Out of the Darkness

Saxburh’s eyes started to slide shut. Vanai’s nipple slid out of the baby’s mouth. Hoisting her daughter to her shoulder, Vanai got a sleepy burp from her, then rocked her till she fell asleep. Saxburh didn’t wake up when she set her in the cradle, either.

Her tunic still hanging open, Vanai turned back to Ealstan. “What were you saying about later?”

He raised an eyebrow. She wasn’t usually so bold. I don’t kill a man I hated every day, either, she thought. Back in the bedchamber, she straddled Ealstan and rode herself-and him with her-to joy with short, hard, quick strokes, then sprawled down on his chest to kiss him. I wish I did, if only it would make me feel like this every time. Even the afterglow seemed hotter than usual. Laughing, she kissed him again.

Winter roared into the Naantali district of Kuusamo as if it were part of the land of the Ice People. The blizzard outside the hostel howled and shrieked, blowing snow parallel to the ground. Pekka’s home town of Kajaani didn’t usually get quite such wretched weather, even though it lay farther south: it also lay by the sea, which helped moderate its climate.

Pekka had hoped to be able to experiment in the scant hours of daylight that came here, but scrubbed the idea when she saw what the weather was like. No matter how much Kuusamans took cold, nasty weather in stride, everything had its limits.

And it’s not as if I’ve got nothing else to do, she thought, brushing a lock of coarse black hair back from her eyes as she waded through paperwork. The greatest drawback she’d found to running a large project was that it transformed her from a theoretical sorcerer, which was all she’d ever wanted to be, to a bureaucrat, a fate not quite worse than death but not enjoyable, either.

Someone knocked on the door to her chamber. She sprang to her feet, a smile suddenly illuminating her broad, high-cheekboned face. Any excuse for getting away from that pile of papers was a good one. And it might be Fernao. That idea sang in her. She hadn’t expected to fall in love with the Lagoan mage, especially when she hadn’t fallen out of love with her own husband. But Leino was far away-in Jelgava now, battling against the Algarvians’ bloodthirsty magic-and had been for a long time, while Fernao was here, and working side by side with her, and had saved her life more than once, and. . She’d stopped worrying about reasons. She just knew what was, knew it and delighted in it.

But when Pekka opened the door, no tall, redhaired Lagoan with narrow eyes bespeaking a touch of Kuusaman blood stood there. “Oh,” she said. “Master Ilmarinen. Good morning.”

Ilmarinen laughed in her face. “Your lover’s off somewhere else,” he said, “so you’re stuck with me.” With Master Siuntio dead, Ilmarinen was without a doubt the greatest theoretical sorcerer in Kuusamo, probably in the world. That didn’t keep him from also being a first-class nuisance. He leered and laughed again at Pekka’s expression. The few wispy white hairs that sprouted from his chin-Kuusaman men were only lightly bearded- wagged up and down.

Getting angry at him did no good. Pekka had long since learned that. Treating him as she did Uto, her little boy, worked better. “What can I do for you?” she asked, as sweetly as she could.

Ilmarinen leaned forward to kiss her on the cheek. That was going too far, even for him. Then he said, “I’ve come to say goodbye.”

“Goodbye?” Pekka echoed, as if she’d never heard the word before.

“Goodbye,” Ilmarinen repeated. “To you, to this hostel, to the Naantali district. It took some wangling-I had to talk to more than one of the Seven Princes of Kuusamo-but I did it, and I’m free. Or I’m going to be free, anyhow, as soon as this ghastly weather lets me escape.”

“You’re leaving!” Pekka said. Ilmarinen nodded. She wondered if her senses were failing her or if, more likely, he was playing one of his horrid practical jokes. “You can’t do that!” she blurted.

“You’d better revise your hypothesis,” Ilmarinen said. “I’m going to falsify it with contradictory data. When you see that I’m gone, you will also see that you were mistaken. It happens to us all now and again.”

He means it, she realized. “But why?” she asked. “Is it anything I’ve done? If it is, is there anything I can do to change your mind and make you stay?”

“No and no,” the master mage answered. “I can tell you exactly what’s wrong here, at least the way I look at things. We’re not doing anything new and different any more. We’re just refining what we’ve already got. Any second-rank mage who can get to ten twice running when he counts on his fingers can do that work. Me, I’d sooner look for something a little more interesting, thank you kindly.”

“What is there?” Pekka asked.

“I’m going to the war,” Ilmarinen answered. “I’m going to Jelgava, if you want me to be properly precise, and I’m sure you do-you’re like that. If those fornicating Algarvian mages start killing Kaunians and aiming all that sorcerous energy at me, I aim to boot ‘em into the middle of next week. Time to really use all this sorcery we’ve dreamed up. Time to see what it can do, and what more we need to do to fancy it up even more.”

“But. .” Pekka floundered. “How will we go on without you?”

“You’ll do pretty well, I expect,” the master mage said. “And I’ll have a chance to play with my own ideas. Maybe I really will figure out a way to knock the Algarvians into the middle of next week. I still say the potential for that lies at the heart of the experimental work we’ve done.”

“And I still say you’re out of your mind,” Pekka answered automatically.

“Of course you do,” Ilmarinen said. “You’re the one who opened this hole in the ice, and now you don’t want to fish in it for fear a leviathan will take hold of your line and pull you under.”

“Those are the kinds of forces you’re talking about,” Pekka said. “Even if you were right-and you’re not, curse it; you almost killed yourself and took half of Kuusamo with you because you’d miscalculated, if you recall-even if you were right, I tell you, you’d never be able to come up with a usable sorcery. Paradoxes would prevent it.”

“Whenever a mage says a spell is possible, he’s likely right,” Ilmarinen replied. “Whenever he says a spell is impossible, he’s likely wrong. That’s an old rule I just made up, but it covers the history of pure and applied sorcery over the past hundred and fifty years pretty well, I think.”

He had a point, though Pekka didn’t intend to admit it. She said, “I think you’re being very foolish. You were talking about second-rank mages, Master. What will you be able to do in Jelgava that any second-rank mage can’t?”

“I don’t know,” he answered cheerfully. “That’s why I’m going there: to find out. I know everything I can do here and”-he yawned with almost as much theatrical flair as an Algarvian might have-”I’m bored.”

“That shouldn’t be reason enough to abandon something of which you’re such an important part,” Pekka insisted.

“Maybe it shouldn’t, but for me it is.” Ilmarinen’s foxy features donned that leer once more. “If I happen to run into your husband while I’m in Jelgava, what shall I tell him?”

Not a thing! Not a fornicating thing! Pekka wanted to shout. Just before she did, she realized that was the worst thing she could possibly say. With studied indifference, she answered, “Tell him whatever you please. You will anyway.”

That took the leer off his face. It got her what might have been a respectful glance. “You’re cooler about the whole business than I thought,” Ilmarinen said.

Pekka, just then, felt anything but cool. Letting him know that, though, didn’t strike her as a good idea. She said, “If you’re bound and determined to do this, powers above keep you safe.”

“For which I thank you,” Ilmarinen said. “I will miss you, curse me if I won’t. Your heart’s in the right place, I think, even if I can’t imagine what you see in that overgrown Lagoan mage.”

“He’s not overgrown!” Indignation crackled in Pekka’s voice. “And you’re a fine one to talk. What do you see in Linna the serving girl?”

“A pretty face and a tight twat,” he answered at once. “I’m a man. Men aren’t supposed to need any more than that, are they? But women, now, women should have better sense, don’t you think?”

Actually, Pekka did think that, or something like that, anyway. But Ilmarinen was the last person with whom she wanted to talk about it. Instead of talking, she hugged him hard enough to make him wheeze as the air came out of him. Then, for good measure, she kissed him, too. “I still think you’re being a fool, but you’re a fool I’m fond of.”

“You’re stuck with me a while longer,” he said, “till this accursed weather eases up. But then I’m flying-or