Wizards At War

“If you’d had as little to eat as I have today, it sure would be,” Dairine said, “and if you ask me, Ponch has the right idea, because despite all the hoopla back at your big fancy royal palace, the one thing that didn’t put in an appearance was a buffet. So forgive me.” She reached into her otherspace pocket and started feeling around in it. “But we found out what we’re supposed to be looking for.”

“The Instrumentality?” Kit said.

“What is it?” Ronan said.

Dairine came up with a trail-mix bar and started unwrapping it. “Not a what,” she said. “A who.”

Ronan and Filif and Kit all stared at one another.

Dairine gave Ronan a cockeyed look as she bit into the trail-mix bar. “And it’s funny that not even you know,” she said, munching, “since your passenger was carrying the information. But then, not even He knew. Did you?” she said to the Champion.

I’ve often worked as a courier before, the One’s Champion said. “Messenger” is one of the most basic parts of my job description. But I’ve never before carried a message I didn’t know I was carrying.

“First time for everything,” Dairine said, having another bite. “Ronan, around the time you stopped by our house, part of that message got loaded into Spot, and you never even knew it was happening. We couldn’t get at it until we got to the mobiles’ world. They put some info from the Defender’s presence in the mobiles’ world together with that information, decoded it…”

She smiled. Beside her, Roshaun sat down on the floor, cross-legged, with his usual effortless grace.

“The Instrumentality,” Dairine said, “is the Hesper.”

At that, Ronan looked up sharply.

“Or a Hesper,” Dairine said. “There’s not much difference at this point, since there’s never been one before, and there may be more later if this works out.”

Kit shook his head. “What’s a Hesper?”

“It’s a made-up word,” Dairine said. “We don’t have an English equivalent to the word in the Speech. You know any of the old names for the Lone One before It fell?”

Kit thought a moment, hearing an echo of the word in an old memory. “Hesperus?” he said. “Is that in Greek mythology?”

“Yes and no,” Dairine said. “But you know.” She looked at Ronan, or rather, at his interior colleague. “‘The morning and the evening star,’ they used to call the Lone Power, before there was that disagreement at the beginning of things. Then the ‘star’ fell.”

“Phosphorus and Hesperus,” said Ronan. “The Greeks didn’t know the morning and evening stars were the same planet, so they had two different names. Some people started using ‘Hesperus’ as the name for the Lone One before It fell.”

Dairine nodded. “That’s the closest word we’ve got for what we’re looking for. What’s about to happen, is the emergence of a ‘bright’ version of the Lone Power.”

Kit’s mouth fell open. “Here?”

“Looks like,” Dairine said. “All we have to do now is figure out who it is, where it is, and how to help it.”

“But the Pullulus,” Kit said.

Dairine gave Kit an exasperated look. “Don’t you get it?” Dairine said. “That’s not even slightly important compared to this! I think the Powers are trying to tell us that doing the right thing about the Hesper will save the universe, too. The Hesper’s a lot more important … and we’ve got exactly one chance to get this right. If we do—”

She stood there and waved her hands in the air. Kit realized that he was seeing a historic thing happen: words had just failed Dairine.

The thought scared Kit almost worse than the Pullulus did.

10: Friendly Fire

THEY CAME OUT INTO the dimmed light of evening at the Crossings, and Nita let out the breath she’d been holding since Sker’ret’s transit spell started to work. At a time when wizardry was acting peculiarly, any successful gating was a triumph.

Beside her, Sker’ret hadn’t moved off the transit pad. He was looking around him with all his eyes, every one pointed in a different direction. “Did you hear something?” he said.

“No,” Nita said. And then that struck her as strange. Nita walked off the gating pad and stepped out to where the hexagon of the enclosure met the corridor. She looked up and down the length of that bright, shining space…

…and shivered.

“This is really weird,” Nita said.

Very quietly, Sker’ret came up beside her and looked up and down the broad corridor. There was no one to be seen, absolutely no one at all.

“Okay,” Nita said, thinking aloud, and glancing over at the nearest information standard, which was showing its default display of Crossings time. “It’s the middle of the night…”

“The middle of a Crossings night,” Sker’ret said, “doesn’t look like this. Somewhere in fifteen or twenty thousand worlds, it’s always the middle of the day for somebody. Somebody is always passing through.”

Nita shivered again. “You did say when we left that the reduced traffic was a symptom of something that was going to get worse.”