A Wizard Alone New Millennium Edition (25 page)

Nita shook her head, sighed, and walked in the direction of the neighborhood deli, to see if they had any bananas.

Kit and Carl were sitting together in Tom and Carl’s dining room, later that afternoon.

“Kit,” Carl said, “it’s all very interesting what you’ve told me. It throws a lot of light on Darryl’s problem. I’m going to look into this myself, as far as possible. In the meantime”—he frowned—”I want to know why it took you so long to get in here and tell Tom or me about this. We’ve been working together on power-sensitive issues long enough that you know better than to let a situation of this kind go for so long without a debrief.”

“I’ve had the manual on record-and-report,” Kit said.

Carl shook his head. “Not good enough,” he said. “The manual, powerful as it is, is context-poor when reporting on experiences like this. Especially considering that what you’ve been doing with Ponch is unique as far as I can tell. For maximum effectiveness in assessing Darryl’s status, I need to know how things looked and felt to you
after
the fact, as well as during it. So you’d better start getting serious about this, Kit. It’s not like you to let things slide.”

“Okay,” Kit said.

Carl looked at him with an expression that suggested he was expecting to hear something else. At last he said, “Which brings me to the next thing on the list. The Powers certainly don’t expect you to work on a project so hard that you neglect your own well-being. Neither do I. You look terrible; you’ve been spending too much time chasing around outside of your home space, and it’s affecting you. I appreciate your efforts, believe me … but I want you to take a couple of days off.”

“But—”

“
No
buts,” Carl said.

Now it was Kit’s turn to frown. Possibly Carl read the expression as rebelliousness. “Kit,” he said, “as a Senior, it’s not beyond my abilities to put a freeze on your wizardly exertions for the next day or three. I would prefer not to have to do that: it’s undignified for both of us, and it also sends a signal to the Powers that there might be a problem with the way you’re using the Art. I would much prefer to hear you tell me that you won’t do any further exploration of Darryl’s inner worlds until Tom and I have had some time to work out what seems to be the best way to proceed. This may sound cruel to you, but he’s been holding his own for the past three months, at least; I would guess he’ll hang on for a day or two more. You, on the other hand, need to leave his problem with me for consideration over the next couple of days.”

Kit let out a long breath. “So,” Carl said, “do I have your word?”

“Mmf,” Kit said.

Carl gave him an exasperated look. “Even among nonwizards,” Carl said, “it’s considered impolite to grunt.”

“I promise,” Kit said.

“Good,” Carl said. “Thanks.” He relaxed a little. “Kit, go home. Get some rest. It’s not that you did a bad job; it’s just that you got a little too wrapped up in this one. Take two days and get your objectivity back. Then you and Tom and I will sit down and work out what to do next.” And he saw Kit out the sliding doors into the backyard.

Kit used his transport wizardry to get home, then walked slowly down the driveway to the side door, with Ponch trotting along behind him. He was feeling rather bruised. But to a certain extent, bizarrely, part of him felt grateful. Carl’s very understated annoyance had shaken Kit a little way out of the feeling that had been creeping up on him that nothing particularly mattered. However, that was the only good thing about it. Kit felt very much as if he were in disgrace.

You look sad,
Ponch said.

“I don’t know,” Kit said. “I think I’m just tired.” Even as he said it, though, Kit wondered how true this was. Ever since he woke up from his jungle dream, he had been moving through a world that seemed oddly dulled around the edges. The daylight seemed to be reaching him through some kind of filter; sound seemed distant, and he didn’t even seem able to feel his clothes properly—they seemed to bother his skin where they rested on it. The feeling was like what he got sometimes when he was coming down with a cold.
Maybe Mama was right
…

He went in the back door, took off his coat and hung it up, while Ponch trotted over to his dog food bowl and started to chow down on dry food. Kit’s mama, in the kitchen in her nurse’s pinks, looked up at him from the business of making a sandwich. “How are you feeling, sweetie?”

“Maybe a little better,” Kit said, thinking that possibly this was true. “Getting out in the air was nice. Where’s Pop?”

“He’s lying down reading a book, waiting for the basketball game.”

“Okay.”

His mama gave Kit a glance as he went and flopped down on the dining room sofa. At first Kit thought she was going to bring up once more the subject of the discussion she and Kit’s pop had had with him earlier. “I meant to thank you, by the way,” his mama said as she opened a drawer to get a plastic bag to put her sandwich in. “It’s been so much quieter.”

His mama’s voice had a strange grating quality to it, which Kit couldn’t remember having heard before.
Is she coming down with a cold, too?
Kit thought.
It wouldn’t be great if we all got sick at once.
“Sorry?”

“The little dog down the street.”

Kit was bemused. “Tinkerbell, you mean? I haven’t talked to him.”

“You haven’t?”

“Sorry, Mama, I’ve been busy.”

“Well, he got quiet again. Relatively quiet, anyway. There was some howling earlier, but it didn’t last long.”

“That’s good,” Kit said. He stretched, but far from making him feel more comfortable, it made him feel less so; he felt very out of sorts, as if his skin didn’t fit him, as if his bones weren’t fastened together correctly. “Mama, I think I might go lie down again for a while.”

That got her attention. She finished wrapping her sandwich and came over to feel his forehead. “Do you feel hot, sweetie?” she said.

Kit shook his head. If anything, he felt chilly, though not to the point of shivers—he felt a strange kind of still numbness that left him unwilling to talk about what was bothering him. Indeed, talking about
anything
seemed more trouble than it was worth. When his mother took her hand away, Kit got up and went to his room. There, as he lay down on his bed, he reached out for his manual and started paging through it to find a diagnostic to run on himself.
I won’t be any good to anybody if I just lie around feeling like this.
But, shortly, Kit was lying on his back again, gazing at the ceiling, the manual lying open, pages down, on the bed beside him. He didn’t even hear Ponch come in and circle around once to lie on the braided rug by the bed, looking up at him with troubled eyes. And after a while Kit turned over on his side again and just stared at the wall….

***

The next afternoon Nita was sitting at her desk, cutting a deck of cards. She’d reached the point where what she really wanted to cut them with was a meat cleaver, but that would simply have meant that she’d have to get another deck of cards from somewhere.

Nita cut the cards again.
There’s an art to this,
she thought.
The only problem is, it isn’t
my
Art. And no matter how I do this, when I think of why I’m learning it in the first place, it feels like cheating.

She was working on her false shuffle. From what she’d been able to find out on the Web, many of the simplest card tricks depended on shuffling the cards in such a way as to make the card you wanted come up in the right place. This, in turn, involved protecting some of the cards with one of your hands while you shuffled. So far, Nita had gotten to the point where she could protect about a third of the deck, keeping the cards stacked there from being shuffled out of order.
In about three hundred years,
she thought,
I’ll be ready to let some other human being see me do a trick.
Why
did I ever mention magic to Mr. Millman?

The only good thing about having to sit here doing this was that it gave Nita something to occupy her hands while she worried about Kit. She’d called him late yesterday afternoon to make sure he’d gone to see Carl, and had been very concerned about the tone of his voice. It had acquired a strange monotonous quality, one that made her think of…

A robot?
she thought, unnerved. She stopped shuffling for a moment and thought about that. It occurred to Nita that the more contact they’d all had with Darryl, the better his ability to express himself had become… and the more adverse effect it seemed to be having on Kit.

If he goes in there again,
she thought,
he’s going to lose it.

And he’s going to go in there again. I’m sure of it.

Nita cut the cards again, looking to see if the ace of hearts, the card she’d been protecting, came up. What she got was the three of clubs. She made an annoyed face and pushed the cards away, knowing perfectly well what was interfering with her concentration.

It wasn’t just a matter of Kit’s stubbornness now—not that that couldn’t be formidable when he was in the right mood. She was also dealing with something else she was less familiar with:
Darryl’s
stubbornness. He’d been holding off the Lone Power all by himself for a long time now, and Nita didn’t think he was going to stop for their sakes.
And why should he?
she thought.
From his point of view, he’s got a job to do, and he’s doing it
… and the place where he’s been hasn’t left him with any sense that he doesn’t have to be the
only
one fighting this fight.
Nita shook her head as she thought about what that must cost him. Such loneliness would have crippled her a long time ago.
But he bears up under it,
she thought.
And he just keeps fighting.

That stubbornness had found a resonance in Kit. He and Darryl had become linked in more ways than one. His promises to Carl aside, Nita had a feeling that Kit was going to find himself in Darryl’s mind again shortly.
At which time,
Nita thought,
I’d better be ready.

She picked up the deck again, took a couple of minutes to find the ace of hearts, repositioned it, and reshuffled, carefully protecting the back third of the deck. Then she put the deck down, cut it twice so that she had three piles, reached out to the leftmost pile, and turned the top card over. It was the four of diamonds.

God
I hate this!
Nita thought. She stood up from her desk and went across the hall to Dairine’s room.

Her sister was sitting at her own desk, which was still completely covered by the papier-mache version of Olympus Mons. It was no longer gray-white; Dairine had done a fairly credible job with her wizardly airbrush. Now the mountain lay there nicely colored in shades of beige and faint rust-red, its huge crater looking entirely ready to spill out lava. Spot was sitting up on one of the bookshelves, peering down at the volcano with his little stalky eyes.

“Dair?”

Dairine looked up at Nita with a weary expression.

“I think I’m going to need some help,” Nita said.

“As long as it doesn’t involve me painting anything,” Dairine said, “you’re on.”

Nita came in and sat down on Dairine’s bed. It creaked.

Dairine looked at her.

“Don’t start,” Nita said. “You know what’s on my mind.”

“Darryl,” Dairine said. “Or the ace of hearts.”

“Please,” Nita said. “Dair, I need to ask you a favor.”

Her sister gave her a slightly suspicious look.

“He’s going to go in there again,” Nita said.

“Kit?” Dairine put her eyebrows up. “Thought he promised Carl he wouldn’t.”

“I don’t think he’s entirely in control of what’s going on with him,” Nita said. “Darryl’s very, uh, single-minded. And that single-mindedness is affecting Kit. We need to be ready for that.”

“‘We’?” Dairine said.

“Dair, he sure isn’t listening to
me
right now—”

“So I guess you know now what it’s been like dealing with
you
over the past month, then.”

Nita grimaced at that, taking the point. “Different reasons, as it turns out,” she said. “But, well, yeah.” It would have been all too easy to immediately add,
And you haven’t exactly been a picnic to be around either!
— but she restrained herself.

“And?”

Nita shifted where she sat, a little uneasily. The bed creaked.

Dairine just tilted her head a little and kept looking at her.

Nita let out a long exasperated breath. “Can I do the groveling and apologizing thing
later
, please? Because there’ll be a whole lot more time.”

Dairine rolled her eyes; but it was an accepting expression. “What do you need?”

“Some kind of connection, ideally with an integrated power feed, from you to me—for when he goes in again. Think of it as a lifeline. I need to make sure there’s somebody on the outside who can yank us both out of there if we get stuck too deep.”

Dairine, sitting there with her hands in her lap, looked up at Nita. It was an unusual position for Dairine. Usually even when she was talking her hands were doing something. But now she sat quite still, looking at Nita steadily, but a little bleakly. “You sure you want my help?” Dairine said.

Nita looked at her strangely. “Are you nuts?” she said. “Of course I do.”

“I wasn’t sure,” Dairine said, and looked at the floor. There was nothing overtly guilty or upset about her face, but all the same Nita saw there was trouble underneath the expression. “I warned you, Neets. Right now I’m paying the price for a big showy start, just as Tom said I would a while back. I can do basic wizardries well enough, but as for anything
really
high-powered—” She shook her head. “I don’t know if you want to be depending on me right now.”

“I will depend on you any time,” Nita said.

The look Dairine gave Nita had a certain amount of good-natured scorn about it.

“Do I have to say it in the Speech?” Nita said.

“Nita,” Dairine said then, very softly, “
Mom
couldn’t depend on me.”

Nita shook her head. “If you mean you couldn’t just make a wish and save her life,” Nita said, “then you’re right. If you really thought it was going to go that way, then, yeah, you made a mistake. But that hardly means that she couldn’t depend on you. Or that I won’t.”