Диана Дуэйн - Wizards At War

" "I can't believe she could even think I'd do something like that. You live with somebody all your life and then-" Kit threw his hands in the air, let them fall again, a helpless gesture. Ronan appeared off to one side of their hardened– space platform. "I've got just the thing," he said, coming over to them. "There's a big stony outcrop a couple of miles from the end of the tunnels of the biggest city." "So what did you find?" Nita said. "Caves?" Ronan nodded. "A big bubble cavern with no connection to the city tunnels," he said. "But there's plenty of room there for all our pup tents, and no surface access of any size; no one's going to come sneaking up on us." He glanced over at Nita. "You want to call your dad now?" "Yeah," Nita said, and got out her phone. "Feed the cave coordinates to our manuals, huh?" "And to me," Sker'ret said. "I'll want them for the short-term transits." Ronan headed over to where Sker'ret was working with Filif on the spell diagrams. As Nita dialed her phone, Ponch got up from where he'd been lying and ambled over to Kit, his tail swinging idly. We're going now? he said. "Yup," Kit said. Good. I'm hungry! Kit reached down to scratch behind Ponch's ears. "It's all about dinner or playing or sleep with you, isn't it?" he said. Not all, Ponch said in a slightly hurt tone of voice. There are other things. Sometimes it's about squirrels. "Oh, great," Nita said under her breath. "What now?" Kit glanced over at her. Nita gave him another of those exasperated looks and hit the button that started up her cell's speakerphone function. At the other end-the other end of the galaxy, or the universe, for all Kit knew-the phone was ringing. And ringing, and ringing, and ringing… "Nobody's home," Nita muttered. She started dialing again. "Maybe your dad's at work?" Kit said. "I sure hope so," Nita said. "Not that I'm sure what time it is there." But when the call started to go through, that number, too, just kept ringing. After a few rings someone picked up. Kit saw Nita's expression go a little less scared. "Hi, this is Harry Callahan-" "Daddy! What time is it? I thought you'd be-" "-at Callahan's Florists," said her dad's voice. "Unfortunately there's no one available in the shop to take your call right now. Our normal business hours are 8:00 a.m. to 5:30 PM. Monday through Friday-" Nita hung up. "Okay," she said. "His cell phone-" She dialed again. But this time all she got was a different recorded message, a digital one. "The party you are dialing is not available at this time. Please try again later-" Nita hung up again, starting to look upset. "This makes no sense," she said. "You could try getting hold of Dairine," Kit said. "Maybe she's heard something." Nita nodded, pulled her manual out, and opened the back cover, where she kept her messaging routines. "Dairine Callahan," she said to the manual. The back page blanked. Then a single phrase in the Speech came up out of the whiteness: "Recipient is out of ambit or in transit, and is not available. Record a message for delivery when ambit or transit status changes?" Nita rolled her eyes. "Yeah, Dair, it's me," she said. "Have you heard anything from Dad? Call me back in the book as soon as you can. End message." The page nickered, spelled the message out in the Speech, and then blanked it. "Saved for delayed send." "Thanks," Nita said. "Now get me Tom Swale or Carl Romeo, and flag it urgent." The back page blanked. Then a single phrase came up: "Messaging in abeyance." "Tn abeyance'?" Nita said. "What's that mean?" "And not even any 'Try again later,'" Kit muttered. "What's going on back there?" Nita shook her head, closed her manual, and picked up her phone again. She punched in the number for Tom's house, hit the speakerphone function. Once again the dialing tone tinkled through its usual sequence, followed by a long silence. w Operational Pause Nita almost hung up, but at last the phone at the other end started ringing. And it rang, and rang, and rang… She let out a long breath, hung up. "Maybe they're out somewhere," Kit said. "Why do I not believe it's that simple?" Nita covered her eyes with one hand. "They always have a wizardry that forwards calls from wizards to their cells," she said, looking up. "And they're hardly ever both not there-" "They were last week," Kit said, "and you know what that was about." He was trying hard to sound calm, but he wasn't sure how well it was working. Nita rubbed her face. "Look," she said. "I'm really freaked now. I'm not going to be any good here until I check on things back home and make sure my dad's okay. It won't take me long." But we just got here! was the first thing Kit wanted to say. He resisted the urge. "Look, I know what you're thinking," Nita said. "I don't care. What good am I going to be for anything if I'm not sure what's going on with my dad?! And, Kit, what if we did just have another of those big time lags? If it's all of a sudden five days later, we'd better find out about it now-because if Dairine and I have to go back and cover for ourselves before school starts making trouble for my dad…" She looked furious and frustrated. Kit let out a long breath, because she was right. "Okay," Kit said. "But how're you going to do this?" Sker'ret had finished conferring with Filif, and now came toddling over to them. "You could always send a fetch back home to see what's going on," Sker'ret said. Nita thought about that, then shook her head. "No way," she said. "It's not just about what / need to see. If my dad's upset already, dealing with a transparent version of me that can't get solid when he needs a hug isn't going to do him any good at all." "Ponch can't take you," Kit said. "We're going to need him here. And even if we didn't, you'd run into the same time lag problem all over again." "I'll do a direct gating," Nita said. "The only reason we needed Ponch to get here was because we didn't know where we were going. Now that we've got the coordinates for Rashah, I can gate straight in and out." She glanced at Ronan. "You can cover for that, too?" / can, said the Champion, sounding uneasy, but we need to keep this kind of thing to a minimum. "For once the spell won't have to be terribly complex," Nita said. "We've all got the power now to push gatings through just by brute force, rather than finesse." "I can coach you on how to compensate for any equivalent lag," Sker'ret said, "now that we know how much of it we're dealing with. In fact, it'd make sense to take that information back to the Crossings-it'll help my sibs keep things running there for a little longer." He glanced over at Kit and Ronan and Filif. "Can you spare me? I won't be gone any longer than Nita is." "While we're still just doing our first on-the-ground surveys," Kit said, "sure. And it makes sense for you to go out at the same time as Neets." He glanced over at Ronan. "It means you'll have only one transit to cover instead of two." "Let's get ready for it, then," Sker'ret said. "I'll get the gating set up." He scuttled away in the darkness to start altering one of the transit circles. "I'll check your spelling," Filif said, going after him. Nita watched them go, then glanced back at Kit. "You're annoyed at me," she said. Kit gave Nita a look, hoping she wasn't going to force him to answer. She returned the look, in spades. Finally Kit said, "Not annoyed. But you're holding out on me. It's not just your dad, is it? It's Tom and Carl, too. Isn't it?" For a long moment, Nita didn't say anything. Then she sighed. "Look, I know we had to run with the information that Ronan and the Champion gave us. But I still feel like we've run out on our Seniors, and they probably got worried about us when they came looking for us and couldn't find us anywhere." "You're not going to tell them anything-" "Of course I'm not going to tell them anything! But they just need to know we're okay." She was quiet for a moment. "And that's still not all of it," Kit said. Once again, and for a much longer time, Nita said nothing. "Look," Kit said, "don't say anything if you don't want to; I guess it's not really important-" "You're eavesdropping on my brains again," Nita said. Her tone was resigned. "No," Kit said, and blushed. "I just overheard– You know how it is. More a feeling than a thought." "Yeah," Nita said. "I know how it is." The look she gave him left Kit embarrassed enough to want to glance away; but he didn't. "A feeling is all it is," Nita said. "I wish I had something more concrete to go on than a hunch! But that's all I've got. There's something back that way that needs doing, and I have to go there and find out what it is, and do it. And I hate acting like being on Rashah is freaking me out enough to make me immediately run away!" "I know that's not it," Kit said. "Do you?" said Nita. Now it was Kit's turn to pause. Is it smart to tell her how seriously scared I am? he thought. Is it going to make her feel worse? "Yeah, I do," Kit said at last. "I don't want to spend a minute more here than I have to. But I don't have any hunches, and you do. So get out of here and do what you have to. And do one thing for me?" "Sure." "Call my mom when you get there? Let her know we're okay." "Yeah," Nita said. "No problem." They turned back to the others. "We're done here," Sker'ret said. "Filif's checked everything over, and we've got the coordinates for the cave. We'll meet you there when we're finished." "Then you two go on," Kit said. "We won't do anything too exciting until you get back." "Why do I have serious doubts about that?" Nita said. But she smiled, even though the smile was wan. "Look, if Dairine turns up before we get back-" "I'll fill her in." Nita went over to where Sker'ret was standing in one of the spell diagrams. "You ready?" she said to Ronan. He lifted the Spear of Light. "Go," he said. The Spear flared into life. Nita and Sker'ret began to speak in the Speech together. Under their feet, the spell diagram came alive with light-the spoken words chasing their way around the circle, knotting in the wizard's knot, then blazing up too blindingly to let a viewer see individual characters. Nita and Sker'ret vanished. As they did, Kit once again caught what he'd "overheard" before, that strange feeling of fear combined with Nita's sense of something that absolutely had to be done. And mixed with it, bizarrely, he could hear a sort of buzzing sound, sharp and abrupt, repeating again and again. Kit frowned. Now where've I heard that sound beforef If I didn't know better, I'd think it was somebody using some kind of energy weapon… He didn't hear anything further. Weird, Kit thought. Never mind. To Filif, who was now standing over Sker'ret's short-term transit spell diagrams, he said, "How's everything look?" "Perfect." Ponch, sitting there looking down at the planet, now stood up again and shook himself all over. Are we going finding again? "Pretty soon," Kit said. "But we should get to the cave so you can have some dinner first." Ponch began to jump up and down excitedly. "Okay, okay, do it over here," he said, leading Kit to one of the transit circles Sker'ret had set up. Nearby, Ronan and Filif each stepped into one of the others. Ronan glanced over at him. "Ready?" "Ready." They vanished. The darkness and silence of the cave was total, and the air was absolutely still, except for the gentle wavering of the heat they felt rising from the surface on which they stood. The stifling air was slightly tainted with an oily smell that reminded Kit of the last time the repairmen had to be called in to deal with the furnace at home. Very slowly Ronan allowed the Spear of Light to show itself in a faint ghostly glimmer of blade, while Filif's eye-berries glowed at their softest. Kit spoke the words of his small wizard-light spell and pushed it loose into the air, where the tiny spark of it hung and made a dim green-blue glow. Around them on all sides, the cavern stretched out, vast, empty, the distant walls glittering faintly.Читать дальше