"To keep fire from getting out of hand," he said, “water, always. One way or another, we have plenty of it here."
Doris came in, followed by Ronan with the tea-tray. He put it down on one of the tables and joined Nita and Kit as they looked at the diagram. Johnny finished one last figure, then stood up. "Tidy enough?" he said. "I miss anything?"
Nita shook her head in complete helpless ignorance. Kit said, "Don't look at me," and moved off to pour himself a cup of tea. Doris came to stand by Johnny and look the diagram over.
"All names seem to be in place," she said. Her gaze dwelt particularly on one spot, which Nita had noticed earlier and not known what to make of. While the rest of the spell was written in shorthand, the names of the participants were all written out in full, as was vitally necessary. Your name in the Speech was meant to describe you completely, and to work with a shortened version of your name was to dangerously shortchange yourself of your own potential power. The name written in the spot
Nita was examining, though, was not the complex, fussy thing that most human names were. It was simple, just six curves and a stroke. Names that short tended to be like short words in the dictionary
- the shorter they were, the more meanings they tended to have - and mortals did not have names like that one, all power and age. But then again, one of them spelling tonight was not mortal. Still
- there's something odd about it. The usual 'continuation' curve is cut off awful short. . .
"Hi, y'all," said Dairine as she swung in through the brocade curtain. "What's happenin'? All set? Oh," she said, stopping at the edge of the diagram and taking a long look at it.
"Does it meet with your approval?" Johnny said.
"Looks fine to me. Yo, Spot!" she called, looking over her shoulder. The laptop computer came scuttling in and sat itself down under a table.
"You picked out a star yet?" Nita said to Dairine, as her sister paused beside her.
Dairine shook her head. "Can't predict the positions that accurately from this end," she said. "We're just going to have to wait until the timeslide's fastened, and then have a look around and pick one that looks good."
"Just make sure you pick a star that's not scheduled to have inhabited planets later," Kit said from the other side of the spell diagram.
Dairine looked at him with mild amusement. "Kit, from that end of time, it's already happened. There never was a star to have planets."
"You hope," Kit said. "If it didn't work, back then, then the star's either still just fine, or it's long since gone nova from its core being tampered with… and we're all going to be so much plasma in about fifteen minutes."
Dairine grinned at him. "Adds spice to life, doesn't it? Don't worry, Kit. I'm here."
Kit looked at Nita with an expression that was eloquent of what he thought that was worth. Nita shrugged at him. She is pretty hot stuff at the moment, she said privately.
If she messes this up, we all will be, Kit replied.
That was true enough. Nita had never had a Senior spelling with her, let alone the Senior for a whole continent. In the past it would have lent her a lot of peace of mind. At the moment, though, it didn't seem to be helping much.
Pre-spell nerves, Kit said. Me too.
It was a small consolation. She sat down for a moment, watching Johnny go over the last few details of the spell diagram with the rowan wand to activate and check the separate character groups. The curtain to the kitchen wing stirred, and Biddy came in slowly, carrying what looked a long, wide bar of metal.
She placed the object inside the node of the spell diagram that was meant to contain the iron plasma, and then stood up, massaging her back. It was a bar of metal all right, about fifteen centimeters thick and fifteen centimeters wide, and just over half a meter long. The bar had a long, deep groove about seven centimeters by seven, right down the length of it, to within about two centimeters of either end.
"There," she said to Johnny. "That's the casting mold I use for fireplace tools. The best I could come up with."
Dairine wandered over and looked at it. "How much does it hold?" she said. "Molten metal, I mean."
"About ten kilograms."
"I mean in volume."
Biddy looked surprised. "I don't usually think of it in those terms. About a litre, I'd say."
"Hmm." Dairine looked at the mold, then glanced at the laptop computer. It got up from under the table, came over and looked at the mold itself; then it and Dairine seemed to exchange glances, though how it did it with no eyes was a good question.
"Yeah," she said to it. To Biddy she said, "What's the melting temperature of the mold? I don't want to mess it up."
"It's case-hardened," she said. "About eight hundred degrees Fahrenheit."
"OK." Dairine looked thoughtful. "You want some carbon in with the iron?" Biddy nodded. "How much?"
"About one and a half percent."
"Gotcha." Dairine looked at the computer for a moment; it made a soft disk-drive thinking noise, which amused Nita, since she could see that its drives were both empty. "OK," Dairine said to Johnny. "I'm ready when you are."
He took one last long look at the spell diagram as he stepped into the middle of it. "I know that in group spellings people usually divide the work up evenly among them," he said, "but if it's all right with you all, I'd sooner handle everything but the actual timeslide, and leave that part of things to Dairine. The Treasures themselves are going to need watching to make sure that they don't interfere, and I would prefer that each of you in the active diagram concentrate on that. Does that seem appropriate to you?"
Everyone nodded, or muttered agreement.
"All right, let's get to it. Doris, the Cup. . ."
"Right," she said, and went into the kitchen. A moment later, light swelled behind the brocade curtain, and she elbowed it aside and carried the Ardagh Chalice in.
Johnny said. "Doris, keep an eye on it. If any of these things is likely to get out of hand here, it's the Cup."
"Oh, I'll mind it all right, don't you worry about that."
"We needn't do anything about the Stone," Johnny said, glancing at the empty circle next to that of the Cup: "we couldn't be much more in contact with the Earth if we tried, and it's here already. Kit. . ."
Kit brought in Fragarach and laid it carefully in the circle waiting for it. Its light was burning low, but a breath of wind stirred the door-curtains and the banners hanging from the ceiling as he put it in place.
"Air is ready," Johnny said. "One element only remaining, and that's the one we need. Ready, Dairine?"
She stepped into the circle for Fire, next to the steel mold, and said, "Let's do it."
Johnny put his hands behind his back, bent over a little the way someone might bend over to read a newspaper lying on the ground, and began to speak, reading the spell from the diagram. Things had seemed quiet before - here, far from any town or road, close to sunset, that was hardly surprising
- but the silence that shut down around them now, and into which the Speech began to fall, was more than natural. Nita felt the hair standing up all over her, the old familiar excitement and nervousness of the start of a spell combining with the effect of the wizardry itself on the space and matter within its range of influence. Under the silence Nita could hear or sense a constant slow rush and flow of water
- or the essence of it - welling up and sinking away again, taking all dangerous influences away with it.
That was something of a problem, of course, for that same flow was likely to perceive the building energies of the wizardry itself as a dangerous influence, and try to carry it away as well. Nita had particularly noticed the careful reinforcement that Johnny had done around the edges of the spell to prevent this.
The spell was taking. It was always a sure sign when you began to perceive it as a physical thing, rather than just words spoken: reality was being affected by it. Nita put up a tentative hand to the air in front of her and felt smooth cool stone, though the air wa
s clear and empty before her, or seemed that way. The Lia Fail was performing its function, holding the boundaries closed against whatever forces might come loose inside them.
The darkness was slowly falling outside, but not in the hall where they stood. Fragarach and the Cup blazed, throwing long shadows back and up on to the walls from everyone who stood there; a clear, warm, pale light from the Sword, a bluer, cooler burning from the Cup. One moment the Cup was brighter, the next the Sword; Nita could hear Johnny's voice straining a little as his mind worked to keep them in balance until the symmetries of the first part of the spell were complete. There was no telling how long it would take. One moment he seemed to have been speaking for ever, and the next, for only a few seconds. It was the usual confusion about time when you were in the middle of a spell. The world seemed to hold still while you redescribed it. . .
His voice stopped. Johnny looked over at Dairine.
She nodded, folded her arms, and began speaking. And if the hair had stood up all over Nita before, now she felt as if every hair had turned into a pin, and it was sticking her. Dairine was building the timeslide, the long pipeline through spacetime that would conduct the star steel where they needed it. It would not, of course, actually exist in space or time, but would circumvent them both; and normal matter disliked such circumventions of the rules, when you set them up, and complained bitterly during the process. Nita looked at Kit and saw him nearly in the same distress, his jaw clenched to help bear it. Ronan looked no better, and neither did any of the grownups. But Dairine looked completely unaffected. She paused for a moment, examined the spell diagram, and then said five words, carefully, a second or so between them. She waited again.
Abruptly there was no room. They stood, all of them, on or around a glowing webwork in the middle of nothingness. But a nothingness that was strewn with stars, cluttered with them, crowded with them. They're too dose together! was Nita's first panicked thought. Not even in the hearts of young galaxies or new globular clusters was there stellar density like this; these stars were so close that some of their coronae were mingling. In other spots, three or four stars were pulling matter out of one another in bizarrely warped accretion discs. New stars were forming all over the place, or trying to, as they stole matter from one another, swirled, kindled as she watched. This was the view from the other end of the timeslide that Dairine had constructed.
She's crazy, Nita thought. We're barely out of the Big Bang here - the universe can't be more than a few hundred thousand years old! But if Dairine heard Nita's thought, she gave no sign of it. One after another of the stars nearby seemed to veer close, then away again, as Dairine considered it, rejected it. For a few seconds the sunspotted globes of stars seemed to pour past them, twisting and skewing. Then one loomed up close, a big white star with a tinge of gold.
Dairine closed her eyes and spoke one more word.
It was as if the world had caught fire. Nita was frozen as much by her own horror as the spell itself. With the outward senses she knew that everything was fine, that the darkness of Matrix and the light of the Treasures was all around her; but her mind saw nothing but annihilation, a ravening light so desperately destructive as to make the thought of physical existence seem ridiculous in the face of it. Pressure and heat beyond anything she could imagine; she saw straight into the heart of this, and could not look away. Vaguely she could feel Dairine doing something, speaking again, naming in the Speech the amount and type of matter she wanted, the form, the place of delivery - all as casually as if she was filling out an order form. She came to the end of her specifications, and was about to sign her name. . .
The rushing sound suddenly became deafening, and the perception of unquenchable fire was suddenly invaded by something; that cooler, bluer light, the feeling of liquid, quelling and subduing. Then, for the first time, she felt something from Dairine: panic, just barely controlled. The Cup had sensed fire, and was trying to put it out - the essence of all quenchings was trying to flow up the timeslide, into the core of a live star. The least that could happen was that the timeslide would be deranged, and the whole energy output of that star would backfire down it. . .
Two more voices were raised then, in the Speech, quite suddenly; Doris's and Aunt Annie's, and their tone was astonishing. Nita almost burst out laughing, despite her terror, as the two of them scolded one of the Elements of the Universe as if it was an unruly child. They sounded as if they intended to send it to bed without supper. Funny it might have been, but if the two of them had anything, they had certainty. The Cup struggled, the blue light washed higher - then abruptly fell away again.
Nita sagged with relief. Dairine had calmed down from her bad moment, and was completing her end of the spell. Through the blinding images still in her mind, Nita could see Dairine look carefully at the metal mold resting on the floor, then crouch down, and poke her finger most carefully at a spot in the air about thirty centimeters above it. She lowered the finger carefully to the mold, and said another word.
Fire followed her gesture. It paused in the spot where Dairine's finger had first paused, and Nita smelled ozone as the tiny spark of plasma took shape at this end of the timeslide and destroyed the air molecules in the spot where it had arrived. That one pinpoint of light drowned out even the fire of the Treasures, and threw back shadows from everyone as stark as if they had been standing on the Moon. Then it began to flow downwards in a narrow incandescent pencil-line, cooling rapidly out of the plasma state, into incandescent iron vapour and then a molten solid again, as Dairine let it pass out of the small magnetic-bottle part of the spell and down into the mold.
Slowly the mold filled, the steel of it smoking. All the air began to smell of burnt metal. Nita looked over at Dairine; she could see her beginning to shake - even Dairine couldn't hold a wizardry like this in place for long. Come on, Dari, she thought. Hang on there. . .
The mold kept filling. Nita could feel the Cup trying to get out of hand again, and her aunt and Doris holding it quiet by sheer skill in the Speech and calculated bad temper. Dairine was wobbling where she crouched, and put one hand behind her to steady her, and sat down on the floor, but never once took her eyes off that spot in the air where the plasma was emerging - her end of the timeslide. If it moved, if it got jostled. . .
Come on, come on. . ./ Nita thought. How long can it take? Oh please God, don't let my sister get fried! Or the rest of us, she added hurriedly, as that possibility suddenly occurred to her. Come on, Dan, you little monster, you can do it. . ./
The light very suddenly went out, with a noise like a large short-circuit happening. Dairine fell over sideways. They all blinked; nothing was left but the light of the Treasures, now looking very pale to their light-traumatized eyes. One other light was left in the room, though. The steel mold was full of it; iron, still liquid and burning red, skinning over and going dark, like cooling lava. Just the sight of it unnerved Nita, and filled her with awe and delight. It somehow looked more definite and real than anything else in the area… anything else but Fragarach and the Cup.
Nita went over to help Dairine up. Her sister tried to stand, couldn't, sagged against Nita.
“What's this "little monster" stuff?" she whispered. “It never even got really tough." And she passed out.
“Here," Johnny said from above Nita, and bent down to pick Dairine up. “I'll put her on the couch. She's going to be out of it for a while. Biddy. . .“
Biddy was standing there looking at the mold, and shaking all over. Nita glanced at Kit, who had noticed this as well. He shook his head, said nothing.
"I think we're going to have a late night," Johnny said. "You're all welcome to stay - we've got room for you. I think we should all take a break for an hour or so. Then - we've got a Spear to forge."
He looked at Biddy. She was still trembling, as if with cold.
She looks worse than Dairine did, Kit said to her privately.
Nita glanced over at him. If she pulls her bit off that well, we'll be in good
shape.
If, Kit said. But why am I getting nervous all of a sudden?
Nita shook her head and went off to see about a drink of something. She agreed with Kit. The problem was, wizards rarely got hunches that didn't have meaning, sooner or later.
She had a feeling it would be sooner.
10.
Lughnasád
Nita went and had a nap immediately. What she had seen had worn her out; and she had been drawn on for general energy assistance during the spell, too, so it was only understandable that she would feel a little wiped out afterwards. When she got up, it was two in the morning. Everything was very still except for a faint clanging sound, soft and repetitive, that wouldn't go away. She had an idea what it might be.
She got up off the ancient bed in the upstairs bedroom Johnny had shown her, and wandered down into the great hall. It was empty now: the spell diagram had been carefully scraped off, and the floor scrubbed. The clanging was closer. She went gently out the front door of the hall and stood there, in the night, listening. Far off on a hill, a sheep went baa. There was a faint hint of light about the far northeastern horizon, an indication that the sun was already thinking about coming up again, and would do so in a couple of hours. If it's like this now, Nita thought, what must it be like around midsummer? It must hardly even get dark at all…
The sound was coming from off to her left. She followed a little path around the edge of the castle towards where the drystone wall ran. The sound of water came chuckling softly up the riverbed beneath it, and the clanging continued, louder.
It was quite dark. She made a small wizard-light to help her go. It sprang out of the air by her, a small silver spark, and lit her way down the rough stone steps that went down towards the water.
The clanging paused, then resumed again. Ahead of her was a small, low building with a rough doorway. There was no door in it, just an opening surrounded by stones. She paused there, and looked in.