Harry Turtledove: Out of the Darkness

It wasn’t anything like his dreams of flying. For one thing, he had no control over it whatever. For another, it didn’t last more than half a heartbeat-and when he hit a pile of rubble, he hit hard. He felt something snap in his leg. He heard it, too. That was almost worse-at least till the pain reached his mind, which took a couple of extra heartbeats.

Somebody close by was screaming. Whoever he was, he had to be close by: Bembo could hear him through the din of the eggs. After a moment, he realized those screams came from his own mouth. He tried to make them stop, but it was like trying to recork a fizzing bottle of sparkling wine-once that stopper was out, no getting it in again. He bawled on and on, and hoped an egg would burst on him and kill him. Then, at least, it would be over.

No such luck. What did I ever do to deserve this? wondered some small part of his brain still able to think. Unfortunately, he had no trouble coming up with answers. Few Algarvians who’d served in Forthweg would have.

The dragons kept dropping eggs for what seemed like forever. Bembo kept screaming all that while, too. And he kept screaming after the Unkerlanter dragons flew back toward the west.

“Oh, shut up,” Oraste told him. “Let’s have a look at you.” He did, with rough competence, the accent being on rough. When he finished, he said, “Well, Bembo my lad, you are one lucky son of a whore.”

That startled Bembo enough to make him stop screaming for a moment. “Lucky?” he howled. “Why, you-” He called Oraste every name he knew.

Considering the decade or so he’d spent in the constabulary, he knew a lot of names.

Oraste slapped him in the face. “Shut up,” he said again, this time in a flat, angry voice. “I said lucky, and I meant fornicating lucky. You’re hurt bad enough, they won’t keep you around here, on account of you won’t be good for a fornicating thing for a long time. That means you won’t be here when the Unkerlanters finally do come over the Twegen. And if that’s not lucky, what in blazes is? You want me to try splinting your leg, or you want me to wait for a healer?”

Bembo cursed him again, not quite so savagely as before. Then the pain made everything blurry for some little while. When he fully returned to himself, someone he didn’t recognize was leaning over him, saying, “Here, Constable, drink this.”

He drank. It tasted nasty-a horrible blend of spirits and poppy seeds. After a bit, the pain ebbed-or he felt as if he were floating away from it. “Better,” he mumbled.

“Good,” the healer said. “Now I’m going to set that leg.” Go ahead, Bembo thought vaguely. I won’t care. But he did. The decoction he’d drunk wasn’t strong enough to keep him from feeling the ends of the broken bone grinding against each other as the healer manipulated them. Bembo shrieked. “Almost done,” the healer assured him. “And you’ll be going back to Algarve to get better after that. They’ll take good care of you.”

“Oraste was right,” Bembo said in drowsy, drugged wonder. A couple of Forthwegians put him on a litter-and hauled him off toward the ley-line caravan depot. When he got there, another healer poured more of the decoction down him. He never remembered getting carried aboard the caravan. When he woke up, he was on his way back to Algarve.

Outside the royal palace in Patras, a blizzard howled. Marshal Rathar had little use for the palace or for the capital of Yanina. He wore a heavy cloak over his knee-length rock-gray tunic, and was none too warm even with it. “Why do you people not heat your buildings in the wintertime?” he growled at King Tsavellas.

The king of Yanina was a skinny little bald man with a big gray mustache and dark, sorrowful eyes. “We do,” he answered. “We heat them so we are comfortable. We do not turn them into ovens, as you Unkerlanters like to do.”

Both the King of Yanina and the Marshal of Unkerlant spoke Algarvian. It was the only tongue they had in common; classical Kaunian was much less studied in their kingdoms than farther east on the continent of Derlavai. Rathar savored the irony. Tsavellas had had no trouble talking with his erstwhile allies, the redheads. Now he could use his command of their language to talk with the new masters of Yanina.

“If you are indoors, you should be warm,” Rathar insisted. He enjoyed telling a king what to do, especially since Tsavellas had to listen to him. King Swemmel. . This time, Rathar’s shiver had nothing to do with the chilly halls through which he walked. The King of Unkerlant was a law unto himself. All Kings of Unkerlant were, but Swemmel more so than most.

“Warm is one thing,” Tsavellas said. “Warm enough to cook?” His expressive shrug might almost have come from an Algarvian.

Rathar didn’t answer. He was eyeing the painted panels that ornamented the walls. Yaninans in old-fashioned robes-but always with pompoms on their shoes-stared out of the panels at him from enormous, somber eyes. Sometimes they fought Algarvians, other times Unkerlanters. Always, they were shown triumphant. Rathar supposed the artists who’d created them had had to paint what their patrons wanted. Those patrons had lost no sleep worrying about the truth.

He couldn’t read the legends picked out in gold leaf beside some of the figures on the walls. He couldn’t even sound them out. Yanina used a script different from every other way of writing in Derlavai. Rathar reckoned that typical of the Yaninans, the most contrary, fractious, faction-ridden folk in the world.

“Here we are,” Tsavellas said, leading him into a room with more Yaninans painted on the walls and with maps on the tables. A Yaninan officer in a uniform much fancier than Rathar’s-his short tunic over kilt and leggings glittered with gold leaf, and even his pompoms were gilded-sprang to his feat and bowed. Tsavellas went on, “I present to you General Mantzaros, the commander of all my forces. He speaks Algarvian.”

“He would,” Rathar rumbled. He was hardly fifty himself-burly, vigorous, and dour. Any man who’d spent so much time dealing with King Swemmel had earned the right to be dour. When he held out his hand, Mantzaros clasped his wrist instead, in the Algarvian style. Rathar raised an eyebrow. “Have you forgotten whose side you’re on these days, General?”

“By no means, Marshal.” Mantzaros drew himself up to his full height, which was a couple of inches less than Rathar’s. “Do you seek to insult me?” Yaninans were some of the touchiest people on earth, too, without the style Algarvians brought to their feuds.

“No. I seek to get some use out of the rabble you call an army,” Rathar said brutally.

That made both Mantzaros and King Tsavellas splutter. The general found his voice first: “Our brave soldiers are doing everything they can to aid our allies of Unkerlant.”

“You have not got more than a handful of brave soldiers. We saw that when you were fighting against us,” Rathar said. Ignoring the Yaninans’ cries of protest, he went on, “Now that you are on our side, you had better get your men moving against the cursed redheads. That was the bargain you struck when you became our allies”- our puppets, he thought-”and you are going to live up to it. Your men will spearhead several attacks we have planned.”

“You will use them to weaken the Algarvians so you can win on the cheap,” Tsavellas said shrilly. “This is not war. This is murder.”

“If you try to go back on your agreement, your Majesty”-Rathar used the title with savage glee-”you will find out what murder is. I promise you that. Do you understand me?”

Tsavellas and Mantzaros both shivered and turned pale beneath their swarthy skins. The Algarvians killed Kaunians for the life energy that powered their strongest, deadliest sorceries. To fight back, Swemmel ordered the deaths of criminals, and of the old and useless of Unkerlant. But, now that his soldiers held Yanina in a grip of iron, what was to stop him from killing Tsavellas’ folk instead? Nothing at all, as anyone who knew him had to realize.