“Greetings also,” the answer came back. Though it was a human-sounding voice, it didn’t come from inside the armor. It was omnidirectional, and seemed to come out of nothing, the way the light did. And the armor did not move in the slightest, as Nita would have expected it to, at least a little, if there was someone inside it.
Nita was relieved. At least the spell was working insofar as it was making communication possible, or a lot more possible than it had been the night before. “Were you trying to talk to me last night?” Nita said.
“Many times,” the voice said.
“I couldn’t understand a lot of what you were saying to me then, but I think that may be fixed now,” Nita said. “What can I do for you?”
There was another long pause. “Nothing,” the voice said. “This is the vigil. There’s nothing to do but wait for the fight to begin again.”
“What fight?” Nita said.
“With the Enemy,” the knight said. “What else is there? Outside of the fighting, nothing exists but this.”
Nita glanced around her. There was no sign of anything else but the two of them in this whole place, which seemed to stretch away into a dark infinity “When will the fight start again?” she said.
“Soon.”
“What happens when you win?”
“There’s no winning this battle. But also no losing it, because for the Enemy, for the shadow that stalks this darkness, there’s no winning the fight, either.”
For the first time, the knight moved, lifting his head up into the light. There was no telling how she knew it, but Nita knew that inside the helmet, the knight was smiling. All the darkness sang with the force of his resolve, and with his amusement—a grim but good-natured cheerfulness that seemed very strange when taken together with what he’d just said.
That good cheer in the face of what sounded like a hopeless situation struck a chord somewhere in Nita, even in her sleep. The sense got stronger and stronger in the dark air around her—of a great strength being hoarded in this place for the oncoming battle, of an unusual bravery. Valor: that was the word that described what Nita felt seeping into this space from the glittering form at its center. It made her feel like she had to do something to be of use. “Are you sure there’s nothing I can do to help you?” Nita said.
The silence that followed stretched out much longer than the other two had.
“Tell what fights the Enemy that It will be held here,” the knight said. “That It will have to fight here, again and again. But that It won’t pass.” And again Nita could feel the fierce, amused smile inside the armor.
“I can’t stay,” Nita said. That was one of the only drawbacks to lucid dreaming: even when reinforced by wizardry, a dream’s duration was very limited. “But I know where this place is now. I can come back if you need help, or I can bring someone else with me who can help you better—”
“No help will avail here,” the knight said, kindly enough, but sternly, too. “This fight must happen only as it has happened, or it will be lost. And if it’s lost, everything else will be—”
Without warning, darkness fell. Nita, uncertain where she was or what had happened, tried to see, but in that complete blackness, there was no way to see anything at all. Briefly, she heard the sound of laughter, challenging and cheerful, and the ringing scrape of a sword being drawn—
***
And then Nita was sitting up in her bed, open-eyed and startled in the less unnerving darkness of her own bedroom. She wasn’t frightened, even though she’d caught a taste, in the dream’s last moments, of what had been coming toward the knight out of the newly fallen blackness. She knew that Enemy too well to be shocked by Its appearance anymore. But the thought of leaving that glad, tough presence to fight all by itself irked her. And though she’d at least been able to make out what it was saying this time, that wasn’t the same as understanding it.
She glanced over at the hands of her bedside clock glowing in the darkness. They said two-thirty. Nita sighed and lay down again, feeling more determined than ever to figure out what was going on. In fact, she felt more determined than she had about anything for weeks.
“Tell what fights the Enemy that It will be held here…”
Eventually Nita fell asleep again, and down the corridors of dream, she heard the sword come scraping out of its sheath again, and again, and again….
Chapter 5: Quandaries
When her alarm went off at about a quarter after six, Nita dragged herself out of bed, showered, and got ready for school with that fierce, small sword-sound still repeating itself in her memory When she woke her dad up, it was still very much on her mind. She found him a little later in the kitchen, having the coffee she’d made for him when she’d finished dressing, and saw him looking thoughtfully at her manual, which Nita had carried into the kitchen with her earlier and had left open and facedown on the counter.
“I thought you seemed a little distracted this morning,” he said, pouring milk into his coffee. “You look like you’re working hard on something. Harder than usual.”
He means, harder than usual lately, Nita thought. “Yeah,” she said. “First-contact problem.”
“As in first contact with an alien species?”
“I think so,” Nita said. “We’ve been having some trouble communicating.”
Her dad shook his head. “I should get you to talk to my cut-flower distributor,” he said. “If you can get through to something from another planet, maybe you could get through to even him.”
Nita had heard enough stories about her dad’s troubles with this particular supplier in the past couple of years to make her uncertain. “Might need more power than I’ve got at the moment.”
“I wouldn’t be too sure about that,” her dad said. “What exactly did you do to your sister yesterday?”
Nita raised her eyebrows. “I got her to see sense,” she said.
Nita’s dad gave her a loving but skeptical look. “Using what kind of nuclear weapon?” he said. “Just so I know when the government calls.”
Humor, she thought. When was the last time I heard Daddy make a joke? Since… well. Since then.
“I moved her bedroom furniture around,” Nita said. “Did a couple of other things… nothing life-threatening.” She looked at her dad over the rim of her mug of tea as she took a drink. “Not that I didn’t think about it.”
Her dad sighed. “You wouldn’t have been the first one,” he said, rinsing out his coffee cup. He got his coat off the hook by the door and shrugged into it. “Keep an eye on her, though, will you?”
“Sure, Daddy.”
Her dad came over and gave her a hug that lingered for a moment. He put his chin down on the top of her head, something else he hadn’t done for a while, and said, “You’ve been the one holding everything together. And that’s not fair to you. I feel like I haven’t been doing everything I could…”
Nita shook her head. “I’m not sure I see it that way, Daddy,” she said, and that was all she could get out.
He squeezed her, let her go. “Shop’s open late tonight,” he said. “Won’t be home till nine. You have anything planned?”
Nita shook her head. “I need to do some research,” she said. “If I have to go out, it won’t be for long, and nowhere far.”
“Okay. Bye…”
She leaned against the counter again, leafing through her manual, while the sound of her dad’s car faded off down the road. She thought she knew how he felt: as if he was the weak link in the family. But she often felt that way herself, and she knew Dairine did, too—and they couldn’t all be right. This was something that had come up in one of her earliest talks with Mr. Millman, a simple piece of logic that had completely eluded Nita until then—probably her first sign that Millman was not just some “good idea” wished on her by the school, but was someone genuinely worth listening to. Nita knew now that all you could do was try to let the sense of inadequacy pass over you, or the other person, and dissipate. Arguing too h
ard about it was likely to make the other person think you were trying to hide the truth from them.
She sighed and turned another page. The size of her manual’s linguistics section had nearly tripled since she got up with the day’s research in mind, and she was left now with the realization that her own knowledge of the Speech was even more basic than she’d thought it was. I can’t believe how dumb I’ve been about this, she thought. The quick vocabulary test she’d taken before her dad came down for his coffee had suggested that Nita was readily familiar with about 650 terms in the Speech … out of a possible 750,000. And more words were being rediscovered or coined every day by wizards of every species. There were even regional dialects and variants, alternate recensions used by species whose physiologies or brain structure, or sometimes even the structure of their home universe, meant that the most basic forms of the Speech had to be altered to make sense. I’ve been treating this like it was a dead language, Nita thought. But it’s alive. It’s the language of Life Itself: how could it not be?
And then, no matter how many of the words you might know, there was always the question of context … the way a species used the Speech. Some species understood it clearly, but meant very different things by their usage of it than other species did. Some members of other species, too, whether wizards or not, might have only a beginner’s acquaintance with the Speech, a most basic understanding of how to use it. Like it looks like I have, Nita thought, turning the manual’s pages ruefully.
So the question is: Was the clown the one being ineffective the other day, or was it me? Because the way she felt lately, Nita thought the incompetence was a lot more likely to have been on her side. And how come I got so little from the knight? Was that just because I was having trouble dealing with the way he used the Speech? Or was he hiding something?
And why?
She leaned there on her folded arms for a while, looking rather glumly at the manual, and didn’t even bother looking up when Dairine came padding in wearing one of their dad’s T-shirts, hunting her breakfast. “Morning.”
“Yeah,” Nita said, turning over another page covered with necessary vocabulary that she didn’t know.
Dairine stuck her head in the refrigerator. “My bed creaks now,” she said.
“It’s always creaked,” Nita said as Dairine came out with the milk. “That’s because you never just get into it: you fling yourself onto it. And don’t get me started on the jumping.”
“I think it’s because it just spent the better part of a day down a crevasse full of liquid nitrogen,” Dairine said, getting a bowl for her cereal.
“If it spent any time in liquid nitrogen, it wouldn’t just creak,” Nita said. “It’d shatter.”
“Yeah, well, I’m thinking your wizardry wasn’t temperature-tight,” Dairine said, pouring first cereal and then milk. “I think you dropped a variable.”
“No, I didn’t.”
“I bet you did.”
“Didn’t.”
Dairine gave Nita a look that said, Yes, you did, you idiot, and went out into the dining room with her cereal.
Nita smiled slightly as she turned another page. At least Dairine seemed to be back to normal for the moment. Of course, it might be a ploy to lull me into a false sense of security. But Nita thought her sister knew better than to bother trying to mislead her just now, when Nita’s fuse was shorter than usual. Next time, it might not be just Dairine’s bed that wound up down a crevasse… and Dairine’s present power levels were no longer quite what they’d been a while ago. Nita’s couple of years’ more experience as a wizard might be enough temporarily to keep Dairine in line.
She raised her eyebrows and went back to the vocabulary list. I really wish there were ways to just magically make all this information go into my head, Nita thought. Oh well…
Dairine finished her cereal and went to get dressed, and Nita kept reading, turning page after page in the manual, looking for a hint as to what she might have been missing. It was at least an hour later when Dairine came by again, dressed, with the backpack she used as a book bag over her shoulder; Nita glanced up just long enough to see Dairine putting her coat on, and to notice the small, glowing, rose-colored eye looking at her from inside the bag.
“Have you been upgrading Spot again?” Nita said.
“He’s been upgrading himself,” Dairine said. “Wireless, optical … some other stuff.” She looked affectionately at the bag as she shouldered it, and the little eye on its silvery stalk disappeared back down between the backpack and its flap.
“I wouldn’t let anybody see him, if I were you,” Nita said.
“They can’t. But he can see them. Gotta go, Neets.”
“See you…”
Dairine left. Nita spent some moments more reading the manual in the quiet, until suddenly she realized that if she didn’t get out of there, she was the one who was going to be in trouble for being late. She ran off to get her own backpack, and her manual went floating after her.
***
The rest of the day went by fairly quickly, partly because Nita’s concerns about the communications between her and “her aliens” kept bringing Nita back to the manual in every free moment that wasn’t taken up with class work. She hardly thought seriously about anything else until just before her lunch period, when Nita suddenly remembered that today was when the time and day for her next session with Mr. Millman would be posted.
When the bell rang, she made her way down into the corridor in the south wing of the school, where the administrative offices were, and from there into the main office, where the bulletin board for the special services messages was still located, an old-fashioned system that seemed not to have been supplanted by text messages even though apparently this was supposed to happen “real soon now”. Nita found the pinned-up folded message that said N. CALLAHAN, pulled it off the board, and headed out into the corridor, opening it.
The message said, “Dear Nita: 7:30 A.M., Monday. Hope the magic’s going okay. Don’t forget to bring some cards. I want to find out how to keep them from falling out of my sleeve. R. Millman.”
Nita looked at this and was tempted to shred the note right down to its component atoms. What in the worlds made me say that to him, she thought, shoving the note into the pocket of her jeans and stalking off down the hall.
By the time she got to the cafeteria, though, she’d shrugged off the annoyance and was once again worrying at one aspect of the clown-robot-knight problem: specifically, that he hadn’t used any personal pronouns in their conversation at all. Nita got herself a sandwich and a fruit juice, sat down by herself off to one side, and spent another half hour looking into what recensions of the Speech were built this way. There were five, and mostly species that used them preferred for cultural reasons to imply personal interaction rather than indicating it directly by way of a a redactive or “virtual” pronoun, which—
It’s sounding a little dry in there, Neets…
Nita smiled. You have no idea, she said, and shut the manual. Nita disposed of her lunch tray and went out of the cafeteria, into the small side parking lot. Kit was leaning against the chain-link fence on the far side, hugging himself a little against the cold while he watched a boys’ gym class out in the athletic field running easy laps to cool down after soccer practice.
Nita went to lean against the fence beside him. “You know any card tricks?” she said under her breath.
He looked at her oddly. “No. Why?”
“I did something incredibly stupid. I mentioned magic to Millman at our last meeting. He thought I meant magician stuff, though, the sawing-people-in-half kind of magic. Now he wants me to show him some.”
Kit stared at Nita, then burst out laughing. “You should do some wizardry, and let him think it’s magic. I bet you can do all kinds of fancy card tricks when you can really make them vanish.”
“I hadn’t thought of it that way.” Nita frowned. “I’m not sure I like the idea, though. Making the real thing look like so
mething fake … It’s too much like lying.”
Kit nodded. “What made you mention magic to him at all, though?”
“I wish I could remember. It was an impulse, and I felt like such a dork afterward.” She sighed. “Never mind. Now I have to learn card tricks in my endless free time.”
Kit raised his eyebrows. “You make any headway with your aliens?”
“Yeah. Or rather, I’m not sure.”
“Not sure they’re aliens?”
Nita shook her head. “Not sure they’re aliens plural, anyway. I’m starting to wonder if think I was talking to the same guy both times.”
“But you understood him this last time, anyway.”
“I’m not real sure about that, either. I think I did… but I keep getting the idea he was holding something back, or having trouble saying something. And it could have been important.” She sighed. “Just gonna have to keep trying. What about you? Did you have time to go after your Ordeal kid again?”
“Not yet. Ponch is still worn out from the last time. I’m going to try to get in touch with Darryl again tonight, maybe tomorrow. You sure you don’t want to come along?”
He sounded almost wistful. Nita gave it a moment’s thought, but then shook her head: She might feel more like working today, but she still wasn’t sure of her ability to be of use in a crisis situation. “Give me a little more time,” she said. “I want to work on this Speech problem for the moment. I think if I bear down on it hard enough, I may make a breakthrough.”
“I wouldn’t want to derail you,” Kit said. “But keep me posted.”
“You okay?” Nita said.
Kit looked at her a little strangely. “Why?”
“You look kinda worn out yourself.”
He looked surprised at that, then shrugged. “What Ponch does,” he said, “it takes a lot out of me, too, maybe more than I realize. I do feel a little run down. It’s okay: I’ll get a good night’s sleep tonight and be fine tomorrow.”
“What is going on with Ponch?” Nita said. “You were still looking for answers to that…”