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Voices in the Line [Niko]
Title: Voices in the Line
Fandom: Stand Still, Stay Silent
Characters: OCs - Niko; also Tuomas & Riidá
Rating: 0+
Length: 3.3k
Summary: It's just a routine check to clear the radio waves. But as he gets to work, Niko hears something unsettling in the screams.
Other: Some self-indulgent slice-of-life stuff with Niko & co. I must confess, I can't get enough of people hearing creepy things in the radio.
Prompt was #82, "Can you hear me?"
Voices in the Line
Once around about the village. Checking the walls, checking the lamps, building up the spells around their fortress to deter anything that wasn't wanted. The spring night was sharp and damp.
Though the air was cool, it wasn't as cold as it had been a week ago. In another week, it would be even milder, and the days would get longer. Soon, Niko thought, the sun would stay up most of the night, keeping him company while he did his rounds. That wasn't so bad on its own, but the warm weather would bring its own problems, and "night duty" would turn into a term with little meaning.
Niko shored up a protection spell along the western wall, and then, with another round finished, he turned and headed toward the radio house for the routine check-in, shivering and shoving his hands in his pockets to guard against the cold. He wished he had dressed a little more warmly. It wasn't summer yet; on a night like this, it wouldn't even be right to call it spring. He should have at least worn thicker gloves. The brightness of the sky when he had stepped out of the house that evening had deceived him. It had looked so much more friendly and warm than it actually was.
Inside the radio house, the single room was brightly-lit and welcoming as usual, a comfortable and familiar mess of organized chaos. Papers and memos and binders were stacked and piled amid the coils of wire and equipment and spare parts, and it was impossible to tell where one part of the "filing system" began and another ended. One of these days, Niko thought, they'll make us put this all in order, and then everyone will be complaining that nobody can find anything.
Tuomas sat in his usual place, an old chair that had seen better days pulled up in front of the radio console. The operator's headset was pulled down over his ears, drawing his long hair back from his face. His lips were pulled into a frown, forehead creasing as he listened to whatever was coming in from the other side.
Business as usual, then, Niko thought as he stepped into his line of sight. Leaned against the console. Gave a little wave. "Hi," he said when Tuomas finally slipped off the headset. "Got a job for me?"
They both knew the answer to that one. He hardly needed to ask. Tuomas handed him the headset with a sigh, shaking his head. "Blocked again. You'll have to clear it for me."
"No problem." Niko flashed him a smile. Every night, it was the same thing; no matter how many times they chased the spirits away from their radio waves, they kept coming back. With their community situated where it was, in the middle of silence, it was no surprise that any hint of noise would attract spirits like that. More than once, Tuomas had muttered in frustration at his inability to remove them himself. But Niko had managed to get pretty good at clearing them out - at least for a while. "Let's see what I'm dealing with, here...."
He pushed back his hood and shoved the headset on. Instantly, his ears were flooded with a barrage of screams. Niko grimaced and tried to ignore them. He stared off into space and listened and tried to brush the voices off. It's just noises, he told himself, biting down on his lower lip. Instead, concentrate on how much of it there is. The volume is what's important, not the words. Ignore what they're saying. How loud is it? How powerful are they? How strong a spell will be needed to clear all of this out? Ignore the words. Ignore them. Ignore the voices. It's just noise. Just the usual. Just noise.
Noise. Nothing but noise. Rising. Falling. Slipping into his ears, shrieking. He tried to pretend it was wind, even if no wind could sound like that. So much noise. The kind that comes in warm weather, when the thaw brings animals out of hibernation - and other things.
But it only took a moment to decide how to proceed, anyway. So, he reminded himself, it didn't matter. It was just noise.
He was just about to lift the headset from his ears when he heard a voice.
Words slipped in between the stream of Finnish crying. One voice, screaming, sobbing, far-off. One voice. They were all voices, and that rush of noise was made up of words. But this voice was crying in his tongue, this one was screaming in his language, and as the anguished sobs in Sami slipped through the radio waves and into his ears Niko froze and blanched and stared down at the radio console.
It wasn't just noise. It was a voice. It was impossible to ignore.
Niko ripped the headset off and shoved it toward Tuomas. "Wait," he said, barely getting the word out. "Give me a minute."
He didn't wait for an answer.
Out the door. Down the steps. Into Kajaani's cold, fresh night. Niko leaned against the side of the building, pressed his palms and head to the wall. Breathed in, breathed out. Tried to stop himself from shaking. Tried to stop his stomach from turning.
That voice. Those words. That language. He had never heard his language in the radio before, in that stream of shrieking voices. He had never heard his language spoken like that, desperate and anguished. His ears rang with it.
Niko waited there for a while, bracing himself against the side of the radio house. He wasn't sure how long he stood there, trying to calm himself down. He tried to count the seconds, the minutes, as he breathed slowly with closed eyes, listening to the sound of the night. Birds calling. The wind combing through the trees, shaking their bare branches. The whistle of a kettle inside the building. Tuomas was making tea. Niko concentrated on every rustle, every noise, until he felt steady enough to step away from the wall, to move and go up the steps into the building, to push open the rough wooden door and slip into his friend's warm light again.
When he finally stepped into that pool of light, Tuomas was taking the kettle off the woodstove, pouring tea for two, the sharp mint scent filling the room. He glanced toward Niko, raised an eyebrow, then turned his attention back to what he was doing.
"Should I ask?" His voice was gentle and quiet in the stillness of the radio room.
Niko hesitated. Would Tuomas understand? He heard his language in the screams every time the radio was clogged - which was often. Every day. There had hardly been a "first time" for him. He'd been doing this for years. It just wasn't the same. It couldn't be. "...No," he said softly. "Um. I don't think you should."
A pause, and nothing more. That answer was enough. "Okay," Tuomas said, and nudged a chair toward him with his foot. As Niko sank down into it, Tuomas pressed a mug into his hands.
They sat there for a while, not saying anything. The tea was sharp, strong, too-hot on Niko's tongue. He drank it slowly, letting the mug warm his hands. Tuomas dipped his head, pulled a stack of notes toward him, and read through them while he waited.
"You're waiting on word from Luleå, aren't you."
"Mmhm." A glance his way. "Probably won't get anything tonight, but we have to keep the line open. They still haven't given us confirmation of the pickup date for the end of the month."
Niko bit his tongue. Of course he knew how important it was to keep the lines of communication clear. Of course he did. He, as much as anyone else, knew it. The radio lines to Keuruu and Luleå were their lifelines to the outside world; without the radio contact, they'd be completely in the dark again, just as they had been for so many years. And even if the message Tuomas was waiting for probably wouldn't come during the night, there was always a chance that it would. And there was always a chance that there would be a call from one of the smaller villages, from Ontojärvi, or from one of the other tiny communities that had popped up around the lake. Or from one of the watch outposts. It could be anything. It could be everything. "...I know." He lifted his gaze, looked at him as steadily as he could. "After tea. Okay?"
"Okay."
"...Okay." Niko sat back. Drank his tea. Stared at the wall. Tried not to think about the voice that was waiting for him.
On the wall above Tuomas's desk hung a map of the Known World. Printed in Iceland. Fancy. Incomplete. Niko remembered the day that the traders had come back along the river with that in their cargo. They had unrolled it in a big gathering in the village hall, making a to-do of it, pointing out proudly how their little town was picked out on the map, its name clearly labelled. Acknowledged by the outside. Important enough to make note of. But the seasonal water route to Sweden was unmarked.
"How do they think we get in and out?" That was what people muttered, dipping their heads to whisper to one another, tsking at the map, how incomplete it was. "Magic?"
Maybe.
Niko lifted his gaze. The voice he had heard in the radio hung in his mind as he mentally traced the pale lines of rivers penetrating into the black, blank northland. It wasn't too long ago, not really long ago at all, that their part of the map would have been completely blank, too. "D'you think there might be people we haven't found yet?" he murmured to Tuomas. "Up north, maybe."
Tuomas lifted his head. Glanced at the map. Shrugged. "Nah. Nobody would last up there." He took up his tea again. "They're all long gone."
"That's what they said about us, you know." Niko gave the map another long look, as if labelled villages would appear if he stared at it long enough. "They said, 'Don't be stupid, nobody could survive out there'. But we were here the whole time."
"And then your crazy grandfather went down the river and surprised the shit out of everybody."
They both laughed. It was true. Everyone knew that story.
"Fine, fine," Tuomas admitted, breathing deeply, quelling his laughter. "There might be someone up there. I don't know."
"Maybe they'll find someone up there. Eventually."
"Maybe."
There was something in his voice, something in the look on his face that made it seem like Tuomas would say something else, like he was mulling over it. Niko waited, nursing his tea, listening. The headphones were around Tuomas's neck, the volume turned down just low enough that Niko couldn't hear the shrieking that he knew was coming through them. Couldn't hear the voices.
"If you're looking for more people like you, you'll have to get better at Swedish."
Niko looked up sharply. Tuomas nodded, then raised a hand to gesture toward the map, pointing lazily toward Sweden. "Luleå's your best bet. There are a couple families there that're like yours. That guy your grandmother is in contact with. Or maybe... well, I guess you could go to Norway. But that's pretty far. And you'd need to learn Swedish before they'll let you down the river, anyway."
"...Yeah." Niko bit his lip. "I guess that's what I'll have to do." Damn it, he thought, you're open to him, no matter if you want to be or not. Tuomas could read him as easily as anything. They had known each other for so long that keeping anything closed off was impossible. But somehow, the tension from earlier had washed away. Maybe it was because of the reminder that there was something else out there. Someone else.
Maybe it was time to take care of things, voice or no voice.
Niko downed the last of his tea, and held out a hand. You can do this, he told himself. "Here. Let me try it again."
Tuomas handed the headset over without a word. Niko steeled himself and put it on. Closed his eyes. Listened to the screaming. Listened and searched for that one anguished voice calling out in his tongue. There it was.
He could handle it now.
The words came easily enough. He'd woven that spell hundreds of times before. He certainly had enough practice with it. The runo to banish spirits from the radio was one that he knew all too well, and the words spilled from his lips like water flowing down a river as he sent them away.
At the end, Niko switched to his own language. The spell flowed more clumsily, but it worked just the same, and he summoned up as much strength and feeling as he could as he ordered the Sami spirit to go. The spell worked all the same no matter which language the spirit spoke in life, and he knew it. He'd heard languages other than Finnish in the screams before; Swedish and Norwegian and others that were completely alien, ones that he couldn't recognize at all. The runo always sent them all away, every one. It didn't matter to the spirits.
But it mattered to him. It did. Niko let the words roll past his teeth, sending the spirit off in a language it understood. In a language they shared. As soon as the crying stopped, he took in a shaking breath, and felt the tension ebb away.
Tuomas didn't say anything. Niko lifted his eyes to him, waiting for him to comment on it, because he knew that even though his friend didn't speak his language, he would recognize it. But he didn't say a word; he just took back the headset as Niko handed it over, put it over his ears, and nodded with approval at the clarity.
That was all.
The rest of the night was quiet, uneventful. Niko slipped out of the radio house and into the night and took up the rest of his duties as if nothing had happened. The usual round of patrols - again. Checking in with Tuomas - again. Reinforcing protections around the perimeters - again. Quiet had settled over Kajaani, the kind of quiet that wasn't really quiet at all, because it was the quiet of whispering treetops and night birds calling. Peaceful. No danger. No voices.
Even so, Niko felt weary when his shift was over and it was time to make his way home. The voice that had sobbed to him over the radio waves kept rolling through his mind, calling, calling.
"I'm home," Niko said as he pushed open the door, stepping into the house his family had lived in for ninety years. The words flowed out in his family's tongue, and it felt soothing in his mouth after a whole night of speaking Finnish. He pressed the door shut and listened while he slipped off his boots and shrugged off his hooded cloak. In the kitchen, he could hear movement. The clink of dishes. A whistling kettle.
"Hey!"
One person. The rest weren't there. Niko stepped carefully through to the kitchen, and peered around the door at his sister. "Where's mom?" he asked, trying not to sound disappointed.
"Gone across the water with Seija to check out last year's clearance before they do the first round with the cats."
"Ah." Right, Niko thought. It was that time of year again. He glanced to the corner of the room, noting the unoccupied chair near the window. "And grandmother?"
"Gone with them."
Niko sucked in a breath. "She's getting too old for that."
"I'd like to see you tell her that." Riidá stepped close to him, shoving a sandwich into one of his hands, and a mug of tea in the other. "If you get your breakfast down quick, you can come with me, and tell her right away."
"Wh-" Is she serious? One glance eased his suspicions. She had that sparkle in her eyes, that hint that she couldn't be any less serious if she tried. "No, thanks. I think I'll pass." He sank down into his familiar chair at the table, and gave her a smile that said he knew that she was joking. "I need to sleep sometimes, you know."
"Fine, fine." Long fingers sank into his hair, ruffling it, as if it could get any more mussed than it already was. "How was work, by the way?"
"Um." The memory of the voice in the radio rolled back to him. Niko tried to shove down the thought, tried to straighten his face, knowing that it was best not to show how it bothered him. Stop it, he thought. Don't tell her. She'll get worried. "Nothing exciting. The nights are still too cold for us to get much trouble." His stomach turned, but he swallowed his breakfast down anyway. "What do you have planned?"
Riidá's mug clinked on the old, worn-out table as she sank down across from him. "Well, I'm going to finish talking to you, and then I'm going to get out of here." She was already dressed for it, her flame-resistant coat draped over her shoulders, her hair tied back tightly. "Could've gone over with mom, but she wanted to be the first out there. And the boat can only hold so many each way..."
A smile tugged at the corner of Niko's lips. "And you wanted to wait for me?"
"Maaaybe." A laugh. "Okay, yes. A little."
"Mm, I see." The smile broadened. "You didn't have to, you know."
"But if I don't wait around for you in the mornings, then I hardly see you at all. I'll be glad when you switch over from this night shift stuff." She reached out to tuck a strand of hair behind his ear. "Are you sure you don't want to come with us? We could use an extra mage - "
"I'm sure a sleep-deprived mage is exactly what you don't need." Niko shook his head. "So, no. Where are you going, anyway?"
"Well, we'll be working on that part near Old Kajaani that we started clearing two years ago. Mom says it'll be a while before we can get in close to the old settlement - I don't know how we'll manage that, but we have to start somewhere. So, right now, we'll just take the cats around, and..."
Niko listened, letting his sister's voice wash over him: light, comfortable, familiar. Alive. Words in his language, their language, rambling and gentle and full of life. Nothing like the voice he had heard in the line, sobbing at him through the radio waves in the middle of the night. He drank his tea, and ate his breakfast, and let her talk about his mother's dream of clearing out the entire area surrounding their lake, their sanctuary, cleansing space all the way around the perimeter until their region of the map could be painted entirely red. It felt like an impossible dream. But, a little at a time. That was what she always said. They had to start somewhere.
Eventually, Riidá rose from the table. She reached over to ruffle his hair, bidding goodbye. Said she'd try to come back early enough to see him before he left that evening for work. Said she'd tell grandmother about what he had said; that he thought she was too old for clearance work. She'd be sure to tell him exactly how grandmother felt about that.
He just laughed and let her go.
Niko watched out the window as she headed down toward the docks. There, the boats would be waiting for her, and the cats, and the rest of the salvage and clearance crew. As the thin morning light dipped its fingers through the glass, brushing brightly against his cheeks, he couldn't help but smile.
Fandom: Stand Still, Stay Silent
Characters: OCs - Niko; also Tuomas & Riidá
Rating: 0+
Length: 3.3k
Summary: It's just a routine check to clear the radio waves. But as he gets to work, Niko hears something unsettling in the screams.
Other: Some self-indulgent slice-of-life stuff with Niko & co. I must confess, I can't get enough of people hearing creepy things in the radio.
Prompt was #82, "Can you hear me?"
Voices in the Line
Once around about the village. Checking the walls, checking the lamps, building up the spells around their fortress to deter anything that wasn't wanted. The spring night was sharp and damp.
Though the air was cool, it wasn't as cold as it had been a week ago. In another week, it would be even milder, and the days would get longer. Soon, Niko thought, the sun would stay up most of the night, keeping him company while he did his rounds. That wasn't so bad on its own, but the warm weather would bring its own problems, and "night duty" would turn into a term with little meaning.
Niko shored up a protection spell along the western wall, and then, with another round finished, he turned and headed toward the radio house for the routine check-in, shivering and shoving his hands in his pockets to guard against the cold. He wished he had dressed a little more warmly. It wasn't summer yet; on a night like this, it wouldn't even be right to call it spring. He should have at least worn thicker gloves. The brightness of the sky when he had stepped out of the house that evening had deceived him. It had looked so much more friendly and warm than it actually was.
Inside the radio house, the single room was brightly-lit and welcoming as usual, a comfortable and familiar mess of organized chaos. Papers and memos and binders were stacked and piled amid the coils of wire and equipment and spare parts, and it was impossible to tell where one part of the "filing system" began and another ended. One of these days, Niko thought, they'll make us put this all in order, and then everyone will be complaining that nobody can find anything.
Tuomas sat in his usual place, an old chair that had seen better days pulled up in front of the radio console. The operator's headset was pulled down over his ears, drawing his long hair back from his face. His lips were pulled into a frown, forehead creasing as he listened to whatever was coming in from the other side.
Business as usual, then, Niko thought as he stepped into his line of sight. Leaned against the console. Gave a little wave. "Hi," he said when Tuomas finally slipped off the headset. "Got a job for me?"
They both knew the answer to that one. He hardly needed to ask. Tuomas handed him the headset with a sigh, shaking his head. "Blocked again. You'll have to clear it for me."
"No problem." Niko flashed him a smile. Every night, it was the same thing; no matter how many times they chased the spirits away from their radio waves, they kept coming back. With their community situated where it was, in the middle of silence, it was no surprise that any hint of noise would attract spirits like that. More than once, Tuomas had muttered in frustration at his inability to remove them himself. But Niko had managed to get pretty good at clearing them out - at least for a while. "Let's see what I'm dealing with, here...."
He pushed back his hood and shoved the headset on. Instantly, his ears were flooded with a barrage of screams. Niko grimaced and tried to ignore them. He stared off into space and listened and tried to brush the voices off. It's just noises, he told himself, biting down on his lower lip. Instead, concentrate on how much of it there is. The volume is what's important, not the words. Ignore what they're saying. How loud is it? How powerful are they? How strong a spell will be needed to clear all of this out? Ignore the words. Ignore them. Ignore the voices. It's just noise. Just the usual. Just noise.
Noise. Nothing but noise. Rising. Falling. Slipping into his ears, shrieking. He tried to pretend it was wind, even if no wind could sound like that. So much noise. The kind that comes in warm weather, when the thaw brings animals out of hibernation - and other things.
But it only took a moment to decide how to proceed, anyway. So, he reminded himself, it didn't matter. It was just noise.
He was just about to lift the headset from his ears when he heard a voice.
Words slipped in between the stream of Finnish crying. One voice, screaming, sobbing, far-off. One voice. They were all voices, and that rush of noise was made up of words. But this voice was crying in his tongue, this one was screaming in his language, and as the anguished sobs in Sami slipped through the radio waves and into his ears Niko froze and blanched and stared down at the radio console.
It wasn't just noise. It was a voice. It was impossible to ignore.
Niko ripped the headset off and shoved it toward Tuomas. "Wait," he said, barely getting the word out. "Give me a minute."
He didn't wait for an answer.
Out the door. Down the steps. Into Kajaani's cold, fresh night. Niko leaned against the side of the building, pressed his palms and head to the wall. Breathed in, breathed out. Tried to stop himself from shaking. Tried to stop his stomach from turning.
That voice. Those words. That language. He had never heard his language in the radio before, in that stream of shrieking voices. He had never heard his language spoken like that, desperate and anguished. His ears rang with it.
Niko waited there for a while, bracing himself against the side of the radio house. He wasn't sure how long he stood there, trying to calm himself down. He tried to count the seconds, the minutes, as he breathed slowly with closed eyes, listening to the sound of the night. Birds calling. The wind combing through the trees, shaking their bare branches. The whistle of a kettle inside the building. Tuomas was making tea. Niko concentrated on every rustle, every noise, until he felt steady enough to step away from the wall, to move and go up the steps into the building, to push open the rough wooden door and slip into his friend's warm light again.
When he finally stepped into that pool of light, Tuomas was taking the kettle off the woodstove, pouring tea for two, the sharp mint scent filling the room. He glanced toward Niko, raised an eyebrow, then turned his attention back to what he was doing.
"Should I ask?" His voice was gentle and quiet in the stillness of the radio room.
Niko hesitated. Would Tuomas understand? He heard his language in the screams every time the radio was clogged - which was often. Every day. There had hardly been a "first time" for him. He'd been doing this for years. It just wasn't the same. It couldn't be. "...No," he said softly. "Um. I don't think you should."
A pause, and nothing more. That answer was enough. "Okay," Tuomas said, and nudged a chair toward him with his foot. As Niko sank down into it, Tuomas pressed a mug into his hands.
They sat there for a while, not saying anything. The tea was sharp, strong, too-hot on Niko's tongue. He drank it slowly, letting the mug warm his hands. Tuomas dipped his head, pulled a stack of notes toward him, and read through them while he waited.
"You're waiting on word from Luleå, aren't you."
"Mmhm." A glance his way. "Probably won't get anything tonight, but we have to keep the line open. They still haven't given us confirmation of the pickup date for the end of the month."
Niko bit his tongue. Of course he knew how important it was to keep the lines of communication clear. Of course he did. He, as much as anyone else, knew it. The radio lines to Keuruu and Luleå were their lifelines to the outside world; without the radio contact, they'd be completely in the dark again, just as they had been for so many years. And even if the message Tuomas was waiting for probably wouldn't come during the night, there was always a chance that it would. And there was always a chance that there would be a call from one of the smaller villages, from Ontojärvi, or from one of the other tiny communities that had popped up around the lake. Or from one of the watch outposts. It could be anything. It could be everything. "...I know." He lifted his gaze, looked at him as steadily as he could. "After tea. Okay?"
"Okay."
"...Okay." Niko sat back. Drank his tea. Stared at the wall. Tried not to think about the voice that was waiting for him.
On the wall above Tuomas's desk hung a map of the Known World. Printed in Iceland. Fancy. Incomplete. Niko remembered the day that the traders had come back along the river with that in their cargo. They had unrolled it in a big gathering in the village hall, making a to-do of it, pointing out proudly how their little town was picked out on the map, its name clearly labelled. Acknowledged by the outside. Important enough to make note of. But the seasonal water route to Sweden was unmarked.
"How do they think we get in and out?" That was what people muttered, dipping their heads to whisper to one another, tsking at the map, how incomplete it was. "Magic?"
Maybe.
Niko lifted his gaze. The voice he had heard in the radio hung in his mind as he mentally traced the pale lines of rivers penetrating into the black, blank northland. It wasn't too long ago, not really long ago at all, that their part of the map would have been completely blank, too. "D'you think there might be people we haven't found yet?" he murmured to Tuomas. "Up north, maybe."
Tuomas lifted his head. Glanced at the map. Shrugged. "Nah. Nobody would last up there." He took up his tea again. "They're all long gone."
"That's what they said about us, you know." Niko gave the map another long look, as if labelled villages would appear if he stared at it long enough. "They said, 'Don't be stupid, nobody could survive out there'. But we were here the whole time."
"And then your crazy grandfather went down the river and surprised the shit out of everybody."
They both laughed. It was true. Everyone knew that story.
"Fine, fine," Tuomas admitted, breathing deeply, quelling his laughter. "There might be someone up there. I don't know."
"Maybe they'll find someone up there. Eventually."
"Maybe."
There was something in his voice, something in the look on his face that made it seem like Tuomas would say something else, like he was mulling over it. Niko waited, nursing his tea, listening. The headphones were around Tuomas's neck, the volume turned down just low enough that Niko couldn't hear the shrieking that he knew was coming through them. Couldn't hear the voices.
"If you're looking for more people like you, you'll have to get better at Swedish."
Niko looked up sharply. Tuomas nodded, then raised a hand to gesture toward the map, pointing lazily toward Sweden. "Luleå's your best bet. There are a couple families there that're like yours. That guy your grandmother is in contact with. Or maybe... well, I guess you could go to Norway. But that's pretty far. And you'd need to learn Swedish before they'll let you down the river, anyway."
"...Yeah." Niko bit his lip. "I guess that's what I'll have to do." Damn it, he thought, you're open to him, no matter if you want to be or not. Tuomas could read him as easily as anything. They had known each other for so long that keeping anything closed off was impossible. But somehow, the tension from earlier had washed away. Maybe it was because of the reminder that there was something else out there. Someone else.
Maybe it was time to take care of things, voice or no voice.
Niko downed the last of his tea, and held out a hand. You can do this, he told himself. "Here. Let me try it again."
Tuomas handed the headset over without a word. Niko steeled himself and put it on. Closed his eyes. Listened to the screaming. Listened and searched for that one anguished voice calling out in his tongue. There it was.
He could handle it now.
The words came easily enough. He'd woven that spell hundreds of times before. He certainly had enough practice with it. The runo to banish spirits from the radio was one that he knew all too well, and the words spilled from his lips like water flowing down a river as he sent them away.
At the end, Niko switched to his own language. The spell flowed more clumsily, but it worked just the same, and he summoned up as much strength and feeling as he could as he ordered the Sami spirit to go. The spell worked all the same no matter which language the spirit spoke in life, and he knew it. He'd heard languages other than Finnish in the screams before; Swedish and Norwegian and others that were completely alien, ones that he couldn't recognize at all. The runo always sent them all away, every one. It didn't matter to the spirits.
But it mattered to him. It did. Niko let the words roll past his teeth, sending the spirit off in a language it understood. In a language they shared. As soon as the crying stopped, he took in a shaking breath, and felt the tension ebb away.
Tuomas didn't say anything. Niko lifted his eyes to him, waiting for him to comment on it, because he knew that even though his friend didn't speak his language, he would recognize it. But he didn't say a word; he just took back the headset as Niko handed it over, put it over his ears, and nodded with approval at the clarity.
That was all.
The rest of the night was quiet, uneventful. Niko slipped out of the radio house and into the night and took up the rest of his duties as if nothing had happened. The usual round of patrols - again. Checking in with Tuomas - again. Reinforcing protections around the perimeters - again. Quiet had settled over Kajaani, the kind of quiet that wasn't really quiet at all, because it was the quiet of whispering treetops and night birds calling. Peaceful. No danger. No voices.
Even so, Niko felt weary when his shift was over and it was time to make his way home. The voice that had sobbed to him over the radio waves kept rolling through his mind, calling, calling.
"I'm home," Niko said as he pushed open the door, stepping into the house his family had lived in for ninety years. The words flowed out in his family's tongue, and it felt soothing in his mouth after a whole night of speaking Finnish. He pressed the door shut and listened while he slipped off his boots and shrugged off his hooded cloak. In the kitchen, he could hear movement. The clink of dishes. A whistling kettle.
"Hey!"
One person. The rest weren't there. Niko stepped carefully through to the kitchen, and peered around the door at his sister. "Where's mom?" he asked, trying not to sound disappointed.
"Gone across the water with Seija to check out last year's clearance before they do the first round with the cats."
"Ah." Right, Niko thought. It was that time of year again. He glanced to the corner of the room, noting the unoccupied chair near the window. "And grandmother?"
"Gone with them."
Niko sucked in a breath. "She's getting too old for that."
"I'd like to see you tell her that." Riidá stepped close to him, shoving a sandwich into one of his hands, and a mug of tea in the other. "If you get your breakfast down quick, you can come with me, and tell her right away."
"Wh-" Is she serious? One glance eased his suspicions. She had that sparkle in her eyes, that hint that she couldn't be any less serious if she tried. "No, thanks. I think I'll pass." He sank down into his familiar chair at the table, and gave her a smile that said he knew that she was joking. "I need to sleep sometimes, you know."
"Fine, fine." Long fingers sank into his hair, ruffling it, as if it could get any more mussed than it already was. "How was work, by the way?"
"Um." The memory of the voice in the radio rolled back to him. Niko tried to shove down the thought, tried to straighten his face, knowing that it was best not to show how it bothered him. Stop it, he thought. Don't tell her. She'll get worried. "Nothing exciting. The nights are still too cold for us to get much trouble." His stomach turned, but he swallowed his breakfast down anyway. "What do you have planned?"
Riidá's mug clinked on the old, worn-out table as she sank down across from him. "Well, I'm going to finish talking to you, and then I'm going to get out of here." She was already dressed for it, her flame-resistant coat draped over her shoulders, her hair tied back tightly. "Could've gone over with mom, but she wanted to be the first out there. And the boat can only hold so many each way..."
A smile tugged at the corner of Niko's lips. "And you wanted to wait for me?"
"Maaaybe." A laugh. "Okay, yes. A little."
"Mm, I see." The smile broadened. "You didn't have to, you know."
"But if I don't wait around for you in the mornings, then I hardly see you at all. I'll be glad when you switch over from this night shift stuff." She reached out to tuck a strand of hair behind his ear. "Are you sure you don't want to come with us? We could use an extra mage - "
"I'm sure a sleep-deprived mage is exactly what you don't need." Niko shook his head. "So, no. Where are you going, anyway?"
"Well, we'll be working on that part near Old Kajaani that we started clearing two years ago. Mom says it'll be a while before we can get in close to the old settlement - I don't know how we'll manage that, but we have to start somewhere. So, right now, we'll just take the cats around, and..."
Niko listened, letting his sister's voice wash over him: light, comfortable, familiar. Alive. Words in his language, their language, rambling and gentle and full of life. Nothing like the voice he had heard in the line, sobbing at him through the radio waves in the middle of the night. He drank his tea, and ate his breakfast, and let her talk about his mother's dream of clearing out the entire area surrounding their lake, their sanctuary, cleansing space all the way around the perimeter until their region of the map could be painted entirely red. It felt like an impossible dream. But, a little at a time. That was what she always said. They had to start somewhere.
Eventually, Riidá rose from the table. She reached over to ruffle his hair, bidding goodbye. Said she'd try to come back early enough to see him before he left that evening for work. Said she'd tell grandmother about what he had said; that he thought she was too old for clearance work. She'd be sure to tell him exactly how grandmother felt about that.
He just laughed and let her go.
Niko watched out the window as she headed down toward the docks. There, the boats would be waiting for her, and the cats, and the rest of the salvage and clearance crew. As the thin morning light dipped its fingers through the glass, brushing brightly against his cheeks, he couldn't help but smile.