He stared at it. “What’s this?”
“That’s a whole two hundred dong, and right now you should count yourself lucky that our money doesn’t come any smaller. Now tell me you’ve got the appendix for that spell ready!”
“Had it five minutes ago,” Darryl said, flashing Kit the briefest grin. He opened the WizPod he was carrying, pushed it into Nguyet’s hands, and turned to the others. “I had a feeling you’d be back around now.”
“Should you be making money off that kind of thing?” Kit said.
“It wasn’t a Feeling,” Darryl said. “Just a feeling.” He glanced at Ronan and bit his lip. “Sometimes I don’t like being right, though.”
“It’s okay,” Nita said. “It could have been a lot worse. And what you told us helped. How’re you doing?”
“Busy,” Darryl said. “I’m not as good as some people at writing new spells from scratch, but I’m getting good at taking them apart and putting them back together in new ways if they’re not working.”
“Troubleshooting,” Kit said as they moonwalked around the spell, carefully avoiding stepping or bouncing on the many other kids who were kneeling around the rim of the diagram and adding, or checking, their names in the Speech.
“Yeah. And this one’s needed it, because we’ve been artificially increasing the spell’s output.”
Nita had already noticed the two large circles enclosed within the main one, each smaller circle bumped up against the outside of the diagram. “Nguyet goes in one,” she said. “Tuyet goes in the other. And then they take the power that everybody else puts into the pool, and bounce it back and forth.”
“You got it. Took us a few times to get it right when someone came up with the idea.”
“‘Someone’?” Kit said, looking at Darryl with good-natured skepticism.
“Oh, okay, it was me,” Darryl said.
“I’m beginning to think you were worth the trouble,” Kit said, sounding impressed.
“It’s the way a laser works,” Nita said. “But with all these separate power sources, it must get complicated.”
“It did,” Darryl said. “It does. Which is why I gotta go give them a hand with the final setup.”
“Got any ‘feelings’?” Kit said.
Darryl looked at him, and that small sharp face that was almost always smiling now lost its smile. He shook his head. “We’re on our own,” he said. “Later.”
“Dai,” Kit said. Darryl headed off.
The wizards milling around the edges of the spell were now moving in closer to it. Kit knelt down and tucked his name into one of the open receptor sites; Nita did the same. Across the diagram, she saw small, trim Tuyet in his long jacket stepping into the diagram and carefully picking his way among the various statements and routines to stand in the farther of the two inner circles. Just in front of them, Nguyet was making for the other circle as Nita straightened up. “Nguyet,” she said, “aren’t there some other pairs of twins up here? You could increase the power feed to this even more—”
“Won’t work,” Nguyet said. “We’ve got three pairs of identical twins, but if identicals try to bounce a spell back and forth between them, it just cancels out. Only two-egg twins are far enough out of phase to keep the spell from canceling and close enough to make it augment. You ready?”
Nita nodded, and Nguyet headed off for her circle. Nita glanced down to her left along the outer arc, past Kit, and saw Dairine and Roshaun kneeling about a hundred yards down, with Spot crouching just outside the circle, between them. A movement behind her caught her attention, and Nita looked over her shoulder to see Carmela sitting down cross-legged a little ways behind them. “I’ll sit this one out,” she said, looking out across the spell diagram with an intrigued expression.
Kit glanced at Nita with a resigned look. Take my advice, Nita said silently. If any of us walk away from this… at your earliest convenience, get her another curling iron!
He smiled slightly. Yeah. And, Neets—if we don’t walk away from this—
Normally she would have said something reassuring right away. But she was desperately tired, and very nervous… and the darkness above them continued to grow. There’s always Timeheart, she said.
Yeah.
Kit turned to look at Ponch, who was now sitting beside him, looking out alertly over the spell. Big guy, he said silently, you need to promise me something.
Okay!
If something bad happens to us, you need to get Carmela out of here.
Sure. And you, too—
I don’t know about that, Kit said. But make sure you get Carmela out, hear me? Take her home, and then get Mama and Pop, and Nita’s dad, and take them away from Earth. Take them somewhere safe.
Ponch blinked. But why?
Look, explaining’s going to take too long. Just promise me!
Ponch started to look upset. Nita blinked hard at the distress in his face and in his thought. All right, but—
“Okay,” Nguyet said to all the wizards gathered around the circle. She didn’t need to raise her voice: anyone whose name was written into that spell could hear her as clearly as if she were standing next to them. “Let’s do this just like the last time, but let’s have this one work. Start with the knot, end with the knot… now!”
All the voices beginning to recite the spell—either from the manual in front of each wizard’s eyes or from the larger diagram in front of them—made a silence that swiftly drowned out all the lesser sounds associated with so big a group. All the many voices started to sound like one gigantic one, and the universe leaned in to listen, not once but a thousand times, three thousand times, and more. Nita read along with everybody else as far as she needed to, but her attention was on the line of light that ran from where she’d put her hands down on either side of her manual, out into the spell itself. Next to her, she could see the light of donated energy running into the spell from Kit. Responding to the growing silence, Nita could feel the peridexis moving at the back of her mind, growing, pouring energy out into her for her use, and ready to give as much as she asked of it. But remember, if you ask it for too much, it’ll give you too much, and you’ll burn yourself to a crisp…
Nita watched Nguyet over at her side of the circle, and Tuyet at the other. Both of them stood still as statues, their hands held out toward each other. There was no other physical sign of what was going on with them, but Nita could feel the power that she and all the other wizards were pouring into the spell as they spoke, and could feel each half of the twychild taking that power, sending it along to the other one, standing briefly empty to receive what the other sent; then sending it back again, and again.
The power grew. The wizards finished speaking the spell, which was, after all, a fairly simple thing, describing how one wanted something to be farther away. Three thousand voices and minds, or more, said the last words of the wizard’s knot together, and fell silent. But between those two out in the middle of the spell diagram, the power kept going back and forth. Nguyet’s and Tuyet’s outlines began to shimmer as if Nita were seeing them through a haze of heat. The sense of something actively dangerous going on started to build inside Nita, so that she very much wanted to get up and back away. But there was nowhere to back away to, and, anyway, everybody else, no matter how alarmed they looked, was holding very still. She shot a glance at Kit, who was sitting there with his fists clenched, tense but unmoving. Behind him, Ponch had begun to whimper softly.
Back and forth between the twychild the power went, back and forth. Between Nguyet and Tuyet, the air had begun to burst out in small sparks of power, wizardly energy looking for somewhere to discharge itself but not finding any way to escape. The power trapped in the air inside the spell-circle built and built, until Nita’s hair started to stand on end and her skin prickled with it. They can’t possibly hold it in any more! she thought. It’s going to blow! They can’t possibly—
Inside the circle, the reflected and re-reflected power just kept building and buildi
ng; the sparkles and flares of its attempted discharge got brighter and brighter, spreading away from the corridor between the twychild and right through the circle, beating right up against the boundaries of it like waves against a storm wall. The power climbed the invisible walls, held in by them and raving against them; it arched up and over until it completely filled the spell’s dome. Inside the dome, the fog of concentrated, concentrating power thickened, the discharge flashes filling every cubic foot of air until Tuyet and Nguyet couldn’t be seen at all. Whether she could see them or not, Nita concentrated on not even twitching, not doing anything that might distract the wizards inside the circle.
And then the spell boundary directly above them vanished.
Everything inside the dome went furiously, blindingly white. Nothing could have prepared Nita for the huge flare of wizardly fire that poured up and out of Daedalus crater, up and out into space, and fled, faster than any normal light, out past Earth’s orbit—three thousand wizards’ worth of wizardry, multiplied who knew how many times. Nita sensed rather than saw the wavefront of the wizardry spilling out across local space like the expanding surface of a blown bubble, speeding away, spreading, pushing before it everything it met. A storm of the micrometeorites that followed Earth around in its orbit vaporized as it impacted them; the ions themselves glowed and sheeted across the surface of the outward-speeding sphere like flattened-out auroras.
Nita tried to rub some sight back into her eyes, craning her neck upward. The spell went blasting outward, a rainbow bubble half the width of the sky, growing fainter as it went but not getting any less strong; it was accelerating as it got closer to the Pullulus. All around her, the other wizards were looking up, watching the spell get closer and closer to its target. A murmur of excitement started to go up among them as some of them started to feel what Nita did—a strange roiling out in the darkness, a sense of something that was darkly alive reacting with fear to something threatening that was coming at it faster and faster.
Nita looked out across the spell diagram, saw Nguyet and Tuyet standing there in their circles, shaking with effort, but watching what was happening with all the others. Out in the darkness, something was furious, something was frightened. Come on, Nita thought, come on!
She held her breath. There was a long, long pause, and then the outflung boundary of the wizardry flared as it struck the substance it had been intended for. Everyone who had been connected to that wizardry felt the resistance of that target in their bones. But the wizardry kept going. The light of it flared in all their minds as it hit the Pullulus, pushed it outward, farther outward. A second later, the wizards started to cheer—
—and the wave front flared out, vanishing.
Nita stared up, unbelieving. No!
The Pullulus was still there. That darkness swallowed the last of the rainbow, snuffed it out, absorbed all the power that had been poured into it…
…and plunged inward through the orbit of Mars, faster than light, faster than darkness, heading for the Earth.
Beside Nita, Kit looked up at the rapidly darkening sky in complete shock.
Ponch put his head under Kit’s arm. Was that it? he said. Can we go home now?
Nita was hiding her face in her hands. Out in the spell diagram, Tuyet and Nguyet collapsed. Along with numerous others, Kit scrambled to his feet and ran across the diagram, heading for Tuyet. Ponch galloped after them. Darryl was one of those who wound up closest to Kit and who got to Tuyet first. Kit slipped an arm under his head, and Darryl boosted him from behind. It was shocking how light Tuyet felt, almost as if the power he and his sister had been channeling had burned him out from inside.
“Tuyet!” Darryl said. “Come on, guy.”
“What about Ngu—,” Tuyet said weakly.
Kit glanced over his shoulder. Others were helping Nguyet. “I think she’s okay,” he said.
“No, she’s not,” Tuyet said. “I can feel it. Burned. Burned out.”
Kit shook his head. “It didn’t work,” he breathed. “With all that power, how could it not work?”
“It did work,” Tuyet said, hardly above a whisper. “It just wasn’t enough.” He sounded desperately tired. “Look,” he said. “It’s coming back.”
Kit absolutely didn’t want to look. He could feel perfectly well what was happening. He looked at Darryl. “Now what?” he said.
“Now, this,” said a voice from the side of the circle. “And perhaps this will be enough.”
Everybody looked over that way. Roshaun had stood up from beside Dairine and Spot. There he stood in that long, floppy T-shirt, his expression grim but not desperate. Around his neck, in the collar he had worn ever since coming back from Wellakh with Dairine, that great orange-amber stone burned like fire. As they watched, he slipped the collar off and held it in his hands.
Dairine got up, looking at him warily. “What’re you thinking of?” she said, sounding slightly panic-stricken.
“It is what I did earlier,” Roshaun said, “to fill in the cavern floor back on Rashah. But here there is no need to be so restrained.”
“Are you nuts?” Dairine said. “Restraint is the only way to treat that spell! Moving little amounts of matter around is one thing, but you can’t just pull out the kind of energy you’d need to deal with that and—”
“I have done it before,” Roshaun said. “Not with a strange star, granted. But yours is no longer so strange. Also, this is your world’s best chance now. If time is all we need to buy—”
“You’re not doing it alone!” Dairine said.
His look got wry. “It had not occurred to me that I’d be able to stop you,” Roshaun said. “And perhaps Spot will also participate.”
“Naturally,” Spot said.
Kit threw a look back at Nita as he pulled off his jacket. What are they up to now? he said.
Nita shook her head.
Kit folded the jacket up and tucked it under Tuyet’s head. Roshaun had stepped a little distance away from the spell diagram, and now was simply standing and looking down at that huge gem in his hands. A moment later he straightened up, settled the collar about his neck again, and began to speak quietly in the Speech. Dairine stood up a few feet away from him with her arms folded, her eyes half closed, as if trying to remember something; crouching on the dusty ground between the two of them, Spot put up a number of eyes, enough to watch them both at once, and held very still.
The silence of a listening universe came down on all the wizards near them. Kit watched, but for a long while nothing seemed to happen; Roshaun and Dairine spoke in unison, more and more quietly, as if they didn’t need to hear each other speaking out loud. And, slowly, Roshaun began to stand out from his surroundings.
At least that was the way it looked at first. For the first minute or so, Roshaun simply looked more definite than the other wizards around him. But then it became plain that there was more light about him than what fell on him from the various wizard-lights hovering about. Then the glow became more obvious. The effect was strange, for it wasn’t as if Roshaun himself was glowing; rather, he was merely the vessel for something else inside him that was the true source of the increasing light.
The light strengthened, slowly gaining a dangerous quality. Roshaun was less a vessel, now, than a crucible, resisting the power inside him, glowing as a result of that resistance. Kit found himself remembering the way the Champion had looked back on Rashah, like a statue of molten metal. This, though, was different, scarier, for at all times the Champion had seemed to be in control of what was going on. Looking at Roshaun, Kit got a clear sense of Roshaun’s struggle with the terrible force inside him, something he was holding in check only with the greatest difficulty. That force was ready every moment to burst free, but Roshaun was spending all his energy to contain it until the moment was right. Behind him, Dairine was beginning to burn with some of that same fire, less violently, but also with a look of less concentration. Her attention was all on Roshaun now; Kit could tell it was, even tho
ugh Dairine’s eyes were squeezed tightly shut.
Very slowly, like someone afraid to lose his balance, Roshaun lifted his arms. All that hair of his was beginning to stir around him now, as if in a growing wind. His eyes were closed, too, and a look of utter concentration had taken possession of his face. He brought his arms around in front of him, put the hands together, and within them materialized the little globe of burning light that was the way he communicated with the Aethyrs; but for once it was the least bright thing about him, dim by comparison with the fire that burned in him.
Roshaun and Dairine both looked up at the sky. At the same moment, Spot’s eyes all turned upward.
The little spark of Roshaun’s manual-globe went out, and light burst upward from him.
It was like being hit in the face. Kit had to turn his head. The whole lunar landscape was lit as if by the light of day. But it was the light of day, the Sun’s own light, borrowed, channeled, concentrated, and aimed like a spear at the inward-pressing tool of their enemy. That fire burned upward and outward and struck straight through the Pullulus.
It screamed. Where that beam struck, the Pullulus vanished utterly. Elsewhere, on either side of it, the darkness shrank away and left clean space and starlight showing. The beam moved slowly through the bulk of the Pullulus, shocking it backward and away, cutting through it like a knife.
But it’s not wide enough, Kit thought, desperate. This isn’t going to do it, either. It needs—
It was almost as if Roshaun had heard him thinking. Above them, the beam broadened out. Roshaun’s expression and stance didn’t alter in the slightest, but Kit could feel the strain on him increase. Dairine was perfectly still, but she was sharing more vividly now in that inward burning, and down on the ground, even Spot was beginning to glow from inside. The beam broadened. The silent screaming of the Pullulus got louder.
Roshaun’s eyes opened wide. It was a look of complete surprise and, a second later, of regret, for something that should have worked, really should have—