Jaws of Darkness (20 page)

“Sounds like you’ve got some sense,” Delminio said. Sergeant Folicone nodded. Bembo beamed. He’d made a good first impression. Delminio went on, “Just come with me. The quarter isn’t far.”

Bembo went past the same sorts of warning signs he would have seen in Gromheort. The Kaunian district here looked much the same as Gromheort’s, too, though it was larger. He watched Kaunian women’s backsides, as the blonds went around in trousers. So did Delminio. They noticed each other doing it, and they both grinned. “I think I can manage here,” Bembo said. His new partner nodded. Bembo wondered if he could find a Kaunian wench for himself. It might not be too hard.

Up till the time when the redheads swept through the Kaunian quarter of Eoforwic, Vanai had been through only one roundup. And back then, she hadn’t even known what the Algarvian constables were doing when they took Kaunians out of Oyngestun. They’d told soothing lies then: they’d said they were sending people west as laborers. Some of her fellow villagers had even gone with them of their own free will.

It wasn’t like that anymore. The surviving Kaunians knew the Algarvians wanted them for one thing and one thing only: their life energy. And so, when the redheads swarmed into the Kaunian district, the blonds did their best to hide.

The roundup, of course, came without warning. Anyone the hunters caught on the street was simply nabbed and grabbed and hauled away. But the captured Kaunians’ cries of despair and the Algarvians’ shouts of triumph warned others of the raid. Like any hunted animals, most of the Kaunians who weren’t caught in the open had holes in which to hide.

Vanai was no exception. After she was captured and brought into the Kaunian district, she’d expected something like this to happen sooner or later—probably sooner. And so she’d gone exploring in the block of flats where the redheads had put her. Waiting quietly in her flat for them to come get her and take her away … She shook her head.
By the powers above, I’m not going to make it easy for them,
she thought.

Exploring had been easier because so many of the flats stood empty. She didn’t like to think about that. But it gave her a lot more choices than she would have had otherwise.

She’d found a good spot in a vacant ground-floor flat: a closet that had a lot more room than it seemed to, and one where a searcher peering in, even with a lamp, wouldn’t be able to spy her. He would have to step all the way into the closet to notice it took an unexpected dogleg. Whoever’d made it that way might have had a hidey-hole in mind.

When the first terrified cries rang out, Vanai knew at once what they meant, what they had to mean. She wasted not an instant. She had to get downstairs and into her hiding place before constables started swarming through the building. If she didn’t, she was ruined. The baby she carried made her awkward and slow, but she forced herself to hurry downstairs anyhow.

More Kaunians, many more, were going up than down. “You fool, it’s death on the streets!” a man said as she pushed past him, moving against the tide.

He was bound to be right, of course. But Vanai wasn’t heading for the streets, though she didn’t say so. She burst out of the stairwell and went down the hallway toward that empty flat at a lumbering trot.

Just outside the open door, panic nearly froze her.
What if someone else has found this place, too? It won’t hold two, and I won’t have time to go looking anywhere else.

Almost moaning in terror, she dashed back to the closet. No one cried out in fear even greater than hers, believing her to be one of the hunters rather than the hunted. And no one shouted for her to go away, either. She still had the place to herself.

“Powers above be praised,” she gasped, making herself as comfortable as she could in the little hidden niche.

Only then did another bad thought strike her: if this hiding place was so splendid, why did this flat stand empty? The redheads must have caught whoever had been living here before. Would constables come casually walking in, check the closet, and take her away? She couldn’t run, not any more. It was too late for that.

Footsteps in the hallway and loud Algarvian voices said she had indeed made her choice. Now she would have to live—or die—with it. “Miserable blonds,” a man growled, his voice sounding as if it came from right outside the doorway to the flat in which she cowered. “Finding the lousy buggers is getting to be like pulling teeth.”

“We’ve got to do it, though,” another Algarvian answered. He might have been talking about any hard, not particularly pleasant job … till he went on, “The Forthwegians here won’t miss them, anyhow.”

“Well, of course they won’t,” the first constable said, as if his friend were belaboring the obvious. And then that first redhead’s voice came from
inside
the flat: “Let’s see what we’ve got here.” Vanai shivered. She forced herself to stop—it might make a noise. She tried not even to breathe.

“Not bloody likely we’ll flush anybody out of this place—Kaunians usually like to run upstairs, not hide down low.” The second Algarvian spoke now as the voice of experience.

“I know, I know,” his pal said. “We’ve got to go through the motions, though.” A piece of furniture went over with a crash. The Algarvian grunted. “Nothing there. Let me check this closet here, and then we can go on upstairs, like you said.”

He spoke his last few words just outside the closet where Vanai hid. The baby growing inside her chose that moment to kick. The unexpected motion within her made her want to jump. It made her want to scream. She did neither. She bit down hard on her lower lip and waited in dark, dusty silence.

Then she wanted to scream again; for the silence, while it remained dusty, was no longer so dark. That Algarvian had a lamp, which he used to illuminate as much of the closet as he could from the entrance to it. Just for a moment, light touched the tip of Vanai’s right shoe. She started to jerk it back, but checked herself. Motion and sound could betray her, too.

“Anything?” the second Algarvian asked.

“Doesn’t look like it,” the first one answered. The hateful light receded. “Now we can go on upstairs and get down to business.”

“Right,” his friend said, “Here, I’ll paint a cross on the front door to keep anybody else from wasting his time.” The two sets of footsteps receded.

I’m safe,
Vanai thought dizzily.
For a little while, I’m safe.
Now she could shake. Once she started, she discovered she had a hard time stopping.

And, just because she’d escaped the roundup for the time being didn’t mean the other Kaunians in the block of flats were so lucky. She heard Algarvians hauling them downstairs, heard men cursing and begging, heard women shrieking in despair. Neither curses nor pleas nor shrieks had the slightest effect on the constables, except to annoy them. Then Vanai heard bludgeons striking flesh—which, if they didn’t quiet the curses and pleas, did turn them to shrieks.

“Well, that’s not a bad bag,” one Algarvian said to another in the ground-floor hallway.

“Not too bad, anyhow,” his companion agreed. “How close to quota are we?”

“How should I know?” the first man answered. “You think our officers tell me anything more than they tell you?”

“Fat chance,” the second man said. “Screw ‘em all.”

They’re just doing their job,
Vanai thought again.
They don’t much like the people who give them the work, but they do it. How can the? I don’t understand. Could anyone understand?

Silence returned. Vanai didn’t dare move. They’d said they were done with this block of flats, but had all of them left? If she came out before they had, she was sure they would be happy enough to scoop her up. How would she know? When could she be sure? She shook her head. She couldn’t be sure. When would she have to take a chance?

She wished she had some way to gauge things inside the closet. She feared her guesses weren’t worth much. It already seemed as if she’d been trapped inside here forever.

She was about to come out and see if she could sneak upstairs when she heard new voices in the hallway. An Algarvian spoke in his own language: “Look at the crosses on the doorways, sir. They’ve already searched this building.”

The fellow who answered did so with aristocratic scorn: “You are looking with your eyes. I look with more than that. I look with senses you haven’t got. And I shall find what you’ve missed, too—you wait and see.”

A mage,
Vanai thought, with terror dulled only because she’d already been through so much other terror. She wasn’t warded. She hadn’t imagined she would need to be warded. If he started incanting—no,
when
he started incanting—she was ruined.
It’s not fair.
That was probably true, but it would do her no good at all.

Out in the street—Vanai thought it was out in the street, anyhow—a shout rang out: the same word, repeated over and over. Hidden in the blind dogleg closet, she couldn’t make out what the word was. Neither could the Algarvian mage. “How am I supposed to concentrate with this racket?” he snapped, his voice peevish.

“You don’t need to concentrate, sir,” the constable with him answered. “They’re yelling that they’ve got their quota. They don’t need any more blonds this time around.”

“Oh,” the mage said. “Is that so? Well, if I don’t have to work, I’m bloody well not going to work. That’s fair enough—better than fair enough, by the powers above.” He began to whistle. His footsteps, along with those of the constable who’d come into the block of flats with him, faded in the distance as the two men left again.

Vanai didn’t move for a long time. By then, she wasn’t sure she
could
move. At last, a bladder that threatened to burst drove her to her feet.

She came out of the closet ever so cautiously. She came out of the flat even more cautiously. When she saw someone come up the stairs and into the block of flats, she almost jumped out of her skin. But it was only another Kaunian. He waved to her. “So I’m not the only one they missed here, eh?” he said, sounding more cheerful than he had any business doing. “Well, good.”

He saw Vanai, who’d survived the roundup, and resolutely didn’t see all the people who hadn’t. She couldn’t think like that.

When she went back up to her flat, she found that the Algarvians had turned it inside out. She wasn’t upset; she’d expected nothing less. She had little that could be broken, and even less that she minded losing. Before long, she had the flat set to rights again.

And, before long, just as if the roundup hadn’t happened, bells clanged in the Kaunian quarter, summoning the blonds who’d come through uncaught to get their food so they could stay strong and healthy till the Algarvians needed more of them. Vanai didn’t go, in case it turned out to be another trap, another betrayal. The Algarvians who’d gone through the flat had been after her person, not the couple of small chunks of stale bread and dried fruit she’d secreted there. She didn’t have a lot to eat, but she had some.

As she nibbled a dried apricot, she looked out the window and down onto the street below. Not many Kaunians could have escaped in this neighborhood, but she saw a fair number of people heading for the feeding stations the Algarvians had set up. She grimaced.
If they’re that stupid, they deserve to be caught.
Then she grimaced again, this time at herself.
Why do they deserve to get caught for having empty stomachs?

And then she spotted the Algarvian constable who came down the street chatting up every young woman who passed. She muttered the foulest curses she knew, and wished she knew worse ones. Even though she couldn’t hear him, she could guess what he’d be saying.
Come with me, sweetheart. Give me what I want, and you won’t go west,
the same sort of vicious bargain Major Spinello had struck with her back in Oyngestun. The redheads were great ones for deals like that. Vanai shrank back from the window, lest he see her. When she peeked out again, a few minutes later, he was gone. She let out a long, heartfelt sigh of relief.

Five

N
ight in the Strait of Valmiera: a nasty night, with rain and even a little sleet beating down. Wind-whipped waves slapped against the
Habakkuk’s
port side as she slid north along a ley line toward the Derlavaian mainland. Secure in the bowels of the great, sorcerously enhanced iceberg, Leino hardly noticed the motion.

When the Kuusaman mage remarked on that, Xavega raised a scornful, elegant eyebrow. “In
a proper
ley-line ship, we would not feel the waves at all,” she said, using classical Kaunian as he had. “We would glide above the water, and not be subject to it.” She didn’t add,
You ignorant Kuusaman oaf,
but she might as well have.

Leino sighed and didn’t answer.
Why did my fancy fix on someone who despises me and all my people? He
wondered. One of his own eyebrows quirked, in wry amusement.
Because I’ve been away from Pekka too long, that’s why. And because Xavega packs her bile in such a nicely shaped container.