Wizards At War

—to leave them running over something that cracked and glowed. Nita looked down and gasped as the heat struck up at her, burning through her sneakers. They were running over lava, under a dull red sky in which hung a single huge planet, banded in eye-vibrating greens and blues. The lava churned and flowed, hot and sluggish, and as two smaller bodies like moons came cruising across the fierce hot sky, Nita glanced to one side and saw how the lava humped toward the new moons’ pull in strange swollen tides—

A second later, the darkness fell again, and the heat and the burning light were gone, and they were racing through the dark, faster now. The white squirrel bounded away in front of Ponch, and Ponch tore after him, and the darkness fell away behind them like the sides of a tunnel until they were all out in a new light, cooler. A blue-green sky stretched over a dusty violet wasteland without a single feature—not a tree or a plant or a rock to be seen anywhere, only the wind blowing a pinkish stinging dust past them, with clouds of more pink, blowing sand airbrushed against the sky’s distant lavender-tinged horizon. The cold began to bite, the air smelled strange, but Nita had no time to get more than a whiff of it before the darkness closed around them all again—

—to break and leave them running across a wasteland of snow, huge mountains uprearing in the background, but closer to hand, the hard-packed snow sculpted into ridge after knife-sharp ridge, imitating the mountain range behind. They plunged and slid down the broad side of one of the ridges, the squirrel almost lost against the whiteness, but Ponch running right behind it, fast and sure, not losing the trail. Then up the far side of the little valley, sliding, trying to get purchase on the snow. The white squirrel leaped, and Ponch leaped, and the darkness folded down around them all again—

Ponch ran, his speed increasing so that it became more and more difficult to grasp the details of one universe before they were into the darkness again, and out into the next world.

The “squirrel” hardly had that shape anymore. It was a blurred line of light, streaking ahead of them, zigzagging, jumping upward, bouncing down, world to darkness to world again; energy getting ready to discharge as soon as it reached its goal. And that had to be soon. We’ve come so far, Nita thought. Not even Ponch can keep this up for much longer. They were flickering from world to world now at least once a second, so quickly that Nita was tempted to close her eyes to keep the flicker from disorienting her. She concentrated on just breathing, because otherwise she would start thinking about the growing pain in her legs, and if she did that, she’d have to stop.

Flicker. Flicker. Flicker. Nita’s lungs burned. The pain was beginning to force itself through her concentration. Just run. Just run. Just keep running—

—and then suddenly she tripped over Sker’ret, who’d stopped, and fell on top of him; and from behind Nita, Ronan fell on top of her.

The air went out of her lungs, leaving Nita unable even to say “Ow!” Within a second or so Ronan got up off her, and Nita could just lie there for a moment, feeling her legs—or wishing she couldn’t feel them.

Underneath her, something hard and edgy moved, or tried to. “Nita,” a muffled voice said in the Speech, “could you please get off me before we accidentally become more than just good friends?”

Nita opened her eyes at that, partly in alarm. She wasn’t entirely sure what Sker’ret meant, but she didn’t intend to find out. “Sorry,” she said, and disentangled herself from him as best she could. It was kind of like having fallen into a closetful of coat hangers, but finally she managed to get herself and her clothes undone from all those jointy pointy legs of his, and carefully stood up to have a look around.

The ground of the dimly lit clearing where they’d wound up was strangely soft underfoot. All around them was a great silence, broken only by a faint rushing sound a long way off. Nita glanced toward Kit, who was removing the wizardly leash from Ponch, and then looked around.