Wizards At War

9: Operational Pause

“The world’s called Rashah,” Kit said.

They sat on a transparent sheet of hardened space a couple of thousand miles above the planet’s surface, gazing down. The world turned sluggishly under them, its seemingly endless expanses of green and blue-green and brown stretching far to either side of a narrow, profoundly deep sea. Hovering a few feet above the wizardly surface where they sat, and surrounded by five intent wizards and a dog, Sker’ret’s implementation of the manual—a spherical holographic display like a particularly high-tech crystal ball—was showing them a slowly turning, annotated version of the planet.

Filif leaned past Kit, all his eye-berries on one side trained on the image as it rotated. Kit glanced over at him, concerned, for though Filif now looked fairly steady, he had been trembling all over when they first made it up into space. “You feeling better?” Kit said.

Filif rustled impatiently. “The initial shock’s passed,” he said. “Those plants aren’t sentient the way my people are. But they’re still in great pain.” His thought turned dark with anger. “The Kindler of Wildfires has plainly made this place Its own.”

There seemed no way to argue with that, for over the image of Rashah in Kit’s manual, and across it in Sker’ret’s view of his own, a string of boldface characters burned in the Speech. They said, “ARESH-HAV,” an acronym for a much longer phrase, and one rarely seen because few worlds were so completely dominated by the Lone Power to qualify for its use. “Aresh-hav” implied “lost”—a place almost as much lost to hope as to the powers of darkness, and presumed to be beyond redemption until the Powers That Be should intervene directly. The term also implied that the intervention might possibly be fatal for the world’s inhabitants, if the Lone One could not be otherwise dislodged.

Kit turned in his manual to the page that held the breakdown of the planet’s physical characteristics. Rashah was the fourth world out from its sun, at about the same distance Jupiter would have been in Earth’s solar system. The other three planets were much too close to Rashah’s ferocious blue-white O-type star for even Life’s endless inventiveness to do much with. Those worlds weren’t much more than little scorched Moon-sized rocks, their sunsides repeatedly slagged down by flare activity. Rashah at least had been distant enough from its star Sek to keep its atmosphere through the flares. Afterward, the plant life that had come to cover the world had slowly exhaled enough gases to breed a greenhouse effect, which allowed other life to evolve there—though not much of it. Millions of years had produced a planet where the vast march of the ruthlessly struggling rain forest was broken only by tar pits thousands of miles wide, slicked over with lakes of oozing oil—the last remnant of far more ancient forests killed by solar flares and transformed by heat and dead weight over thousands of millennia. Rashah’s turbulent weather was as unforgiving as its sun: summers hot enough to melt Earth’s polar caps alternated with winters that were simply one long, supremely violent hurricane.

Most of the living species on that planet were plants. There were a very few flying and creeping species with no intelligence to speak of, and of these, only the ravenous “topflyers” were tough enough to survive Sek’s awful burning light for long. These infested the uppermost levels of the rain forest that covered the two great continents of the world, eating one another and anything else foolish enough to venture up or out into the terrible fire of day.

“It looks like everything else living here except those topflyers stays undercover if it wants to keep on living,” Nita said, looking up from her own manual. “Even the one intelligent species…”

She turned a couple of pages, and Sker’ret’s display shifted to match hers, showing them a closely annotated image of one of the giant bugs. “They call themselves the Yaldiv,” Nita said, “though they’re such a hive species, I’m not sure that the concept of them ‘calling themselves’ anything is right. According to this, they’ve got kind of a common undermind or subconscious, so they may just think of themselves as one body with a lot of moving parts.” She shook her head. “Not a ‘them’: an ‘it.’”

Kit, glancing over at Nita’s manual, pointed at large blue-glowing patches that appeared here and there on the pages. “What the heck are those?”

Nita shook her head again. “Some of the species background information is blocked,” she said. She laid her finger on one patch, which came alive with the words in the Speech, “Data in abeyance.” Another lined-out passage, when she touched it, said, “Data withheld.”

“Withheld by whom?” Sker’ret said. “Or what?”

Nita looked over at Ronan. Such redacted notations, the Defender said through him, mean that some other Power is interfering with the exchange of information.

“And you can just guess which one,” Kit said softly. “Darryl did say—”

Kit saw Nita swallow. “That we shouldn’t hang around any longer than we have to,” she said. “So let’s get down there and find out what the Instrumentality is, and what we have to do to get it and make it work for us.”

Filif rustled all his branches and looked rather challengingly at Ronan. “I don’t suppose you could be a little more forthcoming now about any details you’ve received from your sources.”

I don’t have anything new to share with you, the One’s Champion said through Ronan. The other Powers seem to think we’ve been given enough information to find the Instrumentality without any further input.

“I hate that,” Kit said, though he wasn’t annoyed enough to put too much force on the statement. “You know? I really hate it when They trust us so completely.”

Ronan looked nonplussed. You’re all we have to work with, said the One’s Champion. And you’ve always produced the result before. Suddenly Ronan grinned; it was a sour look. “See, this is your reward for not letting the Lone One defeat you a long time ago.”

“You wouldn’t think it was so funny if you knew what Its idea of defeat usually looks like,” Kit said. “And I still wish the Powers thought we were a little more clueless. We might get things done faster.”

But not as effectively, the Champion said.

“Yeah, well,” Nita said, sounding uncomfortable. She turned her attention back to her manual, and when her gaze was turned away, Kit sneaked a concerned look at her. Nita had been as unnerved as Filif when they’d first gotten up here, and to Kit’s eye, she still looked pale. “Probably we should start with the cities,” Nita said. “There are two city-hives on the bigger of the two continents, kind of like giant anthills. They’re a few hundred miles apart. They’ve been fighting each other, on and off, for—” Nita looked at the numbers on the timeline indicator that shone on the page, and squinted in disbelief. “Millions of years?”

“They must really be enjoying it,” Sker’ret said dryly, “to keep the war going so long.”

“I don’t know if enjoy would be the right word,” Nita said, turning another page. “Each side sees the other as a terrible threat.” She glanced at Sker’ret. “Just think about it. If each of the Yaldiv cities always saw itself as the only being in the world—and then all of a sudden another one turned up, one that thought of itself as the only being in the world—”

“Then both sides have a great reason to panic,” Ronan said. “And an excuse to wipe the other side out.”

“It looks like somebody might already have had a run at that,” Kit said, turning a page in his own manual. “Have you looked at the background radiation numbers for this place?”

Nita looked surprised. “I thought maybe those were so high because we’re so close to the star.”

Kit shook his head, looking increasingly grim. “Oh, yeah, the atmosphere’s real ionized, but that’s not going to account for the plutonium residue all over the place.” He pointed at the manual page. “Look here. And over there—”

Filif shook all over, a horrified shudder. “Someone here was using atomics?” he said. “The Kindler must have driven them completely insane.”

“It’s a popular kind of crazy,” Kit said. “Unfortunately.”

“You’ll be telling me next that they burn their hydrocarbons!”

“Uh, no,” Kit said. “But it looks like there was a more developed civilization here once. A real long time ago. There’s nothing left now. It’s been completely degraded.”

“Were the creatures here part of that civilization?” Sker’ret said to Nita. “Or are they a successor species?”

Nita shook her head. “No way to tell. Almost all the rest of the history section is blocked out. ‘Data withheld.’”

“And here’s something else that’s kind of nasty,” Ronan said, glancing back at the group. He had been looking off into the distance, the way Irish wizards did when consulting their memory-based version of the manual. “All these creatures’ve got a significant, aware fraction of the Lone Power as part of their souls.”

Nita turned a horrified look on him. “Are you saying that the whole Yaldiv species is overshadowed?”

It’s rather worse than that, the One’s Champion said. And rather more permanent. They’re all avatars.

Everyone stared at Ronan. “All of them are mortal versions of the Lone One?” Sker’ret said. “How’s that possible? Such a multiple embodiment would require immense power.”

Which It has, said the Champion. But, yes, even for one of us, this kind of power outlay would be significant. My guess is that this culture has either been owned for so long that this kind of avataric presence has simply seeped into the species’ nature over millennia. Or else the manifestation is something new, a test bed for something the Lone Power is planning.

“Probably a good reason for the world’s history to be blocked,” Filif said, “at least from the Lone One’s point of view. It would be a fair guess that we’d have a better idea where to start looking for the Instrumentality if we knew more about when this process started, and what this world has been through.”

Ronan ran his hands through his hair and looked harried. “All right,” he said. “Where do we go from here? We’ve got to figure out what the Instrumentality is, and where it is … and what to do about it. While walking around in the middle of a war zone full of giant bugs who can see us even when we’re invisible.”

“And just how did that happen?” Nita said to Ronan. “And how was that thing able to get through my shield-spell?”

“The Lone One can break a working wizardry when it’s directly present,” Ronan said. “It was party to wizardry’s creation, so It can easily interfere, if It’s got a local foothold in a willing soul. That’s what avatars are all about. They can be worked through a lot more effectively than the merely overshadowed.”

“But did that avatar recognize us as wizards?” Kit said.

Possibly not, said the Champion. Avatars don’t have to be conscious of their status.

“With such creatures about, it’s a shame there’s nowhere quieter to do our reconnaissance,” Filif said. “Say, the other continent.”

Ponch had been lying stretched out, looking down with a brooding expression at Rashah as the planet rotated in seeming serenity beneath them. But what we’re looking for is down where I brought you out, he said. Why go elsewhere? We’d just be wasting our time.

“That being something we don’t have a lot of,” Nita said. “So let’s get busy.” She glanced over at Ronan. “I do want to call my dad in a little bit, though, to make sure what day it is back home. Is it going to be safe?”

I can cover you, the Defender said. But putting forth power as a cloak is itself a detectable usage, if anyone’s looking for such. So keep it short.

Nita nodded. “But as for the Instrumentality,” she said, “what do we do when we find it? Just take it? What if it’s something that belongs to the Yaldiv? What if they don’t want to let us have it? Or they won’t tell us how it works?”

“One thing at a time,” Sker’ret said. “We’ve got to go down there and do some research.” He was looking through his own manual. “I can set up short-range transits for us from here to the surface in such a way that they ought to be undetectable. You’ll want to look over my shoulder to make sure I don’t miss anything,” Sker’ret said to Ronan. “But what then? We’re going to have to walk some places. We’re going to have to go into the Yaldiv cities and pass unnoticed. And as you say, the usual invisibility doesn’t seem to be enough. These creatures, the warrior-foragers anyway, have a better-than-usual sense of smell, as well as what looks like an innate sensitivity to force fields. Merely visual disguises aren’t going to do the job.”

Filif suddenly shook every frond he owned, and all his berries blazed. “Well, it’s plain that there’s no such thing as coincidence,” he said. “Have a look at this.”

A moment later, Kit found himself looking at another Nita. He glanced over at the original one. Her jaw had dropped.

“How does it look?” Filif said. And, bizarrely, his voice sounded like Nita’s.

“Wow!” Kit said.

“Does it feel right?” Filif said. He held out an arm.

Kit pinched it experimentally. “Yeah…”

“Does it smell right?”

“I wouldn’t answer that if I were you,” Nita said. She got up and went over to Filif, looking at him up close and very carefully. “It’s almost like a mirror,” she said.

“It’s a mochteroof,” Filif said.

The word was plainly in the Speech, but Kit had never heard it used before. “Some kind of seeming?” he said.

“About halfway between a seeming and a full shape-change,” Filif said… and once again the voice was Nita’s. “It’s less likely to leave you with the side effects that a complete change would. Yet it looks and feels solid. It’ll pass all the common sensory tests—touch, smell, taste.”

Kit was impressed. “When’d you start work on this?”

“When I started to realize I didn’t want to look, sound, or smell too much like a vegetable,” Filif said, “in a world full of herbivores.”

Nita suddenly looked embarrassed. “Uh. Sorry. We, uh—”

“Don’t apologize!” Filif said. “I found soon enough that plants on your world aren’t like they are on mine. And I got caught up on my research and discovered you were built to eat the way you do. Just look at your teeth! Anyway, when Roshaun and Sker’ret and I started going out visiting places with Dairine, I built myself a wizardry that was mostly a strictly visual illusion. It worked well enough when we first went to the mall, but it failed when I got distracted. So afterward I took the work I’d done and used it to construct something more robust—an overlay that wasn’t as taxing as a full shape-change but could still cope with being touched, and would react properly to all the other senses.”

Nita leaned close to Filif and pushed his/her bangs aside to stare at his/her forehead. “What?” Kit said.

“He’s even got my zit!” Nita said, straightening up. She sounded rueful but impressed. “You’ve really been working hard on this, Fil.”

“I noticed you looking at it,” Filif said, “and inserted it. The image self-updates when you do that. Otherwise, it just runs true to your last memory of a given template. Here, look at this.”

And suddenly the other-Nita turned into Carmela.

Kit made an exaggerated choking noise and fell over. “Oh, no,” he said. “Not her, not here! No way.”

“What’s the matter?” Filif said, sounding confused. “Did I get something wrong?”

Nita snickered. “No,” she said, and got up to stretch. “I’d say you got it just right.” She looked at Kit in amusement. “No wonder ‘Mela spends so much time bugging you! You give her these huge reactions. If you didn’t make such a fuss, she wouldn’t have nearly so much fun.”

Kit rolled his eyes. Filif went back to being a tree again, and Ronan, too, stood up and had a stretch. “All right,” he said. “So all we need to do now is decide where to start looking for the Instrumentality.”

Kit looked up at Ronan. “You saw where Ponch brought us out. I think we should have some faith in his talent, and start our work near there. One of the cities isn’t too far from our landing site.”

“We’ll have a lot less trouble getting lost in the crowd where there are a lot more Yaldiv,” Nita said. She touched Sker’ret’s rotating globe with one finger. The view of the planet in her own manual and in the larger display expanded to show the cities’ locations. “Yup, that’s the bigger of the two cities.”

“So all we have to do now is tailor versions of Filif’s mochteroof for ourselves,” Sker’ret said.

Ronan nodded slowly. “Right you are,” he said. “And since it looks like the Yaldiv are diurnal—a lot of them go out of the city to work in the forest in the daytime, then come back when it starts to get dark—when they do, we’ll go back in with them.”

“Makes sense,” Sker’ret said. “We’ll need someplace near our target city to use as a base, though, somewhere to put up the pup tents. A cave or something similar.”

“My very thought,” Ronan said. “I’ll go see what I can find. Back in a tick.”

He vanished.

Nita stood looking down at the planet’s surface, while off to one side Sker’ret started laying down his short-transit routines, a lacy filigree of glowing lines embedded in the invisible surface they stood on. Kit wandered over to Nita. “You okay now?” he said.

“Huh? Oh, yeah. I got past it.” She folded her arms, hugging her manual to her. “It’s just … Ronan. Sometimes he sounds so normal.”

“Sometimes,” Kit said.

“But then without warning he gets edgy again.”

“So? Where he’s concerned, so do you,” Kit said.

Nita looked at him. “What?”

Kit shrugged. “You should see your face sometimes. It’s a real ‘You get on my nerves but I can’t take my eyes off you’ kind of look.”

Nita’s expression went suddenly exasperated. “There wasn’t anything like that going on with us,” she said.

“But there could have been.”

“Like what? He’s about a million years older than me!” Nita said.

“Two,” Kit said.

“Two million?”

“Two years older than you,” Kit said.

Nita looked less exasperated and more befuddled. “Your point being…?”

Kit took a breath. “You kissed him,” Kit said.

Nita briefly looked shocked. Then she rolled her eyes. “That was all I did.”

“I know that!”

“Yeah? And how, exactly?”

This, by itself, was almost enough to stop Kit cold. Wizards who worked closely together sometimes overheard things going on in each other’s heads that hadn’t been specifically “sent” by the other party. It was an occupational hazard … and a sign of their closeness. But this is as far as I’ve ever gotten along this line with her, Kit thought, miserable, and if I give up now, I may never have the guts to bring it up again! Or the time—

He opened his mouth. “Look, never mind, I can guess,” Nita muttered, and turned away. “Anyway, you know it’s true. And it just happened. It was just— He was— I don’t know. So vulnerable right then. You see how he is usually! Ronan being vulnerable—it’s kind of an attention-getter.”

She really did sound embarrassed. Back out of this slowly while you can, said some unusually nervous part of Kit’s brain.

“But I do feel a little better about him generally,” Nita said. “If I was feeling a little paranoid about him, maybe it was left over from the last time someone I trusted was being overshadowed by the Lone One. It’s not like Ronan can be overshadowed while he’s got the One’s Champion inside him.”

“As far as we know,” Kit said. “But a lot of things aren’t working the way they usually do.”

“Oh, don’t you get paranoid now,” Nita said. “Remember how it was with Ronan before, when he just wanted the Champion to fall asleep or go away? Now at least the two of them seem to be working together. We ought to be really grateful, because we’re all going to need that.”

“Yeah, I guess.” Kit let out a long breath, feeling relieved. But Nita glanced back at him, and the smile she was wearing was distinctly odd. “What?” Kit said.

“Uh, nothing serious,” Nita said. The smile started to turn into a grin. “I was just thinking about Carmela.”

“Filif got a little too close to the original there,” Kit said, passing a hand over his eyes.

Nita snickered. “Not that. I was thinking that when we get back, somebody’d better make sure she knows exactly what she’s getting into.”

“With what? Ronan?”

“Yeah.”

Kit raised his eyebrows. “You mean we should tell her that being hot on Ronan is actually being hot on both a cranky Celto-Goth hottie and a Senior Power-That-Is who spent most of the past ten years living on Earth and wearing a macaw costume?”

Nita looked at him.

“Nah,” Kit said at last. “Let’s not say anything. Let’s just let it play out.” And then Kit broke up laughing.

Nita’s look grew annoyed. “You’re enjoying the idea,” she said.

“Oh yeah!” Kit managed to say. It took a while to get control of his laughter.

“If she realizes that you’re letting her walk into this without a warning just for your own amusement,” Nita said, “the universe being destroyed is going to come as a relief.”

Kit wiped his eyes, forcibly smothering the last few laughs. “Look,” he said, “when we get back, if he hangs around for very long, Ronan’ll have to tell her. Assuming she doesn’t figure it out herself, somehow. She’s been figuring out way too much lately.”

Nita suddenly looked concerned. “You don’t think she’s going to pull a late-onset Ordeal on us?”

Kit shook his head. “She’s too old. But even if she is getting good with the Speech, you won’t find me complaining. I’d rather have her the way she is than like my other sister.”

“Oh, please,” Nita said. “Helena and your ‘deal with the devil.’ What a laugh.”

“I can’t believe she could even think I’d do something like that. You live with somebody all your life and then—” Kit threw his hands in the air, let them fall again, a helpless gesture.

Ronan appeared off to one side of their hardened-space platform. “I’ve got just the thing,” he said, coming over to them. “There’s a big stony outcrop a couple of miles from the end of the tunnels of the biggest city.”

“So what did you find?” Nita said. “Caves?”

Ronan nodded. “A big bubble cavern with no connection to the city tunnels,” he said. “But there’s plenty of room there for all our pup tents, and no surface access of any size; no one’s going to come sneaking up on us.” He glanced over at Nita. “You want to call your dad now?”

“Yeah,” Nita said, and got out her phone. “Feed the cave coordinates to our manuals, huh?”

“And to me,” Sker’ret said. “I’ll want them for the short-term transits.”

Ronan headed over to where Sker’ret was working with Filif on the spell diagrams. As Nita dialed her phone, Ponch got up from where he’d been lying and ambled over to Kit, his tail swinging idly.

We’re going now? he said.

“Yup,” Kit said.

Good. I’m hungry!

Kit reached down to scratch behind Ponch’s ears. “It’s all about dinner or playing or sleep with you, isn’t it?” he said.

Not all, Ponch said in a slightly hurt tone of voice. There are other things. Sometimes it’s about squirrels.

“Oh, great,” Nita said under her breath. “What now?”

Kit glanced over at her. Nita gave him another of those exasperated looks and hit the button that put the call on the speaker.

At the other end—the other end of the galaxy, or the universe, for all Kit knew—the phone was ringing. And ringing, and ringing, and ringing…

“Nobody’s home,” Nita muttered. She started dialing again.

“Maybe your dad’s at work?” Kit said.

“I sure hope so,” Nita said. “Not that I’m sure what time it is there.”

But when the call started to go through, that number, too, just kept ringing. After a few rings someone picked up. Kit saw Nita’s expression go a little less scared. “Hi, this is Harry Callahan—”

“Daddy! What time is it? I thought you’d be—”

“—at Callahan’s Florists,” said her dad’s voice. “Unfortunately there’s no one available in the shop to take your call right now. Our normal business hours are 8:00 A.M. to 5:30 P.M. Monday through Friday—”

Nita hung up. “Okay,” she said. “His own phone—”

She dialed again. But this time all she got was a different recorded message, a digital one. “The party you are dialing is not available at this time. Please try again later—”

Nita hung up again, starting to look upset. “This makes no sense,” she said.

“You could try getting hold of Dairine,” Kit said. “Maybe she’s heard something.”

Nita nodded, pulled her manual out, and opened the back cover, where she kept her messaging routines. “Dairine Callahan,” she said to the manual.

The back page blanked. Then a single phrase in the Speech came up out of the whiteness: “Recipient is out of ambit or in transit, and is not available. Record a message for delivery when ambit or transit status changes?”

Nita rolled her eyes. “Yeah, Dair, it’s me,” she said. “Have you heard anything from Dad? Call me back in the book as soon as you can. End message.”

The page flickered, spelled the message out in the Speech, and then blanked it. “Saved for delayed send.”

“Thanks,” Nita said. “Now get me Tom Swale or Carl Romeo, and flag it urgent.”

The back page blanked. Then a single phrase came up: “Messaging in abeyance.”

“‘In abeyance’?” Nita said. “What’s that mean?”

“And not even any ‘Try again later,’” Kit muttered. “What’s going on back there?”

Nita shook her head, closed her manual, and picked up her phone again. She punched in the number for Tom’s house, hit the speaker button again. Once again the dialing tone tinkled through its usual sequence, followed by a long silence.

Nita almost hung up, but at last the phone at the other end started ringing. And it rang, and rang, and rang…

She let out a long breath, hung up.

“Maybe they’re out somewhere,” Kit said.

“Why do I not believe it’s that simple?” Nita covered her eyes with one hand. “They always have a wizardry that forwards calls from wizards to their cells,” she said, looking up. “And they’re hardly ever both not there—”

“They were last week,” Kit said, “and you know what that was about.” He was trying hard to sound calm, but he wasn’t sure how well it was working.

Nita rubbed her face. “Look,” she said. “I’m really freaked now. I’m not going to be any good here until I check on things back home and make sure my dad’s okay. It won’t take me long.”

But we just got here! was the first thing Kit wanted to say. He resisted the urge.

“Look, I know what you’re thinking,” Nita said. “I don’t care. What good am I going to be for anything if I’m not sure what’s going on with my dad?! And, Kit, what if we did just have another of those big time lags? If it’s all of a sudden five days later, we’d better find out about it now—because if Dairine and I have to go back and cover for ourselves before school starts making trouble for my dad…”

She looked furious and frustrated. Kit let out a long breath, because she was right. “Okay,” Kit said. “But how’re you going to do this?”

Sker’ret had finished conferring with Filif, and now came toddling over to them. “You could always send a fetch back home to see what’s going on,” Sker’ret said.

Nita thought about that, then shook her head. “No way,” she said. “It’s not just about what I need to see. If my dad’s upset already, dealing with a transparent version of me that can’t get solid when he needs a hug isn’t going to do him any good at all.”

“Ponch can’t take you,” Kit said. “We’re going to need him here. And even if we didn’t, you’d run into the same time lag problem all over again.”

“I’ll do a direct gating,” Nita said. “The only reason we needed Ponch to get here was because we didn’t know where we were going. Now that we’ve got the coordinates for Rashah, I can gate straight in and out.” She glanced at Ronan. “You can cover for that, too?”

I can, said the Champion, sounding uneasy, but we need to keep this kind of thing to a minimum.

“For once the spell won’t have to be terribly complex,” Nita said. “We’ve all got the power now to push gatings through just by brute force, rather than finesse.”

“I can coach you on how to compensate for any equivalent lag,” Sker’ret said, “now that we know how much of it we’re dealing with. In fact, it’d make sense to take that information back to the Crossings—it’ll help my sibs keep things running there for a little longer.” He glanced over at Kit and Ronan and Filif. “Can you spare me? I won’t be gone any longer than Nita is.”

“While we’re still just doing our first on-the-ground surveys,” Kit said, “sure. And it makes sense for you to go out at the same time as Neets.” He glanced over at Ronan. “It means you’ll have only one transit to cover, instead of two.”

“Let’s get ready for it, then,” Sker’ret said. “I’ll get the gating set up.” He scuttled away in the darkness to start altering one of the transit circles.

“I’ll check your spelling,” Filif said, going after him.

Nita watched them go, then glanced back at Kit. “You’re annoyed at me,” she said.

Kit gave Nita a look, hoping she wasn’t going to force him to answer. She returned the look, in spades. Finally Kit said, “Not annoyed. But you’re holding out on me. It’s not just your dad, is it? It’s Tom and Carl, too. Isn’t it?”

For a long moment, Nita didn’t say anything. Then she sighed. “Look, I know we had to run with the information that Ronan and the Champion gave us. But I still feel like we’ve run out on our Seniors, and they probably got worried about us when they came looking for us and couldn’t find us anywhere.”

“You’re not going to tell them anything—”

“Of course I’m not going to tell them anything! But they just need to know we’re okay.”

She was quiet for a moment.

“And that’s still not all of it,” Kit said.

Once again, and for a much longer time, Nita said nothing.

“Look,” Kit said, “don’t say anything if you don’t want to; I guess it’s not really important—”

“You’re eavesdropping on my brains again,” Nita said.

Her tone was resigned. “No,” Kit said, and blushed. “I just overheard—You know how it is. More a feeling than a thought.”

“Yeah,” Nita said. “I know how it is.”

The look she gave him left Kit embarrassed enough to want to glance away; but he didn’t. “A feeling is all it is,” Nita said. “I wish I had something more concrete to go on than a hunch! But that’s all I’ve got. There’s something back that way that needs doing, and I have to go there and find out what it is, and do it. And I hate acting like being on Rashah is freaking me out enough to make me immediately run away!”

“I know that’s not it,” Kit said.

“Do you?” said Nita.

Now it was Kit’s turn to pause. Is it smart to tell her how seriously scared I am? he thought. Is it going to make her feel worse?

“Yeah, I do,” Kit said at last. “I don’t want to spend a minute more here than I have to. But I don’t have any hunches, and you do. So get out of here and do what you have to. And do one thing for me?”

“Sure.”

“Call my mom when you get there? Let her know we’re okay.”

“Yeah,” Nita said. “No problem.”

They turned back to the others. “We’re done here,” Sker’ret said. “Filif’s checked everything over, and we’ve got the coordinates for the cave. We’ll meet you there when we’re finished.”

“Then you two go on,” Kit said. “We won’t do anything too exciting until you get back.”

“Why do I have serious doubts about that?” Nita said. But she smiled, even though the smile was wan. “Look, if Dairine turns up before we get back—”

“I’ll fill her in.”

Nita went over to where Sker’ret was standing in one of the spell diagrams. “You ready?” she said to Ronan.

He lifted the Spear of Light. “Go,” he said.

The Spear flared into life. Nita and Sker’ret began to speak in the Speech together. Under their feet, the spell diagram came alive with light—the spoken words chasing their way around the circle, knotting in the wizard’s knot, then blazing up too blindingly to let a viewer see individual characters.

Nita and Sker’ret vanished. As they did, Kit once again caught what he’d “overheard” before, that strange feeling of fear combined with Nita’s sense of something that absolutely had to be done. And mixed with it, bizarrely, he could hear a sort of buzzing sound, sharp and abrupt, repeating again and again. Kit frowned. Now where’ve I heard that sound before? If I didn’t know better, I’d think it was somebody using some kind of energy weapon…

He didn’t hear anything further. Weird, Kit thought. Never mind. To Filif, who was now standing over Sker’ret’s short-term transit spell diagrams, he said, “How’s everything look?”

“Perfect.”

Ponch, sitting there looking down at the planet, now stood up again and shook himself all over. Are we going finding again?

“Pretty soon,” Kit said. “But we should get to the cave so you can have some dinner first.”

Ponch began to jump up and down excitedly. “Okay, okay, do it over here,” he said, leading Kit to one of the transit circles Sker’ret had set up. Nearby, Ronan and Filif each stepped into one of the others. Ronan glanced over at him. “Ready?”

“Ready.”

They vanished.

***

The darkness and silence of the cave was total, and the air was absolutely still, except for the gentle wavering of the heat they felt rising from the surface on which they stood. The stifling air was slightly tainted with an oily smell that reminded Kit of the last time the repairmen had to be called in to deal with the furnace at home.

Very slowly Ronan allowed the Spear of Light to show itself in a faint ghostly glimmer of blade, while Filif’s eye-berries glowed at their softest. Kit spoke the words of his small wizard-light spell and pushed it loose into the air, where the tiny spark of it hung and made a dim green-blue glow. Around them on all sides, the cavern stretched out, vast, empty, the distant walls glittering faintly. The floor was curved slightly upward toward the far walls, so that the four of them seemed to be standing in the middle of a huge, pale, shallow bowl. In such low light, the ceiling was invisible.

There’s nothing here, the Champion said after a moment. We’re safe enough.

Kit let his light get about as bright as a hundred watt bulb, and the Spear flared up into its full glory; Ronan let the shaft of the Spear sink into the stone of the floor and fasten itself there. Filif’s berries paled down. They could now see the ceiling, at least a hundred feet above them, maybe more. A bristling of tiny thin stalactites, probably the result of many centuries of trickling water, hung from it like a coarse, thick fur. Here and there the floor was bumpy with little walnut-sized lumps of dripped-down mineral salts that crunched underfoot when Kit experimentally stepped on them.

“Was this area volcanic once?” Filif said.

“Could have been,” Kit said. “I think the magma underneath burped out a big gas bubble. Then it all got pushed up toward the surface. The gas got out, the water got in…”

“Not too much of it,” Ronan said, “lucky for us. Otherwise, there might be other ways in.” He looked around, satisfied.

Kit nodded and reached into his otherspace pocket for the pup-tent interface. He hung it in the air and pulled the door down. Ponch dashed through it. “Back in a minute,” Kit said.

He went after Ponch, popped open a can of dog food, and emptied it into one of the waiting bowls. Then he poured some water into another dish from an open bottle. Ponch turned in a few happy circles and then began noisily and happily eating. Kit rooted around in the piles of supplies for one of the prepackaged sandwiches his mother had left for him, unwrapped it, and took a moment to stuff it into his face. Then he stepped out through the interface with the second half of the sandwich.

Ronan had vanished into his own pup tent. Filif stood off to one side, looking down at the bright circle of another transport spell, which was now etching itself in burning lines into the stone. “Sker’ret gave me a compacted version of the transport routine,” Filif said, “for transfers from here to the outer surface.” He brought up his own implementation of the wizard’s manual, which manifested itself as a sort of fog that clung about his branches. In that fog Kit could see a schematic of the immediate neighborhood of the planet’s surface, with the main city-hive marked on it.

“There’s a main trail from the city-hive that passes not too far from here,” Filif said. “We can make our way easily enough to it from our transit point. Since these creatures are so scent-sensitive, we should put the outside end of the transit wizardry in a little loop that leads from the path and goes back to it, so that it won’t be obvious to any Yaldiv stumbling on it that our trail goes only so far and stops.”

“It’ll look as if we just wandered off the main path a little and then right back again,” Kit said. “Great.” He ruffled up Filif’s branches a little, affectionately. Filif was such a hardworking wizard, so self-effacing, but so good at what he did, that Kit was coming to admire him immensely. “You hungry? You should get yourself something.”

“I’ll root in a while,” Filif said. “I want to make sure this is in order first. And this—”

A couple of Filif’s branch-fronds reached inward to touch each other, then parted again. Between them stretched a thin filament of green wizardly fire, the most delicate possible chain of characters in the Speech. As Filif stretched the chain out, it became more and more complex, like a single strand of spiderweb becoming the whole web, then a complex of webs in three dimensions, building a shape in the air. Filif drifted backward from where he had originally been standing, and the green-fire construct stayed anchored in the air and grew upward and outward, becoming more and more complex every minute. It resolved into the big oval shape of a Yaldiv’s body, spreading outward into the legs and the claws, the light then filling the innards of the shape as it sketched itself on the air. Shortly the shape of a complete Yaldiv hung there, resting lightly on its walking claws, towering over Filif and Kit. Filif let go of the filament of wizardry, and the spell stood on its own. He drifted around it, looking it over.

Kit followed, also examining it. He was seriously impressed by the way the many, many sentences in the Speech interwove to produce the result. The mochteroof was woven all around a wizardly “virtual copy” of the Yaldiv’s whole body. “I took the template from the Yaldiv that Ronan had to blast,” Filif said. “Poor creature, it had little enough time to serve Life, even as crookedly as it did. Now it will serve it another way.” He stood back from his work, admiring it. “If, as in some other hive cultures, the warriors here have additional status, this may offer us an extra layer of protection. Or enable us to go places where the workers cannot.”

“I hope it doesn’t also get us in some kind of trouble we can’t anticipate,” Kit muttered. “I wish the manual functions weren’t so messed up here. We don’t know as much about these people as we need to.”

“We have no choice, though,” Filif said, “do we? We’re going to have to take the chance.”

“No argument,” Kit said. “Should I try it on?”

“I was hoping you would ask.”

Kit took another look at the wizardry, seeing the spot near the back of the virtual Yaldiv where the user was meant to step in and shrug the new body around him like a coat. Carefully, he stepped into the center of the weave.

The whole thing blazed up with power and pressed in on Kit like a second skin … then vanished. He stood there tremendously confused for a moment: the mochteroof seemed to have simply vanished. Kit held up a hand—

—and saw the shadow of one of those huge, sharp-edged claws come up in front of his face. It was so odd and sudden that he jumped; the claw jerked. “Wow,” Kit said, and turned around. “This is cool. And I still feel like me.”

Ronan had come out of his pup tent and was heading over to fetch the Spear. He looked over at Kit with interest. Ponch, who had come out of Kit’s tent a little before, now started dancing around Kit and barking joyously, as if this was intensely funny. You’re a giant bug! Ponch said. You even smell like one!

“I’ll take that as a compliment,” Kit said, and was astonished at the bizarre humming and crunching noises that came out of him instead of words. He looked over at Filif, and was aware of the dark mirror-shade eyes that he was “seeing” through, though it was his own form of vision that prevailed.

“You can use the Yaldiv sensorium anytime you need to,” Filif said, drifting around again to check that the mochteroof was working correctly. “You can scent and see either in your own mode exclusively, or as they do, or both at once. The Yaldiv see mostly as heat; a lot of the visible spectrum is lost on them. Scent comes through the legs, and they don’t go in much for tactile information, as far as I can tell. Taste is in the mandibles.”

“And wizardry?” Kit said.

“Won’t be impaired,” Filif said. “Your portable claudication is exactly where it would normally be, as are your preprepared wizardries. You can do whatever you would normally—”

The sudden bang! of displaced air was astonishingly loud in this small space, and was followed by an abrupt shower of a sort of flaky rain, as many of the tiny damp mineral-drop stalactites from the ceiling came pattering down onto the floor. Kit whirled around with a disrupter spell in his hands—a little core of compressed wizardry burning hot and ready to fire—and was only briefly surprised by the huge claw-shadows that seemed to enclose the hands holding the spell. Out beyond the shadows of the mochteroof, Ronan had snatched the Spear up out of the stone floor and was standing there with it flaming in one hand, ready to throw. Filif’s berries were suddenly burning a disconcerting dark color that Kit had never seen before. But then Kit let out a breath and waved his hands and their shadow-claws apart, dismissing the spell, at the sight of the two figures standing there, one shorter than him, one much taller.

Dairine and Roshaun looked up around them at the interior of the cave. Dairine’s hands were also holding some spell that fizzed and glittered as whitely blinding as a Fourth of July sparkler. Roshaun was holding ready in one hand what might have been a meter-long gilded rod, except for the hot, orange-golden, sunlike light that writhed and coiled inside it. Down on the floor between them, Spot crouched, glowing a soft and dangerous blue.

Then Dairine and Roshaun and Spot (extruding a few eyes to do the job) all stared at Kit. Dairine actually squinted at him, and it took some moments before she finally grinned. “Hey,” Dairine said. “On you, that looks good.”

Kit laughed. He pulled one of the tags of the Speech that was hanging down inside the mochteroof, and it fell away.

“How’d you find us so fast?” Ronan said. “We didn’t even know we were coming here until a little while ago.”

“I got Nita’s message when we popped out of transit on our way in,” Dairine said. “She left a pointer to the new coordinates, and forwarded it to the transits Sker’ret built for you. But where’d she go?”

“Home,” Kit said. “Heard anything from your dad?”

Dairine shook her head. “I was going to call,” she said. “Why? Neets tried and couldn’t get through?”

“Yeah,” Kit said. “Nothing.”

“Then I won’t bother right now,” Dairine said. “We’ve got bigger fish to fry.”

Roshaun looked briefly nonplussed. “Is this the time to be thinking about food?” he said.

“If you’d had as little to eat as I have today, it sure would be,” Dairine said, “and if you ask me, Ponch has the right idea, because despite all the hoopla back at your big fancy royal palace, the one thing that didn’t put in an appearance was a buffet. So forgive me.” She reached into her otherspace pocket and started feeling around in it. “But we found out what we’re supposed to be looking for.”

“The Instrumentality?” Kit said.

“What is it?” Ronan said.

Dairine came up with a trail-mix bar and started unwrapping it. “Not a what,” she said. “A who.”

Ronan and Filif and Kit all stared at one another.

Dairine gave Ronan a cockeyed look as she bit into the trail-mix bar. “And it’s funny that not even you know,” she said, munching, “since your passenger was carrying the information. But then, not even He knew. Did you?” she said to the Champion.

I’ve often worked as a courier before, the One’s Champion said. “Messenger” is one of the most basic parts of my job description. But I’ve never before carried a message I didn’t know I was carrying.

“First time for everything,” Dairine said, having another bite. “Ronan, around the time you stopped by our house, part of that message got loaded into Spot, and you never even knew it was happening. We couldn’t get at it until we got to the mobiles’ world. They put some info from the Defender’s presence in the mobiles’ world together with that information, decoded it…”

She smiled. Beside her, Roshaun sat down on the floor, cross-legged, with his usual effortless grace.

“The Instrumentality,” Dairine said, “is the Hesper.”

At that, Ronan looked up sharply.

“Or a Hesper,” Dairine said. “There’s not much difference at this point, since there’s never been one before, and there may be more later if this works out.”

Kit shook his head. “What’s a Hesper?”

“It’s a made-up word,” Dairine said. “We don’t have an English equivalent to the word in the Speech. You know any of the old names for the Lone One before It fell?”

Kit thought a moment, hearing an echo of the word in an old memory. “Hesperus?” he said. “Is that in Greek mythology?”

“Yes and no,” Dairine said. “But you know.” She looked at Ronan, or rather, at his interior colleague. “‘The morning and the evening star,’ they used to call the Lone Power, before there was that disagreement at the beginning of things. Then the ‘star’ fell.”

“Phosphorus and Hesperus,” said Ronan. “The Greeks didn’t know the morning and evening stars were the same planet, so they had two different names. Some people started using ‘Hesperus’ as the name for the Lone One before It fell.”

Dairine nodded. “That’s the closest word we’ve got for what we’re looking for. What’s about to happen, is the emergence of a ‘bright’ version of the Lone Power.”

Kit’s mouth fell open. “Here?”

“Looks like,” Dairine said. “All we have to do now is figure out who it is, where it is, and how to help it.”

“But the Pullulus,” Kit said.

Dairine gave Kit an exasperated look. “Don’t you get it?” Dairine said. “That’s not even slightly important compared to this! I think the Powers are trying to tell us that doing the right thing about the Hesper will save the universe, too. The Hesper’s a lot more important … and we’ve got exactly one chance to get this right. If we do—”

She stood there and waved her hands in the air. Kit realized that he was seeing a historic thing happen: words had just failed Dairine.

The thought scared Kit almost worse than the Pullulus did.