Wizard's Holiday, New Millennium Edition (39 page)

The others arranged themselves around the rim of the wizardry, and then each took one step into it, into the loci prepared for them—the areas that held optimum life support for each and that also contained a last-ditch “lifepod” wizardry intended to at least get them out with their lives if anything went wrong.
But if anything goes
that
wrong,
Dairine thought,
we’re not likely to have time enough to implement the lifepods, anyway…

It was a thought she kept to herself as she looked past the circle and saw the tall shadow standing there in the dark, watching her, saying nothing. She raised a hand to him. He didn’t move for a few breaths… then raised his own.

“Ready?” Roshaun said.

“Ready,” each of the others said, and “Ready,” Dairine said, though she was starting to shake. This wasn’t like the wizardries she did by herself, where if anything went wrong, she was the one to blame, and the only one who would suffer.

“Then let’s speak,” Roshaun said, “and the Aethyrs be with us, because we really need Them tonight.”

The four wizards looked down at the wizardry that surrounded them. In unison, they started to speak its basic propositions in the Speech. The fire of it came up around them, blue-green to start with, rapidly tinged with the gold of the star on which they were about to operate. The silence of a listening universe leaned in around them as they spoke the words; the power built—

They vanished into a suburban silence only slightly troubled by the echo of the hiss of solar wind.

Nita and Kit left the Peliaens’ homestead early the next morning, partly with the intention of seeing no one. And they did see no one, which hurt Nita, but there was nothing she or Kit could do about it right now.
They’ve got to feel we’ve violated their trust,
she thought.
Quelt, especially. And we so very much didn’t mean to, but
— She let out a long breath of discomfort. Explanations would have to wait.

“You ready?” Kit said to her.

“Yeah.”

Doing a short transit to the Naos was the matter of a few moments; there, in the morning mist, Nita and Kit stood at the bottom of one of the flights of steps and looked around them uncertainly. “She’s late,” Kit said.

“I very much doubt that,” Nita said. “The big question on my mind right now is, where’s Ponch? I thought you said he would meet us here.”

“I thought he would,” Kit said. “After he’s been out all night, he usually meets us first thing in the morning.”

Nita sighed. “Where’s the leash?”

“That’s the problem. I left it on him last night.” Kit shrugged. “I do that sometimes. He usually comes back at night so that I can take it off him. Last night he didn’t come back.” Kit shrugged. “He’ll turn up.”

Nita sighed and sat down on the bottom step. “I feel so rotten,” she said.

“I know.”

“But I didn’t think she was going to react so badly. I mean, this isn’t as if it was something that was going to happen overnight. Or even terribly soon. Think about it! The stricture said that if the Alaalids wanted to reject it, and remake their Choice, they had to do that unanimously. They’re never going to—”

Kit shook his head. “Yes, they could. Or, specifically, not them. The wording Druvah used was, ‘Our descendants in power.’” Kit shook his head. “When you were reading the orientation pack, did you look up the Alaalid word for ‘wizard’?”

Nita shook her head.

“Tilidi’t,
” Kit said. “‘One who walks in power.’”

Nita gulped. “Oh no,” she said.

“And it’s easy for a decision among wizards to be unanimous,” Kit said, “when in a whole world there’s only one… ”

“Oh no,” Nita said again. Suddenly it all made sense. She could just see herself if someone offered her such a piece of information.
Know what? Your whole species is in danger of never achieving its potential. But you can do something about it… you, all by yourself. And what happens to all of them hinges entirely and only on you…

Nita shivered. “Shouldn’t Ponch have turned up by now?” she said.

“Yeah… ”

But they waited, and waited, and he didn’t turn up. The one who did turn up was Esemeli, still impeccably clad in white and looking wearily amused. “So,” It said, “you’ve decided to trust me after all.”

Kit didn’t say anything. Nita said, “Let’s get on with it. Where are we headed?”

“Down,” the Lone One said. “Do you want to handle the transit yourself, or shall I do it?”

Kit made an ironic after-you gesture.

The three of them vanished.

***

“This is where it begins,” the Lone One said.

They were standing somewhere else, in the mist at the bottom of a huge cliff. The cliff was some dark stone, towering up into the mist, lost in it; and in the stone of its base was a huge vertical cleft that ran down from the cliff, across the ground, nearly to their feet.

Nita and Kit looked dubiously at the great opening in the Earth. Nita had started taking Latin in school, and the sight of the crevasse suddenly made her remember something she’d translated from the
Aeneid
last semester:
It’s easy to enter the Underworld. The door’s open night and day. But retracing your steps, getting back up to the light
—
there’s the real work, the tough part
—

She took a deep breath.
It doesn’t matter,
Nita thought.
We’re as prepared as we can be. Except for one thing…

She glanced over at Kit and saw that Esemeli was regarding him with an expression of concern. “Where’s your doggy this morning?” It said.

Kit looked at the Lone Power. “I can’t believe, somehow, that you don’t know.”

“I told you,” Esemeli said, “that my ability to perceive what’s going on is severely limited here. So I have no idea where your dog is. And, anyway, after what she made me promise”—and It glanced in annoyance at Nita— “if I knew, I would
have
to tell you if she asked.”

“Where’s Ponch?” Nita said immediately.

“I don’t know,” the Lone One said.

Kit stood still and closed his eyes for just one last try. Nita heard him calling Ponch silently. But there was no response. “You can wait, if you want,” the Lone One said.

“No,” Nita said. The state in which they had left Quelt was very much on her mind. “The sooner we get the proof we need for Quelt, the better. Let’s get going.”

They turned and entered the mouth of darkness, vanishing.

At first the path downward seemed nothing spectacular: a winding passage between stone walls, the walls growing closer together, the rough ceiling growing lower and lower as they went. Nita, looking around her, began to get nervous as they went downward and the walls began to close in. She had never been wild about tight, constricting spaces; and in this one, her general cast of mind was not helped by the strangely organic feeling to the stone. It had that same warm color, a muted gold with pink overtones, that was seen in many of the buildings on the continent.

As the path twisted and turned and descended, it was very hard to keep from thinking that they were descending not into the bowels of the planet but— Nita pushed that thought aside vigorously, and concentrated on keeping an eye on their guide. Esemeli walked casually and confidently ahead of them, seeming untroubled by the way they went. “How can you be sure Druvah came this way?” Kit said, pulling out his manual and producing a small light to bob along ahead of him.

“He’s left traces,” Esemeli said, “even after all this time. He was, after all, the greatest of the wizards who met to enforce the Alaalid Choice.” It chuckled a little. “There’s a joke there, actually; if he hadn’t been so scrupulous about bowing to the wishes of the majority, none of us would need to be here now. The Alaalids would’ve moved on to the next stage in evolution, oh, thousands of years ago… if he’d made them. But like so many wizards who are
too
wholeheartedly on the side of the Powers That Be, he insisted on making his work difficult for himself. And for the people he was supposed to be serving… ”

They made their way around a tightly curving corner in the stone, a place where all of them had to put their backs against the wider side of the curve and inch around it, little by little. Nita breathed in, trying to make herself as thin as possible, and kept herself moving; but she had to keep her eyes closed. The downward-pressing closeness of the stone was beginning to affect her.

Ahead of her, Esemeli moved slowly but with no sign of distress. Nita could hear Kit’s breathing becoming labored. He was no fonder of these tight quarters than she was. “We could just go through the stone,” he said at one point, when he was finding it difficult to follow the Lone Power.

“No,” Esemeli said, “we can’t. All this road into the heart of the Earth is permeated by Druvah’s power.” She smiled a secret, rather uncomfortable smile, which Nita could just make out by the faint gleam of Kit’s wizard-light. “He made sure that anybody who was going to follow him on this road would have to go through exactly what he did when he first found his way to the world’s kernel. Even if it was going to be the wizards who would repeal the Choice he oversaw— they would have no easier time of it. He wanted to give them plenty of time to have second thoughts.”

I’m having plenty of them right now,
Nita heard Kit thinking.

Not just you,
Nita thought. “How do you know where he hid the kernel?” she said.

“I watched him do it,” the Lone One said. “He was using the power that I gave him at the time. And at the time, that made it impossible for him to hide his whereabouts from me.” She was smiling, amused again.

They came out of the tight, close tunnel into a slightly more open area. Kit had to stop and get his breath, and for a moment he stood bowed down with his hands on his knees, gasping. Nita wiped her forehead. It was definitely getting warmer. She tried to work out how far underground they might have come, but she wasn’t sure exactly how to tell.
I could look in the manual,
she thought. But at the same time, she found herself thinking that even that wasn’t likely to do her any good. There was a strange sense coming down over her as if this journey was not exactly a physical one, or not
merely
a physical one…

She looked up to find the Lone One gazing at her with that amused expression. “Yes,” It said, “you do feel it. I was wondering if you would.”

“We’re not exactly inside Time,” Nita said. “Or outside it. This is one of those ‘complex states.’”

“Yes,” Esemeli said. “I’m afraid that, as wizards go, Druvah was fairly expert.”

“Which has to be bad for you,” Kit said, straightening up, “and good for us… ”

The Lone One threw him an annoyed look. “Let’s get moving,” It said. “We’ve got a ways to go yet… ”

They moved on, downward again. Kit dropped back toward Nita a little. “Neets, this is weird,” Kit said under his breath. “It isn’t like the real inside of a planet… any planet. This is more like another dimension.”

“It could be a little of both,” Nita said. “There are ways to make a place’s mythical reality coincide with the physical one… or make one temporarily a lot more powerful than the other.” She shook her head. “But normally you need a kernel to mediate that kind of overlap or substitution.”

“That, at least, means we’re on the right track,” Kit said. “You’ve been doing a lot of reading. You thinking about changing specialties? Maybe turning into a research specialist, like Tom?”

“I don’t know,” Nita said. “Things are changing, all right… but into what, I’m not entirely sure.”

Kit nodded, moved ahead again. For her own part, Nita was relieved to find that the path they took widened out a great deal. But the passage was always downward, and the weight of millions and billions of tons of rock continued to weigh on her. At least she was able to partially distract herself with the splendor of their surroundings: for the chain of complexes of caverns through which Esemeli led them in the next hours—or what felt like hours—would have been a first-class tourist attraction on Earth. One after another they passed through gigantic multicolored arenas and caves of stone, festooned with stalactites, or growing great crops of stalagmites like petrified forests. There were some caverns in which the stone itself glowed, and there was no need for wizard-light at all; they wove their way among pillars and chandeliers of down-hanging, luminous rock, their shadows stretching in ten different directions, or abolished entirely by the glow. But always the way led down, and down, and further down.

It was getting warmer all the time as they went. But this didn’t reassure Nita; it wasn’t nearly as warm as it should have been underground, and she was now certain that they were indeed not entirely in the physical world any more. She had done some reading in the manual about these so-called “complex states,” in which normal space was blended or “affiliated” with constructed spaces that could be based in myth, or one mind’s delusion, or some commonly held belief. Such complex-state spaces could have physical realities that mirrored some old fairy tale or ancient legend… or a physical reality that had once existed but was now long gone. As they passed out of one deep cavern and into another, always with Esemeli leading the way and Kit following It, Nita’s misgivings grew, despite the Binding Oath she had made the Lone One swear. It was very old, and very wise… and entirely too clever. But it was hard to know where she might have gone wrong.
We’re just going to have to rely on the manual for the moment, and try to keep our eyes open,
Nita thought, as they went down, and down, and down…

The walk through the caves began to seem more and more like a dream that had always been happening, and always would. In front of her was Kit, with his wizard-light; in front of him, Esemeli, a white shadow that never paused, never got tired.
Not like me,
Nita thought. She was beginning to regret not having eaten at least something for breakfast that morning.
And when
was
this morning?
she thought.
How many hours ago? How many years?
It was becoming increasingly difficult even to believe in “this morning,” except as something that had happened in a dream a long time ago.