Out of the Darkness

At a stop by the border, the Lagoan guards left the caravan car. Blonds in trousers took their place. “Now you get what is coming to you,” one of them said, proving he too spoke Algarvian. His laugh was loud and unpleasant.

“Go ahead. Have your joke,” the irrepressible sergeant said. “I bet you ran away from the fighting, too, just like all your pals.” The Valmieran spoke in a low voice to his comrades. Four of them beat the sergeant bloody while the rest held sticks on the other Algarvian captives to make sure they didn’t interfere.

“Any other funny men?” the guard asked. No one said a word.

On through Valmiera glided the ley-line caravan. In the early afternoon, the landscape started looking familiar to Lurcanio. Before long, he saw the famous skyline of Priekule. I enjoyed myself here, aye, he thought. All the same, I’d sooner have kept the memories.

Krasta paid as little attention to news-sheet hawkers as she could. When she came to the Boulevard of Horsemen, she came to spend money, to get away from her bastard son, and to show herself off. She had her wig all done up in curls, in the style of the glory days of the Kaunian Empire. A lot of Valmieran women wore their hair that way these days, perhaps to affirm their Kaunianity after the Algarvian occupation. The wig was hot and uncomfortable, but her own hair hadn’t grown out far enough for her to appear in public without its help. Better-far better-discomfort than humiliation.

Hawkers who worked the Boulevard of Horsemen were supposed to be discreet and quiet, so as not to disturb the well-heeled women and men who shopped there. Such rules had gone downhill since the Algarvians pulled out, though. These days, the men who waved the sheets on street corners were about as raucous here as anywhere else in Priekule.

“Redheads coming back for justice!” one of them yelled as Krasta came out of a clothier’s. During the war, the dummies in the window had worn some of the shortest kilts in town. These days, of course, they were all patriotically trousered. The vendor thrust a sheet in Krasta’s face. “It’s our turn now!”

She started to wave him away in annoyance, but then checked herself. “Let me have one.” She couldn’t remember the last time she’d bought, or even looked at, a news sheet, and had to ask, “How much?”

“Five coppers, lady,” the fellow answered apologetically, adding, “Everything’s up since the war.”

“Is it?” Krasta paid as little attention to prices as she could. She gave him a small silver coin, took the news sheet and her change, and sat down on a local ley-line caravan bench to read the story.

It was what the hawker had said it was: an account of how a dozen Algarvians who’d helped rule Valmiera for King Mezentio were being brought back to Priekule to stand before Valmieran judges and answer for their brutality and atrocities. It is to be hoped, the reporter wrote, that the vicious brutes will get no more mercy than they gave.

“That’s right.” Krasta nodded vigorously.

She had to turn to an inside page to find out what she really wanted to know: the names of the Algarvians coming back to Priekule. Those didn’t seem to matter to the fellow writing the story: as far as he was concerned, one Algarvian was as good-or rather, as bad-as another. At last, though, the reporter came to the point. Krasta shook her head when he called an Algarvian brigadier a fiend and a known pervert, a man who took pleasure in killing. She’d met the officer in question at several feasts and dances. Maybe he liked boys, but he liked women, too; he’d pinched her behind and rubbed himself against her like a dog in heat.

“What do reporters know?” she muttered.

But then she saw the next name, the name she’d wondered if she would find. With the previously mentioned officer is his henchman, the vile and lecherous Colonel Lurcanio, who made our capital a place of terror for four long years. Lurcanio openly boasts of the child he sired on Marchioness Krasta, from whose mansion at the edge of the capital he leaped out like a wolf on honest citizens.

Krasta read that twice, then furiously crumpled up the news sheet and flung it in a trash bin. “Powers below eat him!” she snarled. Had Lurcanio stood before her and not a panel of judges, he wouldn’t have lasted long. She’d thought him a gentleman, and one of the things a gentleman didn’t do was tell.