by Diane Duane
But keeping Kit here as well, and Ponch? And Darryl?
The price was too high. Especially, Nita thought, putting aside her personal concerns for the moment, in Darryl’s case.
Nita sighed. Besides, she thought, like in the fairy tale, the Powers That Be will make them let the devil out of the bag eventually. It’s still one of the Powers, part of the world. Keep the Lone Power in here forever and It’ll never be able to change…
Nita stuck the linac weapon under her armpit and held it braced there against her side while she reached into her “pocket” again, found that tangle of light, and spent a few careful moments adjusting several of its properties. She altered the universe’s time flow first, so it matched their home universe’s; then made a few additional changes that might come in handy later. When that was done, she put the kernel away again and considered the maze of half-mirrored trees. It was vast, possibly even infinite, but Nita didn’t let herself worry about that. All these mirrors, the Silence whispered to her, were clones of another one. At the center of the maze was the key to the secret, the way out.
We’re short on time here, Nita said silently. Tell me.
In her mind’s eye, she saw it.
Nita grinned. Darryl, she thought, you are brilliant. You were ready to do this yourself if you could figure out a way not to need this trap any more. And since now you won’t—
She unlimbered the linac weapon again and started to make her way toward the spot she’d been shown. If she’d tried to search for it by sight, she might have passed it many times. But she closed her eyes again, so as not to be bewildered by the reflections, and found it the way the Silence showed her—by walking slowly, bumping into things sometimes, feeling her way. Once she bumped into a tall shape that burned her to be near. “Excuse me,” she said to the Lone Power, and slipped on past It toward the heart of the maze.
It should be near here, shouldn’t it? Nita thought.
You’re close. Keep going…
She walked now through the darkness behind her eyes, slowly, taking her time. A few minutes later Nita came to the place she’d been looking for, and opened her eyes. They’d been closed so long now that she had to blink a little in the light as she looked at the one mirror—among however many uncounted millions in that place—that had no reflection in it at all, not even of any other mirror. This one was a plain bathroom mirror about three feet by two, hanging on a taller mirror-pillar and held in a steel frame—one that probably had a medicine cabinet behind it in the real world. Nita walked up to the rectangular mirror and waved at it, then jumped up and down in front of it. In the mirror, nothing showed at all.
That’s how it’s supposed to be with vampires, Nita thought, intrigued. But, here, the mirrors themselves were vampiric, sucking up fragments of personality, snatches of conversation, the glances of eyes, leaving the originals devoid of words and glances afterward. Nita once more shook her head in admiration. Darryl had done a fantastic job constructing this trap. Even the Lone One, now confined in this constructed world, was vulnerable to it—slowly losing moment after moment of Its vast existence into the mirrored waste, being worn down by the forces that had been wearing away at Darryl since his Ordeal began.
Okay, Nita thought. Here we go. The one thing she made certain of was that her other weapons were all ready to use as soon as she was finished with the linac. I’ll only get one shot with this, she thought. If it’s a good one, all I have to worry about is what’s handy to use next, when all hell breaks loose…
Nita glanced around her to make sure no one was about to come wandering through one of the many openings of the maze that led into this central area. Then she lifted the linac weapon again, narrowed her eyes, took careful aim at the bathroom mirror, and fired.
The blast of energy that came out of the linac weapon didn’t radiate in the visible spectrum, but the air in its path did, ionizing and spitting blue lightnings where the particle beam passed. The mirror leaped and split into thousands of fragments as the blast hit it, and the fragments in turn went white-hot and vaporized in the air—
—and as they did, every other mirror in that world shattered.
The noise was deafening, terrifying. Tons of razory glass exploded into millions of pieces and came raining down on the glassy floor. The fragments vanished as they hit it, as if falling into water. Moments later there was nothing remaining inside that whole huge space but five figures, standing on a dark floor and looking around in various degrees of surprise.
Nita stood there and chucked away the linac weapon, which vanished as soon as she let go of it, its wizardry now spent. She walked over to Kit and Ponch while reaching to her charm bracelet and activating one of the charms.
Ponch was shaking himself all over, as if he were wet. He turned and saw Nita, and began wagging his tail so furiously that it was mostly wagging him. He jumped up and put his forepaws all over her and started jumping up so that he could lick her face.
“Yeah, yeah, big guy, how you doing?” Nita said, sort of holding him by the ears and scratching them at the same time, in a mostly futile effort to keep his tongue out of her nose. “Kit? Give me a hand with this guy, will you?”
Kit was standing there, blinking at her, looking completely astonished. “What are you doing in here?” he said. Then he paused. “Come to think of it, what am I doing in here? I was home! I was lying down—”
The energy bolt came at them from behind.
And it splashed.
Nita looked over her shoulder at the Lone Power and couldn’t restrain a grin. The alterations she’d made in the kernel had worked, and Kit was all right. Now she had backup—and was feeling how good it was to have that again, after she’d been alone. Now then! she thought.
“Well, I guess if you’re going to omit the formalities, so will I,” Nita said, turning to face the Lone One. “Have to say I’d have expected a higher level of function from you! But you’ve been running on half-speed ever since you got in here, poor baby.” She threw It an amused grin. “Take a few moments and try to pull your brains back together. We’ll wait.”
The expression on the Lone Power’s long elegant face set cold, as Nita had known it would; there are few things the Eldest hates more than being made fun of. “Your insolence,” It said, “is going to be short-lived.”
“Compared to the age of the universe, maybe so,” Nita said. “But I think we’re going to walk out of here today, because you miscalculated. You never considered what might happen if Darryl ever realized that the door swings both ways! Or that the door can be locked. Ever since he took the Oath, ever since you decided you had to stop him at all costs from becoming a wizard, he’s been keeping you stuck in here with him on purpose! He’s been getting better and better at it all the time, and you never even suspected, because you thought you were in control. But this is his masterwork, no matter what I did to the fun-house mirrors, which were just a local feature. And you’re still sealed in here until he lets you go.”
The Lone Power looked at Darryl.
Nita looked over at him, too. “Darryl?” she said. “You okay?”
“Yeah,” he said, though he sounded somewhat surprised. “Didn’t know anyone else would be able to see what was going on in here, though.”
“Well, our old buddy here couldn’t,” Kit said. He threw the Lone One a dry glance, and It bristled. “You built this place in such a way that It wouldn’t be able to tell what was happening to it. But you weren’t expecting us inside here too, and we didn’t have enough of It inside us to be fully affected by the spell you built, no matter how much power you pumped into it.”
“A spell’s just an equation,” Nita said. “Or a story. All we did was change the story a little.”
“Rewrote the play a little?” Darryl said, and smiled. “And maybe changed a little of the scenery.” He walking over toward Nita and Kit, with the smile growing on his face rapidly becoming a match for Nita’s: angry, but still very amused. “But the stage is the same. And the doors to the the
ater? Still locked.”
The Lone Power glowered at him and started to tower up tall and dark and shadowy. “Don’t imagine that you have any further power to confine me —”
Darryl’s eyes narrowed as he met its glare, and Nita felt the air around all of them begin to prickle a little, as if there was lightning stored in it and thinking about breaking free. “I may be autistic,” Darryl said to the Lone One, grim, “but I’m not stupid. So yeah, I do imagine that! And don’t you imagine that you can just scare me out of a real great way of keeping you out of trouble for a long while. After all, think how much fun you’ve had chasing me around the landscapes I’ve built for you these last few months, even after you chucked me headfirst into a burnout to try to keep me stuck! Least I can do is return the favor. Maybe I’ll just amuse myself playing with you for the rest of my natural life. It’s sure been fun so far!”
The Lone One’s expression was becoming an indescribable tangle of frustration and fury. Nita felt like laughing out loud, but it didn’t seem right to break the mood.
“You cannot,” It said after a moment. “Now that I am alerted to this game of yours, it will never work again, even if I did allow you to escape with either life or soul intact.” It raised Its hands, clenched Its fists—
And nothing happened.
Nita smiled gently. From her otherspace pocket, she pulled out the kernel to Darryl’s internal universe.
The Lone One looked at it in sudden enraged surprise.
“You really are running slow today,” Nita said, and then glanced over to Darryl. “You’ve done such a number on his head! I love this.” She tossed the kernel lightly from hand to hand and looked back at the Lone One. “You taught me how to deal with these things when you were inside my old ‘friend’ Pralaya. How to find them. How to manage them. Of course you did it for your own reasons. And because you never imagined I’d he shown a way out of the dirty deal you offered me! Or that I’d survive the consequences. Well, I did. And I remember every single thing you taught me.” She smiled. “Now all I have to do is show Darryl how to do whatever he wants to do with you.”
“You wouldn’t dare!” the Lone One said.
Nita stood there with the universe’s kernel, the heart of the world, in her hand, juggling it like someone juggling a grenade with the pin pulled. “After what you put me through? I’d dare a whole lot, so don’t push me! I’’d be all for killing this avatar of you off completely.” She narrowed her eyes at the Lone One. “Oh, sure, it wouldn’t be the whole you, I know that. Here you’re just a fragment of your greater self. And that’d take enough energy discharged in this space that I’d die, too, and so would Kit and Darryl. But the power that the One has invested in Darryl won’t be lost—”
“That power is lost now! Boy,” and the Lone Power turned Its baleful gaze on Darryl, “you are one of the—”
Then Its face suddenly went white, as if a whole universe had suddenly taken It by the throat and squeezed.
“You’re really running on fumes today, aren’t you?” Nita said. “You can forget about discussing certain subjects: I saw to that before I walked in here.” She turned her back on the Lone One. “What were we talking about before I was so rudely interrupted?”
“Blowing up this pocket universe with him inside it,” Kit said.
“Might be worth it,” Nita said. “The damage done to your wider power by the total destruction of even just this fragment of him… Well.”
“Worth it, you think?” Darryl said, glancing from the two of them to Ponch.
The idea has its merits, Ponch said, and glared at the Lone Power, showing teeth under a curl of lip.
The Lone One’s expression went utterly deadly. “If you did such a thing,” the Lone Power said, “your deaths would be the first price everyone you love would pay—”
“Spare me,” Nita said, eyes narrowed. “You were the one who put me in a place where I didn’t much care if I was alive or dead. If right now I feel like it’d be worth going out if I took you down, that’s your fault. I went out taking you down, yeah, my dad and Dairine would grieve, yeah, but they’d applaud, too… because they’d find out soon enough that what I did lessened your clout in this part of the solar system.” Nita grinned. “These guys know what they’d be willing to do better than I do. But for my part—”
She tossed the kernel one last time, caught it, squeezed.
The Lone One lunged at her. Nita just turned sideways, backing away quickly, tossed the kernel in the air and hooked a fist up under it to volleyball-serve it over to Kit.
He fielded it expertly. “Nice little universe you’re stuck in here,” he said, tossing the kernel up in front of him, and then bounced it into the air a few more times from knee and elbow while the Lone Power came toward him in turn with a look of furious uncertainty on Its face. “Be a shame if something happened to it. Whoa!”
He kneed the kernel into the air and headballed it over to Darryl. Darryl caught it and looked it over, tossing it lightly in one hand. The kernel, which had been glowing only softly while Nita and Kit had been holding it, now blazed like a star in the possession of its rightful master.
“I’ve learned a lot from listening to the Silence for the past few months,” Darryl said. “About wizardry, and a lot of other things. But that hasn’t changed the fact that I haven’t lived long enough to be really attached to life. Maybe this is the other thing that makes wizards so powerful when they’re young. It’s not that we don’t know about death. It’s not that we don’t believe in it. It’s that we’re still able to let life go, if the price is right.” And he looked over at the other two.
Nita nodded. She glanced at Kit.
Kit hesitated a moment … then set his jaw, and nodded, too.
The three of them looked at the Lone Power. It stood in the middle of them, trembling with rage, or something else.
“You want to bargain,” It said.
“Our terms,” Darryl said. “Not yours.”
“What’s the price for my freedom?” It said at last.
“Once they leave, they stay unharmed,” Darryl said. “No more than your usual attentions in the future.”
“And why should I agree?”
“Because if you don’t, you stay in here with me until I die. And with this…” He squeezed the kernel. “With this I can arrange things so you won’t even know why you’re here, or that it’s anything out of the ordinary. Or that there’s anything else you could be doing at all: anything but walking around in whatever new scenario I feel like building for you.” He grinned. “Could there be anything worse than the Fallen not even remembering why It fell?”
It blanched.
“I seem,” the Lone Power said after a moment, “to be at something of a disadvantage in this negotiation.”
“You agree then?” Darryl said.
It stood there and looked at Darryl with the kind of hatred that should have been sufficient to make a star go nova.
“Yes,” it growled at last.
Nita opened her mouth, then shut it again. She looked over at Kit, who was staring at Darryl with a stricken expression.
“Except that was a just little too quick, wasn’t it,” Darryl said, turning the kernel over and over in his hands and then looking up at the Lone One again. “Because you can promise all kinds of things while you’re in here. And once I let you out, you do whatever you like.”
“Um,” Nita said. “There are certain oaths…”
“Yes there are,” Darryl said. “So the Silence tells me. But I’d rather not go that route. I think I’d rather take a hostage.”
Nita and Kit looked at each other, perplexed. The Lone One looked nearly as confused.
“Everybody’s got a little bit of you down at the bottom of their soul,” said Darryl. “A lot of people spend a lot of time trying to get rid of that, don’t they? And they can’t do it. They try walling it up, screening it off, locking it in a little room and not thinking about it. Well, I’ve got news for y
ou. I am really, really good at concentrating on things. So I am going to keep that little reflection of you right here where I can see it all the time.”
There in the air, one final mirror assembled itself out of nothing: a mirror that reflected nothing but the Lone One’s tall dark shape. The reflection looked back at It, its pale eyes empty. “If I catch you starting to misbehave, I’m going to use this—” and he tossed the kernel in the air again— “on that reflection of you in me, and make it pull you right back.”
The Lone One began to snarl something derisory… and then broke off short as it found itself being dragged step by step toward that mirror.
It gasped, trying to resist, and couldn’t: just kept getting dragged toward the mirror, straining against the force that impelled it: until finally Darryl gestured with one hand and the Lone One collapsed to the floor like a puppet with its strings cut.
“Of course,” Darryl said a lot more quietly, his gaze dwelling on It, “to make sure I can be sure I do catch you misbehaving, I’ll going to have to watch that mirror pretty much every moment, won’t I. So that means…” He let out a breath. “That I stay in here with you.”
The Lone One had been in the act of slowly getting back to Its feet. Now it straightened and stared at Darryl.
“You stay here?” It said.
“This is my mind,” Darryl said. “Where else would I go?”
Nita and Kit looked at each other in shock.
The Lone Power’s face was expressionless. “On the Oath, and in Life’s name, you say it?”
“Darryl!” Nita cried.
“Don’t!” Kit cried in the same moment.
“On my Oath,” Darryl said, very deliberately, “and in the One’s name, I say it.”
The Lone Power stood there, staring at the floor. Then, slowly, It began to smile.
“Fooled,” It said. “Fooled again.”
It started to chuckle. “And you thought you were being so very clever,” the Lone One said. “You’ve bound yourself to my will after all! Manipulate your little world’s kernel as you please, while you can. I’ve got something far better to manipulate. Entropy’s my oldest tool. Think you’ve had it bad, these last few months? Think you’ve bought yourself a respite?” It smiled a chill cruel smile. “Just wait. There are a hundred other ways to divert your so-wonderful attention. A burnout ten times worse than this one. Physical illness. Personal tragedy. Not just yours: others’. I’ll wear away at your mind and your life till sooner or later you have no choice but to let your guard over the kernel’s parameters drop. I’ll know within milliseconds when you do. Then you’ll still be trapped here forever… and I’ll happily move right in here with you, making your every moment a torment, and reminding you every second of the rest of your life of the price of mocking the Eldest.” It straightened, looking down at Darryl with smug amusement. “Despair now, for you won’t have time later.”
