Unkerlanter egg-tossers kept pounding away at the Algarvian positions to the south and now to the southeast; by the sound of the fighting, King Swemmel’s men had pushed the Algarvians back. That worried Trasone. But Sergeant Panfilo heard the same thing and grinned from ear to ear. “Those whoresons’ll be so busy looking straight ahead of’em, they won’t even think about peering sideways till it’s too late.”
Trasone thought about that. “Here’s hoping you’re right, Sergeant.”
By the affronted pose he struck, Panfilo might have been standing on the street of some Algarvian town rather than trotting across a wheatfield that was coming up rank with weeds. “Of course I’m right. Have you ever heard me wrong?”
“Only when you talk,” Trasone assured him. Panfilo’s glare deserved to go up on the stage. After a moment, though, the sergeant chuckled and got going again.
And Panfilo did turn out to be right. Half an hour later, the crews on the backs of the behemoths started lobbing eggs at swarthy soldiers in rock-gray. “Mezentio!” Major Spinello shouted, and all the troops echoed him: “Mezentio!”
The Unkerlanters had been moving forward against the Algarvians to the east of them. When doing what they were ordered to do, whether that was making an attack or defending a position, they were among the stubbornest warriors in the world; along with so many other Algarvian soldiers, Trasone had found that out the hard way. When taken by surprise . . .
Taken by surprise, the Unkerlanters broke and fled in wild disorder. Some of them threw away their sticks so they could run faster. To complete their demoralization, a squadron of Algarvian dragons swooped out of the sky to drop eggs on some of them, flame down others, and start fires even in the green, damp fields.
After that, some of the Unkerlanters stopped running and threw up their hands in surrender. The Algarvians blazed down a few of them in the heat of the moment, but only a few. Most got relieved of whatever they had worth stealing and sent up in the direction of Aspang.
“Keep moving!” Major Spinello shouted, not just to his own troopers but also to the behemoths’ crews and to anyone else who would listen. “If we just keep moving, by the powers above, maybe we can get ‘em all in a sack, cut ‘em off from their pals, and pound ‘em to pieces. How does that sound?”
“Sounds good to me,” Trasone said, more to himself than to anyone else. He wondered how many other Algarvian officers were shouting the same thing on every stretch of this counterattack. Ruthless speed and drive had taken Algarve deep into Unkerlant. Now the Algarvians could use them again--and the Unkerlanters, Trasone vowed, were going to be sorry.
He also wondered what the Unkerlanter officers were shouting right now. The ones whose orders mattered, the ones with the higher ranks, wouldn’t even know things had gone wrong yet. The Unkerlanters were too cheap or too lazy or too ignorant to give their soldiers as many crystals as they needed. That had cost them before. He hoped it would cost them again.
Because Swemmel’s men didn’t have a lot of crystals, they made elaborate plans ahead of time. Junior officers who changed plans without orders got into trouble. Here, that meant the Unkerlanters kept trying to go east even after the Algarvian counterattack against their northern flank. It also meant the counterattack got a lot farther than it would have otherwise. Not until midaftemoon did Swemmel’s soldiers realize the Algarvians had thrown a lot of men into the fight and really needed to be stopped.
By then, it was too late. Behemoths crushed the first few Unkerlanter regiments that turned from east to north. The Unkerlanters’ strokes came in one after another instead of all at once, which made them easier to break up. The enemy even flung unicorn cavalry into the fight.
Trasone enjoyed blazing down cavalrymen. He enjoyed it even more when they rode unicorns than when they were on horseback. For centuries, unicorns with iron-shod horns had been the dreadful queens of the battlefield, terrorizing footsoldiers with their unstoppable charges. Memories of them lingered in soldiers’ minds to this day, even if sticks had made cavalry charges more dangerous to riders than to the men they attacked.
These days, behemoths ruled the field. They were ugly but strong enough to carry not just soldiers but also egg-tossers and armor. The eggs they flung at the charging unicorns knocked down the splendid, beautiful beasts, sometimes three and four at a time. Wounded unicorns screamed like women in torment. Wounded riders screamed, too. Trasone blazed them once they were off their unicorns with as much relish as while they still rode.
The Unkerlanters were brave. Trasone had seen that ever since the fighting started. Here and now, it did them little good. A scratch force of cavalry couldn’t hope to stop superior numbers of footsoldiers supported by behemoths. King Swemmel’s men fell back in confusion. Trasone slogged after them. He and his fellow Algarvians were going forward again. All was right with the world.
Pekka went down on one knee, first to Siuntio, then to Ilmarinen, as if they were two of the Seven Princes of Kuusamo. Ilmarinen’s chuckle and the leer that went with it said he knew the ancient significance of that particular gesture of obeisance from a woman to a man. Siuntio surely knew it, too, but was too much a gentleman to show he knew.
And Pekka, by this time, was used to ignoring Ilmarinen at need. “Thank you both, from the bottom of my heart,” she said. “Without you, I don’t think I could have persuaded the illustrious Professor Heikki”--she laced the words with as much sardonic venom as she could; Heikki was a nobody even in veterinary sorcery--”to release the funds to go on with the experiment.”
“Always a pleasure to make a fool look foolish,” Ilmarinen said, rolling his eyes. “Oh, and she is, too.”
Siuntio said, “My dear, I only wish our intervention had been unnecessary.
Were Prince Joroinen among the living, you would have had everything you needed in this laboratory here at the crook of a finger.”
“Aye,” Ilmarinen said. “You ask me, it’s amazing you could get any work done at all in this miserable little hole of a laboratory.”
Before she’d seen the elegant facilities at the university up in Yliharma, Pekka would have bristled at that. Till then, she hadn’t thought Kajaani City College was a bad place to do research. She knew better now, even if the Algarvian attack that had killed Joroinen had also kept her from performing her long-planned experiment.
“We do most of our work inside our heads and can do it anywhere,” Siuntio said with a chuckle: “the advantage of theory over practice. We only need the laboratory to see that we’ve done our sums correctly.”
“Or, more often, that we’ve done ‘em wrong,” Ilmarinen put in. Siuntio chuckled again, this time on a note of wry agreement.
Pekka was too nervous to chuckle. Like any theoretical sorcerer, she knew her limits in the laboratory, and knew she was going to have to transcend them. “Let’s see what happens when we use the divergent series,” she said, her voice harsh. Bowing to her senior colleagues, she went on, “You both know what I’m going to do--and you both know what you’ll have to do if things go wrong.”
“We do,” Siuntio said firmly.
“Oh, aye, indeed we do.” Ilmarinen nodded. “The only thing we don’t know is whether we’ll be able to do it before things get too far out of control for anybody to do anything.” His smile showed stained, snaggly teeth. “Of course, like I said, we do the experiment to find out what else we’ve done wrong.”
“That isn’t the only reason,” Siuntio said with a touch of reproof.
Before the two distinguished old men could start snapping and barking again, Pekka repeated, “Let’s see what happens. Take your places, if you please. And no more talking unless it’s life or death. If you distract me, that’s just what it’s liable to be.”
She wished Leino were down here with her instead of working on his own projects somewhere else in this rambling, sprawling building. Her husband was all business when he went into the laboratory. But, being all business, he cared little for theory, and theory was w
hat counted here. One more thing to worry about: if the theory was wrong and the experiment went disastrously awry, she might take him with her in her own failure.
If she did, though, she’d never know it.
Looking from Siuntio to Ilmarinen, she asked, “Are you ready?” It was an oddly formal question: she knew they were, but until they acknowledged as much, she would do nothing. Siuntio’s response was also formal; he dipped his head, a gesture halfway between a nod and a bow. Ilmarinen simply nodded, but his expression held no mockery now. He was as alive with curiosity as either of his colleagues.
Pekka went to the cage of one of the rats she’d selected. She carried the cage over to one of the white tables in the laboratory. After she stepped away, Siuntio came up and, peering through his spectacles, read the rat’s name and identification number. Pekka solemnly repeated them and wrote them down, then pulled another cage off the shelf. She carried this one to an identical table and set it there. Now Ilmarinen stepped forward to read the beast’s name and number.
Again Pekka repeated them and set them in her journal. She said, “For the record, be it noted that the specimens are grandfather and grandson.” She wrote that down, too.
Siuntio said, “Be it also noted that this experiment, unlike others we have attempted before, uses a spell with divergent elements to explore the inverse relationship between the laws of similarity and contagion.” Pekka also set that down in the journal.
Ilmarinen said, “Be it further noted that we don’t know what in blazes we’re doing, that we’re liable to find out the hard way, and that, if we do, they won’t find enough pieces of us to put on the pyre, let alone the precious experimental diary Mistress Pekka is keeping there.”
“And be it noted that I’m not writing a word of that,” Pekka said. Ilmarinen blazed her an impudent grin. She felt like blazing him, too, with the heaviest stick she could find.
“Enough,” Siuntio said. Sometimes--not always--he was able to abash Ilmarinen, not the least of his sorcerous abilities. The other senior theoretical sorcerer quieted down now, even if Pekka doubted he was abashed.
“I begin,” Pekka said. Then she spoke the ritual words any Kuusaman mage used before commencing a spell. They helped calm her. Kuusamo would go on even if she didn’t, just as it had gone on for the millennia before she was born. Reminding herself helped take the edge off her nerves.
She started to incant, her voice rising and falling, speeding and slowing, in the intricate rhythms of the spell she and her fellow theoreticians had crafted. It wasn’t the same version of the spell as she had begun to use in Yliharma when the Algarvians struck. Since then, she and Ilmarinen and Siuntio had gone over it line by line, pruning here, strengthening there, doing their best to see that no error remained in either the words of the spell or the passes she made while chanting.
Spring in Kajaani was none too warm, but sweat sprang out on Pekka’s face. She could feel the energies she was trying to summon and control. They were strong, strong. Every calculation had said they would be, but the distance between knowing and understanding had never felt greater.
“Powers above, aid us.” Siuntio’s voice was soft but very clear. He sensed it, too, then. Ilmarinen muttered something. Pekka didn’t think it was anything like a prayer.
Even the rats started scurrying around in their cages. They worked at the doors with clever paws: clever, but not clever enough. The older one squeaked in fright. The younger one burrowed down into the straw at the bottom of his cage and tried to hide.
Pekka didn’t blame him. She wanted to hide, too. The conjuration she’d made before, the one that had started her down this ley line, had been nothing like this. She wondered if some mage in the Kaunian Empire, or during the long, confused time after its fall, had tried a conjuration like this. If so, he hadn’t lived through it--which the ancients would no doubt have termed summoning up a demon too strong to control. That old-fashioned terminology had always made Pekka smile . . . till now. What went through her mind now was, I must be mad even for attempting this. But she shook her head. The world around her had gone mad. She hadn’t. She hoped she hadn’t, anyhow.
She kept on with the spell. She had, by now, gone much too far into it to back out without consequences almost as bad as the ones she was trying to create--and with none of the safeguards her two colleagues could (she hoped) provide if everything went according to plan.
Don’t do anything foolish. She always told herself that when she went to work magic instead of just working on it. She knew her limits as a practical mage. Because she knew them, and because she knew she was so close to them, she was doubly careful. She could afford a mistake no more than she could afford to try to abandon the conjuration.
“Ahh,” Ilmarinen murmured. For a moment, Pekka, intent on spell and passes, didn’t understand what had pulled that low-voiced exclamation from him. Then she too saw the thin, pale line of light running between the cages that held the two rats. She didn’t smile--she was too busy to smile--but inside she exulted. Theory had predicted that discharge of energies, and theory, so far, was proved right.
As theory had also predicted, the line of light grew brighter with startling speed. Pekka had to squint through narrowed eyes to tolerate the glare. One of the rats--she never knew which one--squeaked in alarm.
If the conjuration didn’t end soon, that light itself might prove enough to wreck the laboratory. Now Pekka worked with her eyes squeezed shut as tight as she could force them, but the brilliance swelled and swelled. She couldn’t turn away, not unless she wanted to turn straight toward ruin. She smelled thunderstorms, as she might have if the beam from a stick passed close to her head. She wished the forces she was challenging were as trivial as that.
For a terrifying instant, she felt heat, heat that made the inside of a furnace seem like the land of the Ice People. The thunderclap that followed almost knocked her off her feet. All the windows in the laboratory broke, spraying shards of glass out onto the lawns.
Silence. Stillness. I’m alive, Pekka thought. I hope the glass didn’t hurt anyone. And then, Professor Heikki will be angry at me for putting all those windows on the department’s budget. The absurdity of that last thought made her snicker, but didn’t make it any less likely to be true.
The odors of growing grass and of flowers bursting into bloom wafted into the laboratory chamber through the newly unglazed windows. Along with them, Pekka’s nose caught a harsh reek of corruption. One way or another, the experiment had come to completion.
“Let’s see what we’ve got,” Ilmarinen said, echoing her thoughts.
Pekka went to the cage that had housed the older rat. He was still there--after a fashion. She nodded at seeing his moldering remains. Then she walked over to the other cage, the one that held--or rather, had held--his grandson. But for straw and a few seeds, it was empty now.
“Congratulations, my dear,” Siuntio said. “This confirms your experiment with the two acorns, confirms and amplifies it. And, thanks to the refined conjuration and the life energy of the rats, it also confirms we can use this means to release sorcerous energy. And more will come.”
Ilmarinen grunted. “Divergent series. They diverged, all right.”
“Aye,” Pekka said, still looking from one cage to another. “The one went on past the end of his span, the other back before the beginning of his time.” She pointed to the empty cage. “Where is he now? Was he ever truly here? Did he ever truly exist? What would it be like, to be pushed out of the continuum so?”
“Do you want to find out?” Ilmarinen asked. “Experimentally, I mean?”
Pekka shuddered. “Powers above, no!”
One more long day like so many long days. Climbing down from the wagon that had brought him back to Gromheort from labor on the roads, Leofsig wondered if he shouldn’t have picked a different line of work after all. He thought about going to the baths to revive himself, but lacked the energy to walk the couple of blocks out of his way he would have needed t
o get there.
“Home,” he muttered. “Food. Sleep.” As far as he was concerned, nothing else mattered tonight. Sleep loomed largest of all. If he hadn’t known the Algarvian constables were liable to take him for a drunk and beat him up, he could easily have lain down on the sidewalk and fallen asleep there.
He put one foot in front of the other till he made it to his own front door. But even as he knocked, he heard a commotion inside. He came to alertness. Commotion was liable to mean danger for him or his whole family. If, for instance, Sidroc had got his memory back . . .
Someone in there heard his knock and lifted the bar off its brackets. Leofsig worked the latch and opened the door. And there stood Sidroc, a large, uncharacteristic grin spread over his heavy features. “I’ve finally gone and done it,” he declared.
“Well, good for you,” Leofsig answered. “Done what, now? If it’s what it sounds like, I hope she was pretty.”
His cousin guffawed, but then shook his head. “No, not that, though I won’t have any trouble getting that, too, whenever I want it. I’ve gone and signed up for Plegmund’s Brigade, that’s what I’ve done.”
“Oh,” Leofsig said. “No wonder everybody in there is screaming his head off, then. You can hear the racket out here. Powers above, you can probably hear the racket over in the count’s castle.”
“Wouldn’t surprise me one bit,” Sidroc said. “I don’t care. I made up my mind, and I’m going to do it. Powers below eat the Unkerlanters, and the cursed Kaunians, too.”
“But fighting for Algarve?” Leofsig shook his head. He was too tired to argue as hard as he would have at another time. “Let me by, would you? I want to get some wine and I want to get some supper.”
Now Sidroc said, “Oh,” and stood aside. As Leofsig went past him, he continued, “Not so much fighting for Algarve as fighting for me. I want to go do this. I want to go see what the war is all about.”
Darkness Descending Page 70
