Out of the Darkness

Bembo went off in a huff. He finally got a flat the next morning. Then he took a ley-line caravan over to his old constabulary station to find out where Saffa was staying these days. That took some doing; a lot of the constables there didn’t remember him and didn’t want to tell him anything. He finally got what he needed from Frontino, the warder at the gaol.

“Read any spicy romances lately?” Bembo asked him.

Frontino reached into his desk. “I’ve got a good one right here, matter of fact.” The romance, called Empress’ Passion, certainly looked good to Bembo. The cover showed a naked Kaunian woman, presumably the Empress in question, with her legs wrapped around an ancient Algarvic warrior with an improbable set of muscles. “The Kaunian Emperor, see, is going to sacrifice a bunch of Algarvian captives, till this guy”-Frontino tapped the warrior-”horns the Empress into talking him out of it. Then the captives get free and the blood really spills. I’m done-want to borrow it? The Empress, she screws up a storm.” He held the book out to Bembo.

Almost to his own surprise, Bembo shook his head. “That whole business of sacrificing …” He looked around to make sure nobody but Frontino could hear him. “Everything they say about the Kaunians in Forthweg. .”

“Pack of lies,” the warder said. “Enemy dragons have been dropping little broadsheets about it, so it has to be a pack of lies. Stands to reason.”

But Bembo shook his head again. “It’s all true, Frontino. Everything everybody says is true, and nobody says even a quarter of what all really went on. I ought to know. I was fornicating there, remember.”

Frontino didn’t believe him. He could see as much. He thought about arguing. He thought about breaking one of his crutches over the warder’s head, too, to let in a little sense. But that would have just landed him in the gaol. Muttering under his breath, he made his slow, hitching way out of the constabulary station and back to the ley-line caravan stop.

The block of flats next to Saffa’s and one across the street were only piles of wreckage. Bembo had to go up three flights of stairs to get to her flat. He was puffing and sweating when he finally got there. A baby wailed behind the door he knocked on.

When Saffa opened it, she looked harried-maybe her brat had been crying for a while. “Oh,” she said. “You.”

He didn’t quite know how to take that. “Hello, Saffa. I’m on my feet- sort of.”

“Hello, Bembo.” Her smile still had some of the sour tang he remembered. So did her words: “I’m glad to see you-sort of.”

“Will you go to supper with me tomorrow night?” he asked, as if the whole Derlavaian War, including his broken leg, had never happened.

“No,” she said. But she wasn’t spitting in his eye, as she’d warned she might, for she went on, “I haven’t got anyone to watch my son then. But three nights from now, my sister isn’t working. I’ll go then.”

“All right,” Bembo said. “Pick an eatery, and we’ll go there. I’ve been away so long, I don’t know what’s good these days, or even what’s standing.” He’d got around by night in Gromheort and Eoforwic with no lights showing; he expected he could manage in his own home town.

But he turned out to be wrong. Tricarico fell to the Kuusamans two days later.

He’d heard that the enemy was coming down out of the Bradano Mountains, of course. The news sheets couldn’t very well deny that. But they did their best to claim the slanteyes would never cross the river, would never threaten the city. Bembo probably should have had more doubts than he did; he’d seen such optimistic twaddle in Forthweg, too. But the assault on Tricarico took him by surprise.

So did the feeble resistance his own countrymen put up inside the city. That left him half relieved-he had, after all, been in the middle of a city convulsed by fighting-and half ashamed. “Why aren’t you giving them a battle?” he called to a squad of soldiers heading west, plainly intending to leave Tricarico.

“Why? I’ll tell you why, porky,” one of the men answered. Bembo squawked indignantly, and with some reason; he’d lost much of the paunch he’d once carried. Ignoring him, the trooper went on, “We’re getting the blazes out on account of the slanteyes have already got men past this rotten place to north and south, and we don’t want to get stuck here, that’s why.”

From a military point of view, that made good enough sense. Out in the west, fighting against the Unkerlanters, all too many garrisons had stayed in their towns too long, and got cut off and destroyed. Gromheort, where Bembo was stationed before transferring to Eoforwic, was going through such a death agony now. But even so … “What are we supposed to do?”

“Best you can, pal,” the soldier answered. “That and thank the powers above it ain’t the Unkerlanters coming into town.” He trotted away, dodging craters in the street and jumping over or kicking aside bits of rubble nobody had bothered to clear away.