A redhead dashed up to Mezentio, crying, “Your Majesty! Your Majesty! The whoresons are inside! We have some barricades in the corridors, but powers above only know how long they’ll hold.” Crashes and more screams said one of them had just gone down.
“All over,” Mezentio said, his voice soft and sad. “We came so close, but it’s all over. We weren’t strong enough. We all deserve to go into the fire.” He bowed to Sidroc. “Will you do the honors?” As Sidroc numbly nodded, the king spoke to the messenger: “Know that this man slays me at my request. Let him be rewarded for it, and in no way punished. Do you understand?”
“Aye, your Majesty.” Tears ran down the redhead’s face.
Mezentio bowed to Sidroc again. “Do what needs doing. Try to blaze true, to make it as quick as you can.” He closed his eyes and waited.
Sidroc did it. He’d done it for wounded comrades more than once before. Seeing King Mezentio slump over dead raised no special horror in him. It was as if he had nothing at all left inside. Ceorl set a hand on his shoulder. “Powers above,” the ruffian whispered.
Fresh shouts came from the back of the palace, these much closer. Sidroc got to his feet. “Come on,” he said savagely. “There’s still some fighting left.” As he and the men he led ran forward, panic-stricken Algarvians ran back toward them. “Cowards!” he shouted, and ran on. With nothing left inside him, what did he have to lose?
A beam took him in the side as he came round a corner. He went down, but kept blazing. Another beam bit, this one deep. He tasted blood in his mouth as his stick slipped from fingers that would not hold it. He was still moving a little when an Unkerlanter lieutenant paused, saw he wasn’t quite dead, and put a beam through his temple before charging on.
Though he got better food and better lodging in his new quarters outside the main captives’ camp on Obuda, Sergeant Istvan missed the company of his fellow Gyongyosians. When he grumbled about that to Lammi, the Kuusaman forensic mage raised a thin black eyebrow. “But they beat you,” she said. “And they would do it again if they had the chance.”
Istvan’s broad shoulders went up and down in a shrug. “I know. But they’re my own folk even so. You Kuusamans”-he shrugged again-”I don’t think the stars shine on you.”
One of his own people would have been furious at such an insult. Lammi only shrugged in her turn, which proved how foreign and alien she was. She knew Gyongyosian customs well, but they didn’t bind her. That made her more alarming to him, not less. She said, “I am willing to take my chances on it.”
Few, if any, Gyongyosians would have been so willing. Lammi didn’t talk about the scar on Istvan’s left hand, or about what it meant. Had his fellow captives known what it meant, they would have done worse to him than they would have for mere suspected treason. What could make treason
His captors let him see Kun now and then. Each of them was wary with the other, for each knew the other had, however unwillingly, confessed to the abomination they’d both committed. Kun seemed more content away from his countrymen than Istvan did. “They’re a pack of fools, most of them,” he said loftily.
“Oh, and you’re not?” Istvan said.
“Not that kind, anyhow,” the former mage’s apprentice replied. “I got sick of men from mountain valleys long before those louts set on me.”
“Proves my point, wouldn’t you say?” Kun grinned at Istvan’s flabbergasted expression. “And you, my dear fellow, you put up with me far better than most.”
Istvan thought about that for a little while. He said, “We’ve been through too much together. If the two of us don’t put up with each other, no one ever will.”
Kun grimaced. “And if that isn’t a judgment on both of us, stars go dark if I know what would be.”
A couple of days after that, Lammi summoned both of them. That surprised Istvan. They’d never been questioned together. Nor were they this time. The Kuusaman mage spoke briskly: “How would the two of you like to be free to return to your own land?”
“Don’t play with us,” Istvan said roughly. “That isn’t going to happen, and you know it. We’re here till the war is over.”
But Lammi shook her head. “Not necessarily. And I ask no treason of you. By the stars, I do not. All I ask is that you go on board ship, go back to the waters off Becsehely, watch a certain something, and then, when you are released, tell your own superiors exactly what you saw.” She held up a hand to forestall questions. “You would not be the only men doing this-far from it.”
“Why us?” Kun asked.
“Because you are in a certain amount of difficulty here,” Lammi answered, “and because you have shown more than a certain amount of wit. We feel confident you would tell those set above you the truth.”
“Why shouldn’t we just keep quiet?” Istvan asked. “And what’s off Becsehely?” They both knew the miserable little island east of Obuda better than they wanted to; they’d been captured there.
Lammi said, “You will see what is off, and on, Becsehely. And you will, I think, find good reason for telling the truth as you see it. Of course, if you would rather stay here on Obuda. .”
“I’ll go,” Istvan said. Kun hesitated, but only briefly.
Lammi smiled. “I thought that might prove persuasive. Pack whatever gear you have. The ley-line cruiser will be here tomorrow at first light.”
Istvan had a duffel bag ready in good time. No captive had much in the way of belongings. Kun’s duffel was heavier, but Kun cared more about books than Istvan ever had. A carriage took both of them to the harbor, which had been repaired since Captain Frigyes’ bloodthirsty magic did its work. The cruiser was long and sleek and deadly, somehow more dangerous-looking than a Gyongyosian ship. “When they boarded the vessel, a Kuusaman military clerk checked their names off a list. A fellow in greenish Kuusaman naval uniform escorted them to a cabin.
“You two stay here,” the Kuusaman said in Gyongyosian. Like most of his countrymen who spoke the language, he used the plural rather than the dual.
The cabin was big enough to boast two cots side by side. Istvan and Kun wouldn’t even have to quarrel over who got the top bunk. Istvan said, “If this is what the slanteyes do for captives, they must live mighty soft themselves.”
“They do,” Kun said. “They’re richer than we are. They’ve had modern magecraft longer than we have, and they do more with it than we do.”
“But we are the warrior race,” Kun said with pride in his countrymen still diminished only a little from what he’d felt when summoned into Ekrekek Arpad’s service.
Kun sighed. “I suppose I’d waste my time asking you how much good that’s done us or who’s winning the war, and so I won’t.”
By “not asking” in that particular way, of course, he put the question all the more effectively. Istvan chewed on it for some little while. He liked the flavors of none of the answers he found. To keep from showing how little he liked them, he peered out the porthole. To his surprise, Obuda was already receding in the distance. “We’re moving!” he exclaimed.
“Well, what if we are?” Kun seemed determined to stay contrary. “Stars above, this is a ley-line ship. Did you expect to hear sails flutter and the wind howl in the rigging? Use your head before you use your mouth.”
“Oh, go bugger a goat,” Istvan said. Coming from a valley far back in the mountains, he knew little about ships, ley-line or otherwise. The only times he’d been aboard them were on journeys across the Bothnian Ocean during the war. He’d never been in a two-man cabin then, but down in the hold with a lot of other soldiers, most of whom were just as ignorant of the sea and its ways as he was.
He did remember the meal gong. Either the Kuusamans had the same signal or they’d got a gong so they could use something with which their Gyongyosian passengers were familiar. Armed Kuusamans directed Istvan and Kun and the other Gyongyosians who emerged from cabins along the corridor to the iron chamber where they would eat. A large sign on the wall declared, WE DO NOT SERVE GOAT ABOARD THIS SHIP. YOU MAY EAT FREELY, WITH NO FEAR OF POLLUTION. Istvan hoped the slanteyes were telling the truth. If they weren’t. . The scar on his hand throbbed. He’d already learned more about ritual pollution and the way it ate at a man than he’d ever wanted to know.
Perhaps three dozen Gyongyosians queued up to take trays and utensils and bowls of the stew a couple of
