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.
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.
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 and Ponch, slightly more visible now that there was a little light up ahead, the fearshadows 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. I
, Kit thought.
Ponch turned 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.
, Ponch said,
Kit wondered if Ponch 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.
…
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 and Ponch, 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 if It decided to get really aggressive, but it would buy Kit and Ponch 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.
, he said.
, 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 and Ponch 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 and Ponch 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 of bleacherlike 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 shattering drumroll 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 on Its 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
