A Wizard Alone

dreaming now.

She stood there again by herself in that great dark space inside Darryl. Far off to one side, somewhere, she knew that the infinitely obstructive white wall was waiting. But this time she wasn’t going to waste her time: There was more important business.

For a long few moments Nita quieted herself, opening her mind to listen, as she’d been taught.

Then, eyes closed, self-blinded, she turned, waiting for the sensation she knew would come.

It took less time to find it than she’d hoped it would. Nita had been banking on the idea that Darryl’s grasp of worldbuilding was instinctive, not studied, and that if he even realized the heart of his universe for what it was, he wouldn’t have thought to hide it. And he hadn’t. When she finally sensed what she was looking for, Nita took the time to actually walk to it, not wanting to attract any possible unwanted attention by using a transit spell. She was glad that the spot she was hunting was only a couple of miles away, not a couple of light-years.

She knew it by feel when she reached it, which was just as well; physically and visually it was indistinguishable from any other part of that tremendous darkness. Nita grinned, though, as she came close, feeling up close the faint, lively, burning, buzzing sensation she’d been seeking. She rolled up her sleeve, thrust her arm elbow-deep into the darkness, felt around for a moment, and came out with a bright, tight, surprisingly large tangle of silvery light.

“Will you look at this,” Nita said under her breath, turning the kernel over in her hands and looking closely at it to identify its major structural elements. The complexity of this kernel was by and large on a par with other personal kernels Nita had seen before. A couple of its sections were devoted to the mere physical business of running a human body. One of them seemed oddly augmented. Maybe this is how an abdal does his co-location, Nita thought. He’s got an extra set of

“body software” in here. Interesting.

But the power conduits were the real surprise. They were huge, far bigger than a physical universe’s own conduits would have been, and they pulsed silently and blindingly with such force that Nita found it hard to look at them. This is what an abdal uses. Or doesn’t even have to use; just has. There’s enough power in here, of enough kinds, to do… incredible things.

Even to keep the Lone Power shut up inside for a while…

Nita shook her head. This much power could be used for a lot more important things than that, though. And she noted one more thing, now that she had the kernel in her hands. She teased some of the power strands out a little and looked closely at one tightly braided chain of characters that glowed calmly right at the heart of the kernel. It was the core representation of the Wizard’s Oath, the heart of an Ordeal; and it was complete.

Nita grinned with sheer pleasure at having been right, remembering her earlier thought that Darryl didn’t have that tentative quality about his use of his wizardly abilities. So, she thought, he’s already passed his Ordeal. Let’s get moving!

She turned the kernel over in her hands once more, finding the little strand of light that was the spell Darryl had, however unwittingly, enacted to create the wall. Nita pulled it a little way out of the kernel, like someone teasing loose one strand from a ball of knitting wool, and twisted it in such a way as to cause that spot to become this one.

Instantly the internal laws of that universe changed accordingly, so that Nita looked up and found herself staring at the wall.

She walked right at it as if it wasn’t there. And when she touched it, it wasn’t. It evaporated in front of her. The wall knew that the key to the physical structure of its universe was right in front of it, in the possession of a living being. Cooperatively, it got out of her way.

“Thank you,” Nita said. She placed the kernel in her otherspace pocket and kept walking. In front of her the view opened up, distant and glittering, a view of what appeared to be a forest of glass trees, shining in that sourceless light she’d come to recognize.

Nita walked toward the forest, listening to the voices that she’d heard before in Darryl’s worlds, and that were here, too, louder than they’d been before, an endless rush of them. If she let them, they blended into a white-noise sound like wind or water, indecipherable. But if she concentrated, they did make sense.

“—get tired of waiting sometimes, you know?” said one of them, a man’s voice, Nita thought.

“Sometimes I wonder whether any of it matters at all.”

“Of course it matters,” said another voice, a softer one, sadder, but more certain of itself. “We have to keep doing what we’re doing. Someday…”

The voices got steadily more distinct as Nita got closer to the forest. Soon she saw that it wasn’t a forest of trees, but of mirrors. “Someday! But no one can tell us when that day’s going to be. No one has the slightest idea! And we’re the ones who know him best. We’re the ones who ought to be able to tell. For a while there it looked like it was working. A little. But since autumn, it’s like we’ve hit a brick wall or something. No change. I can’t help but think… can’t help but think that maybe there’s not going to be any more change. That this is as good as it’s ever going to get. That he’s going to be this way forever—”

The voice broke off, choked with pain.

“You know they told us this was likely to happen,” said the other voice. “That there’d be plateaus… times when nothing would seem to happen for a long time.”

“But this long?”

“Every case is different, they said. You know that, too.” A long pause. “We have to have faith, honey. If we don’t, if we lose it, no one else’s faith is going to help.”

The voices sounded two ways to Nita. On one hand, they were like any conversation she might have heard on the street. On the other, there was a terrible poignancy about them. Hearing their words was like being thrust through the heart with knives. I’m hearing this not just as I would, Nita thought, but as Darryl would. And possibly seeing his inner world as he does, too. Far from drawing her into Darryl’s trap for the Lone Power, this seemed to be giving her a kind of immunity. Good. If that just lets me see a way out

…

As she came closer to the fringes of the “forest,” Nita saw that the trees weren’t exactly just mirrored, either. They were half-mirrored. She could see partway through them, out their other sides, to the shapes that walked among them. And there were only four of those.

Two of them she knew instantly: Her heart seized at the sight of them. Ponch and Kit were wandering, sightless — or rather, it was Kit who looked and walked like someone blind, or like someone afraid to look at what he saw around him. Ponch walked ahead of Kit like a Seeing Eye dog, seeing for both of them. But something about the way the light fell on him made Nita wonder whether Ponch somehow saw more, in this chilly and sterile landscape, than any of them. What is it with him

? she wondered. He hadn’t been able to tell her the other day. Nita remembered Carmela telling her what Kit had said, that there was some kind of “wizardry leakage” going on in his household. Suddenly she felt sure that what was happening with Ponch was more than just a symptom of this.

She paused, watching the other two figures wander around separately in the light shining on and reflecting from the half-mirrored trees. One of them was small and dark, in jeans and a polo shirt. He looked less lost than Kit and Ponch… or the final figure.

That last figure was tall and looked human. He was slender, well-built, and extremely handsome.

Nonetheless, Nita couldn’t help but shudder at the sight of the Fairest and Fallen, the Lone Power, looking, in the dark suit he was wearing, like a businessman lost in a strange city and doomed to wander around because he was too proud to ask for directions.

The shudder passed, though. Nita’s anger was still running high enough to wash it out and leave her mind clear. All right, she thought. Nothing bad has happened yet. Let’s think about what to do.

Let’s…

Nita’s head jerked up, looking for the source of the word, and her hand went to her bracelet again. A second later she was holding the linac weapon, ready to discharge.

I am on errantry