Wizards At War

“Yes.” Sker’ret sounded unnerved. “But not this much worse, not this fast. And there’s still…”

He trailed off.

The feeling of alarm in him was suddenly very pronounced. Still what? Nita said silently. She felt oddly unwilling to make the silence around them seem any louder by speaking into it.

Something wrong, Sker’ret said. He turned and flowed back to the information column by the gate cluster’s transit pad, rearing up against it to trigger the extension of its command-and-control console. Sker’ret brought up a display on the floating console and tapped at the control pad beside it. The display brought up a number of paragraphs in the dot-patterns and acute angles of Rirhait, but the bar graph beside the figures and annotations told Nita enough about what was going on here. That’s showing recent transits through the Crossings? she said.

In the last three standard days, Sker’ret said. The bar graph showed the number of travelers passing through the Crossings’ worldgates in a standard hour. Every bar was shorter than the one before. Then, in the last standard day, there was a brief shallow spike in both incoming and outgoing transits, after which all of them stopped completely. No one’s come through for some hours, Sker’ret said. Absolutely no one.

They stood there looking at each other in silence. Then Nita said, You don’t think that’s possible, do you?

Sker’ret looked back toward the corridor with several of his eyes. I want to have a look at the central management station, he said. And I want to find out where my esteemed ancestor is!

Come on, Nita said silently.

Walking through this emptiness, with the gating-information standards silently changing minutes on their digital readouts all down the concourse, felt to Nita just like it would have felt to walk down a main street in Manhattan that had no one in it at all. She found herself staring into every gating-cluster alcove that they passed, but there were no people anywhere: not the briefest glimpse of a tentacle, not a glimmer of an alien eye. Down the corridor, Nita could just make out a portion of the shining rack that was part of the Stationmaster’s office. Normally there would have been people passing by it in all directions, making their way to one gate or another. Now the rack stood there all by itself, and Nita and Sker’ret made their way toward it, through the silence, through the emptiness—

Nita’s eyes went wide; without actually hearing anything, she felt a sound go blasting past her ear. “Sker’!” she cried, and threw herself on top of him, knocking him down flat against the floor.

And then the actual sound came, and a blast of energy just above her head—a moment too late, for Nita had just said that fourteenth word in the Speech, and her personal shield-spell had gone up around her and down to the ground on either side, covering Sker’ret as well. It’d better work right this time! she thought furiously, and felt around in the back of her head for that shadowy presence that she was now expecting to find, half double serpent of light, half backbone of wizardry. Are you there?

Here, the peridexic effect said. Nita could instantly feel the extra flow of power go rushing through her into the spell. Several more energy bolts splattered into the shield, gnawed at it, and splashed away.

You carrying anything offensive? Nita said to Sker’ret.

His eyes thrashed around underneath Nita. She levered herself up a little to let him squeeze them out to either side. Absolutely, Sker’ret said, sounding grim. Roll off and I’ll bring my shields up. Where’s the fire coming from?

She peered down the corridor. It was hard to see through the eye-burning brightness of the blaster fire, but Nita could just make out a number of tall, thin shadows down that way, leaning out from behind various outward-projecting kiosks to fire, then ducking back again. I think they’re a lot farther down this corridor, past your ancestor’s office.

Right. Roll now!

Nita rolled off Sker’ret to his left, and felt the bump on her side as his own shield came up and pushed her sideways. She scrambled to her feet as several more energy bolts hit her shield, then reached down to her charm bracelet, grabbed the charm that looked like a lightning bolt, and said the single word in the Speech that released the wizardry’s “safety.”