A Wizard Alone New Millennium Edition (21 page)

Poor kid,
Nita thought.
Wait till reality hits him.
Yet, remembering the look in those fearless eyes, she found herself having an unaccustomed second thought. Reality
might
hit him; might, indeed, have hit him hard already—but he wasn’t the one who’d shatter.

Boy, would I like to be there to see
that.

Nita began to peel the banana.
But all that aside, Kit said
he
was with Darryl when I was,
Nita thought.
So
if he’s right, then who was
I
with?

She took a bite of the banana and considered.
And that’s not the only thing about this that’s strange. It’s Kit who’s been looking for him. If this really is Darryl, then why’ve I been seeing him, too?

But now she thought she had an answer to that.
We’ve both been holding the world at arm’s length...though for way different reasons. Trying to get it to leave us alone.
She shook her head.
And making ourselves
more
alone while we did it. But the wizardry knew what it was doing better than we did. One wizard alone found another one
…

Nita sat there for a moment, staring at the banana without really seeing it.
Fine. But still
… if this
is
Darryl, then why’re my visits to his world so different from Kit’s?

She had another bite of the banana, reflecting.
Unless
it’s just that I didn’t
know
that the person trying to contact me was an autistic. So maybe I got something that was more like Darryl’s own ideas about himself
… just translated into my own idiom. Whereas Kit’s known from the beginning that Darryl’s an autistic, and so maybe he’s been projecting his own ideas about that onto what’s been happening.

To Nita this sounded so commonsense that it might be true.
It’s worth checking out. Now I just wish I could figure out how Darryl can be with both me and Kit at the same time. Maybe he’s time-slipping somehow?

But that would take the kind of wizardry that would need a ton of power to fuel it: not to mention (as a rule) authorization from above.
Though maybe not always. Didn’t Ronan timeslide a little when he was in the middle of his Ordeal? Maybe on-Ordeal status itself functions as authorization sometimes.
And the only thing Nita was now certain about, as far as her dream went, was that Darryl hadn’t actually been
doing
any wizardry at the time.

No. Something else was going on
…

Nita finished the banana, got up to dump the skin in the kitchen garbage can, and came back to her tea and the manual again.
What other ways are there for someone to be in two places at one time?

She had to laugh at herself a little as she reached for the manual.
Be a great trick if you had a busy schedule,
Nita thought.
Or you could be in school taking a test while you were also lying on the beach with a good book, working on your tan.

She started paging through the manual again, idly at first, then with more concentration. After about fifteen minutes of this, as the sun got brighter on the snow outside and the dining room filled with its light, Nita realized that she still wasn’t sure exactly how to find what she needed. She went to the back of the manual, to the page that handled search functions.

“I need all the references that have to do with being in two places at one time,” she said.

The page cleared itself, and new words appeared. “Apparition or co-location?”

There it was, yet
another
word Nita hadn’t ever heard of before today “Apparition first,” she said.

“See highlighted section,” the page said, and her manual was abruptly about an inch thicker.

“Oh, no,” Nita said. “I think I need another banana.”

***

In the end, it took three more. Nita was grateful that Dairine seemed to be sleeping late, as she was the big banana fan in the house and would not have been pleased that Nita had made such inroads into the supply. The extra bananas gave Nita time to discover, mostly by skimming the material as fast as she could, that there were a truly unnerving number of ways to appear in two places at once, if you felt like spending the energy.

But that was the factor that kept everyone from doing it all the time. The universe had a deeply ingrained bias against the same thing being in more than one place at once—this singularity of location being one of the ways that matter defined itself to begin with—and if you wanted to bend that bias in your favor, you would be heavily penalized, in terms of having to use a huge amount of effort to build a very complex spell.

It doesn’t matter,
Nita thought as she turned over the last twenty pages of the section, doing little more than glancing at them.
I’m sure he wasn’t doing a wizardry last night, so none of this stuff applies.
She turned back to the search page again. “Give me the co-location stuff now,” she said, not seeing any great point in it, but unwilling to stop until she’d read everything that could have a bearing on the problem.

The manual reduced itself to something more like its normal size, and laid itself open at a much shorter section. Nita glanced at the title page and table of contents for the section, momentarily confused. It was a classifications section on the Orders of Being.

Huh?
she thought. Nita had been through this section every now and then. The time she’d been most interested in it was just after passing her Ordeal, when she was trying to sort out some of the finer details of how wizardry was organized. That version of the information had been thinner than this one, a sort of beginner’s guide; this one was considerably more detailed.

Nita turned the pages, glancing at the master classification listing of created beings in the universe. The listing didn’t go by species, but by type. Good old-fashioned mortals naturally had all the other types outnumbered, but there were still a surprising number of modified mortals and other conditionals. Then came wizards, of which there were hundreds of different types, even within single species. Among her own species, with which Nita would have thought she was moderately familiar by now, there were more classes of wizard than she’d realized.

The standard classes—probationary, mid-Ordeal, full wizard, expert wizard, Advisory/Senior, Regional, Planetary, Sector—those she’d known about for long enough. But there were also splinter classifications, some categories that didn’t quite fit among either mortal wizards or the Powers That Be. The Transcendent Pig, of course, Nita knew. She smiled slightly as she turned past his page.
The picture doesn’t do him justice. Maybe it’s old.
But there were many other classifications in this section, too, some of them most obscure.
Principalities, Thrones, Dominations—
She raised her eyebrows.
‘Thrones?’ Who wants to be a chair? But maybe I’m missing something here. Who knows? Maybe it’s fun to be furniture.

Nita turned the page over.
Pillars? What is this? First furniture, now architecture
…

Abdals / “Pillars”
— This state or condition of created being does not necessarily imply wizardly status but is still routinely included as associated with the classification because of the sharing of various functions and qualities across species and eschatological barriers. The sobriquet “Pillars” refers to the immense supportive strength inherent in these beings wherever they appear. The physical and spiritual structure of the Universe and its contents is strengthened against the assaults of evil by the Pillars’ presence, and weakened by their loss. While they occasionally may also be wizards, abdals display no unusual aptitude for the Art: their value lies elsewhere. Their status comes from direct endowment by the One; their power is derived strictly from the incorrupt nature of their personality. Some have unusual abilities of perception reaching into other universes, or are able to so clearly perceive details of the innate structure of their home universe that the entire physical world can seem a mirage by contrast. Some have sufficient control over their physical natures to change their bodies at will without recourse to normal wizardry, or to travel great distances or appear in two places the same time
….

Certainty went straight through Nita like a lightning bolt, and not only because of the two-places-at-once line. It was everything else in combination with that. She thought of the knight, of the strength and bravery she’d sensed in that version of Darryl, and of the power inherent in the robot. All those experiences were fragments of this bigger picture, pieces of the jigsaw. Nita glanced on down the page.

The Pillars are rarely recognized as such by their contemporaries. Should they become conscious of their own status as abdals, the realization itself renders them ineffective in their role, which is to channel the One’s power without obstruction into the strengthening of the world. Their portion of that power is then lost to the Worlds, and with its loss, the abdal dies.

Nita slapped the manual shut and sat there, actually sweating, for a few moments. The language of the manual could be obscure sometimes, but this time Nita was sure she knew perfectly well what it was talking about when it said the Pillars’ power was “derived strictly from the incorrupt nature of their personality.”
It means what Darryl’s got,
she thought.
Innocence. That plain, straightforward innocence that just goes right through whatever comes at it, like a knife, or bounces any attack off it, like a shield. And that really, really pisses off the Lone Power, so that It just keeps coming at him again and again. Which is just the way Darryl wants it—

Nita pushed back from the table a little, leaning back in the chair and considering. Normally when the Lone Power turned Its attention to destroying a wizard during his or her Ordeal, It would lay out no more energy than It absolutely had to. The tendency not to waste energy unnecessarily was one It still shared with the other Powers. It didn’t waste Its time spending a lot of power on one wizard unless It knew that person was going to be something really special.
Dairine, for example,
Nita thought.
It gave her a lot of grief because she was so young when her Ordeal hit. The kind of power she was going to have, even just for a while, was worth trying to knock out.
But Darryl didn’t give Nita the same impression of huge and abrupt power that Dairine had, and the manual confirmed his power levels as being, while not unusually low, not unusually high, either.

So these repeated attacks suggest that the Lone Power knows Darryl’s one of the Pillars,
Nita thought.
And taking out an abdal slowly and painfully has to be worth more to the Lone Power than just killing some wizard on Ordeal. Though the chance of getting two for the price of one must strike It as an awful lot of fun. A nasty game.

But that’s not the game that’s actually being played. Because Darryl’s not really the stuck one here!

Nita sat looking out into the front yard, watching the maple tree there shed little sparkles of snow into the air as a faint breeze moved its branches.
If the Lone One realizes what’s happening, It’s going to go ballistic,
Nita thought.
It’s been having so much fun toying with Darryl that It doesn’t realize he’s turned the tables on It.

The Enemy will fight and fight again. I will hold It here,
he said. He’s
prolonging
his Ordeal on purpose, running the Lone Power ragged—

But that can’t last forever. If there’s one thing the Lone Power hates worse than anything else, it’s someone
laughing at It. The minute It discovers that Darryl’s yanking Its chain, It’ll just kill him outright in the nastiest way It can.

Nita bit her lip.
Which would be for It to
make
Darryl find out that he’s one of the Pillars. He loses the power; he dies. And the Lone Power gets back at the One, too, through Darryl’s death.

Her eyes narrowed as she remembered that mischievous smile, the courage in those dark eyes—and thought of how long Darryl had been alone there in one or another of his worlds, fighting an endless battle with no hope of relief, no real way to win … but with that valor always there, like shining armor.

Well, It’s not getting Its way
this
time,
Nita thought.

She got up and started picking up the banana skins lying around the dining room table.
There’s been enough dying around here,
she thought.
No more of it! As soon as Kit gets up, we’re going to sit down and figure out how to give Darryl whatever he needs so he can push his way through this and come out the other side. Got to be a way
…

She headed upstairs to get dressed.

Kit stopped in the middle of the jungle path and looked around him. “We’re lost,” he said.

I don’t know if I’d say
we, Ponch said, sounding ever so slightly reproachful.

Kit wiped the rain off his face and turned to look back the way they’d come. It was nearly impossible to see where that was, for the path they’d been following was scarcely any wider than he was. The jungle all around them was a tangle of dark reds and dark greens, huge trees and undergrowth, vines and creepers and strange-looking plants. High above, the upper canopy of broad leaves held away the burning whiteness of the sky. Down here, precious little of that light reached; all the plants were in mud and blood colors, depressing… and the shadows in between them were worse. There were creatures in this jungle that had messy eating habits, and Kit had stopped looking into the shadowy places at the bases of the immense trees unless he absolutely had to.

“Where is he?” Kit said.

Ponch stood there with his nose working.
I’m not sure,
he said.

“
You’re not
sure?”

We didn’t do this the usual way,
Ponch said.
For one thing, neither of us is awake. For another, you went in first, and I followed you because I didn’t want you going in here alone. And you didn’t bring the leash.