A Wizard Abroad, New Millennium Edition (32 page)

He paused. “And one last thing,” Johnny said. “Most of us will never have been in an intervention this crucial, or this dangerous. The odds against us are extremely high. Some of us,” and his glance swept across the group with great unease, “will not come back. It’s a certainty. Please, please,
please
... be careful with your choice. One thing a wizard cannot patch, as you know, is any situation in which his or her own death occurs...so any of you with dependents, or responsibilities which you think may supersede this one, please think about whether you want to cross over. We’ll need guardians on this side too, to keep an eye on the worldgate in case the Fomori try to stage a breakthrough behind the main group. Bravery is valuable, but irresponsibility will doom us. Later, if not now. So
think.”

There was a great silence at this. Nita looked at Kit, and saw him swallow.

“Those of you who need to recuse yourselves from combat, just remain here when we pass through,” Johnny said. “Meanwhile, let’s open the gate.”

He turned to Nita’s aunt. “Anne? This was always one of your specialties. You want to do the honors?” He reached over to the table and handed Nita’s aunt the Sword Fragarach.

She took it. A breath of wind went through the hall; the hangings whispered and rustled among themselves. Then Aunt Annie laid the sword over her shoulder and headed up the narrow spiral stairway to the top of the castle.

The wizards in the hall began to empty out into the graveled parking lot in front. Nita and Kit went along. Nita was curious to see what would happen. Gatings were an air sorcery; the business of parting the fabric of spacetime was attached to the element of air, with all those other subtle forces that a wizard could feel but not see. Nita paused out there with the others in the parking lot and craned her neck.

Against the low golden sunset light, her aunt’s silhouette appeared at the top of the tower, between two of the battlements. It was incongruous; a slightly portly lady with her hair tied back, in jeans and sneakers and a baggy sweatshirt, lifting up the Sword of Lugh in her two hands. She said, just loud enough to be heard down below, “Let the way be opened.”

That was all it took; no complex spelling, not tonight. The barriers between things were worn too thin already. A wind sprang up behind them; light at first, so that the trees merely rustled. Then harder, and leaves began to blow away, and the cypresses down by the water moaned and bent in the wind. Hats blew off; people’s clothing tried to jump off them. Nita hugged herself; the wind was cold. Beside her, Kit zipped up his windbreaker, which was flapping around him like a flag. He stared back into the teeth of the wind. “Here it comes,” he said.

Nita turned to look over her shoulder. It looked like a rainstorm coming, the way she had seen them slide along the hills here; the darker kind of light, wispy, trailing from sky to earth, sweeping down on them. Behind it, the landscape darkened, silvered, muted, as if someone had turned the brightness control down on a TV. Everything went vague and soft. The effect swept toward them rapidly, swallowing the edges of the horizon, and then passed over, roiling like a thundercloud. The wind dropped off as it passed.

Everything had gone subdued, quiet; that warm light of sunset had faded down to a dull, livid sort of light. The only bright thing to be seen was Fragarach, which had its own ideas about light and shining, and scorned to take local conditions into account.

Aunt Annie lowered her arms, looked around her, and disappeared from the battlements. Nita glanced around and saw that everything in sight was muted down to this pallid, threatening twilight. The sunset was a shadow, fading away. Overhead was only low cloud and mist; no stars, no Moon.

“That’s it,” Johnny said. “Someone get the Spear. Doris, the Cup—”

“Which way do we go?” said one of the wizards.

“East, toward the sea, and the dawn. Always toward the East. Don’t let yourselves get turned around.”

Kit looked around. “There are a lot more trees here than there were before…”

“Yeah.” The only thing that was about the same was Matrix, which surprised her. Nita had thought it would take some other shape here, as Sugarloaf had. But it looked like itself; no change. The cars in the parking lot were gone, though, and so was the parking lot itself. There was nothing but longish grass, stretching away to a ride between the trees of the forest and out into a clearing on the far side. It was still a beautiful-looking place, but there was now a grimness about it.

The wizards began moving out. “It was a lot brighter the last time we were here,” Nita said to Kit, thinking of Sugarloaf.

He nodded. “They’re under attack.”
And we will be too,
she heard him think, but not say out loud for fear of unnerving her. Nita laughed softly; she could hardly be much more unnerved than she was at the moment.

Off to one side, Nita caught sight of Aunt Annie, carrying Fragarach. Some ways ahead of them, too, they saw Doris Smyth with the Cup, still in its pillowcase. Nita and Kit passed her, and Nita couldn’t help looking at the striped pillowcase quizzically. Doris caught the look and smiled. “Can’t have it getting scratched,” she said. “They’d ask questions when we bring it back.”

Nita laughed and turned to say something to Kit, and stopped. Ahead of them she saw Ronan, stalking along in his black jeans and boots and leathers, carrying what looked like a pole wrapped in canvas. Except that she knew perfectly well that it wasn’t a pole, since she got the clear feeling that from inside the wrappings, something was looking at her hard.
I think he’ll stop fighting it,
Johnny had said. “…Come on,” she said to Kit.

The two of them made their way over to Ronan. “You okay?” Nita said.

Ronan looked at her. “What a daft question. Why shouldn’t I be okay?”

“The, uh—” Nita almost didn’t like to say its name in front of it. “Your friend there. Don’t you have trouble carrying it? Johnny was having a real hard time.”

“No. Should I? Is the wrapping coming undone?”

“Oh no,” Nita said. “Never mind...” But she remembered what Johnny had said about burdens, and cardinal virtues. Either Ronan was just not very sensitive… But no. It couldn’t be that. She particularly noticed, though, a slightly glazed look in Ronan’s eyes, an abstracted expression, as if he was seeing something different from what the rest of them were seeing. Could the Spear make it easier for the person it wanted to carry it, by dulling or numbing their own sense of it?

Or was it something else?...

Nita shook her head, having no way to work out what was going on, and went on with Kit and all the others through the silvery twilight. This seemed to get a little less gloomy as they went on, though Nita suspected this was just because she was getting used to it. Then the darkness seemed to increase suddenly, and a shadow passed over them. Nita’s head jerked up. Something big and winged went by, cawing harshly, as the wizards passed through the space between two tongues of forest.

The bird came to rest on one of the tallest of the trees, and looked down at them. The tree shuddered, and all its leaves fell off it on the spot. The crow laughed harshly. It was one of the grey-backed ones called hoodie-crows; Nita had seen her aunt shoot at them, and swear when she missed, since hoodies attacked lambs during the lambing season, killing them by pecking their eyes out and going straight through their skulls. There was muttering among the crowd as they looked at the crow.

Johnny, up near the front of the group, called, “Well, Scaldcrow? Smell a battle, do you?”

“Have I ever failed to?” said the scratchy, cawing voice; and it was a woman’s voice as well, and a nasty one, rich with wicked humor over some private joke. “I see it all red; a fierce, tempestuous fight, and great are its signs; destruction of life, the shattering of shields; wetting of sword-edge, strife and slaughter, the rumbling of war-chariots! Go on then, and let there be sweet bloodshed and the clashing of arms, the sating of ravens, the feeding of crows!” And she laughed again.

“Yes, you’d like that part,” Johnny said, not sounding particularly impressed. “The rumbling of chariots, indeed! You’ve been picking up road-kills by the motorway again, Great Queen.”

“Go your ways,” Doris said, beside Johnny. “There’ll be a battle right enough. But we’ll need you at the end, so don’t go far.”

The crow looked down at them, and the light of the Cup caught in her eyes. She was quiet for a moment, then laughed harshly, and vaulted up out of the tree, flapping off eastward. “I’ll tell him you said so,” she said, laughing still, and vanished into the mist.

Nita looked over at Ronan. “Now who was that?”

“It’s just the Morrigan,” he said.

Nita blanched. “Just!” said Kit. Apparently he had been researching matters in the manual as well. But Ronan just shrugged again.

“She’s in a lot of the old stories,” he said, “the chief of the battle-goddesses; always getting off on stirring up troubles and wars.” Nita shivered a little: she saw something more than the recitation of myth in Ronan’s eyes. That dazzled look was about him again, but it was an expression of memory this time. He knew the Morrigan personally, or something looking through his eyes did… “But she can be good, too. She’s one of the Powers that can go either way without warning.”

“Well, she doesn’t look real friendly at the moment,” Kit said. “I’d just as soon she stayed out of this.”

They walked on. Distances seemed oddly telescoped here. The landmarks were the same as they were in the real world, and Nita was seeing already things that had taken them half an hour to reach in the car. She was just pointing Three Rock Mountain out to Kit when they heard the first shouts of surprise from the wizards in front; and then the first wave of the Fomori hit them.

They ran out at the wizards, screaming, from the shelter of the trees. Nita and Kit, being well off to one side and their view not blocked, had a chance to look the situation over before it got totally incomprehensible. There were a lot of the same kind of drow that they had seen in Bray; some of them were riding black horselike creatures, but fanged like tigers. There were strange headless humanoid creatures with eyes in their chests, and scaly wormlike beasts that flowed along the ground but were a hundred times the size of any snake. That much Nita could make out before the front line of the Fomori smashed in among the leading wizards, and battle broke out.

The wizards counterattacked; spells were shouted, weapons alive with wizard-light struck. And the fight started to be a very uneven one, so much so that Nita was surprised by it. The drows, at least, had seemed much stronger in her own world. But here they went down fairly quickly under the onslaught of the wizards; many of those not directly attacked turned and ran away wailing into the woods, and some of those who had been resisted simply fell down dead after a simple stunning-spell or in the backlash of a stasis or rebound wizardry.

“It’s got to be just a feint,” said Kit, shaking his head in disbelief. “That can’t be the best they’ve got.”

“I hope you’re right,” Nita muttered.

“Oh, no,” Kit said softly. “Not already.”

She looked where he was looking. Off to their left a young woman was lying, loose-limbed and pale, like a broken doll thrown down. There were several drows lying in pieces by her, but it was no consolation, seeing they were spattered with that shade of red so bright even in this dim light that it looked fake. Nita shuddered, for experience had shown her over time that that “fake look” was a sure sign it was the real thing.

“Two more over that way,” Kit muttered. “I thought there was supposed to be safety in numbers, Neets.”

She shook her head. Two other wizards had gone over to check the young woman: now one of them came back to Johnny, shaking her head.

“They’ll have to be left here for now,” he said. “We’ll see to them later...we can’t wait. Come on.”

There were a few moments of confusion while the wizards got themselves back in order. Then they headed out again.

“It’s getting darker,” Kit said, looking ahead. “Is that where we’re supposed to be going? Downhill there?”

“I think so.”

“Great,” Kit said. “By the time we get down there, we won’t be able to see anything.”

That thought had occurred to Nita; it was getting hard enough to see their footing as it was, and since there were no roads here, this was a problem. She had made a small wizard-light to bob along in front of her, like an usher’s flashlight in a movie theater, to help her see where to put her feet. Meanwhile, she might not be armed with anything concrete, but she had the spell ready that she had used on the drows in Bray. It hadn’t functioned too well there, but here, to judge by the reactions of the drows to the wizardries used against them in the little skirmish just past, it would work just fine. “You got anything ready to hit things with?” Nita said to Kit.

He looked sideways at her and smiled very slightly. “Well,” he said. “There’s always the beam-me-up spell. If you just leave the locus specification for the far end of the spell blank—or if you specify somewhere, say, out in deep space—”

Nita shuddered. “Yecch.”

Kit shrugged. “Better them than me.”

The crowd was heading downhill now, on a path paralleling the way the road would have run in the real world, down onto the little twisty ridge of Kilmolin and then further down into Enniskerry village. As they came down there seemed to be some confusion among the front ranks; they were milling around, and the wizards behind were pushing up close behind them.