Rulers of the Darkness

Ikhshid nodded. "That's how it looks to me, and it'd look that way even if Balastro hadn't said so."

"Can we afford to let them take dragons and behemoths out of Zuwayza to strike this blow?" the foreign minister asked.

"That comes down to two questions," Ikhshid answered. "First, can we stop 'em if they choose to do it? I doubt it. And second, of course- when they strike this blow, will it finally go to the heart?"

"Aye." Hajjaj let out a long, slow sigh. "We have to hope for the best, then." He wondered what the best was, and if, in this cursed war, it even existed.

Eight

Fernao found his Kuusaman getting better day by day. More Kuusaman mages had come to the hostel: not just Piilis and Raahe and Alkio, all of whom spoke excellent classical Kaunian, but several others who didn't know so much. Those less fluent newcomers weren't directly involved in the experiments the theoretical sorcerers were making, but were important even so. Their duty was to repel, or at least to weaken, any new assaults Algarvian mages might launch against the experiments.

"Can you do it?" Fernao asked one of them, a woman named Vihti. "Much force. Many killings."

"We can try," Vihti answered. "We can fight hard. They are not close. Distance-" She used a word Fernao didn't know.

"Distance does what?" he asked.

"At-ten-u-ates," Vihti repeated, as to a child, and then used a synonym: "Weakens. If you had been working in the north of Kuusamo and not down here in the south, the last attack would have done you all in."

"You need not sound so happy," Fernao said.

"I am not happy," Vihti said. "I am telling you what is." That was something Kuusamans were in the habit of doing. Vihti went off muttering under her breath, probably about flighty, overimaginative Lagoans.

When Fernao went out to the blockhouse with Pekka and Ilmarinen and the three newly arrived theoretical sorcerers, he didn't think he was the overimaginative one. The Kuusamans had done things that no one else would have dreamt of for years.

The blockhouse was new, and stronger than the one the Algarvians had wrecked. But a few of the timbers were charred ones salvaged from the old blockhouse. Pointing to them, Pekka spoke in classical Kaunian: "They help remind us why we continue our work."

Where nothing else lately seemed to have, that got Ilmarinen's notice. "Aye," he growled with something of the fire he'd had before the Algarvian attack. "Every one of those boards has Siuntio's blood on it."

"We shall have our revenge." Piilis was a careful man who spoke careful Kaunian. "That is what Siuntio would have wanted."

Pekka shook her head. "I doubt it. He saw what needed doing against Algarve, but vengeance was never any great part of his style." Her eyes flashed. "I do not care. Regardless of whether he would have wanted me to take revenge, I want it for my own sake. I do not think he would have approved. Again, I do not care."

"Aye." Hot eagerness filled Fernao's voice. He believed in vengeance, too, probably more so than any of the Kuusamans. Elaborate revenge was part of the Algarvic tradition Lagoas shared with Sibiu and Algarve herself. Kuusamans were generally calmer and more restrained. Siuntio had been. But calm and restraint, however valuable in peacetime, grew less so after war began.

Fewer secondary sorcerers had accompanied Fernao and his colleagues to the blockhouse this time. With the coming of spring, the experimental animals shouldn't freeze unless magecraft kept them warm. But the secondary sorcerers still did have to transfer the spell Pekka would recite to the racks of cages that held the rats and rabbits.

"Remember, we are trying something new this time," Pekka said. "If all goes as planned, most of the sorcerous energy we unleash today will strike at a point well removed from the animals. We have to learn to do this if we are to turn our magecraft into a proper weapon. The Algarvians can do it with their murderous magic. We must be able to match them."

"And if things don't go quite right, we'll bring it down on our own heads, and that will put paid to this project once for all," Ilmarinen said.

Oddly, his gloom didn't bother Fernao so much. The master mage had been making cracks like that for as long as Fernao had been in Kuusamo… and undoubtedly for a lot of decades before that. Getting him back to sounding like his sardonic self was if anything an improvement.

"Are we ready?" Pekka's voice had steel in it, warning that anyone who wasn't ready would face her wrath. She didn't even come up to the top of Fernao's shoulder, but he wouldn't have wanted to have to do that. No one admitted he wasn't ready. Pekka's gaze flicked around the blockhouse. After a sharp, abrupt nod, she quietly recited the ritual sentences with which Kuusamans began any sorcerous operation.