Wizards At War

8: Active Defense

Kit came half awake to the sound of something bumping on the floor, very fast, and something jingling. He opened one eye.

Dim light—the wizard-light he’d left hovering near the ceiling in case he needed to get up in the middle of the night—showed him Ponch, sitting by where the door of the pup tent would be when Kit spoke it open. Ponch was scratching behind his collar, turning it around and around as he scratched.

It wasn’t as if Kit didn’t hear this jingling nearly every day. What had awakened him was the utter silence into which the sound fell: a silence devoid of the little creaks and breathing noises that every house made, of wind or rain or weather outside the house, and of the normal world in which it all existed. Kit lay there for several moments just listening to that barren stillness. There was nothing but vacuum and cold outside. Well, that’s all there is on the Moon, too, Kit thought. But the Moon was different. It was within sight of home. And it didn’t have that roiling, growing darkness above it, shutting out the stars.

Kit felt around for the zipper of his sleeping bag and pulled it down, sitting up and rubbing his eyes. His pup tent was sparsely furnished compared to Nita’s. Besides his sleeping bag and some essential toiletries, mostly it seemed to contain dog food. “You can starve when you have to,” his mother had said to him, “but your pet won’t understand why his meals are late, whether he can talk or not! So you make sure your dog always eats before you do. And whether you do or not.” And when Kit’s mother finished with it, the “short wall” of Kit’s pup tent was half obscured by a stack of cans and bags about four feet high, not to mention five or six big bottles of watercooler water. His own supplies seemed meager by comparison—mostly beef jerky and fruit jerky and trail bars, and one or two of the kinds of cereal he didn’t mind eating straight from the box, since finding milk while out on errantry was usually a problem.

I have to go out, Ponch said, standing up and shaking himself.

“Okay,” Kit said, reaching for his manual. “I’ll make you an air bubble.”

No, it’s all right, Ponch said. I can take air with me, if I think about it.

Kit stood up and stretched. Maybe it’s not just our power that’s getting boosted, he thought.

Would you open the door? Ponch said. I have to go!

“Okay, just a minute.” Kit pulled on his jeans and had to hunt for his sweatshirt before he found it had somehow managed to get under his sleeping bag.

Kit pulled it on. Ponch had started turning in circles on the pup-tent floor, either in excitement or because he really needed to be out of there. “Okay, okay,” Kit said, and reached down for the door’s little spell tab, which acted like the pull on a zipper. A long spill of words in the Speech came up on the plain gray wall, showing him details about the outside environment: some words flashed urgently on and off to remind Kit that there was hard vacuum outside.

Kit just pulled up on the tab. Like a blind going up, the silvery-gray surface of the pup tent gave way to a view of the barren surface of the planetoid where they had camped. Ponch burst out through the interface, galloping away across the surface and bouncing in the lower gravity. Kit watched him go, noting idly that this place wasn’t as dusty as the Moon, even though it felt much older.

He went back to the sleeping bag and rooted around for his socks, put them on, and his sneakers, and then picked up his manual. “Bookmark, please?” he said to it.

The manual’s pages riffled through to an image of the world to which Ponch had brought them. The world had no name that living beings had ever given it. Nonetheless, it had its own name in the Speech, Metemne, and the manual showed its location, well out toward the edge of a small irregular galaxy some hundreds of thousands of light-years past the Local Group. A long way from home…

Kit paged through the manual to his routines for vacuum management, found the one that he’d been using on the Moon, and spoke the words that would activate his personal bubble. Then he stepped out through the pup-tent door onto the rough dark gray surface.

Except for the position of the planet’s little star, now high in the sky, nothing had changed; the dark shifting and swarming of the Pullulus continued. I didn’t think I could hate something just because of the way it looked, Kit thought, but I think I hate that. Maybe because I feel so much like it hates me.

Kit glanced off to his left. There was a little rise off in that direction, and he could see the soft slow wreathing of the fire about the head of the Spear of Light, jutting up from behind a massive boulder at the top of the rise. Ronan was still on guard, or if he wasn’t, the Defender in him was. It has to be weird, Kit thought, to have something, someone, like that, sharing brain space with you. But at least He’s on our side. I think…

Kit sighed. Once it hadn’t been so complicated. If someone was a wizard, they were on your side, on the right side. But these days, the mere exercise of wizardry wasn’t a guarantee. You found yourself wondering about people’s motives all the time. And if you didn’t know them well, you started to be less certain about turning your back on them in a tight situation.

And there were other issues on his mind. Ronan and Nita had been close in ways that Nita was too shy to discuss. Now Nita was feeling twitchy about Ronan, and Kit kept wondering why. Oh, it wasn’t anything serious with them. I know that.

At least, I think I know that…

From around the shoulder of that rise, Ponch came galloping back and skidded to a stop in front of Kit. Okay, let’s go for a walk!

Kit laughed and went off after his dog, taking it easy at first to make sure he had the hang of the local gravity. It was heavier than the Moon’s, so that you could run without completely bouncing off the surface if you were careful. Passing the rise where Ronan still sat, Kit had a long look around the surface of Metemne and decided that it wasn’t someplace he would come back to for a holiday. The planet wasn’t much more than a bumpy rock pile. Whether there had even been water here in the planet’s earliest days was a question Kit couldn’t answer just by looking.

He crouched down and put a hand on a largish boulder that sat off to one side. From the beginning of his practice of wizardry, Kit had always been good at hearing what was going on with objects that most people would have considered inanimate. Now he let his mind go a little unfocused, and waited.

…no one here, the stone said eventually. For a long time…

It wasn’t that it actually spoke; that took a different kind of life. But the impression was plain. “Did anyone ever live here?” Kit said.

Never. It would have been nice, the boulder said. There was an atmosphere. And water. But nothing ever got started.

“I’m sorry,” Kit said.

We can’t all have what we want, I suppose, the boulder said, and fell silent.

Slowly Kit got up and dusted off his hands as Ponch came running along from behind a nearby outcropping of gray stone.

There’s nothing here, Ponch said. Come on, let’s play!

“I wouldn’t say nothing,” Kit said, glancing down at the boulder. “No people, maybe.” He walked off to have a look around the outcropping, and Ponch trotted along beside him.

Then it’s nowhere important.

“I guess it’s easy to think that,” Kit said. “There’s so much life around, we start taking it for granted that any planet’ll get some in time.” He shook his head. “Trouble is, once life does show up, before you know it, the Lone One’s turned up, too, and it’s running around messing up the Choices of every species It finds.”

It didn’t mess up ours, Ponch said.

Kit raised his eyebrows. “I keep meaning to get the details on that,” he said, as they walked around the outcropping together. “Though it must have gone the usual way, since there’s no Choice without wizards, and there are dog wizards, Rhiow tells me…”

Ponch’s expression was eloquent of skepticism. Oh, well, if you’re going to believe things cats say about dogs…

Kit got a sense that he was poised above a dangerous abyss. “Uh,” he said, “okay, maybe I should ask someone who knows about it firsthand.”

Ponch woofed; it was a dog laugh, of sorts. He picked up a rock in his mouth, shook it from side to side as if to make sure it was dead, and came bouncing over to Kit to put it in his hand. We have wizards, yeah. But as for the Choice, I just know what everybody’s mom tells them when they’re still drinking milk.

Kit took the rock and spent a while trying to get the dog slobber off it. “So educate me,” he said.

Oh, it’s the usual thing, Ponch said. There was us, and the Ones, and we ruled the world. And then the Bad Thing came and said, I can make it better for you. But we said, How? We have the Ones. We live with them, and hunt with them, and run around with them, and they give us whatever we need, and everything’s fine. So the Bad Thing went away. The End. …So come on and throw the rock!

Kit blinked, and threw the rock well away from the outcropping, across the bare gritty plain. Ponch tore off across the planet’s surface after it, leaving little scoots of gravel hanging up in the vacuum in a trail behind him. If that’s his idea of “the usual thing,” Kit thought, then all the Choices I’ve run into now have been real unusual. In fact, Ponch’s version of his species’ Choice didn’t sound much like a choice at all. And he didn’t sound very interested in talking about it.

He watched Ponch pounce on the rock, pick it up, shake it around, and lose it because of shaking it too hard; he went bounding across the surface again to get it back. Then again, Kit thought, there are some species that’re in really close relationships with each other, and their Choices are interrelated. Why shouldn’t the dogs’ Choice be involved with the human one? It makes a kind of sense.

Ponch skidded to a stop in front of Kit, dropping the rock in front of him. Again!

“Yeah, sure,” Kit said. He picked up the rock and threw it. Ponch went bouncing off after it. Boy, he’s really into it this morning. Needs to dump some stress, I guess.

Kit had to grin at himself then. Oh, great. Now you’re doing psychoanalysis on your dog.

But still… There’d been an overly casual quality to the way Ponch had been talking about the canine Choice. As if there was something about it he didn’t want to be thinking about. Almost as if he was trying to distract himself.

Ponch came bounding and plunging back with his rock, and dropped it in front of Kit once more. Again!

“Uh, no, I think we’ve done enough of that.”

Why? Is it time for something? Ponch looked a little crestfallen.

“Probably,” Kit said, fervently hoping that this was true. But he had to smile; Ponch’s sense of time was weak, except when mealtimes were concerned. “Let’s have a look here.” He got out his manual and flipped its cover open to show the front page, which he’d set to show him the date and time. “See, it says here—”

Then his jaw dropped.

314.3? How did that happen? Crap!!

Kit slapped the manual shut, turned around, and started back toward the pup-tent accesses. “Come on,” he said, “we’re running really late! We have to get Neets up.”

Ponch began to jump up and down with excitement as they went; in the low gravity, he was able to jump up to a height where his head was level with Kit’s. How come?

“Because it’s a lot later than it should be!” Kit started doing the astronaut-bounce that was the only way to hurry in this kind of gravity without falling on your face. “And I don’t know how it got that way. Come on!”

***

Nita stood in front of the mirror over the chest of drawers in her bedroom, staring anxiously at her face. I was right, she thought, utterly exasperated, as she pushed her bangs aside to get a closer look. It is a zit.

She let out a breath, then. Trouble is, this isn’t real. I’m asleep. And what am I wasting my time dreaming about? Zits! Nita shook her head. I can’t believe that the other day I actually thought this was a big deal.

Nonetheless, the place where the pimple was coming up still stung. Nita found herself torn between the eternal choices: squeeze it, which always grossed her out and sometimes left a mark? Or do a wizardry on it? Or just let it be, and go through the next couple of days feeling like a leper?

She shrugged. It’s a dream. There may not be a pimple at all. Just leave it alone. We’ve got more important things to think about.

Nita turned away from the mirror and found herself not in her bedroom at all, but out on the surface of Metemne. This sort of abrupt transition was normal for lucid dreaming, and Nita had learned over time to let these experiences take her where they wanted to.

Reluctantly, she looked up into the sky, knowing what she was about to see, and instead saw … nothing. There was no sign of the Pullulus, but neither was there any sign of the stars, or interstellar space, or even the little planet’s sun. The effect was like being in a closed, windowless room with the lights off. Nita didn’t much care for it … for inside the “room” with her she could hear slow, steady breathing.

She held very still, trying not to panic. The breathing stayed steady and slow; it was as if something slept nearby, something very big. She became concerned that she might wake it up. Then it occurred to her that this was the problem. Whatever was asleep, it needed to wake up.

“Hello?” she said, and her voice sounded as if she actually was inside a small room, like her bedroom with the door shut—but a bare unfurnished bedroom, an empty place in which her voice echoed. “Hey! Can you hear me? Wake up!”

No answer. Nita looked around. There was nothing in any direction but the barren, gritty surface of the planet. That breathing, she thought, that’s the Pullulus. To her surprise, the idea didn’t upset her: The sound of it frightened her a lot less than the way it looked. And after a few moments, the heavy-breathing sound started to seem slightly comic, like someone pretending to be asleep so you’d go away.

Nita rolled her eyes. “Oh, come on,” she said to the darkness in the Speech. “Are you going to just leave me talking to myself here? Say something!”

It won’t answer you, said a voice from somewhere nearby. There is only one to whom it will answer, and that one’s not here.

She looked around to see who’d spoken. There wasn’t anyone to be seen. But from off to one side, there had to be a light shining, because suddenly Nita had a shadow.

Nita stared down at it. The shadow was a double one, as if the light sources producing it were in slightly different positions. She looked toward where the light should have been coming from. But there was nothing there but more barren rock and grit.

Nita looked down again. The shadow was fuzzy-edged, as if thrown by a candle, and the flickering continued. She scuffed at it curiously with one sneaker, then looked around. “Well,” she said, “I’m on errantry, and I greet you. Wherever you are…”

Everywhere, the voice said, for quite a while now.

There were all kinds of potentialities and forces running around in the universe that could truthfully say something like that. “You’re one of the Powers?” Nita said. “Ronan? Is that you? Or your buddy?”

She caught a distinct feeling of surprise from whatever she was talking to. You are thinking of one of the Great Intervenors, it said, the Light’s own designated Defender. No, I would not be anything so exalted.

She looked at the two fuzzy shadows lying out across the grit of Metemne. “You’re a dual-state being of some kind,” Nita said. “Like a twychild.”

Nothing like that. Was that a breath of wistfulness behind the thought? But something old… and something new.

Nita remembered her mother telling her an old poem and showing her the sixpence that an English friend had sent her to put in her shoe the day she married Nita’s dad. “Are you by any chance blue?”

The being was amused. No. But often borrowed.

“How come I can’t see you?” Nita said.

But you can, the being said. Her shadows flickered more energetically.

“That’s my shape,” Nita said. “Not yours.”

But all the shape I have is the one wizards give me, the being said.

Her shadow writhed and flickered against the dusty ground, and as if inside it, Nita caught a glimpse of a number of images melting one into another: something with wings, and then a long twining shape, like a faint light in the shadow—almost the shape of two snakes curling and sliding past each other, so that Nita was reminded of a caduceus. Matter, and the power to do things to matter, she thought. The idea, and the thing you say or do to make it happen—

“You’re wizardry,” Nita whispered. “Wizardry itself.”

Not quite. I’m peridexis: the combined effect of the words of the Speech and the power that lives within it. But without the ones who speak the words and decide how to use the power, there’s no wizardry. It always takes at least three…

“So you’re the ‘power surge’ we’ve been getting,” Nita said to the bright shapes in the shadow. “But also sort of the soul of the spell…”

Of every spell, yes. And to a certain extent, the manual.

“Wow,” Nita said. “It’s a shame you’re not usually this talkative.”

This isn’t a usual sort of time, said the voice of the peridexic effect. Now more than ever, wizards need their spells to give them some extra help.

“It’s going to surprise a lot of people that you’re conscious,” Nita said. As she spoke, she was studying the light submerged in her shadow. Curious, Nita got down on one knee to touch her shadow with a couple of fingers, and found that she could actually put her hand down into it. The bright shapes rose to meet her, and she felt the slight jolt of power as they did, as if she’d touched the poles of a battery with wet fingers.

Not many will notice, the peridexis said. Those who might be bothered by the concept of the living spell won’t hear my voice.

Nita nodded. “Doesn’t bother me,” she said, glancing up again at the strangely empty sky. “But what about the Pullulus? ‘It won’t answer,’ you said. That was what the Senior Wizards were trying to get it to do, wasn’t it?”

Yes. But they were the wrong ones to speak to the Pullulus, and didn’t know the word that needed to be said.

“So who’s the right one to do the speaking?” Nita said. “And what’s the word?”

Without warning, she found herself kneeling by the chain-link fence across the parking lot from her high school’s main doors. Nita got up and dusted her hand off. It was gray with the dust from the worn-in pathway that ran along the fence, the place where kids leaned during lunch hours and “off” periods when they couldn’t leave school property, but were intent on getting as far from school as possible. Over to one side, as far down that path as she could get without being on the sidewalk that led out the parking lot’s gate, was the lanky, thin, denim-clad form of Della Cantrell.

Del was a transfer from the high school over in Oceanside. There were all kinds of stories about the transfer, since almost no one had been willing to get close enough to her to find out what was really going on. One set of rumors claimed that her folks had moved here, to what was a less expensive suburb of the county, because her dad’s business had failed. There were whispers of some kind of vague white-collar wrongdoing—extortion, embezzlement, no one knew what. Others said that Del herself was the problem, that she’d been causing trouble at her old high school and they’d thrown her out. The rumors about what that trouble might have been were even worse than the ones about Della’s dad.

Nita had started to be infuriated by the whispering campaign when she’d first seen the very pretty, very lonely looking girl, always in the same beat-up denim jacket and boot-cut jeans, sitting all by herself in her history class during her first week at Nita’s school—hardly glancing up, interacting exclusively with the teacher, plainly nervous about looking anybody else in the face. That feeling Nita knew all too well from the time before she’d become a wizard, the time when she’d first come to understand it was unlikely that anything she did to her clothes or her hair would ever change the way the other kids saw her—as a nerd—and every passing day had left her more hopeless and angry about it. Now, far more certain of herself and far less concerned with what most of her classmates thought of her, Nita was in a better position to feel concern for anyone else caught in the same trap. As soon as that class had finished, she’d gone over and introduced herself.

This had not been without its penalties, for Nita knew the whispering would start about her within minutes. The most popular kids in school saw her simply as a bottom feeder, a geek with so few friends that she’d purposely befriend a newcomer and outcast so that she’d have someone to be more normal than. Let them think that, Nita had thought. When I’m dealing with them, I have to do right by them … but, otherwise, after we all graduate in a few years, with luck I’ll never see most of these people again.

“Hey, Del,” Nita said, wandering over to where Della was leaning against the chain-link fence, doing something with her smartphone.

“Hey,” Della said. She glanced up just long enough to look up past the school, down toward the parking lot, which was almost empty at this time of day. The juniors and seniors who had cars had pretty much all pulled out half an hour before. Then she dropped her gaze back to her phone again, scrolling its screen with one thumb.

“You okay?” Nita said.

Della turned her head, looked at Nita slowly. Though the look was unsmiling, over time Nita had come to know that it wasn’t actually hostile. This was just the way Della defended herself from people, refusing to reveal anything they could use against her; usually the flatness of the look was enough to scare them off.

“You look depressed,” Nita said, and leaned against the fence as well.

Della sighed and looked away. “The news all sucks,” she said. “Nothing but bomb scares and fighting and airports being evacuated because of terrorists, and security alerts everywhere. The world’s going to shit all around us, and everything else on TV besides the news is just dumb, and my brother’s really getting on my nerves.”

Her voice was surprisingly resigned and bored. “You’ve got a sister,” Della said. “What do you do when you feel like killing her?”

“Try to get her to go to some other planet,” Nita said.

Della smiled a rather bitter smile. “Have much luck with that?”

“Not as much as I’d like,” Nita said. “But sometimes she gets the hint.”

They leaned there in a companionable silence for a few moments. A teacher came out one of the side doors of the school carrying a briefcase and an armful of books, and headed for his car. “I hate just lurking around here,” Della said, watching the teacher get into the car and start it up, “but lurking around home is worse. There’s nowhere to hide. Even when I’m in my room, I know my mom and dad are just waiting for me to come out so they can look at me that way they do, like there’s something I’m supposed to do to make everything turn out all right.” And Della manufactured a sort of creepily threatening cross between a scowl and a smile. The expression looked to Nita so much like something that would normally appear on a cartoon character that she had to laugh.

Della snickered, too, then. “See, not even you take me seriously,” she said, and pushed the long curly blond hair out of her eyes. “Come on, give me a hint: what am I supposed to be doing to make it all right? What is it They want?”

Nita’s eyes widened. She looked more closely at Della, but Del’s face was unrevealing. “I’m not sure,” Nita said.

“But you’re supposed to know,” Della said, gazing across at the school doors as if she was intent on not meeting Nita’s eyes. “You’re the one who’s been left in charge. You’re supposed to have all the answers. Help me out here!”

Nita looked thoughtfully at Della, looked hard. The wind blew the hair across Della’s face again. Annoyed, she lifted a hand to push it aside.

Not a hand. A claw—

Nita’s eyes widened. Then she started violently as something she couldn’t see struck her in the side of the head. She flinched and flung her right hand up, and the lightning-bolt charm with a particularly aggressive “blaster” spell bound into it glinted on her charm bracelet in the late-afternoon sunlight. Nita opened her mouth to say the twenty-third word of the spell and turn the force-blast loose against the thing that had hit her; and as she did, Della pressed herself back against the fence, the darkness that surrounded the claw shimmering up around her, abolishing the blond hair, the face—

Something came down over Nita’s mouth, so that she couldn’t speak. Something else stuck itself in her ear. Nita’s eyes narrowed; she started to simply think the twenty-third word of the force-blast spell instead of saying it. It was a long one. Light twined around it, paired serpents of fire—

Don’t do it!

And abruptly the thing in her ear was a tongue, one she knew entirely too well.

Ewwwww, Nita thought, opening her eyes, her heart still beating hard. Kit stood at the head of the couch, looking down at her anxiously; he’d just removed his hand from her mouth. Ponch, meanwhile, had finished washing her ear and was now enthusiastically working on her face.

“Thanks for not blasting me,” Kit said.

“Good thing you moved fast, ‘cause I didn’t know it was you,” Nita said, pushing Ponch away. “Did I oversleep? It’s morning already?”

“It’s not just morning. It’s Monday morning.”

“What?” Nita’s eyes went wide. She sat straight up, or tried to; as usual, the crocheted throw had wrapped itself around her like a cocoon. “It can’t be! We were only gone—oh, four or five hours, there was the stuff on the Moon—and then we did the transit, and we slept here, yeah, but it should still only be—”

“Normally it should still only be,” Kit said. He looked at Ponch.

Ponch looked guilty. I brought us straight here…

“But it took longer than usual,” Nita said, struggling to get out from under the throw. “Ponch, don’t worry! It wasn’t your fault. It’s got to be the expansion—it’s throwing everything off.”

“Tell that to your dad,” Kit said, sounding rather grim. “I get to do it with mine in a minute. Or if my luck runs out, with my mama.”

Nita swallowed. Her dad—who knew if he’d been trying to reach her? And if he had, why hadn’t her phone gone off? Tom and Carl did the wizardry on it, she thought, it should be okay! But if wizardry wasn’t behaving correctly in some of the places they were going—And then again she saw it, the shimmer of a hand that was a claw, and eyes that willingly blinded themselves behind a sheen of darkness—

She covered her face with her hands and tried to pull everything together so that it made some kind of sense. This may take a while… “Okay,” she said to Kit, pushing her hair back, “give me a minute or two to kick my brains into shape. What’s everybody else doing?”

“Getting up,” Kit said, “like they had a choice.” He glanced in Ponch’s direction with a slightly exasperated look. “I kept him out of here as long as I could. But Ponch had himself a good time with everyone else first. Don’t even ask what he tried to do to Filif.”

Ponch, who had spent the past few moments investigating everything in Nita’s pup tent that he could stick his nose into or under, now bounded back wearing an expression of complete innocence. I wasn’t really going to do that! he said. It was just kind of funny for a moment…

Kit gave Nita a skeptical look. “Let me get the humorist out of here,” he said. “You want something to eat before we go?”

“I’ll grab something,” Nita said. “You go ahead.”

Kit and Ponch went out. Nita finally managed to get completely free of the throw. She got up, folded the throw and chucked it over the back of the sofa, then pulled on jeans and sneakers and a soft shirt, shrugged into the vest-with-too-many-pockets that she’d brought along, and started going through the pockets in search of a candy bar. Sugar, she thought, I really need some sugar. Nita turned up, in rapid succession, a wad of shredded facial tissues, an empty gum packet, a clear plastic mint box with one lone mint left rattling around in it, an extremely sticky ice-cream wrapper, and, finally, a slightly squashed chocolate-and-peanut bar. She unwrapped it and ate it in three bites. Hand. Claw. An eye goes dark—

Nita crumpled up the wrapper of the candy bar and shoved it in yet another pocket. Making notes on what she’d seen was going to have to wait, but at least she wasn’t likely to forget that image in a hurry. She went fishing among the pockets for her phone, and finally turned it up.

Nita hit the “dial” button and waited. The somewhat altered dial tone of a cell phone running wizardly routines came on, and then cut out… and Nita broke out in a sweat. Oh, please don’t let this be broken. This really needs to work right now—

“Hello?”

“Daddy!” Nita said. “It didn’t ring.”

“It rang here,” her father said, “which I’ve been waiting for it to do for four days! You said you were going to keep in touch—”

Nita could understand how annoyed and upset he sounded; she was annoyed herself. “Dad, I’m sorry, but for once it’s not our fault,” she said. “For us it’s just been eight hours or so since we left. It looks like the dark-matter expansion is screwing up our transit times.”

“Well, that’s just great,” her dad said. “Is this going to keep happening?”

“I don’t know,” Nita said, and rolled her eyes. I wish somebody would ask me a question I know the answer to. “I’ll call you as often as I can, but if time’s running weirdly for us, I don’t want to wake you up in the middle of the night and worry you even more.”

“I’ll take my chances with that,” Nita’s dad said. “Has anything bad happened? Are you all safe?”

“We’re fine,” Nita said. “We’re just getting up. We had a few hours’ sleep. Not as much as I would’ve liked.”

“Well, I didn’t get as much last night as I’d have liked, either.”

Nita made an unhappy face. “Daddy, what time is it for you?”

“It’s twenty-five after six.”

“Did you have a bad time in the shop today?”

“Why?” Just as it had sounded like he was calming down a little, her dad sounded angry all over again.

Nita’s eyebrows went up. “Uh, you just sound… really on edge.”

She heard her dad take a long breath and let it out again. “Not that I wouldn’t have reason to be,” he said, “what with what’s going on with you, and the way everything else is here at the moment, but—” He paused. “Yes, you’d be right to say that I’ve been feeling the strain a little more than I usually would.”

Nita swallowed. “Us, too,” she said. “I’m sorry. That’s all I wanted to say, I guess. I’m sorry all this is happening this way.”

“It’s hardly your fault,” her dad said after a moment. “And I shouldn’t have snapped at you. I’m sorry, too. But I’m really relieved to hear from you.”

Nita had to admit that the relief was mutual. Her dad’s matter-of-fact groundedness was one of the things she’d come to count on to help keep her on course when everything else in her life seemed to be going to pieces. “Look,” Nita said, “I’ll call as often as I can. But we may get to places where it won’t be safe to do that. When that happens…”

There was a silence at the other end. I wish I could see his face, Nita thought, feeling a little nervous. “I’ll try to give you advance warning,” she said. “But I may not be able to. When we get where we’re going, we may have to operate undercover for a while.” She swallowed. “And if wizardry starts acting up, too, the phone connection might just stop working until we fix what’s broken.” Until. Just keep thinking “until.”

“You’re telling me that I’m just going to have to tough this one out,” her dad said.

“We all are, Daddy.”

He sighed. “Well, if that’s all we can do, I guess we may as well get on with it,” her dad said. “Speaking of ‘all’: have you heard anything from Dairine? I haven’t heard from her, either.”

“Nothing so far,” Nita said.

“Okay. Well, if you do, tell her to get in touch.”

“I will.”

“I know that tone of voice,” her dad said, with a sigh. “You’ve got something to do. Go do it, sweetie.”

“Okay, Daddy. Love you.”

“Love you, too, kidlet. Go kick old What’s-Its-Face around the block for me.” There, at least, was a flash of her dad’s normal humor.

“First thing on the list, Dad. Talk to you later.”

“Bye-bye.”

Nita hit the hang-up button and stared at the phone. Finally she shoved it into one of the vest’s many pockets, then reached sideways into her otherspace pocket and pulled out her manual. “You need to be a lot smaller,” she said.

Obediently the manual reduced itself to the size of a pocket notebook, and Nita shoved it in another of the vest’s pockets. As she did, she glanced down at the lightning-bolt charm on her bracelet, the slight glow around it showing that it was still undischarged. As she did so, she got a sudden flash of that image of intertwining light.

“You stopped me the second time, didn’t you,” Nita said.

Yes, the peridexis said. It sounded almost abashed. You were in transit between states of consciousness, and possibly unready to decide whether to destroy another wizard.

Nita laughed. “‘Possibly’? No kidding. Thanks.” Then she glanced sidewise, though she wasn’t quite sure what she was glancing at. “You’re not going to make a habit of that, are you?”

I have no such ability when you’re fully volitional, the peridexis said. And in transitional states, only as a fail-safe.

“Okay,” Nita said. She touched the bubble-charm that was shorthand for her personal air-handling spell; it came alive around her, and she stepped out the door and pulled the tab that collapsed the entry to the pup tent.

She was left holding nothing but the tab, like the pull of a zipper; she tucked it into her pocket. Kit ambled over to her, tucking his manual out of the way, while Ponch ran around with the wizardly leash flapping along behind him. Sker’ret wandered after him in a casual way, pausing every now and then to pick up a rock, turn it over in his front “handling” mandibles, and eat it.

“Did you talk to your dad?” Kit asked.

Nita nodded. “He sounded really messed up,” she said.

Kit gave her a sympathetic look. “He’s not the only one,” he said. “You should have heard my mama.”

“She go ballistic?”

“Suborbital at least.” Kit sighed. “But eventually she realized that it wasn’t just me being thoughtless … and there really wasn’t anything I could do.”

“Yeah.” Nita sighed. She glanced over at Filif, who stood off to one side with his branches lifted up, all the eye-berries looking up at the darkness. “We should get moving. The sooner we find what we’re looking for, the sooner we can get back home and sort out the parents. Where’d Ronan go?”

“He’s still there behind his hill,” Kit said.

“Okay,” Nita said. “You go collect Ponch and Sker’ret.” She went off in the direction of the little rise.

Filif was on her way. “You get some rooting done?” Nita said as she went by.

“A little,” he said, turning various berries toward her. “But it’s hard, without a star.”

“Tell me about it,” Nita said, grabbing a few of his fronds and tugging them affectionately. “Hang in there. We’ll get you out of here shortly.”

She went on around the rise. Ronan had just stood up and was stretching; he looked around and raised his eyebrows. “Are we ready?”

“Just about,” Nita said. “You feel okay?”

“Not a bother on me,” Ronan said.

“I’ll assume that’s Irish for ‘yes.’” Nita glanced down the rise, where Sker’ret was munching on a last few rocks while Kit caught up with Ponch. “Everything’s been happening so fast, I’ve hardly had a chance to talk to you.”

“Everybody’s been busy,” Ronan said, leaning the Spear against the front of him and shoving his hands into his pockets.

“How are things back home?”

“Pretty much as usual,” Ronan said. “With a few changes. Your friend Tualha? She gave up being a bard when they made her Queen of the Cats. Now she’s having kittens.”

“Wow,” Nita said. “But she was so little…”

“Cats grow up faster than we do,” Ronan said. “They’ve got a real short latency, which is why you don’t see any of their Seniors here. Anyway, not even an emergency like this is going to make the Powers That Be put an oracular in Tualha’s situation on active duty. The kittens come first.”

That made sense to Nita, but it also made her nervous. “If the cat Seniors aren’t on the job right now,” she said, “who’s handling the worldgates on Earth? That’s their specialty.”

“There are some very new feline wizards, just past Ordeal, who’re taking up the slack,” said Ronan, though it wasn’t quite Ronan. Something else shivered around the edges of his voice, a sense of more power, more age. “It’s as if they were born just in time for this.”

Nita sighed. “One less thing to worry about,” she said. “But I feel sorry for them, being pitched straight into the middle of all this trouble.”

Ronan shrugged. “Not much we can do,” he said, and turned away from the Spear to see what Kit was doing. Nita reflexively reached out to stop the Spear from falling over, and then saw that it just kept on leaning against nothing in exactly the same way it had been leaning against Ronan, the fire wreathing undisturbed about that bitterly sharp blade.

It has a mind of its own, said that other voice. Though maybe “mind” is the wrong word. The kind of consciousness a virtue has isn’t much like the human kind.

Kit had caught Ponch and was checking the leash-spell, the blue-fire glow of it stretching thin and bright between his hands as he checked its wizardry to make sure that it was intact and working correctly. “Something on your mind?” Ronan said, turning back to Nita.

“I don’t know,” Nita said. “I guess…” She wasn’t sure whether she wanted to say what was on her mind, then shrugged as well. “You two are doing okay, aren’t you?”

Ronan’s smile got a bit sardonic. “Told you she’d ask,” he said.

His situation’s hardly unique, the Defender said. Various of the Powers have living avatars for one reason or another.

“Though the rest are all a lot older,” Ronan said. “Apparently it’s unusual for someone so young to be able to cope so well.” He made an ironic face.

Nita raised her eyebrows. Why didn’t I see this coming? If there’s anything Ronan was going to be good at, it’d be coping. “So you’re telling me there’s nothing for me to be worrying about,” Nita said, “for either of you.”

There was a pause. Ronan looked briefly flummoxed. You’re worried about me? said the Defender.

“It can’t be easy being, well, what you are, and having to live inside a human being too,” Nita said. “Especially now, when so many things aren’t working the way they should.”

For a moment Ronan’s face looked as if neither of the two beings living behind it knew how to respond. Finally, Ronan dropped his gaze. Of course my kind of power suffers from being wrapped up in flesh, the One’s Champion said. But it’s inside physicality that the great Game’s played. He looked up again, met Nita’s eyes, and for all the age and power in the voice that spoke, the eyes were strangely young, and there was an odd glint of excitement in them. It’s like chess, the Defender said. It doesn’t matter that you could stand up and turn the board over. That wouldn’t be winning. The only way that matters to win the game is from inside. So— He shrugged. We put up with the limitations, because there’s no other way to win. Not having access to our full power, yes, it’s frustrating. And if we break out before we’re scheduled to, we pay the price.

“But for the time being, you’re okay,” Nita said.

Yes, said the Defender. And I thank you very much for asking. It sounded bemused.

Nita nodded. She looked down from the rise and saw that all the pup-tent accesses were gone now, and Kit and Ponch were standing with Sker’ret and Filif. “Looks like we’re ready,” she said.

Ronan reached out and grasped the Spear. “Let’s go.”

They bounced down to where the others were waiting. Ponch was jumping around, the line of light between him and Kit stretching and shrinking to accommodate him. “Why should you be so nervous?” Sker’ret was saying. “It went just fine the last time.”

“Except that we lost four days getting here,” Kit said. “And that wasn’t nearly as long a jump as this one’s going to be.”

He glanced down at Ponch, whose bouncing went on uninterrupted. It’ll be all right, Ponch said. I know where we’re going. Come on, let’s go!

“Maybe I’m just feeling paranoid today,” Kit said, not quite glancing up at the Pullulus, “but I think we should be in physical contact when we go.” He reached his spare hand out to Filif, who wound a few fronds around it; Sker’ret took hold of some fronds as well from behind Filif, and held a rear handling-claw up.

Nita glanced at Ronan. He shook his head. “I think I’d sooner keep a hand free,” he said, lifting the Spear.

Oh great. I get to hold his hand. Nita swallowed, took Sker’ret’s claw with one of hers, and with the other, took Ronan’s free hand. It was sweating.

She smiled slightly. “All set,” she said to Kit.

Kit looked down at Ponch. “Okay,” he said.

Ponch took a step forward; they all followed, and the gray surface of Metemne vanished behind them.

***

Darkness. For a couple of breaths, that line of light between Ponch and Kit was the only thing Nita could see as they all moved forward together. When she glanced nervously over her shoulder, she couldn’t even see the Spear, though she could still feel Ronan’s hand in hers. There was a surface of some kind under their feet, but Nita couldn’t see it, couldn’t even feel it. The sensation was most peculiar.

“Is it usually like this?” Nita said to Kit—or tried to say. But when she spoke, there was no sound.

Sometimes it is, Kit said silently. Sorry, I should have warned you.

It’s as if there’s no air, Filif said.

I’m not sure there is, Kit said. What’s weird is that whether there is or not, you don’t feel like breathing.

How much longer? Sker’ret said. He sounded somewhat unnerved.

Ponch? Kit said.

Not long.

They kept walking. Nita found herself having to count paces by how her legs moved, since when she put her feet down, she couldn’t really feel anything. Twelve. Thirteen. Fourteen. This is so weird! Fifteen. Sixteen.

The count went past twenty, and still there was nothing but that darkness. Past thirty, and nothing. Nita was having to resist the urge to start singing or whistling, partly because she knew she wouldn’t hear anything, which would just make her feel creepier. And it wouldn’t take much to start imagining the Pullulus infesting this darkness, pressing closer, pushing in—

Nita swallowed and went back to concentrating on counting paces. Forty. Forty-one. Forty-two. Forty-three…

She blinked, not sure whether she was really seeing a dim gleam of light far ahead, or whether she was hallucinating it. No, it’s there, all right, Nita thought. But what is that? The light seemed faintly greenish; as they walked, the green color seemed to get stronger. Fifty. Fifty-one. Fifty-two—

The source of the light quickly grew closer, as if they were moving far faster than a walk. The light began to distinguish itself into shades and patterns; tall dark pillar shapes rose up within it, casting long shadows across the greenness. And then the light swept around them and closed up behind, sealing the darkness outside….

Nita let go of Ronan’s hand, wiping the sweat off against her vest, and stood there gazing up and around her. The dark shapes were huge trees, hundreds of feet high, as broad in the trunk as sequoias, but with broad leaves rather than needles. They towered above the little group, vast branches overhanging the green grass at their feet, and moving shadows from sunlight far above patterned the grass as a slight wind stirred the branches. At the head of the group, Ponch was bouncing up and down excitedly. Kit, looking chagrined, let go of the wizardly leash. “I can’t believe this,” he muttered. “Go on…”

Nita saw Filif and Sker’ret and Ronan looking around them in confusion. Ponch ran barking off across the green lawn under the trees…

…and from high up in the branches, thousands upon thousands of gray shapes came boiling down the tree trunks.

Ronan stepped hurriedly past Nita with the Spear of Light. Thin tongues of white fire coiled and curled around the Spear’s head, and the starsteel of the head itself burned silver-white as if the spearhead had just come out of the forge again, while Ronan hefted it in one hand, ready to throw.

But the squirrels paid no attention whatsoever. Their attention was all on Ponch. The ones behind Ponch ran after him, and the ones in front of him ran away from him and up the trees again as he started to chase them.

Ronan lowered the Spear. “Uh,” he said. “I don’t think this is where we’re headed…”

“Absolutely not. Sorry about this,” Kit said, sounding exasperated. “And welcome to dog heaven. This is one of the first places Ponch made; he seems to need to use this as a first stop…”

Let him get it out of his system, the Defender said.

“Not that it looks like we have any choice,” Ronan said. He shouldered the Spear again, which began to calm down, the uneasy flame about the blade pulling itself in and going quieter.

Nita walked up across the perfect, manicured lawn to join Sker’ret and Filif. Sker’ret’s eyes were looking in all directions at once, as usual. Filif was standing there with all his eye-berries glowing blue, gazing up into the pale blue sky beyond the branches.

“Kit told me about this,” Sker’ret said, “but he understated the strangeness somewhat.”

“More than somewhat,” Nita said. “It’s like a movie set. All perfect. If you’re a dog…”

Ponch was running back toward them now, surrounded by waves of squirrels. He and the squirrels dodged off to the left, past several of the really large trees, and briefly went out of sight.

Kit and Ronan came over to join them. Ponch ran out from behind the trees and back to Kit, the squirrels hanging back a little. As he came, Filif leaned away from Ponch a little, pulling his branches in. “You’re not going to try to water me again, are you?”

It was a joke, Ponch said, sounding somewhat pained.

“Good,” Filif said, with some force.

“And I think we’ve had about enough of the joke stuff for the time being,” Kit said, sounding unusually severe. “I thought we agreed earlier that we’d come here afterward?”

There was something here I needed, Ponch said. I can’t find the way by myself.

Nita blinked at that. “But you said you knew where we were going.”

I do. This is how. Ponch looked up.

Everyone else looked up, too, rather confused. Nita craned her neck back to follow Ponch’s glance, and was surprised when, all by itself, down the largest of the trees a single squirrel came running. It was white.

The squirrel ran down the bole of the tree onto the ground, and there sat up in the middle of the perfect green grass and looked at all of them. Ronan suddenly started to laugh.

Now I understand, said the Defender through him. It’s an embodiment, a way to perceive the trail as an active entity rather than as something passive. Very sophisticated.

And fun. Hurry up and put the leash on! Ponch said, while the white squirrel sat there completely still, its little dark eyes moving across them, one by one. Nita met its eyes and was briefly transfixed, perceiving the white squirrel somewhat as Ponch might have. It was shorthand for a twisting trail made up of a complex of many virtual scents, all braiding and corkscrewing through a peculiar skewed landscape that might have meant time and space as a dog saw them… or as Ponch did, as he wasn’t just any dog anymore.

Kit got Ponch to sit down beside him, and fastened the “collar” end of the wizardly leash around his neck again. Nita and Sker’ret and Filif and Ronan all arranged themselves behind Kit, holding hands or claws or fronds as they’d done before.

The white squirrel’s eyes met Ponch’s. Ponch leaped forward. Just a few lengths ahead of him, the squirrel ran across the grass, then jumped into a sudden darkness that leaped forward to surround them all.

They ran. Ahead of them in the dark, like a white streak through the blackness, the squirrel ran. Ponch tore after it. Kit ran after him, or was dragged. All the rest of them were dragged along as well, and a breath later the darkness vanished—

—to leave them running over something that cracked and glowed. Nita looked down and gasped as the heat struck up at her, burning through her sneakers. They were running over lava, under a dull red sky in which hung a single huge planet, banded in eye-vibrating greens and blues. The lava churned and flowed, hot and sluggish, and as two smaller bodies like moons came cruising across the fierce hot sky, Nita glanced to one side and saw how the lava humped toward the new moons’ pull in strange swollen tides—

A second later, the darkness fell again, and the heat and the burning light were gone, and they were racing through the dark, faster now. The white squirrel bounded away in front of Ponch, and Ponch tore after him, and the darkness fell away behind them like the sides of a tunnel until they were all out in a new light, cooler. A blue-green sky stretched over a dusty violet wasteland without a single feature—not a tree or a plant or a rock to be seen anywhere, only the wind blowing a pinkish stinging dust past them, with clouds of more pink, blowing sand airbrushed against the sky’s distant lavender-tinged horizon. The cold began to bite, the air smelled strange, but Nita had no time to get more than a whiff of it before the darkness closed around them all again—

—to break and leave them running across a wasteland of snow, huge mountains uprearing in the background, but closer to hand, the hard-packed snow sculpted into ridge after knife-sharp ridge, imitating the mountain range behind. They plunged and slid down the broad side of one of the ridges, the squirrel almost lost against the whiteness, but Ponch running right behind it, fast and sure, not losing the trail. Then up the far side of the little valley, sliding, trying to get purchase on the snow. The white squirrel leaped, and Ponch leaped, and the darkness folded down around them all again—

Ponch ran, his speed increasing so that it became more and more difficult to grasp the details of one universe before they were into the darkness again, and out into the next world.

The “squirrel” hardly had that shape anymore. It was a blurred line of light, streaking ahead of them, zigzagging, jumping upward, bouncing down, world to darkness to world again; energy getting ready to discharge as soon as it reached its goal. And that had to be soon. We’ve come so far, Nita thought. Not even Ponch can keep this up for much longer. They were flickering from world to world now at least once a second, so quickly that Nita was tempted to close her eyes to keep the flicker from disorienting her. She concentrated on just breathing, because otherwise she would start thinking about the growing pain in her legs, and if she did that, she’d have to stop.

Flicker. Flicker. Flicker. Nita’s lungs burned. The pain was beginning to force itself through her concentration. Just run. Just run. Just keep running—

—and then suddenly she tripped over Sker’ret, who’d stopped, and fell on top of him; and from behind Nita, Ronan fell on top of her.

The air went out of her lungs, leaving Nita unable even to say “Ow!” Within a second or so Ronan got up off her, and Nita could just lie there for a moment, feeling her legs—or wishing she couldn’t feel them.

Underneath her, something hard and edgy moved, or tried to. “Nita,” a muffled voice said in the Speech, “could you please get off me before we accidentally become more than just good friends?”

Nita opened her eyes at that, partly in alarm. She wasn’t entirely sure what Sker’ret meant, but she didn’t intend to find out. “Sorry,” she said, and disentangled herself from him as best she could. It was kind of like having fallen into a closetful of coat hangers, but finally she managed to get herself and her clothes undone from all those jointy pointy legs of his, and carefully stood up to have a look around.

The ground of the dimly lit clearing where they’d wound up was strangely soft underfoot. All around them was a great silence, broken only by a faint rushing sound a long way off. Nita glanced toward Kit, who was removing the wizardly leash from Ponch, and then looked around.

Trees, was her first impression. Trees as far as the eye can see. But they’re so weird! The trees were many-trunked, their branches reaching down half the time to root themselves in the ground again. Other branches and trunks reached higher, but almost immediately got involved and snarled up with the wrestling, shoving trunks and branches of other nearby trees, so that the upper canopy was as much wood as leafage. It made Nita think of a many-arched roof trying to grow into a cathedral, but strangling itself in grappling loops and buttresses, and having to break away each time in some new direction—then getting tangled and strangled all over again. Little light pierced such a canopy, but what did was blinding. Here and there the strife between the upthrusting, furiously contending branches had let a crack of the high sky show. This burned whiter-hot than the daytime sky above the Crossings, an unbearable glare that seared the skins of the trees through which it tore. Like multiple fiery spearshafts, that light struck down through the branch-ceilings, scarring the nearby growth to a scabrous black and plunging like white knives into the squelching surface below. Slowly, softly, the spongy peat-black stuff underfoot bubbled where the light bored into it, as if something there boiled.

Kit sniffed the air. “Motor oil,” he said. Nita caught the scent he meant, and looked over at one of the closer patches on the bumpy, root-tangled surface, where brown-black tar came oozing up through the ground, slicked over with what was probably crude oil. It gave off the scent Ponch had been tracking.

The rushing sound was slowly getting louder. The effect was like walking toward a waterfall, except that none of them was walking. The sound made it seem as if the waterfall was coming toward them.

And then, in the distance, Nita saw the shadowy shapes moving slowly among the giant, broken-backed trees, in several lines, one after the other, somber, dark, steadily approaching. Slowly she started hearing more than just that rushing noise as the shapes got closer. She heard a low humming or singing sound, and other noises that made her hair stand on end: anguished cries and sobbings that got louder as the marching shapes drew nearer. The crunch and creak of breaking wood told Nita that they were breaking the trees as they came, tearing down branches, ripping away every scrap of brush and undergrowth.

The shrieks echoing along the path of the approaching creatures became louder every moment, and Nita had to force herself to stand still and keep silent, concentrating on not panicking as she heard the trees wailing in anguish as their branches were bitten away. Onward came the softly singing column, leaving everything that had stood in its immediate path now bare except for the spongy ground underfoot. Off the creatures went and out of sight, bearing with them branches like banners, oozing strange sap; and behind them the trees moaned low, and more sap fell and trickled onto the soft ground, pooling like tears.

Filif stirred in silent horror. “And you’re sure this is the place we were looking for?” he said.

Ponch stood up again, gazing at the indistinct, moving shapes with interest. This is the place.

“What are they?” Nita whispered. “I can’t see.”

“I think we should keep that mutual,” Kit said.

Nita nodded and reached down to her charm bracelet for the ready-to-implement invisibility spell, taking hold of the fabric of the spell and whispering its last word in the Speech. She felt the faint itch on her skin that told her it had taken hold, and around her the others all winked out of sight as well.

Best we keep any comments mind-to-mind for the time being, Ronan said.

Silently the others agreed. They all moved carefully forward: not just to avoid making any sound that would be noticed by the creatures they were stalking, but because everybody was using different kinds of invisibility, and this made it all too easy for people to bang into one another.

Something light tickled Nita in the kidneys. She whirled, but there was nothing there, which meant what she’d felt was one of Filif’s fronds. Sorry, Fil.

My fault, I was too close—What?

Sorry, it was me, Sker’ret’s ratchety mind-voice said.

Nita let out a little breath of laughter as she softly skirted around the vast intertwined trunk of one great tree. She put out a hand, touched it—

The tree shuddered. Nita snatched back her hand, shocked, and then laid it against the tree again, much more gently. What’s the matter? she said to it silently in the Speech. Don’t be afraid, I’m not going to hurt you.

But it was afraid. It was in absolute terror. It was holding itself still in utter dread, frightened to speak to Nita, frightened to do anything at all. It was afraid of something far worse than the merely physical destruction Nita had seen. Finally she took her hand away and moved off, rubbing the hand nervously, as if the tree’s anguish was something that could cling to her like sweat.

What? Kit said, catching some leakage of what she felt.

It reminds me of the way the trees were in the Central Park in that other Manhattan, she said, when we were out on Ordeal. That same kind of dumb fear. They wouldn’t respond to the Speech.

Come on.

Softly they made their way closer to the long lines of dark creatures weaving their way among the tree-trunks. Nita could just barely hear the soft footsteps of the others around her, and the slight rustling noise that Sker’ret and Filif made when they moved. She came up behind one particularly large tree and, without touching it, peered around it at the twisting pathway running between it and other large trees a few yards away.

Her nose wrinkled at the strange smell that hung in the air. It’s almost like coffee, Nita thought, as one of the shadowy shapes came around the huge tree that blocked the pathway, but more bitter, a little burnt, as if it—

One of the shapes came around the tree and drifted toward her, almost without a sound—and Nita lost the thread of her thought completely, utterly shocked. A great, shining, dark-glossed almond-shaped body, held up at a diagonal on legs that were longer at the front than in the back; eight black legs, jointed three times each, the back edges of them razor-sharp; up high, a blunt wedge of a head with great dark mirror-shade eyes. Huge claws, hinged at the front top of the body shell, even sharper than the legs, held the squirming, dripping branches torn from some tree.

Nita stood frozen as the creature walked delicately past her. A few seconds later another one passed, and another, in what seemed an endless line. They came in all sizes, but even the smallest of them was the size of a big car. The larger ones, the creatures with the longest claws and heaviest armor, were more the size of vans or small trucks. They went on along the path, some of them making a low soft hum as they went, three or four notes repeated one after another. They weren’t words; if they were, Nita would have been able to understand them as Speech. Unnerved, Nita began to back away very slowly and softly as the long parade continued. The image from her dream was on her mind now: Della’s expression suddenly buried behind a glossy unrevealing eye, a claw coming up to brush blond hair away. Whatever it means, I have to find out.

At last the final dark-shelled creature went past Nita and out of sight beyond the trees down the path. Nita let out a long breath of relief, but couldn’t get rid of the profound unease that had been troubling her since she first touched the tree. There’s something really bad going on here, she thought. And we don’t have much time to find out what.

Without warning, from behind her she heard a different kind of humming sound, getting louder by the second. Nita turned quickly to see what was making it—

She had just time enough to jump back as a claw huger than any of the ones on the parading creatures came snapping straight at her face. She jumped back again in shock, grabbing for her charm bracelet, and the creature followed, snapping at her again. It sees me! But how?

The huge shelled creature lunged at Nita, its claws snapping as she dodged around the tree, doing her best to stay out of its way while she dumped the invisibility spell, which could interfere with what she was about to do. Then she said the short phrase of a basic defense spell, the single spell she probably knew better than any other in the world, because it had been the first one she’d ever done. As the creature followed her and its great down-reaching claws stabbed at Nita again, she saw the claws skid away from the spell. Nita hurriedly held up her hands and spoke the words of the blast spell that she’d been ready to use on whatever had been attacking her in her dream. In a blaze of glowing green-white fire, the force-blast wizardry jumped away from her outstretched hands. The creature vanished in it, leaving her staggering backward. Wow. Who’d have thought it’d have a kick like that. It must be the power boost. The fire faded down as Nita straightened up, relieved. So much for that. I hate having to use so final a spell on anything, but—

—and then she gasped and backed up fast, as the creature came right at her through the fading light of the wizardry. Its armor was shattered and cracked, but it was still making that awful, bone-rattling hum that now escalated into a roar. Those huge claws reached out for her. One of them struck at her shield-spell, and this time the claw didn’t skid aside. It burst right through.

Nita backed up and blasted the creature again. From behind her, Kit, also visible again, came up and did the same. His blasting spell was built differently from Nita’s, and this one knocked the thing back against the nearest tree … but only for a second. The creature recovered its footing and came at them again, the huge claws reaching out.

Down! someone said from behind them, and the word was as much wizardry as order: Nita’s and Kit’s muscles took control of them and flung them down hard on the soft, oozing ground. Nita just managed to turn her head as she went down, and so was able to see the furious fire of the Spear of Light streak over her and Kit and into the huge chitin-mailed form. The ferocity of the light left her briefly blind; she could only hear, and what she heard was a roar like the wind shouting in rage, followed by a silent wave of white-hot force that made Nita throw her arms up around her head to shield it. Then, nothing but silence.

Nita looked up, blinking and still half blinded, and pushed herself up to her knees. She and Kit were both covered with a dusty, scorched-smelling powder that was still sifting down through the air from where the attacking creature had been. Behind her, Ronan put out his hand, and the Spear flew back to his grip.

Filif and Sker’ret and Ponch came up behind him as Kit and Nita helped each other up. “I think we need to get out of here right away now,” Ronan said, “and go somewhere quiet for a think.”

“Boy, are you ever on,” Kit said.

Nita brushed herself off, looking at the vanishing tail end of the column of creatures, and listening to the faint sound of the sobbing trees behind them. “Bugs,” Nita said softly, and the hair stood up on the back of her neck. “Giant bugs…”

Hurriedly, the six of them vanished.