Harry Turtledove - Into the Darkness

He kept on laughing for another couple of heartbeats. Pekka looked around for the blunt instrument nearest to hand. Maybe murder, or something like it, did show in her eyes, for Ilmarinen went from laugh to chuckle to a smile that only set her teeth on edge. Then he reached into a pocket. When he didn’t find what he wanted, the smile fell off his face, too. He started going through his other pockets, and growing more and more frantic as whatever he was after remained elusive. Now Pekka laughed, in sardonic delight.

Ilmarinen looked harried. “However much it may amuse you, Mistress, it is not funny, I assure you.”

“Oh, I don’t know. It seems funny enough to me.” Pekka pointed to a folded-up piece of paper behind the heel of Ilmarinen’s left boot. “Is that by any chance what you seek?”

He turned, stared, and scooped it up. “Aye, it is,” he answered, more sheepishly than she was used to hearing him speak. “It must have fallen out while I was standing on my head.”

“You still have not explained why you were standing on your head,” Pekka reminded him.

And Ilmarinen went right on not explaining, at least with words. Instead, with a flourish, he presented Pekka the paper, as a sommelier in a fancy eatery up in Yliharma might have proffered an expensive bottle of Algarvian wine.

“You were standing on your head because of this piece of paper,” she said in the now-tell-me-another-one tones she used after listening to Uto spin out some outrageous fabrication. Sure as sure, her son and Ilmarinen had the same imp indwelling in them.

But Ilmarinen, this time, seemed immune. “As a matter of fact, Mistress Pekka, I truly was standing on my head because of that piece of paper.”

Pekka studied him. He was serious. He sounded serious. That only made her distrust him more than ever. But, after so much farce, what choice had she but to unfold the sheet and see what was on it? Only later did she wonder what Ilmarinen’s expression would have been had she torn it up and thrown it in his face. There, in a nutshell— not an acorn—was the difference between the two of them. Ilmarinen would have had the thought at once, and might have acted on it.

Once opened, the sheet wasn’t blank, as she’d half expected it to be. Calculations in Ilmarinen’s sprawling script filled it. She glanced down at them for a moment. She started to look up at Ilmarinen again, but her eyes, of themselves, snapped back to the arcane symbols. Her mouth fell open. She held the paper in one hand and traced the logic, traced the symbolic path, with the forefinger of the other.

When, at last, she was finished, she bowed very low to Ilmarinen. “Master Siuntio had the right of it,” she said, her voice a breathy whisper. “He told me that if anyone could find the meaning hidden in my experiment, you would be the mage, for you have the most original cast of mind. And he knew whereof he spoke. I would never in a thousand years have thought as you did.”

Ilmarinen shrugged. “Siuntio is smarter than I am. Siuntio is smarter than anybody is, as a matter of fact. But he isn’t crazy. You need to be a little bit crazy—or it doesn’t hurt, anyhow.” He eyed Pekka like a master eyeing a student who might have promise. “And now do you understand why I was standing on my head?”

“Inversion,” Pekka answered, so absently that Ilmarinen clapped his hands together in delight.

“Just so!” He almost cackled with glee, sounding like a laying hen.

“I never would have thought of such a thing,” Pekka said again. “Never. When I began to try to learn whether similarity and contagion were related, I always thought the relationship I found, if I found any at all, would be a direct one. When I failed to show a direct one, I thought that meant there was none at all—only that didn’t work, either.”

“If the experiment works and the mathematics don’t, the mathematics are wrong,” Ilmarinen said. “I told you—I told all of you—as much before, but you did not heed me. Now we have numbers that suggest why your cursed acorns acted as they did, and what happened to them as well.”

That wasn’t explicit in the sheet he’d given Pekka. She looked through the sprawling lines of symbols again. She had to look twice; even the implications were subtle. Once she found what Ilmarinen was driving at, though, she could work them out for herself. She looked up from the sheet to the theoretical sorcerer. “But that’s impossible!”

“It’s what happened.” His voice was peculiarly flat. After a moment, she realized she’d angered him. She’d seen him play at anger before, when he ranted and blustered. This was different. This made her feel as if he’d caught her doing something vicious and rather nasty.

In a small voice, she said, “I suppose the classical Kaunians would have said the same thing if they saw the spells that went into making a ley-line caravan go.”

“Not if they had any sense, they wouldn’t,” Ilmarinen said, but now in something close to his usual sardonic tones. He reached out and tapped the paper with a gnarled finger. “If you can show me an alternative explanation, then you may tell me this one is impossible. Till then, wouldn’t it be more interesting to try to come up with more experiments to see whether we’re crazy or not?” He shook his head and held up that finger again. “Of course we’re crazy. Let’s see if we’re right or not.”

“Aye.” Ideas rose to the top of Pekka’s mind from below like bubbles in a pot of water coming to a boil. “If this is right”—she shook the paper—“we have a lifetime’s worth of experiments waiting ahead for us. Two lifetimes’ worth, maybe.”

“That’s so, Mistress Pekka.” Ilmarinen sighed.

He was old. He did not have a long lifetime ahead of him, let alone two. “I’m sorry, Master,” Pekka said quietly. “I was tactless.”

“What?” Ilmarinen stared, then laughed. “Oh, no, not that, you silly lass. I’ve known for a long time that I wouldn’t be here forever, or even too much longer. No. I was thinking that, if things keep going as they have over there, over yonder”—he pointed north and west, toward the mainland of Derlavai—“we’d better pack those two lifetimes’ worth of experiments into about half a year.”

Pekka though about that and slowly nodded. “And if we can’t?”

“We’d better do it anyway,” Ilmarinen said.

Leofsig dipped his straight razor into the bowl of hot water he’d begged from his mother to get the soapsuds off it, then went back to trimming the lower edge of his beard. With his head tilted so far back, he had trouble seeing the mirror he’d propped on the chest of drawers in the room he now had to share with Ealstan.

Sidroc stuck his head in, perhaps to find out of Ealstan was there. When he saw what Leofsig was doing, he grinned unpleasantly. “Don’t cut your throat, now,” he said, almost as if he meant to be helpful.

In one smooth movement, Leofsig was off the stool he’d been using and halfway across the room. “You want to think about what you say to a man with a razor in his hand,” he remarked pleasantly.

“Eep,” Sidroc said, and disappeared faster than he would have had a first-rank mage enspelled him. Had a first-rank mage enspelled him, though, he would have stayed disappeared. That, Leofsig thought, was too much to hope for.

Laughing a little, he went back to the mirror and finished shaving. Then he put on his best tunic and his best cloak. A fussy grammarian would have called it his better cloak, for he had only two. He’d had more before the war started, but they were on Sidroc and Uncle Hengist’s backs these days.

This one, of dark blue wool, would do well enough. His father had one very much like it, and so did Ealstan. “You can’t go wrong with dark blue wool,” Hestan had said, ordering all three of them at the same time. When the tailor delivered them, Ealstan had called them a proof of the law of similarity. Leofsig smiled, remembering.