by Diane Duane
“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—”
“You did, maybe.” Nita looked sheepish. “I couldn’t get past Chapter Forty in the manual. No matter how much I read, there was always more.”
Kit smiled just as uncomfortably. “I 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?”
“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 Street 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 started to slow, unwilling to go near it.
“Okay, baby,” Kit said, patting the dashboard reassuringly. “Right here is fine…”
The Lotus stopped in front of the doors to Grand Central, reluctantly shrugging first Nita’s, then Kit’s door open. They got out, Fred zipping out behind them, and looked around.
Silence. Nita looked nervously at the doors to the Terminal and the darkness beyond them, while the Lotus crowded close to Kit, who rubbed its right wheel well absently.
And then 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. Slowly the Lotus pulled out from under Kit’s hand, turning to face down Forty-second the way they’d come, growling deep under its hood. Fred lit on the collar of Nita’s down vest, his light flickering with uncertainty.
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 into 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 down to a skull, leaden-eyed and grinning hollowly. All black iron, that steed was, as if it had stepped down from a pedestal at its rider’s call; and the one who rode 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 with links like chiseled obsidian and a cloak like night with no stars. His face was still handsome, but dreadful now, harder than any stone. His pale 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 long steel rod burning dark and skewing the air about it as the dark Book had. “You’ve 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 didn’t even try to use the rowan wand in defense—she might as well have tried 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 facade of Grand Central.
And in that moment, as it saw Kit scramble away, 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 Terminal’s 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 through them straight 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 whole end of Forty-second. With a sob Kit finally responded to Nita’s desperate pulling, and together they ran through the doors with Fred shooting along behind them as they stumbled up the ramp that led into Grand Central, out across the floor.
Nita was busy getting the rowan wand out and had gotten ahead of Kit, who couldn’t move as fast as he was busy dashing the tears out of his eyes. But it was his hand that shot out and grabbed her by the collar at the bottom of the ramp, almost choking her, and kept her from falling into the abyss.
There was no floor. From one side of the main concourse to the other was a great smoking crevasse, the floor and lower levels and tunnels beneath all split down to bedrock as if with an axe. Ozone-smell and cinder-smell and the smell of tortured steel breathed up hot in their faces, while from behind, outside, the thunder of huge hooves on concrete and the howls of perytons began again.
Below 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 reached back under his jacket and pulled the antenna out, and it was just as Nita noticed how strangely clear the air was burning about him that Kit reared back and threw the piece of steel out far out over the smoking abyss.
The hoofbeats stopped and were followed by a sound as of iron boots coming down on the sidewalk, immensely heavy, shattering the stone. Despite her own panic, Nita found she couldn’t look away from the thrown antenna as it turned and gleamed in the air. 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.
The antenna hit the highest point in its arc and began to fall… but there was something wrong with the way it was falling. It seemed to be getting bigger with distance instead of smaller. It stretched, it grew, glittering as it turned and changed. And then it wasn’t even an antenna anymore. Sharp blue light and diffuse red gleamed from flat, polished faces, edges sharp as razors. It was a sword blade now, no longer falling but settling itself to lie 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, wiping his face again but not stopping, 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, concentrate on what she was doing, and step
in time with him. Smoke and the smell of 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 her muttered, their mouths full of hate. She ignored it all and watched the end of the blade, looked straight ahead. Five steps: Kit was off. Three. One—
She reached out to him, needing desperately to feel the touch of a human hand. Kit grabbed her arm and pulled her off the bridge just as another blast of black-red fire blew in the doors on the other side of the abyss. Kit said one sharp word in the Speech, and the air went murky around his body again as the Book ceased to work through him. Nita let go, glanced over her shoulder in time to see the sword blade snap back to being an antenna, like a rubber band going back to its right size. It fell into the fuming darkness, a lone glitter, quickly gone.
They ran. Nita could still see in her mind the place where the worldgate was hidden; the Book’s power had burned it into her like a brand. She took the lead, racing down a flight of stairs, around a corner and down another flight, into echoing beige-tiled corridors where Fred and the rowan wand were their only light. Above them they could hear the thunderous rumor of iron footsteps, slow, leisurely, inexorable, following them down. The howls of perytons floated down to them like the voices of lost souls, hungry for the blood and pain they needed to feel alive again.
“Here!” Nita shouted, not caring what might hear, and dodged around a corner, and did what she’d never done in all her life before—jumped a subway turnstile. Its metal fingers made a grab for her, but she was too fast for them, and Kit eluded them too, coming right behind. At full speed Nita pounded down the platform, looking for the steps at the end of it that would let them down onto the tracks.
She took them three at a time, two leaps, and then was running on cinders again, leaping over ties. Behind her she could hear Kit hobbling as fast as he could on his sore leg, gasping but keeping up. Fred shot along beside her, pacing her, lighting her way. Eyes flickered in his light—hidebehinds, dun mice, ducking under cover as the three of them went past. Nita slowed and stopped in the middle of the tracks. “Here!”
Kit had his manual out already. He found the page by Fred’s light, thumped to a stop beside Nita. “Here? In the middle of the—”
“Read! Read!” she yelled. There was more thunder rolling in the tunnel than just the sound of their pursuer’s footsteps. Far away, she could hear what had been missing from the other tunnel beneath City Hall: trains. Away in the darkness, wheels slammed into the tracks they rode—even now the rails around them were clacking faintly in sympathy, and a slight cool wind breathed against Nita’s face. A train was coming. On this track.
Kit began the worldgating spell, reading fast. Again the air around them seemed clearer, fresher, as the power of the Book of Night with Moon seized the spell and its speaker, used them both.
That was when the Starsnuffer’s power slammed down onto them. It seemed impossible that the dank close darkness in which they stood could become any darker, but it did, as an oppressive blanket of clutching, choking hatred fell over them, blanketing everything. The rowan rod’s silver fire was smothered. Fred’s light went out as if he had been stepped on. Kit stopped reading, struggled for breath. Nita tried to resist, tried to find air, couldn’t, collapsed to her knees, choking. The breeze from the dark at the end of the tunnel got stronger: the onrushing train, pushing the air in front of it, right up the track, right at them.
I—will—not, Fred said, struggling, angry, I will— not—go out! His determination was good for a brief flare, like a match being struck. Kit found his voice, managed to get out a couple more words of the spell in Fred’s wavering radiance, grew stronger, managed a few more.
Nita found that she could breathe again. She clutched the rowan wand, thinking with all her might of the night Liused had given it to her, the clear moonlight shining down between the branches. The wand came alive again. Shadows that had edged forward from the walls of the tunnel fled again. Kit read, hurrying. Two-thirds done, Nita thought. If he can just finish—
Far away down the tunnel, eyes blazed: the headlights of a train, coming down at them in full career. The clack of the rails rose to a rattle, the breeze became a wind, and the roar of the train itself echoed not just in the other tunnels, but in this one. Nita got to her feet, facing those eyes down. She would not look away. Fred floated by her shoulder; she gathered him close, perching him by her ear, feeling his terror of the overwhelming darkness as if it were her own but having nothing to comfort him with. Kit! she thought, not daring to say it aloud for fear she should interrupt his concentration. The sound of his words was getting lost in the thunder from above, iron-shod feet, the thunder from below, iron wheels on iron rails.
Suddenly Kit’s voice was missing from the mélange of thunders. Without warning the worldgate was there, glistening in the light of the rowan wand and Fred and the train howling down toward them—a great jagged soap bubble, trembling with the pressure of sound and air.
Kit wasted no time, but leaped through. Fred zipped into the shimmering surface and was gone. Nita made sure of her grip on the rowan wand, took a deep, breath, and jumped through the worldgate. A hundred feet away, fifty feet away, the blazing eyes of the train glared at her as she jumped; its horn screamed in delight, anticipating the feel of blood beneath its wheels; sudden thunder rocked the platform behind her, black-red fire more sensed than seen. But the rainbow shimmer of the gate broke across her face first. The train roared through the place where she had been, and she heard the beginnings of a cry of frustrated rage as she cheated death, and anger, and fell and fell and fell….
*
…And came down slam on nothing. Or it seemed that way, until opening her eyes a little wider she saw the soot and smog trapped in the hardened air she lay on, the only remnant of her walkway. Kit was already getting up from his knees beside her, looking out from their little island of air across to the MetLife Building. Everything was dark, and Nita started to groan, certain that something had gone wrong and that the worldgate had simply dumped them back in the Starsnuffer’s world—but no, her walkway was there.
Greatly daring, she looked down and saw far below the bright yellow glow of sodium-vapor streetlights, long straight streams of traffic, the white of headlights and red of taillights. City noise, roaring, cacophonous and alive, floated up to them. We’re back. It worked!
Kit was reading from his wizards’ manual, as fast as he had read down in the train tunnel. He stopped, then, looking at Nita in panic as she got up. “I can’t close the gate!”
She gulped. “Then he can follow us through…” In an agony of haste she fumbled her own book out of her pack, checked the words for the air-hardening spell one more time, and began reading. Maybe panic helped, for this time the walkway spread itself out from their feet to the roof of the building very fast indeed. “Come on,” she said, heading out across it as quickly as she dared. But where will we run to? she thought. He’ll come behind, hunting. We can’t go home, he might follow. And what’ll he do to the city?
She reached up to the heliport railing and swung herself over it. Kit followed, with Fred pacing him. “What’re we gonna do?” he said as they headed across the gravel together. “There’s no time to call the Senior wizards, wherever they are—or even Tom and Carl. He’ll be here shortly.”
“Then we’ll have to get away from here and find a place to hole up for a little. Maybe the bright Book can help.” She paused as Kit spoke to the lock on the roof door, and, they ran down the stairs. “Or the manuals might have something, now that we need it.”
“Yeah, right,” Kit said as he opened the second door at the bottom of the stairs, and they ran down the corridor where the elevators were. But he didn’t sound convinced. “The park?”
“Sounds good.”
Nita punched the call button for the elevator, and she and Kit stood there panting. There was a feeling in the air that all hell was about to break loose, and the sweat was
breaking out all over Nita because they were going to have to stop it somehow. “Fred,” she said, “did you ever hear anything, out where you were, any stories of someone getting the better of you-know-who ?”
Fred’s light flickered uncomfortably as he watched Kit frantically consulting his manual. Oh yes, he said. I’d imagine that’s why he wanted a Universe apart to himself—to keep others from getting in and thwarting him. It used to happen fairly frequently when he went up against life.
Fred’s voice was too subdued for Nita’s liking. “What’s the catch?”
Well … it’s possible to win against him. But usually someone dies of it.
Nita gulped again. Somehow she had been expecting something like that. “Kit?”
The elevator chimed. Once inside, Kit went back to looking through his manual. “I don’t see anything,” he said, sounding very worried. “There’s a general information chapter on him here, but there’s not much we don’t know already. The only thing he’s never been able to dominate was the Book of Night with Moon. He tried—that’s what the dark Book was for; he thought by linking them together he could influence the bright Book with it, diminish its power. But that didn’t work. Finally he was reduced to just stealing the bright Book and hiding it where no one could get at it. That way no one could become a channel for its power, no one could possibly defeat him…”
Nita squeezed her eyes shut, not sure whether the sinking feeling in her stomach was due to her own terror or the elevator going down. Read from it? No, no. I hope I never have to, Tom’s voice said in her mind…. Reading it, being the vessel for all that power—I wouldn’t want to. Even good can be terribly dangerous.
And that was an Advisory, Nita thought, miserable. There was no doubt about it. One of them might have to do what a mature wizard feared doing: read from the Book itself.
“Let me,” she said, not looking at Kit.