Free A Wizard Alone New Millennium Edition by Diane Duane Page B

wizardries in here unless absolutely necessary: might screw up something Darryl has going. He reached into his pocket, pulled out his smartphone, and brought up the flashlight app that made the whole screen go bright. When it came on, he turned it toward another immense carving set into the wall to their left. Kit held the light on it for a few seconds and quickly turned the phone’s light elsewhere, reminded much too clearly of the alien with the laser eggbeater. The carving could have been one of that alien’s relatives in a very bad mood, and it seemed to be looking right at him—not only with all its eyes, but also with all its teeth.
    Kit shook his head and moved away, using the phone-flashlight to look around as Ponch led him further into the hill. There was no dismissing this space as just a cave. It was a long hall, a vast corridor of a dwelling of some kind, as intricately carved inside as it had been outside—as if thousands of creatures with a passion for strange statuary had been working here for centuries. Where the walls were lacking actual statues, they were wrought in weird but wonderful bas-reliefs, vividly colored, touched here and there with the glint of gold or the glassy sheen of gems. Kit moved past them in a mixture of nervousness and admiration, his light flicking past stern creatures with vast, spread wings; tall, rigid humanoid shapes with arms held in positions ungainly but still somehow expressive; strange beast shapes whose expressions were peculiarly more human than those of the man-shapes that alternated with them. The place made Kit think of the set of some kind of adventure movie about exploring ancient tombs, but realized in a hundred times more detail—every chisel mark accounted for, the backs of the statues as perfectly executed as their fronts, everything sharp and clear, down to the last grain of sand or dust.
    This is absolutely amazing, Kit thought. And I’ve been amazingly dumb about this whole situation from the start. He’d rarely thought much about autistic people except to feel vaguely sorry for them, and he’d never given any thought to what they might or might not be able to do. That was changing now. Whatever else might be going on inside of Darryl, he could see things—possibly more clearly than Kit had ever seen them, except under the most unusual circumstances. If that was any kind of hint to what Darryl’s talents as a wizard might eventually become—
    Ponch stopped, and growled.
    Kit stopped, too, looking around, a little more nervously now. It had occurred to him that one of the other things Darryl had managed to include in this space, if he had, indeed, created it for himself, was a sense of it being haunted. And only now, alerted by Ponch’s growl, did Kit start to see the dark shapes moving beyond where his little light could reach, beyond the statues, in the gloom through the archways that opened here and there off the great main hall. And—Kit looked up, unsure whether he had heard wings flapping way up above them, under the soaring shadows of the unseen ceiling.
    What are they? he said silently to Ponch.
    Ponch sniffed, let out a long whoosh of breath, as if smelling something bad. Fears.
    Kit frowned, seeing more of the dark shapes gathering in the path he and Ponch had been taking toward the heart of the hill. Even when he tried to look straight at them, they stayed vague, like the things you see or half suspect you see out of the corner of your eye, the things that creep up on you from behind in the dark. Point the light at them, and they’re gone, flitting to either side; but let the light slide away, and they gather there again, seen better by averted vision than straight on. The glint of eyes, of teeth, showed in the dark: the flailing, skittering motion of too many limbs—
    Ponch growled again. It’s here. Ahead, to the right, then left again. In the center of it all.
    From ahead, further into the hill, came a low rumble of thunder. The sound