Wizards At War

12: Regime Change

When Nita reappeared at the Crossings, she glanced around from the pad where she stood and was astonished. The whole place was crawling with giant centipedes—thousands upon thousands of Rirhait in blue, green, various shades of pink, and more shades of purple than she had known existed. At least, she thought, the place doesn’t feel as creepy anymore.

This far down the side corridor from which she’d originally departed, there wasn’t as much damage as there had been nearer the main intersection. Farther up the wide corridor, among the shattered shops and kiosks, some of the damage was being put right in what, for Rirhait, was a fairly straightforward way. They were eating it.

She headed up the corridor, and several Rirhait came flowing along toward Nita. They stopped in front of her, and one of them reared up about half of his body into the air in what Nita had come to recognize as a gesture of respect. “Emissary,” he said, “Sker’ret is waiting for you at the central control module.”

Nita nodded. “Thank you,” she said. “Please tell him I’ll be with him in a moment.”

They wreathed their eyes at her and flowed away. Nita headed after them, mulling as she went the things the koi had said to her. There was something about the structure of the second haiku that was puzzling her. Within every dewdrop, a world of struggle. It was going to take her a while to figure out what that meant. Not too long, I hope.

When she got down to the command center, she found it almost completely surrounded by bustling Rirhait. Not actually in the rack but within reach of it, Sker’ret was standing with his eyes pointing in many different directions, giving orders to the Rirhait all around him as fast as they presented themselves. As Nita approached, she saw one eye swivel in her direction. Spotting her, Sker’ret came flowing over to her, almost as if relieved to get away from the other Rirhait.

“Are your people at home all right?” he said.

Nita nodded as she came up by the control center, and leaned against the outer racking. “My dad’s okay,” she said, “but Tom and Carl—” She shook her head. “They’ve lost it.”

“Your Seniors!” Sker’ret looked at her in horror. “Mover’s Name, I didn’t think it could start happening so soon.”

“Just a check,” Nita said. “How long have I been gone?”

Sker’ret looked confused. “Hardly an hour of your time,” he said. “Oh, I see, you’re worried about the irregular transit times. Don’t be. I’ve corrected for them—for the moment, at least. When you transit again, if you lose time, it’ll be hours, not days.”

“But you’re going to have to keep correcting—”

“Yes. And it’s going to get harder,” Sker’ret said. “The Pullulus is affecting our local space now.”

“Right,” Nita said, looking around at the frantic activity going on around her. “You find out anything more about who was behind our little friends the Tawalf?”

Sker’ret waved some of his upper legs in an I-don’t-know gesture. “It doesn’t seem to have been the Lone Power, at least not directly. The Tawalf’s aggression contract was bought by a crime syndicate somewhere in the Greater Magellanic Cloud. There are two or three species involved, all from economic or political groups that have had disagreements with the Crossings in the past. The Rirhait law-enforcement authorities are following that up.”

“Well,” Nita said, “that’s good.” She smiled, a little ruefully. “I guess it’s a nice change of pace to be dealing with common crooks.”

“But all this is driving me crazy,” Sker’ret said. “We have to get back to Rashah! The others—”

“Yes,” Carmela’s voice said, “the others.” She came ambling over from the other side of the command console, and the various Rirhait she passed all reared up in that respect gesture. She smiled. “When do we go?”

Nita looked around her, and then back at Sker’ret. “I don’t know about ‘we,’” she said after a moment. “Sker’, what’s the local situation? Have you got things running again?”

“It’s going to take a while,” Sker’ret said. “The defense systems still aren’t secure enough to make me happy. I want to make sure we’re not vulnerable to a second strike. And there’s a lot of gating that ought to be passing through here routinely that hasn’t been. Then there’s the emergency traffic—”

Nita was becoming more expert at reading Sker’ret’s expressions and body language, and right now he looked as if he felt like tearing a few of his eyes out by the roots. “What about your ancestor?” she said a little more quietly.

“We don’t know,” Sker’ret said. He held still for a moment, and that, too, struck Nita as something of a danger sign: it was rare for there not to be something about Sker’ret that was moving. “When the aliens took him and my sibs prisoner in the initial attack, they shoved them all onto a pad and sent them to a portable gate target somewhere in the Greater Magellanic. The first storming team that went to that planet looking for them didn’t find anything. The target had been dismantled and taken somewhere else, possibly through another gate. The law-enforcement people are looking into that, too.”

Nita sighed. “Sker’, you can’t just leave all this and go back to what we were doing. This is where you’re needed.”

Sker’ret sighed out of all his spiracles, and sagged a little where he stood. “If even just a few of my sibs were here,” he said softly.

“But they’re not,” Carmela said, getting down beside him and rubbing the top of his head segment. “I don’t think you have any choice.”

“And there are plenty of us working on you-know-what,” Nita said.

“Ooh, mystery,” Carmela said. “This is more fun every minute.”

Sker’ret looked troubled. “I dislike letting the others down—”

“You’re not,” Nita said. “What you have to do now is not let this whole part of the galaxy down! You can’t walk away from this.”

“Even though I’ve been trying to for so long,” Sker’ret said, and gave Nita a wry look out of several eyes.

The ironic tone that had come back into his voice reassured Nita. “Well, things are different now,” Nita said, “but it looks like when you walked away that last time, that was a good idea. If you’d stayed here then, whatever happened to your ancestor and all your sibs could have happened to you, too.”

Sker’ret sighed. “We can’t ever be sure,” he said. “Anyway, here I stay. In the meantime, I can gate the two of you back quickly enough. You’ll want to warn Ronan that you’re incoming.”

He and his partner know, the peridexis said in the back of Nita’s mind as Carmela got up to stand beside her. The One’s Champion left a stealth routine in place. You can safely direct-gate straight in.

“They’ve got it handled,” Nita said. “All we have to do is go.”

“Take the closest gate there,” Sker’ret said. “I’ll send you out.”

He turned, then, looking with all his eyes at the bluesteel racking of the Stationmaster’s control area. All around, the Rirhait who had been taking Sker’ret’s orders drew back a little and watched. “It was just a little hut, once,” Sker’ret aid. “A little hut outside a cave.”

“It’s a lot more than that now,” Nita said. “And it’s all yours.”

Sker’ret shivered in a shiny ripple that ran right down his body, and then he poured himself into the heart of the cubicle and up onto its racking, draping himself across the control structures. He turned his attention to one of the consoles. “The main pad on the far side,” Sker’ret said. He looked at Nita and Carmela just briefly with every eye. “Call if you need anything.”

“We will,” Nita said. “Hold the fort, Sker’.”

He wreathed his eyes at her. “And, cousin, dai stihó.”

“You go well, too,” Nita said. “‘Mela—”

Carmela reached up and tugged at one of Sker’ret’s eyes. “Make me proud,” she said.

“And as for you, try not to blow up anything that doesn’t need it,” Sker’ret said.

“Me?” Carmela said, in a tone of dignified but wounded innocence. “When would I ever do that?”

Nita took Carmela by the elbow and steered her over to the pad. “Stand in the middle,” she said. “If you ever lose your balance in one of these things, you want to make sure you do it inside.”

“I would never lose my balance,” Carmela said. “I am a paragon of grace and stability.”

“Oh, yeah. Who said that?”

“Roshaun.”

Nita grinned as they positioned themselves in the middle of the pad. “Just wait till Dairine hears,” she said.

The de facto Master of the Crossings raised a few forelegs to them. Nita raised a hand. Carmela got out her curling iron and touched a pattern of spots on its side, upon which it started to make a soft and very businesslike humming sound.

Nita threw her a look. Carmela simply smiled. “You never can tell,” she said.

They vanished.

***

Back in the cavern on Rashah, out of their mochteroofs again, a very confused and troubled group of wizards sat down under the floating spell-lights to eat something and try to make sense of what had happened.

“It doesn’t know why we’re here,” Ronan said, shaking his head. “It actually doesn’t know!”

Will we be able to keep it that way? Filif said.

“If we’re careful, maybe,” said Kit.

“It was really strange,” Dairine said. She had broken out another trail-mix bar, one that didn’t have cranberries in it—Roshaun was eating the last of those, while wearing one of his more brooding expressions—and she paused to take a drink of one of Nita’s favorite lemon sodas, which she’d stolen. “It really did sound as if it was running on automatic. The King may be an avatar of the Lone One, like all Its other people, but You-Know-Who wasn’t completely there.”

“I felt that, too,” Kit said. “But did you feel It sort of… sucking at you? Trying to make you willing to do whatever It said? I did.”

And I, said Filif, all his branches and fronds rustling in a shudder.

“As did I,” Roshaun said. “Disgusting.” He, too, shuddered all over and looked at Kit with a sort of troubled admiration. “Doubtless that is the source of some of Its power over the hive. I wondered that you could find such self-mastery, to stare It in the eye and not flinch.”

“Oh, I was flinching, all right,” Kit said. “But sometimes you just have to cope. Besides, you were all there. It’s different when you have so much backup.”

I didn’t feel anything, Ponch said. Wagging his tail idly, he came ambling along past Kit, having just finished his own dinner, and put his head over Kit’s shoulder. Kit, not missing a beat, moved the bag of pretzels he was eating out from under Ponch’s nose and into his other hand. And there’s only one person who can make me do what he says.

Kit rolled his eyes. “Oh, really? Who would that be?”

Ponch barked and started to bounce around Kit, wagging his tail harder. Kit sighed and gave him a pretzel.

Dairine shook her head. “I can’t get past the fact that the King knew what we were … and then let us walk away. How come?”

“Perhaps because the situation is exactly as Kit extrapolated it,” Roshaun said. “And because this is not a complete avatar of the Isolate. Possibly the species’ rigid structure militates against that. Or the Lone One’s attention, as Kit also suggested, is elsewhere. Besides which”—Roshaun glanced at Ronan—”we have protection.”

It isn’t easy to divert such a creature’s attention from the truth of what’s going on right in front of it, the Champion said, but it can be done. Still, even with just a partial avatar to deal with, and in my present circumstances, I’m finding it … challenging.

When she heard that, Dairine’s mouth felt suddenly dry. “Which brings us to our next problem,” she said. “The Hesper…”

“That was indeed the one we seek?” Roshaun said to Ronan.

Ronan nodded. “It was,” he said. “Ponch”—and he reached out to ruffle the dog’s ears—”has done effing brilliant work.”

Thank you. Got a dog biscuit? Ponch said.

Ronan gave Kit a look. Kit headed for his pup tent, reached inside its door, and came back with the dog biscuit box. He handed Ronan a biscuit, and Ronan gave it to Ponch; loud crunching noises ensued. “Now all we have to do is find out how to make contact with the Hesper,” Ronan said. “Assuming we can get to her without raising the alarm.”

Spot popped his screen up. “I’ve been processing the mapping information I stored while we were there,” he said, “and coordinating it with the markings on the tunnel walls. Some of them, rather than being mottoes and propaganda, are labels.”

On his screen, and in the middle of the rough circle in which they were all sitting, appeared a three-dimensional map of part of the Yaldiv city-hive. “This is incomplete,” Spot said, “but it’s possible to extrapolate a lot of structures we didn’t actually examine from the tunnel openings we passed, and the road signs on the walls.” A small pulsing light appeared in front of one chamber in the diagram. “Here’s where you saw the Hesper,” Spot said.

Dairine leaned down to look at the label that was flashing on the diagram on Spot’s screen. “‘Grubbery’?”

“Possibly we would say ‘nursery,’” Filif said. “A place where the younger and more fragile members of the species are kept or reared.”

“It looks like they reproduce sort of backward from the way hive insects work on Earth,” Dairine said, bringing up another display on Spot’s screen and scrolling down it, while the main map display remained rotating gently in the air in the midst of them. “Instead of a female with a lot of male mates, they have a ‘king’ male who visits a sort of harem and fertilizes chosen females. Then they go off to the nurseries, and—”

“Oh, please,” Kit said. “Sex stuff.” He hid his eyes briefly with one hand. “Aren’t we supposed to be protected from this kind of thing?”

“You’re getting kind of old for that now,” Dairine said, unconcerned. “If standard operating procedure’s actually operating that way at the moment. Anyway, where other species are involved, I think as soon as we’re old enough to ask, we’re old enough to find out.” She gave Kit a slightly cockeyed look, then glanced away again. There were things she herself was still finding uncomfortable about this particular species’ take on reproduction… particularly what happened to the females after the many eggs they bore were fertilized. It brought to mind a particularly vivid sequence from a nature movie she’d seen on one of the educational channels last year—a wasp laying its egg inside some hapless caterpillar, which then went about its business until the day the egg hatched, and the wasp grub started eating its way out. That times a hundred, Dairine thought. Or a thousand. More workers, more warriors for the king. And as for the poor handmaiden, or what’s left of her—

Kit turned to Ronan. “You think you can cover for us again when we go back in?”

The way things are at the moment, I don’t see any problem with that, the Champion said.

“Then let’s do it in the morning,” Dairine said. “The handmaidens don’t go out of the hive with the workers and warriors; there’ll be a lot fewer Yaldiv to avoid if we want to have a chat with her.”

“The question being,” Filif said, “what do we say to her, exactly? ‘Go well, Hesper, and would you kindly now rise up and save the universe?’”

“Don’t ask me,” Dairine said, getting up and stretching. “Improvisation seems to be the order of the day, so I’m gonna wing it. Or better still,” she said, ambling over to look at her mochteroof, “wait for one of you older-and-wiser types to think of something.” She threw what was intended to be an annoying look at Roshaun, and turned away.

A few moments later, he came up behind her and looked over her shoulder, pretending to flick a speck of dust off the gleam of the mochteroof‘s skin. “You are somewhat on edge, are you not?” Roshaun said under his breath.

“Now why would I admit to a thing like that?” Dairine said softly, meeting his reflection’s eye. “But since you ask, I haven’t been so freaked since we were talking to your dad back on Wellakh. I forget what he said, but you gave him this really dirty look and your stone changed color. I thought maybe you were getting ready to blast him or something and then blame it on my unhealthy alien influence.”

Roshaun stared at her. “You saw the Sunstone do what?”

Dairine looked at him curiously. “It got clear. While you were talking to your father. You weren’t going to blast him? I’m glad.”

He looked perturbed. “It wouldn’t be that I wasn’t in something of two minds,” he said, “but all the same—”

She turned away. “Tell me about it,” she said. “He was getting on my nerves, too.”

From behind them Filif said, “This has been a taxing day. We should all root, or rest, or whatever. Tomorrow will almost certainly be more challenging still.”

Dairine sighed. “My favorite leafy green vegetable has a point,” she said. “I’m gonna turn in.”

“And just who are you calling a vegetable?”

“‘Whom,’” Dairine said. “Spot, you coming?”

Stalked sensor-eyes swiveled to follow Dairine. “Shortly. I have a little more analysis to do.”

“Okay. Get me up as soon as anything starts to happen. ‘Night, guys.”

Dairine went into Nita’s pup tent and got as comfortable as she could in the sleeping bag—the couch was far too lumpy for her. She left just a thin glow of wizard-light outlining the door of the pup-tent interface, spent a few moments punching her sleeping bag’s pillow into the right shape, and gratefully lay down and closed her eyes.

But it took her a long time to stop her mind going around and around over the same piece of mental ground. What do we do next? Is it going to be enough? What if it’s not? What’s going on at home? And where the hell is Neets? She should be back by now. Whenever “now” is…

And the next thing she knew, she heard a voice saying from outside, “It does not understand. It does not know.”

Dairine sat bolt upright in the sleeping bag, her eyes wide. The voice had been quiet, almost trembling; there had been as much wonder in it as fear. And it had also not been human. Well, these days that was hardly a big deal. But it also hadn’t been Sker’ret, or Roshaun, or—

She was out of the pup tent about three seconds later, standing on the warm, gritty stone of the cavern floor and feeling grotty and half conscious in the rumpled clothes she hadn’t bothered to take off before bed. Everyone else was standing there looking much the same, give or take a few items of clothing … and also staring in astonishment at an eight-foot-high Yaldiv that was presently walking delicately and a little uncertainly around the mochteroofs, feeling them with long slender scenting palps. Wandering around after her was Ponch, wagging his tail and sniffing the back end of her long abdominal shell in a curious way.

“Ponch!” Kit said. He was standing there in pajama bottoms and a beat-up, plaid flannel bathrobe, looking bleary, astonished, and annoyed. “Cut that out!”

Ponch lolloped over to Kit, plainly far too pleased to be troubled by his annoyance. I found her. Can we keep her?

Kit rubbed his eyes. “My dog brings home strays,” he said in Ronan’s general direction. “I should have mentioned. You think It noticed?”

Difficult to tell, but I think perhaps not, the One’s Champion said from inside Ronan. Otherwise, I should have noticed. Ponch’s way of getting places doesn’t seem to register as a transit.

“I guess we should be relieved,” Kit said. “Ponch, promise me you won’t go off like that again without telling me first!”

Ponch stood up on his hind legs, putting his feet on Kit’s chest. I didn’t do anything bad! he said, sounding worried and a little perturbed. You all wanted to see her! And I wanted to see if she smelled like I thought she should have smelled, Ponch said. And she did!

“Yeah, but we also wanted to give her a chance to get used to us—”

I gave her a chance to get used to me! I smelled her, and she smelled me. And then we started talking.

Dairine stifled her laughter. Roshaun, who had come out of his pup tent shortly after Dairine, caught her eye. You said you were planning to improvise? he said. You are going to have to move much faster in the future.

Dairine turned her attention to the Yaldiv handmaiden. She came around the back of the mochteroofs and paused to look at the members of the group one after another, taking them in: a tree with glowing berries, a tall humanoid with flowing blond hair, a tall dark humanoid, a smaller one, and another smaller still; a little machine, a strange creature that wagged at one end and panted at the other. The Yaldiv’s scenting palps moved uncertainly.

Somebody really ought to say hello to her, Dairine said. But then the question came up: what did you say to a creature that might never have heard of errantry, or might think it was evil? Yet, buried somewhere inside this creature was the hope of a tremendous power for good. You had to let that power know it was safe to express itself.

Dairine opened her mouth. But the Yaldiv beat her to it, raising her foreclaws in the deferential gesture they’d seen used out on the path the afternoon before. Then the Yaldiv let them fall, as if she couldn’t use the normal ceremonial response, and thus the gesture was invalid as well.

“This one saw these,” the Yaldiv said. Those weird pronouns again, Dairine thought. “When they walked in the tunnel, near Grubbery Fourteen. Though they were not Yaldiv, they had a Yaldiv seeming. They wore it strangely, like a shell during molt, but not-like, as if the shell could be seen through. Their shapes were strange. Their shapes were these shapes—” She pointed one claw at each of them in turn.

Then she glanced up again and met Dairine’s eyes, and once again Dairine felt the shock of looking out, looking in, mirrors reflecting in mirrors. “But this one saw that one before,” she said to Dairine. “And not within the Commorancy.”

Dairine became aware that the “older-and-wiser types” were watching her and expecting her to produce some useful result. She took a breath. “Yes,” Dairine said. “And this one, also, has seen that one before.”

“When?”

“Not long ago,” Dairine said. “And not from within the Commorancy, either. From within that one.”

The Yaldiv stood there shifting uncertainly from leg to leg, a rocking motion. “Yes,” she said. “There was a glimpse of strangeness. Other eyes, a world in strange shapes, strange colors. Why are these here?”

Dairine glanced at the others. Anyone have any suggestions?

You’re the only one of us she knows firsthand, Kit said. You’d better run with it.

She turned back to the Yaldiv. “To see this one,” Dairine said.

“Why?”

I really need a few moments to think about this! “To tell the story may take a while,” Dairine said, “as the story told before the King does.”

Dairine saw the shiver that went through the Yaldiv—a shudder that literally shook her on her legs. It was strange, considering the fervent way all the Yaldiv in the hive had seemed to willingly worship that bloated shape on the dais. Maybe—

No, don’t get ahead of yourself. “That one should be at ease,” Dairine said, “and this one will be, too, while the story is told.” She sat down cross-legged on the cavern floor.

Spot came spidering over to Dairine and crouched down beside her. Look, Dairine said silently, keep an eye on her bodily functions while I’m talking. If I get near some dangerous topic, I want some warning.

All right, Spot said.

Very slowly the Yaldiv lowered herself to the floor, folding her legs underneath her and resting the huge claws on the floor at what passed for their elbow joints. As she did this, the others slowly sat down, too—those who could. Filif stayed as he was, and while the Yaldiv was watching them do that, each after his fashion, Dairine saw Spot put up a transparent display above his closed lid. It can’t be seen from the other side, he said. Here are indicators for brain activity, general neural firing, and the rates for all three hearts. But as for what the readings will mean …

She was going to have to take her chances with that. “Tell these of this one’s life,” Dairine said, hoping she was getting the pronouns in the right order.

“This one is a Yaldah,” the Yaldiv said. It was apparently the female form of the species noun. “The Yaldat are the mothers of our people. We are the engenderers of our City’s defense. To be a Yaldah is our destiny, and our glory.”

This sounds too familiar, Dairine thought. The language was much like some of the stuff she’d read in the mid-twentieth-century unit of last year’s history class. “Destiny.” Half the time the word’s just code for “what someone else wants you to do without asking any inconvenient questions.” “What does this one do in the City?” Dairine said.

“What most Yaldat do,” said their guest, and then she did the first casual thing Dairine had seen any Yaldiv do: she lifted one claw to comb back the scent palps on one side, like someone absently brushing the hair out of her eyes. “Feeding meat to the newly hatched grubs who are past their first food. Cleaning away their leavings and molted-off skins until their shells grow. Yaldat tend the hatchlings until they are large and strong enough to be taken away and trained in their work, or the way of warriors… or vessels.”

Vessels was a different word in the Yaldiv language than the simple female form. And the it pronoun simply meant that the creature using it was just a thing, of no value except as it contributed to the glory of the Great One.

Dairine opened her mouth to ask another question, but she didn’t get the chance. “Now these must tell this one of themselves,” the Yaldiv said. “These have come to the City wearing shapes that are not their own. And to mimic a City person’s smell—that has been done in the past by invaders from outside, the Others.”

“These simply did not wish those in the City to be frightened,” Dairine said. “The strangeness of these could make a Yaldiv fear.”

“The strangeness does not frighten this one,” the Yaldiv said. “It is also—” She stopped.

“Also what?” Dairine said.

The Yaldiv was gazing at the cavern floor with those dark eyes. “Also not the same…”

Dairine glanced at the readouts that Spot was privately showing her. The hearts’ rate had increased nearly threefold in the past few minutes. She looked up into those dark eyes again, met them, and held them. “There’s no reason to fear,” Dairine said.

The pause was so long that Dairine broke out in a sweat, wondering if she’d misstepped. But the Yaldiv looked down at her with eyes that somehow managed to show more than fear. There was anger there, too.

“There’s every reason,” the Yaldiv said. “For when one says the wrong word, the dangerous word, in the wrong hearing—little time passes between the last breath and the first bite of another’s jaws on the meat that was one’s body.”

“Whatever else these may do,” Dairine said, also angry now, “these are not going to eat that one.” And then a little exasperation crept into her own anger. “And these can’t just keep calling that one ‘that,’” Dairine said.

The Yaldiv looked at her in complete noncomprehension. “What else would this be called?”

“There is something,” Ronan said suddenly, “called a name.”

The Yaldiv looked from him back to Dairine. “A name?”

“A name,” said the one inside Ronan, “is the word by which one calls a creature that is different from all other creatures. A creature that is its own unique self.”

Though as far as mere sound went there was no difference between Ronan’s voice and his guest’s, the Yaldiv started up, terribly shocked. She wheeled about swiftly to stare at Ronan, and then began to back away. Bumping into one of the mochteroofs stopped her, but still the Yaldiv stared.

“This one also it knows,” the Yaldiv said. “This voice… It is Death to hear this voice, this word from beyond the outside! It is worse than Death!” She was shivering. Now she began to crouch down again, her claws uplifted in desperate supplication. “There is no such place as the Outside, nothing but the City and the One who rules it! Let the Great One forgive this unworthy one! It did not mean to speak the evil word; it will be faithful to the Great One’s trust—”

Ponch got up from where he’d been sitting watching all this, and trotted over to the Yaldiv. Bizarrely, he started licking the claws that were now lifted up to hide the mirror-shade eyes.

The Yaldiv slowly stopped shivering. Dairine watched her turn her attention to Ponch. Stealing a glance at Spot’s display, she saw the heart-rate indicators dropping little by little. The dark eyes looked down into the doggy ones.

“This one is not very like you,” she said after a moment, glancing back at Dairine.

“That one is Ponch,” Kit said. “Ponch is a dog.”

Ponch is my name, the dog said. That’s me. It’s good to have a name.

“Why?”

Because that way people can call you and tell you they want to give you things! He went romping back over to Kit. Like this!

Ponch started bouncing around and barking. Dairine resisted the urge to cover her ears. Even though this was a big cavern, the noise was deafening, and it echoed. Kit looked at Dairine in helpless amusement, reached into the dog biscuit box, and got one more biscuit out. “Opportunist,” he said. “Ponch! Want a biscuit?”

Oh, boy, oh, boy! Ponch barked, and whirled around in a circle a few times, and then jumped up and snatched the dog biscuit out of Kit’s hand. To Dairine’s total astonishment, he then ran back and dropped it in front of the Yaldiv.

She looked at it in surprise. “What is that?”

Food! Ponch sat down and looked at the Yaldiv expectantly.

She reached down a claw and prodded the biscuit. “This is meat?” she said.

This? Not even slightly, Ponch said. But it’s nice!

The Yaldiv looked quizzically at Ponch. Then she reached down, picked up the biscuit, and nibbled at it with a couple of small mandibles.

“It is pleasant,” she said. She finished it up, then settled herself down again. Dairine sneaked another look at Spot’s readout. A lot better, she said to him. She’s calming down now.

That’s what happens when you have a name, Ponch said, and lay down near her, panting a little from all the bouncing and spinning around.

“This one supposes… if there is no harm… then there might be a name.” She still sounded very uncertain.

“Is there something the ones in the City say when they call this one to do something?” Kit said.

She glanced up. “They say it is unworthy of notice,” the Yaldiv said. “They say it is always the last one to be called.” Was that a touch of bitterness?

The last one, Dairine thought. She glanced down at Spot, who was still running analyses of words he had seen on the walls. He showed her a word, in both the Speech and the Yaldiv written language.

“Memeki,” Dairine said.

The dark eyes met hers again. “‘The last,’” she agreed. “It would not be a strange calling.”

“When one has a name,” Dairine said, “one’s not an it anymore. One is called you.”

She shivered again. “Another strangeness,” Memeki said. “This word also you has heard.”

“Sorry,” Dairine said. “Not enough explanation. When it speaks of itself, and has a name, it says, ‘I.’”

Memeki began to shake harder. Dairine swallowed and kept on going. “Like this. I see you.” She pointed first at herself, then at Memeki. “We—” She gestured at the others, then again at Memeki. “We see you.”

The trembling didn’t stop, but Memeki looked at them all, and then down at Ponch, who had rolled over on his back in front of her foreclaws, and now lay there exhibiting his not inconsiderable stomach. “And I—” She stopped. She lifted her claws, dropped them again.

“This one is afraid,” she said, so softly that they could barely hear it. “It knows this word. It never thought anyone else might.”

After a moment, Dairine said, “Tell how you know the word.”

Slowly Memeki made that palp-grooming gesture again, like pushing hair aside. “Often it wished when it was younger that it could achieve such merit as some of the Yaldat had,” she said. “But to serve the Great One personally is not an honor offered to many. And those Yaldat who had achieved such merit, they said it could never happen to this one; for this one was not fair enough to ever attract the King’s attention. This one came to believe them, and stopped hoping for more. It was content to serve in the grubbery, giving the young ones food in the less meritorious way. Such was honor enough.” She glanced down at Ponch, who was now lying there with his eyes closed.

“Yet there came a night when the City was closed as always,” she said. “And this one rested, as all rest when Sek is not in the sky. And in the time of rest, this one heard a voice.” She looked again at Ronan, and once again that tremor started to shake her limbs. “The voice was like the second voice that… you used to speak just now. It came from everywhere, and nowhere. It used the words you use, that this one had never heard before. It said, ‘You—’” Again she struggled to get the words out. “‘You can be far more than this. You can bring your people out of this place, this life, to something far greater. Will you do it?’”

The Yaldiv’s trembling was getting worse. “This one did not know what to answer. But the voice that whispered in the night said, ‘The ones who will show you the way will come. They will not be like you. When they come, listen to what they say. One will say the word you need to hear.’”

Memeki went quiet for a moment, looking at them. “The voice made this one frightened,” she said. “So many forbidden words… This one went through that next day in terror, thinking that those words might force their way out. For they were strong, and clamored to be spoken. They shouted night and day inside this one until it thought that Death was close to it! But nothing happened.”

Memeki still sounded frightened, but now a kind of wonder grew in her voice as well. “Then without warning came the day when what had until then seemed impossible nonetheless did happen. The Great One honored it. Everything was changed. And the rest of the Yaldat said, ‘See how merciful the Great One is! Even to such a one, whom all thought would be the last to be chosen, if it ever happened at all.’ This one became honored even among the workers and warriors. All of those said, ‘Here comes another of those who defend us from the evil Others; the mighty ones, the weapons in the Great One’s claw!’”

Memeki lifted her claws in a gesture more like the one that the warriors had used to greet one another. “But it was too late,” she said, dropping her claws again. “The words of the voice that spoke in the night, and were now inside this one, began to grow as swiftly as the Great One’s favor had. And even the mighty honor the Great One had bestowed on it began to mean little, almost nothing. It began to think that it was—” Memeki paused, then said in a rush, “That it was no one’s weapon. That it was for much more than that. That it was—” Her voice dropped like that of someone whispering heresy. “That it was itself. That it was an I.”

Dairine held her breath.

“And that I was for something else entirely,” Memeki said. She was breathing like someone who’d run a race, as if she was ready to fall over from the strain of saying so short a word. “And now comes strangeness, yet more strangeness. The eyes that… I have seen, which are not Yaldiv.” Memeki looked at Dairine. “And the voice that— I know— the one I heard whispering in the night, and that no one else could hear.” She got up again, and went over to Ronan.

He sat very still as she approached him, and as the huge claws lifted. Memeki drew very close, peered into his face. Ronan, and the Champion, gazed back.

“Hod the Splendid,” said Memeki.

Ronan blinked.

“How do you know that name?” the Champion said.

“Before, I didn’t know what a name was,” Memeki said. “Now I know. That word was something the voice whispered to me in the night. Are these, then, also your names? Regent of the Sun, ruler of the third Day and the fourth Heaven, avenger of the Luminaries, Guardian of the Divided Name?”

Ronan nodded very slowly. “Messenger of Messengers,” he said, “chief Prince of the Presence, Winged like the Emerald, the Providencer.” He raised his eyebrows as he looked up at Memeki. “The creature with those names is within me. We’d say, ‘Those are my names.’”

“I thought so,” Memeki said. “The voice said that one was to be asked. So now I ask… you. What comes next? For my people’s sake, I must know. What is the word that must be heard? What must I do to become what the voice says I must?”

Ronan sat there looking stunned. “I don’t know,” the Defender said through him. And he looked helplessly at the wizards around him.

“There were other words still,” Memeki said. Her sudden eagerness made it sound as if just saying the word “I” out loud had broken a dam somewhere inside her, so that all kinds of things were starting to spill out. “The voice said: ‘You are the aeon of Light; you are the Hesper. You must find the way. But without the word spoken, there is no path, only darkness; until it speaks itself, only the abyss.’”

No one said anything.

Memeki kept looking from one of them to the next. Finally Dairine said, “You’ve asked us hard questions. We don’t know the answers. But we’ll help you find them.”

“It may take a while,” Ronan said.

Memeki settled down again, and combed that wayward palp back into place. “I will wait,” she said. Then she looked up. “The way we came out of the City… I can go back that same way, before morning? No one will know?”

Ponch opened an eye and looked up at her. I can take you that way, he said. Nobody will know.

She looked down at him, admiring. You are very wise.

Out of the corner of her eye, Dairine caught a glimpse of Kit hiding a smile. “I can rest here meanwhile?” Memeki said. “I am tired. This has been a day full of strangeness.”

“Not just for you,” Dairine said, getting up. She went over to Memeki and patted her on the shell. “Rest,” she said. “Nothing will happen to you here. We’ll take care of you.”

The strange eyes dwelled on her. “Yes,” Memeki said. “You will.”

A tremor went through Dairine. The voice had sounded exactly the way Ronan’s voice did when the One’s Champion used it.

Dairine turned away. After a moment or two, Memeki started to lean a little to one side. Quietly Dairine went over to look at Spot’s display. The hearts’ rates were dropping quickly; the Yaldiv’s neural activity was sliding down almost to nothing.

Dairine straightened, looked at the others as the readings bottomed out. She’s gone out like a light, Dairine said silently. It almost looks more like a hibernation state than our kind of sleep.

Yes, the Champion said. She’ll be that way for some hours, I think. I’ll stand guard while you others get back to your rest.

“You’re out of your mind,” Kit said. “Who could sleep after that?” He let out a breath, then Ponch’s nose came over his shoulder. Kit sighed and reached into the box for one more dog biscuit. “We found her. We’ve talked to her. She’s the one!”

Without any possible doubt, the Champion said.

“But what do we do now?”

Ronan shook his head. “He already said, he didn’t know.”

“Yeah, right. And a lot of help you are!” Dairine said.

“Who, me?”

“No, him!” Dairine said. “The Defender!”

We’re not omniscient, you know, the One’s Champion said, sounding annoyed.

“Oh, sure, you’re not. Just immortal and incredibly powerful, which doesn’t do us much good if after all this running around, you can’t give us a clearer sense of what we’re supposed to do!”

Ronan frowned and looked over at Kit. “What is it with these Callahan women,” he said, “that they’re always after yelling at you and giving you grief?”

“Not always,” Kit said, sounding resigned. “Just when it’s going to get most on your nerves.”

“We yell at you because you’re hopeless,” Dairine said, and sat down, looking extremely cross. “But I guess it’s not your fault this time. And where did all these other names come from all of a sudden? I’d have thought you had enough already, just in our own mythologies.”

We pick them up in our travels, the Champion said with a weary and resigned look. It’s an occupational hazard.

“And it’s not like you don’t have a fair number of names,” Ronan added. “Dairine. Dair. Squirt. Right pain in the arse. Speaker to hardware. Botherer of her sister—”

“Deliverer of punches in the nose,” Dairine said, looking Ronan in the eye. “Ruthless punisher of those who don’t cut her some slack.”

“One of those was a little weird,” Kit said suddenly. “‘Guardian of the Divided Name’?”

Ronan nodded. “The One’s full name.”

Roshaun looked perplexed. “Why would that need guarding?”

It doesn’t, the Champion said. You do. From it.

“But the One is on our side, I would have thought,” Filif said. “Or we are on Its…”

That’s not the point, the Champion said. You can’t really have any sense of how much raw power is tied up in the One. Physicality can’t express it. Nothing can express it; it’s not meant to be expressed. It’s meant to be. If the One wasn’t careful about how It manifests Itself inside space and time, everything would all just dissolve.

“So that even the One’s Name in the Speech has to be divided up to keep it safe,” Kit said, “like a critical mass.”

That’s right, said the Champion. The Name of Names has so much primacy of power over mere created matter that it could change or wipe out whole universes if irresponsibly used. So the Names are leaked into creation only in fragmented form … a little bit here, a little bit there. Even names in less central levels of creation get divided up that way—a bit here, a bit there…

Dairine let out an annoyed breath. “Yeah, well, if even the One’s names are so powerful,” she said, “why do we have to be running around all the time and cleaning up the messes all over our universe? Why doesn’t It just get Its butt in here and take care of things?”

Behind Ronan’s eyes, the Champion looked surprised. What fun would that be?

“For It?”

For us, the Champion said, sounding as if He was surprised Dairine didn’t get it.

She stared at him.

“All right,” Filif said, glancing at Dairine as she took a breath. “Memeki knows—for the moment—what she is. But not who she is, or what she can do. How can we best assist her? For until she fully becomes the Hesper, and achieves whatever her full power may be, there’s no hope that she can do anything about the threat to the rest of our universe.”

I have no immediate answers, the Champion said. She’s still only in the middle stages of embodiment. Such a process has to proceed at its own pace.

“There’s not a whole lot of time left for it to proceed in!” Dairine said. “The Pullulus is pushing everything apart out there, the structure of space is suffering, whole civilizations are going to pieces—”

“He’s right, though,” Ronan said.

Dairine stared.

“It took a while for me to come to terms, too,” Ronan said. His voice was unusually subdued. “I didn’t even know he was in there until Nita recognized him.” Dairine was interested to notice that when Ronan had started speaking, he’d been looking at Kit, but suddenly he wasn’t looking at him anymore. “And when I found out what was happening, I really hated it.” He glanced at Memeki. “She seems to have gotten past that, which is amazing. Different psychologies, I guess. But then there still comes a moment when you have to”—he shrugged—”agree to act together. Not just to passively accept what’s happened. How’s that going to be for her? Can she do it? Her people’s lifestyle seems to revolve around doing what you’re told. How fast can she get past that? Can she ever get past it?”

Dairine shook her head, and looked over at the great sleeping figure. “We’d better hope she can,” she said, “and try to figure out some way to hurry her up.”

Kit yawned. “Sorry,” he said. “I can’t help it … I need to at least stretch out for a while, whether I actually get any sleep or not. What do we do in the morning?”

Dairine shrugged. “Take her back. Turn her loose. Wait for something to turn up.”

“Wait?”

“Something always turns up,” Dairine said.

“But not because of the waiting!” Kit muttered.

“And in the meantime,” Dairine said, looking over at Ronan, “I think Kit’s got the right idea. You’re going to keep watch?”

Ronan nodded.

“Then I’m going to try to pick up where I left off,” Dairine said. She headed off for her pup tent, glancing over her shoulder. “Spot?”

“I can finish this analysis inside,” he said, and got up to follow.

They went back to the pup tent together. You’re a little quiet today, Dairine said, even for you. What’s bothering you?

I’ve been running analyses on more than the syntax of written Yaldic, if that’s what you mean.

Yeah, Dairine said, it is. She sealed the pup tent and sat down on the floor next to Spot. He crawled into her lap. “You’ve been really quiet ever since we got here from your people’s world. What’s going on?”

“My people installed a great deal of new software in me,” Spot said. “I’ve been getting to grips with it. Some of the things they loaded into me were patches for my oracular functions.”

“Yeah, I noticed you’d stopped the poetry,” Dairine said. “Frankly, it’s kind of a relief. The notes were starting to cramp my style.”

“I found them troubling, too,” Spot said. “The problem seems to have been that the messages from the Powers simply had too much content embedded in them: I wasn’t able to process them correctly, so they were coming out truncated. But with the patches, I’m now able to perceive more clearly exactly what it is the Powers and the manual functions are trying to tell me in terms of cloaked content, the kinds of things that were showing as blacked-out in Nita’s manual. As a result, I’ve been able to analyze the present situation a lot more accurately.”

“Sounds like good news to me,” Dairine said.

“It would be if the results of the analysis weren’t so troubling,” Spot said. “We’re missing something—both in terms of something we don’t know, and something that’s not here, something we urgently need. A variable is missing.”

“Nita,” Dairine said, and let out a breath.

“I think so. Her presence here has become vital. Whatever she went back to Earth to obtain, we’ve got to have it here very soon, or fail.”

Dairine got goose bumps. “And she wasn’t sure what she was going back for,” Dairine said.

“True. Let’s hope that she has it when she arrives; otherwise, all this will have been for nothing. And—”

Spot went silent.

“And?” Dairine said, hugging him a little closer.

“If she doesn’t have whatever it is,” Spot said, “then there is no ‘and.’”