And even Penn had mentioned it. A way we remember when the Sun was different, when it breathed differently. And all the characters of the Speech in that spot had been faded down into conditional status, into and/or. Something had been there once, something that wasn’t there now.
A lacuna, a loophole, a place where something isn’t.
Except that something is. Because otherwise, why would his spell be misbehaving like this?
Because there had been something else in the lacuna. Something that wasn’t supposed to be in the lacuna. Something that wasn’t designed for it. And whatever happened here, whatever that creature was—an elemental presence, Mehrnaz’s voice whispered again—it was now heading for the Sun to fill the real physical space or place that the spell-lacuna represented.
And when it gets there, whatever’s in there right now will be destroyed!
For a second Dairine was struck speechless and numb by sheer dread. Then she bent down and scooped up Spot, able to think of nothing but how the Sun had tried speaking to her once and she hadn’t understood it but Roshaun had, even though something had been wrong, something had been missing that she couldn’t understand. There’s something wrong here, Sker’ret had said; he’d been monitoring the wizardry they were working. Something’s interfering with the magnetic flow at this level. A darkness . . .
An empty place that should not have been empty. The memory in Penn’s spell of a space waiting to be refilled. For the elemental presence to reassert itself . . . And then Roshaun’s spell on the Moon that had failed when he was pulling energy out of the Sun while fighting the Pullulus, even though the spell should have worked, it really should have. Except his data was skewed because there should have been something in the Sun and it wasn’t—
“We need the coordinates for where we did the spell,” Dairine said as soon as she could find some breath again: she felt like she’d been punched, and even now she was fighting for air. “The one where we fixed the Sun when he was visiting and it was acting up! Project the solar rotation forward to now. Then pull the structural and locational data from the lacuna subset into the calculation, come on, hurry up, Spot—!”
Done, he said. Execute it?
“Yes!!”
They vanished.
Seconds later Dairine stood above the boiling, roiling surface and stared down into it, shaking all over. All alone now, no one but Spot to help her, no other backstop. Below her, nothing but the fire that would destroy her if the fragile force-field bubble protecting her should fail. Strong as the wizardry was that was keeping it in place, it wouldn’t last forever. Even with four other wizards holding it with her, the last time Dairine had been party to this wizardry, it had always been in danger of collapsing within a matter of minutes.
And out there, somewhere between here and the Moon, another danger was approaching. She had very little time. If that shape of fire got here before she’d done what she had to do—
She refused to think about that. “Okay,” she said to Spot. “One of the things I need, I’ve got. The other’s at home. I need you to open a very narrow transit window to my bedroom and get me the Sunstone.”
That . . . It was very rarely that she heard Spot hesitate. That is going to be dangerous. If it breaches the force field—
I knew I should have brought it with me. Dammit, I knew. “Never mind, do it now,” Dairine said, and held out her hand, waiting.
Spot was silent.
The next thing she felt was a flash of nearly unbearable heat. Stunned, Dairine opened her mouth to cry out, probably the last sound she would ever make—
And something heavy fell into her hand: a heavy gold collar, with a big cabochon stone set in the front of it, its pale yellow color almost completely washed out in the light blasting up from the star around her.
“Right,” she muttered, and managed with a struggle to get the collar around her neck. The wizardries embedded in the stone weren’t so much the issue here: its real value at the moment was as a targeting device.
The perception of heat around her was increasing nonetheless. There was only so much power built into the force field: if the local temperature flared, if she had to spend too long here, the force field would fail and she would cease to exist a millisecond later. To try to conserve some power Dairine whispered a few words in the Speech to tighten the field, snugging it in around her and Spot until it was barely more than a sheath around her clothes and skin. There wasn’t a lot of air stored in it, the wizardry that ran the shield would only run it as long as she was conscious, and when she used up the last of her oxygen—
Never mind. There in that torrential brilliance Dairine closed her eyes—not that this helped that much, such was the awful potency of the light around her—and did her best to get into sync with the Sunstone. She’d spent months teaching it to be sensitive to the Sun’s moods. Now, though, it was another set of moods she was searching for. A former user’s—
Dairine held still, listened. It was hard. As the Stone’s sympathy with the star around her settled in deeper, the noise of its burning, of its life, became more and more inescapable, more deafening every second. Dairine squeezed her eyes shut, concentrated, did her best to block out that noise. It was other life she was more interested in.
Local temperature is increasing past shield tolerance, Spot said softly.
“Ask me if I care,” Dairine muttered, concentrating on the stone. The noise around her, the roar of the star, kept getting louder and louder. The Sunstone’s not enough. It’s been too long since he’s been in contact with it—She’d been afraid of that, but she had to try the stone first, because if she tried the stone and her other solution and neither of them worked, then she would have to give up. And if she had to give up . . .
From out of her pocket, Dairine pulled the thing she was hoping she wouldn’t have to use: the chain of emeralds held together with a single strand of the Speech—the gems Roshaun had given her, saying, They’re like your world’s color, everything’s so green, I always think of you when I see these. And the chain—
She tucked Spot under her arm, stripped the round emeralds off it and stretched the long chainlike sentence in the Speech between her hands. It was two names, actually; a long version of hers restated in the Wellakhit style, Dairine daughter of Elizabeth daughter of Pearl and so on back ten generations and more to match his: Roshaun ke Nelaid ke Teriaufv ke Umren . . . But in his strand of the chain were words and concepts and feelings that did not appear in the public version of his name, just as there were in hers—things no one else knew but they two alone. At first Dairine thought about pulling the two strands apart. Then she thought, And what if this doesn’t work? If I’ve got to go, I’m going with them still wrapped around each other.
She wrapped the twinned strand of Speech-made-concrete around the fist of the hand that was holding Spot to her, and gripped the Sunstone with the other, closed her eyes again, and concentrated. That ridiculous lazy drawl of his, the long, graceful gait, the truly silly height of him, the bizarre dress sense, that supercilious smile: all these things she summoned up. And the way his eyes softened and went strangely quiet that time he said “Just” friendship? A poor modifier for so high and honorable a state.