Диана Дуэйн - So You Want To Be A Wizard

"It's solid," he said, still crying, taking another step out onto the span, holding his arms out for balance as it bent slightly under his weight. "Come on, Nita, it's noon-forged steel, he can't cross it. He'll have to change shape or seal this hole up."

(Nita, come on,) Fred said, and 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 and step in time with him. Smoke and the smell or 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 muttered, their mouths full of hate. She watched the end of the looked straight ahead. Five steps: Kit was off. Three. One— She reached out to him, needing desperately to feel the touch of a hand. He grabbed her arm and pulled her off the bridge just as another bias of black-red fire blew in the doors on the other side of the abyss. Kit said one sharp word in the Speech, and the air went murky around his body again as the Book ceased to work through him. Nita let go, glanced over her shoulder in time to see the sword blade snap back to being an antenna, like a rubber band going back to its right size. It fell into the fuming darkness, a lone glitter, quickly gone.

They ran. Nita could still see in her mind the place where the worldgate was hidden; the Book 's power had burned it into her like a brand. She took the lead, racing down a flight of stairs, around a corner and down another flight, into echoing beige-tiled corridors where Fred and the rowan wand were their only light. Above them they could hear the thunderous rumor of iron footsteps, slow, leisurely, inexorable, following them down. The howls of perytons floated down to them like the voices of lost souls, hungry for the blood and pain they needed to feel alive again.

"Here!" Nita shouted, not caring what might hear, and dodged around a corner, and did what she had never done in all her life before—jumped a subway turnstile. Its metal fingers made a grab for her, but she was too fast for them, and Kit eluded them too, coming right behind. At full speed Nita pounded down the platform, looking for the steps at the end of it that would let them down onto the tracks. She took them three at a time, two leaps, and then was running on cinders again, leaping over ties. Behind her she could hear Kit hobbling as fast as he could on his sore leg, gasping, but keeping up. Fred shot along beside her, pacing her, lighting her way. Eyes flickered in his light—hidebehinds, dun mice, ducking under cover as the three of them went past. Nita slowed and stopped in the middle of the tracks. "Here!" Kit had his manual out already. He found the page by Fred's light, thumped to a stop beside Nita. "Here? In the middle of the—"

"Read! Read!" she yelled. There was more thunder rolling in the tunnel than just the sound of their pursuer's footsteps. Far away, she could hear what had been missing from the other tunnel beneath City Hall; trains. Away "i the darkness, wheels slammed into the tracks they rode—even now the "ils around them were clacking faintly in sympathy, and a slight cool wind breathed against Nita's face. A train was coming. On this track. Kit began the worldgating spell, reading fast. Again the air around them seemed clearer, fresher, as the power of the Book of Night with Moon sei/ed the spell and its sPeaker, used them both. That was when the Starsnuffer's power came down on them. It seemed mPossible that the dank close darkness in which they stood could become ny darker, but it did, as an oppressive blanket of clutching, choking hatred

1 Ov'er them, blanketing everything. The rowan rod's silver fire was smoth-

eruggled for breath. Nita tried to resist, tried to find air, couldn't, collapsed to her knees, choking. The breeze from the dark at the end of the tunnel got stronger: the onrushing train, pushing the air in front of it, right up the track, right at them—

(I — will— not,) Fred said, struggling, angry. (I will— not — go out!) His de-termination was good for a brief flare, like a match being struck. Kit found his voice, managed to get out a couple more words of the spell in Fred's wavering radiance, grew stronger, managed a few more. Nita found that she could breathe again. She clutched the rowan wand, thinking with all her might of the night Liused had given it to her, the clear moonlight shining down between the branches. The wand came alive again. Shadows that had edged forward from the walls of the tunnel fled again. Kit read, hurrying. Two thirds done, Nita thought. If he can just finish—

Far away down the tunnel, there were eyes. They blazed. The headlights of a train, coming down at them in full career. The clack of the rails rose to a rattle, the breeze became a wind, the roar of the train itself echoed not just in the other tunnels, but in this one. Nita got to her feet, facing those eyes down. She would not look away. Fred floated by her shoulder; she gathered him close, perching him by her ear, feeling his terror of the overwhelming darkness as if it were her own but having nothing to comfort him with. Kit, she thought, not daring to say it aloud for fear she should interrupt his concentration. The sound of his words was getting lost in the thunder from above, iron- shod feet, the thunder from below, iron wheels on iron rails.

Suddenly Kit's voice was missing from the melange of thunders. Without warning the worldgate was there, glistening in the light of the rowan wand and Fred and the train howling down toward them — a great jagged soap bubble, trembling with the pressure of sound and air. Kit wasted no time, but leaped through. Fred zipped into the shimmering surface and was gone. Nita made sure of her grip on the rowan wand, took a deep breath, and jumped through the worldgate. A hundred feet away, fifty feet away, the blazing eyes of the train glared at her as she jumped; its horn screamed in delight, anticipating the feel of blood beneath its wheels; sudden thunder rocked the plat' form behind her, black-red fire more sensed than seen. But the rainbow shimmer of the gate broke across her face first. The train roared through the place where she had been, and she heard the beginnings of a cry of frustrated rage as she cheated death, and anger, and fell and fell and fell. — and came down slam on nothing. Or it seemed that way, until opening her eyes a little wider she saw the soot and smog trapped in the hardened air she lay on, the only remnant of her walkway. Kit was already getting up fr oinhis knees beside her, looking out from their little island of air across to the Pan Am Building. Everything was dark, and Nita started to groan, certa" j that something had gone wrong and that the worldgate had simply durop etlthem back in the Starsnuffer's world—but no, her walkway was there. Greatly daring, she looked down and saw far below the bright yellow glow of sodium-vapor street lights and red of taillights, City noise, roaring, cacopho-nous and alive, floated up to them. We're back. It worked!

Kit was reading from his wizards' manual, as fast as he had read down in the train tunnel. He stopped and then looked at Nita in panic as she got up. "I can't close the gate!" She gulped. "Then he can follow us ., through… ." In an agony of haste she fumbled her own book out of her pack, checked the words for the air-hardening spell one more time, and began reading herself. Maybe panic helped, for this time the walkway spread itself out from their feet to the roof of the building very fast indeed. "Come on," she said, heading out across it as quickly as she dared. But where will we run to? she thought. He'll come behind, hunting. We can't go home, he might follow. And what'll he do to the city? She reached up to the heliport railing and swung herself over it. Kit fol-lowed, with Fred pacing him. "What're we gonna do?" he said as they headed across the gravel together. "There's no time to call the Senior wizards, wherever they are—or even Tom and Carl. He'll be here shortly."