"We're dead," Kit said, and turned to run. Nita followed him. Perhaps out of hope that another Lotus might be waiting innocently at some curbside, the way Kit ran retraced their earlier path. But there was no Lotus — only bright streets, full of people going about their business with no idea of what was about to happen to them, cars honking at one another in cheerful ignorance. Fat men running newsstands and bemused bag-ladies watched Nita and Kit run by as if death and doom were after them, and no one really noticed the determined spark of light keeping pace. They ran like the wind down West Fiftieth, but no Lotus lay there, and around the corner onto r'fth and up to Sixty-first, but the carnage left in the otherworld was not reflected here — the traffic on Fifth ran unperturbed. Gasping, they waited tor a break in it, then ran across, hopped the wall into the park and crouched down beside it as they had in the world they'd left.
The wind was rising, not just a night breeze off the East River, but a chill wind with a hint of that other place's coldness to it. Kit unslung his pack as drew in close, and by his light Kit brought out the Book of Night with. The darkness of its covers shone, steadying Kit's hands, making Fred seern to burn brighter. Kit and Nita sat gasping for breath, staring at each other. ' rn out of ideas," Kit said. "I think we're going to have to read from this to keep the city the way it should be. We can't just let him change things until he catches us. Buildings are one thing; but what happens to people after that black hits them?" "And it might not stop here either," Nita said between gasps, thinking of her mother and father and Dairine, of the quiet street where they lived, the garden, the rowan, all warped and darkened — if they would survive at all.
Her eyes went up to the Moon shining white and full between the shifting branches. All around them she could feel the trees stirring in that new, strange, cold wind, whispering uneasily to one another. It was so good to be in a place where she could hear the growing things again. The idea came. "Kit," she said hurriedly, "that dark was moving pretty fast. If we're going to read from the Book we may need something to buy us time, to hold off the things that'll come with it, the perytons and the cabs."
"We're out of Lotuses," Kit said, his voice bleak.
"I know. But look where we are! Kit, this is Central Park! You know how many trees there are in here of the kinds that went to the Battle in the old days? They don't forget." He stared at her. "What can they—"
"The Book makes everything work better, doesn't it? There's a spell that— I'll do it, you'll see. But you've got to do one too, it's in your specialty group. The Mason's Word, the long version—" "To bring stone or metal to life." He scrubbed the last tears out of his eyes and managed ever so slight and slow a smile. "There are more statues within screaming distance of this place—" "Kit," Nita said, "how loud can you scream?" "Let's find out."
They both started going through their manuals in panicky haste. Far away on the east side, lessened by all the buildings and distance that lay between, but still much too clear, there was a single, huge, deep-pitched clang, an immense weight of metal hitting the ground with stone- shattering force. Fred hobbled a little in the air, nervously. (How long do you think—) "He'll be a while, Fred," Kit said, sounding as if he hoped it would be a long while. "He doesn't like to run; it's beneath his dignity. But I think—' He broke off for a moment, reading down a page and forming the syllables or the Mason's Word without saying them aloud. "I think we're going to have a few friends who'll do a little running for us."
He stood up, and Fred followed him, staying close to light the page. "Nita, hand me the Book." She passed it up to him, breaking off her own frantic л reading for a moment to watch. "It'll have to be a scream," he said as if himself. "The more of them hear me, the more help we get."
Kit took three long breaths and then shouted the Word at the top of 1 lungs, all twenty-seven syllables of it without missing a one. The sound be-1 impossibly more than the yell of a twelve-year-old as the Book seized the sound and the spell together and flung them out into the city night. Nita had to hold her ears. Even when it seemed safe to uncover them again, the echoes bounced back from buildings on all sides and would not stop. Kit stood there amazed as his voice rang and ricocheted from walls blocks away. "Well," he said, "they'll feel the darkness, they'll know what's happening. I think."
"My turn," Nita said, and stood up beside Kit, making sure of her place. Her spell was not a long one. She fumbled for the rowan wand, put it in the hand that also held her wizards' manual, and took the bright Book from Kit. "1 hope—" she started to say, but the words were shocked out of her as the feeling that the Book brought with it shot up her arm. Power, such sheer joyous power that no spell could fail, no matter how new the wizard was to the Art, Here, under moonlight and freed at last from its long restraint, the Book was more potent than even the dark rider who trailed them would suspect, and that potency raged to be free. Nita bent her head to her manual and read the spell.
Or tried to. She saw the words, the syllables, and spoke the Speech, but the moonfire falling on the Book ran through her veins, slid down her throat, and turned the words to song more subtle than she had ever dreamed of, burned behind her eyes and showed her another time, when another will had voiced these words for the first time and called the trees to battle.
All around her, both now and then, the trees lifted their arms into the wind, breathed the fumes of the new-old Earth and breathed out air that men could use; they broke the stone to make ground for their children to till and fed the mold with themselves, leaf and bough, and generation upon generation. They knew to what end their sacrifice would come, but they did it anyway, and they would do it again in the Witherer's spite. They were doing it now. Oak and ash and willow, birch and alder, elm and maple, they teit the darkness in the wind that tossed their branches and would not stand still for it. The ground shook all around Nita, roots heaved and came free— "rst the trees close by, the counterparts of the trees under whicb she and Kit and Fred had sheltered in the dark otherworld. White oak, larch, twisted Crabapp]e, their leaves glittering around the edges with the flowering radiance of the rowan wand, they lurched and staggered as they came rootloose, arld then crowded in around Kit and Nita and Fred, whispering with wind, Joking a protecting circle through which nothing would pass but moonlight, ne effect spread out and away from Nita, though the spell itself was fin-ned, and that relentless power let her sag against one friendly oak, gasping. ror yards, for blocks, as far as she could see through the trunks of the trees * crowded close, branches waved green and wild as bushes and vines and hundred-year monarchs of the park pulled themselves out of the ground and moved heavily to the defense. Away to the east, the clangor of metal hooves and the barks and howls of the dark rider's pack were coming closer. The trees waded angrily toward the noise, some hobbling along on top of the ground, some wading through it, and just as easily through sidewalks and stone walls. In a few minutes there was a nearly solid palisade of living wood between Kit and Nita and Fred and Fifth Avenue. Even the glare of the street lights barely made it through the branches.
Kit and Nita looked at each other. "Well," Kit said reluctantly, "I guess we can't put it off any longer."
Nita shook her head. She moved to put her manual away and was momentarily shocked when the rowan wand, spent, crumbled to silver ash in her hand. "So much for that," she said, feeling unnervingly naked now that her protection was gone. Another howl sounded, very close by, and was abruptly cut off in a rushing of branches as if a tree had fallen on something on purpose. Nita fumbled in her pocket and pulled out a nickel. "Call it," she said. "Heads."