A Wizard Alone New Millennium Edition (17 page)

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 to Ponch.

The wind?
Ponch said.
Yes. It’s up ahead, where Darryl is. We’ll be there soon.

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

Ponch paused 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 and Ponch 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 a lightbulb,” 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 the lightbulb 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 understood Ponch’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 and Ponch, 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 a premarked 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 fierce sourceless 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. “Glad I brought a coat,” he said softly.

I wish I could grow mine thicker,
Ponch said, looking around him with distaste.
I didn’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 and Ponch’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 this
is
he?” Kit said to Ponch.

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 keep a 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 and Ponch 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 itself be 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.

Ponch pulled on the leash, and Kit followed him across the squeaking blue snow, while every now and then a new and ferocious gust of wind blue-whited everything 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 in midstep.
I hear 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.

“—won’t be able to—”

“—and in local news tonight—”

“—wish I could understand why, but there’s no point in even asking, I guess—”

“—come on, love, we need to get this on you. No, just give me a hand her, it’ll only take a minute—”

The voices somehow both spoke at normal volume and screamed in Kit’s ears, intrusive, grating, maddening. He couldn’t shut them out. He opened his manual and hurriedly went through it to the section that would allow him to soundproof the force field, for the voices were scaling up into the deafening range now, an ever increasing roar. The noise wasn’t just made up of voices, either. Music was part of it, too, but music gone horribly wrong, screeching at him, and also sounds that might have come from Kit’s own house, a door closing, someone opening a drawer, sounds that were magnified past bearing, intolerable—

Kit recited the wizardry, having to do it nearly at the top of his lungs to hear himself think. To his great relief, it took; he could tell that the sound all around him outside the force field was still rising, but now at least it was muted to a tolerable level. “Wow,” he said to Ponch, who was shaking his own head, also troubled by the noise.

I lost him,
Ponch said.
He moved again. He moves very fast sometimes. He—

Ponch’s head whipped around. Kit looked the way his dog was looking, through the blowing blue snow, just in time to catch sight of the thin young shape running past them, dressed in nothing but jeans and a T-shirt, running through the terrible cold and wind, running headlong, a little sloped forward from the waist as Kit had seen him running for the van at school.

“Darryl!” Kit shouted. “Hey, Darryl, wait up!”

Darryl turned his head for just a flash, looking toward Kit. For a fraction of a second, their eyes met.

Darryl ran on. Kit reeled back as if someone had hit him across the face, staggering with astonishment.
The power—!

Kit had sometimes found it hard to look into someone else’s eyes when things got emotional, but that was nothing like this. Right now he felt as if he’d just been looked at and
seen
, very completely, indeed way too completely: and the shock of it was as much his own as the other’s. Darryl, though, seemed to have responded to Kit’s shock before Kit had even felt it. And the response… Surprise, yes: pain, yes, some, at something out of the ordinary, something unexpected and disruptive. But also—was that
excitement?
What had
that
been about?

Like something’s about to happen. Not me: something else—

Kit shook his head. “Where’d he go?”

That way.

“Come on!”

Kit and Ponch ran after him. But it seemed as if, in this world, Darryl could run a lot faster than they could. “The wind’s filling in his tracks,” Kit gasped.

I don’t need them. Listen, though!

Kit could hear very little now that he’d turned the sound down inside the force field.

“What?”

The wings! They’re here—

The first of them roared overhead, trailing noise like a passing jetliner. Kit looked up and saw, dimly, through the blowing snow, what Ponch had been talking about. He was tempted to duck. The thing wasn’t big, maybe only six feet long or so, but it looked deadly. It was as if someone had taken the three-finned symmetry of a standard paper plane and brought it to life, but with wings that were clawed on the forward edges. The creature was a furry blue-white, just paler than the snow, and eyeless, though it had a long, nasty, many-fanged mouth that ran down the length of its body between two of the wings. And it brought the terrible noise with it as it shot overhead and past, dragging behind it still more of the torrent of voices and sounds that threatened to drown whatever lay in their wake. It tilted one wing, and started to circle Kit.

Basilisk!
Kit thought, having seen the creatures’ images in the manual more than once, and having thought every time that he’d rather not see them in the flesh. They weren’t the heraldic beasts that went by the name, but a worse thing that the Lone Power had constructed from spare parts in Its spare time—a minion-creature that served as mindless messenger and doer of small dirty deeds.
And it sees me. The stealth spell’s not working, either—

There were three kinds of basilisk: hot, cold, and starry. It was plain enough to Kit which kind he was dealing with here, and he knew the remedy for them if they got too close.
Heat—

Kit flipped his manual open to its notes and storage area. Some time back during the summer, his pop had been having a lot of trouble keeping the barbecue lit, and Kit—unnerved by the overconfident way his pop sprayed the lighting fluid around in his attempts to relight it—had started working with some of the wizardries that temporarily “set” air solid and selectively reflective, so that it could be used to produce laser beams. When the barbecue season had come to an end, Kit had stored those wizardries in his manual for the next year. Now he hurriedly pulled one of them out, shook the long chain of characters out until it solidified into a rod, and twiddled its end to reset the air variable. Fortunately it didn’t take long: all he had to do was deduct the oxygen and add some hydrocarbons.
Right.
Here we go—

Kit stuffed his manual into his parka pocket, shouldered the bright-glowing rod of the laser, and waited for the basilisk to swoop at him … and then was disappointed when it didn’t bother, but just went screaming on past. Several others followed, all heading in the direction Darryl had gone. Kit stood there for a moment and let out a long breath that was as much frustration as relief. It was annoying to have something to shoot with, and something worth shooting at, and then not have an excuse to shoot at it.

He’s stopped running,
Ponch said suddenly

“What?” Kit said. “They’ve caught him!”

I’m not sure,
Ponch said.

“Come on!”

They ran the way Darryl had gone. As they ran, something occurred to Kit.
I was right, I’m onto something. The way the stealth spell wouldn’t work, but this stuff does? Can’t be accidental. Darryl didn’t just build this scenario: he’s engineered it to work exactly the way it’s doing. And it may not even be an interior universe at all.
This could be a genuine alternate universe, custom-made, the kind of places Nita had been working with to help her mother—the kind of thing Ponch had started creating on his own.
Places where even the way wizardry works can be changed—