So You Want to Be a Wizard, New Millennium Edition (25 page)

She reached out to him, needing desperately to feel the touch of a human hand. Kit 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’d 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 beside 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 rails 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 slammed down onto 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 fell over them, blanketing everything. The rowan rod’s silver fire was smothered. Fred’s light went out as if he had been stepped on. Kit stopped reading, struggled 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, eyes 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, and 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 mélange 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 MetLife Building. Everything was dark, and Nita started to groan, certain that something had gone wrong and that the worldgate had simply dumped 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 streetlights, long straight streams of traffic, the white of headlights 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, then, looking 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. 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 just 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,” she said, not looking at Kit.

He glanced up from the manual, stared at her. “No chance,” 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 streetlights 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’s there, too. I don’t care that it’s on the other side of this silly place, I can feel it, I can 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 as she looked up. The sky, even though clear, did have a faint golden glow to it, city light scattered from smog—

Against that glow, high up atop the MetLife 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 moths 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. At last, 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 Central Park, and crouched down beside it as they had in the world they’d left.