Biting his lip in anger, Almonte plunged into his explanation. He plainly didn’t know how technical to be; sometimes he talked down to Sabrino, others his words went over the dragonflier’s head. What he aimed to do was clear enough: loose horror and destruction on Swemmel’s men from the air. How he proposed to go about it…
Sabrino didn’t hit him. Afterwards, he wondered why. His stomach lurching as if his dragon had dived without warning, he said, “Get out of my sight this instant, or I’ll blaze you where you stand. This makes killing Kaunians clean by comparison.”
“Desperate times take desperate measures,” the mage declared.
King Mezentio had said the same thing, just before the Algarvian wizards started butchering blonds. Sabrino hadn’t been able to stop him. He was the king. This fellow. . “If you want to try
“I shall return with orders from your superiors,” Almonte snapped.
“Fine,” Sabrino said. “You can go up on my dragon, or on any dragon in this wing, but there’s no guarantee you’ll come down.” Almonte stalked off. He didn’t come back. Sabrino hadn’t thought he would.
In the blockhouse not far from the hostel in the Naantali district, Pekka spun a globe. Globes and maps were more than just pictures of the world; as even the sages of the Kaunian Empire had realized, they were also, in their own way, applications of and invitations to the law of similarity. Pekka looked from one of her colleagues to another. “This is our last great test,” she said, and they all nodded. “If everything goes as it should, we can use this sorcery against any place in the world from here.”
They all nodded: Raahe and Alkio, Piilis-and Fernao. Pekka did her best to treat him the same way she treated the other theoretical sorcerers. He didn’t like that; his eyes, so like a Kuusaman’s, showed as much. She hadn’t been in his bed-she hadn’t wanted to be in anyone’s bed-since learning of Leino’s death.
But for a couple of trips back to Kajaani to see her son and her sister, she’d thrown herself into her sorcery, using work as an anodyne where someone else might have used spirits.
He couldn’t very well complain, not here in front of everyone. What he did say was, “The blockhouse seems empty today, compared to so many of the things we’ve done. No secondary sorcerers here, for instance-just a crystallomancer.”
“We don’t need secondary sorcerers, not for this.” Pekka waved at the bank of cages full of rats and rabbits. “We’ll be sending the energy we release from the beasts so far away, we can safely keep the cages here.”
“Shall we begin?” Raahe asked quietly. She was holding Alkio’s hand. She and her husband were ten or fifteen years older than Pekka, but smiling like a couple of newlyweds.
“Aye,” Pekka said: one harsh word.
“Everyone had better be off the island,” Fernao said. “Anyone who stayed behind would be very sorry.”
“I begin,” Pekka said, and started incanting. After so many runs through spells like this, she cast another one with almost as much confidence and aplomb as if she were a practical mage herself.
She felt the sorcerous energy building inside the blockhouse. The animals in the cages felt it, too. They scurried this way and that. Some tried to get out. Some tried to bury under the shavings and sawdust on the cage floors, to hide from what was happening. That wouldn’t help them, but they didn’t know it wouldn’t.