Into The Darkness

"Oh," Pekka said in a small voice. The real world returned with a rush. She wouldn't unify contagion and similarity this afternoon, nor even figure out how to take that one step closer to finding out whether unifying them was even possible. With the real world's embrace came acute embarrassment. Looking down at her shoes, she mumbled, "I'm sorry I shouted at you."

"It's all right." Leino's shrug made water drip from the brim of his hat and the hem of his heavy wool rain cape; his office was in a different building from Pekka's. "If I'd known you were thinking hard, I'd have stood out here a while longer. We're not in that big a hurry, not that I know of."

"No, no, no." Now Pekka turned briskly practical. She was that way most of the time: except when thinking hard, as her husband put it. She pulled on rubber overboots, took her cap from the peg on which it hung, and jammed her own broad-brimmed hat down over her straight black hair. "You're right - we'd better get back. My sister's been trying to corral Uto long enough - I'm sure she'd say so."

"She loves him," Leino said.

"I love him, too," Pekka said. "That doesn't mean he isn't a handful - or two handfuls, or three. Come on. We can catch the caravan at the edge of the campus. It'll take us most of the way there."

"Good enough." Amusement danced in Leino's eyes: watching Pekka go in the space of a few breaths from wooly-headed scholar to a planner who might have served on the Kuusaman General Staff never failed to tickle him.

Raindrops pelted down on Pekka as soon as she stepped outside. She hadn't gone ten paces before her hat and cape were as wet as Leino's.

She ignored the rain in a different way from the one she'd used while off in the realm of theory back in her office. Any Kuusaman who couldn't ignore rain had had the misfortune of being born in the wrong land.

"How was your day?" she asked, squelching along beside her husband.

"Pretty good, actually," Leino answered. "I think we've made a break through on strengthening behemoth armor against beams from heavy sticks."

"They've had you working on that for a while," Pekka said. "I haven't heard you talk about breakthroughs before."

"This is a whole new idea." Leino looked around to make sure no one was close enough to overhear before going on, "Ordinary armor I s just iron, of course, or steel. It can reflect a beam if it's polished enough, or spread the heat around so the beam won't burn through if it doesn't stay right in the same spot long enough."

Pekka nodded. "That's how people have always done it, sure enough.

You've found something different?" She cocked her head to one side and looked at her husband with approval, glad she wasn't the only one in the family straying off the beaten track.

"That's what we've done, all right." Leino also nodded, enthusiastically. "It turns out that, if you make a sort of sandwich of steel and then a special porcelain and then steel again, you get armor that's a lot stronger than what we're using now without weighing any more."

"YOU don't mean a sandwich with three separate layers, do you?"

Pekka asked with a small frown. "I can't think of any kind of porcelain so special that it wouldn't be easy to break in large, thin sheets;"

"You're absolutely right. I think that's why nobody's taken this approach before," Leino said. "The trick is sorcerously fusing the force lain to the steel on either side of it, and doing it so we don't wreck the temper of the steel in the process." He grinned at her. "We've wrecked a lot of other tempers in the process, I'll tell you that. But now I think we're getting the hang of it."

"That will be good," Pekka said. "It will be especially good if we get drawn into the madness on the mainland of Derlavai."

"Aye, though I hope we don't," Leino said. "But you're right again - not much place for behemoths in the island-hopping kind of war we're fighting against Gyongyos."

"Oh!" Pekka muttered something worse than Oh! under her breath.

"There goes the caravan. Now we'll have to wait a quarter of an hour for the next one."

"At least we'll be out of the rain," Leino said. Every caravan stop in Kajaam - so far as Pekka knew, every stop in Kuusamo - was roofed against rain and sleet and snow. The stops wouldn't have been worth having if they weren't.

A news-sheet vendor was taking advantage of the shelter when Pekka and Leino came in to get out of the wet. He waved a sheet at them, saying, "Want to read about the ultimatum Swemmel of Unkerlant has handed Zuwayza?"

"Something unfortunate should happen to Swemmel of Unkerlant," Leino said. That didn't keep him from handing the vendor a couple of square copper coins and taking a sheet. He sat down on a bench, Pekka beside him.

They read together. Pekka's eyebrows rose. "Swemmel doesn't ask for much, does he?" she said.