Wizards At War

You did that. As for the rest—Did it actually sound a little shy? It was my pleasure. And also a pleasure to see a spell I haven’t seen done quite that way before. That’s one for the book.

Nita smiled as the wizardry completed. Closing her eyes, in her mind she could see a swarm of little sparks, like thirty or forty bright bees, all seemingly orbiting one another in a tight swarm down one end of the main cross-corridor. There were no other Tawalf life signs present in the Crossings, and no further live-fusion signatures.

Nita opened her eyes. “Not many of them left,” she said. “They’re all down at the left-hand end of that corridor.” She pointed. “I think they’re trying to get out.”

“That they won’t do,” Sker’ret said. “I’ve cut power to all the gates, and instructed the master gating matrices to refuse any incoming gating. Let’s go have a word with the Tawalf and find out where my ancestor and sibs are.”

Or if they are, Nita thought. Suddenly, she felt very tired. “And you turned off the self-destruct?”

“No,” Sker’ret said. He reached up to the self-destruct console and pulled off what Nita had at first thought was a small protruding piece of the monitor panel. As he detached it, the little slick black piece of metal or plastic came alive with the same frozen figures that shone on the main monitor. Sker’ret opened his mandibles and swallowed it.

Nita’s eyes went wide. “Uh, feeling like a snack?”

“Not that much like one,” Sker’ret said. “This way it can’t be lost or taken from me, and if I have to destroy it, that option’s only a stomach or two away. Let’s go deal with the survivors.”

Nita climbed out of the rack while lifting the accelerator wizardry carefully to keep it from interfering with the local matter. As the three of them walked down the corridor, detouring around blasted pieces of Crossings and remnants of the destroyed fusion weapons, Nita put her free hand up to her face and found herself dripping with sweat and covered with dust. “‘Mela,” she said, wiping some of the sweat away, “how in the worlds did you get here?”

Carmela was ambling along on the other side of Sker’ret, gazing in idle interest at the general destruction. “Well, when you left, the TV and the TiVo and the DVD player were still in sync with Spot,” she said. “While I was changing channels, I found where the two of them were storing the coordinates of all the places you were passing through. And since I didn’t feel like just sitting around after you guys utterly ditched me, I used the TV’s browser to look up where you’d been. There’s a lot there about the Crossings. I thought, ‘Hey, I could go there! I know the address now.’ And the TV showed me how—”

“The TV showed you?”

“It’s real helpful,” Carmela said, “when it’s not being bossed around by the remote. Come to think of it, it’s been a lot more talkative the past few days.”

“And it made you a worldgate,” Sker’ret said, sounding bemused.

“It put it in the closet in my room,” Carmela said. She smiled sunnily. “I told Kit I wanted a magic closet! And now I’ve got one.”

“Oh boy,” Nita said, imagining what Kit’s reaction to this was going to be.

“I was going to do some shopping,” Carmela said, glancing around her regretfully at the trashed and blasted shops. “But when I got here, I heard all this noise, so I ran down this way. And what do I find but all these skinny purple aliens running around shooting at everything! Some of them started shooting at me, too. That was not very friendly of them.” Her tone of voice might have been used to describe the antics of unruly toddlers. “I told them to stop. They wouldn’t. And then after that, I saw them shooting at you. I thought maybe Kit was here, too, so—” She shrugged. “Nobody gets to blow up my baby brother while I have anything to say about it. Or his best friend! So I took steps.”

“Uh,” Nita said, and could think of absolutely nothing else to say.

“Where is he, by the way?” Carmela said.

This is not a place where I want to be overheard discussing what’s really going on. “Uh, there’s another planet where we’re doing some work.”

“Great,” Carmela said. “When we’re done here, let’s go.”

“Ah,” Sker’ret said. “Carmela, the situation there is—”

“‘Mela,” Nita said simultaneously, “look, we’re really grateful that you got here when you did, but—”