idea that changing his answer would not make the officer glowering at him happy. He kept quiet.
That proved a good idea. The Unkerlanter said, “What have you brought us?”
“I don’t even know. What I don’t know, I couldn’t have told Mezentio’s men,” Cornelu said. “I did hear the Kuusamans gave it to the Lagoans. The Lagoans gave it to me, and now I am giving it to you.”
“The Kuusamans, you say?” The Unkerlanter officer brightened; this time, Cornelu had managed to say the right thing. “Aye, that accords with my briefing. We will take it from your leviathan.” He started giving orders to the soldiers in his own language.”
Cornelu didn’t know what he was saying, but could make a good guess. “They’ll get eaten if they try,” he warned.
“Then we will kill the leviathan and take it anyhow,” the Unkerlanter answered, as if it were all the same to him-and it probably was.
It wasn’t all the same to Cornelu. If anything happened to the leviathan, he’d be stuck in southern Unkerlant for the rest of his days. Comparing exile in Setubal to exile in Rysum reminded him of the difference between bad and worse. “Wait!” he exclaimed. “If you let me, I’ll go down there and get it for you myself.”
“You should have brought it up with you,” the officer said grumpily.
“You might have thought it was an egg and blazed me,” Cornelu said. “Now will you trust me to do what needs doing?”
Every line of the Unkerlanter’s body proclaimed that trusting a foreigner- especially a foreigner who spoke Algarvian and looked like an Algarvian-was the last thing he wanted to do. But, his heavy features clotted with suspicion, he gestured toward the rope ladder and said, “All right, go on-do this. But do it with great care, or I am not liable for what will happen to you next.”
Moving slowly and carefully, Cornelu climbed down the rope ladder. His leviathan swam toward him as he dropped into the cold water. He took the small pack attached to the leviathan’s harness. It was small, aye, but it was heavy; Cornelu had to swim hard to get back to the ladder with it strapped to his back. Climbing up with the added weight wasn’t any fun, either, but he managed.
He set the oiled-leather pack on the pier. “Move away from it!” the Unkerlanter officer said sharply. Cornelu obeyed. The Unkerlanter spoke in his own language again. One of the soldiers came up and put the pack on his own broad back while the rest covered him. He walked up the pier and onto dry land.
Once the soldier got off the weathered planks, the officer relaxed a little. He even unbent so far as to ask, “Do you need food for your voyage east?” When Cornelu nodded, the officer barked orders. Another soldier ran off and returned with smoked fish and hard sausage-the sort of fare that wouldn’t suffer much from salt water.
“My thanks,” Cornelu said, though he already had enough to do well unless the leviathan wandered very badly while he slept. He had fresh water and to spare. Waving in the direction the Unkerlanter with the pack had gone, he asked the officer, “Do
“Of course not,” the fellow replied. “It is not for me to know such things. It is not for the likes of you to know them, either.” The words weren’t too bad, not coming from a military man. The way he said them … All at once, Cornelu felt something he’d never imagined he would: a small bit of sympathy for the Algarvians fighting Unkerlant.
Fifteen
For the first time since he’d been injured, Fernao forgot the pain of his hurts without distillates of the poppy to help him do it. Work, exciting work, proved an anodyne as effective as drugs. Ever since Grandmaster Pinhiero gave him that first summary of what the Kuusaman mages had done, he’d burned to take part in their experimental program. And now, at last, here he was in Yliharma. Broken leg? Healing arm? He didn’t much care.
Courteously, Siuntio and Ilmarinen and Pekka kept speaking mostly classical Kaunian among themselves as they set up their rows of rats in cages. Fernao wished he understood Kuusaman, to catch what they said in asides in their language. Like a lot of Lagoans, he hadn’t taken his neighbors to the west seriously enough.
He also quickly discovered he hadn’t taken Pekka seriously enough. Siuntio and Ilmarinen? Being in the same sorcerous laboratory as the two of them was an honor in itself. But he didn’t take long to notice that they both deferred-Siuntio graciously, Ilmarinen with bluster masking a peculiar, mocking sort of pride-to the younger theoretical sorcerer.
She said, “In this experiment, we shall align the cages of the related rats in parallel. In the next-”
“Assuming we live to make the next,” Ilmarinen put in.
“Aye.” Pekka nodded. “Assuming. Now, as I was saying, in the next experiment we shall align the cages of the related rats in the reverse order, to see if reversing them will strengthen the spell by emphasizing the inverse nature of the relationship between the Two Laws.”
Ilmarinen preened; he’d discovered that the relationship between the laws of similarity and contagion was inverse, not direct. But he never would have had the insight without the data from Pekka’s seminal-literally, since it had involved acorns-experiment. And Pekka wasn’t bad at coming up with startling insights herself. She hadn’t done a bad job of quashing Ilmarinen there, either.
Fernao said, “I never would have thought of altering the positions of the cages.”
Pekka shrugged. “That is what lies at the heart of experimenting: changing every variable you can imagine. Since we are so ignorant here, we need to explore as wide a range of possibilities as we can.”
“I never would have reckoned that a variable,” Fernao answered. “It would not have occurred to me.”
“It did not occur to me, either,” Siuntio said, “and I have some small experience in the game we are playing.”
“Which game?” Ilmarinen asked. “Embarrassing Pekka?”
“I am not embarrassed,” Pekka said tightly. But she was; Fernao could see as much. His own praise had flustered her, and Siuntio’s rather more. Fernao understood that; praise from the leading theoretical sorcerer of the age would have flustered him, too.
He said, “It is always good to see a theoretical sorcerer who does not have to be told what the apparatus in the laboratory is for.”
She meant it. Fernao could see that. He studied her. He didn’t usually find Kuusaman women interesting; next to his own taller, more emphatically shaped countrywomen, they struck him as boyish. As far as her figure went, Pekka did, too. But he’d never known a Lagoan female mage he thought could outdo him. He didn’t just think Pekka could. She already had.
“Shall we get on with it now?” she asked, her voice sharp. “Or shall we keep playing till the Algarvians come up with some new dreadful sorcery and drop Yliharma into the Strait of Valmiera?”
“She is right, of course,” Siuntio said. Fernao nodded. Ilmarinen started to say something. All three of the other mages glared at him. He held his peace. By the startled quality of Siuntio’s smile, that didn’t happen very often.
“Master Siuntio, Master Ilmarinen, you know what we shall undertake here today,” Pekka said, taking the lead. “As always, your task is to support me if I blunder-and I may.” She looked over to Fernao. Had he angered her by calling her a good experimenter? Some theoretical sorcerers were oddly proud of being inept in the laboratory, but he hadn’t taken her for one of those. She went on, “Our Lagoan guest is to aid you as best he can, but with the spell being in Kuusaman, you will have to move first, because he may not realize at once that I have gone astray.”
Ilmarinen said, “If
“I do not think we can do that with this experiment,” Pekka said. “Quite.” She shifted to Kuusaman for several rhythmic sentences. Fernao couldn’t have claimed to understand them, but he knew what they were: the Kuusaman claim to be the oldest, most enduring folk in the world. He thought that claim nonsense almost on the order of the Ice People’s belief in gods, but he kept quiet. And then, after a brief pause, Pekka returned to classical Kaunian for two words: “I begin.”
