Nita and Sker’ret vanished. As they did, Kit once again caught what he’d “overheard” before, that strange feeling of fear combined with Nita’s sense of something that absolutely had to be done. And mixed with it, bizarrely, he could hear a sort of buzzing sound, sharp and abrupt, repeating again and again. Kit frowned. Now where’ve I heard that sound before? If I didn’t know better, I’d think it was somebody using some kind of energy weapon…
He didn’t hear anything further. Weird, Kit thought. Never mind. To Filif, who was now standing over Sker’ret’s short-term transit spell diagrams, he said, “How’s everything look?”
“Perfect.”
Ponch, sitting there looking down at the planet, now stood up again and shook himself all over. Are we going finding again?
“Pretty soon,” Kit said. “But we should get to the cave so you can have some dinner first.”
Ponch began to jump up and down excitedly. “Okay, okay, do it over here,” he said, leading Kit to one of the transit circles Sker’ret had set up. Nearby, Ronan and Filif each stepped into one of the others. Ronan glanced over at him. “Ready?”
“Ready.”
They vanished.
***
The darkness and silence of the cave was total, and the air was absolutely still, except for the gentle wavering of the heat they felt rising from the surface on which they stood. The stifling air was slightly tainted with an oily smell that reminded Kit of the last time the repairmen had to be called in to deal with the furnace at home.
Very slowly Ronan allowed the Spear of Light to show itself in a faint ghostly glimmer of blade, while Filif’s eye-berries glowed at their softest. Kit spoke the words of his small wizard-light spell and pushed it loose into the air, where the tiny spark of it hung and made a dim green-blue glow. Around them on all sides, the cavern stretched out, vast, empty, the distant walls glittering faintly. The floor was curved slightly upward toward the far walls, so that the four of them seemed to be standing in the middle of a huge, pale, shallow bowl. In such low light, the ceiling was invisible.
There’s nothing here, the Champion said after a moment. We’re safe enough.
Kit let his light get about as bright as a hundred watt bulb, and the Spear flared up into its full glory; Ronan let the shaft of the Spear sink into the stone of the floor and fasten itself there. Filif’s berries paled down. They could now see the ceiling, at least a hundred feet above them, maybe more. A bristling of tiny thin stalactites, probably the result of many centuries of trickling water, hung from it like a coarse, thick fur. Here and there the floor was bumpy with little walnut-sized lumps of dripped-down mineral salts that crunched underfoot when Kit experimentally stepped on them.
“Was this area volcanic once?” Filif said.
“Could have been,” Kit said. “I think the magma underneath burped out a big gas bubble. Then it all got pushed up toward the surface. The gas got out, the water got in…”
“Not too much of it,” Ronan said, “lucky for us. Otherwise, there might be other ways in.” He looked around, satisfied.
Kit nodded and reached into his otherspace pocket for the pup-tent interface. He hung it in the air and pulled the door down. Ponch dashed through it. “Back in a minute,” Kit said.
He went after Ponch, popped open a can of dog food, and emptied it into one of the waiting bowls. Then he poured some water into another dish from an open bottle. Ponch turned in a few happy circles and then began noisily and happily eating. Kit rooted around in the piles of supplies for one of the prepackaged sandwiches his mother had left for him, unwrapped it, and took a moment to stuff it into his face. Then he stepped out through the interface with the second half of the sandwich.
Ronan had vanished into his own pup tent. Filif stood off to one side, looking down at the bright circle of another transport spell, which was now etching itself in burning lines into the stone. “Sker’ret gave me a compacted version of the transport routine,” Filif said, “for transfers from here to the outer surface.” He brought up his own implementation of the wizard’s manual, which manifested itself as a sort of fog that clung about his branches. In that fog Kit could see a schematic of the immediate neighborhood of the planet’s surface, with the main city-hive marked on it.
“There’s a main trail from the city-hive that passes not too far from here,” Filif said. “We can make our way easily enough to it from our transit point. Since these creatures are so scent-sensitive, we should put the outside end of the transit wizardry in a little loop that leads from the path and goes back to it, so that it won’t be obvious to any Yaldiv stumbling on it that our trail goes only so far and stops.”
“It’ll look as if we just wandered off the main path a little and then right back again,” Kit said. “Great.” He ruffled up Filif’s branches a little, affectionately. Filif was such a hardworking wizard, so self-effacing, but so good at what he did, that Kit was coming to admire him immensely. “You hungry? You should get yourself something.”
“I’ll root in a while,” Filif said. “I want to make sure this is in order first. And this—”
A couple of Filif’s branch-fronds reached inward to touch each other, then parted again. Between them stretched a thin filament of green wizardly fire, the most delicate possible chain of characters in the Speech. As Filif stretched the chain out, it became more and more complex, like a single strand of spiderweb becoming the whole web, then a complex of webs in three dimensions, building a shape in the air. Filif drifted backward from where he had originally been standing, and the green-fire construct stayed anchored in the air and grew upward and outward, becoming more and more complex every minute. It resolved into the big oval shape of a Yaldiv’s body, spreading outward into the legs and the claws, the light then filling the innards of the shape as it sketched itself on the air. Shortly the shape of a complete Yaldiv hung there, resting lightly on its walking claws, towering over Filif and Kit. Filif let go of the filament of wizardry, and the spell stood on its own. He drifted around it, looking it over.
Kit followed, also examining it. He was seriously impressed by the way the many, many sentences in the Speech interwove to produce the result. The mochteroof was woven all around a wizardly “virtual copy” of the Yaldiv’s whole body. “I took the template from the Yaldiv that Ronan had to blast,” Filif said. “Poor creature, it had little enough time to serve Life, even as crookedly as it did. Now it will serve it another way.” He stood back from his work, admiring it. “If, as in some other hive cultures, the warriors here have additional status, this may offer us an extra layer of protection. Or enable us to go places where the workers cannot.”
“I hope it doesn’t also get us in some kind of trouble we can’t anticipate,” Kit muttered. “I wish the manual functions weren’t so messed up here. We don’t know as much about these people as we need to.”
“We have no choice, though,” Filif said, “do we? We’re going to have to take the chance.”
“No argument,” Kit said. “Should I try it on?”
“I was hoping you would ask.”
Kit took another look at the wizardry, seeing the spot near the back of the virtual Yaldiv where the user was meant to step in and shrug the new body around him like a coat. Carefully, he stepped into the center of the weave.
The whole thing blazed up with power and pressed in on Kit like a second skin … then vanished. He stood there tremendously confused for a moment: the mochteroof seemed to have simply vanished. Kit held up a hand—