So You Want to Be a Wizard, New Millennium Edition Page 13

  Nita struggled, though unable to move or cry out. Her mind beat at the spell like a bird in a cage, and finally the spell released her… but only to look in the other direction, downtown toward the Wall Street end of the island. There in the illogical-looking tangle of streets built before the regular gridwork of Manhattan was laid down, buried amid the ghosts of buildings, another light throbbed, regular, powerful, unafraid. It flared, it dazzled with white silver fire, and Nita thought of the moonlight radiance of the rowan wand.

  In a way, the spell said, this second light was the source of the wand’s power, even though here and now the source was bound and limited. This time the syllables of the Speech were no crushing weight of horror. They were a song, one Nita wished would never stop. Courage, joy, an invitation to everything in existence to be what it was, be the best it could be, grow, live—description, affirmation, encouragement, all embodied in one place, one source, buried in the shadows. The Book of Night with Moon.

  A feeling of urgency came over Nita as the spell told her that without the protection of the bright Book, she and Kit and Fred would never survive the hungry malevolence of this place long enough to find the worldgate and escape. Nor, for that matter, would they be able to find the worldgate at all; it was being held against them by powers adept in wizardries more potent than anything the two of them could manage. It would be folly to try matching wizardries with the Lone Power on its own ground, this outworld long given over to its rule. Their best chance was to find the bright Book and free it of the constraint that held its power helpless. Then there might be a chance.

  The spell shut itself off, finished. Walls and physical darkness curdled around them again. Kit and Nita looked at each other, uncertain.

  “We’ve been had,” Kit said.

  Nita shook her head, not following him.

  “Remember Tom saying it was odd that our first spell turned up Fred and the news that the bright Book was missing? And what Picchu said then?”

  “There are no accidents,” Nita murmured.

  “Uh-huh. How likely do you think it is that all this is an accident? Something wanted us here, I bet.” Kit scowled. “They might have asked us! It’s not fair!”

  Nita held still for a moment, considering this. “Well, maybe they did ask us.”

  “Huh? Not me, I—”

  “The Oath.”

  Kit got quiet quickly. “Well,” he admitted after a while, “it did have all kinds of warnings in front of it. And I went ahead and read it anyway.”

  “So did I.” Nita closed her eyes for a second, breathing out, and heard something in the back of her head, a thread of memory: Did I do right? Go find out…

  “Look,” she said, opening her eyes again, “maybe we’re not as bad off as we think. Tom did say that younger wizards have more power. We don’t have a lot of supplies, but we’re both pretty good with the Speech by now, and Fred’s here to help. We’re armed—” She glanced down at the rowan wand, still lying moon bright in her lap.

  “For how long?” Kit said. He sighed too. “Then again, I guess it doesn’t matter much—if we’re going to find the bright Book, the only way to do it is to hurry. Somebody knows we’re here. That thing showed up awful fast—” He nodded at the roof.

  “Yeah.” Nita got up, took a moment to stretch, then glanced down at Kit. He wasn’t moving. “What’s the matter?”

  Kit stared at the antenna in his hands. “When I was talking to the Edsel it told me some things about the Powers that didn’t want intelligence to happen in machines. They knew that people would start talking to them, make friends with them. Everybody would be happier as a result. Those Powers—” He looked up. “If I understood that spell right, the one running this place is the chief of them all, the worst of them. The Destroyer, the engenderer of rust—”

  “Kit!”

  “I know, you shouldn’t name it—” He got up, held out a hand to Fred, who bobbled over to Kit and came to rest on his palm. “But that’s who we’re up against. Or what. Fred, do you know what we’re talking about?”

  Fred’s thought was frightened but steady. The Starsnuffer, he said. The one who saw light come to be and could not make it in turn—and so rebelled against it, and declared a war of darkness. Though the rebellion didn’t work as well as it might have, for darkness only made the light seem brighter.

  Kit nodded. “That’s the one. If we do get the bright Book, that’s who’ll come after us.”

  Fred shuddered, a flicker of light so like a spark about to go out in the wind that Kit hurriedly tucked the antenna under his arm and cupped his other hand around Fred protectively. I’ve lost enough friends to that one, Fred said, heard enough songs stilled. People gone nova before their time, or fallen through naked singularities into places where you burn forever but don’t learn anything from it.

  For a moment neither of them could follow Fred’s thought. Though he was using the Speech, as always, they couldn’t follow what other things he was describing, only that those things were as terrible to him as the helicopter-creature was to them. No matter, he said at last. You two are part of the answer to stopping that kind of thing. Otherwise my search for an Advisory nexus wouldn’t have brought me to you. Let’s do what we can.

  Kit nodded. “Whatever that is. I wish I knew where to begin.”

  Nita leaned back against the wall. “Didn’t Tom say something about the two Books being tied together? So that you could use one to guide you to the other?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well. We’re not too far from the dark one.” Nita swallowed. “If we could get hold of that—and use it to lead us to the bright one. That vision only gave a general idea of where the Book of Night with Moon was. Probably because of its being restrained, or guarded, or whatever—”

  “Steal the dark Book?” Kit looked at Nita as if she had taken leave of her senses. “Yeah, right! And then have—” he waved his hand at the northward wall, not wanting to say any name, “—and God knows what else come chasing after us?”

  “Why not?” Nita retorted. “It’s a better chance than going straight for the bright one, which we know is guarded somehow. We’d go fumbling around down there in the financial district and probably get caught right away. But why would they guard the dark Book? They’re the only ones who would want it! I bet you we could get at the dark one a lot more easily than the other.”

  Kit chewed his lip briefly.

  “Well?” Nita said. “What do you think?”

  “I think you’re probably nuts. But we can’t just sit here, and it wouldn’t hurt to go see what the situation is. Fred?”

  Lead, Fred said, I’ll follow.

  Kit gently tossed Fred back into the air and paused long enough to put his book away. He didn’t put the antenna away, though. The rowan wand glowed steadily and brilliantly. “Can’t you damp that down a little?” Kit said. “If somebody sees us—”

  “No, I can’t. I tried.” Nita cast about for ways to hide it, finally settled on sticking it in her back jeans pocket and settling her down vest over it. “Better?”

  “Yeah.” Kit had turned his attention to the doorknob. He touched it, spoke softly to it in the Speech, turned it. Nothing happened. “Not listening?” he wondered out loud, and bent to touch the keyhole. “Now why—Ow!” He jumped back, almost knocking Nita over.

  “What’s the matter?”

  Kit was sucking on his finger, looking pained. “Bit me!” he said, removing the finger to examine it. It bled.

  “I get the feeling,” Nita said slowly, “that there’s not much here that’s friendly.”

  “Yeah.” Kit looked glumly at the doorknob. “I guess we’d better consider everything we see potentially dangerous.” He lifted the antenna, bent down by the lock again, and touched the keyhole delicately with the knob at the antenna’s end. A brief red spark spat from the antenna; the innards of the lock clicked. This time when Kit turned the knob, the door came open a crack.

  With great caution he o
pened the door a bit more, peered out, then opened it all the way and motioned Nita to follow him. Together they stepped out into a hall much like the elevator corridor in their own world, but dark and silent. “The elevator?” Kit said silently, not wanting to break that ominous quiet.

  “Do you trust it?”

  “No. Know where the stairs are?”

  “Down the way we came. Past the elevator.”

  The door to the main stairway had to be coerced into opening by the same method as the door to the roof. When they were through it Kit spent another moment getting it to lock again, then stepped over to the banister and looked down at story after story of switchback stairs. “It could be worse,” Nita said. “We could be going up.”

  “It will be worse,” Kit said. “If the worldgate stays at this level, we’re going to have to come back up…”

  They headed down. It took a long time. The few times they dared stop to rest, Kit and Nita heard odd muffled noises through the walls—vaguely threatening scrapes and groans and rumbles, the kind of sounds heard in nightmares. The stairs were as dark as the corridor had been, and it was hard to sit in the corner of a landing, rubbing aching legs, with only the light of Nita’s wand to argue with the blackness that towered above and yawned below, as those sounds got louder.

  They quickly lost count of how many stories downward they’d gone. All the landings looked the same, and all the doors from them opened off into the same pitch blackness—until finally Kit eased one open as he had eased open scores of others, and abruptly stood very still. He put his hand out behind him. “Nita! The wand.”

  She passed it to him. It dimmed in his hand from moonfire to foxfire, a faint silver glimmer that Kit held out the door as he looked around. “It’s all that shiny stone, like the other lobby. There should be a way down into the station, then—“

  Nita’s hair stood up on end at the thought. “Kit, you saw what happened to helicopters. Do you really want to meet this place’s version of a train? Let’s go out on the street level, okay?”

  He gulped and nodded. “Which way?”

  “There’s a door out onto Forty-fifth Street. C’mon.”

  She slipped out, and Kit followed with the wand. Its pale light reached just far enough ahead to gleam off the glass wall at the end of the corridor. Near it was the down escalator, frozen dead. They made their way softly down it, then across the slick floor and out the glass doors to the street.

  It was nearly as dark outside as it had been inside; a night without a hint of Moon or stars. The air down there wasn’t as chill as it had been on the building’s roof, but it stank of dark city smells—exhaust, spilled gasoline, garbage, and soot. The gutter was clogged with trash. They stepped out to cross Forty-fifth.

  “No,” Nita hissed, startled into audible speech, and dragged Kit back into the dark of the doorway. Pale yellow-brown light flickered down the street, got brighter. A second later, with a snarl of its engine, a big yellow Checker Cab hurled itself past them, staring in front of it with headlight-eyes burned down to yellow threads of filament—eyes that looked somehow as if they could see. But the cab seemed not to notice them. Its snarl diminished as it plunged down the street, leaving a whirl of dirty paper and dead leaves in its wake. Kit coughed as its exhaust hit them.

  “That was alive,” he said silently when he got his breath back. “The same way the helicopter was.”

  Nita made a miserable face. “Let’s get out of here,” she said.

  Kit nodded.

  She led him off to their left, through the Helmsley-Spear Building, which should have been bright with gold-leafed statuary. Here it was gray with soot, and the carvings stared down with such looks of silent malice that Nita refused to glance up more than that once.

  She hoped for some more encouraging sight as they came onto Forty-sixth Street and looked up Park Avenue. The hope was vain. The avenue stretched away and slightly upward for blocks as it did in their own world, vanishing in the murk. But the divider between the uptown and downtown lanes, usually green with shrubbery, had become one long tangle of barren thorn bushes. The old-fashioned red-and-green traffic lights burned low and dark as if short on power; and no matter how long one watched, they never changed from red. The shining glass-and-steel office buildings that had lined the avenue in their Manhattan were grimy shells here, the broad sidewalks before them cluttered with rubbish. Nothing moved anywhere, except far up Park, where another pair of dimly glowing yellow eyes waited at a corner.

  Those eyes made Nita nervous. “This way,” she said. She hurried past a dirty granite facade full of still doors and silent windows. Kit followed close, and Fred with him, both looking worriedly at everything they passed.

  Nita was doing her best to keep herself calm as they turned the corner onto Forty-seventh. It can’t all be as bad as the helicopter, she told herself. And nothing really bad has happened to us yet. It was just the shock of the—

  She jumped back into the shadow of a building on hearing a clapping sound so loud she felt sure the helicopter’s mate was coming for them. Fred and Kit huddled terrified into that shadow, too, and it took a few seconds for any of them to find the source of the sound. Not more than five or six feet from them, a pigeon had landed—a sooty dark one, cooing and strutting and head-bobbing in a perfectly normal fashion. It walked away from them, muttering absently, intent on its own pursuits. Kit poked Nita from behind—not a warning: a teasing poke. “Getting jumpy, huh?”

  “Yeah, well, you were the one who said—“

  The lightning-stroke of motion not six feet away knocked the amusement right out of them. What had seemed a perfectly ordinary fire hydrant, dull yellow, with rust stains and peeling paint, suddenly cracked open and shot out a long, pale, ropy tongue like a toad’s. The pigeon never had a chance. Hit side on, the bird made just one strangled gobbling noise before the tongue was gone again, too fast to follow, and the wide horizontal mouth it came from was closed again. All that remained to show that anything had happened was a slight bulge under the metallic-looking skin of the fire hydrant. The bulge heaved once and was still.

  Nita bit her lip. Behind her she could feel Kit start shaking again. “I feel really sorry for the next dog that comes along,” he said. “Hope you don’t mind if I cross the street.” And Kit headed out of the shadow.

  “I think I’ll join you,” Nita said. She backed out of range of that tongue before she started across the street herself—

  There was no time to move, to scream, even to think. Kit was halfway across the street, with his eye on that fire hydrant, his head turned away from the big yellow Checker Cab that was maybe six feet away and leaping straight at him.

  A flash of brilliance struck Nita like a blow, and did the same for the cab, so that it swerved to its left and only hit Kit glancingly so that he sprawled sideways and down. The cab roared on by, engine racing in frustration, evidently too angry to try for another pass. But something about it—maybe the savage sidelong look it threw Nita out of its burned-down eyes as it squealed around the corner of Forty-sixth and Madison—something made Nita suspect that it would not forget them. She ran out into the street and bent over Kit, not sure whether she should try to move him.

  “‘S awright,” Kit said, not bothering to speak silently for the moment, and groaning softly as he worked at getting up. Nita slipped hands under his arms to help. “Fred kept it off me.”

  Are you all right? came the frantic thought, as Fred appeared in front of Kit’s face. Did I hurt you? Did I emit anything you can’t take? I took out all the ultraviolet. …Oh no! I forgot the cosmic rays again.

  Kit managed a smile, though not much of one; his face was skinned and bruised where one cheekbone had hit the pavement. “Don’t worry about it, Fred. That thing would have done a lot worse to me than a few cosmic rays if it’d hit me the way it wanted to.” He stood up, wincing. “It got my leg, I think.”

  Nita bent down to look at Kit’s left leg and sucked in her breath. His jeans were to
rn, and he had a straight horizontal gash six inches or so below the knee, which was bleeding freely. “Does it feel deep?”

  “No. It just hurts a lot. I think it was the cab’s fender, there was a jagged piece sticking out of the chrome. Listen, Fred, thanks—“

  You’re sure I didn’t hurt you? You people are so fragile. A little gamma radiation will ruin your whole day, it seems.

  “I’m fine. But I’ve gotta do something about this leg. And then we’ve got to get moving again and get to the dark Book.”

  Nita looked over at the fire hydrant, fear boiling in her. Casually, as if this was something it did many times a day, the hydrant cracked open and spat something out onto the sidewalk—a dessicated-looking little lump of bones and feathers. Then it got up and waddled heavily down to a spot about fifty feet farther down the block, and sat down again.

  And I thought it couldn’t all be bad.

  Together, as quickly as they could, two small, frightened-looking figures and a spark like a lost star hurried into the shadows and vanished there.

  Entropics: Detection and Avoidance

  A whisper in the dimness. “How close are we?”

  “Uh … this is Madison and Forty-ninth. Three blocks north and a long one east.”

  “Can we rest? This air burns to breathe. And we’ve been going fast.”

  “Yeah, let’s.”

  Kit and Nita crouched together in the shadow of a doorway, two wary darknesses and a dim light, watching the traffic that went by. Mostly cabs prowled past, wearing the same hungry look as the one that had wounded Kit. Or a sullen truck might lumber by, or a passenger car, looking uneasy and dingy and bitter. None of the cars or trucks had drivers, or looked like they wanted them. They ignored the traffic lights, and their engines growled.