Out of the Darkness

I want to send the energy to Trapani, she thought savagely. I want to lash the capital of Algarve with a whip of fire, till nothing there still stands. But what good would that do? It wouldn’t bring Leino back to life. Nothing could do that. A day at a time, she was realizing the finality of death.

“Shall we begin?” Raahe asked quietly. She was holding Alkio’s hand. She and her husband were ten or fifteen years older than Pekka, but smiling like a couple of newlyweds.

“Aye,” Pekka said: one harsh word. Whom have I? she wondered. Not Leino, not any more, not ever. I did have Fernao. I could have him again. Is he what I really want, or was he just someone to keep me warm while Leino was far away? She didn’t know. She was afraid to find out.

I’m also too busy to find out. She recited the Kuusaman ritual words that preceded every spell save one cast in an emergency. Then she spun the globe again. This time, she purposely stopped it. Her fingernail tapped what looked like a fly speck in the eastern Bothnian Ocean. “Becsehely.” She pronounced the Gyongyosian name as best she could. “Everyone is supposed to be off the island.”

“Everyone had better be off the island,” Fernao said. “Anyone who stayed behind would be very sorry.”

“I begin,” Pekka said, and started incanting. After so many runs through spells like this, she cast another one with almost as much confidence and aplomb as if she were a practical mage herself. No, that’s Leino, she thought, and felt again the hole in her life. That was Leino. But she couldn’t dwell on it, not now. The spell came first.

She felt the sorcerous energy building inside the blockhouse. The animals in the cages felt it, too. They scurried this way and that. Some tried to get out. Some tried to bury under the shavings and sawdust on the cage floors, to hide from what was happening. That wouldn’t help them, but they didn’t know it wouldn’t.

Pekka chanted on. The passes that went with the incantation were second nature to her now. The other theoretical sorcerers stood by, lending strength and standing ready to rush to her aid if, in spite of everything, she faltered. That had happened before. She missed Master Siuntio--dead at the Algarvians’ hands, too--and Master Ilmarinen. Fernao had saved her before. She didn’t want to think about that, and, again, she didn’t have to.

The animals were growing frantic now, the rats squeaking in fear and alarm. Pekka knew an abstract pity for them. Better you than so many Kaunians or Unkerlanters or even Gyongyosians who are proud to volunteer their throats to the knife. Glowing blue lines of sorcerous energy stretched between cages of young beasts and their grandparents. Those lines grew brighter by the moment, brighter and brighter and . . .

All at once, they flashed, intolerably brilliant. Pekka’s eyes were closed against the glare by then, but that flash pierced her to the quick even so. When she opened her eyes afterwards, green-purple lines seemed printed across the world. Slowly, slowly, they faded.

Corruption’s ripe reek filled the blockhouse, but only for a moment. The older rats and rabbits in the cages aged so catastrophically fast, they went past rotting to bare bones far quicker than the blink of an eye. The younger ones, by contrast, were propelled backwards chronologically, back to the days long before they were born. Had they ever truly existed, then? The mathematics there were indeterminate. But for sawdust and shavings, the cages that had held them were empty now.

“Divergent series,” Pekka murmured. Sure enough, that was how to get the greatest release of sorcerous energy.

“We did everything as planned,” Raahe said. “Now we find out if our calculations were right.”

“That’s the interesting part, or so Ilmarinen would say,” Pekka replied. She hoped the cantankerous old master mage was all right. Losing him on top of all the other disasters of war would have been almost too much to bear. Deliberately forcing the thought from her mind, she turned to the crystallomancer. “Make the etheric connection to the Searaven.”

“Aye, Mistress Pekka.” The crystallomancer bent over her glassy sphere and murmured the charm that would link the blockhouse to the Kuusaman cruiser gliding along a ley line a few miles off the beaches of Becsehely. Her first attempt failed; the crystal refused to flare with light. She muttered something under her breath, then spoke aloud: “It should have worked. Let me try again.”