“But the thought of the Winter has not been far from my mind, or my people’s,” Ith said to Rhiow. “It is a charged subject for us, as charged in its way as humankind’s old story that you told me about the apple and the garden: and there is a serpent in that story too, though I am afraid it is not the Bright one Who is a shape I wear these days sometimes, or Who wears me—whichever. In any case, we are eager that the Winter should not come back, from whatever cause … for if it returns to the upper world, that will eventually affect the Old Downside as well. Since we have no guarantees from the Powers that this fate would never befall us again, I thought that we might seek to put guarantees of our own in place.”
“You could get caught up in that kind of thing to the exclusion of everything else,” Auhlae said, “if you weren’t careful …”
“Oh, indeed. We know well enough that every race dies,” Ith said. “That alone has become obvious enough from studying other species’ history. Entropy is running …” The young-old, wise eyes looked a little tired already. “We cannot stop it. But this does not mean we need instantly to enter into a suicide pact with the Universe. We may forestall the event as long as possible … indeed the Powers would prefer that we do.”
“Getting familiar with Them, are you?” Urruah said.
“No less than you,” Ith said mildly. “Your good friend, Saash of the unending itch, now herself walks the floor of Heaven about the One’s business, and the depths of reality echo to the thumping when she sits down to scratch. And she thought of herself as ‘nothing special’. I am nothing special either, but I am also Father of my people now, and so I find myself chatting often enough with my people’s Grandparents as I try to make some sense out of this terrible mass of data They’ve wished on me, and try to claw it into some shape which our new wizards will be able to handle.”
“New wizards already?” said Arhu.
“They are hatching out even as we speak,” Ith said. “Some seem to have been trying to be born for a long time … some say they have tried many times, but were always killed in the ongoing hethhhiiihhh.” Rhiow blinked at the word: the Speech said holocaust in her ear, but there were even more terrible implications in the word, speaking of a people who for many generations had simply been born to be killed, almost all new hatchlings being destined to feed the chosen warriors of the Lone Power’s planned army.
“Now, though,” Ith said, “there are more than twenty already. Our latency period is fairly short, and besides, there is the time difference between the Upworld and the Downside to consider. We are, in any case, making up for much lost time, which is a good thing, considering the importance of the gates we guard. The Downside will be alive with wizardry before very long, and all the better for it: it is not good for a world to go unmanaged. But our ‘wizard’s manual’ is still in its early stages, and I have been kept very busy trying to codify it.”
“I would have thought it would have just appeared,” Urruah said. “As if it had always been there, now that your people’s Choice is properly made. I mean, the information’s all in the Speech after all … so your people won’t have trouble understanding it—”
“Yes, but first there’s the question of what information a wizard of our People will routinely have access to,” Ith said, “and what they’ll have to ask for authorization from Higher Up to get—”
“I would have thought the Powers would make that distinction themselves.”
“No,” Ith said. “We—upper-level field operatives—are given more autonomy than you might suspect. Surprising amounts of it.” He opened his mouth to grin slightly, the amiable saurian smile that showed all those teeth. “The Powers’ attitude is plainly, ‘You’re living in this universe: why would you be so dumb as to pull down the ceiling of the cavern on yourself? Be cautious running the place—but take what risks you think need to be taken.’ And does it not say in the Estivations, ‘I shall walk Your worlds as You do, as if they are mine … for so indeed they are’?—So I find I must make these decisions—the Powers apparently feeling that one from inside a native ‘psychology’ will be best fitted to understand wizardry’s best implementation for that psychology. Then there’s the matter of how Seniors and Advisories will be chosen, and a very basic one, how the wizardry itself will manifest to my people. We’ve had all kinds of different modalities—voices heard, visions seen—but they’ve been haphazard, and I’ve been told that we should try to keep it to one or two modalities for the whole species, so that legend and tradition regarding their handling will have time to build up around them. At least we don’t have to try to keep wizardry secret, the way the poor ehhif do. My wizardly children will lead normal lives … as far as any wizard’s life can be considered normal.”
“You’re getting pretty organized,” Arhu said.
“Order is a wonderful thing,” Ith said, “when it flows from the roots of a matter rather than being imposed from the top down. And organization usually follows, yes … but not so much so that I can’t slip out for a pastrami sandwich every now and then.” He grinned at Arhu. “And we should try to meet soon in that regard: I’ve found a good place up on Eighty-Sixth between First and Second. Meanwhile, though, I have other business in hand. They tell me you need me,” he said to Rhiow. “And to my people’s Stepmother, I can only say, “Tell me what you need, and it’s yours.” ”
Rhiow put her whiskers forward.
“Meanwhile,” Ith said, turning his head sideways and giving Artie one of those peculiar looks of his, like a very large bird eyeing a very large worm, “is there any more of that pizza?”
Rhiow laughed. “No! Get your own. There’s probably a fairly decent pizza place not too close from where you’re getting your pastrami.”
“No,” Ith said, “I would say Eighty-Sixth is something of a desert as regards pizza. Now if you go a little further uptown—”
“Don’t!” Rhiow said. He and Arhu looked at her, startled. “Just don’t,” she said wearily. “Later. Later I will go and look for pizza with you. If there’s still a reality left on Earth that involves pizza.”
“All right,” Ith said. “Back to the subject. While involved in the codification, I have been eagerly searching for a spell which would prevent a second Winter’s fall. Now I see and hear from your interview with Hwallis that there is, or was such a thing. The Whisperer does not know of it, though: or if She did, it is lost.”
“How would She lose anything?” Siffha’h said.
“I do not know. But let us see the spell again, what you have of it.”
Rhiow showed it to Ith where she had it laid out on the floor. He looked at it for a few moments, and then chuckled, a deep clicking noise in his throat. “Yes,” he said, “there is a piece of my name, and another piece. And the Bright Serpent’s name, which I would have thought was a new thing: but now it seems it is old, and existed from ancient times. Another piece of information lost, or submerged under formerly more aggressive archetypes. And see here—” he put one claw down on one symbol of the spell, which flared briefly brighter in response. “Yes, this is the Ophidian Word in one of its new variants: my people are certainly involved—either the memory of our old tragedy, or the prophecy of our later intervention against repetitions of it. And here is the symbol for the Winter, and the indicator for the conditional branches of the target designation spell. There are definitely pieces missing: and this—” he tapped another symbol—“seems to indicate how many. Five other major parts. The master structure is hexagonal.” He sat back, looking satisfied. “That makes perfect sense, for the Universe has a broadly hexagonal bent: things tend to come in sixes.” He flexed his claws, giving a little extra wiggle to the sixth claw on each forelimb. “Particle arrays, hyperstring structures—”