She put her finger on the listing. “Coordinates, please?”
They displayed on the page. At the same time, a voice said in the back of her head, You know, if you’d just ask me, I’d do the gating and take you there.
“Bobo,” Nita said, “I appreciate the offer. I just want to make sure I don’t lose the hang of doing it the hard way.”
You’re just a glutton for punishment, the peridexis said.
“You and I are going to have to sit down—as much as you can sit, anyway—and have a long talk about—”
How we can be talking at all? Bobo said. At least he didn’t sound injured. I guess I wonder myself. But go on, do your spell the hard way.
Nita jiggled the charm bracelet on her wrist until the gating charm came up. Out of it she pulled a long, blue-glowing thread of spell, a single word-character in the Speech. This she drew down until it touched Dairine’s entry in the manual, hooking to its location parameters. Then Nita let go of the strand of light. When it snapped back into the charm, it pulled with it a whole new chain of characters, swallowed them up, and blazed, ready to go.
Nita stood up and shoved the manual into the waiting otherspace pocket. Then she pulled on the charm again, and that long line of glowing blue light slid out: she dropped it on the floor, where it went a fierce molten gold and stretched into a circle of Speech-words, ready to knot itself up in the Wizard’s Knot. Nita looked down at the glowing words and slowly began to speak them, turning as she spoke.
The room went silent. Darkness pressed in. As she completed the spell and pronounced the syllables of the Wizard’s Knot, everything went dark.
Moments later she found herself standing on a terrace of some smooth, glittering dark-golden stone. Behind her, in a sheer stone wall, was a series of tall, glassy doors, like the entry to a school or the front of a theater, leading into some dim, hard-to-see interior.
Maybe fifty yards in front of Nita, the terrace ended in a meter-high railing that followed the terrace’s curve hundreds of feet along to either side and out of sight. Out past the rail she got a glimpse of wide gardens far below, fading off into a barer landscape. Glancing from side to side, Nita saw that the terrace itself was cantilevered well out from the surface of the huge, relatively smooth needle of stone behind her, in the base of which the doors were set.
Nita tilted her head back, trying to see the top of the peak above. A few hundred feet, maybe— It was hard to tell. The blue-green sky was full of clouds: as she watched, one drifted straight into and around the top of that needle of stone, obscuring it. More terraces were visible above, staggered around the surface of the uprising spear of stone, up to the cloud and past it.
Nita glanced around, wondering where to go from here. Her transport wizardry had built into it a typical so-called “decent interval” offset; you’d be deposited somewhere within, say, a hundred meters of the person you were seeking, but the wizardry wouldn’t drop you right into that person’s lap. So let’s see …Down the right side of the curve, nothing was visible but featureless, shining stone. To the left, though, maybe fifty yards down, Nita spotted a single small door, all by itself. But wait. Not a door. That’s a gate. It’s got bars—
Nita reached sideways and retrieved her manual from the otherspace pocket— for when a wizard was visiting a world where wizardry was practiced in the open, his manual was his passport— and walked toward that gate.
Above her, that cloud moved away. On the stony spire’s far side, the sun came out, throwing a long path of shadow down the wall, over the gate and Nita, and out to the terrace’s edge. But as she got close to the gate, she saw a light as intense pouring out of it, streaming in a narrow bar-striped ribbon out across the terrace.
Nita stared. Oooookay, she thought. Unusual. She walked slowly to the gate, tucking her manual under her armpit, and reached for her charm bracelet, pinching one small glassy lens-charm between finger and thumb and saying a few words in the Speech under her breath. A fragment of spell-shielding ran up and over her free hand and nearly to her elbow, like an oven mitt of thickened air. She wiggled her fingers to make sure that it felt right, and then stuck the shielded hand into that light.
Nothing happened. Just sunlight? Nita thought. Weird, unless there’s a window on the far side of the mountain. She shook the shield-spell back down her arm: it vanished. Then she peered around through the bars of the gate.
Her mouth dropped open. Sunlight, she thought. Inside the gate was a huge, domed, circular room nearly as wide across as the entire width of the spire of stone. Inside it, floating maybe three feet above the floor, was a sun.
Nita leaned against the gate, staring at the burning, dark-golden globe that hung there. It looked to be about fifty feet in diameter. Blobby black foot-long sunspots sailed slowly across its surface, the fiery red-gold plasma they pushed through getting all torn up by their magnetic fields. Plasma writhed and stretched away from the surface in bright filaments as the sunspots plowed stubbornly through it like inkblots with a mission. Elsewhere, sticking up off the surface like fuzz off a ball of yarn, spiky prominences licked into the upper reaches of the star’s atmosphere, frayed at their ends and fell back again. If you held still, you could just see the star’s rotation, as slow as watching sunrise. As Nita watched, movement off to the right caught her eye as someone walked around the side of the great globe and stood with her back to Nita, looking up at it.
What the heck is she wearing? Nita thought. There was no mistaking Dairine, especially in that small sun’s light: it made her red hair look even redder than usual. When Nita had seen her this morning, Dairine had been been wearing jeans leggings and a flowered T-shirt. She might still have them on, but it was hard to tell, as she also now wore some kind of silky floor-length tunic in a dark honey color.
Dairine half turned, pushed up the sleeve of the tunic— yeah, the jeans and the top are still there; what a strange look!— and thrust her arm into the sun, almost up to the shoulder, where she stood feeling around under the “star’s” surface like someone trying to find something hidden at the back of a dark cupboard. And as Dairine felt around inside the sun, her glance fell on Nita.
Dairine’s eyes went wide: she froze. That’s my cue, Nita thought. Is this open? She pushed the gate experimentally. It swung open under her push. Nita walked in and started across that broad shining floor toward Dairine. Dairine took her arm out of the sun, shook it, folded her arms, and stood watching Nita come.
This was a sure sign that Dairine was in a snotty mood and ready to be tough to deal with. Now it’s just a question of how to handle it. Nita kept walking, letting her attention move to that huge, slowly turning ball of energy. The energy was real; as she got closer, the heat from the “sun” was increasing, though it was nothing like what a star would genuinely have emitted. It’s a simulator, Nita thought. Maybe even a real-time mirror of Wellakh’s own star.
Another shape came out from behind the starglobe: a man. He was taller than all but the tallest human beings would be— slender, narrow-shouldered, wiry, with very long hair as red as Dairine’s. He wore the same sort of long, light tunic Dairine was wearing, though his was several shades darker, with nothing under it but a sleeveless vest and long, loose trousers of a similar silky material, almost exactly the dark fiery amber color of that star.
As Nita got closer she spotted something else unusual that Dairine was wearing besides the tunic. Around her neck was an oversize torc of red-gold metal, with a smooth, egg-shaped, egg-sized stone set in it— paler than the metal, slightly paler than the color of the star. In its depths, as Nita got close, she saw a glow that shifted and moved, echoing the stretch and snap of the prominences on the “star’s” surface. Every now and then the glow dimmed as a miniature sunspot slipped by under the surface of the gem.