A Wizard Alone

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 isn’t 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. The stealth spell hasn’t been working since we got here — otherwise, Darryl wouldn’t have seen me, either. Kit wondered if these places where he kept finding Darryl weren’t just rigorously constructed landscapes of the mind, obeying natural law, but genuine alternate universes, 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—

As Kit ran, he found his endurance wasn’t what it normally would have been. He was tiring. He couldn’t get rid of the sense that, whether real or inside Darryl’s mind, this universe was much farther away than the last one. There was something inherently wearying about this space itself, as if its structure sapped the energy of anyone unfortunate enough to stray into it. Or maybe it was just the noise — the wind, the roaring of the voices outside, getting louder again—

Kit stopped for a moment to readjust the force-field wizardry, then went on again at a dogtrot behind Ponch. “You doing okay?” Kit said.

So far, no problems.

“You feel all right?”

So far…

Ahead of them, dimly, through the blue-smoke swirling of the methane snow, Kit thought he could see the basilisks diving and swooping at something, fluttering at it. Kit couldn’t make out what it was.

Then, as he got a little closer, he could.

Darryl was standing there with his arms up over his eyes, twisting, turning from side to side… and then he stopped. Between one breath and another, he had become encased in what looked like a solid block of ice. The basilisks were scrabbling at it with the claws on their wings, screaming, and the thunder up in the sightless, coldly burning sky beat in the air like a heart, deafening.

Suddenly the basilisks flapped away, up into that blue-white haze, as a shadow approached them out of the blowing snow. Kit gulped and put the laser away in his otherspace pocket as the form became distinct, gathering Its darknesses together out of the snowy air.

The Lone Power came striding up to that block of ice, looking as Kit had seen It a long time ago — like a young-looking human, red-haired, handsome, but with cruel, cold eyes and a smile you did not want to see. It was wearing the same dark suit Kit had seen It wear on his own Ordeal, but this time with a long, black winter coat over it, and a scarf wrapped around Its throat. The Lone One’s eyes were still angry and chill, but right now they also held an oddly weary and annoyed expression that intensified the closer It got to Darryl. A few feet away from the block of ice, It stopped and stood, and put out Its hand, which was suddenly filled with the hilt of a long, blackbladed sword.

The Lone Power stood there in silence for a moment, gazing at Darryl’s silent form with narrowed eyes.

“So it comes to this,” the Lone One said. “For a while, at least, you tried to fight. I’ll give you credit for that. But now you’ve given up. What were you thinking of? That I’d be merciful now, that I’d let you off easy because of your ‘problem’? You should know better. When people give up around me, the poor fools pay the price.” It took a step forward, slow, menacing, savoring the moment. “Not that not giving up helps them, either, of course. Even for those who pass their Ordeals, there’s no escape; I get them later. All they ever manage to do is delay the inevitable.”

A chill, which had nothing to do with the local weather, went down Kit’s back as the Lone Power took another step forward, and another, hefting the sword, lifting it in slow preparation to strike. “In your case, though,” the Lone One said, amused, “there won’t be any further delay. You should never have accepted the power if you weren’t willing to use it. And you weren’t… so now you lose it.”

I can’t stand it, Kit said silently to Ponch.

But I thought Tom said—

I don’t care. I’m not going to just stand here!

Kit had already made sure the shield around him was secure. Now he was paging hurriedly through the manual to a section he looked at fairly often but had very rarely used, the offensive weaponry. It was the Lone One Itself he was going to be dealing with here, so Kit chose a quarklevel dissociation tool — the wizardry equivalent of a low-yield tactical nuke — hooked his “canned” description of himself into it, told the wizardry to take as much of his power as it needed for one good shot, and then swallowed hard once, because this was scary stuff. You ready to get us out of here in a hurry if you have to

? he said to Ponch.

Say the word.

I may not have time—

I‘ll be ready.

Kit took a deep breath — then dumped the stealth spell. He took a step forward, and another, and then walked right up to It, where It stood.

“Fairest and Fallen,” Kit said, trying hard to keep his voice even, “greeting and defiance.”

It didn’t even look up.

Kit stood there breathing hard. “I said, greeting and defiance—”

No answer. The Lone One was intent on Darryl. It lifted that black blade high. Darkness ran down it,