by Диана Дуэйн
(This is it,) he said suddenly, his thought sounding unusually muted even for Fred. (This is the middle of the darkness.)
(This?) Kit and Nita thought at the same time, in shock, and then simultaneously hushed themselves. Nita edged out to the sidewalk to get a better look at the place. She had to crane her neck. They were in front of a sky-scraper, faced completely in black plate glass, an ominous, windowless monolith.
(Must be about ninety stories,) Nita said. (I don't see any lights.)
{Why would you?) Fred said. (Whoever lives in this place doesn't seem fond of light at all. How shall we go in?)
Nita glanced back up the street. (We passed a driveway that might go down to a delivery entrance.)
(I'll talk to the lock,) Kit said. (Let's go!)
They went back the way they had come and tiptoed down the driveway. It seemed meant for trucks to back into. A flight of steps at one side led up to a 'oading platform about four feet above the deepest part of the ramp. Climbing the stairs, Kit went to a door on the right and ran his hands over it as Nita and Fred came up behind. (No lock,) Kit said. (It's controlled from inside.) (We can't get in? We're dead.)
(We're not dead yet. There's a machine in there that makes the garage ooors go up. That's all I need.) Kit got out the antenna and held it against e door as he might have held a pencil he was about to write with. He closed 15 eyes. (If I can just feel up through the metal and the wires, find it…). 'j'ta and Fred kept still while Kit's eyes squeezed tighter and tighter shut "erce concentration. Inside one garage door something rattled, fell silent, led again, began to grind. Little by little the door rose until there was an opening at the bottom of it, three feet high. Kit opened his eyes but kept the antenna pressed against the metal. (Go on in.)
Fred and Nita ducked through into darkness. Kit came swiftly after them. Behind him, the door began to move slowly downward again, shutting with a thunderous clang. Nita pulled out the rowan wand, so they could look around. There were wooden loading pallets stacked on the floor, but nothing else — bare concrete walls, bare ceiling. Set in the back wall of the huge room was one normal-sized double door.
(Let's see if this one has a lock,) Kit said as they went quietly up to it. He touched the right-hand knob carefully, whispered a word or two in the Speech, tried it, The right side of the double door opened.
(Huh. Wasn't even locked!) Through the open door, much to everyone's surprise, light spilled — plain old fluorescent office-building light, but cheery as a sunny day after the gloom outdoors. On the other side of the door was a perfectly normal-looking corridor with beige walls and charcoal-color doors and carpeting. The normality came as something of a shock. (Fred, I thought you said it was darker here!)
(Felt darker, And colder. And it does,) Fred said, shivering, his faint light rippling as he did so. (We're very close to the source of the coldness. It's farther up, though.)
(Up?) Nita looked at Kit uneasily. (If we're going to get the dark Book and get out of here fast, we can't fool with stairs again. We'll have to use the elevators somehow.)
Kit glanced down at the antenna. (I think I can manage an elevator if it gets difficult. Let's find one.)
They slipped through the door and went down the hall to their right, heading for a lobby at its far end. There they peered out at a bank of_ elevators set in the same dark-green marble as the rest of the lobby. № 01 was there.
Kit walked to the elevators, punched the call button, and hurriedly m(tioned Nita and Fred to join him. Nita stayed where she was for a moment (Shouldn't we stay out of sight here?) (Come on!)
She went out to him, Fred bobbing along beside. Kit watched the elevator lights to see which one was coming down and then slipped into a recess at the side. Nita took the hint and joined him. The elevator bell chimed; doors slid open—
The perytons piled out of the middle elevator in a hurry, five of them together, not looking to left or right, and burst out the front door into the street. Once outside they began their awful chorus of howls and snarls, but Nita and Kit and Fred weren't sitting around to listen. They dove into the middle elevator, and Kit struck the control panel with the antenna, hard. ""Close up and take ofB"
The elevator doors closed, but then a rumbling, scraping, gear-grinding screech began — low at first, then louder, a combination of every weird, unsettling noise Nita had ever heard an elevator make. Cables twanged and ratchets ratcheted, and, had they been moving, she would have sworn they were about to go plunging down to crash in the cellar. ""Cut it out or I'll snap your cables myself when I'm through with you! "Kit yelled in the Speech. Almost immediately the elevator jerked slightly and then started upward. Nita tried again to swallow and had no better luck than the last time. "Those perytons are going to pick up our scent right outside that door, Kit! And they'll track us inside, and it won't be five minutes before—"
"I know, I know. Fred, how well can you feel the middle of the darkness?" (We're closer.)
"Good. You'll have to tell me when to stop."
The elevator went all the way up to the top, the eighty-ninth floor, before Fred said, (This is it!)
Kit rapped the control panel one last time with his antenna. ""You stay where you are,"" he said. The elevator doors opened silently to reveal another normal-looking floor, this one more opulent than the floor downstairs. Here the carpets were ivory-white and thick; the wall opposite the elevators was one huge bookcase of polished wood, filled with hundreds of books, like volumes of one huge set. Going left they came to another hallway, stretching off to their left like the long stroke of an L; this one too was lined with bookcases. At the far end stood a huge polished desk, with papers and Dictaphone equipment and an intercom and a multiline phone jumbled about on it. At the desk sat—
—it was hard to know what to call it. Kit and Nita, peering around the corner, were silent with confusion and fear. The thing sitting in a secretary's swivel chair and typing on an expensive electric typewriter was dark green and warty, and sat about four feet high in the chair- It had limbs with tentacles and claws, all knotted together under a big eggplant-shaped head, and goggly, wicked eyes. All the limbs didn't seem to help the creature's typing much, for every few seconds it made a mistake and went grumbling and fumbling over the top of its messy desk for a bottle of correcting fluid. 1he creature's grumbling was of more interest than its typing. It used the APeech, but haltingly, as if it didn't care much for the language—and indeed the smooth, stately rhythms of the wizardly tongue suffered somewhat, com-ln§ out of that misshapen mouth.
Kit leaned back against the wall. (We've gotta do something. Fred, are you Sl«e it's up here?)
(Absolutely. And past that door, behind that—) Fred indicated the warty typist. From down the hall came another brief burst of typing, then more grumbling and scrabbling on the desk.
(We've got to get it away from there.) Nita glanced at Fred.
(I shall create a diversion,) Fred said, with relish. (I've been good at it so far.)
(Great. Something big. Something alive again, if you can manage it — then again, forget that.) Nita breathed out unhappily. (I wouldn't leave anything alive here.)
(Not even Joanne?) Kit said with a small but evil grin.
(Not even her. This place has her outclassed. Fred, just—)
A voice spoke, sounding so loud that Kit and Nita stopped breathing, practically stopped thinking. "Akthanath," it called, a male voice, sounding weary and hassled and bored, "come in here a moment… "
Nita glanced at Kit. They carefully peeked down the hall once more and saw the tentacled thing hunch itself up, drop to the floor behind the desk, and wobble its way into the inner office, (Now?) Fred said.
(No, save it! But come on, this is our best chance!) Nita followed Kit down the hall to the door, crouched by it, and looked in. Past it was another room. They slipped into it and found themselves facing a partly open door that led to the office the typist had gone into. Through the slit they could just see the tentacly creature's b
ack and could hear the voice of the man talking to it. "Hold all my calls for the next hour or so, until they get this thing cleared up. I don't want everybody's half- baked ideas of what's going on. Let Garm and his people handle it. And here, get Mike on the phone for me. I want to see if I can get something useful out of him."
Nita looked around, trying not even to think loudly. The room they were in was lined with shelves and shelves of heavy, dark, leatherbound books with gold-stamped spines. Kit tiptoed to one bookshelf, pulled out a volume at random, and opened it. His face registered shock; he held out the book for Nita to look at. The print was the same as that in Carl's large Advisory manual, line after line of the clear graceful symbols of the Speech — but whatever was being discussed on the page Nita looked at was so complicated she could only understand one word out of every ten or twenty. She glanced at Kit as he turned back to the front of the book and showed her the titfe pagC. UNIVERSES, PARAUNIVERSES AND PLANES-------- ASSEMBLY AND MAINTE-NANCE,
it said. a creator's manual. And underneath, in smaller letters, Volume 108—Natural and Supernatural Laws,
Nita gulped. Beside her, Fred was dancing about in the air in great agiW' tion. (What is it?) she asked him. (It's in here.)
(Where?) Kit said.
(One of those. I can't tell which, it's so dark down that end of the room.) Fred indicated a bookcase on the farthest wall. (It's worst over there.) Nita stopped dead when she saw the room's second door, which gave on the inner office and was wide open.
Nita got ready to scoot past the door. The man who sat at the desk in the elegant office had his back to it and was staring out the window into the dimness. His warty secretary handed him the phone, and he swiveled around in the high-backed chair to take it, showing himself in profile. Nita stared at him, confused, as he picked up the phone. A businessman, young, maybe thirty, and very handsome — red-gold hair and a clean-lined face above a trim, dark three-piece suit. This was the Witherer, the Kindler of Wildfires, the one who decreed darkness, the Starsnuffer? "Hi, Michael," he said. He had a pleasant voice, warm and deep. "Oh, nothing much—" (Never mind him,) Kit said. (We've got to get that Book.) (We can't go past the door till he turns around.)
"— the answer to that is pretty obvious, Mike. I can't do a bloody thing with this place unless I can get some more power for it. I can't afford street lights, I can barely afford a little electricity, much less a star. The entropy rating—"
The young man swiveled in his chair again, leaning back and looking out the window. Nita realized with a chill that he had a superb view of the downtown skyline, including the top of the Pan Am Building, where even now wisps of smoke curled black against the lowering gray. She tapped Kit on the elbow, and together they slipped past the doorway to the bookshelf. (Fred, do you have even a little idea—)
(Maybe one of those up there.) He indicated a shelf just within reach. Kit and Nita started taking down one book after another, looking at them. Nita was shaking — she had no clear idea what they were looking for.
(What if it's one of those up there, out of reach?) (You'll stand on my shoulders. Kit, hurry!)
"— Michael, don't you think you could talk to the rest of Them and get me just a little more energy? — Well, They've never given me what I asked or, have They? All I wanted was my own Universe where everything works—Which brings me to the reason for this call. Who's this new operative you turned loose in here? This Universe is at a very delicate stage, interference will-."
1 hey were down to the second-to-last shelf, and none of the books had what they were looking for. Nita was sweating worse. (Fred, are you sure—} («s dark there, it's all dark. What do you want from me?)
Kit, kneeling by the bottom shelf, suddenly jumped as if shocked. (Huh?) Nita said. (It stung me. Nita!) Kit grabbed at the volume his hand had brushed, yanked it out of the case, and knelt there, juggling it like a hot potato. He managed to get it open and held it out, showing Nita not the usual clean page, close-printed with the fine small symbols of the Speech, but a block of transparency like many pages of thinnest glass laid together. Beneath the smooth surface, characters and symbols seethed as if boiling up from a great depth and sinking down again. Nita found herself squinting, fit hurts to look at.)
(It hurts to hold!) Kit shut the book hurriedly and held it out to Fred for him to check, for externally it looked no different from any other book there. (Is this what we're looking for?) Fred's faint glimmer went out like a blown candle flame with the nearness of the book. (The darkness — it blinds—}
Kit bundled the book into his backpack and rubbed his hands on his jacket. {Now if we can just get out of here…)
"— oh, come on, Mike," the voice was saying in the other office. "Don't get cute with me. I had an incident on top of one of my buildings. One of my favorite constructs got shot up and the site stinks of wizardry. Your brand, moonlight and noon-forged metal." The voice of the handsome young man in the three-piece suit was still pleasant enough, but Nita, peering around the edge of the door, saw his face going hard and sharp as the edge of a knife. He swiveled around in his chair again to look out the window at that thin plume of ascending smoke, and Nita waved Kit past the door, then scuttled after him herself. " — that's a dumb question to be asking me, Michael If I knew, would I tell you where the bright Book was? And how likely is it that I know at all? You people keep such close tabs on it, at least that's what I hear. Anyway, if it's not read from every so often, don't / go ffft! like everything else? — You're absolutely right, that's not a responsive answer. Why should / be responsive, you're not being very helpful—"
Kit and Nita peeked back into the hall. Fred floated up to hang between them. (1 get a feeling—) Kit started to say, but the sudden coldness in the voice of the man on the phone silenced him. " — Look, Mike, I've had about enough of this silliness. The Bright Powers got miffed because I wanted to work on projects of my own instead of following-the-leader like you do, working from Their blueprints instead of drawing up your own. You can do what you please, but I thought when 1 settled down in this little pittance of a Universe that They would let me be and let me do things my way. They said They didn't need me when They threw me out — well, I've done pretty well without Them too. Maybe They don't like that, because now all of a sudden I'm getting interference. You say this operative isn't one of your sweetness-and-Light types? Fine. Then you won't mind if when
I catch him, her, or it, I make his stay interesting and permanent. Whoever's disrupting my status quo will wish he'd never been born, spawned, or engendered. And when you see the rest of Them, you tell Them from me that—hello? Hello?"
The phone slammed down. There was no sound for a few seconds. "Akthanath," the young man's voice finally said into the silence, "someone's soul is going to writhe for this."
The slow cold of the words got into Nita's spine. She and Kit slipped around the door and ran for it, down the hall and into the elevator. "—he's playing it close to the chest," that angry voice floated down the hall to them. "I don't know what's going on. The Eldest still has it safe?—Good, then see that guards are mounted at the usual accesses. And have Garm send a pack of his people hacktime to the most recent gate opening. I want to know which universe these agents are coming from."
In the elevator, Kit whipped out the antenna and rapped the control panel with it. "Down!" Doors closed, and down it went, Nita leaned back against one wall of the elevator, panting. Now she knew why that first crowd of perytons had come howling after them on top of the Pan Am Building, but the solution of that small mystery made her feel no better at all. "Kit, they'll be waiting down-stairs, for sure."
He bit his lip. "Yeah. Well, we won't be where they think we'll be, that's all. If we get off a couple of floors too high and take the stairs—"
"Right."
"Stop at Four," Kit said to the elevator.
The elevator stopped, opened its doors. Kit headed out the door fast and tripped — the elevator had stopped several inches beneath the four
th floor. "Watch your step," the elevator said, snickering.
Kit turned and smacked the open elevator door with his antenna as Nita and Fred got out.
"Very funny. You stay here until f give the word. C'mon, kt'sget out of here!"
They ran down the hall together, found the stairs, and plunged down them. Kit was panting as hard as Nita now. Fred shot down past landing after Ending with them, his light flickering as if it were an effort to keep up. "Kit," N'ta said, "where are we going to go after we leave this building? We need htte, and a place to do the spell to find the bright Book."
Kit sounded unhappy. "I dunno, How about Central Park? If we hid in there—"
But you saw what it looks like from the top of Pan Am. It's all dark in a there were things moving—" 1 nere's a lot of room to hide. Look, Nita, if I can handle the machines here, it's a good bet you can handle the plants. You're good with plants and live stuff, you said." She nodded reluctantly. "I guess we'll find out how good."
They came to the last landing, the ground door. Nita pushed the door open a crack and found that they were almost directly across from the green lobby and the elevators. (What's the situation?) Kit said silently.
(They're waiting.) Six perytons, black-coated, brown-coated, one a steely gray, were sitting or standing around the middle elevator with their tongues hanging out and looks of anticipation and hunger in their too-human eyes. (Now?) Fred said, sounding eager.
(Not yet. We may not need a diversion, Fred.) "Go!" he whispered then in the Speech. The antenna in his hand sparked and sputtered with molten light, and Kit pressed close behind Nita. (Watch them!)
There was no bell, but even if there had been one, the sound of it and of the elevator doors opening would have been drowned out in snarls as the perytons leaped in a body into the elevator. The moment the perytons were out of sight, Nita pushed the door open and headed for the one to the garage. It stuck and stung her as the dark Book had; she jerked her hand away from it. Kit came up behind her and blasted it with the antenna, then grabbed it himself. This time it came open. They dashed through and Kit sealed the door behind them.
