Rulers of the Darkness

"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.