Through the Darkness

Thoughts of what he didn’t intend to miss made him extra careful to dodge patrolling Jelgavan constables. He had no trouble finding the house Kugu had named; its whitewashed front made it seem to glow in the dark. No light showed in either of the dormers. Talsu knocked. Three. Pause. One. Pause. Two.

The door opened. Starlight gleamed off the lenses of Kugu’s spectacles. He carried no lamp, nor even a candle. “Good,” he said. “You are punctual. Come with me.” He turned and started into the pitch-black interior of the house. Over his shoulder, he added, “Close the door behind you. We don’t want to let anyone know this building is in use.”

Talsu obeyed. As he shut the door, he felt rather than hearing someone moving toward him. He started to whirl, but something smacked into the side of his head. He saw a brief burst of light, though there was no true light to see. Then darkness more profound than any in the dark, dark house washed over him and swept him away.

When he woke, pain and nausea filled him. He needed a while to realize not all the rattling and shaking were inside his battered head; he lay in a wagon clattering along over cobbles. He tried to sit, and discovered his hands and feet were tied.

Someone slipped the hood off a lantern. That little beam pierced him worse than the fiercest sun after the nastiest hangover he’d ever had. “Kugu?” he croaked.

Laughter answered him. The fellow holding the lantern said, “No, the silversmith is trolling for more foolish fire-eaters. You deal with us now.” He spoke Jelgavan with an Algarvian accent. Partly from the anguish of the betrayal that implied, partly from physical misery, Talsu heaved up his guts. His Algarvian captor let him lie in it.

As the reindeer-drawn sleighs carried Pekka and her comrades through a stretch of southeastern Kuusamo where no ley lines ran, she began to grasp how little of her own homeland she’d seen. Sitting beside her in the sleigh, both of them bundled beneath thick fur robes, Fernao might have magicked that thought right out of her head. In classical Kaunian, he said, “This might almost be southern Unkerlant, or even the land of the Ice People.”

“I do not know those places,” she answered, also in Kaunian. “And until now, I did not know the district of Naantali, either.” She stuck a mittened hand out from under the furs for a moment to wave.

“On a map, this is nothing but a blank spot,” Fernao said.

“Of course,” Pekka said. “That is why we are here, after all... wherever exactly here might be.”

One stretch of low, rolling, snow-covered hills looked much like another. Here, not even the forests of pine and spruce and larch and fir that clothed the hills around Kajaani could survive. She shook her head. No, that wasn’t quite true, as she’d seen at a recent stop. But the trees on these hills weren’t trees at all, but bushes, stunted things the eternal cold and wind would not suffer to grow above the height of a man.

“Does anyone actually live here?” Fernao asked. As Pekka’s had, his wave encompassed the whole Naantali district.

“If you mean, are there towns here, or even villages, the answer is no,” Pekka told him. “If you mean, do some of our nomads drive their herds through this country every now and again--well, of course they do.”

Beneath the fox-fur hat that was close to the coppery shade of his own hair, Fernao’s narrow eyes--sure proof of Kuusaman blood--narrowed further. “They had better not, not while we are here,” he said.

“They will not,” Pekka said reassuringly. “We have soldiers on snowshoes and skids patrolling a perimeter wider than any we could possibly need for this experiment.” She suspected some nomads could slip past patrolling soldiers even if the troopers went arm in arm, but didn’t mention that to Fernao.

His thoughts, this time, glided along a different ley line: “A perimeter wider than any we could need for this experiment unless things go badly wrong.”

“If they go that badly wrong,” Pekka answered, “none of us will be in any condition to worry about it.”

“A point,” Fernao admitted. “A distinct point.” He started to say something else, then pointed ahead instead. “Is that where we are going?”

“I think so,” Pekka said. “So far as I know, it is the only real building in this whole district.”

“Was it once a hunting lodge?” Fernao asked.

“No. I do not think there is anything to hunt in these parts--there has not been since we cleaned out the last of the wolves hundreds of years ago,” Pekka answered. “You have Master Siuntio to thank for the building. He went to the Seven Princes and told them we might need a headquarters in some isolated place for our experiments. Here is a headquarters in an isolated place.”

“Isolated is hardly the word,” the Lagoan mage said. “Desolate might come closer.”