A Wizard Alone

That’s likely to be a tall order…

Ponch had stopped dreaming and was breathing quietly again. Kit hated to wake him, but free days like this weren’t something he got often. He nudged his dog’s tummy gently with one sneaker.

“Ponch,” he said. “C’mon, big guy.”

Ponch opened one eye and looked at Kit.

Breakfast!

His dog might be getting a little strange, as wizards’ pets sometimes do, but in other regards Ponch was absolutely normal. Ponch got up, stretched fore and aft, shook himself all over, and then headed for the hallway. Kit grinned, picked up the manual, stuck it into the “pocket” of otherspace that he kept things in for his wizardly work, and went after him.

In the kitchen, Kit opened a can of dog food and emptied it into the bowl. Ponch went through it in about five minutes of single-minded chowing down, then looked up. More?

“You’re only supposed to get one in the morning. You know that.”

But today’s a workday. Today we go bunting.

“So?”

I have to keep up my strength.

Kit rolled his eyes. “I’m being had here,” he said.

Boss

! Ponch looked pained.

“Oh, all right,” Kit said after a moment. “But if all this food makes you want to lie down and have a big long sleep all of a sudden…”

It won’t.

Kit sighed and opened the cupboard to get out another can of dog food. Not that one. The chicken this time

, Ponch said.

Kit looked at his dog, then at the label on the can. “When did you learn to read?”

I don’t have to read. I can hear you doing it, Ponch said. Anyway, the color’s different on the food with chicken in it.

Kit grabbed a different can and popped the top, shaking his head, and emptied it into Ponch’s bowl. “The color” he said after a moment. “I thought dogs saw only in gray.”

Ponch paused in his eating. Maybe we do, he said. But important things look different.

Kit shook his head. Whatever color his dog saw his food in, it didn’t matter much, as it all swiftly went inside him, where theoretically everything was the same color, especially after it was digested.

When he was finished eating, Ponch circled around a couple of times and lay down to start washing his paws.

“You’re not going to go to sleep, are you?” Kit said.

Ponch looked at him with some mild annoyance. If you ‘re going to hunt, he said, your feet have to be clean

He went back to nibbling his paws again.

Kit sighed and sat down to wait. When Ponch was finished, he got up, shook himself again, and said, I have to go out.

“You’ll be ready then?”

Yes.

Kit opened the door and let the dog out. He put on his jacket, picked up his house keys from the hook inside the back door, and got one more thing from the place where the coats hung — the wizardly “leash” that he’d made for Ponch when they were working together in other worlds. For those who could see it, it looked like a slender, smooth cord of blue light, a tight braid of words in the Speech that had to do with finding things, remembering where you found them, and not losing what had helped you find them in the first place — namely Ponch. Kit coiled up the leash and stuffed it in his parka pocket, then locked up the house and went up the driveway to the gate in the chainlink fence. There Ponch was dancing with impatience. Kit opened the gate, and Ponch shot through and into the yard, straight to the back where the trees and bushes grew thickest.

Kit paused for a moment in the frosty morning air. It was one of those cold gray days, but the wrong kind of gray for snow — the kind of day that made you wish that spring would hurry up, but also a day when going to another universe, any other universe, would be a relief from the gloominess of your own. He reached into his pocket for the transit spell he’d used the other day to get to Darryl's school, and ran the long glowing chain of it through his fingers while Ponch did his business back in the bushes. A moment later Ponch bounced out of the underbrush again, and ran back to Kit, bounding up and down around him.

You ready?

“Yeah. Here’s your leash.”

Kit managed with some difficulty to get Ponch to hold still long enough to slip the leash-spell around his neck. Should Ponch’s search for Darryl take them into some space where there wasn’t air, or something else humans and dogs needed to survive, the leash would make sure Kit’s fail-safe spells temporarily covered Ponch, until Kit could improvise something else. It would also keep them from getting separated in any hostile environment.

Where to first?

“Darryl’s school,” Kit said. “Let me get us invisible first. I want a closer look at him when we get there.”

Kit reached out to one side and traced his finger down the air, “unzipping” his claudication pocket, then reached in for the wizard’s manual. When he bounced it in his hand, it fell open at the spot Kit had previously marked, the invisibility spell. The wizardry was as he’d left it, in a partly activated state, waiting for the last few syllables to be pronounced.

Kit said them, and felt the wizardry take, expanding to fold around him and Ponch and then snug in close. This was one of the simpler ways to be invisible; the wizardry “looked” at what was behind you and made anyone in front of you see that instead of you. This light-diversion type of invisibility wasn’t good for use in large groups, because it tended to break down under the strain of servicing too many viewpoints, but Kit thought this would be good enough for this morning; he didn’t think he and Ponch were likely to wind up in a crowd.

Ponch shook himself as the wizardry settled in around them, then sat down and scratched. It itches!

“I know,” Kit said. “It has to fit tight to work Try to bear with it — we won’t need it for long.”

Kit dropped the bright chain of the transit spell on the ground around them. It knotted itself closed, and the sound of the words and the power of the spell reared up around them in a roar of light. When the brilliance and the noise faded down again, they were standing where they’d been the previous day: in the parking lot, looking at the bland front of Centennial Avenue School.

Kit picked up the transit spell, tucked it away in his claudication pocket. We’d better keep it silent from here on

, he said. Have you got his scent?

Sure. He’s in a room over on the left side of the building. He’s close.

Show me where.

Together they padded quietly onto the sidewalk outside the school doors, and up onto the lawn on the left side, making their way down the length of the one-story building. About half a minute later, they were standing outside the schoolroom where Darryl and his classmates were working. Kit peered in.

It didn’t look much like the classrooms at Kit’s school, but he wasn’t expecting it to: These kids had special needs. The furniture was sofas and cushions and soft mats rather than the desk-chairs that Kit was used to, with a scattering of low tables suitable for working either from a chair or while sitting on the floor. Four teachers, men and women both, casually dressed, were working with the same group of kids Kit had seen getting into the van the day before. Some of the kids were sitting and working with books at one or another of the tables; one was lying on a mat doing exercises with the help of a special-ed teacher. Off to one side, Darryl sat, dressed in T-shirt and jeans and sneakers again, his dark head bent over a large soft-cover book. He was rocking slightly, while next to him a young male teacher sat and read to him from the book.

There he is.