Nita glanced over and just had time to realize that only one of the two flap-fasteners was undone when the manual worked its way out from under the flap and shot across the kitchen into her hand. Sorry about that, she said to the manual. Casual wizardries, home utilities, fridge routine, please… The manual flipped open in her hand, laying itself out to a page about half covered with the graceful curly cursive of the wizardly Speech. Right, Nita said, and began to read. The spell went as spells usually did the workaday sounds of the wind and the occasional passing traffic outside, the soft hum of the fridge motor and other kitchen noises inside, all gradually muting down and down as that concentrating silence, the universe listening to what Nita was saying in the Speech, came into ever greater force and began to assert its authority over merely physical things. The wizardry itself was a straightforward temporospatial translocation, or exchange of one volume of local space for another, though even a spell like that wasn t necessarily simple when you considered that each of the volumes in question was corkscrewing its way through space-time in a slightly different direction, because of their differing locations on the Earth s surface. As Nita read from the manual, an iridescent fog of light surrounded her while the words in the Speech wove and wrapped themselves through physical reality, coaxing it for just a little while into a slightly different shape. She said the spell s last word, the verbal expression of the wizard s knot, the completion that would turn it loose to work The spell activated with a crash of silent thunder, enacting the change. Silence ebbed; sound came back the wind still whistling outside, the splash and hiss of a car going by. Completed, the spell extracted its price, a small but significant portion of the energy presently available to Nita. She stood there breathing hard, sweat standing out on her brow, as she reached out and opened the refrigerator door.