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.