So You Want to Be a Wizard, New Millennium Edition by Diane Duane Read Free Book Online

then said, “Kit, do you have any idea why this works? Leaves, pieces of string, designs on the ground…. It doesn’t make sense.”
    Kit kept drawing. “There’s a chapter on advanced theory in there, but I couldn’t get through it all the way. The magic’s supposed to have something to do with the way things interrupt space—”
    “What?”
    Kit shrugged. “Listen, that’s all I could get out of it. There was this one phrase that kept turning up, ‘spatial claudication.’ I think that’s how you say it. It’s something like, space isn’t really empty, it folds around objects—or even words—and if you put the right things in the right places and do the right things with them, say the right things in the Speech, then the magic happens. Where’s the string?”
    “This one with all the knots in it?” Nita reached down and picked it up.
    “Must have fallen out of my pocket. Stand on this end, okay?” He dropped one end of the string into the middle of the diagram, and Nita stepped onto it. Kit walked around her and the diagram with it, using the end of the string to trace a circle. Just before he came to the place where he had started, he used the willow wand to make a complicated sort of figure-eight mark—a “wizards’ knot,” the book had called it—and closed the circle with it. Kit tugged at the string as he stood up. Nita let it go, and Kit coiled it and put it away.
    “You’ve got to do this part yourself,” Kit said. “I can’t write your name for you—each person who’s working with a spell has to do their own to make sure they get it right. There’s a table in there with all the symbols in it.”
    Nita scuffed some pages aside and found it, a long list of English letters and numbers, and all the symbols in the Speech that were their direct equivalents. She got down to look at Kit’s name, so that she could see how to write hers, and group by group began to puzzle the symbols out. “Your birthday’s August twenty-fifth?”
    “Uh-huh.”
    Nita looked at the symbol for the year. “You’re in that special track at school,” she said. “Advanced placement.”
    “Yeah. Hate it,” Kit said, sounding entirely too cheerful. Nita knew that tone of voice—it was the one in which she usually answered Joanne, while trying to hide her own fear of what was sure to happen next. “It wouldn’t be so bad if they were my age,” Kit went on, looking over Nita’s shoulder and speaking absently. “But they keep saying things like ‘If you’re so smart, ‘ow come you talk so fonny?’“ His imitation of their imitation of his slight accent was precise and bitter. “They make me sick. Trouble is, they outweigh me.”
    Nita nodded and started to drawing her name on the ground inside the spell circle, using the substitutions and symbols that appeared in her manual. Some of them were simple and brief; some of them were almost more complex than she believed possible, crazy amalgams of curls and twists and angles like some insane kind of shorthand. She reproduced them carefully and tied all the symbols together, fastening them into a circle with the same wizards’ knot that Kit had used on the outer circle and on his own name.
    “Done?” Kit asked. He was standing up again, tracing the outer circle around one more time.
    “Yeah.”
    “Okay.” He finished the tracing with another repetition of the wizards’ knot and straightened up; then he put his hand out as if to feel something in the air. “Good,” he said. “Here, come check this.”
    “Check what?” Nita got up and went over to Kit. She put out her hand as he had, and found that something was resisting the movement of her hand through the air—something that gave slightly under increased pressure, like a mattress being pushed down and then springing back again. Nita felt momentarily nervous. “Can air get through this?”
    “I think so. I didn’t have any trouble the last couple of times I did it. It’s only supposed to