Darkness Descending

“Are we ready?” Siuntio nodded. Ilmarinen leered. She took that for an affirmative. Dipping her head to each of them in turn, she said, “I begin, then.”

Don’t make a mistake. She thought that whenever she went from her desk to the laboratory. No matter what Siuntio said about her experimental technique, she knew she was theoretician first, practical mage a distant second. Perhaps that made her more careful than a more practical mage would have been. She hoped so.

As she chanted the carefully crafted spell, as she made pass after intricate pass, confidence began to rise in her. She saw Siuntio smiling approval, silently cheering her on. Maybe she was borrowing the confidence from him. She didn’t care where it came from. She was glad to have it.

And then everything went wrong.

At first, as the chamber began to sway around her, Pekka thought she’d made a mistake after all. Even while she wondered whether she’d die in the next instant, she reviewed all she’d done. For the life of her--literally, for the life of her--she couldn’t see what she’d done wrong.

A heartbeat later, she realized the disaster had come from without, not from within. At that same moment, Siuntio gasped, “The Algarvians!” and Ilmarinen howled, “Murderers!” like a wolf in ultimate anguish.

When the Algarvians murdered Kaunians by the hundreds, perhaps by the thousands, to fuel their military sorcery against Unkerlant, Pekka had felt it, as had sorcerers throughout the world. She’d felt it, too, when the Unkerlanters fought back by murdering their own. But those slaughters, however horrific, had been far to the west. The massacre she felt now was close, close. It was like the difference between feeling an earthquake far away and one right under her feet.

She was feeling an earthquake right under her feet. Even as the building groaned, as cages flew through the air and shelves toppled, her mind leaped. “The Algarvians!” she cried, as Siuntio had before her. She could hardly hear herself through the din. “The Algarvians are turning their death-powered magic against us!”

The war against King Mezentio hadn’t come home to Kuusamo till now. Oh, a handful of Algarvian dragons flying from southern Valmiera had dropped a few eggs on the coast, and ships clashed in the Strait of Valmiera that severed Kuusamo and Lagoas from the mainland of Derlavai. But the Seven Princes had thought--as what Kuusaman had not?--they could prepare behind the Strait and strike at Algarve when they were ready. Algarve, unfortunately, had other ideas.

As earthquakes will, this one seemed to last forever. How long it really went on, Pekka couldn’t have said. At last, it stopped. Rather to her surprise, it hadn’t shaken the building down around her ears. The lamps had gone out, though. Everything in the chamber lay on the floor. Some cages had broken open; rats were scurrying for hiding places. The tremor had knocked Siuntio and Ilmarinen off their feet. Pekka had no idea how or why she was still standing.

Ilmarinen got up without help. He and Pekka pulled some shelves off Siuntio so he could rise. Siuntio was bleeding from a cut above one eye, but that wasn’t why anguish filled his face. “Our city!” he cried. “What the Algarvians have done to our city!”

“We had better find out what they’ve done to our city,” Ilmarinen said grimly. “We had better get out of here, too, before the building falls down on us.”

“I don’t think it will, not if it hasn’t already,” Pekka said. “This isn’t like a natural earthquake--I’ve been through some. There are no aftershocks.” But she hurried out with Ilmarinen and Siuntio.

When she was standing on the snow-dappled dead grass in front of the thaumaturgical laboratory, Pekka gasped. She could see a great deal of Yliharma, and much of what she could see had fallen down. Pillars of smoke rose here and there from rapidly spreading fires. And, when she looked toward the high ground at the heart of the city, she let out an agonized wail: “Not the palace, too!”

“They have struck us a heavy blow,” Siuntio said, wiping blood from his face as if he’d just realized it was there: “heavier than I ever dreamt they could.”

“That they have.” Ilmarinen still sounded like a wolf, a hungry wolf. “Now it’s our turn.”

“Aye,” Pekka said fiercely.

King Swemmel paced back and forth, back and forth, in Marshal Rathar’s office. With his body hunched forward and his jewel-encrusted robe swirling out behind him, the king of Unkerlant put his marshal in mind of a hawk soaring over a field, waiting for a rabbit to show itself.

The difference was that, unlike a hawk, King Swemmel wasn’t inclined to wait. He stabbed out a long, thin finger at the map tacked to the wall. “We’ve got the redheads on the run now!” he gloated. “All we have to do is hit them hard everywhere, and they’ll shatter like a dropped plate.”