A Wizard Alone

The noise was deafening, terrifying. Tons of razory glass exploded into millions of pieces and came raining down on the glassy floor. The fragments vanished as they hit it, as if falling into water.

Moments later there was nothing remaining inside that whole space but five figures, standing on a dark floor and looking around in various degrees of surprise.

Nita stood there and chucked away the linac weapon, which vanished as soon as she let go of it, its wizardry now spent. She walked over to Kit and Ponch while reaching to her charm bracelet and activating one of the charms.

Ponch was shaking himself all over, as if he were wet He turned and saw Nita, and began wagging his tail so furiously that it was mostly wagging him. He jumped up and put his forepaws all over her and started jumping up so that he could lick her face.

“Yeah, yeah, big guy, how you doing?” Nita said, sort of holding him by the ears and scratching them at the same time, in a mostly futile effort to keep his tongue out of her nose. “Kit? Give me a hand with this guy, will you?”

Kit was standing there, blinking at her, looking completely astonished. “What are you doing in here?” he said. Then he paused. “Come to think of it, what am I doing in here? I was home… I was lying down—”

The energy bolt came at them from behind.

And it splashed.

Nita looked over her shoulder at the Lone Power and couldn’t restrain a grin. The alterations she’d made in the kernel had worked. And Kit was all right. Now she had backup — and she felt how good it was to have that again, after she’d been alone. Now then! she thought.

“Well, I guess if you’re going to omit the formalities, so will I,” Nita said, turning to face the Lone One. “I have to say, I would have expected a slightly higher level of function from you. But you’ve been running on half- speed ever since you got in here, poor baby. Take a few moments and try to pull your brains back together. We’ll wait.”

The Lone Power’s expression set cold, as Nita had known it would; there are few things the Eldest hates more than being made fun of.

“Your insolence,” It said, “is going to be short-lived.”

“Compared to the age of the universe, yeah, I guess so,” Nita said. “But I think we’re going to walk out of here today, because you miscalculated. You never considered what might happen if Darryl ever realized that the door swings both ways. Or that the door can be locked. Ever since he took the Oath, ever since you decided to stop him from being a wizard, he’s been keeping you stuck in here with him on purpose! He’s been getting better and better at it all the time, and you never even suspected, because you thought you were in control. But this is his masterwork, no matter what I did to the fun-house mirrors, which were just a local feature. And you’re still sealed in here until he lets you go.”

The Lone Power looked at Darryl.

Nita looked over at him, too. “Darryl?” she said. “You okay?”

“Yeah,” he said, though he sounded somewhat surprised. “I didn’t know anyone else would be able to see what was happening.”

“The Lone Power couldn’t,” Kit said. “You built this place in such a way that It wouldn’t be able to tell what was happening. But you weren’t expecting us inside your worldview. You left a loophole.”

“And once we got in — though we came and went— our points of view stayed behind, at least a little,” Nita said to the Lone Power. “While only you were in here, Darryl believed what you believed about this space, and about his Ordeal—”

Darryl had walked over toward Nita and Kit while Nita was speaking… and the smile growing on his face now was rapidly becoming a match for Nita’s: angry, but still very amused. “I may be autistic,” Darryl said to the Lone One, grim, “but I’m not stupid. You’ve invested a lot of energy in your little cat-and-mouse game. Well, I can play this game, too. Maybe I’ll just amuse myself playing with you for the rest of my natural life. It’s sure been fun so far!”

The Lone One’s expression was indescribable. Nita felt like laughing out loud, but this would have been the wrong moment.

“You cannot,” It said after a moment. “Now that I am alerted to this game of yours, it will never work again, even if I did allow you to escape with either life or soul intact.” It raised Its hands, clenched Its fists—

And nothing happened.

Nita smiled gently, and from her pocket, she pulled out the kernel to Darryl’s internal universe.

The Lone One looked at it in sudden furious surprise.

“You really are running slow today,” Nita said. “You taught me how to deal with these things when you were inside my old ‘friend’ Pralaya. How to find them…how to manage them. Of course, you were doing it for your own reasons. Maybe it didn’t occur to you that I was going to walk away after the dirty deal you offered me! Or that I was going to survive the consequences. Well, I did…and I remember everything you showed me, very well.” She smiled. “Now I— excuse me, we — just have to decide what else to do with this besides making you temporarily powerless.”

Nita stood there with the universe’s kernel, the heart of the world, in her hand, juggling it like someone juggling a grenade with the pin pulled. “Make your stay here permanent, maybe?” she said, glancing over at Darryl. “By just wiping the whole place out?”

“You wouldn’t dare,” the Lone One said.

“I’d dare a whole lot at the moment, so don’t push me!” Nita said. “Doesn’t it strike you as likely that I’d have just a whole lot of fun killing you off? Oh, sure, it wouldn’t be the whole you.

Here you’re just a fragment of your greater self; I know that. And I’d die, too. And so would Kit, and Darryl. But the power that the One has invested in Darryl won’t be lost.”

“That power is lost now! Boy”—the Lone Power turned Its baleful gaze on Darryl —“you are one of the—”

Then Its face suddenly went white, as if a whole universe had suddenly taken It by the throat and squeezed.

“You’re not going to be able to discuss certain subjects,” Nita said, “so don’t bother. Now, I think we were discussing what happens when we blow up this universe with you inside it. The damage done to you by the total destruction of even just this fragment of you… well.”

She smiled.

The Lone One trained that deadly look on Nita now. “If you did such a thing,” the Lone Power said, “your father and sister would—”

“Spare me,” Nita said. Her eyes narrowed. “Life hasn’t been so wonderful for me lately that I need to cling to it for my own sake. And if I went out taking you down, my dad and Dairine would grieve, yeah, but they’d applaud, too… because they’d find out soon enough that what I did lessened your clout in this part of the solar system.” Nita grinned. “You’ve underestimated me one time too many. Someone needs to teach you that this kind of behavior isn’t going to get you anywhere. I think today we’re the ones to do it.”

She turned as the Lone One lunged at her and tossed the kernel to Kit. He fielded it expertly.

“Nice little universe you’ve got here,” Kit said, tossing it up in front of him, and then Hacky Sacking it into the air a few more times, from his knee and elbow, and once from his head, while the Lone Power came toward him, a look of furious uncertainty on Its face. “It’d be a shame if something happened to it. Whoa!”

He flipped the kernel to Darryl. Darryl caught it, looked it over, and tossed it lightly in one hand.

The kernel, which had been glowing only softly while Nita and Kit had been holding it, now blazed like a star in the possession of its rightful master and creator.

“I’ve learned a lot from listening to the Silence for the past few months,” Darryl said. “About wizardry, and a lot of other things. But that hasn’t changed the fact that I haven’t lived long enough to be really attached to life. Maybe this is the other thing that makes wizards so powerful when they’re young. It’s not that we don’t know about death. It’s not that we don’t believe in it. It’s that we’re still able to let life go, if the price is right.”