Wizard's Holiday, New Millennium Edition (25 page)

The wizard with the long red hair looked thoughtfully at Ictanikë. “Who is that?” Kit whispered.

Quelt waved a hand, and all the figures froze in place again. “That’s Druvah,” Quelt said. “He was one of the oldest of the wizards. You can tell by his hair; ours doesn’t usually get that red color for a long time.”

“Uh-oh,” Nita said. “I think I see what’s coming… ”

Quelt let the Display continue. “You still haven’t said what your price will be,” Druvah said.

“It’s only a little thing,” said Ictanikë. “I know the One who brought entropy into being. For those who’re that One’s friends, there are privileges and rewards. One of them is to circumvent the waste and pain that come with age. A people who make this bargain have no need of watching the strength and joy of youth slip slowly away. It’s theirs forever. They have an eternity to grow from power to power… and if they so desire it, more than an eternity. They can go onward into the time beyond Times, in their own bodies, in the flesh. To do so, of course, they must take entropy’s inventor as their master, not some impersonal wind. The relationship is far more rewarding, more personal.”

“But is it more free?” said Seseil. “Those who speak in terms of prices, themselves will do nothing for nothing. The wind has spoken the name of one of the Powers that lives in the dead calm, in the sun that beats down and parches the dry isles and dries up everything that would grow. We want nothing to do with that Power, or Its gifts.”

And the wizards began to argue. Nita sighed, because she had heard various versions of this argument since she’d become a wizard, and it rarely turned out particularly well for the world in question. The Lone Power had had eons of practice at making Its case, and was extremely good at befuddling the innocent and putting one over on the clever. As she watched, Nita noticed Druvah walking off in an absent sort of way, and Ictanikë went after him.

Kit noticed that, too. “Uh-huh,” he said. “Neets is right. I know where this is going.” He glanced over at Quelt.

Quelt made a gesture with an upraised hand; Nita read this as a shrug. “It goes on for a while,” Quelt said.

Off to the side, Nita could see Druvah and Ictanikë talking animatedly. “I bet
that
one does, too,” Nita said.

“Oh, yes,” Quelt said. “Do you want to skip ahead?”

“Sure,” Kit said.

Quelt made another gesture with her hand, and all the figures blurred back and forth briefly, then came to a stand again. Ictanikë and Druvah were walking back toward the main group now, and the others watched them come, Seseil watching most carefully. To Seseil, Druvah said, “Ictanikë has told me a great many things, and I’m convinced that we should give her suggestions a more careful hearing.”

Seseil’s face was calm, but in his eyes Nita thought she saw signs of the first anger she had yet seen in an Alaalid. “I feel no such need,” Seseil said, “nor I think does anyone else here. We want nothing of her ‘exemption.’ Through her voice the dead calm speaks, and there’s no good in that. We will cast her out. We will wall her out of our world. And, henceforth, we will take our chances with the winds.”

The other five wizards in the circle with Seseil held up their hands against Ictanikë in a gesture of rejection. She began to be battered back away from them as if the wind was actually blowing her from the circle, though in the grass around there was no sign of it and only the slightest breeze stirred the flowers. Nita held her breath, waiting for the storm to break. But to her surprise, nothing happened.

Druvah stood there and watched Ictanikë being forced away, and finally turned his back on the Lone Power. But then he also turned away from the other wizards and began walking off through the flowers, a lonely figure.

“You will call me back, before the end of things,” Ictanikë said, and looked warningly around at the wizards as their intention pushed her away. “You think you are acting in virtue, but you are acting in ignorance. And though you are swift in decision now, you will have long to repent it!”

“Never,” Seseil said. “We want nothing to do with you. Take yourself away, and do not bother us again.”

Ictanikë looked one last time at the other wizards with Seseil. Every one of them was of the same face and the same mind. Her frown became terrible; still in the act of being forced away, she raised her hands. Nita winced.
Here it comes,
she thought.
I bet now we find out why this planet has what looks like a really big impact crater…

But Ictanikë simply let her hands fall, and stopped resisting the wizards’ spell, turning and walking away from them, the way Druvah went, not hurrying. Slowly she vanished into the dazzle of the day, and was gone from sight a long time before she came anywhere near that impossibly distant horizon.

Seseil and the other wizards lowered their hands, and closed up their circle again. Kit glanced over at Quelt. “That was it?” he said.

“That was it,” Quelt said. “Should there have been more?”

“Well,” Kit said, “not necessarily. But I’ve seen Choices that took a little longer.”

Nita looked around again at the scenario with some confusion. “This is kind of strange,” she said. “The way Druvah was acting—unless I’m misunderstanding it—it’s more like the kind of thing the Lone One would do. Are you sure he wasn’t—” She paused. It was a word no wizard liked to use about another one.

“Overshadowed,” Nita said at last, when she realized that Quelt wasn’t going to say it.

“You mean actively being influenced by the Lone Power?” Quelt said. “No, not as far as we can tell.”

“What happened to Druvah afterward?” Kit said.

“He left,” Quelt said. “The reasons given differ. And he did say that he didn’t care for the way the Choice had been made… Some versions of the story tell how Druvah said he didn’t want anything more to do with his own people. They say he threatened the other wizards and said to them something like what Ictanikë had said—that they couldn’t make this Choice without him, or that later they’d wish that they’d listened to him, and that someday they’d need him back and wouldn’t be able to find him. But all the stories agree that he went away from the place where he lived and was never seen there again.”

“A sore loser,” Kit said.

“Maybe not,” Nita said. “Maybe he was just sad, or embarrassed when he realized he was wrong.”

“You might be right about that,” Quelt said. She watched as slowly the various wizards wandered off together across the flowery fields, heading out into the world they’d helped to shape. “There are other stories that say how sometimes people would see him for a day, an hour, on some lonely road, or climbing a mountain, or sailing by himself on the sea, always looking for something, always acting as if something was missing. But it wasn’t thought lucky to see him. He was tricky to talk to, they said, and he didn’t always make sense. Or you might hear his voice behind first one tree and then another in the forest, always moving in front of you when you got close, never staying where you thought it was.”

Quelt turned and started walking up through the crystalline air again. Kit and Nita walked up the air behind her. “Sort of a trickster,” Nita said.

“That’s right,” Quelt said. She shrugged. “There’s even one story that says he went wandering right out of the world, among other worlds, looking for whatever he was missing. It doesn’t really matter in terms of the Choice. It’s made now. And pretty well made, I think.”

They broke the surface of the crystalline Display and walked out across it, back to the sward that surrounded it. Kit looked all around him at the bright day, as if wondering whether he should say something, and then, finally, he said, “So people here do die… ”

“I don’t know that we would’ve ever had any choice about that,” Quelt said. “It’s always going to happen eventually, isn’t it? But it’s not so bad. We live a pretty long time. And it’s not as if the dead people go away.”

Nita looked up at that and nodded. “I’ve been meaning to ask you about that,” she said. “There’ve been times I woke up in the middle of the night here and thought I heard people whispering… ”

Quelt looked at Nita and purposely nodded, using the human gesture. “That’s right,” she said, “I thought you’d probably be able to hear them. When we die, we don’t die out of the world. We die
into
it. The people who were here are always around.” And Quelt looked at Nita with a little less certainty than usual, an expression a little less serene. “It’s not like that for you, in your world, is it?” she said.

Nita shook her head. “No,” she said, and couldn’t keep the sadness out of her voice. “Definitely not.”

Kit looked up. “Here comes Ponch,” he said.

Nita glanced up. She couldn’t see anything but a vague troubling of the flowers across the field. “What has he got?” she said, and began to trot off toward him.

Behind her, she could just hear Quelt saying, in a slightly lowered voice, “I’ve been meaning to ask you, since you seem interested in the subject. How
do
you die?”

“Uh… let’s save that for a little later, okay?” Kit said, and the two of them vanished, heading back to the house by the sea.

Out among the blue flowers, Nita sighed sorrowfully and went after Ponch.

Dairine wandered through the house early that morning, looking into every room except the one she was trying to avoid looking into: the basement. Filif was in the kitchen, watching her dad get ready for work. Nobody was in the dining room. Sker’ret was in the living room, watching TV and playing around with the remote. Nobody was in the bathroom or any of the bedrooms.

She let out a long breath and wandered back the way she had come, glancing at the TV as she passed through the living room. “That really looks a lot better,” she said to Sker’ret.

“Something was wrong with the green color matrix,” Sker’ret said. “I talked to the power converter and got it to tweak its voltage a little. Everything seems to be behaving now.”

“You could have a word with my DVD player upstairs if you felt like it,” Dairine said. “But not right now.”

“Are we ready to go?”

“A few minutes.”

She wandered back into the kitchen. “You see what Sker’ret did to the TV, Daddy?” Dairine said.

“I sure did. That boy’s a whiz with the machinery, isn’t he?”

“He’s kind of a structures specialist,” Dairine said. “A taking-things-apart-and-putting-things-back-together fan. I’d say everything would be fine with him around until you ran out of broken things to fix.” She smiled. “Then would be the time to hide… ”

“When he has a free moment, he can come down to the shop,” Dairine’s dad said, finishing his coffee and going to the sink with the mug. “My poor old copier… ” He shook his head.

“I’ll put it on the list.” To Filif, she said, “Seen Roshaun this morning?”

“Not today,” Filif said. “He went into his pup-tent when we all did last night, and I haven’t seen him since.” And he raised a branch and pushed his baseball cap into what was intended to be a jaunty angle. It flopped back down again, because it’s hard to keep a baseball cap in a given position when your head is a single conifer-like branch, similar to the top of a Christmas tree.

“Hmf,
” Filif said, and started weaving a few outer limbs around in a gesture that Dairine recognized as the beginning of a wizardry, Filif’s invocation of a shorthand or “macro” version of something he’d set up before. He had a lot of these for physical manipulation, which made sense for a tree. Dairine’s neck hairs rose a little at the feel of the Speech being used in a nonverbal mode. Dairine’s dad, drinking his coffee, eyed this procedure with some interest, watching the baseball cap come up to level and settle itself as if there were a head underneath it.

“Slick,” Dairine said.

“I don’t know,” her dad said, looking with dry humor at the baseball cap, and turning away again. “I’m not sure what you’re doing bringing something like that into a house full of Mets fans… ”

The cap was a Yankees cap, and Dairine hadn’t had either the inclination or the heart to start explaining to Filif why such a cap could possibly be an issue. He’d really wanted it, and Dairine had gone back to the shopping center and gotten it for him. But she felt fortunate in having been able to talk him out of the Jams, convincing him that they were “very last year.”

Dairine headed past the two of them, sighing.
There’s no way to avoid it. I’m just going to have to go on down there,
she thought. “You about ready to go?” she said.

“Yes,” her dad and Filif said in unison, and then both burst out laughing, since they were each talking about going to a different place.

“Great,” Dairine said. “Back in a minute.”

She went down the stairs into the basement and looked around. There were the three pup-tent accesses, each hanging from its silvery rod. One of them was active. Annoyed, Dairine went over to it and most reluctantly put her head in.

The inside was illuminated, not with the standard directionless lighting of a basic pup-tent installation, but by a number of ornate lamps positioned here and there across the carpeted floor.
Carpets?
Dairine thought. But there they were, beautifully woven in alien patterns of many colors, some of them embroidered as well. They were scattered all over the inside of a space that was significantly larger than the others’ pup tents, which she’d seen when they’d invited her in.

And the place was decorated as if it was a palace. There was elaborate artwork hanging against the walls or, in some cases, unsupported in the air; there was a great couch in the middle of everything, with rich coverings and ornate cushions scattered over it. There was enough furniture—sofas and wardrobes and chests—to supply a good-sized furniture store, except that no furniture store Dairine knew would be likely to carry
this
kind of stuff, everything glittering with gold or inlaid with green or blue metals that Dairine didn’t immediately recognize.
Just
look
at all this junk,
she thought. It was dazzling but, to her eye, overdone.
Then again… if I grew up in a place that looked like this, maybe I’d think it was normal, too.