"You know what they are," Ilmarinen said. "You all know what they are. You just don't want to admit it. Even when you've had your noses rubbed in it, you don't want to believe it. b.l.o.o.d.y cowards, the lot of you."

"I believe it," Fernao said. "I want to find out what we can do with it."

To Pekka's surprise, Ilmarinen beamed. "Well, what do you know? Maybe you're not worthless after all." The only thing different Fernao had done was agree with him for two sentences. Contemplating that, Pekka had all she could to not to laugh out loud. Aye, in many ways, Ilmarinen and her little son Uto were very much alike.

Cornelu's leviathan snapped up a squid. Life of all sorts teemed in the chilly waters of the Narrow Sea. Despite his rubber suit, despite the magecraft that helped ward him, those waters felt unusually chilly today. Maybe that was his imagination. Imagination or not, the Sibian exile wished his Lagoan masters had picked a warmer season of the year to send him forth.

Whenever the leviathan surfaced, Cornelu looked around warily. In these waters, the Algarvian navy and Algarvian dragonfliers reigned supreme. Sailors and men on dragons who served King Mezentio might well take him for one of their own. He hoped they would, but he intended to do his best to disappear if they didn't.

He was particularly careful when he crossed a ley line. Whenever his amulet detected the thin stream of sorcerous energy that formed part of the world grid, he used it to search for nearby ships. He hadn't found one yet, but that didn't make him stop looking. If he wanted to get back to Setubal, being careful was a good idea.

"And I do want to get back to Setubal," he told his leviathan. The great beast kept on swimming; had it been a man, it would have shrugged. Without a doubt, it was happier out in the open ocean.

But then, it wasn't seeing Janira. When he was in Setubal, Cornelu went back to the eatery where she worked every chance he got. He'd taken her to a music hall and to the unicorn races. He'd kissed her--once. Only now that he was going to be away from her for a long time did he realize how smitten he'd become.

It wasn't just that he could speak his own language and have her understand. It wasn't just that he was desperately looking for a woman after Costache's betrayal. He told himself it wasn't, anyhow. He hoped it wasn't.

With a tap, he urged the leviathan to stand on its flukes, to extend his horizon as it lifted its front end--and him--out of the water. There to the north was the mainland of Derlavai. He knew the little spit of land that stuck out toward him--it lay just west of Lungri, a coastal town in the Duchy of Bari. After the Six Years' War, Bari had been split off from Algarve and made self-ruling, but it was Algarvian again now. Its return to Algarvian allegiance had touched off the Derlavaian War.

Cornelu urged the leviathan farther south. He wanted to be sure he gave the headlands of Yanina, which thrust far out into the Narrow Sea, a wide berth. The closer he came to land, the closer he was likely to come to trouble. He didn't want trouble, not on this journey. He wasn't hunting downed Algarvian dragonfliers, or Algarvian floating fortresses, either. He had a delivery to make. Once he did, he could hurry back to Setubal.

As he'd hoped he would, he got round the Yaninan headlands before the sun set in the northwest. It stayed above the horizon less every day, an effect magnified by the high southerly lat.i.tudes in which he found himself. Farther south, down in the land of the Ice People, it would stop rising at all before long.

His leviathan slept in catnaps. He wished he could do the same, but no such luck. Long journeys on leviathan back often got longer because the beasts went their own way when the men who rode them slept. Sometimes they carried two riders on long voyages, to make sure that didn't happen. The Lagoans hadn't seen fit to give Cornelu a comrade. He wondered what that said about the importance of the mission they'd given him.

Even more to the point, he wondered what the Unkerlanters would think it said about the importance of the mission the Lagoans had given him. Nothing good, unless he missed his guess. He shrugged. He was following the orders he'd been given. The Unkerlanters were and always had been great ones for following orders. How could they blame him?

After he woke, the first thing he did was look for the moon. It was setting in the west ahead of him, casting a silvery streak of radiance across the sea. He patted the leviathan. "Have you been swimming this way all the time I've been asleep?" he asked it. "I hope you have. It'll make things easier."

The leviathan didn't answer. It just kept on swimming. That was the purpose for which the powers above had shaped it, and it admirably fulfilled its purpose.

Not long after the sun rose, he had his first anxious moment. The leviathan came upon a fishing boat flying the red-and-white banner of Yanina. It was a sailboat, and used no sorcerous energy, so Cornelu didn't detect it till he saw it. His mouth tightened. The Algarvians, sneaky wh.o.r.esons that they were, had invaded Sibiu with a great fleet of sailing ships, and sneaked into his kingdom's harbors precisely because no one had imagined an a.s.sault not based on magecraft.

But the Yaninans, even though they didn't use the world's energy grid, proved to have some sorcery aboard their boat. As soon as they saw him--or, more likely, saw his leviathan--they ran to an egg-t.o.s.s.e.r at the stern of the fishing boat, swung it toward him, and let fly.

It wasn't much of an egg-t.o.s.s.e.r; the boat wasn't big enough to carry much of an egg-t.o.s.s.e.r. The egg the Yaninans lobbed fell far short, bursting about halfway between the boat and Cornelu's leviathan. They didn't seem to care-- they promptly launched another one at him.

"All right!" he exclaimed. "I believed you the first time." He swung the leviathan on a course that steered well clear of the fishing boat. The Yaninans couldn't possibly have been worrying about Lagoans in these waters. Maybe they feared he was an Unkerlanter. But, for all they knew, he might have been one of their own. They hadn't tried to find out. They'd just tried to get rid of him. And they'd done it, too.

Once he'd left them behind, he laughed. They were probably telling themselves what a great bunch of heroes they were. By everything the war had shown, the Yaninans were better at telling themselves they were heroes than at really playing the role.

Early the next morning, the leviathan brought Cornelu into the Unkerlanter port of Rysum. A ley-line patrol boat and a couple of Unkerlanter leviathans paced him into the harbor. A dragon flew overhead, eggs slung under its belly. He'd told King Swemmel's men who he was and where he'd come from. They were supposed to know he was coming. Considering the war they were fighting with Algarve, he didn't suppose he could blame them for suspecting him, but he thought they were carrying those suspicions further than they had to.

Rysum wasn't much of a port. None of Unkerlant's ports on the Narrow Sea was much, not by the standards prevailing farther east. They all iced over several months a year. That kept them from matching their counterparts in Yanina and Algarve, which lay more to the north. Rysum wouldn't stay clear much longer.

As soon as Cornelu climbed a rope ladder up onto the pier by which his leviathan rested, a squad of soldiers ran up and aimed sticks at him. "I am your friend, not your enemy!" he said in cla.s.sical Kaunian--he spoke not a word of Unkerlanter.

Anywhere in eastern Derlavai--even in Algarve, which slaughtered Kaunians to fuel its sorceries--he would have found someone who understood the old language. Not here; the Unkerlanters, squat and dumpy in their long, baggy tunics, jabbered back and forth in their own guttural tongue.

He could have spoken to them in Algarvian. He held back, fearing that would get him blazed down on the spot. And then an Unkerlanter officer spoke Algarvian to him: "Do you understand me?"

"Aye," he answered in some relief. "I am Commander Cornelu of the Sibian Navy, an exile serving out of Setubal in Lagoas. Are you not expecting me? Why are you all acting like I'm an egg that's about to burst and fling this place to those hills yonder?" He pointed north and west, toward the low hills that crinkled the horizon there.

"What do you know of the Mamming Hills?" the Unkerlanter rapped out.

"Nothing," Cornelu said. After a moment, he remembered the cinnabar mines in those hills, but he got the idea that changing his answer would not make the officer glowering at him happy. He kept quiet.

That proved a good idea. The Unkerlanter said, "What have you brought us?"

"I don't even know. What I don't know, I couldn't have told Mezentio's men," Cornelu said. "I did hear the Kuusamans gave it to the Lagoans. The Lagoans gave it to me, and now I am giving it to you."

"The Kuusamans, you say?" The Unkerlanter officer brightened; this time, Cornelu had managed to say the right thing. "Aye, that accords with my briefing. We will take it from your leviathan." He started giving orders to the soldiers in his own language."

Cornelu didn't know what he was saying, but could make a good guess. "They'll get eaten if they try," he warned.

"Then we will kill the leviathan and take it anyhow," the Unkerlanter answered, as if it were all the same to him--and it probably was.

It wasn't all the same to Cornelu. If anything happened to the leviathan, he'd be stuck in southern Unkerlant for the rest of his days. Comparing exile in Setubal to exile in Rysum reminded him of the difference between bad and worse. "Wait!" he exclaimed. "If you let me, I'll go down there and get it for you myself."

"You should have brought it up with you," the officer said grumpily.

"You might have thought it was an egg and blazed me," Cornelu said. "Now will you trust me to do what needs doing?"

Every line of the Unkerlanter's body proclaimed that trusting a foreigner-- especially a foreigner who spoke Algarvian and looked like an Algarvian--was the last thing he wanted to do. But, his heavy features clotted with suspicion, he gestured toward the rope ladder and said, "All right, go on--do this. But do it with great care, or I am not liable for what will happen to you next."

Moving slowly and carefully, Cornelu climbed down the rope ladder. His leviathan swam toward him as he dropped into the cold water. He took the small pack attached to the leviathan's harness. It was small, aye, but it was heavy; Cornelu had to swim hard to get back to the ladder with it strapped to his back. Climbing up with the added weight wasn't any fun, either, but he managed.

He set the oiled-leather pack on the pier. "Move away from it!" the Unkerlanter officer said sharply. Cornelu obeyed. The Unkerlanter spoke in his own language again. One of the soldiers came up and put the pack on his own broad back while the rest covered him. He walked up the pier and onto dry land.

Once the soldier got off the weathered planks, the officer relaxed a little. He even unbent so far as to ask, "Do you need food for your voyage east?" When Cornelu nodded, the officer barked orders. Another soldier ran off and returned with smoked fish and hard sausage--the sort of fare that wouldn't suffer much from salt water.

"My thanks," Cornelu said, though he already had enough to do well unless the leviathan wandered very badly while he slept. He had fresh water and to spare. Waving in the direction the Unkerlanter with the pack had gone, he asked the officer, "Do you know what's supposed to be in there?"

"Of course not," the fellow replied. "It is not for me to know such things. It is not for the likes of you to know them, either." The words weren't too bad, not coming from a military man. The way he said them ... All at once, Cornelu felt something he'd never imagined he would: a small bit of sympathy for the Algarvians fighting Unkerlant.

Fifteen.

For the first time since he'd been injured, Fernao forgot the pain of his hurts without distillates of the poppy to help him do it. Work, exciting work, proved an anodyne as effective as drugs. Ever since Grandmaster Pinhiero gave him that first summary of what the Kuusaman mages had done, he'd burned to take part in their experimental program. And now, at last, here he was in Yliharma. Broken leg? Healing arm? He didn't much care.

Courteously, Siuntio and Ilmarinen and Pekka kept speaking mostly cla.s.sical Kaunian among themselves as they set up their rows of rats in cages. Fernao wished he understood Kuusaman, to catch what they said in asides in their language. Like a lot of Lagoans, he hadn't taken his neighbors to the west seriously enough.

He also quickly discovered he hadn't taken Pekka seriously enough. Siuntio and Ilmarinen? Being in the same sorcerous laboratory as the two of them was an honor in itself. But he didn't take long to notice that they both deferred--Siuntio graciously, Ilmarinen with bl.u.s.ter masking a peculiar, mocking sort of pride--to the younger theoretical sorcerer.

She said, "In this experiment, we shall align the cages of the related rats in parallel. In the next--"

"a.s.suming we live to make the next," Ilmarinen put in.

"Aye." Pekka nodded. "a.s.suming. Now, as I was saying, in the next experiment we shall align the cages of the related rats in the reverse order, to see if reversing them will strengthen the spell by emphasizing the inverse nature of the relationship between the Two Laws."

Ilmarinen preened; he'd discovered that the relationship between the laws of similarity and contagion was inverse, not direct. But he never would have had the insight without the data from Pekka's seminal--literally, since it had involved acorns--experiment. And Pekka wasn't bad at coming up with startling insights herself. She hadn't done a bad job of quashing Ilmarinen there, either.

Fernao said, "I never would have thought of altering the positions of the cages."

Pekka shrugged. "That is what lies at the heart of experimenting: changing every variable you can imagine. Since we are so ignorant here, we need to explore as wide a range of possibilities as we can."

"I never would have reckoned that a variable," Fernao answered. "It would not have occurred to me."

"It did not occur to me, either," Siuntio said, "and I have some small experience in the game we are playing."

"Which game?" Ilmarinen asked. "Embarra.s.sing Pekka?"

"I am not embarra.s.sed," Pekka said tightly. But she was; Fernao could see as much. His own praise had fl.u.s.tered her, and Siuntio's rather more. Fernao understood that; praise from the leading theoretical sorcerer of the age would have fl.u.s.tered him, too.

He said, "It is always good to see a theoretical sorcerer who does not have to be told what the apparatus in the laboratory is for."

That fl.u.s.tered Pekka, too. She said, "I have more luck than anything else in the laboratory. I would sooner be back at my desk. I truly know what I am doing when I am there."

She meant it. Fernao could see that. He studied her. He didn't usually find Kuusaman women interesting; next to his own taller, more emphatically shaped countrywomen, they struck him as boyish. As far as her figure went, Pekka did, too. But he'd never known a Lagoan female mage he thought could outdo him. He didn't just think Pekka could. She already had.

"Shall we get on with it now?" she asked, her voice sharp. "Or shall we keep playing till the Algarvians come up with some new dreadful sorcery and drop Yliharma into the Strait of Valmiera?"

"She is right, of course," Siuntio said. Fernao nodded. Ilmarinen started to say something. All three of the other mages glared at him. He held his peace. By the startled quality of Siuntio's smile, that didn't happen very often.

"Master Siuntio, Master Ilmarinen, you know what we shall undertake here today," Pekka said, taking the lead. "As always, your task is to support me if I blunder--and I may." She looked over to Fernao. Had he angered her by calling her a good experimenter? Some theoretical sorcerers were oddly proud of being inept in the laboratory, but he hadn't taken her for one of those. She went on, "Our Lagoan guest is to aid you as best he can, but with the spell being in Kuusaman, you will have to move first, because he may not realize at once that I have gone astray."

Ilmarinen said, "If we drop Yliharma into the Strait of Valmiera, that will be a good clue."

"I do not think we can do that with this experiment," Pekka said. "Quite." She shifted to Kuusaman for several rhythmic sentences. Fernao couldn't have claimed to understand them, but he knew what they were: the Kuusaman claim to be the oldest, most enduring folk in the world. He thought that claim nonsense almost on the order of the Ice People's belief in G.o.ds, but he kept quiet. And then, after a brief pause, Pekka returned to cla.s.sical Kaunian for two words: "I begin."

She wasn't the smoothest incantor Fernao had ever seen, but she was a long way from being the clumsiest. Because the spell was in Kuusaman, he couldn't tell whether it went as it should--she'd been right about that. But she sounded confident, and both Siuntio and Ilmarinen nodded approval every now and then.

The Kuusamans hadn't been lying about the magnitude of the forces they were manipulating. Fernao felt that at once. The air of the laboratory seemed to quiver with the energy that built as Pekka chanted on. Ilmarinen and Siuntio weren't sitting back and taking it easy, either. They quivered, too, with tension. If something went wrong here, it would go horribly wrong. And it would go horribly wrong in the blink of an eye.

Even the rats felt something was strange. The young animals in one row of cages scrabbled frantically at the iron bars, trying to break free. One gnawed at the bars till its front tooth broke with an audible snap! The older rats in the other cages burrowed down into the sawdust and cedar shavings from which they made their nests, as if trying to hide from the building sorcerous storm. It would do them no good, of course, but they didn't know that. The only knew they were afraid.

Fernao knew he was afraid, too. He realized Ilmarinen and Pekka hadn't been joking when they talked about generating almost enough sorcerous energy to sink Yliharma in the sea. And that from a few rats.

What would the Algarvians do, he wondered, if they tried this experiment with Kaunian children and grandparents? How much sorcerous energy would that yield? And Swemmel of Unkerlant was already killing his own peasants. Would he worry about killing a few, or more than a few, more? Not likely.

Will there be anything left of the world by the time this cursed war is done? Fernao wondered. The more he saw, the less hope he had.

It was building to a peak. Without understanding the words of the spell, Fernao could tell that from Pekka's intonation ... and from the feeling in the air, like that just before lightning flashes.

Hardly had that thought crossed his mind before Pekka cried out one last word. Lightning did crackle between the rows of cages then, and went on and on. Once, fast as a striking serpent, Siuntio rapped out a word, right in the middle of that spectacular discharge. Fernao couldn't see that it made any difference, but Ilmarinen patted his fellow mage on the back as if he'd done something more than considerable.

At last, the lightnings faded. Pekka slumped, and held herself up by hanging on to the table in front of which she stood. "Well, we got through another one," she said in a gravelly voice. Through dazzled eyes, Fernao saw the sweat on her forehead, saw the skin stretched tight on her high cheekbones. Casting that spell looked to have aged her five years, maybe ten.

Fernao started to say something, but drew in a breath and coughed. The breath was ripe--rank--with the odor of corruption. Ilmarinen coughed, too, coughed and said, "We ought to do more work with the windows open."

"Or else work with a convergent series," Siuntio put in.

"These are the older animals?" Fernao asked.

"A lot older now," Ilmarinen said. "Actually, you're smelling the way they were a while ago, so to speak. They don't stink at all now; they're long past that."

"I... see," Fernao said slowly. "This is what the mathematics said you would be doing, but seeing the mathematics is not the same as seeing the thing itself."

"It should be." Siuntio's voice held a touch of disapproval.

He was a master mage indeed, a master at a level to which Fernao could only aspire. If he truly did see the mathematics and the reality as one and the same--and Fernao was willing to believe he did--his powers of visualization were also well beyond those of the Lagoan mage. Somewhat cowed, Fernao said, "And what of the younger rats?"

Siuntio clucked again. He said, "You know what the mathematics say. If you must have the confirmation, examine their enclosures."

"Aye, Master," Fernao said with a sigh. He knew what he would find when he walked over to that row of cages, and find it he did: they were empty. There was no sign that rats had ever lived in them. He whistled, one soft, low note. " Were they ever really there? Where did they go?"

"They're gone now, by the powers above--that's where the energy discharge came from," Ilmarinen said. "And suppose you define real for me, when you've got a year you're not doing anything else with." No, he had no trouble being colloquially rude in cla.s.sical Kaunian.

"In any case, where--or when--they may have gone is mathematically undefined, and so must be meaningless," Siuntio said.

Femao made a discontented noise, down deep in his throat. "I have not been through the calculations as thoroughly as you have, of course, but this solution does not strike me as if it ought to be undefined."

Pekka stirred. She didn't seem quite so ravaged as she had just after she finished the spell. "I agree," she said. "I believe there is a determinate solution to the question. If we can find it, I believe it will be important."

"I've looked. I haven't found one," Ilmarinen said. He didn't say, If I can't find one, it isnat there, but that was what he meant.

"It may be just as well if we don't look too hard," Siuntio said. "The implications of the convergent series are alarming enough--how long before mages start robbing the young of time to give to the old and rich and vicious? But if you youngsters are right, the possibilities from the divergent series are even worse."

"More paradoxical, certainly," Pekka said. Fernao thought about the young rats. He nodded. The Kuusaman mage had found the right word.

"Sorcery abhors paradox." Siuntio's voice was prim.

"Most of the sorcerers here at the university abhor us," Ilmarinen said. "We scare them to death, too: almost literally, after a couple of our experiments. This one didn't even break any windows; we're getting better control. Shall we go celebrate living through another one with some food and some spirits?"

"Aye!" Pekka said, as if he'd thrown her a cork float while she was drowning. Siuntio nodded. So did Fernao. But he ate and drank absently, for the distinction between the real world and the world of calculation blurred in his mind. By Pekka's abstracted expression, he thought her mind was going down the same ley line as his. He wondered if it led anywhere.

Trasone stood on the northern bank of the Wolter and looked across the river toward the Mamming Hills beyond. He couldn't see much of the hills; snow flurries cut his vision short. Chunks of drift ice floated down the Wolter toward the Narrow Sea.

Here in Sulingen, the snow that stuck on the ground was gray, ranging toward black. So much of the city had burned as the Algarvians battled block by block to seize it from King Swemmel's men. Trasone turned to Sergeant Panfilo, who stood a few feet away. He waved a magnificent, all-encompa.s.sing Algarvian wave. "It's ours at last!" he shouted. "Isn't that b.l.o.o.d.y fornicating wonderful?"

"Oh, aye, it's terrific, all right." Panfilo pointed east. "We still haven't got quite all of it." Fresh smoke rose from the pockets where Unkerlanter soldiers still stubbornly hung on. The sergeant turned away from them, back toward the parts of Sulingen the Algarvians had won. Fresh smoke rose from them, too, here and there--Unkerlanter dragons and egg-t.o.s.s.e.rs kept reminding the Algarvians the war went on. Panfilo gestured in disgust. "It wasn't supposed to be a fight about Sulingen. We were supposed to take this place and then go on to the cursed hills and the cinnabar in them."