Through the Darkness

“Which game?” Ilmarinen asked. “Embarrassing Pekka?”

“I am not embarrassed,” Pekka said tightly. But she was; Fernao could see as much. His own praise had flustered her, and Siuntio’s rather more. Fernao understood that; praise from the leading theoretical sorcerer of the age would have flustered him, too.

He said, “It is always good to see a theoretical sorcerer who does not have to be told what the apparatus in the laboratory is for.”

That flustered Pekka, too. She said, “I have more luck than anything else in the laboratory. I would sooner be back at my desk. I truly know what I am doing when I am there.”

She meant it. Fernao could see that. He studied her. He didn’t usually find Kuusaman women interesting; next to his own taller, more emphatically shaped countrywomen, they struck him as boyish. As far as her figure went, Pekka did, too. But he’d never known a Lagoan female mage he thought could outdo him. He didn’t just think Pekka could. She already had.

“Shall we get on with it now?” she asked, her voice sharp. “Or shall we keep playing till the Algarvians come up with some new dreadful sorcery and drop Yliharma into the Strait of Valmiera?”

“She is right, of course,” Siuntio said. Fernao nodded. Ilmarinen started to say something. All three of the other mages glared at him. He held his peace. By the startled quality of Siuntio’s smile, that didn’t happen very often.

“Master Siuntio, Master Ilmarinen, you know what we shall undertake here today,” Pekka said, taking the lead. “As always, your task is to support me if I blunder--and I may.” She looked over to Fernao. Had he angered her by calling her a good experimenter? Some theoretical sorcerers were oddly proud of being inept in the laboratory, but he hadn’t taken her for one of those. She went on, “Our Lagoan guest is to aid you as best he can, but with the spell being in Kuusaman, you will have to move first, because he may not realize at once that I have gone astray.”

Ilmarinen said, “If we drop Yliharma into the Strait of Valmiera, that will be a good clue.”

“I do not think we can do that with this experiment,” Pekka said. “Quite.” She shifted to Kuusaman for several rhythmic sentences. Fernao couldn’t have claimed to understand them, but he knew what they were: the Kuusaman claim to be the oldest, most enduring folk in the world. He thought that claim nonsense almost on the order of the Ice People’s belief in gods, but he kept quiet. And then, after a brief pause, Pekka returned to classical Kaunian for two words: “I begin.”

She wasn’t the smoothest incantor Fernao had ever seen, but she was a long way from being the clumsiest. Because the spell was in Kuusaman, he couldn’t tell whether it went as it should--she’d been right about that. But she sounded confident, and both Siuntio and Ilmarinen nodded approval every now and then.

The Kuusamans hadn’t been lying about the magnitude of the forces they were manipulating. Fernao felt that at once. The air of the laboratory seemed to quiver with the energy that built as Pekka chanted on. Ilmarinen and Siuntio weren’t sitting back and taking it easy, either. They quivered, too, with tension. If something went wrong here, it would go horribly wrong. And it would go horribly wrong in the blink of an eye.

Even the rats felt something was strange. The young animals in one row of cages scrabbled frantically at the iron bars, trying to break free. One gnawed at the bars till its front tooth broke with an audible snap! The older rats in the other cages burrowed down into the sawdust and cedar shavings from which they made their nests, as if trying to hide from the building sorcerous storm. It would do them no good, of course, but they didn’t know that. The only knew they were afraid.

Fernao knew he was afraid, too. He realized Ilmarinen and Pekka hadn’t been joking when they talked about generating almost enough sorcerous energy to sink Yliharma in the sea. And that from a few rats.

What would the Algarvians do, he wondered, if they tried this experiment with Kaunian children and grandparents? How much sorcerous energy would that yield? And Swemmel of Unkerlant was already killing his own peasants. Would he worry about killing a few, or more than a few, more? Not likely.

Will there be anything left of the world by the time this cursed war is done? Fernao wondered. The more he saw, the less hope he had.

It was building to a peak. Without understanding the words of the spell, Fernao could tell that from Pekka’s intonation ... and from the feeling in the air, like that just before lightning flashes.