With that settled, Pekka claimed a room on the ground floor. It too was about as far removed from the comfort and elegance of the Principality as it could be. It had a cot-with, she saw, plenty of thick wool blankets-a chest of drawers, a stool, and a small bookshelf filled with standard sorcerous reference books. That last was a nice touch, and almost made up for the basin and pitcher that stood on the dresser and the lidded chamber pot under the iron bed. She couldn’t have had a stronger reminder that they were out in the countryside.
Still shaking her head in bemusement, Pekka went out and got her trunk. She manhandled it back into the hostel, doing her best not to get in the way of the secondary sorcerers, who were bringing cage after cage in out of the cold. Fernao managed to get his own case inside and said something in Lagoan. “What was that?” Pekka asked.
“It does not translate into Kaunian, I am afraid,” he replied in the classical tongue. “I said, ‘If I live out of my trunk any longer, I shall turn into an elephant.’ “
Pekka scratched her head. “You are right. It does not translate. I do not understand at all.”
“In Lagoan, the word for a piece of luggage like this and the word for an elephant’s nose sound the same,” Fernao explained. “It is a pun-not a very-good one, I fear.”
“I see.” Pekka sighed. “Any joke where you need an explanation will not be fanny afterwards.”
“A great and profound philosophic truth,” Fernao said. “Do you not feel as if we have fallen back through time to the days of the Kaunian Empire? Here we are, speaking the old language, getting all our light from fire, without even a proper privy to our names.”
“I do think that,” Pekka said, “till I also think of the sorcery we will be trying before long. They would not have imagined the like in the days of the Empire-and how lucky they were not to have to worry about it.”
“I feel no power point close by,” Fernao said. “That will make the magic harder to bring off. We shall have to put all the initial energy into it ourselves.”
“Which may be just as well,” Pekka remarked, “considering how easily it can get out of hand.” Fernao did not argue with her.
After supper-plain food plainly cooked-Pekka was studying in her own room and making a hard job of it by candlelight, when someone knocked on the door. She opened it. There stood Fernao, by Kuusaman standards almost forbiddingly tall. “I would like to review some of the things we will be undertaking,” he said. “Do you mind?”
Pekka considered. The Lagoan mage did not look as if he had anything else in mind. She stepped aside. “No. Come in.”
“I thank you.” He perched on the stool, a gangly, redheaded stork.
Pekka wished Leino were there instead. Loneliness pierced her like iron, like ice. But her husband, these days, had worries of his own. “Where shall we begin?” she asked.
“I have found that the beginning is often the best place,” Fernao replied, his voice perfectly serious.
Leino might have said the very same thing, the only difference being that he would have used Kuusaman, not classical Kaunian. Pekka snorted, as she would have with Leino. Hearing Fernao say something her husband might have made part of her less lonely, part of her more. “Very well,” she said. “From the beginning.”
Fernao supposed it was possible that the wild southern uplands of Lagoas held districts as barren and deserted as Naantali. But those districts, if they existed, would surely have been much smaller. The journey to the hostel in the middle of nowhere had driven home to him how much larger than his own kingdom Kuusamo was.
And now he and the Kuusaman mages with whom he was working and the animal handlers and the team of secondary sorcerers in charge of the apparatus were on the move again. He was quite certain no one in Lagoas traveled by reindeer-drawn sleigh these days. But the sleighs slid smoothly over the snow, and the reindeer seemed more nearly tireless than horses would have been.
Things could be worse, he reminded himself. The Kuusamans could have tamed camels. But the only specimens of those ill-tempered beasts on the island Kuusamo and Lagoas shared dwelt in zoological gardens. Having become more intimately acquainted with camels than he’d ever wanted to down on the austral continent, Fernao missed them not at all.
Beside him, Pekka said, “If we have not got enough empty land for the experiment here, there is no kingdom save Unkerlant that has got enough.”
“I think we will be all right,” Fernao answered. That would have been sarcasm, except none of the three Kuusaman mages seemed to think such jokes were funny. They took this conjuration very seriously indeed. If they got the energy release they’d calculated, they had reason to take it seriously, too. If. Fernao was still not altogether convinced they would.
He shifted in the sleigh, trying to get his healing leg somewhere close to comfortable. The Kuusaman physicians had promised the cast could come off when he got back to Yliharma. He’d stay on crutches for a while after that, though, while the wasted muscles now under plaster got back their strength.
“Is it troubling you?” Pekka asked.
“A little,” he answered. “It is not too bad, though, not really. Not nearly so bad as it was just after it was broken.” The potions he’d swallowed left his memories of those days blurry, but not blurry enough.
“I am glad you are healing,” Pekka told him.
“So am I, now that you mention it,” Fernao said, which made her laugh. He was also glad the two of them traveled in the same sleigh. Ilmarinen still famed with resentment over his presence, like a volcano warning it might erupt at any time. Siuntio would have been a more congenial companion, but his intellect intimidated Fernao more than he was willing to admit, even to himself.
He glanced over toward Pekka. He could see hardly anything but her eyes; she had her fur hat pulled down low on her forehead and the fur robe pulled up over her nose. No matter how little he could see of her, though, he knew she was prettier than Siuntio and Ilmarinen put together.
“I wonder what it would be like,” she said, “to live out your days as a nomad in this kind of country.”
Fernao had had his fill of nomads, as of camels, down in the land of the Ice People. “Unpleasant,” he said at once. “For one thing, consider how seldom you would have the chance to bathe.”
Pekka’s nose must have wrinkled; the fur robe stirred a little. “If it is the same to you, I would rather not,” she said.
Before Fernao could mention any other reasons why he didn’t care for the nomad’s life, the sleighs stopped in the middle of a stretch of snow-covered waste not visibly different from the snow-covered waste over which they’d been traveling for the past couple of hours. “This is the place,” the driver said in Kuusaman. Fernao was beginning to understand the language of Lagoas’ eastern neighbors, though he still made a hash of it when he tried speaking.
“Now we shall see what we shall see.” Excitement crackled in Pekka’s voice. “Do we have something here, or have we spent a goodly sum of the Seven Princes’ money for nothing?”
They did not see quite on the instant. The animal handlers set up wooden racks to hold the cages of the beasts that would be involved in this exploration of what lay at the bottom of the way the world worked. As the handlers set the cages on the racks, some of the secondary sorcerers started the spells that would keep the rats and rabbits from freezing to death before the main magecraft began.
“Over this way,” called the Kuusaman who’d driven Siuntio and Ilmarinen out here. Fernao made his way through the snow, planting his crutches and his broken leg with great care. Pekka paced along beside him. He didn’t know whether she could save him if he started to slip, but she plainly intended to try.