In the blink of an eye, the desperate struggle between the Grelzers who’d fought for Swemmel and those who hated him broke out anew in the tavern. The weapons weren’t so fancy as those of the great war still wracking Unkerlant, but that made the battle no less ferocious. People kicked and punched and grappled and bit. Knives flashed in the firelight.
And Garivald and Obilot made their way through the chaos toward the door as best they could. He punched whoever got in his way, regardless of which side the fellow was on. “Let’s see Tantris track us throughthis” he told Obilot, who’d just kicked a man where it did the most good. A savage grin on her face, she nodded.
A jar full of potent spirits flew into the fireplace and smashed. The spirits caught fire as they splashed out. Flames clung to an overturned chair close by. “Fire!” somebody shrieked. Then everybody was fleeing-everybody who could.
Garivald and Obilot weren’t the only ones who ran not just out of the tavern but away from it as fast as they could. “We got away,” she panted. “This time,” he answered, and ran harder.
The sun rose earlier and set later these days. Before long, the equinox would come to the Naantali district. In much of the world, that would mean spring, and so it would here-formally. Pekka was from Kajaani, which lay even farther south. She knew the snow and ice wouldn’t start melting for quite a while after that.
If anything, the weather here was worse than in Kajaani, a port city that had the ocean to soften its climate. In most circumstances, Pekka would have complained about that. Not now. As she rode in the sleigh from the hostel to the blockhouse, she turned to Fernao and said, “I dread the spring thaw.”
She’d spoken Kuusaman. The Lagoan mage nodded and answered in classical Kaunian: “I understand why-all this will turn to mud, and we shall have a demon of a time moving from where we stay to where we need to go to keep on with our experiments.”
“Exactly,” Pekka said. “And we have to go on with the experiments.” That blazed in her. Next to it, nothing else mattered.
The track to the hostel curved. As the horse rounded the bend, the sleigh tilted a little. Under the fur robes that warded them against the weather, Pekka slid toward Fernao. She was very much aware of her body pressed against his for a moment, and wished she hadn’t been quite so aware of it.
It’s harmless, she told herself, not for the first time. Nothing can come of it. That wasn’t quite the same thing, even if it sounded as if it were.
After the sleigh straightened again, Pekka took an extra moment to move away from Fernao. The Lagoan mage raised an eyebrow when she finally did. His eyes were shaped like hers, but green, not dark brown. Was it the combination of strange and familiar that drew her? Or was it just that she worked closely with Fernao every day, while she’d seen Leino for one brief leave since she came to the Naantali district and her husband went off to work on Habakkuk? Whatever it was, it disconcerted her.
She almost wished Fernao would do something overt. Then she could tell him no, as forcefully as necessary, and they could readjust as needed and go on. Of course, he’d saved her life two or three times, from Algarvian sorcerous assault and from her own botched spellcasting-and, this last time, he’d hurled strong sorcery back against Mezentio’s mages. Do I really want to tell him no?
But Fernao hadn’t done anything overt, and didn’t seem likely to. Ambiguity remained. Pekka laughed. It might as well be life, she thought.
“What’s funny?” Fernao asked.
“Nothing, really,” she answered, at which he raised that eyebrow again. Ignoring it, she took her mittened hand out from under the robes to point ahead. “We are almost there,” she said in classical Kaunian.
“So we are,” Fernao agreed. He didn’t expose any part of himself but his eyes to the frigid air. “I wonder how the driver stands it up there, out in the open.”
“We of Kuusamo do not let the cold trouble us quite so much as you do,” Pekka said, which was true-but only to a degree.
When the sleigh stopped, as it did a couple of minutes later, Fernao had no choice but to come forth. The furs he wore were of Kuusaman make; he hadn’t had anything in his own wardrobe to contend against winter in the Naantali district. That wasn’t to say he hadn’t known it’s like before. He remarked, “The only difference between this place and the land of the Ice People is that the sun does come up for a little while here, even in the middle of winter.”
“Er-aye,” Pekka said. The idea that winter could get worse than it did here was horrifying all by itself.
As soon as she got inside the blockhouse, she started to sweat, and started shedding her outdoor clothes one layer at a time. Braziers and, soon, the press of bodies heated the cramped chamber in which she’d incant.
Ilmarinen and Piilis came into the blockhouse together. Ilmarinen had always shared a sleigh withMasterSiuntio, but Siuntio was dead, slain by murderous Algarvian magecraft. Now Ilmarinen rode with the younger theoretical sorcerer. Pekka didn’t know when she would stop missing Siuntio, or if she ever would. Without him, this project would never have begun, would never had gained the backing of the Seven Princes.
Alkio and Raahe came in right behind Ilmarinen and Piilis. The married couple-both solid theoretical sorcerers-were about halfway between Pekka and Ilmarinen in age. Solid, Pekka thought. Aye, they ‘re very solid. So is Piilis. Nothing wrong with their work at all. Were the three of them together a match for Siuntio? Pekka shook her head. She knew better. She wasn’t a match for Siuntio as project leader, either. She also knew that. But she was what they had.
Secondary sorcerers hurried into the blockhouse, too. Some spells protected the animals at the heart of the experiment from freezing before they were needed. Others would transfer the spell Pekka and the other theoretical sorcerers had crafted to the animals when the time came. And with the secondary sorcerers came the protective mages. After two Algarvian attacks, Pekka knew how necessary they were.
But they didn‘t beat back Mezentio ‘s mages the last time, she thought. Fernao did that, Fernao and Ilmarinen and I. Three theoretical sorcerers who shouldn‘t be allowed to work magic like practical wizards. She smiled, recognizing the ironic pride in her thoughts.
The blockhouse had been built with theoretical sorcerers and secondary sorcerers in mind. It hadn’t been built to include the protective mages. When the weather got better, perhaps Pekka could prevail upon the Seven Princes to enlarge it. Meanwhile, people shoved and jostled and stepped on one another’s feet and got in one another’s way.
“Are we ready?” Pekka asked at last. But even herat last proved too soon; the mages were nowhere near ready. When she spoke again, it was in some exasperarion: “Sooner or later, we shall have to go into the field. The Algarvians will not wait for us, and neither will the Gyongyosians.”
Ilmarinen snapped his fingers. “That for the Gongs. They’re honest foes, which means we can beat them without folderol, knock ‘em back across the Bothnian Ocean one island at a time. As soon as the Algarvians started killing Kaunians to make their magecraft mightier, they put themselves beyond the pale.”
Privately, Pekka agreed with him. Even so, she said, “Whichever way we aim the magic, we’ll have to be able to do it in our time. The sooner we learn, the better.”
Not even contrary Ilmarinen could quarrel with that. And Raahe said, “She is right. Let no one complain that we women are slow here.” That made people laugh. More of the mages in the blockhouse were men than women, but only a few more. Kuusamans were emphatically aware of the differences between the sexes but, unlike Lagoans and most folk on the mainland of Derlavai, didn’t think those differences applied to what each sex could do well.
When Pekka asked, “Are we ready?” again, she found that her colleagues were. “Before the Kaunians came, we of Kuusamo were here
…” she said, and her fellow mages-all of them but Fernao-recited the ritual phrases, the phrases that moved them toward readiness for conjuration, along with her.