A Wizard Abroad, New Millennium Edition (19 page)

“Jack Mourne,” Aunt Annie said to Nita, as they made their way through a low carved archway into the back room. “He owns the place.”

“Does he know what’s going on?”

“I should think he does: he’s one of the Area Specialists. What would you like to drink, hon?”

“Can I get a Coke?”

“No problem. Be right back.”

Nita found herself a seat at a small round wooden table with ornate iron legs, and waited, fidgeting a little self-consciously. She had never been in a bar by herself, though Aunt Annie seemed to think that this wasn’t quite the same. She might have a point, though, Nita thought. Here, the drinking looked almost incidental. People were shouting at each other across the back room, chatting, arguing, laughing, pointing, hollering.

“Here you go,” Aunt Annie said, sitting down next to Nita with a relieved look. She handed Nita her drink and sipped briefly at her pint. “Perfect,” she said. “Jack pulls the best pint in this part of town.”

“Aunt Annie,” Nita said, “if this is a wizard’s meeting—how are you going to keep the regular people out of here?”

“Spell on the back-room archway,” Aunt Annie said. “Look closely at the carving when you go to the rear ladies’ room. Nonwizards hit it and decide they don’t feel like going back there after all—on normal nights, Jack just takes the spell finial off: that little carved flower in the lower right-hand corner. Probably no one could hear us through all this din anyway, but there are voice-scramblers on regardless. Jack makes anything wizardly come out sounding like an argument about football. “ Aunt Annie chuckled. “Nice scrambler spell, that: took him a while to write. But he’s one of our best writers. You need a custom spell in this part of the world, it’s Jack you come to, or Marie Shaughnessy down in Arklow, or Charles Redpath up north in Belfast.”

“Then all these people back here are wizards?” Nita said, looking around her in astonishment. She had never been in such a large gathering of fellow practitioners of the Art before.

“Oh yes. All that could come at short notice, of course. Relax a while; we can’t do anything until Doris and Johnny get here.”

So Nita drank her Coke and listened to the accents around her, and chatted every now and then with the people who came up to her aunt to say hello. If she’d been mired in Irish accents before, the situation now got much worse: she heard about twenty more from as many different people, no two of them the same, and some very odd indeed. In addition, there were a lot of people from Northern Ireland down for this meeting, and their accents astounded her. They sounded more like New Yorkers than anything else, though more nasal.

The Northerners all seemed very open, friendly people, which to Nita seemed a little strange at first: seeing what most Americans saw of Northern Ireland from the news, she half-expected them to be a bit unhappy or nervous, as if afraid a bomb might still suddenly go off under them even though there’d been peace up there for a while now. But they all seemed perfectly cheerful. One man in his late forties, a jocund man in a leather jacket covered with patches, told Nita he’d never seen a bomb or been within fifty miles of one, nor had anybody he knew. The peaceful small-town life he described seemed hard to reconcile with all the old news shots Nita had seen of taped-off, shattered buildings, and the people with ski masks and rifles.

There was a slight commotion at the door as Mrs. Smyth came in under the archway. “Hey Doris, how they cuttin’?” someone shouted. Doris Smyth looked at the speaker and said something clear and carrying in Irish that provoked a roar of approval from the listeners, and caused the person who had asked the question to be genially pummeled.

Behind Mrs. Smyth, someone else came in; a short man in a long overcoat and plaid scarf. At sight of him, many of the wizards in the room called, “Johnny!” or “Shaun!,” and there was a general stir of approval through the back room. Nita bent over to her Aunt Annie and said, “Who’s that?”

“Shaun O’Driscoll,” said Aunt Annie. “Or Johnny, some people call him. He’s the Area Senior for Western Europe.”

“Wow,” Nita said, never having seen so high-ranked a wizard before. Area Seniors answered only to Regional Seniors, and Regionals to Earth’s Planetary Wizard. When she thought of the Senior in charge of all wizards from Shannon to Moscow and Oslo to Gibraltar, she had imagined someone more imposing—not a little man with thinning hair and (as he took his coat off) a tweed three-piece suit. He didn’t look very old. He had a fierce-looking mustache, and his eyes were very cool; he looked around the room and returned all the greetings without ever quite smiling. It was the kind of effect, Nita thought, that made you want to try to get him to smile. It would be worth seeing when it happened, for his face was otherwise a nest of laugh-lines.

Doris and Johnny were fetched pints by another of the gathered wizards, and people started settling down, leaning against the walls when they ran out of seats. Johnny didn’t sit, but stood in the middle of the room, waiting for them to settle, like a teacher with a big unruly class.

“Thanks for coming,” he said. “I know this was short notice, but we’ve had some serious problems crop up in the past few days, and there was no way to hope to manage them except by requiring an intervention meeting.”

There were some heads turned at this, and some murmuring under breath among the assembled wizards. “I know that wasn’t the way it was announced,” Johnny said, “but we turn out to have less time for this discussion than was originally thought when the original texts and emails went out last night. We’ve had serious transitional leakages all over the island, with some sympathetic transitionals on mainland Europe; and this condition has to be contained as quickly as possible. There have been echoes and ripples as far away as China and Peru.”

More stirring at this. “Anyway,” Johnny said, “I want to thank those of you who were in the middle of other assignments and found them changed, or who were off active and were suddenly reactivated. The Powers that Be may not thank you until later, but I like to do it early. I also want to welcome those of you who have come unusual distances, including Nita Callahan. Stand up, honey.”

Nita flushed fiercely, and hoped it didn’t show too much in the pub’s dimmish light. She stood up.

“Nita has been reassigned here temporarily courtesy of North American Regional. She has blood affinities with this area, and was recently involved in the New York incursion and the Hudson Canyon intervention in June, and more recently, with the Reconfiguration; Dairine Callahan is her sister.”

There was a stir at this which surprised Nita somewhat. She nodded, smiled a little uncertainly at Johnny; he gestured her to sit down. “We’re glad to have you,” he said. “Bear with us: we do things a little differently here than you’re used to, and if you think of anything that seems useful during this discussion, don’t hesitate to sing out.”

Huh,
Nita thought, sitting down. And,
Reassigned courtesy of North American Regional? Who’s that? Not Tom and Carl. Someone—or something—further in, or higher up?
But she put the thought aside for the moment.

“Over the past four nights we’ve had ‘sideways’ leakages in twenty-nine out of thirty-two counties,” Johnny said, “and how Monaghan, Wexford and Westmeath were missed is a mystery to us, especially since Westmeath contains the Hill of Tara. In the thirty-three counties, about ninety wizards have experienced timeslides, live remembrances of the so-called ‘mythological’ period, ‘solid’ remembrances that returned interactions, viewings of extradimensional objects without doing the wizardries required for such viewings, and even physical intervention by nonphysical entities or creatures not native to this reality, including physical attacks on occasion. One of us met Cúchullain in warp spasm, which is enough to turn anyone’s hair: that it happened in the middle of the Square shopping center in Tallaght didn’t help, either. The Brown Bull of Cooley was seen crossing the M18 motorway north of Shannon; then it wandered down onto the Iarnrod Éireann main line and caused a derailment, though fortunately neither the train drivers nor any of the other people on the train saw it, and by great good luck no one was hurt. Possibly most to the point, there was an earthquake in the fields north of Naas, at the old site of the Battle of Moytura.”

More stirring over this, and some anxious looks. Johnny made quiet-down gestures. “Fortunately it was only about three point one on the Richter scale, and nothing came of it but some broken china and a power failure down in Kildare town. The Lia Fáil is still managing to hold this island in one place and one piece, no matter what the politicians say. But how long it can hold matters so stable is a good question. Much of its old virtue is gone, as you know. Another such attack will certainly be more effective, on both natural and supernatural levels.”

“Johnny,” said one of the wizards sitting back by the wall, a handsome little dark-haired woman with a sharp face, “these transitional leakages, are we sure that something else isn’t causing them? Something European?”

Johnny shook his head. “I’d prefer to blame Local Europe myself, Morgan, but we’re out of luck on this one. All indications point back at us.”

“Then what are we going to do?”

Johnny looked grim. “We’re going to have to recreate Moytura, I think. Unless someone else can think of something better.”

Half the room started muttering to the other half. Johnny waited for it to settle down. “Recreate Moytura with what?” said the Northern-based wizard Nita had been talking to, the guy in the leather jacket.

“Good question,” Johnny said. “Two of the Four Treasures are still with us, though diminished, as you know. In their present state, they’re too diminished to be of any use. But the ‘souls’ of those Treasures are still in the world, or the Worlds, somewhere. We are going to have to recall those souls to suitable envelopes, and then take them out into battle against the Lone Power. We know that with them, we have a chance. Without them—” He shrugged.

Relative silence fell for a few moments. “Who does the ‘going into battle’ bit?” said another voice from somewhere against the back wall.

“Lacking one of the Powers that Be, probably Doris and I to lead,” Johnny said. “And all of you we can get together in one place.”

“Where are you going to get ‘suitable envelopes’, then?” said another voice.

“We’ll try to use the old ones,” Doris said. “They’ve worked before: with a little coercion, they’ll work again...or we hope so. The Lia Fáil is still working; the Ardagh Chalice we think we can reawaken.”

“Don’t you think the Museum will miss it?” said the wizard in the leather jacket.

Doris smiled slightly. “Not if a wizardry that looks and weighs exactly the same is sitting in the museum case,” she said. “If the Taoiseach can borrow the Chalice just to show it off to the visiting EU politicians at one of his Dublin Castle dinner parties, I think we might take the loan of it for a night or so, for something important, and not feel too guilty afterwards. But everything depends on the circumstances, and the power of the ritual used to call the Cup’s soul back. Which is what we’re going to have to work on. It’s not just warriors we’re going to need to make this work, but poets. Where
is
Charles, by the way?”

“He just Tweeted. Stuck in traffic,” said someone from the bar side of the room.

Johnny grinned. “Ah, the ‘real world.’ But at least Liam and Mairéad and Nigel are here. I’ll be wanting to talk to you three afterwards. The rest of you: I want you all to talk to your area supervisors about your schedules for the next two weeks. Any one of you may have to drop everything at a moment’s notice and lend a hand. Also, given the seriousness of the situation, travel restrictions on teleportation are off for the duration. Just use your judgment, and be very careful about the overlays!”

More chatter erupted. In the middle of it, someone said, “But Johnny, wait a tick! Isn’t this going to make things worse?”

Johnny waved for relative quiet. The room settled a little. “How do you mean?” he said.

“If you’re going to call back the souls of the Treasures—if you can,” said the speaker, a tall dignified-looking wizard with silver hair, “isn’t the land going to get even more awake and aware than it already is? I mean, the Treasures are the land, in some ways. At least that’s what we were always told: four of the five Elements, in their most personified forms. Air and water and earth and fire are going to wake up more than ever, until the situation is resolved and everything is laid to rest again.”

Johnny nodded slowly. The room got quiet as people looked at his expression. “Yes,” he said after a while. “It’s going to get much worse. Which makes it to our advantage to get the situation resolved, as you say, as quickly as possible. Otherwise first Ireland, then the rest of Europe, and eventually all the other continents, are going to be overrun with the past happening again, and the dead walking, and all kinds of other inconveniences. If we can’t stop this, then the barriers between present and past will break down everywhere, and the physical world will be progressively overrun by the nonphysical:  all the myths, and truths that became myth, all the dreams and nightmares, all the more central and more peripheral realities, will superimpose themselves on this one...inextricably.”

“For how long?” said a small voice out of the hush.

“If that level of imposition ever takes hold fully,” Johnny said, “I don’t see how the process could ever be reversed.”