So You Want to Be a Wizard, New Millennium Edition (15 page)

“Lead the way.”

Nita turned around, still holding her arms a little away from her to be sure of her balance, and started for the worldgate as quickly as she dared, with Fred pacing her cheerfully to the left. Eight or ten steps more and it was becoming almost easy. She even glanced down toward the walkway—and there she stopped very suddenly, her stomach turning right over in her at the sight of the dirty, graveled roof of Grand Central, a long, long,
long
fall below. “Don’t look down,” a memory said to her in Machu Picchu’s scratchy voice. She swallowed, shaking all over, wishing she had remembered the advice earlier.

“Nita, what’s the—”

Something went
whack!
into the walkway.

Nita jumped, lost her balance, and staggered back into Kit. For a few awful seconds they teetered back and forth in wind that gusted suddenly, pushing them toward the edge together—and then Kit sat down hard on the walkway, and Nita half fell on top of him, and they held very still for a few gasps.

“Wh-what—”

“I think it was a pigeon,” Nita said, not caring whether Kit heard the tremulousness of her voice. “You okay?”

“Sure,” Kit said, just as shakily. “I try to have a heart attack every day whether I need one or not. Will you get off my knee?”

They picked each other up and headed for the gate again.
Even you have trouble with gravity,
Fred said wonderingly as he paced them.
I’m glad I left my mass elsewhere.

“So are we,” Nita said. She hurried the last twenty steps or so to the widened place at the end of the walkway, with Kit following close.

She knelt down in a hurry to make sure the wind wouldn’t push her over again, and looked up at the worldgate. Seen this close it was about four feet by eight, the shape of a long tear in a piece of cloth, and the inside of it shone with a palely glowing, shifting, soap-bubble iridescence.
Finally, finally, my pen!
she thought.

But somehow the thought didn’t make Nita as happy as it should have. The uneasy feeling that had started in the stairwell was still growing. She glanced over her shoulder at Kit. He was kneeling too, with his back to her, watching the walkway and the rooftop intently.

Beside her, Fred hung quietly waiting.
Now what?

Nita sighed, pulled the rowan rod out of her belt, and inserted one end of it delicately into the shimmering veil that was the surface of the worldgate. Though the city skyline could be seen very clearly through the shimmer, the inch or so of the wand that went through it appeared to vanish. “Just perch yourself on the free end here,” Nita said, holding the wand by its middle. “Make contact with it the same way you did with those keys. Okay?”

Simple enough.
Fred floated to the end of the rod and lit there, a bright, still spark.
All right, I’m ready.

Nita nodded. “
This is a retrieval,
” she said in the Speech. “
Involvement confined to a pen with the following characteristics: m’sedh-zayin six point three—
”

“Nita!”

The note of pure terror in Kit’s mind-voice caused Nita to do the unforgivable
—
break off in the middle of a spell and look over her shoulder. Shapes were pouring out of the little glass shelter building, which had been empty, and was still somehow empty even as Nita looked. She got a first impression of grizzled coats, red tongues that lolled and slavered, fangs that gleamed in the sunlight, and she thought,
Wolves!

But their eyes changed her mind as ten or twelve of the creatures loped across the roof toward the transparent walkway, giving tongue in an awful mindless cacophony of snarls and barks and shuddering howls. The eyes.
People’s
eyes, blue, brown, green, but with almost all the intelligence gone out of them, nothing left but a hot deadly cunning and an awful desire for the taste of blood—

From her reading in the wizards’ manual, she knew what they were: perytons. Wolves would have been way more preferable. Wolves were sociable creatures.
These
had been people once, people so used to hating that at the end of life they’d found a way to keep doing it, by hunting the souls of others through their nightmares. And once a peryton caught you…

Nita started to hitch herself along backward in total panic and then froze, realizing that there was nowhere to go. She and Kit were trapped. Another second and the perytons would be on the bridge, and at their throats, for eternity. Kit whipped his head around toward Nita and the worldgate. “Jump through and break the spell!” he yelled.

There was nothing else to do. She grabbed his arm, pushed the rowan wand through her belt, and yelled, “Come on, Fred!” The first three perytons leaped the guardrail and landed on the bridge, running.

Nita threw herself and Kit at the worldgate, being careful of the edges, as she knew she must, while screaming in absolute terror the word that would dissolve the walkway proper.

For a fraction of a second she caught the sound of screams other than her own, howls of creatures unseen but falling. Then the shimmer broke against her face like water, shutting out sound, and light, and finally thought. Blinded, deafened, and alone, she fell forever….

She lay with her face pressed against the cold harsh gravel, feeling the grit of it against her cheek, the hot tears as they leaked between her lashes, and that awful chill wind that wouldn’t stop tugging at her clothes. Very slowly Nita opened her eyes, blinked, and gradually realized that the problem with the place where she lay was not her blurred vision. It was just very dim there. She leaned on her skinned hands, pushed herself up, and looked to see where she was.

Dark gray gravel was all around. Farther off, something smooth and dark, with navy blue bumps. The helipad. Farther still, the railing, and beyond it the sky, dark. That was odd—it had been morning. The sound of a moan made Nita turn her head. Kit was close by, lying on his side with his hands over his face. Sitting on his shoulder, looking faint as a spark about to go out, was Fred.

Nita sat up straighter, even though it made her head spin. She had fallen a long way; she didn’t want to remember how far…. “Kit,” she whispered. “You okay? Fred?”

Kit turned over, pushed himself up on his hands to a sitting position, and groaned again. Fred clung to him. “I don’t think I busted anything,” Kit said, slow and uncertain. “I hurt all over. Fred, what about you?”

The Sun is gone,
Fred said, sounding absolutely horrified.

Kit looked out across the helipad into the darkness and rubbed his eyes. “Me and my bright ideas. What have I got us into?”

“As much my bright idea as yours,” Nita said. “If it weren’t for me, we wouldn’t have been out by that worldgate in the first place. Anyway, Kit, where else could we have gone? Those perytons—”

Kit shuddered. “Don’t even talk about them. I’d sooner be here than have
them
get me.” He got to his knees, then stood up, swaying for a moment. “Oooh. C’mon, let’s see where the worldgate went.”

He headed off across the gravel. Nita got up on her knees too, then caught sight of a bit of glitter lying a few feet away and grabbed at it happily. It was her pen, none the worse for wear. She clipped it securely to the pocket of her shirt and went after Kit and Fred.

Kit was heading for the south-facing railing. “I guess since you only called for a retrieval, the gate dumped us back on top of the…”

His voice trailed off suddenly as he reached the railing. Nita came up beside him and saw why.

The city was changed. A shiver ran all through Nita, like the odd feeling that comes with an attack of
déjà vu
—but this was true memory, not the illusion of it. She recognized the place from her first spell with Kit—the lowering, sullen-feeling gloom, the shadowed island held prisoner between its dark, icy rivers. Frowning buildings hunched themselves against the oppressive, slaty sky. Traffic moved, but very little of it, and it did so in the dark. Few headlights or taillights showed anywhere. The usual bright stream of cars and trucks and buses was here only dimly seen motion and a faint sound of snarling engines.

And the sky! It wasn’t clouded over; it wasn’t night. It was
empty.
Just a featureless grayness, hanging too low, like a ceiling. Simply by looking at it Nita knew that Fred was right. There was no Sun behind it, and there were no stars—only this wall of gloom, shutting them in, imprisoning them with the presence Nita remembered from the spell, that she could feel faintly even now. It wasn’t aware of her, but … She pushed back away from the rail, remembering the rowan’s words.
The Other. The Witherer, the Kindler of Wildfires—

“Kit,” she said, whispering, this time doing it to keep from perhaps being overheard by
that.
“I think we should really get out of here.”

He backed away from the rail too, a step at a time. “Well,” he said, very low, “now we know what your pen was doing in New York City…”

“The sooner it’s out of here, the happier I’ll be. Kit—
where’d the worldgate go?
”

He shook his head, came back to stand beside her. “Wherever it went, it’s not out
there
now.”

Nita let out an unhappy breath. “Why should it be? Everything else is changed.” She looked back at the helipad. The stairwell was still there, but its door had been ripped away and lay buckled on the gravel. The helipad itself had no design painted on it for a helicopter to center on when landing. The glass of the small building by the pad was smashed in some places and filmed all around; the building was full of rubble and trash, a ruin. “Where
are
we?” Nita said.

“The place we saw in the finding spell. Manhattan—”

“But different.” Nita chewed her lip nervously. “Is this an alternate world, maybe? The next universe over? The worldgate
was
just set for a retrieval, but we jumped through; maybe we screwed up how it works. Carl said this one was easy to mess up.”

“I wonder how much trouble you get in for busting a worldgate,” Kit muttered.

“I think we’re in enough trouble right now. We have to
find
the thing.”

See if you can find me the Sun and the stars and the rest of the Universe while you’re at it,
Fred said. He sounded truly miserable, much worse than when he had swallowed the pen.
I don’t know how long I can bear this silence.

Kit stood silent for a moment, staring out at that grim cold cityscape. “There
is
a spell we can use to find it that doesn’t need anything but words,” he said. “Good thing. We don’t have much in the way of supplies. We’ll need your help, though, Fred. Your claudication was connected to the worldgate’s when we went through. You can be used to trace it.”

Anything to get us out of this place!
Fred said.

“Well,” Nita said, “let’s find a place to get set up.”

The faint rattling noise of helicopter rotors interrupted her. She stared westward along the long axis of the roof, toward the dark half-hidden blot that was Central Park, or another version of it.

A small flying shape came wheeling around the corner of a skyscraper a few blocks away and cruised steadily toward the roof where they stood, the sharp chatter of its blades ricocheting more and more loudly off the blank dark faces of neighboring skyscrapers.

“I thought you said the helipad was closed—”

“I have a feeling this one isn’t,” Nita said, the back of her neck prickling with fear.

“We’d better get under cover,” Kit said.

Nita started for the stairwell, and Kit headed after her, but a bit more slowly. He kept throwing glances over his shoulder at the approaching chopper, both worried by it and interested in it. Nita looked over her shoulder too, to tell him to hurry—and then realized how close the chopper was, how fast it was coming. A standard two-seat helicopter, wiry skeleton, glass bubble protecting the seats, oval doors on each side.

But the bubble’s glass was filmed over except for the doors, which glittered oddly. They had a faceted look.
No pilot could see out of that,
Nita thought, confused.
And the skids, the landing skids are wrong somehow.
The helicopter came sweeping over their heads, low, too low.

“KIT!” Nita yelled. She spun around and tackled him, knocking him flat, as the skids made a lightning jab at the place where he’d been a moment before and hit the gravel with a screech of metal. The helicopter soared on past them, refolding its skids, not yet able to slow down from the speed of its first attack. The thunderous rattling of its rotors mixed with another sound, a high frustrated shriek like that of a predator that has missed its kill. Almost immediately they heard something else too, an even higher pitched squealing, ratchety and metallic, produced by several sources and seeming to come from inside the ruined glass shelter.

Kit and Nita clutched at each other, getting a better look at the helicopter from behind as it swung around for another pass. The “skids” were doubled-back limbs of metal like those of a praying mantis, cruelly clawed. Under what should have been the helicopter’s “bubble,” sharp dark mandibles worked hungrily—and as the chopper heeled over and came about, those faceted eyes
looked
at Kit and Nita with the cold, businesslike glare reserved for helpless prey.

“We’re dead,” Nita whispered.

“Not yet.” Kit gasped, staggering up again. “The stairwell—” Together he and Nita ran for the stairs as the chopper-creature arrowed across the rooftop at them. Nita was almost blind with terror; she knew now what had torn the door off the stairwell, and doubted there was any way to keep that thing from getting them.

They fell into the stairwell together. The chopper roared past again, not losing so much time in its turn this time, coming about to hover like a deadly dragonfly while positioning itself for another jab with those steel claws. Kit fell further down the stairs than Nita did, hit his head against a wall, and lay moaning. Nita slid and scrabbled to a stop, then turned to see that huge, horrible face glaring into the stairwell, sighting on her for the jab.