Диана Дуэйн - High Wizardry

…!"… On the news last night," Kit said, "did you see that thing about the car in Northern Ireland?"

"No."

"They hijack cars over there sometimes, as a protest," he said. "One side or the other." There was something about his voice that made Nita look at him hard. "Sometimes they set the cars on fire after they hijack them." Kit sat looking in front of him at nothing in particular, looking tired. "You know the kind of wire screen you get for station wagons, so that your dog can be in the back and not get into everything?"

"Yeah."

"Someone hijacked a car with one of those in it, the other night. With the dog in it, in the back. Then they set the car on fire. With the dog in it."

Nita went ashen. Kit just kept looking at nothing in particular, and she knew what he was thinking of: Ponch, in Kit's dad's station wagon, lying around in the back too contented and lazy even to try to get into the grocery bags all around him. And someone coming up to the car-"Neets," Kit said, after a while, "Bad enough that they kill children, and grown-ups, and don't even care. But the poor dogs too-if we really have a chance to stop that kind of thing, I'll do… whatever. I don't care. Anything."

She looked at him. "Anything!'"

He was quiet for a long time. "Yeah."

Eventually she nodded. "Me too."

"I know," he said.

She looked at him in surprise. "Well, look at what you did with the whales," he said.

Nita's mouth was very dry. She tried to swallow. It didn't work.

"I mean, you did that already. That's what it was about. The Power got redeemed, a little: we know that much. Or at least It got the option to change. You did it for that. You almost got yourself killed, and you knew that might happen, and you did it anyway. Oh, I know you did it for me, some." He said this as if it were unimportant. "I was in trouble, you got me out of it. But mostly you did it to have things in the world be safe, and work."

She nodded, completely unable to speak.

"It seems like the least I can do," he said, and went no further, as if Nita should know perfectly well what he meant.

"Kit," she said.

"Look, I mean, I don't know if I can be that brave, but-"

"Kit, shut up."

He shut, rather astonished.

I'm always one step closer, sang memory at her from the Moon. "Look," she said, "I didn't do it for you 'some.' I did it for you 'pretty much.' "

Kit looked at her with an expression that at first made Nita think Kit thought she was angry with him.

But then it became plain that he was embarrassed too. "Well," he said, "okay. I-thought maybe you did.

But I didn't want to say anything because I didn't know for sure. And I would have felt real stupid if I was wrong." He had been looking away. Now he looked at her. "So?"

"So," and her voice stuck again, and she had to clear her throat to unstick it. "I like you, that's all. A lot.

And if you start liking somebody that much, well, I still want to keep the team going. If you do. That's all."

He didn't say anything. Nita stood there burning in a torment of embarrassment and anger at herself.

"Neets. Cut me some slack. You're my best friend."

Her head snapped up."… I thought it was Richie Sussman."

Kit shrugged. "We just play pool a lot. But it's the truth." He looked at her. "Isn't it true for you?"

"Yeah, but-"

"So why does that have to change? Look, we've got junk to do. Let's shake on it. We'll be best friends forever. And a team."

He said it so casually. But then that was how Kit did things: the only thing that wasn't casual was the way he worked to do what he said he would. "What if something happens?" Nita said. "What if-"

Kit finished one symbol inside the circle, shut the book, and stood up. "Look," he said, "something always happens. You still have to promise stuff anyway. If you have to work to make the promises true.

" He shrugged, hefted the manual. "It's like a spell. You have to say the words every time you want the results. Neets, come on. Shake on it."

They shook on it. Nita felt oddly light, as if her knapsack had been full of rocks and someone had come up behind her and dumped them out.

"Okay," Kit said. "Peach, where-good Lord."

Picchu was sitting in the water receptacle on the floor, flapping around and showering everything within range. "Do you mean I'm going to have to go halfway across the Galaxy with a soggy bird sitting on me?"

Kit said. "No way. Neets, it's your turn to carry her."

"You're getting a lot like Tom," said Picchu.

"Thanks!"

"That wasn't intended as a compliment."

Peach shook her feathers, scattering water. "Stop your complaining," she said to Kit. "The Powers only know when I'm going to have another chance for a bath." She stepped out of the low basin and shook herself again all over.

Nita wiped a drop out of her eye. "Come on," she said, and got Peach off the edge of the basin. "Kit, we set?"

"Yup. You want to do a defense spell, do it now. Peach? Any bad feelings?"

"All of them," Picchu said, "but nothing specific. Let's go."

They all three got into the circle. Kit knotted it closed with the figure-eight wizard's knot, dropped the gimbal into the circle on the spot marked out for it, then picked up his manual and began to read. Nita silently recited her favorite shieldspell, the one that could stop anything from a thrown punch to an ICBM, and for safety's sake set it at ICBM level. Then she got her own manual open and caught up with Kit.

The air began to sing the note ears sing in silence; the air pushed in harder and harder around them, Nita's ears popped, and the spell took hold and threw them off the planet-not before Nita saw a portly Me! thai gentleman peek in the door to see if it was safe to come in and have his child. .

There was a long, long darkness between the world winking out and flashing back into existence again.

Nita could never remember its having taken so long before-but then the jump from Earth to Rirhath had been a short one no more than fifteen or twenty light-years. She held her breath and maintained control, even while the back of her brain was screaming frantically, He made a mistake in the spell somewhere, you distracted him and he misspelled something else: you're stuck in this and you're never going to get out, never

It broke. Nita was as dizzy as she had been the last time, but she was determined not to wobble. Her ears stopped ringing as she blinked and tried to get her bearings. "Heads up, Neets," Kit was saying.

It was dark. They stood on some barren unlit moon out in the middle of space. Nothing was in the sky but unfamiliar stars and the flaming, motionless curtain of an emission nebula, flung across the darkness like a transparent gauze burning in hydrogen red and oxygen blue. Kit pointed toward the horizon where the nebula dipped lowest. Amid a clutter of equipment and portable shelters of some kind, there stood a small crowd of Satrachi. They had apparently not noticed their pursuers' appearance.

"Right," Nita said. "Let's do this-"

"Move us!" Picchu screeched. "Do it now!"

Kit's eyes widened. He started rereading the spell, changing the end coordinates by a significant amount.

Peach was still flapping her wings and screaming. "No, that's not far enough-"

Nita snatched the gimbal up from the ground and tied it into her shield-spell. Can it take the strain of two spells at once? We'll find out. It'll abort the one it can't manage, anyway. She gulped. Physical forces-

She started reciting in the Speech, naming every force in the universe that she could think of, tying their names into her shield and forbidding them entrance. Can I pull this off? Is this one of the spells that has a limit on the number of added variables? Oh Lord, I hope not

"Light," Peach was screaming at her, "light, lightl"