heroine.'
She answered in Kaunian, something she seldom did since taking on a Forthwegian seeming: 'If these were imperial times, I wouldn't need such sorcery.' Her voice was bleak.
Ealstan wished he could disagree with her. Since he couldn't, he did the next best thing: he kissed her again. 'Whether you are remembered or not, you are still a heroine,' he said, and had a demon of a time understanding why she suddenly started to weep.
Bembo cursed under his breath as he prowled through the streets of Gromheort. Oraste, his partner, didn't bother keeping his voice down. Gromheort lay in eastern Forthweg, not far from the border with Algarve, and a good many locals understood Algarvian. The constable kept cursing anyway.
'Miserable Kaunians,' he growled. 'Powers below eat them, every stinking one. They ought to have their throats cut, the filthy buggers, what with all the extra work they've piled on our backs.'
'Aye, curse them,' Bembo agreed. He was tubbier than he should have been, no braver than he had to be, and heartily disapproved of anything resembling work, especially work he'd have to do.
Oraste, for his part, disapproved of almost everything. 'They're liable to cost us the war, the lousy, stinking whoresons. How are we supposed to scoop 'em up and send 'em west when they start looking like everybody else in this fornicating kingdom? The way things are going over in Unkerlant, we need all the help we can get.'
'Aye,' Bembo repeated, but on a less certain note. The idea of rounding up Kaunians and sending them toward the battlefront to be killed made his stomach turn unhappy flipflops. He did it- what choice did he have but to obey the sergeants and officers set over him? -but he had trouble believing it was the right thing to do.
Oraste had no doubts. Oraste, as far as Bembo could see, never had any doubts about anything. He waved now, not the usual extravagant Algarvian gesture but a functional one, one that took in the street ahead and the people on it. 'Any of these bastards- any of 'em, by the powers above! -could be a Kaunian wrapped in magic cloaking. And what can we do about it? What can we do about it, I ask you?'
'Nothing much,' Bembo answered mournfully. 'If we start using Forthwegians the way we use the Kaunians here, this whole kingdom'll go up in smoke. We haven't got the men to hold it down, not if we want to go on fighting the Unkerlanters, too.'
'It's war,' Oraste said. 'You do what you have to do. If we need Forthwegians, we'll take 'em. We can sell it to the ones we don't take: if the Kaunians weren't wolves in sheep's clothing, we can say, we wouldn't have to do this. The Forthwegians'll buy it, or enough of 'em will. They hate the blonds as much as we do.'
'I suppose so.' Bembo didn't particularly hate anybody- save, perhaps, people who made him work more than he cared to. Those people included Sergeant Pesaro, his boss, as well as the miscreants he all too often failed to run to earth.
'Look at 'em!' Oraste waved again, this time with a sort of animal frustration. 'Any one of them could be a Kaunian. Any one, I tell you. You think I like the notion of those lousy blonds laughing at me? Not on your life, pal.' He folded his beefy hands into fists. When he didn't like something, his notion of what to do next was pound it to pieces.
And, whenever he got into that kind of mood, he'd sometimes lash out at his partner, too; he wasn't always fussy about whom or what he hurt, so long as he was hurting someone or something. To try to placate him, Bembo pointed to a man whose beard was going gray. 'There. That fellow's a genuine Forthwegian, no doubt about it.'
'How d'you know?' Brooding suspicion filled Oraste's voice.
'Don't you remember? He's the one who had a son disappear off to powers above know where, and his nephew murdered his other son. He couldn't get anybody to do anything about it, because the nephew was in Plegmund's Brigade.'
'Oh. Him. Aye.' The fire in Oraste's hazel eyes faded a little. 'Well, I can't say you're wrong- this time.'
Bembo swept off his plumed hat and bowed as deeply as his belly would permit. 'Your servant,' he said.
'My arse,' Oraste said. He pointed to the man with whom the assuredly genuine Forthwegian was speaking. 'How about him? You going to tell me you know for sure he's no Kaunian, too?'
'How can I do that?' Bembo asked reasonably as he and Oraste came up to the two men. The other fellow certainly looked like a Forthwegian: a white-haired, white-bearded, rather dissolute-seeming old Forthwegian. 'But what else is he likely to be? He's a blowhard, I'll tell you that.'
Sure enough, the old man was doing most of the talking, his companion mostly listening and then trying to get a word or two in edgewise. As Bembo and Oraste came up to them, the geezer waved his forefinger in the other man's face and spoke in impassioned Forthwegian. Bembo couldn't understand more than one word in four, but he knew an irate, hectoring tone when he heard one. The fellow the old man was talking to looked as if he wished he were elsewhere.
Oraste rolled his eyes. 'Blowhard, nothing. He's a stinking windbag, is what he is.'
'Aye, that's the truth.' Instead of walking past the windbag, Bembo slowed and cocked his head to one side, frowning and listening hard.
'Are you daft?' Oraste said. 'Come on.'
'Shut up.' Bembo was usually a little afraid of his partner, and wouldn't have dared speak to him like that most of the time. But a moment later he gave a decisive nod. 'It is. By the powers above, it is!'
'Is what?' Oraste asked.
Bembo started to point, then thought better of it. 'That old Forthwegian- he's not a Forthwegian, or I'll eat my club. Remember that noisy, smartmouthed old Kaunian whoreson we first ran into in Oyngestun? We've bumped into him a few times here in Gromheort, too.'
After another couple of paces, Oraste nodded. 'Aye, I do. He's the one with the good-looking granddaughter- or he said she was his granddaughter, anyway.'
'That's the one. And that's him,' Bembo said. 'I recognize his voice. Whatever magecraft he's using, it doesn't change that.'
Oraste took one more step, then spun on his heel. 'Let's snag the son of a whore.'
Had Bembo seen two constables bearing down on him, he would have made himself scarce. Maybe the sorcerously disguised Kaunian didn't see him and Oraste; the fellow was still doing his best to talk the other man's ear off. He looked absurdly astonished when the Algarvians laid hold of him. 'What is the meaning of this?' he demanded- in good Algarvian.
That made Bembo beam. That smartmouthed Kaunian spoke Algarvian- he was supposed to be some sort of scholar. Bembo said, 'You're under arrest on suspicion of being a Kaunian.'
'Do I look like a Kaunian?' the old man said.
'Not now,' Bembo answered. 'We'll take you back, throw you in a cell, and wait and see if the magic wears off. If you still look ugly this same way tomorrow, we'll turn you loose. How much you want to bet we don't have to?'
To his surprise, the other Forthwegian, the genuine Forthwegian, tapped his belt pouch. Coins rang in there. 'Gentlemen,' he said, also in fluent Algarvian, 'I'll make it worth your while if you forget you ever saw this fellow.'
'No.' Oraste spoke before Bembo could. Bembo, like a lot of Algarvians, didn't mind making some money on the side; his constable's salary didn't go very far. But he nodded now. He didn't want money. No, that wasn't quite true- he wanted money, but he wanted this old Kaunian's head more.
And so he, too, said, 'No. We're going to take this fellow in and deal with him.'
'You are making a serious mistake,' the old man said. 'I tell you, I am as much a Forthwegian as Hestan here.'
Hestan there didn't say another word. He didn't call the old man who looked like a Forthwegian a liar, but he didn't claim he was telling the truth, either. Oraste started hauling the fellow off toward Gromheort's gaol, which was more crowded now than it had been when Forthweg ruled the city.
'What have we got here?' an Algarvian gaoler asked when the constables frog-marched their prisoner into the building. 'You catch him filching somebody's false teeth?' He laughed at his own wit.
