They spent the afternoon doing, as her aunt had promised, touristy things; touring the shopping centre at St Stephen's Green, having tea in the Shelbourne Hotel, listening to the street performers playing on pipes and banjos and occasionally spoons. They walked over O'Connell bridge to look up the Liffey at the Halfpenny Bridge's graceful curve, one of the trademarks of Dublin; and browsed through the shops on the south side of the Halfpenny Bridge, Dublin's so-called 'Left Bank'. They sat in O'Connell Street by the statue of the goddess of the River Liffey, relaxing in her stone bath, and were grateful for the spray, for it was hotter that afternoon than it had been all summer. Mothers put their little children in the fountain, and they splashed happily, and the patrolling Gardai smiled and looked the other way.
About seven o'clock, Aunt Annie said, "Dinner?" Nita agreed happily, and they went off to have a pizza in a little restaurant in South Anne Street. Then they went off westward in the city, to the pub where that night's meeting would take place. The Long Hall was a handsome place, fronted in beveled glass and stained glass, all arranged so that people standing inside, in front of the windows, couldn't quite be seen from outside. Above, the glass was clear, showing the beautiful carved and painted plaster ceiling, and the gas fixtures still hanging from it. Some of them had been converted for electricity, some hadn't. They walked in, and Nita gazed admiringly at the huge polished hardwood bar, and the antique mirrors, reaching three meters up from the back of the bar to the ceiling, on the wall behind it. Carved wood and beveled glass and brass railings were everywhere. So were many cheerful people, drinking, but talking more. The place was filled with the subdued roar of a hundred conversations.
"We're in the back room. Hi, Jack," said Aunt Annie to one of the men behind the bar. He was busy filling a glass with the creamy-dark Guinness from one of the arched taps at the bar: he nodded to Aunt Annie, but didn't say anything.
"Jack Mourne," Aunt Annie said to Nita, as they made their way through a low carved archway into the 'back room'. "He owns the place." "Does he know what's going on?"
"I should think he does: he's one of the Area Advisory-Specialists. What would you like to drink, hon?"
"Can I have a Coke?" "No problem. Be right back."
Nita found herself a seat at a small round wooden table with ornate iron legs, and waited, fidgeting a little self-consciously. She had never been in a bar by herself, though Aunt Annie seemed to think that this wasn't quite the same.She might have a point, though, Nita thought. Here, the drinking looked almost incidental. People were shouting at each other across the back room, chatting, arguing, laughing, pointing, shouting.
"Here you go," Aunt Annie said, sitting down next to Nita with a relieved look. She handed Nita her drink and sipped briefly at her pint. "Perfect," she said. "Jack pulls the best pint in this part of town."
"Aunt Annie," Nita said, "if this is a wizards' meeting — how are you going to keep the ordinary people out of here?"
"Spell on the back-room archway," Aunt Annie said. "Look closely at the carving when you go to the rear Ladies. Non wizards hit it and decide they don't feel like going back there after all — on normal nights, Jack just takes the spell finial off: that little carved flower in the lower right-hand corner. And no-one can hear us through all this din anyway; but there are voice-scramblers on. Jack makes anything wizardly come out sounding like an argument about football. Nice scrambler — took him a while to write. But he's one of our best writers. If you need a custom spell in this part of the world, it's Jack you come to, or Marie Shaughnessy down in Arklow, or Charles and Alison Redpath up north in Aghalee."
'Thenall these people back here are wizards?" Nita said, looking around her in astonishment. She had never been in such a large gathering of her own before.
"Oh yes. All that could come at short notice, of course. Relax for a while; we can't do anything until Doris and Johnny get here."
So Nita drank her Coke and listened to the accents around her, and chatted every now and then with the people who came up to her aunt to say hello. If she had been mired in Irish accents before, the situation got much worse now: she heard about twenty more from as many different people, no two of them the same, and some very odd indeed. In addition, there were a lot of people from Northern Ireland down for this meeting, and their accents astounded her; they sounded more like New Yorkers than anything else, though more nasal. They all seemed very open, friendly people, which to Nita seemed a little strange at first: seeing what most Americans saw of Northern Ireland from the news, she half-expected them to be furtive and depressed, as if afraid a bomb might suddenly go off under them. But none of them were. One man in his thirties, a jocund young man in a leather jacket covered with patches, told Nita he had never seen a bomb or been within fifty miles of one, nor had anyone he knew. The peaceful small-town life he described seemed hard to reconcile with all the newsfilm Nita had seen of taped-off, shattered buildings, and the people with ski masks and rifles.
There was a slight commotion at the door as Mrs Smyth came in under the archway. "Hey Doris, how they cuttin'?" someone shouted. Doris Smyth looked at the speaker and said something clear and carrying in Irish that provokeda roar of approval from the listeners, and caused the person who had asked the question to be genially pummelled.
Behind Mrs Smyth, someone else came in; a short man in a long overcoat and tartan scarf. At the sight of him, many of the wizards in the room called, "Johnny!" or "Shaun!", and there was a general stir of approval through the back room. Nita bent over to her Aunt Annie and said, "Who's that?"
"Shaun O'Driscoll," said Aunt Annie. "Or Johnny, some people call him. He's the Area Senior for Western Europe." 'Wow," Nita said, never having seen so high-ranked a wizard before. Area Seniors answered only to Regional Seniors, and Regionals to the three Seniors for Earth. When she thought of the Senior in charge of all wizards from Shannon to Moscow and Oslo to Gibraltar, she had imagined someone more imposing — not a little man with thinning hair and (as he took his coat off) a tracksuit. He didn't look very old. He had a fierce-looking moustache, and his eyes were very cool; he looked around the room and returned all the greetings without ever quite smiling. It was the kind of effect, Nita thought, that made you want totry to get him to smile. It would be worth seeing when it happened, for his face was otherwise a nest of laugh-lines.
Doris and Johnny were got pints by another of the gathered wizards, and people started settling down, leaning against the walls when they ran out of seats. Johnny didn't sit, but stood in the middle of the room, waiting for them to settle, like a teacher with a big unruly class. "Thanks for coming," he said. "I know this was short notice, but we've had some serious problems crop up in the past few days, and there was no way to hope to manage them except by requiring an intervention meeting."
There were some heads turned at this, and some murmuring under breath among the assembled wizards. "I know that wasn't the way it was announced," Johnny said, "but we turn out to have less time for this discussion than was originally thought when we organized this meeting via the phone tree last night and this morning. We have had serious transitional leakages all over the island, with some sympathetic transitionals on mainland Europe; and this condition has to be contained as quickly as possible. There have been echoes and ripples as far away as China and Peru."
More stirring at this. "Anyway," Johnny said, "I want to thank those of you who were in the middle of other assignments and found them changed, or who were off active and were suddenly reactivated. The Powers that Be may not thank you until later, but I like to do it early. I also want to welcome those of you who have come unusual distances, including Nita Callahan. Stand up, Nita."