Into the Darkness (46 page)

A couple of people started yelling at each other down a side street. At first, Bembo was inclined to keep on walking. People shouting at one another was nothing out of the ordinary in any Algarvian city. But then he thought that, since he’d had a quiet shift, he ought to find out what was going on there. He could bring the story back to the stationhouse, which would keep Sergeant Pesaro from calling him a lazy son of a whore.

He turned the corner. A crowd had already started to gather around the quarreling pair. “What’s going on here?” Bembo said loudly. Several people in the crowd looked his way, saw what he was, and discovered urgent business elsewhere. He chuckled. He’d expected nothing different.

One of the people who’d been doing the yelling was a redheaded woman heading hard toward middle age. Her clothes and her wary eyes didn’t say
whore,
not quite, but they did say
slattern.
Facing her was a rather younger man who wore tunic and kilt and spiky waxed mustaches of unimpeachably Algarvian style. But those mustaches and his hair were pale gold, not red or auburn or chestnut.

Uh-oh,
Bembo thought. Aloud, he repeated, “What’s going on here?”

“This stinking Kaunian was trying to rob me,” the slatternly woman shouted. “I bet he’s a Jelgavan spy. He looks like a spy to me.”

A couple of men behind Bembo growled. The constable’s head started to ache, as if he’d poured down too much red wine. The man standing there looking affronted and innocent was undoubtedly of Kaunian blood, as Jelgavans were. That might mean anything, or nothing. His ancestors could have been living in Tricarico for centuries before there were any Algarvians within a couple of hundred miles. But even if they had been, that didn’t prove anything, either. Some folk of Kaunian blood were perfectly loyal to King Mezentio. Some still dreamt of the days of the ancient Kaunian Empire.

“What have you got to say for yourself?” Bembo demanded of the blond man. His voice was rough with suspicion, partly because he was a constable, and so was suspicious on general principles, and partly because he’d been reading a lot of the torrid historical romances that had been coming out lately, and so was more suspicious of Kaunians than he had been.

“Why would I try to rob her?” the man asked. “Does she look like she’s got anything worth having?” He spoke Algarvian with the accent of someone who’d grown up in the northeastern part of the kingdom—the same accent as Bembo’s.
But a spy would be smooth,
the constable thought.

The blond man looked the woman up and down, then rolled his eyes, as any Algarvian who found a woman unattractive and wanted her to know it would have done. She screeched at him. Bembo looked her up and down. She didn’t have anything he particularly wanted, though he probably wouldn’t have said no if she offered it free of charge.

Wearily, Bembo hauled out his notebook. “Give me your names,” he growled. “Don’t get cute with ‘em, either. We’ll have a mage checking.

We don’t like people who lie to the constabulary.” The woman called herself Gabrina. The man said his name was Balozio.

“A likely story,” Gabrina sneered. “Probably started out as Balozhu.” She twisted it from an Algarvian-sounding name to one that sprang from Jelgava or Valmiera.

“Your father never knew what your name was,” Balozio told her: an insult as Algarvian as the day was long.

Gabrina screeched again. Balozio shouted at her. “Shut up!” Bembo yelled, hating them both. He pointed to the woman. “What did he try to rob you of? How did he do it?”

“My belt pouch,” she answered, sticking out the hip on which she wore it. She remained unalluring to Bembo.

“Why, you lying slut!” Balozio shouted. She bit her thumb at the blond man. Turning to Bembo, he went on, “All I was trying to do was pat her on the bum.”

For a moment, Bembo accepted that. He’d felt up a good many women strolling along the street. But then he stopped thinking like a man and started thinking like a constable. “Now just you wait,” he said. “A minute ago, you were telling me this broad didn’t have anything you wanted.”

“Don’t you call me a broad, you tun of lard!” Gabrina yelled at him.

Bembo brandished his club. “For that, you can come along to the station, too. We’ll sort it out there.”

Balozio and Gabrina both looked appalled. If one ran one way and one the other, Bembo didn’t know what he’d do. Calling on people to help was about as likely to get them to help the fugitives as to help him: he knew his countrymen and how they felt about constables only too well. If they’d felt differently, Algarve wouldn’t have needed so many constables.

But then the man and woman didn’t run. Bembo smacked the club into the palm of his left hand. “Come on,” he growled. They came. They came sullenly, but they came.

Before one of them could decide to make a break, Bembo spotted another constable and waved him over. “What’s going on?” asked the newcomer, a burly fellow named Oraste.

“Curse me if I know,” Bembo told him. “He says he was just letting his hand get happy, you know what I mean? She says he tried to steal her pouch.”

Oraste eyed Gabrina. He rocked his hips forward and back; he must have liked what he saw. Gabrina noticed, too, and let her tongue slide along the edge of her lower lip. When Oraste inspected Balozio, he might have been looking at a pile of dog turds on the street. “I’ve never seen a blondie yet who wouldn’t steal whenever he got the chance,” he declared.

Balozio turned pale. Since he was already very fair, he ended up looking downright ghostly. “Now see here,” he said. “I’m an honest man. I’ve always been an honest man, and I’ve always been a loyal man.” He was trying to bluster, and not doing a good job of it—he sounded more frightened than arrogant. After a moment, he added, “I can’t help the way I look. It’s how I was born.”

Gabrina contrived to brush against Oraste. “I still say he looks like a Jelgavan spy,” she murmured in tones that shouldn’t have been heard outside a bedchamber.

Balozio was too upset to notice the byplay. He snarled, “I say you look like a case of the clap on the hoof.”

“Shut up, Kaunian,” Oraste said in a deadly voice. He might have modeled himself after an Algarvian warrior chief in one of those popular historical romances; Bembo thought he read them, too.

Oraste looked about to lay into Balozio with his club. “Have a care,” Bembo muttered behind his hand. “He might be a rich Kaunian.” It didn’t seem likely, not from the blond man’s clothes, but stranger things had happened. Oraste scowled, but desisted.

When they went upstairs and into the station, Sergeant Pesaro set down the plum tart he’d been eating; a couple of flaky crumbs clung to the tuft of hair under his lower lip. “What’s all this?” he rumbled.

Everyone started speaking … shouting … screaming at once, with increasingly frantic gesticulations to accompany the increasingly loud talk. Quite suddenly, Balozio ended up on the floor. Bembo didn’t see how it happened; he’d been nose to nose with Gabrina, exchanging uncompliments.

Like most Algarvians, Pesaro was adept at following several different threads at once. “Enough,” he said after watching and listening to the show for a while. “Bembo, you take this lug”—he pointed at Balozio -“down to the recording section. If he’s tried stealing before, we’ll drop him in a cell and charge him. If he hasn’t, I guess he can go. Oraste, you handle the wench. Same deal: you find out she tries getting customers in trouble, we jug her. Otherwise, kick her tail back out on the street.”

Bembo thought Gabrina would start screeching at Pesaro for implying she had customers. But she was shrewder than that: she sent another smile of invitation toward Oraste, who looked as if he’d like handling her just fine. Bembo got the idea her records wouldn’t be searched so closely as, in a little while, her person would.

Resignedly, Bembo turned to Balozio, who had a bruise on his cheek the constable didn’t remember. “Come on, pal, let’s find out about you,” Bembo said.

Balozio seemed to know his way to the recording station, which Bembo found interesting in a man who’d loudly proclaimed his honesty. The constable leered at Saffa. The sketch artist bit the thumb at him, as Gabrina had at Balozio, but then she winked. Was she teasing him to encourage him, or to drive him mad? Probably to drive him mad.

A bored-looking clerk took Balozio’s name and his thumbprint. He mumbled a charm. One of the many file drawers in back of him came open. He nodded to Bembo. “There’s a thumbprint in there similar to his, all right.” Still bored, he went back and got the file with the thumbprint in it. When he opened it, Bembo recognized one of Saffa’s sketches. “Let’s see,” the clerk said, flipping sheets. “Fine for cheating a courtesan of her fee, petty theft, petty theft again, charged with stealing a pouch, but that wasn’t proved.”

“Of course it wasn’t proved,” Balozio exclaimed. “I didn’t do it.” He spread his hands in despairing appeal. “I’m a blond, and they still couldn’t convict me. I must have been innocent, right?”

“It’s close enough,” Bembo said to the clerk. “Thanks. We’ll pack him away for a while. Getting a Kaunian off the streets sounds good to me.”

“I don’t even
speak
Kaunian!” Balozio said.

The clerk ignored him, except to put his file back in its proper drawer. Bembo took Balozio by the arm. “Come on, pal. Come quiet, and you’ll just get packed away. If you don’t—” Head hanging miserably, Balozio went with him.

Cornelu drank the bitter wine of exile. He ate the hard bread of the man cast from his home. The metaphor, he knew, was only a metaphor.

The bread the Lagoans fed him was no harder than what he’d been used to eating in Sibiu. Now that Lagoas was at war with Algarve, wine had grown hard to come by, but he found nothing wrong with Lagoan ales and lagers, stouts and porters.

However well they fed him, though, an exile he remained. The Algarvian banner, green and white and red, flew above Tirgoviste and the other cities of Sibiu. King Burebistu was a captive, seized in his own palace before he could flee. And Costache, Cornelu’s wife, was a captive, too. By now, he might well have a son or daughter. He did not know. He could not know. He did know Algarvians. They’d be sniffing around Costache like dogs around a bitch in heat.

His hands folded into fists as he sat on his hard cot in one of the barracks halls the Lagoans had given to the forlorn few soldiers and sailors who’d got out of Sibiu: the only free Sibians left. He cursed the Algarvians who occupied his kingdom. He cursed them twice, for being there and for being clever enough to figure out a way to get there that no one in the island kingdom had foreseen.

A Lagoan officer came into the barracks. Cornelu and his fellow exiles looked up from whatever dullnesses occupied them. Cornelu had never been enormously fond of Lagoans. As far as he was concerned, the only reason they’d ever got ahead of Sibiu in trade and war was that they had a larger kingdom.

And now that larger kingdom remained free, while Sibiu lay captive and Algarvian soldiers—or so he feared, at any rate—accosted his wife. That gave him another reason to resent Lagoans: they did not understand what he was going through. Oh, they’d taken him in, they’d fed him, they’d housed him, they’d even promised to use his leviathan and him in the fight against Algarve they now—belatedly—joined. But they did not understand. With gloomy Sibian pride, he was sure of it.

The officer, who wore the grayish green of the Lagoan navy, came toward Cornelu. His stride was easy, loose, confident: the stride of a man whose own king ruled his kingdom and was likely to keep on ruling it. That stride and the thoughtlessly cheerful smile on his face made Cornelu dislike him on sight.

“Good day, Commander, and how are you?” the Lagoan asked in what he no doubt fondly imagined to be Cornelu’s language. To Cornelu, it sounded more like Algarvian, and bad Algarvian at that.

Blithely oblivious, the fellow went on, “I am Lieutenant Ramalho. I hope you are not busy now?”

Slowly, Cornelu got to his feet. He was glad to find himself a couple of inches taller than Ramalho. “I do not know,” he said. “There are, after all, so many important things for me to do right now.”

Ramalho laughed a gay laugh, as if Cornelu had been jocular rather than icily sardonic. Maybe the Lagoan gave him the benefit of the doubt, which was a mistake. Maybe, too, Ramalho couldn’t tell the difference. Still chuckling, the fellow said, “If you are not too busy, will you come with me?”

“Why? Where will we go?” Cornelu kept his words slow and simple, as if speaking to an idiot child. Even Lagoans who thought they spoke his language made heavy going of it. As for him, he despised their tongue, with its nasal vowels and sneezy consonants, with its hordes of words pillaged from Kaunian, Kuusaman, and every other language under the sun. How even people born speaking it figured out what they were going to say was beyond him.

“Well, you’ll know more about that when we get there, won’t you?” Ramalho said, cheerful still. “Come along.” He turned away, certain Cornelu would follow—as indeed he did. He and his fellow Sibian exiles were tools in the Lagoans’ hands—useful tools, to be employed with some care, but tools nonetheless.

He blinked against watery sunshine when he went outside. He also winced at the racket; whatever else the naval half of Setubal harbor was, it was a noisy place. Iron and steel clanged against each other. Sailors and stevedores and teamsters and mages shouted in their incomprehensible language. Every now and then, Cornelu caught a word close enough to its Sibian equivalent for him to recognize it. Those few words made him lonelier than ever; it was as if they were exiles, too.

“Do we go to the leviathan pens?” Cornelu asked. “I should see Eforiel.” He did not want the leviathan to think he’d abandoned her. He counted her a friend—almost the only friend he had here—and did not want to worry her or make her sad.

“Not far from them,” Ramalho answered. He pointed toward a couple of low, white-painted buildings set a little way back from the pens. “We go there.”

“And what do we do there?” Cornelu inquired. All Ramalho did was laugh again, as if at another joke. Cornelu gritted his teeth. He wondered if he should have surrendered to the Algarvians. He’d be with Costache now—if Mezentio’s men didn’t fling him in a captives’ camp. He sighed. He’d done this. He had to live with it.