A Wizard Abroad, New Millennium Edition (31 page)

The socket and binding of the Spear had held. Only the wood of the shaft was scorched black, but it was otherwise sound. Above it, the spearhead stood plain and cool and silvery—but there was something moving in the blade. Those lines of layered metal that Biddy had hammered in, black once, now wavered and twisted: needle-thin lines of fire, white and yellow-white, swirling and writhing in the metal. The air above the Spear wrinkled and wavered the way air does above a hot pavement in the summer, and the ozone smell was thick.

“It’s awake,” Kit said, softly, as if afraid of being overheard. “It worked...!” And he looked over at Biddy just in time to see her collapse.

They hurried over to her. Nita looked helplessly at Johnny as he came over, hoisted Biddy up. Her eyes were closed: her breathing was so shallow it was hardly to be seen. He shook his head.

“What’s wrong with her?” Nita said.

“I’m not sure… We’ll take her inside and find out. Meanwhile—” He glanced over at the Spear, gleaming crimson where the early sun was catching it. “We’re ready,” he said. “It’s Lughnasád. This evening we move.”

She nodded, and looked across the field. Dark in his denims and leather, Ronan was standing there. He had no eyes for anything but the Spear. He was wearing an expression like that of someone who finds something that’s lost, something he has been wanting for a long time; something without which he’s not complete. It was a frightened look, and a frightening one.

What unnerved Nita even more was the way she could feel the Spear looking back at him. It considered Ronan to be just such a lost object, recovered after a long time:  that which completes.

She turned away and did her best to keep her thoughts to herself.

All that day, cars came and went at Matrix: people being dropped off, coming to stay, other people heading out to pick up more people from the train station. The house got full. All the wizards that Nita had seen in the Long Hall were there, and many she had never seen before. The gravel parking lot in front got full, and people started parking in among the sheep.

Everyone had tea. Nita made it several times (as did everyone else). People went out to town for fast food and brought it back, and a lot of baking and cooking went on back in the kitchen; Doris made soda bread seven or eight times, smiling more and more (even through the stress) as the compliments got louder. But Nita had noticed that there was a certain desperate quality to a lot of the conversations...the kind of talk meant to keep people from noticing that they themselves were nervous.

The nerves were not just among the less senior wizards, and there were other worries as well. Nita had watched Johnny that morning as he carried the Spear in from the field. He was wincing as he carried it. “Are you all right?” she said to him.

“Well,” he said, and put the Spear down to lean it against the doorpost—hurriedly, Nita thought, and rather gratefully. Johnny rubbed his hands together. “Not really. It really is hard to hold for even a little while. It burns.” And he laughed. “It can hardly help it—we went to enough trouble to make it do that! But there’s someone else it wants.”

“We could all take turns carrying it.”

“No, I think it’s made its choice. He just has to stop fighting it...” Johnny shook his head. “I think he will.”

Nita was confused. “Is there something the matter with it, that it hurts to carry it?”

“The matter? Nothing! The matter’s with
us
, I’m afraid. We called the Spirit of Fire, and we got it—the essence of purification, and triumph…” He trailed off, then said, “Patience isn’t one of its attributes. It sees the dross in us...and wants to see it burned away, and us made perfect, now. Not possible, of course. It’s not easy, meeting one of the cardinal virtues face to face…” He picked up the Spear again and went off in a hurry. She could feel it looking at her, though, and she understood now what Johnny had said about some weapons being able to speak. She knew what this one wanted.

Nita looked over her shoulder and was not even slightly surprised to find Ronan there, looking after Johnny. “Hey, Paddy,” she said softly.

“Hey, Miss Yank.” But there was none of the good old abrasiveness in his voice now: nothing but soft fear. He was quiet for a moment, and then said, “I hear it calling all the time now. Not just calling me, either.
Him.”

For a moment Nita wasn’t sure what Ronan meant—until the flash of scarlet, of wings or a sword that burned, flickered in her mind’s eye. “Oh,” she said, and laughed slightly. “Sorry. I usually think of Him as a Her—that’s how we saw—”

“Her??”
Ronan sounded outraged, as if this were one shock too many.

Nita burst out laughing: for the moment, at least, Ronan sounded normal. “Give me a break! As if the Powers care about something like gender. They change names and shapes and sexes and bodies the way we change clothes.” She rubbed one ear. The One’s Champion, in the last shape She commonly wore, had bitten Nita there several times. “Doesn’t make Them any less effective on the job.”

The two of them wandered off into the field a little way, absently. Nita looked at the scorched place on the ground and veered aside from it.

“He’s in there, all right,” Ronan said. He sounded like a man admitting he had cancer. “I hear this other voice—not mine— He wants the Spear. It’s his, from a long way back. Lugh.” He coughed slightly: Nita realized then, blushing with embarrassment for him, that he was trying to control the thickening in the throat, the tears. “Why me?” he said softly.

“You’re related,” Nita said.

He stared at her.

But it was true: the Knowledge made that much plain to her. “You’ve got some of His blood,” she said, “from a ways back. You remember what the Queen said, about the Powers dipping in from outside of time, and getting into relationships with people here for one reason or another. So He loved somebody when He was here physically, once. Maybe even as Lugh himself. Does it matter? When He finished the other job he was on, the One set Him—or Her, whatever—another one. Busy guy. But as soon as He could, He came hunting—a suitable vessel. Like the Spear did.” And Nita smiled at him slightly. “Would you rather a blow-in got the job?”

Ronan smiled, but it was a weak smile. After a moment he said, “You knew Him. What’s He like?”

She shook her head, not sure how to describe anything to Ronan that that flicker of scarlet across a dark mind didn’t convey in itself. “Tough,” she said. “Cranky, sometimes. But kind too. Funny, sometimes. Always—very fierce, very—” She fumbled for words for a moment. “Very strong, very certain. Very
right—”

Ronan shook his head. “It’s not right for me,” he said. “Why don’t I get any say in this?”

“But you do,” Nita said.

He didn’t hear her. “I don’t want certainty!” Ronan said softly. “I don’t want answers! I don’t even know what the
questions
are yet! Don’t I get
any
time to find things out for myself, before Saint bloody Michael the Archangel or whatever else He’s been lately moves in upstairs in my head and starts rearranging the furniture?”

Nita shook her head. “You can always throw Him out,” she said. “You know what it says. ‘Power will not live long in the unwilling heart.’ Goes for the Powers, too, I think. But first you’d better see what you’ve got to replace Him with that will be able to use the Spear to cope with Balor, ‘cause
I
can’t think of anything offhand.”

“If I once let Him run me,” Ronan said, bitter in this certainty at least, “He’s in to stay.”

Nita shook her head. She could think of nothing useful to say.

“Miss tough mouth,” Ronan said softly. “Ran out of smart lines at last. Had to happen eventually.”

“If the advice was any good before it ran out,” Nita said, halfway between annoyance and affection, “better make the most of it.”

Ronan was quiet for a breath. Then he said, “The other night—”

Nita held very still.

Ronan looked away from her, toward the castle. After a moment he headed off that way.

Nita stood and watched him go. A few moments later, Kit said from behind her, “He’s in a bind.”

Nita nodded. “It’s a real pain,” she said softly. “What happens if he’s right?”

“Just hope he’s saved everybody in the meantime,” Kit said.

***

They went back to join up with the many new arrivals. By three o’clock, there were some three hundred wizards there; by eight there were perhaps another two hundred, from all over. “What are all those things they’re carrying?” Kit said to her Aunt Annie, during one quiet moment outside.

“Johnny told everybody to come armed,” her aunt said. They had, though they made a most peculiar-looking army. There were a lot of rakes and shovels. Some people actually had swords, and there were many wands and rods in evidence, of rowan and other woods; there were staves of oak and willow and beech. One wizard, for reasons Nita couldn’t begin to guess, was carrying an eggbeater. Another one, the dark-haired sprightly lady that Nita had seen in the Long Hall, had a Viking axe of great beauty and age, and was stalking around looking most intent to use it on something.

“‘It is a great glory of weapons that is in it,’” said a voice down by Nita’s foot, “‘borne by the fair-haired and the beautiful; all mannerly they are as young girls, but with the hearts of boon-comrades and the courage of lions; whoever has been with them and parts from them, he is nine days fretting for their company—’”

“Tualha,” Nita said, bending down to pick her up, “you’re really getting off on this, aren’t you. But what’re you doing here?”

“Where else would I be? A bard’s place is in battle,” Tualha said, perching on Nita’s shoulder uncertainly, and digging her claws in. “And a cat-bard’s doubly so, for we have an example of fortitude and of boldness and of good heart to set for the rest of you.”

Kit looked at her with bemusement. “What would you do in a battle?” he said.

“What she’s doing to me now wouldn’t be bad,” Nita said, gritting her teeth.

Tualha ignored her. “I would make poems and satires on the enemy,” she said, “the way they would curl up and die of shame; and welts would rise up all over them if they did not die straight away, so that they would wish they were dead from that out. And those
that
did not work on—” She flexed her claws.

“—you’d give them cat-scratch fever,” Kit said, and laughed. “Remind me to stay on your good side.”

Tualha started scrambling into Nita’s backpack again. “Anne, what about this one?” someone shouted from the castle. Nita’s aunt sighed and said, “I’ll see you two later.”

“Aunt Annie,” Nita said, “have you seen Biddy since this morning?”

“Huh? Yes.” Her aunt’s face looked suddenly pinched.

“She’s not any better,” Nita said, her heart sinking.

“One of us who’s a doctor had a look at her.” Aunt Annie shook her head. “The body—well, it’s comatose. No surprise. What lived in it has gone elsewhere.” She sighed. “It’ll wind up in the hospital in Newcastle, I would guess, and hang on a little while before giving up and dying. Bodies tend to do that...”

She shook her head and went off toward the wizard who was calling her.

“Listen,” Kit said, “I was supposed to tell you. Johnny wants people to start coming into the big hall,” he said, “as many of us as can fit, anyhow.”

Not everyone could, though they spent a while trying. Many wizards lined the gallery above, or stood and listened in the outer halls and corridors. Others hung about outside in the parking lot, eavesdropping with their wizardry. Not that the ones closest to the door couldn’t hear Johnny anyway. The acoustics in the great hall were very bright, and his sharp voice echoed there as he stood in the center of the floor, his arms folded.

“We’re about ready to go,” Johnny said, when the assembled wizards got quiet. “I take it you’re all as ready as you can be.” The crowd shifted slightly. “I can’t tell you a great deal about what to expect, except that we’re going into what is, for us, the country of myth...so expect to see even more of the old stories coming true, the legends that have been invading our world over the past few weeks. They’ll be real. Just don’t forget,” and he smiled now, “that we are the myths to them. In the plains of Tethra, we are what they tell stories about, around the fire at night. So don’t be afraid to use your wizardry; there aren’t any overlays where we’re going, or none that matter to what we’re doing.”

There was a mutter of approval: apparently Nita wasn’t the only one who felt chafed by the need to be worrying about overlays all the time. “At some point we’ll be faced by an army,” Johnny said. “I don’t know what it’s going to look like. We’ve seen all kinds of Fomori over here in the last couple of weeks. I don’t know how they’ll appear on their own ground, but the important thing is not to be fooled by appearances. Anything can look like anything...so feel for essence, and act accordingly. Don’t forget that the People of the Hills, and the other nonphysicals who live over on that side, are as much oppressed by the Fomori and Balor as we have been in our world...maybe more so, and whether they actively come to our assistance or not, they’re on our side. Be careful not to mistake them for Fomori and take them out. Don’t get carried away in the excitement of things; remember your Oaths. No destruction that’s not necessary.”