Wizards At War (The Young Wizards Book 8) Armistice vi "Never, never, never believe any war will be smooth and easy, or that anyone who embarks on the strange voyage can measure the tides and hurricanes he will encounterOnce the signal is given, he is no longer the master of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events." –Sir Winston Churchill … Moon reflected on the water: The moon doesn't get wet, nor is the water broken. Although its light is broad and great, The moon's reflected even in an inch-wide puddle. The whole moon and the entire wide sky Lie mirrored in one dewdrop on the grass. Dogen, Genjokoan To be the miracle, Get out of its way. –Distych 243, The Book of Night with Moon vii situational Awareness In the bright light of an early spring morning, a teenage girl in faded blue jeans and a cropped white T-shirt stood in her downstairs bathroom, brushing her teeth and examining herself with a critical eye. Have I lost weight? she thought, pulling the T-shirt a little away from her as she looked down. This doesn't fit like it did two weeks ago… The view in the mirror was more or less the usual one: light brunette hair cut just above her shoulders, a face neither unusually plain nor unusually beautiful, a nothing-special figure for a fourteen-year-old. But there were changes besides the fit of her T-shirt. Nita Callahan racked the toothbrush and then leaned close to the mirror over the sink, pulling down the skin above her right cheekbone with one finger. My tan looks pretty good, hut are those circles under my eyes? she thought. / look wrecked. You'd think I hadn't just "I think I need a vacation from my vacation," Nita muttered. She started to turn away from the sink… then stopped, noticing something in the mirror. Nita leaned close to it again, pushing her bangs up with one hand and eyeing her forehead. Oh no, is that a pimple coming up? She poked it, felt that telltale sting. Great. I really need this right now! She sighed. "Okay," she said. Normally she wouldn't have been enthusiastic about spending any significant part of her morning talking to a zit, but if she talked the pimple out of happening right now, it'd take her less effort than if she waited until later. "Uh, excuse me," she said in the wizardly Speech– and then stopped. Wait a minute. I don't know the word for "pimple." Nita frowned. For a moment she considered the tube of facial scrub on the shelf by the sink, then shook her head and reached out toward what otherwise looked like empty air beside her. Into that "empty air," the pocket of otherspace where she normally kept her wizard's manual, Nita's arm disappeared up to the shoulder. She felt around for a moment-/ really have to clean this thing out; there's too much stuff in here-and then pulled out what to most people would have looked like a small hardbound library book an inch or so thick. Nita started paging through it. Let's see. Pimple, pimple… see "aposteme." She shook her head, turning more pages. What's an aposteme? Sometimes I really wonder about the indexing in this thing. "Nita?" came a shout, faintly, from the other end of the house. "What, Daddy?" she shouted back. "Phone!" Nita raised her eyebrows. At this hour of the morn ing? It's not Kit; he wouldn't bother with the phone. "Thanks!" The word for "phone," at least, she knew perfectly well. Nita held out her hand. "If you would?" she said in the Speech to the handset in question. The portable phone from the kitchen appeared in her hand, its hold button blinking. She hit the button, meanwhile balancing her manual on the edge of the sink while she kept paging through it. "Hello?" "Nita," Tom Swale's voice said. "Good morning." "Hey, how are you?" Nita said. "A little pressed for time at the moment," said her local Senior Wizard. "How was your holiday?" "Not bad," she said. "Listen, what's the Speech word for 'pimple'?" There was a pause at the other end. "I used to know that," Tom said. "But you don't anymore?" "I'll look it up. You should do that, too. How are your houseguests doing?" "They're fine as far as I know," Nita said. "Probably having breakfast. I was just going to get some myself." "You should definitely do that," Tom said. "But can you and Kit and the visiting contingent spare me and Carl a little time afterward?" "Uh, sure," Nita said. "I was going to call you anyway, because I heard some really strange things from Dairine about what went on here while we were away… and the manual wouldn't say anything about the details. Where did you guys vanish to? Assuming I'm allowed to ask." "Oh, you're allowed. That's what I'm calling about. I have a lot of people to get in touch with today, but since you two and your guests are just around the corner, we thought we might drop by and brief you in person." "Sure," Nita said. "I'll let everybody know you're coming." "Fine. An hour or so be all right?" "Sure." "Great. See you then." Tom hung up, leaving Nita staring at the phone in her hand. She pushed the hang-up button and just stood there. "Wow," she said. She looked down at the manual, which now lay open to one of its many glossaries, and was showing her fourteen different variations on the "aposteme" word. "Kit?" Nita said. A slightly muffled reply came seemingly from the back of the manual, along with the sound of barking somewhere in the Rodriguez household. "I can't believe we're out of dog food," Kit said. "I leave for a week and a half, and this place goes to pieces." "We were doing just fine without you," said another voice from two blocks away: Kit's sister Carmela. "It's not our fault you forgot to put dog food on the shop ping list before you left. Neets, is it true he destroyed a whole alien culture in just ten days?" Nita snorted. "It wouldn't have been just him, 'Mela," she said. "And we didn't destroy it. We just happened to be there when they were going on to the next thing." "'Just happened'?" Carmela said. Her tone was one of kindly disbelief. "You're so nice to try to share the blame! See you later on…" After a moment Kit said, "Am I allowed to think about teleporting her to Titan and dumping her in a lake of liquid methane?" "No," Nita said, feeling around under her bed for her sneakers. "It'd upset those microbes there…the ones Dairine's been coaching in situational ethics." "The thought of Dairine coaching anybody in ethics…," Kit said. "No offense, but sometimes I wonder if someday our solar system is going to be fa mous for having entire species made up of criminal masterminds." "Well, if the Powers That Be have slipped up, it's too late to do anything now. And speaking of the Powers, you should get over here in about an hour. Tom and Carl want to talk to everybody." "We're not in trouble, are we?" "I don't think so," Nita said. "In fact, I think maybe they are." "And here I thought we were going to have a few quiet days before spring break was over," Kit said. Nita shook her head. "Guess not. But now we get to find out why nobody could find them anywhere." From down the hall, toward the front of the house, she could hear voices in the dining room. "Sounds like they're having breakfast out there," Nita said. "Should I wait to come over?" Nita shrugged and turned away from the mirror. "What for?" she said. "You might as well come have some breakfast, too, if you haven't had anything." "I have," Kit said, "but another breakfast wouldn't kill me. Give me ten minutes, though. I have to talk to Ponch." "Why? Are all the neighbors' dogs sitting around outside the house again?" This had been a problem recently, apparently due to some kind of wizardly leakage. Diagnosing its source had been difficult with so much wizardry happening around their two households lately… and with the present houseguests in residence, the diagnosis promised to get no easier. "Nope," Kit said. "Everything's perfectly quiet. He just has some more questions about life." Nita smiled. "Yeah, who doesn't, lately," she said. "Take your time." Nita paged briefly through the manual, looking at the pimple words. There are too many ways to have this conversation, she thought. And I'm still pooped. If Tom hadn't called, I'd just go back to bed. She yawned– In the moment when her eyes closed during the yawn, the darkness reminded Nita of something. Another darkness, she thought. / had a dream… She had been standing on the Moon, and it had been dark. Bright lights were scattered all around her, throwing strange multidirectional shadows across the rocks and craters, but the sky was as blank of stars as if the whole thing was a stage set. And something was growling Nita suddenly got goose bumps. She opened her eyes. The bathroom, the morning light, the mirror, all the things around her were per fectly normal. But the memory left her feeling chilly. It means something, of course, Nita thought. Lately, what doesn't? Every wizard has a specialty, but the specialty can change. Nita's initially straightforward affinity to living things was now turning into some thing more abstract-an ability to glimpse other beings' realities and futures, or her own, while dreaming. She was struggling to master it, but in the meantime all she could do was pay attention, and try to learn as she went along. Great, she thought. News flash: It was dark on the back side of the Moon. I'll make a note. Meanwhile, as for the zit… She looked one more time at the pimple words in the manual, shrugged, and shut it. Later, Nita thought, and headed out of the bathroom. "All right," her dad was saying from the kitchen as she passed through the living room, and Nita started walking a little faster as she caught the smell of frying bacon. "How many are we for dinner tonight?" "The usual," came the reply. "Three humans, one humanoid, one tree, one giant bug-" "Humanoid king," said another voice. "Yeah, fine, whatever." "And who were you calling a bug?" "Or a humanoid? / am the human. You're the humanoids." Nita came around the corner from the living room and paused in the dining room doorway. The room's slightly faded yellow floral wallpaper was bright in morning sun, and the polished wood of the table was covered with cereal boxes, empty plates and bowls, various cutlery, the morning paper, and several girl– teen magazines of a kind that Nita had sworn off as too pink and clueless a couple of years ago. At the head of the table, poring over the international-news section of the newspaper, was a slender young man with the most unnervingly handsome face and the most perfect waist– length blond hair Nita had ever seen. He was dressed in floppy golden-colored pants and high boots of something like glittering bronze-colored leather, unusually ornate-but over it all he was wearing an oversized gray T-shirt that said fermilab muon collider slo-pitch Softball, and he was sucking on a lollipop. Sitting at the right side of the table, turning the pages of one of the too-pink magazines and eyeing it with many, many red eyes like little berries, was what appeared to be a small Christmas tree, though one without any ornaments except a New York Mets baseball cap. Across the table from the tree was Nita's sister, Dairine, in T-shirt and jeans, her red hair hanging down and half concealing her freckled face as she paged through the paper's entertainment and comics section from last weekend. And at the end of the table opposite the blond guy was a giant metallic-purple centipede, reading several different columns' worth of classified ads with several stalked eyes. "You're too late," Dairine said. "All the French toast is history." "Knew I could count on you," Nita said. At the table, the centipede pointed a couple of spare eyes at the Christmas tree. "You done with that?" the centipede said. "Yes," the tree said, and pushed the pink magazine over to the centipede. "Thanks," said the centipede. It tore the cover off the magazine, examined it with a connoisseur's eye, and started to eat it. "Morning, everybody," Nita said as she headed through the dining room and around the corner into the kitchen, where her father was. "You all sleep well?" "Yes, thank you," said the Christmas tree and the centipede. "Adequately," said the slim blond guy, nodding gra ciously to Nita as she passed. In the kitchen, Nita's tall, blocky, silver-haired dad was standing in front of the open fridge in sweatpants and a T-shirt, considering the contents. Nita went to him and hugged him. "Morning, Daddy." "Morning, sweetie." He hugged her back, one– armed. "Didn't think I'd see you so early." "I'm surprised, too," Nita said. "Didn't think I'd get over the lag so fast. Tom and Carl are coming over in a while. Oh, and Kit." "That's fine." Nita rummaged in the cupboard over the counter by the stove to find herself a mug, then put the kettle on the burner for tea. She put one hand on the kettle and said to the water inside it, in the Speech, "You wouldn't mind boiling for me, would you?" There was a soft rush of response as the water inside the kettle heated up very abruptly. Nita took her hand off in a hurry. It took only about five seconds for the kettle to start whistling with steam. Nita stood there and breathed hard for a moment, feeling as if she'd just run a couple of flights of stairs. No wizardry was without its price, even one so small as making water boil: One way or another, you paid for the energy. "You're getting impatient in your old age," her father said, reaching into one of the canisters on the other side of the refrigerator and handing Nita a tea bag. "Yup," Nita said as she dropped the tea bag into the mug and poured boiling water on it. She smiled. Her father seemed to have become surprisingly blase in a very short time about wizardry in general-but Nita and Dairine had between them put their parents through a fair amount of wizardly business in the past couple of years, and the adults' coping skills had improved in a hurry once they'd come to grips with the idea that the magic in the house wasn't going to go away. We were lucky, I guess, Nita thought. So many wizards don't dare "come out" to their families at all. Or they try it, and it doesn't 't work, and then they have to make them forget… She got down some sugar from the cupboard. But look at him now. You'd think everybody had alien wizards living in their basement… "It's almost nine," her dad said. "I should get ready to go, honey." "Okay," Nita said as her dad headed through the dining room and toward the back of the house. She wandered back into the dining room with her tea and pulled one of the spare chairs over from the wall, pushing it down to the far end of the table between Sker'ret and where Dairine had been sitting. The centipede-Nita smiled at herself. / should lay off that, she thought, it's so Earth-centric… The Rirhait was carefully tearing out another page from the teen magazine. He then examined both sides of the page with great care before shredding it up with several pairs of small knife-sharp mandibles and stuffing it into his facial orifice. "Where'd these come from?" Nita said to Dairine as she came back in. "Carmela brought them," Dairine said. "They're sure not mine. I mean, look at the covers! You could find them in the dark. The publishers must think human females are nearly blind until they're eighteen." The Christmas tree-The Demisive, I mean, Nita thought-reached out a frond-branch to pull another magazine off the pile. "I think the colors are delightful," he said. "That's just because you're a sucker for DayGlo, Filif," Dairine said. "It's a newbie thing. You'll get over it." Nita somehow wasn't so sure about that. "And as for you, Sker'ret," she said to the Rirhait, "you're a one-being recycling center." "There's a pile of Dad's old Time magazines by the chair in the living room," Dairine said. "For when you want something a little more substantial." "Oh, substance isn't everything," Sker'ret said. "Sometimes a little junk food is just what you need." He munched away. Nita drank her tea, watching Roshaun read while he maneuvered the lollipop stick from one side of his mouth to the other. It was like catching some coolly elegant anime character relaxing between shots, because the bulge it produced in the Wellakhit's face looked very out of place against that otherwise flawless facial structure, the emerald green eyes and the too-perfect blond hair. Roshaun felt Nita's gaze resting on him, and looked up. "What?" It was exactly what Dairine would have said. Nita controlled her smile. "The lollipop …" "What about it?" "I hate to say this, but you're kind of spoiling your grandeur." "What grandeur he has," Dairine remarked. "Kings are made no less noble by eating," Roshaun said. "Rather, they ennoble what they eat." "Wow, who sold you that one?" Nita said. She grinned. At the same moment, her stomach growled, and she made up her mind about breakfast. "I think I'll go ennoble a couple of waffles." Roshaun ignored her and continued to work on the lollipop, while Nita went back into the kitchen and headed for the freezer. "And you're going to get cavities," Dairine said. As Nita turned around with the frozen-waffle box, she saw Roshaun deliberately arch one eyebrow. "How can a biped come down with a geological feature?" "It's hwatba-t," Dairine said, turning a page in the weekend section. "Not emiwai." "Oh," Roshaun said. "Well, it's all right: People from my planet don't get those." "I don't care if you come from Dental Hygiene World," Nita said as she put the waffles in the toaster and started it up, "you'll get them all right if you start stuffing that much sugar in your face every day." Roshaun merely chewed briefly, and then reached out to the canister in the middle of the table for another lollipop. Nita winced. "Oh, Roshaun, don't chew them up like that. It hurts just listening to you!" "You sound like Sker'ret," Dairine said, turning another page. "Sker'ret is if nothing else enthusiastic and robust in his approach to the things he enjoys," Roshaun said, "so I'll take that as a compliment." He got up and wandered out the back door. As the screen door slammed behind him, Nita glanced over at Dairine. "You've got a live one there," she said. Dairine glanced up and shrugged. "Listen," she said, "at least he's not complaining about our food anymore. You should have heard him last week." "I didn't understand it, either. All your food's lovely," Sker'ret said, and munched another page of the teen magazine. Nita's waffles popped up. She went to the cupboard for a plate and pulled the waffles one by one out of the toaster, hissing a little as their heat stung her fingers. Dropping the waffles on the plate, she turned to root around on the shelf next to the stove for a bottle of maple syrup. "Got my hands full here," she said in the Speech to the silverware drawer by the sink. "Would you mind?" The drawer, well used to the request by now, slid open. Nita tucked the maple syrup bottle into the crook of her elbow while holding the plate in that hand, and went fishing in it for a knife and fork. "Thanks," she said to the drawer. It courteously closed itself as Nita headed into the dining room. Filif drifted past her in the opposite direction, brushing Nita with the fronds on one side as he passed. "You need anything?" Nita said. "No, I'm just going out to root for a little," Filif said, levitating gracefully past her and toward the back door. "I'll be back shortly." Nita headed into the dining room; the screen door creaked open and banged shut behind her. She sat down and poured syrup on her waffles, then started to eat. "So what're your plans for the day?" Dairine said. "To stay right here until Tom and Carl turn up," Nita said between bites. "They're coming here}" Dairine said, looking alarmed. Sker'ret looked surprised, too. "They're your Seniors, aren't they? Wouldn't you normally go to them}" "Yeah, but what's been normal lately?" Nita said. The screen door creaked open again. A moment later, a black four-legged shape burst into the room and began jumping up on the people at the table, one after another, putting his front paws on them and licking them until they protested they'd had enough. When the large Labrador-ish creature got to Nita, he started the same procedure with her, and then paused, looking with sudden interest at her waffle. "Oh, no, you don't!" Nita said. But it smells so nice, Ponch said silently. "And it's going to keep smelling nice until it's all gone," Nita said. "Oh, come on, don't give me those big sad puppy-dog eyes. Kit gave you breakfast." He might not have. You haven't asked. There was no lessening of the puppy-dog-eyes effect. Nita went back to eating. "I don't have to ask," she said. "I know he did. You're really pitiful, you know that?" Not pitiful enough, it seems, Ponch said, in a tone of mild regret. He dropped to the floor again and went to sit by Sker'ret instead. Sker'ret looked at Ponch with several eyes, then offered him a strip of torn-off magazine page. Ponch sniffed it, mouthed it briefly, and then let Sker'ret have it back, somewhat damp. Tastes like my dry dog food, Ponch said. Kit came in from the kitchen in Ponch's wake. "Did I hear you bad-mouthing breakfast?" Not hers, Ponch said. As Kit flopped down in Roshaun's vacant seat, Ponch got up and went to rest his head on Kit's knee. / don't mind the dry food so much when there's some wet food. But when you have to eat it by itself– "It tastes like cardboard, is that what you're trying to tell me? Okay, we'll try another brand." Kit ruffled Ponch's ears. "Boy, when you got smart, you sure got picky…" / was always picky, Ponch said, with an air of wounded dignity. But now that I'm smart, I can tell you why. Kit looked over at Nita, amused. As he did, it struck her that he looked a little different somehow. "Is it just me," she said, "or are you having another growth spurt? You look taller today." "I am taller," Kit said, looking toward the kitchen as the screen door creaked open again. "Probably so are you. Looks like ten days in eight-tenths Earth gravity makes your spine stretch. My mom picked up on it last night. She measured me and I'd gained half an inch." "Huh," Nita said, turning her attention back to what was left of her waffle. "I, too, am taller," Roshaun said, coming back into the dining room. "Your gravity is somewhat lighter than ours at home." "You're the last one around here who needs to be any taller," Dairine said as Roshaun reached for the lollipop canister again. "I have to stand on a step stool to get your attention as it is." "You finished that last one already}" Nita said, taking a bite of waffle as Roshaun sorted through the canister, pulling out a couple of the root-beer-flavored pops. "Roshaun, you're not going to have any teeth left by the time you get home." "We shall see. And what is this delicacy?" He reached down into Nita's plate and snitched a chunk of waffle off it just as Nita was about to spear it with her fork. As it was, she nearly speared him instead, and wasn't terribly sorry about it. "Hey!" Nita said. "Cut it out!" Roshaun ignored her, chewing. "A naive but pleasing contrast," he said. "And I wouldn't be so concerned about my sugar intake, if I were you." He smiled at Nita. "I don't eat this every five minutes, Roshaun!" Nita said, but it was too late: He was already sauntering out again. Kit smiled as the screen door slammed once more, but the smile was sardonic. "Is he for real?" Kit said under his breath. "He's real enough to fix a busted star," Dairine said, giving Kit an annoyed look. Kit raised his eyebrows. "Finish explaining this to me," he said to Dairine as she got up, "because you didn't get into detail yesterday. He's a prince?" "A king," Dairine and Sker'ret said in chorus, sounding like they'd heard the correction much too often lately. "The 'upgrade' happened the other day," Dairine said. "And he won't let us forget it," Sker'ret said. "I think maybe I liked him better as a prince. He was so much less self-assured…" Dairine rolled her eyes. She made her way around the table and out, heading through the kitchen after Roshaun. Squeak, bang! went the screen door. "Sker'ret, my boy," said Nita's dad as he came in from the living room, now dressed in jeans and a polo shirt for work, "your mastery of the art of irony becomes more comprehensive every day." It was hard to be sure how she could tell that an alien with no face was smiling, but Nita could tell. "You going now, Daddy?" she said. "I want to get some bookkeeping done before I open the shop. See you, sweetie." Once again, the screen door banged shut. "Something going on with Dairine and Roshaun?" Kit said after a moment. Nita shook her head. "At first I thought it might just be a crush," she said. "But now I'm starting to wonder…" Nita speared the last pieces of waffle, and a thought hit her. "Hey, did Filif hear that he needs to be here?" The wizards around the table looked at one another. "He went out as you were coming in, didn't he?" Nita nodded. "He's probably out back," she said. "I'll check." She got up and put her plate in the kitchen sink; and with Kit in tow, and Ponch following him, she went out through the side door, down the brick steps to the driveway. The morning was a little hazy, but the sun was warm on their faces. The view up and down the driveway would have seemed clear enough to any nonwizardly person who happened to pass by, but Nita's vision, well trained in perceiving active spelling by now, could see a tremor of power all around the edges of their property, a selective-visibility field that would hide the presence or actions of anything nonhuman. Inside it, across the driveway, the leaves on the big lilac bushes were out at last, and the flower-spikes were growing fast. Nita was glad to see them, though they also made her sad. The winter and the earliest part of the spring seemed to have lasted forever, some ways: Any sign of things being made new was welcome. But her mom had loved those lilacs, and wouldn't be seeing them again. Nita sighed. "Yeah, I'm tired, too," Kit said, glancing up and down the driveway as Ponch wandered off down it. "You wouldn't think a vacation would leave you so wiped out." "And there won't be much time to get rested up now," Nita said. She looked down their street, where the branches of the maples beside the sidewalk, bare for so long, were now well clothed in that particular new spring yellow-green. The leaves that had been small when they first went off on their spring break were now almost full-sized. "At least there's stuff to do…" "And five whole days left before we have to go back to school." Kit looked at her meaningfully. Nita rolled her eyes. "Yeah, I know, the Mars thing. I've been meaning to talk to you about that. When did you get the idea it would be cute to carve my dad's cell-phone number on a rock in the middle of Syrtis Major? He hates it when people call me on his phone." Kit gave Nita a resigned look. "Sorry," he said, "I couldn't resist." "Well, resist next time!" Nita said. "Anyway, we can't just run off and start digging up half of Syrtis on our own. We have to talk to the rest of the intervention team and see if they've got any kind of idea where to start." "Yeah, but they said individual research was still okay," Kit said as they walked up the driveway toward the gate leading to the backyard. "You don't fool me," Nita said. "You just want to run all over Mars like some kind of areo-geek, and you want me to split the labor on the transport spell with you!" "Oh, wait a minute now, it's not that simple!" Nita grinned, for he hadn't denied it outright. Kit had developed a serious case of Mars fever-serious enough that he'd added a map of the planet's two hemispheres to his bedroom wall and started sticking pins in it, the way he'd been doing with his map of the Moon for some months. "It is cool, isn't it," Nita said, "standing there at sunset and seeing Earth? Just hanging there in the sky like a little blue star." "Yeah," Kit said. "It's not the same as when you do it from closer." "So let's message Mamvish," Nita said, "and see if she feels like getting the team together in the next few days. It'll give you an excuse to go do some 'new research.' And we can take the guests along: They like to do tourist things, from what Dairine says." The screen door slammed again. Nita looked back to see Dairine wandering down toward them. "Filif says he knows about Tom and Carl coming," she said. "He'll be up in a minute." "Okay," Nita said. "Hey, you did a good job on the shield-spell around the yard. The energy for that has to have been costing you a fair amount. You need some help with it? Kit and I can take some of the strain." Dairine looked briefly pained. "No, it's okay," she said. "If it starts to be a problem before the guests have to go, you can make a donation. Spot's holding the spell diagram for me at the moment." Nita blinked. "Hey, yeah, where is he this morning? I haven't seen him." "He's up in my bedroom," Dairine said, "under the bed, saying. 'Uh Oh'.'" "I don't like the sound of that," Kit said. Dairine's laptop computer was more than half wizard's manual, if not more than half wizard, and the Uh-Oh'ing had proven at least once to be an indicator of some unspecified difficulty coming. Nita shrugged. "Neither do I," she said. "But maybe Tom and Carl will know what the trouble is-" The sound of a car turning into Nita's driveway brought all their heads around. It was Tom's big Nissan. "Since when do they drive over here?" Kit said as Filif came drifting toward them from the backyard gate. "They only live three blocks away." "Yeah," Nita said over her shoulder. "Come on-" A few moments later, Tom and Carl were getting out of Tom's car: Tom looking as he usually did, tall and broad-shouldered, his hair graying, casually dressed in jeans and shirt with the sleeves rolled up; Carl, a little shorter, dark, dark-eyed, and-today at least-looking unusually intense, with the shirtsleeves down at full length. Nita's attention fastened instantly on that intensity, and on Tom's hair. He started going gray so fast, she thought. What's been going on? What have I been missing? Nita and Kit greeted the two Seniors as casually as would have been normal. "Hey, you three," Tom said. "Filif?" Carl said, turning to him. "Berries all in place?" Filif laughed, a rustling sound. For the moment, anyway. "Can we go in?" Carl said. "We've got a lot of ground to cover." "Yeah," Nita said. "Come on." She gestured toward the door. Kit pulled the screen door open, holding it for everybody. Nita dawdled a little, watching with fascination as Filif went up the back steps after Tom and Carl. It was hard to see how Filif did it: His people had some personal-privacy thing about their roots, and when they moved, there was always a visually opaque field around the root area, like a little cloud that concealed the actual locomotion. When they were all inside, Nita slipped past them and into the dining room to rearrange the chairs a little. As Tom and Carl came in, Sker'ret and Roshaun rose to greet them, the respectful gesture of a less senior wizard to a more senior one-though Nita noticed with some annoyance that Roshaun looked slightly skeptical. "Sker'ret," Tom said, while Nita sorted out the seating, "I talked to your honorable ancestor this morning: He sends his best." "Does he?" Sker'ret said, politely enough, but Nita thought she caught some edge behind the words. Roshaun was standing there off to one side, with Dairine, looking superior and skeptical as usual. Carl turned to him. "Roshaun he Nelaid am Seriv am Teliuyve am Meseph am Veliz am Teriaunst am det Nuiiliat," Carl said, "eniwe' sa pheir'land then he continued, not in the Speech, but in a beautiful flow of language that sounded more like running water than like words. Nonetheless, the meaning was plain, for those who speak the Speech can listen in it as well, comprehending any language. "A sorrow for your new burden, Sunborn. Bear it as befits you, and lay it down in good time, mere cast-off shadow as it is of the greater radiance beyond." Roshaun looked utterly stunned. He bowed to Tom and Carl as if they were as royal as he thought he was, or more so. "May it be so," he said, "here and henceforward." They nodded to him, and moved around the table to get settled. "Now those are Seniors," Roshaun said under his breath as he sat down beside Nita. "I was wondering if your people had any worthy of the name." "You have no idea," Nita said softly. She wondered yet again exactly what was involved in becoming a Senior. It's not like they're so old. It's not like they're just grown up, either. Lots of grown-ups are wizards, and they never make Senior level, or even Advisory. What is it? What do you have to do? How do they know so much stuff, and make it look so easy? At last everyone was seated. "Normally we'd spend a lot more time being social," Tom said, "but today's not the day for it, so please forgive us if we get right down to business." He let out a long breath, looking them all over. "Some of you," he said, "will have noticed that the world has been getting… well, a lot more complicated lately. And, seemingly, a lot worse." "Yeah," Nita said, thinking ruefully of the Manhattan skyline. "By 'lately,'" Tom said, just a little sharply, "I mean, over the past couple of thousand years." "Oh," Nita said, and shut her mouth. "It isn't local," Tom said. "Matters have been worsening gradually all over the worlds; and wizards who study macrotrends have been concerned about it for some time. The Powers That Be haven't had much to say except that this worsening is a sign of a huge change coming… something that's not been seen before in the worlds. And now we know the change is upon us… because the expansion of the universe is speeding up." Kit looked a little confused. "But hasn't it always been expanding? What's the problem?" "Bear with me," Tom said. He looked at Nita. "Do you know anything about 'dark matter'?" "Mostly that it was missing," Nita said. "Astronomers have been looking for it for a long time, maybe a hundred years or so. But now they've started to find it." "And so have scientists on a lot of other worlds," Carl said. "Know what's strange about that?" "That it took us so long?" Kit said. Carl shook his head. "That all the sentient species who were looking for dark matter started finding it at around the same time." Nita sat there and wondered what to make of that. "The discovery of dark matter and the increase in the speed of the universe's expansion are somehow connected," Tom said. "Dark matter is being detected in ever-increasing masses and volumes… as if it was appearing out of nowhere. And in all the places where 'new' dark matter is being found, local space is starting to expand much faster than it should. Thousands of times faster." "So everything's getting farther and farther away from everything else," Kit said. "Right. Now, that's bad enough by itself. But there are also side effects to this kind of abnormal expansion. Mental ones… and effects that go deeper than the merely mental." Roshaun stirred uncomfortably, and a sort of rustle went through Filif's branches. "The expansion isn't just affecting space itself," Carl said. "It also stretches thin the structure space is hung on-the subdimensions, the realms of hyperstrings and so on. If the expansion isn't slowed to its normal rate, physical laws are going to start misbehaving. And since those laws are the basis on which life and thought work, people here and everywhere else are going to start being affected personally by the greatly increased expansion." "How?" Filif said. "That's going to vary from species to species," Tom said. "In our case, the case of Senior Wizards-and I don't mean Seniors, but everyone much past latency, what our own species calls adolescence-it's going to look like a slowly increasing physical and then mental weariness. We're going to start finding it hard to care, even hard to believe in what we're all doing. And then our wizardry will vanish." Nita looked at Tom and thought, with a sudden twisting in her gut, how very tired he looked. "Yes," Tom said. "It's already begun." He let out a long breath. "Now, of course, this is something we'd try to derail. Most Seniors and Advisory-level wizards from this part of the galaxy were involved this past week with an intervention that was meant to deal with the problem, at least in the short term, for our galaxy." Nita thought of Tom and her dad sitting in her dining room and talking, some days back, when they'd thought no one was listening. We have a chance… a better than even chance… Tom had been saying to her dad, about something the Senior Wizards had been contemplating. "So that's where you were when nobody could get through to you, even with the manuals," Nita said. Carl nodded. "None of us was sure when the necessary forces could be completely assembled. When the call finally came, we had to drop everything and go. There was no time for explanations." "Or for interruptions," Tom said. "To say we were busy would have been putting it mildly… not that it made any difference, in the end. Because we failed. After that we were all sent home to our homeworlds, to start organizing their defense." Nita went cold in a rush, as cold as if someone had dumped a bucket of snow over her head. "Why now?" Kit said. "Why is all this happening now?" "Not even the Powers are sure," Carl said. "Someone's going to have to find out, though… because the 'why' may be the key to solving the problem. If it can be solved." Kit had a very uneasy look on his face. "So, if you guys are going to lose your wizardry for a while… who's going to take over for you as Seniors?" he said. "Who's going to be running the planet?" Tom and Carl looked at each other, then at Nita and Kit. "You are," they said. Force Support Kit sat there and came to terms with what it felt like when all the blood drained from your face. It was a feeling he really didn't like. "You're kidding, right?" he said after a moment. Tom shook his head. "I know this is a terrible thing to dump on you," he said. "But in a very short time– certainly within a couple of weeks, possibly within days-we adult wizards are not going to be able to do our jobs anymore." "We hoped we could head it off," Carl said. "But even a mass intervention involving more than two thousand Seniors from this part of the galaxy couldn't stop what was happening in our neighborhood… or deal with the cause." "But you said it was the dark matter," Sker'ret said. "That's the 'what,'" Carl said. "But we're still missing the 'why'… and there's no point in treating the symptoms. We need to find the cause… and we haven't." Carl raised his hands, let them fall again. "We have some hints and possibilities-" "It's the Lone Power again, isn't it?" Dairine said. "That'd be an easy first assumption," said Tom. "But the early indications are that something different from the Lone One's usual pattern of attack is going on. We're continuing to investigate…" "Not with a lot of success," Carl muttered. Kit squirmed in discomfort, for some of the goodnatured humor that was always there when Tom and Carl talked to each other was missing. They're scared, he thought. And they're trying not to show it, because they don't want to frighten the kids… "We should start at the beginning," Tom said. He looked over at Carl. "Do you want to do the run– through this time? I wouldn't want to deprive you…" Now the humor was back, but Kit was still unnerved. Carl, though, just raised his eyebrows, resigned. "You go ahead," he said. "I'll have lots of chances to do it by myself over the next few days." Tom took a deep breath, then reached into the air and brought out his wizard's manual. It was, as usual, larger and thicker than Nita's-more like a phone book than a library book. He put it down on the table and opened it to about the halfway point. "Go ahead," he said, and the manual's pages began riffling by themselves to the place he was looking for. When the page-riffling stopped, Tom ran his finger down one column of the print on the right-hand page. "Okay," he said, "here we go." He began to speak, very quietly and conversationally, in the Speech. As Kit watched, the manual and its pages seemed to spread out more and more widely across the table-or maybe it was the table underneath it shrinking. But, no, that couldn't be true; Kit was leaning with his forearms on the table, and it wasn't moving, and neither was he. Nonetheless, the room darkened, the yellow-flowered wallpaper fading down and out as if someone had turned off the day. The pages of the book darkened; the table darkened, too, and kept on spreading out into the darkness, somehow seeming to avoid everyone who was sitting around it. Farther and farther that flat darkness spread; and Kit and Nita and Dairine and Roshaun and Filif and Sker'ret were all still illuminated, as if by an overhead light that nobody could see. Across the table from them, illuminated in the same way, Tom leaned back in his chair, his arms folded, his gaze cast down as he watched the ever-spreading pages of the book. There on the surface of the page, as it grew, Kit could see the previously prepared spell diagram that Tom had been working from-a blue-glowing, densely interwritten circle of characters in the Speech, the outer circle containing the basic parameters of the spell, knotted with the wizard's knot, and the inside of the circle containing the variables. As they sat there, the outer circle of the spell rotated up around them out of the horizontal, leaving a hemisphere of incandescent blue filigree overhead, in which various characters of the Speech sparked and glittered as the wizardry worked. For a few moments, as everything got more and more silent except Tom's voice speaking in the Speech, they seemed to be sitting inside an elaborate blue-burning globe, a glowing wire frame. Then, without warning, the globe expanded outward in all directions, as if heading for infinity. Where it passed, first stars flared into being, and then galaxies. Within a few breaths' time, the kitchen table was at the heart of a viewpoint on the Local Group, the thirty-odd galaxies closest to Earth's Milky Way spiral, which Tom had placed at the center of the view for reference purposes. Close by hovered the ragged irregular patches of starfire that were the Greater and Lesser Magellanic clouds; a little farther off, the great golden-tinged spiral of the Andromeda galaxy hung in its majesty, with the other associated galaxies scattered in various directions around it and the Milky Way. The imaging wizardry's blue sphere shot out past the Local Group, sowing more and more galaxies and groups of galaxies in its wake, until it was as if the eight wizards-and the dining room table– were floating free in a near-infinite volume of space. "So here's the neighborhood," Tom said. As he spoke, the utter blackness between the galaxies paled to a sky blue, and the light of the stars paled as well. "I'm lightening up the black of space a little, so you can see where our part of the trouble first started-" He pointed off to one side. Faintly, in the depths of the space between the Andromeda galaxy and its neighbor, the smaller loosely coiled spiral in Triangulum, a dim patch of darkness started to grow in the blue. At first Kit wasn't sure what he was seeing, but it became more and more distinct. "We first spotted that dark patch about three years ago," Tom said. "Back then it seemed as if it was just an anomaly, a dark-matter aggregate that was in the process of popping out and would stabilize after a while. Space is always springing little 'surprises' or accidents in interstellar structure that heal themselves up over time. Intervening too soon, or too energetically, can make them worse." "Like when you keep picking at something," Kit said, "and it doesn't get better…" Carl chuckled. "Something like that," Tom said. "At any rate, the wizards over in Andromeda kept an eye on it. The dark-matter area grew, but not much, and not quickly. There came a point where it seemed to have stopped. But then another one appeared…" They saw it fade in, very gradually, on the opposite side of the Local Group, over by the small irregular galaxy known on Earth as GR8. "And after that, the dark-matter aggregates started appearing more quickly," Tom said. "In rapid succession, over the past couple of years, concentrations of dark matter appeared near 30 Doradus and M32." The dark splotches were spreading fast, popping up seemingly randomly in every direction. "It's getting closer," Nita said. "There's one right by the Lesser Magellanic Cloud. That's really close, just next door, almost." Kit didn't know the names or locations of the galaxies as well as Nita did: Astronomy was her specialty. But right now what troubled him most was the rate at which the darkness seemed to be spreading. "Did you just speed up the simulation?" he said to Tom. Tom shook his head. "No, the spread began accelerating last year," he said. "That was when the Powers That Be first asked wizards to start doing local interventions." He let out a breath. "The early wizardries, which were large-group workings like the one we just came back from, seemed at first to work. The aggregates of dark matter froze, even began to retreat in a few cases. As you see here-" The assembled wizards watched the twilight– colored virtual space between galaxies and groups of galaxies continue to undergo a bizarre and splotchy nightfall. After a few moments, the darkness grew no darker, but there was still too much of it. And to Kit, the galaxies burning in the simulation-wizardry began to look small and threatened. "That's how the situation stood until a few days ago," Tom said. "That spot over there"-he pointed at one side of the simulation, and the view of that area leaped closer-"that's where Carl and I were last week. Two thousand Seniors and Planetary-Supervisory Wizards from all over our own galaxy, along with groups from Andromeda, the Sagittarius and Canis Major Dwarfs-we went there to reverse the effect in that one spot. We defined a local control structure, a temporary 'kernel' for that part of space, and operated on it to force the dark matter back out of our space." "And the intervention did not work," Roshaun said softly. "No," Tom said. "Instead, this happened." The darkness began to spread again-and this time, much faster. "It was as if someone was waiting to see whether we'd be able to pull it off," Carl said. "When it was plain that we couldn't, the expansion took off again at twice the speed. And this is what the projected result looks like." Kit looked up into what was left of the blue of intergalactic space as the simulation ran. In a frighteningly short time, the blue was all gone. Then, the blackness began to intrude among the stars of the galaxies themselves. Their stars pushed apart; the galaxies started to lose shape. "But how can it be happening so fast?" Kit said. "That has to be a lot faster than the speed of light. Matter can't go that fast in space." Nita was shaking her head. "But space can," she said. "Sit an ant on a balloon and blow up the balloon really fast, and the ant winds up moving a lot faster than it could ever move by itself. If something's stretching space out of its usual shape, then everything inside space-matter and light and gravity and time-gets distorted, too." "And that's where the real trouble starts," Carl said. "Physical law is fairly robust, but wizardry is more delicate and subtle. The way this expansion undermines what we do is very simple… very nasty." "When you do a spell," Tom said, "you have to accurately describe what you're working on in the Speech, or you risk destroying it. And to accurately describe anything, you have to know, and describe, not only what it is, but where it is. Now, your manual normally helps you factor in the adjustments you need for the way things in your location are moving: your planet's rotation, its orbit around the Sun, and so on. But if all of a sudden, because of this expansion, things are moving unpredictably in directions or speeds they shouldn't be-" "Then your wizardry doesn't work at all," Kit said. "Or starts to, and then breaks down." The thought gave him the shivers. There were so many ways that a failed wizardry could be deadly that he hated to give it much more thought. And what's worse, Kit thought, is that up until now, the one thing you could always count on was that a spell always worked. If all of a sudden it doesn't… "That would be bad enough," Tom said, "but matters get even worse. The changes in the structure of space then start affecting the thought processes and reactions of all living beings in the area. Their behavior will start to become less and less rational… less committed to Life. This is the point where a wizard whose power levels are below a certain level starts losing the ability to speak or understand the Speech… because you stop believing that you can. Soon you stop believing in it." Kit gulped at the awful thought. "Wizardry will not live in the unwilling heart,'" Sker'ret said, quoting one of the most basic tenets of the Art. "Yes," Tom said. "And nonwizards will suffer, too. Matters of the heart and spirit will be valued less and less. Shortly only physical things will seem real to people. And when that happens-because most humans will still remember that, once, the heart and the spirit did matter-they'll get scared and angry. Eventually anger and violence will be the only things that seem to work the way they used to, the only things left that make people feel alive." Kit shivered, looking over at Nita. She glanced at him, a sidewise, nervous look. "Why do I get this feeling," Nita said, "that on a planet with nuclear weapons, we'll probably blow ourselves up a long time before light and gravity start to malfunction?" "Not that the rest of the known universe won't be just a little way behind us," Kit said. Carl cleared his throat. "Exactly." They all sat there in silence for a few moments. Then, after a moment-"If that's all," Filif said, sounding a little forlorn, "please, may we have the daylight back again?" "Sure," Tom said, and put out his hand. The wizardry surrounding them collapsed itself to a little blue-white sphere no bigger than a ball bearing, and dropped into his palm. As the wizardry shrank away, ordinary afternoon sunshine and the reality of Nita's dining room reasserted themselves: the flowered wallpaper, the dining room table with some of the leftovers of breakfast still on it-a marmalade jar with a knife stuck in it, a couple of crumpled paper napkins. Tom dropped the imaging wizardry back onto the open page of his wizard's manual. It flattened itself to the page; he reached out and closed the book again. Kit watched him do it, feeling peculiarly remote from it all. We're sitting here in Nita's dining room talking about the end of civilization, he thought, and not in ten thousand years, either. From the sound of it, it's gonna be more like ten thousand hours… or minutes. Roshaun glanced up from the table, where his troubled gaze had been resting for a few moments. "Senior," he said, "why is all this happening now} Surely if this is so simple a strategy, the Isolate Power should have enacted it and made an end of us all ages ago." "We don't know why," Tom said. "There's always the possibility that the Lone One might not have known how to do this before. Though they're immortal, the Powers That Be aren't omniscient: They learn, though the exact shape of their learning curves is never likely to be clear to us because of the way they exist outside of time, dipping in and out as it suits them. Or the Lone Power could have known for aeons how to produce this result, but for some reason was waiting for the best moment to spring it on an unsuspecting universe." "Then, perhaps," Filif said, "something has happened either to embolden It… or to frighten It." Carl shook his head. "We have no idea," he said. "Another possibility is that something's going on in our universe that the Lone One doesn't want us interfering with-and this inrush of dark matter may simply be a distraction to keep us from discovering what's really happening, and dealing with it." "But you don't have any idea which of these theories might be the right one," Sker'ret said. "No," Tom said. "What about the Powers That Be?" Dairine said. "What do they say?" "Right now," Tom said, "they're waiting for the experts in this universe to give them some more data." "The experts?" Nita said. Tom smiled just slightly, but once again that smile had a grim edge to it. "Us," he said. "While They live here, too, They do it on a different level. We're a lot more expert in the business of actually dealing with physicality, day to day, than They are." "It's like the difference between manufacturing something, say a dishwasher," Carl said, "and using it every day. You could say that the Powers know what the universe acted like when it left the factory, but we're the ones who know the little noises it makes every day when it's running. And where to kick it to make them stop." Kit spent a moment trying to see the universe as a malfunctioning dishwasher, then put the idea aside; it made his brain hurt. Meanwhile, Tom picked up his manual and put it into the air beside him: It vanished. "Anyway," Tom said, "right now we need to stop the dark matter from tearing the universe apart-or at least slow down its growth and buy ourselves some time to solve the problem." "Or rather, buy you the time to solve it," Carl said. "Wizards near latency age-near their peak power level –are the only ones who'll keep their power long enough to make a difference now." Kit saw Dairine swallow hard, and Nita raised her eyebrows at him, while Sker'ret clenched its front four or six legs together, and Filif held very still, and Roshaun looked down at the table again, as if afraid what might show in his eyes if anyone saw them. And then suddenly, Tom smiled. It wasn't an angry smile, though it was fierce, and it had a surprising edge of amusement to it. "Now, after all that," he said, "believe it or not, we have some good news for you. For the duration-for as long as there is a duration-as far as wizardry goes, the lid is off. Any wizardry you can build to fight what's happening, any wizardry you can figure out how to fuel, is fair game. Normally we all limit our workings carefully to keep them from damaging the universe, or the beings who share it with us. But now the system itself is on the chopping block, along with everything else. If we don't save that…" He shook his head. "Then not just wizardry, but the Life we're sworn to protect, is at an end." Kit was immersed in a strange combination of shock and excitement, but at the same time practical questions nagged at him. "When you said we were going to be running things on the Earth," he said, "you didn't mean just us… did you?" Tom's grin became less fierce. "No," he said, "we didn't. Forgive us for making absolutely sure we had your attention when we started." "Obviously there are a lot of other wizards on the planet who'll be of use in this crisis," Carl said. "Not to mention a whole lot of wizards elsewhere in our galaxy. Seniors here and just about everywhere else have been selecting out younger wizards in their catchment areas who've shown promise, or have produced good results in the past. You fall into those categories. We've been organizing two main intervention groups– those who'll be staying here, managing the usual problems that come up at home, and those who'll be going off-planet to look for ways to stop the dark-matter incursion. Shortly we'll be putting you in touch with the groups you'll be assigned to. In the meantime, start researching on what we've been up to-it'll all be in your manuals. Anybody you feel will help you handle what's going on, get in touch with them pronto. But you've also got some logistical problems to deal with." Kit noticed Dairine beginning to squirm a little in her seat. Uh-huh, he thought. Bet I know what that's about. "First of all," Tom said to Dairine, "you've made the best of being 'grounded' inside the solar system for the last little while, so-assuming you've learned your lesson-the Powers That Be have cleared us to unground you." Dairine stopped squirming, and started to grin. "But don't you assume that this automatically means you're going to be sent off-planet. The team assignments haven't been thrashed out yet, and you may be of more use here." Dairine sat still and assumed an expression that Kit had long since come to recognize as an attempt to look "serious" and "good." As usual, he had a lot of trouble taking it seriously. "Anyway," Tom said, "whichever way your team assignments go, you're all either going to have to be on call at a moment's notice to deal with things here, or you're going to have to be away for some time." He glanced from Dairine to Kit to Nita. "Normally, in an emergency, we'd help you deal with your absence from school and 'real life' by issuing you with timeslide wizardries, so that you could spend as much time away as you needed to and come back at the same time you left. But this situation's not normal. Local implementations of wizardry may suffer early on… and if a timeslide fails, you could wind up marooned in the wrong time period, with no way home. So you're going to have to find other ways to handle your absence. Any way that we can help, let us know as soon as you have a plan." Nita just nodded. "Uh," Kit said, "right." / can see it all now, he thought. / go to my mama and pop and say, Hey, I need to take some more time off school. Yeah? How much? Oh, just enough to save the universe. Might be a few weeks. But no more than a few months, because everything that exists may be destroyed by then… Tom, meanwhile, had turned to Filif, Roshaun, and Sker'ret. "The story's different for you three," he said. "Sker'ret, Filif, we don't have direct jurisdiction over you-your Seniors or Advisories at home have that. But we can advise you while you're here. Both your species fortunately have long latency periods, so that your worlds have plenty of wizards on hand to deal with the local-level threat. Your people in particular, Filif, have such a high latency age that nearly all the wizards on the planet are still of an age range to be immune to what's going to happen. Officially, you're still both enjoying excursus status. The emergency, naturally, supersedes the 'holiday'; if you feel uncomfortable staying here, you can go home to your people at any time. But there's no need for you to rush home unless you feel you must." "I am free to come and go as I please," Filif said, "and have no binding ties to draw me immediately back. I am, after all, just one tree in a forest… and I think I might be of more use here." Tom glanced over at Sker'ret, who gave him a casual look in return. "I'm in no hurry, either," Sker'ret said. "People of my species are legally independent a long time before we're finished being latent. My esteemed ancestor won't mind if I stay." Kit glanced briefly at Nita, and saw her eyes flick toward him, then away again. She hears it, too, he thought. There was something uncomfortable going on with Sker'ret and his family. Not something that's going to get us all in trouble while we're trying to handle this mess, I hope… Tom nodded. "All right, then. But, Roshaun, unfortunately matters aren't as simple in your case." Roshaun glanced up at Tom with an expression that Kit found totally unrevealing. "Though your species has a longer latency period than ours," Tom said, "your own situation's complicated by your family's unique relationship with your planet, and the way wizardry is practiced there. Since your father, the Sun Lord That Was, is your Advisory, you're going to have to go home and sort out your intentions with him." Roshaun's expression didn't change. "It should not take long," he said. "All right. If he's got any questions about what's been going on here, have him get in touch with us; we'll be glad to fill him in on the details. In fact, I kind of look forward to it, because I read the precis in the manual about what you did while we were gone." Roshaun nodded graciously, his face adding only the slightest smile of pleasure at the praise… and Kit suddenly found himself really wishing he could somehow eavesdrop on that conversation. His father's his Advisory? The thought made him boggle. Sure, there were families in which wizardry ran; Nita's was an example. But to have such a close relative be a wizard, too, and your superior-It'd be like having a father who was also principal of your school. It could he super… if your dad was some kind of saint. But, boy, if he wasn't… "So," Carl said, "now you're all up to date. Just make sure you understand one thing: You're not going to be immune from the loss-of-wizardry effect forever. For a while it'll even seem to be going the other way, because as we lose our power, the Powers That Be are going to make sure it's not wasted. It's going to pass to you. But unless you work very fast to find out exactly what it is you need to do with it to save the world, then all that extra power isn't going to help you for long. You'll lose it, as we'll lose it. You'll lose the Speech, and wizardry, and even the belief that there was ever any such thing. And then the darkness will fall." Kit felt himself going pale all over again. "So work fast," Tom said. "We'll do the same, for as long as we can. We'll set you up with all the automatic manual assistance we can before we become nonfunctional." His face hardened as he said it, as if he was trying hard not to let his real feelings out. "But after that, it's up to you." Kit, glancing briefly sideways, saw Nita swallow. He'd seen that sealed-over expression on her often enough lately; he hadn't ever thought he'd see it on Tom. You get used to thinking the Seniors will always have a way out, Kit thought. That they'll figure out what to do. But when you see that it's not going to be that way… Tom glanced around at all of them. "So," he said, "if you have any questions …" He paused as a faint clicking noise came from off to his left, and then watched with interest as Dairine's laptop walked into the room. A small, rectangular silvery case on many jointed legs, it now hunched itself down on the polished wood floor, put up two stalky eyes, rather like Sker'ret's, and glanced from Tom to Carl and then to Dairine. "I was wondering when you were going to come out from under the bed," Dairine said, sounding to Kit both annoyed and a little relieved. "Spot, are you okay?" From Spot issued a small whirring noise, like a cuckoo clock getting ready to strike. Dairine leaned over to peer down at him. "Three true things await discovery," Spot said. "Darkness overspreading, A commorancy underground: And the Moon is no dream-" He sat there for a moment more, silent, and then got up on all his little legs again and spidered off into the kitchen. They all looked after him. "Uh, excuse me," Dairine called after him, "but what was that}" There was a pause, then the sound of little feet on the kitchen floor again, and Spot put several stalked eyes around the doorframe, gazing at Dairine. What was what? he said silently. "What you just said." What did I say? Kit gave Nita a Huh? look. She gave him one right back, and shrugged. Dairine looked perplexed. "You're the computer wizard here," she said. "You're supposed to be the one with all the memory! What do you mean, 'What did I say'?" Kit said, "You said, 'Three true things await discovery'-" " 'Darkness overspreading,'" Nita said. "And then something about a commorancy underground," Dairine said. "Whatever a commorancy is-" "'And the Moon is no dream,'" Roshaun said. "Well, I should say not. It's real enough. Indeed, when we went there-" Dairine elbowed him. "Ow!" Roshaun said. Did I say that? I don't recall. And Spot headed off into the kitchen again. A second later there came a little subdued pop! of displaced air as he teleported outside. "Oh, great," Dairine muttered. "Since when does he have memory errors? This is just not the time." Tom, however, looked thoughtful. "Has he done this before?" he said. Dairine shook her head. "Absolutely not!" Tom looked over at Carl. "That certainly sounded oracular to me. How about you?" "Sounds a lot like our koi," Carl said. "Not haiku, though, more like some kind of poetic shopping list. Better start taking notes," he said to Dairine. "Some of this might turn out to be useful at some point." "Well, that's just great, because he's what I usually take the notes in!" Dairine said, aggrieved. "If all of a sudden he's forgetting stuff-" Nita put her eyebrows up, reached across the table, and pushed a pad of yellow sticky notes over to Dairine. "Oh, sure! So we're going to be running all over the place, saving the universe, and I'm going to have to write things down on stickles while I'm doing it?" Nonetheless, Dairine pulled one of the notes off and started scribbling on it furiously. "How do you spell 'commorancy'?" "You're asking me?" Nit