Wizard's Holiday, New Millennium Edition (24 page)

“Cousin! Of course you can.”

“I mentioned the Lone Power to your folks,” Kit said, “and they barely knew what It was.”

“She,
” Nita said, and shivered.

“I mean, they had to be reminded,” Kit said. “Is that usual, here? Your parents—you told them about your—I was going to call it your Ordeal, but our word for it at home seems a lot too rugged, the way they sounded.”

“Your ‘Own Choice,’” Nita said.

“Normally, we would fight with the Lone Power personally,” Kit said. “Very personally. And, normally, most people in our world know the Lone One exists, or have at least heard of It. In our world, Its effects are all over the place, and they have been for a long time, though things are changing. But here—” Kit waved his arms around him. “Your world is so perfect, our people would hardly believe it. How come? Does it have to do with the way you guys made your Choice?”

“And what did you do?” Nita said. “Because believe me, if we could’ve done the same kind of thing… ” She shook her head.

Quelt’s expression was somewhat bemused. “Well, it would have something to do with the
ne’whaHiilse’t,
the Debate and Decision,” Quelt said at last. “But I’m not sure how to explain the differences, assuming they
can
be explained.” She mused for a moment. “You should probably come look at the Display.”

“Sorry?” Nita said.

“Oh, the Debate and Decision happened right here, on our island,” Quelt said. “So we keep an enactment of it. In fact, that’s one of my jobs as the world’s wizard, to make sure the enactment is kept running. Even though most of us don’t think about it a whole lot! I suppose we might as well go have a look—”

Then Quelt laughed. “You know, we’ve done some of the tourist things, but this one is so boring for most people that it never occurred to me to take you there. That’s silly of me, on second thought. You are wizards; of course you’d be interested! And I haven’t gone through the whole experience myself for a long time, though people come from all the other islands to see it.”

Kit looked from Quelt to Nita and back again. “Let’s go,” he said.

Quelt had a transit spell prepared. “It’s in case I need to go do a service call,” she said, “but that hasn’t happened for a hundred years or so… ” The spell looked much like one of Kit’s or Nita’s “prepackaged” ones; a circle of words in the Speech, which Quelt pulled out of the air and offered to Nita and Kit so that they could insert their personal information—their own names in the Speech and data about their body mass and composition. Both of them routinely carried shorthand versions of these in their manuals, and Kit had a spare one for Ponch. They pulled these out, hooked them onto Quelt’s spell, and stepped into it when she cast the line of bright words down among the flowers.

Wizardry dulled the air around them to a blue haze as they read the words in the Speech together. It was interesting for Nita to have a third voice reading with them, a different flavor in the air, as the universe leaned in around them, obeying the spell, and then popped them loose into another place entirely.

Nita and Kit looked around. Here the horizon was no less high, but the immediately surrounding landscape was flatter, a huge plain. As she glanced around, Nita realized that she was in one of the first places she’d seen on Alaalu that wasn’t within sight of water.

“It’s the heart of the continent,” Quelt said, leading them down a very slight slope. “The nearest ocean is three thousand miles away. A pretty distance, for us. And here we are—”

Not far away from them, down another shallow slope, was something Nita at first took for a wide, deep pool of water. But then she realized that there was too much light reflected in that pool; it was radiant by its own virtue. And there was something strange about the surface of the water—it didn’t ripple.

“It’s air held solid,” Quelt said. “You know the spell, I think. A variation of the Mason’s Word wizardry, with the spell that produces the forms held down inside it. Come on, you can walk out on it.”

She led the way across the surface of the “pool,” strolling out as if onto a crystal floor. Nita and Kit followed her, pausing with Quelt at about the middle of the surface to look down into the depths. There they saw eight figures, male and female, plainly Alaalids by their coloration, hair, and dress. Seven stood more or less together; the eighth one stood apart.

Nita started to laugh, then. “They really are short compared to the rest of you, aren’t they?” she said. “No wonder we’re such celebrities!”

Quelt laughed, too. “I should have brought you here first to explain it,” she said.

They walked above the group standing there under some other sunlight, in another time, in a field full of flowers very like the ones all around them now. When she stood still, Nita found, she could see those figures down below moving, talking, consulting with one another—all but the one who stood apart, an Alaalid taller than the rest of them, dressed all in white, and coolly beautiful, with eyes of a gorgeous burning amber.

“Wow,” Kit said. “Who’s that?”

“Esemeli,” Quelt said.

“She’s hot,” Kit said, in considerable admiration.

Nita threw a glance at him. Next to Kit, Ponch, too, was gazing down into the depths… but he was starting to growl softly. Kit looked at Ponch in shock, and then at Quelt. “Oh no. You mean she’s—”

“The Lone Power,” Nita said. “The local version.”

“That’s her,” Quelt said. “But we came in in the middle of the story. If you come over here, you can see it from the start.”

They walked over to the far side of the Display, and looked deep down into it. The landscape that presented itself was like the one in which they stood, but less groomed-looking, rougher around the edges. There was a field full of the blue
jijis
flowers; it seemed to stretch to the horizon, which was unusual in that world where no landscape seemed to go very far before running into the sea. In the middle of the field stood the seven Alaalid men and women, and in the center, the extremely beautiful one.

“That’s her when she first arrives,” Quelt said. “And there are our first seven wizards, who’re making the Choice.”

Nita cocked her ear at something she was coming to recognize since she’d started to study the Speech more closely earlier in the year—the “Enactive mode,” one of the most powerful ways in which the Speech could be spoken. Quelt wasn’t using the mode itself, but a secondary form called the pre-Enactive voice: a form for talking
about
first-level enactments and other major change, without actually using the words that would bring the change to pass. Its tenses were very weird if translated into any human language, where present and past are usually separate; so Nita didn’t bother trying to translate it in her head, and just let it sound like one very large kind of present.

“Come on,” Quelt said. “They tell the story better than I can.” And she stepped right down into the crystalline surface as if it were water.

Nita and Kit both stared. Quelt looked over her shoulder at them. “It’s all right,” she said. “It’s not an actual portal, just a replay. You can’t actually interact with it, but it’s as if you were there… ”

“How do we—” Kit said, and then looked around him in surprise as, very slowly, he started to sink into the crystal where he stood.

“You just let yourself,” Quelt said. “There’s no problem breathing or anything; the wizardry takes care of that for you.”

Do I have to go, too?
Ponch said to Kit.
I feel like running now.

“No, it’s fine,” Kit said, still sinking. “You go ahead.” Ponch bounded off the Display and out into the flowers.

“I think I’d rather do it your way,” Nita said, and followed Quelt’s lead, just taking a step down as if she were standing on a flight of stairs. The substrate behaved that way, too, letting her foot go down into the crystal.

Nita followed Quelt down into the substrate, while beside the two of them Kit just kept on sinking where he stood, as if he were on some kind of elevator. Within half a minute or so, they were standing in the same field of flowers as the seven figures and the eighth one, standing in the center of the circle. “Let me get this straight,” Kit said. “This isn’t actually the past, and that wasn’t some kind of timeslide—”

“No, not at all,” Quelt said. “I don’t think that’d be allowed. You wouldn’t want to get involved in time paradoxes where a Decision was involved.”

“I don’t know,” Nita said as they walked toward the circle of Alaalids. “There have been times when I’ve wished we could do something like that with ours.”

Quelt gave Nita a concerned look. “You’re going to have to tell me more about that later,” she said. “Anyway, this wizardry just makes it seem as if we were there. We can hear what they say, watch what they do.”

For the moment, though, none of the figures seemed to be doing much of anything. “The scenario repeats whenever anyone who sees it wants it to,” Quelt said. “Most people get taken here once or twice when we’re little. I got to see it more often than most people, because Vereich ran me through the Choice a lot while he was training me as his replacement.” She looked a little amused by this. “There’s not really a lot to it, but it
is
history, and something a wizard here would need to know about… ”

They walked around the circle. “So these were our wizards,” Quelt said. “That little one there: He’s the chief, Seseil. He wrote out the first part of the Telling.”

“He
wrote
it?” Kit said, looking at the lean figure, slight for an Alaalid, who stood there among the flowers, barefoot, in breeches and a loose shirt. “Elsewhere it usually just seems to arrive somehow. You hear it, or find it, or find that you know the beginnings of it… ”

“That’s sort of how it went for us,” Quelt said. “Seseil wrote the words that he heard the wind Telling the water. All the others did that, too, sooner or later, except they all heard different words. Seseil had to journey all over the settled lands, from island to island, to find other people who’d heard the words and could tell him the ones he didn’t know. It took a long time to find them all, but he wouldn’t give up.”

As they came around the side of the circle, Nita looked into that hard, wise face, frozen for the moment into immobility, and had no trouble believing what Quelt was telling them. “That’s the
Imrar,
isn’t it?” Nita said. “The poem about the Island Journey. It got mentioned in one of the orientation sources.”

“That’s right,” Quelt said. “It took him three hundred years, and he had all kinds of adventures. But he found all the words at last. And up above us, in physical reality, in that field—that’s where they started the argument that ended with Ictanikë arriving.”

“Wait a minute,” Kit said. “I thought you just said the Lone One’s name was Esemeli.”

“That’s her second name: it comes later. So here you see them with Ictanikë, when she turns up for the first time. They were confused about her, because she plainly knew about wizardry, though she wasn’t a wizard.”

“I’ve heard many a strange tale on my travels,” Seseil said. The sound of his voice was fading in slowly, as if somebody was turning it up, and Nita wandered a little closer to hear. “But this is one of the stranger ones. What exactly is it that you’re offering us?”

“It doesn’t sound like anything new,” said another of the wizards. “This is the world, and entropy is running. We have time, and life to live in it.”

“But not in power,” Ictanikë said. “Not in power that you can depend upon. You sailed the seas from inner to outer and back again, finding a word here and a word there, hoping the wind would bring you what you need to know. Why should you be at the world’s mercy this way? With help from someone wise, someone longer in the world, you can find your power much more quickly. I can help you do that.”

The Alaalid wizards looked at one another, not quite sure what to make of this. “Help is always welcome,” one of them said.

“But you must pay my price,” Ictanikë said.

The uncertainty among them grew. Nita saw several of them exchange glances, and, in particular, Seseil began to regard Ictanikë with what looked like the beginnings of suspicion. “Among us,” Seseil said, “when one person needs something, another one gladly gives it to them. That way, you know that when the day comes that you need something, another will be ready to give. If you have a gift to give us, we’ll accept it gladly… assuming it’s a thing we need. But this talk of price—”

Ictanikë smiled, and there was a sly look to the expression that Nita didn’t care for. “So adult beings conduct their affairs in the worlds beyond your world,” Ictanikë said. “Go the way I will show you, and you, too, will do your business among the worlds in such a way as to impress all with your wisdom and power. But you should also know that not all beings even in this world conduct their business in such a kindly way, giving freely and accepting freely. Even here there are places where the creatures of the world take what they please, and give little back, or nothing. You must know how to conduct yourselves in such places, and how to defend yourself from those who would take what is yours by force. I can teach you these things.”

“And how is it you know about that in the first place?” Seseil said. “You speak confidently of the worlds beyond our world. You speak of prices to be paid, as if our way of giving and accepting were a trap. Nor do any of us know you, or where you come from. I think any advice you might have to give should be looked at with care.”

Nita watched, and saw how most of the wizards drew together toward Seseil. But one or two of them still stood off to one side, regarding Ictanikë with curiosity if not interest. And one of them, an Alaalid with long red hair hanging down below his shoulders, moved a little way toward Ictanikë and said to her, “What exactly would your price be?”

Nita froze… for the redheaded wizard was the small man, just her height, who had come to her in the dream of statues and said, “I’ve been waiting for you… ”

Ictanikë’s smile grew somber. “It’s as you’ve said, entropy is indeed running. But with my price, you can buy yourselves an exemption. Around you, you see what happens to the rest of the world. Even the mountains are worn away in time; all life ends. But for you, for the wise, it doesn’t have to be this way. There are ways to go on, to reject the fate of the material things around you. If I help you, you can have life… and then cheat death.”