// I let it go now, if once I throw the Spear, I become the Power, become Lugh, become the Champion. Never mortal again. .
Make him do it, Kit cried, frantic, to him and the Other who listened. He's going to get the whole world killed!
No! It doesn't work that way! Nita was equally frantic. He has to do it himself! Ronan — and she gulped — go on! Silence. .
. .and then Ronan lifted the Spear. It shouted triumph as Ronan leaned back, and then it leapt out of his hands, roaring like the shock wave of a nuclear explosion, trailing lightnings and a wild wind behind it as it went. That terrible eye opened wide in shock as a fire more terrible than its own hurtled at it. In the instant of the Eye's opening, the pain increased a hundred times over. Nita screamed and fell. .
. .and then came the piercing. Nothing alive on that field failed to feel it, for everything alive had entropy in its bones; all cries went up together as the essence of all burning ate the darkness to its heart, and however briefly, to each of theirs. It was painful, but a terrible relief: terrible because the mortals present knew that, once they returned to the real world, that small personal darkness would be back with them again.
Something else, though, did not find it a relief; something that had almost nothing but entropy about it. The scream of the Lone Power in Its shape as Balor went up, and up, and would have torn the sky if the sky were made of anything solider than air. It took a long time to die away. The pain was gone, at least. Nita got up to her knees and looked around her, blinded no longer, though her ears were ringing. Kit was just getting up next to her: she helped him up, hugged him. 'Are you all right?'
'I'll live,' he said, sounding dazed, and hugging back. 'Where's Ronan?' He was standing there not too far away, looking fairly dazed himself. The Spear was in his hand again, but quiet now, not straining to go any-where. Ronan was leaning on it, panting, his forehead against the shaft of it; so he did not see the tall shadow rising up over him, towering higher and higher; the immense shape of a woman dressed in black, but with light flickering in the folds of the darkness like a promise, and long dark hair stirring in the wind that had begun to come down from the heights, blowing the blackness of the clouds out over the sea, so that high up the sky began to show again, dark blue, with here and there a star.
Against the growing light, and the clean darkness, that woman raised her arms, and her voice went up into the silence like thunder. 'Let the hosts and the royal heights of Ireland hear it,' the Morrigan cried, and even Ronan looked up now in terror and wonder, 'and all its chief rivers and invers, and every rock and tree; victory over the Fomori, and they never again to be in this land! Peace up to the skies, the skies down to the earth, the earth under the skies; power to every one!' The wizards and the Sidhe shouted approval. And the wind rose, and took the clouds away; and the Morrigan's great shape too bent sideways in that wind and dissipated like a mist, though Nita particularly noticed how her eyes seemed to dwell on Ronan before they vanished completely. You know, Kit said in Nita's head, it's funny, but she looks kind of like Biddy. She shook her head in bemusement, and she and Kit went over to Ronan. He was looking up at the sky, still leaning on the Spear. But when he looked down at last, and saw them coming, he straightened up slightly and smiled. Even through her weariness, Nita was very relieved; that abstracted, inhuman look was gone completely.
'It came back,' he said to Nita, sounding very bemused. 'By itself.' He looked ahead of him. The great bulk that had first been Balor and then the Hunter was nothing but a hill now; there was only the vaguest shape about it that suggested that awful bloated bulk. Grass grew on it, and as they looked a rabbit hopped out of cover under a thorn bush growing on it, and began to graze.
'I didn't dare let it go,' Ronan said.
Nita nodded. 'I know. But you're OK — aren't you?'
He looked at her. 'He's still in there, if that's what you mean.'
Kit shook his head. 'I think you may be stuck with Him,' he said. 'But remember which side He's on. I think He'll behave. if you do. If you're lucky, you'll never hear from Him again.' 'And if I'm not lucky?' Ronan said.
'Those who serve the Powers,'' said the small voice from down by their feet,' 'themselves become the Pow-ers.' It's usually the way.'
'You,' Nita said, picking Tualha up. 'I didn't know you knew language like that — that last bit. Don't think I didn't hear.'
'I got carried away,' Tualha said, sounding pleased.
All around them the light was growing. Nita looked up and around, watching the clouds retreating, and the brightness growing still, though there was no sun now, but a soft violet evening all around them. Everything was beginning to burn with a certainty surpassing anything Nita hatt seen even in the duns of the Sidhe.
Beside her, one of the wizards, that handsome woman with the dark hair, said with a chuckle, 'Ah. the Celtic twilight.' But Nita knew a joke when she heard one, and also knew that more excellent clarity drawing it-self about them; she had seen it before. All around them, the wizards gathered there began to shine in that light, seeming more perfectly themselves than ever before; the Sidhe, already almost too fair to bear, began to acquire a calmer beauty, more settled, older, deeper.
Johnny was standing by the Queen's steed. He looked up at her now, and said, 'Well, madam, you asked me a question once. Would your world ever draw closer to Timeheart, and end your exile? And I could only give you the answer that the bards gave us long ago: not until the Champion comes with His Spear, and the world of your desire is lost.' He laughed softly. 'But then the fulfillment of a prophecy rarely looks like our images of it. There is no journeying from your world to Timeheart. for Timeheart is widening to take your world in. Will this do?' She bowed her head. 'This will do, Senior. Do you take your people home, for shortly this world will per-fect itself beyond their ability to bear it. at least, just yet. And we…' She looked towards the sunset and said, 'We will prepare for the dawn.'
Johnny looked at Nita's aunt. 'We've got a dawn of our own waiting for us,' he said. 'Do the honors?'
She lifted Fragarach. It burned like a star in her hands, and the other Treasures blazed in answer as the wind rose in the east and blew into the opening gap in the air before her. The dark outline of Castle Matrix grew in the early morning of their own world, and the song of a single early blackbird drifted through it.
As one the heads of the People of the Hill turned towards that thin, sweet music. But then one by one they looked towards the light slowly growing in their own northeastern sky; sunrise following hard on the heels of sunset, as was normal in this part of the world, in the heart of summer. The splendor of morning in a world growing ever nearer to Timeheart began to swell in the sky, blinding, glorious. .
The wizards looked around them with regret and moved through the doorway in the air. Nita and Kit and Tu- alha, followed by Ronan, were near the rear of the group; they turned, there in the parking lot of Castle Matrix, and looked through the gateway back into Tir na nOg. 'I am sorry,' Nita's aunt said softly to Johnny,'to have to leave our dead there. Another world, so far away.'
Johnny looked sorrowful as well — but there was a strange edge of thoughtfulness to the look, an expression of mystery, almost of joy. 'Yes, but. look what's happening to the place. It won't be just another world for long. it's being drawn into the very centre of things. Can you really be dead if you're in Timeheart?' he said. 'Can anything.?'
Northeastward, over the sea, a line of light, blinding, brighter than a sun, broke over the water. The Spear Luin in Ronan's hands flamed at the touch of that light on its steel. All that country on the other side of the gate- way flushed with a light more powerful, seemingly more solid than the solid things it fell on, and burned, trans- figured. . The gateway closed.
'So,' Johnny said, turning away.'Little by little, we make the Oath come true.'
Nita and Kit and Ronan looked at each other. Behind them, the blackbird sang: and they heard the young wizard in the leather jacket say, 'Oh, well. What's for breakfast?'
They went to find out.
'Now that things have quietened down somewhat,' Johnny was saying to Nita's aunt in her kitchen the day after next,'the Chalice goes back to the museum, obviously. And the Stone naturally stays where it is. But Fraga- rach.'
'You take it,' Aunt Annie said. 'The neighbors would talk, if they saw something like that in here. You've got a castle. hang it on the wall there some place.' 'The Spear,' Johnny said, 'will stay with Ronan, natu-rally.'
'I wouldn't try to take it away from him,' Kit said from the living-room, where he was playing with the teletext functions of the TV set. 'It'd probably eat you alive.' 'Quite.' He chuckled. 'And I see that we're losing you two.'
