He had hardly spoken when they were there, wherever it was. With merest soft grinding, the sphere stopped. It was up to its middle into red stony earth, and the sun was blinding across them from a sky that was a curious color, between pink and blue. Despite the sunlight, it was still severely cold. They all scrambled to their feet and stared anxiously over bare desert into a distance that struck them as being rather too near. Their long, peculiar shadows stretched halfway to the horizon. As they stared, the sunlight grew stronger and the sky pinker, and they all somehow began to grasp that it was dawn here. Just as the sun grew strong enough to hide the veiled stars behind the pinkness, two rather small moons hurtled across the sky.
This seemed to be the last straw for Corkoran. He put his hands to his face and screamed.
“A screaming wizard is all we need!” Kit said, and he slapped a stasis spell on Corkoran. Corkoran’s eyes bulged with horror, but at least his screaming stopped.
“Ah, that’s not kind,” said Claudia.
“You’re right,” Kit admitted. “It’s not his fault he’s useless.” He took the stasis off and made Corkoran unconscious instead. Nobody protested.
“Apologies,” Blade said as Corkoran flopped to the rounded floor. He did not fall nearly as heavily as they might have expected. Blade frowned about this as he said to Claudia, “Kit and I have just come from a war, and I’m afraid we both got used to being ruthless. Why were you the only person who wasn’t scared stiff on the way here?”
Claudia flushed a dark olive and looked down so that her hair coiled in and hid her face. “It’s my jinx,” she said. “It’s mostly a travel jinx. I always have trouble traveling, but I always get where I was going in the end. So I knew we’d arrive somewhere, you see.”
“You might,” said Kit, “have warned us you had a jinx. Was that what made that spell on the cloakrack so tangled?”
“I think so,” Claudia admitted, with her head still down.
“And collected us all together and dumped us in this hole?” Kit persisted.
“Er,” said Lukin, “some of that was probably mine. I always make a pit of some kind when I do any magic.”
“Don’t criticize this hole,” Ruskin said, huskily even for him. “I reckon we freeze or burn here without it. Wherever here is,” he added. “We ought all to keep well down inside it.”
As everyone hurriedly sat or crouched down, Felim said, “This is a lesson to me not to rely on my honor to rule my actions. I am well served. I thought I was right and Corkoran was wrong, and look where we are now!”
Kit, who knew how it felt to have your pride crushed, said, “You were right. We got here. It just needed a bit more thinking through. Nobody reckoned on two jinxes either. If we had, we’d be on the moon at this moment. Where do you think we are?”
Felim seemed slightly comforted. “All the same,” he said, “I shall be more cautious in the future if we ever get away. As to where this is, I have a feeling that Corkoran was screaming because he knew. Should we rouse him and ask him?”
Blade looked at Corkoran curled up among their legs. “We may have to,” he said, “if we can’t work it out for ourselves. The problem is that I have to know where I am in order to go somewhere else. Kit can push me, but I take us. Kit, when we do go, reckon for everything being lighter here, won’t you?”
Ruskin slapped his knee so hard that his hand bounced. “Now that is the attitude I like! Not if, but when we go. That’s positive wizarding, that is!”
“We were taught that way,” said Blade. “But I don’t want to sit and watch the world go past the way the moon did. Before we do anything else, we’re going to unravel these jinxes.”
“Air?” asked Kit. “Doesn’t that come first? Is there any air here at all?”
Olga edged forward. “Maybe I can ask,” she said. When everyone turned to her in confusion, she pushed her hair back and said, “Well, you see, there are some very queer sorts of elementals looking in at us from the sides of this pit. They’re awfully interested, and they might help.”
Naturally everyone craned to look at the sides of the pit. Not all of them could see the beings Olga meant. Of those who could see them, Ruskin and Lukin had the least trouble. Kit and Elda kept turning their heads this way and that because, from the very tails of their eyes, they thought they could see faces there, like clods of earth with round pebblelike eyes, but when either of them turned to look full on, there was just reddish earth. Claudia thought she glimpsed one face, but that was all. Blade and Felim saw nothing but dry, stony earth, anyway.
Olga shut her eyes and tried to listen to the dry, stony voices. It was like hearing a foreign language that was mostly clicks and faint pattering, a language Olga felt she had once learned and then forgotten. As she listened, the words seemed to come back to her slowly. “They want to know,” she said after a while, “if we really are from the blue world. The air elementals in the bubble with us say we are, and they can’t believe it. I’ve told them we are. And they say this is the red world.”
Everyone started speaking at once. “Ye gods! We’re on the Red Planet!” Blade exclaimed. “The dragons call it Mars,” said Kit. “Oh, damn my jinx!” wailed Claudia. “We came a long way out of our way then!” Felim remarked. “How do we get back?” demanded Elda. “How much air do our air elementals say we’ve got?” Ruskin asked urgently, and Lukin said, “Can’t you use our elementals to translate for you?”
“I don’t want to hurt their feelings,” Olga answered Lukin. “I’m getting what they say more clearly now. Now they’re saying that we seem awfully big and soft. They’re wondering about the way the light from the sun is going right through us.”
They all noticed at once that it was getting very hot in the bubble now that the sun was climbing. Kit said, “Oh, lawks!” and a thing like a huge umbrella shot out of the bubble top and hovered over it. Unfortunately it took some of their precious air with it as it opened. They all heard the whoosh and exchanged anxious looks in the sudden shadow. The pit now felt icy. Warm drops of water formed under the umbrella and went running down the bubble inside and out. This made the rim of compressed air much easier to see. It was much less than half as thick as it had been.
“All huddle together,” said Blade. “I daren’t do another warmth-working. I think magic may use more air than anything else does.”
They all moved closer together, except Olga, who remained leaning against the wet side of the bubble. She said dreamily, “Now they’re saying they haven’t seen melted water for thousands of years. They’re fascinated. I asked about air here. They say the air elementals are all frozen, too.”
It was getting fairly stuffy in the damp shade. “Ask them to send us some air,” Ruskin said, “before we smother. I’ve been in mines with more air than this!”
Olga listened again. “There’s an argument about that,” she said, to everyone’s dismay. “The air ones want to come. They want to see our world. But the earth ones say it’s not fair. They want to see the blue world, too.”
“Tell one of them to get in here with us,” Blade suggested tensely. “I can make a link between it and the rest of them, so that they see what it sees.”