No answer. Nita looked around. There was nothing in any direction but the barren, gritty surface of the planet. That breathing, she thought, that’s the Pullulus. To her surprise, the idea didn’t upset her: The sound of it frightened her a lot less than the way it looked. And after a few moments, the heavy-breathing sound started to seem slightly comic, like someone pretending to be asleep so you’d go away.
Nita rolled her eyes. “Oh, come on,” she said to the darkness in the Speech. “Are you going to just leave me talking to myself here? Say something!”
It won’t answer you, said a voice from somewhere nearby. There is only one to whom it will answer, and that one’s not here.
She looked around to see who’d spoken. There wasn’t anyone to be seen. But from off to one side, there had to be a light shining, because suddenly Nita had a shadow.
Nita stared down at it. The shadow was a double one, as if the light sources producing it were in slightly different positions. She looked toward where the light should have been coming from. But there was nothing there but more barren rock and grit.
Nita looked down again. The shadow was fuzzy-edged, as if thrown by a candle, and the flickering continued. She scuffed at it curiously with one sneaker, then looked around. “Well,” she said, “I’m on errantry, and I greet you. Wherever you are…”
Everywhere, the voice said, for quite a while now.
There were all kinds of potentialities and forces running around in the universe that could truthfully say something like that. “You’re one of the Powers?” Nita said. “Ronan? Is that you? Or your buddy?”
She caught a distinct feeling of surprise from whatever she was talking to. You are thinking of one of the Great Intervenors, it said, the Light’s own designated Defender. No, I would not be anything so exalted.
She looked at the two fuzzy shadows lying out across the grit of Metemne. “You’re a dual-state being of some kind,” Nita said. “Like a twychild.”
Nothing like that. Was that a breath of wistfulness behind the thought? But something old… and something new.
Nita remembered her mother telling her an old poem and showing her the sixpence that an English friend had sent her to put in her shoe the day she married Nita’s dad. “Are you by any chance blue?”
The being was amused. No. But often borrowed.
“How come I can’t see you?” Nita said.
But you can, the being said. Her shadows flickered more energetically.
“That’s my shape,” Nita said. “Not yours.”
But all the shape I have is the one wizards give me, the being said.
Her shadow writhed and flickered against the dusty ground, and as if inside it, Nita caught a glimpse of a number of images melting one into another: something with wings, and then a long twining shape, like a faint light in the shadow—almost the shape of two snakes curling and sliding past each other, so that Nita was reminded of a caduceus. Matter, and the power to do things to matter, she thought. The idea, and the thing you say or do to make it happen—
“You’re wizardry,” Nita whispered. “Wizardry itself.”
Not quite. I’m peridexis: the combined effect of the words of the Speech and the power that lives within it. But without the ones who speak the words and decide how to use the power, there’s no wizardry. It always takes at least three…
“So you’re the ‘power surge’ we’ve been getting,” Nita said to the bright shapes in the shadow. “But also sort of the soul of the spell…”
Of every spell, yes. And to a certain extent, the manual.
“Wow,” Nita said. “It’s a shame you’re not usually this talkative.”
This isn’t a usual sort of time, said the voice of the peridexic effect. Now more than ever, wizards need their spells to give them some extra help.
“It’s going to surprise a lot of people that you’re conscious,” Nita said. As she spoke, she was studying the light submerged in her shadow. Curious, Nita got down on one knee to touch her shadow with a couple of fingers, and found that she could actually put her hand down into it. The bright shapes rose to meet her, and she felt the slight jolt of power as they did, as if she’d touched the poles of a battery with wet fingers.
Not many will notice, the peridexis said. Those who might be bothered by the concept of the living spell won’t hear my voice.
Nita nodded. “Doesn’t bother me,” she said, glancing up again at the strangely empty sky. “But what about the Pullulus? ‘It won’t answer,’ you said. That was what the Senior Wizards were trying to get it to do, wasn’t it?”
Yes. But they were the wrong ones to speak to the Pullulus, and didn’t know the word that needed to be said.
“So who’s the right one to do the speaking?” Nita said. “And what’s the word?”
Without warning, she found herself kneeling by the chain-link fence across the parking lot from her high school’s main doors. Nita got up and dusted her hand off. It was gray with the dust from the worn-in pathway that ran along the fence, the place where kids leaned during lunch hours and “off” periods when they couldn’t leave school property, but were intent on getting as far from school as possible. Over to one side, as far down that path as she could get without being on the sidewalk that led out the parking lot’s gate, was the lanky, thin, denim-clad form of Della Cantrell.
Del was a transfer from the high school over in Oceanside. There were all kinds of stories about the transfer, since almost no one had been willing to get close enough to her to find out what was really going on. One set of rumors claimed that her folks had moved here, to what was a less expensive suburb of the county, because her dad’s business had failed. There were whispers of some kind of vague white-collar wrongdoing—extortion, embezzlement, no one knew what. Others said that Del herself was the problem, that she’d been causing trouble at her old high school and they’d thrown her out. The rumors about what that trouble might have been were even worse than the ones about Della’s dad.
Nita had started to be infuriated by the whispering campaign when she’d first seen the very pretty, very lonely looking girl, always in the same beat-up denim jacket and boot-cut jeans, sitting all by herself in her history class during her first week at Nita’s school—hardly glancing up, interacting exclusively with the teacher, plainly nervous about looking anybody else in the face. That feeling Nita knew all too well from the time before she’d become a wizard, the time when she’d first come to understand it was unlikely that anything she did to her clothes or her hair would ever change the way the other kids saw her—as a nerd—and every passing day had left her more hopeless and angry about it. Now, far more certain of herself and far less concerned with what most of her classmates thought of her, Nita was in a better position to feel concern for anyone else caught in the same trap. As soon as that class had finished, she’d gone over and introduced herself.
This had not been without its penalties, for Nita knew the whispering would start about her within minutes. The most popular kids in school saw her simply as a bottom feeder, a geek with so few friends that she’d purposely befriend a newcomer and outcast so that she’d have someone to be more normal than. Let them think that, Nita had thought. When I’m dealing with them, I have to do right by them … but, otherwise, after we all graduate in a few years, with luck I’ll never see most of these people again.