Wizards At War

He pushed the keypad away from him; it vanished into the column. Sker’ret headed into the middle of the biggest hex, and they all followed. Nita was half amused, half scared to see how everybody put themselves as far into the middle of the hex as they could, so that at the end of the exercise three humans, a dog, a centipede, and a Christmas tree all stood back to back, facing outward against whatever might come at them.

“Twenty,” Sker’ret said. “Ten.”

Nita looked around her at a section of the Crossings that had no one in it but them, no one at all. It gave her the shivers.

“Five.”

Her heart was pounding. She glanced over at Kit.

“Zero—”

Everything went dark.

Nita had to blink a couple of times to get used to the darkness. There was air, at least—Crossings gateways had a vacuum-guard on them, so they wouldn’t dump you out into an inimical or absent atmosphere without warning. As usual, she looked up first at the sky.

There wasn’t one.

They stood on a small, arid, empty world, and Nita had known it was empty the moment they came out of nowhere. The lack of life has a specific feel to which any wizard past Ordeal quickly becomes sensitive, a sensation of something missing that ought to be there, but isn’t, like a pulled tooth. Above them, there should have been stars.

But there weren’t.

Nita tried to make sense of what she was seeing as she looked up. It was like when you stare into the dark for a long time and start imagining that the dark itself is moving. But this movement was real. It was as if the darkness was heaving with small shapes, no bigger than grains of rice—but all darker even than the blackness where they grew.

Nita had a sudden thought of the mealworms she’d once found all through a bag of bad flour—heaving, rustling against each other, like a live thing that was also a lot of little live things. The darkness of space above them stirred and heaved with little darknesses. They were there. And Nita very much did not want to think what they would start to be like when they were bigger.

She swallowed, fighting the thought of being sick, which wouldn’t have helped. Before this, space might have been inimical, bitterly cold, airless, arid, but it was at least clean. Suddenly that innocent, unself-conscious deadliness had been taken from it. Something was trying to squirm through the crevices of reality and fill that calm dark emptiness, void of everything but stars, with something heavier than starstuff, darker than the longest night, and horribly, mindlessly alive … with no interest in any other kind of life except squeezing it out, pushing all the native life more and more apart, filling everything so full with itself that there was no room for anything else. This was what the dark-matter expansion looked like, up close and personal. But the dark matter, innocent enough in itself, had had something added to it… something terrible.

She looked over at Kit: his expression was as shocked and horrified as hers must have been. She wondered how all the wizards there were could possibly stop such a thing. And we don’t even have all the wizards there are. Old age and experience can beat youth and power every time, Dad always says. Now all we’ve got is youth and power. Is it going to be enough?

And what if it’s not?

Kit put out a hand and said a few words in the Speech. A moment later, a small bright spark of wizard-fire materialized above his hand. Nita followed suit, telling hers to hover over one shoulder and just behind her. Around them, the others brought light about as well—Sker’ret’s carapace came alive with it, and all of Filif’s berries blazed. Ronan took that clip-on ballpoint pen out of his pocket and gave it a shake. A moment later he was holding the Spear of Light in its full form—the seven-foot spear shaft glowing softly, the head of the Spear wreathing itself in a chilly white-golden flame.

Kit was looking up into the darkness, and to Nita’s eye, he looked faintly unwell. “That has to be the creepiest thing I’ve ever seen,” he said.

Ronan stood leaning on the Spear, his free hand resting on his hip, his shadow lying pooled black behind him from the Spear’s radiance. It might have seemed a casual stance at first. But as Ronan gazed up into that unhealthy, seething dark, Nita started to sense how tightly he was controlling himself, like someone working hard not to run away. His face was very still, though, and Nita for the first time actually saw someone else look out of Ronan’s eyes. The expression was one of recognition coupled with a very controlled anger. The one who looked out had seen something like this before.

She went over to him. “Something familiar about this?” she said.