wood that had been left out in full moonlight. She touched the claudication closed again, then looked around her and said to the grass, "Excuse me..."

The grass muttered, unconcerned; it knew the drill.

Nita lifted the rod and began, with a speed born of much practice, to write out the single long sentence of the short-haul transit spell in the air

around her.

The symbols came alive as a delicate thread of pale white fire, stretching around her from the point of the rowan wand as she turned: a chord of a

circle, an arc, then the circle almost complete as she came to the end of the spell, writing in her "signature," her name in the Speech, the long chain

of syllables and symbols that described who and what she was today.

With a final figure-eight flourish, she knotted the spell closed, pulled the wand back, and let the transit circle drop to the grass around her, an

arabesqued chain of light. Turning slowly, Nita began to read the sentence, feeling the power lean in around her as she did so, the pressure and

attention of local space focusing in on what Nita told it she wanted of it, relocation to this set of spatial coordinates, life support set to planet-

surface defaults

The silence began to build around her, the sound of the world listening. Nita read faster, feeling the words of the Speech reach down their roots to the

Power That had first spoken them and taught them what they meant, till the lightning of that first intention struck up through them and then through

Nita, as she said the last word, completed the spell, and flung it loose to work

Wham! The displacement of transported air always sounded loud on the inside of the spell, even if you'd engineered the wizardry to keep it from making a