Into the Darkness by Harry Turtledove

was burned. The bloodied flier, a Gyongyosian, staggered toward the trench. “We drove ‘em back!” he called, and fell on his face.
    A couple of soldiers ran out and scooped him up. Sergeant Jokai cursed again. “We drove ‘em back this time,” he said, “on account of we had a surprise to match their surprise, and because we spotted ‘em early. But flying dragons off a ship! The Kuusaman bastards have gone and complicated the war, curse ‘em to powerless.” Istvan was suddenly just as well pleased not to have received his initiation into combat, at least from the receiving end.
     
    Pekka looked out at the students filing into the auditorium. It was hardly the biggest hall at Kajaani City College, but that did not dismay her. Theoretical sorcery, unlike the more practical applications of the art, was not a ley line to fame or riches. Without theoretical sorcery, though, no one would ever have realized ley lines existed, let alone figured out how to use them.
    She set her hands on the lectern, took a deep breath, and began: before anything else, ritual. “Before the Kaunians came, we of Kuusamo were here. Before the Lagoans came, we of Kuusamo were here. After the Kaunians departed, we of Kuusamo were here. We of Kuusamo are here. After the Lagoans depart, we of Kuusamo shall be here.”
    Softly, her students repeated the unadorned but proud phrases. A couple of the students were of Kaunian blood, from Valmiera or Jelgava; another handful were Lagoans. Their inches and beaky features and yellow and auburn hair set them apart from the Kuusaman majority (though some who served the Seven Princes, especially from the eastern part of the realm, might almost have been Lagoans by looks). Regardless of their homelands, they joined in the ritual. If they refused, they did not attend Pekka’s lectures.
    “Mankind has used the energies manifested and released at power points since long before the beginning of recorded history,” she began. Her students scribbled notes. Watching them amused her. Most of them took down everything she said, even when it was something they already knew. For those who advanced in the discipline, that would end. Theoretical sorcery was, after all, about the essential, not the accidental in which it was surrounded.
    “Only improvements in both the theoretical underpinnings of sorcery and in sorcerous instrumentation have enabled us to advance beyond what was known in the days of the Kaunian Empire,” Pekka went on. She held up an amulet of amber and lodestone, such as a mage might use at sea. “Please note that these phenomena have gone hand in hand. Improved instruments of magecraft had yielded new data, which, in turn, have forced improvements in theory, making it correspond more closely to observed reality. And new theory has also led to new instruments to exploit and expand upon it.”
    She turned and wrote on a large sheet of slate behind her the law of similarity— similar causes produce similar effects —and the law of contagion— objects once in contact continue to influence each other at a distance. Like her body, her script was small and precise and elegant.
    One of the students in the front row muttered discontentedly to her benchmate: “What does she think we are, morons? They knew that much back in the Kaunian Empire.”
    Pekka nodded. “Yes, they did know the two laws back in the days of the Empire. Our own ancestors”—like her, the student was of Kuusaman blood—“knew them before the Kaunians crossed the Strait of Valmiera and came to our island. The ancestors of the Gyongyosians discovered them independently. Some of the savages in the distant jungles of equatorial Siaulia and on the island of the Great North Sea know them, too. Even the shaggy Ice People know them, though they may have learned them from us or from the folk of Derlavai.”
    The student looked as if she wished she’d never opened her mouth. In her place, Pekka would have wished the same thing. But