by Diane Duane
Roshaun’s father looked at the Sunstone, and shook his head. “I will not wear it again,” he said. “I think it’s yours now. For look—”
She looked at it. The stone had been clear; now it had gone a much lighter gold than it had been. “It did that before,” she said.
“It is a sign of the mastery passing to another,” Roshaun’s father said. “It seems to have become attuned to another star.”
“Mine,” Dairine said. “Ours is this color.”
There was a long pause. Roshaun’s father reached out to the stone, and then pulled his hand back. “It is still active,” he said. “There are some routines that you should learn. He would have wanted to know that its power was not wasted, that it was safe with one he had—” Roshaun’s father broke off. “That he thought worthy of his attention. Some of those usages you could be taught. With proper supervision…”
Dairine got a clear sense of what terrible control Roshaun’s father was exercising over himself. She was determined to show that hers could be as great as his; here, in particular, at this point in a life that had been so much about control—and in which she’d lost so much control lately. “I’d like that,” she said, “if you have the time.”
“There’ll be nothing but time now,” Roshaun’s father said. He gazed down at Dairine and reached out a hesitant hand to touch the necklace that just showed under the collar of her shirt. There, around her neck, where it would stay, was the fat, round, gleaming emerald threaded on a single sentence in the Speech. It was not until a little earlier, when Dairine had had a moment by herself, that she’d had time to read what that sentence was. She was determined not to think about it now. She’d just cry again. “And what we taught him—” Roshaun’s father said. “That we can teach you, so that you can guarantee the safety of another world as he guaranteed his. Another star.”
“Thank you,” Dairine said. She was controlling herself very tightly, for right now, more than anything, she wanted to say to them, even to shout at them, Stop talking about him in the past tense! As if he’s—But she couldn’t say it. Part of her was certain that she was deluding herself. The thought, You’re just in denial! was already coming up. To say out loud what she really believed would merely guarantee that other people would think she was in denial, too.
But I can’t believe it yet. I can’t say anything until I’m sure. Not until I’ve made that one last test.
Dairine looked from Roshaun’s father to his mother. “Our world is going to need some straightening up after all this trouble,” she said. “It’s going to take a long time to get things back to normal. But as soon as I can come, I will.”
She turned and looked across the vast plain of the sunside. “But he loved you,” Dairine said. “Whatever else he would have wanted you to know, he’d have wanted to make sure you knew that.”
She had to go, then; she felt her control starting to slip. Back by the railing, Spot waited for her, silent. As she headed back, the darkness of a worldgate opened for her. Dairine stepped through, not looking back, and vanished from Wellakh.
***
No matter what Tom had told her to do, it took Nita a long time to get settled enough to rest. She walked Kit home, and talked to his parents, and reassured them as much as she could that they were both in fairly good shape. But all Mr. and Mrs. Rodriguez had to do was look at Kit to tell that there was a lot more to be said on the subject. It was Carmela’s mental state—thoroughly confused but still basically cheerful—that reassured them most.
And then everything started to catch up with Nita: she actually began to fall asleep on the dining room sofa while Carmela told them about what had happened on the Moon. Nita opened her eyes very wide and got up. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “I’ve gotta go.” She said her good nights to Kit’s folks and headed out into the driveway.
He followed her out. They stood there together for a moment, looking at the Moon.
“I miss him already,” Kit said. “It really hurts.”
Nita nodded. “I know,” she said. “Even though he’s okay. More than okay.” She shook her head. “It’s not the same.”
She yawned. “Oh, God, I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s not that— You know I don’t—”
“I know,” Kit said. “Go on, go home, get some sleep. We’ve got an early morning.”
“Yeah,” Nita said. But Kit didn’t move to go inside.
“You’ve been hugging everybody else in the place,” he said after a moment.
Nita turned around and gave Kit a hug calculated to be twice as emphatic as any she’d given anybody else. Then she held him a little ways away.
“You’re not all right,” she said in the Speech. “I’m not all right, either. But we will be.”
“Is that a precognition?” Kit said.
Nita smiled very slightly. “Yes,” she said. “Now get in there and let them know it.”
Kit nodded, punched her lightly in the arm, and went inside.
Nita went home. Her dad was making dinner; she helped him, and was for a while blissfully happy with the simplicity of macaroni and cheese. Dairine arrived not long after dinner started, sat down, and was uncharacteristically silent. She ate, thoroughly but unenthusiastically, and then went up to bed.
Nita’s father looked at her as they were finishing up. “I guess this means,” he said, “that even after you save the universe, you can still feel let down.”
Nita nodded. “It doesn’t last,” she said. “It keeps needing to be saved.”
Her dad smiled at her a little. “Take your time,” he said, as he got up to take his plate into the kitchen, “but I really want to hear all about it. Because it’s worth knowing that it can be saved.”
Nita smiled at that, stretched and yawned, then brought her own plate into the kitchen, kissed her dad good night, and went up to bed.
***
Dairine had gone to sleep holding the Sunstone, suspecting what the result of that would be, especially at a time like this.
The place through which she moved was one of light, and gathered around her was a huge crowd of inhuman shapes. Mostly little and low-built, shelled in light, they moved through a gigantic construction of fire that towered above and around them. Under them, as a floor, lay a spell diagram of incredible complexity, seemingly miles wide, a plain over which the low, shelled creatures moved casually while the uppermost fires of a star roiled and burned beneath them.
Dairine walked out over that wide floor of wizardry, and many of the shelled shapes accompanied her. You’re not supposed to be here just yet, one of them said.
Dairine glanced over at Logo. “Neither are you,” she said. “You’re all still alive!”
Don’t mistake this for Timeheart, Logo said. This is just an anteroom—a portal area. But you brought us the data that made what’s going to happen here possible. Causality therefore becomes something less than an issue. And Logo gave Dairine a mischievous look.
You shouldn’t be raising false hopes, Dairine said. Everything dies eventually. Everything runs down. No exceptions—
You’d be surprised, Logo said. Everywhere it can, the universe breaks the rule, sometimes in the strangest ways. That’s what wizardry’s about, isn’t it? Finding the unexpected way to foil the force that invented Death. Doing what Life itself does every chance it can. You’ve put the tools in our hands, and now the possibilities are endless.
Dairine swallowed. Let’s see how endless, she said. Show me what I came to see.
They walked a long time across the plane of wizardry, through the unending light. Finally, though, Dairine came to the place she’d known would be there. It looked a lot like Wellakh.
Here, though, the mighty spire of stone that reared up into the sky was not scorched barren. Here the red things grew, cascading down it, the hanging gardens of another world. Here that spire pierced right up into the darkness of space, not hubris or a challenge to the heavens, but a dream achieved. And all around it stretched an endless plain
that was barren no more. Wellakh was healed of its old wound.
Dairine stood again high on that terrace above the world, looking down the mountain. She leaned over the railing as she’d done once before, seeing the beautiful red foliage of the native Wellakhit plant life stretching away for miles under the golden sun—not a garden, an artificial thing, but a natural reality, never destroyed by the terrible flare of the Wellakhit sun.
Dairine turned away from the railing and went across the terrace to the crystal-paned doors, and then through them, into the place where Roshaun’s rooms had been. The decorations were much the same as they had been before—to her eye, rich and overdone—but the light that dwelt in every carpet or chair or piece of artwork told her that this was his idea of perfection, the place of his desire. And he wasn’t here.
Dairine started to look around, taking her time. She went into every room in those apartments, explored every inch, but he was still not there. And in the last room she came to, a little place full of huge clothes-presses and nobly carved and decorated cabinets, Dairine found the one thing that could have surprised her. There was a darkness in one wall: the only darkening in that whole bright place—an active worldgate.
How interesting it was that the place of Roshaun’s desire had a hole in it….
Carefully Dairine ducked and stepped through the worldgate—and found herself in her own backyard, out among the trees right at the back of the property, where she and Roshaun had worked their second-to-last great spell together. There was no one here, either: nothing but silence and a faint smell of sassafras. Out past the trees, her yard was bright with moonlight. She stepped out into it, and saw lights on in the house, and all around her trees that seemingly reached up to the stars, and a full Moon above it all, turning everything silver—so strange a color, for someone whose own world had no moon.
Behind her, Logo, silvered by that same light, looked out across the strange place, the image of a Timeheart within a Timeheart. Now do you understand?
Yes, Dairine said softly. We still have unfinished business…!
She went back out through the worldgate, and back out through Roshaun’s place in that virtual Timeheart, and back out to the railing. Then Dairine stepped back out of it all, across the plane of wizardry and back through the portals of dream to Earth’s universe, to the real world, to begin the search for the one who was lost.
***
Watching this in silence from the shadows of the trees, Nita nodded slowly, then stepped back into her own dream.
She walked out of the shadows behind the dais in the great central cavern of the Commorancy. It was empty except for a pool of darkness that slowly began to draw itself up into human shape to look at her.
Nita laughed at it. “You lose again,” she said.
“Oh, go on, delude yourself,” said the Lone One, Its arms folded. “So your wonderful Hesper is here after all. Do you think that matters so far above your level of existence are going to have any effect on your pitiful lives? You won’t live to see any difference her appearance will make. The worlds will seem to be doing the same old thing for millennia to come. And as for your ‘victory,’ you and your universe will be cleaning up its consequences for centuries to come.” It sounded triumphant. Yet behind the triumph, Nita could clearly feel the rage: none of this should have happened!
“Maybe so,” Nita said. “But for the time being, we’ll keep our old promise to you … because that’s what wizards do. We’ll keep on fighting the little versions of you that you’ve left all over the place. And as for the long term, well, we’ve got a new ally now: the one who’s doing what you should have done. So make what you can of what little time you have left.”
“Little? Little! For millions of years yet I will rule this universe!”
“‘Rule’?” Nita said. “Running around kicking over everybody’s sand castles doesn’t mean you own the beach. And as for ‘millions’—in the bigger scheme of things, what’s that?” She snapped her fingers, grinning. “Do what you can with it, because until you finally give up, we’ll always be here to stop you.”
It smiled again, one last time. “Wizards may always be here,” the Lone Power said. “But will you?”
It vanished.
Nita shook her head. Well? she said to the peridexis. Will I?
Let’s go find out, it said.
***
The next morning, Kit got up and did all the routine things that he did when getting ready for school. He got showered, brushed his teeth, got dressed, went downstairs. He ate breakfast, and washed the cereal bowl, and put it and the spoon away.
Then he sighed, and went to Ponch’s bowls, and picked them up, and cleaned them. He rinsed out the water bowl and put it away. The dry-food bowl and wet-food bowls were empty. He washed them, too, and put them in a cupboard. And finally he went to the back door, to the coatrack where the leash was hanging, and took it down.
The front doorbell rang. His pop was at work already, and his mama was still in the bathroom, so that when the door opened, Kit had to smile, knowing what was going to happen next. He waited there by the back door for a few moments.
“Oh, wow!” Carmela yelled. “You shouldn’t have! Or no; I take it back. Yes, you should!”
Very quietly, Kit went out the back door and down the driveway, swinging the leash. At the end of the driveway, he stopped, watching as the UPS truck that had delivered Carmela’s new curling iron drove away.
There were no dogs in sight anywhere. Kit stood there and just felt the loss: the strange feeling of having Ponch’s leash in his hand, but not having Ponch dancing around him and insisting that he hurry up and put it on him. It was much like the strange empty feeling of the braided rug beside Kit’s bed, which had no dog lying on it with his feet sticking up in the air—the strangeness of a bed where there was enough room to stretch your feet out in the morning, because there was no dog taking up the whole lower end of it.
Kit started to walk, because there was nothing else he could do. The only good thing about this, he thought, the only good thing, is that there won’t be any more weird howling all hours of the day and night. No more Hitchcock movie scenarios staged on his front lawn with dogs instead of birds. No more, he thought. All gone.
His eyes started to fill up, as he realized, on a different level, what Nita had had to deal with earlier in the year. The place where the other had always been … or for nearly as long as you could remember … now gone forever.
He kept walking, because that was what he did, this time of day, with a leash in his hand. There was no barking in the street. Even Tinkerbell, the slightly psychotic dog three doors down, stood quietly at his gate and watched Kit go by without the usual threats of bodily harm.
“Dai stihó,” he said.
Tinkerbell just stood looking at him, then turned and trotted back behind his own house.
Kit sighed and kept on walking down the block toward the corner where he usually would stop and let Ponch do his thing. The only thing he was missing right now was the plastic bag he’d have picked up Ponch’s doings with. There was no need for that now.
Kit stopped at the corner, looked around him, and let out a miserable sigh. What am I doing here? he thought.
That was when the sheepdog came trotting down the sidewalk. Kit just stood there for a moment, watching it come. It had been sitting on the lawn, weeks ago, and it wasn’t a neighborhood dog: Kit’s father had asked him where it had come from, and Kit had had no idea. His first urge was to turn away; the sight of any dog was a touch on an open wound.
Then he stopped himself. I don’t care, Kit thought. I want to talk to a dog, any dog, and get an answer back.
The sheepdog crossed the street toward him, jumped up onto the sidewalk, and paused by him, looking up. Kit almost managed to laugh: the way its hair hung down in its face, it was amazing that it could see anything. He hunkered down next to it and ruffled it behind the ears, though the gesture made his throat go thick with tears. In the Sp
eech, he said, “So listen, guy, just where did you come from?”
The sheepdog shook its fur out of its eyes and gazed up at him, its tongue hanging out. That’s sort of a funny question, it said. You should know. You were there, too!
And Kit’s breath went right out of him—because though the sheepdog’s eyes were golden and not dark, Ponch was looking out of them.
Now the tears he’d been fighting so hard did come, and Kit didn’t care. “But I thought—I thought that you—”
That me did, said the sheepdog. But there’s a lot more of me now. I’m more here than I ever was. I’m in every dog there is! Didn’t I tell you I wasn’t going to leave you? The sheepdog grinned at him. Some parts of the old Choice were worth keeping.
Kit threw his arms around the sheepdog. But I made another Choice, Ponch said. For all of us. And now we have a new story: how the Hound of Heaven defeated the Wolf that ate the Moon … but only with the help of the Wise One who knew that what you give away, you get back a hundred times more, and who brought the Hound to where he could learn how the sacrifice could be made. Now all debts are paid, and we can all be more than we were.
And suddenly the street was full of squirrels, sitting upright on their haunches and looking expectantly at the sheepdog.
At least most of the time!
The sheepdog started wriggling wildly in Kit’s arms and washing his face like crazy. Laughing, Kit opened his arms, and the sheepdog went lolloping off after the squirrels, barking his head off, tearing down the road and out of sight. One after another, all the dogs living up and down the street started to bark.
With the tears running down his face, and grinning, Kit turned back toward his house to get his things. As he did, he saw someone standing at the end of his driveway, watching him, as if she’d known exactly where he’d be.
Laughing, he ran to meet her.
By the same author
In the Young Wizards Series
So You Want to Be a Wizard • Deep Wizardry
High Wizardry • A Wizard Abroad
