"Night after next. Two hours past sunset. Don't blab. Knock three, one, two. Follow orders." Talsu reached out and pumped the silversmith's hand. "I can do all that, sir. Thank you so much for giving me the chance!"

"You've earned it. You deserve it," Kugu answered. "Now go back to your own home, and don't let the constables nab you on the way."

"Don't you worry about that," Talsu said. "I can slide around those b.u.g.g.e.rs."

Slide around them he did. He was very full of himself the next two days, but he was often full of himself when he came back from his lessons in cla.s.sical Kaunian. He wanted to tell Gailisa where he would be going, what he would be doing, but he remembered Kugu's warning and held his peace.

On the appointed night, he said, "I have to go out for a bit. I should be back before too long, though."

"A likely story." Gailisa winked. "If you come back reeking of wine, you can sleep on the floor." The kiss she gave him suggested what he'd be missing if he were rash enough to stagger home drunk.

Thoughts of what he didn't intend to miss made him extra careful to dodge patrolling Jelgavan constables. He had no trouble finding the house Kugu had named; its whitewashed front made it seem to glow in the dark. No light showed in either of the dormers. Talsu knocked. Three. Pause. One. Pause. Two.

The door opened. Starlight gleamed off the lenses of Kugu's spectacles. He carried no lamp, nor even a candle. "Good," he said. "You are punctual. Come with me." He turned and started into the pitch-black interior of the house. Over his shoulder, he added, "Close the door behind you. We don't want to let anyone know this building is in use."

Talsu obeyed. As he shut the door, he felt rather than hearing someone moving toward him. He started to whirl, but something smacked into the side of his head. He saw a brief burst of light, though there was no true light to see. Then darkness more profound than any in the dark, dark house washed over him and swept him away.

When he woke, pain and nausea filled him. He needed a while to realize not all the rattling and shaking were inside his battered head; he lay in a wagon clattering along over cobbles. He tried to sit, and discovered his hands and feet were tied.

Someone slipped the hood off a lantern. That little beam pierced him worse than the fiercest sun after the nastiest hangover he'd ever had. "Kugu?" he croaked.

Laughter answered him. The fellow holding the lantern said, "No, the silversmith is trolling for more foolish fire-eaters. You deal with us now." He spoke Jelgavan with an Algarvian accent. Partly from the anguish of the betrayal that implied, partly from physical misery, Talsu heaved up his guts. His Algarvian captor let him lie in it.

As the reindeer-drawn sleighs carried Pekka and her comrades through a stretch of southeastern Kuusamo where no ley lines ran, she began to grasp how little of her own homeland she'd seen. Sitting beside her in the sleigh, both of them bundled beneath thick fur robes, Fernao might have magicked that thought right out of her head. In cla.s.sical Kaunian, he said, "This might almost be southern Unkerlant, or even the land of the Ice People."

"I do not know those places," she answered, also in Kaunian. "And until now, I did not know the district of Naantali, either." She stuck a mittened hand out from under the furs for a moment to wave.

"On a map, this is nothing but a blank spot," Fernao said.

"Of course," Pekka said. "That is why we are here, after all... wherever exactly here might be."

One stretch of low, rolling, snow-covered hills looked much like another. Here, not even the forests of pine and spruce and larch and fir that clothed the hills around Kajaani could survive. She shook her head. No, that wasn't quite true, as she'd seen at a recent stop. But the trees on these hills weren't trees at all, but bushes, stunted things the eternal cold and wind would not suffer to grow above the height of a man.

"Does anyone actually live here?" Fernao asked. As Pekka's had, his wave encompa.s.sed the whole Naantali district.

"If you mean, are there towns here, or even villages, the answer is no," Pekka told him. "If you mean, do some of our nomads drive their herds through this country every now and again--well, of course they do."

Beneath the fox-fur hat that was close to the coppery shade of his own hair, Fernao's narrow eyes--sure proof of Kuusaman blood--narrowed further. "They had better not, not while we are here," he said.

"They will not," Pekka said rea.s.suringly. "We have soldiers on snowshoes and skids patrolling a perimeter wider than any we could possibly need for this experiment." She suspected some nomads could slip past patrolling soldiers even if the troopers went arm in arm, but didn't mention that to Fernao.

His thoughts, this time, glided along a different ley line: "A perimeter wider than any we could need for this experiment unless things go badly wrong."

"If they go that badly wrong," Pekka answered, "none of us will be in any condition to worry about it."

"A point," Fernao admitted. "A distinct point." He started to say something else, then pointed ahead instead. "Is that where we are going?"

"I think so," Pekka said. "So far as I know, it is the only real building in this whole district."

"Was it once a hunting lodge?" Fernao asked.

"No. I do not think there is anything to hunt in these parts--there has not been since we cleaned out the last of the wolves hundreds of years ago," Pekka answered. "You have Master Siuntio to thank for the building. He went to the Seven Princes and told them we might need a headquarters in some isolated place for our experiments. Here is a headquarters in an isolated place."

"Isolated is hardly the word," the Lagoan mage said. "Desolate might come closer."

He had a point, but Pekka didn't feel like admitting it. To her, this structure here in the middle of nowhere was a sign of Kuusamo's might, and also a sign of the importance of the work in which they were engaged. But she was glad wolves had been hunted out of the land of the Seven Princes. Were any still here, she felt sure she would have heard them howling of nights.

Fernao said, "Our experiments had better go well. If they do not, the sleighs will stop coming, we shall quietly starve, and no one will ever find us again, no matter how hard people may look."

"Stop that!" Pekka told him. "This is a civilized land. No one would do any such thing, and you know it."

He dipped his head to her. Mischief glinted in his eyes. "I will believe it, but only because you say it."

Their driver, who up till then might have been operated by sorcery or clockwork, chose that moment to speak up: "Here we are." He used Kuusaman, of course. Pekka wondered if he understood cla.s.sical Kaunian. Most sleigh drivers wouldn't have, but he might have been chosen for something other than how well he could handle reindeer.

The hostel--for lack of a better word, Pekka thought of it as such--did nothing to remind guests of the Princ.i.p.ality or of any other fine establishment back in Yliharma. It had been hastily built from yellow pine, the timber so fresh it hadn't yet aged and weathered even in this harsh climate. The roof climbed steep, to keep snow from clinging. Smoke rose from the red-brick chimney, though the wind swept it away almost at once. Soot here didn't stain the snow, as it would have in a town; there wasn't enough of it to matter.

"How cold do you think it is?" Fernao asked as he unswaddled himself and climbed out of the sleigh.

"Not cold enough to freeze quicksilver, I don't think." Pekka also descended, taking Fernao's hand to steady herself on the way down (the injured mage shifted his crutches for courtesy's sake). With both of them wearing thick mittens, it was hardly a touch at all.

With help from their driver, Siuntio and Ilmarinen were alighting from the other sleigh. Ilmarinen looked at the raw building set down in the middle of the raw land. In perfect idiomatic Kaunian, he exclaimed, "Everybody always told me I'd end up somewhere bad if I stayed on the ley line I was traveling, but I never thought it would be as bad as this."

"You didn't come here by ley line," Siuntio pointed out, "and you still have the chance of escaping."

Ilmarinen shook his head. "The only way to escape is through failure. If we fail one way, they will send us back in disgrace to lands where people actually live. And if we fail another way, they won't find enough of us to send anywhere--but they'll send more poor fools after us, to see if they can get it right."

"You have left out the possibility of success," Pekka reminded him.

"Oh, no, by no means," Ilmarinen replied. "Success and escape have nothing to do with each other, I a.s.sure you. If we succeed, if everything goes exactly as planned . . . Aside from being a miracle, what will that do? I'll tell you what: it'll make the Seven Princes keep us here so we can go right on succeeding. Doesn't that sound like a delightful prospect?"

"It is what we have come here to do," Pekka answered.

"Of course it is," the cantankerous mage said. "But pray pay attention, pretty lady, for that's not the question I asked you."

Pekka looked around. She didn't like the idea of being cooped up here, but she was less worried about it than Ilmarinen. "They will not keep us here for too long a time," she said, "for they cannot keep us here for too long a time." Her Kaunian was grammatically accurate, but, try as she would, she couldn't make the old language come to life in her mouth.

Ilmarinen blew her a kiss. "What an innocent soul you are."

Siuntio was shivering, standing there in the snow. Had Pekka told him to go indoors, he would have been too proud to listen. Instead, she said, "I am cold," and went inside herself. That let Siuntio and the other mages follow. Fernao was laughing a little; he must have seen what she was up to.

Fires laid by servitors roared in the hearths. Pekka took off her fur hat, opened her coat, and shed it a moment later. To her relief, Siuntio needed no urging to go stand in front of a fireplace. To her even greater relief, the sleighs carrying their baggage, the experimental animals, and the sorcerous apparatus came up to the hostel just then. So did the other sleighs in which rode the secondary sorcerers--the ones who would keep the animals alive in the cold and transmit spells from where they were cast to where they were needed. The experiments would go forward, then.

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 Princ.i.p.ality 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 bemus.e.m.e.nt, 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 cla.s.sical tongue. "I said, aIf 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 f.a.n.n.y 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 cla.s.sical 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.

To his relief, she didn't have to. Moving slowly and cautiously, he stayed upright for the quarter of a mile or so till he came to what he first thought to be an upswelling of earth under the snow. But it proved rather more than that: it was a low hut with thick walls of stone. The doorway, which one of the drivers shoveled clean, faced away from the animals.

"This was also readied in advance?" he asked Pekka.

"Of course," she answered.

The secondary sorcerers not involved in keeping the animals alive also came over to the stone ... blockhouse, Fernao decided was the best name for it. Siuntio said, "They will transmit to the beasts the spell we shape."

Fernao hadn't thought about all the consequences of their sorcery. Now he realized he should have. If this spell released as much energy as the Kuusamans thought it would, not being in the immediate neighborhood of that energy release looked like an excellent idea. Only one drawback occurred to him: "I hope they will not introduce any garbling. That could be ... unfortunate."

"It should not prove a difficulty," Pekka said. "They are skilled at what they do."

"And if they do make a mess of things, it's liable to end up saving their necks--and ours, too," Ilmarinen put in.

"We are going to succeed," Pekka said. "We are going to succeed, and we are going to be safe while we are succeeding. And if you think differently, Master Ilmarinen, I am sure the sleigh will take you out of all possible danger."

"Death is the only thing that will take me out of all possible danger," Ilmarinen retorted, and stuck out his tongue at Pekka. That was something no one would have seen before a sorcerous experiment in Lagoas. Instead of getting angry--or, at least, instead of letting her anger show--Pekka stuck out her tongue, too, and started to laugh.

But she didn't laugh for long. She walked out into the center of the blockhouse and chanted the ritual words with which Kuusamans began any magical operation. Fernao still didn't believe those claims of Kuusaman antiquity, but he discovered he understood much more of the chant than he had when he first came to the land of the Seven Princes.

When Pekka finished, she turned to the secondary sorcerers and asked, "Are you ready?" They nodded. She asked the same question of Ilmarinen and Siuntio. Both master mages nodded, too. Pekka turned to Fernao. "And you?"

"As ready as I can be," he replied. Because of his limited grasp of Kuusaman, his role in the conjuration could only be trying to stave off disaster once it was already loose. He didn't think he would be able to do that, and hoped--hoped with all his heart--he wouldn't have to try.

"I begin," Pekka said, this time not just to steady herself but also to warn the secondary sorcerers. The chant and pa.s.ses were mostly familiar, but this spell was more potent than any they'd tried before. Fernao had suggested some of the improvements. He hoped they would serve.

Siuntio and Ilmarinen remained alert. They were the first line of defense if Pekka faltered. Fernao studied her. He'd never had much use for theoretical sorcerers when they did step into the laboratory; they too often forgot which hand was their left and which their right. But Pekka had an air of calm that suggested she really did know what she was doing as she incanted--and that she wouldn't panic if she did make a mistake. The secondary sorcerers also seemed very competent as they relayed Pekka's magic to where it would be most needed: the rows of animal cages.

Fernao hoped the other group of secondary sorcerers, the ones who'd been keeping the animals warm, had known when to depart. If they hadn't, they would be in danger now. He a.s.sumed they had; the Kuusamans would be neither so heartless nor so slipshod as to leave them. Had he fallen in among Unkerlanters, now ...

Pekka incanted with ever greater urgency. Despite the work of the secondary sorcerers, Fernao felt the energies inside the blockhouse build and build.

His hair tried to stand on end. That wasn't fright; it was sorcerous energy on the loose. The other mages' hair also started to stand up straight, as if lightning had struck nearby. It hadn't--not yet. Out in the cages on the snowy plain, though, the rats and rabbits would surely be getting frantic.

Here it comes, Fernao thought. He wanted to say it out loud--he wanted to scream it--but held back for fear of hurting Pekka's concentration. She cried out one last word of Kuusaman. Fernao had learned what that final command meant: "Let it be accomplished!"

And it was accomplished. The thunderous roar from the direction of the racks of cages was astonishing, overwhelming. The ground shook beneath Fer-nao's feet. Brilliant white light appeared for a moment between the planks of the roof--planks that had, till then, been thickly covered with snow. Fernao wondered if the blockhouse would come down on the mages' heads.