by Diane Duane
*
Nita sat at ease, taking a breather and watching the streets of Manhattan rush by. Kit, behind the steering wheel, was holding the dark Book in his lap with his backpack under it, monitoring it carefully for any change in the directional spell…though he was reluctant to touch it.
She could understand why. The farther south they went, the more the Book burned the eyes that looked at it. The wizards’ manual had predicted this effect—that, as the two Books drew closer to one another, each would assert its own nature more and more forcefully. Nita watched the Book warping and skewing the very air around it, blurring its own outlines, and found it easy to believe the manual’s statement that even a mind of terrible enough purpose and power to wrench this Book to its use might in the reading be devoured by what was read. She hoped for Kit’s sake that it wouldn’t devour someone who was just in contact with it.
“We’re close,” Kit said at last, in a quiet, strained voice.
“You okay?”
“I’ve got a headache, but that’s all. Where are we?”
“Uh—that was just Pearl Street. Close to City Hall.” She stroked the inside of her door, a friendly gesture. “Your baby moves.”
“Yeah,” Kit said affectionately. The Lotus rumbled under its hood, sped on.
“Fred? You feeling better?”
Fred looked up at her from her collar. Somewhat. I’d feel better still if I knew what we were going to be facing next. If I’m to make bricks again, I’m going to need some notice.
“Your gnaester, huh?” Kit said.
I’m not sure I have a gnaester anymore, after that last emission. And I’m afraid to find out.
“Kit, scrunch down,” Nita said suddenly, doing the same herself. The Lotus roared past the corner of Broadway and Chambers, pointedly ignoring a pair of sullen-looking cabs that stared and snarled as it passed. They were parked on either side of an iron-railed stairway leading down to a subway station. About a block farther along Broadway, two more cabs were parked at another subway entrance.
From his slumped-down position, Kit glanced over at Nita. “Those are the first we’ve seen.”
“‘The usual accesses,’“ Nita said. “They’ve got it down in the subway somewhere.”
“Oh no,” Kit muttered. Wonderful, Fred said.
Nita swallowed, not too happy about the idea herself. Subway stations, unless they were well lighted and filled with people, often gave her the creeps. Worse, even in her New York, subways had their own special ecologies—not just the mice and rats and cats that everybody knew about, but other less normal creatures, on which the wizards’ manual had had a twenty-page chapter, full of entirely too many details.
“They’re all over the place,” she said aloud, dealing with the worst problem first. “How are we going to—”
“Ooof!” Kit said, as the dark Book, sitting on his lap, suddenly sank down hard as if pulled down from below. The Lotus kept driving on down Broadway, past City Hall, and Kit struggled upward to look out the back window, noting the spot. “That was where the other Book was—straight down from that place we just passed.”
The Lotus turned right onto a side street and slowed as if looking for something. Finally it pulled over to the left-hand curb and stopped.
“What—?” Kit said, confused. But the racecar flicked open first Kit’s door, then Nita’s, as if it wanted them to get out.
They did, cautiously. Very quietly the Lotus closed its doors. Then it rolled forward a little way, bumping up onto the sidewalk in front of a dingy-looking warehouse.
The car reached down, bared its fangs, and with great delicacy sank them into a six-foot-long iron grille in the sidewalk. The Lotus heaved, and with a soft scraping groan, the grillwork came up to reveal an electric-smelling darkness and stairs leading down into it.
“It’s one of the emergency exits from the subway, for when the trains break down,” Kit whispered, jamming the dark Book back into his backpack and dropping to his knees to rub the Lotus enthusiastically behind one headlight. “It’s perfect!”
The Lotus’s engine purred as it stared at Kit with fierce affection. It backed a little, parked itself and dimmed its lights down to the merest glow, its motions indicating it would wait for them.
Kit got up, pulling out his antenna, and Nita got out her wand. “Well,” she said under her breath, “let’s get it over with…”
The steps were cracked concrete, growing damp and discolored as they made their way downward. Nita held out the wand to be sure of her footing and kept one hand on the left wall to be sure of her balance—there was no banister or railing on the right, only darkness and echoing air. “Kit—“ she said silently, wanting to be sure he was near, but not wanting to be heard by anything that might be listening down there.
“Right behind you. Fred?”
His spark came sailing down behind Kit, looking brighter as they passed from gloom to utter dark. Believe me, I’m not far.
“Here’s the bottom,” Nita said. She turned for one last glance up toward street level and saw a huge sleek silhouette carefully and quietly replacing the grille above them.
Nita gulped, feeling as if she were being shut into a dungeon, and turned to look deeper into the darkness. The stairs ended in a ledge three feet wide and perhaps four feet deep, recessed into the concrete wall of the subway. Nita held up the wand for more light. The ledge stretched away straight ahead, with the subway track at the bottom of a wide pit to the right of it. “Which way, Kit?”
“Straight, for the time being.”
The light reflected dully from the tracks beside them as they pressed farther into the dark. Up on the streets, though there had been darkness, there had also been sound. Here there was a silence like black water, a silence none of them dared to break. They slipped into it holding their breaths. Even the usual dim rumor of a subway tunnel, the sound of trains rumbling far away, the ticking of the rails, was missing.
The hair stood up all over Nita as she walked and tried not to make a sound. The air was damp, chilly, full of the smells of life—too full, and the wrong kinds of life, at least to Nita’s way of thinking. Mold and mildew; water dripping too softly to make a sound, but still filling the air with a smell of leached lime, a stale, puddly odor; wet trash, piled in trickling gutters or at the bases of rusting iron pillars, rotting quietly; and always the sharp ozone-and-scorched-soot smell of the third rail.
Shortly there was light that did not come from Nita’s wand. Pale splotches of green-white radiance were splashed irregularly on walls and ceiling—firefungus, which the wizards’ manual said was the main food source of the subway’s smallest denizens, the dun mice and hidebehinds and skinwings. Nita shuddered at the thought and walked faster. Where there were hidebehinds, there would certainly be rats to eat them. And where there were rats, there would also be fireworms and thrastles….
“Nita.”
She stopped and glanced back at Kit. He was holding his backpack in one arm now and the antenna in the other, and looking troubled in the wand’s silver light. “That way,” he said, pointing across the tracks at the far wall with its niche-shaped recesses.
“Through the wall? We don’t even know how thick it is!” Then she stopped and thought a moment. “I wonder— You suppose the Mason’s Word would work on concrete? What’s in concrete, anyhow?”
“Sand—quartz, mostly. Some chemicals—but I think they all come out of the ground”.
“It’ll work. C’mon.”
Nita hunkered down and very carefully let herself drop into the wide pit where the tracks ran. The crunch of rusty track cinders told her Kit was right behind. Fred floated down beside her, going low to light the way. With great care Nita stepped over the third rail and balanced on the narrow ledge of the wall on the other side.
She stowed the wand and laid both hands flat on the concrete to begin implementation of the lesser usage of the Word, the one that merely manipulates stone rather than giving it the semblance of life. N
ita leaned her head against the stone too, making sure of her memory of the Word, the sixteen syllables that would loose what was bound. Very fast, so as not to mess it up, she said the Word and pushed.
Door, she thought as the concrete melted under her hands, and a door there was; she was holding the sides of it.
“Go ahead,” she said to Kit and Fred. They ducked through under her arm. She took a step forward, let go, and the wall re-formed behind her.
“Now what the—“ Kit was staring around him in complete confusion.
It took Nita a moment to recover from the use of the Word, but when her vision cleared, she understood the confusion. They were standing in the middle of another track, which ran right into the wall they had just come through and stopped there. The walls there were practically one huge mass of firefungus. It hung down in odd green-glowing lumps from the ceiling, and layered thick in niches and on the poles that held the ceiling up. Only the track and ties and the rusty cinders between were bare, a dark road leading downward between eerily shining walls for perhaps an eighth of a mile before curving around to the right and out of view.
“I don’t get it,” Kit said. “This track just starts. Or just stops. It would run right into that one we just came off! There aren’t any subway lines in the city that do that! Are there?”
Nita shook her head, listening. The silence of the other tunnel did not persist here. Far down along the track, the sickly green light of the firefungus was troubled by small shadowy rustlings, movements, the scrabbling of claws. “What about the Book?”
Kit nodded toward the end of the track. “Down there, and a little to the right.”
They walked together down the long aisle of cold light, looking cautiously into the places where firefungus growth was sparse enough to allow for shadow. Here and there small sparks of brightness peered out at them, paired sparks—the eyes of dun mice, kindled to unnatural brightness by the fungus they fed on. Everywhere was the smell of dampness, old things rotting or rusting. The burning-ozone smell grew so chokingly strong that Nita realized it couldn’t be just the third rail producing it—even if the third rail were alive in a tunnel this old. The smell grew stronger as they approached the curve at the tunnel’s end. Kit, still carrying the backpack, was gasping. She stopped just before the curve, looked at him. “You okay?”
He gulped. “It’s close, it’s really close. I can hardly see, this thing is blurring my eyes so bad.”
“You want to give it to me?”
“No, you go ahead. This place seems to be full of live things. Your department. Better you should be able to handle stuff without this thing interfering—“
“Yeah, right.” Nita made sure of her grip on the rowan wand. “Here goes. Fred, you ready for another diversion?”
I think I could manage something small if I had to.
“Great. All together now…”
They walked around the curve, side by side – then stopped, and stared.
It was a subway station: or it had been once. From where they stood at one end of the platform, they could see the tons of rubble that had choked and sealed the tunnel at the far end of the platform. The rubble and the high ceiling were overgrown with firefungus enough to illuminate the old mosaics on the wall, and the age-cracked tiles that said CITY HALL over and over again, down the length of the platform wall.
But the platform and tracks weren’t visible from where they stood. Heaped up from wall to wall was a vast collection of garbage and treasure, things that mouldered, things that glittered. Nita saw gems, set and unset, like the plunder of a hundred jewelry stores, tumbled together with furry rotting kitchen garbage; costly fabric in bolts or in shreds, half buried by beer cans and broken bottles; paintings in ornate frames, elaborately carved furniture, lying broken or protruding crookedly from beneath timbers and dirt fallen from the old ceiling; vases, sculpture, crystal, silver services, a thousand kinds of rich and precious things, lying all together, whole and broken, among shattered dirty crockery and base metal. And lying atop the hoard, its claws clutched full of cheap costume jewelry, whispering hoarsely to itself in the Speech, was the dragon.
Once more Nita tried to swallow and couldn’t manage it. This looked nothing like the fireworm her book had mentioned—a foot-long mouse-eating lizard with cigarette-lighter breath. But what if a fireworm had a long, long time to grow? She remembered the voice of the young man in the three-piece suit, saying with relief, “The Eldest has it.” There was no telling how many years this creature had been lairing here in the darkness, growing huger and huger, devouring the smaller creatures of the underground night and dominating those it did not devour, sending them out to steal for its hoard—or to bring it food.
Nita began to tremble, looking at the fireworm-dragon’s thirty feet of lean, scaled, tight-muscled body, looking at the size of its dark-stained jaws, and considering what kind of food it must eat. She glanced down at one taloned hind foot and saw something that lay crushed and forgotten beneath it—a subway repairman’s reflective orange vest, torn and scorched; a wrench, half melted; the bones, burned black….
The dragon had its head down and was raking over its hoard with huge claws that broke what they touched half the time. Its tail twitched like a cat’s as it whispered to itself in a voice like hissing steam. Its scales rustled as it moved, glowing faintly with the same light as the firefungus, but colder, greener, darker. The dragon’s eyes were slitted as if even the pale fungus light was too much for it. It dug in the hoard, nosed into the hole, dug again, nosed about, as if going more by touch than sight. “Four thousand and ssix,” it whispered, annoyed, hurried, angry. “ It was here sssomewhere, I know it was. Three thousand—no. Four thousand and—and—”
It kept digging, its claws sending coins and bottle caps rolling. The dragon reached into the hole and with its teeth lifted out a canvas bag. Bright things like coins spilled out. With a snarl of aggravation the fireworm-dragon flung the bag away, and its contents flew and bounced down the hoard-hill, a storm of brassy glitter.
One of the bright things rolled right to Nita’s feet. Not taking her eyes off the dragon, she bent to pick it up. It was one of the subway tokens that the New York transit system had used once, long before machine-readable cards had come in. Nudging Kit, she passed it to him, while gazing around at the mosaics on the walls.
They were old. The City Hall motif repeated in squares high on the train side wall of the platform looked little like the City Hall of today. This station had to be one of those that were walled up and forgotten when the area was being rebuilt long ago. The question was…
“The problem is—“ Kit started to say in his quietest whisper of thought.
But it wasn’t quiet enough. With an expression of rage and terror, the dragon’s head jerked up away from its digging and looked straight at them. Its squinted eyes kindled in the light from Nita’s wand, throwing back a frightful violet reflection. “Who’s there? Who’s there!” it screamed in the Speech, in a voice like an explosion of steam. And without waiting for an answer it struck forward with its neck as a snake strikes and spat fire at them.
Nita was ready, though; the sound of the scream and the sight of many tiny shadows running for cover had given her enough warning to put up the shield spell for both herself and Kit. The dragon’s firebolt, dark red shot through with billowing black like the output of a flamethrower, splashed off the shield and spilled sideways and down like water running off a window. When the bolt died away, the dragon was creeping and coiling down the hoard toward them; but it stopped, confused, when it saw that Kit and Nita and Fred still stood before it unhurt.
It reared back its head for another bolt.
“You can’t hurt us, Eldest,” Nita said hurriedly, hoping it wouldn’t try; the smell of burned firefungus was already enough to turn her stomach. The dragon crouched low against the hoard, its tail lashing, staring at them.
“You came to ssteal,” it said, its voice quieter than before but angrier, as it rea
lized it couldn’t hurt them. “ No one ever comes here but to ssteal. Or to try,” it added, glancing savagely over at another torn and fire-withered orange vest. “What do you want? You can’t have it. Mine, all thiss is mine. No one takes what’ss mine. He promissed, he ssaid he would leave me alone when I came here. Now he breakss the promiss, is that it?”
The Eldest squinted wrathfully at them. For the second time that day, Nita found herself fascinated by an expression. Rage was in the fireworm-dragon’s face, but also a kind of pain; and its voice was desperate in its anger. It turned its back, then, crawling back up onto the hoard. “I will not let him break the promiss. Go back to him and tell him that I will burn it, burn it all, ssooner than let him have one ring, one jewel. Mine, all thiss is mine, no hoard has been greater than thiss in all times, he will not diminishhh it—” The Eldest wound itself around the top of the hoard-mound like a crown of spines and scales, digging its claws protectively into the gems and the trash.
A small avalanche of objects slid down from the place where it had been laying the hoard open. Gold bars, some of them little collectors’ bars, some of them full-sized ones such as banks used, clattered or crashed down the side of the mound. Nita remembered how some $10 million worth of Federal Reserve gold had vanished from a bank in New York some years before—just vanished, untraceable—and she began to suspect where it had gone.
“Mine,” hissed the Eldest. “ I have eight thousand six hundred forty-two cut diamonds. I have six hundred—no. I have four hundred eight emeralds. I have eighty-nine black opals—no, fifteen black opals. I have eighty-nine—eighty-nine—”
The anxiety in its voice was growing, washing out the anger. Abruptly the Eldest turned away from them and began digging again, still talking, its voice becoming again as it had been when they first came in: hurried, worried. “ Eighty-nine pounds of silver plate. I have two hundred fourteen pounds of gold—no, platinum. I have six hundred seventy pounds of gold—”
“Nita,” Kit said very softly in English, hoping the Eldest wouldn’t understand it. “Its memory’s going.”
