Games Wizards Play Read online

  Contents

  * * *

  Title Page

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Epigraphs

  Time fix: Spring 2011

  Hipparchus

  Coney Island

  Wellakh / Hempstead

  Antarctica / Knox Coast

  San Francisco

  Mumbai

  Hempstead / Elsewhere

  Hempstead / Mumbai

  Manhattan: Javits Center

  Javits Center: The Cull

  New York: The Losers’ Party

  Mumbai / Shanghai / Elsewhere

  Canberra

  Canberra: The Post-Semis Mixer

  Antarctica and Daedalus

  Sol IIIa, Sol, Sol III

  Read More from the Young Wizards Series

  About the Author

  Copyright © 2016 by Diane Duane

  All rights reserved. For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [email protected] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

  Could It Be from KIM POSSIBLE: THE MOVIE.

  Words and music by Andrew Gabriel and Cory Lerois © 2005 by Wonderland Music Company, Inc. and Walt Disney Music Company. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

  Reprinted by permission of Hal Leonard Corporation.

  www.hmhco.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file.

  ISBN 978-0-547-41806-3

  eISBN 978-0-544-63371-1

  v1.0216

  Dedicated to Colin Smythe

  Publisher, editor, friend

  (who knows where the bodies are buried)

  Acknowledgments

  Heartfelt thanks to the many online friends who follow me on Twitter (@dduane) and Tumblr (dduane.tumblr.com), and whose engagement and encouragement are a daily joy. As the man says: “You keep me right.”

  Thanks also to John C. Welch, provider of technical assistance that has proved of inestimable value in the production of this book.

  I . . . am about to embark upon a hazardous and technically unexplainable journey . . . to confer, converse, and otherwise hobnob with my brother wizards.

  —Oz the Great, The Wizard of Oz

  When moon and sun stand each in place

  And your opponent takes the field,

  Look past him to the one you’ll face

  When all hid truths stand new-revealed.

  When that time comes, your only shield

  Will be the outward gaze toward space;

  The cold will show what sword to wield

  Against the fire’s and death’s embrace.

  Still, though your oldest foe should yield,

  Beware the last fall of the dice:

  Though now an ancient sorrow’s healed,

  Beware who pays the final price—

  And do not miss, ’twixt fire and ice,

  Your chance to make the sun rise twice.

  —I Ching trigram 30, Fire over Fire: “Double Brightness”

  I am not young enough to know everything.

  —Oscar Wilde

  Time fix:

  Spring 2011

  1

  Hipparchus

  KIT RODRIGUEZ LAY SPRAWLED in the gray dirt, staring in shock at the fire-blackened book that had just landed open side down in front of him. His stomach flip-flopped as he realized that very close by, another wizard lay dead.

  Still smoking gently at its charred edges, the other wizard’s manual, a thick, beat-up paperback with a cracked spine, slowly started to vanish. Sheer horrified fascination made it hard for Kit to look away. Only when the manual had finished dissolving did he manage to swallow. His mouth was bone dry, not just because of all the dust flying around, and his heartbeat was hammering in his ears. It was amazing how loud your own heart sounded in these conditions, especially when it might shortly stop without warning.

  Kit, you still with us? said a voice that sounded like it was speaking from inside his head.

  “Uh, yeah,” Kit said under his breath. “Don’t think it’d be real smart to move right this minute. I’m pinned down.”

  Lissa is too, said another voice. You’re below effective numbers now, Kit. We can pull you guys out of there—

  “No chance,” Kit said. “Job’s not done yet! You think I’m leaving before we finish what Ritchie gave it all up for?”

  The moment’s silence that followed was broken only by the shudder of the impacts hitting the ground around them. How many have we got moving now? said a voice from across the battlefield.

  Nine of them, said another voice with a distinct twang to it. They’re right over the rim from you right now, so whatever you do, don’t—

  A few hundred meters in front of him, an inward-arrowing glint of ferociously unfiltered sunlight flashed off the narrow shape of yet another of the nasty projectiles that had been making Kit’s life so interesting for the last ten minutes or so. Hurriedly Kit shoved his face down into the dirt again, and the incoming missile shot by right over his head, literally within a yard or so of his scalp. Under the circumstances he couldn’t feel it by air pressure, but its passage pushed his personal shield down harder onto his skull. This wasn’t the kind of sensation any wizard in his right mind took lightly, no matter how confident he was about his shielding—and Kit was a lot less confident about it than he’d been half an hour ago.

  He held still, waiting for the explosion from behind him. For several long moments nothing happened. Then everything rocked. The ground beneath Kit rippled, shaking apart in chunks along spiderweb cracks as the blast wave from the missile’s explosion burst through it. In the wave’s wake, the air inside the larger bubble of Kit’s secondary shield instantly filled with kicked-up gray-white dust that obscured everything, as if he’d suddenly been teleported into the center of a frosted lightbulb. He concentrated on not breathing until the shaking stopped and the dust started to settle.

  Kit? Kit!!

  He didn’t answer right away, because he didn’t trust himself to breathe the air around him yet. After a few moments the dust had settled low enough for him to carefully put his head above the dust level. “I’m still here, it’s okay!” he said. “And no way am I moving! Not ready for Timeheart right this minute.” He gulped air and levered himself up on his elbows to look over the edge of rocks in front of him. There was little to see except more dust, kicked up low across the plain by dimly seen mechanical shapes. “What about Lissa? She was right behind me—”

  I moved, said that lighter voice. Good thing, or I’d be where Ritchie is now. As usual, she sounded way too calm for what was going on around her.

  Kit sighed in unnerved relief. His only other team member, Walt, had been taken out moments before Ritchie had. But Lissa’s survival alone wasn’t likely to be enough to make the difference here: mere numbers weren’t going to help. “You get the reading you were after on this new stuff they’re lobbing at us?”

  The shells’ve got some kind of hyperblooey in them, Lissa said. Boosted composite chemical and micronuke explosive surrounded by a tamping field. But the explosive’s not the problem. The squeeze-field’s where the real action is. It’s a double-tasked starcore compression spell that’s also holding the components of the fusion triggers apart. That’s how they’re getting so much oomph out of these things.

  “Hybrid tech,” Kit muttered. “I really, really hate it when people hook wizardry up to explosives. The results cannot be anything but ugly . . .”

  Wouldn’t argue, Lissa said. Since we don’t have time.

  From his position across the crater came a familiar voic
e: Ronan. Five minutes, he said.

  Sweat started popping out all over Kit. The other team was dead quiet, which suggested that they had some sort of solution to what was going on and were about to implement it. You think they know what you know? he said privately to Lissa.

  I’m not sure, Lissa said. Couldn’t get a clear reading until that last one came real close.

  And you’re sure of your results?

  Pretty sure. If you want me to make absolutely certain, why not stand up and see if you can attract another?

  Pass! Kit said.

  Four minutes thirty . . . said Ronan.

  The hair stood up on the back of Kit’s neck at the thought of what would start breaking loose in four minutes, that being the best-case estimate for when the alien force would push past their defensive perimeter and get at the base on the far side of the crater. The place was full of civilians, none of whom were going to be terribly prepared to be overrun by aliens. And Kit wasn’t sure whether whatever the other team was working on was going to make a difference—So we have to do something. Change the equation somehow. If not ours, then theirs—

  The idea hit him completely without warning, and there was no time to waste mulling it over to see if it was too stupid to suggest. How about this? Kit said to Lissa. Those tamping fields on the missiles they haven’t launched yet . . . what do you think would happen if they went off prematurely?

  What, you mean if we tried to make them complete their squeeze cycle early and blow? No way, that’d take more power than we’ve both got—

  No. I mean, what if the squeeze-fields shut off. Went away—

  There was a long pause. Then, Ooooo, Lissa said, with the appreciative and anticipatory sound of someone about to open a particularly nice present.

  Kit grinned. Can you build the spell in about a minute?

  A much shorter pause this time. Got an off-the-rack solution that’ll work if I tweak it right.

  Great! Set it up. I’ll feed you power.

  Lissa went quiet. Kit pushed himself farther up and peered over the rim of the crater again—the bottom of a landscape overarched by the hard black sky of Moon-based day, the stars washed out by sunglare and the shifting, situational glitter of still-suspended moondust that had been kicked up too high and hard to come down yet. The alien war machines that had been shooting at his group were now stalking and rolling far closer to Kit’s position across the rubble-strewn basin at the nameless crater’s bottom—a stretch of lunar terrain that had been fairly smooth and uncratered until the machines’ arrival via rogue worldgate a few hours ago and their meeting with the two wizardly teams that had been sent out to stop them. Problem is, two teams were never going to be enough, Kit thought. Guess I should be grateful Neets couldn’t get free for this—

  Three minutes, Ronan said, sounding grim.

  You guys got anything? said Matt, from his team’s site on the other side of the crater. He sounded freaked, but not so much so that Kit couldn’t hear the beginnings of a note of triumph in his voice. They do have something, Kit thought. Only question is how fatal it’s going to be, and who to—

  For the moment Kit didn’t answer. Liss—?!

  Just a few seconds more!

  Kit swallowed. Matt, he said, this might be a good time to store some last words . . .

  The silence on the other side had an unnerved quality to it; a wizard could do a lot with his or her last words. But then Lissa whispered, Ready for you.

  The crack-shattered dirt under Kit’s nose came alive with a small, remote segment of the spell diagram she’d just constructed—a two-foot-wide circle packed full of closely written lines of light, hovering just above the moondust. Kit hurriedly checked the curves and curls of his name in the Speech to make sure that Lissa had transcribed it correctly, then took a deep breath and slapped his right hand down into the middle of the spell diagram, in the receptor/connector area she’d left open for him, and spoke the agreed confirmation word in the Speech. In the next instant he felt the power leap out of him and flow into Lissa’s spell as she said its final word and turned it loose. Then Kit flopped down on his chest again, limp as a wrung-out rag.

  Last words? Matt said.

  After letting all that power go, Kit was too weak to do much but grin in anticipation. Don’t count your chickens . . . ! he said.

  And a second later the crater came alive with a scatter of explosions that made the previous missile impacts look small and stingy by comparison. Kit peered over the crater rim again, being very careful—because suddenly the neighboring vacuum wasn’t just full of dust, but also of rocks and twisted pieces of shiny metal rocketing away from multiple explosion centers in the crater.

  Kit took a couple more breaths and started to feel a little recovered from the stress of doing a heavy powerfeed without much prep. Or maybe it’s just seeing the results . . . ! he thought. Can I stand up without falling down? He pushed himself up onto hands and knees and then stood, staggering only a bit. Since his personal force shield was hardened against radiation as well as mere physical impacts, he wasn’t worried about standing up to see how those nuclear explosions were playing out in vacuum and one-sixth g. Even without air to carry what would have been the deafening multiple roars of their detonation, the effect was still impressive. Nine giant dust-streaked glow-inside balloons were now scattered around the crater in various stages of expansion and glaring brightness, each one growing and roiling like something alive, burning and angry. As Kit watched them, something shiny hit him about chest-high. His shield flared, dissipating the impact’s energy, and the thing that had hit him bounced down into the moondust at his feet. He peered down and saw that it was the pointy end of some kind of mechanical claw, twisted out of shape and molten at the edges, the metal still bubbling and exhaling vapor into the vacuum.

  Behind him, standing up in her own crater, Lissa was fist-punching the air, or where the air would normally have been, and hooting with delight. From the team on the other side, the silence held for only a few more moments: then the groaning started. “What the heck was that?” “What did they do??”

  And possibly most satisfying, the complaints were followed by a low chuckle from the scenario designer. Okay, Ronan said, intervention’s complete at fourteen oh five local, and that’s a clear win for Kit and Lissa. Let’s get everyone together over at Mid-Hipparchus for the debrief, and let the dust here settle . . .

  Kit said the four or five words in the Speech that reclaimed the air inside his outer shield into compressed storage, then the half-sentence that killed his outer force field. Off across the big crater he’d been peering into, the simulated nuclear explosions were being decommissioned—the dust that had been the only physically real thing about them now snowing gently back down onto the lunar surface. Shortly, even if any other people besides wizards had been up on the Moon right now, there would be no sign that anything unusual had happened here.

  Kit carefully bounced up the slope behind him to where Lissa had just killed her own outer force bubble, this making it a lot easier to jump around in triumph without interference. Lissa might look somewhat tall and gangly under normal circumstances, but up here in the low gravity her bouncing acquired an unusual grace that made it seem like second nature—an effect assisted by the orange jumpsuit she always wore to these sessions, which made her resemble an escaped astronaut. Her short fair hair crackled and stood up a little with static as she bounced and waved her arms in the air.

  It was hard not to get caught up in such sheer evil glee. As Kit came up with her, Lissa put up one hand for a high-five: both their shields flared with the impact, so that though there couldn’t be any sound, there was at least a brief flash. “They were useless,” Lissa said, and spun around about a meter off the ground in a one-sixth gee dance of triumph. “Useless beyond words! They had nothing and we saved their butts. Or if they did have anything, they left it way too late. Oh, are they going to hate us!”

  “Not if we don’t gloat too much,” Kit sa
id, hoping earnestly that she’d take the point just this once. But even as he said it, the moondust on the ground around Lissa flared blue-white with the wizardry of the personal transit circle she’d dropped around her as she came down, and she vanished.

  He sighed and glanced around, watching the way the dust thrown up by the explosions out in the middle of the crater continued sifting silverly toward the lunar surface. The effect was like watching delicately fluffy snow come down, since the bright-side static tended to make the falling dust clump when there’d been a lot of local activity. Ronan had scheduled this session for relatively late in the two-week lunar “day,” both in an attempt to keep the dust from being a problem and to make sure there were plenty of shadows, which made it a lot easier to see surface details when you were running around shooting at things. The dust, as usual, had its own ideas, but the view couldn’t be otherwise faulted, now that the action was over and there was time to appreciate it. Above the far crater wall, Earth hung gibbous, a cloud-streaked, wet blue jewel three-quarters full, and its dazzling brilliance was ever so slightly fuzzed around the edges by the faint, faint haze of high static-propelled dust that the first astronauts had been so surprised to see—

  Is it possible that you’re still hanging around there sightseeing, crater boy? said the ironic voice inside his head. Can we please get on with this? Matt’s pitching such a fit, and I’d hate for you to miss it.

  Kit grinned. Meaning, he thought, that he’s giving Ronan a lot of grief, and Ro doesn’t want to have to soak it all up himself . . . “On my way,” Kit said.

  His own “beam-me-up-Scotty” spell had long since had the coordinates for the assembly point in the middle of the sprawling Hipparchus crater complex plugged into it. Now Kit said the words that brought the spell to life in a circle on the ground around him, turned once to scan the white-glowing symbols and make sure the Wizard’s Knot that completed the circle was tight, and then said the activator clause out loud.