grabbing skeleton hands.
Blond Valmierans in tunics and trousers trudged this way and that. From what Skarnu had seen, nobody in Ventspils did much more than trudge. He wondered if he could blame that gloom on the Algarvian occupation, or if life in a provincial town would have been bloody dull even before the invaders came. Had he lived his whole life in Ventspils, he suspected he would have been gloomy most of the time himself.
Up the street came a couple of Algarvian soldiers or constables. He didn't recognize them by their red hair; like a lot of his countrymen, they wore hats to fight the cold. He didn't even recognize them by their pleated kilts, though he soon noticed those. No, what set them apart was the way they moved. They didn't trudge. They strutted, heads up, shoulders back, chests out. They moved as if they had vital business to take care of and wanted everybody around them to know it.
'Algarvians,' Skarnu said with fine contempt. If they weren't the most self-important people on the face of the earth, he didn't know who was. He laughed, but not for long. Their pretensions would have been funnier if they hadn't dominated all the east of Derlavai.
And then they came up the stairs to his block of flats. When he saw that, he didn't hesitate for a moment. He grabbed a cloth cap, stuffed it down as low on his head as it would go, and left his flat, closing the door behind him as quietly as he could. His wool tunic would keep him warm for a while outside.
He hurried to the stairs and started down them. As he'd thought he would, he passed the Algarvians coming up. He didn't look at them; they didn't look at him. He'd gambled that they wouldn't. Their orders were probably something like, Arrest the man you find in flat 36. But there wouldn't be any man in flat 36 to arrest when they got there. If Skarnu hadn't seen them coming…
Vapor puffed from his mouth and nose as he opened the front door and went out onto the street. He was already hurrying up the sidewalk in the direction from which the redheads had come- a clever touch, he thought- when he realized he didn't know for a fact that they'd been after him. He laughed, though it wasn't funny. How likely that this block of flats held two men the Algarvians wanted badly enough to send their own after him instead of entrusting the job to Valmieran constables? Not very.
A youth waved a news sheet in his face. 'Algarvians smash Unkerlanter drive south of Durrwangen!' he cried. The news sheets, of course, printed only what King Mezentio's ministers wanted Valmiera to hear. They'd stopped talking about Sulingen, for instance, as soon as the battle there was lost. They made the victories they reported these days sound like splendid triumphs instead of the desperate defensive struggles they had to be.
Skarnu strode past the vendor without a word, without even shaking his head. He turned a corner and then another and another and another, picking right or left at random each time. If the Algarvians came bursting out of the block of flats hot on his trail, they wouldn't have an easy time following him. He chuckled. He didn't know himself where he was going, so why should the redheads?
That didn't stay funny long, though. He had to pause and get his bearings- not easy in Ventspils, since he didn't know the town well. In Priekule, he could have looked for the Kaunian Column of Victory. That would have told him where in the city he was… till the Algarvians knocked it down. The victory it celebrated was one the Kaunian Empire had won over the barbarous Algarvic tribes- a victory that still rankled the tribesmen's barbarous descendants more than a millennium and a half later.
Though he took longer than he should have, he finally did figure out where he was. Then he needed to figure out where to go. That had only one answer, really: the tavern called the Lion and the Mouse. But the answer wasn't so good, either. Were the Algarvians after him in particular, or were they trying to smash all the resistance in Ventspils? If the former, they might know nothing of the tavern. If the latter, they were liable to be waiting in force around or inside it.
He muttered under his breath. A woman passing by gave him a curious look. He stared back so stonily, she hurried on her way as if she'd never looked at him at all. Maybe she thought him a madman or a derelict. As long as she didn't think him one of the handful who kept the fight against Algarve alive, he cared nothing for her opinion.
I've got to go, he realized. The Lion and the Mouse was the only place where he could hope to meet other irregulars. They could find him somewhere else to stay or spirit him out of Ventspils altogether. Without them… Skarnu didn't want to think about that. One man alone was one man helpless.
He approached the tavern with all the caution he'd learned as a captain in the Valmieran army- before the Algarvians used dragons and behemoths to smash that army into isolated chunks and then beat it. He couldn't see anything that looked particularly dangerous around the place. He wished Raunu, his veteran sergeant, were still with him. Having been in the army as long as Skarnu was alive, Raunu knew far more about soldiering than Skarnu had learned in something under a year. But Skarnu was a marquis and Raunu the son of a sausage seller, so Skarnu had led the company of which they'd both been part.
After twice walking past the doorway to the Lion and the Mouse, Skarnu, the mouse, decided he had to put his head in the lion's mouth. Scowling, he walked into the tavern. The burly fellow behind the bar was a man he'd seen before- which meant nothing if the man was in bed with the Algarvians.
But there, at a table in the far corner of the room, Skarnu spied a painter who was one of the leaders of the underground in Ventspils. Unless he proved a traitor, too, the Algarvians didn't know about this place. Skarnu bought a mug of ale- nothing wrong with Ventspils' ale- and sat down across the table from him.
'Well, hello, Pavilosta,' the painter said. 'Didn't expect to see you here today.' That sounded polite, but harsh suspicion lay under it.
Skarnu's answering grimace was harsh, too. He didn't care to have even the name of the village he'd come from mentioned out loud. After a pull at the ale, he said, 'A couple of redheads came into my block of flats an hour ago. If I hadn't spied 'em outside, they would've nabbed me.'
'Well, we can't expect the Algarvians to love us, not after we yanked those Sibian dragonfliers right out from under their noses,' the local underground leader said. 'They'd want to poke back if they saw the chance to do it.'
'I understand that.' Like the painter, Skarnu kept his voice low. 'But are they after underground folk in Ventspils, or me in particular?'
'Why would they be after you in particular?' the other man asked. Then he paused and thumped his forehead with the heel of his hand. 'I keep forgetting you're not just Pavilosta. You're the chap with a sister in the wrong bed.'
'That's one way to put it, aye,' Skarnu said. It was, in fact, a gentler way to put it than he would have used. It also avoided mentioning his noble blood- common women could and did sleep with the redheaded occupiers, too.
After a pull on his own mug of ale, the painter said, 'She knew where you were down in Pavilosta- she did, or else the Algarvian she's laying did. But how would she know you've come to Ventspils? How would the redheads know, either?'
'Obvious answer is, they're squeezing somebody between Pavilosta and here,' Skarnu said. 'I had a narrow escape getting out of there; they might have stumbled onto somebody who helped me.' He named no names. What the other fellow didn't know, King Mezentio's men and their Valmieran stooges couldn't squeeze out of him. Skarnu wouldn't have been so careful about security even during his duty in the regular Valmieran army.
'If they've got hold of a link in the chain between here and there, that could be… unpleasant,' the painter said. 'Every time we take in a new man, we have to wonder if he's the fellow who's going to sell the lot of us to the Algarvians- and one fine day, one of them will do it.'
Someone Skarnu had seen once or twice before strolled into the Lion and the Mouse. Instead of ordering ale or spirits, he spoke in casual tones: 'Redheads and their dogs are heading toward this place. Some people might not want to hang around and wait for them.' He didn't even look toward the corner where Skarnu and the painter sat.
Skarnu's first impulse was to leap and run. Then he realized how stupid that was: it would make him stand out, which was the last thing he wanted. And even if it didn't, where would he go? Ventspils wasn't his town; aside from the men of the underground, he had no friends and hardly any acquaintances here.
After a last quick swig, the painter set down his empty mug. 'Maybe we'd better not hang around and wait for them,' he said, with which conclusion Skarnu could hardly disagree.
Skarnu didn't bother finishing his ale. He left the mug on the table and followed the other man out. 'Where do we go now?' he asked.
