Wizards At War

Ponch whined once, way down in his throat. I’m afraid for you. Even when people mean to do good things, bad things happen in the world.

“They’re happening already,” Memeki said. “Pretending they’re not won’t help.”

Memeki began to tremble again. Once again, through Ponch, Kit felt the tremor—and another one, something that felt like it was happening under the floor. Uh-oh! Kit thought. Is this place earthquake-prone?

He started to get up, but the tremor subsided. I still think you should come home with us, Ponch said.

“But this is home,” Memeki said. She still sounded sad, but there was a touch of affection in her voice. “And if it can be made more like yours…”

They went on arguing, if it was actually an argument. That little shake was weird, Kit thought, reaching sideways into the air to retrieve his manual from its otherspace pocket. The last thing we need right now is to find that we’re sitting on some kind of volcanic plug. But if we are, it’s better to know about it.

He opened the manual and paged through it to the marked section that dealt with Rashah’s physical structure and characteristics. Kit flipped through to the page that showed mapping references for their present location, then zoomed in on the massive outcropping of rock that concealed the cavern. The schematic on the page shifted to show a wire-frame diagram of the cavern’s structure. Kit put out a finger and drew it down the schematic: the image obeyed his gesture and the wire frame changed scale to show the structure of the underlying stone. He studied it carefully, and let out a breath. Okay, at least there’s no lava or anything like that moving around down there. I feel better.

“…but why can’t I?” Memeki was saying. “Why wouldn’t it be right to change the way things are? The Great One has been telling everyone what was right for—for forever—and nothing’s any better! Maybe it’s time to try something different! To stand up and decide something different for ourselves, and not wait to be told.”

But you might get it wrong!

“Maybe we will. But that’s no reason not to do anything. Maybe someone else got it wrong, too, did the wrong thing a long time ago. If they did, why shouldn’t we fix it? And whether they did or not, what’s important is to make it right now. No matter what that takes.”

And without waiting for anyone to tell you it’s right, Ponch said, very slowly. Just look to see what went wrong, what needs fixing, and then fix it? All by yourself?

There was a very long pause. “I think so.”

A shiver, a jingle of dog-license tags. It sounds scary.

Kit looked over the underground schematic for a moment more before getting ready to put it away. Interesting, he thought, seeing that there appeared to be several minor interconnecting caverns underneath the large one. The stone’s structure seemed a lot more intricate than he’d thought from Ronan’s description—

He felt another tremor, stronger this time. Okay, just what is that? Kit thought, glancing down one last time at the schematic. And then he was shocked to see that one of those smaller caverns somehow looked longer than it had a moment ago.

He went cold with fear. I should have looked at this before! Kit thought, scrambling to his feet as he stared at the manual. I knew I should have! “Life signs, quick!” he said to the manual.

The display shifted focus, and various colored sparks of light appeared in it, some of them haloed to show that they were in a “mitigating” field, which meant one or another of the pup tents. Three Earth-humans, one Earth dog, one Wellakhit humanoid, one Yaldiv female—Kit blinked at the fog of life signs associated with Memeki. But of far more concern were the eight, nine, ten other life signs down there in one of those narrow caverns, and getting closer—

Kit plunged out of his pup tent, shouting, “Incoming!” He also really wanted to shout, “Ronan, how the heck did you miss this!”—but it would have been a waste of time. He felt another rumble underfoot as the others burst out of their own pup tents, as Ponch and Memeki looked up in alarm.

“What is it?”

“What’s going on?”

“They’re digging up from underneath!” Kit said. “It’s solid rock underneath there; how are they able to do that?”