Young Wizards
New Millennium Editions
Book 8:
Wizards at War
Diane Duane
Errantry Press
County Wicklow
Republic of Ireland
Copyright page
Wizards at War
New Millennium Edition
Errantry Press
County Wicklow, Ireland
Original edition copyright © 2005 by Diane Duane
Revised edition copyright © 2012 by Diane Duane
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Requests for permission to make copies of any part of the work should be mailed to the following address:
Donald Maass Literary Agency
Suite 801, 121 West 27th Street
New York, NY 10001
USA
Publication history
Harcourt Books hardcover, October 2005
HMH Magic Carpet Books paperback, 2007
Harcourt Trade Publishers ebook, 2010
Errantry Press International ebook edition, 2011
About this edition:
This New Millennium Edition of Wizards at War follows the text of the 2011 Young Wizards International Editions ebook, and has been revised and edited to conform with the new timeline established in the New Millennium Edition of So You Want to Be a Wizard.
Dedication
Once again, and more than usual,
for James White
Rubrics
“Never, never, never believe any war will be smooth and easy, or that anyone who embarks on the strange voyage can measure the tides and hurricanes he will encounter…. Once the signal is given, he is no longer the master of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events.”
—Sir Winston Churchill
…Moon reflected on the water:
The moon doesn’t get wet,
nor is the water broken.
Although its light is broad and great,
The moon’s reflected even
in an inch-wide puddle.
The whole moon and the entire wide sky
Lie mirrored in one dewdrop on the grass.
—Dogen, Genjokoan
To be the miracle,
Get out of its way.
—Distych 243, The Book of Night with Moon
Time Fix
Late April / Early May, 2010
1: Situational Awareness
In the bright light of an early mid-spring morning, a teenaged girl in faded blue jeans and a white V-necked T-shirt stood in her downstairs bathroom, brushing her teeth and examining herself with a critical eye. Have I lost weight? she thought, pulling the T-shirt a little away from her as she looked down. This doesn’t fit like it did two weeks ago…
The view in the mirror was more or less the usual one: light brunette hair cut just above her shoulders, a face neither unusually plain nor unusually beautiful, a nothing-special figure for a fifteen-year-old. But there were changes besides the fit of her T-shirt. Nita Callahan racked the toothbrush and then leaned close to the mirror over the sink, pulling down the skin above her right cheekbone with one finger. My tan looks pretty good, but are those circles under my eyes? she thought. I look wrecked. You’d think I hadn’t just had ten days off on a planet that was almost all beach. “I think I need a vacation from my vacation,” Nita muttered.
She started to turn away from the sink; then stopped, noticing something in the mirror. Nita leaned close to it again, pushing her bangs up with one hand and eyeing her forehead. Oh no, is that a pimple coming up? She poked it, felt that telltale sting. Great. I really need this right now!
She sighed. “Okay,” she said. Normally she wouldn’t have been enthusiastic about spending any significant part of her morning talking to a zit, but if she talked the pimple out of happening right now, it’d take her less effort than if she waited until later.
“Uh, excuse me,” she said in the wizardly Speech—and then stopped. Wait a minute. I don’t know the word for “pimple.”
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.