“Sir, I don’t really recall, I’m afraid.” The peasant plucked a weed from the ground with altogether unnecessary violence.

  “Inefficient.” The inspectors spoke together. Garivald didn’t know whether they meant him or the impressers or both at once. He hoped the village wouldn’t have to try to bring in the harvest with half the young men dragged into the army to go off and fight Gyongyos. He hoped even more that he wouldn’t be one of those young men.

  “Does this powersforsaken place boast a crystal?” the tall inspector asked. “I didn’t see one in your firstman’s shack.”

  Waddo owned the finest house in the village. Garivald wished his own were half so large. Waddo had even added on half a second story to give some of his children rooms of their own. Everyone thought that a citified luxury—everyone but the inspector, evidently. Garivald answered, “Sir, we don’t. We’re a long way from the closest ley line, and—’

  ’We know that,” the short inspector broke in. “I’m so saddle-sore, I can hardly walk.” He rubbed at his left buttock.

  And we like it just fine, Garivald thought. That was one reason impressers and inspectors didn’t come round very often. Nobody hereabouts missed them. Nobody hereabouts missed anyone from Cottbus. In the olden days, the Duchy of Grelz—the Kingdom of Grelz, it had been then, till the Union of Thrones—had been the most important part of Unkerlant. Now the men from the hot, dusty north lorded it over their southern cousins. As far as Garivald was concerned, they could go away and never come back. Bandits, that’s what they were, nothing but bandits.

  He wondered if they were efficient bandits. If they happened to suffer unfortunate accidents, would anyone track them down and take the kind of revenge for which Swemmel had become all too famous? His shoulders worked in a large shrug. He didn’t think the chance worth taking, worse luck. Odds were no one else in the village would, cither.

  The inspectors went off to inflict themselves on someone else. As Garivald kept on pulling weeds, he imagined their stems were the inspectors’ necks. That sent him back to the village at the close of day in a better mood than he would have thought possible while the inspectors raked him over the coals.

  He never thought to wonder what the place looked like to the men from the capital. To him, it was simply home: three or four lines of wooden houses with thatched roofs, and a blacksmith’s shop and a couple of taverns among them. Chickens roamed the dirt streets, pecking at whatever they could find. A sow in a muddy wallow between two houses looked out at Garivald and grunted. Dogs and children roamed the streets, too, sometimes chasing chickens, sometimes one another. He swatted at a fly that landed on the back of his neck. A moment later, another one bit him in the arm.

  In winter, the flies died. In winter, though, the livestock would stay in the house with him and his family. That kept the beasts warm, and helped keep him and his wife and his boy and baby girl warm, too. Winters in Grelz were not for the fainthearted.

  Annore was chopping up parsnips and rhubarb and throwing them into a stewpot full of barley and groats when he came into the house. “I’ll put in the blood sausages in a little while,” she said. When she smiled, he still saw some of the pert good looks that had drawn him to her half a dozen years before. Most of the time, though, she just looked tired.

  Garivald understood that; he was bone-weary himself. “Any beer left in the bucket?” he asked.

  “Plenty.” Annore tapped it with her sandal. “Dip me up a mug, too, will you?” When her husband did, she murmured a word of thanks. Then she said, “People say the inspectors were buzzing around you out in the fields.” The words came out with the usual mixture of hate and fear—and, as usual, fear predominated.

  But Garivald shrugged his broad shoulders. “It wasn’t too bad. They were being efficient”—he laced the catchword with scorn—” so they didn’t spend too much of their precious time on me.” He raised his wooden mug of beer to his lips and took a long pull. After wiping his upper lip on his sleeve, he went on, “The one bad part was when they asked if the impressers had been through this part of the Duchy any time lately.”

  “What did you tell them?” Annore asked. Yes, fear predominated.

  He shrugged again. “Told ’em I didn’t know. They can’t prove I’m lying, so that looked like the efficient thing to do.” Now he laughed at King Swemmel’s favorite term—but softly, lest anyone but his wife hear.

  Slowly, Annore nodded. “I don’t see any better choices,” she said. “But not all inspectors are fools, even if they are bastards. They’re liable to figure out that I don’t know means haven’t seen ’em for years. If they do …”

  If they did, sergeants would teach a lot of young men from the village the arcane mysteries of marching and countermarching. Garivald knew he was liable—no, likely—to be one of them. He’d been too young the last time the impressers came through. He wouldn’t be too young now. They’d give him a stick and tell him to blaze away for the glory of King Swemmel, which mattered to him not in the least. The Gyongyosians had sticks, too, and were in the habit of blazing back. He didn’t want to go to the edge of the world to fight them. He didn’t want to go anywhere. All he wanted was to stay with his family and bring in the harvest.

  His daughter Leuba woke up and started to cry. Annore scooped her out of the cradle, then slid an arm out of her tunic, bared a breast, and put the baby on it. “You’ll have to chop the sausage,” she said above Leuba’s avid gulping noises.

  “All right,” Garivald replied, and he did. He almost chopped off his finger a couple of times, too, because he paid as much attention to his wife’s breast as to what he was supposed to be doing. Annore noticed, and stuck out her tongue at him. They both laughed. Leuba tried to laugh, too, but didn’t want to stop nursing while she did it. She coughed and choked and sprayed milk out her nose.

  When the smell of the vegetables and blood sausage made his stomach growl more fiercely than any inspector from Cottbus, Garivald went to the door and shouted for his son Syrivald to come in and eat supper. Syrivald came. He was covered in mud and dirt, and all the more cheerful because of it, as any five-year-old boy would have been. “I could eat a bear,” he announced.

  “We haven’t got a bear,” Annore told him. “You’ll eat what we give you.” And so Syrivald did, from a child-sized wooden bowl, a smaller copy of the one from which his parents spooned up supper. Annore gave Leuba little bits of barley and groats and sausage on the top of her spoon. The baby was just learning to eat things that weren’t milk, and seemed intent on trying to get as messy as her big brother.

  The sun went down about the time they finished supper. Annore did a little cleaning up by the light of a lamp that smelled of the lard it burned. Syrivald started yawning. He lay down on a bench against the wall and went to sleep. Annore nursed Leuba once more, then laid her in the cradle.

  Before his wife could set her tunic to rights, Garivald cupped in his hand the breast at which the baby had been feeding. “Don’t you think of anything else?” Annore asked.

  “What should I think of, the impressers?” Garivald retorted. “This is better.” He drew her to him. Presently, it was a great deal better. By the moans she tried to muffle, Annore thought so, too. She fell asleep very quickly. Garivald stayed awake longer. He did think of the impressers, whether he wanted to or not.

  3.

  Bembo had never seen so many stars in the sky above Tricarico. But, as the constable paced through the dark streets of his home town, he did not watch the heavens for the sake of diamonds and the occasional sapphire or ruby strewn across black velvet. He kept a wary eye peeled for the swift-moving shapes of Jelgavan dragons blotting out those jewels.

  Tricarico lay not far below the foothills of the Bradano Mountains, whose peaks formed the border between Algarve and Jelgava. Every so often, Bembo could spy flashes of light—momentary stars—in the mountains on the eastern horizon: the soldiers of his kingdom and the Jelgavans blazing away at one another. The Jelgavans, so far, had not pushed their way through the foothills and down on to the southern Algarvian plain. Bembo was glad of that; he’d expected worse.

  He’d also expected the Jelgavans to send more dragons over Tricarico than they had. He’d been a boy during the Six Years’ War, and vividly remembered the terror dropped eggs had spawned. There hadn’t been so many then, but even a few were plenty and to spare. Jelgava’s dragon farms had bee anything but idle since.

  A caravan hummed slowly past, sliding a couple of feet above the ground along its ley line. The lamps at the front of the coach had dark cloth wrapped around them so they gave out only a little light: with luck, too little to be spotted by Jelgavan dragonfliers high in the air.

  The caravan steersman doffed his plumed hat to Bembo. Bembo swept off his own to return the compliment. He smiled a little as he set the hat back on his head. Even in wartime, the courtesies that made Algarvian life endured.

  When he rounded a corner, the smile disappeared. A wineshop was not so securely shuttered as it might have been; light spilled out through the slats to puddle on the pavement. Bembo took the club off his belt and whacked the door with it. “Close up in there!” he called. A moment later, after a couple of startled exclamations, the shutters creaked as someone adjusted them. The betraying light disappeared. Nodding in satisfaction, Bembo walked on.

  A Kaunian column of pale marble gleamed even by starlight. In ancient days, Tricarico, like a lot of northern Algarve, had belonged to the Kaunian Empire. Monuments lingered. So did occasional heads of blond hair among the red- and auburn- and sandy-haired majority. Bembo would just as soon have shipped blonds and monuments alike over the Bradano Mountains. The Jelgavans thought they gave a kingdom of Kaunian blood a claim to what Kaunians had once ruled.

  A woman leaned against the column. Her legs gleamed like its marble; her kilt was very short, scarcely covering the swell of her buttocks. “Hello, sweetheart,” she called, peering toward Bembo as he approached. “Feel like a good time tonight?”

  “Hello, Fiametta,” the constable said, lifting his hat. “Go peddle it somewhere else, or I’ll have to notice you’re here.”

  Fiametta cursed in disgust. “All this dark is terrible for business,” she complained. “The men can’t find me—”

  “Oh, I bet they can,” he said. He’d let her bribe him with her body a time or two, in the easy-going days before the war.

  She snorted. “And when somebody does find me, who is it? A constable! Even if you want me, you won’t pay for it.”

  “Not with money,” Bembo allowed, “but you’re out here on the job, not sitting in Reform sewing tunics or something.”

  “Reform would pay me better than this—and I’d meet more interesting people, too,” Fiametta came over and kissed Bembo on the end of his long, straight nose. Then she flounced off, putting everything she had into it, and she had quite a lot. Over her shoulder, she called, “See? I’m going somewhere else.”

  Somewhere else was probably no farther than the other side of the column, but Bembo didn’t follow her. She’d done what he’d told her, after all. One of these days, he might feel like telling her to do something different again.

  He turned on to a side street, one with houses and apartment houses on it, not shops and offices. Once or twice every block, he had to rap on a window sill or a doorway and shout for people to let lamps die or cover their windows better. Everyone in Tricarico surely knew the new regulations, but every Algarvian was born thinking regulations applied to the other fellow, not to him. A rotund man, Bembo fumed when he had to trudge up to the fourth floor of an apartment house to get some fool to draw his curtains.

  When he came out of the apartment house, someone disappeared down the dark street with remarkable haste. Bembo thought about running after the footpad or whatever he was, but not for long. With his belly, he wouldn’t have had a prayer of catching him.

  He came up to another house with a hand’s breadth of open space between the edges of the curtains. He raised his club to whack the sill, then froze, as if suddenly turned to stone. Inside, a pretty young woman was getting out of her clothes and into a loose kilt and tunic for the night.

  Bembo had never felt so torn. As a man, he wanted to say nothing and keep watching: the more he saw of her, the better she looked. As a constable, though, he had his duty. He waited till she was sliding the night tunic down over herself before he rapped the wall and called, “Darken this house!” The woman jumped and squeaked. The lamp died. Bembo strode on. Duty had triumphed—and he’d had a good peek.

  He used the club several more times—though never so entertainingly—before emerging on to the Avenue of Duchess Matalista, a broad street full of fancy shops, barristers’ offices, and the sort of dining establishments the nobility and rich commoners patronized. When he saw light leaking from places like those, he had to be more polite with his warnings. If a baron or a well-connected restaurateur complained about him, he’d end up on permanent night duty in the nasty part of town.

  He had just asked—asked! it graveled a proud man—a jeweler to close his curtains tighter when a hiss in the air made him look up. He saw moving shadows against the stars. Before he could fill his lungs to shout, the egg he’d heard falling burst a couple of hundred yards behind him. Others crashed down all around Tricarico.

  Bursts of light as their protective shells smashed sent shadows leaping crazily and chopped motion into herky-jerky bits. The bursts were shatteringly loud. Bembo clutched at his ears. Blasts of suddenly released energies knocked him off his feet. The pavement tore his bare knees.

  Howling with pain, he scrambled up again and ran toward the nearest burst. The egg had come to earth on the Avenue of Duchess Matalista in front of an eatery where a supper for two cost about a week of Bembo’s pay It had blown a hole in the cobblestones and had blown in the front of the restaurant; he didn’t know how the roof was staying up.

  The egg had also blown in the front of the milliner’s shop across the street, but Bembo didn’t worry about that: the milliner’s was closed and empty. Screaming, bleeding people came staggering out of the restaurant. A woman got down on her hands and knees and vomited an expensive meal into the gutter.

  Fire was beginning to lick at the exposed roof timbers. Careless of that, Bembo dashed into the restaurant to help whoever hadn’t managed to escape. Shards of glass crunched under his boots. That glass had been almost as deadly as the raw energy of the egg itself. The first person the flickering flames showed him had had his head almost sliced from his body by a great chunk that still glittered beside the corpse.

  Someone farther in groaned. Bembo yanked up the table that pinned an old woman, stooped, got her arm around his shoulder, and half-dragged, half carried her out to the street. “You!” he snapped to the woman who’d thrown up. “Bandage this cut on her leg.”

  “With what?” she asked.

  “Your kerchief, if you’ve got one. Your scarf there. Or cut cloth off her tunic or yours—you’ll have a paring knife in your bag there, won’t you?” Bembo turned to a couple of men who didn’t look too badly hurt. “You and you—in there with me. She’s not the only one left inside.”

  “What if the roof caves in?” one man asked.

  “What if an egg falls on us?” the other added. More eggs were falling. Sticks bigger and heavier than a man could carry had been set up along some of Tricarico’s ley lines. They blazed spears of light up into the sky at the Jelgavan dragons, but there weren’t enough of them, not nearly enough.

  That didn’t matter, not to Bembo. “We’ll be very unhappy,” he answered. “Now come on, or I curse you for cowards.”

  “If you weren’t a constable and immune, I’d call you out for that,” growled the fellow who’d fretted about eggs.

  “If you’d come without arguing, I wouldn’t have had to say it,” Bembo returned, and plunged back into the eatery without waiting to see whether the two men would follow. They did; he heard them kicking through the broken glass that covered the floor.

  They worked manfully, once they got down to it. They and Bembo dragged out customers and servitors and, from the kitchens, a couple of cooks. As the flames began to take hold and the smoke got thicker, Bembo had to make his last trip out crawling and dragging a man after him. He couldn’t breathe if he stood upright. He could hardly breathe while he crawled; his lungs felt scorched and filled with soot. The glass sliced the palms of his hands.

  A horse-drawn pumper clattered up and began pouring water on the flames. Hacking and spitting up lumps of thick black phlegm, Bembo wished the crew could turn the hoses on the inside of his chest.

  They were fighting a losing battle here; the eatery was going to burn. Before long, the crew realized as much. They began playing water on the buildings to cither side, neither of which had yet caught fire. Maybe they wouldn’t, now. Even if they didn’t, though, the water would damage whatever they held.

  “I thank you, sir,” the old woman Bembo had first rescued said from the sidewalk.

  He reached for his hat, only to discover he wasn’t wearing it. It had to be back in the eatery, which meant it was gone for good. Bembo instead, he said, “Milady, it was my duty and”—another coughing spasm cut off his words—“my duty and my honor.”

  “That’s well said.” The old woman—a noble, by her manners—inclined her head to Bembo.

  He bowed again. “Milady, I just hope we’re giving the Jelgavans worse than we’re getting. The news sheets say we are. Every braggart blabbing out of a crystal says we are, but how do we know? The Jelgavans’ news sheets are bound to be telling them they’re beating the stuffing out of us.”

  “How long have you been a constable, young fellow?” the woman asked, a hint of amusement in her voice.

  Bembo wondered what was funny. “Almost ten years, milady.”