Gathering herself, she said, “Masters, I present to you my husband, Leino, and my son, Uto.” She turned to her family. “Here we have the mages Siuntio and Ilmarinen.”
Leino and Uto bowed again. Leino said, “It is indeed an honor to have two such distinguished men as my guests.” He smiled wryly. “It would be an even greater honor were I privileged to hear what they discuss with my wife, but I understand why that cannot be. Come on, Uto--we’re going next door to visit Aunt Elimaki and Uncle Olavin.”
“Why?” Uto had his eye on Ilmarinen. “I’d rather stay and listen to him. I already know what Auntie and Uncle will do.”
“We can’t listen to these mages and your mother talk, because they’ll be talking about secret things,” Leino said. Pekka thought that only more likely to make Uto want to stay, but her husband retrieved the situation by adding, “These things are so secret, even I’m not supposed to hear about them.”
Uto’s eyes widened. He’d known his parents didn’t--couldn’t--tell each other about everything they did, but he’d never seen that brought home so dramatically. He went with Leino to Pekka’s sister’s house without another word of protest.
“A likely lad,” Ilmarinen said. “Likely to make you want to pitch him into the sea a lot of the time, I shouldn’t wonder, but likely the other way, too.”
“I think you’re right on both counts,” Pekka said. “Sit. Make yourselves comfortable, I pray you. Let me bring refreshments.” She hurried into the kitchen, then returned with bread, sliced smoked salmon and onions and pickled cucumbers, and a pot of ale from Kajaani’s best brewer.
By the time she got back, Siuntio had spectacles on his nose and a Lagoan journal in his hand. He set it aside willingly enough to eat and to accept a mug of golden ale, but his eyes kept sliding over to it. Pekka noticed and said nothing. Ilmarinen noticed and twitted him: “The Lagoans watch us, and so you feel compelled to watch the Lagoans?”
“And what if I do?” Siuntio asked mildly. “This does, after all, touch upon our reason for coming to Kajaani.”
Not even Ilmarinen could find a way to disagree with him. “The vultures gather,” he said. “They clawed at the scraps of what we published. Now that we’ve stopped publishing, they claw at the scraps of what isn’t there.”
“How good a mage is this Fernao?” Pekka asked. “From the questions he asked me in his letter, he knows as much as I did a couple of years ago. The question is, can he ferret out the direction I’ve taken since then?”
“He is a first-rank mage, and he has Grandmaster Pinhiero’s ear back in Setubal,” Siuntio said, sipping at his ale.
“He is a sneaky dog, and would have stolen everything in Siuntio’s belt pouch had the two of them met,” Ilmarinen said. “He tried slitting mine, too, but I’m an old sinner myself and not so easy to befool.”
“He came to us openly and innocently,” Siuntio said. Ilmarinen made a rude noise. Siuntio corrected himself: “Openly, at any rate. But how many mages from how many kingdoms are sniffing at the trail of what we have?”
“Even one could be too many, if he served King Swemmel or King Mezentio,” Pekka said. “We don’t know yet how much power lurks at the heart of this link between the two laws or how to unleash whatever there is, but others with the same idea might pass us on the way, and that would be very bad.”
Ilmarinen looked east. “Arpad of Gyongyos has able mages, too.” He looked west. “And Fernao is not the only good one in the stable of Vitor of Lagoas. Gyongyos hates us because we block her way across the islands of the Bothnian Ocean.”
“Lagoas does not hate us,” Siuntio said.
“Lagoas doesn’t need to hate us,” Ilmarinen answered. “Lagoas is our neighbor, so she can covet what we have without bothering to get excited about it. And we and the Lagoans have fought our share of wars over the years.”
“Lagoas would have to be mad to fight us at the same time as she wars with Algarve,” Pekka said. “We outweigh her even more than Mezentio’s kingdom does.”
“If she were ahead of us on this path you mentioned, that might not matter so much,” Siuntio said.
“And she is at war, and kingdoms at war do crazy things,” Ilmarinen added. “And the Lagoans are cousins to the Algarvians, which gives them a good head start on craziness by itself, if anyone wants to know what I think.”
“Kaunians are proud because they’re an old folk, as we are,” Siuntio said. “Algarvic peoples are proud because they’re new. That doesn’t make them crazy, but it does make them different from us.”
“Anyone who’s enough different from me is surely crazy--or surely sane, depending,” Ilmarinen said.
Pekka declined to rise to that. She went on with Siuntio’s though: “And Unkerlanters are proud because they aren’t Kaunian or Algarvic. And Gyongyosians, I think, are proud because they aren’t like anyone else at all. When it comes to that, they’re like us, but no other way I can think of.”
“They’re much uglier than we are,” Ilmarinen said. Siuntio sent him a reproachful look. He bore up under it. “They cursed well are--those overmuscled bodies, that tawny yellow hair sprouting every which way like dried-out weeds.” He paused. “Their women do look better than their men, I will say that.”
And what do ou know of Gyongyosian women? The question stood on the end of Pekka’s tongue, but she didn’t ask it. Something in Ilmarinen’s expression warned her that he would tell her more than she wanted to hear. He had, after all, been attending mages’ meetings longer than she’d been alive. Instead, she said, “We have to learn more ourselves, and we have to be careful while we’re doing it.”
“Oh, indeed,” Siuntio said. “There you have in the compass of an acorn shell one of the reasons for our journey from Yliharma.”
Ilmarinen glanced over to him. “Aside from gulping down Mistress Pekka’s excellent food and guzzling her ale, I thought that was the reason we came to Kajaani.”
“Not quite,” Siuntio said. “I have been pondering the implications of your truly astonishing insight into the inverse nature of the relationship between die laws of similarity and contagion.” He bowed in his seat. “I would never have thought of such a thing, not if I examined the results of Mistress Pekka’s experiment for a hundred years. But once furnished with the insight that sprang from a mind more clever than mine, I have tried to examine some of the avenues down which we may hope to follow it.”
“Look out,” Ilmarinen said to Pekka. “The more humble he sounds, the more dangerous he is.”
Siuntio took no notice of Ilmarinen. Pekka got the idea that Siuntio had a lot of practice taking no notice of Ilmarinen. From his belt pouch, Siuntio drew out three sheets of paper. He kept one and gave one to each of his fellow theoretical sorcerers. “I hope you will not hesitate to point out any flaws you may find in the reasoning, Mistress Pekka,” he said. “I do not give Ilmarinen the same warning, for I know he will not hesitate.”
“Truth is truth,” Ilmarinen said. “Everything else is fair game.” He donned a pair of spectacles to help him read. After a little while, he grunted. After another little while, he grunted again, louder, and looked over the tops of the spectacles at Siuntio. “Why, you old fox.”
Pekka made slower going of the lines of complex symbols Siuntio had given her. About a third of the way down the closely written sheet, she exclaimed, “But this would mean--” and broke off, for the conclusion to which Siuntio was leading her seemed one only a maniac could embrace.