"Uh, right. Excuse me," Nita said, and slowly and carefully edged sideways out from underneath all those overarching eyes, trying hard not to make it look as if she was creeped out.
The eyes watched her go, but otherwise Dazel didn't move, except for those tentacles, which never seemed to stop their silent wreathing and twisting in the air. Nita made her way over to where Pralaya and Pont were settling some final details with Kkirl and a couple of other wizards, and sat down on a little stepstool-looking piece of furniture near Pralaya. As several of Pont rolled off to say something to a couple of wizards on the other side of the gathering, Nita bent over with her elbows on her knees and looked sideways at Pralaya. "Is it just me," Nita said softly, "or is there something a little...! don't know... unusual about him?" She glanced at Dazel.
Pralaya looked casually over his shoulder, then back toward Nita, scrubbing his face thoughtfully with one paw. "I don't really know," he said. "He does have this way of just standing there and looking at you with all those eyes for minutes on end. I mean, it's not as if there's anything wrong with lots of eyes. Or none, for that matter. Maybe it's the multiple brains." Pralaya started scrubbing the other side of his face. "I did ask him once if there was something bothering him, but the answer didn't make much sense."
279
Nita shook her head. "But the Speech always makes sense."
"If you're using it with the intent to be understood, yes," Pralaya said. He waggled his whiskers, an expression Nita took as a shrug. "Whatever; it's not my business."
Nita was starting to feel boorish at having even mentioned it. These people were, after all, wizards, except for the Pig, and had all been extremely kind to her. "Never mind," she said, "probably it is just me. So much has been happening—"
"Now what was that about?" said one of Pont, rolling out from under another of the tables. "That what?" Nita said.
"Dazel there," said Pont, and a couple of them split apart in an uneasy way and then recombined, while "looking" across at Dazel. "They're leaving, apparently. We said to them, 'Go well,' and they said, 'Some of us may, but one of us will not.'"
Nita and Pralaya and all of Pont looked across at Dazel. It gazed back at them with some of those waving eyes, and then vanished.
"Ready now," Kkirl said, straightening up from checking the wizardry one last time. "Shall we?"
They all stepped into position, each into his, her, or its allotted place in the diagram. Nita gulped as she realized she was about to do a wizardry with almost no preparation, with beings she'd met hardly an hour before. But it was too late now. There were Pont, in their part of the circle, their five spheres bumping into one
Late Tuesday Night, Wednesday Morning
another and chiming a little nervously; Pralaya, sitting up on his haunches, his four other paws with their delicate little fingers now folded, expectantly, over his tummy; Neme, the fish-wizard, hanging in its globe of water like a Siamese fighting fish in a bowl, all gauzy silver fins and big eyes; Mmemyn, standing there seemingly eyeless and expressionless, like a giant, badly upholstered gymnastics horse; and Kkirl, her wings spread a little as she stepped into the control circle of the transit wizardry and began reciting the triggering sequence in the Speech, the words drowning out all other sound, including the tiny hissing feel of the playroom space's own kernel.
Nita took a breath, made sure her own personal atmosphere was in place around her and secured by the wizardry attached to her charm bracelet. Then she joined in the chorus of other voices, birdlike, moaning, chiming, growling. The sound of the Speech rose up in their conjoined voices and leaned in close around them, pressing in on all of them as the power built, down on them, squeezing them out of this space and, with a sudden explosive release, into another—
The sourceless radiance of the playroom space vanished, replaced by the high, hard, bright light of a sun high in a pale blue sky, all streaked with wind-torn, sulfurously yellow cloud. Nita and the other wizards stood in a saffron-stained wilderness of ice and blowing snow. Around them blasted a screaming wind that would have been not only bitterly cold—if a temperature-opaque forcefield hadn't been holding
281
Nita's air around her—but also unbreathable, laden with a stinging acid sleet.
The other wizards looked around with dismay. "There has been a lot of discharge of poisonous gas into the atmosphere because of the earthquakes," Kkirl said. "It's getting worse all the time."
"This isn't the seismically active area," Pont said, their spheres dividing up into numerous smaller ones and rolling out of the diagram.
"No, this is where I left the kernel," Kkirl said. "I was hoping it would stay anchored near the planet's magnetic pole. But as you see, it's gone again."
Nita looked out into that snow and listened once more. The wind was screaming in her ears, distracting her, and she wasn't perceiving this universe as artificially compressed, like the ones she'd practiced in. It stretched out all around her, vast to both her normal and her wizardly senses, real and challenging. At the same time, Nita was aware of Pralaya's eyes on her, thoughtful but also a little impatient and challenging, and she was reminded of Dairine again. Nita concentrated on listening. In the shriek of the wind, or behind it, something caught Nita's ear, and she looked over at Kkirl in confusion.
"Are you sure it's not here?" Nita shouted over the wind.
"What?"
"There's— I don't know, it's kind of an echo. Can you hear it?" Kkirl listened. "No..."
Late Tuesday Night, 'Wednesday Morning
Nita turned, looking all around her. There was nothing to see in this howling wilderness, but she could hear it now, she was sure. "Pont," she said, "can you give me a— Can you help me out here?" for Pont were short of hands. "Do what you did before?"
"What? Oh—"
Font's surface shimmered. Suddenly overlying Nita's own perceptions was that odd, tightly curved view of the world: downcurving sky, the golden-hued ice curving away and down all around them, the wind blasting the snow past the wizards and away from them in great chilly clouds. Nita didn't fight the perception but leaned into the curvatures, staring around her, listening.
All the others were doing so, too, Nita could tell, though her perceptions of them were conditioned by Font's. All the other wizards looked spherical, though all in different ways, as distinctive as basketballs from soccer balls from baseballs. Some hint of Kkirl's flamboyant colors showed, in the tight and elegant way she curved space around her; as did Mmemyn's slightly slow and scattered personality, in a sphere that was a little diffuse in the way it reflected its surroundings; as did Pralaya's, in a neat and compact roundness. Nita could sense everyone using their own wizardry-altered senses to search through the space around them for the kernel, as she was doing. Again Nita thought she felt a prickling tangle of unseen power rolling away from her, not far away, in a slow twisting path, downward—
Is it moving? Pralaya said in her mind.
That's what I thought, Nita said. Pralaya, can you do what Font's doing here? If three of us, or you and I 283
and however many of Pont there are, all look at the same time— Fes.
And the look of the world changed again. The icy golden surface underneath them was still the same, as was the wind howling past, but now the wind had a voice, eloquent, upset. Nita's companions were once more wearing forms that looked much like Nita's own way of seeing them, but with something added. Now there were depths of texture and mind that hadn't been there before, as if you could put out a hand and feel thought, warm like fur—a livelier, more animate sense of the others than Font's slightly chilly perception. Maybe it's because Pralaya and I are both mammals, Nita thought. Or something like mammals...