Диана Дуэйн - Games Wizards Play

Nita thought about Penn’s grandfather, too. You have an outrider , he’d said, practically the moment he laid eyes on her. And his grandson . . . how long did he suspect? Nita thought. Is this why Penn never wanted to spend time with him? Because his grandfather knew, but didn’t know what to do? Just hoped, maybe, that in another culture what was inside him would either find a way to sleep peacefully and leave his grandson alone — or else escape at last?

And now, here, finally, concentrated, was all that power—everything it needed to break its prison, to get free. And the spell was in sync with it. The spell’s been trying to break the connection, to let it go! “Do you get it now, Penn?” Nita said. “You’ve had it exactly backwards. You don’t want to be controlling anything to do with the Sun. You want to be taking the control structures away! You’ve got something in you that’s been in your family for a long, long time, stuck in your souls one after another, generation after generation, and it’s never been strong enough to get away before. But now it is! You’ve got the connection, you’ve got the spell! Turn it loose, let it go, set it free! ”

He stared at Nita, shaking his head. “I don’t—”

“You do! You said I had something that you needed. This is it! What you needed is what I see!” She could hardly see him through the blaze of fire, the great wings beating. All she could do was grip his hands until he squeezed his eyes shut with the pain, and had no choice but to see what she was seeing. The spell was active, the linkage was there, the vision ran down the linkage and Nita felt it shock through Penn as if her hands were a live wire he’d grabbed.

The shock hit her too; Nita fell to her knees, shaken, as the vision departed from her. She felt Kit come up behind her to help her as Penn went staggering away from them toward the core of the spell, the Speech-notation all around him flaring with furious golden fire as he stumbled through it, disturbing its power flow.

There at the core of the spell, Penn reeled a moment in panic or indecision. Then he fell, collapsing onto the innermost power control statements, obscuring them, taking them out of the circuit. And as he fell, fire flowered upward.

Nita had to laugh out loud from delight now, looking up at the huge and blinding shape towering over them, throwing its wings wide, first one pair, and then another even larger. This was the fulfillment of the visions of burning that had been haunting her dreams. Flamboyant , Nita thought, isn’t that what I said about him all that time ago? Now I know why! The immense shape kept growing, rearing up and up from the lunar surface like a great fierce bird. It beat those massive burning wings so that shadows fled and flickered among the craters in the mountain peaks, as if the whole surface of the dark side of the Moon was alive with fire. It’s a good thing we’re turned the other way right now, because if they could see this from Earth . . . !

The fire burst higher upward, and as it did, it found a voice and roared with joy. Free , it cried. At last, at last!

Like everyone else on that crater-plain, Nita stood transfixed. She thought she had never heard a more beautiful voice. It was warm; it was glad; it was fierce with incalculable power. And it was female.

If Nita could’ve spared breath for anything but wonder, she would’ve burst out laughing. Oh , Penn . Is this why you’ve always been trying so hard to impress the ladies? Or were you just overcompensating . . . ?

But the urge to laugh left Nita as that impassioned and startling regard turned from the great company gathered around them to fix on her. Nita held very still. She didn’t quite feel like a mouse under the eye of a hawk, but that fiery gaze was profoundly unnerving nonetheless.

One who sees , said the fiery shape—immensely grave, immeasurably joyous— take my thanks. Not until I was seen again could I be found. Not until I was found again could I be freed.

All Nita could think to do was bow: Who knew what the protocol was for this kind of meeting? If there even was any. “Elder sister,” she said, “go to your place, and go well.”

I go! the great voice cried. And the form of fire launched itself up into cislunar space, and then arced around inward and made for the Sun.

And not far away, on the other side of Penn’s spell, Dairine stood staring down at it. The wizardry lay there still burning, afire with power, discharging like crazy: it was hard to make out anything definite from it. The whole thing was alight like a—

Wait , Dairine thought. Because one place where the semiconscious Penn wasn’t lying was not alight. Or rather, its boundaries were: but not the empty inside of it. Nothing was written there: no power moved.

It’s a lacuna.

You always have to leave a little wiggle room for the elemental presences , Mehrnaz had said, as if it was something very basic and elementary and it was surprising that Dairine didn’t know it.

And even Penn had mentioned it. A way we remember when the Sun was different, when it breathed differently. And all the characters of the Speech in that spot had been faded down into conditional status, into and/or. Something had been there once, something that wasn’t there now.

A lacuna, a loophole, a place where something isn’t.

Except that something is. Because otherwise, why would his spell be misbehaving like this?

Because there had been something else in the lacuna. Something that wasn’t supposed to be in the lacuna. Something that wasn’t designed for it. And whatever happened here, whatever that creature was— an elemental presence , Mehrnaz’s voice whispered again—it was now heading for the Sun to fill the real physical space or place that the spell-lacuna represented.

And when it gets there, whatever’s in there right now will be destroyed!

For a second Dairine was struck speechless and numb by sheer dread. Then she bent down and scooped up Spot, able to think of nothing but how the Sun had tried speaking to her once and she hadn’t understood it but Roshaun had, even though something had been wrong, something had been missing that she couldn’t understand. There’s something wrong here , Sker’ret had said; he’d been monitoring the wizardry they were working. Something’s interfering with the magnetic flow at this level. A darkness . . .

An empty place that should not have been empty. The memory in Penn’s spell of a space waiting to be refilled. For the elemental presence to reassert itself . . . And then Roshaun’s spell on the Moon that had failed when he was pulling energy out of the Sun while fighting the Pullulus, even though the spell should have worked, it really should have. Except his data was skewed because there should have been something in the Sun and it wasn’t—

“We need the coordinates for where we did the spell,” Dairine said as soon as she could find some breath again: she felt like she’d been punched, and even now she was fighting for air. “The one where we fixed the Sun when he was visiting and it was acting up! Project the solar rotation forward to now. Then pull the structural and locational data from the lacuna subset into the calculation, come on, hurry up, Spot—! ”

Done , he said. Execute it?

“Yes!!”

They vanished.

Seconds later Dairine stood above the boiling, roiling surface and stared down into it, shaking all over. All alone now, no one but Spot to help her, no other backstop. Below her, nothing but the fire that would destroy her if the fragile force-field bubble protecting her should fail. Strong as the wizardry was that was keeping it in place, it wouldn’t last forever. Even with four other wizards holding it with her, the last time Dairine had been party to this wizardry, it had always been in danger of collapsing within a matter of minutes.