A Wizard Abroad

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?'

Johnny shook his head. 'I'd prefer to blame Local Europe myself, Morgan, but we're out of luck on this one. All indications point back at us.' 'Then what are we going to do?'

Johnny looked grim. 'We're going to have to recreate Moytura, I think. Unless someone else can think of something better.'

Half the room started muttering to the other half. Johnny waited for it to settle down. 'Recreate Moytura withwhat?' said the young wizard Nita had been talking to, the young guy in the leather jacket.

'Good question,' Johnny said. 'Two of the Four Treasures are still with us. The Stone is awake again, re- ensouled. The 'souls' of the other three Treasures are still in the world, or the Worlds, somewhere. We are going to have to recall them to suitable physical envelopes, and then take them out into battle against the Lone Power. We know that with them, we have a chance. Without them… ' He shrugged.

Relative silence fell for a few moments. 'Who does the 'going into battle' bit?' said another voice from somewhere against the back wall.

'Lacking one of the Powers that Be, probably Doris and I to lead,' Johnny said. 'And all of you we can get together in one place.'

'Where are you going to get 'suitable envelopes', then?' said another voice.

'In most cases, we'll try to use the old ones,' Doris said. 'They've worked before: with a little coercion, they may work again. The Lia Fail is awake; the Ardagh Chalice, we think we can reawaken.'

'Don't you think the museum will miss it?' said the young wizard in the leather jacket. Doris smiled slightly. 'Not if a wizardry that looks and weighs exactly the same is sitting in the museum case,' she said. 'If the