Out of the Darkness

“When will you give over your slanders of the decent citizens of Valmiera?” the officer demanded indignantly.

“For one thing, truth is always a defense against a charge of slander,” replied Lurcanio, who feared other charges awaited against which he had no defense. But he intended to make his captors squirm as long as he could, and so went on, “As for dear Krasta, considering some of the things we did, I am not altogether sure she is one of your precious ‘decent citizens of Valmiera.’ Still, I will tell you she enjoyed them all, whether decent or not.”

“How dare you say such things?” the Valmieran officer gabbled.

Lurcanio hid a smile. He didn’t play by the rules the victors thought they’d set up. He didn’t act afraid, and he wasn’t apologetic. That confused the blonds. As long as they were confused, as long as they had trouble deciding what to do about-and to-him, he wasn’t too bad off. If they did decide. . “How dare she say such things about me?” he returned, sounding as indignant as he could. “I, at least, am telling the truth, which she certainly is not.”

“You were her lover at the same time as you were trying to hunt down and kill her brother, the illustrious Marquis Skarnu,” the officer said, as if he’d scored a point.

“Well, what if I was?” Lurcanio answered. “That may have been in poor taste, but you will have precious few men left in a kingdom if you set about killing everyone guilty of poor taste. And Skarnu was in arms against my kingdom, as he himself would be the first to tell you. He was, in fact, in arms against my kingdom after King Gainibu surrendered. What do you people do to Algarvians captured in arms against your occupying armies? Nothing pretty, and you know it as well as I.”

“That has nothing to do with what you tried to do to Skarnu,” the Valmieran said.

“Of course it does, you foolish little man,” Lurcanio said. “If you are too dense to see it, I hope they take you away and give me an interrogator with the sense to understand plain speech in his own language.” That was the last thing he wanted, but the officer didn’t need to know it.

“If you insult me here, it will only go harder for you,” the blond warned, flushing with anger.

“Ah. Splendid!” Lurcanio gave him a seated bow. “I thank you for admitting that what I did and did not do during the late war has in fact nothing to do with what will happen to me.”

“I said nothing of the sort!” The Valmieran turned redder still.

“I beg your pardon.” Lurcanio bobbed his head once more. “That was what it sounded like to me.”

“Guards!” the officer said, and several Valmieran soldiers took one step forward from the places against the wall where they’d stood. The interrogator pointed to Lurcanio. “Back to his cell with this one. He’s not ready to tell the truth yet.”

A Valmieran sergeant pointed his stick at Lurcanio’s belly. “Get moving,” he said. Him Lurcanio obeyed without backtalk and without hesitation. A confused or frightened ordinary soldier was liable to get rid of his confusion and fear by blazing. Games that tied the earnest and rather stupid interrogator in knots would be useless or worse against a man for whom simple brutality solved so many problems.

We thought simple brutality could solve the problem of the underground, Lurcanio thought as he marched along in front of the guards. Were we any more clever than a simple sergeant? Valmieran captives snarled curses at him when he went past their cells. He strode by as if they didn’t exist. They threw things less often then. They weren’t supposed to have anything to throw, but he knew those rules could bend when authorities wanted something unfortunate but also unofficial to happen to a captive.

Today, he reached his own cell unscathed. The door slammed behind him.

A bar outside the cell thudded down. The sergeant muttered a charm to keep anyone from magically tampering with the bar. Lurcanio wished he were a mage. He shrugged. Had he been, he would have gone to a more sorcerously secure prison than this one.

As cells went, he supposed his wasn’t so bad. It was certainly better than the ones his own folk had given Valmieran captives during the war. His cot was severely plain, but it was a cot, not a moldy straw pallet or bare stone. His window had bars, but it was a window. He had a privy, not a stinking slop bucket. He would have fired any cook who gave him food like the stuff he got here, but he did get enough to hold hunger at bay.

But what did this mild treatment mean? Did he have some chance of getting back to Algarve because the Valmierans weren’t sure of exactly what he’d done? Or were they keeping him comfortable now because they knew how harsh they would soon be with him? He didn’t know. By the nature of things, he couldn’t know. Brooding over it would have gone a long way toward driving him mad, and so he did his best not to brood. His best wasn’t always good enough.

Presently, they fed him again. Light leaked out of the sky. He had no lamp in the cell. The hallways had lamps, but not much light came through the small window in the door. He lay down and went to sleep. This was an animal sort of life, and he tried to store up rest against a time when he might badly need it.

Somewhere in the middle of the night, the door flew open. Guards hauled him out of bed. “Come on, you son of a whore!” one of them growled. Another gave him a roundhouse slap in the face that snapped his head back.

Ah, he thought as they hustled him along the corridors to a room where he’d never gone before. At last, the gloves come off. He was afraid-he would have been an imbecile not to be afraid-but he was oddly relieved, too. He’d been waiting for a moment like this. Now it was here.

The guards slammed him down onto a hard stool. A bright light blazed into his face. When he involuntarily looked away, he got slapped again. “Face forward!” a guard shouted.

From behind that blazing lamp, a Valmieran rasped, “You were the one who sent some hundreds of folk of Kaunian blood south to the Strait of Valmiera to be slain for your kingdom’s foul sorceries.”

“I do not know anything about-” Lurcanio began.

Yet another slap almost knocked him off the stool. “Don’t waste my time with lies,” warned the blond behind the lamp. “You’ll be sorry if you do. Now answer my questions, you stinking, worthless sack of shit. You were the one who sent those people to die.”

It wasn’t a question. That didn’t matter. What mattered was that the Valmierans knew how to play the game of interrogation after all. His head ringing, the taste of his own blood in his mouth, Lurcanio fought to gather himself. If he admitted the charge, he was a dead man. That much he could see. “No,” he said through bruised and cut lips. “I was not the one.”

“Liar!” the interrogator shouted. One of the guards punched Lurcanio in the belly. He groaned. For one thing, he couldn’t help himself. For another, he wanted them to think him hurt worse than he was. “So you weren’t the one, eh?” the Valmieran sneered. “A likely story! Well, if you say you weren’t, who was? Talk, powers below eat you!”

That question had as many eggs buried in it as a field on the western front. Another slap encouraged Lurcanio not to take too long answering. He didn’t know how much the Valmierans knew. He didn’t want to betray his own countrymen, but he didn’t want the charge sticking to him alone, either. He’d had something to do with sending blonds south, but he was a long way from the only one.

“Our orders came from Trapani,” he said. “We only followed-”

This time, the slap did knock him off the stool. He thudded down onto stone. The guards kicked him a few times before they picked him up. The interrogator, still unseen, said, “That won’t work, Algarvian. Aye, those whoresons in Trapani’ll get the axe for what they did. But you don’t get off for following orders. You know the difference between war and murder. You’re a big boy.”

“You are the victors,” Lurcanio said. “You can do with me as you please.”

“You bet your balls we can, redhead. You just bet,” the Valmieran gloated. “But weren’t you listening? You’ve got a chance-a skinny chance, but a chance-of saving your lousy neck. Name names, and we just might be happy enough with you to keep you breathing.”

Is he lying? He probably is, but do I dare take the chance? Lurcanio thought, as well as he could think with pain pouring through him. And if I name the names of others-or even if I don t-who will be naming me? One more thing he didn’t care to dwell on.

“Talk, you fornicating bastard,” the interrogator snarled. “We know all about your fornicating, too. She’ll get hers-wait and see if she doesn’t. You have this one chance, pal. Talk now or else don’t. and see what happens to you then.”

Would all his captive countrymen keep quiet? A bitter smile twisted Lurcanio’s lips. Algarvians were no less fond of saving their own skins than the folk of any other kingdom. Somebody would name him-and even if someone