by Diane Duane
“Me either,” said Nita.
“Doesn’t matter. They’ll hunt to a drag—it’s just an old fox skin that leaves a scent for the dogs: they drag it along the ground. They’ll have a good time.”
Nita nodded and went back to her reading, half-thinking of going down to Bray again that afternoon, to see if maybe Ronan or Majella were around. Then she talked herself out of it. It was too nice a day and the sun was hot; there was no reason to go into a smelly town and strangle yourself on the bus fumes and traffic. I’ll put down a towel down outside, Nita thought, and lie out in the sun, and pretend it’s the beach. She already missed the beaches back home: she knew the water here was way too cold for her to enjoy swimming in it.
…So that was what she did. And so it was, about two-fifteen, that she first the cry of the hounds. She got up and pulled a T-shirt on over her bathing suit, put the manual in the trailer, and went to lean on the fence by the back field and see what she could see. She almost missed the first horseman who went by about a half mile away across the field; thundering through the pasture, just a guy on a horse with a long rope dragging behind him, and something dragging at the end of the rope.
There was a long pause. And then the note of the hounds came belling up over the fields, followed by the hounds themselves, woofing, lolloping, yipping. Then, over the rise behind them, came a thunderous crowd of horses of all kinds: chestnut, brown, dapple, black, galloping over the hill. A horn went tarantara!, and the riders hallooed at the sound of it and came riding after the hounds.
It took them about a minute and a half to go by. There were about fifty people, all in their red jackets and their beige breeches and not-so-black boots. Then they were gone. The sounds of the hounds and the horses’ hooves faded away over the next hill, south of the potato field, and were gone. Nita listened to the last cries fade out, then went back to lie in the sun.
It was about three hours later when the horses started coming back to the farm, some of them trucked in by trailer from Newcastle. There was much talk of rides and falls and jumps and water barriers, and a lot of other stuff that Nita didn’t particularly understand. But everyone seemed to have had a good time. Nita was very glad that it had been able to happen without any foxes being ripped up.
Dinnertime that evening was replaced by a marathon “little cup of tea,” as the grooms from the stables got together with the stablemanager and the trainers. It was at least eleven-thirty or twelve before the last of them left, having been given wine and whiskey and (apparently) just about everything else that Aunt Annie had in the house.
Nita came in from the trailer, having had enough of the horsey talk about eight, and helped her aunt do the dishes, or at least rinse them and put them in the dishwasher. “There’s that done with for this year,” said her aunt. She rolled her eyes at the ceiling. “The way they eat!”
“Yeah. You need anything else, Aunt Annie?”
“No, I think we’re okay for the night. You ready to turn in?”
“I’m going to have a little walk first.”
“Okay. Just watch out for those holes in the pasture. It’s pretty torn up out there, what with the neighbor’s cows.”
“Right.”
Nita got her jacket and went out into the evening. It was twelve-thirty by now, but it still wasn’t fully dark; in fact it was beginning, in the northeast, to think about slowly brightening again. Nita cast an eye up at the sky. There was a canopy of thin cloud, enough to obscure all but the very brightest stars, and the occasional planet. Jupiter was high, and the Moon.
She wandered out into the pasture, into the total dark and the quiet, and just stood there and listened. It was the first time she had really felt relaxed since she had come here. She was beginning to feel a little more in control of things: she had done enough reading to at least be able to go and see some more senior wizard and tell him or her what she thought the problem was that had gotten her put on active status, and to be able to discuss it in terms that made some kind of sense to someone who lived here and was familiar with this kind of situation. In the great quiet she heard birds crying, somewhere a long way away. A rookery, maybe? She’d heard that creaky, cawing sound a couple of times now, when the rooks were settled down for the night in a tree and some late noise disturbed them.
Nita stood there under the stars, waiting for the silence to resume. It didn’t resume. The noise got louder.
More rooks. Or no—what was that?
Then the hair stood straight up all over Nita as she heard the howl.
There are no wolves in Ireland! she told herself. The wolfhounds had been bred specifically to deal with them, and there hadn’t been wolves in Ireland since the late 1700’s sometime.
But that howl came shuddering out of the night again, and several others behind it; followed by yips and barks. And the sound of hooves. Not many sets of them, but just one, a long way off. One rider, one horse, galloping. What in the worlds—?
Nita strained to see in the moonlight. It was hard. Through this thin cloud, the Moon was only at first quarter, and it was hard to see anything but a vague bloom of light over the cropland, black where it struck trees and hedgerows, the dimmest silver where it struck anything else. The hoofbeats got louder; and the howls got louder too.
Hurriedly Nita said the first six words of a spell that had proved very handy to her in other times and places. It was a simple force-field spell that made a sort of shell around the wizard who spoke it. Blows went sideways from it; physical force stopped at it and just slid off. One word would release it if she needed it—and she had a feeling she would.
In the dark, not too far away, she saw something moving. There were spells that would augment a wizard’s vision, but she didn’t have any of them prepared at the moment, and didn’t have time to do any one of them from scratch. She didn’t have her manual. She could just begin to see the faint silvering of moonlight on the big thing galloping toward her.
It was not a horse. No horse ever foaled was that tall. This creature went by a tree she knew the height of, at the edge of the field, and then by a fencepost that she knew was only six feet high. The top of the post came just below the creature’s shoulder as the massive four-footed shape sprinted toward her. Not a horse, not with those antlers, six feet across at least; not with that skull a yard and a half long. And no horse had such a voice, trumpeting, desperate, a sound like the night being torn edge to edge.
She’d seen its picture in one of the books in the library. It was an elk, but not any elk that walked the earth these days; an old Irish elk, extinct since the ice came down. It went by her like a piece of stormy night, the breath like a blast of fog out of it as it went. It shook the ground as it ran, and its feet went deep into the soft pasture, spurning up great sods of grass. It flew on past and gave her never a look, making a great roaring belling sound, a trumpeting noise almost like an elephant’s.
And behind it, in a howling pack, came the wolves.
They were not normal wolves. All the wolfhounds in Ireland could not have done anything about these. These were the wolves that had hunted the Irish elk when they still walked this part of the world. They were four feet high at the shoulder, easily, judging by the fence post as they came past it. They were rough-coated, their eyes huge and dark except when the Moon glinted on the head of one or another thrown up to howl as it ran. A faint mist of light clung to them that had nothing to do with the mist on the field, or the moonlight. Their teeth were longer than a regular wolf’s; their feet were bigger, their claws were longer. Their tails were shorter, their heads were heavier and more brutish. They were dire-wolves, the wolves of the Stone Age or earlier, Canis lupus dirus, and they were after the elk, their old familiar prey.
It suddenly occurred to Nita that there would be someone following behind this pack, as there had been this morning... that single set of hoofbeats, growing louder. And she did not want to meet that someone.
The wolves tore toward her. There were about twenty of them
. More than half of them held the main course that they had been running, on the elk’s track: the rest saw or scented her, she had no idea which, and angled toward her. Nita said the sixth word of the spell, felt the shield wink into place around her. Hurriedly she said the first eighteen words of another spell she knew, one she was very reluctant to use—but she had no weapon-spell handy that was less dangerous, and frankly if it came down to a choice between her dying and the wolves, the wolves were out of luck. If they can be killed at all! Are they even real?...
Nita braced herself as best she could, and waited. The first wolf hit her shield—and didn’t bounce; it knocked her down. Nita got a horrible glance of fangs trying desperately to break through to her—failing for the moment—
In shock she fumbled for the last word of the killing spell, couldn’t remember it. Those fangs knocked against the shield, right in front of her face, bending it in toward her—
That was when hooves came down out of nowhere and broke the wolf’s head, and kicked its body aside, and smashed its spine into the ground. There was an immediate flurry of other wolves fastening themselves to the great dark shape that was rearing above Nita, smashing at more of them with its hooves. It had bought her the second she needed; she remembered the nineteenth word. She said it.
The sound that followed was not one Nita enjoyed, but the spell worked, even though the shield hadn’t. These creatures were flesh and blood enough that when you suddenly took all the cell membranes from between their cells, the result was emphatic. Briefly, it rained blood.
Nita looked at another of the wolves near her, said the nineteenth word. It turned in mid-leap, and showered down in gore. She said the nineteenth word again, and again, and she kept saying it, having no weapon more merciful, until there was nothing near her but a sickly, black, wet patch in the field, gleaming dully in the moonlight...and the Irish elk, standing with its head down, panting, looking at her out of great, dumb, understanding eyes.
Nita let the shield spell go, staggered to her feet, and tottered over to the elk. Its flanks and shoulders were torn where the dire-wolves’ teeth had met. “Brother,” she said in the Speech, “let me see to those before you go.”
Hurry, said the elk. The loss of the pack has slowed him. But he’s coming.
He, Nita thought, and broke out in a cold sweat.
Fortunately there was plenty of blood around, blood being what you needed for almost all the healing spells. Nita had some experience with those. She called her manual to her, and hurriedly it came, finding a shortcut through local space and leaping into her hand. Nita started turning pages, not worrying where the blood went that she was smeared with. “Here,” she said, and began reading the quickest of the healing spells, a forced adhesion that caused the damaged tissue to at least hold together long enough for the knitting process to start. The spell was little more than wizardly crazy glue, but Nita was satisfied that the elk’s body would be able to manage the rest of the business itself; the wounds weren’t too serious.
It took about three minutes’ recitation before the last of the wounds shut itself. The elk stood there shivering in all its limbs, as if expecting something to immediately come after it out of the night. Nita was shivering too; the healer always partook of the suffering of the healed—that was part of the price paid.
“Go now,” she said when she was done. “Get out of here!”|
The elk tossed its head and leapt away, galloping across the field. Nita stood there, panting, and wondering. ‘Get out of here.’ Where is ‘here’ any more? That broke through from ‘sideways.’
She stood for a moment, listening. The sound of hoofbeats was fading: both the elk’s, and whatever had been chasing it. She was relieved, though still concerned for the elk. Slowly the silence reasserted itself, deep and whole; and the Moon came out from behind a cloud.
Nita looked up at it and sighed, then turned and started making her way back to the farm. I’m going to have to do something about these clothes before morning, she thought. I suppose the manual has some laundry spells... But she couldn’t push the bigger problem out of her mind.
Exactly what Kit warned me of. Without any spell done by me, something came through from ‘sideways.’ A lot of somethings.
We’re in deep, deep trouble...
4: Áth na Sceire / Enniskerry
Nita had already known she wanted to talk to one of the local wizardly experts. But now it felt like speed was of the essence.
She pulled out her manual the next morning, and began going through it looking for the names and addresses of the local Senior Wizards. Addresses there were—there were four seniors for Ireland, one of whom was on retirement leave, two of whom were on active assignment and hence not available for consults, and one, the Area Advisory, who was located in a place called Castle Matrix. This impressed Nita, though not as much as it would have a couple of weeks before, when she had thought that probably half the people in Ireland lived in old castles. Now she hoped her business would take her that way...but you didn’t go bothering the Area Advisory for a problem that you weren’t yet sure couldn’t be handled at a less central level.
She therefore concentrated on the addresses of wizards in the Bray and Greystones area. There were about forty of these, which surprised her—she’d been expecting fewer. Usually wizards on active status are only about one percent of the population, though in some places it can run as high as ten.
She looked the list up and down in mild perplexity. There was a problem in this part of the world; people tended not to use street numbers unless they lived in a housing estate. Sometimes they didn’t even have a street, so that you might see an address that said, “Ballyvolan, Kilquade, County Wicklow”—and if you didn’t know where Kilquade was, or what Ballyvolan was, or what road it was down, you were in trouble.
She sighed, ticked off a couple of names in Bray that did have street numbers. That done, she went to find her Aunt Annie.
“Going out, are you?” she said.
“Yeah. Aunt Annie, can you tell me where Boghall Road is?”
“The Boghall Road? That’s, um, just off the back road between Greystones and Bray. What for?”
“Oh, I met somebody in one of the cafes in Bray yesterday, and I thought I might go over that way and see if I can find them.” This was not entirely a fib—the sound and feel of Ronan’s lean, edged, angry humor had kept coming back to her for the past day or so. It was just that the two phrases had nothing to do with one another, and if Aunt Annie thought they did, well...that was just fine.
Her aunt said, “Well, no problem. It’ll be in Google Maps. Come on back in the office and I’ll print it out for you.”
“Thanks!” Nita said with considerable gratitude. Within a few minutes she had a color printout, and her aunt sat down and made a few notes on it. “If you get off the 45 bus here, at the top of Boghall, it’s not a long walk to wherever you’re going. That sound all right?”
“Fine, Aunt Annie… thanks.”
“What time will you be back?”
“Not real late.”
“All right. Call if you run into any problems. Might want to take an umbrella or something: Met Eireann has been saying we’re going to get thunder showers later.”
“Will do.” And Nita headed out.
At first she considered not walking—Kit’s “beam-me-up-Scotty” spell could occasionally be extremely useful. However, there was always the danger, when “beaming” around unfamiliar territory, that you might turn up somewhere that had people in it.
However, there was a handy bit of woodland not too far away from where the road from Greystones to Bray started trending downhill toward the down, just outside of the big Kilruddery estate. Nita had noticed it coming upwards, the other day—a stand of five cypresses, very big, very old. Generally the only people who walked up that way were the traveling people who lived in their trailers by the side of the road there.
So Nita popped into that grove of trees and looked around h
er, and paused for a moment. It was a matter of curiosity. Though you might have a sense of how many wizards were working in the area, there was one quick way to find out. It was difficult for a wizard to spend as much as a day without doing some wizardry, the art being its own delight. She opened her manual, as she stood there under the trees in the summer sun, and quickly did the spell that showed one whatever active wizardries were working in an area. Ideally, what happened was that the world blanked out, and you were presented with a sort of schematic—points of light in a field over which the real world was dimly overlaid.
