by Diane Duane
Nita started to hitch herself along backward in total panic and then froze, realizing that there was nowhere to go. She and Kit were trapped. Another second and the perytons would be on the bridge, and at their throats, for eternity. Kit whipped his head around toward Nita and the worldgate. “Jump through and break the spell!” he yelled.
There was nothing else to do. She grabbed his arm, pushed the rowan wand through her belt, and yelled, “Come on, Fred!” The first three perytons leaped the guardrail and landed on the bridge, running.
Nita threw herself and Kit at the worldgate, being careful of the edges, as she knew she must, while screaming in absolute terror the word that would dissolve the walkway proper.
For a fraction of a second she caught the sound of screams other than her own, howls of creatures unseen but falling. Then the shimmer broke against her face like water, shutting out sound, and light, and finally thought. Blinded, deafened, and alone, she fell forever….
Exocontinual Protocols
She lay with her face pressed against the cold harsh gravel, feeling the grit of it against her cheek, the hot tears as they leaked between her lashes, and that awful chill wind that wouldn’t stop tugging at her clothes. Very slowly Nita opened her eyes, blinked, and gradually realized that the problem with the place where she lay was not her blurred vision. It was just very dim there. She leaned on her skinned hands, pushed herself up, and looked to see where she was.
Dark gray gravel was all around. Farther off, something smooth and dark, with navy blue bumps. The helipad. Farther still, the railing, and beyond it the sky, dark. That was odd—it had been morning. The sound of a moan made Nita turn her head. Kit was close by, lying on his side with his hands over his face. Sitting on his shoulder, looking faint as a spark about to go out, was Fred.
Nita sat up straighter, even though it made her head spin. She had fallen a long way; she didn’t want to remember how far…. “Kit,” she whispered. “You okay? Fred?”
Kit turned over, pushed himself up on his hands to a sitting position, and groaned again. Fred clung to him. “I don’t think I busted anything,” Kit said, slow and uncertain. “I hurt all over. Fred, what about you?”
The Sun is gone, Fred said, sounding absolutely horrified.
Kit looked out across the helipad into the darkness and rubbed his eyes. “Me and my bright ideas. What have I got us into?”
“As much my bright idea as yours,” Nita said. “If it weren’t for me, we wouldn’t have been out by that worldgate in the first place. Anyway, Kit, where else could we have gone? Those perytons—”
Kit shuddered. “Don’t even talk about them. I’d sooner be here than have them get me.” He got to his knees, then stood up, swaying for a moment. “Oooh. C’mon, let’s see where the worldgate went.”
He headed off across the gravel. Nita got up on her knees too, then caught sight of a bit of glitter lying a few feet away and grabbed at it happily. It was her pen, none the worse for wear. She clipped it securely to the pocket of her shirt and went after Kit and Fred.
Kit was heading for the south-facing railing. “I guess since you only called for a retrieval, the gate dumped us back on top of the…”
His voice trailed off suddenly as he reached the railing. Nita came up beside him and saw why.
The city was changed. A shiver ran all through Nita, like the odd feeling that comes with an attack of déjà vu—but this was true memory, not the illusion of it. She recognized the place from her first spell with Kit—the lowering, sullen-feeling gloom, the shadowed island held prisoner between its dark, icy rivers. Frowning buildings hunched themselves against the oppressive, slaty sky. Traffic moved, but very little of it, and it did so in the dark. Few headlights or taillights showed anywhere. The usual bright stream of cars and trucks and buses was here only dimly seen motion and a faint sound of snarling engines.
And the sky! It wasn’t clouded over; it wasn’t night. It was empty. Just a featureless grayness, hanging too low, like a ceiling. Simply by looking at it Nita knew that Fred was right. There was no Sun behind it, and there were no stars—only this wall of gloom, shutting them in, imprisoning them with the presence Nita remembered from the spell, that she could feel faintly even now. It wasn’t aware of her, but … She pushed back away from the rail, remembering the rowan’s words. The Other. The Witherer, the Kindler of Wildfires—
“Kit,” she said, whispering, this time doing it to keep from perhaps being overheard by that. “I think we should really get out of here.”
He backed away from the rail too, a step at a time. “Well,” he said, very low, “now we know what your pen was doing in New York City…”
“The sooner it’s out of here, the happier I’ll be. Kit—where’d the worldgate go?”
He shook his head, came back to stand beside her. “Wherever it went, it’s not out there now.”
Nita let out an unhappy breath. “Why should it be? Everything else is changed.” She looked back at the helipad. The stairwell was still there, but its door had been ripped away and lay buckled on the gravel. The helipad itself had no design painted on it for a helicopter to center on when landing. The glass of the small building by the pad was smashed in some places and filmed all around; the building was full of rubble and trash, a ruin. “Where are we?” Nita said.
“The place we saw in the finding spell. Manhattan—”
“But different.” Nita chewed her lip nervously. “Is this an alternate world, maybe? The next universe over? The worldgate was just set for a retrieval, but we jumped through; maybe we screwed up how it works. Carl said this one was easy to mess up.”
“I wonder how much trouble you get in for busting a worldgate,” Kit muttered.
“I think we’re in enough trouble right now. We have to find the thing.”
See if you can find me the Sun and the stars and the rest of the Universe while you’re at it, Fred said. He sounded truly miserable, much worse than when he had swallowed the pen. I don’t know how long I can bear this silence.
Kit stood silent for a moment, staring out at that grim cold cityscape. “There is a spell we can use to find it that doesn’t need anything but words,” he said. “Good thing. We don’t have much in the way of supplies. We’ll need your help, though, Fred. Your claudication was connected to the worldgate’s when we went through. You can be used to trace it.”
Anything to get us out of this place! Fred said.
“Well,” Nita said, “let’s find a place to get set up.”
The faint rattling noise of helicopter rotors interrupted her. She stared westward along the long axis of the roof, toward the dark half-hidden blot that was Central Park, or another version of it.
A small flying shape came wheeling around the corner of a skyscraper a few blocks away and cruised steadily toward the roof where they stood, the sharp chatter of its blades ricocheting more and more loudly off the blank dark faces of neighboring skyscrapers.
“I thought you said the helipad was closed—”
“I have a feeling this one isn’t,” Nita said, the back of her neck prickling with fear.
“We’d better get under cover,” Kit said.
Nita started for the stairwell, and Kit headed after her, but a bit more slowly. He kept throwing glances over his shoulder at the approaching chopper, both worried by it and interested in it. Nita looked over her shoulder too, to tell him to hurry—and then realized how close the chopper was, how fast it was coming. A standard two-seat helicopter, wiry skeleton, glass bubble protecting the seats, oval doors on each side.
But the bubble’s glass was filmed over except for the doors, which glittered oddly. They had a faceted look. No pilot could see out of that, Nita thought, confused. And the skids, the landing skids are wrong somehow. The helicopter came sweeping over their heads, low, too low.
“KIT!” Nita yelled. She spun around and tackled him, knocking him flat, as the skids made a lightning jab at the place where he’d been a moment before and hit t
he gravel with a screech of metal. The helicopter soared on past them, refolding its skids, not yet able to slow down from the speed of its first attack. The thunderous rattling of its rotors mixed with another sound, a high frustrated shriek like that of a predator that has missed its kill. Almost immediately they heard something else too, an even higher pitched squealing, ratchety and metallic, produced by several sources and seeming to come from inside the ruined glass shelter.
Kit and Nita clutched at each other, getting a better look at the helicopter from behind as it swung around for another pass. The “skids” were doubled-back limbs of metal like those of a praying mantis, cruelly clawed. Under what should have been the helicopter’s “bubble,” sharp dark mandibles worked hungrily—and as the chopper heeled over and came about, those faceted eyes looked at Kit and Nita with the cold, businesslike glare reserved for helpless prey.
“We’re dead,” Nita whispered.
“Not yet.” Kit gasped, staggering up again. “The stairwell—” Together he and Nita ran for the stairs as the chopper-creature arrowed across the rooftop at them. Nita was almost blind with terror; she knew now what had torn the door off the stairwell, and doubted there was any way to keep that thing from getting them.
They fell into the stairwell together. The chopper roared past again, not losing so much time in its turn this time, coming about to hover like a deadly dragonfly while positioning itself for another jab with those steel claws. Kit fell further down the stairs than Nita did, hit his head against a wall, and lay moaning. Nita slid and scrabbled to a stop, then turned to see that huge, horrible face glaring into the stairwell, sighting on her for the jab.
It was unreal. None of it could possibly be real; it was all like a dream. With the inane desperation of a dreamer in a nightmare, Nita felt for the only thing at hand, the rowan rod, pulled it free and slashed at the looming face with it.
She was completely unprepared for the result. A whip of silver fire the color of the full Moon cracked across the bubble-face from the rod, which glowed in her hand. Screaming in pain and rage, the chopper-creature backed up and away, but only a little. The razor-combed claws shot down at her. She slashed at them too, and when the moonfire curled around them, the creature screamed again and pulled them back.
“Kit!” she yelled, not daring to turn her back on those raging, ravenous eyes. “Kit! The antenna!”
She heard him fumbling around in his pack as the hungry helicopter took another jab at her, and she whipped it again with fire. Quite suddenly something fired past her ear—a bright, narrow line of blazing red light the color of metal in the forge. The molten light struck the helicopter in the underbelly, splattering in bright hot drops, and the answering scream was much more terrible this time.
“It’s a machine,” Nita said, gasping. “Your department.”
“Great,” Kit said, crawling up the stairs beside her. “How do you kill a helicopter?” But he braced one arm on the step just above his face, laid the antenna over it, and fired again. The chopper-creature screeched again and swung away.
Kit scrambled up to his feet, pressed himself flat against what remained of the crumbling doorway, pointed the antenna again. Red fire lanced out, followed by Nita’s white as she dove back out into the stinging wind and thunder of rotors and slashed at the horror that hung and grabbed from midair. Gravel flew and stung, the wind lashed her face with her hair, the air was full of that ear-tearing metallic scream, but she kept slashing. White fire snapped and curled—and then from around the other side of the chopper-creature there came a sharp crack! as a bolt of Kit’s hot light fired upward.
The scream that followed made all the preceding ones sound faint. Nita wished she could drop the wand and cover her ears, but she didn’t dare—and anyway she was too puzzled by the creature’s reaction. That shot hadn’t hit anywhere on its body that she could see. Still screaming, it began to spin helplessly in a circle like a toy pinwheel. Then Nita realized that Kit had shattered the helicopter’s tail rotor. It might still be airborne, but it couldn’t fly straight, or steer.
Nita danced back from another jab of those legs, whipped the eyes again with the silver fire of the rowan wand as they spun past her. From the other side there was another crack! and a shattering sound, and the bubble-head spinning past her again showed one faceted eye now opaque, spiderwebbed with cracks. The helicopter lurched and rose, trying to gain altitude and get away.
Across the roof Kit looked up, laid the antenna across his forearm again, took careful aim, fired. This time the molten line of light struck through the blurring main rotors. With a high, anguished, ringing snap, one rotor flew off and pinwheeled away almost too fast to see. The helicopter gave one last wild screech, bobbled up, then sideways, as if staggering through the air.
“Get down!” Kit screamed at Nita, throwing himself on the ground. She did the same, covering her head with her arms and frantically gasping the syllables of the defense-shield spell.
The explosion shook everything and sent gravel flying to bounce off the hardened air around her like hail off a car roof. Jagged blade shards snapped and rang and shot in all directions. Only when the roaring and the wash of heat that followed it died down to quiet and flickering light did Nita dare to raise her head.
The helicopter-creature was now a broken-backed wreck with oily flame licking through it. The eye that Kit had shattered stared blindly up at the dark sky from the edge of the helipad; the tail assembly, twisted and bent, lay half under the creature’s body. The only sounds left were the wind and that shrill keening from the little glass building, now much muted. Nita rid herself of the shielding spell and got slowly to her feet. “Fred?” she whispered.
A pale spark floated shakily through the air to perch on her shoulder. Here, he said, sounding as tremulous as Nita felt. Are you well?
She nodded, walked toward the wreck. Kit stood on the other side of it, his fist clenched on the antenna. He was shaking visibly. The sight of his terror made Nita’s worse as she came to stand by him. “Kit,” she said, fighting the urge to cry and losing—tears spilled out anyway. “This is not a nice place,” she said.
He gulped, leaking tears himself. “No,” he said, trying to keep his voice steady, “it sure isn’t.” He looked over at the glass-walled building.
“Yeah,” Nita said, scrubbing at her face. “We better have a look.”
Slowly and carefully they approached the building, came to one collapsed wall, peered in. Nita held her wand high, so they could see by its glow.
Inside, hidden amid the trash and broken glass, was what seemed to be a rude nest built of scraps of metal and wire. In the nest were three baby helicopters, none more than two feet long. They stared fiercely at Kit and Nita from tiny faceted eyes like their parent’s, and threatened with little jabbing forelegs, whirring with rotors too small to lift them yet. Sharing the nest with the fledglings was the partially stripped skeleton of a dog.
Kit and Nita turned away together. “I think maybe we should go downstairs a little ways before we do that finding spell,” Kit said, his voice still shaking. “If there’s another of those things—”
“Yeah.” They headed down the stairwell, to the door that in their own world had opened onto the elevator corridor. The two of them sat down, and Nita laid the rowan wand in her lap so there would be light—the ceiling lights in the stairwell were out, and the place felt like the bottom of a hole.
“Fred,” Kit said, “how’re you holding up?”
Fred hung between them, his light flickering. A little better than before. The silence is still very terrible. But at least you two are here.
“We’ll find you the Sun, Fred,” Nita said, wishing she was as sure as she was trying to sound. “Kit, which spell was it you were going to use?”
Kit had his manual out. “At the bottom of 414. It’s a double; we read together.”
Nita got out her own book, paged through it. “McKillip’s Stricture? That’s for keeping grass short!”
Nita riffled through some more pages. Evidently her book had more information than Kit’s on the spells relating to growing things. Her suspicion about what their specialties were grew stronger. “Got it.” She glanced through the spell. “Fred, you don’t have to do anything actually. But this is one of those spells that’ll leave us blind to what’s happening around here. Watch for us?”
Absolutely!
“Okay,” Kit said. “Ready? One—two—three—”
They spoke together, slowly and carefully, matching cadence as they described the worldgate, and their own needs, in the Speech.
The shadowy stairwell grew darker still, though this darkness seemed less hostile than what hung overhead; and in the deepening dimness, the walls around them slowly melted away. It seemed to Nita that she and Kit and the small bright point between them hung at a great height, unsupported, over a city built of ghosts and dreams. The buildings that had looked real and solid from the roof now seemed transparent skeletons, rearing up into the gloom of this place. Stone and steel and concrete were shadows—and gazing through them, down the length of the island, Nita saw again the two points of light that she and Kit had seen in the first spell.
The closer one, perhaps ten blocks north in the east Fifties, still pulsed with its irregular, distressing light. Compelled by the spell’s working, Nita looked closely at it, though that was the last thing she wanted to do—that bit of angry brightness seemed to be looking back at her. But she had no choice. She examined the light, and into her mind, poured there by the spell, came a description of the light’s nature in the Speech.
Nita would have backed away, as she had from the perytons, except that again there was nowhere to go. A catalogue of sorts, that light was—a listing, a set of descriptions. But all wrong, all twisted, angry as the light looked, hungry as the helicopter-creature had been, hating as the surrounding darkness was, full of the horrors that everything in existence could become. The Book Which Is Not Named…
