all we know, he may not be a wizard at all. Powers above, he may never have set eyes on her before.” The woman listened to him in impatient incomprehension. With an unhappy mutter, he started toward the door. “Cover me,” he told Oraste.
“Oh, aye,” his comrade said, and drew his stick. “Just in case the dingleberry
Bembo was thinking the same thing. The thought made him carefully calibrate his knock. He was aiming for being firm without being overbearing. He didn’t draw his stick, but had his hand on it. When he heard someone moving inside the flat, he didn’t know whether to be relieved or alarmed.
After a click of the latch, the door swung open. The fellow who stood in the doorway staring at Bembo through thick spectacles might have been a mage. As easily, he might have been an out-of-work clerk. Comprehension filled his face when he saw the heavy woman behind the constables. He muttered something in Forthwegian that had to mean, “I might have known.”
“You speak Algarvian?” Bembo barked at him.
To his relief, the fellow answered, “Aye, somewhat. I should have guessed Eanfled would summon the constables.” He looked past Bembo and Oraste and said something to the woman. Bembo didn’t know what she answered, but it sounded hotter than anything he’d learned.
He pointed to the woman. “Did you work magic for her?”
“Aye, I did,” the man answered.
“What does he say?” the woman--Eanfled--demanded in Kaunian. Bembo, feeling harassed, did his best to answer. The man took over; he spoke Kaunian, too.
“Ask him what sort of magic he did,” Oraste suggested--in Algarvian, of course. Again, Bembo tried to translate.
“She wanted to lose weight,” the man said--in Kaunian. “I made a spell to take the edge off her appetite. I had to be careful. Too much and she would starve herself to death. No great loss,” he added, “but people would talk.”
Eanfled let out a furious screech that made doors open all along the hallway. “You cheated me, you whoreson!” she shouted. “Look at me!” There was certainly plenty of her at which to look.
“You were fatter before,” the fellow with the spectacles answered calmly.
“Liar!” she yelled at him.
Oraste nudged Bembo. “All right, smart boy, what are they saying?” he asked. After Bembo told him, he grunted, “That’s about what I thought. What are we going to do about it?”
“Shake ‘em both down,” Bembo answered. He turned to the low-ranking, or more likely amateur, mage, with whom he could converse more readily. “Tell this walking pork chop here that we’re going to haul the both of you up in front of the military governor, and we’ll see if there’s anything left of either one of you when he’s through.”
Looking very unhappy, the bespectacled man translated that into Forthwegian. The fat woman looked even more appalled. Bembo wondered if she was part Kaunian and feared that would come out. She didn’t look it, but you never could tell.
“Ahh . . . Do we really have to do that?” the Forthwegian man asked. Bembo didn’t say anything. The fellow said, “Couldn’t we come to some sort of understanding?”
“What have you got in mind?” Bembo countered. By the time he and Oraste left the block of flats, their belt pouches were full and jingling. If the would-be mage and his dissatisfied customer found themselves unhappy with Algarvian notions of constabulary work, Bembo cared very little. After all, he’d made money on the deal.
Shouldering his axe, Garivald trudged across fields still covered in snow toward the woods out beyond the village of Zossen. Pretty soon, the snow would start to melt. Then the fields would go from frozen to soupy, after which they would dry enough for plowing and sowing. Meanwhile, he still needed firewood.
As he tramped along, he glanced toward a spot in a vegetable plot not far from the house of Waddo, the firstman. Zossen’s crystal lay buried there. Garivald had helped bury it. If Zossen’s Algarvian occupiers ever found out about that, they would bury him. He couldn’t dig up the crystal now, either, because he’d have to do it secretly, and that was impossible. He just had to keep on worrying about it.
“As if I haven’t got enough other things to worry about,” he muttered.
It wasn’t as if the crystal would work now. It wouldn’t, not here in this magic-starved backwater of the Duchy of Grelz, not without blood sacrifices to power it. But it had connected Zossen to Cottbus--which meant it would connect Garivald to Cottbus, and to King Swemmel. He knew what the Algarvians would make of such a connection: they would make an
