Through the Darkness

The villagers screamed and ran and tried to fight back. Some of them made it back to their homes. They did have sticks, and used them bravely. A beam from a comrade’s weapon caught the girl Istvan had kissed and dropped her dead at his feet. He was lucky his own friends didn’t blaze him down, too.

“No!” he shouted, but nobody on either side--and there were sides now-- paid him any attention. When the villagers started blazing, he threw himself down behind the girl’s corpse and blazed back. Finishing them off didn’t take long, not when Captain Tivadar’s whole company rolled down on them.

Three or four women didn’t get killed right away. The Gyongyosians lined up to have a go at them, ignoring their shrieks. Istvan stayed out of the lines; he found he had no taste for that sport. Captain Tivadar came over to him--public rape was beneath an officer’s dignity. “One village that won’t trouble us,” Tivadar said.

“It wasn’t troubling us anyhow,” Istvan mumbled.

Tivadar only shrugged. “War,” he said, as if that explained everything. Maybe it did.

As she usually did, Pekka bristled when someone knocked on her office door. How was she supposed to guide a caravan of thought down its proper ley line if people kept interrupting her? If this was Professor Heikki, Pekka vowed to put an itching spell on the department head’s drawers.

But it wasn’t Heikki, as Pekka discovered when she opened the door. A Kuusaman soldier stood there, one hand on the stick at his belt, the other holding a sealed envelope. He eyed her. “You are Pekka, the theoretical sorcerer?”

“Aye,” Pekka said. The soldier looked as if he didn’t want to believe her. In some exasperation, she told him, “You can knock on any door you like along this hall and get someone to tell you who I am.”

To her amazement, he actually did. Only after one of her colleagues vouched for her did he give her the envelope, for which he required her to write out a receipt. Then, with a grave salute, he went on his way.

Pekka found herself tempted to throw the envelope in the trash unopened. That appealed to her sense of the perverse: what more fitting fate for something the soldier so obviously judged important? But she shook her head. The trouble was, the soldier was all too likely to be right.

And the envelope, she saw by the design of the value imprint, came from Lagoas. One corner of her mouth turned down. She still wasn’t sure she’d done the right thing in backing Siuntio and agreeing to share some of what they knew with Kuusamo’s island neighbors. Aye, the Lagoans were allies, but they were still Lagoans.

She opened the envelope. She wasn’t surprised to find the letter written in excellent classical Kaunian.The last time I dropped you a line, Mistress Pekka, I did not have to send it by special courier, the Lagoan wrote.

Of course, the last time I dropped you a line, you insisted I had no need to do so. I understand why you said that, but now I know it is not true. I have been astonished at the discoveries you and your colleagues have made, and offer my assistance in any way you might find useful. I am presently recovering from wounds I received on the austral continent, but should be well enough to work before too long. Until then, and until I hear from you, I remain your obedient servant: Fernao, mage of the first rank.

“Fernao,” Pekka murmured, and slowly nodded. Sure enough, she remembered his earlier letter. He’d been a snoop then, and evidently remained one. But now he was a snoop with a right to know.

She set aside her calculations (not without a small, irked grimace: she couldn’t see now where she’d hoped to head before the soldier knocked on the door) and reinked the pen she’d been using on them. I have received your letter, she wrote, and hope your recovery from your wounds is swift and sure. My own husband went into the service of the Seven Princes not long ago, and I worry about him.

Pekka looked at that and frowned again. Was it too personal? She decided to leave it in; the powers above knew it was true. She went on,