Jaws of Darkness by Harry Turtledove Page A

guess.”
    He read her far better than she could read him, which never failed to annoy her. “Well, aye,” she admitted, not quite daring to lie to him: a telling measure of how much he intimidated her.
    “Enjoy yourself,” Lurcanio said. “I wish I could find such an easy, pleasant escape.”
    Honestly puzzled, Krasta asked, “Why can’t you?”
    Lurcanio sighed. His mustaches—graying copper—were waxed so stiff, the exhalation didn’t trouble them. “Why, my sweet? Because, unlike you, I have to work for a living. I have duties to perform.” He waved at the blizzard of papers in front of him. “Who would take care of them if I went off whenever I chose?”
    Krasta didn’t recognize a rhetorical question when she heard one. “Why, Captain Gradasso, of course. What are servants for?”
    Colonel Lurcanio sighed again. “First, an adjutant is not a servant. Second, they are my duties, not his; he has his own. And third, at the moment he is performing his duties far from here.”
    “What do you mean?” Krasta asked.
    “I mean that he is on his way to the Duchy of Grelz, if he hasn’t got there yet,” Lurcanio answered. “Powers above grant that he stay safe. For the time being, I have his work to do as well as my own. I may eventually be assigned another adjutant. On the other hand, I may not.”
    Where she was sensitive to little else, Krasta understood every nuance of rank. “That’s an outrage!” she exclaimed.
    “It is war.” Lurcanio’s shrug was less extravagant—less Algarvian—than usual. He got up, came around the desk, and took Krasta in his arms. As he kissed her, his hands roamed her body. She wondered if he would want her to flip up his kilt; she’d done that a couple of times here. She wouldn’t have minded doing it again—the danger of discovery often excited her. But Lurcanio let her go. With a last pat, he said, “Go on. Enjoy yourself. Be glad you can.” He returned to his paperwork.
    Krasta needed no more urging to do what she already intended to do anyhow. Before she left, though, she went around behind the desk, bent beside Lurcanio, and teased his ear with her tongue for a moment. If he preferred work to her, she wanted to remind him of a little of what he’d be missing. Then, laughing, she hurried away before he would grab her.
    Her driver smelled of spirits. He often did. Krasta didn’t worry about that overmuch. Even if he was drunk, the horse remained sober. “Take me to the Boulevard of Horsemen,” she said. When she went into Priekule, she most often went to the street with the capital’s finest shops. The driver nodded. He probably would have taken her there even had she said she wanted to go somewhere else, because he was used to heading there, waiting for her, and drinking while he waited.
    As it had ever since the Algarvians marched into it, Priekule looked sad and gray. Buildings needed paint and a scrubbing they weren’t likely to get any time soon. A lot of the people on the street seemed to need paint and a scrubbing, too: they shambled along, lacking the will or the energy to do anything more. Some of the Valmieran women, by contrast, wore altogether too much paint, and wore either trousers that might have been painted onto their backsides or Algarvian-style kilts that barely covered those backsides. Some of them had caught the redheaded soldiers they were obviously after, too.
    Krasta sneered. She’d caught a redheaded soldier, too, but she didn’t usually let herself think of it that way.
    Now that she was here, she wondered why she’d come. To get away from the mansion for a while, she supposed. But the Boulevard of Horsemen wasn’t what it had been. Shop windows displayed mostly junk, and often old junk at that. The only shops with plenty of new items on display were the booksellers, hardly Krasta’s favorite haunts. Just because she could read and write didn’t mean she felt she had to very often.
    But then she saw Viscount Valnu flipping