Darkness Descending (61 page)

“Curse!” Leuba said cheerfully. She didn’t know what the word meant, only that her parents stressed it when they spoke.

Tears—the easy tears of drunkenness—sprang out in Garivald’s eyes. He seized his daughter and fiercely hugged her to him. She squealed, then wiggled to get free. Such shows of affection didn’t come her way very often. But Garivald had looked death in the face, and knew how afraid he was.

More than half of Pekka wished she could have performed this experiment down in Kajaani, her hometown, rather than coming to Yliharma. Failure in the capital of Kuusamo, failure with all the Seven Princes hoping for success, would be far more humiliating than all the failures she’d known back home.

Both the senior mages who’d invited—for all practical purposes, ordered—her to Yliharma met her at the caravan depot. They laughed when she spoke of her fears. “Nonsense, my dear,” Siuntio said. His smile lit up his wide, high-cheek-boned face. With his hair graying toward white, he looked far more like a kindly grandfather than the leading theoretical sorcerer of his generation. “I’m sure everything will go splendidly.”

Pekka brushed back a few strands of straight black hair that the frigid breeze kept blowing into her eyes. Yliharma had a milder climate than Kajaani, but no one would ever mistake it for the nearly tropical beaches of northern Jelgava. She said, “This is the first time we’ll have tried a divergent series. Too many things can go wrong.”

That set Ilmarinen laughing. Where Siuntio looked like a kindly grandfather, he put Pekka in mind of a disreputable great uncle. But his record was second only to Siuntio’s, and a fair number of people—himself emphatically included—would have argued about that.

Leering at Pekka, he asked, “Which are you more afraid of, having nothing happen, or having too much?”

He had a knack for unpleasantly pointed questions. “Having nothing happen would mortify me,” Pekka said after a little thought. “If too much happens, it’s liable to kill me.”

“Don’t think small,” Ilmarinen said cheerfully. “If too much happens, you’re liable to take out half of Yliharma—maybe even all of it, if you get lucky.” Pekka didn’t think she would call that luck, but contradicting Ilmarinen only encouraged him.

Siuntio gave his longtime colleague a severe look. “That is most unlikely, as you know full well. We do have some notion of the parameters involved. It’s not as if we were back in the days of the Kaunian Empire, when mages were ignorant of the theoretical underpinnings of their craft.”

“We’re ignorant of these underpinnings,” Ilmarinen said with unfortunate accuracy. “If we weren’t, we’d be using them; we wouldn’t be experimenting.”

Pekka thought he was right and hoped he was wrong. Siuntio simply declined to be drawn into the argument, saying, “Let’s get Mistress Pekka settled at the Principality—you needn’t fret, my dear: the Seven Princes are footing the bill—and make her as comfortable as we can, so she’ll be well rested for tomorrow’s conjurations.”

They insisted on carrying her bags, though she was less than half the age of either one of them. A hired carriage waited just outside the depot. Had the driver looked any more bored, he would have been dead. The horse didn’t seem very excited about the business, either. With slow and reluctant steps, it started for the hostel, the finest one Yliharma boasted.

Sitting at a window, Pekka stared out at the town. Though dwarfing Kajaani, Yliharma didn’t compare to Setuba or to Trapani. Still, Yliharma had started as a hill fort before either of the other capitals was settled.

Most of the people on the streets looked like Pekka and her sorcerous companions. Some, though, were taller and fairer. A few sported beaky noses or auburn hair—marks of Lagoan blood. Some few of the folk in Setubal were short and black-haired rather than rangy and redheaded, too.

At the Principality, Pekka unpacked, then indulged in the steam room and cold plunge attached to her chamber. Invigorated, she sent down a supper order by the dumbwaiter and demolished the poached salmon in dill sauce when it arrived. If she was staying at the Seven Princes’ expense, she would eat well.

She wished she could activate the crystal in the room and talk with her husband. But a talented mage could pick emanations out of the air, and Kuusamo was at war with Algarve. Leino would understand why she didn’t try to reach him. He knew secrets needed keeping.

Instead of calling him, she studied. Most of the mathematics behind what she would attempt tomorrow was Ilmarinen’s; anything he did demanded careful study. Siuntio, after whom Pekka tried to model herself, was clear and straightforward. Ilmarinen’s thoughts writhed like an adder with a broken back—and, like an adder, could bite to deadly effect when least expected.

She checked and rechecked, examined and reexamined. A mage who attempted any conjuration unprepared was a fool. A mage who attempted a conjuration aimed at drawing energy from the place where the two laws of similarity and contagion met would be a dead fool if she tried it unprepared. Pekka knew she might die anyhow; that was what exploring the unknown entailed. But she intended to know as much as she could.

Because she studied so long and so hard, she got less sleep than she wanted. A breakfast of rolls and hot tea with plenty of honey helped make up for that. As ready as she’d ever be, she went downstairs and found another carriage waiting for her. “The university, isn’t it?” the driver asked.

“Aye,” Pekka said. She didn’t want to try this magic in the Seven Princes’ palace. If it got away from her at the university, it wouldn’t slay all of Kuusamo’s lords, or as many as were in town. She hoped it wouldn’t, anyhow.

Again, Siuntio and Ilmarinen greeted her when she arrived. “Welcome to my lair,” Ilmarinen said with a grin displaying irregular teeth. “Now we’ll see what we’ll see—if we see anything.”

“We will.” Siuntio sounded perfectly confident. “With your brilliant theorizing and Mistress Pekka’s inspired experiments, how can we do anything but wring the truth from nature?”

Pekka said, “As if you had nothing to do with this, Master Siuntio. You’ve done more work, and more important work, on the two laws and the relationship between them than anyone else. You deserve the bulk of the credit.”

Ilmarinen looked as if he might be inclined to argue that, but said only, “Or the bulk of the blame.”

“Aye, that is so,” Siuntio agreed imperturbably. “Power, any power, is not evil in itself, but surely may be used to evil ends.”

That soft answer also seemed to irk Ilmarinen. He said, “That’s why we do the experiment: to see how we can keep from wringing the truth from nature, I mean.”

Busy checking cages of rats, Pekka did her best to ignore the bickering. It wasn’t easy; Ilmarinen craved as much attention as her little son, Uto, and had as few scruples as Uto about going after it. She chose a pair of cages showing that the rat in one was the grandson of the animal in the other. If all went well, these rats would become as famous as the ones with which she’d experimented down in Kajaani. She shook her head. They’d become as important as those other rats. They’d be in no position to appreciate their fame. Pekka hoped she would be. If things went wrong . . .

Resolutely, she shoved that thought out of her mind, or at least down to its basement. She’d been working toward this moment her whole professional career. If she could draw useful sorcerous energy from the fusion of the laws of similarity and contagion, she would prove theoretical sorcery had some eminently practical uses. And, if she did get into difficulties, Siuntio and Ilmarinen would get her out of them if anyone could.

What if no one can?
She forced that thought into the basement of her mind, too.

Turning to the senior mages, she asked, “Are we ready?” Siuntio nodded. Ilmarinen leered. She took that for an affirmative. Dipping her head to each of them in turn, she said, “I begin, then.”

Don’t make a mistake.
She thought that whenever she went from her desk to the laboratory. No matter what Siuntio said about her experimental technique, she knew she was theoretician first, practical mage a distant second. Perhaps that made her more careful than a more practical mage would have been. She hoped so.

As she chanted the carefully crafted spell, as she made pass after intricate pass, confidence began to rise in her. She saw Siuntio smiling approval, silently cheering her on. Maybe she was borrowing the confidence from him. She didn’t care where it came from. She was glad to have it.

And then everything went wrong.

At first, as the chamber began to sway around her, Pekka thought she’d made a mistake after all. Even while she wondered whether she’d die in the next instant, she reviewed all she’d done. For the life of her—literally, for the life of her—she couldn’t see what she’d done wrong.

A heartbeat later, she realized the disaster had come from without, not from within. At that same moment, Siuntio gasped, “The Algarvians!” and Ilmarinen howled, “Murderers!” like a wolf in ultimate anguish.

When the Algarvians murdered Kaunians by the hundreds, perhaps by the thousands, to fuel their military sorcery against Unkerlant, Pekka had felt it, as had sorcerers throughout the world. She’d felt it, too, when the Unkerlanters fought back by murdering their own. But those slaughters, however horrific, had been far to the west. The massacre she felt now was close, close. It was like the difference between feeling an earthquake far away and one right under her feet.

She
was
feeling an earthquake right under her feet. Even as the building groaned, as cages flew through the air and shelves toppled, her mind leaped. “The Algarvians!” she cried, as Siuntio had before her. She could hardly hear herself through the din. “The Algarvians are turning their death-powered magic against us!”

The war against King Mezentio hadn’t come home to Kuusamo till now. Oh, a handful of Algarvian dragons flying from southern Valmiera had dropped a few eggs on the coast, and ships clashed in the Strait of Valmiera that severed Kuusamo and Lagoas from the mainland of Derlavai. But the Seven Princes had thought—as what Kuusaman had not?—they could prepare behind the Strait and strike at Algarve when they were ready. Algarve, unfortunately, had other ideas.

As earthquakes will, this one seemed to last forever. How long it really went on, Pekka couldn’t have said. At last, it stopped. Rather to her surprise, it hadn’t shaken the building down around her ears. The lamps had gone out, though. Everything in the chamber lay on the floor. Some cages had broken open; rats were scurrying for hiding places. The tremor had knocked Siuntio and Ilmarinen off their feet. Pekka had no idea how or why she was still standing.

Ilmarinen got up without help. He and Pekka pulled some shelves off Siuntio so he could rise. Siuntio was bleeding from a cut above one eye, but that wasn’t why anguish filled his face. “Our city!” he cried. “What the Algarvians have done to our city!”

“We had better find out what they’ve done to our city,” Ilmarinen said grimly. “We had better get out of here, too, before the building falls down on us.”

“I don’t think it will, not if it hasn’t already,” Pekka said. “This isn’t like a natural earthquake—I’ve been through some. There are no aftershocks.” But she hurried out with Ilmarinen and Siuntio.

When she was standing on the snow-dappled dead grass in front of the thaumaturgical laboratory, Pekka gasped. She could see a great deal of Yliharma, and much of what she could see had fallen down. Pillars of smoke rose here and there from rapidly spreading fires. And, when she looked toward the high ground at the heart of the city, she let out an agonized wail: “Not the palace, too!”

“They have struck us a heavy blow,” Siuntio said, wiping blood from his face as if he’d just realized it was there: “heavier than I ever dreamt they could.”

“That they have.” Ilmarinen still sounded like a wolf, a hungry wolf. “Now it’s our turn.”

“Aye,” Pekka said fiercely.

King Swemmel paced back and forth, back and forth, in Marshal Rathar’s office. With his body hunched forward and his jewel-encrusted robe swirling out behind him, the king of Unkerlant put his marshal in mind of a hawk soaring over a field, waiting for a rabbit to show itself.

The difference was that, unlike a hawk, King Swemmel wasn’t inclined to wait. He stabbed out a long, thin finger at the map tacked to the wall. “We’ve got the redheads on the run now!” he gloated. “All we have to do is hit them hard everywhere, and they’ll shatter like a dropped plate.”

Swemmel’s moods swung wildly; he could despair—or grow furious—as readily as he exulted. One of the things Rathar had to do, along with the small task of commanding Unkerlant’s armies, was to try to keep the king on something close to an even keel. “Aye, we have forced them back some, your Majesty,” he said, “but they’re still fighting hard, and they’re still too close to Cottbus.”

Now he pointed toward the map. Gray-headed pins showed Unkerlanter positions, green-headed ones Algarvian forces. He hardly looked at the pins; he knew where the armies were at the moment. He looked at the pinholes west of the present positions, the pinholes that showed how far the Algarvians had come. There was a hole in the middle of the dot labeled
Thalfang,
terrifyingly near the capital of Unkerlant. On a clear day, you could see Thalfang from the spires of Swemmel’s castle. The redheads had fought their way into the town, but they hadn’t fought their way through it.

“Aye, they are still too close to Cottbus,” the king agreed. “They were too close the instant they crossed our border. That is why we have to hammer them hard all along the line, to drive them from our kingdom.”

Rathar chose his words with great care: “Hammering them all along the line may not be—I do not think it is—the best way to beat them back.”

“Say on.” Suspicion gleamed in Swemmel’s dark eyes. Had he not had those eyes and dark hair, he would have looked more like an Algarvian than an Unkerlanter. But in his ability to smell plots whether they were there or not, he was very much a man of his kingdom. And like every king of Unkerlant since its earliest days, he didn’t fancy contradiction.