So You Want to Be a Wizard, New Millennium Edition (24 page)

Nita scrabbled with her hands until she found bare concrete, said the Mason’s Word in a gasp, and flung the stone open. Kit jumped through with Fred behind him. The tunnel shook, roared, blew out a stinging, dust-laden wind, and went down in ruin as Nita leaped through the opening and fell to the tracks beside Kit.

He got to his knees slowly, rubbing himself where he had hit. “Boy,” he said, “if we weren’t in trouble with you-know-who before, we are now…”

Hurriedly Kit and Nita got up and the three of them headed for the ledge and the way to the open air.

With great caution and a grunt of effort, Kit pushed up the grille at the top of the concrete steps and looked around.

“Oh, brother,” he whispered, “sometimes I hate being right…”

He scrambled up out of the tunnel and onto the sidewalk, with Nita and Fred following right behind. The street was a shambles reminiscent of Fifth and Sixty-second. Corpses of cabs and limousines and even a small truck were scattered around, smashed into lampposts and the fronts of buildings, overturned on the sidewalk. The Lotus Esprit was crouched at guard a few feet away from the grille opening, its engine running in long, tired-sounding gasps. As Kit ran over to it, the Lotus rumbled an urgent greeting and shrugged its doors open.

“They know we’re here,” Nita said as they hurriedly climbed in and buckled up. “They have to know what we’ve done. Everything feels different since the dark Book fell out of this space.”

And they must know we’ll head back for the worldgate,
Fred said.
Wherever that is now…

“We’ve gotta find it—
oof!”
Kit said, as the Lotus reared back, slamming its doors shut, and accelerated roaring down the street, around the corner and north again. “Nita, you up for one more spell?”

“Do we have a choice?” She got her manual out of her pack, started thumbing through it. “What I want to know is what we’re supposed to try on whatever they have waiting for us at Grand Central. You-know-who isn’t just going to let us walk in there and leave with the bright
Book—
”

“We’ll burn that bridge when we come to it.” Kit had his backpack open in his lap and was peeking at the
Book of Night with Moon.
Even in the sullen dimness that leaked in the Lotus’s windows, the edges of the pages of the
Book
shone, the black depths of its covers glowed with the promise of light. Kit ran a finger along the upper edge of one cover, and as Nita watched his face settled into a solemn stillness, as if someone spoke and he listened intently.

It was a long moment before the expression broke. Then Kit glanced over at her with a wondering look in his eyes. “It really doesn’t look like that much,” he said. “But it feels— Neets, I don’t think they can hurt us while we have this. Or if they can, it won’t matter much.”

“Maybe not, if we read from it,” Nita said, reading down through the spell that would locate the worldgate for them. “But you remember what Tom said—”

“Yeah.” But there was no concern in Kit’s voice, and he was looking soberly at the
Book
again.

Nita finished checking the locator spell and settled back in the seat to prepare for it, then started forward again as a spark of heat burned into her neck. “Ow!”

Sorry.
Fred slid around from behind her to perch farther forward on her shoulder.

“No problem. Here we go,” Nita said.

She’d hardly even begun reading the imaging spell before a wash of power such as she had never felt seized her and plunged her into the spell headfirst. And the amazing thing was that she couldn’t even be frightened, for whatever had so suddenly pulled her under and into the magic was utterly benevolent, a huge calm influence that Nita sensed would do her nothing but good, though it might kill her doing it. The power took her, poured itself into her, made the spell
part
of her. There was no longer any need to work it; it
was.

Instantly she saw all Manhattan laid out before her again in shadow outlines, and there was the worldgate, almost drowned in the darkness created by the Starsnuffer, but not hidden to her. The power let her go then, once she was sure of its location, and Nita sat back gasping.

Kit was watching her with a strange expression, and all she could do was nod “yes” at him several times. “I see what you meant,” she said. “The
Book
—it made the spell happen by itself, almost.”

“Not ‘almost,’“ Kit said. “No wonder you-know-who wants it kept out of the hands of the Senior wizards. It can make even a beginner’s spell happen. It did the same thing with the Moebius spell. If someone wanted to take this place apart—or if someone wanted to make more places like it, and they had the
Book
—” He gulped. “Look, where’s the gate?”

“Where it should be,” Nita said, finding her breath. “Underground—under Grand Central. But not in the deli, though. It’s down in one of the train tunnels.”

Kit gulped again, harder. “Trains… And you
know
that place’ll be guarded. Fred, are you up to another diversion?”

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

Nita closed her eyes to lean back and take a second’s rest—the power that had run through her for that moment had left her amazingly drained—but nearly jumped out of her skin the next moment as the Lotus braked wildly, fishtailing around a brace of cabs that leaped at it out of a side street. With a scream of engine and a cloud of exhaust and burning rubber it found its traction again and tore out of the intersection and up Third Avenue, leaving the cabs behind.

“They know, they
know,
” Nita moaned. “Kit, what’re we going to do? Is even the
Book
going to be enough to stand up to him?”

“We’ll find out, I guess,” Kit said, though he sounded none too certain. “We’ve been lucky so far. No, not lucky, we’ve been ready. Maybe that’ll be enough. We both came prepared for trouble, we both did our reading—”

“You did, maybe.” Nita looked sheepish. “I couldn’t get past Chapter Forty in the manual. No matter how much I read, there was always more.”

Kit smiled just as uncomfortably. “I only got to Thirty-three myself. Then I skimmed a lot.”

“Kit, there’s about to be a surprise quiz.
Did we study the right chapters?
”

“We’re gonna find out,” Kit said.

The Lotus turned left at the corner of Third and Forty-second, speeding down toward Grand Central. Forty-second Street seemed empty; not even a cab was in sight. But a great looming darkness was gathered down the street, hiding the iron overpass. The Lotus started to slow, unwilling to go near it.

“Okay, baby,” Kit said, patting the dashboard reassuringly. “Right here is fine…”

The Lotus stopped in front of the doors to Grand Central, reluctantly shrugging first Nita’s, then Kit’s door open. They got out, Fred zipping out behind them, and looked around.

Silence. Nita looked nervously at the doors to the Terminal and the darkness beyond them, while the Lotus crowded close to Kit, who rubbed its right wheel well absently.

And then the sound came — a single clang, like an anvil being struck, not too far away. Then another clang, hollow and metallic, echoing from the blank-eyed buildings, dying into bell-like echoes. Several more clangs, close together. Then a series of them, a slow drumroll of metal beating on stone. Slowly the Lotus pulled out from under Kit’s hand, turning to face down Forty-second the way they’d come, growling deep under its hood. Fred lit on the collar of Nita’s down vest, his light flickering with uncertainty.

The clangor grew louder; echoes bounced back and forth from building to building so that it was impossible to tell from what direction the sound was coming. Down at the corner of Lexington and Forty-second, a blackness jutted suddenly from behind one of the buildings on the uptown side. The shape of it, and its unlikely height above the pavement, some fifteen feet, kept Nita from recognizing what it was until more of it came around the corner: until the blackness found its whole shape and swung it around into the middle of the street on iron hooves.

Eight hooves, ponderous and deadly, dented the asphalt of the street. They belonged to a horse—a huge, misproportioned beast, its head skinned down to a skull, leaden-eyed and grinning hollowly. All black iron, that steed was, as if it had stepped down from a pedestal at its rider’s call; and the one who rode it wore his own darkness on purpose, as if to reflect the black mood within. The Starsnuffer had put aside his three-piece suit for chain mail with links like chiseled obsidian and a cloak like night with no stars. His face was still handsome, but dreadful now, harder than any stone. His pale eyes burned with the burning of the dark Book, alive with painful memory about to come real. About the feet of his mount the perytons milled, not quite daring to look in their master’s face, but staring and slavering at the sight of Kit and Nita, waiting the command to course their prey.

Kit and Nita stood frozen, and Fred’s light, hanging small and constant as a star behind them, dimmed down to its faintest.

The cold, proud, erect figure on the black mount raised what it held in its right hand, a long steel rod burning dark and skewing the air about it as the dark Book had. “
You’ve stolen something of mine,
” said a voice as cold as space, using the Speech with icy perfection and hating it. “
No one steals from me.
”

The bolt that burst from the rod was a red darker than the Eldest’s fiery breath. Nita didn’t even try to use the rowan wand in defense—she might as well have tried to use a sheet of paper to stop a laser beam. But as she and Kit leaped aside, the air around them went afire with sudden clarity, as if for a moment the darkness inherent in it was burned away. The destroying bolt went awry, struck up sideways and blasted soot-stained blocks out of the facade of Grand Central.

And in that moment, as it saw Kit scramble away, the Lotus screamed wild defiance and leaped down Forty-second at the rider and his steed.

“NO!” Kit screamed. Nita grabbed him, pulled him toward the Terminal’s doors. He wouldn’t come, wouldn’t turn away as the baying perytons scattered, as the Lotus hurtled into the forefront of the pack, flinging bodies about. It leaped up through them straight at the throat of the iron beast, which reared on four hooves and raised the other four and with them smashed the Lotus flat into the street.

The bloom of fire that followed blotted out that whole end of Forty-second. With a sob Kit finally responded to Nita’s desperate pulling, and together they ran through the doors with Fred shooting along behind them as they stumbled up the ramp that led into Grand Central, out across the floor.

Nita was busy getting the rowan wand out and had gotten ahead of Kit, who couldn’t move as fast as he was busy dashing the tears out of his eyes. But it was his hand that shot out and grabbed her by the collar at the bottom of the ramp, almost choking her, and kept her from falling into the abyss.

There was no floor. From one side of the main concourse to the other was a great smoking crevasse, the floor and lower levels and tunnels beneath all split down to bedrock as if with an axe. Ozone-smell and cinder-smell and the smell of tortured steel breathed up hot in their faces, while from behind, outside, the thunder of huge hooves on concrete and the howls of perytons began again.

Below them severed tunnels and stairways gaped dark. There was no seeing the bottom. It was veiled in fumes and soot, underlit by the blue arcs of shorted-out third rails and an ominous deep red, as if the earth itself had broken open and was bleeding lava. The hooves clanged closer.

Nita turned to Kit, desperate. Though his face still streamed with tears, there was an odd, painful calm about it. “I know what to do,” he said, his voice saying that he found that strange. He reached back under his jacket and pulled the antenna out, and it was just as Nita noticed how strangely clear the air was burning about him that Kit reared back and threw the piece of steel out far out over the smoking abyss.

The hoofbeats stopped and were followed by a sound as of iron boots coming down on the sidewalk, immensely heavy, shattering the stone. Despite her own panic, Nita found she couldn’t look away from the thrown antenna as it turned and gleamed in the air. She was gripped motionless in the depths of a spell again, while the power that burned the air clear now poured itself through Kit and into his wizardry.

The antenna hit the highest point in its arc and began to fall… but there was something wrong with the way it was falling. It seemed to be getting
bigger
with distance instead of smaller. It stretched, it grew, glittering as it turned and changed. And then it wasn’t even an antenna anymore. Sharp blue light and diffuse red gleamed from flat, polished faces, edges sharp as razors. It was a sword blade now, no longer falling but settling itself to lie across the chasm like a bridge.

The wizardry broke and turned Nita loose. Kit moved away from her and stepped out onto the flat of the blade, fear and pain showing in his face again.

“Kit!”

“It’s solid,” he said, wiping his face again but not stopping, taking another step out onto the span, holding his arms out for balance as it bent slightly under his weight. “Come on, Nita, it’s noon-forged steel, he can’t cross it. He’ll have to change shape or seal this hole up.”

Nita, come on!
Fred said, and bobbled out across the crevasse, following Kit. Though almost blind with terror, her ears full of the sound of iron-shod feet coming after them, she followed Fred, who was holding a straight course out over the sword blade—followed him, arms out as she might have on a balance beam, most carefully not looking down. This was worse than the bridge of air had been, for that hadn’t flexed so terribly under each step she or Kit took. His steps threw her off balance until she halted long enough to take a deep breath, concentrate on what she was doing, and step in time with him. Smoke and the smell of burning floated up around her; the shadows of the dome above the concourse stirred with wicked eyes, the open doors to the train platforms ahead of her muttered, their mouths full of hate. She ignored it all and watched the end of the blade, looked straight ahead. Five steps: Kit was off. Three. One—