Into the Darkness (68 page)

“Avert the omen,” Pekka murmured. She hurried over to the other table, wondering what was wrong with the acorn on it.

There lay the white plate, with a mound of soil on it but with no sapling coming up. Pekka spread the soil aside to get at the acorn. Maybe, she thought hopefully, it was infertile. If it was, that would explain why her experiments kept going awry: it wouldn’t be truly similar to the other. A very simple sorcerous test would tell her whether that was so.

“Where is the cursed acorn?” she said. She knew she’d buried it: about a thumb’s breadth from the top of the mound of soil. It wasn’t there. She sifted through all the soil, spreading it out till it slopped off the plate and on to the table. Still no sign of the acorn.

Careless of the dirt on her fingers and palms, Pekka set hands on hips. She knew perfectly well that she’d set an acorn in the pile of soil. She couldn’t have carried it over to the other pile and put it in there along with the other acorn—could she? She did that kind of thing around the house now and again. Everybody did. But she couldn’t have been so careless in the laboratory … could she?

“Powers above,” she said. “If I did that, Leino would never let me forget it. If I did that, nobody ought to let me forget it.”

She walked back to the first table. If she had somehow—she couldn’t imagine how—set both acorns in one pile of dirt, she should have got two saplings springing up toward the ceiling. If she’d made a major blunder
and
the other acorn was somehow infertile … She shook her head. How slim were the odds that two improbables had both gone wrong at the same time.

“But if they haven’t, where’s my acorn?” she demanded of the laboratory chamber. She got no answer. By then, she wouldn’t have been too surprised had one of the tables up and spoken.

She sifted through all the dirt in the pile from which the sapling had sprouted. She did not find the missing acorn. She didn’t know whether to be relieved or not. On the one hand, she hadn’t done anything unpardonably stupid. On the other hand, if she hadn’t done anything unpardonably stupid, the earlier question recurred: where had the bloody acorn gone?

“I know where it should be,” Pekka said, and went back to the pile of dirt in which she had—she knew she had—planted the acorn now missing.

Could it have fallen off the table? Pekka couldn’t see how, but she couldn’t see how it had disappeared, either. She got down on hands and knees and, backside in the air, stuck her nose down to the stone floor and looked all around. She still couldn’t find the acorn. It had been there. She was sure of that. It wasn’t any more. She was becoming sure of that, too.

“Then where is it?” she asked herself and the world at large. “How am I supposed to write up my experimental diary if I don’t know what to put in it?”

She started a list of all the places the acorn wasn’t: in the soil, on the plate, on the table, on the other plate or table, anywhere on the floor -anywhere in the chamber, as far as she could tell. That was all good, solid information. It belonged in the diary, and she put it there.

It was, however, information of a negative sort. Where
was
the acorn? Positive information was a lot harder to come by.
The acorn,
she wrote,
was carried off by Gyongyosian spies.
Then she made sure that was too thoroughly scratched out to be legible, even though it made as much sense as anything else she’d thought of, and more sense than most of the things.

She tried again.
The parameters of the experiment were as follows,
she wrote, and set down everything she’d done, including the alterations she’d made to the horticultural magic that formed the basis for her spell.
The control acorn performed as expected in every way. The other acorn, although emplaced in a setting attuned to the first through both similarity and contagion, did not germinate as a result of the spell and, in fact, could not be located despite diligent search at the close of the experiment.

There. That told the truth, even if in a bloodless way. She didn’t know what it meant. Maybe one of her clever colleagues would be able to figure it out after seeing exactly what she’d done. Maybe, on the other hand, all her clever colleagues would laugh themselves silly at her clumsy technique.

“Suppose,” she said to the air, “just suppose, mind you, that my technique wasn’t clumsy. Suppose something
did
happen.”

Imbued with fresh purpose, she nodded. Odds were, she had done something foolish. Repeating the experiment as exactly as she could would tell her, one way or the other.

To reduce the risk of magical contamination, she used different tables, different plants, and fresh soil for the new trial. Obviously, she used new acorns, too. This time, she took care to note where each of them went. She chanted over one. A sapling duly sprouted. No sapling grew at the other table. She went back there and sifted through the dirt. She found no acorn.

“It’s real,” she breathed. Then she started to laugh. It might have been real, but she had no idea what it meant.

Fifteen

S
ERGEANT JOKAI clanged a gong that sounded like the end of the world. Gyongyosian soldiers tumbled out of the barracks, rubbing sleep from their eyes. Istvan clutched his stick, wondering what sort of new and fiendish drill his superiors had come up with this time.

“Come on, you lugs, down toward the beach,” Jokai shouted. “The cursed Kuusamans are paying us another call.”

Istvan looked around for Borsos. The dowser was nowhere to be seen. Maybe he was the one who’d raised the alarm. Whether he was or not, Istvan had no time to find him, not with Jokai and the officers set above Jokai screaming at the top of their lungs for every soldier to hurry down to the beaches and throw back the invaders. The Kuusaman attack had turned him into an ordinary warrior again. For that if for no other reason—and he had plenty of others—he cursed the Kuusamans as vilely as he could.

Along with his comrades, he stumbled down a path toward the sea.
Stumbled
was the operative word; the eastern sky behind him had gone gray with the beginnings of morning twilight, but dawn still lay most of an hour away. The Gyongyosians could hardly see where they were putting their feet. Every so often, someone would go down with a thump and a howl. As like as not, somebody else would trip over the luckless soldier before he made it to his feet again.

And then, before the Gyongyosians had got off the wooded slopes of Mt. Sorong, eggs began falling around them. “The stinking slanteyes have brought another dragon transport with them,” somebody yelled.

When Istvan came out from under the trees for a moment, he looked up into the heavens. It was still too dark for him to see much, but he did spy a couple of spurts of fire. That meant Gyongyosian dragons had got into the air, too, and were contesting the sky above Obuda with the Kuusamans.

He came down on to the flatlands that led to the Bothnian Ocean. He knew exactly which trenches his company had to occupy. Serving Borsos had got him out of a lot of exercises, but not all of them. He discovered he still remembered such basics as taking cover and making sure no dirt fouled the business end of his stick.

“By the stars!” said one of his comrades, a burly youngster named Szonyi. “Will you look at all the ships!”

Istvan did look, and then cursed some more. “The Kuusamans brought everything they’ve got this time, didn’t they?” he said. He couldn’t begin to guess how many ships were silhouetted against the brightening sky, but he was certain of one thing: that fleet was larger than the one the Gyongyosians had in local waters.

“Don’t despair!” an officer down the trench shouted. “Never despair! Are we not men? Are we not warriors?” In more practical tones, he went on, “Have we not got our great garrison on this island as well as our ships?”

That did help steady Istvan. He stopped feeling as if he were alone and facing the Kuusaman fleet without anyone to aid him. Egg-tossers on and near the beach began flinging their deadly cargo at the foe. Plumes of water mounting high in the air told of near misses. A burst of fire and a plume of smoke told of a hit. Istvan yelled himself hoarse.

But the Kuusamans had brought heavy warships east along the ley lines to Obuda. They carried egg-tossers that matched any the Gyongyosians had mounted on the island. Eggs came whistling in, some aimed at the tossers opposing the Kuusamans, others at the trenches where Istvan and his comrades crouched. He felt trapped in an earthquake that would not end. Not far away, wounded men wailed.

Like any others, Kuusaman cruisers also mounted sticks far heavier than a soldier or even a behemoth could bear. Where their mighty beams smote, smoke sprang skyward. A soldier caught in one of them burned like a moth flying through a torch flame. Istvan hoped the poor fellow hadn’t had time to realize he was dead.

“Look!” Szonyi pointed. “Some of our dragons have broken through!”

Sure enough, several dragons were diving on the Kuusaman fleet. Szonyi wasn’t the only one to have spotted them. But those great sticks could point to the sky as well as toward Obuda. Dragons could not withstand their beams, as they could the ones from the common soldiers’ sticks. One after another, Gyongyosian dragons plunged burning into the sea.

Yet the dragons were fast and agile. Their fliers were fearless, they themselves too stupid to be afraid. Not all were struck before the fliers could release their eggs and even pass low above the warships’ decks. The dragons flamed, enveloping Kuusaman sailors in fire, then flapped away.

“For all the good we’re doing here, we might as well have stayed asleep in the barracks,” Istvan said. “It was like that the last time the Kuusamans tried to take Obuda away from us, too.”

“I don’t think it will stay that way this time,” Sergeant Jokai said. “I wish it would, but I don’t think it will. Those sons of goats have brought a lot more ships and a lot more dragons than they did last time.”

The offshore battle went on for most of the morning. The Gyongyosian admiral in command at Obuda threw in his ships a few at a time, which meant they were defeated a few at a time. Had he hurled the whole fleet at the Kuusamans, he might have accomplished more. As things were, the would-be invaders slowly beat down the Gyongyosian defenses.

Somewhere around noon, a new cry arose, one in which Istvan joined: “Here come the boats!”

Not all the Gyongyosian egg-tossers had been wrecked. Indeed, some had not taken part in the earlier fight against the Kuusaman naval expedition, and so had given the foe no clue about their position. Istvan shouted with glee as eggs fell among the boats carrying Kuusaman soldiers, wrecking some and overturning others.

Gyongyos painted her dragons in gaudy stripes of red and blue, black and yellow. They dove on the invaders. The small boats carried no sticks strong enough to slay them as they dove, and some of those boats began to burn.

But most kept on coming toward the beaches of Obuda. A few, the larger ones, glided swiftly along the ley lines whose convergence at the island made it a bone of contention between Gyongyos and Kuusamo. The rest advanced as they might have in the ancient days of the world, pushed by the wind or pulled by oars.

Small, stocky, dark-haired soldiers crowded the boats. “They don’t look so tough,” said Szonyi, who hadn’t been on Obuda long enough to have seen Kuusamans before. “I could break one of them in half.”

He was on the weedy side as Gyongyosians went, but that didn’t mean he was wrong. It also didn’t mean being right would do him any good, which he didn’t seem to realize. Istvan made things as plain as he could: “As long as the slanteyes have sticks and know what to do with them -and they do, curse ‘em, they do—you won’t get close enough to break ‘em in half.”

“That’s the truth.” Sergeant Jokai sounded surprised to be agreeing with Istvan instead of harassing him, but he did. “Don’t think for even a minute that those ugly little bastards can’t fight, because they cursed well can. And don’t think they can’t take this stinking island away from us, because they’ve done that, too. The thing is, we’d better not let ‘em do it again, not if we want to go on looking up at the stars.”

The Kuusaman captives the Gyongyosians had taken when they last seized Obuda were slave laborers back on the mainland of Derlavai or on the other islands Ekrekek Arpad ruled. Something similarly unpleasant no doubt befell captured Gyongyosians in Kuusaman hands. An enslaved captive might still look up at the stars, but how much joy could he take in doing it?

Istvan hoped he would not have to find out. Kuusaman boats began beaching. Soldiers jumped out of them and ran for what cover they could find. Istvan and his comrades blazed away at them, and knocked down a good many. But not all the Kuusamans came ashore in front of positions that hadn’t been too badly knocked about. Cries of alarm warned that some of the invaders were outflanking the Gyongyosian defenders.

“Fall back!” an officer shouted. “We’ll make a stand on Mt. Sorong.”

Retreat was galling to any troops, and more galling to the Gyongyosians, who fancied themselves a warrior race, than to most. If the choice was retreating or being attacked from the front and flanks at the same time, though, even the fiercest fighters saw where sense lay.