Harry Turtledove: Darkness Descending

“Oh, I do, do I?” Valnu said. “And why is that?”

“Because you can’t have this fellow drive along some quiet road while we do whatever we want in the carriage,” Krasta answered. “He’d blab to Lurcanio, sure as sure.”

“While we do whatever we want?” Valnu laughed softly. “The last time we tried that, you shoved me out of the carriage and left me to walk home alone in the dark. I don’t know about you, my dear marchioness, but that isn’t what I had in mind when we started on the ride.”

Krasta shrugged impatiently. “You deserved it, for picking just the wrong time to start chattering about shopgirls.”

“I won’t say a word about them now, I promise you.” Valnu slid his arm around her. “Stroll with me. We can look up at the stars together, or do anything else we happen to think of.”

There were more stars to look at than there had been when Priekule was at peace. With the city dark, they shone in great, glittering profusion: multicolored jewels scattered across black velvet. After one brief glance, Krasta forgot about them. She hadn’t come out with Valnu to stargaze. She’d come out to enjoy revenge on an Algarvian keeper who took her for granted.

But Valnu really did feel like strolling, or so it seemed. Fuming a little, Krasta went along for a block or so. Then she got mulish. Planting her feet firmly on the slates of the pavement, she took hold of Valnu and said, “If you brought me out here to trifle, what are you waiting for?”

“To get a little farther away,” Valnu answered, which made no sense to her. “But this will do well enough.” He gathered her in. She kissed him more fiercely than she’d ever kissed Lurcanio. The Algarvian was a skilled and pleasing lover, but he also held the whip hand, and Krasta knew it. Not here, not now.

Valnu was nuzzling her neck and nibbling her ear when a thunderous roar behind her knocked both of them off their feet. The first thing Krasta noticed was that she’d torn a knee out of her velvet trousers. Only after cursing at that did she proclaim, “Powers above! What happened?”

“If I had to guess, I would say an egg burst in Sefanu’s mansion,” Valnu answered. He rose and, with startling strength, hauled her to her feet. “Come on.”

Because he sounded sure of himself and acted as if he knew what he was doing, Krasta followed him back toward the mansion. His guess had been right on target, and so, she saw, had the egg. The mansion’s second and third stories had fallen in on themselves, and fire was beginning to spread in the ruins.

Shrieks from injured and trapped people inside made the night hideous. A few men and women, disheveled and bleeding, pulled themselves free of the rubble and came staggering away. Krasta yanked at an arm sticking out from under a pile of bricks. It came away, with no body attached to it. She dropped it with a horrified cry. Her stomach lurched, as if aboard a diving dragon.

“Lurcanio,” she muttered. It hadn’t been his arm--it had belonged to a woman. But what chance had he had to get away?

And then, from behind her, he said, “I am here.” He’d lost his hat. He had a cut over one eye, and another on his forearm. He also had most of his aplomb. Bowing, he said, “Good to see you intact, milady. Your pretty popinjay picked just the right time to entertain you there.”

“Aye,” Krasta said, and realized for the first time that she might easily have been inside the mansion when the egg burst. Her stomach lurched again. “Curse the Lagoan dragons!” she exclaimed.

“Dragons?” Lurcanio shook his head. “No dragons tonight. That egg didn’t drop, milady--it was smuggled in and left to burst. Plenty of ways to arrange such a thing. And when we find out who did it, we’ll arrange his guts as pretty as you please. Oh, he’ll take a long time to die.” He sounded as if he looked forward to seeing that. In some ways, Algarvians remained barbaric after all. No matter how fine and mild the night was, Krasta shivered.

Vanai laid her hand on Ealstan’s forehead. He was burning hot, as he had been an hour before, as he had been a day before, as he had been ever since he came down sick three days before. He thrashed and muttered and stared up at her from the bed. “Conberge,” he muttered.

Biting her lip, Vanai soaked a washrag in a bowl of cold water, wrung it out till it was nearly dry, and put it on his forehead. If he thought she was his sister, he was in a bad way indeed. No one in his right mind could have mistaken her for a swarthy, solidly made Forthwegian woman.

“What am I going to do?” she exclaimed. She’d managed to get occasional sips of water and broth down Ealstan, but that wasn’t nearly enough, and she knew it. And he needed something more than a cold compress to fight the fever, too. She turned the compress over. Already, the heat that came off him had gone a long way toward drying the side that had touched his skin.

He needs a physician, she thought, or at least real medicine. She’d been thinking that for most of the past day, ever since it had become clear that the fever wasn’t going to leave anytime soon. He would have gone out for her. She knew that. But he didn’t face capture and worse if he stuck his nose outside the door to the flat.

“Chilly,” he said in conversational tones, and started to shake. He wasn’t chilly; he was as far in the world as he could be from chilly. But he thought he was freezing. His teeth started to chatter. Vanai piled blankets on him, but he kept shivering underneath them. He’d done that before, too. It never failed to appall Vanai.

With a grimace, she made up her mind. Ealstan had to have more help than she could give here with what little they had in the flat to fight fever. Taking care to speak Forthwegian so he wouldn’t fret, Vanai said, “I’m going out now. I’ll be back as soon as I can.” She did her best to sound as if everything were perfectly normal, as if she could go out anytime she chose, as if nothing could possibly happen to her when she went out into Eoforwic.

Maybe she even succeeded, for Ealstan said, “All right, Mother. Be careful out in the blizzard.” Because he thought he was cold, he thought the rest of the world had to be cold, too.

“I will,” Vanai promised. She took all the money she could find in the flat--a good deal more than she’d thought she and Ealstan had. Algarvians were famous for being bribable. She’d bribed Major Spinello with her body. Next to that, she didn’t worry about silver.

Stepping out into the hall, seeing walls that weren’t the walls of her flat, felt very strange. She wished she’d changed into the long tunic Ealstan had got for her, but it wouldn’t disguise what she was, not on a fine, bright spring day. She hurried downstairs and out of the block of flats.

Street noise hit her like a blow. Eoforwic dwarfed Oyngestun; she’d forgotten how big and brawling the capital was. She’d seen it briefly when she and Ealstan first came here from the east. Since then, she’d stayed high up, looking out through window glass at the world but taking no part in it.

Seeing strange faces up close felt wrong, unnatural. And people stared at her, too. A Forthwegian with a face like a big-nosed ferret grabbed her by the arm. Even as she twisted away, he demanded, “Lady, are you out of your skull? You want the redheads to nab you?”

She needed a moment to notice that the question had come in Kaunian, a slangy dialect far removed from what she’d heard and used back in Oyngestun-- the kind of Kaunian pickpockets and thieves would speak. This fellow had probably learned it from blond pickpockets and thieves.

“I need an apothecary,” she said in Forthwegian--no use drawing attention to herself by ear as well as eye. “My . . . brother’s sick.”