Out of the Darkness

“Oh,” Sidroc said, and then, “Oh, shit.” That was an unanswerable argument. But it also had its drawbacks: “If the army does keep pulling back, what is there left to fight for?” Puliano just scowled by way of reply, from which Sidroc concluded that that had no real answer, either. He wished it did.

Six

Drizzle on the island of Obuda was as natural and unremarkable as snow in Istvan’s home valley. The sergeant stood to attention in his place in the captives’ camp as the Kuusaman guards took the morning roll call and count. He stood in the same place every day, rain or shine. The guards made sure they got the numbers right; when anything went wrong with their count, everything stopped--including the captives’ breakfasts--till they straightened things out.

Beside Istvan, Corporal Kun whispered, “This would go a lot smoother if the goat-eaters could count to twenty-one without playing with themselves.”

That made Istvan laugh. A guard pointed at him and shouted, “To be quiet!” in bad Gyongyosian. He nodded to show he was sorry, then glared at Kun. It was just like his brief time in the village school: somebody else talked out of turn, and he got in trouble for it.

At last, the slanteyes seemed satisfied. Istvan waited for one of them to call out, “To queue up for feeding!” the way they usually did. Instead, though, the Kuusaman captain in charge of the guards said, “Sergeant Istvan! Corporal Kun! To stand out!”

Ice ran through Istvan. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Kun start. But they had no choice. The two of them stepped away from their comrades, away from their countrymen. Istvan hadn’t imagined how terribly lonely he could feel with so many eyes on him.

The captain nodded. “You two,” he said, using the plural where he should have used the dual, “to come with me.”

“Why, sir?” Istvan asked. “What have we done?”

“Not know,” the Kuusaman answered with a shrug. “You to come for interrogation.”

He pronounced the word so badly, Istvan almost failed to understand it. When he did, he wished he hadn’t. Gyongyosian interrogations were nasty, brutal things. The Kuusamans were the enemy, so he couldn’t imagine they would play the game by gentler rules.

But it was their game, not his. Under the sticks of the guards, he could obey or he could die. I should have let Captain Frigyes cut my throat after all, he thought. It would have been over in a hurry then, and my life energy might have done something extra to the slanteyes. Now the stars are having their revenge on me.

One of the guards gestured with his stick. Numbly, Istvan started forward, Kun at his side. Kun’s face was a frozen mask. Istvan tried to wear the same look. If the Kuusamans thought he was afraid, it would only go worse for him. And if they don’t think I’m afraid, they’re fools.

But he would do his best to act like a man from a warrior race as long as he could. “You ought to give us breakfast before you question us,” he told a guard as the fellow led him toward one of the gates in the stockade.

“To shut up,” the guard answered.

Outside the gate, the Kuusamans separated him from Kun, leading him towards one tent on the yellow-brown grass and Kun to another. Istvan grimaced. That made telling lies harder.

He ducked his way into the tent. A couple of guards already stood in there. The Kuusamans didn’t believe in taking chances. One of the men who’d led him out of the captives’ camp walked in behind him. No, the slanteyes didn’t believe in taking chances at all. A moment later, he realized why: the bright-looking Kuusaman sitting in a folding chair waiting for him was a woman. She wore spectacles amazingly like Kun’s. It had barely occurred to him that the Kuusamans had to have women among them as well as men, or there wouldn’t have been any more Kuusamans after a while. He wished there hadn’t been.

“Hello. You are Sergeant Istvan, is it not so?” she said, speaking better Gyongyosian than any other slanteye he’d ever heard. She waited for him to nod, then went on, “I am called Lammi. May the stars shine on our meeting.”

“May it be so,” Istvan mumbled; he felt confused, out of his depth, but he’d be accursed if he would let a foreigner act more politely than he did.

“Sit down, if you care to,” Lammi said, pointing to another folding chair. Warily, Istvan sat. The Kuusaman woman--she was, he guessed, somewhere around forty, for she had a handful of silver threads among the midnight of her hair, the first fine wrinkles around her eyes--went on, “You were taken before breakfast, eh?”

“Aye, Lady Lammi,” Istvan answered, unconsciously giving her the title he would have given a domain-holder’s wife back in his home valley.

She laughed. “I am no lady,” she said. “I am a forensic sorcerer--do you know what that means?”