Wizards at War, New Millennium Edition

by Diane Duane

  Nonetheless, the place where the pimple was coming up still stung. Nita found herself torn between the eternal choices: squeeze it, which always grossed her out and sometimes left a mark? Or do a wizardry on it? Or just let it be, and go through the next couple of days feeling like a leper?

  She shrugged. It’s a dream. There may not be a pimple at all. Just leave it alone. We’ve got more important things to think about.

  Nita turned away from the mirror and found herself not in her bedroom at all, but out on the surface of Metemne. This sort of abrupt transition was normal for lucid dreaming, and Nita had learned over time to let these experiences take her where they wanted to.

  Reluctantly, she looked up into the sky, knowing what she was about to see, and instead saw … nothing. There was no sign of the Pullulus, but neither was there any sign of the stars, or interstellar space, or even the little planet’s sun. The effect was like being in a closed, windowless room with the lights off. Nita didn’t much care for it … for inside the “room” with her she could hear slow, steady breathing.

  She held very still, trying not to panic. The breathing stayed steady and slow; it was as if something slept nearby, something very big. She became concerned that she might wake it up. Then it occurred to her that this was the problem. Whatever was asleep, it needed to wake up.

  “Hello?” she said, and her voice sounded as if she actually was inside a small room, like her bedroom with the door shut—but a bare unfurnished bedroom, an empty place in which her voice echoed. “Hey! Can you hear me? Wake up!”

  No answer. Nita looked around. There was nothing in any direction but the barren, gritty surface of the planet. That breathing, she thought, that’s the Pullulus. To her surprise, the idea didn’t upset her: The sound of it frightened her a lot less than the way it looked. And after a few moments, the heavy-breathing sound started to seem slightly comic, like someone pretending to be asleep so you’d go away.

  Nita rolled her eyes. “Oh, come on,” she said to the darkness in the Speech. “Are you going to just leave me talking to myself here? Say something!”

  It won’t answer you, said a voice from somewhere nearby. There is only one to whom it will answer, and that one’s not here.

  She looked around to see who’d spoken. There wasn’t anyone to be seen. But from off to one side, there had to be a light shining, because suddenly Nita had a shadow.

  Nita stared down at it. The shadow was a double one, as if the light sources producing it were in slightly different positions. She looked toward where the light should have been coming from. But there was nothing there but more barren rock and grit.

  Nita looked down again. The shadow was fuzzy-edged, as if thrown by a candle, and the flickering continued. She scuffed at it curiously with one sneaker, then looked around. “Well,” she said, “I’m on errantry, and I greet you. Wherever you are…”

  Everywhere, the voice said, for quite a while now.

  There were all kinds of potentialities and forces running around in the universe that could truthfully say something like that. “You’re one of the Powers?” Nita said. “Ronan? Is that you? Or your buddy?”

  She caught a distinct feeling of surprise from whatever she was talking to. You are thinking of one of the Great Intervenors, it said, the Light’s own designated Defender. No, I would not be anything so exalted.

  She looked at the two fuzzy shadows lying out across the grit of Metemne. “You’re a dual-state being of some kind,” Nita said. “Like a twychild.”

  Nothing like that. Was that a breath of wistfulness behind the thought? But something old… and something new.

  Nita remembered her mother telling her an old poem and showing her the sixpence that an English friend had sent her to put in her shoe the day she married Nita’s dad. “Are you by any chance blue?”

  The being was amused. No. But often borrowed.

  “How come I can’t see you?” Nita said.

  But you can, the being said. Her shadows flickered more energetically.

  “That’s my shape,” Nita said. “Not yours.”

  But all the shape I have is the one wizards give me, the being said.

  Her shadow writhed and flickered against the dusty ground, and as if inside it, Nita caught a glimpse of a number of images melting one into another: something with wings, and then a long twining shape, like a faint light in the shadow—almost the shape of two snakes curling and sliding past each other, so that Nita was reminded of a caduceus. Matter, and the power to do things to matter, she thought. The idea, and the thing you say or do to make it happen—

  “You’re wizardry,” Nita whispered. “Wizardry itself.”

  Not quite. I’m peridexis: the combined effect of the words of the Speech and the power that lives within it. But without the ones who speak the words and decide how to use the power, there’s no wizardry. It always takes at least three…

  “So you’re the ‘power surge’ we’ve been getting,” Nita said to the bright shapes in the shadow. “But also sort of the soul of the spell…”

  Of every spell, yes. And to a certain extent, the manual.

  “Wow,” Nita said. “It’s a shame you’re not usually this talkative.”

  This isn’t a usual sort of time, said the voice of the peridexic effect. Now more than ever, wizards need their spells to give them some extra help.

  “It’s going to surprise a lot of people that you’re conscious,” Nita said. As she spoke, she was studying the light submerged in her shadow. Curious, Nita got down on one knee to touch her shadow with a couple of fingers, and found that she could actually put her hand down into it. The bright shapes rose to meet her, and she felt the slight jolt of power as they did, as if she’d touched the poles of a battery with wet fingers.

  Not many will notice, the peridexis said. Those who might be bothered by the concept of the living spell won’t hear my voice.

  Nita nodded. “Doesn’t bother me,” she said, glancing up again at the strangely empty sky. “But what about the Pullulus? ‘It won’t answer,’ you said. That was what the Senior Wizards were trying to get it to do, wasn’t it?”

  Yes. But they were the wrong ones to speak to the Pullulus, and didn’t know the word that needed to be said.

  “So who’s the right one to do the speaking?” Nita said. “And what’s the word?”

  Without warning, she found herself kneeling by the chain-link fence across the parking lot from her high school’s main doors. Nita got up and dusted her hand off. It was gray with the dust from the worn-in pathway that ran along the fence, the place where kids leaned during lunch hours and “off” periods when they couldn’t leave school property, but were intent on getting as far from school as possible. Over to one side, as far down that path as she could get without being on the sidewalk that led out the parking lot’s gate, was the lanky, thin, denim-clad form of Della Cantrell.

  Del was a transfer from the high school over in Oceanside. There were all kinds of stories about the transfer, since almost no one had been willing to get close enough to her to find out what was really going on. One set of rumors claimed that her folks had moved here, to what was a less expensive suburb of the county, because her dad’s business had failed. There were whispers of some kind of vague white-collar wrongdoing—extortion, embezzlement, no one knew what. Others said that Del herself was the problem, that she’d been causing trouble at her old high school and they’d thrown her out. The rumors about what that trouble might have been were even worse than the ones about Della’s dad.

  Nita had started to be infuriated by the whispering campaign when she’d first seen the very pretty, very lonely looking girl, always in the same beat-up denim jacket and boot-cut jeans, sitting all by herself in her history class during her first week at Nita’s school—hardly glancing up, interacting exclusively with the teacher, plainly nervous about looking anybody else in the face. That feeling Nita knew all too well from the time before she’d become a wizard, the time when she’d f
irst come to understand it was unlikely that anything she did to her clothes or her hair would ever change the way the other kids saw her—as a nerd—and every passing day had left her more hopeless and angry about it. Now, far more certain of herself and far less concerned with what most of her classmates thought of her, Nita was in a better position to feel concern for anyone else caught in the same trap. As soon as that class had finished, she’d gone over and introduced herself.

  This had not been without its penalties, for Nita knew the whispering would start about her within minutes. The most popular kids in school saw her simply as a bottom feeder, a geek with so few friends that she’d purposely befriend a newcomer and outcast so that she’d have someone to be more normal than. Let them think that, Nita had thought. When I’m dealing with them, I have to do right by them … but, otherwise, after we all graduate in a few years, with luck I’ll never see most of these people again.

  “Hey, Del,” Nita said, wandering over to where Della was leaning against the chain-link fence, doing something with her smartphone.

  “Hey,” Della said. She glanced up just long enough to look up past the school, down toward the parking lot, which was almost empty at this time of day. The juniors and seniors who had cars had pretty much all pulled out half an hour before. Then she dropped her gaze back to her phone again, scrolling its screen with one thumb.

  “You okay?” Nita said.

  Della turned her head, looked at Nita slowly. Though the look was unsmiling, over time Nita had come to know that it wasn’t actually hostile. This was just the way Della defended herself from people, refusing to reveal anything they could use against her; usually the flatness of the look was enough to scare them off.

  “You look depressed,” Nita said, and leaned against the fence as well.

  Della sighed and looked away. “The news all sucks,” she said. “Nothing but bomb scares and fighting and airports being evacuated because of terrorists, and security alerts everywhere. The world’s going to shit all around us, and everything else on TV besides the news is just dumb, and my brother’s really getting on my nerves.”

  Her voice was surprisingly resigned and bored. “You’ve got a sister,” Della said. “What do you do when you feel like killing her?”

  “Try to get her to go to some other planet,” Nita said.

  Della smiled a rather bitter smile. “Have much luck with that?”

  “Not as much as I’d like,” Nita said. “But sometimes she gets the hint.”

  They leaned there in a companionable silence for a few moments. A teacher came out one of the side doors of the school carrying a briefcase and an armful of books, and headed for his car. “I hate just lurking around here,” Della said, watching the teacher get into the car and start it up, “but lurking around home is worse. There’s nowhere to hide. Even when I’m in my room, I know my mom and dad are just waiting for me to come out so they can look at me that way they do, like there’s something I’m supposed to do to make everything turn out all right.” And Della manufactured a sort of creepily threatening cross between a scowl and a smile. The expression looked to Nita so much like something that would normally appear on a cartoon character that she had to laugh.

  Della snickered, too, then. “See, not even you take me seriously,” she said, and pushed the long curly blond hair out of her eyes. “Come on, give me a hint: what am I supposed to be doing to make it all right? What is it They want?”

  Nita’s eyes widened. She looked more closely at Della, but Del’s face was unrevealing. “I’m not sure,” Nita said.

  “But you’re supposed to know,” Della said, gazing across at the school doors as if she was intent on not meeting Nita’s eyes. “You’re the one who’s been left in charge. You’re supposed to have all the answers. Help me out here!”

  Nita looked thoughtfully at Della, looked hard. The wind blew the hair across Della’s face again. Annoyed, she lifted a hand to push it aside.

  Not a hand. A claw—

  Nita’s eyes widened. Then she started violently as something she couldn’t see struck her in the side of the head. She flinched and flung her right hand up, and the lightning-bolt charm with a particularly aggressive “blaster” spell bound into it glinted on her charm bracelet in the late-afternoon sunlight. Nita opened her mouth to say the twenty-third word of the spell and turn the force-blast loose against the thing that had hit her; and as she did, Della pressed herself back against the fence, the darkness that surrounded the claw shimmering up around her, abolishing the blond hair, the face—

  Something came down over Nita’s mouth, so that she couldn’t speak. Something else stuck itself in her ear. Nita’s eyes narrowed; she started to simply think the twenty-third word of the force-blast spell instead of saying it. It was a long one. Light twined around it, paired serpents of fire—

  Don’t do it!

  And abruptly the thing in her ear was a tongue, one she knew entirely too well.

  Ewwwww, Nita thought, opening her eyes, her heart still beating hard. Kit stood at the head of the couch, looking down at her anxiously; he’d just removed his hand from her mouth. Ponch, meanwhile, had finished washing her ear and was now enthusiastically working on her face.

  “Thanks for not blasting me,” Kit said.

  “Good thing you moved fast, ‘cause I didn’t know it was you,” Nita said, pushing Ponch away. “Did I oversleep? It’s morning already?”

  “It’s not just morning. It’s Monday morning.”

  “What?” Nita’s eyes went wide. She sat straight up, or tried to; as usual, the crocheted throw had wrapped itself around her like a cocoon. “It can’t be! We were only gone—oh, four or five hours, there was the stuff on the Moon—and then we did the transit, and we slept here, yeah, but it should still only be—”

  “Normally it should still only be,” Kit said. He looked at Ponch.

  Ponch looked guilty. I brought us straight here…

  “But it took longer than usual,” Nita said, struggling to get out from under the throw. “Ponch, don’t worry! It wasn’t your fault. It’s got to be the expansion—it’s throwing everything off.”

  “Tell that to your dad,” Kit said, sounding rather grim. “I get to do it with mine in a minute. Or if my luck runs out, with my mama.”

  Nita swallowed. Her dad—who knew if he’d been trying to reach her? And if he had, why hadn’t her phone gone off? Tom and Carl did the wizardry on it, she thought, it should be okay! But if wizardry wasn’t behaving correctly in some of the places they were going—And then again she saw it, the shimmer of a hand that was a claw, and eyes that willingly blinded themselves behind a sheen of darkness—

  She covered her face with her hands and tried to pull everything together so that it made some kind of sense. This may take a while… “Okay,” she said to Kit, pushing her hair back, “give me a minute or two to kick my brains into shape. What’s everybody else doing?”

  “Getting up,” Kit said, “like they had a choice.” He glanced in Ponch’s direction with a slightly exasperated look. “I kept him out of here as long as I could. But Ponch had himself a good time with everyone else first. Don’t even ask what he tried to do to Filif.”

  Ponch, who had spent the past few moments investigating everything in Nita’s pup tent that he could stick his nose into or under, now bounded back wearing an expression of complete innocence. I wasn’t really going to do that! he said. It was just kind of funny for a moment…

  Kit gave Nita a skeptical look. “Let me get the humorist out of here,” he said. “You want something to eat before we go?”

  “I’ll grab something,” Nita said. “You go ahead.”

  Kit and Ponch went out. Nita finally managed to get completely free of the throw. She got up, folded the throw and chucked it over the back of the sofa, then pulled on jeans and sneakers and a soft shirt, shrugged into the vest-with-too-many-pockets that she’d brought along, and started going through the pockets in search of a candy bar. Sugar, she tho
ught, I really need some sugar. Nita turned up, in rapid succession, a wad of shredded facial tissues, an empty gum packet, a clear plastic mint box with one lone mint left rattling around in it, an extremely sticky ice-cream wrapper, and, finally, a slightly squashed chocolate-and-peanut bar. She unwrapped it and ate it in three bites. Hand. Claw. An eye goes dark—

  Nita crumpled up the wrapper of the candy bar and shoved it in yet another pocket. Making notes on what she’d seen was going to have to wait, but at least she wasn’t likely to forget that image in a hurry. She went fishing among the pockets for her phone, and finally turned it up.

  Nita hit the “dial” button and waited. The somewhat altered dial tone of a cell phone running wizardly routines came on, and then cut out… and Nita broke out in a sweat. Oh, please don’t let this be broken. This really needs to work right now—

  “Hello?”

  “Daddy!” Nita said. “It didn’t ring.”

  “It rang here,” her father said, “which I’ve been waiting for it to do for four days! You said you were going to keep in touch—”

  Nita could understand how annoyed and upset he sounded; she was annoyed herself. “Dad, I’m sorry, but for once it’s not our fault,” she said. “For us it’s just been eight hours or so since we left. It looks like the dark-matter expansion is screwing up our transit times.”

  “Well, that’s just great,” her dad said. “Is this going to keep happening?”

  “I don’t know,” Nita said, and rolled her eyes. I wish somebody would ask me a question I know the answer to. “I’ll call you as often as I can, but if time’s running weirdly for us, I don’t want to wake you up in the middle of the night and worry you even more.”

  “I’ll take my chances with that,” Nita’s dad said. “Has anything bad happened? Are you all safe?”

  “We’re fine,” Nita said. “We’re just getting up. We had a few hours’ sleep. Not as much as I would’ve liked.”

  “Well, I didn’t get as much last night as I’d have liked, either.”