Out of the Darkness

Rathar knew nothing about sorceries in the middle of the Bothnian Ocean. He wondered if Swemmel did, or if the king were only imagining them. “We’ve won here,” he said. King Swemmel nodded, but with none of the joy Rathar had hoped he’d show. And Rathar’s own joy, in turn, died before being fully born. He wondered if he would ever find a way to forgive Swemmel for that.

Gyorvar, the capital of Gyongyos, lay where four rivers came together near the coast to form a single stream. A ley line went up that stream from the sea to Gyorvar, so the cruiser Csikos, after skirting the Balaton Islands, could take the men it had received from its Kuusaman counterpart straight to the city.

“Home,” Kun murmured as the tall buildings came into sight.

It wasn’t home to Istvan. So many houses and shops and enormous structures whose use he didn’t know all jammed together were as alien to him as the forests of western Unkerlant or the low, flat expanse of Becsehely--Becsehely as it had been when he’d served there, not the scarred and burnt and ruined place the island had become.

“My own people,” Istvan said, as close as he could come to agreeing with the former mage’s apprentice.

Behind the lenses of his spectacles, Kun’s eyes gleamed. “You’re going to see more of your own people than you want to for a while, unless I miss my guess.”

“Huh,” Istvan said. “I never would have imagined.”

As soon as the Csikos

tied up at a quay, swarms of men in clean uniforms with the badges of Eyes and Ears of the Ekrekek swarmed aboard. “Istvan, Sergeant!” one of them shouted, reading from a list.

“Here!” Istvan waved his hand.

“You come with me,” the fellow said, and checked off his name. “Petofi, Captain!”

“Here!” The officer waved as Istvan had. He was tall and gaunt, with a nasty scar on his left cheek that stopped just short of his eye.

“Good. You two are mine.” The Eye and Ear of the Ekrekek checked off Petofi’s name, too. “Come along with me, both of you. We’ve got carriages waiting to take you to interrogation headquarters.”

Istvan wasn’t sure he liked the sound of that. In fact, he was sure he didn’t like the sound of it. But he was only a sergeant. What could he do but obey? Captain Petofi had some ideas on that score. “One moment,” he said dryly. “A long time ago, I learned never to go anywhere with a stranger.”

“I am not a stranger.” The Eye and Ear tapped his badge to show what he meant. Captain Petofi just stood where he was. With a grimace, Ekrekek Arpad’s man said, “You may call me Balazs, if it makes you happy.”

“After what we have seen, it will take a good deal more than that to make us happy, Balazs,” Petofi said. “Is it not so, Sergeant?”

“Uh, aye, sir, it is.” Istvan stammered a little, surprised the scarred officer had bothered speaking to him.

“Well, part of my job is finding out about all that,” Balazs said easily. “Now that you know who I am, you come along with me, and we’ll see what you think you know.”

Captain Petofi bristled anew at that. Istvan didn’t rise to it; he was watching another Eye and Ear leading Kun away. Now he was alone, all the comrades with whom he’d gone through so much stripped away. He was back among his countrymen, true, but how could the smooth, slick, smug Balazs or the dour Petofi understand what had happened to him these past six years? Petofi might, some: he’d seen war and he’d been a Kuusaman captive, too. But he was an officer and, no doubt, a nobleman, and thus a breed apart from a man who’d come out of a village in a mountain valley.

“Come along, come along,” Balazs repeated: it seemed to be his favorite phrase. Istvan and Petofi followed him down the gangplank and over to one from among the swarm of carriages waiting at the base of the pier. The Eye and Ear held the door open for the two returning captives. When he shut it, it clicked as if locking. There were no handles on the inside, and the windows were too small to crawl through. Balazs got up with the driver. The carriage began to move.

Petofi’s face twisted into what Istvan belatedly recognized as a wry smile; the officer’s scar made his expressions hard to read. “Here we are, captives again,” Petofi said. “The fools think they will sit on what we know, as a duck sits on an egg, and the egg will never hatch--or burst. A billy goat’s cock up their arses couldn’t make them pay heed to what needs doing.”