Wizard's Holiday, New Millennium Edition Read Free

area where she kept wizardries-in-progress and paged through it idly, pausing as she came to a page that was half full of the graceful characters of the Speech. But the last line was blinking on and off to remind her that the entry was incomplete. Oh yeah, she thought. Better finish this while the material’s still fresh.
    Nita sat back and eyed the page, munching on her sandwich. Since she’d first become a wizard, she tended to dream things that later turned out to be useful—not strictly predictions of the future, but scenes from her life, or sometimes other people’s lives, fragments of future history. The saying went that those who forgot history were doomed to repeat it; and since Nita hated repeating herself, she’d started looking for ways to make better use of the information from her dreams, rather than just be suddenly reminded of them when the events actually happened.
    Her local Advisory Wizard had given her some hints on how to use “lucid” dreaming to her advantage, and had finally suggested that Nita keep a log of her dreams to refer to later. Nita had started doing this and had discovered that the dreams were getting easier to remember. Now she glanced down at the page and had a look at this morning’s notes. Reading them brought the images and impressions up fresh in her mind again.
    Last night’s dream had started with the sound of laughter, with kind of an edge to it. At first Nita had thought that the source of the laughter was her old adversary, the Lone Power, but the voice had been different. There was an edge of malice to this laughter, all right, but it was far less menacing than the Lone One had ever sounded in Nita’s dealings with it, and far more ambivalent. And the voice was a woman’s.
    Then a man’s voice, very clear: “I’ve been waiting for you for a long time, ” he says. His voice is friendly. The timbre of the voice is young, but there’s something behind it that sounds really old somehow. Nita closed her eyes, tried to remember something more about that moment than the voice. Light! There was a sense of radiance all around, and a big, vague murmuring at the edge of things, as if some kind of crowd scene was going on just out of Nita’s range of vision.
    And there was barking, absolutely deafening barking. Nita had to smile at that, because she knew that bark extremely well. It was Kit’s dog, Ponch, barking excitedly about something, which wasn’t at all strange. What was strange was the absolute hugeness of the sound, in the darkness.
    The darkness, Nita thought, and shivered once as the image, which hadn’t been clear this morning, suddenly presented itself. “Record,” she said to the manual, and sat back with her eyes closed.
    Space, with stars in it. Well, you’d expect space to be dark. But slowly, slowly, some of the stars seemed to go faint, as if something filmy was getting between her and them, like a cloud, a creeping fog…
    The dark fog had crept so slowly across Nita’s field of vision, swallowing the stars. Now that she was awake, the image gave her the creeps. Yet in the dream, somehow this hadn’t been the case. She saw it happening; she somehow wasn’t even surprised by it. In the dream, she knew what it meant, and its only effect on Nita had been to make her incredibly angry.
    She opened her eyes now, feeling a little flushed with the memory of the anger. Nita looked down at the manual, where the last line of the Speech, recording her last impression, was blinking quietly on and off, waiting for her to add anything further.
    She searched her memory, then shook her head. Nothing new was coming up for now. “Close the entry,” she said to the manual, and that last line stopped blinking.
    Nita shut the manual and reached out to pick up her sandwich and have another bite. It was frustrating to get these bits and pieces and not understand what they meant; but, eventually, when she got enough of them together, they would start to make some kind of