by Diane Duane
Kt-chk! said the lock, and the knob turned in Kit’s hand. “ Thanks,” 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, and 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.
“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-veignt-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, Nita 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 Nita, 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 constricted. 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 said silently, sounding very freaked.
“I don’t know. It sounded like a shot. God, 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 the faded remnants of a yellow-painted square-and-H symbol, and surrounded by old embedded blue low-intensity landing lights. Here and there weeds stood up through cracks in the tarmac. At one end of the oblong pad was a small tiled and glass-walled building; by it stood a short mast with the tattered remnants of an orange nylon wind sock, and an old anemometer, its three little cups still spinning energetically in the brisk morning wind though the sensor probably wasn’t connected to anything any more.
Beyond the old 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. But that was all there was to be seen. There was no sign that anyone else was up there at all, or had been for some time
Nita took a few steps off the paved walkway that led to the little glass building and scuffed at the gravel suspiciously. “This wind’s 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.
“Just a little. That noise 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.”
Kit stared at it. “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, pinecone, 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 of Nita’s pen in the Speech, 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 shielding 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 usual wizardry-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 really must be some pen we’re going through all this for,” he said, amused, but also a little unnerved. He 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. Oww!
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.
“Like rock, Kit!” she said, looking up at him, still holding the rail. “C’mon!”
“Sure,” Kit said, skeptical. “Let go of the rail first.”
Nita made a face at him 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 beside her, looking with interest at the hardened air of the walkway. And it will stay this way?
“Till I turn it loose.” She took a step backward, farther onto the walkway, and looked up challengingly. “Well? 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 whether I need one or not. Will you get off my knee?”
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 widened 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 again, and looked up at the worldgate. Seen this close it was about four feet by eight, the shape of a long tear in a piece of cloth, and the inside of it shone with a palely 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 hung quietly waiting. Now what?
Nita sighed, pull
ed 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 way more 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…
