Kit followed, also examining it. He was seriously impressed by the way the many, many sentences in the Speech interwove to produce the result. The mochteroof was woven all around a wizardly “virtual copy” of the Yaldiv’s whole body. “I took the template from the Yaldiv that Ronan had to blast,” Filif said. “Poor creature, it had little enough time to serve Life, even as crookedly as it did. Now it will serve it another way.” He stood back from his work, admiring it. “If, as in some other hive cultures, the warriors here have additional status, this may offer us an extra layer of protection. Or enable us to go places where the workers cannot.”
“I hope it doesn’t also get us in some kind of trouble we can’t anticipate,” Kit muttered. “I wish the manual functions weren’t so messed up here. We don’t know as much about these people as we need to.”
“We have no choice, though,” Filif said, “do we? We’re going to have to take the chance.”
“No argument,” Kit said. “Should I try it on?”
“I was hoping you would ask.”
Kit took another look at the wizardry, seeing the spot near the back of the virtual Yaldiv where the user was meant to step in and shrug the new body around him like a coat. Carefully, he stepped into the center of the weave.
The whole thing blazed up with power and pressed in on Kit like a second skin … then vanished. He stood there tremendously confused for a moment: the mochteroof seemed to have simply vanished. Kit held up a hand—
—and saw the shadow of one of those huge, sharp-edged claws come up in front of his face. It was so odd and sudden that he jumped; the claw jerked. “Wow,” Kit said, and turned around. “This is cool. And I still feel like me.”
Ronan had come out of his pup tent and was heading over to fetch the Spear. He looked over at Kit with interest. Ponch, who had come out of Kit’s tent a little before, now started dancing around Kit and barking joyously, as if this was intensely funny. You’re a giant bug! Ponch said. You even smell like one!
“I’ll take that as a compliment,” Kit said, and was astonished at the bizarre humming and crunching noises that came out of him instead of words. He looked over at Filif, and was aware of the dark mirror-shade eyes that he was “seeing” through, though it was his own form of vision that prevailed.
“You can use the Yaldiv sensorium anytime you need to,” Filif said, drifting around again to check that the mochteroof was working correctly. “You can scent and see either in your own mode exclusively, or as they do, or both at once. The Yaldiv see mostly as heat; a lot of the visible spectrum is lost on them. Scent comes through the legs, and they don’t go in much for tactile information, as far as I can tell. Taste is in the mandibles.”
“And wizardry?” Kit said.
“Won’t be impaired,” Filif said. “Your portable claudication is exactly where it would normally be, as are your preprepared wizardries. You can do whatever you would normally—”
The sudden bang! of displaced air was astonishingly loud in this small space, and was followed by an abrupt shower of a sort of flaky rain, as many of the tiny damp mineral-drop stalactites from the ceiling came pattering down onto the floor. Kit whirled around with a disrupter spell in his hands—a little core of compressed wizardry burning hot and ready to fire—and was only briefly surprised by the huge claw-shadows that seemed to enclose the hands holding the spell. Out beyond the shadows of the mochteroof, Ronan had snatched the Spear up out of the stone floor and was standing there with it flaming in one hand, ready to throw. Filif’s berries were suddenly burning a disconcerting dark color that Kit had never seen before. But then Kit let out a breath and waved his hands and their shadow-claws apart, dismissing the spell, at the sight of the two figures standing there, one shorter than him, one much taller.
Dairine and Roshaun looked up around them at the interior of the cave. Dairine’s hands were also holding some spell that fizzed and glittered as whitely blinding as a Fourth of July sparkler. Roshaun was holding ready in one hand what might have been a meter-long gilded rod, except for the hot, orange-golden, sunlike light that writhed and coiled inside it. Down on the floor between them, Spot crouched, glowing a soft and dangerous blue.
Then Dairine and Roshaun and Spot (extruding a few eyes to do the job) all stared at Kit. Dairine actually squinted at him, and it took some moments before she finally grinned. “Hey,” Dairine said. “On you, that looks good.”
Kit laughed. He pulled one of the tags of the Speech that was hanging down inside the mochteroof, and it fell away.
“How’d you find us so fast?” Ronan said. “We didn’t even know we were coming here until a little while ago.”
“I got Nita’s message when we popped out of transit on our way in,” Dairine said. “She left a pointer to the new coordinates, and forwarded it to the transits Sker’ret built for you. But where’d she go?”
“Home,” Kit said. “Heard anything from your dad?”
Dairine shook her head. “I was going to call,” she said. “Why? Neets tried and couldn’t get through?”
“Yeah,” Kit said. “Nothing.”
“Then I won’t bother right now,” Dairine said. “We’ve got bigger fish to fry.”
Roshaun looked briefly nonplussed. “Is this the time to be thinking about food?” he said.
“If you’d had as little to eat as I have today, it sure would be,” Dairine said, “and if you ask me, Ponch has the right idea, because despite all the hoopla back at your big fancy royal palace, the one thing that didn’t put in an appearance was a buffet. So forgive me.” She reached into her otherspace pocket and started feeling around in it. “But we found out what we’re supposed to be looking for.”
“The Instrumentality?” Kit said.
“What is it?” Ronan said.
Dairine came up with a trail-mix bar and started unwrapping it. “Not a what,” she said. “A who.”
Ronan and Filif and Kit all stared at one another.
Dairine gave Ronan a cockeyed look as she bit into the trail-mix bar. “And it’s funny that not even you know,” she said, munching, “since your passenger was carrying the information. But then, not even He knew. Did you?” she said to the Champion.
I’ve often worked as a courier before, the One’s Champion said. “Messenger” is one of the most basic parts of my job description. But I’ve never before carried a message I didn’t know I was carrying.
“First time for everything,” Dairine said, having another bite. “Ronan, around the time you stopped by our house, part of that message got loaded into Spot, and you never even knew it was happening. We couldn’t get at it until we got to the mobiles’ world. They put some info from the Defender’s presence in the mobiles’ world together with that information, decoded it…”
She smiled. Beside her, Roshaun sat down on the floor, cross-legged, with his usual effortless grace.
“The Instrumentality,” Dairine said, “is the Hesper.”
At that, Ronan looked up sharply.
“Or a Hesper,” Dairine said. “There’s not much difference at this point, since there’s never been one before, and there may be more later if this works out.”
Kit shook his head. “What’s a Hesper?”
“It’s a made-up word,” Dairine said. “We don’t have an English equivalent to the word in the Speech. You know any of the old names for the Lone One before It fell?”
Kit thought a moment, hearing an echo of the word in an old memory. “Hesperus?” he said. “Is that in Greek mythology?”
“Yes and no,” Dairine said. “But you know.” She looked at Ronan, or rather, at his interior colleague. “‘The morning and the evening star,’ they used to call the Lone Power, before there was that disagreement at the beginning of things. Then the ‘star’ fell.”
“Phosphorus and Hesperus,” said Ronan. “The Greeks didn’t know the morning and evening stars were the same planet, so they had two different names. Some people started using ‘Hesperus’ as the name for th
e Lone One before It fell.”
Dairine nodded. “That’s the closest word we’ve got for what we’re looking for. What’s about to happen, is the emergence of a ‘bright’ version of the Lone Power.”
Kit’s mouth fell open. “Here?”
“Looks like,” Dairine said. “All we have to do now is figure out who it is, where it is, and how to help it.”
“But the Pullulus,” Kit said.
Dairine gave Kit an exasperated look. “Don’t you get it?” Dairine said. “That’s not even slightly important compared to this! I think the Powers are trying to tell us that doing the right thing about the Hesper will save the universe, too. The Hesper’s a lot more important … and we’ve got exactly one chance to get this right. If we do—”
She stood there and waved her hands in the air. Kit realized that he was seeing a historic thing happen: words had just failed Dairine.
The thought scared Kit almost worse than the Pullulus did.
10: Friendly Fire
THEY CAME OUT INTO the dimmed light of evening at the Crossings, and Nita let out the breath she’d been holding since Sker’ret’s transit spell started to work. At a time when wizardry was acting peculiarly, any successful gating was a triumph.
Beside her, Sker’ret hadn’t moved off the transit pad. He was looking around him with all his eyes, every one pointed in a different direction. “Did you hear something?” he said.
“No,” Nita said. And then that struck her as strange. Nita walked off the gating pad and stepped out to where the hexagon of the enclosure met the corridor. She looked up and down the length of that bright, shining space…
…and shivered.
“This is really weird,” Nita said.
Very quietly, Sker’ret came up beside her and looked up and down the broad corridor. There was no one to be seen, absolutely no one at all.
“Okay,” Nita said, thinking aloud, and glancing over at the nearest information standard, which was showing its default display of Crossings time. “It’s the middle of the night…”
“The middle of a Crossings night,” Sker’ret said, “doesn’t look like this. Somewhere in fifteen or twenty thousand worlds, it’s always the middle of the day for somebody. Somebody is always passing through.”
Nita shivered again. “You did say when we left that the reduced traffic was a symptom of something that was going to get worse.”
“Yes.” Sker’ret sounded unnerved. “But not this much worse, not this fast. And there’s still…”
He trailed off.
The feeling of alarm in him was suddenly very pronounced. Still what? Nita said silently. She felt oddly unwilling to make the silence around them seem any louder by speaking into it.
Something wrong, Sker’ret said. He turned and flowed back to the information column by the gate cluster’s transit pad, rearing up against it to trigger the extension of its command-and-control console. Sker’ret brought up a display on the floating console and tapped at the control pad beside it. The display brought up a number of paragraphs in the dot-patterns and acute angles of Rirhait, but the bar graph beside the figures and annotations told Nita enough about what was going on here. That’s showing recent transits through the Crossings? she said.
In the last three standard days, Sker’ret said. The bar graph showed the number of travelers passing through the Crossings’ worldgates in a standard hour. Every bar was shorter than the one before. Then, in the last standard day, there was a brief shallow spike in both incoming and outgoing transits, after which all of them stopped completely. No one’s come through for some hours, Sker’ret said. Absolutely no one.
They stood there looking at each other in silence. Then Nita said, You don’t think that’s possible, do you?
Sker’ret looked back toward the corridor with several of his eyes. I want to have a look at the central management station, he said. And I want to find out where my esteemed ancestor is!
Come on, Nita said silently.
Walking through this emptiness, with the gating-information standards silently changing minutes on their digital readouts all down the concourse, felt to Nita just like it would have felt to walk down a main street in Manhattan that had no one in it at all. She found herself staring into every gating-cluster alcove that they passed, but there were no people anywhere: not the briefest glimpse of a tentacle, not a glimmer of an alien eye. Down the corridor, Nita could just make out a portion of the shining rack that was part of the Stationmaster’s office. Normally there would have been people passing by it in all directions, making their way to one gate or another. Now the rack stood there all by itself, and Nita and Sker’ret made their way toward it, through the silence, through the emptiness—
Nita’s eyes went wide; without actually hearing anything, she felt a sound go blasting past her ear. “Sker’!” she cried, and threw herself on top of him, knocking him down flat against the floor.
And then the actual sound came, and a blast of energy just above her head—a moment too late, for Nita had just said that fourteenth word in the Speech, and her personal shield-spell had gone up around her and down to the ground on either side, covering Sker’ret as well. It’d better work right this time! she thought furiously, and felt around in the back of her head for that shadowy presence that she was now expecting to find, half double serpent of light, half backbone of wizardry. Are you there?
Here, the peridexic effect said. Nita could instantly feel the extra flow of power go rushing through her into the spell. Several more energy bolts splattered into the shield, gnawed at it, and splashed away.
You carrying anything offensive? Nita said to Sker’ret.
His eyes thrashed around underneath Nita. She levered herself up a little to let him squeeze them out to either side. Absolutely, Sker’ret said, sounding grim. Roll off and I’ll bring my shields up. Where’s the fire coming from?
She peered down the corridor. It was hard to see through the eye-burning brightness of the blaster fire, but Nita could just make out a number of tall, thin shadows down that way, leaning out from behind various outward-projecting kiosks to fire, then ducking back again. I think they’re a lot farther down this corridor, past your ancestor’s office.
Right. Roll now!
Nita rolled off Sker’ret to his left, and felt the bump on her side as his own shield came up and pushed her sideways. She scrambled to her feet as several more energy bolts hit her shield, then reached down to her charm bracelet, grabbed the charm that looked like a lightning bolt, and said the single word in the Speech that released the wizardry’s “safety.”
Instantly a shape of light formed in the air in front of her: a long slender stock, tapering down to an almost needlelike point. It was one of numerous wizardly versions of a blaster, this one being nothing more than a portable linear accelerator that pushed a thin stream of charged particles as close to lightspeed as they could go, and then (this being, after all, magic) just a little faster. The effects of being struck by a beam from the accelerator tended to be noticeable, and unfortunate, for the target. Nita grabbed the accelerator out of the air with the intention of making its use very unfortunate for someone in a big hurry if they didn’t stop shooting at her.
Okay, let’s see how loud I can be now, she thought, unnerved but excited, as she stood up in the midst of all that blaster fire. There are phrases every wizard knows he or she may have to use in the line of work, and doesn’t really want to. But most wizards nonetheless dream of using them, just once or twice, under the right circumstances … and this was Nita’s first chance to use this one.
“In Life’s name,” she shouted in the Speech, while the energy blasts kept striking her shield, “and for Its sake, I advise you that I am here on the business of the Powers That Be! Your actions toward me, and through me, toward Them, will determine the continuation or revocation of your present status. Be warned by me, and desist!”
Slowly, the blaster fire stopped.
Just as slowly, Nita started
to grin—
—and all at once the blaster fire started up again, twice as ferociously this time, so that the multiple impacts against her shield made Nita stagger.
“Oh, really,” she said under her breath as she got her balance back and made sure of her shield’s integrity. “Sorry, guys, you blew it.”
Both angry and sad, she chose her first target with care—one of those thin shadows standing behind a particularly aggressive stream of energy blasts—aimed, and fired. Away down the corridor, across the central intersection of the Crossings, that source of the blaster fire failed. “Sorry,” Nita said under her breath, meaning it, though not hesitating to immediately choose another target. She fired again. “Sorry.”
Beside her, Sker’ret made his way down toward the central intersection. The closer he got, the more blaster fire hit his shield. It turned a fierce glowing red, mirroring itself in Sker’ret’s shiny carapace—and every bolt that hit it bounced instantly and directly back in the direction from which it had come. Any unshielded being standing in the same place after having shot at him suddenly found itself on the receiving end of a boosted version of whatever it had fired. Nita followed Sker’ret, not hurrying, choosing her targets with regret and great care. The fire from in front of them began to lessen, but now Nita felt some fire hitting her shield from behind. She turned and started walking backward, aiming carefully at more of those thin shadow-shapes who leaned out from behind cover farther down the corridor. “They’re behind us, too, Sker’!” she called. “How’re we planning to get out of here? I don’t want to get cut off.”
“I’m not going anywhere till I find out who these people are, and get them out of here somehow!” Sker’ret called back, making steadily for the intersection. “I’ll open you a gate and get you home.”