as she got farther from Kit and Ponch. "They'll go to bed early. They always do. And when they're asleep—"Kit nodded and muttered something, Nita couldn't quite hear what. He vanished in a small clap of inrushing air and then reappeared next to Nita> walking with her; Ponch barked in annoyance and ran to catch up. "He really hates that 'beam-me-up-Scotty' spell," Nita said.171DEEP WIZARDRY"Yeah, when it bends space, it makes him itch. Look, I was practicing that other one—" "With the water?" She grinned at him. "In the dark, I hope." "Yeah. I'll show you later. And then—" "Dolphins.""\l\\-huh. C'mon, I'll race you." They ran up the dune, followed by a black shape barking loudly about dog biscuits.Wizards' SongThe Moon got high. Nita sat by the window of her ground-floor room, listening through the stillness for the sound of voices upstairs. There hadn't been any for a while. She sighed and looked down at the book she held in her lap. It looked like a library book—bound in one of those slick-shiny buckram library bindings, with a Dewey decimal number written at the bottom of the spine in that indelible white ink librarians use, and at the top of the spine, the words SO YOU WANT TO BE A WIZARD. But on opening the book, what one saw were the words Instruction and Implementation Manual, General and Lim-ited Special-Purpose Wizardries, Sorceries, and Spells: 933rd Edition. Or that was what you saw if you were a wizard, for the printing was done in the graceful, Arabic– looking written form of the Speech.Nita turned a few pages of the manual, glancing at them in idle interest. The instructions she'd found in the book had coached her through her first few spells—both the kinds for which only words were needed and those that required raw materials of some sort. The spells had in turn led her into the company of other wizards—beginners like Kit and more experienced ones, typical of the wizards, young and old, working quietly all over the world. And then the spells had taken her right out of the world she'd known, into one or the ones "next door," and into a conflict that had been going on since time s beginning, in all the worlds there were.
