Out of the Darkness d-6

by Harry Turtledove

  With a shrug, Ilmarinen said, “It was something to keep me busy in my spare time. I didn’t have much, or I’d’ve done more.”

  Something to keep me busy in my spare time, Pekka thought dazedly. She and Fernao and the rest of the mages here in the Naantali district were clever and talented. She knew that. But Ilmarinen had just reminded her of the difference between talent and raw genius. She shook her head, trying to clear it. All she could find to say was, “I’m glad you’re back.”

  Seventeen

  After Ilmarinen got down from his carriage, he gave the blockhouse in the.Naantali district a salute half affectionate, half ironic. “Congratulations,” he told Pekka and Fernao, who alighted just after him. “You never did quite manage to kill yourselves here, or to blast this place off the face of the earth.”

  Fernao’s smile showed fangs. “You were the one who came closest to that, you know, when you told Linna goodbye and came out here with your miscalculations.”

  Ilmarinen scowled; he didn’t like being reminded of that. “I still say there’s more to that side of the equation than you’re willing to admit. You don’t want to see the possibilities.”

  “You don’t want to see the paradoxes,” Fernao retorted. “You ignored such a big one when you came out here, you could have taken half the district with you.”

  That was also true, and Ilmarinen liked it no better. Before he could snap back at Fernao again, Pekka said, “It’s so good to have you back, Master. The bickering got dull after you went away.”

  “Did it?” Ilmarinen’s smile was sour. “Well, I can’t say I’m surprised.”

  Raahe and Alkio and Piilis got out of their carriages. So did the secondary sorcerers, who would transmit the spell to the animals that would power it: an enormous bank of cages, larger than any Ilmarinen had seen. No one approached the blockhouse with any great eagerness. Except for Ilmarinen, all the mages here had already seen that this spell worked as advertised, so they weren’t out to discover anything new. That might have accounted for part of their reluctance. The rest. .

  “You remind me of so many hangmen on execution day,” Ilmarinen said.

  “That’s about what I feel like,” Pekka said. “We’ve tried everything we could to make the Gongs heed us, but they wouldn’t. If they had, we wouldn’t need to do this. I wish we didn’t.”

  “They’re proud and they’re brave and they still don’t believe they’re overmatched,” Ilmarinen said. “When you run into someone like that, you usually have to hit him in the face to get his attention.”

  “We are. I understand the need,” Pekka said. Ilmarinen found himself nodding. When he first got to know her, he’d made the mistake of thinking her soft; he’d had to change his mind about that in short order. She went on, “I understand it, but I still don’t like it.”

  “It will end the war,” Fernao said. “It had better end the war.”

  “Aye. It had better.” Pekka’s tone was bleak. “If it doesn’t… I don’t want to think about doing this twice, or more than twice, not to cities.”

  “That’s one of the reasons we have some hope of getting away with this and keeping our spirits clean,” Ilmarinen said. “Believe me, if the Algarvians had known what we do, they wouldn’t have thought twice about using it. The deeper in trouble they got, the nastier the wizardry they tried and the less they counted the cost. They deserved having the Unkerlanters overrun them, and if that’s not a judgment I don’t know what is.”

  “Let’s go do what needs doing,” Pekka said. “We have a crystal in the blockhouse-I ordered one moved there. If the Gyongyosians decide to be sensible at the last moment, we can abort the spell.”

  She’s grasping at straws, Ilmarinen thought. She has to know she’s grasping- at straws, but she’s doing it anyhow. Can’t blame her for that. Blame? Powers above, I admire her for it. But it won’t do any good. If the Gongs were going to quit, they’d have quit by now. Beating them on the field hasn’t been enough to make them change their minds. Maybe this will be. If it is, it’ll be worthwhile.

  One after another, the mages marched into the blockhouse. It was as cramped as Ilmarinen remembered. With his bad leg, Fernao was the last one through the door. He slammed it shut and let the heavy bar fall into place. The blockhouse might have been sealed away from the rest of the world.

  “No need for that, not anymore,” Ilmarinen said.

  “Maybe not,” Fernao said, “but by now it’s become part of our ritual.” Ilmarinen nodded. Routine did have a way of crystallizing into ritual. And Fernao was a good deal more fluent in Kuusaman these days than he had been before Ilmarinen left the Naantali district. The Lagoan wizard hardly ever needed to fall back into classical Kaunian now. His south-coast accent was also stronger than it had been. Ilmarinen glanced toward Pekka. He had no doubt where Fernao had picked up his style of speaking.

  Pekka might have felt his eye on her. If she had, she didn’t know why he’d looked her way, for she said, “Master Ilmarinen, are you sure you’re comfortable here? In spite of your work, you’re a latecomer to this sorcery.”

  “I’ll pull my weight,” Ilmarinen answered. “This is the end, the very end. I want to be a part of that.”

  “All right.” She nodded. “You’re entitled to it. So much of the work we’ve done is based on your calculations. If it weren’t for you, we wouldn’t be here today. I will say, though, I hope you don’t plan on standing on your head, the way you did in the hallway outside my office.”

  “No,” Ilmarinen said. “What we’re here for today is standing Gyongyos on its head. That’s a different business.”

  Piilis said, “So it is, Master, but one day you must tell us why you chose to stand on your head in the hallway outside Mistress Pekka’s office.”

  “I was demonstrating an inverse relationship,” Ilmarinen replied. Piilis blinked but didn’t smile. He was bright enough-more than bright enough- but had only a vestigial sense of humor. He might have gone further had he had more. Or he might not have, too. Ilmarinen had his own opinion about such things, but recognized it was no more than an opinion.

  “Are we ready?” Pekka asked. No one denied it. She took a deep breath and intoned, “Before the Kaunians came, we of Kuusamo were here. Before the Lagoans came, we of Kuusamo were here. After the Kaunians departed, we of Kuusamo were here. We of Kuusamo are here. After the Lagoans depart, we of Kuusamo shall be here.”

  Ilmarinen repeated the ritual words with her. So did the rest of the Kuusaman mages crowding the blockhouse. And so, he noted, did Fernao. That was interesting. Before Ilmarinen left, the Lagoan mage had always hung back from the stylized phrases with which Kuusamans began any sorcerous endeavor.

  No more, though. Was he starting to think of himself as a Kuusaman, then?

  Even if Fernao did think of himself as belonging to the land of the Seven Princes, Ilmarinen didn’t and wouldn’t. And neither would the Lagoan, if he weren‘t sleeping with a Kuusaman woman, the master mage thought. But then he shrugged. Plenty of men-and women, too-had changed their allegiance over the years for reasons like that.

  “I ask you once more, Master,” Pekka said: “Are you ready to take your place in this spell along with the rest of us?”

  “And I tell you once more: I am,” Ilmarinen replied. “I think I can keep up with you. Do you doubt it?”

  He found himself flattered by how quickly she shook her head. “By no means,” she told him, and looked to the other mages. “Are we all ready?” When no one denied it, Pekka took a deep breath, let it out, and said, “Pursuant to the orders conveyed to me by the Seven Princes of Kuusamo, I begin.”

  Whenever she incanted up till now, it was always just, “I begin,” Ilmarinen thought. Does she want to have it on the record that she’s following orders? A lot of Algarvians tried to do that. Or is her conscience bothering her a little, so she wants to lay the blame on the Seven and not on herself?

  He had little time to wonder about such things. His own spell along th
ese lines would have required only one operator: he’d designed it for himself. The charm the mages here had come up with was a good deal more complex. And when did you ever know a committee to do anything that wasn’t clumsy and cumbersome? Ilmarinen asked himself.

  But that wasn’t altogether fair, and he was honest enough to admit it to himself. His spell was a bare-bones affair. A good sorcerer needed arrogance, and he had it in full measure. He’d simply assumed nothing would go wrong as he loosed the cantrip on the world. If anything did go wrong-if, by some mischance, he made a mistake-the spell would ruin him in short order.

  This version, if more complicated, was also a good deal safer. Raahe and Alkio and Piilis not only helped draw and aim the sorcerous energy: they also stood ready to turn it aside in case Pekka or Fernao or Ilmarinen himself stumbled.

  I don’t intend to stumble, he thought, as Pekka pointed to him and he took up the chant. The passes he used were a good deal more elegant-and more difficult- than those the mages here had worked out. He accepted the revised words they’d come up with. Safety for elegance was a reasonable trade. But he thought their passes ugly. He felt sure he could manage these, and so he used them.

  No mage intends to stumble, went through his mind. By then, though, he’d finished that portion of the spell. He pointed to Fernao and poised himself to deflect any trouble if the Lagoan slipped. Fernao still irked Ilmarinen, but no denying he’d come a long way in a short time.

  He got through his portion of the spell without difficulty, even if Ilmarinen reckoned his passes graceless. Then Pekka took over once more, and brought the charm up to its first plateau. Ilmarinen could feel the power already gathered, and could also sense the shape and size of the power still to be drawn. As he sensed it, awe washed over him. Could I have managed this by myself? I thought I could, but maybe I was wrong. Arrogance brings down as many mages as clumsiness.

  Pekka pointed to him. He nodded, stopped thinking, and started incanting once more. They’d given him the task of getting the cantrip past that first plateau, up to the point where the power, the sorcerous energy, having all been gathered, could be launched against any target the mages chose.

  Ilmarinen felt as if he were pushing a boulder up a hill. For a bad moment, he wondered if the boulder would roll down over him and crush him. Then, without any fuss, he felt added strength from Pekka and from Fernao. The Lagoan mage nodded to him, as if to say, We can do it. And, with his help, they could. That boulder of power went up the metaphorical hill again-and, somehow, began to move up it faster and faster, which just proved metaphor was not only slippery but also dangerous.

  “Now!” Ilmarinen grunted hoarsely. Pekka pointed to Raahe, Alkio, and Piilis, Fernao to the secondary sorcerers. The power didn’t belong here. It needed to be on the far side of the world, where a new day would soon be dawning.

  With the other mages in the blockhouse, Ilmarinen felt the sorcerous energy fly east. They cried out in triumph. And then, some tiny fraction of a heartbeat later, Ilmarinen and the others felt it strike home against Gyorvar.

  He cried out again, almost before the echoes of his first shout had faded. But what he felt this time was a long way from triumph.

  When Istvan went back to Gyongyos, he hadn’t expected merely to exchange one captives’ camp for another. By now, though, he’d concluded he wouldn’t be getting out of this center near Gyorvar any time soon. All the guards spoke his language. The food was what he was used to. But for those details, he might as well have been back on Obuda.

  “You have a simple way to go free,” Balazs told him. The interrogator spoke in calm, reasonable tones: “All you need do, Sergeant, is say you are convinced the accursed Kuusamans, may the stars never shine on them, tried to trick and terrorize you with their show on Becsehely.”

  “All I have to do is lie, you mean,” Istvan said sourly. “All I have to do is turn my back on the stars.”

  “Your attitude is most uncooperative,” Balazs said.

  “I am trying to tell you the truth,” Istvan said in something not far from despair. “If you don’t listen, what will happen to Gyongyos?”

  “Nothing much, I expect,” the interrogator answered. “Nothing much has happened to our stars-beloved land up till now. Why should that change?”

  “Because the slanteyes have given us a little time to make up our minds,” Istvan said. “Pretty soon, they’ll go ahead and do this to us.”

  “If they can, which I do not believe-which everyone with a dram of sense, from Ekrekek Arpad on down, does not believe,” Balazs said. “Most of your comrades have also seen sense and been released. You know what you have to do to join them. Why make an avalanche of a snowflake?”

  “You would say the same thing if you were trying to talk me into eating goat,” Istvan said. The scar on his left hand throbbed. He ignored it. And, where nothing else had, that remark succeeded in insulting Balazs. He stalked away, his nose in the air, and bothered neither Istvan nor Captain Petofi the rest of the day.

  Petofi noticed the interrogator’s absence. At supper, he asked why Balazs had gone missing. Istvan explained. The officer, normally a dour man, laughed out loud. But then he sobered. “He probably went into Gyorvar to denounce you,” he warned. “You may have got satisfaction now, but for how long will you keep it?”

  Istvan shrugged. “They already have me in what might as well be another captives’ camp. What can they do to me that’s so much worse?”

  “Those are the sorts of questions you would do better not to ask,” Petofi replied. “All too often, they turn out to have answers, and you generally end up wishing they didn’t.”

  “Too late to worry about it now, sir,” Istvan said with another shrug. “I already opened my big mouth. Today was mine, and I’ll enjoy it. If he makes me sorry after he gets back here from Gyorvar, then he does, that’s all, and I’ll have to see if I can find some other way to get my own back.”

  Sadly, the captain shook his head. “Those whoresons are armored against attack by virtue of their office. Being the ekrekek’s Eyes and Ears, they think they can do as they please, and they are commonly right.”

  “Balazs isn’t Arpad’s Eye and Ear,” Istvan said. “He’s the ekrekek’s..” He named an altogether different portion of his sovereign’s anatomy, one as necessary as an eye or an ear but much less highly esteemed.

  “No doubt you’re right,” Petofi said, this time favoring him with no more than a wintry smile. “Being right, of course, will get you what being right usually does: the blame, and nothing else.”

  On that cheerful note, the captain nodded to Istvan almost as if they were equals and then left the dining hall for his own private room-he was an officer, after all. Istvan didn’t linger long himself. He felt oppressed, and he didn’t think it was at the prospect of Balazs’ coming revenge. The very air felt heavy with menace. He tried to tell himself it was his imagination. Sometimes he succeeded for several minutes at a stretch.

  Balazs had told one truth, anyhow: the barracks hall where Istvan slept held only a handful of other stubborn underofficers besides himself. He didn’t care much, save that he missed Corporal Kun. Kun must have thought telling a few lies a small enough price for going home to Gyorvar. Istvan hardly blamed him. He knew mulishness was all that kept him here.

  With Kun gone, he was in no mood for company anyhow. Lamps-out came as more than a little relief. Gyorvar’s distant lights came in through the south-facing windows, casting a pale, grayish illumination on the northern wall of the barracks. It was less than moonlight, more than starlight-not enough to disturb Istvan in the least when he fell asleep.

  Having fallen asleep, he promptly began to wish he’d stayed awake. He kept starting up from a series of the ghastliest nightmares he’d ever had the misfortune to suffer. In one of them, Captain Tivadar cut his throat instead of his hand on finding out he’d eaten goat. That was one of the gentler dreams, too. Most of the others were worse, far worse: full of red slaughter. He couldn’t always
remember the details when he woke, but his pounding heart and the terrified gasps with which he breathed told him more than he wanted to know.

  And then, some time toward morning, he woke to bright sunlight streaming in through the window. But it wasn’t morning, not yet, and the window didn’t face east. And the light into the barracks might have been as bright as sunlight, but it wasn’t sunlight. It rippled and shifted like waves-or flames.

  With a cry of horror and despair, Istvan sprang to his feet and rushed to the window. He knew what he would see, and he saw it: the same destruction poured down onto Gyorvar as had descended upon Becsehely. He’d been closer to the disaster in the Kuusaman ley-line cruiser than he was now, but he wasn’t so far away as to have any doubt about what was happening.

  Even through the window, even across the miles separating him from the capital of Gyongyos, savage heat beat on his face. For a moment, that was the only thought in his mind. Then he wondered what it was like in Gyorvar itself, and then, sickly, he wished he hadn’t.

  Well, he thought, if that accursed Balazs went into the capital, he isn‘t coming back. May the stars not shine on his spirit.

  He faced that loss with equanimity. But then one of the other men in the hall whispered, “If Ekrekek Arpad’s there, he couldn’t live through. . that. If his kin are there, they couldn’t, either.”

  That was horror of a different sort. The Ekrekek of Gyongyos was the only man alive who communed with the stars as an equal. That was what made him what he was. If he died, if all his kin died in the same searing instant-who would rule Gyongyos then? Istvan had no idea. He doubted anyone had ever imagined such a nightmare could befall the land.

  “What do we do?” another soldier-or was he another captive? — moaned. “What can we do?”

  The flames pouring out of the sky onto Gyorvar abruptly ceased, though they remained printed on Istvan’s vision when he blinked. Gyorvar without the ekrekek, without the ekrekek’s whole family? Arpad’s house had reigned in Gyongyos since the stars made the world. That was what people said, at any rate.