—and saw the shadow of one of those huge, sharp-edged claws come up in front of his face. It was so odd and sudden that he jumped; the claw jerked. “Wow,” Kit said, and turned around. “This is cool. And I still feel like me.”
Ronan had come out of his pup tent and was heading over to fetch the Spear. He looked over at Kit with interest. Ponch, who had come out of Kit’s tent a little before, now started dancing around Kit and barking joyously, as if this was intensely funny. You’re a giant bug! Ponch said. You even smell like one!
“I’ll take that as a compliment,” Kit said, and was astonished at the bizarre humming and crunching noises that came out of him instead of words. He looked over at Filif, and was aware of the dark mirror-shade eyes that he was “seeing” through, though it was his own form of vision that prevailed.
“You can use the Yaldiv sensorium anytime you need to,” Filif said, drifting around again to check that the mochteroof was working correctly. “You can scent and see either in your own mode exclusively, or as they do, or both at once. The Yaldiv see mostly as heat; a lot of the visible spectrum is lost on them. Scent comes through the legs, and they don’t go in much for tactile information, as far as I can tell. Taste is in the mandibles.”
“And wizardry?” Kit said.
“Won’t be impaired,” Filif said. “Your portable claudication is exactly where it would normally be, as are your preprepared wizardries. You can do whatever you would normally—”
The sudden bang! of displaced air was astonishingly loud in this small space, and was followed by an abrupt shower of a sort of flaky rain, as many of the tiny damp mineral-drop stalactites from the ceiling came pattering down onto the floor. Kit whirled around with a disrupter spell in his hands—a little core of compressed wizardry burning hot and ready to fire—and was only briefly surprised by the huge claw-shadows that seemed to enclose the hands holding the spell. Out beyond the shadows of the mochteroof, Ronan had snatched the Spear up out of the stone floor and was standing there with it flaming in one hand, ready to throw. Filif’s berries were suddenly burning a disconcerting dark color that Kit had never seen before. But then Kit let out a breath and waved his hands and their shadow-claws apart, dismissing the spell, at the sight of the two figures standing there, one shorter than him, one much taller.
Dairine and Roshaun looked up around them at the interior of the cave. Dairine’s hands were also holding some spell that fizzed and glittered as whitely blinding as a Fourth of July sparkler. Roshaun was holding ready in one hand what might have been a meter-long gilded rod, except for the hot, orange-golden, sunlike light that writhed and coiled inside it. Down on the floor between them, Spot crouched, glowing a soft and dangerous blue.
Then Dairine and Roshaun and Spot (extruding a few eyes to do the job) all stared at Kit. Dairine actually squinted at him, and it took some moments before she finally grinned. “Hey,” Dairine said. “On you, that looks good.”
Kit laughed. He pulled one of the tags of the Speech that was hanging down inside the mochteroof, and it fell away.
“How’d you find us so fast?” Ronan said. “We didn’t even know we were coming here until a little while ago.”
“I got Nita’s message when we popped out of transit on our way in,” Dairine said. “She left a pointer to the new coordinates, and forwarded it to the transits Sker’ret built for you. But where’d she go?”
“Home,” Kit said. “Heard anything from your dad?”
Dairine shook her head. “I was going to call,” she said. “Why? Neets tried and couldn’t get through?”
“Yeah,” Kit said. “Nothing.”
“Then I won’t bother right now,” Dairine said. “We’ve got bigger fish to fry.”
Roshaun looked briefly nonplussed. “Is this the time to be thinking about food?” he said.
“If you’d had as little to eat as I have today, it sure would be,” Dairine said, “and if you ask me, Ponch has the right idea, because despite all the hoopla back at your big fancy royal palace, the one thing that didn’t put in an appearance was a buffet. So forgive me.” She reached into her otherspace pocket and started feeling around in it. “But we found out what we’re supposed to be looking for.”
“The Instrumentality?” Kit said.
“What is it?” Ronan said.
Dairine came up with a trail-mix bar and started unwrapping it. “Not a what,” she said. “A who.”
Ronan and Filif and Kit all stared at one another.
Dairine gave Ronan a cockeyed look as she bit into the trail-mix bar. “And it’s funny that not even you know,” she said, munching, “since your passenger was carrying the information. But then, not even He knew. Did you?” she said to the Champion.
I’ve often worked as a courier before, the One’s Champion said. “Messenger” is one of the most basic parts of my job description. But I’ve never before carried a message I didn’t know I was carrying.
“First time for everything,” Dairine said, having another bite. “Ronan, around the time you stopped by our house, part of that message got loaded into Spot, and you never even knew it was happening. We couldn’t get at it until we got to the mobiles’ world. They put some info from the Defender’s presence in the mobiles’ world together with that information, decoded it…”
She smiled. Beside her, Roshaun sat down on the floor, cross-legged, with his usual effortless grace.
“The Instrumentality,” Dairine said, “is the Hesper.”
At that, Ronan looked up sharply.
“Or a Hesper,” Dairine said. “There’s not much difference at this point, since there’s never been one before, and there may be more later if this works out.”
Kit shook his head. “What’s a Hesper?”
“It’s a made-up word,” Dairine said. “We don’t have an English equivalent to the word in the Speech. You know any of the old names for the Lone One before It fell?”
Kit thought a moment, hearing an echo of the word in an old memory. “Hesperus?” he said. “Is that in Greek mythology?”
“Yes and no,” Dairine said. “But you know.” She looked at Ronan, or rather, at his interior colleague. “‘The morning and the evening star,’ they used to call the Lone Power, before there was that disagreement at the beginning of things. Then the ‘star’ fell.”
“Phosphorus and Hesperus,” said Ronan. “The Greeks didn’t know the morning and evening stars were the same planet, so they had two different names. Some people started using ‘Hesperus’ as the name for the Lone One before It fell.”
Dairine nodded. “That’s the closest word we’ve got for what we’re looking for. What’s about to happen, is the emergence of a ‘bright’ version of the Lone Power.”
Kit’s mouth fell open. “Here?”
“Looks like,” Dairine said. “All we have to do now is figure out who it is, where it is, and how to help it.”
“But the Pullulus,” Kit said.
Dairine gave Kit an exasperated look. “Don’t you get it?” Dairine said. “That’s not even slightly important compared to this! I think the Powers are trying to tell us that doing the right thing about the Hesper will save the universe, too. The Hesper’s a lot more important … and we’ve got exactly one chance to get this right. If we do—”
She stood there and waved her hands in the air. Kit realized that he was seeing a historic thing happen: words had just failed Dairine.
The thought scared Kit almost worse than the Pullulus did.