Free A Wizard Abroad, New Millennium Edition by Diane Duane Page B

said.

    Tualha looked up at Nita with wide, bland eyes. “It’s easier here,” she said. “It always has been. But you’re right that it shouldn’t be this easy. There’s danger in it, both for the ‘daylight’ world and the others.”

    Nita looked at the smoke, shaking her head. “What was it you said?...the wind blows, and things get blown along with it?”

    Tualha said nothing. Nita stood there and thought how casually she’d said to her mother,  If I go on call in Ireland, I go on call, and that’s it.

    So it wasn’t really her mother’s idea that she come here, after all. Some one of the Powers that Be had sent her here to do a job. Nita knew that when she got back to the farmhouse—assuming she did get back to the farmhouse—when she opened her manual, she’d find she was on active status again. And here she was, without her partner, without her usual Senior wizards’ support—for their authority didn’t run here: Europe had its own Senior structures. Alone, and with a problem that she didn’t understand—

    I’m going to have to get caught up on my reading, and fast.

    Tualha crouched and leaped at a bit of ash that the wind sailed past her. She missed it. Nita sighed. “How do we get back?” she said.

    “You haven’t done this before?” Tualha said. “Where were you looking when it happened?”

    “At the ocean.”

    “Look back, then.”

    Nita turned her back on the smoke and the cries and the brittle music of breaking glass, and looked out to the flat grey sea, willing things to be as they had been before.

    “There you are, then,” Tualha said.

    Nita turned again. There was the farm, the riding school, the farmhouse: and the field, full of its prosaic jumping equipment, all decals and slightly peeling paint. “But indeed,” Tualha said, “it’s as I told you. Something must change. Get about it, young wizard, before it gets about us.”

3: Bri Cualann / Bray

    The next morning, Nita did what she usually did when she was confused—the thing that had made her a wizard in the first place. She went to the library.

    The bus that stopped at the end of her aunt’s road was a green double-decker of a kind Nita had only so far ever seen in movies. She got in, paid the fare, and climbed straight up the spiral stair about halfway back to the bus’s second floor. No one else was up there at all, so Nita went straight forward to take the very first seat up front, its window looking directly forward and twelve feet down onto the ground. It was interesting to ride along little country lanes and look right down onto the sheep and the hedges and the potholes from such a height. But she didn’t let it distract her for long, as she had reading to do.

    The section in the Wizard’s manual on Ireland had become quite long, just as the one on the United States was quite short. This came as no surprise, as Nita had seen the manual do this before as regarded general subjects; it expanded dynamically to offer whatever wizardly information you might want to research. And she’d also seen it do this on trips to other planets. It was just novel to see it happen on Earth.

    She started paging through the Irish history section and immediately found that she had been correct to be a little suspicious of Tualha’s numbers. The things she discussed as happening four hundred thousand years before had apparently actually happened four hundred million years before. This didn’t surprise Nita either; she remembered her Aunt Annie saying yesterday that as far as she knew, the only times cats were really concerned about were their mealtimes. Maybe she was speaking rhetorically or something.

    In any case, the manual told her of the formation of Ireland, some four hundred million years earlier; of the upthrust of the great chain of mountains that it shared with Newfoundland and the Pyrenees. A hundred and fifty million years later, Greenland began to move away from the ancient European continent,