A Wizard Abroad, New Millennium Edition (13 page)

“Go now,”
she said when she was done.
“Get out of here!”|

The elk tossed its head and leapt away, galloping across the field. Nita stood there, panting, and wondering.
‘Get out of here.’ Where is ‘here’ any more? That broke through from ‘sideways.’

She stood for a moment, listening. The sound of hoofbeats was fading: both the elk’s, and whatever had been chasing it. She was relieved, though still concerned for the elk. Slowly the silence reasserted itself, deep and whole; and the Moon came out from behind a cloud.

Nita looked up at it and sighed, then turned and started making her way back to the farm.
I’m going to have to do something about these clothes before morning,
she thought.
I suppose the manual has some laundry spells...
 But she couldn’t push the bigger problem out of her mind.

Exactly what Kit warned me of. Without any spell done by me, something came through from ‘sideways.’ A
lot
of somethings.

We’re in deep, deep trouble...

Nita had already known she wanted to talk to one of the local wizardly experts. But now it felt like speed was of the essence.

She pulled out her manual the next morning, and began going through it looking for the names and addresses of the local Senior Wizards. Addresses there were—there were four seniors for Ireland, one of whom was on retirement leave, two of whom were on active assignment and hence not available for consults, and one, the Area Advisory, who was located in a place called Castle Matrix. This impressed Nita, though not as much as it would have a couple of weeks before, when she had thought that probably half the people in Ireland lived in old castles. Now she hoped her business would take her that way...but you didn’t go bothering the Area Advisory for a problem that you weren’t yet sure couldn’t be handled at a less central level.

She therefore concentrated on the addresses of wizards in the Bray and Greystones area. There were about forty of these, which surprised her—she’d been expecting fewer. Usually wizards on active status are only about one percent of the population, though in some places it can run as high as ten.

She looked the list up and down in mild perplexity. There was a problem in this part of the world; people tended not to use street numbers unless they lived in a housing estate. Sometimes they didn’t even have a street, so that you might see an address that said, “Ballyvolan, Kilquade, County Wicklow”—and if you didn’t know where Kilquade was, or what Ballyvolan was, or what road it was down, you were in trouble.

She sighed, ticked off a couple of names in Bray that did have street numbers. That done, she went to find her Aunt Annie.

“Going out, are you?” she said.

“Yeah. Aunt Annie, can you tell me where Boghall Road is?”

“The Boghall Road? That’s, um, just off the back road between Greystones and Bray. What for?”

“Oh, I met somebody in one of the cafes in Bray yesterday, and I thought I might go over that way and see if I can find them.” This was not entirely a fib—the sound and feel of Ronan’s lean, edged, angry humor had kept coming back to her for the past day or so. It was just that the two phrases had nothing to do with one another, and if Aunt Annie thought they did, well...that was just fine.

Her aunt said, “Well, no problem. It’ll be in Google Maps. Come on back in the office and I’ll print it out for you.”

“Thanks!” Nita said with considerable gratitude. Within a few minutes she had a color printout, and her aunt sat down and made a few notes on it. “If you get off the 45 bus here, at the top of Boghall, it’s not a long walk to wherever you’re going. That sound all right?”

“Fine, Aunt Annie… thanks.”

“What time will you be back?”

“Not real late.”

“All right. Call if you run into any problems. Might want to take an umbrella or something: Met Eireann has been saying we’re going to get thunder showers later.”

“Will do.” And Nita headed out.

At first she considered not walking—Kit’s “beam-me-up-Scotty” spell could occasionally be extremely useful. However, there was always the danger, when “beaming” around unfamiliar territory, that you might turn up somewhere that had people in it.

However, there was a handy bit of woodland not too far away from where the road from Greystones to Bray started trending downhill toward the down, just outside of the big Kilruddery estate. Nita had noticed it coming upwards, the other day—a stand of five cypresses, very big, very old. Generally the only people who walked up that way were the traveling people who lived in their trailers by the side of the road there.

So Nita popped into that grove of trees and looked around her, and paused for a moment. It was a matter of curiosity. Though you might have a sense of how many wizards were working in the area, there was one quick way to find out. It was difficult for a wizard to spend as much as a day without doing some wizardry, the art being its own delight. She opened her manual, as she stood there under the trees in the summer sun, and quickly did the spell that showed one whatever active wizardries were working in an area. Ideally, what happened was that the world blanked out, and you were presented with a sort of schematic—points of light in a field over which the real world was dimly overlaid.

But she didn’t get what she was expecting. When the spell started, Nita staggered back against one of the trees, half blinded. It was not just points of light that she was perceiving, but fields of it, whole patches of it—great tracts of residual wizardry that just had not gone away.

It’s not supposed to do that!
Nita thought, almost in panic. Ideally, the traces of a wizardry were gone by at least forty-eight hours later.
But this—!
It looked either as if the biggest wizardry on Earth had been done here about two days ago, or else—and this concerned Nita more—all the wizardries done here in the past were still here, in residue.

She shut the spell down and stood there shaking. That last thought was not a good one. Doing a wizardry over another one, overlaying an old magic, was extremely dangerous. The two spells could synergize in ways that neither the wizard who wrought the original spell, or the one presently working, could have expected. The results could be horrendous.

No wonder,
she thought.
If that’s the reason for last night, something like that—Was I working in an overlay area? Oh God.

She called up the detection spell’s result in memory for a moment more to look at it. All Kilquade was covered by one big patch of residual wizardry; all Bray was covered by another. There was in fact very little open space in this area that had
not
had a wizardry done on it at one time or another. She thought with horror of what might have happened had she done a teleportation spell closer to a more heavily overlaid area, like Bray. It was not a pleasant prospect at all.

Nita slipped out of the woodland and walked until she reached the Boghall Road. It was a suburban street, with a church and a school at one end, a computer factory at the other end, and a baker’s, little shops, and many more houses and housing estates scattered all along it or branching off from it. Mothers were out walking their babies in buggies; kids were out kicking soccer balls around. It looked like an entirely normal place...and so it was, since there were wizards working in it.

Nita made her way down to the address she was looking for, on a street called Novara Court. All the houses here were very much the same. There wasn’t much in the way of trees, as if people didn’t want to block the view of Sugarloaf to the west, or Bray Head immediately to the east. And it was a handsome view.

Nita found the house she was looking for and had an attack of shyness practically on the doorstep.
How can I just go up and knock on the door and ask if there are wizards there?
But that was exactly what she needed to do, and there was no way out of it. Nita went up and rang the bell.

There was a long, long wait.
Oh good,
Nita was just thinking,
no one’s home—
when the door was abruptly pulled open.

And Nita stared, because the person who’d answered the door was Ronan, from the chicken place. He looked at her in astonishment.

She regarded him in much the same mood. Once again she was on the end of one of those coincidences that normal people don’t take seriously, but of which wizards’ lives are made, since wizards know there are no coincidences.
And I told Aunt Annie I was coming to see him!
Nita thought.
I’ve really got to watch what I say around here!
But something else was going on as well. Nita found herself twitching with an odd tremor. It was something like anticipation, a shiver down her back at the sight of him scowling at her, tall and dark.
So strange—but never mind that now—!

“R. Nolan?” she said. “—Junior?”

“Yeah,” he said, perplexed. “You’re from—”

“I’m on errantry,” Nita said, “and I greet you.”

He looked at her with his mouth open, suddenly looking like one of the terminally shocked fish that Nita had seen in the fish market in Bray the other morning.
“You?”
he said.

“Me.”

“You mean you’re one of
us?”

“Uh.” Nita made a wry face at him, and lowered her voice. “I’ve been places where the people had tentacles, and more eyes than you’ve got fingers and toes,” she said, “and they didn’t make
this
much fuss about it. Can we talk? I require an advice.”

It was the formal phrasing for a wizard on assignment who needed technical information. Ronan stared at her and said, “Just a minute. I’ll get my jacket.”

The door shut in her face, and Nita stood there on the doorstep, feeling like an idiot. After a moment Ronan came out again, and they walked. “Let’s get out of here,” he said. “I don’t want to be seen.”

Nita had to laugh at that, though she got an odd twinge of pain when he said it.
Not seen with me? Or what?
“What, am I contagious or something?” she said as they made their way down to the Boghall Road.

“No, it’s just—” He didn’t say what it was just. “Never mind. —You mean you’re a—”

“Can we stop having this part of the conversation?” Nita said, both irritated and amused. “There’s more stuff to talk about. Listen. This going ‘sideways’ thing—”

“What?”

“Going ‘sideways,’” Nita said, getting a little more irritable. “I assume you know about it. Well, it’s happened to me twice in the past two days, and I don’t mind telling you that I don’t like it very much—”

“You went sideways?”
Ronan said. “We’re not allowed to go sideways—”

“Listen,” Nita said, “maybe
you’re
not allowed to go sideways, fine, but
I
did it, and not on purpose, let me tell you. Now I need to talk to someone and find out what’s going on here, because last night I was almost eaten by wolves and nearly stepped on by an Irish elk!”

“Holy freaking shite,” said Ronan, almost in awe.

Nita smiled slightly. “My feelings exactly,” she said. Then, while they walked, she spent the next fifteen minutes or so carefully telling him how things had been going for her since she arrived.

When she finished, Ronan was staring at her again. “You could have been killed!”

“Tell me something I don’t know,” Nita said. “And I would like to avoid being killed in the future! Is this kind of thing
normal
around here?”

“Not really,” Ronan said. “At least, not for us. We’re not supposed to be
doing
that kind of thing to begin with. This whole area is badly overlaid.”

“I saw that,” Nita said. “But look...it’s not safe for this to be happening. If a nonwizard falls into one of these—”

“You got that in one,” Ronan said, looking grim. “Jeez, Kilquade,
Kilquade
was supposed to be comparatively quiet. Not like Bray—”

“Things have gotten very unquiet up that way,” Nita said. “Do you have a Senior or an Advisory around here that we can go talk to? This is not good at all.”

“Sure. She’s up in Enniskerry.”

“Then let’s get up there. I’m on active, and I don’t know what for, and if I can’t do wizardry for fear of overlays, I am going to have a nasty problem on my hands. Have you got your manual?”

He looked at her. “Manual?”

“You know. Your wizard’s manual, where you get the spells and the ancillary data.”

“You get them out of a
book??”

Nita was confused. “Where else would you get them?”

Ronan looked at her as if she was very dim indeed. “The way we always have—the way the druids and bards did it for two, three thousand years, maybe more. We do it by memory!”

Now Nita’s mouth fell open. “You learn the whole manual
by heart?
The whole body of spells?! How can you possibly—”

“Well, the basic stuff, yeah! You have to learn the basic incantations that make more detailed information available. But mostly, mostly you learn it by heart—the area restrictions, the address list—if a change happens, you usually just wake up knowing about it one morning—and you make sure you remember it.” He shook his head. “Why? You mean you get it
written down?”