A Wizard Alone New Millennium Edition by Diane Duane Read Free Book Online Page A

head. “If he’s been offered wizardry, that means that there’s some problem to which he is the solution… so fairness doesn’t come into it. In whatever form was right for him, the Wizard’s Oath found its way to him, and he understood and accepted it. Our only business now is to find out how we can assist… without interfering with the basic challenge.”
    Kit nodded. “It makes you wonder, though,” he said. “Is he going to be able to get through this all right?”
    Tom sighed. “Kit, not all Ordeals are world-shaking events; at least, as seen from outside. Whatever struggle he’s caught up in, by definition he’ll have at least a fighting chance at winning through it; and it’ll be proportionate to his gifts… which may not seem obvious at first glance. Yours certainly weren’t.”
    Kit made a face. “And if he seems unlikely as a candidate, well… think how often, because of our own preconceptions, we miss the obvious and it takes the people we assumed were unlikely to be of any help to get us back on the rails, or show us something we completely missed. ‘The stone rejected by the builder becomes the cornerstone.’” Tom got a wry look then. “Which happens way too often to be accidental. Is the universe trying to tell us something important about the way it works, I wonder? That sometimes even what we call fate has an element of unpredictability?”
    Kit nodded. “Or maybe the One’s just saying, ‘Don’t be so sure you know it all.’”
    Tom stretched and leaned back in his chair. “Could be…” And he smiled. “See that? Being a wizard makes philosophers out of most of us eventually. As long as that’s not all it makes of you, you’re okay. Anyway, now you have to plan how to approach Darryl.” Tom chewed one lip briefly. “You may have to go to his home, secretly. But maybe you’d have better luck at his school.”
    “I’m not wild about sneaking around in his house,” Kit said. “School, yeah. I’d thought about that, too. But there are still too many ways to be noticed. I was considering another option.”
    “Oh?”
    “Ponch has been able to treat someone’s interior landscape like an exterior universe before,” Kit said. “He can go into Darryl’s head and take me with him … and maybe Darryl will find it easier to talk to me that way.”
    Tom brooded over that for a moment. “My initial reaction,” he said, “would be to say no. We’re uncertain enough about how the heck Ponch does what he does. Add that set of imponderables to whatever’s going on inside Darryl’s head…” He shook his head. “It starts getting uncomfortably complex.”
    “We’re wizards,” Kit said. “We’re supposed to learn how to get comfortable with the uncomfortably complex.”
    Tom gave Kit a look that would have seemed annoyed if there hadn’t been a resigned quality to it as well. “In theory,” he said, “of course, you’re right. But turning theory into practice without taking due care and attention can screw things up big-time.”
    Kit sat quietly, knowing better than to argue his case too hard with a Senior: that was a sure way to make it seem like he had some kind of ulterior motive.
    Tom looked off into the middle distance, pondering. “Yet here’s this atypically prolonged Ordeal,” he said, “and we can’t just let the kid go on suffering unnecessarily for the sake of caution and correctness. Some more information gathering, at least, seems prudent. But I want you to be very, very cautious, and watch yourself at least as carefully as you’re watching him. Even normal Ordeals are subjective, and getting another entity’s subjectivity involved with one, even temporarily, brings considerable dangers with it. This Ordeal, where the candidate is an autistic—” He shook his head. “He’ll very likely have unique coping mechanisms in place that it might not be easy to recognize as such, at first glance. I have to be concerned about the possibility of