Wizards At War

“I hope it doesn’t also get us in some kind of trouble we can’t anticipate,” Kit muttered. “I wish the manual functions weren’t so messed up here. We don’t know as much about these people as we need to.”

“We have no choice, though,” Filif said, “do we? We’re going to have to take the chance.”

“No argument,” Kit said. “Should I try it on?”

“I was hoping you would ask.”

Kit took another look at the wizardry, seeing the spot near the back of the virtual Yaldiv where the user was meant to step in and shrug the new body around him like a coat. Carefully, he stepped into the center of the weave.

The whole thing blazed up with power and pressed in on Kit like a second skin … then vanished. He stood there tremendously confused for a moment: the mochteroof seemed to have simply vanished. Kit held up a hand—

—and saw the shadow of one of those huge, sharp-edged claws come up in front of his face. It was so odd and sudden that he jumped; the claw jerked. “Wow,” Kit said, and turned around. “This is cool. And I still feel like me.”

Ronan had come out of his pup tent and was heading over to fetch the Spear. He looked over at Kit with interest. Ponch, who had come out of Kit’s tent a little before, now started dancing around Kit and barking joyously, as if this was intensely funny. You’re a giant bug! Ponch said. You even smell like one!

“I’ll take that as a compliment,” Kit said, and was astonished at the bizarre humming and crunching noises that came out of him instead of words. He looked over at Filif, and was aware of the dark mirror-shade eyes that he was “seeing” through, though it was his own form of vision that prevailed.

“You can use the Yaldiv sensorium anytime you need to,” Filif said, drifting around again to check that the mochteroof was working correctly. “You can scent and see either in your own mode exclusively, or as they do, or both at once. The Yaldiv see mostly as heat; a lot of the visible spectrum is lost on them. Scent comes through the legs, and they don’t go in much for tactile information, as far as I can tell. Taste is in the mandibles.”

“And wizardry?” Kit said.

“Won’t be impaired,” Filif said. “Your portable claudication is exactly where it would normally be, as are your preprepared wizardries. You can do whatever you would normally—”

The sudden bang! of displaced air was astonishingly loud in this small space, and was followed by an abrupt shower of a sort of flaky rain, as many of the tiny damp mineral-drop stalactites from the ceiling came pattering down onto the floor. Kit whirled around with a disrupter spell in his hands—a little core of compressed wizardry burning hot and ready to fire—and was only briefly surprised by the huge claw-shadows that seemed to enclose the hands holding the spell. Out beyond the shadows of the mochteroof, Ronan had snatched the Spear up out of the stone floor and was standing there with it flaming in one hand, ready to throw. Filif’s berries were suddenly burning a disconcerting dark color that Kit had never seen before. But then Kit let out a breath and waved his hands and their shadow-claws apart, dismissing the spell, at the sight of the two figures standing there, one shorter than him, one much taller.

Dairine and Roshaun looked up around them at the interior of the cave. Dairine’s hands were also holding some spell that fizzed and glittered as whitely blinding as a Fourth of July sparkler. Roshaun was holding ready in one hand what might have been a meter-long gilded rod, except for the hot, orange-golden, sunlike light that writhed and coiled inside it. Down on the floor between them, Spot crouched, glowing a soft and dangerous blue.

Then Dairine and Roshaun and Spot (extruding a few eyes to do the job) all stared at Kit. Dairine actually squinted at him, and it took some moments before she finally grinned. “Hey,” Dairine said. “On you, that looks good.”

Kit laughed. He pulled one of the tags of the Speech that was hanging down inside the mochteroof, and it fell away.

“How’d you find us so fast?” Ronan said. “We didn’t even know we were coming here until a little while ago.”

“I got Nita’s message when we popped out of transit on our way in,” Dairine said. “She left a pointer to the new coordinates, and forwarded it to the transits Sker’ret built for you. But where’d she go?”

“Home,” Kit said. “Heard anything from your dad?”

Dairine shook her head. “I was going to call,” she said. “Why? Neets tried and couldn’t get through?”

“Yeah,” Kit said. “Nothing.”

“Then I won’t bother right now,” Dairine said. “We’ve got bigger fish to fry.”

Roshaun looked briefly nonplussed. “Is this the time to be thinking about food?” he said.