The next morning, when Nita came into the kitchen, Aunt Annie was sitting at the kitchen table with a cordless phone and a cup of tea, going through the Yellow Pages. She looked up and said, "Want to go into town?"
"Bray?"
"No, Dublin. . ."
The phone rang again. It had been doing that all morning: Nita had been able to hear it even out in the caravan. Aunt Annie sighed and picked it up. Nita went off to get herself a cup of tea.
After a while Aunt Annie hung up and looked over at Nita. "We'll be meeting at a pub in town tonight," she said, starting to dial another number. "This should be fun for you; you haven't been in a pub yet."
Nita blinked at that. "Am I allowed?"
"Oh, yes, it's not like bars in the States." She started dialing another number. "You can't drink, of course, but you can be in a pub all right, as long as you're over a certain age and it's earlyish." Aunt Annie chuckled, then, and said to the phone, "Doris? Anne. Johnny says tonight at nine, in the Long Hall. Will you call Shaun and Mairead? Right. Yes, we are. Right. Bye."
"How are we going in?" Nita said. "Driving?"
"No, we'll take the train in," Aunt Annie said.
"Doris will give us a ride back, we're more or less on her way. Have your breakfast and we'll go. We can slouch around and do tourist things." Aunt Annie smiled at her. "I think I owe you that much, after the other night…"
Nita grinned back and went to get her jacket.
It turned out that she didn't need it. It was another hot day, up in the eighties now. They drove into Greystones to catch the shuttle train to Bray
- the line was only electrified that far out, as yet
- and stood on the platform, looking out towards Greystones' south beach. Dogs ran and barked, and there were even a few people in the water - which astonished Nita, since it was some of the coldest water she had ever tried to swim in and bounced out of with her teeth chattering. Most of the people were out in the sun on the sand, turning very pink.
Nita looked towards the big orange-and-black diesel train that was pulling in.
"Take one of the right-hand seats," Aunt Annie said. "You'll get a better view of the water as we go in."
Nita did. The train pulled out, and Nita looked out at the north beach as they passed it; more sun-bathers, someone riding a horse at the gallop.
"Aunt Annie," she said, "you know something. Why didn't I see your name when I went through the manual and looked in the wizards' directory?"
"Confidentiality," her aunt said. "I wasn't "out" to you yet. The manual senses such things." She looked at Nita thoughtfully. "I suppose I really should have anticipated it," she said. "My kids came out nonwizardly, after all. But anyway, I was looking at the manual this morning… You've been busy."
"You got that in one," Nita said.
Aunt Annie smiled. "Not unusual. Things quieten down, though, after you get to be my age. I remember when I got mine: I had about three years when I hardly had a moment to myself. Then things got calm when I went off to college."
"Did you have a partner?"
The train went abruptly darkish, lit only by the feeble ceiling lights, as it passed into the tunnel bored through Bray Head. "I did for a while," she said. "But she and I parted company eventually. It happens," she said, at Nita's shocked look. "You grow apart… or one partner finds something more important than the magic… or you start disagreeing about how to work."
Nita shook her head, upset. She couldn't imagine not agreeing with Kit on a plan or course of action within a matter of seconds; and indeed, there had been times when if they hadn't been able to agree that fast, they would have been dead. "Do you still talk?" she said.
"Oh, yes, pretty often. We're friendly enough."
The train burst out into the light again, revealing the beach on the other side of Bray Head, and the iron-railed promenade with its hotels and arcade, and the new half-built aquarium. "Don't worry," said Aunt Annie. "I think maybe you and your partner have been through enough trouble together that you'll be working together for a long while."
They pulled into Bray station and changed to the sleek little bright-green Dublin Area Rapid Transit train waiting at the next platform over. About half an hour later, the train slid into Tara Street station. Nita and her aunt got out and made their way through the orange-tiled exterior, beneath the skylights and down the escalator, and went out into the streets of Dublin.
It was a fascinating combination of old and new, and Nita was rather bewildered by it all at first. There were tiny cobbled alleys that seemed not to have been repaved in a hundred years, or maybe two, right next to broad streets roaring with traffic and alive with lights and people shopping; old, old churches caught in the middle of shiny new shopping centres; shouting, cheerfully messy street markets in the shadow of big department stores.
“It takes a little while to get used to," her aunt said, as they crossed the street south of O'Connell Bridge and headed down past the stately fronts of Trinity College and the Bank of Ireland, on the way to the pedestrian precinct at Grafton Street. "If you come from one of the big cities in the States, Dublin can seem very small at first, sort of caught in a time warp; slower, more casual about things. Later… " She chuckled. "You wonder how you ever put up with a place where people are in such a hurry all the time. And you find that life can go along very well without all the "conveniences" you were used to once." She smiled. "It's the people here: they make the difference."
They turned left at the corner of Grafton Street, heading for the National Museum. It was by the Dáil, the Irish houses of parliament, and Aunt Annie clearly knew her way around it. As soon as they had paid their admission fees, she led Nita down a flight of stairs, past a sign that said TREASURY. "There are a lot of gorgeous things here," she said, "but this is probably the most famous of them."
They stopped in front of a glass case that was thicker than any of the others scattered around the big room. No-one else was nearby. Nita moved close to look at it. The cup inside it sat on a big lucite pedestal; a bright spotlight was trained on it from above. Nita thought this might have been unnecessary… since she suspected it might be able to glow by itself.
“The Ardagh Chalice," her aunt said softly. Nita looked at it; not just with the eyes, but with a wizard's senses, and looked as hard as she could. The Chalice was more than half a meter high and a third of a meter wide, mostly gold, with elaborate and beautiful spiral patterns worked on its sides in silver, and ornamented with rubies and topazes. The jewels were lovely enough, but Nita had more of an eye for the ornamentation on the sides. They were spell diagrams in a very antique style, and though they looked simple, that was merely an illusion created by the extreme skill of whoever had designed them. They were subtle, and potentially of huge power; but they were quiescent, emptied of their virtue.
"It's not really very old," Nita said.
"The physical aspects of it, no." Her aunt looked at it. "This chalice was made in the second century."
"Not the Holy Grail, then," Nita said.
Her aunt smiled slightly. "No. And yes. The Treasures might have been made by gods, but they were made of mortal matter… and matter passes. The problem is, of course, that the power put in them - the soul of the Treasures, more or less - is as immortal as the powers that made them. The soul passes on when the envelope wears out - "reincarnates", finds another "body" that's suitable. This cup was a vessel, for a while. But not any more, I think. Do you feel anything different?"
Nita looked at the Cup again, longer this time. Finally she said,”'I don't know. It's as if… if you knew how to shake this awake, this "soul", you might do it. But you'd have to know how."
Her aunt nodded. "We may have to work out how. Come and see the Sword."
They went up a flight of stairs, through another room or two. The room they finally stopped in was full of ancient gold work: tores and stickpins and necklaces and bracelets of gold, beads and bangles, carved plates of gold linked together. "It used to be mined in Wicklow," her aunt said, "not too far from us. But by the fourth century most of it was gone. Anyway, this is worth more than any of them, if you ask me."
The central case held the Sword. It lay there very plain against red velvet; long and lean, shaped like a willow leaf, with no gold or jewel anywhere about it - a plain bronze blade, notched, scraped, somewhat withered-looking. Nita bent close to it, feeling with all of her. "Now this is old," she said.
"Older than the Cup," said Aunt Annie. "Bronze Age, at least."
Nita nodded. There was a faint feeling of purpose still in the old bronze, like a memory impressed on matter by a mind now gone: like the ghosts in Aunt Annie's back garden, a tape still replaying and very faintly to be heard. But there was no vigour in it, only recollection: wistful, mournful, feeble… "It might have been the real Sword once," Nita said. "But it's almost forgotten. It's not nearly as much there as the Cup. I don't think you could wake this one up."
Her aunt nodded. "That's what I think too."
Nita shook her head. “And there's nothing else in the building that's even this much awake…” She sighed. “So we have the Stone, and the Cup, and something that might work for the Sword, but probably won't… and no Spear."
"That about sums it up, yes. The wizards around the country will be looking for other swords that might work better. But the spirit of the Spear Luin seems to have passed completely. Either no "body" was strong enough to contain it… or it was just too powerful to be contained any more in a universe that had no suitable envelope for it, and it passed out entirely."
Nita rather thought that it had passed. Spears were symbols of the element of Fire, and fire was the most uncontainable of the five, next to plasma. Nita began to worry. Three of the Treasures would not be enough, to judge from what the Sidhe had hinted. But she had no ideas about what to do.
She looked at her aunt. "Are we done here?"
"I think so. Want to go over to Grafton Street?"
"Sounds good."
They spent the afternoon doing, as her aunt had promised, touristy things; touring the shopping centre at St Stephen's Green, having tea in the Shelbourne Hotel, listening to the street performers playing on pipes and banjos and occasionally spoons. They walked over O'Connell bridge to look up the Liffey at the Halfpenny Bridge's graceful curve, one of the trademarks of Dublin; and browsed through the shops on the south side of the Halfpenny Bridge, Dublin's so-called 'Left Bank'. They sat in O'Connell Street by the statue of the goddess of the River Liffey, relaxing in her stone bath, and were grateful for the spray, for it was hotter that afternoon than it had been all summer. Mothers put their little children in the fountain, and they splashed happily, and the patrolling Gardai smiled and looked the other way.
About seven o'clock, Aunt Annie said, "Dinner?" Nita agreed happily, and they went off to have a pizza in a little restaurant in South Anne Street. Then they went off westward in the city, to the pub where that night's meeting would take place. The Long Hall was a handsome place, fronted in beveled glass and stained glass, all arranged so that people standing inside, in front of the windows, couldn't quite be seen from outside. Above, the glass was clear, showing the beautiful carved and painted plaster ceiling, and the gas fixtures still hanging from it. Some of them had been converted for electricity, some hadn't. They walked in, and Nita gazed admiringly at the huge polished hardwood bar, and the antique mirrors, reaching three meters up from the back of the bar to the ceiling, on the wall behind it. Carved wood and beveled glass and brass railings were everywhere. So were many cheerful people, drinking, but talking more. The place was filled with the subdued roar of a hundred conversations.
"We're in the back room. Hi, Jack," said Aunt Annie to one of the men behind the bar. He was busy filling a glass with the creamy-dark Guinness from one of the arched taps at the bar: he nodded to Aunt Annie, but didn't say anything.
"Jack Mourne," Aunt Annie said to Nita, as they made their way through a low carved archway into the 'back room'. “He owns the place."
"Does he know what's going on?"
"I should think he does: he's one of the Area Advisory-Specialists. What would you like to drink, hon?"
"Can I have a Coke?"
"No problem. Be right back."
Nita found herself a seat at a small round wooden table with ornate iron legs, and waited, fidgeting a little self-consciously. She had never been in a bar by herself, though Aunt Annie seemed to think that this wasn't quite the same. She might have a point, though, Nita thought. Here, the drinking looked almost incidental. People were shouting at each other across the back room, chatting, arguing, laughing, pointing, shouting.
"Here you go," Aunt Annie said, sitting down next to Nita with a relieved look. She handed Nita her drink and sipped briefly at her pint. "Perfect," she said. "Jack pulls the best pint in this part of town."
"Aunt Annie," Nita said, "if this is a wizards' meeting - how are you going to keep the ordinary people out of here?"
"Spell on the back-room archway," Aunt Annie said. “Look closely at the carving when you go to the rear Ladies. Non wizards hit it and decide they don't feel like going back there after all - on normal nights, Jack just takes the spell finial off: that little carved flower in the lower right-hand corner. And no-one can hear us through all this din anyway; but there are voice-scramblers on. Jack makes anything wizardly come out sounding like an argument about football. Nice scrambler - took him a while to write. But he's one of our best writers. If you need a custom spell in this part of the world, it's Jack you come to, or Marie Shaughnessy down in Arklow, or Charles and Alison Redpath up north in Aghalee."
'Then all these people back here are wizards?" Nita said, looking around her in astonishment. She had never been in such a large gathering of her own before.
“Oh yes. All that could come at short notice, of course. Relax for a while; we can't do anything until Doris and Johnny get here."
So Nita drank her Coke and listened to the accents around her, and chatted every now and then with the people who came up to her aunt to say hello. If she had been mired in Irish accents before, the situation got much worse now: she heard about twenty more from as many different people, no two of them the same, and some very odd indeed. In addition, there were a lot of people from Northern Ireland down for this meeting, and their accents astounded her; they sounded more like New Yorkers than anything else, though more nasal. They all seemed very open, friendly people, which to Nita seemed a little strange at first: seeing what most Americans saw of Northern Ireland from the news, she half-expected them to be furtive and depressed, as if afraid a bomb might suddenly go off under them. But none of them were. One man in his thirties, a jocund young man in a leather jacket covered with patches, told Nita he had never seen a bomb or been within fifty miles of one, nor had anyone he knew. The peaceful small-town life he described seemed hard to reconcile with all the newsfilm Nita had seen of taped-off, shattered buildings, and the people with ski masks and rifles.
There was a slight commotion at the door as Mrs Smyth came in under the archway. "Hey Doris, how they cuttin'?" someone shouted. Doris Smyth looked at the speaker and said something clear and carrying in Irish that provoked a roar of approval from the listeners, and caused the person who had asked the question to be genially pummelled.
Behind Mrs Smyth, someone else came in; a short man in a long overcoat and tartan scarf. At the sight of him, many of the wizards in the room called, "Johnny!" or "Shaun!", and there was a general stir of approval through the back room. Nita bent over to her Aunt Annie and said, "Who's that?"
"Shaun O'Driscoll," said Aunt Annie. "Or Johnny, some people call him. He's the Area Senior for Western Europe."
'Wow," Nita said, never having seen so high-ranked a wizard before. Area Seniors answered only to Regional Seniors, and Regionals to the three Seniors for Earth. When she thought of the Senior in charge of all wizards from Shannon to Moscow and Oslo to Gibraltar, she had imagined someone more imposing - not a little man with thinning hair and (as he took his coat off) a tracksuit. He didn't look very old. He had a fierce-looking moustache, and his eyes were very cool; he looked around the room and returned all the greetings without ever quite smiling. It was the kind of effect, Nita thought, that made you want to try to get him to smile. It would be worth seeing when it happened, for his face was otherwise a nest of laugh-lines.
Doris and Johnny were got pints by another of the gathered wizards, and people started settling down, leaning against the walls when they ran out of seats. Johnny didn't sit, but stood in the middle of the room, waiting for them to settle, like a teacher with a big unruly class.
"Thanks for coming," he said. "I know this was short notice, but we've had some serious problems crop up in the past few days, and there was no way to hope to manage them except by requiring an intervention meeting."
There were some heads turned at this, and some murmuring under breath among the assembled wizards. "I know that wasn't the way it was announced," Johnny said, "but we turn out to have less time for this discussion than was originally thought when we organized this meeting via the phone tree last night and this morning. We have had serious transitional leakages all over the island, with some sympathetic transitionals on mainland Europe; and this condition has to be contained as quickly as possible. There have been echoes and ripples as far away as China and Peru."
More stirring at this. "Anyway," Johnny said, "I want to thank those of you who were in the middle of other assignments and found them changed, or who were off active and were suddenly reactivated. The Powers that Be may not thank you until later, but I like to do it early. I also want to welcome those of you who have come unusual distances, including Nita Callahan. Stand up, Nita."
Nita flushed fiercely, and hoped it didn't show too much in the pub's dimmish light. She stood up.
"Nita has been reassigned here temporarily courtesy of North American Regional. She has blood affinities with this area, and was recently involved in the New York incursion and the Hudson Canyon intervention in June, and more recently, with the Reconfiguration; Dairine Callahan is her sister."
There was a stir at this. Nita nodded, smiled a little uncertainly at Johnny; he gestured her to sit down. "We're glad to have you," he said. "Bear with us: we do things a little differently here than you're used to, and if you think of anything that seems useful during this discussion, don't hesitate to sing out."
Huh, Nita thought, sitting down. And, Reassigned courtesy of North American Regional? Who's that? Not Tom and Carl. Someone - or something - further in, or higher up? But she put the thought aside for the moment.
"Over the past four nights we've had "sideways" leakages in twenty-three out of twenty-six counties," Johnny said, "and how Monaghan, Wexford and Westmeath were missed is a mystery to us, especially since Westmeath contains the Hill of Tara. In the twenty-three counties, about ninety wizards have experienced timeslides, live remembrances of the so-called "mythological" period, "solid" remembrances that returned interactions, viewings of extradimensional objects without doing the wizardries required for such viewings, and even physical intervention by nonphysical entities or creatures not native to this reality, including physical attacks on occasion. Some of these incursions have required timeline patching to keep innocent bystanders from thinking they'd lost their minds - or actually losing them. One of us met Cuchullain hi warp spasm, which is enough to turn anyone's hair: that it happened in the middle of the big shopping centre in Tallaght didn't help, either. The Brown Bull of Cooley was seen crossing the dual carriageway north of Shannon; it wandered down on to the larnrod Eireann tracks and caused a derailment, though fortunately neither the train drivers nor any of the other people on the train saw it, and by great good luck no-one was hurt. Possibly most to the point, there was an earthquake in the fields north of Naas, at the old site of the Battle of Moytura."
More stirring over this, and some anxious looks. Johnny made quiet-down gestures. “It was only about three point one on the Richter scale, and nothing came of it but some broken china. The Lia Fail is still managing to hold this island in one place and one piece, no matter what the politicians say. But how long it can hold matters so stable is a good question. Much of its old virtue is gone, as you all know. Another such attack will certainly be more effective, on both natural and supernatural levels."
“Johnny," said one of the wizards sitting back by the wall, a handsome little dark-haired woman,
"these transitional leakages - are we sure that something else isn't causing them? Something European?"
Johnny shook his head. "I'd prefer to blame Local Europe myself, Morgan, but we're out of luck on this one. All indications point back at us."
"Then what are we going to do?"
Johnny looked grim. "We're going to have to recreate Moytura, I think. Unless someone else can think of something better."
Half the room started muttering to the other half. Johnny waited for it to settle down.
"Recreate Moytura with what?" said the young wizard Nita had been talking to, the young guy in the leather jacket.
"Good question," Johnny said. "Two of the Four Treasures are still with us. The Stone is awake again, re-ensouled. The "souls" of the other three Treasures are still in the world, or the Worlds, somewhere. We are going to have to recall them to suitable physical envelopes, and then take them out into battle against the Lone Power. We know that with them, we have a chance. Without them...” He shrugged.
Relative silence fell for a few moments. "Who does the "going into battle" bit?" said another voice from somewhere against the back wall.
"Lacking one of the Powers that Be, probably Doris and I to lead," Johnny said. "And all of you we can get together in one place."
"Where are you going to get "suitable envelopes", then?" said another voice.
"In most cases, we'll try to use the old ones," Doris said. "They've worked before: with a little coercion, they may work again… The Lia Fail is awake; the Ardagh Chalice, we think we can reawaken."
"Don't you think the museum will miss it?" said the young wizard in the leather jacket.
Doris smiled slightly. "Not if a wizardry that looks and weighs exactly the same is sitting in the museum case," she said. "If the Taoiseach can borrow the Chalice to show it off at a politicians' dinner party, I think we might take the loan of it for a night or so and not feel too guilty afterwards. But it all depends on the circumstances, and the power of the ritual used to call the Cup's soul back. Which is what we're going to have to work on. It's not just warriors we're going to need to make this work, but poets. Where are Charles and Alison?"
"Stuck in traffic," said someone from the bar side of the room.
Johnny grinned. "Ah, the real world. But at least Liam and Mairead and Nigel are here. I'll be wanting to talk to you three afterwards. The rest of you: I want you all to talk to your Area Supervisors about your schedules for the next two weeks. Any one of you may have to drop everything at a moment's notice and lend a hand. Also, given the seriousness of the situation, travel restrictions on teleportation are off for the duration. Just use your judgement and be very careful about the overlays!"
More chatter erupted. In the middle of it, someone said, "But Johnny, wait a tick! Isn't this going to make things worse?"
Johnny waved for relative quiet. The room settled a little. "How do you mean?" he said.
"If you're going to call back the souls of the Treasures - if you can," said the speaker, a tall dignified-looking wizard with a mighty moustache, "isn't the land going to get even more awake and aware than it already is? I mean, the Treasures are the land, in some ways. At least that's what we were always told: four of the five Elements, in their most personified forms. Air and Water and Earth and Fire are going to wake up more than ever, until the situation is resolved and everything is laid to rest again."
Johnny nodded slowly. The room went quiet as people looked at his expression. "Yes," he said after a while. "It's going to get much worse. Which makes it to our advantage to get the situation resolved, as you say, as quickly as possible. Otherwise first Ireland, then the rest of Europe, and eventually all the other continents, are going to be overrun with the past happening again, and the dead walking, and all kinds of other inconveniences. If we can't stop this, then the barriers between present and past will break down everywhere, and the physical world will be progressively overrun by the nonphysical: all the myths, and truths that became myth, all the dreams and nightmares, all the more central and more peripheral realities, will superimpose themselves on this one… inextricably."
“For how long?" said a small voice out of the hush.
"If that level of imposition ever takes hold fully," Johnny said, "I don't see how the process could ever be reversed."
Silence, broken only by the noise of cheerful conversation in the frontmost, nonwizardly part of the pub. "Right," said the man with the moustache again. “But in the meantime, while you Seniors are intervening, Ireland's dreams and nightmares are going to keep coming true - even more than they have been - and the past will keep happening, and the dead and the undead and the immortal will walk. And 'other inconveniences'."
"That's exactly right, Scott," Johnny said.
There was another long silence. Then a voice said, "I need another pint."
A chorus of other voices went up in agreement. Nita noticed that her Coke was long gone, and she was very thirsty.
"I'll get you another," Aunt Annie said, and got up. "Anybody else? Katherine? Nuala? Orla? Hi, Jim. . ." She moved off.
Nita sat there feeling somewhat shaky. "Hey, you look like a sheet," said a voice by her. She looked up: it was Ronan.
She smiled faintly at him as he sat down, and did her best to control herself. He looked, if possible, even more attractive than he had previously. Black leather suited him, and so did this subdued lighting. "I feel like one," she said. "How about you?"
"Sounds pretty bad," Ronan said. But he looked and sounded remarkably unconcerned. "Don't worry about auld Shaun there, he just likes to sound like doom and destruction all the time. Comes of being Area Senior; they all sound like the world's ending half the time."
Probably because it is, Nita thought. It was only the sheer number of wizards in the world, and the sacrifices they kept making from week to week, that kept civilization on an even keel; or so it seemed to her. "Look, can I ask you something?"
"Sure."
"I'm just curious. Was your Ordeal bad?"
He looked peculiarly at her. "Almost got me killed, if that's what you mean."
"So will crossing O'Connell Street," Nita said. "Never mind… I don't know what I mean. I mean, it seemed to me that my Ordeal was pretty awful. I was just curious whether I was an exception, or whether everyone had that bad a time. My sister did, but she's not exactly a normal case. And I haven't had that many chances to discuss it with other wizards."
Ronan looked thoughtful and took a sip of his orange-and-lemon drink. "I got timeslid," he said.
Nita shrugged slightly. "We bought a timeslide from our local Seniors for ours," she said.
"I didn't buy mine," Ronan said. "I got it." He took another drink. "One day I took the Oath -the next I was walking up Vevay Road. You know, at the top of Bray by the Quinnsworth? Well, it stopped being Vevay Road. It was just a dirt track with some thatched huts down near the school, at the bottom of the hill, and it was raining cats and dogs. Thunder and lightning."
Nita shivered: she disliked being caught out in the rain. "What did you do?"
"I went up Bray Head," Ronan said, bursting out in a laugh that sounded as if, in retrospect, he didn't believe his own craziness. "I wanted to see where everything was, you know? It was a mess. You know how the sea gets during a storm. Well, maybe you don't...”
"I live on Long Island," Nita said. "We get high-force gales on the Great South Bay, when the hurricanes come through."
"Well, this storm was driving inland," Ronan said, "between the rain and the spray, there was almost no difference between being in the water and on the land. Well, I saw the boat come in, straight for the rocks. Little thing." He saw Nita's blank look and said, "The Romans."
That made her raise her eyebrows. She had seen the Roman coins that had been found at the base of Bray Head: she had seen a reconstruction of the archaeological site, with their bones. "They were going to try to set up a colony, weren't they?" she said.
Ronan nodded. Nita watched him. She remembered that afternoon in the chicken place in Bray, and the vehemence of Ronan's feelings about colonizers of any kind. But at the moment, Ronan just sat, and flushed a little, and looked away from Nita as he said, "Well, they were going to get killed, weren't they? Them and their little boat and all, in that sea. One of the lifeboats couldn't have stood it, let alone that little smack. So I 'took the sea in'."
Nita stared at him. What Ronan was describing was temporary but complete control of a pure element: using the wizardly Speech to describe every molecule of an object or area so completely and accurately that for a short period you became it. Control was barely the word for it. It became as much part of you as your body… for a while. Then came the backlash: for human beings are not really meant to have more than one physical body at a time. You might find the association impossible to break - and have to spend the rest of your life coexisting with what you had described: which would surely drive you insane. Or the strain of the wizardry itself might kill you. An adult wizard, full of experience, might have done such a wizardry once… and no other wizardry, ever again. A young wizard, on Ordeal, or soon after, would have done it and lived… maybe. It was a good question whether his head would ever be entirely right again.
But here sat Ronan, still blushing slightly, and said, "It wasn't much of it I had to take, just the sea around Bray Head. They jumped ship and made it ashore. I couldn't save the boat, it went all to pieces when I lost control. I must have passed out up there - the slide came undone after a while, and some tourists doing the cliff walk from the Greystones side found me slipping down the rocks on the seaward side, and they called the Guards. I spent a few days in the hospital." He shrugged. "Hypothermia," he added, and laughed. "Too true -but they never knew from what."
"Wow," Nita said under her breath, almost lost in admiration of him. She was starting to blush, but she ignored it as she looked at him again. "But you knew," she said. "That there was just the one boat. The Romans never made it here except for those people. Britain was giving them too much trouble. You could have let them go under."
If there was a little challenge in her voice, Ronan didn't rise to it. "Could I?" he said. "I knew it was a timeslide. Would I have been changing history? Did I have any choice?"
"Too right you did," Nita said, again under her breath.
Ronan heard it. He looked up from under his brows at her, that familiar scowl. "That's as may be. What could I do? Seeing them waving their arms and trying to get off, and knowing they would drown if they tried it, in that water." He looked away again, as if slightly embarrassed. "Sure nothing came of it anyway. They were marooned there; no one ever came after them. They settled down there, and married the people there, some of them. I'm related to them, for all I know."
Nita smiled slightly. "You didn't know that no-one would come after them, though. Suppose you had changed history? Suppose you had just saved the lives of the people who were going to report back to Rome and bring in the conquerors?"
Ronan drank his drink and looked away.
Nita reached out and patted his arm - a casual enough gesture, she did it with Kit all the time, but as she did it to Ronan, the shock of it, the closeness of actually touching him, ran up the arm like fire and half wilted her. "Never mind," she said, trying to get some control back. The point of each wizard's Ordeal was always a private thing: that Ronan should share this much of it with her was more than he had to do. "You want another of those?" she said. "What did you call it?"
"A St Clements. 'Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St Clements. . .' “ He burst out laughing at Nita's uncomprehending look. “Don't know that one, I take it. Not in the Top Forty."
Nita knew when she was being made fun of, and knew when not to take it seriously: her heart warmed that he liked her enough to do it at all. "Eat turf and die, Paddy," she said, and got up, feeling in her pocket for change.
She got Ronan's drink, and when she got back, found her own waiting for her, and rather to her surprise, Johnny sitting in her seat and chatting with Ronan. "Here," Johnny said, and got up; "I was holding it for you. Listen, dear, I have a message for you. Tom and Carl send their best."
"You know them? How are they?" Nita said, sitting right up. 'Are they OK? It was them, then!"
"They're fine. I consult with them fairly often, especially Tom: he's an Advisory to the North American Regional for compositional spelling. But "Them"?"
"I mean, it was them who sent me on assignment. Wasn't it?"
Johnny smiled very slightly, and all his wrinkles deepened. "Ahh… no. Not even a Regional Senior, or one of the Planetaries, can actually put a wizard on active assignment. No matter how certain we are that the world's ending." He shot a humorous look at Ronan, and Ronan looked like he was tempted to try to pull his head down inside his black turtle-neck. "No, those decisions are made higher up. I might have mentioned North American Regional, but there are more than humans involved in that. Never mind for now. I take it Doris had a little talk with you about our local problems."
Nita opened her mouth to answer, and was startled by a sudden shout from up front. "LAST ORDERS NOW! TEN MINUTES, GENTLEMEN. LAST ORDERS, PLEASE. . .!"
Johnny laughed at the look her face must have been wearing. "All the pubs have to close at eleven-thirty this time of year," he said. "Anyway, Doris says she told you the ropes."
"If you mean she told me not even to sneeze in the Speech," Nita said, "yes."
Johnny laughed under his breath. "It must seem hard. Believe me, it's for the best… and there'll be enough magic around here for anybody, come the end of the month, if things keep going the way they've been going. We'll be in touch with you, of course."
"Johnny," Ronan said suddenly,"this may be out of turn. . .'
"Knowing you, my lad," Johnny said, "probably."
"Johnny. . .Look, it's nothing personal," Ronan said, glancing at Nita and blushing furiously again. "But why can't this be handled locally? Why do we need blow-ins?"
Nita went red too, with annoyance. She thought of about six different cutting things to say, and kept her mouth shut on them all.
But Johnny simply looked mildly surprised. "Self-sufficiency, is it?" he said. "Have you fallen for that one? It's an illusion, Ro. Why do we "need" the help of the Tuatha? Why do we need the Powers that Be? Or even the Lone Power? - for that One has a function in the universe, too. You know that. The whole lot of us are interconnected, and there's no way we can get away from it, or any one group of us solve even the littlest problem entirely by ourselves. This matter is being handled locally. It's being handled on Earth. Next thing, you're going to ask me what the Northern Irish wizards are doing here." His eyebrows went up and down. "You've been listening to too many politicians. Better apologize to her before she turns you into a soggy beermat," Johnny said, patted Nita on the shoulder, and moved on.
“TIME NOW, GENTLEMEN, TIME NOW. TAKE THOSE GLASSES AWAY, CHARLIE!" Jack was shouting from the front of the pub. Nita did her best to keep her face still. She had gone quite hot and tight inside, and was holding on to herself hard; controlling her emotions had never been her strongest suit, and she had no desire to say something stupid here, where she was a guest and would make her aunt look bad. Besides, I'm a wizard among wizards. It should take more than some provincial punk with a chip on his shoulder to get me annoyed. . ./
"Look, Nita," Ronan said. He sounded slightly desperate. "I didn't. . ."
"Of course you didn't," she said. And shut herself up: and then lost it again. "Look," she said, her voice low but fierce,"do you think this was my idea? Do you think I wouldn't rather be back home with my partner taking care of business, than messing around in this stupid little place where you can't even twitch without permission? Do you think I don't have better things to do? "Blow-ins"," she said bitterly, and picked up her drink and began to drink the whole thing at once, to shut herself up: at least she couldn't say what she was thinking while she was drinking something.
It was the wrong drink. In the middle of the second swallow she spluttered in shock at the alcoholic black-bread taste of it, and from beside her Aunt Annie said, "You're going to get us thrown out of here, you know that? Here, have a tissue."
Nita gasped and choked and took the tissue gratefully, and began mopping Guinness off herself and the table. Ronan was leaning against the wall and laughing, soundlessly, but so hard that he was turning twice as red as he had been. Furious, Nita felt around in her head for the small simple spell that would dump his own drink in his lap: then remembered where she was, and in rapid succession first shoved the sodden tissue down the neck of his turtleneck, and while Ronan was fumbling for it, knocked his glass sideways with her elbow. "Oops," she said in utter innocence, as it went all over him.
"COME ON NOW, GENTS, TIME NOW, TIME. HAVE YOU NO HOMES TO GO TO? YOU TOO, LADIES, NO OFFENSE MEANT," Jack shouted from the front of the pub. The conversations were getting louder, if anything. Ronan sat and stared at his lap, and just as he lifted his eyes to Nita's, Johnny went by and patted him on the shoulder, and said, "I told you she was going to turn you into a soggy beermat. No-one ever listens to me. “Night, Annie, give me a call in the morning… “ And he was away.
"I guess we'd better go," Aunt Annie said, as the lights began flashing on and off. "Doris is waiting. Ronan, do you need a lift home?"
"No thank you, Mrs Callahan," he said, "I came in with Barry."
"Right, then. Come on, Nita, let's call it a night."
Nita got up, and looked down at Ronan. He was
gazing back at her with an expression she couldn't interpret. Not anger, not amusement - what was it? She refused to waste her time trying to work it out. "Keep your pants dry," she said to him, trying desperately to keep her face straight, and losing it again. Gratefully she followed Mrs Smyth and Aunt Annie out, grinning to herself.
Blow-ins. Huh.
She grinned all the way home… and wasn't quite sure why.
“What's going on?" Kit said the next afternoon. 'How are things going with the Treasures?"
They were sitting around the kitchen table, looking at the papers. “Well," Nita's aunt said, “Doris and a couple of the other Seniors are going to go in tonight and get the Ardagh Chalice. They'll leave a perfect copy in its place. They think they have a guess at how to make it wake up. Apparently, whatever they did with the Stone worked better than they thought; it seems your friend Tom is quite an asset," she said to Nita. "They were able to wake it up on the first try, using the spell he wrote for them."
Nita nodded. "He says it's because he used to write so many adverts."
Aunt Annie chuckled. "I guess I can see the point. Well, anyway, it's awake. As you will have noticed, the land is getting, uh, restive… more than it was, anyway."
"Are they going to bring the Stone here? Or somewhere special?" said Kit.
"Oh, no… there's no need for that. The Stone is the earth of Ireland, some ways; anywhere there is earth of Ireland, the Stone is there in essence. The same way that the Cup is the water of Ireland, and all wells and pools; the Sword is the air of Ireland, the Spear is the fire. The Treasures exist in essence in all the things they represent. But when they're awake, they co-exist many times more powerfully than before. They themselves become weapons of considerable power; and the earth and air and water and fire themselves become weapons that we can turn to our advantage. We sincerely hope." She took a drink of her tea.
"What about the Sword?" Kit said.
"It's hard to say," said Annie. "The Cup is more awake than any of the envelopes they're thinking about using for the Sword; so they're going to try the spell on the Chalice first, and see how the re-animation works on that. If it does, they'll move on and try it on the Sword in the museum."
"And the Spear?" Kit said.
Aunt Annie shook her head. "No news. There are a lot of spears and pikes and whatnot lying around, but none of them seem ever to have been the Spear Luin. Which is a problem, for Luin was the weapon that overthrew Balor. The others were basically support for it."
Kit shrugged. "Well, something'll turn up. Something always does."
"I wish I had your confidence," Aunt Annie said, getting up to pour herself another cup.
"Something has to turn up," Kit said. "We're here."
Nita punched him lightly. "Something's always turned up before," she said. "This is not like before j
Kit shrugged again. "Listen, if I can't keep your spirits up, you won't do good work."
"How can my spirits be other than wonderful when I have this to look at?" she said, pushing the paper at him.
The Bray People had come out that morning, and the usual details of the fortunes and misfortunes of Bray people overseas, or the failure of the county council to do something about an urgent local problem, or the accusations of one of the local political parties about the purported bad behaviour of one of the others, had been forced off the front pages. Other people besides Nita had been having problems.
SILLY SEASON COMES TO NORTH WICKLOW! Said the headline. Underneath it was a story concerning some of the bizarre occurrences in the county that week. The trouble had started out in the country. A farmer had claimed that a dinosaur a small one, but still plainly a dinosaur - had been eating his sheep. These claims had been greeted with amusement by his neighbors, some of whom had suggested that he had, in the local way of putting it,"drink taken.”
The Gardai declined comment on the business, as they did about the rocks rolling uphill at Ballywal-trim, or the problem incurred by the dairy cattle farmer over by Kilmacanogue, who claimed his Guernsey herd was stolen - driven away across the dual carriageway by a man who said he was Finn MacCumhal, and was entitled to take any cattle that their owner was not strong enough to defend in clean battle. There were a chorus of noisy protests to Bray Urban District Council and Wicklow County Council about this - some people insisting that the psychiatric hospital at Newcastle needed to look into its security.
They were perusing these accounts when Johnny O'Driscoll arrived. Nita put the newspaper aside and introduced Kit to him. "You're very welcome," Johnny said to him. "Your friend here will have warned you about the overlays, though."
"She mentioned, yes."
"Well, just, you know, don't. We have enough problems at the moment."
Nita poured a cup of tea for Johnny; he took it, drank it with a thankful air, and said, "Everyone else I've talked to this morning has had a problem, so I might as well hear yours, too. What happened to you yesterday?"
"Nothing really," she said. "But I did have an interesting conversation with a fox the other day." And she described her meeting with the dog-fox, and the information he had given her.
Johnny looked thoughtful at that. "I have to say," he said,"that I had suspected for some time that at least one of the Bright Powers was in the area, in human form. I had no solid confirmation. Normally, if one of Them is going to be in the area on business, the manuals give warning of it: or the Knowledge does, depending on which you use. But there's been no such warning. Then again, this isn't a normal situation. Anyway, I had other indications. Interesting to hear them confirmed."
Nita glanced over at Kit. "Why do They hide?" she said.
"To keep the other side from knowing that They're here. Except that the other side seems to know already, so that reason doesn't work in this case." He shook his head. "I don't know. The Powers are frequently beyond our ability to explain… but there's nothing strange about that. They're the next major level of creation up from us, after all. Should a rock expect to be able to explain a human being?"
"We have enough trouble with that ourselves," Kit said.
"Just so. Anyway, whatever Power it is doubtless has good reasons for wanting to stay hidden. I wouldn't want to break Its cover too soon."
Kit and Nita looked at each other.
"Meanwhile," Johnny said, "Anne, if it's all right with you, Doris will be stopping in this afternoon with what she's picked up. The Enniskerry area is too badly overlaid for her to keep it up there for a few minutes without the area remembering all kinds of things that are better not roused. Down here is a little cleaner; you and I can do something to suppress those memories about the church and Cromwell's people."
"No problem," said Aunt Annie. "We'll put it in the back office."
"Fine. Your staff don't usually go in there?"
"Only my secretary. I can ask her not to."
"Fine. These Treasures are proving a little more dangerous than we thought. Harry, who went up to do the work on the Stone, did it all right… but I think he's probably not going to be worth much of anything for the next few days. We have to be very careful that we don't let people spend too long near these things. If you show me where you want to put it, I'll build a warding for that room, and see that it doesn't do anyone any damage."
"But how can these be hurting people?" Nita said. "They're good!"
"Oh, absolutely," Johnny said. "There are probably no more powerful forces for good on the planet… except for human beings, naturally. But just because they're good, doesn't mean they're safe."
"Listen, Shaun," Aunt Annie said then, "is there any plan yet for where we're going to do the big ceremony, the re-enactment?"
"It'll have to start up at Matrix," Johnny said. "It has all the necessary 'equipment'. That's right," he said to Nita, "you haven't seen my place yet, have you? Not really 'my' place, of course. No-one owns Castle Matrix but itself… and whatever's under it. You'll see." He got up. “Anyway, Matrix is where it'll start. But where it'll end… ' He shook his head. 'I have to go down to Bray. Either of you need a lift?"
“Thanks," Nita said. “We were going to take the bus, but if it's OK…”
“Sure, come on."
Johnny dropped them more or less in the centre of town, where Herbert Road crosses Main Street. They waved goodbye to him as he drove off, and Kit said, “I didn't have any breakfast… I'm an empty shell. Is there anywhere to eat around here?"
“There's a chicken place over here that's not too bad," Nita said. “I've got some money. Let's go in there."
They walked in, went to the counter and ordered. Nita took one quick glance at the back of the restaurant, and her stomach turned over inside her in nervous response. Ronan was sitting back there. He shot Nita one quick glance and then looked down again at the Coke he was busy with.
"You OK?" Kit said, as they turned away with their own drinks and went to sit down at a table. "Your face is all weird."
"Uh," Nita said. "I poured a drink over a guy the other night."
"You were out with a guy?"
Nita blushed. "No, not me. A bunch of us were out."
"What, a bunch of the kids around here?"
"What is this, the Spanish Inquisition? I was out with my aunt. There was a big wizards' meeting in town."
"Oh," Kit said. He started to go red again.
Nita rolled her eyes and said, "Spare me! Never mind that." She took a drink of her Coke - her mouth was suddenly dry - and said, "Haifa second."
Then she got up and went back to Ronan's table.
He looked up at her with an expression partly unease and partly annoyance; and he still managed to smile on top of it all. "You forgot your Coke," he said.
"No, it's back there."
"I mean, I thought you were going to pour it on me."
She looked at him ruefully. "Listen, Ronan, I'm sorry. Look, come on and sit with us, and meet my partner."
"That's him?" He craned his neck a little.
"Yeah, he's just in from the States. Come on and sit with us."
Somewhat reluctantly, Ronan got up, bringing his Coke, and went and stood by the table. "Kit," she said,"this is Ronan. Ronan, Kit Rodriguez, my partner."
They shook hands, Kit willingly enough, Ronan with some reserve, and they looked at each other. "Dai stihó," Kit said.
Ronan raised his eyebrows as he sat down. "You can tell?"
Kit looked surprised. "It sticks out all over you."
"Your partner couldn't."
Nita went hot with embarrassment at that. Kit shrugged. "It's always easier for guy wizards to tell guys, and girls to tell girls. Anyway, Neets has other things to think about. Besides, she's in a weird place. You get thrown off. I didn't know her aunt was one until she was pointed out to me."
There was tension in the air. Nita had thought this would be a good idea, at first; now she was beginning to regret it. "I was just telling Ronan," she said to Kit,"that I was sorry I dumped the drink on him the other night."
Ronan looked bemused. "Watch out for her. She's got a temper."
"I've noticed," Kit said. “Just hope you never see her sister lose hers. Whoo. But Neets is no prize either."
"Will you two stop talking about me as if I'm not here?" Nita said, annoyed. Then they both grinned at her, and she went hot again. Bad enough being teased from just one direction…
"Shove over, Kit," she said, sat down next to him, and started working on her Coke again. Then she said to Ronan, "How was your day yesterday?"
There was an abrupt sound of breaking glass from outside. All three of their heads jerked up at the same time. "What on earth. . .!" Kit said.
"Probably an accident," Ronan said, getting up hurriedly. "The corner next to here is a bad one. People are always coming around it too fast. . ."
The next sound of glass breaking was the shop's own window, and it was not a car that broke it. Something big, dark and blunt slammed into it from one side, and plate glass rained in. The ladies behind the counter cried out in surprise and headed for the back of the shop in a hurry. The shop's three other patrons followed them, leaving Kit and Nita and Ronan standing there.
Something stepped in through the broken glass. If you had taken a human being, and coated it with tar, and rolled it in gravel, and then turned it loose to walk around blindly smashing things, it might look something like this. At least, it would if it were nearly two meters tall, and more than a meter broad, with arms and thighs as thick as a man's waist, and a round ugly face like a boulder.
They looked at it in shock as it came towards them. "It's a drow," Ronan whispered. "Fomori…"
They could see others like it stalking past, out in the street. The sounds of breaking plate glass were spreading down the road; cars screeched to a halt, horns blasted. There was one long screech followed by the sound of more breaking glass, and the crunch of metal too, this time.
"Someone's hit one," Kit said.
"I feel sorry for their car," Ronan said. "Come on."
"How do you stop them?" said Nita.
"Stop them? You don't stop them. You run away!" Ronan said. He grabbed Nita's arm with one hand, and Kit's with the other, and hustled them out the back door.
They ducked out the back of the chicken place and into Castle Terrace behind it. Nita looked down to the end of the street, towards the remains of the old castle. Several of the drows were busily throwing down the last few stones. They appeared to be made of good Wicklow granite, and to dislike everything they saw. Several of them, a little nearer down the street, were punching holes in the walls of the Bank of Ireland: its alarm bell was ringing disconsolately. Another one, in Herbert Road, was busy turning a car over, while people struggled and screamed and tried to get out of it.
"This is not good," Nita muttered. "We can't just leave these things running all over the place!"
"There's no wizardry that can deal with these," Ronan said, "not with overlays all over the place! You've just got to get away! If they. . ."
That was when the heavy hand fell on Ronan's shoulder. "No way!" Kit said. He said three words, very short and sharp. The drow screamed, a high thin whine, and reeled back, mostly because it had no head left. Rock dust sifted down past Ronan as
Kit pulled him away. "You were saying?" Kit said, breathing hard.
The drow kept screaming. A great crack or fissure ran down it, from its head straight down its centreline. It staggered, and the crack spread. But something else happened as well. The drow got wider. It seemed to have two heads. Then six arms; then eight. It fell to the ground with a terrible crash, and broke in two; and got up… twice. It had twinned.
"I was saying that," Ronan said. "Run!"
The way westward down Herbert Road was blocked by more drows. They dodged around the formerly single drow and ran into Main Street. People were running and screaming in all directions. Cars were being overturned, windows and walls being bashed in or pulled down. Two drows were in the process of overturning the monument in front of the Royal Hotel. “What on earth are these things?" Nita said.
"It's not a re-enactment. They're Fomori."
Nita looked up Main Street towards the old beam-and-plaster building that had been the town's market hall, and was now the tourist centre and museum. It was still fairly clear up there. "Come on," she said.
They ran up that way, accompanied by a lot of other people who apparently had the same idea. They didn't get much further than the little arcade of shops in the middle of the main street before they saw the first squat, grey forms appearing down at the other end of the road. One of them began pulling at the gryphon-topped granite fountain in front of the heritage centre.
They stopped. "No good," Nita said. "We don't dare use wizardry in case it backfires. We've got to do something else."
"Such as?" Ronan said, desperate. "There's no river to throw them in!"
She smiled at him, rather crookedly. She was beginning to shake. "Let's try this," she said.
There was a format for these things. She called the name once; she called it twice. The second time, it made her throat hurt - more in warning, she thought, than because of the sound of it. Something was saying to her, Are you sure? Very sure? She gulped, and said the name the third time. It shook her, and flung her down.
She sat up on the pavement, slightly dazed. It took a swallow or two to get her throat working again. Then she shouted in the Speech, "Pay me back what you owe me - and do it now!"
It being wizardry involved, she expected immediate results. It being wizardry involved… she got them.
Over the screams and the breaking glass, over the crashes of cars and the howling of the sirens of the Gardai, came another sound: bells. Not church bells. It was as if someone had taken the sound of hoofbeats, and tuned them; as if what came galloping did so on hooves of glass, or silver, a clangour of relentless and purposeful harmonies. Other bells were the sounds that bridles might make if each one were built like a musical instrument, made to be carried into battle and shaken to frighten the enemy - a sharp, chilly sound. The galloping and the sound of the bells came closer together, and were joined by a third sound, a high, eerie singing noise, the sound that metal might make if you woke it up and taught it how to kill. The faces of the buildings up near the heritage centre flushed bright, as if a light came near them.
And then the tide of colour poured itself down into Main Street from both sides of the Heritage Centre, and the first of the drows fell away from the gryphon fountain, screaming as a crystal sword pierced it. The horses shone, the riders shone; not with any kind of light. They were simply more there than the main street was, more there than the broken glass, and the crashed cars, and the grey things; more vivid, more real. Everything went pallid or dull that was seen in the same glance with them - the crimson of cloaks and banners that burned like coals, the blues and emerald greens like spring suddenly afire amid the concrete, the gold of tores and arm-rings glowing as if they were molten, the silver of hair burning like the moon through cloud, the raven of hair burning like the cold between the stars. The riders poured down into Main Street, and the drows fled screaming before them - not that it helped. Two of them took refuge in the smoked-glass-and-aluminium phone booths down at that end of the street; the faery horses smashed them to splinters with their hooves, and the drows afterwards. Down past the Chinese restaurant, down past the estate agents and the electrical shops, the riders came storming down between the cars, or through them, as if the cars were not real to them: and perhaps they were not. The riders' hands were not empty. Their swords shone and sang where the sunlight fell on them, that high, inhumanly joyous keen of metal that will never know rust. The riders had spears like tongues of fire, and sickles like sharpened moons, and bows of glass which fired arrows that did not miss. The grey things went down like lumps of stone when the weapons struck them, and lay like stone, and didn't move again. The only screams left were those of the drows, now; everything mortal was hiding, or standing very still, hoping against hope it wouldn't be noticed by the terrible, deadly beauty raging down through the main street of Bray.
The riders swept down the street to where Nita and Ronan and Kit stood, backs against the wall next to the pub by the arcade; and swept on past them, towards the Dargle, driving a crowd of the drows before them. A Garda sergeant in his blue shirtsleeves stood astounded on the corner and watched them pass, too dumbfounded to do anything at the moment but cross himself; and several of the riders bowed to him as they passed, and smiled as they did it.
One of the riders turned aside from the bright tide, and paused by them, looking down at Nita. He said, "Are you repaid, then?"
Nita looked up at him, the crimson and emerald and golden splendour of his clothing, the impossible handsomeness of his face, and she felt dingy and shopworn by comparison. Her heart ached in her with pity for the wretched ordinariness of life, seen next to this awful, assured beauty. But she said, "Yes, thank you. Thank you .very much."
"I would have saved the favour, myself," said the black-haired rider, "for you'll need it more later. But what's done, is done. And now get up and ride, for the Queen desires to speak with you."
Ronan put his eyebrows up at that. "Which queen?"
"Not any mortal one," said the young rider on the horse, looking at him with mild amusement. "The Queen whom it is unwise to refuse… as it is unwise to refuse her Fool."
"The Amadaunl” Ronan said, his eyes going wide. "Do what he says," he said to Nita. And she caught a flash of unnerved thought from him: he can kill with a look or a touch, this one, if offended. . .
"No problem with that," Nita said, at the moment having no time for Ronan's nervousness. "But one thing first." She looked around her with distress: the cars stopped or crashed in the street, the shattered glass, the stunned townspeople standing around. She beckoned Kit and Ronan off to one side a little, and said, "We can't leave the place this way. Little hiccups in daily reality, people can deal with - but this? They'll never be able to explain it to themselves. . ."
"Or their insurance companies," Kit muttered.
Nita shook her head. "They'll lose their grip. . ."
Ronan looked at them curiously. "What are you thinking of doing?"
Kit looked thoughtfully at Nita. "Patch it?"
Nita nodded. Ronan stared at her. " 'Patch it?' Patch what'? With what?"
Nita bit her lip. "Time," she said. "With a spare piece. It's basic alternate-universe theory; Johnny mentioned patching in the pub. Somewhere parallel to our universe, where this happened, there has to be one where this didn't… where the drows never popped out, where this damage wasn't done. You patch this timeline with an equivalent piece of that one." She looked around her, considering. “The area and the timespan's small enough not to have to get an authorization, like you would for a full timeslide. And the reason's good, which is the whole point."
"But the overlays. . ."
"Ronan," Kit said, holding his voice very steady in a way that Nita knew meant he was fighting not to lose his temper, "we can't sit around arguing about this all day. A few minutes more, and what's happened will have printed itself too strongly on these people's minds to be patched over. We'll be careful of the overlays. You in, or what?"
Ronan looked from him to Nita. She shrugged, nodded.
"All right. . ."
"Here it is," Kit said, riffling through his manual. "We're inside the time limit, we can do the short form. Ronan?" He offered him the manual.
"No," he said, looking slightly off to one side like someone having an idea, "I see it. You start."
Kit and Nita started reading together: Ronan joined them. It was a little odd to hear the Speech for the first time in an Irish accent, but Nita didn't let that distract her, concentrating instead on the part of the spell that located and verified the piece of alternate spacetime they needed, 'copied' it into the spell buffer prepared for it, and held it ready. Then came the second part of the spell, which bilocated the copied spacetime with the one presently proceeding locally.
Kit looked up after a moment, breathing hard. Everything around them suddenly looked a little peculiar, as if every object had two sets of outlines, which were vibrating, jarring against one another. "Come on," he said to Nita and Ronan, "let's get out of here and drop it in place."
"How are we going?" Nita said, glancing up at the Amadaun.
There were abruptly three more horses beside him; bridled and saddled, ready to go. "Can you ride?"
"I can be carried," Nita said, utterly unhappy about the idea.
"Up, then."
Kit helped her up. "Where is the Queen?" she said to the Amadaun. "Did she come out with you?"
"She did not: she goes not foraying any more," the Amadaun said. "Though because of you, that may change."
Nita thought about that one for a minute. Ronan meanwhile swung up in his saddle with perfect ease, gathered up the reins and sat there like a lord. Kit clambered up into his saddle, clutching the pommel of it.
"Don't fear," the Amadaun said. "You won't fall."
Nita desperately hoped that was true. "OK," she said to Kit. "As soon as we're clear, let it drop."
The Amadaun turned his mount and led them at a walk up Herbert Road. By the entrance to the church parking lot Kit paused, looked over his shoulder, said one word. Looking back towards the main street with Ronan, Nita saw the outlines of everything tremble, then suddenly solidify. With that, the glitter of broken glass in the road was gone, and a sudden confused silence fell over the shouting that had started in the street.
"Good enough," Kit said. "It took, nice and solid. Let's go."
And they rode. Nita knew these horses from old stories, but she still was not prepared for how fast they went. One moment she was trying to find a way to sit so that she wouldn't slip sideways: the next, she was galloping. Though it physically felt as if she was trapped in a dream sequence in a film, the horse moving in slow motion, everything else blurred past her with such speed that she could hardly tell which way they were going. Apparently the Good People's horses didn't care about roads; rough or smooth was all one to them, for they ran 'sideways', across water, or fetlock-deep through a hillside in their path. The country around them now appeared as it had - how many hundreds of years ago? - before there were roads, or people, or anything else to trouble the serenity of the world. It was an Ireland of apple trees in flower, of long hillsides green with flowery meadows, deep forests, thickets of hazel and rowan. They rode westward out of Bray, and made for Great Sugarloaf.
In the sideways world it was no mountain, but a city that stood up huge and golden, the towers lancing up as Nita had seen them from a distance that afternoon, back in Kilquade. The rider alongside them looked at Nita, and at the view ahead, and smiled slightly. "It is the chief of our duns in these parts," he said. "And the fairest. Other mountains are higher, but none was so well shaped, we thought."
"I saw."
"So you did. You have the gift; it comes of the blood, I suppose." The Fool looked at her. "Not a safe gift, though."
"Neither is wizardry," Nita said.
The Fool nodded. "As you will no doubt keep discovering, before the end. No matter. We're here."
They dismounted before the great gates. The horses tossed their heads, somehow losing their saddles and tack at the same time, and wandered off into the surrounding meadows. "Come then," said the Fool. "The Queen holds summer court."
They did not go through the gates. The Fool led them instead a short distance around the high shining walls, to where an open pavilion of white silk was pitched in the meadow. Inside it was a simple chair, and several young women standing around it; in the chair sat another woman, who watched them come.
The Fool led them just inside the pavilion, before the lady in the chair. Afterwards Nita had some trouble remembering her face; what chiefly struck her was the woman's hair, masses of it, a beautiful mellow gold like the wheat ripening in Aunt Annie's third field over. The thick plaits of it that hung down reached almost to the ground; the rest was coiled up, braided and wound around her head, the only crown she wore. She was dressed all in a white silk much finer than that of the pavilion, and she held something wrapped in more silk in her lap.
"The greeting of gods and man to you, wizards," she said.
They all bowed. "And to you, madam," Ronan said, "our greeting and the One's."
She bowed her head in return. "I may not keep you long here," she said; "you are on errantry, and we respect that. But word has come to us of what the wizards are doing. We know a little of draoiceacht ourselves, and we have something here that may be of use to you." She turned her attention to the bundle in her lap.
'Madam," Kit said, 'may I ask a question?"
She looked up, and her eyes glinted a little with merriment. 'Could I stop you?"
'Who are you, please?"
She sat back in the chair at that. 'Bold one," she said. 'But the stranger in the gate has a right to ask. I am one who 'died into the hills'." Ronan turned his face away. "Feel no shame," she said. "The name is long given to us by humans, and we are used to it. The first of us who lived here after the Making, and could not bear to leave, slipped sideways here, by what art you know; it is part of wizardry. We took ourselves to live outside of the world's time, and exiled ourselves as a result; we cannot go back except for a little while, every now and then. A night of moon to dance in; a morning, or an afternoon, on each of the four great turning-days of the year, when the hills stand open, and there is some commerce between this world and yours. We are near one of them now, which is why you can be here at all."
She turned back a bit of the silk of the wrapped thing in her lap, toying with it. "Now and then, the desire for the physical world becomes too much for us, and one or another of us crosses back into it -to live the lives of human beings, in a world where things are definite and deadly, and what one does matters for ever. We age swiftly when we do that, and our passions rule us; we do terrible deeds sometimes, forgetting the calm of the slower-running time outside the world. I have been back several times, and returned here after each visit, which makes me unusual… for many of us have gone over to try death, and have not come back from it. Your world would know me by several names. I was called Aoife, and Fand, and Macha, and other names besides: but most important at the moment, I was called Emer, the wife of Cuchullain mac Sualtim, who was Hero of Ulster. And that is how I come by this."
She looked down at the bundle in her lap, and slowly unfolded the wrappings around it. "After Cuchullain died," she said, "I gave it to Conall of the Hundred Battles. It passed from him, eventually; he could not bear the spirit that was in the thing. It was in pain, because there was no hand mighty enough to wield it any more, and no mind that understood its power. Our wise folk thought at last that it ought to be brought out of the world, and "into the hills", to spare its pain. And so it was. See. . ."
She slipped the silk aside, and held up what had been in it. It was a sword. There were no jewels on it; the hilt was plain gold, riveted with silver, and the blade was a long graceful willow-leaf curve of mirror-polished steel, nearly a meter long, coming to a 'waist' about a third of a meter above the hilt, and then flaring slightly outward again. There was a wavy pattern in its steel, but more than that, the blade itself seemed to waver slightly in the vision, as if seen through a heat-haze. Even in this golden light, with the summer of the Otherworld all around them, the Queen looked pale and plain as she held it up; the sword made whatever one looked at with it seem less than real, as the Sidhe had done in Bray.
"Cruaidin Cailidcheann, he called it; the Hard, Hard-Headed. But it had another name, first. Cuchullain's father was Lugh of the Long Reach; and this is Fragarach, the Answerer, the Sword of Air, which Lugh sent to him. Take it."
Nita put her hand out to it, and felt a cold fire burning, and a pressure of wind forcing her hand away. "It doesn't want me," she said.
"No. It has its own desires, and I can only hold it because I am one of the Undying. One of you," she said to Kit and Ronan.
Ronan put a hand out, and then snatched it back, and scowled. "It doesn't want me either."
"You then," she said to Kit. "Take it, young wizard: and give it to the Senior, with my blessing. He will be the one to wield it, I think. Say also to him," she said, turning to Ronan,"that I ask him again the question I have asked him before; and ask whether he has any new answer for me."
"I will," Ronan said, but his eyes slid sideways to Fragarach.
Kit bowed slightly. "And I'll deliver this." He took the sword, and apparently had no trouble with it.
"Go, then. The Amadaun will see you home. And have a care; for the One-Eyed is very strong. He is not as strong as he was once… but neither are the Treasures." The Queen's green eyes were troubled. "Nonetheless, they may serve. They must serve."
They nodded.
"Go now."
The horses were brought for them, and they rode back to Nita's aunt's. The dual carriageway wasn't there, but they could recognize the Glen of the Downs as the Good People's horses left it swiftly behind them. The sea glinted before them with colours they had never seen before, under the Otherworld's sun, as they rode down the hill towards Kilquade; then the new colours faded, and there was nothing shining on the sea but mundane sunlight. The road faded into visibility around them at the end of Aunt Annie's drive.
"Go well," said the Amadaun as they dismounted, and their three horses faded away. "We can do no more for you. One Treasure from the land itself; one from the hand of the People; one from humankind. The fourth must come from elsewhere: from one of the Powers, or not at all."
"You say you're a Fool," Nita said. "Are you making a joke?"
"Always. But the jokes are always true. Beware," he said. "And the One go with you."
He faded away as well. They turned and headed down the drive, Kit carrying the sword across his hands and looking extremely nervous.
"You said things around here are getting weird?" he said to Nita.
She sighed. "Don't ask me for hints that they might get less weird," she said. "My money says things get worse yet."
There it lay in the middle of the kitchen table, along with old Lotto tickets and a tea-stained copy of the Bray People, on top of the placemats, next to a plastic biscuit tray with nothing but crumbs left in it, and the milk jar and sugar bowl; Fragarach the Answerer, shining under the light that hung down from the ceiling. They sat around it, nursing their tea, and looking at it. It was hard to look at anything else. The cats sat up on the kitchen worktop, the way they did when waiting to be fed, and stared at it too, big-eyed.
"And that was it," Kit said to Nita's aunt. "They said we would have to come up with the fourth one ourselves, somehow."
"Did they give you any hints?" Aunt Annie said.
Nita shook her head. "Unless you caught something that I didn't, Ronan. I can't always understand the way people talk around here."
Ronan shook his head. "I heard what you heard, more's the pity. I was hoping they might come up with the Spear, too."
"You and me both," said Aunt Annie. She stretched, and slumped in her chair. Nita noticed how tired she looked, and felt sorry for her.
"Did you do the warding you were going to do?" she said.
Her aunt nodded. "The back office is ready for the Cup," she said. "Johnny went to help Doris with it; apparently it's more alive than they had expected, and it was causing them trouble. They should be here in a while. Anyway, when you're in the back of the house, be careful of the office door. I had to draw the spell pattern partway up the inside of it to miss the rug in there, and if you open the door, it'll break the circuit. Just reach in through the door if you need something."
They nodded. "Aunt Annie," Nita said, "I was going to ask you. Where does Biddy the farrier live?"
She tried to make it sound nonchalant, and had no idea whether she had succeeded. Her aunt looked at her a little curiously. "Just up the road in Kilpedder," she said. 'Next to the shop across the dual carriageway. She has her ordinary forge there. Why?"
Nita tried not to squirm. "I had a couple of questions I wanted to ask her," she said.
"About her forge," Kit said. "It's really great… I hadn't seen a portable one like that before."
"Oh. Well, it's getting close to teatime: you should be able to find her up there in a while - her work rarely keeps her out much later than this."
Nita became aware of a low buzzing, and looked around her. "Is that the oven-timer?" she said.
Aunt Annie looked bemused. "No, the oven's not on."
They looked at each other as the buzzing got louder. Some of the spoons on the table began to vibrate gently, moving along the table a little.
"Look at the Sword!" Kit said. "It's vibrating."
It was. The low humming sound that Nita had mistaken for the oven-timer was coming from it, and it was getting louder. "It sounds a little like feedback," she said.
A faint beep-beep sound came from outside. The Sword's hum got louder, and (Nita thought) more threatening. "Ohmigosh," her aunt said, "it's Doris and Johnny, and they've got the Cup!"
"Neat!" Kit said, and got up. "Let's go and see!"
"Wait a minute!" Aunt Annie said, sounding panic-stricken. "We don't have the place prepared to have two of the Treasures here at once! Put two of these things together without adequate preparation, and you're going to get something that makes atomic critical mass look like a wet firework!" She looked around hurriedly. "Crikey, I can't leave now! Kit, quick, take it and get out of here!"
He picked it up, rather nervously. It jumped and jittered in his hands, and the hum started to scale up into a howl. "Where?!"
"Anywhere! Somewhere far! More than fifty miles. I'll cover you for the overlays, just go!"
He looked at Nita. "Copernicus," he said, and muttered three words, and vanished.
The air went whoomfinto where he had been: not the usual explosion. Nita smiled slightly, considering that Kit had been as impressed by Johnny's expertise as she had.
Outside, car doors slammed. "Here, let me get that for you, Doris," Johnny's voice said.
They all went to the door. Johnny was pulling the glass sliding door aside. Behind him came Doris Smyth, holding something wrapped in a pastel-striped pillowcase. The something shone through the pillowcase as if it were on fire: a still, cool, changeless fire that nonetheless rippled and wavered on everything it touched, like the sun looked at from underwater. "Back office, Anne?" said Doris's voice, sounding strained but cheerful.
"Right. Don't open the door, just walk through it."
"Certainly. Johnny, you handle that; I have my hands full."
There was no room for them all, down that narrow hall. Nita and Ronan stood there and watched as the three older wizards walked down past the bookshelves and turned the corner, out of view. Except that they weren't entirely out of view at all; they were faintly visible in the reflected light from the Cup, even through the intervening walls. Nita shook her head.
"Don't do things like this at home, do you?" Ronan said.
She grinned at him and headed back into the kitchen. "Neither do you, buster. Not as a rule, anyway."
She went to fill the kettle for the next inevitable round of tea. "Where's Copernicus?" Ronan said.
"On the Moon. Southern hemisphere."
"The Moon?!"
Nita shrugged. "She said more than fifty miles. That should be enough." Then she looked at Ronan's face as she plugged the kettle in. "Haven't you been there?"
"To the Moon? No!"
"Why not? It's great." He opened his mouth, and Nita suddenly felt annoyed at herself. "The overlays, I guess. I'm sorry. Look, there have to be some places you can teleport from safely. If you can find one, and hop over and see us, we'll run the wizardry through for you, and show you around. It's no big deal."
"I'd like that," he said, and smiled slightly. It was a look Nita hadn't seen on him often; the chip off the shoulder for the moment, and just a touch of wistfulness. "It must be grand," he said, 'being where you don't have to be afraid to do all the wizardries you know can be done."
She laughed a little, and leaned against the worktop, waiting for the kettle to boil. "It has its downside - you wouldn't believe the trouble you can get into. Remind me to tell you about the shark who almost ate me…"
"Want a look?" Aunt Annie said, coming back into the kitchen, with Johnny and Doris behind her.
"Yeah!" Nita said. She headed down the hall, with Ronan behind her.
There was no need to do anything special. Walls meant nothing to the light of the Chalice - or rather the light of what was inside it. It was sitting on its pillowcase, the bowl of it half a meter across, the gold inlay on the outside of the bowl, and in the spirals and curves that ran down its stem and massive foot, all burning as if molten and ready to flow off the Chalice at a moment's notice. The burning came from the blue-white light filling it, a light that was liquid and was still trembling slightly from having been moved. It shone through the metal as if it were glass, and through everything else it touched.
She looked at Ronan, and away again, shaking her head. Words seemed inadequate, and out of place. But at the same time she couldn't help noticing his expression, like that of someone struggling with a memory: and oddly, not trying to remember, but to forget. . .
Maybe he felt her eyes on him: he turned his gaze away from the Cup, and looked at her with a troubled expression. "Let's get together some time soon," he said. "I need to talk."
Nita suddenly found herself afraid to find out what he wanted to talk about. She nodded, and went away hurriedly, back down to the kitchen.
The three older wizards were sitting around the kitchen table, waiting for the teapot to finish brewing. "I have a message for you from the Queen," she said. Johnny looked at her questioningly, and Nita repeated the message.
He smiled very slightly, and it was a sad look. "She is asking," he said, "whether there is any hope that the world they have chosen to live in will ever come any closer to Timeheart. They love Ireland, make no mistake; but at the same time, they're of the Powers, and they long for Timeheart, where they were created. But the legends say they must stay in the world they have chosen until the One's Champion comes back with his Spear, and they lose the world of their desire." He shook his head. "A while yet, I think…"
"Do you want Kit back?" Nita said.
He passed a hand over his forehead, smoothing his hair back. "Where is he?"
"The Moon."
"That's all right, then. Wait a few minutes before you bring him back here. I can add a limiter to the binding on the Cup that'll make it at least safe for the Sword to be here with it. But the Sword will need its own binding."
Doris poured the tea out. "That's one less problem," she said. "Now if we just knew what to do about the Spear, we'd be fairly ready."
There was silence around the table at that, and some hopeless looks. “You couldn't find anything that would work?" Nita said, as Ronan came in and sat down again.
"My dear," said Doris, "we have the original Stone and the original Sword awake again. The Cup is not the original, but has ensouled very emphatically indeed. We dare not try to conjoin an inferior or weak Spear to them. They would blast it out of existence. The resouled Spear must be at least as strong as they - preferably much stronger. But we have no proper envelope. It is not strictly a change that a physicist would understand, but matter is not quite the robust stuff it was at the beginning of the world, when Creation as an art was young, and the energies of it dwelt new and hot in the nucleus of every atom. As gravity and other forces have declined over many millions of years, so has the basic - "selfness" - of matter. You see how the resouled Treasures make everything around them look somewhat shabby and poor. The souls in them are reminding the matter they embody how matter was then. It was much closer to being alive."
"But then the Spear's soul will remind the matter it's in. Won't it?"
"Not if the matter is simply unable to hold the soul long enough in one place for the change to take," Johnny said. "It'd be like trying to hold a burning coal in a Kleenex. The Spear's soul is the fiercest of them all. I had hoped I was wrong about this, but the research I've been doing over the past couple of days indicates that no spear on Earth would be strong enough now to contain the soul for long enough to do the trick: whether it had contained it before or not."
“Off the Earth, then," Nita said.
Johnny cocked his head. "It's a thought that occurred to me. But the changes in matter that have happened here have happened everywhere else, too. And we keep coming back to the problem," and he smoothed his hair back again,"that we don't have much time."
Ronan sighed and sat back. "It's a pity we can't just make a new one," he said.
Aunt Annie sighed too. “Even if we had uncontaminated matter from the beginning of time," she said, "we wouldn't have the expertise to do anything with it. I think we're just going to have to keep looking for some other kind of answer." She glanced over at Johnny and Doris. They nodded.
Nita got up. “I'll go and get Kit," she said. “Fifteen or twenty minutes be long enough?"
"Fine."
She looked at her aunt. She nodded. "The overlay buffer is still in place. Go ahead."
Nita said the transport spell quickly in her head, considering how much air she would need, doubling it as usual, and arranging the spell intake so that it would take the air from outside the house rather than inside - the memory of the last time she had done such a spell in her own house, without stopping to consider that her father's desk was covered with paperwork, was still much with her. She vanished.
She found Kit sitting on his favorite rock - a pumice boulder on which he had been using a sharp piece of granite to whittle the boulder into the crude likeness of a human face, for the bemusement of future lunar photographic surveys. The Sword was laid across his lap.
She climbed up beside him. "Johnny said he should be ready for you to come back in a little while."
"I don't want to go right back there," Kit said, turning the Sword over in his lap and looking at it. "Someone I want to have a talk with first."
"Biddy," Nita said.
Kit nodded. "Remember what the fox said to you," he said.
"Listen," Nita said. "You remember how you told me that you felt her forge was alive?" He nodded. Nita started to tell him what Doris had said about the relative 'liveness' of matter at the beginning of time.
He stopped her. "It's OK, I heard it. I used your ears."
She punched him. "Illegal brain-tapping! You didn't even ask me! What if you had overheard something I was thinking?"
"What, about Ronan?"
She blushed hot and punched him again, much harder, so that in the low gravity he fell sideways off the boulder and bounced a couple of times in the moondust. "Great," he said, as he got up and dusted himself off. "This stuff is all down my shirt. Now I'm going to itch all night."
"Serves you right. Eavesdropper!"
"Still," he said, and looked thoughtful. "He's sharp, your boyfriend Ronan. Why shouldn't they make another one?"
"Because they don't know how. Whaddaya mean, 'my boyfriend'?" She started heading around the rock to punch him again, far gone in embarrassment.
"Hmm," Kit said. "Neets, forget it, I'll lay off."
"Promises, promises."
"Look, let's go and see Biddy."
"What are we going to say to her?!"
He shook his head. " "Come out with your hands up"? I don't know. But if one of Them is here, They need to be giving us a hand. Do you know where we're going?"
"Yeah. I'll pass you the coordinates."
Nita pictured the place in her head - she had seen it often enough when riding past it on the farm's bike - and translated the image quickly into coordinates that could be plugged into a transport spell. "Got it," Kit said. "Just change that bit there. Got it? Go."
They made the jump. Air slid out and away from them, and they were standing not far from the far side of the dual carriageway, near the pub that stood there. It was getting dark.
"Over here," Nita said, and led the way over to the right, where a small group of whitewashed buildings stood near the Kilpedder shop. There was a low iron gate at the entrance to them, covered with ornate and graceful wrought-iron work; and a hanging sign on a nearby wall said B. o DALAIGH, I.F.A. Carefully and quietly Nita unlatched the gate and swung it inward. There were no lights showing in any of the buildings, though Biddy's truck was parked in front of one of them.
"Maybe she's gone out," Nita said.
Kit shook his head and went slowly to the truck, and put one hand up against the forge-box at the back. "Feel this," he said.
Nita laid her hand against it, and snatched it back with the shock. Life, for a wizard, is something that can be felt like the warmth from a radiator. This was not just a warmth, but a burning - and totally unlike the kind of low-level awareness that 'inanimate' objects normally manifested.
"I can't believe you didn't feel it the first tune," Kit said.
"Different specialties, different sensitivities," said Nita. "Besides, I never touched it. But look at that."
She nodded at Fragarach. The dusk was falling all around them, but it had no power over the Sword; Fragarach shone as if it lay out in full sunlight, though the waning Moon was high and the bats were out.
"It knows," Kit said. " "Uncontaminated matter from the time of Creation", did they say?" He chuckled. "Let's see if we can find her."
He went off around one of the outbuildings. Nita leaned against the forge, and breathed out.
"Looking for somebody?" Biddy said from the shadows.
Nita jumped, then laughed a little nervously. Get a grip on yourself, she thought. Now what was the wording? She didn't move; just watched Biddy head over towards her. "Elder sister," Nita said, “in the One's name, honour and greeting."
"Now what do you mean by. . ." She stopped, as Kit came around the corner, with the Sword in his hand. It had been bright enough. Now, in her immediate presence, it blazed.
Biddy looked at it, and her face altered. Recognition, and affection, and surprise, all appeared in it. "Now I thought that had been put away somewhere safe," she said in her soft drawl.
"It was," Nita said. "But nothing much is going to be safe any more, unless it gets used."
"It knows you," Kit said. "I can feel that. It just about shouts that it knows you." There was an odd exultation in his face; Nita felt inclined to keep her distance for the moment. "And it knows your forge, there. I think maybe you made this." He hefted the Sword, but there was something in the gesture that also looked as if the Sword had moved itself, a small leap of excitement. "Or someone using the metal that's been built into that forge made this. Probably both."
Biddy looked at them thoughtfully, and leaned against the wall, folding her arms.
"Cutlery isn't usually my stock in trade," Biddy said. "Pretty, though."
“Oh, come on,” Kit said. And Nita added, "I wish you'd ditch the accent. It's really bad."
"What?" Biddy said.
Nita had to laugh. "I'm sorry. It's probably good enough to fool the people around here, but it wouldn't fool a real American for very long. The morning after I met you, I was wondering why you sounded so weird. Now I know." She laughed again. "You may be one of the Powers that Be, but you're no more perfect than we are. Especially not at sounding like you've lived somewhere you've never been!"
Biddy looked faintly shocked. Then she leaned back again, and she too laughed a little, and fell silent afterwards, looking at the Sword.
"Well?" Kit said.
"Well," said Biddy. 'May I see it, then?"
Kit went to her and handed her the Sword, hilt-first. She took it, and held it up to examine it, laying it for a moment across the flat of her forearm. "Not much changed," she said. "Though it's more tired than I remember."
"You can do something about that," Nita said.
Biddy glanced over at her with a humorous look. "You have a lot of confidence in my abilities," she said.
"You'd better believe we do," Kit said. "We've worked with the Powers before."
"Not all of us are of equal ability," Biddy said. "And spending time in a physical body tends to affect one's ability to do one's job."
"The last Power we worked with took on the Lone One after spending ten years in the shape of a macaw, sitting on a perch and eating sunflower seeds," Kit said dryly,"so I wouldn't sell yourself short, if I were you."
Biddy sighed and looked at the Sword. "How long have you been here?" Nita said.
"Since the beginning," Biddy said. She turned the Sword over again and looked at Fragarach's flat, as if searching for flaws. "I never left. Couldn't bear to."
Nita boosted herself up on to the fence rail.
"You were one of the ones who made Ireland, then."
Biddy nodded, turning Fragarach over again. "The first of the blow-ins," she said, and smiled slightly. "Here." She handed Fragarach back to Kit.
"The stories say that the Tuatha came bringing the Treasures from the Four Cities," Kit said. "Those are just parts of Timeheart, aren't they. And you were one of the ones who had made the Treasures in the first place."
"I was the Smith of Falias," said Biddy, "among others. I made Fragarach… yes."
"And then the stories tell about Govan, the smith of the gods, who came to Lugh the Ildanach," Nita said, "and how they went away together and took the Spear of Victory, Luin, and forged it full of fire and a fierce spirit. . ."
She looked at Nita and nodded slowly. "That was me as well."
"You could do that again," Kit said.
Biddy frowned. “I doubt it," she said. "The worlds aren't what they used to be, and neither is matter."
"Your anvil is," Kit said.
"That can't be used as anything but an anvil," Biddy said. "Its nature is set, from time's beginning almost."
"But if you could get some more of that old "original" matter - you could do it. You could make another Spear!"
"What do you take me for?" Biddy said, laughing hopelessly. "You really didn't understand me. When you live in the physical world, you have to do it in a physical body. Those are the rules. And if you're going to spend as long in a mortal form as I have, you give up a lot of your power by necessity. It would burn the body out, otherwise, and the brain; physicality just isn't robust enough to bear our state of being for very long. The memories all ebb away after a while. And why shouldn't they? I did my work well - too well." She laughed, with some bitterness in the sound. "I fell in love with what I made, and couldn't leave it. You're quite right that we're not perfect, especially that way. Once I had finished my part in making this place, I didn't want anything more but to be here in peace, for ever. The One released me to do that - just to be here, and be useful in my small way, until I'm required to give my power back at the end of things. I do my forgework, and live in the place I love."
'Then make yourself useful," Kit said, sounding grim. "Otherwise 'this place you love' is going to be nothing but a big pile of cinders, after Balor gets through with it."
Biddy was shaking her head. "This is one use I can't be. I haven't the power to pull matter here from the heart of time, or its beginning either! And wizards or not, not even the Seniors have that kind of power!"
"I know someone who does," Nita said, "at the moment, anyway." Kit glanced at her, uncomprehending for a moment - then got it, and his eyes glittered. "Never mind that now. The memories may ebb - but you can't have forgotten how you made that."
Biddy's eyes lingered on Fragarach. "No," she said. "That I remember very well."
"And the Spear," Kit said.
"I remember some of the details," Biddy said softly. "But I had that other Power to help me, the one they called Lugh the All-Crafted."
"I can't get you someone who knows how to do everything," Nita said, grinning, "but I can sure get you someone who thinks she does. Second best, maybe. But take it or leave it."
Biddy stood there, her eyes downcast, irresolute. "Come on," Nita said. "We could require it of you, in the One's name. Once a Power, always a Power, regardless of how much or little of it you have left. Those are the rules, as you say. But. . ." She broke off.
Nita and Kit stood quiet. Biddy stared at the ground.
She looked up, then. "It's better than doing nothing, I suppose. Tell me what you want of me."
"Come and have some tea at my aunt's," Nita said.
Kit groaned.
Some hours later almost all the free chairs in Aunt Annie's kitchen were full of wizards, all talking hard. Most of them there knew Biddy, and there had been some shock at Nita's announcement of who else she was besides the local farrier, but Fragarach's response to Biddy couldn't be explained in any other way. Shock had been quickly put aside in favour of plan-making.
"It was Ronan's idea," Nita said, and Ronan blushed right out to his ears. "We can make another. We can!"
"I'll entertain explanations of how," Johnny said, sitting back and stroking his moustache. "Don't tell me you're thinking of pinching some ur-matter from Timeheart, either, because it won't work. That matter is structured differently from the way matter was at the beginning of Time in this universe."
"Timeslide, then," Kit said.
Johnny shook his head. "We would need a wizard with enough power to drive that kind of a slide back far enough. You're talking billions of years."
Kit bent over to Nita and said, "Should I?"
"I think you'd better," Nita said, and sighed. It had been so quiet until now, relatively speaking. "It's after dinnertime. See if you can do it without raising the alarm, if you know what I mean."
Kit nodded and went out. "It might help," Aunt Annie said to Johnny, 'if we understood a little more about exactly what kind of matter's needed."
"Well, you've got a bard around here somewhere, haven't you?" he said. "Let's hear the authorized version first, and then Biddy can give us what she remembers of the technicalities, so that we can work on the spelling proper."
"Hmm," Aunt Annie said. She went to the door. “ Tualha! Kitty kitty kitty! Tuna!"
The kitchen immediately began to fill with meowing cats. "Do you really think this will work, Shaun?" Doris said.
He stretched, then shrugged. "It's our best chance, I think, considering that no envelope presently extant seems to be suitable. It seems as if the Spear's soul burns out its containers the way - well." He looked at Biddy, then away.
The catflap clattered as Tualha scrambled in through it. She stood there, very small and black, with her small tail pointing straight up in the air, and said, "Mew."
Nita burst out laughing. "Oh, come on, Tualha. It's the Senior for Europe, and he wants your advice."
"Oh, well, that's different," Tualha said. She looked up at Aunt Annie and said, "First things first. What about that tuna?"
'There was a time," Johnny said, 'when bards performed first, and then the lord of the hall gave them largesse."
Tualha looked disdainfully at him. 'Tuna," she said to Nita's aunt. “And then cream, please."
Aunt Annie raised her eyebrows, and went to get it. It was astounding how fast such a small kitten could eat, especially in contrast to all the other cats, who had to be fed too so that they wouldn't steal Tualha's food. Eventually she was lifted up on the table and given her saucer of cream there, and she lapped it with a thoughtful air, burping occasionally, while the human wizards sat around and nursed their tea.
"Now then," Johnny said.
Tualha sat down and began washing her face. "What do you want to know?" she said.
"Tell us if you would, oh bard, the forging of the Spear Luin."
Tualha began washing behind one ear. "The Spear of Victory itself came from the city Finias; Arias the poet-smith made it there. The song says that Arias took a star and hammered it on the anvil, and so made the blade of the spear. Then the Tuatha de Danaan brought it with them through the air and the high air when they came to Ireland. And with them it stayed, and gave light to any place it was in, for the burning that was in it."
Tualha stopped, yawned, and then started on the other ear. "Then came Balor, and made a tower of glass for himself and his creatures in the sea near Ireland. Balor's likeness was that of a human, but gross and misformed, and one eye squinted away almost to nothing for the hugeness and horribleness of the other. So great was it that it took four Fomori with forks of iron to pull the eyelid up when Balor wanted it so. And when it opened, what its glance fell on scorched and burned and was poisoned, and blasted off the world and out of it."
Glances were exchanged around the table. "It was foretold by other wizards," said Tualha,"that only fire and the spirit of fire would end Balor, and that one would come who had all skills, and was kin to Balor, and would make that end of him. So the Tuatha waited, looking for that one to come."
"Another of the Powers," Aunt Annie said, "by the sound of it. And a fairly central one, if Balor is another version of the Lone Power."
Johnny nodded. Tualha had tucked herself down into meatloaf shape. "Nuada the King did not know who that one might be," she said,"so he gathered to him all the great Powers that were in Ireland in those days: Diancecht the physician, and Badb the lady of battles, and the Morrigan, the Great Queen; he gathered in Go van the Smith, and Luchtar the Builder, and Brigit whose name meant the Fiery Arrow, who was healer and smith and poet all together; and cupbearers and druid-wizards and craftsmen of all kinds. And one day they were feasting when a young man came to the door of their great rath and asked to come in. The doorman asked what skill he had. He said he was a warrior, and a harper, and a storyteller too, and a champion in the fight, and a smith, and a cupbearer and a doctor and a wizard and a poet. And when the Powers heard that, They said, 'This must be the All-Skilled, our deliverer. Let him in so that we can test his power." They did that, and the young man could do everything he said he could: and the Ildanach, the all-crafted, is what they nicknamed him. Then they started their plan to drive out Balor and the threat of his Eye, and his creatures the Fomori from Ireland forever."
Tualha looked thoughtfully at the saucer, then at Aunt Annie. Aunt Annie poured her some more cream. "Thirsty work," Tualha said, and had a brief drink. "Then," she said, licking some cream off her whiskers, "Lugh went off in private for a long time with Go van the Smith; they took counsel and made a plan, and Lugh had the Spear of Victory brought to him. In secret Lugh and Go van laboured for three years, or some say seven, forging the Spear anew. Unquenchable fire they forged into it, and a fierce spirit. . ." Tualha yawned, and crouched down in meatloaf shape again. "Then, when they were done, Lugh returned to the great rath of the Tuatha with the Spear, just in time to meet a party of the Fomori that had been sent there by Balor to demand a tribute of slaves from the Tuatha. He unwrapped the Spear and called on the Tuatha to cover their eyes, and the Spear roared with rage and blasted the Fomori to ash on the instant - all but one that he sent back to Balor to tell what had happened, and bring the message of Lugh's defiance to him." Tualha rolled over on her side, and yawned again, blinking at them. "Then the war starts. Did you want anything else?"
"No, that'll do for now. Thank you."
Something went POW! out in the front yard. All heads turned at that, and there were some concerned expressions; but a moment later they heard the front door slide open, and Kit walked in.
"Noisy, that," Johnny said. "You weren't so loud when you left."
"Not my fault," Kit said, jerking his thumb over his shoulder.
Behind him, Nita's sister Dairine walked into the kitchen: ten years old, small, skinny and bright-eyed, with a shock of red hair, wearing shorts and trainers and a Batman T-shirt three sizes too large for her: one of Nita's, actually. Nita started to fume slightly - Dairine had started 'borrowing' her clothes lately, and returning them in less than pristine condition - but there were more important things to be concerned about at the moment; she kept her annoyance to herself. Dairine glanced around the kitchen with interest, then said, 'Hi, Neets. Hi, Aunt Annie!" And she put down the portable computer she was carrying, and went and gave her aunt a hug.
Johnny and Doris and Biddy and Ronan all watched this with some bemusement. "My sister," Nita said to Johnny. "Dairine."
Johnny blinked. "This is the Dairine Callahan who. . ." He paused, then, and laughed at himself. "It would be, wouldn't it. The youngest ones are always the strongest, after all. They're just getting a lot younger these days."
Another chair was pulled in from the living-room while introductions were made. Nita had to smile as she watched the portable computer unlean itself from against the table leg, flop down flat on the floor, grow short spidery legs, and wander over to the cat food dish where Bronski was still eating. Bronski hissed at the computer, hit it hard with one paw, and when that didn't do anything, went out the catflap in a hurry.
Nita looked over at Kit and said, "Any problems?"
"Nothing significant," he said. "She'd had her dinner, so we have a few hours."
"You've briefed her?"
"I know what you're trying to do, more or less," Dairine said, reaching out to take a biscuit from the fresh packet their aunt had brought out. "Mmm." She chewed for a few seconds, then said, "It's all been updating itself in the precis in my manual for the past few days." She nodded over at the computer, which was still examining the cat food dish with interest.
"The language is interesting," Johnny said, leaning back in his chair. " 'Took a star and hammered it on the anvil. . .' "
"When I was in Timeheart, I used meteoric iron," Biddy said quietly. "There seemed to be a certain… appropriateness to it."
"There's plenty of that around," Kit said. "Not all in museums, either."
"But not ur-matter," Doris said. "You would need meteoric iron from around the time of the birth of the Universe."
Dairine shook her head. "It wouldn't be meteoric," she said. "That early in the physical universe, there weren't any planetary bodies to shatter and turn into meteors, yet; not even in the oldest galaxies." She looked at Nita for confirmation: Nita nodded. "You're going to have to get real starsteel."
The older wizards looked at her, beginning to understand. "From the nucleus of a star?" Johnny said.
Dairine looked at him with interest. "Plenty of iron inside stars, especially the type As and Fs."
Biddy stared at Dairine. "You're suggesting that someone should put one end of a timeslide into the centre of a star light-years away and millions of years back in time, and fasten the other end here'? And then do what?"
"Forge what comes out at this end," Dairine said. "That's your department, though. You did that. . ." She glanced over into the next room, where Fragarach lay on a sideboard, with several layers of spell-warding glowing around it to keep its power from combining disastrously with that of the Cup in the back office. "The techniques shouldn't be so different."
"You really think you can do this?" Doris said to Dairine.
"You mean, can I get you what you need?" Dairine said. She sat back in her chair and let her eyes drop closed a little, and then began to speak in the Speech. It was not exactly a spell, but the schematic for one, the outline, with certain key words and phrases left out so that nothing untoward would start to happen just yet. Nita lost the thread of it after about a minute: she had never heard any spell so complex in her life, and several parts of it that she did understand, the power-control parameters and the description of the matter that would be conducted down the timeslide, along with several Names to be invoked, all rattled her badly. Nita knew that her sister had, in some ways, become the manual since her own Ordeal; and by way of semi-parenthood, Dairine had the power of a whole race of sentient computer wizards to draw on. But Nita had not had those facts brought home to her quite so definitely as they were being brought home now. She shivered; it was a little like being big sister to a nuclear explosion that could pick its own time to go off, and was thinking of doing it soon.
Dairine stopped and opened her eyes again. "That's the procedure," she said. "It won't be easy, but at least it's not too complicated. When do you want to do it?"
Doris was shaking her head. " 'Forged fire into it'," she said. "That spell would certainly produce that result. Shaun?"
Johnny was looking very thoughtful. "If the other end of the slide were to slip out of place in either location or time," he said to Dairine, "it could annihilate the Earth. You realize that, of course."
Dairine shrugged. "At the rate things are going, people might be thankful for something like that shortly. If I were you, I'd take the chance you've got. I can do this now, but whether I'll have the power next week, or next month, is a good guess. If the world still exists next week or next month."
There was a silence. "Well, Shaun?" Doris said. "You're the Senior."
He sat and stared into his teacup, and then said, "I guess we haven't any choice. Tomorrow night, then? At Matrix. Assuming the other Planetaries concur."
Doris nodded, and Ronan, and Nita's aunt. "Will the Treasures be all right here tonight, Johnny?" Aunt Annie said.
"I should think so. Let's meet at Matrix around seven. This ought to be done at about sunset, so that the Spear knows what it's for."
Everyone nodded and pushed their chairs back. Nita looked over at Dairine. "You came a long way for just this," she said.
Dairine stretched and grinned. "Worth it to see the expression on your face when I outlined that spell. What a look! I thought you were going to. . ."
"Never mind," Nita said. Becoming a wizard had mostly changed her sister for the better, but it also seemed to have increased some of Dairine's more annoying traits, like the bragging and teasing. "Listen, runt," she said, "I missed you too. How are Mum and Dad?"
Dairine shrugged. "Mum keeps going on about "her baby". Dad looks depressed all the time. They're fine." Then she chuckled. "They'll never try a stunt like this on you again."
"Oh?"
"Uh huh. I heard them arguing about it the other day. Went on for about an hour, and finally Mum said, 'If she wants to be a wizard, fine, let her. Better to have a daughter who's a wizard, than not have a daughter.' "
"All right," Nita said softly. "When can I. . ." She was about to say go home, except that it occurred to her that she didn't want to go home right this minute. Not until after the business with the Spear was settled, anyway. And besides, I'm on assignment… I'd have to see it through anyway. "Never mind," she said again. "Did you tell them where you were going?"
"What, and get them all upset again? No way. Mum hasn't worked out a way to get any promises out of me yet, and that's the way it's going to stay. For the time being, anyhow. What time is it at home when it's seven in the evening here?"
"Two in the afternoon."
"That's fine," Dairine said. "I don't have to be home for dinner until seven our time. Yes, I know where we're going: it's in the manual. See you tomorrow. Bye, Kit. Spot, heel!"
The computer scuttled over to her; cats hissed and bristled at it as it went by. Dairine vanished, and not one of the various papers on the table moved.
"Hey, pretty slick," Kit said.
Nita laughed to herself for a second. "Look," she said, “you'd better get back too. Your parents are going to start wondering."
"Let 'em wonder," Kit said. But he started heading for the door. Nita followed and said, "Make sure you get your sleep."
Kit laughed too, a rueful noise. Excitement sometimes made it hard for him to sleep the night before a big wizardry, and Nita was used to teasing him about the circles under his eyes. “I'll try," he said. "Take it easy, huh?"
"Yeah."
Kit vanished too; Johnny and Doris and Ronan headed out past Nita to Johnny's car, saying their goodnights as they went. As Ronan passed her, he said, "That was your sister?"
"Uh huh."
"You poor thing," said Ronan.
Nita nodded in complete agreement. "She has her uses, though," she said. "Hang loose."
Ronan chuckled and went out.
Nita went back into the kitchen, where she found her aunt staring moodily at a sink full of teacups. "They breed," she said, "I swear they do."
Nita laughed and reached up to the shelf that held the washing-up liquid.
Sleep refused to come easily to her that night. Finally Nita got up about midnight and struggled back into her clothes, thinking that she would go and see whether there was a boring film on the last functioning TV channel.
She never made it past the back garden. It was a clear night, where the last few had been misty: and the Milky Way hung there overhead, nothing subtle about it for once, the Galaxy seen edge-on and for once looking it, ridiculously bright. Nita climbed up on the fence between the garden and the riding area, and just sat there and stared at it for a long time. Only a month or so ago now she had been out that way, among thousands of alien creatures: and she still felt stranger here than she had there…
The crunch of the gravel down the drive got her attention. Nita held very still and listened, suddenly finding herself getting very tense. Who knew what kind of people went sneaking about farms when everyone was in bed. . .
She knew, though. The tension got worse… not to say that it was entirely unpleasant.
By the time the dark shape turned the corner of the house and paused, looking around it, Nita's sight was so night-acclimatized that he might as well have been spotlit. And there were other indications, to another wizard anyway. Very quietly she said, "Dai."
He said nothing for the moment, just came over to where she sat on the fence. His head was on a level with hers; very faintly, the starlight caught in Ronan's eyes. "Dai," he said. It came out as more of a growl.
She laughed at him, very softly so as not to attract any attention in the house. "You sound angry all the time," she said, “You know that? Doesn't it wear you out?"
He turned away from her a moment, leaning against the fence next to her and looking up at the sky. "I couldn't sleep," he said.
Nita grunted softly and also looked up. "And you walked all the way up here from Bray? I'm glad I didn't bother going in to look at the TV. There must really be nothing on."
This time she actually felt him getting angry, sensed it rising off him like steam off a hard-ridden horse. "Look," she whispered as he opened his mouth, "just spare me. OK? Everything somebody says to you, you find a reason to get annoyed about it. It's a wonder anyone even talks to you any more. Except you're so. . ." Words jostled in her head: she shut up. Attractive. Sensitive. Helpless. . .
He opened his mouth again, shut it, and then opened it again and started to laugh, almost soundlessly. "Yeah. I guess. I've always been this way. But lately it's been getting worse. Like whatever causes it is getting closer."
And Ronan looked at her sidewise - a sort of wry expression, clearly visible even in this dimness. "Funny. I thought you were pretty different when I met you first. . ."
"And now you think I'm pretty much normal?" Nita said. "Nice of you."
"No," Ronan said, sounding annoyed. "I think you're more different than anybody around here. Especially the other girls." He sounded less annoyed. "A lot of them talk tough all the time, but if you push them, they give, right then. You, though, you don't talk tough - mostly. When you do, you're scary. . ." He shrugged. "And as for pushing - you just fall all over whoever does it, like a brick wall."
Nita flushed hot at this, not sure what to make of it. "Well, you're certainly different from everyone else I know," she said, and then shut her mouth again lest the confusion inside should start finding its way out and make her look like a total idiot.
But Ronan just laughed again. "You think loud, too," he said.
The last blush was nothing to this one, but Nita fought it down, starting to get annoyed herself. That broke off, though, when she saw the way he was looking at her. For once, there was no anger about it. Bizarrely, the look made her start to shake a little. Then it occurred to her that there was nothing bizarre about it, for it was not her own physical excitement she was feeling. She knew what that felt like-There was nothing in the manual about this. Or is there? Nita thought. Have I ever looked? It's not as if the subject has ever come up, working with Kit. . .
. . .and abruptly she knew, or started to know, rather more about it. Nita sat there in the starlight and swallowed, getting her first taste of what it was like for a native wizard to experience 'the Knowledge' - the direct input from the wizardly 'database' which was the way Irish wizards experienced the information. Would it keep getting this way for me if I stayed here longer? she wondered. But that was hardly important just now: there was other information to consider. Of course wizards got physical with each other sometimes, just the same as other human beings did. But they experienced it somewhat differently. It had to do with the Speech, which had physical components as well as verbal and mental ones - and when two people expert in the Speech were attracted, they were likely to overhear one another's bodies as well as their minds. . .
Nita broke out in a sweat. Not mine, she thought, fascinated. She looked at Ronan, and for a long few moments her thoughts chased themselves unintelligibly through her head. Only one finally made itself plain:
Well, heck, I guess you have to start somewhere. And I do like him - otherwise I wouldn't even be thinking about this. . .
Ronan looked away. And Nita said, "You're not going to get any pushing out of me on this one." She was still shaking, but it was her own nervousness this time.
She just sat there and waited.
He leaned back on the fence a bit. His face was quite close to hers: she caught the starlight in his eyes one more time before he bent in to kiss her.
She spent the first two seconds trying to work out what to do with her nose. After that Nita was simply lost in sensation: the kiss itself, and what underlay it, the rush and pour of thought and emotion that was both of their minds getting tangled together. She was nervous about it at first, but after a moment it seemed completely natural, that odd fresh scent of his mind - green, she thought, of course, and was tempted to laugh; and behind it, another sensation, something faint but familiar. She couldn't place it. . .
The kiss broke. She blinked at him. Her heart was racing. The second kiss went on for a lot longer. This time they touched. This time, as the sweetness built in her body, Nita went shouldering through that welcoming greenness in mind, touching it, warm, but curiously hunting that sense of something else. And there in the dark was some of that anger, quite a bit of it actually, fretting, churning against itself. There was something down in the warm dark here, an irritant, a scent or colour that she knew, that made Ronan keep lashing out at everything: some kind of energy looking to be properly expressed. Not mere rage, but a righteous anger, turning on itself, without an outlet, impotent at the moment, straining to get out and be put to the right purpose. Nita blinked in the middle of the kiss. A flash of scarlet, an impression of something swift and fierce and hot-tempered, and utterly good. . .
Her eyes flew open with shock as she recognized the mind-sense of what was struggling down inside of Ronan. "Peach!" she whispered. But that had been only one of that creature's names. It had many others. Without her being able to prevent it, she felt Ronan's thought follow hers, down to the image of how she had seen Peach last - no longer a creature that had been hiding in the shape of a scarlet macaw, another wizard's 'pet'. He saw it as Nita had seen it last, in combat with the Lone One: moulted out of its old body, now radiant, immortal, unconquerable, one of the Powers that Be, the one with many names, the One's Champion. . .
"No," Ronan gasped. "Oh, no!"
And he was gone now, running, the sound of his going frantic on the gravel. Fading now. Gone. Nita sat there on the fence, shaking, half in tears, half too amazed to cry.
The night fell silent again around her.
She went back to bed again, but once more it was a long time before she could sleep…
The next evening she and her aunt and Kit got in the car together at about six-thirty. It was just starting to get dark; sunset was not until eight that night, and it wouldn't be completely dark until perhaps ten-thirty or eleven.
Castle Matrix was eastward from Greystones and Kilquade, in the mountains beyond Sugarloaf. They drove down many small narrow roads, which got smaller and narrower and bumpier all the way, until finally they came to a drive with two huge trees at the end of it, each one beginning to be covered with a great mass of red berries.
"Rowan," Nita's aunt said.
"I know," Nita said. "I have a friend at home who's a rowan tree."
Her aunt chuckled. "It's still so funny to hear things like that come out of one of my relatives… " she said.
"There it is," Kit said. They turned out of the drive into an open gravelled area. Off to one side of it, Castle Matrix rose. The main part of it was a plain square tower, about forty meters tall and fifteen meters on each side, of light grey granite. To Nita's intense delight, it actually had battlements on top. There were narrow arrow-slit windows here and there up and down the face of the tower, and a huge iron-bound oaken door at the bottom. Off to one side, the castle had been added to; there was an additional wing about fifteen meters high, with diamond-paned windows. A low fieldstone wall ran around the gravelled area. She wandered over to peer into it after they got out of the car. Biddy's truck was parked by that wall, and the forge was missing from the back of it.
The oak door swung open for them. There was
Johnny in his tracksuit, looking very ordinary except for what he held in one hand. It was a rod that burned with light. Nita recognized a tool she had used once before herself, a rowan wand that had spent time out in moonlight: a potent weapon for a lower-level wizard, though she couldn't imagine what Johnny needed one for. "Come on in," he said.
Nita and Kit went in behind her aunt, looking around in curiosity. About two meters inside the door was a long, heavy wine-coloured brocade curtain. "Draughts," Johnny said, pushing it aside; “you wouldn't believe the draughts we get in here in the winter."
They passed through it and looked around, and up, and up. This was the castle's main hall, about fifteen meters across; it had whitewashed walls, black-and-white tiled floors, and big, handsome, polished wooden tables. Immediately to their left was a huge fireplace with a strange sort of grate that seemed to be designed to hold the fire's coals up vertically rather than horizontally; a big iron spit and a crank to turn it stood in front, and there were smaller fireplaces, grills actually, on either side of the main grate. Tall arched windows, about two meters wide, were let into the west and south walls. The wooden tables had been pulled off to the sides of the big room, and in the middle of the floor, where all the tiles were dark, a most elaborate spell diagram was in the process of being laid out in white. Nita sniffed, and from her art classes identified the sweetish smell of water-based acrylic paint.
"Doesn't scuff off in the middle of a spell," Johnny said, picking up a brush. "Anyway. Welcome to Matrix."
"Have you always lived here?" Kit said, looking around in admiration. "Did you inherit it?"
"Oh, no," Johnny said. "I found this place in ruins. A big tree growing through what was left of the roof, right about here. . ." He pointed to the centre of the room, where the spell diagram was. "We had it removed when we started to renovate the place, my wife and I. She's in London at the moment with our son. But the Normans built the place, originally, some time in the eleven hundreds, when they were trying to subdue Ireland." He chuckled and looked down at his work. "They fell in love with it and got "more Irish than the Irish", as the saying goes."
"Seems to be a lot of that going around," Kit said.
Johnny nodded. "They built this place on the site of an old holy well… it's still here. But more than that. Matrix had been a centre for a lot of kinds of faith, or power, over the years. The Mother Goddesses were honoured here first… that's where its first name came from. Matrix means "womb", but the older form was probably "matricis" - the Castle of the Mothers. Then for a while I think the well was sacred to Brigit, the old fire-goddess; and later to Saint Brigid, the Mary of the Gael as they called her. Other mysteries were here later. There was some connection with the Knights Templar; some of them said this was one of the Grail Castles. But all those came later. We have older business tonight…"
"Are you about ready?" Aunt Annie said.
"Just about. Waiting on Biddy and Dairine. Ronan's in the back with Doris, making tea."
"Where else," Kit muttered.
"Give it time, you'll get used to it," Nita said. She wandered over to the diagram that Johnny was working on, noticing the elegance and cleanliness of it. Half the figures in the Speech that she was used to tracing out laboriously and in whole, here were only hinted at; a single graceful stroke 'holding the place' for a figure or diagram much more complex. I guess when you're Senior for half a continent, though, you get enough practice to be able to do that … It was a big five-noded diagram, with a separate circle for each of the Treasures - each written around with the reinforcing and warding spells that each specific Treasure would need - and a fourth empty circle for the starsteel that would become the Spear. That fourth circle was particularly densely written-in, and Nita could understand why. The spell there was for the magnetic bottle that would be needed to confine the starsteel and cool it down until it was safe to work; for in its native condition inside the star it would not be solid metal, or even molten, but iron plasma at something more than seven thousand degrees Kelvin. If there was any specific part of the spell diagram Nita would have been interested in double-checking, that was it. But again the shorthand that Johnny was using was a little beyond her…
Nita stopped then, suddenly, and looked down as Johnny finished one character and touched it with the rowan rod. The acrylic flared briefly bright, then died down again.
Nita stared at the floor. “Something wrong?" Johnny said.
"There's something down there."
She was aware of Kit looking at her uncomprehendingly from off to one side, where he had been examining a set of old pikes mounted against the wall. "Yes, there is," Johnny said. "I didn't expect you to feel it, but then a lot of wizards older and more experienced than you don't. There's a power in the earth here; not the earth itself, though. The water table runs fairly high here, and this castle's element is Water. No surprise, since the place is more or less haunted by the "female principle". You saw the little stream that runs down by the forge, out by where you parked? We'll be doing work down there later."
Nita stood there just feeling it - a long, slow swelling, biding its time, caring nothing for the flash and dazzle and busyness of life, but only for slow nourishment, things growing, things prospering, birth, being. She glanced up at Johnny and said, "This is the only place where we could do what we have to, isn't it."
"To keep fire from getting out of hand," he said, “water, always. One way or another, we have plenty of it here."
Doris came in, followed by Ronan with the tea-tray. He put it down on one of the tables and joined Nita and Kit as they looked at the diagram. Johnny finished one last figure, then stood up. "Tidy enough?" he said. "I miss anything?"
Nita shook her head in complete helpless ignorance. Kit said, "Don't look at me," and moved off to pour himself a cup of tea. Doris came to stand by Johnny and look the diagram over.
"All names seem to be in place," she said. Her gaze dwelt particularly on one spot, which Nita had noticed earlier and not known what to make of. While the rest of the spell was written in shorthand, the names of the participants were all written out in full, as was vitally necessary. Your name in the Speech was meant to describe you completely, and to work with a shortened version of your name was to dangerously shortchange yourself of your own potential power. The name written in the spot
Nita was examining, though, was not the complex, fussy thing that most human names were. It was simple, just six curves and a stroke. Names that short tended to be like short words in the dictionary
- the shorter they were, the more meanings they tended to have - and mortals did not have names like that one, all power and age. But then again, one of them spelling tonight was not mortal. Still
- there's something odd about it. The usual 'continuation' curve is cut off awful short. . .
"Hi, y'all," said Dairine as she swung in through the brocade curtain. "What's happenin'? All set? Oh," she said, stopping at the edge of the diagram and taking a long look at it.
"Does it meet with your approval?" Johnny said.
"Looks fine to me. Yo, Spot!" she called, looking over her shoulder. The laptop computer came scuttling in and sat itself down under a table.
"You picked out a star yet?" Nita said to Dairine, as her sister paused beside her.
Dairine shook her head. "Can't predict the positions that accurately from this end," she said. "We're just going to have to wait until the timeslide's fastened, and then have a look around and pick one that looks good."
"Just make sure you pick a star that's not scheduled to have inhabited planets later," Kit said from the other side of the spell diagram.
Dairine looked at him with mild amusement. "Kit, from that end of time, it's already happened. There never was a star to have planets."
"You hope," Kit said. "If it didn't work, back then, then the star's either still just fine, or it's long since gone nova from its core being tampered with… and we're all going to be so much plasma in about fifteen minutes."
Dairine grinned at him. "Adds spice to life, doesn't it? Don't worry, Kit. I'm here."
Kit looked at Nita with an expression that was eloquent of what he thought that was worth. Nita shrugged at him. She is pretty hot stuff at the moment, she said privately.
If she messes this up, we all will be, Kit replied.
That was true enough. Nita had never had a Senior spelling with her, let alone the Senior for a whole continent. In the past it would have lent her a lot of peace of mind. At the moment, though, it didn't seem to be helping much.
Pre-spell nerves, Kit said. Me too.
It was a small consolation. She sat down for a moment, watching Johnny go over the last few details of the spell diagram with the rowan wand to activate and check the separate character groups. The curtain to the kitchen wing stirred, and Biddy came in slowly, carrying what looked a long, wide bar of metal.
She placed the object inside the node of the spell diagram that was meant to contain the iron plasma, and then stood up, massaging her back. It was a bar of metal all right, about fifteen centimeters thick and fifteen centimeters wide, and just over half a meter long. The bar had a long, deep groove about seven centimeters by seven, right down the length of it, to within about two centimeters of either end.
"There," she said to Johnny. "That's the casting mold I use for fireplace tools. The best I could come up with."
Dairine wandered over and looked at it. "How much does it hold?" she said. "Molten metal, I mean."
"About ten kilograms."
"I mean in volume."
Biddy looked surprised. "I don't usually think of it in those terms. About a litre, I'd say."
"Hmm." Dairine looked at the mold, then glanced at the laptop computer. It got up from under the table, came over and looked at the mold itself; then it and Dairine seemed to exchange glances, though how it did it with no eyes was a good question.
"Yeah," she said to it. To Biddy she said, "What's the melting temperature of the mold? I don't want to mess it up."
"It's case-hardened," she said. "About eight hundred degrees Fahrenheit."
"OK." Dairine looked thoughtful. "You want some carbon in with the iron?" Biddy nodded. "How much?"
"About one and a half percent."
"Gotcha." Dairine looked at the computer for a moment; it made a soft disk-drive thinking noise, which amused Nita, since she could see that its drives were both empty. "OK," Dairine said to Johnny. "I'm ready when you are."
He took one last long look at the spell diagram as he stepped into the middle of it. "I know that in group spellings people usually divide the work up evenly among them," he said, "but if it's all right with you all, I'd sooner handle everything but the actual timeslide, and leave that part of things to Dairine. The Treasures themselves are going to need watching to make sure that they don't interfere, and I would prefer that each of you in the active diagram concentrate on that. Does that seem appropriate to you?"
Everyone nodded, or muttered agreement.
"All right, let's get to it. Doris, the Cup. . ."
"Right," she said, and went into the kitchen. A moment later, light swelled behind the brocade curtain, and she elbowed it aside and carried the Ardagh Chalice in.
Johnny said. "Doris, keep an eye on it. If any of these things is likely to get out of hand here, it's the Cup."
"Oh, I'll mind it all right, don't you worry about that."
"We needn't do anything about the Stone," Johnny said, glancing at the empty circle next to that of the Cup: "we couldn't be much more in contact with the Earth if we tried, and it's here already. Kit. . ."
Kit brought in Fragarach and laid it carefully in the circle waiting for it. Its light was burning low, but a breath of wind stirred the door-curtains and the banners hanging from the ceiling as he put it in place.
"Air is ready," Johnny said. "One element only remaining, and that's the one we need. Ready, Dairine?"
She stepped into the circle for Fire, next to the steel mold, and said, "Let's do it."
Johnny put his hands behind his back, bent over a little the way someone might bend over to read a newspaper lying on the ground, and began to speak, reading the spell from the diagram. Things had seemed quiet before - here, far from any town or road, close to sunset, that was hardly surprising
- but the silence that shut down around them now, and into which the Speech began to fall, was more than natural. Nita felt the hair standing up all over her, the old familiar excitement and nervousness of the start of a spell combining with the effect of the wizardry itself on the space and matter within its range of influence. Under the silence Nita could hear or sense a constant slow rush and flow of water
- or the essence of it - welling up and sinking away again, taking all dangerous influences away with it.
That was something of a problem, of course, for that same flow was likely to perceive the building energies of the wizardry itself as a dangerous influence, and try to carry it away as well. Nita had particularly noticed the careful reinforcement that Johnny had done around the edges of the spell to prevent this.
The spell was taking. It was always a sure sign when you began to perceive it as a physical thing, rather than just words spoken: reality was being affected by it. Nita put up a tentative hand to the air in front of her and felt smooth cool stone, though the air was clear and empty before her, or seemed that way. The Lia Fail was performing its function, holding the boundaries closed against whatever forces might come loose inside them.
The darkness was slowly falling outside, but not in the hall where they stood. Fragarach and the Cup blazed, throwing long shadows back and up on to the walls from everyone who stood there; a clear, warm, pale light from the Sword, a bluer, cooler burning from the Cup. One moment the Cup was brighter, the next the Sword; Nita could hear Johnny's voice straining a little as his mind worked to keep them in balance until the symmetries of the first part of the spell were complete. There was no telling how long it would take. One moment he seemed to have been speaking for ever, and the next, for only a few seconds. It was the usual confusion about time when you were in the middle of a spell. The world seemed to hold still while you redescribed it. . .
His voice stopped. Johnny looked over at Dairine.
She nodded, folded her arms, and began speaking. And if the hair had stood up all over Nita before, now she felt as if every hair had turned into a pin, and it was sticking her. Dairine was building the timeslide, the long pipeline through spacetime that would conduct the star steel where they needed it. It would not, of course, actually exist in space or time, but would circumvent them both; and normal matter disliked such circumventions of the rules, when you set them up, and complained bitterly during the process. Nita looked at Kit and saw him nearly in the same distress, his jaw clenched to help bear it. Ronan looked no better, and neither did any of the grownups. But Dairine looked completely unaffected. She paused for a moment, examined the spell diagram, and then said five words, carefully, a second or so between them. She waited again.
Abruptly there was no room. They stood, all of them, on or around a glowing webwork in the middle of nothingness. But a nothingness that was strewn with stars, cluttered with them, crowded with them. They're too dose together! was Nita's first panicked thought. Not even in the hearts of young galaxies or new globular clusters was there stellar density like this; these stars were so close that some of their coronae were mingling. In other spots, three or four stars were pulling matter out of one another in bizarrely warped accretion discs. New stars were forming all over the place, or trying to, as they stole matter from one another, swirled, kindled as she watched. This was the view from the other end of the timeslide that Dairine had constructed.
She's crazy, Nita thought. We're barely out of the Big Bang here - the universe can't be more than a few hundred thousand years old! But if Dairine heard Nita's thought, she gave no sign of it. One after another of the stars nearby seemed to veer close, then away again, as Dairine considered it, rejected it. For a few seconds the sunspotted globes of stars seemed to pour past them, twisting and skewing. Then one loomed up close, a big white star with a tinge of gold.
Dairine closed her eyes and spoke one more word.
It was as if the world had caught fire. Nita was frozen as much by her own horror as the spell itself. With the outward senses she knew that everything was fine, that the darkness of Matrix and the light of the Treasures was all around her; but her mind saw nothing but annihilation, a ravening light so desperately destructive as to make the thought of physical existence seem ridiculous in the face of it. Pressure and heat beyond anything she could imagine; she saw straight into the heart of this, and could not look away. Vaguely she could feel Dairine doing something, speaking again, naming in the Speech the amount and type of matter she wanted, the form, the place of delivery - all as casually as if she was filling out an order form. She came to the end of her specifications, and was about to sign her name. . .
The rushing sound suddenly became deafening, and the perception of unquenchable fire was suddenly invaded by something; that cooler, bluer light, the feeling of liquid, quelling and subduing. Then, for the first time, she felt something from Dairine: panic, just barely controlled. The Cup had sensed fire, and was trying to put it out - the essence of all quenchings was trying to flow up the timeslide, into the core of a live star. The least that could happen was that the timeslide would be deranged, and the whole energy output of that star would backfire down it. . .
Two more voices were raised then, in the Speech, quite suddenly; Doris's and Aunt Annie's, and their tone was astonishing. Nita almost burst out laughing, despite her terror, as the two of them scolded one of the Elements of the Universe as if it was an unruly child. They sounded as if they intended to send it to bed without supper. Funny it might have been, but if the two of them had anything, they had certainty. The Cup struggled, the blue light washed higher - then abruptly fell away again.
Nita sagged with relief. Dairine had calmed down from her bad moment, and was completing her end of the spell. Through the blinding images still in her mind, Nita could see Dairine look carefully at the metal mold resting on the floor, then crouch down, and poke her finger most carefully at a spot in the air about thirty centimeters above it. She lowered the finger carefully to the mold, and said another word.
Fire followed her gesture. It paused in the spot where Dairine's finger had first paused, and Nita smelled ozone as the tiny spark of plasma took shape at this end of the timeslide and destroyed the air molecules in the spot where it had arrived. That one pinpoint of light drowned out even the fire of the Treasures, and threw back shadows from everyone as stark as if they had been standing on the Moon. Then it began to flow downwards in a narrow incandescent pencil-line, cooling rapidly out of the plasma state, into incandescent iron vapour and then a molten solid again, as Dairine let it pass out of the small magnetic-bottle part of the spell and down into the mold.
Slowly the mold filled, the steel of it smoking. All the air began to smell of burnt metal. Nita looked over at Dairine; she could see her beginning to shake - even Dairine couldn't hold a wizardry like this in place for long. Come on, Dari, she thought. Hang on there. . .
The mold kept filling. Nita could feel the Cup trying to get out of hand again, and her aunt and Doris holding it quiet by sheer skill in the Speech and calculated bad temper. Dairine was wobbling where she crouched, and put one hand behind her to steady her, and sat down on the floor, but never once took her eyes off that spot in the air where the plasma was emerging - her end of the timeslide. If it moved, if it got jostled. . .
Come on, come on. . ./ Nita thought. How long can it take? Oh please God, don't let my sister get fried! Or the rest of us, she added hurriedly, as that possibility suddenly occurred to her. Come on, Dan, you little monster, you can do it. . ./
The light very suddenly went out, with a noise like a large short-circuit happening. Dairine fell over sideways. They all blinked; nothing was left but the light of the Treasures, now looking very pale to their light-traumatized eyes. One other light was left in the room, though. The steel mold was full of it; iron, still liquid and burning red, skinning over and going dark, like cooling lava. Just the sight of it unnerved Nita, and filled her with awe and delight. It somehow looked more definite and real than anything else in the area… anything else but Fragarach and the Cup.
Nita went over to help Dairine up. Her sister tried to stand, couldn't, sagged against Nita.
“What's this "little monster" stuff?" she whispered. “It never even got really tough." And she passed out.
“Here," Johnny said from above Nita, and bent down to pick Dairine up. “I'll put her on the couch. She's going to be out of it for a while. Biddy. . .“
Biddy was standing there looking at the mold, and shaking all over. Nita glanced at Kit, who had noticed this as well. He shook his head, said nothing.
"I think we're going to have a late night," Johnny said. "You're all welcome to stay - we've got room for you. I think we should all take a break for an hour or so. Then - we've got a Spear to forge."
He looked at Biddy. She was still trembling, as if with cold.
She looks worse than Dairine did, Kit said to her privately.
Nita glanced over at him. If she pulls her bit off that well, we'll be in good shape.
If, Kit said. But why am I getting nervous all of a sudden?
Nita shook her head and went off to see about a drink of something. She agreed with Kit. The problem was, wizards rarely got hunches that didn't have meaning, sooner or later.
She had a feeling it would be sooner.