Interim Errantry 2: On Ordeal

by Diane Duane

  I’m doing that right now.

  Except apparently not. A snicker. Or not very successfully.

  I’d watch how you make fun of me.

  Always, the answer came back. I’m always thinking about that. Every Planck instant of my existence is spent on—

  It should be. It had better be. Because if you think you’re going to get anything useful out of this one—

  I already have. And I will again. And you know it, don’t you! It’s started already.

  …Don’t be so sure. The day is young. His life is young. And a lot can happen before the one or the other ends…

  ***

  It was astonishing, and dispiriting, to find how little fun you could have when you had a day off school that you didn’t want.

  And just yesterday, Ronan thought, I’d have given anything for a day or two off… Just not like this.

  He went out of the house and scowled up at Bray Head—which was practically shining in the morning’s sun, here and there showing patches of that perfect so-fugitive spring green that when it appeared rarely lasted more than a day or two. No way, he thought, not today. Because who knew what lay under that innocent appearance? Nope. Don’t care. Gonna go to town today. Or maybe to Dublin. He had enough money: he could catch the DART train in and lose himself among a few hundred thousand people who didn’t have a clue who he was or care whether or not he’d been suspended.

  He had to skulk for a while to make sure his mam and da were safely out of the way first. This he did by initially heading for the main road as if he was going to school as normal, but instead slipping hurriedly down the driveway of the house two houses down on the main-road side and concealing himself there in a little niche where they usually kept their bins. Those were out on the street today, though, and from that quiet spot Ronan looked out to see first his da and then his mam drive away, neither one any the wiser.

  After that he resolutely made his way down the main street toward town, refusing even to look across the road as he passed the intersection where he’d normally have crossed for school. It was a mile and a half or so from there to the built-up center of Bray, and every yard of it that Ronan walked felt like that might be the one where his mam or da would have realized they’d forgotten something at home, and would drive past and spot him there.

  But it didn’t happen, and eventually it got too late for it to do so. Eventually Ronan realized he was free to just keep slogging his way downhill as the road twisted and turned past the convenience stores and the parking lots, the semi-detached houses and the strips of park that were scattered along the way. It took a while, as he didn’t rush. He strolled slowly down through that relentlessly ordinary landscape as behind him the wind started to blow cooler and overhead the blue of the sky went grey, everything once more going dull and everyday and average-looking. Yet all the time words and more words and still more words in the Speech drizzled down around Ronan without pause, like a substitute for yesterday’s rain; words that described the trees and the plants he noticed, and all the materials the houses he passed were made of; words describing the dogs and cats and birds and people he passed—words that meant them, could have power over them.

  It was overwhelming, hard to take in… even after a whole night mostly spent trying to get to grips with it. Ronan liked to think he was good at coping with reality, even when it was unpleasant. But here he was suddenly weighted down with a whole new pile of it, and though he hated to admit it, he was struggling to find his balance.

  So, great! he found himself thinking. I’ve got wizardry! So why do I feel like crap?

  Because he did. This isn’t how I ever imagined it, Ronan thought, if something like this was going to happen to me. It would be terrific and wonderful and all my problems would be solved. Instead the world looked a lot like it had yesterday, except that now he also had all this stuff he was going to have to learn if it was ever going to be useful.

  He sighed, then, standing at what a lot of people considered the beginning of downtown Bray. It was the intersection where Vevay Road and Killarney Road came together in a vee—the angle filled by a weird old half-timbered building that once had been the City Hall and was now a McDonalds. Even the smell of the fries and the growling of his stomach (for he hadn’t had the appetite for anything but tea at breakfast time) wasn’t enough to distract Ronan at the moment. I said I wanted this, he thought, crossing over and heading down among the pubs and shops of Main Street. And now I’ve got it. All these words…

  The whisper of them was always there now: even the late-morning traffic noise couldn’t stop them. Whenever Ronan held still and closed his eyes, he could practically see the words starting to try to fit themselves together in his head in order to match whatever he was thinking about. If there really had been a letter about me this morning, and I’d had just a little more time to get used to this, he thought, I could’ve made it go away.

  And the thought gave him a shiver. What else could I do?

  What else should I do?

  Because he could still faintly hear the voice that had been talking to him all through that dream. Making a difference. Making bad things stop happening. Help good things not get screwed up. Guarding growth… There were a lot of things that could mean. Easing pain… That too.

  Those words, the words of his promise, were burned into his brain and utterly memorable, even if some of the details surrounding the actual making of the promise were a bit dim. I said that, he thought. I meant it. It’s a good thing to mean.

  …So best get on with it, then.

  There in the center of town Ronan stood looking into one of the plateglass windows of the local bookstore, not really seeing anything he was looking at: shiny covers, three for two deals, all the words on all the covers making less sense to him at the moment than the words he was hearing now in his head. Half of him was thinking, Might as well stay here for a few minutes at least, because it’s looking like rain again… And indeed it was getting very dark back up up at the north end of town, in the direction of the road back home. As he looked up that way, he saw a flicker of light in the clouds up there, followed a couple of seconds later by a sullen mutter of thunder.

  That decided him. It was yet another good reason to go spend the day in Dublin, rather than hang around in Bray where he’d constantly have to wonder whether he was going to run into someone he knew.

  He turned back to the window full of books and started going through his jacket pocket for enough change to deal with his fare on the DART. Then I can sit down somewhere quiet, maybe get a burger or something, and get a grip and start working on this, Ronan thought. Because, okay, I kinda got caught by surprise. And then he snickered at himself in mockery while the first big drops of rain started pattering onto the pavement around him and the first drops of rain tapped his shoulders. Yeah, well, ‘magic is real’, who wouldn’t be surprised? But here it is, looks like. So… time to make a plan. Let’s get out of here and start making it happen. If I move quick I can get down to the station before this really sets in.

  The wind picked up in a gust as Ronan turned to his right to head back towards the intersection with Florence Road, which would take him down toward the Seafront and the DART station. The rain started pattering down harder, big fat drops that were going to mean another soaking if he didn’t get moving. Is it going to pass over fairly fast, Ronan thought, glancing up to assess the clouds, or is it—

  Just as he turned, another flash of lightning from the northward lit up everything in the street as blazingly as if someone had turned movie-set lights onto it. For just a split second Ronan was absolutely dazzled by the sharpness with which every detail jumped out at him, every bit of color and texture—the clothes of passing pedestrians frozen by that brilliance as brightly as if by a strobe, every edge or corner or surface perfectly defined. In the next split second that flash caught him right in the eyes and blasted the vision out of them.

  He actually staggered as if struck a blow. The weird thing was
that while Ronan was recovering himself, he didn’t hear any thunder. That can’t have been that far away! he thought, putting out a hand to lean on the shop window while he tried to blink some vision back into his eyes, which were showing him nothing but glowing afterimages. Something that bright, it should’ve been practically on top of us—

  But there was still no thunder. And he couldn’t find the window with his hand, which was weird. I got turned around, Ronan thought. Okay, just stand here until the eyes are working again…

  The wind began to pick up once more; rain started splattering into his face. Feck it all, this is just my week for getting wet, isn’t it? Ronan thought. He could have just started laughing out loud at the ridiculousness of it if he wasn’t standing there in the middle of town where someone would come across him in a moment and think he’d gone spare. Yesterday was all about water, and it looks like today’s going to be that way too. “Okay, come on,” he said under his breath, “talk to me, what’s the trouble?”

  But for the moment, despite the fact that the water wouldn’t shut up with him for most of the previous night, it had nothing to say right now. What Ronan could tell, though, was that it was scared.

  Wait, what? he thought. That was just wrong. “Come on,” he muttered again, knowing he was using the Speech in the middle of Main Street but not caring, because he was finding it upsetting that water should be scared about anything. “What’s the matter?”

  He didn’t get any answer back that made sense. Ronan rubbed his eyes some more, blinked. Yeah, better, he thought, because much to his relief that afterimage was now fading. Except, why’s everything so dark all of a sudden, and wait, where are the—

  —buildings…?

  Because there were no buildings.

  Nor was there a street. Ronan was standing in the middle of a wheel-rutted muddy track that wound up to where he stood from the direction of the Seafront, and then wound away again, uphill in the direction of Bray Head. And he could see Bray Head from here, easily, because there was not a single building between it and him to obstruct his view.

  He stared around him, open-mouthed. On all sides Ronan was surrounded by nothing but soggy sandy soil covered with scraggly bracken and sea grass, the kind that grew on dunes and hillsides close to the water. Further inland, in the general direction of Little Bray and the river Dargle, he could just make out through the mist and the down-pelting rain several large conical thatch-roofed houses that looked exactly like the ones in the Ancient Ireland theme park down by Waterford that he’d gone on a school trip to a couple of years ago. Penned in a rough enclosure of wooden pilings near one of the big thatched houses were some disconsolate-looking brown cows, all very muddy and raising up a pitiable racket of mooing at the weather.

  “You and me both, lads,” Ronan said, for all around him the rain was simply hammering down, the air hissing with it and water leaping up in muddy drops from every puddle. There were no people to be seen, which at the moment Ronan counted as a plus—since if the inhabitants were the kind of people who would logically go with these houses, or these cows, seeing him would probably just give them some kind of conniption. This weather, honestly, they’d be smarter to be inside anyway…

  He looked up towards Bray Head again and saw the lightning flickering in the clouds above it, like a warning. Or like a challenge, Ronan thought—or something inside him thought.

  He could feel it, too: that sense of something taunting him, daring him. His thoughts immediately went back to Seamus yesterday. Something up there, something behind the lightning, had taken up the dare that Ronan saying the words of the Oath implied. And from the looks of it, It had said, Fine. Let’s see how you handle— Ronan looked around him and had to use the words: Time travel. Let’s see how you cope with that.

  And why do I get the idea it won’t be just that? Because if Squishy McSnakeface just wanted to make my life difficult, he wouldn’t have to go all timey-wimey with me. He’s got something else up his sleeve.

  Ronan pushed his hair back away from his face—because it was dripping in his eyes—and looked up at Bray Head.

  “Okay,” he said in the Speech, and not under his breath. “Time to get the lay of the land. Let’s get on up there.”

  ***

  Without any warning, the landscape all around him was partly obscured by a diagram laid out in lines of multicolored light—like neon, but more alive. It was a diagram made up of interlocking circles that at first looked like a Venn diagram with a lot of writing inside it.

  Ronan bent over to look at the parts of it that were nearest to him, for he was actually standing inside one of the circles. The writing was graceful and curvy, like a many-branched vine: it seemed to be some kind of cursive, its tendrils curling out on alternate sides of a central stem. As Ronan bent over to look at the writing he realized to his astonishment that he could read it. The long sentence that curved along inside one arc of the circle in which he stood was a number of words in the Speech that had to do with transport, moving something from one place to another. He saw a long word that he knew immediately meant Bray Head, followed by a string of words describing the location of the top of the Head: a coordinate set, like something from a GPS readout. Okay, Ronan thought. And to get up there I have to read that—

  He straightened up. “Okay,” he said. “Fine.” And as the rain drummed relentlessly down onto him and he once more had to push his dripping, sopping hair out of his face, Ronan lost his temper and said, “And can I please not be wet?”

  The sentence came out in the Speech, and forcefully, so much so that—as they had in his dream—the words shook the air Ronan used to speak them, and leapt out of him with enough force to leave him staggering. Feeling a little hurt but nonetheless cooperative, the water soaking into his clothes immediately removed itself three inches away from his skin in all directions.

  Ronan startled at that, because now he found himself encased in what closely resembled a shell of pebble glass, the kind you put in bathroom windows. Except this “pebble glass” was apparently alive. It was shimmering all over from where the rain outside was hitting it—the rain, too, now cooperating by observing that three-inch limit. “Well, thanks,” Ronan said then.

  Welcome, the water said—and kept saying, repeatedly, in tiny ripples. He could see it saying so as well as hear it, which was interesting in and of itself: the movement itself apparently was an expression in the Speech, if you were water.

  Right. Can we smooth that out a little? Because I’m not gonna be able to read through this.

  Instantly the surface of the water around him went smooth and clear as window glass.

  “Ta,” Ronan said, and took a moment to get used to being dry again—completely dry, even the sweat of his initial shock was gone now. So weird! But there was no point in trying to deal with the details of all this right now. Just get through it. One thing at a time.

  “Okay,” he said under his breath, “let’s see which bits of this I need to read now…” Because the Speech itself was making it plain to him that for any spell, the right words had to happen in the right order to produce a result. And transit spells, apparently, were notoriously tricky. Misplace the Speech-equivalent of a decimal point or a vector quantity at a time like this and you could wind up not on Bray Head, but in it.

  In this case fortunately the two arcs’ worth of wording he needed to recite were clearly marked for him. They flared softly in response as Ronan reached for the words that they meant in his head, found them, sounded them out without saying them. As he did numerous other notations and subclauses glowed faintly where they were embedded in the ancillary circle—protective barriers against remnants of older wizardry that might be lingering in the area.

  Two phrases, he thought. Room for a big breath in between. Let’s go.

  He took a long breath and started saying the first phrase. The words were more under control this time when Ronan was taking more care over them and injecting less emotion. They didn’t shake him so
violently on the way out, but there was still a sort of buzzing and juddering in his body as each one was pronounced; as if someone had reached down inside Ronan and turned up the bass. And around him the incessant hiss of the rain was muting down as if someone was sliding some kind of master volume control downward; as if someone, or something, wanted to listen.

  Speaking the words was an effort, though. Each one represented some fraction of the force that was holding everything in the world together. Each one felt massive. Every time he finished speaking one, Ronan felt like he’d lifted up a rock or a breezeblock and couldn’t let go of it until he found exactly the right place to put it. Yet there was a kind of poetry in what he was doing, even if it felt strained and weighty and inherently dangerous. Every time he got a word, a stone, set in the right place, the act came with a huge sense of accomplishment, as if everything that existed was leaning in around him watching and applauding every time he got it right. The increasing quiet, as he put the second-to-last word of that phrase in place, might have freaked him out under other circumstances, but right now it just felt like a crowd going more and more still as you got ready to kick a goal—

  Ronan came to the end of that first phrase and stood there gasping as around him the transit circles glowed more brightly in time with his breaths. There would be times, the Speech told him, when this would be quick and easy, over with in just a few seconds… but right now he was in a place where a lot of other wizardries had happened over time, and filtering out their influence was a problem. On understanding that, Ronan found that he could actually feel their traces deep-sunk into the earth, layered like strata of stone or sediment, and full of decayed or trapped energies as dangerous in their way as if they were radioactive. Great, he thought as he finished getting his breath back. I’m living in a magical toxic waste dump…

  But the rest of the spell was waiting, and the rain was coming down harder; water was starting to run past him in little streams toward the seafront. Better get to higher ground, Ronan thought. He took a long breath and started in on the second arc of the spell.