Wizards At War

The others crowded in close to say their good-byes. Finally Filif stood away from them. “Cousins,” he said, “you’re needed at home, and so am I. Till the journey brings us together again, dai stihó!”

“Dai,” they all said, and Filif made his way to the gate that Sker’ret had programmed for him. He glided out onto the pad, all his berries alight, and a second later he flicked out of view.

Nita let out a breath. Will we see him again? she wondered. And more to the point … will he see us again?

“There’s one main area of activity on your world’s satellite right now,” Sker’ret said. “Should I drop you there?”

Kit stepped over to the console pad at which Sker’ret was working and looked over his top few sets of shoulders at the coordinates. “We know the spot,” he said, and glanced over at Nita. “Let’s go.” He put an arm around Sker’ret, grabbed a fistful of eyes and wobbled them around a little. “Sker’—”

“Cousin,” Sker’ret said. He looked up at the others. “Go do what needs doing for your own world. One way or another, we’ll meet again.”

They all headed onto the same pad from which Filif had departed, and Roshaun and Dairine guided Ronan along behind them. At the control pad, looking very uncertain, very alone, even while surrounded by all his people, Sker’ret raised a single foreleg to them.

One way or another, Nita thought as she looked at him. He hit a control on his console. Which doesn’t necessarily mean while we’re still alive.

The Crossings disappeared from view.

***

There is no “dark side” of the Moon. In the course of its monthlong day, all of it eventually sees the Sun. But on the side of the Moon that the Earth never sees, just a shade below the spot where the lunar equator and its central meridian cross, there’s a crater called Daedalus; and many of Earth’s wizards know it well.

Almost dead center in the far side, the three-kilometer-high rim of the crater rises into the black and starry night. Normally Daedalus is where a moon-walker goes when he or she needs peace and quiet for some reason—in this case, “quiet” meaning complete isolation from the radio noise that Earth spills out into space. It’s not a big crater—barely sixty miles wide, with a floor surprisingly flat and smooth for any feature on the far side of the Moon. But in the crater’s broad center stand three small mounds, each about three miles wide, arranged in a triangle pointing southeast. At the top of the southernmost mound is a tiny crater, barely a half mile wide. There are many names for it, but most wizards call it the “Dimple.”

Nita and Kit and the others came out just above where the smaller bowl of the Dimple dropped away before them, and paused, looking around. It was dark, the Sun well down behind the western horizon, and Earth, of course, was nowhere to be seen. Nita did a moment’s calculation in her head. The Moon had just gone new when they’d left. Now, as seen from the Earth, it would be just past first quarter. In “real time,” we’ve been gone ten days, almost eleven—

Just the thought started to make her feel shaky again, but she had no time for that right now. The Dimple below them was absolutely crammed full of wizards, faintly illuminated by hundreds of sparks or globes of wizard-light. Behind Nita, Roshaun and Dairine and Spot made their own lights, while Carmela looked around her in astonishment.

“Don’t go more than six feet from us,” Kit said to her, as Ponch went running and half bouncing off down the slope, scattering gray-white dust in all directions. “That’s where our air stops.”

“Doesn’t seem to be stopping him,” Carmela said.

“Ponch plays by his own rules,” Kit said, looking down into the crater as Nita did. “So unless you can create your own universes, either stay close or get vacuum-dried.”

“Kit, it’s not a problem,” Dairine said. “Look…”

He glanced up as Nita did. Over the entire crater a faint dome of wizardry was shivering. “Somebody down there roofed the whole thing over with an auto-maintaining life-support wizardry,” Dairine said. “We can let the personal shields go as soon as we pass the boundary. Probably somebody didn’t care to sweat the small stuff while there were bigger things to be doing.”

“Makes sense,” Kit said. “Come on.”

They all stepped through the brief shiver of the spell’s outer boundary and onto the downward slope of the crater. “Big crowd,” Kit said. But the look on Kit’s face reflected the worry that Nita was feeling. He’d noticed that though there might be hundreds and hundreds of wizards down there, there wasn’t even one who looked adult.

“They’ve all lost it, haven’t they?” Kit said. “Every single one.”