Darkness Descending

As always, the ritual helped calm Pekka. Whether this experiment succeeded or failed, her people would endure. Confident in that, she could go on with more assurance. She raised her hands above her head and began to chant.

The spell she used was a variant of the one she’d employed with the two acorns, the spell that had made one of them grow at a furious pace while the other disappeared. Ilmarinen’s inversion suggested an answer to what had happened to that acorn. After a good deal of thought, Pekka had--or hoped she had--come up with a way to find out if the inversion was merely clever mathematics (anything Ilmarinen did would be clever, regardless of whether it was true) or if it described something in the real world at which she could point.

She had to tell herself not to look at either of the cages while she was incanting. If something did happen, she wouldn’t see it while she was shaping the spell, only afterwards. The old rat scrambled about in his cage, which sat on the table that had held the disappearing acorn. The young rat peered out through the bars of his cage, which sat on the table that had held the acorn that sprouted at preternatural speed.

Don’t make a mistake, she told herself again and again. How many discoveries had been delayed because of chance errors in spells? On and on she went, watching herself perform as if she were an outsider. Everything was going as it should. Her tongue hadn’t stumbled. She wouldn’t let it stumble. I won’t, she thought. No matter what, I won’t.

“So may it be!” she exclaimed at the very end, and slumped forward, utterly spent. Performing magic was much harder work than considering how it might be performed. She wiped sweat from her forehead, though the laboratory was cool and the ground outside covered with snow.

So may it be, she thought, wondering what would be, what had become. Now she could examine the cages, and the rats inside them. Make sure you see what’s really there, she thought. Don’t see what you wish were there.

The first thing she saw was that both cages still held rats. That was a relief; she didn’t know what she would have done if one of the little beasts had vanished, as one acorn had during her earlier experiment. She supposed she’d have gone back, weakened her spell some more, and tried again.

She examined the older rat first. The changes in him, if there were any, would be easier to spot than those in his grandson. He looked up at her, his little black eyes shining, his whiskers quivering. His muzzle, which had been flecked with gray, was as dark as that of any rat for which a housewife had ever set a trap.

Heart pounding, Pekka noted the changes in appearance she saw. Then she went to the cage that housed the other rat. He’d had a sort of awkward gangliness about him, a sense of being not quite comfortable in a full-sized body about him. Adolescent rats and people were similar, at least in that. Now.. .

Now he looked like a mature rat, a rat of about the same apparent age as his grandfather. “Powers above,” Pekka said softly. “That is what it does.” She checked herself. “I think that’s what it does.” But had the spell rejuvenated the older rat at the expense of the younger one, or had it sent both of them traveling through time in opposite directions? Ilmarinen’s work suggested the first, but didn’t rule out the second.

Pekka had a way to find out. She’d built one into the experiment. She took the grandfather rat out of his cage and took him over to the maze. If he had trouble running it, she would know he’d been carried back through time to a point in his personal lifeline before he’d learned which route led to the food. If he didn’t, he would show he was essentially the same rat with a newer body.

“Tell me,” she whispered. “Come on, rat, tell me.” She set him down in the maze and waited to see what he would do.

For a moment, he did nothing at all. He sat there at the beginning of the path, his little black nose twitching, his tail wiggling. Had Pekka found him in her kitchen, she would have tried to land him with a frying pan. As things were, she gave him an indignant look. His indecision was liable to make her have to repeat the experiment.

She wondered if poking him to get him started would distort her results. As if the rat sensed what she was thinking, he started to move. He went through the maze with as much assurance as he had before she subjected him to magecraft. Pekka had forgotten to refill the grain cup that served as his reward. Now he looked indignantly at her. “I’m sorry,” she said, and gave him what he wanted, and another honey drop to boot.

After he’d eaten, she picked him up and returned him to his cage. He was, at the moment, the most valuable rat in the world, though of course he didn’t know it. She and her colleagues would have to repeat the experiment a good many times, but if the results held. . . . If they hold, we’re going somewhere at last, Pekka thought. Where that might be, she didn’t know, but the research, whatever else one said about it, was stalled no more.

She went back to her office, carrying her notebooks with her. There she activated her crystal and attuned it to that of one of the men waiting to hear what she had done. A moment later, Siuntio’s