Harry Turtledove - Jaws of Darkness

“Powers above, that’s foul stuff,” he said, and then, a moment later, “Let me have some more.”

“No.” Sabrino shook his head again, which made him wish it would fall off. “The idea is to cure you, not to start you down the slope again.”

“Oh, I’m cured,” Orosio said in hollow tones. “Into shoe leather, I think. I’m going to swear off spirits forever, or at least until the next time I feel like getting drunk again.” He eyed the jar in Sabrino’s hand. “A little more?”

“No,” Sabrino repeated, and shoved the stopper into the jar again. He sat down beside Orosio: his legs didn’t want to hold him up any more. “I didn’t take any more for myself than I gave you-enough to take the edge off things, but that’s all.”

“You’re a hard, cruel man, Colonel.” Orosio grimaced. “I’ve got demons ringing bronze bells in my head.”

“I know what you mean.” With an old man’s spraddle-legged shuffle, Sabrino walked to a window. He felt like a very old man just then. When he undid the leather lashings that held the shutter closed, he looked out on swirling white. “The snow hasn’t let up.”

“Good,” Orosio said. “Maybe we’ll be somewhere close to human before we have to fly again. Right now, I don’t think the undertakers did much of a job embalming me.”

“You embalmed yourself, same as I did,” Sabrino answered. “I wonder how many men in the wing have gone and done the same.”

“Nothing elseto do in this miserable place,” Orosio said. “Nothing to do on this whole front but drink and fly. If we can’t fly, that only leaves one thing.” He cast a longing eye at the jar of spirits.

“Don’t remind me.” Sabrino’s laugh was half real amusement, half something darker, something grimmer. “When I’m drunk, I keep looking around for my wife to hit, the same as any Unkerlanter peasant would.” He laughed again. “I wouldn’t really hit Gismonda, mind you; she’d have the law on me in nothing flat. But if Fronesia were here…”

“But she’s notyour mistress anymore,” Orosio said. “Didn’t you tell me she’d taken up with a major of footsoldiers?”

“A major, a colonel, something like that.” Sabrino made a fist. “Well, my good fellow, what better reason to hit her than that?”

“Ah,” Orosio said, again as if Sabrino had offered him a philosophical revelation.

Sabrino wasn’t feeling philosophical. He was just feeling battered and abused. The last thing he needed was someone pounding on the door to the hut. He flinched at the racket. So did Orosio. The only way to make it stop was to open the door. When Sabrino did; he marveled at how young and clean-cut the crystallomancer looked. “Well?” he growled-softly.

The crystallomancer seemed oblivious to his fragile condition. He said, “Sir, we’ve got ten new dragons and ten new dragonfliers coming in as soon as the weather clears enough.”

“Dowe?” Sabrino said, and the youngster nodded. “Ten? Really?” Sabrino asked. The crystallomancer nodded again.

“That’s about half the strength we’ve got here now,” Orosio said.

“Aye, and it brings the wing up to something close to half-strength,” Sabrino added. Though at the start of the war he’d never imagined it would be, that was something to celebrate. He went back into the hut, poured a mug full of spirits, and thrust it at the crystallomancer. “Here,” he said. “Have a drink.”

“I’m off to the Boulevard of Horsemen,” Krasta said with as much gaiety as she could muster.

ColonelLurcaniolooked up from his paperwork, but not for long. “Try not to buy more than the carriage can carry back here,” he told her: even for one of the Algarvian occupiers, he was notably cynical.

“I was hoping one of the lingerie shops might finally have something new,” she said.

“Were you?” That got Lurcanio’s notice, as Krasta had thought it would. If it hadn’t, she would have been offended, and she would have let him know about it, too. He ran his eyes up and down her, as if imagining her in a new negligee, or perhaps being peeled out of a new negligee. “Here’s hoping they do.”

“If you come to my bedchamber tonight, maybe you’ll find out,” Krasta purred. “Maybe. If I decide to open the door and let you in.” Giggling, she hurried out of his office. “Enjoy your papers,” she called from the empty antechamber. No new adjutant had replacedCaptainGradasso, who was off somewhere in the barbarous wilds of Unkerlant.

Krasta’s driver greeted the news that he was to take her into Priekule with something less than unrestrained enthusiasm. “Oh, very well, milady,” he said. “It’ll be a bit, though: I have to get the horses ready.” When Krasta went out to the stables, she discovered, not for the first time, that getting the horses ready also involved getting his trusty flask ready.

But he still handled the carriage well enough. So long as that remained true, Krasta didn’t care if he drank. He was a commoner, after all, and what were commoners but a pack of drunks?

The lingerie shop had the same wares it had displayed the last time she’d shopped there, a few weeks before-and on her visit before that, too. She’d sneered then. Today she bought a gown of filmy blue silk that would play up her eyes-as well as some other assets. She’d seen it before, aye, butColonelLurcanio wouldn’t have.

She didn’t even harass the shopgirl while making the purchase, which proved she had something on her mind. Carrying the parcel in her hand-the silk folded up into next to nothing-she hurried out of the shop. On the sidewalk, she paused and looked around. Everything looked as normal, and as dreary, as could be.

Shoes clicking on the slates, she hurried off the Boulevard of Horsemen and onto a side street. The blocks of flats there had a look of good breeding even wartime poverty and neglect couldn’t mar. People who lived in them were people to be reckoned with. Krasta looked around again. She didn’t see any of the people who’d been on the Boulevard when she left the lingerie shop. Satisfied, she ducked into one of the blocks of flats and went up to the third floor.

It’ll be the one farthest from the stairs, she reminded herself. The hallway had carpeting thicker and softer than her mansion boasted. She knocked on the door.

ViscountValnuopened it. “Well, come in, sweetheart,” he said, smiling his bright, predatory, skeletally handsome smile. “No one followed you here, I hope?”

“I don’t think so,” Krasta said, before remembering that trusting him was liable to be even more dangerous than trusting Lurcanio. Hastily she added, “If I don’t come back, I’ve left enough behind in writing to make sure you get what you deserve.”

Smiling still, Valnu said, “I don’t believe you.” Alarm blazed through Krasta, for she was bluffing. Before she could say anything, before she could do anything, Valnu went on: “Before the war, though, you never would have had the wit to come up with the lie-so maybe it isn’t a lie. Invasions are so educational, aren’t they?”

“I don’t know what on earth you’re talking about,” Krasta snapped.

Valnu laughed. “Well, that sounds more like you. But the question isn’t what you don’t know. The question is what you do know, and what you intend to do about it.”

“I know…” Krasta paused and took a deep breath. “I know you’re part of the underground, because if you weren’t, CountAmatu wouldn’t be dead.”

“And so?” Valnu asked. “What do you propose to do about that? That Algarvian colonel’s been in your bed ever since the redheads marched into Priekule. I don’t care to have my name come up in pillow talk, you know.”

The parcel Krasta was holding crinkled a little. That reminded her of what was inside the paper. Her cheeks heated. Even so, she said, “If you didn’t care to have that happen, you shouldn’t have tried molesting me at one party or another-at one partyand another, I should say.”