Wizards At War

Nita frowned. For a moment she considered the tube of facial scrub on the shelf by the sink, then shook her head and reached out toward what looked like empty air beside her. Her arm promptly disappeared nearly to the shoulder into that “empty air” as she dug deep into the pocket of otherspace where she normally kept her wizard’s manual. Nita felt around for a moment—I really have to clean this thing out; there’s way too much stuff in here—and then pulled out what to most people would have looked like a small hardbound library book an inch or so thick.

Nita started paging through it. Let’s see. Pimple, pimple … see “aposteme.” She shook her head, turning more pages. What’s an aposteme? Sometimes I really wonder about the indexing in this thing.

“Nita?” came a shout, faintly, from the other end of the house.

“What, Daddy?” she shouted back.

“Phone!”

Nita raised her eyebrows. At this hour of the morning? Not Kit; he wouldn’t bother with the phone, or he’d just text instead of calling the house phone. “Thanks!”

The word for “phone,” at least, she knew perfectly well. Nita held out her hand. “If you would?” she said in the Speech to the handset in question.

The portable phone from the kitchen appeared in her hand, its hold button blinking. She hit the button, meanwhile balancing her manual on the edge of the sink while she kept paging through it. “Hello?”

“Nita,” Tom Swale’s voice said. “Good morning.”

“Hey, how are you?” Nita said.

“A little pressed for time at the moment,” said her local Senior Wizard. “How was your holiday?”

“Not bad,” she said. “Listen, what’s the Speech word for ‘pimple’?”

There was a pause at the other end. “I used to know that,” Tom said.

“But you don’t anymore?”

“I’ll look it up. You should do that, too. How are your houseguests doing?”

“They’re fine as far as I know,” Nita said. “Probably having breakfast. I was just going to get some myself.”

“You should definitely do that,” Tom said. “But can you and Kit and the visiting contingent spare me and Carl a little time afterward?”

“Uh, sure,” Nita said. “I was going to call you anyway, because I heard some really strange things from Dairine about what went on here while we were away… and the manual wouldn’t say anything about the details. Where did you guys vanish to? Assuming I’m allowed to ask.”

“Oh, you’re allowed. That’s what I’m calling about. I have a lot of people to get in touch with today, but since you two and your guests are just around the corner, we thought we might drop by and brief you in person.”

“Sure,” Nita said. “I’ll let everybody know you’re coming.”

“Fine. An hour or so be all right?”

“Sure.”

“Great. See you then.”

Tom hung up, leaving Nita staring at the phone in her hand. She pushed the hang-up button and just stood there.

“Wow,” she said. She looked down at the manual, which now lay open to one of its many glossaries, and was showing her fourteen different variations on the “aposteme” word. “Kit?” Nita said.

A slightly muffled reply came seemingly from the back of the manual, along with the sound of barking somewhere in the Rodriguez household. “I can’t believe we’re out of dog food,” Kit said. “I leave for a week and a half, and this place goes to pieces.”

“We were doing just fine without you,” said another voice from two blocks away: Kit’s sister Carmela. “It’s not our fault you forgot to put dog food on the shopping list before you left. Neets, is it true he destroyed a whole alien culture in just ten days?”

Nita snorted. “Wouldn’t have been just him, ‘Mela. And we didn’t destroy it. We just happened to be there when they were going on to the next thing.”

“‘Just happened’?” Carmela said. Her tone was one of kindly disbelief. “You’re so nice to try to share the blame! See you later on…”

After a moment Kit said, “Am I allowed to think about teleporting her to Titan and dumping her in a lake of liquid methane?”

“No,” Nita said, feeling around under her bed for her sneakers. “It’d upset those microbes there … the ones Dairine’s been coaching in situational ethics.”

“The thought of Dairine coaching anybody in ethics…,” Kit said. “No offense, but sometimes I wonder if someday our solar system is going to be famous for having entire species made up of criminal masterminds.”

“Well, if the Powers That Be have slipped up, it’s too late to do anything now. And speaking of the Powers, you should get over here in about an hour. Tom and Carl want to talk to everybody.”

“We’re not in trouble, are we?”

“I don’t think so,” Nita said. “In fact, I think maybe they are.”

“And here I thought we were going to have a few quiet days before spring break was over,” Kit said.