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. No one was there.
Kit walked to the elevators, punched the call button, and hurriedly motioned 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 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 off!”
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 away at a fancy programmable keyboard in front of a huge flatscreen monitor 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 into a frenzy of frustrated backspacing. The creature’s grumbling, however, was of more interest than its typing. It used the Speech, but haltingly, as if it didn’t care much for the language—and indeed the smooth, stately rhythms of the wizardly tongue suffered somewhat, coming out of that misshapen mouth.
Kit leaned back against the wall. Silently he said, “We’ve gotta do something. Fred, are you sure it’s up here?”
Absolutely. And past that door, behind that— Fred indicated the warty secretary. From down the hall came another brief burst of typing, then more grumbling and backspacing, and some of what might have been the Speech’s version of rude language.
“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 asked 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 deep 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 tentacled creature’s back 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 riot even to think loudly. The room they were in was lined with shelves and shelves of heavy, dark, leather-bound 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 title page. UNIVERSES, PARAUNIVERSES, AND PLANES—ASSEMBLY AND MAINTENANCE, 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 agitation. “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 was wide open and led to the inner office.
Nita got ready to scoot past the door. The man who sat at the desk in the elegant office had his back to the door right now and was staring out the window into the dimness. His warty secretary handed him the handset of a portable desk 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, high-cheekboned 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, a warm deep baritone. “Oh, nothing much—”
“Never mind him,”Kit said in a silent whisper. “We’ve got to get that Book!”
“Yeah, well, we can’t go past the door till he turns around!”
“—the answer to that is pretty obviou
s, Mike. I can’t do a bloody thing with this place unless I can get some more power for it. I can’t afford streetlights, I can barely afford a little electricity. And as for a star, don’t make me laugh. 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 MetLife 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 up!”
“—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 for, 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—”
They were down to the second-to-last shelf, and none of the books had been what they were looking for. Nita was sweating worse. “Fred, are you sure—“
It’s dark there, it’s all dark. What do you want from me?
Kit, kneeling by the bottom shelf, suddenly jumped as if shocked. “What?” 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. “It 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 as if trying to get rid of some stinging residue. “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 just had a very noticeable event 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 grey eyes narrowing and 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’d know anyway? 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 I go ffft! like everything else?— You’re absolutely right, that’s not a responsive answer. Why should I be responsive when you won’t even—”
Kit and Nita peeked back into the hall. Fred floated up to hang between them. “I get a feeling—“ Kit started to say, but the sudden vicious chilliness in the voice of the man on the phone silenced him.
“Look, Mike, I’ve had about enough of this silliness. The Powers got miffed because I wanted to work on projects of my own instead of playing follow the leader like you do, working from Their blueprints instead of drawing up your own. I thought when I settled down in this little pittance of a Universe that They’d finally let me be and let me do things my way. They said They didn’t need me when They threw me out? Fine, I’ve done pretty well without Them, too. And 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 that terrible 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 backtime 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 downstairs 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 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 I give the word. C’mon, let’s get 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 landing with them, his light flickering as if it were an effort to keep up. “Kit,” Nita said, “where are we going after we leave? We need time, and a place to do the spell to find the bright Book.”
Kit sounded unhappy. “No idea. How about Central Park? If we hid in there—”
“But you saw what it looks like from the top of MetLife, It’s all dark in there, there were things moving—”
“There’s a lot of room to hide. Look, Neets, if I can handle the machines here, it’s a good bet you can handle the plants. You’re good with live stuff, you said.”
She nodded reluctantly. “I guess we’ll find out how good.”
They came to the last landing, the ground floor. 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.”
He took a breath, and then aloud, “Go!” Kit whispered 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 door
s 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. The doorknob 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 the door 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 fell away screaming. Then came the explosion, and it hurled both her and Kit staggering off to their right. The street shook as if lightning-struck, and part 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 from somewhere to fill the street from side to side, burying sidewalks and perytons and doors and the delivery bay twenty feet deep.
Nita picked herself up. A few feet away Kit was doing the same, and Fred bobbled over to them as an ominous stillness settled over everything.
How was I? Fred asked, seeming dazed but pleased.
“Are you all right?” Kit asked.
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!”