by Diane Duane
“Listen, Shaun,” Aunt Annie said then, “is there any plan yet for where we’re going to do the big ceremony, the reenactment?”
“It’ll have to start up at Matrix,” Johnny said. “It has all the necessary ‘equipment.’ That’s right,” he said to Nita, “you haven’t seen my place yet, have you? Not really ‘my’ place, of course. No one owns Castle Matrix but itself...and whatever’s under it. You’ll see.” He got up. “Anyway, Matrix is where it’ll start. But where it’ll end...” He shook his head. “I have to go down to Bray. Either of you need a ride?”
“Thanks,” Nita said. “We were going to take the bus, but if it’s OK...”
“Sure, come on.”
Johnny dropped them more or less in the center of town, where Herbert Road crosses Main Street. They waved goodbye to him as he drove off, and Kit said, “I didn’t have any breakfast...I’m an empty shell. Is there anywhere to eat around here?”
“There’s a chicken place over here that’s not too bad,” Nita said. “I’ve got some money. Let’s go in there.”
They walked in, went to the counter and ordered. Nita took one quick glance at the back of the restaurant, and her stomach turned over inside her in nervous response. Ronan was sitting back there. He shot Nita one quick glance and then looked down again at the Coke he was busy with.
“You okay?” Kit said, as they turned away with their own drinks and went to sit down at a table. “Your face went all weird.”
“Uh,” Nita said. “I poured a drink over a guy the other night.”
“You were out with a guy?”
Nita blushed. “Not that way. A bunch of us were out.”
“What, a bunch of the kids around here?”
“What is this, the Spanish Inquisition? I was out with my aunt. There was a big wizards’ meeting in town.”
“Oh,” Kit said. He started to go red again.
Nita rolled her eyes and said, “Never mind, it’s really not important…” She took a drink of her Coke—her mouth was suddenly dry—and said, “Half a second.” Then she got up and went back to Ronan’s table.
He looked up at her with an expression partly unease and partly annoyance; and he still managed to smile on top of it all. “You forgot your Coke,” he said.
“No, it’s back there.”
“I mean, I thought you were going to pour it on me.”
She looked at him ruefully. “Listen, Ronan, I’m sorry. Look, come on meet my partner.”
“That’s him?” He craned his neck a little.
“Yeah, he’s just in from the States. Come sit with us.”
Somewhat reluctantly, Ronan got up, bringing his Coke, and went and stood by the table. “Kit,” she said, “this is Ronan. Ronan, Kit Rodriguez.”
They nodded to each other, looked each other over. “Dai stihó,” Kit said.
Ronan raised his eyebrows as he sat down. “You can tell?”
Kit looked surprised. “It sticks out all over you.”
“Your partner couldn’t.”
Nita went hot with embarrassment at that. Kit shrugged. “It’s always easier for guy wizards to tell guys, and girls to tell girls. Anyway, Neets has other things to think about. And she’s in a weird place: you get thrown off. I didn’t know her aunt was one of us till she was pointed out to me.”
Despite the apparent ease of the conversation, there was tension in the air. Nita had thought this would be a good idea, at first. Now she was beginning to regret it. “I was just telling Ronan,” she said to Kit, “that I was sorry I dumped the drink on him the other night.”
Ronan looked bemused. “Watch out for her. She’s got a temper.”
“I’ve noticed,” Kit said. “Just hope you never see her sister lose hers. Whoo! But Neets is no prize either.”
“Will you two stop talking about me as if I’m not here?” Nita said, annoyed. Then they both grinned at her, and she went hot again. Bad enough being teased from just one direction...
“Shove over, Kit,” she said, sat down next to him, and started working on her Coke again. Then she said to Ronan, “How was your day yesterday?”
There was an abrupt sound of breaking glass from outside. All three of their heads jerked up at the same time. “What the heck—!” Kit said.
“Probably an accident,” Ronan said, getting up hurriedly. “The corner next to here’s a bad one, people are always coming around it too fast—”
The next sound of glass breaking was the shop’s own window, and it was not a car that broke it. Something big, dark and blunt slammed into it from one side, and plate glass rained in. The ladies behind the counter cried out in surprise and headed for the back of the shop in a hurry. The shop’s three other patrons followed them, leaving Kit and Nita and Ronan standing there.
Something stepped in through the broken glass. If you had taken a human being, and coated it with tar, and rolled it in gravel, and then turned it loose to walk around blindly smashing things, it might have looked something like this. At least, it would have if it was about five feet tall, and about four feet broad, with arms and thighs as thick as a man’s waist, and a round ugly face like a boulder.
They looked at it in shock as it came toward them. “Shit. It’s a drow,” Ronan whispered. “Fomori...”
They could see others like it stalking past, out in the street, amid the rising screams of people who didn’t understand what was happening. The sounds of breaking plate glass were spreading down the road; cars screeched to a halt, horns blasted. There was one long screech followed by the sound of more breaking glass, and the crunch of metal too, this time.
“Someone’s hit one,” Kit said.
“I feel sorry for their car,” Ronan said. “Come on.”
“How do you stop them?” said Nita.
“Stop them?! You don’t stop them. You run away!” Ronan said. He grabbed Nita’s arm with one hand, and Kit’s with the other, and hustled them out the back door.
They ducked out the back of the chicken place and into Castle Terrace behind it. Nita looked down to the end of the street, toward the remains of the old castle. Several of the drows were there, tearing the place up, or down. They appeared to be made of good Wicklow granite, and to dislike everything they saw. Several of them, a little nearer down the street, were punching holes in the walls of the Bank of Ireland: its alarm bell was ringing disconsolately. Another one, in Herbert Road, was busy turning a car over, while people struggled and screamed and tried to get out of it.
“This is not good,” Nita muttered. “We can’t just leave these things running all over the place!”
“There’s no wizardry that can deal with these,” Ronan said, “not with overlays everywhere! You’ve just got to get away! If they—”
That was when the heavy hand fell on Ronan’s shoulder. “No way!” Kit said. He then spoke three words, very short and sharp. The drow screamed, a high thin whine, and reeled back, mostly because it had no head left. Rock dust sifted down past Ronan as Kit pulled him away. “You were saying?” Kit said, breathing hard.
The drow kept screaming. A great crack or fissure ran down it, from its head straight down its centerline. It staggered, and the crack spread. But something else happened as well. The drow got wider. It seemed to have two heads. Then six arms; then eight. It fell to the ground with a terrible crash, and broke in two; and got up...twice. It had twinned.
“I was saying that,” Ronan said. “Run!”
The way westward down Herbert Road was blocked by more drows. The three of them dodged around the formerly single drow and ran into Main Street. People were running and screaming in all directions. Cars were being overturned, windows and walls being bashed in or pulled down. Two drows were in the process of overturning the monument in front of the Royal Hotel. “What the heck is this supposed to be a reenactment of?” Nita gasped, staring around her in panic.
“It’s not a reenactment. They’re Fomori, doing what they always do...destroying everything in sight.”
> Nita looked up Main Street toward the old beam-and-plaster building that had been the town’s market hall, and was now the tourist center. It was still fairly clear up that way. “Come on,” she said.
They ran up the road, accompanied by a lot of other people who apparently had the same idea. They didn’t get much farther than the little arcade of shops in the middle of the main street, though, before they saw the first squat, grey forms appearing down at the other end of the road. One of them began pulling at the gryphon-topped granite fountain in front of the heritage center.
They stopped. “No good,” Nita said. “We don’t dare use spells—they’ll just backfire. We’ve got to do something else.”
“Such as?” Ronan said, desperate.
Nita smiled at him, rather crookedly. She was beginning to shake, but she’d had an idea. “Let’s try this,” she said.
There was a format for these things. She swallowed, and called the name once; she called it twice. The second time, it made her throat hurt—more in warning, she thought, than because of the sound of it. Something was saying to her, Are you sure? Very sure? She gulped, and said the name the third time. It shook her, and flung her down.
Nita sat up on the sidewalk, slightly dazed. It took a swallow or two to get her throat working again. Then she shouted in the Speech, “Pay me back what you owe me—and do it now!”
It being wizardry involved, Nita expected immediate results. It being wizardry involved...she got them.
Over the screams and the breaking glass, over the crashes of cars and the howling of the sirens of the Gardaí, came another sound: bells. Not church bells. It was as if someone had taken the sound of hoofbeats, and tuned them; as if what came galloping did so on hooves of glass, or silver, a clangor of relentless and purposeful harmonies. Other bells were the sounds that bridles might make if each one were built like a musical instrument, made to be carried into battle and shaken to frighten the enemy, a sharp, chilly sound. The galloping and the sound of the bells came closer together, and were joined by a third sound, a high, eerie singing noise, the sound that metal might make if you woke it up and taught it how to kill. The faces of the buildings up near the Heritage Center flushed bright, as if a light came near them.
And then the tide of color poured itself down into Main Street from both sides of the Heritage Center, and the first of the drows fell away from the gryphon fountain, screaming as a crystal sword pierced it. The horses shone, the riders shone; and not with any kind of light. They were simply more there than the main street was, more there than the broken glass, and the crashed cars, and the grey things; more vivid, more real. Everything went pallid or dull that was seen in the same glance with them—the crimson of cloaks and banners that burned like coals, the blues and emerald greens like spring suddenly afire amid the concrete, the gold of torcs and arm-rings glowing as if they were molten, the silver of hair burning like the moon through cloud, the raven of hair burning like the cold between the stars.
The riders poured down into Main Street, and the drows fled screaming before them—not that it helped. Two of them took refuge in the old smoked-glass-and-aluminum phone booths down at that end of the street; the faery horses smashed them to splinters with their hooves, and the drows afterwards. Down past the Chinese restaurant, down past the real estate agents and the appliance stores, the riders came storming down between the cars, or through them, as if the cars were not real to them: and perhaps they were not. The riders’ hands were not empty. Their swords shone and sang where the sunlight fell on them, in the high, inhumanly joyous keen of metal that will never know rust. The riders had spears like tongues of fire, and sickles like sharpened moons, and bows of glass firing arrows that never missed. The grey things went down like lumps of stone when the weapons struck them, and lay like stone, and didn’t move again. The only screams left were those of the drows, now; everything mortal was hiding, or standing very still, hoping against hope it wouldn’t be noticed by the terrible beauty raging down through the main street of Bray.
The riders swept down the street to where Nita and Ronan and Kit stood, backs against the wall next to the pub by the arcade; and swept on past them, toward the Dargle, driving a crowd of the drows before them. A Garda sergeant in his blue shirtsleeves stood astounded on the corner and watched them pass, too dumbfounded to do anything at the moment but cross himself; and several of the riders bowed to him as they passed, and smiled as they did it.
One of the riders turned aside from the bright tide, and paused by them, looking down at Nita. He said, “Are you repaid, then?”
Nita looked up at him, the crimson and emerald and golden splendor of his clothing, the impossible handsomeness of his face, and she felt dingy and shopworn by comparison. Her heart ached in her with pity for the wretched ordinariness of life, seen next to this awful, assured beauty. But she said, “Yes, thank you. Thank you very much.”
“I would have saved the favor, myself,” said the black-haired rider, “for you’ll need it more later. But what’s done, is done. And now get up and ride, for the Queen desires to speak with you.”
Ronan put his eyebrows up at that. “Which queen?”
“Not any mortal one,” said the young rider on the horse, looking at him with mild amusement. “The Queen whom it is unwise to refuse...as it is unwise to refuse her Fool.”
“The Amadaun!” Ronan said, his eyes going wide. “Do what he says,” he said to Nita, under his breath. And she caught a flash of unnerved thought from him: he can kill with a look or a touch, this one, if offended—
“No problem with that,” Nita said, at the moment having no time for Ronan’s nervousness. “But one thing first.” She looked around her in distress: the cars stopped or crashed in the street, the shattered glass, the stunned townspeople standing around. She beckoned Kit and Ronan off to one side a little, and said, “We can’t leave the place this way. Little hiccups in daily reality, people can deal with—but this? They’ll never be able to explain it to themselves—”
“Or their insurance companies,” Kit muttered.
Nita shook her head. “They’ll lose their grip—”
Ronan looked at them curiously. “What are you thinking of doing?”
Kit looked thoughtfully at Nita. “Patch it?”
Nita nodded. Ronan stared at her. “ ‘Patch it’? Patch what? With what?”
Nita bit her lip. “Time,” she said. “With a spare piece. It’s basic alternate-universe theory! You must know about this. Somewhere parallel to our universe, where this happened, there has to be one where this didn’t… where the drows never popped out, where this damage wasn’t done. You patch this timeline with an equivalent piece of that one.” She looked around her, considering. “The area and the timespan’s small enough not to have to get an authorization, the way you’d have to for a full timeslide. And the reason’s good, which is the whole point.”
“But the overlays—”
“Ronan,” Kit said, holding his voice very steady in a way Nita knew he was fighting not to lose his temper, “we can’t sit around debating this all day. A few minutes more, and what’s happened will have printed itself too strongly on these people’s minds to be patched over. We’ll be careful of the overlays. You in, or what?”
Ronan looked from him to Nita, She shrugged, nodded. “All right—”
“Here it is,” Kit said, riffling through his manual. “We’re inside the time limit, we can do the short form. Ronan?”
“No,” Ronan said, looking slightly off to one side like someone having an idea, “I see it. You start.”
Kit and Nita started reading together: Ronan joined them. It was strange to hear the Speech for the first time in an Irish accent, but Nita didn’t let that distract her, concentrating instead on the part of the spell that located and verified the piece of alternate spacetime they needed, “copied” it into the spell buffer prepared for it, and held it ready. Then the second part of the spell, which bilocated the copied spacetime with the one pre
sently proceeding locally.
