Kit opened the back door. Ponch threw one last longing look at what Kit’s mama was doing with the chicken, then threw himself past Kit, hitting the screen door with a bang! and flying out into the driveway.
Kit followed him. At the driveway’s end, he paused, looking up briefly. It was almost dark already; the bare branches of the maples were showing black against an indigo sky. January was too new for any lengthening of days to be perceptible yet, and the shortness of the daylight hours was depressing. But at least the holidays were over. Kit could hardly remember a year when he’d been less interested in them. For his own family’s sake, he’d done his best to act as if he was, but his heart hadn’t been in the celebrations, or the presents. He hadn’t been able to stop thinking about the one present Nita most desperately wanted, one that not even the Powers That Be could give her.
Kit sighed and looked down the street. Ponch was down there near curbside in the rapidly falling dark, saluting one of the neighbor’s trees. “Back this way, please?” he said, and waited until Ponch was finished and came galloping back up the street toward him.
Kit made his way into the backyard again, with Ponch bouncing along beside him, wagging his tail. “Where did the ‘meaning of life’ thing come from all of a sudden?” Kit said.
I heard you ask about it
, Ponch said.
The question had, indeed, come up once or twice recently in the course of business, around the time Ponch started talking regularly. “So?” Kit said, as they made their way past the beat-up birdbath into the tangle of sassafras at the back of the yard, where they were out of sight of the houses on either side. “Come to any conclusions?”
Just that your mama’s easy to shake down for dog biscuits.
Kit grinned. “You didn’t need to start talking to her to find that out,” he said. He reached into his pocket, felt around for the “zipper” in it that facilitated access to the alternate space where he kept some of his spells ready, and pulled one out — a long chain of strung-together words in the Speech that glowed a very faint blue in the swiftly falling darkness. “I’d keep it in the family, though,” Kit said to Ponch. “Don’t start asking strangers complicated philosophical questions… It’ll confuse them.”
It may be too late
, Ponch said.
Kit wondered what that was supposed to mean, then shrugged. He dropped the spell-chain to the ground around them in a circle. The transit wizardry knotted itself together at the ends in the figureeight wizard’s knot, and from it a brief shimmering curtain of light went up and blanked the night away as displaced air went thump! and Kit’s ears popped. A moment later he and Ponch were standing together in Tom’s backyard, behind the high privet hedge blocking the view from Tom’s neighbors’ houses. Across the patio, lights were on in the house, and banging noises were coming from the kitchen.
Kit and Ponch made their way past the stucco koi pond toward the sliding porch doors, Ponch shaking his head emphatically. “Are your ears bothering you?” Kit said, as the sound of barking came from further inside the house.
Only lately
, Ponch said.
“Sorry. I’ll have a look at the spell later.” Kit pushed the patio door to one side and went into Tom’s dining room. That space flowed into the living room area, where Tom’s desk sat in a corner, past the sofas and the entertainment center. But at the moment all the action was in the kitchen, off to the left, where big, dark-haired Carl, his fellow Advisory wizard, was doing something to the strip lighting that ran below the upper kitchen cupboards. Tom was leaning against the refrigerator, holding a cup of coffee, with the expression of a man who wants nothing to do with whatever’s happening.
“Hi, Kit,” he said, as Ponch ran through the kitchen and out the other side, heading toward the bedrooms, where the sheepdogs Annie and Monty were barking at something. “Coke?”
“Yeah, thanks.” Kit sat down at the table and watched Carl, who was bent over sideways under the upper cupboards and making faces.
“I told him to call an expert,” Tom said as he fished a can of Coke out of the refrigerator and sat down with Kit at the dining room table, where a number of volumes of the Senior version of the wizard’s manual were piled up.
“We’re expert enough to change the laws of physics temporarily,” Carl muttered. “How hard can wiring be?”
With a dunk! all the lights in the house went out.
Carl moaned. Kit could just see Tom make a flicking motion with one finger at the circuitbreaker box near the kitchen door, and the lights came back on again. “You should stick to physics,” Tom said.
“Just one more time,” Carl said, and went down the stairs to the basement.
“This will be the sixth ‘one more time’ in the past two hours,” Tom said. “I’m hoping he’ll see sense before he blows up the transformer at the end of the street. Or maybe the local power station.”
“I heard that!” said the voice from the basement.
Kit snickered, but not too loudly.
“Anyway,” Tom said, “thanks for coming over. Briefly, one of our wizards is missing, and I’d like you to look into it.”
This was a new one on Kit. “Missing? Anybody I know?”
“Hard for me to tell. Here’s the listing.” Tom pulled down the topmost manual and opened it; the pages riffled themselves to a spot he had bookmarked. It was a page in the master wizards’ address listing for the New York area, and one block of information glowed a soft rose. Kit leaned over to look at it. In the
Speech, it said:
McALLISTER, Darryl
18355 Hempstead Turnpike
Baldwin, NY 11568
(516)555-7384
power rating: 5.6 +/-.3
status: on Ordeal
initiation: 4777598.3
completion:
duration to present date: 90.3
resolution: nil
Kit stared at the duration figure for a moment: There was something wrong with it. “That doesn’t look right,” he said at last. “Did a decimal point get misplaced or something? That looks like months.”
“It is months,” Tom said. “Just a whisker over three, which is why it came up for attention today.
The manual normally flags such extended Ordeals to be audited by a Senior.”
“I thought nobody was allowed to interfere with a wizard’s Ordeal,” Kit said. “It’s what determines whether you ought to be a wizard in the first place. Whether you can run into the Lone Power and survive…”
“Normally that’s true,” Tom said. “But Ordeals aren’t always so clear-cut; they do sometimes go wrong. A resolution can get delayed somehow, or there can be local interference that keeps the resolution from happening. An area’s Seniors are allowed a certain amount of information about Ordeals among probationary wizards who’d be in their catchment area if things went right, especially if something goes wrong in a specific sort of way — a stuck Ordeal, or a contaminated one.
We have some latitude to step in and try to kick that Ordeal back into operation again. While interfering as little as possible.“
Kit nodded, glancing to one side as Carl came up from the basement with a very large roll of duct tape. “Ah,” Tom said. “The substance that binds the universe together.”
“We’ll see,” Carl said, and bent himself over sideways again.
“It’s a brute force solution,” Tom said. “Inelegant. The phone’s right there!”
Carl ignored him and started doing something with the duct tape.
“So now we come to this kid,” Tom said, indicating the highlighted listing again.