“Tell me!” Memeki pleaded.
“Memeki, if I tell you what to say,” Nita said, “it’s not your choice.”
Behind her, Nita could hear Ponch starting to growl. She forced herself to ignore him.
“And you have to choose,” Nita said. “If you don’t, we’ll have come here all this way for nothing. Except to die.”
“That is a hard saying!” Memeki said. She sounded hurt and indignant, like someone under unfair pressure.
“Unfortunately, it’s also a true one,” Nita said. “Wizards tell the truth. Sometimes it’s all we’ve got: one way or another, the words wind up doing the job.”
“I need time! Time to think, to decide—”
“There is no time,” Nita said. “And this kind of choice won’t need time. It’s done in a flash, in a breath. All you have to do is be willing to finally make it, instead of putting it off!”
Memeki turned away from her.
Nita broke out in a cold sweat. Oh, please don’t let me have messed up! she thought. If I’ve ruined this somehow, if the whole universe is going to go dark because I just said the wrong thing—
“Nita,” Ronan said. “Now. “
Her head came right around at the sound of sheer command in his voice—and the unexpected desperation.
“They’re coming,” he said, and this time it was just Ronan. “He can’t hide us anymore. His power’s going, and there’s another great lot of them coming. Five times as many as last time, maybe more. Something’s waking up in the City.”
Nita swallowed. His power’s going? How long is ours going to last? “Look,” she said, “maybe we can help Him. Pass Him some power, or operate His shield routine independently. Can you feed Spot the cloaking spell He was using? At least we can buy ourselves some time.”
Ronan frowned, a concentrating look. “I have it,” said Spot from across the room. “Working…”
“Everybody into the mochteroofs!” Filif said.
There was a wholesale scramble for them. “Ponch,” Kit said, “if You-Know-Who can feel our transits now, you’re going to have to walk us out of here: It doesn’t seem to be able to feel you. ‘Mela, here, get in—”
Nita stood for a moment more with her hand against Memeki’s carapace. Memeki swung herself around toward Nita, looked at her, and once again Nita was briefly dazzled by the reflections: mirror-shade eyes, dewdrops, and, suddenly, another eye looking out at her from one of the reflections—
Nita recoiled in terror as the myriad sparks of dark fire inside Memeki buzzed and jostled against one another with sudden rage. Nita jerked her hand away. “We’ll get you back to the grubbery,” she said, and turned and ran for her mochteroof.
“Ponch, where’s the leash?” Kit said.
I have it here.
“Great. Fil—”
“I thought we might wind up needing this kind of transit: I left an open receptor for the leash in all the mochteroof spells. Tell me the words for your end of the spell. I can chain them together.”
He thinks of everything, Nita thought as she got to her mochteroof and put her hands up against it. He’s a better Senior than any of us. Where’d we be without him? She melted straight through the virtual carapace, into the dim green insides of it. Light outside went monochrome, restating itself as heat and cool rather than light and darkness; the cavern around them blazed like day. Nita found the spell-handles inside that would let her wear the mochteroof in automatic mode, like a tight-fitting suit, and spoke the words in the Speech to activate each one. “Don’t worry about spoken conversation,” Filif said. “It’ll stay in-circuit; only wizards will be able to hear it.”
Nita nodded. “It’s in novice mode; all you have to do is walk,” she heard Kit saying to Carmela, who was inside one of the mochteroofs now. “Walk the way you usually do … Uh, maybe not that way, but just—”
“Thank you so much,” Carmela said sweetly, “but it’s not like this is the entertainment system and I need a little kid to program it for me or anything.”
Nita could just hear Kit gritting his teeth. “Ponch,” he said. “You ready?”
Always.
“Let’s go!”
They all stepped forward, vanishing—
—and came out together in some anonymous City tunnel, strung out along it: Kit and Ponch first, with Nita, Carmela, Ronan, and Memeki close behind them, and Roshaun and Filif and Dairine, with Spot, bringing up the rear. Inside the City, everything was terribly quiet—a heavy, hot, unechoing silence like being in a closed room.
Nita stood still with the others for a moment, listening, and looking around at the strange papery walls with their endless messages: The Commorancy is all, the Outside is the Enemy, the different is the dangerous. But clearer than any of the writings was the message that she felt all around her, thousands of point-sources of darkness, inert for the moment but ready to awaken: the avatar-presence of the Lone Power in every single Yaldiv, owning every soul in the City, each one ready and eager to do Its will. They’re bad news, she could just hear Darryl saying. Deadly. And I think if you hang around where they are, somebody’s going to get killed.
Nita was trembling with nerves and sheer weariness. Stronger far now than the individual Yaldiv avatars in its pressure against her mind was the sense of one presence that was no longer running on automatic. Nita could sense it right through the walls, a core of burning darkness which was definitely the parent of the sparks of dark fire inside Memeki. It’s not going to wait for matters to take their course, Nita thought.
She glanced behind her. Through the shell of Filif’s mochteroof, she could see the dark green light of a locator spell. It’s as Ponch thought, Filif said, his eye-berries glowing faintly through the mochteroof‘s illusion-field as he looked at the others. Our cavern is full of warriors again; they’ve broken in through a new tunnel. Easily a hundred of them.
“At least we’re not there,” Kit said. “And they may waste a little more time thinking we are, and looking for us.” He glanced back at Memeki. “So, to the grubbery?”
Nita turned to Memeki. The Yaldah rubbed her foreclaws together, shivering.
“Yes,” she said. “If I’m not there when the others wake, they will raise the alarm.”
It’s raised already! Nita wanted to say, but she restrained herself. Give her the time to realize the truth. Until it’s plain there’s no more time left. “Ponch, you know the way?” Nita said.
Of course. He sounded faintly offended. We’re not very close; if they were waiting for us, I wanted a chance to know about it and go somewhere else. But we’re not very far, either.
“Let’s go,” Kit said.
Ponch led them down through that tunnel and paused at the end of it; the passage they were in grew broader, and two narrower ones led off left and right. He chose the right-hand one, and Kit followed him.
One after another, cautious, they went after. Nita was listening with all of her for the sound of other claws on the floor of the tunnel but heard nothing. Next to her, Carmela—who had been watching Ronan as she walked—staggered into the right-hand wall and rebounded. Ronan rolled his eyes and looked away.
“‘Mela,” Nita said under her breath, “you need to stop concentrating on someone else’s hottitude and get serious, okay? We are not in a safe place here.”