They nodded.
"Go now."
The horses were brought for them, and they rode back to Nita's aunt's. The dual carriageway wasn't there, but they could recognize the Glen of the Downs as the Good People's horses left it swiftly behind them. The sea glinted before them with colours they had never seen before, under the Otherworld's sun, as they rode down the hill towards Kilquade; then the new colours faded, and there was nothing shining on the sea but mundane sunlight. The road faded into visibility around them at the end of Aunt Annie's drive.
"Go well," said the Amadaun as they dismounted, and their three horses faded away. "We can do no more for you. One Treasure from the land itself; one from the hand of the People; one from humankind. The fourth must come from elsewhere: from one of the Powers, or not at all."
"You say you're a Fool," Nita said. "Are you making a joke?"
"Always. But the jokes are always true. Beware," he said. "And the One go with you."
He faded away as well. They turned and headed down the drive, Kit carrying the sword across his hands and looking extremely nervous.
"You said things around here are getting weird?" he said to Nita.
She sighed. "Don't ask me for hints that they might get less weird," she said. "My money says things get worse yet."
8.
Cheárta Na Chill Pheadair
Kilpedder Forge
There it lay in the middle of the kitchen table, along with old Lotto tickets and a tea-stained copy of the Bray People, on top of the placemats, next to a plastic biscuit tray with nothing but crumbs left in it, and the milk jar and sugar bowl; Fragarach the Answerer, shining under the light that hung down from the ceiling. They sat around it, nursing their tea, and looking at it. It was hard to look at anything else. The cats sat up on the kitchen worktop, the way they did when waiting to be fed, and stared at it too, big-eyed.
"And that was it," Kit said to Nita's aunt. "They said we would have to come up with the fourth one ourselves, somehow."
"Did they give you any hints?" Aunt Annie said.
Nita shook her head. "Unless you caught something that I didn't, Ronan. I can't always understand the way people talk around here."
Ronan shook his head. "I heard what you heard, more's the pity. I was hoping they might come up with the Spear, too."
"You and me both," said Aunt Annie. She stretched, and slumped in her chair. Nita noticed how tired she looked, and felt sorry for her.
"Did you do the warding you were going to do?" she said.
Her aunt nodded. "The back office is ready for the Cup," she said. "Johnny went to help Doris with it; apparently it's more alive than they had expected, and it was causing them trouble. They should be here in a while. Anyway, when you're in the back of the house, be careful of the office door. I had to draw the spell pattern partway up the inside of it to miss the rug in there, and if you open the door, it'll break the circuit. Just reach in through the door if you need something."
They nodded. "Aunt Annie," Nita said, "I was going to ask you. Where does Biddy the farrier live?"
She tried to make it sound nonchalant, and had no idea whether she had succeeded. Her aunt looked at her a little curiously. "Just up the road in Kilpedder," she said. 'Next to the shop across the dual carriageway. She has her ordinary forge there. Why?"
Nita tried not to squirm. "I had a couple of questions I wanted to ask her," she said.
"About her forge," Kit said. "It's really great… I hadn't seen a portable one like that before."
"Oh. Well, it's getting close to teatime: you should be able to find her up there in a while - her work rarely keeps her out much later than this."
Nita became aware of a low buzzing, and looked around her. "Is that the oven-timer?" she said.
Aunt Annie looked bemused. "No, the oven's not on."
They looked at each other as the buzzing got louder. Some of the spoons on the table began to vibrate gently, moving along the table a little.
"Look at the Sword!" Kit said. "It's vibrating."
It was. The low humming sound that Nita had mistaken for the oven-timer was coming from it, and it was getting louder. "It sounds a little like feedback," she said.
A faint beep-beep sound came from outside. The Sword's hum got louder, and (Nita thought) more threatening. "Ohmigosh," her aunt said, "it's Doris and Johnny, and they've got the Cup!"
"Neat!" Kit said, and got up. "Let's go and see!"
"Wait a minute!" Aunt Annie said, sounding panic-stricken. "We don't have the place prepared to have two of the Treasures here at once! Put two of these things together without adequate preparation, and you're going to get something that makes atomic critical mass look like a wet firework!" She looked around hurriedly. "Crikey, I can't leave now! Kit, quick, take it and get out of here!"
He picked it up, rather nervously. It jumped and jittered in his hands, and the hum started to scale up into a howl. "Where?!"
"Anywhere! Somewhere far! More than fifty miles. I'll cover you for the overlays, just go!"
He looked at Nita. "Copernicus," he said, and muttered three words, and vanished.
The air went whoomfinto where he had been: not the usual explosion. Nita smiled slightly, considering that Kit had been as impressed by Johnny's expertise as she had.
Outside, car doors slammed. "Here, let me get that for you, Doris," Johnny's voice said.
They all went to the door. Johnny was pulling the glass sliding door aside. Behind him came Doris Smyth, holding something wrapped in a pastel-striped pillowcase. The something shone through the pillowcase as if it were on fire: a still, cool, changeless fire that nonetheless rippled and wavered on everything it touched, like the sun looked at from underwater. "Back office, Anne?" said Doris's voice, sounding strained but cheerful.
"Right. Don't open the door, just walk through it."
"Certainly. Johnny, you handle that; I have my hands full."
There was no room for them all, down that narrow hall. Nita and Ronan stood there and watched as the three older wizards walked down past the bookshelves and turned the corner, out of view. Except that they weren't entirely out of view at all; they were faintly visible in the reflected light from the Cup, even through the intervening walls. Nita shook her head.
"Don't do things like this at home, do you?" Ronan said.
She grinned at him and headed back into the kitchen. "Neither do you, buster. Not as a rule, anyway."
She went to fill the kettle for the next inevitable round of tea. "Where's Copernicus?" Ronan said.
"On the Moon. Southern hemisphere."
"The Moon?!"
Nita shrugged. "She said more than fifty miles. That should be enough." Then she looked at Ronan's face as she plugged the kettle in. "Haven't you been there?"
"To the Moon? No!"
"Why not? It's great." He opened his mouth, and Nita suddenly felt annoyed at herself. "The overlays, I guess. I'm sorry. Look, there have to be some places you can teleport from safely. If you can find one, and hop over and see us, we'll run the wizardry through for you, and show you around. It's no big deal."
"I'd like that," he said, and smiled slightly. It was a look Nita hadn't seen on him often; the chip off the shoulder for the moment, and just a touch of wistfulness. "It must be grand," he said, 'being where you don't have to be afraid to do all the wizardries you know can be done."
She laughed a little, and leaned against the worktop, waiting for the kettle to boil. "It has its downside - you wouldn't believe the trouble you can get into. Remind me to tell you about the shark who almost ate me…"
"Want a look?" Aunt Annie said, coming back into the kitchen, with Johnny and Doris behind her.
"Yeah!" Nita said. She headed down the hall, with Ronan behind her.
There was no need to do anything special. Walls meant nothing to the light of the Chalice - or rather the light of what was inside it. It was sitting on its pillowcase, the bowl of it half a meter across, the gold inlay on the outside
of the bowl, and in the spirals and curves that ran down its stem and massive foot, all burning as if molten and ready to flow off the Chalice at a moment's notice. The burning came from the blue-white light filling it, a light that was liquid and was still trembling slightly from having been moved. It shone through the metal as if it were glass, and through everything else it touched.
She looked at Ronan, and away again, shaking her head. Words seemed inadequate, and out of place. But at the same time she couldn't help noticing his expression, like that of someone struggling with a memory: and oddly, not trying to remember, but to forget. . .
Maybe he felt her eyes on him: he turned his gaze away from the Cup, and looked at her with a troubled expression. "Let's get together some time soon," he said. "I need to talk."
Nita suddenly found herself afraid to find out what he wanted to talk about. She nodded, and went away hurriedly, back down to the kitchen.
The three older wizards were sitting around the kitchen table, waiting for the teapot to finish brewing. "I have a message for you from the Queen," she said. Johnny looked at her questioningly, and Nita repeated the message.
He smiled very slightly, and it was a sad look. "She is asking," he said, "whether there is any hope that the world they have chosen to live in will ever come any closer to Timeheart. They love Ireland, make no mistake; but at the same time, they're of the Powers, and they long for Timeheart, where they were created. But the legends say they must stay in the world they have chosen until the One's Champion comes back with his Spear, and they lose the world of their desire." He shook his head. "A while yet, I think…"
"Do you want Kit back?" Nita said.
He passed a hand over his forehead, smoothing his hair back. "Where is he?"
"The Moon."
"That's all right, then. Wait a few minutes before you bring him back here. I can add a limiter to the binding on the Cup that'll make it at least safe for the Sword to be here with it. But the Sword will need its own binding."
Doris poured the tea out. "That's one less problem," she said. "Now if we just knew what to do about the Spear, we'd be fairly ready."
There was silence around the table at that, and some hopeless looks. “You couldn't find anything that would work?" Nita said, as Ronan came in and sat down again.
"My dear," said Doris, "we have the original Stone and the original Sword awake again. The Cup is not the original, but has ensouled very emphatically indeed. We dare not try to conjoin an inferior or weak Spear to them. They would blast it out of existence. The resouled Spear must be at least as strong as they - preferably much stronger. But we have no proper envelope. It is not strictly a change that a physicist would understand, but matter is not quite the robust stuff it was at the beginning of the world, when Creation as an art was young, and the energies of it dwelt new and hot in the nucleus of every atom. As gravity and other forces have declined over many millions of years, so has the basic - "selfness" - of matter. You see how the resouled Treasures make everything around them look somewhat shabby and poor. The souls in them are reminding the matter they embody how matter was then. It was much closer to being alive."
"But then the Spear's soul will remind the matter it's in. Won't it?"
"Not if the matter is simply unable to hold the soul long enough in one place for the change to take," Johnny said. "It'd be like trying to hold a burning coal in a Kleenex. The Spear's soul is the fiercest of them all. I had hoped I was wrong about this, but the research I've been doing over the past couple of days indicates that no spear on Earth would be strong enough now to contain the soul for long enough to do the trick: whether it had contained it before or not."
“Off the Earth, then," Nita said.
Johnny cocked his head. "It's a thought that occurred to me. But the changes in matter that have happened here have happened everywhere else, too. And we keep coming back to the problem," and he smoothed his hair back again,"that we don't have much time."
Ronan sighed and sat back. "It's a pity we can't just make a new one," he said.
Aunt Annie sighed too. “Even if we had uncontaminated matter from the beginning of time," she said, "we wouldn't have the expertise to do anything with it. I think we're just going to have to keep looking for some other kind of answer." She glanced over at Johnny and Doris. They nodded.
Nita got up. “I'll go and get Kit," she said. “Fifteen or twenty minutes be long enough?"
"Fine."
She looked at her aunt. She nodded. "The overlay buffer is still in place. Go ahead."
Nita said the transport spell quickly in her head, considering how much air she would need, doubling it as usual, and arranging the spell intake so that it would take the air from outside the house rather than inside - the memory of the last time she had done such a spell in her own house, without stopping to consider that her father's desk was covered with paperwork, was still much with her. She vanished.
She found Kit sitting on his favorite rock - a pumice boulder on which he had been using a sharp piece of granite to whittle the boulder into the crude likeness of a human face, for the bemusement of future lunar photographic surveys. The Sword was laid across his lap.
She climbed up beside him. "Johnny said he should be ready for you to come back in a little while."
"I don't want to go right back there," Kit said, turning the Sword over in his lap and looking at it. "Someone I want to have a talk with first."
"Biddy," Nita said.
Kit nodded. "Remember what the fox said to you," he said.
"Listen," Nita said. "You remember how you told me that you felt her forge was alive?" He nodded. Nita started to tell him what Doris had said about the relative 'liveness' of matter at the beginning of time.
He stopped her. "It's OK, I heard it. I used your ears."
She punched him. "Illegal brain-tapping! You didn't even ask me! What if you had overheard something I was thinking?"
"What, about Ronan?"
She blushed hot and punched him again, much harder, so that in the low gravity he fell sideways off the boulder and bounced a couple of times in the moondust. "Great," he said, as he got up and dusted himself off. "This stuff is all down my shirt. Now I'm going to itch all night."
"Serves you right. Eavesdropper!"
"Still," he said, and looked thoughtful. "He's sharp, your boyfriend Ronan. Why shouldn't they make another one?"
"Because they don't know how. Whaddaya mean, 'my boyfriend'?" She started heading around the rock to punch him again, far gone in embarrassment.
"Hmm," Kit said. "Neets, forget it, I'll lay off."
"Promises, promises."
"Look, let's go and see Biddy."
"What are we going to say to her?!"
He shook his head. " "Come out with your hands up"? I don't know. But if one of Them is here, They need to be giving us a hand. Do you know where we're going?"
"Yeah. I'll pass you the coordinates."
Nita pictured the place in her head - she had seen it often enough when riding past it on the farm's bike - and translated the image quickly into coordinates that could be plugged into a transport spell. "Got it," Kit said. "Just change that bit there. Got it? Go."
They made the jump. Air slid out and away from them, and they were standing not far from the far side of the dual carriageway, near the pub that stood there. It was getting dark.
"Over here," Nita said, and led the way over to the right, where a small group of whitewashed buildings stood near the Kilpedder shop. There was a low iron gate at the entrance to them, covered with ornate and graceful wrought-iron work; and a hanging sign on a nearby wall said B. o DALAIGH, I.F.A. Carefully and quietly Nita unlatched the gate and swung it inward. There were no lights showing in any of the buildings, though Biddy's truck was parked in front of one of them.
"Maybe she's gone out," Nita said.
Kit shook his head and went slowly to the truck, and put one hand up against the forge-box at the back. "Feel this," he said.
Nita laid her hand against it, and snatched it back with the shock. Life, for a wizard, is something that can be felt like the warmth from a radiator. This was not just a warmth, but a burning - and totally unlike the kind of low-level awareness that 'inanimate' objects normally manifested.
"I can't believe you didn't feel it the first tune," Kit said.
"Different specialties, different sensitivities," said Nita. "Besides, I never touched it. But look at that."
She nodded at Fragarach. The dusk was falling all around them, but it had no power over the Sword; Fragarach shone as if it lay out in full sunlight, though the waning Moon was high and the bats were out.
"It knows," Kit said. "Uncontaminated matter from the time of Creation", did they say?" He chuckled. "Let's see if we can find her."
He went off around one of the outbuildings. Nita leaned against the forge, and breathed out.
"Looking for somebody?" Biddy said from the shadows.
Nita jumped, then laughed a little nervously. Get a grip on yourself, she thought. Now what was the wording? She didn't move; just watched Biddy head over towards her. "Elder sister," Nita said, “in the One's name, honour and greeting."
"Now what do you mean by. . ." She stopped, as Kit came around the corner, with the Sword in his hand. It had been bright enough. Now, in her immediate presence, it blazed.
Biddy looked at it, and her face altered. Recognition, and affection, and surprise, all appeared in it. "Now I thought that had been put away somewhere safe," she said in her soft drawl.
"It was," Nita said. "But nothing much is going to be safe any more, unless it gets used."
"It knows you," Kit said. "I can feel that. It just about shouts that it knows you." There was an odd exultation in his face; Nita felt inclined to keep her distance for the moment. "And it knows your forge, there. I think maybe you made this." He hefted the Sword, but there was something in the gesture that also looked as if the Sword had moved itself, a small leap of excitement. "Or someone using the metal that's been built into that forge made this. Probably both."