Into the Darkness (26 page)

Fury roared in to take its place. Kuusamans were as a rule easygoing, especially when set alongside the proud and touchy folk of the kingdoms of Algarvic stock. But every mage had to keep in mind the difference between the rule and the exception.

Springing to her feet, Pekka dashed to the door and flung it wide. “What are you doing interrupting me?” she screeched, even before it had opened all the way.

Her husband, fortunately, lived up to the Kuusaman reputation for calm. “I’m sorry, dear,” Leino said. His narrow eyes didn’t widen; no surprise showed on his broad, high-cheekboned face. He’d seen Pekka burst like a large egg before. “It is time to head home, though.”

“Oh,” Pekka said in a small voice. The real world returned with a rush. She wouldn’t unify contagion and similarity this afternoon, nor even figure out how to take that one step closer to finding out whether unifying them was even possible. With the real world’s embrace came acute embarrassment. Looking down at her shoes, she mumbled, “I’m sorry I shouted at you.”

“It’s all right.” Leino’s shrug made water drip from the brim of his hat and the hem of his heavy wool rain cape; his office was in a different building from Pekka’s. “If I’d known you were thinking hard, I’d have stood out here a while longer. We’re not in that big a hurry, not that I know of.”

“No, no, no.” Now Pekka turned briskly practical. She was that way most of the time: except when thinking hard, as her husband put it. She pulled on rubber overboots, took her cap from the peg on which it hung, and jammed her own broad-brimmed hat down over her straight black hair. “You’re right—we’d better get back. My sister’s been trying to corral Uto long enough—I’m sure she’d say so.”

“She loves him,” Leino said.

“I love him, too,” Pekka said. “That doesn’t mean he isn’t a handful—or two handfuls, or three. Come on. We can catch the caravan at the edge of the campus. It’ll take us most of the way there.”

“Good enough.” Amusement danced in Leino’s eyes: watching Pekka go in the space of a few breaths from wooly-headed scholar to a planner who might have served on the Kuusaman General Staff never failed to tickle him.

Raindrops pelted down on Pekka as soon as she stepped outside. She hadn’t gone ten paces before her hat and cape were as wet as Leino’s. She ignored the rain in a different way from the one she’d used while off in the realm of theory back in her office. Any Kuusaman who couldn’t ignore rain had had the misfortune of being born in the wrong land.

“How was your day?” she asked, squelching along beside her husband.

“Pretty good, actually,” Leino answered. “I think we’ve made a breakthrough on strengthening behemoth armor against beams from heavy sticks.”

“They’ve had you working on that for a while,” Pekka said. “I haven’t heard you talk about breakthroughs before.”

“This is a whole new idea.” Leino looked around to make sure no one was close enough to overhear before going on, “Ordinary armor’s just iron, of course, or steel. It can reflect a beam if it’s polished enough, or spread the heat around so the beam won’t burn through if it doesn’t stay right in the same spot long enough.”

Pekka nodded. “That’s how people have always done it, sure enough. You’ve found something different?” She cocked her head to one side and looked at her husband with approval, glad she wasn’t the only one in the family straying off the beaten track.

“That’s what we’ve done, all right.” Leino also nodded, enthusiastically. “It turns out that, if you make a sort of sandwich of steel and then a special porcelain and then steel again, you get armor that’s a lot stronger than what we’re using now without weighing any more.”

“You don’t mean a sandwich with three separate layers, do you?” Pekka asked with a small frown. “I can’t think of any kind of porcelain so special that it wouldn’t be easy to break in large, thin sheets.”

“You’re absolutely right. I think that’s why nobody’s taken this approach before,” Leino said. “The trick is sorcerously fusing the porcelain to the steel on either side of it, and doing it so we don’t wreck the temper of the steel in the process.” He grinned at her. “We’ve wrecked a lot of other tempers in the process, I’ll tell you that. But now I think we’re getting the hang of it.”

“That will be good,” Pekka said. “It will be especially good if we get drawn into the madness on the mainland of Derlavai.”

“Aye, though I hope we don’t,” Leino said. “But you’re right again—not much place for behemoths in the island-hopping kind of war we’re fighting against Gyongyos.”

“Oh!” Pekka muttered something worse than
Oh!
under her breath. “There goes the caravan. Now we’ll have to wait a quarter of an hour for the next one.”

“At least we’ll be out of the rain,” Leino said. Every caravan stop in Kajaani—so far as Pekka knew, every stop in Kuusamo—was roofed against rain and sleet and snow. The stops wouldn’t have been worth having if they weren’t.

A news-sheet vendor was taking advantage of the shelter when Pekka and Leino came in to get out of the wet. He waved a sheet at them, saying, “Want to read about the ultimatum Swemmel of Unkerlant has handed Zuwayza?”

“Something unfortunate should happen to Swemmel of Unkerlant,” Leino said. That didn’t keep him from handing the vendor a couple of square copper coins and taking a sheet. He sat down on a bench, Pekka beside him.

They read together. Pekka’s eyebrows rose. “Swemmel doesn’t ask for much, does he?” she said.

“Let’s see.” Leino ran his hand down the page. “All the border fortifications, all the power points halfway from the border to Bishah, the right to base a fleet at the harbor of Samawa—and to have the Zuwayzin pay for it. No, not much: not much he deserves, I mean.”

“And all that on pain of war if Zuwayza refuses,” Pekka said sadly. “If he were an ordinary man instead of a king, he’d be up before a panel of judges on extortion charges.”

Leino had read a little more than she had. “Looks like another war, sure enough. Here, see a crystal report from Bishah quotes their foreign minister as saying that yielding to an unjust demand is worse than making one. If that doesn’t sound like the Zuwayzin intend to fight, I don’t know what does.”

“I wish them well,” Pekka said.

“So do I,” her husband answered. “The only thing I’m sorry about is that, if they’d given in, Swemmel might have gone back to war with Gyongyos. As is, the Gongs are only fighting us, and that makes them tougher.”

“If a few islands out in the Bothnian Ocean were in different places, if a few ley lines ran in different directions, we’d have no quarrel with Gyongyos,” Pekka said.

“Gyongyos would probably have a quarrel with us, though,” Leino answered. “The Gongs enjoy fighting, seems like.”

“I wonder what they say about us,” Pekka said in musing tones. Whatever it was, it did not appear in the
Kajaani Crier
or any other Kuusaman news sheet.

A caravan hummed up to the stop. The conductor opened the door. A couple of people in hats and capes got off. Pekka preceded Leino up the steps and into the car. They both plopped eight-copper silver bits in the fare box. Nodding, the conductor waved them back to the seats, as if it were only through his generosity that they had so many from which to choose.

As the caravan began to move, Pekka said, “My grandmother said that, when she was a little girl,
her
grandmother told her how frightened she was when
she
was a little girl, the first time she got up on the step to go into a ley-line caravan. There it was, floating on
nothing,
and she couldn’t see why it didn’t fall down or tip over.”

“Can’t expect a child to understand the way complex sorceries work,” Leino answered. “For that matter, back in those days ley lines were a new thing in the world, and nobody understood them very well—though people thought they did.”

“People always think they know more than they do,” Pekka said. “It’s one of the things that make them people.”

They got off at the road that led up to their house. No butterflies flitted now. No birds sang. Rain fell. Rain dripped from trees. Wet branches slapped them in the face as they slogged uphill to pick up Uto from Pekka’s sister.

When Elimaki came to the door, she looked harried. Uto, on the other hand, seemed the picture of innocence. Pekka did not need grounding in theoretical sorcery to know appearances could deceive.

“What did you do?” she asked him.

“Nothing,” he answered sweetly, as he always did.

Pekka glanced to her sister. Elimaki said. “He went climbing in the pantry. He knocked over a five-pound canister of flour, and then tried to tell me he hadn’t. He might have gotten away with it, too, if he hadn’t left a footprint right in the middle of the pile of flour on the pantry floor.”

Leino started to laugh. So did Pekka, in spite of herself. She and her husband weren’t the only ones in the family straying off the beaten track, either. Ruffling Uto’s hair, she said, “You’ll go a long way, son—if we decide to let you live.”

Colonel Dzirnavu was not a happy man. So far as Talsu could tell, Dzirnavu was never a happy man. Like a lot of common people, the Jelgavan count took out his unhappiness on everyone around him. Since he was an officer and a noble, the soldiers in his regiment couldn’t tell him to jump off a cliff, as they surely would have if he’d been a commoner like themselves.

“Vartu!” he shouted one morning—he shouted the way singers went through the scales, to warm up his voice. “Confound it, Vartu, where have you gone and hidden yourself? Get your whipworthy arse into my tent this instant!”

“Confound it, Vartu!” Talsu echoed as Dzirnavu’s servant came by on the dead run. Vartu gave him a dirty look before ducking under the tent-flap and facing his principal’s wrath.

“How may I serve you, my lord?” he asked, his words clearly audible through the canvas.

“How may you serve me?” Dzirnavu bellowed. “How may you
serve
me? You may get me that rascally cook, that’s how, and serve me his guts for tripe at my luncheon today. Will you look at this? Will you
look
at this, Vartu? The ham-fisted thumbfingered son of a whore had the gall to serve me a plate of runny scrambled eggs. How in the names of the powers above am I supposed to eat runny scrambled eggs?”

Talsu looked down at his own tin plate, which contained the usual breakfast scoop of mush and the equally usual length of cheap, stale sausage. He glanced over to his friend Smilsu, who was sitting on a rock close by. In a low voice, he asked, “How in the names of the powers above am I supposed to eat runny scrambled eggs?”

“With a spoon?” Smilsu suggested. His breakfast ration was no more prepossessing than Talsu’s.

“I’ve got one of those, sure enough.” Talsu held it up. “Now if I only had some eggs, I’d be in business.”

Smilsu sadly shook his head. “If you’re going to grouse and grumble about every least little thing, my boy, you’ll never get to be a colonel like our illustrious regimental commander.” He set a finger by the side of his nose. “Of course, if you don’t grouse and grumble, you’ll never get to be a colonel, either. You haven’t got the bloodlines for it.”

“Bloodlines are fine, if you’re a horse.” Talsu let his eyes slide toward Count Dzirnavu’s tent. “Or even some particular part of a horse.” Smilsu, who was in the middle of swallowing a mouthful of mush, almost choked to death on it. Talsu went on, “For picking soldiers, though …” Now he shook his head. “If we had real soldiers leading us, we’d be down in Tricarico this time, instead of still slogging our way through these cursed hills.” He snapped his fingers. “I bet that’s why the stinking Algarvians haven’t really counterattacked.”

He’d got a jump ahead of Smilsu. “What’s why?” his friend asked. “What are you talking about?”

Talsu dropped his voice to hardly more than a whisper, so only Smilsu would hear: “If the redheads hit us hard, they’d be bound to kill off a lot of officers. Sooner or later, we’d run out of nobles to take their places. Then we’d have to start using men who knew what they were doing instead. We’d be sure to lick Algarve after that, so they’re just playing it safe and smart.”

“I’d be sure you were right, if only I thought the Algarvians had that much upstairs.” Without doing anything more than sitting a little straighter, Smilsu managed to convey the Algarvians’ swaggering pomposity. As he slumped back down, he went on, “And you’d better not say anything like that around anybody you’re not sure of, either, or you’ll be sorry for a long time.”

Vartu came out of Dzirnavu’s tent just then. Talsu and Smilsu both fell silent. Talsu liked the colonel’s servant, and trusted him fairly far, but not far enough to speak treason in front of him.

Mumbling under his breath, Vartu stalked past the two soldiers. A moment later, Talsu heard him yelling at a cook. The cook yelled back. Smilsu’s snicker was amused and sympathetic at the same time. “Poor

Vartu,” he said. “He gets it from both sides at once.”

“So do all of us,” Talsu answered, “from our officers and from the Algarvians.”

“Someone put vinegar in your beer this morning, that’s plain,” Smilsu said. “Why don’t you go over there and scream at the cooks, too?”

“Because they’d stick a carving knife in me or hit me over the head with a pot,” Talsu said. “I can’t get away with things like that. I’m not a count, or even servant to a count.”

“Aye, you’re a no-account, all right,” Smilsu said, whereupon Talsu felt like hitting him over the head with a pot.

After their less than magnificent breakfast, the Jelgavan soldiers cautiously advanced. Exhortations from King Donalitu to move faster kept coming forward. Colonel Dzirnavu would read them out whenever they did, and would blame the men for not living up to their sovereign’s requests. Then he and his superiors would order another tiptoeing step ahead, and would seem surprised when King Donalitu found it necessary to exhort the troops again.

The Algarvians did their best to make life unpleasant for their foes, too. The country through which Talsu and his comrades moved was made for defense. One stubborn soldier with a stick who found a good hiding place could hold up a company. There were plenty of good hiding places to find, and plenty of stubborn Algarvians to fill them. Each redhead had to be flanked out and flushed from cover, which made what would have been a slow business slower.