She did her chores that morning and got out of the house with
the book as fast as she could, heading for one of her secret places
in the woods. If weird things start happening, she thought, no one
will see them there. Oh, I’m going to get that pen back! And
then . . .
Behind the high school around the corner from Nita’s house
was a large tract of undeveloped woodland, the usual Long Island
combination of scrub oak, white pine, and sassafras. Nita detoured
around the school, pausing to scramble over a couple of
chain-link fences. There was a path on the other side; after
a few minutes she turned off it to pick her way carefully through
low underbrush and among fallen logs and tree stumps. Then there
was a solid wall of clumped sassafras and twining wild blackberry
bushes. It looked totally impassable, and the blackberries
threatened Nita with their thorns, but she turned sideways and
pushed through the wall of greenery undaunted.
She emerged into a glade walled all around with blackberry and
gooseberry and pine, sheltered by the overhanging branches of
several trees. One, a large crabapple, stood near the edge of the
glade, and there was a flattish half-buried boulder at the
base of its trunk. Here she could be sure no one was watching.
Nita sat down on the rock with a sigh, put her back up against
the tree, and spent a few moments getting comfortable—then
opened the book and started to read.
She found herself not just reading, after a while, but
studying—cramming the facts into her head with that
particular mental stomp she used when she knew she was going to
have to know something by heart. The things the book was telling
her now were not vague and abstract, as the initial discussion of
theory had been, but straightforward as the repair manual for a new
car, and nearly as complex. There were tables and lists of needed
resources for working spells. There were formulas and equations and
rules. There was a syllabary and pronunciation guide for the 418
symbols used in the wizardry Speech to describe relationships and
effects that other human languages had no specific words for.
The information went on and on—the book was printed small,
and there seemed no end to the things Nita was going to have to
know about. She read about the hierarchy of practicing
wizards—her book listed only those practicing in the
U.S. and Canada, though wizards were working everywhere in the
world—and she scanned down the listing for the New York area,
noticing the presence of Advisory wizards, Area Supervisors, Senior
wizards. She read through a list of the “otherworlds”
closest to her own, alternate earths where the capital of the
United States was named Huictilopochtli or Lafayette City or
Hrafnkell or New Washington, and where the people still called
themselves Americans, though they didn’t match
Nita’s ideas about the term.
She learned the Horseman’s Word, which gets the attention
of any member of the genus Equus, even the zebras; and the two
forms of the Mason’s Word, which give stone the appearance of
life for short periods. One chapter told her about the magical
creatures living in cities, whose presence even the nonwizardly
people suspect sometimes—creatures like the steambreathing
fireworms, packratty little lizards that creep through cracks in
building walls to steal treasures and trash for their
lair-hoards under the streets. Nita thought about all the
steam she had seen coming up from manhole covers in Manhattan and
smiled, for now she knew what was causing it.
She read on, finding out how to bridle the Nightmare and
learning what questions to ask the Transcendent Pig, should she
meet him. She read about the Trees’ Battle—who fought
in it, and who won it, and why. She read about the forty basic
classes of spells and their subclasses. She read about Timeheart,
the unreal and eternal realm where the places and things people
remember affectionately are preserved as they remember them,
forever.
In the middle of the description of things preserved in their
fullest beauty forever, and still growing, Nita found herself
feeling a faint tingle of unease. She was also getting tired. She
dropped the book in her lap with an annoyed sigh, for there was
just too much to absorb at one sitting, and she had no clear idea
of where to begin. “Crud,” she said under her breath.
“I thought I’d be able to make Joanne vanish by
tomorrow morning . . . ”
Nita picked the manual up again and leafed through it to the
section labeled “Preliminary Exercises.”
The first one was set in a small block of type in the middle of
an otherwise page.
To change something, you must first describe it. To describe
something, you must first see it. Hold still in one place for as
long as it takes to see something.
Nita felt puzzled and slightly annoyed. This didn’t sound
much like magic. But obediently she put the book down, settled
herself more comfortably against the tree, folded her arms, and
sighed. It’s almost too warm to think about anything
serious . . . What should I look at? That rock
over there? Naah, it’s kind of a dull-looking rock.
That weed . . . look how its leaves go up
around the stem in a spiral . . . Nita leaned
her head back, stared up through the crabtree’s branches.
That rotten Joanne. Where would she have hidden that pen? I wonder.
Maybe if I could sneak into her house somehow, maybe there’s
a spell for that . . . Have to do it after
dark, I guess. Maybe I could do it
tonight . . . wish it didn’t take so long
to get dark this time of year. Nita looked at the sky where it
showed between the leaves, a hot blue mosaic of light with here and
there the fireflicker of sun showing through, shifting with the
shift of leaves in the wind. There are kinds of patterns—the
wind never goes through the same way twice, and there are patterns
in the branches but they’re never quite the same either. And
look at the changes in the brightness. The sky is the same but the
leaves cover sometimes more and sometimes
less . . . the
patterns . . . the patterns,
they . . . they . . .
(They won’t let you have a moment’s rest,) the
crabapple tree said irritably. Nita jumped, scraping her back
against the trunk as she sat up straight. She had heard the tree
quite plainly in some way that had nothing to do with spoken words.
It was light patterns she had heard, and wind movements, leaf
rustle, fire flicker.
(Finally paid attention, did you?) said the tree. (As if one of
them isn’t enough, messing up someone’s
fallen-leaf pattern that’s been in progress for fifteen
years, drawing circles all over the ground and messing up the
matrices. Well? What’s your excuse?)
Nita sat there with her mouth open, looking up at the words the
tree was making with cranky light and shadow. It works. It works!
“Uh,” she said, not knowing whether the tree could
understand her, “I didn’t draw any circles on your
leaves—”
(No, but that other one did,) the tree said. (Made circles and
stars and diagrams all over Telerilarch’s collage, doing some
kind of power spell. You people don’t have the proper respect
for artwork. Okay, so we’re amateurs,) it added, a touch of
belligerence creeping into its voice. (So none of us have been here
more than thirty years. Well, our work is still valid,
and—)
“Uh, listen, do you mean that there’s a, uh, a
wizard out here somewhere doing magic?”
(What else?) the tree snapped. (And let me tell you, if you
people don’t—)
“Where? Where is she?”
(He,) the tree said. (In the middle of all those
made-stone roads. I remember when those roads went in,
and they took a pattern Kimber had been working on for eighty years
and scraped it bare and poured that black rock over it. One of the
most complex, most—)
He? Nita thought, and her heart sank slightly. She had trouble
talking to boys. “You mean across the freeway, in the middle
of the interchange? That green place?”
(Didn’t you hear me? Are you deaf? Silly question. That
other one must be not to have heard Teleri yelling at him. And now
I suppose you’ll start scratching up the ground and invoking
powers and ruining my collage. Well, let me tell you—)
“I, uh—listen, I’ll talk to you later,”
Nita said hurriedly. She got to her feet, brushed herself off, and
started away through the woods at a trot. Another wizard? And my
God, the trees—Their laughter at her amazement was all around
her as she ran, the merriment of everything from foot-high
weeds to hundred-foot oaks, rustling in the wind—grave
chuckling of maples and alders, titters from groves of sapling
sassafras, silly giggling in the raspberry bushes, a huge
belly-laugh from the oldest hollow ash tree before the
freeway interchange. How could I never have heard them before?
Nita stopped at the freeway’s edge and made sure that
there were no cars coming before she tried to cross. The
interchange was one of those cloverleaf affairs, and the circle
formed by one of the offramps held a stand of the original
pre-freeway trees within it, in a kind of sunken bowl. Nita
dashed across the concrete and stood a moment, breathless, at the
edge of the downslope, before starting down it slantwise.
This was another of her secret places, a spot shaded and
peaceful in summer and winter both because of the pine trees
that roofed the hollow in. But there was nothing peaceful about it
today. Something was in the air, and the trees, irritated, were
muttering among themselves. Even on a foot-thick cushion
of pine needles, Nita’s feet seemed to be making too much
noise. She tried to walk softly and wished the trees wouldn’t
stare at her so.
Where the slope bottomed out she stopped, looking around her
nervously, and that was when she saw him. The boy was holding a
stick in one hand and staring intently at the ground underneath a
huge shag-larch on one side of the grove. He was shorter than
she was, and looked younger, and he also looked familiar somehow.
Now who is that? she thought, feeling more nervous still. No
one had ever been in one of her secret places when she came
there.
But the boy just kept frowning at the
ground, as if it were a test paper and he was trying to scowl the
right answer out of it. A very ordinary-looking kid, with
straight black hair and a Hispanic look to his face, wearing a
beat-up green windbreaker and jeans and sneakers, holding a
willow wand of a type that Nita’s book recommended for
certain types of spelling.
He let out what looked like a breath of irritation and put his
hands on his hips. “Cojones,” he muttered, shaking his
head—and halfway through the shake, he caught sight of
Nita.
He looked surprised and embarrassed for a moment, then his face
steadied down to a simple worried look. There he stood regarding
Nita, and she realized with a shock that he wasn’t going to
yell at her, or chase her, or call her names, or run away himself.
He was going to let her explain herself. Nita was amazed. It
didn’t seem quite normal.
“Hi,” she said.
The boy looked at her uncertainly, as if trying to place her.
“Hi.”
Nita wasn’t sure quite where to begin. But the marks on
the ground, and the willow wand, seemed to confirm that a power
spell was in progress. “Uh,” she said, “I, uh, I
don’t see the oak leaves. Or the string.”
The boy’s dark eyes widened. “So that’s how
you got through!”
“Through what?”
“I put a binding spell around the edges of this
place,” he said. “I’ve tried this spell once or
twice before, but people kept showing up just as I was getting
busy, and I couldn’t finish.”
Nita suddenly recognized him. “You’re the one they
were calling crazy last week.”
The boy’s eyes narrowed again. He looked annoyed.
“Uh, yeah. A couple of the eighth graders found me last
Monday. They were shooting up the woods with BB guns, and there I
was working. And they couldn’t figure out what I was doing,
so at lunch the next day they said—”
“I know what they said.” It had been a badly rhymed
song about the kid who played with himself in the woods, because no
one else would play with him. She remembered feeling vaguely sorry
for the kid, whoever he was; boys could be as bad as girls
sometimes.
“I thought I blew the binding too,” he said.
“You surprised me.”
“Maybe you can’t bind another wizard out,”
Nita said. That was it, she thought. If he’s not
one—
“Uhh . . . I guess not.” He
paused. “I’m Kit,” he said then.
“Christopher, really, but I hate Christopher.”
“Nita,” she said. “It’s short for
Juanita. I hate that too. Listen—the trees are mad at
you.”
Kit stared at her. “The trees?”
“Uh, mostly this one.” She looked up into the
branches of the shag-larch, which were trembling with more
force than the wind could lend them. “See, the trees
do—I don’t know, it’s artwork, sort of, with
their fallen leaves—and you started doing your power
schematic all over their work, and, uh—”
“Trees?” Kit said, “Rocks I knew about, I
talked to a rock last week—or it talked to me,
actually—though it wasn’t talking,
really . . . ” He looked up at the tree.
“Well, hey, I’m sorry,” he said. “I
didn’t know. I’ll try to put things back the way I
found them. But I might as well not have bothered with the
spell,” he said, looking again at Nita. “It got caught,
it’s not working. You know anything about
this?”
He gestured at the diagram he had drawn on the cleared ground,
and Nita went to crouch down by it. The pattern was one she had
seen in her book, a basic design of interlocking circles and woven
parallelograms. There were symbols drawn inside the angles and
outside the curves, some of them letters or words in the Roman
alphabet, some of them the graceful characters of the wizardly
Speech. “I just got my book yesterday,” she said.
“I doubt I’ll be much help. What were you trying to
get? The power part of it I can see.”
She glanced up and found Kit looking with somber interest at her
black eye. “I’m getting tired of being beat up just
because I have a Spanish accent,” he said. “I was
going to attract enough power to me so that the big kids would just
leave me alone and not start anything. An ‘aura,’ the
book called it. But the spell got stuck a couple of steps in, and
when I checked the book it said that I was missing an
clement.” He looked questioningly at Nita. “Maybe
you’re it?”
“Uhh—” She shook her head. “I
don’t know. I was looking for a spell for something
different. Someone beat me up and stole my best pen. It was a space
pen, the kind the astronauts have, and it writes on anything, and I
always took all my tests with it and I always pass when I use it,
and I want it back.” She stopped, then added, “And I
guess I wouldn’t mind if they didn’t beat me up any
more either.”
“We could make a finding spell and tie it into this
one,” Kit said.
“Yeah? Well, we better put these needles back
first.”
“Yeah.”
Kit stuck the willow wand in his back pocket as he and Nita
worked to push the larch’s needles back over the cleared
ground. “Where’d you get your book?” Nita
said.
“In the city, about a month ago. My mother and father went
out antique hunting, there’s this one part of Second Avenue
where all the little shops are and one place had this box of
secondhand books, and I stopped to look at them because I always
look at old books—and this one caught my eye. My hand,
actually. I was going after a Tom Swift book underneath it and it
pinched me . . . ”
Nita chuckled. “Mine snagged me in the library,” she
said. “I don’t know . . . I
didn’t want Joanne—she’s the one who beat me
up—I didn’t want her to get my pen, but I’m glad
she didn’t get this.” She pulled her copy of the book
out of her jacket as Kit straightened up beside her. She looked
over at him. “Does it work?” she demanded. “Does
it really work?”
Kit stood there for a moment, looking at the replaced needles.
“I fixed my dog’s nose,” he said. “A wasp
stung him and I made it go down right away. And I talked to the
rock.” He looked up at Nita again. “C’mon,”
he said. “There’s a place in the middle where the
ground is bare. Let’s see what happens.”
Together they walked to the center of the hollow, where the pine
trees made a circle open to the sky and the ground was bare dirt.
Kit pulled out his willow wand and began drawing the diagram again.
“This one I know by heart,” he said. “I’ve
started it so many times. Well, this time for sure.” He got
his book out of his back pocket and consulted it, beginning to
write symbols into the diagram. “Would you look and see if
there’s anything else we need for a finding spell?”
“Sure.” Nita found the necessary section in the
index of her book and checked it. “Just an image of the thing
to be found,” she said. “I have to make it while
you’re spelling. Kit, do you know why this works? Leaves,
pieces of string, designs on the ground. It doesn’t make
sense.”
Kit kept drawing. “There’s a chapter on advanced
theory in there, but I couldn’t get through it all the way.
The magic is supposed to have something to do with interrupting
space—”
“Huh?”
“Listen, that’s all I could get out of it. There was
this one phrase that kept turning up, ‘temporospatial
claudication.’ I think that’s how you say it.
It’s something like, space isn’t really empty, it folds
around things—or words—and if you put the right things
in the right place and do the right things with them, and say the
right things in the Speech, magic happens. Where’s the
string?”
“This one with all the knots in it?” Nita reached
down and picked it up.
“Must have fallen out of my pocket. Stand on this end,
okay?” He dropped one end of the string into the middle of
the diagram, and Nita stepped onto it. Kit walked around her and
the diagram with it, using the end of the string to trace a circle.
Just before he came to the place where he had started, he used the
willow wand to make a sort of figure-eight mark—a
“wizards’ knot,” the book had called it—and
closed the circle with it. Kit tugged at the string as he stood up,
Nita let it go, and Kit coiled it and put it away.
“You’ve got to do this part yourself,” Kit
said. “I can’t write your name for you—each
person in a spelling does their own. There’s a table in there
with all the symbols in it—”
Nita scuffed some pages aside and found it, a long list of
English letters and numbers, and symbols in the Speech. She got
down to look at Kit’s name, so that she could see how to
write hers, and group by group began to puzzle the symbols out.
“Your birthday’s August twenty-fifth?”
“Uh huh.”
Nita looked at the symbol for the year. “They skipped you
a couple grades, huh?”
“Yeah. It’s rotten,” Kit said, sounding
entirely too cheerful as he said it. Nita knew that tone of
voice—it was the one in which she usually answered Joanne
back, while trying to hide her own fear of what was sure to happen
next. “It wouldn’t be so bad if they were my
age,” Kit went on, looking over Nita’s shoulder and
speaking absently. “But they keep saying things like
‘If you’re so smart, how come you talk so
funny?’ ” His imitation of their imitation of his
accent was precise and bitter. “They make me sick. Trouble
is, they outweigh me.”
Nita nodded and started to draw her name on the ground, using
the substitutions and symbols that appeared in her manual. Some of
them were simple and brief; some of them were almost more complex
than she believed possible, crazy amalgams of curls and twists and
angles like those an insane stenographer might produce. She did her
best to reproduce them, and tied all the symbols together,
fastening them into a circle with the same wizards’ knot that
Kit had used on the outer circle and on his own name.
“Done?” Kit said. He was standing up again, tracing
the outer circle around one more time.
“Yup.”
“Okay.” He finished the tracing with another
repetition of the wizards’ knot and straightened up; then he
put his hand out as if to feel something in the air.
“Good,” he said. “Here, come check
this.”
“Check what?” Nita said; but she got up and went
over to Kit. She put out her hand as he had, and found that
something was resisting the movement of her hand through the
air—something that gave slightly under increased
pressure, like a mattress being pushed down and then springing
back again. Nita felt momentarily nervous. “Can air get
through this?”
“I think so. I didn’t have any trouble the last
couple of times I did it. It’s only supposed to seal out
unfriendly influences.”
Nita stood there with her hand resting against nothing, and the
nothing supported her weight. The last of her doubts about the
existence of magic went away. She might have imagined the contents
of the book, or been purposely misreading. She might have dozed off
and dreamed the talking tree. But this was daylight, the waking
world, and she was leaning one-handed on empty air!
“Those guys who came across you when you had this
up,” she said, “what did they think?”
“Um, it worked on them too. They didn’t even
understand why they couldn’t get at me—they thought it
was their idea to yell at me from a distance. They thought they
were missing me with the BB guns on purpose too, to scare me.
It’s true, what the book said. There is people who
couldn’t see a magic if it bit them.” He glanced around
the finished circle. “There are other spells like this that
don’t need drawings after you do them the first time, and
when you need them, they’re there really fast—like if
someone’s about to try beating you up. People just kind of
skid away from you . . . ”
“I bet,” Nita said, with relish. Thoughts of what
else she might be able to do to Joanne flickered through her head,
but she pushed them aside for the moment. “What
next?”
“Next,” Kit said, going to the middle of the circle
and sitting down carefully so as not to smudge any of the
marks he’d made, “we read it. Or I read most of it, and
you read your name. Though first you have to check my
figuring.”
“How come?” Nita joined him, avoiding the lines and
angles.
“Two person spell—both people always check each
other’s work. But your name, you check again after I
do.”
Kit was already squinting at her squiggles, so Nita pulled out
her book again and began looking at the symbols Kit had drawn in
the dirt. There were clearly two sides to the diagram, and the book
said they both had to balance like a chemical equation. Most of the
symbols had numerical values attached, for ease in balancing, and
Nita started doing addition in her head, making sure both sides
matched. Eventually she was satisfied. She looked again at her
name, seeing nothing wrong. “Is it okay?”
“Yeah.” Kit leaned back a little. “You have to
be careful with names, it says. They’re a way of saying what
you are—and if you write something in a spell that’s
not what you are, well . . . ”
“You mean . . . you
change . . . because the spell says
you’re something else than what you are? You become
that?”
Kit shrugged, but he looked uneasy. “A spell is saying
that you want something to happen,” he said. “If you
say your name wrong—”
Nita shuddered. “And now?”
“Now we start. You do your name when I come to it. Then,
the goal part down there—since it’s a joint goal, we
say it together. Think you can do it okay if I go slow?”
“Yeah.”
Kit took a deep breath with his eyes closed, then opened his
eyes and began to read.
Nita had never heard a voice speaking a spell aloud before, and
the effect was strange. Ever so slightly, ever so slowly, things
began to change around her. The tree-sheltered quiet grew
quieter. The cool light that filtered through the canopy of
branches grew expectant, fringed with secrecy the way things seen
through the edge of a lens are fringed with rainbows. Nita began to
feel as if she was caught in the moment between a very vivid dream
and the awakening from it. There was that feeling of living in a
body—of being aware of familiar surroundings and the
realities of the daylight world waiting to be resumed—yet at
the same time seeing those surroundings differently, colored with
another sort of light, another kind of time. On one level Nita
heard Kit reciting a string of polysyllables that should have been
meaningless to her—words for symbols, pieces of words,
babble. Yet she could also hear Kit talking, saying casually, and,
it seemed, in English, “We need to know something, and we
suggest this particular method of finding the
information . . . ” And the words
didn’t break the expectancy, the listening silence. For once,
for the first time, the dream was real while Nita was awake. Power
stirred in the air around her and waited for her to shape it.
Magic.
She sat and listened to Kit. With each passing second she could
catch more clearly the clean metallic taste of the equation as it
began to form itself, flickering chill and bright in her mind.
Kit’s speech was giving it life, and with quiet, flowing
efficiency it was going about its purpose. It was invoking the
attention of what Nita might have called physical laws, except that
there was nothing physical about them—they had to do with
flows of a kind of power as different from ordinary energy as
energy was from matter. The equation stretched and coiled and
caught those powers within itself as the words wove it. Nita and
Kit were caught in it too. To Nita it seemed as if, without moving,
she held out her hands, and they were taken—by Kit, and by
the spell itself, and by the ponderous powers caught across from
her in the dance. There was a pause: Kit looked across the diagrams
at her.
Nita scowled at the symbols beside her and began to read them,
slowly and with some hesitation—naming herself one concept or
one symbol at a time, binding herself into the spell. At first she
was scared, for she could feel the strangeness folding in close
around her. But then she realized that nothing awful was happening,
and as her name became part of the spell, that was what was sliding
down around her, protecting her. She finished, and she was out of
breath, and excited, and she had never been happier in her
life.
Kit’s voice came in again then, picking up the weave,
rejoining the dance. So it went for a while, the strange words and
the half-seen, half-felt movements and images
falling into a rhythm of light and sound and texture, a song, a
poem, a spell. It began to come whole all around them, and all
around the tingling air stayed still to better hold the words, and
the trees bent close to listen.
Kit came to the set of symbols that stood for his name and who
he was, starting to read them slowly and
carefully, Nita felt the spell settle down around
her too. He finished it and glanced up at
Nita, and together they began the goal section of the spell. Nita
did her best to make a clear image of the pen as she
spoke—the silver case, gone a little scratched and grubby
now, her initials incised up on the top. She hardly had time to
wonder at the harmony their paired voices made before things began
to change again. The shadows of the trees around them seemed to
grow darker; the aura of expectancy grew sharp enough to taste. The
silence became total, and their voices fell into it as into a great
depth.
The formula for their goal, though longer than either of their
names had been, seemed to take less time to say—and even
stranger, it began to sound like much more than just finding a pen
and being left alone. It began to taste of starfire and night and
motion, huge and controlled, utterly strange. Saying the formula
left Kit and Nita breathless and drained, as if something
powerful had briefly been living and speaking through them and
had worn them down. They finished the formula together, and gulped
for air, and looked at each other in half-frightened
expectation, wondering what would happen next.
The completed spell took effect. Nita had thought that she would
gradually begin to see something, the way things had changed
gradually in the grove. The spell, though, had its own ideas. Quick
as a gasp it slammed them both out of one moment and into another,
a shocking, wrenching transition like dreaming that you’ve
fallen out of bed, wham! Instinctively they both hung on to the
spell as if onto a railing, clutching it until their surroundings
steadied down. The darkness had been replaced by a lowering,
sullen-feeling gloom. They looked down as if from a high
balcony onto a shadowed island prisoned between chill rivers and
studded with sharp spikes of iron and cold stone.
(Manhattan?) Kit asked anxiously, without words. Nita felt
frozen in place like a statue and couldn’t turn to answer
him—the spell was holding her immobile.
(It looks like Manhattan,) she said, feeling just as uneasy.
(But what’s my pen doing there?)
Kit would have shaken his head if he could have. (I don’t
get it. What’s wrong here? This is New York City—but it
never looked this awful, this dirty and nasty
and . . . ) He trailed off in confusion and
dismay.
Nita looked around her. It was hard to make out anything on the
island—there was a murky pall over the city that seemed more
than just fog. There was hardly any traffic that she could see, and
almost no light—in fact, in all of Manhattan there were only
two light sources. In one place on the island—the East
Fifties, it looked like—a small point of brittle light seemed
to pulse right through steel and stone, throbbing dully like a sown
seed of wildfire waiting to explode. The pulses were irregular and
distressing, and the light was painful to look at. Some blocks to
the south, well into the financial district near the south end of
the island, another fire burned, a clear white spark like a
sunseed, beating regularly as a heart. It was consoling, but it was
very small.
(Now what?) Nita said. (Why would my pen be in this place?) She
looked down at the dark grainy air below them, listened to the
brooding silence like that of a beast of prey ready to spring, felt
the sullen buildings hunching themselves against the oppressive
sky—and then felt the something malevolent and alive
that lay in wait below—a something that saw them, was
conscious of them, and was darkly pleased.
(Kit, what’s that?)
(It knows!) Kit’s thought sang with alarm like a plucked
string. (It knows we’re here! It shouldn’t be able to,
but—Nita, the spell’s not balanced for this. If that
thing grabs us or holds us somehow, we won’t be able to get
back!)
Nita felt Kit’s mind start to flick frantically through
the memories of what he had read in his wizards’ manual,
looking for an idea, for something they could do to protect
themselves.
She held very still and looked over his shoulder at his
thoughts, even though part of her trembled at the thought of that
dark presence which was even now reaching out toward them, lazy,
curious, deadly. Abruptly she saw something that looked useful.
(Kit, stop! No, go back one. That’s it. Look, it says if
you’ve got an imbalance, you can open out your side of
the spell to attract some more power.)
(Yeah, but if the wrong kind of power answers, we’re in
for it!)
(We’re in for it for sure if that gets us,) Nita said,
indicating the huge, hungry darkness billowing upward toward them
like a cloud. (Look, we’ll make a hole through the spell big
enough for something friendly to fall into, and we’ll take
potluck.)
Nita could feel Kit’s uncertainty as he started choosing
from memory the words and symbols he would need. (All right, but I
dunno. If something worse happens . . . )
(What could be worse?) Nita hollered at Kit, half in amusement,
half in fear. The hungry something drew closer.
Kit started to answer, then forgot about it. (There,) he said,
laying the equation out in his mind, (I think that’s all we
need.)
(Go ahead,) Nita said, watching anxiously as their pursuer got
closer and the air around them seemed to grow thicker and darker
yet. (You say it. Just tell me what to do and when.)
(Right,) Kit said, and began speaking in his mind, much faster
than he had during the initial spelling. If that first magic had
felt like the weaving of a whole, this one felt like ripping
something apart. Their surroundings seemed to shimmer uncertainly,
the dark skyline and lead-gray sky rippled like a
wind-stirred curtain; even that stalking presence seemed to
hesitate in momentary confusion. (Push,) Kit said suddenly,
(push right there.) Nita felt the torn place that Kit had made in
the spell, and she shoved clumsily at it with her mind, trying to
make the hole larger.
(It’s . . . giving . . . )
(Now, hard!) Kit said, and Nita pushed until pain stabbed and
stabbed again behind where her eyes should have been, and at the
moment she thought she couldn’t possibly push any more, Kit
said one short sharp syllable and threw the spell wide open like a
door.
It was like standing at the core of a tornado which, rather than
spinning you away to Oz, strips the roof off your home, opens the
house walls out flat as the petals of a plaster flower, and leaves
you standing confused and disbelieving in the heart of a
howling of smoke and damned voices; or like moving through a
roomful of people, every one of whom tries to catch your eye and
tell you the most important thing that ever happened to him. Nita
found herself deluged in fragments of sights and sounds and tastes
and feelings and thoughts not her own, a madly coexisting maelstrom
of imageries from other universes, other earths, other times. Most
of them she managed to shut out by squeezing her mind shut like
eyes and hanging on to the spell. She sensed that Kit was doing the
same and that their stalker was momentarily as bewildered as
they were by what was happening. The whirling confusion seemed to
be funneling through the hole in the spell like water going down a
drain—things, concepts, creatures too large or too small for
the hole fell through it, or past it, or around it. But sooner or
later something just the right size would catch. (Hope we get
something useful,) Nita thought desperately. (Something bigger
than that thing, anyway.)
And thump, something fitted into the hole with snug precision,
and the crazy whirling died away, and the two of them had company
in the spellweb. Something small, Nita felt, very small, too
small—but no, it was big,
too . . . Confused, she reached out to Kit.
(Is that it? Can we get out now? Before that
what’s-its-name—)
The what’s-its-name shook itself with a ripple
of rage and hunger that Kit and Nita could feel even at a distance.
It headed toward them again, quickly, done with playing with
them.
(Uh oh!) Kit said. (Let’s get outta here!)
(What do we—)
(What in the—) said a voice that neither of them
recognized.
(Out!) Kit said, and hooked the spell into the added power that
the newcomer provided, and pulled—and plain pale daylight
came down around them, heavy as a collapsed tent. Gravity yanked at
them. Kit fell over sideways and lay there panting on the ground
like someone who’s run a race. Nita sagged, covered her face,
bent over double right down to the ground, struggling for
breath.
Eventually she began to recover, but she put off moving or
opening her eyes. The book had warned that spelling had its prices,
and one of them was the physical exhaustion that goes along with
any large, mostly mental work of creation. Nita felt as if she had
just been through about a hundred English tests with essay
questions, one after another. “Kit?” she said, worried
by his silence.
“Nnngggg,” Kit said, and rolled over into a sort of
crouch, holding his head in his hands. “Ooooh. Turn off the
Sun.”
“It’s not that bad,” Nita said, opening her
eyes. Then she winced and shut them in a hurry. It was.
“How long have we been here?” Kit muttered.
“The Sun shouldn’t be showing here yet.”
“It’s—” Nita said, opening her eyes
again to check her watch and being distracted by a bright light to
her right that was entirely too low to be the Sun, and squinting at
it—and then forgetting what she had started to say.
Hanging in midair about three feet away from her, inside the
circle, was a spark of eye-searing white fire. It looked no
bigger than a pinhead, but it was brilliant all out of proportion
to its size, and was giving off light about as bright as that of a
two-hundred-watt bulb without a shade. The light bobbed gently in
midair, up and down, looking like a
will-o’-the-wisp plugged into too powerful
a current and about to blow out. Nita sat there with her mouth open
and stared.
The bright point dimmed slightly, appeared to describe a small
tight circle so that it could take in Kit, the drawn circle, trees
and leaves and sky; then it came to rest again, staring back at
Nita. Though she couldn’t catch what Kit was feeling, now
that the spell was over, she could feel the light’s emotions
quite clearly—amazement, growing swiftly into unbelieving
pleasure. Suddenly it blazed up white-hot again.
(Dear Artificer,) it said in bemused delight, (I’ve blown
my quanta and gone to the Good Place!)
Nita sat there in silence for a moment, thinking a great many
things at once. Uhh . . . she thought. And, So
I wanted to be a wizard, huh? Serves me right. Something falls
into my world and thinks it’s gone to Heaven. Boy, it’s
gonna get a shock. And, What in the world is it, anyway?
“Kit,” Nita said. “Excuse me a moment,”
she added, nodding with abrupt courtesy at the light source.
“Kit.” She turned slightly and reached down to shake
him by the shoulder. “Kit. C’mon, get up. We have
company.”
“Mmrnp?” Kit said, scrubbing at his
eyes and starting to straighten up. “Oh, no, the binding
didn’t blow, did it?”
“Nope. It’s the extra power you called in. I think
it came back with us.”
“Well, it—oh,” Kit said, as he finally managed
to focus on the sedately hovering brightness, “Oh.
It’s—uh . . . ”
“Right,” Nita said. “It says,” she
added, “that it’s blown its quanta. Is that
dangerous?” she asked the light.
(Dangerous?) It laughed inside, a crackling sound like an
overstimulated Geiger counter. (Artificer, child, it means
I’m dead.) “Child” wasn’t precisely the
concept it used; Nita got a fleeting impression of a huge volume of
dust and gas contracting gradually toward a common center, slow,
confused, and nebulous. She wasn’t flattered.
“Maybe you won’t like hearing this,” Nita
said, “but I’m not sure this is the Good Place. It
doesn’t seem that way to us, anyhow.”
The light drew a figure-eight in the air, a shrug. (It
looks that way to me), it said. (Look how orderly everything is! And
how much life there is in just one place! Where I come from, even a
spore’s worth of life is scarcer than atoms in a
comet’s tail.)
“Excuse me,” Kit said, “but what are
you?”
It said something Nita could make little sense of. The concept
she got looked like page after page of mathematical equations. Kit
raised his eyebrows. “It uses the Speech too,” he
commented as he listened.
“So what is it?”
Kit looked confused. “Its name says that it came from way
out in space somewhere, and it has a mass equal to—to five or
six blue-white giant stars and a few thousand-odd
planets, and it emits all up and down the matter-energy
spectrum, all kinds of light and radiation and even some subatomic
particles.” He shrugged. “You have any idea what that
is?”
Nita stared at the light in growing disbelief.
“Where’s all your mass?” she said. “If you
have that much, the gravity should have crushed us up against you
the minute you showed up.”
(Elsewhere,) the light said offhandedly. (I have a
singularity-class temporospatial claudication.)
“A warp,” Nita whispered. “A tunnel through
space-time. Are you a white hole?”
It stopped bobbing, stared at her as if she had said something
derogatory. (Do I look like a hole?)
“Do I look like a cloud of gas?” Nita snapped back,
and then sighed—her mouth was getting the better of her
again. “I’m sorry. That’s just what we call your
kind of, uh, creature. Because you act like a hole in the Universe
that light and radiation come through, I know you’re not,
really. But, Kit,” she said, turning, “where’s my
pen? And where’s the power you were after? Didn’t the
spell work?”
“Spells always work,” Kit said. “That’s
what the book says. When you ask for something, you always get back
something that’ll help you solve your problem, or be the
solution itself.” He looked entirely confused. “I asked
for that power aura for me, and your pen for you—that was
all. If we got a white hole, it means he’s the
answer—”
“If he’s the answer,” Nita
said, bemused, “I’m not sure I understand the
question.”
(This is all fascinating,) the white hole said, (but I have to
find a functional Advisory nexus in a hurry. I found out
that the Naming of Lights has gone missing, and I managed to find a
paradimensional net with enough empty loci to get me to an Advisory
in a hurry. But something seems to have gone wrong. Somehow I
don’t think you’re Advisories.)
“Uh, no,” Kit said. “I think we called
you—”
(You called me?) the white hole said, regarding Kit with mixed
reverence and amazement. (You’re one of the Powers born of
Life? Oh, I’m sorry I didn’t recognize You—I know
You can take any shape but somehow I’d always thought of You
as being bigger. A quasar, or a mega-nova.) The white hole
made a feeling of rueful amusement. (It’s confusing being
dead!)
“Oh, brother,” Kit said, “Look, I’m
not—you’re not—just not. We made a spell and we
called you. I don’t think you’re dead.”
(If you say so,) the white hole said, polite but doubtful. (You
called me, though? Me personally? I don’t think we’ve
met before.)
“No, we haven’t,” Nita said. “But we
were doing this spell, and we found something, but something found
us too, and we wouldn’t have been able to get back here
unless we called in some extra power—so we did, and it was
you, I guess. You’re not mad, are you?” she asked
timidly. The thought of what a live, intelligent white hole might
be able to do if it got annoyed scared her badly.
(Mad? No. As I said, I was trying to get out of my own space to
get the news to someone who could use it, and then all of a sudden
there was a paranet with enough loci to handle all the dimensions I
carry, so I grabbed it.) The white hole made another small circle,
looking around him curiously. (Maybe it did work. Are there
Advisories in this—on this—What is this, anyway?)
Kit looked at Nita. “Huh?”
(This,) the white hole said, (all of this.) He made another
circle.
“Oh! A planet,” Nita said. “See,
there’s our star.” She pointed, and the white hole
rotated slightly to look.
(Artificer within us,) he said, (maybe I have blown my quanta,
after all. I always wanted to see a planet, but I never got around
to it. Habit, I guess. You get used to sitting around emitting
X-rays after a while, and you don’t think of doing
anything else. You want to see some?) he asked suddenly. He felt a little insecure.
“Maybe
you’d better not,” Nita said.
(How come? They’re really pretty.)
“We can’t see them—and besides, we’re
not built to take hard radiation. Our atmosphere shuts most of it
out.”
(A real planet,) the white hole said, wondering and delighted,
(with a real atmosphere. Well! If this is a planet, there has to be
an Advisory around here somewhere. Could you help me find one?)
“Uhh—” Kit looked uncertainly at the white
hole, “Sure. But do you think you could help me find some
power? And Nita get her pen back?”
The white hole looked Kit up and down. (Some potential, some
potential,) he muttered. (I could probably have you emitting light
pretty quickly, if we worked together on a regular basis. Maybe
even some alpha. We’ll see. What’s a pen?)
“What’s your name?” Kit said, “I mean,
we can’t just call you ‘hey you’ all the
time.”
(True,) the white hole said. (My name is
Khairelikoblephareh-glukumeilichephreidosd’enagouni—)
and at the same time he went flickering through a pattern of colors
that was evidently the visual translation.
“Ky-elik—” Nita began.
“Fred,” Kit said quickly. “Well,” he
added as they looked at him again, “if we have to yell for
help or something, the other way’s too long. And that was the
only part I got, anyway.”
“Is that okay with you?” Nita asked.
The white hole made his figure-eight shrug again. (Better
than having my truename mangled, I guess,) he said, and chuckled
silently. (Fred, then. And you are?)
“Nita.”
“Kit.”
(I see why you like them short,) Fred said. (All right. Tell me
what a ‘pen’ is, and I’ll try to help you find
it. But we really must get to an Advisory as fast as we
can—)
“Okay,” Kit said. “Let’s break the
circle and go talk.”
“Sounds good,” Nita said, and began to erase the
diagrams they had drawn. Kit cut the wizards’ knot and
scuffed the circle open in a few places, while Nita took a moment
to wave her hand through the now-empty air. “Not bad
for a first spell,” she said with satisfaction.
(I meant to ask,) Fred said politely, (what’s a
spell?)
Nita sighed, and smiled, and picked up her book, motioning Fred
to follow her over by where Kit sat. It was going to be a long
afternoon, but she didn’t care. Magic was loose in the
world.
She did her chores that morning and got out of the house with
the book as fast as she could, heading for one of her secret places
in the woods. If weird things start happening, she thought, no one
will see them there. Oh, I’m going to get that pen back! And
then . . .
Behind the high school around the corner from Nita’s house
was a large tract of undeveloped woodland, the usual Long Island
combination of scrub oak, white pine, and sassafras. Nita detoured
around the school, pausing to scramble over a couple of
chain-link fences. There was a path on the other side; after
a few minutes she turned off it to pick her way carefully through
low underbrush and among fallen logs and tree stumps. Then there
was a solid wall of clumped sassafras and twining wild blackberry
bushes. It looked totally impassable, and the blackberries
threatened Nita with their thorns, but she turned sideways and
pushed through the wall of greenery undaunted.
She emerged into a glade walled all around with blackberry and
gooseberry and pine, sheltered by the overhanging branches of
several trees. One, a large crabapple, stood near the edge of the
glade, and there was a flattish half-buried boulder at the
base of its trunk. Here she could be sure no one was watching.
Nita sat down on the rock with a sigh, put her back up against
the tree, and spent a few moments getting comfortable—then
opened the book and started to read.
She found herself not just reading, after a while, but
studying—cramming the facts into her head with that
particular mental stomp she used when she knew she was going to
have to know something by heart. The things the book was telling
her now were not vague and abstract, as the initial discussion of
theory had been, but straightforward as the repair manual for a new
car, and nearly as complex. There were tables and lists of needed
resources for working spells. There were formulas and equations and
rules. There was a syllabary and pronunciation guide for the 418
symbols used in the wizardry Speech to describe relationships and
effects that other human languages had no specific words for.
The information went on and on—the book was printed small,
and there seemed no end to the things Nita was going to have to
know about. She read about the hierarchy of practicing
wizards—her book listed only those practicing in the
U.S. and Canada, though wizards were working everywhere in the
world—and she scanned down the listing for the New York area,
noticing the presence of Advisory wizards, Area Supervisors, Senior
wizards. She read through a list of the “otherworlds”
closest to her own, alternate earths where the capital of the
United States was named Huictilopochtli or Lafayette City or
Hrafnkell or New Washington, and where the people still called
themselves Americans, though they didn’t match
Nita’s ideas about the term.
She learned the Horseman’s Word, which gets the attention
of any member of the genus Equus, even the zebras; and the two
forms of the Mason’s Word, which give stone the appearance of
life for short periods. One chapter told her about the magical
creatures living in cities, whose presence even the nonwizardly
people suspect sometimes—creatures like the steambreathing
fireworms, packratty little lizards that creep through cracks in
building walls to steal treasures and trash for their
lair-hoards under the streets. Nita thought about all the
steam she had seen coming up from manhole covers in Manhattan and
smiled, for now she knew what was causing it.
She read on, finding out how to bridle the Nightmare and
learning what questions to ask the Transcendent Pig, should she
meet him. She read about the Trees’ Battle—who fought
in it, and who won it, and why. She read about the forty basic
classes of spells and their subclasses. She read about Timeheart,
the unreal and eternal realm where the places and things people
remember affectionately are preserved as they remember them,
forever.
In the middle of the description of things preserved in their
fullest beauty forever, and still growing, Nita found herself
feeling a faint tingle of unease. She was also getting tired. She
dropped the book in her lap with an annoyed sigh, for there was
just too much to absorb at one sitting, and she had no clear idea
of where to begin. “Crud,” she said under her breath.
“I thought I’d be able to make Joanne vanish by
tomorrow morning . . . ”
Nita picked the manual up again and leafed through it to the
section labeled “Preliminary Exercises.”
The first one was set in a small block of type in the middle of
an otherwise page.
To change something, you must first describe it. To describe
something, you must first see it. Hold still in one place for as
long as it takes to see something.
Nita felt puzzled and slightly annoyed. This didn’t sound
much like magic. But obediently she put the book down, settled
herself more comfortably against the tree, folded her arms, and
sighed. It’s almost too warm to think about anything
serious . . . What should I look at? That rock
over there? Naah, it’s kind of a dull-looking rock.
That weed . . . look how its leaves go up
around the stem in a spiral . . . Nita leaned
her head back, stared up through the crabtree’s branches.
That rotten Joanne. Where would she have hidden that pen? I wonder.
Maybe if I could sneak into her house somehow, maybe there’s
a spell for that . . . Have to do it after
dark, I guess. Maybe I could do it
tonight . . . wish it didn’t take so long
to get dark this time of year. Nita looked at the sky where it
showed between the leaves, a hot blue mosaic of light with here and
there the fireflicker of sun showing through, shifting with the
shift of leaves in the wind. There are kinds of patterns—the
wind never goes through the same way twice, and there are patterns
in the branches but they’re never quite the same either. And
look at the changes in the brightness. The sky is the same but the
leaves cover sometimes more and sometimes
less . . . the
patterns . . . the patterns,
they . . . they . . .
(They won’t let you have a moment’s rest,) the
crabapple tree said irritably. Nita jumped, scraping her back
against the trunk as she sat up straight. She had heard the tree
quite plainly in some way that had nothing to do with spoken words.
It was light patterns she had heard, and wind movements, leaf
rustle, fire flicker.
(Finally paid attention, did you?) said the tree. (As if one of
them isn’t enough, messing up someone’s
fallen-leaf pattern that’s been in progress for fifteen
years, drawing circles all over the ground and messing up the
matrices. Well? What’s your excuse?)
Nita sat there with her mouth open, looking up at the words the
tree was making with cranky light and shadow. It works. It works!
“Uh,” she said, not knowing whether the tree could
understand her, “I didn’t draw any circles on your
leaves—”
(No, but that other one did,) the tree said. (Made circles and
stars and diagrams all over Telerilarch’s collage, doing some
kind of power spell. You people don’t have the proper respect
for artwork. Okay, so we’re amateurs,) it added, a touch of
belligerence creeping into its voice. (So none of us have been here
more than thirty years. Well, our work is still valid,
and—)
“Uh, listen, do you mean that there’s a, uh, a
wizard out here somewhere doing magic?”
(What else?) the tree snapped. (And let me tell you, if you
people don’t—)
“Where? Where is she?”
(He,) the tree said. (In the middle of all those
made-stone roads. I remember when those roads went in,
and they took a pattern Kimber had been working on for eighty years
and scraped it bare and poured that black rock over it. One of the
most complex, most—)
He? Nita thought, and her heart sank slightly. She had trouble
talking to boys. “You mean across the freeway, in the middle
of the interchange? That green place?”
(Didn’t you hear me? Are you deaf? Silly question. That
other one must be not to have heard Teleri yelling at him. And now
I suppose you’ll start scratching up the ground and invoking
powers and ruining my collage. Well, let me tell you—)
“I, uh—listen, I’ll talk to you later,”
Nita said hurriedly. She got to her feet, brushed herself off, and
started away through the woods at a trot. Another wizard? And my
God, the trees—Their laughter at her amazement was all around
her as she ran, the merriment of everything from foot-high
weeds to hundred-foot oaks, rustling in the wind—grave
chuckling of maples and alders, titters from groves of sapling
sassafras, silly giggling in the raspberry bushes, a huge
belly-laugh from the oldest hollow ash tree before the
freeway interchange. How could I never have heard them before?
Nita stopped at the freeway’s edge and made sure that
there were no cars coming before she tried to cross. The
interchange was one of those cloverleaf affairs, and the circle
formed by one of the offramps held a stand of the original
pre-freeway trees within it, in a kind of sunken bowl. Nita
dashed across the concrete and stood a moment, breathless, at the
edge of the downslope, before starting down it slantwise.
This was another of her secret places, a spot shaded and
peaceful in summer and winter both because of the pine trees
that roofed the hollow in. But there was nothing peaceful about it
today. Something was in the air, and the trees, irritated, were
muttering among themselves. Even on a foot-thick cushion
of pine needles, Nita’s feet seemed to be making too much
noise. She tried to walk softly and wished the trees wouldn’t
stare at her so.
Where the slope bottomed out she stopped, looking around her
nervously, and that was when she saw him. The boy was holding a
stick in one hand and staring intently at the ground underneath a
huge shag-larch on one side of the grove. He was shorter than
she was, and looked younger, and he also looked familiar somehow.
Now who is that? she thought, feeling more nervous still. No
one had ever been in one of her secret places when she came
there.
But the boy just kept frowning at the
ground, as if it were a test paper and he was trying to scowl the
right answer out of it. A very ordinary-looking kid, with
straight black hair and a Hispanic look to his face, wearing a
beat-up green windbreaker and jeans and sneakers, holding a
willow wand of a type that Nita’s book recommended for
certain types of spelling.
He let out what looked like a breath of irritation and put his
hands on his hips. “Cojones,” he muttered, shaking his
head—and halfway through the shake, he caught sight of
Nita.
He looked surprised and embarrassed for a moment, then his face
steadied down to a simple worried look. There he stood regarding
Nita, and she realized with a shock that he wasn’t going to
yell at her, or chase her, or call her names, or run away himself.
He was going to let her explain herself. Nita was amazed. It
didn’t seem quite normal.
“Hi,” she said.
The boy looked at her uncertainly, as if trying to place her.
“Hi.”
Nita wasn’t sure quite where to begin. But the marks on
the ground, and the willow wand, seemed to confirm that a power
spell was in progress. “Uh,” she said, “I, uh, I
don’t see the oak leaves. Or the string.”
The boy’s dark eyes widened. “So that’s how
you got through!”
“Through what?”
“I put a binding spell around the edges of this
place,” he said. “I’ve tried this spell once or
twice before, but people kept showing up just as I was getting
busy, and I couldn’t finish.”
Nita suddenly recognized him. “You’re the one they
were calling crazy last week.”
The boy’s eyes narrowed again. He looked annoyed.
“Uh, yeah. A couple of the eighth graders found me last
Monday. They were shooting up the woods with BB guns, and there I
was working. And they couldn’t figure out what I was doing,
so at lunch the next day they said—”
“I know what they said.” It had been a badly rhymed
song about the kid who played with himself in the woods, because no
one else would play with him. She remembered feeling vaguely sorry
for the kid, whoever he was; boys could be as bad as girls
sometimes.
“I thought I blew the binding too,” he said.
“You surprised me.”
“Maybe you can’t bind another wizard out,”
Nita said. That was it, she thought. If he’s not
one—
“Uhh . . . I guess not.” He
paused. “I’m Kit,” he said then.
“Christopher, really, but I hate Christopher.”
“Nita,” she said. “It’s short for
Juanita. I hate that too. Listen—the trees are mad at
you.”
Kit stared at her. “The trees?”
“Uh, mostly this one.” She looked up into the
branches of the shag-larch, which were trembling with more
force than the wind could lend them. “See, the trees
do—I don’t know, it’s artwork, sort of, with
their fallen leaves—and you started doing your power
schematic all over their work, and, uh—”
“Trees?” Kit said, “Rocks I knew about, I
talked to a rock last week—or it talked to me,
actually—though it wasn’t talking,
really . . . ” He looked up at the tree.
“Well, hey, I’m sorry,” he said. “I
didn’t know. I’ll try to put things back the way I
found them. But I might as well not have bothered with the
spell,” he said, looking again at Nita. “It got caught,
it’s not working. You know anything about
this?”
He gestured at the diagram he had drawn on the cleared ground,
and Nita went to crouch down by it. The pattern was one she had
seen in her book, a basic design of interlocking circles and woven
parallelograms. There were symbols drawn inside the angles and
outside the curves, some of them letters or words in the Roman
alphabet, some of them the graceful characters of the wizardly
Speech. “I just got my book yesterday,” she said.
“I doubt I’ll be much help. What were you trying to
get? The power part of it I can see.”
She glanced up and found Kit looking with somber interest at her
black eye. “I’m getting tired of being beat up just
because I have a Spanish accent,” he said. “I was
going to attract enough power to me so that the big kids would just
leave me alone and not start anything. An ‘aura,’ the
book called it. But the spell got stuck a couple of steps in, and
when I checked the book it said that I was missing an
clement.” He looked questioningly at Nita. “Maybe
you’re it?”
“Uhh—” She shook her head. “I
don’t know. I was looking for a spell for something
different. Someone beat me up and stole my best pen. It was a space
pen, the kind the astronauts have, and it writes on anything, and I
always took all my tests with it and I always pass when I use it,
and I want it back.” She stopped, then added, “And I
guess I wouldn’t mind if they didn’t beat me up any
more either.”
“We could make a finding spell and tie it into this
one,” Kit said.
“Yeah? Well, we better put these needles back
first.”
“Yeah.”
Kit stuck the willow wand in his back pocket as he and Nita
worked to push the larch’s needles back over the cleared
ground. “Where’d you get your book?” Nita
said.
“In the city, about a month ago. My mother and father went
out antique hunting, there’s this one part of Second Avenue
where all the little shops are and one place had this box of
secondhand books, and I stopped to look at them because I always
look at old books—and this one caught my eye. My hand,
actually. I was going after a Tom Swift book underneath it and it
pinched me . . . ”
Nita chuckled. “Mine snagged me in the library,” she
said. “I don’t know . . . I
didn’t want Joanne—she’s the one who beat me
up—I didn’t want her to get my pen, but I’m glad
she didn’t get this.” She pulled her copy of the book
out of her jacket as Kit straightened up beside her. She looked
over at him. “Does it work?” she demanded. “Does
it really work?”
Kit stood there for a moment, looking at the replaced needles.
“I fixed my dog’s nose,” he said. “A wasp
stung him and I made it go down right away. And I talked to the
rock.” He looked up at Nita again. “C’mon,”
he said. “There’s a place in the middle where the
ground is bare. Let’s see what happens.”
Together they walked to the center of the hollow, where the pine
trees made a circle open to the sky and the ground was bare dirt.
Kit pulled out his willow wand and began drawing the diagram again.
“This one I know by heart,” he said. “I’ve
started it so many times. Well, this time for sure.” He got
his book out of his back pocket and consulted it, beginning to
write symbols into the diagram. “Would you look and see if
there’s anything else we need for a finding spell?”
“Sure.” Nita found the necessary section in the
index of her book and checked it. “Just an image of the thing
to be found,” she said. “I have to make it while
you’re spelling. Kit, do you know why this works? Leaves,
pieces of string, designs on the ground. It doesn’t make
sense.”
Kit kept drawing. “There’s a chapter on advanced
theory in there, but I couldn’t get through it all the way.
The magic is supposed to have something to do with interrupting
space—”
“Huh?”
“Listen, that’s all I could get out of it. There was
this one phrase that kept turning up, ‘temporospatial
claudication.’ I think that’s how you say it.
It’s something like, space isn’t really empty, it folds
around things—or words—and if you put the right things
in the right place and do the right things with them, and say the
right things in the Speech, magic happens. Where’s the
string?”
“This one with all the knots in it?” Nita reached
down and picked it up.
“Must have fallen out of my pocket. Stand on this end,
okay?” He dropped one end of the string into the middle of
the diagram, and Nita stepped onto it. Kit walked around her and
the diagram with it, using the end of the string to trace a circle.
Just before he came to the place where he had started, he used the
willow wand to make a sort of figure-eight mark—a
“wizards’ knot,” the book had called it—and
closed the circle with it. Kit tugged at the string as he stood up,
Nita let it go, and Kit coiled it and put it away.
“You’ve got to do this part yourself,” Kit
said. “I can’t write your name for you—each
person in a spelling does their own. There’s a table in there
with all the symbols in it—”
Nita scuffed some pages aside and found it, a long list of
English letters and numbers, and symbols in the Speech. She got
down to look at Kit’s name, so that she could see how to
write hers, and group by group began to puzzle the symbols out.
“Your birthday’s August twenty-fifth?”
“Uh huh.”
Nita looked at the symbol for the year. “They skipped you
a couple grades, huh?”
“Yeah. It’s rotten,” Kit said, sounding
entirely too cheerful as he said it. Nita knew that tone of
voice—it was the one in which she usually answered Joanne
back, while trying to hide her own fear of what was sure to happen
next. “It wouldn’t be so bad if they were my
age,” Kit went on, looking over Nita’s shoulder and
speaking absently. “But they keep saying things like
‘If you’re so smart, how come you talk so
funny?’ ” His imitation of their imitation of his
accent was precise and bitter. “They make me sick. Trouble
is, they outweigh me.”
Nita nodded and started to draw her name on the ground, using
the substitutions and symbols that appeared in her manual. Some of
them were simple and brief; some of them were almost more complex
than she believed possible, crazy amalgams of curls and twists and
angles like those an insane stenographer might produce. She did her
best to reproduce them, and tied all the symbols together,
fastening them into a circle with the same wizards’ knot that
Kit had used on the outer circle and on his own name.
“Done?” Kit said. He was standing up again, tracing
the outer circle around one more time.
“Yup.”
“Okay.” He finished the tracing with another
repetition of the wizards’ knot and straightened up; then he
put his hand out as if to feel something in the air.
“Good,” he said. “Here, come check
this.”
“Check what?” Nita said; but she got up and went
over to Kit. She put out her hand as he had, and found that
something was resisting the movement of her hand through the
air—something that gave slightly under increased
pressure, like a mattress being pushed down and then springing
back again. Nita felt momentarily nervous. “Can air get
through this?”
“I think so. I didn’t have any trouble the last
couple of times I did it. It’s only supposed to seal out
unfriendly influences.”
Nita stood there with her hand resting against nothing, and the
nothing supported her weight. The last of her doubts about the
existence of magic went away. She might have imagined the contents
of the book, or been purposely misreading. She might have dozed off
and dreamed the talking tree. But this was daylight, the waking
world, and she was leaning one-handed on empty air!
“Those guys who came across you when you had this
up,” she said, “what did they think?”
“Um, it worked on them too. They didn’t even
understand why they couldn’t get at me—they thought it
was their idea to yell at me from a distance. They thought they
were missing me with the BB guns on purpose too, to scare me.
It’s true, what the book said. There is people who
couldn’t see a magic if it bit them.” He glanced around
the finished circle. “There are other spells like this that
don’t need drawings after you do them the first time, and
when you need them, they’re there really fast—like if
someone’s about to try beating you up. People just kind of
skid away from you . . . ”
“I bet,” Nita said, with relish. Thoughts of what
else she might be able to do to Joanne flickered through her head,
but she pushed them aside for the moment. “What
next?”
“Next,” Kit said, going to the middle of the circle
and sitting down carefully so as not to smudge any of the
marks he’d made, “we read it. Or I read most of it, and
you read your name. Though first you have to check my
figuring.”
“How come?” Nita joined him, avoiding the lines and
angles.
“Two person spell—both people always check each
other’s work. But your name, you check again after I
do.”
Kit was already squinting at her squiggles, so Nita pulled out
her book again and began looking at the symbols Kit had drawn in
the dirt. There were clearly two sides to the diagram, and the book
said they both had to balance like a chemical equation. Most of the
symbols had numerical values attached, for ease in balancing, and
Nita started doing addition in her head, making sure both sides
matched. Eventually she was satisfied. She looked again at her
name, seeing nothing wrong. “Is it okay?”
“Yeah.” Kit leaned back a little. “You have to
be careful with names, it says. They’re a way of saying what
you are—and if you write something in a spell that’s
not what you are, well . . . ”
“You mean . . . you
change . . . because the spell says
you’re something else than what you are? You become
that?”
Kit shrugged, but he looked uneasy. “A spell is saying
that you want something to happen,” he said. “If you
say your name wrong—”
Nita shuddered. “And now?”
“Now we start. You do your name when I come to it. Then,
the goal part down there—since it’s a joint goal, we
say it together. Think you can do it okay if I go slow?”
“Yeah.”
Kit took a deep breath with his eyes closed, then opened his
eyes and began to read.
Nita had never heard a voice speaking a spell aloud before, and
the effect was strange. Ever so slightly, ever so slowly, things
began to change around her. The tree-sheltered quiet grew
quieter. The cool light that filtered through the canopy of
branches grew expectant, fringed with secrecy the way things seen
through the edge of a lens are fringed with rainbows. Nita began to
feel as if she was caught in the moment between a very vivid dream
and the awakening from it. There was that feeling of living in a
body—of being aware of familiar surroundings and the
realities of the daylight world waiting to be resumed—yet at
the same time seeing those surroundings differently, colored with
another sort of light, another kind of time. On one level Nita
heard Kit reciting a string of polysyllables that should have been
meaningless to her—words for symbols, pieces of words,
babble. Yet she could also hear Kit talking, saying casually, and,
it seemed, in English, “We need to know something, and we
suggest this particular method of finding the
information . . . ” And the words
didn’t break the expectancy, the listening silence. For once,
for the first time, the dream was real while Nita was awake. Power
stirred in the air around her and waited for her to shape it.
Magic.
She sat and listened to Kit. With each passing second she could
catch more clearly the clean metallic taste of the equation as it
began to form itself, flickering chill and bright in her mind.
Kit’s speech was giving it life, and with quiet, flowing
efficiency it was going about its purpose. It was invoking the
attention of what Nita might have called physical laws, except that
there was nothing physical about them—they had to do with
flows of a kind of power as different from ordinary energy as
energy was from matter. The equation stretched and coiled and
caught those powers within itself as the words wove it. Nita and
Kit were caught in it too. To Nita it seemed as if, without moving,
she held out her hands, and they were taken—by Kit, and by
the spell itself, and by the ponderous powers caught across from
her in the dance. There was a pause: Kit looked across the diagrams
at her.
Nita scowled at the symbols beside her and began to read them,
slowly and with some hesitation—naming herself one concept or
one symbol at a time, binding herself into the spell. At first she
was scared, for she could feel the strangeness folding in close
around her. But then she realized that nothing awful was happening,
and as her name became part of the spell, that was what was sliding
down around her, protecting her. She finished, and she was out of
breath, and excited, and she had never been happier in her
life.
Kit’s voice came in again then, picking up the weave,
rejoining the dance. So it went for a while, the strange words and
the half-seen, half-felt movements and images
falling into a rhythm of light and sound and texture, a song, a
poem, a spell. It began to come whole all around them, and all
around the tingling air stayed still to better hold the words, and
the trees bent close to listen.
Kit came to the set of symbols that stood for his name and who
he was, starting to read them slowly and
carefully, Nita felt the spell settle down around
her too. He finished it and glanced up at
Nita, and together they began the goal section of the spell. Nita
did her best to make a clear image of the pen as she
spoke—the silver case, gone a little scratched and grubby
now, her initials incised up on the top. She hardly had time to
wonder at the harmony their paired voices made before things began
to change again. The shadows of the trees around them seemed to
grow darker; the aura of expectancy grew sharp enough to taste. The
silence became total, and their voices fell into it as into a great
depth.
The formula for their goal, though longer than either of their
names had been, seemed to take less time to say—and even
stranger, it began to sound like much more than just finding a pen
and being left alone. It began to taste of starfire and night and
motion, huge and controlled, utterly strange. Saying the formula
left Kit and Nita breathless and drained, as if something
powerful had briefly been living and speaking through them and
had worn them down. They finished the formula together, and gulped
for air, and looked at each other in half-frightened
expectation, wondering what would happen next.
The completed spell took effect. Nita had thought that she would
gradually begin to see something, the way things had changed
gradually in the grove. The spell, though, had its own ideas. Quick
as a gasp it slammed them both out of one moment and into another,
a shocking, wrenching transition like dreaming that you’ve
fallen out of bed, wham! Instinctively they both hung on to the
spell as if onto a railing, clutching it until their surroundings
steadied down. The darkness had been replaced by a lowering,
sullen-feeling gloom. They looked down as if from a high
balcony onto a shadowed island prisoned between chill rivers and
studded with sharp spikes of iron and cold stone.
(Manhattan?) Kit asked anxiously, without words. Nita felt
frozen in place like a statue and couldn’t turn to answer
him—the spell was holding her immobile.
(It looks like Manhattan,) she said, feeling just as uneasy.
(But what’s my pen doing there?)
Kit would have shaken his head if he could have. (I don’t
get it. What’s wrong here? This is New York City—but it
never looked this awful, this dirty and nasty
and . . . ) He trailed off in confusion and
dismay.
Nita looked around her. It was hard to make out anything on the
island—there was a murky pall over the city that seemed more
than just fog. There was hardly any traffic that she could see, and
almost no light—in fact, in all of Manhattan there were only
two light sources. In one place on the island—the East
Fifties, it looked like—a small point of brittle light seemed
to pulse right through steel and stone, throbbing dully like a sown
seed of wildfire waiting to explode. The pulses were irregular and
distressing, and the light was painful to look at. Some blocks to
the south, well into the financial district near the south end of
the island, another fire burned, a clear white spark like a
sunseed, beating regularly as a heart. It was consoling, but it was
very small.
(Now what?) Nita said. (Why would my pen be in this place?) She
looked down at the dark grainy air below them, listened to the
brooding silence like that of a beast of prey ready to spring, felt
the sullen buildings hunching themselves against the oppressive
sky—and then felt the something malevolent and alive
that lay in wait below—a something that saw them, was
conscious of them, and was darkly pleased.
(Kit, what’s that?)
(It knows!) Kit’s thought sang with alarm like a plucked
string. (It knows we’re here! It shouldn’t be able to,
but—Nita, the spell’s not balanced for this. If that
thing grabs us or holds us somehow, we won’t be able to get
back!)
Nita felt Kit’s mind start to flick frantically through
the memories of what he had read in his wizards’ manual,
looking for an idea, for something they could do to protect
themselves.
She held very still and looked over his shoulder at his
thoughts, even though part of her trembled at the thought of that
dark presence which was even now reaching out toward them, lazy,
curious, deadly. Abruptly she saw something that looked useful.
(Kit, stop! No, go back one. That’s it. Look, it says if
you’ve got an imbalance, you can open out your side of
the spell to attract some more power.)
(Yeah, but if the wrong kind of power answers, we’re in
for it!)
(We’re in for it for sure if that gets us,) Nita said,
indicating the huge, hungry darkness billowing upward toward them
like a cloud. (Look, we’ll make a hole through the spell big
enough for something friendly to fall into, and we’ll take
potluck.)
Nita could feel Kit’s uncertainty as he started choosing
from memory the words and symbols he would need. (All right, but I
dunno. If something worse happens . . . )
(What could be worse?) Nita hollered at Kit, half in amusement,
half in fear. The hungry something drew closer.
Kit started to answer, then forgot about it. (There,) he said,
laying the equation out in his mind, (I think that’s all we
need.)
(Go ahead,) Nita said, watching anxiously as their pursuer got
closer and the air around them seemed to grow thicker and darker
yet. (You say it. Just tell me what to do and when.)
(Right,) Kit said, and began speaking in his mind, much faster
than he had during the initial spelling. If that first magic had
felt like the weaving of a whole, this one felt like ripping
something apart. Their surroundings seemed to shimmer uncertainly,
the dark skyline and lead-gray sky rippled like a
wind-stirred curtain; even that stalking presence seemed to
hesitate in momentary confusion. (Push,) Kit said suddenly,
(push right there.) Nita felt the torn place that Kit had made in
the spell, and she shoved clumsily at it with her mind, trying to
make the hole larger.
(It’s . . . giving . . . )
(Now, hard!) Kit said, and Nita pushed until pain stabbed and
stabbed again behind where her eyes should have been, and at the
moment she thought she couldn’t possibly push any more, Kit
said one short sharp syllable and threw the spell wide open like a
door.
It was like standing at the core of a tornado which, rather than
spinning you away to Oz, strips the roof off your home, opens the
house walls out flat as the petals of a plaster flower, and leaves
you standing confused and disbelieving in the heart of a
howling of smoke and damned voices; or like moving through a
roomful of people, every one of whom tries to catch your eye and
tell you the most important thing that ever happened to him. Nita
found herself deluged in fragments of sights and sounds and tastes
and feelings and thoughts not her own, a madly coexisting maelstrom
of imageries from other universes, other earths, other times. Most
of them she managed to shut out by squeezing her mind shut like
eyes and hanging on to the spell. She sensed that Kit was doing the
same and that their stalker was momentarily as bewildered as
they were by what was happening. The whirling confusion seemed to
be funneling through the hole in the spell like water going down a
drain—things, concepts, creatures too large or too small for
the hole fell through it, or past it, or around it. But sooner or
later something just the right size would catch. (Hope we get
something useful,) Nita thought desperately. (Something bigger
than that thing, anyway.)
And thump, something fitted into the hole with snug precision,
and the crazy whirling died away, and the two of them had company
in the spellweb. Something small, Nita felt, very small, too
small—but no, it was big,
too . . . Confused, she reached out to Kit.
(Is that it? Can we get out now? Before that
what’s-its-name—)
The what’s-its-name shook itself with a ripple
of rage and hunger that Kit and Nita could feel even at a distance.
It headed toward them again, quickly, done with playing with
them.
(Uh oh!) Kit said. (Let’s get outta here!)
(What do we—)
(What in the—) said a voice that neither of them
recognized.
(Out!) Kit said, and hooked the spell into the added power that
the newcomer provided, and pulled—and plain pale daylight
came down around them, heavy as a collapsed tent. Gravity yanked at
them. Kit fell over sideways and lay there panting on the ground
like someone who’s run a race. Nita sagged, covered her face,
bent over double right down to the ground, struggling for
breath.
Eventually she began to recover, but she put off moving or
opening her eyes. The book had warned that spelling had its prices,
and one of them was the physical exhaustion that goes along with
any large, mostly mental work of creation. Nita felt as if she had
just been through about a hundred English tests with essay
questions, one after another. “Kit?” she said, worried
by his silence.
“Nnngggg,” Kit said, and rolled over into a sort of
crouch, holding his head in his hands. “Ooooh. Turn off the
Sun.”
“It’s not that bad,” Nita said, opening her
eyes. Then she winced and shut them in a hurry. It was.
“How long have we been here?” Kit muttered.
“The Sun shouldn’t be showing here yet.”
“It’s—” Nita said, opening her eyes
again to check her watch and being distracted by a bright light to
her right that was entirely too low to be the Sun, and squinting at
it—and then forgetting what she had started to say.
Hanging in midair about three feet away from her, inside the
circle, was a spark of eye-searing white fire. It looked no
bigger than a pinhead, but it was brilliant all out of proportion
to its size, and was giving off light about as bright as that of a
two-hundred-watt bulb without a shade. The light bobbed gently in
midair, up and down, looking like a
will-o’-the-wisp plugged into too powerful
a current and about to blow out. Nita sat there with her mouth open
and stared.
The bright point dimmed slightly, appeared to describe a small
tight circle so that it could take in Kit, the drawn circle, trees
and leaves and sky; then it came to rest again, staring back at
Nita. Though she couldn’t catch what Kit was feeling, now
that the spell was over, she could feel the light’s emotions
quite clearly—amazement, growing swiftly into unbelieving
pleasure. Suddenly it blazed up white-hot again.
(Dear Artificer,) it said in bemused delight, (I’ve blown
my quanta and gone to the Good Place!)
Nita sat there in silence for a moment, thinking a great many
things at once. Uhh . . . she thought. And, So
I wanted to be a wizard, huh? Serves me right. Something falls
into my world and thinks it’s gone to Heaven. Boy, it’s
gonna get a shock. And, What in the world is it, anyway?
“Kit,” Nita said. “Excuse me a moment,”
she added, nodding with abrupt courtesy at the light source.
“Kit.” She turned slightly and reached down to shake
him by the shoulder. “Kit. C’mon, get up. We have
company.”
“Mmrnp?” Kit said, scrubbing at his
eyes and starting to straighten up. “Oh, no, the binding
didn’t blow, did it?”
“Nope. It’s the extra power you called in. I think
it came back with us.”
“Well, it—oh,” Kit said, as he finally managed
to focus on the sedately hovering brightness, “Oh.
It’s—uh . . . ”
“Right,” Nita said. “It says,” she
added, “that it’s blown its quanta. Is that
dangerous?” she asked the light.
(Dangerous?) It laughed inside, a crackling sound like an
overstimulated Geiger counter. (Artificer, child, it means
I’m dead.) “Child” wasn’t precisely the
concept it used; Nita got a fleeting impression of a huge volume of
dust and gas contracting gradually toward a common center, slow,
confused, and nebulous. She wasn’t flattered.
“Maybe you won’t like hearing this,” Nita
said, “but I’m not sure this is the Good Place. It
doesn’t seem that way to us, anyhow.”
The light drew a figure-eight in the air, a shrug. (It
looks that way to me), it said. (Look how orderly everything is! And
how much life there is in just one place! Where I come from, even a
spore’s worth of life is scarcer than atoms in a
comet’s tail.)
“Excuse me,” Kit said, “but what are
you?”
It said something Nita could make little sense of. The concept
she got looked like page after page of mathematical equations. Kit
raised his eyebrows. “It uses the Speech too,” he
commented as he listened.
“So what is it?”
Kit looked confused. “Its name says that it came from way
out in space somewhere, and it has a mass equal to—to five or
six blue-white giant stars and a few thousand-odd
planets, and it emits all up and down the matter-energy
spectrum, all kinds of light and radiation and even some subatomic
particles.” He shrugged. “You have any idea what that
is?”
Nita stared at the light in growing disbelief.
“Where’s all your mass?” she said. “If you
have that much, the gravity should have crushed us up against you
the minute you showed up.”
(Elsewhere,) the light said offhandedly. (I have a
singularity-class temporospatial claudication.)
“A warp,” Nita whispered. “A tunnel through
space-time. Are you a white hole?”
It stopped bobbing, stared at her as if she had said something
derogatory. (Do I look like a hole?)
“Do I look like a cloud of gas?” Nita snapped back,
and then sighed—her mouth was getting the better of her
again. “I’m sorry. That’s just what we call your
kind of, uh, creature. Because you act like a hole in the Universe
that light and radiation come through, I know you’re not,
really. But, Kit,” she said, turning, “where’s my
pen? And where’s the power you were after? Didn’t the
spell work?”
“Spells always work,” Kit said. “That’s
what the book says. When you ask for something, you always get back
something that’ll help you solve your problem, or be the
solution itself.” He looked entirely confused. “I asked
for that power aura for me, and your pen for you—that was
all. If we got a white hole, it means he’s the
answer—”
“If he’s the answer,” Nita
said, bemused, “I’m not sure I understand the
question.”
(This is all fascinating,) the white hole said, (but I have to
find a functional Advisory nexus in a hurry. I found out
that the Naming of Lights has gone missing, and I managed to find a
paradimensional net with enough empty loci to get me to an Advisory
in a hurry. But something seems to have gone wrong. Somehow I
don’t think you’re Advisories.)
“Uh, no,” Kit said. “I think we called
you—”
(You called me?) the white hole said, regarding Kit with mixed
reverence and amazement. (You’re one of the Powers born of
Life? Oh, I’m sorry I didn’t recognize You—I know
You can take any shape but somehow I’d always thought of You
as being bigger. A quasar, or a mega-nova.) The white hole
made a feeling of rueful amusement. (It’s confusing being
dead!)
“Oh, brother,” Kit said, “Look, I’m
not—you’re not—just not. We made a spell and we
called you. I don’t think you’re dead.”
(If you say so,) the white hole said, polite but doubtful. (You
called me, though? Me personally? I don’t think we’ve
met before.)
“No, we haven’t,” Nita said. “But we
were doing this spell, and we found something, but something found
us too, and we wouldn’t have been able to get back here
unless we called in some extra power—so we did, and it was
you, I guess. You’re not mad, are you?” she asked
timidly. The thought of what a live, intelligent white hole might
be able to do if it got annoyed scared her badly.
(Mad? No. As I said, I was trying to get out of my own space to
get the news to someone who could use it, and then all of a sudden
there was a paranet with enough loci to handle all the dimensions I
carry, so I grabbed it.) The white hole made another small circle,
looking around him curiously. (Maybe it did work. Are there
Advisories in this—on this—What is this, anyway?)
Kit looked at Nita. “Huh?”
(This,) the white hole said, (all of this.) He made another
circle.
“Oh! A planet,” Nita said. “See,
there’s our star.” She pointed, and the white hole
rotated slightly to look.
(Artificer within us,) he said, (maybe I have blown my quanta,
after all. I always wanted to see a planet, but I never got around
to it. Habit, I guess. You get used to sitting around emitting
X-rays after a while, and you don’t think of doing
anything else. You want to see some?) he asked suddenly. He felt a little insecure.
“Maybe
you’d better not,” Nita said.
(How come? They’re really pretty.)
“We can’t see them—and besides, we’re
not built to take hard radiation. Our atmosphere shuts most of it
out.”
(A real planet,) the white hole said, wondering and delighted,
(with a real atmosphere. Well! If this is a planet, there has to be
an Advisory around here somewhere. Could you help me find one?)
“Uhh—” Kit looked uncertainly at the white
hole, “Sure. But do you think you could help me find some
power? And Nita get her pen back?”
The white hole looked Kit up and down. (Some potential, some
potential,) he muttered. (I could probably have you emitting light
pretty quickly, if we worked together on a regular basis. Maybe
even some alpha. We’ll see. What’s a pen?)
“What’s your name?” Kit said, “I mean,
we can’t just call you ‘hey you’ all the
time.”
(True,) the white hole said. (My name is
Khairelikoblephareh-glukumeilichephreidosd’enagouni—)
and at the same time he went flickering through a pattern of colors
that was evidently the visual translation.
“Ky-elik—” Nita began.
“Fred,” Kit said quickly. “Well,” he
added as they looked at him again, “if we have to yell for
help or something, the other way’s too long. And that was the
only part I got, anyway.”
“Is that okay with you?” Nita asked.
The white hole made his figure-eight shrug again. (Better
than having my truename mangled, I guess,) he said, and chuckled
silently. (Fred, then. And you are?)
“Nita.”
“Kit.”
(I see why you like them short,) Fred said. (All right. Tell me
what a ‘pen’ is, and I’ll try to help you find
it. But we really must get to an Advisory as fast as we
can—)
“Okay,” Kit said. “Let’s break the
circle and go talk.”
“Sounds good,” Nita said, and began to erase the
diagrams they had drawn. Kit cut the wizards’ knot and
scuffed the circle open in a few places, while Nita took a moment
to wave her hand through the now-empty air. “Not bad
for a first spell,” she said with satisfaction.
(I meant to ask,) Fred said politely, (what’s a
spell?)
Nita sighed, and smiled, and picked up her book, motioning Fred
to follow her over by where Kit sat. It was going to be a long
afternoon, but she didn’t care. Magic was loose in the
world.