Dairine held her breath.
“And that I was for something else entirely,” Memeki said. She was breathing like someone who’d run a race, as if she was ready to fall over from the strain of saying so short a word. “And now comes strangeness, yet more strangeness. The eyes that… I have seen, which are not Yaldiv.” Memeki looked at Dairine. “And the voice that— I know— the one I heard whispering in the night, and that no one else could hear.” She got up again, and went over to Ronan.
He sat very still as she approached him, and as the huge claws lifted. Memeki drew very close, peered into his face. Ronan, and the Champion, gazed back.
“Hod the Splendid,” said Memeki.
Ronan blinked.
“How do you know that name?” the Champion said.
“Before, I didn’t know what a name was,” Memeki said. “Now I know. That word was something the voice whispered to me in the night. Are these, then, also your names? Regent of the Sun, ruler of the third Day and the fourth Heaven, avenger of the Luminaries, Guardian of the Divided Name?”
Ronan nodded very slowly. “Messenger of Messengers,” he said, “chief Prince of the Presence, Winged like the Emerald, the Providencer.” He raised his eyebrows as he looked up at Memeki. “The creature with those names is within me. We’d say, ‘Those are my names.’”
“I thought so,” Memeki said. “The voice said that one was to be asked. So now I ask… you. What comes next? For my people’s sake, I must know. What is the word that must be heard? What must I do to become what the voice says I must?”
Ronan sat there looking stunned. “I don’t know,” the Defender said through him. And he looked helplessly at the wizards around him.
“There were other words still,” Memeki said. Her sudden eagerness made it sound as if just saying the word “I” out loud had broken a dam somewhere inside her, so that all kinds of things were starting to spill out. “The voice said: ‘You are the aeon of Light; you are the Hesper. You must find the way. But without the word spoken, there is no path, only darkness; until it speaks itself, only the abyss.’”
No one said anything.
Memeki kept looking from one of them to the next. Finally Dairine said, “You’ve asked us hard questions. We don’t know the answers. But we’ll help you find them.”
“It may take a while,” Ronan said.
Memeki settled down again, and combed that wayward palp back into place. “I will wait,” she said. Then she looked up. “The way we came out of the City… I can go back that same way, before morning? No one will know?”
Ponch opened an eye and looked up at her. I can take you that way, he said. Nobody will know.
She looked down at him, admiring. You are very wise.
Out of the corner of her eye, Dairine caught a glimpse of Kit hiding a smile. “I can rest here meanwhile?” Memeki said. “I am tired. This has been a day full of strangeness.”
“Not just for you,” Dairine said, getting up. She went over to Memeki and patted her on the shell. “Rest,” she said. “Nothing will happen to you here. We’ll take care of you.”
The strange eyes dwelled on her. “Yes,” Memeki said. “You will.”
A tremor went through Dairine. The voice had sounded exactly the way Ronan’s voice did when the One’s Champion used it.
Dairine turned away. After a moment or two, Memeki started to lean a little to one side. Quietly Dairine went over to look at Spot’s display. The hearts’ rates were dropping quickly; the Yaldiv’s neural activity was sliding down almost to nothing.
Dairine straightened, looked at the others as the readings bottomed out. She’s gone out like a light, Dairine said silently. It almost looks more like a hibernation state than our kind of sleep.
Yes, the Champion said. She’ll be that way for some hours, I think. I’ll stand guard while you others get back to your rest.
“You’re out of your mind,” Kit said. “Who could sleep after that?” He let out a breath, then Ponch’s nose came over his shoulder. Kit sighed and reached into the box for one more dog biscuit. “We found her. We’ve talked to her. She’s the one!”
Without any possible doubt, the Champion said.
“But what do we do now?”
Ronan shook his head. “He already said, he didn’t know.”
“Yeah, right. And a lot of help you are!” Dairine said.
“Who, me?”
“No, him!” Dairine said. “The Defender!”
We’re not omniscient, you know, the One’s Champion said, sounding annoyed.
“Oh, sure, you’re not. Just immortal and incredibly powerful, which doesn’t do us much good if after all this running around, you can’t give us a clearer sense of what we’re supposed to do!”
Ronan frowned and looked over at Kit. “What is it with these Callahan women,” he said, “that they’re always after yelling at you and giving you grief?”
“Not always,” Kit said, sounding resigned. “Just when it’s going to get most on your nerves.”
“We yell at you because you’re hopeless,” Dairine said, and sat down, looking extremely cross. “But I guess it’s not your fault this time. And where did all these other names come from all of a sudden? I’d have thought you had enough already, just in our own mythologies.”
We pick them up in our travels, the Champion said with a weary and resigned look. It’s an occupational hazard.
“And it’s not like you don’t have a fair number of names,” Ronan added. “Dairine. Dair. Squirt. Right pain in the arse. Speaker to hardware. Botherer of her sister—”
“Deliverer of punches in the nose,” Dairine said, looking Ronan in the eye. “Ruthless punisher of those who don’t cut her some slack.”
“One of those was a little weird,” Kit said suddenly. “‘Guardian of the Divided Name’?”
Ronan nodded. “The One’s full name.”
Roshaun looked perplexed. “Why would that need guarding?”
It doesn’t, the Champion said. You do. From it.
“But the One is on our side, I would have thought,” Filif said. “Or we are on Its…”
That’s not the point, the Champion said. You can’t really have any sense of how much raw power is tied up in the One. Physicality can’t express it. Nothing can express it; it’s not meant to be expressed. It’s meant to be. If the One wasn’t careful about how It manifests Itself inside space and time, everything would all just dissolve.
“So that even the One’s Name in the Speech has to be divided up to keep it safe,” Kit said, “like a critical mass.”
That’s right, said the Champion. The Name of Names has so much primacy of power over mere created matter that it could change or wipe out whole universes if irresponsibly used. So the Names are leaked into creation only in fragmented form … a little bit here, a little bit there. Even names in less central levels of creation get divided up that way—a bit here, a bit there…
Dairine let out an annoyed breath. “Yeah, well, if even the One’s names are so powerful,” she said, “why do we have to be running around all the time and cleaning up the messes all over our universe? Why doesn’t It just get Its butt in here and take care of things?”