Wizards at War, New Millennium Edition (44 page)

She’s terrified,
Nita said silently.
And not just for herself. But something else is going on, too. You feel it?

He nodded as he came up beside Memeki and patted her carapace again. “We’ll be ready to go pretty soon,” he said, “but you don’t have to be by yourself.”

“Kit,” Memeki said. Kit’s mouth dropped open, for it was the first time she’d actually used a name for any of them. “You need not take me anywhere else,” she said. “I must go back to the City, for I see I am putting you all in danger. Particularly Ponch.”

Kit looked at her thoughtfully, as Ponch, who had left Carmela to follow him, stood up on his hind legs and put his forepaws on her.
We’ll stay with you,
he said.
We’ll take care of you.

The wash of fear that Kit caught from Ponch was astonishing: it made him wince. “I see how you do that,” Memeki said. “You care for each other. It is so strange. Somehow, though you come from so far away, you are like me. How, I can’t say.” And then she, too, sat down on the ground, a strange, jerky motion. She twitched. “But there are other reasons. I must return to the grubbery. My time—” She broke off, went silent, like someone distracted by a spasm of pain.

Ronan came up behind Kit and stood there for a moment, just a dark presence that said nothing. Kit glanced at him.

“Ponch is right,” he said. “If she’s going back to the City, we can’t just leave her there and tiptoe away, not after what happened here! We’ve got to stay with her and keep her safe.”

“That’s not going to attract any attention, I’ll bet,” Ronan said. “When someone asks, just what are
we
supposed to be doing hanging around her?”

“We’re her guards,” Kit said. “The One sent us.” His grin was a little grim. “Though what we mean by that won’t be what they mean by it, it’s still true. And if anyone gives us trouble”—he shrugged—”we play it by ear.”

Ronan shook his head. “I hope this works,” he said. Kit did, too. He looked around. “Are we packed up?”

Nita joined them. “All you need to do is take down your pup tent, and we’ll be ready to run,” she said. “What time is it outside?”

Kit looked at his watch. “About an hour till dawn. So we’ll go in half an hour?” He looked around at the others. Roshaun bowed agreement; Filif rustled “yes.”

He looked over at Carmela, who was leaning against one of the
mochteroofs,
fiddling with her curling iron. Kit let out another exasperated breath. “Fil,” he said, “can you retailor Sker’ret’s
mochteroof
for Carmela? And better put some training wheels on it.”

“I take your meaning; I’m working on that right now,” Filif said. “Fifteen minutes more will see the work done.”

Kit nodded.
Neets,
he said silently,
we really need to talk.

You’re right,
she said.
We do.
But she was looking at Memeki.

Ponch looked up at Kit.
And about the biscuits…

Kit sighed. “Okay, so I hid a box,” he said. “Come on.”

***

Sitting cross-legged on the floor of the cavern, Nita drank her soda and watched Filif working over the last remaining
mochteroof,
while Carmela walked around it, kibitzing and apparently offering design tips. Off to one side, Dairine and Roshaun were sitting down and conferring about something. Kit and Ponch had vanished inside Kit’s pup tent. By the scarred-over crevasse, Memeki crouched, every now and then shivering a little. And in that shiver, Nita suddenly felt that both their biggest problem and its solution were buried.

She closed her eyes and breathed out, breathed in. The messages that were coming to her—whether as hunches or visions or half-heard whispers—were getting so intense, in this past day or so, that she didn’t have to be asleep to have them.
Is this going to be a permanent thing?
she wondered.
Or is this just the peridexic effect working? When all this is over, is it back to business as usual?

Don’t ask me,
said the silent voice in the back of her brain.
Nothing about
this
business has been usual.

She smiled slightly, opened her eyes again. Crouched down on the gritty stone in front of her, Spot looked up at her with two small, stalked, glowing eyes. “So how’re you holding up, small stuff?” she said. “You feel better since Dairine took you back home?”

“Much better,” Spot said. His voice was clearer than Nita had heard it for some time. Nonetheless, there was a hesitant quality to it.

“You don’t sound too sure.” She reached out and stroked his case between the eyes.

“There’s still much stored data to assimilate,” Spot said. “And it will take a long time. But in the short term, I can say that I seem to be more than I was. If I can just work out what to do with it.”

Nita laughed, just once, a brief and rueful sound. “That goes for both of us.”

“But at least you’ve come back from Earth with what we need,” Spot said. “The word that has to be heard.”

Nita gave Spot a look. “I have?” She found this news reassuring coming from Spot, and she needed the reassurance.

He wiggled his eyes at her and trundled back off in Dairine’s direction. “Getting a lot more vocal, that wee fella,” said the voice from behind her.

Nita cocked an eye up at Ronan, and took another drink of soda.
I wonder if it’s contagious,
she thought, catching a glimpse out of the corner of her eye of Kit coming out of his pup tent again. Ponch followed him out, and Kit started to roll up the access and pull it down out of the air.

Across the cavern, Carmela’s
mochteroof
skinned over with the simulacrum of a Yaldiv’s golden-green inner shell, but Nita was distracted from this by the unusually edgy feeling practically radiating from Ronan. “How’re you holding up?” she said after a moment.

She somehow wasn’t surprised to see that he wouldn’t quite look at her. “Possibly better than some of us.”

“Who?” She was conscious of Kit’s gaze in their direction—not hostile, not even trying to look like he was particularly interested. But she knew better.

“Not him,” Ronan said, annoyed.

“Oh. Your partner—”

Ronan nodded. “It’s okay,” he said. “He’s working to make sure our next move is covered. But this isn’t easy for him. He thought he’d have enough power accessible to make a difference when things started to get rough. And suddenly he doesn’t seem to have access to anything like enough.”

Nita shook her head. “What can we do?”

“Nothing,” Ronan said, sounding bleak.

Nita glanced up at him. “Except maybe hope the problem’s working both ways.”

Ronan stared at her in confusion. “I took a quick look just now at the manual to see what’s been happening since I left,” Nita said. “When you guys got hauled in front of the King-avatar, he seemed to be a few words short of a spell. Like the avatar was running on auto.”

“Don’t count on that lasting long enough to do us any good,” Ronan said.

“It may already have done all the good it needs to,” Nita said softly, glancing at Memeki. “But think about it. Why shouldn’t the Pullulus be having some effect on the Lone Power, too? Or at least Its presence in Its avatars?”

Ronan looked astounded. “But the Pullulus is the Lone Power’s own weapon. You’d think It’d make sure
It
couldn’t be affected.”

“But the Lone One’s power is still the same as the power behind wizardry, isn’t it?” Nita said. “Just perverted. It still has to obey wizardry’s rules while It’s physically present in the universe. And the rules say that the structure of space affects the way wizardry works … and vice versa.” She thought a moment. “What if It was willing to risk having less power for the moment, just so long as It got the other result It was playing for?” Nita glanced over at Memeki. “Distracting everybody from knowing that
she
was about to happen.”

Ronan was quiet for a moment. “Hope you’re right,” he said, “because that’s all the advantage we’ve got. As soon as It realizes that some of us
haven’t
been distracted … or that she
has
happened, which she hasn’t, entirely…”

Nita shook her head. “One thing at a time,” she said. “But you didn’t exactly answer my question.”

Ronan gave Nita one of those looks that was meant to frighten her off the subject. She frowned at him. “Don’t even
bother,
” she said.

The grim look briefly dissolved into one of those dark, wry smiles. “Never did much good with you, did it?” he said.

“Nope,” Nita said. She got up and stretched, almost too tired to bother getting as annoyed at him as she could have. “Look, Ronan, any chance you could stop being so defensive for a few seconds? Do you seriously think I’m asking how you are as a way of secretly suggesting you’re going to screw up in some weird way? I was asking about
how you’re feeling.
But since you can’t get
that
through your head, just work on getting ever so briefly conscious about your own abilities. Think about what you pulled off on your Ordeal! And then back in Ireland, on the Fields of Tethra—”

“That was then,” Ronan said, sounding uneasy. “This is now.”

“Spare me,” Nita said. “Anybody who can ‘take in the Sea’ on his first time out, and afterward cope with handling
that
thing—” She glanced at the Spear of Light. “—has no business wandering around looking morose and fishing for compliments.” Then she had to grin. “Which is probably why the Powers have now sent you the greatest challenge of your life.”

Ronan suddenly looked shocked, and glanced around him with a sudden guilty look of someone who’s just been found out. “What? What do you—”

Nita looked sidewise to where Carmela, having finished up with another session of fussing over Ponch, was heading toward them. “She’s all yours,” Nita said, and turned away.

Behind her, Ronan didn’t move for a moment or so. Then he collapsed the Spear back into its ballpoint pen disguise and tucked it away inside his jacket.
A wee bit freaked,
he said silently.
More than a wee bit. Not at all
cool, or calm, or able to deal, no matter how it looks from outside. Is that what you wanted to hear?

Nita looked over her shoulder just long enough to flash him a very small smile.
No. But the truth’s worth hearing, anyway.
Then she headed over to Memeki.

For a moment she paused just out of reach of Memeki’s claws. The mirror-shade eyes looked at Nita thoughtfully.

“You do not have to be afraid of me,” Memeki said. “I am nothing to fear.”

Nita shook her head. “I had a little scare when we first got here,” she said. “It wasn’t your fault.” Then she put out a hand and laid it on that shining carapace. Memeki shivered a little under her touch. “And as for you being nothing to be afraid of—not for us, maybe. But someone else is scared.”

Nita had to hold herself very still as she said that, for the touch had told her something about the reasons for that fear. Inside Memeki, Nita clearly felt a growing power, a core of something like heat or light—like a heart quietly beating, getting stronger. But also inside Memeki were a myriad of tinier glittering points of power, and these were of a darker fire. They scorched the testing mind, cruel as sparks spun up from a fire intent on burning.

“I know now who’s afraid,” Memeki said. “It’s the creature that speaks through the King.
It’s my enemy… and my other self.
”

Nita swallowed as she felt the sudden surge of power inside the voice. “And it’s inside me,” Memeki said. “I never really knew that until now.”

Nita hesitated a moment, then nodded. “It’s inside all of us, a little.”

“But not in the same way,” Memeki said. “You understand. In you, it’s far less. Inside me—It has me outnumbered. And unless something happens very soon, It will put an end to me.”

“Not if you don’t let It,” Nita said.

Memeki combed that palp down again, that uncertain gesture. “There is no way to stop what’s coming!” she said, distressed. “You must know! You can feel them all.”

“The eggs,” Nita said. “Yes.”

“They won’t be eggs for long,” Memeki said. “Soon they’ll hatch, each one of them with its spark of the Great One, the Darkness. They’ll belong to It. And when they hatch, they will turn to their mother for food.”

Nita shivered, suddenly glimpsing a scene Memeki had seen again and again in the grubbery of the city-hive: the little closed-in cells where the handmaidens, the Favored, were kept and ministered to until their time came… until the eggs hatched inside them, and the grubs within turned outward and began to feast on the flesh that had sheltered them.

“It will happen very soon,” Memeki said. “A sunrise more, perhaps two, and I’ll be taken to the incubatory inside the grubbery, there to wait my time. When Ponch found me I was spending my last hours in freedom, walking, and working and walking again, fearing what was about to happen—and not knowing how to speak of it, not daring to. Knowing that everything was about to be lost, everything from the time the strange voice spoke to me…” She pulled her claws close to herself. “But you are the one who knows the way,” Memeki said then, looking up again. “You know how it will be. You had a mother…”

Nita held still in pure shock. After a moment she said, “We all had mothers. Well, maybe not Filif, and as for Spot, he—”

“But only your mother did what all
our
mothers do,” Memeki said. “Surely you understand! I can hear it in you when you touch me.”

Nita went abruptly blind with memory. The moments that followed were full of towering darkness and the sound of rushing waters, and a woman’s voice saying, in the face of the Lone Power Itself, “You can do what you like with me,
but not with my daughter!
”

Nita wasn’t sure how long she stood there in that remembered darkness. When she could see her surroundings again, she was leaning against Memeki’s shell with both hands, and her eyes were stinging. She blinked hard, working to get control of herself. Strangely, the feel of those swarming, furious little sparks of dark fire was helping her a lot.
Not again,
Nita thought.
Not this time. And not
this
mom!