DIANE DUANE - A Wizard Alone

Okay.

His mama gave Kit a glance as he went and flopped down on the dining room sofa. At first Kit thought she was going to bring up once more the subject of the discussion she and Kit s pop had had with him earlier. I meant to thankyou, by the way, his mama said as she opened a drawer to get a plastic bag to put her sandwich in. It s been so much quieter.

His mama s voice had a strange grating quality to it, which Kit couldn t remember having heard before.Is she coming down with a cold, too Kit thought.It wouldn t be great if we all got sick at once . Sorry

The little dog down the street.

Kit was bemused. Tinkerbell, you mean I haven t talked to him.

You haven t

Sorry, Mama, I ve been busy.

Well, he got quiet again. Relatively quiet, anyway. There was some howling earlier, but it didn t last long.

That s good, Kit said. He stretched, but far from making him feel more comfortable, it made him feel less so; he felt very out of sorts, as if his skin didn t fit him, as if his bones weren t fastened together correctly. Mama, I think I might go lie down again for a while.

That got her attention. She finished wrapping her sandwich and came over to feel his forehead. Do you feel hot, sweetie she said.

Kit shook his head. If anything, he felt chilly, though not to the point of shivers he felt a strange kind of still numbness that left him unwilling to talk about what was bothering him. Indeed, talking aboutanything seemed more trouble than it was worth. When his mother took her hand away, Kit got up and went to his room. There, as he lay down on his bed, he reached out for his manual and started paging through it to find a diagnostic to run on himself. Iwon t be any good to anybody if I just lie around feeling like this . But, shortly, Kit was lying on his back again, gazing at the ceiling, the manual lying open, pages down, on the bed beside him. He didn t even hearPonch come in and circle around once to lie on the braided rug by the bed, looking up at him with troubled eyes. And after awhile Kit turned over on his side again and just stared at the wall

The next afternoon, Nita was sitting at her desk, cutting a deck of cards. She had reached the point where what she really wanted to cut them with was a meat cleaver, but that would simply have meant that she d have to get another deck of cards from somewhere.

Nita cut the cards again.There s an art to this , she thought.The only problem is,it isn t myArt. And no matter how I do this, when I think of why I m learning it in the first place, it feels like cheating .

She was working on her false shuffle. From what she d been able to find out on the Web, many of the simplest card tricks depended on shuffling the cards in such a way as to make the card you wanted come up in the right place. This, in turn, involved protecting some of the cards with one of your hands while you shuffled. So far, Nita had gotten to the point where she could protect about a third of the deck, keeping the cards stacked there from being shuffled out of order.In about three hundred years , she thought, I'llbe ready to let some other human being see me do a trick. Why did I ever mention magic to Mr.Millman

The only good thing about having to sit here doing this was that it gave Nita something to occupy her hands while she worried about Kit. She d called him late yesterday afternoon to make sure he d gone to see Carl, and had been very concerned about the tone of his voice. It had acquired a strange monotonous quality, one that made her think of

A robot shethought, unnerved. She stopped shuffling for a moment and thought about that. It occurred to Nita that the more contact they d all had with Darryl, the better his ability to express himself had become and the more adverse effect it seemed to be having on Kit.

If he goes in there again, she thought,he s going to lose it .

And he s going to go in there again. I m sure of it.

Nita cut the cards again, looking to see if the ace of hearts, the card she had been protecting, came up. What she got was the three of clubs. She made an annoyed face and pushed the cards away. It wasn t just a matter of Kit s stubbornness now not that that couldn t be formidable when he was in the right mood. She was also dealing with something else she was less familiar with: Darryl s stubbornness. He had been holding off the Lone Power all by himself for a long time now, and Nita didn t think he was going to stop for their sakes.And why should he she thought.From his point ofview, or what s been his point of view for a long while, he s all there is. He might as well be the only wizard alive. He may briefly realize there are more of us but it doesn t last .

Because he keeps making himself alone again every time. Nita thought about what that must cost him. Such loneliness would have crippled her a long time ago.But he bears up under it , she thought.He just keeps fighting .

That stubbornness had found a resonance in Kit. He and Darryl had become linked in more ways than one.

His promises to Carl aside, Nita had a feeling that Kit was going to find himself in Darryl s mind again shortly.At which time , Nita thought,I d better be ready .

She picked up the deck again, took a couple of minutes to find the ace of hearts, repositioned it, and reshuffled, carefully protecting the back third of the deck. Then she put the deck down, cut it twice so that she had three piles, reached out to the leftmost pile, and turned the top card over. It was the four of diamonds.

I hatethis , Nita thought. She stood up from her desk and went across the hall toDairine s room.

Her sister was sitting at her own desk, which was still completely covered by thepapier-mache version of OlympusMons . It was no longer gray-white;Dairine had done a fairly credible job with her wizardly airbrush.Now the mountain lay there nicely colored in shades of red and pink, its huge crater looking entirely ready to spill out lava. Spot was sitting up on one of the bookshelves, peering down at the volcano with his littlestalky eyes.

Dair

Dairinelooked up at Nita with a weary expression.

I think I m going to need some help, Nita said.

As long as it doesn t involve me painting anything, Dairine said, you re on.

Nita came in and sat down onDairine s bed. It creaked.

Dairinelooked at her.

Don t start, Nita said. You know what s on my mind.

Darryl, Dairine said. Or the ace of hearts.

Please, Nita said. Dair, I need to ask you a favor.

Her sister gave her a slightly suspicious look.

He s going to go in there again, Nita said.

Kit Dairine put her eyebrows up. I thought he promised Carl he wouldn t.

Dairine, I don t think he s entirely in control of what s going on with him. Darryl is very, uh, single-minded. And that single-mindedness strikes me as really likely to affect Kit. I think we need to be ready for that.

We Dairinesaid.

Dairine, he s sure not listening tome right now

I guess you know what he felt like with you over the past month, then, Dairine said.

Nita grimaced at that, taking the point. So we ve got to arrange some kind of connection, ideally with an integrated power feed, from you to me for when he goes in again. Think of it as a lifeline. I need to make sure that there s somebody on the outside who can yank us both out of there if we get stuck too deep.

Dairine, sitting there with her hands in her lap, looked up at Nita. It was an unusual position forDairine ; usually, even when she was talking her hands were doing something. But now she sat quite still, looking at Nita steadily, but a little bleakly. Are you sure you want my help Dairine said.

Nita looked at her strangely. Are you crazy she said. Of course I do.

I just wasn t sure, Dairine said, and looked at the floor. There was nothing overtly guilty or upset abouther face, but all the same, Nita saw there was trouble underneath the expression. I warned you,Neets . Right now I m paying the price for a big showy start, just as Tom said I would not so long ago. I can do basic wizardries well enough, but as for anything really high-powered She shook her head. I don t know if you want to be depending on me right now.

I will depend on you any time, Nita said.

The lookDairine gave Nita had a certain amount of good-natured scorn about it. She opened her mouth. Do I have to say it in the Speech Nita said.

Nita, Dairine said then, very softly, Momcouldn t depend on me.

Nita shook her head. If you mean you couldn t just make a wish and save her life, Nita said, then you re right. If you really thought that it was going to be that way, then, yeah, you made a mistake. But that hardly means that she couldn t depend on you. Or that I won t.

Youmay be the one making the mistake, depending on my power right now, Dairine said.

Nita rolled her eyes. I don t know if I m exactly a model of stability right now myself, she said, but I can t afford to just stand around wondering. Will you help, or am I going to have to do this without a net Because more depends on this than just me or Kit. Darryl is apparently

Nita trailed off. She was uncertain exactly how much she wanted to tellDairine about why Darryl was special.

Something unusual, Dairine said. A lot of power or something else. He would have to be unusual, to have attracted so much attention from Tom and Carl.

Dairinesat quietly for a few seconds,then nodded. I ll work something out for you, she said.

Nita nodded. Thanks, she said. She turned away.

It kills you, doesn t it Dairine said. Asking me for help.

Nita gave her sister a very slight smile. Better it should kill me than Kit, she said.

Then she went back into her room to start yet another futile search for the ace of hearts.

We have to go.

Kit sat up suddenly on the bed, looking around him. His glance wandered past the clock on his wall; it was around four-thirty in the afternoon.Where did the day go part of him wondered, but that part seemed very remote. Much more important was the need to go looking for Darryl. Darryl was in trouble, he was stuck, and Kit had to get him out of there. In a world where nothing much seemed to matter, that suddenly mattered a great deal.

He could almost see that other world, here in the room with him, as if he were in two places at once. The world had changed again, or rather,he had changed it,Darryl had changed it, to put the One who was pursuing him off the scent. It always realized what had happened eventually that Darryl had It trapped and then Darryl had to change everything again, making a new world, a new self, in which the Pursuer would once again be confused. Each new world was better than thelast, with new rules to impede the Lone One s power and to keep him occupied longer. He wished, sometimes, that Darryl didn t have to do it again and again. It gave him no time to find out what else wizardry might be for.If itwas for anything else

We have to go, Kit thought, and got out of bed

and tripped overPonch , who was lying on the rug, watching him.Boss !Ponch yelped.Where are you going

We have to go, Kit said. The bedroom was already beginning to fade a little, like something that didn t matter. What mattered was elsewhere. The Pursuer was coming again; all his attention now had to be given to the creation of the new illusion, at the expense of the old one.

You promised you wouldn t!Ponch whimpered, jumping up and down.You told Carl you d stay here !

But it seemed now as if a different person entirely had made that promise. In fact, someone differenthad made it: another person, in another place different from this, the only reality that really mattered, now reforming itself around him. The last time, he d gotten a little careless, and the darkOther had found Its way in, and out again, too easily. This time, the place to which he found his way had to be a little more challenging. The idea had come to him that morning in the bathroom, as once again he faced what he couldn t face in the mirror on the wall, in which he had to see, every day, human eyes with the darkOther looking out of them.This is Its weapon against you , the thought had come to him.Turn the weapon againstIt