Out of the Darkness

Bembo turned. There gesturing at him stood a skinny old Kuusaman with a few little wisps of white hair sprouting from his chin. He wore greenish-gray Kuusaman uniform, with a prominent badge that had to be a mage’s emblem. “What do you want, uh, sir?” Bembo asked cautiously.

“I already told you what I wanted,” the Kuusaman said in his almost unaccented Algarvian. “I want you to come here. I have some questions for you, and I expect to get answers.” I’ll turn you into a leech if I don’t, lay behind his words.

“I’m coming,” Bembo said, and made his slow way over to the mage. Refusing didn’t cross his mind, not because of the implied threat but simply because one did as this man said first and then wondered why afterwards, if at all. Still, Bembo was not easily overawed, and had his own full measure of Algarvian cheekiness. He asked a question of his own: “Who are you, old-timer?”

“Ilmarinen,” the mage answered. “Now you know as much as you did before.” He eyed Bembo. Bembo didn’t like the way he did it; it seemed as if Ilmarinen were looking right into his soul. And maybe the mage was, for the next thing he said, in tones of genuine curiosity, was, “How could you?”

“Uh, how could I what, sir?” Bembo asked.

“Round up Kaunians and send them off to what you knew was death and then go back to your bed and sleep at night,” the Kuusaman mage answered.

“How did you know that? I mean, I never-” But Bembo’s denial faltered. Ilmarinen would know if he lied. He was grimly certain of that. And so, instead of denying, he evaded: “I saved some, too, by the powers above. Plenty of my pals didn’t.”

Ilmarinen looked into him again. Grudgingly, the mage nodded. “So you did-a handful, and usually for favors. But you did, and I cannot deny it. A tiny weight in the other pan of the scales. Now answer what I asked before-what of all those you did not save?”

Bembo had spent years not thinking about that. He didn’t want to think about it now. Under Ilmarinen’s eye, though, he had no choice. At last, he mumbled, “The people set over me told me what to do, and I went and did it. They were the ones who were supposed to know what was going on, not me. And what else could I have done?”

Ilmarinen started to spit into his face. Bembo was sure of it. At the last instant, the mage checked himself. “A tiny weight of truth there, too,” he said, and spat at Bembo’s feet instead, then turned and walked away.

“Hey! You can’t-” Bembo broke off as a sense of just how narrow his escape had been flowed through him. The last thing in all the world he wanted was for that terrible old Kuusaman wizard to come back and look into his eyes again.

As soon as Istvan walked into the barracks, he knew he was in trouble. All eyes swung his way. Somebody got up and closed the barracks door behind him. “Well, well,” somebody else said, “if it isn’t the Kuusamans’ little pet goat.”

“Maaa! Maaa!” somebody else said shrilly. Several of his countrymen got off their cots and came toward him, hands bunching into fists.

Fear chilled him. Men occasionally got stomped or beaten to death here in the captives’ camp on Obuda. Once in a while, the Kuusaman guards found out who did it and punished them. More often than not, though, they didn’t. That sort of fate looked to be about to befall him.

He didn’t turn and run. That wasn’t so much because he came from a warrior race as because he felt sure more Gyongyosians were closing in behind him. Instead, he drew himself up very straight. “I have kept my honor,” he said. “The stars shine on my spirit, and they know I have kept my honor.”

“Liar,” three men said together.

“Maaa! Maaa!” That hateful, mocking goat-bleat rang out again.

“I am no liar,” Istvan declared. “Come on, all of you. I will fight you one at a time till I can fight no more. I will say nothing to the guards about what happened. By the stars, I swear it. Or show yourselves goat-eating cowards and mob me all at once.”

They hesitated. He hadn’t been sure he would get even that much. Then a burly man stepped out of the group and advanced on him, saying, “My fists and feet are better than you deserve.”

Istvan didn’t answer. He just waited. The other captive was bigger than he, and looked to know what he was doing. The fellow surged forward, head down, fists churning. Istvan blocked a blow with his arm, struck a stomach hard as oak, took a boot in the hip instead of in the crotch, and also lashed out with his foot. A buffet to the side of the head made him see stars that had nothing to do with the ones he reverenced. He grabbed his foe and threw him to the floor. The other captive tripped him on the way down.

But Istvan was the one who got up. He spat red on the floor. “Who’s next?” he said, squinting a little because his left eye was half swollen shut.

Another Gyongyosian strode toward him. He won that fight, too, and waved for a third challenger. By then, every part of him hurt. He didn’t think he would win the third fight, and he didn’t. The other captive thumped his head against the floor, once, twice. . That was the last thing he remembered.

They could have killed him after he was out. When he woke up again, he rather wished they had. They’d kicked him around some. He could feel that. But it was almost lost in the thudding, nauseating pain in his head. He’d had his wits scrambled for him, sure as sure. He had trouble remembering where he was and even who he was. He did remember how three other captives in the barracks had got pretty good sets of lumps of their own, though. That gave him a certain small satisfaction, when he wasn’t hoping his own head would fall off.

Corporal Kun walked into the barracks perhaps half an hour after Istvan came to. He took one look at Istvan and realized what must have happened to him. He had time for one horrified yelp before somebody said, “All right, squealer-your turn now.” The captives fell on him and beat him bloody, but he was still breathing when they stopped. Maybe Istvan had won enough respect to keep them from wanting to kill his comrade any more.

At the roll call that evening, the Kuusaman guards stared at Istvan. “What you to do?” one of them asked.

“Nothing,” he said stolidly. Where he had trouble recalling his name, he did remember the oath he’d sworn. The guards eyed Kun. He didn’t look quite so bad as Istvan-and, somehow, he’d managed to keep his spectacles from shattering- but he was no beauty. Neither were the men who’d fought Istvan one after the next.

The guards shook their heads and shrugged. They’d seen such things before. This time, at least, they weren’t carrying corpses from the captives’ camp.

A couple of days later, Istvan got summoned out of the camp for another interrogation with Lammi, the forensic sorcerer. By then, some of his bruises had turned truly spectacular colors. His ribs looked like a sunset. His face was no bargain, either. When he made his way into Lammi’s tent-ducking through the flap hurt, too-the mage’s jaw dropped. “By the stars!” she exclaimed in her good Gyongyosian. “What happened to you?”

No matter how well she spoke his language, Istvan didn’t like to hear her use such oaths-what regard would the stars have for a foreigner like her? He answered as he’d answered the guard: “Nothing.”

Lammi shook her head. “A little more nothing like that and they would lay you on a pyre. Now-tell me at once what happened to you.”

“Nothing,” Istvan repeated.

“You are a stubborn man. I have seen that,” she said. “But you know I have ways to get answers from you.”

“Nothing happened,” Istvan said. As he’d expected, his command of his senses disappeared. Lammi might have miscalculated there. Taking away his senses took away his pain, too, the first relief he’d had from it since the fights. And she’d robbed him often enough, he was starting to get used to it. He didn’t mistake her voice for that of the stars any more.

Presently, she brought him back to himself. “You are a very stubborn man,” she said.

“Thank you,” he answered, — which made her blink.

She needed a moment to rally. “I think,” she said, “we would do well not to send you back to your barracks.” She picked up a crystal and spoke into it in Kuusaman, which Istvan didn’t understand. Whoever was on the other end of the etheric connection answered in the same language. The crystal flared, then went inert. Lammi looked back to Istvan. “Corporal Kun, it seems, is also sporting bruises. How did that happen?”

“I don’t know,” he answered, and waited to go back to the unworld of no sight, no hearing, no smell, no taste, no touch. He looked forward to losing the sense of touch once more: indeed he did.

Lammi made an exasperated noise. “How can we find and punish the men who beat you if you will not tell us