Through the Darkness

He didn’t say how. Then Oraste raised his hand. Pesaro looked at him in some surprise; Oraste didn’t usually bother with questions. But when the sergeant nodded his way, he came up with a good one: “What shall we do, take along manicure scissors to snip hair with?”

“If you’ve got ‘em, why not?” Pesaro answered. “It’s a better idea than people with fancier badges than yours have come up with, I’ll tell you that. But listen--don’t spend all your time checking the prettiest girls. We want the bastards with beards, too. They’re likely to be more dangerous. All right? Go on.”

Off the constables went. Oraste asked Bembo, “You have a little scissors?”

“Of course I do.” Bembo was as vain of his person as most Algarvians. “How am I supposed to keep my mustaches and imperial in proper trim without one?”

“You could gnaw ‘em,” Oraste said helpfully. “Or you could let ‘em grow out thick and bushy all over your face, the way the Forthwegians do.”

“Thank you, but no thank you,” Bembo replied with dignity. “If I want fur, I’ll buy a ruff.” He pointed to the first reasonably good-looking Forthwegian girl he saw and called out, “You there! Aye, you. Stop.”

She did, and asked, “What do you want with me?” in pretty good Algarvian.

Bembo took the small scissors from his belt pouch. “I want a little lock of your hair, sweetheart, to make sure you’re not a Kaunian in disguise.”

“What will you do with it afterwards?” she asked in some alarm. “Make nasty magic against me?” She started to shrink away.

A fat lot of good our sorcery s done in Unkerlant, Bembo thought sourly, but even the Forthwegians are afraid of it. “No, no, no, by the powers above!” he exclaimed. “I’ll give it back to you, every single hair. You can dispose of it.”

She eyed him, plainly trying to decide whether he was telling the truth. At last, grimacing, she nodded. Bembo came up to her, stroked her cheek on the pretext of brushing the hair back from it, and snipped a lock. The hair he’d cut stayed dark. He handed it back to the girl, as he’d promised. She put it in her belt pouch and went off with her proud nose in the air.

“You see, darling?” Bembo called after her. “I keep my word.” She kept walking.

“Nice try, lover boy,” Oraste said. Bembo stuck his nose in the air.

They tramped on through the gray, battered, sorry-looking streets of Gromheort. Every so often, they would stop somebody and cut off a lock of hair. Explaining what they wanted was a lot harder when the people they stopped didn’t speak Algarvian. Trying to explain in Kaunian was hard for Bembo, to say nothing of the irony he couldn’t help feeling while using that language to search for sorcerously disguised blonds. “We should have learned some Forthwegian,” he told Oraste.

His partner shook his head. “All those other languages are just a bunch of grunting noises, anybody wants to know what I think. These whoresons don’t want to understand Algarvian, they’ll understand a club smacked into the side of their pot, they will. And you can take that to the bank.”

“I like the way you think,” Bembo said, halfway between mocking admiration and the genuine article. “Nothing’s ever hard for you, is it?”

By way of reply, Oraste grabbed his crotch. Bembo threw back his head and laughed. He couldn’t help himself. He and Oraste kept on prowling, kept on snipping, and caught not a single camouflaged Kaunian.

When they got back to the barracks at the end of their shift, though, Bembo had an inspiration. He went up to Pesaro and said, “What are all the crazy buggers in this whole stinking kingdom doing this time of year?”

“Driving me daft,” Pesaro said, giving him a sour look. Nobody from his squad of constables had come up with any Kaunians, and he wasn’t very happy about that.

Bembo refused to let himself get too annoyed. He said, “They’re all going out into the country to hunt fornicating mushrooms, that’s what. The blonds are as wild for those nasty things as the real Forthwegians are. If the gate guards checked everybody who came in and went out. . .”

Slowly, a smile replaced the glower on Pesaro’s plump face. “Well, curse me!” he exclaimed. “There, do you see? You’re not as foolish as you look. Who would have believed it?”

“I’ve had good ideas before,” Bembo protested indignantly.

“Oh, so you have,” Pesaro said. “The one good idea you never could figure out was keeping your big mouth shut.” He pondered, stroking the tuft of hair on his chin. “But that is smart, dip me in dung if it’s not. Aye, I’ll pass it up the line.” He stroked his chin again. “Something else like that, too--if we shut off a whole city block, say, and snipped everybody in it, I bet we’d catch a few blonds by surprise.”