A Wizard Abroad, New Millennium Edition (28 page)

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 said 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—

Two more voices were raised then, in the Speech, quite suddenly; Doris’s and Aunt Annie’s, and their tone was astonishing. Nita almost burst out laughing at the sound of it, despite her terror, as the two of them scolded one of the Elements of the Universe as if it was an unruly child. They sounded as if they intended to send it to bed without supper. And though the effect might initially have been comical, if the two of them had anything, they had certainty. The Cup struggled, the blue light washed higher—then abruptly fell away again.

Nita sagged with relief. Dairine had calmed down from her bad moment, and was completing her end of the spell. Through the blinding images still in her mind, Nita could see Dairine look carefully at the metal mold resting on the floor, then crouch down and poke her finger most carefully at a spot in the air about a foot above it. She lowered the finger carefully to the mold, and said another word.

Fire followed her gesture. It paused in the spot where Dairine’s finger had first paused, and Nita smelled ozone as the tiny spark of plasma took shape at this end of the timeslide and destroyed the air molecules in the spot where it had arrived. That one pinpoint of light drowned out even the fire of the Treasures, and threw back shadows from everyone as stark as if they had been standing on the Moon. Then the light began to flow downwards in a narrow incandescent pencil-line, cooling rapidly out of the plasma state, into incandescent iron vapor and then a molten solid again, as Dairine let it pass out of the small magnetic-bottle part of the spell and down into the mold.

Slowly the mold filled, the steel of it smoking. All the air began to smell of burnt metal. Nita looked over at Dairine; she was turned into a white-and-black paper cutout by the ferocity of the light hanging a foot away from her nose, but she seemed not to be bothered by it. Nita could see her beginning to shake, though—even Dairine couldn’t hold a wizardry like this in place for long.
Come on, Dari,
Nita thought.
Hang in there—

The mold kept filling. Nita could feel the Cup trying to get out of hand again, and her aunt and Doris holding it quiet by sheer skill in the Speech and calculated bad temper. Dairine was wobbling where she crouched, and put one hand behind her to steady her, and sat down on the floor, but never once took her eyes off that spot in the air where the plasma was emerging—her end of the timeslide. If it moved, if it got jostled—

Come on, come
on—! Nita thought.
How long can it take?! Oh please God, don’t let my sister get fried! Or the rest of us,
she added hurriedly, as that possibility suddenly occurred to her.
Come on, Dari, you’re the hot stuff right now, you can do it—!

The light very suddenly went out with a
crack
as normal atmosphere slammed back into the space where superheated air had been. Dairine fell over sideways. Everyone blinked in the sudden comparative darkness; nothing was left but the light of the Treasures, now looking very pale to their light-traumatized eyes.

One other light was left in the room, though. The steel mold was full of it; iron, still liquid and burning red, skinning over and going dark, like cooling lava. Just the sight of it unnerved Nita, and filled her with awe and delight. It somehow looked more definite and real than anything else in the area… anything else but Fragarach and the Cup.