He scratched his head. Was a flight returning already?
Sergeant Jokai cursed horribly. At last, the curses cooled to coherence: "The slant-eyes have gone and loaded a ship full of dragons. Life just got uglier, aye, it did."
Sure enough, while some of the Gyongyosian dragons arrowed down toward whatever Kuusaman ships lay below Istvan's horizon, others wheeled in a dance of death with the enemy's fliers. When a couple of the great beasts flew back toward Obuda, neither Istvan nor anyone else on the ground knew whether or not to blaze at them.
One was plainly laboring, doing more gliding than stroking with its left wing. It crashed down on to the sand not twenty feet in front of Istvan, which let him see how badly that wing was burned. The blood led flier, a Gyongyosian, staggered toward the trench. "We drove 'em back!" he called, and fell on his face.
A couple of soldiers ran out and scooped him up. SergeantJokal cursed again. "We drove 'em back this time," he said, "on account of we had a surprise to match their surprise, and because we spotted 'em early. But flying dragons off a ship! The Kuusaman bastards have gone and complicated the war, curse 'em to powerloss. " Istvan was suddenly just as well pleased not to have received his initiation into combat, at least from the receiving end.
Pekka looked out at the students filing into the auditorium. It was hardly the biggest hall at Kajaam City College, but that did not dismay her. Theoretical sorcery, unlike the more practical applications of the art, was not a ley line to fame or riches. Without theoretical sorcery, though, no one would ever have realized ley lines existed, let alone figured out how to use them.
She set her hands on the lectern, took a deep breath, and began: before anything else, ritual. "Before the Kaunians' came, we of Kuusamo were here. Before the Lagoans' came, we of Kuusamo were here. After the Kaunians' departed, we of Kuusamo were here. We of Kuusamo are here. After the Lagoans' depart, we of Kuusamo shall be here."
Softly, her students repeated the unadorned but proud phrases. A couple of the students were of Kaunian blood, from VaImiera or Jelgava; another handful were Lagoans. Their inches and beaky features and yet low and auburn hair set them apart from the Kuusaman majority (though some who served the Seven Princes, especially from the eastern part of the realm, might almost have been Lagoans by looks). Regardless of their homelands, they joined in the ritual. If they refused, they did not attend Pekka's lectures.
"Mankind has used the energies manifested and released at power points since long before the beginning of recorded history," she began.
Her students scribbled notes. Watching them amused her. Most of them took down everything she said, even when it was something they already knew. For those who advanced in the discipline, that would end.
Theoretical sorcery was, after all, about the essential, not the accidental in which it was surrounded.
"Only improvements in both the theoretical underpinnings of sorcery and in sorcerous instrumentation have enabled us to advance beyond what was known in the days of the Kaunian Empire," Pekka went on.
She held up an amulet of amber and lodestone, such as a mage might use at sea. "Please note that these phenomena have gone hand in hand.
Improved instruments of magecraft had yielded new data, which, in turn, have forced improvements in theory, making it correspond more closely to observed reality. And new theory has also led to new instruments to exploit and expand upon it."
She turned and wrote on a large sheet of slate behind her the law of similarity - similar causes produce similar effects - and the law of contagion - objects once in contact continue to influence each other at a distance. Like her body, her script was small and precise and elegant.
One of the students in the front row muttered discontentedly to her benchmate: "What does she think we are, morons? They knew that much back in the Kaunian Empire."
Pekka nodded. "Yes, they did know the two laws back in the days of the Empire. Our own ancestors" - like her, the student was of Kuusaman blood - "knew them before the Kaunians crossed the Strait of Valmiera and came to our island. The ancestors of the Gyongyosians discovered them independently. Some of the savages in the distant jungles of equatonal Slaulia and on the island of the Great North Sea know them, too.
Even the shaggy Ice People know them, though they may have learned them from us or from the folk of Derlavai."
The student looked as if she wished she'd never opened her mouth. In her place, Pekka would have wished the same thing. But wishes had no place in theoretical sorcery. Pekka resumed: "What we have here is qualitative, not quantitative. The laws of d in [..may art, ugh, out efore were r the here - ~ i es...] Jelgava thought part of f their similarity and contagion state that these effects occur, but not how they occur or to what degree they occur. That is what we shall be contemplating during the rest of the term.
She covered the sheet of slate with symbols and numbers a couple of times before the lecture ended, pausing to use an old wool rag to wipe it clean before cluttering it once more. When she dismissed the students, one of them came up to her, bowed, and asked, "Mistress Pekka, could you not have cleansed the slate by magecraft instead of bothering with that rag?"
"A mage with a stronger practical bent than mine would have had an easier time of it, but yes, I could have done that." Pekka hid most of her amusement; she got this sort of question about every other term. She could see the followup gleaming in the young man's eyes, and forestalled it: "I use the rag instead of magic because using the rag is easier than any magic I could make. One thing a mage must learn is, that he can do some thing does not necessarily mean he should do it."
He stared at her, his eyes as wide as a Kuusaman's could be, nothing but incomprehension on his face. "What's the point of magic, if not doing things'," he asked.
"Knowing what things to do?" Pekka suggested gently. No, the student did not understand; she could see as much. Perhaps he would begin to by the end of the term. Perhaps not, too, He was very young.
And, being a man, he was likelier to think of limits as things to be overcome than to be respected.
He went off shaking his head. Pekka permitted herself a small smile.
She dealt with a couple of other questions of smaller import, though ones more immediately urgent to the students asking them: matters of text and examinations. And then, as a new group of chattering young men and women began coming into the auditorium for the lecture on crystallography that followed hers, Pekka neatly tucked her notes into a small leather valise and left the hall.
The sun had come out while she was speaking, and puddles from the previous night's rain sparkled, sometimes dazzlingly. Even in summer, though, the sunlight had a watery quality to it. Kuusamo was a land of mists and fogs and drizzles, a land where the sky went from gray to gray ish blue and back again, a land where the rich and brilliant greens of forest and meadow and hillside had to make up for the drabness overhead.
And they did. So everyone in Kuusamo proudly boasted. Pekka was no different from her countrymen in that. But, four or five years before – no, it had to be five, because the war with Gyongyos hadn't started - she'd taken a holiday on the famous golden beaches of northern Jelgava.
Her skin, not far from golden itself, withstood the fierce sun better than the pale hides of the Jelgavans who toasted themselves on the sand. That was one of the memories she'd brought home to Kajaani. Another - and she could still call it up whenever she chose, as if she lay naked on the beach again - was the astonishing color of the sky. Passages of Kaunian poetry that had been obscure suddenly took on new meaning for her.
Here, though, such colors, such heat, were only memories. Kajaani, on the southern coast of Kuusamo, looked out across the Narrow Sea southeast toward the land of the Ice People and straight south toward the endless ice floes at the bottom of the world. Pekka straightened her slim shoulders. She enjoyed remembering Jelgava. She would not have wanted to live there. Kaaani was home.