Rulers of the Darkness

The more he walked his beat, though, the more worried he got. If that was a place where disguised Kaunians gathered, had the healer tried to cure him or curse him? When he got back to the barracks, he put the question to a mage attached to the constabulary.

"Let's see the amulets she gave you," the fellow said. Bembo showed them to him. He nodded. "The substances are what they should be. I can check whether the spell was perverted some sort of way." The mage chanted, cocked his head to one side as if listening, and chanted some more. He glanced over at Bembo. "Far as I can tell, friend, you're not likely to get the grippe for a while. Everything's as it should be."

"Good," Bembo said. "The way things are nowadays, you can't be too careful."

"Well, I'm not going to tell you you're wrong there," the mage said. "But everything's fine this time."

Bembo intended to stop in and thank the healer- and probably frighten the life out of her customers- when he walked his beat the next day. But when he came to the little storefront, the door was ajar. He stuck his head inside. The door to the back room stood half open, too. He went back and peered into the gloom- no lamps shining now. And no litter of sorcerous apparatus there, either. The mage was gone, and she'd cleaned out all her stuff.

Bembo sighed. He wasn't even very surprised. He patted the amulets she'd given him. She'd been honest, and then she'd decided she had to run away. "Shows what honesty's worth," Bembo muttered. And if that wasn't a demon of a thought for a constable to have, he didn't know what was.

***

Spinello not only walked through the streets of Trapani with a limp, he walked through them with a cane. From what the healers said, he might get rid of the cane one day before too long. The limp, though, the limp looked to be here to stay.

There were compensations. He got pitying glances from women, and pity, for a man of enterprise, might easily be turned to some warmer emotion. The wound badge he wore on his tunic now supported a gold bar. He'd been awarded the Algarvian Sunburst, Second Grade, for gallantry in the face of the enemy, to go with his frozen-meat medal, and he had a colonel's three stars on his collar patches. When he went back to the front, he'd probably end up commanding a brigade.

He tried to straighten up and walk as if he hadn't been wounded. He could do it- for a couple of steps at a time. After that, it hurt too much. He would have traded rank and decorations for the smooth stride he'd once enjoyed in a heartbeat- in half a heartbeat, by the powers above, he thought. But the powers above didn't strike bargains like that, worse luck.

Going up the stairs to the Royal Cultural Museum made sweat spring out on his forehead. By the time he climbed them all and strode into the great rococo pile of a building, he was biting his lip against the pain. The ticket-seller, a nice-looking young woman, gave him a smile that could have been promising. But when Spinello said hello to her, he tasted blood in his mouth. He went on by, his own face grim.

As always, he made for the large gallery housing artifacts from the days of the Kaunian Empire. The spare, even severe, sensibility informing those busts and pots and coins and sorcerous tools and other articles of everyday life was as far removed from that inspiring the building in which they were housed as it possibly could have been. And yet, all things considered, Spinello preferred elegant simplicity to equally elegant extravagance.

As he always did in this gallery, Spinello paused in front of a two-handled drinking cup whose lines had always struck him as being as close to perfection as made no difference. Neither illustration nor memory ever did it justice. Every so often, he had to see it in the fired clay to remind himself what human hand and human will could shape.

"Spinello, isn't it?"

He was so lost in contemplation, he needed a moment to hear and recognize his own name. Then he turned and stared at the aged savant who'd been leaning on a cane longer than he had been alive. His own bow was awkward, but heartfelt. "Master Malindo!" he exclaimed. "What an honor! What a pleasant surprise!" What a pleasant surprise to see you still breathing, was what he meant. Malindo had been too old to serve in the Six Years' War, which surely put him up past ninety now.

"I go on," Malindo said in a creaky voice. "Are those a colonel's stars I see?"

"Aye." Spinello drew himself up with what he hoped was pardonable pride.

"A man of valor. A man of spirit," Malindo murmured. He paused, perhaps trying to find what he'd meant to say. He is old, Spinello thought. But then, quite visibly, the savant did find it. "And have you fought in the west?"

"Aye," Spinello repeated, this time in a different tone of voice.