Out of the Darkness

“I’m still here,” Almonte answered.

“So are the Unkerlanters,” Sabrino said dryly.

Almonte gave him a reproachful stare. “I am but one man, Colonel. I do what I can for King Mezentio and Algarve. I hope you can say the same.”

If he thought he would make Sabrino feel guilty, he erred. “Futter you, Major,” the wing commander said, not bothering to raise his voice. “I fought on the ground in the Six Years’ War, and I’ve been at the front in this one since the day it started. I don’t owe Algarve any more than I’ve already given. Before I decide whether I want you on a dragon with me, suppose you tell me just what your precious spell is and what you think it can do to the Unkerlanters.”

Biting his lip in anger, Almonte plunged into his explanation. He plainly didn’t know how technical to be; sometimes he talked down to Sabrino, others his words went over the dragonflier’s head. What he aimed to do was clear enough: loose horror and destruction on Swemmel’s men from the air. How he proposed to go about it…

Sabrino didn’t hit him. Afterwards, he wondered why. His stomach lurching as if his dragon had dived without warning, he said, “Get out of my sight this instant, or I’ll blaze you where you stand. This makes killing Kaunians clean by comparison.”

“Desperate times take desperate measures,” the mage declared.

King Mezentio had said the same thing, just before the Algarvian wizards started butchering blonds. Sabrino hadn’t been able to stop him. He was the king. This fellow. . “If you want to try that, Major, I’d sooner see the Unkerlanters smash us down,” Sabrino said.

“I shall return with orders from your superiors,” Almonte snapped.

“Fine,” Sabrino said. “You can go up on my dragon, or on any dragon in this wing, but there’s no guarantee you’ll come down.” Almonte stalked off. He didn’t come back. Sabrino hadn’t thought he would.

In the blockhouse not far from the hostel in the Naantali district, Pekka spun a globe. Globes and maps were more than just pictures of the world; as even the sages of the Kaunian Empire had realized, they were also, in their own way, applications of and invitations to the law of similarity. Pekka looked from one of her colleagues to another. “This is our last great test,” she said, and they all nodded. “If everything goes as it should, we can use this sorcery against any place in the world from here.”

They all nodded: Raahe and Alkio, Piilis-and Fernao. Pekka did her best to treat him the same way she treated the other theoretical sorcerers. He didn’t like that; his eyes, so like a Kuusaman’s, showed as much. She hadn’t been in his bed-she hadn’t wanted to be in anyone’s bed-since learning of Leino’s death.

But for a couple of trips back to Kajaani to see her son and her sister, she’d thrown herself into her sorcery, using work as an anodyne where someone else might have used spirits.

He couldn’t very well complain, not here in front of everyone. What he did say was, “The blockhouse seems empty today, compared to so many of the things we’ve done. No secondary sorcerers here, for instance-just a crystallomancer.”

“We don’t need secondary sorcerers, not for this.” Pekka waved at the bank of cages full of rats and rabbits. “We’ll be sending the energy we release from the beasts so far away, we can safely keep the cages here.”

I want to send the energy to Trapani, she thought savagely. I want to lash the capital of Algarve with a whip of fire, till nothing there still stands. But what good would that do? It wouldn’t bring Leino back to life. Nothing could do that. A day at a time, she was realizing the finality of death.

“Shall we begin?” Raahe asked quietly. She was holding Alkio’s hand. She and her husband were ten or fifteen years older than Pekka, but smiling like a couple of newlyweds.

“Aye,” Pekka said: one harsh word. Whom have I? she wondered. Not Leino, not any more, not ever. I did have Fernao. I could have him again. Is he what I really want, or was he just someone to keep me warm while Leino was far away? She didn’t know. She was afraid to find out.

I’m also too busy to find out. She recited the Kuusaman ritual words that preceded every spell save one cast in an emergency. Then she spun the globe again. This time, she purposely stopped it. Her fingernail tapped what looked like a fly speck in the eastern Bothnian Ocean. “Becsehely.” She pronounced the Gyongyosian name as best she could. “Everyone is supposed to be off the island.”

“Everyone had better be off the island,” Fernao said. “Anyone who stayed behind would be very sorry.”

“I begin,” Pekka said, and started incanting. After so many runs through spells like this, she cast another one with almost as much confidence and aplomb as if she were a practical mage herself. No, that’s Leino, she thought, and felt again the hole in her life. That was Leino. But she couldn’t dwell on it, not now. The spell came first.

She felt the sorcerous energy building inside the blockhouse. The animals in the cages felt it, too. They scurried this way and that. Some tried to get out. Some tried to bury under the shavings and sawdust on the cage floors, to hide from what was happening. That wouldn’t help them, but they didn’t know it wouldn’t.

Pekka chanted on. The passes that went with the incantation were second nature to her now. The other theoretical sorcerers stood by, lending strength and standing ready to rush to her aid if, in spite of everything, she faltered. That had happened before. She missed Master Siuntio-dead at the Algarvians’ hands, too-and Master Ilmarinen. Fernao had saved her before. She didn’t want to think about that, and, again, she didn’t have to.

The animals were growing frantic now, the rats squeaking in fear and alarm. Pekka knew an abstract pity for them. Better you than so many Kaunians or Unkerlanters or even Gyongyosians who are proud to volunteer their throats to the knife. Glowing blue lines of sorcerous energy stretched between cages of young beasts and their grandparents. Those lines grew brighter by the moment, brighter and brighter and. .

All at once, they flashed, intolerably brilliant. Pekka’s eyes were closed against the glare by then, but that flash pierced her to the quick even so. When she opened her eyes afterwards, green-purple lines seemed printed across the world. Slowly, slowly, they faded.

Corruption’s ripe reek filled the blockhouse, but only for a moment. The older rats and rabbits in the cages aged so catastrophically fast, they went past rotting to bare bones far quicker than the blink of an eye. The younger ones, by contrast, were propelled backwards chronologically, back to the days long before they were born. Had they ever truly existed, then? The mathematics there were indeterminate. But for sawdust and shavings, the cages that had held them were empty now.

“Divergent series,” Pekka murmured. Sure enough, that was how to get the greatest release of sorcerous energy.

“We did everything as planned,” Raahe said. “Now we find out if our calculations were right.”

“That’s the interesting part, or so Ilmarinen would say,” Pekka replied. She hoped the cantankerous old master mage was all right. Losing him on top of all the other disasters of war would have been almost too much to bear. Deliberately forcing the thought from her mind, she turned to the crystallomancer. “Make the etheric connection to the Searaven.”

“Aye, Mistress Pekka.” The crystallomancer bent over her glassy sphere and murmured the charm that would link the blockhouse to the Kuusaman cruiser gliding along a ley line a few miles off the beaches of Becsehely. Her first attempt failed; the crystal refused to flare with light. She muttered something under her breath, then spoke aloud: “It should have worked. Let me try again.”

“All right,” Pekka said nervously. The amount of energy they’d released. . If they’d miscalculated even by a little, it might have come down on the Searaven instead of the empty island at which they’d aimed.

But then the crystal did light up. After a moment, the flash faded and a naval officer’s face appeared in the globe. “Here you are, Mistress Pekka,” the crystallomancer said. “Here is Captain Waino.”

“Powers above be praised,” Pekka murmured as she hurried over to stand before the crystal. She raised her voice: “Hello, Captain. Please describe what- if anything-you and your crew observed on Becsehely.”

“If anything?” Waino exclaimed. “Mistress, as far as that island’s concerned, it’s the end of the fornicating world-pardon my Valmieran.”

Pekka smiled. “You’re a naval man, and you talk like what you are.”

“As you say, Mistress.” Waino sounded like a man who’d just been through an earthquake. “Everything was normal as you please, and then lightning slammed down out of a clear sky and things blew up-it was as though every dragon in the world dropped a couple of eggs on Becsehely at the same time as the lightning hit it. But there