Диана Дуэйн - So You Want To Be A Wizard

"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.