Wizards at War, New Millennium Edition (22 page)

And there were other issues on his mind. Ronan and Nita had been close in ways that Nita was too shy to discuss. Now Nita was feeling twitchy about Ronan, and Kit kept wondering why.
Oh, it wasn’t anything serious with them. I know that.

At least, I
think
I know that…

From around the shoulder of that rise, Ponch came galloping back and skidded to a stop in front of Kit.
Okay, let’s go for a walk!

Kit laughed and went off after his dog, taking it easy at first to make sure he had the hang of the local gravity. It was heavier than the Moon’s, so that you could run without completely bouncing off the surface if you were careful. Passing the rise where Ronan still sat, Kit had a long look around the surface of Metemne and decided that it wasn’t someplace he would come back to for a holiday. The planet wasn’t much more than a bumpy rock pile. Whether there had even been water here in the planet’s earliest days was a question Kit couldn’t answer just by looking.

He crouched down and put a hand on a largish boulder that sat off to one side. From the beginning of his practice of wizardry, Kit had always been good at hearing what was going on with objects that most people would have considered inanimate. Now he let his mind go a little unfocused, and waited.

…
no one here,
the stone said eventually.
For a long time…

It wasn’t that it actually spoke; that took a different kind of life. But the impression was plain. “Did anyone ever live here?” Kit said.

Never. It would have been nice,
the boulder said.
There was an atmosphere. And water. But nothing ever got started.

“I’m sorry,” Kit said.

We can’t all have what we want, I suppose,
the boulder said, and fell silent.

Slowly Kit got up and dusted off his hands as Ponch came running along from behind a nearby outcropping of gray stone.

There’s nothing here,
Ponch said.
Come on, let’s play!

“I wouldn’t say
nothing,
” Kit said, glancing down at the boulder. “No people, maybe.” He walked off to have a look around the outcropping, and Ponch trotted along beside him.

Then it’s nowhere important.

“I guess it’s easy to think that,” Kit said. “There’s so much life around, we start taking it for granted that any planet’ll get some in time.” He shook his head. “Trouble is, once life does show up, before you know it, the Lone One’s turned up, too, and it’s running around messing up the Choices of every species It finds.”

It didn’t mess up ours,
Ponch said.

Kit raised his eyebrows. “I keep meaning to get the details on that,” he said, as they walked around the outcropping together. “Though it must have gone the usual way, since there’s no Choice without wizards, and there are dog wizards, Rhiow tells me…”

Ponch’s expression was eloquent of skepticism.
Oh, well, if you’re going to believe things
cats
say about dogs…

Kit got a sense that he was poised above a dangerous abyss. “Uh,” he said, “okay, maybe I should ask someone who knows about it firsthand.”

Ponch woofed; it was a dog laugh, of sorts. He picked up a rock in his mouth, shook it from side to side as if to make sure it was dead, and came bouncing over to Kit to put it in his hand.
We have wizards, yeah. But as for the Choice, I just know what everybody’s mom tells them when they’re still drinking milk.

Kit took the rock and spent a while trying to get the dog slobber off it. “So educate me,” he said.

Oh, it’s the usual thing,
Ponch said.
There was us, and the Ones, and we ruled the world. And then the Bad Thing came and said, I can make it better for you. But we said, How? We have the Ones. We live with them, and hunt with them, and run around with them, and they give us whatever we need, and everything’s fine. So the Bad Thing went away. The End. …So come on and throw the rock!

Kit blinked, and threw the rock well away from the outcropping, across the bare gritty plain. Ponch tore off across the planet’s surface after it, leaving little scoots of gravel hanging up in the vacuum in a trail behind him.
If that’s his idea of “the usual thing,
” Kit thought,
then all the Choices I’ve run into now have been real unusual.
In fact, Ponch’s version of his species’ Choice didn’t sound much like a choice at all.
And he didn’t sound very interested in talking about it.

He watched Ponch pounce on the rock, pick it up, shake it around, and lose it because of shaking it too hard; he went bounding across the surface again to get it back.
Then again,
Kit thought,
there are some species that’re in really close relationships with each other, and their Choices are interrelated. Why shouldn’t the dogs’
Choice be involved with the human one? It makes a kind of sense.

Ponch skidded to a stop in front of Kit, dropping the rock in front of him.
Again!

“Yeah, sure,” Kit said. He picked up the rock and threw it. Ponch went bouncing off after it.
Boy, he’s really into it this morning. Needs to dump some stress, I guess.

Kit had to grin at himself then.
Oh, great. Now you’re doing psychoanalysis on your dog.

But still…
There’d been an overly casual quality to the way Ponch had been talking about the canine Choice.
As if there was something about it he didn’t want to be thinking about. Almost as if he was trying to distract himself.

Ponch came bounding and plunging back with his rock, and dropped it in front of Kit once more.
Again!

“Uh, no, I think we’ve done enough of that.”

Why? Is it time for something?
Ponch looked a little crestfallen.

“Probably,” Kit said, fervently hoping that this was true. But he had to smile; Ponch’s sense of time was weak, except when mealtimes were concerned. “Let’s have a look here.” He got out his manual and flipped its cover open to show the front page, which he’d set to show him the date and time. “See, it says here—”

Then his jaw dropped.

314.3? How did
that
happen? Crap!!

Kit slapped the manual shut, turned around, and started back toward the pup-tent accesses. “Come on,” he said, “we’re running really late! We have to get Neets up.”

Ponch began to jump up and down with excitement as they went; in the low gravity, he was able to jump up to a height where his head was level with Kit’s.
How come?

“Because it’s a lot later than it should be!” Kit started doing the astronaut-bounce that was the only way to hurry in this kind of gravity without falling on your face. “And I don’t know how it got that way.
Come on!”

***

Nita stood in front of the mirror over the chest of drawers in her bedroom, staring anxiously at her face.
I was right,
she thought, utterly exasperated, as she pushed her bangs aside to get a closer look.
It
is
a zit.

She let out a breath, then.
Trouble is, this isn’t real. I’m asleep. And what am I wasting my time dreaming about? Zits!
Nita shook her head.
I can’t believe that the other day I actually thought this was a big deal.

Nonetheless, the place where the pimple was coming up still stung. Nita found herself torn between the eternal choices: squeeze it, which always grossed her out and sometimes left a mark? Or do a wizardry on it? Or just let it be, and go through the next couple of days feeling like a leper?

She shrugged.
It’s a dream. There may not be a pimple at all. Just leave it alone. We’ve got more important things to think about.

Nita turned away from the mirror and found herself not in her bedroom at all, but out on the surface of Metemne. This sort of abrupt transition was normal for lucid dreaming, and Nita had learned over time to let these experiences take her where they wanted to.

Reluctantly, she looked up into the sky, knowing what she was about to see, and instead saw … nothing. There was no sign of the Pullulus, but neither was there any sign of the stars, or interstellar space, or even the little planet’s sun. The effect was like being in a closed, windowless room with the lights off. Nita didn’t much care for it … for inside the “room” with her she could hear slow, steady breathing.

She held very still, trying not to panic. The breathing stayed steady and slow; it was as if something slept nearby, something very big. She became concerned that she might wake it up. Then it occurred to her that this was the problem. Whatever was asleep, it
needed
to wake up.

“Hello?” she said, and her voice sounded as if she actually was inside a small room, like her bedroom with the door shut—but a bare unfurnished bedroom, an empty place in which her voice echoed. “Hey! Can you hear me? Wake up!”

No answer. Nita looked around. There was nothing in any direction but the barren, gritty surface of the planet.
That breathing,
she thought,
that’s the Pullulus.
To her surprise, the idea didn’t upset her: The sound of it frightened her a lot less than the way it looked. And after a few moments, the heavy-breathing sound started to seem slightly comic, like someone pretending to be asleep so you’d go away.

Nita rolled her eyes. “Oh, come on,” she said to the darkness in the Speech. “Are you going to just leave me talking to myself here? Say something!”

It won’t answer you,
said a voice from somewhere nearby.
There is only one to whom it will answer, and that one’s not here.

She looked around to see who’d spoken. There wasn’t anyone to be seen. But from off to one side, there had to be a light shining, because suddenly Nita had a shadow.

Nita stared down at it. The shadow was a double one, as if the light sources producing it were in slightly different positions. She looked toward where the light should have been coming from. But there was nothing there but more barren rock and grit.

Nita looked down again. The shadow was fuzzy-edged, as if thrown by a candle, and the flickering continued. She scuffed at it curiously with one sneaker, then looked around. “Well,” she said, “I’m on errantry, and I greet you. Wherever you are…”

Everywhere,
the voice said,
for quite a while now.

There were all kinds of potentialities and forces running around in the universe that could truthfully say something like that. “You’re one of the Powers?” Nita said. “Ronan? Is that you? Or your buddy?”

She caught a distinct feeling of surprise from whatever she was talking to.
You are thinking of one of the Great Intervenors,
it said,
the Light’s own designated Defender. No, I would not be anything so exalted.

She looked at the two fuzzy shadows lying out across the grit of Metemne. “You’re a dual-state being of some kind,” Nita said. “Like a twychild.”

Nothing like that.
Was that a breath of wistfulness behind the thought?
But something old… and something new.

Nita remembered her mother telling her an old poem and showing her the sixpence that an English friend had sent her to put in her shoe the day she married Nita’s dad. “Are you by any chance blue?”

The being was amused.
No. But often borrowed.

“How come I can’t see you?” Nita said.

But you can,
the being said. Her shadows flickered more energetically.

“That’s my shape,” Nita said. “Not yours.”

But all the shape I have is the one wizards give me,
the being said.

Her shadow writhed and flickered against the dusty ground, and as if inside it, Nita caught a glimpse of a number of images melting one into another: something with wings, and then a long twining shape, like a faint light in the shadow—almost the shape of two snakes curling and sliding past each other, so that Nita was reminded of a caduceus.
Matter, and the power to
do
things to matter,
she thought.
The idea, and the thing you say or do to make it happen—

“You’re wizardry,” Nita whispered. “Wizardry itself.”

Not quite. I’m peridexis: the combined effect of the words of the Speech and the power that lives within it. But without the ones who speak the words and decide how to use the power, there’s no wizardry. It always takes at least three…

“So you’re the ‘power surge’ we’ve been getting,” Nita said to the bright shapes in the shadow. “But also sort of the soul of the spell…”

Of every spell, yes. And to a certain extent, the manual.

“Wow,” Nita said. “It’s a shame you’re not usually this talkative.”

This isn’t a usual sort of time,
said the voice of the peridexic effect.
Now more than ever, wizards need their spells to give them some extra help.

“It’s going to surprise a lot of people that you’re conscious,” Nita said. As she spoke, she was studying the light submerged in her shadow. Curious, Nita got down on one knee to touch her shadow with a couple of fingers, and found that she could actually put her hand down into it. The bright shapes rose to meet her, and she felt the slight jolt of power as they did, as if she’d touched the poles of a battery with wet fingers.

Not many will notice,
the peridexis said.
Those who might be bothered by the concept of the living spell won’t hear my voice.

Nita nodded. “Doesn’t bother me,” she said, glancing up again at the strangely empty sky. “But what about the Pullulus? ‘It won’t answer,’ you said. That was what the Senior Wizards were trying to get it to do, wasn’t it?”

Yes. But they were the wrong ones to speak to the Pullulus, and didn’t know the word that needed to be said.

“So who’s the right one to do the speaking?” Nita said. “And what’s the word?”

Without warning, she found herself kneeling by the chain-link fence across the parking lot from her high school’s main doors. Nita got up and dusted her hand off. It was gray with the dust from the worn-in pathway that ran along the fence, the place where kids leaned during lunch hours and “off” periods when they couldn’t leave school property, but were intent on getting as far from school as possible. Over to one side, as far down that path as she could get without being on the sidewalk that led out the parking lot’s gate, was the lanky, thin, denim-clad form of Della Cantrell.