The Wizard's Dilemma, New Millennium Edition (36 page)

Ponch produced a feeling like a shrug. “I think maybe it’s cheating. It shouldn’t be
that
easy.”

“I wish I felt better,” Kit said. Yet there was something about what the Pig had said, something that was eluding him…

“It’s all right,” Ponch said. “I know her scent. I got it fresh yesterday; it hasn’t changed that much. And the trail is fresh. I can track her.”

Changed,
Kit thought, confused.
How could it change?

“Come on!” Ponch said. “The longer we stand here, the farther away she goes.”

“Let’s go,” Kit said. “There’s not much time.”

The leash was still around Ponch’s neck. Kit picked it up and wound it around his wrist. The two of them stepped into the darkness and were gone.

***

Grand Central was in shadow as Nita came out of the gate by track twenty-four, and as she put her foot down, she heard a splash. There was so little light in the space around her that Nita spent some power to produce a small wizard’s candle, a glimmer of light that rode above her shoulder as she looked around.

The tracks were all under water, and water lapped at the piers that held up the platforms—a bizarre sight. Even the platforms were an inch deep or so in water, like black glass, the surface of it rippling gently, silent and intimidating. Beside her, Pralaya slipped into the water, ducking under it, and coming up again down by the place where the platforms tapered in, down where the tracks ducked more deeply under Forty-sixth Street. “This would be a wonderful swimmery,” she heard him say from down in the darkness, “but I think perhaps it shouldn’t be this way?”

“You’re not kidding,” Nita said. Already she was trying to sense around her for this micro-universe’s kernel, and she couldn’t feel anything.
What’s the matter? I should he able to at least get a hint. It’s my
mother,
after all!
But it felt wrong somehow; she couldn’t hear that faint buzz or whine that she’d learned to associate with a kernel, the sound of life doing its business. “Can you feel anything?” she said.

Pralaya surfaced in front of her, twisting and rolling in the dark water. “I’m not sure,” he said. “There’s—a darkness.”

Nita was all too aware of this darkness. Listening, watching, she could feel it all around her. It bent in; it pressed against her; and worst of all was the sense that at any moment Pralaya’s innocent, merry personality could be twisted out of shape by the Lone Power suddenly looking out of his eyes at her, offering her the bargain she could not refuse.

It’s here,
she thought, feeling that heavy, dark presence leaning in all around her.
It’s waiting for me to make a mistake.
And maybe she already had.

“Come on,” she said to Pralaya, “let’s get out into the open.”

Together they made their way toward what would have been the Main Concourse in her own world. “What does this look like to you?” Nita said to Pralaya as they made their way through the wet.

“In my world? This is the Meeting of the Waters,” Pralaya said. “The place where the rivers come together before they run to the Sea.”

Nita thought of the Sea and immediately was sad, seeing in her mind’s eye Jones Inlet, and the Sun over the water, leaning westward in the afternoon, and the long, broad golden sunset light over the Great South Bay, where she had screwed things up so seriously with Kit. But now they came out under what should have been the ceiling of the Main Concourse.

Nita stood there and took in a long breath of shock, and let out another long one of sorrow. The whole place was under water, five feet deep, and the beautiful cream-colored stone walls of the terminal, to the four compass points, were striped with green-brown tidemarks of high water from other times, and still flooded deep in an unhealthy dark water that lapped and sucked at the walls. The whole place smelled of damp and cold and weed and chilly pain, and Nita shuddered as she splashed out of the platform arcade into the center of the terminal. She looked up at what should have been a warm, summery, Mediterranean-sky ceiling, and instead saw nothing but watery stars and autumn constellations, all fish and dolphins and sea serpents—not to mention poor Andromeda shackled to the rock, waiting to be eaten by the monster from the waves. It was not a view that filled Nita with confidence.

“Is it always so dark here?” Pralaya said.

Nita thought of fire gaping out of the depths of this space, not so long ago; yet now that scenario seemed positively preferable, for it had put only her own life at stake, not her mom’s. “Not usually,” she said, and led Pralaya up out of the Main Concourse, up the ramp to what normally would have been the street.

It was no improvement. The sky was clouded, dark and heavy; this was a city in shadow and under threat, with the waters rising all around. Some of the skyscrapers around them were in good-enough shape, but many of them were crumbling.
Too many,
Nita thought, knowing that she was seeing what her own mind could most effectively make of her mother’s physical condition. Things were already going wrong here, and her doubt rose up and choked her.

“We have to go where it’s worst, don’t we?” Nita said.

Pralaya nodded. “It would be the only way.”

They stood there in the thunder-colored water, in the flooded street, and gazed up and down it. All of Forty-second Street was a river, and no traffic light, or any other light, burned on it anywhere; buildings cliffed out above the street, dark and forbidding, their lower stories wet and scummed with mold, their upper windows dulled with the residue of recent storms. Overhead, the roiling gray sky was like an unhealed wound, uncomfortable, unwell, unresolved. Nita closed her eyes and swallowed. Somewhere here was the kernel, the software of her mother’s soul.

She held still and listened, listened.

“Do you have time for this?” said the voice behind her, a little provocative.

“Yup,” Nita said, fierce. “Don’t joggle my elbow, Pralaya, or I’ll chew one of your legs off.”

There was a pause. In a hurt voice Pralaya said, “I wouldn’t have thought I’d have deserved that from you, Nita.”

“Yeah, well,” Nita said. “Sorry, cousin.”
Assuming you’re really my cousin at the moment, and not That One.

The trouble was, there was no telling.
Never mind that.
Nita held still and listened with all of her.
It’s my
mother,
for heaven’s sake! I should be able to hear
her. But it was hard, suddenly.

And who’s
making
it hard? Or is it just tough to sense your own mother when you’re on business, as opposed to when you’re at home? She becomes like water, like air, like anything else you get used to and take for granted.
Beside her, in the water, Pralaya paddled along as they worked their way down Forty-second Street “Sorry,” Nita said again. She would have said,
I didn’t mean that
, except at the time she
had
meant it, cruel as it was, and a wizard did not lie in the Speech—that was fatal.

More fatal than what I’m about to do?

Nita stood at the spot where Forty-second normally crossed the Vanderbilt Avenue underpass, saw the drowned canal that the under-running road had become, and wished that Kit were here. It seemed to her that if only he were here, everything would be all right. Yet she had constructed the circumstances in which he
couldn’t
be here. She stood there in the muddy, westward-flowing water…

…and something slimy-feeling started wrapping itself around her leg.

Nita yelped and jumped, and shook it off. “What was
that?
” she said.

Pralaya had already clambered up onto a pillar of the west side of Grand Central, sticking up out of the water. “We’re not alone here,” he said. “What would these be? I can feel the hatred in them. They are malign—”

“Exactly. Free-floating malignancies,” Nita said. “I wouldn’t let them get too friendly with your extremities, if I were you.”

Peering down into the muddy water, Nita could see them: little dark rounded shapes, rhythmically deforming their membranes so they could push themselves forward and cruise around. The water was teeming with them, large and small, like the little dark minnows in one of the local freshwater creeks near her home.
So many!
Nita thought.
How am I going to persuade all
these
things to do anything? The Lone Power was right. It was right.

She considered using the spell that would let her walk on water, but that would take more energy than she now felt like using.
I’m going to need everything I can possibly save for later,
Nita thought.
Better use the low-power one I tailored earlier.
“I have a spell against these,” she said to Pralaya. The spell would at least protect the two of them from being attacked by the malignant cells, but it couldn’t stop them from doing what they pleased with her mother.

She pulled the spell off her charm bracelet. With a little effort, she pulled the charm in two. It stretched like taffy, then parted with a snap, leaving her holding two identical versions of the spell. Nita tossed Pralaya the clone, then dropped her version of it into the water.

Pralaya stretched out his version of the spell, adjusted it, and dropped it around him. Nita saw this happening and could not avoid thinking,
Here is the Power That invented these things, indirectly; and I’m protecting Its servant against them.

Not that he knows…

Nita held still then, again, and listened. In this threatening light it was hard to think clearly. Everything seemed geared to leave you frightened, chilled, cowed, as slowly the livid sunset light behind those clouds shut down toward some final night

Nita knew that daylight was waiting back there somewhere. If she could just find it, sense it, hear it. The sound of morning, of a dawn past all this leaden twilight—if she could just find it. If she could, it wouldn’t matter if her wizardry departed her forever; it would be worth it.

And at the same time—
She sloshed up Forty-second in the general direction of Fifth, listening with all of her, not hearing anything, and beginning, as predicted, to despair.
Kit…

The bleak wind blew over the gray waters, and Nita walked on through it all, with Pralaya swimming beside her, and knew true desperation’s colors at last.

“I thought you said you were going to be able to find her.”

“I should have been able to. But the scent’s changed again.”

“What?” Kit was confused, and stood still in the utter darkness where they had been walking. “How?”

Beside him Kit could feel Ponch gazing around him. “The One who doesn’t want us to find Nita has changed it. The world she’s gone to is twisted out of orientation with the usual ones.”

Kit tried to put his own concerns aside; there was something more on his mind. “So where are they?” he said.

“Elsewhere.”

“Thanks loads.”

“You don’t have the words for it,” Ponch said, a little sharply. “You can’t smell what’s happening the way I do. We have to backtrack. There’s a scent, but there’s also trouble.”

“What kind?”

Ponch shook himself. “Since we’re not with Nita, it’s going to be hard to convince the ones who guard the borders to let us in.”

Kit let out a long nervous breath. “Never mind. Let’s just keep going.”

***

Nita and Pralaya kept making their way along through the dark waters, southward along Fifth Avenue. Nita had only a hunch to go on now, only the faintest sense of where her mother’s kernel lay. Pralaya paused with her at the corner of Fifth and Fortieth, putting his head up out of the water and peering about him, while all around the two of them, the malignant cells darted at their defense shields like angry little bees.

“Should we try it again?” Pralaya said.

Nita looked up and down the street—or rather the river, which the street had become—and nodded. “Yeah.”

She let her mind fall toward Pralaya’s again, adding his viewpoint of this place to hers. Everything quivered, changed.

The darkness around them became even more oppressive, an inward-leaning, watching, sullen nest of shadows. Nita could feel how the place was full of death and the anticipation of death, and wanted them out of there.

But if Pralaya is the Lone One, why is It finding this so scary and upsetting
? Nita thought. That was a question that she wasn’t going to ask him out loud, though. She put it aside and did her best to feel around them for the kernel, listening.

A stronger hint this time.
South and west; and not too far.

Nita let her mind drop away from Pralaya’s again. He was lying there in the water, shivering. “You okay?” she said.

“Yes,” he said, and shook himself all over, those big dark eyes troubled. “But, Nita, this is a terrible place. I wonder that you can bear it here.”

She was shaking, too, but she couldn’t let it stop her. “It’s the one place I’ve been working to be,” Nita said. “Let’s go.”

She set off westward, toward Sixth Avenue—splashing through water that was deeper and deeper—and Pralaya followed her, slowly, almost as if reluctant. Nita refused to spend any time trying to figure this out. She was tired, and very scared—both for herself and for her mother—and she simply wished that all this was over. The thought came to her:
You are now so tired, you will make some terrible mistake.

And she was too tired even to care about
that.

***

In the darkness between worlds, Kit felt Ponch pause and look at something.

“This is interesting,” the dog said.

Kit couldn’t see anything. “What is it?”

“Home,” Ponch said in surprise.

“What?” Kit said, bemused. “Show me!”

“Here.”

Suddenly they stepped out into Kit’s backyard—except that the place had the feel of the universes that Kit and Ponch had been creating when Ponch first started taking Kit along on his walks. It was like something that Kit had made just now with whatever power lay between the worlds, ready to be used if you knew it was there.

Kit looked around him in surprise at an utterly perfect summer day. Everything he could have wanted was there: the knowledge that school was out for the summer, the sound of Carmela’s stereo blasting upstairs, his mother laughing with loving scorn at something his father was doing in the kitchen. The sky was flawlessly blue, the air just hot enough to make one think about going to the beach, but not having to
do
anything. The locusts were beginning to say
zzzeeeeeeee
in the trees. And just over there, the sudden
whoomp!
of air as Nita appeared out of nothing, turned toward him, grinning with excitement, her manual in her hand—