Two more voices were raised then, in the Speech, quite suddenly; Doris’s and Aunt Annie’s, and their tone was astonishing. Nita almost burst out laughing at the sound of it, despite her terror, as the two of them scolded one of the Elements of the Universe as if it was an unruly child. They sounded as if they intended to send it to bed without supper. And though the effect might initially have been comical, if the two of them had anything, they had certainty. The Cup struggled, the blue light washed higher—then abruptly fell away again.
Nita sagged with relief. Dairine had calmed down from her bad moment, and was completing her end of the spell. Through the blinding images still in her mind, Nita could see Dairine look carefully at the metal mold resting on the floor, then crouch down and poke her finger most carefully at a spot in the air about a foot above it. She lowered the finger carefully to the mold, and said another word.
Fire followed her gesture. It paused in the spot where Dairine’s finger had first paused, and Nita smelled ozone as the tiny spark of plasma took shape at this end of the timeslide and destroyed the air molecules in the spot where it had arrived. That one pinpoint of light drowned out even the fire of the Treasures, and threw back shadows from everyone as stark as if they had been standing on the Moon. Then the light began to flow downwards in a narrow incandescent pencil-line, cooling rapidly out of the plasma state, into incandescent iron vapor and then a molten solid again, as Dairine let it pass out of the small magnetic-bottle part of the spell and down into the mold.
Slowly the mold filled, the steel of it smoking. All the air began to smell of burnt metal. Nita looked over at Dairine; she was turned into a white-and-black paper cutout by the ferocity of the light hanging a foot away from her nose, but she seemed not to be bothered by it. Nita could see her beginning to shake, though—even Dairine couldn’t hold a wizardry like this in place for long. Come on, Dari, Nita thought. Hang in there—
The mold kept filling. Nita could feel the Cup trying to get out of hand again, and her aunt and Doris holding it quiet by sheer skill in the Speech and calculated bad temper. Dairine was wobbling where she crouched, and put one hand behind her to steady her, and sat down on the floor, but never once took her eyes off that spot in the air where the plasma was emerging—her end of the timeslide. If it moved, if it got jostled—
Come on, come on—! Nita thought. How long can it take?! Oh please God, don’t let my sister get fried! Or the rest of us, she added hurriedly, as that possibility suddenly occurred to her. Come on, Dari, you’re the hot stuff right now, you can do it—!
The light very suddenly went out with a crack as normal atmosphere slammed back into the space where superheated air had been. Dairine fell over sideways. Everyone blinked in the sudden comparative darkness; nothing was left but the light of the Treasures, now looking very pale to their light-traumatized eyes.
One other light was left in the room, though. The steel mold was full of it; iron, still liquid and burning red, skinning over and going dark, like cooling lava. Just the sight of it unnerved Nita, and filled her with awe and delight. It somehow looked more definite and real than anything else in the area… anything else but Fragarach and the Cup.
Nita went over to help Dairine up. Her sister tried to stand, couldn’t, sagged against Nita.
“I told you it’d be okay,” she whispered. “And yeah, you’re right. I am hot stuff.” And she passed out.
“Here,” Johnny said from above Nita, and bent down to pick Dairine up. “I’ll put her in on the couch. She’s going to be out of it for a while. Biddy—”
Biddy was standing there looking at the mold, and shaking all over. Nita glanced at Kit, who had noticed this as well. He shook his head, said nothing.
“I think we’re going to have a late night,” Johnny said. “You’re all welcome to stay; we’ve got room for you. I think we should all take a break for an hour or so. Then—we’ve got a Spear to forge.”
He looked at Biddy. She was still trembling, as if with cold.
She looks worse than Dairine did, Kit said to Nita privately.
Nita glanced over at him. If she pulls her bit off that well, we’ll be in good shape.
If, Kit said. But why am I getting nervous all of a sudden?
Nita shook her head and went off to see about a drink of something, thinking as she went that she agreed with Kit. The problem was, wizards rarely got hunches that didn’t have meaning, sooner or later.
She had a feeling it would be sooner.
10: Lughnasád
Nita went and had a nap immediately. What she’d just seen had worn her out; and she’d been drawn on for general energy assistance during the spell, too, so it was only understandable that she would feel a little wiped afterwards.
When she got up, it was two in the morning. Everything was very still except for a faint clanging sound, soft and repetitive, that wouldn’t go away. She had an idea what it might be.
Nita got up off the ancient bed in the upstairs bedroom Johnny had shown her, and wandered down into the great hall. It was empty now: the spell diagram had been carefully scraped off, and the floor scrubbed. The clanging was closer.
She went softly out the front door of the hall and stood there, in the night, listening. Away on a nearby hill, a sheep went “baa.” There was a faint hint of light about the far northeastern horizon, an indication that the Sun was already thinking about coming up again, and would do so in a couple of hours. If it’s like this now, Nita thought, what must it be like around Midsummer? It must hardly even get dark at all...
The sound was coming from off to her left. She followed a little path around the edge of the castle toward where the drystone wall ran. The sound of water came chuckling softly up the riverbed beneath it, and the clanging continued, louder.
It was quite dark. She made a small wizard-light to help her go. It sprang out of the air by her, a tiny sharp silver spark, and lit her way down the rough stone steps that went down toward the water.
The clanging paused, then resumed again. Ahead of her was a small, low building with a rough doorway. There was no door in it, just an opening surrounded by stones. She paused there, and looked in.
The castle’s forge was larger than it seemed from outside in the dark. Biddy’s steel-walled portable forge had been carried in and set up on one side; her anvil stood in the middle of the floor, on a low stone table there. There was a stone trough, like a watering-trough for horses, off to one side, full of cold water that ran in and out from a channel to the river outside. Something else was there as well; the Ardagh Chalice, sitting all by itself on another stone sill to one side, shining. Its light was quiet at the moment, though it flickered ever so slightly in time with Biddy’s hammer blows, when the sparks flew up. Biddy kept hammering—not a simple single stroke, but a clang-tink, clang-tink, doubled with the rebound of the hammered ingot on the anvil; a sound like a heartbeat, but metallic. Biddy’s shirtsleeves were rolled up, and her shirt was soaked with sweat, and sweat stood out on her forehead. Johnny was leaning against a wall, watching; Kit was sitting on the edge of the trough, swinging his legs. He raised his eyebrows at Nita as she came in.
“I couldn’t sleep,” he said. “Even after I went home. So I came back. My folks think I’m still in bed...it’s not a problem.”
“What about Dairine?”
“I saw her home. If she needs to come back tomorrow, she can.”
“I don’t think we’ll be needing her any more at this point,” said Johnny. “Also I wouldn’t like to put all my eggs in one basket. Some of us might not come back from this intervention, and the newer talents like Dairine may be needed for other defenses elsewhere if we can’t pull this off.”
Nita came in close enough to see what Biddy was doing, while at the same time staying out of her way so as not to spoil her concentration. The bar of starsteel had been hammered out into a long flat rectangular tongue now. As she watched, Biddy paused and picked up the hot steel in her tongs, shoving it back into the furna
ce.
She turned up the feed to the propane bottle, and the steel began to glow cherry-red, and brighter. “When are you going to do it?” Biddy said to Johnny.
He sighed and leaned back. “I think we have to make our move tomorrow. May as well be: it’s Lughnasád. A good day for it.”
“But you can’t have the spells ready by then,” Biddy said to him. “You can’t possibly—”
“They’re ready enough,” Johnny said. “We can’t wait for the poetry of them to be perfect. It’s not the old days any more, unfortunately. Brute force and the Treasures are going to have to carry the day...or nothing.”
Biddy looked with a critical eye at the steel. It was getting crocus-yellow. She pulled it out hurriedly, put it back on the anvil and began beating it with the hammer in such a way that it folded over. Nita looked at the lines running up and down the length of the spearblank and realized that she had already done this many times. This would strengthen the metal and give it a better edge. “When does the ‘forging in the fierce spirit’ bit start?” Nita said.
Johnny laughed. “Oh, the re-ensoulment? As soon as Biddy’s done. We can’t wait any longer. Fortunately we don’t have to do what the Power that worked with her the first time did, and actually call that spirit out of timelessness. It’s here already, somewhere. All it needs is to be slipped into this ‘body.’”
“It seems strange, sometimes,” Kit said, leaning back and taking a drink out of a Coke he had with him. “The idea of weapons having souls...”
“Oh, it was common in the older days. It was a rare sword that wouldn’t tell you its history when you picked it up: and verbally, not just the way one would do it these days, to a wizard sensitive to such things. That may be our problem today...that our weapons don’t nag us any more, or tell us what they think of what we’re doing with them...just let themselves be used. But then they take their example from us. And bigger things than just people have lost their spirits, over time; planets, nations...”
Nita looked at him curiously. “Nations have souls?”
“With so much life concentrated in them, how not? You must have seen how certain images, personifications, keep recurring. All our countries have their own ‘hauntings,’ good and bad. The bad ones get more press, unfortunately.” He shifted against the stone of the wall. “But the good ones do keep resurfacing...”
Nita looked at the steel, cooling now on the anvil as Biddy rested for a moment. “How much more do you need to fold it?”
Biddy shook her head. “It’s had enough. There are maybe twenty thousand layers in there now, if I’ve done my figuring right.”
“It’s not the hardness of the steel itself that’s going to make it useful as a weapon,” Johnny said, “but you’re right; something useful should be beautiful, too....Let me know when you’re ready.”
“Not too long now,” Biddy said. She put the spear-blank in the fire one last time, and turned the gas right up. The length of metal got hotter and hotter, reaching that buttercup-yellow shade again and getting brighter still. She watched the color critically. “About seven hundred degrees,” Biddy said then. “That’s all it needs. Kit, you want to move out of the way.”
Kit hopped down and went sideways hurriedly as Biddy plucked the steel out of the fire and came past him. It was radiating such heat that Nita could feel it clear across the room by the door. But Biddy seemed not to mind it. To Nita’s surprise, Biddy headed, not to the water-trough, but straight for the Chalice. “Straight in,” Johnny said.
Nita opened her mouth to say, You’re nuts, that won’t fit in there! But Biddy, holding the length of metal by one end, eased it straight down into the water-light in the Cup—and in, and in, and in, far past the point where it should have come out the bottom of the Chalice, if the chalice had been any ordinary kind of vessel.
She held the metal there. A roar and a bubbling went up, and the light of the Chalice rose and fell; but none of its contents flowed over the edge, and finally the bubbling died away, and the roaring got quiet. Biddy pulled the metal up and out of it. It was dark again, almost a dark blue on its surface.
“So how exactly are we going to do this, Shaun?” Biddy said, as she laid the metal on the anvil again, and reached for a file.
“Well, all the Lone Power’s forays so far have been into our own world—twistings of our reality. We’re just a beachhead, of course; it’s Timeheart that’s really meant to be attacked, through us. It’s true, we have some limited advantage over the Lone One here, because we’re fighting on our own ground, so to speak. But we can’t hope to prosper if we stay merely on the defensive. We’ll take the fight over into the reality where the Lone One’s focused at the moment: one more central than ours. What happens there will affect what happens here.”
“And what will happen here?” Kit said.
Johnny shook his head. “There’s going to be a lot more trouble, and it can’t be avoided. We’ll move as fast as we can, try to finish the battle fast by forcing a fight with Balor immediately. I have a few ideas about how we can do that.” He laughed ruefully. “Unfortunately, the only way I can test those ideas is to try them. If they don’t work—” He shrugged.
“Then we’re no worse off than we were,” Nita said, “because the world looks like it’s going to pieces at the moment anyway.”
Johnny laughed softly. “The directness of the young. But you’re right.” He looked over at Biddy. “Let’s finish this first. We can’t do anything until it’s done.”
Biddy had been filing at the length of metal while they talked. The bar was now looking much more like a spearblade and less like a long flat piece of metal. The steel shone, even in that dim place where the only light was the coals in the forge and the camp-lantern on the shelf, and the Cup standing nearby. It glinted the way Fragarach did—as if it lay in sunshine that the rest of them couldn’t see.
Biddy kept working on it, with file and polishing wheel and cloth, and then after about twenty minutes held it up for them to see. “Sloppy but fast,” she said. Nita shook her head; she didn’t see anything sloppy about it. The flat of the blade gleamed, and the point of it looked deadly, a wicked needle.
“Okay,” Johnny said. “Let’s get it mounted. Then around dawn, we’ll finish the job.”
“Dawn will be fine. Then what?”
“Then this afternoon we go to war.”
“‘We?’” Nita said.
“They’ll be coming in this afternoon,” Johnny said. “Wizards on active assignment...some just along for the ride, but they live here, and they feel involved. And when everybody’s together, we go have us a fight.”
He headed off. Biddy was still standing by the anvil, looking at the head of the spear, her expression very still. She looked up, after a little while, to gaze over at Nita.
“Do you know what I’ve forged here?” she said.
Nita looked at the spearhead, and found that there were two answers to that question. One of them had something to do with Ronan, and the way he had run from her after she’d seen the Champion buried in him the other night. That answer was still partially obscure. But as for the other— The edge of the spearhead glinted in the low light, and Nita suddenly saw the way Johnny had written Biddy’s name in the circle, and the way it had seemed to cut off short—
“Your death,” Nita said: or rather the answer spoke itself.
Biddy folded her arms and leaned back against the stone wall of the forge. “I gave up making,” she said after a while. “At least, the kind of making I used to do once. Can you have any idea—” She shook her head, smiling a little: a hopeless look. “What it’s like to ensoul your consciousness in a mountain range while it’s still molten, and spend a century watching every crystal form?—and planning the long slides of strata, the way erosion wears at your work, even the scrape of glaciers. To be what you make...” Biddy sighed. “And to know what it’ll become. You can’t do that in one of these bodies. And I said I would do so no more, and that rather than ev
er do so again, I would give myself back to the One—”