A Wizard Alone New Millennium Edition (22 page)

Kit sighed and put out his hand. “Leash,” he said.

Nothing happened.

You tried that before,
Ponch said,
and it didn’t work then, either.

Kit sighed and wiped the rain out of his eyes again. At least the rain was warm, which was a good thing because it never really stopped; even when the hot sky above it wasn’t actively raining, the jungle floor got more or less constantly dripped on.

So which way?
Ponch said.

“We might as well keep on down this path,” Kit said. “We’re bound to run into Darryl eventually.”

A high-pitched scream came out of the gloomy creeper-hung darkness ahead of them.
Assuming
that
doesn’t run into him first,
Ponch said.
Or that it doesn’t run into us first.

“Come on,” Kit said. He slogged down the muddy path, and Ponch padded along behind him, glancing nervously into the shadows of the trees and the undergrowth on either side of the path.

The path made a curve around one unusually large tree. Kit paused, looking at it, and went slowly around the curve. “Darryl?” he shouted. “Where are you?”

There was no answer but another of the bloodcurdling screeches from up in the canopy. Kit knew, in a general sort of way, that there was no guarantee that what he was hearing up there was a carnivore … but there was no guaranteeing that it
wasn’t,
either. He reached sideways to his otherspace pocket, thinking about the barbecue-lighting laser … and couldn’t find the pocket, let alone the laser.

You tried that before, too,
Ponch said.

“I forgot,” Kit said. He wiped his face again. It wasn’t rain he was wiping away this time, but sweat. The heat here was terrible—stifling, muffling, like wearing a portable electric blanket—but far worse was the humidity. If there was anything in the normal world that Kit really hated, it was hot, humid weather. In this place, though, it seemed like all the spare humidity from any number of jungle planets had been gathered up and dumped here. The sweat was running into his eyes, making them burn. Kit paused long enough to wipe his face again, then continued around the tree, looking at it suspiciously. “I keep expecting Darth Vader to come out of one of these and chase me with a light saber.”

I don’t think that’s a good thing for you to be imagining,
Ponch said, sounding unnerved.
Let’s stick to Darryl for now. And once we’ve found him, let’s get out of here!

They went on under the trees. Not far ahead, trees shorter than the gigantic two-hundred-footers were gathered together in a cluster, and the path wound through them. It seemed to Kit that this looked like a perfect place for some kind of ambush… yet somehow he felt unable to take the prospect seriously: there was a vague sense of unreality hanging about it all. He slowed down a little, but kept walking.

Something smells bad here,
Ponch said.

“
Everything
smells bad here,” said Kit. The whole jungle had a smell like wet laundry that had been left in the washing machine too long, a stagnant scent. Some of the creepers were even festooned with something that might have been mistaken for wet laundry, though the growth was actually some kind of nasty, flabby fungus. Kit looked now with some loathing at the vines hanging from the red-trunked trees ahead of him; they had that fungus all over them, curtaining away the view of whatever might be further down the path.

“You smell anything?” Kit said.

Mold,
Ponch said, his nose wrinkling.
And other things. I don’t want to talk about it.

Kit walked forward a little more slowly, looking at those trees, then looked over his shoulder again, back down the path. “I wish Nita were here,” he said.

I don’t!
Ponch said.
I wouldn’t want anyone I liked to be here. And I don’t want us to be here, either! We’re not going to find him this way, boss. Let’s go home!

“Just a little while more,” Kit said. He was beginning to agree with Ponch, though. He was so tired.
I should have walked out of here the minute I found myself in here,
he thought,
except I don’t remember how I
got
in here.

No, wait. I do remember. The dream. I dreamed I saw Darryl running into the jungle. I went after him
…

There was a rustling among the trees that lined the path ahead of them. Kit reached sideways for his otherspace pocket. Then, as he was feeling around for it, he remembered that it didn’t seem to be there in the dream.
I keep forgetting things,
he thought.
I guess it’s just that I’m so tired. After yesterday, and the days before. But I can’t help it. We can’t leave him stuck in this. We have to find him!

There was definitely something moving around in those trees, though Kit couldn’t see what it was, and he didn’t want to go any closer without some kind of weapon. He had a memory that there should have been wizardries that he could use for self-defense, but he was just too tired to think of any of them right now. Kit looked around him, saw a fallen log to one side of the path. There was a branch sticking out of it that looked big enough to use as a club. He got down on one knee and struggled with the branch for a few moments until it snapped off the log. It was covered with dark brown goo, yet more mold of one kind or another. Kit made a face as he rubbed it off the branch as best he could, rubbed his hands more or less clean on his pants, and then got up. “Come on,” he said to Ponch.

High up in the jungle canopy, one of the invisible monsters started screaming again. Kit wanted to hold his ears against the noise of it, though that would have meant dropping the branch. Shortly the screamer was joined by a second, and they screamed at each other more and more loudly as Kit got closer to the trees.

One big creeper was hanging down over the path. It was well draped with the dirty-laundry fungus, and looked almost like a curtain. They were going to have to push through this. There was no avoiding it. Kit reached out one hand to the creeper, while above him in the trees the intolerable screeching got louder and louder.
If there is something in there,
Kit thought,
I’m not going to he able to hear it if it’s coming for me.

Yet he felt he had to go in. “You ready?” he said to Ponch.

I’m right behind you. Be careful!

Kit pushed the creeper aside. The gloom beyond the curtain of fungus was even worse than that out in the shadow of the trees; it was danker, more stifling and breathless. Kit edged into it, let the curtain fall—

Darkness. Ponch was close behind him, crowded up against his legs. Any hope that Kit had had that being in this closed-in place might somewhat muffle the awful screeching from outside was in vain; if anything, it seemed worse. He moved softly among the trees, brushing past the down-hanging loops and rags of fungus, trying not to touch them more than he had to. Where the fungus brushed him, he got an uncomfortable itchy feeling even through his shirt.

Kit started to move faster, though the weariness that had started to bother him when he came into this place was getting worse all the time. He was sure he could see shadows moving just beyond the trees that hemmed in the path. It might just have been more of the fungus, shifting in the wind, except that there was no wind. Something
was
moving there. Then, even over the screaming from above, Kit thought he heard a breathing sound—

He couldn’t bear it anymore. He broke into a run, and Ponch plunged along behind him. The awful fungus slapped him in the face and upper body as he ran; Kit swatted it aside as best he could, but somehow it always seemed to get him anyway. Once he nearly throttled himself by running into a creeper that was hanging exactly at throat height. Kit reacted just in time to grab it, and used it to swing himself a little sideways—but then he banged into one of the closer trees and fell, and from above he could hear the screaming, louder than ever, sounding like laughter now.

Kit staggered to his feet and wobbled down the path again. His body didn’t seem to be working right, and he couldn’t understand why, unless it was just the weariness that was getting to him. His legs almost seemed to belong to someone else. His brain was full of noise that he couldn’t stop. He knew Ponch was behind him, but he had to keep reminding himself of that. He couldn’t get rid of the idea that he was all alone here, had been alone forever…

…except for something that hated him. It was hiding in the shadows. It was up in the furious brightness above the trees. It was dripping from every leaf, underfoot in every square inch of mud, looking at him with cruel, small, burning eyes from up among the branches of the trees. Kit ran, but his body wouldn’t obey him, wouldn’t let him run fast enough; he staggered along like some broken mechanical thing, and the screaming voices up above all laughed at him, and there was no escape from the regard of the unseen eyes staring at him from all around in the dark. He would come out into the open again in a moment, but there would be no respite for him then, either, no escape. What owned the eyes would be there, waiting for him, in the shape of what was going to kill him at last.

Kit tried to stop, but he couldn’t. Ponch blundered into him from behind. Kit’s own momentum combined with the push from Ponch sent him forward, through the last curtain of creeper and fungus, sprawling down nearly spreadeagled onto the path, and he was helpless in front of the merciless thing that waited.

Hands came down, grabbed him by the arms. “
No!
” Kit cried—

—and then realized that nothing had happened to him, and that he was facedown in the mud, and that the screaming above him was just screaming again—and that the hands were Darryl’s.

Darryl was stronger than Kit would have expected. He hauled Kit nearly upright, but Kit didn’t have the strength to stay that way; he collapsed down onto his butt again in a most undignified manner, and stayed there for a few moments, just panting and trying to get his breath back.

“Come on, hurry up, get
up
now!” Darryl said. “It’s coming!”

Kit tried, and had trouble. Once again Darryl reached down to him and took Kit by the forearms. This time he swung him right up to his feet and kept him there. Kit staggered a little, but managed to stay upright, marveling again at how strong the youngster was. “Thanks,” Kit said as Darryl rather hastily let go. “Darryl, I’ve been trying to catch up with you for a long time. I’m on errantry, and do I ever greet you! Now can we go somewhere quiet and have a talk, because—”

“No,” Darryl said.

“You don’t understand,” Kit said, getting his breath again, but only slowly. “You have to get out of here while you’ve got the chance. It’s not here yet, but—”

“That’s just why I
can’t
leave,” Darryl said. “There are still things I have to do here, and in the other heres I’ve made. It doesn’t matter whether—” He stopped, scowling, as if searching for words: as if something was trying to keep him from finding them. “It doesn’t, it doesn’t, doesn’t
matter—”
a sudden flush of intention, and of fierce satisfaction at a barrier pushed through—
“
if there’s a way out now. I can’t take it yet. I have to find the thing that still needs to be done before I can go.”

Kit had been tired enough to start with, but now the exhaustion was coming down on him hard.“Darryl, buddy, I don’t get it.
Why
can’t you—”

“I promised I wouldn’t. I said I’d stay until what I came to do was done,” Darryl said. He breathed out, glancing away, but not in any vague way: as if he was looking at something clear and concrete—a moment or a person. “When things got so bad all of a sudden, it started getting so hard to hear things. But finally I heard the Silence, even through all the noise. And it said, ‘So here’s what it’s all about. Here are the words. What’re you going to do about them?’ And it kept being so hard to hear them as things got worse… but finally I got them all together and said them. ‘In Life’s name…’”

Kit sat there listening to the words. Part of him knew them better than he knew almost anything else. But another part of him thought, wearily,
Why does that sound familiar?
And the bizarre roaring and screeching in his head were once again making it hard to pay attention, hard to care about anything.

“…I will fight to preserve what grows and lives well in its own way…”

It was amazing the way the incessant howling of the world could weary you, until you wanted to do anything to distract yourself from the noise of it, even scream back to drown it out. That noise got into your head and wouldn’t let you alone, wouldn’t let you
be.
In the face of the torment, you quickly got to the point where the pain was itself reassuring, something less stressful than trying to think anything or do anything through the cacophony of life—especially when the life around you started looking and feeling somehow fake, as if whatever reality existed was elsewhere, far away, and all your surroundings were just some kind of skin over it.
And when you come right down to it, it doesn’t really matter. Nothing’s really worth the fuss, the struggle
….

“…To these ends, in the practice of my Art, I will put aside fear for courage, and death for life…”

Not that any of those matter.
The world seemed dim and far away—this world,
any
world. Kit was wavering, trembling with weariness now. He folded down where he stood, sat down in the mud again, blinking.

Darryl looked at him with alarm. “I have a feeling this isn’t the time for anyone else to be here, though,” he said. He reached down to Kit and started to pull him upright again; and he was grinning, as if there was something that mattered, impossible though that seemed to Kit at the moment. “What you’re doing, believe me, I get it. It’s really great. But you’re here the wrong way, the dangerous way. You’re a link. If you stay much longer, it’ll get so the link can’t be broken. You’ll keep getting sucked back into the trap I’ve set—”

Kit was wobbling on his feet, wavering, as Darryl once more finished hauling him upright. “So go on,
go,”
Darryl said, pushing at him. “Go!”