Диана Дуэйн: Games Wizards Play

“That way you’d have had the next three whole minutes to grandstand over the big complex spell structure you’d built and you were powering up on,” Lissa said from on top of the boulder where she sat, arching her neck so that she gazed down at Matt as if from a great ironic height. “All the drama, all the tension! Like watching the bomb in a spy movie count down until you pull the big save out of the bag just as the bad guys are gonna break through into the base.”

“We’d have been so impressed,” Kit said. “And you’d have made a big deal over it for days! Except you know what? You were still building the spell.”

Matt scowled. “And you were rushing your construction, too, so when you finally finished it, it wasn’t fast enough on the execution end,” Lissa said. “And so we had time to execute ours first, and beat you, and that’s the size of that! ” She started fist-pumping again, with both fists this time, doing a little sitting-down victory dance on the rock and briefly losing contact with it in the light gravity.

Both the blond wizards gave Matt a wry, amused told-you-so look that suggested Lissa’s analysis was on the money. Matt rolled his eyes and turned to Ronan. “That shouldn’t matter! And if you weren’t leaving enough wiggle room in the rules so that your buddies’d pick up the hint and figure out how to squeeze through them—”

Kit gave Matt an annoyed look. “Just because Ronan and I hang out,” Kit said, “doesn’t mean we spend any of that time plotting sleazy ways to win. What’d be the point?”

Matt had the grace to look embarrassed. “Okay, sorry, I meant that if our thing had executed—”

“ If the Lone Power had wheels, it’d be an SUV,” Hélene said. “Matt, let it go!”

Matt said a few words in the Speech which when delivered in his present tone weren’t designed to slow down entropy. “But it never had a chance,” he said to Kit, “because you started your own little drama. The whole ‘last words’ thing—you played me!”

Lissa spluttered with laughter again, drumming the side of the boulder with her heels. “Yes we did!”

Matt glared at Ronan. “And you let them!”

Ronan looked angelically unconcerned. “Hey, I just designed the setup. How you moved through it was your business.”

Matt kept on protesting. But Kit doubted this was going to go on much longer, as Jeannine and Heléne were already laughing and poking Matt in good-natured mockery, and the rest of his team were giving him looks plainly suggesting that he give it up. Ronan just stood there in patient-umpire mode and let Matt run down, while Kit stood there scuffing at the regolith underfoot and pretending to pay attention.

Finally Matt simply waved his hands in the air in a “Whatever . . .” gesture and shook his head. “Fine, let it stand.”

Ronan glanced around. “Anything else need discussion?”

Heads shook no around the two teams. “Then if we can please get our schedules sorted out for next time?” Ronan said. “As some of us have other things to do besides get our pants full of moondust . . .”

Those who used physical versions of the wizard’s manual got them out, and heads were lowered over various books and codices and electronic devices as people started synchronizing their calendars and looking for matching gaps in their busy lives. As this process went forward Kit glanced from one wizard to another of the two teams, privately appreciating them . . . a process he wouldn’t have admitted to unless pushed. They were a diverse and motley crew—some of them, like Matt, Kit had met in the heat of the Pullulus crisis that had threatened so much of known space, leaving younger wizards alone to deal with the deadly darkness that was eating away the stars. Others, like Lissa, had become involved months back on the fringes of the project to discover what had happened to the long-lost Martian species, and had met up with Kit after he’d found himself stuck right in the center of it. In every case they were people Kit liked a lot, though they could be irritating in ways that were still taking him a while to get used to. Fortunately most of them were also enough fun to be around that Kit was finding it easy to get past the annoyances. Lissa in particular was the kind of person you’d like a lot even if she weren’t also a wizard—

“Ahem,” Ronan said rather loudly, right in Kit’s ear. Kit jumped. “It helps if you’re looking at something besides the weather report for Aldebaran IVa. Not real great this time of year anyway, till the red giant comes out of that pesky expansion phase. JD2455702.10: Can you do that? Everybody else can.”

“Uh—” Kit flipped hastily through his manual to the calendar page.

“Say you can,” Matt said, “because you’re running it.” His grin was entirely amused.

For the moment Kit was too thrown off the beat to give Ronan the look he wanted to. It was Ronan who’d started organizing this get-together-and-run-a-nightmare-scenario group. As a result he was in charge not only of coordinating everyone’s schedules—since the long-distance teleporting meant that the group had to pool enough energy to power the transit spells—but also of assigning whose turn it was to design and stage the next nightmare. You , he said privately to Ronan, are cruel.

But effective. Since now Matt, who thought maybe I was giving you an easy time, is changing his mind . . .

Kit made a face. “Morning or afternoon?”

Jeannine giggled that low, throaty giggle of hers. “There’s sort of no way point ten can be anything but afternoon . . .”

“Yeah, right,” Kit said. He looked at his manual half in resignation, as the schedule grid for that day was empty; though a number of days after it were grayed out and the word “Provisional” was branded across them. What is that? Kit thought, peering at it. Must have set something up with Neets when neither of us was sure whether we were going to go ahead with it. Pity this date couldn’t have fallen in there. He made a face. But if it did, Matt’d probably take it as proof that we’ve got some evil plot against him . . . “Okay,” Kit said. “Let’s do it.”

Everyone started putting their stuff away. “Right,” Ronan said. “Ten minutes for you to get yourselves sorted and then we’ll do the jump down to Tower Hill . . .”

“Thought we were routing through Grand Central this time,” Lissa said.

Ronan shook his head. “Had to change it. The GCT gating team’s scheduled some kind of emergency maintenance for this afternoon. The North American crowd gets a free transfer back to Penn from London, so if anybody wants to do a little sightseeing. . . .”

People started jumping down from boulders and getting ready to head out. Matt sidled over to Kit. “Look, just so you know—it was just procedural stuff I was complaining about. It was still pretty hot, what you did.”

“Thanks,” Kit said.

“But don’t think I’m gonna let you have any slack next session when it comes around to critiquing time!”

Kit laughed at him. “Why should you? That’s not what this is about.”

“And as for you,” Matt said to Ronan, who was still trying to get the moondust off his usually impeccable black clothing, “we still need to talk about why you’re never on my side when this stuff happens.”

“What,” Ronan said, “just because you pulled a magic spear out of my chest and saved my life, I should cut you a special break? Dream on, ya gob.”

Matt made a face and threw his hands up in the air. “Later,” he said, and bounced off after Lissa.

“It’s amazing you keep on doing this,” Kit said under his breath.