Диана Дуэйн - So You Want To Be A Wizard

(Manhattan?) Kit asked anxiously, without words. Nita felt frozen in place like a statue and couldn't turn to answer him — the spell was holding her immobile.

(It looks like Manhattan,) she said, feeling just as uneasy. (But what's my pen doing there:') Kit would have shaken his head if he could have. (I don't get it. What's wrong here? This is New York City — but it never looked this awful, this dirty and nasty and…) He trailed off in confusion and dismay.

Nita looked around her. It was hard to make out anything on the island— there was a murky pall over the city that seemed more than just fog. There was hardly any traffic that she could see, and almost no light — in fact, in all of Manhattan there were only two light sources. In one place on the island-the cast Fifties, it looked like — a small point of brittle light seemed to pulse right through steel and stone, throbbing dully like a sown seed of wildfire waiting to explode. The pulses were irregular and distressing, and the light was painful to look at. Some blocks to the south, well into the financial district near the south end of the island, another fire burned, a clear white spark like a sunseed, beating regularly as a heart. It was consoling, but it was very small.

(Now what?) Nita said. (Why would my pen be in this place?) She looked down at the dark grainy air below them, listened to the brooding silence like that of a beast of prey ready to spring, felt the sullen buildings hunching themselves against the oppressive sky — and then felt the something malevolent and alive that lay in wait below — a something that saw them, was conscious of them, and was darkly pleased. (Kit, what's that?)

(It knows!) Kit's thought sang with alarm like a plucked string. (It knows we're here! It shouldn't be able to, but—Nita, the spell's not balanced for this. If that thing grabs us or holds us somehow, we won't be able to get back!)

Nita felt Kit's mind start to flick frantically through the memories of what he had read in his wizards' manual, looking for an idea, for something they could do to protect themselves.

She held very still and looked over his shoulder at his thoughts, even though part of her trembled at the thought of that dark presence which was even now reaching out toward them, lazy, curious, deadly. Abruptly she saw something that looked useful. {Kit, stop! No, go back one. That's it. Look, it says if you've got an imbalance, you can open out your side of the spell to attract some more power.)(Yeah, but if the wrong kind of power answers, we're in for it!)

(We're in for it for sure if that gets us,) Nita said, indicating the huge, hungry darkness billowing upward toward them like a cloud. (Look, we'll make a hole through the spell big enough for something friendly to fall into, and we'll take pot luck.)

Nita could feel Kit's uncertainty as he started choosing from memory the words and symbols he would need. (All right, but I dunno. If something worse happens…)

(What could be worse?) Nita hollered at Kit, half in amusement, half in tear. The hungry something drew closer.

Kit started to answer, then forgot about it. (There,) he said, laying the equation out in his mind, (I think that's all we need.)

(Go ahead,) Nita said, watching anxiously as their pursuer got closer and the air around them seemed to grow thicker and darker yet. (You say it. Just tell me what to do and when.) (Right,) Kit said, and began speaking in his mind, much faster than he had during the initial spelling. If that first magic had felt like the weaving of a whole, this one felt like ripping something apart. Their surroundings seemed to shimmer uncertainly, the dark skyline and lead-gray sky rippled like a wind-stirred curtain; even that stalking presence seemed to hesitate in momentary confusion. (Push,) Kit said suddenly, {push right there.) Nita felt the torn place that Kit had made in the spell, and she shoved clumsily at it with her mind, trying to make the hole larger. (It's . giving ...)

(Now, hard?) Kit said, and Nita pushed until pain stabbed and stabbed again behind where her eyes should have been, and at the moment she thought she couldn't possibly push any more, Kit said one short sharp syllable and threw the spell wide open like a door.

It was like standing at the core of a tornado which, rather than spinning you away to Oz, strips the roof off your home, opens the house walls out flat as the petals of a plaster flower, and leaves you standing confused and disbelieving in the heart of a howling of smoke and damned voices; or little moving through a roomful of people, every one of whom tries to catch your eye and tell you the most important thing that ever happened to him. Nita found herself deluged in fragments of sights and sounds and tastes and feelings and thoughts not her own, a madly coexisting maelstrom of imageries from other universes, other earths, other times. Most of them she managed to shut out by squeezing her mind shut like eyes and hanging on to the spell. She sensed that Kit was doing the same and that their stalker was momentarily as bewildered as they were by what was happening. The whirling confusion seemed to be funneling through the hole in the spell like water going down a drain— things, concepts, creatures too large or too small for the hole fell through it, or past it, or around it. But sooner or later something just the right size would catch. (Hope we get something useful,) Nita thought desperately. (Some-thing bigger than that thing, anyway.) And thump, something fitted into the hole with snug precision, and the crazy whirling died away, and the two of them had company in the spellweb. Something small, Nita felt, very small, too small — but no, it was big, too… Confused, she reached out to Kit. (Is that it? Can we get out now? Before that what's-tts-name—)

The what's-its-name shook itself with a ripple of rage and hunger that Kit and Nita could feel even at a distance. It headed toward them again, quickly, done with playing with them. (Uh oh!) Kit said. (Let's get outa here!) (What do we—)

(What in the—) said a voice that neither of them recognized.

(Out!) Kit said, and hooked the spell into the added power that the newcomer provided, and pulled—

— and plain pale daylight came down around them, heavy as a collapsed tent. Gravity yanked at them. Kit fell over sideways and lay there panting on the ground like someone who's run a race. Nita sagged, covered her face, bent over double right down to the ground, struggling for breath.

Eventually she began to recover, but she put off moving or opening her eyes. The book had warned that spelling had its prices, and one of them was the physical exhaustion that goes along with any large, mostly mental work of creation. Nita felt as if she had just been through about a hundred English tests with essay questions, one after another. "Kit?" she said, worried by his silence.

"Nnngggg," Kit said, and rolled over into a sort of crouch, holding his head in his hands. "Ooooh. Turn off the Sun."

"It's not that bad," Nita said, opening her eyes. Then she winced and shut them in a hurry. It was.

"How long've we been here?" Kit muttered. "The Sun shouldn't be showing here yet." "It's—" Nita said, opening her eyes again to check her watch and being distracted by a bright light to her right that was entirely too low to be the Sun, and squinting at it—and then forgetting what she had started to say.

Hanging in midair about three feet away from her, inside the circle, was a spark of eye- searing white fire. It looked no bigger than a pinhead, but it was brilliant all out of proportion to its size, and was giving off light about as bright as that of a two-hundred-watt bulb without a shade. The light bobbed gently in midair, up and down, looking like a will-o'-the-wisp plugged into too powerful a current and about to blow out. Nita sat there with her mouth open and stared.