Диана Дуэйн - Wizards At War

The floor was curved slightly upward toward the far walls, so that the four of them seemed to be standing in the middle of a huge, pale, shallow bowl. In such low light, the ceiling was invisible. There's nothing here, the Champion said after a moment. We're safe enough. Kit let his light get about as bright as a hundred– watt bulb, and the Spear flared up into its full glory; Ronan let the shaft of the Spear sink into the stone of the floor and fasten itself there. Filif ' berries paled down. They could now see the ceiling, at least a hundred feet above them, maybe more. A bristling of tiny thin stalactites, probably the result of many centuries of trickling water, hung from it like a coarse, thick fur. Here and there the floor was bumpy with little walnut– sized lumps of dripped-down mineral salts, which crunched underfoot when Kit experimentally stepped on them. "Was this area volcanic once?" Filif said. "Could have been," Kit said. "I think the magma underneath burped out a big gas bubble… then it all got pushed up toward the surface. The gas got out, the water got in…" "Not too much of it," Ronan said, "fortunately for us. Otherwise, there might be other ways in." He looked around, satisfied. Kit nodded and reached into his otherspace pocket for the pup-tent interface. He hung it in the air and pulled the door down. Ponch dashed through it. "Back in a minute," Kit said. He went after Ponch, popped open a can of dog food, and emptied it into one of the waiting bowls. Then he poured some water into another dish from an open bottle. Ponch turned in a few happy circles and then began noisily and happily eating. Kit rooted around in the piles of supplies for one of the prepackaged sandwiches his mother had left for him, unwrapped it, and took a moment to stuff it into his face. Then he stepped out through the interface with the second half of the sandwich. Ronan had vanished into his own pup tent. Filif stood off to one side, looking down at the bright circle of another transport spell, which was now etching itself in burning lines into the stone. "Sker'ret gave me a compacted version of the transport routine," Filif said, "for transfers from here to the outer surface." He brought up his own implementation of the wizard's manual, which manifested itself as a sort of fog that clung about his branches. In that fog Kit could see a schematic of the immediate neighborhood of the planet's surface, with the main city-hive marked on it. "There's a main trail from the city-hive that passes not too far from here," Filif said. "We can make our way easily enough to it from our transit point. Since these creatures are so scent-sensitive, we should put the outside end of the transit wizardry in a little loop that leads from the path and goes back to it, so that it won't be obvious to any Yaldiv stumbling on it that our trail goes only so far and stops." "It'll look as if we just wandered off the main path a little and then right back again," Kit said. "Great." He ruffled up Filif's branches a little, affectionately. Filif was such a hardworking wizard, so self-effacing, but so good at what he did, that Kit was coming to admire him immensely. "You hungry? You should get yourself something." "I'll root in a while," Filif said. "I want to make sure this is in order first. And this-" A couple of Filif's branch-fronds reached inward to touch each other, then parted again. Between them stretched a thin filament of green wizardly fire, the most delicate possible chain of characters in the Speech. As Filif stretched the chain out, it became more and more complex, like a single strand of spiderweb becoming the whole web, then a complex of webs in three dimensions, building a shape in the air. Filif drifted backward from where he had originally been standing, and the green-fire construct stayed anchored in the air and grew upward and outward, becoming more and more complex every minute. It resolved into the big oval shape of a Yaldiv's body, spreading outward into the legs and the claws, the light then filling the innards of the shape as it sketched itself on the air. Shortly the shape of a complete Yaldiv hung there, resting lightly on its walking claws, towering over Filif and Kit. Filif let go of the filament of wizardry, and the spell stood on its own. He drifted around it, looking it over. Kit followed, also examining it. He was impressed by the way the many, many sentences in the Speech interwove to produce the result. The mochteroof was woven all around a wizardly "virtual copy" of the Yaldiv's whole body. "I took the template from the Yaldiv that Ronan had to blast," Filif said. "Poor creature, it had little enough time to serve Life, even as crookedly as it did. Now it will serve it another way." He stood back from his work, admiring it. "If, as in some other hive cultures, the warriors here have additional status, this may offer us an extra layer of protection. Or enable us to go places where the workers cannot." "I hope it doesn't also get us in some kind of trouble we can't anticipate," Kit muttered. "I wish the manual functions weren't so messed up here. We don't know as much about these people as we need to." "We have no choice, though," Filif said, "do we? We're going to have to take the chance." "No argument," Kit said. "Should I try it on?" "I was hoping you would ask." Kit took another look at the wizardry, seeing the spot near the back of the virtual Yaldiv where the user was meant to step in and shrug the new body around him like a coat. Carefully, he stepped into the center of the weave. The whole thing blazed up with power and pressed in on Kit like a second skin… then vanished. He stood there tremendously confused for a moment: the mochteroof seemed to have simply vanished. Kit held up a hand– –and saw the shadow of one of those huge, sharp– edged claws come up in front of his face. It was so odd and sudden that he jumped; the claw jerked. "Wow," he said, and turned around. "This is cool. And I still feel like me." Ronan had come out of his pup tent and was heading over to fetch the Spear. He looked over at Kit with interest. Ponch, who had come out of Kit's tent a little before, now started dancing around Kit and barking joyously, as if this was intensely funny. You're a giant bug! Ponch said. You even smell like one! "I'll take that as a compliment," Kit said, and was astonished at the bizarre humming and crunching noises that came out of him instead of words. He looked over at Filif, and was aware of the dark mirror– shade eyes that he was "seeing" through, though it was his own form of vision that prevailed. "You can use the Yaldiv sensorium anytime you need to," Filif said, drifting around again to check that the mocbteroof was working correctly. "You can scent and see either in your own mode exclusively, or as they do, or both at once. The Yaldiv see mostly as heat; a lot of the visible spectrum is lost on them. Scent comes through the legs, and they don't go in much for tactile information, as far as I can tell. Taste is in the mandibles." "And wizardry?" Kit said. "Won't be impaired," Filif said. "Your portable claudication is exactly where it would normally be, as are your preprepared wizardries. You can do whatever you would normally-" The sudden bang! of displaced air was astonishingly loud in this small space, and was followed by an abrupt shower of a sort of flaky rain, as many of the tiny damp mineral-drop stalactites from the ceiling came pattering down onto the floor. Kit whirled around with a disrupter spell in his hands-a little core of compressed wizardry burning hot and ready to fire-and was only briefly surprised by the huge claw-shadows that seemed to enclose the hands holding the spell. Out beyond the shadows of the mocbteroof, Ronan had snatched the Spear up out of the stone floor and was standing there with it flaming in one hand, ready to throw. Filif's berries were suddenly burning a disconcerting dark 279 color that Kit had never seen before. But then Kit let out a breath and waved his hands and their shadow– claws apart, dismissing the spell, at the sight of the two figures standing there, one shorter than him, one much taller. Dairine and Roshaun looked up around them at the interior of the cave. Dairine's hands were also holding some spell that fizzed and glittered as whitely blinding as a Fourth of July sparkler. Roshaun was holding ready in one hand what might have been a meter-long gilded rod, except for the hot, orange-golden, sunlike light that writhed and coiled inside it. Down on the floor between them, Spot crouched, glowing a soft and dangerous blue. Then Dairine and Roshaun and Spot (extruding a few eyes to do the job) all stared at Kit. Dairine actually squinted at him, and it took some moments before she finally grinned. "Hey," Dairine said. "On you, that looks good." Kit laughed. He pulled one of the tags of the Speech that was hanging down inside the mocbteroof, and it fell away. "How'd you find us so fast?" Ronan said. "We didn't even know we were coming here until a little while ago." "I got Nita's message when we popped out of transit on our way in," Dairine said. "She left a pointer to the new coordinates, and forwarded it to the transits Sker'ret built for you. But where'd she go?" "Home," Kit said. "Have you heard anything from your dad?" Dairine shook her head. "I was going to call," she said. "Why? Neets tried and couldn't get through?" "Yeah," Kit said. "Nothing." "Then I won't bother right now," Dairine said. "We've got bigger fish to fry." Roshaun looked briefly nonplussed. "Is this the time to be thinking about food?" he said. "If you'd had as little to eat as I have today, it sure would be," Dairine said, "and if you ask me, Ponch has the right idea, because despite all the hoopla back at your big fancy royal palace, the one thing that didn't put in an appearance was a buffet. So forgive me." She reached into her otherspace pocket and started feeling around in it. "But we found out what we're supposed to be looking for." "The Instrumentality?" Kit said. "What is it?" Ronan said. Dairine came up with a trail-mix bar and started unwrapping it. "Not a what," she said. "A who." Ronan and Filif and Kit all stared at one another. Dairine gave Ronan a cockeyed look as she bit into the trail-mix bar. "And it's funny that not even you know," she said, munching, "since your passenger was carrying the information. But then, not even He knew. Did you?" she said to the Champion. I've often worked as a courier before, the One's Champion said. "Messenger" is one of the most basic parts of my job description. But I've never before carried a message I didn't know / was carrying. "First time for everything," Dairine said, having another bite. "Ronan, around the time you stopped by our house, part of that message got loaded into Spot, and you never even knew it was happening. We couldn't get at it until we got to the mobiles' world. They put some info from the Defender's presence in the mobiles' world together with that information, decoded it…" She smiled. Beside her, Roshaun sat down on the floor, cross-legged, with his usual effortless grace. "The Instrumentality," Dairine said, "is the Hesper." At that, Ronan looked up sharply. "Or a Hesper," Dairine said. "There's not much difference at this point, since there's never been one before, and there may be more later… if this works out." Kit shook his head. "What's a Hesper?" "It's a made-up word," Dairine said. "We don't have an English equivalent to the word in the Speech. You know any of the old names for the Lone One before It fell?" Kit thought a moment, hearing an echo of the word in an old memory. "Hesperus?" he said. "Is that in Greek mythology?" "Yes and no," Dairine said. "But you know." She looked at Ronan, or rather, at his interior colleague. ' 'The morning and the evening star,' they used to call the Lone Power, before there was that disagreement at the beginning of things.Читать дальше