Диана Дуэйн - So You Want To Be A Wizard

"Then we'll have to get away from here and find a place to hole up for a little. Maybe the bright Book can help." She paused as Kit spoke to the lock on the roof door, and they ran down the stairs. "Or the manuals might have something, now that we need it." "Yeah, right," Kit said as he opened the second door at the bottom of the stairs, and they ran down the corridor where the elevators were. But he didn't sound convinced. "The park?" "Sounds good."

Nita punched the call button for the elevator, and she and Kit stood there panting; There was a feeling in the air that all hell was about to break loose, and the sweat was breaking out all over Nita because they were going to have to stop it somehow. "Fred," she said, "did you ever hear anything, out where you were, any stories of someone getting the better of you-know-who?" Fred's light flickered uncomfortably as he watched Kit frantically consult- In8 his manual. (Oh, yes,) he said. (I'd imagine that's why he wanted a universe apart to himself—to keep others from getting in and thwarting him. '* used to happen fairly frequently when he went up against life.) rred's voice was too subdued for Nita's liking. "What's the catch?" 'Well … it's possible to win against him. But usually someone dies of >*) Nita gulped again. Somehow she had been expecting something like that. Kit?" 'he elevator chimed. Once inside, Kit went back to looking through his manual. "I don't see anything," he said, sounding very worried. "There's a general-information chapter on him here, but there's not much we don't know already. The only thing he's never been able to dominate was the Book of Night with Moon. He tried — that's what the dark Book was for; he thought by linking them together he could influence the bright Book with it diminish its power. But that didn't work. Finally he was reduced to simply stealing the bright Book and hiding it where no one could get at it. That way no one could become a channel for its power, no one could possibly defeat him… "

Nita squeezed her eyes shut, not sure whether the sinking feeling in her stomach was due to her own terror or the elevator going down. Read from it? No, no. I hope I never have to, Tom's voice said in her mind… Reading it, being the vessel for all that power — I wovldn't want to. Even good can be terribly dangerous.

And that was an Advisory, Nita thought, miserable. There was no doubt about it. One of them might have to do what a mature wizard feared doing: read from the Book itself. "Let me do it," she said, not looking at Kit.

He glanced up from the manual, stared at her. "Bull," he said, and then looked down at the manual again. "If you're gonna do it, I'm gonna do it."

Outside the doors another bell chimed as the elevator slowed to a stop. Kit led the way out across the black stone floor, around the corner to the en-trance. The glass door let them out onto a street just like the one they had walked onto in the Snuffer's otherworld — but here windows had lights in them, and the reek of gas and fumes was mixed with a cool smell of evening and a rising wind, and the cabs that passed looked blunt and friendly. Nita could have cried for relief, except that there was no reason to feel relieved. Things would be getting much worse shortly. Fred, though, felt no such compunctions. (The stars, the stars are back,) he almost sang, flashing with delight as they hurried along.

"Where?" Kit said skeptically. As usual, the glow of a million street lights was so fierce that even the brightest stars were blotted out by it. But Fred was too cheerful to be suppressed.

(They're there, they're there!) he said, dancing ahead of them. (And the Sun is there too. I don't care that it's on the other side of this silly place, 1 can feel — feel—)

His thought cut off so abruptly that Nita and Kit both stopped and glanced over their shoulders. A coldness grabbed Nita's heart and wrung it-The sky, even though clear, did have a faint golden glow to it, city ligW scattered from smog — and against that glow, high up atop the Pan Am Building, a form half unstarred night and half black iron glowered down лthem like a statue from a dauntingly high pedestal. Nita and Kit froze like pinned to a card as the remote clear howl of perytons wound through the air.

"He'll just jump down," Nita whispered, knowing somehow that he could do it, But the rider did not leap, not yet. Slowly he raised his arms in summons. One hand still held the steel rod about which the air twisted and writhed as if in pain; as the arm lifted, that writhing grew more violent, more tortured.

And darkness answered the gesture. It flowed forward around the feet of the dark rider's terrible mount, obscuring the perytons peering down over the roof's edge, and poured down the surface of the building like a black fog. What it touched, changed. Where the darkness passed, metal tarnished, glass filmed over or shattered, lighted windows were quenched, went blind. Down all the sides of the building it flowed, black lava burning the brightness out of everything it touched. Kit and Nita looked at each other in despair, knowing what would happen when that darkness spilled out onto the ground. The streets would go desolate and dark, the cabs would stop being friendly; and when all the island from river to river was turned into his domain, the dark rider would catch them at his leisure and do what he pleased with them. And with the bright Book —and with everything else under the sky, perhaps. This was no other-world, frightening but remote. This was their home. If this world turned into that one—

"We're dead," Kit said, and turned to run. Nita followed him. Perhaps out of hope that another Lotus might be waiting innocently at some curbside, the way Kit ran retraced their earlier path. But there was no Lotus — only bright streets, full of people going about their business with no idea of what was about to happen to them, cars honking at one another in cheerful ignorance. Fat men running newsstands and bemused bag-ladies watched Nita and Kit run by as if death and doom were after them, and no one really noticed the determined spark of light keeping pace. They ran like the wind down West Fiftieth, but no Lotus lay there, and around the corner onto r'fth and up to Sixty-first, but the carnage left in the otherworld was not reflected here — the traffic on Fifth ran unperturbed. Gasping, they waited tor a break in it, then ran across, hopped the wall into the park and crouched down beside it as they had in the world they'd left.

The wind was rising, not just a night breeze off the East River, but a chill wind with a hint of that other place's coldness to it. Kit unslung his pack as drew in close, and by his light Kit brought out the Book of Night with. The darkness of its covers shone, steadying Kit's hands, making Fred seern to burn brighter. Kit and Nita sat gasping for breath, staring at each other. ' rn out of ideas," Kit said. "I think we're going to have to read from this to keep the city the way it should be. We can't just let him change things until he catches us. Buildings are one thing; but what happens to people after that black hits them?" "And it might not stop here either," Nita said between gasps, thinking of her mother and father and Dairine, of the quiet street where they lived, the garden, the rowan, all warped and darkened — if they would survive at all.

Her eyes went up to the Moon shining white and full between the shifting branches. All around them she could feel the trees stirring in that new, strange, cold wind, whispering uneasily to one another. It was so good to be in a place where she could hear the growing things again. The idea came. "Kit," she said hurriedly, "that dark was moving pretty fast. If we're going to read from the Book we may need something to buy us time, to hold off the things that'll come with it, the perytons and the cabs."