Rulers of the Darkness

"Aye," one of his assistants said. They did as they were told. The old man squawked protests and tried to fight back, but he might have been a three-year-old for all the good it did him. The assistant gaolers led him away. Even though he was naked, he kept on squawking.

"Now…" The gaoler reached into a desk drawer and pulled out some forms. "The paperwork. If he really is a Kaunian, you'll get the credit. If he's not, you'll get the blame."

"Blame? For what?" Bembo clapped a hand to his forehead in melodramatic disbelief. "For bothering a miserable Forthwegian? Where's the blame in that?"

"There's no blame for bothering a Forthwegian," the gaoler agreed. "But if that old bugger turns out not to be a Kaunian, you get the blame for bothering me." He favored the constables with a singularly unpleasant smile, the sort of smile that made them scurry out of the gaol in a hurry.

Once they'd got outside, Oraste gave Bembo the same kind of smile. "You'd better not be wrong," he said. Bembo wanted to scurry away from his partner, too, but he couldn't. He had to smile himself, and nod, and go on with his shift.

As soon as they came on duty the next day, they hurried to the gaol. The gaoler didn't start cursing the moment he set eyes on them, which Bembo took for a good sign. "Well, you boys got it straight," the gaoler said. "He was a Kaunian."

Oraste thumped Bembo on the shoulder, hard enough to stagger him. Bembo heard something Oraste missed. "Was?" he asked.

"Aye." The gaoler looked sour. "Sometime during the night, somebody gave him drawers and a tunic so he wouldn't freeze. He twisted 'em up and hanged himself with 'em. That killed the spell along with him. Like I say, he was a Kaunian, all right."

"Filthy bastard," Oraste said. "We could have got some use out of his life energy."

"That's right," Bembo said. "Killing yourself like that ought to be punishable by death." He laughed. After a moment, Oraste and the gaoler did, too.

"I've sent the forms off to the constabulary barracks," the gaoler said. "You deserve the credit, like I told you yesterday. That turned out to be a nice bit of work." Bembo beamed and preened and strutted. He hadn't much minded hearing that the longwinded old Kaunian was dead. Now that he knew he'd get the credit for capturing him, he didn't mind at all.

***

Back in the days when he was a peasant like any other peasant in the Unkerlanter Duchy of Grelz, Garivald had looked forward to winter. With snowdrifts covering the fields, he'd spent most of his time indoors and a lot of that time drunk. Aside from taking care of the livestock that always shared the hut with his family and him, what else was there to do but drink?

But he had no home now, only a miserable little shelter, not even worth dignifying with the name of hut, in the middle of the forest west of Herborn, the capital of Grelz. Munderic's band of irregulars still held the woods, still held away the Algarvians who'd overrun Grelz and the Grelzer puppets who served them, but irregulars had a harder time of it in winter than they did in summer.

Garivald came out of his shelter to look up through the pines and the bare-branched birches to the sullen gray sky overhead. It had snowed the day before. He thought it was done for a while, but you never could tell. He took a couple of steps. At each one, his felt boots left a clear track in the snow.

"Footprints," he growled, vapor puffing from his mouth at the word. "I wish there were a magic to make footprints go away."

"Don't say things like that," Obilot exclaimed. She was one of a handful of women in Munderic's band. The women who ran off to fight the redheads and their local cat's-paws commonly had reasons much more urgent than those of their male counterparts. Obilot went on, "Sadoc's liable to get wind of it and try to cast a spell to be rid of them."

"That might not be so bad," Garivald said. "Odds are, whatever magecraft he tried wouldn't do anything."

"Aye, but it might go wrong so badly, it'd bring the Algarvians down on our heads," Obilot said.

Neither of them spoke of the benefits that would follow if Sadoc's spell succeeded. Neither of them thought Sadoc's spell, if he made one, would succeed. He was the closest thing to a mage Munderic's band boasted. As far as Garivald was concerned, he wasn't close enough. He had no training whatever. He was just a peasant who'd fiddled around with a few charms.

"If only he knew when to try and when not to," Garivald said mournfully. "He might be good enough for little things, but he won't stay with those. He won't even take a blaze at them. If it isn't huge, he doesn't want to bother with it."

"Who doesn't want to bother with what?" Munderic asked. The leader of the irregulars was a big, hard-faced, burly man. He looked the part he played. His temper suited him to it, too. Scowling, he went on, "Who doesn't, curse it? We all have to do whatever we can."