Out of the Darkness

triumph. And then, some tiny fraction of a heartbeat later, Ilmarinen and the others felt it strike home against Gyorvar.

He cried out again, almost before the echoes of his first shout had faded. But what he felt this time was a long way from triumph.

When Istvan went back to Gyongyos, he hadn’t expected merely to exchange one captives’ camp for another. By now, though, he’d concluded he wouldn’t be getting out of this center near Gyorvar any time soon. All the guards spoke his language. The food was what he was used to. But for those details, he might as well have been back on Obuda.

“You have a simple way to go free,” Balazs told him. The interrogator spoke in calm, reasonable tones: “All you need do, Sergeant, is say you are convinced the accursed Kuusamans, may the stars never shine on them, tried to trick and terrorize you with their show on Becsehely.”

“All I have to do is lie, you mean,” Istvan said sourly. “All I have to do is turn my back on the stars.”

“Your attitude is most uncooperative,” Balazs said.

“I am trying to tell you the truth,” Istvan said in something not far from despair. “If you don’t listen, what will happen to Gyongyos?”

“Nothing much, I expect,” the interrogator answered. “Nothing much has happened to our stars-beloved land up till now. Why should that change?”

“Because the slanteyes have given us a little time to make up our minds,” Istvan said. “Pretty soon, they’ll go ahead and do this to us.”

“If they can, which I do not believe-which everyone with a dram of sense, from Ekrekek Arpad on down, does not believe,” Balazs said. “Most of your comrades have also seen sense and been released. You know what you have to do to join them. Why make an avalanche of a snowflake?”

“You would say the same thing if you were trying to talk me into eating goat,” Istvan said. The scar on his left hand throbbed. He ignored it. And, where nothing else had, that remark succeeded in insulting Balazs. He stalked away, his nose in the air, and bothered neither Istvan nor Captain Petofi the rest of the day.

Petofi noticed the interrogator’s absence. At supper, he asked why Balazs had gone missing. Istvan explained. The officer, normally a dour man, laughed out loud. But then he sobered. “He probably went into Gyorvar to denounce you,” he warned. “You may have got satisfaction now, but for how long will you keep it?”

Istvan shrugged. “They already have me in what might as well be another captives’ camp. What can they do to me that’s so much worse?”

“Those are the sorts of questions you would do better not to ask,” Petofi replied. “All too often, they turn out to have answers, and you generally end up wishing they didn’t.”

“Too late to worry about it now, sir,” Istvan said with another shrug. “I already opened my big mouth. Today was mine, and I’ll enjoy it. If he makes me sorry after he gets back here from Gyorvar, then he does, that’s all, and I’ll have to see if I can find some other way to get my own back.”

Sadly, the captain shook his head. “Those whoresons are armored against attack by virtue of their office. Being the ekrekek’s Eyes and Ears, they think they can do as they please, and they are commonly right.”

“Balazs isn’t Arpad’s Eye and Ear,” Istvan said. “He’s the ekrekek’s..” He named an altogether different portion of his sovereign’s anatomy, one as necessary as an eye or an ear but much less highly esteemed.

“No doubt you’re right,” Petofi said, this time favoring him with no more than a wintry smile. “Being right, of course, will get you what being right usually does: the blame, and nothing else.”

On that cheerful note, the captain nodded to Istvan almost as if they were equals and then left the dining hall for his own private room-he was an officer, after all. Istvan didn’t linger long himself. He felt oppressed, and he didn’t think it was at the prospect of Balazs’ coming revenge. The very air felt heavy with menace. He tried to tell himself it was his imagination. Sometimes he succeeded for several minutes at a stretch.

Balazs had told one truth, anyhow: the barracks hall where Istvan slept held only a handful of other stubborn underofficers besides himself. He didn’t care much, save that he missed Corporal Kun. Kun must have thought telling a few lies a small enough price for going home to Gyorvar. Istvan hardly blamed him. He knew mulishness was all that kept him here.

With Kun gone, he was in no mood for company anyhow. Lamps-out came as more than a little relief. Gyorvar’s distant lights came in through the south-facing windows, casting a pale, grayish illumination on the northern wall of the barracks. It was less than moonlight, more than starlight-not enough to disturb Istvan in the least when he fell asleep.

Having fallen asleep, he promptly began to wish he’d stayed awake. He kept starting up from a series of the ghastliest nightmares he’d ever had the misfortune to suffer. In one of them, Captain Tivadar cut his throat instead of his hand on finding out he’d eaten goat. That was one of the gentler dreams, too. Most of the others were worse, far worse: full of red slaughter. He couldn’t always remember the details when he woke, but his pounding heart and the terrified gasps with which he breathed told him more than he wanted to know.

And then, some time toward morning, he woke to bright sunlight streaming in through the window. But it wasn’t morning, not yet, and the window didn’t face east. And the light into the barracks might have been as bright as sunlight, but it wasn’t sunlight. It rippled and shifted like waves-or flames.

With a cry of horror and despair, Istvan sprang to his feet and rushed to the window. He knew what he would see, and he saw it: the same destruction poured down onto Gyorvar as had descended upon Becsehely. He’d been closer to the disaster in the Kuusaman ley-line cruiser than he was now, but he wasn’t so far away as to have any doubt about what was happening.

Even through the window, even across the miles separating him from the capital of Gyongyos, savage heat beat on his face. For a moment, that was the only thought in his mind. Then he wondered what it was like in Gyorvar itself, and then, sickly, he wished he hadn’t.

Well, he thought, if that accursed Balazs went into the capital, he isn‘t coming back. May the stars not shine on his spirit.

He faced that loss with equanimity. But then one of the other men in the hall whispered, “If Ekrekek Arpad’s there, he couldn’t live through. . that. If his kin are there, they couldn’t, either.”

That was horror of a different sort. The Ekrekek of Gyongyos was the only man alive who communed with the stars as an equal. That was what made him what he was. If he died, if all his kin died in the same searing instant- who would rule Gyongyos then? Istvan had no idea. He doubted anyone had ever imagined such a nightmare could befall the land.

“What do we do?” another soldier-or was he another captive? — moaned. “What can we do?”

The flames pouring out of the sky onto Gyorvar abruptly ceased, though they remained printed on Istvan’s vision when he blinked. Gyorvar without the ekrekek, without the ekrekek’s whole family? Arpad’s house had reigned in Gyongyos since the stars made the world. That was what people said, at any rate.

And so? Istvan wondered. If Arpad had the brains of a carrot, he would have realized’ Kuusamo was trying to warn us, not trying to bluff us. Now he’s paid for being wrong-along with the stars only know how many people who never did anyone any harm. If there’s any justice, the stars will refuse to shine on his spirit.

“Other lands just have kings,” Istvan said. “Maybe we can get along with nothing more than a king, too.”

“But-” Three shocked-sounding men began an automatic protest.

Istvan cut them off with a sharp chopping motion of his right hand. “We’d better be able to get along with nothing more than a king. How much good did Ekrekek Arpad do us? We lost the war, we lost Gyorvar-stars above, we might as well have had a goat-eating savage on the throne.”

Two of the soldiers at the window with him backed away, as if afraid he had some deadly, highly contagious disease. The third one, a corporal, said, “You’re right, by the stars.”

“I wonder what we’ll do now, and who the new Ekrekek or King or whatever he is of Gyongyos will be,” Istvan said, and then, with a shrug, “It probably won’t matter, not to the likes of us.”

“No,” said the underofficer who’d nodded-his name was Diosgyor. “Only thing that matters to us is whether they let us out.”

Captain Petofi strode into the barracks hall in time to hear that. “We’ll need to be very lucky to get away,” he said.