Through the Darkness

Without Leino to come knock on her door, she had to pay more attention to leaving for home at the right time. She’d been very late one day when Uto had been even more inventive than usual, and her sister Elimaki, usually the best-natured woman around, had screamed at her when she finally came to get her son. She didn’t want that to happen again.

As she chanted the spells that would secure her calculations in her desk till she came for them in the morning, she wondered if they were as strong as they might be. Oh, she was sure they would foil a burglar looking for whatever he could sell for a little cash, but who was more likely to want to break into her office: that kind of burglar or an Algarvian spy?

Ilmarinen will know if the spells are good enough, she thought. Ilmarinen had a raffish distrust of his fellow man Siuntio couldn’t come close to matching. Siuntio was more brilliant, but Ilmarinen lived in--reveled in--the real world.

The real world hit her in the face when she walked across the Kajaani City College campus to the ley-line caravan stop to wait for a car to take her home. The news-sheet vendor at the stop was shouting word of the Algarvian breakthrough into the outskirts of Sulingen. “Trapani says it’s so, and Cot-tbus doesn’t deny it!” he added, as if that proved everything. Maybe it did; she’d got used to evaluating war claims out of the west by splitting the difference between what the Algarvians and the Unkerlanters said. If the Unkerlanters weren’t saying anything. . . Pekka shook her head. That wasn’t a good sign.

And the grim look on Elimaki’s face when Pekka came to pick up Uto wasn’t a good sign, either. Pekka wanted to throw up her hands. “What now?” she asked, and scowled at her son. “What did you do today?”

“Nothing,” Uto replied, as sweetly as he always did when he’d committed some new enormity.

“He learned a little spell,” Elimaki said. “Powers above only know where children pick these things up, but they do. And he’s your son and Leino’s, so he has talent, too--talent for trouble, that’s what.”

“What did you do? Pekka asked Uto, and then, realizing she wouldn’t get an answer from him, she turned to Elimaki. “What did he do?”

“He animated the dog’s dish, that’s what, so it chased poor Thumper all over the house and spilled table scraps everywhere, that’s what he did,” Elimaki said. Uto looked up at the sky, as if he’d had nothing to do with that dish.

“Oh, no,” Pekka said, doing her best to sound severe and not burst into giggles. Uto found such creative ways to land in trouble. Not many children his age could have made that spell--Pekka was pretty sure she knew which one it was--work so well. Even so ... Even so, he would have to be punished. “Uto, you can’t do that kind of thing at Aunt Elimaki’s house--or at home, either,” Pekka added hastily; leaving loopholes around Uto wasn’t safe. “Your tiny stuffed leviathan is going to spend the night up on the mantel.”

That brought the usual storm of tears from her son. It also brought a new threat: “I’ll make him come back to me so I can sleep! I can! I will!”

“No, you won’t,” Pekka told him. “You will not use magic without permission. Never. You will not. Do you understand me? It can be very dangerous.”

“All right,” Uto said sulkily.

Pekka could see he wasn’t convinced. She didn’t care. She would do whatever she had to do to convince him. Children playing with sorcery were at least as dangerous as children playing with fire. If taking Uto’s toy leviathan away didn’t work, if she had to switch his backside instead, she would. Were Leino here, he surely would have. Pekka took her son’s hand. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s go home.”

Ahead of Trasone, Sulingen burned. It was a great burning, the smoke rising in tall, choking, brown-black clouds. Sulingen was a bigger city than the Algarvian veteran had thought it would be. It sprawled for miles along the northern bank of the Wolter, its districts cut here and there by steep gullies. Day after day, dragons painted in red, green, and white pounded it from the air. Egg-tossers hurled more destruction at it. But, because it was a big city, it was hard to wreck. And the Unkerlanters fought back as if they would fall off the edge of the world if they were forced into the Wolter.

Crouched behind a heap of bricks that had once been somebody’s chimney, Trasone called out to Sergeant Panfilo: “I thought, what with all the behemoths and such we’ve got, we were supposed to go around the cursed Unkerlanters, not through “em.” He didn’t lift up his head when he spoke. Plenty of King Swemmel’s soldiers would have been delighted to put a beam between his eyes if he were so foolish.

Panfilo stayed low, too, in a little hole in the ground for which he’d made a breastwork from the dirt dug out of it. “We did all that. How do you think we got here? Now there’s no more room to go around, so we go forward instead.”