Диана Дуэйн: Wizards At War

Nita sat there and wondered what to make of that.

“The discovery or location 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’s been appearing out of nowhere. And in all the places where ‘new’ dark matter is being found, local space is beginning 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 more 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 fighting chance—actually, a lot better than just a 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 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.

2: 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 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 good-natured 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? 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 plenty 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, though 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.