Through the Darkness

“Aye.” Skarnu hauled himself to his feet. The first few steps he took, out to the barn door, he stumbled like a drunken man. Then the cold rain hit him in the face. That woke him up, and sobered him up, in a hurry. “Where are we going?” he asked as he followed Maironiu away from the farm.

“Like I told you, I know somebody,” Maironiu replied. “You don’t really want a name, do you?” Skarnu considered, then shook his head. Maironiu grunted approval. “All right, then. Once you’re out of this part of the kingdom, you should be pretty safe again, eh?”

“I suppose so.” Skarnu kept looking back over his shoulder, not toward Maironiu’s farm but toward Merkela’s. Old Gedominu’s place, he thought. Everything in the world that mattered to him was there, and he couldn’t go back, not if he wanted to live. Cursing under his breath, he squelched after Maironiu.

Sixteen

Sergeant Pesaro glared at the constables lined up before him. Bembo looked back steadfastly, holding out a shield of burnished innocence to cover up whatever he might have done to rouse Pesaro’s anger. But Pesaro wasn’t angry at him. The sergeant seemed angry at the whole world. “Boys, we’ve got ourselves a problem,” he declared.

“Our problem is whatever’s eating him,” Bembo whispered to Oraste. The other constable grunted and nodded.

Pesaro pointed to a Forthwegian in a knee-length tunic walking past the barracks. “D’you see that bastard?” he said. “D’you see him?”

“Aye, Sergeant,” the constables chorused dutifully. Bembo made sure his voice was a loud part of that chorus.

Sergeant Pesaro kept right on pointing at the stocky, hook-nosed, black-bearded man. “You see him, eh? Well, all right-how do you know he’s not a stinking Kaunian?”

“Because he doesn’t look like a Kaunian, Sergeant,” Bembo said, and then, under his breath to Oraste, “Because we’re not bloody idiots, Sergeant.” Oraste grunted again.

But Pesaro was unappeased. “Do you know what those lousy blonds have gone and done? Do you? I’ll bloody well tell you what they’ve done. They’ve found themselves a magic that lets ‘em look like Forthwegians, that’s what. How are we supposed to tell who’s a stinking Kaunian snake in the grass if we can’t tell who’s a stinking Kaunian snake in the grass?”

Bembo’s head started to ache. If that Forthwegian really was a Kaunian- if you couldn’t tell who was who by looking-how in blazes were you supposed to keep the blonds in their own district?

Somebody stuck up a hand. Pesaro pointed to him, as if relieved not to be pointing at the Forthwegian-if he was a Forthwegian-anymore. The constable asked, “Can they make themselves look like us, too, or only like Forthwegians?”

“That’s a good question,” Pesaro said. “I don’t have a good answer for it. All I got told about was Kaunians looking like Forthwegians.”

Bembo stuck his hand in the air. “How do we know ‘em if we do find any? And what do we do if we catch one?”

“The way you know is, snip off some hair. If it turns blond once it’s cut, you’ve caught yourself a Kaunian. If you catch one, you take the bugger to the caravan depot and ship his arse west. If he’s a she, you can do whatever else you want first. Nobody’ll say boo. We’ve got to stop this.”

“Pretty miserable business, all right,” Bembo said. “The blonds don’t want to go west, so they stop looking like blonds. That’s not playing fair.”

“Too cursed right it isn’t.” Pesaro didn’t notice the joke. “If we’re going to lick the Unkerlanters, we need Kaunians. We can’t let ‘em slip out from between our fingers like snot. And if you nail the whoreson who came up with this magic, you can ask for the moon. They’d probably give it to you. Any more questions? No? Get your backsides out there and catch those buggers.”

He didn’t say how. Then Oraste raised his hand. Pesaro looked at him in some surprise; Oraste didn’t usually bother with questions. But when the sergeant nodded his way, he came up with a good one: “What shall we do, take along manicure scissors to snip hair with?”

“If you’ve got ‘em, why not?” Pesaro answered. “It’s a better idea than people with fancier badges than yours have come up with, I’ll tell you that. But listen-don’t spend all your time checking the prettiest girls. We want the bastards with beards, too. They’re likely to be more dangerous. All right? Go on.”

Off the constables went. Oraste asked Bembo, “You have a little scissors?”

“Of course I do.” Bembo was as vain of his person as most Algarvians. “How am I supposed to keep my mustaches and imperial in proper trim without one?”

“You could gnaw ‘em,” Oraste said helpfully. “Or you could let ‘em grow out thick and bushy all over your face, the way the Forthwegians do.”

“Thank you, but no thank you,” Bembo replied with dignity. “If I want fur, I’ll buy a ruff.” He pointed to the first reasonably good-looking Forthwegian girl he saw and called out, “You there! Aye, you. Stop.”

She did, and asked, “What do you want with me?” in pretty good Algarvian.

Bembo took the small scissors from his belt pouch. “I want a little lock of your hair, sweetheart, to make sure you’re not a Kaunian in disguise.”

“What will you do with it afterwards?” she asked in some alarm. “Make nasty magic against me?” She started to shrink away.

A fat lot of good our sorcery s done in Unkerlant, Bembo thought sourly, but even the Forthwegians are afraid of it. “No, no, no, by the powers above!” he exclaimed. “I’ll give it back to you, every single hair. You can dispose of it.”

She eyed him, plainly trying to decide whether he was telling the truth. At last, grimacing, she nodded. Bembo came up to her, stroked her cheek on the pretext of brushing the hair back from it, and snipped a lock. The hair he’d cut stayed dark. He handed it back to the girl, as he’d promised. She put it in her belt pouch and went off with her proud nose in the air.

“You see, darling?” Bembo called after her. “I keep my word.” She kept walking.

“Nice try, lover boy,” Oraste said. Bembo stuck his nose in the air.

They tramped on through the gray, battered, sorry-looking streets of Gromheort. Every so often, they would stop somebody and cut off a lock of hair. Explaining what they wanted was a lot harder when the people they stopped didn’t speak Algarvian. Trying to explain in Kaunian was hard for Bembo, to say nothing of the irony he couldn’t help feeling while using that language to search for sorcerously disguised blonds. “We should have learned some Forthwegian,” he told Oraste.

His partner shook his head. “All those other languages are just a bunch of grunting noises, anybody wants to know what I think. These whoresons don’t want to understand Algarvian, they’ll understand a club smacked into the side of their pot, they will. And you can take that to the bank.”

“I like the way you think,” Bembo said, halfway between mocking admiration and the genuine article. “Nothing’s ever hard for you, is it?”

By way of reply, Oraste grabbed his crotch. Bembo threw back his head and laughed. He couldn’t help himself. He and Oraste kept on prowling, kept on snipping, and caught not a single camouflaged Kaunian.

When they got back to the barracks at the end of their shift, though, Bembo had an inspiration. He went up to Pesaro and said, “What are all the crazy buggers in this whole stinking kingdom doing this time of year?”

“Driving me daft,” Pesaro said, giving him a sour look. Nobody from his squad of constables had come up with any Kaunians, and he wasn’t very happy about that.

Bembo refused to let himself get too annoyed. He said, “They’re all going out into the country to hunt fornicating mushrooms, that’s what. The blonds are as wild for those nasty things as the real Forthwegians are. If the gate guards checked everybody who came in and went out. .”

Slowly, a smile replaced the glower on Pesaro’s plump face. “Well, curse me!” he exclaimed. “There, do you see? You’re not as foolish as you look. Who would have believed it?”

“I’ve had good ideas before,” Bembo protested indignantly.