Out of the Darkness

“I’ll take them,” Talsu said. “I’ll be glad to, in fact--his house is near the grocery where Gailisa’s working.”

“Don’t dawdle away the whole day there,” his father said. “I would like to get a little more work out of you.”

“Foosh,” Talsu said. His father laughed. Talsu grabbed the trousers and headed across town with them. When he got to Mindaugu’s, the wealthy wine merchant took them, ducked away to try them on, and came out beaming. He gave Talsu his silver. Talsu looked the coins over, as he’d got into the habit of doing. “Wait a bit. This one’s got Mainardo’s ugly mug on it.”

Mindaugu made a sour face. “I thought I’d made a clean sweep of those.” He suddenly looked hopeful. “The silver’s still good, you know.” Talsu just clicked his tongue between his teeth. He had right on his side, and he knew it. Muttering, Mindaugu replaced Mainardo’s coin with one that had King Donalitu’s image. Talsu stuck it and the others in his pocket and headed off to the grocery store.

I won’t spend too much time there, he thought, but a fellow is entitled to see his wife every once in a while, isn’t he? He’d been married for more than a year, but still felt like a man on his honeymoon.

As he left the wine merchant’s, a couple of utterly ordinary middle-aged men in clothes even more ordinary (a tailor’s son, he noticed such things) who’d been leaning against a wall stepped out into the middle of the sidewalk--and into his path. “You Talsu son of Traku?” one of them asked, his voice mildly friendly.

“That’s right,” Talsu answered; only afterwards did he wonder what would have happened had he lied. As things were, he just said, “Do I know you?”

“You know us well enough,” replied the man who hadn’t asked his name. He reached into a trouser pocket and pulled out a short stick such as a constable might use. “You know us well enough to come along quietly, don’t you?”

Ice ran through Talsu. When he first saw the stick, he thought the men were a couple of robbers. He would have given up the silver he’d just got--it wasn’t worth his life. But they knew his name. And they wanted him, not his money. That could only make them King Donalitu’s men. As he bleated, “But I haven’t done anything!” he thought he would rather have dealt with robbers.

“Quietly, I said.” That was the fellow with the stick.

“Charge is treason against the Kingdom of Jelgava,” added the other one, the one who’d asked his name.

“Come along,” they said again, this time together. The one who didn’t have his stick out took Talsu’s arm. The other one fell in behind them so he could blaze Talsu at the first sign of anything untoward.

Numbly, Talsu went where they took him. If he’d done anything else, something dreadful would have happened to him. He was sure of that. Donalitu’s men had no reputation for restraint. They didn’t lead him in the direction of the constabulary station, which surprised him enough to make him ask, “Where are we going?” He added, “I really haven’t done anything,” not that he thought it would do him any good.

And it didn’t. “Shut up,” one of them said.

“You’ll find out where,” the other told him.

He did, too, when they marched him into the ley-line caravan depot. He wondered how they would keep things quiet and discreet in an ordinary caravan car. But, being servitors of the king, they didn’t have to worry about ordinary cars. They had a special laid on just for them--and him. He would gladly have done without the honor.

“What about my family?” he howled as the car--which had bars across the windows and sorcerous locks on the door--rolled out of Skrunda, heading southeast.

“Can’t pin anything on ‘em yet,” one of the men who’d seized him said. That wasn’t what Talsu meant, nor anything close to it, but he didn’t try to make himself any clearer. He’d caught the unmistakable regret in the fellow’s voice.

The other man said, “You want to confess now and make it easy on everybody?”

Everybody but me, Talsu thought. Of course, they didn’t care about him. He said, “How can I confess when I haven’t done anything?”

“Happens all the time,” the fellow answered.

Talsu believed that. He’d spent time in a dungeon before. “How can you arrest me for treason when the cursed redheads arrested me for treason?” he demanded.

“Happens all the time,” Donalitu’s bully boy said again. “Some people have treason in their blood.” While Talsu was still spluttering over that, he went on, “Turn out your pockets. Everything that’s in ‘em. You leave anything at all behind, you’ll be sorry--you can bet your arse on that.” He shoved a tray at Talsu.