Out of the Darkness

Captain Petofi spoke up: “And you, wretch, you would be wise to listen to the underofficer. He spoke with a warrior’s courage, telling nothing but the truth, and you mock him and scorn him and answer him with threats. By the stars, with goatheads like you set over us, it’s no wonder we’re losing the war.”

Like most Gyongyosian men, Balazs let his shaggy, tawny beard grow high on his cheeks. It didn’t grow high enough to hide his flush of anger, though. “You have no business talking to me that way, Captain. I tell you what Ekrekek Arpad has told the land: we shall win this fight against the stars-detested savages of Kuusamo. If the Ekrekek of Gyongyos says a thing is so, how can a couple of ragged captives say otherwise?”

Istvan gulped. If Arpad said something was so, then it was bound to be so. Everything he’d ever learned proclaimed the truth of that. The stars spoke to Arpad, and Arpad spoke to Gyongyos. So it had ever been; so it would ever be.

But Petofi said, “If Ekrekek Arpad had been on that Kuusaman cruiser, he would have known the truth, the same as we did. And if we’re winning the war, how did the slanteyes ravage an island that used to belong to us?”

“I give you one last warning, Captain,” the Ekrekek’s Eye and Ear said. “We have places where we send defeatists, to keep them out of the way so their cowardice can’t infect the true warriors of Gyongyos.”

Petofi bowed. “By all means, send me to one of those places. The company and the wit are bound to be better there than here.”

“You’ll get your wish,” Balazs promised. He rounded on Istvan. “What about you, Sergeant? I trust you have better sense?”

That could only mean, Say what I want you to say, and things will go easy for you. Istvan gulped again. I just got out of a captives’ camp,

he thought with something not far from despair. Petofi eyed him without saying a word. Sell yourself, wretch, his eyes seemed to say. Sighing, Istvan said, “How can you ask me to lie when the stars looking down on me know I tell the truth?”

“Another fool, eh?” Balazs scribbled a note on a leaf of paper in front of him. “Well, I already told you--we have places for fools.”

Ilmarinen was not a hunter. He had no qualms about eating game or meat. He just saw no sport in killing beasts. Men were supposed to be smarter than animals, so where was the contest? (The way men had behaved during the Derlavaian War did make him wonder about his assumption, but he’d still never heard of a deer or a wolf picking up a stick and blazing back at a hunter.) Still and all, though, one hunting phrase he’d heard stuck in his mind: in at the death. With Trapani fallen, he wanted to be in at the death of Algarve.

If that meant leaving Torgavi, he wasn’t altogether sorry to go. He hadn’t had much fun there anyhow, not since the Unkerlanters figured out he was a mage and ordered him to stay on his own kingdom’s side of the Albi. He went instead to Scansano, where Mainardo, once King of Jelgava and now King of Algarve, headed what passed for his kingdom’s government these days.

Kuusaman and Lagoan soldiers--and a few Jelgavans--patrolled the streets of Scansano these days. Mainardo had ordered the Algarvian soldiers fighting in the northeast of his kingdom to lay down their sticks even before his brother, King Mezentio, died in the fall of Trapani. All that was left now was for Mainardo to order all the Algarvians still fighting to do the same.

Mainardo reigned not from a palace, not even from the local count’s mansion, but from a hostel, as if to underscore how temporary his power was likely to prove. Ilmarinen managed to arrange a room in the very same hostel for himself.

“How did you do that?” a Kuusaman news-sheet writer asked him at a tavern across the street. “They told me they were full up.”

“It wasn’t hard,” the mage answered. “I bribed them.”

“That really worked?” The writer’s narrow eyes widened. “I know they say Algarvians are like that, but I didn’t believe it.”

“Believe it,” Ilmarinen said. “It’s true.” He laughed at the look on the news-sheet writer’s face. Kuusamans were straightforward in their dealings with one another. When they said aye or nay, they commonly meant it. Offer one of Ilmarinen’s countrymen a little money on the side to change his mind about something, and he was much more likely to shout for a constable. Algarvians weren’t like that. They used bribes the same way mechanics used grease.

“Will the surrender come today?” the writer asked. “That’s what everybody is saying, anyhow.”

“I’ll tell you how you’ll know,” Ilmarinen answered. The writer leaned toward him. He said, “When there’s a ley-line caravan from out of the west, then you’ll know it’s really over.”

“Out of the west?” Now the young news-sheet writer looked confused.