Through the Darkness

“That’s because you don’t have to listen to it--except when you’re up in my bedchamber, that is,” Krasta said. “When you’re over in the west wing, you probably don’t even know when it’s pitching a fit.”

Instead of answering that, Lurcanio made a steeple of his fingertips. “If you brother the marquis were still alive, do you think he would have done his best to reach you and let you know his situation?”

“Skarnu?” Krasta raised an eyebrow. She didn’t think of her brother much these days--what point, when he hadn’t come home from Valmiera’s debacle? “Aye, I think so. I’m sure of it, in fact.”

Lurcanio eyed her, not as a man eyes a woman but more like a cat eyeing a mouse. She glared at him; she didn’t care for that. More often than not, he ignored her glares. This time, he looked away. “It could be,” he said at last. “The investigators in those parts do not know everything there is to know. They’ve proved that often enough--too often, in fact.”

“What are you talking about?” Krasta asked crossly.

“Nothing,” Lurcanio answered with another fine Algarvian shrug. “It might have been something, but it turns out to be nothing.” He sipped the golden wine he’d ordered, then nodded solemn approval.

“I’ll tell you what,” Krasta said. “If I ever get a letter from my brother--or from anyone else in this Pavilosta-in-the-wilderness place--you’ll be the first to know about it.”

“Oh, I expect I will, my dear--you said so yourself,” the Algarvian colonel answered with a laugh. Krasta took offense at its tone. They might have squabbled some more, but the waiter chose that moment to bring their suppers on a tray. Not even Krasta felt like quarreling when faced with that lovely food. And Lurcanio, having tasted his chicken, said, “Aye, simplicity is best.” He beamed at Krasta. “You prove that every day, my dear.” She smiled back, taking it for a compliment.

Pekka sat in her Kajaani City College office staring up at the ceiling, staring up through the ceiling. After a long stretch where the theoretical sorcerer scarcely moved, she bent to the paper in front of her and scribbled two quick lines and then, after a moment, another. A smile chased the abstracted expression she had worn from her broad, high-cheekboned face.

This is real sorcery, she thought. The other part, the part that goes on in the laboratory, that hardly matters. Without this, laboratory experiments would be nothing but guesswork.

Plenty of mages would have disagreed with her. That bothered her not at all. Her husband was one of those mages. That bothered her only a little. Leino was good at what he did. And I, by the powers above, am good at what I do, too, Pekka thought.

Through her open window, she heard a mason’s trowel scraping across mortar as he set bricks in place to repair a wall damaged in a laboratory accident. That was all most people knew about what had happened here a few weeks before. Pekka devoutly hoped it was all the Algarvians knew about what had happened here. She, though, she knew better.

After looking up at the ceiling a while longer, she wrote another line and slowly nodded. One step at a time, she and Siuntio and Ilmarinen were learning more about the energy that lay at the heart of the relationship between the laws of contagion and similarity. The hole in the wall the mason was repairing was one of the lessons the master mages hadn’t learned quite so well as they thought they had.

“If we figure out how to release the energy where and when we need it, we can shake the world,” Pekka murmured.

Sometimes, thinking about what they might do terrified her and made her wish they’d never started down this ley line. But whenever she thought about what Mezentio’s wizards had done first against Unkerlant and then to Yliharma, the capital of her beloved Kuusamo, she hardened her heart. The Algarvians hadn’t needed the new sorcery to shake the world. Old-fashioned sorcery on a large and bloodthirsty scale had been plenty for that.

We won’t slaughter people to get what we want, Pekka thought. We won’t, no matter what. I would sooner see Kuusamo plunge into the Bothnian Ocean. And with this new sorcery, we won’t have to.

Kuusamo wouldn’t have to, if Pekka and her colleagues could gain the understanding they needed. If they didn’t, the land of the Seven Princes was liable to plunge into the sea. Pekka stared down at her latest sheet of calculations. If she couldn’t come up with answers fast enough ... She’d never imagined that sort of pressure.

When someone knocked on the office door, she jumped in surprise. It was still light outside, but it would stay light outside the whole day through, or almost. Kajaani lay so far south, it made the most of summer.