Wizards At War

The wash of fear that Kit caught from Ponch was astonishing: it made him wince. “I see how you do that,” Memeki said. “You care for each other. It is so strange. Somehow, though you come from so far away, you are like me. How, I can’t say.” And then she, too, sat down on the ground, a strange, jerky motion. She twitched. “But there are other reasons. I must return to the grubbery. My time—” She broke off, went silent, like someone distracted by a spasm of pain.

Ronan came up behind Kit and stood there for a moment, just a dark presence that said nothing. Kit glanced at him.

“Ponch is right,” he said. “If she’s going back to the City, we can’t just leave her there and tiptoe away, not after what happened here! We’ve got to stay with her and keep her safe.”

“That’s not going to attract any attention, I’ll bet,” Ronan said. “When someone asks, just what are we supposed to be doing hanging around her?”

“We’re her guards,” Kit said. “The One sent us.” His grin was a little grim. “Though what we mean by that won’t be what they mean by it, it’s still true. And if anyone gives us trouble”—he shrugged—”we play it by ear.”

Ronan shook his head. “I hope this works,” he said. Kit did, too. He looked around. “Are we packed up?”

Nita joined them. “All you need to do is take down your pup tent, and we’ll be ready to run,” she said. “What time is it outside?”

Kit looked at his watch. “About an hour till dawn. So we’ll go in half an hour?” He looked around at the others. Roshaun bowed agreement; Filif rustled “yes.”

He looked over at Carmela, who was leaning against one of the mochteroofs, fiddling with her curling iron. Kit let out another exasperated breath. “Fil,” he said, “can you retailor Sker’ret’s mochteroof for Carmela? And better put some training wheels on it.”

“I take your meaning; I’m working on that right now,” Filif said. “Fifteen minutes more will see the work done.”

Kit nodded. Neets, he said silently, we really need to talk.

You’re right, she said. We do. But she was looking at Memeki.

Ponch looked up at Kit. And about the biscuits…

Kit sighed. “Okay, so I hid a box,” he said. “Come on.”

***

Sitting cross-legged on the floor of the cavern, Nita drank her soda and watched Filif working over the last remaining mochteroof, while Carmela walked around it, kibitzing and apparently offering design tips. Off to one side, Dairine and Roshaun were sitting down and conferring about something. Kit and Ponch had vanished inside Kit’s pup tent. By the scarred-over crevasse, Memeki crouched, every now and then shivering a little. And in that shiver, Nita suddenly felt that both their biggest problem and its solution were buried.

She closed her eyes and breathed out, breathed in. The messages that were coming to her—whether as hunches or visions or half-heard whispers—were getting so intense, in this past day or so, that she didn’t have to be asleep to have them. Is this going to be a permanent thing? she wondered. Or is this just the peridexic effect working? When all this is over, is it back to business as usual?

Don’t ask me, said the silent voice in the back of her brain. Nothing about this business has been usual.

She smiled slightly, opened her eyes again. Crouched down on the gritty stone in front of her, Spot looked up at her with two small, stalked, glowing eyes. “So how’re you holding up, small stuff?” she said. “You feel better since Dairine took you back home?”

“Much better,” Spot said. His voice was clearer than Nita had heard it for some time. Nonetheless, there was a hesitant quality to it.

“You don’t sound too sure.” She reached out and stroked his case between the eyes.

“There’s still much stored data to assimilate,” Spot said. “And it will take a long time. But in the short term, I can say that I seem to be more than I was. If I can just work out what to do with it.”

Nita laughed, just once, a brief and rueful sound. “That goes for both of us.”

“But at least you’ve come back from Earth with what we need,” Spot said. “The word that has to be heard.”

Nita gave Spot a look. “I have?” She found this news reassuring coming from Spot, and she needed the reassurance.

He wiggled his eyes at her and trundled back off in Dairine’s direction. “Getting a lot more vocal, that wee fella,” said the voice from behind her.

Nita cocked an eye up at Ronan, and took another drink of soda. I wonder if it’s contagious, she thought, catching a glimpse out of the corner of her eye of Kit coming out of his pup tent again. Ponch followed him out, and Kit started to roll up the access and pull it down out of the air.