A few moments passed in silence. You were kind to me when I was frightened, Filif said.
“At a time like that, what else could I do?” Dairine’s dad said. “You’re my daughter’s colleagues. And her friends. I may not be a wizard, but I’ve been scared in my time: I know how it feels. Any time you’re feeling scared, you’re welcome here.”
Then I’m welcome now, Filif said, because though where we’re going is the source of the Light as well as the heart of the Fire, and it’d be all kinds of glory to die there, I’d really rather not.
“I’d rather none of you did,” Dairine’s dad said. “And you’re not going to. My daughter’s a pretty hot property as a wizard, and she’s not going to lose anybody on her watch.”
The absolute certainty in his voice was somehow worse than anything Dairine could have imagined, and it made her eyes sting. Hastily, she stepped back into the shadows and turned her attention back where it belonged, to the spell.
I will make Dad right, she thought, if it kills me…
****
Subversive Factions Nita stood on the beach, a few miles down from the house by the sea, and watched Alaalu’s sun come up. It always seemed to take a long time, and today it seemed to be taking even longer than usual.
Something’s missing, she thought.
When she’d first started to get this feeling, she’d discounted it. That’s how stressed out I’ve been, she’d thought at the time. They take me to an island paradise for a week, and already I’m dissatisfied with it, looking for some way to find fault. The problem’s probably in my own head. I should kick back and relax, let everything be all right for a change. I’ve just gotten out of the habit of trusting the world.
For a day or so, she’d talked herself into believing it. But this morning she knew that that was exactly what she had done. She had talked herself into believing, however temporarily, something that wasn’t true. She had mistakenly, but purposely, deactivated one of a wizard’s most useful tools: the hunch.
What her hunch told her—contradicting the whispering voices that spoke to her while she slept, the voices of the joyous but complacent—was that not everything was right here. That there was trouble in paradise. Not with the people. Not with the creatures living here. But something else, something much more basic.
Something’s missing.
And in at least one case, she thought she knew what it was—
Worlds had hearts. This was information she had started to work with when her mother got sick. People, planets, even universes—all the places inhabited by mind, either on the small scale or the grand—had “kernels”: hidden, bundled constructs of wizardry, of the fluid interface between science and magic, where
matter and spirit and natural law got tangled together. The rules for a universe were written in its kernel, and the matter in a universe or a world ran by those rules, the way a computer runs by its software. The rules could be altered, but usually it wasn’t smart to do so unless you really knew what you were doing.
Nita was still far too new at kernel studies to fall into this category. But she had a fairly good grasp of the basics, after working hard at the subject over recent months, and she’d learned a lot of the places and ways in which a world’s kernel might routinely be hidden. When she’d first started to get the “something is missing” feeling, the state of Alaalu’s kernel was one of the first things to occur to her. A lot of planets’ kernels were hidden for good reasons—mostly so that they wouldn’t be altered by those who had no right to do so. But that didn’t normally keep a properly trained wizard from at least detecting that a kernel was indeed present. And Nita hadn’t been able to confirm that by casual sensing…which was unusual.
Now she pulled out her manual and sat down in the sand with her back against a dune, twitching a little, and not from sand getting into her clothes. She felt slightly guilty about what she was doing. It wasn’t as if Quelt wasn’t taking really good care of her world, as far as Nita could tell. And normally you didn’t start investigating another wizard’s environment or practice of the Art unless you’d been asked to; “no intervention without a contract” was the usual order of business. But we’re here to see how this world works, among other things, Nita thought, and when I notice something as weird as this, what am I supposed to do? Ignore it? A world’s kernel shouldn’t he separated from it without good reason. There are too many things that could go wrong.
Maybe even things that have gone wrong already—
Nita let out a long breath and paged through the manual, bringing up the custom kernel-detection routines she had started designing over the past few months. She’d come to be able to sense a kernel directly, if it was anywhere at all nearby—usually within some thousands of miles; and if she did a wizardry to augment her internal sensing abilities, her range increased greatly. To save time, Nita had started to file away the spells she used for this purpose, hooking them into a matrix that kept them ready to fuel and turn loose. Now all she had to do for routine kernel-finding was plug in the details about a planet’s or space’s physical characteristics, and turn the spell loose.
Nita came to the pages in her manual where she kept the routines stored, and once again she looked guiltily up and down the beach. But there was no sign of Quelt, nor did Nita really expect there to be—the whole family was extremely thoughtful about one another’s privacy, and their guests’. But if you’re so concerned that something’s wrong here, Nita’s uneasy conscience said to her, why don’t you just take the problem straight to Quelt?
Nita sat thinking about that for some moments, and finally shook her head. Because I really think something’s wrong here. Because I’m not sure she’ll see it the same way I do…or maybe even see it at all. Because—
Just because. I don’t really know why. But I have to look into this. It was, finally, just a hunch. Tom and Carl had told her often enough to trust them…
She laid the manual open next to her on the golden sand and started to read. The wizardry wasn’t a showy one, and wouldn’t manifest its results outside of her
manual, but it was complex, taking several minutes to read straight through. It seemed to take forever for the listening silence to give way to the normal sounds of day with the spell’s completion, and when it finally did, Nita had to slump back against the dune and just gasp for breath for some minutes more. The wizardry was not a cheap one to enact.
It was maybe fifteen or twenty minutes more before she felt up to actually starting to use the running spell to look for Alaalu’s kernel. After that she lost track of time, something she found herself doing with great ease here where the day was thirty percent longer than at home. When she finally closed the spell down and shut the manual, it had to be at least a few hours later, to judge by the sun’s position.
Nita sat there a while more just listening to the water slide in and out, to the occasional songbird twitter of the bat-creatures that soared and swooped over the sea. It’s just nowhere here, she thought. Nowhere in the ground or in the sea, not even anywhere inside the planet’s orbit. Not even for a hundred million miles outside.
Where have they put it? And why isn’t it closer? What’s going on?
Above her Nita heard the faint scratching sound of someone coming down the dune toward her. She looked up over her shoulder and saw the twin silhouettes of Kit and Ponch sliding down the dune, cutouts against the bright sky.
“I was looking for you back at the house,” Kit said. “Demair was there, but she said no one had seen you all day.”
“I skipped breakfast,” Nita said.
“Did you sleep okay last night?” Kit said to her.
Nita shook her head. “No.”
“Dreams again?”
“Partly. But I was thinking,” she said. Kit sat down beside her with his back against the dune, and Nita told him what she’d been thinking about.