by Diane Duane
—and then came the piercing. Nothing alive on that field failed to feel it, for everything alive had entropy in its bones; all cries went up together as the essence of all burning ate the darkness to its heart, and however briefly, to each of theirs. It was painful, but a terrible relief: terrible because the mortals present knew that, once they returned to the real world, that small personal darkness would be back with them again.
Something else, though, did not find it a relief; something that had almost nothing but entropy about it. The scream of the Lone Power in Its shape as Balor went up, and up, and would have torn the sky if the sky were made of anything solider than air. It took a long time to die away.
The pain was fading away, at least. Nita got up to her knees and looked around her, blinded no longer, though her ears were ringing. Kit was just getting up next to her: she helped him up, hugged him. “Are you all right?”
“I’ll live,” he said, sounding dazed, and hugging back. “Where’s Ronan?”
He was standing there not too far away, looking fairly dazed himself. The Spear was back in his hand again, but quiet now, not straining to go anywhere. Ronan was leaning on it, panting, his forehead against the shaft of it; so he did not see the tall shadow rising up over him, towering higher and higher; the immense shape of a woman dressed in black, but with light flickering in the folds of the darkness like a promise, and long dark hair stirring in the wind that had begun to come down from the heights, blowing the blackness of the clouds out over the sea, so that high up the sky began to show again, dark blue, with here and there a star.
Against the growing light, and the clean darkness, that woman raised her arms, and her voice went up into the silence like thunder. “Let the hosts and the royal heights of Ireland hear it,” the Morrigan cried, and even Ronan looked up now in terror and wonder, “and all its chief rivers and invers, and every rock and tree; victory over the Fomor, and they never again to be in this land! Peace up to the skies, the skies down to the earth, the earth under the skies; power to every one!”
The wizards and the Sidhe shouted approval. And the wind rose, and took the clouds away. The Morrigan’s great shape too bent sideways in that wind and dissipated like a mist, though Nita particularly noticed how her eyes seemed to dwell on Ronan before they vanished completely.
You know, Kit said in Nita’s head, it’s weird, but she looks kind of like Biddy...
Nita shook her head in bemusement, and she and Kit went over to Ronan. He was looking up at the sky, still leaning on the Spear. But when he looked down at last, and saw them coming, he straightened up slightly and smiled. Nita was very relieved; that abstracted, inhuman look was gone completely.
“It came back,” he said to Nita, sounding very bemused. “By itself.”
“You put too much English on it,” she said, and grinned.
Ronan winced and rolled his eyes. “Oh, please God, no,” he said. “Oldest pun ever.” He looked ahead of him. The great bulk that had first been Balor and then the Hunter was nothing but a hill, now; there was only the vaguest shape about it that suggested that awful bloated bulk. Grass grew on the hill, and as they looked a rabbit hopped out of cover under a thornbush growing on it, and began to graze.
“…I didn’t dare let it go,” Ronan said after a moment.
Nita nodded. “I know. But you’re okay—aren’t you?”
He looked at her. “He’s still in there, if that’s what you mean.”
Kit shook his head. “I think you may be stuck with Him,” he said. “But remember which side He’s on. I think He’ll behave...if you do. If you’re lucky, you’ll never hear from Him again.”
“And if I’m not lucky?” Ronan said.
“‘Those who serve the Powers,’” said the small voice from down by their feet, “‘themselves become the Powers.’ It’s usually the way.”
“You,” Nita said, picking Tualha up. “I didn’t know you knew language like that—that last bit! Don’t think I didn’t hear.”
“I got carried away,” Tualha said, her ears going flat.
“Not good technique for a bard,” Kit said. And when Tualha scowled at him, he just laughed and began scratching her behind the ears until finally she gave up and purred.
All around them the light was growing. Nita looked up and around, watching the clouds retreating, and the brightness growing still, though there was no sun now, but a soft violet evening all around them. Everything was beginning to burn with a certainty surpassing anything Nita had seen even in the duns of the Sidhe.
Beside her, one of the wizards, that handsome woman with the dark hair and the Viking axe, said with a chuckle, “Ah...the Celtic twilight.” But Nita knew a joke when she heard one, and also knew that more excellent clarity drawing itself about them; she’d seen it before. All around them, the wizards gathered there began to shine in that light, seeming more perfectly themselves than ever before. The Sidhe, already almost too fair to bear, began to acquire a calmer beauty, more settled, older, deeper.
Johnny was standing by the Queen’s steed. He looked up at her now, and said, “Well, madam, you asked me a question once. Would your world ever draw closer to Timeheart, and end your exile? And I could only give you the answer that the bards gave us long ago. The Champion must come with His spear, and the world of your desire be lost.” He laughed softly. “But then the fulfillment of a prophecy rarely looks like our images of it. Will this do?”
She bowed her head. “This will do, Senior. Do you swiftly take your people home, for shortly this world will perfect itself beyond their ability to bear it... at least, just yet. And we...” She looked toward the sunset. “We will prepare for the dawn.”
Johnny looked at Nita’s aunt. “We’ve got a dawn of our own waiting for us,” he said. “Do the honors?”
Aunt Annie lifted Fragarach. It burned like a star in her hands, and the other Treasures blazed in answer as the wind rose in the east and blew into the opening gap in the air before her. The dark outline of Castle Matrix grew in the early morning of their own world, and the song of a single early blackbird drifted through it.
As one the heads of the People of the Hill turned toward that thin, sweet music. But then one by one they looked toward the light slowly growing in their own northeastern sky; sunrise following hard on the heels of sunset, as was normal in this part of the world, in the heart of summer. The splendor of morning in a world growing ever nearer to Timeheart began to swell in the sky, blinding, glorious—
The wizards looked around them with regret and moved through the doorway in the air. Nita and Kit and Tualha, followed by Ronan, were near the rear of the group; they turned, there in the parking lot of Castle Matrix, and looked through the gateway back into Tir na nÓg.
“I am sorry,” Nita’s aunt said softly to Johnny, “to have to leave our dead there. Another world, so far away…”
Johnny looked sorrowful as well—but there was a strange edge of thoughtfulness to the look, an expression of mystery, almost of joy. “Yes, but… look what’s happening to the place. It won’t be just another world for long… it’s being drawn into the very center of things. Can you really be dead if you’re in Timeheart?” he said. “Can anything?...”
Northeastward, over the sea, a line of light, blinding, brighter than a sun, broke over the water. The Spear Lúin in Ronan’s hands flamed at the touch of that light on its steel. All that country on the other side of the gateway flushed with a light more powerful, seemingly more solid than the solid things it fell on, and burned, transfigured—
The gateway closed.
“So,” Johnny said, turning away. “Little by little, we make the Oath come true…”
Nita and Kit and Ronan looked at each other. Behind them, the blackbird sang again: and they heard the wizard in the leather jacket sigh, and say, “Oh, well. What’s for breakfast? And is there fresh tea?”
They went to find out.
***
“Now that things have quieted down somewhat,” Joh
nny was saying to Nita’s aunt in her kitchen the day after next, “the Chalice goes back to the Museum, obviously. And the Stone naturally stays where it is. But Fragarach…”
“You take it,” Aunt Annie said. “The neighbors would talk, if they saw something like that in here. You’ve got a castle. Just hang it on the wall there someplace.”
Johnny chuckled. Nita put the teapot down and moved to look over his shoulder at the newspaper, doing her best to read around Tualha, who was dozing on it. STRANGE OCCURRENCES END?, said the Wicklow People, in large, somewhat relieved letters. Things had indeed quieted down a lot, all over the world. “The Spear,” Johnny said, “will stay with Ronan, naturally.”
“Who’d even try taking it away from him?” Kit said from the living room, where he was playing with the teletext functions of the TV set. “It’d probably eat you alive.”
“Quite.” Johnny chuckled. “And I see that we’re losing you two.”
“My mom,” Nita said, “says they can change my flight home after all.” She grinned slightly. “So I go home over the weekend. Not that it hasn’t been fun… but every wizard knows her own patch of ground best.” And she smiled at Ronan.
He smiled back and said nothing that the others could hear.
“Well, you come back any time,” Aunt Annie said, and grabbed her and hugged her one-armed. “She always does the dishes,” she said to Johnny. “And without wizardry, even.”
“Impressive,” Johnny said. “But there was something else I was meaning to tell you—” He sipped his tea. “Oh, that was it. I’d say the odd things aren’t quite done happening yet.”
“Oh?” Everyone at the table looked at him.
“No. I was out for a walk after things settled down last night, and I saw the strangest thing. A party of cats carrying a little coffin. I stopped to watch them go by, and one of them said to me, ‘This is Magrath. Magrath na Chualainn is dead.’ And they walked off—”
Tualha’s eyes flew open at that. “What?!” she cried. “What? Did you say Magrath?”
“Why, uh, yes—” Johnny said, sounding uncertain, and concerned. “If it’s a relative, I’m—”
“Relative, never mind that, what relative! Great Powers about us, if Magrath is dead, then I’m the Queen of the Cats!”
She leaped off the table and tore away into the living room. There was a brief sound of scrabbling, and then from the living room, sounding slightly bemused, Kit said, “Uh, Annie? Your cat just went up the chimney...”
There was a moment of silence in the kitchen. “Ahem,” Nita’s aunt said to her after a breath or two. “Welcome to Ireland…”
“You sure you don’t want to stay another couple of weeks?” Johnny said.
Nita smiled at him, and went out to the trailer to start packing.
A Small Glossary
ban-draoia: Female wizard. In its original usage, “she-Druid.”
ban-gall: Woman of the Gall: British (or sometimes non-Celtic) woman. Possibly an insult, depending on who says it and how they feel about galláin (q.v.).
“Blow-in”: A foreigner who settles in Ireland, and is presumed to be likely to leave suddenly (no matter how long they’ve been there); not seen as being seriously attached to the place as it really is, but “in love” with some romanticized and inaccurate version of it.
the Dáil (pr. “Doyle”): The “lower house” of the Irish Parliament (the Oireachtas [“oyROCKtas”]), more or less equivalent to the House of Representatives in the US, or the House of Commons in the UK. A member of the Dail is called a Teachta Dála (“TOCKta DAWla”) or T.D. The upper house of the Oireachtas is the Seanad (“SHEAHnad”) or Senate.
Draoiacht: Wizardry. In its original usage, “druid-craft.”
Dùn (Anglicized as "Dun". Used interchangeably in early times for a castle, fortified house, or other strong place. The word persists in many Irish place names, such as Dun Laoghaire.
Faery: One of the inhabitants of the Otherworlds, in this case particularly Tir na nÓg: or something that has to do with them. Originally derived from the Latin fatae or “fates,” in this case meaning the Powers that involve Themselves in the destinies of living things. Unfortunately the term has been corrupted by various storytellers, from Shakespeare down to the mushier writers of Victorian children’s moralistic tales, so that it now summons up imagery of tiny flying beings who ride butterflies, live in flowers, etc etc ad nauseam. True Faery is beautiful, but extremely dangerous; the casualty rate of those who interact willingly with it is high, even among wizards.
Gael: A member or descendant of the Gaelic or Goidelic Celts, who settled in Britain and Ireland during and after the Iron and Bronze Ages. The Welsh, Irish, Scots, and some of the Celts of Brittany and parts of Spain are included in this group.
Gall (pl. galláin, pronounced more or less like “gawllon”): A non-Gael.
“Guards, the”—The Garda Síochána (GARda shiKOHna) or Civil Guards: the Irish equivalent of police. Also found as “Garda” (one policeman) or (not in modern usage) ban-Garda (policewoman): the plural is Gardaí, (pr. “garDEE”).
Lia Fáil (pr. LEEuh FOYLE): the Stone of Destiny, originally supposed to be near the Hill of Tara: now sometimes identified with a different stone near Armagh. Legend had it that the Stone would shout aloud when the rightful High King of Ireland stood on it at his elevation to the throne.
rath (pr. “rawth”): A hill-fort. Sometimes the term includes whatever buildings (halls, towers, etc) are built into or on the rath.
Sidhe (pr. “shee”): the Faery People of Ireland. Sometimes (most inaccurately) confused with elves. Usually considered to be the Tuatha de Danaan, the original Children of the Goddess Danu, one of the mother-Goddesses of Ireland; or descendants of those Children. Some legends identify them with “weak-minded” fallen angels, too good to be damned, but too fallible for Heaven. Considered by wizards to be descendants of those of the Powers that Be Who could not bear to leave the place They had, under the instruction of the One, built. They are deathless except by violence, and are expert in some forms of wizardry, especially music, shapechange, illusion, and the manipulation of time; but humans are usually physically stronger, and their wizardries have much more effect on the physical world. Often referred to as “the Good Folk” or “the Good People of the Parish,” “the Gentry,” “the People of the Hills,” (from which is derived their commonest Irish name, dÁine sidhe), and other euphemistic idioms meant to keep from offending them by invoking their real names, or reminding them of portions of their history they prefer to forget.
Slán (pr. “slawn”): Hello, or goodbye.
Taoiseach (pr. TEEshock): the Prime Minister of Ireland. Leader of the political party presently in power, who has legislative and political powers somewhat like those of the President of the US or the Prime Minister of the UK. By contrast, the Presidency of Ireland is largely a ceremonial position and is considered to be “above politics.”
Tir na nOg (pr. TEER naNOHG): the Land of Youth (or of the Ever-Young), the alternate universe or other-Ireland inhabited by the Sidhe. Time runs at a different rate in this universe, or rather entropy does: experience continues unabated while bodily aging proceeds at a infinitesimal fraction of its usual speed, if at all. Humans who venture there frequently experience untoward side effects on attempting to return to universes with different time/entropy rates. See the legend of the hero Oisín for an example.
By the same author
In the Young Wizards Series
So You Want to Be a Wizard • Deep Wizardry
High Wizardry • A Wizard Abroad
The Wizard’s Dilemma • A Wizard Alone
Wizard’s Holiday • Wizards at War
A Wizard of Mars
The Middle Kingdoms Series (for adult readers)
The Door into Fire • The Door into Shadow
