DIANE DUANE - A Wizard Alone

I don t want to lose this, Nita thought, making a sudden decision.This is important. I m going to ditch the rest of my classes. I don t care if they call Dad. He ll know what s going on .

Meanwhile, I need somewhere private to teleport from.

Nita hurried for the girls  room. Between periods it was always full of people who didn t feel like going through the hassle of getting a hall pass in their next period, and as Nita pushed into the smaller of the two girls  rooms on that floor, she saw a couple of girls she knew there: Janie from her chemistry class and Dawn from gym. She nodded and said hi to them, found herself a stall, and sat down on the rim of the toilet, keeping the stall door pushed closed with her foot.

Well, thisis one of the less dignified moments in my practice of the Art , Nita thought, resigned. Nonetheless, she sat and waited. As the five-minute period between classes went by, the room outside the stall door got very briefly busy, then less busy  then the room emptied out altogether. A few seconds later, the beginning-of-period bell rang.Okay , Nita thought, standing up,here s my opportunity .

The door to the hallway pushed open a little.  Room check,  said an adult voice.

Nita flushed hot with annoyance. It was one of the teachers who checked the toilets after the change-of-class bell to make sure no one was hiding in there and smoking or doing something even less healthy.Who needs this   Nita thought, getting furious all over again. Her hand went to her charm bracelet just as the teacher pushed open the stall door.

The teacher it turned out to be one of the gym teachers, Ms.Delemond , a tall, blond, willowy lady  stared in at Nita, but saw nothing, because Nita had just climbed up on the toilet seat, to avoid the door, and had availed herself of the simplest way to be invisible. A second or so later, Ms.Delemond turned away, went to check the next stall, and the next. Finally she went outside again, and Nita could hear her footsteps going down the hall.

Nita got down off the toilet and let out one small breath of annoyed laughter. Then she reached into herclaudication pocket, came out with the long chain of the ready-made transit spell she kept there, and dropped it on the floor around her. The chain of words knotted itself closed and blazed with light

Nita came out in a sheltered part of her backyard, ankle-deep in snow, and the air-pressure change caused by the air she had brought with her from school made snow fall off the trees above her and onto her head. She spluttered as the snow got down her collar, finding it funny and getting angrier by the second.Good. Use it. It s a tool 

Nita s house keys were inside her locker at school, along with her coat and her boots.Forget it , she thought as she went around into the driveway and up to her back door. She pulled the screen door open and put her hand against the wood of the inside door.  I just need to walk through you, if you don t mind,  she said in theSpeech, while she reached down to the charm bracelet for another wizardry she d been keeping there, this one with a charm like a little cloud.  Is that okay  Thanks, just bear with me.

She said the three words that turned the low-leveldissociator loose. Nita waited a moment for the itching to set in the sign that every atom in her body was willing to move aside for atoms of other substances. In this case, Nita wanted to walk through the atoms of the door. She went through it like so much smoke, itching fiercely all the way, and when she was standing inside the back door, she let the wizardry go, then just stood there and scratched for a few seconds until she felt like all her molecules had settled themselves back into place.

She headed upstairs to her room, got her manual, and lay down on the bed.This had better work , Nita thought,because Dad s probably going to go intercontinental when he finds out I cut school. But I can t help it. What s the use of behavingmyself and losing my best friend 

She lay there and realized it was just too bright for her even to think about going to sleep. Nita opened her manual, went to the energy-management section, and turned pages until she found the wizardry she wanted.

She recited it, feeling the universe leaning in around her, paying attention, slowly muting down the light in her room as if someone was turning down a dimmer switch.Anyway, this is all my fault , she thought as the room got darker and darker. If Ihadn t been so wrapped up in my own troubles, I d have been with Kit on this job from the start. Yeah, okay, I have a right to grieve. But do I have a right to dump my friends until I m finished with it, until it s convenient to listen to them, to careabout them again  If I d listened to Kit 

 He wouldn t listen to me,  Nita had said. And  Now you know howhe felt before, Dairine had said to her, as blunt as always, and accurate. Kit had come right out and said that he wished he had backup on this job. She d ignored him, and he d gone ahead with what he was doing and gotten in too deep. Ishould have been paying attention to what was going on around me, no matter how awful I felt. I ve been indulging myself. I ve almost been having funhurting. That s so stupid .

Nita stopped herself. There was no point in rerunning the  guilt movies.  They always ended the same way. And a new guilt movie was no better than the old ones.

But she was still left with her anger at herself. Nita lay there just breathing, just feeling it, letting it build. Well, she d been in too deep herself, not long ago, unable to see the trouble she was getting into  and Kit had pulled her out. Now she was going to be able to return the favor. But it wasn t about scorekeeping at all; there were much more important issues.I ve already lost one of the most important people in my life. I m not going to lose another !

Nita was briefly distracted by the burning at her wrist and throat.

She glanced down in surprise. All the charms on her bracelet, the symbols for all the prefabricated spells she was carrying, were glowing considerably brighter than usual. And the necklace of the lucid-dreaming wizardry was running hot, too.

 Think about what result this kind of emotion has produced in the past, Millman had said. Or might produce again in the future.

Nita smiled a small angry smile.

I could get to like this, she thought.Maybe it s better if I don tBut today  today, I m going to like it a lot.

She closed her eyes and pushed all her available power into the lucid-dreaming spell.

Nita s intention and the force of her anger briefly turbocharged the spell, and it drowned her consciousness in dream. The effect wouldn t last, she knew, as she opened her eyes in a different darkness; the spell would relapse to its normal levels momentarily, but it wouldn t matter. She d stay asleep. The important thing was that she was dreamingnow .

She stood there again by herself in that great dark space inside Darryl. Far off to one side, somewhere, she knew that the infinitely obstructive white wall was waiting. But this time she wasn t going to waste her time: There was more important business.

For a long few moments Nita quieted herself, opening her mind to listen, as she d been taught. Then, eyes closed, self-blinded, she turned, waiting for the sensation she knew would come.

It took less time to find it than she d hoped it would. Nita had been banking on the idea that Darryl s grasp ofworldbuilding was instinctive, not studied, and that if he even realized the heart of his universe for what it was, he wouldn t have thought to hide it. And he hadn t. When she finally sensed what she was looking for, Nita took the time to actually walk to it, notwanting to attract any possible unwanted attention by using a transit spell. She was glad that the spot she was hunting was only a couple of miles away, not a couple of light-years.

She knew it by feel when she reached it, which was just as well; physically and visually it was indistinguishable from any other part of that tremendous darkness. Nita grinned, though, as she came close, feeling up close the faint, lively, burning, buzzing sensation she d been seeking. She rolled up her sleeve, thrust her arm elbow-deep into the darkness, felt around for a moment, and came out with a bright, tight, surprisingly large tangle of silvery light.

 Will youlook at this,  Nita said under her breath, turning the kernel over in her hands and looking closely at it to identify its major structural elements. The complexity of this kernel was by and large on a par with other personal kernels Nita had seen before. A couple of its sections were devoted to the mere physical business of running a human body. One of them seemed oddly augmented.Maybe this is how anabdal does his co-location , Nita thought.He s got an extra set of  body software  in here.Interesting.

But the power conduits were the real surprise. They were huge, far bigger than a physical universe s own conduits would have been, and they pulsed silently and blindingly with such force that Nita found it hard to look at them.This is what anabdal uses. Or doesn t even have to use; just has.There s enough power in here, of enough kinds, to do  incredible things .

Even to keep the Lone Power shut up inside for a while

Nita shook her head. This much power could be used for a lot more important things than that, though. And she noted one more thing, now that she had the kernel in her hands. She teased some of the power strands out a little and looked closely at one tightly braided chain of characters that glowed calmly right at the heart of the kernel. It was the core representation of the Wizard s Oath, the heart of an Ordeal; and it was complete.

Nita grinned with sheer pleasure at having been right, remembering her earlier thought that Darryl didn t have that tentative quality about his use of his wizardly abilities.So , she thought,he s already passed his Ordeal. Let s get moving !

She turned the kernel over in her hands once more, finding the little strand of light that was the spell Darryl had, however unwittingly, enacted to create the wall. Nita pulled it a little way out of the kernel, like someone teasing loose one strand from a ball of knitting wool, and twisted it in such a way as to cause that spot to become this one.

Instantly the internal laws of that universe changed accordingly, so that Nita looked up and foundherself staring at the wall.

She walked right at it as if it wasn t there. And when she touched it, it wasn t. It evaporated in front of her. The wall knew that the key to the physical structure of its universe was right in front of it, in the possession of a living being. Cooperatively, it got out of her way.

 Thank you,  Nita said. She placed the kernel in herotherspace pocket and kept walking. In front of her the view opened up, distant and glittering, a view of what appeared to be a forest of glass trees, shining in thatsourceless light she d come to recognize.

Nita walked toward the forest, listening to the voices that she d heard before in Darryl s worlds, and that were here, too, louder than they d been before, an endless rush of them. If she let them, they blended into a white-noise sound like wind or water, indecipherable. But if she concentrated, they did make sense.

  get tired of waiting sometimes, you know   said one of them, a man s voice, Nita thought.  Sometimes I wonder whether any of it matters at all.

 Of course it matters,  said another voice, a softer one, sadder, but more certain of itself.  We have to keep doing what we re doing. Someday 

The voices got steadily more distinct as Nita got closer to the forest. Soon she saw that it wasn t a forest of trees, but of mirrors. Someday! But no one can tell us when that day s going to be. No one has the slightest idea! And we re the ones who know him best. We re the ones who ought to be able to tell. For a while there it looked like it was working.A little. But since autumn, it s like we ve hit a brick wall or something. No change. I can t help but think  can t help but think that maybe there s not going tobe any more change. That this is as good as it s ever going to get. That he s going to be this way forever 

The voice broke off, choked with pain.

 You know they told us this was likely to happen,  said the other voice.  That there d be plateaus  times when nothing would seem to happen for a long time.

 Butthis long 

 Every case is different, they said. You know that, too. A long pause.  We have to have faith, honey. If we don t, if we lose it, no one else s faith is going to help.

The voices sounded two ways to Nita. On one hand, they were like any conversation she might have heard on the street. On the other, there was a terrible poignancy about them. Hearing their words was like being thrust through the heart with knives.I m hearing this not just as I would , Nita thought,but as Darryl would.And possibly seeing his inner world as he does, too. Far from drawing her into Darryl s trap for the Lone Power, this seemed to be giving her a kind of immunity.Good. If that just lets me see a way out 

As she came closer to the fringes of the  forest,  Nita saw that the trees weren t exactly just mirrored, either. They were half-mirrored. She could see partway through them, out their other sides, to the shapes that walked among them. And there were only four of those.

Two of them she knew instantly: Her heart seized at the sight of them.Ponch and Kit were wandering, sightless or rather, it was Kit who looked and walked like someone blind, or like someone afraid to look at what he saw around him.Ponch walked ahead of Kit like a Seeing Eye dog, seeing for both of them. But something about the way the light fell on him made Nita wonder whetherPonch somehow sawmore , inthis chilly and sterile landscape, than any of them.What isit with him  she wondered. He hadn t been able to tell her the other day. Nita rememberedCarmela telling her what Kit had said, that there was some kind of  wizardry leakage  going on in his household. Suddenly she felt sure that what was happening withPonch was more than just a symptom of this.

She paused, watching the other two figures wander around separately in the light shining on and reflecting from the half-mirrored trees. One of them was small and dark, in jeans and a polo shirt. He looked less lost than Kit andPonch   or the final figure.

That last figure was tall and looked human. He was slender, well-built, and extremely handsome. Nonetheless, Nita couldn t help but shudder at the sight of the Fairest and Fallen, the Lone Power, looking, in the dark suit he was wearing, like a businessman lost in a strange city and doomed to wander around because he was too proud to ask for directions.

The shudder passed, though. Nita s anger was still running high enough to wash it out and leave her mind clear.All right , she thought.Nothing bad has happened yet. Let s think about what to do .

Let s

Nita s head jerked up, looking for the source of the word, and her hand went to her bracelet again. A second later she was holding thelinac weapon, ready to discharge.

I am on errantry, she thought, glancing around,and I greet you. Wherever you are 

Iamerrantry , the Silence said.

Nita held very still. There was something familiar about that voice  though it wasn t a voice as such.