Carmela carefully handed Sker’ret the chocolate bar. “Don’t crease the paper!” she said, as he delicately took it in a forward handling-claw. “So. All you guys behave now,” she said to the Tawalf. “If you don’t, I’ll hear about it, and I’ll refuse to relinquish title.”
There was a lot of broken-spirited muttering from the Tawalf. “I’m going to transfer you to a secure holding facility,” Sker’ret said, moving over to the nearest gate-cluster standard and tapping at it so that it extruded its own control console. “We’ll be along to see that you have nourishment shortly, and to start your questioning. Everyone into the zone, please.”
A pad came alive, glowing red. The Tawalf spidered their way onto it and huddled there. A moment later they vanished.
Nita and Sker’ret looked at each other. Nita let out a long breath. She could hear the tiny multiple hiss as Sker’ret pushed a sigh out of the little spiracles all down the length of his body.
“You should get on home to do what you need to,” he said. “I’ll pop a gate open for you now.”
Nita looked around her, concerned. “Are you going to be able to manage here?”
“I’ll call the planetary authorities,” Sker’ret said. “They’ll send me plenty of staff until I can get the systems back up again, and get a clearer sense of what happened here. The logs should help me figure it out. And assuming that my ancestor is all right—”
He fell silent.
“I’m sure he is,” Nita said. “He’s too mean to—” She stopped herself. “I mean—”
“I know,” Sker’ret said, amused. “Go find out where your own ancestor is. I’ll meet you here afterward, and we can go back together.”
“Yeah,” Nita said.
She turned to Carmela. “One thing before I go,” Nita said. “Are your pop and mom okay?”
“They’re just fine,” Carmela said.
“Do they know you’ve left?”
“Sure. I left them a note on the fridge, the way Kit does.”
Nita was uncertain what the Rodriguezes’ response to that was going to be, but right now she had other concerns. “Look, I don’t think I’m going to have to be gone long. Are you sure you’re going to be okay here?”
“Haven’t I been okay so far?” Carmela said.
Even in her present stressed-out condition, Nita had to grin. “Just possibly you have,” she said. “Keep an eye on him, okay? Help him out however you can.”
“Now you know I live to do just that,” Carmela said.
“Got a gate for you,” Sker’ret said, training one eye on Nita while another one gazed at the red-lit hexagon of one of the pads in the nearest cluster. “There’s that spot out at the far end of your backyard that’s seen a lot of traffic—”
“Perfect,” Nita said. She headed for the pad.
“Better lose the accelerator,” Sker’ret said. “If anybody in your neighborhood’s sensitive enough to see the wizardry, they might talk.”
Nita nodded, tossed the accelerator up into the air, snapped her fingers at it; the spell resolved itself into its component words in the Speech, a long tangled drift of words and symbols that hung wavering in the air like glowing weeds in water. Nita snagged the spell, wrapped it back around the charm on her charm bracelet that usually held it, and made sure it had sunk into the charm’s matrix again before she stepped across the boundary line into the gating hex. “Go,” she said. “I’ll be back soon.”
Sker’ret hit a control on his console, and Nita vanished.
11: Acceptable Losses
The cave in the outcropping on Rashah had become a busy place. The fifth of seven Yaldiv-shaped mochteroofs stood on the floor on its delicate walking-legs, at the center of a circle of bright floating wizard-lights. All the mochteroofs’ underlying spell structures were exposed, a wire-frame of wizardry. Filif was looking it over, checking all the fine details to make sure everything was in place. The other four mochteroofs stood complete—images of giant bugs all still and shining, each one waiting for a wizard to step into it and bring it to life. Off to one side of the circle of lights, Dairine and Kit and Roshaun and Ronan and Ponch sat or sprawled on blankets or pads from the pup tents, waiting for Filif to finish.
“Each one of these is going to have to be a little different,” Filif said, drifting around the mochteroof and poking the occasional frond into it here and there to test its disguise routines. “After all, if we all looked exactly identical, that could provoke as much attention as all of us just walking around in our own shapes.”
Dairine smiled. Filif was fussing, and typically for him, he seemed not to have noticed that no one was paying much attention. But Dairine didn’t think he minded. Also typically of him, he had understood about the Hesper more quickly than any of them, even Ronan. Ronan was having problems, and Dairine was getting increasingly tempted to kick him, except that it wouldn’t have helped.
Then again, maybe it’s not just Ronan, she thought. His invisible friend may have reason to feel odd about all this, too…
“Fil?” Dairine said. “How much longer, do you think?”
“Perhaps twenty minutes,” Filif said, poking another frond into the mochteroof. “Planet dusk is coming. When it does, we’ll be ready for it.”
“‘Enthusiasmic,’” Ronan said, shaking his head. “You sure it didn’t say ‘enthusiastic’?”
Dairine glanced over at Spot. Spot grew some legs and toddled over to where Ronan sat cross-legged with the Spear across his lap. The mobile flipped his screen open and showed Ronan the word that had appeared under the surface of the mobiles’ world.
“See,” Dairine said. “It’s got the root word for a spirit, not just a mortal soul but one that’s a lot more powerful. One that can confer immortality on its vessel, once it gets properly seated.” She shook her head. “And ‘incorporation,’ over there—it doesn’t have anything to do with industry. There’s the ‘ensoulment’ root, but with that procedural suffix. It’s not something that’s finished with; it’s an ongoing process.”
“One that could get derailed,” Kit said.
“We’d better hope not,” said Spot.
“But think of it,” Roshaun said. “A new Power, never seen before. Not just a redeemed version of the Isolate, but something truly new. A version of the Lone Power that never fell.”
He crumpled up the wrapper of the fifth or sixth of Dairine’s trail-mix bars, and tossed it away. Dairine smiled half a smile. He had been eating more or less constantly since they got here: first a lot of his own food, and then (without having asked permission) one after another of Dairine’s trail-mix bars. She was putting up with it because he seemed distracted, but also because she had used this opportunity to push off on him a lot of the bars that contained dried cranberries, which she hated.
“This moment has been a very long time coming,” said the Champion after a few moments. “If the embodiment survives long enough to come to Its full power, then the universe is truly changed.”
“If it does,” Kit said. “But no wonder the Pullulus is happening now. If It knows about this, the Lone Power must be completely freaked. A completely new Power is coming into the game. One that’s going to be the Lone One’s very own dedicated enemy…”
Ponch lifted his head, and his tail banged against the floor. I told you I smelled something brand-new! he said. That’s part of what I was following.
If It knows, the Champion said. Great efforts have been made to keep It from discovering all the details. Or any of the other Powers, for that matter. If, as seems to be the case, the efforts to keep the secret have been successful … then our job is to make sure that the ensoulment goes through without a hitch.