A Wizard Abroad yw[n&k-4 Page 11

  Nita did. The train pulled out, and Nita looked out at the north beach as they passed it; more sun- bathers, someone riding a horse at the gallop.

  "Aunt Annie," she said, "you know something. Why didn't I see your name when I went through the manual and looked in the wizards' directory?"

  "Confidentiality," her aunt said. "I wasn't "out" to you yet. The manual senses such things." She looked at Nita thoughtfully. "I suppose I really should have anticipated it," she said. "My kids came out nonwizardly, after all. But anyway, I was looking at the manual this morning. You've been busy."

  "You gotthat in one," Nita said.

  Aunt Annie smiled. "Not unusual. Things quieten down, though, after you get to be my age. I remember when I got mine: I had about three years when I hardly had a moment to myself. Then things got calm when I went off to college." "Did you have a partner?"

  The train went abruptly darkish, lit only by the feeble ceiling lights, as it passed into the tunnel bored through Bray Head. "I did for a while," she said. "But she and I parted company eventually. It happens," she said, at Nita's shocked look. "You grow apart. or one partner finds something more important than the magic. or you start disagreeing about how to work." Nita shook her head, upset. She couldn't imagine not agreeing with Kit on a plan or course of action within a matter of seconds; and indeed, there had been times when if they hadn't been able to agree that fast, they would have been dead. "Do you still talk?" she said. "Oh, yes, pretty often. We're friendly enough."

  The train burst out into the light again, revealing the beach on the other side of Bray Head, and the iron-railed promenade with its hotels and arcade, and the new half-built aquarium. "Don't worry," said Aunt Annie. "I think maybe you and your partner have been through enough trouble together that you'll be working together for a long while."

  They pulled into Bray station and changed to the sleek little bright-green Dublin Area Rapid Transit train waiting at the next platform over. About half an hour later, the train slid into Tara Street station. Nita and her aunt got out and made their way through the orange-tiled exterior, beneath the skylights and down the escalator, and went out into the streets of Dublin. It was a fascinating combination of old and new, and Nita was rather bewildered by it all at first. There were tiny cobbled alleys that seemed not to have been repaved in a hundred years, or maybe two, right next to broad streets roaring with traffic and alive with lights and people shopping; old, old churches caught in the middle of shiny new shopping centres; shouting, cheerfully messy street markets in the shadow of big department stores.

  "It takes a little while to get used to," her aunt said, as they crossed the street south of O'Connell Bridge and headed down past the stately fronts of Trinity College and the Bank of Ireland, on the way to the pedestrian precinct at Grafton Street. "If you come from one of the big cities in the States, Dublin can seem very small at first, sort of caught in a time warp; slower, more casual about things. Later. " She chuckled. "You wonder how you ever put up with a place where people are in such a hurry all the time. And you find that life can go along very well without all the "conveniences" you were used to once." She smiled. "It's the people here: they make the difference."

  They turned left at the corner of Grafton Street, heading for the National Museum. It was by the Dail, the Irish houses of parliament, and Aunt Annie clearly knew her way around it. As soon as they had paid their admission fees, she led Nita down a flight of stairs, past a sign that said TREASURY. "There are a lot of gorgeous things here," she said, "but this is probably the most famous of them."

  They stopped in front of a glass case that was thicker than any of the others scattered around the big room. No-one else was nearby. Nita moved close to look at it. The cup inside it sat on a big lucite pedestal; a bright spotlight was trained on it from above. Nita thought this might have been unnecessary. since she suspected it might be able to glow by itself.

  "The Ardagh Chalice," her aunt said softly. Nita looked at it; not just with the eyes, but with a wizard's senses, and looked as hard as she could. The Chalice was more than half a meter high and a third of a meter wide, mostly gold, with elaborate and beautiful spiral patterns worked on its sides in silver, and ornamented with rubies and topazes. The jewels were lovely enough, but Nita had more of an eye for the ornamentation on the sides. They were spell diagrams in a very antique style, and though they looked simple, that was merely an illusion created by the extreme skill of whoever had designed them. They were subtle, and potentially of huge power; but they were quiescent, emptied of their virtue. "It's not really very old," Nita said.

  "The physical aspects of it, no." Her aunt looked at it. "This chalice was made in the second century."

  "Not the Holy Grail, then," Nita said.

  Her aunt smiled slightly. "No. And yes. The Treasures might have been made by gods, but they were made of mortal matter. and matter passes. The problem is, of course, that the power put in them — the soul of the Treasures, more or less — is as immortal as the powers that made them. The soul passes on when the envelope wears out — "reincarnates", finds another "body" that's suitable. This cup was a vessel, for a while. But not any more, I think. Do you feel anything different?" Nita looked at the Cup again, longer this time. Finally she said,"'I don't know. It's as if. if you knew how to shake this awake, this "soul", you might do it. But you'd have to know how." Her aunt nodded. "We may have to work out how. Come and see the Sword." They went up a flight of stairs, through another room or two. The room they finally stopped in was full of ancient gold work: tores and stickpins and necklaces and bracelets of gold, beads and bangles, carved plates of gold linked together. "It used to be mined in Wicklow," her aunt said, "not too far from us. But by the fourth century most of it was gone. Anyway, this is worth more than any of them, if you ask me."

  The central case held the Sword. It lay there very plain against red velvet; long and lean, shaped like a willow leaf, with no gold or jewel anywhere about it — a plain bronze blade, notched, scraped, somewhat withered-looking. Nita bent close to it, feeling with all of her. "Now thisis old," she said. "Older than the Cup," said Aunt Annie. "Bronze Age, at least."

  Nita nodded. There was a faint feeling of purpose still in the old bronze, like a memory impressed on matter by a mind now gone: like the ghosts in Aunt Annie's back garden, a tape still replaying and very faintly to be heard. But there was no vigour in it, only recollection: wistful, mournful, feeble. "It might have been the real Sword once," Nita said. "But it's almost forgotten. It's not nearly as much there as the Cup. I don't think you could wake this one up." Her aunt nodded. "That's what I think too."

  Nita shook her head. "And there's nothing else in the building that's even this much awake." She sighed. "So we have the Stone, and the Cup, and something thatmight work for the Sword, but probably won't. and no Spear."

  "That about sums it up, yes. The wizards around the country will be looking for other swords that might work better. But the spirit of the Spear Luin seems to have passed completely. Either no "body" was strong enough to contain it. or it was just too powerful to be contained any more in a universe that had no suitable envelope for it, and it passed out entirely."

  Nita rather thought that it had passed. Spears were symbols of the element of Fire, and fire was the most uncontainable of the five, next to plasma. Nita began to worry. Three of the Treasures would not be enough, to judge from what the Sidhe had hinted. But she had no ideas about what to do. She looked at her aunt. "Are we done here?" "I think so. Want to go over to Grafton Street?" "Sounds good."

  They spent the afternoon doing, as her aunt had promised, touristy things; touring the shopping centre at St Stephen's Green, having tea in the Shelbourne Hotel, listening to the street performers playing on pipes and banjos and occasionally spoons. They walked over O'Connell bridge to look up the Liffey at the Halfpenny Bridge's graceful curve, one of the trademarks of Dublin; and browsed through the shops on the south side of the Halfpenny Bridge, Dublin's so-called 'Left
Bank'. They sat in O'Connell Street by the statue of the goddess of the River Liffey, relaxing in her stone bath, and were grateful for the spray, for it was hotter that afternoon than it had been all summer. Mothers put their little children in the fountain, and they splashed happily, and the patrolling Gardai smiled and looked the other way.

  About seven o'clock, Aunt Annie said, "Dinner?" Nita agreed happily, and they went off to have a pizza in a little restaurant in South Anne Street. Then they went off westward in the city, to the pub where that night's meeting would take place. The Long Hall was a handsome place, fronted in beveled glass and stained glass, all arranged so that people standing inside, in front of the windows, couldn't quite be seen from outside. Above, the glass was clear, showing the beautiful carved and painted plaster ceiling, and the gas fixtures still hanging from it. Some of them had been converted for electricity, some hadn't. They walked in, and Nita gazed admiringly at the huge polished hardwood bar, and the antique mirrors, reaching three meters up from the back of the bar to the ceiling, on the wall behind it. Carved wood and beveled glass and brass railings were everywhere. So were many cheerful people, drinking, but talking more. The place was filled with the subdued roar of a hundred conversations.

  "We're in the back room. Hi, Jack," said Aunt Annie to one of the men behind the bar. He was busy filling a glass with the creamy-dark Guinness from one of the arched taps at the bar: he nodded to Aunt Annie, but didn't say anything.

  "Jack Mourne," Aunt Annie said to Nita, as they made their way through a low carved archway into the 'back room'. "He owns the place." "Does he know what's going on?"

  "I should think he does: he's one of the Area Advisory-Specialists. What would you like to drink, hon?"

  "Can I have a Coke?" "No problem. Be right back."

  Nita found herself a seat at a small round wooden table with ornate iron legs, and waited, fidgeting a little self-consciously. She had never been in a bar by herself, though Aunt Annie seemed to think that this wasn't quite the same.She might have a point, though, Nita thought. Here, the drinking looked almost incidental. People were shouting at each other across the back room, chatting, arguing, laughing, pointing, shouting.

  "Here you go," Aunt Annie said, sitting down next to Nita with a relieved look. She handed Nita her drink and sipped briefly at her pint. "Perfect," she said. "Jack pulls the best pint in this part of town."

  "Aunt Annie," Nita said, "if this is a wizards' meeting — how are you going to keep the ordinary people out of here?"

  "Spell on the back-room archway," Aunt Annie said. "Look closely at the carving when you go to the rear Ladies. Non wizards hit it and decide they don't feel like going back there after all — on normal nights, Jack just takes the spell finial off: that little carved flower in the lower right-hand corner. And no-one can hear us through all this din anyway; but there are voice-scramblers on. Jack makes anything wizardly come out sounding like an argument about football. Nice scrambler — took him a while to write. But he's one of our best writers. If you need a custom spell in this part of the world, it's Jack you come to, or Marie Shaughnessy down in Arklow, or Charles and Alison Redpath up north in Aghalee."

  'Thenall these people back here are wizards?" Nita said, looking around her in astonishment. She had never been in such a large gathering of her own before.

  "Oh yes. All that could come at short notice, of course. Relax for a while; we can't do anything until Doris and Johnny get here."

  So Nita drank her Coke and listened to the accents around her, and chatted every now and then with the people who came up to her aunt to say hello. If she had been mired in Irish accents before, the situation got much worse now: she heard about twenty more from as many different people, no two of them the same, and some very odd indeed. In addition, there were a lot of people from Northern Ireland down for this meeting, and their accents astounded her; they sounded more like New Yorkers than anything else, though more nasal. They all seemed very open, friendly people, which to Nita seemed a little strange at first: seeing what most Americans saw of Northern Ireland from the news, she half-expected them to be furtive and depressed, as if afraid a bomb might suddenly go off under them. But none of them were. One man in his thirties, a jocund young man in a leather jacket covered with patches, told Nita he had never seen a bomb or been within fifty miles of one, nor had anyone he knew. The peaceful small-town life he described seemed hard to reconcile with all the newsfilm Nita had seen of taped-off, shattered buildings, and the people with ski masks and rifles.

  There was a slight commotion at the door as Mrs Smyth came in under the archway. "Hey Doris, how they cuttin'?" someone shouted. Doris Smyth looked at the speaker and said something clear and carrying in Irish that provokeda roar of approval from the listeners, and caused the person who had asked the question to be genially pummelled.

  Behind Mrs Smyth, someone else came in; a short man in a long overcoat and tartan scarf. At the sight of him, many of the wizards in the room called, "Johnny!" or "Shaun!", and there was a general stir of approval through the back room. Nita bent over to her Aunt Annie and said, "Who's that?"

  "Shaun O'Driscoll," said Aunt Annie. "Or Johnny, some people call him. He's the Area Senior for Western Europe." 'Wow," Nita said, never having seen so high-ranked a wizard before. Area Seniors answered only to Regional Seniors, and Regionals to the three Seniors for Earth. When she thought of the Senior in charge of all wizards from Shannon to Moscow and Oslo to Gibraltar, she had imagined someone more imposing — not a little man with thinning hair and (as he took his coat off) a tracksuit. He didn't look very old. He had a fierce-looking moustache, and his eyes were very cool; he looked around the room and returned all the greetings without ever quite smiling. It was the kind of effect, Nita thought, that made you want totry to get him to smile. It would be worth seeing when it happened, for his face was otherwise a nest of laugh-lines.

  Doris and Johnny were got pints by another of the gathered wizards, and people started settling down, leaning against the walls when they ran out of seats. Johnny didn't sit, but stood in the middle of the room, waiting for them to settle, like a teacher with a big unruly class. "Thanks for coming," he said. "I know this was short notice, but we've had some serious problems crop up in the past few days, and there was no way to hope to manage them except by requiring an intervention meeting."

  There were some heads turned at this, and some murmuring under breath among the assembled wizards. "I know that wasn't the way it was announced," Johnny said, "but we turn out to have less time for this discussion than was originally thought when we organized this meeting via the phone tree last night and this morning. We have had serious transitional leakages all over the island, with some sympathetic transitionals on mainland Europe; and this condition has to be contained as quickly as possible. There have been echoes and ripples as far away as China and Peru."

  More stirring at this. "Anyway," Johnny said, "I want to thank those of you who were in the middle of other assignments and found them changed, or who were off active and were suddenly reactivated. The Powers that Be may not thank you until later, but I like to do it early. I also want to welcome those of you who have come unusual distances, including Nita Callahan. Stand up, Nita."

  Nita flushed fiercely, and hoped it didn't show too much in the pub's dimmish light. She stood up. "Nita has been reassigned here temporarily courtesy of North American Regional. She has blood affinities with this area, and was recently involved in the New York incursion and the Hudson Canyon intervention in June, and more recently, with the Reconfiguration; Dairine Callahan is her sister."

  There was a stir at this. Nita nodded, smiled a little uncertainly at Johnny; he gestured her to sit down. "We're glad to have you," he said. "Bear with us: we do things a little differently here than you're used to, and if you think of anything that seems useful during this discussion, don't hesitate to sing out."

  Huh, Nita thought, sitting down. And, Reassigned courtesy of North American Regional? Who's that
? Not Tom and Carl. Someone — or something — further in, or higher up? But she put the thought aside for the moment.

  "Over the past four nights we've had "sideways" leakages in twenty-three out of twenty-six counties," Johnny said, "and how Monaghan, Wexford and Westmeath were missed is a mystery to us, especially since Westmeath contains the Hill of Tara. In the twenty-three counties, about ninety wizards have experienced timeslides, live remembrances of the so-called "mythological" period, "solid" remembrances that returned interactions, viewings of extradimensional objects without doing the wizardries required for such viewings, and even physical intervention by nonphysical entities or creatures not native to this reality, including physical attacks on occasion. Some of these incursions have required timeline patching to keep innocent bystanders from thinking they'd lost their minds — or actually losing them. One of us met Cuchullain hi warp spasm, which is enough to turn anyone's hair: that it happened in the middle of the big shopping centre in Tallaght didn't help, either. The Brown Bull of Cooley was seen crossing the dual carriageway north of Shannon; it wandered down on to the larnrod Eireann tracks and caused a derailment, though fortunately neither the train drivers nor any of the other people on the train saw it, and by great good luck no- one was hurt. Possibly most to the point, there was an earthquake in the fields north of Naas, at the old site of the Battle of Moytura."

  More stirring over this, and some anxious looks. Johnny made quiet-down gestures. "It was only about three point one on the Richter scale, and nothing came of it but some broken china. The Lia Fail is still managing to hold this island in one place and one piece, no matter what the politicians say. But how long it can hold matters so stable is a good question. Much of its old virtue is gone, as you all know. Another such attack will certainly be more effective, on both natural and supernatural levels."

  "Johnny," said one of the wizards sitting back by the wall, a handsome little dark-haired woman, "these transitional leakages — are we sure that something else isn't causing them? Something European?"