Out of the Darkness

Eat he did. “It is good,” he said in some small surprise after the first mouthful, and wolfed down the rest of the bowl. The Forthwegian girl was right; except for the flavor they added, he hardly knew the mushrooms were there. He’d dreaded biting into some big, fleshy chunk, but that didn’t happen at all. When he’d eaten every bit of the stew, he got to his feet, bowed, and made a production of returning bowl and spoon. “Another kiss?” he asked.

She shook her head. “Go to make more. For others.” She hurried off.

A crystallomancer shouted, “Hey, Colonel, I’ve just picked up some emanations from the fornicating Unkerlanters. Sounds like somebody just bumped off General Gurmun. I bet that was our pal last night.”

“I bet you’re right,” Spinello breathed. “And I bet they’d trade a couple of brigades of ordinary men for that Gurmun whoreson, too. He was far and away the best they had with behemoths.”

The confusion on the other side of the Twegen continued the whole day long. The Unkerlanters hardly bothered harassing Eoforwic. Spinello didn’t take that for granted. His guess was, they would start pummeling the city hard when they began to recover. But he enjoyed the respite while he had it.

His own respite didn’t last so long as Eoforwic’s. He woke in the middle of the night with belly pains and an urgent need to squat. “A pox!” he grumbled. “I’ve come down with a flux.” But squatting didn’t help, and the pain only got worse.

When morning came, his men exclaimed in horror. “Powers above, Colonel, get to a healer,” one of them said. “You’re yellow as a lemon!”

“Yellow?” Spinello stared down at himself. “What’s wrong with me?” He scratched his head. He didn’t argue about going to a healer; he felt as bad as he looked, maybe worse. “I wonder if it was those mushrooms. Plenty of reasons we don’t eat them, I bet.”

He got a powerful emetic from the healers. That just gave him one more misery, and did nothing to make him feel better. Nothing the healers did could make him feel better, or even ease his torment. It ended for good three days later, with him still wondering about those mushrooms.

Vanai splashed hot water, very hot water, water as hot as she could stand it, onto her face again and again, especially around her mouth. Then she rubbed and rubbed and rubbed at her lips with the roughest, scratchiest towel she had. Finally, when she’d rubbed her mouth bloody, she gave up. She could still feel Spinello’s lips on hers even after all that.

But then she snatched Saxburh out of her cradle and danced around the flat with the baby in her arms. Saxburh liked that; she squealed with glee. “It was worth it. By the powers above, it was worth it!” Her little daughter wouldn’t have argued for the world. She was having the time of her life. She squealed again.

“Do you know what I did?” Vanai said. “Do you have any idea what I did?” Saxburh had no idea. She chortled anyhow. Still dancing, ignoring the sandpapered state of her lips, Vanai went on, “I put four death caps in his stew. Not one, not two, not three. Four. Four death caps could kill a troop of behemoths, let alone one fornicating Algarvian.” She kept right on dancing. Saxburh kept right on laughing.

Fornicating Algarvian is right, Vanai thought savagely. Her mouth was sore, but she didn’t care. I’d’ve put my lips on his prong to get him to take that bowl of stew. Powers below eat him, why not? It’s not as if he didn’t make me do it before. Teach me tricks, will you? See how you ‘II like the one I just taught you!

Spinello, without a doubt, felt fine right now. That was one of the things that made death caps and their close cousins, the destroying powers, so deadly. People who ate them didn’t feel anything wrong for several hours, sometimes even for a couple of days. By then it was far too late for them to puke up what they’d eaten. The poison stayed inside them, working, and no healer or mage had ever found a cure for it. Soon enough, Spinello would know what she’d done.

“Isn’t that fine?” Vanai asked Saxburh. “Isn’t that just the most splendid thing you ever heard in all your days?” The baby didn’t have many days, but, by the way she gurgled and wriggled with glee, it might have been.

All Forthwegians hunted mushrooms whenever they got the chance. In that, if in few other things, the Kaunians in Forthweg agreed with their neighbors. No one--not even Algarvian soldiers, not any more--paid much attention to people walking with their heads down, eyes on the ground. And who was likely to notice what sort of mushrooms went into a basket? One thing Vanai’s grandfather had taught her was how to tell the poisonous from the safe. Everyone in Forthweg learned those lessons. This once, Vanai had chosen to stand them on their head.