Out of the Darkness

who they are?”

“What men?” Istvan said. The forensic sorcerer made another, louder, exasperated noise. With a shrug, Istvan went on, “I told you, nothing happened.”

“Aye, that is what you told me,” Lammi agreed. “And I am telling you once more, Sergeant, that, had a little more of such nothing happened, you would now be dead, and we would not be having this discussion.” Istvan shrugged again. She was probably-no, certainly-right. She glowered at him. “We will be removing you from the captives’ camp for your own protection. You do understand that?”

With one more shrug, Istvan answered, “You are the captors. I am the captive. You can do as you like with me. If you do too much, and word gets back to Gyongyos, your own captives will suffer.”

The Kuusaman mage drummed her fingers on her notepad. She muttered something in her own tongue, then translated it into Gyongyosian: “Very difficult, too.” Istvan inclined his head, as at another compliment. That made Lammi mutter again. When she returned to Gyongyosian once more, she said, “Very well, Sergeant. If you will not discuss this, you will not. Let us turn to something else, then.”

“You are the captor,” Istvan repeated.

“I do wonder,” Lammi murmured. Istvan understood the words, but not everything behind them. She gathered herself and went on, “You have a scar on your left hand, Sergeant.”

Istvan had been afraid in a physical sense of what the Kuusamans might do to him. Now, for the first time in the interrogation, he knew real terror. He had to force a one-word answer out through numb lips: “Aye.”

“Sergeant Kun, your comrade, has an identical scar,” Lammi continued.

“Does he?” Istvan said, shrugging yet again. “I hadn’t noticed.”

The world disappeared once more. Lammi, he remembered, knew when he lied. After some endless-but, happily, also painless-time, she allowed him to return to the sensible world. “I point out,” she said, “that one of the men who was slain in the unfortunate incident, a certain,”-she checked her notes-”a certain Szonyi, aye, had an identical scar, duly noted on his identity documents. He too was a comrade of yours.”

“He was,” Istvan said. He couldn’t very well deny it. Saying anything else- such as how much he missed his friend-would have just given Lammi another handle on him.

She waited for something more. When it didn’t come, she shrugged and said, “How do you explain these three identical scars, Sergeant?”

“We all got them at the same time in Unkerlant,” Istvan said. Again, he said no more. He fought against trembling. His heart pounded in his chest. He would sooner have gone through a dozen beatings than this.

Lammi peered at him through her spectacles. Try as he would to hide it, he feared she saw his agitation. “Why?” she asked softly.

She can tell when I lie. To Istvan, that was the most terrifying thought of all. Instead of lying, he said nothing at all. Whatever she chose to do to him would be better than a truthful answer to that question.

“Why?” Lammi asked once more. Istvan still did not answer. The inside of the tent was cool-the island of Obuda never got very warm, especially not in late winter-but sweat ran down his face. He could smell his own fear. He didn’t know if Lammi could, but she could hardly miss the sweat. Still softly, she asked, “Is it a scar of expiation?”

“I don’t know what that word means,” Istvan said.

She could tell when he gave her the truth, too. That didn’t do him much good, though. She simplified: “A scar, a wound, to wash away a sin?” Istvan still sat mute, which looked to be answer enough by itself. Lammi asked, “What sort of sin?”

“One I never meant to commit!” Istvan burst out. The Kuusaman mage just sat there, waiting. Again, he said no more. Again, it didn’t seem to matter. Lammi looked at him, looked through him, looked into his heart. She knows. By the stars, she knows, he thought, and despair overwhelmed even terror. A Kuusaman, a foreigner, knew he’d eaten goat. She knew what it meant, too. She knew altogether too much about Gyongyos and its ways. She owns me, he thought hopelessly.

If Lammi did, she didn’t seem anxious to take possession. “We will find you other housing, safer housing,” she said, and spoke to the guards in Kuusaman. They led Istvan out of the tent.

Likely not by coincidence, Kun came out of the other interrogation tent at just the same time. He walked toward Istvan as Istvan headed toward him. The guards didn’t interfere. Istvan looked at Kun’s battered face, and at the devastated expression on it, the same expression he wore himself. The two men embraced and burst into tears. No matter how bright the night sky might be, Istvan didn’t think the stars would ever shine on him again.

Very cautiously, Leudast stuck his head up from behind a shattered wall and peered across the Scamandro. He had reason for caution. The Algarvians had snipers on the east bank of the river, and they were very alert. A man who wasn’t careful would have a beam go in one ear and out the other.

True, eggs were bursting over there, but that wouldn’t make the redheads quit blazing. Leudast knew what sort of men he faced. They’d driven through Unkerlant to the outskirts of Cottbus. Had the war gone just a little differently..

“It’s a good thing there weren’t more of the whoresons,” he muttered.

“What’s that, Lieutenant?” asked Captain Dagaric, who’d taken over as regimental commander after Captain Drogden hadn’t been careful enough while raping an Algarvian woman. Dagaric had efficiency written all over him. He was a good soldier, in a cold-blooded way. Nobody would love him, but he wouldn’t throw men away out of stupidity, either. Given some of the things Leudast had seen, solid professionalism was nothing to sneeze at.

He repeated himself, adding, “Powers below eat ‘em.”

“They will.” Dagaric spoke with assurance. “We are going to hammer them flat when we cross the river. That will be the last fight, because we will take Trapani once we get rolling.”

“May it be so, sir,” Leudast said. “This war. . We had to win it. If we didn’t, they’d’ve held us down forever.”

“I only wish we could get rid of every last one of the buggers,” Dagaric said. “If we treated them the way they treated the Kaunians up in Forthweg, we really wouldn’t have to worry about Algarve for a long time to come.”

Leudast nodded. He didn’t think even King Swemmel would massacre all the redheads in the lands he was overrunning, but you never could tell with Swemmel. Any Unkerlanter would have said the same. And. . “We’ve had to use our own people the way the Algarvians used the Kaunians from Forthweg. Mezentio’s men deserve something extra to pay for that.”

“You bet they do,” Captain Dagaric said. “I expect they’ll get it, too.”

A weird wailing, laughing, gobbling noise came out of the east. Leudast grabbed for his stick. “What in blazes is that? Does it go with some new Algarvian magic?”

Dagaric pointed out to the Scamandro, where a big bird was swimming, its back checked in black and white, its beak a fish-catching spear. “No, it’s just a loon-and you’re another one, for letting the call spook you.”

“They must be birds of the south,” Leudast said. “They don’t live on any streams up near the village I come from.” More than half to himself, he added, “I wonder if anything’s left of the place these days.” Then he spoke to the regimental commander again: “And I don’t see how you can blame me for being jumpy about the fornicating redheads and their magecraft, sir. With all the weird new spells they’re throwing at us these days. .”

With a dismissive gesture, Dagaric said, “A drowning man thrashes his arms and flails. Whoreson still drowns, though. The Algarvians send these stupid spells of theirs at us before they find out what the magic can do, or even if it works at all. No wonder most of it goes sour.”

That made sense-up to a point. “Even the spells that maybe don’t do everything they’re supposed to can still hurt us,” Leudast said. “We’ve seen it.”

“They’d hurt us worse if the redheads really knew what they were doing,” Dagaric said. That made Leudast blink. Like most Unkerlanters, he took it almost for granted that the Algarvians were cleverer than his own folk. They’d proved their wit in Unkerlant too often for him to think anything else. But Dagaric stubbornly plowed ahead: “Think how much trouble they could cause if all their fancy magic really worked. It mostly doesn’t, though, and I’ll tell you why. A couple-three years ago, the redheads figured they could lick us with what they already had, and they didn’t worry about anything else. Then, when they started getting into trouble, that’s