DIANE DUANE - A Wizard Alone

She stayed still for a long time. Mercifully, no one showed up, and Nita began to relax, realizing that she might have expected this outcome if she d really thought about it.Dairine , when she slept these days, slept hard, in utter exhaustion. Their dad lately had been doing much the same, a change from the previous month, when he had hardly slept at all. It didn t take a wizard to figure out that he d beenafraid to fall asleep, because of who he would, again and again,not find beside him when he woke up. Finally his body had overruled that kind of behavior and now was trying to sleep too much, to not wake up at all, if possible. Thereasons were thesame, and just thinking of them made Nita want to cry all over again.

Shelay back against the pillows and let her breath out at the thought of the dream.It s just me , she thought. She hated to describe it any further, for the next line of explanation would have been,Since Mom   And she refused to blame her mother for it; her mom now had nothing further to do with pain. It was Nita s own pain that made her nights so awful. The shrink at school, the counselor at the hospital, both told her the same thing:  Grief takes time. The pain discharges in a lot of different ways, in old repeated patterns, weird symbolic images, mental unrest. Try to stop it, and it just takes longer. Let it take its own time; let it go at its own speed.

Like I have a choice, Nita thought bitterly. She could have used wizardry to combat the sleep disturbances, but the manual had told her plainly that this would be counterproductive. Easing others  pain is one thing; willfully trying to avoid experiencing one s own is another, and has its own price, too high for the intelligent wizard to pay. It was smarter to let the hurt discharge naturally, without interfering.

But these commonsense counsels were still no comfort in the middle of the night, when she was alone in the dark. All Nita could do was wipe her face repeatedly, dry her eyes on the pillow, and hope to fall asleep eventually. Lacking that, she d lie there and wait for dawn.

Nita lay there, almost seeing the eyes hidden in the exaggerated colors and shadows of the painted face, and squeezed her own eyes shut.It s just my pain in

disguise, she thought.Pain expressed as a symbol, one step away from the reality .

I wish this were over with. I wish life were normal again... But she knew that the old kind of normal was never going to come back. Somehow she was just going to have to make a new one.

Nita turned over to try to go back to sleep, but it took a long while: From the shadows of dream, those eyes kept watching her

The next day was Tuesday. Kit went through his early classes more or less mechanically. The problem of Tom s  lost wizard  was on his mind. Tracking him down and identifyinghim wouldn t be a problem the manual would be able to localize him and point him out when Kit was close enough.But what then he thought as the bell rang for fourth period. He picked up his backpack and walked out of his math class on his way to history.Do I just walk up to him, say,  Hi,there. I m on errantry and I greet you. What s the problem   Is it better to just take a good look at him from a distance, maybe 

 Hey, KF, don t say hi or anything!

Kit glanced around and foundRaoulEschemeling walking along next to him. Or rather, he glanced over and then up, becauseRaoul went up a good ways. He was a skinny, pale blond guy, tall enough to be a basketball player the kind of person for whom the wordgangly originally could have been coined. Friendly and gregarious,Raoul was constantly inventing bizarre nicknames for the other kids in the advanced history class,a motley crew of crazies of various ages, all fast-tracked together into a single advanced unit.  KF  was short for  kit fox,  and this nickname had stuck longer than any of the othersRaoul had hung on Kit at one point or another.

 Hey, Pirate,  Kit said.  Sorry, I was daydreaming.

 Saw that. You almost walked into a locker there. You ready for Machiavelli s quiz 

 Oh, god, no,  Kit said as they turned the corner and headed down the corridor toward their classroom.  Machiavelli  was Mr. Mack, their history teacher, and, in his case at least, the nickname was justifiable: He had a twisty, calculating mind that made learning history from him a pleasure.  I forgot. Well, I did the reading. Maybe I ll survive.

Raoullooked at him closely.  You got stuff on your mind 

 Yeah, I guess.

 She doingokay  I haven t seen her around a lot lately.

 Huh Oh, Nita.  They went into the classroom together and took seats near the back wall. There was no assigned seating in Mack s class, which meant there was always a rush for the rearmost seats, everybody s desperate attempt to be somewhere that would make Machiavelli less likely to call on them  not that sitting in the back ever seemed to work.  She s okay, pretty much.  Kit paused, watching the room fill up hurriedly no surprise since Mack made the lives of latecomers a question-filled hell.  I mean, as okay as she can be under the circumstances.

Raoullooked at Kit with interest.  So if you weren t going all vague about her just now, then what s on your mind 

 Oh, just home stuff 

The bell rang.Saved ! Kit thought. With the bell came Machiavelli, moving fast, as always, five feet tall and balding, in a blue suit and wearing a red tie ornamented with the images of many tiny yellow rubberduckies . The suit never changed, but the tie changed every day, and in the few seconds of fascination it produced, Mr. Mack would always pick the unfortunate student who looked most off guard and start peppering him or her with questions.  Rodriguez,  he said, and Kit s heart sank.  You ready for our little quiz today 

Wizards do not lie; too much depends on the words they use seriously for them to play fast and loose with the less serious ones.  I don t know, Mr. M., but I think I m about to find out.

Machiavelli grinned at him. Kit restrained the urge to groan out loud, and once again wished it wasn t unethical for a wizard to use his powers to read the closed textbook in his backpack. All he could do now was pray for the bloodshed to be over with quickly.

Forty-five minutes later, Kit and the rest of the class walked out, mostly looking like they had been run over repeatedly by the same steamroller.  Remind me never to go to sub-SaharanAfrica in the eighteen hundreds, Raoul muttered.  After today, just seeing it would make me come down with post-traumatic stress disorder.

Kit theoreticallycould have gone to that time and place if he wanted to and was willing to pay the price,but right now he felt about the same asRaoul did.  Still, it could have been worse. At least we passed.

 Yeah.Not sure I have any appetite left for lunch  I guess we can go look, though.

Kit grinned, privately thinking that it would take a nuclear war to ruinRaoul's appetite.  Let me know how it was. I have to go home for lunch.

 God, I wish I lived as close to school as you do, Raoul said.  When I think of all the cafeteria food I wouldn t have to eat !

 Go on, Pirate,  Kit said.  Suffer a little. I ll see you later.

He made his way back to his locker, chucked his backpack into it, locked it up again, and headed out the school s back door, jogging across the parking lot, through the gate, and around the corner ontoConlon Road .

Ponchwas bouncing around in the backyard, jumping almost to the top of the chain-link fence, as Kit came down the driveway.  Okay, okay, give me a minute,  Kit said. He pulled the screen door open and poked the lock with one finger.  Hey,Chubbo  

The lock obligingly threw its bolt back for him. Kit patted the lock, opened the door, loped into the kitchen, very hastily threw together a ham sandwich on rye with some mustard, and ate it. For his mother, who was still asleep because she had been working night shifts at the hospital over the past week, he left a note scribbled on the pad on the refrigerator:  I had lunch. See you later.  He thought of adding the code phrase  Out on business now  to let his mama know that there was wizardly work afoot, but then he changed his mind. He d have no more than his lunch period minus the time to eat the sandwich before he would have to be back at school again, anyway.

Kit cleaned up the crumbs from his sandwich and wentout, pulling the door softly closed behind him so as not to wake his mama.  See you, big guy,  Kit said to the lock.  Keep her safe.

I m on it!

He went around the back, opened the gate softly, and closed it again, grabbingPonch by the collar and roughing him up a little by way of saying hello.  And you weren t even barking,  Kit said.  Good for you.

She s asleep,Ponch said. Idon t want her to yell at me .

 Neither do I Good for you for thinking of it.

Are we going out !Ponch began chasing his tail in delight.

 Just for a quick look at our guy.I want to see if he s okay before I come barging in on him. We re going to have to be stealthy, though.

Ponchfinished his running around and sat down, his tail sweeping the sparse grass while Kit reached into his  pocket  and came out with the long chain of his transit spell, and another spell, morecomplex, that he had prepared earlier. There were several different ways for wizards to be invisible, and this one was probably the most comprehensive of them: Even if someone bumped up against Kit, he would feel nothing, and the spell would incline him to think he d just stumbled somehow. Building the spell had required half an hour scareful reading from the manual at a time of morning when Kit would rather still have been in bed, followed by fifteen or twenty minutes on his back, as exhausted as if he d run around the school track about ten times. But now, as he shook the cloaking spell out onto the air in a cloudy web of woven Speech, he had to admire his handiwork. The basicspellweb would last a good while, as long as he remembered to recharge it at intervals.

 Okay,  he said toPonch .  You ready 

Yeahyeahyeahyeah!

 Good. Stay close to me. This thing only has about a six-foot radius.  He draped the invisibility spell over his shoulder for a moment, stuck the chain of the transit spell into the belt of his parka, and reached down into the  pocket  for his wizard s manual.  Now then,  he said. He flipped it open, and the pages riffled to the spot he d bookmarked. He ran a finger down the listing of functions on that page.  Location and detection  cross-reference to personnel listings Right.  The locator spell blocked out on the page rearranged itself to include Darryl s listing, and the listing itself pulsed to indicate that it was  in circuit  with the rest of the spell and ready to go.

 This is a temporal-spatial locator routine with sync to an existing transit nexus now balanced for two,  Kit said in the Speech.  Purpose: Locate and identify the wizard in the listing. Additional info: Linkage to stealth routine referenced on page   He stopped and had to check his other bookmark, on the cloaking spell s page, because the manual s pagination was constantly changing, depending on Kit s needs (and sometimes its own). Three-eighty-nine. Ready 

The whole spell pulsed bright on the page as he turned back to it. Slowly Kit started reading, making sure of his pronunciation, and that his andPonch s names were correctly entered. The usual waiting silence of the universe leaning in around them to hear the Speech spoken and implement it now started to build.Ponch sat there with his big eyes glinting and his tail thumping as the power of the spell built all around them. Kit felt a brief pang because of the absence of the other voice that usually would have been there, reading her half of the work, but there was no time for the feeling right now. Kit finished the spell, snapped the manual shut, and in the moment before the spell worked, flipped the cloaking routine over himself andPonch .

The power washed up over and around them, blotting out the backyard. A moment later, Kit andPonch were standing in a parking lot two towns away, looking at another school building.

It was considerably smaller than Kit s junior high, though this place shared the same kind of late-seventies institutional architecture: a lot of plate glass, a lot of brick. Kit looked around them through the slight heat-haze shimmer of the invisibility spell, keepingPonch with him for the moment simply by holding on to his collar. The school was surrounded by suburban housing and, off to one side, what looked like the back of a strip mall; maybe about fifty cars were parked around the school. It had a small playing field, but nobody was out there.

Kit wasn t overly concerned even if anyone had been out there, they wouldn t have been able to seePonch and him. Now the point was to find Darryl. The structure of the locator spell mandated that Darryl was somewhere within a two-hundred-meter radius: All Kit had to do was look around.

Two hundred meters, Kit thought,could definitely include at least part of the school building . He walked toward it, looking for any sign of the characteristic aura that would surround the object of his search once he got within visual range. Beside him,Ponch paced along, looking at everything, his nose working.

From around the side of the school, a white van drove toward the front entrance and pulled up. Kit gave the van a wide berth, having no desire to be run over by something that couldn t see him. A moment later, the driver got out and went in through the front doors. Kit looked through the front windows of the school, foundhimself looking at office space, not classrooms.  Okay,  he said,  so we ll go in. Don t start barking at anything, whatever you do!

Please,Ponch said in a somewhat offended tone. Kit smiled in slight amusement as they headed for the doors. Once upon a time, his dog wouldn t have been quite so focused duringa wizardry , but lately, sincePonch had started actively finding things like other universes this had changed.

They went up to the doors together. They were all closed no surprise, in this weather and Kit was unwilling just to pull one of them open: Someone might be watching.Never mind. We can just walk through the glass , he thought. But then, through the glass of the door, Kit saw the van driver coming back toward them.  Okay,  Kit said softly toPonch ,  he can let us in. Just step back and don t let him bump into you. We ll slip past before the door closes behind him.

Fine.

The van driver, a small, slender man in a big parka, pushed the door open right in front of Kit s nose, and then reached up to the closing mechanism to pull down the little toggle that would hold the door open.Convenient , Kit thought, and slipped through the door withPonch close behind him.

In the main tile-and-terrazzo corridor of the school, a number of people were moving around; some of them were coming toward the doors some students, Kit thought, heading for the van with a few teachers.Field trip he wondered. Then Kit paused, for the locator spell said in his head,Proximity alert  subject of search within fifty meters. Forty meters

That s them, Kit thought.  Ponch, come on,  Kit whispered.  Over here   Together they moved off to one side of the hallway as the group approached. Kit started examining them for signs of that faint, glowing halo.