Wizards At War

“But what do we do now?”

Ronan shook his head. “He already said, he didn’t know.”

“Yeah, right. And a lot of help you are!” Dairine said.

“Who, me?”

“No, him!” Dairine said. “The Defender!”

We’re not omniscient, you know, the One’s Champion said, sounding annoyed.

“Oh, sure, you’re not. Just immortal and incredibly powerful, which doesn’t do us much good if after all this running around, you can’t give us a clearer sense of what we’re supposed to do!”

Ronan frowned and looked over at Kit. “What is it with these Callahan women,” he said, “that they’re always after yelling at you and giving you grief?”

“Not always,” Kit said, sounding resigned. “Just when it’s going to get most on your nerves.”

“We yell at you because you’re hopeless,” Dairine said, and sat down, looking extremely cross. “But I guess it’s not your fault this time. And where did all these other names come from all of a sudden? I’d have thought you had enough already, just in our own mythologies.”

We pick them up in our travels, the Champion said with a weary and resigned look. It’s an occupational hazard.

“And it’s not like you don’t have a fair number of names,” Ronan added. “Dairine. Dair. Squirt. Right pain in the arse. Speaker to hardware. Botherer of her sister—”

“Deliverer of punches in the nose,” Dairine said, looking Ronan in the eye. “Ruthless punisher of those who don’t cut her some slack.”

“One of those was a little weird,” Kit said suddenly. “‘Guardian of the Divided Name’?”

Ronan nodded. “The One’s full name.”

Roshaun looked perplexed. “Why would that need guarding?”

It doesn’t, the Champion said. You do. From it.

“But the One is on our side, I would have thought,” Filif said. “Or we are on Its…”

That’s not the point, the Champion said. You can’t really have any sense of how much raw power is tied up in the One. Physicality can’t express it. Nothing can express it; it’s not meant to be expressed. It’s meant to be. If the One wasn’t careful about how It manifests Itself inside space and time, everything would all just dissolve.

“So that even the One’s Name in the Speech has to be divided up to keep it safe,” Kit said, “like a critical mass.”

That’s right, said the Champion. The Name of Names has so much primacy of power over mere created matter that it could change or wipe out whole universes if irresponsibly used. So the Names are leaked into creation only in fragmented form … a little bit here, a little bit there. Even names in less central levels of creation get divided up that way—a bit here, a bit there…

Dairine let out an annoyed breath. “Yeah, well, if even the One’s names are so powerful,” she said, “why do we have to be running around all the time and cleaning up the messes all over our universe? Why doesn’t It just get Its butt in here and take care of things?”

Behind Ronan’s eyes, the Champion looked surprised. What fun would that be?

“For It?”

For us, the Champion said, sounding as if He was surprised Dairine didn’t get it.

She stared at him.

“All right,” Filif said, glancing at Dairine as she took a breath. “Memeki knows—for the moment—what she is. But not who she is, or what she can do. How can we best assist her? For until she fully becomes the Hesper, and achieves whatever her full power may be, there’s no hope that she can do anything about the threat to the rest of our universe.”

I have no immediate answers, the Champion said. She’s still only in the middle stages of embodiment. Such a process has to proceed at its own pace.

“There’s not a whole lot of time left for it to proceed in!” Dairine said. “The Pullulus is pushing everything apart out there, the structure of space is suffering, whole civilizations are going to pieces—”

“He’s right, though,” Ronan said.

Dairine stared.