Rulers of the Darkness

Behind the Algarvians came another company in uniform: bearded Forthwegians who'd joined Plegmund's Brigade. Their countrymen, forced to wait at the cross street while they passed, cursed them more foully than the Algarvian soldiers had cursed Bembo. Disciplined and stolid, the new recruits for the Brigade kept on marching. They puzzled Bembo. If some foreign king occupied Algarve, he couldn't see himself volunteering to fight for the fellow.

Of course, I'm a lover, not a fighter, he thought. He wouldn't have said that aloud had Oraste been tramping along beside him. His partner seldom found his jokes funny, but Oraste would have howled laughter at that.

A little storefront had a big sign in unintelligible Forthwegian. Below it, in smaller letters, were a couple of words of perfectly understandable Algarvian: Healing Charms. The paint that served as their background was a little newer, a little cleaner, than the rest of the sign. Bembo wondered if the sign had said the same thing in classical Kaunian before Gromheort changed hands.

He might have walked on by had he not chosen that moment to sneeze. He didn't want to spend several days on his cot aching and feverish and generally feeling as if he'd stepped in front of a ley-line caravan car. If a charm would stop his sickness before it really got started, he was all for it. He went inside.

Two men and a woman sat in a gloomy, nasty waiting room. They all looked up at him in varying degrees of alarm. He'd expected nothing less. "Relax," he told them, hoping they understood Algarvian- after the baker, he was feeling spoiled. "I'm here for the same reason you are."

One of the men murmured in Forthwegian. The other two people eased back into their seats. The woman chuckled nervously. The man who knew some Algarvian asked, "And why is that?"

"To keep myself from coming down with the grippe, of course," Bembo answered. He sneezed again. "Powers above, I hope I'm not too late."

"Oh," the man said. He translated once more. The other man said something. They all smiled. The man patted the chair next to him. "Here. You can go next."

"Thanks." Bembo took such privileges for granted. He sat down.

A few minutes later, the door to the back room opened. A man and a woman came out. The man took one look at Bembo and scooted past him, out the front door, and onto the street. That didn't surprise Bembo, either- the fellow was the type who would have dealt with constables before. The woman looked Bembo up and down, too. After a brittle silence, she asked, "What you want?" in halting Algarvian.

Before Bembo could speak, the man sitting by him said, "He's after your famous cure for the grippe."

"Ah." The woman nodded. She pointed to Bembo. "You come with me."

"Aye, Mistress," he answered, and followed her into the back room. It had the impressive disorder he'd seen before among mages of a certain type, although he would have been mightily surprised if she held any formal ranking. When she gestured, he sat down in one of the chairs. She sat in the other, which faced his.

"Grippe, eh?" she said.

"That's right," Bembo agreed. "My partner's down with it now, and I don't want to catch it myself."

Nodding again, she set her hand on his forehead. Her palm was cool and smooth. She clicked her tongue between her teeth. "You just in time- I hope," she said.

"Have I got a fever?" Bembo asked anxiously.

She held up her thumb and forefinger. "Little one," she answered. "Now little one. You not worry. I fix." She reached for a book. It was, Bembo saw, in Kaunian. He gave a mental shrug. Algarvian mages used the classical tongue, too.

After reading, she rummaged through her sorcerous supplies (had she not been a mage of sorts, Bembo would have thought of the stuff as junk). She bound a small, reddish rock and a bit of something fibrous into a silk bag, then hung it round his neck by a cord. Then she put a couple of teeth, one needlelike, the other thicker but still sharp, into another little sack and set that in his breast pocket.

"Bloodstone and sea sponge good against fever," she said. "Likewise fangs of serpent and crocodile." She stood and set both hands on top of his head. Some of her chant was in Forthwegian, some in Kaunian. When she was done, she gave Bembo a brisk nod and held out her right hand, palm up. "One broad silver bit."

He started to growl. But angering a mage, even a lesser one, was foolish. He paid. Not only did he pay, he said, "Thank you."

It wasn't what he was thinking. The healer had to know that. But nobody could blaze you for thinking. She said, "You're welcome."

When he came out into the front room, conversation stopped most abruptly. A couple of new people had come in while the healing mage was helping him. He thought they were talking back and forth in Kaunian, but he hadn't heard enough to be sure. He strode past them and out onto the street again.