Out of the Darkness

“Suppose you do?” Lurcanio said mildly. “I would say-I do say-she is lying.”

“And why should we prefer your word to hers?” the Valmieran demanded. “You have more to gain by lying than she does.”

“If you care about the truth there, you might really try to find it,” Lurcanio said. “You could ask Viscount Valnu what he knows, for instance.”

As he’d hoped it would, that knocked the interrogator back on his heels. Valnu was a hero of the underground, so his word carried weight. And Lurcanio’s guess was that he, unlike Krasta, wouldn’t lie for the fun of it. Also, interrogating someone else meant the Algarvians might not try to question Lurcanio himself under torture or under sorcery. He hadn’t raped Krasta, but they might find plenty of other things for which to put a rope around his neck.

The officer said, “Viscount Valnu cannot know the truth.”

“Indeed,” Lurcanio agreed. “Only Krasta and I can know the truth. But Valnu will know what Krasta said to him about what we did, and I have no doubt she said a great deal: getting her to stop talking has always been much harder than getting her to start.”

“When will you give over your slanders of the decent citizens of Valmiera?” the officer demanded indignantly.

“For one thing, truth is always a defense against a charge of slander,” replied Lurcanio, who feared other charges awaited against which he had no defense. But he intended to make his captors squirm as long as he could, and so went on, “As for dear Krasta, considering some of the things we did, I am not altogether sure she is one of your precious ‘decent citizens of Valmiera.’ Still, I will tell you she enjoyed them all, whether decent or not.”

“How dare you say such things?” the Valmieran officer gabbled.

Lurcanio hid a smile. He didn’t play by the rules the victors thought they’d set up. He didn’t act afraid, and he wasn’t apologetic. That confused the blonds. As long as they were confused, as long as they had trouble deciding what to do about-and to-him, he wasn’t too bad off. If they did decide. . “How dare she say such things about me?” he returned, sounding as indignant as he could. “I, at least, am telling the truth, which she certainly is not.”

“You were her lover at the same time as you were trying to hunt down and kill her brother, the illustrious Marquis Skarnu,” the officer said, as if he’d scored a point.

“Well, what if I was?” Lurcanio answered. “That may have been in poor taste, but you will have precious few men left in a kingdom if you set about killing everyone guilty of poor taste. And Skarnu was in arms against my kingdom, as he himself would be the first to tell you. He was, in fact, in arms against my kingdom after King Gainibu surrendered. What do you people do to Algarvians captured in arms against your occupying armies? Nothing pretty, and you know it as well as I.”

“That has nothing to do with what you tried to do to Skarnu,” the Valmieran said.

“Of course it does, you foolish little man,” Lurcanio said. “If you are too dense to see it, I hope they take you away and give me an interrogator with the sense to understand plain speech in his own language.” That was the last thing he wanted, but the officer didn’t need to know it.

“If you insult me here, it will only go harder for you,” the blond warned, flushing with anger.

“Ah. Splendid!” Lurcanio gave him a seated bow. “I thank you for admitting that what I did and did not do during the late war has in fact nothing to do with what will happen to me.”

“I said nothing of the sort!” The Valmieran turned redder still.

“I beg your pardon.” Lurcanio bobbed his head once more. “That was what it sounded like to me.”

“Guards!” the officer said, and several Valmieran soldiers took one step forward from the places against the wall where they’d stood. The interrogator pointed to Lurcanio. “Back to his cell with this one. He’s not ready to tell the truth yet.”

A Valmieran sergeant pointed his stick at Lurcanio’s belly. “Get moving,” he said. Him Lurcanio obeyed without backtalk and without hesitation. A confused or frightened ordinary soldier was liable to get rid of his confusion and fear by blazing. Games that tied the earnest and rather stupid interrogator in knots would be useless or worse against a man for whom simple brutality solved so many problems.

We thought simple brutality could solve the problem of the underground, Lurcanio thought as he marched along in front of the guards. Were we any more clever than a simple sergeant? Valmieran captives snarled curses at him when he went past their cells. He strode by as if they didn’t exist. They threw things less often then. They weren’t supposed to have anything to throw, but he knew those rules could bend when authorities wanted something unfortunate but also unofficial to happen to a captive.

Today, he reached his own cell unscathed. The door slammed behind him.