Through the Darkness

He sighed with relief when Oraste reluctantly nodded. Of course the occupiers wanted peace and quiet in Forthweg. Anything but peace and quiet would have required more men. Algarve had no men to spare. Anybody who wasn’t doing something vitally important somewhere else was off in the freezing, trackless west, fighting King Swemmel’s men.

“I bet it was a Kaunian who shouted that,” Oraste said.

“Maybe,” Bembo answered. “Of course, the Forthwegians love us, too. They just don’t love us quite as much.”

As Bembo had used “love” to mean something else, so Oraste said something that could have meant, “Love the Forthwegians.” The burly, bad-tempered constable went on, “Those whoresons didn’t have the balls to get rid of their own Kaunians, but do they thank us for doing it for ‘em? Fat chance!”

Bembo said, “When does anybody ever thank a constable?” Part of that was his usual self-pity, part a cynical understanding of the way the world worked.

Then, around a corner, he heard a cacophony of shouts and screams. He and Oraste looked at each other. They both yanked their sticks off their belts and started running.

By the time Bembo turned that corner, he was puffing. He’d always been happier about sitting in a tavern eating and drinking than about any other part of constabulary work. And his girth--especially now that the constables weren’t marching out to the villages around Gromheort to bring back Kaunians--reflected that.

All the yelling was in Forthwegian, which he didn’t understand. But pointing fingers were obvious enough. So were the three men running down the street as fast as they could go, knocking over anybody who got in their way.

“Robbers!” Bembo exclaimed, a brilliant bit of deduction if ever there was one. He raised his voice to a shout: “Halt, in the name of the law!”

He shouted, inevitably, in Algarvian. It might have been Gyongyosian for all the good it did. Oraste wasted no time on yelling. He lowered his stick, sighted along it, and started blazing. “Buggers won’t go anywhere if we kill them,” he said.

“What if we hit a bystander?” Bembo asked. The street was crowded.

“What if we do?” Bembo answered with a scornful shrug. “Who cares? You think this is Tricarico, and somebody’ll call out his pet solicitor if we singe his pinkie? Not fornicating likely.”

He was right, of course. Bembo also sighted along his stick. By the time he did so, two of the robbers had vanished around a corner. But the third one, or a man Bembo presumed to be the third one, sprawled motionless on the slates of the sidewalk.

“Good blazing,” Bembo told Oraste.

“I should have killed all of them,” his partner answered. He started toward the man he had killed. “Let’s see what we’ve got before some light-fingered Forthwegian walks off with the loot, whatever it is.”

A crowd had formed around the corpse. People were pointing at it and exclaiming in their unintelligible language. “Move aside, curse you, move aside,” Bembo said, and made sure people moved aside with a few well-placed elbows. Then he got a good look at the body and said, “Well, I’ll be a son of a whore.”

“What else is new?” Oraste pointed down to the dead man and said, “What do you bet the other two were the same?”

“I wouldn’t touch that,” Bembo said. The corpse had black hair--hair that surely had to be dyed, for the man’s build, skin tone, and long face were all typically Kaunian. “I bet he looked like a Forthwegian till your beam caught him,” Bembo added.

“Of course he did,” Oraste said. “Now let’s see what he was trying to lift.”

Bembo picked up the leather sack that lay by the dead man’s outflung right hand. He looked inside and whistled softly. “All sorts of pretties: rings and necklaces and earrings and bracelets and I don’t know what.” He hefted the sack. It was heavy, all right. “Good stuff--gold and silver, or I don’t know anything.”

“You don’t know bloody much--you’ve made that plain enough,” Oraste said. “But I’ll believe you know what’s worth something and what isn’t.”

A Forthwegian spoke up in good Algarvian: “That’s my jewelry, gentlemen, I’ll have you know.” He held out a hand for the sack, at the same time asking, “Where are the other two bandits? They said they’d cut my throat if I didn’t give them everything I had on display. I believed them, too.”

“They’re long gone, pal.” Oraste didn’t sound particularly brokenhearted about that, either. “You’re cursed lucky you had constables around. Otherwise, you never would have seen any of your stuff again. This way, you get some of it back, and one of the bad eggs is dead.” He spat on the corpse. “Stinking Kaunian.”

“You get some of your pretties back eventually,” Bembo added. “For now, it’s evidence of a crime--and serious crime, and even more serious because these outlaws were Kaunians with illegal, very illegal, sorcerous disguises.”