(Now what?) he asked.
Nita sighed, pulled 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. "]ust 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 preferable — wolves were socta-ble 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…
Nita started to hitch backward in total panic and then froze, realizing that there was nowhere to go. She and Kit were trapped. Another second ana the perytons would be on the bridge, and at their throats, for eternity. K» whipped his head around toward Nita and the worldgate. "Jump through artf break the spell!" he yelled.
"But—" And she grabbed his arm, pushed the rowan wand through ne , u ^d yelled, "Come on, Fred!" The first three perytons leaped the guard- i anj landed on the bridge, running. Nita threw herself and Kit at the Ideate, being careful of the edges, as she knew she must, while screaming
• 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 raiting, 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, *e wouldn't have been out by that worldgate in the first place. Anyway, Kltr where else could we have gone? Those perytons—"
Kit shuddered. "Don't even talk about them. I'd sooner be here than SO YOU WANTTOBE A WIZARD81 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. 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 deft 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 oppres-sive, 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 better get out of here."
He backed away from the rail too, a step at a time. "Well," he said, very '°w, "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 did the world-gate go!" "e shook his head, came back to stand beside her. "Wherever it went, it's "ot out there now." Nita let out an unhappy breath. "Why should it be? Everything else is cl)anged." She looked back at the helipad. The stairwell was still there, but s door had been ripped away and lay buckled on the gravel. The helipad J*'r had no design painted on it for a helicopter to center on when landing. e glass of the small building by the pad was smashed in some places and med all around; the building was full of rubble and trash, a ruin. "Where "*we?" Nita said,' he place we saw in the 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 messed up its workings. 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."