got out of the car. Biddy's truck was parked by that wall, and the forge was missing from the back of it. The oak door swung open for them. There was Johnny in his tracksuit, looking very ordinary except for what he held in one hand. It was a rod that burned with light. Nita recognized a tool she had used once before herself, a rowan wand that had spent time out in moonlight: a potent weapon for a lower-level wizard, though she couldn't imagine what Johnny needed one for. 'Come on in,' he said.
Nita and Kit went in behind her aunt, looking around in curiosity. About two meters inside the door was a long, heavy wine-coloured brocade curtain. 'Draughts,' Johnny said, pushing it aside; 'you wouldn't believe the draughts we get in here in the winter.'
They passed through it and looked around, and up, and up. This was the castle's main hall, about fifteen meters across; it had whitewashed walls, black-and-white tiled floors, and big, handsome, polished wooden tables. Immediately to their left was a huge fireplace with a strange sort of grate that seemed to be designed to hold the fire's coals up vertically rather than horizontally; a big iron spit and a crank to turn it stood in front, and there were smaller fireplaces, grills actually, on either side of the main grate. Tall arched windows, about two meters wide, were let into the west and south walls. The wooden tables had been pulled off to the sides of the big room, and in the middle of the floor, where all the tiles were dark, a most elaborate spell diagram was in the process of being laid out in white. Nita sniffed, and from her art classes identified the sweetish smell of water-based acrylic paint.
'Doesn't scuff off in the middle of a spell,' Johnny said, picking up a brush. 'Anyway. Welcome to Matrix.'
'Have you always lived here?' Kit said, looking around in admiration. 'Did you inherit it?' 'Oh, no,' Johnny said. 'I found this place in ruins. A big tree growing through what was left of the roof, right about here. .' He pointed to the centre of the room, where the spell diagram was. 'We had it removed when we started to renovate the place, my wife and I. She's in London at the moment with our son. But the Normans built the place, originally, some time in the eleven hundreds, when they were trying to subdue Ireland.' He chuckled and looked down at his work. 'They fell in love with it and got 'more Irish than the Irish', as the saying goes.' 'Seems to be a lot of that going around,' Kit said.
Johnny nodded. 'They built this place on the site of an old holy well. it's still here. But more than that. Matrix had been a centre for a lot of kinds of faith, or power, over the years. The Mother Goddesses were honoured here first. that's where its first name came from. Matrix means 'womb', but the older form was probably 'matricis' — the Castle of the Mothers. Then for a while I think the well was sacred to Brigit, the old fire-goddess; and later to Saint Brigid, the Mary of the Gael as they called her. Other mysteries were here later. There was some connection with the Knights Templar; some of them said this was one of the Grail Castles. But all those came later. We have older business tonight.' 'Are you about ready?' Aunt Annie said.
'Just about. Waiting on Biddy and Dairine. Ronan's in the back with Doris, making tea.' 'Where else,' Kit muttered.
'Give it time, you'll get used to it,' Nita said. She wandered over to the diagram that Johnny was working on, noticing the elegance and cleanliness of it. Half the figures in the Speech that she was used to tracing out laboriously and in whole, here were only hinted at; a single graceful stroke 'holding the place' for a figure or diagram much more complex. I guess when you're Senior for half a continent, though, you get enough practice to be able to do that. It was a big five-noded diagram, with a separate circle for each of the Treasures — each written around with the reinforcing and warding spells that each specific Treasure would need — and a fourth empty circle for the starsteel that would become the Spear. That fourth circle was particularly densely written-in, and Nita could understand why. The spell there was for the magnetic bottle that would be needed to confine the starsteel and cool it down until it was safe to work; for in its native condition inside the star it would not be solid metal, or even molten, but iron plasma at something more than seven thousand degrees Kelvin. If there was any specific part of the spell diagram Nita would have been interested in double-checking, that was it. But again the shorthand that Johnny was using was a little beyond her.
Nita stopped then, suddenly, and looked down as Johnny finished one character and touched it with the rowan rod. The acrylic flared briefly bright, then died down again. Nita stared at the floor. 'Something wrong?' Johnny said. 'There's something down there.'
She was aware of Kit looking at her uncomprehendingly from off to one side, where he had been examining a set of old pikes mounted against the wall. 'Yes, there is,' Johnny said. 'I didn't expect you to feel it, but then a lot of wizards older and more experienced than you don't. There's a power in the earth here; not the earth itself, though. The water table runs fairly high here, and this castle's element is Water. No surprise, since the place is more or less haunted by the 'female principle'. You saw the little stream that runs down by the forge, out by where you parked? We'll be doing work down there later.'
Nita stood there just feeling it — a long, slow swelling, biding its time, caring nothing for the flash and dazzle and busyness of life, but only for slow nourishment, things growing, things prospering, birth, being. She glanced up at Johnny and said, 'This is the only place where we could do what we have to, isn't it.'
'To keep fire from getting out of hand,' he said, 'water, always. One way or another, we have plenty of it here.'
Doris came in, followed by Ronan with the tea-tray. He put it down on one of the tables and joined Nita and Kit as they looked at the diagram. Johnny finished one last figure, then stood up. 'Tidy enough?' he said. 'I miss anything?'
Nita shook her head in complete helpless ignorance. Kit said, 'Don't look at me,' and moved off to pour himself a cup of tea. Doris came to stand by Johnny and look the diagram over. 'All names seem to be in place,' she said. Her gaze dwelt particularly on one spot, which Nita had noticed earlier and not known what to make of. While the rest of the spell was written in shorthand, the names of the participants were all written out in full, as was vitally necessary. Your name in the Speech was meant to describe you completely, and to work with a shortened version of your name was to dangerously shortchange yourself of your own potential power. The name written in the spot Nita was examining, though, was not the complex, fussy thing that most human names were. It was simple, just six curves and a stroke. Names that short tended to be like short words in the dictionary the shorter they were, the more meanings they tended to have — and mortals did not have names like that one, all power and age. But then again, one of them spelling tonight was not mortal. Still there's something odd about it. The usual 'continuation' curve is cut off awful short. .
'Hi, y'all,' said Dairine as she swung in through the brocade curtain. 'What's happenin'? All set? Oh,' she said, stopping at the edge of the diagram and taking a long look at it. 'Does it meet with your approval?' Johnny said.
'Looks fine to me. Yo, Spot!' she called, looking over her shoulder. The laptop computer came scuttling in and sat itself down under a table.
'You picked out a star yet?' Nita said to Dairine, as her sister paused beside her. Dairine shook her head. 'Can't predict the positions that accurately from this end,' she said. 'We're just going to have to wait until the timeslide's fastened, and then have a look around and pick one that looks good.'
'Just make sure you pick a star that's not scheduled to have inhabited planets later,' Kit said from the other side of the spell diagram.
Dairine looked at him with mild amusement. 'Kit, from that end of time, it's already happened. There never was a star to have planets.'
'You hope,' Kit said. 'If it didn't work, back then, then the star's either still just fine, or it's long since gone nova from its core being tampered with. and we're all going to be so much plasma in about fifteen minutes.'
Dairine grinned at him. 'Adds spice to life, doesn't it? Don't worry, Kit. I'm here.'
Kit looked at Nita with an expression that was eloquent of what he thought that was worth. Nita shrugged at him. She is pretty hot stuff at the moment, she said privately. If she messes this up, we all will be, Kit replied.
That was true enough. Nita had never had a Senior spelling with her, let alone the Senior for a whole continent. In the past it would have lent her a lot of peace of mind. At the moment, though, it didn't seem to be helping much. Pre-spell nerves, Kit said. Me too.
It was a small consolation. She sat down for a moment, watching Johnny go over the last few details of the spell diagram with the rowan wand to activate and check the separate character groups. The curtain to the kitchen wing stirred, and Biddy came in slowly, carrying what looked a long, wide bar of metal.
She placed the object inside the node of the spell diagram that was meant to contain the iron plasma, and
