Kit couldn’t think of anything to do but get down on one knee and hug Ponch, and ruffle his fur.
After a moment Ponch said,
“I know,” Kit said. But he wasn’t sure that it was “all right.”
Ponch looked at him again. 5b
That answer, at least, Kit was sure of. “Just get on with work,” he said. “That’s what wizards do.”
“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.”
They walked back up the driveway together, and Kit let Ponch 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. “No Carmela 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 him what 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 and Ponch’s “leash.”
They stood out in the backyard a little while later, in the near darkness, and Kit looked down at Ponch. “Ready?” he said.
“You’ve got Darryl’s scent?”
, Ponch said.
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.”
Ponch pulled the bright leash of wizardry taut, stepped forward, and vanished into a 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 and Ponch, 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 as Ponch 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 whitenoise hiss at a high frequency, but every now and then Kit thought he heard words in it.
? he thought as the hiss got louder around them. “You hear that?” he said to Ponch.
? Ponch said.
“I mean, do you hear something besides the wind? The voices?”
Ponch paused a moment, cocked his head to one side.
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.
, Ponch said, looking around him with distaste.
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.
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.
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.
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
