The wizards began moving out. “It was a lot brighter the last time we were here,” Nita said to Kit, thinking of Sugarloaf.
He nodded. “They’re under attack.” And we will be too, she heard him think, but not say out loud for fear of unnerving her. Nita laughed softly; she could hardly be much more unnerved than she was at the moment.
Off to one side, Nita caught sight of Aunt Annie, carrying Fragarach. Some ways ahead of them, too, they saw Doris Smyth with the Cup, still in its pillowcase. Nita and Kit passed her, and Nita couldn’t help looking at the striped pillowcase quizzically. Doris caught the look and smiled. “Can’t have it getting scratched,” she said. “They’d ask questions when we bring it back.”
Nita laughed and turned to say something to Kit, and stopped. Ahead of them she saw Ronan, stalking along in his black jeans and boots and leathers, carrying what looked like a pole wrapped in canvas. Except that she knew perfectly well that it wasn’t a pole, since she got the clear feeling that from inside the wrappings, something was looking at her hard. I think he’ll stop fighting it, Johnny had said. “…Come on,” she said to Kit.
The two of them made their way over to Ronan. “You okay?” Nita said.
Ronan looked at her. “What a daft question. Why shouldn’t I be okay?”
“The, uh—” Nita almost didn’t like to say its name in front of it. “Your friend there. Don’t you have trouble carrying it? Johnny was having a real hard time.”
“No. Should I? Is the wrapping coming undone?”
“Oh no,” Nita said. “Never mind...” But she remembered what Johnny had said about burdens, and cardinal virtues. Either Ronan was just not very sensitive… But no. It couldn’t be that. She particularly noticed, though, a slightly glazed look in Ronan’s eyes, an abstracted expression, as if he was seeing something different from what the rest of them were seeing. Could the Spear make it easier for the person it wanted to carry it, by dulling or numbing their own sense of it?
Or was it something else?...
Nita shook her head, having no way to work out what was going on, and went on with Kit and all the others through the silvery twilight. This seemed to get a little less gloomy as they went on, though Nita suspected this was just because she was getting used to it. Then the darkness seemed to increase suddenly, and a shadow passed over them. Nita’s head jerked up. Something big and winged went by, cawing harshly, as the wizards passed through the space between two tongues of forest.
The bird came to rest on one of the tallest of the trees, and looked down at them. The tree shuddered, and all its leaves fell off it on the spot. The crow laughed harshly. It was one of the grey-backed ones called hoodie-crows; Nita had seen her aunt shoot at them, and swear when she missed, since hoodies attacked lambs during the lambing season, killing them by pecking their eyes out and going straight through their skulls. There was muttering among the crowd as they looked at the crow.
Johnny, up near the front of the group, called, “Well, Scaldcrow? Smell a battle, do you?”
“Have I ever failed to?” said the scratchy, cawing voice; and it was a woman’s voice as well, and a nasty one, rich with wicked humor over some private joke. “I see it all red; a fierce, tempestuous fight, and great are its signs; destruction of life, the shattering of shields; wetting of sword-edge, strife and slaughter, the rumbling of war-chariots! Go on then, and let there be sweet bloodshed and the clashing of arms, the sating of ravens, the feeding of crows!” And she laughed again.
“Yes, you’d like that part,” Johnny said, not sounding particularly impressed. “The rumbling of chariots, indeed! You’ve been picking up road-kills by the motorway again, Great Queen.”
“Go your ways,” Doris said, beside Johnny. “There’ll be a battle right enough. But we’ll need you at the end, so don’t go far.”
The crow looked down at them, and the light of the Cup caught in her eyes. She was quiet for a moment, then laughed harshly, and vaulted up out of the tree, flapping off eastward. “I’ll tell him you said so,” she said, laughing still, and vanished into the mist.
Nita looked over at Ronan. “Now who was that?”
“It’s just the Morrigan,” he said.
Nita blanched. “Just!” said Kit. Apparently he had been researching matters in the manual as well. But Ronan just shrugged again.
“She’s in a lot of the old stories,” he said, “the chief of the battle-goddesses; always getting off on stirring up troubles and wars.” Nita shivered a little: she saw something more than the recitation of myth in Ronan’s eyes. That dazzled look was about him again, but it was an expression of memory this time. He knew the Morrigan personally, or something looking through his eyes did… “But she can be good, too. She’s one of the Powers that can go either way without warning.”
“Well, she doesn’t look real friendly at the moment,” Kit said. “I’d just as soon she stayed out of this.”
They walked on. Distances seemed oddly telescoped here. The landmarks were the same as they were in the real world, and Nita was seeing already things that had taken them half an hour to reach in the car. She was just pointing Three Rock Mountain out to Kit when they heard the first shouts of surprise from the wizards in front; and then the first wave of the Fomori hit them.
They ran out at the wizards, screaming, from the shelter of the trees. Nita and Kit, being well off to one side and their view not blocked, had a chance to look the situation over before it got totally incomprehensible. There were a lot of the same kind of drow that they had seen in Bray; some of them were riding black horselike creatures, but fanged like tigers. There were strange headless humanoid creatures with eyes in their chests, and scaly wormlike beasts that flowed along the ground but were a hundred times the size of any snake. That much Nita could make out before the front line of the Fomori smashed in among the leading wizards, and battle broke out.
The wizards counterattacked; spells were shouted, weapons alive with wizard-light struck. And the fight started to be a very uneven one, so much so that Nita was surprised by it. The drows, at least, had seemed much stronger in her own world. But here they went down fairly quickly under the onslaught of the wizards; many of those not directly attacked turned and ran away wailing into the woods, and some of those who had been resisted simply fell down dead after a simple stunning-spell or in the backlash of a stasis or rebound wizardry.
“It’s got to be just a feint,” said Kit, shaking his head in disbelief. “That can’t be the best they’ve got.”
“I hope you’re right,” Nita muttered.
“Oh, no,” Kit said softly. “Not already.”
She looked where he was looking. Off to their left a young woman was lying, loose-limbed and pale, like a broken doll thrown down. There were several drows lying in pieces by her, but it was no consolation, seeing they were spattered with that shade of red so bright even in this dim light that it looked fake. Nita shuddered, for experience had shown her over time that that “fake look” was a sure sign it was the real thing.
“Two more over that way,” Kit muttered. “I thought there was supposed to be safety in numbers, Neets.”
She shook her head. Two other wizards had gone over to check the young woman: now one of them came back to Johnny, shaking her head.
“They’ll have to be left here for now,” he said. “We’ll see to them later...we can’t wait. Come on.”
There were a few moments of confusion while the wizards got themselves back in order. Then they headed out again.
“It’s getting darker,” Kit said, looking ahead. “Is that where we’re supposed to be going? Downhill there?”
“I think so.”
“Great,” Kit said. “By the time we get down there, we won’t be able to see anything.”
That thought had occurred to Nita; it was getting hard enough to see their footing as it was, and since there were no roads here, this was a problem. She had made a small wizard-light to bob along in front of her, like an usher’s fla
shlight in a movie theater, to help her see where to put her feet. Meanwhile, she might not be armed with anything concrete, but she had the spell ready that she had used on the drows in Bray. It hadn’t functioned too well there, but here, to judge by the reactions of the drows to the wizardries used against them in the little skirmish just past, it would work just fine. “You got anything ready to hit things with?” Nita said to Kit.
He looked sideways at her and smiled very slightly. “Well,” he said. “There’s always the beam-me-up spell. If you just leave the locus specification for the far end of the spell blank—or if you specify somewhere, say, out in deep space—”
Nita shuddered. “Yecch.”
Kit shrugged. “Better them than me.”
The crowd was heading downhill now, on a path paralleling the way the road would have run in the real world, down onto the little twisty ridge of Kilmolin and then further down into Enniskerry village. As they came down there seemed to be some confusion among the front ranks; they were milling around, and the wizards behind were pushing up close behind them.
“Hmf,” said the wizard in the leather jacket, as they came up abreast of him among some others. “Not the best of positions. Look at that.” He pointed down the valley. “All strung out like this, if anything should come at us from the sides, it’d break us in two. No, he’s doing the right thing, gathering us together. That way if anything happens—”
And then it did happen. The Fomori forces came down out of the trees again, from both sides and in great crowds, hitting the group of wizards in the middle. From where Nita and Kit stood, they could see the crowd being shoved together, in danger of being pinched apart into two groups that couldn’t help each other. The fighting broke out in earnest now; flashes of wizard-fire repeating back, a low sound of angry and startled cries beginning to ricochet up the valley. “Here we go,” said the young wizard, and he was gone, off down into the press.
Nita looked at Kit and said, “Should we hold off—wait till it gets at us?” And then of course it was at them, as another attacking force hit the group up on the hill from both sides, and everything went crazy.
Nita had a great deal of difficulty remembering the fighting later. The one thing she did remember, rather to her horror, was that she enjoyed it a great deal. It helped a lot, knowing you were on the right side; though several times she wondered, as a drow or one of those black tiger-horse-looking things came at her, whether they knew that they were on the wrong side, and whether it affected them much. It didn’t seem to. Everything turned into a wild confusion of waving arms and hands, shouting, being jostled and bumped. That was the worst of it, really; you could never tell what was going to bump into you, friend or enemy, and it kept you from reacting as quickly to enemies as you might—or else you accidentally hit a friend. Several times Nita was aware of not-so-accidentally elbowing other wizards, just in case they were something that was about to attack her; better to throw them a little off balance than to take the chance—and then of course you were embarrassed afterwards. She did it to Kit once, knocking him right over, and was mortified.
The other problem was the screaming. At the time it didn’t bother Nita particularly; later on she found herself wondering whether there was something to the claim that people got inured to violence by watching too much TV. Everything seemed remote, like something in the crowd scene from a movie. Nita remembered one moment with particular clarity, of seeing a drow come at her, and saying the spell that had not worked in Main Street in Bray, and seeing the spell then work entirely too well as the thing exploded in fragments and splinters of stone that bled hot, and splattered her with ichor that burnt like drops of lava. Her wizard’s shield took most of it, but a few drops got through, probably because she was distracted, and burnt right through her clothes to the skin.
She wasn’t able to keep track of what Kit was doing; but for those strange few minutes, she didn’t really care. She had her hands full. The screaming from all sides got louder, as beasts of the Fomor kind came at wizards to savage them, sometimes missing, sometimes succeeding. That was when it really came home to Nita that all of this was entirely too real. One wizard went by her staggering and white-faced with shock and blood loss, one arm so badly torn that it seemed to be just barely hanging by a string from his shoulder. Another wizard, a young woman in jeans and a sweatshirt, hurried to help, and carried him away. This was not a movie. People were getting killed here.
And what happens then? Nita thought, in one lull when the fighting seemed to be happening somewhere else, and she had lost sight of Kit. What happens if you die when you’re not in the real world? Where does your soul go? Does it know where to go when you die? But it seemed unwise to push that issue too far.
After a long while, there came another lull. Nita looked down the hill and saw nothing but human wizards, milling around; there seemed to be no more drows, no more of the horse-things; just quiet. A lot of wizards, maybe ten percent of the whole group, had been hurt, and were sitting or lying down on the ground while others tended to them. She didn’t feel so wonderful herself; she sat down to rest on a log under the eaves of the forest, gasping for air.
After a while, Kit found her. His clothes were spattered with burn-holes, apparently from the drows’ hot lava-blood, and he was limping as he came toward her. Nita staggered to her feet at the sight of him; but he shook his head and waved at her. “No, it’s okay. I just turned it.”
“Well, c’mere, you can’t just walk on it like that, it’ll get worse. You won’t be able to run anywhere if you have to.”
He sat down on the log beside her. “Your specialty.”
She nodded; she had always had a knack for the fixing and healing spells for either animate or inanimate objects. Spells for the living always required blood, but there was no shortage of that; Nita had bashed herself pretty thoroughly against one drow that had caught hold of her, getting loose. Now the memory made her shiver: but at the time it had seemed simply an annoyance, and had made her angrier. She had blown that drow up while it was still holding her—
Nita shook her head and set to work. She spent five minutes or so working on Kit’s leg. It was a strained tendon, and she talked it out of the strain and gave it the equivalent of several days’ rest in several minutes. The spell seemed to come harder to her than usual, though, and at the end of it Nita was panting even harder than she had been from the sheer exertion of the battle. “It’s not right,” she said to Kit when she got her breath back. “It shouldn’t take that much energy.”
Kit was looking vaguely gloomy. “I think that’s the catch,” he said. “Wizardry works better here, but it takes more out of us—we can do less of it.” He shook his head. “We’d better get this over with fast. In a few hours we won’t be worth much.”
Nita was too nervous to sit there much longer: she got up and dusted herself off. “Have you seen my aunt?”
“She was down in front with Johnny, last I saw her. That was before the fighting started, though.”
“Tualha, you any good at finding people? There’s quite a crowd down there.”
“In this case it won’t be hard. I should look for Fragarach’s light, or the Cup’s.”
It was as good a hint as any. After about twenty minutes’ walking they found Aunt Annie, and Tualha had been right; she was with Doris Smyth, and it was the blue-green fire of the Cup that gave their presence away. Doris was working with one of the more seriously wounded people. Two of the larger and more muscular wizards were easing a young woman with a torn leg down into the Cup. She seemed no smaller than she should have been, and the Cup seemed no larger; but nevertheless the woman was lost from the waist down in that cool light, and a few moments later, when the other wizards helped her to her feet again, the leg was whole.
Doris was looking wobbly. “I’ll not be doing much more of this,” she said to Nita’s aunt. “The Cup’s able enough for it, but it’s just a tool; it can’t work by itself without someone to tell it what to do. And no
r I nor anyone else will be able to keep doing this again and again—not here. Not today.” She looked over at Nita and Kit as if seeing them there for the first time, and her face was very distressed. “Away with you out of here,” she said, “you shouldn’t be seeing things like this at your age.” And she turned her attention away to another hurt wizard who was being brought over.