—and then he had to laugh. He started to laugh so hard, he could hardly stand it; his sides started to hurt. Oh, yeah, he thought. Nice try. Gimme a, break!
When he was able to breathe again, Kit straightened up and gazed around him. No matter how he created such a perfect place—or had this one been left for him to find?—no matter that he might even be able to delude himself into believing that it was reality, the truth was that it wouldn't be. Elsewhere the real world would go on, people would hurt, life would be alternately happy and miserable... in the real places where wizards were needed to fight the fight, even if they might never see it won. And this... This isn't real enough for me, Kit thought. / want the kind of reality that surprises me. And, anyway, wizardry isn't for getting out of reality, out of the world. It's for getting further into it.
He gave that frozen pseudo-Nita one last glance, then turned away, back to the butterfly, embedded in air —and turned it loose.
The moment resumed. "Kit," Nita said, "Hey, whatcha—"
Kit squeezed his eyes shut and erased it all. A moment later he was standing in the darkness again,
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listening only to the silence... and having a little trouble breathing. This isn't going to stop us, he thought. / know what the Lone Power trying to stop me feels like. We'll go all the way through. One way or another, we'll do what's necessary.
They came to where the corner of Sixth and Thirty-eighth would have been if it hadn't been just an intersection of two muddy, rushing rivers, and stopped there. Nita could feel the kernel more clearly now; it wasn't too far away. But somehow this wasn't making her feel any better. The darkness, that watching presence hidden in it, and the little swarming, biting viruses were all beginning to wear her down. Pralaya was always there, companionable enough, but not really that much help. And again and again the words of the Wizard's Oath kept coming back to Nita, as she slogged her way along through the dark, resisting water: "I will guard growth and ease pain."
But does there come a time when you stop growing? And when you and the universe agree that you're going to stop? "will ever put aside fear for courage, and death for life, when it is right to do so." Was there the slightest possibility, here and now, that it wasn't right? How could you tell, without being one of the Powers?
And if people can't tell, then the game just isn't fair!
But that didn't matter right now. Nita stopped at the corner and looked down Sixth Avenue. The water seemed a little less deep down there; but that overshadowing dark presence seemed much stronger. "The kernel's there," she said to Pralaya. "I'm sure of it."
"I think you're right," he said. "What is that—that tallest building there?"
"The Empire State," Nita said. It struck her as a poor place to hide anything. But then, Its purpose isn't to keep the kernel hidden. It's to let me find it and use it and fail So that I'll agree to the bargain—
"Come on," she said, and splashed down Sixth Avenue with Pralaya swimming along beside her, uncertainty in his dark eyes.
Kit and Ponch were moving once more through the darkness. "It fooled us that time," Ponch said. "But not twice." The dog was angry.
"It's not your fault," Kit said. "It was after me." "I should have expected it. But now we know something." "What?"
"That you have something that can stop It."
Kit took a couple of long breaths. That thought had occurred to him.
"I'm telling the darkness," Ponch said, "to take us to where we'll learn best what to do to find Nita, to help her."
Kit's mouth was dry; he was getting more nervous by the moment. "Are we going to have time for this?" "All the time we need."
How much longer they spent in the darkness, he wasn't sure. Kit could feel in Ponch a terrible sense of
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urgency, of the darkness resisting, pushing against him, trying to slow him down. But Ponch wasn't letting it stop him. He was pushing back, fierce, unrelenting. They slowed down, finally stopped, and Kit could feel Ponch pushing, pushing with all his strength against whatever was fighting him—
—until without warning they broke through into the light. Ponch surged forward, the leash wizardry extending away in front of Kit, while Kit stood still and rubbed his eyes, which were watering in the sudden brilliant light.
It was a beach. He was standing at the water's edge, and turning, he could see Jones Inlet behind him.
Is this another of Its tricks? Kit thought, confused. Another place where I'm supposed to get distracted by what could have been?
But somehow he knew it wasn't so. Though this was Jones Inlet, it was also something else.
Kit turned, looking south again. It was the Sea: darkness and light under the Sun, Life and the home of Life—all potential, lying burning and swirling under the dawn. "The Sea," Ponch was barking, shouting, as he ran down the beach and fought with the waves. "The Sea!" And it wasn't just what dogs always said —Oh boy, the water!—but something else, both a question and an answer, a reference to the beginning of things, the oldest Sea from which Life arose. And our blood's like that Sea, Kit thought. The same salinity. The same—
His eyes went wide. Ponch had been right. Here was the solution... the one that the Lone Power was counting on Nita not seeing, because she had messed it up so badly before.
"You're right!" Kit yelled to Ponch. "You're right! Come on, we've got to find her, before she starts!"
Ponch came running back, bounced around him a last few times, and then they leaped forward into the darkness together and vanished from the beach, leaving only footprints, which were shortly washed away.
Nita stood at the base of the Empire State Building and looked up at it. In this version of New York, there was a great flight of steps up to it, up from the water level, and she immediately went about halfway up them, glad to get out of the water, where the viruses were swarming and snapping more thickly than they had anywhere else. Pralaya came flowing up the stairs along with her, shaking the water out of his golden fur and scratching himself all over. "Those things," he said, "even though they didn't really bite me, they make me itch."
"Me, too," Nita said. She stood there and craned her neck upward, looking at the terrible height of the tower. Even in her own New York, when you were this close to it, the Empire State always looked as if it was going to fall on you. But here, she wasn't sure that it might not somehow be possible. And all around them was that terrible shadowy darkness, thicker in the air here than anywhere else, pressing in on them, looking at them.
"Let's go in," Nita said. She could hear the kernel now without actually having to listen to it: a buzz, that
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familiar fizz on the skin. Part of her was afraid; it shouldn't have been this easy to find. And she knew why it had been so easy...
They went in through the doors at the top of the steps and found themselves in a vast gray hall full of shadows. Standing up, here and there in the dimness, were many banks of steely doored elevators, which Nita saw were intended to go in only one direction: down. All around the great floor of the place were a number of square pools, and Nita looked at them and decided not to step into any of them. They had that black-water depth that suggested they had no real bottoms.
"Right," Nita said. She glanced once at her charm bracelet, made sure that the spells on it were active, and began walking through the place, listening.
Pralaya followed, pausing by each of the elevator banks and cocking his head to listen. "I'm not sure," he said.
"I am," Nita said. "Not up, but down." She paused by one of the pools, listening.