Диана Дуэйн - Games Wizards Play

And out there, somewhere between here and the Moon, another danger was approaching. She had very little time. If that shape of fire got here before she’d done what she had to do—

She refused to think about that. “Okay,” she said to Spot. “One of the things I need, I’ve got. The other’s at home. I need you to open a very narrow transit window to my bedroom and get me the Sunstone.”

That . . . It was very rarely that she heard Spot hesitate. That is going to be dangerous. If it breaches the force field—

I knew I should have brought it with me. Dammit, I knew. “Never mind, do it now ,” Dairine said, and held out her hand, waiting.

Spot was silent.

The next thing she felt was a flash of nearly unbearable heat. Stunned, Dairine opened her mouth to cry out, probably the last sound she would ever make—

And something heavy fell into her hand: a heavy gold collar, with a big cabochon stone set in the front of it, its pale yellow color almost completely washed out in the light blasting up from the star around her.

“Right,” she muttered, and managed with a struggle to get the collar around her neck. The wizardries embedded in the stone weren’t so much the issue here: its real value at the moment was as a targeting device.

The perception of heat around her was increasing nonetheless. There was only so much power built into the force field: if the local temperature flared, if she had to spend too long here, the force field would fail and she would cease to exist a millisecond later. To try to conserve some power Dairine whispered a few words in the Speech to tighten the field, snugging it in around her and Spot until it was barely more than a sheath around her clothes and skin. There wasn’t a lot of air stored in it, the wizardry that ran the shield would only run it as long as she was conscious, and when she used up the last of her oxygen—

Never mind. There in that torrential brilliance Dairine closed her eyes—not that this helped that much, such was the awful potency of the light around her—and did her best to get into sync with the Sunstone. She’d spent months teaching it to be sensitive to the Sun’s moods. Now, though, it was another set of moods she was searching for. A former user’s—

Dairine held still, listened. It was hard. As the Stone’s sympathy with the star around her settled in deeper, the noise of its burning, of its life, became more and more inescapable, more deafening every second. Dairine squeezed her eyes shut, concentrated, did her best to block out that noise. It was other life she was more interested in.

Local temperature is increasing past shield tolerance , Spot said softly.

“Ask me if I care,” Dairine muttered, concentrating on the stone. The noise around her, the roar of the star, kept getting louder and louder. The Sunstone’s not enough. It’s been too long since he’s been in contact with it— She’d been afraid of that, but she had to try the stone first, because if she tried the stone and her other solution and neither of them worked, then she would have to give up. And if she had to give up . . .

From out of her pocket, Dairine pulled the thing she was hoping she wouldn’t have to use: the chain of emeralds held together with a single strand of the Speech—the gems Roshaun had given her, saying, They’re like your world’s color, everything’s so green, I always think of you when I see these. And the chain—

She tucked Spot under her arm, stripped the round emeralds off it and stretched the long chainlike sentence in the Speech between her hands. It was two names, actually; a long version of hers restated in the Wellakhit style, Dairine daughter of Elizabeth daughter of Pearl and so on back ten generations and more to match his: Roshaun ke Nelaid ke Teriaufv ke Umren . . . But in his strand of the chain were words and concepts and feelings that did not appear in the public version of his name, just as there were in hers—things no one else knew but they two alone. At first Dairine thought about pulling the two strands apart. Then she thought, And what if this doesn’t work? If I’ve got to go, I’m going with them still wrapped around each other.

She wrapped the twinned strand of Speech-made-concrete around the fist of the hand that was holding Spot to her, and gripped the Sunstone with the other, closed her eyes again, and concentrated. That ridiculous lazy drawl of his, the long, graceful gait, the truly silly height of him, the bizarre dress sense, that supercilious smile: all these things she summoned up. And the way his eyes softened and went strangely quiet that time he said “ Just” friendship? A poor modifier for so high and honorable a state.

Under her the fire roiled, the subsurface turbulence growing. Local temperature increasing sharply , Spot said. Survivability index is decreasing. Force field duration estimated fifteen seconds . . .

“Going to use another ten of those looking,” Dairine muttered. And maybe another five . . .

—and just kept listening, listening. That voice, laughing, scorning, speaking in anger or pain; you are the only one who hears me. The only one. Around her the fire licked and blasted at her shield, and Dairine hung on, stopped breathing, turned off the life support because it was eating energy, the roar scaled up—

And she heard it. The whisper. So weak, so faint.

Down! she said to the force field. Obediently, it sank further into the Sun’s roiling plasma. The whisper was weaker. But it was also closer.

Down!

She sank faster. The heat began to pierce the shield now. Nonsurvivable in five seconds , Spot said.

Dairine let go of the Sunstone, thrust her arm out into the fire, reached, felt around—

Her hand touched something that wasn’t plasma.

Dairine clutched it, desperate. Get us out! she screamed to Spot as all around a new wave of turbulence rose up around her as if from a sea suddenly agitated to storm.

The roaring scaled up once more until it obliterated everything. White fire utterly blinded her as the shield began to collapse.

She felt the familiar fizz of a last-ditch transit spell folding in around her. From light, everything abruptly flashed into darkness as a great burning winged shape came diving in past her through the corona and arrowed into the surface of the Sun as if into a pool.

Under Dairine the chromosphere heaved and rippled like the liquid it was. The enraged corona lashed at her as everything went black. And the last thing Dairine knew was the sense of something heavy, inescapable as gravity, dragging her down . . .

A bare moment later she came down on something hard and cold with a heavy weight clutched in her arms, crushing her. I can’t breathe. Am I in vacuum? But she didn’t care; the coldest vacuum to be found from one end of the universe to the other couldn’t have kept her from opening her eyes right then. Wheezing, her chest tight with fear or anoxia, she didn’t care which, Dairine opened her eyes to see what she held.

It was something in humanoid shape, long, lean, still afire with terrible light, too bright to look at—limbs splayed every which way, a heavy dead weight. Dairine gasped again, struggled up from beneath, desperately blinked her tearing eyes to try to see something besides a blur. As she tried to sit up, long hair fell into her face—sun-golden, silken fine. In anguished haste she pushed it away, squinting and wincing into the raging glow around what she held, trying to see something that mattered more than hair—a face, eyes with life in them, a chest with breath in it—