Darkness Descending (91 page)

“Powers above, aid us.” Siuntio’s voice was soft but very clear. He sensed it, too, then. Ilmarinen muttered something. Pekka didn’t think it was anything like a prayer.

Even the rats started scurrying around in their cages. They worked at the doors with clever paws: clever, but not clever enough. The older one squeaked in fright. The younger one burrowed down into the straw at the bottom of his cage and tried to hide.

Pekka didn’t blame him. She wanted to hide, too. The conjuration she’d made before, the one that had started her down this ley line, had been nothing like this. She wondered if some mage in the Kaunian Empire, or during the long, confused time after its fall, had tried a conjuration like this. If so, he hadn’t lived through it—which the ancients would no doubt have termed summoning up a demon too strong to control. That old-fashioned terminology had always made Pekka smile . . . till now. What went through her mind now was,
I
must be mad even for attempting this.
But she shook her head. The world around her had gone mad. She hadn’t. She hoped she hadn’t, anyhow.

She kept on with the spell. She had, by now, gone much too far into it to back out without consequences almost as bad as the ones she was trying to create—and with none of the safeguards her two colleagues could (she hoped) provide if everything went according to plan.

Don’t do anything foolish.
She always told herself that when she went to work magic instead of just working on it. She knew her limits as a practical mage. Because she knew them, and because she knew she was so close to them, she was doubly careful. She could afford a mistake no more than she could afford to try to abandon the conjuration.

“Ahh,” Ilmarinen murmured. For a moment, Pekka, intent on spell and passes, didn’t understand what had pulled that low-voiced exclamation from him. Then she too saw the thin, pale line of light running between the cages that held the two rats. She didn’t smile—she was too busy to smile—but inside she exulted. Theory had predicted that discharge of energies, and theory, so far, was proved right.

As theory had also predicted, the line of light grew brighter with startling speed. Pekka had to squint through narrowed eyes to tolerate the glare. One of the rats—she never knew which one—squeaked in alarm.

If the conjuration didn’t end soon, that light itself might prove enough to wreck the laboratory. Now Pekka worked with her eyes squeezed shut as tight as she could force them, but the brilliance swelled and swelled. She couldn’t turn away, not unless she wanted to turn straight toward ruin. She smelled thunderstorms, as she might have if the beam from a stick passed close to her head. She wished the forces she was challenging were as trivial as that.

For a terrifying instant, she felt heat, heat that made the inside of a furnace seem like the land of the Ice People. The thunderclap that followed almost knocked her off her feet. All the windows in the laboratory broke, spraying shards of glass out onto the lawns.

Silence. Stillness.
I’m alive,
Pekka thought.
I
hope the glass didn’t hurt anyone.
And then,
Professor Heikki will be angry at me for putting all those windows on the department’s budget.
The absurdity of that last thought made her snicker, but didn’t make it any less likely to be true.

The odors of growing grass and of flowers bursting into bloom wafted into the laboratory chamber through the newly unglazed windows. Along with them, Pekka’s nose caught a harsh reek of corruption. One way or another, the experiment had come to completion.

“Let’s see what we’ve got,” Ilmarinen said, echoing her thoughts.

Pekka went to the cage that had housed the older rat. He was still there—after a fashion. She nodded at seeing his moldering remains. Then she walked over to the other cage, the one that held—or rather, had held—his grandson. But for straw and a few seeds, it was empty now.

“Congratulations, my dear,” Siuntio said. “This confirms your experiment with the two acorns, confirms and amplifies it. And, thanks to the refined conjuration and the life energy of the rats, it also confirms we can use this means to release sorcerous energy. And more will come.”

Ilmarinen grunted. “Divergent series. They diverged, all right.”

“Aye,” Pekka said, still looking from one cage to another. “The one went on past the end of his span, the other back before the beginning of his time.” She pointed to the empty cage. “Where is he now? Was he ever truly here? Did he ever truly exist? What would it be like, to be pushed out of the continuum so?”

“Do you want to find out?” Ilmarinen asked. “Experimentally, I mean?”

Pekka shuddered. “Powers above, no!”

One more long day like so many long days. Climbing down from the wagon that had brought him back to Gromheort from labor on the roads, Leofsig wondered if he shouldn’t have picked a different line of work after all. He thought about going to the baths to revive himself, but lacked the energy to walk the couple of blocks out of his way he would have needed to get there.

“Home,” he muttered. “Food. Sleep.” As far as he was concerned, nothing else mattered tonight. Sleep loomed largest of all. If he hadn’t known the Algarvian constables were liable to take him for a drunk and beat him up, he could easily have lain down on the sidewalk and fallen asleep there.

He put one foot in front of the other till he made it to his own front door. But even as he knocked, he heard a commotion inside. He came to alertness. Commotion was liable to mean danger for him or his whole family. If, for instance, Sidroc had got his memory back . . .

Someone in there heard his knock and lifted the bar off its brackets. Leofsig worked the latch and opened the door. And there stood Sidroc, a large, uncharacteristic grin spread over his heavy features. “I’ve finally gone and done it,” he declared.

“Well, good for you,” Leofsig answered. “Done what, now? If it’s what it sounds like, I hope she was pretty.”

His cousin guffawed, but then shook his head. “No, not that, though I won’t have any trouble getting that, too, whenever I want it. I’ve gone and signed up for Plegmund’s Brigade, that’s what I’ve done.”

“Oh,” Leofsig said. “No wonder everybody in there is screaming his head off, then. You can hear the racket out here. Powers above, you can probably hear the racket over in the count’s castle.”

“Wouldn’t surprise me one bit,” Sidroc said. “I don’t care. I made up my mind, and I’m going to do it. Powers below eat the Unkerlanters, and the cursed Kaunians, too.”

“But fighting for Algarve?” Leofsig shook his head. He was too tired to argue as hard as he would have at another time. “Let me by, would you? I want to get some wine and I want to get some supper.”

Now Sidroc said, “Oh,” and stood aside. As Leofsig went past him, he continued, “Not so much fighting for Algarve as fighting for me. I want to go do this. I want to go see what the war is all about.”

“That’s only because you haven’t done it,” Leofsig said, remembering the smell of entrails laid open—and remembering the smell of fear, too.

“You sound like my father,” Sidroc said scornfully.

“He hasn’t done it, either, so he doesn’t know what he’s talking about,” Leofsig answered, relishing the chance to say that about Uncle Hengist. “But I have, and I do, and I’m telling you you’re crazy, too.”

“You can tell me whatever you want. It doesn’t matter worth a sack of beans because I signed the papers this afternoon,” Sidroc said. “Anybody who doesn’t like it can cursed well lump it.”

Leofsig wanted to lump Sidroc. But he also still wanted supper and sleep. And a house without Sidroc in it was liable to be a more peaceable place. So all he said was, “Have it your way,” and walked down the entry hall and turned left into the kitchen.

His mother and sister were in there. “I heard you talking with him,” Elfryth said in a stage whisper. “Fighting for Mezentio after what the redheads have done to our kingdom! The very idea! Did you persuade him not to?”

“No, Mother,” Leofsig answered, and poured himself some wine. “And do you know what else? I didn’t try very hard.”

“Good.” Conberge didn’t bother holding her voice down. “I won’t be sorry to see him out of this house, and nobody can make me say I will. Having him here has been nothing but trouble. If the Algarvians want him, they’re welcome to him, as far as I’m concerned.”

Sidroc must have gone back into the dining room after letting Leofsig in, for more shouts erupted from there: he and Uncle Hengist were going at each other hammer and tongs. Leofsig cocked his head to one side, wanting to catch some of the choicer names they were throwing back and forth. He almost missed his mother saying, “Here—I had a kettle of hot water over the fire waiting for you. You can wash now.”

Reluctantly, he came back to the real world. “Oh. Thank you,” he said, and hoped he didn’t sound too vague.

Conberge set a basin on the floor for him. She and Elfryth headed out of the kitchen to give him privacy in which to wash. Over her shoulder, Conberge said, “Take the pork stew off the fire if it starts to smell like it’s burning.”

“All right.” Leofsig worked the pump handle in the sink to get cold water to mix with what his mother had heated for him. Then he scrubbed away at the dirt and sweat that clung to him. A washrag and a basin didn’t let him do the job he could have at the baths, but he hadn’t had to go out of his way to get here.

His father came into the kitchen while he was drying off. Leofsig didn’t know whether Hestan had been home for a while or just stepped in. His father quickly made that plain: “You’ll have heard the news, I expect.”

“Oh, aye,” Leofsig answered with a nod. “The whole neighborhood will have heard it by now, except for that old deaf man three doors down.”

Hestan chuckled, then sighed. “That would be funny, if only it were funny, if you know what I mean. Sidroc doesn’t want to listen to anybody, though I wish he would.”

“You and Uncle Hengist are the only ones who do,” Leofsig said as another blast of shouts came out of the dining room. “And I thought you’d be glad to see Sidroc gone, from most of the things you’ve said.”

His father sighed again. “I would have been. Powers above, I was, till he said he was really going. After that. . . it’s hard to watch your own kin walk into what can’t be anything but a big mistake.”

“If he goes, Ealstan’s safer,” Leofsig pointed out.

“That’s so,” Hestan said, “but Sidroc hasn’t shown any sign of recalling just what happened there. I never felt safe enough about it to tell Ealstan he could come home, and he probably wouldn’t want to now, not when he’d have to try to bring that girl with him.”

“Vanai,” Leofsig said, remembering how startled he’d been when Ealstan told him her name. “Aye. Now that the redheads are shutting so many of the Kaunians away, how could he bring her back to Gromheort?”

Before Hestan could answer, Sidroc shouted. “Curse you, you old shitter! Powers below eat you! I’m going where I
am
wanted!” A moment later, the door opened and then slammed shut. The whole house shook.

“That seems to settle that,” Leofsig said, and his father nodded. He continued, “I’m sorry, but I’m not sorry, if that makes any sense. I won’t miss him very much, and I’m safer with him gone, too, even if he hasn’t made little sly cracks about turning me in to the Algarvians for a while.”

“I don’t think he ever meant them,” Hestan said. “I hope he never did, I’ll tell you that.”

Leofsig was convinced his cousin
had
thought hard about betraying him to the Algarvian authorities, but held his tongue. Sidroc hadn’t actually done it, and pretty soon he’d get shipped off to Unkerlant. He’d have plenty of more urgent things to worry about there.

Uncle Hengist came into the kitchen. He was Hestan’s younger brother, and the more dapper of the two. Now he looked older than Leofsig’s father, and worn to a nub. “He’s gone,” he said, as if he couldn’t believe it. “He walked out of here. He’s gone.”

“Aye,” Hestan said. Leofsig busied himself with putting away the basin. That way, Uncle Hengist wouldn’t be able to see the look on his face. As he’d said to his father, the whole block knew Sidroc was gone.

“Who would have thought he’d want to go fight for the Algarvians?” Hengist said, though Sidroc had been talking about doing that for months.

And Hengist had had some things to say about the redheads that didn’t sit well with Leofsig, either. “Don’t you think they’re the coming thing anymore, Uncle?” he asked.

His father gave him a look that told him to keep his mouth shut. Uncle Hengist scowled, but answered, “Even if they are, that’s no reason to take up arms for them. They’ve got plenty of soldiers of their own.”

You can’t have it both ways,
was what Leofsig wanted to say. One thing that stopped him was his father’s warning glance, which had got more urgent than ever. The other was remembering that Hengist, like Sidroc, knew he’d escaped from an Algarvian captives’ camp. He didn’t dare push his uncle too far, not when he couldn’t fully trust him.

Hestan said, “Powers above keep the boy safe, Hengist.”

“Boy
is right!” Hengist burst out. “But he’s so cursed sure he’s a man, and how can anyone tell him anything different?”

“He’ll learn,” Hestan said. “You did. I did. Leofsig has. We just hope he doesn’t pay too high a price for his lessons.”

“Easy for you to say,” Uncle Hengist said.

“No, it’s not,” Leofsig’s father answered. “I had a son in the army, the Forthwegian army”—he couldn’t resist the dig, and Hengist’s mouth tightened—”and my other boy’s gone, and who can say what happened to him? No one in Gromheort knows where Ealstan is. He might have fallen off the face of the earth.”

“I never have understood what happened the day he disappeared, Hestan, the day Sidroc got hurt,” Hengist said. “If I did understand it, I think I might have something more to say to you.” He turned on his heel and walked away.

“He’s liable to be more dangerous than Sidroc,” Leofsig said in dismay after his uncle had gone.

“I don’t think so,” Hestan answered, and then, with one more sigh, “I hope not. He has other things than us on his mind right now, anyhow.”