Games Wizards Play

Mumbai / Shanghai / Elsewhere

THE MORNING SUN was streaming in the windows of Mehrnaz’s upstairs flat. Everything looked bright and cheerful; tea was laid out on the table before them, along with a basket of sweet breads and two or three plates of cookies and—set aside, as if someone didn’t want the more posh and proper foods to suffer by contagion—a brown paper bag of onion bhajis. It was the best breakfast imaginable, except that Dairine knew that the early morning sunlight meant that for her it was really just past midnight. Her stomach was growling, and her head ached, and she didn’t understand everything that was going on—which was worst of all.

Next to her on the couch, Spot flipped his lid open to display the restructured Invitational schedule. “By the final count,” Dairine said, “they threw out two hundred and eighty of three hundred and thirty projects. That leaves only fifty or so, which is a semifinal kind of total. This was one of those years where the judges seem to have come down hard on everybody. It’s happened often enough before, but not in the last few decades.”

“What made them do that?” Mehrnaz said.

Dairine shrugged. “Bad catering? Insomnia? Sunspots? No idea. Check the manual, you’ll see all kinds of theories about why over-deselection might have happened before. But theories are all anyone’s got.”

She leaned back against the sofa pillows. “So what the Intervention management committee is doing,” she said, “is removing the quarter-final stage entirely. We’re going straight on to the semis. They’ll be happening on the original schedule, which is good, because it gives you more time to prepare. Five extra days, in our case. And since this is the first time you’ll be going in front of a live judging panel and having to defend your spell instead of laying it out for examination and talking it up, the extra time is good.”

Mehrnaz, sitting cross-legged on the sofa across from Dairine, shook her head. “It still doesn’t seem like a lot of time . . .”

“But it’s a better schedule,” Dairine said.

Mehrnaz didn’t say anything, just reached out for her cup of tea and drank some of it in silence.

“So you should take today off,” Dairine said, “because I’m sure going to. You did a great job yesterday. You were brilliant, you had everyone eating out of your hand, they couldn’t get enough of you. But in the next stage what you’re going to need is the ability to describe your spell in very fine detail, to be questioned on it by experts and not panic . . . and to make absolutely sure that it’s structurally sound. They are going to test it everywhere that it could be weak, and if they find anything significant you’ll be out on your butt.”

Dairine stretched her legs out. “I told you about the aschetic space that my sister has access to, didn’t I?”

Mehrnaz put the teacup down. “Yes, you did. It sounds intriguing.”

“Well, I think the best thing we can do for you is take you and your spell in there and reproduce the very worst earthquake conditions we can find, and test the spell against them. I know yours is kind of regionally specific, because you designed it to intervene in earthquakes around that one slipstrike fault in Iran, and the spell has its historical behavior and tendencies built in. But if we test it against a bunch of other sets of conditions—against San Francisco and Wellington and Tokyo, say—then we can both improve the spell and probably impress the judges, because their intention’s always going to be to see how useful this spell is in more than one place.”

Mehrnaz nodded and poured more tea.

Dairine took a breath and reached for the bag of bhajis and a couple of the paper napkins sitting by it. “I love these things,” she said “but they are so greasy . . .”

She fished a bhaji out of the bag, doing her best to look casual, as she’d spent the last few hours trying to work out the best way to approach the problem. I’m going to have to come at this sideways, or I’m not going to find out what’s happening here. “There’s one thing we have to sort out first,” she said. “It would seriously help if you could tell me more about what your problem was last night. Because I get the feeling that we’re going to need to handle whatever was going on there before we go much further.”

Mehrnaz put her face in her hands. “I panicked,” she said into her hands.

Dairine was tempted to believe her. Though at the time, she’d found herself possessed of the feeling that Mehrnaz was prepared for this panic.

Mehrnaz dropped her hands now, looking extremely embarrassed. “Maybe it was the time zone lag,” she said. “Maybe it was blood sugar, or fatigue, or too much excitement. Or all the people around. Everything just seemed to be too much to bear, all of a sudden. I had to get out . . .”

Dairine sat quiet. She wasn’t tempted to try to make Mehrnaz repeat any of this in the Speech. If you volunteered to speak so, that was one thing. Otherwise, it turned into a rather insulting sort of lie detector test. “Well,” she said, “that won’t be a problem the next time. You get a panel of seven expert wizards and a quiet room to present your spell and an associated intervention plan. Other than that, if you’re having trouble managing stress, there are steps we can take to help you get a handle on that.” She sighed. “So is your mom pleased? She should be.”

“Oh yes,” Mehrnaz said. “Frankly, I think she expected me to be knocked out.”

Dairine kept what she was thinking off her face. My money says she was hoping you’d be knocked out, she thought. And I don’t know where that comes from . . . but I think it has something to do with your meltdown. “Well, what we expect doesn’t always happen,” Dairine said. “So she’d better fasten her seatbelt, because I think things are going to get interesting.”

“You truly think I have a chance of making it through?” Mehrnaz said.

Dairine laughed. “After a Cull like that, are you kidding? I’m beginning to think the people who survived that could walk away from a meteor strike.” She folded her legs under her and fished another bhaji out of the bag. “The competition’s going to be tough, but all you have to do is beat four out of five of the people you’re up against. After that you’re in the finals, and whether you win or lose, you’re covered with glory.”

Mehrnaz shivered. “It sounds so impossible . . .”

“‘Impossible’ is a dangerous word around our neighborhood,” Dairine said. “Look, we’ll do whatever it takes to make sure you have a fair shot at getting into the finals. After that . . .” She took a breath. “One thing at a time.”

Mehrnaz nodded slowly. “Why is this next stage being held in Canberra?” she asked after a moment. “Was it their turn or something?”

Dairine shook her head. “You know, I looked that up,” she said, “and there was nothing but a note that described it as ‘mandated.’”

Mehrnaz blinked. “Meaning that the Powers told them to do that.”

“I think so.” Dairine shrugged. “You could always ask Irina. I assume she knows.”

The look Mehrnaz turned on her was shocked.

“What?” Dairine said.

Mehrnaz sat there quietly for a few seconds before lifting her head. “You speak of her so casually,” she said. “It’s so odd. Like saying you’ll have a word with a thunderstorm, or ask the incoming tide to run down to the shops.”

“Well, we’re wizards, aren’t we? We have words with thunderstorms all the time. I don’t know that I’d ask the tide to do much of anything—mostly it seems to know about going in and out. But seriously, Mehrnaz, this whole thing is about winning a one-year apprenticeship with Irina. She’s powerful, yeah, but she’s not a force of nature. She’s about managing them. There’s a difference. Irina’s a housewife with a baby and a parakeet, and people walk up to her and talk to her every day! And if that’s something you don’t think you can do, your apprenticeship’s going to be kind of uneventful . . .”

Mehrnaz sat blinking at that. Then, slowly, she smiled. “You might have a point there.”

“Good,” Dairine said. “So what time should I come by tomorrow?”

“Well . . . if you’re not too tired right now, I had some thoughts about the intervention plan . . .”

Dairine wasn’t quite satisfied that she’d gotten to the bottom of what was bothering Mehrnaz, but at least this was a start. She smiled. “Let’s go.”

“Shanghai?” Nita stared at Penn. “What do we need to go to Shanghai for?”

“To see my Baba,” Penn said matter-of-factly. “He wants to see my winner’s token.”

Nita sighed. Okay, it is just after the Cull . . . But Penn had been using the word “winner” approximately once every ten minutes since she’d first laid eyes on him this morning.

It had occurred to Nita that things could be a lot worse. She’d been dreading this meeting, but she’d had no choice but to take it alone. It was a school day, and this was one of the two days in the week when her schedule and Kit’s got out of sync. But much to her relief, whatever had got into Penn last night—and it occurred to Nita that beer might have had something to do with it—he seemed to have left the oh-my-God-aren’t-you-gagging-for-me mood behind. This morning, downstairs in the working basement of his parents’ place in San Francisco, he was merely insufferably cheeky. That I can cope with. God knows, I’ve been getting it for long enough from Dairine.

She shook her head and got back on track. “I thought you weren’t wild about your grandparents.”

Penn waved a hand as he went rummaging around in a chest over to one side of the recreation room. “My folks aren’t,” he said, “but they’d die rather than admit it. They’re still all hung up on the old-fashioned filial piety thing. Baba, though, he doesn’t care what they think of him. Come to think of it, he mostly doesn’t care what anybody thinks of him. Which makes him kind of cool, even though he’s not trying.”

Penn straightened up from the chest, letting its lid slam down. In his hands he was holding something that looked like a tube made of bamboo slats. He shook it open and dropped it to the floor. As it fell, Nita could see that it was a mat lined with paper and tightly written all over its interior surface both in the Speech and Chinese. It spread itself out on the floor, and from it a worldgating diagram flooded right out to the walls.

“There’s a place over there for your name,” Penn said, pointing at an empty circular stance locus near the spell’s far edge. “Climb on in, add all the detail you feel the need for. It’s pretty generic . . .”

“Right,” Nita said, and made her way around to where she would stand. My, aren’t we businesslike this morning, she thought. Is someone a little nervous about this meeting? I wonder.

She turned her charm bracelet around on her wrist and felt for the charm that was a capital N. From it she pulled out, in a line of Speech-curlicues burning with pale golden light, the template version of her name that she kept for such off-the-cuff transits. This she dropped into the circle, and then bent over to do a careful double-check. Even though it was her own boilerplate, it was always smart to check it once it was in place in someone else’s spell. Sometimes unexpected spell elements could alter your own name’s parameters, and if you came out of the other end of a transit with an extra head or something because you hadn’t checked, you had nobody but yourself to blame.

“Ready?” Penn said, already in his own locus, and impatient.

“Yeah, yeah,” Nita said, and was about to add “Keep your pants on” until she stopped herself. There were too many responses Penn might come up with that she didn’t want to hear. “Ready.”

Penn shoved his hands in his pockets—jeans pockets, this morning, and just a T-shirt over the jeans with some Chinese characters—and began to read the spell. Swiftly the room around them went quiet as the universe leaned in to hear. A moment later came the slam of air as the transit spell activated—

And then another slam as they came out on the far side. Penn bent down to pick up the little bamboo mat as Nita looked around her. Concrete, a lot of it: concrete ceiling, concrete pillars, concrete floors . . . “What is this, a parking structure?”

“Yep,” Penn said, rolling up the mat and sticking it in his back pocket. “We’re right under the Hyatt on the Bund—that’s the big shopping street on this side of the river. Come on—”

He headed for a stairwell and Nita followed. A few moments later they were up at ground level and out on the street, and she gazed around in unease and amazement.

Nita had of course seen images of Shanghai before. They turned up all the time on TV and in movies, the splendid upward-spearing skyline glowing jewel-bright in many colors by night and neon-blue down among the feet of the skyscrapers, where the highways ran like rivers. She knew in a general way that the hypermodern downtown was just one side of a very complicated picture in which old shabby-seeming neighborhoods crouched and sprawled in the shadow of the sheen and gleam of plate glass and the glow of a superilluminated downtown. But here, on the Bund, both sides lay right up against each other, seemingly a little hostile. It unnerved Nita.

And the other thing that amazed her as the two of them started walking away from the Hyatt was the color of the air, and her ability to see the air in the first place. “Penn, my God, the pollution! What are people doing about it?”

“Not enough,” he said, sounding relatively unconcerned. “Too many people here and not enough wizards, I guess. The amount of energy spent dirtying it up is more than anyone wants to spend cleaning . . .”

Nita shook her head. “Seriously, it reminds me of Titan.” Penn threw her a look. “Well, it does! The same shade of brown, almost.”

“Never wanted to get involved with this myself. Seems hopeless, like shoveling out the ocean . . .”

Nita didn’t say anything as they turned the corner between the Hyatt and the next skyscraper over, and almost within a block the neighborhood changed entirely to row after row of three- and four-story apartment buildings with shops on the bottom floor, or locked gates in stucco-faced walls through which tiny courtyards could be glimpsed. She felt the urge to look over her shoulder, back at the skyscrapers towering over them, and then back again at the run-down and tattered buildings in their shadow, to try to make some sense of the disconnect.

Shanghai was a very busy city, the streets full of people, and Nita found herself getting a lot of looks as she followed in Penn’s wake. She worked to smile at the people they passed, but it took some doing; those who noticed her almost without fail stared at her with either the kind of curiosity you might bestow on some exotic animal walking down your street, or expressions of mild suspicion or hostility. This is weird, Nita thought. I don’t mind this sort of thing in the Crossings. But on Earth . . . She took a deep breath and instructed herself to ignore it and concentrate on following Penn. Shortly he took a sharp turn onto a side street lined with more of the small apartment buildings, and then another turn onto an even smaller street, which seemed to be lined entirely by blank walls with gates in them. “There’s not much of this type of architecture left in the city,” Penn said. “Baba’s lucky to have a place like this. Though maybe it’s not luck. He knows a lot of wizards in town, and it wouldn’t surprise me if one of them’s on the planning management board.”

In front of one gate—a wire-mesh and iron-grilled structure set in an energetically flaking blue-plastered wall—Penn stopped, reached out to touch the padlock hanging from the gate’s latch, and murmured a few words in the Speech. The padlock undid itself, and Penn opened the gate and slipped through. Nita followed, and Penn locked the gate behind them.

They were standing in a courtyard about the length and width of Nita’s driveway. Narrow cinderblock balconies surrounded it on three sides, and there was a stairway up to one of them. “Over here,” Penn said, and led the way.

Nita followed up the stairs, looking around her and trying very hard not to judge, but it was difficult. The place seemed exceedingly run-down, and the balcony, though it was uncluttered, was one long passage of peeling paint and raw, stained concrete, the roof above it discolored again and again with rust marks from dripping water. Finally Penn came up to a door down at the far end of the balcony, with a reinforced iron screen door outside. Penn pulled the screen door and the interior one open, shouting something in Chinese. The Speech rendered it for Nita: “Hey, Baba, the genius is here!”

Nita found herself standing in the middle of a small living room with a sofa and easy chairs that when new would not have looked out of place in any suburban home back in New York, but now were pretty beat up and looked like the kind of thing you put out on the curb and hoped someone would steal. There was a new flat-screen TV opposite the curtained front window, and a scatter of remotes and magazines across a central wooden coffee table along with someone’s relatively new laptop.

Penn stood over the coffee table, fumbling around in his pocket, and came out with his token from the Cull. He flipped it onto the table and then pushed past Nita. “I’ve got to get a few things,” he said, “make yourself at home.”

He slipped into the next room. Nita looked around a little helplessly. “I thought your grandfather was going to be here.”

Penn came back into the room wearing an expression that Nita could not read. Annoyance? Disdain? Nervousness? “Oh, he’s here,” he said, “but he doesn’t like me bothering him in the daytime. Claims he’s busy. Here—” He opened another door. “You go talk to him if you like.”

“But I—if he doesn’t want to be—”

“Don’t worry, he knows some English. He likes Americans! Thinks they’re interesting.” Penn’s expression let Nita know what he thought of that concept as he more or less shoved Nita into the room and shut the door behind her.

She stood there feeling profoundly embarrassed. And as she glanced around, she realized that he had shoved her into the kitchen.

Nita took a long breath. I will kill him, she thought, without even bothering to use wizardry. Just a nice blunt rock. She let the breath out, and concentrated on taking in where she was. As kitchens went, it was on the basic and run-down side—cupboards on two sides of the room, a small refrigerator, and a plainly patterned linoleum floor, rather worn and grimy in the middle. Off to one side was a window with a stainless-steel counter running under it, a sink to one side of the window and a double gas burner on the other side, with a wok sitting on one of the burners. In the middle of the floor was a well scrubbed, somewhat scratched and hacked-up wooden dining room table. And sitting in one of the chairs around it was a little old baldheaded man wearing gray tracksuit bottoms and a darker gray hoodie.

Nita stood there for a moment while he looked her over. And now what do I say? she thought. Does he know what Penn’s up to? How am I supposed to explain myself?

“Well, young cousin,” he said in English, “don’t just stand there. Sit down and tell me what you’re doing here.”

He had a voice like a rusty hinge, and for some reason it made her want to smile, even though there wasn’t anything overtly friendly about it. All she said was, “Thank you, sir,” then pulled out the chair opposite him and sat down.

They studied each other for a few moments. Penn’s grandfather was on the wiry side but surprisingly unwrinkled, with high cheekbones and a strong jaw. If his age showed anywhere it was in his eyes: the lids drooped. But the gaze with which those eyes favored Nita was sharp, sharp as knives. Beyond that, it was intriguing how someone sitting so straight in his chair could still seem so relaxed. There was a tablet computer off to his side on the table; on top of it, face-down and open, was a paperback book in a dialect of Chinese. Off to the other side was an open bottle of beer, which he had apparently been drinking from the neck. “I’m sorry if I interrupted you,” Nita said.

“You didn’t interrupt me,” the old man said. “Penn interrupted me.”

“I’m sorry about that,” Nita said. “He said he was coming here to show you his passing-through token from the Invitational.”

“Knowing Penn,” his grandfather said, “it’s you he came here to show me. We’re all supposed to be very impressed by his mentors. Forgive me if I don’t give him what he wants. At least, not right away . . .”

Nita had some difficulty keeping herself from laughing. “Impressed with his ‘mentors,’ plural?” She managed to smile without allowing it to look scornful. “But as for not giving him what he wants, I’m with you on that.”

The diminutive figure flashed her a totally unselfconscious smile that was missing some teeth. “You don’t like him much.”

“He’s a challenge,” Nita said. “But I have to believe there’s a reason.”

“Can we use the Speech?” Penn’s grandfather said. “It’s harder to hide what you’re feeling.”

Nita nodded. Bobo, she said silently, stay close here. I may need you to fill me in on vocabulary.

I’ll grab your vocal cords if you’re about to say something stupid, Bobo said.

Nita smiled. “Interesting,” Penn’s grandfather said, picking up his beer bottle. “You have an outrider.”

He used the specialist phrase in the Speech for a wizard whose thought processes were somehow augmented by those of another sentience. Nita swallowed; though it was a blanket term, Bobo’s presence wasn’t something she was used to having other people notice. “That’s right,” she said, also in the Speech. “Not many people pick up on it.”

He nodded, as if it was nothing out of the ordinary. “I notice things,” Penn’s grandfather said. “Though mostly I’m a mathematician.” He reached out to pick up the paperback lying on top of the tablet, turned it to face Nita, and she could see it was a Sudoku book. “So tell me. Who else in your family is a wizard?”

“My sister . . .”

“No. Outside of your own generation.”

“One of my aunts,” Nita said. “That’s all, as far as I know.”

“You’ve looked no further back than that?”

“I did once, but we only seem to go back five or six generations, and even then we keep skipping them. We may have been ‘outbreak’ wizards.” She used one of the terms in the Speech for newly established wizardly families, specifically the kind that occur in clusters, geographically or temporally speaking. There was some conjecture that this clustering might be a reflection of the Powers attempting to solve some problem that was about to arise. But there was no way to prove it one way or the other.

“A difference between us, then. Our family has had quite a few generations, going back into the 1500s at least.” He smiled slightly, a dry look. “Even family members who don’t know we have wizardry in the line always know there’s something a little odd about us. Though we do try to keep it quiet.” The smile went tighter. “We don’t mention it to the government, for one thing.”

Nita blinked. “I thought China was supposed to be . . . more culturally accepting of wizardry.”

“Sometimes that has been true. But cultures can change very quickly sometimes. And this is one of those times.”

“There’s supposed to be a saying,” Nita said. “They say it’s Chinese, anyhow. ‘May you live in interesting times . . . ’”

Penn’s grandfather nodded. “It’s Chinese . . . though I’m sure other people have said it, too. Other countries, other empires. The world’s changing faster than it ever used to. The change comes from a thousand directions, nowadays, and it leaves you wondering whether you ever actually knew what was going on.”

“I know how that feels,” Nita muttered.

“I looked you up in the Tao.” Penn’s grandfather said. Nita put her eyebrows up at that. She knew what the Tao was; to consider the wizard’s manual as being included in it made perfect sense, since the Tao was everything. “You’re older than I thought.”

“I’d think it would’ve told you how old I am,” Nita said.

“It told me what age you are. But how old you are is another story.” He had a swig of his beer. “Some of us seem to get pushed into being older quicker.”

It was as if he was almost daring Nita to say something. Finally she took a breath and said, “My mother died not long ago.”

She didn’t think she had ever put it to anybody quite that bluntly. The look the old man gave her was oddly congratulatory, as if he had been expecting her to soften the declaration somehow. “So did mine,” he said. “There seems to be a lot of that going around. The human condition . . .”

Nita was beginning to wonder if there was some kind of secret sport among Chinese wizards that involved being borderline rude all the time, and seeing how much of it you could get away with. If not, and if this was merely a personality thing, then it was definitely something Penn had gotten from his granddad. Well, she thought, two can play at that game. “People die,” Nita said, “people get born. Sometimes even in that order.”

He flashed a gap-toothed grin: an expression suggesting that he thought she should win a prize of some kind. “My daughter,” he said, “was a wizard of great skill. Weather was her specialty. She died much, much too young. It was an accident; insofar as anything’s ever truly an accident. But it was one of those events in which nobody living can see any sense.” He stared at a drop of condensation running down the neck of his beer bottle. “Your culture has it too, I think; the saying that the Powers ‘called somebody home.’ Because it makes no sense, what’s happened to them; there’s no other reason possible, or palatable, that this person who was walking around warm and vibrant one day is suddenly gone from the world.”

He shook his head. “The pain you have to suffer for such a thing—it makes no sense. And when there are young people involved, when you have a boy like Penn who worshiped his mother, and suddenly the world is broken and the Sun is black in his eyes because she’s not there anymore—”

Nita swallowed. “Entropy,” she said very quietly.

Penn’s grandfather nodded.

It occurred to Nita that the Powers That Be had known exactly what they were doing when they sent her as part of a team to mentor Penn. “He became a wizard after that, then?” she said.

“A year and a half later, after his father remarried and they all emigrated. It was a very sudden Ordeal.” And then he laughed at himself. “Well, what Ordeal isn’t? We’d all thought that perhaps Penn would be a skipped generation. But we were very wrong. Typical of him to show us so noisily how wrong we were.” He took another drink of his beer, put it down on the table, and turned the bottle around and around on top of one of many water-rings there. “Hell journey,” he said.

Nita held very still. That was not information the manual would ever have given her—certainly not without Penn’s permission, which wasn’t likely to have been granted. So-called hell journeys, Ordeal-fueled forays across multiple dimensional barriers, were famously associated with wizards who were very angry, or very stubborn, or very troubled, or all three. “Let me guess,” Nita said. “He went to try to get her back.”

“Of course he did. And you can guess who met him on the road. He doesn’t talk about it much. But what he has said is that the Lone One didn’t give him a lot of trouble. And though he’s all bluster and brag, our Penn, for some reason I believe him.” He picked up the bottle again, stared at the wet label. “Naturally he didn’t bring his mother back; when he came back he was like someone defeated in battle. Any return from Ordeal is a victory. But he didn’t see it that way.”

“I guess it might be,” Nita said after a moment’s thought, “that somebody who had that kind of introduction to wizardry might spend a lot of time later trying to find that first victory that was supposed to happen.”

“It very well could be,” Penn’s grandfather said. “I know little about what he actually does. That, too, might go back to his mother; she was usually very private about her practice in casual conversation. It was as if she felt that too much discussion of what she did might possibly attract certain others’ attention.”

Nita nodded. There were lots of wizards who felt it unwise or even unlucky to discuss with other wizards, let alone family and friends, what they did on errantry. Personal preference, she thought; I don’t know that it’s made a difference to me one way or the other . . .

The old man let out a long breath, and glanced around the room with the softened gaze of someone looking into another time. “She did a lot of work in here,” he said. “She’d have her version of a page of the Tao rolled out across this table like a drop cloth, a big display of maps and charts and satellite imagery. Half the world’s storms would go drifting across here while we tried to have supper around them, and Penn’s mama talked some of the worst ones out of what they were doing.”

“She was an aeromancer?” Nita said.

“She was.” His face twitched up in a gentler smile. “And with her being air, and Penn fire in his way, well, they fed on each other. He was in here a lot, afterward . . .”

After she died. “I have to tell you,” Nita said, “except for—some similar recent history—I don’t know what the Powers are thinking of by assigning us to him as mentors. He only listens to us about half the time.”

“That’s half the time better than the rest of us usually get with him. As I said, he doesn’t usually want to talk about his own practice much. But who are we to second-guess the Powers?”

Nita snickered. “Lately that’s my whole business day.”

The door to the kitchen flew open. “Come on, Juanita,” Penn said, “I’ve got the stuff I need. We’ve gotta get back. Work to do . . .” He went over to his grandfather and grabbed him by the head and kissed him on top of it: then dropped the glowing token on the table in front of him. “There, now you’ve seen it, satisfied?”

Penn’s grandfather peered at it. “If I say that I am, it could shatter your whole image of me.”

“Too true, Baba.”

“It’s smaller than I thought. They should have given you something bigger.”

“See that, Juanita! If I’d have gotten culled I’d never have heard the end of it. And when I don’t get culled, it’s still not good enough for him!”

Nita thought it smarter not to respond to this. Penn laughed and headed toward the kitchen door. “I’ll come back and see you when I’m famous, Baba. Better be nice to me then or it won’t happen twice.”

“If you don’t hurry up it won’t even happen once,” his grandfather growled. “The Powers might have plans for me, and don’t think I’ll keep Them waiting just because you might drop by.” Nita caught a flicker of a wry look from under his bushy dark brows: You see what I put up with.

“Respected elder,” Nita said, giving him a slight bow, “dai stihó . . .”

“Why are you bothering being nice to him?” Penn said, holding the door open and jerking his head impatiently for her to hurry. “He wouldn’t have bothered to do it to you.”

“’Course he wouldn’t,” Nita murmured with a last sidewise look at Penn’s grandfather, and brushed past Penn without a glance.

Dairine stood in the little spinney of sassafras trees at the far end of the Callahans’ backyard. The doorway to the place she wanted to go was hidden, but she knew that Nita had left the aschetic space commissioned and on standby. It was safe enough, after all; the portal proper was keyed to the personalities of Nita and the wizards she was working with, which naturally included Dairine.

It was evening, warm still after the day, with just a slight breeze moving in the trees around her. Nita was off working with Penn, and would be for a while. That suited Dairine perfectly. Right now, right here, she was going to be overstepping her bounds a little, and the last thing she wanted was to have Nita lecturing her.

She spoke the brief coded series of characters in the Speech, like a keypad combination, that popped open the portal to the aschetic space. Access to it was still private; Nita had re-booked it for her own use until the Invitational was over. Which is interesting, Dairine thought as she stepped through. I think she foresees a lot of trouble with Penn . . .

Foresight, of course: that was more and more the issue with Nita. Dairine was getting the idea that there were things Nita was afraid to see. She’d come downstairs some mornings lately with a very guarded expression on her face. Only Dairine, who had known her longer than anyone else, would’ve recognized it for what it was: dread. Nita had seen something that frightened her, and she wasn’t discussing it with anybody. And if I ask her, she’s going to deny it, Dairine thought. She’s afraid that even sharing information about what she’s seen might somehow change the future.

Dairine stood there on the endless, black-and-white checkerboard floor and shook her head. Of all the gifts she would’ve wanted nothing of, seeing the future badly, or even incompletely, would be chief among them. One of the things she’d always liked best about her big sister was that Nita knew how to make up her mind. She would make a choice, and then she would go for it, wholeheartedly. But that wasn’t happening so much anymore. Choice was beginning to frighten her. Or rather, she sees a whole bunch of choices in front of her and she doesn’t know which one will make things turn out the way she wants. And so she hesitates . . .

Like I’m doing now, Dairine thought, laughing softly at herself. She felt around in the malleable space to find the otherspace pocket where its controlling kernel was stored. A few moments later she was holding it. Dairine was nowhere near as expert with this as Nita was; Neets had had so much practice with it before their mom died. But she understood the general principles.

She turned the kernel over and over in her hands, pulled out its recent history strand, which Nita had thoughtfully tagged with the image of a clock, and ran her fingers down its nodes until she found the settings for her last session in there with Penn. Dairine squeezed the node, and Penn’s spell spread itself out across the floor.

She looked it over with satisfaction as she noted that Nita had instructed this display of the spell to sync itself with Penn’s most recent version, the edited and cleaned-up wizardry that he’d presented at the Cull. It was much neater now, much more concise than the original work, but there were still things about it that bothered her.

Dairine stood there in silence, then started walking around the spell, letting it sink in. This kind of analysis was something she’d been working on with Nelaid. What frustrated her at such times, though, was how easy he made it look.

And Roshaun had been even better at it. The easy fluency of the way he handled fire, that sense that he and his element were one and understood each other intimately—Dairine wondered rather desperately if she was ever going to have that. In fact, she thought, let’s be honest with ourselves here, shall we? I will never be as good as he is.

Anyway, there was so much more to the way Roshaun had been than mere expertise. Courage, she thought. In her mind, Dairine saw again that terrible abyss of fire over which she and Filif and Sker’ret and Roshaun had hung, all the while knowing that they might die doing what they were trying to do—tinkering with the insides of a living star to keep it from flaring and destroying half the life on Earth. But it was a death that would’ve been over in the blink of an eye. One moment they’d have been breathing, and in the next, they’d all have been sitting in Timeheart, wondering what they’d got wrong.

Roshaun, though, hadn’t been content to sit tight and let death come to him. He’d walked down willingly into that danger, barely shielded, as calmly as someone going downstairs in the middle of the night for a drink of water. And Dairine had seen the look in his eyes before he went—and had known why he did it. It was almost too much of a burden to bear: the passage of time made it harder, not easier.

She shook her head. Not the time to be thinking about that . . . Right now the issue was Penn’s spell. Something about it had been bothering her since she had first laid eyes on it. Something that I’m missing. It wasn’t strictly structural, or at least she didn’t think so. But she was having trouble identifying what was wrong, and part of the difficulty was in the way Penn diagrammed his spells. He just keeps leaving these big messy blanks all over them . . .

Dairine stood still again, staring down. Big messy blanks, she thought. Life seems full of those lately. The big messy blank left where her mother had been. The big messy blank left where Roshaun had been. One of them, at least, she might be able to do something about. If only she could handle these damn blank spots . . .

It’s not a blank space, Mehrnaz’s voice suddenly said in memory. It’s a lacuna.

Dairine laughed under her breath. See, there’s another one.

Except . . .

No. Just a coincidence.

But still . . . There are no coincidences.

Dairine held still. It’s a legacy structure, Penn had said in his presentation. And Dairine remembered thinking, I wonder, does Thahit have one of those?

Spot, she said.

He was in the house, but that wasn’t a problem where communication between them was concerned. Need something?

Can you do me a favor? I need the diagrams for the underlying spell suite for Thahit’s solar simulator.

Kind of complicated, that, Spot said. Might take an hour or so to process it down. The simulator itself incorporates something like six or seven hundred smaller spells, after all—

Okay, Dairine said, maybe that’s not what I need. I want you to look for any sign of structures that might’ve been left over or held over from previous versions of the simulator, or previous versions of the individual spells. Stuff that’s been tagged to be saved on purpose. Can you do that?

No problem, Spot said. Leave it with me for a while.

Hours?

More like minutes. Scanning for something specific will take a lot less time than porting in the entire suite.

Fine.

Dairine resumed walking around the spell, continuing to take it in. She got sufficiently lost in it that it startled her somewhat when Spot spoke to her far sooner than she’d expected. I have three such incidences, he said.

Really! Dairine said. Lay them out for me.

Overlaid, or separately?

Separately.

Off to one side, beyond Penn’s spell circle, three smaller circles appeared. Dairine went to look at them and found that each one was densely interwritten with the Speech, as she’d expected. But each had a space in it that had once been left open. In all three circles, however, the space was now filled.

So Thahit doesn’t have this feature now, she thought. But it did once. The only problem is . . . what are these for? The Speech-writing itself gave no clue. It merely seemed to indicate that these would be useful as the container for some unspecified energy.

Dairine stood there and scowled in frustration at one of the circles. Great, she thought. Another dead end. She examined the other two circles, but the result was the same. This is some kind of safety valve, probably, in case of abnormal energy fluctuations: a place to store an overload until it can be safely released. The encapsulations would serve the same purpose as when someone dredged a stream or watercourse to make sure that, even in flood conditions, it would never burst its banks. Dairine sighed heavily. Whatever the answer she was looking for might be, this wasn’t it. She walked away.

On a sudden urge she again turned the kernel over in her hands and felt around for another node in its recent history. Finding it, she gave it a squeeze, and that ravening, deadly sea of fire that Nita had made for Penn spread itself away to the edges of visible existence, swimming with sunspots, prominence-lashed: the naked Sun, deadly, beautiful, the anchor and source of all life in the System. I used to think it was going to be easy to master you, she thought. Now I know it’s going to take a long time . . . if I ever manage it at all.

She sighed, squeezed the node again. The Sun went out, leaving her looking dully at the spell diagrams. Oh, Ro, she thought, and simply stood there and ached. Her eyes burned with missing him.

Not that it helped in the slightest.

. . . Shall I get rid of these? Spot said after a few moments.

Dairine shrugged. No, store them, she said. I might need them for something later, and I’m still curious about who left them in place. I can always ask Nelaid about it when I see him next.

She put the space’s kernel back in its storage pocket and then stood for a few more seconds staring down at Penn’s spell. I hate this guy, Dairine thought. Because even when he’s screwing up, he’s better than I am. Even though I’m trying and he’s not.

And there’s not a damn thing I can do about it. It’s like it was with Roshaun. It was an astonishingly bitter realization for someone whose motto had always been I can do that.

Slowly Dairine walked away toward the portal, stepped through, and waved it closed behind her.

Nita dreamed.

She was upstairs in the shopping center a couple of towns over, on the food-court level, strolling slowly around the big circle of it and smelling the sweet-and-sour of Chinese food and the beany scent of burritos and the aroma of frying fat. Bright-colored plastic chairs and tables were scattered around, littered with empty trays and crumpled fast food containers and tipped-over paper cups; the garbage bins placed here and there among them were mostly overflowing. “What a mess,” Nita murmured, looking idly around to see if there were any cleanup staff working on the situation. But the place was empty except for her and the one walking next to her, in step, easy and casual.

It was Roshaun. And in the dream, this was nothing unusual. She saw him as Dairine had described him when he last visited here with her and Sker’ret and Filif: ridiculously tall, the long, long blond hair that made him look like an animated character or movie elf hanging down before and behind, the golden eyes narrowed in amusement at the plebeian surroundings, hands shoved deep in the pockets of the Earth clothing he was wearing as a disguise—jeans and an oversize floppy T-shirt that said FERMILAB MUON COLLIDER SLO-PITCH SOFTBALL.

“Yes,” he said, “dreadfully untidy. The servants should be disciplined without delay.” And his gaze slid sideways to meet hers. There was only one problem with that. The mind looking out of those eyes at her was not Roshaun’s.

“Oh, no,” Nita said. “Not you again.”

“But we’re such old associates!” the Lone Power said. It looked at her sideways again through Roshaun’s eyes. “And you’ve done so much for me!”

“If by that you mean I helped give you a chance to be something different,” Nita said, “and that since then I’ve stood in your way a bunch of times when you wanted to keep screwing things up the old-fashioned way, then yeah, I have done a lot for you. You’d think you might show some gratitude.”

“But I am!” said the Lone One. “I’m helping you right now.”

“The only thing you’re doing now, as far as I can tell, is slowing me down. Or making fun of something I’ve got on my mind.” She gave him a pointed look, glancing up and down the long, lean shape of the (more or less) late King of Wellakh, and turned away with an annoyed breath.

“Well, you must know that that’s a fool’s errand,” said the Lone Power. “Surely you know you have other things to be looking for right now. Much more important things. I can’t imagine why you’re wasting your time searching for the hopelessly lost when you want to be concentrating on keeping someone much closer to home from getting lost in the first place.”

The images flashed before Nita’s mind again: Carmela shaking with terror, stammering with fear of something that was about to happen. Kit, looking for her, finding her, and then suddenly and terribly falling down into darkness. And Nita shivered all over, because this was so peculiar. A dream within a dream . . . When the levels nest this deep, how will you know when you wake up? How will you know the difference between the vision and reality? And what happens when you can’t tell anymore? What are you then? There’s a word for that, and it’s not “visionary” . . .

“Yes,” said the Lone One. “Such a common problem for people with a specialty like yours. They lose their way. They get overconfident, and go wandering off among the paths of vision one time too many, and after that they never come out.” It wore an amused smile that was a parody of expressions Nita had seen Roshaun wear.

“I wouldn’t say that overconfidence is the problem here,” Nita muttered.

“Well, no,” the Lone One said, “because you do keep changing specialties, don’t you? Can’t seem to make up your mind. Try one thing . . . can’t make it work . . . try something else. You seem unable to settle.”

“Can this not be about me for the time being?” Nita said. “I’m trying hard to be useful to somebody else here.”

“Yet the visionary who fails to include herself as a point of reference in her vision can’t possibly see clearly or effectively,” the Lone Power said. “There is no seeing without the one who sees. And if the medium through which one sees is clouded, all the visions will be clouded, too. If the medium’s left clouded on purpose, the question then becomes what good you’re going to be to anybody.”

That had the sound of something that Tom or Carl might have said, and for some reason that annoyed Nita even more. “You know,” she said, “nobody with a brain would trust anything you say. You’re all about the lies. The smartest thing might be to do the opposite of everything you’re saying. And to assume that this is all some attempt to lead me off into the wrong direction.”

The Lone Power in Roshaun’s shape actually rolled Its eyes at Nita. This, too, was an expression she’d seen on the original, frequently when the royalty in question had a lollipop stick hanging out of his face. “The reverse psychology argument?” It said. “Truly, I thought better of you. You’re the one eager to throw it into my face that I’ve been given a chance to change. If you’re not willing to at least entertain the possibility that I might honestly be trying to be of assistance to you, then what’s been the point of this whole exercise? You’re the one keeping me stuck in the old role. And if you won’t avail yourself of available help, then I can’t be blamed. I did my best . . .”

It didn’t sound wistful; It didn’t sound smug. It sounded blasé. And something about that tone caught Nita’s attention. She wasn’t about to give up being alert for her old enemy’s trickery, but she did have to give It a chance.

“Okay,” she said, doing her best to sound as blasé as It had. “What have you got for me?”

They walked along again quietly for a few steps. Then, in an altered tone, as if suddenly dealing with an entirely different subject, the Lone One said, “What’s the old saying—that every wizard is the answer to a problem? And that every intervention, every wizardry, solves not only its own problem but others that you may never even know about?”

“‘All is done for each,’” Nita said. She hadn’t quite known what to make of that concept the first time that Tom mentioned it to her. Later, the more she’d thought about it, the more it had unsettled her, even as she came to understand that it was a simple expression of a quantum reality: that all events in the universe, at least theoretically, were interconnected on levels that beings functioning only in three or four or five dimensions were ill-equipped to grasp.

“Sheer laziness, that’s all it is,” said the being walking beside her. It was a growl of pure irritation. “The One may try to pretend that It simply hates wasted motion, but It’s not fooling anyone. All this finagling around with the structure of reality to have everybody possible be happy when they don’t even particularly deserve to be—”

Nita cleared her throat. “Less bitching, please?” she said.

The Power that invented death stopped in mid-stride and looked at Nita out of Roshaun’s eyes with the strangest expression of appreciation. “You have no idea,” it said, “how disappointing it is that you chose the side you did to work on. We could’ve been so good together.”

This struck Nita as some of the most backhanded flattery she’d ever received. At least until Penn came along . . .“I know this is a dream, but try to focus, okay?”

It heaved a sigh and started walking again. “Right. Problem solving. There probably ought to be some irony in the concept that while you’re being the solution to someone else’s problem, they’re being the solution to yours.”

“As long as the problems get solved,” Nita said, “I can cope with that.”

“Actually, no, you can’t. And that’s where I get my fun. So very often, humans who’re wizards and humans who aren’t get so intent on having the solution come out their way that they mess up what the other side is doing, and nobody gets what they want.” It smiled a lazy smile at her.

“So you’re telling me that’s something that might start happening . . .”

“Oh no. I’m telling you that it’s something that’s happening right now.”

Nita frowned. “And of course you’re not going to tell me exactly how this is happening.”

“Where would be the fun in that? For either of us.” It smiled more broadly. “Besides, you like to think of yourself as a smart person. I’m sure you’ll figure it out eventually.”

“But ideally,” Nita said, “not before I screw it up.”

The Lone One bowed Its head to her to indicate she’d got that right.

Nita took a deep breath and let it out again. “Okay,” she said. “Thanks for that.”

The being walking beside her in Roshaun’s body threw Nita a rather testy look. “You know,” it said, “you’re a lot more fun when you’re less controlled.”

“It’s funny you should say that,” Nita said. “Because normally when we’re playing the game, you and I, and I lose my temper, things don’t always go real well for you.”

“Yes, well,” the Lone One said, “at least there’s someone to play the game with. Nonwizards don’t even know they’re playing, half the time. And wizards . . .” It shrugged. “Even they forget. They get into their day-to-day practice and the minutiae of problem solving—do a spell to move this piece here or that piece there—and they stop bothering to look up, across the board, and remember who they’re playing with.”

And that time it was Nita who stopped walking. She stood still, and looked down at the dusty, rocky ground; and for that moment didn’t need to glance up to see the butterscotch sky. Mars, she thought, on one level; how did we wind up here? But there was something else going on, something she hadn’t been meant to hear, or to understand, about the one who walked in the shape beside her. A long time ago . . . Nita thought. Who did you think wasn’t noticing you enough when you made things, did things? When did you start getting the idea that Somebody thought others were more important than you? And so you did something that would get everyone’s attention once and for all . . .

It was the most bizarre concept. Far away in the depths of time, a great Power, one of the very greatest, moving through the darkness and thinking thoughts that were eccentric and terrible and profound—yet also feeling so alone, sure that others thought It was lesser than they and wouldn’t include It in their games. And so It went away and invented a new game, one with unending pain and danger at its heart, a level of threat that no other Power had ever contemplated, and a terrible prize for the losers.

A chill ran down Nita’s spine. You can never let on that you suspect this, something whispered in her ear. Your anger, that It can cope with. That It courts. But if It catches you pitying It . . . then for you and everybody around you, it might be better if you’d all never been born. The only way to win this game is to pretend you don’t know what the other player’s thinking.

She looked up into Its eyes, then, and searched them. The expression was unconcerned. Nonchalant again. “Well,” Nita said, “how about this. I won’t forget you. Who looks across the board and tells you that to your face? Sure, it’s sensible to be scared of what you can do. Think what you’ve already done to me. But you know what? That’s no reason to stop playing. Maybe I’ll win the next round. Unless you keep playing, there’s no way to find out.”

For a long moment, the other’s face was unrevealing. “If you’re conceiving of this as some clever plan to get me to treat you more kindly—”

“Oh, come on, reverse psychology again?” Nita gave It a look of kindly scorn. “I thought that was off the table. I’m serious. Let’s play.”

The laughter It forced through Roshaun’s throat at that was appalling, meant to unnerve her. But it had an unexpected effect. Something struck Nita very abruptly, a jolt down her spine like half-expected lightning. In the laughter’s wake, reflections of a thousand possibilities teemed around her, rustling against one another like leaves in a high wind—as if she stood in a forest of mirroring probabilities. A dream within a dream . . . But in this second she surprisingly felt no fear of getting lost among the levels, within the reflections: she was right where she needed to be, utterly centered. “And listen,” Nita said. “That working together thing?”

It turned the most confused expression possible on her.

“Don’t give up on that,” Nita said. “It might happen yet.”

The Lone One gaped at her, and Its jaw dropped. “What?”

And just like that Nita was awake, gasping for breath and her heart pounding, her eyes wide open, staring at the window in the wall beyond the end of her bed, and the dawn light seeping through the Venetian blinds.

What did I just tell it? Nita thought in shock. What was that? Yet her feeling in the dream hadn’t been at all one of concern. What she’d said had struck her at the time as funny. It had almost been a joke.

But not entirely. It had also absolutely been the truth.

Nita sat up in bed, still staring at the far wall as if it held some clue to what was going on. Mars. Why does this keep coming back to Mars?

But that’s a minor issue. There’s something more important going on here. She rubbed the sleep out of her eyes and flopped back down against the pillows. “Bobo?”

On deck, boss.

“Good. That last one—boy, have I got some context for you. Let’s make these notes and get moving.”