Out of the Darkness

He knew he stared. He couldn’t help it. The smiling young fellow striding toward him might have come out of the early days, the triumphant days, of the war. It wasn’t so much that his uniform tunic and kilt were clean and new and well pressed, though at this stage of things that seemed a minor prodigy to Sabrino of itself. But the stranger’s expression and bearing seemed to say the past two years and more had been nothing but a bad dream. Sabrino wished it were so. Unfortunately, he knew better.

“Pleased to make your acquaintance, Colonel,” the younger man said, holding out his arm. As he and Sabrino clasped wrists, he went on, “I have the honor to be called Almonte, sir.”

He wore a major’s rank badges and, prominent on his left breast, a mage’s insigne. “Pleased to make your acquaintance,” Sabrino echoed, though anything but sure he was pleased. “What can I do for you?”

“No, Colonel, it’s what I can do for you.” Almonte was excessively glib; he put Sabrino in mind of a commercial traveler peddling silver spoons that would show the brass beneath inside a month. He had plenty of brass himself; he continued, “How would you like to lick the Unkerlanters all the way back to their own kingdom?”

“If I could lick them back half a mile, I’d be tolerably pleased,” Sabrino answered. In Algarve’s hour of desperation, all sorts of maniacs were getting their chances, for how could they make things worse? “What have you got in mind?”

“Riding with you to smite the enemy from the air with a new, particularly potent sorcery I’ve devised,” Almonte answered.

“Have you tried it before?” Sabrino asked. “If you have, how did it go?”

“I’m still here,” Almonte answered.

“So are the Unkerlanters,” Sabrino said dryly.

Almonte gave him a reproachful stare. “I am but one man, Colonel. I do what I can for King Mezentio and Algarve. I hope you can say the same.”

If he thought he would make Sabrino feel guilty, he erred. “Futter you, Major,” the wing commander said, not bothering to raise his voice. “I fought on the ground in the Six Years’ War, and I’ve been at the front in this one since the day it started. I don’t owe Algarve any more than I’ve already given. Before I decide whether I want you on a dragon with me, suppose you tell me just what your precious spell is and what you think it can do to the Unkerlanters.”

Biting his lip in anger, Almonte plunged into his explanation. He plainly didn’t know how technical to be; sometimes he talked down to Sabrino, others his words went over the dragonflier’s head. What he aimed to do was clear enough: loose horror and destruction on Swemmel’s men from the air. How he proposed to go about it...

Sabrino didn’t hit him. Afterwards, he wondered why. His stomach lurching as if his dragon had dived without warning, he said, “Get out of my sight this instant, or I’ll blaze you where you stand. This makes killing Kaunians clean by comparison.”

“Desperate times take desperate measures,” the mage declared.

King Mezentio had said the same thing, just before the Algarvian wizards started butchering blonds. Sabrino hadn’t been able to stop him. He was the king. This fellow . . . “If you want to try that, Major, I’d sooner see the Unkerlanters smash us down,” Sabrino said.

“I shall return with orders from your superiors,” Almonte snapped.

“Fine,” Sabrino said. “You can go up on my dragon, or on any dragon in this wing, but there’s no guarantee you’ll come down.” Almonte stalked off. He didn’t come back. Sabrino hadn’t thought he would.

In the blockhouse not far from the hostel in the Naantali district, Pekka spun a globe. Globes and maps were more than just pictures of the world; as even the sages of the Kaunian Empire had realized, they were also, in their own way, applications of and invitations to the law of similarity. Pekka looked from one of her colleagues to another. “This is our last great test,” she said, and they all nodded. “If everything goes as it should, we can use this sorcery against any place in the world from here.”

They all nodded: Raahe and Alkio, Piilis--and Fernao. Pekka did her best to treat him the same way she treated the other theoretical sorcerers. He didn’t like that; his eyes, so like a Kuusaman’s, showed as much. She hadn’t been in his bed--she hadn’t wanted to be in anyone’s bed--since learning of Leino’s death.

But for a couple of trips back to Kajaani to see her son and her sister, she’d thrown herself into her sorcery, using work as an anodyne where someone else might have used spirits.

He couldn’t very well complain, not here in front of everyone. What he did say was, “The blockhouse seems empty today, compared to so many of the things we’ve done. No secondary sorcerers here, for instance--just a crystallomancer.”

“We don’t need secondary sorcerers, not for this.” Pekka waved at the bank of cages full of rats and rabbits. “We’ll be sending the energy we release from the beasts so far away, we can safely keep the cages here.”