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 this
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 that
'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.
'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
