A Wizard Alone yw[n&k-6 Read online

  “Have they been asking you about the meaning of life?” Kit said.

  Both Tom and Carl gave Kit a look. “Uh, yes,” Tom said.

  Kit covered his face. “It’s my fault,” he said. “A new kind of blackmail, and I know where they got it. They probably want dog biscuits.”

  “New tactic,” Tom said wearily, getting up. “Old problem. I’ll bear it in mind.”

  Ponch came lolloping back into the dining room. Kit got up, too. “I’ll get in touch as soon as I find anything out,” Kit said, opening the patio door to let Ponch out.

  “Thanks, fella,” Tom said. “Dai stiho.”

  “Yeah, you go well, too. Well enough not to electrocute somebody, anyway!”

  They headed back the way they’d come, Kit pausing briefly in Tom’s backyard with the spellchain in his hands to adjust the variable that determined how much and how fast the air displaced around their transiting mass when they “came out of nowhere.” Ponch was bouncing up and down around him, making it difficult for Kit to remember where in the structure of the spell the variable actually was. “Would you sit down?” he said under his breath to Ponch, while passing the softly glowing chain of words through his hands until the little barbed bit sticking out from the variable scratched his skin. Kit held the word up in front of his eyes, squinting at it like someone threading a needle, and managed to catch the delicate outward-hooked tail of the spell character between finger and thumb.

  Chicken! Ponch was shouting in his head. Hurry up! It’s chicken!

  “And philosophy goes right out the window, huh?” Kit said as he twiddled the massdisplacement variable; it shaded down from a bright blue to a darker one. “You’re a bad influence on those guys, you know that?”

  Me? Never. Chicken!

  “Right,” Kit said, folding the variable’s tail back in and shaking the spell through a quick sine wave to unkink it. It fell smoothly to the ground and knotted itself. “Now sit down or you’re gonna wind up in two different places, and not in one piece!”

  Ponch sat down but still managed to bounce a little.

  The spell flared up, its blue a little darker this time. A second later they were standing in Kit’s backyard again, without the ear-popping effect this time, and the light faded out of the spell.

  “Better?” Kit said, winding the spell-chain up and sticking it back in his “pocket.”

  It’s fine. I’m hungry

  ! Ponch shouted, and ran for the house.

  Kit breathed out, feeling hungry, too, and tired. This, at least, had nothing to do with the emotional climate. No wizardry is without its price, and this was the normal reaction to a transit wizardry: a small but significant deduction from Kit’s personal energy supply. It was one of the reasons why, as they got older, a lot of wizards spent as much time as they could making sure they were in decent physical shape.

  Kit went after Ponch and was surprised not to see his mama and pop eating in the kitchen, as they usually did. He wandered into the living room and found them there on the sofa. Kit’s pop was finishing the last of what must have been a second helping of arroz con polio, watching the TV screen, while Kit’s mama sat next to him, cross-legged, punching the scan button on the remote and looking at the TV with an expression of extreme bemusement.

  His father looked up. “Five billion channels and nothing on,” he said in a kind of horrified astonishment.

  “The story of modern life,” Kit said, resigned, and headed to the kitchen to get himself a plate.

  “Just be-cause a species is more scientifically advanced than us doesn’t mean its TV is any better, believe me.”

  His father absorbed this assessment with a thoughtful look. “Maybe that should make me feel better. I’ll let you know. What did Tom have to say?”

  “It’s complicated,” Kit said. “A missing persons case.”

  “And are you likely to go missing?” his pop said.

  “Not right away,” Kit said. “I have to do some detective work here first.”

  “Oh, my god,” Kit’s mama said, “what are they doing”

  Anything that could so seriously gross out Kit’s mama, the nurse, was worth a look. Kit grabbed a plate and ducked back into the living room, looked at the writhing, thrashing, stridently colored image for a moment, then took the remote away from his mama and punched it for subtitles. “Oh, that’s what I thought,” he said, after spending about ten seconds reading them. “It’s a soap.”

  “Not of any brand I recognize,” his mother said. She looked scandalized.

  “It’s real basic, Mama,” Kit said. “Boy meets girl meets thing meets other thing. Boy loses girl loses other thing finds thing. Boy loses thing gets girl loses thing. Happily ever after…” He tossed the remote back to his mother.

  She fielded it badly as she studied the screen for any signs of boys or girls, and looked like she was having trouble finding any, though there were plenty of “things.” “‘Basic,’ you said?”

  “Old, old story, Mama. You should see some of these guys’ literature. Shakespeare would have loved it.” Kit considered that briefly: His lit class had been doing the late Shakespeare comedies, and suddenly a whole set of opportunities opened out before him. “Just imagine A Midsummer Night’s Dream with ten or twelve extra genders…”

  His mother raised her eyebrows, gave up on the soap, and started changing channels again.

  “Doesn’t this thing have an online channel guide?” she said.

  “I’ll have a look at it later and let you know,” Kit said.

  He saw the look she threw at his pop. “Are there cooking channels?”

  “Oh, yeah.” Then Kit paused, having a horrible thought. “On second thought, it might be smarter to avoid those. Some of them feature humans… and not as the cooks.”

  The look on his mother’s face made Kit wish he’d kept quiet. She began changing channels with unusual speed. Kit raised his eyebrows and went back into the kitchen with the plate.

  He was spooning out rice when his dad came back in and began rooting around in the silverware drawer in an aimless way that didn’t fool Kit for a moment. “Son,” he said, very quietly, “is there really a cooking channel, uh, ‘about’ us?”

  “Pop, there’s lots of them.”

  His father looked shocked. “But how is something like that permitted*.”

  Kit shrugged. “You go where you shouldn’t go,” Kit said, and couldn’t help grinning, “you find out stuff you shouldn’t find out. Like how you taste in a sweet-and-sour sauce with galingale. The universe is full of little surprises.”

  “I always have the feeling that there’s a lot about this wizardry you’re not telling me,” his father said. “Sometimes it worries me. Then come times like this when I’m horribly glad about my ignorance. Just don’t go places where you shouldn’t go, okay?”

  “I try to avoid it,” Kit said. “Is it okay with you if I go to Baldwin in the next couple of days, though?”

  His pop looked surprised. “Baldwin? No problem with that.”

  “Thanks.”

  Kit brought his plate into the living room, where he sat down on the floor and watched his mother change channels one more time. “Well, that’s pretty,” she said, sounding relieved.

  Kit glanced up at the screen, chewing. “Uh, Mama,” he said, “I’m probably too young to be watching anything that explicit.”

  Her eyes widened. “But, honey, it’s just a big cloud of gas, or smoke, or…” She stopped, her eyes widening even more, then changed the channel six times in a row without stopping.

  Kit grinned and turned his attention back to the chicken.

  Investigations

  Circuses — even just the thought of them — had always scared Nita when she was little. Later on, she had felt that the fear was ridiculous. Circuses were supposed to be so much fun for small children — all the sparkle, glitter, and noise, the processions of elephants parading along trunk-bytail, the blare of brass music, the daring acrobats and tumbl
ers, the goofy clowns.

  Yet it hadn’t worked that way for Nita the first time she actually went to one. Where the other kids in the audience had laughed and clapped, she sat amid all the raucous noise feeling terribly unnerved. It wasn’t so much being afraid that an acrobat would fall, that a lion would eat the lion tamer… nothing so concrete or obvious. But the darkness, the gradually strengthening smells of sawdust, animal sweat, greasepaint, and canvas, the spotlighting that left too many other things purposely obscure while half-seen forms moved in those shadows, themselves concealed by the light — all these slowly combined to suggest that something unexpected, something unavoidable, was going to happen. And that looming unknown frightened Nita badly. At intermission she’d begged her parents to take her home. Dairine had cried at the thought of leaving, and so their mom had stayed with Dari while her father drove Nita back to the house.

  That her dad had never pressed her for details about this was still one of the things Nita thought about when counting up the reasons she loved him. But even his silent support couldn’t do anything about the nightmares that followed, nightmares full of leering clown faces and the musky smell of big cats. Finally the nightmares faded away and left Nita wondering what in the world had been the matter with her. Yet she never went to another circus. And even now, sometimes the mere sight of a spotlight aimed at an empty floor, with darkness lying silent beyond it, was enough to induce in her a feeling of tremendous foreboding that would darken her soul for hours.

  Sometimes she tried to work out in more detail why she’d been so scared. She kept coming back to the clowns. To Nita, there was a fake quality about them, nothing genuinely humorous. It was strange to think that someone seriously thought that makeup could make you funny. But there was no question in Nita’s mind that makeup could make you scary. The stylized clown face, too generic, too cartoony: That really bothered her. The baggy, motley costume, disguising the real body shape so that it could have been a bare steel skeleton underneath instead of flesh and bone. The slapstick jokes, endlessly repeated, which were supposed to be amusing because of the repetition — all these left Nita cold. There was something mechanical about clowns, something automatic, a kind of robot humor; and it gave her the creeps.

  It was doing so again, right now, because here in the darkness, followed around by one of those sinister spotlights, was a typical clown act — the clown riding around and around in circles on a ridiculously small bicycle, in ever decreasing circles. There was nothing funny about it to Nita. It was pitiful. Around and around and around, in jerky, wobbling movements, around and around went the clown. It had a painted black tear running down its face. The red-painted mouth was turned down. But the face under the white greasepaint mask was as immobile as a marble statue’s, expressionless, plastered in place. Only the eyes were alive. They shouted, I can’t get off! I can’t get off! And, just this once, the clown didn’t think it was funny, either.

  The drumroll went on and on, as if for a hanging rather than a circus stunt. The chain of the bicycle rattled relentlessly in the silence inside the light. Beyond the light, in the darkness, the heartless crowd laughed and clapped and cheered. And through the sound of their applause, low, but building, came the growl of the tiger, pacing behind the bars, waiting its turn.

  The drumroll never stopped. The clown rode in tighter and tighter circles, faster and faster. The wheels of the bike began to scream. The crowd shouted for more. “Stop it,” Nita yelled. “Stop it!

  Can’t you see it’s killing him?”

  “As often as possible,” growled the tiger. “And never often enough.”

  The crowd roared louder. “Stop it!” Nita shouted back, but now they were drowning her out, too.

  “Stop it!”

  “STOP!”

  She was sitting up in the dark, alone. It took her a ragged three or four breaths to realize she was in her own room, in bed, and that her own shout had awakened her.

  Nita sat still for a few moments, praying that she wouldn’t hear anyone coming to find out if she was okay. She wasn’t, but she still hoped no one would respond. There wasn’t anyone in the house who’d been sleeping well for a while now.

  She stayed still for a long time. Mercifully, no one showed up, and Nita began to relax, realizing that she might have expected this outcome if she’d really thought about it. Dairine, when she slept these days, slept hard, in utter exhaustion. Their dad lately had been doing much the same, a change from the previous month, when he had hardly slept at all. It didn’t take a wizard to figure out that he’d been afraid to fall asleep, because of who he would, again and again, not find beside him when he woke up. Finally his body had overruled that kind of behavior and now was trying to sleep too much, to not wake up at all, if possible. The reasons were the same, and just thinking of them made Nita want to cry all over again.

  She lay back against the pillows and let her breath out at the thought of the dream. It’s just me, she thought. She hated to describe it any further, for the next line of explanation would have been, Since Mom

  — And she refused to blame her mother for it; her mom now had nothing further to do with pain. It was Nita’s own pain that made her nights so awful. The shrink at school, the counselor at the hospital, both told her the same thing: “Grief takes time. The pain discharges in a lot of different ways, in old repeated patterns, weird symbolic images, mental unrest. Try to stop it, and it just takes longer. Let it take its own time; let it go at its own speed.”

  Like I have a choice

  , Nita thought bitterly. She could have used wizardry to combat the sleep disturbances, but the manual had told her plainly that this would be counterproductive. Easing others’ pain is one thing; willfully trying to avoid experiencing one’s own is another, and has its own price, too high for the intelligent wizard to pay. It was smarter to let the hurt discharge naturally, without interfering.

  But these commonsense counsels were still no comfort in the middle of the night, when she was alone in the dark. All Nita could do was wipe her face repeatedly, dry her eyes on the pillow, and hope to fall asleep eventually. Lacking that, she’d lie there and wait for dawn.

  Nita lay there, almost seeing the eyes hidden in the exaggerated colors and shadows of the painted face, and squeezed her own eyes shut. It’s just my pain in disguise

  , she thought. Pain expressed as a symbol, one step away from the reality.

  I wish this were over with. I wish life were normal again

  … But she knew that the old kind of normal was never going to come back. Somehow she was just going to have to make a new one.

  Nita turned over to try to go back to sleep, but it took a long while: From the shadows of dream, those eyes kept watching her…

  The next day was Tuesday. Kit went through his early classes more or less mechanically. The problem of Tom’s “lost wizard” was on his mind. Tracking him down and identifying him wouldn’t be a problem — the manual would be able to localize him and point him out when Kit was close enough. But what then? he thought as the bell rang for fourth period. He picked up his backpack and walked out of his math class on his way to history. Do I just walk up to him, say, “Hi, there. I’m on errantry and I greet you. What’s the problem?” Is it better to just take a good look at him from a distance, maybe?

  “Hey, KF, don’t say hi or anything!”

  Kit glanced around and found Raoul Eschemeling walking along next to him. Or rather, he glanced over and then up, because Raoul went up a good ways. He was a skinny, pale blond guy, tall enough to be a basketball player — the kind of person for whom the word gangly originally could have been coined. Friendly and gregarious, Raoul was constantly inventing bizarre nicknames for the other kids in the advanced history class, a motley crew of crazies of various ages, all fast-tracked together into a single advanced unit. “KF” was short for “kit fox,” and this nickname had stuck longer than any of the others Raoul had hung on Kit at one point or another.

  “Hey, Pirate,�
�� Kit said. “Sorry, I was daydreaming.”

  “Saw that. You almost walked into a locker there. You ready for Machiavelli’s quiz?”

  “Oh, god, no,” Kit said as they turned the corner and headed down the corridor toward their classroom. “Machiavelli” was Mr. Mack, their history teacher, and, in his case at least, the nickname was justifiable: He had a twisty, calculating mind that made learning history from him a pleasure. “I forgot. Well, I did the reading. Maybe I’ll survive.”

  Raoul looked at him closely. “You got stuff on your mind?”

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  “She doing okay? I haven’t seen her around a lot lately.”

  “Huh? Oh, Nita.” They went into the classroom together and took seats near the back wall. There was no assigned seating in Mack’s class, which meant there was always a rush for the rearmost seats, everybody’s desperate attempt to be somewhere that would make Machiavelli less likely to call on them… not that sitting in the back ever seemed to work. “She’s okay, pretty much.” Kit paused, watching the room fill up hurriedly — no surprise since Mack made the lives of latecomers a question-filled hell. “I mean, as okay as she can be under the circumstances.”

  Raoul looked at Kit with interest. “So if you weren’t going all vague about her just now, then what’s on your mind?”

  “Oh, just home stuff…”

  The bell rang. Saved! Kit thought. With the bell came Machiavelli, moving fast, as always, five feet tall and balding, in a blue suit and wearing a red tie ornamented with the images of many tiny yellow rubber duckies. The suit never changed, but the tie changed every day, and in the few seconds of fascination it produced, Mr. Mack would always pick the unfortunate student who looked most off guard and start peppering him or her with questions. “Rodriguez,” he said, and Kit’s heart sank. “You ready for our little quiz today?”

  Wizards do not lie; too much depends on the words they use seriously for them to play fast and loose with the less serious ones. “I don’t know, Mr. M., but I think I’m about to find out.”