A Wizard Alone

Ponch, but both more intricate and thicker. The wizardry had to handle much higher power levels than the leash did, and had no life-support functions as such — those Nita would be carrying with her on her charm bracelet, in a suite of interconnected shielding and atmosphere-maintenance spells.

Nita was also more heavily armed than usual, not knowing how many friends the Lone Power might have skulking around the borders of Darryl’s mind, intent on keeping enemies out and friends in. From Nita’s bracelet dangled a number of charms, each of which represented a spell almost ready to go, needing only one thought or pronounced syllable to set it going. It was wearying to carry this much nearly released power around, but Nita was beyond caring how much energy she had to expend. Her fear for Kit was growing by the minute.

After she’d finished looking over the lifeline wizardry and lay down on the bed, Nita took a last moment or three to check out the weaponry — the lightning bolt of the quark-level dissociator, the little closed spiral of a pinch-off utility that could seal a designated attacker or group of attackers into a “pocket” space, the little “magic wand” charm that contained a one-off terawatt particle-beam generator. Even in her present nervous state, Nita looked at that one with slight relish and wished she might have a chance to use it — the manual had been explicit about how dangerous it was, and how effective. The manual itself was slipped into her own otherspace pocket, inside the lifeline wizardry with her. Last of all she checked her throat, where the thin fine chain of the lucid- dreaming wizardry was fastened, and made sure it was charged and active. It buzzed slightly against her fingers, acknowledging that it was ready to go.

Nita settled herself back against the pillows. “How long’s the lifeline good for?” she said to Dairine.

“You get six hours,” Dairine said. “Then it’s got to be dismantled and rebuilt, and I have to recharge it. It’s…” She glanced at Spot, who was sitting on the desk with his screen up, running manual functions, among them a Julian date clock. “It’s just past three-oh-three-point-three. You get until point-fifty-five, then you snap back here, no matter what you’re doing. So keep an eye on your manual.”

Nita nodded. She wiggled against the pillows a little and closed her eyes.

After about five minutes, she opened them again, and sighed. “Dari…”

“Is there something wrong with the spell?”

Nita made a face. “This is really dumb, but I can’t fall asleep with you sitting there watching me.

You’re going to have to stay in your room, for a while anyway.”

Dairine shrugged. “No problem,” she said, and reached down to pick up one of the lines of light that was trailing away from the lifeline spell. Dairine walked out the door with the power-feed line in her hand. The line of light, the single character for connection in the Speech, stretched and stretched after her as she went.

Then Dairine stuck her head back in the room. “Good luck, Neets,” she said.

“Thanks,” Nita said. I may need it…

At first Nita concentrated on doing the breathing exercises that often helped her get to sleep when she was having trouble doing so, but tonight all they seemed to do was make her uncomfortably aware of her breathing. Finally she gave up on that and just stared at the ceiling, fixing her attention on one spot, the little flawed place where Dairine had once bounced a Superball too high and flaked off the ceiling paint. After a while, as Nita had expected, her eyes started tiring.

Eventually she found herself standing in the dark. That darkness was nearly complete: There were no spotlights now, no signs of anything being in this universe but her, and only the faintest, not-quite-black “background” radiance from the sky above. Did I miss them? Nita wondered. Have they gone somewhere else?

She looked around. It did no good standing still in one of these dreams, she’d found. You had to walk around to get anywhere worth being. So Nita reached into her otherspace pocket and came out with a favorite tool, a moonlight-steeped rowan wand lent her by Liused, the tree in her backyard.

This one was getting close to its “use by” date — such wands routinely lasted for only three full moons and an intercalary day, unless burned out by overuse before then — and wasn’t much good for anything but light at this point. But light was just what Nita needed. As she touched it and pulled it out, the wand came afire with a blaze of secondhand moonlight, enough to show Nita that she was standing on the same plain black surface that she’d seen here before, when meeting the clown, the robot, and the knight. But there was nothing else to be seen at all, in any direction.

“Okay,” she said softly. “Let’s see.”

One of the ready-made spells on her bracelet had a charm that looked like a miniature radar screen. Knowing before she left who she was going to be looking for, Nita had wound Kit’s name in the Speech into it. Now she reached down to that charm and, touching it, saw in her mind the single word needed to activate the spell.

She said the word. Immediately Nita was standing in the middle of a pool of faint light, very much like the big radar that air traffic controllers use. It was a life-sign detector, one that would tag any specific personality it had been keyed to. Nita looked down at it. Even though the steady glow of it was soft, it was hard to make out any specific indication from it. Nita whispered the light of the rowan wand down to nothing and stared at the detector for many long moments, until her eyes watered.

Finally, though, she spotted what she was looking for: a faint, faint patch of light, off in the two o’clock direction. The curling tracery of Kit’s initials in the Speech were beside it.

He’s a long way off Nita thought. But he’s here.

The trouble was that he seemed to be all by himself; there didn’t seem to be any indication of Darryl on the radar screen. He might still he by himself, Nita thought. Or if he has found Darryl, then Darryl's perception of his own isolation may have affected Kit so that he thinks he’s still alone.

It didn’t matter. At least now Nita had a direction to walk in.

She spoke the light of the rowan wand back up and spent what seemed like the better part of the next fifteen minutes walking toward Kit. But my time sense may be off, too, Nita thought, pausing briefly at about the fifteen-minute point to check her manual.

She was shocked to find that it was nearly.40. It’s been nearly three hours outside! she thought.

This is the problem Kit ran up against the other night. Time flow in here is getting strange.

Nita walked faster. After what seemed like another five minutes or so, she started to see something right against the very edge of the dark horizon, like a very faintly seen thread or line of some different color. The closer she got to it, the more distinct it became; it was starting to pick up the light of the rowan wand.

Within a few minutes she found that the line was growing thicker and taller with every step, and brighter, too. Shortly she was close enough to start to make out what it was.

It was a wall. Perfect, white, featureless, stretching away from her — seemingly to infinity — in great curves on either side, the wall towered over Nita as she approached it. A few feet away from it, Nita stopped, bent her neck back to look at it.

It was not a physical thing, she knew, but a representation of some power or force that had been put here to stop any intruder. And there was no telling who had put it here — Darryl, or the Lone Power.

Nita stepped forward and cautiously touched the wall with a fingertip, like someone gingerly testing an electric fence. She could tell immediately that this construction didn’t have anything to do with the Lone Power: There was none of the inimical burn she would have expected. Nothing else happened — no force attacked her — but Nita could tell by the feel of the wall that it was meant to be infinitely obstructive. She could try to levitate over it, but it would simply stretch up and up and up to match the height at which she attacked it; she could try to dig down under it, but it would extend that way, too. The only way to deal with this wall was to go through — if she had time.

Okay

, Nita thought. Let’s see what works.

She said the twelve words of a small-scale antigravity wizardry, wrapped them around the rowan wand, and hung it on the air to give her some light to work by; then turned the charm bracelet on her wrist. One of the charms, looking like a little lasso, was the representation of the lifeline spell.

Touching it, Nita could feel the power feeding down it, and could faintly feel Dairine, in circuit with it back at home.