So You Want to Be a Wizard, New Millennium Edition (16 page)

It was unreal. None of it could possibly be real; it was all like a dream. With the inane desperation of a dreamer in a nightmare, Nita felt for the only thing at hand, the rowan rod, pulled it free and slashed at the looming face with it.

She was completely unprepared for the result. A whip of silver fire the color of the full Moon cracked across the bubble-face from the rod, which glowed in her hand. Screaming in pain and rage, the chopper-creature backed up and away, but only a little. The razor-combed claws shot down at her. She slashed at them too, and when the moonfire curled around them, the creature screamed again and pulled them back.

“Kit!” she yelled, not daring to turn her back on those raging, ravenous eyes. “Kit! The antenna!”

She heard him fumbling around in his pack as the hungry helicopter took another jab at her, and she whipped it again with fire. Quite suddenly something fired past her ear—a bright, narrow line of blazing red light the color of metal in the forge. The molten light struck the helicopter in the underbelly, splattering in bright hot drops, and the answering scream was much more terrible this time.

“It’s a machine,” Nita said, gasping. “Your department.”

“Great,” Kit said, crawling up the stairs beside her. “How do you kill a helicopter?” But he braced one arm on the step just above his face, laid the antenna over it, and fired again. The chopper-creature screeched again and swung away.

Kit scrambled up to his feet, pressed himself flat against what remained of the crumbling doorway, pointed the antenna again. Red fire lanced out, followed by Nita’s white as she dove back out into the stinging wind and thunder of rotors and slashed at the horror that hung and grabbed from midair. Gravel flew and stung, the wind lashed her face with her hair, the air was full of that ear-tearing metallic scream, but she kept slashing. White fire snapped and curled—and then from around the other side of the chopper-creature there came a sharp
crack!
as a bolt of Kit’s hot light fired upward.

The scream that followed made all the preceding ones sound faint. Nita wished she could drop the wand and cover her ears, but she didn’t dare—and anyway she was too puzzled by the creature’s reaction. That shot hadn’t hit anywhere on its body that she could see. Still screaming, it began to spin helplessly in a circle like a toy pinwheel. Then Nita realized that Kit had shattered the helicopter’s tail rotor. It might still be airborne, but it couldn’t fly straight, or steer.

Nita danced back from another jab of those legs, whipped the eyes again with the silver fire of the rowan wand as they spun past her. From the other side there was another
crack!
and a shattering sound, and the bubble-head spinning past her again showed one faceted eye now opaque, spiderwebbed with cracks. The helicopter lurched and rose, trying to gain altitude and get away.

Across the roof Kit looked up, laid the antenna across his forearm again, took careful aim, fired. This time the molten line of light struck through the blurring main rotors. With a high, anguished, ringing snap, one rotor flew off and pinwheeled away almost too fast to see. The helicopter gave one last wild screech, bobbled up, then sideways, as if staggering through the air.

“Get down!” Kit screamed at Nita, throwing himself on the ground. She did the same, covering her head with her arms and frantically gasping the syllables of the defense-shield spell.

The explosion shook everything and sent gravel flying to bounce off the hardened air around her like hail off a car roof. Jagged blade shards snapped and rang and shot in all directions. Only when the roaring and the wash of heat that followed it died down to quiet and flickering light did Nita dare to raise her head.

The helicopter-creature was now a broken-backed wreck with oily flame licking through it. The eye that Kit had shattered stared blindly up at the dark sky from the edge of the helipad; the tail assembly, twisted and bent, lay half under the creature’s body. The only sounds left were the wind and that shrill keening from the little glass building, now much muted. Nita rid herself of the shielding spell and got slowly to her feet. “Fred?” she whispered.

A pale spark floated shakily through the air to perch on her shoulder.
Here,
he said, sounding as tremulous as Nita felt.
Are you well?

She nodded, walked toward the wreck. Kit stood on the other side of it, his fist clenched on the antenna. He was shaking visibly. The sight of his terror made Nita’s worse as she came to stand by him. “Kit,” she said, fighting the urge to cry and losing—tears spilled out anyway. “This is
not
a nice place,” she said.

He gulped, leaking tears himself. “No,” he said, trying to keep his voice steady, “it sure isn’t.” He looked over at the glass-walled building.

“Yeah,” Nita said, scrubbing at her face. “We better have a look.”

Slowly and carefully they approached the building, came to one collapsed wall, peered in. Nita held her wand high, so they could see by its glow.

Inside, hidden amid the trash and broken glass, was what seemed to be a rude nest built of scraps of metal and wire. In the nest were three baby helicopters, none more than two feet long. They stared fiercely at Kit and Nita from tiny faceted eyes like their parent’s, and threatened with little jabbing forelegs, whirring with rotors too small to lift them yet. Sharing the nest with the fledglings was the partially stripped skeleton of a dog.

Kit and Nita turned away together. “I think maybe we should go downstairs a little ways before we do that finding spell,” Kit said, his voice still shaking. “If there’s another of those things—”

“Yeah.” They headed down the stairwell, to the door that in their own world had opened onto the elevator corridor. The two of them sat down, and Nita laid the rowan wand in her lap so there would be light—the ceiling lights in the stairwell were out, and the place felt like the bottom of a hole.

“Fred,” Kit said, “how’re you holding up?”

Fred hung between them, his light flickering.
A little better than before. The silence is still very terrible. But at least you two are here.

“We’ll find you the Sun, Fred,” Nita said, wishing she was as sure as she was trying to sound. “Kit, which spell was it you were going to use?”

Kit had his manual out. “At the bottom of 414. It’s a double; we read together.”

Nita got out her own book, paged through it. “McKillip’s Stricture? That’s for keeping grass short!”

“No, no!” Kit leaned over to look at Nita’s manual. “Huh. How about that, our pages are different. Look under ‘Eisodics and Diascheses.’ The fourth one after the general introduction. Davidson’s Minor Enthalpy.”

Nita riffled through some more pages. Evidently her book had more information than Kit’s on the spells relating to growing things. Her suspicion about what their specialties were grew stronger. “Got it.” She glanced through the spell. “Fred, you don’t have to do anything actually. But this is one of those spells that’ll leave us blind to what’s happening around here. Watch for us?”

Absolutely!

“Okay,” Kit said. “Ready? One—two—three—”

They spoke together, slowly and carefully, matching cadence as they described the worldgate, and their own needs, in the Speech.

The shadowy stairwell grew darker still, though this darkness seemed less hostile than what hung overhead; and in the deepening dimness, the walls around them slowly melted away. It seemed to Nita that she and Kit and the small bright point between them hung at a great height, unsupported, over a city built of ghosts and dreams. The buildings that had looked real and solid from the roof now seemed transparent skeletons, rearing up into the gloom of this place. Stone and steel and concrete were shadows—and gazing through them, down the length of the island, Nita saw again the two points of light that she and Kit had seen in the first spell.

The closer one, perhaps ten blocks north in the east Fifties, still pulsed with its irregular, distressing light. Compelled by the spell’s working, Nita looked closely at it, though that was the last thing she wanted to do—that bit of angry brightness seemed to be looking back at her. But she had no choice. She examined the light, and into her mind, poured there by the spell, came a description of the light’s nature in the Speech.

Nita would have backed away, as she had from the perytons, except that again there was nowhere to go. A catalogue of sorts, that light was—a listing, a set of descriptions. But all wrong, all twisted, angry as the light looked, hungry as the helicopter-creature had been, hating as the surrounding darkness was, full of the horrors that everything in existence could become. The
Book Which Is Not Named…

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.