, she thought. I’m dreaming already. Isn’t that wild?
Nita glanced around at the endless dark stretching away from her on all sides. Off in the distance she saw light coming from somewhere to fall on the dark surface on which she stood. The source of the light was it-self invisible, but in its beam she could see more snow gently falling.
Okay
, she thought, and for lack of anything better to do, she started walking toward the light. As she went, Nita became aware of a low mutter of sound out in the further reaches of the darkness. It took some minutes of walking through the dark before she recognized it as human voices speaking: a slow, muted sound of conversation, coming from somewhere else, but not seeming to matter, particularly. It was as if Nita was hearing these voices through someone else, filtered, and the filter made it all seem not so much unimportant, but simply unreal, unrelated to anything that mattered, as if a TV show about some subject that bored you was blathering away in the background, while you were too busy with other things to turn it off.
She shivered a little, recognizing the kinship of this filter with the one she’d been seeing life through lately. Can something like this get stuck in place? Nita wondered. It wasn’t an idea she much liked. And suddenly it made that don’t-care, don’t-feel-like-it attitude seem not so much like a self-indulgence as a danger. What kind of wizard doesn’t care? she thought. What kind of wizard—
The sound of the voices began to dwindle, just as Nita thought she was about to understand what they were saying. She breathed out in frustration, and kept on walking. The light was a little closer now, and she could see the white spotlight it made on the black floor; the snow kept gently falling through the light, though as far as Nita could see, it vanished as soon as it came in contact with the ground. “Hello?” she said. “Anybody here?”
No answer came back. She kept on walking. That spot of light had been about a quarter mile away when she noticed it. Now it was maybe a short block away, and as she peered at it, Nita thought she saw something sitting in it, a starkly illuminated shape — mostly white and black and red, with discordant splashes of other colors — sitting there in a pool of its own shadow.
It was the clown.
How about that
, Nita thought. She didn’t hurry. That was a good way to wake up prematurely.
She just kept on walking, and when she was about ten yards away, what seemed like a polite distance to her, Nita stopped.
“Hello?” she said again.
The clown sat in the middle of the spotlight and didn’t look up.
“I talked to you the other night, right?” Nita said. “Or you tried to talk to me, anyway.”
The clown just sat there. Its face was immobile. The big red nose, the bizarre purple wig sticking out from under the absurd little derby hat, the painted tear, all were exactly the same as they had been before. The clown sat there cross-legged in brightly patched, baggy pants, rocking very slightly in the stillness, while the snow falling all around began to taper off.
“I’m on errantry,” Nita said, “and I greet you.”
Nothing. The clown sat there, didn’t even turn its head toward her.
What’s the matter with you
? Nita thought. I’m going out of my way to help you get through to me, here
She thought for a moment, and then tried the on-duty wizards’ identification phrase in another of its commoner forms. “I am on the Powers’ business,” Nita said, “walking the worlds as do They; well met on the common journey!”
The clown just sat there with its head turned away, rocking. Nita started to get annoyed. Okay, she thought Let’s try this. Nita thought for a moment about what she was about to say in the Speech, wanting to make sure she got it right the first time, as she wasn’t sure what would happen if she mispronounced it.
“In Life’s name and the One’s,” Nita said, “I adjure you to speak to me!”
It was astonishing how just uttering the phrase made a kind of shocked silence after it. The manual had said there was no resisting such an injunction. Nonetheless, there followed one of the longest silences Nita could remember hearing. It took a long time before the clown looked up. Its eyes didn’t come to rest exactly on Nita, but looked a little way over her shoulder, and the voice that replied, not from the clown itself but from the darkness all around, was absolutely flat.
“I am One,” it said.
Chills ran up and down Nita’s back at the sound of a phrase unnervingly close to the one reputed to have caused the Big Bang, and much else. “Uh, I doubt that very much,” Nita said. “At least not the way I understand the term.”
“Then you are One.”
Nita’s expression was rueful. “Not by a long shot,” she said. “I’m just one more mortal… and a wizard.”
The clown still didn’t look right at her. But Nita felt a change coming over the darkness around the clown, or in the way she saw it. Instead of being frightening, now the shadows outside the light were filled with potential and promise, and the light now seemed painful and arid, an expression of everything stuck and hopeless — a scorching-bright loneliness that didn’t even have a word for itself.
The clown looked at her helplessly, and though it seemed frozen in place, except for the rocking, the painted tear was real. All the darkness shivered with its pain.
“What’s a mortal?” it said.
Nita actually winced. That was a question the answer to which she’d had entirely too much of lately. Yet Nita also could sense that out here, pinned down in the unforgiving light, was someone or something as vulnerable as a butterfly with glass wings. An angry or thoughtless answer could shatter it.
She thought about her response for a moment. “We’re the impermanent ones,” she finally said.
“The world may last, but we don’t.”
The eyes in the painted face widened.
The painted mouth went wide, and a great cry of anguish burst out of the clown. Nita took a breath, terrified that she’d screwed up, despite her caution.
Then she caught her breath again, because without warning there was suddenly another clown there, identical to the first one. It was standing, not sitting, and with an interested expression it watched the first clown scream. “I heard about the impermanence thing,” said the second clown.
“The Silence told me. What went wrong?”
Nita was finding all of this unusually weird, even for a dream. The Silence? What’s that supposed to mean
? She sat down outside the circle of the spotlight, not far from where the second clown stood in the “twilight zone,” halfway between the light and the shadow. “There are a lot of answers to that one,” Nita said. “One of them’s simple. Somebody invented Death.”
As she mentioned It, Nita heard that low menacing growl coming from somewhere out there in the shadows. Invoking the Lone Power, however obliquely, and even in dream, always had its dangers. But the growl seemed to have no real teeth in it. It sounds almost tired, Nita thought.
Weird
But of much more interest to her, though the second clown wouldn’t look directly at her, either, was the sudden live look in its eyes — a flash of recognition, a scowl of rejection.
“I know,” the second clown said. Its voice, his voice, was fighting with that robotic quality, the life in it struggling to get out.