With great caution and a grunt of effort, Kit pushed up the
grille at the top of the concrete steps and looked around.
“Oh, brother,” he whispered, “sometimes I wish I
wasn’t right.”
He scrambled up out of the tunnel and onto the sidewalk, with
Nita and Fred following right behind. The street was a shambles
reminiscent of Fifth and Sixty-second. Corpses of cabs and
limousines and even a small truck were scattered around, smashed
into lampposts and the fronts of buildings, overturned on the
sidewalk. The Lotus Esprit was crouched at guard a few feet away
from the grille opening, its engine running in long,
tired-sounding gasps. As Kit ran over to it, the Lotus
rumbled an urgent greeting and shrugged its doors open.
“They know we’re here,” Nita said as they
hurriedly climbed in and buckled up. “They have to know
what we’ve done. Everything feels different since the dark
Book fell out of this space.”
(And they must know we’ll head back for the worldgate at
Pan Am,) Fred said. (Wherever that is.)
“We’ve gotta find it—oof!” Kit said, as
the Lotus reared back, slamming its doors shut, and dove down the
street they were on, around the corner and north again.
“Nita, you up for one more spell?”
“Do we have a choice?” She got her manual out of her
pack, started thumbing through it. “What I want to know is
what we’re supposed to try on whatever they have waiting for
us at Grand Central. You-know-who isn’t just
going to let us walk in there and leave with the bright
Book—”
“We’ll burn that bridge when we come to it.”
Kit had his backpack open in his lap and was peeking at the Book of
Night with Moon. Even in the sullen dimness that leaked in the
Lotus’s windows, the edges of the pages of the Book shone,
the black depths of its covers glowed with the promise of light.
Kit ran a finger along the upper edge of one cover, and as Nita
watched his face settled into a solemn stillness, as if someone
spoke and he listened intently. It was a long moment before the
expression broke. Then Kit glanced over at her with a wondering
look in his eyes. “It really doesn’t look like that
much,” he said. “But it feels—Nita, I don’t
think they can hurt us while we have this. Or if they can, it
won’t matter much.”
“Maybe not, if we read from it,” Nita said, reading
down through the spell that would locate the worldgate for them.
“But you remember what Tom said—”
“Yeah.” But there was no concern in Kit’s
voice, and he was looking soberly at the Book again.
Nita finished checking the spell and settled back in the seat to
prepare for it, then started forward again as a spark of heat
burned into her neck, “Ow!”
(Sorry.) Fred slid around from behind her to perch farther
forward on her shoulder.
“Here we go,” Nita said.
She had hardly begun reading the imaging spell before a wash of
power such as she had never felt seized her and plunged her into
the spell headfirst. And the amazing thing was that she
couldn’t even be frightened, for whatever had so
suddenly pulled her under and into the magic was utterly
benevolent, a huge calm influence that Nita sensed would do
her nothing but good, though it might kill her doing it. The power
took her, poured itself into her, made the spell part of her. There
was no longer any need to work it; it was. Instantly she saw all
Manhattan laid out before her again in shadow outlines, and there
was the worldgate, almost drowned in the darkness created by the
Starsnuffer, but not hidden to her. The power let her go then, and
she sat back gasping. Kit was watching her strangely.
(I think I see what you mean,) she said. (The Book—it made
the spell happen by itself, almost.)
“Not ‘almost,’ ” Kit said. “No
wonder you-know-who wants it kept out of the hands of
the Senior wizards. It can make even a beginner’s spell
happen. It did the same thing with the Moebius spell. If someone
wanted to take this Place apart—or if someone wanted to make
more places like it, and they had the Book—” He gulped.
“Look, where’s the gate?”
“Where it should be,” Nita said, finding her breath.
“Underground—under Grand Central. Not in the deli,
though. It’s down in one of the train tunnels.”
Kit gulped again, harder.
“Trains . . . And you know that
place’ll be guarded. Fred, are you up to another
diversion?” (Will it get us back to the sun and the stars
again? Try me.) Nita closed her eyes to lean back and take a
second’s rest—the power that had run through her for
that moment had left her amazingly drained—but nearly jumped
out of her skin the next moment as the Lotus braked, wildly
fishtailing around a brace of cabs that leaped at it out of a side
street. With a scream of engine and a cloud of exhaust and burned
rubber it found its traction again and tore out of the intersection
and up Third Avenue, leaving the cabs behind.
“They know, they know,” Nita moaned, “Kit,
what’re we going to do? Is the Book going to be enough to
stand up to him?”
“We’ll find out, I guess,” Kit said, though he
sounded none too certain. “We’ve been lucky so far. No,
not lucky, we’ve been ready. Maybe that’ll be enough.
We both came prepared for trouble, we both did our
reading—”
Nita looked sheepish. “You did, maybe. I couldn’t
get past Chapter Forty. No matter how much I read, there was always
more.”
Kit smiled just as uncomfortably. “I only got to
Thirty-three myself, then I skimmed a lot.”
“Kit, there’s about to be a surprise quiz. Did we
study the right chapters?”
“Well, we’re gonna find out,” Kit said. The
Lotus turned left at the corner of Third and Forty-second,
speeding down toward Grand Central. Forty-second seemed
empty; not even a cab was in sight. But a great looming darkness
was gathered down the street, hiding the iron overpass. The Lotus
slowed, unwilling to go near it.
“Right here is fine,” Kit said, touching the
dashboard reassuringly. The Lotus stopped in front of the doors to
Grand Central, reluctantly shrugging first Nita’s, then
Kit’s door open.
They got out and looked around them. Silence. Nita looked
nervously at the doors and the darkness beyond, while the Lotus
crowded close to Kit, who rubbed its right wheelwell absently.
The sound came. A single clang, like an anvil being struck, not
too far away. Then another clang, hollow and metallic, echoing from
the blank-eyed buildings, dying into bell-like echoes.
Several more clangs, close together. Then a series of them, a slow
drumroll of metal beating on stone. The Lotus pulled out from under
Kit’s hand, turning to face down Forty-second the way
they had come, growling deep under its hood.
The clangor grew louder; echoes bounced back and forth from
building to building so that it was impossible to tell from what
direction the sound was coming. Down at the corner of Lexington and
Forty-second, a blackness jutted suddenly from behind one of
the buildings on the uptown side. The shape of it and its unlikely
height above the pavement, some fifteen feet, kept Nita from
recognizing what it was until more of it came around the corner,
until the blackness found its whole shape and swung it around into
the middle of the street on iron hooves.
Eight hooves, ponderous and deadly, dented the asphalt of the
street—They belonged to a horse—a huge, misproportioned
beast, its head skinned to a skull, leaden-eyed and grinning
hollowly. All black iron that steed as if
it had stepped down from a pedestal at its rider’s call; and
the one who rode it wore his own darkness
on purpose, as if to reflect the black mood within. The Starsnuffer
had put aside his three-piece suit for chain mail like
hammered onyx and a cloak like night with no stars. His face was
still handsome, but dreadful now, harder than any stone. His
eyes burned with the burning of the dark Book, alive with painful
memory about to come real. About the feet of his mount the perytons
milled, not quite daring to look in their master’s face, but
staring and slavering at the sight of Kit and Nita, waiting the
command to course their prey.
Kit and Nita stood frozen, and Fred’s light, hanging small
and constant as a star behind them, dimmed down to its
faintest.
The cold, proud, erect figure on the black mount raised what it
held in its right hand, a steel rod burning dark and skewing the
air about it as the dark Book had. “You have stolen something
of mine,” said a voice as cold as space, using the Speech
with icy perfection and hating it. “No one steals from me.”
The bolt that burst from the rod was a red darker than the
Eldest’s fiery breath. Nita did not even try to use the rowan
wand in defense—as well try to use a sheet of paper to stop a
laser beam. But as she and Kit leaped aside, the air around them
went afire with sudden clarity, as if for a moment the darkness
inherent in it was burned away. The destroying bolt went awry,
struck up sideways and blasted soot-stained blocks out of the
facing of Grand Central. And in that moment the Lotus screamed wild
defiance and leaped down Forty-second at the rider and his
steed.
“NO!” Kit screamed. Nita grabbed him, pulled him
toward the doors. He wouldn’t come, wouldn’t turn away
as the baying perytons scattered, as the Lotus hurtled into the
forefront of the pack, flinging bodies about. It leaped up at the
throat of the iron beast, which reared on four hooves and raised
the other four and with them smashed the Lotus flat into the
street.
The bloom of fire that followed blotted out that end of the
street. Kit responded to Nita’s pulling then, and together
they ran through the doors, up the ramp that led into Grand
Central, out across the floor—
Nita was busy getting the rowan wand out, had gotten ahead of
Kit, who couldn’t move as fast because he was
crying—but it was his hand that shot out and caught her by
the collar at the bottom of the ramp, almost choking
her and kept her from falling into the
pit. There was no floor. From one side of the main concourse to the other was a great smoking crevasse, the
floor, lower levels and tunnels beneath all split as if with an axe.
Ozone smell, cinder smell and the
smell of tortured steel breathed up hot in their faces, while from behind, outside, the
thunder of huge hooves on concrete and the howls of perytons began
again. Below them severed tunnels and
stairways gaped dark. There was no seeing the bottom—it was
veiled in fumes and soot, underlit by the blue arcs of
shorted-out third rails and an ominous deep red, as if the
earth itself had broken open and was bleeding lava. The hooves
clanged closer.
Nita turned to Kit, desperate. Though his face still streamed
with tears, there was an odd, painful calm about it. “I know
what to do,” he said, his voice saying that he found that
strange. He drew the antenna out of his back pocket, and it was
just as Nita noticed how strangely clear the air was burning about
him that Kit threw the piece of steel out over the smoking abyss.
She would have cried out and grabbed him, except that he was
watching it so intently.
The hoofbeats stopped and were followed by a sound as of iron
boots coming down on the sidewalk, immensely heavy, shattering the
stone. Despite her own panic, Nita found she couldn’t
look away from the falling antenna either. She was gripped
motionless in the depths of a spell again, while the power that
burned the air clear now poured itself through Kit and into his
wizardry. There was something wrong with the way the antenna was
falling. It seemed to be getting bigger with distance instead of
smaller. It stretched, it grew, glittering as it turned and
changed. It wasn’t even an antenna any more. Sharp blue light
and diffuse red gleamed from flat, polished faces, edges sharp
as razors. It was a sword blade, not even falling now, but laid
across the chasm like a bridge. The wizardry broke and turned Nita
loose. Kit moved away from her and stepped out onto the flat of the
blade, fear and pain showing in his face again.
“Kit!”
“It’s solid,” he said, still crying, taking
another step out onto the span, holding his arms out for balance as
it bent slightly under his weight. “Come on, Nita, it’s
moon-forged steel, he can’t cross it. He’ll have
to change shape or seal this hole up.”
(Nita, come on,) Fred said, and bobbled out across the crevasse,
following Kit. Though almost blind with terror, her ears full of
the sound of iron-shod feet coming after them, she followed
Fred, who was holding a straight course out over the sword
blade—followed him, arms out as she might have on a balance
beam, most carefully not looking down. This was worse than the
bridge of air had been, for that hadn’t flexed so terribly
under each step she or Kit took. His steps threw her off balance
until she halted long enough to take a deep breath and step in time
with him. Smoke and the smell of burning floated up around her; the
shadows of the dome above the concourse stirred with wicked eyes,
the open doors to the train platforms ahead of muttered, their
mouths full of hate. She watched the end of the looked straight
ahead. Five steps: Kit was off. Three. One—
She reached out to him, needing desperately to feel the touch of
a hand. He grabbed her arm and pulled her off the bridge just as
another blast of black-red fire blew in the doors on the other
side of the abyss. Kit said one sharp word in the Speech, and the
air went murky around his body again as the Book ceased to work
through him. Nita let go, glanced over her shoulder in time to see
the sword blade snap back to being an antenna, like a rubber band
going back to its right size. It fell into the fuming darkness, a
lone glitter, quickly gone.
They ran. Nita could still see in her mind the place where the
worldgate was hidden; the Book’s power had burned it into
her like a brand. She took the lead, racing down a flight of
stairs, around a corner and down another flight, into echoing
beige-tiled corridors where Fred and the rowan wand were
their only light. Above them they could hear the thunderous rumor
of iron footsteps, slow, leisurely, inexorable, following them
down. The howls of perytons floated down to them like the voices of
lost souls, hungry for the blood and pain they needed to feel alive
again.
“Here!” Nita shouted, not caring what might hear,
and dodged around a corner, and did what she had never done in all
her life before—jumped a subway turnstile. Its metal fingers
made a grab for her, but she was too fast for them, and Kit eluded
them too, coming right behind. At full speed Nita pounded down the
platform, looking for the steps at the end of it that would let
them down onto the tracks. She took them three at a time, two
leaps, and then was running on cinders again, leaping over ties.
Behind her she could hear Kit hobbling as fast as he could on his
sore leg, gasping, but keeping up. Fred shot along besides her,
pacing her, lighting her way. Eyes flickered in his
light—hidebehinds, dun mice, ducking under cover as the three
of them went past. Nita slowed and stopped in the middle of the
tracks. “Here!”
Kit had his manual out already. He found the page by
Fred’s light, thumped to a stop beside Nita. “Here? In
the middle of the—”
“Read! Read!” she yelled. There was more thunder
rolling in the tunnel than just the sound of their pursuer’s
footsteps. Far away, she could hear what had been missing from the
other tunnel beneath City Hall; trains. Away in the darkness,
wheels slammed into the tracks they rode—even now the
tracks around them were clacking faintly in
sympathy, and a slight cool wind breathed against Nita’s
face. A train was coming. On this track. Kit began the worldgating
spell, reading fast. Again the air around them seemed clearer,
fresher, as the power of the Book of Night with Moon seized the
spell and its speaker, used them both.
That was when the Starsnuffer’s power came down on them.
It seemed impossible that the dank close darkness in which they
stood could become any darker, but it did, as an oppressive blanket
of clutching, choking hatred blasted them,
blanketing everything. The rowan rod’s silver fire was
smothering. Fred’s light went out as if he had been stepped
on, Kit stopped reading, rugged for breath. Nita tried to resist,
tried to find air, couldn’t, collapsed to her knees, choking.
The breeze from the dark at the end of the tunnel got stronger: the
onrushing train, pushing the air in front of it, right up the
track, right at them—
(I—will—not,) Fred said, struggling, angry. (I
will—not—go out!) His determination was good for a
brief flare, like a match being struck. Kit found his voice,
managed to get out a couple more words of the spell in Fred’s
wavering radiance, grew stronger, managed a few more. Nita found
that she could breathe again. She clutched the rowan wand, thinking
with all her might of the night Liused had given it to her, the
clear moonlight shining down between the branches. The wand came
alive again. Shadows that had edged forward from the walls of the
tunnel fled again. Kit read, hurrying. Two thirds done, Nita
thought. If he can just finish—
Far away down the tunnel, there were eyes. They blazed. The
headlights of a train, coming down at them in full career. The
clack of the rails rose to a rattle, the breeze became a wind, the
roar of the train itself echoed not just in the other tunnels, but
in this one. Nita got to her feet, facing those eyes down. She
would not look away. Fred floated by her shoulder; she gathered him
close, perching him by her ear, feeling his terror of the
overwhelming darkness as if it were her own but having nothing to
comfort him with. Kit, she thought, not daring to say it aloud for
fear she should interrupt his concentration. The sound of his words
was getting lost in the thunder from above, iron-shod feet,
the thunder from below, iron wheels on iron rails.
Suddenly Kit’s voice was missing from the melange of
thunders. Without warning the worldgate was there, glistening in
the light of the rowan wand and Fred and the train howling down
toward them—a great jagged soap bubble, trembling with the
pressure of sound and air. Kit wasted no time, but leaped through.
Fred zipped into the shimmering surface and was gone. Nita made
sure of her grip on the rowan wand, took a deep breath, and jumped
through the worldgate. A hundred feet away, fifty feet away, the
blazing eyes of the train glared at her as she jumped; its horn
screamed in delight, anticipating the feel of blood beneath
its wheels; sudden thunder rocked the platform behind her,
black-red fire more sensed than seen. But the rainbow shimmer
of the gate broke across her face first. The train roared through
the place where she had been, and she heard the beginnings of a cry
of frustrated rage as she cheated death, and anger, and fell and
fell and fell . . .
—and came down slam on nothing. Or it seemed that way,
until opening her eyes a little wider she saw the soot and smog
trapped in the hardened air she lay on, the only remnant of her
walkway. Kit was already getting up from his knees beside her,
looking out from their little island of air across to the Pan Am
Building. Everything was dark, and Nita started to groan, certain
that something had gone wrong and that the worldgate had simply
dropped them back in the
Starsnuffer’s world—but no, her walkway was there.
Greatly daring, she looked down and saw far below the bright yellow
glow of sodium-vapor street lights and red of taillights,
City noise, roaring, cacophonous and alive, floated up to
them. We’re back. It worked!
Kit was reading from his wizards’ manual, as fast as he
had read down in the train tunnel. He stopped and then looked at
Nita in panic as she got up. “I can’t close the
gate!”
She gulped. “Then he can follow us,
through . . . ” In an agony of haste she
fumbled her own book out of her pack, checked the words for the
air-hardening spell one more time, and began reading herself.
Maybe panic helped, for this time the walkway spread itself out
from their feet to the roof of the building very fast indeed.
“Come on,” she said, heading out across it as quickly
as she dared. But where will we run to? she thought. He’ll
come behind, hunting. We can’t go home, he might follow. And
what’ll he do to the city?
She reached up to the heliport railing and swung herself over
it. Kit followed, with Fred pacing him. “What’re
we gonna do?” he said as they headed across the gravel
together. “There’s no time to call the Senior
wizards, wherever they are—or even Tom and Carl.
He’ll be here shortly.”
“Then we’ll have to get away from here and find a
place to hole up for a little. Maybe the bright Book can
help.” She paused as Kit spoke to the lock on the roof door,
and they ran down the stairs. “Or the manuals might have
something, now that we need it.”
“Yeah, right,” Kit said as he opened the second door
at the bottom of the stairs, and they ran down the corridor where
the elevators were. But he didn’t sound convinced. “The
park?”
“Sounds good.”
Nita punched the call button for the elevator, and she and Kit
stood there panting. There was a feeling in the air that all hell
was about to break loose, and the sweat was breaking out all over
Nita because they were going to have to stop it somehow.
“Fred,” she said, “did you ever hear anything,
out where you were, any stories of someone getting the better of
you-know-who?”
Fred’s light flickered uncomfortably as he watched Kit
frantically consulting his manual. (Oh, yes,) he said. (I’d
imagine that’s why he wanted a universe apart to
himself—to keep others from getting in and thwarting him. It
used to happen fairly frequently when he went up against life.)
Fred’s voice was too subdued for Nita’s liking.
“What’s the catch?”
(Well . . . it’s possible to win
against him. But usually someone dies of it)
Nita gulped again. Somehow she had been expecting something like
that. “Kit?”
The elevator chimed. Once inside, Kit went back to looking
through his manual. “I don’t see anything,” he
said, sounding very worried. “There’s a
general-information chapter on him here, but there’s
not much we don’t know already. The only thing he’s
never been able to dominate was the Book of Night with Moon. He
tried—that’s what the dark Book was for; he thought by
linking them together he could influence the bright Book with it,
diminish its power. But that didn’t work. Finally he was
reduced to simply stealing the bright Book and hiding it where no
one could get at it. That way no one could become a channel for its
power, no one could possibly defeat
him . . . ”
Nita squeezed her eyes shut, not sure whether the sinking
feeling in her stomach was due to her own terror or the elevator
going down. Read from it? No, no. I hope I never have to,
Tom’s voice said in her
mind . . . Reading it, being the vessel for all
that power—I wouldn’t want to. Even good can be
terribly dangerous. And that was an Advisory, Nita thought, miserable. There was no
doubt about it. One of them might have to do what a mature wizard
feared doing: read from the Book itself.
“Let me do it,” she said, not looking at Kit.
He glanced up from the manual, stared at her.
“Bull,” he said, and then looked down at the manual
again. “If you’re gonna do it, I’m gonna do
it.”
Outside the doors another bell chimed as the elevator slowed to
a stop. Kit led the way out across the black stone floor, around
the corner to the entrance. The glass door let them out onto a
street just like the one they had walked onto in the
Snuffer’s otherworld—but here windows had lights in
them, and the reek of gas and fumes was mixed with a cool smell of
evening and a rising wind, and the cabs that passed looked blunt
and friendly. Nita could have cried for relief, except that there
was no reason to feel relieved. Things would be getting much worse
shortly.
Fred, though, felt no such compunctions. (The stars, the stars
are back,) he almost sang, flashing with delight as they hurried
along.
“Where?” Kit said skeptically. As usual, the glow of
a million street lights was so fierce that even the brightest stars
were blotted out by it. But Fred was too cheerful to be
suppressed.
(They’re there, they’re there!) he said, dancing
ahead of them. (And the Sun is there too. I don’t care that
it’s on the other side of this silly place, I can
feel—feel—)
His thought cut off so abruptly that Nita and Kit both stopped
and glanced over their shoulders. A coldness grabbed Nita’s
heart and wrung it—The sky, even though clear, did have a
faint golden glow to it, city light scattered from smog—and
against that glow, high up atop the Pan Am Building, a form half
unstarred night and half black iron glowered down at them like a
statue from a dauntingly high pedestal. Nita and Kit froze like
pinned to a card as the remote clear howl of perytons wound through
the air.
“He’ll just jump down,” Nita whispered,
knowing somehow that he could do it, But the rider did not leap,
not yet. Slowly he raised his arms in summons. One hand still held
the steel rod about which the air twisted and writhed as if in
pain; as the arm lifted, that writhing grew more violent, more
tortured.
And darkness answered the gesture. It flowed forward around the
feet of the dark rider’s terrible mount, obscuring the
perytons peering down over the roof’s edge, and poured down
the surface of the building like a black fog. What it touched,
changed. Where the darkness passed, metal tarnished, glass filmed
over or shattered, lighted windows were quenched, went blind. Down
all the sides of the building it flowed, black lava burning the
brightness out of everything it touched.
Kit and Nita looked at each other in despair, knowing what would
happen when that darkness spilled out onto the ground. The streets
would go desolate and dark, the cabs would stop being
friendly; and when all the island from river to river was turned
into his domain, the dark rider would catch them at his leisure and
do what he pleased with them. And with the bright Book—and
with everything else under the sky, perhaps. This was no
otherworld, frightening but remote. This was their home. If
this world turned into that one—
“We’re dead,” Kit said, and turned to run.
Nita followed him. Perhaps out of hope that another Lotus might be
waiting innocently at some curbside, the way Kit ran retraced their
earlier path. But there was no Lotus—only bright streets,
full of people going about their business with no idea of what was
about to happen to them, cars honking at one another in cheerful
ignorance. Fat men running newsstands and bemused
bag-ladies watched Nita and Kit run by as if death and doom
were after them, and no one really noticed the determined spark of
light keeping pace. They ran like the wind down West Fiftieth, but
no Lotus lay there, and around the corner onto Fifth and up to
Sixty-first, but the carnage left in the otherworld was not
reflected here—the traffic on Fifth ran unperturbed. Gasping,
they waited for a break in it, then ran across, hopped the wall
into the park and crouched down beside it as they had in the world
they’d left.
The wind was rising, not just a night breeze off the East River,
but a chill wind with a hint of that other place’s coldness
to it. Kit unslung his pack as drew in close, and by his light Kit
brought out the Book of Night with Moon. The darkness of its covers
shone, steadying Kit’s hands, making Fred seem to burn
brighter. Kit and Nita sat gasping for breath, staring at each
other.
“I’m out of ideas,” Kit said. “I think
we’re going to have to read from this to keep the city the
way it should be. We can’t just let him change things until
he catches us. Buildings are one thing; but what happens to people
after that black hits them?”
“And it might not stop here either,” Nita said
between gasps, thinking of her mother and father and Dairine, of
the quiet street where they lived, the garden, the rowan, all
warped and darkened—if they would survive at all.
Her eyes went up to the Moon shining white and full between the
shifting branches. All around them she could feel the trees
stirring in that new, strange, cold wind, whispering uneasily to
one another. It was so good to be in a place where she could hear
the growing things again.
The idea came. “Kit,” she said hurriedly,
“that dark was moving pretty fast. If we’re going to
read from the Book we may need something to buy us time, to hold
off the things that’ll come with it, the perytons and the
cabs.”
“We’re out of Lotuses,” Kit said, his voice
bleak.
“I know. But look where we are! Kit, this is Central Park!
You know how many trees there are in here of the kinds that went to
the Battle in the old days? They don’t forget.”
He stared at her. “What can they—”
“The Book makes everything work better, doesn’t it?
There’s a spell that—I’ll do it, you’ll
see. But you’ve got to do one too, it’s in your
specialty group. The Mason’s Word, the long
version—”
“To bring stone or metal to life.” He scrubbed the
last tears out of his eyes and managed ever so slight and slow a
smile. “There are more statues within screaming distance of
this place—”
“Kit,” Nita said, “how loud can you
scream?”
“Let’s find out.”
They both started going through their manuals in panicky haste.
Far away on the east side, lessened by all the buildings and
distance that lay between, but still much too clear, there was a
single, huge, deep-pitched clang, an immense weight of metal
hitting the ground with stone-shattering force. Fred hobbled
a little in the air, nervously. (How long do you think—)
“He’ll be a while, Fred,” Kit said, sounding
as if he hoped it would be a long while. “He doesn’t
like to run; it’s beneath his dignity. But I
think—” He broke off for a moment, reading down a page
and forming the syllables of the Mason’s Word without saying
them aloud. “I think we’re going to have a few friends
who’ll do a little running for us.”
He stood up, and Fred followed him, staying close to light the
page. “Nita, hand me the Book.” She passed it up to
him, breaking off her own frantic reading for a moment to watch.
“It’ll have to be a scream,” he said as if
himself. “The more of them hear me, the more help we
get.”
Kit took three long breaths and then shouted the Word at the top
of his lungs, all twenty-seven syllables of it without
missing a one. The sound rose impossibly
more than the yell of a twelve-year-old could as the Book
seized the sound and the spell together and flung them out into the
city night. Nita had to hold her ears. Even when it seemed safe to
uncover them again, the echoes bounced back from buildings on all
sides and would not stop. Kit stood there amazed as his voice rang
and ricocheted from walls blocks away. “Well,” he said,
“they’ll feel the darkness, they’ll know
what’s happening. I think.”
“My turn,” Nita said, and stood up beside Kit,
making sure of her place. Her spell was not a long one. She fumbled
for the rowan wand, put it in the hand that also held her
wizards’ manual, and took the bright Book from Kit. “I
hope—” she started to say, but the words were shocked
out of her as the feeling that the Book brought with it shot up her
arm. Power, such sheer joyous power that no spell could fail, no
matter how new the wizard was to the Art, Here, under moonlight and
freed at last from its long restraint, the Book was more potent
than even the dark rider who trailed them would suspect, and that
potency raged to be free. Nita bent her head to her manual and read
the spell.
Or tried to. She saw the words, the syllables, and spoke the
Speech, but the moonfire falling on the Book ran through her veins,
slid down her throat, and turned the words to song more subtle than
she had ever dreamed of, burned behind her eyes and showed her
another time, when another will had voiced these words for the
first time and called the trees to battle.
All around her, both now and then, the trees lifted their arms
into the wind, breathed the fumes of the new-old Earth and
breathed out air that men could use; they broke the stone to make
ground for their children to till and fed the mold with themselves,
leaf and bough, and generation upon generation. They knew to what
end their sacrifice would come, but they did it anyway, and they
would do it again in the Witherer’s spite. They were doing it
now. Oak and ash and willow, birch and alder, elm and maple, they
felt the darkness in the wind that tossed their branches and would
not stand still for it. The ground shook all around Nita, roots
heaved and came free—first the trees close by, the
counterparts of the trees under which she and Kit and Fred had
sheltered in the dark otherworld. White oak, larch, twisted
crabapple, their leaves glittering around the edges with the
flowering radiance of the rowan wand, they lurched and
staggered as they came rootloose, and then crowded in around Kit
and Nita and Fred, whispering with wind, making a protecting circle
through which nothing would pass but moonlight, the effect spread
out and away from Nita, though the spell itself was finished, and
that relentless power let her sag against one friendly oak,
gasping. For yards, for blocks, as far as she could see through the
trunks of the trees crowded close, branches waved green and wild as
bushes and vines and hundred-year monarchs of the park pulled
themselves out of the ground and moved heavily to the defense. Away
to the east, the clangor of metal hooves and the barks and howls of
the dark rider’s pack were coming closer. The trees waded
angrily toward the noise, some hobbling along on top of the ground,
some wading through it, and just as easily through sidewalks and
stone walls. In a few minutes there was a nearly solid palisade of
living wood between Kit and Nita and Fred and Fifth Avenue. Even
the glare of the streetlights barely made it through the
branches.
Kit and Nita looked at each other. “Well,” Kit said
reluctantly, “I guess we can’t put it off any
longer.”
Nita shook her head. She moved to put her manual away and was
momentarily shocked when the rowan wand, spent, crumbled to
silver ash in her hand. “So much for that,” she said,
feeling unnervingly naked now that her protection was gone. Another
howl sounded, very close by, and was abruptly cut off in a rushing
of branches as if a tree had fallen on something on purpose. Nita
fumbled in her pocket and pulled out a nickel. “Call
it,” she said.
“Heads.”
She tossed the coin, caught it, slapped it down on her forearm.
Heads. “Crud,” she said, and handed the bright Book to
Kit.
He took it uneasily, but with a glitter of excitement in his
eye. “Don’t worry,” he said. “You’ll
get your chance.”
“Yeah, well, don’t hog it.” She looked over at
him and was amazed to see him regarding her with some of the same
worry she was feeling. From outside the fence of trees came a
screech of brakes, the sound of a long skid, and then a great
splintering crashing of metal and smashing of glass as an
attacking cab lost an argument with some tree standing guard.
Evidently reinforcements from that other, darker world were
arriving.
“I won’t,” Kit said, “You’ll take
it away from me and keep reading if—”
He stopped, not knowing what might happen, Nita nodded.
“Fred,” she said, “we may need a diversion. But
save yourself till the last minute.”
(I will. Kit—) The spark of light hung close to him for a
moment. (Be careful.)
Suddenly, without warning, every tree around them shuddered as
if violently struck. Nita could hear them crying out in silent
anguish, and cried out in terror herself as she felt what they
felt—a great numbing cold that smote at the heart like an
axe. Kit, beside her, sat frozen with it, aghast. Fred went dim
with shock. (Not again!) he said, his voice faint and horrified.
(Not here, where there’s so much life!)
“The Sun,” Nita whispered. “He put out the
Sun!” Starsnuffer, she thought. That tactic’s worked
for him before. And if the Sun is out, pretty soon there
won’t be moonlight to read by, and he can—
Kit stared up at the Moon as if at someone about to die,
“Nita, how long do we have?”
“Eight minutes, maybe a little more, for light to get here
from the Sun. Eight minutes before it runs
out . . . ”
Kit sat down hurriedly, laid the bright Book in his lap, and
opened it. The light of the full Moon fell on the glittering pages.
This time the print was not vague as under the light of
Nita’s wand. It was clear and sharp and dark, as easily read
as normal print in daylight. The Book ‘s covers were fading,
going clear, burning with that eye-searing transparency that
Nita had seen about Kit and herself before. The whole Book was
hardly to be seen except for its printing, which burned in its own
fashion, supremely black and clear, but glistening as if the ink
with which the characters were printed had moonlight trapped in
them too. “Here’s an index,” Kit whispered, using
the Speech now. “I think—the part about New
York—” Yes, Nita thought desperately, as another cab crashed into the
trees and finished itself. And what then? What do we do
about—She would not finish the thought, for the sound of
those leisurely, deadly hoofbeats was getting closer, and mixing
with it were sirens and the panicked sound of car horns. She
thought of that awful dark form crossing Madison, kicking cars
aside, crushing what tried to stop it, and all the time that wave
of blackness washing alongside, changing everything, stripping
the streets bare of life and light. And what about the Sun? The
Earth will freeze over before long, and he’ll have the whole
planet the way he wants it—Nita shuddered. Cold and darkness
and nothing left alive—a storm-broken, ice-locked
world, full of twisted machines stalking desolate streets
forever . . .
Kit was turning pages, quickly but gently, as if what he touched
was a live thing. Perhaps it was. Nita saw him pause between one
page and the next, holding one bright-burning page draped
delicately over his fingers, then letting it slide carefully
down to lie with the others he’d turned. “Here,”
he whispered, awed, delighted. He did not look up to see what Nita
saw, the wave of darkness creeping around them, unable to pass the
tree-wall, passing onward, surrounding them so that they were
suddenly on an island of grass in a sea of wrestling naked tree
limbs and bare-seared dirt and rock.
“Here—”
He began to read, and for all her fear Nita was lulled to
stillness by wonder. Kit’s voice was that of someone
discovering words for the first time after a long silence, and the
words he found were a song, as her spell to free the trees had
seemed, She sank deep in the music of the Speech, hearing the story
told in what Kit read.
Kit was invoking New York, calling it up as one might call up a
spirit; and, obedient to the summons, it came. The skyline came,
unsmirched by any blackness—a crown
of glittering towers in a smoky sunrise, all stabbing points
of jeweled windows, precipices of steel
and stone. City Hall came, brooding over its colonnades, gazing
down in weary interest at the people who came and went and governed
the island through it. The streets came, hot, dirty crowded, but
flowing with voices and traffic and people, bright lifeblood
surging through concrete arteries. The parks came, settling into
place one by one as they were described, free of the darkness under
the night—from tiny paved vest-pocket niches to the
lake-set expanses of Central Park, they all came, thrusting
the black fog back. Birds sang, dogs ran and barked and rolled in
the grass, trees were bright with wary squirrels’ eyes. The
Battery came, the crumbling old first-defense fort standing
peaceful now at the southernmost tip of Manhattan—the
rose-gold of some remembered sunset glowed warm on its bricks
as it mused in weedy silence over old battles won and nonetheless
kept an eye on the waters of the harbor, just in case some British
cutter should try for a landing when the colonists weren’t
looking. Westward over the water, the Palisades were there, shadowy
cliffs with the Sound behind them,
mist-blue and mythical—looking as though New Jersey was
only a mile away. Eastward and westward the bridges were there, the
lights of their spanning suspension cables coming out blue as stars
in the twilight. Seabirds wheeled pale and graceful about the
towers of the George Washington Bridge and the Verrazano
Narrows and the iron crowns of the 59th Street Bridge, as the soft
air of evening settled over Manhattan, muting the city roar to a
quiet breathing rumble. Under the starlight and the risen Moon, an
L-101 arrowed out of LaGuardia Airport and soared over the
city, screaming its high song of delight in the cold upper airs,
dragging the thunder along behind—
Nita had to make an effort to pull herself out of the waking
dream. Kit read on, while all around the trees bent in close to
hear, and the air flamed clear and still as a frozen moment of
memory. He read on, naming names in the Speech, describing people
and places in terrifying depth and detail, making them real
and keeping them that way by the Book’s power and the sound
of the words. But no sign of any terror at the immensity of what he
was doing showed in Kit’s face—and that frightened Nita
more than the darkness that still surged and whispered around them
and their circle of trees. Nita could see Kit starting to burn with
that same unbearable clarity, becoming more real, so much so that
he was not needing to be visible any more. Slowly—subtly, the
Book’s vivid transparency was taking him too. Fred, hanging
beside Kit and blazing in defiance of the dark, looked pale in
comparison. Even Kit’s shadow glowed, and it occurred to Nita
that shortly, if this kept up, he wouldn’t have one. What do
I do? she thought. He’s not having trouble, he seems to be
getting stronger, not weaker, but if this has to go on much
longer—
Kit kept reading. Nita looked around her and began to see an
answer. The darkness had not retreated from around them. Out on the
Fifth Avenue side of the tree-wall,
the crashes of cabs were getting more frequent, the howls of
perytons were closer, the awful clanging hoofbeats seemed almost on
top of them. There was nowhere to run, and Nita knew with horrible
certainty that not all the trees in the park would be enough to
stop the Starsnuffer when he came there. Keeping New York real was
one answer to this problem, but not the answer. The darkness and
the unreality were symptoms, not the cause. Something had to be
done about him.
The iron hooves paused. For an awful moment there was no sound;
howls and screeching tires fell silent. Then metal began to smash
on stone in a thunderous canter, right across the street, and with
a horrible screeching neigh the rider’s iron steed smashed
into the tree-wall, splintering wood, bowing the palisade
inward. Nita wanted to shut her mind against the screams of the
trees broken and flung aside in that first attack, but she could
not—All around her the remaining trees sank their roots deep
in determination, but even they knew it would be hopeless.
There were enough cracks in the wall that Nita could see the black
steed rearing back for another smash with its front four hooves,
the rider smiling, a cold cruel smile that made Nita shudder. One
more stroke and the wall would be down. Then there would be
wildfire in the park, Kit, oblivious, kept reading. The iron mount
rose to its full height. “Fred,” Nita whispered,
“I think you’d better—” The sound of heavy
hoofbeats, coming from behind them, from the park side, choked her
silent. He has a twin brother, Nita thought. We are dead.
But the hoofbeats divided around the battered circle of trees
and poured past in a storm of metal and stone, the riders and
steeds marble pale or bronze dark, every equestrian statue in or
near Central Park gathered together into an impossible cavalry
that charged past Nita and Kit and Fred and into the street to give
battle. Perytons and cabs screamed as General Sherman from Grand
Army Plaza crashed in among them with sword raised, closely
followed by Joan of Arc in her armor, and Simón Bolívar and General
Martin right behind. King Wladislaw was there in medieval scale
mail, galloping on a knight’s armored charger; Don Quixote
was there, urging poor broken-down Rosinante to something
faster than a stumble and shouting swears against the whole breed
of sorcerers; Teddy Roosevelt was there, cracking off shot after
shot at the cabs as his huge horse stamped them into the pavement;
El Cid Campeador rode there, his bannered lance striking down one
peryton after another. Behind all these came a wild assortment of
statues, pouring past the tree circle and into the
street—eagles, bears, huge owls or
foxes, a hunting cat, a crowd of doughboys from the
first World War with bayoneted rifles—all the most warlike of
the nearby statuary—even some not warlike, such as several
deer and the Ugly Duckling. From down Fifth Avenue came striding
golden Prometheus from his pedestal in Rockefeller Center, bearing
the fire he brought for mortals and using it in bolt after bolt to
melt down cabs where they stood; and from behind him, with a stony
crash like the sky falling, the great white lions from the steps of the
Public Library leaped together and threw themselves upon the iron
steed and its dark rider. For all its extra legs, the mount
staggered back and sideways, screaming in a horrible parody of a
horse’s neigh and striking feebly at the marble claws that
tore its flanks.
Under cover of that tumult of howls and crashes and the clash of
arms Nita grabbed Kit to pull him away from the tree-wall,
behind another row of trees. She half expected her hands to go
right through him, he was becoming so transparent. Unresisting, he
got up and followed her, still holding the Book open, still reading
as if he couldn’t stop, or didn’t want to, still
burning more and more fiercely with the inner light of the bright
Book’s power. “Fred,” she said as she pushed Kit
down onto the ground again behind a looming old maple,
“I’ve got to do this now. I may not be able to do
anything else. If a diversion’s needed—”
(I’ll do what’s necessary,) Fred said, his voice
sounding as awed and frightened as Nita felt at the sight of
what Kit was becoming. (You be careful too.)
She reached out a hand to Fred. He bobbed close and settled at
the tip of one finger for a moment, perching there delicately as a
firefly, energy touching matter for a moment as if to
reconfirm the old truth that they were just different forms of the
same thing. Then he lifted away, turning his attention out to the
street, to the sound of stone and metal wounding and being wounded;
and in one quick gesture Nita grabbed the Book of Night with Moon
away from Kit and bent her head to read.
An undertow of blinding power and irresistible light poured into
her, over her, drowned her deep. She couldn’t fight it. She
didn’t want to. Nita understood now the
clear-burning transfiguration of Kit’s small plain
human face and body, for it was not the wizard who read the Book;
it was the other way around. The silent Power that had written the
Book reached through it now and read what life had written in her
body and soul—joys, hopes, fears, and failings all
together—then took her intent and read that too, turning it
into fact. She was turning the bright pages without even thinking
about it, finding the place in the Book that spoke of creation and
rebellion and war among the stars—the words that had once
before broken the terrible destroying storm of death and darkness
that the angry Starsnuffer had raised to break the newly made
worlds and freeze the seas where life was growing, an eternity ago.
“I am the wind that troubles the water,” Nita said, whispering
in the Speech—The whisper smote against the windowed cliffs
until they echoed again, and the clash and tumult of battle began
to grow still as the wind rose at the naming. “I am
the water, and the waves; I am the shore where the waves
break in rainbows; I am the sunlight that
shines in the spray—”
The power rose with the rhythms of the old, old words, rose with
the wind as all about her the earth and air and waters of the park
began to remember what they were—matter and energy, created,
indestructible, no matter what darkness lay over them. “I am
the trees that drink the light; I am the air of the green
things’ breathing; I am the stone that the trees break
asunder; I am the molten heart of the world—”
“NO!” came his scream from beyond the wall of trees,
hating, raging, desperate. But Nita felt no fear. It was as it had
been in the Beginning; all his no’s had never been able to
stand against life’s I Am. All around her trees and stones
and flesh and metal burned with the power that burned her,
self-awareness, which death can seem to stop but can never
keep from happening, no matter how hard it tries. “Where
will you go? To what place will you wander?” she asked
sorrowfully, or life asked through her, hoping that the lost one
might at last be convinced to come back to his allegiance. Of all
creatures alive and otherwise, he had been and still was one of the
mightiest. If only his stubborn anger would break, his power could
be as great for light as for darkness—but it could not
happen. If after all these weary eons he still had not realized the
hopelessness of his position, that everywhere he went, life was
there before him—Still she tried, the ancient words speaking
her solemnly. “—in vale or on hilltop, still I am
there—”
Silence, silence, except for the rising wind. All things seemed
to hold their breath to hear the words; even the dark rider, erect
again on his iron steed and bitter of face, ignoring the tumult
around him. His eyes were only for Nita, for only her reading held
him bound. She tried not to think of him, or of the little time
remaining before the Moon went out, and gave herself over wholly to
the reading. The words shook the air and the earth, blinding,
burning.
“—will you sound the sea’s depth, or climb the
mountain? In air or in water, still I am there; Will the earth cover you?
Will the night hide you? In deep or in darkness, still I am there;
Will you kindle the nova, or kill the starlight? In fire or in
deathcold, still I am there—”
The Moon went out.
Fred cried out soundlessly, and Nita felt the loss of light like
a stab in the heart. The power fell away from her, quenched,
leaving her small and cold and human and
alone, holding in her hands a Book gone dark from lack of
moonlight. She and Kit turned desperately toward each other in a
darkness becoming complete as the flowing blackness put out the
last light of the city. Then came the sound of low, satisfied
laughter and a single clang of a heavy hoof, stepping forward.
Another clang.
Another.
(Now,) Fred said suddenly, (now I understand what all that
emitting was practice for. No beta, no gamma, no microwave or
upper-wavelength ultraviolet or X-rays, is that
all?)
“Fred?” Kit said, but Fred didn’t
wait—He shot upward, blazing, a point of light like a falling
star falling the wrong way, up and up until his brightness was as
faint as one more unremarkable star. “Fred, where are you
going?”
(To create a diversion,) his thought came back, getting fainter
and fainter. (Nita, Kit—)
They could catch no more clear thoughts, only a great wash of
sorrow and loss, a touch of fear—and then brightness
intolerable erupted in the sky as Fred threw his claudication open,
emitting all his mass at once as energy, blowing his quanta. He
could hardly have been more than halfway to the Moon, for a second
or two later it was alight again, a blazing searing full such as no
one had ever seen. There was no looking at either Fred’s
blast of light or at the Moon that lit trees and statues and the
astounded face of the Starsnuffer with a light like a silver
sun.
The rider spent no more than a moment being astounded.
Immediately he lifted his steel rod, pointing it at Fred this time,
shouting in the Speech cold words that were a curse on all light
everywhere, from time’s beginning to its end. But Fred burned
on, more fiercely, if possible. Evidently not even the Starsnuffer
could quickly put out a white hole that was liberating all the
bound-up energy of five or six blue-white giant stars at once.
“Nita, Nita, read!” Kit shouted at her. Through her
tears she looked down at the Book again and picked up where she had
left off. The dark rider was cursing them all in earnest now,
knowing that another three lines in the book would bring Nita to
his name. She had only to pronounce it to cast him out into the
unformed void beyond the universes, where he had been cast the
first time those words were spoken.
Cabs and perytons screamed and threw themselves at the barrier
in a last wild attempt to break through, the statues leaped into
the fray again, stone and flesh and metal clashed. Nita fell down
into the bright power once more, crying, but reading in urgent
haste so as not to waste the light Fred was giving himself to
become.
As the power began again to read her, she could hear it reading
Kit too, his voice matching hers as it had in their first wizardry,
small and thin and brave, and choked with grief like hers. She
couldn’t stop crying, and the power burned in her tears too,
an odd hot feeling, as she cried bitterly for Fred, for Kit’s
Lotus, for everything horrible that had happened all that
day—all the fair things skewed, all the beauty twisted by the
dark Lone Power watching on his steed. If only there were some way
he could be otherwise if he wanted to—for here was his name, a long
splendid flow of syllables in the Speech, wild and courageous in
its own way—and it said that he had not always been so
hostile; that he got tired sometimes of being wicked, but his pride
and his fear of being ridiculed would never let him stop. Never,
forever, said the symbol at the very end of his name, the closed
circle that binds spells into an unbreakable cycle and indicates
lives bound the same way. Kit was still reading. Nita turned
her head in that nova moonlight and looked over her shoulder
at the one who watched—His face was set, and bitter still,
but weary. He knew he was about to be cast out again, frustrated
again; and he knew that because of what he had bound himself into
being, he would never know fulfillment of any kind. Nita looked
back down to the reading, feeling sorry even for him, opened her
mouth and along with Kit began to say his name. Don’t be
afraid to make corrections!
Whether the voice came from her memory or was a last whisper
from the blinding new star far above, Nita never knew. But she knew
what to do. While Kit was still on the first part of the name she
pulled out her pen, her best pen that Fred had saved and changed.
She clicked it open, The metal still tingled against her skin, the
ink at the point still glittered oddly—the same glitter as
the ink with which the bright Book was written, Nita bent quickly
over the Book and, with the pen, in lines of light, drew from that
final circle an arrow pointing upward, the way out, the symbol that
said change could happen—if, only if—and together they
finished the Starsnuffer’s name in the Speech, said the new
last syllable, made it real.
The wind was gone. Fearfully Nita and Kit turned around, looked
at Fifth Avenue—and found it empty. The creeping blackness
was gone with the breaking of its master’s magic and the
sealing of the worldgate he had held open. Silent and somber, the
statues stood among the bodies of the slain—crushed cabs and
perytons, shattered trees—then one by one each paced off into
the park or down Fifth Avenue, back to its pedestal and its long
quiet regard of the city. The howl of sirens, lost for a while in
the wind that had risen, now grew loud again. Kit and Nita stood
unmoving as the trees ringing them moved away to their old places,
sinking roots back into torn-up earth and raising branches to
the burning Moon. Some ninety-three million miles
away the Sun had come quietly back to
life. But its light would not reach for another eight minutes yet,
and as Nita and Kit watched, slowly the star in the heavens faded,
and the Moon faded with it—from daylight to silver fire, to
steel-gray glow, to earthlight shimmer, to nothing.
The star went yellow, and red, and died. Nothing was left but a
stunning, wide aurora, great curtains and rays of rainbow light
shivering and cracking all across the golden-glowing city
night.
“He forgot the high-energy radiation again,”
Kit said, tears constricting his voice to a whisper.
Nita closed the Book she held in her hands, now dark and
ordinary-looking except for the black depths of its covers,
the faint shimmer of starlight on page edges. “He always
does,” she said, scrubbing at her eyes, and then offered Kit
the Book. He shook his head, and Nita dropped it into her backpack
and slung it over her back again. “You think he’ll
take the chance?” she said.
“Huh? Oh.” Kit shook his head unhappily. “I
dunno. Old habits die hard. If he wants
to . . . ”
Above them the Moon flicked on again, full and
silver-bright through the blue and red shimmer of the auroral
curtain. They stood gazing at it, a serene, remote brilliance,
seeming no different than it had been an hour before, a night
before, when everything had been as it should be. And
now—
“Let’s get out of here,” Nita said.
They walked out of the park unhindered by the cops and firemen
who were already arriving in squad cars and fire trucks and
paramedic ambulances. Evidently no one felt that two
grade-school kids could possibly have anything to do with a
street full of wrecked cabs and violently uprooted trees. As they
crossed Fifth Avenue and the big mesh-sided Bomb Squad truck
passed them, Nita bent to pick up a lone broken-off twig of
oak, and stared at it sorrowfully. “There wasn’t even
anything left of him,” she said as they walked east on
Sixty-fourth, heading back to the Pan Am Building and the
timeslide.
“Only the light,” Kit said, looking up at the
aurora. Even that was fading now.
Silently they made their way to Grand Central and entered the
Pan Am Building at the mezzanine level. The one guard was sitting
with his back to them and his feet on the desk, reading the Post.
Kit went wearily over to one elevator, laid a hand on it, and spoke
a word or three to it in the Speech. Its doors slid silently open,
and they got in and headed upstairs.
The restaurant level was dark, for the place served only lunch,
and there was no one to see them go back up to the roof. Kit opened
the door at the top of the stairs, and together they walked out
into peace and darkness and a wind off the ocean. A helicopter was
moored in the middle of the pad with steel pegs and cables,
crouching on its skids and staring at them with clear, sleepy,
benevolent eyes. The blue high-intensity marker lights blazed
about it like the circle of a protection spell. Nita looked away,
not really wanting to think about spells or anything else to do
with wizardry. The book said it would be hard. That I didn’t
mind. But I hurt! And where’s the good part—There was
supposed to be happiness too . . .
The bright Book was heavy on her back as she looked out across
the night.
All around, for miles and miles, was glittering light, brilliant
motion, shining under the Moon; lights of a thousand colors
gleaming from windows, glowing on streets, blazing from the
headlights of cars. The city, breathing, burning, living the life
they had preserved. Ten million lives and more. “If something
should happen to all that life—how terrible.” Nita
gulped for control as she remembered Fred’s words of just
this morning, an eternity ago. And this was what being a wizard was
about. Keeping terrible things from happening, even when it hurt.
Not just power, or control of what ordinary people couldn’t
control, or delight in being able to make strange things happen.
Those were side effects—not the reason, not the purpose.
She could give it up, she realized suddenly. In the recovery of
the bright Book, she and Kit had more than repaid the energy
invested in their training. If they chose to lay the Art aside, if
she did, no one would say a word. She would be left in peace. Magic
does not live in the unwilling soul.
Yet never to hear a tree talk again, or a stone, or a
star . . .
On impulse Nita held out her hands and closed her eyes. Even
without the rowan rod she could feel the moonfire on her skin as a
tree might feel it. She could taste the restored sunlight that
produced it, feel the soundless roar of the ancient atomic furnace
that had burned just this way while her world was still a cloud of
gas, nebulous and unformed. And ever so faintly she could taste a
rainbow spatter of high-energy radiation, such as a white
hole might leave after blowing its quanta.
She opened her eyes, found her hands full of moonlight that
trembled like bright water, its surface sheened with fading
aurora-glow. “All right,” she said after a
moment. “All right.” She opened her hands to let the
light run out. “Kit?” she said, saying his name in the
Speech.
He had gone to stand beside the helicopter and was standing with
one hand laid against its side. It stared at him mutely.
“Yeah,” He said, and patted the cool metal, and left
the chopper to rejoin Nita. “I guess we pass the
test.”
They took their packs off and got out the materials necessary
for the timeslide. When the lithium-cadmium battery and the
calculator chip and the broken teacup-handle were in place,
Kit and Nita started the spell—and without warning were again
caught up by the augmenting power of the bright Book and plunged
more quickly than they expected into the wizardry. It was like
being on a slide, though they were the ones who held still, and the
events of the day as seen from the top of the Pan Am Building
rushed backward past them, a high-speed 3-D movie in
reverse. Blinding white fire and the nova Moon grew slowly in the
sky, flared, and were gone. The Moon, briefly out, came on again.
Darkness flowed backward through the suddenly open worldgate,
following its master on his huge dark mount, who also stepped
backward and vanished through the gate. Kit and Nita saw themselves
burst out of the roof door, blurred with speed; saw themselves run
backward over the railing, a bright line of light pacing them as
they plunged out into the dark air, dove backward through the gate,
and vanished with it The Sun came up in the west and fled back
across the sky. Men in coveralls burst out of the roof door and
unpegged the Helicopter; two of them got into it and it took off
backwards. Clouds streamed and boiled past, jets fell backward
into LaGuardia. The Sun stood high.
The slide let them go, and Kit and Nita sat back gasping.
“What time have you got?” Kit said when he had enough
breath.
Nita glanced at her watch. “Nine
forty-five.”
“Nine forty-five! But we were supposed
to—”
“It’s this Book, it makes everything work too well.
At nine forty-five we were—”
They heard voices in the stairwell, behind the closed door. Kit
and Nita stared at each other. Then they began frantically picking
up the items left from their spelling. Nita paused with the
lithium-cadmium battery in her hand as she recognized one of
those voices coming up the stairs. She reared back, took aim, and
threw the heavy battery at the closed door, hard. crack!
Kit looked at her, his eyes wide, and understood. “Quick,
behind there,” he said. Nita ran to scoop up the battery,
then ducked around after Kit and crouched down with him behind the
back of the stairwell. There was a long, long pause before the door
opened and footsteps could be heard on the gravel. Kit and Nita
edged around the side of the stairwell again to peer around the
corner. Two small, nervous-looking figures were heading for
the south facing rail in the bright sunlight. A dark-haired
girl, maybe thirteen, wearing jeans and a shirt and a down vest; a
dark-haired boy, small and a touch stocky, also in jeans and
parka, twelve years old or so. The boy held a broken-off
piece of antenna, and the girl held a peeled white stick, and they
were being paced by a brilliant white spark like a
will-o’-the-wisp plugged into too much
current and about to blow out.
“ ‘There are no accidents,’ ” Kit whispered
sadly.
The tears stung Nita’s eyes again. “G’bye,
Fred,” she said softly in English, for fear the Speech should
attract his attention, or hers.
Silently and unseen, Kit and Nita slipped through the door and
went downstairs for the shuttle and the train home.
With great caution and a grunt of effort, Kit pushed up the
grille at the top of the concrete steps and looked around.
“Oh, brother,” he whispered, “sometimes I wish I
wasn’t right.”
He scrambled up out of the tunnel and onto the sidewalk, with
Nita and Fred following right behind. The street was a shambles
reminiscent of Fifth and Sixty-second. Corpses of cabs and
limousines and even a small truck were scattered around, smashed
into lampposts and the fronts of buildings, overturned on the
sidewalk. The Lotus Esprit was crouched at guard a few feet away
from the grille opening, its engine running in long,
tired-sounding gasps. As Kit ran over to it, the Lotus
rumbled an urgent greeting and shrugged its doors open.
“They know we’re here,” Nita said as they
hurriedly climbed in and buckled up. “They have to know
what we’ve done. Everything feels different since the dark
Book fell out of this space.”
(And they must know we’ll head back for the worldgate at
Pan Am,) Fred said. (Wherever that is.)
“We’ve gotta find it—oof!” Kit said, as
the Lotus reared back, slamming its doors shut, and dove down the
street they were on, around the corner and north again.
“Nita, you up for one more spell?”
“Do we have a choice?” She got her manual out of her
pack, started thumbing through it. “What I want to know is
what we’re supposed to try on whatever they have waiting for
us at Grand Central. You-know-who isn’t just
going to let us walk in there and leave with the bright
Book—”
“We’ll burn that bridge when we come to it.”
Kit had his backpack open in his lap and was peeking at the Book of
Night with Moon. Even in the sullen dimness that leaked in the
Lotus’s windows, the edges of the pages of the Book shone,
the black depths of its covers glowed with the promise of light.
Kit ran a finger along the upper edge of one cover, and as Nita
watched his face settled into a solemn stillness, as if someone
spoke and he listened intently. It was a long moment before the
expression broke. Then Kit glanced over at her with a wondering
look in his eyes. “It really doesn’t look like that
much,” he said. “But it feels—Nita, I don’t
think they can hurt us while we have this. Or if they can, it
won’t matter much.”
“Maybe not, if we read from it,” Nita said, reading
down through the spell that would locate the worldgate for them.
“But you remember what Tom said—”
“Yeah.” But there was no concern in Kit’s
voice, and he was looking soberly at the Book again.
Nita finished checking the spell and settled back in the seat to
prepare for it, then started forward again as a spark of heat
burned into her neck, “Ow!”
(Sorry.) Fred slid around from behind her to perch farther
forward on her shoulder.
“Here we go,” Nita said.
She had hardly begun reading the imaging spell before a wash of
power such as she had never felt seized her and plunged her into
the spell headfirst. And the amazing thing was that she
couldn’t even be frightened, for whatever had so
suddenly pulled her under and into the magic was utterly
benevolent, a huge calm influence that Nita sensed would do
her nothing but good, though it might kill her doing it. The power
took her, poured itself into her, made the spell part of her. There
was no longer any need to work it; it was. Instantly she saw all
Manhattan laid out before her again in shadow outlines, and there
was the worldgate, almost drowned in the darkness created by the
Starsnuffer, but not hidden to her. The power let her go then, and
she sat back gasping. Kit was watching her strangely.
(I think I see what you mean,) she said. (The Book—it made
the spell happen by itself, almost.)
“Not ‘almost,’ ” Kit said. “No
wonder you-know-who wants it kept out of the hands of
the Senior wizards. It can make even a beginner’s spell
happen. It did the same thing with the Moebius spell. If someone
wanted to take this Place apart—or if someone wanted to make
more places like it, and they had the Book—” He gulped.
“Look, where’s the gate?”
“Where it should be,” Nita said, finding her breath.
“Underground—under Grand Central. Not in the deli,
though. It’s down in one of the train tunnels.”
Kit gulped again, harder.
“Trains . . . And you know that
place’ll be guarded. Fred, are you up to another
diversion?” (Will it get us back to the sun and the stars
again? Try me.) Nita closed her eyes to lean back and take a
second’s rest—the power that had run through her for
that moment had left her amazingly drained—but nearly jumped
out of her skin the next moment as the Lotus braked, wildly
fishtailing around a brace of cabs that leaped at it out of a side
street. With a scream of engine and a cloud of exhaust and burned
rubber it found its traction again and tore out of the intersection
and up Third Avenue, leaving the cabs behind.
“They know, they know,” Nita moaned, “Kit,
what’re we going to do? Is the Book going to be enough to
stand up to him?”
“We’ll find out, I guess,” Kit said, though he
sounded none too certain. “We’ve been lucky so far. No,
not lucky, we’ve been ready. Maybe that’ll be enough.
We both came prepared for trouble, we both did our
reading—”
Nita looked sheepish. “You did, maybe. I couldn’t
get past Chapter Forty. No matter how much I read, there was always
more.”
Kit smiled just as uncomfortably. “I only got to
Thirty-three myself, then I skimmed a lot.”
“Kit, there’s about to be a surprise quiz. Did we
study the right chapters?”
“Well, we’re gonna find out,” Kit said. The
Lotus turned left at the corner of Third and Forty-second,
speeding down toward Grand Central. Forty-second seemed
empty; not even a cab was in sight. But a great looming darkness
was gathered down the street, hiding the iron overpass. The Lotus
slowed, unwilling to go near it.
“Right here is fine,” Kit said, touching the
dashboard reassuringly. The Lotus stopped in front of the doors to
Grand Central, reluctantly shrugging first Nita’s, then
Kit’s door open.
They got out and looked around them. Silence. Nita looked
nervously at the doors and the darkness beyond, while the Lotus
crowded close to Kit, who rubbed its right wheelwell absently.
The sound came. A single clang, like an anvil being struck, not
too far away. Then another clang, hollow and metallic, echoing from
the blank-eyed buildings, dying into bell-like echoes.
Several more clangs, close together. Then a series of them, a slow
drumroll of metal beating on stone. The Lotus pulled out from under
Kit’s hand, turning to face down Forty-second the way
they had come, growling deep under its hood.
The clangor grew louder; echoes bounced back and forth from
building to building so that it was impossible to tell from what
direction the sound was coming. Down at the corner of Lexington and
Forty-second, a blackness jutted suddenly from behind one of
the buildings on the uptown side. The shape of it and its unlikely
height above the pavement, some fifteen feet, kept Nita from
recognizing what it was until more of it came around the corner,
until the blackness found its whole shape and swung it around into
the middle of the street on iron hooves.
Eight hooves, ponderous and deadly, dented the asphalt of the
street—They belonged to a horse—a huge, misproportioned
beast, its head skinned to a skull, leaden-eyed and grinning
hollowly. All black iron that steed as if
it had stepped down from a pedestal at its rider’s call; and
the one who rode it wore his own darkness
on purpose, as if to reflect the black mood within. The Starsnuffer
had put aside his three-piece suit for chain mail like
hammered onyx and a cloak like night with no stars. His face was
still handsome, but dreadful now, harder than any stone. His
eyes burned with the burning of the dark Book, alive with painful
memory about to come real. About the feet of his mount the perytons
milled, not quite daring to look in their master’s face, but
staring and slavering at the sight of Kit and Nita, waiting the
command to course their prey.
Kit and Nita stood frozen, and Fred’s light, hanging small
and constant as a star behind them, dimmed down to its
faintest.
The cold, proud, erect figure on the black mount raised what it
held in its right hand, a steel rod burning dark and skewing the
air about it as the dark Book had. “You have stolen something
of mine,” said a voice as cold as space, using the Speech
with icy perfection and hating it. “No one steals from me.”
The bolt that burst from the rod was a red darker than the
Eldest’s fiery breath. Nita did not even try to use the rowan
wand in defense—as well try to use a sheet of paper to stop a
laser beam. But as she and Kit leaped aside, the air around them
went afire with sudden clarity, as if for a moment the darkness
inherent in it was burned away. The destroying bolt went awry,
struck up sideways and blasted soot-stained blocks out of the
facing of Grand Central. And in that moment the Lotus screamed wild
defiance and leaped down Forty-second at the rider and his
steed.
“NO!” Kit screamed. Nita grabbed him, pulled him
toward the doors. He wouldn’t come, wouldn’t turn away
as the baying perytons scattered, as the Lotus hurtled into the
forefront of the pack, flinging bodies about. It leaped up at the
throat of the iron beast, which reared on four hooves and raised
the other four and with them smashed the Lotus flat into the
street.
The bloom of fire that followed blotted out that end of the
street. Kit responded to Nita’s pulling then, and together
they ran through the doors, up the ramp that led into Grand
Central, out across the floor—
Nita was busy getting the rowan wand out, had gotten ahead of
Kit, who couldn’t move as fast because he was
crying—but it was his hand that shot out and caught her by
the collar at the bottom of the ramp, almost choking
her and kept her from falling into the
pit. There was no floor. From one side of the main concourse to the other was a great smoking crevasse, the
floor, lower levels and tunnels beneath all split as if with an axe.
Ozone smell, cinder smell and the
smell of tortured steel breathed up hot in their faces, while from behind, outside, the
thunder of huge hooves on concrete and the howls of perytons began
again. Below them severed tunnels and
stairways gaped dark. There was no seeing the bottom—it was
veiled in fumes and soot, underlit by the blue arcs of
shorted-out third rails and an ominous deep red, as if the
earth itself had broken open and was bleeding lava. The hooves
clanged closer.
Nita turned to Kit, desperate. Though his face still streamed
with tears, there was an odd, painful calm about it. “I know
what to do,” he said, his voice saying that he found that
strange. He drew the antenna out of his back pocket, and it was
just as Nita noticed how strangely clear the air was burning about
him that Kit threw the piece of steel out over the smoking abyss.
She would have cried out and grabbed him, except that he was
watching it so intently.
The hoofbeats stopped and were followed by a sound as of iron
boots coming down on the sidewalk, immensely heavy, shattering the
stone. Despite her own panic, Nita found she couldn’t
look away from the falling antenna either. She was gripped
motionless in the depths of a spell again, while the power that
burned the air clear now poured itself through Kit and into his
wizardry. There was something wrong with the way the antenna was
falling. It seemed to be getting bigger with distance instead of
smaller. It stretched, it grew, glittering as it turned and
changed. It wasn’t even an antenna any more. Sharp blue light
and diffuse red gleamed from flat, polished faces, edges sharp
as razors. It was a sword blade, not even falling now, but laid
across the chasm like a bridge. The wizardry broke and turned Nita
loose. Kit moved away from her and stepped out onto the flat of the
blade, fear and pain showing in his face again.
“Kit!”
“It’s solid,” he said, still crying, taking
another step out onto the span, holding his arms out for balance as
it bent slightly under his weight. “Come on, Nita, it’s
moon-forged steel, he can’t cross it. He’ll have
to change shape or seal this hole up.”
(Nita, come on,) Fred said, and bobbled out across the crevasse,
following Kit. Though almost blind with terror, her ears full of
the sound of iron-shod feet coming after them, she followed
Fred, who was holding a straight course out over the sword
blade—followed him, arms out as she might have on a balance
beam, most carefully not looking down. This was worse than the
bridge of air had been, for that hadn’t flexed so terribly
under each step she or Kit took. His steps threw her off balance
until she halted long enough to take a deep breath and step in time
with him. Smoke and the smell of burning floated up around her; the
shadows of the dome above the concourse stirred with wicked eyes,
the open doors to the train platforms ahead of muttered, their
mouths full of hate. She watched the end of the looked straight
ahead. Five steps: Kit was off. Three. One—
She reached out to him, needing desperately to feel the touch of
a hand. He grabbed her arm and pulled her off the bridge just as
another blast of black-red fire blew in the doors on the other
side of the abyss. Kit said one sharp word in the Speech, and the
air went murky around his body again as the Book ceased to work
through him. Nita let go, glanced over her shoulder in time to see
the sword blade snap back to being an antenna, like a rubber band
going back to its right size. It fell into the fuming darkness, a
lone glitter, quickly gone.
They ran. Nita could still see in her mind the place where the
worldgate was hidden; the Book’s power had burned it into
her like a brand. She took the lead, racing down a flight of
stairs, around a corner and down another flight, into echoing
beige-tiled corridors where Fred and the rowan wand were
their only light. Above them they could hear the thunderous rumor
of iron footsteps, slow, leisurely, inexorable, following them
down. The howls of perytons floated down to them like the voices of
lost souls, hungry for the blood and pain they needed to feel alive
again.
“Here!” Nita shouted, not caring what might hear,
and dodged around a corner, and did what she had never done in all
her life before—jumped a subway turnstile. Its metal fingers
made a grab for her, but she was too fast for them, and Kit eluded
them too, coming right behind. At full speed Nita pounded down the
platform, looking for the steps at the end of it that would let
them down onto the tracks. She took them three at a time, two
leaps, and then was running on cinders again, leaping over ties.
Behind her she could hear Kit hobbling as fast as he could on his
sore leg, gasping, but keeping up. Fred shot along besides her,
pacing her, lighting her way. Eyes flickered in his
light—hidebehinds, dun mice, ducking under cover as the three
of them went past. Nita slowed and stopped in the middle of the
tracks. “Here!”
Kit had his manual out already. He found the page by
Fred’s light, thumped to a stop beside Nita. “Here? In
the middle of the—”
“Read! Read!” she yelled. There was more thunder
rolling in the tunnel than just the sound of their pursuer’s
footsteps. Far away, she could hear what had been missing from the
other tunnel beneath City Hall; trains. Away in the darkness,
wheels slammed into the tracks they rode—even now the
tracks around them were clacking faintly in
sympathy, and a slight cool wind breathed against Nita’s
face. A train was coming. On this track. Kit began the worldgating
spell, reading fast. Again the air around them seemed clearer,
fresher, as the power of the Book of Night with Moon seized the
spell and its speaker, used them both.
That was when the Starsnuffer’s power came down on them.
It seemed impossible that the dank close darkness in which they
stood could become any darker, but it did, as an oppressive blanket
of clutching, choking hatred blasted them,
blanketing everything. The rowan rod’s silver fire was
smothering. Fred’s light went out as if he had been stepped
on, Kit stopped reading, rugged for breath. Nita tried to resist,
tried to find air, couldn’t, collapsed to her knees, choking.
The breeze from the dark at the end of the tunnel got stronger: the
onrushing train, pushing the air in front of it, right up the
track, right at them—
(I—will—not,) Fred said, struggling, angry. (I
will—not—go out!) His determination was good for a
brief flare, like a match being struck. Kit found his voice,
managed to get out a couple more words of the spell in Fred’s
wavering radiance, grew stronger, managed a few more. Nita found
that she could breathe again. She clutched the rowan wand, thinking
with all her might of the night Liused had given it to her, the
clear moonlight shining down between the branches. The wand came
alive again. Shadows that had edged forward from the walls of the
tunnel fled again. Kit read, hurrying. Two thirds done, Nita
thought. If he can just finish—
Far away down the tunnel, there were eyes. They blazed. The
headlights of a train, coming down at them in full career. The
clack of the rails rose to a rattle, the breeze became a wind, the
roar of the train itself echoed not just in the other tunnels, but
in this one. Nita got to her feet, facing those eyes down. She
would not look away. Fred floated by her shoulder; she gathered him
close, perching him by her ear, feeling his terror of the
overwhelming darkness as if it were her own but having nothing to
comfort him with. Kit, she thought, not daring to say it aloud for
fear she should interrupt his concentration. The sound of his words
was getting lost in the thunder from above, iron-shod feet,
the thunder from below, iron wheels on iron rails.
Suddenly Kit’s voice was missing from the melange of
thunders. Without warning the worldgate was there, glistening in
the light of the rowan wand and Fred and the train howling down
toward them—a great jagged soap bubble, trembling with the
pressure of sound and air. Kit wasted no time, but leaped through.
Fred zipped into the shimmering surface and was gone. Nita made
sure of her grip on the rowan wand, took a deep breath, and jumped
through the worldgate. A hundred feet away, fifty feet away, the
blazing eyes of the train glared at her as she jumped; its horn
screamed in delight, anticipating the feel of blood beneath
its wheels; sudden thunder rocked the platform behind her,
black-red fire more sensed than seen. But the rainbow shimmer
of the gate broke across her face first. The train roared through
the place where she had been, and she heard the beginnings of a cry
of frustrated rage as she cheated death, and anger, and fell and
fell and fell . . .
—and came down slam on nothing. Or it seemed that way,
until opening her eyes a little wider she saw the soot and smog
trapped in the hardened air she lay on, the only remnant of her
walkway. Kit was already getting up from his knees beside her,
looking out from their little island of air across to the Pan Am
Building. Everything was dark, and Nita started to groan, certain
that something had gone wrong and that the worldgate had simply
dropped them back in the
Starsnuffer’s world—but no, her walkway was there.
Greatly daring, she looked down and saw far below the bright yellow
glow of sodium-vapor street lights and red of taillights,
City noise, roaring, cacophonous and alive, floated up to
them. We’re back. It worked!
Kit was reading from his wizards’ manual, as fast as he
had read down in the train tunnel. He stopped and then looked at
Nita in panic as she got up. “I can’t close the
gate!”
She gulped. “Then he can follow us,
through . . . ” In an agony of haste she
fumbled her own book out of her pack, checked the words for the
air-hardening spell one more time, and began reading herself.
Maybe panic helped, for this time the walkway spread itself out
from their feet to the roof of the building very fast indeed.
“Come on,” she said, heading out across it as quickly
as she dared. But where will we run to? she thought. He’ll
come behind, hunting. We can’t go home, he might follow. And
what’ll he do to the city?
She reached up to the heliport railing and swung herself over
it. Kit followed, with Fred pacing him. “What’re
we gonna do?” he said as they headed across the gravel
together. “There’s no time to call the Senior
wizards, wherever they are—or even Tom and Carl.
He’ll be here shortly.”
“Then we’ll have to get away from here and find a
place to hole up for a little. Maybe the bright Book can
help.” She paused as Kit spoke to the lock on the roof door,
and they ran down the stairs. “Or the manuals might have
something, now that we need it.”
“Yeah, right,” Kit said as he opened the second door
at the bottom of the stairs, and they ran down the corridor where
the elevators were. But he didn’t sound convinced. “The
park?”
“Sounds good.”
Nita punched the call button for the elevator, and she and Kit
stood there panting. There was a feeling in the air that all hell
was about to break loose, and the sweat was breaking out all over
Nita because they were going to have to stop it somehow.
“Fred,” she said, “did you ever hear anything,
out where you were, any stories of someone getting the better of
you-know-who?”
Fred’s light flickered uncomfortably as he watched Kit
frantically consulting his manual. (Oh, yes,) he said. (I’d
imagine that’s why he wanted a universe apart to
himself—to keep others from getting in and thwarting him. It
used to happen fairly frequently when he went up against life.)
Fred’s voice was too subdued for Nita’s liking.
“What’s the catch?”
(Well . . . it’s possible to win
against him. But usually someone dies of it)
Nita gulped again. Somehow she had been expecting something like
that. “Kit?”
The elevator chimed. Once inside, Kit went back to looking
through his manual. “I don’t see anything,” he
said, sounding very worried. “There’s a
general-information chapter on him here, but there’s
not much we don’t know already. The only thing he’s
never been able to dominate was the Book of Night with Moon. He
tried—that’s what the dark Book was for; he thought by
linking them together he could influence the bright Book with it,
diminish its power. But that didn’t work. Finally he was
reduced to simply stealing the bright Book and hiding it where no
one could get at it. That way no one could become a channel for its
power, no one could possibly defeat
him . . . ”
Nita squeezed her eyes shut, not sure whether the sinking
feeling in her stomach was due to her own terror or the elevator
going down. Read from it? No, no. I hope I never have to,
Tom’s voice said in her
mind . . . Reading it, being the vessel for all
that power—I wouldn’t want to. Even good can be
terribly dangerous. And that was an Advisory, Nita thought, miserable. There was no
doubt about it. One of them might have to do what a mature wizard
feared doing: read from the Book itself.
“Let me do it,” she said, not looking at Kit.
He glanced up from the manual, stared at her.
“Bull,” he said, and then looked down at the manual
again. “If you’re gonna do it, I’m gonna do
it.”
Outside the doors another bell chimed as the elevator slowed to
a stop. Kit led the way out across the black stone floor, around
the corner to the entrance. The glass door let them out onto a
street just like the one they had walked onto in the
Snuffer’s otherworld—but here windows had lights in
them, and the reek of gas and fumes was mixed with a cool smell of
evening and a rising wind, and the cabs that passed looked blunt
and friendly. Nita could have cried for relief, except that there
was no reason to feel relieved. Things would be getting much worse
shortly.
Fred, though, felt no such compunctions. (The stars, the stars
are back,) he almost sang, flashing with delight as they hurried
along.
“Where?” Kit said skeptically. As usual, the glow of
a million street lights was so fierce that even the brightest stars
were blotted out by it. But Fred was too cheerful to be
suppressed.
(They’re there, they’re there!) he said, dancing
ahead of them. (And the Sun is there too. I don’t care that
it’s on the other side of this silly place, I can
feel—feel—)
His thought cut off so abruptly that Nita and Kit both stopped
and glanced over their shoulders. A coldness grabbed Nita’s
heart and wrung it—The sky, even though clear, did have a
faint golden glow to it, city light scattered from smog—and
against that glow, high up atop the Pan Am Building, a form half
unstarred night and half black iron glowered down at them like a
statue from a dauntingly high pedestal. Nita and Kit froze like
pinned to a card as the remote clear howl of perytons wound through
the air.
“He’ll just jump down,” Nita whispered,
knowing somehow that he could do it, But the rider did not leap,
not yet. Slowly he raised his arms in summons. One hand still held
the steel rod about which the air twisted and writhed as if in
pain; as the arm lifted, that writhing grew more violent, more
tortured.
And darkness answered the gesture. It flowed forward around the
feet of the dark rider’s terrible mount, obscuring the
perytons peering down over the roof’s edge, and poured down
the surface of the building like a black fog. What it touched,
changed. Where the darkness passed, metal tarnished, glass filmed
over or shattered, lighted windows were quenched, went blind. Down
all the sides of the building it flowed, black lava burning the
brightness out of everything it touched.
Kit and Nita looked at each other in despair, knowing what would
happen when that darkness spilled out onto the ground. The streets
would go desolate and dark, the cabs would stop being
friendly; and when all the island from river to river was turned
into his domain, the dark rider would catch them at his leisure and
do what he pleased with them. And with the bright Book—and
with everything else under the sky, perhaps. This was no
otherworld, frightening but remote. This was their home. If
this world turned into that one—
“We’re dead,” Kit said, and turned to run.
Nita followed him. Perhaps out of hope that another Lotus might be
waiting innocently at some curbside, the way Kit ran retraced their
earlier path. But there was no Lotus—only bright streets,
full of people going about their business with no idea of what was
about to happen to them, cars honking at one another in cheerful
ignorance. Fat men running newsstands and bemused
bag-ladies watched Nita and Kit run by as if death and doom
were after them, and no one really noticed the determined spark of
light keeping pace. They ran like the wind down West Fiftieth, but
no Lotus lay there, and around the corner onto Fifth and up to
Sixty-first, but the carnage left in the otherworld was not
reflected here—the traffic on Fifth ran unperturbed. Gasping,
they waited for a break in it, then ran across, hopped the wall
into the park and crouched down beside it as they had in the world
they’d left.
The wind was rising, not just a night breeze off the East River,
but a chill wind with a hint of that other place’s coldness
to it. Kit unslung his pack as drew in close, and by his light Kit
brought out the Book of Night with Moon. The darkness of its covers
shone, steadying Kit’s hands, making Fred seem to burn
brighter. Kit and Nita sat gasping for breath, staring at each
other.
“I’m out of ideas,” Kit said. “I think
we’re going to have to read from this to keep the city the
way it should be. We can’t just let him change things until
he catches us. Buildings are one thing; but what happens to people
after that black hits them?”
“And it might not stop here either,” Nita said
between gasps, thinking of her mother and father and Dairine, of
the quiet street where they lived, the garden, the rowan, all
warped and darkened—if they would survive at all.
Her eyes went up to the Moon shining white and full between the
shifting branches. All around them she could feel the trees
stirring in that new, strange, cold wind, whispering uneasily to
one another. It was so good to be in a place where she could hear
the growing things again.
The idea came. “Kit,” she said hurriedly,
“that dark was moving pretty fast. If we’re going to
read from the Book we may need something to buy us time, to hold
off the things that’ll come with it, the perytons and the
cabs.”
“We’re out of Lotuses,” Kit said, his voice
bleak.
“I know. But look where we are! Kit, this is Central Park!
You know how many trees there are in here of the kinds that went to
the Battle in the old days? They don’t forget.”
He stared at her. “What can they—”
“The Book makes everything work better, doesn’t it?
There’s a spell that—I’ll do it, you’ll
see. But you’ve got to do one too, it’s in your
specialty group. The Mason’s Word, the long
version—”
“To bring stone or metal to life.” He scrubbed the
last tears out of his eyes and managed ever so slight and slow a
smile. “There are more statues within screaming distance of
this place—”
“Kit,” Nita said, “how loud can you
scream?”
“Let’s find out.”
They both started going through their manuals in panicky haste.
Far away on the east side, lessened by all the buildings and
distance that lay between, but still much too clear, there was a
single, huge, deep-pitched clang, an immense weight of metal
hitting the ground with stone-shattering force. Fred hobbled
a little in the air, nervously. (How long do you think—)
“He’ll be a while, Fred,” Kit said, sounding
as if he hoped it would be a long while. “He doesn’t
like to run; it’s beneath his dignity. But I
think—” He broke off for a moment, reading down a page
and forming the syllables of the Mason’s Word without saying
them aloud. “I think we’re going to have a few friends
who’ll do a little running for us.”
He stood up, and Fred followed him, staying close to light the
page. “Nita, hand me the Book.” She passed it up to
him, breaking off her own frantic reading for a moment to watch.
“It’ll have to be a scream,” he said as if
himself. “The more of them hear me, the more help we
get.”
Kit took three long breaths and then shouted the Word at the top
of his lungs, all twenty-seven syllables of it without
missing a one. The sound rose impossibly
more than the yell of a twelve-year-old could as the Book
seized the sound and the spell together and flung them out into the
city night. Nita had to hold her ears. Even when it seemed safe to
uncover them again, the echoes bounced back from buildings on all
sides and would not stop. Kit stood there amazed as his voice rang
and ricocheted from walls blocks away. “Well,” he said,
“they’ll feel the darkness, they’ll know
what’s happening. I think.”
“My turn,” Nita said, and stood up beside Kit,
making sure of her place. Her spell was not a long one. She fumbled
for the rowan wand, put it in the hand that also held her
wizards’ manual, and took the bright Book from Kit. “I
hope—” she started to say, but the words were shocked
out of her as the feeling that the Book brought with it shot up her
arm. Power, such sheer joyous power that no spell could fail, no
matter how new the wizard was to the Art, Here, under moonlight and
freed at last from its long restraint, the Book was more potent
than even the dark rider who trailed them would suspect, and that
potency raged to be free. Nita bent her head to her manual and read
the spell.
Or tried to. She saw the words, the syllables, and spoke the
Speech, but the moonfire falling on the Book ran through her veins,
slid down her throat, and turned the words to song more subtle than
she had ever dreamed of, burned behind her eyes and showed her
another time, when another will had voiced these words for the
first time and called the trees to battle.
All around her, both now and then, the trees lifted their arms
into the wind, breathed the fumes of the new-old Earth and
breathed out air that men could use; they broke the stone to make
ground for their children to till and fed the mold with themselves,
leaf and bough, and generation upon generation. They knew to what
end their sacrifice would come, but they did it anyway, and they
would do it again in the Witherer’s spite. They were doing it
now. Oak and ash and willow, birch and alder, elm and maple, they
felt the darkness in the wind that tossed their branches and would
not stand still for it. The ground shook all around Nita, roots
heaved and came free—first the trees close by, the
counterparts of the trees under which she and Kit and Fred had
sheltered in the dark otherworld. White oak, larch, twisted
crabapple, their leaves glittering around the edges with the
flowering radiance of the rowan wand, they lurched and
staggered as they came rootloose, and then crowded in around Kit
and Nita and Fred, whispering with wind, making a protecting circle
through which nothing would pass but moonlight, the effect spread
out and away from Nita, though the spell itself was finished, and
that relentless power let her sag against one friendly oak,
gasping. For yards, for blocks, as far as she could see through the
trunks of the trees crowded close, branches waved green and wild as
bushes and vines and hundred-year monarchs of the park pulled
themselves out of the ground and moved heavily to the defense. Away
to the east, the clangor of metal hooves and the barks and howls of
the dark rider’s pack were coming closer. The trees waded
angrily toward the noise, some hobbling along on top of the ground,
some wading through it, and just as easily through sidewalks and
stone walls. In a few minutes there was a nearly solid palisade of
living wood between Kit and Nita and Fred and Fifth Avenue. Even
the glare of the streetlights barely made it through the
branches.
Kit and Nita looked at each other. “Well,” Kit said
reluctantly, “I guess we can’t put it off any
longer.”
Nita shook her head. She moved to put her manual away and was
momentarily shocked when the rowan wand, spent, crumbled to
silver ash in her hand. “So much for that,” she said,
feeling unnervingly naked now that her protection was gone. Another
howl sounded, very close by, and was abruptly cut off in a rushing
of branches as if a tree had fallen on something on purpose. Nita
fumbled in her pocket and pulled out a nickel. “Call
it,” she said.
“Heads.”
She tossed the coin, caught it, slapped it down on her forearm.
Heads. “Crud,” she said, and handed the bright Book to
Kit.
He took it uneasily, but with a glitter of excitement in his
eye. “Don’t worry,” he said. “You’ll
get your chance.”
“Yeah, well, don’t hog it.” She looked over at
him and was amazed to see him regarding her with some of the same
worry she was feeling. From outside the fence of trees came a
screech of brakes, the sound of a long skid, and then a great
splintering crashing of metal and smashing of glass as an
attacking cab lost an argument with some tree standing guard.
Evidently reinforcements from that other, darker world were
arriving.
“I won’t,” Kit said, “You’ll take
it away from me and keep reading if—”
He stopped, not knowing what might happen, Nita nodded.
“Fred,” she said, “we may need a diversion. But
save yourself till the last minute.”
(I will. Kit—) The spark of light hung close to him for a
moment. (Be careful.)
Suddenly, without warning, every tree around them shuddered as
if violently struck. Nita could hear them crying out in silent
anguish, and cried out in terror herself as she felt what they
felt—a great numbing cold that smote at the heart like an
axe. Kit, beside her, sat frozen with it, aghast. Fred went dim
with shock. (Not again!) he said, his voice faint and horrified.
(Not here, where there’s so much life!)
“The Sun,” Nita whispered. “He put out the
Sun!” Starsnuffer, she thought. That tactic’s worked
for him before. And if the Sun is out, pretty soon there
won’t be moonlight to read by, and he can—
Kit stared up at the Moon as if at someone about to die,
“Nita, how long do we have?”
“Eight minutes, maybe a little more, for light to get here
from the Sun. Eight minutes before it runs
out . . . ”
Kit sat down hurriedly, laid the bright Book in his lap, and
opened it. The light of the full Moon fell on the glittering pages.
This time the print was not vague as under the light of
Nita’s wand. It was clear and sharp and dark, as easily read
as normal print in daylight. The Book ‘s covers were fading,
going clear, burning with that eye-searing transparency that
Nita had seen about Kit and herself before. The whole Book was
hardly to be seen except for its printing, which burned in its own
fashion, supremely black and clear, but glistening as if the ink
with which the characters were printed had moonlight trapped in
them too. “Here’s an index,” Kit whispered, using
the Speech now. “I think—the part about New
York—” Yes, Nita thought desperately, as another cab crashed into the
trees and finished itself. And what then? What do we do
about—She would not finish the thought, for the sound of
those leisurely, deadly hoofbeats was getting closer, and mixing
with it were sirens and the panicked sound of car horns. She
thought of that awful dark form crossing Madison, kicking cars
aside, crushing what tried to stop it, and all the time that wave
of blackness washing alongside, changing everything, stripping
the streets bare of life and light. And what about the Sun? The
Earth will freeze over before long, and he’ll have the whole
planet the way he wants it—Nita shuddered. Cold and darkness
and nothing left alive—a storm-broken, ice-locked
world, full of twisted machines stalking desolate streets
forever . . .
Kit was turning pages, quickly but gently, as if what he touched
was a live thing. Perhaps it was. Nita saw him pause between one
page and the next, holding one bright-burning page draped
delicately over his fingers, then letting it slide carefully
down to lie with the others he’d turned. “Here,”
he whispered, awed, delighted. He did not look up to see what Nita
saw, the wave of darkness creeping around them, unable to pass the
tree-wall, passing onward, surrounding them so that they were
suddenly on an island of grass in a sea of wrestling naked tree
limbs and bare-seared dirt and rock.
“Here—”
He began to read, and for all her fear Nita was lulled to
stillness by wonder. Kit’s voice was that of someone
discovering words for the first time after a long silence, and the
words he found were a song, as her spell to free the trees had
seemed, She sank deep in the music of the Speech, hearing the story
told in what Kit read.
Kit was invoking New York, calling it up as one might call up a
spirit; and, obedient to the summons, it came. The skyline came,
unsmirched by any blackness—a crown
of glittering towers in a smoky sunrise, all stabbing points
of jeweled windows, precipices of steel
and stone. City Hall came, brooding over its colonnades, gazing
down in weary interest at the people who came and went and governed
the island through it. The streets came, hot, dirty crowded, but
flowing with voices and traffic and people, bright lifeblood
surging through concrete arteries. The parks came, settling into
place one by one as they were described, free of the darkness under
the night—from tiny paved vest-pocket niches to the
lake-set expanses of Central Park, they all came, thrusting
the black fog back. Birds sang, dogs ran and barked and rolled in
the grass, trees were bright with wary squirrels’ eyes. The
Battery came, the crumbling old first-defense fort standing
peaceful now at the southernmost tip of Manhattan—the
rose-gold of some remembered sunset glowed warm on its bricks
as it mused in weedy silence over old battles won and nonetheless
kept an eye on the waters of the harbor, just in case some British
cutter should try for a landing when the colonists weren’t
looking. Westward over the water, the Palisades were there, shadowy
cliffs with the Sound behind them,
mist-blue and mythical—looking as though New Jersey was
only a mile away. Eastward and westward the bridges were there, the
lights of their spanning suspension cables coming out blue as stars
in the twilight. Seabirds wheeled pale and graceful about the
towers of the George Washington Bridge and the Verrazano
Narrows and the iron crowns of the 59th Street Bridge, as the soft
air of evening settled over Manhattan, muting the city roar to a
quiet breathing rumble. Under the starlight and the risen Moon, an
L-101 arrowed out of LaGuardia Airport and soared over the
city, screaming its high song of delight in the cold upper airs,
dragging the thunder along behind—
Nita had to make an effort to pull herself out of the waking
dream. Kit read on, while all around the trees bent in close to
hear, and the air flamed clear and still as a frozen moment of
memory. He read on, naming names in the Speech, describing people
and places in terrifying depth and detail, making them real
and keeping them that way by the Book’s power and the sound
of the words. But no sign of any terror at the immensity of what he
was doing showed in Kit’s face—and that frightened Nita
more than the darkness that still surged and whispered around them
and their circle of trees. Nita could see Kit starting to burn with
that same unbearable clarity, becoming more real, so much so that
he was not needing to be visible any more. Slowly—subtly, the
Book’s vivid transparency was taking him too. Fred, hanging
beside Kit and blazing in defiance of the dark, looked pale in
comparison. Even Kit’s shadow glowed, and it occurred to Nita
that shortly, if this kept up, he wouldn’t have one. What do
I do? she thought. He’s not having trouble, he seems to be
getting stronger, not weaker, but if this has to go on much
longer—
Kit kept reading. Nita looked around her and began to see an
answer. The darkness had not retreated from around them. Out on the
Fifth Avenue side of the tree-wall,
the crashes of cabs were getting more frequent, the howls of
perytons were closer, the awful clanging hoofbeats seemed almost on
top of them. There was nowhere to run, and Nita knew with horrible
certainty that not all the trees in the park would be enough to
stop the Starsnuffer when he came there. Keeping New York real was
one answer to this problem, but not the answer. The darkness and
the unreality were symptoms, not the cause. Something had to be
done about him.
The iron hooves paused. For an awful moment there was no sound;
howls and screeching tires fell silent. Then metal began to smash
on stone in a thunderous canter, right across the street, and with
a horrible screeching neigh the rider’s iron steed smashed
into the tree-wall, splintering wood, bowing the palisade
inward. Nita wanted to shut her mind against the screams of the
trees broken and flung aside in that first attack, but she could
not—All around her the remaining trees sank their roots deep
in determination, but even they knew it would be hopeless.
There were enough cracks in the wall that Nita could see the black
steed rearing back for another smash with its front four hooves,
the rider smiling, a cold cruel smile that made Nita shudder. One
more stroke and the wall would be down. Then there would be
wildfire in the park, Kit, oblivious, kept reading. The iron mount
rose to its full height. “Fred,” Nita whispered,
“I think you’d better—” The sound of heavy
hoofbeats, coming from behind them, from the park side, choked her
silent. He has a twin brother, Nita thought. We are dead.
But the hoofbeats divided around the battered circle of trees
and poured past in a storm of metal and stone, the riders and
steeds marble pale or bronze dark, every equestrian statue in or
near Central Park gathered together into an impossible cavalry
that charged past Nita and Kit and Fred and into the street to give
battle. Perytons and cabs screamed as General Sherman from Grand
Army Plaza crashed in among them with sword raised, closely
followed by Joan of Arc in her armor, and Simón Bolívar and General
Martin right behind. King Wladislaw was there in medieval scale
mail, galloping on a knight’s armored charger; Don Quixote
was there, urging poor broken-down Rosinante to something
faster than a stumble and shouting swears against the whole breed
of sorcerers; Teddy Roosevelt was there, cracking off shot after
shot at the cabs as his huge horse stamped them into the pavement;
El Cid Campeador rode there, his bannered lance striking down one
peryton after another. Behind all these came a wild assortment of
statues, pouring past the tree circle and into the
street—eagles, bears, huge owls or
foxes, a hunting cat, a crowd of doughboys from the
first World War with bayoneted rifles—all the most warlike of
the nearby statuary—even some not warlike, such as several
deer and the Ugly Duckling. From down Fifth Avenue came striding
golden Prometheus from his pedestal in Rockefeller Center, bearing
the fire he brought for mortals and using it in bolt after bolt to
melt down cabs where they stood; and from behind him, with a stony
crash like the sky falling, the great white lions from the steps of the
Public Library leaped together and threw themselves upon the iron
steed and its dark rider. For all its extra legs, the mount
staggered back and sideways, screaming in a horrible parody of a
horse’s neigh and striking feebly at the marble claws that
tore its flanks.
Under cover of that tumult of howls and crashes and the clash of
arms Nita grabbed Kit to pull him away from the tree-wall,
behind another row of trees. She half expected her hands to go
right through him, he was becoming so transparent. Unresisting, he
got up and followed her, still holding the Book open, still reading
as if he couldn’t stop, or didn’t want to, still
burning more and more fiercely with the inner light of the bright
Book’s power. “Fred,” she said as she pushed Kit
down onto the ground again behind a looming old maple,
“I’ve got to do this now. I may not be able to do
anything else. If a diversion’s needed—”
(I’ll do what’s necessary,) Fred said, his voice
sounding as awed and frightened as Nita felt at the sight of
what Kit was becoming. (You be careful too.)
She reached out a hand to Fred. He bobbed close and settled at
the tip of one finger for a moment, perching there delicately as a
firefly, energy touching matter for a moment as if to
reconfirm the old truth that they were just different forms of the
same thing. Then he lifted away, turning his attention out to the
street, to the sound of stone and metal wounding and being wounded;
and in one quick gesture Nita grabbed the Book of Night with Moon
away from Kit and bent her head to read.
An undertow of blinding power and irresistible light poured into
her, over her, drowned her deep. She couldn’t fight it. She
didn’t want to. Nita understood now the
clear-burning transfiguration of Kit’s small plain
human face and body, for it was not the wizard who read the Book;
it was the other way around. The silent Power that had written the
Book reached through it now and read what life had written in her
body and soul—joys, hopes, fears, and failings all
together—then took her intent and read that too, turning it
into fact. She was turning the bright pages without even thinking
about it, finding the place in the Book that spoke of creation and
rebellion and war among the stars—the words that had once
before broken the terrible destroying storm of death and darkness
that the angry Starsnuffer had raised to break the newly made
worlds and freeze the seas where life was growing, an eternity ago.
“I am the wind that troubles the water,” Nita said, whispering
in the Speech—The whisper smote against the windowed cliffs
until they echoed again, and the clash and tumult of battle began
to grow still as the wind rose at the naming. “I am
the water, and the waves; I am the shore where the waves
break in rainbows; I am the sunlight that
shines in the spray—”
The power rose with the rhythms of the old, old words, rose with
the wind as all about her the earth and air and waters of the park
began to remember what they were—matter and energy, created,
indestructible, no matter what darkness lay over them. “I am
the trees that drink the light; I am the air of the green
things’ breathing; I am the stone that the trees break
asunder; I am the molten heart of the world—”
“NO!” came his scream from beyond the wall of trees,
hating, raging, desperate. But Nita felt no fear. It was as it had
been in the Beginning; all his no’s had never been able to
stand against life’s I Am. All around her trees and stones
and flesh and metal burned with the power that burned her,
self-awareness, which death can seem to stop but can never
keep from happening, no matter how hard it tries. “Where
will you go? To what place will you wander?” she asked
sorrowfully, or life asked through her, hoping that the lost one
might at last be convinced to come back to his allegiance. Of all
creatures alive and otherwise, he had been and still was one of the
mightiest. If only his stubborn anger would break, his power could
be as great for light as for darkness—but it could not
happen. If after all these weary eons he still had not realized the
hopelessness of his position, that everywhere he went, life was
there before him—Still she tried, the ancient words speaking
her solemnly. “—in vale or on hilltop, still I am
there—”
Silence, silence, except for the rising wind. All things seemed
to hold their breath to hear the words; even the dark rider, erect
again on his iron steed and bitter of face, ignoring the tumult
around him. His eyes were only for Nita, for only her reading held
him bound. She tried not to think of him, or of the little time
remaining before the Moon went out, and gave herself over wholly to
the reading. The words shook the air and the earth, blinding,
burning.
“—will you sound the sea’s depth, or climb the
mountain? In air or in water, still I am there; Will the earth cover you?
Will the night hide you? In deep or in darkness, still I am there;
Will you kindle the nova, or kill the starlight? In fire or in
deathcold, still I am there—”
The Moon went out.
Fred cried out soundlessly, and Nita felt the loss of light like
a stab in the heart. The power fell away from her, quenched,
leaving her small and cold and human and
alone, holding in her hands a Book gone dark from lack of
moonlight. She and Kit turned desperately toward each other in a
darkness becoming complete as the flowing blackness put out the
last light of the city. Then came the sound of low, satisfied
laughter and a single clang of a heavy hoof, stepping forward.
Another clang.
Another.
(Now,) Fred said suddenly, (now I understand what all that
emitting was practice for. No beta, no gamma, no microwave or
upper-wavelength ultraviolet or X-rays, is that
all?)
“Fred?” Kit said, but Fred didn’t
wait—He shot upward, blazing, a point of light like a falling
star falling the wrong way, up and up until his brightness was as
faint as one more unremarkable star. “Fred, where are you
going?”
(To create a diversion,) his thought came back, getting fainter
and fainter. (Nita, Kit—)
They could catch no more clear thoughts, only a great wash of
sorrow and loss, a touch of fear—and then brightness
intolerable erupted in the sky as Fred threw his claudication open,
emitting all his mass at once as energy, blowing his quanta. He
could hardly have been more than halfway to the Moon, for a second
or two later it was alight again, a blazing searing full such as no
one had ever seen. There was no looking at either Fred’s
blast of light or at the Moon that lit trees and statues and the
astounded face of the Starsnuffer with a light like a silver
sun.
The rider spent no more than a moment being astounded.
Immediately he lifted his steel rod, pointing it at Fred this time,
shouting in the Speech cold words that were a curse on all light
everywhere, from time’s beginning to its end. But Fred burned
on, more fiercely, if possible. Evidently not even the Starsnuffer
could quickly put out a white hole that was liberating all the
bound-up energy of five or six blue-white giant stars at once.
“Nita, Nita, read!” Kit shouted at her. Through her
tears she looked down at the Book again and picked up where she had
left off. The dark rider was cursing them all in earnest now,
knowing that another three lines in the book would bring Nita to
his name. She had only to pronounce it to cast him out into the
unformed void beyond the universes, where he had been cast the
first time those words were spoken.
Cabs and perytons screamed and threw themselves at the barrier
in a last wild attempt to break through, the statues leaped into
the fray again, stone and flesh and metal clashed. Nita fell down
into the bright power once more, crying, but reading in urgent
haste so as not to waste the light Fred was giving himself to
become.
As the power began again to read her, she could hear it reading
Kit too, his voice matching hers as it had in their first wizardry,
small and thin and brave, and choked with grief like hers. She
couldn’t stop crying, and the power burned in her tears too,
an odd hot feeling, as she cried bitterly for Fred, for Kit’s
Lotus, for everything horrible that had happened all that
day—all the fair things skewed, all the beauty twisted by the
dark Lone Power watching on his steed. If only there were some way
he could be otherwise if he wanted to—for here was his name, a long
splendid flow of syllables in the Speech, wild and courageous in
its own way—and it said that he had not always been so
hostile; that he got tired sometimes of being wicked, but his pride
and his fear of being ridiculed would never let him stop. Never,
forever, said the symbol at the very end of his name, the closed
circle that binds spells into an unbreakable cycle and indicates
lives bound the same way. Kit was still reading. Nita turned
her head in that nova moonlight and looked over her shoulder
at the one who watched—His face was set, and bitter still,
but weary. He knew he was about to be cast out again, frustrated
again; and he knew that because of what he had bound himself into
being, he would never know fulfillment of any kind. Nita looked
back down to the reading, feeling sorry even for him, opened her
mouth and along with Kit began to say his name. Don’t be
afraid to make corrections!
Whether the voice came from her memory or was a last whisper
from the blinding new star far above, Nita never knew. But she knew
what to do. While Kit was still on the first part of the name she
pulled out her pen, her best pen that Fred had saved and changed.
She clicked it open, The metal still tingled against her skin, the
ink at the point still glittered oddly—the same glitter as
the ink with which the bright Book was written, Nita bent quickly
over the Book and, with the pen, in lines of light, drew from that
final circle an arrow pointing upward, the way out, the symbol that
said change could happen—if, only if—and together they
finished the Starsnuffer’s name in the Speech, said the new
last syllable, made it real.
The wind was gone. Fearfully Nita and Kit turned around, looked
at Fifth Avenue—and found it empty. The creeping blackness
was gone with the breaking of its master’s magic and the
sealing of the worldgate he had held open. Silent and somber, the
statues stood among the bodies of the slain—crushed cabs and
perytons, shattered trees—then one by one each paced off into
the park or down Fifth Avenue, back to its pedestal and its long
quiet regard of the city. The howl of sirens, lost for a while in
the wind that had risen, now grew loud again. Kit and Nita stood
unmoving as the trees ringing them moved away to their old places,
sinking roots back into torn-up earth and raising branches to
the burning Moon. Some ninety-three million miles
away the Sun had come quietly back to
life. But its light would not reach for another eight minutes yet,
and as Nita and Kit watched, slowly the star in the heavens faded,
and the Moon faded with it—from daylight to silver fire, to
steel-gray glow, to earthlight shimmer, to nothing.
The star went yellow, and red, and died. Nothing was left but a
stunning, wide aurora, great curtains and rays of rainbow light
shivering and cracking all across the golden-glowing city
night.
“He forgot the high-energy radiation again,”
Kit said, tears constricting his voice to a whisper.
Nita closed the Book she held in her hands, now dark and
ordinary-looking except for the black depths of its covers,
the faint shimmer of starlight on page edges. “He always
does,” she said, scrubbing at her eyes, and then offered Kit
the Book. He shook his head, and Nita dropped it into her backpack
and slung it over her back again. “You think he’ll
take the chance?” she said.
“Huh? Oh.” Kit shook his head unhappily. “I
dunno. Old habits die hard. If he wants
to . . . ”
Above them the Moon flicked on again, full and
silver-bright through the blue and red shimmer of the auroral
curtain. They stood gazing at it, a serene, remote brilliance,
seeming no different than it had been an hour before, a night
before, when everything had been as it should be. And
now—
“Let’s get out of here,” Nita said.
They walked out of the park unhindered by the cops and firemen
who were already arriving in squad cars and fire trucks and
paramedic ambulances. Evidently no one felt that two
grade-school kids could possibly have anything to do with a
street full of wrecked cabs and violently uprooted trees. As they
crossed Fifth Avenue and the big mesh-sided Bomb Squad truck
passed them, Nita bent to pick up a lone broken-off twig of
oak, and stared at it sorrowfully. “There wasn’t even
anything left of him,” she said as they walked east on
Sixty-fourth, heading back to the Pan Am Building and the
timeslide.
“Only the light,” Kit said, looking up at the
aurora. Even that was fading now.
Silently they made their way to Grand Central and entered the
Pan Am Building at the mezzanine level. The one guard was sitting
with his back to them and his feet on the desk, reading the Post.
Kit went wearily over to one elevator, laid a hand on it, and spoke
a word or three to it in the Speech. Its doors slid silently open,
and they got in and headed upstairs.
The restaurant level was dark, for the place served only lunch,
and there was no one to see them go back up to the roof. Kit opened
the door at the top of the stairs, and together they walked out
into peace and darkness and a wind off the ocean. A helicopter was
moored in the middle of the pad with steel pegs and cables,
crouching on its skids and staring at them with clear, sleepy,
benevolent eyes. The blue high-intensity marker lights blazed
about it like the circle of a protection spell. Nita looked away,
not really wanting to think about spells or anything else to do
with wizardry. The book said it would be hard. That I didn’t
mind. But I hurt! And where’s the good part—There was
supposed to be happiness too . . .
The bright Book was heavy on her back as she looked out across
the night.
All around, for miles and miles, was glittering light, brilliant
motion, shining under the Moon; lights of a thousand colors
gleaming from windows, glowing on streets, blazing from the
headlights of cars. The city, breathing, burning, living the life
they had preserved. Ten million lives and more. “If something
should happen to all that life—how terrible.” Nita
gulped for control as she remembered Fred’s words of just
this morning, an eternity ago. And this was what being a wizard was
about. Keeping terrible things from happening, even when it hurt.
Not just power, or control of what ordinary people couldn’t
control, or delight in being able to make strange things happen.
Those were side effects—not the reason, not the purpose.
She could give it up, she realized suddenly. In the recovery of
the bright Book, she and Kit had more than repaid the energy
invested in their training. If they chose to lay the Art aside, if
she did, no one would say a word. She would be left in peace. Magic
does not live in the unwilling soul.
Yet never to hear a tree talk again, or a stone, or a
star . . .
On impulse Nita held out her hands and closed her eyes. Even
without the rowan rod she could feel the moonfire on her skin as a
tree might feel it. She could taste the restored sunlight that
produced it, feel the soundless roar of the ancient atomic furnace
that had burned just this way while her world was still a cloud of
gas, nebulous and unformed. And ever so faintly she could taste a
rainbow spatter of high-energy radiation, such as a white
hole might leave after blowing its quanta.
She opened her eyes, found her hands full of moonlight that
trembled like bright water, its surface sheened with fading
aurora-glow. “All right,” she said after a
moment. “All right.” She opened her hands to let the
light run out. “Kit?” she said, saying his name in the
Speech.
He had gone to stand beside the helicopter and was standing with
one hand laid against its side. It stared at him mutely.
“Yeah,” He said, and patted the cool metal, and left
the chopper to rejoin Nita. “I guess we pass the
test.”
They took their packs off and got out the materials necessary
for the timeslide. When the lithium-cadmium battery and the
calculator chip and the broken teacup-handle were in place,
Kit and Nita started the spell—and without warning were again
caught up by the augmenting power of the bright Book and plunged
more quickly than they expected into the wizardry. It was like
being on a slide, though they were the ones who held still, and the
events of the day as seen from the top of the Pan Am Building
rushed backward past them, a high-speed 3-D movie in
reverse. Blinding white fire and the nova Moon grew slowly in the
sky, flared, and were gone. The Moon, briefly out, came on again.
Darkness flowed backward through the suddenly open worldgate,
following its master on his huge dark mount, who also stepped
backward and vanished through the gate. Kit and Nita saw themselves
burst out of the roof door, blurred with speed; saw themselves run
backward over the railing, a bright line of light pacing them as
they plunged out into the dark air, dove backward through the gate,
and vanished with it The Sun came up in the west and fled back
across the sky. Men in coveralls burst out of the roof door and
unpegged the Helicopter; two of them got into it and it took off
backwards. Clouds streamed and boiled past, jets fell backward
into LaGuardia. The Sun stood high.
The slide let them go, and Kit and Nita sat back gasping.
“What time have you got?” Kit said when he had enough
breath.
Nita glanced at her watch. “Nine
forty-five.”
“Nine forty-five! But we were supposed
to—”
“It’s this Book, it makes everything work too well.
At nine forty-five we were—”
They heard voices in the stairwell, behind the closed door. Kit
and Nita stared at each other. Then they began frantically picking
up the items left from their spelling. Nita paused with the
lithium-cadmium battery in her hand as she recognized one of
those voices coming up the stairs. She reared back, took aim, and
threw the heavy battery at the closed door, hard. crack!
Kit looked at her, his eyes wide, and understood. “Quick,
behind there,” he said. Nita ran to scoop up the battery,
then ducked around after Kit and crouched down with him behind the
back of the stairwell. There was a long, long pause before the door
opened and footsteps could be heard on the gravel. Kit and Nita
edged around the side of the stairwell again to peer around the
corner. Two small, nervous-looking figures were heading for
the south facing rail in the bright sunlight. A dark-haired
girl, maybe thirteen, wearing jeans and a shirt and a down vest; a
dark-haired boy, small and a touch stocky, also in jeans and
parka, twelve years old or so. The boy held a broken-off
piece of antenna, and the girl held a peeled white stick, and they
were being paced by a brilliant white spark like a
will-o’-the-wisp plugged into too much
current and about to blow out.
“ ‘There are no accidents,’ ” Kit whispered
sadly.
The tears stung Nita’s eyes again. “G’bye,
Fred,” she said softly in English, for fear the Speech should
attract his attention, or hers.
Silently and unseen, Kit and Nita slipped through the door and
went downstairs for the shuttle and the train home.