The silence stretched and stretched as they went across the polished white floor. Nita didn’t turn her head, just looked at Kit out of the corner of her eye. She could just see him looking back at her, sidelong.
They’d actually made it to the third step down from the top of the plinth when the Lone One shouted after them, “Wait!”
Both of them paused, turned.
Esemeli was off Its throne and hurrying toward them. “You cannot leave me here like this!” It said.
“Watch us,” Kit said. He turned again.
“No, wait!!”
They both stood there and watched the Lone One come out into the sunlight.
It winced at it a little, but then it was bright after the shadows of the Naos. “Forget everything else,” It said. “Do you have any idea what it’s been like for me, being trapped here?” And It actually waved Its arms in the air in frustration. “The eternal boredom of it, here in the land of flying sheep and sweet-tempered people? I may exist mostly outside of Time, in the depths of eternity, but what happens here echoes there, and do you think I don’t experience what this is like? Tedium! The whole planet’s a playpen! There are no storms, there are no floods, no earthquakes, no disasters— Even eavesdropping on the dark sides of these people’s hearts isn’t any fun. They hardly have any dark sides! The most they manage is the spiritual equivalent of sitting in the shade! They don’t know how to hate each other. They’re not greedy, they’re not envious, they don’t get sick, they don’t die in pain! They’re not even accident-prone— there’s not so much as even a stubbed toe to enjoy some days! Damn eternally graceful, temperate, loving, goody-goody—”
For the first time, Nita saw an old idiom come true, as the Lone Power began to curse, and around It the shocked air literally turned blue with a haze of locally annihilated water atoms and oxygen broken down to ozone. Nita waved a hand in front of her face, rolling her eyes at the acrid sizzling stink. When It ran out of curses, which took a while, It glared at Nita and Kit and got ready to turn some of that anger on them— until It noticed their frowns and the slight in-unison body movement that suggested they were getting ready to turn their backs on it again. Then It dropped the anger and just got desperate. “Just help me get out of here!” It said. “I’ll tell you whatever you want to know about what to do—”
“Yeah, sure,” Kit said.
“I’ll do anything you like—”
“Hah! We’re supposed to take your word for that?”
“—promise you anything you like—”
“Promises!” Nita said, and sniffed. “I’ve heard it all before.”
“There’s no promise you wouldn’t break,” Kit said, bored and scornful. “No oath you could take—”
“Well,” Nita said softly, “actually, there’s one…”
The Lone One suddenly looked even more alarmed than It had before. Kit threw Nita a concerned glance. “What? Are you sure?
“We’ve heard It get wizards to swear this particular oath before, in shorter versions,” Nita said. “It’s at the very center of wizardry, embodied in all the Enactive modes of the Speech. Not even one of the Powers That Be would dare break it: They’re held by the stricture whether They’re renegade or not. It’s at the root of creation. Even the Wizard’s Oath is derived from it.”
The Lone Power’s expression was becoming more than merely alarmed: It looked suspicious. “Where have you been getting information like that?” Esemeli said.
Nita’s smile was grim. “You made me do a lot of research when my mother got sick,” Nita said. “A whole lot of reading in the manual. Do you think that after she was gone, I just gave that up? And since I started really working on it, I’ve been getting access to all kinds of information I didn’t know was there before. You have no idea what trouble you’ve made for yourself.”
There was a brief silence.
“So swear,” Nita said. “Come on, it’s not so hard. And I can only do this once: it’s not like you’re ever going to have to repeat yourself on my account. ‘I swear by the One to perform what I promise—’”
The Lone Power looked at her, stony-faced, silent. “You know,” It said after a few moments, “what you’re likely to be bringing down on yourself, at some later date, by making me do something—”
Nita folded her arms and looked at the Lone One. “Threats are a bad start for what’s going to happen now… ”
Esemeli glared at her.
“Won’t swear, huh?” Nita said. “No, I didn’t think so. You’ve just been yanking our chain this whole time.” She looked over at Kit. “I guess it’s true,” she said, with a sigh. “Evil can’t change. Or else,” she said, looking back at Esemeli, “you’re even more stuck than you say you are, you poor thing. Never mind. You just have a nice time sitting here in the shade for another aeon or three!”
She turned her back and started down the stairs again. Kit shrugged helplessly at the Lone Power, and turned to go after Nita.
“Wait!”
Nita didn’t stop.
“I’ll swear!”
Nita went down a couple more steps, a little more slowly, and then stopped and looked over her shoulder.
“Let’s hear it, then,” she said. “And don’t leave anything out.”
“I swear by the One,” Esemeli said, standing there in the sun and casting a longer and blacker shadow every moment, “to perform what I promise—”
“Fully and without any reservation,” Nita said, “nor with any mechanism or execution founded in the intention to deceive; to fully inform the wizards of all manner of things of which they inquire; to carry out this information at a speed and in a way best suited to these wizards’ desires and the achievement of their ends; and at the end of said achievement, to depart without doing any harm to them or any thing or person affiliated with them in whatever degree, and when the conditions of this swearing are discharged and acknowledged to have been discharged, to go peaceably again into my own place. And all this, by the Power of that One in Which all oaths and all intentions rest, inviting It on my abbroachment of this Oath to withdraw the gifts It allows me to enjoy, I swear—”
Phrase by phrase, scowling more and more blackly with every word, the Lone One recited the Binding Oath. It got as far as “any thing or person affiliated with them in whatever degree,” and then stopped, glaring at them, while its shadow boiled with half-seen nightmare shapes of fury. “Oh, come on, that could be construed as meaning your whole universe!!” It said.
Nita ignored Its shadow, kept her eyes on Esemeli’s face. “So it could,” Nita said. “And if you cooperate with us, there won’t be any need to take you to arbitration over it.”
“Assuming you survive that long,” the Lone One said, grinding Its teeth.
“Anything can happen,” Nita said. “And if you start trying to sabotage us after you’ve sworn this Oath, I wouldn’t make any bets on your longevity, either. You know what that last clause means. The only reason you’re here is because the One hasn’t yet seen fit to abolish you by withdrawing the energy It gave you at the very beginning of things. If you break this Oath—” Then she grinned. “Nah. You’re infinitely destructive but you’re not actively dumb. Come on, just get it over with! Stalling isn’t going to help you.”
Esemeli grimaced, and then started reciting again. When the Oath was finished, Nita nodded and said, “All right. That wasn’t so bad, was it?”
The Lone One said nothing. “Never mind,” Nita said. “Kit?”
“Right,” Kit said. “First question: Where is Druvah?”
“I don’t know.”
Kit gave Esemeli a skeptical look. “I mean it,” Esemeli said. “He used the energy I gave him to change his way of being. After the Choice, he bound himself into the world physically. Finding him is going to require making some preparations.”
“Then make them,” Nita said. “I want to hear all about them, of course, when they’ve been made, before we actually go looking. But don’t take too
long. We’re only here for another week or so, and after we get this sorted out, I want lots of time on the beach to relax with Quelt.”
The Lone One nodded in a surly way. “You’ll hear from me tomorrow dawn,” It said, then turned and slowly went back up the steps into the Naos, vanishing into the shadows.
Kit and Nita went down the stairs again, with Ponch following after, wagging his tail. At the bottom of the stairs, they paused briefly as Ponch hurled himself off into the flowery fields, jumping at the occasional fur-bat that flapped up, startled, out of the jijis flowers. “Weren’t you a little mean to It?” Kit said under his breath as they went after Ponch.
“After a whole week on the Planet of Nice,” Nita said, equally softly, “and come to think of it, a week without Dairine, I kind of wanted an excuse to get cranky about something.” She smiled slightly.
“Do you trust It?”
“Now? After It swore the Binding Oath? Sure.” She glanced at Kit out of the corner of her eye. “About ninety percent. I wouldn’t put it past Esemeli to keep trying to find a way out of what I made It swear. But at least the odds are on our side. And we’ve got to find out the truth about what’s going on around here. Druvah is definitely still here… and he’ll be able to tell us.”
They walked on a little ways. “So this turns out to be errantry after all,” Kit said.
Nita nodded. “Just not formally declared, nothing that the Powers officially sent us on.”
Kit shook his head. “But why not?” he said. “Why didn’t they just send us here and say, ‘There’s something wrong with this planet and we need you to fix it’?”
“Or,” Nita said, “why didn’t They just get in touch with Quelt and tell her what the problem was?” She picked up a small rock and threw it off into the flowers. One flower moved slightly in a sea of them as the rock came down, and then everything was still once more.
She and Kit sighed more or less in unison. No answers were going to be forthcoming. They were just going to have to get on with it. “It’s like Rhiow said, a while ago,” Nita muttered. The little black cat who was head of the New York gating team had been describing a pleasure trip when she’d routed outward through the Crossings and had wound up spending days there, helping them repair a recalcitrant worldgate. “Wizard’s holiday… ”
Kit grinned. The phrase meant a vacation or pleasure trip that rapidly turned into something else, usually involving errantry, but was still pleasant in a strange way, simply because of the change. “I don’t know why the Powers let us think we’re ever going to get a real vacation,” Kit said.
“Maybe They don’t get any, either,” Nita said, “and They think the situation’s normal.”
“If you’re right,” Kit said, “I feel sorry for Them.”
“So do I,” Nita said, “if I’m right. Meanwhile… ”
“Back to the house by the sea.”
***
“It’ll work,” Roshaun said.
In the darkness, they all knelt (or in Filif’s case, rooted) above the wizardry together. It lay glowing on the ground under the sassafras trees, now almost completely interwritten with the long, delicately curling characters of the Speech. “You’re sure?” Sker’ret said.
Roshaun nodded. “The final layout confirms it. Suck the matter out from underneath the tachocline, and you get a brief but big shift in the way the Sun handles its magnetic fields—for the tachocline is the dynamo for the star’s whole field. When you pull the matter out, the tachocline collapses back just a little and cools. The magnetic field drops off, and you get an artificial ‘quiet star’ period. All the other ‘inflamed’ areas have a chance to quiet down as a result. If you’re very careful with the calculations, you can get as much as a month of quiet time and derail the cycle entirely.”
He looked down at the wizardry and sighed. “The big problem remains, though. We must emplace the far end of the conduit, by hand, as it were, underneath the tachocline. We can’t just sink it in from above and pray. The height of the tachocline changes from hour to hour, even minute to minute. Put the conduit in too high, and take out too much material of too low a density, and nothing happens. Put it in too low, take out too much higher-density material, and then the star’s core, and the nuclear burning process, are affected.”
Everybody did their own version of shaking their heads emphatically. “We’ve got to get it right the first time,” Roshaun said. “Once the sunward side of the conduit is in place, the rest is easy. The far end will dump the matter out well beyond this solar system’s heliopause, out past—” He looked at Dairine. “What’s that last planet called?”
“Pluto.”
“But we can’t let the Sun end jump around,” Roshaun said. “Otherwise… ” He trailed off.
The others looked at one another, nodding or rustling or waving their eyes around. “We need rest now,” Sker’ret said then. “No point in trying to do a wizardry when you’re tired. It’s a recipe for failure.”
“I’ll be in my pup-tent,” Filif said. Then he looked up and around him at the night, with his berries. “No, I won’t,” he said. “If this might be my last night on a planet, I’m going to go root.” And he wandered off toward the rhododendron bed.
“I wish he wouldn’t put it quite that way,” Dairine muttered.
“Let him,” Sker’ret said. “I’m for my own pup-tent. When do we start, Roshaun?”
He looked at Dairine. “Three a.m. local time,” she said.
“You’ll call me?” Sker’ret said.
“No, you big dumb bug,” Dairine said, “of course we’ll let you sleep through it and do it all ourselves, and then let you go home to a promising clerical career.”
Sker’ret snickered at her, a sound that did Dairine’s heart good. He went trundling off on all those legs.
She sighed, stood up, and after a few moments followed him, though she didn’t go into the house but rather paused outside, by the steps to the back door. Over the lilac hedge that separated the Callahan property from that of the next-door neighbors, she could see the Moon through the leaves. She more or less ignored the tall dark shape, glittering slightly from the usual jeweled clothes, as he came to stand in front of her. But I can’t really ignore him, she thought. What if something goes wrong tonight?
Dairine looked up at Roshaun. “I owe you an apology,” she said.
“You owe me nothing.”
“Yeah, well,” Dairine said, “in that case I have a word or two for you, Mr. I’m Prince of Everything I Survey. ‘We wouldn’t want people looking at us?’ ‘It wouldn’t be permitted?’ You don’t have a neighbor within a thousand miles! The only reason your palace is there on the Burnt Side is so that no one has to live by you. Your people are scared to death of being without you. And scared to death of you. Aren’t they?”
Roshaun turned to look up at the Moon, and didn’t say anything.
“You’re all that stands between them and destruction,” Dairine said, “at least in the version of history that most of your people know. They’re terrified of what would happen without you. And you’ve let them get that way, haven’t you? It’s easier than going out the front door every now and then and explaining that you’re just like other people, just with a few extra talents that were given you for their good, too, not just yours. Wizardry is service! But your family seems to have it a little backward. And the people all over Wellakh bring you everything you want, you live nice comfortable lives, all that. But someday, when wizards are a little commoner on your planet—”
Roshaun looked at Dairine with some discomfort. “I don’t set family policy,” he said.
“You will someday,” Dairine said. “Someday you’ll be Beloved of the Sun Lord and all that other stuff that translates into king on Wellakh. And I hope you start letting your people look at you then, because otherwise, I think that as soon as they find a way to do without you, they will. It’s only a matter of time until technology catches up to what only wizardry can do now, in terms of
protecting your planet. And then where are you?”
Roshaun looked up at the Moon, and then, without much warning, sat down on the back step, half leaning on the scraggly climbing rosebush that went up the chimney. “Are you always so reticent?” he said.
Dairine blinked.
“I didn’t want to go on this excursus at first,” Roshaun said. “My mother said she thought I should. She wouldn’t say why. She discouraged me from coming back, even from using the pup-tent. I was angry about that. And then, a couple of days ago, a message came. My father has stepped down as Sun Lord. When I come back, I am king. For me, it starts now.”
He looked up at the Moon. “And it’s just as you say,” Roshaun said. “We’re— I found the Earth word, the… English word? Anyway, I looked it up. We’re pariahs. In people’s minds, we’ve become associated with the Burning. We’re its cure, but some people believe that maybe we were also its cause. They don’t dare live without us. They hate living with us. So they kill us when they can.” Roshaun shrugged. “It’s not easy, especially when the person they’re trying to assassinate is a wizard. But even wizards have to sleep. My father got tired of being the target; he’s been one for forty years. He resigned and it’s my turn now.”
Dairine’s knees felt weak under her. She had often enough had the Lone Power trying to kill her. She’d learned to cope with it. But having just people trying to kill you… that was something else entirely, and, strangely, it felt more awful. She sat down by Roshaun on the step and stared at the Moon so that she wouldn’t have to look at him.
“That’s why we have to fix your star,” Roshaun said.
“You’re not involved,” Dairine said. “Nobody’s expectations are looking over your shoulder, saying, ‘He had to do that. He didn’t do it just because it was the right thing.’”
There was a long silence. “It would be nice if we had one of those,” Roshaun said.
Dairine looked up, confused. “What?”
“That.” He gestured with his chin at the Moon.
“Yeah,” Dairine said. “We like it.”