Out of the Darkness

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?”

Forensic sounded as if it ought to be Gyongyosian-it wasn’t the funny sort of noises Kuusamans used for a language-but it wasn’t a word Istvan had heard before. He shrugged broad shoulders. “You’re a mage. That’s enough to know.”

“All right.” She turned to one of the guards and spoke in her own language. The man nodded. He left the tent. Lammi returned to Gyongyosian: “He is fetching you something to eat.”

What Istvan got must have come from the guards’ rations, not the captives’: a big plate full of eggs and smoked salmon scrambled together, with fried turnips swimming in butter off to the side. He ate like a starving mountain ape. Kuusaman interrogations certainly didn’t seem much like those his countrymen would have used.

While he shoveled food into his mouth, Lammi said, “What it means is, after something has happened, I investigate how and why it happened. You can probably guess what I am here to investigate.”

Istvan’s stomach did a slow lurch, as if he were aboard ship in a heavy sea. “Probably,” he said, and let it go at that. The less he said, the less Lammi could use.

She gave him back a brisk nod. Behind the lenses of her spectacles, her eyes were very sharp indeed. “It means one thing more, Sergeant: if you lie, I will know it. You do not want that to happen. Please believe me-you do not.”

Another lurch. Istvan almost regretted the enormous breakfast he was demolishing. Almost, but not quite. He’d eaten mush-and thin mush at that-for too long. Lammi waited for him to say something. Reluctantly, he did: “I understand.”