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 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 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 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 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 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 is there, too. I don't care that it's on the other side of this silly place, I 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 light 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 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; 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 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 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 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 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 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. "Nita, 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. 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. "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 and 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 spite. 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 heaved and came 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 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 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 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!)
"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 do we have?"
"Eight minutes, maybe a little more, for light to get here from the Sun. Eight 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. "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 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 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.