Harry Turtledove - Through the Darkness

Since Pekka, however much she wished she could, truly couldn’t tell him that, she pointed down the ley line and said, “Here comes the caravan.”

“I hope we’ll be able to get seats and not have to wait for the next one,” Leino said.

As things turned out, Pekka got a seat. Her husband stood beside her, hanging onto the overhead rail, till a good many people got out at the downtown stops and not so many came aboard. Then he sat down beside her. They rode together as the caravan glided along the energy line of the world’s grid to their stop. When they got out, they climbed the hill that led up to their house hand in hand.

Before they got home, they stopped next door to pick up their son from Elimaki. “And how was Uto today?” Pekka asked her sister.

“Not so bad,” Elimaki answered, which, given Uto, wasn’t the smallest praise she might have offered.

“Have you heard from Olavin lately?” Leino asked. Elimaki’s banker husband had gone into the service of the Seven Princes, to keep the army’s finances running smoothly.

“Aye-I got a letter from him in the afternoon post,” Elimaki said. “He’s complaining about the food, and he says they’re trying to work him to death.” She laughed a little. “You know Olavin. If he said everything was fine, I’d think someone had ensorceled him.”

Pekka took her son’s hand. “Come on, let’s get you home. I’m going to give you a bath after supper.” That produced as many piteous howls and groans and grimaces as she’d expected. Indifferent to all of them, she gave her sister relief from Uto and took charge of him herself.

“What’s for supper tonight?” Leino asked as they went into the house.

“I have some nice mutton chops in the rest crate, and a couple of lobsters, too,” Pekka answered. “Which would you rather have? If you’re starving, I can do the chops faster than the lobsters.”

“Let’s have the mutton chops, then,” Leino said.

“No, let’s have lobster,” Uto said. “Then I won’t have to have a bath so soon.”

“Maybe I could use the hot water from the lobsters to bathe you in,” Pekka suggested. Uto fled, squalling in delicious horror. “Mutton chops,” Pekka said to remind herself. She shook her head. If she wasn’t acting like one of the absent-minded mages comics made jokes about, what was she doing?

She took the lid off the rest crate, which broke the spell that kept the crate’s contents from aging at the same rate as the world around them. In a different way, the crate did some of the same things as her experiments, but it did them undramatically, by conserving sorcerous energy rather than releasing it in bursts. She reached into the crate for the mutton chops, which lay wrapped in butcher paper and string.

A moment later, she called for her husband. When Leino came into the kitchen, she thrust the package of chops at him. “Here,” she said. “You can throw these in a pan as well as I can. I need to do some calculating.”

“You’ve had an idea,” Leino said in accusing tones.

“I certainly have,” Pekka answered. “Now I want to get some notion of whether I’m right or not.”

“All right,” Leino said. “If you’re not going to worry about whether they come out half done or burnt, I won’t, either. Is there anything else I can do for you?”

“Aye, there is,” Pekka said. “Keep Uto quiet. I’m going to need to be able to hear myself think.”

“I’ll try,” Leino said. “I make no guarantees.” Pekka blazed him a look that warned he’d better do his best to offer a guarantee. His grimace said he understood that, even as Pekka understood life-and Uto-could include the unexpected.

She went into the bedchamber she shared with her husband, took out pen and paper, and began to calculate. She knew the parameters of rest crates well; it wasn’t as if she were stumbling around half in the dark, as she so often was while calculating implications of the still-murky relationship between the laws of similarity and contagion.

“It could work,” she breathed. “By the powers above, it truly could.” She hadn’t been more than half serious when she gave her husband the chops. By the time he called that they were ready, she’d found most of what she needed to know. The results startled her.

“You’ve got something,” Leino said as he served up mutton chops and a salad of spinach and scallions. “I can see it on your face.”

“I do,” Pekka agreed, still sounding surprised. “And I want to kick myself for being such a fool, I didn’t see it before. I want to get on the crystal and talk with Ilmarinen and Siuntio. They might have better notions of where to go with this than I do.”

“Either be vague or send them a letter,” Leino answered. “You never can tell who’s liable to be listening.”

“That’s true enough. It’s too true, in fact,” Pekka said. Absently, she added, “These chops are good.” That surprised her almost as much as the possible new use for rest crates had.

“Thanks.” Leino turned to Uto. “There. Do you see? I wasn’t trying to poison everybody after all. Now eat up.”

“Did he really say that?” Pekka asked. Leino nodded. Pekka wagged a forefinger at their son. “Don’t say things like that again, or you’ll spend some more time sleeping without your stuffed leviathan.”

That was a threat to make Uto behave himself, at least for a little while. If only the Algarvians were so easy, Pekka thought. But they weren’t, and wouldn’t be. Despite her new idea, the war was a long way from won. She laughed, not very happily. She needed some more progress on some of the other ideas she’d had before the new one would be worth anything at all.

As Skarnu buried the egg in the middle of the ley line that ran between the farm on which he lived and Pavilosta, he wondered where the Valmieran underground had come up with it. “Jelgavan army issue,” he remarked, leaning on his spade for a moment. “How did it get down here from the north?”

In the darkness, he couldn’t see the expression on Raunu’s face. But what the veteran sergeant said made his feelings plain: “Don’t worry about hows and whys, sir. Somebody got hold of it, somebody else got it to us, and now we’re going to make the redheads’ lives miserable with it.”

“That’s good enough, all right,” Skarnu agreed. He peered both ways along the ley line. If an unscheduled caravan should come gliding up before he and Raunu had the egg buried, they wouldn’t get a second chance to do the job properly. The same held true if an unexpected Algarvian patrol picked the wrong time to make sure the ley line stayed safe and secure.

But everything was quiet. Crickets chirped. Somewhere in the distance, an owl hooted. Breathing a little easier, Skarnu started digging again. So did Raunu. Twinkling stars watched them work. There was no moon.

“Think that’s deep enough?” Skarnu asked after a bit.

“Aye, should do,” Raunu answered. Grunting, he picked up the egg and lowered it into the hole. “It had better have the proper spell on it, so it’ll burst when a caravan goes over it,” he said. “Otherwise, we’d be doing just as much good hiding a rock down here.”

“They said it did,” Skarnu reminded him. “Of course, they’ve probably been wrong before.”

“Huh,” Raunu said: a sound of reproach. “Your lady wouldn’t care to hear you talk like that, and you can’t tell me different.”

What would Merkela have to say? Probably something on the order of, Shut up and dig. It was good advice, even if it came from Skarnu’s own mind. He shut up and dug. When he and Raunu had filled in the hold and tamped down the dirt, he said, “Now let’s get out of here. We don’t want the Algarvians to find us toting spades back to the farm.”