So You Want to Be a Wizard, New Millennium Edition

Young Wizards

New Millennium Editions

Book 1:

So You Want to Be a Wizard

Diane Duane

Errantry Press

A department of

The Owl Springs Partnership

County Wicklow

Republic of Ireland

So You Want to Be a Wizard

New Millennium Edition

Errantry Press

County Wicklow, Ireland 

Original edition copyright © 1983 by Diane Duane

New Millennium 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

Delacorte Press hardcover, 1983

Dell Laurel-Leaf mass-market paperback, 1986

Science Fiction Book Club omnibus edition (Support Your Local Wizard), 1989

Corgi Books (UK) mass market paperback, 1991

Dell Yearling digest format paperback, 1992

Harcourt/HMH Magic Carpet Book mass market paperback, 1996-present

Science Fiction Book Club omnibus edition (The Young Wizards), 1996

Harcourt 20th Anniversary hardcover, 2003

Magic Carpet Books digest edition, 2005

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt North American ebook edition, 2010

This 2012 Errantry Press New Millennium Edition ebook edition is based on the text of the 1980s and 1990s paperbacks published by Dell and Harcourt. Significant revisions have been made to the text, and new material which does not appear in the original editions has been added.

Dedication

By necessity every book must have at least one flaw; a misprint, a missing page, one imperfection…. The Rabbis … point out that even in the holiest of books, the scroll resting inside the Ark, the Name of Names is inscribed in code so that no one might say it out loud, and chance to pronounce properly the Word that once divided the waters from the waters and the day from the night…. As it is, some books, nearly perfect, are known to become transparent when opened under the influence of the proper constellation, when the full Moon rests in place. Then it is not uncommon for a man to become lost in a single letter, or to hear a voice rise up from the silent page; and then only one imperfect letter, one missing page, can bring him back to the land where a book, once opened, may still be closed, can permit him to pull up the covers around his head and smile once before he falls asleep.

—Midrashim,
by Howard Schwartz

I have been a word in a book.

—”The Song of Taliesin” in
The Black Book of Caermarthen

May, 2008

Part of the problem, 
Nita thought as she tore desperately down Rose Avenue,
is that I just can’t keep my mouth shut.

She’d been running for five minutes now, jumping fences, squeezing sideways through hedges, but she was losing her wind. Behind her she could hear Joanne and Glenda and the rest of them riding furiously down the street after her, shouting abuse and threatening to replace her last, now-fading black eye with a new and shinier shiner. Well, Joanne
would
come up to her with that new bike, all chrome and silver and gearshift levers and digital speedometer-odometer and toe clips and water bottle, and ask what she thought of it. The problem was that it was almost exactly the bike that Nita had thought she was getting for her last birthday – and instead got nothing but clothes.

So you thought you’d have a little fun rubbing that in,
Nita thought, panting, as she took a short cut down the driveway of the house at the corner, around the house, through its back yard and over the low fence behind it into the back yard of the house on the opposite block. Naturally it had never occurred to Joanne that after what she did to Nita last week, and with all her gang hanging around to back her up, Nita would dare do anything but stand there and take it.
And I really thought I could do that and not care if those idiots laughed.
But the laughter stung worse than she’d thought it would… and suddenly Nita found herself telling Joanne in scathing detail what she thought, not of the bike, but of
her
. The result was predictable.

“Don’t know what ‘supercilious’ means, Callahan,” Joanne yelled as she rode around the corner at the head of her gang, “but when we catch you I’m gonna look it up in your little dictionary and then shove it down your throat!”

Nita paused for just a second in the next back yard, just time for one sharp laugh and no more: getting her breath was harder by the moment.
Vocabulary’s never been her best subject, has it,
she thought. But right now it was tough to find this as funny as usual. Avoiding getting beaten up again was more on Nita’s mind.
They’re stuck with their bikes. Right now I can go where they can’t. But when I’m close to the house, I’ll have to use the street to get home. They’ll catch up with me fast. And then…

Then the whole scene at home would play itself out again. Her dad wondering loudly enough for the whole house to hear, “Why didn’t you hit them
back?”;
her little sister making belligerent noises over Nita having picked up yet another set of non-battle scars; and her mother just shaking her head and cleaning up the hurts in silence, because she understood what was going on inside Nita’s head. That sad look would hurt Nita more than the bruises and scrapes and swollen face, because sometimes understanding just wasn’t enough…

Nita ran on down the grassy length of the neighbor’s back yard, making for the chain link fence at the back of it – but it was hard to catch her breath now, and a pain was starting up in her side.
Crap!
Can’t keep this up much longer.
Gotta hide somewhere and wait them out. But where?
She was running out of neighborhood yards that were easy or safe to run through, and there was nowhere close by where it’d be safe to hide. In the cul-de-sac at the end of the next block was Old Crazy Swale’s house with its big landscaped yard, a place the neighborhood kids avoided. There were rumors that weird stuff happened in there, and Nita had herself noticed that the guy didn’t go to work like normal people.
He might even be there now. …But that idea could keep Joanne & Co. out, too! If I ducked in there just for a few minutes till they left, if I stayed by that big hedge around his yard and didn’t go near the house, it might be okay—

The clanking of bike chains and the whirr of wheels coming from the far side of the fence and yard in front of her warned Nita that Joanne and her crowd had turned the corner into the next side street.
Too late.
I’m cut off. Better double back—

Nita ran back the way she’d come, pausing just briefly behind the neighbor’s house to make sure no one had lagged behind to watch for her.
Nope. Clear. But they’ll figure it out real quick. Just have to figure out where to go next.
Nita dashed down the house’s driveway and back up Rose Avenue … and the answer to her immediate problem suddenly presented itself to her in the shape of a little brown-brick building with windows warmly alight—refuge, safety, sanctuary: the little bungalow that housed the town library.
It’s open! I forgot it was open late on Saturday!

The sight of the place gave Nita a new burst of energy. She ran across the library’s tidy lawn, took the five stairs to the front porch in two jumps, bumped open the front door, and banged it shut behind her.

The library had been a private home once, and it hadn’t lost the look of one despite the crowding of all its rooms with bookshelves. The walls were paneled in mahogany and oak, and the place smelled warm and brown and booky. At the bang of the door, Mrs. Lesser, the large kind-eyed brunette lady who worked in the library at weekends, glanced up from her desk across the room with the beginnings of a sharp expression. Then she saw who was standing there and how hard Nita was breathing.

Mrs. Lesser wasn’t the kind to miss much, and the quick rueful grin on her face said she understood what was going on. “Nobody’s downstairs,” she said, nodding at the door that led to the children’s library in the single big basement room. “Get down there and keep quiet. I’ll get rid of them.”

“Thanks!” Nita said, and went thumping down the painted cement stairs. As she reached the bottom, she heard the crash of bikes being dumped out on the front walk, and then the bump and squeak of the front door opening again.

Nita paused to try to hear voices and found that she couldn’t.
Doubt they can hear me either,
she thought. But for safety’s sake she walked quietly anyway as she made her way into the children’s library, smiling slightly at the books and the bright posters.

She hadn’t been down here in ages; no self-respecting thirteen-year-old would let herself be seen down in the little-kid zone. But she privately still loved the place as much as the upstairs library, or (for that matter) any library anywhere. There was something about all that knowledge, all those facts waiting patiently to be found, that never failed to give Nita a shiver. When friends couldn’t be found, the books were always waiting with something new to tell. Life that was getting too much the same could be shaken up in a few minutes by the picture in a book of some ancient temple newly discovered deep in a rain forest, an image of a blue sunrise above a crater on Mars, or a prismed picture taken through the faceted eye of a bee.

And I just about lived down here till I got out of elementary,
Nita thought as she moved softly through the dimness, among the low tables and chairs. She’d read everything in sight, fiction and nonfiction alike—fairy tales, science books, horse stories, dog stories, music books, art books, even the encyclopedias.

Of course as soon as some of the other kids noticed this, the trouble began.
Bookworm,
she heard the old jeering voices go in her head,
four-eyes, Little Miss Dictionary. Smartass. Walking encyclopedia. Think you’re so hot.
“No,” she remembered herself answering once, “I just like to find things out!” And she sighed, for
that
time she’d found out about being punched in the stomach.

But maybe not today.
For the moment Nita just strolled between the shelves, looking at titles, smiling as her gaze fell on old friends—books she’d read three times, or five times, or a dozen. Just a title, or an author’s name, would be enough to summon up happy images. Strange creatures like phoenixes and psammeads, moving under the smoky London daylight of a hundred years before, in company with groups of bemused children; princesses in silver and golden dresses, princes and heroes carrying swords like sharpened lines of light, monsters rising out of weedy tarns, wild creatures that talked and tricked one another; starships and new worlds and the limitless vistas of interstellar night, outer space challenged but never conquered….

I used to think the world would be like the stories when I got older. Exciting all the time, full of wonder. Instead of the way it is….

Something stopped Nita’s hand as it ran along the bookshelf. She looked and found that one of the books, a little library-bound volume in shiny red buckram, had a loose thread at the top of its spine, and her finger had caught on it. She pulled the finger free, glanced at the book’s title. It was one of those “So You Want to Be a …” books, a series on careers. Also on the shelf were
So You Want to Be a Pilot
there had been, and
So You Want to Be a Scientist … a Nurse … a Writer…

But this one said,
So You Want to Be a Wizard.

A
what?

Nita pulled the book off the shelf, surprised both by the book’s title and the fact that she’d never noticed it before.
I thought I knew every book down here.
Yet this wasn’t a new book. The page edges were yellow with age, and the top of the book was dusty. SO YOU WANT TO BE A WIZARD. HEARNSSEN, the spine said: that was the author’s name. PHOENIX PRESS: the publisher. And then, written in white ink in Mrs. Lesser’s tidy handwriting,
793.4
: the Dewey Decimal number.

This has to be a joke,
Nita said to herself. But the book looked exactly like all the others in the series. She opened it and turned the first few pages to the table of contents.

Normally Nita was a fast reader and would quickly have finished a page with only a few lines on it; but what she found on that contents page slowed her down. “Preliminary Determinations: A Question of Aptitude.” “Wizardly Preoccupations and Predilections.” “Basic Equipment and Milieus.” “Introduction to Spells, Bindings, arid
Geasa.
” “Familiars and Helpmeets: Advice to the Initiate.” “Psychotropic Spelling.”