Wizards at War, New Millennium Edition (50 page)

“It’s going to take a long time,” Dairine said.

It will take forever,
the Hesper said.
But I have forever now. The past, and the future, the ability to be in time: you gave it to me.

Her regard dwelled on them all for a moment.
I can
only stay a little more of your time in this form,
the Hesper said.
So new a connection between the physical realms and eternity won’t hold for long in this ephemeral place. I must depart. But because you and your worlds have endured such danger for my sake, I’ve done what I can to repay the debt. For a very little while, I have driven our Enemy out of time. While Its brief exile lasts, It can do no new evil. But what It has already set in train, I can’t now halt. I must withdraw into timelessness now and recoup my strength, or risk being unable to embody again for a long while.

Roshaun bowed to her. “Crowned one,” he said, “you owe us no debts. In the paths of errantry, we’ll meet again.”

The Hesper was already fading. Ponch started barking again.
Don’t go away! Don’t go—

Those rainbow-mirror eyes rested briefly on Ponch, and Nita thought she saw affection there.
Make haste to your world,
the Hesper said, looking from Ponch to Kit and Nita and Dairine.
Make haste! They will need you there.

The light faded, slipped away, as if sunset was happening indoors. Finally they all stood or knelt in twilight, surrounded by many curious Yaldiv who peered down at them and held up their claws in a new gesture.

“Welcome,” they said. “Friends of the Daughter of the true Great One, friends of the Queen of Light;
dai stihó,
and well met on the journey!”

Nita and Kit stared at each other. “Too much strange,” Nita said, “
just too much!
” She rubbed her eyes. “Hi, guys, good to see you, too. Please bear with us for a moment.” She turned her attention back to Ronan. “Fil, quick, give us some light!”

All Filif’s berries blazed with wizard-light as Nita reached sideways into her otherspace pocket, found it where it belonged, pulled out her manual, and dumped it on the floor. Its pages riffled wildly as she pulled the rowan wand out of her belt and shook it down once like someone shaking a thermometer: white moonfire ran down it. She looked down at Ronan, put a hand on his chest next to the place where the Spear had gone in—then froze.

She looked up at Kit. “Is he breathing?” she whispered.

Kit looked at her, and very quietly said, “No.”

Nita’s ears roared with her panic. All she could hear herself thinking was
Oh no, oh no, not this, not
now!
And is it my fault?

The idea shook her. “The greatest challenge of your life,” she’d said to him.
Why did I say that? Except somehow I knew it was true.
All this while she’d been treating the peridexic effect as if it was something cute, rather than what it was, the manual suddenly inside her head, making what she said truer than usual. And now she could hear her voice saying to Carmela, “Enjoy him while you can. He won’t be here for long.”
No, oh no, please don’t let it be that I
made
this happen—

Everything inside her started to go cold, and the coldness, a kind of distant, freezing calm, was exactly what was needed. Nita looked down at Ronan, lying there bleeding nothing but blood now, and he seemed as remote to her as something showing on TV while she was paying attention to something else in front of her. “Okay,” she said. “I know what to do—”

Kit was looking at her with a shocked sort of expression: Nita assumed it had something to do with her voice, which even to her sounded like it belonged to somebody else. “What? A healing spell?”

Nita shook her head. “No time for that now,” she said, glancing down at her manual; its pages stopped riffling. “We have to get back to Earth as fast as we can.”

“But the Pullulus! If it’s getting closer to Earth, wizardry might not be working right—”

“See if the manual tells you anything about that,” Nita said. The page she’d wanted in her manual, containing the spell she’d prepared days earlier, lay there waiting in front of her. “But we have to take the chance. You heard the Hesper! We need to head back
now.
”

“But if you don’t heal him—” Kit looked past Nita at her manual, peering down at the details of the spell.

She shook her head again, shoving the rowan wand back into her belt for the moment. “Stasis,” she said. “After the little chat we had with Darryl, I thought I’d better have one ready.”

“Send me a copy!” Kit said, flipping his manual open.

“Did that already,” Nita said. She glanced around them. “Dair, Roshaun, Fil, when this is finished we need to transit back to the Crossings and home from there. A straight-in gating might derange this spell, especially if something
is
wrong with wizardry back home.”

“I will contact Sker’ret,” Roshaun said, “and make sure they’re ready for us.”

“I will set up the transit spell,” Filif said. “Will you need further assistance with that one?”

“Shouldn’t,” Nita said. “Kit?”

He nodded, and together they started to recite in the Speech. The old reassuring fade-out of sound started to set in around them as the words of the Speech seized on the fabric of the universe and started to bend it into a new shape, one that would absolutely freeze time for Ronan. It was a particularly “hard” stasis, its emphasis on completely stopping all activity in a living being, right down to the motions of electrons around their atoms’ nuclei.

Okay,
Nita thought to the peridexis.
If you’ve got extra power for me, let’s have it.

Nita’s whole mind went up a flare of sheer power that rushed out through her and into the spell with tremendous force, scorching her as it passed. Now Nita started to understand why wizards were so rarely allowed to channel power of this intensity: the “power limit” was a safety valve. Do this too often and it would scar the conduits of mind and spirit through which it flowed, leaving the wizard too sensitive to bear wizardry’s flow. Even lesser wizardries, afterward, would feel as if your own blood was burning you.
Not my problem right now,
Nita thought.
Right now there’s exactly one thing to concentrate on—

The first long passage of the spell was done. Nita paused, taking a long breath as she got ready for the second passage. Even the simplest and most temporary stasis spell wouldn’t operate until you correctly described the physical object it was meant to freeze, and this one was neither simple nor particularly temporary. The lockdown was always the worst part of the work.
But if I can’t handle this now, I’ll never be able to.

She caught Kit’s eye: he nodded. Ronan’s name in the Speech was already laid into the spell. Nita looked across the burning pattern the spell made in her mind, expecting to see the reality of what was going on with Ronan, probably a swirl of pain and shock.

But there wasn’t any pain, and the emotional context she sensed was very far indeed from shock. It was utterly serene. And off in the distance, getting more distant by the moment, Nita caught sight of a growing glow of light.

Oh, no, you don’t!
she shouted inwardly.
Not that way! You don’t get to do
that
right now! Kit!

I can’t get at him! He won’t listen, he’s not—

Typical,
Nita said, furious.
Ronan!

She poured more power into the spell.
Don’t let me down now,
she said silently to the peridexis.
Now’s when I need it! Come on, let me have whatever you’ve got.

The new access of power burst through her with terrific force, leaping away from her across the spell diagram and past her and Kit to the dwindling figure that stood silhouetted against the faraway light. Nita hung on, though the scorching at the back of her mind got worse and worse.
No—you
—don’t
!

The form walking away from them began to slow … and second by second, moved more slowly still. Nita closed her eyes and concentrated on being simply something for the power to pour through into the wizardry. Her brain felt like it was shaking itself apart, but Nita hung on, hung on.
Not—another—step! Not—another—

In the distance, between one step and the next, Ronan froze.

Gasping, Nita opened her eyes again and looked at Kit across the spell diagram. He was still reading from his manual, finishing the last few phrases that would lock the stasis down. All around, the others were staring at her.

She looked around at them all. “What?”

Kit said the last couple of words of the spell, added the shorthand version of the words of the wizard’s knot, and then slapped his manual shut and dropped it in front of him, next to Ronan’s inert and unbreathing form. “You were kind of on fire there,” Kit said.

Nita rubbed her eyes. “Tell me about it,” she said. “I really need an aspirin.”

“No, I mean on
fire
on fire,” Kit said. “A lot of light…”

“I was?” She found it hard to care. At least the spell had worked.

“Yeah. And who else were you talking to?”

“Oh.” She laughed. “My invisible friend.”

Dairine looked horrified. “Oh, jeez, not
Bobo!”

Nita laughed again. These days she couldn’t remember the invisible friend she’d blamed for everything that went wrong around her when she was five or six, but her mom and dad had told her endless stories about “Bobo’s” escapades. “Uh, no,” she said. “Just wizardry.”

Kit stared at her. “
Wizardry
talks?” he said. “Is this something new?”

Nita closed her manual and chucked it into her otherspace pocket. “Yeah,” she said. “It took me by surprise, too.” She looked down at Ronan. He wasn’t breathing, but now that was normal. If he suddenly started breathing again,
that
would be a real sign of trouble. “Come on,” she said, “we need to get back. This should hold for a few hours at least.”

“Question is,” Dairine said, “is that going to be enough?”

“Let’s go find out.”

Filif came gliding over to them with something held in his fronds. It was a drift of what looked like smoke, but it was shot through with glints of the dark green fire that characterized his wizardries.
This is a version of the mobility routine I use to get around on hard surfaces,
he said.
It will make Ronan a little more manageable until he’s able to get around by himself.

“Great,” Nita said. Filif shook the cloud of smoke out like someone shaking a sheet out across a bed; the cloud thinned, drifted down over Ronan, and shrouded him like a see-through blanket. As soon as it had draped completely down over him, Ronan levitated gently up into the air to about Nita’s waist.

“Handy,” Kit said. He reached out and nudged Ronan’s shoulder a little with one hand: he moved weightlessly through the air. “Okay, let’s get him into the transit diagram.”

The Yaldiv crowding around them made a little space for the wizards to pass over to where Roshaun had laid out their transit circle. As they made their way over to the diagram, one Yaldiv came up to them through the gathered crowd. To Nita’s slight surprise, it was the Arch-votary. She could just barely see the old patterns on its outer shell, which had burned themselves pale in the overflow from the Hesper’s transformation. “Friends of the Queen of Light,” it said, “will you return?”

“If we can,” Nita said. “There’s a lot going on at home right now.” It occurred to her then that there was something she wanted to do right away. She rooted around in her pockets until she found her cell phone. “But if we don’t come back ourselves, we’ll make sure somebody visits you when things quiet down.”

Kit floated Ronan into the diagram. “Can he go vertical?” he said to Filif. “He takes up a lot of room in here.”

“Certainly. I’ll help.”

While they were standing Ronan upright, Nita punched the “last dialed number” button on the phone, put it to her ear, and waited.

Nothing happened. She took the phone away from her ear and looked at it. Its dialing screen cleared and showed her a little message: DIALED PLANET UNAVAILABLE.

Nita’s blood instantly ran cold. “
Planet
unavailable?!” Nita said. “What’s
that
supposed to mean?”

She looked over at Kit, then at Dairine. Kit looked pale. Dairine’s eyes were worried. “If it means that wizardry’s failed completely back there—”

“I really, really hope that’s all it means,” Nita said.

“Unavailable?” Carmela mused, looking over Nita’s shoulder at the phone. “I think you need to change your service provider.”

“I want the old one back first so I can yell at it,” Nita muttered. She shoved the phone in her pocket, feeling herself starting to shake again. “You guys ready?”

“Ready now,” Filif said.

To the Yaldiv surrounding them, Kit said, “Take care of yourselves, people, and go well. Meanwhile, stand clear—”

The Yaldiv crowded away. Nita took a last look around in that great dimness, which just a short time ago had been so bright.
Things looked really bad here, too,
she thought.
Just keep telling yourself that!

They vanished.

***

The group came out into a Crossings that wasn’t quite as frenetic as Nita had seen it last; and there seemed to be fewer Rirhait around … but she wasn’t sure whether that was a good sign or not. The group got off the transit pad on which they’d arrived and looked around.

“Which way?” Kit said. “We should check with the Master before we head out.”

“That won’t take long,” Nita said, and smiled just slightly. Away down the long shining corridor she saw a vividly purple shape pouring itself along toward them, followed by about thirty other Rirhait.

“You’re back!” Sker’ret shouted at them, long before he got anywhere near them. The urgency of his manner was so much unlike Sker’ret’s usual soft-spoken diffidence that Nita couldn’t do anything but get down on one knee and grab him as he came up with them. Then she wheezed a little, because being hugged by someone with twenty or more pairs of legs can leave you a little short of air. “Oh, Mover without us and within,” Sker’ret said, “I didn’t know if we were going to
see
you again! …I mean, ‘when!’”