Out of the Darkness

“Those are the sorts of questions you would do better not to ask,” Petofi replied. “All too often, they turn out to have answers, and you generally end up wishing they didn’t.”

“Too late to worry about it now, sir,” Istvan said with another shrug. “I already opened my big mouth. Today was mine, and I’ll enjoy it. If he makes me sorry after he gets back here from Gyorvar, then he does, that’s all, and I’ll have to see if I can find some other way to get my own back.”

Sadly, the captain shook his head. “Those whoresons are armored against attack by virtue of their office. Being the ekrekek’s Eyes and Ears, they think they can do as they please, and they are commonly right.”

“Balazs isn’t Arpad’s Eye and Ear,” Istvan said. “He’s the ekrekek’s..” He named an altogether different portion of his sovereign’s anatomy, one as necessary as an eye or an ear but much less highly esteemed.

“No doubt you’re right,” Petofi said, this time favoring him with no more than a wintry smile. “Being right, of course, will get you what being right usually does: the blame, and nothing else.”

On that cheerful note, the captain nodded to Istvan almost as if they were equals and then left the dining hall for his own private room-he was an officer, after all. Istvan didn’t linger long himself. He felt oppressed, and he didn’t think it was at the prospect of Balazs’ coming revenge. The very air felt heavy with menace. He tried to tell himself it was his imagination. Sometimes he succeeded for several minutes at a stretch.

Balazs had told one truth, anyhow: the barracks hall where Istvan slept held only a handful of other stubborn underofficers besides himself. He didn’t care much, save that he missed Corporal Kun. Kun must have thought telling a few lies a small enough price for going home to Gyorvar. Istvan hardly blamed him. He knew mulishness was all that kept him here.

With Kun gone, he was in no mood for company anyhow. Lamps-out came as more than a little relief. Gyorvar’s distant lights came in through the south-facing windows, casting a pale, grayish illumination on the northern wall of the barracks. It was less than moonlight, more than starlight-not enough to disturb Istvan in the least when he fell asleep.

Having fallen asleep, he promptly began to wish he’d stayed awake. He kept starting up from a series of the ghastliest nightmares he’d ever had the misfortune to suffer. In one of them, Captain Tivadar cut his throat instead of his hand on finding out he’d eaten goat. That was one of the gentler dreams, too. Most of the others were worse, far worse: full of red slaughter. He couldn’t always remember the details when he woke, but his pounding heart and the terrified gasps with which he breathed told him more than he wanted to know.

And then, some time toward morning, he woke to bright sunlight streaming in through the window. But it wasn’t morning, not yet, and the window didn’t face east. And the light into the barracks might have been as bright as sunlight, but it wasn’t sunlight. It rippled and shifted like waves-or flames.

With a cry of horror and despair, Istvan sprang to his feet and rushed to the window. He knew what he would see, and he saw it: the same destruction poured down onto Gyorvar as had descended upon Becsehely. He’d been closer to the disaster in the Kuusaman ley-line cruiser than he was now, but he wasn’t so far away as to have any doubt about what was happening.

Even through the window, even across the miles separating him from the capital of Gyongyos, savage heat beat on his face. For a moment, that was the only thought in his mind. Then he wondered what it was like in Gyorvar itself, and then, sickly, he wished he hadn’t.

Well, he thought, if that accursed Balazs went into the capital, he isn‘t coming back. May the stars not shine on his spirit.

He faced that loss with equanimity. But then one of the other men in the hall whispered, “If Ekrekek Arpad’s there, he couldn’t live through. . that. If his kin are there, they couldn’t, either.”

That was horror of a different sort. The Ekrekek of Gyongyos was the only man alive who communed with the stars as an equal. That was what made him what he was. If he died, if all his kin died in the same searing instant-who would rule Gyongyos then? Istvan had no idea. He doubted anyone had ever imagined such a nightmare could befall the land.

“What do we do?” another soldier-or was he another captive? — moaned. “What can we do?”

The flames pouring out of the sky onto Gyorvar abruptly ceased, though they remained printed on Istvan’s vision when he blinked. Gyorvar without the ekrekek, without the ekrekek’s whole family? Arpad’s house had reigned in Gyongyos since the stars made the world. That was what people said, at any rate.