Darkness Descending

“What’s this?” Oraste asked suspiciously. Bembo didn’t know, either, and was just as suspicious. His experience had been that Forthwegians didn’t look for constables--they looked out for them. The woman spewed forth a stream of gibberish: the handful of Forthwegian words Bembo know were vile.

“Wait!” he said, and threw up his hands as if stopping an oncoming wagon. “Do you speak any Algarvian?” The woman shook her head. Her massive bosom shook too. Bembo found the spectacle anything but entrancing. He sighed, then shifted languages and asked a question that obscurely embarrassed him: “You speaking Kaunian?”

“Yes, I speak some Kaunian,” the woman answered--she had more of the tongue than he did, which wasn’t saying much. “Live next to those nasty people long enough and some rubs off.”

Bembo tried to follow her and at the same time to dredge up vocabulary he hadn’t had to worry about since the last time a schoolmaster beat it into his back with a switch. “You wanting to telling me what?” he asked. He gave up on grammar and syntax; if he could make himself understood, he was ahead of the game.

And the woman did understand him. Pointing back toward her building, she said, “A wicked wizard has cheated me out of a week’s pay. I wait on tables. I am not rich. I will never be rich. I cannot afford to have a miserable mage take away my money.”

“What’s she yattering about?” asked Oraste, who either had never learned Kaunian or didn’t remember so much as a word. Bembo explained. Oraste’s long face got longer. “A wizard? Oh, aye, that’s just what you love to do when you’re a constable: go after a wizard. Have to blaze the whoreson if he tries to give you trouble. Otherwise, he doesn’t just try--he cursed well does it.”

“I know, I know. Don’t remind me.” Bembo turned back to the Forthwegian woman. “Wizard doing was what?”

“What was he doing?” Her bosom heaved once more. Sparks flashed in her dark eyes. “He was cheating me. I told you that. Did you not listen?”

Constabulary work could be exasperating in Tricarico, too. Every kingdom had its share of fools. Bembo remained convinced he met more than his share. He pointed at the woman. “You taking toward he we.”

Into the block of flats they went. It was more battered and more crowded than any equivalent back in Algarve. The stairway stank of stale olive oil and staler piss. Bembo wrinkled his nose. The Forthwegian woman took the smell for granted, which suggested it had been there before the Algarvians overran Gromheort.

On the third floor, the woman pointed to the doorway farthest from the stairs. “There!” she said loudly. “The thief lives there.”

“Kick it in?” Oraste asked.

“Not yet,” Bembo answered. “We’ve only got this gal’s side of it. For all we know, this fellow in there may be right. For all we know, he may not be a wizard at all. Powers above, he may never have set eyes on her before.” The woman listened to him in impatient incomprehension. With an unhappy mutter, he started toward the door. “Cover me,” he told Oraste.

“Oh, aye,” his comrade said, and drew his stick. “Just in case the dingleberry is a mage.”

Bembo was thinking the same thing. The thought made him carefully calibrate his knock. He was aiming for being firm without being overbearing. He didn’t draw his stick, but had his hand on it. When he heard someone moving inside the flat, he didn’t know whether to be relieved or alarmed.

After a click of the latch, the door swung open. The fellow who stood in the doorway staring at Bembo through thick spectacles might have been a mage. As easily, he might have been an out-of-work clerk. Comprehension filled his face when he saw the heavy woman behind the constables. He muttered something in Forthwegian that had to mean, “I might have known.”

“You speak Algarvian?” Bembo barked at him.

To his relief, the fellow answered, “Aye, somewhat. I should have guessed Eanfled would summon the constables.” He looked past Bembo and Oraste and said something to the woman. Bembo didn’t know what she answered, but it sounded hotter than anything he’d learned.

He pointed to the woman. “Did you work magic for her?”

“Aye, I did,” the man answered.

“What does he say?” the woman--Eanfled--demanded in Kaunian. Bembo, feeling harassed, did his best to answer. The man took over; he spoke Kaunian, too.

“Ask him what sort of magic he did,” Oraste suggested--in Algarvian, of course. Again, Bembo tried to translate.

“She wanted to lose weight,” the man said--in Kaunian. “I made a spell to take the edge off her appetite. I had to be careful. Too much and she would starve herself to death. No great loss,” he added, “but people would talk.”

Eanfled let out a furious screech that made doors open all along the hallway. “You cheated me, you whoreson!” she shouted. “Look at me!” There was certainly plenty of her at which to look.

“You were fatter before,” the fellow with the spectacles answered calmly.

“Liar!” she yelled at him.