Wizards At War

Light blasted out and away from her through the surface, curving and twining away in all directions as long sentences in the Speech etched themselves under it in living fire. She had a peculiar sense that someone else was in the spell with her. Not the Motherboard, not the mobiles, not Spot or Roshaun: nothing living—or at least not with the usual kind of life. All around her, the mobiles glowed more brightly by the moment as the spell drew on the Motherboard’s manual functions and showed Dairine what to say.

The feeling of the sheer power running through her astounded Dairine. I’d forgotten it could be like this… The throb of it ran up her arms and into her brain; she stood up slowly, let it build. If it wasn’t for how desperate all this is, I could really enjoy this.

And she was enjoying it. There was no use pretending otherwise. Dairine started to speak the words in the Speech that were the search coordinates. The sound of them going out of her was like thunder. They shook her from side to side as she spoke them, streaking out into the structure of the wizardry to build its fire higher, second by second.

Across the diagram, Roshaun knelt at his focus point, his expression full of the terror and exaltation of the power that was suddenly his by virtue of his connection to the wizardry and the Motherboard. Dairine couldn’t remember ever having seen so naked and open an expression on his face before. Past him, in its container, the Sunstone blazed the orange-gold of Wellakh’s star.

You okay? Dairine said silently.

He lifted his eyes to hers. The look slammed into Dairine with force that felt like it should have knocked her down. The world whited out. It was as if the two of them stood in Earth’s Sun again, working the spell that drained off the excess energy which would have made the Sun flare up and roast the side of Earth facing toward it. But this time the roiling sea of power above which they stood was partly the Motherboard, and partly Dairine—or, rather, the surface of Dairine’s mind as Roshaun saw it.

From Roshaun, Dairine got the sense of someone standing on a narrow bridge over what looked like untameable, furious chaos paired with infinite power. That power was speaking to him, too, tempting him to get a little closer to the edge. Don’t get any ideas! Dairine said silently.

The answer was a strange low garbled roar, one she instantly recognized, since it had shocked her so when first she’d heard it. The Sun said something, and I didn’t understand. But now it was Roshaun saying something in the Speech, and once again Dairine wasn’t getting it. Impossible. Everything understands the Speech!

She shook her head. No time for it now, she thought. It’s some weirdness to do with him; we’ll figure it out later. The rest of the Speech was working just fine; the spell lay before her, ready to implement.

Dairine took a breath and said the single word in the Speech that is the shorthand for the wizard’s knot, the “go” word of the spell.

Everything went dark. Then images began to superimpose themselves on the darkness, blotting out even the viewer’s sense of being at the center of a point of view, so that Dairine felt more like a bodiless presence than an observer. She saw the strange slick cloud of some atom’s shell, from the inside, an undersky fuzzy with probabilities. The “sky” rushed toward her, blew past her like fog, leaving her gazing out on interstitial space alive with the neon ripples of “strong force” between a seemingly infinite latticework of atoms. Another few breaths, and the view was a solid mass of chains of molecules, writhing among one another like a nest of snakes. Another blurring outward rush, and reddish lightning rattled and sizzled everywhere, whip-cracking down the length of strange bumpy textures like a child’s blocks strung on rope. Another rush, and everything went milky and crystalline, with a faint strange movement going on outside the surface of the crystal.

One last blur of fog descended, and the image resolved itself into a peculiar view seen through eyes that fringed every object with brilliant rainbows of color. It was a landscape, all in flat dark reds, the sky black with heat; and finally there was a point of view associated with it. This is it, Dairine said, exultant. This is what the world looks like for the person who’s got the Instrumentality. Now all we need to find is where they are.