Deep Wizardry-wiz 2 (18 page)

Her parents were staring at each other. “Betty ...” said Nita’s father.

“We need more time,” Nita’s mother said.

“I don’t think we’ve got it.”

Her mother looked back at her father. “If they’re right about this,” she said, “it would be wrong of us to stop them if they want to help.”

“But we’re responsible for them!”

“Apparently,” Nita’s mother said, in a peculiar mixture of pride and pain, “they’ve learned that lesson better than we suspected, Harry. Because now they seem to be making themselves responsible for us. And a lot of other people.”

“I guess there comes a time when you can’t do anything but trust,” her father said at last, sounding reluctant. “It just seems—so soon... Nita— is all this on the level?”

“Oh, Daddy.” She loved him, right then, and hurt for him, more than she could have told him. “I wish it weren’t. But it is.”

Nita’s father was silent for several long breaths. “Millions of lives,” he said under his breath.

And another silence, which he finally broke as if it were a physical thing, “When do you need to be up?”

“Sixish. I’ll set my alarm, Daddy.” Nita got stiffly down from the chair aching all over. Behind her, Kit got up and brushed past her as Nita hugged first her dad good night. Maybe the last time she would ever hug him .. or the second-to-the-last— Oh, don’t think of that now!

Her mother had caught Kit on the way past and hugged him—and now wouldn’t let Nita past without one either. She held her for a moment at arm’s length. “Thank you for—up there, baby,” she said, nodding once at the ceiling. Her eyes were wet, but she was smiling.

“It’s okay, Mom. Any time.” Is this what it feels like when your heart breaks? Oh, Lord, don’t let me cry.

“And thank you for trusting us.”

Nita swallowed. “You taught me how,” she said. And then she couldn’t stand it any more. She broke away and headed for her room, Kit right behind her.

She knew there was one hurdle left between her and bed. Actually, the hurdle was on the bed: sitting there crosslegged in the dark, looking at her with cool interest as they came in.

“Well?” Dairine said, as Nita flopped down on her stomach beside her, and the bed bounced them both once or twice. “I saw you disappear. Where’d’ja take them?”

“The Moon.”

“Oh, come on, Neets.”

“Dairine,” Kit said from the doorway. “Catch.”

Nita glanced up, saw her sister reach up and pick something out of the air: an irregular piece of pale, grainy stone, about the size and shape of an eraser. Dairine peered at it, rubbing it between her fingers. “What is this? Pumice?” There was a moment of shocked silence; then Dairine’s voice scaled up to an aggrieved shriek. “You did go to the Moon! And you didn’t take me! You, you —“ Apparently she couldn’t find anything sufficiently dirty to call them. “I’m gonna kill you!”

“Dari, shut up, they’re in shock out there!” Nita said. This argument did little to save her. Far more effective was Kit’s wrestling Dairine down flat, stuffing her under the bedcovers and a couple of pillows, and more or less sitting on her until she shut up and stopped struggling.

“We’ll take you next time,” Nita said, and then the pain hit her again. “Kit,” she said, husky-voiced. “Remind me to see that the runt here gets to the Moon in the near future. Next week, maybe. If she behaves.”

“Right,” Kit said. “You give up, runt?”

“Hwhmffm hnnoo rrhhrhn ffwmhhnhhuh,” said the blankets.

“Keep talking like that and your mouth’ll get stuck that way,” Kit said, and let Dairine out.

Nita’s sister extricated herself from the covers with icy dignity that lasted just until she was sitting where she had been, back in control and smoothing her ruffled pajamas. “Mom ‘n’ Dad didn’t kill you,” she said to Nita.

“Nope. You gave me good advice, runt.”

“Huh? What advice?”

“Last night, I suspect,” Kit said. “That stuff about ‘Either keep your mouth shut, or tell the truth—‘ “

Nita nodded, looking from Kit to Dairine, while Dairine modestly polished her nails on her Yoda pajamas. And Nita stared at her, and then started to laugh, so hard that she got the hiccups and fell over sideways, and Dairine looked at her as if she’d gone nuts, and Kit sat down and punched her once or twice, worriedly, in the shoulder. “Neets? You okay?”

“Oh, Kit,” she managed to gasp at last, between bubbles of laughter. “What Picchu said—“

“Huh?”

“What Peach said. ‘Do what the night tells you—‘ “ She went off into the giggles again.

Kit looked down at her, perplexed. “You lost me.”

Nita pushed herself upright, reached out and tugged a couple of times, weakly, at one of Dairine’s pajama-sleeves. “ ‘Do what the night tells you.’ Not night like when it gets dark. ‘Knight’! Do what the knight tells you! As in the Junior Jedi here—“ She went over sideways again and strangled her last few whoops of laughter in a convenient pillow.

“It was good advice,” he said to Dairine. “Thanks, Dari.”

“Uh, sure,” said Dairine, amazed at another compliment.

Nita sat up again after a little while, wiping her eyes. “Yeah,” she said. “Even if I took it before I remembered you said it ... it was good advice.” She thought she would let her sister have just one more compliment—especially since it was true, and information she might never have another chance to give her. “You’re gonna be one hot wizard someday,” Nita said.

Dairine sat speechless.

“Neets,” Kit said, “we’ve had a long day. And tomorrow’ll be longer. I’m sacking out. Dairine—“

“Right,” Nita said. She lay down again, feeling glad, afraid, excited, shaky, light—a hundred things at once. She never noticed when Dairine got off her bed; she never heard Kit leave. She fell into sleep as if into a hole.

Foregathering Song

Nita sat hunched in a miserable little bundle on the beach, her arms around her knees—staring at the bright morning sea and not seeing it.

She had gone to bed with the feeling that everything would be all right when she woke up in the morning. But she’d awakened to a pair of parents torn among insane curiosity, worry, approval, and disapproval, who drank cup after cup of coffee and stared at the lump of lunar pumice in the middle of the table, and made little sense when they talked.

She hardly knew them. Her mom and dad alternated between talking to her, hanging on every word she said, and talking over her head about her, as if she weren’t there. And they kept touching her like a delicate thing that might break—though there was an undercurrent of anger in the touches that said her parents had suddenly discovered she was in some ways stronger than they were, and they didn’t like it.

Nita sighed. I’d give anything for one of Dad’s hugs that squeeze the air out and make you go squeak! she thought. Or to hear Mom do Donald Duck voices at me. But fat chance of that...

She let out a long, unhappy breath. Kit was finishing his breakfast at a leisurely pace and handling endless questions about wizardry from her parents —covering for her. Just as well: She had other business to attend to before they left.

“Tom,” she said, almost mourning, under her breath. She had been down to Friedman’s already and had “minded the store” under Dog’s watchful eye for a long time, waiting for Tom to return her call. She needed expert help, in a hurry. I’ve gone as far as I can on my own, she thought. I need advice! Oh, Tom, where are you?

As she’d expected. Nothing—

The last thing she expected was the sudden explosion of air that occurred about twenty feet down the beach from her, flinging sand in all directions. No, Nita corrected herself. The last thing she expected was what the explosion produced: a man with one towel wrapped around his waist and another draped around his neck—tall, broad-shouldered and narrow-waisted, with dark hair and the kind of face one sees in cigarette ads, but never hopes to see smile. It was not Tom, but Carl. He looked around him, saw Nita, and came over to her in a hurry, looking grave. “What’sa matter, Nita?” he said, casual as always, but concerned. “I heard that even though it wasn’t meant for me.”

She looked up at him wanly and tried to smile just a little; but the smile was a dismal failure. “Uh, no. Look, no one was answering the phone—and then I was just thinking—“

“That wasn’t what I would call ‘just’ thinking,” Carl said, sitting down on the sand beside her. “Sometimes I forget what kind of power wizards have when they’re kids...”

Nita saw that Carl’s hair was wet. “I got you out of the shower,” she said. “I’m sorry...”

“No, I was out already. It’s okay.”

“Where’s Tom?” Nita said.

“He has a breakfast meeting with some people at ABC; he asked me to take his calls. Not that I had much choice, in your case... You’ve got big trouble, huh? Tell me about it.”

She did. It took her a while. Though she braced herself for it, the look of shock on Carl’s face when he heard about Nita’s accepting the Silent Lord’s part was so terrible, she started to leak tears again. Carl sat still while she finished the story.

“Do your folks know?” he said at last.

“No,” Nita said. “And I don’t think I’m going to tell them. I think Dad suspects—and Mom knows he does and doesn’t want to talk to him about it.”

Carl let out a long breath. “I don’t know what to tell you,” he said.

This was not the most encouraging thing Nita had ever heard. A Senior Wizard always knew what to tell you. “Carl,” she said, tears still thick in her voice, “what can I do? I can’t—I can’t just die!”

It was the first time she had actually said the word out loud. It left her shaking all over like the aftermath of a particularly large wizardry, and the tears started coming again.

Carl was quiet. “Well, yeah, you can,” he said at last, gently. “People do it all the time—sometimes for much less cause.”

“But there must be something I could do!”

Carl looked down at the sand. “What did you say you were going to do?”

Nita didn’t say anything; they both knew the answer very well. “You know what caused this?” Carl said.

”What?”

“Remember the blank-check sorcery you did while in the other Manhattan, that time? The open-ended request for help?”

“Uh-huh.”

“That kind of spell always says that at some later date you’ll be called upon to return the energy you use.” Carl looked somber. “You got your help. But it must have taken a lot of energy to seal a whole piece of another space away from every other space, forever...”

Nita scrubbed at her eyes, not much liking this line of reasoning. “But the spell never said anyone was going to have to die to pay back the price!”

“No. All it said was that you were going to have to pay back the exact amount of energy used up at some future date. And it must have been a very great amount, to require lifeprice to be paid. There’s no higher payment that can be made.” Carl fell silent a moment, then said, “Well, one.” And his face shut as if a door had closed behind his eyes.

Nita put her head down on her knees again. This wasn’t working the way it was supposed to. “Carl, there has to be something you, we could do—“

The surf crashed for a long time between her words and his. “Nita,” Carl said finally, “no. What you absolutely do not want is ‘something you could do.’ What you really want is for me to get you off the hook somehow, so you don’t have to carry through with your promise.”

Her head snapped up in shock. “You mean— Carl, don’t you care if I die or not?”

“I care a whole lot.” The pain in Carl’s voice made it plain that he did. “But unfortunately I also have to tell you the truth. That’s what Seniors are for; why do you think we’re given so much power to work with? We’re paid for what we do—and a lot of it isn’t pleasant.”

“Then tell me some truth! Tell me what to do—“

“No,” he said gently. “Never that. Nine-tenths of the power of wizardry comes from making up your own mind what you’re going to do. The rest of it is just mechanics.” Carl looked at her with a professional calm that reminded Nita of her family doctor. “What I can do is go over your options with you.”

She nodded.

“So first—what you’d like to do. You want to break your word and not sing the Song. That’d be easy enough to do. You would simply disappear—stay on land for the next week or so and not have anything further to do with the whales with whom you’ve been working. That would keep you out of the Song proper; you’d be alive three days from now.”

Carl looked out to sea as he spoke, nothing in his expression or his tone of voice hinting at either praise or condemnation. “There would naturally be results of that action. For one, you took the Celebrant’s Oath in front of witnesses and called on the Powers of wizardry themselves to bring certain things about if you break the Oath. They will bring those things about, Nita —the Powers don’t forget. You’ll lose your wizardry. You’ll forget that there is any such thing as magic in the world. Any relationships you have with other wizards will immediately collapse. You would never have met Kit, for example, or me, or Tom, except for your wizardry. So we’ll cease to exist for you.”

Nita held still as stone.

“There’ll also be effects on the Song itself as a result of your leaving. Even if the group manages to find a replacement wizard to sing the Silent One—“ Nita thought of Kit and froze. “—the Song itself will still have been sabotaged by your betrayal of your Oath. It won’t be effective. The undersea tremors, the pollution and the attacks on the whales and all the rest of it will continue. Or the Lone Power will enter into the wizardry and throw it completely out of control—in which case I don’t want to think of what will happen to New York and the Island, sooner or later. If all the other wizards in the area worked together, we might be able to slow it down. But not for long.”

Carl took a breath. “And on top of everything else, breaking the Celebrant’s Oath will also be a violation of the Wizard’s Oath, your oath to assist in slowing down the death of the Universe. In your last moment as a wizard, as you lose your magic, you will know beyond all doubt that the Universe around you is going to die sooner because of your actions. And all through your life there’ll always be something at the bottom of your heart that feels sad ... and you’ll never be able to get rid of it, or even understand it.”

Nita didn’t move.

“That was all the ‘bad’ stuff. On the ‘good’ side I can tell you that you probably wouldn’t die of the upheavals that will start happening. What you did in Manhattan with Kit wouldn’t be forgotten by the Powers either; they pay their debts. I imagine your folks would get a sudden urge to go visit some relatives out of state—something like that—and be a good distance inland when the trouble started. And after the trouble, you would go on to live what would seem a perfectly normal life ... after all, most people think it’s normal to have a nameless sorrow at the bottom of your soul. You’d grow up, and find a job, and get married, or not, and work and play and do all the other things that mortals and wizards do. And then you’d die.”

Nita was silent.

“Now the second option,” Carl said. “You go down there and keep your word—though you’re not happy about it, to say the least. You sing the Song, and when the time comes you dive into that coral or whatever and cut yourself up, and the Master-Shark comes after you and eats you. You experience about two or three minutes of extreme pain, pain like being hit by a car or burned all over, until you go into shock, or your brain runs out of oxygen, whichever comes first; and you die. Your parents and friends then have to deal with the fact of your death.”

Nita’s tears started again.

“The ‘good’ side to this option,” said Carl, “is that the Song will be successfully completed, millions of people will continue to live their lives untroubled, and the Lone Power will have suffered another severe setback. My estimate is that It couldn’t interfere in any large way with the Sea’s affairs—and, to some extent, with the land’s—for some forty to fifty years thereafter. Possibly more.”

Nita nodded slowly. “So if—“

“Wait. There’s a third option,” Carl said.

“Huh?”

He looked at her with an expression she couldn’t fully decipher. “Sing the Song and make the Sacrifice—but do it willingly. Rather than just doing it because you have to, to keep terrible things from happening.”

“Does it make a difference?”

Carl nodded. “If you can make the Sacrifice willingly, the wizardry will gain such power as you can barely imagine. The Lone One’s power is always based on Its desire to have Its own way in everything. Nothing undermines Its workings faster than power turned toward having something be the way someone else wants it.”

Carl looked hard at her. “I have to make real sure you understand this. I’m not talking about the sort of fakery most people mean when they talk about ‘sacrifice’—none of that ‘unselfishness’ business, which usually has the desire for other people to feel guilty or sad hidden at the bottom of it. No being a ‘martyr.’ That would sabotage a wizardry almost as badly as running out on it. But to willingly give up one’s life for the sake of the joy and well-being of others will instantly destroy whatever power the Lone One has currently amassed.” He glanced away. “That doesn’t mean you couldn’t be afraid and still have it work, by the way.”

“Great,” Nita said with a nervous laugh.

“The important thing is that, other times when the Sacrifice has been made willingly, there have been fewer wars afterward, less crime, for a long while. The Death of things, of the world as whole, has been slowed... ”

Nita thought of people beating and shooting and stealing from each other; she thought of A-bombs and H-bombs, and people starving and poor—and she thought of all that slowed down. But all those troubles and possibilities seemed remote right now compared to her own problem, her own life. “I don’t know if I could do that,” Nita said, scarcely above a whisper.

There was a long pause. “I don’t know if I could either,” said Carl, just as quietly.

She sat still for a long time. “I think—“

“Don’t say it,” Carl said, shaking his head. “You couldn’t possibly have decided already. And even if you have—“ He glanced away. “You may change your mind later ... and then you’ll be saved the embarrassment of having to justify it to me.”

“Later—“ She looked at him in distress and confusion. “You mean you would still talk to me if I—“ She stopped. “Wait a minute. If I don’t do it, I won’t know you! And if I do do it—“

“There’s always Timeheart,” Carl said softly.

Nita nodded, silent. She had been there once, in that “place” to which only wizards can find their way while still alive; that terrible and beautiful place where things that are loved are preserved, deathless, perfect, yet still growing and becoming more themselves through moment after timeless moment. “After we— After we’re alive, then—“

“What’s loved,” Carl said, “lives.”

She looked at him in a few moments’ sorrowful wonder. “But sure,” she said. “You’re a Senior. You must go there all the time.”

“No.” He looked out over the sea. “In fact, the higher you’re promoted, when you’re a wizard, the more work you have to do—and the less time you get to spend outside this world, except on business.” He breathed out and shook his head. “I haven’t been to Timeheart for a long time, except in dreams...”

Now it was his turn to sound wistful. Nita reached out and thumped Carl’s shoulder once or twice, hesitantly.

“Yeah,” Carl said. Slowly he stood up and brushed the sand off his towel, then looked down at her. “Nita,” he said—and his voice was not impassive any more, “I’m sorry.”

“Yeah,” she said.

“Call us before you start the song, if you can, okay?” The New York accent was pronounced and raspy, as if Carl’s nose were stuffed.

“Right.”

He turned away, then paused and looked back at her. And everything suddenly became too much for Nita. She went to Carl in a rush, threw her arms around him at about waist height, and began to bawl. “Oh, honey,” Carl said, and got down on one knee and held Nita tight, which was what she needed. But the helpless expression on his face, when she finally got some control over herself and looked up, almost hurt her more than her own pain.