Out of the Darkness

Ilmarinen felt Kuusaman sorcerers in the field try to throw up counterspells against the dark cantrip. He felt them fail, too, and felt the extinguishment of some of them. That was the only word he could find. They didn’t die, at least not right away. They would have been better off if they had.

He essayed no counterspells. He had no idea whether that blackness could be countered, in any conventional sense of the word. He wasn’t much interested in finding out, either. Instead, he hurled a bolt of sorcerous energy of the sort Pekka had discovered straight at the Algarvian attacking his countrymen.

The enemy mage hadn’t expected that. His spell was so vicious, so dreadful, he might have assumed other wizards would attack it, not him. A lot of wizards would have. Ilmarinen didn’t think like most of his professional colleagues. His own sorcerous stroke went home, a lightning bolt piercing the darkness. He felt the Algarvian sorcerer’s outraged astonishment as the fellow died.

For a nasty moment, Ilmarinen feared that wouldn’t be enough. The spell, once unleashed, seemed to want to go on by itself. It did crumble at last, but only slowly and reluctantly. Then the day seemed to brighten, though the sun was touching the western horizon.

Weary, shaken, disgusted as he was, Ilmarinen stormed off to Grand General Nortamo’s headquarters, which he found in a farmhouse on this side of the river from Tricarico. A sentry tried to block his progress. He pushed past as if the man didn’t exist. Nortamo was conferring with several of his officers. Ilmarinen ignored them, too. In a voice that brooked no contradiction, he said, “I need to talk to those captive mages, Nortamo. Now.”

Nortamo looked at him. He was not a fool; he didn’t argue. “Very well, sorcerous sir. You have my authorization. I will give it to you in writing, if you like.”

“Never mind. We haven’t time to waste.” Ilmarinen hurried off to the small captives’ camp where mages were housed and securely guarded by other mages. He had several of the highest-ranking captives brought before him. “How could any of you do … that?” he demanded in classical Kaunian. He spoke fluent Algarvian, but chose not to.

“How?” one of the Algarvians answered in the same tongue. “We are fighting to save our kingdom, that is how. “What would you have us do, roll over and die?” “Sooner than that?” Ilmarinen shuddered. “Aye, by the powers above.”

“No,” the mage said. “No one will enslave us, not while we still live to fight.”

“Doing that, you enslave yourselves,” Ilmarinen answered. “Better to be

ruled by foreigners, don’t you think, than by the powers below?”

“My wife and daughters are in the west,” the Algarvian said. “I sent them word to flee. I do not know whether they could. If they did not, and the Unkerlanters have caught them. . They are raping their way through my kingdom, you know.”

“And what did you do to them?” Ilmarinen returned. “What did you do to the Kaunians in Forthweg?”

“This is a Kaunian war,” the Algarvian mage declared. His comrades solemnly nodded. “Everyone picks on Algarve, and so of course we have to fight back in any way we can.” The other wizards nodded again.

“War is bad enough. You made it worse,” Ilmarinen said. “You made it much worse. Is it any wonder that every other kingdom has joined together to knock you down and make sure you can never do it again? By all you’ve done, you deserve it. You almost killed me when you loosed your attack on Yliharma.”

“Too bad we failed, old man.” The Algarvian didn’t lack for nerve-but then, lacking for nerve had never been an Algarvian characteristic. “So long as we can fight back, we will, any way we can.”

“Then you had better not complain about what happens to you afterwards,” Ilmarinen said. Since he was on the side of the captors and not the captives, he took advantage of having the last word and walked out.

As soon as Bembo could get around with crutches and his splint, the healers in Tricarico threw him out of the sanatorium. He’d expected nothing else; wounded people kept flooding into the place. If the healers didn’t need to keep an eye on him, they did need the cot he was filling.

He had no flat, of course, not any more. But finding a new one wasn’t hard, not when he had silver to spend. And he did; he hadn’t used much of his salary in all the time he’d been in Forthweg, and he’d done pretty well for himself shaking down the locals. He would have landed a place even sooner than he did if he hadn’t insisted on living on the ground floor.

“Everybody wants those flats,” a landlord with none to let told him. “Fast and easy to get to the cellar when the eggs start falling.”

“I can’t go anywhere fast and easy,” Bembo said. Using crutches made it harder for him to gesture while he talked, and an Algarvian who couldn’t talk with his hands was hardly alive. “You think I want to go up and down stairs with these things?”

The landlord shrugged. “Sorry, pal. I can’t give you what I ain’t got.”