It’s not a blank space, Mehrnaz’s voice suddenly said in memory. It’s a lacuna.
Dairine laughed under her breath. See, there’s another one.
Except . . .
No. Just a coincidence.
But still . . . There are no coincidences.
Dairine held still. It’s a legacy structure, Penn had said in his presentation. And Dairine remembered thinking, I wonder, does Thahit have one of those?
Spot, she said.
He was in the house, but that wasn’t a problem where communication between them was concerned. Need something?
Can you do me a favor? I need the diagrams for the underlying spell suite for Thahit’s solar simulator.
Kind of complicated, that, Spot said. Might take an hour or so to process it down. The simulator itself incorporates something like six or seven hundred smaller spells, after all—
Okay, Dairine said, maybe that’s not what I need. I want you to look for any sign of structures that might’ve been left over or held over from previous versions of the simulator, or previous versions of the individual spells. Stuff that’s been tagged to be saved on purpose. Can you do that?
No problem, Spot said. Leave it with me for a while.
Hours?
More like minutes. Scanning for something specific will take a lot less time than porting in the entire suite.
Fine.
Dairine resumed walking around the spell, continuing to take it in. She got sufficiently lost in it that it startled her somewhat when Spot spoke to her far sooner than she’d expected. I have three such incidences, he said.
Really! Dairine said. Lay them out for me.
Overlaid, or separately?
Separately.
Off to one side, beyond Penn’s spell circle, three smaller circles appeared. Dairine went to look at them and found that each one was densely interwritten with the Speech, as she’d expected. But each had a space in it that had once been left open. In all three circles, however, the space was now filled.
So Thahit doesn’t have this feature now, she thought. But it did once. The only problem is . . . what are these for? The Speech-writing itself gave no clue. It merely seemed to indicate that these would be useful as the container for some unspecified energy.
Dairine stood there and scowled in frustration at one of the circles. Great, she thought. Another dead end. She examined the other two circles, but the result was the same. This is some kind of safety valve, probably, in case of abnormal energy fluctuations: a place to store an overload until it can be safely released. The encapsulations would serve the same purpose as when someone dredged a stream or watercourse to make sure that, even in flood conditions, it would never burst its banks. Dairine sighed heavily. Whatever the answer she was looking for might be, this wasn’t it. She walked away.
On a sudden urge she again turned the kernel over in her hands and felt around for another node in its recent history. Finding it, she gave it a squeeze, and that ravening, deadly sea of fire that Nita had made for Penn spread itself away to the edges of visible existence, swimming with sunspots, prominence-lashed: the naked Sun, deadly, beautiful, the anchor and source of all life in the System. I used to think it was going to be easy to master you, she thought. Now I know it’s going to take a long time . . . if I ever manage it at all.
She sighed, squeezed the node again. The Sun went out, leaving her looking dully at the spell diagrams. Oh, Ro, she thought, and simply stood there and ached. Her eyes burned with missing him.
Not that it helped in the slightest.
. . . Shall I get rid of these? Spot said after a few moments.
Dairine shrugged. No, store them, she said. I might need them for something later, and I’m still curious about who left them in place. I can always ask Nelaid about it when I see him next.
She put the space’s kernel back in its storage pocket and then stood for a few more seconds staring down at Penn’s spell. I hate this guy, Dairine thought. Because even when he’s screwing up, he’s better than I am. Even though I’m trying and he’s not.
And there’s not a damn thing I can do about it. It’s like it was with Roshaun. It was an astonishingly bitter realization for someone whose motto had always been I can do that.
Slowly Dairine walked away toward the portal, stepped through, and waved it closed behind her.
Nita dreamed.
She was upstairs in the shopping center a couple of towns over, on the food-court level, strolling slowly around the big circle of it and smelling the sweet-and-sour of Chinese food and the beany scent of burritos and the aroma of frying fat. Bright-colored plastic chairs and tables were scattered around, littered with empty trays and crumpled fast food containers and tipped-over paper cups; the garbage bins placed here and there among them were mostly overflowing. “What a mess,” Nita murmured, looking idly around to see if there were any cleanup staff working on the situation. But the place was empty except for her and the one walking next to her, in step, easy and casual.
It was Roshaun. And in the dream, this was nothing unusual. She saw him as Dairine had described him when he last visited here with her and Sker’ret and Filif: ridiculously tall, the long, long blond hair that made him look like an animated character or movie elf hanging down before and behind, the golden eyes narrowed in amusement at the plebeian surroundings, hands shoved deep in the pockets of the Earth clothing he was wearing as a disguise—jeans and an oversize floppy T-shirt that said FERMILAB MUON COLLIDER SLO-PITCH SOFTBALL.
“Yes,” he said, “dreadfully untidy. The servants should be disciplined without delay.” And his gaze slid sideways to meet hers. There was only one problem with that. The mind looking out of those eyes at her was not Roshaun’s.
“Oh, no,” Nita said. “Not you again.”
“But we’re such old associates!” the Lone Power said. It looked at her sideways again through Roshaun’s eyes. “And you’ve done so much for me!”
“If by that you mean I helped give you a chance to be something different,” Nita said, “and that since then I’ve stood in your way a bunch of times when you wanted to keep screwing things up the old-fashioned way, then yeah, I have done a lot for you. You’d think you might show some gratitude.”
“But I am!” said the Lone One. “I’m helping you right now.”
“The only thing you’re doing now, as far as I can tell, is slowing me down. Or making fun of something I’ve got on my mind.” She gave him a pointed look, glancing up and down the long, lean shape of the (more or less) late King of Wellakh, and turned away with an annoyed breath.
“Well, you must know that that’s a fool’s errand,” said the Lone Power. “Surely you know you have other things to be looking for right now. Much more important things. I can’t imagine why you’re wasting your time searching for the hopelessly lost when you want to be concentrating on keeping someone much closer to home from getting lost in the first place.”