He nodded, as if it was nothing out of the ordinary. “I notice things,” Penn’s grandfather said. “Though mostly I’m a mathematician.” He reached out to pick up the paperback lying on top of the tablet, turned it to face Nita, and she could see it was a Sudoku book. “So tell me. Who else in your family is a wizard?”
“My sister . . .”
“No. Outside of your own generation.”
“One of my aunts,” Nita said. “That’s all, as far as I know.”
“You’ve looked no further back than that?”
“I did once, but we only seem to go back five or six generations, and even then we keep skipping them. We may have been ‘outbreak’ wizards.” She used one of the terms in the Speech for newly established wizardly families, specifically the kind that occur in clusters, geographically or temporally speaking. There was some conjecture that this clustering might be a reflection of the Powers attempting to solve some problem that was about to arise. But there was no way to prove it one way or the other.
“A difference between us, then. Our family has had quite a few generations, going back into the 1500s at least.” He smiled slightly, a dry look. “Even family members who don’t know we have wizardry in the line always know there’s something a little odd about us. Though we do try to keep it quiet.” The smile went tighter. “We don’t mention it to the government, for one thing.”
Nita blinked. “I thought China was supposed to be . . . more culturally accepting of wizardry.”
“Sometimes that has been true. But cultures can change very quickly sometimes. And this is one of those times.”
“There’s supposed to be a saying,” Nita said. “They say it’s Chinese, anyhow. ‘May you live in interesting times . . . ’”
Penn’s grandfather nodded. “It’s Chinese . . . though I’m sure other people have said it, too. Other countries, other empires. The world’s changing faster than it ever used to. The change comes from a thousand directions, nowadays, and it leaves you wondering whether you ever actually knew what was going on.”
“I know how that feels,” Nita muttered.
“I looked you up in the Tao.” Penn’s grandfather said. Nita put her eyebrows up at that. She knew what the Tao was; to consider the wizard’s manual as being included in it made perfect sense, since the Tao was everything. “You’re older than I thought.”
“I’d think it would’ve told you how old I am,” Nita said.
“It told me what age you are. But how old you are is another story.” He had a swig of his beer. “Some of us seem to get pushed into being older quicker.”
It was as if he was almost daring Nita to say something. Finally she took a breath and said, “My mother died not long ago.”
She didn’t think she had ever put it to anybody quite that bluntly. The look the old man gave her was oddly congratulatory, as if he had been expecting her to soften the declaration somehow. “So did mine,” he said. “There seems to be a lot of that going around. The human condition . . .”
Nita was beginning to wonder if there was some kind of secret sport among Chinese wizards that involved being borderline rude all the time, and seeing how much of it you could get away with. If not, and if this was merely a personality thing, then it was definitely something Penn had gotten from his granddad. Well, she thought, two can play at that game. “People die,” Nita said, “people get born. Sometimes even in that order.”
He flashed a gap-toothed grin: an expression suggesting that he thought she should win a prize of some kind. “My daughter,” he said, “was a wizard of great skill. Weather was her specialty. She died much, much too young. It was an accident; insofar as anything’s ever truly an accident. But it was one of those events in which nobody living can see any sense.” He stared at a drop of condensation running down the neck of his beer bottle. “Your culture has it too, I think; the saying that the Powers ‘called somebody home.’ Because it makes no sense, what’s happened to them; there’s no other reason possible, or palatable, that this person who was walking around warm and vibrant one day is suddenly gone from the world.”
He shook his head. “The pain you have to suffer for such a thing—it makes no sense. And when there are young people involved, when you have a boy like Penn who worshiped his mother, and suddenly the world is broken and the Sun is black in his eyes because she’s not there anymore—”
Nita swallowed. “Entropy,” she said very quietly.
Penn’s grandfather nodded.
It occurred to Nita that the Powers That Be had known exactly what they were doing when they sent her as part of a team to mentor Penn. “He became a wizard after that, then?” she said.
“A year and a half later, after his father remarried and they all emigrated. It was a very sudden Ordeal.” And then he laughed at himself. “Well, what Ordeal isn’t? We’d all thought that perhaps Penn would be a skipped generation. But we were very wrong. Typical of him to show us so noisily how wrong we were.” He took another drink of his beer, put it down on the table, and turned the bottle around and around on top of one of many water-rings there. “Hell journey,” he said.
Nita held very still. That was not information the manual would ever have given her—certainly not without Penn’s permission, which wasn’t likely to have been granted. So-called hell journeys, Ordeal-fueled forays across multiple dimensional barriers, were famously associated with wizards who were very angry, or very stubborn, or very troubled, or all three. “Let me guess,” Nita said. “He went to try to get her back.”
“Of course he did. And you can guess who met him on the road. He doesn’t talk about it much. But what he has said is that the Lone One didn’t give him a lot of trouble. And though he’s all bluster and brag, our Penn, for some reason I believe him.” He picked up the bottle again, stared at the wet label. “Naturally he didn’t bring his mother back; when he came back he was like someone defeated in battle. Any return from Ordeal is a victory. But he didn’t see it that way.”
“I guess it might be,” Nita said after a moment’s thought, “that somebody who had that kind of introduction to wizardry might spend a lot of time later trying to find that first victory that was supposed to happen.”
“It very well could be,” Penn’s grandfather said. “I know little about what he actually does. That, too, might go back to his mother; she was usually very private about her practice in casual conversation. It was as if she felt that too much discussion of what she did might possibly attract certain others’ attention.”
Nita nodded. There were lots of wizards who felt it unwise or even unlucky to discuss with other wizards, let alone family and friends, what they did on errantry. Personal preference, she thought; I don’t know that it’s made a difference to me one way or the other . . .
The old man let out a long breath, and glanced around the room with the softened gaze of someone looking into another time. “She did a lot of work in here,” he said. “She’d have her version of a page of the Tao rolled out across this table like a drop cloth, a big display of maps and charts and satellite imagery. Half the world’s storms would go drifting across here while we tried to have supper around them, and Penn’s mama talked some of the worst ones out of what they were doing.”
“She was an aeromancer?” Nita said.
“She was.” His face twitched up in a gentler smile. “And with her being air, and Penn fire in his way, well, they fed on each other. He was in here a lot, afterward . . .”