Wizards At War

The two spots in question were perhaps ten meters apart. Dairine went to hers and stood in it; the diagram around her started to glow brighter as she took her place. She knelt down, found the wizard’s knot that marked the beginning and ending of her name in the Speech, and began to trace the many-branched curve of it right around the circle.

Spot scurried out of the crowd of mobiles to settle himself in the third, smaller dark patch that had opened up. “I’ll be storing the proceedings,” he said, “so that if you need to refer to them later, you’ll have everything handy.”

“Okay,” she said, turning a little to get a better view of the next part of her name. “How’re you feeling?”

Spot paused. “Different,” he said.

He’s not the only one, Dairine thought. She traced along one section of the long sequence of Speech-characters, which made up the description of her that was crucial to a working wizardry. Some of its elements spoke more of the machine than the human. She’d seen those growing slowly since her Ordeal, and during her affiliation with Spot, but today some of them were crowding the strictly human qualities somewhat. “You feel better?” Dairine said to Spot.

“I think so,” Spot said. “Clearer, anyway.”

“Good,” she said, and turned to Roshaun. “You ready for it?”

“Yes,” Roshaun said, and looked down at her with an amused expression. “Always assuming you don’t need time to compose yourself because you have been panicked by the sheer size of the impending wizardry. Even I am impressed.”

Dairine smiled a half smile. “Yeah, I’ll just bet you are,” she said.

Most of the mobiles who had gathered to see their arrival had now crowded back out of the space, but not because they weren’t participating. Underneath every mobile Dairine could see, a small circle of power was flaring—each one’s own name and a power-conduit linking it to the central wizardry. Logo, Gigo, Beanpole, and Hex made their way out into the center of the master spell diagram, where similar circles flared under each of them. They were followed by the rest of the core imaging team, who arranged themselves around the inner four at the vertices of a hexagon.

“We are nearly ready,” said Beanpole.

“But one question,” Logo said. He turned toward Roshaun. “What’s that you bear?”

Roshaun looked around him in confusion. “What—Oh, this,” he said, looking down at the great stone around his neck. “It’s a token of my office as Sunlord.”

“Its structure is unusual; it needs to be a separate part of the spell,” Beanpole said.

Roshaun raised his eyebrows, and lifted the great torc from his throat. “If you need a description of its physical properties—”

“There,” said Beanpole, indicating a newly appearing empty spot in the wizardry, just to one side of Roshaun. A “container” for the collar bloomed there in the surface—a hollow sphere of pale filigree fire, constructed of numerous long phrases in the Speech all knitted together and burning. Roshaun went to the glowing sphere and looked it over carefully, tracing several of the longer curves of Speech with one finger. Finally he slipped the collar into the sphere. It hung there, gleaming in the white fire, turning slightly.

“Is the description accurate?” Hex said.

“So far as I can tell,” Roshaun said, making his way back to his own circle.

“Very well,” Logo said, and looked out toward Dairine, Spot, and Roshaun. “Does the ground suit?”

It was one of several traditional queries for a wizard proposing a potentially dangerous solution to a problem. Dairine looked at Roshaun, who tilted his head “yes,” and then at Spot. “Yes,” he said.

“On the Powers’ business, all ground suits,” Dairine said. “Let’s do Their work, and the One’s.”

A rustle of tension and expectation went around the huge circle. “All right,” Gigo said. “If you two would get into circuit with the Motherboard? Skin to skin, to begin with.”

Dairine sat down cross-legged in the middle of her spell diagram, and put her hands flat down on the cool surface on either side of her. The sudden jolt of power, of connectedness to everyone around her, took her completely by surprise. She wobbled as she looked back at herself through thousands of other eyes. Then she heard a voice she hadn’t directly heard until now, a rumble in the bones.

You’ve come back, the Motherboard said to Dairine. You’ve come home!

Yes, Dairine said, feeling a little embarrassed, as if she’d been out late and hadn’t let her mom know beforehand.

And you’re much more than you were, the Motherboard said.

Now Dairine started to feel the faint discomfort of someone being praised for something they haven’t actually earned. Uh—