Wizards At War

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.