Diane Duane - Wizard 08 by Wizards at War

Author:Wizards at War
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2012-06-05T12:24:08+00:00

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Friendly Fire

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THEY CAME OUT INTO the dimmed light of evening at the Crossings, and Nita let out the breath she’d been holding since Sker’ret’s transit spell started to work. At a time when wizardry was acting peculiarly, any successful gating was a triumph.

Beside her, Sker’ret hadn’t moved off the transit pad. He was looking around him with all his eyes, every one pointed in a different direction. “Did you hear something?” he said.

“No,” Nita said. And then that struck her as strange. Nita walked off the gating pad and stepped out to where the hexagon of the enclosure met the corridor. She looked up and down the length of that bright, shining space…

…and shivered.

“This is really weird,” Nita said.

Very quietly, Sker’ret came up beside her and looked up and down the broad corridor. There was no one to be seen, absolutely no one at all.

“Okay,” Nita said, thinking aloud, and glancing over at the nearest information standard, which was showing its default display of Crossings time. “It’s the middle of the night…”

“The middle of a Crossings night,” Sker’ret said, “doesn’t look like this. Somewhere in fifteen or twenty thousand worlds, it’s always the middle of the day for somebody. Somebody is always passing through.”

Nita shivered again. “You did say when we left that the reduced traffic was a symptom of something that was going to get worse.”

“Yes.” Sker’ret sounded unnerved. “But not this much worse, not this fast. And there’s still…” He trailed off.

The feeling of alarm in him was suddenly very pronounced. Still what? Nita said silently. She felt oddly unwilling to make the silence around them seem any louder by speaking into it.

Something wrong, Sker’ret said. He turned and flowed back to the information column by the gate cluster’s transit pad, rearing up against it to trigger the extension of its command-and-control console. Sker’ret brought up a display on the floating console and tapped at the control pad beside it. The display brought up a number of paragraphs in the dot-patterns and acute angles of Rirhait, but the bar graph beside the figures and annotations told Nita enough about what was going on here. That’s showing recent transits through the Crossings? she said.

In the last three standard days, Sker’ret said. The bar graph showed the number of travelers passing through the Crossings’ worldgates in a standard hour. Every bar was shorter than the one before. Then, in the last standard day, there was a brief shallow spike in both incoming and outgoing transits, after which all of them stopped completely. No one’s come through for some hours, Sker’ret said. Absolutely no one.

They stood there looking at each other in silence. Then Nita said, You don’t think that’s possible, do you?

Sker’ret looked back toward the corridor with several of his eyes. I want to have a look at the central management station, he said. And I want to find out where my esteemed ancestor is! Come on, Nita said silently.

Walking through this emptiness, with the

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