Диана Дуэйн - Games Wizards Play

“And presenting next,” said Irina’s voice, “Penn Shao-Feng—”

“Get up,” Nita said, “and do it.”

Penn got up, shaking but suddenly determined, and walked out into the cleared circle. He looked like someone walking to his doom.

Kit watched him go, and abruptly realized that he was shaking too. Beside him, Nita was trembling as well with the force of something that hadn’t happened yet but was about to.

“What happens now?” he whispered.

Nita shook her head. “It all depends on him . . .”

The threat management wizards were standing around the borders of the circle now, reciting together. Above the space where they were working, the solar wind slowly became visible, spilling past the Moon in great waves and folds like the curtains of aurorae in Earth’s upper atmosphere: but these were white, not green or blue, because there were no atmospheric gases for them to react with. They lashed and rippled close to the Moon’s surface as dangerous solar storm weather would lash and lick at the Earth when the solar wind was too strong.

Penn took a huge breath, closed his eyes, and held out his arms to either side. All around him, blue-glowing on the dusty ground, it began to appear—the spell Kit and Nita had seen and debugged a hundred times now, the one Kit thought he could probably draw in his sleep.

Very quietly, almost in a whisper, Penn began to recite the spell.

From the diagram, long, graceful, frondlike golden structures began to rear up, the local wavefront guides that would push the solar radiation away from the Moon for demonstration purposes. And from the core of the spell came winding upward another, bigger structure, wavering gracefully: the spell’s power conduit, the part that was meant to be sunk into the Sun to power the redirection. The fins at the top of it, the power collectors, looked like the broad petals of a flower, and the main power conduit that would enable the redirection of the solar wind was its stem.

Slowly and lazily the gigantic, glowing, immaterial flower of energy began to twine upward . . .

And then it started to move faster. And faster. It burst upward through the sheltering dome and out past it, curving around the lunar horizon, heading with terrible speed into space . . . and toward the glow of the Sun, away past the dark circle of the new Earth.

There were shouts of alarm from some of the wizards in the audience and on the staff, because this wasn’t supposed to be happening. The integrity of the wizardly dome was holding—it had been designed to allow energy constructs to pass. But the amount of energy now passing upward through it was already frightening, far more than expected, even though—the wizardry not being impeded by minor matters such as light speed—the conduit was still barely halfway to the Sun. And shortly the incoming energy would be more appalling still, for the power collectors on their ever-stretching conduit were arrowing toward the solar surface with ever-increasing speed. They would sink into the Sun, they would pull power from it, and that awful power would be conducted back here to the surface of the Moon—

“Shut it down!” Irina shouted.

But Penn had finished the recitation and was now frozen where he stood. Irina moved forward, sudden power trembling about her hands as she flung them up and with one huge gesture brought another force shield into being between Penn’s spell circle and the surrounding audience.

Barely a second later, a horrifying spill of raw plasma came blasting down the conduit from its far end, already inside Mercury’s orbit, and slagged down the lunar surface for hundreds of yards around. Penn fell, vanished away in a blaze of eye-hurting white fire.

And Nita realized that while she stood here watching this terror in the waking world, she was also standing inside one of her dreams.

16

Sol IIIa, Sol, Sol III

OH NO. IT’S STARTING. It’s starting now.

I’m not ready for this!

And then Nita got a grip. Of course I’m ready for this. I’m a visionary. I will handle this thing, because I can see at least some of what’s going to happen. Which is more than most of the people here can do . . .

And then, instantaneously, she had that terrible sensation she’d experienced occasionally before—that she was standing on a knife-edge, and huge forces were waiting to see which way she moved. This is how it was the first time , she thought, remembering what happened to Kit’s first Edsel-antenna in Grand Central Terminal all that while ago, at the end of the Ordeal that first made them wizards: the smoking abyss full of terrible, hungry eyes anticipating their fall, the sword-bridge that the noon-forged steel became and that they both had to cross. They had been over that bridge in other forms many times since.

Now everything was different, everything was changing. But some things are still the same , Nita thought. Have to be. Have to be!

She lifted her gaze to Kit. Their eyes locked.

“Whatever you have to do,” Kit said, “do it. I’m with you.”

She turned away from Kit and went over to Penn and took his hands. He gasped in air and stared at her in shock.

“I am looking at you,” she said. “ I am looking at you across the board. Do you see me here? Do you understand me? I’m looking at you. If you’re going to do something, if what you said to me was for real, this would be the moment. ”

Penn stared at Nita in astonishment and terror, uncomprehending. Close behind her, she could feel Kit staring at her, not understanding either, and very afraid.

But still not moving. Not saying a word, holding still, letting her keep her balance. Trusting her—

“Just hold still,” she said to Penn, and closed her eyes.

Because you have to see this. I can see it now. Everything’s come together and I can see it at last. The choice to see became the vision, and it blinded her and spilled over out of her. Fire, fire everywhere, flurrying like wings, like something trapped in a cage and beating its wings against the bars of the cage to get out. And crying out in a voice like fire, the voice from her dreams, Let me out, let me go —

Fire, fire that flies. All the stories about the phoenix, the fire that burned out and then rekindled itself in a blaze of magic: this force was the source of them. Not stories after all, and not just magic. The nearest star, the Sun—

Something living in the Sun. Something that was part of the Sun; a living thing, its soul, the way the soul lives in a body. But also, something that left, that went voyaging. And then got caught away from home . . . got lost . That got trapped somewhere it shouldn’t have.

And in a flash, literally a flash of light, Nita understood it.

I have a problem with crowds , Penn had said to her once.

Nita swallowed. And why wouldn’t you, she thought, if something inside you was used to this kind of life? Solitary, so alone, built to be that way , happy to be that way. But stuffed into a place where you couldn’t get out, where you were trapped and crammed in tight and tied down by thought and emotion, by fear and pain . . . She thought about how Ronan had been, sometimes, his edginess and troublesome ways when the Michael Power had been inhabiting him, an immortal crammed into so small a space, physically and temporally. Of course Ronan’s still a pain in the butt sometimes but it wasn’t all him being the pain all the time—