by Diane Duane
But she didn’t get what she was expecting. When the spell started, Nita staggered back against one of the trees, half blinded. It was not just points of light that she was perceiving, but fields of it, whole patches of it—great tracts of residual wizardry that just had not gone away.
It’s not supposed to do that! Nita thought, almost in panic. Ideally, the traces of a wizardry were gone by at least forty-eight hours later. But this—! It looked either as if the biggest wizardry on Earth had been done here about two days ago, or else—and this concerned Nita more—all the wizardries done here in the past were still here, in residue.
She shut the spell down and stood there shaking. That last thought was not a good one. Doing a wizardry over another one, overlaying an old magic, was extremely dangerous. The two spells could synergize in ways that neither the wizard who wrought the original spell, or the one presently working, could have expected. The results could be horrendous.
No wonder, she thought. If that’s the reason for last night, something like that—Was I working in an overlay area? Oh God.
She called up the detection spell’s result in memory for a moment more to look at it. All Kilquade was covered by one big patch of residual wizardry; all Bray was covered by another. There was in fact very little open space in this area that had not had a wizardry done on it at one time or another. She thought with horror of what might have happened had she done a teleportation spell closer to a more heavily overlaid area, like Bray. It was not a pleasant prospect at all.
Nita slipped out of the woodland and walked until she reached the Boghall Road. It was a suburban street, with a church and a school at one end, a computer factory at the other end, and a baker’s, little shops, and many more houses and housing estates scattered all along it or branching off from it. Mothers were out walking their babies in buggies; kids were out kicking soccer balls around. It looked like an entirely normal place...and so it was, since there were wizards working in it.
Nita made her way down to the address she was looking for, on a street called Novara Court. All the houses here were very much the same. There wasn’t much in the way of trees, as if people didn’t want to block the view of Sugarloaf to the west, or Bray Head immediately to the east. And it was a handsome view.
Nita found the house she was looking for and had an attack of shyness practically on the doorstep. How can I just go up and knock on the door and ask if there are wizards there? But that was exactly what she needed to do, and there was no way out of it. Nita went up and rang the bell.
There was a long, long wait. Oh good, Nita was just thinking, no one’s home—when the door was abruptly pulled open.
And Nita stared, because the person who’d answered the door was Ronan, from the chicken place. He looked at her in astonishment.
She regarded him in much the same mood. Once again she was on the end of one of those coincidences that normal people don’t take seriously, but of which wizards’ lives are made, since wizards know there are no coincidences. And I told Aunt Annie I was coming to see him! Nita thought. I’ve really got to watch what I say around here! But something else was going on as well. Nita found herself twitching with an odd tremor. It was something like anticipation, a shiver down her back at the sight of him scowling at her, tall and dark. So strange—but never mind that now—!
“R. Nolan?” she said. “—Junior?”
“Yeah,” he said, perplexed. “You’re from—”
“I’m on errantry,” Nita said, “and I greet you.”
He looked at her with his mouth open, suddenly looking like one of the terminally shocked fish that Nita had seen in the fish market in Bray the other morning. “You?” he said.
“Me.”
“You mean you’re one of us?”
“Uh.” Nita made a wry face at him, and lowered her voice. “I’ve been places where the people had tentacles, and more eyes than you’ve got fingers and toes,” she said, “and they didn’t make this much fuss about it. Can we talk? I require an advice.”
It was the formal phrasing for a wizard on assignment who needed technical information. Ronan stared at her and said, “Just a minute. I’ll get my jacket.”
The door shut in her face, and Nita stood there on the doorstep, feeling like an idiot. After a moment Ronan came out again, and they walked. “Let’s get out of here,” he said. “I don’t want to be seen.”
Nita had to laugh at that, though she got an odd twinge of pain when he said it. Not seen with me? Or what? “What, am I contagious or something?” she said as they made their way down to the Boghall Road.
“No, it’s just—” He didn’t say what it was just. “Never mind. —You mean you’re a—”
“Can we stop having this part of the conversation?” Nita said, both irritated and amused. “There’s more stuff to talk about. Listen. This going ‘sideways’ thing—”
“What?”
“Going ‘sideways,’” Nita said, getting a little more irritable. “I assume you know about it. Well, it’s happened to me twice in the past two days, and I don’t mind telling you that I don’t like it very much—”
“You went sideways?” Ronan said. “We’re not allowed to go sideways—”
“Listen,” Nita said, “maybe you’re not allowed to go sideways, fine, but I did it, and not on purpose, let me tell you. Now I need to talk to someone and find out what’s going on here, because last night I was almost eaten by wolves and nearly stepped on by an Irish elk!”
“Holy freaking shite,” said Ronan, almost in awe.
Nita smiled slightly. “My feelings exactly,” she said. Then, while they walked, she spent the next fifteen minutes or so carefully telling him how things had been going for her since she arrived.
When she finished, Ronan was staring at her again. “You could have been killed!”
“Tell me something I don’t know,” Nita said. “And I would like to avoid being killed in the future! Is this kind of thing normal around here?”
“Not really,” Ronan said. “At least, not for us. We’re not supposed to be doing that kind of thing to begin with. This whole area is badly overlaid.”
“I saw that,” Nita said. “But look...it’s not safe for this to be happening. If a nonwizard falls into one of these—”
“You got that in one,” Ronan said, looking grim. “Jeez, Kilquade, Kilquade was supposed to be comparatively quiet. Not like Bray—”
“Things have gotten very unquiet up that way,” Nita said. “Do you have a Senior or an Advisory around here that we can go talk to? This is not good at all.”
“Sure. She’s up in Enniskerry.”
“Then let’s get up there. I’m on active, and I don’t know what for, and if I can’t do wizardry for fear of overlays, I am going to have a nasty problem on my hands. Have you got your manual?”
He looked at her. “Manual?”
“You know. Your wizard’s manual, where you get the spells and the ancillary data.”
“You get them out of a book??”
Nita was confused. “Where else would you get them?”
Ronan looked at her as if she was very dim indeed. “The way we always have—the way the druids and bards did it for two, three thousand years, maybe more. We do it by memory!”
Now Nita’s mouth fell open. “You learn the whole manual by heart? The whole body of spells?! How can you possibly—”
“Well, the basic stuff, yeah! You have to learn the basic incantations that make more detailed information available. But mostly, mostly you learn it by heart—the area restrictions, the address list—if a change happens, you usually just wake up knowing about it one morning—and you make sure you remember it.” He shook his head. “Why? You mean you get it written down?”
Nita pulled out her manual and showed it to him. Ronan paged through it with a mixture of fascination and disgust. “I can’t believe this. This makes it too easy!”
All Nita could do was laugh at him. “Are you kidding? Do you have an
y idea how thick this thing can get sometimes? I think we have a little more information to deal with than you do over here.”
“Don’t be so sure,” Ronan said, handing the manual back to her in some irritation. “We may be a smaller place than you Yanks have to deal with, but it’s a lot more complicated.”
They walked down the street, each in a state of mild annoyance with the other. “Look,” Nita said, “let’s not fight over details. Are there a lot of you working around here? How many of you are there?”
Ronan shook his head. “Not a lot, at the moment. For a while we were doing okay, when the job market was decent. But things have already started going south: it’s getting to be like the old days again, when everybody who wanted to work had to emigrate. More people are leaving every month. Stands to reason some of them are going to be wizards…”
“Leaving. You mean just leaving the country?”
“What else are we supposed to do? People are getting over to the States and England and Australia as fast as they can, before their savings vanish completely. Companies are closing everywhere; people are getting fired and there are no new jobs opening up. You may be a wizard, but you’ve got to have a job, too. You know the universe doesn’t let you just make food or money out of nothing.”
“Yeah,” Nita said. “I know…”
Ronan looked at her with more annoyance. “But there are still enough locals to do the work that needs done around here. Can’t understand why you’ve been put on active all of a sudden.”
“Mmmh,” Nita said. “Possibly past experience.” She didn’t feel like going into much more detail. “Never mind that. Let’s go see your Senior.”
“We’ll have to take the bus,” Ronan said.
***
So they did. Enniskerry was about four miles away, across the motorway and up a a twisty turny road which the locals called “the thirteen-bend road”, which paralleled the course of the Glencree river as it poured down through beautiful woodland. Occasional old houses were scattered along the way, but mostly the road was bounded by hedges on one side and walls on the other, and the river chattered by on the far side of the hedge.
Nita and Ronan sat in the top of the bus, which was fortunately empty again. “I can’t believe it,” Ronan kept saying. “I mean, a Yank—!”
“Look, some of us have to be wizards, don’t we?” Nita said, rolling her eyes. “We can’t function entirely with emigrants from Ireland.” She grinned at him wickedly.
“Well, I suppose. But books!”
“You should see my sister,” Nita said. “She gets hers out of a laptop.”
“Janey mack,” Ronan said in wonder and disgust.
At last they came to Enniskerry village. It was a pretty place, surrounded by some small housing estates, but with an even more village-y center than Greystones. At the heart of it was a handsome little red-and-white hotel with peaked roofs, a pub, a couple of small restaurants, some small antique stores and a food shop and florist. In the middle of the town’s triangular “square” was a wonderful blocky Victorian clock tower with a domed top and a weathervane. “Do we get off here?” Nita said.
“Not unless you want to spend ten minutes climbing the steepest hill you’ve ever seen.”
“Pass,” Nita said.
The bus paused in the square for a couple of minutes, then continued up the winding road that led westward. Where the road topped out, near another housing estate and a little store, they got off. Ronan turned and began to walk back down the hill. “It’s over here,” he said.
They walked down the hill and crossed the road to a pair of wooden gates between two pillars, one of which had the words KILGARRON HOUSE painted on it. “Impressive,” Nita said.
“Wait till you see inside.”
There was a little side gate; Ronan opened it for her, and they stepped through. Inside it was a curving driveway leading to a large two-storey house, square and blocky, maybe a farmhouse once. It had a beautiful view of the Dargle Valley, leading downward toward Bray, and also of the church and water meadow just down the hill.
They went up to the door and knocked. There was a long pause, and then a little old lady came to the door. She was very fresh-faced and smooth-skinned, and only the fact that her hair was quite silver really gave away much about her age. She was a little stocky, with very sharp, intelligent eyes. “Morning, Mrs. Smyth,” said Ronan.
“And good morning to you,” she said in a faintly Scots accent. “Are you on business or pleasure?”
“Business,” Ronan said, nodding at Nita. “She’s on errantry.”
“I greet you, ma’am,” Nita said, as she would have said to an American Senior she was meeting for the first time.
The lady blinked at her. “Are you on active status?”
“Yes, I am. At least the manual says so.”
“Then you’d better come in and have a cup of tea, and tell me what it’s all about.”
Nita rolled her eyes slightly at the prospect of yet another cup of tea, and resigned herself to the inevitable.
***
They were made comfortable in the sitting room, and tea was brought out, and Mrs. Smyth poured it out formally for them, and gave them cookies and sandwiches, and cakes, and encouraged them to eat more of them before she would let them tell her anything about what was going on. Then Nita began to explain again, as she had to Ronan. When she mentioned Tualha, Mrs. Smyth’s eyes widened. When Nita mentioned going sideways, Mrs. Smyth’s jaw almost dropped. “My dear,” she said. “I hope you understand that you must not do that again.”
“Ma’am, I didn’t do it on purpose the first time. Or the third. The only time I did it on purpose was when I looked at Sugarloaf. I won’t do it again.”
“I wonder...” Mrs. Smyth said. “Well. Something’s certainly in the wind. We’re coming up on Lughnasád; I’d be surprised if it didn’t have something to do with that.”
Ronan bit his lip. Nita looked from one of them to the other. “I hope you’ll forgive me if I don’t know what’s going on here,” she said, “but if I’m going to be on active status...”
“No, indeed. Lughnasád is one of the four great seasonal holidays—with Beltain, Samhain, and Imbolc. It used to be the harvest festival, a long time ago: people would celebrate the first crops coming in. And it also celebrated the turning of the heat of the summer toward the cooler weather.”
“The heat of the summer?” Nita said, mildly skeptical. So far it had only gotten up into the high seventies, though the sun had been warm enough.
Mrs. Smyth blinked at her. “Oh, you’re used to it warmer where you lived? We’re not, though. I think the drought is just about official now, isn’t it, Ronan?”
“They said they were going to start water rationing,” Ronan said.
“So,” said Mrs. Smyth. “I suppose that’s another indication as well. Anyway, Nita’s quite right; if this is allowed to continue, even the non-wizardly will start to notice it...and be endangered by it. This is, mmm, an undesirable outcome.”
Nita couldn’t help but laugh at that. “But what are you going to do about it?”
