“How are you keeping this thing up?” I said, running my palm over the rich surface of the carpet.
“I’ve woken the gift worked into the pattern.”
“Can Brightner follow us?”
Gran chuckled. “This was the only carpet with the right design. I’ve had my eye on it all morning.”
I said, “Let’s go back and dive-bomb him! Can this thing shoot somehow, like a fighter plane?”
Gran said sharply, “Don’t even think it! Power turned to destruction becomes a curse.”
“That’s not fair,” I shouted into the wind. “Brightner gets to throw any old magical crap he likes at us, but we can’t hit back? What good is power that you can’t use to defend yourself?”
“If you want to counterattack,” Gran said, “you must find a way to turn his aggression against him, which I’m afraid is beyond me at the moment, lovie. I’m half frozen and I can scarcely think and still steer this thing decently.”
“I’m cold too,” I admitted. “When can we go down?”
“I’m looking for a flat place to land,” Gran said. “These are a bit tricky to handle if you’re out of practice.”
I didn’t much like the idea of zooming around on a flying carpet with somebody who was out of practice.
We were right over Central Park now, and even colder: the sun had gone behind some clouds. At least we had company. In the sky were three kites, two above us and a smaller one below.
I had once spent some Saturdays in the Sheep Meadow with Mom, who had thought she might meet some interesting guy among the kite-flying enthusiasts who hung out there. I remembered getting an earache from running in the wind all day (I was pretty little then) and a crick in my neck from looking up.
I wondered if we looked like a giant kite from below. More like a manta ray, probably. The carpet was very slowly and subtly sort of flapping its wings: its outer sides rippled up and then down. This was certainly not the way magic carpets were supposed to fly according to the special-effects people who did these things in the movies. They always pulled the carpet flat through the air like something on rails, which I guess a flying carpet in a movie probably is.
This one was something else. I must say I found its ponderous way of flapping along reassuring. It made the carpet seem like an exotic animal with a brain of its own, maybe enough of one to keep us up even if Granny Gran got absentminded about the mechanics of flying the thing.
The smaller kite below us was a neat diamond shape, like an Oriental fighting kite.
I had made two kites and done a lot of research before Mom gave up on kite flying. In my reading I’d come across stories about kite fighting, which is a sport in Japan and Korea.
What they do is, they run a good length of the flying line, just under the bridle where you hitch it to the kite, through some paste. Then they roll that part in smashed glass and let it dry. When the line is taut, it’s like a knife-edge that can cut other lines if it crosses them at the right angle.
The flyer who cuts the other guy’s line gets to keep the downed kite as a trophy (usually the losing kite crashes and is ruined anyway). The kite is always small, so it maneuvers fast, like a hawk.
One of the larger kites above us, with a soaring bird painted on it, suddenly fluttered and jigged and began to spiral toward the ground. Its line trailed after it, cut down below.
“Hey,” I said, “a kite fight!”
Well, sort of. You’re only supposed to use a fighting kite against other fighting kites, of course. Cutting down ordinary kites is crude.
The little kite was no longer below us but darted above, heading across the line of the second big kite, a huge one painted with a snarling samurai face.
I peeked over the edge of the carpet, trying to see who was flying the kites. The meadow was scattered all over with the little dark figures of people strolling, throwing Frisbees, practicing karate and so on.
“A kite what?” Gran said distractedly. “Blast it, this light is so hard to see by. I don’t want to bring us down in the trees!”
“That samurai kite’s no fighter,” I said. “It’s not even the right shape. This little guy must be a pirate, chopping the others out of the sky for kicks.”
The fighter kite was painted with a black and orange stripe design, like tiger fur, with a yellow cat’s eye in the center. It was chasing the bigger kite, which floated lower.
Then the wind shifted and suddenly the two kites collided and dropped. The tiger kite shot free and the samurai kite just fell out of the sky, looking ragged and torn. The little fighter zigzagged high into the air directly above us, undamaged.
I couldn’t help but admire the thing, with its wedge-shaped tail and the arched cross-strut that made it look like a bow-and-arrow drawn to fire. Too bad it was being flown by a bully.
A rasping noise made me look to my left. The flying line of the fighter kite was sawing at the edge of our carpet, tearing at the heavy wool fibers.
“Gran!” I yelled. I made a grab for the string, but the kite shot clear and the line was snatched out of my reach.
Our carpet trailed a wispy curl of thread where it had been frayed.
We both looked up.
The tiger kite floated above us, its painted eye looking blank and innocent. Innocent, for Pete’s sake, what was I thinking? It was just paper, glue, a couple of sticks of wood, and some string!
It fluttered suddenly and sped across our path, and the line hit the carpet edge at another place.
“Help!” I yelled. “Gran, what’s happening?”
“Brightner,” she shouted. “Or one of his cohorts.”
I could believe that, all right. I could believe anything about that awful man. How in the world could we get away from him? I ached with cold and hopelessness.
The rowboat lake was below us now. We had been maneuvered over water so that we couldn’t land. The kite string curved away down a huge, impossible distance back to the Sheep Meadow.
“Grab the rug fringe and hang on,” Gran said. She lay down beside me, her lumpy old hands twisted firmly into the thick fringe next to mine. The carpet shivered under us and we banked and headed west toward the river, traveling so fast that I could scarcely breathe.
Nothing spectacular, mind you, no loops or rolls or zigzags, but flat-out velocity into the west wind. The kite chased us, but its line held it back. It got smaller, falling behind, and my heart rate started to slow to mere overdrive.
Then the kite made a dive, looped back across its own string, and flew free, its cutting line trailing maybe twenty feet—cut by itself.
As the tiger kite sped toward us, I saw something that made me shut my eyes: a metallic glitter of the sun’s sudden light along the wooden frame—the edges of razor blades, fixed to the wooden spars. Now I knew why the big samurai kite had gone down trailing raggedy flags. It had been sliced to death, not by a fighting kite but by a killer kite.
“Hold tight!” Gran screamed in my ear. Our carpet did a sudden sideslip and fast climb that almost made me whoops.
Something brushed my right hand like a feather of fire, and we sped upward at a steep angle.
I opened my eyes and saw a line of blood along my knuckles. Below us, the killer kite stalled, turned, and shot toward the carpet’s underside. We dropped hard toward the ground, as if to knock the killer out of the air with our sheer weight.
The little kite turned belly-up and crossed underneath us, hitting us a light blow. A three-inch slice in the weave opened right next to my knee.
The tiger kite spiraled off at an angle, righted itself, and sailed in a high, wide, mocking loop over us. Our carpet flew heavily now, losing altitude over the dull, rippled sheen of the Hudson River.
My cut hand hurt. The pain sort of merged with the cold that ached in my clenched fingers.
The tiger kite peeled out of the sky like a fighter plane in an old movie.
“Aagh!” I screamed. “Get away!”
Then the gulls came: big, white, nois
y birds in a riotous gang looping through the sky. They swarmed around the kite and pretended to ram it, sheering off at the last minute. They stalled and flipped and clowned, squawking and nipping at it with their ugly orange beaks, quarreling as if over a choice piece of edible garbage.
The kite sliced through the mob of birds, leaving two of them streaked with blood. I saw one flutter down silently and disappear into the river.
The gulls screamed and attacked. A wild melee filled the air with drifting feathers and scraps of paper. The sun glanced off white wings and darting eyes. Two more gulls tumbled down, crying.
Then the kite plummeted, pinwheeling, the gulls after it all the way. They burst outward in all directions over the water, yelling and swooping to snatch bits of paper from each other’s beaks. The kite sank.
One by one, the gulls settled on the river. The water lifted them in a peaceful, bobbing motion. They dug their beaks into their feathers, rooting around disgustingly for bugs to eat. I loved them.
“I thought they’d never come,” Gran said. “Someone must have been feeding them over at the yacht basin.”
I was shaking all over. “What was it? The kite, I mean.”
“It was what you called The Claw,” she said, “in one of its many manifestations. Basically, it’s a sort of evil impulse that Brightner can project out of himself and into objects like that little kite, to animate them and send them to do his will. Like the hangers at Kress’s that he organized into a monster, and now this kite—brilliantly done, too. I’d rather not have used those old friends against that, but I couldn’t see an alternative.”
“Friends?” I squinted to make out the gulls, pale spots riding the dark water.
“They’re just birds, lovie, not spirits. I know how to get on their frequency, that’s all. I wish I hadn’t had to. They’ve a tough enough life as it is.”
“Can we go down now?” I said. My hands felt like two bundles of icy cramps and my ears ached from the wind.
“We have no choice,” Gran said.
We were flying very low, heading southeast, limping in off the river onto the west shoreline of Manhattan Island. We hopped over the West Side Drive, skimmed a parapet wall, and bounced in the air, just missing a big skylight of dirty, frosted panes. We landed with a bump in the middle of a rooftop.
I staggered upright and stepped off the wounded carpet.
We were on some kind of industrial roof with a row of skylights marching down the middle of it. The building—it looked like a warehouse—seemed to take up one whole end of a block. It was surrounded by streets on three sides. The fourth side was bounded by a narrow alley and a neighboring building. An old iron fire escape led down over the farther parapet into the alley.
Gran stooped and grabbed one edge of the carpet. “Come on, lovie, give me a hand with this.”
To my surprise the carpet was very light and easy to handle. It folded not only in half but in quarters and then again, and again, each time getting smaller and less bulky. In no time we were standing nose to nose and Gran was smoothing down something that looked like a handkerchief. She tucked it carefully into the baggy side-pocket of her tweed coat.
“Poor wounded carpet,” I said. “Can you fix it?”
“Oh, I think so,” Gran said, frowning absently.
“He tried to kill us!” I said, shivering, and then I blushed to have said something so stupid. I mean, this guy was stealing people’s souls. Trying to kill me and my Gran would be like swatting flies to a person like that.
Gran kindly ignored my foolishness completely. “Let’s get cracking, lovie, before he locates us again.” She set off down the roof toward the fire escape. “I must find Dirty Rose for our dinner at Collie’s Kitchen. As for your mother, try to keep her out of Brightner’s company.” She looked hard, at me. “This meeting they’ve already had—tell me, lovie, did you notice? Does your mother still have her shadow?”
“I think so,” I said, trying to remember. It’s not as easy as you’d think, recalling whether a person has a shadow or not. I mean, it’s not the kind of thing you look for.
“I imagine she does,” Gran said in a worried tone. “I’m very much afraid that he’s preparing something special for your mother.”
“What do you mean?” I said. “I thought you said she’s just somebody to use as a sort of hostage, to keep you from getting in his way.”
Gran gave me a thoughtful look. “And people sometimes let hostages go, when there’s no more reason to hold them; is that what you’re thinking?”
I couldn’t exactly bring myself to say what I was thinking, which was that maybe we should let Brightner take his load of shadows with him, if only he would leave my mom behind. How could we fight him, Gran and me? We had just barely escaped alive, thanks to a bunch of greedy, rowdy sea gulls!
Gran leaned against the parapet. An ambulance went wailing by someplace way below in the streets. She said in a quiet, matter-of-fact tone, “Brightner is clearly willing to try to simply kill me outright, and you, too. So he doesn’t need your mother as a hostage, does he? He must be interested in Laura in her own right.”
“You mean, really? As a—as a date? As a girlfriend?”
Gran said, “We must keep her from him, lovie.”
I groaned. “Gran, she’s the mommie, I’m the kid. She’s supposed to fuss about the people I go out with, not the other way around!”
“Do your best,” Gran said.
It sounded completely screwy to me. I said, “If he’s such a hotshot wizard, he could go out with anybody he wanted. I mean, Mom is pretty and smart and everything, but she’s no movie star. What’s the attraction for somebody like him?”
“Her share of the family talent,” Gran said patiently. “Her unused potential. He’s ambitious, he wants to pull off a real coup here, and evil magic is limited, you know. It’s based on fear, after all, and lies. Your mother, now, has her share of our family gift, and captured good magic can extend the range of bad magic quite considerably.”
“Wait, now, wait,” I objected. “Mom has no power, she has no magic. She won’t even talk about magic!”
Gran sighed. “I know she won’t, but she is my daughter. She does have—capacities. The problem is, she’s always ducked the whole subject. You’ve read about how the children of Hippies grew up to become stockbrokers? Which doesn’t mean that her gift is wiped out, only that she neither uses it nor protects it. So her unused magic is up for grabs, and that attracts a man like Brightner.”
“Can’t she see that?” I shook my head miserably. “How can she even stand him?”
“She doesn’t know what she’s dealing with,” Gran said grimly.
I said, “You said he works with fear. So why isn’t Mom afraid of him? I am.”
Gran shook her head. “It’s her own fears that he uses to draw her to him—fear of being left all alone, of being unloved.”
“What?” I said. “But I’m there, and I love her!”
Gran patted my hair with one gnarly hand. “Of course you love her, but you have your own life, Val. She wants what a woman is supposed to want, a man in her life. And she’s at a touchy stage right now, you know that—striking out on her own and all. Life’s not easy for a divorcée with a child, lovie. She’s still hoping for a knight in shining armor, I’m sure, like most women in her position.”
“She goes out with a lot of guys,” I said, picking at the bubbles in the tar on the parapet. “She should have more sense by now.”
Gran said, “So she should, but obviously her vision’s not too clear on this point. Well, it’s partly my fault, I’m sure. Magic doesn’t make one the perfect mother, alas. I made a mistake. For the longest time I didn’t tell her anything about the family talent. I didn’t explain anything. I wanted her to learn about life without it. She did, and she liked being ‘normal.’ And I grant you, without a smidgin of magic she went out and got exactly what she wanted—nice, normal, hectic New York rat race, nice, normal divorce, and no simple
sense.”
“She does okay,” I said. I mean, Mom’s not always easy to get along with, but she’s not a jerk.
“I’m glad you speak up for her,” Gran said, “but you can see as well as I can that ‘okay’ is not good enough when you are a sorcerer’s child. No amount of normality can cancel that.”
“I still don’t see why he’s after her,” I said stubbornly. I really just wanted Gran to say that he wasn’t, I think. And I wanted to keep Gran there, talking about magic on a warehouse rooftop, so that she wouldn’t be gone on her undercover mission, leaving me alone.
Gran frowned. “I’m not sure,” she admitted, “but it is possible, lovie, that he’s expanded his plans from a minor foray into a major soul-stealing expedition on the basis of being able to use your mother’s unrealized power himself. Building on her capacities, he could tear away a really great mass of souls to steal. He could make poor Laura his springboard to a triumph.”
I looked over the edge of the roof. The rusted metal steps seemed to descend into a slice of absolute darkness.
“But you’re not sure,” I insisted. “You can’t be sure that’s what he’s doing!”
“No,” said Gran, “but I’m going to find out. I’m just trying to prepare you, lovie. This could be a dreadful business, more dreadful even than it’s been so far.”
I had nothing to say to that. I just wanted to cry.
Gran said thoughtfully, “Now, if by chance I do not get in touch with you in the morning, you are on no account to try to come after me. Whatever Collie’s Kitchen is, it’s no place for you. You can do more if you stick by your mother.”
The idea of not hearing from Gran, for whatever reason, froze my blood.
She went on, “And one more thing: I wouldn’t say anything about today, about seeing me—and especially about my plans for tonight—to your mother.”
“Why not?” I said, stunned. “She’ll be so glad to know you’re all right, how could I not mention it?”
“Anything you tell her may get back to Brightner, and the less he knows, the better. You go down first, I’m slower than you are.”