Kit was having trouble believing what he was hearing. The Lone Power was frustrated. He saw the unbelievable — saw the Power that invented death start hammering with Its fists on the upright coffin of ice. “Come out!” the Lone One cried, and thunder cracked in response, high up in the wind-torn air. The snow blew around again, hiding nearly everything but that relentless, furious, stymied darkness. “Come out and let’s finish it! Come out!”
The thunder of Its voice started to drown out even the thunder up in the turbulent atmosphere.
How long this went on Kit wasn’t sure, but finally It fell silent, looking once more at the small, unmoving shape in the ice.
“It doesn’t matter,” the Lone One said. “I can wait. I have all the time in all the worlds. Sooner or later, you’ll drop this ploy and try another that’s less effective.
Sooner or later, in life or after, you’ll be forced to face me… and when you finally do, you’ll wish your soul had never been created. For that day, I’ll wait as long as it takes.“
It turned and walked away into the blue-white snow. Kit lost sight of It within seconds, and a few seconds after that, by a lightening of the spirit that was impossible to mistake, Kit knew that It had left this space. Next to him, Ponch was shivering with a combination of nervousness and amusement.
“Wow,” Kit said.
Yes. Let’s get him out of there
! Ponch said.
“Absolutely.”
Kit dismantled the dissociator, and he and Ponch hurried over to the block of ice. But the closer Kit got to it, the stranger things started to seem. That weariness that Kit had been feeling, to a certain extent, since he got here, now got stronger with every step closer to Darryl.
He rubbed his eyes, staggered over to the block, put a hand on it. It was frozen methane, but the force field protected him from its touch. “Darryl,” Kit said. “Dai stiho, guy. I can’t believe you held It off like that. Nice going.”
But Darryl didn’t so much as twitch an eyelid. And as Kit bent over the block, trying to figure out how to get rid of it, or at least how to rouse Darryl, he found himself having more and more trouble believing in any of this. It started to seem as if none of it was reaclass="underline" not the cold, not the wind, not the single small, still, cold shape standing there rigid in the ice, expressionless, unmoving, unseeing. And as for the concept of the Lone Power banging on the block of ice, not only frustrated but powerless — that couldn’t have happened, either.
“Darryl,” Kit said. “Come on, buddy, this is no place for our kind of people.”
But the feeling began to grow in Kit that this wasn’t really Darryl, that he wasn’t here — which was something Ponch had said the last time. Now, though, Kit could feel for himself what Ponch had meant. Darryl’s presence here was illusory. None of this was real. What a relief, because this is all just too weird—
Kit straightened up, passed his hand over his eyes. He was incredibly tired, and there was nothing he could do here. Outside the force field, the noise was scaling up again. Somehow it didn’t seem to matter, though.
Kit.
“What?”
We have to go.
“Go where?”
Kit! We have to go home. The wizardry’s failing. Come on!
“What?”
Ponch turned, leaped at him, knocked him over. For a moment the two of them fell through darkness. Kit flailed for balance, found none, cried out—
And came down, wham, into something cold and wet. At first Kit panicked, because with a terrible suddenness his mind became clear again about two things: that the force field had failed, and that he was lying in the snow, which meant that in about another five seconds he would be dead. But then Kit realized that this snow was so much warmer and wetter than the snow where he’d just been that it might as well have been steaming; and the silence surrounding them was so complete, compared to where they had been, that Kit’s ears rang with it.
Ponch was lying on top of him, licking his face in apology and fear. Are you all right? Boss! I had to get us out of there. Are you all right? Kit!
“Oh, wow,” Kit whispered. “Okay, yeah, I’m okay.” He pushed himself up on his elbows with some difficulty, dislodging Ponch in the process. Kit was lying in his driveway, in approximately three inches of snow, and as he looked over at the corner streetlight, he saw that more snow was falling, in big flakes, through still and silent air.
He turned around to look at his house and saw that all the lights were off except for the one in his parents’ bedroom. “Oh, no,” he said. “What time is it?”
Kit looked at his watch. It was two-thirty in the morning.
“Oh, god, the time flow in there wasn’t what I was expecting. I’m going to get it now,” he muttered as he staggered to his feet. “I’m completely wrecked. And they’re going to kill me.”
Not if I can help it
, Ponch said.
“Buddy,” Kit said, “I don’t think even the Powers That Be could prevent the massacre at this point. Let’s go in and get it over with.”
Together they made their way up the driveway.
Elucidations
Nita looked up from her reading and glanced out the window into the darkness to see that snow was just beginning to fall. She sat still in the pool of light at her desk, for the first time in hours really paying attention to the silence that had been settling down outside— that particular muffling effect, possibly something to do with the low clouds, that always seemed to accompany a heavy snowfall from the very first.
Nita sighed at the sight of the big flakes coming gently down. The first really decent snowfall of the winter, and her mother wasn’t here to see it. First snowfalls had always been an event for her mom. She would bundle herself up and go out and play in the snow like a crazy thing until she was worse soaked than either Nita or Dairine ever let themselves get. Over the past few years, Nita had heard her mom complain more than once to her dad that the greenhouse effect was screwing up the winter weather. “We just don’t get snow like we used to, Harry,“ she would say. ”We have to do something, or future generations won’t know what it’s like to get slush in their socks.“
Nita held still a moment longer, listening to the quiet of the house around her. Her dad and Dairine were both in bed, and outside the snow kept on falling. After a few moments, Nita sighed again and pushed her manual away. For hours now she had been up to her eyes in more research on the contextual variations of the Speech — in noun paradeclensions, and judicial imperatives, and the history and use of the Enactive Recension. It was all fascinating, and she had no idea how she was going to stomp all this information into her head soon enough to be of any use. At any rate, it was late, and she wasn’t going to get any more of it into her head tonight.
Nita got up… and her bedroom went away, fading around her into a darkness through which, bizarrely, snow continued to fall.
Standing there in jeans and one of her dad’s big sweatshirts, Nita looked all around her in shock, and then realized what had happened. Her hand went to her throat, where the “necklace” of the lucid-dreaming wizardry rested. I forgot about this. I turned it on, and then I fell asleep while I was reading