Diane Duane - A Wizard Alone

Nita could see his point, but she didn’t like it. “Carl, he’s been really spaced-out since he came back from his last time in Darryl's universe. Anything could happen to him in a few minutes, let alone an hour!”

“Nita,” Carl said, “take a breath or two and get a grip on yourself. I know how you feel, but even if you’d already done the presleep preparation you need to do for a lucid dreaming session — which I don’t think you have — you’d still need to get to sleep after that. And you know you can’t induce it with a sleep spell when you’re going lucid. You’re going to have to relax a little, enough to sleep, or you won’t be able to do anything.”

She let out a long breath. “I hate it when you’re right,” Nita said. “Okay. I’ll call you later and let you know what I find.”

“Do that. I’ll be up late.”

She hung up, looked at her father. Dairine had come downstairs and was leaning in the dining room doorway, looking alert, with Spot peering into the kitchen from behind her legs. To Dairine, Nita said, “He’s gone. Let’s start building that power-feed spell; I’m going to need it in a couple of hours.”

She and Dairine headed up the stairs.

It took Nita nearly four hours to get ready to go after Kit, and even then she couldn’t sleep. Part of the problem was that she was very much a daytime person and found it tough to get to sleep before eight in the evening. The rest of the problem was her nerves.

When Nita first lay down, Dairine was still sitting in the chair by Nita’s desk, looking over the lifeline spell she’d constructed. At any other time, Nita would have been annoyed enough by the elegance and speed with which Dairine had constructed it to try to find at least some fault with it.

But there wasn’t time for that, and right now she was simply grateful that Dairine was so talented in this kind of work. The bed was surrounded by a long, tightly knitted cord of words in the Speech, rather like Kit’s leash for Ponch, but both more intricate and thicker. The wizardry had to handle much higher power levels than the leash did, and had no life-support functions as such — those Nita would be carrying with her on her charm bracelet, in a suite of interconnected shielding and atmosphere-maintenance spells.

Nita was also more heavily armed than usual, not knowing how many friends the Lone Power might have skulking around the borders of Darryl’s mind, intent on keeping enemies out and friends in. From Nita’s bracelet dangled a number of charms, each of which represented a spell almost ready to go, needing only one thought or pronounced syllable to set it going. It was wearying to carry this much nearly released power around, but Nita was beyond caring how much energy she had to expend. Her fear for Kit was growing by the minute.

After she’d finished looking over the lifeline wizardry and lay down on the bed, Nita took a last moment or three to check out the weaponry — the lightning bolt of the quark-level dissociator, the little closed spiral of a pinch-off utility that could seal a designated attacker or group of attackers into a “pocket” space, the little “magic wand” charm that contained a one-off terawatt particle-beam generator. Even in her present nervous state, Nita looked at that one with slight relish and wished she might have a chance to use it — the manual had been explicit about how dangerous it was, and how effective. The manual itself was slipped into her own otherspace pocket, inside the lifeline wizardry with her. Last of all she checked her throat, where the thin fine chain of the lucid-dreaming wizardry was fastened, and made sure it was charged and active. It buzzed slightly against her fingers, acknowledging that it was ready to go.

Nita settled herself back against the pillows. “How long’s the lifeline good for?” she said to Dairine.

“You get six hours,” Dairine said. “Then it’s got to be dismantled and rebuilt, and I have to recharge it. It’s…” She glanced at Spot, who was sitting on the desk with his screen up, running manual functions, among them a Julian date clock. “It’s just past three-oh-three-point-three. You get until point-fifty-five, then you snap back here, no matter what you’re doing. So keep an eye on your manual.”

Nita nodded. She wiggled against the pillows a little and closed her eyes.

After about five minutes, she opened them again, and sighed. “Dari…”

“Is there something wrong with the spell?”

Nita made a face. “This is really dumb, but I can’t fall asleep with you sitting there watching me.

You’re going to have to stay in your room, for a while anyway.”

Dairine shrugged. “No problem,” she said, and reached down to pick up one of the lines of light that was trailing away from the lifeline spell. Dairine walked out the door with the power-feed line in her hand. The line of light, the single character for connection in the Speech, stretched and stretched after her as she went.

Then Dairine stuck her head back in the room. “Good luck, Neets,” she said.

“Thanks,” Nita said. I may need it …

At first Nita concentrated on doing the breathing exercises that often helped her get to sleep when she was having trouble doing so, but tonight all they seemed to do was make her uncomfortably aware of her breathing. Finally she gave up on that and just stared at the ceiling, fixing her attention on one spot, the little flawed place where Dairine had once bounced a Superball too high and flaked off the ceiling paint. After a while, as Nita had expected, her eyes started tiring.

Eventually she found herself standing in the dark. That darkness was nearly complete: There were no spotlights now, no signs of anything being in this universe but her, and only the faintest, not-quite-black “background” radiance from the sky above. Did I miss them ? Nita wondered. Have they gone somewhere else ?

She looked around. It did no good standing still in one of these dreams, she’d found. You had to walk around to get anywhere worth being. So Nita reached into her otherspace pocket and came out with a favorite tool, a moonlight-steeped rowan wand lent her by Liused, the tree in her backyard.

This one was getting close to its “use by” date — such wands routinely lasted for only three full moons and an intercalary day, unless burned out by overuse before then — and wasn’t much good for anything but light at this point. But light was just what Nita needed. As she touched it and pulled it out, the wand came afire with a blaze of secondhand moonlight, enough to show Nita that she was standing on the same plain black surface that she’d seen here before, when meeting the clown, the robot, and the knight. But there was nothing else to be seen at all, in any direction.

“Okay,” she said softly. “Let’s see.”

One of the ready-made spells on her bracelet had a charm that looked like a miniature radar screen. Knowing before she left who she was going to be looking for, Nita had wound Kit’s name in the Speech into it. Now she reached down to that charm and, touching it, saw in her mind the single word needed to activate the spell.

She said the word. Immediately Nita was standing in the middle of a pool of faint light, very much like the big radar that air traffic controllers use. It was a life-sign detector, one that would tag any specific personality it had been keyed to. Nita looked down at it. Even though the steady glow of it was soft, it was hard to make out any specific indication from it. Nita whispered the light of the rowan wand down to nothing and stared at the detector for many long moments, until her eyes watered.

Finally, though, she spotted what she was looking for: a faint, faint patch of light, off in the two o’clock direction. The curling tracery of Kit’s initials in the Speech were beside it.