Games Wizards Play Read online

  In the airless environment, the normal silence that fell around a working spell—the sound of the universe listening to what you wanted—was much harder to detect. It became more something you felt on your skin, the protecting force field having no power to shield you from the basic forces that powered both it and everything else in existence. Kit could feel the universe pushing in around him as he spoke: paying attention, bearing down on him the way the overshooting missile had pushed down on his force field before. At its greatest pressure, everything went dark—

  Then everything flashed bright again as Kit came out in the middle of another patch of pale dusty terrain. Here a gravel-strewn plain stretched away to the foreshortened horizon in every direction, with only the occasional hump or low rille to break the bright-streaked flatness. This was normal for Hipparchus, which was a very old crater and very beat-up because of its age. Its rim was mostly flattened down to low hills by meteor strikes; its main basin had long ago been flooded by black basalt lava, then cracked into gravel over many millennia by countless micrometeorite impacts and the extremes of heat and cold. The only feature of interest anywhere nearby was a low cloud of dust a few hundred yards away and to Kit’s right. In it half-seen human shapes were moving around fast, while hard bright lines of colored light zapped up out of the cloud. Theoretically this group had come up here as spectators, but with some of the people involved—particularly Darryl—Kit had always suspected it wouldn’t take long before a session of laser tag broke out.

  Much closer, off to Kit’s left and near a cluster of big grainy gray boulders, a small crowd was gathered. Most of them were talking hard, though there was no way to be sure what they were saying outside the bubble-thin skin of the communal force field dome that was holding in their shared air. Kit had his suspicions, though.

  He bounced over to them in the shallow jumpwalk that astronauts and wizards passing through learned in a hurry on the Moon. Leaning against the biggest boulder, in the middle of the group, was Ronan Nolan, tall and dark and angular in his usual black leather jacket and black shirt and faded black jeans. Lissa was there, laughing and shaking her head at Matt Kingston, who was wearing one of his trademark loud Hawaiian shirts and long baggy khaki shorts. He was holding his open wizard’s manual under Lissa’s nose and pointing at something on the page with an aggrieved expression, but Lissa wasn’t looking at it, just waving Matt away and laughing. Ritchie was there, too, leaning against Lissa’s boulder and looking short and dark and a lot less dead than he had ten minutes before. Also gathered around were some of the rest of Matt’s team—tall, thin, dark Ahmed, and those two blond girls who always turned up together, one tall and broad, the other short and skinny. Which one is Heléne and which one’s Jeannine? I can never remember—Kit lifted a hand in greeting and glanced around. “Where’s Walt?”

  Ronan gestured toward the nearby dustcloud. “He got bored with being dead,” he said in that south-Dublin drawl of his, “so he’s off getting that way again with the laser tag crowd.”

  “Glutton for punishment,” Ritchie said, pulling off his jacket and shaking it in what looked like the most recent of many attempts to get rid of the moondust that had buried him when the next-to-last missile strike took him out.

  Ronan waved away the dust. “So listen, Kit: Matt’s having some trouble with your solution—”

  “Not with the solution, that worked okay, more than okay, who could miss the way everything in sight blew up? But you ran over the time limit!” Matt was a little abrasive at the best of times, but in situations like this the Aussie in his voice sometimes got so sharp and shrill that when he talked fast it was tough to follow him. “Ronan said that once the scenario hit the T-minus-five point, everybody had to either enact their solution or hand over to the next team—”

  Kit shook his head and reached out sideways, and his hand vanished up to the wrist in the empty space off to his right as he felt around in his otherspace pocket for his own manual. “Wasn’t what he said at all,” Kit said as he pulled his manual out and flipped it open, paging through to the section where the scenario details and guidelines were stored. “And if you’d read this stuff more than once before you get here, it could be useful, because your memory’s not exactly perfect—”

  The usual argument promptly got under way. Matt was what Ronan liked to call a “rules lawyer”: not a bad loser as such, but if things didn’t go the way he thought they should have during a war game, he had a gift for finding all kinds of things wrong with the setup—failed communications, some part of the rules that you hadn’t spelled out, as if you were talking to a kindergartner, a tiny point of logic that was blatantly obvious to everyone else but which suddenly made no sense to Matt. “You should have started your wizardry going before the five-minute limit, and if you weren’t ready you had to clear the next team to go, because—”

  “That way you’d have had the next three whole minutes to grandstand over the big complex spell structure you’d built and you were powering up on,” Lissa said from on top of the boulder where she sat, arching her neck so that she gazed down at Matt as if from a great ironic height. “All the drama, all the tension! Like watching the bomb in a spy movie count down until you pull the big save out of the bag just as the bad guys are gonna break through into the base.”

  “We’d have been so impressed,” Kit said. “And you’d have made a big deal over it for days! Except you know what? You were still building the spell.”

  Matt scowled. “And you were rushing your construction, too, so when you finally finished it, it wasn’t fast enough on the execution end,” Lissa said. “And so we had time to execute ours first, and beat you, and that’s the size of that!” She started fist-pumping again, with both fists this time, doing a little sitting-down victory dance on the rock and briefly losing contact with it in the light gravity.

  Both the blond wizards gave Matt a wry, amused told-you-so look that suggested Lissa’s analysis was on the money. Matt rolled his eyes and turned to Ronan. “That shouldn’t matter! And if you weren’t leaving enough wiggle room in the rules so that your buddies’d pick up the hint and figure out how to squeeze through them—”

  Kit gave Matt an annoyed look. “Just because Ronan and I hang out,” Kit said, “doesn’t mean we spend any of that time plotting sleazy ways to win. What’d be the point?”

  Matt had the grace to look embarrassed. “Okay, sorry, I meant that if our thing had executed—”

  “If the Lone Power had wheels, it’d be an SUV,” Hélene said. “Matt, let it go!”

  Matt said a few words in the Speech which when delivered in his present tone weren’t designed to slow down entropy. “But it never had a chance,” he said to Kit, “because you started your own little drama. The whole ‘last words’ thing—you played me!”

  Lissa spluttered with laughter again, drumming the side of the boulder with her heels. “Yes we did!”

  Matt glared at Ronan. “And you let them!”

  Ronan looked angelically unconcerned. “Hey, I just designed the setup. How you moved through it was your business.”

  Matt kept on protesting. But Kit doubted this was going to go on much longer, as Jeannine and Heléne were already laughing and poking Matt in good-natured mockery, and the rest of his team were giving him looks plainly suggesting that he give it up. Ronan just stood there in patient-umpire mode and let Matt run down, while Kit stood there scuffing at the regolith underfoot and pretending to pay attention.

  Finally Matt simply waved his hands in the air in a “Whatever . . .” gesture and shook his head. “Fine, let it stand.”

  Ronan glanced around. “Anything else need discussion?”

  Heads shook no around the two teams. “Then if we can please get our schedules sorted out for next time?” Ronan said. “As some of us have other things to do besides get our pants full of moondust . . .”

  Those who used physical versions of the wizard’s manual got them out, and heads were lowered over various books and cod
ices and electronic devices as people started synchronizing their calendars and looking for matching gaps in their busy lives. As this process went forward Kit glanced from one wizard to another of the two teams, privately appreciating them . . . a process he wouldn’t have admitted to unless pushed. They were a diverse and motley crew—some of them, like Matt, Kit had met in the heat of the Pullulus crisis that had threatened so much of known space, leaving younger wizards alone to deal with the deadly darkness that was eating away the stars. Others, like Lissa, had become involved months back on the fringes of the project to discover what had happened to the long-lost Martian species, and had met up with Kit after he’d found himself stuck right in the center of it. In every case they were people Kit liked a lot, though they could be irritating in ways that were still taking him a while to get used to. Fortunately most of them were also enough fun to be around that Kit was finding it easy to get past the annoyances. Lissa in particular was the kind of person you’d like a lot even if she weren’t also a wizard—

  “Ahem,” Ronan said rather loudly, right in Kit’s ear. Kit jumped. “It helps if you’re looking at something besides the weather report for Aldebaran IVa. Not real great this time of year anyway, till the red giant comes out of that pesky expansion phase. JD2455702.10: Can you do that? Everybody else can.”

  “Uh—” Kit flipped hastily through his manual to the calendar page.

  “Say you can,” Matt said, “because you’re running it.” His grin was entirely amused.

  For the moment Kit was too thrown off the beat to give Ronan the look he wanted to. It was Ronan who’d started organizing this get-together-and-run-a-nightmare-scenario group. As a result he was in charge not only of coordinating everyone’s schedules—since the long-distance teleporting meant that the group had to pool enough energy to power the transit spells—but also of assigning whose turn it was to design and stage the next nightmare. You, he said privately to Ronan, are cruel.

  But effective. Since now Matt, who thought maybe I was giving you an easy time, is changing his mind . . .

  Kit made a face. “Morning or afternoon?”

  Jeannine giggled that low, throaty giggle of hers. “There’s sort of no way point ten can be anything but afternoon . . .”

  “Yeah, right,” Kit said. He looked at his manual half in resignation, as the schedule grid for that day was empty; though a number of days after it were grayed out and the word “Provisional” was branded across them. What is that? Kit thought, peering at it. Must have set something up with Neets when neither of us was sure whether we were going to go ahead with it. Pity this date couldn’t have fallen in there. He made a face. But if it did, Matt’d probably take it as proof that we’ve got some evil plot against him . . . “Okay,” Kit said. “Let’s do it.”

  Everyone started putting their stuff away. “Right,” Ronan said. “Ten minutes for you to get yourselves sorted and then we’ll do the jump down to Tower Hill . . .”

  “Thought we were routing through Grand Central this time,” Lissa said.

  Ronan shook his head. “Had to change it. The GCT gating team’s scheduled some kind of emergency maintenance for this afternoon. The North American crowd gets a free transfer back to Penn from London, so if anybody wants to do a little sightseeing. . . .”

  People started jumping down from boulders and getting ready to head out. Matt sidled over to Kit. “Look, just so you know—it was just procedural stuff I was complaining about. It was still pretty hot, what you did.”

  “Thanks,” Kit said.

  “But don’t think I’m gonna let you have any slack next session when it comes around to critiquing time!”

  Kit laughed at him. “Why should you? That’s not what this is about.”

  “And as for you,” Matt said to Ronan, who was still trying to get the moondust off his usually impeccable black clothing, “we still need to talk about why you’re never on my side when this stuff happens.”

  “What,” Ronan said, “just because you pulled a magic spear out of my chest and saved my life, I should cut you a special break? Dream on, ya gob.”

  Matt made a face and threw his hands up in the air. “Later,” he said, and bounced off after Lissa.

  “It’s amazing you keep on doing this,” Kit said under his breath.

  “I love the aggro,” Ronan said, and kept on brushing.

  “You must.”

  They looked over at the remaining dustcloud off to the side, from which beams and chunks of lunar surface were still flying out more or less constantly. “What are they doing in there?”

  “Beyond some kind of laser tag, not sure I want to find out,” Ronan said. “Looks like mindless violence to me.”

  “Wizardry’s biggest hurling fan considers that mindless violence?” Kit said, and laughed. “Right.”

  “Not my fault if you’ve not got the chops to come out and try it sometime.”

  Kit shook his head, putting his manual away. “Thanks, I like my head where it is. Any sport with legends about nine-year-olds killing each other and getting bumped up in the leagues for it? Not for me!”

  Ronan merely smiled sardonically, stretching and gazing around him at the slowly deepening lunar afternoon. “And I only get two weeks to put a scenario together?” Kit said.

  “I did warn you,” Ronan said. Kit made a face. Ronan snickered. “You’ll be fine. . . .You know, though, you gave me a bad moment there . . .”

  “I gave you a bad moment??”

  “Your ‘last words’ thing,” Ronan said. “The scenario wasn’t set up for that.”

  Kit gave him a thoughtful look. “Oh? Seems like an omission, especially when a wizard could get so much power out of that move.”

  “Never occurred to me that anyone on these teams would use it,” Ronan muttered. “You never-say-die types, after all, it wouldn’t normally occur—”

  Kit burst out laughing. “Oh, come on, what were you all about six months back? Make sure you put it in next time, ’cause I want to see what happens when someone does use it.” Ronan gave him a grim look. “But while we’re handing out compliments—that was nice, that bit with the burnt manual. In an ugly way.”

  “Yeah. Heard of that once.”

  “But you’ve never seen it.”

  “Never want to, either.”

  “We came close once . . .”

  Ronan looked away. “Yeah. Not the kind of memory you dwell on, you know?”

  Off to their left, something down close to ground level flashed bright in the afternoon light: another dustcloud, gently expanding from a single focus point. “Now what,” Ronan said under his breath—then paused as the sphere of moondust kicked out from around a half-seen figure and started to settle in a circle around it. Kit and Ronan both stared, for the figure was that of a human adult.

  The guy, a tall, thin shape, waved at them and started bouncing over. “Anybody you know?” Ronan said.

  “Nope,” Kit said as the adult wizard paused just outside the main air bubble to size up the force field spell and match it with his own. A faint line of fieldglow sprang up around the edges of his silhouette as the two spells synched up and he passed through. “Hey, dai stihó,” he said, as he got close enough to be heard without shouting. “Didn’t interrupt anything, did I?”

  They shook their heads as the newcomer bounced to a stop near them, peering around. He was in his late thirties or thereabouts, in jeans and short-sleeved shirt with a neat goatee; he looked at Ronan for a moment as if he was trying to place him, then glanced back at Kit. “No, it’s fine, cousin, you’re well met,” Kit said, mystified. “We were just finishing up here.”

  “Alien invasion,” Ronan said.

  The wizard looked around, taking in the settling dust as well as the dustcloud off to one side, which, far from settling, was kicking up worse than ever. “I take it we won?”

  Kit snickered. “Might still be some discussion going on about that.”

  The wizard chuckled, then looked around again
, his attention more on the empty landscape this time. “How’s the surface around here?”

  “Level,” Ronan said. “For this neighborhood. And pretty firm. That’s why I picked it. You’re welcome to my survey logs.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Is there some kind of problem?” Kit said, for the wizard’s eyes were darting between the two of them and the surrounding landscape.

  “Problem? No, sorry, no way! Just having a look at the area.”

  “What for?” Ronan said.

  “Well, considering how much use the place has been getting lately,” he said, “it might be getting some more shortly. Pre-event prep work. They sent me up to do a suitability check.”

  “They?”

  The guy looked at them quizzically. “You seriously haven’t heard? . . . No, guess you were busy. Checked your manual lately?”

  Kit and Ronan swapped bemused looks. “For updates? Uh, no,” Kit said.

  The older wizard suddenly acquired a grin that spread straight across his face. “You might want to take a moment,” he said. “Don’t mind me, I’ll just get on with this.”

  He bounced away across the landscape. Kit and Ronan stared at each other for a second more. Then Ronan shut his eyes to access the Knowledge in his own style, and Kit grabbed for his manual.

  It might have been nerves that made Kit fumble the manual and drop it. It bounced, and he managed to grab it again on the way back up, at about knee level, and flipped it open. Sure enough, the edges of the section on general-event notification were flashing softly. His mouth started to go dry; the flashing reminded him too much of the way his manual had looked when the Pullulus overran Earth’s solar system not long ago. But the flashing had been red that time. This was a much cooler and more informational-looking blue.

  He tipped the pages open to that central section, and the blue flashing dimmed down immediately. The page he was looking at withdrew what it had been displaying—some general weather notification to wizards working in the central Pacific—and a new page’s worth of words rose to the surface and settled themselves in place.