The Wizard's Dilemma, New Millennium Edition Read Free

then at least aware (if not necessarily self -aware)—even things that science didn’t usually think were aware, because science didn’t yet know how to measure or overhear the kinds of consciousness they had.
    Nita took a deep breath, let it out again. This was the core of wizardry for her: hearing it all going, and keeping it all going—putting in a word in the Speech here or a carefully constructed spell there, fixing broken things, helping what was hurt to heal and get going again… and being astonished, delighted, sometimes scared to death in the process, but never, ever bored.
    Nita said a single word in the Speech, at the same time stroking one hand across the empty air in search of the access to the little pinched-in pocket of time space where she kept some of her wizardly equipment.
    Responsive to the word she’d spoken, a little tab of clear air went hard between her fingers. She pulled it from left to right like a zipper, and then slipped her hand into the opening and felt around. A second later she came out with a piece of equipment she usually kept ready, a peeled rod of rowan wood that had been left out in full moonlight. She touched the claudication closed again, then looked around her and said to the grass, “Excuse me…”
    The grass muttered, unconcerned; it knew the drill. Nita lifted the rod and began, with a speed born of much practice, to write out the single long sentence of the short-haul transit spell in the air around her.
    The symbols came alive as a delicate thread of pale white fire, stretching around her from the point of the rowan wand as she turned: a chord of a circle, an arc, then the circle almost complete as she came to the end of the spell, writing in her “signature,” her name in the Speech, the long chain of syllables and symbols that described who and what she was today.
    With a final figure-eight flourish, she knotted the spell closed, pulled the wand back, and let the transit circle drop to the grass around her, an arabesqued chain of light. Turning slowly, Nita began to read the sentence, feeling the power lean in around her as she did so. The pressure and attention of local space started focusing in on what Nita was saying she wanted of it: relocation to this set of spatial coordinates, life support set to planet-surface defaults—
    The silence began to build around her, the sound of the world listening. Nita read faster, feeling the words of the Speech reach down their roots to the Power That had first spoken them and taught them what they meant. The lightning of that first intention struck up through them and then through Nita, as she said the last word, completed the spell, and flung it loose to work—
    Wham! The displacement of transported air always sounded loud on the inside of the spell, even if you’d engineered the wizardry to keep it from making a lot of noise on the outside. The crack of sound, combined with the sudden blazing column of light from the activated transit, left Nita momentarily blind and deaf.
    Only for a moment, though. A second later the light died back, and she was standing near the end of a long jetty of big rough black stones, all spotted and splotched with seagull guano and festooned with washed-up seaweed in dull green ribbons and flat brown bladdery blobs. The sun hung blinding over the water to the west, silhouetting the low flat headlands that were all she could see of the Rockaway Beach peninsula from this angle. Somewhere beyond them, lost in mist and sun glare and half submerged beneath the horizon line, lay the skyline of New York.
    Nita pulled her jacket a little more tightly around her in the chilly spray-laden wind and turned to look over her shoulder. Down at the landward end of the quarter-mile-long jetty, where it came up against the farthest tip of West End Beach, was a squat white box of a building with an antenna sticking up from it: the Jones Inlet navigational radio beacon. Beyond it there was no one in sight—the