Диана Дуэйн - Wizard's Holiday

The Whispering started to die away a little. “Can’t you hear what we’ve been trembling on the brink of?” Quelt said. “Can’t you hear the darkness, the potential that’s been chasing around our world forever like the night, just waiting for someone to look up and see it? Our own Whispering’s drowned out that deeper silence. We talk to ourselves all the time so we won’t hear what the silence holds—the risk, the chance—”

“The danger!”

“Yes, the danger!” Quelt said, turning toward whoever it was who’d spoken. “How long has it been since there was danger in our world—any real danger? Oh, occasionally there’s an accident, or some passing pain or personal sorrow—but why doesn’t it last? We’ve outgrown passion! These bodies are too used to this world, where all the edges and sharp corners have been rubbed off and everything made safe for us. We live and we die and everything is perfect and fine. What do we have to do with the rest of the universe anymore?”

“What, then?” someone’s voice cried, desperate. “Do you want our world to go back to the way it was in the very first times, before we awoke as a sentient species, where death is dreadful, and whole nations die in horror and pain, and the Lone Power has Its way with Life?” And here Kit covered his face, for he remembered the look on Quelt’s face when he’d told her about his world. “Do you

want to—”

“I don’t want to go back to anything,” Quelt said. “I want to go forward. To the thing that waits.”

The stir and hush that went through that vast emptiness was awful.

“I’m afraid,” said one voice, trembling.

“I’m afraid!” said another, and “I’m afraid, too!” said another voice yet, and another yet, and whole crowds of voices together, and choruses of them, cities of them, nations of them. Afraid, afraid, we’re afraid!

The roar rose to a shout, the shout to a rumble like an earthquake all around them. Finally, in a great voice, Quelt cried, “SO AM I!”

Slowly silence fell again.

“But I’m going to do it anyway,” Quelt said. “So that we can all make the leap together. Think about it! One way or another, we’ve all got to die eventually. That part of the Choice was never in doubt if we were going to live in Time. Now we can go forward and find another way to do it. If we fail, what’s the worst that can happen? We all go down into the darkness at once. But we’ll still be together. And even in the darkness, there’s still the One!”

At that, the Lone One turned Its face away, and Nita thought she heard teeth grinding.

“And if this succeeds,” Quelt said, “we’ll all be together, and go on into—”

She shook her head. “There aren’t words. I don’t think there can be. But every

one of you has looked up, or out, sometime, and thought, ‘There’s something

else that’s supposed to happen. What is it?’ This is it! This is the something else!

Let’s go!”

The roar died back, slowly, to a murmur again. There was no great cry of acclamation, no uproar of acceptance. Her people were, indeed, too afraid. But Nita could feel the change in the air, and glancing over at Kit, she knew that he could, too.

It’s happening, Nita thought in silent wonder. And, holidays aside, this is why the Powers That Be sent us here. Because even if they’d told Quelt Themselves, face-to-face, what needed to happen, she wouldn’t have believed Them. The proof had to come through someone she knew personally, someone she liked. Strangers just passing through, people with no agenda. Somebody she sat on the beach with and talked to about nothing important, at dawn.

Us…

Quelt waited until the silence fell. More and more strongly through it, strongly enough for even Ponch to feel it, so that he sat there wagging his tail, the silent acquiescence grew. It was another of those out-of-time moments that might have lasted an hour, or a day, or a month: In this otherworldly worldheart, there was no telling. But there came a time when the acceptance was complete, and when that happened, Quelt moved slowly to the center of it all, where Druvah stood, and held out her hands.

He gave her Alaalu’s kernel. She turned it over in her hands a few times, regarding it, and then looked up and around.

“We made a Choice once, as wizards, for our people,” Quelt said.

Druvah said, “We did.”

“And the Choice can be unmade,” Quelt said, “by all the living wizards of Alaalu, unanimously.”

Druvah said, “So the original structure of the Choice was built.”

“Then it’s time to unbuild it,” Quelt said. “I am all the living wizards of Alaalu. I say now to the Choice that was made, be unmade in this regard: that our people may go, not merely our own way, but the whole way, the way that lay in the One’s mind before we could perceive it clearly!”

The silence became complete.

Kit and Nita stood there waiting for whatever would happen. The Lone Power turned Its back on the proceedings, though It moved no farther.

It started to get brighter, in the world inside the world. The radiance from that dazzling and impossible sky began to build, thickening in the air around them the way a low cloud thickens into mist near the ground, but here that mist was radiance that washed out colors in light, starting to dissolve away the outlines and details of things as it grew. Nita glanced down at her hands, wondering if she should be nervous about the way they were beginning to refine themselves away into something that was more light than shape—

Ponch nosed Kit, and put the leash in his hand. We’d better get out of here!

“Seems like a real good idea to me!” Kit said. He grabbed Nita’s arm. Just before they took a step forward together, she glanced over and caught just a flash of eyes in her direction, as Quelt’s arms went around her mother and father, and she buried her face against her mother’s shoulder. But she was smiling. And that smile spread to Kuwilin’s face, slowly, and then to Demair’s, as the two of them looked up and the light indwelling in the world-kernel of Alaalu spread and spread outward from them, flowering into something long awaited, something long denied, blinding—

Nita stepped quickly forward with Kit and Ponch.

Ponch brought them out far above the planet, looking down from space. The shield-spell that Kit had inlaid into Ponch’s leash for times like this instantly took hold, protecting the three of them from the cold and the vacuum. There was air, too, which was important, but for the moment, Nita had forgotten to breathe.

Below them, the whole surface of the planet was coming alive with lightning strikes. From cloud to cloud, from cloud to earth, they crackled across the day side, the massive discharges clearly visible, and on the night side, the clouds flickered with them like electrified milk. Auroras whipped and crackled at the poles, even lashing up and out along the lines of the planet’s magnetic field, and all over the planet, Alaalu’s horizon burst out in spiky spurts of blue-jet and red-sprite lightning, and curving prominences of ion-fire.

“A little leftover Alaalid anger?” Kit said under his breath.

Nita nodded. “But I think not for long…”

Slowly, the atmospheric fury died away. The night sky went quiet first; on the day side, a few genuine lightning bolts, startled out of several great storm systems by the less natural discharges, let themselves loose for several minutes. Things went still.

Then, slowly, light began to grow here and there on the world’s surface. It was most obvious in the Cities, from which it seemed at first that white fireworks were rocketing upward. But the lights came from scattered islands, even from far out in Alaalu’s immense seas…and they were not fireworks. They leaped and curved through the lower atmosphere, yes, but then the lights found their way up and out, and once into space, shot free, like meteors in reverse—growing brighter and brighter as they pierced up and out of the atmosphere, shooting up and out of the planet’s gravity well, burning brighter still as they fired themselves up and outward into the eternal night.