Roshaun!
The cry was soundless. One moment he was standing there, a statue of burning gold. The next moment, the statue was a searing white, and the moment after that, there was no statue at alclass="underline" just something falling through one-sixth gravity to bounce into the dust—a collar of yellow metal with a great colorless stone in it, as clear as glass.
The fire was all gone out of Dairine now. Spot’s eyes had vanished; he lay as flat against the ground as if he wished he could bury himself in it. Dairine slumped to her knees. “Where is he?” she was whispering as she looked all around her, desperate. “What happened to him? Where is he?”
And the Pullulus began crawling back into the space that had been carved free of it, once more flowing toward the Moon.
Beside Kit, Ponch let out a single cry that wasn’t so much a bark as a yelp of pain. He ran over to where Roshaun had been standing, and started frantically sniffing around the spot. He ran back to Kit, a horrified look in his eyes. Where did he go? Ponch barked. What happened to him?
Kit shook his head; his eyes were stinging. “I don’t know,” he said softly. The one thing he was sure of was that he couldn’t bear to look at Dairine right now, the moment after she had picked up the fallen collar.
He turned and exchanged a glance with Nita. Then he dropped to his knees beside Ponch.
“You know you’re the best, right?”
Yes, Ponch said, but he sounded dreadfully uncertain and frightened.
“Good,” Kit said. He roughed the dog’s ears up. “So now you have to go do what you promised.”
I’m not going anywhere without you!
“Yes, you are. You have to take Carmela, and—”
No!
“You promised,” Kit said fiercely. “Ponch, I’m a wizard. I promised I’d take care of the world, and that’s what I have to do now. You promised me that you’d take care of Mama and Pop and Carmela, and Nita’s dad—”
But I can’t! Ronan couldn’t, and then Tuyet couldn’t, and now Roshaun couldn’t, and if I go, you could— You’ll—
“Ponch!” Kit said. He felt close to tears, but he didn’t dare show it. “This is what we have to do! Now go on.”
He threw his arms around the dog. One last hug, he thought. They have to let dogs into Timeheart, they have to.
But what about you? What about Nita?! And what about Tom and Carl and—
“Ponch!” Kit cried. “Just go!”
Ponch stood and looked at Kit. He hung his head, and his tail drooped. Utterly dejected, he turned away. He started to vanish.
And then he stopped. Half there, half not, and wholly torn, Ponch sat down in the dust of the Moon and threw his head up and howled for sheer grief and pain.
The tears ran down Kit’s face. This is what it’s like when your heart breaks, he thought. Good thing I won’t have to feel it for long. He looked up and saw the Pullulus closing in tighter on the clean space that Roshaun had carved out. But then he heard something that distracted him.
It was still more howling.
At first it seemed a very long way away, but then the sound came to Kit more immediately. He realized that he was hearing it as Ponch did. Other dogs were howling. Kit stared all around, but there was no one there but all his fellow wizards, and the spell diagram—now burning low from lack of power—and Ponch, his howling briefly diminishing into a terrible whimpering moan of pain as he got up again, anguished, to do as Kit had told him. Desperately, Kit looked up into the sky and saw nothing but darkness, and a single pathway of seemingly lighter sky cutting through it—the dark of space with the stars still burning in it, while everywhere else, the Pullulus pressed in all around. Ponch looked up at that path and howled one last time, and it seemed to Kit as if somewhere beyond him, the voices of hundreds of dogs, thousands of dogs, hundreds of thousands, could be heard howling with him. Or through him? Kit thought. It was impossible to tell. The cacophony was unbearable: it drove all thought out of the mind that listened to it. All around them, kids were holding their ears, bending over double, trying to maintain some kind of control. The air, Kit thought. The life-support—the spell won’t hold for much longer; wizardry’s starting to fail—
Yet in this moment of utter terror, somehow the spell started to seem less important. For above them, the inward-pressing darkness of the Pullulus seemed to be taking form. Shivering, Kit blinked and rubbed his own eyes, certain they were fooling him. How could there be any blackness darker than what the Pullulus had already become? But there was such a blackness, and it took the form of eyes, burning in that darkness, embodying it. Kit started to think he heard something growling softly to itself in pleasure.
Did you hear that? he said silently to Nita.
There was no answer at first. Kit looked around for Nita and saw that she’d gone to Dairine, and was now kneeling down beside her, her arms around her little sister, while Dairine just knelt there looking dazed.
A little noisy, Nita said after a moment, wiping her eyes. But is it just me, or is all this looking sort of strange to you?
Kit glanced around him. There was more light here than there should have been, with the Sun completely blocked away from them, and the terrible potency of Roshaun’s sunbeam gone along with him. The Moon had begun to look a lot less moonlike, almost more like a stage; it was as if something invisible was illuminating it from above. The howling was beginning to die away. Even Ponch had stopped now, and was staring up into the darkness, up into those eyes.
Very quietly, he began to growl.
“Kit?”
It was Carmela’s voice, sounding thoroughly confused. He turned to see her looking at something off to one side. “What?” Kit said.
“Do you know any pigs?”
He stared at her. “What?”
“Over there,” Carmela said.
Kit looked where she was pointing. Only a few feet away from them both, apparently unnoticed by many of the upward-gazing wizards, stood a large white pig that looked back at Kit with an interested expression, flicking one large pink ear.
Kit made his way over to that silvery-bristled shape and looked down at it in something like outrage. “What are you doing here?” he said.
“You forgot to ask about the meaning of life,” said the Transcendent Pig. “That’s got to be a first.”
“Yeah, well, it can wait, because there’s other business,” Kit said. He looked away from the Pig, back toward Ponch.
But Ponch was not there.
In his place was a huge dog-shaped shadow that towered above them. It was looking up into that blank black darkness, its eyes trained on the darker eyes that stared down at them in fury from above. And it was growling, too.
Ponch? Kit thought.
The shadow-shape above him made no response. Stiff-legged, it took a step forward, its hackles bristling. That one step took it right past the edge of the Dimple. Its second step took it right over the edge of Daedalus, over that three-kilometer-high rim. The third step took it out into the roiling dark, and straight off the edge of the Moon.
The Transcendent Pig stood there beside Kit, regarding the two dark shapes that now stood in the depths of translunar space, eyeing each other through the endless night. “And why the surprise?” the Pig said. “You didn’t think I kept turning up before just to see you and Nita, did you? I mean, not that it wasn’t a pleasure. It’s always nice to meet new people. But, as you say, there’s other business.”