The week went by quickly for Nita. Though Carl had made the
business of opening a worldgate sound fairly simple, she began to
suspect that he’d been doing it so long that it actually
seemed that way to him. It wasn’t simple, as her book told
her as soon as she opened to the pertinent chapter, which was forty
pages long in small print.
Grand Central worldgate had its own special requirements:
specific supplies and objects that had to be present at an
opening so that space would be properly bent, spells that had to be
learned just so. The phone calls flew between Nita’s house
and Kit’s for a couple of days, and there was a lot of
visiting back and forth as they divided up the work. Nita spent a
lot of time keeping Fred from being noticed by her family, and also
got to see a lot of Kit’s mother and father and sisters, all
of whom were very friendly and kept forgetting that Nita
couldn’t speak Spanish. She started to learn a little of it
in self-defense. Kit’s dog told her the brand of dog
biscuits it could never get enough of; she began bringing them with
her when she visited. The dog spoke the Speech with a Spanish
accent, and would constantly interrupt Kit and Nita as they
discussed who should do what in the spelling. Kit wound up with
most of the spoken work, since he had been using the Speech longer
and was better at it; Nita picked up supplies.
“You ever swallow anything accidentally before,
Fred?” Nita said under her breath. It was late Friday
afternoon, and she was in a little antiques-and-junk
store on Nassau Road, going through boxes of dusty odds and ends in
search of a real silver fork. Fred was hanging over her shoulder,
almost invisible, a faint red point lazily emitting heat.
(Not for a long time) he said, glancing curiously at a
pressed-glass salt-cellar Nita was holding. (Not since
I was a black hole, certainly. Black holes know everything, but a
white hole’s business is emission. Within limits,) he added,
and the air around him rippled with heat as he shuddered. (I
don’t ever again want to emit the way I did after your pen
went down. Some of those things hurt on the way out. And anyway,
all that emission makes me nervous. Too much of that kind of thing
and I could blow my quanta.)
She looked up at him, worried. “Really? Have you emitted
that much stuff that you’re in danger of blowing
up?”
(Oh, not really—I’d have to lose a lot more mass
first. After all, before I was a black hole, I was a
respectable-sized blue-white star, and even those days
I massed a few hundred thousand times what your cute little
yellow-dwarf Sun does. I wouldn’t worry about
it—I’m nowhere near the critical threshold yet.)
“ ‘Cute’?” Nita said.
(Well, it is . . . And I suppose
there’s no harm in getting better at emissions. I have been
improving a lot. What’s that?)
Nita looked farther down in the box, dug deep, and came up with
a battered old fork. It was scratched and its lines were bent out
of shape, but it was definitely silver, not stainless steel.
“That’s what I needed,” she said. “Thanks, Fred. Now all I need is that piece of rowan wood,
and then tonight I go over my part of the spells again.”
(You sound worried.)
“Well, yeah, a little,” Nita said, getting up. All
that week her ability to hear what the plants were saying had been
getting stronger and surer; the better she got with the Speech, the
more sense the bushes and trees made.
“It’s just—the rowan branch has to come off a
live tree, Fred, and I can’t just pick it—that’d
be like walking up to someone and pulling one of their fingers off.
I have to ask for it. And if the tree won’t give it to
me . . . ”
(Then you don’t get your pen back, at least not for a
while) Fred shimmered with colors and a feeling like a sigh.
(I am a trouble to you.)
“Fred, no. Put your light out a moment so we can get out
of here.” Nita interrupted the shopkeeper’s intense
concentration on a Gothic novel long enough to find out what the
fork cost (a dollar) and buy it. A few steps outside the door, Fred
was pacing her again. “If you’re trouble, you’re
the best trouble that’s happened around here for a while.
You’re good to talk to, you’re good company—when
you don’t forget and start emitting cosmic
rays—”
Fred blazed momentarily, blushing at Nita’s teasing. In an
excited moment the night before he had forgotten himself and
emitted a brief blast of ultrashortwave radiation, which had heated up
Nita’s backyard a good bit and ionized the air for miles around, and produced a
local but brilliant aurora. (Well, it’s
an old habit, and old habits die hard. I’m working on
it.)
“Heat we don’t mind so much. Or ultraviolet, the
longwave kind doesn’t hurt people’s eyes,”
(You fluoresce when I use that,
though . . . )
Nita laughed. “I don’t mind fluorescing. Though on
second thought, don’t do that where anyone but Kit can see. I
doubt my mother’d understand.”
They walked home together, chatting alternately about life in
the suburbs and life in a part of deep space close to the Great
Galactic Rift. Nita felt more relaxed than she had for months.
Joanne had been out of sight since Monday afternoon at Tom and
Carl’s. Even if she hadn’t, Nita had been practicing
with that body shield, so that now she could run through the
syllables of the spell in a matter of seconds and nothing short of
a bomb dropped on her could hurt her. She could even extend the
spell to cover someone else, though it wasn’t quite so
effective; she had a harder time convincing the air to harden up.
But even that lessened protection would come in handy if she and
Kit should be in trouble together at some point and there was no
time to cooperate in a spelling. Not that she was expecting any
more trouble. The excitement of a trip into the city was already
catching at her. And this wasn’t just another shopping trip.
Magic was loose in the world, and she was going to help work
some . . .
She ate supper and did her homework almost without thinking
about either, and as a result had to do much of the math homework
twice. By the time she was finished, the sun was down and the
backyard was filling with a cool blue twilight, In the front of the
house, her mother and father and Dairine were watching TV as Nita
walked out the side door and stood on the step, letting her eyes
get used to the dimness and looking east at the rising Moon. Canned
laughter echoed inside the house as Fred appeared by her
shoulder.
(My, that’s bright for something that doesn’t emit
heat) Fred said, looking at the Moon too.
“Reflected sunlight,” Nita said absently.
(You’re going to talk to the tree now?)
“Uh huh.”
(Then I’ll go stay with the others and watch that funny
box emit. Maybe I’ll figure out what it’s trying to get
across)
“Good luck,” Nita said as Fred winked out. She
walked around into the yard.
Spring stars were coming out as she stood in the middle of the
lawn and looked down the length of the yard at the rowan, a great
round-crowned tree snowy with white flowers. Nita’s
stomach tightened slightly with nervousness. It had been a long
time ago, according to her manual, that the trees had
to war on mankind’s behalf,
against the dark powers that wanted to
prevent human intelligence from happening
at all. The war had been a terrible one,
lasting thousands of centuries—the trees and other plants
taking more and more land, turning barren
stone to soil that would support them and the animals and men to
follow; the dark powers breaking the soil with earthquake and
mountain building, scouring it with glaciers, climate-changing good
ground for desert, and burning away forests in firestorms far more
terrible than the small brushfires any forest needs to stay
healthy. But the trees and the other plants had won at last.
They had spent many more centuries readying the world for
men—but when men came, they forgot the old debts and wasted
the forests more terribly than even the old dark powers. Trees had
no particular reason to be friendly to people these days. Nita
found herself thinking of that first tree that had spoken to her,
angry over the destruction of its friend’s artwork. Even
though the rowan tree had always been well tended, she wasn’t
certain how it was going to respond to her. With the other ash
trees, rowans had been in the forefront of the Battle; and they had
long memories.
Nita sighed and sat down under the tree, book in hand, her back
against its trunk. There was no need to start right away,
anyhow—she needed a little while to recover from her
homework. The stars looked at her through the rowan’s
windstirred branches, getting brighter by the minute. There was
that one pair of stars that always looked like eyes, they were so
close together. It was one of the three little pairs associated
with the Big Dipper. The Leaps of the Gazelle, the ancient Arabs
had called them, seeing them as three sets of hoofprints left in
the sky. “Kafza’at al Thiba,” Nita murmured, the
old Arabic name. Her eyes wandered down toward the horizon, finding
a faint reddish gleam. “Regulus.” And a whiter gleam,
higher: “Arcturus.” And another, and another, old
friends, with new names in the Speech, that she spoke silently,
remembering Carl’s warning:
(Elthathte . . . ur’Senaahel . . . )
The distant fires flickered among shadowy leaves.
(Lahirien . . . )
(And Methchane and Ysen and Cahadhwy and
Rasaug’hil . . . They are nice tonight.)
Nita looked up hurriedly. The tree above her was leaning back
comfortably on its roots, finished with the stretching-upward
of growth for the day, and gazing at the stars as she was. (I was
hoping that haze would clear off) it said as silently as Nita had
spoken, in a slow, relaxed drawl. (This will be a good night for
talking to the wind. And other such transient creatures. I was
wondering when you were going to come out and pay your respects,
wizardling.)
(Uh—) Nita was reassured: the rowan sounded friendly,
(it’s been a busy week.)
(You never used to be too busy for me,) the rowan said, its
whispery voice sounding ever so slightly wounded. (Always up in my
branches you were, and falling out of them again. Or swinging. But
I suppose you outgrew me.)
Nita sat quiet for a moment, remembering how it had been when
she was littler. She would swing for hours on end, talking to
herself, pretending all kinds of things,
talking to the tree and the world in general. And
some . . . (You talked back!) she said in
shocked realization. (You did, I wasn’t making it up.)
(Certainly I talked. You were talking to me, after
all . . . Don’t be surprised. Small
children look at things and see them, listen to things and hear
them. Of course they understand the Speech. Most of them never
realize it any more than you did. It’s when they get older,
and stop looking and listening, that they lose the Speech, and we
lose them) The rowan sighed, many leaves showing pale undersides
as the wind moved them. (None of us are ever happy about losing our
children. But every now and then we get one of you back.)
(All that in the book was true, then,) Nita said. (About the
Battle of the Trees—)
(Certainly. Wasn’t it written in the Book of Night with
Moon that this world’s life would become free to roam among
our friends there)—the rowan stretched upward toward the
turning stars for a moment—(if we helped? After the world was
green and ready, we waited for a long time. We started letting all
sorts of strange creatures live in our branches after they came up
out of the water. We watched them all; we never knew which of our
guests would be the children we were promised. And then all of a
sudden one odd-looking group of creatures went down out of
our branches, and looked upward again, and called us by name
in the Speech. Your kind . . . ) The tree
looked down musingly at Nita. (You’re still an
odd-looking lot,) it said.
Nita sat against the rowan and felt unhappy. (We weren’t
so kind to you) she said. (And if it weren’t for the plants,
we wouldn’t be here)
(Don’t be downcast, wizardling,) the tree said, gazing up
at the sky again. (It isn’t your fault. And in any case, we
knew what fate was in store for us. It was written in the
Book.)
(Wait a minute. You mean you knew we were going to start
destroying your kind, and you got the world ready for us
anyway?)
(How could we do otherwise? You are our children.)
(But . . . we make our houses out of you,
we—) Nita looked guiltily at the book she was holding. (We
kill you and we write on your bodies!)
The rowan continued to gaze up at the night sky. (Well,) it
said. (We are all in the Book together, after all. Don’t you
think that we wrote enough in the rock and the soil, in our day?
And we still do. We have our own lives, our feelings and goals. Some of them you
may learn by your wizardry, but I doubt you’ll ever come to
know them all. We do what we have to, to live. Sometimes that means
breaking a rock’s heart, or pushing roots down into the
ground that screams against the intrusion. But we never forget what
we’re doing. As for you)—and its voice became very
gentle—(how else should our children climb to the stars but
up our branches? We made our peace with that fact a long time ago,
that we would be used and maybe forgotten. So be it. What you learn
in your climbing will make all the life on this planet greater,
more precious. You have your own stories to write. And when it
comes to that, who writes the things written in your body, your
life? And who reads?) It breathed out, a long sigh of leaves in the
wind. (Our cases aren’t that much different.)
Nita sat back and tried to absorb what the tree was saying. (The
Book of Night with Moon,) she said after a while. (Do you know who
wrote it?)
The rowan was silent for a long time. (None of us are sure,) it
said at last. (Our legends say it wasn’t written. It’s
simply been, as long as life has been. Since they were kindled, and
before.) It gazed upward at the stars.
(Then the other Book, the dark one—)
The whole tree shuddered. (That one was written, they say.) The
rowan’s voice dropped to a whisper. (By the Lone
Power—the Witherer, the one who blights. The Kindler of
Wildfires. Don’t ask more. Even talking about that one or its
works can lend it power.)
Nita sat quiet for a while, thinking. (You came to ask
something,) the rowan said. (Wizards are always asking things of
rowans.)
(Uh, yes.)
(Don’t worry about it,) the rowan said. (When we decided
to be trees of the Light, we knew we were going to be in
demand.)
(Well—I need some live wood. Just enough for a stick, a
little wand. We’re going to open the Grand Central worldgate
tomorrow morning.)
Above Nita’s head there was a sharp cracking sound. She
pressed back against the trunk, and a short straight branch about a
foot and a half long bounced to the grass in front of her. (The
Moon is almost full tonight,) the rowan said. (If I were you,
I’d peel the leaves and bark off that twig and leave it out
to soak up moonlight. I don’t think it’ll hurt the
wood’s usefulness for your spelling, and it may make it more
valuable later on.)
(Thank you, yes,) Nita said. The book had mentioned something of
the sort—a rowan rod with a night’s moonlight in it
could be used for some kind of defense. She would look up the
reference later. (I guess I should go in and check my spells over
one more time. I’m awfully new at this.)
(Go on,) the tree said, with affection. Nita picked up the stick
that the rowan had dropped for her, got up and stretched, looking
up at the stars through the branches. On impulse she reached up,
hooked an arm around the branch that had had the swing on it.
(I guess I could still come and climb sometimes,) she said.
She felt the tree looking at her, (My name in the Speech is
Liused,) it said in leafrustle and starflicker. (If there’s
need, remember me to the trees in Manhattan. You won’t be
without help if you need it.)
“I’m Nita,” she said in the Speech, aloud for
this once. The syllables didn’t sound strange: they sounded
like a native language and made English feel like a foreign tongue.
For a moment every leaf on the tree quivered with her name,
speaking it in a whispery echo.
(Go,) the rowan said again. (Rest well.) It turned its calm
regard to the stars again.
Nita went back inside.
Saturday morning about eight, Kit and Nita and Fred took the bus
down to the Long Island Railroad station and caught a shiny silver
train for Manhattan. The train was full of the usual cargo of
Saturday travelers and shoppers, none of whom paid any
particular attention to the boy and girl sitting by one window,
going over the odd contents of their backpacks with great care.
Also apparently unnoticed was a faint spark of white light hanging
in the center of the window between the two, gazing out in
fascination at the backyards and parking lots and stores the train
passed.
(What are all those dead hunks of metal there? All piled
up?)
(Cars, Fred.)
(I thought cars moved.)
(They did, once.)
(They all went there to die?)
(They were dead when they got there, probably.)
(But they’ve all climbed on top of each other! When they
were dead?)
(No, Fred. They have machines—)
(What was that? There are three—I don’t know who
those were, but they have them shut up in a box hanging from that
long thing.)
(No one you know, Fred. That was a traffic light.)
(It was emitting—Look, he’s trying to say something!
Hello! Hello!)
(Fred, you’re flashing! Calm down or someone’ll see
you!)
(Well, I don’t know what a nice guy like him was doing in
a place like that.)
Nita sighed out loud, “Where were we?” she said to
Kit.
“The battery.”
“Right. Well, here it is.”
“Lithium-cadmium?”
“Right. Heavy thing, it weighs more than anything else
we’ve got that last thing for activating the piece of time,
isn’t it? What more. The eight and a half sugar
cubes.”
Nita held up a little plastic bag. “Now the worldgate stuff. The
pine cone—”
“Bristlecone pine.” Nita held it up, then dropped it
in her backpack.
“Aspirin.”
“Uh-huh.”
“The fork.”
“Here.”
“The rowan branch.”
“Yup.” She held it up. Cut down and peeled, it was
about a foot long, a greenish-white wand.
“Great. Then we’re set. You’ve got all that
other stuff, why don’t you give me the battery?”
“Here.” Nita handed it to him, watched as he found a
good spot for it in his backpack, under the sandwiches.
“What’s that?” she said, spotting something
that hadn’t been accounted for in the equipment tally.
“Huh? Oh, this.” He reached in and brought out a
slim piece of metal like a slender rod, with a small knob at one
end and broken off jaggedly at the other.
“What is it?”
“A piece of junk. A busted-off car antenna.
Well,” Kit amended, “it was, anyway. I was sitting out
behind the garage yesterday afternoon, reading, and I started
talking to my dad’s old car. He has this ancient Edsel.
He’s always talking about getting it reconditioned, but I
don’t think he’s really going to—there’s
never enough money. Anyway he goes out every now and then to work
on the engine, usually when he’s tired or mad about
something. I don’t know if he ever really gets any work done,
but he always comes inside greasy all over and feeling a lot
better. But I was going over the spells in my head, and the car
spoke to me in the Speech—”
“Out loud?”
“No, inside, like Fred does. Kind of a grindy noise, like
its voice needed a lube job. I wasn’t too surprised; that
kind of thing has been happening since I picked the book up. First
it was rocks, and then things started to talk to me when I picked
them up. They would tell me where they’d been and who’d
handled them. Anyway, the car and I started talking,” Kit
paused, looking a touch guilty. “They don’t see things
the way we do. We made them, and they don’t understand why
most of the time we make things and then just let them wear out and
throw them away afterward . . . ”
Nita nodded, wondering briefly whether the train was alive too.
Certainly it was as complex as a car. “What about this
antenna thing, though?” she said after a moment.
“Oh. The car said to take it for luck. It was just lying
there on the ground, rusting. Dad replaced the antenna a long time
ago. So I took it inside and cleaned it up, and there are some
wizardries you can do with metal, to remind it of the different
forces it felt when it was being made. I did a couple of those.
Partly just practicing,
partly . . . ”
“You thought there might be trouble,” Nita said.
Kit looked at her, surprised. “I don’t know,”
he said. “I’m going to be careful anyway. Carl was
pretty definite about not messing around with the worldgate; I wasn’t thinking
about anything like that. But it occurred to me, it’ll be
easy to carry the antenna to school if I wanted to. And if anyone
started bothering me—” He shrugged, then laughed.
“Well, that’s their problem. Hey, look, we’re
getting close to that big curve where you can see the city before
you go under the river. Come on, these trains have a window in the
very front of the first car. Fred! Want to see where we’re
going?”
(Why not? Maybe I’ll understand it better than where
we’ve been.)
Kit and Nita wriggled into their backpacks and made their way up
through a couple of cars, hanging on carefully as they crossed the
chained walkways between them. Treetops and housetops flashed by in
a rush of wind and clatter of rails. Each time Nita touched the
bare metal of the outside of the train, she jumped a little,
feeling something, she wasn’t quite sure what. The train? she
thought. Thinking? And now that I’m aware that it does, I can
feel it a little?—though not as clearly as the trees. Maybe
my specialty is going to be things that grow and Kit’s is
going to be things that run. But how many other kinds of life are
there that I could learn to feel? Who knows where thought is
hiding? . . .
They went into the first car and made their way up to the front
window, carefully hanging on to the seats of oblivious riders to
keep the swaying of the train from knocking them over. There were
no more stops between there and Penn Station, and the train was
plunging along, the rails roaring beneath it. Those rails climbed
gradually as the already elevated track went higher still to avoid
a triple-stacked freeway. Then the rails bent away to the
left in a long graceful curve, still climbing slightly; and little
by little, over the low brown cityscape of Brooklyn, the towers of
Manhattan rose glittering in the early sunlight. Gray and crystal
for the Empire State Building, silver-blue for the odd
sheared-off Citibank building, silver-gold for the twin
square pillars of the World Trade Center, and steely white fire for
the scalloped tower of the Chrysler Building as it caught the Sun.
The place looked magical enough in the bright morning. Nita grinned
to herself, looking at the view and realizing that there was magic
there. That forest of towers opened onto other worlds. One day she
would open that worldgate by herself and go somewhere.
Fred stared at the towers, amazed. (This is more life? More even
than the place where you two live?)
(Ten million lives in the city, Fred. Maybe four or five million
on that island alone.)
(Doesn’t it worry you, packing all that life together?
What if a meteor hits—What if there’s a starflare? If
something should happen to all that life—how terrible!)
Nita laughed to herself. (It
doesn’t seem to worry them . . . ) Beside
her, Fred was hanging on to a seat, being
rocked back and forth by the train’s speed. Very faintly Nita
could hear what Kit heard and felt more strongly; the train’s
aliveness, its wild rushing joy at doing what it was made to
do—its dangerous pleasure in its speed, the wind it fought
with, the rails it rode. Nita shook her head in happy wonder. And I
wanted to see the life on other planets. There’s more life in
this world than I expected . . .
(It’s beautiful,) Fred said from his vantage point just
above Kit’s shoulder.
“It really is,” Nita said, very quiet.
The train howled defiant joy and plunged into the darkness under
the river.
Penn Station was thick with people when they got there, but even
so it took them only a few minutes to get down to the Seventh
Avenue Subway station and from there up to Times Square and the
shuttle to Grand Central. The shuttle ride was short and crowded.
Nita and Kit and Fred were packed tight together in a corner, where
they braced themselves against walls and seats and other people
while the train shouted along through the echoing underground
darkness.
(I can’t feel the Sun,) Fred said, sounding worried.
(We’re ten or twenty feet underground,) Nita said
silently. (We’ll get you some Sun as soon as we get off.)
Kit looked at Fred with concern. (You’ve been twitchy ever
since we went into the tunnel, haven’t you?)
Fred didn’t speak for a moment. (I miss the openness,) he
said then. (But worse I miss the feeling of your star on me. Where
I come from no one is scaled away from the surrounding emissions.)
He trailed off, his thoughts full of the strange hiss and crackle
of interstellar radiation—subtly patterned sound, rushing and
dying away and swelling up again—the Speech in yet another of
its forms. Starsong, Nita thought. (You said you heard about the
Book of Night with Moon,) she said. (Was that how?
Your . . . friends, your people, they actually
talk to each other over all those distances—millions of
light—years?)
(That’s right. Not that we use light to do it, of course.
But the words, the song, they never stop. Except now. I can hardly
hear anything but neutrinos . . . )
Kit and Nita glanced at each other. (The worldgate is
underground, Fred,) Kit said. (In back of a deli, a little store.
We’ll have to be there for at least a few minutes to get
Nita’s pen out.)
(We could go out first and look around,) Nita said. (We’re
early—it’s only nine thirty. We don’t even have
to think about anchoring the timeslide for a little bit yet.)
The subway cars screeched to a halt, doors rolled open, and the
crush loosened as people piled out. Nita got off gladly, looking
around for directional signs to point the way toward the concourse
level of Grand Central—it had been a while since she’d
been there.
“Are you sure you know your way around this place?”
Kit said as Nita headed down one torn-up looking corridor.
“Uh huh. They’re always doing construction in here.
C’mon.”
She led them up a flight of stairs into the lower Grand Central
concourse—all beige tiles, gray floor, signs pointing to
fifty different trains, and small stores packed together.
“The deli’s down there,” she said as she went,
waving a hand at a crowd of hurrying people and the wide hall past
them. “We go up here.” And another flight of stairs,
wider and prettier, let them out on the upper concourse, a huge
stretch of cream-colored marble under a great blue dome
painted with constellations and starred with lights.
They headed across the marble floor, up a short ramp, and out
one of many brassy yellow doors, onto the street. Immediately the
three of them were assailed by noise, exhaust fumes, people
hurrying in all directions, a flood of cabs and buses and cars. But
there was also sunlight, and Kit and Nita stood against the wall by
the Grand Central doors, letting Fred soak it up and get his
composure back. He did so totally oblivious to the six men and
three jackhammers working just across the street behind a barrier
of saw-horses and orange plastic cones. (That’s much
better,) he said.
(It was quieter inside, though,) Kit said, and Nita was inclined
to agree with him. The rattling clamor of the jackhammers was
climbing down her ears into her bones and making her teeth jitter.
The men, two burly ones and one skinny one, all three
broad-shouldered and tan, all in helmets and jeans and boots,
appeared to be trying to dig to China. One of them hopped down into
the excavation for a moment to check its progress, and vanished up
to his neck. Then the hammering started again, “How can they
stand it?” Nita muttered.
(Stand what? It’s lovely out here.) Fred danced about a
little in the air, brightening out of invisibility for a few
moments and looking like a long-lived remnant of a fireworks
display.
(Fred, put it out!) Kit said. (If somebody sees you—)
(They didn’t see me in the field the other day,) Fred
replied, (though Artificer knows they looked.)
(Probably the Learjet distracted them. Fred, come on, tone it
down a little) Nita said. (Let’s go back inside and do what
we have to. Then we can use the timeslide and have fun in the city for
the rest of the day.)
They went back inside and down the stairs again, accompanied by
the inward sound of Fred’s
grumbling. There was no trouble finding the
area where the worldgate was situated, and
Nita and Kit paused outside. (You have everything ready?) Nita
said.
(In here.) Kit tapped his head. (The spells are all set except
for one or two syllables—it’s like dialing almost all
of a phone number. When I call for you, just come on back. All we
need is for the supplies to be in range of the spell; there’s
nothing special that has to be done with them. Fred, you stay with
Nita.)
(As you say.)
They went in. Nita lingered by the front counter, staring at
dill pickles and sandwich makings, trying to look normal while she
waited for Kit to call her. Fred hung over her shoulder, looking
with great interest at bologna and salami and mayonnaise and cream
cheese. (You people certainly have enough ways to internalize
energy,) he said. (Is there really that much difference between one
brand of matter and another?)
(Well, wasn’t there any difference when you were a black
hole? Didn’t a rock, say, taste different from a ray of
light, when you soaked one or the other up?)
(Now that you mention it, yes. But appreciating differences like
that was something you had to work at for a long time. I
wouldn’t expect someone as young as you to—)
(Nita,) Kit’s thought came abruptly. (We’ve got
trouble. It’s not here.)
(What? It has to be!)
(It’s gone, Nita.)
“Girlie,” said the man behind the deli counter in a
no-nonsense growl, “you gonna buy anything?”
“Uh,” Nita said, and by reflex more than anything
else picked up a can of soda from the nearby cooler and fished
around in her pocket for the change, “Kit—” she
called.
“Coming.”
Nita paid for the soda. Kit joined her, carrying a small bag of
potato chips, which he paid for in turn, Together they went back
out into the corridor, and Kit knelt down by the window of a store
across the way, a window full of shiny cutlery. He got his
wizards’ manual out of his pack and began going through the
pages in a hurry. “I don’t get it,” he said.
“I even checked this morning to make sure there hadn’t
been any change in the worldgate status. It said, right here,
‘patent and operative.’ ”
“Were the spells all right?”
Kit glared up at Nita, and she was instantly sorry she’d
asked. “The spells were fine,” Kit said. “But
they got caught like that first one I did, when you came along. Oh,
damn . . . ” He trailed off, and Nita
edged around beside him to look at the page,
“Something’s changed,” Kit said, and indeed the
page didn’t look as it had when Nita had checked it herself
in her own manual the night before. The listings for the other
Manhattan worldgates were the same—the World Trade Center
gate was still listed as “under construction” and
the Rockefeller Center gate as “closed for routine
maintenance.” But under the Grand Central gate listing was a
small red box that said in boldface type, Claudication temporarily
dislocated due to unscheduled spatial interruption, followed by a
string of numbers and symbols in the Speech, a description of the
gate’s new location. Kit glanced up at the roof, through
which the sound of jackhammers could plainly be heard. “The
construction,” he said. “It must have screwed up
the worldgate’s interruption of space somehow.”
Nita was puzzling over the symbols for the new location.
“Isn’t that term there the one for height above the
ground?” she asked.
“Uh huh. Look at it, it must be sixty, seventy stories
straight up from here.” Kit slapped the book shut in great
annoyance, shoved it back in his backpack. “Now what do we
do?”
(We go back outside?) Fred said, very hopefully.
It seemed the best suggestion. The three of them walked out
again, and Fred bobbed and danced some more in the sunlight while
Nita and Kit walked slowly eastward along Forty-second
Street, toward the Park Avenue overpass. “Dislocated,”
Kit muttered, “And who knows how long it’ll take to
come undislocated? A perfectly good piece of time
wasted.”
Nita stopped and turned, looking up into the air and trying to
estimate where the deli lay under the Grand Central complex. She
picked a spot that seemed about right, let her eye travel up and
up, sixty, maybe seventy stories. “Kit,” she said.
“Kit! Look what’s seventy stories high, and right next
door.”
Kit looked. Dark blue and silver, with its big stylized globe
logo on one side, the Pan Am Building reared its oblong self up at
least seventy stories high, right there—not only right behind
Grand Central, but part of it. “Yeah,” Kit said, his
voice still heavy with annoyance. “So?”
“So you remember that shield spell you showed me? The one
that makes the air solid? If you change the quantities in the spell
a little, you can use it for something else. To walk on, even. You
just keep the air hard.”
She couldn’t keep from grinning. Kit stared at Nita as if
she’d gone crazy. “Are you suggesting that we walk out to the
worldgate and—” He laughed. “How are we going to get up
there?”
“There’s a heliport on top of the building,” Nita
said promptly. “They won’t use it for big helicopters
any more, but the little ones still land, and there’s an
elevator in the building that goes right to the top. There’s
a restaurant up there too; my father had lunch with someone up
there once. I bet we could do it.”
Kit stared at her. “If you talk the air solid, you
‘re going to walk on it first! I saw that spell; it’s
not that easy.”
“I practiced it some. Come on, Kit, you want to waste the
timeslide? It’s almost ten now! It’ll probably be years
before these guys are finished digging. Let’s do
it!”
“They’ll never let us up there,” Kit said with
conviction.
“Oh, yes, they will. They won’t have a choice,
because Fred’ll make a diversion for us. We don’t even
need anything as big as a Learjet this time. How about it,
Fred?”
Fred looked at them reluctantly. (I must admit I have been
feeling an urge to burp—)
Kit still looked uncertain. “And when we get up
there,” he said, “all those stories up, and looking as
if we’re walking on nothing—what if somebody sees
us?”
Nita laughed—“Who are they going to tell? And
who’s going to believe them?”
Kit nodded and then began to grin slowly too.
“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah! Let’s go,
it’s getting late.”
Back they went into Grand Central, straight across the main
concourse this time and up one of the six escalators that led up to
the lobby of the Pan Am Building. They paused just outside the
revolving doors at the end of the escalators. The Pan Am lobby was
a big place, pillared and walled and paved in dark granite, echoing
with the sound of people hurrying in and out of the station. They
went up the escalator to the next floor, and Nita pointed off to
one side, indicating an elevator bank. One elevator had a sign
standing by it: copter club—helipad level—express. Also
standing by it was a bored-looking uniformed security
guard.
“That’s it,” Nita said.
“So if we can just get him away from
there . . . ”
“It’s not that simple.” She pointed down at
the end of the hall between two more banks of elevators. Another
guard sat behind a large semicircular desk, watching a row of TV
monitors. “They’ve got cameras all over the place.
We’ve got to get that guy out of there too. Fred, if
you’re going to do something, do it right between them. Out
in front of that desk.”
(Well,) Fred said, sounding interested, (let’s see,
let’s see . . . ) He damped his light
down and floated off toward the elevators, nearly invisible unless
you were looking for him, and even then looking like an unusually
large speck of dust, nothing more. The dustmote stopped just
between the desk and the elevator guard, hung in midair, and
concentrated so fiercely that Nita and Kit could both feel it
thirty feet away.
(T—hupt)
bang!
“That’ll get their attention,” Kit muttered.
It did; both the guards started at the noise, began looking around
for the source of it—then both went very very slowly over to
examine the large barrel cactus in a brass pot that had suddenly
appeared in the middle of the shiny floor.
“Now,” Kit said, and took off toward the elevator
with Nita close behind.
Both the guards had their backs turned, and Nita, passing them,
saw the elevator keys hanging off one guard’s belt. (Fred,)
she said hurriedly, (can you grab those real fast, the way you
grabbed my pen? Don’t swallow them!)
(Once I might make that mistake,) Fred said, (but not twice.) As
they slipped into the elevator Fred paused by the guard’s
belt, and the keys vanished without so much as a jingle. He
sailed in to them. (How was that?)
(Great. Quick, Nita, close the door!)
She punched one of the elevator buttons and the doors slid shut;
the keys appeared again, and Kit caught them in midair before they
fell. “It’s always one of these round ones, like they
use on coin phones,” he said, going through the keys.
“Fred, I didn’t know you could make live
things!”
(I didn’t know either,) Fred said, sounding unsettled,
(and I’m not sure I like it!)
“Here we go” Kit said, and put one key into the
elevator lock, turning it to run, and then pressed the button
marked 73—restaurant—helipad. The elevator took off in
a hurry; it was one of the high-speed sort.
Nita swallowed repeatedly to pop her ears. “Aren’t
you going to have to change the spells a little to compensate for
the gate being up high now?” she said after a moment.
“A little. You just put in the new height coordinate.
Oops!”
The elevator began to slow down quickly, and Nita’s
stomach churned for a moment. She and Kit both pressed themselves
against the sides of the elevator, so they wouldn’t be
immediately visible to anyone who might happen to be standing
right outside the door. But when the doors slid open, no one was
there. They peered out and saw a long carpeted corridor with a
plate-glass door at one end. Through it could be seen tables
and chairs and, more dimly, through a window, a hazy view of the
East Side skyline. A muffled sound of plates and silverware being
handled came down the hall to them.
(It’s early for lunch,) Nita said, relieved. (Let’s
go before someone sees us.)
(What about these keys?)
(Hmm . . . )
(Look, let’s leave them in the elevator lock. That way the
guard downstairs’ll just think he left them there. If they
discover they’re missing they’ll start looking for
whoever took them—and this would be the first place
they’d look.)
(Yeah, but how are we going to get down?)
(Well walk on air,) Kit said, his voice teasing. Nita rolled her
eyes at the ceiling. (Or we’ll go down with the people coming
out from lunch, if that doesn’t work. Let’s just get
out of here first, okay? Which way do we go to get on the
heliport?).
(There are stairs.)
They slipped out of the elevator
just as it chimed and its doors shut again—probably the guard
had called it from downstairs. The corridor off to the left was
featureless except for one door at its very end. helipad access,
the door said in large red letters. Nita tried the knob, then let
her hand fall in exasperation. (Locked, Crud!)
(Well, wait a moment,) Kit said, and tried the knob himself.
“You don’t really want to be locked, do you?” he
said aloud in the Speech, very quietly. Again Nita was amazed by
how natural the wizards’ language sounded when you heard it,
and how nice it was to hear—as if, after being lost in a
foreign country for a long time, someone should suddenly speak
warmly to you in English. “You’ve been locked for a
couple of days now,” Kit went on, his voice friendly and
persuasive, not casting a spell, just talking—though in the
Speech, the two were often dangerously close. “It must be
pretty dull being locked, no one using you, no one paying any
attention. Now we need to use you at least a couple of times this
morning, so we thought we’d ask—” Kt-chk! said the lock, and the knob turned in Kit’s
hand. “Thank you,” he said. “We’ll be back
later.” He went through the door into the stairwell, Nita and
Fred following, and as the door swung to behind them and locked
itself again, there was a decidedly friendly sound to the click.
Kit grinned triumphantly at Nita as they climbed the stairs.
“How about that?”
“Not bad,” Nita said, determined to learn how to do
it herself, if possible, “You’ve been practicing
too.”
“Not really—some of this stuff just seems to come
naturally as you work with it more. My mother locked herself out of
the car at the supermarket last week and I was pulling on the car
door and talking at it—you know how you do when you’re
trying to get something to work. And then it worked. I almost fell
over, the door came open so fast. It’s the Speech that does
it, I think. Everything loves to hear it.”
“Remember what Carl said, though.”
“I know. I won’t overdo it. You think we ought to
call him later, let him know what happened to the gate?”
They came to the top of the stairs, paused before the next
closed door, breathing hard from the exertion of climbing the
stairs fast. “Probably he knows, if he’s looked at his
book this morning,” Nita said. “Look, before we do
anything else, let’s set the timeslide. This is a good place
for it; we’re out of sight. When we’re tired of running
around the city, we can just activate it and we’ll be back
here at quarter of eleven. Then we just go downstairs, into Grand
Central and downstairs to the shuttle, and then home in time for
lunch.”
“Sounds good.” They began rummaging in their
backpacks, and before too long had produced the eight and a half
sugar cubes, the lithium-cadmium battery—a fat
one, bigger than a D cell and far heavier—a specific
integrated-circuit chip salvaged from the innards of a dead
pocket calculator, the handle of a broken glass teacup. “You
might want to back away a little, Fred, so your emissions
don’t interfere with the spell,” Kit said.
(Right.) Fred retreated high up into one ceiling-corner of
the stairwell, flaring bright with interest. There was a brief
smell of burning as he accidentally vaporized a cobweb.
“All right,” Kit said, thumbing through his manual
to a page marked with a bit of ripped-up newspaper,
“here we go. This is a timeslide inauguration,” he said
aloud in the Speech. “Claudication type
mesarrh—gimel—veingt—six, authorization
group—”
Nita swallowed, feeling the strangeness set in
as it had during their first spell together, feeling the walls lean
in to listen. But it was not a silence that fell this time. As Kit
spoke, she became aware of a roaring away at the edge of her
hearing and a blurring at the limits of her vision. Both effects
grew and strengthened to the overwhelming point almost before she
realized what was happening. And then it was too late. She was
seeing and hearing everything that would happen for miles and miles
around at quarter to eleven, as if the building were transparent,
as if she had eyes that could pierce stone and ears that could hear
a leaf fall blocks away. The words and thoughts of a million minds
poured down on her in a roaring onslaught like a wave crashing down
on a swimmer, and she was washed away, helpless. Too many sights,
commonplace and strange, glad and frightening, jostled and
crowded all around her, and squeezing her eyes shut made no
difference—the sights were in her mind. I’ll go crazy,
I’ll go crazy, stop it! But she was caught in the spell and
couldn’t budge. Stop it, oh, let it stop—
It stopped. She was staring at the floor between her and Kit as
she had been doing when the flood of feelings swept over her.
Everything was the same as it had been, except that the sugar was
gone. Kit was looking at her in concern. “You all
right?” he said. “You look a little green.”
“Uh, yeah.” Nita rubbed her head, which ached
slightly as if with the memory of a very loud sound.
“What happened to the sugar?”
“It went away. That means the spell took.” Kit began
gathering up the rest of the materials and stowing them,
He looked at her again. “Are you sure you’re
okay?”
“Yeah, I’m fine.” She got up, looked around
restlessly. “C’mon, let’s go.”
Kit got up too, shrugging into his backpack. “Yeah. Which
way is the—”
crack! went something against the door outside, and Nita’s
insides contracted. She and Kit both threw themselves against the
wall behind the door, where they would be hidden if it opened. For
a few seconds neither of them dared to breathe.
Nothing happened.
(What was that?) Kit asked.
(I don’t know. It sounded like a shot. Lord, Kit what if
there’s somebody up here with a gun or something—)
(What’s a gun?) Fred said.
(You don’t want to know,) Kit said. (Then again, if there
was somebody out there with a gun, I doubt they could hurt you.
Fred, would you go out there and have a quick look around? See
who’s there?)
(Why not?) Fred floated down from the ceiling, looked the door
over, put his light out, and slipped through the keyhole. For a
little while there was silence, broken only by the faint faraway
rattle of a helicopter going by, blocks away.
Then the lock glowed a little from inside, and Fred popped back
in. (I don’t see anyone out there,) he said.
Kit looked at Nita. (Then what made that noise?)
She was as puzzled as he was. She shrugged. (Well, if Fred says
there’s nothing out there—)
(I suppose. But let’s keep our eyes open.)
Kit coaxed the door open as he had the first one, and the three
of them stepped cautiously out onto the roof.
Most of it was occupied by the helipad proper, the long wide
expanse of bare tarmac ornamented with its big yellow
square-and-H symbol and surrounded by blue
low-intensity landing lights. At one end of the oblong pad
was a small glass-walled building decorated with the Pan Am
logo, a distended orange windsock, and an anemometer, its
three little cups spinning energetically in the brisk morning wind.
Beyond the helipad, the roof was graveled, and various
low-set ventilator stacks poked up here and there. A
yard-high guardrail edged the roof. Rising up on all sides
was Manhattan, a stony forest of buildings in all shapes and
heights. To the west glimmered the Hudson River and the Palisades
on the New Jersey side; on the other side of the building lay the
East River and Brooklyn and Queens, veiled in mist and pinkish
smog. The Sun would have felt warm if the wind had stopped
blowing. No one was up there at all.
Nita took a few steps off the paved walkway that led to the
little glass building and scuffed at the gravel suspiciously.
“This wind is pretty stiff,” she said. “Maybe a
good gust of it caught some of this gravel and threw it at the
door.” But even as she said it, she didn’t believe
it.
“Maybe,” Kit said. His voice made it plain that he
didn’t believe it either “Come on, let’s find the
gate.”
“That side,” Nita said, pointing south, where the
building was wider. They headed toward the railing together,
crunching across the gravel. Fred perched on Nita’s shoulder;
she looked at him with affection. “Worried?”
(No. But you are.)
“A little. That sound shook me up.” She paused
again, wondering if she heard something behind her. She turned.
Nothing; the roof was bare. But still—Nita turned back and
hurried to catch up with Kit, who was looking back at her.
“Something?”
“I don’t know. I doubt it. You know how you see
things out of the corner of your eye, movements that aren’t
there? I thought maybe the door moved a little.”
“I don’t know about you,” Kit said, “but
I’m not going to turn my back on anything while I’m up
here. Fred, keep your eyes open.” Kit paused by the railing,
examining the ledge below it, maybe six feet wide, then looked up
again. “On second thought, do you have eyes?”
(I don’t know,) Fred said, confused but courteous as
always. (Do you have chelicerae?)
“Good question,” Nita said, a touch nervously.
“Kit, let’s do this and get out of here.”
He nodded, unslung his pack, and laid the aspirin, pine cone,
and fork on the gravel by the railing. Nita got out the rowan wand
and dropped it with the other materials, while Kit went through his
book again, stopping at another marked spot. “Okay,” he
said after a moment. “This is an
imaging-and-patency spell for a temporospatial
claudication, asdekh class. Purpose: retrieval of an accidentally
internalized object, matter-energy
quotient . . . ” Kit read a long string
of syllables, a description in the Speech of Nita’s pen,
followed by another symbol group that meant Fred and described the
properties of the little personal worldgate that kept his
great mass at a great distance.
Nita held her breath, waiting for another onslaught of uncanny
feelings, but none ensued. When Kit stopped reading and the spell
turned her loose, it was almost a surprise to see, hanging there in
the air, the thing they had been looking for. Puckered, roughly
oblong, vaguely radiant, an eight-foot scar on the sky; the
worldgate, about a hundred feet out from the edge where they stood
and maybe thirty feet below the heliport level.
“Well,” Kit said then, sounding very pleased with
himself. “There we are. And it looks all right, not much
different from the description in the book.”
“Now all we have
to do is get to it.” Nita picked up the rowan wand, which for
the second part of the spell would serve as a key to get the pen
through the worldgate and out of Fred. She tucked the wand into her
belt, leaned on the railing, and looked out at the air.
According to the wizards’ manual, air, like the other
elements, had a memory and could be
convinced in the Speech to revert to something it had
been before. It was this memory of being
locked in stone as oxides or nitrates, or
frozen solid in the deeps of space, that made the air harden
briefly for the spell. Nita started
that spell in its simplest form and then went on into a more formal
one, as much a reminiscence as a convincing—she talked to the
air about the old days when starlight wouldn’t twinkle
because there was nothing to make it do so, and when every shadow
was sharp as a razor and distances didn’t look distant
because there was no air to soften them. The immobility came down
around her as the spell began to say itself along with Nita,
matching her cadence. She kept her eyes closed, not looking, for
fear something that should be happening might not be. Slowly with
her words she began to shape the hardening air into an oblong,
pushing it out through the other, thinner air she wasn’t
including in the spell. It’s working better than usual,
faster, she thought. Maybe it’s all the smog here—this
air’s half solid already. She kept talking.
Kit whispered something, but she couldn’t make out what
and didn’t want to try. “I know it’s a strain,
being solid these days,” she whispered in the Speech,
“but just for a little while, just to make a walkway out to
that puckered place in the sky, then you can relax. Nothing
too thick, just strong enough to walk on—”
“Nita. Nita!”
The sound of her name in the Speech caught her attention. She
opened her eyes. Arrow-straight, sloping down from the lower
curb of the railing between her and Kit, the air had gone hard.
There was dirt and smog trapped in it, making the sudden walkway
more translucent than transparent—but there was no mistaking
it for anything but air. It had a more delicate, fragile look than
any glass ever could, no matter how thin. The walkway ran smooth
and even all the way out to the worldgate, widening beneath it into
room enough for two to stand.
“Wow!” Nita said, sagging against the railing and
rubbing at her eyes as she let the spell go. She was tired; the
spelling was a strain—and that feeling of nervousness left
over from the loud noise outside the stairwell came back. She
glanced over her shoulder again, wondering just what she was
looking for.
Kit peered over the railing at the walkway. “This better
be some pen,” he said, and turned his back to the worldgate,
watching the roof. “Go ahead.”
Nita made sure her backpack was slung properly, checked the
rowan wand again, and slowly swung over the guardrail, balancing on
the stone in which it was rooted. She was shaking, and her hands
were wet. If I don’t just do this, she thought, I never will.
Just one step down, Callahan, and then a nice solid walkway
straight across. Really. Believe. Believe. Ouch!
The air was so transparent that she misjudged the distance down
to it—her foot hit before she thought it would, and the jolt
went right up her spine—Still holding the railing, Nita
lifted that foot a bit, then stomped down hard on the walkway. It
was no different from stomping on a sidewalk. She let her
weight down on that foot, brought the second down, and stomped with
that too. It was solid.
“It’s solid as rock, Kit!” she said, looking
up at him, still holding the rail.
“Sure,” Kit said, skeptical. “Let go of the
rail first.”
Nita made a face at Kit and let go. She held both arms out at
first, as she might have on a balance beam in gym, and then waved
them experimentally. “See? It works. Fred?”
Fred bobbed down besides her, looking with interest at the
hardened air of the walkway. (And it will stay this way?)
“Until I turn it loose. Well?” She took a step
backward, farther onto the walkway, and looked up challengingly.
“How about it?”
Kit said nothing, just slung his own backpack over his shoulders
and swung over the railing as Nita had done, coming down cautiously
on the hardened air. He held on to the rail for a moment while
conducting his own tests of the air’s solidity. “Come
on,” Nita said. “The wind’s not too
bad.”
“Lead the way.”
Nita turned around, still holding her arms a little away from
her to be sure of her balance, and started for the worldgate as
quickly as she dared, with Fred pacing her cheerfully to the left.
Eight or ten steps more and it was becoming almost easy. She even
glanced down toward the walkway—and there she stopped very
suddenly, her stomach turning right over in her at the sight of the
dirty, graveled roof of Grand Central, a long, long, long fall
below. “Don’t look down,” a memory said to her in
Machu Picchu’s scratchy voice. She swallowed, shaking all
over, wishing she had remembered the advice earlier.
“Nita, what’s the—”
Something went whack! into the walkway. Nita jumped, lost her
balance, and staggered back into Kit. For a few awful seconds they
teetered back and forth in wind that gusted suddenly, pushing them
toward the edge together—and then Kit sat down hard on the
walkway, and Nita half fell on top of him, and they held very still
for a few gasps.
“Wh-what—”
“I think it was a pigeon,” Nita said, not caring
whether Kit heard the tremulousness of her voice. “You
okay?”
“Sure,” Kit said, just as shakily. “I try to
have a heart attack every day either I need one or not. Get off my
knee, huh?”
They picked each other up and headed for the gate again. (Even
you have trouble with gravity,) Fred said wonderingly as he paced
them. (I’m glad I left my mass elsewhere.)
“So are we,” Nita said. She hurried the last twenty
steps or so to the place at the end
of the walkway, with Kit following close.
She knelt down in a hurry, to make sure the wind wouldn’t
push her over, and looked up at the worldgate. Seen this close it
was about four feet by eight, the shape of a tear in a piece of
cloth. It shone with a glowing, shifting, soap-bubble
iridescence. Finally, finally, my pen! she thought—but
somehow, the thought didn’t make Nita as happy as it should
have. The uneasy feeling that had started in the stairwell was
still growing She glanced over her shoulder at Kit. He was kneeling
too, with his back to her, watching the walkway and the rooftop
intently. Beside her, Fred hummed softly, quietly waiting.
(Now what?) he asked.
Nita sighed, pulled the rowan rod out of her belt, and inserted
one end of it delicately into the shimmering veil that was the
surface of the worldgate. Though the city skyline could be seen
very clearly through the shimmer, the inch or so of the wand that
went through it appeared to vanish. “Just perch yourself on
the free end here,” Nita said, holding the wand by its
middle. “Make contact with it the same way you did with those
keys. Okay?”
(Simple enough.) Fred floated to the end of the rod and lit
there, a bright, still spark. (All right, I’m ready.)
Nita nodded. “This is a retrieval,” she said in the
Speech. “Involvement confined to a pen with the following
characteristics: m’sedh—zayin six point
three—”
(Nita!)
The note of pure terror in Kit’s mind-voice caused
Nita to do the unforgivable—break off in the middle of a
spell and look over her shoulder. Shapes were pouring out of the
little glass shelter building, which had been empty, and was still
somehow empty even as Nita looked. She got a first impression of
grizzled coats, red tongues that lolled and slavered, fangs that
gleamed in the sunlight, and she thought, Wolves!
But their eyes changed her mind as ten or twelve of the
creatures loped across the roof toward the transparent walkway,
giving tongue in an awful mindless cacophony of snarls and barks
and shuddering howls. The eyes. People’s eyes, blue, brown,
green, but with almost all the intelligence gone out of them,
nothing left but a hot deadly cunning and an awful desire for the
taste of blood. From her reading in the wizards’ manual, she
knew what they were: perytons. Wolves would have been
preferable—wolves were sociable creatures. These had been
people once, people so used to hating that at the end of life
they’d found a way to keep doing it, by hunting the souls of
others through their nightmares. And once a peryton caught
you . . .
Nita started to hitch backward in total panic and then froze,
realizing that there was nowhere to go. She and Kit were trapped.
Another second and the perytons would be on the bridge, and at
their throats, for eternity. Kit whipped his head around
toward Nita and the worldgate. “Jump through and break the
spell!” he yelled.
“But—” And she grabbed his arm, pushed the
rowan wand through and yelled,
“Come on, Fred!” The first three perytons leaped the
guard-rail and landed on the bridge,
running. Nita threw herself and Kit at the gate, being careful of
the edges, as she knew she must, while screaming in absolute terror
the word that would dissolve the walkway proper. For a fraction of
a second she caught the sound of screams other than her own, howls
of creatures unseen but falling. Then the shimmer broke against her
face like water, shutting out sound, and light, and finally
thought.
Blinded, deafened, and alone, she fell
forever . . .
The week went by quickly for Nita. Though Carl had made the
business of opening a worldgate sound fairly simple, she began to
suspect that he’d been doing it so long that it actually
seemed that way to him. It wasn’t simple, as her book told
her as soon as she opened to the pertinent chapter, which was forty
pages long in small print.
Grand Central worldgate had its own special requirements:
specific supplies and objects that had to be present at an
opening so that space would be properly bent, spells that had to be
learned just so. The phone calls flew between Nita’s house
and Kit’s for a couple of days, and there was a lot of
visiting back and forth as they divided up the work. Nita spent a
lot of time keeping Fred from being noticed by her family, and also
got to see a lot of Kit’s mother and father and sisters, all
of whom were very friendly and kept forgetting that Nita
couldn’t speak Spanish. She started to learn a little of it
in self-defense. Kit’s dog told her the brand of dog
biscuits it could never get enough of; she began bringing them with
her when she visited. The dog spoke the Speech with a Spanish
accent, and would constantly interrupt Kit and Nita as they
discussed who should do what in the spelling. Kit wound up with
most of the spoken work, since he had been using the Speech longer
and was better at it; Nita picked up supplies.
“You ever swallow anything accidentally before,
Fred?” Nita said under her breath. It was late Friday
afternoon, and she was in a little antiques-and-junk
store on Nassau Road, going through boxes of dusty odds and ends in
search of a real silver fork. Fred was hanging over her shoulder,
almost invisible, a faint red point lazily emitting heat.
(Not for a long time) he said, glancing curiously at a
pressed-glass salt-cellar Nita was holding. (Not since
I was a black hole, certainly. Black holes know everything, but a
white hole’s business is emission. Within limits,) he added,
and the air around him rippled with heat as he shuddered. (I
don’t ever again want to emit the way I did after your pen
went down. Some of those things hurt on the way out. And anyway,
all that emission makes me nervous. Too much of that kind of thing
and I could blow my quanta.)
She looked up at him, worried. “Really? Have you emitted
that much stuff that you’re in danger of blowing
up?”
(Oh, not really—I’d have to lose a lot more mass
first. After all, before I was a black hole, I was a
respectable-sized blue-white star, and even those days
I massed a few hundred thousand times what your cute little
yellow-dwarf Sun does. I wouldn’t worry about
it—I’m nowhere near the critical threshold yet.)
“ ‘Cute’?” Nita said.
(Well, it is . . . And I suppose
there’s no harm in getting better at emissions. I have been
improving a lot. What’s that?)
Nita looked farther down in the box, dug deep, and came up with
a battered old fork. It was scratched and its lines were bent out
of shape, but it was definitely silver, not stainless steel.
“That’s what I needed,” she said. “Thanks, Fred. Now all I need is that piece of rowan wood,
and then tonight I go over my part of the spells again.”
(You sound worried.)
“Well, yeah, a little,” Nita said, getting up. All
that week her ability to hear what the plants were saying had been
getting stronger and surer; the better she got with the Speech, the
more sense the bushes and trees made.
“It’s just—the rowan branch has to come off a
live tree, Fred, and I can’t just pick it—that’d
be like walking up to someone and pulling one of their fingers off.
I have to ask for it. And if the tree won’t give it to
me . . . ”
(Then you don’t get your pen back, at least not for a
while) Fred shimmered with colors and a feeling like a sigh.
(I am a trouble to you.)
“Fred, no. Put your light out a moment so we can get out
of here.” Nita interrupted the shopkeeper’s intense
concentration on a Gothic novel long enough to find out what the
fork cost (a dollar) and buy it. A few steps outside the door, Fred
was pacing her again. “If you’re trouble, you’re
the best trouble that’s happened around here for a while.
You’re good to talk to, you’re good company—when
you don’t forget and start emitting cosmic
rays—”
Fred blazed momentarily, blushing at Nita’s teasing. In an
excited moment the night before he had forgotten himself and
emitted a brief blast of ultrashortwave radiation, which had heated up
Nita’s backyard a good bit and ionized the air for miles around, and produced a
local but brilliant aurora. (Well, it’s
an old habit, and old habits die hard. I’m working on
it.)
“Heat we don’t mind so much. Or ultraviolet, the
longwave kind doesn’t hurt people’s eyes,”
(You fluoresce when I use that,
though . . . )
Nita laughed. “I don’t mind fluorescing. Though on
second thought, don’t do that where anyone but Kit can see. I
doubt my mother’d understand.”
They walked home together, chatting alternately about life in
the suburbs and life in a part of deep space close to the Great
Galactic Rift. Nita felt more relaxed than she had for months.
Joanne had been out of sight since Monday afternoon at Tom and
Carl’s. Even if she hadn’t, Nita had been practicing
with that body shield, so that now she could run through the
syllables of the spell in a matter of seconds and nothing short of
a bomb dropped on her could hurt her. She could even extend the
spell to cover someone else, though it wasn’t quite so
effective; she had a harder time convincing the air to harden up.
But even that lessened protection would come in handy if she and
Kit should be in trouble together at some point and there was no
time to cooperate in a spelling. Not that she was expecting any
more trouble. The excitement of a trip into the city was already
catching at her. And this wasn’t just another shopping trip.
Magic was loose in the world, and she was going to help work
some . . .
She ate supper and did her homework almost without thinking
about either, and as a result had to do much of the math homework
twice. By the time she was finished, the sun was down and the
backyard was filling with a cool blue twilight, In the front of the
house, her mother and father and Dairine were watching TV as Nita
walked out the side door and stood on the step, letting her eyes
get used to the dimness and looking east at the rising Moon. Canned
laughter echoed inside the house as Fred appeared by her
shoulder.
(My, that’s bright for something that doesn’t emit
heat) Fred said, looking at the Moon too.
“Reflected sunlight,” Nita said absently.
(You’re going to talk to the tree now?)
“Uh huh.”
(Then I’ll go stay with the others and watch that funny
box emit. Maybe I’ll figure out what it’s trying to get
across)
“Good luck,” Nita said as Fred winked out. She
walked around into the yard.
Spring stars were coming out as she stood in the middle of the
lawn and looked down the length of the yard at the rowan, a great
round-crowned tree snowy with white flowers. Nita’s
stomach tightened slightly with nervousness. It had been a long
time ago, according to her manual, that the trees had
to war on mankind’s behalf,
against the dark powers that wanted to
prevent human intelligence from happening
at all. The war had been a terrible one,
lasting thousands of centuries—the trees and other plants
taking more and more land, turning barren
stone to soil that would support them and the animals and men to
follow; the dark powers breaking the soil with earthquake and
mountain building, scouring it with glaciers, climate-changing good
ground for desert, and burning away forests in firestorms far more
terrible than the small brushfires any forest needs to stay
healthy. But the trees and the other plants had won at last.
They had spent many more centuries readying the world for
men—but when men came, they forgot the old debts and wasted
the forests more terribly than even the old dark powers. Trees had
no particular reason to be friendly to people these days. Nita
found herself thinking of that first tree that had spoken to her,
angry over the destruction of its friend’s artwork. Even
though the rowan tree had always been well tended, she wasn’t
certain how it was going to respond to her. With the other ash
trees, rowans had been in the forefront of the Battle; and they had
long memories.
Nita sighed and sat down under the tree, book in hand, her back
against its trunk. There was no need to start right away,
anyhow—she needed a little while to recover from her
homework. The stars looked at her through the rowan’s
windstirred branches, getting brighter by the minute. There was
that one pair of stars that always looked like eyes, they were so
close together. It was one of the three little pairs associated
with the Big Dipper. The Leaps of the Gazelle, the ancient Arabs
had called them, seeing them as three sets of hoofprints left in
the sky. “Kafza’at al Thiba,” Nita murmured, the
old Arabic name. Her eyes wandered down toward the horizon, finding
a faint reddish gleam. “Regulus.” And a whiter gleam,
higher: “Arcturus.” And another, and another, old
friends, with new names in the Speech, that she spoke silently,
remembering Carl’s warning:
(Elthathte . . . ur’Senaahel . . . )
The distant fires flickered among shadowy leaves.
(Lahirien . . . )
(And Methchane and Ysen and Cahadhwy and
Rasaug’hil . . . They are nice tonight.)
Nita looked up hurriedly. The tree above her was leaning back
comfortably on its roots, finished with the stretching-upward
of growth for the day, and gazing at the stars as she was. (I was
hoping that haze would clear off) it said as silently as Nita had
spoken, in a slow, relaxed drawl. (This will be a good night for
talking to the wind. And other such transient creatures. I was
wondering when you were going to come out and pay your respects,
wizardling.)
(Uh—) Nita was reassured: the rowan sounded friendly,
(it’s been a busy week.)
(You never used to be too busy for me,) the rowan said, its
whispery voice sounding ever so slightly wounded. (Always up in my
branches you were, and falling out of them again. Or swinging. But
I suppose you outgrew me.)
Nita sat quiet for a moment, remembering how it had been when
she was littler. She would swing for hours on end, talking to
herself, pretending all kinds of things,
talking to the tree and the world in general. And
some . . . (You talked back!) she said in
shocked realization. (You did, I wasn’t making it up.)
(Certainly I talked. You were talking to me, after
all . . . Don’t be surprised. Small
children look at things and see them, listen to things and hear
them. Of course they understand the Speech. Most of them never
realize it any more than you did. It’s when they get older,
and stop looking and listening, that they lose the Speech, and we
lose them) The rowan sighed, many leaves showing pale undersides
as the wind moved them. (None of us are ever happy about losing our
children. But every now and then we get one of you back.)
(All that in the book was true, then,) Nita said. (About the
Battle of the Trees—)
(Certainly. Wasn’t it written in the Book of Night with
Moon that this world’s life would become free to roam among
our friends there)—the rowan stretched upward toward the
turning stars for a moment—(if we helped? After the world was
green and ready, we waited for a long time. We started letting all
sorts of strange creatures live in our branches after they came up
out of the water. We watched them all; we never knew which of our
guests would be the children we were promised. And then all of a
sudden one odd-looking group of creatures went down out of
our branches, and looked upward again, and called us by name
in the Speech. Your kind . . . ) The tree
looked down musingly at Nita. (You’re still an
odd-looking lot,) it said.
Nita sat against the rowan and felt unhappy. (We weren’t
so kind to you) she said. (And if it weren’t for the plants,
we wouldn’t be here)
(Don’t be downcast, wizardling,) the tree said, gazing up
at the sky again. (It isn’t your fault. And in any case, we
knew what fate was in store for us. It was written in the
Book.)
(Wait a minute. You mean you knew we were going to start
destroying your kind, and you got the world ready for us
anyway?)
(How could we do otherwise? You are our children.)
(But . . . we make our houses out of you,
we—) Nita looked guiltily at the book she was holding. (We
kill you and we write on your bodies!)
The rowan continued to gaze up at the night sky. (Well,) it
said. (We are all in the Book together, after all. Don’t you
think that we wrote enough in the rock and the soil, in our day?
And we still do. We have our own lives, our feelings and goals. Some of them you
may learn by your wizardry, but I doubt you’ll ever come to
know them all. We do what we have to, to live. Sometimes that means
breaking a rock’s heart, or pushing roots down into the
ground that screams against the intrusion. But we never forget what
we’re doing. As for you)—and its voice became very
gentle—(how else should our children climb to the stars but
up our branches? We made our peace with that fact a long time ago,
that we would be used and maybe forgotten. So be it. What you learn
in your climbing will make all the life on this planet greater,
more precious. You have your own stories to write. And when it
comes to that, who writes the things written in your body, your
life? And who reads?) It breathed out, a long sigh of leaves in the
wind. (Our cases aren’t that much different.)
Nita sat back and tried to absorb what the tree was saying. (The
Book of Night with Moon,) she said after a while. (Do you know who
wrote it?)
The rowan was silent for a long time. (None of us are sure,) it
said at last. (Our legends say it wasn’t written. It’s
simply been, as long as life has been. Since they were kindled, and
before.) It gazed upward at the stars.
(Then the other Book, the dark one—)
The whole tree shuddered. (That one was written, they say.) The
rowan’s voice dropped to a whisper. (By the Lone
Power—the Witherer, the one who blights. The Kindler of
Wildfires. Don’t ask more. Even talking about that one or its
works can lend it power.)
Nita sat quiet for a while, thinking. (You came to ask
something,) the rowan said. (Wizards are always asking things of
rowans.)
(Uh, yes.)
(Don’t worry about it,) the rowan said. (When we decided
to be trees of the Light, we knew we were going to be in
demand.)
(Well—I need some live wood. Just enough for a stick, a
little wand. We’re going to open the Grand Central worldgate
tomorrow morning.)
Above Nita’s head there was a sharp cracking sound. She
pressed back against the trunk, and a short straight branch about a
foot and a half long bounced to the grass in front of her. (The
Moon is almost full tonight,) the rowan said. (If I were you,
I’d peel the leaves and bark off that twig and leave it out
to soak up moonlight. I don’t think it’ll hurt the
wood’s usefulness for your spelling, and it may make it more
valuable later on.)
(Thank you, yes,) Nita said. The book had mentioned something of
the sort—a rowan rod with a night’s moonlight in it
could be used for some kind of defense. She would look up the
reference later. (I guess I should go in and check my spells over
one more time. I’m awfully new at this.)
(Go on,) the tree said, with affection. Nita picked up the stick
that the rowan had dropped for her, got up and stretched, looking
up at the stars through the branches. On impulse she reached up,
hooked an arm around the branch that had had the swing on it.
(I guess I could still come and climb sometimes,) she said.
She felt the tree looking at her, (My name in the Speech is
Liused,) it said in leafrustle and starflicker. (If there’s
need, remember me to the trees in Manhattan. You won’t be
without help if you need it.)
“I’m Nita,” she said in the Speech, aloud for
this once. The syllables didn’t sound strange: they sounded
like a native language and made English feel like a foreign tongue.
For a moment every leaf on the tree quivered with her name,
speaking it in a whispery echo.
(Go,) the rowan said again. (Rest well.) It turned its calm
regard to the stars again.
Nita went back inside.
Saturday morning about eight, Kit and Nita and Fred took the bus
down to the Long Island Railroad station and caught a shiny silver
train for Manhattan. The train was full of the usual cargo of
Saturday travelers and shoppers, none of whom paid any
particular attention to the boy and girl sitting by one window,
going over the odd contents of their backpacks with great care.
Also apparently unnoticed was a faint spark of white light hanging
in the center of the window between the two, gazing out in
fascination at the backyards and parking lots and stores the train
passed.
(What are all those dead hunks of metal there? All piled
up?)
(Cars, Fred.)
(I thought cars moved.)
(They did, once.)
(They all went there to die?)
(They were dead when they got there, probably.)
(But they’ve all climbed on top of each other! When they
were dead?)
(No, Fred. They have machines—)
(What was that? There are three—I don’t know who
those were, but they have them shut up in a box hanging from that
long thing.)
(No one you know, Fred. That was a traffic light.)
(It was emitting—Look, he’s trying to say something!
Hello! Hello!)
(Fred, you’re flashing! Calm down or someone’ll see
you!)
(Well, I don’t know what a nice guy like him was doing in
a place like that.)
Nita sighed out loud, “Where were we?” she said to
Kit.
“The battery.”
“Right. Well, here it is.”
“Lithium-cadmium?”
“Right. Heavy thing, it weighs more than anything else
we’ve got that last thing for activating the piece of time,
isn’t it? What more. The eight and a half sugar
cubes.”
Nita held up a little plastic bag. “Now the worldgate stuff. The
pine cone—”
“Bristlecone pine.” Nita held it up, then dropped it
in her backpack.
“Aspirin.”
“Uh-huh.”
“The fork.”
“Here.”
“The rowan branch.”
“Yup.” She held it up. Cut down and peeled, it was
about a foot long, a greenish-white wand.
“Great. Then we’re set. You’ve got all that
other stuff, why don’t you give me the battery?”
“Here.” Nita handed it to him, watched as he found a
good spot for it in his backpack, under the sandwiches.
“What’s that?” she said, spotting something
that hadn’t been accounted for in the equipment tally.
“Huh? Oh, this.” He reached in and brought out a
slim piece of metal like a slender rod, with a small knob at one
end and broken off jaggedly at the other.
“What is it?”
“A piece of junk. A busted-off car antenna.
Well,” Kit amended, “it was, anyway. I was sitting out
behind the garage yesterday afternoon, reading, and I started
talking to my dad’s old car. He has this ancient Edsel.
He’s always talking about getting it reconditioned, but I
don’t think he’s really going to—there’s
never enough money. Anyway he goes out every now and then to work
on the engine, usually when he’s tired or mad about
something. I don’t know if he ever really gets any work done,
but he always comes inside greasy all over and feeling a lot
better. But I was going over the spells in my head, and the car
spoke to me in the Speech—”
“Out loud?”
“No, inside, like Fred does. Kind of a grindy noise, like
its voice needed a lube job. I wasn’t too surprised; that
kind of thing has been happening since I picked the book up. First
it was rocks, and then things started to talk to me when I picked
them up. They would tell me where they’d been and who’d
handled them. Anyway, the car and I started talking,” Kit
paused, looking a touch guilty. “They don’t see things
the way we do. We made them, and they don’t understand why
most of the time we make things and then just let them wear out and
throw them away afterward . . . ”
Nita nodded, wondering briefly whether the train was alive too.
Certainly it was as complex as a car. “What about this
antenna thing, though?” she said after a moment.
“Oh. The car said to take it for luck. It was just lying
there on the ground, rusting. Dad replaced the antenna a long time
ago. So I took it inside and cleaned it up, and there are some
wizardries you can do with metal, to remind it of the different
forces it felt when it was being made. I did a couple of those.
Partly just practicing,
partly . . . ”
“You thought there might be trouble,” Nita said.
Kit looked at her, surprised. “I don’t know,”
he said. “I’m going to be careful anyway. Carl was
pretty definite about not messing around with the worldgate; I wasn’t thinking
about anything like that. But it occurred to me, it’ll be
easy to carry the antenna to school if I wanted to. And if anyone
started bothering me—” He shrugged, then laughed.
“Well, that’s their problem. Hey, look, we’re
getting close to that big curve where you can see the city before
you go under the river. Come on, these trains have a window in the
very front of the first car. Fred! Want to see where we’re
going?”
(Why not? Maybe I’ll understand it better than where
we’ve been.)
Kit and Nita wriggled into their backpacks and made their way up
through a couple of cars, hanging on carefully as they crossed the
chained walkways between them. Treetops and housetops flashed by in
a rush of wind and clatter of rails. Each time Nita touched the
bare metal of the outside of the train, she jumped a little,
feeling something, she wasn’t quite sure what. The train? she
thought. Thinking? And now that I’m aware that it does, I can
feel it a little?—though not as clearly as the trees. Maybe
my specialty is going to be things that grow and Kit’s is
going to be things that run. But how many other kinds of life are
there that I could learn to feel? Who knows where thought is
hiding? . . .
They went into the first car and made their way up to the front
window, carefully hanging on to the seats of oblivious riders to
keep the swaying of the train from knocking them over. There were
no more stops between there and Penn Station, and the train was
plunging along, the rails roaring beneath it. Those rails climbed
gradually as the already elevated track went higher still to avoid
a triple-stacked freeway. Then the rails bent away to the
left in a long graceful curve, still climbing slightly; and little
by little, over the low brown cityscape of Brooklyn, the towers of
Manhattan rose glittering in the early sunlight. Gray and crystal
for the Empire State Building, silver-blue for the odd
sheared-off Citibank building, silver-gold for the twin
square pillars of the World Trade Center, and steely white fire for
the scalloped tower of the Chrysler Building as it caught the Sun.
The place looked magical enough in the bright morning. Nita grinned
to herself, looking at the view and realizing that there was magic
there. That forest of towers opened onto other worlds. One day she
would open that worldgate by herself and go somewhere.
Fred stared at the towers, amazed. (This is more life? More even
than the place where you two live?)
(Ten million lives in the city, Fred. Maybe four or five million
on that island alone.)
(Doesn’t it worry you, packing all that life together?
What if a meteor hits—What if there’s a starflare? If
something should happen to all that life—how terrible!)
Nita laughed to herself. (It
doesn’t seem to worry them . . . ) Beside
her, Fred was hanging on to a seat, being
rocked back and forth by the train’s speed. Very faintly Nita
could hear what Kit heard and felt more strongly; the train’s
aliveness, its wild rushing joy at doing what it was made to
do—its dangerous pleasure in its speed, the wind it fought
with, the rails it rode. Nita shook her head in happy wonder. And I
wanted to see the life on other planets. There’s more life in
this world than I expected . . .
(It’s beautiful,) Fred said from his vantage point just
above Kit’s shoulder.
“It really is,” Nita said, very quiet.
The train howled defiant joy and plunged into the darkness under
the river.
Penn Station was thick with people when they got there, but even
so it took them only a few minutes to get down to the Seventh
Avenue Subway station and from there up to Times Square and the
shuttle to Grand Central. The shuttle ride was short and crowded.
Nita and Kit and Fred were packed tight together in a corner, where
they braced themselves against walls and seats and other people
while the train shouted along through the echoing underground
darkness.
(I can’t feel the Sun,) Fred said, sounding worried.
(We’re ten or twenty feet underground,) Nita said
silently. (We’ll get you some Sun as soon as we get off.)
Kit looked at Fred with concern. (You’ve been twitchy ever
since we went into the tunnel, haven’t you?)
Fred didn’t speak for a moment. (I miss the openness,) he
said then. (But worse I miss the feeling of your star on me. Where
I come from no one is scaled away from the surrounding emissions.)
He trailed off, his thoughts full of the strange hiss and crackle
of interstellar radiation—subtly patterned sound, rushing and
dying away and swelling up again—the Speech in yet another of
its forms. Starsong, Nita thought. (You said you heard about the
Book of Night with Moon,) she said. (Was that how?
Your . . . friends, your people, they actually
talk to each other over all those distances—millions of
light—years?)
(That’s right. Not that we use light to do it, of course.
But the words, the song, they never stop. Except now. I can hardly
hear anything but neutrinos . . . )
Kit and Nita glanced at each other. (The worldgate is
underground, Fred,) Kit said. (In back of a deli, a little store.
We’ll have to be there for at least a few minutes to get
Nita’s pen out.)
(We could go out first and look around,) Nita said. (We’re
early—it’s only nine thirty. We don’t even have
to think about anchoring the timeslide for a little bit yet.)
The subway cars screeched to a halt, doors rolled open, and the
crush loosened as people piled out. Nita got off gladly, looking
around for directional signs to point the way toward the concourse
level of Grand Central—it had been a while since she’d
been there.
“Are you sure you know your way around this place?”
Kit said as Nita headed down one torn-up looking corridor.
“Uh huh. They’re always doing construction in here.
C’mon.”
She led them up a flight of stairs into the lower Grand Central
concourse—all beige tiles, gray floor, signs pointing to
fifty different trains, and small stores packed together.
“The deli’s down there,” she said as she went,
waving a hand at a crowd of hurrying people and the wide hall past
them. “We go up here.” And another flight of stairs,
wider and prettier, let them out on the upper concourse, a huge
stretch of cream-colored marble under a great blue dome
painted with constellations and starred with lights.
They headed across the marble floor, up a short ramp, and out
one of many brassy yellow doors, onto the street. Immediately the
three of them were assailed by noise, exhaust fumes, people
hurrying in all directions, a flood of cabs and buses and cars. But
there was also sunlight, and Kit and Nita stood against the wall by
the Grand Central doors, letting Fred soak it up and get his
composure back. He did so totally oblivious to the six men and
three jackhammers working just across the street behind a barrier
of saw-horses and orange plastic cones. (That’s much
better,) he said.
(It was quieter inside, though,) Kit said, and Nita was inclined
to agree with him. The rattling clamor of the jackhammers was
climbing down her ears into her bones and making her teeth jitter.
The men, two burly ones and one skinny one, all three
broad-shouldered and tan, all in helmets and jeans and boots,
appeared to be trying to dig to China. One of them hopped down into
the excavation for a moment to check its progress, and vanished up
to his neck. Then the hammering started again, “How can they
stand it?” Nita muttered.
(Stand what? It’s lovely out here.) Fred danced about a
little in the air, brightening out of invisibility for a few
moments and looking like a long-lived remnant of a fireworks
display.
(Fred, put it out!) Kit said. (If somebody sees you—)
(They didn’t see me in the field the other day,) Fred
replied, (though Artificer knows they looked.)
(Probably the Learjet distracted them. Fred, come on, tone it
down a little) Nita said. (Let’s go back inside and do what
we have to. Then we can use the timeslide and have fun in the city for
the rest of the day.)
They went back inside and down the stairs again, accompanied by
the inward sound of Fred’s
grumbling. There was no trouble finding the
area where the worldgate was situated, and
Nita and Kit paused outside. (You have everything ready?) Nita
said.
(In here.) Kit tapped his head. (The spells are all set except
for one or two syllables—it’s like dialing almost all
of a phone number. When I call for you, just come on back. All we
need is for the supplies to be in range of the spell; there’s
nothing special that has to be done with them. Fred, you stay with
Nita.)
(As you say.)
They went in. Nita lingered by the front counter, staring at
dill pickles and sandwich makings, trying to look normal while she
waited for Kit to call her. Fred hung over her shoulder, looking
with great interest at bologna and salami and mayonnaise and cream
cheese. (You people certainly have enough ways to internalize
energy,) he said. (Is there really that much difference between one
brand of matter and another?)
(Well, wasn’t there any difference when you were a black
hole? Didn’t a rock, say, taste different from a ray of
light, when you soaked one or the other up?)
(Now that you mention it, yes. But appreciating differences like
that was something you had to work at for a long time. I
wouldn’t expect someone as young as you to—)
(Nita,) Kit’s thought came abruptly. (We’ve got
trouble. It’s not here.)
(What? It has to be!)
(It’s gone, Nita.)
“Girlie,” said the man behind the deli counter in a
no-nonsense growl, “you gonna buy anything?”
“Uh,” Nita said, and by reflex more than anything
else picked up a can of soda from the nearby cooler and fished
around in her pocket for the change, “Kit—” she
called.
“Coming.”
Nita paid for the soda. Kit joined her, carrying a small bag of
potato chips, which he paid for in turn, Together they went back
out into the corridor, and Kit knelt down by the window of a store
across the way, a window full of shiny cutlery. He got his
wizards’ manual out of his pack and began going through the
pages in a hurry. “I don’t get it,” he said.
“I even checked this morning to make sure there hadn’t
been any change in the worldgate status. It said, right here,
‘patent and operative.’ ”
“Were the spells all right?”
Kit glared up at Nita, and she was instantly sorry she’d
asked. “The spells were fine,” Kit said. “But
they got caught like that first one I did, when you came along. Oh,
damn . . . ” He trailed off, and Nita
edged around beside him to look at the page,
“Something’s changed,” Kit said, and indeed the
page didn’t look as it had when Nita had checked it herself
in her own manual the night before. The listings for the other
Manhattan worldgates were the same—the World Trade Center
gate was still listed as “under construction” and
the Rockefeller Center gate as “closed for routine
maintenance.” But under the Grand Central gate listing was a
small red box that said in boldface type, Claudication temporarily
dislocated due to unscheduled spatial interruption, followed by a
string of numbers and symbols in the Speech, a description of the
gate’s new location. Kit glanced up at the roof, through
which the sound of jackhammers could plainly be heard. “The
construction,” he said. “It must have screwed up
the worldgate’s interruption of space somehow.”
Nita was puzzling over the symbols for the new location.
“Isn’t that term there the one for height above the
ground?” she asked.
“Uh huh. Look at it, it must be sixty, seventy stories
straight up from here.” Kit slapped the book shut in great
annoyance, shoved it back in his backpack. “Now what do we
do?”
(We go back outside?) Fred said, very hopefully.
It seemed the best suggestion. The three of them walked out
again, and Fred bobbed and danced some more in the sunlight while
Nita and Kit walked slowly eastward along Forty-second
Street, toward the Park Avenue overpass. “Dislocated,”
Kit muttered, “And who knows how long it’ll take to
come undislocated? A perfectly good piece of time
wasted.”
Nita stopped and turned, looking up into the air and trying to
estimate where the deli lay under the Grand Central complex. She
picked a spot that seemed about right, let her eye travel up and
up, sixty, maybe seventy stories. “Kit,” she said.
“Kit! Look what’s seventy stories high, and right next
door.”
Kit looked. Dark blue and silver, with its big stylized globe
logo on one side, the Pan Am Building reared its oblong self up at
least seventy stories high, right there—not only right behind
Grand Central, but part of it. “Yeah,” Kit said, his
voice still heavy with annoyance. “So?”
“So you remember that shield spell you showed me? The one
that makes the air solid? If you change the quantities in the spell
a little, you can use it for something else. To walk on, even. You
just keep the air hard.”
She couldn’t keep from grinning. Kit stared at Nita as if
she’d gone crazy. “Are you suggesting that we walk out to the
worldgate and—” He laughed. “How are we going to get up
there?”
“There’s a heliport on top of the building,” Nita
said promptly. “They won’t use it for big helicopters
any more, but the little ones still land, and there’s an
elevator in the building that goes right to the top. There’s
a restaurant up there too; my father had lunch with someone up
there once. I bet we could do it.”
Kit stared at her. “If you talk the air solid, you
‘re going to walk on it first! I saw that spell; it’s
not that easy.”
“I practiced it some. Come on, Kit, you want to waste the
timeslide? It’s almost ten now! It’ll probably be years
before these guys are finished digging. Let’s do
it!”
“They’ll never let us up there,” Kit said with
conviction.
“Oh, yes, they will. They won’t have a choice,
because Fred’ll make a diversion for us. We don’t even
need anything as big as a Learjet this time. How about it,
Fred?”
Fred looked at them reluctantly. (I must admit I have been
feeling an urge to burp—)
Kit still looked uncertain. “And when we get up
there,” he said, “all those stories up, and looking as
if we’re walking on nothing—what if somebody sees
us?”
Nita laughed—“Who are they going to tell? And
who’s going to believe them?”
Kit nodded and then began to grin slowly too.
“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah! Let’s go,
it’s getting late.”
Back they went into Grand Central, straight across the main
concourse this time and up one of the six escalators that led up to
the lobby of the Pan Am Building. They paused just outside the
revolving doors at the end of the escalators. The Pan Am lobby was
a big place, pillared and walled and paved in dark granite, echoing
with the sound of people hurrying in and out of the station. They
went up the escalator to the next floor, and Nita pointed off to
one side, indicating an elevator bank. One elevator had a sign
standing by it: copter club—helipad level—express. Also
standing by it was a bored-looking uniformed security
guard.
“That’s it,” Nita said.
“So if we can just get him away from
there . . . ”
“It’s not that simple.” She pointed down at
the end of the hall between two more banks of elevators. Another
guard sat behind a large semicircular desk, watching a row of TV
monitors. “They’ve got cameras all over the place.
We’ve got to get that guy out of there too. Fred, if
you’re going to do something, do it right between them. Out
in front of that desk.”
(Well,) Fred said, sounding interested, (let’s see,
let’s see . . . ) He damped his light
down and floated off toward the elevators, nearly invisible unless
you were looking for him, and even then looking like an unusually
large speck of dust, nothing more. The dustmote stopped just
between the desk and the elevator guard, hung in midair, and
concentrated so fiercely that Nita and Kit could both feel it
thirty feet away.
(T—hupt)
bang!
“That’ll get their attention,” Kit muttered.
It did; both the guards started at the noise, began looking around
for the source of it—then both went very very slowly over to
examine the large barrel cactus in a brass pot that had suddenly
appeared in the middle of the shiny floor.
“Now,” Kit said, and took off toward the elevator
with Nita close behind.
Both the guards had their backs turned, and Nita, passing them,
saw the elevator keys hanging off one guard’s belt. (Fred,)
she said hurriedly, (can you grab those real fast, the way you
grabbed my pen? Don’t swallow them!)
(Once I might make that mistake,) Fred said, (but not twice.) As
they slipped into the elevator Fred paused by the guard’s
belt, and the keys vanished without so much as a jingle. He
sailed in to them. (How was that?)
(Great. Quick, Nita, close the door!)
She punched one of the elevator buttons and the doors slid shut;
the keys appeared again, and Kit caught them in midair before they
fell. “It’s always one of these round ones, like they
use on coin phones,” he said, going through the keys.
“Fred, I didn’t know you could make live
things!”
(I didn’t know either,) Fred said, sounding unsettled,
(and I’m not sure I like it!)
“Here we go” Kit said, and put one key into the
elevator lock, turning it to run, and then pressed the button
marked 73—restaurant—helipad. The elevator took off in
a hurry; it was one of the high-speed sort.
Nita swallowed repeatedly to pop her ears. “Aren’t
you going to have to change the spells a little to compensate for
the gate being up high now?” she said after a moment.
“A little. You just put in the new height coordinate.
Oops!”
The elevator began to slow down quickly, and Nita’s
stomach churned for a moment. She and Kit both pressed themselves
against the sides of the elevator, so they wouldn’t be
immediately visible to anyone who might happen to be standing
right outside the door. But when the doors slid open, no one was
there. They peered out and saw a long carpeted corridor with a
plate-glass door at one end. Through it could be seen tables
and chairs and, more dimly, through a window, a hazy view of the
East Side skyline. A muffled sound of plates and silverware being
handled came down the hall to them.
(It’s early for lunch,) Nita said, relieved. (Let’s
go before someone sees us.)
(What about these keys?)
(Hmm . . . )
(Look, let’s leave them in the elevator lock. That way the
guard downstairs’ll just think he left them there. If they
discover they’re missing they’ll start looking for
whoever took them—and this would be the first place
they’d look.)
(Yeah, but how are we going to get down?)
(Well walk on air,) Kit said, his voice teasing. Nita rolled her
eyes at the ceiling. (Or we’ll go down with the people coming
out from lunch, if that doesn’t work. Let’s just get
out of here first, okay? Which way do we go to get on the
heliport?).
(There are stairs.)
They slipped out of the elevator
just as it chimed and its doors shut again—probably the guard
had called it from downstairs. The corridor off to the left was
featureless except for one door at its very end. helipad access,
the door said in large red letters. Nita tried the knob, then let
her hand fall in exasperation. (Locked, Crud!)
(Well, wait a moment,) Kit said, and tried the knob himself.
“You don’t really want to be locked, do you?” he
said aloud in the Speech, very quietly. Again Nita was amazed by
how natural the wizards’ language sounded when you heard it,
and how nice it was to hear—as if, after being lost in a
foreign country for a long time, someone should suddenly speak
warmly to you in English. “You’ve been locked for a
couple of days now,” Kit went on, his voice friendly and
persuasive, not casting a spell, just talking—though in the
Speech, the two were often dangerously close. “It must be
pretty dull being locked, no one using you, no one paying any
attention. Now we need to use you at least a couple of times this
morning, so we thought we’d ask—” Kt-chk! said the lock, and the knob turned in Kit’s
hand. “Thank you,” he said. “We’ll be back
later.” He went through the door into the stairwell, Nita and
Fred following, and as the door swung to behind them and locked
itself again, there was a decidedly friendly sound to the click.
Kit grinned triumphantly at Nita as they climbed the stairs.
“How about that?”
“Not bad,” Nita said, determined to learn how to do
it herself, if possible, “You’ve been practicing
too.”
“Not really—some of this stuff just seems to come
naturally as you work with it more. My mother locked herself out of
the car at the supermarket last week and I was pulling on the car
door and talking at it—you know how you do when you’re
trying to get something to work. And then it worked. I almost fell
over, the door came open so fast. It’s the Speech that does
it, I think. Everything loves to hear it.”
“Remember what Carl said, though.”
“I know. I won’t overdo it. You think we ought to
call him later, let him know what happened to the gate?”
They came to the top of the stairs, paused before the next
closed door, breathing hard from the exertion of climbing the
stairs fast. “Probably he knows, if he’s looked at his
book this morning,” Nita said. “Look, before we do
anything else, let’s set the timeslide. This is a good place
for it; we’re out of sight. When we’re tired of running
around the city, we can just activate it and we’ll be back
here at quarter of eleven. Then we just go downstairs, into Grand
Central and downstairs to the shuttle, and then home in time for
lunch.”
“Sounds good.” They began rummaging in their
backpacks, and before too long had produced the eight and a half
sugar cubes, the lithium-cadmium battery—a fat
one, bigger than a D cell and far heavier—a specific
integrated-circuit chip salvaged from the innards of a dead
pocket calculator, the handle of a broken glass teacup. “You
might want to back away a little, Fred, so your emissions
don’t interfere with the spell,” Kit said.
(Right.) Fred retreated high up into one ceiling-corner of
the stairwell, flaring bright with interest. There was a brief
smell of burning as he accidentally vaporized a cobweb.
“All right,” Kit said, thumbing through his manual
to a page marked with a bit of ripped-up newspaper,
“here we go. This is a timeslide inauguration,” he said
aloud in the Speech. “Claudication type
mesarrh—gimel—veingt—six, authorization
group—”
Nita swallowed, feeling the strangeness set in
as it had during their first spell together, feeling the walls lean
in to listen. But it was not a silence that fell this time. As Kit
spoke, she became aware of a roaring away at the edge of her
hearing and a blurring at the limits of her vision. Both effects
grew and strengthened to the overwhelming point almost before she
realized what was happening. And then it was too late. She was
seeing and hearing everything that would happen for miles and miles
around at quarter to eleven, as if the building were transparent,
as if she had eyes that could pierce stone and ears that could hear
a leaf fall blocks away. The words and thoughts of a million minds
poured down on her in a roaring onslaught like a wave crashing down
on a swimmer, and she was washed away, helpless. Too many sights,
commonplace and strange, glad and frightening, jostled and
crowded all around her, and squeezing her eyes shut made no
difference—the sights were in her mind. I’ll go crazy,
I’ll go crazy, stop it! But she was caught in the spell and
couldn’t budge. Stop it, oh, let it stop—
It stopped. She was staring at the floor between her and Kit as
she had been doing when the flood of feelings swept over her.
Everything was the same as it had been, except that the sugar was
gone. Kit was looking at her in concern. “You all
right?” he said. “You look a little green.”
“Uh, yeah.” Nita rubbed her head, which ached
slightly as if with the memory of a very loud sound.
“What happened to the sugar?”
“It went away. That means the spell took.” Kit began
gathering up the rest of the materials and stowing them,
He looked at her again. “Are you sure you’re
okay?”
“Yeah, I’m fine.” She got up, looked around
restlessly. “C’mon, let’s go.”
Kit got up too, shrugging into his backpack. “Yeah. Which
way is the—”
crack! went something against the door outside, and Nita’s
insides contracted. She and Kit both threw themselves against the
wall behind the door, where they would be hidden if it opened. For
a few seconds neither of them dared to breathe.
Nothing happened.
(What was that?) Kit asked.
(I don’t know. It sounded like a shot. Lord, Kit what if
there’s somebody up here with a gun or something—)
(What’s a gun?) Fred said.
(You don’t want to know,) Kit said. (Then again, if there
was somebody out there with a gun, I doubt they could hurt you.
Fred, would you go out there and have a quick look around? See
who’s there?)
(Why not?) Fred floated down from the ceiling, looked the door
over, put his light out, and slipped through the keyhole. For a
little while there was silence, broken only by the faint faraway
rattle of a helicopter going by, blocks away.
Then the lock glowed a little from inside, and Fred popped back
in. (I don’t see anyone out there,) he said.
Kit looked at Nita. (Then what made that noise?)
She was as puzzled as he was. She shrugged. (Well, if Fred says
there’s nothing out there—)
(I suppose. But let’s keep our eyes open.)
Kit coaxed the door open as he had the first one, and the three
of them stepped cautiously out onto the roof.
Most of it was occupied by the helipad proper, the long wide
expanse of bare tarmac ornamented with its big yellow
square-and-H symbol and surrounded by blue
low-intensity landing lights. At one end of the oblong pad
was a small glass-walled building decorated with the Pan Am
logo, a distended orange windsock, and an anemometer, its
three little cups spinning energetically in the brisk morning wind.
Beyond the helipad, the roof was graveled, and various
low-set ventilator stacks poked up here and there. A
yard-high guardrail edged the roof. Rising up on all sides
was Manhattan, a stony forest of buildings in all shapes and
heights. To the west glimmered the Hudson River and the Palisades
on the New Jersey side; on the other side of the building lay the
East River and Brooklyn and Queens, veiled in mist and pinkish
smog. The Sun would have felt warm if the wind had stopped
blowing. No one was up there at all.
Nita took a few steps off the paved walkway that led to the
little glass building and scuffed at the gravel suspiciously.
“This wind is pretty stiff,” she said. “Maybe a
good gust of it caught some of this gravel and threw it at the
door.” But even as she said it, she didn’t believe
it.
“Maybe,” Kit said. His voice made it plain that he
didn’t believe it either “Come on, let’s find the
gate.”
“That side,” Nita said, pointing south, where the
building was wider. They headed toward the railing together,
crunching across the gravel. Fred perched on Nita’s shoulder;
she looked at him with affection. “Worried?”
(No. But you are.)
“A little. That sound shook me up.” She paused
again, wondering if she heard something behind her. She turned.
Nothing; the roof was bare. But still—Nita turned back and
hurried to catch up with Kit, who was looking back at her.
“Something?”
“I don’t know. I doubt it. You know how you see
things out of the corner of your eye, movements that aren’t
there? I thought maybe the door moved a little.”
“I don’t know about you,” Kit said, “but
I’m not going to turn my back on anything while I’m up
here. Fred, keep your eyes open.” Kit paused by the railing,
examining the ledge below it, maybe six feet wide, then looked up
again. “On second thought, do you have eyes?”
(I don’t know,) Fred said, confused but courteous as
always. (Do you have chelicerae?)
“Good question,” Nita said, a touch nervously.
“Kit, let’s do this and get out of here.”
He nodded, unslung his pack, and laid the aspirin, pine cone,
and fork on the gravel by the railing. Nita got out the rowan wand
and dropped it with the other materials, while Kit went through his
book again, stopping at another marked spot. “Okay,” he
said after a moment. “This is an
imaging-and-patency spell for a temporospatial
claudication, asdekh class. Purpose: retrieval of an accidentally
internalized object, matter-energy
quotient . . . ” Kit read a long string
of syllables, a description in the Speech of Nita’s pen,
followed by another symbol group that meant Fred and described the
properties of the little personal worldgate that kept his
great mass at a great distance.
Nita held her breath, waiting for another onslaught of uncanny
feelings, but none ensued. When Kit stopped reading and the spell
turned her loose, it was almost a surprise to see, hanging there in
the air, the thing they had been looking for. Puckered, roughly
oblong, vaguely radiant, an eight-foot scar on the sky; the
worldgate, about a hundred feet out from the edge where they stood
and maybe thirty feet below the heliport level.
“Well,” Kit said then, sounding very pleased with
himself. “There we are. And it looks all right, not much
different from the description in the book.”
“Now all we have
to do is get to it.” Nita picked up the rowan wand, which for
the second part of the spell would serve as a key to get the pen
through the worldgate and out of Fred. She tucked the wand into her
belt, leaned on the railing, and looked out at the air.
According to the wizards’ manual, air, like the other
elements, had a memory and could be
convinced in the Speech to revert to something it had
been before. It was this memory of being
locked in stone as oxides or nitrates, or
frozen solid in the deeps of space, that made the air harden
briefly for the spell. Nita started
that spell in its simplest form and then went on into a more formal
one, as much a reminiscence as a convincing—she talked to the
air about the old days when starlight wouldn’t twinkle
because there was nothing to make it do so, and when every shadow
was sharp as a razor and distances didn’t look distant
because there was no air to soften them. The immobility came down
around her as the spell began to say itself along with Nita,
matching her cadence. She kept her eyes closed, not looking, for
fear something that should be happening might not be. Slowly with
her words she began to shape the hardening air into an oblong,
pushing it out through the other, thinner air she wasn’t
including in the spell. It’s working better than usual,
faster, she thought. Maybe it’s all the smog here—this
air’s half solid already. She kept talking.
Kit whispered something, but she couldn’t make out what
and didn’t want to try. “I know it’s a strain,
being solid these days,” she whispered in the Speech,
“but just for a little while, just to make a walkway out to
that puckered place in the sky, then you can relax. Nothing
too thick, just strong enough to walk on—”
“Nita. Nita!”
The sound of her name in the Speech caught her attention. She
opened her eyes. Arrow-straight, sloping down from the lower
curb of the railing between her and Kit, the air had gone hard.
There was dirt and smog trapped in it, making the sudden walkway
more translucent than transparent—but there was no mistaking
it for anything but air. It had a more delicate, fragile look than
any glass ever could, no matter how thin. The walkway ran smooth
and even all the way out to the worldgate, widening beneath it into
room enough for two to stand.
“Wow!” Nita said, sagging against the railing and
rubbing at her eyes as she let the spell go. She was tired; the
spelling was a strain—and that feeling of nervousness left
over from the loud noise outside the stairwell came back. She
glanced over her shoulder again, wondering just what she was
looking for.
Kit peered over the railing at the walkway. “This better
be some pen,” he said, and turned his back to the worldgate,
watching the roof. “Go ahead.”
Nita made sure her backpack was slung properly, checked the
rowan wand again, and slowly swung over the guardrail, balancing on
the stone in which it was rooted. She was shaking, and her hands
were wet. If I don’t just do this, she thought, I never will.
Just one step down, Callahan, and then a nice solid walkway
straight across. Really. Believe. Believe. Ouch!
The air was so transparent that she misjudged the distance down
to it—her foot hit before she thought it would, and the jolt
went right up her spine—Still holding the railing, Nita
lifted that foot a bit, then stomped down hard on the walkway. It
was no different from stomping on a sidewalk. She let her
weight down on that foot, brought the second down, and stomped with
that too. It was solid.
“It’s solid as rock, Kit!” she said, looking
up at him, still holding the rail.
“Sure,” Kit said, skeptical. “Let go of the
rail first.”
Nita made a face at Kit and let go. She held both arms out at
first, as she might have on a balance beam in gym, and then waved
them experimentally. “See? It works. Fred?”
Fred bobbed down besides her, looking with interest at the
hardened air of the walkway. (And it will stay this way?)
“Until I turn it loose. Well?” She took a step
backward, farther onto the walkway, and looked up challengingly.
“How about it?”
Kit said nothing, just slung his own backpack over his shoulders
and swung over the railing as Nita had done, coming down cautiously
on the hardened air. He held on to the rail for a moment while
conducting his own tests of the air’s solidity. “Come
on,” Nita said. “The wind’s not too
bad.”
“Lead the way.”
Nita turned around, still holding her arms a little away from
her to be sure of her balance, and started for the worldgate as
quickly as she dared, with Fred pacing her cheerfully to the left.
Eight or ten steps more and it was becoming almost easy. She even
glanced down toward the walkway—and there she stopped very
suddenly, her stomach turning right over in her at the sight of the
dirty, graveled roof of Grand Central, a long, long, long fall
below. “Don’t look down,” a memory said to her in
Machu Picchu’s scratchy voice. She swallowed, shaking all
over, wishing she had remembered the advice earlier.
“Nita, what’s the—”
Something went whack! into the walkway. Nita jumped, lost her
balance, and staggered back into Kit. For a few awful seconds they
teetered back and forth in wind that gusted suddenly, pushing them
toward the edge together—and then Kit sat down hard on the
walkway, and Nita half fell on top of him, and they held very still
for a few gasps.
“Wh-what—”
“I think it was a pigeon,” Nita said, not caring
whether Kit heard the tremulousness of her voice. “You
okay?”
“Sure,” Kit said, just as shakily. “I try to
have a heart attack every day either I need one or not. Get off my
knee, huh?”
They picked each other up and headed for the gate again. (Even
you have trouble with gravity,) Fred said wonderingly as he paced
them. (I’m glad I left my mass elsewhere.)
“So are we,” Nita said. She hurried the last twenty
steps or so to the place at the end
of the walkway, with Kit following close.
She knelt down in a hurry, to make sure the wind wouldn’t
push her over, and looked up at the worldgate. Seen this close it
was about four feet by eight, the shape of a tear in a piece of
cloth. It shone with a glowing, shifting, soap-bubble
iridescence. Finally, finally, my pen! she thought—but
somehow, the thought didn’t make Nita as happy as it should
have. The uneasy feeling that had started in the stairwell was
still growing She glanced over her shoulder at Kit. He was kneeling
too, with his back to her, watching the walkway and the rooftop
intently. Beside her, Fred hummed softly, quietly waiting.
(Now what?) he asked.
Nita sighed, pulled the rowan rod out of her belt, and inserted
one end of it delicately into the shimmering veil that was the
surface of the worldgate. Though the city skyline could be seen
very clearly through the shimmer, the inch or so of the wand that
went through it appeared to vanish. “Just perch yourself on
the free end here,” Nita said, holding the wand by its
middle. “Make contact with it the same way you did with those
keys. Okay?”
(Simple enough.) Fred floated to the end of the rod and lit
there, a bright, still spark. (All right, I’m ready.)
Nita nodded. “This is a retrieval,” she said in the
Speech. “Involvement confined to a pen with the following
characteristics: m’sedh—zayin six point
three—”
(Nita!)
The note of pure terror in Kit’s mind-voice caused
Nita to do the unforgivable—break off in the middle of a
spell and look over her shoulder. Shapes were pouring out of the
little glass shelter building, which had been empty, and was still
somehow empty even as Nita looked. She got a first impression of
grizzled coats, red tongues that lolled and slavered, fangs that
gleamed in the sunlight, and she thought, Wolves!
But their eyes changed her mind as ten or twelve of the
creatures loped across the roof toward the transparent walkway,
giving tongue in an awful mindless cacophony of snarls and barks
and shuddering howls. The eyes. People’s eyes, blue, brown,
green, but with almost all the intelligence gone out of them,
nothing left but a hot deadly cunning and an awful desire for the
taste of blood. From her reading in the wizards’ manual, she
knew what they were: perytons. Wolves would have been
preferable—wolves were sociable creatures. These had been
people once, people so used to hating that at the end of life
they’d found a way to keep doing it, by hunting the souls of
others through their nightmares. And once a peryton caught
you . . .
Nita started to hitch backward in total panic and then froze,
realizing that there was nowhere to go. She and Kit were trapped.
Another second and the perytons would be on the bridge, and at
their throats, for eternity. Kit whipped his head around
toward Nita and the worldgate. “Jump through and break the
spell!” he yelled.
“But—” And she grabbed his arm, pushed the
rowan wand through and yelled,
“Come on, Fred!” The first three perytons leaped the
guard-rail and landed on the bridge,
running. Nita threw herself and Kit at the gate, being careful of
the edges, as she knew she must, while screaming in absolute terror
the word that would dissolve the walkway proper. For a fraction of
a second she caught the sound of screams other than her own, howls
of creatures unseen but falling. Then the shimmer broke against her
face like water, shutting out sound, and light, and finally
thought.
Blinded, deafened, and alone, she fell
forever . . .