Wizards At War

The flare of power that had burst up from the group wizardry before was as nothing to this. All space went white as lightning in the flash of the terrible teeth. Kit closed his eyes and still could see nothing but that intolerable whiteness. In it, everything vanished. There was nothing to be felt or experienced but pure power and the eternity in which it was happening. In the face of that irresistible brilliance, the Pullulus burned away like so much ash.

In the white timelessness, Kit stood for some while, as blind as any other wizard on the Moon. But presently he was able to see something dark; and a wagging shape came wandering along to him, and put its head under his hand.

“I have to go,” Ponch said. “But I wanted to thank you first!”

Kit got down beside his dog. “Thank me? For what?”

“You showed me what to do,” Ponch said. “Now dogs have a new story, and a new way to be… thanks to you.”

Kit shook his head, burying his face briefly against the glossy black of Ponch’s coat. “I’m going to miss you,” he said. “You’re not coming back, are you?”

“Not like this,” Ponch said. “I have another job now, and I have to get started. My people have been waiting for me for a long, long time. But I won’t ever really go away.” He looked up at Kit, and his eyes were full of starlight now. “And dogs won’t really seem to change that much. Some old ways of being are good, while we work out what the new ones are.”

Kit put his arms around Ponch and held him for a long time. He had no idea how long they remained like that, or when the light began to fade. But gradually it paled, like dawn in reverse, and Kit found himself kneeling in moondust. He looked up and saw nothing above him but starry night, untroubled by any darkness except the one that properly lives between the stars.

Nita was crouching down by him, looking closely at Kit. “You all right?” she said.

Kit let out a long breath and looked around him. What he had been holding was gone. “Yeah,” he said. “I think so.”

Nita sighed, too, as she stood, looking over to where Carmela was standing with one arm around Dairine. “And as for you!

” she said to the Pig, which was standing on the other side of Kit.

“Tell me you’re not going to ask me that question!” said the Pig.

“I was going to ask you,” Nita said, “whether all that was what I thought it was.”

“If you thought that dogs now finally have their own version of the One,” said the Transcendent Pig, “then the answer is yes.”

Kit was shaking his head. “I can’t believe it,” he whispered. “Are you trying to tell me that my dog—my dog was—”

“Was? No. Is? Yes, it’s the ‘spell-it-backward’ joke again,” the Pig said, with some resignation. “The One just loves those old jokes. The older, the better.” It raised its bristly eyebrows. “Making a big

BANG! sound and running off to hide behind the nearest chunk of physical existence, like some kid ringing the doorbell at Halloween. And the puns. Don’t get It started on the puns… you’ll be there forever.” It smiled. “Literally. But what did you expect? Your dog started making universes out of nothing. This wasn’t a slight tip-off?”

“And not just making them,” Nita said. “Saving them.”

“Or saving one person,” Kit said.

“It’s the same thing, I’m told,” said the Pig; and it vanished.

Kit looked around at the thousands of astonished and exhausted wizards. Then he looked along the arc of the now-dimming spell diagram, and saw Dairine standing there, holding in her hands a collar with a stone that had gone as clear as water, and now was shading gently toward gold; and beyond her, off in the background, Ronan’s still form. “This is going to take a while to sort out,” he said, and wiped his eyes. “Let’s go home.”

15: Armistice

It was, of course, not so simple. There was first of all the matter of Ronan.

His problem was easier to solve than Nita had feared. In the company of three thousand wizards, there were always going to be many who were expert at healing, and some far more so than Nita was. Within a very short time, Darryl had introduced Nita to a spiky-haired fifteen-year-old boy in floppy surfer shorts and a jeans jacket. As he hunkered down by where Ronan hovered, Nita found herself looking at the boy curiously, for he was familiar somehow.

“Missed the heart by about a centimeter,” he said in an Aussie accent, running his manual up and down over Ronan’s chest and looking at the visualization of the wound that appeared on the manual’s pages. “Went right past the right atrium into the lung, but below the major bronchi, and cauterized the tissue on the way in, so the lung didn’t bleed or collapse. Missed the vena cava, too!” He sat back on his heels. “Couldn’t have done it better with a scalpel, but that’d be the Spear for you. Whatever he might have had in mind, it didn’t care to kill him. Or need to, I’m thinking—the trauma and shock did the job of letting the Defender out, not to mention his own intentions. I don’t think he lost all that much blood.”