The Lone Power looked at her, stony-faced, silent. “You know,” It said after a few moments, “what you’re likely to be bringing down on yourself, at some later date, by making me do something—”
Nita folded her arms and looked at the Lone One. “Threats are a bad start for what’s going to happen now…”
Esemeli glared at her.
“Won’t swear, huh?” Nita said. “No, I didn’t think so. You’ve just been yanking our chain this whole time.” She looked over at Kit. “I guess it’s true,” she said, with a sigh. “Evil can’t change. Or else,” she said, looking back at Esemeli, “you’re even more stuck than you say you are, you poor thing. Never mind. You just have a nice time sitting here in the shade for another aeon or three!”
She turned her back and started down the stairs again. Kit shrugged helplessly at the Lone Power, and turned to go after Nita.
“Wait!”
Nita didn’t stop.
“I’ll swear!”
Nita went down a couple more steps, a little more slowly, and then stopped and looked over her shoulder.
“Let’s hear it, then,” she said. “And don’t leave anything out.”
“I swear by the One,” Esemeli said, standing there in the sun and casting a longer and blacker shadow every moment, “to perform what I promise—”
“Fully and without any reservation,” Nita said, “nor with any mechanism or execution founded in the intention to deceive; to fully inform the wizards of all manner of things of which they inquire; to carry out this information at a speed and in a way best suited to these wizards’ desires and the achievement of their ends; and at the end of said achievement, to depart without doing any harm to them or any thing or person affiliated with them in whatever degree, and when the conditions of this swearing are discharged and acknowledged to have been discharged, to go
peaceably again into my own place. And all this, by the Power of that One in Which all oaths and all intentions rest, inviting It on my abroachment of this Oath to withdraw the gifts It allows me to enjoy, I swear—”
Phrase by phrase, scowling more and more blackly with every word, the Lone One recited the Binding Oath. It got as far as “any thing or person affiliated with them in whatever degree,” and then stopped, glaring at them, while its shadow boiled with half-seen nightmare shapes of fury. “Oh, come on, that could be construed as meaning your whole universe!! It said.
Nita ignored Its shadow, kept her eyes on Esemeli’s face. “So it could,” Nita said. “And if you cooperate with us, there won’t be any need to take you to arbitration over it.”
“Assuming you survive that long,” the Lone One said, grinding Its teeth.
“Anything can happen,” Nita said. “And if you start trying to sabotage us after you’ve sworn this Oath, I wouldn’t make any bets on your longevity, either. You know what that last clause means. The only reason you’re here is because the One hasn’t yet seen fit to abolish you by withdrawing the energy It gave you at the very beginning of things. If you break this Oath—” Then she grinned. “Nah. You’re infinitely destructive but you’re not actively dumb. Come on, just get it over with! Stalling isn’t going to help you.”
Esemeli grimaced, and then started reciting again. When the Oath was finished, Nita nodded and said, “All right. That wasn’t so bad, was it?”
The Lone One said nothing.
“Never mind,” Nita said. “Kit?”
“Right,” Kit said. “First question: Where is Druvah?”
“I don’t know.”
Kit gave Esemeli a skeptical look.
“I mean it,” Esemeli said. “He used the energy I gave him to change his way of being. After the Choice, he bound himself into the world physically. Finding him is going to require making some preparations.”
“Then make them,” Nita said. “I want to hear all about them, of course, when they’ve been made, before we actually go looking. But don’t take too long. We’re only here for another week or so, and after we get this sorted out, I want lots of time on the beach to relax with Quelt.”
The Lone One nodded in a surly way. “You’ll hear from me tomorrow dawn,” It said, then turned and slowly went back up the steps into the Naos, vanishing into the shadows.
Kit and Nita went down the stairs again, with Ponch following after, wagging his tail. At the bottom of the stairs, they paused briefly as Ponch hurled himself off into the flowery fields, jumping at the occasional fur-bat that flapped up, startled, out of the jijis flowers.
“Weren’t you a little mean to It?” Kit said under his breath as they went after Ponch.
“After a whole week on the Planet of Nice,” Nita said, equally softly, “and come to think of it, a week without Dairine, I kind of wanted an excuse to get cranky about something.” She smiled slightly.
“Do you trust It?”
“Now? After It swore the Binding Oath? Sure.” She glanced at Kit out of the corner of her eye. “About ninety percent. I wouldn’t put it past Esemeli to keep trying to find a way out of what I made It swear. But at least the odds are on our side. And we’ve got to find out the truth about what’s going on around here. Druvah is definitely still here…and he’ll be able to tell us.”
They walked on a little ways.
“So this turns out to be errantry after all,” Kit said.
Nita nodded. “Just not formally declared, nothing that the Powers officially sent us on.”
Kit shook his head. “But why not?” he said. “Why didn’t they just send us here and say, ‘There’s something wrong with this planet and we need you to fix it’?”
“Or,” Nita said, “why didn’t They just get in touch with Quelt and tell her what the problem was?” She picked up a small rock and threw it off into the flowers. One flower moved slightly in a sea of them as the rock came down, and then everything was still once more.
She and Kit sighed more or less in unison. No answers were going to be forthcoming. They were just going to have to get on with it.
“It’s like Rhiow said, a while ago,” Nita muttered. The little black cat who was head of the New York gating team had been describing a pleasure trip when she’d routed outward through the Crossings and had wound up spending days there, helping them repair a recalcitrant worldgate. “Wizard’s holiday…”
Kit grinned. The phrase meant a vacation or pleasure trip that rapidly turned into something else, usually involving errantry, but was still pleasant in a strange way, simply because of the change. “I don’t know why the Powers let us think we’re ever going to get a real vacation,” Kit said.
“Maybe They don’t get any, either,” Nita said, “and They think the situation’s normal.”
“If you’re right,” Kit said, “I feel sorry for Them.”
“So do I,” Nita said, “if I’m right. Meanwhile…”
“Back to the house by the sea.”
“It’ll work,” Roshaun said.
In the darkness, they all knelt (or in Filif’s case, rooted) above the wizardry together. It lay glowing on the ground under the sassafras trees, now almost completely interwritten with the long, delicately curling characters of the Speech.
“You’re sure?” Sker’ret said.
Roshaun nodded. “The final layout confirms it. Suck the matter out from underneath the tachocline, and you get a brief but big shift in the way the Sun handles its magnetic fields—for the tachocline is the dynamo for the star’s whole field. When you pull the matter out, the tachocline collapses back just a little and cools. The magnetic field drops off, and you get an artificial ‘quiet star’ period. All the other ‘inflamed’ areas have a chance to quiet down as a result. If you’re very careful with the calculations, you can get as much as a month of quiet time and derail the cycle entirely.”
He looked down at the wizardry and sighed.
“The big problem remains, though. We must put the far end of the conduit in place, by hand, as it were, underneath the tachocline. We can’t just sink it in from above and pray. The height of the tachocline changes from hour to hour, even minute to minute. Put the conduit in too high, and take out too much material of too low a density, and nothing happens. Put it in too low, take out too much higher-density material, and then the star’s core, and the nuclear burning process, are affected.”