Darkness Descending

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.