Diane Duane - A Wizard Alone

Kit paused for a moment in the frosty morning air. It was one of those cold gray days, but the wrong kind of gray for snow — the kind of day that made you wish that spring would hurry up, but also a day when going to another universe, any other universe, would be a relief from the gloominess of your own. He reached into his pocket for the transit spell he’d used the other day to get to Darryl's school, and ran the long glowing chain of it through his fingers while Ponch did his business back in the bushes. A moment later Ponch bounced out of the underbrush again, and ran back to Kit, bounding up and down around him.

You ready?

“Yeah. Here’s your leash.”

Kit managed with some difficulty to get Ponch to hold still long enough to slip the leash-spell around his neck. Should Ponch’s search for Darryl take them into some space where there wasn’t air, or something else humans and dogs needed to survive, the leash would make sure Kit’s fail-safe spells temporarily covered Ponch, until Kit could improvise something else. It would also keep them from getting separated in any hostile environment.

Where to first?

“Darryl’s school,” Kit said. “Let me get us invisible first. I want a closer look at him when we get there.”

Kit reached out to one side and traced his finger down the air, “unzipping” his claudication pocket, then reached in for the wizard’s manual. When he bounced it in his hand, it fell open at the spot Kit had previously marked, the invisibility spell. The wizardry was as he’d left it, in a partly activated state, waiting for the last few syllables to be pronounced.

Kit said them, and felt the wizardry take, expanding to fold around him and Ponch and then snug in close. This was one of the simpler ways to be invisible; the wizardry “looked” at what was behind you and made anyone in front of you see that instead of you. This light-diversion type of invisibility wasn’t good for use in large groups, because it tended to break down under the strain of servicing too many viewpoints, but Kit thought this would be good enough for this morning; he didn’t think he and Ponch were likely to wind up in a crowd.

Ponch shook himself as the wizardry settled in around them, then sat down and scratched. It itches !

“I know,” Kit said. “It has to fit tight to work Try to bear with it — we won’t need it for long.”

Kit dropped the bright chain of the transit spell on the ground around them. It knotted itself closed, and the sound of the words and the power of the spell reared up around them in a roar of light. When the brilliance and the noise faded down again, they were standing where they’d been the previous day: in the parking lot, looking at the bland front of Centennial Avenue School.

Kit picked up the transit spell, tucked it away in his claudication pocket. We’d better keep it silent from here on

, he said. Have you got his scent ?

Sure. He’s in a room over on the left side of the building. He’s close.

Show me where.

Together they padded quietly onto the sidewalk outside the school doors, and up onto the lawn on the left side, making their way down the length of the one-story building. About half a minute later, they were standing outside the schoolroom where Darryl and his classmates were working. Kit peered in.

It didn’t look much like the classrooms at Kit’s school, but he wasn’t expecting it to: These kids had special needs. The furniture was sofas and cushions and soft mats rather than the desk-chairs that Kit was used to, with a scattering of low tables suitable for working either from a chair or while sitting on the floor. Four teachers, men and women both, casually dressed, were working with the same group of kids Kit had seen getting into the van the day before. Some of the kids were sitting and working with books at one or another of the tables; one was lying on a mat doing exercises with the help of a special-ed teacher. Off to one side, Darryl sat, dressed in T-shirt and jeans and sneakers again, his dark head bent over a large soft-cover book. He was rocking slightly, while next to him a young male teacher sat and read to him from the book.

There he is.

But still not there

, Ponch said.

Then where, exactly?

It’s hard to tell from here. I need to get a better scent. We should go in.

Kit nodded. No point in going all the way back to the doors , he said, and flipped through the manual for yet another spell. This spell, too, Kit had prepared the night before, knitting both his and Ponch’s names and descriptions into it. The wizardry included a variant of the Mason’s Word, which involves a very detailed description, in wizardly terms, of the structure of stone. As both wizards and physicists know, even the densest stone — indeed, almost all kinds of matter perceived as solid — is mostly empty space. Now as Kit and Ponch walked toward the wall of the school, all the atoms in their bodies and the atoms of the wall engaged in a brief, complex, stately little dance, carefully avoiding one another in droves as wizard and dog passed through brick and mortar and reinforcing metal. A moment later, Kit and Ponch were standing inside the classroom.

The room was carpeted, which made it easy to walk softly. Kit and Ponch made their way carefully around the edge of the room, toward the side where Darryl sat on the floor, looking at the book. Or is he really ? Kit thought, as his point of view changed and he could see more clearly that Darryl was looking in the general direction of the book, but not at it, more through it. His face was not quite expressionless: There was a shadow of a smile there, but it was hard to tell what he was smiling at.

They paused near him, behind him, while the teacher kept reading, something about the seven wonders of the ancient world. Ponch stood looking intently at Darryl, his nose working, while Kit looked over the boy’s shoulder, trying to make something of that remote expression. Definitely his body’s here

, Kit said. But as for the rest of him …

Far away

, Ponch said. I can show you where now, though. The scent’s strong .

Okay-In a moment

Ponch sat down and started scratching.

Unfortunately, in this small quiet space, a sound that Kit heard all the time, so often that he didn’t pay attention to it anymore, suddenly made itself apparent. It was Ponch’s dog-license tag and name tag, on his collar, jingling together. Just about everybody in the classroom, except for Darryl, looked up in surprise, trying to figure out where the sound was coming from.

Uh-oh

, Kit thought. That was dumb ! To Ponch he said hurriedly, and silently, Now would be a good time !

Right—

Ponch stepped forward, pulling the leash tight, and vanished, just as Darryl’s teacher got up from the floor with a mystified look and headed toward them.

Kit stepped forward after Ponch and vanished, too, relieved—

The wind hit him then, so that Kit staggered, staring around him, half-blinded by the sudden blazing light after the soft fluorescents of the classroom.

“Where are we?”

Inside his mind. He’s here somewhere

, Ponch said.

Here was a landscape right out of the depths of the Sahara. Kit and Ponch were perched precariously on the crest of a dune so sharply wind-sculpted that its edge could have been used for a razor… except that every second, the wind stripped grains off it, eroding it, and whipping sand off the other dunes that stretched out all around them. A hard blue sky came down to the horizon on all sides, featureless; it held not a wisp of cloud, only the fierce sun… yet there was something mysteriously indistinct about that sun, as if, even in that sky, dust obscured it.