Jaws of Darkness by Harry Turtledove Page B

through some volume or other inside a bookstore. She tapped on the glass. Valnu looked up. His smile illuminated his long, bony face. He fluttered his fingers at her, then did a proper job of waving, urging her to come in.
    She did, though she felt at least as out of place as she would have walking into a brothel. “Where are my spectacles?” she exclaimed, careless as usual of the proprietor behind his counter. “Don’t I have to have spectacles?”
    “Not you, darling,” Valnu murmured in a husky voice that enchanted women—and also Algarvian officers of a certain inclination. He kissed her on the cheek. “You are a spectacle, so you don’t need to wear any.”
    “You should talk,” Krasta said: He was wearing a kilt himself, one that showed off as much leg as those of any of the slatterns on the street. “What are you doing here?”
    “Eating beans,” Valnu answered. “What else is there to do at a bookseller’s?” He started to put away the tome he’d been looking at.
    Krasta took it from him before he could slide it back on the shelf. “ The Kaunian Empire and the Barbarians of the Southwest,” she read from the front cover, and started to laugh. “Don’t let your redheaded friends know you look at such things.”
    Viscount Valnu laughed, too. “It shall be my deep, dark secret, believe me.” He rolled his blue, blue eyes, as if to say no one could possibly take him seriously.
    And then Krasta remembered something that had shaken Priekule—had certainly shaken her—not long before. “Don’t let your redheaded friends know about Amatu, either,” she said, this time in a lower voice. Amatu, who’d gone over from the Valmieran underground to the Algarvians, had been ambushed and murdered on his way home from a supper with Krasta and Lurcanio. Valnu had known beforehand he would be there.
    The viscount’s smile never wavered. “You’d better keep quiet, my dear, or you’ll go the way he did,” he said.
    “That could happen to you, too, you know,” she answered with a smile of her own. “If I had an accident, Lurcanio would learn everything.” That was a lie, but Valnu couldn’t prove it.
    He condescended to raise an eyebrow. “Maybe we should talk further.”
    “Aye.” Krasta nodded. “Maybe we should.”
     
    Marshal Rathar wished he were back at the front, still commanding the Unkerlanter armies battling to drive the Algarvians out of the Duchy of Grelz. There, he was lord of all he surveyed: who dared go against the wishes of the second most powerful man in all the Kingdom of Unkerlant?
    One man dared, and no one in Unkerlant, not even Marshal Rathar— perhaps particularly not Marshal Rathar—presumed to disobey King Swemmel’s express command. And so Rathar found himself back in Cottbus, far from the fighting, all too close to the king. The maps in his office—the maps whose moving gray- and red-headed pins showed the fight going well in the south and not badly in the north—did little to ease his spirit. If anything, they reminded him what he was missing.
    Running a hand through his iron-gray hair, he glared at his adjutant. “I feel like a caged wolf, Major, nothing else but.”
    Major Merovec shrugged. “I’m sorry, lord Marshal,” he replied, not sounding sorry at all. He’d spent the whole war in Cottbus, in the vast royal palace. Rathar didn’t doubt his courage, but he’d never had to show it. He went on: “The king will surely be glad to have your advice.”
    Swemmel was never glad to have anyone’s advice. Major Merovec and Marshal Rathar both knew that perfectly well. They both also knew how deadly dangerous saying anything else would have been.
    A young lieutenant whose clean, soft rock-gray tunic and clean, soft features said he’d never done any real fighting, either, came into the office and saluted Merovec and Rathar. He said, “Lord Marshal, his Majesty bids you sup with him this evening, an hour past sunset.” Having delivered his message, he