Deep Wizardry-wiz 2 (16 page)

Not once did her parents say a word.

Mostly Kit kept quiet, except when Nita’s memory about something specific failed; then he spoke up and filled in the gap, and she went on again. The look on her father’s face was approaching anger again, and her mother was well into complete consternation, by the time Nita started telling them about the dolphin who nudged her in the back, the whale she and Kit found on the beach, and the story the whale had told them. She told them a little-very little, fearing for her own composure—about the Song of the Twelve and what she was going to be doing in it.

And then, not knowing what else to say, she stopped.

Her mother and father looked at each other.

Our daughter, the look said, is going to have to be hospitalized. She’s sick.

Nita’s mother finally turned to her. Her dad had bowed his head about a third of the way through the story, and except for that glance at her mother seemed unable to do anything but sit with his hands clasped tightly together. But her mother’s face was stricken.

“Nita,” she said, very gently—but her voice was shaking like the tightly clasped hands of the man beside her, “you don’t have to make up stories like this to keep us from being angry with you.”

Nita’s mouth fell open. “Mom,” she said, “are you trying to say you don’t believe me?”

“Nita,” her father said. His eyes were haunted, and his attempt to keep his voice sounding normal was failing miserably. “Give us a break. How are we supposed to believe a crazy story like this? Maybe you’ve got Kit believing it-” He broke off, as if wanting to find a way to explain all this, something reasonable. “I guess it’s understandable, he’s younger than you...”

Nita glanced over at Kit for the first time in a while and gulped. His annoyed look brought the sperm-whale battlecry scraping through her memories again.

“
I’ll
tell you how you’re supposed to believe it,” Kit said.

Nita’s mother and father looked at him.

Kit was suddenly sitting a little taller in the chair. And taller still, though he didn’t move a muscle. And taller—until Nita could see that Kit’s seat and the seat of the chair no longer had much to do with each other. He was hovering about two feet in the air.

“Like this,” Kit said.

Holding her breath, Nita looked from Kit to her parents.

They stared at Kit, their faces absolutely unmoved, as if waiting for something. Kit glanced over at Nita, shrugged, and kept floating up until he was sitting six feet or so above the floor. “Well?” he said.

They didn’t move a muscle.

“Harry—“ Nita’s mother said, then, after what seemed forever.

He didn’t say a thing.

“Harry,” her mother said, “I hate to admit it, but I think all this has gotten to me...”

Nita’s father simply kept looking at the chair.

Then, ever so slowly, he leaned his head back and looked up at Kit.

“Hypnosis,” Nita’s father said.

“Bull!” Kit said. “When did I hypnotize you?”

Nita’s father didn’t say anything.

“I haven’t said a thing,” Kit said. “If I hypnotized you without lights or words or anything, that’s a pretty good trick, isn’t it? You two better talk to each other and see if you’re seeing the same thing. If you aren’t, maybe I did hypnotize you. But if you are—“

Nita’s mother and father looked away from Kit with some effort. ‘Betty ...” said Nita’s father.

Neither of them said anything further for a few seconds.

“Harry,” her mother said at last, “if I told you that I saw ... saw Kit ...” She stopped and swallowed. Then she started again, and the same feeling that had shaken Nita earlier about Kit took hold of her and shook her about her mother. Evidently bravery came in odd forms, and out of unexpected places. “If I told you that I saw Kit not sitting in the chair any more,” her mother said, all at once and in a rush. Then her voice gave out on her.

“Above it,” her dad said. And that was all he could manage.

They stared at each other.

“You got it,” Kit said.

Nita’s dad broke away from looking at her mother and glared at Nita instead. “Hypnosis,” her father said. “There’s no other explanation.”

“Yes, there is!”Nita hollered at him, waving her arms in frustration, “but you don’t want to admit it!”

“Nita,” her mother said.

“Sorry,” Nita said. “Look, Kit ... this isn’t going to do it. We need something more impressive.” She got up. “Come on,” she said. “Outside. It’s my turn.”

Nita yanked the front door open and ran outside, up the dune and down its far side toward the beach. There was a long pause before she heard the sound of footsteps following her down the wooden stairs. Shock, she thought, feeling both pity and amusement. If only there was some easier way! But there wasn’t... She made it down to the beach, picked the spot she wanted, then stood and waited for them to arrive.

First her mother, then her father, came clambering up the dune and slid down its far side, to stand on the beach and stare up and down it, looking for her. Then Kit appeared beside them in a small clap of air that startled her mother so badly she jumped. Her father stared.

“Sorry,” Kit said, “I should have warned you.” He was still sitting cross-legged in the air, and Nita noticed that he didn’t sound very sorry either.

“Oh, Lord,” said Nita’s father at the sight of Kit, and then turned resolutely away. “All right. Where’s Nita?”

“Over here, Daddy,” Nita called from where she was standing on the water, just past the line of the breakers.

He stared at Nita. So did Nita’s mother, who slowly went to stand beside her husband. Her voice was shaking as she said, “Harry, it could be that my eyes are just going...”

“Mom,” Nita shouted, “give me a break; you both went to the eye doctor last month and you were fine!” She bounced up and down on the water several times, then took a few long strides to the west, turned, and came back. “Admit it! You see me walking on water! Well, surprise: I am walking on water! Get it! It’s like I told you: I’m a wizard!”

“Nita,” her father said, “uh, walking on water is, uh—“

“I know,” she said. “I wouldn’t want to overdo it. It makes my legs hurt.”

Nita trotted back in to shore, taking a last hop onto the curl of a flattening breaker and letting it push her up onto the beach and strand her there, a few feet in front of them.

Kit uncrossed his legs, got his feet back on the ground, and came to stand beside her. “So what else would you like to see?” he said.

Her parents looked at each other, then down at the two of them. “Look, Kit, Nita,” her father said unhappily, “it’s not a question of what we’d like to see. At this point I’m sure you two could get us to ‘see’ anything you wanted to ... heaven knows how. But that’s not the point. This can’t be—none of this is real!”

“Wanna bet?” Kit said softly. “Neets, this is gonna call for drastic measures.”

“I think you’re right. Well, let’s see what the manual says about this. Book, please,” she said, thinking the six words of a spell she knew by heart and putting her hand out. Another small clap of air, about as noisy as a cap going off, and her wizard’s manual dropped into her hand. Her mother goggled. Nita opened the manual and began browsing through it. “Let’s see...”

“You two just stop making things pop in and out for a moment, and listen to me,” Nita’s mother said all of a sudden. “Nita, I want to know where this power came from! You two haven’t made a pact with, with—“

Nita thought of her last encounter with the Lone Power and burst out laughing. “Oh, Mom! Kit and I are the last people that One wants anything to do with.”

Her mother looked nonplussed. “Well, that’s—never mind, you’ll tell me about that some other time. But, honey, why, why?”

“You mean, ‘Why are there wizards?’ Or ‘Why are we wizards?’ “ Nita said. “Or do you really mean ‘What’s in it for us?’ “

“Yes,” her mother said, sounding lost.

Nita and Kit looked at each other, and Kit shook his head. “We’re never gonna be able to explain this,” he said.

She agreed with him. “Only one thing we can do, I guess,” Nita said, musing.

“Show them?”

Nita looked at Kit, and for the first time in what seemed days, a smile began to grow. “Remember that place we went a week and a half ago?” she said. “The one with the great view?”

“I’ll get my book,” he said, grinning back, “and the string.”

“Don’t forget the chip!” Nita said, but Kit had already gone out, bang! just like a candle, and Nita was talking to empty air. She turned to her mother and father. “He went to get some supplies,” she said. “Most wizardry you need things for—raw materials, kind of.”

“Fine, honey,” her mother said, “but does he have to keep appearing and disappearing like that?”

“It’s faster than walking,” Nita said. “And we haven’t got all night. He and I are going to have to be out early again tomorrow morning—“

“Nita!” said her father.

She went to him and put her arms around him. “Please, Dad,” she said, “let it be for a little while. We told you why. But you have to feel this first. It won’t make sense unless you do. In fact, it may never make sense. Just trust me!”

Kit popped back out of nothing, making Nita’s mother jump again. “Sorry, Mrs. Callahan,” he said. “It’s fun, that’s all. It’s a ‘beam-me-up-Scotty’ spell. So’s this one we’re going to do. Just a little more involved.” He dropped the necessary supplies on the sand—a small coil of cord, an old silicon chip salvaged from a broken pocket calculator, a gray stone. Then he started going through his own manual.

Nita looked down at the stone Kit had brought. “Good idea,” she said. “Shorthand, huh?”

“It remembers the way. Should save some work. Good thing, too ... we’ve got two more sets of variables this time. Get the figures for me, will you?”

“Right.” Nita held out her book a bit as she went through it, so that her mother and father could look over her shoulder. “See, Mom? Dad? It’s just an instruction manual, like I said.”

“I can’t read it,” her father said, staring at the graceful strokes of the written form of the Speech. “What is it, Arabic?”

“No,” she said. “No Earthly language. At least, not strictly Earthly. A lot of the forces we work with don’t have names in any language on Earth—or they only have vague ones. You can’t be vague about magic.”

“Good way to get killed,” Kit said from where he knelt in the sand, scribbling with a stick and sounding cheerful. “Mr. Callahan, Mrs. Callahan, don’t step on any of these things I’m writing in the sand, or we’ll all be in big trouble. Mrs. Callahan, what’s your birthday?”

“April twenty-eighth,” said Nita’s mother.

“Mr. Callahan?”

“July seventh,” said Nita’s father.

“Neets, how big a circle?”

“Half a second,” Nita said. “Brighter,” she said to her manual. Its pages began to glow softly in the dark. “Okay, here we are. Four of us ... about a cubic foot of air for each breath. Allow for excitement—say thirty breaths a minute. Times four...” She turned to another page. “Start,” she said, and heard over her shoulder her mother’s quick intake of breath as the page Nita had opened to abruptly went blank. “Print one two zero times four.” A set of characters appeared. “Okay, print four eight zero times twenty... Good, print nine six zero zero divided by three... Great. Cubic meters ... uhh … Oh, crap. Kit, what’s the volume of a cylinder again?”

“V equals pi times r squared times the height.”

“That’s it. Now how did I do this before?” Nita chewed her lip a little, thinking. “Okay,” she said to the book, “print three point one four one seven times, uh, three zero.” A figure flickered at her. “No, that is not a number,” she said to the book. “Times three zero, and don’t get cute with me... Okay. Print square root parenthesis three two zero zero divided by nine four point two five one close parentheses. Great. End. Kit? Make it thirty-six feet wide.”

“Got it,” Kit said. “Mrs. Callahan, would you stand on this string, please? And whatever happens, don’t go near the edge of the circle after I close it.” He started to walk around them all, using Mrs. Callahan and the long knotted string as a compass. “Neets? Come check your name. And theirs; they can’t do it—“

She stepped over to the circle and made sure that the Speech-characters describing herself and her parents were correct, then glanced over Kit’s too for safety’s sake. Everything was in order. Kit finished the circle he was making in the sand, closed it with the figure-eight design called a wizard’s knot, and stood up. “All set,” Nita said.

“Then let’s go.” He opened his book; Nita went looking for the page in hers on which the spell was written. “It’s a ‘read’ spell,” Nita said to her mother and father. “That means it’s going to be a few moments before it takes. Don’t say anything, no matter what you feel or see or hear. Don’t move, either.”

“You might want to hang on to each other,” Kit said. Nita gave him a wry grin; there had been occasions in the past when the two of them, terrified out of their wits, had done just that. “Ready?”

“Go ahead,” said Nita’s father, and reached out and pulled Nita’s mother close.

Nita and Kit looked at each other and began slowly to read out loud. The strange, listening stillness of a working spell began to settle in around the four of them, becoming more pronounced with every word of the Speech, as the Universe in that area waited to hear what would be required of it. The wind dropped, the sound of the surf grew softer, even the breakers in the area became gentler, flatter, their hiss fading to a bare whisper...

The sense of expectation, of anticipation, of impatient, overwhelming potential grew all around them as the silence grew ... slowly undergoing a transformation into a blend of delight and terror and power that could be breathed like air, or seen as a shading now inhabiting every color, a presence inhabiting every shape.

Nita raised her voice into the stillness unafraid, speaking the words of the spell formula, barely needing to look at her book. The magic was rising in her, pouring through her with dangerous power. But with the sureness of practice she rode the danger, knowing the wonder to which it would bring her, reveling in her defiance of her fear. And in more than that: for Kit was across the circle from her, eyes on hers, matching her word for word and power for power—peer and friend and fellow-wizard, afraid as she was, and still willing to dare, for the delight of what lay on the other side of the magic—