Диана Дуэйн - Wizard's Holiday

He’s definitely a looker, Dairine thought, though the handsomeness was a little less striking now, on her second or third glance, than it had been at the first. What is it with his name, though? It goes on and on. She looked at the referral to the planet Wellakh, turned to that page, and tried to find something that explained the name structure. She scanned down the planet’s entry, skipping the usual information about size and location and so forth, looking for anything that could give her a hint.

Something’s coming, Spot said.

Through him she could feel the faint troubling of local space that meant a worldgating was incoming: a kind of curdling or shivering in the air. Dairine stood up. “Well, finally,” she said. “How many? Are they all together, or are they coming separately?”

Separately, I think, Spot said.

“Where’s the locus of emergence?”

Out in the backyard, where you and Nita usually vanish.

“Right,” Dairine said. She snapped Spot’s lid shut and headed through the backyard to the part farthest to its rear, where the sassafras trees had been growing wild for as long as Dairine could remember.

Though her dad was careful about the landscaping, he had purposely left the back of the lot a casual, partial wilderness of trees of all sizes, self-seeding, and

blocking the view of the yard from the neighbors’ lots. About fifteen feet in among them, well sheltered by growth of all sizes, was an empty patch about six feet in diameter, which Nita had talked into staying that way. There the ground was bare of everything but fallen leaves, and just outside that spot Dairine now stationed herself, putting Spot down.

“How long?” she said.

Any moment—

Her hair blew back in the abrupt breeze of an appearance, which made only a very small Whumff sound as the air displaced. Standing in front of her, low down in that rough circle of brown and gold leaves, was the Rirhait, gleaming softly in the sunlight that was filtering through the new leaves. Likening him to a centipede, Dairine thought, was probably a little simplistic. The body wasn’t a series of smooth sections but looked rather as if a number of metallic purple beach balls had been stuck together, flattening a little at the ends. Then someone had attached three pairs of legs to each beach ball—two pointing down, and a third pointing up. When we get friendly, I’ve got to ask him what those extra ones are for, Dairine thought. At one end of the centipede, stalked eyes—Dairine thought there were about eight of them—were fastened to the top of the last “beach ball,” and there were some scissory mouth parts underneath.

The Rirhait was doing something Dairine herself had done often enough: shifting a little from foot to foot to check the gravity, to see if he needed to adjust his wizardry to compensate. In the Rirhait’s case, this produced an effect something like a spectator wave. All the while he looked around with his own version of an expression Dairine had worn, herself, often enough—that first glance in which you try to get your bearings in an alien environment as quickly as possible, getting the scale of things, while trying not to look as if you’re completely freaked out. How she would tell if a Rirhait was freaked out, Dairine wasn’t sure. For the moment, the best approach was to keep it from getting that way to start with.

“Dai stihó!” she said right away in the Speech, to give her guest something to fix on. “Are you Sker’ret?”

“That’s me,” the Rirhait said after a moment. “And you’d be Darren?”

“Dairine,” she said. “Maybe you want to move over—” But the Rirhait was already pouring himself out of the circle and over toward Dairine. She looked curiously down at him as he came: He reminded her strangely of a favorite pull toy she’d had when she was about four.

“Were you waiting long?” he said.

“No,” Dairine said. “How was the trip at your end?”

“The usual,” Sker’ret said. “You hurry to get to the gating facility and then you sit around and wait forever.”

Dairine had to laugh. Sker’ret looked up at her with all its eyes, in shock.

“Sorry?” he said.

“No,” she said, “it’s all right. I was laughing. That’s a happy sound.”

“Thanks, I was wondering,” Sker’ret said. “I thought you had something in your throat.”

The air in front of them trembled. There was another, even more demure explosion of air and sound, more a pop! than anything else. And there stood a tree.

Except he wasn’t a tree. “Dai stihó!” Dairine said, and was delighted to see the branches of the tree shiver in unison and look at her with all their berries.

“Dai!” the tree said.

“I hope you’ll forgive me,” Dairine said, “but your name’s kind of a mouthful for me. Will Filif be all right?”

“We use that at home,” Filif said. His voice was absolutely the rustling of wind in leaves. Dairine wondered how he did it, because all she could see were needles, which wouldn’t rustle terribly well.

The tree part of Filif seemed fine; Dairine cast a glance down at his roots and saw that they were shrouded in a kind of portable haze. She recognized this instantly as a decency field, used by some wizards to conceal a part of themselves that they didn’t feel it appropriate to show to other people, either of their own species or another one.

“How was your trip?” Dairine said. “Is there anything you need right now?”

“No, I’m fine,” Filif said. There was a diffident sound to his voice that made Dairine wonder whether this was strictly the truth—but he was using the Speech, so it couldn’t be a lie.

“Good,” she said. “We’ll go in, in a little while, and get you guys settled in. You have your pup tents all setup?”

“Oh, yes,” the two said in unison.

Dairine looked around her. “Speaking of which, where’s our third guy?”

Filif and Sker’ret looked at each other. “We weren’t early, were we?” Sker’ret said.

“No,” Dairine said. “Roshaun of the multiple names seems to be—”

BANG!

The wind blew Dairine’s hair back, and a tall figure imploded into the space in the middle of the circle of leaves. He was nearly as tall as Dairine’s dad and was dressed in what even Dairine, the consummate T-shirt and baggy pants fan, was willing to describe as “splendid robes.” He was wearing an undertunic and hose and boots in some golden fabric or substance. There was an overtunic or long jacket in scarlet, all embroidered over in gold; and he was wearing gauntlets of gold, and a strange sort of scarf of gold over the outer jacket. And there was a fillet of gold bound around his head, but it was a more reddish gold, which wonderfully set off all that hair, which, it turned out, went right down his back and was long enough for him to sit on. There he stood, looking around imperiously at all of them, his thumbs hooked in the broad golden belt under the overtunic.

Dairine’s first thought, which she couldn’t control, was, Noisy arrival. Sloppy technique.

Her second thought was, Maybe it’s something cultural, dressing up so fancy. But the back of her mind answered instantly and without reason: Yeah, sure. He’s showing off. And why?

The new arrival looked around.

“And where is the welcoming committee?” he said.

Dairine didn’t know quite what she’d been expecting from the final arrival, but this wasn’t it. “Dai stihó,” she said after a moment.

That tall, blond figure turned his attention to her, and Dairine abruptly felt so

short, so insignificant, so very minor. However, the feeling immediately kicked her into a most profound state of annoyance. “Yes,” he said after a moment, “may you also go well. And you would be?”