DIANE DUANE - A Wizard Alone

 Something unusual, Dairine said. A lot of power  or something else. He would have to be unusual, to have attracted so much attention from Tom and Carl.

Dairinesat quietly for a few seconds,then nodded.  I ll work something out for you,  she said.

Nita nodded.  Thanks,  she said. She turned away.

 It kills you, doesn t it  Dairine said. Asking me for help.

Nita gave her sister a very slight smile.  Better it should kill me than Kit,  she said.

Then she went back into her room to start yet another futile search for the ace of hearts.

We have to go.

Kit sat up suddenly on the bed, looking around him. His glance wandered past the clock on his wall; it was around four-thirty in the afternoon.Where did the day go  part of him wondered, but that part seemed very remote. Much more important was the need to go looking for Darryl. Darryl was in trouble, he was stuck, and Kit had to get him out of there. In a world where nothing much seemed to matter, that suddenly mattered a great deal.

He could almost see that other world, here in the room with him, as if he were in two places at once. The world had changed again, or rather,he had changed it,Darryl had changed it, to put the One who was pursuing him off the scent. It always realized what had happened eventually that Darryl had It trapped and then Darryl had to change everything again, making a new world, a new self, in which the Pursuer would once again be confused. Each new world was better than thelast, with new rules to impede the Lone One s power and to keep him occupied longer. He wished, sometimes, that Darryl didn t have to do it again and again. It gave him no time to find out what else wizardry might be for.If itwas for anything else

We have to go, Kit thought, and got out of bed

 and tripped overPonch , who was lying on the rug, watching him.Boss !Ponch yelped.Where are you going 

 We have to go,  Kit said. The bedroom was already beginning to fade a little, like something that didn t matter. What mattered was elsewhere. The Pursuer was coming again; all his attention now had to be given to the creation of the new illusion, at the expense of the old one.

You promised you wouldn t!Ponch whimpered, jumping up and down.You told Carl you d stay here !

But it seemed now as if a different person entirely had made that promise. In fact, someone differenthad made it: another person, in another place  different from this, the only reality that really mattered, now reforming itself around him. The last time, he d gotten a little careless, and the darkOther had found Its way in, and out again, too easily. This time, the place to which he found his way had to be a little more challenging. The idea had come to him that morning in the bathroom, as once again he faced what he couldn t face in the mirror on the wall, in which he had to see, every day, human eyes with the darkOther looking out of them.This is Its weapon against you , the thought had come to him.Turn the weapon againstIt 

That other reality, glassy, gleaming, was becoming more and more real around Kit as he stood there. It was only a matter of moments before he would be able to step wholly intoit, such was the other s power and his need for help. Distressed,Ponch said,Theleash! Boss, let me get the leash! Wait for me 

The voice in his head seemed to Kit to come from almost too far away to matter.

Stay there, boss! Kit stay! Stay!

The urgency of that voice was just enough to keep Kit where he was, to prevent him from taking the single step forward that would bring him into the gleaming maze now being constructed for the Other s confusion. That was all that could be hoped for to befuddle It, wear It down until eventually It would stop coming and just leave him alone. There was no telling whether the hope would ever be realized. But it was the only hope in the world, and hence it was worth clinging to.

The sound of paws scrabbling up the steps was as distant as everything else. Kit watched the shining unreality forming around him, watched his bedroom fade away, a backdrop without meaning. Into that backdrop burst something thatshone, a line of blue light around a dark creature s collar. The creature looked up at him, the only gaze he could stand, the only eyes that didn t hurt him.Boss, take the leash! Takeit, put it around your wrist .

Kit couldn t see the point, but the creature s eyes were so beseeching that he did as he was told. As he looped the other end of the line of light around his wrist, the world in which he was standing finally became totally irrelevant. Kit took the step forward into the real world, or into the one that had become real, and the black creature beside him stepped through, too

 Kit,  his mama s voice said from down the hall,  I m going out now. You call me if anything comes up here. Can I bring you anything back on my meal break 

No reply.

 Kit  Sweetie, are you asleep 

No reply.

Kit s mama came down the hall.  You know, I brought that cold medicine home, the one with the zinc in it,  she said.  I wonder if maybe you should just take some, so you can head this thing off 

She stood in the doorway of his bedroom, looking in at the empty bed.

 Oh, no,  she whispered.

At Nita s house, the phone rang. Her dad, sitting at the dining room table and working his way through the Sunday paper with a beer and a sandwich, got up and answered it.

 Hello  Oh, hi,Marina  No, he s not, as far as I know. Wait a minute 

Nita s dad looked around the corner into the living room, where Nita was sitting on the rug, playing an extremely frustrated game of solitaire as relaxation from nearly an hour of utterly unsuccessful attempts at getting a simple  guess the card  trick to work.  Nita   her dad said.  Is Kit here 

Nita was surprised.  No.

 His mom s looking for him.

Nita s heart went cold inside her.  I thought he was going to be home all day today.

 He s not there, his mom says.

Nita sat still for a moment.Kit 

There was no answer.

She broke out in a sweat. There was no way to be absolutely sure where he was, but she thought she could guess. And it upset her to be right so quickly.  I don t hear him nearby,  she said.  Wait a minute, Daddy.

She went to get her manual, paged through it to the messaging section, and said to it,  Kit, where are you  Urgent!

 Send message   the manual page said.

 Send it!

 Recipient is out of ambit. Please try again later.

Nita swallowed. She got up and went into the dining room. As she did so, she suddenly started to hear something she hadn t been able to hear in the living room; the sound of dogs howling a few streets away, more and more of them.

She took the phone from her dad.  Mrs. Rodriguez  It s Nita. I just called him, but I don t get any answer. And the manual says he s not in this universe. He s gone again.

There was a long, frightened pause on the other end of the phone.  He said he wasn t going to do that until Tom and Carl gave him the word,  Kit s mama said.  But he really hasn t been  himself, these past couple of days.

That was exactly Nita s worry at the moment: that Kit wasn t himself, but somebody else. She had started wondering last night, as she wrestled with the cards, what possible effect autism might have on anabdal s ability to be two places at one time. If that ability could start  slopping over  onto another party, one already susceptible to theabdal s worldview, from having been inside it a few times

She held still. Ihave got to keep my cool here , she thought.It s the only way I m going to find him .  I m going to go look for him,  Nita said.  It may take me a while to find him. I can t do it the way he does it withPonch ; I ve got to be asleep.

She heard Kit s mama take a long breath, the sound of someone else controlling herself as tightly as Nita was having to right now.  I have to go to work,  she said.  I ll beback around midnight. But if you hear anything before then, will you call me  I think Kit gave you my work number.

 Yeah,  Nita said.  Mrs. Rodriguez, please  don t worry. It s going to he all right , Nita wanted most desperately to say, but she couldn t say it: It might not be true.

 Okay,  Mrs. Rodriguez said.  Thank your dad for me, sweetie. Good-bye.

Nita hung up the phone. Outside, faint but clear, the howling continued. Her father was looking at her in distress.

 Whereis he   he said.

Nita shook her head.  I don t have a name for it, Daddy. It s not another planet or anything like that. I wish it were, because it d be easier to get to. It s somewhere inside of Darryl, which means it s closer to us in some ways, but in some ways much further off than anything that would just be way out in conventional space. And it s a lot more dangerous, in its way.If Kit s stuck in there, and I can t get him out 

She began to shake. Here it was, full-blown, what she d been most afraid of a crisis that she was terrified she wasn t going to be able to handle.And you re all alone on this one , she thought.Dairinemay be able to offer some support, but you regoing to be the one who has to figure out what to do with it. And if you can tfigure it out 

Her father saw the look on her face and came over to her, put his arms around her.  Nita,  he said.  Listen to me.

She looked up at him, rather shocked at his tone of voice. It was unusually stern for him.

 You re tough,  her dad said.  You re tougher than you think. That s what you need to hang on to now. That s what I ve been hanging on to the best I can, and as far as I can tell, it turns out to be true every time if you just don t let the idea go. What you have to do now is take one thing at a time don t let the stress overload you. Will Tom or Carl know what to do  Call them.

 Yeah,  Nita said, and went back to the phone, dialed it hurriedly. A moment later, Carl s voice said,  Hello 

 Carl,  Nita said,  we ve got trouble. He couldn t hold it. He s gone again.

Wizards tend not to swear, since the results are likely to be unfortunate if they slip into the Speech while doing it. Nita, however, distinctly heard several swearwords in Carl s silence.  When did he leave 

 It might have been just a few minutes ago.

 Okay. Wait a second.

Carl put the phone down. She could hear him going to the table, where his version of the manual usually lay hidden. She heard him flip one volume open and start going through it. Listening carefully, she could hear a hiss, the little breath-between-teeth noise that Carl made when there was trouble.

A moment later he picked up the phone again.  He s out of ambit, all right,  Carl said.  And the energy signatures are too vague to track himwith, in terms of getting an ID on a specific universe  even assuming I could do that. The universesPonch has been finding arenontypical , as is his mode of transit; the normal wizardry-tracking routines won t work. But this much we do have in our favor.Ponch went with Eat.

 I betPonch made Kit take him,  Nita said, feeling sure of this without knowing why.  Carl, I ll go try to find them.

 I wouldn t do that right this minute,  Carl said.  They might still be in transit. I can t tell. Give the situation an hour or two to settle.

Nita could see his point, but she didn t like it.  Carl, he s been really spaced-out since he came back from his last time in Darryl's universe. Anything could happen to him in a few minutes, let alone an hour!

 Nita,  Carl said,  take a breath or two and get a grip onyourself . I know how you feel, but even if you d already done thepresleep preparation you need to do for a lucid dreaming session which I don t think you have you d still need to get to sleep after that. And you know you can t induce it with a sleep spell when you re going lucid. You re going to have to relax a little, enough to sleep, or you won t be able to do anything.

She let out a long breath.  I hate it when you re right,  Nita said.  Okay. I ll call you later and let you know what I find.

 Do that. I ll be up late.

She hung up, looked at her father.Dairine had come downstairs and was leaning in the dining room doorway, looking alert, with Spot peering into the kitchen from behind her legs. ToDairine , Nita said,  He s gone. Let s start building that power-feed spell; I m going to need it in a couple of hours.

She andDairine headed up the stairs.

It took Nita nearly four hours to get ready to go after Kit, and even then she couldn t sleep. Part of the problem was that she was very much a daytime person and found it tough to get to sleep before eight in the evening. The rest of the problem was her nerves.

When Nita first lay down,Dairine was still sitting in the chair by Nita s desk, looking over the lifeline spell she d constructed. At any other time, Nita would have been annoyed enough by the elegance and speed with whichDairine had constructed it to try to find at least some fault with it. But there wasn t time for that, andright now she was simply grateful thatDairine was so talented in this kind of work. The bed was surrounded by a long, tightly knitted cord of words in the Speech, rather like Kit s leash forPonch , but both more intricate and thicker. The wizardry had to handle much higher power levels than the leash did, and had no life-support functions as such those Nita would be carrying with her on her charm bracelet, in a suite of interconnected shielding and atmosphere-maintenance spells.

Nita was also more heavily armed than usual, not knowing how many friends the Lone Power might have skulking around the borders of Darryl s mind, intent on keeping enemies out and friends in. From Nita s bracelet dangled a number of charms, each of which represented a spell almost readyto go, needing only one thought or pronounced syllable to set it going. It was wearying to carry this much nearly released power around, but Nita was beyond caring how much energy she had to expend. Her fear for Kit was growing by the minute.

After she d finished looking over the lifeline wizardry and lay down on the bed, Nita took a last moment or three to check out the weaponry the lightning bolt of the quark-leveldissociator , the little closed spiral of a pinch-off utility that could seal a designated attacker or group of attackers into a  pocket  space, the little  magic wand  charm that contained a one-off terawatt particle-beam generator. Even in her present nervous state, Nita looked at that one with slight relish and wished she might have a chance to use it the manual had been explicit about how dangerous it was, and how effective. The manual itself was slipped into her ownotherspace pocket, inside the lifeline wizardry with her. Last of all she checked her throat, where the thin fine chain of the lucid-dreaming wizardry was fastened, and made sure it was charged and active. It buzzed slightly against her fingers, acknowledging that it was ready to go.

Nita settled herself back against the pillows.  Howlong s the lifeline good for   she said toDairine .

 You get six hours, Dairine said.  Then it s got to be dismantled and rebuilt, and I have to recharge it. It s   She glanced at Spot, who was sitting on the desk with his screen up, running manual functions, among them a Julian date clock.  It s just past three-oh-three-point-three. You get until point-fifty-five,then you snap back here, no matter what you re doing. So keep an eye on your manual.