"We can talk almost anywhere in the kingdom," the woman said, not without pride.
"Good," Skarnu said. "Just don't do too much of it, or you'll have the Algarvians listening in." The woman nodded. Despite his words, Skarnu was impressed. Down on the farm near Pavilosta, he'd often wondered if his pin-pricks meant anything to the Algarvians, and if anyone else in Valmiera was doing anything against them. Seeing with his own eyes how resistance spread across the whole kingdom felt very fine indeed.
"Zarasai" went back into the kitchen and returned with a couple of steaming mugs of tea. He passed one on to Skarnu, waited till he'd sipped, and then said, "All right- you're in charge. Tell us what to do, and we'll do it."
Maybe having served as a captain fitted Skarnu to the role thrust on him. Having wrecked the one caravan didn't, as he knew too well. Doing his best to think like a soldier, he said, "Have you got a map with ley lines marked? I want to see the possibilities."
"Aye," the woman said matter-of-factly, and pulled one from the bureau drawer.
Skarnu studied it. "If they're after Setubal again, they'll send the captives to the camp by Dukstas, the one they used before when the Lagoans raided them."
The irregular from Zarasai nodded. "We figure that one's the most likely. They'd dearly love to serve Setubal as they served Yliharma. All these other camps are smaller and farther east. Setubal's the best target they've got. I don't see that they'd want to hit Kuusamo again and leave Lagoas untouched."
"No, I wouldn't think so, either," Skarnu agreed. But he frowned. "Dukstas is the obvious place to send the captives."
"Of course it is," "Zarasai" said. "That's why they're doing all these dances, isn't it? -to keep us from seeing what's obvious, I mean."
"Maybe." Skarnu shrugged. "It could be, aye. But I just don't know…" He cursed under his breath. "Can we try to sabotage the ley lines into all of these camps?"
"We can try doing them all." The other irregular sounded dubious, and explained why: "Odds are, some of the people we send in will get caught. They've got lots of soldiers and lots of cursed Valmieran traitors guarding the ley lines. They want to get these captives through, that's plain."
"That means something really big," Skarnu said. "Setubal or… something else." His frown turned into a scowl. "What could be bigger than Setubal, if they can bring it off? But Setubal doesn't feel right to me- do you know what I mean?"
"It's your call," the man from Zarasai answered. "That's why you're here."
"All right." Skarnu nodded to the woman who did duty for a crystallomancer. "As much in the way of sabotage on every ley line we can reach that leads to one of those camps. I'm not convinced the captives are going to Dukstas. Maybe we'll see where they are going when we seen which ley lines the redheads defend hardest."
"Sabotage all the ley lines we can," the woman repeated. "I shall pass the word." Pass it she did, one crystal at a time. Having given his orders, Skarnu could only wait to see how things far away turned out. That was new for him: he'd been a captain before, aye, but never a general.
Reports started coming back around midday, some from raiders who had planted eggs, others from bands that failed because their stretch of ley line was too strongly protected. A couple of bands never reported back at all. Skarnu worried about that. Eyeing the map, "Zarasai" said, "Well, the buggers won't ship 'em into Dukstas, and that's flat."
"So it is." Skarnu felt a certain satisfaction himself. A few hours later, word came that the Algarvians had succeeded in moving the Kaunian captives into a seaside camp, but one far, far to the east. He cursed, but made the best of things: "They may manage something, but we kept them from doing their worst."
Four
From the dining room of the hostel that had been run up in the wilderness of southeastern Kuusamo, Pekka looked out on bright sunlight shining off snow. She took another bite of a grilled and salted mackerel. "Finally," she said in classical Kaunian. "Decent weather for more experiments."
"I've seen bad weather," Ilmarinen said. "I don't know that I've ever seen indecent weather. Might be interesting." Even in the classical language, he liked to twist words back on themselves to see what happened.
Pekka gave him a sweet smile. "Any weather with you out in it, Master, would soon become indecent."
Siuntio coughed. Fernao chuckled. Ilmarinen guffawed. "That all depends on whether the experiment goes up or down," he said.
Siuntio coughed again, more sharply this time. "Let us please remember the high seriousness of the work in which we are engaged," he said.
"Why?" Ilmarinen asked. "The work will go on just the same either way. We'll have more fun if we have more fun, though."
"We are also more likely to make a mistake if we take things lightly," Siuntio said. "Considering the forces we are trying to manipulate, a mistake would be something less than desirable."
"Enough," Pekka said before the elderly and distinguished mages could get any further into their schoolboy bickering. "One of the mistakes we make is arguing among ourselves."
"Quite right." Siuntio nodded, then shook a finger in Ilmarinen's direction. "You should pay attention to Mistress Pekka's wisdom, for she-"
Now Fernao coughed. "It pains me to tell you this, Master Siuntio," he said in his careful Kaunian, "but you are still arguing."
"I am?" Siuntio sounded astonished. Then he seemed to consider. "Why, so I am." He dipped his head to Fernao. "My thanks for pointing it out; I confess I hadn't noticed."
Pekka believed him. He was just the sort of man who might do such a thing without paying much attention to what he was doing. She said, "When we go out today- or tomorrow, if we do not get the chance to do it today- we have to remind the secondary sorcerers to bend every effort to keeping all the animals hale while we perform the primary incantations. Having one of the rats in the younger group die before the spell was complete ruined a day's work and more."
"As opposed to ruining a good part of the landscape," Ilmarinen said.
"We have already done that," Pekka said. "Even after the blizzards come and pour snow over the latest hole in the ground, you can still see the scars of what we have done." She shook her head. "And to think all this started with an acorn disappearing."
"More than an acorn disappearing nowadays," Fernao said, "but that will be the experiment the textbooks of the future mention."
"Textbooks," Ilmarinen said with the scorn of a man who'd written a good many. "The permanent written record of what the world doesn't remember quite the right way."
"I want to go out to the site," Pekka said. "I want to go into the blockhouse and cast the spells. We have come so far now. We need to go on."
"We need to pluck more fresh, green grass from the latest crater," Ilmarinen said, throwing oil on the fire. "We need to see what we can do about that, and we need to see if anything smarter than a blade of grass can come through unchanged." He eyed Fernao, then shook his head. "No, you wouldn't make a proper experimental subject there."
"True," Fernao agreed imperturbably. "I am not green."
Ilmarinen looked wounded at having provoked no warmer response. Pekka pushed her plate toward the center of the table and stood up. "Let us go out to the blockhouse," she said. "Let us see if we can keep from snapping one another's heads off while we go."
As usual, she rode in the sleigh with Fernao. Part of that was deference to the two senior sorcerers. Part of it was that the two younger mages had more in common with each other than either did with Siuntio or Ilmarinen. Some small part of it was slowly growing pleasure in each other's company.
The blockhouse had had new work done on it since the experiments began, to make it stronger and better able to withstand the energies the mages released. Even so, the secondary sorcerers set up the rows of animal cages more than twice as far from the little reinforced hut as they had when the series of spells started.
"Well, let's get on with it," Ilmarinen said when they were assembled in the blockhouse. "With any luck at all, we c
an drop this whole corner of the island into the sea. In a few weeks, who knows? Maybe we'll manage the whole island."
One of the secondary sorcerers said, "May it please you, Masters, Mistress, the animals are ready."
He spoke in Kuusaman. When he started to repeat himself in classical Kaunian for Fernao's benefit, the Lagoan mage said, "Never mind. I understand."
In Kaunian, Pekka said, "Your Kuusaman has a noticeable Kajaani accent."
"Does it?" Fernao said. "I wonder why that would be." They smiled at each other.
"To business, if you please," Siuntio said.
"Aye. To business," Pekka agreed. She took a deep breath, then intoned the words with which a mage of her blood prefaced every major sorcerous operation: "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."
Siuntio and Ilmarinen both nodded; they'd used that ritual far longer than she'd been alive. One of Fernao's eyebrows rose. He had to know what the words were, what they meant. Did he believe them, as the Kuusaman sorcerers did? That was bound to be a different question.
Ritual complete, Pekka glanced to the secondary sorcerers. They nodded: they were ready to support the experimental animals and to transmit the magecraft so it had its proper effect. Pekka took another deep breath. "I begin."
She had not got more than half a dozen lines into the newly revised and strengthened spell- not nearly far enough to land in serious trouble for stopping- when her head suddenly came up and she looked away from the text she'd been reading. "Something's wrong," she said, first in her own language, then in classical Kaunian.
Siuntio and Fernao both frowned; whatever it was that had disturbed her, they didn't sense it. But Ilmarinen's head was up and swinging this way and that, too, the expression on his face one that might have been a wolf's when it feared a hunter close by.
And then, as that wary old wolf might have, he took a scent. "The Algarvians!" he said harshly. "Another slaughter."
This time, Siuntio nodded. His eyes went very wide, wider than Pekka had ever seen them, wider than she'd thought a Kuusaman's eyes could get. White showed all around his irises. He said the three worst words Pekka could imagine just then: "Aimed at us."
Pekka gasped. She felt it, too, the horrid sense of potent murder-powered magic not so far away. She and Siuntio and Ilmarinen had been in Yliharma when Mezentio's mages attacked the capital of Kuusamo. That had been bad, very bad. She hadn't thought anything could be much worse. But she'd been wrong. Now she found out how wrong.
As he usually did, Siuntio had the right of it: this time, the stolen life energy of those Kaunian captives was hurled straight at the blockhouse, a deadly dart of sorcerous force. The lamps flickered in a strange, rhythmic pattern. Then the walls started to shake in the same rhythm, and then the floor beneath Pekka's feet. The air felt hot and thick in her lungs. It tasted of blood.
The paper on which her cantrip was written burst into flames. One of the secondary sorcerers screamed. Her hair had burst into flames, too. A comrade swaddled her head with a blanket, but the flames did not want to go out.
"No!" Siuntio shouted, a battle cry that might have burst from the throat of a man half his age. "By the powers above, no! You shall not have us! You shall not!" He began what had to be a counterspell. Pekka had never imagined such a thing- one determined mage, all alone, trying to withstand the massed might of many, a might magnified by murder.
Ilmarinen's voice joined Siuntio's a moment later. They were the finest sorcerers of their generation. For an instant, just for an instant, Pekka, marshaling in her mind what she could do to aid their magecraft, thought they might have fought the Algarvians to a standstill. But then the lamps went out altogether, plunging the blockhouse into darkness. With a shriek of bursting timbers, the roof fell in. Something hit Pekka in the side of the head. The dark went black, shot with scarlet.
She couldn't have stayed senseless long. When she woke, she was lying in the snow outside the blockhouse- the burning blockhouse, for flames crackled and smoke poured from it. She tried to sit up, but the pounding pain in her head got worse. Her eyes didn't want to focus. The world seemed to spin. So did her guts. She leaned over and was violently sick in the snow.
Somewhere not far away, Ilmarinen let out a string of horrible curses in Kuusaman, Kaunian, and Lagoan all mixed together. "Go after him, you fools!" he bellowed. "Go after him! Go on, powers below eat you all! He's worth more than the lot of you put together. Get him out of there!"
Pekka tried again to sit. This time, moving ever so slowly and carefully, she managed it. Ilmarinen and Fernao both stood by the blockhouse. Fernao was shouting, too, in Kaunian when he remembered and in incomprehensible Lagoan when he didn't.
Ilmarinen tried to run into the burning building. One of the secondary sorcerers grabbed him and pulled him back. He stuck an elbow into the man's belly and broke free. But two other men seized him before he could do what he so plainly wanted to.
Fernao turned to him and said something Pekka didn't catch. Ilmarinen's shoulders sagged. He seemed to shrink in on himself. In that moment, for the very first time, he looked his age, with another twenty years tacked on besides.
Pekka grubbed up some snow well away from where she'd vomited and used it to rinse the vile taste from her mouth. The motion drew the notice of the other two theoretical sorcerers. They both came over to her, Fernao making slow going of it with the one stick he'd managed to bring out into the open.
"What- what happened?" The banality of the question shamed Pekka, but it was the best she could do.
"The Algarvians must have noticed the sorcerous energy we were releasing in our experiments," Fernao answered. "They decided to put a stop to them." He had a cut above one eye, a shiner, and another cut on his cheek, and appeared to notice none of them.
Ilmarinen added, "Rather like stepping on a cockroach with a mountain. Powers above, they're strong when they want to be. Curse them all. Curse them forever." Tears froze halfway down his cheeks.
Trying to make her battered brains think at all, Pekka asked, "Where's Master Siuntio?" Neither mage answered. Fernao looked back toward the burning blockhouse. Ilmarinen started cursing again. More tears flowed and froze. Pekka gulped, a heartsickness far worse than the pounding her body had taken. Siuntio- gone? Now, when they needed him more than ever?
Grimly, Ilmarinen said, "There shall be a reckoning. Aye, by the powers above, there shall be a reckoning indeed."
***
Fernao sat in the dining room of the small hostel in the Kuusaman wilderness. When he lifted a finger, a serving woman brought him a new glass of brandy. Glasses he'd already emptied crowded the table in front of him. No one said a word about it. Kuusamans often mourned their dead with spirits. If a foreigner wanted to do likewise, they would let him.
Presently, I shall fall asleep. Fernao thought with the false clarity of a man already drunk and getting drunker. Then they will carry me upstairs, the way they carried Ilmarinen upstairs half an hour ago.
He was surprised and proud he'd outlasted the Kuusaman mage. But Ilmarinen had thrown himself into his binge with a frightening enthusiasm, as if he didn't care whether he came out the other side. He'd known Siuntio for more than fifty years. In their minds, they'd both gone places no one else in the world could reach till they showed the way. No wonder Ilmarinen drank as if he'd lost a brother, maybe a twin.
Fernao reached for the new glass- reached for it and missed. "Hold still," he told it, and tried again. This time, he not only captured it, he raised it to his mouth.
Even if his body didn't want to obey him, his wits still worked after a fashion. What will I be like tomorrow morning? he wondered- a truly frightening thought. He drank some more to drown it. Part of him knew that wouldn't help. He drank anyway.
He'd almost emptied the glass when Pekka stepped into the di
ning room. Seeing him, she came his way. She walked slowly and carefully. She'd taken a nasty whack when the blockhouse came down in ruin, and her head had to hurt even more now than his would come morning.
"May I join you?" she asked.
"Aye. Please do. I am honored." Fernao remembered to answer in classical Kaunian, not Lagoan, which she didn't speak. He stopped just before he ran through the whole passive conjugation of the verb to honor: you are honored, he/she/it is honored, we…
"I wondered if I would see Master Ilmarinen here," Pekka said.
"He went belly-up a while ago," Fernao answered.
"Ah." Pekka nodded. "They understood each other, those two. I wonder if anyone else did."
That so closely paralleled Fernao's thought, he tried to tell her of it. His tongue tripped over itself and wouldn't let him. "I am sorry, milady," he said. "You see me… not at my best." He knocked back his brandy and signaled for another.
"You need not apologize, not here, not now," Pekka said. "I would drink to the dead, too, but the healers gave me a decoction of poppy juice and told me I must not take spirits with it."
The serving woman brought Fernao a fresh brandy, then glanced a question at Pekka. Ever so slightly, the Kuusaman mage shook her head. The serving woman went away. "Which decoction?" Fernao asked. What with his injuries down in the land of the Ice People, he'd become something of an expert on the anodynes made from poppy sap.
"It was yellow and tasted nasty," Pekka answered.
"Ah, the yellow one." Part of Fernao's nod was drunken gravity, part remembering. "Aye. Compared to some of the others, it leaves your wits fairly clear."
"Then the others must be ferocious," Pekka said. "I thought my head would float away. Considering how it felt, I hoped my head would float away. Some of the drug has worn off since." Her grimace showed she wished it hadn't. She brightened when she added, "I can take more soon."
For Fernao, the yellow decoction had been a long and welcome step back toward the real world; he'd been taking more potent mixtures before. For Pekka, plainly, it was a long and welcome step out of the real world.
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