“Of course he did. And you can guess who met him on the road. He doesn’t talk about it much. But what he has said is that the Lone One didn’t give him a lot of trouble. And though he’s all bluster and brag, our Penn, for some reason I believe him.” He picked up the bottle again, stared at the wet label. “Naturally he didn’t bring his mother back; when he came back he was like someone defeated in battle. Any return from Ordeal is a victory. But he didn’t see it that way.”
“I guess it might be,” Nita said after a moment’s thought, “that somebody who had that kind of introduction to wizardry might spend a lot of time later trying to find that first victory that was supposed to happen.”
“It very well could be,” Penn’s grandfather said. “I know little about what he actually does. That, too, might go back to his mother; she was usually very private about her practice in casual conversation. It was as if she felt that too much discussion of what she did might possibly attract certain others’ attention.”
Nita nodded. There were lots of wizards who felt it unwise or even unlucky to discuss with other wizards, let alone family and friends, what they did on errantry. Personal preference, she thought; I don’t know that it’s made a difference to me one way or the other . . .
The old man let out a long breath, and glanced around the room with the softened gaze of someone looking into another time. “She did a lot of work in here,” he said. “She’d have her version of a page of the Tao rolled out across this table like a drop cloth, a big display of maps and charts and satellite imagery. Half the world’s storms would go drifting across here while we tried to have supper around them, and Penn’s mama talked some of the worst ones out of what they were doing.”
“She was an aeromancer?” Nita said.
“She was.” His face twitched up in a gentler smile. “And with her being air, and Penn fire in his way, well, they fed on each other. He was in here a lot, afterward . . .”
After she died. “I have to tell you,” Nita said, “except for—some similar recent history—I don’t know what the Powers are thinking of by assigning us to him as mentors. He only listens to us about half the time.”
“That’s half the time better than the rest of us usually get with him. As I said, he doesn’t usually want to talk about his own practice much. But who are we to second-guess the Powers?”
Nita snickered. “Lately that’s my whole business day.”
The door to the kitchen flew open. “Come on, Juanita,” Penn said, “I’ve got the stuff I need. We’ve gotta get back. Work to do . . .” He went over to his grandfather and grabbed him by the head and kissed him on top of it: then dropped the glowing token on the table in front of him. “There, now you’ve seen it, satisfied?”
Penn’s grandfather peered at it. “If I say that I am, it could shatter your whole image of me.”
“Too true, Baba.”
“It’s smaller than I thought. They should have given you something bigger.”
“See that, Juanita! If I’d have gotten culled I’d never have heard the end of it. And when I don’t get culled, it’s still not good enough for him!”
Nita thought it smarter not to respond to this. Penn laughed and headed toward the kitchen door. “I’ll come back and see you when I’m famous, Baba. Better be nice to me then or it won’t happen twice.”
“If you don’t hurry up it won’t even happen once,” his grandfather growled. “The Powers might have plans for me, and don’t think I’ll keep Them waiting just because you might drop by.” Nita caught a flicker of a wry look from under his bushy dark brows: You see what I put up with.
“Respected elder,” Nita said, giving him a slight bow, “dai stihó . . .”
“Why are you bothering being nice to him?” Penn said, holding the door open and jerking his head impatiently for her to hurry. “He wouldn’t have bothered to do it to you.”
“’Course he wouldn’t,” Nita murmured with a last sidewise look at Penn’s grandfather, and brushed past Penn without a glance.
Dairine stood in the little spinney of sassafras trees at the far end of the Callahans’ backyard. The doorway to the place she wanted to go was hidden, but she knew that Nita had left the aschetic space commissioned and on standby. It was safe enough, after all; the portal proper was keyed to the personalities of Nita and the wizards she was working with, which naturally included Dairine.
It was evening, warm still after the day, with just a slight breeze moving in the trees around her. Nita was off working with Penn, and would be for a while. That suited Dairine perfectly. Right now, right here, she was going to be overstepping her bounds a little, and the last thing she wanted was to have Nita lecturing her.
She spoke the brief coded series of characters in the Speech, like a keypad combination, that popped open the portal to the aschetic space. Access to it was still private; Nita had re-booked it for her own use until the Invitational was over. Which is interesting, Dairine thought as she stepped through. I think she foresees a lot of trouble with Penn . . .
Foresight, of course: that was more and more the issue with Nita. Dairine was getting the idea that there were things Nita was afraid to see. She’d come downstairs some mornings lately with a very guarded expression on her face. Only Dairine, who had known her longer than anyone else, would’ve recognized it for what it was: dread. Nita had seen something that frightened her, and she wasn’t discussing it with anybody. And if I ask her, she’s going to deny it, Dairine thought. She’s afraid that even sharing information about what she’s seen might somehow change the future.
Dairine stood there on the endless, black-and-white checkerboard floor and shook her head. Of all the gifts she would’ve wanted nothing of, seeing the future badly, or even incompletely, would be chief among them. One of the things she’d always liked best about her big sister was that Nita knew how to make up her mind. She would make a choice, and then she would go for it, wholeheartedly. But that wasn’t happening so much anymore. Choice was beginning to frighten her. Or rather, she sees a whole bunch of choices in front of her and she doesn’t know which one will make things turn out the way she wants. And so she hesitates . . .
Like I’m doing now, Dairine thought, laughing softly at herself. She felt around in the malleable space to find the otherspace pocket where its controlling kernel was stored. A few moments later she was holding it. Dairine was nowhere near as expert with this as Nita was; Neets had had so much practice with it before their mom died. But she understood the general principles.
She turned the kernel over and over in her hands, pulled out its recent history strand, which Nita had thoughtfully tagged with the image of a clock, and ran her fingers down its nodes until she found the settings for her last session in there with Penn. Dairine squeezed the node, and Penn’s spell spread itself out across the floor.
She looked it over with satisfaction as she noted that Nita had instructed this display of the spell to sync itself with Penn’s most recent version, the edited and cleaned-up wizardry that he’d presented at the Cull. It was much neater now, much more concise than the original work, but there were still things about it that bothered her.
Dairine stood there in silence, then started walking around the spell, letting it sink in. This kind of analysis was something she’d been working on with Nelaid. What frustrated her at such times, though, was how easy he made it look.
And Roshaun had been even better at it. The easy fluency of the way he handled fire, that sense that he and his element were one and understood each other intimately—Dairine wondered rather desperately if she was ever going to have that. In fact, she thought, let’s be honest with ourselves here, shall we? I will never be as good as he is.
Anyway, there was so much more to the way Roshaun had been than mere expertise. Courage, she thought. In her mind, Dairine saw again that terrible abyss of fire over which she and Filif and Sker’ret and Roshaun had hung, all the while knowing that they might die doing what they were trying to do—ti
nkering with the insides of a living star to keep it from flaring and destroying half the life on Earth. But it was a death that would’ve been over in the blink of an eye. One moment they’d have been breathing, and in the next, they’d all have been sitting in Timeheart, wondering what they’d got wrong.
Roshaun, though, hadn’t been content to sit tight and let death come to him. He’d walked down willingly into that danger, barely shielded, as calmly as someone going downstairs in the middle of the night for a drink of water. And Dairine had seen the look in his eyes before he went—and had known why he did it. It was almost too much of a burden to bear: the passage of time made it harder, not easier.
She shook her head. Not the time to be thinking about that . . . Right now the issue was Penn’s spell. Something about it had been bothering her since she had first laid eyes on it. Something that I’m missing. It wasn’t strictly structural, or at least she didn’t think so. But she was having trouble identifying what was wrong, and part of the difficulty was in the way Penn diagrammed his spells. He just keeps leaving these big messy blanks all over them . . .
Dairine stood still again, staring down. Big messy blanks, she thought. Life seems full of those lately. The big messy blank left where her mother had been. The big messy blank left where Roshaun had been. One of them, at least, she might be able to do something about. If only she could handle these damn blank spots . . .
It’s not a blank space, Mehrnaz’s voice suddenly said in memory. It’s a lacuna.
Dairine laughed under her breath. See, there’s another one.
Except . . .
No. Just a coincidence.
But still . . . There are no coincidences.
Dairine held still. It’s a legacy structure, Penn had said in his presentation. And Dairine remembered thinking, I wonder, does Thahit have one of those?
Spot, she said.
He was in the house, but that wasn’t a problem where communication between them was concerned. Need something?
Can you do me a favor? I need the diagrams for the underlying spell suite for Thahit’s solar simulator.
Kind of complicated, that, Spot said. Might take an hour or so to process it down. The simulator itself incorporates something like six or seven hundred smaller spells, after all—
Okay, Dairine said, maybe that’s not what I need. I want you to look for any sign of structures that might’ve been left over or held over from previous versions of the simulator, or previous versions of the individual spells. Stuff that’s been tagged to be saved on purpose. Can you do that?
No problem, Spot said. Leave it with me for a while.
Hours?
More like minutes. Scanning for something specific will take a lot less time than porting in the entire suite.
Fine.
Dairine resumed walking around the spell, continuing to take it in. She got sufficiently lost in it that it startled her somewhat when Spot spoke to her far sooner than she’d expected. I have three such incidences, he said.
Really! Dairine said. Lay them out for me.
Overlaid, or separately?
Separately.
Off to one side, beyond Penn’s spell circle, three smaller circles appeared. Dairine went to look at them and found that each one was densely interwritten with the Speech, as she’d expected. But each had a space in it that had once been left open. In all three circles, however, the space was now filled.
So Thahit doesn’t have this feature now, she thought. But it did once. The only problem is . . . what are these for? The Speech-writing itself gave no clue. It merely seemed to indicate that these would be useful as the container for some unspecified energy.
Dairine stood there and scowled in frustration at one of the circles. Great, she thought. Another dead end. She examined the other two circles, but the result was the same. This is some kind of safety valve, probably, in case of abnormal energy fluctuations: a place to store an overload until it can be safely released. The encapsulations would serve the same purpose as when someone dredged a stream or watercourse to make sure that, even in flood conditions, it would never burst its banks. Dairine sighed heavily. Whatever the answer she was looking for might be, this wasn’t it. She walked away.
On a sudden urge she again turned the kernel over in her hands and felt around for another node in its recent history. Finding it, she gave it a squeeze, and that ravening, deadly sea of fire that Nita had made for Penn spread itself away to the edges of visible existence, swimming with sunspots, prominence-lashed: the naked Sun, deadly, beautiful, the anchor and source of all life in the System. I used to think it was going to be easy to master you, she thought. Now I know it’s going to take a long time . . . if I ever manage it at all.
She sighed, squeezed the node again. The Sun went out, leaving her looking dully at the spell diagrams. Oh, Ro, she thought, and simply stood there and ached. Her eyes burned with missing him.
Not that it helped in the slightest.
. . . Shall I get rid of these? Spot said after a few moments.
Dairine shrugged. No, store them, she said. I might need them for something later, and I’m still curious about who left them in place. I can always ask Nelaid about it when I see him next.
She put the space’s kernel back in its storage pocket and then stood for a few more seconds staring down at Penn’s spell. I hate this guy, Dairine thought. Because even when he’s screwing up, he’s better than I am. Even though I’m trying and he’s not.
And there’s not a damn thing I can do about it. It’s like it was with Roshaun. It was an astonishingly bitter realization for someone whose motto had always been I can do that.
Slowly Dairine walked away toward the portal, stepped through, and waved it closed behind her.
Nita dreamed.
She was upstairs in the shopping center a couple of towns over, on the food-court level, strolling slowly around the big circle of it and smelling the sweet-and-sour of Chinese food and the beany scent of burritos and the aroma of frying fat. Bright-colored plastic chairs and tables were scattered around, littered with empty trays and crumpled fast food containers and tipped-over paper cups; the garbage bins placed here and there among them were mostly overflowing. “What a mess,” Nita murmured, looking idly around to see if there were any cleanup staff working on the situation. But the place was empty except for her and the one walking next to her, in step, easy and casual.
It was Roshaun. And in the dream, this was nothing unusual. She saw him as Dairine had described him when he last visited here with her and Sker’ret and Filif: ridiculously tall, the long, long blond hair that made him look like an animated character or movie elf hanging down before and behind, the golden eyes narrowed in amusement at the plebeian surroundings, hands shoved deep in the pockets of the Earth clothing he was wearing as a disguise—jeans and an oversize floppy T-shirt that said FERMILAB MUON COLLIDER SLO-PITCH SOFTBALL.
“Yes,” he said, “dreadfully untidy. The servants should be disciplined without delay.” And his gaze slid sideways to meet hers. There was only one problem with that. The mind looking out of those eyes at her was not Roshaun’s.
“Oh, no,” Nita said. “Not you again.”
“But we’re such old associates!” the Lone Power said. It looked at her sideways again through Roshaun’s eyes. “And you’ve done so much for me!”
“If by that you mean I helped give you a chance to be something different,” Nita said, “and that since then I’ve stood in your way a bunch of times when you wanted to keep screwing things up the old-fashioned way, then yeah, I have done a lot for you. You’d think you might show some gratitude.”
“But I am!” said the Lone One. “I’m helping you right now.”
“The only thing you’re doing now, as far as I can tell, is slowing me down. Or making fun of something I’ve got on my mind.” She gave him a pointed look, glancing up and down the long, lean shape of the (more or less) late King of Wellakh, and turned away with an annoyed breath.
/> “Well, you must know that that’s a fool’s errand,” said the Lone Power. “Surely you know you have other things to be looking for right now. Much more important things. I can’t imagine why you’re wasting your time searching for the hopelessly lost when you want to be concentrating on keeping someone much closer to home from getting lost in the first place.”
The images flashed before Nita’s mind again: Carmela shaking with terror, stammering with fear of something that was about to happen. Kit, looking for her, finding her, and then suddenly and terribly falling down into darkness. And Nita shivered all over, because this was so peculiar. A dream within a dream . . . When the levels nest this deep, how will you know when you wake up? How will you know the difference between the vision and reality? And what happens when you can’t tell anymore? What are you then? There’s a word for that, and it’s not “visionary” . . .
“Yes,” said the Lone One. “Such a common problem for people with a specialty like yours. They lose their way. They get overconfident, and go wandering off among the paths of vision one time too many, and after that they never come out.” It wore an amused smile that was a parody of expressions Nita had seen Roshaun wear.
“I wouldn’t say that overconfidence is the problem here,” Nita muttered.
“Well, no,” the Lone One said, “because you do keep changing specialties, don’t you? Can’t seem to make up your mind. Try one thing . . . can’t make it work . . . try something else. You seem unable to settle.”
“Can this not be about me for the time being?” Nita said. “I’m trying hard to be useful to somebody else here.”
“Yet the visionary who fails to include herself as a point of reference in her vision can’t possibly see clearly or effectively,” the Lone Power said. “There is no seeing without the one who sees. And if the medium through which one sees is clouded, all the visions will be clouded, too. If the medium’s left clouded on purpose, the question then becomes what good you’re going to be to anybody.”