“Of course not,” the fellow replied. “It is not for me to know such things. It is not for the likes of you to know them, either.” The words weren’t too bad, not coming from a military man. The way he said them … All at once, Cornelu felt something he’d never imagined he would: a small bit of sympathy for the Algarvians fighting Unkerlant.
Fifteen
For the first time since he’d been injured, Fernao forgot the pain of his hurts without distillates of the poppy to help him do it. Work, exciting work, proved an anodyne as effective as drugs. Ever since Grandmaster Pinhiero gave him that first summary of what the Kuusaman mages had done, he’d burned to take part in their experimental program. And now, at last, here he was in Yliharma. Broken leg? Healing arm? He didn’t much care.
Courteously, Siuntio and Ilmarinen and Pekka kept speaking mostly classical Kaunian among themselves as they set up their rows of rats in cages. Fernao wished he understood Kuusaman, to catch what they said in asides in their language. Like a lot of Lagoans, he hadn’t taken his neighbors to the west seriously enough.
He also quickly discovered he hadn’t taken Pekka seriously enough. Siuntio and Ilmarinen? Being in the same sorcerous laboratory as the two of them was an honor in itself. But he didn’t take long to notice that they both deferred-Siuntio graciously, Ilmarinen with bluster masking a peculiar, mocking sort of pride-to the younger theoretical sorcerer.
She said, “In this experiment, we shall align the cages of the related rats in parallel. In the next-”
“Assuming we live to make the next,” Ilmarinen put in.
“Aye.” Pekka nodded. “Assuming. Now, as I was saying, in the next experiment we shall align the cages of the related rats in the reverse order, to see if reversing them will strengthen the spell by emphasizing the inverse nature of the relationship between the Two Laws.”
Ilmarinen preened; he’d discovered that the relationship between the laws of similarity and contagion was inverse, not direct. But he never would have had the insight without the data from Pekka’s seminal-literally, since it had involved acorns-experiment. And Pekka wasn’t bad at coming up with startling insights herself. She hadn’t done a bad job of quashing Ilmarinen there, either.
Fernao said, “I never would have thought of altering the positions of the cages.”
Pekka shrugged. “That is what lies at the heart of experimenting: changing every variable you can imagine. Since we are so ignorant here, we need to explore as wide a range of possibilities as we can.”
“I never would have reckoned that a variable,” Fernao answered. “It would not have occurred to me.”
“It did not occur to me, either,” Siuntio said, “and I have some small experience in the game we are playing.”
“Which game?” Ilmarinen asked. “Embarrassing Pekka?”
“I am not embarrassed,” Pekka said tightly. But she was; Fernao could see as much. His own praise had flustered her, and Siuntio’s rather more. Fernao understood that; praise from the leading theoretical sorcerer of the age would have flustered him, too.
He said, “It is always good to see a theoretical sorcerer who does not have to be told what the apparatus in the laboratory is for.”
That flustered Pekka, too. She said, “I have more luck than anything else in the laboratory. I would sooner be back at my desk. I truly know what I am doing when I am there.”
She meant it. Fernao could see that. He studied her. He didn’t usually find Kuusaman women interesting; next to his own taller, more emphatically shaped countrywomen, they struck him as boyish. As far as her figure went, Pekka did, too. But he’d never known a Lagoan female mage he thought could outdo him. He didn’t just think Pekka could. She already had.
“Shall we get on with it now?” she asked, her voice sharp. “Or shall we keep playing till the Algarvians come up with some new dreadful sorcery and drop Yliharma into the Strait of Valmiera?”
“She is right, of course,” Siuntio said. Fernao nodded. Ilmarinen started to say something. All three of the other mages glared at him. He held his peace. By the startled quality of Siuntio’s smile, that didn’t happen very often.
“Master Siuntio, Master Ilmarinen, you know what we shall undertake here today,” Pekka said, taking the lead. “As always, your task is to support me if I blunder-and I may.” She looked over to Fernao. Had he angered her by calling her a good experimenter? Some theoretical sorcerers were oddly proud of being inept in the laboratory, but he hadn’t taken her for one of those. She went on, “Our Lagoan guest is to aid you as best he can, but with the spell being in Kuusaman, you will have to move first, because he may not realize at once that I have gone astray.”
Ilmarinen said, “If we drop Yliharma into the Strait of Valmiera, that will be a good clue.”
“I do not think we can do that with this experiment,” Pekka said. “Quite.” She shifted to Kuusaman for several rhythmic sentences. Fernao couldn’t have claimed to understand them, but he knew what they were: the Kuusaman claim to be the oldest, most enduring folk in the world. He thought that claim nonsense almost on the order of the Ice People’s belief in gods, but he kept quiet. And then, after a brief pause, Pekka returned to classical Kaunian for two words: “I begin.”
She wasn’t the smoothest incantor Fernao had ever seen, but she was a long way from being the clumsiest. Because the spell was in Kuusaman, he couldn’t tell whether it went as it should-she’d been right about that. But she sounded confident, and both Siuntio and Ilmarinen nodded approval every now and then.
The Kuusamans hadn’t been lying about the magnitude of the forces they were manipulating. Fernao felt that at once. The air of the laboratory seemed to quiver with the energy that built as Pekka chanted on. Ilmarinen and Siuntio weren’t sitting back and taking it easy, either. They quivered, too, with tension. If something went wrong here, it would go horribly wrong. And it would go horribly wrong in the blink of an eye.
Even the rats felt something was strange. The young animals in one row of cages scrabbled frantically at the iron bars, trying to break free. One gnawed at the bars till its front tooth broke with an audible snap! The older rats in the other cages burrowed down into the sawdust and cedar shavings from which they made their nests, as if trying to hide from the building sorcerous storm. It would do them no good, of course, but they didn’t know that. The only knew they were afraid.
Fernao knew he was afraid, too. He realized Ilmarinen and Pekka hadn’t been joking when they talked about generating almost enough sorcerous energy to sink Yliharma in the sea. And that from a few rats.
What would the Algarvians do, he wondered, if they tried this experiment with Kaunian children and grandparents? How much sorcerous energy would that yield? And Swemmel of Unkerlant was already killing his own peasants. Would he worry about killing a few, or more than a few, more? Not likely.
Will there be anything left of the world by the time this cursed war is done? Fernao wondered. The more he saw, the less hope he had.
It was building to a peak. Without understanding the words of the spell, Fernao could tell that from Pekka’s intonation … and from the feeling in the air, like that just before lightning flashes.
Hardly had that thought crossed his mind before Pekka cried out one last word. Lightning did crackle between the rows of cages then, and went on and on. Once, fast as a striking serpent, Siuntio rapped out a word, right in the middle of that spectacular discharge. Fernao couldn’t see that it made any difference, but Ilmarinen patted his fellow mage on the back as if he’d done something more than considerable.