Ilmarinen might have made more suggestive banter. Pekka watched him think about it and, to her relief, decide against it. He said, “You’d do best to talk to Prince Jauhainen’s men, I think. He’s not half the man his uncle was, but he can manage that for you-he’d cursed well better be able to, anyhow.”
“Expecting anyone to match up to Prince Joroinen is asking a lot,” Pekka replied. “But that’s still a good notion--his folk will know enough of what I’m doing that I won’t have to do any more explaining. Thank you. I’ll try it.”
“Who’s the letter to?” Ilmarinen asked.
“The Lagoan named Fernao,” Pekka said; she wouldn’t mention Fernao’s trade by crystal, not when emanations might be stolen. She did add, “You know him, don’t you?”
“Oh, aye-a most inquisitive fellow, Fernao is.” Ilmarinen set a finger by the side of his nose. “I see: you’re arranging an assignation with him, not with me. I must be too old and ugly for you.”
“And too crackbrained, to boot,” Pekka snapped. Ilmarinen crowed laughter, delighted at getting a rise out of her. She glared. “I’ll have you know he was wounded down in the land of the Ice People.”
“What a painful place to be hurt,” Ilmarinen exclaimed. Pekka refused to acknowledge that in any way, which wasn’t easy. Ilmarinen shrugged. “Anything else?” he asked. Pekka shook her head. “So long, then,” he told her, and vanished from the crystal. It glowed for a moment, then went back to being nothing but a glassy sphere.
Pekka activated her crystal again. Sure enough, Prince Jauhainen’s aide- who’d served Prince Joroinen before he died in the Algarvians’ sorcerous assault on Yliharma-promised to send a man, and the fellow arrived not much later. Pekka gave him the letter and went back to work.
It went better than she’d thought it would. Maybe that was because she, like Fernao, had written in classical Kaunian: composing in a language not her own, especially one so different from Kuusaman, forced her to think clearly. Or maybe, though she hadn’t thought so, she’d just needed a break from what she was doing.
Without Leino to come knock on her door, she had to pay more attention to leaving for home at the right time. She’d been very late one day when Uto had been even more inventive than usual, and her sister Elimaki, usually the best-natured woman around, had screamed at her when she finally came to get her son. She didn’t want that to happen again.
As she chanted the spells that would secure her calculations in her desk till she came for them in the morning, she wondered if they were as strong as they might be. Oh, she was sure they would foil a burglar looking for whatever he could sell for a little cash, but who was more likely to want to break into her office: that kind of burglar or an Algarvian spy?
The real world hit her in the face when she walked across the Kajaani City College campus to the ley-line caravan stop to wait for a car to take her home. The news-sheet vendor at the stop was shouting word of the Algarvian breakthrough into the outskirts of Sulingen. “Trapani says it’s so, and Cot-tbus doesn’t deny it!” he added, as if that proved everything. Maybe it did; she’d got used to evaluating war claims out of the west by splitting the difference between what the Algarvians and the Unkerlanters said. If the Unkerlanters weren’t saying anything. . Pekka shook her head. That wasn’t a good sign.
And the grim look on Elimaki’s face when Pekka came to pick up Uto wasn’t a good sign, either. Pekka wanted to throw up her hands. “What now?” she asked, and scowled at her son. “What did you do today?”
“Nothing,” Uto replied, as sweetly as he always did when he’d committed some new enormity.
“He learned a little spell,” Elimaki said. “Powers above only know where children pick these things up, but they do. And he’s your son and Leino’s, so he has talent, too-talent for trouble, that’s what.”
“What did you
“He animated the dog’s dish, that’s what, so it chased poor Thumper all over the house and spilled table scraps everywhere, that’s what he did,” Elimaki said. Uto looked up at the sky, as if he’d had nothing to do with that dish.
“Oh, no,” Pekka said, doing her best to sound severe and not burst into giggles. Uto found such creative ways to land in trouble. Not many children his age could have made that spell-Pekka was pretty sure she knew which one it was-work so well. Even so … Even so, he would have to be punished. “Uto, you can’t do that kind of thing at Aunt Elimaki’s house-or at home, either,” Pekka added hastily; leaving loopholes around Uto wasn’t safe. “Your tiny stuffed leviathan is going to spend the night up on the mantel.”
That brought the usual storm of tears from her son. It also brought a new threat: “I’ll make him come back to me so I can sleep! I can! I will!”
“No, you won’t,” Pekka told him. “You will not use magic without permission. Never. You
“All right,” Uto said sulkily.
Pekka could see he wasn’t convinced. She didn’t care. She would do whatever she had to do to convince him. Children playing with sorcery were at least as dangerous as children playing with fire. If taking Uto’s toy leviathan away didn’t work, if she had to switch his backside instead, she would. Were Leino here, he surely would have. Pekka took her son’s hand. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s go home.”
Ahead of Trasone, Sulingen burned. It was a great burning, the smoke rising in tall, choking, brown-black clouds. Sulingen was a bigger city than the Algarvian veteran had thought it would be. It sprawled for miles along the northern bank of the Wolter, its districts cut here and there by steep gullies. Day after day, dragons painted in red, green, and white pounded it from the air. Egg-tossers hurled more destruction at it. But, because it was a big city, it was hard to wreck. And the Unkerlanters fought back as if they would fall off the edge of the world if they were forced into the Wolter.
Crouched behind a heap of bricks that had once been somebody’s chimney, Trasone called out to Sergeant Panfilo: “I thought, what with all the behemoths and such we’ve got, we were supposed to go around the cursed Unkerlanters, not through “em.” He didn’t lift up his head when he spoke. Plenty of King Swemmel’s soldiers would have been delighted to put a beam between his eyes if he were so foolish.
Panfilo stayed low, too, in a little hole in the ground for which he’d made a breastwork from the dirt dug out of it. “We did all that. How do you think we got here? Now there’s no more room to go around, so we go forward instead.”
An egg burst not far from them. Rocks and clods of earth and chunks of wood pattered down on Trasone. He ignored them with the resignation of a man who’d known worse. “We ought to find some kind of way to get across the Wolter,” he said.
Over in his foxhole, Panfilo laughed. “Only way I know is straight south,” he answered. “This is the only place where we’ve even come close to the bloody, stinking river-and we’ve already got Yaninans guarding our flanks.”
Trasone grunted. He knew that as well as Panfilo did. “They aren’t quite as hopeless as I thought they’d be,” he said-not much praise, but the best he could do.
Panfilo laughed again. “They don’t like the notion of getting killed any better than you do, pal. If they don’t fight some, they know cursed well they’ll die. But wouldn’t you sooner see our lads doing the job instead?”
“Of course I would. You think I’m daft, or something?” Trasone shook his head, which made a couple of pebbles fall from the brim of his hat into the dirt beside him. “And I’d sooner the Yaninans were full strength with behemoths and egg-tossers and dragons. I’d sooner we were, too.” Now he laughed, a laugh full of vitriol. “And while I’m at it, I’ll wish for the moon.”
It wasn’t funny. Replacements kept filtering in to the battalion, but it was still far under strength. All the battalions and regiments at the thin end of the wedge were far under strength. That was how it got to be the thin
