"In the city, about a month ago. My mother and father went out antique hunting. There's this one part of Second Avenue where all the little shops are—and one place had this box of secondhand books, and I stopped to look at them because I always look at old books—and this one caught my eye. My hand, actually. I was going after a Tom Swift book underneath it and it pinched me...."
Nita chuckled. "Mine snagged me in the library," she said. "I don't know ... I didn't want Joanne—she's the one who beat me up—I didn't want her to get my pen, but I'm glad she didn't get this." She pulled her copy of the book out of her jacket as Kit straightened Up beside her. She looked over at him. "Does it work?" she demanded. "Does it really work?"
Kit stood there for a moment, looking at the replaced needles. "I fixed my dog's nose," he said. "A wasp stung him and I made it go down right away. And I talked to the rock." He looked up at Nita again. "C'mon," he said. "There's a place in the middle where the ground is bare. Let's see what happens."
Together they walked to the center of the hollow, where the pine trees made a circle open to the sky and the ground was bare dirt. Kit pulled out his willow wand and began drawing the diagram again. "This one I know by heart," he said. "I've started it so many times. Well, this time for sure." He got his book out of his back pocket and consulted it, beginning to write symbols into the diagram. "Would you look and see if there's anything else we need for a finding spell?"
"Sure." Nita found the necessary section in the index of her book and checked it. "Just an image of the thing to be found," she said. "I have to make it while you're spelling. Kit, do you know why this works? Leaves, pieces of string, designs on the ground. It doesn't make sense."
Kit kept drawing. "There's a chapter on advanced theory in there, but I couldn't get through it all the way. The magic is supposed to have something to do with interrupting space—"
"Huh?"
"Listen, that's all I could get out of it. There was this one phrase that kept turning up, 'temporospatial claudication.' I think that's how you say it. It's something like, space isn't really empty, it folds around objects—or words—and if you put the right things in the right place and do the right things with them, and say the right things in the Speech, magic happens. Where's the string?"
"This one with all the knots in it?" Nita reached down and picked it up.
"Must have fallen out of my pocket. Stand on this end, okay?" He dropped one end of the string into the middle of the diagram, and Nita stepped onto it. Kit walked around her and the diagram with it, using the end of the string to trace a circle. Just before he came to the place where he had started, he used the willow wand to make a sort of figure-eight mark—a "wizards' knot," the book had called it—and closed the circle with it. Kit tugged at the string as he stood up. Nita let it go, and Kit coiled it and put it away.
"You've got to do this part yourself," Kit said. "I can't write your name for you—each person in a spelling does their own. There's a table in there with all the symbols in it."
Nita scuffed some pages aside and found it, a long list of English letters and numbers, and symbols in the Speech. She got down to look at Kit's name, so that she could see how to write hers, and group by group began to puzzle the symbols out. "Your birthday's August twenty-fifth?"
"Uh-huh."
Nita looked at the symbol for the year. "They skipped you a couple grades, huh?"
"Yeah. It's rotten," Kit said, sounding entirely too cheerful as he said it. Nita knew that tone of voice—it was the one in which she usually answered Joanne, while trying to hide her own fear of what was sure to happen next. "It wouldn't be so bad if they were my age," Kit went on, looking over Nita's shoulder and speaking absently. "But they keep saying things like 'If you're so smart, 'ow come you talk so fonny?'" His imitation of their imitation of his accent was precise and bitter. "They make me sick. Trouble is, they outweigh me."
Nita nodded and started to draw her name on the ground, using the substitutions and symbols that appeared in her manual. Some of them were simple and brief; some of them were almost more complex than she believed possible, crazy amalgams of curls and twists and angles like those an insane stenographer might produce. She did her best to reproduce them, and tied all the symbols together, fastening them into a circle with the same wizards' knot that Kit had used on the outer circle and on his own name.
"Done?" Kit asked. He was standing up again, tracing the outer circle around one more time.
"Yup."
"Okay." He finished the tracing with another repetition of the wizards' knot and straightened up; then he put his hand out as if to feel something in the air. "Good," he said. "Here, come check this."
"Check what?" Nita got up and went over to Kit. She put out her hand as he had, and found that something was resisting the movement of her hand through the air—something that gave slightly under increased pressure, like a mattress being pushed down and then springing back again. Nita felt momentarily nervous. "Can air get through this?"
"I think so. I didn't have any trouble the last couple of times I did it. It's only supposed to seal out unfriendly influences."
Nita stood there with her hand resting against nothing, and the nothing supported her weight. The last of her doubts about the existence of magic went away. She might have imagined the contents of the book, or been purposely misreading. She might have dozed off and dreamed the talking tree. But this was daylight, the waking world, and she was leaning one-handed on empty air!
"Those guys who came across you when you had this up," she said, "what did they think?"
"Oh, it worked on them, too. They didn't even understand why they couldn't get at me—they thought it was their idea to yell at me from a distance. They thought they were missing me with the BB guns on purpose, too, to scare me. It's true, what the book said. There are people who couldn't see a magic if it bit them." He glanced around the finished circle. "There are other spells like this that don't need drawings after you do them the first time, and when you need them, they're there really fast—like if someone's about to try beating you up. People just kind of skid away from you."
"I bet," Nita said, with relish. Thoughts of what else she might be able to do to Joanne flickered through her head, but she pushed them aside for the moment. "What next?"
"Next," Kit said, going to the middle of, the circle and sitting down carefully so as not to smudge any of the marks he'd made, "we read it. Or I read most of it, and you read your name. Though first you have to check my figuring."
"How come?" Nita joined him, avoiding the lines and angles.
"Two-person spell—both people always check each other's work. But your name, you check again after I do."
Kit was already squinting at Nita's squiggles, so she pulled out her book again. and began looking at the symbols Kit had drawn in the dirt. There were clearly two sides to the diagram, and the book said they both had to balance like a chemical equation. Most of the symbols had numerical values attached, for ease in balancing, and Nita started doing addition in her head, making sure both sides matched. Eventually she was satisfied. She looked again at her name, seeing nothing wrong. "Is it okay?"
"Yeah." Kit leaned back a little. "You have to be careful with names, it says. They're a way of saying what you are— and if you write something in a spell that's not what you are, well..."
"You, mean... you change ... because the spell says you're something else than what you are? You become that?"
Kit shrugged, but he looked uneasy. "A spell is saying that you want something to happen," he said. "If you say your name wrong—"
Nita shuddered. "And now?"
"Now we start. You do your name when I come to it. Then, the goal part down there—since it's a joint goal, we say it together. Think you can do it okay if I go slow?"
"Yeah."
Kit took a deep breath with his eyes closed, then opened his eyes and began to read.
Nita had never heard a voice speaking a spell aloud before, and the effect was strang
e. Ever so slightly, ever so slowly, things began to change around her. The tree-sheltered quiet grew quieter. The cool light that filtered through the canopy of branches grew expectant, fringed with secrecy the way things seen through the edge of a lens are fringed with rainbows. Nita began to feel as if she was caught in the moment between a very vivid dream and the awakening from it. There was that feeling of living in a body—of being aware of familiar surroundings and the realities of the daylight world waiting to be resumed—yet at the same time seeing those surroundings differently, colored with another sort of light, another kind of time. On one level Nita heard Kit reciting a string of polysyllables that should have been meaningless to her—words for symbols, pieces of words, babble. Yet she could also hear Kit talking, saying casually, and, it seemed, in English, "We need to know something, and we suggest this particular method of finding the information..." And the words didn't break the expectancy, the listening silence. For once, for the first time, the dream was real while Nita was awake. Power stirred in the air around her and waited for her to shape it.
Magic.
She sat and listened to Kit. With each passing second she could catch more clearly the clean metallic taste of the equation as it began to form itself, flickering chill and bright in her mind. Kit's speech was giving it life, and with quiet, flowing efficiency it was going about its purpose. It was invoking the attention of what Nita might have called physical laws, except that there was nothing physical about them—they had to do with flows of a kind of power as different from ordinary energy as energy was from matter. The equation stretched and coiled and caught those powers within itself as the words wove it. Nita and Kit were caught in it, too. To Nita it seemed as if, without moving, she held out her hands, and they were taken—by Kit, and by the spell itself, and by the ponderous powers caught across from her in the dance. There was a pause: Kit looked across the diagrams at her.
Nita scowled at the symbols beside her and began to read them, slowly and with some hesitation—naming herself one concept or one symbol at a time, binding herself into the spell. At first she was scared, for she could feel the strangeness folding in close around her. But then she realized that nothing awful was happening, and as her name became part of the spell, that was what was sliding down around her, protecting her. She finished, and she was out of breath, and excited, and she had never been happier in her life.
Kit's voice came in again then, picking up the weave, rejoining the dance. So it went for a while, the strange words and the half-seen, half-felt movements and images falling into a rhythm of light and sound and texture, a song, a poem, a spell. It began to come whole all around them, and all around the tingling air stayed still to better hold the words, and the trees bent close to listen.
Kit came to the set of symbols that stood for his name and who he was, and read them slowly and carefully. Nita felt the spell settle down around him, too. He finished it and glanced up at Nita, and together they began the goal section of the spell. Nita did her best to make a clear image of the pen as she spoke—the silver case, gone a little scratched and grubby now, her initials incised up on the top, She hardly had time to wonder at the harmony their paired voices made before things began to change again. The shadows of the trees around them seemed to grow darker; the aura of expectancy grew sharp enough to taste. The silence became total, and their voices fell into it as into a great depth.
The formula for their goal, though longer than either of their names had been, seemed to take less time to say—and even stranger, it began to sound like much more than just finding a pen and being left alone. It began to taste of starfire and night and motion, huge and controlled, utterly strange. Saying the formula left Kit and Nita breathless and drained, as if something powerful had briefly been living and speaking through them and had worn them down. They finished the formula together, and gulped for air, and looked at each other in half-frightened expectation, wondering what would happen next.
The completed spell took effect. Nita had thought that she would gradually begin to see something, the way things had changed gradually in the grove. The spell, though, had its own ideas. Quick as a gasp it slammed them both out of one moment and into another, a shocking, wrenching transition like dreaming that you've fallen out of bed, wham! Instinctively they both hung on to the spell as if onto a railing, clutching it until their surroundings steadied down. The darkness had been replaced by a lowering, sullen-feeling gloom. They looked down as if from a high balcony onto a shadowed island prisoned between chill rivers and studded with sharp spikes of iron and cold stone.
(Manhattan?) Kit asked anxiously, without words. Nita felt frozen in place like a statue and couldn't turn to answer him—the spell was holding her immobile.
(It looks like Manhattan,) she said, feeling just as uneasy. (But what's my pen doing there?)
Kit would have shaken his head if he could have. (I don't get it. What's wrong here? This is New York City—but it never looked this awful, this dirty and nasty and...) He trailed off in confusion and dismay.
Nita looked around her. It was hard to make out anything on the island—there was a murky pall over the city that seemed more than just fog. There was hardly any traffic that she could see, and almost no light—in fact, in all of Manhattan there were only two light sources. In one place on the island—the east Fifties, it looked like—a small point of brittle light seemed to pulse right through steel and stone, throbbing dully like a sown seed of wildfire waiting to explode. The pulses were irregular and distressing, and the light was painful to look at. Some blocks to the south, well into the financial district near the south end of the island, another fire burned, a clear white spark like a sun seed, beating regularly as a heart. It was consoling, but it was very small.
(Now what?) Nita said. (Why would my pen be in this place?) She looked down at the dark grainy air below them, listened to the brooding silence like that of a beast of prey ready to spring, felt the sullen buildings hunching themselves against the oppressive sky—and then felt the something malevolent and alive that lay in wait below—a something that saw them, was conscious of them, and was darkly pleased.
(Kit, what's that?)
(It knows!) Kit's thought sang with alarm like a plucked string. (It knows we're here! It shouldn't be able to, but—Nita, the spell's not balanced for this. If that thing grabs us or holds us somehow, we won't be able to get back!)
Nita felt Kit's mind start to flick frantically through the memories of what he had read in his wizards' manual, looking for an idea, for something they could do to protect themselves.
She held very still and looked over his shoulder at his thoughts, even though part of her trembled at the thought of that dark presence that was even now reaching out toward them, lazy, curious, deadly. Abruptly she saw something that looked useful.
(Kit, stop! No, go back one. That's it. Look, it says if you've got an imbalance, you can open out your side of the spell to attract some more power.)
(Yeah, but if the wrong kind of power answers, we're in for it!)
(We're in for it for sure if that gets us,) Nita said, indicating the huge, hungry darkness billowing upward toward them like a cloud. (Look, we'll make a hole through the spell big enough for something friendly to fall into, and we'll take potluck.)
Nita could feel Kit's uncertainty as he started choosing from memory the words and symbols he would need. (All right, but I dunno. If something worse happens...)
(What could be worse?) Nita hollered at Kit, half in amusement, half in fear. The hungry something drew closer.
Kit started to answer, then forgot about it. (There,) he said, laying the equation out in his mind, (I think that's all we need.)
(Go ahead,) Nita said, watching anxiously as their pursuer got closer and the air around them seemed to grow thicker and darker yet. (You say it. Just tell me what to do and when.)
(Right,) Kit said, and began speaking in his mind, much faster than he had during the initial spelling. If that first magic ha
d felt like the weaving of a whole, this one felt like ripping something apart. Their surroundings seemed to shimmer uncertainly, the dark skyline and lead gray sky rippled like a wind-stirred curtain; even that stalking presence seemed to hesitate in momentary confusion. (Push,) Kit said suddenly, (push right there.) Nita felt the torn place that Kit had made in the spell, and she shoved clumsily at it with her mind, trying to make the hole larger.
(It's ... giving...)
(Now, hard!) Kit said, and Nita pushed until pain stabbed and stabbed again behind where her eyes should have been, and at the moment she thought she couldn't possibly push anymore, Kit said one short sharp syllable and threw the spell wide open like a door.
It was like standing at the core of a tornado which, rather than spinning you away to Oz, strips the roof off your home, opens the house walls out flat as the petals of a plaster flower, and leaves you standing confused and disbelieving in the heart of a howling of smoke and damned voices; or like moving through a roomful of people, every one of whom tries to catch your eye and tell you the most important thing that ever happened to him. Nita found herself deluged in fragments of sights and sounds and tastes and feelings and thoughts not her own, a madly coexisting maelstrom of imageries from other universes, other earths, other times. Most of them she managed to shut out by squeezing her mind shut like eyes and hanging on to the spell. She sensed that Kit was doing the same and that their stalker was momentarily as bewildered as they were by what was happening. The whirling confusion seemed to be funneling through the hole in the spell like water going down a drain—things, concepts, creatures too large or too small for the hole fell through it, or past it, or around it. But sooner or later something just the right size would catch. (Hope we get something useful,) Nita thought desperately. (Something bigger than that thing, anyway.)
And thump, something fitted into the hole with snug precision, and the crazy whirling died away, and the two of them had company in the spellweb. Something small, Nita felt; very small, too small—but no, it was big, too ... Confused, she reached out to Kit.