Wizards At War

“Huh,” Dairine said. She moved the lollipop from right to left in her mouth, and then from left to right again, and finally said, “I don’t know how ‘inappropriate’ looks to your people.”

“You should read the manual more,” Roshaun said.

“Seemed simpler to ask you.”

“And possibly more embarrassing.”

“Maybe I just like yanking your chain,” Dairine said, “as much as you like yanking mine.”

Roshaun’s expression was bemused. “The idiom is peculiar,” he said after a few moments, “except insofar as it implies we’re linked.”

Dairine stayed quiet.

“My father’s concerns about the two of us,” Roshaun said, “I take as an indication of other things that were going on with him right then. Wellakhit are not moved to seek unionbond with another until at least a third of the way along in our life span. I am nowhere near that, and you, if I’m right, would be only about a sixth of a way along, as your people reckon time.”

Dairine did the multiplication. “Sounds about right,” she said. “You do have the idea of being ‘just good friends?’”

He gave her a sidewise look. “For so high and honorable an estate,” Roshaun said, “‘just’ seems a poor modifier to choose.”

Crunch! went the lollipop Roshaun was working on, and Dairine flinched.

“I really wish you wouldn’t do that,” she said.

“You are always hearing trouble before it happens,” Roshaun said. “Some might say it was a sign of a lack of faith in the benevolence of the universe. Or of dysfunction.”

Dairine glared at him. “You keep this up, I’ll give you a dysfunction where you’ll have trouble finding it again,” she muttered.

“Now there you have it,” Roshaun said. “All this aggressiveness! I wonder about you sometimes.”

You wonder about me! Dairine thought.

Yes, Roshaun said in the back of her head.

Dairine saw that Roshaun was wearing a brooding look. “And what’s the matter with you?” she said.

Roshaun let out an annoyed breath. “My father,” he said at last. “My business with him did not go as I thought it would.”

“What? You expected him to just roll over and agree with whatever you told him?”

“On the contrary,” Roshaun said. “I expected a great fight with storming and shouting. Then everything would have been over with, and in a short time we would have been set at rights with one another again. But this—this calm complaisance—” Roshaun shook his head. “It sounded nothing like the way he usually does. It troubles me.”

“Well, I was sure troubled,” Dairine said, “and if that was him being calm—”

Roshaun laughed. “And you thought I was so lucky to have a wizard for a parent.”

“Is it possible for me to admit you might have been right without you rubbing it in?” Dairine said.

Roshaun gazed out into the darkness as if giving a strange new concept some thought. “Perhaps,” he said. “Next time I’ll try.”

They leaned back in their chairs again and looked at the silently rising galaxy. “Forgive us,” said a voice down on the ground between their feet, “but we’re ready for you now.”

They both looked down. Logo was there, and his back was roiling with Speech charactery, a brilliantly blending muddle of symbols and figures. Dairine looked down at the shifting patterns chasing themselves across Logo’s hide and suddenly, unreasonably, found them threatening. She swallowed. “What do you need us to do?” she said, and got up.

“We’ll be setting up the diagram out here,” Logo said. “You’ll want to check it, of course, to make sure that your personal information is complete and correct.”

Logo trundled out into the very center of the huge open area inside the circle of towers. The mobiles all around drew back and left the great space empty; under Dairine’s and Roshaun’s feet, the surface went dark, and that darkness ran straight up the surrounding towers and extinguished their fire.

Dairine could feel the jolt of power that passed between Logo and the surface. From the low dome of his back, a multilobed diagram far more complex and more densely interlaced than anything Dairine had seen so far raced out across to the towers and up them. Light in many colors burned bright and dim through the pattern as it established itself, the color and brightness of every line and curve signaling the relative importance of the part of the spell involved.

Dairine gulped at the immensity of it. “Wow,” she said. “Even you guys couldn’t have built this whole wizardry just now!”

“No,” Logo said. “We had help. You’ll see.” He sprouted an arm and waved it across the expanse of the wizardry. Three relatively dark patches had been left open in the diagram, each of them a many-sided polygon with a minimum of inscribed words in the Speech inside. “There are your spots,” Logo said. “Yours over there, Dairine. Roshaun, yours there.”