Wizards At War

They came out on the landing, and Kit paused there for a moment with his hand on the banister. Ponch went under his arm and paused, too, looking up at him. “Yeah,” Kit said.

I wasn’t sure if you were joking, Ponch said.

Kit laughed a single laugh. “Not this time.”

All right. Let’s do it, then.

Kit laughed again as they went into his room. “You’re on,” he said. “You point me in the right direction when you see what we need to do.” He tossed his manual onto the bed and looked around at the place: desk and work chair, chest of drawers, braided rug, pushpin-stuck maps of the Moon and Mars, neatly made bed. Everything was unnaturally clean, but then he’d been away for the better part of ten days and hadn’t had time enough to get things into their normal comfortable mess.

He sprawled on the bed, picked up the pillows at the head of it and started whacking them into a shape he could lean against, while trying to think some more about where to start attacking this problem. The weirdest thing is that space started stretching in some place where there was so little stuff to do a wizardry on. Anyone who could work directly on the structure of space-time is going to be really powerful…

That was the thought that kept making Kit think that once again the Lone Power was involved. But Tom and Carl seemed real eager to keep us from coming to that conclusion. And if the Powers That Be themselves think that this is something new…

He picked up the manual and flipped it open again, pausing briefly to look at the Wizard’s Oath, all by itself in a block of text in the middle of its page. Just after that came a section containing your own personal data—especially about the way the “long version” of your name looked in the Speech at the moment, information that was vital for doing spells. After that normally came the sections on spell writing, specialized vocabulary in the Speech, and so on. But now, before those sections, Kit’s manual contained a “notifications” area nearly a quarter inch thick. Every page of it was full of bold headings and blocks of text that rewrote themselves as you read them, constantly updating with real-time information from the physical universe. He glanced down at one heading: METEOROLOGICAL INTERVENTION:

Diversion of tropical disturbance/incipient cyclone “Pewa” (NOAA) aka CP102010 (JTWC) approved JD 2455307.2625. Cyclone centerpoint latitude: 21:11:15N, longitude 141:55:30E, SSE of Iwo Jima. Storm heat energy release presently holding at only 1.6 × 1012 watts/day, making it ideal for “bounce-away” intervention within thirty hours (cutoff time/latest implementation 2455312.8900). Intervention team is scouting for available backup wizards with past experience in tropical-latitude hydro and meteo work (usual SE Asia specs on assignment to master [interim] crisis evaluation group Earth). Seniors are urgently requested to check their local talent for availability.

Kit shook his head, for this was just one small problem on a planet full of them. On all the pages that followed were status reports on more interventions of every kind. Wizards all over the world were doing spells for everything, from melting back an overaggressive glacier to stopping a small southeast Asian “bush war” from breaking out by giving all the potential combatants a brief, profound case of amnesia. The fighters in question had instantly forgotten what they’d come for; by the time the spell wore off, all of them had wandered hours and miles away from the battlefield, and were universally so freaked out that they had no desire to find their way back..

Sweet, Kit thought, reading that précis with admiration. And smart. But that spell must have really cost the wizards. The psychotropic wizardries are so tough to work.