Out of the Darkness

sanatorium. He’d expected nothing else; wounded people kept flooding into the place. If the healers didn’t need to keep an eye on him, they did need the cot he was filling.

He had no flat, of course, not any more. But finding a new one wasn’t hard, not when he had silver to spend. And he did; he hadn’t used much of his salary in all the time he’d been in Forthweg, and he’d done pretty well for himself shaking down the locals. He would have landed a place even sooner than he did if he hadn’t insisted on living on the ground floor.

“Everybody wants those flats,” a landlord with none to let told him. “Fast and easy to get to the cellar when the eggs start falling.”

“I can’t go anywhere fast and easy,” Bembo said. Using crutches made it harder for him to gesture while he talked, and an Algarvian who couldn’t talk with his hands was hardly alive. “You think I want to go up and down stairs with these things?”

The landlord shrugged. “Sorry, pal. I can’t give you what I ain’t got.”

Bembo went off in a huff. He finally got a flat the next morning. Then he took a ley-line caravan over to his old constabulary station to find out where Saffa was staying these days. That took some doing; a lot of the constables there didn’t remember him and didn’t want to tell him anything. He finally got what he needed from Frontino, the warder at the gaol.

“Read any spicy romances lately?” Bembo asked him.

Frontino reached into his desk. “I’ve got a good one right here, matter of fact.” The romance, called Empress’ Passion, certainly looked good to Bembo. The cover showed a naked Kaunian woman, presumably the Empress in question, with her legs wrapped around an ancient Algarvic warrior with an improbable set of muscles. “The Kaunian Emperor, see, is going to sacrifice a bunch of Algarvian captives, till this guy”-Frontino tapped the warrior-”horns the Empress into talking him out of it. Then the captives get free and the blood really spills. I’m done-want to borrow it? The Empress, she screws up a storm.” He held the book out to Bembo.

Almost to his own surprise, Bembo shook his head. “That whole business of sacrificing …” He looked around to make sure nobody but Frontino could hear him. “Everything they say about the Kaunians in Forthweg. .”

“Pack of lies,” the warder said. “Enemy dragons have been dropping little broadsheets about it, so it has to be a pack of lies. Stands to reason.”

But Bembo shook his head again. “It’s all true, Frontino. Everything everybody says is true, and nobody says even a quarter of what all really went on. I ought to know. I was fornicating there, remember.”

Frontino didn’t believe him. He could see as much. He thought about arguing. He thought about breaking one of his crutches over the warder’s head, too, to let in a little sense. But that would have just landed him in the gaol. Muttering under his breath, he made his slow, hitching way out of the constabulary station and back to the ley-line caravan stop.

The block of flats next to Saffa’s and one across the street were only piles of wreckage. Bembo had to go up three flights of stairs to get to her flat. He was puffing and sweating when he finally got there. A baby wailed behind the door he knocked on.

When Saffa opened it, she looked harried-maybe her brat had been crying for a while. “Oh,” she said. “You.”

He didn’t quite know how to take that. “Hello, Saffa. I’m on my feet- sort of.”

“Hello, Bembo.” Her smile still had some of the sour tang he remembered. So did her words: “I’m glad to see you-sort of.”

“Will you go to supper with me tomorrow night?” he asked, as if the whole Derlavaian War, including his broken leg, had never happened.

“No,” she said. But she wasn’t spitting in his eye, as she’d warned she might, for she went on, “I haven’t got anyone to watch my son then. But three nights from now, my sister isn’t working. I’ll go then.”

“All right,” Bembo said. “Pick an eatery, and we’ll go there. I’ve been away so long, I don’t know what’s good these days, or even what’s standing.” He’d got around by night in Gromheort and Eoforwic with no lights showing; he expected he could manage in his own home town.

But he turned out to be wrong. Tricarico fell to the Kuusamans two days later.

He’d heard that the enemy was coming down out of the Bradano Mountains, of course. The news sheets couldn’t very well deny that. But they did their best to claim the slanteyes would never cross the river, would never threaten the city. Bembo probably should have had more doubts than he did; he’d seen such optimistic twaddle in Forthweg, too. But the assault on Tricarico took him by surprise.

So did the feeble resistance his own countrymen put up inside the city. That left him half relieved-he had, after all, been in the middle of a city convulsed by fighting-and half ashamed. “Why aren’t you giving them a battle?” he called to a squad of soldiers heading west, plainly intending to leave Tricarico.

“Why? I’ll tell you why, porky,” one of the men answered. Bembo squawked indignantly, and with some reason; he’d lost much of the paunch he’d once carried. Ignoring him, the trooper went on, “We’re getting the blazes out on account of the slanteyes have already got men past this rotten place to north and south, and we don’t want to get stuck here, that’s why.”

From a military point of view, that made good enough sense. Out in the west, fighting against the Unkerlanters, all too many garrisons had stayed in their towns too long, and got cut off and destroyed. Gromheort, where Bembo was stationed before transferring to Eoforwic, was going through such a death agony now. But even so … “What are we supposed to do?”

“Best you can, pal,” the soldier answered. “That and thank the powers above it ain’t the Unkerlanters coming into town.” He trotted away, dodging craters in the street and jumping over or kicking aside bits of rubble nobody had bothered to clear away.

Had Bembo had two good legs, he would have kicked at rubble, too. As things were, he made his own slow way down the street. The trooper was right. The Kuusamans wouldn’t rape or massacre everyone they saw just for the sport of it. At least, Bembo hoped they wouldn’t. I’m going to find out, he realized.

He was back in his flat, with the shutters tightly drawn, when the Kuusamans did come into Tricarico. One of the windows in the flat had had glass in it when he rented the place; the landlord had tried to charge him more because of it. He’d laughed in the man’s face, asking, “How long do you expect it to last?” And he’d proved a good prophet, for an egg bursting not far away soon shattered the pane into tinkling shards. He’d had a demon of a time cleaning up afterwards, too. Trying to handle crutches and broom and dustpan was more an exercise in frustration than anything else.

But Bembo couldn’t stay in his flat forever, or even very long. He had to come out to look for something to eat. He’d never done much cooking for himself, even back when he’d been living in Tricarico. A constable with an eye for the main chance could get most of his meals from the eateries on his beat. In Forthweg, he’d done the same thing a lot of the time, and eaten in barracks like a soldier when he hadn’t. And, with crutches, he would have been as awkward in the kitchen as he had been chasing slivers of glass around the floor. Of course, he was pretty awkward in the kitchen without crutches, too.

A few eggs were still bursting inside Tricarico when he emerged from his block of flats. At first, he thought that meant the Kuusamans hadn’t yet come into the city after all. But then he saw several of them setting up sandbags so they could cover all sides of an intersection. They looked like runts; he was several inches taller than the biggest of them, and he wasn’t exceptionally tall by Algarvian standards. But they had sticks and they had the same sort of urgent, disciplined wariness he’d seen in Algarvian soldiers in Forthweg. Any civilians who tried trifling with them would be very sorry very fast. He was sure of that.

More eggs burst. He realized his retreating countrymen were tossing them at his home town. They didn’t care what happened to the people who lived in Tricarico as long as they killed or maimed a few Kuusamans. Bembo turned toward the west and scowled. See if I do anything for you any time soon, he thought, the you being either the departed soldiers or King Mezentio himself: even Bembo wasn’t quite sure which. It amounted to the same thing either way.

“You!” someone said sharply, and for a moment Bembo thought the word remained in his own mind, not the world outside him. But then the fellow who’d spoken went on: “Aye, you-the chubby fellow with the crutches. Come here.”