by Диана Дуэйн
The last blush was nothing to this one, but Nita fought it down, starting to get annoyed herself. That broke off, though, when she saw the way he was looking at her. For once, there was no anger about it. Bizarrely, the look made her start to shake a little. Then it occurred to her that there was nothing bizarre about it, for it was not her own physical excitement she was feeling. She knew what that felt like-There was nothing in the manual about this. Or is there? Nita thought. Have I ever looked? It's not as if the subject has ever come up, working with Kit. .
. .and abruptly she knew, or started to know, rather more about it. Nita sat there in the starlight and swallowed, getting her first taste of what it was like for a native wizard to experience 'the Knowledge' — the direct input from the wizardly 'database' which was the way Irish wizards experienced the information. Would it keep getting this way for me if I stayed here longer? she wondered. But that was hardly important just now: there was other information to consider. Of course wizards got physical with each other sometimes, just the same as other human beings did. But they experienced it somewhat differently. It had to do with the Speech, which had physical components as well as verbal and mental ones — and when two people expert in the Speech were attracted, they were likely to overhear one another's bodies as well as their minds. . Nita broke out in a sweat. Not mine, she thought, fascinated. She looked at Ronan, and for a long few moments her thoughts chased themselves unintelligibly through her head. Only one finally made itself plain:
Well, heck, I guess you have to start somewhere. And I do like him — otherwise I wouldn't even be thinking about this. .
Ronan looked away. And Nita said, "You're not going to get any pushing out of me on this one." She was still shaking, but it was her own nervousness this time. She just sat there and waited.
He leaned back on the fence a bit. His face was quite close to hers: she caught the starlight in his eyes one more time before he bent in to kiss her.
She spent the first two seconds trying to work out what to do with her nose. After that Nita was simply lost in sensation: the kiss itself, and what underlay it, the rush and pour of thought and emotion that was both of their minds getting tangled together. She was nervous about it at first, but after a moment it seemed completely natural, that odd fresh scent of his mind — green, she thought, of course, and was tempted to laugh; and behind it, another sensation, something faint but familiar. She couldn't place it. .
The kiss broke. She blinked at him. Her heart was racing. The second kiss went on for a lot longer. This time they touched. This time, as the sweetness built in her body, Nita went shouldering through that welcoming greenness in mind, touching it, warm, but curiously hunting that sense of something else. And there in the dark was some of that anger, quite a bit of it actually, fretting, churning against itself. There was something down in the warm dark here, an irritant, a scent or colour that she knew, that made Ronan keep lashing out at everything: some kind of energy looking to be properly expressed. Not mere rage, but a righteous anger, turning on itself, without an outlet, impotent at the moment, straining to get out and be put to the right purpose. Nita blinked in the middle of the kiss. A flash of scarlet, an impression of something swift and fierce and hot-tempered, and utterly good. .
Her eyes flew open with shock as she recognized the mind-sense of what was struggling down inside of Ronan. "Peach!" she whispered. But that had been only one of that creature's names. It had many others. Without her being able to prevent it, she felt Ronan's thought follow hers, down to the image of how she had seen Peach last — no longer a creature that had been hiding in the shape of a scarlet macaw, another wizard's 'pet'. He saw it as Nita had seen it last, in combat with the Lone One: moulted out of its old body, now radiant, immortal, unconquerable, one of the Powers that Be, the one with many names, the One's Champion. . "No," Ronan gasped. "Oh, no!"
And he was gone now, running, the sound of his going frantic on the gravel. Fading now. Gone. Nita sat there on the fence, shaking, half in tears, half too amazed to cry. The night fell silent again around her.
She went back to bed again, but once more it was a long time before she could sleep. The next evening she and her aunt and Kit got in the car together at about six-thirty. It was just starting to get dark; sunset was not until eight that night, and it wouldn't be completely dark until perhaps ten-thirty or eleven.
Castle Matrix was eastward from Greystones and Kilquade, in the mountains beyond Sugarloaf. They drove down many small narrow roads, which got smaller and narrower and bumpier all the way, until finally they came to a drive with two huge trees at the end of it, each one beginning to be covered with a great mass of red berries. "Rowan," Nita's aunt said.
"I know," Nita said. "I have a friend at home who's a rowan tree."
Her aunt chuckled. "It's still so funny to hear things like that come out of one of my relatives. " she said.
"There it is," Kit said. They turned out of the drive into an open gravelled area. Off to one side of it, Castle Matrix rose. The main part of it was a plain square tower, about forty meters tall and fifteen meters on each side, of light grey granite. To Nita's intense delight, it actually had battlements on top. There were narrow arrow-slit windows here and there up and down the face of the tower, and a huge iron-bound oaken door at the bottom. Off to one side, the castle had been added to; there was an additional wing about fifteen meters high, with diamond-paned windows. A low fieldstone wall ran around the gravelled area. She wandered over to peer into it after they got out of the car. Biddy's truck was parked by that wall, and the forge was missing from the back of it. The oak door swung open for them. There was Johnny in his tracksuit, looking very ordinary except for what he held in one hand. It was a rod that burned with light. Nita recognized a tool she had used once before herself, a rowan wand that had spent time out in moonlight: a potent weapon for a lower-level wizard, though she couldn't imagine what Johnny needed one for. "Come on in," he said.
Nita and Kit went in behind her aunt, looking around in curiosity. About two meters inside the door was a long, heavy wine-coloured brocade curtain. "Draughts," Johnny said, pushing it aside; "you wouldn't believe the draughts we get in here in the winter."
They passed through it and looked around, and up, and up. This was the castle's main hall, about fifteen meters across; it had whitewashed walls, black-and-white tiled floors, and big, handsome, polished wooden tables. Immediately to their left was a huge fireplace with a strange sort of grate that seemed to be designed to hold the fire's coals up vertically rather than horizontally; a big iron spit and a crank to turn it stood in front, and there were smaller fireplaces, grills actually, on either side of the main grate. Tall arched windows, about two meters wide, were let into the west and south walls. The wooden tables had been pulled off to the sides of the big room, and in the middle of the floor, where all the tiles were dark, a most elaborate spell diagram was in the process of being laid out in white. Nita sniffed, and from her art classes identified the sweetish smell of water-based acrylic paint.
"Doesn't scuff off in the middle of a spell," Johnny said, picking up a brush. "Anyway. Welcome to Matrix."
"Have you always lived here?" Kit said, looking around in admiration. "Did you inherit it?" "Oh, no," Johnny said. "I found this place in ruins. A big tree growing through what was left of the roof, right about here. ." He pointed to the centre of the room, where the spell diagram was. "We had it removed when we started to renovate the place, my wife and I. She's in London at the moment with our son. But the Normans built the place, originally, some time in the eleven hundreds, when they were trying to subdue Ireland." He chuckled and looked down at his work. "They fell in love with it and got "more Irish than the Irish", as the saying goes." "Seems to be a lot of that going around," Kit said.
Johnny nodded. "They built this place on the site of an old holy well. it's still here. But more than that. Matrix had been a centre for a lot of kinds of faith, or power, over the years. The Mother Goddesses we
re honoured here first. that's where its first name came from. Matrix means "womb", but the older form was probably "matricis" — the Castle of the Mothers. Then for a while I think the well was sacred to Brigit, the old fire-goddess; and later to Saint Brigid, the Mary of the Gael as they called her. Other mysteries were here later. There was some connection with the Knights Templar; some of them said this was one of the Grail Castles. But all those came later. We have older business tonight." "Are you about ready?" Aunt Annie said.
"Just about. Waiting on Biddy and Dairine. Ronan's in the back with Doris, making tea." "Where else," Kit muttered.
"Give it time, you'll get used to it," Nita said. She wandered over to the diagram that Johnny was working on, noticing the elegance and cleanliness of it. Half the figures in the Speech that she was used to tracing out laboriously and in whole, here were only hinted at; a single graceful stroke 'holding the place' for a figure or diagram much more complex. I guess when you're Senior for half a continent, though, you get enough practice to be able to do that. It was a big five-noded diagram, with a separate circle for each of the Treasures — each written around with the reinforcing and warding spells that each specific Treasure would need — and a fourth empty circle for the starsteel that would become the Spear. That fourth circle was particularly densely written-in, and Nita could understand why. The spell there was for the magnetic bottle that would be needed to confine the starsteel and cool it down until it was safe to work; for in its native condition inside the star it would not be solid metal, or even molten, but iron plasma at something more than seven thousand degrees Kelvin. If there was any specific part of the spell diagram Nita would have been interested in double-checking, that was it. But again the shorthand that Johnny was using was a little beyond her.
Nita stopped then, suddenly, and looked down as Johnny finished one character and touched it with the rowan rod. The acrylic flared briefly bright, then died down again. Nita stared at the floor. "Something wrong?" Johnny said. "There's something down there."
She was aware of Kit looking at her uncomprehendingly from off to one side, where he had been examining a set of old pikes mounted against the wall. "Yes, there is," Johnny said. "I didn't expect you to feel it, but then a lot of wizards older and more experienced than you don't. There's a power in the earth here; not the earth itself, though. The water table runs fairly high here, and this castle's element is Water. No surprise, since the place is more or less haunted by the "female principle". You saw the little stream that runs down by the forge, out by where you parked? We'll be doing work down there later."
Nita stood there just feeling it — a long, slow swelling, biding its time, caring nothing for the flash and dazzle and busyness of life, but only for slow nourishment, things growing, things prospering, birth, being. She glanced up at Johnny and said, "This is the only place where we could do what we have to, isn't it."
"To keep fire from getting out of hand," he said, "water, always. One way or another, we have plenty of it here."
Doris came in, followed by Ronan with the tea-tray. He put it down on one of the tables and joined Nita and Kit as they looked at the diagram. Johnny finished one last figure, then stood up. "Tidy enough?" he said. "I miss anything?"
Nita shook her head in complete helpless ignorance. Kit said, "Don't look at me," and moved off to pour himself a cup of tea. Doris came to stand by Johnny and look the diagram over. "All names seem to be in place," she said. Her gaze dwelt particularly on one spot, which Nita had noticed earlier and not known what to make of. While the rest of the spell was written in shorthand, the names of the participants were all written out in full, as was vitally necessary. Your name in the Speech was meant to describe you completely, and to work with a shortened version of your name was to dangerously shortchange yourself of your own potential power. The name written in the spot Nita was examining, though, was not the complex, fussy thing that most human names were. It was simple, just six curves and a stroke. Names that short tended to be like short words in the dictionary the shorter they were, the more meanings they tended to have — and mortals did not have names like that one, all power and age. But then again, one of them spelling tonight was not mortal. Still there's something odd about it. The usual 'continuation' curve is cut off awful short. .
"Hi, y'all," said Dairine as she swung in through the brocade curtain. "What's happenin'? All set? Oh," she said, stopping at the edge of the diagram and taking a long look at it. "Does it meet with your approval?" Johnny said.
"Looks fine to me. Yo, Spot!" she called, looking over her shoulder. The laptop computer came scuttling in and sat itself down under a table.
"You picked out a star yet?" Nita said to Dairine, as her sister paused beside her. Dairine shook her head. "Can't predict the positions that accurately from this end," she said. "We're just going to have to wait until the timeslide's fastened, and then have a look around and pick one that looks good."
"Just make sure you pick a star that's not scheduled to have inhabited planets later," Kit said from the other side of the spell diagram.
Dairine looked at him with mild amusement. "Kit, from that end of time, it's already happened. There never was a star to have planets."
"You hope," Kit said. "If it didn't work, back then, then the star's either still just fine, or it's long since gone nova from its core being tampered with. and we're all going to be so much plasma in about fifteen minutes."
Dairine grinned at him. "Adds spice to life, doesn't it? Don't worry, Kit. I'm here."
Kit looked at Nita with an expression that was eloquent of what he thought that was worth. Nita shrugged at him. She is pretty hot stuff at the moment, she said privately. If she messes this up, we all will be, Kit replied.
That was true enough. Nita had never had a Senior spelling with her, let alone the Senior for a whole continent. In the past it would have lent her a lot of peace of mind. At the moment, though, it didn't seem to be helping much. Pre-spell nerves, Kit said. Me too.
It was a small consolation. She sat down for a moment, watching Johnny go over the last few details of the spell diagram with the rowan wand to activate and check the separate character groups. The curtain to the kitchen wing stirred, and Biddy came in slowly, carrying what looked a long, wide bar of metal.
She placed the object inside the node of the spell diagram that was meant to contain the iron plasma, and then stood up, massaging her back. It was a bar of metal all right, about fifteen centimeters thick and fifteen centimeters wide, and just over half a meter long. The bar had a long, deep groove about seven centimeters by seven, right down the length of it, to within about two centimeters of either end.
"There," she said to Johnny. "That's the casting mold I use for fireplace tools. The best I could come up with."
Dairine wandered over and looked at it. "How much does it hold?" she said. "Molten metal, I mean."
"About ten kilograms." "I mean in volume."
Biddy looked surprised. "I don't usually think of it in those terms. About a litre, I'd say." "Hmm." Dairine looked at the mold, then glanced at the laptop computer. It got up from under the table, came over and looked at the mold itself; then it and Dairine seemed to exchange glances, though how it did it with no eyes was a good question.
"Yeah," she said to it. To Biddy she said, "What's the melting temperature of the mold? I don't want to mess it up."
"It's case-hardened," she said. "About eight hundred degrees Fahrenheit."
"OK." Dairine looked thoughtful. "You want some carbon in with the iron?" Biddy nodded. "How much?"
"About one and a half percent."
"Gotcha." Dairine looked at the computer for a moment; it made a soft disk-drive thinking noise, which amused Nita, since she could see that its drives were both empty. "OK," Dairine said to Johnny. "I'm ready when you are."
He took one last long look at the spell diagram as he stepped into the middle of it. "I know that in group spellings people usually divide the work up evenly among them
," he said, "but if it's all right with you all, I'd sooner handle everything but the actual timeslide, and leave that part of things to Dairine. The Treasures themselves are going to need watching to make sure that they don't interfere, and I would prefer that each of you in the active diagram concentrate on that. Does that seem appropriate to you?" Everyone nodded, or muttered agreement. "All right, let's get to it. Doris, the Cup. ."
"Right," she said, and went into the kitchen. A moment later, light swelled behind the brocade curtain, and she elbowed it aside and carried the Ardagh Chalice in.
Johnny said. "Doris, keep an eye on it. If any of these things is likely to get out of hand here, it's the Cup."
"Oh, I'll mind it all right, don't you worry about that."
"We needn't do anything about the Stone," Johnny said, glancing at the empty circle next to that of the Cup: "we couldn't be much more in contact with the Earth if we tried, and it's here already. Kit. ."
Kit brought in Fragarach and laid it carefully in the circle waiting for it. Its light was burning low, but a breath of wind stirred the door-curtains and the banners hanging from the ceiling as he put it in place.
"Air is ready," Johnny said. "One element only remaining, and that's the one we need. Ready, Dairine?"
She stepped into the circle for Fire, next to the steel mold, and said, "Let's do it."
Johnny put his hands behind his back, bent over a little the way someone might bend over to read a newspaper lying on the ground, and began to speak, reading the spell from the diagram. Things had seemed quiet before — here, far from any town or road, close to sunset, that was hardly surprising but the silence that shut down around them now, and into which the Speech began to fall, was more than natural. Nita felt the hair standing up all over her, the old familiar excitement and nervousness of the start of a spell combining with the effect of the wizardry itself on the space and matter within its range of influence. Under the silence Nita could hear or sense a constant slow rush and flow of water or the essence of it — welling up and sinking away again, taking all dangerous influences away with it.