It was probably completely unnecessary for her to reach out and take Roshaun’s hand as the wizardry closed in around them and the view of her house and driveway dulled through the glowing curtain of Speech expressed and space bent slightly awry. It’s just a precaution, Dairine thought. I wouldn’t want to lose him at this crucial moment—
They vanished.
****
Areas to Avoid After their visit to the Lone Power, Nita and Kit had little to do but sit around on the
beach for the rest of that afternoon, because Quelt was away dealing with the issue of the Great Vein again and wouldn’t be back until later, so Kuwilin told them. Ponch spent the afternoon running up and down the beach, mostly in the water; Kit and Nita, in no mood to play with him, sat trying to work out how to tell Quelt what they’d learned.
“Why should she believe any of this?” Kit said under his breath. He’d amassed a small pile of stones and was throwing them into the water one by one.
“Because we’re wizards,” Nita said, “and we wouldn’t lie to her. We can’t, in the Speech! And she knows that.”
“She should,” Kit said, throwing another rock in the water. “But even if she knows we’re telling the truth, I’m not sure she’s going to like what we have to tell her.”
“No,” Nita said. “She might even think it was just some weird misperception of ours, because we’re aliens…”
Kit nodded, looking morose. “Where’s Ponch gone?” he said, looking up and down the beach.
Nita shook her head. Trying to keep track of a dog who could make his own universes, and walk at will through ones he hadn’t made, was always a challenge. “No idea,” she said. “Weren’t you working on a thing to do with his special leash, so that you can track him down?”
“I was working on that, yeah,” Kit said. “It’s not perfect yet.” He reached into the little local space-pocket that followed him around, rummaged around in it, and came up with Ponch’s leash. Kit had made it of the Speech, with some added ingredients. The whole wizardry was wound together into a soft, infinitely extensible cord that nothing could break and that would allow the wizard who held on to it to safely follow Ponch wherever he might walk.
“Let’s see,” Kit said. He ran the leash through his hands, closed his eyes for a moment. Nita could feel the direction-finding part of the wizardry come awake, but that was all—the wizardry was tuned to Kit specifically, and couldn’t otherwise be overheard.
He opened his eyes a moment later. “It’s all right,” he said. “He’s ten miles away, down the beach. He loves that he can just run and run and never run out of sand.” He stood up. “I don’t know how he’s got any pads left on his paws with all the running he’s been doing the past few days.”
Kit got up. “I’ll be back in a few minutes,” he said, and vanished with a soft pop of imploding air.
Nita sat back against the dune and looked out at the glitter and roil of the sunlit water. This was working so well, she thought, until I started to feel that something was wrong. Have I ruined myself somehow? Am I always going to go looking for what’s wrong, forever, so that even when things are perfectly all right, I can’t let them just he the way they are?
She sighed and picked up one of Kit’s stones, turning it over and over in her hand. We could have spent a lovely couple of weeks here and left these happy people living their happy lives. And, all right, so there’s something else going on at the bottom of it all. So what? Is it my business to go out of my way to make the Alaalids unhappy, just so that they’ll possibly evolve into something better? Is
there—
A shadow fell over her, and Nita looked up, startled.
“Quelt!” she said.
“Nita…”
Quelt had just come over the top of the dune. She stood there looking at Nita for a moment, and then sighed and came down, step by step, rather slowly.
“Are you all right? You look tired.”
“I am,” Quelt said, and sat down by Nita, looking at the water. “I am tired.”
She looked troubled, too, but Nita wasn’t going to say anything about that; she had too many troubles on her mind to be accusing anyone else of having difficulty dealing with theirs.
“There’s going to be more trouble with the Great Vein than I’d thought,” Quelt said. “The crust really is shifting down there: The layering’s become more complex than it used to be. It’s going to take days yet to sort it out.”
She sighed, leaning back on her elbows.
“And on top of everything else, there seems to be something wrong with the Display,” Quelt said. “It seems to have stopped functioning, and I have no idea why…or what to do about it. It’s puzzling. The wizardry laid into that was always very resilient: Vereich told me that Druvah himself put it in place.” She shook her head.
Uh-oh, Nita thought. I wish I could put this off, but there’s not going to be a better time, and we can’t just sit around and hope that this issue goes away. “Quelt,” Nita said, “I think I know how that happened.”
Quelt looked surprised. “You do?”
“Kit and Ponch were down in there, and it stopped working while Kit was viewing something to do with Druvah,” Nita said. There. That’s the truth…
At that, Quelt turned a very strange look on Nita. Anywhere else, she thought, in anyone else, it would look like suspicion, Nita thought.
“Something to do with Druvah,” Quelt said. “What about him?”
“Uh,well…”
Nita suddenly saw Kit coming down the beach. Trotting along beside him was Ponch; the wizardly leash was around his neck, and Ponch was carrying the other end of it in his mouth, like any more ordinary dog out for a walk. “Here he comes,” Nita said, feeling awful to push this off onto Kit. But he was there. He can tell her better than I can.
“Hey, Quelt,” he said, as he came up to them, “dai.” Ponch, with the leash in his mouth, went straight to Quelt and started nuzzling her. She took his head under her arm and started rubbing his ears.
“He’s got you trained already,” Kit said. Nita caught his eye. Here it comes…
After a moment Quelt looked up at him. “Nita says you were down in the Display when it failed,” she said.
“Yes,” Kit said.
Ponch looked up into Quelt’s eyes. I think it was my fault, he said. Please don’t he angry at Kit.
Quelt produced a strange, unhappy smile and roughed up Ponch’s ears some more. “I can’t let him try to take the blame for this,” Kit said. “I asked him to alter
the way the Display was working. I wanted to hear what Druvah actually said to Esemeli.”
Quelt didn’t look up. “And what did you hear?”
Kit told her.
It took a long while. Kit’s memory was excellent, Nita thought; the phrasing he was using was that of an older time, and she could almost hear the ancient wizard speaking through him. All the time, though, Quelt’s expression never changed. She sat looking down at the sand until Kit finished.
“So then,” she said, “having heard that, you went to see Esemeli.”
“Yes,” Nita said. Now, she figured, it was her turn. She told Quelt everything the Lone One had said to them, leaving out not a word. It was surprisingly easy for her, for she had been turning all those words over again and again in her mind, looking for anything dangerous hidden under them that she might have missed the first time around.
Once again, Quelt held very still, kept very silent, while Nita told her what the Lone Power had said about the Alaalids’ need to evolve. And then Nita fell silent herself, waiting to see what Quelt would do.
The silence lasted a long while, and Nita forced herself to listen to the water slipping up and down the beach, and the little hissing noises that happened when air got trapped in the sand and bubbled out. When she looked at Quelt again, she found the Alaalid gazing at her with an indrawn expression very unlike anything Nita had seen on her before.