So You Want to Be a Wizard, New Millennium Edition (28 page)

And the wind died.

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—one by one began to pace off into the park or down Fifth Avenue, each one making its way 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 Earth for another eight minutes yet, and as Nita and Kit watched, slowly the new star in the heavens faded, and the Moon faded with it—from daylight brilliance 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, sky-wide aurora, great curtains and rays of rainbow light shivering and crackling all across the golden-glowing city night.

“He forgot the high-energy radiation again,” Kit said, grief 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. “Yeah, 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 MetLife 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 MetLife Building at the mezzanine level. The one guard at the security desk 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 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. Nita stood there looking out over the city and sighed, 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 was looking down toward lower Manhattan, deep in thoughts of his own, gazing toward where the twin towers of the World Trade Center had once stood, and where the new Freedom Tower was just barely beginning to rise. In his hands she could just see the glittering ghost of a car’s antenna, dissolving, running through his fingers like sand, vanishing away. “
Yeah,
” he said, and turned toward 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 MetLife 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. Clouds streamed and boiled past, jets fell backward into La Guardia. 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 for twelve, also in jeans and a hooded jacket. 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.

The walk home from the bus stop was weary and quiet. Three blocks from Nita’s house, they reached the corner where their ways usually parted. Kit paused there, waiting for the light to change, though no traffic was in sight. “Call me in the morning?” he said.

What for?
Nita felt like saying, for there were no more spells in the offing, and she was deadly tired. Still… “Tomorrow’s your turn,” she said.

“Huh? Right.” The light changed, and Kit headed across the street to Nita’s left. In the middle of the street he turned, walking backward. “We should call Tom and Carl,” he shouted, sounding entirely exhausted.

“Yeah.” The light changed again, in Nita’s favor; Kit jumped up onto the sidewalk on the other side and headed south toward his place. Nita crossed east, watching Kit as she went. Though the look on his face was tired and sad, all the rest of his body wore the posture of someone who’d been through so much fear that fear no longer frightened him.
Why’s he so afraid of getting beat up?
Nita thought.
Nobody in their right mind would mess with him.

In midstep she stopped, watching him walk away.
How about that. How
about
that. He got what he asked for.

After a second she started walking home again. The weight at her back suddenly reminded her of something.
“Kit!”
she called silently, knowing he could hear even though he was now out of sight.
“What about the
Book?”

“Hang on to it,”
he answered.
“We’ll give it to the Advisories. Or they’ll know what to do with it.”

“Right. Text me!”

“Will do.”

Nita was so tired that it took three or four minutes before the identity of the blond person walking up East Clinton toward her registered at all. By then Joanne was within yelling distance, but she didn’t yell at Nita at all, much to Nita’s surprise. This was such an odd development that Nita looked at Joanne carefully as they got closer, something she had never done before. There was something familiar about Joanne today, a look that Nita couldn’t quite pin down—and then she recognized the expression and let out a tired, unhappy breath.

The look was much less marked, endlessly less violent and terrible than that of the pride-frozen misery of the dark rider, but there all the same. The angry fear was there too—the terror of what had been until now no threat but was now out of control; the look of the rider about to be cast out by a power he had thought himself completely safe from, the look of a bully whose victim suddenly wasn’t a victim anymore.

Nita slowed down and stopped where she was, in the middle of the sidewalk, watching Joanne.
Even he can be different now,
she thought, her heart beating fast, for her own old fear wasn’t entirely gone.
But that was partly because we gave him the chance.

She stood there, watching Joanne slow down warily as she got closer to Nita. Nita sweated. Doing something that would be laughed about behind her back was almost as bad as being beaten up. But she stood still until Joanne came to a stop four or five feet away from her. “Well?” Joanne said, her voice full of anger and uncertainty.

I don’t know what to say to her, we have absolutely nothing in common,
Nita thought frantically.
But it has to start somewhere.
She swallowed and did her best to look Joanne in the eye, calmly and not in threat. “Come on over to my place after supper sometime, when it’s dark,” she said, “and you can check out the digital interface I got for my telescope last Christmas. You can see Jupiter’s moons live on the computer. Or Mars.”

Joanne made that old familiar haughty face and brushed past Nita and away. “So lame,” she said. “Geek stuff again. Why would I ever want to go to
your
place? You don’t even have HD.”

Nita stood still, listening to Joanne’s footsteps hurrying away, a little faster every second—and slowly began to realize that she’d gotten what she asked for too—the ability to break the cycle of anger and loneliness, not necessarily for others, but at least for herself. And the joke was that it didn’t matter whether Joanne ever got over herself or not. The change wouldn’t even take the Speech; plain words would do it, and the much-discounted magic of reaching out. It would probably take a lot of time with some people, way longer than something simple like breaking the walls between the worlds. It would cost more effort than even the reading of the
Book of Night with Moon.

But it would be worth it—and eventually it would work. A spell always works.

Nita went home.

*

That night after supper she slipped outside to sit in Liused’s shadow and watch the sky. The tree caught her mood and, after greeting her, was quiet—until about ten o’clock, when it and every other growing thing in sight suddenly trembled violently as if stricken at the root. They had felt the Sun go out.

“It’s all right,”
she said silently, though for someone whose tears were starting again, it was an odd thing to say. She waited the eight minutes with them, saw the Moon blink out, and leaned back against the rowan trunk, sheltering from the wind that rose in the darkness. Branches tossed as if in a hurricane, leaves hissed in anguish—and then the sudden new star in the heavens etched every leaf’s shadow sharp against the ground and set the Moon on fire.