smaller than she was, a year younger, dark-haired and brown-eyed and sharp of face and mind; definitely sharper, Nita thought with approval, than the usual twelve-year-old. “He was hollering about whales,” Kit said, nodding at Ponch.
“Dolphins,” Nita said. “At least, a dolphin. I said hi to it and it said ‘A wizard!’ and ran away.”
“Great.” Kit looked southward, across the ocean. “Something’s going on out there, Neets. I was up on the jetty. The rocks are upset.”
Nita shook her head. Her specialty as a wizard was living things; animals and plants talked to her and did the things she asked, at least if she asked properly. It still startled her sometimes when Kit got the same kind of result from “unalive” things like cars and doors and telephone poles, but that was where his talent lay. “What can a rock get upset about?” she said.
“I’m not sure. They wouldn’t say. The stones piled up there remembered something. And they didn’t want to think about it any more. They were shook.” Kit looked up sharply at Nita. “That was it. The earth shook once…”
“Oh, come off it. This isn’t California. Long Island doesn’t have earthquakes.”
“Once it did. The rocks remember… I wonder what that dolphin wanted?”
Nita was wondering too. She zipped up her windbreaker. “C’mon, we have to get back before Mom busts a gut.”
“But the dolphin—“
Nita started down the beach, then turned and kept walking backward when she noticed that Kit wasn’t following her. “The ball game was almost over,” she said, raising her voice as she got farther from Kit and Ponch. “They’ll go to bed early. They always do. And when they’re asleep—“
Kit nodded and muttered something, Nita couldn’t quite hear what. He vanished in a small clap of inrushing air and then reappeared next to Nita, walking with her; Ponch barked in annoyance and ran to catch up.
“He really hates that ‘beam-me-up-Scotty’ spell,” Nita said.
”Yeah, when it bends space, it makes him itch. Look, I was practicing that other one—“
“With the water?” She grinned at him. “In the dark, I hope.”
“Yeah. I’ll show you later. And then—“
“Dolphins.”
“Uh-huh. C’mon, I’ll race you.”
They ran up the dune, followed by a black shape barking loudly about dog biscuits.
Wizards’ Song
The Moon got high. Nita sat by the window of her ground-floor room, listening through the stillness for the sound of voices upstairs. There hadn’t been any for a while.
She sighed and looked down at the book she held in her lap. It looked like a library book — bound in one of those slick-shiny buckram library bindings, with a Dewey decimal number written at the bottom of the spine in that indelible white ink librarians use, and at the top of the spine, the words SO YOU WANT TO BE A WIZARD. But on opening the book, what one saw were the words Instruction and Implementation Manual, General and Limited Special-Purpose Wizardries, Sorceries, and Spells: 933rd Edition. Or that was what you saw if you were a wizard, for the printing was done in the graceful, Arabic-looking written form of the Speech.
Nita turned a few pages of the manual, glancing at them in idle interest. The instructions she’d found in the book had coached her through her first few spells — both the kinds for which only words were needed and those that required raw materials of some sort. The spells had in turn led her into the company of other wizards — beginners like Kit and more experienced ones, typical of the wizards, young and old, working quietly all over the world. And then the spells had taken her right out of the world she’d known, into one or the ones “next door,” and into a conflict that had been going on since time s beginning, in all the worlds there were.
In that other world, in a place like New York City but also terribly different, she had passed through the initial ordeal that every candidate for wizardry undergoes. Kit had been with her. Together they had pulled each other and themselves through the danger and the terror, to the successful completion of a quest into which they had stumbled. They saved their own world without attracting much notice; they lost a couple of dear friends they’d met long the way; and they came into their full power as wizards. It was a privilege that had its price. Nita still wasn’t sure why she’d been chosen as one of those who fight for the Worlds against the Great Death of entropy. She was just glad she’d been picked.
She flipped pages to the regional directory, where wizards were listed by name and address. Nita never got tired of seeing her own name listed there, for other wizards to call if they needed her. She overshot her own page in the Nassau County section, wanting to check the names of two friends, Senior Wizards for the area — Tom Swale and Carl Romeo. They had recently been promoted to Senior from the Advisory Wizard level, and as she’d suspected, their listing now read “On sabbatical: emergencies only.” Nita grinned at the memory of the party they’d thrown to celebrate their promotion. The guests had been a select group. More of them had appeared out of nowhere than arrived through the front door. Several had spent the afternoon floating in midair; another had spent it in the fishpond, submerged. Human beings had been only slightly in the majority at the party, and Nita became very careful at the snack table after her first encounter with the dip made from Pennsylvania crude oil and fresh- ground iron filings. She paged back through the listing and looked at her own name.
CALLAHAN, Juanita T.
On active status E. Clinton Avenue, Hempstead, NY 11575 (516) 379-6786 Assignment location: 38 Tiana Beach Road, Southampton, NY 11829 (516) 667-9084
Nita sighed, for this morning the status note had said, like Tom’s, “Vacationing/emergencies only.” The book updated itself all over that way — pages changing sometimes second to second, reporting the status of worldgates in the area, what spells were working where, the cost of powdered newt at your local Advisory. Whatever’s come up, Nita thought, we’re expected to be able to handle it.
Of course, last time out they expected us to save the world, too… “Neets!”
She jumped, then tossed her book out the window to Kit and began climbing out. “Sssh!”
“Shhh yourself, mouth. They’re asleep. C’mon.” Once over the dune, the hiss and rumble of the midnight sea made talking easer.
“You on active status too?” Kit said.
“Yup. Let’s find the dolphin and see what’s up.”
They ran for the breakers. Kit was in bathing suit and windbreaker as Nita was, with sneakers slung over his shoulder by the laces. “Okay,” he said, “watch this.” He said something in the Speech, a long liquid-sounding sentence with a curious even-uneven rhyme in it, all of which told the night and the wind and the water what Kit wanted of them. And without pause Kit ran right up to the water, which was retreating at that particular moment — and then onto it. Under his weight it bucked and sloshed the way a waterbed will when you stand on it; but Kit didn’t sink. He ran four or five paces out onto the silver-slicked surface — then lost his balance and fell over sideways.
Nita started laughing, then hurriedly shut herself up for fear the whole beach should hear. Kit was lying on the water, his head propped up on one hand; the water bobbed him up and down while he looked at her with a sour expression. “It’s not funny. I did it all last night and it never happened once.”
“Must be that you did the spell for two this time,” Nita said, tempted to start laughing again, except that Kit would probably have punched her out. She kept her face as straight as she could and stepped out to the water, putting a foot carefully on an incoming, flattened-out wave. It took her weight, flattening more as she stepped up with the other foot and was carried backward. “It’s like the slidewalk at the airport,” she said, putting her arms out for balance and wobbling.
“Kind of.” Kit got up on hands and knees and then again, swaying. “Come on. Keep your knees bent a little. And pick up your feet.”
It was a useful warning. Nita tripped over several breakers and sprawled each time, a sensation like doing a bellywhopper onto a waterbed, until she got her sea legs. Once past the breakers she had no more trouble, and Kit led her at a bouncy trot out into the open Atlantic.
