Harry Turtledove - Through the Darkness

Behind the bar, he almost crawled over the tough. The fellow grinned at him and said, “Come on, pal. I know the back way.”

“Good,” Skarnu said. “I hoped there was one.” He also hoped the Algarvians and the constables who did their bidding weren’t watching it and scooping up fleeing foes one by one.

The tough scrambled into the little room in back of the bar. Skarnu followed him. The little room had a door that opened on the alleyway behind the Drunken Dragon. The tough hurried through it. Skarnu would have peered out first. But when the tough didn’t get blazed, he followed again.

Nobody looked to be watching the alley. Maybe the Algarvians didn’t know it was there, and maybe the Valmieran constables hadn’t bothered telling them about it. Skarnu hoped the constables weren’t cooperating so enthusiastically as they seemed to be, anyhow. After looking this way and that, he said, “Now we split up.”

“Aye, I was going to tell you the same thing, Pavilosta,” the other Valmieran answered. “You’ve got a pretty good notion of what you’re doing, looks like. Powers above keep you safe.”

“And you,” Skarnu said. The tough hadn’t waited for his reply, but was already strolling down the alley as if he didn’t have a care in the world. Skarnu strolled up it, trying to act similarly nonchalant. He felt easier when he ducked into another alleyway that ran into the one behind the tavern. That second alley led him to a third, and the third to a fourth. Tytuvenai seemed to have a web of little lanes going nowhere in particular. By the time Skarnu emerged onto a real street, he was several blocks away from the Drunken Dragon. He hoped more of the men who kept on resisting the Algarvians had got out after the tough and him.

“You, there!” The call was sharp and peremptory. Skarnu turned. A constable was pointing at him. “Aye, you, bumpkin. What are you doing here?”

If he was trying to panic Skarnu, he failed. For all the world as if he were nothing but a bumpkin, the marquis jingled coins in his pocket. “Sold some eggs,” he answered. “Now I’m heading home.”

“Well, go on, then,” the constable growled. He might not have caught hold of foes of the Algarvians, but he had exercised his petty authority. That was enough to satisfy him.

Skarnu hurried out of Tytuvenai. He breathed easier once he was out in the countryside. Most people on the roads outside the towns looked like farmers-which made sense, because most of them were farmers.

He wondered how the Algarvians had got word of the meeting their enemies were having. Someone betrayed us. The thought was inescapable. And everyone who’d sat around that table now knew what he looked like and near which village he lived. If the Algarvians caught his comrades and squeezed them, would they send a company of soldiers-or a couple of officers and a company of Valmieran constables-looking for him on the farms round Pavilosta? In their boots, he would have. That worried him more than anything.

“Come on!” Sergeant Pesaro boomed to the squad of Algarvian constables he led west from Gromheort. “Keep moving! You can do it!”

Bembo lifted off his hat and wiped sweat from his forehead with his other sleeve. “Fat old bugger,” he grumbled. “Why doesn’t he have an apoplexy and fall over dead?”

“He’s not even as fat as he used to be,” Oraste said.

“I know.” Bembo didn’t like that, either, and wasn’t shy about saying why: “It’s all this fornicating marching we’re doing. Powers above, even I’m starting to get skinny.”

“Not so you’d notice, you’re not,” Oraste answered, which made Bembo send him a wounded look and tramp along for some little while in silence.

Sergeant Pesaro wasn’t shy about filling silences. “Keep it moving,” he repeated. “Won’t be much longer before we get to that stinking Oyngestun place.”

“Oh, aye, and won’t they be glad to see us when we get there?” Bembo said. “We’ve already taken one lot of Kaunians out of the lousy dump. What’ll they do now that we’re coming back for more?”

“Forthwegians’ll cheer, just like I would,” Oraste said. “As far as the blonds go, well, who cares?”

No one cared what happened to the Kaunians in Forthweg-except those Kaunians themselves, and there weren’t enough of them to matter. That was why dreadful things kept happening to them. If the Kaunian kingdoms were winning the war, what would they be doing to Algarvians? Bembo wondered. Nothing good-he was sure of that.

Another thought crossed his mind: if the Unkerlanters do win the war, what will they do to Algarvians? He didn’t care to imagine that. He was ever so glad to be marching through eastern Forthweg rather than through Unkerlant, even if King Mezentio’s men were moving forward again there. The Forthwegians might not love Algarvian constables, but some of the rumors that came drifting out of Unkerlant made the hair on the back of his neck try to prickle up.

“Here we are,” Pesaro said, lifting him out of his unhappy reverie. “Beautiful Oyngestun, the garden spot of all Forthweg.”

“Huh,” Oraste said, looking at the small, decrepit village with his usual scorn. “If Forthweg needed a good purging, this is where they’d plug in the hose.”

Bembo thought about that, then snorted. As long as Oraste was making jokes about villages and not about him, he thought his squadmate was a pretty funny fellow.

Oyngestun’s two or three Algarvian constables were waiting for the squad from Gromheort. So were a couple of dozen Kaunians, all standing glum and dejected in the village square. “Powers above, you lazy buggers,” Pesaro shouted to the local constables. “Where’s the rest of ‘em?”

“We haven’t got enough men to do a proper roundup,” one of the men posted to Oyngestun answered. “Miserable blonds start sliding away whenever our backs are turned.”

“You should have blazed a couple. That would have given the rest the idea.” Pesaro threw his hands in the air, as if to say, What can you do? “All right, all right. Well take care of it.” He turned to his squad. “Come on, boys. It’ll be a little more work than we figured, but we’ll live through it. Remember, we want to make a clean sweep-no more Kaunians left in Oyngestun. We’re going to take ‘em all back to Gromheort with us.”

A young constable named Almonio asked, “Permission to fall out, Sergeant?”

He didn’t have the stomach to seize Kaunians and put them on ley-line caravans to certain death. To Bembo’s surprise, Pesaro had let him get away with hanging back. But the sergeant shook his head this time. “Only place they’re going is Gromheort, kid. You can cursed well help us get ‘em there.”

“You know what’ll happen to them afterwards, though, same as I do,” Almonio protested.

“No.” Pesaro shook his head again. The wattle under his chin, a flap of skin that had been filled with fat when he was heavier, flopped back and forth. “The same thing’d happen to them if they stayed here. We’re just moving ‘em so we can keep track of ‘em easier, and you’ll help or I’ll report you. Have you got that?”

“Aye,” Almonio answered miserably.

“You’d better.” Pesaro raised his voice to a parade-ground roar: “Kaunians, come forth! Come forth or it will be worse for you!”

He spoke only Algarvian. A constable named Evodio, who remembered the classical Kaunian that had been beaten into him in school, translated Pesaro’s bellows into the language the blonds were more likely to understand.

But, regardless of the language in which they were hailed, no Kaunians came forth. As Bembo had said, they remembered what had happened the last time the Algarvian constables from Gromheort visited Oyngestun.