It was the nature of the spell not to activate until dreaming actually began. How long she actually spent in the preparatory space between falling asleep and dreaming, Nita had no idea. But the activation seemed to come very quickly.
She was standing in the dark again, in a place where light fell in one spot from some source she couldn’t see. The darkness was not entirely quiet; from outside it came a faint sound, blurred and confused, like traffic noise outside a closed window, or voices in another room with the door closed — a hum, a mutter that both sounded and felt remote. Alone in that faintly humming darkness, under the single source of light, lay a big slab or dais of some kind — and there was some kind of figure on it.
Slowly, Nita made her way through the darkness toward the patch of light. The feeling of this dream was entirely different from that of the previous ones. She could still taste metal in the air, somehow, but it now seemed to her less mechanical, less impersonal a flavor. Maybe I’m just getting used to it
, Nita thought, as she passed through the immense darkness pressing down all around, heading slowly for the light.
It was a dais there, under the white radiance that seemed to fall on it from nowhere; and the figure kneeling there, in the center of the stone, glittered blindingly silver in the light. It was a knight, kneeling there on the pure white stone, completely covered from head to foot in plate armor, and holding before him, with its point resting on the stone, a sword in a metal scabbard that gleamed even more brightly than the armor did.
Nita tried to remember in what book she had seen this image, a long time ago. Yet at the same time she also thought of the robot she’d seen the previous night, for the knight’s helmet was the same in front — a perfectly smooth, blank surface, with just a single dark opening crossing it, for the eyes to look out through. Assuming there really are eyes in there, she thought.
Quietly she stepped around in front of — him? There was no telling.
“I’m on errantry,” Nita said, “and I greet you.”
There was a long silence.
“Greetings also,” the answer came back. Though it was a human-sounding voice, it didn’t come from inside the armor. It was omnidirectional, and seemed to come out of nothing, the way the light did. And the armor did not move in the slightest, as Nita would have expected it to, at least a little, if there was someone inside it.
Nita was relieved. At least the spell was working insofar as it was making communication possible, or a lot more possible than it had been the night before. “Were you trying to talk to me last night?” Nita said.
“Many times,” the voice said.
“I couldn’t understand a lot of what you were saying to me then, but I think that may be fixed now,” Nita said. “What can I do for you?”
There was another long pause. “Nothing,” the voice said. “This is the vigil. There’s nothing to do but wait for the fight to begin again.”
“What fight?” Nita said.
“With the Enemy,” the knight said. “What else is there? Outside of the fighting, nothing exists but this.”
Nita glanced around her. There was no sign of anything else but the two of them in this whole place, which seemed to stretch away into a dark infinity. “When will the fight start again?” she said.
“Soon.”
“What happens when you win?”
“There’s no winning this battle. But also no losing it, because for the Enemy, for the shadow that stalks this darkness, there’s no winning the fight, either.”
For the first time, the knight moved, lifting his head up into the light. There was no telling how she knew it, but Nita knew that inside the helmet, the knight was smiling. All the darkness sang with the force of his resolve, and with his amusement — a grim but good-natured cheerfulness that seemed very strange when taken together with what he’d just said.
That good cheer in the face of what sounded like a hopeless situation struck a chord somewhere in Nita, even in her sleep. The sense got stronger and stronger in the dark air around her of a great strength being hoarded in this place for the oncoming battle, of an unusual bravery. Valor: That was the word that described what she felt seeping into this space from the glittering form at its center. It made her feel like she had to do something to be of use. “Are you sure there’s nothing I can do to help you?” Nita said.
The silence that followed stretched out much longer than the other two had.
“Tell what fights the Enemy that It will be held here,” the knight said. “That It will have to fight here, again and again. But that It won’t pass.” And again Nita could feel the fierce, amused smile inside the armor.
“I can’t stay,” Nita said. That was one of the only drawbacks to lucid dreaming: Even when reinforced by wizardry, a dream’s duration was very limited. “But I know where this place is now. I can come back if you need help, or I can bring someone else with me who can help you better—”
“No help will avail here,” the knight said, kindly enough, but sternly, too. “This fight must happen only as it has happened, or it will be lost. And if it’s lost, everything else will be—”
Without warning, darkness fell. Nita, uncertain where she was or what had happened, tried to see, but in that complete blackness, there was no way to see anything at all. Briefly, she heard the sound of laughter, challenging and cheerful, and the ringing scrape of a sword being drawn—
And then Nita was sitting up in her bed, open-eyed and startled in the less unnerving darkness of her own bedroom. She wasn’t frightened, even though she’d caught a taste, in the dream’s last moments, of what had been coming toward the knight out of the newly fallen blackness. She knew that Enemy too well to be shocked by Its appearance anymore. But the thought of leaving that glad, tough presence to fight all by itself irked her. And though she’d at least been able to make out what it was saying this time, that wasn’t the same as understanding it.
She glanced over at the hands of her bedside clock glowing in the darkness. They said two-thirty.
Nita sighed and lay down again, feeling more determined than ever to figure out what was going on.
In fact, she felt more determined than she had about anything for weeks.
“Tell what fights the Enemy that It will be held here…”
Eventually Nita fell asleep again, and down the corridors of dream, she heard the sword come scraping out of its sheath again, and again, and again…
Quandaries
When her alarm went off at about a quarter after six, Nita dragged herself out of bed, showered, and got ready for school with that fierce, small sword-sound still repeating itself in her memory.
When she woke her dad up, it was still very much on her mind. She found him a little later in the kitchen, having the coffee she’d made for him when she’d finished dressing, and saw him looking thoughtfully at her manual, which Nita had carried into the kitchen with her earlier and had left open and facedown on the counter.
“I thought you seemed a little distracted this morning,” he said, pouring milk into his coffee.
“You look like you’re working hard on something. Harder than usual.”
He means, harder than usual lately, Nita thought. “Yeah,” she said. “First-contact problem.”