"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 fourth 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.
No one was in the garage, but a feeling was growing in the air as if the storm of rage they'd heard beginning upstairs was about to break over their heads. Kit raised the antenna again, firing a line of hot light that zapped the ceiling-mounted controls of the delivery door, With excruciating slowness the door began to rumble upward. (Now?) Fred said anxiously as they ran toward it. (No, not yet, just—)
They bent over double, ducked underneath the opening door, and ran up the driveway. It was then that the perytons leaped at them from both sides-howling, and Nita grabbed for her wand and managed one slash with it. yelling, "Now, Fred! Now.
All she saw clearly was the peryton that jumped at her, a huge, blue-eyed, brindled she-wolf, as the rowan wand spat silver moonfire and the peryton M away screaming. Then came the explosion, and it hurled both her and Krt staggering off to their right. The street shook as if lightning-struck, and par-of the front of the dark building was demolished in a shower of shattered plate glass as tons and tons and tons of red bricks came crashing down froC1 somewhere to fill the street from side to side, burying sidewalks and peryton and doors and the delivery bay twenty feet deep. Nita picked herself up. A few feet away, Kit was doing the same, and bobbed over to them as an ominous stillness settled over everything. (How was I?) Fred said, seeming dazed but pleased. "Are you all right?" Kit said.
(I'm alive, but my gnaester will never be the same,} Fred said. (You two?) "We're fine," Kit said.
"And I think we're in trouble," Nita added, looking at the blocked street. "Let's get going!"
They ran toward Fifth Avenue, and the shadows took them.
Contractual Magic An Introduction
A four-foot-high wall ran down the west side of Fifth Avenue, next to a sidewalk of gray hexagonal paving-stones. Nita and Kit crouched behind it, just inside Central Park, under the shadows of barren-branched trees, and tried to catch their breath. Fred hung above them, watching both Fifth Avenue and Sixty-fourth Street for signs of pursuit.
Nita leaned against the dirty wall, careless of grime or roughness or the pigeon droppings that streaked it. She was scared. All through her life, the one thing she knew she could always depend on was her energy — it never gave out. Even after being beaten up, she always sprang right back. But here and now, when she could less afford exhaustion than she had ever been able to in her life, she felt it creeping up on her. She was even afraid to rest, for fear it would catch up with her quicker. But her lungs were burning, and it felt so good to sit still, not have death or something worse chasing her. And there was another spell to be cast…
If I'd known I was going to get into a situation like this, she thought would I ever have picked that book up at all? Would I have taken the Oath? Then she shook her head and tried to think about something else, for she got an inkling of the answer, and it shocked her. She had always been told that she wasn't brave. At least that's what Joanne and her friends had always sai«: Can't take a dare, can't take a joke, crybaby, crybaby. We were only teas-ing.…
She sniffed and rubbed her eyes, which stung. "Did you find the spell?' she said.
Kit had been paging through his wizards' manual. Now he was running 3 finger down one page,
occasionally whispering a word, then stopping himself to keep from using the Speech aloud.
"Yeah. It's pretty simple." But he was frowning.
"What's the matter?"
Kit slumped back against the wall, looked over at her. "I keep thinking about what — you know who — was talking about on the phone." "Sounded like he was hiding something."
"Uh hah. They know where the bright Book is, all right. And somebody's patching it. Whoever the 'Eldest' is. And now there're going to be more guards around it." " 'The usual accesses/ he said. Kit, there might be an unusual access, then."
"Sure. If we had any idea where the thing was hidden." "Won't the spell give us a vision, a location, like the last one?"
"No. It's a directional." Kit dropped his hands wearily on the book in his lap, sighed, looked over at Nita. "I don't know… I just don't get it."
"What?" She rolled the rowan wand between her hands, watching the way its light shone between her fingers and through the skin.
"He didn't look evil. Or sound that way, at least not till right at the end there." (The Snuffer was always glorious to look at before it scorned the light,) Fred said. {And it kept the beauty afterward—that's what the stars always used to say. That's one reason it's dangerous to deal with that one. The beauty … seduces.) Fred made a small feeling of awe and fear. (What a blaze of darkness, what a flood of emissions. I was having a hard time keeping my composure in there.) "Are you all right now?"
(Oh, yes. I was a little amazed that you didn't perceive the power burning around the shell he was wearing. Just as well — you might have spoken to him, and everything would have been lost. That one's most terrible power, they say, is his absolute conviction that he's right in what he does.) "He's not right, then?" Kit said. (I don't know.)
"But," Nita said, confused, "if he's fighting with… with Them… w'th the ones who made the bright Book, isn't he in the wrong?"