High Wizardry New Millennium Edition, Page 2

  …And Nita’s eye fell again on the CDs on her desk, and the wizard’s manual underneath them. She pushed the CDs aside to look at it, still open to the Oath. Idly she pulled the manual out, touching the open pages as she held it. In Life’s name, and for Life’s sake, began the small block of type on the right-hand page, I say that I will use this art only in service of that Life…

  Dairine was in here yesterday, Nita thought, skimming down over the words of the Oath. …And it looks like she was reading this. For a moment Nita had a flash of anger at the idea of her sister rummaging around in her stuff; but it didn’t last. Surprising that she could see it, though, Nita thought, for most nonwizards had trouble seeing or even noticing wizardly things. Still…maybe this isn’t so bad after all. She’s been pestering me with questions about wizardry ever since she found out there really is such a thing. She thinks it’s all exciting adventures. But the Oath’s heavy stuff. Maybe it threw a little scare into her with all the stuff about “time’s end” and doing what you have to, no matter what.

  And Nita smiled to herself, a bit grimly. Be a good thing if it did make her back off a little, because she was getting waaaay too interested…

  Nita shut the manual, tucked it under her arm and headed out into the living room. Dairine was still standing in front of the computer, typing hurriedly into an open window, the text too small for Nita to see. Their mother and father were still deep in the paperwork, congenially contradicting each other. “Mom,” Nita said, “Kit and I want to go into the city, to the planetarium, is it okay? Kit’s folks say he can.”

  Nita’s mother glanced up at her, considering. “Well… Okay, but make sure you’re back before dark.”

  “Stay out of Times Square,” her father said without looking up, while riffling through more of the paperwork.

  “You’ve got enough money for the train?” her mother said.

  “Mom,” Nita said, hefting her wizard’s manual in one hand, “don’t think we’re taking the train.”

  “Oh.” Her mom looked a touch dubiously at the book. She’d seen more than enough evidence of her daughter’s power in the past couple of months, but Nita knew better than to think that her mother was anything like comfortable with wizardry yet, or all that used to it. “You’re not going into town to, uh, do something, are you?”

  “We’re not on assignment, Mom, no. Not for a while, after last time.”

  “Oh. Good. All the same… you be careful, Neets. Wizards are a dime a dozen as far as I’m concerned, but daughters…”

  Nita’s father looked up at that. “Stay out of trouble,” he said, and meant it.

  “Okay, Dad.”

  “Now, Bets,” her Dad said, immediately turning back to the subject at hand, “see, right here, it says ‘The first time you turn on your iMac, Setup Assistant starts. Setup Assistant helps you—’”

  “Yes, I got that, Harry. But that’s not the problem. It’s the business of the email accounts. Over here it says—”

  Nita hurried out through the kitchen before her folks could change their minds. Kit was evidently thinking along the same lines, since he was standing in the middle of the sandy place by the backyard gate, using the stick Ponch had brought him to draw a wizard’s basic transit circle on the ground. “I sent Ponch home,” he said, setting various symbols around the inside circumference of the circle.

  “Okay.” Nita stepped in beside him. “Where’re we headed? Grand Central?”

  “No, the worldgate there’s down for the next hour and a half for maintenance. The manual says to use Penn Station. What time have you got?”

  Nita squinted up at the Sun. “Nine thirty.”

  Kit rolled his eyes at Nita, though the expression was good-humored. “Show-off. Use the watch; I need Naval Observatory time.”

  “Nine thirty-three and twenty seconds,” Nita said, scowling at her Timex, “now.”

  “Not bad. Let’s get out of here before—”

  “What are you doing!” yelled Nita’s father, clearly audible even ten yards outside the house.

  Nita and Kit both jumped guiltily, then looked at each other. Nita sighed.

  “Too late,” Kit said.

  At nine thirty-three and twenty-eight seconds, the screen door opened and Dairine was propelled firmly out of it. Nita’s father put his head out after Dairine, and looked up the driveway. “Take her with you,” he said to Nita, and meant that too.

  “Okay, Dad…” Nita said, trying not to sound too surly as the screen door slammed shut. Kit rolled his eyes and slowly began adding another set of symbols to those already inside the circle. Dairine scuffed over to them, looking at least as annoyed as Nita felt.

  “Well,” Dairine said, “looks like I’m stuck with you.”

  “Get in,” Kit said, sounding resigned. “Don’t step on the lines.”

  “And try not to freak out too much, okay?” Nita said, secretly rather hoping that she would. It’d serve her right.

  Dairine stepped over the bounds of the circle and stood there with her arms folded, glaring at Nita.

  “What a great time we’re all going to have,” Kit said, opening his manual. He began to read in the wizardly Speech, fast. Nita looked away from her sister for the moment and let Kit handle it.

  The air around them began to sing-the same note ears sing when they’ve been in a noisy place too long; but this singing got louder, not softer, as seconds passed. Nita had the mild satisfaction of seeing Dairine start to look nervous at that, and at the slow breeze beginning around them when everywhere else the summer air was still. The breeze got stronger, dust around them whipped and scattered in it, the sound scaled up until it blotted out almost everything else. And despite her annoyance, Nita suddenly got lost in the old familiar exhilaration of magic working. From memory—for she and Kit had worked this spell together many times—she lifted her voice in the last chorus of it, where the words came in a rush, and the game and skill of the spell lay in matching your partner’s cadence exactly. Kit dropped not a syllable as Nita came in, but grinned at her, matching her word for word for the last ten seconds They ended together on one word that was half laugh, half shout of triumph. And on the word, the air around them cracked like thunder and struck inward from all directions, like a blow—

  The wind stilled and the dust settled, and they found themselves in the last aisle of a small chain bookstore, next to a door with a hand-lettered sign that said EMPLOYEES ONLY. Kit put his manual away, and he and Nita were brushing themselves off when that door popped open and a small sandy-haired man with inquiring eyes looked out at them. “Something fall down out here? No?… You need some help?”

  “Uh,” Nita and Kit said, still in unison.

  “Comics,” Dairine said, not missing a beat. “X-Men.”

  “Up front on the right, in the rack, third shelf down,” said the small man, and vanished through his door again.

  “Hope they’ve got X-Men: Legacy,” Dairine said, casually brushing the dust off her shorts and her Star Wars T-shirt, and heading for the front of the store.

  Kit and Nita glanced ruefully at each other and went after her. It looked like it was going to be a long day.

  Passwords

  Like so many other human beings, Dairine made her first major decision about life and the world quite early; at the age of three, in fact. She’d seen Nita (then six years old) go away to kindergarten for the first time, and at the end of the day come back crying because she hadn’t known the answers to some of the questions the teacher asked her.

  Nita’s crying had upset Dairine more than anything else in her short life. It had instantly become plain to Dairine’s three-year-old mind that the world was a dangerous place if you didn’t know things, a place that would make you unhappy if it could. Right there she decided that she was not going to be one of the unhappy ones.

  So she got smart. She started out by working to keep her ears and eyes open, noticing everything. Not surprisingly, Dairine’s senses became abnormally sha
rp, and stayed that way. She found out how to read by the time she was four… just how, she never remembered: but at five she was already working her way through the encyclopedias her parents had bought for Nita. The first time they caught her at it—reading aloud to herself from a Britannica article on taxonomy, and sounding out the longer words—her mom and dad were shocked, though for a long time Dairine couldn’t understand why. It had never occurred to her that you could use what you knew, use even the knowing itself, to make people feel things… perhaps even to make them do things.

  For fear of her parents getting upset and maybe stopping her, until she was five or so Dairine kept her reading out of their sight as much as she could; for the thought of being kept away from books terrified her. Most of what moved Dairine was sheer delight of learning, the great openness of the world that reading offered her, even though she herself wasn’t free to explore the world yet. But there was also that obscure certainty, buried under the months and years since the decision, that the sure way to make the world work for you was to know everything. Dairine sat home and busied herself with conquering the world.

  Eventually it came time for her to go off to kindergarten. Remembering Nita, her parents were braced for the worst, but not at all for Dairine’s scowling, annoyed response when she came home. “They won’t pay attention to what I tell them,” Dairine said. “Yet.” And off she went to read, leaving her mother and father staring at each other.

  School went on, and time; and after Dairine sailed her way effortlessly through the the first couple of grades, she was put into an advanced track. She knew (having heard a couple of her mother’s phone conversations with the school’s psychiatrist) that her mom and dad were concerned about this. But Dairine had gone out of her way to charm the poor guy, as well as taking time to impress upon him that he wasn’t dealing with some fragile flower, but a strongminded kid who had no intention of letting the older ones in the same track steamroll her. Once the new track placement took effect in third grade, she started to relax a little: having (as it were) received her school’s stamp of approval—as if she needed it—nobody would now find her reading habits unusual.

  Then Dairine was able to really let her reading cut loose. Every day after school, she would hit the little local library (right across the street) and soon enough had read everything in the kids’ library downstairs at the rate of about six books a day. Then—after the concerned librarian got permission from Dairine’s parents—she read through the whole adult collection, a touch more slowly. Her mom and dad thought it would be a shame to stifle such an active curiosity. Dairine considered this opinion wise, and kept reading, trying not to think of the time, not too far away, when she would exhaust the adult books (for she wasn’t yet allowed to go to the big township library by herself).Still, you could always order them in by interlibrary loan, and from much further afield… even from the New York Public Library, where there were eight million volumes on tap. Dairine admitted that it might take even her a while to work through all of those.

  Then, though, things changed seriously in two very different ways. First, the little local library finally got its computers installed—simple downmarket machines though they were—and its Internet connection going: and her life shifted dramatically as she was released into whole new realms of knowledge, fresh and immediate, that gave even the books a run for their money. And second, Dairine started to notice mass media, and a whole new sheaf of dreams abruptly came alive.

  In reading straight through the children’s library she’d ingested a huge number of folk tales and fairy tales. They hadn’t had that much effect on her. But when she first got a taste of the new trilogy of Star Wars movies, a peculiar upheaval took place in her heart; one that made her half crazy until she’d seen all the old ones, and left her desperately excited for the new, even the animated “Clone Wars” film that had just come out. Magic, great power for good and evil, she’d naturally read about in many other places. But the Star Wars movies somehow hit her with a terrible immediacy that the books had not; with a clear picture of power available even to the young sons of slaves or untrained farmboys on distant planets in the future, and therefore surely available to someone who knew things in the present. And if you could learn that supreme knowledge, and master the power that filled and shaped the universe, how could the world ever hurt you? For a good while Dairine’s reading suffered, and her daydreams were full of the singing blaze of lightsabers, the electric smell of blasterfire, and the shadow of ultimate evil in a black cloak, which after terrible combat she always defeated. Her sister teased her a lot less about it than Dairine expected.

  Her sister… Their relationship early on had been peculiar, almost a little on the casual or remote side compared to the sibling relationships Dairine had first come up against among the other kids in her track at school. It wasn’t that it was hostile. When both Dairine and Nita were little, they’d played together often enough. But where learning came in, for a while there had been trouble. There were times that Nita showed Dairine things she was learning at school… and when Dairine learned them from her almost immediately, and shortly was better at them than Nita was, Nita for some reason or other got upset. Dairine had trouble understanding why. WHen she succeeded this way, it was a victory for them both, wasn’t it, over the world, which would hurt you if you didn’t know things? But Nita seemed not to understand that.

  Eventually things got better. As they got older, they started growing together, sharing more. Possibly Nita was understanding her better, or had simply seen how much Dairine liked to know things; for she started tutoring Dairine in the upper-grade subjects she was studying, algebra and so forth. Dairine started actively liking her sister (though she kept herself restrained about showing it, nervous about revealing even to her own sister too much of what was going on inside her head). When they started having trouble with bullies, and their parents sent them both off to self-defense school, Dairine mastered that art as quickly as anything else she’d ever decided to learn. Then when a particularly bad beating near home made it plain that Nita wasn’t using what they’d learned, she quietly put the word out that anyone who messed with Nita would have Dairine to deal with. The bullying stopped, for both of them, and Dairine felt smugly satisfied.

  That is, she did until one day after school she saw a kid come at Nita to “accidentally” body-block her into the dirt of the playground she was crossing. Dairine started to move to prevent it—but as the kid threw himself at Nita, he abruptly slid sideways off the air around her as if he had run into a glass wall. No one else seemed to notice. Even the attacker looked blank as he fell sideways into the dust. But Nita smiled a little, and kept on walking… and suddenly the world fell out from under Dairine, and everything was terribly wrong. Her sister knew something she didn’t.

  Dairine’s whole inner world immediately blazed up in a raging fire of curiosity. She started watching Nita closely, and her best friend, Kit, too, on a hunch. Slowly Dairine began to catch Nita at things no one else seemed to notice; odd words muttered to empty air, after which lost things abruptly became found, or stuck things came loose.

  There was one day when their father had been complaining about the crabgrass in the front lawn, and Dairine had seen an odd, thoughtful look cross Nita’s face. That evening her sister had sat on the lawn for a long time, muttering under her breath. Dairine couldn’t hear a word she said. But a week and a half later their father was standing on and admiring a crabgrass-free lawn, extolling the new brand of weedkiller he’d tried. He didn’t notice, as Dairine did, the large patch of crabgrass under the apple trees in the neighbor’s yard next door… carpeting a barren place where the neighbor had been trying to get something green to grow, anything, for as long as Dairine could remember. It was all stuff like that… little things, strange thin nothing Dairine could understand and use. It drove her nuts.

  Then came summer vacation at the beach—and the strangeness started to come out in the open. Nita and Kit started spendin
g a lot of time away from home, sneaking in and out as if there were something to hide. Dairine heard her mother’s uneasy conversations about this with her father, and was amused, since she knew that whatever secret thing Nita was doing with Kit, it wasn’t sex, but something way more interesting. For the time being covered for Nita and Kit and bided her time, waiting for something to happen that she could exploit.

  The time came soon enough. One night the two of them went swimming and didn’t come back when it got dark, as they’d agreed to. Seriously worried about them, Dairine’s mom and dad wet out looking for Nita and Kit on the beach, taking Dairine with them. Amid all the confusion and the worry—for Dairine’s mom was terrified that there might be sharks out in that water—it took no time at all to “get separated” from them. And Dairine was a quarter-mile down the beach from them when with a rush of water and noisy breath, a forty-foot humpback whale breached right in front of her, ran itself aground…and turned into Nita.

  Nita went white with shock at the sight of Dairine. Dairine didn’t care. “You’re going to tell me everything,” Dairine said. Then she ran down the beach to distract her parents just long enough for Nita and Kit—also just changed back from a whale—to get back into their bathing suits. And after the noisy, angry scene with their parents that followed, after the house was quiet, Dairine went to Nita’s room, where Kit was waiting, too, and made them them tell her the whole story.

  It was like a world ending… and a new one opening up. Wizard’s manuals, oaths, wizardry, spells, quests, terrible dangers beyond the world, great powers that moved unseen and unsuspected beneath the surface of everyday existence, and every now and then broke surface… Dairine was ecstatic. It was all there, everything she had longed for. And if they could have it, she could have it too—