DIANE DUANE - A Wizard Alone

The shadowy fears crowded closer.Ponch bared his teeth and growled more loudly, and the closest of the fears skittered away. Kit looked all around them, reaching out with a wizard s senses to try to tell if whatever avatar the Lone Power was using here was particularly close by. It seemed to him thatIt wasn t, that Its attention was elsewhere, closely centered on someone else.

Darryl

They came to the end of that immense hallway, a T-junction; the wall just ahead of them held another of the immense carvings, reaching up and out of sight into the gloom. It showed a tangle of human and alien bodies that seemed to struggle and push against one another, trying to go in one direction or another, but that seemed unable to get much of anywhere, like a stone rush hour in some otherworldly subway station. Kitshook his head at it asPonch pulled him to the right. A faint mutter of sound was coming from that direction, and from far away, reflected on the endless carvings, a gleam of light.

The corridor through which they moved got narrower, the much-carved walls of it seeming to press slowly together, like another gimmick from a bad adventure movie. Kit tried to convince himself that the effect was just a trick of perspective, but no matter how he tried, he wasn t sure that when he wasn t looking, those walls didn t actually creep inward, just a little bit. And off to either side of him andPonch , slightly more visible now that there was a little light up ahead, the fear-shadows paced them, flitting in and out among the carvings, skittering,chittering softly to themselves with, every now and then, the occasional little chattering laugh. In the way they moved, and in the way they avoided being seen, they began to remind Kit very unpleasantly of cockroaches and he longed for the leisure to pause and stomp on some of them, just for the fun of it. But there wasn t time for that now.Ponch was intent, his head down, in full tracking mode, growling softly again. The sound ahead of them started getting louder, and louder still a repetitive, thundering noise. Idon t think this place is going to be conducive to a relaxed conversation with Darryl , Kit thought.

Ponchturned a corner to the left; Kit followed him. The light up ahead was cold and flickering, like something glimpsed through the doors of a movie theater while the feature was showing. But no theater on Earth would have had a sound system capable of producing the thunder-rumble that accompanied the light. They turned down yet another carved corridor, this one a tall, narrow slit that Kit soon realized was two doors, easily several stories tall, that weren t quite shut.

Kit stopped at another of those earthshaking, wall-shaking rumbles of noise, louder than ever, and the hair on the back of his neck stood up because he could sense the Lone Power nearby. If Darryl and the Lone One or Its minions were having it out up ahead, some kind of protection would probably be a good idea.You stick close to me from here on , he said toPonch .All we have to do now is figure out what s going on, and what to do about it .

Let me know when you do that,Ponch said,because right after that, I want to go home . He sounded unusually definite.

You re not alone there, believe me. Kit wondered ifPonch was feeling what he himself had started to feel a wearying pressure that made him too tired to look at things, too tired to pay attention to what was going on around him.And just when I need to pay attention the most.If Darryl has to put up with this all the time, then, boy, do I sympathize with him

There was one other spell that Kit had been keeping ready in the back of his mind, twenty-six words of its twenty-seven already spoken. Now, under his breath, Kit said the last word of the spell. Nothing visible happened around him andPonch , but the silent sizzle of a wizardly force field flicked into being there, a half sphere of protection against sudden violent force. The field wasn t anything that would hold off the Lone Power for very long ifIt decided to get really aggressive, but it would buy Kit andPonch time enough to think of something else, or to get away.

Kit reached just above his head and felt the expected bump and slight shock of touching the field, like the shock you get from walking on carpet and then touching something metallic.It s running , he said.You ready

No, but let s get it over with,Ponch said.

His dog s nervousness surprised Kit a little but then he wasn t exactly calm himself. Kit slowly went forward toward the partway open doors,Ponch keeping close beside him. The increasingly bright light spilling out of the doors showed some of the carvings on them, another tangle of the strange half-man, half-beast creatures, all with their heads turned away from the viewer, or their faces hidden, as if afraid to be looked at directly. Kit began to wonder about that, but the crescendo of thunder coming from inside the doors distracted him.Light flared again and again from inside, blue-white, blinding.

Kit moved a little to one side, so that he andPonch would be sheltered by the right-hand door, and wouldn t immediately be seen by whoever was inside. They crowded up against the writhing shapes carved into the great brazen doors, the force field complaining softly in the back of Kit s mind about having to press up against something solid. Kit ignored the complaint and had a good long look into the darkness, back the way he andPonch had come, to make sure they weren t being followed by anything that might be capable of breaching the force field. Then he turned and peered, very carefully, around the edge of the door.

His view was somewhat limited, but he could see enough of what was going on to have to catch his breath in astonishment. Beyond the door was a huge open space enclosed, Kit thought from the way the sound echoed in there, but with a ceiling so high up that he couldn t even see it. Well below that point, the awful blinding light contained in that space started to give way to gloom. For what looked like about half a mile in front of him, and off to either side, stretched a huge pit of the red stone, carved into endless rings ofbleacherlike seats an amphitheater, its upper walls crowded with more of the creepy blind-eyed statues, their gazes turned down toward the central stage, watching, though seeming not to. In the stands of the amphitheater were hundreds of the shadows that Kit had seen in the outer darkness, maybe even thousands of them, all as intent as the statues on what was happening down in the space in the middle.

The fury of light concentrated there should have washed all those shadows away to nothing. The center of the amphitheater was crowded with writhing whips of lightning, ropes and sheets of lightning, whole curtains of it, such as Kit hadn t seen since he was last deep in the atmosphere of Jupiter. All of the deadly fire was striking at one spot, washing over it again and again as if trying to obliterate the single small shape that stood alone in the middle of it all, arms up around his head, twisting from side to side. With every crack of lightning, the air was torn with a great havoc of thunder, a shatteringdrumroll that never stopped.Ponch , peering around the door and squinting into the lightning, crowded close to Kit, growling softly, and Kit hung on to him as together they peered down into the heart of that riot of fire and destruction, trying to make out what was happening.

For just a few moments, the lightning died back a little, and Kit was able to make out what stood on the far side of it, beyond the small shape that the lightning was tormenting. It was a tall form, dark, somewhat human at the moment, and wearing a deeper darkness around it like a cloak or a shroud looking like an abyss into which everything must invariably fall and be devoured, a chilly, light-hating vacuum that would have made a black hole seem outgoing and generous by comparison. The Lone Power stood there, looking down onIts present handiwork, and finding it good.

The darkness around It rose up, and from it more lightning lashed down into the center of the arena at the little staggering boy shape that now turned and twisted and cried out, writhing and falling to its knees, clutching at its head, tearing at itself in a frenzy of trying to be somewhere else. Yet escape seemed impossible. The boy kneeling there was bent double now, impotent, rocking back and forth, rocking. Kit thought in pity and horror of the slight rocking motion that Darryl had been making in the classroom as he looked at the book.

The unfairness of all this, the cruelty of it, was making Kit furious, even as the crowding pressure of weariness in the air left him more and more uncomfortable and tired. Beside him,Ponch never stopped growling. Iwish I could do something , Kit thought.But I m not sure what to do. This isn t my Ordeal and right now, my job s to watch .

And so he held still, and watched though he got angrier all the time while the Lone One whipped the little crouching shape withlightnings , and Its laughter, the earthquake, rumbled through all the stone around them. In the stands, the fear-shadows hissed and whispered and heaved with amusement, and Kit stood there and held his peace until he felt like he just couldn t keep quiet anymore. He started to stand up andshout,He s not alone !

ButPonch shouldered Kit to one side, behind the door again, and Kit sat down hard.Ponch put his nose up against Kit s ear, cold, his own style of wake-up call, andsaid,He s not here !

What Kit said.

Dairy I.He s not here.

But you said he wasn t in school, either

The scent s changed! Watch.

Kit shook his head, got up,looked around the door again. There was the small, dark shape, crouching in the center of that huge lightning-scarred space, rocking, rocking, hiding its head in its arms, while the Lone Power scourged it withlightnings andlaughed, the hissing of the watching fears a soft, evil accompaniment. It went on for a long time, a little eternity but Kit held still. Thelightnings descended with more and more violence every moment, until even that last faint glimpse of Darryl was washed out in their fury.

Watch,Ponch said again, sounding perplexed but somehow also amused. The air stank of ozone, the stone of the floor began to run and go molten in places, and there was nothing at the center of things anymore but a ferocious knot of pale, blue-white fire, lightning that unnaturally endured for breath after breath, washing and burning through this one last stubborn spot that it had not been able to abolish

until it faded away, andall that huge amphitheater rustled with the satisfied hissing of a thousand fears.

But there was one sense of satisfaction that was missing. The greatest, deepest darkness the tall one now moving down into the center, to where a young boy s body should have lain was not at all satisfied. All the shadow-fears that looked on slowly stilled their hissing, becoming afraid themselves, as that master darkness towered over the place where Darryl should have been and wasn t.

Gone! the Lone Power cried. Gone again!

Find him!!

With a vast wind-rush rustling of terror, the shadows vanished. The Lone One, furious, sweptItsdarknesses about Itself. They writhed like an angry cloak, wrapped in close around their master. A second later,It was gone.

And Kit andPonch stood there at the edge of it all, behind the door, in the dark, shaking.

It didn t even notice you,Ponch said, confused but relieved.That s good .

No argument.But what about Darryl Kit was seriously confused.How could he be there and nothe there at the same time

I don t know,Ponch said.But I want to go home now. And when we get home, I want a biscuit .

Five biscuits, Kit said.Maybe ten.Let s get out of here .