Kit noticed Dairine beginning to squirm a little in her seat. Uh-huh, he thought. Bet I know what that’s about.
“First of all,” Tom said to Dairine, “you’ve made the best of being ‘grounded’ inside the solar system for the last little while, so—assuming you’ve learned your lesson—the Powers That Be have cleared us to unground you.” Dairine stopped squirming, and started to grin. “But don’t you assume that this automatically means you’re going to be sent off-planet. The team assignments haven’t been thrashed out yet, and you may be of more use here.”
Dairine sat still and assumed an expression that Kit had long since come to recognize as an attempt to look “serious” and “good.” As usual, he had trouble taking it seriously.
“Anyway,” Tom said, “whichever way your team assignments go, you’re all either going to have to be on call at a moment’s notice to deal with things here, or you’re going to have to be away for some time.” He glanced from Dairine to Kit to Nita. “Normally, in an emergency, we’d help you deal with your absence from school and ‘real life’ by issuing you with timeslide wizardries, so that you could spend as much time away as you needed to and come back at the same time you left. But this situation’s not normal. Local implementations of wizardry may suffer early on … and if a timeslide fails, you could wind up marooned in the wrong time period, with no way home. So you’re going to have to find other ways to handle your absence. Any way that we can help, let us know as soon as you have a plan.”
Nita just nodded.
“Uh,” Kit said, “right.” I can see it all now, he thought. I go to my mama and pop and say, Hey, I need to take some more time off school. Yeah? How much? Oh, just enough to save the universe. Might be a few weeks. But no more than a few months, because everything that exists may be destroyed by then…
Tom, meanwhile, had turned to Filif, Roshaun, and Sker’ret. “The story’s different for you three,” he said. “Sker’ret, Filif, we don’t have direct jurisdiction over you—your Seniors or Advisories at home have that. But we can advise you while you’re here. Both your species fortunately have long latency periods, so that your worlds have plenty of wizards on hand to deal with the local-level threat. Your people in particular, Filif, have such a high latency age that nearly all the wizards on the planet are still of an age range to be immune to what’s going to happen. Officially, you’re still both enjoying excursus status. The emergency, naturally, supersedes the ‘holiday’. If you feel uncomfortable staying here, you can go home to your people at any time. But there’s no need to rush home unless you feel you must.”
“I am free to come and go as I please,” Filif said, “and have no binding ties to draw me immediately back. I am, after all, just one tree in a forest… and I think I might be of more use here.”
Tom glanced over at Sker’ret, who gave him a casual look in return. “I’m in no hurry, either,” Sker’ret said. “People of my species are legally independent a long time before we’re finished being latent. My esteemed ancestor won’t mind if I stay.”
Kit glanced briefly at Nita, and saw her eyes flick toward him, then away again. She hears it, too, he thought. There was something uncomfortable going on with Sker’ret and his family. Not something that’s going to get us all in trouble while we’re trying to handle this mess, I hope…
Tom nodded. “All right, then. But, Roshaun, unfortunately matters aren’t as simple in your case.”
Roshaun glanced up at Tom with an expression that Kit found totally unrevealing. “Though your species has a longer latency period than ours,” Tom said, “your own situation’s complicated by your family’s unique relationship with your planet, and the way wizardry’s practiced there. Since your father, the Sun Lord That Was, is your Advisory, you’re going to have to go home and sort out your intentions with him.”
Roshaun’s expression didn’t change. “It should not take long,” he said.
“All right. If he’s got any questions about what’s been going on here, have him get in touch with us; we’ll be glad to fill him in on the details. In fact, I kind of look forward to it, because I read the précis in the manual about what you did while we were gone.”
Roshaun nodded graciously, his face adding only the slightest smile of pleasure at the praise … and Kit suddenly found himself really wishing he could somehow eavesdrop on that conversation. His father’s his Advisory? The thought made him boggle. Sure, there were families in which wizardry ran; Nita’s was an example. But to have such a close relative be a wizard, too, and your superior? It’d be like having a father who was also principal of your school. It could be super— if your dad was some kind of saint. But, boy, if he wasn’t…
“So,” Carl said, “now you’re all up to date. Just make sure you understand one thing. You’re not going to be immune from the loss-of-wizardry effect forever. For a while it’ll even seem to be going the other way, because as we lose our power, the Powers That Be are going to make sure it’s not wasted by having it pass to you. But unless you work very fast to find out exactly what it is you need to do with it to save the world, then all that extra power isn’t going to help you for long. You’ll lose it, as we’ll lose it. You’ll lose the Speech, and wizardry, and even the belief that there was ever any such thing. And then the darkness will fall.”
Kit felt himself going pale all over again.
“So work fast,” Tom said. “We’ll do the same, for as long as we can. We’ll set you up with all the automatic manual assistance we can before we become nonfunctional.” His face hardened as he said it, as if he was trying hard not to let his real feelings out. “But after that, it’s up to you.”
Kit, glancing briefly sideways, saw Nita swallow. He’d seen that sealed-over expression on her often enough lately; he hadn’t ever thought he’d see it on Tom. You get used to thinking the Seniors will always have a way out, Kit thought. That they’ll figure out what to do. But when you see that it’s not going to be that way…
Tom glanced around at all of them. “So,” he said, “any questions?”
He paused as a faint clicking noise came from off to his left, and then watched with interest as Dairine’s laptop walked into the room. A small, rectangular silvery case on many jointed legs, it now hunched itself down on the polished wood floor, put up two stalky eyes, rather like Sker’ret’s, and glanced from Tom to Carl and then to Dairine.
“Wondered when you’d come out from under the bed,” Dairine said, sounding to Kit both annoyed and a little relieved. “Spot, are you okay?”
From Spot issued a small whirring noise, like a cuckoo clock getting ready to strike. Dairine leaned over to peer down at him.
“Three true things await discovery,” Spot said.
“Darkness overspreading,