“Seems to be a lot of that going around,” Kit said.
Johnny nodded. “They built this place on the site of an old holy well—it’s still here. But there’s more than that. Matrix had been a center for a lot of kinds of faith, or power, over the year. The Mother Goddesses were honored here first—that’s where its first name came from. Matrix means ‘womb,’ but the older form was probably ‘matricis’—the Castle of the Mothers. Then for a while I think the well was sacred to Brigit, the old fire-goddess; and later to Saint Brigid, the Mary of the Gael as they called her. Other mysteries were here later. There was some connection with the Knights Templar. Some of them said this was one of the Grail Castles. But all those came later. We’ve got much older business tonight...”
“Are you about ready?” Aunt Annie said.
“Just about. Waiting on Biddy and Dairine. Ronan’s in the back with Doris, making tea.”
“Where else,” Kit muttered.
“Give it time, you’ll get used to it,” Nita said. She wandered over to the diagram that Johnny was working on, noticing the elegance and cleanliness of it. Half the figures in the Speech that she was used to tracing out laboriously and in whole, here were only hinted at; a single graceful stroke “holding the place” for a figure or diagram much more complex. I guess when you’re Senior for half a continent, though, you get enough practice to be able to do that...
It was a big five-noded diagram, with a separate circle for each of the Treasures—each written around with the reinforcing and warding spells that each specific Treasure would need—and a fourth empty circle for the starsteel that would become the Spear. That fourth circle was particularly densely written-in, and Nita could understand why. The spell there was for the magnetic bottle that would be needed to confine the starsteel and cool it down until it was safe to work; for in its native condition inside the star it would not be solid metal, or even molten, but iron plasma at something more than 7000 degrees Kelvin. If there was any specific part of the spell diagram Nita would have been interested in double-checking, that was it. But again the shorthand that Johnny was using was beyond her.
Nita stopped then, suddenly, and stared down at the floor as Johnny finished one character of the spell diagram and touched it with the rowan rod. The acrylic flared briefly bright, then died down again, and Johnny glanced up at her. “Something wrong?”
“There’s something down there.”
She was aware of Kit looking at her uncomprehendingly from off to one side, where he had been examining a set of old pikes mounted against the wall. “Yes, there is,” Johnny said. “I didn’t expect you to feel it, but then a lot of wizards older and more experienced than you don’t. There’s a power in the earth here; not the earth itself, though. The water table runs fairly high hereabouts, and this castle’s element is water. No surprise, since the place is more or less haunted by the ‘female principle.’ You saw the little stream that runs down by the forge, out by where you parked? We’ll be doing work down there later.”
Nita stood there just feeling it—a long, slow swelling of power, biding its time, caring nothing for the flash and dazzle and busyness of life, but only for slow nourishment, things growing, things prospering, birth, being. She glanced up at Johnny and said, “This is the only place where we could do what we have to, isn’t it.”
“To keep fire from getting out of hand,” he said, “you always need water,. One way or another, we’ve got 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. “Did 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; to work with too shortened a 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 shakin’? 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. Her laptop/manual 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 still, she said privately.
If she screws this up, we all will be, Kit replied. Oh well...we’ve been in worse spots.
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 small consolation. Nita 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 like 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 six inches thick and six inches wide, and about two feet long. The bar had a long deep groove about three inches by three, right down the length of it, to within about an inch 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 twenty pounds.”
“I mean in volume.”
Biddy looked surprised. “I don’t usually think of it in those terms. —About a liter, I’d say.”
“Hmm.” Dairine looked at the mold, then glanced at Spot the laptop. 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 that with no eyes was a good question.
“Yeah,” she s
aid to Spot. Then 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 800 Fahrenheit.”
“Okay.” Dairine looked thoughtful. “You want some carbon in with the iron?”
“That would be a good idea. 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. “Okay,” 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. The whole thing blazed, and the knotwork designs running around its bowl and foot were so bright that to Nita’s dazzled eyes they looked as if they were moving. Doris carefully bent down to place the Cup in the center of the circle waiting for it. It burned even brighter, and the light-liquid inside it moved gently and threw ripples of brightness on the high ceiling.
“Water knows its own,” 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, so 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. But all the same, the soft rushing sound that she more felt than heard was washing against the boundaries of the wizardry, becoming more insistent as the spell progressed, like waves pushing harder and harder against a coastline as the storm comes up behind them.
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 was clear and empty before her, or seemed that way. The Lia Fáil 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 onto 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 forever, 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—
Johnny’s voice stopped. He 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 was sticking her. Dairine was reciting the spell that would build the timeslide, the long pipeline through spacetime that would conduct the starsteel 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… which was the source of the pins-and-needles discomfort.
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 surrounding them. They stood, all of them, on or around a glowing webwork in the middle of nothingness. But this was a nothingness that was strewn with stars, cluttered with them, crowded with them. They’re too close 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; here and there they were so close that they were pulling matter out of one another in bizarrely warped multiple-lobed accretion disks. New stars were forming all over the place, or trying to, as they stole matter from one another, swirled, kindled as NIta 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!! 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 in a bright skein or stream, 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—Nita 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. Or more accurately, 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—