Tricanico 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 Tricanico 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 hurnmed 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 some one 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 king dom 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 con stable! 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 interest ing 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 con stable, 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 kiices.
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.