So You Want To Be A Wizard

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 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 merriment "ght out of them. What had seemed a perfectly ordinary fire hydrant, dull yellow, with rust stains and peeling paint, suddenly cracked open and shot °ut a long, pale, ropy tongue like a toad's. The pigeon never had a chance. *i't 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 £^anie from was closed again. All that remained to show that anything had ^aPpened was a slight bulge under the metallic-looking skin of the fire hy-^arant. The bulge heaved once and was still. Nita bit her lip. Behind her she could feel Kit start shaking again. (I feel rry for the next dog that comes along,) he said. (I hope you don't mind if I cross the street.) Kit headed out of the shadow.

U think I'll join you,) Nita said. She backed out of range of that tongue ^ef°re 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 sv/crved to its left and knocked Kit 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. fSawright,) Kit said, groaning softly as he worked at getting up. Nita slipped hands under his arms to help. (Fred did it.)

(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 some, I think.)

Nita bent down to look at Kit's left leg and sucked in her breath. His jeans were torn, 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.

Entropies Detection and Avoidance

(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.)

They 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.

Nita's eyes burned in the dark air. She rubbed them and glanced down at Kit's leg, bound now with a torn-off piece of her shirt. {How is it?)

(Not too bad. It feels stiff. I guess it stopped bleeding.) He looked down, felt the makeshift bandage, winced. (Yeah… . I'm hungry.)

Nita's stomach turned over — she was too nervous to even consider eating — as Kit came up with a ham sandwich and offered her half. (You go ahead,) she said. She leaned against the hard cold wall, and on a sudden thought Pulled her pen out of her pocket and looked at it. It seemed all right, but as ^she held it she could feel a sort of odd tingling in its metal that hadn't been there before. (Uh, Fred—)

He hung beside her at eye level, making worried feelings that matched the d'niness of his light, (Are you sure that light didn't hurt you?)

(Yeah. It's not that.) She held out the pen to him. Fred backed away a

'^e' 3 s if afraid he might swallow it again. (Is this radioactive or anything?) ^N'ta said.

He drifted close to it, bobbed up and down to look at it from several angles. (You mean beta and gamma and those other emissions you have trouble with? No.)

Nita still felt suspicious about the pen. She dug into her backpack for a piece of scrap paper, laid it on her wizards' manual, clicked the point out, and scribbled on the paper. Then she breathed out, perplexed. (Come on, Fred! Look at that!)

He floated down to look. The pen's blue-black ink would normally have been hard to see in that dimness, no matter how white the paper. But the scrawl had a subtle glimmer about it, a luminosity just bright enough to make out. (I don't think it's anything harmful to you,) Fred said. (Are you sure it didn't do that before?)

(Yes!)

(Well, look at it this way. Now you can see what you're writing when it's dark. Surprising you people hadn't come up with something like that al-ready.)

Nita shook her head, put the paper away, and clipped the pen back in her pocket. Kit, finishing the first half of his sandwich, looked over at the scribble with interest. (Comes of being inside Fred, I guess. With him having his own claudication, and all the energy boiling around inside him, you might have expected something like that to happen.) (Yeah, well, I don't like it. The pen was fine the way it was.)

(Considering where it's been,) Kit said, (you're lucky to get it back in the same shape, instead of crushed into a little lump.) He wrapped up the other half of his sandwich and shoved it into his backpack. (Should we go?) (Yeah.)

They got up, checked their surroundings as usual to make sure that no cabs or cars were anywhere close, and started up Madison again, ducking into doorways or between buildings whenever they saw or heard traffic coming.

(No people,) Kit said, as if trying to work it out. (Just things — all dark and ruined — and machines,

all twisted. Alive — but they seem to hate everything-And pigeons—)

(Dogs, too,) Nita said.

(Where?) Kit looked hurriedly around him.

(Check the sidewalk and the gutter. They're here. And remember that nest.) Nita shrugged uneasily, setting her pack higher. (I don't know. Maybe people just can't live here.) (We're here,) Kit said unhappily. (And maybe not for long.)

A sudden grinding sound like tortured metal made them dive for another shadowy doorway close to the corner of Madison and Fiftieth. No traffic was in sight; nothing showed but the glowering eye of the traffic light and the unchanging don't walk signs. The grinding sound came again — metal scraping on concrete, somewhere across Madison, down Fiftieth, to their left. Kit edged a bit forward in the doorway. (What are you—)

(I want to see.) He reached around behind him, taking the antenna in hand.

(But if—)

(If that's something that might chase us later, I at least want a look at it. Fred? Take a peek for us?)

(Right.) Fred sailed ahead of them, keeping low and close to the building walls, his light dimmed to the faintest glimmer. By the lamppost at Madison and Fiftieth he paused, then shot low across the street and down Fiftieth between Madison and Fifth, vanishing past the corner. Nita and Kit waited, sweating.

From around the comer Fred radiated feelings of uncertainty and curiosity. (These are like the other things that run these streets. But these aren't moving. Maybe they were dangerous once. I don't know about now.)

(Come on,) Kit said. He put his head out of the doorway. (It's clear.) With utmost caution they crossed the street and slipped around the cor-ner, flattening to the wall. Here stores and dingy four-story brownstones with long flights of railed stairs lined the street. Halfway down the block, jagged and bizarre in the dimness and the feeble yellow glow of a flickering sodium-vapor street light, was the remains of an accident. One carf a heavy two-

door sedan, lay crumpled against the pole of another nearby street light, its right-hand door ripped away and the whole right side of it laid open. A little distance away, in the middle of the street, lay the car that had hit the sedan, resting on its back and skewed right around so that its front end was pointed at Kit and Nita. It was a sports car of some kind, so dark a brown that it was almost black. Its windshield had been shattered when it overturned, and it.had many other dents and scrapes, some quite deep. From its front right wheelwell jutted a long jagged strip of chrome, part of the other car's fender, now wound into the sports car's wheel.

(I don't get it,) Nita said silently. (If that dark one hit the other, why isn't ^l*s front all smashed in—)

^A>he broke off as with a terrible metallic groan the sports car suddenly

^Tocked back and forth, like a turtle on its back trying to right itself. Kit ^sucked in a long breath and didn't move. The car stopped rocking for a foment, then with another scrape of metal started again, rocking more energetically this time. Each time the side-to-side motion became larger. It °cked partway onto one door, then back the other way and partway onto the

^Jler> then back again — and full onto its left-hand door. There it balanced, f^recar'°us, for a few long seconds, as if getting its breath. And then twitched, ^ardf shuddered all the way over, and fell right-side down.

The scream that filled the air as the sports car came down on the fender-tangled right wheel was terrible to hear. Instantly it hunched up the fouled wheel, holding it away from the street, crouching on the three good wheels and shaking with its effort. Nita thought of an old sculpture she had seen once, a wounded lion favoring one forelimb — weary and in pain, but still dangerous. Very slowly, as if approaching a hurt animal and not wanting to alarm it, Kit stepped away from the building and walked out into the street. (Kit!)

(Ssssh,) he said silently. (Don't freak it.) (Are you out of your — j

(Ssssshhh!)

The sports car watched Kit come, not moving. Now that it was right-side up, Nita could get a better idea of its shape. It was actually rather beautiful in its deadly looking way — sleekly swept- back and slung low to the ground. Its curves were battered in places; its once-shining hide was scored and dull. It stared at Kit from hunter's eyes, headlights wide with pain, and breathed shallowly, waiting.

(Lotus Esprit,) Kit said to Nita, not taking his eyes off the car, matching it stare for stare. Nita shook her head anxiously. (Does that mean something? I don't know cars.) (It's a racer. A mean one. What it is here— Look, Nita, there's your answer. Look at the front of it, under the headlights.) He kept moving forward, his hands out in front of him. The Lotus held perfectly still, watch-ing.

Nita looked at the low-sloping grille. (It's all full of oil or something.)

(It's a predator. These other cars, like that sedan — they must be what it hunts. This time its prey hurt the Lotus before it made its kill. Like a tiger getting gored by a bull or something. Ooops!) Kit, eight or ten feet away from the Lotus's grille, took one step too many; it abruptly rolled back away from him a foot or so. Very quietly its engine stuttered to life and settled into a throaty growl.

(Kit, you're—)

(Shut up,) "/won't hurt you," he said in the Speech, aloud. "Let me see to that wheel" The engine-growl got louder — the sound of the Speech seemed to upset the Lotus. It rolled back another couple of feet, getting close to the curb, and glared at Kit. But the glare seemed to have as much fear as threat in it now-

"/won't hurt you," Kit repeated, stepping closer, holding out his hand⁵' one of them with the antenna in it. "Come on, you know what this is. Letm& do something about that wheel You can't run on it. And if you can't run, °^r /bet there are other hunters here, aren 't there? Or scavengers. I'm sure there are scavengers. Who 'II be coming here to clean up this kill? And do you want them to find you here, helpless?"

The Lotus stared at him, shifting a little from side to side, now, swaying uncertainly. The growl had not stopped, but it hadn't gotten any louder either. "// /were going to hurt you, I would have by now," Kit said, getting closer. The car was four feet away, and its headlights were having to look up at Kit now. "fust kt me do something about that fender stuck in you, then you 'II go your way and I'll go mine."

The dark eyes stared at the antenna, then at Kit, and back at the antenna again. The Lotus stopped swaying, held very still. Kit was two feet away. He reached out with his free hand, very slowly, reached down to touch the scratched fiberglass hide—

The engine raced, a sudden startling roar that made Nita stifle a scream and made Kit flinch all over—but he didn't jump away, and neither did the Lotus. For a second or two he and the car stood there just looking at each other — small trembling boy, large trembling predator. Then Kit laid his hand carefully on the brown hide, a gingerly gesture. The car shook all over, stared at him. Its engine quieted to an uncertain rumbling. "It's okay," he said."Will you let me take care of it?"

The Lotus muttered deep under its hood. It still stared at Kit with those fearsome eyes, but its expression was mostly perplexed now. So was Kit's. He rubbed the curve of the hurt wheelwell in distress. (I can't understand why it's mute,) he said unhappily, (The Edsel wasn't. All it took was a couple of sentences in the Speech and it was talking.) (It's bound,} Nita said, edging out of the shadow of the building she stood against. (Can't you feel it, Kit? There's some kind of huge binding spell laid over this whole place to keep it the way it is.)

. She stopped short as the Lotus saw her and began to growl again. "Relax," Kit said. "She's with me, she won't hurt you either,"

Slowly the growl dwindled, but the feral headlight-eyes stayed on Nita. She gulped and sat down on the curb, where she could see up and down the street. "Kit, do what you're going to do. If another of those cabs comes along—"

Right. Fred, give me a hand? No, no, no," he said hastily, as Fred drifted ^Own beside him and made a light-pattern and a sound as if he was going to A't something. "Not that kind. Just make some light so I can see what to do down here."

Kit knelt beside the right wheel, studying the damage, and Fred floated in ^se to lend his light to the business, while the Lotus watched the process 'aelong and suspiciously. "Mmmfff—nothing too bad, it's mostly wrapped ^around the tire. Lucky it didn't get fouled with the axle.

"Come on, come on," Kit said in the Speech, patting the bottom of the tire, "relax it, loosen up. You're forcing the scrap into yourself, holding the wheel up like that. Come on." The Lotus moaned softly and with fearful care relaxed the uplifted wheel a bit. "That's better." Kit slipped the antenna up under the Lotus's wheelwell, aiming for some piece of chrome that was out of sight. "Fred, can you get in there so I can see? Good. Okay, this may sting a little." Molten light, half- seen, sparked under the Lotus's fender. It jumped, and an uneven half-circle-shaped piece of chrome fell clanging onto the pavement. "Nowhunch the wheel up again. A little higher—" Kit reached in with-both hands and, after a moment's tugging and twisting, freed the other half of the piece of metal. "There," Kit said, satisfied. He tossed the second piece of scrap to the ground. The engine roared again with terrible suddenness, deafening. This time Kit scrambled frantically backward as the Lotus leaped snarling away from him. With a screech of tires it swept so close past Nita that she fell over backward onto the sidewalk. Its engine screaming, the Lotus tore away down Fiftieth toward Madison, flung itself left around the corner in a cloud of blue exhaust, and was gone.

Very slowly Kit stood up, pushed the antenna into his pants pocket, and stood in the street dusting his hands off on his shirt as he gazed in disappoint-ment after the Lotus. Nita sat herself back up again, shaking her head and brushing at herself. (I thought maybe it was going to stay long enough to thank you,) she said.

Kit shook his head, evidently in annoyance at himself for having thought the same thing, (Well, I don't know — I was thinking of what Picchu said. 'Don't be afraid to help.') He shrugged. (Doesn't really matter, I guess. It was hurting; fixing it was the right thing to do.)

(I hope so,) Nita said. (I'd hate to think the grateful creature might run off to—you know — and tell everybody about the people who helped it instead of hurting it. I have a feeling that doing good deeds sticks out more than usual around here.)

Kit nodded, looking uncomfortable. (Maybe I should've left well enough alone.) (Don't be dumb. Let's get going, huh? The … whatever the place is where the dark Book's kept, it's pretty close. I feel nervous standing out here.) They recrossed Madison and again started the weary progression from doorway to driveway to shadowed wall, heading north.

At Madison and Fifty-second, Nita turned right and paused. (It's on this block somewhere,) she said, trying to keep even the thought quiet. (Th^e north side, I think. Fred, you feel anything?)

Fred held still for a moment, not even making a flicker, (The darkness feels thicker up ahead, at the middle of the block.)

Kit and Nita peered down the block. (It doesn't look any different,) Kit said. (But you're the expert on light, Fred. Lead the way.)

With even greater care than usual they picked their way down Fifty-second. This street was stores and office buildings again; all the store windows empty, all the windows dark. But here, though external appearances were no different, the feeling slowly began to grow that there was a reason for the grimy darkness of the windows. Something watched, something peered out those windows, using the darkness as a cloak, and no shadow was deep enough to hide in; the silent eyes would see. Nothing happened, nothing stirred anywhere. No traffic was in sight. But the street felt more and more like a trap, laid open for some unsuspecting creature to walk into. Nita tried to swallow as they ducked from one hiding place to another, but her mouth was too dry. Kit was sweating. Fred's light was out.

(This is it,) he said suddenly, his thought sounding unusually muted even for Fred. (This is the middle of the darkness.)

(This?) Kit and Nita thought at the same time, in shock, and then simultaneously hushed themselves. Nita edged out to the sidewalk to get a better look at the place. She had to crane her neck. They were in front of a sky-scraper, faced completely in black plate glass, an ominous, windowless monolith.

(Must be about ninety stories,) Nita said. (I don't see any lights.)

{Why would you?) Fred said. (Whoever lives in this place doesn't seem fond of light at all. How shall we go in?)

Nita glanced back up the street. (We passed a driveway that might go down to a delivery entrance.)

(I'll talk to the lock,) Kit said. (Let's go!)

They went back the way they had come and tiptoed down the driveway. It seemed meant for trucks to back into. A flight of steps at one side led up to a 'oading platform about four feet above the deepest part of the ramp. Climbing the stairs, Kit went to a door on the right and ran his hands over it as Nita and Fred came up behind. (No lock,) Kit said. (It's controlled from inside.) (We can't get in? We're dead.)

(We're not dead yet. There's a machine in there that makes the garage ooors go up. That's all I need.) Kit got out the antenna and held it against ^e door as he might have held a pencil he was about to write with. He closed ¹⁵ eyes. (If I can just feel up through the metal and the wires, find it…). 'j'ta and Fred kept still while Kit's eyes squeezed tighter and tighter shut "^erce concentration. Inside one garage door something rattled, fell silent, ^led again, began to grind. Little by little the door rose until there was an opening at the bottom of it, three feet high. Kit opened his eyes but kept the antenna pressed against the metal. (Go on in.)

Fred and Nita ducked through into darkness. Kit came swiftly after them. Behind him, the door began to move slowly downward again, shutting with a thunderous clang. Nita pulled out the rowan wand, so they could look around. There were wooden loading pallets stacked on the floor, but nothing else — bare concrete walls, bare ceiling. Set in the back wall of the huge room was one normal-sized double door.

(Let's see if this one has a lock,) Kit said as they went quietly up to it. He touched the right-hand knob carefully, whispered a word or two in the Speech, tried it, The right side of the double door opened.

(Huh. Wasn't even locked!) Through the open door, much to everyone's surprise, light spilled — plain old fluorescent office-building light, but cheery as a sunny day after the gloom outdoors. On the other side of the door was a perfectly normal-looking corridor with beige walls and charcoal-color doors and carpeting. The normality came as something of a shock. (Fred, I thought you said it was darker here!)

(Felt darker, And colder. And it does,) Fred said, shivering, his faint light rippling as he did so. (We're very close to the source of the coldness. It's farther up, though.)

(Up?) Nita looked at Kit uneasily. (If we're going to get the dark Book and get out of here fast, we can't fool with stairs again. We'll have to use the elevators somehow.)

Kit glanced down at the antenna. (I think I can manage an elevator if it gets difficult. Let's find one.)

They slipped through the door and went down the hall to their right, heading for a lobby at its far end. There they peered out at a bank of_ elevators set in the same dark-green marble as the rest of the lobby. № 01 was there.

Kit walked to the elevators, punched the call button, and hurriedly m(tioned Nita and Fred to join him. Nita stayed where she was for a moment (Shouldn't we stay out of sight here?) (Come on!)

She went out to him, Fred bobbing along beside. Kit watched the elevator lights to see which one was coming down and then slipped into a recess at the side. Nita took the hint and joined him. The elevator bell chimed; doors slid open—

The perytons piled out of the middle elevator in a hurry, five of them together, not looking to left or right, and burst out the front door into the street. Once outside they began their awful chorus of howls and snarls, but Nita and Kit and Fred weren't sitting around to listen. They dove into the middle elevator, and Kit struck the control panel with the antenna, hard. ""Close up and take ofB"

The elevator doors closed, but then a rumbling, scraping, gear-grinding screech began — low at first, then louder, a combination of every weird, unsettling noise Nita had ever heard an elevator make. Cables twanged and ratchets ratcheted, and, had they been moving, she would have sworn they were about to go plunging down to crash in the cellar. ""Cut it out or I'll snap your cables myself when I'm through with you! "Kit yelled in the Speech. Almost immediately the elevator jerked slightly and then started upward. Nita tried again to swallow and had no better luck than the last time. "Those perytons are going to pick up our scent right outside that door, Kit! And they'll track us inside, and it won't be five minutes before—"

"I know, I know. Fred, how well can you feel the middle of the darkness?" (We're closer.)

"Good. You'll have to tell me when to stop."

The elevator went all the way up to the top, the eighty-ninth floor, before Fred said, (This is it!)

Kit rapped the control panel one last time with his antenna. ""You stay where you are,"" he said. The elevator doors opened silently to reveal another normal-looking floor, this one more opulent than the floor downstairs. Here the carpets were ivory-white and thick; the wall opposite the elevators was one huge bookcase of polished wood, filled with hundreds of books, like volumes of one huge set. Going left they came to another hallway, stretching off to their left like the long stroke of an L; this one too was lined with bookcases. At the far end stood a huge polished desk, with papers and Dictaphone equipment and an intercom and a multiline phone jumbled about on it. At the desk sat—

—it was hard to know what to call it. Kit and Nita, peering around the corner, were silent with confusion and fear. The thing sitting in a secretary's swivel chair and typing on an expensive electric typewriter was dark green and warty, and sat about four feet high in the chair- It had limbs with tentacles and claws, all knotted together under a big eggplant-shaped head, and goggly, wicked eyes. All the limbs didn't seem to help the creature's typing much, for every few seconds it made a mistake and went grumbling ^and fumbling over the top of its messy desk for a bottle of correcting fluid. ¹he creature's grumbling was of more interest than its typing. It used the APeech, but haltingly, as if it didn't care much for the language—and indeed the smooth, stately rhythms of the wizardly tongue suffered somewhat, com-^ln§ out of that misshapen mouth.

Kit leaned back against the wall. (We've gotta do something. Fred, are you ^Sl«e it's up here?)

(Absolutely. And past that door, behind that—) Fred indicated the warty typist. From down the hall came another brief burst of typing, then more grumbling and scrabbling on the desk.

(We've got to get it away from there.) Nita glanced at Fred.

(I shall create a diversion,) Fred said, with relish. (I've been good at it so far.)

(Great. Something big. Something alive again, if you can manage it — then again, forget that.) Nita breathed out unhappily. (I wouldn't leave anything alive here.)

(Not even Joanne?) Kit said with a small but evil grin.

(Not even her. This place has her outclassed. Fred, just—)

A voice spoke, sounding so loud that Kit and Nita stopped breathing, practically stopped thinking. "Akthanath," it called, a male voice, sounding weary and hassled and bored, "come in here a moment… "

Nita glanced at Kit. They carefully peeked down the hall once more and saw the tentacled thing hunch itself up, drop to the floor behind the desk, and wobble its way into the inner office, (Now?) Fred said.

(No, save it! But come on, this is our best chance!) Nita followed Kit down the hall to the door, crouched by it, and looked in. Past it was another room. They slipped into it and found themselves facing a partly open door that led to the office the typist had gone into. Through the slit they could just see the tentacly creature's back and could hear the voice of the man talking to it. "Hold all my calls for the next hour or so, until they get this thing cleared up. I don't want everybody's half- baked ideas of what's going on. Let Garm and his people handle it. And here, get Mike on the phone for me. I want to see if I can get something useful out of him."

Nita looked around, trying not even to think loudly. The room they were in was lined with shelves and shelves of heavy, dark, leatherbound books with gold-stamped spines. Kit tiptoed to one bookshelf, pulled out a volume at random, and opened it. His face registered shock; he held out the book for Nita to look at. The print was the same as that in Carl's large Advisory manual, line after line of the clear graceful symbols of the Speech — but whatever was being discussed on the page Nita looked at was so complicated she could only understand one word out of every ten or twenty. She glanced at Kit as he turned back to the front of the book and showed her the titfe pagC. UNIVERSES, PARAUNIVERSES AND PLANES-------- ASSEMBLY AND MAINTE-NANCE,

it said. a creator's manual. And underneath, in smaller letters, Volume 108—Natural and Supernatural Laws,

Nita gulped. Beside her, Fred was dancing about in the air in great agiW' tion. (What is it?) she asked him. (It's in here.)

(Where?) Kit said.

(One of those. I can't tell which, it's so dark down that end of the room.) Fred indicated a bookcase on the farthest wall. (It's worst over there.) Nita stopped dead when she saw the room's second door, which gave on the inner office and was wide open.

Nita got ready to scoot past the door. The man who sat at the desk in the elegant office had his back to it and was staring out the window into the dimness. His warty secretary handed him the phone, and he swiveled around in the high-backed chair to take it, showing himself in profile. Nita stared at him, confused, as he picked up the phone. A businessman, young, maybe thirty, and very handsome — red-gold hair and a clean-lined face above a trim, dark three-piece suit. This was the Witherer, the Kindler of Wildfires, the one who decreed darkness, the Starsnuffer? "Hi, Michael," he said. He had a pleasant voice, warm and deep. "Oh, nothing much—" (Never mind him,) Kit said. (We've got to get that Book.) (We can't go past the door till he turns around.)

"— the answer to that is pretty obvious, Mike. I can't do a bloody thing with this place unless I can get some more power for it. I can't afford street lights, I can barely afford a little electricity, much less a star. The entropy rating—"

The young man swiveled in his chair again, leaning back and looking out the window. Nita realized with a chill that he had a superb view of the downtown skyline, including the top of the Pan Am Building, where even now wisps of smoke curled black against the lowering gray. She tapped Kit on the elbow, and together they slipped past the doorway to the bookshelf. (Fred, do you have even a little idea—)

(Maybe one of those up there.) He indicated a shelf just within reach. Kit and Nita started taking down one book after another, looking at them. Nita was shaking — she had no clear idea what they were looking for.

(What if it's one of those up there, out of reach?) (You'll stand on my shoulders. Kit, hurry!)

"— Michael, don't you think you could talk to the rest of Them and get ^me just a little more energy? — Well, They've never given me what I asked or, have They? All I wanted was my own Universe where everything works—Which brings me to the reason for this call. Who's this new operative you turned loose in here? This Universe is at a very delicate stage, interference will-."

1 hey were down to the second-to-last shelf, and none of the books had what they were looking for. Nita was sweating worse. (Fred, are you sure—} («s dark there, it's all dark. What do you want from me?)

Kit, kneeling by the bottom shelf, suddenly jumped as if shocked. (Huh?) Nita said. (It stung me. Nita!) Kit grabbed at the volume his hand had brushed, yanked it out of the case, and knelt there, juggling it like a hot potato. He managed to get it open and held it out, showing Nita not the usual clean page, close-printed with the fine small symbols of the Speech, but a block of transparency like many pages of thinnest glass laid together. Beneath the smooth surface, characters and symbols seethed as if boiling up from a great depth and sinking down again. Nita found herself squinting, fit hurts to look at.)

(It hurts to hold!) Kit shut the book hurriedly and held it out to Fred for him to check, for externally it looked no different from any other book there. (Is this what we're looking for?) Fred's faint glimmer went out like a blown candle flame with the nearness of the book. (The darkness — it blinds—}

Kit bundled the book into his backpack and rubbed his hands on his jacket. {Now if we can just get out of here…)

"— oh, come on, Mike," the voice was saying in the other office. "Don't get cute with me. I had an incident on top of one of my buildings. One of my favorite constructs got shot up and the site stinks of wizardry. Your brand, moonlight and noon-forged metal." The voice of the handsome young man in the three-piece suit was still pleasant enough, but Nita, peering around the edge of the door, saw his face going hard and sharp as the edge of a knife. He swiveled around in his chair again to look out the window at that thin plume of ascending smoke, and Nita waved Kit past the door, then scuttled after him herself. " — that's a dumb question to be asking me, Michael If I knew, would I tell you where the bright Book was? And how likely is it that I know at all? You people keep such close tabs on it, at least that's what I hear. Anyway, if it's not read from every so often, don't / go ffft! like everything else? — You're absolutely right, that's not a responsive answer. Why should / be responsive, you're not being very helpful—"

Kit and Nita peeked back into the hall. Fred floated up to hang between them. (1 get a feeling—) Kit started to say, but the sudden coldness in the voice of the man on the phone silenced him. " — Look, Mike, I've had about enough of this silliness. The Bright Powers got miffed because I wanted to work on projects of my own instead of following-the-leader like you do, working from Their blueprints instead of drawing up your own. You can do what you please, but I thought when 1 settled down in this little pittance of a Universe that They would let me be and let me do things my way. They said They didn't need me when They threw me out — well, I've done pretty well without Them too. Maybe They don't like that, because now all of a sudden I'm getting interference. You say this operative isn't one of your sweetness-and-Light types? Fine. Then you _won't mind if when

I catch him, her, or it, I make his stay interesting and permanent. Whoever's disrupting my status quo will wish he'd never been born, spawned, or engendered. And when you see the rest of Them, you tell Them from me that—hello? Hello?"

The phone slammed down. There was no sound for a few seconds. "Akthanath," the young man's voice finally said into the silence, "someone's soul is going to writhe for this."

The slow cold of the words got into Nita's spine. She and Kit slipped around the door and ran for it, down the hall and into the elevator. "—he's playing it close to the chest," that angry voice floated down the hall to them. "I don't know what's going on. The Eldest still has it safe?—Good, then see that guards are mounted at the usual accesses. And have Garm send a pack of his people hacktime to the most recent gate opening. I want to know which universe these agents are coming from."

In the elevator, Kit whipped out the antenna and rapped the control panel with it. "Down!" Doors closed, and down it went, Nita leaned back against one wall of the elevator, panting. Now she knew why that first crowd of perytons had come howling after them on top of the Pan Am Building, but the solution of that small mystery made her feel no better at all. "Kit, they'll be waiting down-stairs, for sure."

He bit his lip. "Yeah. Well, we won't be where they think we'll be, that's all. If we get off a couple of floors too high and take the stairs—"

"Right."

"Stop at Four," Kit said to the elevator.

The elevator stopped, opened its doors. Kit headed out the door fast and tripped — the elevator had stopped several inches beneath the fourth floor. "Watch your step," the elevator said, snickering.

Kit turned and smacked the open elevator door with his antenna as Nita and Fred got out.

"Very funny. You stay here until f give the word. C'mon, kt'sget out of here!"

They ran down the hall together, found the stairs, and plunged down them. Kit was panting as hard as Nita now. Fred shot down past landing after Ending with them, his light flickering as if it were an effort to keep up. "Kit," ^N'ta said, "where are we going to go after we leave this building? We need htte, and a place to do the spell to find the bright Book."

Kit sounded unhappy. "I dunno, How about Central Park? If we hid in there—"

But you saw what it looks like from the top of Pan Am. It's all dark in a there were things moving—" 1 nere's a lot of room to hide. Look, Nita, if I can handle the machines here, it's a good bet you can handle the plants. You're good with plants and live stuff, you said." She nodded reluctantly. "I guess we'll find out how good."

They came to the last landing, the ground door. Nita pushed the door open a crack and found that they were almost directly across from the green lobby and the elevators. (What's the situation?) Kit said silently.

(They're waiting.) Six perytons, black-coated, brown-coated, one a steely gray, were sitting or standing around the middle elevator with their tongues hanging out and looks of anticipation and hunger in their too-human eyes. (Now?) Fred said, sounding eager.

(Not yet. We may not need a diversion, Fred.) "Go!" he whispered then in the Speech. The antenna in his hand sparked and sputtered with molten light, and Kit pressed close behind Nita. (Watch them!)

There was no bell, but even if there had been one, the sound of it and of the elevator doors opening would have been drowned out in snarls as the perytons leaped in a body into the elevator. The moment the perytons were out of sight, Nita pushed the door open and headed for the one to the garage. It stuck and stung her as the dark Book had; she jerked her hand away from it. Kit came up behind her and blasted it with the antenna, then grabbed it himself. This time it came open. They dashed through and Kit sealed the door behind them.

No one was in the garage, but a feeling was growing in the air as if the storm of rage they'd heard beginning upstairs was about to break over their heads. Kit raised the antenna again, firing a line of hot light that zapped the ceiling-mounted controls of the delivery door, With excruciating slowness the door began to rumble upward. (Now?) Fred said anxiously as they ran toward it. (No, not yet, just—)

They bent over double, ducked underneath the opening door, and ran up the driveway. It was then that the perytons leaped at them from both sides-howling, and Nita grabbed for her wand and managed one slash with it. yelling, "Now, Fred! Now.

All she saw clearly was the peryton that jumped at her, a huge, blue-eyed, brindled she-wolf, as the rowan wand spat silver moonfire and the peryton M away screaming. Then came the explosion, and it hurled both her and Krt staggering off to their right. The street shook as if lightning-struck, and p^ar-of the front of the dark building was demolished in a shower of shattered plate glass as tons and tons and tons of red bricks came crashing down fr^oC1 somewhere to fill the street from side to side, burying sidewalks and peryton and doors and the delivery bay twenty feet deep. Nita picked herself up. A few feet away, Kit was doing the same, and bobbed over to them as an ominous stillness settled over everything. (How was I?) Fred said, seeming dazed but pleased. "Are you all right?" Kit said.

(I'm alive, but my gnaester will never be the same,} Fred said. (You two?) "We're fine," Kit said.

"And I think we're in trouble," Nita added, looking at the blocked street. "Let's get going!"

They ran toward Fifth Avenue, and the shadows took them.

Contractual Magic An Introduction

A four-foot-high wall ran down the west side of Fifth Avenue, next to a sidewalk of gray hexagonal paving-stones. Nita and Kit crouched behind it, just inside Central Park, under the shadows of barren-branched trees, and tried to catch their breath. Fred hung above them, watching both Fifth Avenue and Sixty-fourth Street for signs of pursuit.

Nita leaned against the dirty wall, careless of grime or roughness or the pigeon droppings that streaked it. She was scared. All through her life, the one thing she knew she could always depend on was her energy — it never gave out. Even after being beaten up, she always sprang right back. But here and now, when she could less afford exhaustion than she had ever been able to in her life, she felt it creeping up on her. She was even afraid to rest, for fear it would catch up with her quicker. But her lungs were burning, and it felt so good to sit still, not have death or something worse chasing her. And there was another spell to be cast…

If I'd known I was going to get into a situation like this, she thought would I ever have picked that book up at all? Would I have taken the Oath? Then she shook her head and tried to think about something else, for she got an inkling of the answer, and it shocked her. She had always been told that she wasn't brave. At least that's what Joanne and her friends had always sai«^: Can't take a dare, can't take a joke, crybaby, crybaby. We were only teas-ing.…

She sniffed and rubbed her eyes, which stung. "Did you find the spell?' she said.

Kit had been paging through his wizards' manual. Now he was running 3 finger down one page,

occasionally whispering a word, then stopping himself to keep from using the Speech aloud.

"Yeah. It's pretty simple." But he was frowning.

"What's the matter?"

Kit slumped back against the wall, looked over at her. "I keep thinking about what — you know who — was talking about on the phone." "Sounded like he was hiding something."

"Uh hah. They know where the bright Book is, all right. And somebody's patching it. Whoever the 'Eldest' is. And now there're going to be more guards around it." " 'The usual accesses/ he said. Kit, there might be an unusual access, then."

"Sure. If we had any idea where the thing was hidden." "Won't the spell give us a vision, a location, like the last one?"

"No. It's a directional." Kit dropped his hands wearily on the book in his lap, sighed, looked over at Nita. "I don't know… I just don't get it."

"What?" She rolled the rowan wand between her hands, watching the way its light shone between her fingers and through the skin.

"He didn't look evil. Or sound that way, at least not till right at the end there." (The Snuffer was always glorious to look at before it scorned the light,) Fred said. {And it kept the beauty afterward—that's what the stars always used to say. That's one reason it's dangerous to deal with that one. The beauty … seduces.) Fred made a small feeling of awe and fear. (What a blaze of darkness, what a flood of emissions. I was having a hard time keeping my composure in there.) "Are you all right now?"

(Oh, yes. I was a little amazed that you didn't perceive the power burning around the shell he was wearing. Just as well — you might have spoken to him, and everything would have been lost. That one's most terrible power, they say, is his absolute conviction that he's right in what he does.) "He's not right, then?" Kit said. (I don't know.)

"But," Nita said, confused, "if he's fighting with… with Them… ^w'th the ones who made the bright Book, isn't he in the wrong?"

(I don't know,) Fred said again. (How am I supposed to judge? But you're

*>zards, you should know how terrible a power belief is, especially in the

*rong hands — and how do you tell which hands are wrong? Believe some-

*"^lrtg and the Universe is on its way to being changed. Because you've changed, by believing.

Once you've changed, other things start to follow, ^Is«'t that the way it works?)

Nita nodded as Fred looked across the dark expanse of Central Park. The ^ranches of trees were knitted together in tangled patterns of strife. Ivy jangled what it climbed. Paths were full of pitfalls, copses clutched themselves full of threat and darkness. Shadows moved secretively through shadows, making unnerving noises. (This is what — he — believes in,) Fred said sadly, (however he justifies the belief.)

Nita could find nothing to say. The wordless misery of the trees had been wearing at her ever since she set foot inside the wall. All the growing things there longed for light, though none of them knew what it was; she could feel their starved rage moving sluggishly in them, slow as sap in the cold. Only in one place was their anger muted — several blocks south, at Fifth and Central Park South, where in her own New York the equestrian statue of General Sherman and the Winged Victory had stood. Here the triumphant rider cast in black bronze was that handsome young man they had seen in the black glass building, his face set in a cold proud conqueror's smile. The creature he rode was a skull-faced eight-legged steed, which the wizards' manual said brought death with the sound of its hooves. And Victory with her palm branch was changed to a grinning Fury who held a dripping sword. Around the statue group the trees were silent, not daring to express even inarticulate feelings. They knew their master too well.

Nita shook her head and glanced at Kit, who was looking in the same direction. "I thought it'd be fun to know the Mason's Word and run around bringing statues to life," he said unhappily, "but somehow 1 don't think there's any statue here I'd want to use the Word on… You ready? We should start this." "Yeah."

The spell was brief and straightforward, and Nita turned to the right page in her manual and drew the necessary circle and diagram. Kit got the dark Book out of his backpack and dropped it in the middle of the circle. Nita held up her wand for light. They began to recite the spell. It was only three sentences long, but by the end of the first sentence Nita could feel the trees bending in close to watch — not with friendly, secretive interest, as in her first spell with Kit, but in hungry desperation. Even the abstract symbols and words of the Speech must have tasted of another Uni-verse where light was not only permitted, but free. The rowan wand was blazing by the end of the second sentence, maybe in reaction to being so close to something of the dark powers, and Nita wondered whether she should cover it up to keep them from being noticed. But the spell held her immobile as usual. For another thing, the trees all around were leaning in and in with such piteous feelings of hunger that she would as soon have eaten i*¹ front of starving children and not offered them some of what she had. Branches began to toss and twist, reaching down for a taste of the light. and Kit finished the spell.

Kit reached right down to pick up the dark Book, which was as well immediately after the last word of the spell was spoken it actually itself a little way along the ground, southward. Kit could only hold it for moment before stuffing it back into his backpack. It no longer looked innocent. It burned, both to touch and to look at. Even when Kit had it hidden away and the backpack slung on, neither of them felt any easier. It was as if they were all now visible to something that was looking eagerly for them.

"Let's get out of here," Kit said, so subdued that Nita could hardly hear him- Nita stood and laid a hand against the trunk of the nearest tree, a consoling gesture. She was sorry she couldn't have left them more light. (I wish there was something I could do,) she said silently. But no answer came back. These trees were bound silent, like the car Kit had tended. She rejoined Kit, who was looking over the wall. "Nothing," he said. Together they swung over the dropping-streaked stone and hurried down Fifth Avenue, crossing the street to get a safe distance between them and the strange cries and half-seen movements of the park. "Straight south?" Nita said.

"Pretty nearly. It's pushing straight that way on my back. The bright Book looked like it was way downtown, didn't it, in that spell?"

"Uh huh. The financial district, I think." She gulped. It was a long way to walk — miles — even without having to worry about someone chasing you.

"Well, we'd better hurry," Kit said, He paused while they both stopped at the corner of Fifth and Sixty-first. When they were across, he added, "What gets me is that he's so sure that we're interference from the bright side. We haven't done anything yet."

"Huh," Nita said, gently scornful. "Sure we haven't. And anyway, whad-daya mean we aren't 'interference from the bright side'? You were the one who said we'd been had." Kit mulled this over as they approached Sixtieth. "Well … maybe. If they know about us, do you think they'll send help?"

"I don't know. I get the feeling that maybe we are the help,"

"Well, we're not dead yetf" Kit said, and peered around the corner of Sixtieth and Fifth — and then jumped back, pale with shock. "We're dead," he said, turned around, and began running back the way they had come, though he limped doing it. Nita looked around that corner just long enough to see what he had seen — a whole pack of big yellow cabs, thundering down

Sixtieth. The one in front had a twisted fender that stuck out slightly on one ^Slae, a jagged piece of metal. She turned and ran after Kit, frantic. "Where °an we hide?" 'The buildings are locked here too," Kit said from up ahead. He had been trying doors. "Fred, can you do something?"

(After that last emission? So soon?) Fred's thought was shaken. (It's all I ^Can do to radiate light. I need time to recover.)

'Crud! Kit, the park, maybe the trees'll slow them down."

They both ran for the curb, but there was no time. Cabs came roaring around the corner from Sixtieth, and another pack of them leaped around the corner of Sixty-first and hurtled down Fifth toward them; they would never make it across the street. Kit grabbed for his antenna, and Nita yanked out the wand, but without much hope — it hadn't worked that well on the helicopter. The cabs slowed closed in from both sides, forming a half- circle with Kit and Nita and Fred at the center, backing them against the wall of a dingy building. The cordon tightened until there were no gaps, and one cab at each side was up on the sidewalk, blocking it. No matter where Nita looked, all she saw were chromed grilles like gritted teeth, hungry headlights staring. One of the cabs shouldered forward, its engine snarling softly. The jagged place at one end of its front fender wore a brown discoloration. Not rust — Kit's blood, which it had tasted. Kit lifted the antenna, the hand that gripped it shaking. The high-pitched yowl of rage and defiance from outside the circle jerked Kit's head up. Nita stared. Fenders scraped and rattled against one another as the tight-wedged cabs jostled, trying to see what was happening. Even the bloodstained cab, the pack leader, looked away from Kit. But none of them could move any way but backward, and one cab paid immediately for that limitation as a fanged grille bit deep into its hindquarters and dragged it screaming out of the circle. Metal screeched and tore, glass shattered as the Lotus Esprit's jaws crushed through the cab's trunk, ripped away its rear axle, and with a quick sideways shake of its front end flung the bitten-off axle crashing down Fifth Avenue. Then the Lotus slashed sideways, its fangs opening up the side of another cab like a can opener. The circle broke amid enraged roaring; cabs circled and Feinted while the first victim dragged itself away by its front wheels to collapse in the street. Everything started happening at once. Nita slashed at the front of the cab closest to her. The whip of moonfire cracking across its face seemed to confuse and frighten it, but did no damage. 1 hope it doesn't notice that right away, she thought desperately, for there was no use yelling for help. Kit had his hands full. He had the antenna laid over his forearm again and was snapping off shot after shot of blinding-hot light, cracking headlights, bum-ing holes in hoods and exploding tires, a hit here, a hit there — nothing fatal, Nita noticed with dismay. But Kit was managing to hold the cabs at their distance as they harried him.

Out in the street one cab lunged at the Lotus, a leap, its front wheels clear of the ground and meant to come crashing down on the racer's hood — untu suddenly the Lotus's nose dipped under the cab and heaved upward, sending the cab rolling helplessly onto its back. A second later the Lotus came down on top of the cab, took a great shark-bite out of its underbelly, and then whirled around, whipping gas and transmission fluid all over, to slash at another cab about to leap on it from behind. This was the king cab, the pack leader, and as the Lotus and the Checker circled one another warily in the street, the other cabs drew away from Kit and Nita to watch the outcome of the combat. There were two more cabs dead in the street that Nita hadn't seen fall— one with everything from right rear door to right front fender torn away, another horribly mangled in its front end and smashed sideways into a tree on the other side of Fifth, as if it had been thrown there. Amid the wreckage of these and the other two cabs, the cab and the Lotus rolled, turning and backing, maneuvering for an opening that would end in a kill. The Lotus was scored along one side but otherwise unhurt, and the whining roar of its engine sounded hungry and pleased. Infuriated, the Checker made a couple of quick rushes at it, stopping short with a screech of tires and backing away again each time in a way that indicated it didn't want to close in. The Lotus snarled derisively, and without warning the Checker swerved around and threw itself full speed at Kit and Nita, still braced against the wall.

This is it, Nita thought with curious calm. She flung up the rowan wand in one last useless slash and then was thrown back against the wall with terrible force as a thunderstorm of screaming metal flew from right to left in front of her and crashed not five feet away. She slid down the wall limp as a rag doll, stunned, aware that death had gone right past her face. When her eyes and ears started working again, the Lotus was standing off to her left, its back scornfully turned to the demolished pack leader, which it had slammed into the wall. The Checker looked like the remains of a front-end collision test—it was crumpled up into itself like an accordion, and bleeding oil and gas in pools. The Lotus roared triumphant disdain at the remaining two cabs, then threatened them with a small mean rush. They turned tail and ran a short distance, then slowed down and slunk away around the corner of Sixty-flrst. Satisfied, the Lotus bent over the broken body of one dead cab, reached down, and with casual fierceness plucked away some of the front fender, as a falcon plucks its kill before eating.

Nita turned her head to look for Kit. He was several feet farther down the ^wall, looking as shattered as she felt. He got up slowly and walked out into the street. The Lotus glanced up, left its kill and went to meet him. For a foment they simply looked at each other from a few feet apart. Kit held one hand out, and the Lotus slowly inched forward under the hand, permitting "ie caress. They stood that way for the space of four or five gasps, and then he Lotus rolled closer still and pushed its face roughly against Kit's leg, like a cat.

How about that," Kit said, his voice cracking. "How about that." Nita put her face down in her hands, wanting very much to cry, but all she Quid manage were a couple of crooked, whopping sobs. She had a feeling ^ar- much worse was coming, and she couldn't break down all the way. Nita hid her eyes until she thought her voice was working again, then let her hands fall and looked up. "Kit, we've got to—"

The Lotus had rolled up and was staring at her — a huge, dangerous, curious, brown-hided beast. She lost what she was saying, hypnotized by the fierce, interested stare. Then the Lotus smiled at Nita, a slow, chrome smile silver and sanguine. "Uhh," she said, disconcerted, and glanced up at Kit, who had come to stand alongside the racer. "We've gotta get out of here, Kit, It has to be the spell that brought these things down on us. And when those two cabs let you-know-who know that we didn't get caught, or killed—"

Kit nodded, looked down at the Lotus; it glanced sideways up at him, from headlights bright with amusement and triumph. "How about it?" Kit said in the Speech. "Could you give us a lift?" In answer the Lotus shrugged, flicking its doors open like a bird spreading its wings. Nita stood up, staggering slightly. "Fred?"

He appeared beside her, making a feeling of great shame. "Fred, what's the matter?" Kit said, catching it too. (I couldn't do anything.)

"Of course not," Nita said, reaching up to cup his faint spark in one hand. "Because you just did something huge, dummy. We're all right. Come on for a ride." She perched Fred on the upstanding collar of her down vest; he settled there with a sigh of light.

Together she and Kit lowered themselves into the dark seats of the Lotus, into the dim, warm cockpit, alive with dials and gauges, smelling of leather and metal and oil. They had barely strapped themselves in before the Lotus gave a great glad shake that slammed its doors shut, and burned rubber down Fifth Avenue — out of the carnage and south toward the joining of two rivers, and the oldest part of Manhattan.

Nita sat at ease, taking a breather and watching the streets of Manhattan rush by. Kit, behind the steering wheel, was holding the dark Book in his lap. feeling it carefully for any change in the directional spell. He was reluctant to touch it. The farther south they went, the more the Book burned the eyes that looked at it. The wizards' manual had predicted this effect — that, as the two Books drew closer to one another, each would assert its own nature more and more forcefully. Nita watched the Book warping and skewing the very air around it, blurring its own outlines, and found it easy to believe the manual s statement that even a mind of terrible enough purpose and power to wrench this Book to its use might in the reading be devoured by what was read. She hoped for Kit's sake that it wouldn't devour someone who just touched it- "We're close," Kit said at last, in a quiet, strained voice. "You okay?"

"I've got a headache, but that's all. Where are we?" «Uh—that was just Pearl Street. Close to City Hall." She tapped the inside of her door, a friendly gesture. "Your baby moves." "Yeah," Kit said affectionately. The Lotus rumbled under its hood, sped on.

"Fred? You feeling better?"

Fred looked up at her from her collar. (Somewhat. I'd feel better still if I knew what we were going to be facing next. If I'm to make bricks again, I'm going to need some notice.) "Your gnaester, huh?" Kit said.

(I'm not sure I have a gnaester any more, after that last emission. And I'm afraid to find out.) "Kit, scrunch down," Nita said suddenly, doing the same herself. The Lotus roared past the corner of Broadway and Chambers, pointedly ignoring a pair of sullen-looking cabs that stared and snarled as it passed. They were parked on either side of an iron-railed stairway leading down to a subway station. About a block farther along Broadway, two more cabs were parked at another subway entrance.

From his slumped-down position, Kit glanced over at Nita. "Those arc the first we've seen." " 'The usual accesses,' " Nita said. "They've got it down in the subway somewhere." "Oh, no," Kit muttered, and (Wonderful,) Fred said. Nita swallowed, not too happy about the idea herself. Subway stations, unless they were well lighted and filled with people, gave her the creeps. Worse, even in her New York, subways had their own special ecologies — not just the mice and rats and cats that everybody knew about, but other less normal creatures, on which the wizards' manual had had a twenty-page chapter. "They're all over the place," she said aloud, dealing with the worst problem first. "How are we going to—"

"Ooof!" Kit said, as the dark Book, sitting on his lap, sank down hard as if pushed. The Lotus kept driving on down Broadway, past City Hall, and Kit struggled upward to look out the back window, noting the spot. 'That was where the other Book was — straight down from that place we just passed."

The Lotus turned right onto a side street and slowed as if looking for something. Finally it pulled over to the left-hand curb and stopped. What—" Kit started to say, but the racer flicked open first Kit's door, then Nita's, as if it wanted them to get out.

They did, cautiously. The Lotus very quietly closed its doors, Then it rolled forward a little way, bumping up onto the sidewalk in front of a dingy-looking warehouse. It reached down, bared its fangs, and with great delicacy sank them into a six-foot-long grille in the sidewalk. The Lotus heaved, and with asoft scraping groan, the grille-work came up to reveal an electric-smelling darkness and stairs leading down into it.

"It's one of the emergency exits from the subway, for when the trains break down/' Kit whispered, jamming the dark Book back into his backpack and dropping to his knees to rub the Lotus enthusiastically behind one head-light. "It's perfect!"

The Lotus's engine purred as it stared at Kit with fierce affection. It backed a little and parked itself, its motions indicating it would wait for them. Kit got up, pulling out his antenna, and Nita got out her wand "Well," she said under her breath, "let's get it over with… "

The steps were cracked concrete, growing damp and discolored as she walked downward. Nita held out the wand to be sure of her footing and kept one hand on the left wall to be sure of her balance — there was no banister or railing on the right, only darkness and echoing air. (Kit—) she said silently, wanting to be sure he was near, but not wanting to be heard by anything that might be listening down there. (Right behind you. Fred?)

His spark came sailing down behind Kit, looking brighter as they passed from gloom to utter dark. (Believe me, I'm not far.)

(Here's the bottom,) Nita said. She turned for one last glance up toward street level and saw a huge sleek silhouette carefully and quietly replacing the grille above them. She gulped, feeling as if she were being shut into a dun-geon, and turned to look deeper into the darkness. The stairs ended in a ledge three feet wide and perhaps four feet deep, recessed into the concrete wall of the subway. Nita held up the wand for more light. The ledge stretched away straight ahead, with the subway track at the bottom of a wide pit to the right of it. (Which way, Kit?) (Straight, for the time being.)

The light reflected dully from the tracks beside them as they pressed farther into the dark. Up on the streets, though there had been darkness, there had also been sound. Here there was a silence like black water, a silence none of them dared to break. They slipped into it holding their breaths. Even the usual dim rumor of a subway tunnel, the sound of trains rumbling far away, the ticking of the rails, was missing. The hair stood up all over Nita as she walked and tried not to make a sound. The air was damp, chilly, full of the smells of life — too full, and the wrong kinds of life, at least to Nita's way of thinking. Mold and mildew; water dripping too softly to make a sound, but still filling the air with a smell of leached lime, a stale, puddly odor; wet trash, piled in trickling gutters or at the bases of rusting iron pillars, rotting quietly; and always the sharp ozone-and-scorched- soot smell of the third rail. Shortly there was light that did not come from Nita's wand. Pale splotches of green-white radiance were splashed irregularly on walls and ceiling — firefungus, which the wizards' manual said was the main food source of the subway's smallest denizens, dun mice and hidebehinds and skinwings. Nita shuddered at the thought and walked faster. Where there were hidebehinds, there would certainly be rats to eat them. And where there were rats, there would also be fireworms and thrastles— (Nita.)

She stopped and glanced back at Kit. He was holding his backpack in one arm now and the antenna in the other, and looking troubled in the wand's silver light. (That way,) he said, pointing across the tracks at the far wall with its niche-shaped recesses. (Through the wall? We don't even know how thick it is!) Then she stopped and thought a moment. (I wonder — You suppose the Mason's Word would work on concrete? What's in concrete, anyhow?)

(Sand—quartz, mostly. Some chemicals—but I think they all come out of the ground.) (Then it'll work. C'mon.) Nita hunkered down and very carefully let her-self drop into the wide pit where the tracks ran. The crunch of rusty track cinders told her Kit was right behind. Fred floated down beside her, going low to light the way. With great care Nita stepped over the third rail and balanced on the narrow ledge of the wall on the other side. She stowed the wand and laid both hands flat on the concrete to begin implementation of the lesser usage of the Word, the one that merely manipulates stone rather than giving it the semblance of life. Nita leaned her head against the stone too, making sure of her memory of the Word, the sixteen syllables that would loose what was bound, Very fast, so as not to mess it up, she said the Word and pushed.

Door, she thought as the concrete melted under her hands, and a door there was; she was holding the sides of it, (Go ahead,) she said to Kit and Fred. They ducked through under her arm. She took a step forward, let go, and the wall re-formed behind her. (Now what the—) Kit was staring around him in complete confusion. It took Nita a moment to recover from the use of the Word, but when her vision cleared, she understood the confusion. They were standing in the fiddle of another track, which ran right into the wall they had just come through and stopped there. The walls there were practically one huge mass of ^Aefungus. It hung down in odd green-glowing lumps from the ceiling and ^ayered thick in niches and on the poles that held the ceiling up. Only the jack and ties and the rusty cinders between were bare, a dark road leading °wnward between eerily shining walls for perhaps an eighth of a mile before curving around to the right and out of view. U don't get it,) Kit said. (This track just starts. Or just stops. It would run right into that one we just came off! There aren't any subway lines in the city that do that! Are there?)

Nita shook her head, listening. The silence of the other tunnel did not persist here. Far down along the track, the sickly green light of the fircfungu_s was troubled by small shadowy rustlings,

movements, the scrabbling of claws. (What about the Book?} she said.

Kit nodded down toward the end of the track. (Down there, and a little to the right.)

They walked together down the long aisle of cold light, looking cautiously into the places where firefungus growth was sparse enough to allow for shadow. Here and there small sparks of brightness peered out at them, paired sparks — the eyes of dun mice, kindled to unnatural brightness by the fungus they fed on. Everywhere was the smell of dampness, old things rotting or rusting. The burning-ozone smell grew so chokingly strong that Nita realized it couldn't be just the third rail producing it — even if the third rail were alive in a tunnel this old. The smell grew stronger as they approached the curve at the tunnel's end. Kit, still carrying the backpack, was gasping. She stopped just before the curve, looked at him. (Are you okay?)

He gulped. (It's close, it's really close. I can hardly see, this thing is blur-ring my eyes so bad.)

(You want to give it to me?)

(No, you go ahead. This place seems to be full of live things. Your depart-ment—)

(Yeah, right,) Nita agreed unhappily, and made sure of her grip on the rowan wand. (Well, here goes. Fred, you ready for another diversion?)

(I think I could manage something small if I had to.)

(Great. All together now… .)

They walked around the curve, side by side. Then they stopped.

It was a subway station. Or it had been at one time, for from where they stood at one end of the platform, they could see the tons of rubble that had choked and scaled the tunnel at the far end of the platform. The rubble and the high ceiling were overgrown with firefungus enough to illuminate the old mosaics on the wall, the age-cracked tiles that said city hall over and over again, down the length of the platform wall. But the platform and tracks weren't visible from where they stood. Heaped up from wall to wall was a collection of garbage and treasure, things that glittered, things that mold-ered. Nita saw gems, set and unset, like the plunder of a hundred jewelry stores, tumbled together with moldy kitchen garbage; costly fabric in bolts or in shreds, half buried by beer cans and broken bottles; paintings in ornate frames, elaborately carved furniture, lying broken or protruding crookedly from beneath timbers and dirt fallen from the old ceiling; vases, sculpture, crystal, silver services, a thousand kinds of rich and precious things, lying a" t ether, _wnol_e and broken, among shattered dirty crockery and base metal. \nd ly'ⁿ§ atop the hoard, its claws clutched full of cheap costume jewelry, whispering to itself in the Speech, was the dragon.

Once more Nita tried to swallow and couldn't manage it. This looked nothing like the fireworm her book had mentioned — a foot long mouse-eating lizard with cigarette-lighter breath. But if a fireworm had had a long, long time to grow—she remembered the voice of the young man in the three-piece suit, saying with relief, "The Eldest has it." There was no telling how many years this creature had been lairing here in the darkness, growing huger and huger, devouring the smaller creatures of the underground night and dominating those it did not devour, sending them out to steal for its hoard—or to bring it food. Nita began to tremble, looking at the fireworm-dragon's thirty feet of lean, scaled, tight-muscled body, looking at the size of its dark-stained jaws, and considering what kind of food it must eat. She glanced down at one taloned hind foot and saw something that lay crushed and forgotten beneath it — a subway repairman's reflective orange vest, torn and scorched; a wrench, half melted; the bones, burned black… .

The dragon had its head down and was raking over its hoard with huge claws that broke what they touched half the time. Its tail twitched like a cat's as it whispered to itself in a voice like hissing steam. Its scales rustled as it moved, glowing faintly with the same light as the firefungus, but colder, greener, darker. The dragon's eyes were slitted as if even the pale fungus light was too much for it. It dug in the hoard, nosed into the hole, dug again, nosed about, as if going more by touch than sight, "Four thousand and ssix," it whispered, annoyed, hurried, angry. "It was here sssomewhere, I know it was. Three thousand — no. Four thousand and — and—"

It kept digging, its claws sending coins and bottlecaps rolling. The dragon reached into the hole and with its teeth lifted out a canvas bag. Bright things spilled out, which Nita first thought were more coins but that turned out to be subway tokens. With a snarl of aggravation the fireworm-dragon flung the bag away, and tokens flew and bounced down the hoard-hill, a storm of brassy glitter. One rolled right to Nita's feet. Not taking her eyes off the dragon, she ^bent to pick it up. It was bigger than the subway token the New York transit ystem used these days, and the letters stamped on it were in an old-time style. She nudged Kit and passed it to him, looking around at the mosaics on ^Ae walls. They were old. The City Hall motif repeated in squares high on toe train-side wall of the platform looked little like the City Hall of today.

^]s station had to be one of those that were walled up and forgotten when ^G area was being rebuilt long ago. The question was— ' ne problem is—) Kit started to say in his quietest whisper of thought. j '* ^wasn't quiet enough. With an expression of rage and terror, the dragon ^e° up from its digging, looked straight at them. Its squinted eyes kindled in the light from Nita's wand, throwing back a frightful violet reflection "Who's there? Who's there.'" it screamed in the Speech, in a voice like an explosion of steam. Without waiting for an answer it struck forward with its neck as a snake strikes and spat fire at them. Nita was ready, though; the sound of the scream and the sight of many tiny shadows running for cover had given her enough warning to put up the shield spell for both herself and Kit. The firebolt, dark red shot with billowing black like the output of a flamethrower, blunted against the shield and spilled sideways and down like water splashing on a window, When the bolt died away, the dragon was creeping and coiling down the hoard toward them; but it stopped, confused when it saw that Kit and Nita and Fred still stood unhurt. It reared back its head for another bolt. "You can't hurt us, Eldest," Nita said hurriedly, hoping it wouldn't try; the smell of burned firefungus was already enough to turn the stomach. The dragon crouched low against the hoard, its tail lashing, staring at them.

"You came to ssteal, "it said, its voice quieter than before but angrier, as it realized it couldn't hurt them. "No one ever comes here but to ssteal. Or to try," it added, glancing savagely over at another torn and fire-withered orange vest. "What do you want? You can't have it. Mine, all thiss is mine. No one takes what'ss mine. He promissed, he ssaid he would leave me alone when I came here. Now he breakss the promiss, is that it?"

The Eldest squinted wrathfully at them. For the second time that day, Nita found herself fascinated by an expression. Rage was in the fireworm-dragon's face, but also a kind of pain; and its voice was desperate in its anger. It turned its back, then, crawling back up onto the hoard. "I will not let him break the premiss. Go back to him and tell him that I will burn it, bum it all, ssooner than let him have one ring, one jewel. Mine, all thiss is mine, no hoard has been greater than thiss in all times, he will not diminishhh it— The Eldest wound itself around the top of the hoard-mound like a crown of spines and scales, digging its claws protectively into the gems and the trash. A small avalanche of objects started from the place where it had been laying the hoard open before. Gold bars, some the small collectors' bars, some large ones such as the banks used, clattered or crashed down the side of the mound. Nita remembered how some ten million dollars' worth of Federal Reserve gold had vanished from a bank in New York some years before — just vanished, untraceable — and she began to suspect where it had gone.

"Mine, "hissed the Eldest. "Ihave eight thousand six hundred forty-two cw diamonds, I have six hundred — no. I have four hundred eight emeralds. I hatf'eighty-nine black opals—no, fifteen black opals. I have eighty-nine—eighty-nine—" The anxiety in its voice was growing, washing out the ang^erj Abruptly the Eldest turned away from them and began digging again, still talking, its voice becoming again as it had been when they first came u*- hurried, worried. "Eighty-nine pounds of silver plate. I have two hundred fourteen pounds of gold — no, platinum. I have six hundred seventy pounds of gold—"

"Nita," Kit said, very softly, in English, hoping the Eldest wouldn't under-stand it- "You get the feeling it's losing its memory?"

She nodded- "Lord, how awful." For a creature with the intense posses-siveness of a fireworm to be unable to remember what it had in its hoard must be sheer torture. It would never be able to be sure whether everything was there; if something was missing, it might not be able to tell. And to a fireworm, whose pride is in its defense of its hoard from even the cleverest thieves, there was no greater shame than to be stolen from and not notice and avenge the theft immediately. The Eldest must live constantly with the fear of that shame. Even now it had forgotten Kit and Nita and Fred as it dug and muttered frantically, trying to find something, though uncertain of what it was looking for.

Nita was astonished to find that she was feeling sorry for a creature that had tried to kill her a few minutes before. "Kit," she said, "what about the bright Book? Is it in there?" He glanced down at the dark Book, which was straining in his backpack toward the piled-up hoard. "Uh huh. But how are we going to find it? And are you sure that defense shield is going to hold up at close range, when it comes after us? You know it's not going to just let us take something—"

{Why not trade it something?) Fred asked suddenly.

Nita and Kit both looked at him, struck by the idea. "Like what?" Kit said.

(Like another Book?)

"Oh, no," they said in simultaneous shock.

"Fred," Kit said then, "we can't do that. The—you-know-who—he'll just come right here and get it."

(So where did you get it from, anyway? Doubtless he could Have read from 't any time he wanted. If you can get the bright Book back to the Senior wizards in your world, can't they use it to counteract whatever he does?)

Nita and Kit both thought about it. "He might have a point," Nita said after a second. "Besides, Kit—if we do leave the dark Book here, can you "nagine you-know-who getting it back without some trouble?" She glanced ^UP at the mound, where the Eldest was whispering threats of death and destruction against whoever might come to steal. "He wouldn't have put the ^br'ght Book here unless the Eldest was an effective guardian."

Even through the discomfort of holding the dark Book, Kit managed to a small smile. "Gonna try it?"

Nita took a step forward. Instantly the dragon paused in its digging to stare "^fir, its scaly lips wrinkled away from black fangs in a snarl, but its eyes frightened. "Eldest," she said in the Speech, "we don't come to steal We r_e here to make a bargain."

The Eldest stared at Nita a moment more, then narrowed its eyes further. "Hss, you're a clever thiefff," it said. "Why ssshould I bargain with you?"

Nita gulped. Wizardryis words, the book had said.Believe, and create the truth; but be careful what you believe. "Because only your hoard, out ofall the other hoards from this world to the next, has what we 're interested in," she said carefully. "Only you ever had the taste to acquire and preserve this thing."

"OA?" said the Eldest. Its voice was still suspicious, but its eyes looked less threatened. Nita began to feel a glimmer of hope. "Whatmight thiss thingbe?" "A book," Nita said, "an old book something like this one." Kit took a step forward and held up the dark Book for the Eldest to see. This close to its bright counterpart, the dark volume was warping the air and light around it so terribly that its outlines writhed like a fistful of snakes. The Eldest peered at the dark Book with interest. 'Wow there is ssome-thing I don't have," it said. "Sssee how it changes. That would be an interest-ing addition… . What did you ssay you wanted to trade it for?"

"Another Book, Eldest. You came by it some time ago, we hear. It's close in value to this one. Maybe a little less,"Nita added, making it sound offhand.

The dragon's eyes brightened like those of a collector about to get the best of a bargain. "Lesss, you say. Hsss… . Sssomeone gave me a book rather like that one, ssome time ago, I forget just who. Let me ssseee… ."Ittumed away from them and began digging again. Nita and Kit stood and watched and tried to be patient while the Eldest pawed through the trash and the treasure, making sounds of possessive affection over everything it touched, mumbling counts and estimating values.

"I wish it would hurry up," Kit whispered. "I can't believe that after we've been chased this far, they're not going to be down here pretty quick. We didn't have too much trouble getting in—"

"You didn't open the wall," Nita muttered back. "Look, I'm still worried about leaving this here."

"Whaddaya want?" Kit snapped. "Do I have to carry it all the way home?" He breathed out, a hiss of annoyance that sounded unnervingly ii*^e the Eldest, and then rubbed his forearm across his eyes. "This thing burn*-I'm sorry."

"It's okay," Nita said, slightly embarrassed. "I just wish there were some way to be sure that you-know-who wouldn't get his hands on it anytime soon."

Kit looked thoughtful and opened his mouth to say something. It was a* that moment that the

Eldest put its face down into the hole it had been digging and came up again with something bright.

The Book of Night with Moon fell with a thump onto a pile of gold and gems and made them look tawdry, outshone them in a way that seemed to have nothing to do with light. Its cover was the same black leather as that of the dark Book—but as one looked at it, the blackness seemed to gain depth; light seemed hidden in it like a secret in a smiling heart. Even the dim green glow of the firefungus looked healthier now that the Book lay out in it. \Vhere page edges showed, they glittered as if brushed with diamond dust rather than gilding. The Eldest bent over the bright Book, squinting as if into a great light but refusing to look away. "Aaaaaahhh," it said, a slow, caress-ing, proprietary sigh. "Thisss is what you wisshed to trade your book ffor?" "Yes, Eldest,"Nita said, starting to worry.

The dragon laid its front paws on either side of the Book. "Ffair, it is ssso ffair. I had forgotten how ssweet it was to look on. No. No, I will not trade. I will not. Mine, mine… ."It nosed the bright Book lovingly.

Nita bit her lip and wondered what in the world to try next. "Eldest,"Kit said from beside her, "we have something more to trade."

"Oh?" The dragon looked away from the Book with difficulty and squinted at Kit. "What might that be?"

(Yeah, what?) Nita said silently.

(Sssh.) "//you will take our book in trade for that one, we'll work suck a wizardry about this place that no thiefwill ever enter. You 'II be safe here for as long as you please. Or forever,"

{What are you talking about!) Nita said, amazed. (We don't have the supplies for a major wizardry like that. The only one you could possibly manage would be one of—)

(—the blank-check spells, I know. Nita, shaddup!)

The Eldest was staring at Kit. 'Wo one would ever come in again to ssteal from me?" it said.

"That's right"

Nita watched the dragon's face as it looked away from Kit, thinking. It was old and tired, and terrified of losing what it had amassed; but now a fright-ened hope was awakening in its eyes. It looked back at Kit after a few seconds. "You will not come back either? No one will trouble me again?" 'Guaranteed," Kit said, meaning it.

'Then I will trade. Give me your book, and work your spell, and go. Leave We with what is mine." And it picked up the Book of Night with Moon in its)^aws and dropped it off the hoard- hill, not far from Kit's feet. "Give me, give ^mt> 'the Eldest said. Warily, Nita dropped the shield spell. Kit took a couple ° ^Ufieasy steps forward and held out the dark Book, The dragon shot its head ^Sarlk teeth in the dark Book, and jerked it out of Kit's hands so fast he stared at them for a moment, counting fingers. mine," it hissed as it turned away and started digging at another spot on the hoard, preparing to bury the dark Book. Kit stooped, picked up the Book of Night with Moon. It was as heavy as the dark Book had been about the size of an encyclopedia volume, and strange to hold — the depth of the blackness of its covers made it seem as if the holding hands should sink right through. Kit flipped it open as Nita and Fred came up behind to look over his shoulder. (But the pages are blank,) Fred said, puzzled. (It needs moonlight,) Kit said.

(Well, this is moonlight.) Nita held up the rowan wand over the opened Book Very vaguely they could make out something printed, the symbols of the Speech, too faint to read. (Then again, maybe secondhand moonlight isn't good enough. Kit, what're you going to do? You have to seal this place up now. You promised.)

{I'm gonna do what I said. One of the blank-check wizardries.)

(But when you do those you don't know what price is going to be asked later.)

(We have to get this Book, don't we? That's why we're here. And this is something that has to be done to get the Book. I don't think the price'll be too high. Anyway you don't have to worry, I'll do it myself.)

Nita watched Kit getting out his wizards' manual and bit her lip. (Oh, no, you're not,) she said. (If you're doing it, I'm doing it too. Whatever you're doing…)

(One of the Moebius spells,) Kit said, finding the page. Nita looked over his shoulder and read the spell. It would certainly keep thieves out of the hoard. When recited, a Moebius spell gave a specified volume of space a half-twist that left it permanently out of synch with the spaces surrounding it. The effect would be like stopping an elevator between floors, forever. (You read it all through?) Kit said. (Uh huh.)

(Then let's get back in the tunnel and do it and get out of here. I'm getting this creepy feeling that things aren't going to be quiet on ground level when we get up there.)

They wanted to say good-bye to the Eldest, but it had forgotten them already. "Mine, mine, mine, "it was whispering as garbage and gold flew in all directions from the place where it dug. (Let's go,) Fred said.

Out in the tunnel, the firefungus seemed brighter to Nita — or perhaps that was only the effect of looking at the Book of Night with Moon. They halted at the spot where the tunnel curved and began with great care to read the Moebius spell. The first part of it was something strange and unsettling—³¹¹ invocation to the Powers that governed the arts of wizardry, asking help this piece of work and promising that the power lent would be returne They required. Nita shivered, wondering what she was getting herself i^nt0' (or use of the Speech made the promise more of a prediction. Then came the definition of the space to be twisted, and finally the twisting itself. As they spoke the words Nita could see the Eldest, still digging away at his hoard, going pale ^and dim as if with distance, going away, though not moving. The words pushed the space farther and farther away, toward an edge that could be sensed more strongly though not seen—then, suddenly, over it. The spell broke, completed. Nita and Kit and Fred were standing at the edge of a great empty pit, as if someone had reached up into the earth and scooped out the subway station, the hoard, and the Eldest, whole. Someone had.

"1 think we better get out of here," Kit said, very quietly. As if in answer to his words came a long, soft groan of strained timber and metal—the pillars and walls of the tunnel where they stood and the tunnel on the other side of the pit, bending under new stresses that the pillars of the station had handled and that these were not meant to. Then a rumble, something falling. Nita and Kit turned and ran down the tunnel, stumbling over timbers and picking themselves up and running again. Fred zipped along beside like a shooting star looking for the right place to fall. They slammed into the wall at the end of the track as the rumble turned to a thunder and the thunder started catching up behind. Nita found bare concrete, said the Mason's Word in a gasp, and flung the stone open. Kit jumped through with Fred behind him. The tunnel shook, roared, blew out a stinging, dust-laden wind, and went down in ruin as Nita leaped through the opening and fell to the tracks beside Kit.

He got to his knees slowly, rubbing himself where he had hit. "Boy," he said, "if we weren't in trouble with you-know-who before, we are now… ."

Hurriedly Kit and Nita got up and the three of them headed for the ledge and the way to the open air.

Major Wizardries Termination and

Recovery

With great caution and a grunt of effort, Kit pushed up the grille at the top of the concrete steps and looked around. "Oh, brother," he whispered, "sometimes I wish I wasn't right." He scrambled up out of the tunnel and onto the sidewalk, with Nita and Fred following right behind. The street was a shambles reminiscent of Fifth and Sixty-second. Corpses of cabs and limousines and even a small truck were scattered around, smashed into lampposts and the fronts of buildings, over-turned on the sidewalk. The Lotus Esprit was crouched at guard a few feet away from the grille opening, its engine running in long, tired-sounding gasps. As Kit ran over to it, the Lotus rumbled an urgent greeting and shrugged its doors open. "They know we're here," Nita said as they hurriedly climbed in and buck-led up. "They have to know what we've done. Everything feels different since the dark Book fell out of this space."

(And they must know we'll head back for the worldgate at Pan Am,) Fred said. (Wherever that is.)

"We've gotta find it — oof!" Kit said, as the Lotus reared back, slamming its doors shut, and dove down the street they were on, around the corner and north again. "Nita, you up for one more spell?"

"Do we have a choice?" She got her manual out of her pack, started thumbing through it. "What I want to know is what we're supposed to try on whatever they have waiting for us at Grand Central. You-know-who isn't just going to let us walk in there and leave with the bright Book—"

"We'll burn that bridge when we come to it." Kit had his backpack open in his lap and was peeking at the Book of Night with Moon. Even in the sullen dimness that leaked in the Lotus's windows, the edges of the pages of the Book shone, the black depths of its covers glowed with the promise of light. Kit ran a finger along the upper edge of one cover, and as Nita watched his fa^ce settled into a solemn stillness, as if someone spoke and he listened intently. It was a long moment before the expression broke. Then Kit glanced over at her with a wondering look in his eyes. "It really doesn't look like that much," he said. "But it feels—Nita, I don't think they can hurt us while we have this. Or if they can, it won't matter much."

"Maybe not, if we read from it," Nita said, reading down through the spell that would locate the worldgate for them. "But you remember what Tom said—"

"Yeah." But there was no concern in Kit's voice, and he was looking soberly at the Book again.

Nita finished checking the spell and settled back in the seat to prepare for it, then started forward again as a spark of heat burned into her neck, "Ow!"

(Sorry.) Fred slid around from behind her to perch farther forward on her shoulder.

"Here we go," Nita said.

She had hardly begun reading the imaging spell before a wash of power such as she had never felt seized her and plunged her into the spell headfirst. And the amazing thing was that she couldn't even be frightened, for what-ever had so suddenly pulled her under and into the magic was utterly benevolent, a huge calm influence that Nita sensed would do her nothing but good, though it might kill her doing it. The power took her, poured itself into her, made the spell part of her. There was no longer any need to work it; it was. Instantly she saw all Manhattan laid out before her again in shadow outlines, and there was the worldgate, almost drowned in the darkness created by the Starsnuffer, but not hidden to her. The power let her go then, and she sat back gasping. Kit was watching her strangely. (I think I see what you mean,) she said. (The Book-— it made the spell happen by itself, almost.)

"Not 'almost,' " Kit said. "No wonder you-know-who wants it kept out of the hands of the Senior wizards. It can make even a beginner's spell happen. " did the same thing with the Moebius spell. If someone wanted to take this Place apart—or if someone wanted to make more places like it, and they had the Book——"He gulped. "Look, where's the gate?" 'Where it should be," Nita said, finding her breath. "Underground— under Grand Central. Not in the deli, though. It's down in one of the train tunnels."

Kit gulped again, harder. "Trains… . And you knowthat place'll be Bearded. Fred, are you up to another diversion?" (will it g_et _us back t_o t_ne s_{un anc}i the _st_ars again? Try me.) Nita closed her eyes to lean back and take a second's rest — the power that ^ad run through her for that moment had left her amazingly drained — but nearly jumped out of her skin the next moment as the Lotus braked wildly fishtailing around a brace of cabs that leaped at it out of a side street. With a scream of engine and a cloud of exhaust and burned rubber it found its traction again and tore out of the intersection and up Third Avenue, leaving the cabs behind.

"They know, they know," Nita moaned, "Kit, what're we going to do? Is the Book going to be enough to stand up to him?"

"We'll find out, I guess," Kit said, though he sounded none too certain. "We've been lucky so far. No, not lucky, we've been ready. Maybe that'll be enough. We both came prepared for trouble, we both did our reading—"

Nita looked sheepish. "You did, maybe. I couldn't get past Chapter Forty, No matter how much I read, there was always more."

Kit smiled just as uncomfortably. "1 only got to Thirty-three myself, then I skimmed a lot."

"Kit, there's about to be a surprise quiz. Did we study the right chapters?"

"Well, we're gonna find out," Kit said. The Lotus turned left at the corner of Third and Forty- second, speeding down toward Grand Central. Forty-second seemed empty; not even a cab was in sight. But a great looming darkness was gathered down the street, hiding the iron overpass. The Lotus slowed, unwilling to go near it.

"Right here is fine," Kit said, touching the dashboard reassuringly. The Lotus stopped in front of the doors to Grand Central, reluctantly shrugging first Nita's, then Kit's door open. They got out and looked around them. Silence. Nita looked nervously at the doors and the darkness beyond, while the Lotus crowded close to Kit, who rubbed its right wheelwell absently. The sound came. A single clang, like an anvil being struck, not too far away. Then another clang, hollow and metallic, echoing from the blank-eyed buildings, dying into bell-like echoes. Several more clangs, close together. Then a series of them, a slow drumroll of metal beating on stone. The Lotus pulled out from under Kit's hand, turning to face down Forty-second the way they had come, growling deep under its hood.

The clangor grew louder; echoes bounced back and forth from building to building so that it was impossible to tell from what direction the sound was coming. Down at the corner of Lexington and Forty-second, a blackness jutted suddenly from behind one of the buildings on the uptown side. The shape of it and its unlikely height above the pavement, some fifteen feet kept Nita from recognizing what it was until more of it came around the corner, until the blackness found its whole shape and swung it around inW the middle of the street on iron hooves. Eight hooves, ponderous and deadly, dented the asphalt of the street-They belonged to a horse — a huge, misproportioned beast, its head skinned to a skull, leaden-eyed and grinning hollowly. All black iron that steeds as if it had stepped down from a pedestal at its rider's call; and the one l_{o ro}de it wore his own darkness on purpose, as if to reflect the black mood within. The Starsnuffer had put aside his three-piece suit for chain mail like hammered onyx and a cloak like night with no stars. His face was still hand-some, but dreadful now, harder than any stone. His eyes burned with the burning of the dark Book, alive with painful memory about to come real. About the feet of his mount the perytons milled, not quite daring to look in their master's face, but staring and slavering at the sight of Kit and Nita, waiting the command to course their prey. Kit and Nita stood frozen, and Fred's light, hanging small and constant as a star behind them, dimmed down to its faintest.

The cold, proud, erect figure on the black mount raised what it held in its right hand, a steel rod burning dark and skewing the air about it as the dark Book had. "You have stolen something of mine," said a voice as cold as space, using the Speech with icy perfection and hating it. "No one steals from me. "

The bolt that burst from the rod was a red darker than the Eldest's fiery breath. Nita did not even try to use the rowan wand in defense — as well try to use a sheet of paper to stop a laser beam. But as she and Kit leaped aside, the air around them went afire with sudden clarity, as if for a moment the darkness inherent in it was burned away. The destroying bolt went awry, struck up sideways and blasted soot-stained blocks out of the facing of Grand Central. And in that moment the Lotus screamed wild defiance and leaped down Forty-second at the rider and his steed.

"NO!" Kit screamed. Nita grabbed him, pulled him toward the doors. He wouldn't come, wouldn't turn away as the baying perytons scattered, as the Lotus hurtled into the forefront of the pack,

flinging bodies about. It leaped up at the throat of the iron beast, which reared on four hooves and raised the other four and with them smashed the Lotus flat into the street.

The bloom of fire that followed blotted out that end of the street. Kit responded to Nita's pulling then, and together they ran through the doors, ^UP the ramp that led into Grand Central, out across the floor—

Nita was busy getting the rowan wand out, had gotten ahead of Kit, who couldn't move as fast because he was crying — but it was his hand that shot put and caught her by the collar at the bottom of the ramp, almost choking

J^r. and kept her from falling into the pit. There was no floor. From one side the main concourse to the other was a great smoking crevasse, the floor lower levels and tunnels beneath all split as if with an axe. Ozone smell ^a cinder smell and the smell of tortured steel breathed up hot in their ^c^^s, while from behind, outside, the thunder of huge hooves on concrete the howls of perytons began again, clow them severed tunnels and stairways gaped dark. There was no seeing the bottom — it was veiled in fumes and soot, underlit by the blue arcs of shorted-out third rails and an ominous deep red, as if the earth itself had broken open and was bleeding lava. The hooves clanged closer.

Nita turned to Kit, desperate. Though his face still streamed with tears, there was an odd, painful calm about it. "I know what to do," he said, his voice saying that he found that strange. He drew the antenna out of his back pocket, and it was just as Nita noticed how strangely clear the air was burning about him that Kit threw the piece of steel out over the smoking abyss. She would have cried out and grabbed him, except that he was watching it so intently. The hoofbeats stopped and were followed by a sound as of iron boots coming down on the sidewalk, immensely heavy, shattering the stone. De-spite her own panic, Nita found she couldn't look away from the falling antenna either. She was gripped motionless in the depths of a spell again, while the power that burned the air clear now poured itself through Kit and into his wizardry. There was something wrong with the way the antenna was falling. It seemed to be getting bigger with distance instead of smaller. It stretched, it grew, glittering as it turned and changed. It wasn't even an antenna any more. Sharp blue light and diffuse red gleamed from flat, polished faces, edges sharp as razors. It was a sword blade, not even falling now, but laid across the chasm like a bridge. The wizardry broke and turned Nita loose. Kit moved away from her and stepped out onto the flat of the blade, fear and pain showing in his face again. "Kit!"

"It's solid," he said, still crying, taking another step out onto the span, holding his arms out for balance as it bent slightly under his weight. "Come on, Nita, it's noon-forged steel, he can't cross it. He'll have to change shape or seal this hole up."

(Nita, come on,) Fred said, and bobbled out across the crevasse, following Kit. Though almost blind with terror, her ears full of the sound of iron-shod feet coming after them, she followed Fred, who was holding a straight course out over the sword blade — followed him, arms out as she might have on a balance beam, most carefully not looking down. This was worse than the bridge of air had been, for that hadn't flexed so terribly under each step she or Kit took. His steps threw her off balance until she halted long enough to take a deep breath and step in time with him. Smoke and the smell or burning floated up around her; the shadows of the dome above the concourse stirred with wicked eyes, the open doors to the train platforms ahead of muttered, their mouths full of hate. She watched the end of the looked straight ahead. Five steps: Kit was off. Three. One— She reached out to him, needing desperately to feel the touch of a hand. He grabbed her arm and pulled her off the bridge just as another bias 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 had 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 "i the darkness, wheels slammed into the tracks they rode—even now the "ils 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 sei/ed the spell and its ^sPeaker, used them both. That was when the Starsnuffer's power came down on them. It seemed ^mPossible that the dank close darkness in which they stood could become ⁿy darker, but it did, as an oppressive blanket of clutching, choking hatred

^{1 Ov}'er them, blanketing everything. The rowan rod's silver fire was smoth-

^eruggled 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 de-termination 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, there were eyes. They 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, 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 melange 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 plat' form 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 fr^oin his knees beside her, looking out from their little island of air across to the Pan Am Building. Everything was dark, and Nita started to groan, certa" j that something had gone wrong and that the worldgate had simply durop^etl 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 street lights and red of taillights, City noise, roaring, cacopho-nous 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 and then looked 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 herself. 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 fol-lowed, 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 consult-^In8 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. '* used to happen fairly frequently when he went up against life.) rred'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 >*) Nita gulped again. Somehow she had been expecting something like that. Kit?" 'he 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 simply 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 wovldn'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 do it," she said, not looking at Kit.

He glanced up from the manual, stared at her. "Bull," 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 en-trance. 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 street lights 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 is there too. I don't care that it's on the other side of this silly place, 1 can feel — 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-The sky, even though clear, did have a faint golden glow to it, city ligW scattered from smog — and against that glow, high up atop the Pan Am Building, a form half unstarred night and half black iron glowered down ^л them like a statue from a dauntingly high pedestal. Nita and Kit froze like 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; and 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 other-world, 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 r'fth 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 tor a break in it, then ran across, hopped the wall into the park and crouched down beside it as they had in the world they'd left.

The wind was rising, not just a night breeze off the East River, but a chill wind with a hint of that other place's coldness to it. Kit unslung his pack as drew in close, and by his light Kit brought out the Book of Night with. The darkness of its covers shone, steadying Kit's hands, making Fred ^seern to burn brighter. Kit and Nita sat gasping for breath, staring at each other. ' rn out of ideas," Kit said. "I think we're going to have to read from this to keep the city the way it should be. We can't just let him change things until he catches us. Buildings are one thing; but what happens to people after that black hits them?" "And it might not stop here either," Nita said between gasps, thinking of her mother and father and Dairine, of the quiet street where they lived, the garden, the rowan, all warped and darkened — if they would survive at all.

Her eyes went up to the Moon shining white and full between the shifting branches. All around them she could feel the trees stirring in that new, strange, cold wind, whispering uneasily to one another. It was so good to be in a place where she could hear the growing things again. The idea came. "Kit," she said hurriedly, "that dark was moving pretty fast. If we're going to read from the Book we may need something to buy us time, to hold off the things that'll come with it, the perytons and the cabs."

"We're out of Lotuses," Kit said, his voice bleak.

"I know. But look where we are! Kit, this is Central Park! You know how many trees there are in here of the kinds that went to the Battle in the old days? They don't forget." He stared at her. "What can they—"

"The Book makes everything work better, doesn't it? There's a spell that— I'll do it, you'll see. But you've got to do one too, it's in your specialty group. The Mason's Word, the long version—" "To bring stone or metal to life." He scrubbed the last tears out of his eyes and managed ever so slight and slow a smile. "There are more statues within screaming distance of this place—" "Kit," Nita said, "how loud can you scream?" "Let's find out."

They both started going through their manuals in panicky haste. Far away on the east side, lessened by all the buildings and distance that lay between, but still much too clear, there was a single, huge, deep-pitched clang, an immense weight of metal hitting the ground with stone- shattering force. Fred hobbled a little in the air, nervously. (How long do you think—) "He'll be a while, Fred," Kit said, sounding as if he hoped it would be a long while. "He doesn't like to run; it's beneath his dignity. But I think—' He broke off for a moment, reading down a page and forming the syllables or the Mason's Word without saying them aloud. "I think we're going to have a few friends who'll do a little running for us."

He stood up, and Fred followed him, staying close to light the page. "Nita, hand me the Book." She passed it up to him, breaking off her own frantic ^л reading for a moment to watch. "It'll have to be a scream," he said as if himself. "The more of them hear me, the more help we get."

Kit took three long breaths and then shouted the Word at the top of 1 lungs, all twenty-seven syllables of it without missing a one. The sound be-1 impossibly more than the yell of a twelve-year-old as the Book seized the sound and the spell together and flung them out into the city night. Nita had to hold her ears. Even when it seemed safe to uncover them again, the echoes bounced back from buildings on all sides and would not stop. Kit stood there amazed as his voice rang and ricocheted from walls blocks away. "Well," he said, "they'll feel the darkness, they'll know what's happening. I think."

"My turn," Nita said, and stood up beside Kit, making sure of her place. Her spell was not a long one. She fumbled for the rowan wand, put it in the hand that also held her wizards' manual, and took the bright Book from Kit. "1 hope—" she started to say, but the words were shocked out of her as the feeling that the Book brought with it shot up her arm. Power, such sheer joyous power that no spell could fail, no matter how new the wizard was to the Art, Here, under moonlight and freed at last from its long restraint, the Book was more potent than even the dark rider who trailed them would suspect, and that potency raged to be free. Nita bent her head to her manual and read the spell.

Or tried to. She saw the words, the syllables, and spoke the Speech, but the moonfire falling on the Book ran through her veins, slid down her throat, and turned the words to song more subtle than she had ever dreamed of, burned behind her eyes and showed her another time, when another will had voiced these words for the first time and called the trees to battle.

All around her, both now and then, the trees lifted their arms into the wind, breathed the fumes of the new-old Earth and breathed out air that men could use; they broke the stone to make ground for their children to till and fed the mold with themselves, leaf and bough, and generation upon generation. They knew to what end their sacrifice would come, but they did it anyway, and they would do it again in the Witherer's spite. They were doing it now. Oak and ash and willow, birch and alder, elm and maple, they teit the darkness in the wind that tossed their branches and would not stand still for it. The ground shook all around Nita, roots heaved and came free— "rst the trees close by, the counterparts of the trees under whicb she and Kit ^and Fred had sheltered in the dark otherworld. White oak, larch, twisted ^Crabapp]e, their leaves glittering around the edges with the flowering radiance of the rowan wand, they lurched and staggered as they came rootloose, ^arld then crowded in around Kit and Nita and Fred, whispering with wind, Joking a protecting circle through which nothing would pass but moonlight, ne effect spread out and away from Nita, though the spell itself was fin-^ned, and that relentless power let her sag against one friendly oak, gasping. ror yards, for blocks, as far as she could see through the trunks of the trees * crowded close, branches waved green and wild as bushes and vines and hundred-year monarchs of the park pulled themselves out of the ground and moved heavily to the defense. Away to the east, the clangor of metal hooves and the barks and howls of the dark rider's pack were coming closer. The trees waded angrily toward the noise, some hobbling along on top of the ground, some wading through it, and just as easily through sidewalks and stone walls. In a few minutes there was a nearly solid palisade of living wood between Kit and Nita and Fred and Fifth Avenue. Even the glare of the street lights barely made it through the branches.

Kit and Nita looked at each other. "Well," Kit said reluctantly, "I guess we can't put it off any longer."

Nita shook her head. She moved to put her manual away and was momentarily shocked when the rowan wand, spent, crumbled to silver ash in her hand. "So much for that," she said, feeling unnervingly naked now that her protection was gone. Another howl sounded, very close by, and was abruptly cut off in a rushing of branches as if a tree had fallen on something on purpose. Nita fumbled in her pocket and pulled out a nickel. "Call it," she said. "Heads."

She tossed the coin, caught it, slapped it down on her forearm. Heads. "Crud," she said, and handed the bright Book to Kit.

He took it uneasily, but with a glitter of excitement in his eye. "Don't worry," he said. "You'll get your chance."

"Yeah, well, don't hog it." She looked over at him and was amazed to see him regarding her with some of the same worry she was feeling. From outside the fence of trees came a screech of brakes, the sound of a long skid, and then a great splintering crashing of metal and smashing of glass as an attack-ing cab lost an argument with some tree standing guard. Evidently reinforcements from that other, darker world were arriving.

"I won't," Kit said, "You'll take it away from me and keep reading if—

He stopped, not knowing what might happen, Nita nodded. "Fred," she said, "we may need a diversion. But save yourself till the last minute."

fl will. Kit—) The spark of light hung close to him for a moment. (Be careful.) Suddenly, without warning, every tree around them shuddered as if ^Vl°" lently struck. Nita could hear them crying out in silent anguish, and cried out in terror herself as she felt what they felt — a great numbing cold that smote at the heart like an axe. Kit, beside her, sat frozen with it, aghast. Fred went dim with shock. (Not again!) he said, his voice faint and horrified. (Not here, where there's so much life!)

"The Sun," Nita whispered. "He put out the Sun!" Starsnuffer, she thought. That tactic's worked for him before. And if the Sun is out, pretty soon there won't be moonlight to read by, and he can—

Kit stared up at the Moon as if at someone about to die, "Nita, how long jo we have?" "Eight minutes, maybe a little more, for light to get here from the Sun. gight minutes before it runs out "

Kit sat down hurriedly, laid the bright Book in his lap, and opened it. The light of the full Moon fell on the glittering pages. This time the print was not vague as under the light of Nita's wand. It was clear and sharp and dark, as easily read as normal print in daylight. The Book's covers were fading, going clear, burning with that eye-searing transparency that Nita had seen about Kit and herself before. The whole Book was hardly to be seen except for its printing, which burned in its own fashion, supremely black and clear, but glistening as if the ink with which the characters were printed had moonlight trapped in them too. "Here's an index," Kit whispered, using the Speech now. "/think — the part about New York—"

Yes, Nita thought desperately, as another cab crashed into the trees and finished itself. And what then? What do we do about— She would not finish the thought, for the sound of those leisurely, deadly hoofbeats was getting closer, and mixing with it were sirens and the panicked sound of car horns. She thought of that awful dark form crossing Madison, kicking cars aside, crushing what tried to stop it, and all the time that wave of blackness wash-ing alongside, changing everything, stripping the streets bare of life and light. And what about the Sun? The Earth will freeze over before long, and he'll have the whole planet the way he wants it— Nita shuddered. Cold and darkness and nothing left alive — a storm-broken, ice-locked world, full of twisted machines stalking desolate streets forever., .

Kit was turning pages, quickly but gently, as if what he touched was a live thing. Perhaps it was. Nita saw him pause between one page and the next, holding one bright-burning page draped delicately over his fingers, then let-ting it slide carefully down to He with the others he'd turned. "Here," he whispered, awed, delighted. He did not look up to see what Nita saw, the ^wave of darkness creeping around them, unable to pass the tree-wall, passing onward, surrounding them so that they were suddenly on an island of grass in ^a sea of wrestling naked tree limbs and bare-seared dirt and rock. "Here—"

He began to read, and for all her fear Nita was lulled to stillness by wonder. Kit's voice was that of someone discovering words for the first time arter a long silence, and the words he found were a song, as her spell to free the trees had seemed, She sank deep in the music of the Speech, hearing the ^story told in what Kit read.

Kit was invoking New York, calling it up as one might call up a spirit; and °°edient to the summons, it came. The skyline came, unsmirched by any 'ackness — a crown of glittering towers in a smoky sunrise, all stabbing points ⁿ The parks came, settling into place one by one as they were described, free of the darkness under the night — from tiny paved vest-pocket niches to the lake-set expanses of Central Park, they all came, thrusting the black fog back. Birds sang, dogs ran and barked and rolled in the grass, trees were bright with wary squirrels' eyes. The Battery came, the crumbling old first-defense fort standing peaceful now at the southernmost tip of Manhattan — the rose-gold of some remembered sunset glowed warm on its bricks as it mused in weedy silence over old battles won and nonetheless kept an eye on the waters of the harbor, just in case some British cutter should try for a landing when the colonists weren't looking. Westward over the water, the Palisades were there, shadowy cliffs with the Sifn behind them, mist-blue and mythical-looking though New Jersey was only a mile away. Eastward and westward the bridges were there, the lights of their spanning suspension cables coming out blue as stars in the twilight. Seabirds wheeled pale and graceful about the towers of the George Washing-ton Bridge and the Verrazano Narrows and the iron crowns of the 59th Street Bridge, as the soft air of evening settled over Manhattan, muting the city roar to a quiet breathing rumble. Under the starlight and the risen Moon, an L-1011 arrowed out of LaGuardia Airport and soared over the city, screaming its high song of delight in the cold upper airs, dragging the thun-er along behind— Nita had to make an effort to pull herself out of the waking dream. Kit read on, while all around the trees bent in close to hear, and the air flamed clear and still as a frozen moment of memory. He read on, naming names in the Speech, describing people and places in terrifying depth and detail, making them real and keeping them that way by the Book 's power and the sound of the words. But no sign of any terror at the immensity of what he was doing showed in Kit's face — and that frightened Nita more than the darkness that still surged and whispered around them and their circle of trees. Nita could see Kit starting to burn with that same unbearable clarity, becoming more real, so much so that he was not needing to be visible any more. Slowly-subtly, the Book's vivid transparency was taking him too. Fred, hanging b^A side Kit and blazing in defiance of the dark, looked pale in comparison. Even Kit's shadow glowed, and it occurred to Nita that shortly, if this kept up_; h⁶ wouldn't have one. What do I do? she thought He's not having trouble, h^e seems to be getting stronger, not weaker, but if this has to go on much longer— Kit kept reading. Nita looked around her and began to see an answer Th* darkness had not retreated from around them. Out on the Fifth Avenue sid^e r A_e tree-wall, the crashes of cabs were getting more frequent, the howls of vrvtons were closer, the awful clanging hoofbeats seemed almost on top of the'rn. There was nowhere to run, and Nita knew with horrible certainty that not all the trees in the park would be enough to stop the Starsnuffer when he came there. Keeping New York real was one answer to this problem, but not the answer. The darkness and the unreality were symptoms, not the cause. Something had to be done about him.

The iron hooves paused. For an awful moment there was no sound; howls and screeching tires fell silent. Then metal began to smash on stone in a thunderous canter, right across the street, and with a horrible screeching neigh the rider's iron steed smashed into the tree-wall, splintering wood, bowing the palisade inward. Nita wanted to shut her mind against the screams of the trees broken and flung aside in that first attack, but she could not- All around her the remaining trees sank their roots deep in determination, but even they knew it would be hopeless. There were enough cracks in the wall that Nita could see the black steed rearing back for another smash with its front four hooves, the rider smiling, a cold cruel smile that made Nita shudder. One more stroke and the wall would be down. Then there would be wildfire in the park, Kit, oblivious, kept reading. The iron mount rose to its full height. "Fred," Nita whispered, "I think you'd better—" The sound of heavy hoofbeats, coming from behind them, from the park side, choked her silent. He has a twin brother, Nita thought. We are dead.

But the hoofbeats divided around the battered circle of trees and poured past in a storm of metal and stone, the riders and steeds marble pale or bronze dark, every equestrian statue in or near Central Park gathered together into an impossible cavalry that charged past Nita and Kit and Fred and into the street to give battle. Perytons and cabs screamed as General sherman from Grand Army Plaza crashed in among them with sword raised, closely followed by loan of Arc in her armor, and Simon Bolivar and General fi* aan Martin right behind. King Wladislaw was there in medieval scale mail, galloping on a knight's armored charger; Don Quixote was there, urging poor ^broken-down Rosinante to something faster than a stumble and shouting weats against the whole breed of sorcerers; Teddy Roosevelt was there, cracking off shot after shot at the cabs as his huge horse stamped them into he pavement; El Cid Campeador rode there, his bannered lance striking

^Own one peryton after another. Behind all these came a wild assortment of Matures, pouring past the tree circle and into the street—eagles, bears, huge °§s, a hunting cat, a crowd of doughboys from the first World War with ^aXoneted rifles—all the most warlike of the nearby statuary—even some not Warlike, such as several deer and the Ugly Duckling. From down Fifth enue came striding golden Prometheus from his pedestal in Rockefeller ^er)ter, bearing the fire he brought for mortals and using it in bolt after bolt to melt down cabs where they stood; and from behind him, with a stony A like the sky falling, the great white lions from the steps of the Public Librarv leaped together and threw themselves upon the iron steed and its dark rider For all its extra legs, the mount staggered back and sideways, screaming (_{n a} horrible parody of a horse's neigh and striking feebly at the marble claws that tore its flanks.

Under cover of that tumult of bowls and crashes and the clash of arms Nita grabbed Kit to pull him away from the tree-wall, behind another row of trees. She half expected her hands to go right through him, he was becoming so transparent. Unresisting, he got up and followed her, still holding the Book open, still reading as if he couldn't stop, or didn't want to, still burning more and more fiercely with the inner light of the bright Book's power. "Fred," she said as she pushed Kit down onto the ground again behind a looming old maple, "I've got to do this now. I may not be able to do anything else. If a diversion's needed—"

(I'll do what's necessary,) Fred said, his voice sounding as awed and frightened as Nita felt at the sight of what Kit was becoming. (You be careful too.)

She reached out a hand to Fred. He bobbed close and settled at the tip of one finger for a moment, perching there delicately as a firefly, energy touch-ing matter for a moment as if to reconfirm the old truth that they were just different forms of the same thing. Then he lifted away, turning his attention out to the street, to the sound of stone and metal wounding and being wounded; and in one quick gesture Nita grabbed the Book of Night with Moon away from Kit and bent her head to read.

An undertow of blinding power and irresistible light poured into her, over her, drowned her deep. She couldn't fight it. She didn't want to. Nita under-stood now the clear-burning transfiguration of Kit's small plain human face and body, for it was not the wizard who read the Book; it was the other way around. The silent Power that had written the Book reached through it now and read what life had written in her body and soul — joys, hopes, fears, and failings all together — then took her intent and read that too, turning it into fact. She was turning the bright pages without even thinking about it, finding the place in the Book that spoke of creation and rebellion and war among the stars — the words that had once before broken the terrible destroying storm01 death and darkness that the angry Starsnuffer had raised to break the ne*' made worlds and freeze the seas where life was growing, an eternity ago. am the wind that troubles the water," Nita said, whispering in the SpeeC"-The whisper smote against the windowed cliffs until they echoed again, anfl the clash and tumult of battle began to grow still as the wind rose at»^e naming. "I am the - water, and the waves; I am the shore where the waves bt$ in rainbows; I am the sunlight that shines in the spray—".

The power rose with the rhythms of the old, old words, rose with the wip as all about her the earth and air and waters of the park began to remember what they were—matter and energy, created, indestructible, no matter what darkness lay over them. '7 am the trees that drink the light; I am the air of the green things' breathing; I am the stone that the trees break asunder; I am the molten heart of the world—"

"NO/" came his scream from beyond the wall of trees, hating, raging, desperate. But Nita felt no fear. It was as it had been in the Beginning; all his no's had never been able to stand against life's I Am. All around her trees and stones and flesh and metal burned with the power that burned her, self-awareness, which death can seem to stop but can never keep from happening, no matter how hard it tries. "Where will you go? To what place will you wander?" she asked sorrowfully, or life asked through her, hoping that the lost one might at last be convinced to come back to his allegiance. Of all creatures alive and otherwise, he had been and still was one of the mightiest. If only his stubborn anger would break, his power could be as great for light as for darkness—but it could not happen. If after all these weary eons he still had not realized the hopelessness of his position, that everywhere he went, life was there before him— Still she tried, the ancient words speaking her solemnly. "—in vale or on hilltop, still I am there—"

Silence, silence, except for the rising wind. All things seemed to hold their breath to hear the words; even the dark rider, erect again on his iron steed and bitter of face, ignoring the tumult around him. His eyes were only for Nita, for only her reading held him bound. She tried not to think of him, or of the little time remaining before the Moon went out, and gave herself over wholly to the reading. The words shook the air and the earth, blinding, burning. "—will you sound the sea's depth, or climb the mountain?

In air or in water, still I am there; Will the earth cover you? Will the night hide you? In deep or in darkness, still I am there; Will you kindle the nova, or kill the starlight? In lire or in deathcold, still I am there—" The Moon went out.

'red cried out soundlessly, and Nita felt the loss of light like a stab in the ^art The power fell away from her, quenched, leaving her small and cold ^ncl human and alone, holding in her hands a Book gone dark from lack of °°ⁿ"ght She and Kit turned desperately toward each other in a darkness Pidly becoming complete as the flowing blackness put out the last light of the city. Then came the sound of low, satisfied laughter and a single clang of a heavy hoof, stepping forward. Another clang. Another.

(Now,) Fred said suddenly, (now I understand what all that emitting was practice for. No beta, no gamma, no microwave or upper-wavelength ultraviolet or X-rays, is that all?) "Fred?" Kit said, but Fred didn't wait- He shot upward, blazing, a point of light like a falling star falling the wrong way, up and up until his brightness was as faint as one more unremarkable star. "Fred, where are you going?"

(To create a diversion,) his thought came back, getting fainter and fainter. (Nita, Kit—) They could catch no more clear thoughts, only a great wash of sorrow and loss, a touch of fear — and then brightness intolerable erupted in the sky as Fred threw his claudication open, emitting all his mass at once as energy, blowing his quanta. He could hardly have been more than halfway to the Moon, for a second or two later it was alight again, a blazing searing full such as no one had ever seen. There was no looking at either Fred's blast of light or at the Moon that lit trees and statues and the astounded face of the Starsnuffer with a light like a silver sun. The rider spent no more than a moment being astounded. Immediately he lifted his steel rod, pointing it at Fred this time, shouting in the Speech cold words that were a curse on all light everywhere, from time's beginning to its end. But Fred burned on, more fiercely, if possible. Evidently not even the Starsnuffer could quickly put out a white hole that was liberating all the bound-up energy of five or six blue-white giant stars at once.

"Nita, Nita, read!" Kit shouted at her. Through her tears she looked down at the Book again and picked up where she had left off. The dark rider was cursing them all in earnest now, knowing that another three lines in the-#00* would bring Nita to his name. She had only to pronounce it to cast him out into the unformed void beyond the universes, where he had been cast the first time those words were spoken.

Cabs and perytons screamed and threw themselves at the barrier in a '^ast wild attempt to break through, the statues leaped into the fray again, stone and flesh and metal clashed. Nita fell down into the bright power once more, crying, but reading in urgent haste so as not to waste the light Fred was giving himself to become.

As the power began again to read her, she could hear it reading Kit too, his voice matching hers as it had in their first wizardry, small and thin and brave, and choked with grief like hers. She couldn't stop crying, and the power burned in her tears too, an odd hot feeling, as she cried bitterly for Fred, ro^f Kit's Lotus, for everything horrible that had happened all that day — all ^l"* fair things skewed, all the beauty twisted by the dark Lone Power watching on his steed. If only there were some way he could be otherwise if he wanted to For here was his name, a long splendid flow of syllables in the Speech, _wild and courageous in its own way — and it said that he had not always been so hostile; that he got tired sometimes of being wicked, but his pride and his fear of being ridiculed would never let him stop. Never, forever, said the symbol at the very end of his name, the closed circle that binds spells into an unbreakable cycle and indicates lives bound the same way. Kit was still reading. Nita turned her head in that nova moonlight and looked over her shoul-der at the one who watched- His face was set, and bitter stil], but weary. He knew he was about to be cast out again, frustrated again; and he knew that because of what he had bound himself into being, he would never know fulfillment of any kind. Nita looked back down to the reading, feeling sorry even for him, opened her mouth and along with Kit began to say his name. Don 't be afraid to make corrections! Whether the voice came from her memory or was a last whisper from the blinding new star far above, Nita never knew. But she knew what to do. While Kit was still on the first part of the name she pulled out her pen, her best pen that Fred had saved and changed. She clicked it open, The metal still tingled against her skin, the ink at the point still glittered oddly — the same glitter as the ink with which the bright Book was written, Nita bent quickly over the Book and, with the pen, in lines of light, drew from that final circle an arrow pointing upward, the way out, the symbol that said change could happen — if, only if — and together they finished the Starsnuf-fer's name in the Speech, said the new last syllable, made it real. The wind was gone. 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 — then one by one each paced off into the park or down Fifth Avenue, back to its pedestal and its long quiet ^Tegard 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

, the Sun had come quietly back to life. But its light would not reach for another eight minutes yet, and as Nita and Kit watched, slowly the star in the heavens faded, and the Moon faded with it — from daylight to silver fire, to steel- gray glow, to earthlight shimmer, to nothing. star went yellow, and red, and died. Nothing was left but a stunning, n y-wide aurora, great curtains and rays of rainbow light shivering and crack-^mg all across the golden-glowing city night.

"He forgot the high-energy radiation again," Kit said, tears 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. "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'II 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 Pan Am 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 Pan Am Building at the mezzanine level. The one guard 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.

The restaurant level was dark, for the place served only lunch, and there was no one to see them go back up 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. A helicopter was moored in the middle of the pad with steel pegs and cables, crouching on its skids and staring at them with clear, sleepy, benevolent eyes. The blue high-intensity marker lights blazed about it like the circle of a protection spell. Nita looked away, not really wanting ^to think about spells or anything else to do with wizardry. The book said 11 would be hard. That I didn't mind. But I hurt! And where's the good pa^rt-Therc was supposed to be happiness too…

The bright Book was heavy on her back as she looked out across the nigh*-

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. //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 had gone to stand beside the helicopter and was standing with one hand laid against its side. It stared at him mutely. "Yeah,"\ie said, and patted the cool metal, and left the chopper to rejoin Nita. "Iguess 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 Pan Am Building rushed backward past them, a high-speed 3-D movie in reverse. Blinding white fire j*ⁿd 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 °Pen worldgate, following its master on his huge dark mount, who also ^stcpped backward and vanished through the gate. Kit and Nita saw them-^Sewes 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. Men in coveralls burst out of the roof door and unpegged the Helicopter; two of them got into it and it took off backwards. Clouds streamed and boiled past, jets fell back-ward into LaGuardia. 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 boyf small and a touch stocky, also in jeans and parka, twelve years old or so. 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 arc 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.

Timeheart

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 tomorrow?" he said. What for? Nita felt like saying, for there were no more spells in the offing, and she was deadly tired. Still -. "It'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's been through so much fear that fear no longer frightens 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 "bout 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. See ya later.)

(See ya.)

Nita was so tired that it took three or four minutes before the identity of blond person walking up East Clinton toward her registered at all. By 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 less marked, 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 safe from, the look of a bully whose victim suddenly wasn't a victim any more.

Nita slowed down and stopped where she was, in the middle of the side-walk, watching Joanne. Even he can be different now, she thought, her heart beating fast — 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 and look through my telescope," she said. "I'll show you Jupiter's moons. Or Mars—"

Joanne made that old familiar haughty face and brushed past Nita and away. "Why would I ever want to go to your house? You don't even have a color TV."

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. It wouldn't even take the Speech; plain words would do it, and the magic of reaching out, It would take a long time, much longer than something simple like breaking the walls between the worlds, and 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 moon and, after greeting her, was quiet-' until about ten o'clock, when it and every other growing thing in sign* 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 leafs shadow sharp against the ground and set the Moon on fire. Nita squinted up at the pinpoint of brilliance, unwilling to look away though her eyes leaked tears of pain. She'd thought, that afternoon, that living through the loss a second time would be easier. She was wrong. The tears kept falling long after the star went out, and the Moon found its light again, and the wind died to a whisper. She stopped crying long enough to go back inside and go to bed, and she was sure she would start again immediately. But she was wrong about that too. Exhaustion beat down grief so fast that she was asleep almost as soon as her head touched the pillow under which she had hidden the Book of Night with Moon… .

The place where they stood was impossible, for there's no place in Man-hattan where the water level in the East River comes right up to the railed path that runs alongside it. There they stood, though, leaning with their backs against the railing, gazing up at the bright city that reared against the silver sky, while behind them the river whispered and chuckled and slapped its banks. The sound of laughter came down the morning wind from the apartments and the brownstones and the towers of steel and crystal; the seabirds wheeled and cried over the white piers and jetties of the Manhattan shoreline, and from somewhere down the riverside came the faint sound of music — quiet rock, a deep steady backbeat woven about with guitars and ^yoices in close harmony. A jogger went by on the running path, puffing, followed by a large black and white dog galloping to catch up with its master.

Are we early, or are they late? Kit asked, leaning back farther still to watch an overflying Learjet do barrel-roll after barrel-roll for sheer joy of being alive.

Who cores? Nita said, leaning back too and enjoying the way the music ^a"d the city sounds and the Learjet's delighted scream all blended. Anyway, "&is Timeheart. There's nothing here but Now… "hey turned their backs on the towers and the traffic and the laughter, and out across the shining water toward Brooklyn and Long Island. Neiwas there just then — probably someone else in Timeheart was using, and Kit and Nita didn't need them at the moment. The silver expanse 'he Atlantic shifted and glittered from their feet to the radiant horizon, Far off to their right, south and west of the Battery, the Statue of Liberty held up her torch and her tablet and looked calmly out toward the sunrise as they did, waiting. Nita was the first to see the dark bulge out on the water, She nudged Kit and pointed. Look, a shark/

He glanced at her, amused. Even here I don't think sharks hav_e wheels… .

The Lotus came fast, hydroplaning. Water spat up from its wheels as it skidded up to the railing and fishtailed sideways, grinning, spraying them both. On its wildly waving antenna rode a spark of light. Nita smiled at her friend, who danced off the antenna to rest momentarily on one of her fingers like a hundred-watt firefly. Well, Nita said, is it confusing being dead?

Fred chuckled a rainbow, up the spectrum and down again. Not very. Beside him, the Lotus stood up on its hind wheels, putting its front ones on the railing so that Kit could scratch it behind the headlights.

We brought it, Kit said.

Good, said the Lotus, as Nita got the bright Book out of her backpack and handed it to Kit. The Powers want to put it away safe. Though the precaution may not really be necessary, after what you did. It worked? He's changed?Nita said.

Fred made a spatter of light, a gesture that felt like the shake of a head. Not changed, fust made otherwise, as if he'd been that way from the beginning. He has back the option he 'd decided was lost—to put aside his anger, to build instead of damn… . Then if he uses that option — you mean everyplace could be like this some day? Kit looked over his shoulder at the city and all the existence behind it, preserved in its fullest beauty while still growing and becoming greater.

Possibly. What he did remains. Entropy's still here, and death. They look like waste and horror to us now. But if he chooses to have them be a blessing on the worlds, instead of anger's curse—who knows where those gates will lead then?…The Lotus sounded pleased by the prospect.

Kit held out the Book of Night with Moon. Most delicately the Lotus opened fanged jaws to take it, then rubbed its face against Kit and dropped to all four wheels on the water. It smiled at them both, a chrome smile, silver and sanguine — then backed a little, turned and was off, spraying Kit and Nita again.

Fred started to follow, but Nita caught him in cupped hands, holding him back for a moment. Fred! Didwe do light?

Even here she couldn't keep the pain out of her question, the fear that she could somehow have prevented his death. But Fred radiated a serene and wondering joy that took her breath and reassured her and filled her wiW wonder to match his, all at once. Go find out, he said. She opened her hands and he flew out of them like a spark blown on tn wind — a brightness zipping after the Lotus, losing itself against the silver of the sea, gone. Nita turned around to lean on the railing again, after a moment Kit turned with her. They breathed out, relaxing, and settled back to gaze at the city transfigured, the city preserved at the heart of Time, as all things loved are preserved in the hearts that care for them — gazed up into the radiance, the life, the light unending, the light…

… the light was right in her eyes, mostly because Dairine had yanked the curtain open. Her sister was talking loudly, and Nita turned her head and quite suddenly felt what was not under her pillow. "You gonna sleep all morning? Get up, it's ten thirty! The Sun went out last night, you should see it it was on the news. And somebody blew up Central Park; and Kit Rodriguez called, he wants you to call him back. How come you keep calling each other, anyhow?" Halfway out the bedroom door, realization dawned in her sister's eyes. "Maaaaa!" she yelled out the door, strangling on her own laugh-ter. "Nita's got a boyfriend.'" "Oh, jeez, Daimiiiiime/"

The wizard threw her pillow at her sister, got up, and went to breakfast.