“Aye.” Pekka nodded. “Assuming. Now, as I was saying, in the next experiment we shall align the cages of the related rats in the reverse order, to see if reversing them will strengthen the spell by emphasizing the inverse nature of the relationship between the Two Laws.”
Ilmarinen preened; he’d discovered that the relationship between the laws of similarity and contagion was inverse, not direct. But he never would have had the insight without the data from Pekka’s seminal—literally, since it had involved acorns—experiment. And Pekka wasn’t bad at coming up with startling insights herself. She hadn’t done a bad job of quashing Ilmarinen there, either.
Fernao said, “I never would have thought of altering the positions of the cages.”
Pekka shrugged. “That is what lies at the heart of experimenting: changing every variable you can imagine. Since we are so ignorant here, we need to explore as wide a range of possibilities as we can.”
“I never would have reckoned that a variable,” Fernao answered. “It would not have occurred to me.”
“It did not occur to me, either,” Siuntio said, “and I have some small experience in the game we are playing.”
“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.
Hardly had that thought crossed his mind before Pekka cried out one last word. Lightning did crackle between the rows of cages then, and went on and on. Once, fast as a striking serpent, Siuntio rapped out a word, right in the middle of that spectacular discharge. Fernao couldn’t see that it made any difference, but Ilmarinen patted his fellow mage on the back as if he’d done something more than considerable.
At last, the lightnings faded. Pekka slumped, and held herself up by hanging on to the table in front of which she stood. “Well, we got through another one,” she said in a gravelly voice. Through dazzled eyes, Fernao saw the sweat on her forehead, saw the skin stretched tight on her high cheekbones. Casting that spell looked to have aged her five years, maybe ten.
Fernao started to say something, but drew in a breath and coughed. The breath was ripe—rank—with the odor of corruption. Ilmarinen coughed, too, coughed and said, “We ought to do more work with the windows open.”
“Or else work with a convergent series,” Siuntio put in.
“These are the older animals?” Fernao asked.
“A lot older now,” Ilmarinen said. “Actually, you’re smelling the way they were a while ago, so to speak. They don’t stink at all now; they’re long past that.”
“I . . . see,” Fernao said slowly. “This is what the mathematics said you would be doing, but seeing the mathematics is not the same as seeing the thing itself.”
“It should be.” Siuntio’s voice held a touch of disapproval.
He was a master mage indeed, a master at a level to which Fernao could only aspire. If he truly did see the mathematics and the reality as one and the same—and Fernao was willing to believe he did—his powers of visualization were also well beyond those of the Lagoan mage. Somewhat cowed, Fernao said, “And what of the younger rats?”
Siuntio clucked again. He said, “You know what the mathematics say. If you must have the confirmation, examine their enclosures.”
“Aye, Master,” Fernao said with a sigh. He knew what he would find when he walked over to that row of cages, and find it he did: they were empty. There was no sign that rats had ever lived in them. He whistled, one soft, low note. “Were they ever really there? Where did they go?”
“They’re gone now, by the powers above—that’s where the energy discharge came from,” Ilmarinen said. “And suppose you define real for me, when you’ve
got a year you’re not doing anything else with.” No, he had no trouble being colloquially rude in classical Kaunian.
“In any case, where—or when—they may have gone is mathematically undefined, and so must be meaningless,” Siuntio said.
Fernao made a discontented noise, down deep in his throat. “I have not been through the calculations as thoroughly as you have, of course, but this solution does not strike me as if it ought to be undefined.”
Pekka stirred. She didn’t seem quite so ravaged as she had just after she finished the spell. “I agree,” she said. “I believe there is a determinate solution to the question. If we can find it, I believe it will be important.”
“I’ve looked. I haven’t found one,” Ilmarinen said. He didn’t say, If I can’t find one, it isn’t there, but that was what he meant.
“It may be just as well if we don’t look too hard,” Siuntio said. “The implications of the convergent series are alarming enough—how long before mages start robbing the young of time to give to the old and rich and vicious? But if you youngsters are right, the possibilities from the divergent series are even worse.”
“More paradoxical, certainly,” Pekka said. Fernao thought about the young rats. He nodded. The Kuusaman mage had found the right word.
“Sorcery abhors paradox.” Siuntio’s voice was prim.
“Most of the sorcerers here at the university abhor us,” Ilmarinen said. “We scare them to death, too: almost literally, after a couple of our experiments. This one didn’t even break any windows; we’re getting better control. Shall we go celebrate living through another one with some food and some spirits?”
“Aye!” Pekka said, as if he’d thrown her a cork float while she was drowning. Siuntio nodded. So did Fernao. But he ate and drank absently, for the distinction between the real world and the world of calculation blurred in his mind. By Pekka’s abstracted expression, he thought her mind was going down the same ley line as his. He wondered if it led anywhere.
Trasone stood on the northern bank of the Wolter and looked across the river toward the Mamming Hills beyond. He couldn’t see much of the hills; snow flurries cut his vision short. Chunks of drift ice floated down the Wolter toward the Narrow Sea.
Here in Sulingen, the snow that stuck on the ground was gray, ranging toward black. So much of the city had burned as the Algarvians battled block by block to seize it from King Swemmel’s men. Trasone turned to Sergeant Panfilo, who stood a few feet away. He waved a magnificent, all-encompassing Algarvian wave. “It’s ours at last!” he shouted. “Isn’t that bloody fornicating wonderful?”
“Oh, aye, it’s terrific, all right.” Panfilo pointed east. “We still haven’t got quite all of it.” Fresh smoke rose from the pockets where Unkerlanter soldiers still stubbornly hung on. The sergeant turned away from them, back toward the parts of Sulingen the Algarvians had won. Fresh smoke rose from them, too, here and there—Unkerlanter dragons and egg-tossers kept reminding the Algarvians the war went on. Panfilo gestured in disgust. “It wasn’t supposed to be a fight about Sulingen. We were supposed to take this place and then go on to the cursed hills and the cinnabar in them.”
Trasone spat. “You know that. I know that. Nobody bothered to tell the stinking Unkerlanters.”
“Now, boys!” That was Major Spinello’s cheery voice. Trasone didn’t know how the battalion commander did it. Had he not known better, he would have suspected Spinello of keeping his spirits up with nostrums and potions. But even food had a hard time coming into Sulingen, let alone drugs. Spinello went on, “Aren’t you proud of our magnificent victory?”
“One more victory like this and we won’t have any soldiers left at all,” Trasone answered. Spinello didn’t mind if his soldiers spoke their minds. He always spoke his.
Panfilo said, “Even if we do finally clean out the Unkerlanters, we won’t be able to cross the Wolter and get into the Mamming Hills till spring. That’s not how it was supposed to work.”
“How many things do work out just the way you want them to?” Spinello asked. “I can only think of—” He stopped, a surprised look on his face. In normal, conversational tones, he said, “I’ve been blazed.” He crumpled to the snow- and soot-streaked ground.
“Sniper!” Trasone screamed as he threw himself flat. Panfilo also lay on the ground; he was shouting the same thing. Trasone crawled over to Major Spinello and started to drag him off toward some rubble nearby. Panfilo helped. “How bad is it, sir?” Trasone asked.
“Hurts,” Spinello answered. When the two soldiers dragged him over a broken brick, he began to shriek.
Once they got him behind the wreckage—so the Unkerlanter sniper, wherever he was, would have a harder time getting a good blaze at any of them—Trasone and Panfilo examined the wound. It went through the right side of Spinello’s chest and back. The major kept on shrieking and writhing while they looked him over. Trasone took that in stride. He’d helped too many wounded men to do anything else.
“Through the lung,” Panfilo said. “That’s not good.”
“No,” Trasone said. “But he’s not bleeding too much, the way they do sometimes. If we can get him out of here and the healers can slow him down and work on him, he’s got a chance. He’s an officer, and he’s a noble—if we can haul him out of here, they’ll sure as blazes sling him under a dragon and fly him off.”
“All right, let’s try it,” Sergeant Panfilo said. “He’s not a bad fellow.”
“Pretty fair officer,” Trasone agreed as each of them draped one of Spinello’s arms over his shoulder. “Of course, if it was you or me, we’d take our chances right here in Sulingen.” Panfilo nodded. They both scrambled to their feet and hauled Spinello off toward the closest dragon farm, a few hundred yards from the Wolter. Perhaps mercifully, the wounded major passed out before they got there.
“We’ll get him away,” the chief dragon handler promised. “He’s not the first one that stinking sniper’s nailed. Somebody ought to give the whoreson what he deserves.” The Algarvian slashed a forefinger across his throat to show what he meant.
“Where are our snipers, the lazy buggers?” Trasone grumbled as he and Sergeant Panfilo made their way toward the front once more.
“We’ve got a good one in that Colonel Casmiro,” Panfilo answered. “He’s sent dozens of Swemmel’s men down to the powers below. They say he learned his business hunting big game in Siaulia.”
“Maybe so,” Trasone said, “but the tigers and elephants and what-have-you don’t blaze back. It’d be a lot easier if the Unkerlanters didn’t.”
They were both crawling by the time they got to the place where Spinello was blazed. Trasone wasn’t so cold as he had been the year before. This time, warm clothes had got to the men before snow started falling. He wished that had happened the year before. He and Panfilo also wore white smocks not much different from those King Swemmel’s men had.
That evening, a couple of squads of Unkerlanters sneaked out of their pocket and prowled among the Algarvians, doing all the damage they could till they were hunted down and killed. When the wan sun of fading autumn rose in the northwest, Trasone was running on wine and fury, for he hadn’t had any sleep.
He was, then, the wrong man to greet the dapper officer who came up to the front with a fancy stick that had a spyglass screwed to the top of it. “Is this where we’ve had trouble with snipers?” the fellow demanded.
“What if it is?” Trasone growled. Belatedly—very belatedly—he added, “Sir?”
“I am Colonel the Count Casmiro,” the officer replied in a snooty accent that said he’d been born and raised in Trapani, no matter where he’d hunted big game. “You will have heard of me.” He struck a pose.
Trasone, worn and filthy and burning inside, was in no mood to back down from anybody. “Blaze the bastard who bagged my battalion commander and I’ll have heard of you. Till then, you can go jump off the fornicating cliffs into the fornicating Wolter for all I care.”
Casmiro’s nose
was almost as beaky as King Mezentio’s. He looked at Trasone down it. “Curb your tongue,” he said. “I can have you punished.”
“How?” Trasone threw back his head and laughed in Casmiro’s face. “What can you do to me that’s worse than this?”
The hulking trooper waited to see if Colonel Casmiro had an answer for him. The Algarvian noble pushed past him toward the front, muttering, “I will rid the world of that Unkerlanter for good and all.”
“He doesn’t lack for confidence,” Sergeant Panfilo observed when Trasone recounted the conversation to him. The sergeant laughed. “Why should he? He’s an Algarvian, after all.”
“He’s an officer, too,” Trasone said darkly.
Casmiro prowled the forwardmost trenches and foxholes all that day, flitting from one pile of ruined brickwork to the next as if he were a ghost. He did know something—quite a bit—about moving without drawing notice. At some point that afternoon, Trasone wrapped himself in his blanket and went to sleep. When he woke, night had fallen—and Colonel Casmiro was nowhere to be found.
A pot full of pillaged buckwheat groats and what was probably dog meat interested Trasone more, anyhow. Only after he’d filled his belly did he bother asking, “Where’d that know-it-all sniper get to?”
“He crawled out toward the Unkerlanters,” somebody answered.
“Where’d he go?” Trasone asked.
No one knew. A soldier said, “You don’t want to stick your head up to find out, you know what I mean? Not when Swemmel’s stinking whoresons’ll drill you a new ear hole first chance they get.”
“That’s the truth—no doubt about it.” Trasone felt better for some food in him. The Unkerlanters weren’t tossing very many eggs. After their raid the night before, they didn’t try another one. Nobody ordered the Algarvians forward in a night attack. Trasone cleaned his mess tin and went back to sleep. No one bothered him till dawn. That left him only about a year behind.
When he woke, he yawned and stretched and made his slow, careful way up to the front. He didn’t think it was light enough for Swemmel’s soldiers to have an easy time spying him and blazing him, but he didn’t want to find out he was wrong, either. “Anything going on?” he asked when he reached the battered trenches nearest the enemy.
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