The Unkerlanters were brave. Trasone had seen that ever since the fighting started. Here and now, it did them little good. A scratch force of cavalry couldn’t hope to stop superior numbers of footsoldiers supported by behemoths. King Swemmel’s men fell back in confusion. Trasone slogged after them. He and his fellow Algarvians were going forward again. All was right with the world.
Pekka went down on one knee, first to Siuntio, then to Ilmarinen, as if they were two of the Seven Princes of Kuusamo. Ilmarinen’s chuckle and the leer that went with it said he knew the ancient significance of that particular gesture of obeisance from a woman to a man. Siuntio surely knew it, too, but was too much a gentleman to show he knew.
And Pekka, by this time, was used to ignoring Ilmarinen at need. “Thank you both, from the bottom of my heart,” she said. “Without you, I don’t think I could have persuaded the illustrious Professor Heikki”--she laced the words with as much sardonic venom as she could; Heikki was a nobody even in veterinary sorcery--”to release the funds to go on with the experiment.”
“Always a pleasure to make a fool look foolish,” Ilmarinen said, rolling his eyes. “Oh, and she is, too.”
Siuntio said, “My dear, I only wish our intervention had been unnecessary.
Were Prince Joroinen among the living, you would have had everything you needed in this laboratory here at the crook of a finger.”
“Aye,” Ilmarinen said. “You ask me, it’s amazing you could get any work done at all in this miserable little hole of a laboratory.”
Before she’d seen the elegant facilities at the university up in Yliharma, Pekka would have bristled at that. Till then, she hadn’t thought Kajaani City College was a bad place to do research. She knew better now, even if the Algarvian attack that had killed Joroinen had also kept her from performing her long-planned experiment.
“We do most of our work inside our heads and can do it anywhere,” Siuntio said with a chuckle: “the advantage of theory over practice. We only need the laboratory to see that we’ve done our sums correctly.”
“Or, more often, that we’ve done ‘em wrong,” Ilmarinen put in. Siuntio chuckled again, this time on a note of wry agreement.
Pekka was too nervous to chuckle. Like any theoretical sorcerer, she knew her limits in the laboratory, and knew she was going to have to transcend them. “Let’s see what happens when we use the divergent series,” she said, her voice harsh. Bowing to her senior colleagues, she went on, “You both know what I’m going to do--and you both know what you’ll have to do if things go wrong.”
“We do,” Siuntio said firmly.
“Oh, aye, indeed we do.” Ilmarinen nodded. “The only thing we don’t know is whether we’ll be able to do it before things get too far out of control for anybody to do anything.” His smile showed stained, snaggly teeth. “Of course, like I said, we do the experiment to find out what else we’ve done wrong.”
“That isn’t the only reason,” Siuntio said with a touch of reproof.
Before the two distinguished old men could start snapping and barking again, Pekka repeated, “Let’s see what happens. Take your places, if you please. And no more talking unless it’s life or death. If you distract me, that’s just what it’s liable to be.”
She wished Leino were down here with her instead of working on his own projects somewhere else in this rambling, sprawling building. Her husband was all business when he went into the laboratory. But, being all business, he cared little for theory, and theory was what counted here. One more thing to worry about: if the theory was wrong and the experiment went disastrously awry, she might take him with her in her own failure.
If she did, though, she’d never know it.
Looking from Siuntio to Ilmarinen, she asked, “Are you ready?” It was an oddly formal question: she knew they were, but until they acknowledged as much, she would do nothing. Siuntio’s response was also formal; he dipped his head, a gesture halfway between a nod and a bow. Ilmarinen simply nodded, but his expression held no mockery now. He was as alive with curiosity as either of his colleagues.
Pekka went to the cage of one of the rats she’d selected. She carried the cage over to one of the white tables in the laboratory. After she stepped away, Siuntio came up and, peering through his spectacles, read the rat’s name and identification number. Pekka solemnly repeated them and wrote them down, then pulled another cage off the shelf. She carried this one to an identical table and set it there. Now Ilmarinen stepped forward to read the beast’s name and number.
Again Pekka repeated them and set them in her journal. She said, “For the record, be it noted that the specimens are grandfather and grandson.” She wrote that down, too.
Siuntio said, “Be it also noted that this experiment, unlike others we have attempted before, uses a spell with divergent elements to explore the inverse relationship between the laws of similarity and contagion.” Pekka also set that down in the journal.
Ilmarinen said, “Be it further noted that we don’t know what in blazes we’re doing, that we’re liable to find out the hard way, and that, if we do, they won’t find enough pieces of us to put on the pyre, let alone the precious experimental diary Mistress Pekka is keeping there.”
“And be it noted that I’m not writing a word of that,” Pekka said. Ilmarinen blazed her an impudent grin. She felt like blazing him, too, with the heaviest stick she could find.
“Enough,” Siuntio said. Sometimes--not always--he was able to abash Ilmarinen, not the least of his sorcerous abilities. The other senior theoretical sorcerer quieted down now, even if Pekka doubted he was abashed.
“I begin,” Pekka said. Then she spoke the ritual words any Kuusaman mage used before commencing a spell. They helped calm her. Kuusamo would go on even if she didn’t, just as it had gone on for the millennia before she was born. Reminding herself helped take the edge off her nerves.
She started to incant, her voice rising and falling, speeding and slowing, in the intricate rhythms of the spell she and her fellow theoreticians had crafted. It wasn’t the same version of the spell as she had begun to use in Yliharma when the Algarvians struck. Since then, she and Ilmarinen and Siuntio had gone over it line by line, pruning here, strengthening there, doing their best to see that no error remained in either the words of the spell or the passes she made while chanting.
Spring in Kajaani was none too warm, but sweat sprang out on Pekka’s face. She could feel the energies she was trying to summon and control. They were strong, strong. Every calculation had said they would be, but the distance between knowing and understanding had never felt greater.
“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.