DIANE DUANE - A Wizard Alone

They re good. Why do they have to suffer when they haven t been bad It s not fair!

Kit bowed his head. This line of reasoning all too closely reflected some of his own late-night thoughts over the past couple of months. And all the easy answers about the Powers That Be and the Lone Power, and all the other additional theories or answers that might be suggested by either religion or science suddenly sounded hollow and pathetic.

I don t know, Kit said. I really don t know.

Ifelt sad for them all ,Ponch said.Sad for everything, because it shouldn t have to be that way.All of a sudden I had to howl, that s all . He looked embarrassed.

Kit couldn t think of anything to do but get down on one knee and hugPonch , and ruffle his fur. After a momentPonch said,I m not going to howl now. It s all right .

I know, Kit said. But he wasn t sure that it was all right.

Ponchlooked at him again. 5bwhat do we do he said.To make it right

That answer, at least, Kit was sure of. Just get on with work, he said. That s what wizards do.

And their dogs.

And their dogs, Kit said. After dinner tonight, huh We ll go looking for Darryl again. We ll see if we can t get a word with him find out what s going on. Then he can get himself out of there, and we can get back to doing what we usually do.

Right.

They walked back up the driveway together, and Kit letPonch into the house, hurriedly shutting the door. The wind outside was beginning to rise. He ditched his coat in a hurry, because his pop had already carried the soup pot to the table, setting it on a trivet, and his mama was putting out bowls and spoons. NoCarmela tonight Kit said, because there were only three bowls.

No, she s over at Miguel s with some of the other kids.A homework thing. His mama sat down, took her spoon, and tasted the soup as Kit s pop sat down.

Oh, honey, that s so good! his mama said. Even without the celery seed. Who d believe most of it came out of a can What else did you put in there

Genius, Kit s father said, and grinned.

Kit was inclined to agree. He finished his first bowl in record time, and reached for the ladle to serve himself some more.

Another satisfied customer, his pop said.

Kit nodded, already working on the second bowl.

You ve got that fueling-up look, his pop said, as he chased the last few spoonfuls of soup around his own bowl. You going out on business tonight, son

Yup.

How long

Not late, Kit said. I don t think, anyway.Back by bedtime.

Yours,or mine

Mine, Pop.

Good, his dad said. What you re doing is important and so is getting your rest. His father gave himwhat Kit usually thought of as the eye, a faintly warning look. You re looking a little pooped, this past day or so. Try to relax a little over the weekend, okay

If I can, Kit said.

His pop looked like he was going to say something, then changed his mind, and reached for the ladle himself. Hey, who took all the beans

That would be me, Kit s mama said.

Now I m going to have to make another pot of this!

How terrible for us all, she said.

Kit finished his own bowlful and, smiling, got up and put his bowl in the sink. Then he went to get his parka andPonch s leash.

They stood out in the backyard a little while later, in the near darkness, and Kit looked down atPonch . Ready he said.

All ready.

You ve got Darryl s scent

It s faint,Ponch said.We re going to have to walk for a while .

Kit checked the force-field spell, which he had integrated into the leash-wizardry, and saw that it was charged, up and running; it would keep hostile environments out for a good while, and protect the two of them from deadly force for at least long enough to come up with a better, more focused defense. Okay. Let s go.

Ponchpulled the bright leash of wizardry taut, stepped forward, and vanished intoa darkness deeper than anything in Kit s backyard. Kit stepped after him; the blackness folded in all around.

They did, indeed, have to walk for some time. Kit kept a careful eye on the line of wizardry stretching between him andPonch , watching to make sure that it was drawing power correctly, and that the faint diagnostic glow of light running up and down it was doing so regularly. Beyond that, there wasn t much for Kit to do for a long while except keep walking through the dark, watching the ever-so-faintly illuminated shape of his dog asPonch led the way.

A whispering sound very faint, seemingly very far away was the first thing that Kit started to notice as differing from the darkness and silence surrounding them. It was incessant, a soft white-noise hiss at a high frequency, but every now and then Kit thought he heard words in it.Am I just imagining that he thought as the hiss got louder around them. You hear that he said toPonch .

The wind Ponchsaid.Yes. It s up ahead, where Darryl is. We ll be there soon .

I mean, do you hear something besides the wind The voices

Ponchpaused a moment, cocked his head to one side.No , he said.Not right now, anyway. Let s get there and see if I hear it then .

They started walking again. Quite suddenly, as if they d walked through a curtain, Kit andPonch were surrounded by blue-white light. Kit stopped, looking around him, blinking. After the darkness, this brilliance was dazzling.

At least there was gravity, though it felt lighter than Earth s; and he knew there was an atmosphere, because Kit could hear sound from outside his force field: the hiss of the wind. But he wasn t convinced that the atmosphere was breathable, especially because he could feel the cold outside, even through the force field. The air on the far side of the force field was full of blue-white smoke, or fog, moving fast, blown by the wind, and there was more blue-white stuff underfoot. It s like being inside alightbulb , Kit said.

If it is, then I ll avoid it in the future,Ponch said, looking around him with distaste.It smells bad here .

The wind dropped off briefly, and Kit was able to look out of thelightbulb and see that the two of them had stepped into a snowfield.Except that snow isn t blue , Kit thought.Ponch, though insulated from the cold around them by the force field, nonetheless shifted uncertainly from foot to foot in the robin s-egg blue stuff. Kit felt the odd soft squeak of it under his sneakers, and understoodPonch s confusion.It feels more like talcum powder than snow. Or, no, more like cornstarch for that strange squeaky sensation persisted no matter how the stuff packed under Kit s feet.

The wind rose again, reducing the visibility to nothing as it picked the snow up and started blowing it around in the air. The snow was as fine as powder on the wind, finer than any powdery snow that Kit had ever seen, even in blizzard conditions. The stuff piled and drifted in spherical sections around Kit s force field, gathering like swirls of smoke, abruptly dissipating again like smoke blown away. Suddenly Kit realized what he was seeing, and realized, too, why the snow s texture was so strange.This isn t water snow. It s too cold here for that. This is methane

The wind howling around them gusted for a few breaths more, blowing the blinding snow shrieking past Kit andPonch , and then dropped off once more, just briefly giving Kit the wider view again as the snow drifted back out of the air to the ground.We might as well call it air , Kit thought, though he knew that if he tried to breathe it at this temperature, it would freeze his lungs to solid blocks of blood and water ice. He popped his manual open to apremarked page for reading environmental conditions and let it take a moment to do its sensing while he turned in a circle, looking at the landscape.

There wasn t much of it. Nearby, black crags of stone stood up here and there, shining with blue ice that seemed almost to glow on its own in this fiercesourceless light. Kit glanced up at the sky, wondering whether there was a star up there somewhere, on the far side of what might be a greenhouse layer like Venus s upper atmosphere. But there was always the possibility that this wasn t a planet at all just some kind of Euclidean space, another dimension that just went on eternally in all directions.Whichever it is , he thought,it has weather, and the weather s bad. Even Titan s weather is better than this .

Kit glanced at the manual page again, read the words in the Speech that began to spell themselves out there.

Nitrogen atmosphere.No oxygen. Methane and some other hydrocarbons frozen out to make the snow Kit shivered despite the force field: The temperature outside was about two hundred degrees below zero centigrade.

I m glad I brought a coat, he said softly.

Iwish I could grow mine thicker ,Ponch said, looking around him with distaste. Ididn t like that other place, the hot one, but it was better than this.

Believe me, we won t stay long, Kit said. Just long enough to talk to Darryl. The contrast between the room-temperature range that the two of them needed to function and the temperature of the space around them was as extreme as the difference between room temperature and a blowtorch and this meant that keeping his own environment andPonch s tolerable would require Kit to spend a lot of energy in a hurry. He was going to have to keep a close eye on the energy levels of the force field; this was no kind of place to have it fail suddenly. Whether they were genuinely in some other universe or just inside Darryl s mind, the cold would kill them both in seconds if their protection failed. Let s get going. Where in all thisis he Kit said toPonch .

That way,Ponch said, turning.The contrast in temperatures stands out. But so do other things. There s company here .

The same company as last time

The same.A heart of cold.

Great, Kit said under his breath. Well, let s head that way. I ll put the stealth spell up around us again, though in these conditions, it may not work a hundred percent.

If you could make the wind drop

It was worth a try. Kit paged quickly through his manual to the environmental management section and looked for the spells that involved short-term weather control. He found one that looked likely, started to recite it And then stopped, shocked. Something that had accompanied every spell he d ever done, that growing, listening silence as the universe started to pay attention to the Speech used in its creation was suddenly missing.

Blocked, Kit thought.But how ! Not even the Lone Power Itself should have been able to keepa wizardry from executing. Once executed, of course, it might fail, but

Kit tried the spell again, and again got no result. Yet his force field was working fine. If it hadn t been, he andPonch would both have been frozen solid by now.

Weird, Kit said, closing the manual for the moment. Looks like this environment s been instructed not to let itselfbe altered.

Could the Lone One have done that

Kit shook his head. I don t know.

Never mind,Ponch said.I don t need to see, to lead us.And as for the Lone One Ponch s nose worked.It s distracted ,Ponch said.And Darryl s moving. Come on .

Ponchpulled on the leash, and Kit followed him across the squeaking blue snow, while every now andthen a new and ferocious gust of wind blue-whitedeverything out. Snow tonight, a voice said from somewhere immeasurably distant.

You heard it that time, right Kit said.

I heard something,Ponch said. And then he paused inmidstep . Ihear something besides that, too .

Kit waited.

Wings

Kit listened, but couldn t make anything out except that the wind was rising, the hiss scaling up to a soft roar. The last time he d heard a wind like this was when the hurricane had come through three years ago. The hurricane, though, had at least sounded impersonal in its rage. The sound of this wind had a more intimate quality, invasive, as if it was purposely pointed at Kit. And the voices were part of it.