So You Want to Be a Wizard

  "They know we're here," Nita said as they hurriedly climbed in and buckled 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 face 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 whatever 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. It 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 know that place'll be guarded. Fred, are you up to another diversion?"

  (Will it get us back to the Sun and the stars again? Try me.)

  Nita closed her eyes to lean back and take a second's rest—the power that had 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—"

  "You did, maybe." Nita looked sheepish. "I couldn't get past Chapter Forty. 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?"

  "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 wheel well 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 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 like hammered onyx and a cloak like night with no stars. His face was still handsome, 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—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 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 bay
ing 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 out and caught her by the collar at the bottom of the ramp, almost choking her, and kept her from falling into the pit. 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 as if with an ax. 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 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. Despite 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 anymore. 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 hobbled 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 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 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. He 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 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 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 came down on 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, 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, 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.
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  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 Pan Am 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!