Harry Turtledove - Rulers of the Darkness

That seemed to please her. She nodded again, more relaxed, less jerky, than she had been. Then, after a couple of deep breaths, she turned to the secondary sorcerers and asked again in Kuusaman if they were ready. Fernao knew a certain amount of pride at understanding the question. He understood the answer, too- they confirmed they were. Pekka inhaled once more, then spoke first in her language and afterwards in classical Kaunian: "I begin."

And begin she did, with the same quiet authority Fernao had seen again and again in her incanting. She was rougher at her work than a mage who spent day after day refurbishing rest crates would have been at his, but such a mage barely touched the surface of sorcery, while Pekka understood it down to the very roots, down deeper, in fact, than anyone before her had imagined those roots ran. Watching her, listening to her attack the spell, Fernao could have loved her not for who she was but for what she knew, a distinction of a sort he'd never imagined making.

He felt rather less proud of the spell she was using. All the Kuusamans had joined together in crafting it, and it had the smoothed corners and shapelessness characteristic of a work formed by committee. Even with his imperfect grasp of Kuusaman, he could tell as much from the feel of the air in the blockhouse as she worked. He did not doubt the spell would do what it was designed to do. But it had no elegance to it. Had Siuntio drafted it, it would have been half as long and twice as strong; Fernao was sure of it. He had no proof, though. He would never have proof, not anymore, not with Siuntio dead.

Force built- not the blood-tasting force the Algarvians had brought down on their heads, but potent nonetheless. Potent enough to confront Mezentio's murder-powered magic? Fernao wouldn't have thought so, not from what was in the air, but he'd seen what this energy release could do. Transferring it from one site to another seemed far easier than finding out how to elicit it had been.

And then, as matter approached a climax, Pekka made the sort of mistake that could befall any mage working through a long, complex, difficult spell: she dropped a line. Ilmarinen jumped. Piilis exclaimed in horror. Raahe and Alkio seized each other's hands as if they never expected to touch anything else again.

Fernao knew a certain amount of pride at recognizing the problem as fast as any of the Kuusamans. He also knew the same fear that gripped them: Ilmarinen's joke about bringing the sorcerous energy down on their own heads wasn't funny anymore. When things went wrong at this stage…

"Counterspells!" Ilmarinen rapped out, and began to chant with sudden harsh urgency. So did Raahe and Alkio, their two voices merging into one. So did Pekka, trying to reverse what she'd unleashed. Dismay still seemed to freeze Piilis.

Not so Fernao. For a long time, he'd had nothing to do but draft and refine counterspells. Because he wasn't fluent in Kuusaman, he'd been only an emergency backstop, a firewall. The spell he raced through now wasn't in Kuusaman, or even classical Kaunian. It was in Lagoan: his birthspeech, he'd long since decided, would be best for such magic, for he could use it faster and more accurately than any other.

And he, like the rest of the mages, was incanting for his life now. He knew as much. The sorcerous energies that would have torn a new hole in the landscape were poised now to do the same to the mages who had unleashed them. If the mages couldn't divert those energies, weaken them, spread them fast enough, they wouldn't get a second chance.

Past, present, and future seemed to stretch very thin- all too fitting for the sort of sorcery they'd been using. Fernao felt an odd rush of memories: from his youth, from his childhood, from what he would have taken oath were his father's and grandfather's childhoods as well- but all recalled or perhaps relived with as much immediacy, as much reality, as his own. And, at the same time (if time had any meaning here), he knew also memories from years he hadn't yet experienced: from himself as an old man; from one of the children he did not at this moment have, also old; and from that child's child.

He wished he could have held those memories instead of just being aware that he'd had them. All the Kuusaman mages around him were exclaiming in awe and dread as they used their counterspells, so he supposed they were going through the same thing he was. And then, at last, when he thought the chaos in the timestream would cast them adrift in duration- or perhaps cast them out of it altogether- the counterspells began to bite.

Now suddenly took on meaning again. His consciousness, which had been spread over what felt like a century or more, contracted back to a single sharp point that advanced heartbeat by heartbeat. He remembered things that had happened to him before that point, but nothing more. No, not quite nothing more: he remembered remembering other things, but he could not have said what they were.

"Well, well," Ilmarinen said. Sweat beaded his face and soaked the armpits of his tunic. Even so, he didn't forget to use classical Kaunian: "Wasn't that interesting, my friends?" He didn't forget his ironic tone, either.

Pekka, who had been standing while she cast the spell that went awry, slumped down onto a stool and began to weep, her face hidden in her hands. "I could have… us all," she said in a broken voice. Fernao didn't know the Kuusaman verb, but he would have been astonished if it didn't mean killed.

He limped over to her and put a hand on her shoulder. "It is all right," he said, cursing the classical tongue for not letting him sound colloquial. "We are safe. We can try again. We shall try again."

"Aye, no harm done," Ilmarinen agreed. "Any spell you live through is a spell you learn something from."

"Learn what?" Pekka said with a laugh that sounded more like hysterics than mirth. "Not to miss a line at the key moment of the incantation? I was already supposed to know that, Master Ilmarinen, thank you very kindly."

Fernao said, "No, I think there is more to learn here than that. Now we know from the inside out what our spell does, or some of what it does. If our next version is not better on account of that, I shall be surprised. The method was drastic, but the lesson is worthwhile."

"Aye," Ilmarinen repeated. "The Lagoan mage has the right of it." He glanced over at Fernao. "Accidents will happen." Fernao smiled and nodded, as if at a compliment. Ilmarinen glared at him, which was exactly what he wanted.

Every time a peasant sneaked into the woods and sought out the battered band of irregulars Garivald was leading these days, he almost wished the newcomer would go away. He'd heard a great many tales of woe, some of them horrible enough to move him close to tears. How could he resist bringing such people into the band? He couldn't. But what if one of them was lying?

"What do I do?" he asked Obilot. "Let in the wrong man- or woman- and the Grelzers will know everything about us a day later."

"If we don't get new blood, they won't care about us one way or the other," she answered. "If we didn't take chances, none of us would be irregulars in the first place."

Garivald grunted. That held an unpleasant amount of truth. But he said, "It's not on your shoulders. It's on my shoulders. And you're one of the people who helped dump it there." He glowered at her with none of the interest, none of the liking- why lie? none of the desire- he usually felt.

Obilot met the glare with a shrug. "Munderic got killed. Somebody had to lead us. Why not you? Thanks to your songs, people have heard your name. They want to join Garivald the Songmaker's band."

"But I don't want to lead them!" Garivald said in a sort of whispered scream. "I never wanted to lead anybody. All I ever wanted to do was raise a decent crop and stay drunk through the winter and- lately- make songs. That's all, curse it!"