Wizards At War

Roshaun headed for the door; Dairine went with him. About halfway down to the doors, she said, “I can’t wait to get out of these clothes.”

“The way you did before?” Roshaun said. “That was entertaining. And informative.”

Now what the heck is that supposed to mean?! Dairine thought.

“Probably not what you think,” Roshaun said. “But when you do resume your usual guise…” He reached out toward her as they went, and very casually tapped the cabochon emerald at Dairine’s throat.

“Not that,” he said. “That I think you should keep. It becomes you.”

“Uh, okay,” Dairine said, and blushed again, she hardly knew why. “It’s just—I’m hard on jewelry. It gets busted, or…”

The expression on his face was so strange that she said, “All right, sure, I’ll keep it.”

“Good,” Roshaun said. “Meanwhile—”

They were at the doors. Roshaun stepped through them. Dairine hung back, waiting. Out beyond the mountain of the palace, all across the plain, the two million Wellakhit people still stood, their quiet now more hushed than before because of the great height; and before them, near the slender rail at the highest terrace’s edge, stood Roshaun’s father.

Roshaun went directly to Nelaid and stood beside him at the edge of the terrace. Dairine watched Nelaid’s face, set and proud, as he turned it toward his son. After a few moments, Roshaun stretched out a hand.

His father took it. They stood there in the view of that great assemblage, and slowly an uncertain murmur went up at that gesture that Dairine guessed suggested more a joint kingship than one vesting solely in one party or the other.

“You told them?” Roshaun said.

“I did,” said Nelaid.

“Then by your leave, royal father,” Roshaun said, “I go. And, Father, I am sorry.”

“My son,” Nelaid said, “the Aethyrs go with you.”

And carefully, as if he wasn’t sure how to do it in front of all these people, Nelaid embraced his son. The sound from the crowd swelled, still confused, but somehow approving.

Roshaun let his father go. “I have to attach this to a substrate,” he said, as he produced his manual again and reached into it, pulling out the compressed darkness that was the subsidized worldgate.

“Go ahead, son.”

As Roshaun made his way back toward the wall near the doors, Dairine saw Nelaid throw her a look that was much less stiff than his regard had been earlier. She bowed her head to him again, not too far for fear of what the tiara would do, and then turned to join Roshaun, with Spot spidering along behind her.

“You were going to have some coordinates for me?” Roshaun said.

“Here,” Spot said.

Roshaun flung the darkness of the worldgate up against the wall; it spread out into a black circle a few meters wide. “One thing,” Dairine said, as Spot fed the temporospatial coordinates of the Motherboard World to the worldgate wizardry.

“Yes?”

“Something you said back there,” Dairine said, as the worldgate’s vacuum-warding subroutine snapped to life. “‘When we come home from this errand’?”

“It was a slip of the tongue,” Roshaun said after a moment.

“And therefore not true?” Dairine said.

Roshaun wouldn’t answer.

Dairine smiled and led the way through the gate.

6: Collateral Damage

Nita looked around her as they materialized inside the vast space of the Crossings Worldgating Facility. It was night there; as usual after sunset, the vast, remote ceiling had apparently vanished, and the milky turbulence of the upper atmosphere had cleared, letting the extravagant night sky of Rirhath B show through.

Automatically Nita did the first thing you do in the Crossings when appearing out of nowhere: she looked down to check whether the transport surface they were all standing on was “dedicated” or not. Fortunately, it wasn’t. “Come on, guys,” Nita said, “everybody out of the zone.”

Filif followed Nita over the line as Kit and Ponch and Ronan were crossing over in a slightly different direction. Ponch bounded past them, lolloping off down the wide central corridor of this part of the Crossings. “Don’t run!” Nita called after him, concerned that he would go crashing into some unsuspecting alien; but there wasn’t much point. They were easily a quarter mile from the nearest other beings who were catching late (or early) gates to their destinations. Ponch galloped along, oblivious, tail wagging, and no one paid him any attention.

Nita looked at her watch as Sker’ret poured past her, heading for one of the many bluesteel information kiosks that rose ten or twelve feet from the floor at intervals all along the length of the concourse. It really is later than we’ve usually been in here before, Nita thought. To her watch, she said, “Crossings time, please?”

The face of the watch restructured itself to show her the thirty-three-hour Crossings day. It’s nearly twenty-nine o’clock, Nita thought. Probably no surprise that traffic’s a little down.