Through the Darkness

It wasn’t all the same to Cornelu. If anything happened to the leviathan, he’d be stuck in southern Unkerlant for the rest of his days. Comparing exile in Setubal to exile in Rysum reminded him of the difference between bad and worse. “Wait!” he exclaimed. “If you let me, I’ll go down there and get it for you myself.”

“You should have brought it up with you,” the officer said grumpily.

“You might have thought it was an egg and blazed me,” Cornelu said. “Now will you trust me to do what needs doing?”

Every line of the Unkerlanter’s body proclaimed that trusting a foreigner-- especially a foreigner who spoke Algarvian and looked like an Algarvian--was the last thing he wanted to do. But, his heavy features clotted with suspicion, he gestured toward the rope ladder and said, “All right, go on--do this. But do it with great care, or I am not liable for what will happen to you next.”

Moving slowly and carefully, Cornelu climbed down the rope ladder. His leviathan swam toward him as he dropped into the cold water. He took the small pack attached to the leviathan’s harness. It was small, aye, but it was heavy; Cornelu had to swim hard to get back to the ladder with it strapped to his back. Climbing up with the added weight wasn’t any fun, either, but he managed.

He set the oiled-leather pack on the pier. “Move away from it!” the Unkerlanter officer said sharply. Cornelu obeyed. The Unkerlanter spoke in his own language again. One of the soldiers came up and put the pack on his own broad back while the rest covered him. He walked up the pier and onto dry land.

Once the soldier got off the weathered planks, the officer relaxed a little. He even unbent so far as to ask, “Do you need food for your voyage east?” When Cornelu nodded, the officer barked orders. Another soldier ran off and returned with smoked fish and hard sausage--the sort of fare that wouldn’t suffer much from salt water.

“My thanks,” Cornelu said, though he already had enough to do well unless the leviathan wandered very badly while he slept. He had fresh water and to spare. Waving in the direction the Unkerlanter with the pack had gone, he asked the officer, “Do you know what’s supposed to be in there?”

“Of course not,” the fellow replied. “It is not for me to know such things. It is not for the likes of you to know them, either.” The words weren’t too bad, not coming from a military man. The way he said them ... All at once, Cornelu felt something he’d never imagined he would: a small bit of sympathy for the Algarvians fighting Unkerlant.

Fifteen

For the first time since he’d been injured, Fernao forgot the pain of his hurts without distillates of the poppy to help him do it. Work, exciting work, proved an anodyne as effective as drugs. Ever since Grandmaster Pinhiero gave him that first summary of what the Kuusaman mages had done, he’d burned to take part in their experimental program. And now, at last, here he was in Yliharma. Broken leg? Healing arm? He didn’t much care.

Courteously, Siuntio and Ilmarinen and Pekka kept speaking mostly classical Kaunian among themselves as they set up their rows of rats in cages. Fernao wished he understood Kuusaman, to catch what they said in asides in their language. Like a lot of Lagoans, he hadn’t taken his neighbors to the west seriously enough.

He also quickly discovered he hadn’t taken Pekka seriously enough. Siuntio and Ilmarinen? Being in the same sorcerous laboratory as the two of them was an honor in itself. But he didn’t take long to notice that they both deferred--Siuntio graciously, Ilmarinen with bluster masking a peculiar, mocking sort of pride--to the younger theoretical sorcerer.

She said, “In this experiment, we shall align the cages of the related rats in parallel. In the next--”

“Assuming we live to make the next,” Ilmarinen put in.

“Aye.” Pekka nodded. “Assuming. Now, as I was saying, in the next experiment we shall align the cages of the related rats in the reverse order, to see if reversing them will strengthen the spell by emphasizing the inverse nature of the relationship between the Two Laws.”

Ilmarinen preened; he’d discovered that the relationship between the laws of similarity and contagion was inverse, not direct. But he never would have had the insight without the data from Pekka’s seminal--literally, since it had involved acorns--experiment. And Pekka wasn’t bad at coming up with startling insights herself. She hadn’t done a bad job of quashing Ilmarinen there, either.

Fernao said, “I never would have thought of altering the positions of the cages.”

Pekka shrugged. “That is what lies at the heart of experimenting: changing every variable you can imagine. Since we are so ignorant here, we need to explore as wide a range of possibilities as we can.”

“I never would have reckoned that a variable,” Fernao answered. “It would not have occurred to me.”

“It did not occur to me, either,” Siuntio said, “and I have some small experience in the game we are playing.”