He glanced up from the manual, stared at her. “No chance,” he said, and then looked down at the manual again. “If you’re gonna do it, I’m gonna do it.”
Outside the doors another bell chimed as the elevator slowed to a stop. Kit led the way out across the black stone floor, around the corner to the entrance. The glass door let them out onto a street just like the one they had walked onto in the Snuffer’s otherworld—but here windows had lights in them, and the reek of gas and fumes was mixed with a cool smell of evening and a rising wind, and the cabs that passed looked blunt and friendly. Nita could have cried for relief, except that there was no reason to feel relieved. Things would be getting much worse shortly.
Fred, though, felt no such compunctions. The stars, the stars are back! he almost sang, flashing with delight as they hurried along.
“Where?” Kit said skeptically. As usual, the glow of a million streetlights was so fierce that even the brightest stars were blotted out by it. But Fred was too cheerful to be suppressed.
They’re there, they’re there! he said, dancing ahead of them. And the Sun’s there, too. I don’t care that it’s on the other side of this silly place, I can feel it, I can feel—
His thought cut off so abruptly that Nita and Kit both stopped and glanced over their shoulders. A coldness grabbed Nita’s heart and wrung it as she looked up. The sky, even though clear, did have a faint golden glow to it, city light scattered from smog—
Against that glow, high up atop the MetLife Building, a form, half unstarred night and half black iron, glowered down at them like a statue from a dauntingly high pedestal. Nita and Kit froze like moths pinned to a card as the remote clear howl of perytons wound through the air.
“He’ll just jump down,” Nita whispered, knowing somehow that he could do it. But the rider did not leap, not yet. Slowly he raised his arms in summons. One hand still held the steel rod about which the air twisted and writhed as if in pain; as the arm lifted, that writhing grew more violent, more tortured.
And darkness answered the gesture. It flowed forward around the feet of the dark rider’s terrible mount, obscuring the perytons peering down over the roof’s edge, and poured down the surface of the building like a black fog. What it touched, changed. Where the darkness passed, metal tarnished, glass filmed over or shattered, lighted windows were quenched, went blind. Down all the sides of the building it flowed, black lava burning the brightness out of everything it touched.
Kit and Nita looked at each other in despair, knowing what would happen when that darkness spilled out onto the ground. The streets would go desolate and dark, the cabs would stop being friendly. At last, when all the island from river to river was turned into his domain, the dark rider would catch them at his leisure and do what he pleased with them.
And with the bright Book—and with everything else under the sky, perhaps. This was no otherworld, frightening but remote. This was their home. If this world turned into that one…
“We’re dead,” Kit said, and turned to run. Nita followed him.
Perhaps out of hope that another Lotus might be waiting innocently at some curbside, the way Kit ran retraced their earlier path. But there was no Lotus—only bright streets, full of people going about their business with no idea of what was about to happen to them, cars honking at one another in cheerful ignorance. Fat men running newsstands and bemused bag ladies watched Nita and Kit run by as if death and doom were after them, and no one really noticed the determined spark of light keeping pace. They ran like the wind down West Fiftieth, but no Lotus lay there, and around the corner onto Fifth and up to Sixty-first, but the carnage left in the otherworld was not reflected here—the traffic on Fifth ran unperturbed. Gasping, they waited for a break in it, then ran across, hopped the wall into Central Park, and crouched down beside it as they had in the world they’d left.
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 Fred drew in close, and by his light Kit brought out the Book of Night with Moon. The darkness of its covers shone, steadying Kit’s hands, making Fred seem to burn brighter. Kit and Nita sat gasping for breath, staring at each other.
“I’m 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 risen 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.
Her heart clenched for his sake. “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? Believe me, they don’t forget.”
He stared at her. “What can they do—?”
“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 rubbed 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. Over 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 bobbled 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 of 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. “Neets, hand me the Book.” She passed it up to him, breaking off her own frantic reading for a moment to watch. “It’ll have to be a scream,” he said as if to 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 his lungs, all twenty-seven syllables of it without missing a one. The sound became impossibly more than the yell of a twelve-year-old boy as the Book seized the sound and the spell together and flung them out into the city night: windows rattled with them, and the air shook.
Nita had to hold her ears against the thunder of the Word rushing down through the city’s channeling canyons, irresistible as a flood. Even when it seemed safe to uncover her ears again, the echoes still kept bouncing back from buildings on all sides and just wouldn’t stop. Kit, too, 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. “I 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 humans could use; they broke the stone to make ground for their children to till arid fed the mold with themselves, leaf and bough, for 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 despite.
They were doing it now. Oak and ash and willow, birch and alder, elm and maple, they felt the darkness in the wind that tossed their branches and would not stand still for it. The ground shook all around Nita, roots started to heave up and come free—first the trees close by, the counterparts of the trees under which she and Kit and Fred had sheltered in the dark otherworld. White oak, larch, twisted crabapple, their leaves glittering around the edges with the flowering radiance of the rowan wand, they lurched and staggered as they came rootloose, and then crowded in around Kit and Nita and Fred, whispering with wind, making a protecting circle through which nothing would pass but moonlight. The effect spread out and away from Nita, though the spell itself was finished, and that relentless power finally let her sag against one friendly oak, gasping.
For yards, for blocks, as far as she could see through the trunks of the trees that 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 streetlights 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, very much on purpose.
Nita fumbled in her pocket and pulled out a quarter. “Call it,” she said.
“Heads.”
She tossed the coin, caught it, slapped it down on her forearm. Heads. “Crap,” 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 attacking 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.”
I 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 violently 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 ax. 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!
“Oh my God,” Nita whispered. “The Sun. He put out the Sun!”
Starsnuffer, she thought. That tactic’s worked for him before. And if the Sun’s gone 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. “How long do we have?”
“Eight minutes, maybe a little more, for light to get here from the Sun. Eight minutes before it runs out. Hurry!”
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. “I 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 wouldn’t 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 washing 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 letting it slide carefully down to lie 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 after 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 obedient to the summons, it came. The skyline came, unbesmirched by any blackness—a crown of glittering towers in a smoky sunrise, all stabbing points and jeweled windows, precipices of steel and stone. City Hall came, brooding over its colonnades, gazing down in weary interest at the people who came and went and governed the island through it. The streets came, hot, dirty, crowded, but flowing with voices and traffic and people, bright lifeblood surging through concrete arteries. 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 ca
me, 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 Sun 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 Washington 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, a Boeing 757 arrowed out of LaGuardia Airport and soared away over the city, screaming its high song of delight in the cold upper airs, dragging the thunder 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 anymore. Slowly, subtly, the Book’s vivid transparency was taking him too. Fred, hanging beside 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, he wouldn’t have one. What do I do? she thought. He’s not having trouble, he seems to be getting stronger, not weaker, but if this has to go on much longer…