he said loftily.

“Oh, and you’re not?” Istvan said.

“Not that kind, anyhow,” the former mage’s apprentice replied. “I got sick of men from mountain valleys long before those louts set on me.”

“I’m

a man from a mountain valley,” Istvan reminded him, his big hands balling into fists.

“Proves my point, wouldn’t you say?” Kun grinned at Istvan’s flabbergasted expression. “And you, my dear fellow, you put up with me far better than most.”

Istvan thought about that for a little while. He said, “We’ve been through too much together. If the two of us don’t put up with each other, no one ever will.”

Kun grimaced. “And if that isn’t a judgment on both of us, stars go dark if I know what would be.”

A couple of days after that, Lammi summoned both of them. That surprised Istvan. They’d never been questioned together. Nor were they this time. The Kuusaman mage spoke briskly: “How would the two of you like to be free to return to your own land?”

“Don’t play with us,” Istvan said roughly. “That isn’t going to happen, and you know it. We’re here till the war is over.” And who knows for how long after that?