Wizards At War

13: Strategic Withdrawal

As Dairine vanished into her pup tent, Kit watched with considerable relief. Dairine could get difficult to deal with when Nita wasn’t around to stomp on her. And just where are you? he thought, glancing at the walls of the cavern as if Nita might suddenly step through one of them.

Ponch had flopped down beside him and was lying on his back again, though his head was turned so that he was watching Memeki. Kit poked him amiably in the gut. “I thought that was just another ploy to get an extra biscuit,” he said under his breath. “I don’t often see you giving food away.”

She was sad, Ponch said. She was sad before, too. That’s why I brought her. None of the others were sad.

They headed into the pup tent together. Kit lay down again, and within a few moments Ponch was lying with his head on Kit’s chest. Kit sighed. “What was Memeki sad about?” he said.

I don’t know, Ponch said. It felt like something wrong had happened to her. I wanted to make her feel better. I thought maybe if she went for a walk with me, I could take her away from the bad thing that made her sad. But it’s still inside her.

And that’s not all, either, Kit thought. He put an arm around Ponch. “Well, you did right,” he said. “We’re going to try to help her, too.”

Good, Ponch said.

Kit breathed out, closed his eyes.

But what if you can’t?

Kit sighed again. It was hard when there wasn’t even an answer that would make sense to a human. But when it was Ponch involved, sometimes the explanations got more involved rather than less. “It’s like this…,” he said, and trailed off, wondering where to go from there.

You were saying about the things you couldn’t talk about.

I was? Kit thought. No, I wasn’t—

And another voice spoke, both seemingly at a distance and very close.

“There is a story that every Yaldah knows for a short while,” it said. “When she’s very new. But knowing the story makes no difference. The ones who know it die, anyway. And speaking it means you die sooner. The wise thing is to forget.”

I was asleep, Kit thought. He realized that the weight on his chest was gone. But he also realized that once again he’d slipped into the upper reaches of Ponch’s mind, so he lay very still, doing nothing to disturb this state in which he could hear what the dog heard, scent what he scented. Right now, Ponch’s world smelled of warm stone, mineral-flake grit, somewhat sweaty or otherwise ripe-smelling humans, various foodstuffs and food wrappings … and the unique scent of a Yaldiv. It was like a more refined version of the crude-oil scent he’d followed here: a hot plastic sort of smell, shifting slightly from moment to moment, with the emotions of the one who spoke.

Why forget? Ponch said. Remembering things is good.

“Not when they kill you for it.” Memeki’s voice sounded weary. “And it was so long ago. Nothing that happened such a long time ago can matter now; things aren’t that way anymore.”

What way were they? I don’t understand.

Her voice went low, as if even here she was afraid she might be overheard. “When we’re very young,” Memeki said, “the blood inside us speaks for a while. It says that once there wasn’t a City, or even a little hive. Once the world was big enough for everyone to walk wherever they wanted. And there wasn’t just one King. There were many, and each King had just a few chosen ones. There was always enough to eat, and not so much work to do. And there were no Others.” She briefly sounded confused. “Or there were Others who didn’t want to kill us. I said it was a strange story! Then something happened.”

What?

There was a long pause. “No one is sure,” Memeki said. “But in the story, it’s as if there was a bigger King who made everything to be built—the sky, the ground—the way our own King tells us how to build a nest and kill the enemy. There were some who built the Everything that way, the story says. That other King was supposed to have shown them how. Then Yaldiv came to live in what that Great One’s servants had made. They lived there a long time—”

She broke off suddenly. “But that part of the story makes no sense,” Memeki said. “How could anybody build the sky? No one could reach it. It’s got to be true, what the Arch-votary says the King tells him—that the old stories are madness and death made real, a way for our enemies to trick us.”

I know a story like that, Ponch said. I don’t think it’s a trick.

Silence again. “You don’t?”

From Ponch, Kit got a sudden sense of reticence. If your story is like mine, then there’s more to tell.

“Yes,” Memeki said. She sounded subdued. “It’s as if when everything’s made, another Great One appears: another King. That one went about saying that he knew more things than the first Great One, better ways to live. He said that having so many little kings among the Yaldiv was wrong, and that there should be only one—himself. That would make warriors mightier, he said, and workers stronger, and the vessels more fruitful. The little kings and their consorts said they didn’t want his way of living. They started a war with the great King and his vessels. It went on forever. But, finally, the second Great One realized they would never do what he wanted, so he made the sky catch fire. Small suns like Sek fell from the sky on the little kings, and killed them and all their Yaldiv.”

But the story that your people tell each other now says something different, Ponch said.

“It says there was never any war before the War of Now,” Memeki said. “The only King that has ever been is our own Great One. And when we win the War of Now against the evil City, then the world will be pure.”

Ponch was quiet. Then he spoke again.

Do you want another biscuit?

What? Kit thought. Very slowly and cautiously, so as not to make any noise, he put his hand out beside him. The dog biscuit box was gone. Why, that sneaky—

Vague crunching noises came from the cavern, much amplified in Kit’s inner hearing by the fact that he was inside the mind of one of the creatures doing the chewing. After a moment, Memeki said, “What happens in your story?” She crunched a little more. “Is there a great war? Do suns fall from the sky?”

No, Ponch said. There’s some singing, but mostly we eat.

Kit got a sudden glimpse of Memeki’s mirror-dark eyes looking down into Ponch’s. “Your people’s story… is about food?”

Later, Ponch said, yes. But it didn’t start that way. The crunching started up again.

I hadn’t thought about this for a long time, Ponch said after a moment. You tend not to think about it … there’s so much to keep you busy. Barking. Running. Eating. Doing what the One You’re With wants you to do. But that’s what we’ve done for a long time. We promised to take care of Them…

He trailed off. Kit asked me to tell him the story not long ago, Ponch said after some more crunching. It’s not the kind of thing you ever think of Them being concerned about: They’re even busier than we are. I was so surprised, I told him the puppy version, because I wasn’t sure how he would take the other one. We love Them, but humans can be strange sometimes.

Kit lay there, staring into the darkness, wondering what to make of this. The story seemed to be working its way out of Ponch with the same difficulty as it had worked its way out of Memeki.

It was a very long time ago, Ponch said, when our parents, the First Ones, realized who they were. They woke up and started singing to the Light in the Sky, and heard others singing back, so that they realized we were all singing the same song. Instead of staying alone, the First Ones started to run together in groups, hunting for food together. It was a hard time. The world was full of things to eat, but catching them was hard. Then many of the things we ate went away, or died, and many of us died, too. Our mothers bore more and more of us. They had to, because so many of us died young.

There was more crunching from Memeki. “That must have been terrible. What did you do?”

At first, we didn’t know what to do. There was a pause while Ponch put his nose into the dog biscuit box, knocked it over, and pawed another one out. Then some of the First Ones started to think, Maybe we should go away. Maybe there’ll be more food somewhere else. So we traveled. We journeyed a long way under the Light in the Sky, and came to a place where there was a little more food. But we found something else there, too. We found Them.

He was quiet for a moment. We found them living by themselves, Ponch said, in cold places. They wore furs, like us. They denned in caves, the way we did sometimes. They were lonely, the way we were before we found out how to live together. And they were so hungry! And we remembered how that had been for us, too.

“Did they eat the same things you ate?” Memeki said, sounding dubious.

They did then. Some of us said, “Let’s go away from here! There won’t be enough for everyone to eat.” Others said, “Let’s drive them away! Then there will be enough.” And some—Kit could hear the shadow of a growl stirring at the bottom of Ponch’s mind—some said, “Let’s eat them, and solve both problems.”

Slowly the growl faded. But then, when they found different ways to catch things to eat, and we saw them do it and cried because we were hungry, some of the humans did what the First Ones thought was the strangest thing. They gave us some of what they caught! They started sharing, the way we learned to do when we began hunting together. So we took them in, into life as a pack, and showed them the other ways it could be—caring for the pups and watching out for each other, and especially the hunting in a group. They learned fast. And the humans took us in as well, into life with another kind of creature, and showed us how to learn their strange new ways. Like how they made things with their clever paws—sharp teeth that they could throw, so that food was bitten and fell down without the humans actually catching it and biting it themselves. We learned to drive the food into those extra teeth of theirs, and then we shared the kill with them. That became the bargain. We promised we’d help our human packmates find food when they needed it; they helped us with food when we needed it. When the animals that hated our packmates got close to their dens, we shouted to warn them; then they’d bring out the fire that scared those things away. We’d even sit together, after the meal, and sing at the Light together. It was a good time.

There was a long silence. “If your story is like ours,” Memeki said, “the good time ends.”

Yes and no, Ponch said. We always heard voices when the Light in the Sky was full, the thing the humans call the Moon. But there came a Moon when all the First Ones actually heard what the voices were saying. One sounded like the brightness of the Moon: cold, and small, sometimes louder and sometimes very faint and soft. It said, “The time comes for you to choose a new path, in which you may become more than you have been. Wisdom will come to you, and the power that will descend on you in that path is great. The One who made all hunters and all the hunted alike will dwell within you and among you, in your own image. But to enter on that path, you must depart from your old comfortable certainties and walk the new way alone.” And then the second voice spoke. It was more like the darkness of the Moon, which is always all around it, trying to drown the brightness out. That voice said, “Greatness, indeed, awaits you, but these naked apes, who in your folly you treat like your own kind, will either turn you into slaves or, after the manner of prey with their proper predators, will come to fear your greatness and kill you. If you do my bidding and kill them first, neither death nor pain will touch you, and this world will be yours forever.”

“So your story has the killing as well,” Memeki said.

Almost, Ponch said, sounding somber. The First Ones drew aside to consider. And when they’d sung the matter over together, to the Voices they said, “We’ve eaten the same meat as these creatures, and hunted in company with them. Though they’re shaped differently from us, we’re in-pack with them. We’ll do them no harm. Yet neither will we desert them, for without our companionship, they might die.” At this, the second Voice laughed, and said, “Fools and weaklings! In repayment of your kindness, the ones you’ve spared will make you their slaves. They’ll change your bodies and your nature at their whim, until you no longer know yourselves. And since you’ve chosen to stay in-pack with them, you’ll suffer the fate they suffer—death and pain until Time’s end.” And that Voice faded away into the darkness, where it remains in the dark beyond the Moon, always waiting Its time.

Yet when It was silent, then the first Voice spoke, still and small. It said, “You’ve put your proper Choice aside, but this you did in loyalty’s name, and so in Life’s. For Life’s sake, therefore, some of Its power will still descend to you. In every generation will be whelped among you some of those able to sing the Speech that every creature hears. But no power more will come to you, and no new life, until you once more see before you the path you refused, and set out to walk it alone.” Then that Voice was silent as well, and though we’ve sung to the silver of the Moon from then till now, we haven’t heard it again. We live and work and hunt with them as we did before, and we take care of them as we promised we would. They give us what we need, which was always their part of the bargain. So everything is fine.

Kit lay there, hardly breathing.

“But if everything is fine,” Memeki said, “then why do you still sing to the Light?”

There was a pause while Kit heard Ponch nosing one last time, regretfully, in the biscuit box. It was empty. I don’t know, he said. It’s a habit.

“It sounds as if there’s something you still need to do,” Memeki said.

A brief cardboard-scraping noise suggested that Ponch had gotten his nose stuck in the dog biscuit box and, as usual, was having trouble getting it out again. That sounds strange coming from you, he said. You don’t even know what you’re supposed to do next.

“But if I knew what this thing I needed to do was, I would be doing it. It’s far better than what awaits me if life goes on as it’s been going.” That shiver again—

Kit felt Ponch looking up at her. Are you all right?

“Not all right,” she said, “no. Tell me again what you told me when we met—what it’s like where you live. Tell me what you do.”

From the way the point of view changed, Kit could tell that Ponch had rolled over and was looking at Memeki upside down. I get up in the morning. I go out and harnf. Kit’s eyebrows went up at Ponch’s careful use of the politest Cyene word for dealing with bodily waste. Then Kit gets up and gives me food. Maybe we go walking before he goes off to school. Afterward I go out to my little house in the middle of my territory and have a nap. Then I get up and check my territory and make sure that everything’s all right. I have another nap. Then Kit comes home and we go for a walk, and I run, and he throws the ball for me, and maybe I see a squirrel and chase it. And then Kit gives me food. Ponch’s stomach growled; he rolled over again, looking longingly at the dog biscuit box. Then he does things he needs to do for school, and I lie and watch him while he does that. And then we go downstairs and he watches the pictures on the Noisy Flat Thing for a while, or he does wizardry, or uses the Quiet Box with the screen that sends him messages. And then we go to sleep, and I lie on his bed and make sure that he’s safe. Then we sleep—and in the morning, we get up and do it again.

Memeki was looking down at Ponch with what the dog could tell was the most profound kind of longing. “This is a life beyond lives that you’re living,” she said, wistful. “No carrying, no digging, no killing—”

I dig, Ponch said. I have to put my bones somewhere! Otherwise the dogs down the street might get them. And I carry things. Balls and sticks, mostly. But only when I want to. And as for the killing— He sounded a little wistful. It doesn’t happen that often, and only to the really stupid squirrels. I don’t usually get to catch the smart ones. I think that’s how it’s supposed to be, though. You have to send the stupid ones back so they can get it right the next time.

“But what a wonder to live in a world where there are next times,” Memeki said. “And to do what you want to do, not always what someone else says you must.”

You shouldn’t have to live a life like that, Ponch said. He was indignant. It’s terrible. Why don’t you come home with us! If you like caves, we have a cave under the house where you could stay.

Uh-oh! Kit thought, and his eyes opened wide in the dark as a series of truly terrible images started spreading themselves out in his mind. He could just imagine what his pop would think about Ponch bringing home a pet giant bug. He remembered his Popi’s reaction to all the neighbors’ dogs howling about nothing on the front lawn. Boy, once they got Memeki’s scent, would they have something to howl about then.

He was going to have to defuse Ponch’s idea as quickly as he could. Kit started to get up. Then he paused, for Memeki was saying, “It sounds wonderful—but I can’t leave here.”

Why not? They’re mean to you! Why should you stay?

Some seconds of silence passed. “Because this is my place,” Memeki said. “This is part of realizing that I’m an I. ” There was no more hesitation over the pronoun. “I’m here to do something. I must do it … as soon as I can work out what it is. But you give me a feeling that maybe things are not so terrible, if somewhere the killing doesn’t happen, if somewhere no one listens to every word you say and punishes you for the ones they think are bad. Someone should find a way for that to be the way things are here. Someone should do something!”

But why does it have to be you? Ponch said. He was sounding distressed now. You’re good! What if you do something, and then bad things happen to you? That wouldn’t be fair! In Ponch’s mind, Kit could just catch sensory echoes of things that had lately come to embody this unfairness for Ponch: the flower scent clinging to Kit’s clothes after Nita’s mom’s funeral, the faint cries of pain trapped in young Darryl’s mind during his seemingly endless Ordeal.

“Though it’s not fair, it might be right,” Memeki said. “If no one ever does anything, nothing will ever get better. Sometimes when I was young, I would go outside the City with the other moltlings, and in the forest we would hear the trees crying.” She shivered. “I always thought what the workers did to them was wrong somehow. But the Great One said that the City had to be bigger, so that there could be more warriors to fight the Others, and there was no way for the City to be bigger without the paper that the workers make from the trees. Most Yaldiv didn’t care about the trees one way or another. And though their weeping troubled me, I’d never have dared say what I thought, because the warriors are always looking for anyone who says the wrong word. There’s never enough meat, and they get the first bite of any transgressor.”

Memeki shuddered again, but all the same, a new note started to creep into her voice, a sterner tone. “Yet I grew angry. I said to myself, if ever I could do something to stop the trees’ pain, I will. And later, after the Honor came upon me, I began to wonder: would they dare touch me if I spoke now? For I remembered what I’d said, and I could still hear the weeping in my heart, though a Yaldah who’s been favored by the King can’t leave the City.” Memeki rustled a little, a gesture like a sigh. “I was almost ready to speak. Then I turned around and saw Yaldiv in the tunnel who weren’t Yaldiv, and the world went strange… Now what I said comes back to me. If what the other Voice inside him says is true—” and she glanced over in Ronan’s direction— “if I’m truly one who can do something, if things here can be made different—”

Ponch whined once, way down in his throat. I’m afraid for you. Even when people mean to do good things, bad things happen in the world.

“They’re happening already,” Memeki said. “Pretending they’re not won’t help.”

Memeki began to tremble again. Once again, through Ponch, Kit felt the tremor—and another one, something that felt like it was happening under the floor. Uh-oh! Kit thought. Is this place earthquake-prone?

He started to get up, but the tremor subsided. I still think you should come home with us, Ponch said.

“But this is home,” Memeki said. She still sounded sad, but there was a touch of affection in her voice. “And if it can be made more like yours…”

They went on arguing, if it was actually an argument. That little shake was weird, Kit thought, reaching sideways into the air to retrieve his manual from its otherspace pocket. The last thing we need right now is to find that we’re sitting on some kind of volcanic plug. But if we are, it’s better to know about it.

He opened the manual and paged through it to the marked section that dealt with Rashah’s physical structure and characteristics. Kit flipped through to the page that showed mapping references for their present location, then zoomed in on the massive outcropping of rock that concealed the cavern. The schematic on the page shifted to show a wire-frame diagram of the cavern’s structure. Kit put out a finger and drew it down the schematic: the image obeyed his gesture and the wire frame changed scale to show the structure of the underlying stone. He studied it carefully, and let out a breath. Okay, at least there’s no lava or anything like that moving around down there. I feel better.

“…but why can’t I?” Memeki was saying. “Why wouldn’t it be right to change the way things are? The Great One has been telling everyone what was right for—for forever—and nothing’s any better! Maybe it’s time to try something different! To stand up and decide something different for ourselves, and not wait to be told.”

But you might get it wrong!

“Maybe we will. But that’s no reason not to do anything. Maybe someone else got it wrong, too, did the wrong thing a long time ago. If they did, why shouldn’t we fix it? And whether they did or not, what’s important is to make it right now. No matter what that takes.”

And without waiting for anyone to tell you it’s right, Ponch said, very slowly. Just look to see what went wrong, what needs fixing, and then fix it? All by yourself?

There was a very long pause. “I think so.”

A shiver, a jingle of dog-license tags. It sounds scary.

Kit looked over the underground schematic for a moment more before getting ready to put it away. Interesting, he thought, seeing that there appeared to be several minor interconnecting caverns underneath the large one. The stone’s structure seemed a lot more intricate than he’d thought from Ronan’s description—

He felt another tremor, stronger this time. Okay, just what is that? Kit thought, glancing down one last time at the schematic. And then he was shocked to see that one of those smaller caverns somehow looked longer than it had a moment ago.

He went cold with fear. I should have looked at this before! Kit thought, scrambling to his feet as he stared at the manual. I knew I should have! “Life signs, quick!” he said to the manual.

The display shifted focus, and various colored sparks of light appeared in it, some of them haloed to show that they were in a “mitigating” field, which meant one or another of the pup tents. Three Earth-humans, one Earth dog, one Wellakhit humanoid, one Yaldiv female—Kit blinked at the fog of life signs associated with Memeki. But of far more concern were the eight, nine, ten other life signs down there in one of those narrow caverns, and getting closer—

Kit plunged out of his pup tent, shouting, “Incoming!” He also really wanted to shout, “Ronan, how the heck did you miss this!”—but it would have been a waste of time. He felt another rumble underfoot as the others burst out of their own pup tents, as Ponch and Memeki looked up in alarm.

“What is it?”

“What’s going on?”

“They’re digging up from underneath!” Kit said. “It’s solid rock underneath there; how are they able to do that?”

Ronan looked completely stricken, but for the moment all he did was point the Spear of Light at the spot on the floor where, slowly, with a noise like a series of muffled gunshots, a thin crack had begun stitching its way across the cavern floor, and the stone to either side of it was humping up in fragmenting slabs.

Dairine looked at Roshaun. Roshaun nodded. “How many?” she said to Kit.

Kit glanced down at the manual. “Nine,” he said, “no, ten that I can see.”

“Someone’s started paying attention,” Dairine said, frowning. She reached into the air beside her and came out with what Kit could only think of as a lightning bolt, writhing and jumping in her hand and looking positively eager to be flung at something. “What do you think?”

Roshaun looked over at her, then at Kit. “Once we have stopped this incursion,” he said, “I can make sure that no more are able to use that route.”

Underfoot, that rumbling got louder. “Okay,” Kit said. “Try not to mess up the mochteroofs!”

“Leave that with me,” Filif said.

And then everything started happening at once.

The crack burst open, scattering shattered stone and rock dust in all directions, and Yaldiv warriors started clambering up out of it. The first two vanished in a burst of fire from Ronan’s spear, but within a second two more had come up. Dairine came up behind Ronan and threw the blinding bolt she was holding. The second pair of Yaldiv vanished. Then came three more, only one from the spot where the first two had appeared, for the crack kept on stretching and widening across the cavern, making room for more and more of the Yaldiv to enter. A secondary crack split away from the main, still-forming crevasse, toward the mochteroofs, and first one, then a second mochteroof started to pitch down into it. But Filif was already reaching out fronds to them, and in a glow of dark green light, all the mochteroofs together floated up and away from the widening crevasse in the floor. Kit leveled his own weapon and took out one of the next pair of Yaldiv warriors; Ronan destroyed its companion. Only a few more, Kit thought. Only a few—

But it wasn’t only a few. Easily another five or six came clambering up along the length of the crevasse. They were waiting out of range, Kit thought, and glanced around the cavern in the beginnings of a panic. Now what? How are we going to get all this stuff out of here, and Memeki—

And that was another problem, for the next few Yaldiv to come up from under immediately charged at Memeki with claws open. Ponch leaped out from beside her, snarling. Oh no! Kit thought, and dashed over toward the two of them with his personal force shield turned up higher than he’d ever had it before, saying the words necessary to fling it well out to either side of him, far enough to cover Ponch and Memeki until he could get to them. He could feel the power flowing out of him and into the shield in tremendous amounts. But as he got close enough to Ponch and the terrified Memeki to seal the shield completely around them, and the Yaldiv warriors began throwing themselves up against the shield, Kit started to wonder whether, even with the augmented energy, he and the others were going to be able to hold their own. The Yaldiv have been augmented too, Kit thought. That’s how they were able to tunnel up through the stone— He concentrated on keeping the warriors away from the crouching handmaiden. “Ronan!” Kit yelled.

Blast after blast from the Spear of Light picked off Yaldiv after Yaldiv, but there always seemed to be more. Any time Ronan flagged, Dairine was there with her pocket thunderbolt. But the Yaldiv kept coming, and more and more of them were piling themselves against Kit’s shield, scrabbling at it like mad things, apparently willing to sacrifice themselves for the chance that one of their number might be able to get through. The Great One’s decided it doesn’t have to do anything but use these things to wear us down, Kit thought. But something’s made it wake up all of a sudden. What? We have to find out.

“Roshaun?” Kit shouted, watching Dairine blast several more Yaldiv to nothing. “This isn’t getting us anywhere. Might be smart not to wait!”

“I hear you,” Roshaun said. He was standing there, as often, with a little light in his hand, his implementation of the manual. Now he gazed into it and began to speak, and it began to glow more brightly. “This is an argasth-type implementation,” he said in the Speech, “requiring a median-level transposition of—”

Down at the far end of the crevasse, something went BANG!, the abnormally loud sound of a worldgating in an enclosed space where the air was more than usually well sealed in. Then came another loud report, and another, the sound of some kind of energy weapon. Kit’s heart froze as a Yaldiv fell over, and behind it, through the dust and smoke kicked up by the fighting, he could faintly see a human shape glance around her and swing the long, lean shape of a wizardly accelerator up to her shoulder. Kit swallowed hard. Of all the times Nita could have turned up, this was both the best and the worst. She started firing.

“Roshaun?” Kit shouted.

A moment more! the silent answer came back as Roshaun kept reciting the spell. “—from the heliospasm into the following coordinate sets—”

More weapons fire spat from the far end of the crevasse, some kind of plasma blast, every blast perfectly targeted and every one knocking another Yaldiv down. Kit stared over that way, distracted as he wondered whether Nita somehow had two weapons going at once. No, of course, it’s Sker’ret—and then the claws scrabbling at his shield suddenly seemed significantly closer, as the shield bowed in toward Kit a little. He gulped, and concentrated on pouring more power into it, while more Yaldiv warriors than ever came boiling up out of the crevasse, flinging themselves at Kit’s shield. Kit did everything he could to ignore what was going on outside the shield now, a task made easier by the fact that there was nothing to see but the bodies and claws and tearing mandibles of Yaldiv warriors. “Roshaun?!”

There was no answer—and then, between one breath and the next, it was as if a star had fallen into the crevasse. The blinding light struck like fiery arrows through every space around Kit that was not filled with Yaldiv. Their rattling, scratchy roaring was now replaced by a high keening whine as they dropped away from the shield, knocked or blasted off it and down into the light. In the depths of the crevasse, Kit could hear the rumbling and rattling of shattering stone suddenly dwindle to nothing, swallowed up by a sluggish, heavy boiling sound as a blast of heat blew up from below. Kit said the few words in the Speech to retune the shield for heat as well as physical impact, and put a hand out to the shaking Memeki.

Ponch got under that hand as well, nuzzling it. Did we win?

“Let you know in a minute,” Kit said. There were no more Yaldiv cries. Slowly, in the silence, the hot light vanished, replaced by a low golden-red glow that, in turn, faded to a sullen red, cooling along with the newly melted stone that now filled the former crevasse.

Kit turned his back on the magma. Its heat was still intense, but not so much so that the shield was needed anymore, so he dissolved it.

“Neets!” Dairine went tearing across the cavern. Beside Kit, Memeki lifted herself up a little to watch her go. Ponch leaped up and shook himself, headed after Dairine.

Across the cavern, Dairine tackled Nita in a hug that nearly knocked her over. Nita, grinning, hugged her back while struggling for balance. “Neets!” Kit shouted as he went after Ponch, doing his best to not look like he was ready to break into a run. “Finally! Where were you?” He paused. “Where’s Sker’ret? Who’s—”

That other figure, who had transited in with Nita and had been facing the other way, now turned around, waving a hand in front of her face to fan away some of the rock dust still floating in the air.

Kit’s mouth dropped open. “What are— Why are— Since when are you supposed to be here?”

His sister smiled her sunniest and most infuriating smile at him. “Since I got hold of the manual,” Carmela said.

Kit’s heart simply froze.

“But this is all just too much for you right now, isn’t it?” Carmela said. “Never mind, I’ll go talk to someone I’m much more interested in. Oh, Ronan…” And she headed away.

Not even if the Lone Power Itself had walked into the cavern right then could Kit have done anything whatever but stand there in shock. Oh no, Kit thought. No, no, no, this is worse than bad, so much worse. What did I do to deserve this?

He turned back to Nita. To his complete astonishment, she was still hugging Dairine. “I was so worried about you.”

“I was worrying, too. What about Dad?”

“He’s okay.”

“Uh, Neets,” Kit said.

She glanced over at him, smiling. “Oh, and your pop and mama,” Nita said, “they’re okay, too, my dad says.”

“That wasn’t what I was worried about.”

Nita gave him a look. “You weren’t?”

He looked over at Carmela. “Neets, what happened with her?”

Nita’s expression was both bemused and appreciative. “She showed up on Rirhath B and blew six kinds of crap out of a bunch of alien invaders,” Nita said. “We didn’t get too much further into the details: there wasn’t time.” She paused and looked at Memeki.

Her expression appeared shocked, but somehow not in a way Kit had expected. It was almost as if she was seeing something she’d half expected. She let go of Dairine at last, and pushed her hair back on one side as she looked at the Yaldiv.

“This is Memeki,” Kit said.

Nita and Memeki exchanged a glance. “Yes,” Nita said slowly, “she is.”

Okay, this is getting weird, Kit thought, but I should be used to that by now. “We can’t stay here long,” Kit said. “More of these guys are probably coming; we should find somewhere else to be.”

“Okay,” Nita said, “but before anything else happens, I really need something to drink. Has she stolen all my sodas yet?”

Dairine looked innocent. “She would have,” Kit said, “except I stole some first and stuck them in my pup tent.”

Nita punched him gratefully in the shoulder. “Knew I could count on you,” she said, and headed that way.

Kit watched her go, then turned and let out a long, frustrated breath as he saw Carmela prattling away to Ronan. This is going to take forever to sort out, he thought as Ponch came trotting back toward him. Not that we’ve got that much forever left. “You all right?” he said to Ponch.

I’m fine! It’s so great that Nita’s back!

“No argument,” Kit said.

And Carmela! I wondered when she’d get here. I missed her! And everybody else was here, so she needed to be here, too.

Kit rolled his eyes. “Yeah, right.” He turned to Memeki. “Memeki, how are you feeling?”

Memeki appeared to be finding it hard to speak. Ponch nosed her. She was a little nervous at first, he said, but I knew you’d save us.

I wish I’d been that certain, Kit thought. Memeki was watching Filif lower the mochteroofs back into place, and Kit saw, to his satisfaction, that at least her trembling had stopped. “I was afraid,” she said. “But you protected me as you said you would.” She sounded troubled. “Yet why did the warriors try to kill me? Has my scent changed? I am one of the Favored; no warrior should dare to touch me!”

“I don’t know,” Kit said. He patted her carapace. “We’ll try to find out. Meanwhile, I think we’re going to have to get out of here pretty quick. Ponch, stay with her and take care of her, okay?”

I will.

He headed over to where Roshaun and Dairine were talking to Nita. “Roshaun,” Kit said, “that was a sweet one.”

Roshaun looked startled. “‘Sweet’?”

Kit laughed. “An idiom,” he said. “What you did, whatever that was, it was terrific!”

“I did a location-to-location matter transfer,” Roshaun said. “It was… surprisingly effective.” And he smiled.

“You find a volcano on this planet somewhere?”

“Oh, no. I borrowed some stellar metal from the system primary: iron, mostly.” Kit’s eyes went wide. “It’s a novel technique,” Roshaun said, and glanced over at Dairine.

Kit raised his eyebrows. The thought that Dairine had been not only practicing fast-deployment routines for pulling white-hot atmospheric iron out of stars, but also coaching someone else in it, freaked him out slightly. But then Roshaun’s good with stars. Maybe I shouldn’t worry.

In the meantime, there were two other things Kit was going to have to handle in a hurry, and it took him several moments to figure out which of them he disliked more. He sighed and went over to where Ronan was taking down his pup-tent interface. “Are you okay?” he said.

Ronan nodded, the usual curt gesture.

“Then do you mind telling me what just happened here?” Kit said. “I thought you said the Champion could cover for us!”

“I thought he could, too,” Ronan said. “But he’s on it again, reinforcing the safeguards that slipped.”

“And how long’s he going to be able to hold them in place this time?” Kit said. “If they slipped once, they’re likely to do it again. It’s the Pullulus, isn’t it? It’s affecting even him now.”

Ronan nodded. “Or his presence inside time, inside me. He didn’t feel it happening at first, and now he’s getting worried.”

“He’s getting worried!” Kit rubbed his face. “So when we get out of here, is he going to be any use to us?” Kit said. “And what about you? What—” The temptation to say What good are you without him? was considerable, but Kit restrained himself. “What’s it going to take to get him back into shape?”

“Getting rid of the Pullulus would do it,” Ronan said, grim. “And while there is one other way, it’d probably take another sixty or seventy years to finesse, so maybe we’d better concentrate on taking care of Memeki.”

“That’s another problem,” Kit said. “They sure wanted to take care of her.” He looked at the few fragments of Yaldiv warrior that had not been completely vaporized or blasted to other kinds of nothing during the attack. “Someone’s realized that she’s important. But not important enough that It came Itself.”

It’s still not here in a completely embodied avatar, the Champion said. That, I would feel immediately. It remains partly unaware … for the moment.

Kit held his breath at the sound of the Champion’s voice speaking through Ronan. It seemed to have lost a lot of the power he normally heard in it. “I guess we should be grateful,” Kit said. “But I don’t think it’s gonna last. Anyway, have the others all take their pup tents down pronto. We won’t stay here a second longer than we have to.”

He turned, then, and let out a long, annoyed breath. This couldn’t be put off any longer. Off by the former crevasse, Filif and Roshaun were checking over the mochteroofs, and Ponch had run over to them and the slender figure who now stood by Filif and was fluffing up his fronds. “Just look at you!” said Carmela. “You wore your hat all the way here!”

“It has become a personality thing,” said Filif, reaching up with one frond to adjust his Mets baseball cap. Kit had to smile slightly, as Filif’s sense of which part of the cap should face forward tended to change from hour to hour.

Carmela glanced down at Ponch, who was jumping up and down beside her, trying to get her attention. She got down to give him a hug, and started getting her face seriously washed as a result.

In the middle of this, Ponch glanced over at Kit and gave him a reproachful look. I can’t find any more biscuits, he said.

“That would be because you and Memeki ate every one you could find!” Kit said.

Ponch snorted and went back to slurping Carmela’s face. “And in the meantime,” Kit said, “I really need Ponch to be concentrating on helping us all get out of here to somewhere safer. So if you can please stop fussing over him—”

Carmela glanced up. “Now, here I am having some quality smooch-time with my favorite doggie,” she said, “and you’re just standing there ruining it. Bear with me while I ask one of these nice people for a spell or something to destroy you with.” She glanced around. “Filif! Would you destroy Kit for me, please? You’re such a honey. Thanks.” And she went back to scratching Ponch behind the ears.

“‘Melaaaaa!” Kit said as Filif came up behind Kit.

“If I were you,” Filif’s nearest fronds said very quietly in Kit’s ear, tickling it, “I’d bend in this wind, and not break yourself trying to stand against it.” To Carmela, he said, “Destroy him how, exactly?”

“Melted lead?” Carmela said. “Boiling oil? Forget it, those are way too retro. Disintegration’s big this year…”

Filif stood there looking innocently at the ceiling with all his berries as Carmela started to hit her stride. Kit just shook his head and turned away.

Off by the mochteroofs, Memeki stood watching Carmela and Ponch and the rest of them. There was no making anything of a Yaldiv’s expressions, but Kit got a sense from Memeki of something much like wistfulness, like a kid who stands off to one side of the playground, knowing he’s about to be picked last for a game, as usual. Kit swallowed: he’d been there. But there was something else going on besides that sadness—a strange and growing hope that something different was about to happen. Off across the cavern, as she was taking down her pup tent, Kit saw Nita pause, looking at Memeki, too. She glanced at Kit.

She’s terrified, Nita said silently. And not just for herself. But something else is going on, too. You feel it?

He nodded as he came up beside Memeki and patted her carapace again. “We’ll be ready to go pretty soon,” he said, “but you don’t have to be by yourself.”

“Kit,” Memeki said. Kit’s mouth dropped open, for it was the first time she’d actually used a name for any of them. “You need not take me anywhere else,” she said. “I must go back to the City, for I see I am putting you all in danger. Particularly Ponch.”

Kit looked at her thoughtfully, as Ponch, who had left Carmela to follow him, stood up on his hind legs and put his forepaws on her. We’ll stay with you, he said. We’ll take care of you.

The wash of fear that Kit caught from Ponch was astonishing: it made him wince. “I see how you do that,” Memeki said. “You care for each other. It is so strange. Somehow, though you come from so far away, you are like me. How, I can’t say.” And then she, too, sat down on the ground, a strange, jerky motion. She twitched. “But there are other reasons. I must return to the grubbery. My time—” She broke off, went silent, like someone distracted by a spasm of pain.

Ronan came up behind Kit and stood there for a moment, just a dark presence that said nothing. Kit glanced at him.

“Ponch is right,” he said. “If she’s going back to the City, we can’t just leave her there and tiptoe away, not after what happened here! We’ve got to stay with her and keep her safe.”

“That’s not going to attract any attention, I’ll bet,” Ronan said. “When someone asks, just what are we supposed to be doing hanging around her?”

“We’re her guards,” Kit said. “The One sent us.” His grin was a little grim. “Though what we mean by that won’t be what they mean by it, it’s still true. And if anyone gives us trouble”—he shrugged—”we play it by ear.”

Ronan shook his head. “I hope this works,” he said. Kit did, too. He looked around. “Are we packed up?”

Nita joined them. “All you need to do is take down your pup tent, and we’ll be ready to run,” she said. “What time is it outside?”

Kit looked at his watch. “About an hour till dawn. So we’ll go in half an hour?” He looked around at the others. Roshaun bowed agreement; Filif rustled “yes.”

He looked over at Carmela, who was leaning against one of the mochteroofs, fiddling with her curling iron. Kit let out another exasperated breath. “Fil,” he said, “can you retailor Sker’ret’s mochteroof for Carmela? And better put some training wheels on it.”

“I take your meaning; I’m working on that right now,” Filif said. “Fifteen minutes more will see the work done.”

Kit nodded. Neets, he said silently, we really need to talk.

You’re right, she said. We do. But she was looking at Memeki.

Ponch looked up at Kit. And about the biscuits…

Kit sighed. “Okay, so I hid a box,” he said. “Come on.”

***

Sitting cross-legged on the floor of the cavern, Nita drank her soda and watched Filif working over the last remaining mochteroof, while Carmela walked around it, kibitzing and apparently offering design tips. Off to one side, Dairine and Roshaun were sitting down and conferring about something. Kit and Ponch had vanished inside Kit’s pup tent. By the scarred-over crevasse, Memeki crouched, every now and then shivering a little. And in that shiver, Nita suddenly felt that both their biggest problem and its solution were buried.

She closed her eyes and breathed out, breathed in. The messages that were coming to her—whether as hunches or visions or half-heard whispers—were getting so intense, in this past day or so, that she didn’t have to be asleep to have them. Is this going to be a permanent thing? she wondered. Or is this just the peridexic effect working? When all this is over, is it back to business as usual?

Don’t ask me, said the silent voice in the back of her brain. Nothing about this business has been usual.

She smiled slightly, opened her eyes again. Crouched down on the gritty stone in front of her, Spot looked up at her with two small, stalked, glowing eyes. “So how’re you holding up, small stuff?” she said. “You feel better since Dairine took you back home?”

“Much better,” Spot said. His voice was clearer than Nita had heard it for some time. Nonetheless, there was a hesitant quality to it.

“You don’t sound too sure.” She reached out and stroked his case between the eyes.

“There’s still much stored data to assimilate,” Spot said. “And it will take a long time. But in the short term, I can say that I seem to be more than I was. If I can just work out what to do with it.”

Nita laughed, just once, a brief and rueful sound. “That goes for both of us.”

“But at least you’ve come back from Earth with what we need,” Spot said. “The word that has to be heard.”

Nita gave Spot a look. “I have?” She found this news reassuring coming from Spot, and she needed the reassurance.

He wiggled his eyes at her and trundled back off in Dairine’s direction. “Getting a lot more vocal, that wee fella,” said the voice from behind her.

Nita cocked an eye up at Ronan, and took another drink of soda. I wonder if it’s contagious, she thought, catching a glimpse out of the corner of her eye of Kit coming out of his pup tent again. Ponch followed him out, and Kit started to roll up the access and pull it down out of the air.

Across the cavern, Carmela’s mochteroof skinned over with the simulacrum of a Yaldiv’s golden-green inner shell, but Nita was distracted from this by the unusually edgy feeling practically radiating from Ronan. “How’re you holding up?” she said after a moment.

She somehow wasn’t surprised to see that he wouldn’t quite look at her. “Possibly better than some of us.”

“Who?” She was conscious of Kit’s gaze in their direction—not hostile, not even trying to look like he was particularly interested. But she knew better.

“Not him,” Ronan said, annoyed.

“Oh. Your partner—”

Ronan nodded. “It’s okay,” he said. “He’s working to make sure our next move is covered. But this isn’t easy for him. He thought he’d have enough power accessible to make a difference when things started to get rough. And suddenly he doesn’t seem to have access to anything like enough.”

Nita shook her head. “What can we do?”

“Nothing,” Ronan said, sounding bleak.

Nita glanced up at him. “Except maybe hope the problem’s working both ways.”

Ronan stared at her in confusion. “I took a quick look just now at the manual to see what’s been happening since I left,” Nita said. “When you guys got hauled in front of the King-avatar, he seemed to be a few words short of a spell. Like the avatar was running on auto.”

“Don’t count on that lasting long enough to do us any good,” Ronan said.

“It may already have done all the good it needs to,” Nita said softly, glancing at Memeki. “But think about it. Why shouldn’t the Pullulus be having some effect on the Lone Power, too? Or at least Its presence in Its avatars?”

Ronan looked astounded. “But the Pullulus is the Lone Power’s own weapon. You’d think It’d make sure It couldn’t be affected.”

“But the Lone One’s power is still the same as the power behind wizardry, isn’t it?” Nita said. “Just perverted. It still has to obey wizardry’s rules while It’s physically present in the universe. And the rules say that the structure of space affects the way wizardry works … and vice versa.” She thought a moment. “What if It was willing to risk having less power for the moment, just so long as It got the other result It was playing for?” Nita glanced over at Memeki. “Distracting everybody from knowing that she was about to happen.”

Ronan was quiet for a moment. “Hope you’re right,” he said, “because that’s all the advantage we’ve got. As soon as It realizes that some of us haven’t been distracted … or that she has happened, which she hasn’t, entirely…”

Nita shook her head. “One thing at a time,” she said. “But you didn’t exactly answer my question.”

Ronan gave Nita one of those looks that was meant to frighten her off the subject. She frowned at him. “Don’t even bother,” she said.

The grim look briefly dissolved into one of those dark, wry smiles. “Never did much good with you, did it?” he said.

“Nope,” Nita said. She got up and stretched, almost too tired to bother getting as annoyed at him as she could have. “Look, Ronan, any chance you could stop being so defensive for a few seconds? Do you seriously think I’m asking how you are as a way of secretly suggesting you’re going to screw up in some weird way? I was asking about how you’re feeling. But since you can’t get that through your head, just work on getting ever so briefly conscious about your own abilities. Think about what you pulled off on your Ordeal! And then back in Ireland, on the Fields of Tethra—”

“That was then,” Ronan said, sounding uneasy. “This is now.”

“Spare me,” Nita said. “Anybody who can ‘take in the Sea’ on his first time out, and afterward cope with handling that thing—” She glanced at the Spear of Light. “—has no business wandering around looking morose and fishing for compliments.” Then she had to grin. “Which is probably why the Powers have now sent you the greatest challenge of your life.”

Ronan suddenly looked shocked, and glanced around him with a sudden guilty look of someone who’s just been found out. “What? What do you—”

Nita looked sidewise to where Carmela, having finished up with another session of fussing over Ponch, was heading toward them. “She’s all yours,” Nita said, and turned away.

Behind her, Ronan didn’t move for a moment or so. Then he collapsed the Spear back into its ballpoint pen disguise and tucked it away inside his jacket. A wee bit freaked, he said silently. More than a wee bit. Not at all cool, or calm, or able to deal, no matter how it looks from outside. Is that what you wanted to hear?

Nita looked over her shoulder just long enough to flash him a very small smile. No. But the truth’s worth hearing, anyway. Then she headed over to Memeki.

For a moment she paused just out of reach of Memeki’s claws. The mirror-shade eyes looked at Nita thoughtfully.

“You do not have to be afraid of me,” Memeki said. “I am nothing to fear.”

Nita shook her head. “I had a little scare when we first got here,” she said. “It wasn’t your fault.” Then she put out a hand and laid it on that shining carapace. Memeki shivered a little under her touch. “And as for you being nothing to be afraid of—not for us, maybe. But someone else is scared.”

Nita had to hold herself very still as she said that, for the touch had told her something about the reasons for that fear. Inside Memeki, Nita clearly felt a growing power, a core of something like heat or light—like a heart quietly beating, getting stronger. But also inside Memeki were a myriad of tinier glittering points of power, and these were of a darker fire. They scorched the testing mind, cruel as sparks spun up from a fire intent on burning.

“I know now who’s afraid,” Memeki said. “It’s the creature that speaks through the King. It’s my enemy… and my other self.”

Nita swallowed as she felt the sudden surge of power inside the voice. “And it’s inside me,” Memeki said. “I never really knew that until now.”

Nita hesitated a moment, then nodded. “It’s inside all of us, a little.”

“But not in the same way,” Memeki said. “You understand. In you, it’s far less. Inside me—It has me outnumbered. And unless something happens very soon, It will put an end to me.”

“Not if you don’t let It,” Nita said.

Memeki combed that palp down again, that uncertain gesture. “There is no way to stop what’s coming!” she said, distressed. “You must know! You can feel them all.”

“The eggs,” Nita said. “Yes.”

“They won’t be eggs for long,” Memeki said. “Soon they’ll hatch, each one of them with its spark of the Great One, the Darkness. They’ll belong to It. And when they hatch, they will turn to their mother for food.”

Nita shivered, suddenly glimpsing a scene Memeki had seen again and again in the grubbery of the city-hive: the little closed-in cells where the handmaidens, the Favored, were kept and ministered to until their time came… until the eggs hatched inside them, and the grubs within turned outward and began to feast on the flesh that had sheltered them.

“It will happen very soon,” Memeki said. “A sunrise more, perhaps two, and I’ll be taken to the incubatory inside the grubbery, there to wait my time. When Ponch found me I was spending my last hours in freedom, walking, and working and walking again, fearing what was about to happen—and not knowing how to speak of it, not daring to. Knowing that everything was about to be lost, everything from the time the strange voice spoke to me…” She pulled her claws close to herself. “But you are the one who knows the way,” Memeki said then, looking up again. “You know how it will be. You had a mother…”

Nita held still in pure shock. After a moment she said, “We all had mothers. Well, maybe not Filif, and as for Spot, he—”

“But only your mother did what all our mothers do,” Memeki said. “Surely you understand! I can hear it in you when you touch me.”

Nita went abruptly blind with memory. The moments that followed were full of towering darkness and the sound of rushing waters, and a woman’s voice saying, in the face of the Lone Power Itself, “You can do what you like with me, but not with my daughter!”

Nita wasn’t sure how long she stood there in that remembered darkness. When she could see her surroundings again, she was leaning against Memeki’s shell with both hands, and her eyes were stinging. She blinked hard, working to get control of herself. Strangely, the feel of those swarming, furious little sparks of dark fire was helping her a lot. Not again, Nita thought. Not this time. And not this mom!

“She died,” Nita said, straightening up. “Yes. She died.”

“So you understand how it must be for us, for all the Yaldat. How it will be for me.” Memeki shivered again, and Nita noticed that those shivers were getting more frequent. “It’s the greatest honor that a Yaldah can achieve. I was called to the King. I became his vessel. Inside me, the eggs grew. Now they’re almost ready. The Great One’s children will come forth.”

“And kill you,” Nita whispered.

“Of course they will. This is the holy Sacrifice; this is Motherhood. What kind of mother would not die for her children?”

Once again the memory of darkness came down on Nita, the darkness inside her mother’s cancer-stricken body, and the worse one, much later, on the night Nita went up to her room after the funeral, shut the door, and sat in the dark, completely dead inside. But the shock a few moments ago had left Nita less susceptible to this second one… and she wasn’t going to let the pain distract her from the business at hand, especially when it was so plain that the whole Yaldiv species was being jerked around in a way that Nita found so personal. Suddenly everything seemed reflected in everything else—the mirror-eye looking back at her, and the koi’s words: Within every dewdrop, a world of struggle. And this was it, she realized. The struggles were the same; the answers were the same. This was the key.

“What kind of mother wouldn’t die for her kids? Lots of kinds!” Nita said. Her own anger surprised her, and at the sound of it, Memeki started back. “Would, sure. But have to? Most places it’s optional, not mandatory! Not for you, though. Someone’s picked out the kind of motherhood that’ll hurt the most, the kind you can never enjoy, and talked you into thinking it’s all you’ve got!”

Shock practically radiated from Memeki. “But this is—this is—”

“The way it’s always been done?” Nita said. “No, it’s not! There’s another story, isn’t there?” And as she said it, she knew it was true, the same way she’d known when to throw herself out of the line of fire back at the Crossings. But nothing about this business is usual, she thought, and felt the peridexic effect’s amusement in response.

Memeki’s shock became even more pronounced. She waved her claws in distress. “How do you know that?” she cried. “You were not—He didn’t—” She threw a glance toward Ponch.

She told him, Nita thought. And that’s how I know now. This was part of the information that was blocked in the manuals. But when she told Ponch herself, the peridexic effect got access to the information! “It doesn’t matter right now,” Nita said. “Listen to me, Memeki! Once upon a time, mothers here didn’t have to do that kind of thing, did they?”

“No! They—” Memeki quieted a little. “No,” she said.

“Because there weren’t so many eggs?”

Memeki hesitated. “Maybe. I don’t know.”

“But these days there are so many,” Nita said. “Too many. And they have no other way to be born. They have to kill you.” She was getting angrier every moment. It was another of the Lone Power’s favorite gambits—perverting the way Life worked just to spite it. “There might be more to it than that. Never mind that right now. Once, things were different. But now you’re called to the King—” Nita thought about that for a moment. “‘Called.’ They make you go to him?”

Memeki put up her claws again in distress. “It is an honor—”

“Yeah, sure,” Nita said. “What if you don’t want the honor?”

“The warriors make meat of you,” Memeki whispered.

“So you have no choice,” Nita said.

Memeki was silent. Nita put a hand out to her and felt again the burning storm of angry life inside her, all the new little avatars of the Lone One waiting for their first act in life, which would be to murder someone. Away behind her, she could hear Ponch whimpering, and Kit was picking up on his distress.

Neets—

I know.

We’re just about ready.

Give us a minute. “Memeki,” Nita said, “the only reason you’re here with us now is because somehow you felt different from all the other Yaldiv, all the other Yaldat.”

“That’s true,” Memeki said.

“And you said you heard a voice speaking to you?”

“The voice that said I could be more,” Memeki said, “that all my people could be more.”

“Memeki,” Nita said, “did you give the voice an answer?”

And inside Memeki, Nita could feel all those little sparks of dark fire suddenly blaze up in shock. From the other core of power working inside her, the small, dim-beating one, there was not the slightest sign of reaction: like someone holding absolutely still lest some shy, trembling thing bolt away.

Memeki was silent.

Neets, we really need to get out of here. Ponch thinks he smells something starting to happen.

Just a minute more! “Memeki!” Nita said.

Memeki looked at Nita. “No,” she said. “I never knew what to say.”

Nita swallowed. “Memeki,” she said, “before, you never had a choice in anything. Now you have one, your very own choice. Give the voice an answer.”

Almost too softly to be heard, “But what answer?” Memeki said. “What do I do?”

Nita thought of Della in her dream: the claw pushing the hair back, the way Memeki groomed her palp, that nervous gesture. Come on, give me a hint: What am I supposed to be doing to make everything turn out all right? You’re supposed to know what They want, you’re the one who’s supposed to have all the answers.

Her mouth had gone as dry as any desert, but Nita managed to open it, and said, very softly, “I can’t tell you.”

“But you have to! You know!”

I know the right answer. At least, I know a right answer. And it would be so easy to tell her. But if I did… She couldn’t even swallow, she was so scared, for Nita was sure that giving Memeki any answer would completely screw everything up. It’s not what Tom or Carl would do. And if I’m being a Senior, it’s not what I should do either.

“Tell me!” Memeki pleaded.

“Memeki, if I tell you what to say,” Nita said, “it’s not your choice.”

Behind her, Nita could hear Ponch starting to growl. She forced herself to ignore him.

“And you have to choose,” Nita said. “If you don’t, we’ll have come here all this way for nothing. Except to die.”

“That is a hard saying!” Memeki said. She sounded hurt and indignant, like someone under unfair pressure.

“Unfortunately, it’s also a true one,” Nita said. “Wizards tell the truth. Sometimes it’s all we’ve got: one way or another, the words wind up doing the job.”

“I need time! Time to think, to decide—”

“There is no time,” Nita said. “And this kind of choice won’t need time. It’s done in a flash, in a breath. All you have to do is be willing to finally make it, instead of putting it off!”

Memeki turned away from her.

Nita broke out in a cold sweat. Oh, please don’t let me have messed up! she thought. If I’ve ruined this somehow, if the whole universe is going to go dark because I just said the wrong thing—

“Nita,” Ronan said. “Now. “

Her head came right around at the sound of sheer command in his voice—and the unexpected desperation.

“They’re coming,” he said, and this time it was just Ronan. “He can’t hide us anymore. His power’s going, and there’s another great lot of them coming. Five times as many as last time, maybe more. Something’s waking up in the City.”

Nita swallowed. His power’s going? How long is ours going to last? “Look,” she said, “maybe we can help Him. Pass Him some power, or operate His shield routine independently. Can you feed Spot the cloaking spell He was using? At least we can buy ourselves some time.”

Ronan frowned, a concentrating look. “I have it,” said Spot from across the room. “Working…”

“Everybody into the mochteroofs!” Filif said.

There was a wholesale scramble for them. “Ponch,” Kit said, “if You-Know-Who can feel our transits now, you’re going to have to walk us out of here: It doesn’t seem to be able to feel you. ‘Mela, here, get in—”

Nita stood for a moment more with her hand against Memeki’s carapace. Memeki swung herself around toward Nita, looked at her, and once again Nita was briefly dazzled by the reflections: mirror-shade eyes, dewdrops, and, suddenly, another eye looking out at her from one of the reflections—

Nita recoiled in terror as the myriad sparks of dark fire inside Memeki buzzed and jostled against one another with sudden rage. Nita jerked her hand away. “We’ll get you back to the grubbery,” she said, and turned and ran for her mochteroof.

“Ponch, where’s the leash?” Kit said.

I have it here.

“Great. Fil—”

“I thought we might wind up needing this kind of transit: I left an open receptor for the leash in all the mochteroof spells. Tell me the words for your end of the spell. I can chain them together.”

He thinks of everything, Nita thought as she got to her mochteroof and put her hands up against it. He’s a better Senior than any of us. Where’d we be without him? She melted straight through the virtual carapace, into the dim green insides of it. Light outside went monochrome, restating itself as heat and cool rather than light and darkness; the cavern around them blazed like day. Nita found the spell-handles inside that would let her wear the mochteroof in automatic mode, like a tight-fitting suit, and spoke the words in the Speech to activate each one. “Don’t worry about spoken conversation,” Filif said. “It’ll stay in-circuit; only wizards will be able to hear it.”

Nita nodded. “It’s in novice mode; all you have to do is walk,” she heard Kit saying to Carmela, who was inside one of the mochteroofs now. “Walk the way you usually do … Uh, maybe not that way, but just—”

“Thank you so much,” Carmela said sweetly, “but it’s not like this is the entertainment system and I need a little kid to program it for me or anything.”

Nita could just hear Kit gritting his teeth. “Ponch,” he said. “You ready?”

Always.

“Let’s go!”

They all stepped forward, vanishing—

—and came out together in some anonymous City tunnel, strung out along it: Kit and Ponch first, with Nita, Carmela, Ronan, and Memeki close behind them, and Roshaun and Filif and Dairine, with Spot, bringing up the rear. Inside the City, everything was terribly quiet—a heavy, hot, unechoing silence like being in a closed room.

Nita stood still with the others for a moment, listening, and looking around at the strange papery walls with their endless messages: The Commorancy is all, the Outside is the Enemy, the different is the dangerous. But clearer than any of the writings was the message that she felt all around her, thousands of point-sources of darkness, inert for the moment but ready to awaken: the avatar-presence of the Lone Power in every single Yaldiv, owning every soul in the City, each one ready and eager to do Its will. They’re bad news, she could just hear Darryl saying. Deadly. And I think if you hang around where they are, somebody’s going to get killed.

Nita was trembling with nerves and sheer weariness. Stronger far now than the individual Yaldiv avatars in its pressure against her mind was the sense of one presence that was no longer running on automatic. Nita could sense it right through the walls, a core of burning darkness which was definitely the parent of the sparks of dark fire inside Memeki. It’s not going to wait for matters to take their course, Nita thought.

She glanced behind her. Through the shell of Filif’s mochteroof, she could see the dark green light of a locator spell. It’s as Ponch thought, Filif said, his eye-berries glowing faintly through the mochteroof‘s illusion-field as he looked at the others. Our cavern is full of warriors again; they’ve broken in through a new tunnel. Easily a hundred of them.

“At least we’re not there,” Kit said. “And they may waste a little more time thinking we are, and looking for us.” He glanced back at Memeki. “So, to the grubbery?”

Nita turned to Memeki. The Yaldah rubbed her foreclaws together, shivering.

“Yes,” she said. “If I’m not there when the others wake, they will raise the alarm.”

It’s raised already! Nita wanted to say, but she restrained herself. Give her the time to realize the truth. Until it’s plain there’s no more time left. “Ponch, you know the way?” Nita said.

Of course. He sounded faintly offended. We’re not very close; if they were waiting for us, I wanted a chance to know about it and go somewhere else. But we’re not very far, either.

“Let’s go,” Kit said.

Ponch led them down through that tunnel and paused at the end of it; the passage they were in grew broader, and two narrower ones led off left and right. He chose the right-hand one, and Kit followed him.

One after another, cautious, they went after. Nita was listening with all of her for the sound of other claws on the floor of the tunnel but heard nothing. Next to her, Carmela—who had been watching Ronan as she walked—staggered into the right-hand wall and rebounded. Ronan rolled his eyes and looked away.

“‘Mela,” Nita said under her breath, “you need to stop concentrating on someone else’s hottitude and get serious, okay? We are not in a safe place here.”

“Yeah, okay,” Carmela muttered. But she shot Nita a sly look. “See that? Hung up on my little brother as you unfortunately are, I got you to admit it. He is utterly hot.”

“I am not—” Nita exhaled in exasperation. “Forget it. As for Ronan—yeah, he has his moments.”

“Without a doubt,” Carmela said. “And how many of his moments have you had?”

Nita gave Carmela an evil look as they turned a corner. “It’s possible to be too nosy,” she said, “even around people as perfect as Kit and me.”

Carmela looked thoughtful. “‘Perfect,’” she said experimentally. “‘Kit.’” Then she shook her head. “Sorry, Neets, one of those words is in the wrong sentence…”

Nita grinned. “As for Ronan, better enjoy him while you can. After this is over there’s no guarantee he’ll be with us that much longer…”

Nita checked behind them. There was no sign of pursuit, not even any sign of workers. But all the same, Nita thought, and reached down to her charm bracelet, making sure her accelerator was recharged, loaded, and ready to go.

And just in case the more techie kinds of spell are the first to fail—Nita reached into her otherspace pocket and pulled out her old standby, yet another in a series of peeled rowan wands soaked in full moonlight. Nita shoved it into the belt of her jeans and sighed. Just the touch of it brought back the feel of her backyard on an early autumn evening as she sat against the trunk of her buddy Liused the rowan tree, discussing the finer points of how most artistically to begin dropping your leaves in the fall…

Nita moved a little faster to catch up with Kit and Ponch and Carmela. The three of them were up near an intersection, pausing while Ponch picked yet another turn, moving right and up a slight incline into a wide and still-empty corridor. Kit was saying, “—don’t get how this can possibly have happened. You’re too old! And you haven’t had anything that looks like an Ordeal.”

Carmela looked down at Kit as if from a great height. “Oh, yeah? Well, you haven’t had you for a little brother all these years. It’s felt pretty ordeal-ish to me!”

“I don’t mean that kind of ordeal! Wizardry doesn’t just get passed out on street corners to just anybody who comes along!”

“Oh yeah, like I need this experience to learn that,” Carmela said. “You should hear yourself go on and on about it. Suffer suffer, pain pain, responsibility responsibility.” She waved her hands in exaggerated distress, and the mochteroof‘s claws waved around every which way. “Not like you’re not having insane and crazy fun, secretly, every minute of the day!”

They came to the next intersection. Ponch paused there a moment, then crowded back against Kit. Somebody’s down there, Ponch said. Some workers, I think. Wait a moment, they’re going by—

Ponch peered around the corner. “I can’t believe this,” Kit muttered, just briefly turning his head to look back toward Carmela. “You’re one of us and you’re still clueless! It could only happen to me. Would you just please open the manual and read that first page again, the one with the little block of text on it, you know the one—” Carmela reached behind her. “Anything to shut you up.”

“The first page!” Kit said. “The one that says, ‘In Life’s name, and for Life’s sake, I assert that I will use the Art which is Its gift—’”

“—in compliance with FCC regulation part 15, section 209(c), which states that any unwanted RF emissions from an intentional radiator shall not exceed the level of the—”

Openmouthed, Kit stared at Carmela. “What?”

“Right here,” Carmela said, pushing what she held up against the side of her mochteroof. “The first page—”

What Carmela was bracing against the side of her mochteroof for Kit to see was a paper booklet, in which the lettering neither moved around nor changed, but held almost bizarrely still.

“I said I found the manual,” Carmela said.

Kit stared at the paper booklet.

“For the TV,” Carmela said, with the slow distinct delivery of someone speaking in a kindly way to the mentally disadvantaged.

Nita took her hands off the spell-controls for her mochteroof and put them over her mouth in a desperate attempt to keep herself from bursting out laughing.

Very slowly, Kit looked up at his sister.

“Have I ever told you how wonderful you are?” he said.

“Not lately,” Carmela said, slapping the TV manual shut and stuffing it out of sight. “And boy, had you better start making up for lost time, because I am feeling real unappreciated right now. I show up and shoot the butts off eight million hostile aliens to find out where you are so I can give you a hand, and what do I get from you? Bupkis!” She glanced back at Nita. “That’s my new word for this week,” she said.

Nita took her hands away from her mouth and concentrated on looking completely unconcerned. “Where’d you hear it?” she said.

“One of the cable channels. It’s alien, I think.”

Kit, meanwhile, was grinning in a helpless way and looking up. “Oh, thank you,” he said—and not, Nita thought, to Carmela. “Thank you so much.”

“A little bit late,” Carmela said, “but better than never. Sincere-sounding, anyway.” Then abruptly she looked at Kit and said, “Wait a minute. ‘One of us’?” And she laughed. “You thought I was talking about a wizard’s manual? I don’t need a wizard’s manual. I’m just fine the way I am. You can check that with the Power thingies.”

“Thingies?” Kit said.

They’re gone, Ponch said. Come on.

“How close are we?” Dairine said from the end of the line. “I think I hear some action behind us.”

Just a few minutes’ walk, Ponch said. Up a level, and then a left turn.

They followed Ponch up the long ramp to the next level of the city, where a number of corridors came together in a small, central concourse or crossroads, under an arched-over papery dome. Down one of the other corridors, Nita could see shadowy figures moving: workers, she thought. Nonetheless, she was walking more softly now, and she noticed that the others were, too. They all know that, sooner or later, we’re going to wind up walking into a trap. And, indeed, the one subject none of them had so far discussed was one that in more normal times would have been one of the first to come up: how are we getting out of here?

They paused again. Ponch looked around him and chose their way, one of the left-hand passages. The relative dimness of a side corridor shut down around them as they went. But this is more serious than any of us getting out, Nita thought. This is a whole universe’s worth of trouble, solved or messed up in one shot … and they all know it. It was a relief to know they realized it. And a strange feeling swelled up in Nita: pride in all of them.

They stopped outside an arched doorway. On the wall to either side of it was written, in the Yaldiv charactery, GRUBBERY 14.

Memeki slipped past Nita, went to the doorway. Inside, in the dimness, nothing moved. Nita could dimly see a central pit area that heaved gently with many, many small, caterpillarish forms … every one of them alive, inside, with one of those angry, evil little dark-fire sparks. On the far side of the room, past the main pit, were many smaller archways, each big enough to take a single entering Yaldiv. Many of those were walled up. Nita had already seen from Memeki’s mind what happened here, as each Favored Yaldah came to her time, entered, and was immured. The newly emerged grubs would be tenderly carried out by the ministering handmaidens, fed and tended… and the empty shell that was all that was left of their mother would be given to a worker to dump into the oily swamp.

Slowly, farther down the corridors, other Yaldiv began to appear: workers mostly, heading toward the door of the Commorancy to make their way out into the world for the day’s work. Inside her mochteroof, Nita turned to Memeki and waited.

Memeki stood quiet. All of them were looking at her now, but she seemed oblivious to this. Nita waited. Come on, she thought, come on! Just say yes! That’s all it needs. Just say—

“I will not,” Memeki said.

They all stared at her.

She stood there with her claws together, in a position that was neither the Yaldah’s fearful “averting” gesture or the warrior’s threat. There was something strangely serene about it, and she looked over at Ponch and bowed. “I will not go in,” she said. “I am no longer of the City. I am the Hes—”

And from the dim silence of the grubbery, the warriors came boiling out.

Once again everything started to happen at once. Nita saw Dairine and Filif and Roshaun drop, inside their mochteroofs, come up with strange shapes furred with the power-glow of working wizardries, and start firing at the surrounding warriors. To her own astonishment, Nita was horrified. “No! Look out, you’ll hurt Memeki, if you—”

Then the firing stopped. That, too, horrified Nita, because it wasn’t due to anything she’d said. From around all of them, the mochteroofs abruptly vanished.

There they stood, suddenly unshelled—five humans, one humanoid king, one talking tree, one dog, one computer-being, and a Yaldiv—and harsh claws seized them from every side, snatching away everything they had been holding, including the suddenly revealed Spear of Light from the shocked and swearing Ronan. The breath went right out of Nita, not so much from the horror of two giant bugs each grabbing one of her arms, but because of something much more innately awful. Ever since Nita had begun to practice the Art, the rule had been, “A spell always works.” But suddenly it didn’t.

The warriors began to hustle them all away from the grubbery. There was a certain amount of noise. When Spot was pried out of her arms, Dairine had joined Ronan in struggling hard and yelling words that would have given their dad a heart attack if he’d heard them; and Roshaun was accompanying her in Wellakhit idiom that from the sound of it was nearly as bad. Carmela, to Nita’s surprise and relief, was angry, but not terrified; as they were dragged along, she flicked Nita a glance and waggled her eyebrows a couple of times, then glanced toward her curling iron’s holster, and shrugged. It was empty.

Damn, Nita thought. She glanced at Kit and Filif, who were being dragged along nearby. As Nita was pulled even with Kit, she met his eye, tried to pass a thought to him, but was astonished to find that even in this moment of crisis, she couldn’t hear him think. He just looked at her and shook his head.

As they passed various astonished-looking workers and handmaidens and were hauled downward into the heart of the City, in the back of Nita’s mind she could feel the peridexis struggling as desperately as a bird clutched in someone’s fist. What’s happened? she said to it, getting less scared and more angry. Why isn’t anything working?!

The Lone One’s now fully occupying Its avatar here, the peridexis said. And It’s locally damped down every secondary wizardly function. The peridexis’s tone was faint and terrified, like that of a creature watching itself begin to bleed to death.

Nita was astonished. But that would affect It, too—

No. The only powers fully functioning here right now are those that have possessed wizardry or the power behind it from their very beginnings.

“Oh no,” Nita breathed. Yet she still found it impossible to believe. In her mind she felt around for the memory of a self-defense spell she’d come across while reading the manual, had memorized, and had then sworn (as required) that she’d never use unless she thought she was in danger of her life. Nita opened her mouth, started to recite it…

…and couldn’t find the words. Or, rather, she knew what they were, but as she whispered the first one, it didn’t make sense. It was just a nonsense word. The universe didn’t get quiet to listen to it. She said the second word, and the third, and they were nonsense, no power to them, nothing magical at all…

Around her, Nita saw the others struggling as she had done, trying to get a grip on wizardly weapons or say words that would act as such, but the words all sounded made up and did nothing.

Nita started to despair—then found, to her surprise, that the feeling didn’t last. She’d been in a similar situation not so long ago, a place and time in which no solution seemed possible. While there, she’d learned that, sometimes, if you just kept doing whatever you could, something would change in your favor. And I’m not dead yet, she thought. Neither are the others. If I can’t think of something, one of them might.

Down and down the warriors carried them, deeper into the depths of the City. Nita knew in a general way where they were headed, from the précis she’d been looking at earlier; they were close to the King-Yaldiv’s great cavernous hall. But more to the point, she could feel that dull glow of evil power and scornful rage at the Commorancy’s heart getting stronger every moment as they got closer. The Lone One’s just about ready for us, she thought. So we’ve got only a few minutes to think of something.

I have no help for you, the peridexic effect said miserably.

Nita blinked. Wait a minute. If all the second-level uses of wizardry aren’t working for us now, then how am I still hearing you?

I still exist, the peridexic effect said. I am simply of no use.

I wouldn’t bet on it! Nita said as their Yaldiv escort hauled them around another long curve and pushed them into a wide spherical chamber. Its far door was guarded by another warrior, possibly the biggest one Nita had seen yet. For the moment, you’re keeping me sane. She gulped, because the memory of that horrible moment of disbelief in Tom and Carl’s backyard now rose up in front of her as something she definitely never wanted to experience again. You’re proof that wizardry’s been real, even if it’s not working right now. So just hang in there, because right now I need you!

The warriors turned the group loose inside the chamber and went to block the door behind them. The ten of them all clustered together in the center of the room, the humanoids rubbing their various bruises. Muttering under her breath, Dairine picked up Spot, who’d been unceremoniously dumped on the floor, and stood looking around her with a ferocious scowl. Ronan threw a furious look at the warrior holding the Spear, and eyed Dairine with a sort of disgruntled admiration. “What is it with these Callahan women?” he said to Kit as he tried to flex one strained shoulder back into working order.

Kit shook his head. “You okay?” he said to Dairine.

“Yeah. But Spot’s not. He’s gone mute, and his eyes and legs are gone.”

“Pop his screen,” Kit said. “See if you get any manual functions. Roshaun?”

Roshaun opened one cupped hand, the gesture he usually used to bring up the little matrix of light that was his implementation of the manual. But nothing happened. He shook his head at Kit.

“Fil?”

Filif rustled all his branches, No.

Nita swallowed. She reached for her otherspace pocket … and couldn’t find it. She pulled the rowan wand out of the belt of her jeans, and found it nothing but a peeled white stick. She lifted her charm bracelet, shook it—

But now it was just a bracelet, and the charms jingled harmlessly. A lightning bolt, a circle with the number 26, a little fish, a few other symbols.

Dairine had been tapping at Spot’s keyboard. Now she was scowling harder than ever. “No manual,” she said. “He’s still in there, he can communicate through the software, but that’s all. No access to the manual functions. And he can’t hear his homeworld, or any of his people.” She let out an unhappy breath, closed Spot up again, and went back to hugging him. “We’re cut off.”

Kit had also been feeling in the air for his pocket; he couldn’t find his, either. “Okay,” he said, “we’re supposed to become useless, now, because we think we’re marooned, completely isolated, and totally powerless. Forgive me if I don’t feel like cooperating. What can we do?” He looked around at them. No one volunteered any thoughts.

The warrior who had been blocking the door before them now moved away from it, and another figure came through.

It was the Arch-votary in its patterned shell. Slowly, it approached, those massive claws raised. Nita held her ground, and saw that the others were doing the same, though Ponch, sticking close to Kit’s side, growled softly, and the fur over his shoulders and down his back was bristling.

The Arch-votary stopped, looming up before them. “Evil ones,” it said, “enemies of the Great One, come and be judged.”

Roshaun lifted his head and gave the Arch-votary an inexpressibly haughty look. “Killed, perhaps,” he said. “But your dark Master has neither authority nor right to judge us. Therefore stand away, lackey, and keep silent in the presence of your betters.”

And Roshaun swept straight past the Arch-votary, right on through that doorway into the central cavern, leaving the angry and befuddled Yaldiv staring after him. Dairine went straight past it, too, throwing it a dirty and dismissive look, and followed Roshaun. Carmela and Ronan and Filif went after her. After a moment’s hesitation, Memeki followed Filif through the doorway, and Ponch, with a glance back at Kit, trotted after her, growling.

Kit and Nita threw each other a glance and headed after Ponch. “Roshaun really comes into his own in situations like this,” Kit said under his breath, glancing over his shoulder as the Arch-votary and the warriors followed them in.

“You’ve got a point,” Nita muttered back, “but if it’s all the same to you, I don’t want to be in any more situations like this.”

“If we don’t get real lucky in the next few minutes,” Kit said, “you can relax, because we won’t be.”

They passed through the door, their guards following.

The lower bowl of that huge elliptical cavern was empty except for the warriors who blocked the many other entrances. It was a long walk for the group across that strangely soft, papery surface, and after the first look at the huge swollen shape of the King, Nita started to feel her confidence ebbing away, feeling more like ill-founded bravado every moment. The massive, bloated bag of body that lay there on the dais at one focus of the elliptical bowl, with handmaidens constantly bringing food to its little chewing jaws and going away again, felt to Nita as if it was absolutely heaving with millions of those sparks of angry fire, endlessly being spun off like stars of a dark galaxy from that core of evil at their center, the Lone One’s presence in the King. And it was strong, stronger than she’d thought. She could feel it sucking at her will as they got closer, as if it was trying to empty all the thoughts out of her brain, every sense that she was herself, that she was anything but a slave, to do what she was told, to obey orders.

She shook her head. There was something she was supposed to be doing, but she couldn’t think what.

Something jabbed her in the side. “Neets!”

Her eyes went wide. Nita realized that she’d been walking toward the dais without even being aware of it. She glanced sideways, and saw Kit looking at her in concern, but ready to elbow her again if necessary. “You there?”

“Yeah, thanks.”

“Count inside your head, or sing yourself a song or something.”

Nita made a face. “You wouldn’t want to hear me sing,” she said. “Dair’s the school-choir department.” But she started reciting a series of primes, and tried not to walk in rhythm.

She managed to keep herself from vaguing out again, but as they got closer and closer to the dais, a straightforward horror of the King itself started to set in. The idea of giant bugs had been a problem for her when she was little, a fear mostly exorcised now, but not entirely. Nita had pretty much come to terms with the claws and shells and fangs of the Yaldiv, but this was different. The flabby, pallid, distended bag of the King’s body, swollen, gross, heaving, beating with little veins, made her shudder at the very sight of it—and the closer she got to it, the farther away Nita desperately wanted to be. I don’t want to scream, she thought, but if anybody makes me go up to it, makes me touch it—I really don’t want to scream; it’ll just set Dairine off.

“What a gigantic ugly sack of crap,” Dairine said, in a tone of completely clinical interest. “Truly disgusting. And would you look at the ugly wiggly bits! But it’s so deluded, it still thinks everybody ought to be bowing and scraping to it. Isn’t it beyond pathetic? Don’t freeze up, Memeki, it’s not worth your time.”

Nita gulped again, but at the same time felt strangely reassured; she was certain the remark hadn’t been entirely directed at Memeki. She gave Kit a glance and saw him roll his eyes in amusement, even here, even now. A shadow on her left made her look that way: Filif was there, rustling against her, saying nothing, but all those little berry-eyes looked surprisingly serene.

As they got close to the dais, the warriors behind reached out claws to stop them. The King’s flesh-buried little eyes peered down at them, black, unreflecting, empty… though not nearly empty enough: Nita could feel the darkness behind them, looking out at them all with cruel recognition.

Roshaun held his head up. “Bright star that was,” he said, “dark star that falls, in your downward arc with defiance we greet you. Do your poor worst!”

A few moments’ silence passed, and then the King spoke. The voice that came out of it was a shock to Nita, a perfectly human sound, though she had no idea how Filif or Ponch or Memeki might be hearing it. “That will not take much doing,” said the Lone Power through Its tool, “for the evil power which the Enemy gave you is now yours no more.” Nita wasn’t sure how that inhuman face could smile, but somehow it seemed to be managing it.

The King tried to hitch itself forward a little; Nita winced at the long water-bed ripple that this sent up its body. Then the Lone One looked at Memeki through the King. “Here, then, is our little heretic, doomed to die so soon, doing my will as she must, no matter how she desires to do otherwise.” It paused. “Though she might still die in my good graces, and so achieve as much salvation as she ever will.”

It bent Its gaze on her. “Handmaiden, Favored of the Great One,” It said softly, “give up this vain dream of oneness, of being one’s own self! Don’t you realize this is all an evil plot by the One’s enemies? They would drive you away from your own kind, from the right way to think, the right way to be. Come back within the mind that bore you; come back and be one again with those who will always honor what you have done as a mother of your people, a daughter of the Great One, honored by the King.”

Nita could feel the power the King was bringing to bear on Memeki. Even she began slowly to feel that it was wrong of any being to resist such honor, that Memeki should forget all about them, save herself, bow down before the King.

Beware! said the peridexis’s voice in her head. Don’t let Its shadowy little truth overwhelm the greater one.

Nita blinked, shook her head slightly as if to clear it. Thanks, she said, and the King’s influence receded. But this is just Its usual game, isn’t it? The Lone One would really love it if It could not only stop Memeki from being the Hesper, but also break her will before she died.

Memeki now stood swaying on her many legs, her eyes reflecting nothing but the King as she leaned more and more toward him. “For am I not the One who set your people free from the tyranny of the mighty and evil Force from Outside?” the King was saying. “Do you not owe all your loyalty to the One who stole the tyrant’s power despite everything it could do, and so made your world free?”

Memeki swayed, swayed, slowly grew still … then looked up. “Free?” she said. “Yes. You made us free.” She was shivering again, and she crouched down as if once again feeling the pangs of the eggs beginning to move inside her. “Free to kill. And free to die.”

“But what other freedom is there,” the King said, more softly still, “in this concentration camp of a universe, where all things must happen according to the evil Other’s inflexible rules, on threat of some awful eternal punishment? Far better to tell it, ‘Not your will, but mine!’—and turn your back on the Other’s unkept promise that groveling to It will bring you joy. Death comes no matter what the Other does, and so only Death’s servants, my servants, are truly free! Free to take what they want, to kill what they want, no consequences, no punishment, no limits!”

“Except when the freedom is one you don’t choose to grant,” Memeki said, more loudly this time. She was shaking herself all over, struggling to stand straight again. “You hold out hope with one claw and take it away with the other! I may be weak and doomed soon to die, but I will die as an I, not just one more nameless scrap of shell to be thrown out into the sucking mud! No matter how little a time it lasts, I will be what all these are—” And she looked around at Kit and Ponch and Nita and the others. “— selves unto themselves, and beings that matter to each other! Such a life, even a breath’s worth of it, is better than anything you’ve ever given me!”

Memeki was trembling again, but with passion, with determination, desperate and doomed. She took a step toward the dais, and another, her claws lifted not in that old gesture of submission, but in one more like a warrior’s threat. “I will be what the Voice said I was, the Hesper, I will be the Aeon of Light, the Power that made a different choice from yours. I will be the Star that did not fall, no matter how little a time the light lasts!”

The possessed King tapped a fretful foreclaw on the dais, almost like someone drumming his fingers. It looked past Memeki at Kit and Nita and the others. “Well, they have spoiled you beyond tempting,” It said, sounding aggrieved. “What a shame. But this is no great loss, for in a very little while I will nonetheless get a couple of hundred more avatars out of you. Oh, yes,” It said, as once again Memeki’s legs started to give way under her. Dairine and Roshaun reached out to support her on one side, and Kit and Ronan on the other. Ponch shouldered in between them and started licking Memeki’s face. “I have hastened your time considerably; you can feel them preparing to come forth. This should be educational for these ‘friends’ you’re so enamored of.”

The King waved away the handmaidens servicing him; they scuttled away into the shadows behind the dais. “And after that, you will have an honor guard to accompany you on your road into the dark from which there is no return. But, no, of course, I forget.” It looked around at Nita and Kit and the others. “Obedient to the Other’s brainwashing, you have all deluded yourselves into thinking that the darkness is actually light. ‘Timeheart.’” It chuckled. “Little consolation that place will be to you, even if you manage to reach it; for there you’ll sit outside of time, waiting for the sufferings of everyone you’ve ever known to end. And I need not do anything further to bring that fate about, for the Pullulus has already doomed all your worlds.”

It turned Its head just enough to look over at Carmela, who was standing there with her hands on her hips, looking scornful. “And to your ignorance you’ve now added folly,” the King said, “for you’ve gone so far as to bring with you someone who doesn’t even have any of the Other’s vile power. Whatever possessed you to do something so foolishly arrogant, so sheerly useless?” Then It laughed. “Well, I suppose that in the long run, probably I did. You, alien thing, come over here.”

To Nita’s absolute horror, Carmela’s arms suddenly flopped away from her body, jerking like the arms of a puppet on strings. Carmela wobbled, her balance lost, and her face went slack with shock as she took a step toward those nastily working jaws. Then she scowled, dug in her heels, and stopped again.

“Oh, resistance,” the King said. “How amusing. But you have no more power against me than that. Now come here.”

Carmela struggled, but it was no use. Nita watched with horror as she put one foot in front of the other, clumsy, stiff—and with each step she was able to resist less, and her face went still and empty. “No!” Kit yelled, and started forward, but the warriors who had been lingering nearby now grabbed him roughly from behind. They did the same with Nita and Roshaun and Ronan when they tried to move.

“This has all been just a game for you, hasn’t it?” the King said. “But you see now how wrong you were. Maybe it would be amusing to do to you what we do to the handmaidens. Wall you up in an incubatorium, without food or water, and see how long it takes before you beg to be fed what the grubs are fed. Or perhaps even feed you to the grubs. There are always some whose first meal isn’t big enough.”

There was no sign of struggle left in Carmela, none at all; Nita got just a glimpse of the blank look of her eyes as she stepped closer and closer to the King, as if sleepwalking, helpless. Kit threw himself again in the King’s direction, but the warriors held him fast. “No!” he shouted. “Do it to me if you want, not her!”

The King’s regard slid in Kit’s direction. “We will do it to you soon enough, I think,” It said. “But first we will let her bleed a little. Just a nip here… a nip there.” It lazily stretched out Its claws. “She will feel every moment of it, but not be able to move a muscle. It should be a learning experience for one so spirited.”

Carmela stepped closer, and closer. Another step or two would bring her within range of those cruel claws; they were stretching toward her, one of them would be close enough with the next step to brush her cheek—”NO!” Nita screamed, struggling in the grip of the claws that held her.

“But wait. What might this be that I perceive there?” said the King’s soft, oily voice. “A weapon of some kind? And how cunningly hidden under that body-covering. But though you might have been clever about hiding it, it makes no difference if the mind that hid it is helpless to hide its own thoughts. Bring it out.”

Carmela stopped, and slowly reached inside the light vest she was wearing, bringing out the curling iron. Very softly the King said, “Perhaps blood would be the wrong approach after all. What delicious irony if one who lives by such a weapon should die by it, and be unable even to—”

The terrible blast of fire in that dim place blinded everybody and knocked them staggering. The force of the explosion shoved Nita into the warrior that was holding her; she found her footing again just before it let go of her and went down, crashing to the floor with a horrible, thin, shrilling scream. An awful singed-hair stink of burning bug came billowing out from the dais through waves of greasy black smoke, and it was some seconds before this cleared enough for Nita to see that the King’s entire front half had been blown away. Its rear half was now a smoking, bubbling, sagging bag of grossness, the sight of which made Nita simply bend over double and retch, mutely grateful that the soda she’d drunk was now too far along in her system to come back up. When she straightened up again, she saw through the smoke that Carmela was standing in front of the King’s smoking remains with the curling iron in her hand.

“Oops,” Carmela said… and, very slowly, smiled.

Nita stared around them in utter astonishment. Around them, all the other warriors and even the Arch-votary were making that same terrible shrill cry, wavering, desperate, as they fell to the ground and went silent. From the depths of the City to its heights, faintly at first and then more loudly, Nita started to hear that shrilling spreading all through the vast place. Ronan instantly whirled and snatched the Spear of Light out of the claws of the collapsed warrior who’d held it.

Kit ran over to Carmela. When he got to her, he threw his arms around her and buried his face against her. “You dummy,” he said, “you incredible idiot, you stupid—”

“Hey, I love you, too,” Carmela said, hugging him back as Nita hurried over.

“‘Mela,” she said, “it was controlling you! How did you—”

“It wasn’t,” Carmela said. “It made me jerk a little that first time, but after that I was just playing along. Maybe it’s no good with our kind of brain or something?”

Nita didn’t think that was likely, but she looked about halfway back at the King, making a face. It was very dead, and the smell seemed to be getting worse rather than better. “Okay,” she said. “But what about Memeki?”

They turned toward her. Memeki was hunched on the floor, and her limbs, which had before been flailing as if in distress, were now unnervingly still. Nita went over to her, knelt down by her. “Memeki?”

No answer.

“It’s starting to happen to her, isn’t it,” Kit said.

Nita felt sure it was. She reached sideways, feeling around for her otherspace pocket, and still couldn’t feel it.

Huh? she thought. What’s the matter? she said to the peridexis. The King’s dead, the Lone One should be—

“Uh,” Dairine said, very quietly. “Neets—”

Nita looked up, looked around, unable to see what Dairine’s problem was. Then she looked back at the dais.

The charred remnants of the King still lay there, smoking. But within them, slowly drawing upward instead of drifting outward, was a deeper darkness, gathering together and shaping itself into a new form: humanoid enough, but taller than any human, and with a far deeper darkness in the eyes gazing down at them as the shape grew more ominously distinct. Solidifying, clothing itself in a long ebon tunic and booted breeches somewhat like Roshaun’s, the young and darkly handsome figure of the Lone Power glanced down and around It, and casually kicked Its way out of the ruin of the King’s body like someone kicking his way out of a pair of shucked-off jeans.

The Lone One stepped down from the dais and surveyed the smoking remains of the King. Then It turned around and looked at them. “‘Oops’?” It said.

The voice was deep, urbane, and dry. It could almost have been pleasant had Nita not known perfectly well that the pleasantness was never more than a disguise or a trap. What worried her most at the moment was that all Its attention was bent on Carmela. It left the dais and stalked toward them. “‘Oops’?”

Carmela had sense enough to be unnerved. She took a hasty step backward, then another, as the Lone Power approached. “Sorry,” she said.

“I rather doubt it,” the Lone One said, “but that will change. Is it possible that you don’t know you’ve made things worse for yourself, not better? Then again, you’re new at this. Well, in the short time left to you, here’s one lesson for you to learn.”

It smiled, and Carmela shrank back. Then her eyes abruptly went wide. A little shriek burst out of her. She spun and, hastily, overhand, threw the curling iron away hard. A mere six feet or so away from her, in midair, it blew up.

Everyone jumped back. Nita gulped, and was briefly relieved that Carmela had spent so much of this school year on the pitcher’s mound for the school softball team.

“So much for science,” the Lone One said. “Though I must confess that why you weren’t more susceptible to control is an issue for curiosity.”

“Might be that someone here was able to keep you from noticing,” Ronan said. Leaning on the Spear of Light, he glowered at the Lone One from under those dark brows of his.

“That seems unlikely,” the Lone Power said. “He’s got precious little power left in him right now, and he can’t draw on the pitiful scrap of power that’s got left.” It glanced dismissively at the Spear, which now simply looked like a spear and nothing else; its flame was gone, and not even the twisting fires that normally lived in its blade were there anymore. “But even more unlikely is the possibility that she was able to keep the information to herself. So for the moment we’ll file the matter under ‘interesting but unimportant.’”

It turned around and looked briefly at the King’s remains. “What a shame,” the Lone One said. “I’d just gotten this one broken in. But I’ll soon grow another. Meantime, I have other business here.”

“What are you going to do with us?” Kit said.

“Probably nothing,” It said.

“Oh, sure!” Dairine said.

“No,” the Lone One said, “seriously. Why should I exert myself? Not a single one of you has enough power to turn lemons into lemonade. And that’s not going to change.” It strolled over toward the softly growling Ponch. “Not even he can get out of here; his abilities, not that I care to try to understand them, are derived from wizardry as well. You’re all completely stuck.”

It turned Its back on Ponch and wandered over to Memeki. “I admit,” It said, “normally just killing you would be my initial impulse. But I’m thinking it would be more fun just to let you all wander around on this planet for the rest of your natural lives, which probably wouldn’t be long: there’s not much to eat or drink here that your metabolisms are built to handle. But you’d live quite long enough to suffer from some of the things that are going to happen as a result of your failure.”

The Lone One came to a halt by Memeki’s side, gazing down at her. “And as for the attempted ‘Aeon of Light’ here,” It said, kicking Memeki idly with one booted toe, “the Unfallen One and all the rest of the fancy terminology—well, she’s a spent force. She waited a few seconds too long to make up her mind. When I sealed wizardry away, she lost access to the power that would have allowed her to enact her transformation. So, starting in a few minutes, when the grubs hatch and she begins to die, her embodiment will officially have failed … and after that, I won’t ever have to worry about the much-waited-for Hesper again, in this or any universe. You did know that if an emergent Power’s first embodiment fails, both the being inside time and the being outside in timelessness cease to exist?”

Nita glanced over at Kit and the others, miserable. “Oh, good, you knew,” the Lone One said, pleased. “That will make your failure hurt lots worse. If a Power hasn’t actually been on hand at the creation of a physical universe, the initial successful embodiment is the risk it has to take to insert itself into one. If the Hesper had been smart and stayed outside of so-called reality, in timelessness, I’d have left it completely alone. But once it decided to meddle in what’s going on inside physicality, it had to pass this test first, which always eventually attracts my attention, though this time it took a little more tracking down than usual. I’ve been expecting this move ever since my so-called redemption. The One didn’t wait nearly as long as I thought It would. Its mistake.”

The Lone One looked down at Memeki, amused, and turned away. “So, no more Hesper. She’s about to do what all good mothers on Rashah do—die.” It smiled at Nita and Dairine. “Her children will go on to start useful and productive careers as my slaves. And I’ll have at least a few aeons’ more peace and quiet until the Powers decide to try another stunt like this.”

“I doubt it will be anything like that long,” Filif said, giving the Lone One a look of massive disapproval out of every berry-eye.

“Oh, I think it will,” the Lone One said. “The Powers That Be used up a great deal of energy setting up this project, and They hate to waste. Now, of course, I used up a fair amount, too, because I needed to distract all you little wizardly busybodies from noticing what I suspected was happening somewhere or other. It didn’t entirely work—after all, here you are. But all the same, you’ve done me a favor. Without all of you bringing Rashah to my attention, who knows whether I’d have been alerted to this problem right under my nose in time to do something about it?” It smiled again. “So the other Powers have outsmarted Themselves … and it’ll be a long time before they feel like trying this again.” It gave Filif an amused look. “Life on your planet will be so much mulch by then. Actually, it’ll be mulch a lot sooner, because even though I don’t mind all of you living out your little antlike lives in misery on Rashah, your worlds are going to pay up front for your meddling. Certainly you didn’t expect otherwise!”

“So you’re just going to let the Pullulus destroy everything,” Ronan said bleakly.

“Don’t be silly,” the Lone One said, sitting down on the dais and crossing Its legs. “If I did that, what would be left to play with? There are billions of years’ worth of suffering left in your universe yet. Oh, I’m finished with the Pullulus now. When I withdraw my attention from it, it’ll run down in a hurry. While it didn’t completely do what I wanted it to, it did disrupt or even destroy a good number of civilizations in the populated galaxies. The other Powers will waste far more energy trying to save the maximum number of all those trillions of endangered lives than I ever spent destroying them. So I’ve won this round on two counts.”

Its smile got nastier. “And while They’re trying to pick up the pieces elsewhere in the universe, I can amuse myself with raising another King for the Commorancy, and watching all of you run around trying to survive on Rashah. It really is a nice little world. Hundreds of thousands of Yaldiv, every one of them devoted to my service, and every one convinced that all other life is their enemy, and that only I can offer them salvation. I haven’t had such a promising species to work with for a long time. Possibly not even since yours.” It gave Nita and the other three Earth-humans a look of ironic appreciation. “Once I’ve got enough of them, and I’ve given them the right technology, they should be able to overrun a significant portion of this universe. But present pleasures first.” It glanced at Roshaun. “One early order of business will be to push the Pullulus in tightly enough around your solar system to flare up Wellakh’s star. Your people always do react more hysterically to fire than to ice.”

Nita saw Roshaun go pale, but he kept his face stern. He plainly wasn’t going to give the Lone One the satisfaction of seeing him express his fear.

“And I can use the same technique on your people, I suppose,” It said, looking back at Filif. “‘Kindler of Wildfires,’ they call me? They won’t have seen anything like this. The sunside of your planet will be one big charcoal briquette when I’m done. Your little friends,” and It frowned at Dairine, “have unfortunately made themselves energy-independent … but we’ll see how much good that does them when one or two rogue planets collide with theirs from either side. It’ll be just like dropping an egg on concrete. All that tinkly shattering silicon.” It glanced over at Kit and Nita and Ronan. “And then, of course, Earth. The Pullulus is doing such a lovely job there already, I won’t have to do a single thing but watch. It’s closing in on your heliopause already, and people’s tempers are getting frayed. Every government on the planet with any weapons worth noticing is already at DEFCON Two, and it’s only a matter of hours before the big show begins. A fallen skyscraper or two will be nothing compared to what’s coming up. And you’ll know, for the rest of your short lives, that it was all your fault.”

It stretched Its arms above Its head and grinned. Nita gulped.

Kit, though, gave It a blasé look. “Nice gloat,” he said.

The Lone One gave him a look. “You’re too kind,” It said. “But I’m just telling you the truth, which you pretend so to value. And, Kit…” It tsk-tsk-tsked at him. “Denial, even disguised as humor, suits you so badly. Don’t you understand? You’re not getting out this time. You don’t have a scrap of wizardry left to you. And did it occur to you that you might have been a little too secretive about getting here? There’s not a wizard anywhere in this universe who either knows where you’ve gone or is going to be able to do anything about it. Since this is now a no-wizardry zone, manual functions won’t be able to find you. And don’t think I’m forgetting your multilegged friend at the Crossings,” It said, looking over at Nita. “He’s got his claws full, too, every one of them.”

It sat down on the dais, crossing Its legs and swinging them a little. “So, for the extremely foreseeable future, here you stay. It takes quite a lot of power to exclude wizardry from any space, but with my energy investment withdrawn from ninety-nine percent of the Pullulus now, I have some to spare. I’m perfectly happy to use it making sure that the ‘Great Art’ is permanently disabled here. And in the meantime—”

On the floor before the dais, Memeki began heaving rhythmically.

The Lone Power laced Its fingers behind Its head and leaned back. “No,” It said, “there’s no rush at all. Nature is going to take its inevitable course, and we’ll all get to watch this particular zero hollow itself out.”

Nita stood there frozen with horror as she watched the heaving wrack Memeki more and more terribly. That awful wave of desperation she’d felt in the Crossings rose up to possess her again, and this time it stuck. This is it, then, she thought. Despite all our work, regardless of everything we did, it’s all over.

Behind her, someone moved. Ronan pushed past Nita to stand in front of her and Memeki. “All right,” he said, pausing to lean on the Spear again, “I don’t know about everybody else here, but I for one think it’s time somebody put some manners on you.”

The Lone Power burst out laughing at him. “Oh please!” It said. “Just look at you! You and the Toothpick of Virtue. That can’t hurt me now: it’s absolutely no good for anything without someone who both knows how to use it, and has the strength! Which, as we’ve seen, you don’t.”

“You’re right,” Ronan said. “I don’t. But someone else does.”

“You know, you missed your calling,” the Lone Power said. “Why aren’t you in stand-up comedy? You’re just another cage for another spent force! My esteemed ‘little brother’ might be wearing fewer feathers this time, but you’re an even worse embodiment for him than his last one.” It turned Its back on Ronan and walked away, chuckling and shaking Its head. “You’ve only once let him have access to his full power, and never again since. Talk about a hopeless mismatch! But since he had to commit fully to embodying inside you, he’s stuck there whether he likes it or not. If he tried to leave you, it’d kill you. And, being a Power of Light”—the Lone One turned, and the sneer in Its voice was so full of scorn that the words almost burned in Nita’s ears—”he’d never take that chance.”

“No,” Ronan said softly. “He wouldn’t.”

“So you see that for all your big words—”

“But I would!”

Nita’s head snapped around.

Ronan leaned back and threw the Spear.

Forged in wizardry by one of the Powers That Be, with another Power as old as wizardry itself bound into the starsteel of the blade, the Spear of Light roared out of Ronan’s hand toward the Lone One. The Lone Power casually flung up a hand alive with black lightning to deflect it. But the Spear went nowhere near It. Instead, it swung far around the Lone One’s back, roared past him, and headed back.

The breath went out of Nita. “Ronan!”

He didn’t move, except to look just slightly sideways at Nita: that dark, wry, ironic expression of his, mocking himself now as much as the One whom he was attacking in the least expected way. In that last second, Ronan threw his arms wide—a grandstanding gesture, a casually defiant flash of black against the dim heat of the hive—and the Spear of Light struck him in the chest, and he went down.

“No!” screamed the Lone Power, and the whole City shook.

Nita stood there wide-eyed and gasping, as stricken as if she’d been the one hit by the Spear. She plunged toward where Ronan lay, bleeding blood and fire. But a breath later, a wave of force blasting away from the light that pooled around him struck Nita and knocked her and all the others flat … even the Lone Power. In that shock wave, the fallen bodies of the Arch-votary and its warriors were scattered across the floor of the central chamber like so many toys, and, with the rebound of the shock wave, a huge form of light gathered itself up around Ronan, swirling, streaming upward. Across the floor, the shape that had been human moments before and had been blasted into a puddle of darkness by that fury of light now began straining upward to reform itself, a blinding blackness throwing itself out in a hundred directions in writhing, raging tendrils and tentacles of shadow.

Nita scrambled to her knees, craning her neck to take in the tremendous form towering over them, armed in light, armored in fire. Once again she understood why, long ago, the first thing such an apparition had to say to the people who saw it was “Fear not.” No sane and mortal creature could look on the One’s Champion in full manifestation without being afraid that mere fragile reality might start to shred around so terrible a Power for good. The Champion towered up into the heights in what looked to Nita like human form. But in this manifestation, the Defender was not terribly concerned about details such as gender or ornament. Light flared behind It like wings, licking upward like fire, as It stood there burning like a statue cast in lightning, laughing uproariously.

Free! the Champion cried. Once again, Brother, you’ve underestimated the tenacity of the One’s other weapons. This one in particular! I’m surprised you ever let him in here, but then this splinter of you seriously believed that the first work I did with Ronan was what I came to him for! It laughed again, delighted. And though there’s only one thing I can do, now—thanks to him, it’s the only thing that needs to be done. You’ve done everything else for us; you yourself triggered the whole cycle of events you most desired to avoid!

The Champion lifted one arm and pointed what It held at the furiously writhing, growing shape of blackness building before It. A sword like a splinter of sun’s core lifted over the Lone One, ready to strike. So as you interrupted my work once before, now I interrupt yours. And what was trying to happen, now has one last chance.

That unbearable shard of light reared high, struck down. Another blast of power hit Nita so hard that she staggered, but not because of the impact of any physical force. The words came rushing back right through her as the Speech once again meant something. Her charm bracelet blazed; the rowan wand in her belt burned moonfire chill. She glanced around, saw the others scrambling up from where the shock wave had thrown them, regaining their power and their weapons.

The light around them grew less bright. Nita looked up in shock and saw that the dark shape of the Lone One lay writhing on the floor like a tangle of shadowy snakes. But the burning form of the Champion was fading, slipping away out of the physical world. I can’t stay any longer inside time, It said in the depths of Nita’s mind, and the others’. This embodiment ended too soon: I have no more power to spend. Now hurry! It’s up to you.

The light vanished: the Champion was gone. At least It’s broken the Lone One’s blockage, Nita thought. But the Lone One was still there. And were Its shadowy tentacles getting more solid again? She glanced at the still-heaving Memeki, who was trying to get to her feet. Filif and Roshaun and Dairine hurried over to her, getting down to support her, pushing her up. But Nita headed straight past them to Ronan, flinging herself down on her knees beside him.

The Spear stood upright in him, burning. Nita reached to pull it out of him, then hesitated as its blade went up in a great flame of furious white fire. Why? Though maybe it’s trying to protect him, maybe if I pulled it out he’d—

Kit was suddenly there, kneeling across from Nita, staring down at Ronan, the light of the Spear glinting in his eyes. A moment later, Nita became aware of a darkness overshadowing her. She looked up. It was Memeki, with Roshaun and Dairine and Carmela and Filif all around her, helping keep her on her feet. Memeki’s claws trembled as she reached down to Ronan, toward the Spear.

“Memeki, no, don’t! He might—”

With a great effort, Ronan opened his eyes. “This,” he said. “This is your—” He took an incredibly deep breath. “—made for you. Now you can—”

His eyes closed again, his head fell to one side.

The ground began to shake. This cannot happen! said a terrible voice in all their bones, as the Lone Power started to rise again, the serpentine arms reaching out of that pool of darkness now getting more solid as It exerted every last ounce of force It had left to try to force Its way back into full physicality. I will not permit—

But Memeki ignored It. She looked down at Ronan, where he lay silent and bleeding. Then she looked around her at Nita, and Kit, and Roshaun, and Dairine, and Filif, and, finally, at Ponch.

“Yes,” she said to him. “My answer is your answer. My answer is yes.”

And she reached out and seized the Spear in her claws.

Nita braced herself. But instead of what she expected—a cataclysmic shaking, some great scream of rage or triumph—there fell around them instead a profound stillness, into which all sound swirled down and was swallowed away. In silence, the universe bent close to hear what was going to happen next. In silence, Memeki reared up and yanked the Spear out of Ronan’s body. In silence, its fire whipped out of it in a vortex of terrific force and swirled around her, burning, hiding her away.

The City was already dark, but now it grew darker still. At first Nita was afraid that the Lone One was doing something. The darkness around them deepened, but that light at the center of everything swirled out, spiraling away from what had been its center. All that remained within the core of the light was a shell, glowing, transparent as the mochteroofs, and inside it a swarm of dark sparks of fire. They swirled and burned and then, all at once, burned fiercely bright, too bright to look at, like the myriad sparks of a fireworks display—

They went out. Around them, the glow of the shell that had been Memeki went out like a blown-out candle flame. Memeki was gone.

But the light itself was not. It fountained up into the heights of the central space of the City, and then down again, sheeting and splashing out, illuminating that whole place and flooding outward, striking the papery walls, pouring through them. At first Nita thought the walls were vanishing, but then she realized that they were simply becoming as transparent as glass under the influence of the power that now imbued them. All around, in every direction, hundreds and thousands of Yaldiv became visible in the deepest structures of the nest. Tens and hundreds more began to pour into the central chamber through its many doors. All the mirrory eyes looked up and inward at the blaze of light as it spun downward and outward from the heights, defining a new shape, a radiant and tremendous form shelled and sheened in light; and the beauty of it, even in the strange alien shape, was nearly unbearable. Nita wanted nothing more than to stand there staring at it, waiting to see what other, more momentous shape it would take when her human senses finally came to grips with it.

The chamber was full of Yaldiv now, thousands of them packed into this space. They and the thousands of others elsewhere in the now-crystalline structure of the City gazed inward or upward at the rainbow-streaming shape above them, all their myriad eyes swimming with a light that seemed to come in more colors than physical existence normally allowed—a spectrum as much of possibility as of mere radiance. The light no longer just lay on the surface of those eyes, but sank into them, dwelt in them. Some of the Yaldiv out there were handmaidens, some of them bearing eggs inside them as Memeki had done; and as Nita saw the brilliant sparks held within the huge shape of the Hesper flare up, so did the sparks within the handmaidens below, flaring into ferocious brilliance, burning clean, dying down again to swirls of rainbow glitter, dark no more—

Her heart went up in a blaze of triumph. But this is what had to happen. And now all the Yaldiv born and unborn will be her avatars, all the Hesper’s children and not the Lone One’s!

Nita looked over at Kit. Off to one side, beside him, Ponch had been standing very still, watching this like a dark and shining statue of a dog. But suddenly his tail started to wag, and then he started barking, and jumping up and down. The barking got louder and louder, a sound of sheer triumph.

The rainbow light shivered and trembled to the sound of Ponch’s barking. Burning, glinting, like mirrors in the sun, the eyes of the great shelled shape above them looked down at Ponch, and at the wizards who stood or crouched to look up at Her; and at the one wizard who lay still, even the blood pooled beside him reflecting rainbows now. I am here, It said: I am here at last.

The tremendous voice shivered in all their bones, as the Lone Power’s voice had. It was impossibly ancient, impossibly powerful… and it was Memeki’s.

For a few seconds, no one said anything. Then, “Elder sister,” Kit said, awestruck, “greeting and honor.”

To Nita’s astonishment, that great shape bowed to them.

My first work’s done, thanks to you, the Hesper said. I’ve driven the Lone Power away from here, possibly forever. And I have written a new history in the Yaldiv’s bodies: they will find ways to live that mean their lives need not begin in death as well as end in it. So this poor world that my other self maimed so badly will now be healed. And after it, in time, so will many other worlds, one by one.

“It’s going to take a long time,” Dairine said.

It will take forever, the Hesper said. But I have forever now. The past, and the future, the ability to be in time: you gave it to me.

Her regard dwelled on them all for a moment. I can only stay a little more of your time in this form, the Hesper said. So new a connection between the physical realms and eternity won’t hold for long in this ephemeral place. I must depart. But because you and your worlds have endured such danger for my sake, I’ve done what I can to repay the debt. For a very little while, I have driven our Enemy out of time. While Its brief exile lasts, It can do no new evil. But what It has already set in train, I can’t now halt. I must withdraw into timelessness now and recoup my strength, or risk being unable to embody again for a long while.

Roshaun bowed to her. “Crowned one,” he said, “you owe us no debts. In the paths of errantry, we’ll meet again.”

The Hesper was already fading. Ponch started barking again. Don’t go away! Don’t go—

Those rainbow-mirror eyes rested briefly on Ponch, and Nita thought she saw affection there. Make haste to your world, the Hesper said, looking from Ponch to Kit and Nita and Dairine. Make haste! They will need you there.

The light faded, slipped away, as if sunset was happening indoors. Finally they all stood or knelt in twilight, surrounded by many curious Yaldiv who peered down at them and held up their claws in a new gesture.

“Welcome,” they said. “Friends of the Daughter of the true Great One, friends of the Queen of Light; dai stihó, and well met on the journey!”

Nita and Kit stared at each other. “Too much strange,” Nita said, “just too much!” She rubbed her eyes. “Hi, guys, good to see you, too. Please bear with us for a moment.” She turned her attention back to Ronan. “Fil, quick, give us some light!”

All Filif’s berries blazed with wizard-light as Nita reached sideways into her otherspace pocket, found it where it belonged, pulled out her manual, and dumped it on the floor. Its pages riffled wildly as she pulled the rowan wand out of her belt and shook it down once like someone shaking a thermometer: white moonfire ran down it. She looked down at Ronan, put a hand on his chest next to the place where the Spear had gone in—then froze.

She looked up at Kit. “Is he breathing?” she whispered.

Kit looked at her, and very quietly said, “No.”