So You Want To Be A Wizard

Preliminary Exercises

She did her chores that morning and got out of the house with the book as fast as she could, heading for one of her secret places in the woods. If weird things start happening, she thought, no one will see them there. Oh, I'm going to get that pen back! And then. , Behind the high school around the corner from Nita's house was a large tract of undeveloped woodland, the usual Long Island combination of scruh oak, white pine, and sassafras. Nita detoured around the school, pausing to scramble over a couple of chain-link fences. There was a path on the other side; after a few minutes she turned off it to pick her way carefully through low underbrush and among fallen logs and tree stumps. Then there was a solid wall of clumped sassafras and twining wild blackberry bushes. It looked totally impassable, and the blackberries threatened Nita with their thorns, but she turned sideways and pushed through the wall of greenery undaunted.

She emerged into a glade walled all around with blackberry and gooseberry and pine, sheltered by the overhanging branches of several trees. One, a large crabapple, stood near the edge of the glade, and there was a flatfish half-buried boulder at the base of its trunk. Here she could be sure no one was watching.

Nita sat down on the rock with a sigh, put her back up against the tree, and spent a few moments getting comfortable — then opened the book and started to read. She found herself not just reading, after a while, but studying — cramming the facts into her head with that particular mental stomp she used when she knew she was going to have to know something by heart. The things the book was telling her now were not vague and abstract, as the initial discussion of theory had been, but straightforward as the repair manual for a new car, and nearly as complex. There were tables and lists of needed resources for working spells. There were formulas and equations and rules. There was a syllabary and pronunciation guide for the 418 symbols used in the wizardry Speech to describe relationships and effects that other human languages had no specific words for.

The information went on and on — the book was printed small, and there seemed no end to the things Nita was going to have to know about. She read about the hierarchy of practicing wizards — her book listed only those practicing in the U.S. and Canada, though wizards were working everywhere in the world — and she scanned down the listing for the New York area, noticing the presence of Advisory wizards, Area Supervisors, Senior wizards. She read through a list of the "otherworlds" closest to her own, alternate earths where the capital of the United States was named Huictilopochtli or Lafayette City or Hrafnkell or New Washington, and where the people still called them-selves Americans, though they didn't match Nita's ideas about the term. She learned the Horseman's Word, which gets the attention of any member of the genus Equus, even the zebras; and the two forms of the Mason's Word, which give stone the appearance of life for short periods. One chapter told her about the magical creatures living in cities, whose presence even the nonwizardly people suspect sometimes — creatures like the steambreathing fireworms, packratty little lizards that creep through cracks in building walls to steal treasures and trash for their lair-hoards under the streets. Nita thought about all the steam she had seen coming up from manhole covers in Manhattan and smiled, for now she knew what was causing it. She read on, finding out how to bridle the Nightmare and learning what questions to ask the Transcendent Pig, should she meet him. She read about the Trees' Battle — who fought in it, and who won it, and why. She read about the forty basic classes of spells and their subclasses. She read about Timeheart, the unreal and eternal realm where the places and things people remember affectionately are preserved as they remember them, forever.

In the middle of the description of things preserved in their fullest beauty forever, and still growing, Nita found herself feeling a faint tingle of unease. She was also getting tired. She dropped the book in her lap with an annoyed sigh, for there was just too much to absorb at one sitting, and she had no clear idea of where to begin. "Crud," she said under her breath. "I thought I'd be able to make Joanne vanish by tomorrow morning... "

Nita picked the manual up again and leafed through it to the section labeled "Preliminary Exercises."

The first one was set in a small block of type in the middle of an otherwise page. To change something, you must first describe it. To describe something, you must first see it. Hold still in one place for as long as it takes to see something.

Nita felt puzzled and slightly annoyed. This didn't sound much like magic. But obediently she put the book down, settled herself more comfortably against the tree, folded her arms, and sighed. It's almost too warm to think about anything serious… What should I look at? That rock over there? Naah, it's kind of a dull-looking rock. That weed. , look how its leaves go up around the stem in a spiral… Nita leaned her head back, stared up through the crabtree's branches. That rotten Joanne. Where would she have hidden that pen? I wonder. Maybe if I could sneak into her house somehow, maybe there's a spell for that… Have to do it after dark, I guess. Maybe I could do it tonight… wish it didn't take so long to get dark this time of year. Nita looked at the sky where it showed between the leaves, a hot blue mosaic of light with here and there the fireflicker of sun showing through, shifting with the shift of leaves in the wind. There are kinds of patterns — the wind never goes through the same way twice, and there are patterns in the branches but they're never quite the same either. And look at the changes in the brightness. The sky is the same but the leaves cover sometimes more and sometimes less… the patterns… the patterns, they… they… (They won't let you have a moment's rest,) the crabapple tree said irritably. Nita jumped, scraping her back against the trunk as she sat up straight. She had heard the tree quite plainly in some way that had nothing to do with spoken words. It was light patterns she had heard, and wind movements, leafrustle, fireflicker.

(Finally paid attention, did you?) said the tree. (As if one of them isn't enough, messing up someone's fallen-leaf pattern that's been in progress for fifteen years, drawing circles all over the ground and messing up the matrices. Well? What's your excuse?)

Nita sat there with her mouth open, looking up at the words the tree was making with cranky light and shadow. It works. It works! "Uh," she said, not knowing whether the tree could understand her, "I didn't draw any circles on your leaves—" (No, but that other one did,) the tree said. (Made circles and stars and diagrams all over Telerilarch's collage, doing some kind of power spell. You people don't have the proper respect for artwork. Okay, so we're amateurs,) it added, a touch of belligerence creeping into its voice. (So none of us have been here more than thirty years. Well, our work is still valid, and—)

"Uh, listen, do you mean that there's a, uh, a wizard out here somewhere doing magic?" (What else?) the tree snapped. (And let me tell you, if you people don't—) "Where? Where is she?"

(He,) the tree said. (In the middle of all those made-stone roads. I remember when those roads went in, and they took a pattern Kimber had been working on for eighty years and scraped it bare and poured that black rock over it. One of the most complex, most—) He? Nita thought, and her heart sank slightly. She had trouble talking to boys. "You mean across the freeway, in the middle of the interchange? That green place?" (Didn't you hear me? Are you deaf? Silly question. That other one must be not to have heard Teleri yelling at him. And now I suppose you'll start scratching up the ground and invoking powers and ruining my collage. Well, let me tell you—} "I, uh — listen, I'll talk to you later," Nita said hurriedly. She got to her feet, brushed herself off, and started away through the woods at a trot. Another wizard? And my God, the trees— Their laughter at her amazement was all around her as she ran, the merriment of everything from foot-high weeds to hundred-foot oaks, rustling in the wind — grave chuckling of maples and alders, titters from groves of sapling sassafras, silly giggling in the rasp-berry bushes, a huge belly-laugh from the oldest hollow ash tree before the freeway interchange. How could I never have heard them before! Nita stopped at the freeway's edge and made sure that there were no cars coming before she tried to cross. The interchange was one of those cloverleaf affairs, and the circle formed by one of the offramps held a stand of the original pre-freeway trees within it, in a kind of sunken bowl. Nita dashed across the concrete and stood a moment, breathless, at the edge of the downslope, before starting down it slantwise.

This was another of her secret places, a spot shaded and peaceful in sum-mer and winter both because of the pine trees that roofed the hollow in. But there was nothing peaceful about it today. Something was in the air, and the trees, irritated, were muttering among themselves. Even on a foot-thick cushion of pine needles, Nita's feet seemed to be making too much noise. She tried to walk softly and wished the trees wouldn't stare at her so.

Where the slope bottomed out she stopped, looking around her nervously, and that was when she saw him. The boy was holding a stick in one hand and staring intently at the ground underneath a huge shag-larch on one side of the grove. He was shorter than she was, and looked younger, and he also looked familiar somehow. Now who is that? she thought, feeling more nervous still. No one had ever been in one of her secret places when she came there. out the boy just kept frowning at the ground, as if it were a test paper and he was trying to scowl the right answer out of it. A very ordinary-looking kid, with straight black hair and a Hispanic look to his face, wearing a beat-up green windbreaker and jeans and sneakers, holding a willow wand of a type that Nita's book recommended for certain types of spelling.

He let out what looked like a breath of irritation and put his hands on his hips. "Cofones" he muttered, shaking his head — and halfway through the shake, he caught sight of Nita. He looked surprised and embarrassed for a moment, then his face steadied down to a simple worried look. There he stood regarding Nita, and she realized with a shock that he wasn't going to yell at her, or chase her, or call her names, or run away himself. He was going to let her explain herself, Nita was amazed. It didn't seem quite normal. "Hi," she said.

The boy looked at her uncertainly, as if trying to place her. "Hi."

Nita wasn't sure quite where to begin. But the marks on the ground, and the willow wand, seemed to confirm that a power spell was in progress. "Uh," she said, "I, uh, I don't see the oak leaves. Or the string,"

The boy's dark eyes widened. "So that's how you got through!" "Through what?"

"I put a binding spell around the edges of this place," he said. "I've tried this spell once or twice before, but people kept showing up just as I was getting busy, and I couldn't finish."

Nita suddenly recognized him, "You're the one they were calling crazy last week."

The boy's eyes narrowed again. He looked annoyed. "Uh, yeah. A couple of the eighth graders found me last Monday. They were shooting up the woods with BB guns, and there I was working.

And they couldn't figure out what I was doing, so at lunch the next day they said—"

"I know what they said." It had been a badly rhymed song about the kid who played with himself in the woods, because no one else would play with him. She remembered feeling vaguely sorry for the kid, whoever he was; boys could be as bad as girls sometimes.

"1 thought I blew the binding too," he said. "You surprised me."

"Maybe you can't bind another wizard out," Nita said. That was it, she thought. If he's not one—

"Uhh… I guess not." He paused. "I'm Kit," he said then. "Christopher, really, but I hate Christopher."

"Nita," she said. "It's short for Juanita. I hate that too. Listen — the trees are mad at you." Kit stared at her. "The trees?"

"Uh, mostly this one." She looked up into the branches of the shag-larch, which were trembling with more force than the wind could lend them. "See, the trees do — I don't know, it's artwork, sort of, with their fallen leaves — and you started doing your power schematic all over their work, and, uh—"

"Trees?" Kit said, "Rocks I knew about, I talked to a rock last week — or it talked to me, actually — though it wasn't talking, really… " He looked up at the tree. "Well, hey, I'm sorry," he said. "I didn't know. I'll try to put things back the way I found them. But I might as well not have bothered with the spell," he said, looking again at Nita. "It got caught, it's not work-ing. You know anything about this?"

He gestured at the diagram he had drawn on the cleared ground, and Nita went to crouch down by it. The pattern was one she had seen in her book, a basic design of interlocking circles and woven parallelograms. There were symbols drawn inside the angles and outside the curves, some of them letters or words in the Roman alphabet, some of them the graceful characters of the wizardly Speech. "I just got my book yesterday," she said. "I doubt I'll be much help. What were you trying to get? The power part of it I can see." She glanced up and found Kit looking with somber interest at her black eye. "I'm getting tired of being beat up just because I have a Spanish ac-cent," he said. "I was going to attract enough power to me so that the big kids would just leave me alone and not start anything. An 'aura,' the book called it. But the spell got stuck a couple of steps in, and when I checked the book it said that I was missing an clement." He looked questioningly at Nita. "Maybe you're it?"

"Uhh—" She shook her head. "I don't know. I was looking for a spell for something different. Someone beat me up and stole my best pen. It was a space pen, the kind the astronauts have, and it writes on anything, and I always took all my tests with it and I always pass when I use it, and I want it back." She stopped, then added, "And I guess I wouldn't mind if they didn't beat me up any more either."

"We could make a finding spell and tie it into this one," Kit said. "Yeah? Well, we better put these needles back first." "Yeah."

Kit stuck the willow wand in his back pocket as he and Nita worked to push the larch's needles back over the cleared ground. "Where'd you get your book?" Nita said. 'In the city, about a month ago. My mother and father went out antique hunting, there's this one part of Second Avenue where all the little shops are and one place had this box of secondhand books, and I stopped to look at them because I always look at old books — and this one caught my eye. My "and, actually. I was going after a

Tom Swift book underneath it and it Pinched me… "

Nita chuckled. "Mine snagged me in the library," she said. "I don't know... I didn't want Joanne — she's the one who beat me up — I didn't want her to get my pen, but I'm glad she didn't get this" She pulled her copy of the book out of her jacket as Kit straightened up beside her. She looked over at him. "Does it work?" she demanded. "Does it really work?"

Kit stood there for a moment, looking at the replaced needles. "I fixed my dog's nose," he said. "A wasp stung him and I made it go down right away. And I talked to the rock." He looked up at Nita again. "C'mon," he said. "There's a place in the middle where the ground is bare. Let's see what happens."

Together they walked to the center of the hollow, where the pine trees made a circle open to the sky and the ground was bare dirt. Kit pulled out his willow wand and began drawing the diagram again. "This one I know by heart," he said. "I've started it so many times. Well, this time for sure."

He got his book out of his back pocket and consulted it, beginning to write symbols into the diagram. "Would you look and see if there's anything else we need for a finding spell?"

"Sure." Nita found the necessary section in the index of her book and checked it. "Just an image of the thing to be found," she said. "I have to make it while you're spelling. Kit, do you know why this works? Leaves, pieces of string, designs on the ground. It doesn't make sense."

Kit kept drawing. "There's a chapter on advanced theory in there, but I couldn't get through it all the way. The magic is supposed to have something to do with interrupting space—"

"Huh?"

"Listen, that's all I could get out of it. There was this one phrase that kept turning up, 'temporospatial claudication.' I think that's how you say it. It's something like, space isn't really empty, it folds around things — or words— and if you put the right things in the right place and do the right things with them, and say the right things in the Speech, magic happens. Where's the string?"

"This one with all the knots in it?" Nita reached down and picked it up. "Must have fallen out of my pocket. Stand on this end, okay?" He dropped one end of the string into the middle of the diagram, and Nita stepped onto it. Kit walked around her and the diagram with its using the end of the string to trace a circle. Just before he came to the place where he had started, he used the willow wand to make a sort of figure-eight mark—a "wizards' knot," the book had called it—and closed the circle with it. Kit tugged at the string as he stood up, Nita let it go, and Kit coiled it and put it away. "You've got to do this part yourself," Kit said. "I can't write your name for you—each person in a spelling does their own. There's a table in there with all the symbols in it—" Nita scuffed some pages aside and found it, a long list of English letters and numbers, and symbols in the Speech. She got down to look at Kit's name, so that she could see how to write hers, and group by group began to puzzle the symbols out. "Your birthday's August twenty-fifth?" "Uh huh."

Nita looked at the symbol for the year. "They skipped you a couple grades, huh?"

"Yeah. It's rotten," Kit said, sounding entirely too cheerful as he said it. Nita knew that tone of voice—it was the one in which she usually answered loanne back, while trying to hide her own fear of what was sure to happen next. "It wouldn't be so bad if they were my age," Kit went on, looking over Nita's shoulder and speaking absently. "But they keep saying things like 'If you're so smart, 'ow come you talk so funny?' " His imitation of their imitation of his accent was precise and bitter. "They make me sick. Trouble is, they outweigh me." Nita nodded and started to draw her name on the ground, using the substitutions and symbols that appeared in her manual. Some of them were simple and brief; some of them were almost more complex than she believed possible, crazy amalgams of curls and twists and angles like those an insane stenographer might produce. She did her best to reproduce them, and tied all the symbols together, fastening them into a circle with the same wizards' knot that Kit had used on the outer circle and on his own name.

"Done?" Kit said. He was standing up again, tracing the outer circle around one more time. "Yup."

"Okay." He finished the tracing with another repetition of the wizards' knot and straightened up; then he put his hand out as if to feel something in the air. "Good," he said. "Here, come check this."

"Check what?" Nita said; but she got up and went over to Kit. She put out her hand as he had, and found that something was resisting the movement of her hand through the air—something that gave slightly under increased pres-sure, like a mattress being pushed down and then springing back again. Nita felt momentarily nervous. "Can air get through this?" I think so. I didn't have any trouble the last couple of times I did it. It's only supposed to seal out unfriendly influences."

Nita stood there with her hand resting against nothing, and the nothing supported her weight. The last of her doubts about the existence of magic went away. She might have imagined the contents of the book, or been Purposely misreading. She might have dozed off and dreamed the talking «ee. But this was daylight, the waking world, and she was leaning one-handed on empty air!

"Those guys who came across you when you had this up," she said, "what d" d they think?" U", it worked on them too. They didn't even understand why they couldn't get at me — they thought it was their idea to yell at me from a distance. They thought they were missing me with the BB guns on purpose too, to scare me. It's true, what the book said. There are people who couldn't see a magic if it bit them." He glanced around the finished circle. "There are other spells like this that don't need drawings after you do them the first time, and when you need them, they're there really fast — like if someone's about to try beating you up. People just kind of skid away from you… "

"I bet," Nita said, with relish. Thoughts of what else she might be able to do to Joanne flickered through her head, but she pushed them aside for the moment. "What next?" "Next," Kit said, going to the middle of the circle and sitting down care-fully so as not to smudge any of the marks he'd made, "we read it. Or I read most of it, and you read your name. Though first you have to check my figuring."

"How come?" Nita joined him, avoiding the lines and angles.

"Two person spell — both people always check each other's work. But your name, you check again after I do."

Kit was already squinting at her squiggles, so Nita pulled out her book again and began looking at the symbols Kit had drawn in the dirt. There were clearly two sides to the diagram, and the book said they both had to balance like a chemical equation. Most of the symbols had numerical values attached, for ease in balancing, and Nita started doing addition in her head, making sure both sides matched. Eventually she was satisfied. She looked again at her name, seeing nothing wrong. "Is it okay?"

"Yeah." Kit leaned back a little. "You have to be careful with names, it says. They're a way of saying what you are—and if you write something in a spell that's not what you are, well… " "You mean…you change… because the spell says you're some-thing else than what you are?

You become that?"

Kit shrugged, but he looked uneasy. "A spell is saying that you want something to happen," he said. "If you say your name wrong—" Nita shuddered. "And now?"

"Now we start. You do your name when I come to it. Then, the goal part down there — since it's a joint goal, we say it together. Think you can do it okay if I go slow?"

"Yeah."

Kit took a deep breath with his eyes closed, then opened his eyes and began to read. Nita had never heard a voice speaking a spell aloud before, and the effect was strange. Ever so slightly, ever so slowly, things began to change around her. The tree-sheltered quiet grew quieter. The cool light that filtered through the canopy of branches grew expectant, fringed with secrecy the way things seen through the edge of a lens are fringed with rainbows. Nita began to feel as if she was caught in the moment between a very vivid dream and the awakening from it. There was that feeling of living in a body — of being aware of familiar surroundings and the realities of the daylight world waiting to be resumed — yet at the same time seeing those surroundings differently, colored with another sort of light, another kind of time. On one level Nita heard Kit reciting a string of polysyllables that should have been meaningless to her — words for symbols, pieces of words, babble. Yet she could also hear Kit talking, saying casually, and, it seemed, in English, "We need to know something, and we suggest this particular method of finding the information. " And the words didn't break the expectancy, the listening silence. For once, for the first time, the dream was real while Nita was awake. Power stirred in the air around her and waited for her to shape it.

Magic.

She sat and listened to Kit. With each passing second she could catch more clearly the clean metallic taste of the equation as it began to form itself, flickering chill and bright in her mind. Kit's speech was giving it life, and with quiet, flowing efficiency it was going about its purpose. It was invoking the attention of what Nita might have called physical laws, except that there was nothing physical about them — they had to do with flows of a kind of power as different from ordinary energy as energy was from matter. The equation stretched and coiled and caught those powers within itself as the words wove it. Nita and Kit were caught in it too. To Nita it seemed as if, without moving, she held out her hands, and they were taken — by Kit, and by the spell itself, and by the ponderous powers caught across from her in the dance. There was a pause: Kit looked across the diagrams at her.

Nita scowled at the symbols beside her and began to read them, slowly and with some hesitation — naming herself one concept or one symbol at a time, hinding herself into the spell. At first she was scared, for she could feel the strangeness folding in close around her. But then she realized that nothing awful was happening, and as her name became part of the spell, that was what was sliding down around her, protecting her. She finished, and she was out of breath, and excited, and she had never been happier in her life.

Kit's voice came in again then, picking up the weave, rejoining the dance, and it went for a while, the strange words and the half-seen, half-felt movements and images falling into a rhythm of light and sound and texture, a song, a poem, a spell. It began to come whole all around them, and all around the tingling air stayed still to better hold the words, and the trees bent close to listen. Kit came to the set of symbols that stood for his name and who he was, and read them slowly and carefully, Nita felt the spell settle down around 'ro too. He finished it and glanced up at Nita, and together they began the goal section of the spell. Nita did her best to make a clear image of the pen as she spoke — the silver case, gone a little scratched and grubby now, her initials incised up on the top. She hardly had time to wonder at the harmony their paired voices made before things began to change again. The shadows of the trees around them seemed to grow darker; the aura of expectancy grew sharp enough to taste. The silence became total, and their voices fell into it as into a great depth. The formula for their goal, though longer than either of their names had been, seemed to take less time to say — and even stranger, it began to sound like much more than just finding a pen and being left alone. It began to taste of starfire and night and motion, huge and controlled, utterly strange. Saying the formula left Kit and Nita breathless and drained, as if something powerful had briefly been living and speaking through them and had worn them down. They finished the formula together, and gulped for air, and looked at each other in half-frightened expectation, wondering what would happen next.

The completed spell took effect. Nita had thought that she would gradually begin to see something, the way things had changed gradually in the grove. The spell, though, had its own ideas. Quick as a gasp it slammed them both out of one moment and into another, a shocking, wrenching transition like dreaming that you've fallen out of bed, wham! Instinctively they both hung on to the spell as if onto a railing, clutching it until their surroundings steadied down. The darkness had been replaced by a lowering, sullen-feeling gloom. They looked down as if from a high balcony onto a shadowed island prisoned between chill rivers and studded with sharp spikes of iron and cold stone.

(Manhattan?) Kit asked anxiously, without words. Nita felt frozen in place like a statue and couldn't turn to answer him — the spell was holding her immobile.

(It looks like Manhattan,) she said, feeling just as uneasy. (But what's my pen doing there:') Kit would have shaken his head if he could have. (I don't get it. What's wrong here? This is New York City — but it never looked this awful, this dirty and nasty and…) He trailed off in confusion and dismay.

Nita looked around her. It was hard to make out anything on the island— there was a murky pall over the city that seemed more than just fog. There was hardly any traffic that she could see, and almost no light — in fact, in all of Manhattan there were only two light sources. In one place on the island-the cast Fifties, it looked like — a small point of brittle light seemed to pulse right through steel and stone, throbbing dully like a sown seed of wildfire waiting to explode. The pulses were irregular and distressing, and the light was painful to look at. Some blocks to the south, well into the financial district near the south end of the island, another fire burned, a clear white spark like a sunseed, beating regularly as a heart. It was consoling, but it was very small.

(Now what?) Nita said. (Why would my pen be in this place?) She looked down at the dark grainy air below them, listened to the brooding silence like that of a beast of prey ready to spring, felt the sullen buildings hunching themselves against the oppressive sky — and then felt the something malevolent and alive that lay in wait below — a something that saw them, was conscious of them, and was darkly pleased. (Kit, what's that?)

(It knows!) Kit's thought sang with alarm like a plucked string. (It knows we're here! It shouldn't be able to, but—Nita, the spell's not balanced for this. If that thing grabs us or holds us somehow, we won't be able to get back!)

Nita felt Kit's mind start to flick frantically through the memories of what he had read in his wizards' manual, looking for an idea, for something they could do to protect themselves.

She held very still and looked over his shoulder at his thoughts, even though part of her trembled at the thought of that dark presence which was even now reaching out toward them, lazy, curious, deadly. Abruptly she saw something that looked useful. {Kit, stop! No, go back one. That's it. Look, it says if you've got an imbalance, you can open out your side of the spell to attract some more power.)(Yeah, but if the wrong kind of power answers, we're in for it!)

(We're in for it for sure if that gets us,) Nita said, indicating the huge, hungry darkness billowing upward toward them like a cloud. (Look, we'll make a hole through the spell big enough for something friendly to fall into, and we'll take pot luck.)

Nita could feel Kit's uncertainty as he started choosing from memory the words and symbols he would need. (All right, but I dunno. If something worse happens…)

(What could be worse?) Nita hollered at Kit, half in amusement, half in tear. The hungry something drew closer.

Kit started to answer, then forgot about it. (There,) he said, laying the equation out in his mind, (I think that's all we need.)

(Go ahead,) Nita said, watching anxiously as their pursuer got closer and the air around them seemed to grow thicker and darker yet. (You say it. Just tell me what to do and when.) (Right,) Kit said, and began speaking in his mind, much faster than he had during the initial spelling. If that first magic had felt like the weaving of a whole, this one felt like ripping something apart. Their surroundings seemed to shimmer uncertainly, the dark skyline and lead-gray sky rippled like a wind-stirred curtain; even that stalking presence seemed to hesitate in momentary confusion. (Push,) Kit said suddenly, {push right there.) Nita felt the torn place that Kit had made in the spell, and she shoved clumsily at it with her mind, trying to make the hole larger. (It's . giving ...)

(Now, hard?) Kit said, and Nita pushed until pain stabbed and stabbed again behind where her eyes should have been, and at the moment she thought she couldn't possibly push any more, Kit said one short sharp syllable and threw the spell wide open like a door.

It was like standing at the core of a tornado which, rather than spinning you away to Oz, strips the roof off your home, opens the house walls out flat as the petals of a plaster flower, and leaves you standing confused and disbelieving in the heart of a howling of smoke and damned voices; or little moving through a roomful of people, every one of whom tries to catch your eye and tell you the most important thing that ever happened to him. Nita found herself deluged in fragments of sights and sounds and tastes and feelings and thoughts not her own, a madly coexisting maelstrom of imageries from other universes, other earths, other times. Most of them she managed to shut out by squeezing her mind shut like eyes and hanging on to the spell. She sensed that Kit was doing the same and that their stalker was momentarily as bewildered as they were by what was happening. The whirling confusion seemed to be funneling through the hole in the spell like water going down a drain— things, concepts, creatures too large or too small for the hole fell through it, or past it, or around it. But sooner or later something just the right size would catch. (Hope we get something useful,) Nita thought desperately. (Some-thing bigger than that thing, anyway.) And thump, something fitted into the hole with snug precision, and the crazy whirling died away, and the two of them had company in the spellweb. Something small, Nita felt, very small, too small — but no, it was big, too… Confused, she reached out to Kit. (Is that it? Can we get out now? Before that what's-tts-name—)

The what's-its-name shook itself with a ripple of rage and hunger that Kit and Nita could feel even at a distance. It headed toward them again, quickly, done with playing with them. (Uh oh!) Kit said. (Let's get outa here!) (What do we—)

(What in the—) said a voice that neither of them recognized.

(Out!) Kit said, and hooked the spell into the added power that the newcomer provided, and pulled—

— and plain pale daylight came down around them, heavy as a collapsed tent. Gravity yanked at them. Kit fell over sideways and lay there panting on the ground like someone who's run a race. Nita sagged, covered her face, bent over double right down to the ground, struggling for breath.

Eventually she began to recover, but she put off moving or opening her eyes. The book had warned that spelling had its prices, and one of them was the physical exhaustion that goes along with any large, mostly mental work of creation. Nita felt as if she had just been through about a hundred English tests with essay questions, one after another. "Kit?" she said, worried by his silence.

"Nnngggg," Kit said, and rolled over into a sort of crouch, holding his head in his hands. "Ooooh. Turn off the Sun."

"It's not that bad," Nita said, opening her eyes. Then she winced and shut them in a hurry. It was.

"How long've we been here?" Kit muttered. "The Sun shouldn't be showing here yet." "It's—" Nita said, opening her eyes again to check her watch and being distracted by a bright light to her right that was entirely too low to be the Sun, and squinting at it—and then forgetting what she had started to say.

Hanging in midair about three feet away from her, inside the circle, was a spark of eye- searing white fire. It looked no bigger than a pinhead, but it was brilliant all out of proportion to its size, and was giving off light about as bright as that of a two-hundred-watt bulb without a shade. The light bobbed gently in midair, up and down, looking like a will-o'-the-wisp plugged into too powerful a current and about to blow out. Nita sat there with her mouth open and stared.

The bright point dimmed slightly, appeared to describe a small tight circle so that it could take in Kit, the drawn circle, trees and leaves and sky; then it came to rest again, staring back at Nita. Though she couldn't catch what Kit was feeling, now that the spell was over, she could feel the light's emotions quite clearly — amazement, growing swiftly into unbelieving pleasure. Sud-denly it blazed up white-hot again.

(Dear Artificer,) it said in bemused delight, {I've blown my quanta and gone to the Good Place!)

Nita sat there in silence for a moment, thinking a great many things at once. Uhh. … she thought. And, So I wanted to be a wizard, huh? Serves you right. Something falls into my world and thinks it's gone to Heaven. Boy, ^ls >t gonna get a shock. And, What in the world is it, anyway?

'Kit," Nita said. "Excuse me a moment," she added, nodding with abrupt courtesy at the light source. "Kit." She turned slightly and reached down to shake him by the shoulder. "Kit. C'mon, get up. We have company." (Mmrnp?" Kit said, scrubbing at his eyes and starting to straighten up. Oh, no, the binding didn't blow, did it?"

Nope. It's the extra power you called in. I think it came back with us."

"Well, it—oh," Kit said, as he finally managed to focus on the sedately hovering brightness, "Oh. It's—uh… ."

"Right," Nita said. "It says," she added, "that it's blown its quanta. Is that dangerous?" she asked the light.

(Dangerous?) It laughed inside, a crackling sound like an overstimulated Geiger counter. (Artificer, child, it means I'm dead.) "Child" wasn't precisely the concept it used; Nita got a fleeting impression of a huge volume of dust and gas contracting gradually toward a common center, slow, confused, and nebulous. She wasn't flattered.

"Maybe you won't like hearing this," Nita said, "but I'm not sure this is the Good Place. It doesn't seem that way to us, anyhow."

The light drew a figure-eight in the air, a shrug. (It looks that way to mej it said. (Look how orderly everything is! And how much life there is in just one place! Where I come from, even a spore's worth of life is scarcer than atoms in a comet's tail.) "Excuse me," Kit said, "but what are you?"

It said something Nita could make little sense of. The concept she got looked like page after page of mathematical equations. Kit raised his eye-brows. "It uses the Speech too," he commented as he listened. "So what is it?"

Kit looked confused. "Its name says that it came from way out in space somewhere, and it has a mass equal to — to five or six blue-white giant stars and a few thousand-odd planets, and it emits all up and down the matter-energy spectrum, all kinds of light and radiation and even some subatomic particles." He shrugged. "You have any idea what that is?"

Nita stared at the light in growing disbelief. "Where's all your mass?" she said. "If you have that much, the gravity should have crushed us up against you the minute you showed up." (Elsewhere,) the light said offhandedly. (I have a singularity-class temporospatial claudication.) "A warp," Nita whispered. "A tunnel through space-time. Are you a white hole?" It stopped bobbing, stared at her as if she had said something derogatory. (Do I look like a hole?)

"Do I look like a cloud of gas?" Nita snapped back, and then sighed — her mouth was getting the better of her again. "I'm sorry. That's just what we call your kind of, uh, creature. Because you act like a hole in the Universe that light and radiation come through, I know you're not, really. But, Kit,' she said, turning, "where's my pen? And where's the power you were after? Didn't the spell work?"

"Spells always work," Kit said. "That's what the book says. When you ask for something, you always get back something that'll help you solve your problem, or be the solution itself." He looked entirely confused. "I asked for that power aura for me, and your pen for you—that was all. If we got a white hole, it means he's the answer—" "If he's the answer," Nita said, bemused, "I'm not sure I understand the question."

(This is all fascinating,) the white hole said, (but I have to find a functional-Advisory nexus in a hurry. I found out that the Naming of Lights has gone missing, and I managed to find a paradimensional net with enough empty loci to get me to an Advisory in a hurry. But something seems to have gone wrong. Somehow I don't think you're Advisories.) "Uh, no," Kit said. "1 think we called you—"

(You called me?) the white hole said, regarding Kit with mixed reverence and amazement. (You're one of the Powers born of Life? Oh, I'm sorry I didn't recognize You—I know You can take any shape but somehow I'd always thought of You as being bigger. A quasar, or a mega-nova.) The white hole made a feeling of rueful amusement. (It's confusing being dead!) "Oh, brother," Kit said, "Look, I'm not—you're not—just not. We made a spell and we called you. I don't think you're dead."

(If you say so,) the white hole said, polite but doubtful. (You called me, though? Me personally? I don't think we've met before.)

"No, we haven't," Nita said. "But we were doing this spell, and we found something, but something found us too, and we wouldn't have been able to get back here unless we called in some extra power—so we did, and it was you, I guess. You're not mad, are you?" she asked timidly. The thought of what a live, intelligent white hole might be able to do if it got annoyed scared her badly.

(Mad? No. As I said, I was trying to get out of my own space to get the news to someone who could use it, and then all of a sudden there was a paranet with enough loci to handle all the dimensions I carry, so I grabbed rt.) The white hole made another small circle, looking around him curiously. (Maybe it did work. Are there Advisories in this—on this— What is this, anyway?}

Kit looked at Nita. "Huh?"

(This,) the white hole said, (all of this.) He made another circle. 'Oh! A planet," Nita said. "See, there's our star." She pointed, and the white hole rotated slightly to look. (Artificer within us,) he said, (maybe I have blown my quanta, after all. I always wanted to see a planet, but I never got around to it. Habit, I guess. on get used to sitting around emitting X-rays after a while, and you don't 'nk of doing anything else. You want to see some?) he asked suddenly. He a little insecure. , maybe you'd better not," Nita said. (How come? They're really pretty.)

"We can't see them—and besides, we're not built to take hard radiation. Our atmosphere shuts most of it out."

(A real planet,) the white hole said, wondering and delighted, (with a real atmosphere. Well! If this is a planet, there has to be an Advisory around here somewhere. Could you help me find one?)

"Uhh—" Kit looked uncertainly at the white hole, "Sure. But do you think you could help me find some power? And Nita get her pen back?"

The white hole looked Kit up and down. (Some potential, some potential,) he muttered. (I could probably have you emitting light pretty quickly, if we worked together on a regular basis. Maybe even some alpha. We'll see. What's a pen?)

"What's your name?" Kit said, "I mean, we can't just call you 'hey you' all the time." (True,) the white hole said. (My name is Khairelikoblephareh-glukumeilichephreidosd'enagouni—) and at the same time he went flickering through a pattern of colors that was evidently the visual translation. "Ky—elik—" Nita began.

"Fred/' Kit said quickly. "Well," he added as they looked at him again, "if we have to yell for help or something, the other way's too long. And that was the only part I got, anyway." "Is that okay with you?" Nita asked.

The white hole made his figure-eight shrug again. (Better than having my true name mangled, I guess,) he said, and chuckled silently. (Fred, then. And you are?) "Nita." "Kit."

{I see why you like them short,) Fred said. (All right. Tell me what a 'pen' is, and I'll try to help you find it. But we really must get to an Advisory as fast as we can—) "Okay," Kit said. "Let's break the circle and go talk."

"Sounds good," Nita said, and began to erase the diagrams they had drawn. Kit cut the wizards' knot and scuffed the circle open in a few places, while Nita took a moment to wave her hand through the now-empty air. "Not bad for a first spell," she said with satisfaction. (I meant to ask,) Fred said politely, (what's a spell?)

Nita sighed, and smiled, and picked up her book, motioning Fred to folio* her over by where Kit sat. It was going to be a long afternoon, but she didn't care. Magic was loose in the world.

Research and Development

They were at the schoolyard early the next morning, to be sure they wouldn't miss Joanne and her crew. Nita and Kit sat on the curb by the front door to the school, staring across at the packed dirt and dull grass of the athletic field next to the building. Kit leafed through his wizards' manual, while Fred hung over his shoulder and looked around with mild interest at everything. (Will it be long?) he said, his light flickering slightly.

"No," Nita said. She was shaking. After the other day, she didn't want anything to do with Joanne at all. But she wanted that pen back, so …

"Look, it'll be all right," Kit said, paging through his manual. "Just do it the way we decided last night. Get close to her, keep her busy for a little while. Fred'll do the rest." "It's keeping her busy that worries me," Nita muttered. "Her idea of busy usually involves her fists and my face."

{I don't understand,) Fred said, and Nita had to laugh briefly—she and Kit had heard that phrase about a hundred times since Fred arrived. He used it on almost everything. (What are you afraid of?)

"This," Nita said, pointing to her black eye. "And this—" uncovering a bruise. "And this, and this—"

Fred regarded her with a moment's discomfiture. (I thought you came that way Joanne makes this happen?)

'Uh huh. And it hurts getting this way."

(But she only changes your outsides. Aren't your insides still the same afterward?)

Nita had to stop and think about that one. "Okay," Kit said suddenly, "here's the Advisory list for our area." He ran a ⁿger down the page. "And here's the one in town. Twenty-seven Hundred Rose—"

"That's up the hill past the school. What's the name?"

"Lessee. 'Swale, T.B., and Romeo, C.J. Research Advisories, temporospatial adjustments, entastics, non-specific scryings—' "

"Wait a minute," Nita said hurriedly. " 'Swale'? You mean Crazy Swale? We can't go in there, Kit, that place is haunted! Everybody knows that! Weird noises are always coming out of there—"

"If it's haunted," Kit said, "it's haunted by wizards. We might as well go after school, it's only five or six blocks up the road."

They were quiet for a while. It was about twenty minutes before the bell would ring for the doors to open, and a few early kids were gathering around the doors. "Maybe we could rig you a defense against getting hit," Kit said, as he kept looking through his manual. "How about this?" He pointed at one page, and both Nita and Fred looked at the formula he was indicating. All it needed was the right words. It would be something of a strain to cany the shield for long, but Nita wouldn't have to; and any attempt to hit her would fust glance off.

(The problem is,) Fred said, (that spell will alter the field slightly around this Joanne person. I'm going to have a hard enough time matching my pattern to that of your pen so that I can get it off her—if indeed she has it. Her own field is going to interfere, and so will yours, Nita. More stress on the space in the area and I might not be able to get your pen back at all.)

Nita shook her head. She could tolerate another black eye if it meant getting that pen back. "Forget it," she said, still shaking, and leaned forward a bit, elbows on knees and face in hands, trying to relax. Above her the old maple trees were muttering morning thoughts in the early sunlight, languid observations on the weather and the decreasing quality of the tenant birds who built nests in their branches. Out in the field the grass was singing a scratchy soprano chorus — (growgrowgrowgrowgrowgrow) — which broke off abruptly and turned into an annoyed mob-sound of boos and razzes as one of the ground- keepers, way across the field, started up a lawnmower. I'm good with plants, Nita thought. I guess I take after Dad. I wonder if I'll ever be able to hear people this way. Kit nudged her. "You're on," he said, and Nita looked up and saw Joanne walking into the schoolyard. Their eyes met, Joanne recognized her, saw her handiwork, smiled. Now or never! Nita thought, and got right up before she had a chance to chicken out and blow everything, She walked over to Joanne without a pause, fast, to keep the tremor in her knees from showing. Oh, Fred, please be behind me. And what in the world can I say to her?

"I want my pen back, Joanne," she said,—or rather it fell out of her mouth, and she went hot at her own stupidity. Yet the momentary shocked look on Joanne's face made her think that maybe saying what was on her mind hadn't been so stupid after all. Joanne's shock didn't last; a second later she was smiling again. "Callahan," she said slowly, "are you looking for another black eye to match that one?"

"Lllp. No," Nita said, "just my pen, thanks."

"I don't know what you're talking about," Joanne said, and then grinned. "You always were a little odd. I guess you've finally flipped out."

"I had a space pen on me the other day, and it was gone afterward. One of you took it. I want it back." Nita was shaking worse than ever, but she was also surprised that the fist hadn't hit yet. And there over Joanne's shoulder, a flicker, a pinpoint of light, hardly to be seen, looking at her.

(Don't react. Make me a picture of the thing now.)

"What makes you think I would want anything of yours?" Joanne was saying, still with that smile. Nita looked straight at her and thought about the pen. Silver barrel, grooved all around the lower half so your fingers, or an astronaut's, wouldn't slip. Her initials engraved on it. Hers, her pen. (Enough. Now then—}

"But now that I think of it, I do remember finding a pen on the ground last week. Let's see." Joanne was enjoying this so much that she actually nipped open the top of her backpack and began rummaging around. "Let's see, here—"She came up with something. Silver barrel, grooved — and Nita went hot again, not with embarrassment this time. "It's mine!"

"Come and get it, then," Joanne said, dropping her backpack, keeping her smile, holding the pen back a little.

And a spark of white light seemed to light on the end of the pen as Joanne held it up, and then both were gone with a pop and a breath of air. Joanne spun to see who Had plucked the pen out of her fingers, then whirled on Nita again. Nita smiled and held out her hands, empty. Joanne was not amused. She stepped in close, and Nita took a few hurried steps back, unable to stop grinning even though she knew she was going to get hit. Heads were turning all around the schoolyard at the prospect of a night. "Callahan," Joanne hissed, "you're in for it now!"

The eight-thirty bell went off so suddenly they both jumped. Joanne stared at Nita for a long long moment, then turned and went to pick up her backpack. "Why hurry things?" she said, straightening. "Callahan, if I were you, I'd sleep here tonight. Because when you try to leave—"

And he walked off toward the doors. Nita stood where she was, still shaking, but with amazement and triumph as much as with fear. Kit came up beside her when Joanne was gone, and Fred appeared, a bright point between them. "u were great!" Kit said.

"I m gonna get killed tonight," Nita said, but she couldn't be terrified about it just yet. "Fred, have you got it?"

The point of light was flickering, and there was something about the way it did so that made Nita wonder if something was wrong. (Yes,) Fred said, the thought coming with a faint queasy feeling to it. (And that's the problem.)

"Are you okay?" Kit said. "Where'd it go?"

(I swallowed it,) Fred said, sounding genuinely miserable now.

"But that was what you were going to do," Nita said, puzzled. "Catch it in your own energy-field, you said, make a little pocket and hold it there."

(I know. But my fields aren't working the way they should. Maybe it's this gravity, I'm not used to any gravity but my own. I think it went down the wrong way.) "Oh, brother," Kit said.

"Well," Nita said, "at least Joanne hasn't got it. When we go to the Advisories tonight, maybe they can help us get it out."

Fred made a small thought-noise somewhere between a burp and a squeak. Nita and Kit looked up at him, concerned — and then both jumped back hurriedly from something that went bang! down by their feet.

They stared at the ground. Sitting there on the packed dirt was a small portable color TV, brand new.

"Uh, Fred—" Kit said.

Fred was looking down at the TV with embarrassment verging on shame. (I emitted it,) he said. Nita stared at him. "But I thought white holes only emitted little things. Subatomic particles. Nothing so big — or so orderly."

(I wanted to visit an orderly place,) Fred said miserably. (See what it got me!) "Hiccups," Kit muttered. "Fred, I think you'd better stay outside until we're finished for the day. We'll go straight to the Advisories' from here."

"Joanne permitting," Nita said. "Kit, we've got to go in."

(I'll meet you here,) Fred said. The mournful thought was followed by another burp/squeak, and another bang! and four volumes of an encyclopedia were sitting on the ground next to the TV. Kit and Nita hurried for the doors, sweating. Apparently wizardry had more drawbacks than the book had indicated…

Lunch wasn't calm, but it was interesting, due to the thirty teachers, assistant principal, principal, and school superintendent who were all out on the athletic field, along with most of the students. They were walking around looking at the furniture, vacuum cleaners, computer components, books, knickknacks, motorcycles, typewriters, art supplies, stoves, sculptures, lumber, and many other odd things that had since morning been appearing one after another in the field. No one knew what to make of any of it, or what to do; and though Kit and Nita felt sure they would be connected with the situation somehow, no one accused them of anything.

They met again at the schoolyard door at three, pausing just inside it while Nita peered out to see if Joanne was waiting. She was, and eight of her friends were with her, talking and laughing among themselves. "Kit," Nita said quietly, "we've got problems." He looked. "And this is the only door we can use."

Something went bang! out in the field, and Nita, looking out again, saw heads turn among Joanne's group. Without a moment's pause every one of the girls headed off toward the field in a hurry, leaving Joanne to glare at the school door for a moment. Then she took off after the others. Kit and Nita glanced at each other. "I get this feeling …" Kit said. "Let's go."

They waited until Joanne was out of sight and then leaned cautiously out of the door, looking around. Fred was suddenly there, wobbling in the air. He made a feeling of greeting at them; he seemed tired, but cheerful, at least for the moment.

Nita glanced over her shoulder to see what had drawn the attention of Joanne and her group—and drew in a sharp breath at the sight of the shiny silver Learjet. "Fred," she said, "you did that on purpose!"

She felt him look back too, and his cheerfulness drowned out his weariness and queasiness for a moment. (I felt you wondering whether to come out, so I exerted myself a little. What was that thing?)

"We'll explain later; right now we should run. Fred, thank you!" (You're most welcome. Just help me stop this!) "Can you hold it in for a few blocks?" (What's a block?)

They ran down Rose Avenue, and Fred paced them. Every now and then a little of Fred's hiccup-noise would squeak out, and he would fall behind them, controlling it while they ran on ahead. Then he would catch up again. The last time he did it, they paused and waited for him. Twenty-seven Hundred Rose had a high poplar hedge with one opening for the walk up to the house, and neither of them felt like going any farther without Fred. (Well?) he said, when he caught up. (Now what?)

Nita and Kit looked at each other. "I don't care if they are wizards," Nita said, "I want to peek in and have a look before I just walk in there. I've heard too many stories about this place—"

(Look,) Fred said in great discomfort, (I've got to—)

Evidently there was a limit on how long a white hole in Fred's condition hold it in. The sound of Fred's hiccup was so much louder than usual "at Nita and Kit crowded back away from him in near-panic. The bang!

Ended like the beginning of a fireworks display, and when its echoes faded, Powder-blue Mercedes-Benz was sitting half on, half off the sidewalk. (% gnaester hurts,) Fred said.

"Let's peek," Nita said, turned, and pushed a little way through the hedge. She wanted to be sure there were no monsters or skeletons hanging from trees or anything else uncanny going on in the yard before she went in. What she did not expect was the amiable face of an enormous black-and- white English sheepdog, which first slurped her face energetically, then grabbed her right arm in gentle but insistent teeth and pulled her straight through the hedge.

"Kit!" she almost screamed, and then remembered not to because Crazy Swale or whoever else lived here might hear her. Her cry came out as sort of a grunt. She heard Kit come right through the bushes behind her as the sheep-dog dragged her along through the yard. There was nothing spooky about the place at all — the house was big, a two-story affair, but normal-looking, all warm wood and shingles. The yard was grassy, with a landscaped garden as pretty as one of her father's. One side of the house had wide glass patio doors opening on a roofed-over terrace. Potted plants hung down and there was even a big square masonry tank, a fishpond — Nita caught a glimpse of some-thing coppery swimming as the sheepdog dragged her past it to the terrace doors. It was at that point that the dog let go her arm and began barking noisily, and Nita began thinking seriously of running for it.

"All right, all right," came a man's voice, a humorous one, from inside the house, and it was definitely too late for running. Kit came up behind Nita, panting. "All right, Annie, let's see what you've got this time."

The screen door slid open, and Nita and Kit looked at the man who opened it in slight surprise. Somehow they had been expecting that any wizard not their age would be old, but this man was young, certainly no more than in his middle thirties. He had dark hair and was tall and broad- shouldered. He looked rather like someone out of a cigarette ad, except that he was smiling, which the men in cigarette ads rarely do. "Well," the man said, sounding not at all annoyed by three unexpected guests, "I see you've met Annie…"

"She, uh," Nita said, glancing down at the dog, who was smiling at her with the same bemused interest as her master. "She found me looking through your hedge." "That's Annie for you," the man said, sounding a bit resigned. "She's good at finding things. I'm Tom Swale." And he held out his hand for Nita to shake. "Nita Callahan," she said, taking it.

"Kit Rodriguez," Kit said from beside her, reaching out to shake hands too. "Good to meet you. Call me Tom, What can I do for you?" "Are you the Advisory?" Kit said.

Tom's eyebrows went up. "You kids have a spelling problem?"

Nita grinned at the pun and glanced over her shoulder. "Fred?" Fred bobbed up between her and Kit, regarding Tom, who looked back at the unsteady spark of light with only moderate surprise. "He's a white hole," Nita said. "He swallowed my space pen."

(Y-hup!) Fred said, and bang! went the air between Kit and Nita as they stepped hurriedly off to either side. Fourteen one-kilogram bricks of 999-fine Swiss gold fell clattering to the patio's brown tiles.

"I can see this is going to take some explaining," Tom said, "Come on in." They followed him into the house. A big comfortable living room opened onto a den on one side and a bright kitchen-dining room on the other. "Carl, we've got company," Tom called as they entered the kitchen.

"Wha?" replied a muffled voice — muffled because the upper half of its owner was mostly in the cabinet under the double sink. The rest of him was sprawled across the kitchen floor. This by itself wasn't so odd; what was odd was the assortment of wrenches and other tools floating in the air just outside the cabinet doors. From under the sink came a sound like a wrench slipping off a pipe, and a sudden soft thump as it hit something else. Probably its user, for "Nnngg!" said the voice under the sink, and all the tools fell clattering to the kitchen floor. The voice broke into some most creative swearing.

Tom frowned and smiled both at once. "Such language in front of guests! You ought to sleep outside with Annie. Come on out of there, we're needed for a consultation." "You really arc wizards!" Nita said, reassured but still surprised. She had rarely seen two more normal-looking people.

Tom chuckled. "Sure we are. Not that we do too much freelancing these days — better to leave that to the younger practitioners, like you two."

The other man got out from under the sink, brushing himself off, He was at least as tall as Tom, and as broad-shouldered, but his dark hair was shorter and he had an impressive mustache. "Carl Romeo," he said in a voice with a pronounced Brooklyn accent, and shook hands with Kit and Nita. "Who's this?" he said, indicating Fred. Fred hiccuped; the resulting explosion produced six black star sapphires the size of tennis balls. Fred here," Tom said, "has a small problem." I wish / had problems like that," Carl remarked. "Something to drink, paple? Soda?" After a few minutes the four of them were settled around the kitchen table, with Fred hovering nearby. "It said in the book that you specialize in temporospatial claudications," Kit said. Karl does. Maintenance and repair; he keeps the worldgates at Grand Central Station and Rockefeller Center working. You've come to the right Place."

"His personal gate is acting up, huh?" Carl said. "I'd better get the books." He got up. "Fred, what're the entasis figures on your warp?"

Fred mentally rattled off a number of symbols in the Speech, as he had when Kit asked him what he was. "Right," Carl said, and went off to the den. "What do you do?" Nita said to Tom.

"Research, mostly. Also we're something of a clearinghouse for news and gossip in the Business. If someone needs details on a rare spell, or wants to know how power balances are running in a particular place, I can usually find out for them." "But you do other things too." Kit looked around at the house.

"Oh, sure, we work. I write for a living — after all, some of the things I see in the Business make good stories. And Carl sells commercial time for WNXT in the city. As well as regular time, on the side."

Kit and Nita looked at each other, puzzled. Tom chuckled. "Well, he does claudications, gatings, doesn't he? Temporospatial — time and space. If you can squeeze space — claudicate it — so that you pop out of one place and into another, why can't you squeeze time the same way? Haven't you heard the saying about 'buying time'? Carl's the one you buy it from. Want to buy a piece of next Thursday?"

"I can get it for you wholesale," Carl said as he came back into the room. In his arms he was carrying several hardbound books as thick as telephone directories. On his shoulder, more interesting, was a splendid scarlet-blue-and-yellow macaw, which regarded Kit and Nita and Fred out of beady black eyes. "Kit, Nita, Fred," Carl said, "Machu Picchu. Peach for short." He sat down, put the books on the table, and began riffling through the one on top of the stack; Tom pulled one out of lower in the pile and began doing the same. "All right," Tom said, "the whole story, from the beginning."

They told him, and it took a while. When they got to Fred's part of the story, and the fact that the Naming of Lights was missing, Tom and Carl became very quiet and just looked at one another for a moment. "Damn,' Tom said, "I wondered why the entry in the Materia Magica hadn't been updated in so long. This is news, all right. We'll have to call a regional Advisories' meeting."

Fred hiccuped again, and the explosion left behind it a year's back issues of TV Guide. "Later," Carl said. "The situation here looks like it's deteriorating." He paused at one page of the book he was looking through, ran his finger down a column. The macaw peered over his shoulder as if interested. "Alpha-rai-eri' tath-eight, you said?" (Right.)

"I can fix you," Carl said. "Take about five minutes." He got up and headed for the den again. "What is the Naming of Lights:³" Kit said to Tom. "We tried to get Fred to tell us last night, but it kept coming out in symbols that weren't in our books."

"Well, this is a pretty advanced subject. A novice's manual wouldn't have much information on the Naming of Lights any more than the instruction manual for a rifle would have information on atomic bombs… ." Tom took a drink. "It's a book. At least that's what it looks like when it's in or near this Universe. The Book of Night with Moon, it's called here, since in these parts you need moonlight to read it. It's always been most carefully accounted for; the Senior wizards keep an eye on it. If it's suddenly gone missing, we've got trouble. "Why?" Nita said.

"Well, if you've gotten even this far in wizardry, you know how the wizards' symbology, the Speech, affects the things you use it on. When you use it, you define what you're speaking about. That's why it's dangerous to use the Speech carelessly. You can accidentally redefine something, change its nature. Something, or someone—" He paused, took another drink of his soda. "The Book of Night with Moon is written in the Speech. In it, every-thing's described. Everything. You, me, Fred, Carl … this house, this town, this world. This Universe and everything in it. All the Universes. …" Kit looked skeptical. "How could a book that big get lost?"

"Who said it was big? You'll notice something about your manuals after a while," Tom said. "They won't get any bigger, but there'll be more and more inside them as you learn more, or need to know more. Even in plain old math "t s true that the inside can be bigger than the outside; it's definitely true in wizardry. But believe me, the Book of Night with Moon has everything described in it. It's one of the reasons we're all here—the power of those descriptions helps keep everything that is, in existence." Tom looked worried. And every now and then the Senior wizards have to go get the Book and ^r£ad from it, to remind the worlds what they are, to preserve everything alive ^Or inanimate—"

Have you read from it?" Nita said, made uneasy by the disturbed look on Tom's face. Tom glanced at her in shock, then began to laugh. "Me? No, no. I hope I never have to." But if it's a good Book, if it preserves things—" Kit said. " s good—at least, yes, it preserves, or lets things grow the way they want t reading it, being the vessel for all that power—I wouldn't want to.

Even good can be terribly dangerous. But this isn't anything you two need to worry about. The Advisories and the Senior wizards will handle it." "But you are worried," Kit said.

"Yes, well—" Tom took another drink. "If it were just that the bright Book had gone missing, that wouldn't be so bad. A universe can go a long time without affirmation-by-reading. But the bright Book has an opposite number, a dark one; the Book which is not Named, we call it. It's written in the Speech too, but its descriptions are… skewed. And if the bright Book is missing, the dark one gains potential power. If someone should read from that one now, while the Book of Night with Moon isn't available to counter-act the power of the dark one—" Tom shook his head. Carl came in then, the macaw still riding his shoulder. "Here we go," he said, and dumped several sticks of chalk, an enormous black claw, and a 1943 zinc penny on the table. Nita and Kit stared at each other, neither quite having the nerve to ask what that claw had come off of. "Now you under-stand," Carl said as he picked up the chalk and began to draw a circle around the table, "that this is only going to stop the hiccups. You three are going to have to go to Manhattan and hook Fred into the Grand Central worldgate to get that pen out. Don't worry about being noticed. People use it all the time and no one's the wiser. / use it sometimes when the trains are late." "Carl," Tom said, "doesn't it strike you as a little strange that the first wizardry these kids do produces Fred — who brings this news about the good Book—and they come straight to us—" "Don't be silly," the macaw on Carl's shoulder said in a scratchy voice. "You know there are no accidents."

Nita and Kit stared.

"Wondered when you were going to say something useful," Carl said, sounding bored. "You think we keep you for your looks? OW!" he added, as the bird bit him on the car. He hit it one on the beak, and, while it was still shaking its head woozily, put it up on the table beside Tom.

Picchu sidled halfway up Tom's arm, stopped and looked at Nita and Kit. "Dos d'en agouni nikyn toude phercsthai," it muttered, and got all the way up on Tom's shoulder, and then glared at them again. "Well?" "She only speaks in tongues to show off," Tom said. "Ignore her, or rap her one if she bites you. We just keep her around because she tells the future." Tom made as if to smack the bird again, and Picchu ducked back' "How about the stocks tomorrow, bird?" he said.

Picchu cleared her throat. "'And that's the way it is,'" she said in a voice very much like that of a famous newscaster, "'July eighteen, 1988. Frofll New York, this is Walter—'" Tom fisted the bird in the beak, clunk! Picchu shook her head again.

" 'Issues were down in slow trading,' " she said resentfully. " 'The Dow-Jones Index—' " and she called off some numbers. Tom grimaced,

"I should have gone into pork bellies,' he muttered. "I ought to warn you two - If you have peas, look out- Practicing wizardry around them can cause some changes."

"There we go," Carl said, and stood up straight. "Fred, you ready? Hiccup for me again." (I can't,) Fred said, sounding nervous. (You're all staring.)

"Never mind, I can start this in the meantime." Carl leaned over the table, glanced down at one of the books, and began reading in the Speech, a quick flow of syllables sharpened by that Brooklyn accent. In the middle of the third sentence Fred hiccuped, and without warning the wizardry took. Time didn't precisely stop, but it held still, and Nita became aware of what Carl's wizardry was doing to Fred, or rather had done already—subtly untangling forces that were knotted tight together. The half-finished hiccup and the wizardry came loose at the same time, leaving Fred looking bright and well for the first time since that morning. He still radiated uncertainty, though, like a person who isn't sure he's stopped hiccuping yet.

"You'll be all right," Carl said, scuffing away the chalk marks on the floor. "Though as I said, that pen is still in there with the rest of your mass, at the other end of your claudication, and you'll need Grand Central to get it out."

(Have you stopped my emissions entirely?) Fred said,

"No, of course not. I couldn't do that: you'll still emit from time to time. Mostly what you're used to, though. Radiation and such."

"Grand Central!" Kit was looking worried. "1 don't think my mother and father are going to want me in the city alone. I could sneak in, I guess, but they'd want to know where I'd been all that while."

Well," Tom said, looking thoughtful, "you've got school. You couldn't go before the weekend anyway, right? Carl could sell you a piece of Saturday or Sunday—"

Kit and Nita looked at each other, and then at the two men. "Uh, we don't have much money." Who said anything about money?" Carl said. "Wizards don't pay each other cash. They pay off in service—and sometimes the services aren't done for years. But first let's see if there's any time available this weekend. Satur-

^ay^s go fast, even though they're expensive, especially Saturday mornings." l^Ae picked up another book and began going through it. Like all the other ^ks. it was printed in the same type as Nita's and Kit's manuals, though ^e print was much smaller and arranged differently. "This way," Tom said, you buy some time, you could be in the city all day, all week if you wanted y ^llt once you activate the piece of time you're holding, you're back then. ⁿave to pick a place to anchor the time to, of course, a twenty-foot radius. But after you've finished whatever you have to do, you bring you_t marked time to life,

and there you are. Maybe five minutes before ybu started for the city, back at home. Or anywhere and anywhen else along the path you'll follow that day."

"Huh," Carl said suddenly, "Callahan, J., and Rodriguez, C., is that you two?" They nodded. "You have a credit already," Carl said, sounding a little surprised. "What have you two been doing to rate that?"

"Must have been for bringing Fred through," Tom said. "I didn't know that Upper Management had started giving out door prizes, though."

From her perch on Tom's shoulder, Picchu snorted. "Oh? What's that mean?" Tom said.

"Come on, bird, be useful. Is there something you know that these kids ought to?"

"I want a raise," Picchu said, sounding sullen.

"You just had one. Talk!"

" 'Brush your teeth twice a day, and see your dentist regularly,' " the macaw began, in a commercial-announcer's voice. Tom made a fist and stared at her. "AH right, all right," Picchu muttered. She looked over at Kit and Nita, and though her voice when she spoke had the usual good-natured annoyance about it, her eyes didn't look angry or even teasing — they looked anxious. Nita got a sudden chill down her back, "Don't be afraid to make corrections," Picchu said. "Don't be afraid to lend a hand." She fell silent, seeming to think for a moment. "And don't look down."

Tom stared at the macaw. "Can't you be a little more specific?" "Human lives," Picchu said irritably, "aren't much like the Dow-Jones index. No, 1 can't." Tom sighed. "Sorry. Kids, if she says it, she has a reason for saying it—so remember."

"Here you go," Carl said. "Your piece of time is from ten forty-five to ten forty-seven on this next Saturday morning. There aren't any weekend openings after that until sometime in July." "We'll take this one," Kit said. "At least I can—Nita, will your folks let you go?"

She nodded. "I have some allowance saved up, and I'd been thinki about going into the city to get my dad a birthday present anyhow. I doul there'll be any trouble."

Kit looked uncomfortable for a moment. "But there's something I'm sure about. My spell—our spell brought Fred here. How are we going to him back where he belongs?" (Am I a problem?) Fred said, sounding concerned.

"Oh, no, no—it's just that, Fred, this isn't your home, and it seemed as sooner or later you might want to go back where you came from,"

"As far as that goes," Tom said, "if it's your spell that brought him ou'H be able to send him back. The instructions are in your book, same as the instructions for opening the Grand Central worldgate."

"Stick to those instructions," Carl said. "Don't be tempted to improvise. That claudication is the oldest one in New York, and it's the trickiest because of all the people using it all the time. One false syllable in a spell and you may wind up in Schenectady." (Is that another world?) Fred asked.

"Nearly." Carl laughed. "Is there anything else we can do for you?"

Nita and Kit shook their heads and got up to leave, thanking Tom and Carl and Picchu. "Let us know how things turn out," Tom said. "Not that we have any doubts—two wizards who can produce a white hole on the first try are obviously doing all right. But give us a call. We're in the book."

The two men saw Nita and Kit as far as the patio door, said their good-byes, and went back into the house. Nita started off across the lawn the way she had come, but Kit paused for a moment by the fishpool, staring down into it. He pulled a penny out of his pocket, dropped it in.

Nita saw the ripples spread—and then suddenly another set of ripples wavered away from the head of a very large goldfish, which spat the penny back at Kit and eyed him with distaste. "Do / throw money on your living-room floor?" it said, and then dived out of sight. Kit picked up his penny and went after Nita and Fred as they pushed through the poplar hedge again. The blue Mercedes, which had been half in the street and half on the sidewalk, was now neatly parked by the curb. In front of it sat Annie., with her tongue hanging out and a satisfied look on her face. There were teethmarks deep in the car's front fender, Annie grinned at them as Nita and Kit passed, and then trotted off down the street, probably to "find" something else.

"If my dog starts doing things like that," Kit muttered, "I don't know how I m going to explain it to my mother."

Nita looked down the street for signs of Joanne. "If we can just get home without being killed, I wouldn't care what the dog found. Uh oh—" A good ^ways down the street, four or five girls were heading toward them, and Nita saw Joanne's blond hair. "Kit, we'd better split up. No reason for them to ^c°irie after you too."

Right. Give me a call tonight. I'm in the book…, " He took off down a

Side street. ^>he looked around, considering the best direction to run in—and then nought of the book she was carrying. There wasn't much time, though. She °^rced herself to calm down even while she knew they were coming for her, ^acte herself turn the pages slowly to the place Kit had shown her that °^rning, the spell that made blows slide off. She read through it slowly in the

^Aech, sounding out the syllables, taking the time to look up the pronunciation of the ones she wasn't sure of, even though they were getting close and she could hear Joanne's laugh.

Nita sat down on the curb to wait for them. They let her have it when they found her, as they had been intending to all day; and she rolled around on the ground and fell back from their punches and made what she hoped were horrible groaning noises. After a while Joanne and her four friends turned away to leave, satisfied that they had taught her a lesson. And Nita stood up and brushed herself off, uncut, unbruised, just a little dirty. "Joanne," she called after them. In what looked like amazement, Joanne turned around. Nita laughed at her. "It won't work any more," she said. Joanne stood dumb,

"Never again/' she said. She felt like turning her back on them, but in-stead she walked toward them, watching the confusion in their eyes. On a sudden urge, she jumped up in the air and waved her arms crazily. "BOO!" she shouted.

They broke and ran, all of them. Joanne was the first, and then the rest followed her in a ragged tail down Rose Avenue. Not a word, not a taunt. They just ran.

Nita stopped short. The feeling of triumph that had been growing in her withered almost instantly. Some victory, she thought. It took so little, so little to scare them. Maybe I could have done that at any time, without a shield. Maybe. And now I'll never know for sure.

(Are you all right?) Fred said quietly, bobbing again by her shoulder. (They didn't hurt you this time.)

"No," Nita said slowly. She was thinking of all the glorious plans she'd had to use her new-found wizardry on Joanne and her bunch, to shame them, confuse them, hurt them. And look what so small and inoffensive thing as a body shield had done to them. They would hate her worse than ever now.

I've got to be careful with this, she thought. I thought it was going to be all fun. "Come on, Fred," she said, "let's go home."

Temporospatial Claudications Use and Abuse

The week went by quickly for Nita. Though Carl had made the business of opening a worldgate sound fairly simple, she began to suspect that he'd been doing it so long that it actually seemed that way to him. It wasn't simple, as her book told her as soon as she opened to the pertinent chapter, which was forty pages long in small print.

Grand Central worldgate had its own special requirements: specific sup-plies and objects that had to be present at an opening so that space would be properly bent, spells that had to be learned just so. The phone calls flew between Nita's house and Kit's for a couple of days, and there was a lot of visiting back and forth as they divided up the work. Nita spent a lot of time keeping Fred from being noticed by her family, and also got to see a lot of Kit's mother and father and sisters, all of whom were very friendly and kept forgetting that Nita couldn't speak Spanish. She started to learn a little of it in self-defense. Kit's dog told her the brand of dog biscuits it could never get enough of; she began bringing them with her when she visited. The dog ^spoke the Speech with a Spanish accent, and would constantly interrupt Kit and Nita as they discussed who should do what in the spelling, Kit wound up with most of the spoken work, since he had been using the Speech longer and was better at it; Nita picked up supplies. You ever swallow anything accidentally before, Fred?" Nita said under her breath. It was late Friday afternoon, and she was in a little antiques-and-)unk store on

Nassau Road, going through boxes of dusty odds and ends in arch of a real silver fork. Fred was hanging over her shoulder, almost invisible a faint red point lazily emitting heat.

INot for a long time) he said, glancing curiously at a pressed-glass salt-

^a*er Nita was holding. (Not since I was a black hole, certainly. Black holes '°^w everything, but a white hole's business is emission. Within limits,) he added, and the air around him rippled with heat as he shuddered. (I don't ever again want to emit the way I did after your pen went down. Some of those things hurt on the way out. And anyway, all that emission makes me nervous. Too much of that kind of thing and I could blow my quanta.)

She looked up at him, worried. "Really? Have you emitted that much stuff that you're in danger of blowing up?"

(Oh, not really — I'd have to lose a lot more mass first. After all, before I was a black hole, I was a respectable-sized blue-white star, and even those days I massed a few hundred thousand times what your cute little yellow-dwarf Sun does. I wouldn't worry about it—I'm nowhere near the critical threshold yet.) " 'Cute'?" Nita said.

(Well, it is… And I suppose there's no harm in getting better at emis-| sions. I have been improving a lot. Wliat's that?) |

Nita looked farther down in the box, dug deep, and came up with a| battered old fork. It was scratched and its tines were bent out of shape, but if was definitely silver, not stainless steel. "That's what I needed," she said|

"Thanks, Fred. Now all I need is that piece of rowan wood, and then tonighf

I go over my part of the spells again."

(You sound worried.) '

"Well, yeah, a little," Nita said, getting up. All that week her ability to hear what the plants were saying had been getting stronger and surer; the better she got with the Speech, the more sense the bushes and trees made. "It's just—the rowan branch has to come off a live tree, Fred, and I can't just pick it—that'd be like walking up to someone and pulling one of their fingers off. I have to ask for it. And if the tree won't give it to rne , ."

(Then you don't get your pen back, at least not for a while.) Fred shim-mered with colors and a feeling like a sigh. (I am a trouble to you.)

"Fred, no. Put your light out a moment so we can get out of here." Nita interrupted the shopkeeper's intense concentration on a Gothic novel long enough to find out what the fork cost (a dollar) and buy it. A few steps outside the door, Fred was pacing her again. "If you're trouble, you're the best trouble that's happened around here for a while. You're good to talk to, you're good company — when you don't forget and start emitting cosmic rays—"

Fred blazed momentarily, blushing at Nita's teasing. In an excited n* ment the night before he had forgotten himself and emitted a brief blast ultrashortwave radiation, which had heated up Nita's backyard a good ^л£ionized the air for miles around, and produced a local but brilliant ai (Well, it's an old habit, and old habits die hard. I'm working on it.) "Heat we don't mind so much. Or ultraviolet, the longwave kind doesn't hurt people's eyes," (You fluoresce when I use that, though...)

Nita laughed. "I don't mind fluorescing. Though on second thought, don't do that where anyone but Kit can see. I doubt my mother'd understand."

They walked home together, chatting alternately about life in the suburbs and life in ^a P^art °f deep space close to the Great Galactic Rift. Nita felt niore relaxed than she had for months. Joanne had been out of sight since Monday afternoon at Tom and Carl's. Even if she hadn't, Nita had been practicing with that body shield, so that now she could run through the syllables of the spell in a matter of seconds and nothing short of a bomb dropped on her could hurt her. She could even extend the spell to cover someone else, though it wasn't quite so effective; she had a harder time convincing the air to harden up. But even that lessened protection would come in handy if she and Kit should be in trouble together at some point and there was no time to cooperate in a spelling. Not that she was expecting any more trouble. The excitement of a trip into the city was already catching at her. And this wasn't just another shopping trip. Magic was loose in the world, and she was going to help work some…

She ate supper and did her homework almost without thinking about either, and as a result had to do much of the math homework twice. By the time she was finished, the sun was down and the backyard was filling with a cool blue twilight, In the front of the house, her mother and father and Dairine were watching TV as Nita walked out the side door and stood on the step, letting her eyes get used to the dimness and looking east at the rising Moon. Canned laughter echoed inside the house as Fred appeared by her shoulder.

(My, that's bright for something that doesn't emit heat,) Fred said, looking at the Moon too. "Reflected sunlight," Nita said absently. (You're going to talk to the tree now?) "Uh huh."

л (Then I'll go stay with the others and watch that funny box emit. Maybe II figure out what it's trying to get across.)

'Good luck," Nita said as Fred winked out. She walked around into the Mcyard, Spring stars were coming out as she stood in the middle of the lawn and °°Ked down the length of the yard at the rowan, a great round-crowned tree ⁿowy with white flowers. Nita's stomach tightened slightly with nervous-^Iess' It had been a long time ago, according to her manual, that the trees had j>^0rie to war on mankind's behalf, against the dark powers that wanted to ^eP human intelligence from happening at all. The war had been a terrible ' *> lasting thousands of centuries—the trees and other plants taking more ^a rnore land, turning barren stone to soil that would support them and the animals and men to follow; the dark powers breaking the soil with earthqu_a[._e and mountain building, scouring it with glaciers, climate-changing good ground for desert, and burning away forests in firestorms far more terrible than the small brushfires any forest needs to stay healthy. But the trees and the other plants had won at last.

They had spent many more centuries readying the world for men — but when men came, they forgot the old debts and wasted the forests more terribly than even the old dark powers. Trees had no particular reason to be friendly to people these days. Nita found herself thinking of that first tree that had spoken to her, angry over the destruction of its friend's artwork. Even though the rowan tree had always been well tended, she wasn't certain how it was going to respond to her. With the other ash trees, rowans had been in the forefront of the Battle; and they had long memories.

Nita sighed and sat down under the tree, book in hand, her back against its trunk. There was no need to start right away, anyhow — she needed a little while to recover from her homework. The stars looked at her through the rowan's windstirred branches, getting brighter by the minute. There was that one pair of stars that always looked like eyes, they were so close together. It was one of the three little pairs associated with the Big Dipper. The Leaps of the Gazelle, the ancient Arabs had called them, seeing them as three sets of hoofprints left in the sky. "Kafza'at al Thiba," Nita murmured, the old Arabic name. Her eyes wandered down toward the horizon, finding a faint reddish gleam. "Regulus." And a whiter gleam, higher: "Arcturus." And another, and another, old friends, with new names in the Speech, that she spoke silently, remembering Carl's warning: (Elthathte. , ur'Senaahel…} The distant fires flickered among shadowy leaves. (Lahirien…) (And Methchane and Ysen and Cahadhwy and Rasaug6hil… .They are nice tonight.) Nita looked up hurriedly. The tree above her was leaning back comfortably on its roots, finished with the stretching-upward of growth for the day, and gazing at the stars as she was. (I was hoping that haze would clear off,) it said as silently as Nita had spoken, in a slow, relaxed drawl. (This will be a good night for talking to the wind. And other such transient creatures. I was wondering when you were going to come out and pay your respects, wizardling.) {Uh—) Nita was reassured: the rowan sounded friendly, fit's been a bus)' week.) (You never used to be too busy for me,) the rowan said, its whispery voice sounding ever so slightly wounded. (Always up in my branches you were, and falling out of them again. Or swinging. But I suppose you outgrew me.)

Nita sat quiet for a moment, remembering how it had been when she w littler. She would swing for hours on end, talking to herself, pretending k'nds of things, talking to the tree and the world in general. And some- _es_ (You talked back!) she said in shocked realization. (You did, I wasn't making it up.)

(Certainly ! talked. You were talking to me, after all… . Don't be sur-nrised. Small children look at things and see them, listen to things and hear them. Of course they understand the Speech. Most of them never realize it any more than you did. It's when they get older, and stop looking and listening, that they lose the Speech, and we lose them.) The rowan sighed, many leaves showing pale undersides as the wind moved them. (None of us are ever happy about losing our children. But every now and then we get one of you back.) (All that in the book was true, then,) Nita said. (About the Battle of the Trees—)

(Certainly. Wasn't it written in the Book of Night with Moon that this world's life would become free to roam among our friends there) — the rowan stretched upward toward the turning stars for a moment—(if we helped? After the world was green and ready, we waited for a long time. We started letting all sorts of strange creatures live in our branches after they came up out of the water. We watched them all; we never knew which of our guests would be the children we were promised. And then all of a sudden one odd-looking group of creatures went down out of our branches, and looked up-ward again, and called us by name in the Speech. Your kind… .) The tree looked down musingly at Nita. (You're still an odd-looking lot,) it said.

Nita sat against the rowan and felt unhappy. (We weren't so kind to you,) she said. (And if it weren't for the plants, we wouldn't be here.)

(Don't be downcast, wizardling,) the tree said, gazing up at the sky again. (It isn't your fault.

And in any case, we knew what fate was in store for us. It was written in the Book.)

(Wait a minute. You mean you knew we were going to start destroying your kind, and you got the world ready for us anyway?)

(How could we do otherwise? You are our children.)

(But … we make our houses out of you, we—) Nita looked guiltily at tne book she was holding. (We kill you and we write on your bodies!)

The rowan continued to gaze up at the night sky. (Well,) it said. (We are all m the Book together, after all. Don't you think that we wrote enough in he rock and the soil, in our day? And we still do. We have our own lives, our

^Wn '^eclings and goals. Some of them you may learn by your wizardry, but I °ubt you'll ever come to know them all. We do what we have to, to live.

^Orfietimes that means breaking a rock's heart, or pushing roots down into ground that screams against the intrusion. But we never forget what we're ^lng As for you)—and its voice became very gentle—(how else should our ^dren climb to the stars but up our branches? We made our peace with that fact a long time ago, that we would be used and maybe forgotten. So be it. What you learn in your climbing will make all the life on this planet greater, more precious. You have your own stories to write. And when it comes to that, who writes the things written in your body, your life? And who reads?) It breathed out, a long sigh of leaves in the wind. (Our cases aren't that much different.)

Nita sat back and tried to absorb what the tree was saying. (The Book of Night with Moon,) she said after a while. (Do you know who wrote it?)

The rowan was silent for a long time. (None of us are sure,) it said at last. (Our legends say it wasn't written. It's simply been, as long as life has been. Since they were kindled, and before.) It gazed upward at the stars. (Then the other Book, the dark one—)

The whole tree shuddered. (That one was written, they say.) The rowan's voice dropped to a whisper. (By the Lone Power — the Witherer, the one who blights. The Kindlcr of Wildfires. Don't ask more. Even talking about that one or its works can lend it power.)

Nita sat quiet for a while, thinking. (You came to ask something,) the rowan said. (Wizards are always asking things of rowans.) (Uh, yes.)

(Don't worry about it,) the rowan said. (When we decided to be trees of the Light, we knew we were going to be in demand.)

(Well — I need some live wood. Just enough for a stick, a little wand. We're going to open the Grand Central worldgatc tomorrow morning.)

Above Nita's head there was a sharp cracking sound. She pressed back against the trunk, and a short straight branch about a foot and a half long bounced to the grass in front of her. (The Moon is almost full tonight,) the rowan said. (If I were you, I'd peel the leaves and bark off that twig and leave it out to soak up moonlight. I don't think it'll hurt the wood's usefulness for your spelling, and it may make it more valuable later on.)

(Thank you, yes,) Nita said. The book had mentioned something of the sort — a rowan rod with a night's moonlight in it could be used for some kind of defense. She would look up the reference later. (1 guess I should go in and check my spells over one more time. I'm awfully new at this.) (Go on,) the tree said, with affection. Nita picked up the stick that the rowan had dropped for her, got up and stretched, looking up at the stars through the branches. On impulse she reached up, hooked an arm around the branch that had had the swing on it. (I guess I could still come and climb sometimes,) she said.

She felt the tree looking at her, (My name in the Speech is Liused,) it said in leafrustle and starfhcker. (If there's need, remember me to the trees in Manhattan. You won't be without help if you need it.)

""I'm Nita," she said in the Speech, aloud for this once. The syllables didn't sound strange: they sounded like a native language and made English feel like a foreign tongue. For a moment every leaf on the tree quivered with her name, speaking it in a whispery echo. (Go,) the rowan said again. (Rest well.) It turned its calm regard to the stars again. Nita went back inside.

Saturday morning about eight, Kit and Nita and Fred took the bus down to the Long Island Railroad station and caught a shiny silver train for Manhattan. The train was full of the usual cargo of Saturday travelers and shoppers, none of whom paid any particular attention to the boy and girl sitting by one window, going over the odd contents of their backpacks with great care. Also apparently unnoticed was a faint spark of white light hanging in the center of the window between the two, gazing out in fascination at the backyards and parking lots and stores the train passed.

(What are all those dead hunks of metal there? All piled up?) (Cars, Fred.) (I thought cars moved.) (They did, once.)

(They all went there to die?)

(They were dead when they got there, probably.)

(But they've all climbed on top of each other! When they were dead?) (No, Fred. They have machines—)

(What was that? There are three — I don't know who those were, but they have them shut up in a box hanging from that long thing.)

(No one you know, Fred. That was a traffic light.)

(It was emitting— Look, he's trying to say something! Hello! Hello!)

(Fred, you're flashing! Calm down or someone'll sec you!)

(Well, I don't know what a nice guy like him was doing in a place like that)

Nita sighed out loud, "Where were we?" she said to Kit.

"The battery."

"Right. Well, here it is."

'Lithium-cadmium?"

Right. Heavy thing, it weighs more than anything else we've got That's last thing for activating the piece of time, isn't it?" more. The eight and a half sugar cubes."

Nita held up a little plastic bag. Now the worldgate stuff. The pine cone—"

(

"The fork."

"Here."

"The rowan branch."

"Yup." She held it up. Cut down and peeled, it was about a foot long, _a greenish-white wand.

"Great. Then we're set, You've got all that other stuff, why don't you give me the battery?" "Here." Nita handed it to him, watched as he found a good spot for it in his backpack, under the sandwiches. "What's that?" she said, spotting some-thing that hadn't been accounted for in the equipment tally.

"Huh? Oh, this." He reached in and brought out a slim piece of metal like a slender rod, with a small knob at one end and broken off jaggedly at the other. "What is it?"

"A piece of junk. A busted-off car antenna. Well," Kit amended, "it was, anyway. I was sitting out behind the garage yesterday afternoon, reading, and I started talking to my dad's old car. He has this ancient Edsel. He's always talking about getting it reconditioned, but I don't think he's really going to— there's never enough money. Anyway he goes out every now and then to work on the engine, usually when he's tired or mad about something. I don't know if he ever really gets any work done, but he always comes inside greasy all over and feeling a lot better. But I was going over the spells in my head, and the car spoke to me in the Speech—" "Out loud?"

"No, inside, like Fred does. Kind of a grindy noise, like its voice needed a lube job. I wasn't too surprised; that kind of thing has been happening since I picked the book up. First it was rocks, and then things started to talk to me when I picked them up. They would tell me where they'd been and who'd handled them. Anyway, the car and I started talking " Kit paused, looking a touch guilty. "They don't see things the way we do. We made them, and they don't understand why most of the time we make things and then just let them wear out and throw them away afterward… " Nita nodded, wondering briefly whether the train was alive too. Certainly it was as complex as a car. "What about this antenna thing, though?" she said after a moment.

"Oh. The car said to take it for luck. It was just lying there on the ground, rusting. Dad replaced the antenna a long time ago. So I took it inside and cleaned it up, and there are some wizardries you can do with metal, to remind it of the different forces it felt when it was being made. I did a couple of those. Partly just practicing, partly…"

"You thought there might be trouble," Nita said.

Kit looked at her, surprised. "I don't know," he said. "I'm going to be reful anyway. Carl was pretty definite about not messing around with the nrldeate; I wasn't thinking about anything like that. But it occurred to me ,1 _t jt'j be easy to carry the antenna to school if I wanted to. And if anyone started bothering me—" He shrugged, then laughed. "Well, that's their oroblem. Hey, look, we're getting close to that big curve where you can see the city before you go under the river. Come on, these trains have a window in the very front of the first car. Fred! Want to see where we're going?" (Why not? Maybe I'll understand it better than where we've been. -.) Kit and Nita wriggled into their backpacks and made their way up through a couple of cars, hanging on carefully as they crossed the chained walkways between them. Treetops and housetops flashed by in a rush of wind and clatter of rails. Each time Nita touched the bare metal of the outside of the train, she jumped a little, feeling something, she wasn't quite sure what. The train? she thought. Thinking? And now that I'm aware that it does, I can feel it a little?—though not as clearly as the trees. Maybe my specialty is going to be things that grow and Kit's is going to be things that run. But how many other kinds of life are there that I could learn to feel? Who knows where thought is hiding?… They went into the first car and made their way up to the front window, carefully hanging on to the seats of oblivious riders to keep the swaying of the train from knocking them over. There were no more stops between there and Penn Station, and the train was plunging along, the rails roaring beneath it. Those rails climbed gradually as the already elevated track went higher still to avoid a triple-stacked freeway. Then the rails bent away to the left in a long graceful curve, still climbing slightly; and little by little, over the low brown cityscape of Brooklyn, the towers of Manhattan rose glittering in the early sunlight. Gray and crystal for the Empire State Building, silver-blue for the odd sheared- off Citibank building, silver-gold for the twin square pillars of the World Trade Center, and steely white fire for the scalloped tower of the Chrysler Building as it caught the Sun.

The place looked magical enough in ⁽ne bright morning. Nita grinned to herself, looking at the view and realizing that there was magic there. That forest of towers opened onto other worlds. Une day she would open that worldgate by herself and go somewhere. Fred stared at the towers, amazed. (This is more life? More even than the place where you two live?)

(Ten million lives in the city, Fred. Maybe four or five million on that ^lsland alone.) I Doesn't it worry you, packing all that life together? What if a meteor hits What if there's a starflare? If something should happen to all that life— ^ho* terrible!) v, /

,. to laughed to herself. (It doesn't seem to worry them… .)Beside her, ^Was hanging on to a seat, being rocked back and forth by the train's speed. Very faintly Nita could hear what Kit heard and felt more strongly; the train's aliveness, its wild rushing joy at doing what it was made to do — its dangerous pleasure in its speed, the wind it fought with, the rails it rode. Nita shook her head in happy wonder. And I wanted to see the life on other planets. There's more life in this world than I expected…

(It's beautiful,) Fred said from his vantage point just above Kit's shoulder.

"It really is," Nita said, very quiet.

The train howled defiant joy and plunged into the darkness under the river. Penn Station was thick with people when they got there, but even so it took them only a few minutes to get down to the Seventh Avenue Subway station and from there up to Times Square and the shuttle to Grand Central. The shuttle ride was short and crowded. Nita and Kit and Fred were packed tight together in a corner, where they braced themselves against walls and seats and other people while the train shouted along through the echoing underground darkness. (I can't feel the Sun,) Fred said, sounding worried.

(We're ten or twenty feet underground,) Nita said silently. (We'll get you some Sun as soon as we get off.)

Kit looked at Fred with concern. (You've been twitchy ever since we went into the tunnel, haven't you?)

Fred didn't speak for a moment. (I miss the openness,) he said then. (But worse I miss the feeling of your star on me. Where I come from no one is scaled away from the surrounding emissions.) He trailed off, his thoughts full of the strange hiss and crackle of interstellar radiation — subtly patterned sound, rushing and dying away and swelling up again — the Speech in yet another of its forms. Starsong, Nita thought. (You said you heard about the Book of Night with Moon,) she said. (Was that how? Your… friends, your people, they actually talk to each other over all those distances — millions of light-years?)

(That's right. Not that we use light to do it, of course. But the words, the song, they never stop. Except now. 1 can hardly hear anything but neutrinos…)

Kit and Nita glanced at each other. (The worldgate is underground, Fred,) Kit said. (In back of a deli, a little store. We'll have to be there for at least a few minutes to get Nita's pen out.)

(We could go out first and look around,) Nita said. {We're early—it's only nine thirty. We don't even have to think about anchoring the timeslide for a little bit yet.)

The subway cars screeched to a halt, doors rolled open, and the crush loosened as people piled out.

Nita got off gladly, looking around for directional signs to point the way toward the concourse level of Grand Central—it had been a while since she'd been there.

"Are you sure you know your way around this place?" Kit said as Nita headed down one tom- up looking corridor.

"Ub huh. They're always doing construction in here. C'mon."

She led them up a flight of stairs into the lower Grand Central concourse__ all beige tiles,

gray floor, signs pointing to fifty different trains, and small stores packed together. "The deli's down there," she said as she went, waving a hand at a crowd of hurrying people and the wide hall past them. "We go up here." And another flight of stairs, wider and prettier, let them out on the upper concourse, a huge stretch of cream-colored marble under a great blue dome painted with constellations and starred with lights.

They headed across the marble floor, up a short ramp, and out one of many brassy yellow doors, onto the street. Immediately the three of them were assailed by noise, exhaust fumes, people hurrying in all directions, a flood of cabs and buses and cars. But.there was also sunlight, and Kit and Nita stood against the wall by the Grand Central doors, letting Fred soak it up and get his composure back. He did so totally oblivious to the six men and three jackhammers working just across the street behind a barrier of saw-horses and orange plastic cones. (That's much better,) he said.

(It was quieter inside, though,) Kit said, and Nita was inclined to agree with him. The rattling clamor of the jackhammers was climbing down her ears into her bones and making her teeth jitter. The men, two burly ones and one skinny one, all three broad-shouldered and tan, all in helmets and jeans and boots, appeared to be trying to dig to China. One of them hopped down into the excavation for a moment to check its progress, and vanished up to his neck. Then the hammering started again, "How can they stand it?" Nita muttered. (Stand what? It's lovely out here.) Fred danced about a little in the air, brightening out of invisibility for a few moments and looking like a long-lived remnant of a fireworks display. (Fred, put it out!) Kit said. (If somebody sees you—)

(rtiey didn't see me in the field the other day,) Fred replied, (though Artificer knows they looked.)

(Probably the Learjet distracted them. Fred, come on, tone it down a ^t'^e,} Nita said. (Let's go back inside and do what we have to. Then we can the timeslide and have fun in the city for the rest of the day.)

1 hey went back inside and down the stairs again, accompanied by the j^A'et inward sound of Fred's grumbling. There was no trouble finding the

J^e deli where the worldgate was situated, and Nita and Kit paused outside ubu have everything ready?) Nita said. in here.) Kit tapped his head. (The spells are all set except for one or two syllables — it's like dialing almost all of a phone number. When I call fo_r you, just come on back. All we need is for the supplies to be in range of the spell; there's nothing special that has to be done with them. Fred, you stay with Nita.) (As you say.)

They went in. Nita lingered by the front counter, staring at dill pickles and sandwich makings, trying to look normal while she waited for Kit to call her. Fred hung over her shoulder, looking with great interest at bologna and salami and mayonnaise and cream cheese. (You people certainly have enough ways to internalize energy,) he said. {Is there really that much difference between one brand of matter and another?)

(Well, wasn't there any difference when you were a black hole? Didn't a rock, say, taste different from a ray of light, when you soaked one or the other up?)

(Now that you mention it, yes. But appreciating differences like that was something you had to work at for a long time. I wouldn't expect someone as young as you to—)

(Nita,) Kit's thought came abruptly. (We've got trouble. It's not here.)

(What? It has to be!)

(It's gone, Nita.)

"Girlie," said the man behind the deli counter in a no-nonsense growl, "you gonna buy anything?"

"Uh," Nita said, and by reflex more than anything else picked up a can of soda from the nearby cooler and fished around in her pocket for the change, "Kit—" she called.

"Coming?"

Nita paid for the soda. Kit joined her, carrying a small bag of potato chips, which he paid for in turn, Together they went back out into the corridor, and Kit knelt down by the window of a store across the way, a window full of shiny cutlery. He got his wizards' manual out of his pack and began going through the pages in a hurry. "I don't get it," he said. "I even checked this morning to make sure there hadn't been any change in the worldgate status. It said, right here, 'patent and operative.' "

"Were the spells all right?"

Kit glared up at Nita, and she was instantly sorry she'd asked. "The spells were fine," Kit said. "But they got caught like that first one I did, when you came along. Oh, damn… " He trailed off, and Nita edged around beside him to look at the page, "Something's changed," Kit said, and indeed the page didn't look as it had when Nita had checked it herself in her own manual the night before.

The listings for the other Manhattan worldgate⁵ were the same — the World Trade Center gate was still listed as "under construction" and the Rockefeller Center gate as "closed for routine maintenance." But under the Grand Central gate listing was a small red box that said in boldface type, Claudication temporarily dislocated due to unscheduled sdatial interruption, followed by a string of numbers and symbols in the Speech, a description of the gate's new location. Kit glanced up at the roof, through which the sound of jackhammers could plainly be heard. "The construction," he said. "It must have screwed up the worldgate's interruption of space somehow."

Nita was puzzling over the symbols for the new location. "Isn't that term there the one for height above the ground?" she asked.

"Uh huh. Look at it, it must be sixty, seventy stories straight up from here." Kit slapped the book shut in great annoyance, shoved it back in his backpack. "Now what do we do?" {We go back outside?) Fred said, very hopefully.

It seemed the best suggestion. The three of them walked out again, and Fred bobbed and danced some more in the sunlight while Nita and Kit walked slowly eastward along Forty-second Street, toward the Park Avenue overpass. "Dislocated," Kit muttered, "And who knows how long it'll take to come undisiocated? A perfectly good piece of time wasted." Nita stopped and turned, looking up into the air and trying to estimate where the deli lay under the Grand Central complex. She picked a spot that seemed about right, let her eye travel up and up, sixty, maybe seventy stories. "Kit," she said. "Kit! Look what's seventy stories high, and right next door."

Kit looked. Dark blue and silver, with its big stylized globe logo on one side, the Pan Am Building reared its oblong self up at least seventy stories high, right there—not only right behind Grand Central, but part of it. "Yeah," Kit said, his voice still heavy with annoyance. "So?"

"So you remember that shield spell you showed me? The one that makes the air solid? If you change the quantities in the spell a little, you can use it for something else. To walk on, even. You just keep the air hard."

She couldn't keep from grinning. Kit stared at Nita as if she'd gone crazy. Are you suggesting that we walk out to the worldgate and—" He laughed. How are we going to get up there?" There's a heliport on top of the building," Nita said promptly. "They aon t use it for big helicopters any more, but the little ones still land, and there's an elevator in the building that goes right to the top. There's a restaurant up there too; my father had lunch with someone up there once. I ^bet we could do it."

Kit stared at her. "If you talk the air solid, you 're going to walk on it first! I ^sa* that spell; it's not that easy."

1 practiced it some. Come on, Kit, you want to waste the timeslide? It's J most ten now! It'll probably be years before these guys are finished digging. ^Let's do it!"

'They'll never let us up there," Kit said with conviction.

"Oh, yes, they will. They won't have a choice, because Fred'll make a diversion for us. We don't even need anything as big as a Learjet this time. How about it, Fred?"

Fred looked at them reluctantly. (I must admit I have been feeling an urge to burp—)

Kit still looked uncertain. "And when we get up there," he said, "all those stories up, and looking as if we're walking on nothing — what if somebody sees us?"

Nita laughed- "Who are they going to tell? And who's going to believe them?"

Kit nodded and then began to grin slowly too. "Yeah," he said. "Yeah! Let's go, it's getting late."

Back they went into Grand Central, straight across the main concourse this time and up one of the six escalators that led up to the lobby of the Pan Am Building. They paused just outside the revolving doors at the end of the escalators. The Pan Am lobby was a big place, pillared and walled and paved in dark granite, echoing with the sound of people hurrying in and out of the station. They went up the escalator to the next floor, and Nita pointed off to one side, indicating an elevator bank. One elevator had a sign standing by it: copter club — helipad level — express, Also standing by it was a bored-looking uniformed security guard.

"That's it," Nita said.

"So if we can just get him away from there…"

"It's not that simple." She pointed down at the end of the hall between two more banks of elevators. Another guard sat behind a large semicircular desk, watching a row of TV monitors.

"They've got cameras all over the place. We've got to get that guy out of there too. Fred, if you're going to do something, do it right between them. Out in front of that desk."

(Well,) Fred said, sounding interested, (let's see, let's see…) He damped his light down and floated off toward the elevators, nearly invisible unless you were looking for him, and even then looking like an unusually large speck of dust, nothing more. The dustmote stopped just between the desk and the elevator guard, hung in midair, and concentrated so fiercely that Nita and Kit could both feel it thirty feet away.

(T-hupt) bang!

"That'll get their attention," Kit muttered. It did; both the guards started at the noise, began looking around for the source of it — then both went very very slowly over to examine the large barrel cactus in a brass pot that had suddenly appeared in the middle of the shiny floor. "Now," Kit said, and took off toward the elevator with Nita close behind'

Both the guards had their backs turned, and Nita, passing them, saw the elevator keys hanging off one guard's belt. (Fred,) she said hurriedly, (can you erab those real fast, the way you grabbed my pen? Don't swallow them!)

(Once I might make that mistake,) Fred said, (but not twice.) As they slipped into the elevator Fred paused by the guard's belt, and the keys vanished without so much as a jingle. He sailed in to them. (How was that?)

(Great. Quick, Nita, close the door!)

She punched one of the elevator buttons and the doors slid shut; the keys appeared again, and Kit caught them in midair before they fell. "It's always one of these round ones, like they use on coin phones," he said, going through the keys. "Fred, I didn't know you could make live things!" (I didn't know either,) Fred said, sounding unsettled, (and I'm not sure I like it!)

"Here we go/' Kit said, and put one key into the elevator lock, turning it to run, and then pressed the button marked 73—restaurant — helipad. The elevator took off in a hurry; it was one of the highspeed sort.

Nita swallowed repeatedly to pop her ears. "Aren't you going to have to change the spells a little to compensate for the gate being up high now?" she said after a moment. "A little. You just put in the new height coordinate. Oops!"

The elevator began to slow down quickly, and Nita's stomach churned for a moment. She and Kit both pressed themselves against the sides of the elevator, so they wouldn't be immediately visible to anyone who might hap-pen to be standing right outside the door. But when the doors slid open, no one was there. They peered out and saw a long carpeted corridor with a plate-glass door at one end. Through it could be seen tables and chairs and, more dimly, through a window, a hazy view of the East Side skyline. A muffled sound of plates and silverware being handled came down the hall to them.

(It's early for lunch,) Nita said, relieved. (Let's go before someone sees us.) (What about these keys?) (Hmm…)

(Look, let's leave them in the elevator lock. That way the guard downstairs'll just think he left them there. If they discover they're missing they'll start looking for whoever took them — and this would be the first place they'd look.) Ueah, but how are we going to get down?)

Well walk on air,) Kit said, his voice teasing. Nita rolled her eyes at the eiling. (Or we'll go down with the people coming out from lunch, if that °esn t work. Let's just get out of here first, okay? Which way do we go to get on the heliport?). There are stairs.) slipped out of the elevator just as it chimed and its doors shut again—probably the guard had called it from downstairs. The corridor off to the left was featureless except for one door at its very end. helipad access, the door said in large red letters. Nita tried the knob, then let her hand fall in exasperation. (Locked, Crud!) (Well, wait a moment,) Kit said, and tried the knob himself. "You don't really want to be locked, do you?" he said aloud in the Speech, very quietly. Again Nita was amazed by how natural the wizards' language sounded when you heard it, and how nice it was to hear — as if, after being lost in a foreign country for a long time, someone should suddenly speak warmly to you in English. "You 've been locked for a couple of days now," Kit went on, his voice friendly and persuasive, not casting a spell, just talking—though in the Speech, the two were often dangerously close. "It must be pretty dull being locked, no one using you, no one paying any attention. Now we need to use you at least a couple of times this morning, so we thought we'd ask—" Kt-chk! said the lock, and the knob turned in Kit's hand. "Thank you,"he said. "We'll be back later." He went through the door into the stairwell, Nita and Fred following, and as the door swung to behind them and locked itself again, there was a decidedly friendly sound to the click. Kit grinned trium-phantly at Nita as they climbed the stairs. "How about that?"

"Not bad," Nita said, determined to learn how to do it herself, if possible, "You've been practicing too."

"Not really—some of this stuffjust seems to come naturally as you work with it more. My mother locked herself out of the car at the supermarket last week and I was pulling on the car door and talking at it — you know how you do when you're trying to get something to work. And then it worked. I almost fell over, the door came open so fast. It's the Speech that does it, I think. Everything loves to hear it." "Remember what Carl said, though."

"I know. I won't overdo it. You think we ought to call him later, let him know what happened to the gate?"

They came to the top of the stairs, paused before the next closed door, breathing hard from the exertion of climbing the stairs fast. "Probably h^fi knows, if he's looked at his book this morning," Nita said. "Look, before we do anything else, let's set the timeslide. This is a good place for it; we're out of sight. When we're tired of running around the city, we can just activate it and we'll be back here at quarter of eleven. Then we just go downstairs, int° Grand Central and downstairs to the shuttle, and then home in time for lunch."

"Sounds good." They began rummaging in their backpacks, and before too long had produced the eight and a half sugar cubes, the lithium-cadrniu"¹ battery—a fat one, bigger than a D cell and far heavier — a specific grated-circuit chip salvaged from the innards of a dead pocket calculator, .. handle of a broken glass teacup. "You might want to back away a little, Fred s° y°^ur emissions don't interfere with the spell," Kit said.

(Right.) Fred retreated high up into one ceiling-corner of the stairwell, flaring bright with interest. There was a brief smell of burning as he accidentally vaporized a cobweb. "All right," Kit said, thumbing through his manual to a page marked with bit of ripped-up newspaper, "here we go. This is a timeslide inauguration," he said aloud in the Speech. "Claudication type mesarrh-gimel-veignt-six, authorization group—" Nita swallowed, feeling the strangeness set in as it had during their first spell together, feeling the walls lean in to listen. But it was not a silence that fell this time. As Kit spoke, she became aware of a roaring away at the edge of her hearing and a blurring at the limits of her vision. Both effects grew and strengthened to the overwhelming point almost before she realized what was happening. And then it was too late. She was seeing and hearing everything that would happen for miles and miles around at quarter to eleven, as if the building were transparent, as if she had eyes that could pierce stone and ears that could hear a leaf fall blocks away. The words and thoughts of a million minds poured down on her in a roaring onslaught like a wave crashing down on a swimmer, and she was washed away, helpless. Too many sights, commonplace and strange, glad and frightening, jostled and crowded all around her, and squeezing her eyes shut made no difference—the sights were in her mind. I'll go crazy, I'll go crazy, stop it! But she was caught in the spell and couldn't budge. Stop it, oh, let it stop—

It stopped. She was staring at the floor between her and Kit as she had been doing when the flood of feelings swept over her. Everything was the same as it had been, except that the sugar was gone. Kit was looking at her in concern. "You all right?" he said. "You look a little green."

"Uh, yeah." Nita rubbed her head, which ached slightly as if with the memory of a very loud sound.

"What happened to the sugar?"

It went away. That means the spell took." Kit began gathering up the rest the materials and stowing them, He looked at her again. "Are you sure you're okay?"

Yeah, I'm fine." She got up, looked around restlessly. "C'mon, let's go."

K-'t got up too, shrugging into his backpack. "Yeah. Which way is the—" crack! went something against the door outside, and Nita's insides con-r'cted. She and Kit both threw themselves against the wall behind the door,

^ere they would be hidden if it opened. For a few seconds neither of them ^Ad to breathe.

Nothing happened. was that?) Kit asked.

(I don't know. It sounded like a shot. Lord, Kit what if there's somebody up here with a gun or something—)

(What's a gun?) Fred said.

(You don't want to know,) Kit said. (Then again, if there was somebodv out there with a gun, I doubt they could hurt you. Fred, would you go out there and have a quick look around? See who's there?)

(Why not?) Fred floated down from the ceiling, looked the door over, put his light out, and slipped through the keyhole. For a little while there was silence, broken only by the faint faraway rattle of a helicopter going by, blocks away.

Then the lock glowed a little from inside, and Fred popped back in. (1 don't see anyone out there,) he said.

Kit looked at Nita. (Then what made that noise?)

She was as puzzled as he was. She shrugged. (Well, if Fred says there's nothing out there—)

(I suppose. But let's keep our eyes open.)

Kit coaxed the door open as he had the first one, and the three of them stepped cautiously out onto the roof.

Most of it was occupied by the helipad proper, the long wide expanse of bare tarmac ornamented with its big yellow square-and-H symbol and sur-rounded by blue low-intensity landing lights. At one end of the oblong pad was a small glass-walled building decorated with the Pan Am logo, a dis-tended orange windsock, and an anemometer, its three little cups spinning energetically in the brisk morning wind. Beyond the helipad, the roof was graveled, and various low-set ventilator stacks poked up here and there. A yard-high guardrail edged the roof. Rising up on all sides was Manhattan, a stony forest of buildings in all shapes and heights. To the west glimmered the Hudson River and the Palisades on the New Jersey side; on the other side of the building lay the East River and Brooklyn and Queens, veiled in mist and pinkish smog. The Sun would have felt warm if the wind had stopped blow-ing. No one was up there at all.

Nita took a few steps off the paved walkway that led to the little glass building and scuffed at the gravel suspiciously. "This wind is pretty stiff," she said. "Maybe a good gust of it caught some of this gravel and threw it at the door." But even as she said it, she didn't believe it.

"Maybe," Kit said. His voice made it plain that he didn't believe it either "Come on, let's find the gate."

"That side," Nita said, pointing south, where the building was wider. They headed toward the railing together, crunching across the gravel. Fred perche" on Nita's shoulder; she looked at him with affection. "Worried?" (No. But you are.)

"A little. That sound shook me up." She paused again, wondering if ^s"^e heard something behind her. She turned. Nothing; the roof was bare. But still— Nita turned back and hurried to catch up with Kit, who was looking back at her.

"Something?"

"I don't know. I doubt it. You know how you see things out of the corner Of your eye,

movements that aren't there? I thought maybe the door moved a little."

"I don't know about you," Kit said, "but I'm not going to turn my back on anything while I'm up here. Fred, keep your eyes open." Kit paused by the railing, examining the ledge below it,

maybe six feet wide, then looked up again. "On second thought, do you have eyes?" (I don't know,) Fred said, confused but courteous as always. (Do you have chelicerae?) "Good question," Nita said, a touch nervously. "Kit, let's do this and get out of here." He nodded, unslung his pack, and laid the aspirin, pine cone, and fork on the gravel by the railing. Nita got out the rowan wand and dropped it with the other materials, while Kit went through his book again, stopping at another marked spot. "Okay," he said after a moment. "This is an imaging-and-patency spell for a. temporospatial claudication, asdekh class. Purpose: retrieval of an accidentally internalized object, matter-energy quotient…" Kit read a long string of syllables, a description in the Speech of Nita's pen, followed by another symbol group that meant Fred and described the proper-ties of the little personal worldgate that kept his great mass at a great dis-tance.

Nita held her breath, waiting for another onslaught of uncanny feelings, but none ensued. When Kit stopped reading and the spell turned her loose, it was almost a surprise to see, hanging there in the air, the thing they had been looking for. Puckered, roughly oblong, vaguely radiant, an eight-foot scar on the sky; the worldgate, about a hundred feet out from the edge where they stood and maybe thirty feet below the heliport level. 'Well," Kit said then, sounding very pleased with himself. "There we are. And it looks all right, not much different from the description in the book." Now all we have to do is get to it." Nita picked up the rowan wand, ^wnich for the second part of the spell would serve as a key to get the pen through the worldgate and out of Fred. She tucked the wand into her belt, leaned on the railing, and looked out at the air.

According to the wizards' manual, air, like the other elements, had a "lemory and could be convinced in the Speech to revert to something it had ^eeji before. It was this memory of being locked in stone as oxides or nitrates, 'frozen solid in the deeps of space, that made the air harden briefly for the ^eAding spell. Nita started that spell in its simplest form and then went on into a more formal one, as much a reminiscence as a convincing — she talked to the air about the old days when starlight wouldn't twinkle because there was nothing to make it do so, and when every shadow was sharp as a razor and distances didn't look distant because there was no air to soften theirj. The immobility came down around her as the spell began to say itself alone with Nita, matching her cadence. She kept her eyes closed, not looking, for fear something that should be happening might not be. Slowly with her words she began to shape the hardening air into an oblong, pushing it out through the other, thinner air she wasn't including in the spell. It's working better than usual, faster, she thought. Maybe it's all the smog here — this air's half solid already. She kept talking.

Kit whispered something, but she couldn't make out what and didn't want to try. "/know it's a strain, being solid these days," she whispered in the Speech, "but just for a little while, lust to make a walkway out to that puckered place in the sky, then you can relax. Nothing too thick, lust strong enough to walk on—" "Nita. Nita!"

The sound of her name in the Speech caught her attention. She opened her eyes. Arrow-straight, sloping down from the lower curb of the railing between her and Kit, the air had gone hard. There was dirt and smog trapped in it, making the sudden walkway more translucent than transparent — but there was no mistaking it for anything but air. It had a more delicate, fragile look than any glass ever could, no matter how thin. The walkway ran smooth and even all the way out to the worldgate, widening beneath it into room enough for two to stand. "Wow!" Nita said, sagging against the railing and rubbing at her eyes as she let the spell go. She was tired; the spelling was a strain — and that feeling of nervousness left over from the loud noise outside the stairwell came back. She glanced over her shoulder again, wondering just what she was looking for.

Kit peered over the railing at the walkway. "This better be some pen," he said, and turned his back to the worldgate, watching the roof. "Go ahead.'

Nita made sure her backpack was slung properly, checked the rowan wand again, and slowly swung over the guardrail, balancing on the stone in which it was rooted. She was shaking, and her hands were wet. If I don't just do this, she thought, I never will. Just one step down, Callahan, and then a nice solid walkway straight across. Really. Believe. Believe. Ouch! The air was so transparent that she misjudged the distance down to it— her foot hit before she thought it would, and the jolt went right up her spine-Still holding the railing, Nita lifted that foot a bit, then stomped down hard on the walkway. It was no different from stomping on a sidewalk. She let he' weight down on that foot, brought the second down, and stomped with that too. It was solid. fjj rock, Kit!" she said, looking up at him, still holding the rail.

"Sure," Kit said, skeptical. "Let go of the rail first."

Nita made a face at Kit and let go. She held both arms out at first, as she might have on a balance beam in gym, and then waved them experimentally. "See? It works. Fred?" Fred bobbed down beside her, looking with interest at the hardened air of the walkway. (And it will stay this way?)

"Until I turn it loose. Well?" She took a step backward, farther onto the walkway, and looked up challengingly. "How about it?"

Kit said nothing, just slung his own backpack over his shoulders and swung over the railing as Nita had done, coming down cautiously on the hardened air. He held on to the rail for a moment while conducting his own tests of the air's solidity. "Come on," Nita said. "The wind's not too bad."

"Lead the way."

Nita turned around, still holding her arms a little away from her to be sure of her balance, and started for the worldgate as quickly as she dared, with Fred pacing her cheerfully to the left. Eight or ten steps more and it was becoming almost easy. She even glanced down toward the walkway — and there she stopped very suddenly, her stomach turning right over in her at the sight of the dirty, graveled roof of Grand Central, a long, long, long fall below. "Don't look down," a memory said to her in Machu Picchu's scratchy voice. She swallowed, shaking all over, wishing she had remembered the advice earlier. "Nita, what's the—"

Something went whack! into the walkway. Nita jumped, lost her balance, and staggered back into Kit. For a few awful seconds they teetered back and forth in wind that gusted suddenly, pushing them toward the edge together — and then Kit sat down hard on the walkway, and Nita half fell on top of aim, and they held very still for a few gasps. "Wh-what—"

'I think it was a pigeon," Nita said, not caring whether Kit heard the trernulousness of her voice. "You okay?"

Sure," Kit said, just as shakily. "I try to have a heart attack every day Aether I need one or not. Get off my knee, huh?"

They picked each other up and headed for the gate again. {Even you have ouble with gravity,) Fred said wonderingly as he paced them. (I'm glad I ^left my mass elsewhere.) So are we," Nita said. She hurried the last twenty steps or so to the 'uened place at the end of the walkway, with Kit following close. knelt down in a hurry, to make sure the wind wouldn't push her over, and looked up at the worldgate. Seen this close it was about four feet by eight, the shape of a tear in a piece of cloth. It shone with a glowing, shifting, soap-bubble iridescence. Finally, finally, my pen! she thought — but somehow, the thought didn't make Nita as happy as it should have. The uneasy feeling that had started in the stairwell was still growing She glanced over her shoulder at Kit. He was kneeling too, with his back to her, watching the walkway and the rooftop intently. Beside her, Fred hune i • quietly waiting.

(Now what?) he asked.

Nita sighed, pulled the rowan rod out of her belt, and inserted one end of it delicately into the shimmering veil that was the surface of the worldgate. Though the city skyline could be seen very clearly through the shimmer, the inch or so of the wand that went through it appeared to vanish. "]ust perch yourself on the free end here," Nita said, holding the wand by its middle. "Make contact with it the same way you did with those keys. Okay?"

(Simple enough.) Fred floated to the end of the rod and lit there, a bright, still spark. (All right, I'm ready.)

Nita nodded. "This is a retrieval," she said in the Speech. "Involvement confined to a pen with the following characteristics: m 'sedh-zayin six point three—"

(Nita!)

The note of pure terror in Kit's mind-voice caused Nita to do the unforgivable — break off in the middle of a spell and look over her shoulder. Shapes were pouring out of the little glass shelter building, which had been empty, and was still somehow empty even as Nita looked. She got a first impression of grizzled coats, red tongues that lolled and slavered, fangs that gleamed in the sunlight, and she thought, Wolves!

But their eyes changed her mind as ten or twelve of the creatures loped across the roof toward the transparent walkway, giving tongue in an awful mindless cacophony of snarls and barks and shuddering howls. The eyes. People's eyes, blue, brown, green, but with almost all the intelligence gone out of them, nothing left but a hot deadly cunning and an awful desire for the taste of blood. From her reading in the wizards' manual, she knew what they were: perytons. Wolves would have been preferable — wolves were socta-ble creatures. These had been people once, people so used to hating that at the end of life they'd found a way to keep doing it, by hunting the souls of others through their nightmares. And once a peryton caught you…

Nita started to hitch backward in total panic and then froze, realizing that there was nowhere to go. She and Kit were trapped. Another second ana th^e perytons would be on the bridge, and at their throats, for eternity. K» whipped his head around toward Nita and the worldgate. "Jump through artf break the spell!" he yelled.

"But—" And she grabbed his arm, pushed the rowan wand through n^e , u ^d yelled, "Come on, Fred!" The first three perytons leaped the guard- i _anj landed on the bridge, running. Nita threw herself and Kit at the Ideate, b_ei_ng careful of the edges, as she knew she must, while screaming

• absolute terror the word that would dissolve the walkway proper. For a fraction of a second she caught the sound of screams other than her own, howls of creatures unseen but falling. Then the shimmer broke against her face like water, shutting out sound, and light, and finally thought. Blinded, deafened, and alone, she fell forever… .