Through the Darkness d-3 Read online

  To her amazement, he actually did. Only after one of her colleagues vouched for her did he give her the envelope, for which he required her to write out a receipt. Then, with a grave salute, he went on his way.

  Pekka found herself tempted to throw the envelope in the trash unopened. That appealed to her sense of the perverse: what more fitting fate for something the soldier so obviously judged important? But she shook her head. The trouble was, the soldier was all too likely to be right.

  And the envelope, she saw by the design of the value imprint, came from Lagoas. One corner of her mouth turned down. She still wasn’t sure she’d done the right thing in backing Siuntio and agreeing to share some of what they knew with Kuusamo’s island neighbors. Aye, the Lagoans were allies, but they were still Lagoans.

  She opened the envelope. She wasn’t surprised to find the letter written in excellent classical Kaunian.The last time I dropped you a line, Mistress Pekka, I did not have to send it by special courier, the Lagoan wrote.

  Of course, the last time I dropped you a line, you insisted I had no need to do so. I understand why you said that, but now I know it is not true. I have been astonished at the discoveries you and your colleagues have made, and offer my assistance in any way you might find useful. I am presently recovering from wounds I received on the austral continent, but should be well enough to work before too long. Until then, and until I hear from you, I remain your obedient servant: Fernao, mage of the first rank.

  “Fernao,” Pekka murmured, and slowly nodded. Sure enough, she remembered his earlier letter. He’d been a snoop then, and evidently remained one. But now he was a snoop with a right to know.

  She set aside her calculations (not without a small, irked grimace: she couldn’t see now where she’d hoped to head before the soldier knocked on the door) and reinked the pen she’d been using on them. I have received your letter, she wrote, and hope your recovery from your wounds is swift and sure. My own husband went into the service of the Seven Princes not long ago, and I worry about him.

  Pekka looked at that and frowned again. Was it too personal? She decided to leave it in; the powers above knew it was true. She went on,

  Indeed, we have done a good deal of interesting work since we stopped publishing in the learned journals, and a man of your abilities will help us go further. I cannot set down the details here, but I think we may be on the edge of something intriguing, as perhaps you may also be hearing from my colleagues. Again, I wish you well, and hope to hear from you again. Pekka, at Kajaani City College.

  She put the letter into a prepaid envelope and copied out the address in Setubal Fernao had given her. Then she hesitated. Her letter didn’t say much, but neither had Fernao’s, and he’d sent his by courier. Could she risk hers in the maelstrom of the mailstream? For all she knew, half the postal workers in Kajaani were Algarvian spies.

  But she hadn’t the faintest idea how to order up a special courier. Maybe she should have told the one who’d brought the letter to wait. Unfortunately, that would have required more forethought than she’d had in her. The head of whatever garrison Kajaani boasted could have told her, but she didn’t want to talk to him. She didn’t want to talk to anyone who didn’t already know what she was involved with.

  Then she smiled. Ilmarinen would know. Siuntio would, too, no doubt, but she still fought shy of bothering him. She didn’t so much with Ilmarinen; he lived both to bother and to be bothered.

  When she attuned her crystal to his, she found his image looking out of the glass at her a moment later. “Well, what now?” he asked. “An assignation, because your husband’s not at home? I can be there in a few hours, if you like.”

  “You are a filthy old man,” Pekka said, to which the senior theoretical sorcerer responded with an enormous grin and a big nod of agreement. Telling herself she should have expected as much, she asked, “How do I go about getting a courier to deliver a letter for me?”

  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.

  Pretty soon, I’ll be ready to go back into the laboratory again, she thought. If Siuntio or Ilmarinen comes up with something interesting, it’ll be sooner yet. Those were notions she’d had several times since she’d started probing the relationship at the heart of the laws of similarity and contagion. Now, though, she had a new one: Iwonder what Fernao is making of this as he catches up to us. She hoped the Lagoan was well and truly impressed. If he wasn’t, he should have been.

  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?

  Ilmarinen will know if the spells are good enough, she thought. Ilmarinen had a raffish distrust of his fellow man Siuntio couldn’t come close to matching. Siuntio was more brilliant, but Ilmarinen lived in-reveled in-the real world.

  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 do? Pekka asked Uto, and then, realizing she wouldn’t get an answer from him, she turned to Elimaki. “What did he do?”

  “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 will not. Do you understand me? It can be very dangerous.”

  “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 end of the wedge: by grinding against the Unkerlanters. They had to be getting thin on the ground, too, but they always seemed to have plenty of soldiers when the battalion tried to go forward.

  And sometimes they tried coming forward themselves. More eggs fell around Trasone. He wanted to hide, to dig down deep in the dirt so no danger could find him. But he knew what was liable to happen when the Unkerlanters started tossing lots of eggs. They wanted the Algatvians to put their heads down, whereupon a wave of infantry in rock-gray tunics would wash over them.

  Sure enough, from off to the left Major Spinello shouted, “Here they come, the bare-faced, bald-arsed buggers!”

  He didn’t need to have cried out. The rhythmic roars of “Urra! Urra!” that rose from the Unkerlanters would have told the Algarvians fighting in the outskirts of Sulingen everything they needed to know. Now Trasone had to peer out from behind his heap of bricks.

  As he’d seen them do outside Aspang, the Unkerlanters were advancing in thick lines, one a few feet behind another. They blazed as they came. Some of diem had linked arms, which helped steady them as they scrambled over the wreckage that had once been houses and shops.

  They hadn’t knocked out all the Algarvian egg-tossers. Eggs caught the footsoldiers out in the open, knocking some of them down, flinging others high into the air, leaving nothing whatever of still others. The eggs tore great holes in the Unkerlanters’ ranks. But Trasone, like his countrymen, had long since learned King Swemmel’s men had very little give in them. The ones who weren’t felled came on. “Urra! Swemmel! Urra!”

  Along with his comrades, Trasone started blazing. Their beams made more Unkerlanters stumble and fall, but other men in rock-gray always rushed up to take the places of those who couldn’t go forward any more.

  Trasone’s mouth went dry. The Unkerlanters were going to break in among the Algarvian troopers. It would be every man for himself then, with numbers counting as much as or more than skill: a melee of blazing and sticks swinging like clubs and knives and fists and teeth. Sometimes the Unkerlanters took prisoners. More often, they slaughtered them. The Algarvians fought the war the same way.

  Trasone had just blazed down another Unkerlanter when several shadows swiftly swept over him. With coughing roars, half a dozen Algarvian dragons flamed Swemmel’s onrushing soldiers. The Unkerlanters could endure eggs. They could endure beams. Watching their friends crisp and blacken, smelling the stink of burnt flesh, was more than they could bear. They broke and fled, or went to earth well outside the Algarvian lines.

  “Forward!” Spinello ordered, and blew a long blast on his officer’s whistle to emphasize the order.

  Wishing the battalion commander would have been content to beat back the Unkerlanter attack, Trasone scrambled out from behind the shelter that had served him so well. Somebody saw him: a beam charred in hole in a sun-bleached board by his head. It could have gone through him instead, and he knew it.

  He threw himself flat behind an overturned wagon. It offered concealment, but not much protection. He looked ahead for a better place. Spying one, he dashed toward it. An Unkerlanter broke cover and started running for the same hole. They saw each other at the same instant. The Unkerlanter started to bring his stick up to his shoulder. Trasone blazed from the hip. The Unkerlanter went down, stick falling from nerveless fingers. Trasone dove into
the hole.

  But the dead enemy’s countrymen attacked again; they truly were saying, Thus far and no farther. Again, Algarvian dragons swooped down on the Unkerlanters. Swemmel’s men could not stand in the face of flame. Those who could fell back.

  Those who couldn’t. . Trasone ran past a shrunken, twisted black doll that had, up till a few minutes before, been a man who wanted to kill him. Now the horrid thing, still smoking, sent up a stink that reminded him of a pork roast forgotten on a hot, hot stove. He spat-and spat black, from all the soot he was breathing in. With a broad-shouldered shrug, he jumped down into a new hole.

  A moment later, Sergeant Panfilo jumped down with him. “You see the dead one back there?” Panfilo asked. Trasone nodded. Panfilo shuddered. “That could have been us, as easy as it was him.”

  “Not quite as easy,” Trasone said. “The Unkerlanters haven’t got a whole lot of dragons down here.”

  “What difference does that make?” Panfilo demanded. “You think our own beasts wouldn’t flame us? They’re too stupid to care who they’re killing, as long as they’re killing somebody.”

  “That’s why they’ve got dragonfliers on their backs,” Trasone pointed out.

  “Aye, so they do-and half the time they’re as stupid as the beasts they ride,” Panfilo said. Trasone chuckled and nodded; he was always ready to listen to slander about anyone who wasn’t a footsoldier.

  Before Panfilo could add to the slander, Spinello’s whistle blew an urgent blast. “Be ready, boys!” he called.

  “Ready for what?” Trasone asked.

  “More counterattacks,” the major answered. “Crystal says they’re sending lots of men up over the Wolter from the south bank. They don’t want us in Sulingen. They don’t want us anywhere near Sulingen. If we can get them out of this place and cross the Wolter ourselves, there’s nothing between us and the Mamming Hills and most of the cinnabar that isn’t in the land of the Ice People.”