Through the Darkness

Bembo took off his hat, fanned himself with it, and scratched his head. “How do you figure that?”

“Why would a soldier in Plegmund’s Brigade brawl with his kin?” Oraste asked, and provided his own answer: “Maybe on account of they’re Kaunian-lovers, and that makes him want to heave. We already know the old blond’s granddaughter ran off with a Forthwegian, right? Hangs together pretty good, you ask me.”

“Well, I’ll be a son of a whore,” Bembo said, staring at his partner as if he’d never seen him before. “That Forthwegian looked like he had money, too. He’d have to have money, or he couldn’t afford to live in this part of town. If you’re right, we can shake him down for a bundle.”

Oraste grunted. “Even if I’m wrong, we can shake him down for a bundle. He’s not going to want that story spreading no matter what.”

“That’s true.” Bembo’s head bobbed up and down in eager agreement. “Let’s go track down that murder he was talking about it. Somebody’ll know everything there is to know about it, and that’ll tell us who he is and how much he’s liable to have.” He grinned. “Constabulary work at its finest.” And so it was. That he’d be using it to fatten his belt pouch, not to run down some desperate criminal, bothered him not at all.

Once he and Oraste started asking questions back at the barracks, they got answers in short order. The only trouble was, Bembo didn’t much like the answers they got. Neither did Oraste. “You’re so cursed smart,” he said with a fine curl of the lip. “Sounds like this Hestan bugger’s already paying off everybody and his mother. We can’t touch him, not unless we want half the Algarvian bigwigs in town landing on our backs.”

“How was I supposed to know?” Bembo struck a pose of melodramatic innocence. “Besides, this was your brainstorm, not mine, so why are you blaming me?”

“Why not?” Oraste retorted. “You’re handy.” Bembo started to make a rude suggestion, but held his tongue instead. For one thing, he was nervous about getting Oraste too angry. And, for another, his partner had a point- blaming whoever looked handy was also constabulary work at its finest.

Vanai stared out the window of her flat and worried. Down in the street, Forthwegian rioters hurled rocks and bricks and anything else they could lay their hands on at an outnumbered band of Algarvian constables. A constable went down, clutching at his bleeding head. His pals wasted no time after that, but started blazing into the crowd.

Screams rose. The Forthwegians scattered, leaving wounded men writhing on the cobblestones and one woman who wasn’t moving at all. Before long, the rioters would attack some other Algarvians somewhere else.

“And I hope they get some more of them, too,” Vanai muttered. But that wasn’t why she worried. Ealstan had left the flat to cast accounts bright and early in the morning. This latest round of riots had broken out a couple of hours later. Vanai had no idea why. Maybe the Algarvians had committed another outrage. Maybe, too, the long, hot summer days were making the people of Eoforwic irritable. Whatever the cause-if there was a cause-how was Ealstan supposed to get home through the chaos?

As always when things went wrong, Vanai wondered, What would I do without Ealstan? She depended on him far more than she ever had on Brivibas. She also cared for him far more than she’d cared for her grandfather. If Brivibas had fallen over dead one morning, she could easily have gone on with her life. Without Ealstan …

How could I even go out and buy food? How could I make money to buy food? That second question, unfortunately, had an obvious answer. Having sold, or rather traded, her body to keep her grandfather out of a labor gang, she couldn’t dismiss the notion of prostituting herself out of hand. But if the redheads caught her and flung her into the tiny Kaunian quarter or simply shipped her west, even that wouldn’t do her any good.

“Curfew!” an Algarvian shouted in Forthwegian down below. “Sunset curfew! Anyone on streets after sunsetting, we blazing!” He walked along, then shouted his warning-threat? promise? — again.

Ealstan hadn’t come back to the flat by the time the sun went down. Dully, mechanically, Vanai went through the motions of getting supper ready. She made enough for two. She always did. Then she lowered the fire in the stove to next to nothing, put some extra water in the stew to keep it from drying out, and settled down to wait.

Without looking to see what she grabbed, she pulled a book out of one of the cases in the front room. When she found she was holding You Too Can Be a Mage, she made a horrible face and started to thrust it back onto the shelf. If its spell had been worth anything, she could have made herself look like a Forthwegian. Then she wouldn’t have had to worry about going out on the street.

But instead of putting away the book, she carried it over to the sofa and sat down. She opened it to the spell that had betrayed her. Most of it still looked as if it should have worked. That part that had gone wrong was plainly a botched translation from Kaunian into Forthwegian.

“All right, then,” she said under her breath. “I know what it’s supposed to do. To do that, how should it have read in Kaunian?” She was using that language; it was hers-where it obviously wasn’t the author’s. If she could reconstruct the original, maybe she could do her own translation into Forthwegian.

She decided to try. Whether she could or not, it would help keep her from thinking-too much-about where Ealstan might be. She quickly realized she couldn’t get away with rebuilding just the garbled section. She would have to start from the beginning if she was ever going to get anywhere.

She’d just reached the part that had brought her to grief on trying the spell when she heard the knock she’d been waiting for, the knock she’d feared she wouldn’t hear again. She sprang up from the sofa, sending You Too Can Be a Mage flying one way and her translation another. Only when she reached for the bar on the door did she discover she was still holding her pen.

“Where have you been?” she exclaimed as Ealstan walked into the flat. Because of her translating, she spoke in Kaunian, not the Forthwegian they used more often. “Are you all right?”

“I am fine,” Ealstan answered, also in Kaunian. “I am tired and hungry and thirsty, but I am fine. I had to move carefully, to stay away from trouble and also to stay away from the redheaded barbarians.” He brought that phrase out with considerable relish.

“Powers above, I’m so glad to hear it,” Vanai said. “Come on, sit down, and I’ll get you supper.” Her own belly rumbled, reminding her she hadn’t eaten anything, either. She took the stew off the fire. It wasn’t what it would have been had Ealstan got home on time, but she didn’t care. She poured big cups of rough red wine for both of them.

“This is all splendid. Thank you,” Ealstan said. When he spoke Kaunian, he did so with a slow seriousness that made everything he said more earnest, more important, than it would have in casual Forthwegian. Only a starving man would have called the overcooked stew splendid in any language, but, by the way he shoveled it down, he came pretty close.

“Do you know what made things burst this time?” Vanai asked.

Ealstan shook his head. “I heard four different tales as I was going through the streets. One person says one thing, another something else.” He got all his case endings right there, and grinned in modest triumph.

“The Algarvians are blazing to kill out there,” Vanai said. “I saw them. I was frightened for you.”

“I was a little frightened myself, once or twice,” Ealstan said-no small admission from him. “I took a long time coming home because I did not want to run into the redheads. I already told you that.” Ealstan hesitated, then added, “I saw several bodies in the street.”

“There was one right outside this block of flats-a woman,” Vanai said, “and some wounded men, too.”

“That woman’s body is gone. I saw others.” Ealstan changed the subject, and changed languages with it: “What were you doing there when I got home?”

“Trying to make sense out of You Too Can Be a Mage.” Vanai switched to Forthwegian, too. “I was seeing if I could figure out where that idiot went wrong in translating his transformation spell out of Kaunian and into Forthwegian. If I can figure out how the Kaunian really ran, I can do a better job of turning it back into Forthwegian.”

“Why bother?” Ealstan asked. “If you’re sure you’ve got the Kaunian right, leave it alone and use it. I guess the next question is, how sure are you?”

“Pretty sure,” Vanai said, and felt the corners of her mouth turn down.

Ealstan frowned, too. “You can get into all sorts of trouble using a spell you’re pretty sure is good. Last time, you made me look Kaunian instead of doing anything to yourself. We don’t want that to happen again, and we don’t