A Wizard Alone New Millennium Edition (8 page)

Uh-oh,
Kit thought. That
was dumb!
To Ponch he said hurriedly, and silently,
Now would be a good time!

Right—

Ponch stepped forward, pulling the leash tight, and vanished, just as Darryl’s teacher got up from the floor with a mystified look and headed toward them. Kit stepped forward after Ponch and vanished, too, relieved—

The wind hit him then, so that Kit staggered, staring around him, half-blinded by the sudden blazing light after the soft fluorescents of the classroom.

“Where are we?”

Inside his mind. He’s here somewhere,
Ponch said.

Here
was a landscape right out of the depths of the Sahara. Kit and Ponch were perched precariously on the crest of a dune so sharply wind-sculpted that its edge could have been used for a razor… except that every second, the wind stripped grains off it, eroding it, and whipping sand off the other dunes that stretched out all around them. A hard blue sky came down to the horizon on all sides, featureless; it held not a wisp of cloud, only the fierce sun… yet there was something mysteriously indistinct about that sun, as if, even in that sky, dust obscured it.

“Just
look
at all this,” Kit said, gazing around him. “Is this just the way his inner world looks to him? Or did he build it this way for some reason?”

I don’t know.

Kit shook his head. “I’ve seen an interior landscape or two in my time,” he said, “but wow, this one… This is
huge
. Look at it, it goes on forever…” He scanned the horizon. “Where is he, you think?”

Busy with something? Or maybe
hiding?

Kit thought about that, and about what his mother had said about autistic people who might find the rush of data around them just too intense to bear. “No way to tell till we talk to him.”

He
is
here, though. Look!
Ponch said. Kit looked where Ponch’s nose pointed. Footsteps led down from the dune-crest, dug in deep where someone had had to dig his heels in to stop sliding, and then had kept on sliding anyway. Down at the bottom of the dune, in the space sheltered from the wind, the footsteps were better preserved, better defined. They reminded Kit of certain footsteps left in the moondust of Tranquillity Base, except that those were now being eroded by micrometeorites. These footsteps were still sharp, and they had a familiar sneaker company’s logo scored across them, one that Armstrong’s and Aldrin’s boot soles had definitely been missing.

“Weird,” Kit said softly. The footsteps led away across that blazing wilderness, up the next dune and into the unremitting day. “Where’s he going?” Kit said.

Away from the Other One,
Ponch said.
Can’t you feel It? It’s here, too. It’s following him.
Ponch scented the air.
It’s been following him for a long time.

“Three months?” Kit said.

I think much longer.

“How can that be?”

I don’t know. But Its scent’s strong in Darryl’s neighborhood. No way to mistake it: I’ve smelled it often enough when It’s been chasing after you.
Ponch shook himself all over … and this time it had nothing to do with feeling itchy; it was his version of a shudder.
He flees—It pursues.
Ponch’s nose worked; he looked bemused.
And not just here.

“Then where?”

I’m not sure. Come on.

The sand they slid down was more pink than golden. Kit looked at it and thought of the book that Darryl’s teacher had been reading him. “That book was open to a page about the Pyramids,” Kit said.

Was it?
Ponch looked around him as they slid down the dune.
If it was, then it’s something he’s seen before. None of this is new.

The heat from the sun was oppressive. Kit pulled off his parka, rolled it up, and stuck it into his otherspace pocket. Then he and Ponch reached the bottom of the dune and started the climb up the side of the next one. “We could airwalk it…,” Kit said.

He didn’t,
Ponch said.
His trail’s down here. For now we need to go the way he went.

Kit nodded, put his head down to try to keep the wind-whipped sand out of his eyes, and went up the next dune in Ponch’s wake.
That way,
Ponch said as he came up to the top of the dune.

Kit looked across the sand, following Ponch’s gaze. Maybe eight or ten miles away, almost obscured by the height of the farther dunes and the haze of sand and dust in the air, a low line of jagged stone rose against the horizon. “Are those hills?” Kit said.

I think so. He’s there somewhere. Come on.

Ponch led, and Kit followed. Once or twice, Ponch was certain enough of the trail to let Kit use a transit spell to cover some distance, but more often he insisted on doing it on foot, so Kit simply had to slog after him, for the time being unwilling to use any spells to protect him from the wind and the sand, on the off chance that they would somehow interfere with Ponch’s tracking sense. The sand seemed to get into everything—down Kit’s shirt and up his pants, into the bends of his knees and elbows. It rubbed him raw around the neck and even under his socks.
I can barely stand this,
Kit thought as he toiled up yet another dune after Ponch.
And if I can’t, what’s it doing to Darryl?

Ponch reached the top of that dune and looked ahead of them. From here the low, jagged hills that had shown earlier near the horizon finally seemed within reach, no more than a few miles away. They looked taller than they had, harsher and more forbidding; they cast long, dark shadows at their feet, under that unforgiving sun, which hadn’t moved in the sky the whole time they had been there. Kit glanced up toward it, then away. “This is incredibly detailed,” he said softly. “So very real.”

Maybe it has to be, so that it’ll be real to What’s chasing him
…

Kit shook his head at that. Tom’s warning not to get caught up in Darryl’s Ordeal had been straightforward enough. Yet was it going to be possible to stand to one side and let another wizard handle the Lone Power by himself?
And what if It doesn’t want just to concentrate on him?
Kit thought.
What am
I
supposed to do if It decides to try to do something about me? Just cut and run, just leave him there?

I wish Neets was here. I could really use some backup.

Ponch stood panting in the heat, gazing down.
That looks sort of like a building,
he said.

Kit squinted. Down among the rock-tumble at the foot of the steep, jagged hills, there did seem to be something that looked built, and in it was a vertical, oblong darkness that could have been a gigantic door. “Is that where he went?” Kit said.

I think so. Do you want to take us down there?

Kit looked at the dark patch in the long ominous shadows thrown by the hills.
Want to?
he thought.
Wow, I can’t wait.
Nonetheless, he pulled out the transit spell. “Let’s go,” he said.

A few moments later, they stood at the foot of the biggest cliff. Kit looked up at it, and up, and up, and hardly knew what to think. The whole side of the cliff was a dark red stone, carved, deeply, for at least three hundred feet up. The red stone must have been the source of the pink tint in all the sand they’d been toiling through. Someone had carved the cliff into pillars and arches, galleries and balconies, reaching back into solid stone that looked as if it had been laboriously hollowed out, chip by chip, by gloriously detail-minded artisans. Niches and pedestals were carved into the stone; in them and on them stood statues, of people and animals and creatures not native to Earth, some of them not native to any planet Kit knew. Some of the poses, some of the expressions, were very creepy, indeed; all the statues, human or not, were staring down at the space in front of the oblong opening with stony blind eyes—staring at Kit as if, stone or not, they could still see. And it all looked brand-new, as if whatever or whoever had done this work might still be here, somewhere inside the gigantic gateway that loomed, dark and empty, in front of Kit and Ponch right now.

It wasn’t an idea that made Kit particularly happy.
What a great place to have a cozy chat with Darryl about what’s giving him trouble,
Kit thought. “Can you smell anybody else here?” he said to Ponch. “Besides us, and Darryl, and you-know-who?”

No.
Ponch stood there with his nose working.
But I’m not sure that means that nobody else
can
be here
…

I’ve got to stop asking him questions when I know the answers are going to make me more nervous than I already am,
Kit thought. “In there?” he said, breaking his resolution immediately.

In there.

“So let’s go.”

Ponch stalked forward into the darkness. The way he was walking made Kit almost feel like laughing a little, even through his nervousness. It was the way Ponch stalked squirrels out in the backyard: stealthy, a little stiff-legged.
That’s all we need in here,
he thought as he followed Ponch into the dimness.
To be attacked by millions of evil squirrels.
Then he hastily squashed that thought: all he needed was for it to come true.

As the darkness around them got deeper, Kit pushed that thought away as one it was probably smarter not to encourage. “Can you see all right?” he said very softly to Ponch.

I can smell all right. Seeing doesn’t matter so much.

Kit swallowed as the darkness got deeper.
To you, maybe,
he thought. He started to reach into his otherspace pocket for his manual, to pull out a “virtual flashlight” spell he sometimes had recourse to. Then he paused. Maybe not a smart idea to do wizardries in here unless absolutely necessary: might screw up something Darryl has going. He reached into his pocket, pulled out his smartphone, and brought up the flashlight app that made the whole screen go bright. When it came on, he turned it toward another immense carving set into the wall to their left. Kit held the light on it for a few seconds and quickly turned the phone’s light elsewhere, reminded much too clearly of the alien with the laser eggbeater. The carving could have been one of that alien’s relatives in a very bad mood, and it seemed to be looking right at him—not only with all its eyes, but also with all its teeth.

Kit shook his head and moved away, using the phone-flashlight to look around as Ponch led him further into the hill. There was no dismissing this space as just a cave. It was a long hall, a vast corridor of a dwelling of some kind, as intricately carved inside as it had been outside—as if thousands of creatures with a passion for strange statuary had been working here for centuries. Where the walls were lacking actual statues, they were wrought in weird but wonderful bas-reliefs, vividly colored, touched here and there with the glint of gold or the glassy sheen of gems. Kit moved past them in a mixture of nervousness and admiration, his light flicking past stern creatures with vast, spread wings; tall, rigid humanoid shapes with arms held in positions ungainly but still somehow expressive; strange beast shapes whose expressions were peculiarly more human than those of the man-shapes that alternated with them. The place made Kit think of the set of some kind of adventure movie about exploring ancient tombs, but realized in a hundred times more detail—every chisel mark accounted for, the backs of the statues as perfectly executed as their fronts, everything sharp and clear, down to the last grain of sand or dust.

This is absolutely amazing,
Kit thought.
And I’ve been amazingly dumb about this whole situation from the start.
He’d rarely thought much about autistic people except to feel vaguely sorry for them, and he’d never given any thought to what they might or might not be able to do. That was changing now. Whatever else might be going on inside of Darryl, he could
see
things—possibly more clearly than Kit had ever seen them, except under the most unusual circumstances. If that was any kind of hint to what Darryl’s talents as a wizard might eventually become—

Ponch stopped, and growled.

Kit stopped, too, looking around, a little more nervously now. It had occurred to him that one of the other things Darryl had managed to include in this space, if he had, indeed, created it for himself, was a sense of it being haunted. And only now, alerted by Ponch’s growl, did Kit start to see the dark shapes moving beyond where his little light could reach, beyond the statues, in the gloom through the archways that opened here and there off the great main hall. And—Kit looked up, unsure whether he had heard wings flapping way up above them, under the soaring shadows of the unseen ceiling.

What are they?
he said silently to Ponch.

Ponch sniffed, let out a long whoosh of breath, as if smelling something bad.
Fears.

Kit frowned, seeing more of the dark shapes gathering in the path he and Ponch had been taking toward the heart of the hill. Even when he tried to look straight at them, they stayed vague, like the things you see or half suspect you see out of the corner of your eye, the things that creep up on you from behind in the dark. Point the light at them, and they’re gone, flitting to either side; but let the light slide away, and they gather there again, seen better by averted vision than straight on. The glint of eyes, of teeth, showed in the dark: the flailing, skittering motion of too many limbs—

Ponch growled again. It’s
here. Ahead, to the right, then left again. In the center of it all.

From ahead, further into the hill, came a low rumble of thunder. The sound of it went right up to that unseen ceiling, echoing, and went right through the floor; Kit could feel it through his feet.

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 that It 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. Kit shook his head at it as Ponch 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.