Wizards At War

For a long moment, Nita didn’t say anything. Then she sighed. “Look, I know we had to run with the information that Ronan and the Champion gave us. But I still feel like we’ve run out on our Seniors, and they probably got worried about us when they came looking for us and couldn’t find us anywhere.”

“You’re not going to tell them anything—”

“Of course I’m not going to tell them anything! But they just need to know we’re okay.”

She was quiet for a moment.

“And that’s still not all of it,” Kit said.

Once again, and for a much longer time, Nita said nothing.

“Look,” Kit said, “don’t say anything if you don’t want to; I guess it’s not really important—”

“You’re eavesdropping on my brains again,” Nita said.

Her tone was resigned. “No,” Kit said, and blushed. “I just overheard—You know how it is. More a feeling than a thought.”

“Yeah,” Nita said. “I know how it is.”

The look she gave him left Kit embarrassed enough to want to glance away; but he didn’t. “A feeling is all it is,” Nita said. “I wish I had something more concrete to go on than a hunch! But that’s all I’ve got. There’s something back that way that needs doing, and I have to go there and find out what it is, and do it. And I hate acting like being on Rashah is freaking me out enough to make me immediately run away!”

“I know that’s not it,” Kit said.

“Do you?” said Nita.

Now it was Kit’s turn to pause. Is it smart to tell her how seriously scared I am? he thought. Is it going to make her feel worse?

“Yeah, I do,” Kit said at last. “I don’t want to spend a minute more here than I have to. But I don’t have any hunches, and you do. So get out of here and do what you have to. And do one thing for me?”

“Sure.”

“Call my mom when you get there? Let her know we’re okay.”

“Yeah,” Nita said. “No problem.”

They turned back to the others. “We’re done here,” Sker’ret said. “Filif’s checked everything over, and we’ve got the coordinates for the cave. We’ll meet you there when we’re finished.”

“Then you two go on,” Kit said. “We won’t do anything too exciting until you get back.”

“Why do I have serious doubts about that?” Nita said. But she smiled, even though the smile was wan. “Look, if Dairine turns up before we get back—”

“I’ll fill her in.”

Nita went over to where Sker’ret was standing in one of the spell diagrams. “You ready?” she said to Ronan.

He lifted the Spear of Light. “Go,” he said.

The Spear flared into life. Nita and Sker’ret began to speak in the Speech together. Under their feet, the spell diagram came alive with light—the spoken words chasing their way around the circle, knotting in the wizard’s knot, then blazing up too blindingly to let a viewer see individual characters.

Nita and Sker’ret vanished. As they did, Kit once again caught what he’d “overheard” before, that strange feeling of fear combined with Nita’s sense of something that absolutely had to be done. And mixed with it, bizarrely, he could hear a sort of buzzing sound, sharp and abrupt, repeating again and again. Kit frowned. Now where’ve I heard that sound before? If I didn’t know better, I’d think it was somebody using some kind of energy weapon…

He didn’t hear anything further. Weird, Kit thought. Never mind. To Filif, who was now standing over Sker’ret’s short-term transit spell diagrams, he said, “How’s everything look?”

“Perfect.”

Ponch, sitting there looking down at the planet, now stood up again and shook himself all over. Are we going finding again?

“Pretty soon,” Kit said. “But we should get to the cave so you can have some dinner first.”

Ponch began to jump up and down excitedly. “Okay, okay, do it over here,” he said, leading Kit to one of the transit circles Sker’ret had set up. Nearby, Ronan and Filif each stepped into one of the others. Ronan glanced over at him. “Ready?”

“Ready.”

They vanished.

***

The darkness and silence of the cave was total, and the air was absolutely still, except for the gentle wavering of the heat they felt rising from the surface on which they stood. The stifling air was slightly tainted with an oily smell that reminded Kit of the last time the repairmen had to be called in to deal with the furnace at home.

Very slowly Ronan allowed the Spear of Light to show itself in a faint ghostly glimmer of blade, while Filif’s eye-berries glowed at their softest. Kit spoke the words of his small wizard-light spell and pushed it loose into the air, where the tiny spark of it hung and made a dim green-blue glow. Around them on all sides, the cavern stretched out, vast, empty, the distant walls glittering faintly. The floor was curved slightly upward toward the far walls, so that the four of them seemed to be standing in the middle of a huge, pale, shallow bowl. In such low light, the ceiling was invisible.