Out of the Darkness

“Congratulations, lord Marshal,” Vatran said again. “We’ve done it.”

Rathar returned the general’s salute. “So we have,” he said. “And now to let his Majesty know we’ve done it.” He went off to the crystallomancers’ room. Arranging an etheric connection back to Cottbus didn’t take long. He hadn’t thought it would; the crystallomancers had to have been waiting for this moment. As soon as King Swemmel’s image appeared in the crystal before the marshal, he said, “Your Majesty, the Algarvians in Trapani have yielded, the surrender to spare their lives but nothing more. The enemy’s capital is yours.”

“And what of the enemy’s king?” Swemmel demanded. “We want Mezentio.”

“He is said to have died in the fighting, your Majesty,” Rathar answered. “I am sending a sorcerer to make sure the corpse is his.”

King Swemmel snorted contemptuously. “Mark our words-he turned coward at the end. He dared not face what we would have done to him for all that he did to our kingdom.” Rathar thought his sovereign likely to be right. In Mezentio’s place, he wouldn’t have cared to endure Swemmel’s wrath, either. The king went on, “Who now claims the throne of Algarve, if Mezentio is truly dead?”

“His brother Mainardo, your Majesty,” Rathar said. “He is said to have yielded himself up to the Kuusamans in the northeast.”

“They will not kill him, as he deserves. No.” Swemmel sounded worried, almost frightened. His eyes flicked back and forth, back and forth, as if watching demons only he could see. “No. They will leave him alive, leave him on what they call the throne of Algarve. The stinking whoresons, they will use him for a cat’s paw, a stalking horse, against us.”

“They want Algarve beaten as much as we do, your Majesty,” Rathar said.

“Algarve is beaten,” the king said. “Now they want us crushed as well. They think they can loose their sorceries in the middle of the Bothnian Ocean without our knowing it, but they are wrong-wrong, we tell you!” Swemmel’s voice rose to something close to a scream.

Rathar knew nothing about sorceries in the middle of the Bothnian Ocean. He wondered if Swemmel did, or if the king were only imagining them. “We’ve won here,” he said. King Swemmel nodded, but with none of the joy Rathar had hoped he’d show. And Rathar’s own joy, in turn, died before being fully born. He wondered if he would ever find a way to forgive Swemmel for that.

Gyorvar, the capital of Gyongyos, lay where four rivers came together near the coast to form a single stream. A ley line went up that stream from the sea to Gyorvar, so the cruiser Csikos, after skirting the Balaton Islands, could take the men it had received from its Kuusaman counterpart straight to the city.

“Home,” Kun murmured as the tall buildings came into sight.

It wasn’t home to Istvan. So many houses and shops and enormous structures whose use he didn’t know all jammed together were as alien to him as the forests of western Unkerlant or the low, flat expanse of Becsehely-Becsehely as it had been when he’d served there, not the scarred and burnt and ruined place the island had become.

“My own people,” Istvan said, as close as he could come to agreeing with the former mage’s apprentice.

Behind the lenses of his spectacles, Kun’s eyes gleamed. “You’re going to see more of your own people than you want to for a while, unless I miss my guess.”

“Huh,” Istvan said. “I never would have imagined.”

As soon as the Csikos tied up at a quay, swarms of men in clean uniforms with the badges of Eyes and Ears of the Ekrekek swarmed aboard. “Istvan, Sergeant!” one of them shouted, reading from a list.

“Here!” Istvan waved his hand.

“You come with me,” the fellow said, and checked off his name. “Petofi, Captain!”

“Here!” The officer waved as Istvan had. He was tall and gaunt, with a nasty scar on his left cheek that stopped just short of his eye.

“Good. You two are mine.” The Eye and Ear of the Ekrekek checked off Petofi’s name, too. “Come along with me, both of you. We’ve got carriages waiting to take you to interrogation headquarters.”

Istvan wasn’t sure he liked the sound of that. In fact, he was sure he didn’t like the sound of it. But he was only a sergeant. What could he do but obey? Captain Petofi had some ideas on that score. “One moment,” he said dryly. “A long time ago, I learned never to go anywhere with a stranger.”

“I am not a stranger.” The Eye and Ear tapped his badge to show what he meant. Captain Petofi just stood where he was. With a grimace, Ekrekek Arpad’s man said, “You may call me Balazs, if it makes you happy.”

“After what we have seen, it will take a good deal more than that to make us happy, Balazs,” Petofi said. “Is it not so, Sergeant?”

“Uh, aye, sir, it is.” Istvan stammered a little, surprised the scarred officer had bothered speaking to him.

“Well, part of my job is finding out about all that,” Balazs said easily. “Now that you know who I am, you come along with me, and we’ll see what you think you know.”