She looked at Nita and nodded slowly. “That was me as well.”
“You could do that again,” Kit said.
Biddy frowned. “I doubt it,” she said. “The worlds aren’t what they used to be, and neither is matter.”
“Your anvil is,” Kit said.
“That can’t be used as anything but an anvil,” Biddy said. “Its nature is set, from time’s beginning almost.”
“But if you could get some more of that old ‘original’ matter—you could do it. You could make another Spear!”
“What do you take me for?!” Biddy said, laughing hopelessly. “You really didn’t understand me. When you live in the physical world, you have to do it in a physical body. Those are the rules. And if you’re going to spend as long in a mortal form as I have, you give up a lot of your power by necessity. It would burn the body out, otherwise, and the brain; physicality just isn’t robust enough to bear our state of being for very long. The memories all ebb away after a while. And why shouldn’t they? I did my work well—too well.”
She laughed, with some bitterness in the sound. “I fell in love with what I made, and couldn’t leave it. You’re quite right that we’re not perfect, especially that way. Once I had finished my part in making this place, I didn’t want anything more but to be here in peace, forever. The One released me to do that—just to be here, and be useful in my small way, until I’m required to give my power back at the end of things. I do my forgework, and live in the place I love.”
“Then make yourself useful,” Kit said, sounding grim. “Otherwise ‘this place you love’ is going to be nothing but a big pile of cinders, after Balor gets through with it.”
Biddy was shaking her head. “This is one use I can’t be. I haven’t the power to pull matter here from the heart of time, or its beginning either! And wizards or not, not even the Seniors have that kind of power!”
“I know someone who does,” Nita said, “at the moment, anyway.” Kit glanced at her, uncomprehending for a moment—then got it, and his eyes glittered. “Never mind that now. The memories may ebb—but you can’t have forgotten how you made that.”
Biddy’s eyes lingered on Fragarach. “No,” she said. “That I remember very well.”
“And the Spear,” Kit said.
“I remember some of the details,” Biddy said softly. “But I had that other Power to help me, the one they called Lugh the All-Crafted.”
“I can’t get you someone who knows how to do everything,” Nita said, grinning, “but I can sure get you someone who thinks she does. Second best, maybe. But take it or leave it.”
Biddy stood there, her eyes downcast, irresolute. “Come on,” Nita said. “We could require it of you, in the One’s name. Once a Power, always a Power, regardless of how much or little of it you have left. Those are the rules, as you say. But—” She broke off.
Nita and Kit stood quiet. Biddy stared at the ground.
She looked up, then. “It’s better than doing nothing, I suppose. Tell me what you want of me.”
“Come have some tea at my aunt’s,” Nita said.
Kit groaned.
***
Some hours later almost all the free chairs in Aunt Annie’s kitchen were full of wizards, all talking hard. Most of them there knew Biddy, and there had been some shock at Nita’s announcement of who else she was besides the local farrier, but Fragarach’s response to Biddy couldn’t be explained in any other way. Shock had been quickly put aside in favor of plan-making.
“It was Ronan’s idea,” Nita said, and Ronan blushed right out to his ears. “We can make another. We can!”
“I’ll entertain explanations of how,” Johnny said, sitting back and stroking his mustache. “Don’t tell me you’re thinking of pinching some ur-matter from Timeheart, either, because it won’t work. Matter there is structured differently from the way matter was at the beginning of Time in this universe.”
“Timeslide, then,” Kit said.
Johnny shook his head. “We would need a wizard with enough power to drive that kind of a slide back far enough. You’re talking billions of years.”
Kit bent over to Nita and said, “Should I?”
“I think you’d better,” Nita said, and sighed. It had been so quiet until now, relatively speaking. “It’s after dinnertime. See if you can do it without raising the alarm, if you know what I mean.”
Kit nodded and went out. “It might help,” Aunt Annie said to Johnny, “if we understood a little more about exactly what kind of matter’s needed.”
“Well, you’ve got a bard around here somewhere, haven’t you?” he said. “Let’s hear the authorized version first, and then Biddy can give us what she remembers of the technicalities, so that we can work on the spelling proper.”
“Hmm,” Aunt Annie said. She went to the door. “Tualha! Kitty kitty kitty! Tuna!”
The kitchen immediately began to fill with meowing cats. “Do you really think this will work, Shaun?” Doris said.
He stretched, then shrugged. “It’s our best chance, I think, considering that no envelope presently extant seems to be suitable. It seems as if the Spear’s soul burns out its containers the way—well.” He looked at Biddy, then away.
The kitty door flapped as Tualha scrambled in through it. She stood there, very small and black, with her small tail pointing straight up in the air, and said, “Mew.”
Nita burst out laughing. “Cut us some slack, Tualha. It’s the Senior for Europe, and he wants your advice.”
“Oh, well, that’s different,” Tualha said. She looked up at Aunt Annie and said, “First things first. What about that tuna?”
“There was a time,” Johnny said, “when bards performed first, and then the lord of the hall gave them largesse.”
Tualha looked disdainfully at him. “What century have you been living in? Tuna,” she said to Nita’s aunt. “And then cream, please.”
Annie’s aunt raised her eyebrows, and went to get it. It was astounding how fast such a small kitten could eat, especially in contrast to all the other cats, who had to be fed too so that they wouldn’t steal Tualha’s food. Eventually she was lifted up on the table and given her saucer of cream there, and she lapped it with a thoughtful air, burping occasionally, while the human wizards sat around and nursed their tea.
“Now then,” Johnny said.
Tualha sat down and began washing her face. “What do you want to know?” she said.
“Tell us if you would, oh bard, the forging of the Spear Lúin.”
Tualha began washing behind one ear. “The Spear of Victory itself came from the city Finias; Arias the poet-smith made it there. The song says that Arias took a star and hammered it on the anvil, and so made the blade of the spear. Then the Tuatha de Danaan brought it with them through the air and the high air when they came to Ireland. And with them it stayed, and gave light to any place it was in, for the burning that was in it.”
Tualha stopped, yawned, and then started in on the other ear. “Then came Balor, and made a tower of glass for himself and his creatures in the sea near Ireland. Balor’s likeness was that of a human, but gross and misformed, and one eye squinted away almost to nothing for the hugeness and horribleness of the other. So great was it that it took four Fomori with forks of iron to pull the eyelid up when Balor wanted it so. And when it opened, what its glance fell on scorched and burned and was poisoned, and blasted off the world and out of it.”
Glances were exchanged around the table. “It was foretold by other wizards,” said Tualha, “that only fire and the spirit of fire would end Balor, and that one would come who had all skills, and was kin to Balor, and would make that end of him. So the Tuatha waited, looking for that one to come.”
“Another of the Powers,” Aunt Annie said, “by the sound of it. And a fairly central one, if Balor is another version of the Lone Power.”
Johnny nodded. Tualha had tucked herself down into meat-loaf shape. “Nuada the King did not know who that one might be,?
?? she said, “so he gathered to him all the great Powers that were in Ireland in those days: Diancecht the physician, and Badb the lady of battles, and the Morrigan, the Great Queen; he gathered in Govan the Smith, and Luchtar the Builder, and Brigit whose name meant the Fiery Arrow, who was healer and smith and poet all together; and cupbearers and druid-wizards and craftsmen of all kinds.
“’And one day they were feasting when a young man came to the door of their great rath and asked to come in. The doorman asked what skill he had. He said he was a warrior, and a harper, and a storyteller too, and a champion in the fight, and a smith, and a cupbearer and a doctor and a wizard and a poet. And when the Powers heard that, They said, “This must be the All-Skilled, our deliverer. Let him in so that we can test his power.” They did that, and the young man could do everything he said he could: and the Ildánach, the all-crafted, is what they nicknamed him. Then they started their plan to drive out Balor and the threat of his Eye, and his creatures the Fomori from Ireland forever.”
Tualha looked thoughtfully at the saucer, then at Aunt Annie. Aunt Annie poured her some more cream. “Thirsty work,” Tualha said, and had a brief drink. “Then,” she said, licking cream off her whiskers, “Lugh went off in private for a long time with Govan the Smith; they took counsel and made a plan, and Lugh had the Spear of Victory brought to him. In secret Lugh and Govan labored for three years, or some say seven, forging the Spear anew. Unquenchable fire they forged into it, and a fierce spirit—”
Tualha yawned, and crouched down in meat-loaf mode once more. “Then when they were done Lugh returned to the great rath of the Tuatha de Danaan with the Spear, just in time to meet a party of the Fomori that had been sent there by Balor to demand a tribute of slaves from the Tuatha. He unwrapped the Spear and called on the Tuatha to cover their eyes, and the Spear roared with rage, and blasted the Fomori to ash on the instant, all but one that he sent back to Balor to tell what had happened, and bring the message of Lugh’s defiance to him.” Tualha rolled over on her side, and yawned again, blinking at them. “Then the war starts. Did you want anything else?”
“No, that’ll do for now. Thank you.”
Something went POW! out in the front yard. All heads turned at that, and there were some concerned expressions; but a moment later they heard the front door slide open, and Kit walked in.
“Noisy, that,” Johnny said. “You weren’t so loud when you left.”
“Not my fault,” Kit said, jerking his thumb over his shoulder.
Behind him, Nita’s sister Dairine walked into the kitchen: twelve years old, small, skinny and bright-eyed, with a shock of red hair, wearing shorts and sneakers and a Batman T-shirt three sizes too large for her: one of Nita’s, actually. Nita started to fume slightly—Dairine had started “borrowing” her clothes lately, and returning them in less than pristine condition—but there were more important things to be concerned about at the moment; she kept her annoyance to herself. Dairine glanced around the kitchen with interest, then said, “Hi, Neets. Hi, Aunt Annie!” And she put the shiny black laptop she was carrying down on the table and went and gave her aunt a hug.
Johnny and Doris and Biddy and Ronan all watched this with some bemusement. “My sister,” Nita said to Johnny. “Dairine.”
Johnny blinked. “This is the Dairine Callahan who—” He paused, then, and laughed at himself. “It would be, wouldn’t it. The youngest ones are always the strongest, after all. They’re just getting a lot younger these days…”
Another chair was pulled in from the living room while introductions were made. Nita had to smile as she watched the laptop sprout spidery legs, shinny down the table leg onto the floor, and wander over to the cat food dish where Bronski was still eating. Bronski hissed at the computer, hit it hard with one paw, and when that didn’t do any good, went out the cat door in a hurry.
Nita looked over at Kit, and said, “Any problems?”
“Nothing significant,” he said. “She’d had her lunch, so we have a few hours.”
“You brief her?”
“I know what you’re trying to do, more or less,” Dairine said, reaching out to take a cookie from the fresh packet their aunt had brought out. “Mmm.” She chewed for a few seconds, then said, “It’s all been updating itself in the manual précis in Spot for the past few days.” She nodded over at the laptop, which was still examining the cat food dish with interest.
“The language is interesting,” Johnny said, leaning back in his chair. “‘Took a star and hammered it on the anvil—’”
“When I was in Timeheart, I used meteoric iron,” Biddy said quietly. “There seemed to be a certain… appropriateness to it.”
“There’s plenty of that around,” Kit said. “Not all in museums, either.”
“But not ur-matter,” Doris said. “You would need meteoric iron from around the time of the birth of the Universe.”
Dairine shook her head. “It couldn’t be meteoric,” she said. “That early in the physical universe, there weren’t any planetary bodies to shatter and turn into meteors, yet; not even in the oldest galaxies.” She looked at Nita for confirmation: Nita nodded. “You’re going to have to get real starsteel.”
The older wizards looked at her. “From the nucleus of a star?” Johnny said.
Dairine looked at him with interest. “Plenty of iron inside stars, especially the type A’s and F’s.”
Biddy stared at Dairine. “You’re suggesting that someone should put one end of a timeslide into the center of a star light-years away and millions of years back in time, and fasten the other end here? And then do what?”
“Forge what comes out at this end,” Dairine said. “That’s your department, though. You did that—” She glanced over into the next room, where Fragarach lay on a sideboard, with several layers of spell-warding glowing around it to keep its power from combining disastrously with that of the Cup in the back office. “The techniques shouldn’t be so different.”
“You really think you can do this?” Doris said to Dairine.
“You mean, can I get you what you need?” Dairine said. She sat back in her chair and let her eyes drop closed a little, and then began to speak in the Speech. It was not exactly a spell, but the schematic for one, the outline, with certain key words and phrases left out so that nothing untoward would start to happen just yet.
Nita lost the thread of it after about a minute: she had never heard any spell so complex in her life, and several parts of it that she did understand, the power control parameters and the description of the matter that would be conducted down the timeslide, along with several Names to be invoked, all rattled her badly. Nita knew that her sister had, in some ways,partly become the manual since her own Ordeal; and by way of semi-parenthood, Dairine had the power of a whole race of sentient computer wizards to draw on. But Nita had not had those facts brought home to her quite so definitely as they were being brought home now. She shivered. It was a little like being big sister to a nuclear explosion that could pick its own time to go off, and was thinking of doing it soon.
Dairine stopped and opened her eyes again. “That’s the procedure,” she said. “It won’t be easy, but at least it’s not too complicated. When do you want to do it?”
Doris was shaking her head. “‘Forged fire into it,’” she said. “That spell would certainly produce that result. Shaun?”
Johnny was looking very thoughtful. “If the other end of the slide were to slip out of place in either location or time,” he said to Dairine, “it could annihilate the Earth. You realize that, of course.”
Dairine shrugged. “At the rate things are going, if this problem doesn’t get solved, people might be thankful for something like that shortly. So if I were you, I’d take the chance you’ve got. I can do this now, but whether I’ll have the power next week, or next month—” She shrugged again. “If the world still exists next week or next month. I’m running on borrowed time, they tell me, as far as my power levels go.”