howl. 'Where?!'
'Anywhere! Somewhere far! More than fifty miles. I'll cover you for the overlays, just go!'
He looked at Nita. 'Copernicus,' he said, and muttered three words, and vanished.
The air went whoomfinto where he had been: not the usual explosion. Nita smiled slightly, considering that Kit had been as impressed by Johnny's expertise as she had.
Outside, car doors slammed. 'Here, let me get that for you, Doris,' Johnny's voice said.
They all went to the door. Johnny was pulling the glass sliding door aside. Behind him came Doris Smyth, holding something wrapped in a pastel-striped pillowcase. The something shone through the pillowcase as if it were on fire: a still, cool, changeless fire that nonetheless rippled and wavered on everything it touched, like the sun looked at from underwater. 'Back office, Anne?' said Doris's voice, sounding strained but cheerful.
'Right. Don't open the door, just walk through it.'
'Certainly. Johnny, you handle that; I have my hands full.'
There was no room for them all, down that narrow hall. Nita and Ronan stood there and watched as the three older wizards walked down past the bookshelves and turned the corner, out of view. Except that they weren't entirely out of view at all; they were faintly visible in the reflected light from the Cup, even through the intervening walls. Nita shook her head. 'Don't do things like this at home, do you?' Ronan said.
She grinned at him and headed back into the kitchen. 'Neither do you, buster. Not as a rule, anyway.'
She went to fill the kettle for the next inevitable round of tea. 'Where's Copernicus?' Ronan said. 'On the Moon. Southern hemisphere.' 'The Moon?!'
Nita shrugged. 'She said more than fifty miles. That should be enough.' Then she looked at Ronan's face as she plugged the kettle in. 'Haven't you been there?' 'To the Moon? No!'
'Why not? It's great.' He opened his mouth, and Nita suddenly felt annoyed at herself. 'The overlays, I guess. I'm sorry. Look, there have to be some places you can teleport from safely. If you can find one, and hop over and see us, we'll run the wizardry through for you, and show you around. It's no big deal.'
'I'd like that,' he said, and smiled slightly. It was a look Nita hadn't seen on him often; the chip off the shoulder for the moment, and just a touch of wistfulness. 'It must be grand,' he said, 'being where you don't have to be afraid to do all the wizardries you know can be done.' She laughed a little, and leaned against the worktop, waiting for the kettle to boil. 'It has its downside — you wouldn't believe the trouble you can get into. Remind me to tell you about the shark who almost ate me.'
'Want a look?' Aunt Annie said, coming back into the kitchen, with Johnny and Doris behind her. 'Yeah!' Nita said. She headed down the hall, with Ronan behind her.
There was no need to do anything special. Walls meant nothing to the light of the Chalice — or rather the light of what was inside it. It was sitting on its pillowcase, the bowl of it half a meter across, the gold inlay on the outside of the bowl, and in the spirals and curves that ran down its stem and massive foot, all burning as if molten and ready to flow off the Chalice at a moment's notice. The burning came from the blue-white light filling it, a light that was liquid and was still trembling slightly from having been moved. It shone through the metal as if it were glass, and through everything else it touched.
She looked at Ronan, and away again, shaking her head. Words seemed inadequate, and out of place. But at the same time she couldn't help noticing his expression, like that of someone struggling with a memory: and oddly, not trying to remember, but to forget. .
Maybe he felt her eyes on him: he turned his gaze away from the Cup, and looked at her with a troubled expression. 'Let's get together some time soon,' he said. 'I need to talk.' Nita suddenly found herself afraid to find out what he wanted to talk about. She nodded, and went away hurriedly, back down to the kitchen.
The three older wizards were sitting around the kitchen table, waiting for the teapot to finish brewing. 'I have a message for you from the Queen,' she said. Johnny looked at her questioningly, and Nita repeated the message.
He smiled very slightly, and it was a sad look. 'She is asking,' he said, 'whether there is any hope that the world they have chosen to live in will ever come any closer to Timeheart. They love Ireland, make no mistake; but at the same time, they're of the Powers, and they long for Timeheart, where they were created. But the legends say they must stay in the world they have chosen until the One's Champion comes back with his Spear, and they lose the world of their desire.' He shook his head. 'A while yet, I think.' 'Do you want Kit back?' Nita said.
He passed a hand over his forehead, smoothing his hair back. 'Where is he?' 'The Moon.'
'That's all right, then. Wait a few minutes before you bring him back here. I can add a limiter to the binding on the Cup that'll make it at least safe for the Sword to be here with it. But the Sword will need its own binding.'
Doris poured the tea out. 'That's one less problem,' she said. 'Now if we just knew what to do about the Spear, we'd be fairly ready.'
There was silence around the table at that, and some hopeless looks. 'You couldn't find anything that would work?' Nita said, as Ronan came in and sat down again.
'My dear,' said Doris, 'we have the original Stone and the original Sword awake again. The Cup is not the original, but has ensouled very emphatically indeed. We dare not try to conjoin an inferior or weak Spear to them. They would blast it out of existence. The resouled Spear must be at least as strong as they — preferably much stronger. But we have no proper envelope. It is not strictly a change that a physicist would understand, but matter is not quite the robust stuff it was at the beginning of the world, when Creation as an art was young, and the energies of it dwelt new and hot in the nucleus of every atom. As gravity and other forces have declined over many millions of years, so has the basic — 'selfness' — of matter. You see how the resouled Treasures make everything around them look somewhat shabby and poor. The souls in them are reminding the matter they embody how matter was then. It was much closer to being alive.' 'But then the Spear's soul will remind the matter it's in. Won't it?'
'Not if the matter is simply unable to hold the soul long enough in one place for the change to take,' Johnny said. 'It'd be like trying to hold a burning coal in a Kleenex. The Spear's soul is the fiercest of them all. I had hoped I was wrong about this, but the research I've been doing over the past couple of days indicates that no spear on Earth would be strong enough now to contain the soul for long enough to do the trick: whether it had contained it before or not.' 'Off the Earth, then,' Nita said.
Johnny cocked his head. 'It's a thought that occurred to me. But the changes in matter that have happened here have happened everywhere else, too. And we keep coming back to the problem,' and he smoothed his hair back again,'that we don't have much time.' Ronan sighed and sat back. 'It's a pity we can't just make a new one,' he said.
Aunt Annie sighed too. 'Even if we had uncontaminated matter from the beginning of time,' she said, 'we wouldn't have the expertise to do anything with it. I think we're just going to have to keep looking for some other kind of answer.' She glanced over at Johnny and Doris. They nodded. Nita got up. 'I'll go and get Kit,' she said. 'Fifteen or twenty minutes be long enough?' 'Fine.'
She looked at her aunt. She nodded. 'The overlay buffer is still in place. Go ahead.' Nita said the transport spell quickly in her head, considering how much air she would need, doubling it as usual, and arranging the spell intake so that it would take the air from outside the house rather than inside — the memory of the last time she had done such a spell in her own house, without stopping to consider that her father's desk was covered with paperwork, was still much with her. She vanished.
She found Kit sitting on his favorite rock — a pumice boulder on which he had been using a sharp piece of granite to whittle the boulder into the crude likeness of a human face, for the bemusement of future lunar photographic surveys. The Sword was laid across his lap.
She climbed up beside him. 'Johnny said he should be ready for you to come back in a little while.' 'I don't want to go right back there,' Kit said, turning the Sword over in his lap and looking at it. 'Someone I want to have a talk with first.' 'Biddy,' Nita said.
Kit nodded. 'Remember what the fox said to you,' he said.
'Listen,' Nita said. 'You remember how you told me that you felt her forge was alive?' He nodded. Nita started to tell him what Doris had said about the relative 'liveness' of matter at the beginning of time.
He stopped her. 'It's OK, I heard it. I used your ears.'
She punched him. 'Illegal brain-tapping! You didn't even ask me! What if you had overheard something I was thinking?' 'What, about Ronan?'
