Harry Turtledove - Into the Darkness

Somewhere else was probably no farther than the other side of the column, but Bembo didn’t follow her. She’d done what he’d told her, after all. One of these days, he might feel like telling her to do something different again.

He turned on to a side street, one with houses and apartment houses on it, not shops and offices. Once or twice every block, he had to rap on a window sill or a doorway and shout for people to let lamps die or cover their windows better. Everyone in Tricarico surely knew the new regulations, but every Algarvian was born thinking regulations applied to the other fellow, not to him. A rotund man, Bembo fumed when he had to trudge up to the fourth floor of an apartment house to get some fool to draw his curtains.

When he came out of the apartment house, someone disappeared down the dark street with remarkable haste. Bembo thought about running after the footpad or whatever he was, but not for long. With his belly, he wouldn’t have had a prayer of catching him.

He came up to another house with a hand’s breadth of open space between the edges of the curtains. He raised his club to whack the sill, then froze, as if suddenly turned to stone. Inside, a pretty young woman was getting out of her clothes and into a loose kilt and tunic for the night.

Bembo had never felt so torn. As a man, he wanted to say nothing and keep watching: the more he saw of her, the better she looked. As a constable, though, he had his duty. He waited till she was sliding the night tunic down over herself before he rapped the wall and called, “Darken this house!” The woman jumped and squeaked. The lamp died. Bembo strode on. Duty had triumphed—and he’d had a good peek.

He used the club several more times—though never so entertainingly—before emerging on to the Avenue of Duchess Matalista, a broad street full of fancy shops, barristers’ offices, and the sort of dining establishments the nobility and rich commoners patronized. When he saw light leaking from places like those, he had to be more polite with his warnings. If a baron or a well-connected restaurateur complained about him, he’d end up on permanent night duty in the nasty part of town.

He had just asked—asked! it graveled a proud man—a jeweler to close his curtains tighter when a hiss in the air made him look up. He saw moving shadows against the stars. Before he could fill his lungs to shout, the egg he’d heard falling burst a couple of hundred yards behind him. Others crashed down all around Tricarico.

Bursts of light as their protective shells smashed sent shadows leaping crazily and chopped motion into herky-jerky bits. The bursts were shatteringly loud. Bembo clutched at his ears. Blasts of suddenly released energies knocked him off his feet. The pavement tore his bare knees.

Howling with pain, he scrambled up again and ran toward the nearest burst. The egg had come to earth on the Avenue of Duchess Matalista in front of an eatery where a supper for two cost about a week of Bembo’s pay It had blown a hole in the cobblestones and had blown in the front of the restaurant; he didn’t know how the roof was staying up.

The egg had also blown in the front of the milliner’s shop across the street, but Bembo didn’t worry about that: the milliner’s was closed and empty. Screaming, bleeding people came staggering out of the restaurant. A woman got down on her hands and knees and vomited an expensive meal into the gutter.

Fire was beginning to lick at the exposed roof timbers. Careless of that, Bembo dashed into the restaurant to help whoever hadn’t managed to escape. Shards of glass crunched under his boots. That glass had been almost as deadly as the raw energy of the egg itself. The first person the flickering flames showed him had had his head almost sliced from his body by a great chunk that still glittered beside the corpse.

Someone farther in groaned. Bembo yanked up the table that pinned an old woman, stooped, got her arm around his shoulder, and half-dragged, half carried her out to the street. “You!” he snapped to the woman who’d thrown up. “Bandage this cut on her leg.”

“With what?” she asked.

“Your kerchief, if you’ve got one. Your scarf there. Or cut cloth off her tunic or yours—you’ll have a paring knife in your bag there, won’t you?” Bembo turned to a couple of men who didn’t look too badly hurt. “You and you—in there with me. She’s not the only one left inside.”

“What if the roof caves in?” one man asked.

“What if an egg falls on us?” the other added. More eggs were falling. Sticks bigger and heavier than a man could carry had been set up along some of Tricarico’s ley lines. They blazed spears of light up into the sky at the Jelgavan dragons, but there weren’t enough of them, not nearly enough.

That didn’t matter, not to Bembo. “We’ll be very unhappy,” he answered. “Now come on, or I curse you for cowards.”

“If you weren’t a constable and immune, I’d call you out for that,” growled the fellow who’d fretted about eggs.

“If you’d come without arguing, I wouldn’t have had to say it,” Bembo returned, and plunged back into the eatery without waiting to see whether the two men would follow. They did; he heard them kicking through the broken glass that covered the floor.

They worked manfully, once they got down to it. They and Bembo dragged out customers and servitors and, from the kitchens, a couple of cooks. As the flames began to take hold and the smoke got thicker, Bembo had to make his last trip out crawling and dragging a man after him. He couldn’t breathe if he stood upright. He could hardly breathe while he crawled; his lungs felt scorched and filled with soot. The glass sliced the palms of his hands.

A horse-drawn pumper clattered up and began pouring water on the flames. Hacking and spitting up lumps of thick black phlegm, Bembo wished the crew could turn the hoses on the inside of his chest.

They were fighting a losing battle here; the eatery was going to burn. Before long, the crew realized as much. They began playing water on the buildings to cither side, neither of which had yet caught fire. Maybe they wouldn’t, now. Even if they didn’t, though, the water would damage whatever they held.

“I thank you, sir,” the old woman Bembo had first rescued said from the sidewalk.

He reached for his hat, only to discover he wasn’t wearing it. It had to be back in the eatery, which meant it was gone for good. Bembo instead, he said, “Milady, it was my duty and”—another coughing spasm cut off his words—“my duty and my honor.”

“That’s well said.” The old woman—a noble, by her manners—inclined her head to Bembo.

He bowed again. “Milady, I just hope we’re giving the Jelgavans worse than we’re getting. The news sheets say we are. Every braggart blabbing out of a crystal says we are, but how do we know? The Jelgavans’ news sheets are bound to be telling them they’re beating the stuffing out of us.”

“How long have you been a constable, young fellow?” the woman asked, a hint of amusement in her voice.

Bembo wondered what was funny. “Almost ten years, milady.”

The old woman nodded. “That appears to be enough to have left you a profoundly cynical man.”

“Thank you,” he said. She laughed out loud. For the life of him, he couldn’t figure out why.

With the dawn, Talsu peered down from the Bratanu Mountains into Algarve. Smoke rose from the burning town of Tricarico. He smiled. His officers had assured him that Jelgava was doing far more damage to Algarve than the cowardly Algarvian air pirates were inflicting on his own kingdom.

His officers had also assured him that soon, very soon, Jelgava’s ever-victorious forces would sweep out of the mountains and across the plains of Algarve. The Jelgavan army had visited fire and devastation on those plains in the last months of the Six Years’ War. He saw no reason why Jelgava should not do the same thing again.