"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 can 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 dining 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.
After a little while, she said, "One of the secondary sorcerers told me you dragged me out of the blockhouse. Thank you."
"I wish I could have carried you." Abrupt fury filled Fernao's voice. "If I could have moved faster, I might have got you out and then gone back in and got Siuntio, too, before the fire spread too badly. If..." He knocked back the brandy. In spite of it, his hand shook as he set down the empty glass.
Pekka said, "Had you been standing closer to him than to me, you would have taken him first, and then you would have tried to come back for me." She reached into her belt pouch and took out a bottle full of the yellow decoction and a spoon. "It is not quite time for my dose yet, but I do not care. I do not wish to think about that." Fernao would have taken more, but he was bigger than she.
The serving woman appeared at his elbow. He hadn't noticed her come up. There were a good many things he wasn't noticing right now. "Will I get you another, sir?" she asked.
"No, thank you," he said, and she went away again.
"How badly are we set back?" Pekka said.
Fernao shrugged. "I think they are still sorting things out. Sooner or later, we shall have answers."
"Answers of a sort," Pekka said. "But we shall never again have Master Siuntio's answers, and there are none better." She sighed, but then her pain-and grief- lined face softened. "The decoction works quickly. I can forget for a little while that my head belongs to me."
"I know about that," Fernao said. "Believe me, I know about that." He also knew he would wish for some of the yellow liquid-or maybe one of the stronger ones- in the morning. He would wish for it, but he wouldn't borrow any from Pekka. After so long taking decoctions of one color or another, he'd had to get over a craving for poppy juice. He didn't want to bring it back to life. He hoped he would remember that when he went from drunk to hung over.
Pekka said, "What will we do without Siuntio? How can we go on without him? He made this field what it is today. Everyone else walks in his footsteps-except Ilmarinen, who walks around them and pisses in them whenever he sees the chance."
Fernao would have laughed at that even sober. Drunk, he thought it the funniest thing he'd ever heard. He laughed and laughed. He laughed so hard, he had to put his head down on the table. That proved a mistake, or at least the end of his evening. He never heard himself starting to snore.
He never knew how he got into his bed, either. Most likely, the servitors carried him up, as they'd carried up Ilmarinen. Fernao couldn't have proved it. For all he could prove, it might as readily have been cockroaches or dragons.
Whoever had done it, he wished they'd thrown him on the rubbish heap instead. His head pounded even worse than he'd thought it would. The wan sunshine of winter in southern Kuusamo seemed as bright as the Zuwayzi desert; he had to squint to see at all. By the taste in his mouth, he'd been sleeping in a latrine trench.
He felt of himself, and made at least one happy discovery. "Powers above be praised, I didn't piss the bed," he said. Then he winced again. His voice might have been a raven's, a very loud raven's, harsh croak.
Holding his head with his free hand, he limped into the commode with one crutch. Along with a water closet, it also boasted a cold-water tap. He splashed water on his face. He cleaned his teeth. After rinsing his mouth, he took a couple of
sips of water. Even that was almost too much for his poor, abused stomach. He thought he'd be sick right there. Somehow, he wasn't.
Groaning-and trying not to groan, because the noise hurt his head-he limped back to bed. He felt better than he had before he got up, which meant he was no longer actively wishing he were dead. He lay there for a while. Quiet and with his eyes closed, he did his best to wait out the hangover.
Again, he didn't notice drifting off. This time, he fell into something close to real sleep, not sodden unconsciousness. He would have slept longer, but someone tapped on his door. The taps weren't very loud-except to his ears. He sat up, and winced. "Who is it?" he asked, and winced again.
"I." Pekka's voice came through the door. "May I come in?"
"I suppose so," Fernao a
nswered.
The door opened. Pekka carried a tray to his bedside. "Here," she said briskly. "Half a raw cabbage, chopped. And a mug of cranberry juice with a slug-a small slug-of spirits mixed in. Eat. Drink. You will be better for it."
"Will I?" Fernao said dubiously. His own countrymen used fruit juice laced with spirits to fight the morning after, but cabbage was a remedy new to him. He didn't much feel like eating or drinking anything, but had to admit himself improved after he did.
Pekka saw as much. "You will do," she said. "Ilmarinen is worse, but he will do, too."
In an odd way, Fernao found himself agreeing with her. He would do. "How are you?" he asked, knowing sudden shame that he'd let her serve him. "You are the one who is truly hurt. This" -he patted his own forehead-"this will be nothing at all in a few hours. But you have real injuries."
"My head hurts," Pekka said matter-of-factly. "I have a little trouble remembering things. I would not want to try to work magic right now. I do not think it is the yellow decoction. I think you are right. I think it is the blow to the head. As with you, time will set it right. With the yellow liquid, it is not too bad."
Turtledove, Harry - Darkness 04 - Rulers Of The Darkness Page 13