“I’ll get around to the despair thing when I’m good and ready,” Darryl said. “Meantime, get your butt out of my world.”
It gave them an ironic bow. “Once again,” It said to Nita, “despite all the brave words, you’ve gotten someone else to save your little life at his expense. One of these days, someone will refuse you. I’ll be waiting for you then. And for you,” It said, glancing at Kit, “when she betrays you at last.”
“Out,” Darryl said.
It looked from one to another of them. But It looked hardest and most cruelly at Darryl. “Don’t get too comfortable here,” It said. “I’ll be along any day.”
And It was gone.
They stood there, in the sudden silence, staring at each other.
Then, as if by prearranged signal, they all began to laugh.
“Oh, Neets!” Kit said, and he grabbed her and swung her around. “What a bluff! You were terrific!”
Nita was laughing, too, but there was an edge of pain on the laughter. “I’m not sure I was bluffing,” she said. “I was just so angry right then that I believed it.”
“You must have,” Kit said. “There’s no lying in the Speech. But Darryl…”
He turned to Darryl in concern. “That’s the problem for you, guy. You promised to stay here.”
“I did,” Darryl said.
Nita let out a long, unhappy breath.
“But this isn’t the only place I can be at the same time,” Darryl said softly.
Nita’s head jerked up.
“And It doesn’t know that.” Darryl grinned at them both. “I wouldn’t have known it either, without the two of you! When you started coming into my worlds, I was with you both at once.” He shook his head. “I don’t know if this is something most wizards can do—”
“It’s not,” Kit and Nita said simultaneously.
“But it’s real useful,” Kit said after a moment, intrigued. “Just think. If you were—”
“Kit, maybe we should save it for later,” Nita said. This was a line of reasoning she didn’t want him to go too far down just now. “Why don’t we all get out of here first?”
Darryl looked at Nita in shock. “But I shouldn’t leave yet, should I?” Darryl said. “My Ordeal’s not over.”
Nita looked at Kit, wondering if he’d realized the truth yet. From his blank look, it seemed he hadn’t. Looking at Darryl, then, she laughed out loud for sheer delight. “Hand me that, would you?” she said, reaching for the kernel.
Bemused, Darryl did. Once more Nita reached into it, pulled out the “enacture” strand she’d been examining earlier. In a wizard still of probationary status it would have been a bit transparent. But this was solid and bright, and as Darryl reached across Nita to touch it, it sang with light and power like the plucked string of an instrument.
“Look at the date on that,” Nita said. “Two and a half months ago, yeah?”
“Two weeks after things started to get so bad all of a sudden,” Darryl said.
“Two weeks after the Powers that Be offered you the Oath,” Nita said. “And the Lone One spent that whole time trying to make it impossible for you to find the words.”
“Didn’t work, though,” Kit said, and he was grinning too, now. “Not with you. You may have had to fight to get the Oath out, word by word and phrase by phrase, sure, and It may have kept derailing you. But you wouldn’t be derailed. You got it out at last.”
“And passed your Ordeal the minute you managed to finish it,” Nita said.
Darryl was wearing a listening look as the Silence spoke to him, confirming his status. Slowly his face changed, and the joy in it was so dazzling that Nita found it hard to bear, and had to look away for a moment. “That was the real battle, wasn’t it,” Darryl said at last. “And I won it! I won…”
Kit looked thoughtful as he nodded. “Kind of unusual though, isn’t it?” he said to Nita. “Thought the Lone One doesn’t usually notice a wizard-to-be until after he says the Oath.”
“That’s how it is for most of us,” Nita said. “But not all Ordeals are alike.” She was still treading cautiously around anything that would get too close to the subject of abdals. The Lone Power definitely knew Darryl was an abdal. Probably It just wanted to keep him from taking the Oath any way It could, because who could tell how powerful he might become once he was a wizard? “And his was as tough for him as ours was for us.”
“What I’m not getting,” Kit said, “is why your manual and Tom’s and mine all said that Darryl was still stuck in his Ordeal!”
“Maybe because he hadn’t realized it was over,” Nita said. And she laughed again. “Hadn’t acknowledged it! The manuals go by the opinion of the one who’ll know for sure. The one who says ‘That’s it… I’m a wizard.’”
“Uh,” Darryl said. “…I was busy.”
“You really do concentrate totally on one thing at a time, don’t you.”
Darryl raised his eyebrows. “Comes with the territory sometimes,” Darryl said, sounding just a little rueful. “Mine, anyway.”
“Doesn’t matter,” Nita said. “You just got so concentrated on implementing your decision to nail the Lone One down in here that you didn’t take time to realize it what had already happened. So the Silence stayed stuck for you, too, and couldn’t pass your status to the manual network outside.”
Darryl nodded. “I don’t know, though,” he said. “It still feels like maybe I got off easy. Just saying the Oath…?”
Kit looked at him as if he was insane. “You’re kidding, right? When the first thing you do afterwards is not just try to survive what the Lone One’s doing to you, but try to take the Lone One out of the game completely?” He shook his head. “This is nobody’s definition of easy! Come on.”
“The game,” Nita said, “the big game, is where we need you. Let’s get you out of here.”
Darryl turned away, then, looking back at the mirror in which the Lone One’s image stood gazing out at them, pale-eyed, malevolent, completely still. “One thing to do first,” he said.
A moment later there was a second mirror standing there, facing the first. Darryl walked over to it, and as he moved close his own image appeared in it—but not reflecting him exactly as a normal mirror would. His reflection’s regard was fixed on the reflection of the Lone Power in the other mirror, and didn’t move or look away when Darryl stepped away from it again.
“Automated oversight,” he said, pausing to look over his shoulder and make sure the reflection’s gaze didn’t move away from the Lone One’s image. But he looked reluctant to do anything else. “That’s the letter of the promise kept. It is me again.” Darryl bit his lip. “Not sure it’s enough, though.”
“You staying completely shut up in here by yourself isn’t going to help anything,” Nita said.
“I set this situation up,” Darryl said. “No point in making anyone else suffer for it.”
“I understand you’re trying to do the ‘fear for courage’ part,” Nita said. “But believe me, it’s way better not to do it alone.” And she found herself feeling a bit ashamed. “I needed reminding about that. And without you doing that for me, no telling where I’d be right now.”
For a moment, Darryl didn’t look up.
“There’s strength in numbers, Darryl,” Kit said. “Too easy to forget that.” He glanced at Nita, looking embarrassed. She gave him an amused look and raised her eyebrows. He turned back to Darryl. “Too easy to get so fixated on keeping other people out of trouble that you forget they volunteered for the same fight you’re fighting.”
“This has been a pretty cool battlefield,” Nita said, glancing around. “And you won your first fight. But now it gets interesting. Now you’re a wizard, you’ve got a lot more territory to cover. So get on out into the world with the rest of us and give It a run for Its money at least as good as what you’ve been giving it in here!”
Darryl was looking uncertain still. “Not real sure how that’s going to work,” he said. “In her
e, well, control’s easier. Outside, though…” He sighed. “I’ve got a nervous system that doesn’t act the way a lot of people think it should.”
Kit’s eyes went to the kernel in Darryl’s hands. “There’s a whole lot you could do with that,” he said.
Darryl looked at Nita.
“It’s hardware management as well as software,” she said. “Extremely powerful. In here, maybe infinitely so.”
Darryl held quite still for some moments, looking at the kernel, watching as the pale fires expressing the moment-to-moment business of neural pathways went shifting and flickering through the tangle of light.
“Well…” Darryl said. And paused.
And then he lifted his chin. “No.”
They looked at him.
“No,” Darryl said more strongly. “I’m me. I’m what I’ve got.” And then he looked at Nita a little strangely. “Were you doing something with cards before?”
She stared. “What?”
“Cards. You were thinking about it.”
She wondered how he knew that. Possibly through Kit: they were pretty tightly connected, and Kit could have caught it from me. Which didn’t mean it wasn’t annoying. “Oh God,” Nita muttered, “don’t tell me you want to see me do card tricks!”
Now Darryl looked confused. “What? No. You were playing some card game.”
She blinked. “Oh, right, I was. Just killing time.”
Kit rolled his eyes. “Solitaire…”
Nita smiled. Kit was good at most games, but for some reason he couldn’t keep the rules for solitaire in his head despite having been taught them about twenty times. “Yeah,” she said to Darryl.
“Do you cheat?”
“What?” Nita was taken aback. “No!”
“Didn’t think so somehow,” Darryl said.
She sighed. “I mean, sometimes I want to, but if you’re going to play a game, what’s the point of not playing it by the rules? How’ll you get any good at it?”
“So you play the hand you dealt yourself,” Darryl said.
“Yeah.”
“That’s what I’m doing,” Darryl said. “The brain and the nerves and the mind I’ve got… even if I don’t have them for some specific reason, they’re mine. They’re me. I’ve got a right to them, and I’m used to them. Besides, who knows what I might mess up if I started fiddling around?” He shrugged.
“And anyway, why fix what’s not broken?” Kit said, quite softly, “just different?”
Their eyes met. “Yeah,” Darryl said. “Thank you.” And that joy simply poured off him again, so that once more Nita had to brace herself against it. Kit wobbled with the impact of it too. Ponch, who had been standing there untroubled and wagging his tail ever since the Lone One left, now started to bark happily spin around in circles.
“So let’s just put this away wherever it belongs,” Darryl said, “and get out of here. Things to do…” He held the kernel out to Nita.
She shook her head. “Doesn’t have to go anywhere specific,” she said. “Just open up some inner space and shove it in. That way you’ll always be able to find it in a hurry if you want to do some minor redecoration some time.”
Darryl swept a hand out through the air beside him, felt around. “Oh!” he said as the hand sunk in, half vanishing. Then he craned his head around to try to see what the seemingly-chopped-through wrist looked like.
Kit snickered. “Has there ever been anybody who didn’t do that the first time?” he said.
“Not that I know of,” Nita said, resigned, as Darryl gave up on the anatomical investigations and stuffed the kernel into his own version of an otherspace pocket, sealing it off. As he did, he looked over his shoulder at the dark shape in the mirror.
“Don’t let It freak you,” Kit said. “It’s not just inside you. We’ve all got It, at least a little bit… and we see It all the time.”
Nita nodded. “In the people we know, the stuff that happens around us: there It is. There’s no escape. That’s life.”
“And Life, too,” Kit said. “Because it also goes the other way. We get to see what we serve. And it’s really worth it.”
Darryl was silent for a moment. “The Lone Power doesn’t make empty threats, does It.”
“Well, we’ve heard It threaten stuff that hasn’t happened yet,” Kit said, looking just a touch uneasy. “But…”
“Point is, It could do the things It was threatening?”
“Could,” Nita said. “But will it?” She shrugged. “It makes Its declarations. We make ours. And then we play out the game.” She looked over at Kit. “We’ve done okay, so far. There’s always the chance of losing, yeah. But the odds slide way over in Its favor if you don’t at least try… and way over in yours if you play hard and smart.”
Darryl nodded. “This has been a pretty bad time for me,” he said. “For so long I was managing okay. Sure, it’s always a challenge. The world can scrape me pretty raw. But I was managing. Then… wham, the burnout, and all of a sudden all the ways I had to cope just weren’t enough.” He scowled. “I think that’s over now. But if it happens again, worse, the way It was threatening…” He looked up. “My folks’ll be a mess.”
“I’m guessing they’re tougher than you think,” Nita said, remembering the voices she’d heard on the way in. “So don’t freak; give them a chance. And give yourself a chance. If it does happen—” She grinned. “You’re a wizard. Listen to the Silence. Pick yourself up and do what it tells you. You’ll get out again, because you’re tough, too. Tougher than you think.”
“Twice as tough, in fact,” Kit said, and glanced back at the mirror. “Maybe more.”
Darryl laughed at that. “And by the way,” Kit said, looking over at Nita, “thanks.”
“For what?”
“Uh, saving my butt?”
Nita waved a hand. “It was my turn, that’s all. In a few weeks it’ll probably be yours. Weren’t we supposed to have stopped keeping track?”
Kit just smiled a crooked smile at her. But then Nita had a thought, and glanced down at Ponch. “Come to think of it, though, I thought you said you weren’t going to take the boss out again without me.”
Ponch dropped his head a little. He went, he said. So I had to go, too. Then he brightened. But you got here when I thought you would, so it’s all right!
Nita gave Kit a look. “Your dog has me on a schedule?” she said.
Kit shrugged. “He has a very well-developed time sense,” Kit said. “Ask him about feeding time, for example.”
Ponch began to jump up and down in excitement.
“Now you’ve done it,” Nita said. “Darryl, better let us out of here before the Gut That Walks here starts ripping the place up.”
“He can if he wants,” Darryl said. “I’m closing this section down for the moment. That redecoration wan wait. But for now…”
Slowly, all around them, the brightness dimmed down. “I left you a space to slip out through,” Darryl said, as the space darkened, like a stage at the end of a play. “Just behind you there.” He pointed off toward a sliver of bright light in the near distance that cast a long beam across the shining floor. “But in the meantime, just in case the Guy in the Suit comes back?” He looked over at Nita, grinning. “This is what he’ll find.”
Through the now nearly-complete darkness, a spotlight shone down. In the spotlight, a little toy clown rode a tiny bicycle around and around, never stopping, never looking up. Nita looked at it and thought of a windup mouse going around and around in little circles, waiting for the cat.
“Boobytrap,” Darryl said. “It’ll trigger the oversight routine if Anyone drops by. And if It does… I think I can find a way to make It sorry all over again.”
Kit nodded. “So let’s get out of here. You sure you know the way back?”
“In my sleep,” Darryl said, and grinned.
Kit held out a hand. “Welcome to the Art, brother,” he said.
Darryl took the hand, then pulled Kit clos
e and hugged him hard. Then he let go, turned to Nita, and hugged her, too.
“Later,” she said. “Go home! But when you’re ready? Come find us.”
Kit nodded. “We’re in the book.”
Darryl rolled his eyes. “The book,” he said, and grinned. “You guys are so rigid! Can’t wait to show you how to swing out and use something a little less concrete.”
And he flashed that astonishing grin at them one last time and vanished with the ease of someone who’s been doing it for years.
Kit and Nita looked at each other. “Your place or mine?” Nita said.
“My folks are going to yell at me,” Kit said, “so let’s do mine first.”
Nita smiled a small wry smile. “You just want me to help you take the heat.”
Mind reader, Kit said. Come on.
They headed for the doorway of light and vanished through it together.
***
Some distance away, in a special-ed classroom in Baldwin, the afternoon routine was proceeding as usual when one of the teachers saw something unusual happen.
Darryl McAllister closed the book in his lap, glanced around, sighed and straightened up..
The teacher went over to the boy, and got down beside him where until now he’d been sitting on the floor, gazing down into the open book and rocking. “Hey there, Darryl,” he said. “What’s up?”
There was a pause. “I think,” Darryl said at last, in a voice that cracked a little with not having been used for words for some weeks, “I think I’m done here.”