Into the Darkness (10 page)

“We’re going to have company,” the flier answered, and pointed west. He said no more, but hurried away to give his superiors a detailed account of what kind of company and how soon.

Only one kind of company mattered, though: the Kuusamans. Several ley lines converged on Obuda. That was why Gyongyos and Kuusamo kept fighting over the island. The natives’ sorcerers hadn’t discovered ley lines. They sailed by wind and paddle; several fishing boats bobbed in the ocean off the island.

“If we weren’t fighting the Unkerlanters, too, we’d kick Kuusamo hard enough to make the Seven Princes leave us alone,” Istvan said hotly.

Turul shrugged. “If all seven of the Princes ever walked in the same line, they might do the same to us. Nobody’s giving this war everything he had—and a good thing, too, says I.”

Being young and from the back country, Istvan said, “Not bloody likely!”

“I’ll bet the recruiters smiled when they got their hands on you.” Turul smiled, too, but not altogether pleasantly.

Drums started thudding an alarm. Istvan forgot about the cynical dragonkeeper and ran to snatch up his stick and to assemble so an officer could send him to a battle station. He almost collided with several of his squadmates, who were also doing their best to seem seasoned soldiers. None of them had yet seen combat. Istvan was half eager, half terrified.

The Obudans had seen combat, even if they hadn’t taken part in it. They had their own strong opinion on the subject, and showed it by fleeing the town of Sorong. Some ran up toward the top of Mt. Sorong, others just headed off into the woods. A few carried sacks of coarse native cloth stuffed with their belongings; most didn’t bother, and took off with nothing but the robes on their backs.

“Have no fear, fierce warriors of Ekrekek Arpad!” Major Kisfaludy cried. Every tawny strand of his beard seemed to quiver from great emotion. “We have a surprise in store for the Kuusamans, if those little slant-eyed demons ever dare set foot on the soil of this island.” His grin was both fierce and conspiratorial. “They can have no notion of how many dragons we’ve flown into Obuda since we took it back from them.”

In his mind’s eye, Istvan saw dragons dropping eggs around and then on Kuusaman ships that presumed to approach Obuda. He saw some of those ships burning and others fleeing east down the ley lines as fast as they could go. He joined the rest of the squad, the rest of the whole unit, in a rousing cheer.

“And now, down toward the beach,” Major Kisfaludy said. “If any Kuusamans are lucky enough to land on Obuda, we shall drive them back into the sea.”

Along with his comrades, Istvan cheered again. Wings thundered, off in the distance, as dragons hurled themselves and their fliers into the air. Istvan laughed to think of the dreadful surprise the enemy would get when flame and raw energy consumed them. If they were rash enough to set themselves against the will of Arpad the ekrekek, they deserved nothing better, not as far as he was concerned.

He trotted down a path through the woods toward the beach. At the edge of the trees, sheltered among logs and rocks, stood egg-tossers and their crews, also ready to rain fire down on any Kuusamans who reached land. Istvan waved to the crews, then filed into a trench.

After that, he had nothing to do but wait. He watched the dragons wing their way east against targets they could see, but which the bulge of the earth hid from his eyes. And then he watched in some surprise as dragons came out of the east toward those that had flown from Obuda. He scratched his head. Was a flight returning already?

Sergeant Jokai cursed horribly. At last, the curses cooled to coherence:

“The slant-eyes have gone and loaded a ship full of dragons. Life just got uglier, aye, it did.”

Sure enough, while some of the Gyongyosian dragons arrowed down toward whatever Kuusaman ships lay below Istvan’s horizon, others wheeled in a dance of death with the enemy’s fliers. When a couple of the great beasts flew back toward Obuda, neither Istvan nor anyone else on the ground knew whether or not to blaze at them.

One was plainly laboring, doing more gliding than stroking with its left wing. It crashed down on to the sand not twenty feet in front of Istvan, which let him see how badly that wing was burned. The bloodied flier, a Gyongyosian, staggered toward the trench. “We drove ‘em back!” he called, and fell on his face.

A couple of soldiers ran out and scooped him up. Sergeant Jokai cursed again. “We drove ‘em back this time,” he said, “on account of we had a surprise to match their surprise, and because we spotted ‘em early. But flying dragons off a ship! The Kuusaman bastards have gone and complicated the war, curse ‘em to powerless.” Istvan was suddenly just as well pleased not to have received his initiation into combat, at least from the receiving end.

Pekka looked out at the students filing into the auditorium. It was hardly the biggest hall at Kajaani City College, but that did not dismay her. Theoretical sorcery, unlike the more practical applications of the art, was not a ley line to fame or riches. Without theoretical sorcery, though, no one would ever have realized ley lines existed, let alone figured out how to use them.

She set her hands on the lectern, took a deep breath, and began: before anything else, ritual. “Before the Kaunians came, we of Kuusamo were here. Before the Lagoans came, we of Kuusamo were here. After the Kaunians departed, we of Kuusamo were here. We of Kuusamo are here. After the Lagoans depart, we of Kuusamo shall be here.”

Softly, her students repeated the unadorned but proud phrases. A couple of the students
were
of Kaunian blood, from Valmiera or Jelgava; another handful were Lagoans. Their inches and beaky features and yellow and auburn hair set them apart from the Kuusaman majority (though some who served the Seven Princes, especially from the eastern part of the realm, might almost have been Lagoans by looks). Regardless of their homelands, they joined in the ritual. If they refused, they did not attend Pekka’s lectures.

“Mankind has used the energies manifested and released at power points since long before the beginning of recorded history,” she began. Her students scribbled notes. Watching them amused her. Most of them took down everything she said, even when it was something they already knew. For those who advanced in the discipline, that would end. Theoretical sorcery was, after all, about the essential, not the accidental in which it was surrounded.

“Only improvements in both the theoretical underpinnings of sorcery and in sorcerous instrumentation have enabled us to advance beyond what was known in the days of the Kaunian Empire,” Pekka went on. She held up an amulet of amber and lodestone, such as a mage might use at sea. “Please note that these phenomena have gone hand in hand. Improved instruments of magecraft had yielded new data, which, in turn, have forced improvements in theory, making it correspond more closely to observed reality. And new theory has also led to new instruments to exploit and expand upon it.”

She turned and wrote on a large sheet of slate behind her the law of similarity—
similar causes produce similar effects
—and the law of contagion—
objects once in contact continue to influence each other at a distance.
Like her body, her script was small and precise and elegant.

One of the students in the front row muttered discontentedly to her benchmate: “What does she think we are, morons? They knew that much back in the Kaunian Empire.”

Pekka nodded. “Yes, they did know the two laws back in the days of the Empire. Our own ancestors”—like her, the student was of Kuusaman blood—“knew them before the Kaunians crossed the Strait of Valmiera and came to our island. The ancestors of the Gyongyosians discovered them independently. Some of the savages in the distant jungles of equatorial Siaulia and on the island of the Great North Sea know them, too. Even the shaggy Ice People know them, though they may have learned them from us or from the folk of Derlavai.”

The student looked as if she wished she’d never opened her mouth. In her place, Pekka would have wished the same thing. But wishes had no place in theoretical sorcery. Pekka resumed:

“What we have here is qualitative, not quantitative. The laws of similarity and contagion state
that
these effects occur, but not
how
they occur or
to what degree
they occur. That is what we shall be contemplating during the rest of the term.”

She covered the sheet of slate with symbols and numbers a couple of times before the lecture ended, pausing to use an old wool rag to wipe it clean before cluttering it once more. When she dismissed the students, one of them came up to her, bowed, and asked, “Mistress Pekka, could you not have cleansed the slate by magecraft instead of bothering with that rag?”

“A mage with a stronger practical bent than mine would have had an easier time of it, but yes, I could have done that.” Pekka hid most of her amusement; she got this sort of question about every other term. She could see the followup gleaming in the young man’s eyes, and forestalled it: “I use the rag instead of magic because using the rag is easier than any magic I could make. One thing a mage must learn is, that he
can
do something does not necessarily mean he
should
do it.”

He stared at her, his eyes as wide as a Kuusaman’s could be, nothing but incomprehension on his face. “What’s the point of magic, if not doing things?” he asked.

“Knowing what things to do?” Pekka suggested gently. No, the student did not understand; she could see as much. Perhaps he would begin to by the end of the term. Perhaps not, too. He was very young. And, being a man, he was likelier to think of limits as things to be overcome than to be respected.

He went off shaking his head. Pekka permitted herself a small smile. She dealt with a couple of other questions of smaller import, though ones more immediately urgent to the students asking them: matters of text and examinations. And then, as a new group of chattering young men and women began coming into the auditorium for the lecture on crystallography that followed hers, Pekka neatly tucked her notes into a small leather valise and left the hall.

The sun had come out while she was speaking, and puddles from the previous night’s rain sparkled, sometimes dazzlingly. Even in summer, though, the sunlight had a watery quality to it. Kuusamo was a land of mists and fogs and drizzles, a land where the sky went from gray to grayish blue and back again, a land where the rich and brilliant greens of forest and meadow and hillside had to make up for the drabness overhead.

And they did. So everyone in Kuusamo proudly boasted. Pekka was no different from her countrymen in that. But, four or five years before—no, it had to be five, because the war with Gyongyos hadn’t started—she’d taken a holiday on the famous golden beaches of northern Jelgava. Her skin, not far from golden itself, withstood the fierce sun better than the pale hides of the Jelgavans who toasted themselves on the sand. That was one of the memories she’d brought home to Kajaani. Another—and she could still call it up whenever she chose, as if she lay naked on the beach again—was the astonishing color of the sky. Passages of Kaunian poetry that had been obscure suddenly took on new meaning for her.

Here, though, such colors, such heat, were only memories. Kajaani, on the southern coast of Kuusamo, looked out across the Narrow Sea southeast toward the land of the Ice People and straight south toward the endless ice floes at the bottom of the world. Pekka straightened her slim shoulders. She enjoyed remembering Jelgava. She would not have wanted to live there. Kajaani was
home.

That mattered very much to a Kuusaman. Picking her way around the puddles, Pekka really noticed the buildings that more often just formed the backdrop before which she played out her life. Most of them were wooden: Kuusamo was a land of wide forests. Some of the timber was stained, some pale with weathering. Very little was painted, not on the outside; gaudy display was alien to her people. The handful of brick buildings harmonized with the rest. They were brown or yellow-brown or tan—no reds or oranges to jar the eyes.

“No,” she said softly, but with no less pride than that, “we are no branch from the Algarvic stem, nor the Kaunian, either. Let them swagger and preen. We endure.”

She hardly knew when she left the college grounds and went into Kajaani itself. The people on the streets here were a little older, a little more sober looking. The Lagoans and men from the Kaunian countries who leavened the mix were more apt to be sailors than students. Shops showed their wares, but the shopkeepers didn’t rush out, grab her by the arm, and try to drag her inside, as happened in Jelgava. That would have been gaudy display, too.

A public caravan hummed by her, the wind of its passage ruffling the rainwater in the gutters. The two coaches were also of wood, with their roofs overhanging the windows to either side to ward against the weather. In Lagoas or Sibiu, they would have been metal. In Valmiera or Jelgava, they would have been painted to look like marble, whatever they were made of.

Pekka paid a couple of coppers for a news sheet and walked along reading it. She made a clucking noise of dismay when she saw that the Gongs had thrown back the fleet trying to retake Obuda. Admiral Risto was quoted as saying, “They had more dragons up their sleeve than we expected. We’ll regroup and have another go at them sometime later.”

Swemmel of Unkerlant would have had Risto’s head for a failure like that. The Naval Ministry issued a statement over the signature of the Seven Princes expressing full confidence in the admiral. Lopping off heads was not the Kuusaman style. Pekka wondered, just for a moment, whether the war would have gone better if it had been.

In the war on the mainland of Derlavai, Valmiera and Jelgava and Forthweg all claimed smashing victories over the Algarvians. Algarve reported smashing victories over her foes, too. Somebody was lying. Pekka smiled wryly. Maybe everybody was lying.

She walked up into the hills that rose swiftly from the gray, booming sea. Gulls wheeled screeching, high overhead. A jay in a pine sapling screeched, too, on a different note. A bright yellow brimstone butterfly fluttered past. This time, genuine pleasure filled Pekka’s smile. Butterflies had only a brief stretch of summer to be on the wing, down here in Kajaani.