Oraste spat again. “We can have the constables-the blond constables, I mean-do it for us. Why not? They’d be glad to, I bet-and glad nobody was shipping them off instead of the whoresons they’re catching.”
“You think even a Kaunian would stoop so low?” Bembo asked.
“Kaunians are Kaunians.” Oraste sounded very sure-but then, Oraste always sounded very sure about everything. “Their hair may be blond, but their hearts are black.”
“For that matter, their hair may be black, too, at least in Gromheort,” Bembo said. “I’d like to get my hands on the bastard who thought of that. Wouldn’t he squeal when I was done with him! What we need are mages to nail the ones using those spells.”
“Army needs ‘em more than we do,” Oraste said. “Army gets what it needs. We get what’s left-if there’s anything left. Usually we just get hind tit.”
Somebody behind the two Algarvian constables shouted, “Sulingen!” Bembo and Oraste both whirled. Bembo raised his truncheon as if to break a head. Oraste grabbed for his stick. Both gestures were useless. The Forthwegians they saw were all just walking along the street. No way to tell which one of them had shouted. And they were all smiling, enjoying the occupiers’ discomfiture.
“Ought to blaze a couple of ‘em just for fun,” Oraste growled. “That’d teach ‘em not to get gay.”
“It’d probably touch off a riot, too,” Bembo pointed out. “And if the bigwigs ever found out who did that, they’d throw us in the army and ship us off to Unkerlant. All they want is for things to stay quiet here.”
He sighed with relief when Oraste reluctantly nodded. Of course the occupiers wanted peace and quiet in Forthweg. Anything but peace and quiet would have required more men. Algarve had no men to spare. Anybody who wasn’t doing something vitally important somewhere else was off in the freezing, trackless west, fighting King Swemmel’s men.
“I bet it was a Kaunian who shouted that,” Oraste said.
“Maybe,” Bembo answered. “Of course, the Forthwegians love us, too. They just don’t love us quite as much.”
As Bembo had used “love” to mean something else, so Oraste said something that could have meant, “Love the Forthwegians.” The burly, bad-tempered constable went on, “Those whoresons didn’t have the balls to get rid of their own Kaunians, but do they thank us for doing it for ‘em? Fat chance!”
Bembo said, “When does anybody ever thank a constable?” Part of that was his usual self-pity, part a cynical understanding of the way the world worked.
Then, around a corner, he heard a cacophony of shouts and screams. He and Oraste looked at each other. They both yanked their sticks off their belts and started running.
By the time Bembo turned that corner, he was puffing. He’d always been happier about sitting in a tavern eating and drinking than about any other part of constabulary work. And his girth-especially now that the constables weren’t marching out to the villages around Gromheort to bring back Kaunians-reflected that.
All the yelling was in Forthwegian, which he didn’t understand. But pointing fingers were obvious enough. So were the three men running down the street as fast as they could go, knocking over anybody who got in their way.
“Robbers!” Bembo exclaimed, a brilliant bit of deduction if ever there was one. He raised his voice to a shout: “Halt, in the name of the law!”
He shouted, inevitably, in Algarvian. It might have been Gyongyosian for all the good it did. Oraste wasted no time on yelling. He lowered his stick, sighted along it, and started blazing. “Buggers won’t go anywhere if we kill them,” he said.
“What if we hit a bystander?” Bembo asked. The street was crowded.
“What if we do?” Bembo answered with a scornful shrug. “Who cares? You think this is Tricarico, and somebody’ll call out his pet solicitor if we singe his pinkie? Not fornicating likely.”
He was right, of course. Bembo also sighted along his stick. By the time he did so, two of the robbers had vanished around a corner. But the third one, or a man Bembo presumed to be the third one, sprawled motionless on the slates of the sidewalk.
“Good blazing,” Bembo told Oraste.
“I should have killed all of them,” his partner answered. He started toward the man he had killed. “Let’s see what we’ve got before some light-fingered Forthwegian walks off with the loot, whatever it is.”
A crowd had formed around the corpse. People were pointing at it and exclaiming in their unintelligible language. “Move aside, curse you, move aside,” Bembo said, and made sure people moved aside with a few well-placed elbows. Then he got a good look at the body and said, “Well, I’ll be a son of a whore.”
“What else is new?” Oraste pointed down to the dead man and said, “What do you bet the other two were the same?”
“I wouldn’t touch that,” Bembo said. The corpse had black hair-hair that surely had to be dyed, for the man’s build, skin tone, and long face were all typically Kaunian. “I bet he looked like a Forthwegian till your beam caught him,” Bembo added.
“Of course he did,” Oraste said. “Now let’s see what he was trying to lift.”
Bembo picked up the leather sack that lay by the dead man’s outflung right hand. He looked inside and whistled softly. “All sorts of pretties: rings and necklaces and earrings and bracelets and I don’t know what.” He hefted the sack. It was heavy, all right. “Good stuff-gold and silver, or I don’t know anything.”
“You don’t know bloody much-you’ve made that plain enough,” Oraste said. “But I’ll believe you know what’s worth something and what isn’t.”
A Forthwegian spoke up in good Algarvian: “That’s my jewelry, gentlemen, I’ll have you know.” He held out a hand for the sack, at the same time asking, “Where are the other two bandits? They said they’d cut my throat if I didn’t give them everything I had on display. I believed them, too.”
“They’re long gone, pal.” Oraste didn’t sound particularly brokenhearted about that, either. “You’re cursed lucky you had constables around. Otherwise, you never would have seen any of your stuff again. This way, you get some of it back, and one of the bad eggs is dead.” He spat on the corpse. “Stinking Kaunian.”
“You get some of your pretties back eventually,” Bembo added. “For now, it’s evidence of a crime-and serious crime, and even more serious because these outlaws were Kaunians with illegal, very illegal, sorcerous disguises.”
Maybe the jeweler had been robbed before. Maybe he just knew how the minds of Algarvian constables worked. His expression sour, he said, “You mean you’ll make the stuff disappear for good if I don’t pay you off.”
“I never said that,” Bembo answered righteously: everyone else gathered around the dead Kaunian was listening. Being corrupt was one thing, getting caught being corrupt something else again. Still more righteously, he went on, “What you’re saying violates our regulations.”
Oraste gave him a horrible look. Having killed a robber, he wanted to make a profit on the deal, too. Fortunately, the jeweler wasn’t so naive as to take Bembo seriously. He said, “Come back to my shop, boys, and we can talk this over like reasonable people.”
Once inside the shop-which had several glass cases opened, and several others smashed-Bembo said, “All right, pal, just how reasonable do you propose to be?”
He and Oraste left without the sack of trinkets, but with a couple of gold-pieces each that hadn’t been in their belt pouches before. “If I’d thought getting rid of robbers was such good business, I’d’ve tried harder before,” Oraste said.
“If you’d listened more to me, you’d have known that,” Bembo answered. “Your trouble is, half the time you care more about smashing heads than making a good deal. This time, you got to do both.”
“What if I did?” Oraste said. “We’d better see if we can find out who that dead Kaunian sack of turds is-was. If we can get a name for him, maybe we can find out who his pals are.”
“That’s true.” Bembo gave his partner a puzzled look. Oraste wasn’t usually so diligent. “Why do you want ‘em so bad?”