Through the Darkness

He shifted in the sleigh, trying to get his healing leg somewhere close to comfortable. The Kuusaman physicians had promised the cast could come off when he got back to Yliharma. He’d stay on crutches for a while after that, though, while the wasted muscles now under plaster got back their strength.

“Is it troubling you?” Pekka asked.

“A little,” he answered. “It is not too bad, though, not really. Not nearly so bad as it was just after it was broken.” The potions he’d swallowed left his memories of those days blurry, but not blurry enough.

“I am glad you are healing,” Pekka told him.

“So am I, now that you mention it,” Fernao said, which made her laugh. He was also glad the two of them traveled in the same sleigh. Ilmarinen still famed with resentment over his presence, like a volcano warning it might erupt at any time. Siuntio would have been a more congenial companion, but his intellect intimidated Fernao more than he was willing to admit, even to himself.

He glanced over toward Pekka. He could see hardly anything but her eyes; she had her fur hat pulled down low on her forehead and the fur robe pulled up over her nose. No matter how little he could see of her, though, he knew she was prettier than Siuntio and Ilmarinen put together.

“I wonder what it would be like,” she said, “to live out your days as a nomad in this kind of country.”

Fernao had had his fill of nomads, as of camels, down in the land of the Ice People. “Unpleasant,” he said at once. “For one thing, consider how seldom you would have the chance to bathe.”

Pekka’s nose must have wrinkled; the fur robe stirred a little. “If it is the same to you, I would rather not,” she said.

Before Fernao could mention any other reasons why he didn’t care for the nomad’s life, the sleighs stopped in the middle of a stretch of snow-covered waste not visibly different from the snow-covered waste over which they’d been traveling for the past couple of hours. “This is the place,” the driver said in Kuusaman. Fernao was beginning to understand the language of Lagoas’ eastern neighbors, though he still made a hash of it when he tried speaking.

“Now we shall see what we shall see.” Excitement crackled in Pekka’s voice. “Do we have something here, or have we spent a goodly sum of the Seven Princes’ money for nothing?”

They did not see quite on the instant. The animal handlers set up wooden racks to hold the cages of the beasts that would be involved in this exploration of what lay at the bottom of the way the world worked. As the handlers set the cages on the racks, some of the secondary sorcerers started the spells that would keep the rats and rabbits from freezing to death before the main magecraft began.

“Over this way,” called the Kuusaman who’d driven Siuntio and Ilmarinen out here. Fernao made his way through the snow, planting his crutches and his broken leg with great care. Pekka paced along beside him. He didn’t know whether she could save him if he started to slip, but she plainly intended to try.

To his relief, she didn’t have to. Moving slowly and cautiously, he stayed upright for the quarter of a mile or so till he came to what he first thought to be an upswelling of earth under the snow. But it proved rather more than that: it was a low hut with thick walls of stone. The doorway, which one of the drivers shoveled clean, faced away from the animals.

“This was also readied in advance?” he asked Pekka.

“Of course,” she answered.

The secondary sorcerers not involved in keeping the animals alive also came over to the stone ... blockhouse, Fernao decided was the best name for it. Siuntio said, “They will transmit to the beasts the spell we shape.”

Fernao hadn’t thought about all the consequences of their sorcery. Now he realized he should have. If this spell released as much energy as the Kuusamans thought it would, not being in the immediate neighborhood of that energy release looked like an excellent idea. Only one drawback occurred to him: “I hope they will not introduce any garbling. That could be ... unfortunate.”

“It should not prove a difficulty,” Pekka said. “They are skilled at what they do.”

“And if they do make a mess of things, it’s liable to end up saving their necks--and ours, too,” Ilmarinen put in.

“We are going to succeed,” Pekka said. “We are going to succeed, and we are going to be safe while we are succeeding. And if you think differently, Master Ilmarinen, I am sure the sleigh will take you out of all possible danger.”

“Death is the only thing that will take me out of all possible danger,” Ilmarinen retorted, and stuck out his tongue at Pekka. That was something no one would have seen before a sorcerous experiment in Lagoas. Instead of getting angry--or, at least, instead of letting her anger show--Pekka stuck out her tongue, too, and started to laugh.