Darkness Descending

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