Harry Turtledove - Jaws of Darkness

Kunsaid, “We won’t find out till morning at the earliest.” If he felt the least bit guilty about remaining alive where his comrades had perished, he showed no sign that Istvan could see.

And a Gyongyosian captive in the next chamber of the infirmary proved him wrong a moment later, calling, “By the stars, half the walls have fallen down!”

“We could escape!” Istvan exclaimed.

“Go ahead,”Kun said. “If you want to skulk through the woods up on the slopes of Mount Sorong till the Kuusamans hunt you down with dogs, go right ahead. Me, I don’t see much point to it. If I thought we could get back to an island we still held, or even one where we were still fighting, that’d be different. As things are…” He shook his head. “No, thanks.”

That made more sense than Istvan wished it would have. Some of his countrymen thought otherwise. Outside the infirmary, booted feet pounded across dirt toward what had been the palisade. A Kuusaman shouted in bad Gyongyosian: “To halt! To halt or to blaze!” Those feet kept running. A moment later, a shriek rang out, and then another one. After that, Istvan heard no more running feet inside the captives’ camp.

And then, a few minutes later-after he andKun had cautiously emerged from their shelter-he did. All the shouting this time was in Kuusaman, which he didn’t understand. “The slanteyes will have found the bodies,”Kun said.

“Do you know that, or are you just guessing?” Istvan asked. It did strike him as a good guess.

“I can understand some of what they’re saying,”Kun answered. “Not a lot-Kuusaman is a peculiar language, if anyone wants to know what I think: much worse than Unkerlanter-but enough.”

All Istvan had ever learned of either were such phrases as, Hands high! andCome out of there! “I’ll take your word for it,” he said.

A Kuusaman guard charged into their chamber, stick at the ready. He looked at them, saw they were where they were supposed to be and not making trouble, and relaxed a little. Sounding innocent, Kun asked, “What happened?”

“Magic,” the guard answered. “Bad magic. Many to be dead.” His Gyongyosian was halting but understandable. “To kill themselves to make magic. Bad. Very bad.” Shaking his head, he backed out of the room.

Istvan sniffed. “I smell smoke.”

“Aye, something’s burning,”Kun agreed. He sniffed, too. “Not close, I don’t think. Nothing we have to worry about.” He paused, then went on, “That guard was right, you know. Itwas bad magic, and I don’t care that our allies used it first.”

“Neither do I,” Istvan said, and did his best to believe he was telling the truth.

When the sun rose, he peered eagerly out the window. Sure enough, most of the walls were down, but the Kuusamans had posted an armed man every ten feet or so to prevent escapes. The ley-line depot was also wrecked, and the smoke, he found, came from the direction of the port the Kuusamans had built: he could see as much through the gaps in what had been the palisade. But he could also see that the Kuusamans remained in firm control of the island of Obuda, regardless of what Frigyes and Borsos and the redheads and-most important-Szonyi and the other Gyongyosians who’d laid down their lives had done.

“It was a waste of magic,” he said, and would have felt vindicated if he hadn’t felt so bad.

“Halt!” Garivald called. “What are you doing?” Seeing any movement was enough to make him swing his stick toward it.

What he saw in the bridgehead by Eoforwic wasn’t an Algarvian soldier, but a gray-bearded Forthwegian with a stooped back. When the old man smiled a placating smile, he showed a mouth full of bad teeth. “Nothing, sir,” he said. “I’m only… mushrooms.”

Garivald didn’t know the missing word, but had no trouble figuring out what it meant. Even a Grelzer could follow bits and pieces of Forthwegian, just as the locals could understand a little of what he said. “Come with me,” he commanded. “Come with me to my lieutenant.”

“Why?” the Forthwegian asked. His smile got wider. He said something else. Garivald couldn’t understand it, but could make a good guess-probably something like, Iwasn‘t doing any harm.

He shrugged. “Come,” he repeated. “Orders. All civilians to be questioned when they’re found where they’re not supposed to be.”

“Only mushrooms,” the Forthwegian said. He held up his basket, then held it out to Garivald. “I’ll give them to you.”

“No.” Garivald liked mushrooms, but not so much as the locals did- certainly not enough to let himself be bribed with them. “Come along right now, or you’ll be sorry.”

Muttering under his breath, the old man came. None of what he said sounded like a compliment. As they went deeper into the bridgehead, he spoke a few words Garivald could understand: “Need to piss.”

“Later.” With a stick in his hand, Garivald could afford to be heartless.

But the old man whined, “Need topiss,” again with such dramatic urgency that Garivald relented. He pointed to a stout tree somehow still standing despite all the eggs that had landed on the bridgehead.

The old man disappeared behind it. Perhaps a heartbeat slower than it should have, that roused Garivald’s suspicions. “Hey! What are you doing back there?” he barked, and hurried over to find out for himself. The old man wasn’t standing there easing himself. He was loping toward a fallen tree not far away, keeping the still-standing one between himself and where Garivald had been. “Halt!” Garivald shouted again.

The old man ran harder than ever. Nobody, though, nobody could outrun a beam. Garivald’s caught him in the middle of the back just as he was about to dive behind the tree trunk. He shrieked and went over on his face.

He was still moving feebly when Garivald trotted up to him. With a glare, he said something Garivald couldn’t understand: the blood running from his mouth garbled it. Whatever it was, it didn’t sound like Forthwegian. Garivald wished he hadn’t blazed to kill-but that, he’d found, was almost always what a soldier intended to do. He hadn’t thought of doing anything else till much too late.

With a last unintelligible mumble, the old man died. Garivald knew the exact instant life left his body, for his looks changed in that instant. Suddenly, he no longer looked like a Forthwegian, but like an Algarvian who’d let his beard grow out, as Forthwegians were in the habit of doing.

“Magic!” Garivald exclaimed. His hands twisted in the sign Grelzers used when they ran across magecraft where they didn’t expect to. In an abstract way, he admired the redhead’s thoroughgoing imposture. It wasn’t just the beard: the fellow had spoken good, maybe perfect, Forthwegian, and had even acted as if he liked mushrooms, which Mezentio’s men weren’t in the habit of doing.

“What have you got, Corporal?” somebody called from behind Garivald: an Unkerlanter. At least, I think he’s an Unkerlanter, Garivald thought dizzily. Nothing in the world seemed so certain as it had a moment before.

“What have I got?” he echoed. “I’ve got a spy, that’s what. Go fetchLieutenantAndelot right away. He needs to see this, and to hear about it, too.” The Unkerlanter soldier’s eyes widened. He took off at a run. Garivald was only a corporal, but common soldiers obeyed him as if he wereMarshalRathar. Of course, he had to obey sergeants and real officers the same way, while Rathar had to obey only the king, with everyone else in Unkerlant obeying him. The marshal has it easy, Garivald thought.

Andelot came trotting back with the trooper. “A spy?” he said, and stared down at the dead Algarvian. “How in blazes did he get so far inside our lines, Fariulf?”