Into The Darkness

He'd also expected the Jelgavans to send more dragons over Tricanico than they had. He'd been a boy during the Six Years' War, and vividly remembered the terror dropped eggs had spawned. There hadn't been so many then, but even a few were plenty and to spare. Jelgava's dragon farms had bee anything but idle since.

A caravan hurnmed slowly past, sliding a couple of feet above the ground along its ley line. The lamps at the front of the coach had dark cloth wrapped around them so they gave out only a little light: with luck, too little to be spotted by Jelgavan dragonfliers high in the air.

The caravan steersman doffed his plumed hat to Bembo. Bembo swept off his own to return the compliment. He smiled a little as he set the hat back on his head. Even in wartime, the courtesies that made Algarvian life endured.

When he rounded a corner, the smile disappeared. A wineshop was not so securely shuttered as it might have been; light spilled out through the slats to puddle on the pavement. Bembo took the club off his belt and whacked the door with it. "Close up in there!" he called. A moment later, after a couple of startled exclamations, the shutters creaked as some one adjusted them. The betraying light disappeared. Nodding in satisfaction, Bembo walked on.

A Kaunian column of pale marble gleamed even by starlight. In ancient days, Tricarico, like a lot of northern Algarve, had belonged to the Kaunian Empire. Monuments lingered. So did occasional heads of blond hair among the red- and auburn- and sandy-haired majority.

Bembo would just as soon have shipped blonds and monuments alike over the Bradano Mountains. The Jelgavans thought they gave a king dom of Kaunian blood a claim to what Kaunians had once ruled.

A woman leaned against the column. Her legs gleamed like its marble; her kilt was very short, scarcely covering the swell of her buttocks.

"Hello, sweetheart," she called, peering toward Bembo as he approached. "Feel like a good time tonight?"

"Hello, Fiametta," the constable said, lifting his hat. "Go peddle it somewhere else, or I'll have to notice you're here."

Fiametta cursed in disgust. "All this dark is terrible for business," she complained. "The men can't find me-"

"Oh, I bet they can," he said. He'd let her bribe him with her body a time or two, in the easy-going days before the war.

She snorted. "And when somebody does find me, who is it? A con stable! Even if you want me, you won't pay for it."

"Not with money," Bembo allowed, "but you're out here on the job, not sitting in Reform sewing tunics or something."

"Reform would pay me better than this - and I'd meet more interest ing people, too," Fiametta came over and kissed Bembo on the end of his long, straight nose. Then she flounced off, putting everything she had into it, and she had quite a lot. Over her shoulder, she called, "See? I'm going somewhere else."

Somewhere else was probably no farther than the other side of the column, but Bembo didn't follow her. She'd done what he'd told her, after all. One of these days, he might feel like telling her to do something different again.

He turned on to a side street, one with houses and apartment houses on it, not shops and offices. Once or twice every block, he had to rap on a window sill or a doorway and shout for people to let lamps die or cover their windows better. Everyone in Tricarico surely knew the new regulations, but every Algarvian was born thinking regulations applied to the other fellow, not to him. A rotund man, Bembo fumed when he had to trudge up to the fourth floor of an apartment house to get some fool to draw his curtains.

When he came out of the apartment house, someone disappeared down the dark street with remarkable haste. Bembo thought about running after the footpad or whatever he was, but not for long. With his belly, he wouldn't have had a prayer of catching him.

He came up to another house with a hand's breadth of open space between the edges of the curtains. He raised his club to whack the sill, then froze, as if suddenly turned to stone. Inside, a pretty young woman was getting out of her clothes and into a loose kilt and tunic for the night.

Bembo had never felt so torn. As a man, he wanted to say nothing and keep watching: the more he saw of her, the better she looked. As a con stable, though, he had his duty. He waited till she was sliding the night tunic down over herself before he rapped the wall and called, "Darken this house!" The woman jumped and squeaked. The lamp died. Bembo strode on. Duty had triumphed - and he'd had a good peek.