A pale spark floated shakily through the air to perch on her (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, J"5 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 e t0 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 helicop-ters, 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 fore-legs, 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 down-stairs 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 arc 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 three eighteen. 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!"
No, no!" Kit leaned over to look at Nita's manual. "Huh. How about that, our pages are different. Look under 'Eisodics and Diascheses.' The °urth one after the general introduction. Davidson's Minor Enthalpy."
Nita ruffled through some more pages. Evidently her book had more information than Kit's on the spells relating to growing things. Her suspicion /out what their specialties were grew stronger. "Got it." She glanced r°ugh the spell. "Fred, you don't have to do anything actually. But this is e ot those spells that'll leave us blind to what's happening around here. Watch for us?-
[Absolutely!)
<0lcay," 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. She 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—
Nita struggled, though unable to move or cry out; her mind beat at the spell like a bird in a cage, and finally the spell released her. But only to look in the other direction, downtown toward the Wall Street end of the island. There in the illogical-looking tangle of streets built before the regular gridwork of Manhattan was laid down, buried amid the ghosts of buildings, another light throbbed, regular, powerful, unafraid. It flared, it dazzled with white-silver fire, and Nita thought of the moonlight radiance of the rowan wand.
In a way, the spell said, this second light was the source of the wand's power, even though here and now the source was bound and limited. This time the syllables of the Speech were no crushing weight of horror. They were a song, one Nita wished would never stop. Courage, merriment, afl invitation to everything in existence to be what it was, be the best it could oe, grow, live—description, affirmation, encouragement, all embodied in one place, one source, buried in the shadows. The Book of Night with Moon.
A feeling of urgency came over Nita, and the spell told her that without the protection of the bright Book, she and Kit and Fred would never survive the hungry malevolence of this place long enough to find the worldgate aA escape. Nor, for that matter, would they he able to find the worldgate at aUf it was being held against them by powers adept in wizardries more poteD' than anything the two of them could manage. It would be folly to try match-' „wizardries with the Lone Power on its own ground, this outworld long given over to its rule. Their best chance was to find the bright Book and free it of the constraint that held its power helpless. Then there might be a chance.
The spell shut itself off, finished. Walls and physical darkness curdled around them again. Kit and
Nita looked at each other, uncertain.
"We've been had," Kit said.
Nita shook her head, not following him.
"Remember Tom saying it was odd that our first spell turned up Fred and the news that the bright Book was missing? And what Picchu said then?" "There are no accidents," Nita murmured.
"Uh huh. How likely do you think it is that all this is an accident? Some-thing wanted us here, I bet." Kit scowled. "They might have asked us! It's not fair!"
Nita held still for a moment, considering this. "Well, maybe they did ask us."
"Huh? Not me, I—"
"The Oath."
Kit got quiet quickly. "Well," he admitted after a while, "it did have all kinds of warnings in front of it. And I went ahead and read it anyway."
"So did I." Nita closed her eyes for a second, breathing out, and heard something in the back of her head, a thread of memory; Did I do right? Go find out… . "Look," she said, opening her eyes again, "maybe we're not as bad off as we think. Tom did say that younger wizards have more power. We don't have a lot of supplies, but we're both pretty good with the Speech by now, and Fred is here to help. We're armed—" She glanced down at the rowan wand, still lying moon-bright in her lap.