Wizards at War, New Millennium Edition (9 page)

“
Dai,
cousin.” Nita thought for a moment, and then said, “Or is it ‘cousin
s
‘?”

He rolled his eyes. “Some days,” he said, “your guess’d be as good as mine.” He looked from her to Carmela. “Can I come in?”

“Sure,” Carmela said, sounding rather stunned.

Ronan stepped in and glanced around the living room. “Listen,” he said, “normally I wouldn’t just show up without warning—”

“Is anything normal at the moment?” Nita said.

“Now you’d be asking.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Nita said. “Believe it or not, it’s kind of good to see you.”

“Kind of?”

She smiled slightly. Ronan smiled a little, too, then looked down at his feet. Nita followed his glance. To her surprise, Spot was standing in front of Ronan, staring up at him with multiple stalked eyes.

“Three matters unknown but soon to be:

The way of the Gods with the created,

The way of the created with the Gods,

The way between them across the bridge of Being.”

Ronan blinked as Spot walked away again, toward the TV and the DVD and DVR, where he sat down on the rug and both legs and eyes vanished.

“You remember Spot,” Nita said.

Ronan raised his eyebrows. “Had an upgrade, from the looks of him,” he said.

“Yeah. Well, he’s started doing poetry. Haiku, sort of.”

Ronan shook his head. “Triads,” he said. “In Ireland we used to get a lot of prophecies that way: everything in threes.”

Nita shrugged. “His basic logic’s trinary, Dairine says. But at least it beats him sitting in the corner going ‘uh-oh’ all day.”

Ronan snorted. “Been hearing a fair amount of that myself,” he said. “That’s why I’m here. You’ve been in touch with your Advisories about the trouble that’s coming—”

“Uh, yeah.”

“Did they seem a little less helpful than usual?”

“A little,” Nita said, hating to admit it.

Ronan nodded. “It’s the same all over. Well, things are moving already, and we have to be part of it. But I need your help.
We
need it.”

He looked uncomfortable as he said “we.” That, at least, was in character. “Come on,” Nita said, and led him toward the dining room. Then she paused and turned, responding again to that sun-on-sunburn feeling. “It’s here, isn’t it?” Nita said.

“What’s here?”

“The Spear. You’ve got it with you.”

Ronan nodded. “Thought you might notice.”

Now it was Nita’s turn to laugh a little. “How do you not notice
that?
” she said, for she’d been present at the forging of the Spear of Light, and had been more frightened by it than by almost anything else she’d seen or experienced during her practice of wizardry. It wasn’t that the Spear was a bad thing: absolutely the opposite. But it was hard to be in the neighborhood of a power of pure goodness for very long. That Ronan could handle the full force of the Spear—had apparently been
destined
to handle it—made Nita as nervous as the thought of the Power that lived inside his head with him and made dealing with the Spear possible.

“Is it a problem?” Ronan said.

Nita shook her head. “Right now we can use all the help we can get—and that means weapons, too. Where have you got it? In an otherspace pocket?”

“No, in this one.” Ronan reached inside his jacket and came out with a plastic ballpoint pen.

Nita blinked. “
That?
”

“Mightier than the sword, theoretically,” Ronan said, clicking the point in and out a couple of times. Nita got just the briefest glimpse of a spark of blindingly white fire at the tip of the ballpoint, as if its ink were lightning. “Don’t think I carry it around in its normal shape all day, do you? It’s murder on people’s woodwork.” He slipped the pen back into the inside pocket and went into the dining room past her. “
Dai stihó,
everybody—”

“
Dai stihó,
” said five audible voices and one silent one.

Nita stood there watching them all get acquainted with the newcomer. Ronan looked taller somehow.
Seems a little late for a growth spurt,
Nita thought: Ronan had to be around seventeen now, maybe more. But there was always the possibility that what Nita was picking up was something to do with the Other that lived inside him—a being much older, and far more powerful, than any of them.

She glanced over at Kit as Ronan made his way around to him, and banged a friendly fist against Kit’s. “You don’t look surprised,” Nita said.

Kit and Ronan looked at her, and then at each other, and Ronan raised his eyebrows. “Why would he be?” Ronan said.

“I asked him to come,” Kit said.

Nita’s mouth dropped open. She shut it.

“I was thinking of coming anyway,” Ronan said, “but this makes everything easier.” He glanced around at the other wizards. “And I’m glad to meet you folks, because it seems like you weren’t sent here by accident.”

“No,” Dairine said. “We kind of got that feeling…”

Without warning, Carmela came around the corner and pulled Nita away from behind Ronan, backward and out of sight of the dining room, where Kit had started to ask Ronan something.

“Who. Is. Your.
Friend??
” Carmela whispered, as Nita regained her balance. “Where did he
come
from?”

“Ireland. There’s this town on the east coast, it’s called Bray—”

“No, no, no,” Carmela said. “I meant it in a much more existential way. I was referring to his basic, you know, hotness.” Carmela put her head down by Nita’s. “Is he attached?” she whispered.

“In ways it would take me days to describe,” Nita said, “yes.”

Carmela’s face fell.

“But none of them are
those
kinds of ways,” Nita said.

A smile appeared slowly on Carmela’s face. “Oh,
good.
” Carmela then strolled back into the dining room in the most casual manner imaginable.

Nita shook her head.
Did I think things were getting weird around her? We’re about to set a weirdness baseline the likes of which the planet’s never seen.
She went after Carmela.

Ronan had just sat down at the table. The others got comfortable on the sofa or on chairs or on the floor, each according to his kind.

“As I just said to Nita, things are starting to happen already,” Ronan said. “The new ‘young Seniors’ are starting to meet on the Moon, right now. You’d have found out about the gathering shortly from your manuals, or whatever form of the Knowledge you use. But I needed to reach you before you left … because I’ve got access to information that’s too sensitive to be entrusted to the manuals.”

Nita’s eyes went wide.

“
Whoa,
” Kit said softly.

“Here’s the short version,” Ronan said. “The Powers have learned that hidden somewhere in this universe, there’s an Instrumentality, a weapon, that will stop the stretching of space-time—if we can find it and ‘arm’ it soon enough. They say if we start looking now, there’s a good chance we’ll find the Instrumentality before things get really bad.”

“What are the adult Seniors saying about this?” Sker’ret said.

“Nothing,” Ronan said. “They haven’t been told.”

Nita shot Kit an uncomfortable glance.

“I know how it sounds,” Ronan said. “But we can’t tell them. They’re already losing their power; that’s why the intervention last week failed. And that power loss also means they won’t be able to guard the secret from the one Power who’d benefit most from learning it and sabotaging what we’ve got to do.”

“Which is what?” Carmela said.

Ronan glanced sharply at her. “I’m not sure you should be here,” he said.

“I live here,” Carmela said in the Speech. “Get used to it.”

Ronan looked at her for a moment more, then shrugged. “Well. The One’s Champion has passed me a hint of what the solution to the problem might be. But the Powers can’t tell anybody straight out, not even me.” Ronan looked royally annoyed. “If the Powers speak plainly about this to
anyone,
or put it in the manuals, the Lone One will shortly know whatever it is They know. So we have to go looking for the weapon with nothing but hints to guide us.”

Nita was shaking her head. “I don’t get it. Why are you the one to get this news? Why didn’t the Powers say anything about this to Tom and Carl and the other Seniors who went out on the intervention last week?”

“Because they’re the ones the Lone Power would
expect
to be given that news,” Ronan said. “I’m sure It was listening to their every thought. But me? I’m a failure.”

He smiled one of those particularly grim smiles of his as he said it, and Nita winced a little. With Ronan it was often hard to tell whether he was being bitter because he meant it, or whether he was doing it for effect.

“I’ve had the One’s Champion in my head for a good while now,” Ronan said. “And I haven’t done much of anything.” He shrugged. “The usual wizardry: local interventions, small-time stuff. But nothing to suggest that I’ve come to any kind of long-term agreement with the Champion, or that I’m anything to be concerned about.”

And whose idea was that, I wonder?
Nita thought. Ronan had at first fought the idea of the ancient warrior Power, which humans had occasionally called Thor, or Athena, or even Michael, winding up inside him. He’d hoped the presence of that Power would eventually just fade away and leave him in peace to be human.

“And if the Lone One eavesdrops on me and isn’t able to hear what’s going on in my head terribly well,” Ronan said, “It’s likely to jump to the conclusion that it’s my fault. Ambivalence … the thing that makes a wizard least effective.” His smile wasn’t quite so bitter this time. “So I guess the Powers fancy me as an undercover agent. It was ‘suggested’ to me that someone I knew would be able to get the search for the Instrumentality started. Right after the suggestion came, you got in touch with me”—he glanced over at Kit—”which kind of clinched it.”

“Great minds think alike,” Kit said.

Ronan’s grin acquired a sly and amused edge to its darkness. “There’ll be other suggestions as we go along,” he said. “And the Champion will keep us from being eavesdropped on. But for the moment, to get started, the Champion says we need a Finder. We need the best one there is.”

Ponch, lying on the floor, lifted his head.
That would be me,
he said, and yawned, and sat up.
What are you looking for?

“All I have to go on is imagery,” Ronan said. “I don’t know where it comes from, and neither does the Champion. But if you really have the tracking gift, my lad, it won’t matter. You’ll be able to find it.”

Kit said, “Ponch is very good. He’s ‘made’ whole universes before, to find what he wanted.”

Ponch’s tail started to wag.
Squirrels!
he said, and started to jump up and down.

Kit groaned. “Ponch,” he said, “this is so not the moment! First you have to find what Ronan and his ‘friend’ need you to find.”

Then the squirrels? Hurray!
At least that was how the thought translated from a deafening spate of mental barking.

Kit exchanged a wry glance with Ronan. “The Lone One has to know something about what Ponch can do.”

“Probably more than we’d like It to. All we can do is try to cover our tracks.”

“Then we should head for the Moon first,” Kit said. “If a lot of wizards are there, it’ll seem normal that we should be there, too. If after that we go out into space as just one more of however many teams, It may get thrown off our track long enough for us to find what we’re looking for.”

“Right you are,” Ronan said. “So we should get going now.”

“What,
right
now?” Nita said.

Ronan threw her one of those
of-course-you-dummy
looks that Nita had hated so much until she came to understand that they were caused by impatience, not cruelty. “There are other kinds of ‘now,’” Ronan said, “but, yeah, that was the one I meant.” He looked around at the others. “How about it?”

Filif and Sker’ret and Roshaun exchanged glances. “If the Powers That Be want to send us on the hunt,” Sker’ret said, “it seems foolish to refuse.”

“I have some issues at home that will have to be handled,” Roshaun said. “But after that”—he looked over at Dairine—”I have never yet worked directly with one of the Powers That Be.” He smiled. “It should be interesting. For the Power, of course.”

Dairine shot Roshaun a look that he entirely missed, but Nita didn’t. She had to cover her mouth to keep from snickering.

Filif rustled. “I am with you,” he said at last.

Kit turned to Nita. “What do you say?”

She let out a breath. “I say we go,” she said.

Half an hour later, they were on the Moon.

At the far left edge of the face of the Moon, as it’s seen from the northern hemisphere, about halfway between the Moon’s equator and its south pole lies a vast triple-ringed crater—the remnant of a huge impact in ancient times when the Moon’s surface was still just a thin crust of stone over seas of seething lava. Whatever hit the Moon did so with such awful force that three consecutive ripples of lava, each as tall as Everest, roared hundreds of kilometers outward across the surface before they froze in place. They became the Inner Rook, Outer Rook, and Cordillera mountain ranges, all surrounding Mare Orientale—the Eastern Sea.

The mountain rings have themselves over time become pocked with countless big and little craters. One of these, at the one o’clock position on the Cordillera ring, is too small and unremarkable to have a name on any astronomer’s map. But others familiar with the Moon know it for its unusually dark crater floor, its spectacular view across the vast expanse of the Sea, and the short, sharp impact spike sticking up sheer out of the middle of it; and today it was remarkable for other reasons, too.

“Wow,” Nita said under her breath. “It’s full of wizards.”

The normal darkness of the crater floor’s basalt was obscured by what, in the pale blue-white light of the setting near-full Earth, could have been mistaken for gigantic soap bubbles. But they were really force fields full of air—hundreds of them, big and small, scattered right across the near-perfect kilometer-wide circle of the little crater that wizards call Lake View, after the nearby basin of Lacus Veris, Spring Lake. The force-field wizardries gleamed blue on one side with Earth-light, where the crater’s Earthward shadow fell over them, and on the other with the light of the Sun, now nearly halfway up the jet-black sky over the Eastern Sea; and about them all was a little shimmer or tremor of a most delicate silvery fog, as the force fields shed out frozen “waste” carbon dioxide into the lunar dusk.