Диана Дуэйн - A Wizard Abroad

She therefore concentrated on the addresses of wizards in the Bray and Grey stones area. There were about forty of these, which surprised her — she had been expecting fewer. Usually wizards on active status are only about one percent of the population, though in some places it can run as high as ten.

She looked the list up and down in mild perplexity. There was a problem in this part of the world; people tended not to use street numbers unless they lived in a housing estate. Sometimes they didn't even have a street; so that you might see an address that said, 'Ballyvolan, Kilquade, County Wicklow' — and if you didn't know where Kilquade was, or what Ballyvolan was, or what road it was down, you were in trouble.

She sighed, ticked off a couple of names in Bray that did have street numbers. That done, she went to find Aunt Annie.

"Going out, are you?" her aunt said.

"Yeah. Aunt Annie, can you tell me where Boghall Road is?"

"The Boghall Road? That's, um, just off the back road between Greystones and Bray. What for?" "Oh, I met somebody in one of the cafes in Bray and I thought I might go over that way and see if I could find them." This was not entirely a fib — the sound and feel of Ronan's lean, edged, angry humour had kept coming back to her for the past day or so. It was just that the two phrases had nothing to do with one another, and if Aunt Annie thought they did, well. that was just fine. Her aunt said, "Here, let me draw you a map."

"Oh, thank you!" Nita said with considerable gratitude. Her aunt sat down and sketched her a thumbnail map, and said, "If you get off the forty-five bus here, at the top of Boghall, it's not a long walk to wherever you're going. That sound all right?"

"Fine, Aunt Annie. thanks."

"What time will you be back?"

"Not very late."

"All right. Call if you run into any problems. And take an umbrella or something: the weathermen have been predicting thundery showers." "Will do." And she headed out.

At first she considered not walking — Kit's 'beam-me-up-Scotty' spell could occasionally be extremely useful. However, there was always the danger, when 'beaming' around unfamiliar territory, that you might turn up somewhere that had people in it. However, there was a handy bit of woodland not too far away from where the road from Greystones to Bray started trending downhill towards the downs, just outside of the big Kilruddery estate. Nita had noticed it coming upwards, the other day — a stand of five cypresses, very big, very old. Generally the only people who walked up that way were the traveling people who lived in their caravans by the side of the road there.

So Nita popped into that grove of trees and looked around her, and paused for a moment. It was a matter of curiosity. Though you might have a sense of how many wizards were working in the area, there was one quick way to find out. It was difficult for a wizard to spend as much as a day without doing some wizardry, the art being its own delight. She opened her manual, as she stood there under the trees in the summer sun, and quickly did the spell that showed one whatever active wizardries were working in an area. Ideally, what happened was that the world blanked out, and you were presented with a sort of schematic — points of light in a field over which the real world was dimly overlaid. She did not get what she was expecting. Nita staggered back against one of the trees, half-blinded. It was not just points of light that she was perceiving, but fields of it, whole patches of it — great tracts of residual wizardry that just had not gone away.

Its not supposed to do that!

Nita thought. Ideally, the traces of a wizardry were gone by at most forty- eight hours later. But this. .! It looked either as if the biggest wizardry on Earth had been done here about two days ago, or else — and this concerned Nita more — all the wizardries done here in the past were still here, in residue.

She shut the spell down and stood there, just shaking a bit. That last thought was not a good one. Doing a wizardry over another one, overlaying an old magic, was extremely dangerous. The two spells could synergize in a way that neither the wizard of the original spell, or the one presently working, could have expected. The results could be horrendous.

No wonder, she thought. If that's the reason for last night, something like that.. Was I working in an overlay area? She called up the spell in memory for a moment more to look at it. All Kilquade was covered by one big patch of residual wizardry; all Bray was covered by another. There was in fact very little open space in this area that had not had a wizardry done on it at one tune or another. She thought with horror of what might have happened had she done a teleportation spell closer to a more heavily overlaid area, like Bray. It was not a pleasant prospect at all. She walked down the Boghall Road. It was a suburban street, with a church and a school at one end, a computer factory at the other end, and a baker's, little shops, and more houses and housing estates scattered along it or branching off from it. Mothers were out walking their babies in buggies; kids were out kicking footballs around. It looked like an entirely normal place. and so it was, since there were wizards working in it.

Nita made her way down to the address she was looking for, on a street called Novara Court. All the houses here were very much the same. There was not much in the way of trees, as if people didn't want to block the view of Sugarloaf to the west, or Bray Head immediately to the east. And it was a handsome view.

Nita found the house and had an attack of shyness practically on the doorstep. How can I just go up and knock on the door and ask if there are wizards there? But that was exactly what she needed to do, and there was no way out of it. Nita went up and rang the bell.

There was a long, long wait. Oh good, Nita was just thinking, no-one's in. . when the door was abruptly pulled open. It was Ronan, from the chicken place. He looked at her in astonishment.

She looked at him in much the same mood. Once again she was on the end of one of those coincidences of which wizards' lives are made, and which normal people (incorrectly) never take too seriously. A wizard, though, knows that there are no coincidences. And she had said to her aunt that she was coming to see him. I've got to watch what I say around here! And there was something else. An odd tremor — anticipation, a shiver down her back at the sight of him scowling at her, tall and dark, that she didn't quite know what to make of. .

"R. Nolan?" she said. "Junior?"

"Yeah," he said, perplexed. "You're from. ."

"I'm on errantry," Nita said, "and I greet you."

He looked at her with his mouth open. He suddenly looked like one of the terminally shocked fish that Nita had seen in the Bray fish market the other morning. "You?" he said.

"Me."

"You mean you're one of US?"

"Um." Nita made a wry face at him, and lowered her voice. "I've been places where the people had tentacles, and more eyes than you have hairs," she said, "and they didn't make this much fuss about it. Can we talk? I require an advice."

It was the formal phrasing for a wizard on assignment who needed technical information from another one. Ronan stared at her and said, "Just a minute. I'll get my jacket." The door shut in her face, and Nita stood there on the doorstep, feeling like an idiot. After a moment Ronan came out again, and they walked. "Let's get out of here," he said. "I don't want to be seen."

Nita had to laugh at that, though she got an odd twinge of pain when he said it. Not seen with me? Or what? "What, am I contagious or something?" she said as they made their way down to the Boghall Road.