Rulers of the Darkness

"I don't know what you're talking about," the apothecary answered calmly. "Can I interest you in a horehound-and-honey cough elixir? You sound stuffy, and I've just mixed up a new batch."

In the little storeroom, Vanai shivered with terror. She hadn't wanted to bring the man danger by casting her spell too loudly, but she'd brought him worse danger, deadly danger, by asking him to pass it on to her fellow Kaunians. And now the redheads were here, and one jump away from her.

She wanted to jump out from the storeroom and attack them, as if she were the heroine of one of the trashy Forthwegian romances of which she'd read so many while cooped up in the flat. Common sense told her that would only ruin her along with the apothecary. She stayed where she was, hating herself for it.

"You are a whorehound, and a son of a whorehound besides," the Algarvian said. He and his comrade both laughed loudly at his wit. "You are also a lying son of a whorehound, and you are going to pay for it. Come with us right now, and we shall have the truth from you."

"I have given you the truth," the apothecary said.

"You have given us dung, and told us it is perfume," the Algarvian retorted. "Now you come with us, or we blaze you where you stand. Here! Hold! What are you doing?"

"Taking a pill," the apothecary said, his voice easy and relaxed. "I've been getting over the grippe. Let me swallow it down, and I am yours."

"You are ours, all right. Now we have you in our grip." Mezentio's man, along with his other depravities, fancied himself a punster.

"I go with you under protest, for you are seizing an innocent man," the apothecary said.

That sent both Algarvians into gales of laughter. Vanai leaned forward and ever so cautiously pressed her ear to the door. Receding footsteps told her of the redheads' departure with their captive. She didn't hear the front door slam behind them. The Algarvians wouldn't care who plundered the shop, while the apothecary, bless him, was giving her a way to slip off without drawing notice to herself.

She waited. Then she opened the door the tiniest crack and peered out. Not seeing anyone, she darted out from behind the counter and into the front part of the shop, as if she were an ordinary customer. Then, as casually as she could, she left the place and strode out onto the street.

Nobody asked her what she was doing coming out of the shop bare minutes after a couple of Algarvians had hauled away the proprietor. Nobody paid her any heed at all, in fact. A good-sized crowd had gathered down at the end of the block.

Confident now that she would keep on looking Forthwegian, Vanai hurried over to find out what was going on. She saw two redheads in the middle of the crowd: they overtopped the Forthwegians around them by several inches. One of them said, "We did not touch him, by the powers above! He just fell over."

She'd heard that voice in the apothecary's shop. The Algarvian wasn't punning now. His partner bent down, disappearing from Vanai's view. A moment later, he spoke in his own language: "He's dead."

The day was cool and gloomy, but sunshine burst in Vanai. She didn't know, but she would have bet her life what the apothecary had taken had nothing to do with the grippe. The Algarvians reached the same conclusion a heartbeat later. They both started cursing in their own language. "He cheated us, the stinking bugger!" cried the one who'd done all the talking in Forthwegian.

"If he weren't already dead, I'd kill him for that," the other one answered.

The one who did the talking in Forthwegian started waving his arms. That got him attention, not least because he held a short, deadly looking stick in his right hand. "Go away!" he shouted. "This criminal, this dog who hid Kaunians, has escaped our justice, but the fight against the menace of the blonds goes on."

Vanai wondered how many in the crowd were sorcerously disguised Kaunians like herself. Because the Forthwegian majority left without a word of protest, she couldn't stay. She had to act as it she were a person who despised her own kind. It left her sick inside, even as she realized she had no choice.

She had to walk past the apothecary's shop on the way back to her block of flats. People were already going in and starting to clean the place out. Vanai wanted to scream at them, but would good would that do? Again, none at all. It would only draw the Algarvians' notice, the one thing she couldn't afford, the thing the apothecary had kept from happening.

"He's dead because of what I did," she said to Ealstan when he came home that evening. "How do I live with that?"

"He'd want you to," Ealstan answered. "He killed himself so Mezentio's men couldn't pry anything about you out of him- and so they couldn't torment him, of course."

"But they wouldn't have had anything to torment him about if it weren't for me," Vanai said.

"And if it weren't for you and it weren't for him, how many Kaunians who are still alive would be dead now?" her husband returned.