Wizards At War

Nita went home. Her dad was making dinner; she helped him, and was for a while blissfully happy with the simplicity of macaroni and cheese. Dairine arrived not long after dinner started, sat down, and was uncharacteristically silent. She ate, thoroughly but unenthusiastically, and then went up to bed.

Nita’s father looked at her as they were finishing up. “I guess this means,” he said, “that even after you save the universe, you can still feel let down.”

Nita nodded. “It doesn’t last,” she said. “It keeps needing to be saved.”

Her dad smiled at her a little. “Take your time,” he said, as he got up to take his plate into the kitchen, “but I really want to hear all about it. Because it’s worth knowing that it can be saved.”

Nita smiled at that, stretched and yawned, then brought her own plate into the kitchen, kissed her dad good night, and went up to bed.

***

Dairine had gone to sleep holding the Sunstone, suspecting what the result of that would be, especially at a time like this.

The place through which she moved was one of light, and gathered around her was a huge crowd of inhuman shapes. Mostly little and low-built, shelled in light, they moved through a gigantic construction of fire that towered above and around them. Under them, as a floor, lay a spell diagram of incredible complexity, seemingly miles wide, a plain over which the low, shelled creatures moved casually while the uppermost fires of a star roiled and burned beneath them.

Dairine walked out over that wide floor of wizardry, and many of the shelled shapes accompanied her. You’re not supposed to be here just yet, one of them said.

Dairine glanced over at Logo. “Neither are you,” she said. “You’re all still alive!”

Don’t mistake this for Timeheart, Logo said. This is just an anteroom—a portal area. But you brought us the data that made what’s going to happen here possible. Causality therefore becomes something less than an issue. And Logo gave Dairine a mischievous look.

You shouldn’t be raising false hopes, Dairine said. Everything dies eventually. Everything runs down. No exceptions—

You’d be surprised, Logo said. Everywhere it can, the universe breaks the rule, sometimes in the strangest ways. That’s what wizardry’s about, isn’t it? Finding the unexpected way to foil the force that invented Death. Doing what Life itself does every chance it can. You’ve put the tools in our hands, and now the possibilities are endless.

Dairine swallowed. Let’s see how endless, she said. Show me what I came to see.

They walked a long time across the plane of wizardry, through the unending light. Finally, though, Dairine came to the place she’d known would be there. It looked a lot like Wellakh.

Here, though, the mighty spire of stone that reared up into the sky was not scorched barren. Here the red things grew, cascading down it, the hanging gardens of another world. Here that spire pierced right up into the darkness of space, not hubris or a challenge to the heavens, but a dream achieved. And all around it stretched an endless plain that was barren no more. Wellakh was healed of its old wound.

Dairine stood again high on that terrace above the world, looking down the mountain. She leaned over the railing as she’d done once before, seeing the beautiful red foliage of the native Wellakhit plant life stretching away for miles under the golden sun—not a garden, an artificial thing, but a natural reality, never destroyed by the terrible flare of the Wellakhit sun.

Dairine turned away from the railing and went across the terrace to the crystal-paned doors, and then through them, into the place where Roshaun’s rooms had been. The decorations were much the same as they had been before—to her eye, rich and overdone—but the light that dwelt in every carpet or chair or piece of artwork told her that this was his idea of perfection, the place of his desire. And he wasn’t here.

Dairine started to look around, taking her time. She went into every room in those apartments, explored every inch, but he was still not there. And in the last room she came to, a little place full of huge clothes-presses and nobly carved and decorated cabinets, Dairine found the one thing that could have surprised her. There was a darkness in one wall: the only darkening in that whole bright place—an active worldgate.