Something had better be done.
If only I could find out what?
She headed back to the farm.
The next morning was the foxhunt. She missed the earliest part of the operation, having been reading late again that night, and chatting with Kit. He hadn't been able to throw much light on anything, except that he missed her. "Kit," she said, "I don't know how much more of this I can take."
"You can take it," he said. "I can take it too. I saw your parents the other day."
"How are they?"
"They're fine… they're going to call you tonight. They said they were going to give you a couple of days to get yourself acclimatized before they bothered you."
"Fine by me," Nita said. "I've had enough to keep me busy."
She had felt Kit nod, thirty-five hundred miles away. "So I see," he said. “I'd watch doing that too much, Neets."
"Hm?"
"I mean, it makes me twitch a little bit. You didn't do any specific wizardry, but with that result - makes you wonder what's going on over there."
"Yeah, well, it can't be that bad, Kit. Look, you come back as easily as you go. . ."
"I hope you do," he said.
The conversation had trailed off after that. It was odd how it was becoming almost uncomfortable to talk to Kit, because their conversation couldn't run in the same channels it usually did, the easy, predictable ones. For the first time, she was having things to tell him that he hadn't actually participated in. "How's Dairine?" she said.
"She's been busy with something… I don't know what. Something about somebody's galaxy."
"Oh no, not again," Nita said. "Sometimes I think she should be unlisted. She's never going to have any peace, at least not while she's in breakthrough… and maybe not later."
They chatted on a bit, and then it trailed off.
Nita was thinking about this in the morning as she got her breakfast. The kitchen was in havoc. A lot of the riders who were picking up their horses from the stable had come in for 'a quick cup of tea'. Nita was learning that there was no such thing in Ireland as a quick cup of tea. What you got was several cups of tea, taking no less than half an hour, during which whatever interesting local news there was was passed on. 'A quick cup of tea' might happen at any hour of the day or night, include any number of people, male or female, and always turned into a raging gossip session with hilarious laughter and recriminations. You could hear some terrific gossip if you hung around them, or so Nita was learning.
Finally the kitchen began to clear out a bit. The people who were in the hunt were splendidly dressed, all red coats and black caps and beige riding breeches and black shiny boots. They were discussing the course they would ride - a difficult one, from Calary Upper behind Great Sugarloaf, down through various farmers' lands, straight down to Newcastle. The thing that was bemusing them was that, suddenly, there were no reports of foxes anywhere. Nita smiled again to herself as she heard the discussion in the kitchen that morning. Everyone was excessively bemused about the situation. Some people blamed hunt protesters; others blamed the weather, crop dusting, sunspots, global warming, or overzealous shooting by local farmers. Nita grinned outright, and had another cup of tea. She was beginning to really like tea.
"Well, that's all we'll see of them," said Aunt Annie, pouring herself a cup as well and then flopping down in one of the kitchen chairs in thinly-disguised relief.
"I thought they were coming through here," Nita said.
"Oh, they will, but that's not until this afternoon."
"No foxes, huh?" Nita said, in great satisfaction.
"Not a one." Her aunt looked over at her and said, "Personally, I can't say that I'm exactly brokenhearted."
"Me neither," said Nita.
"Doesn't matter. They'll hunt to a drag - it's just an old fox skin, that leaves a scent for the dogs: they drag it along the ground. They'll have a good time."
Nita nodded and went back to her reading, half-thinking of going down to Bray again that afternoon, to see if Ronan or Majella were around. Then she talked herself out of it. She would put a towel down outside, and lie out in the sun, and pretend it was the beach. She missed the beaches back home: the water here was much too cold to swim in.
So that was what she did.
And so it was, about two-fifteen, that she heard the cry of the hounds. She got up and pulled a T-shirt on over her bathing suit, put the manual in the caravan, and went to lean on the fence by the back field and see what she could see. She almost missed the first horseman to go by, far away, about a half mile across the field, actually; thundering through the pasture, one horseman with a long rope dragging behind him, and something dragging at the end of the rope.
There was a long pause. And then the note of the hounds came belling up over the fields, followed by the hounds themselves, woofing, lolloping, yipping. Then, over the rise behind them, came a splendid pouring of horses of all kinds: chestnut, brown, dapple, black, galloping over the hill; and a horn going tarantara! And the riders, halloing and riding as best they could after the hounds.
It took them about a minute and a half to go by. There were about fifty people, all in their red jackets and their beige breeches and not-so-black boots. Then they were gone. The sounds of the hounds and the horses' hooves faded away over the next hill, south of the potato field, and were gone. Nita listened to the last cries fade out, then went back to lie in the sun.
The horses started coming back to the farm about three hours later. There was much talk of rides and falls and jumps and water barriers, and a lot of other stuff that Nita didn't particularly understand. But everyone seemed to have had a good time.
Nita was very glad that it had been able to happen without any foxes being ripped up.
Dinnertime that evening was replaced by a marathon 'little cup of tea', as the grooms from the stables got together with the stablemanager and the instructors. It was at least eleven-thirty or twelve before the last of them left, having been given wine and whiskey and everything else that Aunt Annie had.
Nita came back in from the caravan, having had enough of the horsy talk about eight, and helped her aunt do the washing-up, or at least rinse the dishes and put them in the dishwasher. “There's that done with for this year," said her aunt. She rolled her eyes at the ceiling. "The way they eat!"
"Yeah. You need anything else, Aunt Annie?"
"No, I think we're OK for the night. You ready to turn in?"
"I'm going to have a little walk first."
"OK. Just watch out for those holes in the pasture. It's a little torn up out there, what with our neighbor's cows."
"Right."
She got her jacket and went out into the evening. It was twelve-thirty by now, but it still wasn't fully dark; in fact it was beginning, in the northeast, to think about slowly brightening again. Nita cast an eye up at the sky. There was a canopy of thin cloud, enough to obscure all but the very brightest stars, and the occasional planet. Jupiter was high, and the moon.
She wandered out into the pasture, into the total dark and the quiet, and just stood there and listened. It was the first time she had really felt relaxed since she had come here. In the great quiet she heard birds crying, somewhere a long way away. It might have been a rookery. She had heard that creaky, cawing sound a couple of times now, when the rooks were settled down for the night and some late noise disturbed them.
She stood there under the stars, waiting for the silence to resume. It didn't resume. It got louder.
More rooks. Or no - what was that?
The hair stood straight up all over her as she heard the howl. There are no wolves in Ireland! she told herself. The wolfhounds had been bred specifically to deal with them, and there hadn't been wolves in Ireland since the late lyoos some time.
But that howl came shuddering out of the night, and several others behind it; followed by yips and barks. And hooves. She heard hooves: not many sets, but just one this time, a long way off. One rider, one horse, galloping. What
in the worlds. . .?
She strained to see in the moonlight. It was difficult to see; through this thin cloud, the moon was only at first quarter, and it was hard to see anything but a vague soft bloom of light over the cropland, black where it struck trees and hedgerows, the dimmest silver where it struck anything else. The sound got louder, the hooves; and the howls got louder too.
Hurriedly she said the first six words of a spell that had proved very handy to her in other times and places. It was a simple force-field spell, which made a sort of shell around the wizard who spoke it. Blows went sideways from it; physical force stopped at it and just slid off. One word would release it if she needed it - and she had a feeling she would.
In the dark, not too far away, she saw something moving. There were spells that would augment a wizard's vision, but she didn't have any of them prepared at the moment, and didn't have time to do any one of them from scratch. She didn't have her manual. She could just begin to see the faint silvering of moonlight on the big thing galloping towards her.
It was not a horse. No horse ever foaled was that tall. It went by a tree she knew the height of, at the edge of the field, and then by a fencepost that she knew was only two meters high. The top of the post came just below the creature's shoulder. A great, massive four-footed shape, sprinting towards her. Not a horse, not with those antlers, two meters across at least; not with that skull more than a meter long; belling, desperate, trumpeting, a sound like the night being torn edge to edge. She had seen its picture. It was an elk, but not like any elk that walked the Earth these days; the old Irish elk, extinct since the ice came down.
It went by her like a piece of storm, the breath like a blast of fog out of it as it went. It shook the ground as it ran, and its feet went deep into the soft pasture, spurning up great sods of grass. It flew on past and gave her never a look. Belling, on it went, with a great roar, a trumpeting like an elephant's. And behind it came the wolves.
They were not normal wolves. All the wolfhounds in Ireland could not have done anything about these. These were the wolves that had hunted the Irish elk when they still walked this part of the world. They were more than a meter high at the shoulder, easily; she saw them come past the fencepost too. They were rough-coated, their eyes huge and dark except when the Moon glinted on the head of one or another thrown up to howl as it ran. A faint mist of light clung to them that had nothing to do with the mist on the field, or the moonlight. Their teeth were longer than a normal wolfs; their feet were bigger, their claws were longer. Their tails were shorter, their heads were heavier and more brutish. They were dire-wolves, the wolves of the Stone Age or earlier, Canis lupus dims.
It suddenly occurred to Nita that there would be someone following behind this pack, as there had been this morning… that single set of hoofbeats, growing louder as the rider strove to break through into this world, behind his pack. And she didn't want to meet that rider.
The wolves tore towards her. There were about twenty of them. More than half of them held the main course that they had been running, on the elk's track: the rest saw or scented her, she had no idea which, and angled towards her. Nita said the sixth word of the spell, felt the shield wink into place around her. Hurriedly she said the first eighteen words of another spell she knew, one she was very reluctant to use; but she had no weapon-spell handy that was less dangerous, and frankly was more willing to see the wolves dead than herself. If they can be killed at all. Are they even real…?
She braced herself as best she could, and waited. The first wolf hit her shield - and didn't bounce; it knocked her down. Nita got a horrible glance of fangs trying desperately to break through to her -failing for the moment, failing. . .
In shock she fumbled for the last word of the killing spell; couldn't remember it. Those fangs knocked against the shield, right in front of her face, bending it in towards her. . .
That was when the hooves came down and broke the wolfs head, and kicked its body aside, and smashed its spine into the ground. There was an immediate flurry of other wolves fastening themselves to the great dark shape that was rearing above Nita, smashing at more of them with its hooves. It had bought her the second she needed; she remembered the nineteenth word. She said it.
The sound that followed was not one that she much enjoyed, but the spell worked, even though the shield hadn't. These creatures were flesh and blood enough that when you suddenly took all the cell membranes from between their cells, the result was quite effective. It rained blood briefly. Nita looked at another of the wolves near her, said the nineteenth word. It turned in mid-leap, and showered down in gore. She said the nineteenth word again, and again, and she kept saying it, having no weapon more merciful, until there was nothing near her but a sickly, black, wet patch in the field, gleaming dully in the moonlight… and the elk, the Irish elk, standing with its head down, panting, looking at her out of great, dumb, understanding eyes.
Nita let the shield spell go, staggered to her feet, and tottered over to the elk. Its flanks and shoulders were torn where the dire-wolves' teeth had met. Brother, she said in the Speech, let me see to those before you go.
Hurry, said the elk. The loss of the pack has slowed him. But he's coming.
He, Nita thought, and broke out in a cold sweat.
Fortunately there was plenty of blood around, blood being what you needed for almost all the healing spells. Nita had some experience with those. She called her manual to her and it came, hurriedly. She started turning pages, not worrying where the blood went that she was smeared with. "Here," she said, and began reading the quickest of the healing spells, a forced adhesion that caused the damaged tissue to at least hold together long enough for the knitting process to start. The spell was little more than wizardly superglue, but Nita was satisfied that the elk's body would be able to manage the rest of the business itself; the wounds weren't too serious.
It took about five minutes' recitation before the last of the wounds shut itself. The elk stood there shivering in all its limbs, as if expecting something to come after it out of the night. Nita was shivering too; the healer always partook of the suffering of the healed - that was part of the price paid.
Go now, she said. Get out of here!
The elk tossed its head and leapt away, galloping across the field. Nita stood there, panting, and wondering. 'Get out of here.' Where is 'here' any more? That broke through from 'sideways'.
She stood for a moment, listening. The sound of hoofbeats was fading: both the elk's, and whatever had been chasing it. She was relieved, though still concerned for the elk. The silence reasserted itself, deep and whole. The Moon came out from behind a cloud.
Nita looked up at it and sighed, then turned and Started making her way back to the farm. I'm going to have to do something about these clothes before the morning, she thought. I suppose the book has some washing spells… But she couldn't push the bigger problem out of her mind.
Without any spell done by me, something came through from 'sideways'. A lot of somethings.
We're in deep, deep trouble…
4.
Ath Na Sceire Enniskerry
It was at that point that Nita realized she needed expert help, and she needed it fast.
She pulled out her manual the next morning, and began going through it looking for the names and addresses of the local Senior Wizards. Addresses there were - there were four Seniors for Ireland, one of whom was on retirement leave, two of whom were on active assignment and hence not available for consultation, and one, the Area Advisory, who was located in a place called Castle Matrix. This impressed Nita, though not as much as it would have a couple of weeks before, when she had thought that probably half the people in Ireland lived in old castles. Now she hoped her business would take her that way… but you didn't go bothering the Area Advisory for a problem that you weren't yet sure couldn't be handled at a less central level.
She therefore concentrated on the addresses of wizards in the Bray and Grey stones area. There were ab
out forty of these, which surprised her -she had been expecting fewer. Usually wizards on active status are only about one percent of the population, though in some places it can run as high as ten.
She looked the list up and down in mild perplexity. There was a problem in this part of the world; people tended not to use street numbers unless they lived in a housing estate. Sometimes they didn't even have a street; so that you might see an address that said, 'Ballyvolan, Kilquade, County Wicklow' - and if you didn't know where Kilquade was, or what Ballyvolan was, or what road it was down, you were in trouble.
She sighed, ticked off a couple of names in Bray that did have street numbers. That done, she went to find Aunt Annie.
"Going out, are you?" her aunt said.
"Yeah. Aunt Annie, can you tell me where Boghall Road
is?"
"The Boghall Road
? That's, um, just off the back road between Greystones and Bray. What for?"
"Oh, I met somebody in one of the cafes in Bray and I thought I might go over that way and see if I could find them." This was not entirely a fib -the sound and feel of Ronan's lean, edged, angry humour had kept coming back to her for the past day or so. It was just that the two phrases had nothing to do with one another, and if Aunt Annie thought they did, well… that was just fine.
Her aunt said, "Here, let me draw you a map."
"Oh, thank you!" Nita said with considerable gratitude. Her aunt sat down and sketched her a thumbnail map, and said, "If you get off the forty-five bus here, at the top of Boghall, it's not a long walk to wherever you're going. That sound all right?"
"Fine, Aunt Annie… thanks."
"What time will you be back?"
"Not very late."
"All right. Call if you run into any problems. And take an umbrella or something: the weathermen have been predicting thundery showers."
"Will do." And she headed out.
At first she considered not walking - Kit's 'beam-me-up-Scotty' spell could occasionally be extremely useful. However, there was always the danger, when 'beaming' around unfamiliar territory, that you might turn up somewhere that had people in it.