by Diane Duane
The moment resumed. "Kit," Nita said, "Hey, whatcha—"
Kit squeezed his eyes shut and erased it all. A moment later he was standing in the darkness again,
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listening only to the silence... and having a little trouble breathing. This isn't going to stop us, he thought. / know what the Lone Power trying to stop me feels like. We'll go all the way through. One way or another, we'll do what's necessary.
They came to where the corner of Sixth and Thirty-eighth would have been if it hadn't been just an intersection of two muddy, rushing rivers, and stopped there. Nita could feel the kernel more clearly now; it wasn't too far away. But somehow this wasn't making her feel any better. The darkness, that watching presence hidden in it, and the little swarming, biting viruses were all beginning to wear her down. Pralaya was always there, companionable enough, but not really that much help. And again and again the words of the Wizard's Oath kept coming back to Nita, as she slogged her way along through the dark, resisting water: "I will guard growth and ease pain."
But does there come a time when you stop growing? And when you and the universe agree that you're going to stop? "will ever put aside fear for courage, and death for life, when it is right to do so." Was there the slightest possibility, here and now, that it wasn't right? How could you tell, without being one of the Powers?
And if people can't tell, then the game just isn't fair!
But that didn't matter right now. Nita stopped at the corner and looked down Sixth Avenue. The water seemed a little less deep down there; but that overshadowing dark presence seemed much stronger. "The kernel's there," she said to Pralaya. "I'm sure of it."
"I think you're right," he said. "What is that—that tallest building there?"
"The Empire State," Nita said. It struck her as a poor place to hide anything. But then, Its purpose isn't to keep the kernel hidden. It's to let me find it and use it and fail So that I'll agree to the bargain—
"Come on," she said, and splashed down Sixth Avenue with Pralaya swimming along beside her, uncertainty in his dark eyes.
Kit and Ponch were moving once more through the darkness. "It fooled us that time," Ponch said. "But not twice." The dog was angry.
"It's not your fault," Kit said. "It was after me." "I should have expected it. But now we know something." "What?"
"That you have something that can stop It."
Kit took a couple of long breaths. That thought had occurred to him.
"I'm telling the darkness," Ponch said, "to take us to where we'll learn best what to do to find Nita, to help her."
Kit's mouth was dry; he was getting more nervous by the moment. "Are we going to have time for this?" "All the time we need."
How much longer they spent in the darkness, he wasn't sure. Kit could feel in Ponch a terrible sense of
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urgency, of the darkness resisting, pushing against him, trying to slow him down. But Ponch wasn't letting it stop him. He was pushing back, fierce, unrelenting. They slowed down, finally stopped, and Kit could feel Ponch pushing, pushing with all his strength against whatever was fighting him—
—until without warning they broke through into the light. Ponch surged forward, the leash wizardry extending away in front of Kit, while Kit stood still and rubbed his eyes, which were watering in the sudden brilliant light.
It was a beach. He was standing at the water's edge, and turning, he could see Jones Inlet behind him.
Is this another of Its tricks? Kit thought, confused. Another place where I'm supposed to get distracted by what could have been?
But somehow he knew it wasn't so. Though this was Jones Inlet, it was also something else.
Kit turned, looking south again. It was the Sea: darkness and light under the Sun, Life and the home of Life—all potential, lying burning and swirling under the dawn. "The Sea," Ponch was barking, shouting, as he ran down the beach and fought with the waves. "The Sea!" And it wasn't just what dogs always said —Oh boy, the water!—but something else, both a question and an answer, a reference to the beginning of things, the oldest Sea from which Life arose. And our blood's like that Sea, Kit thought. The same salinity. The same—
His eyes went wide. Ponch had been right. Here was the solution... the one that the Lone Power was counting on Nita not seeing, because she had messed it up so badly before.
"You're right!" Kit yelled to Ponch. "You're right! Come on, we've got to find her, before she starts!"
Ponch came running back, bounced around him a last few times, and then they leaped forward into the darkness together and vanished from the beach, leaving only footprints, which were shortly washed away.
Nita stood at the base of the Empire State Building and looked up at it. In this version of New York, there was a great flight of steps up to it, up from the water level, and she immediately went about halfway up them, glad to get out of the water, where the viruses were swarming and snapping more thickly than they had anywhere else. Pralaya came flowing up the stairs along with her, shaking the water out of his golden fur and scratching himself all over. "Those things," he said, "even though they didn't really bite me, they make me itch."
"Me, too," Nita said. She stood there and craned her neck upward, looking at the terrible height of the tower. Even in her own New York, when you were this close to it, the Empire State always looked as if it was going to fall on you. But here, she wasn't sure that it might not somehow be possible. And all around them was that terrible shadowy darkness, thicker in the air here than anywhere else, pressing in on them, looking at them.
"Let's go in," Nita said. She could hear the kernel now without actually having to listen to it: a buzz, that
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familiar fizz on the skin. Part of her was afraid; it shouldn't have been this easy to find. And she knew why it had been so easy...
They went in through the doors at the top of the steps and found themselves in a vast gray hall full of shadows. Standing up, here and there in the dimness, were many banks of steely doored elevators, which Nita saw were intended to go in only one direction: down. All around the great floor of the place were a number of square pools, and Nita looked at them and decided not to step into any of them. They had that black-water depth that suggested they had no real bottoms.
"Right," Nita said. She glanced once at her charm bracelet, made sure that the spells on it were active, and began walking through the place, listening.
Pralaya followed, pausing by each of the elevator banks and cocking his head to listen. "I'm not sure," he said.
"I am," Nita said. "Not up, but down." She paused by one of the pools, listening.
"Not here," she said softly. "But this is the right direction." She passed between two more of the great square pools, listening again. That faint fizz on her skin got more pronounced.
"That one," she said softly, and walked over to it. She knelt by the edge of the water, listening, then got up again and moved around to the other side of the pool. Right there, she thought. The kernel was well down in the black water, but not out of reach. Nita shook the charm bracelet around to check the status of her personal shields again, twiddled with one charm to adjust the shield just slightly, and then with the other arm reached down into the water.
It was freezing cold, so cold she could hardly breathe, and she could feel her fingers going numb. But she groped, and reached deeper, though she felt the buzzing and stinging of little dark lancets against her skin. None of them was getting through... yet.
There.
Slowly she reached under what she'd felt—the jabbing of the little black needles against her skin increased, but Nita forced herself not to rush—slowly she closed her fingers around what was waiting there for her. Slowly she drew it up.
It was an apple.
Nita stood up with it in her hands. It dripped black water, and as that water fell into the pool, the pool's surface came alive with more of the ugly little hexagonal virus shapes that
had swarmed around her and Pralaya outside. These, though, were bigger, and somehow nastier. They had no eyes, but they were nonetheless looking at her and seeing prey, the kind they already knew the taste of.
"Okay," she said softly, and turned the "apple" over in her hands, feeling for the way its control structures were arranged. She found the outermost level quickly, let her hands sink into what now stopped being an apple and started being that familiar tangle of light.
All around, the shadows leaned in to watch what she was doing. Nita gulped and looked down into the pool, where those awful little black shapes had now
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put their "heads" up out of the water and were looking at her, hating her.
Guys, Nita said, I'd like you to stop doing what you're doing to my mother. The buzzing, snarling chorus said, No! We have a right to live!
I mean it, Nita said. It's really got to stop. It's going to stop, one way or another. It can be with your cooperation, or without it.
No! they snarled. We are her. We are of her. We live in her. She gave us birth. Not on purpose!
That does not matter. We have rights here. We were born. We have a, right to do what we were created to do. The snarling was getting louder, more threatening. You are also of her. What we do to her, we can do to you, given time.
Nita didn't like the sound of that. Guys, she said, last chance. Agree to stop doing what you're doing, or I must abolish you. It was the formal phrasing of a wizard who, however reluctantly, discovers that he or she must kill.
The snarling scaled up; the waters in the pools all around her roiled. Shaking, Nita squeezed and manipulated the power-strands in the kernel until she found the one control sequence that managed the shapes of proteins in this internal space. She stroked it slowly and carefully into a shape that would forbid this kind of viral shape to exist in the local space-time.
One last chance, guys, she said.
The snarling only got louder.
Nita took a deep breath, flicked the charm bracelet around to bring the power-feed configuration she'd designed into place, then brought it together with the kernel. I'm sorry! she said, and pushed the power in...
And nothing happened.
Nita stared at the kernel, horrified. She tried feeding the necessary power into the kernel again, twisted that particular strand of power until it bit into her fingers—
But that spell is now invalid, said a dark voice inside her. It uses a version of your name that is no longer operational. Your name has changed; you have changed. When you were looking at your mother in the hospital last night, you made up your mind to pay my price, and therefore the spell cannot work.
Nita stood still in utter shock and terror. She wanted to shout No! but she couldn't, because she was suddenly horribly certain that, just this once, the Lone Power was telling the truth. The fact that the spell hadn't worked simply confirmed it.
And because I agreed, I'm going to lose my wizardry ... and my mom will die.
Standing there with the kernel, realizing once and for all that she'd done everything she could and there was nothing else she knew that would make the slightest difference, Nita's world simply started to come undone. She could do nothing to stop the tears of fear and grief and frustration that began to run down her face.
It told me it wouldn't work. What made me think I might somehow be able to manage it anyway?
"Pralaya," she said.
"This is beyond my competence," Pralaya said. "I wish I could help you, but..."
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Nita nodded once, and the grief started to give way to anger. "Just what I thought," she said. "So much for any help fromyou"
He looked shocked.
"But that would hardly be the Lone One's preferred method," she said. "No way It's going to give me any help at all, if it can be avoided."
Pralaya looked more stunned than before, if possible. "What are you talking about?"
"You don't know what's living inside you," Nita said. "Well, I bet you're about to find out. Come on," she said to the One she knew was listening. "This is the moment you've been waiting for, isn't it?"
"Not with any possible doubt of the outcome," said that huge dark satisfied voice.
The Lone Power was standing there looking at her; and for just the briefest second, Pralaya coexisted with Its newly chosen form. It looked human, like a young man—though an inhumanly handsome one— and shadows wrapped around It like an overcoat, shadows that reached out and now wrapped themselves around Pralaya, dragged him, struggling and horrified, into themselves, and hid him away.
"Now, you shouldn't really have said that," said the young man. "While he didn't actually know what was happening, I could have let him live. But you had to come right out and tell him, at which point his usefulness to me vanished."
Nita stood there horrified. "You just killed him!"
"No," the Lone One said, "you did. Not a bad start, but then you were intent enough on killing something."
All around Nita, the snarling of the viruses was getting louder and louder. "Anyway, don't be too concerned about Pralaya; I'll find another of his people to replace him if there's need. Now, though, matters stand as I told you they stood. AIL we need is your conscious answer to the question. Can we do business?"
Nita stood there, frozen.
And another voice spoke out of the darkness.
"Fairest and Fallen," Kit said, "one more time... greeting and defiance." Beside him, Ponch just bared his teeth and growled.
Nita stared in astonishment at Kit and Ponch. The Lone Power gave them an annoyed look.
" You again," the Lone One said. "Well, I suppose it was to be expected. You'll do anything to try to run her life for her, won't you?"
Nita's eyes widened in shock. "The chance that she might possibly pull something off without your assistance drives you crazy," the Lone Power said conversationally. "Well, fortunately you're not going to see anything like that today. She's decided to turn to someone else for her last gasp at a partnership." Its smile made it plain Who that was meant to be.
"We know better, so don't try this stuff on us," Kit said. " You think you know better," It said.
It looked at Nita. "Does he?" It said. "Or are you perhaps a little tired of him ordering you around?" Nita stood silent, trembling.
"Might you possibly, just this once, know better? Know best? Actually make the sacrifice?"
"Neets, don't pay any attention to It," Kit said. "You know why I came—"
"To keep her Oath from being contaminated," said the Lone One dryly. "Too late for that. The deal is done, and she's made her choice at last. Without you."
Nita saw Kit flinch at that, but he straightened up again. "I wouldn't write me off as useless just yet," Kit said. "And I wouldn't bet that Neets is just going to dump me."
"I would," the Lone One said. "I hold the only betting token that matters at all in the present situation. Only with my help can she save her mother's life."
"It's not true, Neets!" Kit shouted. "It tried pretty hard to keep Ponch and me from getting here. It must have a reason!"
"I can do without further interference," said the Lone One. "That's reason enough. Now, though, if I thought you might possibly accept a different version of the same bargain..." It stood musing. "Suppose Nita here keeps her wizardry—even despite the mistake she's just made. I even save her mother, in the bargain—"
Kit shook his head, and Ponch growled again. "I serve Life, and the Powers That Be That cast you out, and the One, the Power beyond Them. And so does Neets, whatever you've done to her. So just get used to it!"
The brief silence that followed was terrible. "I've been used to it for too long," said the Lone Power. "Here and there, I stop mortals from incessantly reminding me." The shadow wrapped around It, already huge, grew longer and darker; and inside it moved things that Nita emphatically did not want to see. It had been a long time since her bedroom shadows had been full of their little legs and their
blind front ends, and their fangs, the little jaws that moved...
Kit, though, laughed. "Been there, seen them," he said. "Millipedes? Is that all you've got? What a yawn."
His tone was astonishing. It banished the shadows, all by itself. Nita remembered how she had dreaded those things when she was little, and now found herself thinking, to her amazement, Can someone else really show you how to kill the fears? Is it that easy? I thought they always said you had to do it yourself.
But maybe there was more to it than that. Maybe others' strengths weren't their own property— —if they offered...
"Kit," Nita said. "I know what you want to do, and after how stupid I've been with you, it's great that you even tried, but you've got to get out of here—"
"And leave you alone with That'} Not a chance."
The Lone Power laughed. "Well, anyone can see where this is going. Unless you throw him out of here yourself, it looks like you're going to let someone else die for you again. I wouldn't have thought you were such a coward."
The flush of fury and embarrassment and pain struck through Nita like fire. She opened her mouth to say, You think I wanted it that way the last time? You think I'm not brave enough to do it now? Okay, here—
She didn't get a chance, for another shape leaped through the shadows and hit Nita about chest high.
She came crashing down hard beside one of the pools. "Don't!" Ponch barked at her. "Don't do it!"
Nita rolled over and tossed Ponch off to one side. Ob, the good pooch; I love him, but I can't let him stop me. There's still time, I can still save her. Nita pushed herself up on her hands and knees, and opened her mouth again. But as she did, the greater darkness that had hung about her since she came to this place— that leaning, inward-pressing obscurity—came wrapping down around her, squeezing the breath right out of her, and it spoke.
Don't I get something to say about this?
That darkness leaned in ever closer around all of them, even the Lone One. It was a different kind of darkness than the Lone Power's enwrapping shadows. Nita stared up into it, confused, frightened...