Ailurin is not a spoken language, or not simply spoken.
Like all the human languages, it has a physical component, the cat version of
"body language," and a surprising amount of information is passed
through the physical component before a need for vocalized words arises.
Even people who haven't studied cats closely will
recognize certain "words" in Ailurin: the rub against a friendly leg,
the arched back and fluffed fur of a frightened cat, the crouch and stare of
the hunter. All of these have strictly physical antecedents and uses, but they
are also used by cats for straight forward communication of mood or intent.
Many subtler signs can be seen by even a human student: the sideways flirt of
the tail that says "I don't care" or "I wonder if I can get away
with this..." the elaborate yawn in another cat's face, the stiff-legged,
arch-backed bounce, which is the cat equivalent of making a face and jumping
out at someone, shouting "Boo!" But where gestures run out, words are
used—more involved than the growl of threat of purr of contentment, which are
all most humans hear of intercat communication.
"Meowing" is not counted here, since cats
rarely seem to meow at each other. That type of vocalization is usually a
"pidgin" language used for getting humans' attention: the cat
equivalent of "Just talk to them clearly and loudly and they'll get what
you mean sooner or later." Between each other, cats sub-vocalize using the
same mechanism that operates what some authorities call "the purr
box," a physiological mechanism that is not well understood but seems to
have something to do with the combined vibration of air in the feline larynx
and blood in the veins and arteries of the throat. To someone with a powerful
microphone, a cat speaking Ailurin seems to be making very soft meowing and
purring sounds ranging up and down several octaves, all at a volume normally
inaudible to humans.
This vocalized part of Ailurin is a
"pitched" language, like Mandarin Chinese, more sung than spoken. It
is mostly vowel-based—no surprise in a species that cannot pronounce most
human-style consonants. Very few noncats have ever mastered it: not only does
any human trying to speak it sound to a cat as if he were shouting every word,
but the delicate intonations are filled with traps for the unwary or
unpracticed. Auo hwaai hhioehhu uaeiiiaou, for example, may look
straightforward: "I would like a drink of milk" is the Cat-Human
Phrasebook definition. But the people writing the phrasebook for the human ear
are laboring under a terrible handicap, trying to transliterate from a
thirty-seven-vowel system to an alphabet with only five. A human misplacing or
mispronouncing only one of the vowels in this phrase will find cats smiling
gently at him and asking him why he wants to feed the litter-box to the
taxicab? ... this being only one of numerous nonsenses that can be made of the
above example.
So communication from our side of things tends to fall
back on body language (stroking, or throwing things, both of which cats
understand perfectly well) and a certain amount of monologue—which
human-partnered cats, with some resignation, accept as part of the deal. For
their communications with most human beings, the cats, like so many of us, tend
to fall back on shouting. For this book's purposes, though, all cat-to-human
speech, whether physical or vocal, is rendered as normal dialogue: that's the
way it seems to the cats, after all.*
One other note: two human-language terms,
"queen" and "tom," are routinely used to translate the
Ailurin words sh'heih and sth'heih. "Female" and
"male" don't properly translate these words, being much too sexually
neutral—which cats, in their dealings with one another, emphatically are not.
The Ailurin word ffeih is used for both neutered males and spayed
females.
—DD
*Cat thoughts and silent communications are rendered
in italics.
I am the Cat who took up His stance
by the Persea Tree, on the night we
destroyed the enemies of God....
Pert em hru, c. 2800 b.c., tr. Budge
Bite: bite hard, and find the tenth life.
--The Gaze of Rhoua's Eye
(feline recension of The Book of Night with Moon): Ixiii,
18
They never turn the lights off in Grand Central; and
they may lock the doors between 1 and 5:30 a.m., but the place never quite
becomes still. If you stand outside those brass-and-glass doors on Forty-second
Street and peer in, down the ramp leading into the Grand Concourse, you can see
the station's quiet nightlife—a couple of transit police officers strolling
past, easygoing but alert; someone from the night cleaning crew heading toward
the information island in the center of the floor with a bucket and a
lot of polishing cloths for all that century-old brass. Faintly, the sound of
rumblings under the ground will come to you—the Metro-North trains being moved
through the upper- and lower-level loops, repositioned for their starts in the
morning, or tucked over by the far-side tracks to be checked by the night
maintenance crews. On the hour, the massive deep gong of the giant Accurist
clock facing Forty-second strikes, and the echoes chase themselves around under
the great blue sky-vault and slowly fade.
By five o'clock the previous day's dust will have been
laid, the locks checked, the glass on the stores in the Graybar and Hyatt
passageways all cleaned: everything done, until it's time to open again. The
transit policemen, still in a pair because after all this is New York and you
just can't tell, will stroll past, heading up the stairs on the Vanderbilt
Avenue side to sit down in the ticketed passenger waiting area and have their
lunch break before the day officially starts. Anyone looking in through the
still-locked Forty-second Street doors will see nothing but stillness, the
shine of slick stone and bright brass.
But there are those for whom locked doors are no
barrier. Were you one of them, this morning, you would slip sideways and
through, padding gently down the incline toward the terrazzo flooring of the
concourse. The place would smell green, the peculiar too-strong wintergreen
smell of a commercial sweeping compound. Your nose would wrinkle as you passed
a spot on the left, against the cream-colored wall, where blood was spilled
yesterday—a disagreement, a knife and a gun pulled, everything finished in a
matter of seconds: one life wounded, one life fled, the bodies taken away. But
the disinfectants and the sweeping compound can't hide the truth from you and
the stone.
You would walk on, pause in the center of the room,
and look upward, as many tunes before, at the starry, painted vault of the
heavens—its dusk-blue rather faded, and half the bulbs in the Zodiac's
constellations burnt out. The Zodiac is backward. They'll be renovating
the ceiling this spring, but you doubt they'll fix that problem. It
doesn't matter, anyway: after all, "backward" depends on which
direction you're looking from....
You would walk on again then, guided by senses other
than the purely physical ones, and stroll silently over to the right of the
motionless up-escalators, toward the gate to Track 25. Once through its
archway, everything changes. The ambiance of the terminal—light, air, openness—
abruptly shifts: the ceiling lowers, the darkness closes in. Lighting comes in
the form of long lines of fluorescent fixtures, only one out of every three of
them lit, this time of day. They shine down in bright dashed lines on the seven
platforms to your right, the nine to your left, and straight ahead, on the gray
concrete of the platform that serves Tracks 25 and 26. Behind you, a pool of
warm light lies under the windows of the glass-walled room that is the
Trainmaster's Office. Little light, though, makes it past the platform's edge
to the tracks themselves. They are long trenches of shadow between pale gray
plateaus of concrete that stretch, tapering, into the middle distance, vanishing
into more darkness. The rails themselves gleam faintly only close to where you
stand: they too reach off into the dark, converging, and swiftly disappear. Red
and green track guidelights shine dully there. A few shine brighter: the track
crew members are down there, walking the rails to check for obstructions and
wiping the lights off as they come.
You walk quietly down the center platform, letting
your eyes get used to the reduced light, until you come to where the platform
ends, almost a quarter-mile from the arches of the gates.
You jump down from the tapered end of the platform,
into shadow, and walk out of reach of the last fluorescent lights. The red and
green lights marking the track switches are your only illumination now, and all
you need. Seventy-five feet ahead of you, Tracks 25 and 26 converge. Just off
to your right is the walkway to a low concrete building, Tower A, the master
signaling center for the terminal. You are careful not to look directly at it:
the bright lights inside it, the blinking of switch indicators and computer
telltales, would ruin your night-sight. You pad softly on past, under its
windows, past the little phone-exchange box at the tower's end, on into the
darkness. The still, close air smells of iron, rust, garbage, mildew, cinders,
electricity—and something else.
Here you pause, warned by the senses that drew you
here, and you wait. Trembling on your skin, and against your eyes, is a feeling
like the tremor of air in the subway when, well down (he tunnel, a train is
coming. But what's coming isn't a train. Everything around is silent, even the
subway tunnel three levels below you. Two levels above you now is the block
between Forty-ninth and Fiftieth Streets: from there, no sound conies, either.
Watching, you wait.
No eyes but yours, acclimated and looking in the right
place, would see what slowly becomes visible. The air itself, somehow more dark
than the air in front of it, is bending, showing contour, like a plate-glass
window bowing outward in a hurricane wind—or inward, toward you. Yet the
contour that you half-see, half-sense, is wrong. It bulges like a blown
bubble—but a bubble blown backward, drawn in rather than pushed out. You
half-expect to hear breath sucked inward to match what you almost-see.
The bubble gets bigger and bigger, spanning the
tracks. The darkness in the air streaks, pulled past its tolerances. Not-light
shows through the thin places; wincing, you glance away. The faintest possible
shrilling sound fills your twitching ears, the sound of spacetime yielding to
intolerable pressure, under protest: it scales up and up, piercing you like
pins—
—and stops, as the bubble breaks, letting through
whatever has been leaning on it from the other side. You look at it, blinking.
Silence again: darkness. A false alarm—
Until, as you shake your head again at the shrilling,
you realize that you shouldn't still be hearing it. And out of the blackness in
front of you, pattering, rustling, they come. First, just a few. Then ten of
them, a hundred of them, more. Hurrying, scattering, humpily running, their
little wicked eyes gleaming dull red in the light from far behind you, they
flow at you like darkness come alive, darkness with teeth, darkness shrilling
with hunger: the rats.
There is more than hunger in those voices, though,
more than just malice in those eyes. Their screams have terror in them. They
will destroy anything that gets between them and their flight from what comes
behind them, driving them; they'll strip the flesh from your bones and never
even stop to enjoy it. Backing away, hissing, you see the huge dark shape that
comes behind them—walking two-legged, claws like knives lashing out in
amusement at the shrieking tats, the long lashing tail balancing out behind:
high above, the blunt and massive head, jaws working compulsively, huge razory
fangs gleaming even in this dim light: and gazing down at you through the
darkness, the eyes—the small, gemlike, cruelly smiling eyes, with your death in
them: everything's death.
Seeing this, you do the only thing you can. You run.
But it's not enough....
-=O=-***-=O=-
She was sound asleep when the voice breathed in her
ear. There was nothing unusual about that: They always took the method of least
resistance.
Oh, fwau, why
right this minute?
Rhiow refused to hurry about opening her eyes, but
rolled over and stretched first, a good long stretch, and yawned hard. Opening
her eyes at last, she saw the main room still dark: her ehhif hadn't
come out to open the window-coverings yet. No surprise there, for the
noisemaker by the bed hadn't gone off yet, either. Rhiow rolled over and
stretched one more time, for the call hadn't been desperately urgent, though
urgent enough. Please don't let it be the north-side gate again. Not after
all the hours we spent on the miserable thing yesterday. Au, it's going
to take forever to get things going this morning....
She stood up, stretched fore and aft, then sat down on
the patterned carpet in the middle of the room and started washing, making a
face as she began; her fur still tasted a little like the room smelled, of
cheese and mouth-smoke and other people from the eating party last night.
Rhiow's mouth watered a little at the memory of the cheese, to which she was
most partial. She had managed to wheedle a fair amount of it out of the guests.
Normally this would have left her with a somewhat abated appetite in the
morning, but getting a call always sharpened her stomach, and more so if she
was asleep when the call came: it was as if the urgency transmitted straight to
her gut and there turned into hunger.
Probably some kind of sublimation, Rhiow thought, scrubbing her ears. And a vhai'd
nuisance, in any case. She leaned back, bracing herself on one paw, and
started washing the inside right rear leg.
Well, at least the timing isn't too abysmal. The
others will be up shortly, or else they won't have gone to bed at all: just
fine either way.
Rhiow finished up, putting her tail in order, and then
stood and trotted through the landscape of disordered furniture, noting drinking-vessels
left under chairs, a couple of them knocked over and spilled, and she paused to
pick up half a dropped cracker with some of that pink fish stuff on it. Salmon
paid, she thought as she munched. Not bad, even a night old. She
gulped the last bit down, licked a couple of errant specks of it off her
whiskers, and looked around. I wonder if they left the container out on the
counter, like those others?
But there wasn't time for that: she was on call. The
bedroom door was shut. Rhiow started to rear up and scratch on it, then sat
back down, having second thoughts: if she wanted both breakfast and an early
start, it was smarter not to annoy them. She looked thoughtfully at the
doorknob, squinting slightly.
It took only a second or so to clearly perceive the
mechanism: friction-dependent, as she knew from previous experience, but not
engaged. The door was merely pushed shut and was sticking a little tighter at
the top than the bottom, that being all that held it in place.
Rhiow gazed at that spot for a moment, closed her eyes
a bit further, and presently came to see the two patches of dim sparkle that
represented the material forces at work in the two adjoining surfaces of the
stuck spot. Under her breath she said the word that temporarily reduced the
coefficient of friction in that spot, then stood on her hind legs and leaned
against the door.
It fell open. Rhiow trotted in, feeling the normal
forces reassert themselves behind her. One jump took her onto the bed, which
sloshed up and down as she padded up the length of it, to a spot beside Iaehh's
head. He was facedown in the pillow, a position she had come to recognize over
time as meaning he didn't want to get up any time soon. Rhiow blinked,
sympathetic if nothing else, and walked over his back to get to Hhuha.
She was on her back, snoring gently. Rhiow put her
head down by Hhuha's ear and purred.
No response.
It would have been nice to do this the easy way, Rhiow thought reluctantly, but... She bumped
Hhu's head with her own, purring harder.
"Rrrrgh," said Hhuha, and rolled over, and
squinted her eyes tighter shut, and after a moment looked at Rhiow out of them
with some disbelief.
She sat up groggily in the bed and looked at the door.
"Now how the heck did you get in here? I know he shut that last night."
"Yes, I know, 7 opened it, never mind,"
Rhiow said, "come on, will you? I have to get an early start. Business,
unfortunately." She rubbed against Hhuha's side and purred some more.
"Wow, you're noisy this morning, aren't you? What
on earth do you want? Not breakfast already, you pig! You had two whole slices
of pizza just a few hours ago."
Don't remind me, Rhiow thought, for her stomach was growling so hard, she was amazed
Hhuha couldn't hear it. "Look, it would really help if you would just get up
and give me my morning feed so I can get on with things—"
"Mike? Mike, get up. I think maybe your kitty
wants her breakfast."
"Nnnggghhhh," said Iaehh, and didn't move.
"Oh, will you come on already?" Rhiow
said, desperately hoping Hhuha didn't notice that her purr was becoming a
little forced. "And as for pigs, who ate half a salami last night? And
never gave me any? Even when I asked. Now please get up before it
gets so late that I have to leave!"
"Gosh, you really must be hungry. I guess cats
digest faster than people or something," Hhuha said, her voice going soft,
and she reached out to scratch Rhiow's eyebrows. The tone of voice was one
Rhiow had heard before: she got a sense that her ehhif liked being
"talked to," even when they couldn't hear half of what was being
said, and, even if they could, would have no idea what the words meant anyway.
This tendency made them either great idiots or very fond of her indeed, and
either conjecture only made Rhiow twitchier under the present circumstances.
She stomped her forefeet alternately on the coverlet, as much from impatience
as from pleasure at having her head scratched.
"Come on, then," said Hhuha. She got out of
bed, threw a house-pelt around her, and headed toward the kitchen. Rhiow went
after her, not in a hurry: this was no time to trip Hhuha halfway there and
have to deal with an ehhif temper tantrum that might take half an hour
to resolve. By the time Rhiow got to the kitchen, Hhuha was cranking a can
open.
"Mmm," Hhuha said, "nice tuna. You'll
like this."
"I hate the tuna," Rhiow said,
sitting down and curling her tail around her forefeet. "It's not made from
any part of the fish that you 'd ever eat. You should read more of the
label than just the part about the dolphins."
"Yum, yum," Hhuha said, putting the plate
down on the floor. "Here you go, puss. Lovely tuna."
Rhiow looked at the gelid stuff with resignation. Oh,
well, she thought, it's food, and I need something before I go
out. And anyway—manners... She reared up and gave Hhuha a good rub around
the shins before starting to eat.
"You're a good kitty," Hhuha said, and
turned, yawning, to take something out of the refrigerator.
Rhiow purred with amusement and satisfaction as she
ate. The compliment was true enough, but also true was that, while she had been
rearing up to rub against Hhuha's leg, she had seen where the container of
salmon pate had been pushed back behind some drinking containers on the counter
beside the ffrihh.
"God, I'm glad it's Sunday," Hhuha said, and
shut the refrigerator again, heading for the bedroom. "I couldn't bear the
thought of work after last night."
Rhiow sighed as she finished one last bite and turned
away from the dish, reluctant: eating too much now would make her want a nap,
and she had no time for that. "Must be nice to have weekends off,"
Rhiow muttered, sitting down to wash. "I wish I did."
The rest of her personal hygiene took only a few
minutes more: her ehhif had put a hiouh-box. out on their small
terrace for her, where it was under cover from rain. While using it, Rhiow went
off into unfocused mode briefly and could hear them talking as Hhuha opened the
window-coverings and the window.
"Mmngnggh ..." Iaehh's voice. "Did she
eat?"
"Uh huh." A pause. "She's out now.... I
don't know... I'm still not sure it's a great idea to have her box out
there."
"Oh, come on, Sue. Better there than in the
bathroom. You 're the one who was always muttering about walking in the
kitty Utter in the morning. Anyway, she's not going to fall or anything."
"I don't mean that It's encouraging her to get
down on that lower roof that worries me."
"Why? It's not like she can get to anywhere else
from there. She can roam around and get some fresh air... and she's been doing
it for months now without any trouble. She would have gone missing a long time
back if she could have."
"Well, I still worry."
"Susannnnn ... She's not stupid. It's not like
she's going to try to go twenty stories straight down."
Rhiow put her whiskers forward in a slight smile as
she finished tidying the box, then got out and shook her feet fastidiously.
Bits of litter scattered in various directions, skittering off the terrace. They
can make water run uphill and fly off to the Moon when they like, she
thought, resigned, but they can't make hiouh-litter that won't stick
to your paws. A serious misplacement of priorities...
Rhiow went to the edge of the railed terrace, looked
down. Her ehhif's apartment was near the corner of the building. Its
wall fell sheer to the next terrace, thirty feet down, but she had no interest
in that. Off to the left was an easy jump, about three feet, to the concrete
parapet of a lower roof of a building diagonally behind theirs, but Rhiow
wasn't going that way either. Her intended path lay sideways, along the brick
wall itself. Some fanciful builder had built into it a pattern of slightly
protruding bricks, a stairstep pattern repeating above and below. The part of
it Rhiow used led rightward down the wall to the building's other near corner,
about fifty feet away; and six feet below that, in the direction of the street,
was the raised parapet of yet another roof, the top of the next building along.
Rhiow slipped through the railings, stepped carefully
up onto the first brick, and made her way downward along the wall, foot before
foot, no hurry. This segment of her road, the first used each day setting out
and the last to manage before getting home, was also the trickiest: no more
than two inches' width of brick to put her feet on as she went, nothing to
catch her should she fall. Once she almost had, and afterward had spent nearly
half an hour washing and regaining her composure, horrified at what might have
happened, or worse, who might have seen her. Wasted time, she thought
now, amused at her younger self. But we all learn....
At the corner of the building Rhiow paused, looked
around. Soft city-noise drifted up to her the hoot of horns over on Third,
someone's car alarm wailing disconsolately to itself four or five blocks north,
the rattle of trays being unloaded at the bakery eastward and around the
corner. All around her, the sheer walls of other apartment and office buildings
turned blind walls and windows to the sight of a small black cat perched on a
two-inch-wide brick, ninety feet above the sidewalk of Seventieth Street. No
one saw her. But that was life in iAh'hah, after all: no one looked up or paid
attention to any but their own affairs.
Except for a small group of public servants, of whom
she was one. But Rhiow spent no more time thinking about that than was
necessary, especially not here, where she stuck out like an eye on a week-old
fish head. Her business was not to be noticed, and by now, she was good at it.
She measured the jump down to the parapet. No matter
that she had done it a thousand times before: it was the thousandth jump and
one, misjudged, that would cheat you out of a spare life you had been saving
for later. Rhiow crouched, tensed, jumped; then came down on the cracked
foot-wide concrete top of the parapet, exactly where she liked to. She made the
smaller jump down onto the surface of the roof, looked around again, her tail
twitching.
No one there. Rhiow stepped across the coarse cracked
gravel as quickly as she could: she disliked the stuff, which hurt her feet.
She passed wire vent grilles and fan housings making a low moaning roar,
blasting hot air up and out of the air-conditioning systems below; summer was
coming on, and the unseasonably hot weather this last week had turned the
city-roar abruptly louder. The smells had changed, too, as a result. The air up
here reeked of the disinfectant that the biggest ehhif-houses put in
their ventilating systems these days and also stank of lubricating oil, dust
settled since last winter, sucked-out food scents, mouth-smoke, garbage stored
in the cellars until pickup day ...
After that, the fumes and steams coming up from the
city street seemed fresh by comparison. Rhiow jumped up on the streetside
parapet, looking down. Seventieth reached east to the river, west to where her
view was blocked past Third by scaffolding for a new building and digging in
the street itself, something to do with the utility tunnels. The street was an
asphalt-stitched pattern of paved and repaved blacktop, pierced by the
occasional gently steaming tunnel-cover, lined with the inevitable two long
lines of parked cars, punctuated by the ehhif walking calmly here and
there. Some of them had houiff on the leash: Rhiow's nose wrinkled, for
even up here she could smell what the houiff left in the street, no
matter how their ehhif cleaned up after them.
No matter, she
thought. It's just the way the city is. And better get on with it, if you
want it to stay that way.
Rhiow sat down, curled her tail around her forefeet,
and composed herself. Amusing, to be making the world safe for houiff to foul
the sidewalks in, but that was part of what she did.
Her eyes drooped shut, almost closed, so that she
could more clearly see, and be seen by, the less physical side of things. I will
meet the cruel and the cowardly today, she thought, liars and the
envious, the uncaring and unknowing: they will be all around. But their numbers
and their carelessness do not mean I have to be like them. For my own
part, I know my job; my commission comes from Those Who Are. My paw
raised is Their paw on the neck of the Serpent, now and always....
There was more to the formal version of the
meditation, but Rhiow was far enough along in her work now, after these six
years, to (as one of her ehhif associates put it) depart from the
Catechism a little. The idea was to put yourself in order for the day's work,
reminding yourself of the priorities—not your own species-bound concerns, but
the welfare of all life on the planet: not your personal grudges and doubts,
but the fears, however idiotic they seemed, of all the others you met. There
was always the danger that the words would become routine, just something you
rattled off at the start of the workday and then forgot in the field. Rhiow did
her best to be conscientious about the meditation and her other setup work,
giving it more than just speech-service ... but at the same time, the urge to
get going and do the work itself drove her hard. She presumed They understood.
Rhiow got up again, stretched, and trotted off down
the roofs parapet to its back corner, which looked inward toward the center of
the block between Seventieth and Sixty-ninth. She had egress routes all around
the top of the building, but this was the least exposed; this time of day, when
even an ehhif could see clearly, there was no point in being careless.
At the back corner Rhiow paused, glanced downward into
the dusty warm darkness of the alley between the two buildings. Nothing was
there but a rat, stirring far down among the garbage bags behind the locked
steel door that led to the street. The far windows in the nearest building were
all blinded with shades or curtains, no ehhif face showing. Well
enough, she thought, and said under her breath the word that reminds the
ephemeral of how it once was solid.
Rhiow stepped out, felt the step under her feet, there
as always, and went on down: another step, another, through the apparently
empty air, Rhiow trotting down it like a stairway. This imagery struck Rhiow as
easier (and more dignified) than the tree-climbing paradigm often used by cats
who lived out, and the air seemed amenable enough to the image made real: an
empty stairway reaching twenty stories down into the alley's dimness, the
stairsteps outlined and defined only by the faintest radiance of woven string
structure. The strings held the wizardry in. Inside it, air was briefly stone
again, as solid to walk on as it would have been a billion years back, before
ancient eruption and the warming sun on Earth's crust let the atmosphere's
future components out. Shortly, when Rhiow was down, it would be free as air
again. But like all the other elements—in fact, like all matter, when you came
down to it, sentient or not—air was nostalgic, and enjoyed being lured into
being as it had been once before, long ago, when things were simpler.
Eight feet above the ground, where the surrounding
walls were all bund, Rhiow paused. I could jump on that rat, she
thought. Once again she saw the rustle and flicker of motion, heard the nasty
yummy squeak-squeal from inside one of the black plastic garbage bags.
Involuntarily, Rhiow's jaw spasmed, chattering slightly—the spasm that would
break the neck of the prey clenched in it. Her mouth watered. Not that she
would eat a rat, indeed not: filthy flea ridden things, Rhiow thought, and
besides, who knows what they've been eating. Poison, half the time. But
cornering one, hitting it, feeling the body bruise under your paw and hearing
the squeal of pain: that was sweet. Daring the rat's jump at your face, and the
yellowed teeth snapping at you— and then, when it was over, playing with the
corpse, tossing it in the air, celebrating again in your own person the old
victory against the thing that gnaws at the root of the Tree—
No time this morning, she thought, and you 're wasting energy standing
here. Let the air get on with doing what it has to. Carrying smog around,
mostly...
She went down the last few almost-invisible steps,
jumping over the final ones to the dusty brick-paved surface of the alley. The
noise inside the garbage bag abruptly stopped.
Rhiow smiled. She said the word that released the air
from solidity: upward and behind her, the strings faded back into the general
fabric of things from which they had briefly been plucked, and the air
dispersed with a sigh. Rhiow walked by the garbage bag toward the streetward
wall and the gate in it, still smiling. She knew where this one was. Later,
she thought. Rats were smart, but not smart enough to leave garbage alone.
It was two days yet until collection. The rat would be back, and so would she.
But right now, she had business. Rhiow put her head
out under the bottom of the iron door, looked around. The sidewalk was empty of
pedestrians for half a block; most important, there were no houiff in sight.
Not that Rhiow was in the slightest afraid of houiff, but they could be
a nuisance if you ran into them without warning—the ridiculous barking and the
notice they drew to you were both undesirable.
A quiet morning, thank Iau. She slipped under and out, onto the sidewalk, and
trotted along at a good rate. There was no time to idle, and besides, one of
the first lessons a city cat learns is that it's always wise to look like
you're going somewhere definite, and like you know your surroundings. A cat
that idles along staring at the scenery is asking for trouble, from houiff
or worse.
She passed the dry cleaner's, still closed so early,
and the bookshop, and the coffee-and-sandwich shop—open and making extremely
tantalizing smells of bacon: Rhiow muttered under her breath and kept going.
Past the stores were five or six brownstones in a row, and as she passed the
third one, a gravelly voice said, "Rhiow!"
She paused by the lowest step, looking up at the top
of the graceful granite baluster. Yafh was sitting there with a bored look,
scrubbing his big blunt face: not that scrubbing it ever made much difference
to his looks. The spot was a perfect one for beginning the day's bout of hauissh,
the position-game that cats everywhere played with each other for
territorial power, or pleasure, or both. In hauissh, early placement was
everything. Now any cat who might appear on the street and try to settle down
in the area that Yafh was temporarily claiming as "territory" would
have to deal with Yafh first—by either confronting him head-on, moving
completely out of sight, or taking a neutral stance... which would translate as
appeasement or surrender, and lose the newcomer points.
Rhiow, since she was just passing through, was not
playing. Business certainly gave her an excuse not to pause, but she rarely
felt so antisocial. She went up the stairs, jumped onto the baluster, and paced
down toward Yafh to breathe breaths with him. "Hunt's luck, Yafh—"
His mouth a little open, Yafh made an appreciative
"tasting" face at the scent of her cat food. "If I had been
really hunting, I could have used some luck," he said. "One of those
little naked houiff, say ... or even a pigeon. Even a squirrel. But
there's nothing round here except roaches and rats."
Rhiow knew: she had smelled them on his breath, and
she kept her own taste-face as polite as she could. "Don't they feed you
in there, Yafh? If it weren't for you, your ehhif would have those
things in their stairwells, if not their beds. You should leave them and go
find someone who appreciates your talents."
Yafh made a most self-deprecating silent laugh and
tucked himself down into half-crouch again, folding his paws in. After a moment
Rhiow joined in the laugh, without the irony. Of the many cats in these few
square blocks, Yafh was the one Rhiow knew and was known by best, and some
would have found that an odd choice of friends, for one with Rhiow's
advantages. Yafh was a big cat for one who had been untommed very young, but
unless you took a close look at his hind end, you would never have suspected
his ffeih status from the way his front end looked. Yafh would fight
anything that moved, and had done so for years: he had enough scar tissue to
make a new cat from, and was as ugly as a houff—broken-nosed,
ragged-eared, one eye gone white-blind from some old injury. Where there were
no scars, Yafh's coat was white; but his fondness for dust-bathing and for
hunting in the piled-up rubbish behind his ehhif's building kept him a
more or less constant dingy gray. His manner was generally as blunt and bluff
as his looks, but he had few illusions and no pretensions, and his good humor
hardly ever failed, whether he was using it on others or on himself.
"Listen," Yafh said, "what's food, in
the long run? Once you're full, you sleep, whether it's caviar you were eating,
or rat. These ehhif let me out on my own business, at least:
that's more than a lot of us hereabouts can say. And they may be careless about
mealtimes, but they don't send me off to have my claws pulled out, either, the
way they did with poor Ailh down the road. Did you hear about that?"
"You'll have to tell me later," Rhiow said,
and shook herself all over to hide the shudder. Such horror stories had long
ago convinced her to leave her ehhif's furniture strictly alone, no
matter how tempted she might be to groom her claws on its lovely seductive
textures. "Yafh, I hate to wash and run, but it's business this
morning."
"They work you too hard," he said, eyeing
her sidewise. "As if the People were ever made to work in the first place!
The whole thing's some ehhif plot, that's what it is."
Rhiow laughed as she jumped down from the baluster.
Others might retreat into unease at her job, or envy of it: Yafh simply saw
Rhiow's errantry as some kind of obscure scam perpetrated on her proper
allotment of leisure time. It was one of the things she best liked about him.
"'Luck, Yafh," she said, starting down the sidewalk again. "See
you later."
"Hunt's luck to you too," he said, "you
poor rioh." It was a naughty punning nickname he had given her some
time back—the Ailurin word for someone's beast of burden.
Rhiow went on her way, past the empty doorsteps,
smiling crookedly to herself. At the corner she paused, looking down the length
of Third. The light Sunday morning traffic was making her life a little easier,
anyway: there was no need to wait. She trotted across Third, dashed down along
the wall of the apartment building on the comer there, and ducked under the gate
of the driveway behind it, making for the maze of little narrow alleys and
walls on the inside of the block between Third and Lexington.
This was probably the most boring part of Rhiow's day:
the commute down to the Terminal. She could have long-jumped it, of course.
Considering her specialty, that kind of rapid transit was simple. But
long-jumping took a lot of energy—too much to waste first thing in the morning,
when she was just getting started, and when having enough energy to last out
the day's work could mean the difference between being successful or being a
total failure. So instead, Rhiow routinely went the long way: across to
Lexington as quickly as she could manage, and then downtown, mostly by
connecting walls and rooftops. The route was circuitous and constantly
changing. Construction work might remove a long section of useful wall-walk or
suddenly top the wall with sharp pieces of glass; streets might become easier
to use because they were being dug up, or alternately because digging had stopped;
scaffolding might provide new temporary routes; demolition work might mean a
half-block's worth of barriers had suddenly, if temporarily, disappeared—at
least, until construction work began. Typically, though, Rhiow would have at
least a few weeks on any one route—long enough for it to become second nature,
and for her to run it in about three-quarters of an hour, without having to
think much about her path until she got down near Grand Central and met up with
the others.
This morning, she spent most of the commute thinking
about Ailh-down-the-road, the poor thing. Ailh was a nice enough person:
well-bred, a little diffident—a handsome, close-coated little mauve-beige
creature, with brown points and big lustrous green eyes. Not, Rhiow had to
admit, the kind of cat one usually meets on the streets in the city; which made
her unusual, memorable in her way. But apparently Ailh also couldn't control
herself well enough to keep her scratching outside, though she had access to
the few well-grown trees in their street. It was a shame. A shame, too, that ehhif
were so peculiarly territorial about the things they kept in their dens. Being
territorial about the den itself, that any cat could understand; but not about things.
It was one of the great causes of friction between two species that had
enough trouble understanding one another as it was. Rhiow wished heartily that ehhif
could somehow come by enough sense to see that things simply didn't
matter, but that was unlikely at best. Not in this life, she thought, and
not in the next couple either, I'll bet.
Just west of Third on Fifty-sixth, Rhiow paused,
looking down from an iron-spiked connecting wall between two brownstones, and
caught a familiar glimpse of a blotched brown shape, skulking wide-eyed in the
shadows of the driveway-tunnel leading into the parking garage near the corner.
This was one of the more convenient parts of Rhiow's morning run: a handy
meeting place fairly close to the Terminal, where the ehhif knew her and
her team, and didn't mind them. Not for the first time, Rhiow considered
Saash's luck in getting herself adopted by the ehhif who worked there. Luck,
though, she thought, almost certainly has nothing to do with it, in our
line of work,...
She jumped down from the wall, ran under a parked car,
looked both ways from underneath it, and hurried across the street. Saash, now
crouched down against the wall of the garage, saw her coming, got up, and
stretched fore and aft.
She was a long-limbed, delicate-featured, skinny
little thing. Rhiow wondered one more time whatever could be the matter with
her that she didn't seem able to put on weight: Saash was hardly there. Her
coloring supported the illusion. In coat she was a hlah'feihre, what ehhif
called a tortoiseshell—but not one of the bold, splashy ones. Saash's coat
was patched softly in many shades and shapes of brown, gray, and beige, all
running into one another: in some lights, and most especially in shadow, you
could look straight at her and hardly see her. It was probably something to do
with her kittenhood, which she rarely discussed—but hiding had been a large
part of it, and you got the feeling Saash wouldn't be done with that aspect of
her life for a long time, if ever. She had never quite grown into her ears, and
the size of them gave her a look of eternal kittenishness— while the restless
way they swiveled made her look eternally wary and uneasy, despite the ironic
humor in her big gold eyes.
'"Luck," Rhiow said, and Saash immediately
turned her back, sat down, put her left back leg over her left shoulder, and
began to wash furiously. Rhiow sat down, too, and sighed. Another cat would
probably have sniffed and walked off at the rudeness, but Rhiow had been
working long enough with Saash to know it wasn't intentional.
"Is it bad this morning?" Rhiow said.
Saash kept washing. "Not like last week,"
she muttered. "Abha'h put that white stuff on me again, the powder."
There was another second's satisfied pause. "I took a few strips off him
while he was putting it on, anyway. Whether the junk does help or not,
it still smells disgusting. And the taste—!"
Rhiow gazed off in the direction of the street,
waiting for Saash to finish washing, and making faces at the flea powder, and
scratching, and shaking herself. Rhiow privately doubted that the problem was
fleas. Saash simply seemed to be allergic to her own skin, and itched all the
time, no matter what anyone did: she couldn't make more than a move or two
before stopping to put her fur back in order, even when it was perfectly
smooth. When they had started working together, Rhiow had thought the constant
grooming was vanity, and blows had been exchanged over it. Now she knew better.
Saash shook her coat out and sat down again properly.
"There," she said. "I'm sorry, Rhi. 'Luck to you too."
"You heard?"
"They called me," Saash said in her little
breathy voice, "right in the middle of breakfast. Typical."
"I was sleeping myself. Any sign of Urruah
yet?"
Saash looked disdainful. "He's probably snoring
at the bottom of that Dumpster he was describing in such ecstatic detail
yesterday." She made an ironic breath-smelling face, one suggestive of a
cat whiffing something better suited for a houff to roll in than
for any kind of meal.
"Saash," Rhiow said, "for pity's sake,
don't start in on him this morning: I can't cope. —Were They more specific with
you than They were with me? I got a sense that something was wrong with the
north-side gate again, but that was all."
Saash looked over her shoulder and washed briefly down
her back. "Au, it's the north one, all right," she said,
straightening up again. "It looks like someone did an out-of-hours access
and forgot that the north gate's diurnicity timings change when it's accessed.
So it's sitting there still patent."
"And after we just got the hihhhh thing
fixed. .. !" Rhiow lashed her tail in irritation.
"My thought exactly."
"But who in the worlds would be accessing it
out-hours without checking the rates first? That's pretty basic stuff. Even ehhif
know enough to check the di-timings before they transit, and they can't
even see the strings."
"Well, whoever came through didn't bother,"
Saash said. "Until we close it down again, the gate won't be able to slide
back where it belongs for the day shift. And to get it shut, we'll have to
reweave the whole vhai'd portal substrate until the egress stringing
matches the access web again."
Rhiow sighed. "After we spent all of yesterday
doing just that. Urruah's going to love this."
"Whenever he wakes up," Saash said dryly,
sitting down to scratch again; but whatever else she might have said was lost
as her ehhif cams bustling up from down the ramp.
"Oh, poor kitty, you still scratchin', I gotta do
you again!" Abad cried as he came toward them, feeling around for
something in the deep pockets of his stained blue coverall. Abad was a living
example of the old saying that an ehhif either looks like its cat to
begin with or gets that way after a while—a tall, thin tom, fine-boned,
brown-complected, with what looked like an eternal expression of concern. As
Abad finally came up with the canister of flea powder, Saash took one wide-eyed
look, said "Oh no!" and took off around the corner of the
garage door and down the sidewalk toward Lexington. By the time he got into the
open doorway and started looking for her, Saash had already done a quick sidle.
Rhiow got up and strolled out onto the sidewalk after them. Abad stood there
looking first one way, then the other, seeing nothing. But Rhiow, as she came
up beside him, saw Saash slow down by the corner of the apartment building and look
over her shoulder at Abad, then sit down again and start washing behind one
ear.
"Aah, she hidin' now," Abad said sadly, and
bent down to scratch Rhiow, whom he at least could still see. "Hey, nice
to see you, Miss Black Cat, but my little friend, she gone now, I don' know
where. You come back later and she be back then, she play with you then,
eh?"
"Sure," Rhiow said, and purred at the ehhif
for kindness' sake; "sure, I'll come back later." She
stood up on her hind legs and rubbed hard against Abad's leg as he stroked her.
Then she went after Saash, who glanced up at her a little guiltily as she stood
again.
"You do that to him often?" Rhiow said.
"I'd be ashamed."
"We all sidle when we have to," Saash said.
"And if your fur tasted like mine does right now, so would you. Come
on, you may as well... we're close, and enough people are out now that they'll
slow us down if we're seen."
Rhiow sighed. "I suppose. It's getting late,
isn't it?"
Saash squinted in the general direction of the sun.
"I make it ten of six, ehhif-time."
Rhiow frowned. "That first train from North White
Plains is due at twenty-three after, and we can't let it run through a patent
gate. Which Dumpster did he say it was?"
"Fifty-third and Lex," Saash said. "By
that new office building that's going up. There's a MhHonalh's right next to
it, and the workmen keep throwing their uneaten food in there."
At the thought, Rhiow grimaced slightly, and looked
over her shoulder to see what Abad was doing. He was still gazing straight
toward them, looking for Saash: seeing nothing but Rhiow, he sighed, put the
flea powder away, and went back into the garage.
Rhiow stood up and sidled, feeling the familiar slight
fizz at ear-tips, whisker-tips, and claws as she stepped sideways into the
subset of concrete reality where visible light would no longer bounce off her.
Then she and Saash headed south on Lex toward Fifty-third, taking due care and
not hurrying. The main problem with being invisible was that other pedestrians,
ehhif and houiff particularly, had a tendency to run into or over
you; and since they and other concrete things were still fully in the world of
visible light, in daytime they hurt to look at. In the "sidled"
state, though, you were already well into the realm of strings and other
nonconcrete structures, and so your view was littered with them too. The world
became a confusing tableau of glaringly bright ehhif and buildings,
all tangled about with the more subdued light-strings of matter substrates,
weft lines, and the other indicators of forces and structures that held the
normally unseen world together. It was not a condition that one stayed in for
long if one could help it—certainly not in bright daylight. At night it was
easier, but then so was everything else: that was when the People had been
made, after all.
Rhiow and Saash trotted hurriedly down Lexington,
being narrowly missed by ehhif pedestrians, other ehhif making
early deliveries from trucks and vans, houiff out being walked, and
(when crossing streets) by cabs and cars driving at idiotic speed even at this
time of morning. There was simply no hour, even on a Sunday, when these streets
were completely empty; solitude was something for which you had to go
elsewhere. One had to weave and dodge, or hug the walls, trying not to fall through
gratings or be walked into by ehhif coming unexpectedly around corners.
They made fairly good time, only once having to pause
when an under-sidewalk freight elevator started clanging away while Saash was
walking directly over its metal doors. She jumped nearly out of her skin at the
sudden sound and the lurch of the opening doors, and skittered curbward—
straight into a houff on the leash. There was no danger: the houff was
one of those tiny ones, a bundle of silky golden fur and yap and not much else.
Saash, however, still panicked by the dreadful clanging of the elevator alarm
and the racket of the rising machinery, hauled off and smacked the houff
hard in the face, as much from embarrassment as from fright at jostling
into it, and galloped off down the street, bristling all over. The houff, having
been hit claws-out and hard by something invisible, plunged off down the
sidewalk in a panic, half-choking on its collar and shrieking about murder and
ghosts, while its bewildered ehhif was towed along behind.
Rhiow was half-choked herself, holding in her
merriment. She went after Saash as fast as she could, and didn't catch up with
her until she ran out of steam just before the corner of Fifty-fourth. There
Saash sat down close to the corner of the building and began furiously washing
her fluffed-up back fur. Rhiow knew better than to say anything, for this was
not Saash's eternal itch: this was he'ihh, composure-grooming, and
except under extraordinary circumstances, one didn't comment on it. Rhiow sat
down back to back, keeping watch in the other direction, and waited.
To Saash's credit, she cut the he'ihh short,
then breathed out one annoyed breath and got up. "I really hate
them," she said as they went together to the curb, "those little
ones. Their voices—"
"I know," Rhiow said. They waited for the
light to change, then trotted across, weaving to avoid a pair of ehhif mothers
with strollers. "They grate on my nerves, too. But would you rather have
had one of the big ones?"
"Don't tease," Saash muttered as they
trotted on toward the next corner. "I feel foolish now for hitting the
poor thing like that. It wasn't its fault. And I was sidled too. Those little
ones aren't always very resilient thinkers; if I've unhinged it
somehow..."
"I doubt that." But Rhiow smiled. "All
the same, you should have seen the look on its face. It—"
She stopped, ears pricked. From nearby, sounds of
barking and snarling and yowling were rising over the muted early-morning
traffic noise, becoming louder and louder. The two of them paused and looked at
each other, eyes widening—for one of the two lifted voices, they knew.
"Sweet Queen around us," Saash said, "what's
he doing?!"
They took off at a run, dodging among ehhif going in
and out of the early-opening bakery at the end of the block, and tore around
the corner. A dusty car with one tire flat and another booted was parked on
their side of Fifty-third: Rhiow jumped up on its trunk and then leaped to its
roof to get a better view. Saash came after, skidding a little on the roof and
staring down the street. At the second impact, the car's alarm went off. Rhiow
and Saash ignored it, knowing everyone else would, too.
Fifty-third was a mess of construction in this block:
several beat-up yellow Dumpsters were lined head to tail on the north side, and
scaffolding towered several stories above them, against the front of two
brownstones being renovated. Near the middle Dumpster, which sat with its lid
open, a group of men in T-shirts and hard hats, and two others in security
guards' uniforms, stood staring in astonishment at something between them and
the Dumpster. At the sound of the car alarm, the men gave one glance toward the
end of the street, saw nothing, and turned their attention back to what they
had been watching.
The barks and growls scaled up into a yipping howl of
sheer terror, and the men scattered, some toward the scaffolding, some toward
the street From among them burst a huge German shepherd, tawny and black. Its
ears were plastered against its skull, its tail was clamped between its hind
legs, and it leapt four-footed into the air and came down howling, and spun in
circles, and shook itself all over. But it could do nothing to dislodge the
gray-striped shape that clung to its neck, yowling at the top of his voice ...
not in fear or pain, either. Urruah was having a good time.
"Oh, not today" Rhiow muttered.
"Come on, Saash, we've got to do something, that gate won't wait—!"
"Tell him," Saash said, dry-voiced,
as the unfortunate houff and its rider came plunging toward them.
Urruah's eyes were wide, his mouth was wide as he yowled, and he had both front
pawfuls of claws anchored in the houff's collar, or maybe in its upper
neck behind its ears; his back claws kicked and scrabbled as if he thought he'd
caught a rabbit, and was trying to remove its insides in the traditional
manner. The dog continued to howl, jump, and turn in circles, and still
couldn't rid himself of his tormentor: the howls were more of pain than fear,
now. Urruah grinned like an idiot, yowling some wordless nonsense for sheer
effect.
Rhiow saw one of the security guards pull out his gun.
He wouldn't be so stupid—I she thought. But some ehhif were
profoundly stupid by feline standards, and one might take what he thought was a
safe shot at the cat tormenting his guard dog, even if he stood an even chance
of hitting the dog instead.
She glanced at the scaffolding above the group of ehhif.
"Saash," Rhiow said. "That bucket."
Saash followed her glance. "I see it. In front of
the Dumpster?"
"That's the spot." Rhiow turned her
attention to Urruah and the houff.
An almighty crash came from just in front of the
second Dumpster. The bucket full of wet cement-sand had come down directly in
front of the security guard with the gun. He jumped back, yelling with surprise
and fear at being splattered, as the other ehhif did; then spun,
looking upward for the source of the trouble. There was no one there, of
course. Several of the men, including the second security guard, disappeared
into the construction site; the man with the gun stood staring upward.
Rhiow, meantime, waited until the houff was within
clear hearing range—she didn't want to have to shout. As it lurched closer to
the car where she and Saash sat, Rhiow chose her moment... then said the six
syllables of the ahou'ffriw. It was not a word she spoke often, though
part of the general knowledge of a feline in her line of work. Sidled as she
was, Rhiow could see the word take flight like one of the hunting birds that
worked the high city, arrowing at the houff. The word of command struck
straight through the creature, as it had been designed to do when the houff themselves
were designed; struck all its muscles stiff, froze the thoughts in its brain
and the intended movements in its nerves. The houff crashed to the
concrete and lay there on its side, its tongue hanging out, its eyes glazed.
Urruah went down with it, and after a moment extricated himself and got up,
looking confused.
"I don't know about you," Rhiow said
softly—and Urruah's head jerked up at the sound—"but we're on callout
this morning. You had some different business, maybe? The Powers That Be
suggested you take the morning off to beat up defenseless houff?"
Urruah squinted to see her better. "Oh, 'luck,
Rhiow."
"'Luck is what none of us are going to have if
you don't pull yourself together," Rhiow said. "Come on. We've got
ten blocks to make before twenty-three after."
"Long-jump it," Urruah said, stepping down
off the houff.
"No," Rhiow said. "No point in throwing away power like that, when we
may have something major to do in a few minutes. Get sidled and come on."
She jumped down from the car: Saash followed.
They crossed the street and went on down Lexington
again: Urruah first, sidled now, and taking it easy for the moment; then Saash.
Rhiow paused just for a moment to look over her shoulder at the houff. He
was staggering to his feet again, looking groggy but relieved.
Good, Rhiow
thought. She went after the others and caught up with Saash first. "That
was slick," she said, "with the bucket."
"It was in a bad position to start with. Pull a
string or so, change the bucket's moment of inertia—" Saash shrugged one
ear back and forward, casual, but she smiled.
Rhiow did, too, then trotted forward to catch up with
Urruah. "Now," she said, more affably, "you tell me what all
that was about."
He strolled along for a moment without answering.
Rhiow was tempted to clout him, but it would be a waste of energy, and it really
was difficult being annoyed for long at so good-looking a young tom, at
least when he was behaving himself. Urruah was only two and a half, having
passed his Ordeal and started active practice a year ago. He was good at what
he did, and was pleased with himself, on both professional and physical counts:
a big, burly, sturdy tabby, silver and black, with silver-gray eyes, a voice
all purr, some very ornamental scars, and a set of the biggest, sharpest,
whitest teeth that Rhiow could remember seeing on one of the People in several
lives. She occasionally wondered, when Urruah pulled dumb stunts like this,
whether those teeth went straight up into his skull and filled most of it,
leaving less room for sense.
"That houff," Urruah said, as they
crossed Fifty-second, "took my mouse."
"Wait a minute," Saash said. "You're
trying to tell us that you actually caught a mouse, when there was all
that perfectly good MhHonalh's food in the Dumpster?"
Urruah gave Saash a scathing look. Saash simply
blinked at him, refusing to accept delivery on the scorn, and kept on walking.
"It was a terrific mouse," Urruah said. "It was one of those
bold ones: it kept jumping and trying to bite me in the face. I was going to
let it go after a while: you have to respect that kind of defiance! And then
that miserable ehhif shows up at shift-change and lets his houff off
the chain where they keep the thing all night, and it comes running out of
there, jumps into the street practically on top of me, and eats my mouse! Must
have a lot of wolf in it or something. But what would you have
done?"
"Not ride it down the street and nearly get
myself shot," Rhiow said dryly. "Or the poor houff. A good
slapping around would have been plenty. And do you really expect a houff to mind
People's manners? It didn't know any better. But that ehhif's reckless
with the houff. And it must have been awfully hungry. I wonder what can
be done about your poor mouse-eater...."
"Not our problem," Urruah said as they
crossed Fifty-first.
"Everything in this city is our problem," Rhiow said, "as you know very
well. I'd say you owe that houff a favor, now; you overreacted. Better
arrange a meeting with one of our people on the houff side and see what
can be done about him. I'll expect a report tomorrow."
Urruah growled under his breath, but Rhiow put her
ears back at him. "Business, Urruah," she said. "There's work
waiting for us. Put yourself aside and get ready to do what you were made
to."
He sighed, and after a half a block his whiskers went
forward again. 'Tell me it's the northside gate again."
Rhiow grimaced. "Of course it is."
"Somebody did an out-of-hours access," Saash
said, "and left it misaligned."
"The substrates still hinged?"
"Hard to tell from just the notification, but I
hope so. If we go in prepared to do a subjunctive restring—"
And they were off, several sentences deep into
gate-management jargon before the three of them crossed Fiftieth. Rhiow sighed.
Saash and Urruah might have frictions, but the technical details of their work
fascinated them both, and while they had a problem to solve they usually
managed to avoid taking their claws to one another. It was before work, and
after, that difficulties set in; fortunately, the team's relationship was
strictly a professional one, and no rule said they had to be friends. For her
own part, Rhiow mostly concentrated on balancing Saash and Urruah off against
one another so that the team got its work done without claws-out transactions
or murder.
Just south of the southwest corner of Fiftieth and Lex
was then: way down into Grand Central. Outside the delicatessen on the corner,
a street grating that covered the west-side ventilation shaft was damaged,
leaving room enough to squeeze through without mussing one's fur. They slipped
down through it, Urruah first, then Saash and Rhiow, and followed the downward
incline of the concrete shaft for a few yards until they were out of sight of
the street. All of them paused to let their eyes settle, now blessedly relieved
of the bright sunlight. The dimness around them began to be more clearly
stitched and striated with the thin radiance of strings, properly separate now,
and their colors distinct rather than blindingly run together.
"Smells awful down here today," Saash said,
wrinkling her nose.
"Just your delicate sensibilities," Urruah
said, grinning. "Or the flea powder."
Saash lifted a paw to cuff him, but Rhiow shouldered
between them. "Not now. Your eyes better? Then, let's go on."
The concrete-walled shaft was four feet wide and no
more than two feet high, low enough to make you keep your tail down as you
went. It stretched for about thirty feet ahead before turning off westward at a
right angle, where it stopped. Under the end of the shaft was a concrete ledge,
much eroded from waste water dripping down it, and below that, a drop of some
ten feet to the "back yard," the northeastern bank of sidings where
locomotives and loose cars were kept when the East Yard was congested with
trains being moved.
One after another they jumped down, avoiding the
eternal puddle of water that lay stagnant under the shaft-opening in all but
the driest weather. In the darkness the clutter and tangle of strings was more
visible than ever, and many of them were pulled curving over to a spot between
Tracks 25 and 26, blossoming outward from it in all directions like a diagram
of a black hole's event horizon. That particular nodal symmetry meant an open
worldgate, and was the signature of Rhiow's business and her team's. With
worldgates in place and working properly, wizards out on errands didn't have to
spend their own precious energy on rapid transit to get where the Powers That
Be assigned them. Without working gates, solutions to crises were slowed down,
lives were hurt or untimely ended, and the heat-death of the Universe
progressed unchecked or sometimes sped up.That was what all those in the team's
line of work were sworn to stop; and moments like this, as Rhiow stood and eyed
the incredible mess and tangle of malfunctioning strings, made her wonder why
they all kept trying when things kept going this spectacularly wrong.
The strings curving in to the nodal junction shivered
with light and with the faintest possible sound, as if all being plucked at
once. And the curvature wasn't symmetrical: there should have been a matching
"outward" curvature to complement the "inward" one. Taken
together, the signs meant an unstable gate, which might shift phase, mode, or
location without warning. 'Time?" Rhiow said.
'Twenty after," Saash said.
They sprinted through the darkness, across the tracks.
Though even a cat's eyes take time to adjust to sudden darkness, they had the
advantage of knowing their ground; they were down here three times a week,
sometimes more, slipping so skillfully among the tracks and buildings that they
were seldom seen. Urruah went charging ahead, delighted as always by a
challenge and a chance to show off; Rhiow was astonished to see him suddenly
stumble as he came down from a jump over track. Something squealed as he fell
on it.
"Irh's balls," he yowled, "it's rats!
Rats!"
More squeals went up. Rhiow spat with disgust, for the
rats were all over the place, like a loathsome carpet: she'd been so intent on
the gate that they hadn't even registered until she ran right into them. Some
rats now panicked and ran off shrieking down the tunnels, but for every three
that ran, one stayed to try to slash your leg or ear.
Rhiow prided herself on having a fast and heavy paw
when she needed it, and she needed it now. She disliked using the killing bite
until she was sure the thing being bitten couldn't bite her back in the lip or
the eye: the only way to be sure was to crush skulls and break backs first, so
she got busy doing that, hitting wildly around her. Up ahead of her, Urruah was
yowling delight and rage, and rats flew from every stroke. But Saash, Rhiow
thought in sudden concern. She's no fighter. What if—
She looked over to the left. Saash was crouched down,
her eyes gone so wide that they were just black pools with a glint of rim; a
rat nearly her own size was crouched in front of her, preparing to jump. Saash
opened her mouth and hissed at it.
The rat blew up.
And here I was worrying, Rhiow thought, both revolted and impressed.
"Saash," she shouted over the squeals and the cracking of bones,
heading after Urruah, "can you extend the range on that spell? We don't
have time for this!"
Saash shook herself to get the worst of the former rat
off her, hissed, and spat. "Yes," she said. "Believe me, I'd
have had it ready for numbers if I'd known! Give me a moment—"
She crouched again, looking intent, and Rhiow
concentrated on defending her. The rats were coming faster now, as if they knew
something bad was about to happen. Rhiow felt the bite in her tail, another in
her leg, and struck out all around her in a momentary fury that she knew she
couldn't maintain for long. "Urruah," she yelled, "for the Dam's
sake get your mangy butt back here and lend us a paw!"
The answer was a yowl that was actually cheerful in a
horrible way. A moment later Rhiow could see him working back toward them by
virtue of an empty space around him that moved as he moved. Rats would rush
into it, but they wouldn't rush out: they went down, skulls smashed or backs
broken. Once Rhiow saw Urruah reach down with that idiot grin, grab a rat
perfectly in the killing-bite spot at the base of the skull, and whip around
him with the thing's whole body, bludgeoning away the other rodents coming at
him. It was disgusting, and splendid.
Urruah jumped right over Rhiow, turned in midair, and
came down tail-to-tail with her. Together they struck at the writhing squealing
forms all around, while between them Saash scowled at the dirty gravelly
ground, with her eyes half-shut. "Nervous breakdown?" Urruah yelled
between blows.
Rhiow was too busy to hit him. Saash ignored him
completely. A moment later, she lifted her head, slit-eyed, and hissed.
Rhiow went flat-eared and slack-jawed at the piercing
sound, more like a train's air-brakes than anything from a tiny cat's throat.
Urruah fell over sideways as the force of it struck him. From all around them
came many versions of a loathsome popping sound, like a car running over a
sealed plastic bag full of liver. Everyone got sprayed with foul-smelling muck.
Silence fell. Saash got up and ran toward the track
onto which the gate had slid down. Rhiow went after, followed by Urruah when he
struggled to his feet. The fur rose on Rhiow's back as they went, not just from
the itch of closeness to the patent gate. From back in the upper-level tunnel
came a rumbling, and the tracks ticked in sympathy: the single white eye of the
6:23's headlight was sliding toward them.
Urruah saw it, too. "I could give it a power
failure," he gasped as they ran. "No one would suspect a thing."
"It wouldn't stop the train before it ran through
the gate."
"I could stop it—"
"You've swapped brains with your smallest
flea," Rhiow hissed. The dreadful mass and kinetic energy bound up in a
whole train were well beyond even Urruah's exaggerated idea of his own ability
to handle. "It'll derail, and Iau only knows how many of those poor ehhif
will get hurt or killed. Come on—!"
They ran after Saash. She stood in front of the gate,
tail lashing violently as she looked the tangle of strings up and down, eyes
half-closed to see them better. As Rhiow and Urruah came up with her, she
turned.
"It's still viable," she said. "Much
better than I feared. The configuration that we left it in yesterday afternoon
is still saved in the strings—see that knot? And that one."
Rhiow peered at them. "Can you get them to
retie?"
"Should be able to. We can reweave later: no time
for it now. This'll at least shut the thing. Urruah?"
"Ready," he said. He was panting, but eager
as always. "Where do you want it?"
"Just general at first. Then the substrate.
Rhiow?"
"Ready," she said.
First Saash, then Urruah, and at last Rhiow, reared up
and hooked claws through the bright web of strings, and began to pull. Saash
leaned in deep, set her teeth into another knotted set of burning stringfire,
closed her eyes and started work. The fizz and itch in the air started to get worse,
while Saash's power and intention ran down the strings through the gate
substrate, and the strings obediently writhed and began reweaving themselves
over the gaping portal. Through the physical gate itself, not the orderly
circle or sphere Rhiow was used to but just a jagged rent in the dark air,
nothing could be seen: not the train, not anything else. The gate had been left
open on some void or empty place. Cold dark wind breathed from it, mixing
peculiarly with the hot metallic breath of the train trundling along through
the dimness toward them. Oh, hurry up! Rhiow thought desperately, for
she couldn't get rid of the image of the train plunging into that jagged
darkness and being lost—where? No way of telling. After a catastrophic
incursion by such a huge mass, certainly the gate would derange, maybe
irreparably. And what would happen to the train and its passengers,
irretrievably lost into some hole in existence?
Rhiow pulled forcibly away from such thoughts: they
wouldn't help the work. Saash was deep in it, drowned in the concentration that
made her so good at this work—claws snagged deep in the substrate as she drew
strings out with paws and mind, knitted them together, released them to pull in
others. Urruah, his face a mask of strained but joyous snarl like the one he
had worn while killing rats, fed her power, a blast of sheer intention as
irresistible as the stream from a fire hose, so that the strings blazed,
kindling to Saash's requirements and knitting faster every moment. This was
what made Urruah the second heart of the team, despite all his bragging and bad
temper: the blatant energy of a young tom in his prime, harnessed
however briefly and worth any amount of skill.
Rhiow fed her energy down the weave, too, but mostly
concentrated on watching the overall progress of the reweave. There, she
said down the strings to the others, watch that patch there— Saash was
on it, digging her forelegs into the tangle practically to the shoulders. A
moment while she fished around deep inside the weave, as if feeling for a mouse
inside a hole in a wall: then she snagged the string she wanted and pulled it
into place, and the part of the weave that had threatened to come undone
suddenly went seamless, a patch of light rather than a webwork. The tear in the
darkness was healing itself. Peering around its right edge, Rhiow saw the train
coining, very close now, certainly no more than a hundred yards down the track.
It's going to be all right, she thought, it'll be all right, oh, come
on, Saash, come on, Urruah—!
The gate substrate looked less like a bottomless hole
now, and more like a flapping, flattening tapestry woven of light on a weft of
blackness. The gap was narrowing to a tear, the tear to a fissure of black
above the tracks. The train was fifty yards away. Still Saash stood reared up
against the glowing weave of substrate, pulling some last few burning strings
into order. Rhi, she thought, hold this last bit—
Half deafened, Rhiow reached in and bit the indicated
strings to hold them in place while Saash worked in a final furious flurry of
haste, pulling threads in and out, interweaving them. Not for the first time,
Rhiow wondered what human had once upon a time seen a gate-technician of the
People about her business, and later had named a human children's game with
string "cat's-cradle"—
Done! Saash
shouted into the weave. It snapped completely flat, a dazzling tapestry along
which many-colored fires rolled outward to the borders, bounced, rippled in
again. The dark crack in the air slammed shut. Behind it, the blind white eye
of the 6:23's locomotive slid ponderously at them in a roar of diesel thunder.
Rhiow and Urruah threw themselves to the right of the track, under the
platform; Saash leapt to the left. The loco roared straight through the rewoven
and now-harmless gate substrate, stirring it not in the slightest, and brakes
screeched as the train gradually slid down to the end of its platform and
gently stopped.
The train sat there ticking and hissing gently to
itself, the huge wheels of one car not two inches from Rhiow's and Urruah's
noses. "A little close," Urruah said from where he crouched,
wide-eyed, a few feet away.
"A little," Saash said, from the far side.
"Rhiow? I want to do some low-level diagnosis on this gate before we
leave. The other three I can check from here; but I want to look into this
one's log weave and see who left it in this state."
"Absolutely," Rhiow said. "Wait till
they move this thing."
It usually took fifteen or twenty minutes for the
train to empty out and for the crew to finish checking it. Urruah rose after
getting his breath back. "I need to stretch," he said, and walked off
to the end of the platform. Rhiow went after him.
Down the track they met Saash, who had had the same
idea. At the sight of her, Urruah made a face, his nose twitching. "Aaurh
up a tree, look at you! And you stink!"
Saash made a matching face, for once unwilling to sit
down and wash. But then she grinned. "Your delicate sensibilities?"
Saash said sweetly.
Urruah had the grace to look sheepish. He wandered
away through the carnage. "Not a trick you'd want to use every day. But
effective ... !"
"It saved us," Rhiow said softly. "And
them. Nice work, Saash."
Saash looked wry. "I know what I'm good for.
Fighting isn't it."
'Technical expertise, though ..." Rhiow said.
"Rats," said Saash, "make a specific
shape in space. There's a way they affect strings in their area, one that no
other species duplicates. There's a way to exploit that." She shrugged her
tail; but she smiled.
"Keep that spell loaded," Rhiow said,
heartfelt. "We may need it again."
From down the track came a rumble and groan of wheels
as the train started backing out into the tunnel where all the upper-level
tracks merged. Rhiow and the team moved a couple of tracks eastward to avoid
it, Urruah wandering ahead. "So what will we do after this?" he said.
"Get cleaned up," Rhiow said, with longing.
"I mean after mat.... We could go down to the
Oyster Bar and romance the window lady."
Rhiow flicked an ear in mild exasperation, wondering
how Urruah could think of any food, even oysters, when surrounded by a smell
like this. But they were a passion of his. Occasionally Rhiow had secretly
followed Urruah down to the restaurant's pedestrian-service window after
finishing work, and had seen him stand there in line with the other
commuters—provoking much amused comment—and then wheedle bluepoints out of one
of the window staff, a big broad blond lady, by force of purr alone. For her
own part, Rhiow would never have done something so high-profile in the terminal
itself. But Urruah had no shame, and Rhiow had long since given up trying to
teach him any.
"Window's not open on Sunday," Saash said.
"Do you ever think about anything but your stomach?"
"I sure do. Just the night before last there was
this little ginger number, with these big green eyes, and she—"
Saash sat down in a clean spot behind a signal and
started having herself a good scratch, yawning the while. "Urruah, you've
obviously mistaken me for someone who's even slightly interested in your
nightly exploits."
"Au, it's
not your fault," Urruah said magnanimously. "You can't help not
taking an interest, poor thing: you're ffeih, after all."
Rhiow smiled slightly: she had given up trying to
teach Urruah tact too. But there was no arguing the statement, on either
Saash's part or her own. Before her wizardry, while still very young with her ehhif,
Hhuha had taken Rhiow to the vet's and unqueened her. Saash had had this
happen, too, so long ago that she couldn't even remember it. Being ffeih did
free you from certain inconvenient urges; sometimes Rhiow wondered how
still-queened wizards managed when heat and an assignment coincided.
"Still," Rhiow said, "Saash has a point. Till tomorrow, it's
MhHonalh's or nothing for you, my kit."
"Worth waiting for," Urruah said,
unconcerned, still ambling along. He paused, peering down. "Here, you
missed one, Saash. Iau's sweet name, but these things are getting big this
year—"
He broke off. "Rhiow? This isn't a rat."
The alarm in his voice made Rhiow's heart jump. She
hurried over and stood with him to stare down unhappily at the small sodden
heap of fur and limbs lying on the rail. Sometimes you ran into them down here,
People who were sick or careless, and ran afoul of the trains: there was
nothing much you could do but send their bodies on and wish them well in their
next life. So young, she thought sadly: this catling could hardly have
been out of his 'tweens, still kittenish and not yet old enough to worry about
sex.
"Poor kit," Saash said. "I
wonder—"
He moved. A gasp, a heave of his chest, a kick of one
leg. Another heave of breath.
"I don't believe it," Rhiow said. She bent
down and gave his head a lick. He tasted foul, of cinder and train fumes as
well as rat blood. She breathed breaths with him: the scent/taste was hurt and
sick, yes, but not dead yet.
And someone said in her head, Rhiow? Are you free?
It was a voice she knew, and one she had expected to
hear from, but not right this minute. The others heard it, too, from their
expressions.
Urruah made a wry face. "The Area Advisory,"
he said. "I guess we should be honored."
"We got that shut," Saash said,
flicking an ear at the gate. "We're honored. —You go on, Rhi. We'll see to
this one ... and I'll start those deep diagnostics. I've checked all four
gates' logs now. The other three are answering properly: no effect on them from
this event. One thing, though. The log weave on this one is blank. No
transits or accesses showing since the midnight archive-and-purge of the
log."
Rhiow blinked at that and started to demand
explanations, but Saash turned away to the catling. "Ask me later."
Rhiow jumped up onto the platform. "Next train's
at seven oh four," she said, looking over her shoulder at them.
Urruah gave her a tolerant look. "It's clear over
on Track Thirty-two," he said. "We'll be fine."
Rhiow sighed. She was a mess, a layer of dust and
track cinders kicked up by the North White Plains local now stuck to the rat
detritus that had sprayed her, but there was no time to do much about it. She
shook herself hard, scrubbed at her face enough to become slightly decent—then
trotted on up the platform, out through the gate, and into the main concourse.
Here Rhiow stayed by the wall with some care, for the
place was slowly becoming busy. Great beams of dusty sunlight slanted down into
the concourse from the tall east windows; the big Accurist clock's deep-throated
bell began tolling seven.
Rhiow gazed around, seeing very little stillness in
the place. It was all ehhif moving, going, heading somewhere; except up
the steps on the Vanderbilt Avenue side, where the ticketed waiting area was,
and the coffee bar next to it. In the coffee bar, with the Sunday Times piled
up on the glass table in front of him, and a cup of something hot to one side,
sat a tall dark-haired ehhif in jeans and running shoes and a beige polo
shirt. As Rhiow looked at him, the ehhif glanced up from the section he
was reading, and then looked right down at her and raised his eyebrows: a good
trick, since she was invisible.
Rhiow trotted across the concourse and up the stairs,
pausing only a moment near the bottom of the staircase to enjoy the residual
scent of fish floating up from the Oyster Bar downstairs. At the top of the
steps, she wove and dodged to miss a couple of transit cops coming out of the
Metro-North police offices off to the left, and slid among the tables, to where
Carl Romeo sat.
He was handsome, as ehhif went,
broad-shouldered and narrow-waisted, with high cheekbones, clear gray eyes, and
a face that looked friendly to her—though of course it was always dangerous to
felidomorphize. How he had turned up so fast, even with a malfunctioning gate,
wasn't hard to imagine: an Area Advisory was not limited to public transit in
the performance of his duties.
"Dai stiho, Har'lh," she said, tucking herself up comfortably under the table.
She did not speak Ailurin to him. To one of another species but in her own line
of work, she could use the Speech, and preferred to: its detailed professional
vocabulary made errors of understanding less likely.
"Dai," Carl said, using the paper to cover his attention to her. "Rhiow,
what was all this about?"
"The integration we did yesterday came
undone," Rhiow said. "Saash is working on the technical details for
me; we'll know more in a while. But we were able to reinstate before the North
White Plains local came in."
Carl rustled his Times aside and reached for
his cappuccino. "You and your team don't usually need to do things
twice," Carl said. "Is there something I should know about?"
"Nothing regarding team function," Rhiow
said. "But I'm disturbed about the condition we found the gate in, Har'lh.
The symptoms were of someone using it without due care. However, the logs show no
transit, not even any accesses ... which is odd. Either the gate was not
used, and this malfunction had some other cause"—and she shuddered:
that was a nest of mice Rhiow was unwilling to start ripping open—"or
someone out on errantry did access it, and then wiped the logs on
purpose. Not very ethical."
Carl smiled, a thin humorless look. "That's
putting it mildly." For a few moments he said nothing, and Rhiow wished
she could guess all of what was going on in the mind behind that face. Ehhif
could be inscrutable even after you'd learned to understand their
expressions; one of the Area Advisories, the two people ultimately responsible
for all the wizards working in the greater metropolitan area, could be expected
to know things and have concerns Rhiow could only guess at. About some of those
concerns, though, Rhiow felt she could safely speculate.
She wondered if Carl was thinking what she was: that,
though all wizards were supposed to be in service to the Powers That Be,
sometimes ... just sometimes ... one or another of them will shift allegiances.
There was, after all, one of those Powers that had had a profound disagreement
with all the Others, very early on in the Universe. It had lost some of Its
strength, as a result, but not all: and It was still around. Dealing with the
Lone Power could seem very attractive to some, Rhiow knew; but she considered
such dealings unacceptably hazardous. This was, after all, the same Power that
had invented death and turned it loose on the worlds ... a final nasty offhand
gesture before turning Its back on the establishment that It felt had spurned
It. The Lone One was as likely to turn on Its tools as on Its enemies.
Carl looked at her. "You're thinking of
rogues," he said.
"I'd think you would be, too, Har'lh," Rhiow
said, "the evidence being what it is at the moment."
He folded the first section of the paper, put it
aside. "It's circumstantial at best. Can you think of any way a gate's logs
might wipe accidentally on access or transit?"
"Not at first lick," Rhiow said, "since
gates are supposedly built not to be able to function that way. But I'll take
it up with Saash. If anyone can find a way to make a gate fail that way, she
can. Meanwhile, I'll go Downside myself later on and check the top-level spell
emplacement, just to make sure one of the other gate structures isn't
interfering with the malfunctioning one."
"If you like ... but I'm not requiring it of
you."
"I know. I'd just like 10 be sure the trouble
isn't some kind of structural problem."
"All right. But watch yourself down there."
"I will, Advisory."
"Anything else I need to know about this?"
Rhiow sneezed, a residual effect from the foul
rodent-smell down on the tracks, not to mention the way she smelled herself.
"A lot of rats down there, Har'lh. A lot."
Carl raised his eyebrows. "The early
spring," he said, "combined with this hot weather? That's what the
paper says. Some kind of screwup in the normal breeding season—"
Rhiow laid her whiskers back, a "no"
gesture. "A lot of rats since yesterday. In fact, to judge from the
quality of the smell, since this morning. —That's the other thing: we found a
hurt youngster back there."
"Feline? Human?"
"Feline. About the same age for us as a human
child of nine. I think he ran into those rats: he's all bitten up. Urruah and
Saash are seeing to him. He should be all right, after some care."
"Very well." Carl picked up the magazine
section. "The other gates are behaving themselves?"
"No signs of trouble."
"You don't think I need to declare them
off-limits till you can look into this in detail?"
Rhiow thought. There were three other worldgates
associated with the Terminal. Taking them offline would throw the whole weight
of the area's extraspatial transit on the Penn Station gates. Penn was
underequipped to handle such a load—its two gates normally handled only
onplanet work, and one of them would have to be extensively restrung at very
short notice if the Grand Central gates went down. Jam, Hwaa, and Fhi'ss, the
technical team handling Penn, would not thank her at all.
But it wasn't a question of their feelings: what
mattered was safety. Still, the nodes and string structures around the other
two track-level gates, seen at a distance, looked fine; and she had Saash's
report....
"I'll double-check them shortly," Rhiow
said. "But Saash says the gates at Thirty-two and One-sixteen, and the
Lexington Avenue local gate, are patent and functional, and their logs and
access-transit structures answered properly when interrogated. Her snap
assessment is likely to be as accurate as my more leisurely one. If I find
anything when I go Downside, I'll advise you. But on present data, I would
advise you to leave the gates as they are."
Carl nodded. "I'll take One-sixteen home and
check it," he said.
"Don't be seen," Rhiow said. "Nothing
runs on the lower levels on Sunday."
Carl smiled slightly. "There are more ways to be
invisible than to sidle," he said. "Let's talk tomorrow morning,
then." He sipped at his cappuccino, then squinted briefly at her.
"Rhi, what is that all over you? You look awful."
She smiled slightly at him. "Occupational hazard.
I told you the rats were thick down there ... about an eighth of an inch thick,
at the moment. —You on call all alone this weekend?"
Carl nodded. "Tom's in Geneva at the
Continental-regionals meeting; he'll be back Wednesday. I'm handling the whole
East Coast, just now."
"Not much fun for you," Rhiow said,
"having no one to split shifts with."
Carl waved the cappuccino at her. "I drink a lot
of this. I get jangled, but I survive."
Rhiow got up and shook herself again, not that it
helped. "Well, give T'hom my best when you hear from him," she said.
"Go well, Advisory ... and watch out for that caffeine."
"Dai stiho, Rhiow," Carl said. "Stay in touch. And mind the rats."
"You got that in one," she said, and
headed down the stairs.
-=O=-***-=O=-
When Rhiow got back down to the tracks, she found that
Saash and Urruah had moved over to the far side, near the wall. Between them
lay the killing, now curled into a tight ball. He was cleaner: Saash was
washing him, and looked up from that now as Rhiow came over.
"How is he?" Rhiow said.
"He woke for a moment," Saash said,
"but went right out again—understandable. No bones broken, no internal
injuries. He's just bitten up and shocked to exhaustion. Sleep's best for him,
and a wizardry to kill the filth in the bites. But not here."
"No, indeed not," Rhiow said, glancing
around. No ehhif terminal staff were out on the tracks as yet, but it
wouldn't do for any to come along and find this kitling. The ehhif's
relations with terminal cats had become somewhat difficult over the last few
years. Every now and then the place was "swept," and sick or indigent
cats found there were taken away, along with sick or indigent ehhif who had
also taken refuge in the tunnels for shelter rather than food. "Well, he's
got to have somewhere to rest. But I can't help: the outside places near my den
are too dangerous for a kit."
"I live in a Dumpster," Urruah said, with
execrable pride. "There would be room... but I don't think it's the place
for him if he's sick."
"No," Rhiow said, "but it's good of you
to offer." She didn't say what she was thinking: that attempting to keep a
young tom barely out of kittenhood in close company with a tom of siring
age was a recipe for disaster, whether the tom lived in a Dumpster or a palace,
and whether he was a wizard or not. Mature toms couldn't help their attitude
toward kittens in general, and male ones in particular, no matter how they
tried.
"I think I can put him up," Saash said.
"There are a lot of places way down and back in the garage where the ehhif
never go. One big high ledge that I use sometimes will serve: it's four
levels down. None of the ehhif go down there except to fetch cars out,
and not often—it's long-term storage space. This kitling won't be heard, even
if he cries, and if I have to, I can lay a barrier to hold either him or the
sound in till he's well enough to go."
"You'll have to spend some time there to be sure
he's settled," Rhiow said, "and if he catches you, Abha'h will powder
you again—"
Saash hissed softly, but the sound was resigned.
"I suppose it's in a good cause," she said. "And I have to eat
sometime; he'd catch me then anyway. Will you two lend a hand with the jump? I
don't propose to carry him all the way home in my mouth."
"No problem. Urruah?"
"As long as she does the circle," Urruah
said, emitting a cavernous yawn. The morning's exertions were beginning to
catch up with him.
Rhiow yawned, too, then laughed. "Quick,"
she said, "before we all fall asleep where we stand ..."
Saash glanced around her, eyeing the area, and with a
quick practiced flick of her tail laid out the boundaries of the spell,
sweeping the area clean of random string influences and defining the area where
she wanted the new ones to anchor. When the anchors were in place, looking like
a cage of vertical bright lines around the edges of the circle, Saash added the
only ingredient needed: the words. She said one word in the Speech, and the
anchors leaned inward above them, knotting into the tip of a cone. Then three
more words—the medium-precision versions of Saash's and Rhiow's and Urruah's
names, and a fourth generic medium-precision term for their
"passenger," with only the physical characteristics of his size and
color added in, since they didn't know his name or anything about his
personality. With the details completed, the dirt and cinders under their feet
went webbed with more bright lines, the anchors that would hold the four of
them inside the spell. "Location's coming," Saash said to Urruah.
"Ready?"
He turned and snagged one of the anchor strands in his
teeth, ready to feed power down it. "Go."
Saash recited a string of coordinates in the Speech,
and then said the last word that knotted the spell closed and turned it loose.
Urruah bit hard on the string, feeding power down it. The whole structure
blazed: the "cone" of strings collapsed down on them, pushed them
down and out through its bottom. A moment when the world was a tangle of lines
of fire—
Then dimness reasserted itself. The four of them stood
and sat and lay on a concrete shelf four feet wide and ten feet long, high up
at the far end of a room much longer than it was wide. The shelf's edge was a
sheer drop of twenty feet to a floor painted with white lines and covered with
blocky machinery, in which ehhif's cars were stacked three high.
The string structure snapped away to nothing. "Au,
I'm glad there are gates," Saash said, and flopped down on her side.
"Who'd want to do that every time you wanted to go any distance? It's bad
enough for ten blocks."
"That's why Iau gave us feet," Rhiow said.
"Urruah? You okay?"
He sat down, blinking. "I will be after I eat
something."
He's fine, Rhiow
thought, amused. "Now let's see about this one—" She peered at the
kitling. Under the grime, most of which Saash had gotten off, he was white with
irregular black patches on back and flanks and face: one splotch sat on his
upper lip, creating an effect like Carl's mustache. Ear-tips, tail-tips, and
feet were black. Hu-rhiw was the Ailurin name for this kind of pattern:
day-and-night. He lay there breathing hard, ears back, eyes squeezed shut.
Conscious, Rhiow
thought, but unwilling to accept what's been happening to him. And why
wouldn't he be? For not all People believed in wizards. Many who did
believe were suspicious of them, thinking they somehow desired to dominate
other People, or else they mocked wizards as unnecessary or ineffective, saying
that they'd never seen a wizard do anything useful. Well, that's the whole
point, Rhiow thought, to do as much good as possible, as quietly as
possible. What the Lone One doesn't have brought to Its attention. It can't
ruin. But the generally dismissive attitude of other People was something
you got used to and learned to work around. After all, the situation could have
been much worse ... like that of the ehhif wizards. Rhiow often wondered
how they got anything done, since hardly any of their kind knew they existed or
believed in them at all, and preserving that status quo was part of their
mandate.
That little body still lay curled tense; Rhiow caught
a flicker of eyelid. Conscious, all right. We'll have some explaining to do,
but it can wait. "Saash," she said, "would you feel inclined
to give him a bit more of a wash? He'll wake."
"Certainly." Saash too had seen that
betraying flicker. She curled closer to the youngster and began
enthusiastically washing inside one ear. Only the most unconscious cat could
resist that for long.
The youngster's eyes flew open, and he sneezed:
possibly from the washing, or the smell that still lingered about him. He tried
to get up, but Saash put a paw firmly over his midsection and held him down.
"Lemme go!"
"You've had a bad morning, kit," Rhiow said
mildly. "I'd lie still awhile."
"Don't call me kit," he said in a yowl meant
to be threatening. "I'm a tom!"
Urruah gave him an amused glance. "Oh. Then we
can fight now, can we?"
"Uhh ..." The kit looked up at Urruah—taking
in the size of him, the brawny shoulders and huge paws, and, where the tips of
the forefangs stuck out so undemurely, the massive teeth. "Uh, maybe I
don't feel well enough."
"Well, then," Urruah said, "at your
convenience." He sat down and began to wash. Rhiow ducked her head briefly
to hide a smile. It was, of course, an excuse that the rituals of tom-combat
permitted: most of those rituals were about allowing the other party to escape
a fight and still save face.
"You have reason not to feel well," Saash
said, pausing in her washing. "About fifty rats took bites out of you. You
lie still, and we'll work on that."
"Why should you care?" the kit said
bitterly.
"We have our reasons," Rhiow said.
"What's your name, youngster?"
His eyes narrowed, a suspicious look, but after a
moment he said, "Arhu."
"Where's your dam?" Saash said.
"I don't know." This by itself was nothing
unusual. City-living cats might routinely live in-pride, even toms sometimes
staying with their mother and littermates; or they might go their own way at
adolescence to run with different prides, or stay completely unaligned.
"Are you in hhau'fih?" Saash used the
word that meant any group relationship in general, rather than rrai'fih, a
pride-relationship implying possible blood ties.
"No. I walk alone."
Rhiow and Saash exchanged glances. He was very young
to be nonaligned, but that happened in the city, too, by accident or design.
"There'll be time for those details later,"
Rhiow said. "Arhu, how did you come to be down there where we found you,
in the tunnel?"
"Someone said I should go there. They laughed at
me. They said, I dare you..." Arhu yawned, both weariness and
bravado. "You have to take dares...."
"What was the dare?"
"She said, Walk down here, and take the
adventure that comes to you—"
Rhiow's eyes went wide. "'She.' What did she say
to you first?"
"When?"
"Before that."
A sudden coolness in Arhu's voice, in his eyes.
"Nothing."
"Fwau," Rhiow said; a bit roughly, for her, but she thought it necessary.
"Something else has to have been said first." She thought she knew
what, but she didn't dare lead him....
Arhu stared at her. Rhiow thought she had never seen
such a cold and suspicious look from a kit so young. Pity rose up in her; she
wanted to cry, Who hurt you so badly that you've lost your kittenhood
entire? What's been done to you? But Rhiow held her peace. She thought Arhu
was going to give her no answer at all: he laid his head down sideways on the
concrete again. But he did not close his eyes, staring out instead into the
dimness of the garage.
Come on, Rhiow
thought. Tell me.
"I was in the alley," Arhu said. "The
food's good there: they throw stuff out of that grocery store on the other side
of it, the Gristede's. But the pride there, Hrau and Eiff and Ihwin and them,
they caught me and beat me again. They said they'd kill me, next time; and I
couldn't move afterward, so I just lay where they left me. No one else came for
a good while.... Then she must have come along while I was hurting. I couldn't
see her: I didn't look, it hurt to move. She said, You could be powerful.
The day could come when you could do all kinds of good things, when you could
do anything, almost, with the strength I can give you... if you lived through
the... test, the... hard time..." Arhu made an uncertain face, as if
not sure how to render what had been said to him. "She said, If you
take what I give you, and live through the trouble that follows—and it will
follow—then you 'II be strong forever. Strong for all your lives." His
voice was going matter-of-fact now, like someone repeating a milk-story heard
long ago against his dam's belly."! wanted that. To be strong. I said, What
could happen to me that would be worse than what's already happened? Do it.
Give it to me. She said, Are you sure? Really sure? I said, Yes,
hurry up, I want it now. She said, Then listen to what I'm going to say
to you now, and if you believe in it, then say it yourself, out loud. And I
said it, though some of it was pretty stupid. And it was quiet then."
"Hmm. Where was this alley, exactly?" said
Urruah.
"Ru, shut up. You can check the Gristede's later.
Arhu," Rhiow said, "say what she told you to."
A little silence, and then he began to speak, and a
shiver went down Rhiow from nose to tail: for the voice was his, but the tone,
the meaning and knowledge held in it, was another's. "In Life's name, and
for Life's sake, I assert that I will employ the Art that is Its gift in Life's
service alone. I will guard growth and ease pain. I will fight to preserve what
grows and lives well in its own way: nor will I change any creature unless its
growth and life, or that of the system of which it is part, are threatened. To
these ends, in the practice of my Art, I will ever put aside fear for courage,
and death for life, when it is fit to do so—looking always toward the Heart of
Time, where all our sundered times are one, and all our myriad worlds lie
whole, in That from Which they proceeded...."
No hesitation, no uncertainty; as if it had been
burned into his bones. Rhiow and Urruah and Saash all looked at one another.
"Then what happened?"
He stirred. "After a while, I felt better, and I
saw I could get away—none of them were there. I walked out into the
street. It was quiet. It was late, just the steam coming up out of the street,
you know how it does. I walked a long time until I saw inside there, inside
those doors. It was all bright and warm, but the doors were shut. I thought, It's
no use, there's no way to get in. But then—" Now he sounded dreamily
mystified, though at a remove. "Then someone— men I heard how to
get in, if I wanted to. I knew more than I knew a minute before: a way to move,
and words to say. And she said, Do that, and then go in and see what
happens. I dare you. So I did. I said the words, and I walked in through
the doors ... through them!... and then on under the sky-roof, and on
down through those littler doors, down into the dark..."
Arhu trailed off, and shivered. "I'm tired,"
he said, and closed his eyes.
Saash, lying beside him, looked at Rhiow thoughtfully,
then started to wash the top of Arhu's head.
Rhiow sat down and let out a breath. Well, she
said silently to the others, in the form of the Speech that goes privately from
mind to mind, it would appear that the Powers That Be have sent us a
brand-new wizard.
Not a wizard yet, Urruah said, his eyes narrowing. An overgrown kitten on Ordeal. And
since when do the Powers dump a probationer on already-established wizards? The
whole point of Ordeal is that you have to survive it alone.
None of us, Saash
said, ever does it completely alone. There's always advice, at first:
from Them, or other wizards. That's most likely why he's been sent to us. Who else
has he got?
That's the problem, Rhiow said. You know there are no accidents in our line of
work. This kit was sent to us. He's going to have to stay with us, at least
until he's started to take this seriously.
No way! Urruah
hissed.
Rhiow stared at him. You heard him, she said.
"I said it, though some of it was pretty stupid." He's not clear
yet about the meaning of the Oath he's taken. If he hadn't met us, that would
be his problem, and the Powers': he'd live or die according to the conditions
of his Ordeal and his use of the wizardry bestowed on him. But we found him—you
found him!—and under the conditions of our own Oaths, we can't let him go
until he understands what he's brought on himself. After he does, he's the
Powers' business: he and They will decide whether he lives and becomes a
wizard, or dies. But for the time being, we're a pride in the nurturing
sense as well as the professional one... and that's how it will be. You have
any problems with that?
She stared until Urruah dropped his eyes, though he
growled in his throat as he did it. Rhiow cared not a dropped whisker for his
noise. Urruah was still young in his wizardry but also profoundly committed to
it, and though he could be lazy, tempery, and self-indulgent, he wouldn't
attempt to deny responsibilities he knew were incumbent on him.
"So," Rhiow said aloud. "Saash, you
seem to have become queen for the day...."
Saash made a small ironic smile, suggestive of someone
enjoying a job more than she had expected. "It's all right, I can manage
him. He'll sleep sound for a while.... I made one of the small healing
wizardries to start the wounds cleaning themselves out."
"Make sure you sleep, too. I'll make rounds in
the Terminal in a while; Har'lh wanted the gates double-checked. Urruah, it
would help if you held yourself ready while Saash is awake, in case she needs
anything."
"All right," he said, and he brightened.
"It'll be ehhif lunchtime soon, and they'll be throwing lots of
nice leftovers in that Dumpster around the corner. Then there's this alley,
with the Gristede's. Thirty-eighth, you think, Saash?..."
Rhiow's whiskers went forward in amusement as she
turned to jump down. For the moment, she wasn't sure which was motivating
Urruah more: the desire for food or the prospect of a good scrap with a tough
pride. "Eat hearty," she said, "and keep your ears unshredded.
Call if you need anything: you'll know where to find me."
"Working," Urruah said, in a voice of
good-natured pity.
An hour later Rhiow strolled across the concourse again,
under a "sky" glowing blue with reflection from brilliant sunshine
glancing blindingly from the polished acreage of floor. She had checked the
main tunnel gates first, and finished with the Lexington Avenue local gate,
near the left-hand end of the platform. All their logs were reporting as they
should have, including the malfunctioning gate's log, which now showed eight
accesses since its repair. Things were back to normal.
For the time being, Rhiow thought, as she headed one last time toward the upper-level track
gates. The problem with worldgates was that they were inherently unstable.
Space didn't like to be broached, however briefly: it strove to re-seal itself
by any means. Standing worldgates needed constant adjustment and maintenance to
compensate for changes in local string structure caused by everything from
seasonal changes in the Earth's orbit to anomalies in local conditions—solar
wind, sunspots, shifts in the ionosphere or the planet's magnetic field. After
a while you learned to anticipate the gates' quirks, and you routinely prepared
for trouble before the full and new of the Moon, at the solstices, during close
cometary passes. And every now and then, like today, the gates would find a new
and totally unexpected way to make your life interesting.
Part of Rhiow's mind kept worrying at the problem of
the malfunctioning gate's lost logs while she made her way over to the gate
that was best for long-range accesses, the one near Track 32. Besides that,
though, she was thinking about Arhu and about all those rats. There'd been no
reason for so many of them to be down there. What had attracted them? Where had
they gotten in from? ... Probably some passageway to the outside needed to be
blocked up. Somewhere under these streets, in the tangle of tunnels and
conduits too complex for even one of the People to know, the rats must have
found entirely too suitable a breeding-place. As she passed through the door to
the platform, Rhiow's mouth quirked with distaste at the taint of dead rat that
still lingered in the tunnel air. To her, rats were a symbol of the entropy
that wizards spent their lives slowing: a persistent, hungry force, implacable,
that might be fought to a standstill, but rarely more, and which would quickly
grow past control if ignored....
Halfway down the platform, a slender blond-haired she-ehhif
in dark skirt and jacket stood waiting, a briefcase under one arm. Rhiow
smiled at the sight of her, knowing immediately that she was not waiting for
the train—though she would claim to be, should anyone question her. The odds of
her being noticed at all in so busy a place were minimal. If she were noticed,
her manner of leaving wouldn't surprise anyone. She would simply be there one
moment, and gone the next, and anyone watching would assume that they'd simply
somehow missed seeing her walk away. Even if someone looked at that wizard
right at the moment she passed the gate, the nature of wizardry itself would
protect her. Almost no nonwizardly creature is willing to see the
"impossible," even right under its nose, and shortly it finds all
kinds of explanations for the strange thing it saw. This useful tendency meant
that many short-duration wizardries didn't have to be concealed at all. Other
kinds were simply invisible to most species, like the glowing, shimmering
webwork of the gate where it hung face-on to the platform, the surface of the
web slowly beginning to pucker inward in the beginning of patency.
Rhiow strolled on down to the she-ehhif. At the
flicker of motion, seen out the corner of an eye, the woman turned and saw
Rhiow coming, and raised her eyebrows. "Dai stiho," the woman
said. "Was this one down this morning?"
"For a change, no," Rhiow said. 'This will
come in phase in about thirty seconds. Got far to go?"
"Not too far, but Perm's a mess right now, and
I'm on deadline," the woman said. "Vancouver, and then
Kamchatka."
"Oh, the oil spill."
"If we can get authorization from the Powers That
Be for the timeslide," the woman said, and smiled slyly, "it'll be, '
What oil spill?' But we won't know until we check with the A.A. in
Vancouver."
"Well, dai," Rhiow said, as the woman
turned toward the gate, "and good luck with the Advisory. And with
Them..."
"Thanks. You go well, too," the woman said,
stepping forward as the center of the gate's string structure puckered fully
inward into metaextension. A human wizard couldn't see the strings without
help, but she certainly could see the metaextension's sudden result. Hanging in
the air before them was a round (or actually, spherical) window into deep gray
shadow with the beginnings of dawn outside it, a sky paling above close-planted
pine trees. A park, perhaps, or someone's backyard, there was no telling—a
given wizard set the coordinates to suit his mission's needs. Had Rhiow been
curious about the location, she could check the gate's log later. For the
moment, she watched the young woman step into the predawn dimness, and heard
her speak the word that completed the wizardry, releasing the hyperextended
strings to pop back out of phase.
The gate-weft persisted in metaextension just a second
or so—a safety feature—and then the curvature snapped back flat as if woven of
rubber bands, light rippling up and down the resonating strings as the
structure collapsed into a configuration with lower energy levels. The
spherical intersection with otherwhere vanished: the tapestry of light lay flat
against the air again, waiting.
That's working all right, at least, Rhiow thought. Last week, as the wizard had mentioned,
this had been the gate that had needed adjustment. Three mornings out of
five, its web had refused to extend properly, making it impossible to use
without constant monitoring.
Saash had had to stand here sidled all during rush
hour, running the gate on manual and being jostled by insensible commuters. Her
comments later had left Rhiow's ears burning: that soft breathy little voice
sounded unusually shocking when it swore.
Rhiow smiled at the memory, and said silently, Saash?
A pause, and then, Here.
I'm over by your favorite gate. I'm going Downside to
make sure none of the others is fouling it.
A slight shudder at the other end. Better you than
me, Saash said.
How's our foundling?
Sleeping still. Go ahead, Rhi; Urruah's around if
anything's needed.
Dai, then.
You too. And be careful...
Rhiow let the link between them lapse, and watched the
gate, letting its weft steady and the colors pale from their use-excited state.
Then she reached into the weave with a paw and plucked at one specific string,
a control structure. The whole weave of the gate resonated with light and power
as it ran a brief diagnostic on its own fabric. Then it displayed a smaller
glowing pattern, a "tree" structure—many-branched at the top,
narrowing to a single "trunk" at the bottom.
With a single claw, Rhiow snagged the trunk line. The
string blazed, querying her identity: the access for which Rhiow was asking was
restricted.
Rhiow hung on to the string. The power blazing in it
ran up through claw and paw and sizzled along her nerves, hunt-big for her
access "authorization" from the Powers That Be. It found that, along
with Rhiow's memory of her own acceptance of the Oath, woven together into the
tapestry of life-fire and thought-fire that was how the wizardry perceived her
brain. Satisfied, the wizardry rebounded, ran burning out of her body and down
the weft of the gate. The tapestry rippled with light; the string structure
puckered inward. The sphere in the air snapped open.
Warm green shadow shading down to a rich brown,
slanting golden light leaning through the dimness in shafts... And that smell.
Rhiow did not linger but leapt through, and waved the gate closed behind her
with a flirt of her tail.
She landed in loam, silent, springy, deep. Rhiow came
down soundlessly but hard, as always forgetting the change until it actually
came upon her—and then, within a breath's time, she was wondering how she'd
ever borne the way she'd been until a second ago, bound into the body of one of
the People, not even a very big body as the People reckoned such things. Rhiow
lifted the paw that had plucked the gate-string out, found it ten times bigger,
the claw an inch-long talon; looked down at the print that paw had left in the
soft loam, and found it as wide across as an ehhif's hand was long. The
usual unbelieving look over her shoulder reassured her about her color: she was
still glossy black. She would have found it difficult to handle if that had
changed as well.
Rhiow stood surrounded by many brown pillar-trunks of
shaggy-barked trees, limbless this far down: their first branches began far
above her head, holding out thin-needled bunches of fronds like an ehhif's hands
with fingers spread. No sky could be seen through the overlapping ceiling of
them, though here and there, ahead and to the sides, some gap of growth let the
sun come slanting through to pool, tawny-golden, on the needle-carpeted floor.
Rhiow padded along toward where more light came slipping among trunks more
sparsely set, a bluer, cooler radiance.
A few minutes later she stepped out from among the
trees onto a mossy stone ledge lifted up above the world; she looked downward
and outward, breathing deep. The breeze stirring among those trees and rustling
their tops behind her had nothing to do with New York air: it was a wind from the
morning of the world, bearing nothing but the faint clean smell of salt. In a
sky of cloudless, burning blue, the sun swung low to her right, passing toward
evening from afternoon; westward, low over the endless green hills, its light
burnished everything gold.
It was summer here. It was always summer here. The sun
lay warm on her pelt, a lovely basking heat. The wind was warm and always bore
that salt tang from the glimmering golden-bronze expanse of ocean just to the
east. The whole view, excepting the occasional cliff-face or ledge like the one
on which Rhiow stood, was covered with the lush green of subtropical forest.
Here was the world as it had been before magnetic fields and poles and climates
had shifted. Whether it was actually the same world, the direct
ancestor-in-timeline of Rhiow's own, or an alternate universe more centrally
placed in the scheme of things, Rhiow wasn't sure—and she didn't think anyone
else was, either. It didn't seem to make much difference. What mattered was
that her own world was grounded in this one, based on it. This was a world more
single and simple, the lands not yet fragmented: everything one warm, green
blanket of mingled forest and grassland, from sea to sea. The wind breathed
softly in the trees, and there was no other sound until from a great distance
came a low coughing roar: one of her Kindred, the great cats of the ancient
world, speaking his name or the name of his prey, to the wind.
At the sound, Rhiow shivered briefly, and then smiled
at herself. The People were descended from the dire-cats and sabertooths who
roamed these forests—or had descended from them, willingly, giving up
size and power for other gifts. Either way, when one of the People returned to
this place, the size of the cat's body once again matched the size of its soul,
reflecting the stature and power both had held in the ancient days. Reflex
might make Rhiow worry at the thought of meeting one of those great ones, but
for the moment, she was at least as great.
Rhiow gazed down from that high place. Perhaps half a
mile below and a mile eastward, the River plunged down in a torrent that she
thought must haunt the dreams of the lesser streams of her day, trickles like
the Mississippi and the Yangtze. In her own time and world, this would become the
Hudson, old, wide, and tame. But now it leapt in a roaring half-mile-wide wall
of water from the deep-cut edge of what would someday be the Continental Shelf,
falling a mile and a half sheer to smash deafening into its first shattered
cauldron-pools, and then tumbled, a lakeful every second, on down the crags and
shelves of its growing canyon, into the clouded sea. The spray of the water's
impact at such velocity, spread so wide, made a permanent rainbow as wide as
Manhattan Island would be someday.
And the island— Rhiow looked behind her, northward:
looked up. Lands would change in times to come. Continents would drift apart or
be torn asunder. Countries would be raised up, thrown down, drowned, or buried.
But through the geological ages, one mountain of this coastland would persist.
The indomitable foundation of it, a solid block of basalt some ten miles
square, would be fragmented by earthquakes, half-sunk with the settling of what
would become North America; the land around it would be raised hundreds of feet
by glacier-dumped silt and stone, and the water of the massive, melted icecaps
would nearly submerge what remained, coming right up to what endured of its
ancient, battered, flattened peak. But that had not happened yet. And even when
it did, New Yorkers would remember—not knowing the memory's source—and call the
place the Rock.
Rhiow looked up. Far higher than she could see,
standing so close to its base, the Mountain reared up to high heaven. There was
no judging its height. Its slopes, towering above and to either side like a
wall built against the northern sky, were clothed in forest. The trees were
mighty pale-barked pillars, primeval seed-parents of the darker, younger trees
among which the gate had left her, some of the parent-trees now hundreds of
feet in circumference. In rank after rank they speared upward, diminishing,
finally becoming hidden among their own branches, merely a green cloud against
the farthest heights. Amid the cloud, though, where the great peak began (even
from this aspect) to narrow, one slender arrowy shape, distinct even at this
distance, speared higher than all the others: one tree, the Tree—the
most ancient of them, and, legend said, the first.
Rhiow gazed at it, mute with awe. Maybe someday she
would have leisure to climb the Mountain and look up into those branches, to
sit in the shadow of the Tree and listen to the voices that spoke, so legend
said, from that immense green silence. Not now: perhaps not in this life:
perhaps not until after the ninth one, if luck and her fate led her that far.
It was dangerous enough for her just to be here—as dangerous as it was for any
being to remain, for a prolonged period, out of its own time or space.
Meantime, though, she might briefly enjoy the sight of
me true and ancient Manhattan, the living reality of which the steel- and
concrete-clad island was a shadowy and mechanistic restatement. Ehhif built
"skyscrapers" half in ambition, half in longing—uncertain why the
ambition never satisfied them no matter how they achieved it, and not
remembering what they longed for. They had been latecomers, the ehhif: they
had not been here very long before the world changed, and this warm, still
wilderness went chill and cruel. It was the Lone One's fault, of course. That
fact the ehhif dimly remembered in their own legends, just as they
vaguely remembered the Tree, and an ancient choice ill-made, and the sorrow of
something irrevocably lost.
Rhiow sighed, and turned her back on the lulling vista
of the Old World, padding back among the trees. Better get on with what she had
come here to do, before being here too long did her harm.
Rhiow made her way silently through the dimness
beneath the trees toward the great cliff-outcroppings on this side of the
Mountain's foot. Thinking of the Lone One brought Arhu to mind again. No
question who he heard speaking to him, Rhiow thought, the first time, at
least. She knew well enough the voice that had awakened her this morning,
and which spoke to all feline wizards on behalf of the Powers That Be: the
wisdom that first whispered in your ear to offer you the Art and the promise of
your Ordeal, and then, assuming you survived, taught you the details of
wizardry from day to day and passed on your assignments. Tradition said the one
Who actually spoke was Iau's daughter, Hrau'f the Silent, Whose task was to
order creation, making rules and setting them in place. The tradition seemed
likely enough to Rhiow: the voice you "heard" had a she-ish sense
about it and a tinge of humor that agreed with the old stories' accounts of
Hrau'f's quiet delight in bringing order from chaos.
But the question remained: whose voice had spoken
second? For Queen Iau had other daughters. There was another "she"
involved with wizardry, one whose methods were subtle, whose intentions were
ambivalent—and rarely good for the wizard....
Rhiow came to the bottom of the scree-slope that ran
up to the base of the cliff-face. Here the trees bore the scars of old
stonefalls: boulders lay among the pine needles, and the brown soft carpet grew
thinner toward the sheer bare cliff. At the top of the scree-slope, jagged,
silent, and dark, yawned the entrance to the caves.
She padded up the stones, paused on the flat
rubble-strewn slab that served for a threshold, and gazed in. It was not
totally dark inside, not this near to the opening—and not where the master
anchor-structures for the New York gates all hung, a blazing complex of
shifting, rippling webs and wefts, burning in the still, cool air of the outer
cave.
Rhiow sat down and just looked at them, as she always
did when she made this trip. Learning the way these patterns looked had been
one of her first tasks as a young wizard. Her Ordeal had revealed that she had
an aptitude for this kind of work, and afterward the Powers had assigned Rhiow
to old Ffairh to develop her talent. She remembered sitting here with him for
the first time, her haunches shifting with impatience, both with delight at her
splendidly big new body, and with the desire to get up and do something about
the patterns that hung before her, singing and streaming with power. Or rather,
to do something with them.
Ffairh had stared at her, eyes gleaming, and Rhiow had
stopped her fidgeting and sat very still under his regard. Ffairh had been
nothing much to look at in their homeworld—a scruffy black-and-white tom
without even the rough distinction of scars, crooked in the hind leg and tail
from where the cab hit him. Here, though, where the soul ruled the body, Ffairh
stood nearly five feet high at the shaggy, brindled shoulder, and the sabers of
bis fangs were nearly as long as Rhiow's whole body back home. The weight and majesty
of his presence was immense, and the amused annoyance in those amber eyes,
which down by Track 116 had seemed merely funny, now took on a more dangerous
quality.
"Don't be so quick to want to tamper,"
Ffairh had said. "No one exploring this world has been able to find a time
when these wizardries weren't here... and exocausal spell-workings like
that always mean the Powers are involved. No one knows for sure which One wove
them. Aaurh herself, maybe: they're strong enough for it. They're old and strong
enough to be a little alive. They have to be, to take care of themselves and
protect themselves from misuse: for wizards can't watch them all the time. Most
of the time, though .. . and you'll find that's what you'll spend these
next few lives doing, unless They retire you, or you slip up...."
He had been right about that, as about most things.
Ffairh was two years gone now: where, Rhiow had no idea. He had let his sixth
life go peacefully, in extreme old age, and if he'd since come back, Rhiow had
yet to meet him. But he had refused to go before completely training his
replacement. Now, as she sat and examined the gate-wefts for abnormalities,
Rhiow smiled at the memory of her head ringing from yet another of the old
curmudgeon's ferocious cuffs and Ffairh's often-repeated shout, "Will you
hurry up and learn this stuff so I can die?!"
She had learned. She came here more often than need
strictly required, though not so often for repeated exposure to endanger her:
about that issue, Rhiow was most scrupulous. She was just as scrupulous,
though, about knowing the gates well, and knowing this part of them—the root of
the installation—best of all. The wizardries that manifested as the string
structures of the four Grand Central gates were only extensions: branches, as
it were, of the Tree. The "trunk" of the spells, the master control
structure for each of them, was here, in the Old World—the upper levels of the
true Downside, of which Grand Central's and Penn's "downsides" were
mere sketchy restatements. The "roots" of the spell structure, of
course, went farther down ... much farther, into the endless, tangled caverns,
down to the roots of the Mountain, the heart of this world. But that wasn't
somewhere Rhiow would go unless the Powers That Be specifically ordered it They
never had, during her management of these gates, and Rhiow hoped they never
would. Ffairh had gone once and had described that intervention to her, in a
quiet, dry fifteen-minute monologue that had given her nightmares for weeks.
But there was no need to consider any action so
radical at the moment. Rhiow spent a good while looking over the
interrelationships of the Grand Central gates with the Penn complex, making
sure there were no accidental overlaps or frayings of the master patterns,
which needed to remain discrete. It happened sometimes that some shift in
natural forces—a meteor strike, a solar microflare—would so disrupt
"normal" space that the spell patterns in it would be disrupted, too,
jumping loose from the structures that held them. Then the abnormally released
forces would "backlash" down the connection to the master structures
here in the Old World, causing a string to pop loose and foul some other
pattern. There was no sign of mat, though. The four Grand Central patterns and
the smaller, more tightly arrayed Penn wefts were showing good separation.
Rhiow got up and padded to the shifting, shimmering
weft of the third of the Grand Central gates, the north-sider at Track 26. A
long while she scrutinized it, watching the interplay of forces, the colors
shimmering in and out Everything looked fine.
Truth was more than looks, though. Rhiow took a few
moments to prepare herself, men reached out a paw, as she had done in Grand
Central, extended a claw, and hooked it into the wizardry's interrogation
weave.
The question, as always, was who was interrogating
whom. How you put Me into a wizardry, a bodiless thing made of words and
intent, Rhiow wasn't sure, but if Aaurh had indeed set the gates here, that was
explanation enough. She had not invented life, but she was the Power that had
implemented it, and the stories said that, one way or another, life got into
most of what she did. The gate certainly thought it was alive. While
Rhiow quested down its structure, assessing it from inside as she might have
assessed her own body for hurt or trouble, the gate felt it had the right to do
the same with her. It was unnerving, to feel something un-feline, and older
than your world, come sliding down your nerves and through your brain,
rummaging through your memories and testing your reflexes. Quite cool, it was,
quite matter-of-fact, but disturbed.
Disturbed. So was Rhiow when the gate was finished
with her, and she unhooked her claw from the blazing, softly humming weft.
Panting and blinking, she stood there a moment with streaked and blurring
afterimages burning in her eyes: the all-pervasive tangle of strings and
energies that was the way the gate perceived the world all the time. To the
gate, proper visual images of concrete physical structures were alien.
Therefore there was no image or picture of whoever had come and—interfered with
it—
Rhiow started to get normal vision back again. Still
troubled by both her contact with the gate and by what it had perceived, she
sat down and began to wash her face, trying to sort out the gate's perceptions
and make sense of them.
Something had interfered. Someone. The gate did
not deal in names and had no pictures: there was merely a sense of some
presence, a personality, interposing itself between one group of words of
control and another, breaking a pattern. Associated with that impression was a
sense that the interposition was no accident: it was meant. But for what
purpose, by whom, there was no indication.
And when that break in the pattern was made, something
else had thrust through. The gate held no record of what that thing or force
might have been: the energy-strands holding the gate's logs had been unraveled
and restrung. They now lay bright and straight in the weave, completely devoid
of data. The initial break was sealed over by the intervention Rhiow and the
team had done this morning. But the gate, in its way, was as distraught as
anyone might be to wake up and find himself missing a day of his life.
Rhiow was upset, too. What came through... ? she
thought, gazing at the gate-weft. She thought of the dry chill flowing from the
jagged, empty tear in the air they'd found waiting for them that morning. A
void place... There were enough of those, away in the outer fringes of
being, worlds where life had never "taken." Other forces moving among
the worlds liked such places. They used them to hide while preparing attacks
against what they hated: the worlds full of light and life, closer to the Heart
of things ...
Rhiow shuddered. She needed advice. Specifically, she
needed to talk to Carl, and to her local Senior, Ehef, when she had rested and
sorted her thoughts out. But rest would have to come first.
Rhiow stood up and once more slipped a paw into the
gate-weft, watching the light ripple away from where she felt around for its
control structures. You're all right now, she said to the gate. Don't
worry; we'll find out what happened.
From the gate came a sense of uncertainty, but also of
willingness to be convinced. Rhiow smiled, then looked wistfully at the huge,
glossy, taloned paw thrust into the webwork. It would be delightful to stay
here longer—to slip down into those ancient forests and hunt real game,
something nobler and more satisfying to the soul than mice: to run free in the
glades and endless grasslands of a place where the word "concrete"
had no meaning, to hold your head up and snuff air that tasted new-made because
it was...
Her claw found the string that managed the gate's
custom access routines. The gate's identification query sizzled down her
nerves. Rhiow held still and let it complete the identification, and when it
was done, paused. Just for a while... if wouldn't hurt...
Rhiow sighed, plucked the string toward her, softly
recited in the Speech the spatial and temporal coordinates she wanted, and let
the string loose.
The whole weft-structure sang and blazed. Before her,
the sphere of intersection with her own world snapped into being. A
circular-seeming window into gray stone, gray concrete, a long view over jagged
pallid towers to a sky smoggy gray below and smoggy blue above, and the sun
struggling to shine through it: steam smells, chemical smells, houff-droppings,
car exhaust...
Rhiow looked over her shoulder, out of the cave, into
the green light with its promise of gold beyond ... then leapt into the circle
and through, down onto the gravel of the rooftop next to her building. Behind
her, with a clap of sound that any ehhif would mistake for a car
backfiring, the gate snapped shut. Rhiow came down lightly, so lightly she
almost felt herself not to be there at all. She glanced at her forepaw again.
It seemed unreal for it to be so small. But this was reality.
Such as it was ...
When she got back up to the apartment's terrace again,
the glass terrace doors were open, and Hhuha and Iaehh were having breakfast at
the little table near it. The whole place smelled deliciously of bacon.
"Well, look who's here!" Iaehh said. "Just in time for
brunch."
"She's been out enjoying this pretty day,"
Hhuha said, stroking Rhiow as she came past her chair. "It's so nice and
sunny out. Mike, you should feel her, she's so warm...."
Rhiow smiled wryly. Iaehh chuckled. "No
accidents: this cat's timing is perfect. I know what she wants."
"Sleep, mostly," Rhiow said, sitting down
wearily and watching him fish around on his plate for something to give her.
"And if you'd had the morning I had, you'd want some, too. These four-hour
shifts, they're deadly."
"All right, all right, be patient," Iaehh
said, and reached Rhiow down a piece of bacon. "Here."
Rhiow took it gladly enough; she just wished she
wasn't falling asleep on her feet "You spoil that cat," Hhuha said,
getting up and going over to the ffrihh. "I know what she wants.
She wants more of that tuna. You should have seen her dive into it this
morning! We've got to get some more of that."
"Oh Queen Iau," Rhiow muttered around the
mouthful, "give me strength." She cocked an eye up at Iaehh.
"And some more of that before I go have a nap ..."
The hour's main news stories, from National Public
Radio: I'm Bob Edwards.... The South Kamchatka oil spill has begun to disperse
after Tropical Storm Bertram shifted course northeastward in the early morning
hours, Pacific time, causing near-record swells between the Bay of Kronockji
and Shumshu Island at the southern end of Russia's Kamchatka Peninsula. The
spill from the crippled Japanese tanker Amaterasu Maru threatened the
economically important fishing grounds off the disputed Kurile Islands, and had
significantly increased tensions between Russia and Japan at a time when the
disposition of the Kuriles, claimed by Japan but occupied by the Soviet Union
since the end of World War Two, had been thought by diplomatic sources to be
nearing resolution. —President Yeltsin's special envoy Anatoly Krischov has
returned to Moscow from Teheran after talks aimed at resolving the escalating
border crisis in the Atrek valley between Iran and Turkmenistan, where rebel
tribesmen have clashed with both Iranian and Russian government forces for the
fourth day in..."
Rhiow rolled over on her back, stretched all her legs
in the air, and yawned, blinking in the late afternoon light. The sound of the ra'hio
being turned on had awakened her. A long day, she thought. I don't
usually oversleep like this...
She twisted her head around so that she was looking at
the living room upside down. A soft rustling of papers had told Rhiow even
before her eyes were open that Hhuha had just sat back down at the other end of
the couch. Iaehh was nowhere to be seen; Rhiow's ears told her that he was not
in the sleeping room, or the room where he and Hhuha bathed and did their hiouh.
So he was out running, and could be gone for as little as a few minutes or as
long as several hours.
Rhiow knew in a general way that Iaehh was doing this
to stay healthy, but sometimes she thought he overdid it, and Hhuha thought so,
too; depending on her mood, she either teased or scolded him about it.
"You're really increasing your chances of getting hit by a truck one of
these days," she would say, either laughing or frowning, and Iaehh would
retort, "Better that than increasing my chances of getting hit by a
massive cardiac, like Dad, and Uncle Robbie, and ..." Then they would box
each other's ears verbally for a while, and end up stroking each other for a
while after that. Really, they were very much like People sometimes.
Rhiow yawned again, looking upside down at Hhuha.
Hhuha glanced over at her and said, "You slept a long time, puss."
She reached over and stroked her.
Rhiow grabbed Hhuha's hand, gave it a quick lick, then
let it go and started washing before going for her breakfast. So, Rhiow
thought while the news headlines finished, there's still an oil spill. This
by itself didn't surprise her. Timeslides, like any wizardry meant to alter the
natural flow and unfolding of time, were rarely sanctioned when other options
were available. Probably the Area Advisory for the Pacific Region had noticed
the availability of a handy alternative instrumentality: natural,
"transparent" in terms of being unlikely to arouse ehhif suspicions,
and fairly easily influenced—of all the languages that humans use, only the
wizardly Speech has no equivalent idiom for "everyone talks about the weather,
but no one does anything about it."
Oh well, Rhiow
thought. One less thing to worry about. She spent a couple more minutes
putting her back fur and tail in order, then got down off the couch, stretched
fore and aft, and strolled over to the food dish. Halfway across the room, her
nose told her it was that tuna stuff again, but she was too hungry to argue the
point.
Wouldn't I just love to walk over to you, she thought about halfway down the bowl, looking over
her shoulder at Hhuha, and say to you, loud and clear, "I'd think that
last raise would let you spend at least sixty cents a can." But
rules are rules...
Rhiow had a long drink, then strolled back to jump up
on the couch and have a proper wash this time. She had finished with her head
and ears when Hhuha got up, went to the dining room, and came back with still
more papers. Rhiow looked at them with distaste.
As Hhuha sighed and put the new load down on the
couch, Rhiow got up, stretched again, and carefully sat herself down on the
papers; then she put her left rear leg up past her left ear and began to wash
her back end. It was body language that even humans seemed sometimes to
understand.
Rhiow was pretty sure that Hhuha understood it, but
right now she just breathed out wearily. She picked Rhiow up off the pile and
put her on the couch next to it, saying, "Oh, come on, you, why do you
always have to sit on my paperwork?"
"I'm sitting on it because you hate it,"
Rhiow said. She sat down on it again, then hunkered down and began kneading her
claws into the paperwork, punching holes in the top sheet and wrinkling it and
all the others under it.
"Hey, don't do that, I need those!"
"No, you don't. They make you crazy. You
shouldn't do this stuff on the weekend: it's bad enough that they make you do
it all day during the week." Rhiow rolled over off the paper-pile,
grabbing some of the papers as she went, and throwing them in the air.
"Oh, kitty, don't!" Hhuha began picking the
papers up. "Not that I wouldn't like to myself," she added under her
breath.
"See? And why you should pay attention to that
stuff when I'm here, I can't understand," Rhiow muttered, as Hhuha
picked her up and put her in her lap. "See, isn't that better? You don't
need this junk. You need a cat."
"Talk talk, chatter chatter," Hhuha said
under her breath, straightening the paperwork out. "Probably you're trying
to tell me I shouldn't bring my work home. Or more likely it's something about
cat food."
"Yes, now that you mention—" Rhiow made a
last swipe at one piece of the paperwork as it went past her nose in Hhuha's
hand. "Hey, watch those claws," Hhuha said.
"I would never scratch you, you know that,"
Rhiow said, settling. "Unless you got slow. Put that stuff down...."
Hhuha started rubbing behind Rhiow's ears, and Rhiow
went unfocused for a little while, purring. There were People, she knew, who
saw the whole business of "having" an ehhif as being,
at best, old-fashioned—at worst, very politically incorrect. The two species
really had no common ground, some People said. They claimed that there could be
no real relationships between carnivores and omnivores, predators and
hunter-gatherers: only cohabitation of a crude and finally unsatisfactory kind.
Cats who held this opinion usually would go on at great length about the
imprisonment of People against their will, and the necessity to free them from
their captivity if at all possible—or, at the very least, to raise their
consciousness about it so that, no matter how pleasant the environment, no
matter how tasty the food and how "kind" the treatment, they would
never forget that they were prisoners, and never forget their own identity as a
People presently oppressed, but who someday would be free.
When all ehhif
civilization falls, maybe, Rhiow thought, with a dry look. Make every
ehhif in the city vanish, right this second, and turn every cat in
Manhattan loose: how many of them will be alive in three weeks? Cry
"freedom!"—and then try to find something to eat when all you know
about is Friskies Buffet.
She made a small face, then, at her own irony. Maybe
it would be better if all cats lived free in the wild, out of buildings, out of
ehhif influence; maybe it would be better if that influence had never
come about in the first place. But the world was the way that it was, and such
things weren't going to be happening any time soon. The truth remained that ehhif
kept People and that a lot of People liked it... and she was one.
That's the problem, of course, she thought. We're embarrassed to admit enjoying
interdependence. Too many of us have bought into the idea that we're somehow
"independent" in our environment to start with. As if we can stop
eating or breathing any time we want...
She sighed and stretched again while Hhuha paused in
her scratching and started going through her papers once more. Anyway,
what's the point, Rhiow thought, in making sure People are so very aware
that they're oppressed, when for most of them there's nothing they can do about
it? And in many cases, when they truly don't want to do anything, the awareness
does nothing but make them feel guilty... thus making them more like ehhif than
anything else that could have been done to them. That outwardly imposed
awareness satisfies no one but the "activist" People who impose it.
"I suffer, therefore you should too..."
Granted, Rhiow's own position was a privileged one and
made holding such a viewpoint easy. All languages are subsets of the Speech,
and a wizard, by definition at least conversant with the Speech if not fluent
in it, is able to understand anything that can speak (and many things that
can't). Rhiow's life with her ehhif was certainly made simpler by the
fact that she could clearly understand what they were saying. Unfortunately,
most cats couldn't do the same, which tended to create a fair amount of
friction.
Not that matters were perfect for her either. Rhiow
found, to her annoyance, that she had slowly started becoming bilingual in
Human and Ailurin. She kept finding herself thinking in slang-ehhif terms
like ra'hio and o'hra: poor usage at best. Her dam, who had
always been so carefully spoken, would have been shocked.
Rhi? said
Saash inside her.
I'm awake, Rhiow
said silently.
Took you long enough, Saash said. Believe me, when this is over, I've got
a lot of sleep to make up.
Oh? Rhiow
said.
Our youngster, Saash
said dryly, has been awake and lively for a good while now. It's been
exciting trying to keep him in here, and I don't think I'll be able to do it
much longer. I had to teach him to sidle to distract him even this long—
You mean you had to try to teach him to sidle, Rhiow said.
I mean he's been sidling for the last two hours, said
Saash.
Rhiow bunked at that. Nearly all wizardry cats had an
aptitude for sidling, but most took at least a week to learn it; many took
months. Sweet Queen about us, Rhiow thought, what have the
Powers sent us? Besides trouble ...
All right, Rhiow
said to Saash. I'll be along in half an hour or so. Where's Urruah?
He's having a break, Saash said. I sent him off early.... I thought
maybe there was going to be a murder.
Oh joy, Rhiow
thought. To Saash, she said, Did he go off to the park? He mentioned the
other day that some big tom thing would be going on over there.
He mentioned it to me too, Saash said. Not that I understood one word in five
of what he was saying: it got technical. He left in a hurry, anyway, and I
didn't want to try to keep him.
I just bet, Rhiow
thought. When Urruah was in one of those moods, it was more than your ears were
worth to try to slow him down. All right. Hold the den; I'll be along.
Somewhat regretfully—for quiet times like this seemed
to be getting rarer and rarer these days—Rhiow got down out of Hhuha's lap, sat
down on the floor and finished her wash, then went out to the terrace to use
the hiouh-box.
Afterward, she made her way down from the terrace to
the top of the nearby building and did her meditation—not facing east for once,
but westward. The smog had been bad today; Rhiow was glad she had been inside
with the air-conditioning. But now that the day was cooling, a slight offshore
breeze had sprung up, and the ozone level was dropping, so that you could at
least breathe without your chest feeling tight. And—probably the only positive
aspect to such a day—the Sun was going down in a blaze of unaccustomed
splendor, its disk bloated to half again its proper size and blunted to a
beaten-copper radiance by the thick warm air. Down the westward-reaching
street, windows flashed the orange-gold light back in fragments; to either side
of Rhiow, and behind her, skyscraper-glass glowed and in the heat-haze almost
seemed to run, glazed red or gold or molten smoky amber by the westering light.
Rhiow tucked herself down and considered the disk of
fire as it sank toward the Palisades, gilding the waters of the Hudson. As a
wizard, she knew quite well that what she saw was Earth's nearest star, a
glimpse of the fusion that was stepchild to the power that started this
universe running. Rhoua was what People called it. The word was a
metonymy: Rhoua was a name of Queen Iau, of the One, in Her aspect as
beginner and ender of physical life. Once cats had understood the Sun only in
the abstract, as life's kindler. It had taken a while for them to grasp the
concept of the Sun as just one more star among many, but when they did, they
still kept the old nickname.
The older name for the Sun had been Rhoua'i'th, Rhoua's
Eye: the only one of Her eyes that the world saw, or would see, at least for a
good while yet. That one open Eye saw thoughts, saw hearts, knew the realities
beneath external seemings. The other Eye saw those and everything else as well;
but no one saw it. It would not open until matter was needed no more,
and in its opening, all solid things would fade like sleep from an opening eye.
A blink or two, and everything that still existed would be revealed in true
form, perhaps final form—though that was uncertain, for the gathered knowledge of
matters wizardly, which cat-wizards called The Gaze of Rhoua's Eye, said
little about time after the Last Time or about how existence would go after
Existence, in terms of matter, past its sell-by date. But there was little need
to worry about it just yet while Rhoua still winked. The day the wink turned to
a two-eyed gaze ... then would be the time to be concerned.
... For my own part, Rhiow told the fading day,
7 know my job; my commission comes from Those Who Are. Some I will
meet today who think that day is blind and that night lies with its eyes
closed; that the Gaze doesn't see them, or doesn't care. Their certainty of
blindness, though, need not mean anything to me. My paw raised is Their
paw on the neck of the Serpent, now and always...
Rhiow finished her meditation and stood, stretching
herself thoroughly and giving one last look to that great burning disk as the
apartment buildings of the western Hudson shore began to rear black against it.
Having, like many other wizards, done her share of off-planet work, Rhiow found
it difficult to think of Rhoua's Eye as anything less than the fiery heart of
the solar system. It still amused her, sometimes, that when the People had
found out about this, they had had a lot of trouble explaining the concept to the
ehhif. Some of the earlier paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art
were potentially rather embarrassing, or at best amusing, in this regard—images
of big eyes and sun-disks teetering precariously on top of cat-headed people,
all hilariously eloquent of ehhif confusion, even in those days when ehhif
language was much closer to Hauhai, and understanding should have been at
least possible if not easy.
Rhiow made her way down to the street, sidled before
she passed the iron door between her and the sidewalk, and then slipped under,
heading west for Central Park.
-=O=-***-=O=-
She was surprised to meet Urruah halfway, making his
way along East Sixty-eighth Street through the softly falling twilight, with a
slightly dejected air. He slipped into the doorway of a brownstone and sat
down, looking absently across the street at the open kitchen door of a Chinese
restaurant. Clouds of fluorescent-lit steam and good smells were coming out of
it, along with the sounds of a lot of shouting and the frantic stirring of
woks.
"I would have thought you'd still be in the
park," Rhiow said, sitting down beside him.
"The rehearsal's been put off until
tomorrow," Urruah said. "One of the toms is off his song."
Rhiow made an oh-really expression. Urruah, like most
toms, had a more or less constant fascination with song. She had originally
been completely unable to understand why a tom should be interested in the
mating noises that another species made: still less when the other species was
not making these noises as part of mating, but because it was thinking about
mating, in the abstract. But Urruah had gone on to explain that this
particular kind of ehhif singing, called o'hra, was not simply
about sex but was also some kind of storytelling. That had made Rhiow feel
somewhat better about it all, for storytelling was another matter. Dams sang
stories to their kits, grown People purred them to one another—gossip and myth,
history and legend: no one simply spoke the past. It was rude. The
thought that ehhif did the same in song made Rhiow feel oddly closer to
them, and made her feel less like Urruah was doing something culturally, if not
morally, perverse.
"So," Rhiow said, "what will they do
now?"
"They'll keep building that big structure down at
the end of the Great Lawn; that wasn't going to be finished until tonight
anyway. Tomorrow they'll do the sound tests and the rest of the rehearsal. The
other two toms are fine, so there shouldn't be any more delays."
Rhiow washed an ear briefly. "All right,"
she said. "We're going to have to take Arhu out and show him our beat...
not that I particularly care to be doing that so soon, but he already knows how
to sidle—"
"Whose good idea was that?" Urruah
said, narrowing his eyes in annoyance.
"Mine," Rhiow said, "since you ask.
Come on, Urruah! He would have had to learn eventually anyway ... and it turns
out he's a quick study. That may save his life, or, if he dies on Ordeal, who
knows, it may make the difference between him getting his job done and not
getting it done. Which is what counts, isn't it?"
"Humf," Urruah said, and looked across the
street again at the restaurant. "Chicken ..."
"Never mind the chicken. I want you on-site with
him for this first evening at least, and as many of the next few evenings as
possible. He needs a good male role model so that we can start getting him in
shape for whatever's going to happen to him." She gave him an approving
look. "I just want you to know that I think you're handling all this very
well."
"I am a professional," Urruah said,
"even if he does make my teeth itch.... But something else is on my mind,
not just o'hra, as you doubtless believe. That oil spill intervention
you mentioned? I heard that they got the authorization for the timeslide they
wanted."
Rhiow bunked at that. "Really? Then why is the
spill still on the news? That whole timeline should have 'healed over'...
excised itself. We're well past the 'uncertainty period' for such small
change."
"Something went wrong with it."
Rhiow put her whiskers back in concern. Timeslides
were expensive wizardries, but also fairly simple and straightforward ones:
hearing that something had "gone wrong" with a timeslide was like
hearing that something had gone wrong with gravity. "Where did you hear
about that?"
"Rahiw told me; he heard it from Ehef—he saw him
this morning."
The source was certainly reliable. "Well, the
situation's not a total loss anyway," Rhiow said. "That tropical
storm sure 'changed course.' You could tell that was an intervention
with your whiskers cut off."
"Well, of course. But not the intended one. And a
failed timeslide ..." Urruah's tail lashed. "Pretty weird, if you ask
me."
"Probably some local problem," Rhiow said.
"Sunspots, for all I know: we're near the eleven-year maximum. If I talk
to Har'lh again this week, I'll ask him about it."
"Sunspots," Urruah said, as if not at all
convinced. But he got up, stretched, and the two of them headed back down East
Sixty-eighth together.
They wove their way along the sidewalk, taking care to
avoid the hurrying pedestrians. As they paused at the corner of Sixty-eighth
and Lex, Urruah said, "There he is."
"Where?"
"The billboard."
Rhiow tucked herself well in from the corner, right
against the wall of the dry cleaner's there, to look at the billboard on the
building across the street. There was a picture on it—one of those flat
representations that ehhif used—and some words. Rhiow looked at those
first, deciphering them; though the Speech gave her understanding of the words,
sometimes the letterings that ehhif used could slow you down. '"The—three—'
What's a 'tenor'?"
"It's a kind of voice. Fvais, we would
say; a little on the high side, but not the highest."
Rhiow turned her attention to the picture and
squinted at it for a good while; there was a trick to seeing these flat
representations that ehhif used—you had to look at them just right. When
she finally thought she had grasped the meaning of what she saw, she said to
Urruah, "So after they sing, are they going to fight?" The word she
used was sth'hruiss, suggesting the kind of physical altercation that
often broke out when territory or multiple females were at issue.
"No, it's just hrui't: voices only, no
claws. They do it everywhere they go."
That made Rhiow stare, and then shake her head till
her ears rattled. "Are they a pride? A pride of males? What a weird
idea."
Urruah shook his head. "I don't know if I
understand it myself," he said. "I think ehhif manage that
kind of thing differently ... but don't ask me for details."
Rhiow was determined not to. "Which one's your
fellow, then? The one who went off voice."
"The one in the middle."
"He's awfully big for an ehhif, isn't
he?"
"Very," Urruah had said with satisfaction
and (Rhiow thought) a touch of envy. "He must have won hundreds of fights.
Probably a tremendous success with the shes."
Rhiow thought that it didn't look like the kind of
"big" that won fights. She had seen pictures of the ehhif-toms
who fought for audiences over at Madison Square Garden, and they seemed to
carry a lot less weight than this ehhif. However, she supposed you
couldn't always judge by sight. This one might be better with the claws and
teeth than he looked.
"So all these ehhif are coming to listen
to him in, what is it, three nights from now? Is he that good?"
"He is magnificently loud," said
Urruah, his voice nearly reverent. "You can hear him for miles on a still
night, even without artificial aids."
Rhiow put her whiskers forward, impressed almost
against her will. "If I'm free tomorrow," she said, "maybe I'll
go with you to have a look at this rehearsal."
"Oh, Rhiow, you'll love it!" They crossed
the street and walked back toward the garage where Saash stayed, and Urruah
started telling Rhiow all about ah'rias and ssoh'phraohs and
endless other specialized terms and details, and Dam knew what all else, until
Rhiow simply began saying "Yes," and "Isn't that
interesting," and anything else she could think of, so as not to let on
how wildly boring all this was. For me, anyway, she thought.
Occasionally, thinking he'd been invited to, or that someone nearby was in the
slightest bit interested, Urruah went off on one of these tangents. If you
didn't want to hurt his feelings—and mostly his partners didn't, knowing how it
felt to have a personal passion used as a scratching-post by the uncaring—there
was nothing much you could do but nod and listen as politely as you could for
as long as you could, then escape: the suddenly discovered need to do houih was
usually a good excuse. Rhiow couldn't do that just now, but once more she found
herself thinking that Urruah was a wonderful example of one of a wizard's most
useful traits: the ability to carry around large amounts of potentially useless
information for prolonged periods. That, she thought, he's got in
abundance.
"Oh, I forgot," she said at last, almost
grateful to have something else to talk about. "Did you talk to the canine
Senior about that houff?"
"Yes," Urruah said. "Rraah's going to
arrange some kind of accident for him—have him 'accidentally' cut loose from
the building site, late one night. Apparently he's got a home waiting for him
already."
"Good," Rhiow said. They turned the corner
into Fifty-sixth, and down the street Rhiow saw Saash sitting outside the
garage, a little to one side of the door, through which light poured out into
the evening. She wasn't even sidled, and her fur looked somewhat ruffled, as if
she was too annoyed to put it in order. Cars were going in and out at the usual
rate, and Saash was ignoring them, which was unusual; she was normally very
traffic-shy, but right now she just sat there and glared.
Saash looked at Rhiow and Urruah as they came up to
her, and as the saying goes, if looks were claws, their ears would have been in
rags. "What kept you?" she said.
"Where's the wonder child?" Urraah said.
"He's inside," Saash said, "playing
hide-and-seek with the staff. Abha'h's going out of his mind; he can't
understand why one minute he can see the new kitten and the next minute he
can't. Fortunately he thinks it's funny, and he just assumes that Arhu is
hiding under one car or another. However, he's also decided that the new kitten
should have flea powder put on him, and needless to say, that's the moment Arhu
chooses to disappear and not come visible again, which means I got the
flea powder instead of him—"
Urruah began to laugh. Saash gave him a sour look and
said, "Oh yes, it's just hilarious. You should have heard the little sswiass
laughing. I hope I get to hear him laugh at you like that."
Rhiow suppressed her smile. "Who knows, you may
get your chance. Did you get some sleep, finally?"
"Some. How about you?'
"I've slept better," Rhiow said. "I had
odd dreams...."
"After having been in the real Downside,"
Saash said, relaxing enough to scratch, "that's hardly a surprise. Just
think of the last time ..."
"I know." Rhiow preferred not to. "But
I'm not sure I noticed everything I should have there: I want to go talk to
Ehef this evening."
"About the gate?"
"Not entirely." Rhiow twitched an ear back
toward the depths of the garage. "The circumstances, our involvement with
him... the situation isn't strictly unusual, but it's always good to get a
second opinion."
Saash flicked her tail in somewhat sardonic agreement.
"Should be interesting. Come on," she said, "let's go see if
Abha'h's caught him yet."
They waited for a break in the traffic, then slipped
in through the door and made their way down into the garage and among the racks
of parked cars. They passed Abad, who was looking under some of the cars racked
up front in a resigned sort of way; he was holding a can of flea powder. Saash
gave it a dirty look as they passed.
They found Arhu crouching under a car near the back of
the garage, snickering to himself as he watched Abad's feet going back and
forth under the racks. He looked up as they came, with an expression that was
much less alarmed than any Rhiow had seen on him yet, but the edge of hostility
on his amusement was one that she didn't care for much. "Well, hunt's luck
to you, Arhu," she said, politely enough, "though it looks like
you're doing all right in that department ... if you consider this a hunt and
not mere mouse-play." She and the others hunkered down by him.
"Might as well be," Arhu said after a
moment. He watched Abad go off. "They're real easy to fool, ehhif."
"If you couldn't sidle, you'd be singing another
song," said Urruah.
"But I can. I'm a wizard!"
Rhiow smiled a slight, tart smile. "We are
wizards," she said. "You are still only a probationer-wizard,
on Ordeal."
"But I can do stuff already!" Arhu said.
"I went through the doors last night! And I'm sidling!" He got up and
did it while they watched, strolling to and fro under the metal ramp-framework,
and weaving in and out among the strings: there one moment and gone the next,
and then briefly occluded in stripes of visibility and nonvisibility, as if
strutting behind a set of invisible, vertical Venetian blinds. He looked
ineffably smug, as only a new wizard can when he first feels the power sizzling
under his skin.
"Not a bad start," Saash said.
Urruah snorted. "You kidding? That's one of the
most basic wizardries there is. Even some cats who aren't wizards can do
it. Don't flatter him, Saash. He'll think he really might amount to
something." His slow smile began. "Then again, go ahead, let him
think that. He'll just try some dumb stunt and get killed sooner. One less
thing to worry about."
Rhiow turned and clouted Urruah on the top of his
head, with her claws out, though not hard enough to really addle him. He
crouched down a very little, eyeing her, his ears a bit flat. When I want
your assessment of his talents, she said silently, I'll ask you
for it, Mister Couldn't-keep-a-dog-from-eating-his-mouse-earlier. Aloud she
said, "You know as well as I do that the Oath requires the protection of all
life, including life that annoys you. So just stuff your tail in it"
Urruah glared at her, turned his head away. Rhiow
looked back at Arhu. 'Tell me something to start with. What do you know
about wizards? I don't mean what Saash has been telling you, though it's plain
she hasn't been able to get much through your thick little skull. I want to
hear what you know from before we met you."
He squirmed a little, scowling. "Wizards can do
stuff."
"What stuff? How?"
"Good stuff, I guess. I never saw any. But People
talk about them."
"And what do they say?" Urruah said.
Arhu glared back at him. "That they're stuck up,
that they think they're important because they can do things."
Urruah started slowly to stand up. Rhiow glanced at
him; he settled back again. "And probably," Rhiow said just a touch
wearily to Arhu, "you've heard People say that wizards are using their
power somehow to help ehhif control People. Or that they're just trying
to make all the other People around be their servants somehow. And somebody has
to have told you that it's not real wizardry at all, just some kind of trick
used to get power or advantage, some kind of hauissh or power
game."
Arhu looked at her. "Yeah," he said.
"All that."
"Well." Rhiow sat down. "'Just tricks';
do you think that? After you went through the doors?"
She watched him struggle a little, inwardly, before
speaking. He desperately did not want to admit that he didn't understand
something, or (on the other side) admit to feeling more than cool and blase
about anything ... especially not in front of Urruah. Yet at the same time, he liked
the feel of what he'd done the night before: Rhiow recognized the reaction
immediately ... knowing it very well herself. And she knew that the thought
that there might be more of that was tantalizing him. It was the Queen's
greatest recruitment tool, the one that was the most effective, and the most
unfair, for any living being—but especially for cats: curiosity. You are
unscrupulous, she said privately to the Powers That Be. But then You
can't afford to be otherwise....
"That happened," Arhu said finally. He
looked, not at Rhiow, but at Urruah, as if for confirmation: Urruah simply
closed his eyes ... assent, though low-key. "I felt it. It was real."
"Urruah's right, you know," Rhiow said.
"Even nonwizardly cats can sometimes walk through things ... though
usually only in moments of crisis: if you're not a wizard, the act can't be
performed at will. You'll be able to, though ... if you live through
what follows."
"Whatever it is, I can take it," Arhu said
fiercely. "I'm a survivor."
Saash shook herself all over, then sat down and
scratched. "That's nice," she said, very soft-voiced. "We get a
lot of 'survivors' in wizardry. Mostly they die."
Rhiow tucked herself down in the compact position that
Hhuha sometimes called "half-meatloaf," the better to look eye-to-eye
with the kit. "You said you heard a voice that said 'I dare you,'"
she said. "We've all heard that voice. She speaks to every potential
wizard, sooner or later, and offers each one the Ordeal. It's a test to see if
you have what it takes. If you don't, you'll die. If you do, you'll be a wizard
when the test is over."
"How long does it take?"
"Might be hours," Urruah said. "Might
be months. You'll know when it's over. You'll either have a lot of power that
you didn't have a moment before ... or you'll find yourself with just enough
time for a quick wash between lives."
"What's the power for, though?" Arhu
said, eager. "Can you use it for anything you want?"
"Within limits," Saash said. "Walk in
other elements and other worlds, talk to other creatures, even not-live things
sometimes—go places no other People not wizards have ever been or seen—"
"Other creatures?" Arhu said. "Wow! Any
other creatures?"
"Well, mostly"
"Even ehhif? Cool! Let's go talk to that
cop and freak him out!" He started toward the garage door.
Rhiow grabbed him by the scruff and pushed him down
with one paw. "No. You may not use the Speech to communicate
with members of other species unless they're wizards, or unless you're on
errantry and the job specifically requires it."
"But that's dumb!"
"Listen, killing," Urruah said, leaning over
Arhu with a thoughtful expression. "If you start routinely talking to ehhif
so they can understand, there's a chance that eventually one of them's
going to believe that you're talking. And before you know it they've
thrown you in a scientific institute somewhere and started drilling holes in your
skull, or else they're taking you apart in some other interesting way. More to
the point, if you do that, they'll start doing it to other People too. A
lot of them. I wouldn't want to cause something like that, not ever, because
sooner or later you're going to find yourself between lives, and the
explanations that would be demanded of you by the Powers That Be—" He
shook his head slowly. "If I started seriously thinking that you might
actually pull a stunt like that, I'd just grab you and kick your guts out right
now, Ordeal or no Ordeal. So take notice."
"Then this wizardry isn't any use," Arhu
muttered, scowling. "You say you can do all this stuff, and then you say
you're not allowed to do it! What's the point?"
Rhiow felt herself starting to fluff up. Urruah,
though, said mildly, "It's not quite like that. Are you allowed to
fight with me, killing?"
Arhu glared at Urruah, then he too began to bristle.
Finally he burst out: "Yes, I am! But if I did, you'd shred me!"
"Then you understand the principle," Urruah
said. "We're allowed to do all kinds of things. But we don't do
them, because the result in the long term would be unfortunate." He smiled
at Arhu. "For us or someone else. Till you come to know better, just
assume that the results would be unfortunate for you. And in either the
long term or the short... they would be."
Rhiow noticed that his claws were showing more than
usual. Wonderful, she thought, remembering the saying: Old tom, young
tom, trouble coming! "You'll find in the next few days," Rhiow
said, "that there are a fair number of things you can do... and they'll be
useful enough. You'll like them, too. Keep your ears open: when you hear the
whisper... listen. She doesn't repeat herself much, the One Who Whispers."
Arhu looked up at that. "We're not working for
anyone, are we?" he said, suspicious. "The People ate
free,"
Rhiow wanted to roll her eyes but didn't quite dare:
Arhu was a little too sensitive to such things. "She'll suggest something
you might do," Rhiow said, "but whether you do it or not is your
choice."
"That's not exactly an answer."
Urruah stood up. "He makes my head hurt,"
Urruah said. "Give him the power to change the world and he complains
about it. But then, if he's not willing to cooperate with the Powers Who're the
source of the power, why should he learn anything more about it? Not that he will"
He looked amused.
"All right, all right," Arhu said hastily,
"so I want to learn. So when do I start?"
They looked at one another. "Right away,"
Rhiow said. "We have to go inspect the place we take care of, make sure
things are going right there. You should come with us and see what we do."
Arhu looked at them a little suspiciously. "You
mean your den? You're a pride?"
"Not the way you mean it. But yes, we are. The
place we take care of—you remember it: the place where we found you. Ehhif living
here use it as a beginning and ending to their journeys. So do ehhif wizards,
and other wizards too, though the journeys are to stranger places than the
trains go. - -."
"There are ehhif wizards?" Arhu
laughed out loud at the idea. "No way! They're too dumb!"
"Now who's being 'stuck up'?" Urruah said.
'There are plenty of ehhif wizards. Very nice people. And from other
species too, just on this planet. Wizards who're other primates, who're whales
... even wizards who're houiff."
Arhu snickered even harder. "I wouldn't pay any
attention to them. Houiff don't impress me."
"You may yet meet Rraah-yarh," said Urruah,
looking slightly amused, "who's Senior among the houiff here: and
if you're wise, you'll pay attention to her. 7 wouldn't cross her ... and not
because she's a houff, either. She may look like half an ad for some
brand of ehhif Scotch, but she's got more power in one dewclaw than
you've got in your whole body, and she could skin you with a glance and wear
you for a doggie-jacket on cold days."
Rhiow kept quiet and tried to keep her face straight
over the thought that everything toms discussed seemed to come down to
physical violence sooner or later. Saash, though, leaned close to Arhu and
said, "You are now on the brink of joining a great community of people
from many sentient species ... a fellowship reaching from here to the stars,
and farther. Some of your fellow-wizards are so strange or awful to look at
that your first sight of them could nearly turn your wits right around in your
head. But they've all taken the same Oath you have. They've sworn to slow down
the heat-death of the Universe, to keep the worlds going as best they can, for
as long as they can ... so that the rest of Life can get on with its job. You
want great adventure? It's here. Scary things, amazing things? You'll never run
out of them... there are any nine lives' worth, and more. But if you don't pass
your Ordeal, this life, none of it's ever going to happen."
"You willing to find out how hot you really are?"
Urruah said. "That's why the Whisperer has spoken to you. Take her up on
her offer... and the Universe gets very busy trying to kill you. Live through
it, though... and there'll be good reason for the queens to listen to you when
you sing."
Once more Rhiow kept her smile under control, for this
kind of precisely applied power play was exactly what she had needed Urruah
for. Tom-wizards tended to equate management of their power with management of
their maleness: no surprise, since for toms in general all of life was
about power and procreation. But it was language Arhu wouldn't understand until
he grew old enough to understand wizardry, and life in general, in terms of hauissh,
the power-and-placement game that ran through all feline culture. Rhiow
almost smiled at the memory of Har'lh once equating hauissh with an old
human strategy-game and referring to it as "cat chess," but the
metaphor was close enough. All cat life was intrinsically ha'hauissheh, or
"political" as Har'lh had translated it; and as the saying went,
those who did not play hauissh had hauissh played on them,
usually to their detriment. As a team manager, Rhiow had long since made her
peace with this aspect of the job, and always made sure her own placement in
the game was very secure, then directed her attention to placing her team
members where they would do the most good, and felt guilty about the
manipulation only later, if ever.
"So," Rhiow said. "Let's get on with
it, young wizard. We usually walk, and you'll need to learn the various routes
before we teach you the faster ways to go." She stood up. "First
route, then: the hardest one, but the one that exposes us least to notice. Can
you climb?"
Arhu positively hissed with indignation. Rhiow turned
away, for fear the smile would slip right out, and as she passed, Saash lowered
her head so that (without seeming to do so on purpose) it bumped against
Rhiow's in passing, their whiskers brushing through one another's and trembling
with shared and secretive hilarity. Oh, Rhi, Saash said silently, were
we ever this unbearable?
I was, Rhiow
said, and you would have been if you'd had the nerve. Let's dull his claws a
little, shall we?...
-=O=-***-=O=-
The run to Grand Central along the High Road, which
normally would have taken the three of them perhaps twenty minutes, took nearly
an hour and a half; and the dulling of Arhu's claws, which Rhiow had intended
in strictly the metaphorical sense, happened for real—so that when they finally
sat down on the copper-flashed upper cornice of the great peaked roof, looking
down at Forty-second, Arhu was bedraggled, shaking, and furious, and Rhiow was
heartily sorry she had ever asked him whether he could climb.
He couldn't. He was one of those cats who seem
to have been asleep in the sun somewhere when Queen Iau was giving out the
skill, grace, and dexterity: he couldn't seem to put a paw right. He fell off
walls, missed jumps that he should have been able to make with bis eyes closed,
and clutched and clung to angled walks that he should have been confident to
run straight up and down without trouble. It was a good thing he was so
talented at sidling, since (if this performance was anything to judge by) he
was the cat Rhiow would choose as most likely to spend the rest of his life
using surface streets to get around: a horrible fate. It may change, she
thought. This could be something he 'II grow out of. Dear gods, I hope so...
Finally she'd said to the others, out loud, "I could use a few minutes
to get my breath back," and she'd sat down on the crest of the terminal
roof. It was not her breath Rhiow was concerned about, while Arhu sat
there gasping and glaring at the traffic below.
Why is he
so clumsy? Urruah said silently as they sat there, letting Arhu calm
himself down again. There's nothing wrong with him physically, nothing wrong
with his nerves... they're the right "age" for the way his body is
developing. He was the one of them best talented at feeling the insides of
others' bodies, so Rhiow was inclined to trust his judgment in this regard.
It's like he can't see the jump ahead of him, Saash said. There's nothing wrong with his eyes, is
there?
No. Urruah
washed one paw idly. Might just be shock left over from last night, and the
healing, and everything else that's happening.
He didn't look shocky to me in the garage, Rhiow said.
Believe me, Saash
said, especially before you got there, shock was the last thing he was
exhibiting. This is something of a revelation.
After a few moments, Rhiow got up and walked along the
rounded copper plaques of the roofs peak to where Arhu sat staring down at the
traffic. "That last part of the climb," she said as conversationally
as she could, "can be a little on the rough side. Thanks for letting me
rest"
He gave her a sidelong look, then stared down again at
the traffic and the ehhif going about their business on the far side of
Forty-second Street, walking through the glare of orange sodium-vapor light.
"How far down is it?" he said softly.
It was the first thing Rhiow had heard him say that
hadn't sounded either angry or overly bold. "About fifty lengths, I'd say.
Not a fall you'd want..." She looked across the street, watching the cabs
on Vanderbilt being released by the change of lights to flow through the
intersection into Forty-second. A thought struck her. "Arhu," she
said, "you don't have trouble with heights, do you?"
He flicked his tail sideways in negation, not taking
his eyes off the traffic below. "Only with getting to them," he said,
again so quietly as to be almost inaudible.
"I think the sooner we teach you to walk on air,
the better," Rhiow said. "We'll start you on that tomorrow."
He stared at her. "Can you do that? I mean, can
I—"
"Yes."
She sat still a moment, looking down. After a few
breaths Saash came up behind, stepping as delicately and effortlessly as usual,
and looked over Rhiow's shoulder at the traffic and at the dark, graceful,
sculpted silhouettes that came between them and the orange glow from beneath.
"A closer view than you get from the street," she said to Arhu.
"Though you do miss some of the fine detail from this angle."
"What are they?"
"'Who,' actually," Saash said. "Ehhif
gods."
"What's a god?"
Rhiow and Urruah and Saash all looked at one another. My,
Urruah said silently, we are going to have to start from scratch with
this one, aren't we? ... Hope he doesn't survive to breed. I wouldn't hold out
much hope for the next generation.
"Very powerful beings," said Saash, giving
Urruah a look. "Cousins to the Whisperer: they're all littermates under
the One, or so we think. Each species has its own, even ehhif."
Arhu sniffed at the idea and squinted at the carved
figures. "One of them looks like he's falling asleep."
"She," Rhiow said.
"How do you tell?"
Urruah opened his mouth, but Rhiow said, "Some
other time. That one's a queen, Arhu: the other two're toms."
"What's that one got on his head?"
"It's something ehhif wear," Saash
said; "it's called a hha't. But don't ask me why it's got wings on
it."
"Symbolic of something," Rhiow said.
"All these carvings are. That middle one is a messenger-god, I believe.
The 'sleepy' one, she's got a book; that's a way ehhif communicate. The
other one, he's probably something to do with the trains. See the wheel?"
"There has to be more to it than just that,
though," Urruah said. "Someone involved in the construction has to
have known what this was going to be, besides just a place where the trains
come and go. It can't just be coincidence that the Lord of Birds is shown there
at the center of it all; they've always been the symbols of speed in getting
around, especially of nonphysical travel. And then that one there, the queen,
has the Manual, and the one in the middle has the stick with the Wise Ones
wound around it: the emblem of what's below, in the Downside, under the roots
of the worldgates. There have to have been wizards on the building's design
team."
"I'll leave it to you to conduct some research on
the subject," Rhiow said "But there was wizardry enough about the
place's building, even at the merely physical level: it never shut down, even
when the construction was heaviest. Eight hundred trains came and went each
day, and some of them may have been late, but they never stopped... and neither
did other kinds of transit. Speaking of which, let's get on with our own
business. We're running late."
She walked on down the roof-cornice, taking her time.
"All very scenic," she said casually to Urruah, "but tomorrow
we'll take the Low Road, all right?"
"The Queen's voice purrs from your throat, oh
most senior of us all," Urruah said, following her at a respectable
distance. She didn't look at him, but she twitched one ear back and thought, I'm
going to take this out of your hide eventually, O smart-mouthed one. Don't give
him ideas. And don't make fun of his ignorance. It's not his fault he has no
education, and it's our job to see that he gets one.
I would say, Urruah
said with a silent wrinkling of his whiskers, that we have our job cut out
for us.
Rhiow kept walking toward the end of the roof.
"There's an opening down here," she said to Arhu as they went.
"It's a little tricky to get through, but once in, everything else is
easy. How much other experience have you had with buildings?"
He shrugged. 'Today."
She nodded. He was young and inexperienced enough not
even to have the usual cat-reference, which likened buildings to dens, or in
the case of the taller ones, to trees hollowed out inside. Rhiow had always
been a little amused by this, knowing what trees the city buildings were echoes
of. She'd occasionally heard humans refer to the city as a jungle: that made
her laugh, too, for she knew the real "jungle," ancient and perilous,
of which the shadowy streets were only a reflection.
"Well, you're going to start picking up more
experience fast," she said. "This is one of the biggest buildings in
this city, though not the tallest. If you laid the almost-tallest building on
the island—see that one, the great spike with the colored lights around the
top?—yes, that one—laid it down on its side and half-buried it as the
Terminal's buried, then this would still be larger than that. There are
a hundred thousand dens in it, from the roof to the deepest-dug den under the
streets, at the track levels. But we'll start at the top, tonight. The path
we'll take leads under this roof-crest where we're walking, to the substructure
over the building's inner roof. You said you came through the main concourse
... did you look up and see blue, a blue like the sky, high up?"
Arhu stopped well clear of the edge of the roof, which
they were nearing, and thought a moment. "Yes. There were lights in it.
They were backwards...."
His eyes looked oddly unfocused. The height bothers
him, Rhiow thought, no matter what he says... And then she changed
her mind, for his eyes snapped back to what seemed normalcy. Well, never
mind. A trick of the light...
"Backwards," though. "Saw that, did you?" she said, which was
another slight cause for surprise. "Very perceptive of you. Well, we'll be
walking above that: it's all a built thing, and you'll see the bones of it.
Come here to the edge now and look down. See the hole?"
He saw it: she saw his tongue go in and out, touching
his nose in fright, and heard him swallow.
"Right. That's what I thought the first time.
It's easier than it looks. There's just a tiny step under it, where the brick
juts out. Stretch down, put your right forepaw down on that, turn around hard,
and put yourself straight in through the hole. Urruah?"
"Like this," Urruah said, slipping between
them, and poured himself straight over the edge into the dark. Arhu watched him
find the foothold, twist, and vanish into the little square hole among the
bricks.
"Do that," Rhiow said. "I'll spot for
you. You won't fall: I promise."
Arhu stared at her. "How can you be sure?"
Rhiow didn't answer him, just gazed back. Sooner or
later there was always a test of trust among team-working wizards—the sooner,
the better. Demonstrations that the trust was well-founded never helped at this
stage: start giving such proofs and you would soon find yourself handicapped by
the need to provide them all the time. She kept her silence and spoke inwardly
to the air under the little "step" of outward-jutting brick, naming
the square footage of air that she needed to be solid for this little
while—just in case. Arhu looked away, after a moment, and gingerly, foot by
foot, started draping himself over the edge of the cornice, stretching and
feeling with his forefeet for the step.
He found it, fumbled, staggered— Rhiow caught her
breath and got ready to say the word that would harden the air below. But
somehow Arhu managed to recover himself, and turned and writhed or fell through
the hole. A scrabbling noise followed, and a thump.
Rhiow and Saash looked at each other, waiting, but
mercifully there was no sound of laughter from Urruah. They went down after
Arhu.
Inside the hole, they found Arhu sitting on the rough
plank flooring that ran to the roofs edge underneath the peak, and washing his
face in a very sincere bout of composure-grooming. A line of narrow horizontal
windows, faintly orange-yellow with upward-reflected light from the street, ran
down both sides of the roof, about six feet below its peak, and northward
toward Lexington. From below those windows, thick metal supporting beams ran up
to the peak and across the width of the room, and a long plank-floored gallery
ran along one side, made for ehhif to walk on.
Cats needed no such conveniences. Urruah was already
strolling away down the long supporting beam at just below window-level, the
golden light turning his silver-gray markings to an unaccustomed marmalade
shade.
Arhu finished his he'ihh and looked down the
length of the huge attic. "See the planks under the beams and joists
there?" Rhiow said. "On the other side of them is the sky-painting
that the ehhif artist did all those years ago, to look like the summer
sky above a sea a long way from here. The painting's trapped, though: when they
renovated the station some years back, they glued another surface all over the
original painting, bored new holes for the stars, and did the whole thing over
again."
Arhu looked at Rhiow oddly. "But they had one
there already!"
"It faded," Saash said, shrugging her tail.
"Seems like that bothered them, even though the real sky fades every day. Ehhif...
go figure them."
"Come on," Rhiow said. They walked along the
planks, ducking under the metal joists and beams every now and then, and Arhu
looked with interest at the corded wires and cables reaching across the inside
of the roof. "For the light bulbs," Saash said. "The
walking-gallery is so that, when one of the brighter stars burns out, the ehhif
can come up here and replace it."
Arhu flirted his tail in amusement and went on.
"Here's our way down," Rhiow said as they came to the far side of the
floor. "It's all easy from here."
A small doorway stood before them, let into the bare
bricks of the wall: the door was shut. Urruah had leaped down beside it and was
leaning against it, head to one side as if listening.
"Locked?" Rhiow said.
"Not this time, for a change. I think the new
office staff are finally learning." He looked thoughtfully at the
doorknob.
The doorknob turned: the door clicked and swung open,
inward. Beyond it was a curtain: Urruah peered through it "Clear," he
said a moment later, and slipped through.
Rhiow and Saash went after him, Arhu followed them.
The little office had several desks in it, very standard-issue, banged-up gray
metal desks, all littered with paperwork and manuals and computer terminals and
piles of computer-printed documentation. More golden light came in from larger
windows set at the same height as those out in the roof space.
"Some ehhif who help run the station work
here during the 'weekdays,'" Rhiow said to Arhu as they headed for the
office's outer door, "but this is a 'weekend,' so there's no fear we'll
run into them now. We're seven 'stories,' or ehhif-levels, over
the main concourse; there's a stepping-tree, a 'stairway' they call it, down to
that level. That's where we're headed."
Urruah reared up to touch the outer door with one paw,
spoke in a low yowl to the workings in its lock: the door obligingly clicked
open with a soft squeal of hinges, letting them out into the top of a narrow
cylindrical stairwell lit from above by a single bare bulb set in the
white-painted ceiling. The staircase before them was a spiral one, of openwork
cast iron, and the spiral was tight. While Saash pushed the door shut again and
spoke it locked, Urruah ran on down the stairs two or three at a time, as he
usually did, and Rhiow found herself half-hoping (for Arhu's benefit) that he
would take at least one spill down the stairs, as he also usually did. But the
Tom was apparently watching over Urruah this evening. Urruah vanished into the
dimness below them without incident, leaving Rhiow and Saash pacing behind at a
more sedate speed, while behind them came Arhu, cautiously picking his way.
Faint street sounds came to them through the walls as
they went, but slowly another complex of sounds became more assertive: rushing,
echoing sounds, and soft rumbles more felt than genuinely heard. At one point
near the bottom of the stairs, Rhiow paused to look over her shoulder and saw
Arhu standing still about hah7 a turn of the stairs above her, his ears
twitching; bis tail lashed once, hard, an unsettled gesture.
"It's like roaring," he said quietly.
"A long way down ..."
He's nervous about getting so close to where he almost
came to grief, Rhiow thought. Well,
if he's going to be working with us, he's just going to have to get used to
it.... "It does sound that way at first," she said, "but
you'd be surprised how fast you get used to it. And at how many things there
are to distract you. Come on...."
He looked down at her, then experimentally jumped a
couple of steps down, Urruah-style, caught up with her, and passed her by,
bouncing downward from step to step with what looked like a little more
confidence.
She followed him. In the dimness below them, she could
see a wedge of light spilling across the floor: Urruah had already cracked open
the bottom door. Through it, the echoes of the footfalls and voices of ehhif
came more strongly.
"Now get sidled," Saash was saying,
"and keep your wits about you: this isn't like running around under the
cars in the garage. Ehhif can move pretty fast, especially when they're
late for a train, and you haven't lived until you've tripped someone and had
them drop a few loaded Bloomie's bags on you."
Arhu merely looked amused. He had sidled himself
between one breath and the next. "I don't see why we should
hide," he said. "If you take care of this place, like you say, then
we have as much right to be here as all of them do."
'The right, yes," Rhiow said. "In our law.
But not in theirs. And in wizardry, where one species is more vulnerable
than the other to having its effectiveness damaged by the conflict of their two
cultures, the more powerful or advanced culture gives way graciously. That's
us."
"That's not the way People should do it,"
Arhu growled as they stepped cautiously out into the Graybar passage, one of
the two hallways leading from Lexington Avenue to the concourse. "I don't
know a lot about hauissh yet, but I do know you have to fight to get a
good position, or take it, and keep it."
"Sometimes," Urruah said. "In the
cruder forms of the game ... yes. But when you start playing hauissh for
real someday, you'll learn that some of the greatest players win by doing
least. I know one master who dominates a whole square block in the West
Eighties and never even so much as shows himself through a window: the other
People there know his strength so well, they resign every day at the start of
play."
"What land of hauissh is that?" Arhu
said, disgusted. "No blood, no glory—"
"No scars," Urruah said, with a broad smile,
looking hard at Arhu.
Arhu looked away, his ears down.
"Last time they counted his descendants,"
Urruah added, "there were two hundred prides of them scattered all over
the Upper West Side. Don't take subdued or elegant play as a sign that someone
can't attract the queens."
They came out into the concourse and paused by the
east gallery, looking across the great echoing space glinting with polished
beige marble and limestone, and golden with the brass of rails and light
fixtures and the great round information desk and clock in the middle. The
sound of ehhif footsteps was muted at the moment; there were perhaps
only a hundred of them in the Terminal at any given moment now, coming and going
from the Sunday evening trains at a leisurely rate. Then even the
footstep-clatter was briefly lost in the massive bass note of the Accurist
clock.
Arhu looked up and around nervously. "Just a
time-message," Saash said. "Nine hours past high-Eye."
"Oh. All right. What are all those metal tubes
stuck all over everything? And why are all the walls covered with that cloth
stuff?"
"They're renovating," said Saash.
"Putting back old parts of the building that were built over, years ago
... getting rid of things that weren't in the original plans. It should look
lovely when they're done. Right now it just means that the place is going to be
noisier than usual for the next couple of years...."
"The worldgates have occasionally gotten
misaligned due to the construction work," Rhiow said. "It means we've
had to keep an extra close eye on them. Sometimes we have to move a gate's
'opening' end, its portal locus, closer to one platform or away from another.
It was the gate by Track Thirty-two, last time: they were installing some kind
of air-conditioning equipment on Thirty-two, and we had to move the locus far
enough away to keep the ehhif workmen from seeing wizards passing
through it, but not so close to any of the other gates' loci to interfere with
them...."
"What would happen if they did interfere?"
Arhu said, with just a little too much interest for Rhiow's liking.
Urruah sped up his pace just enough for Arhu to
suddenly look right next to him and see a tom two and a half times his size,
and maybe three times his weight. "What would happen if I pushed those big
ears of yours down their earholes, and then put my claws far enough down your
throat to pull them out that way?" Urruah said in a conversational tone.
"I mean, what would be your opinion of that?"
They all kept walking, and when Arhu finally spoke
again, it was in a very small voice. "That would be bad," he said.
"Yes. That would be very bad. Just like
coincident portal loci would be bad. If you were anywhere nearby when such a
thing happened, it would feel similar. But it would be your whole body ... and
it would be forever. So wouldn't you agree that these are both events
that, as responsible wizards, we should do all we can to forestall?"
"Yeah. Uh, yes."
'Track Thirty, team," said Rhiow. "Right
this way, and we'll check that the Thirty-two gate is where it belongs. Saash,
you want to go down first and check the gate's logs?"
"My pleasure, Rhi."
They strolled down the platform, empty now under its
long line of fluorescent lights. No trains were expected on 30 until the 10:30
from Dover Plains and Brewster North; off to one side, on 25, a Metro-North
"push-pull" locomotive sat up against the end-of-track barrier,
thundering idly to itself while waiting for the cars for the 11:10 to Stamford
and Rye to be pushed down to it and coupled on. Arhu stopped and gave it a long
look.
"Loud," Urruah said, shouting a little.
Arhu flicked his tail "no." "It's not
that—"
"What is it, exactly?" Rhiow said.
"It roars."
"Yes. As I said, you get used to the
roaring."
"That's not what I mean." He sat down, right
where he was, and kept staring at the loco. "It—it knows it's
roaring." He turned to Urruah, almost pleading. "It can't—it can't be
alive?"
"You'd be surprised," Urruah said.
"A lot of wizards can 'hear' what we normally
consider inanimate things," Rhiow said. "It's not an uncommon talent.
Talking to things and getting them to respond, the way you saw Urruah talk to
the door upstairs, that takes more practice. You'll find out quickly enough if
you have the knack."
Arhu got up as suddenly as he had sat down, and shook
himself all over: it took a moment for Rhiow to realize that he was hiding a
shudder. "This is all so strange...."
"The Downside is a strange place," Urruah
said, beginning again to stroll toward the end of the platform, where Saash had
disappeared over the edge and down to track level. "Always has been. There
are all kinds of odd stories about these tunnels, and the 'underworld' in this
area. Lost colonies of web-footed mutant ehhif.. . alligators in the sewers..."
"And are there?"
"Alligators? No," Urruah said. "Dragons,
though ..." He smiled.
Arhu stopped again, looked at him oddly. "Dragons
..." He turned to Rhiow. "He's making it up. Isn't he?"
Arhu desperately wanted to think so, that was for
sure. "About the dragons?" Rhiow said. "No, that's true enough
... though not the way you might think. The presence of the worldgates can make
odd things happen, things that even wizardry can't fully explain. These tunnels
sometimes reach into places that have little to do with this city. They aren't
a place to wander unless you know them well. Sometimes not even then ..."
"But the ehhif—I heard about them. Lots of
them live down here, everybody says, and they're always hungry, and they eat...
rats, and, and ..."
"People? No, not these ehhif, anyway,"
Urruah said. "And while some ehhif do indeed live down in the
tunnels and dens under the streets, it's not as many as their stories, or ours,
would make you think. Not as many People, either."
"Problem is, ehhif don't see well in the
dark," Saash said, leaping up out of it and walking down the platform
toward them. "Either for real or in their minds. When they try to tell
stories about what they think they've seen down here, they tend to get confused
about detail. Even for People, it's never that easy to be accurate about this
darkness. It reaches down too deep, to things that are too old. A story that
seemed plain when you started, soon starts drawing darkness about itself even
while you think you have it pinned down broken-backed in the daylight.,.."
Arhu was looking unusually thoughtful. "How's the
gate?" Rhiow said.
"Answering interrogations normally," Saash
said. "No resonances from our wayward friend at the end of Twenty-six:
it's sitting over there and behaving itself as if nothing had ever gone
wrong."
"Its logs are all right?"
"They're recording usage normally again,
yes."
"That's so strange," Urruah said. "How
are you going to explain it all to Har'lh when he asks for that report?"
"I'm going to tell him the truth, as usual,"
Rhiow said, "and in this case, that means we don't have the slightest idea
what went wrong. Come on, Arhu, we'll show you how a gate looks when it's
working right." They walked on down to the end of the platform and jumped off.
Arhu came last: he was slow about it.
"Before we go on," Rhiow said. "Arhu,
if any of this starts to frighten you, say so. You had a bad day yesterday, and
we know it. But we work down here all the time, and if you're going to be with
us, you're going to need to get used to it. If you think you need time to do
that, or if you can't stay here long, say so."
Arhu's tongue came out and licked his nose nervously,
twice in a row, before he finally said, "Let's see what's so hot down
here."
"One thing, anyway," Urruah said, his voice
full of approval. He headed off into the darkness.
The glitter and sheen of the hyperstrings of the gate
was visible even before they were out of the glare of the fluorescents. The
locus, a. broad oval hanging some twenty yards along from the end of
Track 30, was relaxed but ready for use: its characteristic weave, which to
Rhiow always looked a little like the pattern of the Chinese silk rug her ehhif
had on the dining-room floor at home, radiated in shimmering patterns of
orange, red, and infrared. Arhu stared at it.
"It is alive," he said.
"Could be," Rhiow said. "With some
kinds of wizardry, especially the older and more powerful ones, it's hard to
tell...."
"Why is it here?"
"For wizards to use for travel, as I said."
"No, wait, I don't mean why. How did they
get here? This one, and all the others I can feel—"
"I see what he means," Saash said. 'To have
so many gates in one place is a little unusual. It may have to do with
population pressure. All these millions of minds packed close together, pressing
against the structure of reality, trying to get their world to do what they
want... and hundreds of years of that kind of pressure, started by people who
came here over great distances to found a city where they could live the way
they wanted to, have things their way— Sooner or later, even the structure of
physical reality will start to bend under such pressure. Or maybe not 'bend.'
'Wear thin,' so that other realities start showing through. They say that this
is the city where you can get anything: in a way, it's become true.... If
there's no gate in so populous and hard-driven a place, the theory says, one
will eventually appear. If there was already a naturally occurring gate, it'll
spawn others."
"But there's always been at least one gate here,"
Urruah said, "since long before the city: the one leading to the true
Downside, the Old Downside."
"Oh, yes. If I had to pick one, I'd bet on the
gate over by One-sixteen, myself: it just feels stabler than the others,
somehow. But all the gates' signatures have become so alike, after all this
time, that you'd be hard put to prove which was eldest. Not my problem,
fortunately ..."
Rhiow sat down, looking the gate over. "It does
seem to be behaving. You want to run it through the standard patency sequence?
We should check that this week's bout of construction hasn't affected it."
"Right." Saash sat up on her hindquarters,
settling herself and reaching up to the glowing weft, spreading her claws out
to catch selected strings in them and pull—
She froze, then reached in and through the webbing of
the gate once more, feeling for something—
"Rhi," she said, "we've got a
problem."
Rhiow stared as Saash grasped for the strings
again—and once more couldn't get a grip on them. In the midst of this bizarre
turn of affairs, the last thing Rhiow would have expected to hear was purring,
except she did hear it, then turned in surprise and saw Arhu standing there
rigid, looking not at Saash or the gate, but out into the darkness beyond them.
The purr was not pleasure or contentment: it was that awful edgy purr that
comes with terror or pain, and the sound of it made Rhiow's hackles rise.
"Arhu—"
He paid no attention to her; just stood there,
trembling violently, his eyes wide and dark, his throat rough with the purr of
fear.
"Something's coming," he said.
They all listened for the telltale tick of rails, for
the sound of an unscheduled loco down in the main tunnel past Tower U, where
forty tracks narrowed to four. But no such sound could be heard. Neither could
what Rhiow half-expected— the squeak of rats—though just the thought made her
bristle.
Flashback, Urruah
said silently. We've brought him down too soon.
"Arhu," Rhiow said, "maybe you and
Urruah should go back out to the concourse."
"It won't make any difference," Arhu said,
his voice oddly dry and drained-sounding. "It's coming all the same. It
came before. Once, to see. Once, to taste. Once, to devour—"
"Get him back out there," Rhiow said to
Urruah.
Urruah reached over past her, grabbed Arhu by the
scruff of the neck as if he were a much smaller kitten than he was, leapt up
onto the platform with him, and hurried off down it, half-dragging Arhu like a
lion with a gazelle. Fortunately the youngster was still sidled: allowing any
watching station staff to view the spectacle of him being dragged down the
platform by something that wasn't there, Rhiow thought, would have produced
some choice remarks from Har'lh later.
Rhiow turned her attention back to Saash, who was
hissing softly with consternation and anger. "What's the matter?"
"I don't know. I interrogated it not five
minutes ago and it was fine! Here—" She pulled her paws out of the
gate-weave, then carefully put out a single claw and hooked it behind the
three-string bundle that led into the interrogation routines. Saash pulled, and
the lines of light stretched outward and away from the weft structure, came
alive with flickers of dark red fire that ran down the threads like water.
"See? That's fine. But the gate won't
hyperextend, Rhi! The control functions aren't answering. It's simply refusing
to open."
"That can't happen. It can't."
"I'd have thought a gate couldn't have its logs
erased, either," Saash hissed, "but this seems to be our week for
surprises. Now what do we do? There is simply no way I can do
this"— she pushed her forepaws through the strings again, leaned back, and
pulled, and her paws simply came out again, without a pause—"without
getting a response. It's like dropping something and having it not fall down.
In fact, gravity would be easier to repeal than hyperstring function!
What in Iau's name is going on?"
"I wish
I knew," Rhiow said, and heartily she did, for life was now much more
complicated than she wanted it to be. "We need advice, and a lot of it,
and fast." She looked over at the gate. "If it's not functional,
you'd better shut it down. FU notify Har'lh."
"Rhi," Saash said with exaggerated patience,
"what I'm trying to tell you is that I cannot shut it down. Though
the gate diagnoses correctly, none of the command structures are palpable. It's
going to have to hang here just like this until it starts answering properly,
and we'd better pray to the Queen that the thing doesn't come alive again
without warning, with some train full of coffee-swigging commuters halfway
through it."
Rhiow swallowed. "Go check the others," she
said. "I want to make sure they're not doing the same thing. Then get
yourself right out of here."
Saash loped off into the darkness. Rhiow sat and
looked at the recalcitrant gate. I really need this right now, she
thought.
The gate hung there and did nothing but glow and
ripple subtly, splendid to look at, and about as useful for interspatial
transit as that silk rug back in her ehhif's den.
Miserable vhai'd
thing, Rhiow thought, and looked out into the darkness, trying to calm
herself down: there was no tune to indulge her annoyance. No trains were coming
as yet, but something needed to be done so that the commuters would not meet
this gate before it was functioning correctly again.
Rhiow trotted hurriedly westward down the track,
toward Tower A. Directly opposite the tower was a portion of switched track,
used to shunt trains into Tracks 23, 24, and 25, and crossing more shunting
track for Tracks 30 through 34. She found the spot where the two
"joints" of track interleaved in a shape like an ehhif letter
X, or like an N or V, depending in which direction the interleave was set.
Rhiow glanced up hurriedly at the windows of the
tower. There were a couple of the station ehhif sitting there, watching
the board behind them, its colored lights indicating the presence of trains
farther up the line. She could read those lights well enough, after some years
of practice, to know that no moving train was anywhere near her, and the ehhif
weren't likely to turn and see her before she did what needed doing.
She stood on the little black box set down in the
gravel beside the switch and looked at it with her eyes half-shut, seeing into
it, watching how the current flowed. Not a complicated mechanism, fortunately:
it simply moved the track one way or the other, depending on what the tower
told it.
Rhiow closed her eyes all the way, put herself down
into the flow of electricity in the switch, and told the switch that she was
the tower, and it should move the track this way.
It did. Clunk, clunk, went the track, and it
locked in position: the position that would shunt an incoming train away from
Tracks 23, 24, and 25.
Rhiow glanced up at the tower. One of the men inside
at the desk was looking over his shoulder at a control board, having heard
something: an alarm, or maybe just a confirming click inside the tower that the
switch was moving. Right, Rhiow thought, and leapt over to the switched
track itself. The switch had been the hard part. This would be easier.
She put her paws on the cool metal of the track and
spoke to it in the Speech. Why do you want to lie there with your atoms
moving so slowly? Why so sluggish? Let them speed up a bit: here's some energy
to do it with.... A bit more. Go on, keep it up. Don't stop till I tell
you.
Then she got her paws off it in a hurry because the
metal was taking her seriously. The segment of track went from cool to a
neutral temperature she couldn't feel, to warm, to hot, to really hot,
in a matter of seconds. She loped away quickly while it was still shading up
from a dull apple-red to cherry-red, to a beautiful glowing canary-yellow. A
few seconds more to the buttercup-yellow stage, and the steel of the two pieces
of track had fused together. All right, that's fine, you can stop now, thank
you! she yowled silently to the metal, jumped up onto the platform, and
skittered back toward the concourse.
A few moments later the Terminal annunciator came
alive and started asking the trainmaster to report to Tower A immediately.
Rhiow, panting a little but pleased with herself, came out into the concourse
and found Saash, Urruah, and Arhu waiting for her: Saash looking flustered and
annoyed, Urruah looking very put-upon, and Arhu deep in composure-grooming
again, with one ear momentarily inside out from the scrubbing he was giving it.
"I welded the switching track by Tower A,"
she said to Saash. "Nothing's going onto Tracks Twenty-three through
Twenty-five that isn't picked up and carried there, at least not until they
replace that track. Might take them a couple of days."
"Well, don't expect me to know what's wrong with
that gate by then," Saash said. "I haven't got a clue. We need
advice."
"I agree. What about you?" Rhiow said to
Arhu. "Are you all right?"
He glanced at her, then went back to washing. Urruah
looked over his head and said to Rhiow, "He was a little rocky for a few
moments when I brought him out. Then he just blinked and looked dozy."
"Arhu?"
He looked up this time. "I'm all right," he
said. "I just remembered ... you know."
I wish I did know, Rhiow thought, for
she still had no satisfactory explanation for what this killing had been doing
down there the other day, or for exactly what had caused what happened.
"Come on," she said, "let's walk. This
place is going to be crawling with station people in a few minutes."
They headed for the Graybar passage again. Rhiow
spared herself a few seconds more to revel, just briefly, in the relative quiet
of the terminal this time of day, this time of week. The soft rush of sound,
echoing from the ceiling 120 feet above, was soothing rather than frantic: an
easygoing bustle. People down for a Sunday in the city, heading home again;
people who lived here, returning after a day out of town; or subway riders
emerging to pick up a sandwich or a late newspaper, or a coffee. That bizarre,
dark smell... Rhiow wondered what Arhu thought of it, for it bad taken so long
for her to get used to it as anything but a stink. Now she was so accustomed to
the scent of coffee in the Terminal that she couldn't imagine the place without
it, any more than without the faint aromas of cinders and steel and ozone.
"Arhu," she said—
But he wasn't mere. And Rhiow smelled something in the
air besides coffee, and suddenly everything became plain.
All our worries about his education, she thought. Did any of us think about getting him
something to eat??
The smell of roasting meat, and cold meat, and meat as
yet uncooked, was extremely noticeable, and it was coming from right in front
of them—from the Italian deli that had a branch here, one of a big chain. Also
in front of them, and now much closer to the meat, was Arhu. "Oh,
wow," he shouted as he tore toward the open glass-fronted deli counter,
mercifully inaudible over yet another noisy announcement-request, for the
stationmaster this time, "what is that, I want some!"
They ran after him. Rhiow's fur stood right up all
over her in fear. Oh, Gods, look at him, he's come visible—
Arhu had already dodged around the side of the deli
counter and was now behind it, standing on his hind legs, reaching and pawing for
the meat that the white-aproned ehhif there was slicing. Pastrami, Rhiow
thought, her mouth starting to water as she ran, oh, -what I wouldn't give
for some pastrami at the moment... ! But Arhu couldn't reach, and succeeded
only in snagging the ehhif's apron. Arhu crouched down, ready to jump up
onto the deli counter—
He fell over backward in an utterly comical manner...
or so it looked to the big swarthy ehhif, who glanced down to see what
had caught in his apron. But the cause was Urruah, who (still sidled) had
simply reared up on his hind legs again, grabbed Arhu once more by the scruff
of the neck, and thrown himself over backward, so that the two of them fell
down in a heap.
The ehhif stared. Arhu struggled, his legs
waving around wildly, until he realized that he wasn't going anywhere and that
(to judge by the soft but very heartfelt growling noises coming from just
behind him) he would be truncating his present life by trying to. The ehhif laughed
out loud ... as well he might have at the sight of a young and apparently very
uncoordinated cat, lying on his back and kicking like a crab.
"Arhu!" Rhiow hissed at him. "Get out
of there!"
Urruah let Arhu go, looking blackest murder at him.
Arhu righted himself, shook himself all over, looked with desperate longing at
the meat, and then at Urruah, and slunk back around the deli counter.
Urruah came close behind him. Rhiow thought for a
moment, then came unsidled, and sat down against the wall as Urruah shouldered
Arhu out into the concourse again, out of the ehhif's direct view. He
craned his neck to try to see where Arhu had gone, and couldn't; then went back
to his work, chuckling.
Urruah sat down between Arhu and the deli counter, and
glanced over at Rhiow. I'm going to kill him. You know that.
I think you won't Besides, you'd have to wait your
turn, at the moment. "So,"
Rhiow said to Arhu, who was on the point of turning around and trying to find
another way around the counter. "What was that supposed to
be?"
"I'm hungry! Look at all that stuff up there!
They're caching!"
He tried to get around Urruah again. Urruah hunched up
his shoulders and narrowed his eyes in a way that suggested Arhu could do this
only if he was willing to leave his skin behind.
"Ehhif save
food," Rhiow said. "It's weird, I know, but they do it. Let it
pass for the moment. You're starting to look like one of those people who has
to be taken everywhere twice: the second time, it's always to apologize. Arhu, stop
it and sit down for a moment!!"
"But I want it."
"So do I, and we'll have some shortly, but
anybody with more than used hiouh-litter between their ears would know
not to dance around the way you did! Like a houff, I swear. Anybody
would think you're a stray." She used auuh, the worst of the
numerous words for the concept.
"lama stray,"
Arhu said sullenly.
"Not anymore, you're not. You can be a
ragged-eared, scarred-up, shameless, unwashed, thieving, bullying reprobate
later in life if you want, or else you can be respectably nonaligned. Just as
you please. But right now you're in-pride, and you'll behave yourself
respectably, or I'll know why."
"Oh, yeah?" he spat. "Why?"
Rhiow hit him upside the head, hard, with her claws
just barely in, and knocked Arhu flat. The thump was audible some feet away:
one or two ehhif passing by glanced over at it.
"That's why,"
she said, as Arhu started to get up, then crouched down to avoid another blow,
and glared up at Rhiow, wincing and flat-eared. She held the paw ready,
watching him with eyes narrowed. "And don't flatter yourself to think you
can make so much trouble for me that I'll let you run away from your beatings,
either. The Powers sent you to us, and by Iau we'll keep you and feed you and
teach you to know better until you're past your Ordeal, or of age, or this-life
dead: you won't get away from us any sooner than that." She glanced around
at the others. "Isn't that so?"
Saash blinked and looked off vaguely in another
direction. Urruah yawned, exhibiting every one of his teeth, long, white, and
sharp; then he looked lazily at Arhu, and said, "I like the dead
part."
Oh, thank you so much for your help, Rhiow said silently to them both, growling softly. Saash,
didn't you think to get him something to eat, all today?
I was about to, when he started his little stunt with
Abad. And then you showed up, and we went straight out, and I assumed you would
stop for something, but no, we had
to come straight here, by the High Road, no less, and by the time we got near
food he was ravenous, and why do you expect him to have behaved otherwise?
Rhiow bristled ... and then took a breath and let it
out Well, you know, she said, after a moment, you may have something
there. So box my ears and call me a squirrel.
Saash looked at her with annoyed affection. Not
today. I'm saving up all your beatings to give them to you all at once.
Probably kill you.
"What's a life or two between friends?"
Rhiow muttered. "I'm sorry. Now, Arhu, listen to me because you've got to
get this through your head. We do not go out of our way to attract
attention. A wizard's business is not to be noticed. And it's not ehhif
attention we're working to avoid! We've been doing strange things around
them all through their history, and they still haven't worked out what's going
on. There are much worse things to worry about. Though we work for the Powers
That Be, not all the Powers are friendly ... and if you carelessly raise your
profile high enough to get noticed by one of them in particular, She'll squash
you flatter than road pizza, eat all your nine lives, spit them up like a
hairball, and leave you nothing but a voice to howl in the dark with! She is no
friend to wizards, or life, or any of the other things you took your Oath to
defend. And even if you don't take your Oath seriously yet, She does ...
and will, if She catches you."
He stared at her, ears down, still wide-eyed: not the
usual insolent look. Maybe it got through, she thought. I hope so. "So
behave yourself," Rhiow said, "because I'm personally going to see to
it that your ears ring from moonrise to sunset until you do. —Meanwhile, we're
not going to linger here; we've been visible too long already. But for the
Dam's sweet sake if you have to come out in public and beg, at least do
it with some dignity. Watch this."
She slipped around the counter and strolled through
the door over to the open space just beside the big glass counter laden with
all the meat and cheese: then she sat down demurely and put her tail about her
feet. There she waited.
The big man behind the counter had gone back to the
business of making a pastrami and Swiss on rye. Rhiow gazed at him steadily,
and when he felt the pressure of her look, she opened her mouth and trilled. It
was practically a shout for a cat, but Rhiow knew mat ehhif beard this
sound as a small conversational half-purr, not grating or intrusive, but
inquisitive and polite. When he looked over at her, Rhiow did it again,
stretching her mouth a bit out of shape to approximate the human smile, far
more pronounced than a cat's.
The man looked at her thoughtfully for a moment. Then
he shrugged. He glanced from side to side to see whether anyone was watching,
then reached down to the pile of pastrami he had already cut, and threw a big
slice in Rhiow's direction.
She was ready for this. In an instant she was up on
her hind legs and had caught it in her paws. Then she dropped it, picked it up
in her teeth, and trotted around the counter and out with it: not hurried, but
businesslike, with her tail up and confident.
Off to one side, Rhiow dropped it for the others to
share. The sound of the ehhif's laughter was still loud behind the
counter. "The outside's got pepper on it: it's an acquired taste,"
Rhiow said to Arhu. "Better just eat the middle. — Now did you see how
that went? I picked up that technique from my ehhif: don't ask me why,
but they think it's hilarious. If I go back, that man will give me more to see
me do it again."
"It's a waste of time," Arhu muttered around
his mouthful. "You could have just sidled and took it."
"No, I couldn't. You can't take anything but
yourself with you when you sidle. If you steal, you do it visibly... and that's
just as it should be."
"Then you might as well have just taken it
anyway. You could have gotten in and out of that glass thing before he knew
what had happened."
"No," Rhiow said. "For one thing, you'd
never be able to come back here and get more: they'd chase you on sight But
more importantly, it's rude to them.*'
"Who cares? They don't care about us. Why should
we care about them?"
The pastrami was gone. "Come on," Urruah
said, glancing around: "let's get ourselves sidled before the transit cops
show up and get on our case."
They slipped around a corner from the deli and sidled,
then started to walk back out toward the concourse. "They do care, some of
them," Saash said.
Arhu hissed softly in scorn. "Yeah? What about
all the others? They'll kick you or kill you for fun. And you can't tell which
kind they are until it's too late."
Rhiow and the others exchanged glances over Arhu's
head as they walked. "It's not their fault," Urruah said. "They
generally don't know any better. Most ehhif aren't very well equipped
for moral behavior as we understand it."
"Then they're just dumb animals," Arhu said,
"and we should take what they've got whenever we like."
"Oh, stop it," said Rhiow. "Just
because we were made before they were doesn't mean we get to act superior to
them."
"Even if we are?"
She gave him a sidelong look. "Queen Iau made
them," Rhiow said, "even if we're not sure for what. Ten lives on,
maybe we'll all be told. Meanwhile, we work with them as we find them...."
Arhu opened his mouth, and Rhiow said, "No. Later. We have to get moving
if we're going to catch Ehef during his business hours."
"Who's Ehef?" Arhu said.
"Our local Senior wizard," Urruah said.
"He's five lives on, now. This Me alone, he must be, oh, how old,
Rhi?"
"A hundred and sixty-odd moons-round," Rhiow
said, "thirteen or so if you do it by suns-round, ehhif-style. Oldish
for this life."
"A hundred and sixty moons?" Arhu
goggled. "He's ancient! Can he walk?'
Urruah burst out laughing. "Oh, please,
gods," he said between laughs, "let him ask Ehef that. Oh
please."
"Come on," Rhiow said.
The walk down to Fifth and Forty-second is never an
easy one, even on weekends: too many windowshoppers in from out of town, too
many tourists, and even a sidled cat has to watch where it walks on Fifth
Avenue on Sunday. But by nine-thirty on a Sunday night, almost everything is
closed, even the electronics shops that litter the middle reaches of Fifth,
festooned with signs declaring closing-out sale! everything must go! and
attracting the unsuspecting passersby who haven't yet worked out that, come
next week, nothing will be gone but their money. As a result, a pedestrian,
whether on two feet or four, can stand for a moment and gaze across at the
splendid Beaux-Arts facade of the New York Public Library's Forty-second Street
building—especially in the evening, when it glows golden with its landmark
lighting—and enjoy the look of the place without being trampled by man,
machine, or beast.
The four of them crossed with care in the lull between
red lights, and Arhu stood looking up the big flight of steps, and from one
side to the other, at the massive shapes of the two lions carved out of the
pale pink Tennessee marble. Feral Arhu might have been, but no cat with brains
enough to think could have failed to recognize the two huge, silent figures as
images of relatives.
"Who are they?" Arhu said.
"Gods," Urruah said pointedly. "Some of
ours."
Rhiow smiled. "They're Sef and Hhu'au," she
said, "the lion-Powers of Yesterday and Today."
Arhu stared. "Are they real?"
Saash smiled slightly. "If you mean, do they
exist? Yes. If you mean, do they walk around looking like that? No," Saash
said. "But they're like that. Big, and powerful... and predatory,
each in his or her own way. They stand for the barriers between what was, which
we can't affect, and what will be—which we can, but only by what we do in the
present moment."
"Except if you get access to a timeslide,"
Urruah said, "when you can go back in time and—"
"Urruah," Rhiow said, glaring at him,
"go eat something, or do something useful with that mouth, all
right?" To Arhu she said, "We do not tamper with time without
authorization from Them, from the Powers That Be. And even They don't do
it lightly. You can destroy a whole world if you're not careful or else you can
wipe yourself out of existence, which tends to have the same effect at the
personal level even if you're lucky enough not to have caused everyone else not
to have existed as well. So don't even think about it. And you'll
find," she added, as the smug we'll-see-about-that expression settled
itself over Arhu's face, "when you ask the One Who Whispers for details on
time travel anyway, that you won't be given that information, no matter how you
wheedle. If you press Her on the subject, your ears will ring for days. But
don't take my word for it. Go ahead and ask."
Arhu's face went a little less smug as he looked from
Saash to Urruah and saw their knowing grins: especially Urruah's, which had a
little too much anticipation in it. Rhiow looked sidewise at Saash. This
"heavy-pawed dam" role isn't one I ever imagined myself in, Rhiow
said silently. And I'm not sure I like it....
Saash glanced at her, a little amused. You 're
betraying a natural talent, though....
Thanks loads.
"If they're
Yesterday and Today," Arhu said, "then where's Tomorrow?"
"Invisible," Urruah said. "Hard to make
an image of something that hasn't happened yet. But he's there, Reh-t is,
whether you see him or not. Like all the best predators, you never see him till
it's much too late. Walk right through him, feel the chill: he's there."
Arhu stared at the empty space between the two
statues, and shivered. It was a little odd. Rhiow looked at him in mild concern
for a moment.
They went in, trotting up the stairs and weaving to
avoid the ehhif. Arhu kept well over to the right side, skirting the
pedestal of Sef's statue. You scared the child, Rhiow said to Urruah.
It's good for him, Urruah said, untroubled. He can use some scaring, if you ask me.
They came up to the top of the steps, and Rhiow took a
moment to coach Arhu in how to handle the revolving door. Inside the polished
brass doors, they stood for a moment, looking up at the great entrance hall,
all resplendent in its white marble staircases. Then Rhiow said, "Come on,
this way ..." and led them off to the left, under the staircase and the
second-floor gallery, and past the green travertine marble doorway that opened
into the writers' room; then right, around the corner to a door adorned with a
sign reading staff only, and an arrow pointing down with the word
CAFETERIA.
Arhu sniffed the air appreciatively. "Don't get
any ideas," Urruah growled, "that's today's lunch you're smelling,
and it's long eaten."
Rhiow heard his stomach growl, and carefully didn't
chuckle out loud. She reared up and pushed the door open: outside of opening
hours, it wasn't locked. It leaned inward with the usual squeak, and they
trotted in and up the stairs to the central level of the stacks.
When they were out of the stairwell, Arhu loped over
to the edge of the inner stack corridor and looked down through the railings.
"Wow," he said, "what is all this stuff?"
"Knowledge," Rhiow said, stepping up beside
him and looking up at the skylights and four stories of books, and down at
three stories more: four and a half miles of shelving, here and in the tunneled-out
space under Bryant Park, pierced here and there by the several staircases that
allowed access between levels, and the selective retrieval system that moved
between levels, its vertical conveyor arms picking up books that had been
called for and dropping off books to be returned. It was the genius of this
building, its arrangement in such a way as to hide this great mass of shelf
space—so that even when you knew it was here, it was always a shock to see it,
as much cubic space as would be in a good-sized apartment building, and not an
inch of it wasted.
In the center of it all, on the level at which they
had entered, was a large pitlike area filled with desks and carrels, with a
wide wooden-arched opening off to one side. Right now this opening, where ehhif
would come from the main reading room on the side to pick up books, was
shuttered and locked, in case thieves should somehow get in through the great
reading room windows by night and try to steal books for collectors. The rarest
books were all now up in little wood-paneled, iron-grilled jails in the Special
Collections, second-floor front, isolated from the main reference stacks by
thick concrete walls and alarm systems. Ehef had told Rhiow once that you could
hear the books whispering to each other in the dark through the trefoil-pierced
gratings, in a tiny rustling of page chafing against page, prisoners waiting
for release. Rhiow had come away wondering whether he had been teasing her.
Wizards do not lie: words are their tool and currency, which they dare not
devalue. But even wizardry, in which a word can shape a world, has room for
humor, and there had been a whimsical glint in Ehef's eyes that night....
She smiled slightly. "This way," Rhiow said,
and led the way over to the central core of carrels, where the computers sat
two to a desk, or sometimes three. Several of the monitors were turned on,
casting a soft blue-white glow over the desks; and on one desk, sprawled
comfortably with one paw on the keyboard, and looking thoughtfully at the screen
in front of him, lay Ehef.
He looked over at them with only mild interest as they
came, though when his eyes came to rest on Arhu, the expression became more
awake. Ehef's coloration was what People called vefessh, and ehhif called
"blue"; his eyes, wide and round in a big round platter of a face,
were a vivid green that set off the plush blue fur splendidly. Those eyes
reflected the shifting images on the screen, pages scrolling by.
"Useless," he said softly. "Not even wizardry can do anything
about the overcrowding on these lines. Phone company's gotta do something.
—Good evening, Rhiow, and hunt's luck to you."
"Hunt's luck, Senior," she said, sitting
down.
"Wondered when you were going to get down to see
me. Urruah? How they squealin'?"
"Loudly," Urruah said, and grinned.
"That's what I like to hear. Saash? Life treating
you well?"
She sat down, threw a look at Arhu, and immediately
began to scratch. "No complaints, Ehef," she said.
"So I see." He looked at Arhu again, got up,
stretched fore and aft, and jumped down off the desk, crossing to them.
"And I smell new wizardry. What's your name, youngster?"
"Arhu."
Ehef leaned close to breathe breaths with him: Arhu
held still for it, just. "Huh. Pastrami," said Ehef. "Well,
hunt's luck to you too, Arhu. You still hungry? Care for a mouse?"
"There are mice here?"
"Are there mice here, he asks." Ehef looked
at the others as if asking for patience in the face of idiocy. "As if
there's any building in this city that doesn't have either mice, rats,
or cockroaches. Mice! There are hundreds of mice! Thousands! ... Well, all
right, some."
"I want to catch some! Where are they?"
Ehef gave Rhiow a look. "He's new at this, I take
it."
Arhu was about to shoot off past Rhiow when he
suddenly found Urruah standing in front of him, with an attentive and entirely
too interested expression. "When you're on someone else's hunting
ground," Urruah said, "it's manners to ask permission first."
"If there are thousands, why should I? I
wanna—"
"You should ask permission, young fastmouth,"
said Ehef, his voice scaling up into a hiss as he leaned in past Urruah's
shoulder with a paw raised, "because if you don't, I personally will rip
the fur off your tail and stuff it all right down your greedy face, are we
clear about that? Young people these days, I ask you."
Arhu crouched down a little, wide-eyed, and Rhiow kept
her face scrupulously straight. Ehef might look superficially well-fed and
well-to-do, but to anyone who had spent much time in this city, the glint in
his eyes and the muscles under his pelt spoke of a kittenhood spent on the West
Side docks among the smugglers and the drug dealers, with rats the size of
dogs, dogs the size of ponies, and ehhif who (unlike the tunnel-ehhif)
counted one of the People good eating if they could catch one.
"Please don't rip him up, Ehef," Rhiow said
mildly. "He's a little short on the social graces. We're working on
it."
"Huh," Ehef said. "He better work fast,
otherwise somebody with less patience is going to tear his ears off for him.
Right, Mr. Wisemouth?" He moved so fast that even Rhiow, who was
half-expecting it, only caught sight of Ehef's paw as it was just missing
Arhu's right ear; the ear went flat, which was just as well, for Ehef's claws
were out, and Arhu crouched farther down.
"Right," said Ehef. "Well, because
Rhiow suggests it, I'll cut you a little slack. You can't help it if you were
raised in a sewer, a lot of us were. So what you say is, 'Of your courtesy, may
I hunt on your ground?' And then I say, 'Hunt, but not to the last life, for
even prey have Gods.' So come on, let's hear it."
Only a little sullenly—for there was a faint,
tantalizing rustling and squeaking to be heard down at the bottom of the
stacks—Arhu said, "Of your courtesy, may I hunt on your ground."
"Was that a question? Who were you asking, the
floor? One more time."
Arhu started to make a face, then controlled it as one
of Ehef's paws twitched. "Of your courtesy, may I hunt on your
ground?"
"Sure, go on, you, catch yourself some mice,
there's a steady supply, I make sure of that. But don't eat them all or I'll
skin you before anybody's gods get a chance. Go on, what are you waiting for,
don't you hear them messing around down there? Screwing each other, that's what
that noise is, mouse sex, disgusting."
Hurriedly, Arhu got up and scurried off. Rhiow and the
others looked after him, then sat down with Ehef.
"Thanks, Ehef," Rhiow said. "I'm sorry
he's so rude."
"Aah, don't worry about it, we all need a little
knocking around in this life before we're fit to wash each other's ears. I was
like that once. He'll learn better; or get dead trying."
"That's what we're hoping to avoid...."
Saash blinked, one ear swiveling backward to follow
the rustling going on above. '"I make sure there's a steady supply'? I wouldn't
think that's a very professional attitude for a mouser."
"I got more than one profession, you know that.
But the day I eat every mouse in the place, that's the day they decide they
don't need a cat anymore."
"And, besides," Saash said dryly,
'"even prey have gods.'"
"Sure they do." Ehef settled himself,
stretched out a paw. "But ethics aside, look, it's not like the old times
anymore, no more 'jobs for life.' With the budget cuts, if these people want to
give me cat food, they have to pay for it themselves. Bad situation, nothing I
can do about it. So I make sure they think I'm useful, and I make sure I don't
have to go out of my way to do it. Why should I go hunting out when I can eat
in? I bring the librarians dead mice every day, they bring me cat food,
everybody's happy. Leaves me free for other work. Such as consultation, which
reminds me, why didn't you call to make sure I was available first?"
Rhiow smiled. "You're always available."
"The disrespect of youth."
"When have I ever been disrespectful to you? But
it's true, you know it is. And I usually do call first, but I had a
problem."
Ehef's ears swiveled as he heard the scampering
downstairs. "So I see. Not the one I thought, though." His whiskers
went forward in a dry smile. "Thought you finally figured out what to do
with that spell."
"What? Oh, that." Rhiow laughed. "No,
I'm still doing analysis on it, when I have the time. Not much, lately. The
gates seem to take up most of it... and that's the problem now."
"All right." He blinked and looked vague for
a moment, then said, "I keep a sound-damper spell emplaced around the
desks: it's active now, he won't hear. Tell me your troubles."
She told him about their earlier failure with the
gate. Ehef settled down into a pose that Rhiow had become very familiar with
over the years: paws tucked in and folded together at the wrists, eyes
half-closed as he listened. Only once or twice did he speak, to ask a technical
question about the structure of the gate. Finally he opened one eye, then the
second, and looked up.
So did Rhiow. It was very quiet downstairs.
"He couldn't get out of here, could he?" she
said.
"Not without help. Or not without turning himself
into a mouse," said Ehef, "which fortunately he can't do yet, though
I bet that won't last long. But never mind. Pretty unsettling, Rhi, but you
have to see where this line of reasoning is going to take you."
"I wasn't sure," she said. "I thought a
second opinion—"
"You hoped I would get you off the hook
somehow," Ehef said with that slightly cockeyed grin that showed off the
broken upper canine. "You've already talked this through with Saash, I
know—otherwise you wouldn't waste my time—and she couldn't suggest anything at
our level of reality that could cause such a malfunction." He glanced up
at Saash: she lashed her tail "no." "So the problem has to be
farther in, at a more central, more senior level. Somewhere in the Old
Downside."
This agreed with Rhiow's opinion, and it was not at
all reassuring. Wizards most frequently tend to rank universes in terms of
their distance to or from the most central reality known—the one that all
universes mirror, to greater degree or lesser, and about which all worlds and
dimensions are arranged. That most senior reality had many names, across
existence. Wizards of the People called it Auhw-t, the Hearth: ehhif wizards
called it Timeheart. It was the core-reality of the universes: some said it was
the seed-reality, parent of all others. Whether this was the case or
not, worlds situated closer to the Hearth had an increased power to affect
worlds farther out in life's structure. The Old Downside was certainly much
more central than the universe in which Earth moved, so that what happened
there was bound to happen here, sooner or later. And a failure in the effect of
the laws of wizardry in a universe so central to the scheme of things had bad
implications for the effectiveness of wizardry here and now, on Earth, in the
long term.
"You mean," Rhiow said, "that something
is changing the way the Downside gating structures behave?"
Ehef shrugged his tail. "Possible."
"Or else something's changing the locks on the
gates," Saash said suddenly, with a peculiar and disturbed look on her
face.
"That would probably be the lesser of the two
evils," Ehef said, "but neither one's any good. Worldgating's one of
the things that keeps this planet running ... not that the world at large
notices, or ought to. If wizards in high-population areas like this have to start
diverting energy from specialized wizardries just to handle 'rapid transit,'
they're not going to be able to do their jobs at peak effectiveness ... and the
results are going to start to show in a hurry. Someone's going to have to find
out what's going wrong, and fast." Ehef looked up at Rhiow. "And you
found the problem ... so you know what that means. You get to fix
it."
Rhiow hissed very softly. "Which means a trip
Downside. Hiouh. Well, you can tell the Powers from me that they're
going to have to find someone else to mind the baby while we do what we're
doing. He's on Ordeal, but he doesn't understand the ramifications of the Oath
as yet, and we're not going to have time to teach him and do this at the
same time. Nor can we take the chance that he might sabotage something we're
doing in a moment of high spirits—"
"Sony, Rhi," Ehef said. "You're stuck
with him. The 'you found the problem, you fix it' rule applies to Arhu as well.
Your team must have something to offer him that no other wizards now working
have; otherwise he wouldn't be here with you."
"Maybe they do," Rhiow said, starting to get
angry, "but what about my team, then? How're they supposed to cope,
having to do their jobs—and particularly nasty ones, now— while playing
milk-dam to a half-feral kitten? He's an unknown quantity, Ehef: he sounds odd
sometimes. And I have no idea what he's going to do from one moment to the
next, even when he's not sounding odd. Why should my team be endangered,
having to look out for him? They're past their own Ordeals, trained,
experienced, and necessary—who's looking out for their needs?"
"The same Ones who look after them usually,"
Ehef said. "No wizard is sent a problem that is inappropriate to him or to
his needs. Problems sent to a team are always appropriate to the whole team
... whether it looks that way, at this end of causality, or not. Right now, you
can question that appropriateness ... what wizard doesn't, occasionally? But
afterward, things always look different."
"They'll look a lot more different if
we're dead," Urruah said softly.
"Yeah, well, we all take that chance, don't we?
But even crossing the street's not safe around here, you know that. At least if
you die on errantry, you know it was for a purpose. More assurance than most
People get. Or most other sentient beings of whatever kind." He glanced up
at the stairway to the next level of the stacks, where scampering sounds could
be heard again. "As for him, he's almost certainly part of the solution to
this problem. Look at him: almost too young to be doing this kind of
thing ... and all the more powerful for it. You know how it is with the
youngest wizards: they don't know what's impossible, so they have less trouble
doing it. And just as well. We learn our limits too soon as it is...."
"If we survive to find them," Saash said,
dry-voiced.
"Yeah, well. I didn't hold out much hope for you
when we first met," Ehef said. "You'd jump at the sight of your
own shadow." Saash glanced away. "And look at you now. Nice work,
that, yesterday: you kept cool. So keep cool now. That might be what this
youngster's been sent to you for. But there's no way to tell which of you will
make the difference for him." He glanced at Urruah, somewhat ironically.
Urruah closed his eyes, a you-must-be-joking
expression, and turned his head away.
Rhiow opened her mouth, then closed it again, seeing
Ehef's expression—annoyed, but also very concerned. "Rhiow," he said,
"you know the Powers don't waste energy: that's what all this is about If
you found the problem, you're meant to solve it. You're going to have to
go down there, and I'm glad it's not me, that's all I can say."
Rhiow made a face not much different from Arhu's
earlier one. "I was hoping you could suggest something else."
"Of course you were. If I were in your place, I
would too! But it's my job to advise you correctly, and you know as well as I
do that that's the correct advice. Prepare an intervention, and get your tails
down there. Look around. See what's the matter... then come home and report."
Down below, the soft sound of squeaking began again.
Ehef wrinkled his nose. "I wish they could do that more quietly," he
muttered.
"Oh?" Rhiow said, breathing out in
annoyance. "Like toms do?"
"Heh. Rhi, I'll help every way I can. But my
going along wouldn't be useful in an intervention like this. Adding someone
else on wouldn't help... might hurt."
"And him?" Urruah flicked an ear at the
stacks above them. "He sure got added on."
"Not by me. By Them. You gonna argue with
the hard-to-see type standing out there between those two big guys out front?
Or with the Queen? I don't mink so. She has Her reasons."
"What possible good can he be?"
"What do I look like, Hrau'f the Silent? How
would I know? Go down there and find out. But go prepared."
They thought about that for a while. Then Ehef said to
Urruah, 'Toms. That reminds me. You going to that rehearsal tomorrow morning? I
heard tonight's was canceled."
"Uh, yes, I'm going."
"You know Rahiw?"
"Yeah, I saw him earlier."
"Fine. You see him there, you tell him I have the
answer to that problem he left with me. Tell him to get his tail back up here
when it's convenient."
"All right. You're not going, though?"
"Aah, that kind of thing, ehhif stuff, I
know multicultural is good, but I got no taste for it, my time of life. You
youngsters, you get out there, have a good time, listen to the music, maybe
make a little of your own, huh?"
Urruah squeezed his eyes shut, a tolerant expression,
eloquent of a tom dealing with someone who'd been ffeih for so long that
he couldn't remember the good things in life. Ehef grinned back and cuffed
Urruah in front of one ear, a lazy gesture with the claws out, but not enough
force or speed to do any harm. "You just lick that look out of your
whiskers, sonny boy," he said. "I knew you when you didn't
know where your balls were yet, let alone how many of them to expect. I've got
other things to do with my spare time lately." He threw an annoyed glance
at the computer.
Rhiow smiled, for this was hardly news, although
getting Ehef to talk about this new hobby had been difficult at first She had
known what was going on, though, for some years—since the library installed its
first computer system and announced that it was calling it CATNYP.
"I wouldn't have thought you were the techie
type," Saash murmured.
"Yeah, well, it grows on you," Ehef said.
"Horrifying. But we have an ehhif colleague working with the less,
shall we say, 'visible' aspects of the CATNYP system. She's been busy porting
in the software for putting The Book of Night with Moon online."
Rhiow blinked at that. The Book of Night with Moon was
probably the oldest of the human names for what cat-wizards called The Gaze
of Rhoua's Eye, the entire assembled body of spells and wizardly reference
material, out of which Hrau'f whispered you excerpts when you needed them.
Humans had a lot of other regional names for the Book, many of them
translating into "the Knowledge" or a similar variant. Ehhif wizards
who got their information from the Powers That Be in a concrete written or
printed form, rather than as words whispered in their ears or their minds,
often carried parts of the Book as small volumes that were usually
referred to casually as "the Manual," and used for daily reference.
"Wouldn't have thought it was possible," Rhiow said. "The
complexity ... and the sheer volume of information that would have to be there
..."
"It works, though," Ehef said, jumping up
onto one of the nearby desks with a computer terminal on it. "Or at least
it's starting to ... the beta-test teams have been working on it for some years
now. There was some delay—I think the archetypal 'hard copy' of the Book was
missing for a while— but a team out on errantry found it and brought it back.
Since then the work's been going ahead steadily on versions tailored to several
different platforms, mostly portable computers and organizers. This is the
first mainframe implementation, though. We're trying to give it a more
intuitive interface than previously, a little less structured: more like the input
you get from the Whisperer when you ask advice."
Rhiow jumped up after him, followed a moment later by
Urruah and Saash. "I've seen the ehhif Manuals," Saash said,
sitting down and tucking her tail around her as she looked with interest at the
computer. "They change in size— the information comes and goes as the
wizard needs it How does a computer version of the Gaze handle
mat?"
"You're asking me?" Ehef said,
looking at the computer's screen, which at the moment was showing a
screen-saver image of flowing stars... but me stars looked unnervingly more
real than the ones on Rhiow's ehhif's computer screen. "Not my
specialty area. Dawn says the software has 'metaextensions into other
continua,' whatever that means." He put out a paw, touched the
screen: die stars went away, replaced by the white page and lion logo for the
library.
'Touch-sensitive," Rhiow said. "Nice."
"Gives the Keyboards a little relief. Or they can
use these." He put a paw on the nearby mouse, waggled it around.
Urruah looked at it. "I always wondered why they
called these things 'mice.'"
"Has a tail. Makes little clicky squeaky noises.
Breaks if you use it hard enough to have any real fun with it. Would have
thought that was obvious."
"But to ehhif?"
Ehef shrugged his tail. "Anyway, this is
convenient enough for wizards who use a text-based version of the Book's information
and need to stop into the research libraries to check some piece of fine
detail. Later, when we work the bugs out, we'll allow access from outside.
Maybe let it loose on the Internet, or whatever that turns into next."
"You mean whatever you turn it into,"
Rhiow said, with a slight smile.
"Come on, Rhi, it doesn't show that much,"
Ehef said mildly. "Anyway, someone has to help manage something so
big. And ehhif 'are so anarchic.... Au, what do I need this for
right now?" Ehef muttered, and reached out for the mouse, moved it a
little on the table.
"What?" Rhiow said. She peered at the
screen. A little symbol, a stroke with a dot under it, had appeared down in the
right-hand corner: what ehhif called an "exclamation point."
Ehef had clicked on it, and another little window had popped up on the screen:
this now flickered and filled with words.
"It's the usual thing," he growled:
"I'm between systems here, and half the time She Whispers, and half the
time She sends me E-mail, and sometimes she does both, and I never know
which to— All right, now what is it?"
Rhiow turned away politely, as the others did, but
privately she was wondering about Ehef's relationship with one of the Powers
That Be, and how he could take such a tone with Hrau'f herself.
"Huh," Ehef said finally, finishing his reading. "Well. Not that
serious. Rhi, there's something in the Met you're supposed to have a look at.
They've been bringing out some archival material that was in storage in
Egyptian. Written stuff, in old ehhif. She says, check the palimpsest
cases."
"For what?" Rhiow flicked her ears forward
but could hear nothing from the Whisperer herself.
"She says you'll know it when you see it"
Rhiow put her whiskers forward good-humoredly at that:
it often seemed that Hrau'f was not above making you do a little extra work for
your own good. "Strange," she said, "getting news from her
written down like that."
"Ffff," Ehef said, a disgusted noise, "you don't know how strange
it looked until we got the Hauhai font designed. Technology." He
pronounced it as a curse word, and spat softly. "If I ever find out which
of us suggested to the ehhif that the wheel should be round instead of
square, I'm going to dig up her last grave and shred her ears. —Oh, there you
are, finally. You leave me some?"
Arhu was standing by the desk, looking considerably
thicker around the middle than he had just a little while ago. Rhiow was
briefly shocked at how thin Arhu was, when a full meal produced a whopping
gut-bulge like the one he presently sported.
"Thank you," Arhu said, and burped.
"Well, may Iau send you good of it, you young
slob," Ehef said, ironic, but still amused.
"Yeah, that reminds me," Arhu said, and
burped again, "who is this Iau you're all yowling about all the
time?"
Rhiow opened her mouth, then shut it again and looked
away in embarrassment.
To her surprise, though, Ehef merely produced a very
crooked smile. "Killing, we got a saying in this business. 'Stupidity can
be accidental. Ignorance is on purpose.' Ignorance gets your ears shredded The
only thing that saved you is, you asked the question. Always ask.
You may get your ears shredded anyway, but afterward you'll still be alive to
wear them. Maybe." He gave Rhiow a dry look. "Maybe you should take
him up to the Met with you. He keeps going on like this, he's likely to run
into the Queen in the street one day and get his features rearranged. She's
patient, but I don't know if She's this patient."
"It won't be tonight, I don't mink," Rhiow
said.
He looked at her narrow-eyed for a moment. "You
think it's wise to put this off?"
"I'm only feline, Ehef," Rhiow said, and
yawned; there was no point in hiding it "Give me a break. It's been a
lively couple of days, and it's going to get worse. We'll get it taken care
of... but my team and I need some sleep first, and I need a good long talk with
the Whisperer tonight before we go Downside. I want to make sure I have the
right spells ready to protect us. You know why."
"Yes," Ehef said. "Look, I'll ask the
Perm team to keep an eye on your open gate. But that's going to have to be your
main concern when you've had a little rest. You did a nice interim solution,
but you know it won't last. They'll be cutting that piece of bad track out even
as we speak. Tomorrow night—morning after next, tops—they'll replace it, and if
that gate's not behaving right, then where are we? Go home, get your
sleep. Meanwhile, we'll get some help to watch the top side of the gate for
you, act as liaison if you need anything from Above when you're ready to get
working down there."
"Thanks, Ehef," Rhiow said. Til appreciate
that."
Arhu yawned, too, and looked somewhat surprised as he
did so. "I'm tired," he said. "Can we go back to that little den
now?"
"Not a bad idea," Saash said. "Rhi,
when should we meet tomorrow?"
"A little after noon, I guess," she said.
"Sound all right? Urruah?"
"I'll be up earlier," he said. "That
rehearsal. I'll walk you three home first, though."
"The Tom's own chivalry. Senior... thanks again
for the help."
"We're all in this together," Ehef said,
settling down on the desk again. "Go well on the errand, wizards."
They purred their thanks, all but Arhu, and headed
out. As they made their way toward the door to the main front hall, Arhu
whispered, none too quietly, "What do you want more spells for? Are we
going to have a fight? Is something going to happen?"
"You'll find out soon enough," Saash said,
"when your Ordeal really gets started."
"This looks pretty much like an ordeal
already," Arhu muttered, glancing from Rhiow to Saash. He did not look at
Urruah.
Urruah smiled, and they went out.
-=O=-***-=O=-
As it turned out, they got slightly sidetracked on the
way home. Rhiow wanted Arhu to know the way to her own neighborhood, so they
went there first. There was no rush to get anywhere, so Rhiow and the others
strolled down Seventy-first at their ease: Rhiow, in particular, with the
intense pleasure of someone who is off shift for the moment and has the luxury
of enough time to stop and smell the roses. Or, more accurately, time to smell
and appreciate, each in its proper way, the trees, air, cars, gutters, weeds,
flowers, garbage cans, and other endemic wildlife of the city: the squirrels,
sparrows, starlings, passing ehhif and houiff, the rustlings
above and below ground, the echoes and the whispers; steam hissing, tires and
footsteps on concrete, voices indoors and outdoors: and above and around it
all, the soft rush of water, the breeze pouring past the buildings— now that
there was enough temperature differential for there to be a breeze—and
very occasionally, from high up, the cry of one of the Princes of the Air about
his business, which in this part of the world mostly amounted to killing and
eating pigeons. Her Oath aside, Rhiow's personal opinion was that the city was
oversupplied with pigeons, and as part of their position in the natural order
of things, the Princes were welcome to as many of them as they could eat. They
reminded her too much of rats, with the unwelcome and unnecessary addition of
wings.
There were no pigeons in the street at the moment,
though, because hauissh was in progress ... and any pigeon careless or
foolish enough to drop itself into the middle of a bout of hauissh rapidly
became an aspect of play, and shortly thereafter an object of digestion. Cars, ehhif,
and houiff did pass through, and took part in play, without
knowing they did.
Indeed there was nothing overt that would have led any
ehhif to suspect that a game as old as felinity was going on up and down
the length of the block of Seventy-first between First and Second; reputations
were on the line, and from many windows eyes watched, hindered from game-play,
perhaps, but not from intelligent and passionate interest.
Rhiow sidled through it all with her tail up, as did
the rest of the team. So close to home, it wouldn't have done to be visible on
the street: if one of the neighbors should mention her presence there to Iaehh
or Hhuha, there would be endless trouble. As it was, she needed to be sidled
anyway, to avoid the many ehhif who were on the street this time of the
evening.
"Hey, ffeih-wizard!" came a comment
from one of the streetside terraces above. "Had a good roll on your back
lately?"
Rhiow put her whiskers forward and strolled on by, not
even bothering to look up, though Arhu did. Urraah and Saash wore expressions
suggesting calm tolerance of idiocy. "... If she's so terrific and
powerful and all," said the predictable second voice, "why can't she
make the kittening part grow back, and do something really useful with
herself?"
Rhiow kept walking, showing no reaction to the others
and schooling herself to be slightly amused. There were People in her
neighborhood, as in every neighborhood where a feline wizard worked, who knew
about her and found her either funny or repugnant; and who found the concept of
wizardry laughable or even hateful. These People in particular—the two
extremely spoiled and opinionated pedigreed Himalayans six stories up, in one
of the penthouse apartments of the new building near the corner—were sure that
Rhiow was living evidence of some kind of convoluted plot against their well-being:
a parasite, possibly a traitor, and certainly not proper breeding material.
Rhiow, for her own part, was sure that they were pitifully bored and ignorant,
had nothing to do with their days but culture their spite, and had almost
certainly never done a useful thing since their eyes came open. "... can't
really be much of a Person," one of them said spitefully, meaning to be
heard, "if you haven't even made kittens once..."
"Not much point in making them if you're not
going to be able to tell what they are, my dear."
"Ooh, meow," Rhiow muttered, and kept
walking.
"They need a nice little plague of fleas to take
their minds off their 'troubles,'" Urruah said under his breath, coming up
alongside her.
"Please. That would be so unethical."
"But satisfying. Just think of them scratching
..."
"... and give them the satisfaction of thinking
the universe really is after them? Please." All the same...
The team paused about a third of the way down the
street; Rhiow ducked into the entranceway of an apartment building and sat for
a moment, peering down the sidewalk.There was a row of five brownstones across
the street, their front steps still largely identical despite the renovations
of the past few decades; they faced across to a large modem apartment building
and two other brownstones, one on each side of it. On the first floor, far left
windowsill of the left-hand brownstone, a small milk-chocolate-colored cat sat
hunched up, round-backed, golden eyes half-shut, as if looking at nothing.
Across the street, sitting upright, was a large, dirty white tom; he was
looking intently at the top of a wall between the two brownstones directly
across from him. Shadows fell across that wall, cast by a thick raggy carpet of
some kind of climbing vine that scaled up the nearest wall of the adjoining
building.
Rhiow stood for a moment and waited to see if any
other players would reveal themselves to so cursory an analysis, but after a
few seconds she gave it up. "Come on," she said, and walked with the
others over to where the white cat sat; he glanced at them as they came. It was
Yafh, of course, dominating the block's gameplay as usual. It was a good thing
he was so genial about it; life with him could have become extremely annoying
otherwise.
She went up the stairs toward the other two, pausing
briefly beside Yafh as she came up even with him. Protocol dictated that a
nonplayer await permission from players before passing or approaching their
chosen stances too closely; to obstruct or intervene in a player's field of
view while another player was moving could damage not only that player's score,
but others' scores as well.
Yafh had been sitting with eyes half-closed, watching
the brown cat across the street without seeming to watch her. Now he stood,
stretched fore and aft, and turned his back on the proceedings: a gesture
readable to all players as indicating the intention to temporarily abandon play
without loss of stance.
"Hey there, Rhiow," he said, and stalked off
to one side of his stance. "Haven't seen you for a while."
"Business," she said, and they breathed
breaths companionably before she sat down. "Goodness, who gave you the
fish?"
"Restaurant round the corner," Yafh said.
"Perfectly lovely fish heads, why they don't keep them I can't imagine. Ehhif
have no taste. Urruah? How's the hunting?"
"Not bad, not bad."
"Saash... don't often see you down this way.
'Luck to you. And who's this youngster?"
"Arhu."
" 'Luck to you, son. Come to see how the
professionals do it?"
"Nowhere better," Urruah said, before Arhu
could open his mouth. "How's the bout going?"
"Third sequence, twenty-eighth passage,"
Yafh said. "The balances have shifted."
"You mean you're not winning as
usual?"
"'Winning.' What an ehhif word. We'll
see how the situation looks by next week."
"You want to understand the Game," Urruah
said to Arhu, "this is the Person you come to."
"I don't understand it very well," Arhu
said, in a small voice.
Rhiow glanced at him, wondering briefly where this
sudden and becoming modesty had come from. Or maybe he was simply impressed by
all of Yafh's scars. "Well, mat's no surprise," Rhiow said.
"Years now I've been following hauissh, and I'm not sure 7
understand anything but the basics yet. Yafh is a master, though; what he
doesn't know about it isn't worth knowing."
"All you need to know, young tom," Yafh
said, "is that hauissh is the Fight—or the best version of it we've
got left. Everything else is commentary."
"But ...She says life is the
Fight," Arhu said.
"'She'?" Yafh said. "Oh, the One Who
you wizards say Whispers to you? Well, probably she's right. But one thing's
for sure, life is hauissh."
"There speaks the enthusiast," Saash said
dryly. "Arhu, don't let him fool you. Yafh eats, drinks, washes and sleeps
hauissh. If it didn't exist, he would have to invent it."
"Don't talk naughty," Yafh said, settling
himself down in a way that suggested he had less concern about the elegance of
his position than his comfort. "Takes a god to invent something this
complex, something with this kind of elegance, this subtlety. You tell me now,
young tom: who do you mink's holding down the most important stance at the
moment?"
Arhu looked around him in bemusement. "Her,"
he said, flirting his tail sideways to indicate the handsome chocolate-brown
cat who crouched, immobile as a statue, on one of the nearby walls between two
buildings.
"And you wouldn't be too far off. Trust Hmahilh'
to hog a good spot at the earliest opportunity. But why?"
Arhu looked up and down the street. "Because she
can see everybody else," he said, "and not everybody else can see
her.
"Right That's part of it, but not all. So try
this. We have six players out there: seven, counting me, as of a moment ago. I
don't officially count right now, but for this analysis, you can keep my stance
in. Look at the pattern, see what you see about it. Not the People: the
relationships. Take your time, don't look too hard."
Yafh sat washing his face, ineffectively as usual: the
grime never did seem to come off, but at least he was always seen to be making
the effort. Arhu looked out at the street for a few moments, and then said,
"There's— Is there an empty place they're all pointed at, in the street?
Between the cab parked there and the big car?"
"A natural talent," Yafh said, looking
around at Rhiow and Urruah with approval. "Boy's got the eye. That's the
spot," he said to Arhu. "That's where the Tree is: with the Serpent wound
around it, gnawing at the root...."
"There's no Tree there! That's the middle of the
street!"
"It's there in spirit," Yafh said. "All
hauissh is anchored at the Tree. It's all the original Fight, really;
but since we can't chuck lightningbolts at the Old Snake the way Aaurh and
Urrau did, we use movement and stealth as a weapon, and seeing as the bolt we
strike with, and position as influence. Anyone who sees anyone else could strike
them with a lightningbolt if they had one. And the Tree is always the
center."
Arhu sat down, looking puzzled for a moment.
"Maybe I do see...."
Yafh scrubbed behind one ear. "Hmahilh' there is
in one of the classic positions just now, the fouarhweh. Thousands of
hours of commentary have been made about it, just in the last century; it would
take you a fair amount of study to understand even a few of the major
implications for play as it might progress over the next several hours or days.
But she's holding down a variant of the position the Great Tom would have
held—"
"—before he dies," Arhu said, looking at the
empty spot, the life slowly starting to drain out of his voice. "For the
Old Serpent rises against him and strikes him with its venom, and the Great Cat
falls with a great cry, and striveth to rise but cannot; and breath and warmth
swiftly go from him so that his Enemy rises over his poisoned body and leaps
upon Aaurh the Mighty. Great and terrible is their struggle, so that seas leap
from their beds and the earth is riven, and the tom sky rains fire—"
Yafh looked at Rhiow with mild surprise. Urruah was
watching Arhu uneasily, but Arhu paid no attention at all, his whole regard
being bent on the spot in the street, through which an ehhif with a houff
on the leash was walking. The houff, at the sight of them
sitting on the steps, started to bark, but for Arhu, it might not have been
there at all. "—Yet even so Aaurh at last is lapped in the Serpent's
coils, and crushed in them, and she falls, and her power fails out of the
world. Then Iau sees that the light has gone from the Moon, and the Sun is
blackened with fair Aaurh's dying; and She rises in Her majesty and says, What
has become of My children ? Where is Aaurh the warrior, and sa'Rrahh the
Tearer, wayward but dear to Me? And what has become of My Consort and the light
of his eye, without which My own is dark? —Then Iau draws Her power about
Her, and goes forth in grief and rage; and all things hear Her cry: Old
Serpent, turn You and face Us, for the fight is not done—!"
"He's been well educated, I'll give you
that," Yafh said to Rhiow, blinking a little.
"All the best teachers," Urruah said, dry,
but still unsettled.
"That's right, young tom," Yafh said to
Arhu, as Arhu abruptly sat up a little straighter, blinking himself.
"That's the whole pattern of the gameplay of hauissh, right there
in the old words. There are endless variations on the theme, as you might well
think. But the Queen raises up Her dead, though not forever, as we know; and
then the Fight starts up again ... and so it goes."
"Yafh," came a deafening and strangely pitched shout from across the street, "let's
get on with this! Are you in stance, or out?"
Everyone winced at the noise. Rhiow smiled, a little
crookedly. The source was Hmahilh'. Delicate, graceful little creature though
she was, with her demure semi-ehhif smile, she was also profoundly deaf:
when she spoke, the noise was so alarming that Rhiow was often amazed that
bricks didn't shatter. Rhiow had tried several times, as any wizard might, to
treat the deafness, but there was something about the nerve damage that
resisted treatment. Rhiow half-suspected that the trouble was not the nerves,
but the less educable "limbic" areas of Hmahilh's brain, which had
gotten so used to being deaf that they couldn't understand there were other options,
and so ignored or stubbornly undid any repair to the cranial nerves involved.
As a result, a conversation with Hmahilh', while enjoyable enough for her
cultured and humorous qualities, otherwise tended to resemble an interview with
a fire siren.
"Here, young tom," Yafh said, "you
watch this now. She's always worth watching. All right, all right," he
yowled back at Hmahilh', "I'm in, already."
"What??"
With a sigh, he turned to face her, a signal she would
recognize. Arhu sat watching this, seemingly fascinated, and Rhiow took the
opportunity to gesture the others over to a neighboring doorstep where they
could watch without being anywhere near another player's stance.
As they went, Rhiow said to Saash, "Are you
feeling all right? It's been a busy day ... but you look tireder than
usual."
"Yes, well. There were some more mice in the
garage this morning. I was trying to catch them ..."
"And?"
Saash flicked her ears backward and forward, a
hopeless gesture. "Nothing. As usual. I'm so glad I live in the city, and
have access to an ehhif with a can opener. If I were a country
Person, I'd be dead of starvation by now."
Rhiow gave Saash a sympathetic look. She had never
been a hunter: it was as if there were something missing in her makeup, perhaps
the essential sense of timing that told you when to jump. Either way, the
situation had always struck Rhiow as a little unfortunate, or strange, in
someone whose technical expertise and timing in other matters were so perfect.
"So what did you do about it, finally?"
"This morning? Nothing. I mean, I could have
blown the mice up, but besides being overkill, what good would that have been?
The garage ehhif would just have thought a car ran them over or
something. When Arhu's done here, I'll ask him to see what he can do. Have to
keep the ehhif impressed with our usefulness, after all: otherwise we
might have to find somewhere else to stay..."
"Oh, surely not. Abha'h likes you, he wouldn't
try to get rid of you!"
'True. But he's not the boss in the garage. I'll be
making sure George sees whatever we catch."
Rhiow sighed. "You let me know if you need any
help," she said.
They sat on the doorstep two doors down from Yafh's
stance. "Our boy is spending more and more time in weird-vision
land," Urruah said, looking with some concern at Arhu.
"Just as well," Rhiow said. "It's his
wizardry ... He seems to see things ... and then try to avoid seeing
them. I'm getting concerned about the avoidance."
"Can you blame him? I'm not sure I'd want
to be sitting on a doorstep one moment and looking at the original Battle at
the Dawn of Time the next!"
Saash sat straight and scratched for a moment or so,
then started washing. "I think the problem might be that he hasn't really
done much wizardry yet. Spells, I mean."
"Yes," Rhiow said. "Everything has sort
of been done to him, hasn't it?" Rhiow cocked her ears, then; for
the statement, once made, created a sort of silence around itself. When you
were a wizard, you learned to pay attention to those silences: they were often
diagnostic. Sometimes the Whisperer whispered very quietly indeed. "And
you're right: I haven't really seen him do a spell. Initiate one, I
mean. Well, he walked through a door or so, and in the air. And the sidling
..."
"As regards the physical stuff, he's pretty
good," Saash said. "It's the nonphysical I'm more worried about.
Nine-tenths of our work is nonphysical...."
"There are a lot of different styles of
wizardry," Urruah said. "I think we should try to cut him a little
slack, here. Not everyone jumps straight in and starts doing fifty spells a
day."
"You did,"
Saash and Rhiow said, practically in unison.
"Well, we can't all be me."
Rhiow and Saash looked at each other and gave silent
praise to Ian the Queen of Everything that this was so. "But it's not like
there's a quota," Urruah said. "Or some kind of template for Ordeals.
Everybody knows you get the occasional 'sleeper' Ordeal that takes months or
years. Or 'second' Ordeals, if you don't finish your first one."
"The universe doesn't usually have that much time
to spare for the first kind," Rhiow said, "as you know; and the
second kind is as rare as working balls on a ffeih'd tom, as you also
know. His passivity just worries me a little, that's all."
"He's a tom," Urruah said, with a wink.
"He'll grow out of it."
This time Rhiow did not bother looking physically at
Saash, and didn't have to: she could inwardly hear the small, stifled groan.
"You are in, how shall I put it, unusually male mode tonight,"
Rhiow said. "Got another bout of o'hra coming on?"
"Night after next. It's the big night, the
concert. I'm going to need the time off, Rhi."
"Take it, for Aaurh's sake," she said,
waving her tail. "Get the hormones out of your system. If that's
possible."
Urruah smirked briefly, but then folded himself down,
and after a few seconds, looked a touch more serious. "Maybe the problem
is that he just hasn't noticed how much fun wizardry is," Urruah
said. "How good it feels."
"I would suspect not," Saash said, with a
little more tooth in her voice than usual, "since his first experience of
it came immediately before being almost bitten to shreds by rats...."
'"Ruah," Rhiow said, "I have to admit
that Saash has a point. And pushing Arhu won't help. Till he comes to
understand that satisfaction claws-on, there's no point in describing it. If he
has what it takes to make a good wizard, he'll know it when he feels it... no
matter how he may rationalize it to himself and others as time goes on."
"... Well, I hope he has that time.
Otherwise the crunch-part of his Ordeal may come upon him and he won't have
anything useful prepared. In which case ..." Urruah chattered his teeth
briefly, the way a cat will when seeing a rat or a bird, anticipating the jaw
spasm that will snap its neck.
"We'll see how he does," Rhiow said, and
yawned. "You going to see him home, Saash?"
"Yes. The mice ..."
"That's right All right, then ... you call me in
the morning when you're ready, and I'll take him down on patrol again: show him
the differences between the gates, get him familiar with the track layout on
the upper level." She yawned once more. "Sweet Iau, but I have got
to get off days.... I am just not a day person. Urruah, you take tomorrow
evening off, though I wouldn't mind having you on call during the early
daylight hours, at least till I get up."
"No problem. This is going to be going on for a
while, and Yarn's right about one thing: watching Hmahilh' is always
educational. She's some strategist."
"Right. I'll have a walk around the block, then
turn in. 'Luck, you two."
"'Luck, Rhi..."
She went down the steps, looked up at Yafh and Arhu as
she passed. "Hunt's luck, gentlemen... I'm done for today."
"Don't want to stay and see the epic
struggle?" Yafh said. "You're working too hard, Rhiow."
"Smile when you say that, Yafh. 'Luck, Arhu ...
see you in the morning."
"All right," he said, but he was still
gazing at that empty spot... with less of an estranged look, this time. The
expression was thoughtful, and Rhiow was not entirely sure what to make of
it... but then, that was becoming the story of her life, where Arhu was
concerned.
She saluted them both with a flirt of her tail and
walked on down the block. From above, a voice said, "Oh, look, she's going
to go out and try to get some after all."
"It won't matter.... Even if she knew what to do
with a tom, she couldn't find any really select blood."
Rhiow had had about enough for one night. She laughed
out loud. "What, like yours?" she said, intending her voice to
carry as well as theirs had. "Hairballs at one end, fur-mats at the other,
and twenty pounds of flab apiece in the middle? This is considered 'select'?
Things must be pretty bad in the Himalayas."
Feline laughter came from all up and down the street.
There was a flustered silence from above, followed by annoyed hisses and
growling. Rhiow turned the corner to finish her circuit of the block, then
headed for home, walking up the air to her own rooftop and smiling slightly.
-=O=-***-=O=-
When Rhiow got home, she found that Hhuha had gone to
bed already. Iaehh was sitting up late, in the big leather chair by the empty
fireplace, reading. As Rhiow's small door clicked, he looked up in slight
surprise, rubbing his eyes. "Well, there you are. I was wondering if I was
going to see you today."
Rhiow sighed. "Yes, well," she said,
"we all have long workdays sometimes." She went to her dish for a
long drink of water.
Iaehh put his book down, got up, and took the dish
right out from under her nose.
"Hey!"
"You can't drink that," Iaehh said,
"it's got cat food in if He started to refill it from the sink.
"As if I care at the moment!" Rhiow said.
"Do you know how salty that pastrami can be? Put it back!"
"Here," Iaehh said, "here's some
fresh."
"Well, thanks," Rhiow said, and sighed
again, and started to drink once more.
"Your 'mom,'" Iaehh said softly, sitting
down with his book again, "is terrible about giving you fresh water."
"My 'mom,'" Rhiow said under her breath as
she drank. She smiled slightly. There was no question that Iaehh had noticed
over time that Rhiow was, to use the annoying ehhif phrase, more
"her" cat than his: he teased them both about it, Hhuha directly and
Rhiow in the usual one-sided dialogue.
Well, it wasn't Iaehh's fault, Rhiow supposed. He
simply had no gift for making a lap the way Hhuha did. He somehow seemed to
have more than the usual number of bones. Nor (when he did make a lap) did he
seem capable of sitting still for more than thirty seconds. Always running in
all directions was Iaehh: running to work, running home, running out to the
store, just plain running. She liked him well enough: he was thoughtful. He
just wasn't soft or still the way Hhuha was; and when he held her, no matter
how affectionately, there was never that sense that Rhiow had with Hhuha that
there was a purr inside the ehhif too, and their two purrs were in
synch. Just a personality thing. But he does mean well....
She finished with the water and came over to him to
thank him: jumped up in his lap and began to knead his knee and purr.
"Ow," he said, "ow ow OW ow—"
"Sorry," Rhiow said, and curled around and
settled herself, still purring. "Here now, you just sit still and
relax—"
He stroked her while propping the book off to one
side, on the other knee, under the lamp. For a little while they sat that way,
Rhiow closing her eyes and beginning to feel blessedly calmer after the day
she'd had. Saash had reported in briefly that after they'd left the bout of hauissh,
she'd bedded Arhu down without trouble; he'd be out until at least dawn and
maybe longer, from the looks of him. Urruah had been very good, better than
she'd expected. So had Saash.
How long they'd be that way, as tomorrow progressed,
was a good question. For once it had become plain that they would all have to
go Downside, she had felt Urruah's and Saash's fear at once. There was no
hiding it from team members, not when the three of them had worked together so
closely, for as long as they had....
Iaehh sighed and put the book down. "Oh, come
on," Rhiow said under her breath, "couldn't you have made it a
record? Thirty seconds or so?" But no: he lifted her, got up, and
carefully put her down on the seat where he had been.
"I'm bushed," he said. "This way when I
get in bed and your mom says, 'Did she come in?' I can say, 'Yes,' and be
allowed to go to sleep. 'Night, plumptious cat."
She breathed out in resignation and watched him make
the rounds of the apartment, checking the locks, turning out the lights,
finally slipping through the bedroom door and closing it softly behind him.
Rhiow lay there, looking around the room in the fault yellow
light that came up in stripes through the narrow Venetian blinds: reflection
from the streetlights down the alley outside.
"Plumptious," she thought. Is that a real ehhif word? I must
look that up.
Oh, well... I have other things to do first.
Rhiow started washing, beginning as she did so to make
a mental list of the spells she thought they would need for their journey. She
felt like stuffing her head full of everything she could coax out of the
Whisperer, and all the other spells she routinely carried with her,
useful-seeming or not, from the air hardener right down to the
"research" spell that had come with her Ordeal. But normally, the
Whisperer would let you carry only so much; Her preference, apparently, was for
you to call on Her as you needed new material. She would then provide it for
you, whole, in your mind. There was a certain extra security, though, in having
the spell ready to go, all spoken in your mind except for the final
syllable....
But still.
Downside...
In the darkness, now that there was no one to see,
Rhiow shuddered. Bad enough that tune had done nothing whatever to mellow her
memories of the team's last trip. But now there was an added problem: Ainu's
voice, dry and strange, crying: It doesn't matter. It's coming anyway.
And what had the rest of that meant? It came
before. Once to see. Once to taste. Once to devour—
She tried washing a little to get her composure back,
but it didn't help. Finally she stopped and, instead of flinching away from the
issue, "turned" in mind to face it.
Their intervention Downside had been bad the last
time: bad. She had not been able to eat for days afterward: the mere
feeling of food in her mouth made her retch and choke, so that her ehhif took
her to the vet, where she endured indignities she couldn't prevent for the
sake of explanations she couldn't make. Finally they had brought her home
again, defeated by finding nothing physically wrong, and Rhiow had eventually
found her appetite once more. But it had taken her a good while to gain back
the lost weight, and all that time her food had tasted like dust, no matter
what choice delicacies Iaehh and Hhuha had tempted her with.
She had seen the Ones Below, the Old Ones, the Wise
Ones, the Children of the Serpent... and what they were doing to each other.
-=O=-***-=O=-
They were intelligent: that had been the worst of it.
They had been the lords of the world, once. But something had gone very wrong.
... Like any wizard of every species from here to the
galaxy's rim, Rhiow knew the generalities. The Powers That Be had made the
worlds, under the One's instruction. Each Power had gone Its way, making the
things that seemed to It most likely to forward the business of Creation as a
whole. Abruptly, then, matters changed as one of the Powers, without warning, brought
forth something that none of the others had expected or desired. It invented
entropy: it created death.
War broke out in heaven. When the conflict died down,
that one Power, furious with the others for the rejection of Its gift, was cast
out into the darkness. But there was no getting rid of It so simply: the Lone
Power (as various species called it) had been part of creation from the first,
and It was part of it still.
There was relative quiet for a while after the battle
as worlds formed, seas cooled, atmospheres condensed. Slowly life awakened in
the worlds, ascended through each environment's necessary stages of physical
complexity, and became intelligent. The Powers relaxed, at first: it now seemed
as if Creation was going well.
But each species that became intelligent found itself
being offered a chance, a Choice, by an often beautiful form that appeared to
its first members early in its history. The Choice, after other issues were
stripped away, was usually fairly simple. Take the path that the Powers seemed
to have put before it—or turn aside into a path destined to make the species
that trod it wiser, more powerful and blessed ... more like gods.
The Choice took countless forms, each cunningly
tailored to the species to which it was offered. But under its many guises, no
matter how fair, it always spelled Death. The Lone Power went from sentient
race to race, intent on tricking them into it: offering, again and again, the
poisoned apple, the casket that must not be opened. Many species believed the
fair promises and accepted the gift, condemning themselves to entropy and death
forever after. Some species accepted it only partially, came to understand
their error, and rejected it with greater or lesser levels of success, often
involving terrible sacrifices that resonated back to earlier battles and
sacrifices deep in time. Some species, by wisdom, or luck, or the unwinding of
complex circumstance, never accepted the poisoned Gift at all... with results
that various other creatures find hard to accept: but even on Earth, there are
species that are never seen to die.
Rhiow shifted uncomfortably on the chair. The People
had been offered the Choice just as everyone else had: like so many other
species on Earth, they had not done well. They had been lucky, though, compared
to the Wise Ones. Once upon a time, that had been a mighty people, coming to
their dominance of the planet long before the primates or other mammals.
Offered the Choice—and the Lone Power's gift, disguised as the assurance that
their dominion would never fail while the sun shone—the reptilian forefathers
of the Wise Ones chose what the great dark-scaled shape offered them. For a
while, Its words were true: the great lizards strode the world and devoured
what they would. But it was little more than an eyeblink in terms of geological
time before, without warning, the hammerblow fell from the sky. The skies
darkened with the massive amounts of dust thrown up by the initial meteoric
impact and the earthquakes and volcanic eruptions that followed. The sun no
longer shone. The winds rose and stripped the lands bare: the great lizards,
almost all of them, starved and died, lamenting the ill-made Choice ... and
hearing, in the howl of the bitter wind and the endless storms of dust and
snow, the cruel laughter of the One who had tricked them.
Not all of them had died, of course. Some had
found refuge in other worlds, places more central. One of those worlds was the
one where the Old Downside lay. Down under the roots of the Mountain, the
descendants of the survivors of the Wise Ones had found their last refuge.
There they nursed their slow cold anger at the changes that had come over the
world they ruled. They were no friends toward mammals, which they considered
upstarts—degenerate inheritors of their own lost greatness. And to a mammal,
the alien reptilian mindset that (at the beginning of things) had made the
great lizards the exponents of an oblique and unusual wisdom now merely made
them almost impossible to understand—treacherous, dangerous. Even some of the
older ehhif stories had apparently come to reflect a few shattered
fragments of the truth: tales of a tree, of a serpent that spoke, of an ancient
enmity between mammals and serpents.
The enmity certainly remained. It hardly seemed to
Rhiow as long as a year ago when she and Urruah and Saash had gone down into
the caves under the Mountain for the first time, in search of the cause of a
recurrent malfunction plaguing the gate that normally resided over by the
platform for the Lexington Avenue line. They had inspected the
"mirror" gates up at the top of the caves and had found that
intervention there would not be sufficient Slowly they had made their way down
into the caverns—a night and a day it had taken them to reach the place; they
had even had to sleep there, uneasy nightmare-ridden sleep that it had been.
Finally they had found the secondary, "catenary" gate matrix, the
place where the immaterial power "conduits" of the upper gates came
up through the living stone.
They had also found the Wise Ones, waiting for them
just before the cavern where the catenary matrix lay.
There had been a battle. Its outcome had not been a
foregone conclusion, even though the three of them were wizards. Rhiow and her
team, driven to it, much regretting it (except possibly for Urruah, Rhiow
thought), had killed the lizards who'd attacked them, and then began repairs on
the gate. It had been clumsily sabotaged, apparently by the lizards interfering
with the hyperstrings that led the catenary's energy conduit up through the
stone: nonphysical though those "tethers" were, active tunneling
under the right circumstances could displace them... and the Old Ones, by
accident or other means, had gotten it right. Fortunately the damage had not
been too serious. Rhiow and her team had rooted the gate-conduit more securely,
caused new molten stone to flow in and reinforce its pathway through the stone,
and had started to make their retreat.
That was when they found more of the lizards, furtive
and hasty, devouring the bodies of those Rhiow and the others had killed.
Urruah had charged them, scattering them: and the three of them had made their
way hurriedly back to the surface and to the gateway to their own world. But
Rhiow had not been able to forget the sight of an intelligent being, tearing
the flesh of one of its own kind for food. What kind of life is that for any
creature? Down there in the dark... with nothing to eat but...
She shivered again, then started breathing strong and
slow to calm herself. Whisperer, she said silently, I have work to
do. Tell me what I need to hear.
What do you have in mind? the answer came after a moment.
Rhiow told her. Shortly, what she needed to see had
begun laying itself out before her mind: spell diagrams, the complex circles
and spheres in which the words and signs of the Speech would be
inscribed—either on some actual physical surface, or in her mind. From much
practice and a natural aptitude, Rhiow had come to prefer die second method:
she had discovered that a spell diagram, once "inscribed" in the
right part of her memory, would stay there, complete except for the final
stroke, or sigil, that would finish it. For the rest of it—words, equations,
descriptions, and instructions—she simply memorized the information. Like other
peoples with a lively oral tradition, cats have good memories. And Rhiow knew
there was always backup, should a detail slip: the Whisperer was always there,
ready to supply the needed information, as reliable as a book laid open would
be for an ehhif.
You could carry too much, though—burden yourself with
useless spells and find yourself without quick access to the one you really needed—so
you had to learn to strike a balance, to "pack" cleverly. Rhiow
selected several spells that could be used to operate on the "sick"
gate—each tailored to a specific symptom it had been showing—and then several
others. To the self-defense spells she gave particular thought. One line of
reasoning was that the Old Ones, having been so thoroughly routed last time,
wouldn't try anything much now. But Rhiow was unwilling to trust that
idea—though it would be nice if it turned out that way. She packed several very
emphatic destructive spells, designed not to affect a delicate gate halfway
through its readjustment: spells designed to work on the molecular structure of
tissue rather than with sheer blunt destructive force on any kind of matter,
knives rather than sledgehammers. It was like Saash's approach to the
rats—nasty but effective.
Finally Rhiow couldn't think of anything else she
would need. The knowledge settled itself into her brain, the images and
diagrams steadying down where she could get at them quickly. She began to relax
a little. There was really nothing more to be done now but sleep. She would
make sure she ate well in the morning: going out underfueled on one of these
forays was never smart
Rhiow closed her eyes, "looking" at the
spell diagrams littering the workspace in her mind, a glowing word-scattered
landscape. Other spells, recently used, lay farther out on the bright plain,
less distinct, as if seen through mist: the last few months' worth of work, a
foggy, dimly radiant tapestry. Even the spell that Ehef had mentioned was
visible way off there, right at the edge of things, the "hobby" spell
that she had picked up on her own Ordeal so long ago. Well, at least that's
behind me.
It's not behind Arhu, though. Poor baby. I hope he
makes it.
But so many of us don't....
She sighed, feeling sleep coming, and passed
gratefully into dream.
-=O=-***-=O=-
The warmth was all around her but slightly stronger
from one side, like the fire her ehhif would light in the apartment's
old fireplace once in a while, in the winter, when they thought they could get
away with it. The Whispering had died away some time ago; now there was only
the comforting presence of the Silent One, and the hint of a rumbling,
reassuring purr that ran through everything.
Madam, Rhiow
said, I'm frightened.
So are we all, in the face of That, the answer came. Or almost all of us are. My
sister the Firstborn wasn't. But that was always her style, to go into battle
laughing, as if there were no possibility of defeat. Maybe she knows something
the rest of us don't. Or that may simply be in her nature as our Dam made it.
For the mortal and the semimortal, at least change, the learning of courage, is
an option. But for those of us whose natures were set at the beginning of
things, we must, I fear, simply be afraid while we keep on doing our jobs. A
god that forgets the virtues of specialization, trying to do things It was
never designed for, soon becomes no god, but a tyrant.
Like your other sister, madam...
I don't speak of her, the answer came. We see enough of her as it is. You
will shortly see more.
I really don't want to, Rhiow said.
Little enough attention the worlds pay to what any of
us want, the answer came. As always,
there was a slight edge of humor in the Whisperer's voice, but it was more
muted than usual. Desire, though... and intention... those are other powers
to which even the Powers must answer. Go do your job, daughter. I'll do mine.
Perhaps both of them may yet come to something....
The silence became complete, though, still reassuring,
the warmth remained. The dim glow of the spells faded, and Rhiow slept.
Morning came up clear but not at all cool, and Rhiow
was awakened early by Hhuha complaining as she got dressed. "Must be
eighty out there already," she was saying to Iaehh. "And the damn air
conditioner at the office is on the bunk again. I swear, a company that makes
profits every year that could be mistaken for the GNP of a small country, but
they'll let the staff sit there and swelter for two weeks in a row before they
get someone in to fix the thing so it doesn't produce heat in August...."
"Sue, you should quit," Iaehh said. Rhiow got up and stretched and
went over to where Hhuha leaned against one of the counters in the kitchen.
"Here he goes again," she said under her breath, rubbing against
Hhuha's legs, and then went to the food bowl. This argument was one that
happened about once a month, these days. Hhuha was a salaried consultant for
one of the larger computer companies with offices in the city; but before this
job, she had been "freelance"—nonaligned, Rhiow thought this
meant—and had worked for whom she pleased. Iaehh— who was presently still
wrapped in only his bathrobe and was leaning against the other counter,
facing Hhuha— thought Hhuha should be freelance again, even though it meant
less certainty about how much they would have to eat each week or (sometimes)
whether they would eat at all.
"I wish. Damn contract," Hhuha said, pouring
milk in her coffee.
"Some of that down here, please?" Rhiow said
loudly.
"So don't sign it the next time."
"Don't tempt me...."
"I am tempting you. Don't commit yourself
to them again. Go independent and let them pay twice what they're paying now if
they want your services. Otherwise, let someone else pay twice what
they're paying."
Hhuha put the milk away, sighing. "I don't know
... I've gotten kind of used to the steady paycheck...."
"I know you have."
"Excuse me? Milk?" Rhiow said,
standing up on her hind legs and patting the bottom of Hhuha's skirt. "Oh,
sweet Iau, but I wish just once I could say it so you would understand. Hello? Hhuha?!"
Hhuha looked at Rhiow, bent down and stroked her.
"More cat food, honey? Sure. I don't know, though, Mike... There's so much
competition out there ... and so much uncertainty. In your job, too. You and I
can starve. But someone else wouldn't understand if the food ran out...."
She straightened up and started to open another can of
cat food. "Don't blame it on me," Rhiow said. "You should
do what makes you happy.... Oh, gods, not the tuna again! —Look, Hhuha! Saucer!
Empty! Milk!!"
"Wow, she really likes that stuff," Iaehh
said. "Better get some more."
"I'll stop by the store on the way home."
"But, hon, you really should think about it. The
hours there are wearing you out. You keep having to bring work home. They're
not giving you the support they promised. They can't even keep the air
conditioners working, as you say. You're not happy there...."
Rhiow sighed, hating to look ungrateful, and went over
to the ffrihh, stood up on her hind legs against it, and patted the
handle, looking mournfully at Hhuha.
"What?" Hhuha said.
"You put the milk away without offering her
any," Iaehh said.
"Why can't more toms have brains like
yours?" Rhiow said, and went straight to him and rubbed his legs, too,
while Hhuha opened the ffrihh and got the milk out again. "What a
clever ehhif you are."
"Won't be any left for your coffee," Hhuha
said.
"Never mind, give it to her," Iaehh said.
"I'm running late as it is. I'll have something at the office."
"You wouldn't be running late if you'd
gotten up when the alarm clock rang."
And they were off again about another favorite
subject: the routine ignoring and silencing of the dreadful little bedside ra'hio
that spouted news reports at them all hours of the day and night, but
especially in the morning, when it began its recitation with a particularly
foul and repetitive little buzzer. Rhiow was always glad when they turned it
off... though this morning she had to admit she had been pleased enough, while
it was still on, to hear it fail to mention anything terrible happening in
Grand Central overnight. "Oh, thank you," she said, and purred, as
Hhuha bent down and poured the milk.
"Hey, don't bump the hand that feeds you, my
puss; the milk's going to go all over the floor."
"I'll take care of that, don't you worry,"
Rhiow said, and drank.
Hhuha and Iaehh went back toward the bedroom, still
arguing genially. It was barely argument, really: more like what People called fhia-sau,
or "tussle," where any blows struck were affectionate, the claws
were carefully kept in, teeth did not break skin, and the disagreement, if it
really was one, was replayed more as a pastime than anything else. They
really are so like us, some ways, Rhiow thought, finishing the milk and
sitting up to wash her face. I wonder if you could teach them Ailurin, given
enough time? Repeating one word enough times, in the right context, until they
got it...
"Bye, honey," Hhuha said, and as she passed
through the living room, "bye, puss, have a nice day ..."
"From your mouth to the Queen's ear," Rhiow
said as the front door closed behind her, and meaning it most fervently.
She was still washing when Iaehh came out of the
bedroom in his "formal" sweats, with his office clothes and his
briefcase over his shoulder in a backpack. "Byebye, plumptious one,"
he said, heading for the door. "Don't eat all that food at once, it's got
to last you ..."
Rhiow threw a meaningful look at the bowl full of reeking
tuna, but it was lost on Iaehh: he was halfway out the door already. It clicked
shut, and one after another came more clicks as he locked the other locks.
"Plumptious" again. Is he trying to say I'm
putting on weight?
Hmm,
Rhiow sighed, finished her wash, and went out her own
door, into the warm, ozony air, heading for the rooftops.
-=O=-***-=O=-
Half an hour later she caught up with Urruah at the
Bear Gate to Central Park. There were actually two sets of statues there—one of
three bears, one of three deer—but from the predator's point of view, it was
naturally the bears that mattered.
'"Luck," Rhiow said, as they breathed one
another's breath. "Oh, Urruah, not more MhHonalh's!"
He wrinkled his face a little, an annoyed expression.
"I thought I got all the tartar sauce off that fish thing first."
"All this fried food ... it's going to catch up
with you one day."
"You should
talk. What kind of oil are they packing that tuna cat food in? Smells like it
comes out of somebody's crankcase."
Rhiow thought privately that, for all she knew, he was
right.... They walked into the park, heading southward along the broad paved
expanse of its roadway loop, staying well to one side to miss the ehhif on Rollerblades
and the ehhif with strollers. "You sleep well last night?"
"Considering where we're going today?"
Urruah said. "What do you think? ... I kept hearing Saash dreaming
all night. Her nerves are in shreds."
Rhiow sighed. "I missed that. Guess my little
chat with the Whisperer tired me out."
"Well, I had one, too." Urruah sighed.
"I'm well enough stocked with spells: right up against the limit, I'd say.
My head feels twice its normal size."
Rhiow waved her tail in agreement. "We'll have to
spend a little time coordinating before we head down ... make sure none of us
are carrying duplicates."
They made good time down through the park, heading to
a level about even with the streets in the upper Sixties. There, a huge stage
had been erected at the southern end of the big green space that city People called
somewhat ironically Eiuev, the Veldt, and which ehhif called the
Sheep Meadow. It wasn't sheep milling around in it now, though, but what looked
like about five hundred ehhif dealing with the technical and logistical
end of preparing for a meeting of many thousands: cables and conduits being
laid and shielded, scaffolding secured, sound systems tested. The squawks and
hisses and feedback-howls of mispositioned speakers and other equipment had
been echoing for blocks from the park since fairly early in the morning, making
it sound as if a herd of large, clumsy, and very broken-voiced beasts were
staggering around the place and banging into things. "They're doing sound
checks now, though," Urruah said.
"Sound," Rhiow said, wincing slightly at yet
another yowl, "wouldn't seem to be a problem."
"No, that was accidental. It'll be voices they're
checking, soon. Come on."
They slipped close, behind one of the larger trees
that stood at the bottom border of the meadow, and which was behind the
security cordons still being erected, a maze of orange nylon webbing stretched
from tree to tree. There were plenty of small openings in it so that Rhiow and
Urruah had no trouble stepping through and making their way close to the stage,
under one of the big scaffolding towers.
A great crowd of ehhif, in T-shirts and
shirtsleeves, were already sitting around tuning their instruments, making a
scraping and hooting cacophony that made Rhiow shake her head once or twice.
"It's the Metropolitan Opera's orchestra, without the first chairs,"
Urruah said.
Rhiow blinked, since all the chairs seemed to be
there. "Smart of them to start early," she said. "They'll miss
the heat."
Urruah sighed. "I wish I could," he said. In
hot weather, the thickness of his coat often bothered him.
"So do a little wizardry," Rhiow said.
"Cool some of this wind down: keep a pocket of it for yourself."
"Naah," Urruah said. "Why waste the
energy?... Look, it's starting—"
Rhiow craned her neck as the musicians quieted down a
little. The ehhif who appeared was not the one in the poster, though,
but a short, round, curly-haired tom, who came to stand in front of the
orchestra with a small stick or wand in his hand. Rhiow peered at that.
"He's not one of us, is he?"
Urruah stared at him. "The conductor? Not that I
know." He cocked his head to one side, briefly listening to the Whisperer,
and then said, "No, she says not. —Here he comes!"
On the stage above the musicians, a big burly figure
appeared, also in a shortsleeved shirt and dark pants. Rhiow supposed that as ehhif
went, he was handsome enough; he had a surprising amount of facial fur. He
stepped up to the front of the stage, exchanged a few words with the small
round ehhif: there was some subdued shuffling and tapping of bows on
strings among the musicians.
The small round ehhif made a suggestion,
and the larger ehhif nodded, stepped back to find his right position on
the stage. For a few moments there was more howling and crackling of the sound
system; then quiet The conductor-ehhif raised his wand.
Music started. It sounded strange to Rhiow, but then
most ehhif music did. Urruah, though, had all his attention fixed on the
big ehhif, who suddenly began to sing.
The volume was surprising, even without mechanical
assistance: Urruah had been right about that, at least. Rhiow listened to about
a minute's worth of it, then said to Urruah, low, "So tell me: what's he
yowling about?"
"The song's called 'Nessun dorma.' It
means that no one's going to sleep."
"With that noise," Rhiow said,
"I could understand why not...."
"Oh, come on, Rhi," said Urruah, "give
it a chance. Listen to it."
Rhiow sighed, and did. The harmonies were strange to
feline ears and didn't seem to want to resolve correctly; she suspected no
amount of listening was likely to change that perception soon, for her anyway.
But at least her knowledge of the Speech made meaning available to her, if
nothing else, as the man stood and sang with passion approaching a tom's of his
hope and desire, alone here under the starlight. ... When the stars' light faded
and the dawn rose up, he sang, then he would conquer... though at the moment,
who or what would be conquered wasn't quite clear: the song itself hadn't yet
provided much context. Perhaps some other tom? There did seem to be a she-ehhif
involved, to whom this tom sang—though there was no sign of her at the
moment, she being out of sight in the story, or the reality, or both. That at
least was tomlike enough: an empty place, the lonely silent night to fill with
song, whether or not there was any chance of fulfillment. Or perhaps, Rhiow
thought as he sang, it's the she herself, the one he woos, that he's
intending to conquer. If there was more intended to the conquest than just
sex, though, the thought made Rhiow smile a little. Toms who tried domination
or other such maneuvers with their mates too soon after the act itself got
nothing but ragged ears and aching heads for their trouble.
It was a little odd, actually, to hear such power and
passion come from someone standing still on a bare stage, holding, not a she,
but only a piece of cloth in one hand, which he kept using to wipe his face. He
paused a moment, and behind him the recorded voices of some other ehhif sang
sweetly but mournfully that he and they might all very well be dead in the
morning if he didn't conquer.... Yet the tom-ehhif sang on with
assurance and power, answering them fearlessly; his last note, amplified rather
beyond need, made Rhiow put her ears down flat for the loudness of it rather
than the tone, which was blindingly true, and went on for longer than seemed
possible with even such a big chest's breath. Rhiow was almost unwillingly held
still by the long, cried note at the end of the conquer-word, vinceeeeeeeerrro!
as if by teeth in her scruff; alien as the sound was, any cat-tom who had a
voice of such power would rightly have had his choice of shes.
The ehhif let the note go. The last chords of
accompaniment crashed to an end, and the technical staff responded, some of
them, with a chorus of good-natured hoots and applause. After that torrent and
slam of sound, the hoots of boms and the city's rush seemed a little muted.
The ehhif spoke a few words to the short round
curly-haired ehhif conducting the musicians, then waved the cloth
casually at the technical people and retreated to the back of the stage to have
a long drink from a bottle of water. The ehhif conducting the musicians
turned to talk to them now, and Rhiow looked a little sidewise at Urruah, a
feline gesture of reluctant agreement. "It reminds me a little," she
said, "of the part in the Argument when the Old Tom sings.
Innocent, though he's all scars: and hopeful, though he knows whose teeth will
be in his throat shortly."
Urruah nodded. "That's one connection I've
thought of, yes...."
"I can see why they'll need all these
fences," Rhiow said as they got up and strolled away. "The she-ehhif
would be all over him afterward, I'd think. Probably wear him out for any
more singing."
"They don't, though. It's not meant
personally."
"That's the strangest part of it, for me,"
Rhiow said. "I don't understand how he can sing like that and have
it not be personal. That was real fighting stuff, that last note. He
should have had his claws in someone's guts, or his teeth in someone else's
scruff, afterward."
Urruah shook his own head as well. "They're not
us. But later on in the story, there's a fight."
"Another tom?"
"No, in the story this tom fights with the queen.
She has this problem, see ..."
Rhiow half-closed her eyes in good-natured
exasperation, for he was off and running again. Like most toms, Urruah had
trouble grasping how, for queens, the fascination with song in any of its forms
was strictly seasonal. When you were in heat, a tom's voice was, admittedly,
riveting, and the song it sang spoke directly to your most immediate need. Out
of heat, though, the tendency was to try to get away from the noise before you
burst out laughing at the desperate, impassioned cacophony of it—a reaction not
at all appreciated by the toms near a queen in heat, all deep in the throes of
competitive artistic and erotic self-expression.
Most of Urruah's explanation now went over Rhiow's
head, as they walked back uptown, but at least he had something to keep his
mind off what the rest of the day's work was going to involve. He finished with
the tale of the tom fighting with the queen—after which the queen apparently
surrendered herself to the tom (What a crazy fantasy, Rhiow thought)—and
started in on some other story, many times more complicated, that seemed to
involve a river, and a piece of some kind of metal. "And when you take
this piece of metal and make it into a hring, it makes you master of the
universe...."
Rhiow had to laugh at that. "Ehhif? Run the
universe? Let alone the world... What a dream! They can't even run the
parts of it they think they do run. Or at least none of them who aren't
wizards seem able to. Look at them! Half of the ehhif on the
planet go to bed with empty stomachs: the other half of them die of eating
themselves sick...." She gave Urruah a cockeyed look. "And what about
your great ehhif-tom there? No way he's that size naturally. What does
he mean by smothering a wonderful voice like that with ten fur coats' worth of
fat? Whichever ehhif-god is in charge of mistreating one's gifts should
have a word with him. Probably will, too, if he doesn't get off his great tail
and do something about it pretty soon."
Urruah began muttering something vague about the
artistic temperament. Rhiow immediately perceived that this was something
Urruah had noticed, and it bothered him, too. "Well, look," she said.
"Maybe he'll get himself straightened out. Meanwhile, we're almost at the
Met. They'll be on the steps, if I know Saash. Anything you need to tell me
about today's work before we meet up with them?"
He stopped, looked at her. "Rhi..."
She let him find his words.
"How do you cope?" he said finally. "My
memory's not clouded about last time. We almost died, all three of us. Now
we're going to have to go down there again—and it may even be the same place
this time. Am I wrong?"
"No," Rhiow said, "I don't think so. It
could well be the same spot: the gate we're servicing this time has its roots
in the same catenary."
"It could be an ambush," he said.
"Another sabotage, better planned than the last. Certainly the problem's
more serious. If someone caused it on purpose, they'd know a service team would
have to be down there very quickly. Not like the last tune, where there was
enough slack in the schedule that we might have come down any time during the
space of a week or two. Half the lizards in Downside could be waiting there for
us."
"It's a thought I've considered," Rhiow
said. "Though the Whisperer didn't seem to indicate it was going to be
quite that dangerous. She usually gives you a hint..."
"... If she knows," Urruah said.
There was that too. Even the gods were sometimes
caught by surprise.... '"Ruah," Rhiow said, "I'm as well
prepared as I can be. So are you. Saash will be, as well."
"That leaves only Arhu," Urruah muttered.
"And what he might do, I'll bet the gods don't know, either. Irh's
balls, but I wish we could dump him somewhere."
"Don't get any ideas," Rhiow said. "He
may save your skin yet."
Urruah laughed. They looked at each other for a moment
more, then made their way around to the steps of the Met.
Saash and Arhu were waiting for them in the sunshine,
or rather, Saash was sitting scratching herself and putting her fur in order,
alternately, and Arhu was tearing back and forth across the steps, sidled,
trying to trip the ehhif going up and down. Fortunately, he was falling
down the steps as often as running successfully along them, so the ehhif,
by and large, weren't doing more than stumble occasionally. As they walked over
to Saash, and Rhiow breathed breaths with her and wished her hunt's luck,
Urruah looked over at Arhu, who, seeing Rhiow, was now running toward them.
"You sure you want to stop with just the Met?" Urruah said, loudly
enough to be heard. "I'd take him across the park, afterward. Natural
History. Some skeletons there he ought to see—"
"No," Rhiow said, a touch angrily. "He's going to have to make up his
own mind about what we see. Don't prejudice his opinions .. . and whatever it
is he's going to be good for, don't make him less effective at it."
Urruah grumbled, but said nothing further. Arhu looked
from Urruah to Rhiow, a little puzzled, and said, "What are we supposed to
do?"
"Courtesy first," Rhiow said. "Hunt's
luck to you, Arhu."
"I had some," he said, very proud. "I
caught a mouse."
Rhiow looked at Saash: Saash flicked an ear in
agreement. "It got into the garage this morning," she said. "Out
of someone's car: I think it had been eating some fast food crumbs or
something. He did it right in front of Zhorzh, too. Very clever." She
threw him a look that was half-amused, half-annoyed, and Rhiow put her whiskers
forward in slight amusement.
"Well, good for you," Rhiow said.
"Nicely done. Let's go in, then, and see the gods. We have a busy day
ahead of us, and we want to be out of here before lunchtime." So that
you won't be tempted to start stealing sandwiches out of ehhif hands...
Sidled, they slipped in through a door that some poor
tom-ehhif found himself holding open for about seven ehhif-queens,
one after another. Ehhif were gathering at the turnstiles where people
made contributions to the museum; Rhiow and her team went around them to one
side and went on up the white marble steps to the next floor. Rhiow led them
sharply to the right, then right again along the colonnade next to the stairs,
then left to pass through the Great Hall, and toward the wide doorway over
which a sign said, in ehhif English, egyptian art.
The right was dimmer, cooler, here. The walls were
done in a shade of deep blue-gray; through the skylights above, the sun fell
pale, as if coming through a great depth of time. Against the walls, and on
pedestals and in glass cases in the middle of the great room, were ancient
sculptures and tombs and other things, great and small, belonging to ehhif who
had lived in a very different time.
Arhu lagged a little behind the others, looking in
(for once) undisguised astonishment at the huge solemn figures, which gazed out
cool-eyed at the ehhif strolling among them. Rhiow paused a moment to
look back at Arhu, then turned to join him as he looked at the nearest of the
sculptures, a massive sarcophagus in polished black basalt, standing on end
against a wall. Nearly three feet wide, not counting the carven wig surrounding
it, the serene, lordly ehhif face gazed at, or past, or through them,
with the imperturbability of massive age.
"It's big," Arhu said, almost in a whisper.
Rhiow wondered if what he was really thinking about
was size. "And old," she said, "and strange. These ehhif used
to keep their dead in containers like this; it was to keep their bodies
safe."
"Safe how?"
"I know," Rhiow said, "after a body
dies, the further processes of death tend not to have any trouble finding it.
But these ehhif did their best to give it difficulty. I'm afraid it was
from something we told them, or rather our ancestors did. About our
lives—"
They walked along a little. "You get nine,"
Arhu said, looking around at the everyday things in the glass cases: a glass
cup here, rainbowed with age and exposure; a shoe there, the linen upper and
leather sole still intact; a little farther on, a crockery pot shaped like a
chicken, intended to magically produce more chicken in the afterlife.
"We do," Rhiow said, "but it seems that
ehhif don't. Or if they do, there's no way to tell because they don't
remember anything from the last life, as we do—none of the useful memories or
the highlights, the People you knew or loved ... anyway, ehhif don't think
they come back. But when People back then told them how we did, and told
them about the Living Ones, the ehhif got confused, and they thought we
meant that they were going to do something similar. ..."
They caught up with Saash and Urruah, who were
standing in front of a massive granite sphinx. "What's a 'Living
One'?" Arhu said. "Is that another kind of god?"
Rhiow smiled slightly. Should an uninstructed young
wizard see such a being going about its business, he could be forgiven for
mistaking it for a god. "Not quite so elevated," Urruah said.
"But close."
"After your ninth life," Saash said,
"well, no one's really sure what happens... but there's a story.
That, if in nine lives you've done more good than evil, then you get a
tenth."
"With a mind that won't get tired," Urruah
said, "and a body that won't wear out, too fast and tough for even Death
to claw at... so you can go on to hunting your great desire, right past the
boundaries of physical reality, they say, past world's end and in toward the
heart of things...."
"If you ever see a Living One, you'll know it,"
Rhiow said. "They pass through, sometimes, on Iau's business. ..."
"Have you ever seen one?" Arhu said,
skeptical again.
"As it happens, yes."
"What did it look like?"
Rhiow threw an amused glance at the sphinx. "Not
like that," she said, remembering the glimpse she had once caught, very
early in the morning, of a feline shape walking casually by the East River in
the upper Seventies. To the superficial glance, ehhif's or People's, it
would have appeared to be just another cat, a dowdy tabby. But the second
glance showed how insubstantial, almost paltry, mere concretely physical things
looked when seen with it, at the same time. Shortly thereafter the cat shape
had paused, then jumped down onto the East River, and walked off across it,
with a slightly distracted air, straight along the glittering path laid along
the water by the rising sun and out of sight.
"Well, I sure hope not," Arhu said, somewhat
scornfully. "Half the stuff in here is just lion-bodies with ehhif-heads
on them."
"The ehhif did that because they were
trying to say that they knew these beings the People were describing to them
were intelligent... but essentially feline in nature. Ehhif can't help
being anthropomorphic—as far as they're concerned, they're the only intelligent
species on the planet."
"Oh please!" Arhu said, laughing.
"Yes, well, it does have its humorous aspects
..." Saash said. "We enjoy them the best we can. Meanwhile, here's
their picture of someone who is one of our Gods."
They walked on a little to where a long papyrus was
spread out upright in a case against the wall. "It all starts with
her," Saash said, first indicating the nearest statue. In more of the
polished black basalt, a regal figure stood: ehhif-bodied, with the
nobly sculpted head of one of the People— a long straight nose, wide, slightly
slanted eyes, large graceful ears set very straight and alert. Various other
carvings here wore one kind or another of the odd Egyptian headwear, but this
figure, looking thoughtfully ahead of her, was crowned with the Sun: and on her
breast, the single, open Eye.
"Iau," Urruah said. "The Queen, the
Creatress and Dam. '... In the first evening of the worlds, Iau Hauhai'h walked
in the Silences, hearing and seeing, so that what She heard became real, and
what She saw was so. She was the Fire at the Heart; and of that Fire She grew
quick, and from it She kittened. Those children were four, and grew swiftly to
stand with their queen.'"
"It's the oldest song our people know,"
Saash said to Arhu. "Any of us can hear it: the Whisperer taught it to us
first, and the wizards who heard it taught it to everybody else. And everybody
else taught it to the ehhif... though they got mixed up about some of
the details—"
"You're good at this, Saash," Rhiow said,
"you do the honors.... I need to check those palimpsests that Ehef
mentioned. Or Herself, rather." Rhiow glanced over at a third statue,
farther down the hall.
"You go ahead," Saash said. Rhiow strolled
off toward the papyrus cases in the back of the hall as the others went on to
pause before another statue, nearly nine feet tall, standing by itself. Rhiow
glanced at her in passing, too: she was not easy to go by without taking some
kind of notice. Lioness-headed, holding the lightning in her hands, this tall straight
figure was crowned again with the Sun, but a homed Sun that looked somehow more
aggressive and dangerous; and the Eye she wore glared. Her face was not as
kindly as the Queen's. The lips were wrinkled, fierce; teeth showed. But the
eyes were relentlessly intelligent: this Power's rages would not be blind ones.
"'Aaurh the Mighty,'" Saash said, '"the
Destroyer by Flame, who came first, burning like a star, and armed with the
First Fire. She was Her Dam's messenger and warrior, and went where she was
sent swift as light, making and ending as Iau taught her...."
Rhiow went back to the glass cases ranked against the
wall, jumped up on the first one she came to, and started walking along the
line of them. She visited here as often as she could, liking the reminder of
the People/ehhif joint heritage, of this time when they had been a
little closer, before their languages became so widely parted. As a result of
all the visiting, there was little of this material with which Rhiow was not
familiar, but every now and then something new came out of storage and was put
out for public view.
The palimpsests were such material. They were not true
palimpsests—recycled parchment used for writing, the old writing having been
scraped off with knives—but an equivalent Paper made from the papyrus reed was
mounted on long linen rolls to make books, and the paper scraped clean of the
old soot-based inks when the book was wanted for something else.
Rhiow peered down at the first palimpsest she found in
the case she was standing on, turning her head from side to side to get the
best angle on it. The ehhif of that period had had two different
ways of writing: the hieratic writing, all pictograms, and the demotic, a
graceful curled and swirled language, as often written vertically as
horizontally, which shared some structural attributes with the present written
form of the Speech. True to their names, these palimpsests had no visible
writing left and were here mostly as examples of how papyrus was recycled (so
Rhiow read from the museum's explanatory notes inside the case). But for one of
the People, and a wizard, used to seeing the invisible, such paperwork was more
revealing. Rhiow squinted a little at the first palimpsest, doing her best to
make out the dim remnants of the characters there. Of barley, eight
measures, she read, and of water, twenty measures, and of the day's
bread-make, a lump of a fist's size: let all be set in the sun for nine days,
and when the mixture smelleth fair and the life in it hath quietened, let all
be strained and poured into larger vessels so that twenty measures more of
water may be added—
Rhiow snickered. A beer recipe... The ehhif of
that time liked their beer, having invented it, and were constantly leaving
jars of it out for the gods. That it always vanished afterward struck the ehhif
of that time as proof of deity's existence; it was evidence of their
youth and innocence as a species that they rarely noticed how drunk the
neighbors were the next morning.
Rhiow glanced up, looked over her shoulder at the
others. They were in front of yet another statue, in a light gray stone mis
time. This figure was seated, with a roll of papyrus in her lap; again her head
was that of one of the People, but wearing a more reflective look than that of
Iau the Queen, and a much milder one than her sister. '"Then came Hrau'f
the Tamer,'" said Urruah, "who calmed the fires Aaurh set, and put
things in order: the Lady of the Hearth, who burns low, and learns wisdom, and
teaches it. In every still warm place she may be found, in every heart that
seeks. She speaks the Silent Knowledge to the ears of those who can
hear....'"
Rhiow twitched her tail meditatively and stepped along
the top of the glass case to look at the next palimpsest, puzzling over the
faintly visible characters. This one had been more thoroughly scraped off than
the last, but she could still read the earlier writings. A long column of the
demotic script ran down the side of the ordered page full of hieratic
characters, stick-figures of birds and upheld hands and feathers and snakes,
eyes and chairs and wiggly lines. At the top of the scripture, the hieratic
writing was easier to read, though Rhiow still had to squint. —he performeth
this by means of the mighty words of power that proceed from his mouth, and in
this region of the Underworld he inflicteth with the knife wounds upon Aapep,
whose place is in heaven—
An odd phrase. Rhiow knew that Aapep was one of the
many ehhif names for the Lone Power in Its aspect of Old Serpent. She
twitched her tail in bemusement, kept reading. —Ye are the tears of my Eye,
and Iau in Her name of Mai-t the Great Queen-Cat and Sekhet the Lioness shall
redeem the souls of men; She shall pour flame upon thy darkness, and the River
of Flame down into thy depths; from the lake the depths of which are like fire
shall the Five arise; atru-sheh-en-nesert-f-em-shet—
The rhythm changed abruptly, and Rhiow's tail lashed.
It was the Speech, written crudely as ehhif had done in those
days when trying to work the multiple compound feline vowels into their own
orthography: two out of every three vowels were dropped out here. Part of a
spell? she thought Something jotted down by some human wizard of that
time? For it was just a fragment: the circular structure familiar to
wizards everywhere was absent.
Rhiow looked up for a moment, and saw Saash and Urruah
eyeing each other with a slightly dubious expression, as if to say, And what
about... the other one? Do we mention ...?
Saash looked up at the next glass case close to them,
instead. "And over here—" she started to say.
But Arhu was staring at the floor. Saash and Urruah
glanced down at the spot he was staring at: Rhiow did, too, half-expecting to
see a bug there. Arhu, though, said, very slowly, "'... Then after her
came sa'Rrahh, the Unmastered Fire ... burning both dark and bright, the
Tearer, the Huntress; she who kills unmindfully, in rage, and without warning,
and as unreasonably raises up again.'" He swallowed, his tongue going in
and out, mat nervous gesture again. His voice was dry and remote. " 'It is
she who is strongest after Aaurh the firstborn, knowing no bounds in her power,
yet desiring to find those bounds: the Dreadful, the Lady of stillbirths and
the birth that kills the queen, but also of the Tenth Life: the Power who is
called Lone, for she would hear no wisdom, and her Dam would not have her,
driving her out in her wildness until she might learn better.'" Arhu
gulped again, but his voice still kept that remote, narrative quality, as if
someone else were speaking through him. " 'In every empty place and in all
darknesses she may be found, seeking, and angry, for still she knows not what
she seeks.'"
He looked up, openly scared now.
"Yes," Saash said. "Well, you plainly
know now what the Whisperer's voice sounds like. If she goes out of her way to
warn you about her sister..."
Rhiow flicked one ear forward and back. Well,
madam, you 're taking proper care of him. But what about me? What am I
supposed to make of this? It makes no sense whatever— She moved a
little farther down to look at the rest of the scraped-off papyrus. —semit-her-abt-uaa-s;
mhetchet-nebt-Tuatiu ash-hrau khesef-haa-heseq—
Rhiow stopped, feeling something suddenly shift in the
back of her mind. In the darkness there, light moved, reshaped itself,
recognizing something that belonged to it.
The words were winged: they flew, fluttered in the
darkness inside her, lodged among the other scrawls and curves of light. A
moment's shifting, shuffling, as things resettled themselves. Then quiet again
... but it was an unsettling sort of silence.
In that darkness in the back of her mind, though,
there was no dramatic change: absolutely nothing was happening. Rhiow looked
up, licking her nose uneasily. The others had moved on again. "Here's what
the story's all about," Urruah said. "The first battle ..."
They went to look at the glass case. Near the head of
the long rolled-out papyrus was a picture of a huge Tree, under which stood a
slightly disreputable looking tabby-tom, holding a great curved knife or sword
in one hand, and using it to chop a large snake into ample chunks, the way
someone in a hurry might cut up salami. The furious snake glared at the Cat,
the impression being that simply being cut in pieces was not going to slow it
down permanently.
Rhiow, her tail still lashing with bemusement, jumped
down from the case and went to join them. "The Cat who stood under the
Great Tree on the night the enemies of Iau, the agents of evil, were
destroyed," said Saash.
"Urrua," Rhiow said. "He who Scars, the
Lightning-Clawed—"
Arhu, who had been recovering a little, looked up at
Urruah and started to grin. Urruah grimaced. "It was a pun," Urruah
said, very annoyed. "My mother loved puns." For in Ailurin, adding
the terminal aspirant to the Great Tom's name turned it into urruah, "flat-nose,"
a joke-name for someone who'd acquired so much scar tissue there that he could
hardly breathe.
Rhiow smiled slightly, seeing Arhu getting ready to
start teasing again. Saash said, "It says, 'There dropped from the Queen
one last child, and he Burned dark and tore Her in his passing. And still His
children tear Hers as He tore, when queen and tom come together.'" Urruah
rolled his eyes slightly, as he tended to when this part of the full litany was
recited." 'Murderer of the young is He, sly Trickster, silent-roaming sire
of all dangers that abide our people: but sudden Savior also, one-eyed Wanderer
in the dark, midnight Lover, lone Singer, He Who Scars and is Scarred: Urrua,
Whom the Queen bore last, the Afterthought, Her gift to Herself.'"
At the phrase "murderer of the young," Arhu
looked suddenly at Urruah, who at least had the grace not to smile. When Rhiow
finished, Arhu sat, looked down the hall and up again at the papyrus, and said,
"So when was this big fight?"
"A couple million years ago," Saash said.
"The beginning of time," said Urruah.
"Now," said Rhiow.
Arhu looked from one to another of them, baffled.
"Well," Rhiow said, "all three are
true, really. This universe was barely cooling down from the fireball of its
birth when the fight started. It's been refought many times since, though some
battles stand out. And ..." she sighed, looked down at Arhu, "we're
going out to fight it again, this afternoon. And you're coming with us."
He stared at her...
... then leapt up and yowled with joy.
People all around the big room stared, didn't see
anything, went back to looking at the exhibits. "This is great!" Arhu
yelled. "We're going to have a fight! This is going to be terrific! When
can we leave? Let's go now!"
More heads were turning all around. Rhiow looked at
Urruah. Not even you, she said silently, could have been this excited
about the prospect of going into a fight that could possibly get you killed.
I don't know, Urruah
said, seriously seeming to consider it. Maybe I was.
Rhiow sighed again. "Let's get you out of
here," she said to Arhu, "before security shows up." She glanced
over Arhu's head at the others. "We need to confer and eliminate any
duplicate spells you're carrying ... and then we've got to get down to the
Terminal. Our backup will be waiting."
They headed out. As they went, Rhiow threw one last
look over her shoulder at the statue of the Queen. What am I looking for? she
asked herself a moment later. Poor rude rendering of another species' mystery
that it was, done by creatures who couldn't ever quite get clear on the
concept— But even so, sometimes it was consoling to have a concrete image to
look at, however misleading one knew the concreteness to be, or the image of a
regard that might actually fix on you.
The stone Queen, however, looked thoughtfully out into
the dim blue space of the Egyptian Collection, apparently thinking her own
thoughts. It was an expression that suggested to the viewer, What are you
looking at Me for? Go work out your own salvation.
It was, of course, the only kind of look most People
would accept from their Maker. But Rhiow, at this moment, found herself
thinking:
Maybe I've been with ehhif too long....
She went after the other three.
Did you get what you came for? Saash said.
Rhiow shivered. I think a little bit more, she
said.
The lunch rush was just beginning out in the streets,
but there wasn't much the team could do about that except hug the building side
of the sidewalk, all the way down, and try to keep from being trampled. It was
a relief to get into Grand Central, where few people hugged the walls: the
crush was in the middle, a river of legs and briefcases and shopping bags,
flowing faster in the center of the stream than by the banks.
Rhiow and her team made their way down to Track 30.
She was relieved, on passing the Italian deli, to find it so completely
thronged with ehhif that not even the most reckless lading could
have gotten near it without doing violence to the crowd. Even so, Arhu threw a
longing glance at it as they passed, then looked guiltily at Rhiow.
"Maybe later," she said, "if you're
good." And we're all still in one piece...
A train from Rye had just come in, and the last of its
passengers were filtering off. Far down the platform, off to one side, stood
two ehhif watching the others get off the train: a boy and a girl. They
were young; Rhiow was no expert on ages, but she thought perhaps the young
queen-ehhif was fourteenish, the tom a year or so younger. They looked
like anyone else who might have come off the train—both wearing shorts and
oversized T-shirts and beat-up running shoes, the queen wearing a fanny pack: a
couple of suburban kids, apparently fresh in from up Westchester for a good
day's hanging out. But these two had something none of the other commuters
had—the shift and tangle of hyperstrings about them, which meant that they too
were sidled.
"Prompt," Saash said, as they walked down
the platform toward the two.
"Har'lh's plainly been keeping an eye on
things," Rhiow said. Good. Because if we need help, I'd prefer it to be
the kind that an Advisory would send...
As the team came up to them, the two young ehhif hunkered
down to a level more comfortable for conversation. "We're on
errantry," said the young queen, "and we greet you."
"You're well met on the errand," Rhiow said.
"We can definitely use some help on this one."
"Yeah, that's what Carl said. I'm Nita; this is
Kit."
"Rhiow; and Urruah there, and Saash; and
Arhu—"
The young queen-ehhif looked at Arhu with
interest. "You're new to this, aren't you," she said.
He gave her a look. "So what?"
"Hey, take it easy," she said. "You
just reminded me a little of my sister, that's all."
"The day I look like any ehhif's sister—"
Nita smiled, a little crookedly. "Sounds like
her, too," she said, under her breath, to her partner.
"She meant only," said the young tom-ehhif,
"that her sister just passed Ordeal a little while ago."
Arhu blinked at that. Rhiow said to him, "It
happens sometimes that you get littermates who're wizards. Not so often as it
used to: the tendency is for the trait to skip a couple of generations between
occurrences in a family."
"Yeah," Kit said. "My dad says he
thinks it's so your parents won't be too scared to have more kids... and so
that you won't, either."
"I thought ehhif wizards usually kept
their business secret from nonwizards," Saash said, curious.
"Supposedly humans don't believe in wizardry ... is that right?"
"Mostly they don't. Oh, we keep it private from
everybody but family. It's the wizard's choice, in our species. Hide it or
spill it, you can get in nearly as much trouble either way. But I guess
we're lucky ... our parents coped pretty well after the initial shock, though
we still have a little trouble with them every now and then." Kit looked
around him. "It's been pretty noisy down here this mom-ing—they were
pulling up a piece of track down there. Had to have jackhammers used on it: the
guys said it had been melted right into the concrete. I take it that means this
gate is the busted one."
Rhiow flirted her tail in agreement. "Yes. We'll
be using a different one for our access, though: the Lexington Avenue local
gate—it's had the least use lately. Har'lh tells me you've worked with it
before?"
"Yeah," Nita said, "when its locus was
still anchored upstairs. We used it for a rapid-transit jump when it was
dislocated, some years ago. It was the usual thing—someone was digging up the
potholes on Forty-second and messing with the high-tension power cables during
a sunspot maximum. The combined structural and electromagnetic disruptions made
the gate's stabilizer strings pop out of the anchor stratum, and the portal
locus came loose and jumped sixty stories straight up." She smiled a
small, dry smile. 'Tom and Carl said that getting it back where it belonged,
afterward, was interesting. That was you, was it?"
"Not me," Rhiow said, "my predecessor,
Ffairh. He told me about it, though."
"And then after all that, you had to move it over
to Lex, didn't you? But they'd moved the deli it was in back of when the
construction started here."
"That's right, when they started renovating the
Hyatt passageway. Everything's been pretty ripped up lately...." Rhiow
looked around bet. "Well, your expertise will be welcome ... we're
going a long way down on this run, and keeping the gate anchored and patent is
going to be important."
"Shouldn't be a problem," Kit said.
"Carl says you took a lot of care last time to fasten the gate down good
and tight. We'll make sure it stays stuck open for you while you're down there.
There shouldn't be any way a patent gate can be dislocated or interfered
with."
Rhiow had her doubts this week. 'That's what
conventional wisdom would say," she said, "but the gates' behavior
lately hasn't been conventional."
Nita shook her head. "We'll do the best we can
for you," she said. "If we need help, we'll yell for Carl."
"Right. Let's get started," Saash said, and
headed over for the gate.
It was as they had left it the other day: hanging
there, the warp and weft of the hyperstrings glowing a slightly duller red than
before, token of a lack of extension in the last day. Once more Saash sat up on
her haunches, reached in, and plucked at the gate's diagnostic strings: they
followed her claw outward, and light sheened down them, violet in the darkness.
"Same as yesterday," she said to the two young wizards.
"Looks perfectly normal," Kit said.
"Yes, well, watch." Saash reached in again
for the activation strings, pulled, and again came out with a double pawful of
nothing.
Nita whistled softly. "Weird."
"Yes. I was kind of hoping it might have
corrected itself," Saash said, sounding wry and slightly amused, "but
fat chance."
Rhiow looked at her and was silently impressed, not
for the first time, at the way Saash could hold such a casual tone when she was
shivering inside. But that was her way, at work. Later, after this was
done—assuming everything went all right—she would complain neurotically about
her terror for days. But at the moment, she sounded like she was going for a nice
sleep in the sun, followed by cream. I wish I could sound that confident....
Saash let go of the strings, settled back to all fours
again, and glanced around. "So here's what we'll do," she said.
"I'm going to pull the Lexington Avenue local gate's locus out of its
present location and tether it over here temporarily so that you can keep an
eye on both the bum gate and the one we've used. Theoretically we should be
able to use the broken one to come back after we've fixed it; then the Lex gate
can have the temporary tethers broken and it'll just snap back into
place."
"Sounds sensible," Nita said. "One of
us can stay over by Lex and redirect any wizards who turn up there to use it
before the change in the gate's location shows up in then: manuals."
"Fine," Saash said, "let's go,
then." She trotted off, and the young queen-ehhif went after her,
looking carefully down-track as she followed.
Arhu looked after the two of them, while the young
tom-ehhif sat down on the edge of the platform, looking at the gate.
"It must be an interesting line of work," Kit said. "I bet you
get to travel a lot."
Rhiow laughed softly. "I wish! No, we're here
mostly. The New York gates get nearly as much use as the ones at Tower Bridge
or Alexandria. Not as much usage as the complex at Tokyo, maybe ... but those
would be the only ones to beat us. As a result, we're always having to fix
something that's busted." She put her whiskers forward, slightly amused at
a memory. "Last time I was scheduled for a weekend off, I got all the way
to the big Crossings worldgating facility on Rirhath B before one of their gates
broke, and I found myself helping them service it...." She made the
extra-large smile that an ehhif would understand. '"Wizard's
holiday."'
The young tom chuckled. "Yeah," he said,
"I've had a couple of those myself—"
The darkness in front of them suddenly had another
gate hanging in it: more oval than the first one, hanging closer to the cinders
and concrete of the floor, almost in contact with the rails. It hyperextended
as they watched, the bright lines of its curvature pulling inward and
apparently away to vanishing-point eternity before disappearing altogether,
replaced by the oval image of the end of the Lexington Avenue local platform,
and Nita standing there, looking through the aperture with an interested
expression. Saash leaped neatly through, and the image vanished in lines of
bright fire as the curvature snapped back flat again behind her. Numerous
unnaturally bright "tether" lines could be seen stretching from
equidistant points around the edges of the gate-weave, up into
"empty" air or down into the ground, radiating outward in an array
corresponding roughly (as it would have to, in a space with one dimension too
few) to the vertices of a tesseract.
"Everything's set," Saash said. "Khi-t,
I would strongly recommend that you put a general-warding circle around both of
these when we're out of your way and down there working. I don't know that
anything from that side might try to come through a patent gate, if it should
stumble across one; but there are creatures in that part of Downside that,
though they're just animals by both our standards, could cause a lot of trouble
if they got loose in here."
"I'll take care of it," the young ehhif-tom
said. He opened the book he was carrying, leafed through it for a moment
and ran his finger down one page. "These personal-description parameters
look right to you?"
Saash and Rhiow both looked down at the wizard's
manual, which obligingly shifted the color of its printing so that they could
more easily read the graceful curves of the printed version of the Speech; and
Rhiow cocked her head to one side, hearing at the same time the Whisperer's
translation of the printed material. "That's fine," she said.
"Just one thing—" She put a paw out to the small block of print
containing the symbols that, in wizardly shorthand, described Arhu. There were
a lot of blank spaces in the equation that summed him up for spelling purposes.
"That configuration," she said, "is changing rapidly. And
in unexpected ways. Keep an eye on it...."
"Will do," Kit said.
"Let's go," said Saash. She reared up, slipped
her paws into the weave of the second gate, and pulled the lines of light
outward, wove them together—
The gate hyperextended again, this time the lines of
its intraspatial contours seeming to be pulled to a much farther-out infinity
than last time—impossible, but so it seemed, regardless. The lines stretched
and stretched outward, and there was almost a feeling of the watcher being
pulled outward as well, drawn thin, almost to nonexistence. Odd, Rhiow
thought. Possibly something to do with this locus being so close to one
that's malfunctioning—
—then snap,
the feeling was gone: and through the gate came the golden light of
somewhere else's summer afternoon ...
Urruah leapt through without apparent hesitation,
though Rhiow knew he had gone first so that no one should know how nervous he
had been. "Just jump through," Rhiow said to Arhu. "At all
costs, stay clear of the edges: even though there are safeties on the locus
boundaries, if one of them goes wrong somehow, you could lose a tail, or leg,
or something you'd miss more. You'll feel heavy on the other side. Be prepared
for it...."
She purposely hadn't told him what else he was going
to need to be prepared for, as Ffairh hadn't told her, all that time ago.
Better not to create impressions about the desirability of one's state Downside
... there would be enough temptations later. Arhu swallowed, crouched and
tensed, and jumped through, almost as neatly as Urruah had.
There was a thump on the other side, and a yowl... but
much deeper than a cat's yowl would have been. Kit craned his neck to see
through, looking slightly concerned. "He okay?"
Rhiow laughed softly. "That's the question of the
week. He's not hurt, anyway."
More yowling, this time tinged with surprise, was
coming through the open gate. "Rhi," Saash said, "let's go,
shall we, before our wonder child restarts those legends about giant demon cats
in the tunnels ... ?"
Rhiow chuckled. "You've got a point."
"Dai stiho," Kit said, the wizard's casual greeting and goodbye in
the Speech to another one: go well.
"Thanks," Rhiow said. She jumped through the
gate: Saash let go the control strings, took aim, and followed her.
-=O=-***-=O=-
There was the usual moment's worth of disorientation
as Rhiow felt her body adjust to its new status; then her vision cleared, and
everything was fine again. Rhiow shook herself all over, settling the pelt—it
was so close and short, compared to her usual fur, that she always felt
slightly naked for the first few seconds. Saash, true to form, was sitting down
and having a good scratch, watching Arhu with amusement.
"—Look at me! Look at me! I'm huge!"
Arhu was going around and around in a circle, trying to get a good look at
himself, but mostly looking as if he were chasing his tail. It was an amusing
sight: the white patch at the tail's end was now nearly as long by itself as
the whole tail had been. Rhiow thought privately that, if he survived to come
here to hunt later, he was going to have to do it by speed, for camouflage
wasn't going to be one of his strong points, not splashed all over with black
and white the way he was. Though, then again, she thought, on moonlit
nights, in broken country, it might work.... "And look at you!"
Arhu said, staring at Saash. She smiled a little crookedly, and Rhiow put her
whiskers forward in amusement. Saash was certainly worth looking at: a
tortoiseshell lioness, almost a ton of muscle. "And you!" Arhu said
to Rhiow. "And, oh wow," he said, seeing Urruah, whose tabby
patterning had kept its color but gone much more tigerish, to suit his shape
and size; he was nearly a taxicab high at the shoulder.
"What happened? Can we do this at home?"
"No," Urruah said. "Cats' bodies are
the same size as their souls, here. Your soul remembers our ancient history,
even if your body doesn't...."
"Look at
all this! Where are we?"
"IAh'hah." Saash used the Ailurin slang that was as close as the
average cat could come to pronouncing "New York."
He stared at Saash. "You're crazy!"
"This is New York, all right," Urruah said.
"Five hundred thousand years ago, maybe... and ten or twenty worlds
over."
"But this isn't our world," Arhu
said, not entirely as a question.
"No," Rhiow said, looking up and around
through the golden air. "Ours is related to it... but this one is older...
or it's simply still the way ours was, long ago. Hard to tell: time differs,
from world to world."
"And things that happen here... happen at home
too?"
"Yes. Often in different shapes, ones you might
not expect at first. Know how when you look in a puddle, you see yourself? But
the image is twisted: the wind touches it, it wrinkles..."
"Yeah."
"Like that. Except this world would be the
real you... and our world would be the image in the puddle, the mirror."
Arhu opened his mouth, shut it again. "You mean
... this is the real world? This is the way we're supposed to
look?"
"I didn't say that." Now it was getting
tricky. It had taken Rhiow a good couple of years' study to fully understand
the implications of interdimensional relations between worlds. "This world
is... in some ways... realer than ours. Closer to the center of things. But,
Arhu, there are other worlds a lot more central than this one ... and you can
go sshai-sau trying to define reality merely in terms of centrality. I
wouldn't suggest you start working on a definition at this early stage. Let's
just say that this is a place where you can be different... but you take care
not to do it for too long."
"Why not? I like this! It would be great to be
this way all the time!"
The paw came down on him, heavy, from behind, and
pushed Arhu down flat. Arhu twisted his head around to gaze up into the huge,
silver-gray face that loomed over him, narrow-eyed, fangs showing just a
little. Though Urruah's markings always went tigerish when he was Downside, he
always looked, to Rhiow, more leopardlike. But in this form he was also still
the biggest of them: and for all the lions' fearful reputation, leopards are
known even by ehhif to be the more dangerous and terrible hunters, wily
and fearfully powerful.
"You wouldn't like it," Urruah said,
"if you didn't have a mind."
Arhu just lay there and looked at him.
"Oh, sure," Urruah said, "hunt big
game, conquer a territory miles long, be big, be strong, eat anything you like,
have trees fall over at the sound of your roar: sounds great, doesn't it? But
there's a price, because none of us are supposed to stay out of our proper
worlds for very long. Little by little you start to forget who you are. You
forget your other lives if you've had any. You lose your wizardry, assuming
you've achieved it. You lose your history. Finally you lose your name. And then
it's as if you never existed at all, since when you die and Iau calls your name
to issue you with your next life, no one answers...." Urruah shrugged.
Arhu lay there looking rather stunned. "Okay,
okay," he said, "I guess I see your point. I like being me."
Urruah stood back and let him up. Arhu shook himself
off, sat down, and took a moment's he'ihh to correct his slightly
rumpled head fur. "But that stuff only happens if you stay here a long
time?" he said.
"As far as we know, yes," Rhiow said.
He looked rather sharply at her. "So what happens
if you die Downside before you forget?"
It was the crucial question, the one that had made it
harder than usual for Rhiow to get to sleep last night. "I don't know,"
she said.
"You mean ... even if you have more lives ... you
still might not come back." He was wide-eyed. "You mean you
just die dead... like a bug or an ehhif?"
"Maybe," Rhiow said. The Whisperer was
silent about this possibility ... and the concept that Hrau'f the Silent herself
had no information on this subject was not one that filled Rhiow with joy.
Moreover, she had absolutely no desire to be one of those who would supply the
information. ...
Arhu shook his head until his ears rattled, then
craned his neck to look up, gazing at the rank above rank of gigantic trees,
vanishing above them into the mist of a passing cloud. "It's a mountain
..." he said.
"It's the Mountain," Saash said.
"This is the center of everything."
"What's that tall thing up at the top ..."
His voice trailed off, his ears twitching, as the Whisperer had a word with
him.
"Oh," he said then, and sat down with a
thump.
"Yes," Rhiow said. "And down among the
Tree's roots, into the caverns, is where we're going."
"What, in the dark? I don't want to go down
there! I want to go over there!" He was staring at the narrow
flicker of sunny veldtland showing westward, past the forests. A faint plume of
dust hung above it, golden in the late sun: distant herds of game on the move.
But then he threw a look over his shoulder at Urruah, who had resolutely turned
his back on the vista.
"I just bet you do. Later," Rhiow said.
"Business first." She looked around them, caught Urruah's eye, and
nodded toward the cave entrance, in which hung the main control matrices for
all the Grand Central and Penn gates, all shimmering and alive with the fiery
patterns of normal function. Rhiow glanced back at the still-open gate through
which they had come, and flirted her tail at Kit, who was standing there
watching on the other side. He sketched her a small salute in return.
Can you hear me all right? she said inwardly.
No problems, Kit
said, the same way. It was a little odd: his thought to her sounded like one of
her own—the way inward speech between her teammates did. But this was
Speech-based telepathy rather than thought grounded in Ailurin, and Kit's
thought had a pronounced ehhif accent. Am I clear?
Just fine. "I
feel a lot better with them there," Rhiow said, turning away and making
her way sideways along the "threshold" stone, to where Saash already
had her claws into the weave of the malfunctioning gate.
"Those were ehhif wizards?" Arhu
said, padding along beside her.
"Yes."
"Very nice people," Urruah said. "Very
professional."
"Hmf," Arhu said. "They don't look like
much to me."
"That they were here to meet us," Rhiow
said, "indicates that Carl thinks they're two of the most powerful wizards
available in this area. The younger the wizard, the more powerful..." She
carefully did not say why, in case the Whisperer had not yet mentioned it to
Arhu: because the young don't know what's impossible yet, and do it anyway. "The
only wizards better at being powerful for a long time while young are the ones
who're whales. They stay children longest. Our latency period isn't that long,
relatively ... so we have to make up in extreme cleverness and adaptability
what we lose early on in sheer power."
She was gazing past the gates' control matrices,
toward the back of the cavern, and the darkness. "You don't want to go
down here, really, do you..." Arhu said.
"No."
"You're nervous. I mean, I heard you being... I
mean, you didn't say, I just thought..."
"You're beginning to be able to 'hear' some of
what goes on in people's minds," Rhiow said, wondering how she was going
to hide her discomfort at this realization. "Some wizards are better at it
than others." She threw him a look. "You want to keep what you hear
to yourself, by and large."
"Oh? Why?"
"Because," she said, phrasing it very
carefully, "we're likely to start hearing you, too ... and if you start
saying out in the open what you hear other People thinking, they're likely to
do the same for you ..."
His eyes widened a little at that, and he stared
somewhat guiltily at Urruah. Good, Rhiow thought, amused, and turned her
attention to Saash.
"How is it?" she said.
Saash was balancing on her haunches again, eyeing the
web of the master locus for the malfunctioning gate. She reached out a paw,
slipped it into the shining weft, hooked a claw behind a carefully selected
bundle of strings, and pulled. They stretched out toward her correctly, but the
gate still refused to hyperextend.
"No good," she said to Rhiow. "There's
a blockage of some kind between this gate and the power source, the catenary.
We're going to have to go down and troubleshoot the linkage from the bottom
up."
Her voice was unusually flat and matter-of-fact.
Rhiow, though, noticed Arhu watching her, and said, "I'm not wild about
mis, either. But we're all adequately armed...."
"We thought so last time too," Saash said.
Urruah had already slipped behind the gates and was
looking down into the darkness of the caverns, listening hard. As Rhiow came up
to him, he turned his head and said, "Quiet today."
"Not 'too quiet'?"
"No," Urruah said, falling silent again, and
Rhiow listened and saw what he meant. The water that had tunneled out of these
caverns, however many millennia ago, was still doing the same work, and you could
usually faintly hear the dripping of it, echoing up from below. The sound was
not entirely gone, today, but was somewhat more subdued than Rhiow was used to.
"It might have been a little droughty here,
lately," Rhiow said.
"It might not mean anything at all," said
Saash, coming up to join them, with Arhu behind her.
Rhiow lashed her tail "maybe," a touch
nervously. "Well," she said. "The sooner we catch this rat, the
sooner its back'll be broken. Arhu—stay with us. Don't go exploring. There are
miles of these caverns: no one knows all their branchings, and some of the
smaller ones aren't stable. You could seal yourself in if you meddled with the
wrong pile of rocks... and we wouldn't be able to get you out."
"But we can go through things," Arhu
said. "I did it in your big den, the station. A wizard who was stuck could
go through the rock—"
Saash and Rhiow exchanged a look. Too smart, this
one.,. "Yes," Urruah said, "but if you try it so close to
the main control structures of the gates, you could have real trouble. You're
halfway through a tunnel wall, say, and a nearby gate activates; the power
running up to it from the catenary below makes some very minor shifts in the
elementary structure of the stone... and all of a sudden, the stone you
described in your spell, when you started your little walk, isn't the same stone
anymore. Your spell doesn't work on that changed stone because the initial
description's no longer accurate. The spell structure unravels, and you get
stuck half in the wall and half out of it. In an argument like that... the
stone's older than you are: it wins."
Arhu's eyes went so round that Rhiow thought they
looked ready to pop out of their sockets. "So keep close," she said.
"And Arhu—keep alert. There are creatures who live down in these caves who
don't like us."
Urruah sniffed down his nose, an
oh-what-an-understatement kind of noise. "Come on," Rhiow said.
"Let's get this over with."
She led them down into the dark.
-=O=-***-=O=-
She remembered the way well enough from their last
intervention here, though even if she had not, the Whisperer knew the main
routes perfectly well—the explorations and interventions of other wizards, like
Rhiow's old master Ffairh in his time, would have been preserved in the Whispering
for anyone who might later need the information. As it was, it was a shame that
the context of where they were going and what they might meet tended to keep
them from enjoying this place on its own merits: in their upper regions, at
least, the caverns in the Mountain were beautiful enough.
The water had been a long time doing its work. As the
main cavern narrowed and began to slope downward, Rhiow picked her way along
among the upward-poking spines of pale stone, wondering a little at the lacy
structure of some of them: each had its cousin-spike hanging down from the
ceiling above. All these were dry now, the areas of active cavern formation
having receded farther down into the Mountain. But up here, Rhiow would have
welcomed the occasional drip or tinkle of water; it would have distracted her
from the image that always struck her, when they were forced to come this way,
that they were walking into a particularly fangy set of jaws, backed by a dark
and hungry gullet of stone. If you weren't careful, you could imagine the jaws
closing—
Cut that out, she
thought. The "gullet" narrowed and sloped down before them until it
was only a few feet wide, and the light from outside the main cavern opening
failed in the darkness beyond it. This was the only place in the Old Downside
where Rhiow found herself wishing she had a proper Person's body rather than
this ancient and attractive, but oversized, persona. The walls here always
brushed against her shoulders as she slipped through, yet there was no
corresponding feeling of her whiskers being anywhere near the walls, as there
would have been were she in her own body. The resultant sensation was
disconcerting, disorienting.
The walls squeezed down closer: the tunnel kinked,
kinked again. Rhiow slipped forward absolutely silently, listening hard. When
she had nightmares about being attacked here, the nightmares always involved
this spot: hemmed in by stone, no room to turn around, something bad behind
her, something worse waiting in front. She knew that attack so high up, so
close to the light and the day, was wildly unlikely. But still, it was the
unlikely things that would kill you—
Sudden relief, as the feeling of stone touching her
sides fell away, and the sound changed, even though it was only the nearly
inaudible little dry sound that Rhiow's paw-pads made on the stone. She
activated one of the spells she had brought with her, saying the last word of
it, and well ahead of her a tiny spark of faint green light came into being,
floating high up in the air. The color was carefully chosen: the Wise Ones did
not see in this frequency.
Behind her, first Saash, then Arhu, and finally Urruah
slipped into the larger cavern, looking around. In the faint light a vast array
of more stalactites—whole glittering white or cream or rust-banded chandeliers
of them—could be seen hanging from the ceiling. There were fewer standing
stalagmites here; gaps in the spiky ceiling and the shattered rubble on the
floor showed where the occasional groundshake or mere structural weakness had wrought
much damage over many years.
"It's pretty," Arhu said, sounding rather
befuddled.
"It is," Saash said. "Sometimes I wish
we could make a proper light when we come down here...." She shrugged her
tail.
Rhiow shrugged back, and said, "Come on. We've got
at least an hour's walk ahead of us...." Assuming we don't run into
anything that makes us need to go another way. Oh, please, Queen Iau, just this
once, let it be easy for us....
Rhiow had her doubts, though, as she led them downward
through that cavern and into the next one, as to whether this prayer was at all
likely to be answered. When you were in the company of a wizard on Ordeal,
anything could happen, probably would. The odds against a quiet intervention
were fairly high.
Behind her, as she padded through the wide entry into
the next cavern, Arhu was saying to Saash, "Why are you so nervous?"
Saash breathed out. "We were down here before,
about a sun's-round ago. Not a good trip."
"What happened?"
"Bad things," Urruah said from behind Arhu,
his voice plainly suggesting that one might happen right now if Arhu didn't
shut up.
He shut up. They walked a long way: down, always down,
through galleries and arcades of stone, mighty halls as big as the concourse in
Grand Central, twisting hallways as broad as the Hyatt passage. Sometimes the
links between caverns squeezed to tunnels as narrow as the first one, or
narrower: once the ceiling of one of these tunnels dropped so low that Rhiow
had to get down on her belly and crawl forward, a few inches at a time, pushing
herself along with an effort. Behind them she could hear the others doing the
same, Urruah last and suffering most because of his size— grunting and swearing
very softly under his breath. It was at such times, her own breath sounding
intolerably loud to her, the others', behind her, sounding even louder, that
Rhiow always got the feeling that the Mountain was listening: that the stone
itself was alive—though impassive—and watching them, though without any feeling
of interest as a living being would understand it... without anything but a
sense of weight. Hostility she could have coped with: benign neglect would have
been fine. But this gave her the creeps, the sense of the stone piled up
above her, the Mountain pressing down on her back, on her head....
Cut it out, she
told herself, annoyed, and pushed forward. ...
They went onward, and downward. The sound of water
faded away to nothing or grew again, by turns. The little green light bobbed
ahead of them into places where water was now actively dripping so that they
were rained on under the earth, and Saash muttered and hissed under her breath,
having to stop every twenty paces or so to shake water out of her eyes or
smooth back into place some patch of fur that she simply could not leave alone
any longer. Generally Saash was pretty good about controlling her fur fixation
when she was on errantry, but down here she had problems, and Rhiow was in no
mood to call her on them: she had problems of her own. The weight of the
stone, the silence of it... watching...
She thought of the cool stony regard of the statue of
Queen Iau in the Met and broke away from the other imagery with pleasure. The
comfortable, dusky blue light of that space: it would be a pleasure to be back
up there again, strolling among the ancient things. Rhiow thought of the clay
chicken pot there, with a very realistic chicken carved on the upper side of
it, and how she had laughed once to see an almost exact duplicate of the thing
in the window of a kitchen shop in the upper Eighties, off First Avenue. Down
in this darkness, it was all too easy to stop believing in sunlight, and
museums, and traffic noise, and taxi horns blaring, and all the rest of normal
life in the city. Yet all those things—the buildings, the ehhif, the
noise, and the hurry— had their roots here, in the roots of the Mountain, in
this darkness, this silence. Without this, none of those could exist.
They went onward, and downward. Several times Rhiow
stopped, and the others—perhaps looking elsewhere—ran into her from behind, or
into each other, so that soft hisses were exchanged, or the occasional cuff.
Once Arhu—who had been uncharacteristically silent, catching the others' mood,
or perhaps himself unnerved at the way he was starting to hear the waiting, listening
stone—crowded too close to Saash. She stopped suddenly, perhaps hearing
something: Arhu bumped into her, Urruah bumped into Arhu, and Arhu turned
around and actually hit Urruah in the head. Rhiow turned just in time to see
the pale green spark of surprise in Urruah's eyes, the flicker of anger, and
then the sudden and very welcome return of humor. He said rrrrrrr under
his breath, and Arhu backed into Saash, who promptly smacked nun.
Arhu started to say rrrrrr on his own behalf,
but Rhiow shouldered between him and Saash. "All right," she said,
"come on. Tension. All our nerves are shredded like the Great Tom's ears
at the moment: why try to pretend they're not? We don't have much farther to
go. Arhu, how are you holding up?"
"It reminds me of, of—" His tail was
lashing. "Never mind. Let's go."
They went on again: still downward. The sound of
dripping water had faded away again; there was nothing now to be heard but
their own breaths, and the faint sound of their paw-pads on the dry, rough
stone—sometimes a tchk as one of them kicked or shifted a bit of stone,
and the sound fell flat and loud into the surrounding stillness. The little
green light was starting to make Rhiow's eyes water, and sometimes her
concentration on it faltered, so that it flickered slightly in the dark, like a
candle guttering out. It would be nice, she thought, if there
were wizardries you could just start and ignore afterwards. ... But there
were no such things. A wizardry needed attention at regular intervals,
re-description of its basic tenets, of the space you intended to affect, and
the effect you were trying to have; otherwise it lapsed—
—the light went out—
Rhiow stopped short. I didn't do that—
Utter stillness behind her. The others were holding
their breaths. Then Arhu whispered, "Is that a light up there?"
Her eyes were relaxing back to handling complete
darkness again, or trying to—in night this total, even the keenest-eyed feline
was helpless. But there was indeed a faint, faint glow coming from up ahead—
It's the catenary, she thought. Thank you, Iau.
But why did my light go out?...
"It's the power source," she whispered back
to Arhu. "We're almost where we're going. Saash?"
The dim, dim light started to seem brighter with time;
as she turned, Rhiow could actually see Saash's face, and her ears working. She
had the best hearing of any of them.
"Nothing," she said very softly. "Let's
do what we have to, Rhi, and get ourselves out of here again. We've been
lucky."
So far, Rhiow
heard her add.
Silently Rhiow agreed. "The next chamber is very
big," she said to Arhu. "It has to be: the catenary structure is what
feeds power up to the gate loci, and its inwoven wizardry very carefully
controls a large clear space around it. We'll have to deactivate that wizardry
before we start working, and before that we'll be laying down a protective
circle. You must stay inside that circle at all costs, no matter what happens
to any of us: if you venture outside it while the catenary's control
wizardry is down, and accidentally come in direct contact with the energy of
the catenary—you'll be dead, that's all. Clear about that?"
"Uh huh," Arhu said, and Rhiow heard him
gulp.
"Good. Come on, crew."
She led the way toward the faint glow. The tunnel
narrowed and kinked again, then opened out into the next chamber.
Here the stone was more gray than pale. The chamber
had numerous openings, and a floor that was flattish and devoid of stalagmites,
dropping to a shallow depression in its middle. From that depression, right out
of the solid stone of the floor, almost straight up to the ceiling and
apparently into and through it, a tightly coiled and interwoven bundle of
hyperstrings stretched. Up and down it, in many colors, ran a fierce, bitter
light, much more dangerous-looking than the weft of the gates above. The whole
structure jittered and sizzled with power, all the while wavering slightly in
the air as if it were a plant swaying in some breeze. The effect was actually
caused by the hyperstrings' bundled structure being more than usually affected by
changes in gravitic stresses and the local magnetic field, and, for all Rhiow
knew, by neutrino flow.
"Wow," Arhu said from behind her. "How
are you going to fix this?"
"By shutting it down and taking it apart,"
Rhiow said. "Urruah?"
"I'll make a circle," he said, and started
pacing out, to one side of the cavern, the protected area from which they would
operate. As he paced, looking intently at the floor and occasionally pushing a
bit of cracked stone or rubble out of the way, the sigils and symbols of the
Speech started to appear glowing on the stone, a long flowing
sentence-equation. All their names, and descriptions of them all, were woven
into it as well: otherwise the spell would have no way to know who it was
protecting. All the rest of the written circle, looking more and more as Urruah
worked like a glowing vinework of words in the Speech, was in the most
technical of its dialects, mostly involving the control and redirection of
energy flows, and based on words that had originally been Ailurin. Of all
wizards working on Earth, the People knew most about energy—being able to
clearly perceive aspects of it that ehhif and other species' wizards
couldn't. Even nonwizardly People had an affinity with warmth, a link to fire
and the Sun, which other species had noticed: it was traceable back to this
native talent for seeing and managing energy flows.
Rhiow glanced at Saash: she was watching the openings
into the cave, listening, on guard. Rhiow strolled over to have a look at
Urruah's work—it was routine, in a group wizardry, to check your teammates'
work, as a failsafe to catch errors. Urruah was making a third pass around the
circle, its design growing more and more complex. Again and again the symbol
for the word auw, "energy," appeared in numerous compound
forms. Most of the terms that Urruah was using here were specialist
terminologies relating to auwsshui'f, the term for the "lower
electromagnetic spectrum," which besides describing "sub-matter"
relationships such as string and hyperstring function also took in quantum
particles, faster-than-light particles, wavicles, and sub-atomics. He was
paying less attention, for this spell's purposes, to efviauw, the
electromagnetic spectrum, or iofviauw, the "upper electromagnetic
spectrum," involving straightforward plasma functions, fission, fusion,
and gravitic force: gating energies were by and large subtler and more
dangerous than any of these.
The circle completed, Urruah stopped after a few
moments and actually panted a little, looking back at his handiwork.
"You all right?"
"Yes," he said. "It just takes it out
of you a little, dumping it all out at once like that."
"I know. Nice job, though." Rhiow paced
around the circle, looking at it. "Seems complete. Saash? Come check your
parameters. Arhu, look at this—"
The other two came over. Rhiow pointed at one gappy
sequence of symbols. "See that?" she said to Arhu. "That's your
name—or the version of it we use for spelling. Look at the version of your name
that the the Whisperer shows you inside your head—check it against this
version, make sure this one's right. A spell is nothing but descriptions of
things, and people, and something you want to happen. When you trigger the
spell, the description it contains will change what you've described. Describe
yourself wrong, and you'll change ... whether you like it or not."
He squinted at the glowing network of symbols.
"Yeah. Uh, right."
'Take your time over it. Be sure. Saash?"
"It's fine. He knows me well enough by now."
She glanced up at Urruah, amused. "Though I'm not sure I scratch that much."
"If you don't now," Urruah said, with some
amusement, "you will later."
Saash hissed, a sound of affectionate annoyance. Arhu
looked up then and said, "I think—" He put a paw out, hesitated.
"Can I touch it?"
"Sure," Urruah said, "it's not active
yet."
"There's a piece missing here—" He put a paw
on one spot where there was a "place-holding" gap with several
graceful curves stitched over it, indicating, to a wizard's eye, To be
continued... All their names had such gaps, here and there, but Arhu's had
whole chains of them. "She—" he said, and sounded embarrassed.
"She says—"
"Go ahead, put it in," Urruah said.
"The matrix will pick it up from you. Make a picture of it in your
head."
Arhu frowned and thought, while he did so jutting his
chin out in a way that made Rhiow smile slightly, thinking of Yafh around the
corner from her: he got a similar "concentrating" look while
pondering imponderables, endearing because of how witless it made him look.
After a second, a pair of symbols appeared in the place-holding area, and the
to-be-continued sigil relocated itself farther along in the diagram. Rhiow
looked thoughtfully at the new symbols. They looked familiar, but she couldn't
place them....
The Whisperer spoke briefly in her ear, just a word or
two.
Rhiow froze. Oh, no, she thought. Not
really. No...
She straightened hurriedly. "All right," she
said, "we're in order. Saash, are you ready? Anything that needs to be
done to the catenary before we get inside?"
"Not a thing. Let's start."
"Arhu, jump in," Rhiow said, and did so
herself.
Saash followed; Urruah was last in. He planted his
paws, claws out, in the "trigger" area of the spell, and said the
word that would initiate the circle.
It blazed, the vinework that had been distinguishable
part by part and in detail when dimmer now bloomed into a blur of white-golden
fire, shimmering and alive. Urruah looked vacant-eyed for a moment, then said
to Rhiow, "It's powered up for the next twenty minutes or so."
"Good. Let's go. Saash?"
She was sitting in the circle, scratching. Rhiow said
nothing; Urruah glanced at her, his whiskers forward, and looked back down at
the circle.
"Do you have a skin problem or something?"
Arhu said.
Rhiow hissed at him and cuffed him, not too hard.
"If she did, it would still be preferable to your tact problem," she
said. "You just be still and watch."
Saash sat up then and looked over at the catenary.
It began, slowly, to drift toward them: a pillar of
structured, high-tension fire, like a rainbow pulled out into hair-fine strands
and plugged into much too high a current, ready to blow something out: itself
or you.
Arhu watched it come, wide-eyed. "Is this
safe?" he said.
"Not at all," Rhiow said calmly. "If
that power came undone and we weren't in here, we'd be ash. If that. The power
bound up in that could melt the whole island of the city into a bowl of slag
half a mile deep if it was given enough time. The only thing that's going to
control it, when it gets in here with us, is Saash. Got any more comments on
the condition of her fur?"
He stared, watched the catenary drift closer.
"Nice color," Arhu said, and his tongue went in and out twice, very
quickly.
He II have a sore nose before the day's done, at this
rate, Rhiow thought; but at the same
time, she was less interested in the catenary than in that symbol in Arhu's
name, now lost in the bloom of fire of the activated circle.
The catenary drifted up against the boundary of the
circle, touched it. Light flared at the contact, and the catenary bounced away,
drifted back again: another flare, a smell of something singeing, not here but
somehow somewhere else. Rhiow's nostrils flared. It was the scent of the
kind of magic they worked with, in combination with the gate-forces, as
inimitable and unmistakable a scent as the cinder-iron-ozone reek of the Grand
Central tracks. Subatomic-particle annihilations, hyperstring stress, who knew
what caused the smell, or whether it was even real? It meant that things were
working ... for the moment.
The burning, twisting column of the catenary pushed
against the circle, bowing it inward in one spot Saash's eyes were fixed on it,
rainbowed with its fires as she guided the catenary in by force of will toward
the spell that would catch it and hold it still for operation. "It's going
to pop through in a second," she said to Urruah, her voice calm enough,
but strained a little higher than usual. "Got the pocket ready for
it?"
"Ready." He slid his left paw over to
another part of the circle, sank his claws into the fire.
The catenary pushed farther into the circle, the
stream and sheen of light down its length getting brighter and fiercer, the
smell getting stronger. The circle bent inward to accommodate its passage, a
curve-bud of light pushing inward around the contour of the column of fire.
Abruptly, with a jerk, the catenary broke free of the circle, broke through—
A smaller circle, the completed "bud," now
surrounded the base of the column, where it erupted from the stone: another one
encircled it higher up. Rhiow saw Arhu's nervous glance upward. "The
spell's spherical," she said. "You need to extend at least one extra
dimension along when you're working with these things."
Arhu backed away from the catenary as it drifted into
the center of the circle, stopped there. "All right," Saash said,
pacing around it once and looking it over. "See that bundle there? The one
that looks mostly blue. That's the one for the gate that's giving us
trouble."
"How do you want to handle this?"
Saash sat down and had another scratch, looking oddly
meditative and calm for someone who was nose to nose with a concentration of
power in which a small nuclear explosion might be drowned out, if not entirely
missed. "I'm going to shut down everything but Penn, and the one Grand
Central gate that Khi-t's holding patent," she said. "The Penn power
linkages are right over on the other side of the bundle ... no need to involve
them, and it'll give anyone who needs to do a transit somewhere to divert to
for a little while."
"Right." Kit, Rhiow said inwardly, we're
taking all the Grand Central gates down but yours.
Right—we 'II divert anyone who shows up. Let us know
when you 're done.
Saash got up, finished with her scratch, then paced
once more around the catenary, looking it up and down. One spot she leaned in
to look at with great care, a braided cord of blue and blue-white fires as
thick as the wrist of her forepaw. With great care and delicacy, she leaned
closer, then shut her eyes—and bit it.
Sparks flew, the light grew blinding; the singeing
smell got stronger. Arhu stared.
More than half the catenary went dark, or nearly so.
Saash straightened, looked the pillar of fire up and down.
"All right," she said. "That's better." The
"dark" bundles and strands weren't completely dead, but now shone
only as brightly as the weft of one of the gate matrices up at the surface. She
sat up on her haunches in her preferred operating position and reached into the
dark bundles, pulling out a hefty double clawful of them.
"Here," she said suddenly to Arhu,
"come on over here." He did, looking dubious. "Right. Now hold
these for me. Don't be scared, they won't hurt you. Much," she added, her
whiskers going forward just a little as she shoved the pulled-out strings at
him, and Arhu, more from reflex than anything else, grabbed them and hung on.
His eyes went wide with shock as he felt the sizzle of the catenary's power in
his paws—the ravening fire of it just barely leashed, and as anxious to get at
him as a guard dog on a chain.
"Good," Saash said, not even looking at him
as she pulled out another of the bundles of hyperstrings and handed them off to
Rhiow. Rhiow settled herself on her haunches as well, hanging onto the strings,
and Saash looked over the bundle, slipped a careful claw behind three or four
of the strings, and slashed them. They leapt free, glowing and hissing softly,
and lashing like angry tails. "Don't let those hit you," she said
conversationally to Arhu, "they'll sting. Rhi, remember last time, when
that whole bundle came loose at once?"
"Please," Rhiow muttered. "I'd rather
be attacked by bees. At least they can sting you only once."
Saash was elbow-deep in the catenary now, slowing down
a little in her work. "Hmm," she said. "I wonder..." She
leaned in again, pulled forward one particular minor bundle of strings, glowing
a pale gold, and took it behind her front fangs, closed her mouth; then looked
unfocused for a moment, an expression like the "tasting" look she
made when breathing breaths with someone. After a few seconds, Saash's eyes
flicked sideways toward Rhiow. "Aha," she said.
'"Aha,"' said Rhiow, slightly edgy. Her mind
was on those openings all around them, but more on Arhu. "Care to give us
an explanation of what that means in the technical sense?"
"String fatigue," Saash said.
Rhiow blinked. You came across it, occasionally, but
more usually in the gate matrices, higher up. Usually a hyperstring had to be
most unusually stressed by some repetitive local phenomenon to degrade to the
point where it stopped holding matter and energy together correctly.
"There's a bad strand here," Saash said.
"It's not conducting correctly. Tastes 'sick.'"
"What would have caused that?" Urruah said.
Saash shrugged her tail. "Sunspots?"
"Oh please."
"No, seriously. You get more neutrinos at a
maximum. Add that to the flare weather we've been having recently— get a good
dose of high-energy stuff through a weak area in a hyperstring, it's likely enough
to unravel. In any case, it's not passing power up the line to the gate."
"I thought the power conduits were all redundant,
though," Urruah said.
"They are. That's the cause of the problem here.
The 'sick' strand's energy states have contaminated the redundant backup as
well because they're identical and right against each other in the
bundle." Saash looked rather critically at the catenary. "Someone may
have to come down here and rebraid the whole thing to prevent it happening
again."
"Please don't
say that," Rhiow said. "Can you fix it now?"
"Oh, I can cut out the sick part and patch it
with material from another string," said Saash. "They're pretty
flexible. I'd just like to know a little more about the conditions that
produced this effect."
"Well," Rhiow said, "better get
patching. Are the other strings all right?"
"I'm going to finish the diagnostic," Saash
said. "Two minutes."
They seemed long to Rhiow, although nothing bad was
happening. Her forearms were aching a little with the strain of holding the
hyperstrings at just the angle Saash had given them to her; and meanwhile her
eyes kept dropping to that symbol, almost lost in the fire of the circle but
not quite. It was simple: two curves, a slanted straight line bisecting them—in
its way, rather like the symbol that even the ehhif had known to carve
on the Queen's breast.
The Eye—
She looked up suddenly and found Arhu sitting there
with his claws clenched full of hyperstrings and gazing down at it, too, while
Saash, oblivious, pulled out several bright strings in her claws and began to
knit them together. Arhu's expression was peculiar, in its way as meditative as
Saash's look had been earlier.
"They have a word for it, don't they?" he
said.
"For what?" Rhiow said. "And who?"
"For this," Arhu said, glancing up again at
his paws full of dulled fire. "Ehhif."
"Cat's-cradle," she said. "For them
it's just play they do with normal string, a kitten's game."
"They must have seen us."
"So I think, sometimes," Rhiow said.
Arhu's glance fell again to the symbol, to the Eye.
"So has someone else," he said.
Rhiow licked her nose and swallowed, nervous.
"All right," Saash said after a minute.
"That ought to be the main conduit of the bad gate repaired. I'll just do
the second here, and we'll be finished."
"Hurry," Rhiow said.
"Can't hurry quality work, Rhi," Saash said,
intent on what she was doing. "How's the circle holding up?"
Urruah examined it critically. "Running a little
low on charge at the moment. How much longer is this going to take you?"
"Oh ... five minutes. Ten at the outside."
"I'll give it another jolt." Urruah bent
down: the circle dimmed slightly, then brightened.
Arhu looked up from the circle then. Not at the
catenary, not at Saash: up into the empty air.
"They're coming," he said.
Rhiow looked at him with alarm. "Who?"
But she was afraid she knew perfectly well.
"He didn't lie," Arhu said, looking at
Urruah with rather skewed intensity. "They are here."
"Uh oh," Urruah said. "You don't
mean—"
"The dragons—!"
And then the roaring began. It was not very near
yet—but it was entirely too near, echoing down through one of those openings
... or all of them.
Rhiow rapidly went through the spells she was carrying
in her head, looking for the one that would have the most rapid results against
the attackers she was expecting. One of them was particularly effective: it ran
down the adversary's nerves and rendered them permanently unresponsive to
chemical stimulus—the wizardry equivalent of nerve gas, and tailored
specifically to the problem at hand. But it wouldn't be able to get out of a
protective circle; you would have to drop the circle to use it. And those who
were coming were fast. If you miscalculated, if one of them jumped at you and
put a big long claw through your brain before you could get the last word out—
"Rhiow? Rhiow!"
Her head snapped around. Arhu was still sitting there
with his claws full of strings, but now they were trembling because he was.
"What's that noise?" he said.
"What you said was coming," she said.
"What I said—" He looked confused.
"This is what he did before, Rhi," Urruah
said, looking grim. "Saash?"
"Not right now," Saash said, her voice
desperately level. "If I don't finish this other patch, the whole job'll
have to be done again. Let them come."
"Oh, sure," Urruah said. "Let them
'tree' us inside the circle, five bodies thick! Then what are we supposed
to—"
"No," Arhu said, and the word started as a
hiss of protest, scaled up to a yowl. "No—!"
The Children of the Serpent burst in.
Rhiow knew that ehhif had somewhat rediscovered
dinosaurs in recent years. Or rather, rediscovered them again, only more
visually than usual this time. She had once heard Iaehh and Hhuha idly
discussing this tendency for each new generation of their kind to become
fascinated with the long names, the huge sizes and terrible shapes. But in
Rhiow's opinion, the fascination had to do with the ehhif perception that
such creatures were a long time ago and far away. And the most recent
resurrection of the fascination, in that movie and its sequel, were rooted in a
variant on the same perception: that long ago and far away was where and when
such creatures belonged.
But this too had become one of the places where they
belonged. They did not take kindly to intruders. And they certainly would not
let any leave alive....
Arhu started to crouch down, trembling, at the sight
of them, as if he had forgotten what he was holding. "Saash!" Rhiow
hissed, and without missing a beat, Saash let go of the strings she had been
working on—they snapped back into place in the catenary—and took hold of the
ones Rhiow had held. Rhiow bent down before Arhu could finish collapsing, and
snatched the strings out of his paws. He was wide-eyed, crouching right down
into a ball of terror a pitiful and incongruous sight with him in this body,
which would have been large and powerful enough to bring down the biggest
wildebeest. But the hunt was in the heart, as the saying went: Rhiow couldn't
entirely blame him for not having the heart for this one as the Children of the
Serpent poured into the cavern and hit the circle, claws out, roaring hunger
and rage.
Urruah lifted his head and roared too, but the sound
was almost drowned in the wave of shrieks of hate that followed it. Single
sickle-claws three feet long scrabbled against the circle, jaws half the size
of one of their bodies tried to slash or bite their way in; and everywhere on
your body, though nothing touched you physically, you felt the pressure of the
little, cold, furious eyes. There was intelligence there, but it was drowned in
hatred, and gladly drowned. The impression of outraged strength, pebbled
and mottled greenish- and bluish-hided bodies throwing themselves again and
again at the circle; the impression of raging speed, and the interminable
screaming, a storm of sound in this closed-in place: that was what you had to
deal with, rather than any single, rational impression of This is a
deinonychus, that is a carnosaur—
"That's what it was," Arhu was moaning,
almost helplessly, like a starving kitten. "That's what it was—"
Rhiow swallowed. "The circle's holding?" she
said to Urruah.
"Of course it is. Nothing they can do about it.
But how are we going to get out?"
It was a fair question. He had said "five
deep"; possibly he had been optimistic. The cavern was now packed so full
of saurians that there was no seeing the far wall, except for the part near the
roof, above the tallest heads. Rhiow had a sudden ridiculous vision of what
Grand Central would look like at rush hour if it were full of saurians, not
people: a whole lot like this. We need shopping bags, though, she
thought, pacing around the circle, forcing herself to look into the terrible
little eyes, the jaws snapping futilely but with increasing frustration and
violence against the immaterial barrier of the circle: and Reeboks and
briefcases. Or no, maybe the briefcases wouldn't be in the best of taste—
"Done," Saash said.
"The whole repair?"
"Yes. I'm going to bring up the rest of the Grand
Central complex again," Saash said. "Tell our connection to get
ready."
Heard that. Kit
said. We're set. Rhiow, if you need help, there's backup waiting.
Might need it, Rhiow
said, but it's hard to say. Hang on—
Saash leaned into the catenary again, put out one
single claw, inserted it into an insignificant-looking little loop in one
string—it looked like a snag in a sweater—and pulled.
The loop straightened, vanished. The catenary came
alive again, the full fire of its power bursting up through the strings that
had been offline. Saash stood watching it, her head tilted to one side,
listening.
"Feels right," she said. "Khi-t?"
We've got the gates back, said another voice: Nita's. Want us to test the bad
one?
"Please."
The screaming and scrabbling and clawing went on all
around them, undiminished. Okay, it hyperextended all right—
"I saw that," Saash said. "The
catenary's feeding the patched string properly. Shut it again?"
—Closed.
Saash sat down and started to scratch again, looking
surprisingly satisfied with herself, under the circumstances. "I deserve
some milk."
"So do we," Urruah roared at her, "and
we also deserve to get out of here with our pelts intact, which seems
increasingly unlikely at the moment! What in Iau's name are we supposed to do now?"
Saash looked at the catenary, then back at Rhiow, and
slowly her whiskers started to go forward.
"Oh, no, Saash," Rhiow said. "Oh no."
"Why not? Have you got anything better?"
Saash said. "You want to try the odds of dropping the circle and having
time to hit them with the neural inhibitor? I don't think so, Rhi! There
are so many of them leaning against that spell right now, they'd just squash us
to death the second we dropped it, never mind what else they'd do to us. Which
they will, as you remember from last time."
Rhiow swallowed. Arhu stared at Saash in dumb terror.
Urruah said, "Just what are you thinking of?"
Saash started to smile again, a smile entirely in
character with a giant prehistoric predator-cat. "I'm going to push the
catenary back out there without its 'insulating" spell in place,"
Saash said.
"Your brain has turned to hairballs!" Rhiow
shouted. "What if it degrades the circle on the way through?"
"It won't."
"How sure are you?"
"Very sure. I'll leave the 'insulation' in place
until after I've shoved it outside."
"Oh, wonderful, just great! And what about when
you take the insulation off, have you thought that it might just degrade the
circle then, and blast us all to ashes?"
"It shouldn't."
"Shouldn't—!"
"You want to sit here and wait them out?"
Rhiow looked out at the room full of roaring,
shrieking saurians. Those at the far side of the room were already settling
down to wait.
"It won't work. No matter how long we sit
here, they'll wait," Saash said. "And sooner or later we're going to
need food and sleep, and as soon as the last one of us goes to sleep, and the
circle weakens enough to let them in—"
Urruah looked from Rhiow to Saash, then back to Rhiow
again. "She's got a point," he said.
Rhiow's tail was lashing. "You think you have a
life or so to spare?"
"You want to find out if it matters," Urruah
said, more gently than necessary, "down here?"
Rhiow licked her nose again, then looked at Saash.
"All right," she said. "I concur."
"Right," Saash said.
She looked at the catenary. It drifted toward the edge
of the circle; its own protective circles drifted with it.
Some of the saurians nearest the place where it was
about to make contact looked at the catenary with the first indications of
concern. Its rainbow fire fell into their big dark eyes, turning them into a
parody of People's eyes—bright slits, dark irises; they blinked, backed away
slightly.
"They're not wild about the light," Urruah
said.
Saash nodded. The small circle surrounding the
catenary made contact with the larger one: they "budded" together
again. As if becoming somewhat uneasy at this, more of the saurians began to
back away, and the screaming and roaring started to take on an uncomfortable
edge. Some of the saurians nearer the walls stood up again, began to mill
around, catching their companions' unease. Saash closed her eyes then and held
quite still.
In one swift motion the catenary popped back out
through the circle. It was now bereft of the smaller, "child" circles
that the main protective circles had generated around it, and saurians jostled
away from it as it drifted quickly back to its original position in the center
of the cavern.
The saurians parted around it, closing together again
nearest the circle, and going back to their raging and scrabbling against its
invisible barrier. Saash looked over their heads as best she could, past them,
to where the catenary had now settled itself back in place.
"Ah1 right?" she said. "Mind your eyes,
now."
Rhiow started to close hers but was caught too late.
The catenary suddenly stopped being merely a fiercely bright bundle of rainbows
and turned into a raging floor-to-ceiling column of pure white fire. Lightning
forked out of it in all directions, at least what would have passed for
lightning. The whole cavern whited out in a storm of blinding fire that hissed
and gnawed at their circle like a live thing. All Rhiow's fur stood on end, and
her eyes fizzed in their sockets. Behind her, Arhu cried out in fear. The
desperate shrieks of the saurians were lost in the shrieking roar of the
unleashed catenary.
Eventually things got quiet again, and Rhoiw scrubbed
at her tearing eyes, trying to rub some vision back into them. When she could
see again, the catenary was once more sizzling with its normal light. But there
was little else left in the cavern that was not reduced to charcoal or ash, and
nothing at all left that was alive in the strictest sense... though bits and
pieces here and there continued to move with lizardly persistence.
Saash stood there, looking around her with grim
satisfaction. "Definitely," she said, "not at all wild
about the light."
Urruah got up and shook himself, making a face at the
smell. "I take it I can drop the circle now."
"It's as safe as it's going to get, I
think," Rhiow said, "and once it's down, we can use the other spell
if we need it." She went over to the crouching Arhu. "Arhu, come
on—we have to go."
He looked up and around him, blinking and blinded, but
Rhiow somehow got the idea that this blindness had nothing to do with the light
"Yes," he said, and got up. Urruah had hardly collapsed the circle
before Arhu was making hurriedly for the cavern-entrance through which they had
come. "We have to hurry," he said. "It's coming—"
Urruah looked from Arhu to Rhiow. "Now what?"
"What's coming?" Saash said.
"The greater one," he said. "The
father. The son. Quick, quick, it's coming!" His voice started to shade
upward into a panicky roar. "We've got to get out before it comes!"
Rhiow's tail was lashing with confusion and concern.
"I'm willing to take him at his word," she said. "There's no
reason to linger—we've done what we came for. Let's get back up to the
light."
-=O=-***-=O=-
It took less time than going down had taken. Despite
the thought that they might shortly be attacked again, they were all lighter of
spirit than they had been—all of them but Arhu. He wouldn't be quiet: the whole
way up through the caverns with him was a litany of "It's coming" and
"That's what it was ..." and "the greater one," and
an odd phrase that Rhiow heard only once: "the sixth claw ..." Arhu
didn't grow silent again until they came up into the last cavern, past the
great teeth of stone, to see the red-gold light of that world's sunset, and the
green shadows beneath the trees beyond the stony threshold. There he stood for
a long time while Saash checked the main matrix for the repaired gate, and he
gazed at the declining sun as if he thought he might never see it again.
The thought had certainly been on Rhiow's mind
earlier; but now that they were up and out, there were other concerns. She
glanced through the patent gate to the darkness beneath Grand Central, from
which Kit and Nita were looking through, interested. "Many thanks,"
she said. "Having you here as backup lent us the confidence to go all
out."
Kit made a small, only fractionally mocking bow: Nita
grinned. "Our pleasure," she said. "We're all in the same
business, after all. Want us to leave this open for you?"
Rhiow looked over at Saash. "No," Saash
said, turning away from the matrix she was checking. "I want to check its
open-close cycle a couple more times. But nicely done, my wizards. Go well, and
let's meet well again."
"Dai," the two said; and the gate snapped from its view of the Grand Central
tracks to the usual shining warp/weft pattern.
Rhiow turned to Saash, who said, "The matrix is
just fine now. That design flaw in the braiding of the catenary is going
to have to be looked at, at some point. But not just now..."
"No," Rhiow said. "I'll talk to Har'lh
about it; I'll have to report to him this evening anyway. But, Saash ... what a
job. And you did wonderfully, too," she said to Urruah. "Not many
circles could have taken that punishment."
She went over to where Arhu was standing. He looked at
Rhiow with an expression equally composed of embarrassment and fear.
"I screwed up," he said.
She breathed in, breathed out. "No," she
said, and gave him a quick lick behind one ear. He stared at her, shocked.
"You started your Ordeal. Now at least we have some kind of hint of what
your problems are going to be."
He looked at her, and away again, toward the sunset:
the sun was gone now, the darkness falling fast.
"Yes," he said, in a voice of complete
despair. "So do I."
What with the report for Har'lh, and seeing Saash and
Arhu safely back to the garage—for Arhu still seemed very disturbed, though his
litany of fear had stopped—it was late before she got home. At the sound of the
kitty door going, Hhuha looked up from where she was sitting, reading in the
big chair. From inside, in the bedroom, a man's voice was saying, "And now
tonight's list of Top Ten Reasons to call the Board of Health—"
"Mike," Hhuha said, "she's back."
Rhiow ran across to her and jumped in her lap,
purring, before Hhuha could rise. "Oh, you rotten little thing,"
Hhuha said, picking her up and nuzzling the side of her face, "I've been
worried stiff, where the heck have you been all evening?"
Once again Rhiow wondered, as she had before, which ehhif
demigod Heck was. "Don't ask," she muttered. "But I'm glad
to be back, oh, believe me I am. Mmm, you had pizza again. Any leftovers?"
Hhuha held her away a little, leaving Rhiow's hind
legs dangling. "I wish you wouldn't do that," Rhiow added, with a
rueful glance down at her legs. "It's hardly dignified."
"I wonder," Hhuha said, "are you
getting out somehow?"
From the bedroom, a snort could be clearly heard over
the laughter coming from the picturebox. "There's nowhere for her to get
out but twenty stories down, Sue," the answer came. "And if she's
doing that, how's she getting back?"
"I hate it when he's sensible," Hhuha muttered,
holding Rhiow close again. "Well, you're okay. I'm so glad. I'll give you
some of that nice tuna."
"I'll eat it," Rhiow said,
"though I must be out of my mind."
But neither of them moved for a few minutes: Hhuha
just held Rhiow more or less draped over her shoulder, and Rhiow just let her,
and they purred at each other. Moments like this make it all worthwhile, Rhiow
thought. Even the almost-getting-eaten-by-dinosaurs part. For the work
she did was as much about keeping Manhattan safe for ehhif as for
People, and about making it easier for wizards of all kinds to keep the planet
going as it should. Wizards had kept various small and large disasters from
befalling the city in the past and would do so often again; on the smallest
scale, they did it every day. And the purpose, finally, was so that normal life
could go on doing what it did—just trying to manage the best it could and
finding what joy there was to be found along the way. Entropy was running: the
heat was slowly bleeding out of the worlds, and nothing could be done to
actually stop the process. But wizards could slow it down, however slightly,
and make a little more time for everyone else to purr at each other in....
"You must be hungry," Hhuha said, and didn't
move.
"Starving," Rhiow said, and didn't move,
either.
She glanced around, her head resting on Hhuha's
shoulder. Papers were all over the place again, on the living-room table and in
a heap by the chair. "I'm going to shred some of those if I get a
chance," Rhiow said lazily, her tail twitching a bit with the pleasant
image. "I wish you'd find something else to do with your days; you so
dislike what you have to do now."
'Talk talk talk," Hhuha said, having just caught
the last few sounds of the sentence as a soft trill. "You are hungry,
I bet. Come on."
She finally put Rhiow carefully down on the rug and
went to open another can of cat food. Rhiow sat, watching it with some
resignation, since her nose told her plainly that the leftover pizza was in the
microwave, and there was pepperoni on it.
They always leave it there and sneak slices in the
middle of the night. Would they ever notice if I just opened it one night, took a slice out, and
closed it again? If I timed it right, each of them might think the other one
did it....
"How much of that pizza is left?" Iaehh's
voice came from the bedroom.
"About half."
"Bring me some?"
"How much?"
"About hah0."
"Pig."
"Controlling personality."
"Pizza in bed. Disgusting."
"Call it a lifestyle choice."
"You can damn well choose about half of about
half. I get the rest."
"Forget it," Rhiow said then, with amusement
and resignation, as Hhuha filled her bowl again. "It would never work...
you two talk to each other too much. If this relationship were a little more
dysfunctional, I'd eat a lot better, you know that?"
"There you go," Hhuha said, straightening up
from the food bowl. "What a good kitty."
Rhiow set about eating the awful tuna at her best
possible speed, so that she could get into the bedroom before the pizza was all
gone.
-=O=-***-=O=-
Much later, both of them were snoring, and Rhiow lay
at the end of the bed, looking at the yellow Venetian-blind light and thinking.
In particular, she was looking at a chance group of wrinkles in the blanket at
the end of the bed: they looked a little like two curves and a slash across
them.
The Eye.
We've got a visionary on our hands, Rhiow thought.
Seers turned up occasionally among wizards, just as
among non-wizards—though there would always be those who would argue that any
seer was probably actually some kind of wizard anyway. The talent was not
widespread. Wizards as a class might be more liable, by the nature of their
work, to the sudden flash of insight that could be mistaken for genuine
future-seeing: and to a lesser extent, they were sensitive to dreams and
visions—perhaps the Whisperer, in her most benevolent mode, trying to hint at
where danger might lie, since she was not allowed to warn you directly. But
some few wizards sidestepped even her boundaries and saw clearly what
might happen if things kept going the way they were going at present. Some did
so with dreadful clarity. They tended not to last long: they were usually claws
in the One's paw and (as the myth had it) usually personified the Claw That
Breaks, the razor-sharp but brittle weapon that inflicts a fatal wound on the
enemy, but itself does not survive the battle. Having a seer in the vicinity
meant that the Lone Power would start noticing you back with unusual
persistence ... not a happy scenario. I had a lot of plans for this life yet,
Rhiow thought. This is not good.
She thought once more of Arhu's voice crying, That's
what it was. That's what it was— "'It' what?" she said softly.
And she sighed. She was going to have to press him on that point, and it was
going to be painful. Rhiow was sure it had something to do with the condition
in which they had first found him: she had her suspicions, but she needed
confirmation from him, to tie up that particular loose string.
And there were others. One was a very small thing, but
it was still bothering her.
Why did my light go out?
Rhiow went back in thought, suddenly, to her first
diagnostic on the malfunctioning gate, the other day. The gate had as much as
told her that it had been interfered with, somehow, during its function.
But nothing should be able to produce such
interference except more wizardry.
Another wizard...
She shied away from that thought. There were rogues,
though they weren't much discussed. The common knowledge was that wizardry did
not live in the unwilling heart: a wizard uncomfortable with his power, unable
to bear the ethical and practical choices it implied, soon lost the power, and
any sense of ever having had it. But a wizard who was quite comfortable with
the Art, and then started to find ways to use it that weren't quite ethical...
Normally such wizards didn't last long. The universe,
to which wizardry was integral, had a way of twisting itself into unexpected
shapes that would interfere with a rogue's function. Equally, there was no
particular safety in assuming that a rogue was willingly cooperating with the
Lone One— or with what It stood for. Like many another ill-tempered craftsman,
sa'Rrahh the Destroyer was careless with her tools, as likely to throw them
away or break them in spite as to reward them for services done. So when rogues
appeared, they tended to be a temporary phenomenon.
Yet a personally maintained wizardry, once done and
set in motion, shouldn't be able to be interfered with.
Except by the wizard who created it...
Rhiow bunked once or twice as that thought intruded.
Did something affect me down there?
She thought hard. The recurring difficulties she had
been having with threatening imagery ...
Surely not.
But when had she ever had anything like that happen
before? Certainly she had been scared to the ends of her guard-hairs the last
couple of times she'd been Downside. But nothing had gone wrong inside her
head.
There were ways, though, to get inside another being's
mind against its will. Wizards knew about them... but did not use such
"back doors" except in emergencies: they were highly unethical.
But if one of my team—
She put the thought aside. It was ridiculous. Saash
would never do any such thing: her commitment to the Powers, and to Rhiow
personally, was total. She was incorruptible, Rhiow would swear. Urruah was,
too: he was just too stubborn and opinionated, once he had his mind made up
about which side he was on, to change without signs as readable as an
earthquake.
But Arhu...
Rhiow found herself thinking, once more, about the
weak link, the new link, the new "member" of the team.
That was something she was going to have to deal with,
of course, and the sooner the better... how much she disliked the idea of
having a team member simply thrust on them, even if it was by the Powers
That Be. Teams of wizards came together willingly, for reasons of work and
affinity ... otherwise they fell apart under the strain of frequent exposures
to life-or-death situations. Feline teams, made up of members of the most
independent-minded species on the planet, had to have close personal
relationships and had to be absolutely convinced of each other's reliability.
One came by such certainty only slowly. She and Saash
had started working together a while after they met, about a year after Rhiow
had passed her Ordeal, maybe two years after Saash's. It had been a casual
thing at first—pulling together to do an assigned job, then drifting apart
again. But the "apart" periods had become fewer and fewer as they
realized they had a specialization in common. This was a commonplace phenomenon
among wizards. After the first blaze of power associated with your Ordeal, the
power begins to fade somewhat with age: but you soon find something to
specialize in, and make up by concentration and narrowing of focus what you
lose in sheer brute force, becoming, in a phrase Rhiow had heard Har'lh use
once, "a rifle instead of a fire hose." After a while she and Saash
started to be "listed" together in the Whispering as "associated
talents," the Manual's delicate way of suggesting that they were beginning
to become a team. Some time after that, Urruah turned up in their professional
Me as a "suggested adjunct" for a couple of missions, and simply
became part of the team over time.
There were still a lot of things they all didn't know
about each other, but wizardry by no means required total disclosure, any more
than relationships in the rest of life did. How many lives along you were, what
you had gone through in this one ... how much personal information came out,
and when, was all a matter of trust and inclination, and the need for privacy
that was inextricably part of feline life and which balanced them both.
Rhiow would swear to the Queen's own face, though,
that she knew Urruah and Saash well enough to say that neither of them would
ever go rogue or sabotage a wizardry in process. If there had been
sabotage today, its source was elsewhere.
And as for Arhu...
She sighed. She would have to deal with him tomorrow.
But not before noontime, anyway. They would all need a good night's sleep
tonight, odd as it was to be asleep now. Over the next few days, they
could all get back to their normal schedules.
She stretched out on the bed, rolled over so that her
feet were in the air in what Hhuha described as the somebody-shot-my-cat
position, and let herself drift off to sleep, but not before burping once,
gently, as the pepperoni settled itself.
-=O=-***-=O=-
By noon the next day she was at the garage and was
surprised to meet Saash by the door, lying sprawled well out of the way of the
cars, but there was no sign of Arhu.
"Sleeping," Saash said, washing one paw
calmly.
"He could probably use it."
"Don't know, Rhi," Saash said, standing up
and arching her back to stretch, then lying down again. "I wonder if he
might not be better awake."
"You saw the Eye, then."
"I did. Risky business this, Rhi. He's likely to
attract high-profile attention."
"Believe me," Rhiow said, "it's on my
mind. How did you sleep?"
"After the jitters went away ... well enough.
But, Rhi, I'm not going down there again for a good long while, not if Iau Dam
of Everything walks right in here and offers me Her job."
"Don't see why we should," Rhiow said.
"Even Ffairh went only three or four times in his career, and only once
down deep."
"May She agree with you," Saash said, and
stood up— looked around carefully for any sign of Abad, and then scratched, and
afterward sat down and began washing the fur into place again. "Meanwhile,
are you going to let him sleep?"
"No," Rhiow said. "And I have an
excuse. Where's Urruah this morning?"
"Off again. Something about his o'hra."
"Spare me," Rhiow said, putting her whiskers
forward. "Look, you get some more sleep if you can. I'll take him off your
hands for the day: he can go with me to check the track-level gates out again
this afternoon—I want to see if they've replaced that switching track yet.
Maybe help them a little if I can, now that the problem with Thirty's solved.
If you want me, call."
"Thanks, Rhi," Saash said, and let out a
cavernous yawn. "Don't wait for the call, though."
Rhiow sidled herself and made her way up to the ledge
where Saash slept. There was Arhu, curled up small and tight, as if trying to
pass for a rock. His breathing was so shallow, it could hardly be seen.
She hunkered down near him, and purred in his ear.
There was no response.
Right, she
thought, and extended a claw, and sank it carefully into the ear closest to the
ground.
He whipped upright, eyes wide, and stared at her; then
slumped back down again, the eyes relaxing again to a dozy look, with more than
a touch of sullenness to it. "What?"
"It's time you were awake," Rhiow said.
"After yesterday? Come on." He put his head
down again, closed his eyes.
Rhiow put her claw into the other ear this time, and
somewhat more forcefully. Arhu sat up, and hissed. "What?"
"Trying not to see," Rhiow said,
"won't help."
He stared at her.
"That's not what I'm here about," she said,
"not mostly, anyway. I promised to teach you to walk on air. The sooner we
get this lesson handled, the better... since you're going to be going on rounds
with us for a while yet, I think, and we can't slow ourselves down all the time
by using non-climbing routes. Get up, have a wash, you'll have your first
lesson, and then we'll get you something to eat Some more of that pastrami,
maybe?"
Arhu looked at Rhiow with a little more interest. But
the look suddenly went cooler. "I'm not going back down there," he
said.
"Good," Rhiow said, a little wearily,
"then you and Saash are in complete agreement. It's not high on my list,
either. Come on, Arhu, let's get a move on...."
-=O=-***-=O=-
The lesson went quickly: faster than Rhiow would have
thought possible. It reinforced a feeling she had been having, that Arhu could
learn with blinding speed when he wanted to... and right now he wanted to, in
order to get rid of Rhiow.
Purposely, therefore, Rhiow spun the lesson out. An
hour and a half later, they were standing on the air directly above the roof of
Grand Central, maybe thirty stories up, sidled, and fairly close to the windows
of the Grand Hyatt. Rhiow had to smile, for many of those windows did not have
their curtains pulled, and inside them, one could see (as one almost always
could) the occasional pair of ehhif doing what Hhuha sometimes
facetiously called "the cat-scaring thing." Rhiow could not remember
when she had last been scared by it, even by some of the noises Hhuha and Iaehh
made in their throes. Arhu, however, had been betrayed by his prurient
curiosity, and was watching one pair of ehhif with complete and
disgusted fascination.
"Don't skywalk where you can easily be
seen," Rhiow was saying, while wondering how much of what she told him was
sinking in. "If you do it between buildings, make sure the walls are blind
... or that you're sidled. Which has its dangers, too. Birds won't see
you...."
"That could be nice," Arhu said, briefly distracted;
he glanced around and licked his chops.
" 'Nice'? It could be fatal. There are more kinds
of birds in this city than pigeons and sparrows and starlings. If one of the
Princes of the Air hits you at eighty miles an hour, you'd better pray you're
high enough up for a long-enough fall to reconstruct the wizardry."
"The Princes—"
"And a couple of 'princesses,'" Rhiow said.
"There's a falcon-breeding program based on top of a building down near
Central Park South. One of the hatchlings, about ten clutches ago, was a
wizard: he's been promoted since, to Lord of the Birds of the East—a Senior for
his kind. The rest of them are stuck-up as anything, think they're royalty, and
kill more pigeons in a given day than they need to. They're a menace. Especially
if they hit you with one of those little claw-fists of theirs, at high
velocity, while you're invisible. The impact alone might kill you, for all I
know. It sure kills the pigeons."
She sighed then as the two ehhif fell together,
exhausted, at the end of their bout. "Come on," she said.
"Enough looking for one day ..."
Arhu's tail lashed. "If I stop looking at
this," he said, almost absently, "I'll just see something
else...."
Yes, Rhiow
thought, that's the problem, isn't it.... "Come on," she said,
"and we'll go down to the concourse and see about that pastrami. You can't
see things while you're eating, I don't think. The chewing is supposed to
interfere."
He looked at her with a glitter of hope in his eyes.
"AD right," he said.
They walked down the air together, Arhu still doing it
very slowly and carefully, as if it were a normal stairway; went right down to
ground level, nearest the wall, and slipped inside the brass doors. Arhu looked
around them as they walked together past the main waiting room toward the
concourse.
Suddenly Arhu stopped and stared. "What are those?"
he whispered.
Rhiow looked over into the waiting room. It had been
one of the first areas to have its refurbishment completed, and was now
routinely used for art exhibitions and receptions, and sometimes even parties.
At the moment, though, the big airy space looked oddly empty, even though there
were things in it... rather large things. In the center of the room, on a large
black pedestal with velvet crowd-control ropes around it, caught in
midstride—almost up on its toes, its tail stretched out horizontally and
whipping out gracefully behind it—a dinosaur skeleton was mounted. Its huge
head, empty-eyed, jaws open, seemed to glare down at the few casual observers who
were strolling around it or pausing to read the informational plaque mounted
nearby.
Rhiow gazed up at it and smiled sardonically.
"Yes," she said, "I guess it doesn't look much like what we were
dealing with last night. A lot bigger. These are part of the Museum of Natural
History's new exhibition ... and the ehhif are all excited about it
because now they think they know, from these new models, how the saurians
really held themselves and moved."
Arhu took a few steps toward the biggest of the
mounted skeletons .... cocked his head to one side, and listened. After a
moment, he said, "And those are real bones?"
"They dig them up and wire them together,"
Rhiow said. "It always struck me as a little perverse. But then, they have
no way of seeing what we saw last night."
They walked on. "This place looked a lot
different, the other night," Arhu said.
"If it's any help, it never looks the same way
twice to me," Rhiow said. "I mean, the physical structures are always
the same, obviously—well, not always, not with all this renovation and with
exhibitions coming and going out in front But night and day pass, the light
changes, the ehhif here are never the same ones at any given moment....
Though the city still isn't as big as you might think: you'll glimpse the occasional
familiar face..."
"That's not what I meant," Arhu said, more
slowly, with a puzzled expression. "It was bigger, somehow. It
echoed."
"It does that more at night than in the
daytime," Rhiow said. "Emptier."
"No," Arhu said. "It was full; I saw it
full. Or I think I do now." He stopped and stared at the concourse before
him: a late lunchtime crowd, the crush easing somewhat. "I heard something
... a lot of noise. I walked in to find out what it was. Then—" He shook
his ears as if they hurt him. "I don't want to think about that," he
said.
"You're going to have to, sooner or later. But
come on," Rhiow said. "Pastrami first."
Rhiow came unsidled long enough to do her
"trick" again for the man in the Italian deli, and he gave her not
only pastrami but cheese as well. She shared the pastrami happily enough with
Arhu but never got a chance to do so with the cheese: as soon as he smelled it,
he immediately snatched the whole thing and gobbled it, almost choking
himself—a topologically interesting sight, like watching a shark eat a
mattress. "Oh, this is wonderful," Arhu attempted to say around the
mouthful, "what is this?"
"Solid milk," Rhiow said, just a little
wistfully, watching it vanish. "They have a lot of kinds. This one's
called 'mozzarella.'"
"What a terrific invention!"
"So ehhif are good for something
after all?"
He glanced sidewise at her, and his face shut down
again. "Not much besides this."
Rhiow held her peace until he finished the cheese.
"Come on, get sidled," she said, "and we'll come back and see
him again later: he's a soft-hearted type."
They strolled a little way out into the concourse, sat
down by the east wall, out of the way of people's feet, and well to one side of
the cash machines. Arhu craned his neck back in the bright noon light and
looked up at the ceiling again. "It is backward."
"Yes ... and you saw that before. Seeing is going
to be a problem for you now ... and a gift."
"If it's a gift, they can take it back," he
said bitterly. "I can't stop seeing things now. Though you were
right about the chewing."
"What kinds of things?"
"I don't know what most of them are," Arhu
said. "It's like when the Whisperer... when she tells you stuff... but
there's always more than just what she tells you. I see pictures of things
behind things behind things, and it all keeps changing. I don't know where to
put my feet."
"Images of alternate futures," Rhiow said,
wondering if she now was beginning to understand Arhu's clumsiness. Arhu looked
at her strangely.
"Anything can change a future," Rhiow said.
"Say one thing, do one thing, and it goes one way. Do something else, and
it goes another. What would have happened if the Whisperer had offered you the
Oath, and you'd said no? What if you'd slipped off the brickwork, the other
night? What if the police-ehhif had come and caught you trying to steal
the pastrami, and they had taken you away to an animal shelter? Each of your
futures would have been different. And there are thousands more."
"But which of them is real?" Arhu
muttered.
Rhiow swished her tail slowly from side to side.
"All of them... until you make the choice, perform the act. You're only
seeing possibilities."
"But it's not just things behind things,"
Arhu said. "There are other images, things that stay."
"The past," Rhiow said softly. "That at
least holds still. . . some ways, anyway. Are you seeing your past lives?"
"No," Arhu said, and then added, very
surprised, "I think this is my first one."
"We all have to start somewhere," Rhiow
said.
"How many have you had?"
She gave him a look. "That's a question you don't
usually ask. If the Person you're talking to volunteers the information—"
He scowled, turned away. "That's what Saash said
when I asked her what her Ordeal was like."
"And she was right to say so," Rhiow said.
"That's personal business, too, as personal among wizards as the issue of
lives is among People. Go around asking People questions like that and you're
going to get your ears boxed."
Arhu looked scornful. "You guys are sure
sensitive. Won't talk about this. Can't do that, somebody's
feelings might get hurt. How do you ever get anything done?"
"If there were more People in the world
concerned about being sensitive," Rhiow said, rather shortly, "we'd
have a lot less work to do.... Look, Arhu, you've had a bad time of it so far,
I'd say. But we're trying to teach you the rules so that you'll have a better
tune later. All I can do is warn you how People are going to take the things
you say. If you still say them..." She shrugged her tail.
They were quiet for a moment. "As to lives,"
Rhiow said then, "I don't think all that much about my last ones. Most of
us don't, I suspect, after the first few, when the novelty of the change wears
off. The really persistent memories—big mistakes, great sorrows or joys—they
intrude sometimes. I don't go digging. What you stumble across, from day to
day, you're usually meant to find for some reason. But caching memories is as
sick as caching food, for one of our People. Better to live now, and use the
memories, when they come to mind, as a way to keep from making the same
mistakes all over again. Use the past as a guide, not a fence."
"The past..." He looked out into the golden
light of the concourse, toward the sunlight spilling through the south windows.
"I don't remember much of mine."
"You don't have to tell me."
"I do," Arhu said, somewhat painfully.
"You don't trust me."
There was no answer to that, not right now: and no
question but that he was seeing at least some things with surprising clarity.
"Arhu," Rhiow said, "it's just that if your gift is seeing ...
and it looks that way ... you have to try to manage it, use it... and
especially, you have to try to accept what there is to see about yourself, when
it comes up for viewing. You are the eye through which you see. If the
eye is clouded, all the other visions will be, too ... and at this dangerous
time in your life, if you don't do your best to see clearly, you won't
survive."
He would not look at her.
He sees something, Rhiow thought. Something in his own future, I bet. And he thinks
that if he doesn't talk about it, it won't happen....
"For the time being, you just do the best you
can," Rhiow said at last. "Though I admit I'd be happier if I knew
you were coming to some kind of terms with your Oath."
"I said the words," Arhu said after a little
while.
"Yes. But will you hold by them?"
"Why wouldn't I?" The voice was completely
flat.
Rhiow swung her tail gently from side to side.
"Arhu, do you know what entropy is?"
He paused a moment, listening. 'Things run down,"
he said finally. "Stuff dies. Everything dies."
"Yes."
"But it wasn't meant to ... not at first."
"No," Rhiow said. "Things got
complicated. That's the story of the worlds in one bowl. All the rest of the
history of all the worlds there are, has been about the issue of resolving that
complication. It will take until the end of the worlds to do it. Our People
have their part to play in that resolution. There will be a lot of fighting ...
so if you like that kind of thing, you're in the right place."
"I wasn't yesterday," he said bitterly.
"I couldn't have fought anything. I was fooling myself."
So that much self-vision is in play, whether he thinks
so or not, Rhiow thought. "In
the strictly physical sense, maybe," Rhiow said. "But nonetheless,
you said what you saw. You tried to warn us. You may have given Saash that
little impetus she needed to hurry and finish what she had to do before the saurians
came in. That's worthwhile, even that little help. You struck your first
blow."
"I don't know if I even did it on purpose,"
Arhu said.
"It doesn't matter," Rhiow said. "The
result matters. We got out alive... and for a while, there was no way to tell
whether we would or not. So, by and large, your presence yesterday made a
difference."
She stood up, stretched, let out a big yawn.
"Let's get a little more concrete," Rhiow said. "Anyway, I want
to have a look at that track."
Together they walked through the concourse, slipping
to one side or another to avoid the ehhif, and made their way down to
the platform for Track 30. A repetitive clanking noise was coming from a little
ways down in the darkness, and Rhiow and Arhu paused at the platform's end to
watch the workmen, in their fluorescent reflective vests and hard hats, working
on something on the ground, which at the moment was completely obscured by all
of them standing around it, watching.
Rhiow threw a glance over at the gate, which was
visible enough to her and Arhu if not to the workmen; the patterns of color
sheening down it said that it was back to normal again. "Good," she
said. "And it looks like that track's almost ready to go back into
service. Come on," she said, and hopped down off the platform, onto the track
bed.
Arhu was slightly uneasy about following her, but
after a moment he came along. She led him carefully around the workmen, past
the end of Tower A, and then back down in the direction from which they had
first come, but this time at an angle, down toward the East Yard, where trains
were pulled in for short-term storage during the morning and evening rush
hours. She was not headed for the yard itself, but for a fire exit near the
north side of Tower C. Its heavy steel door was shut; she glanced over at Arhu.
"Down here," she said, and put a paw into the metal.
Arhu hesitated for a moment. "Come on, you did it
just fine the other night," Rhiow said.
"Yeah, but I wasn't thinking about it."
"Just remember, it's mostly empty space. You're
mostly empty space. Just work the solid parts around each other..."
Rhiow walked through the door. After a moment Arhu
followed, with surprising smoothness. "Nice," Rhiow said, as they
went down the stairs together. The light here was dun even by cat standards,
and Rhiow didn't hurry —there was always the chance you might run into someone
or something you hadn't heard on the way down.
At the bottom of the fire exit, they walked through
the door there and came out on the lower track level, on another platform, the
longest one to be seen on this level. More fluorescent lights ran right down
its length toward a low dark mass of machinery at the platform's end; electric
carts and manually powered ones stood waiting here and there. "The tracks
on this side are primarily for moving packages and light freight to and from
the trains," Rhiow said; "bringing in supplies and equipment for the
station, that kind of thing. But mostly that kind of traffic takes place during
the evening or late at night. In the daytime, this area doesn't get quite so
much official use ... and so others move in."
Arhu looked alarmed. "What kind of
'others'?"
"You'll see."
They walked northward along the platform to the point
where it stopped, across from a sort of concrete-lined bay in the eastern wall.
Rhiow jumped down from the platform and crossed the track to the right of it.
"This track runs in a big loop," she said, "around the terminal
ends of the main tracks and out the other side. Not a place to linger: it's
busy night and day. But things are a little quieter up this way."
She ducked into the bay and to the left, pausing to
let her eyes adjust—it was much darker down here than out in the cavernous
underground of the main lower track area, with all its lines of fluorescents
and the occasional light shining out the windows of workshops and locker rooms.
Behind her, Arhu stared into the long dark passage. Huge wheels wrapped full of
fire hose, and mated to more low, blocky-looking machines, were bolted into the
walls, from which also protruded big brass nozzles of the kind to which fire
equipment would be fastened. A faint smell of steam came drifting from the end
of the corridor, where it could be seen to meet another passage, darker still.
"What is this? And what's that?" Arhu
whispered, staring down the dark hallway. For, hunched far down the length of
it, against one of the low dark machines, something moved ... shifted, and
looked at them out of eyes that eerily caught the light coming from behind
them.
"It's a storage area," Rhiow said.
"We're under Forty-eighth Street here; this is where they keep the fire
pumps. As for what it is—"
She walked down into the darkness. Very slowly, she
could hear Arhu coming up behind, his pads making little noise on the damp
concrete. The steam smell got stronger. Finally she paused by the spot from
which those strange eyes had looked down the hallway at them. It seemed at
first to be a heap of crazily folded cardboard, and under that a pile of old,
stained clothing. But then you saw, under another piece of folded cardboard
from a liquor store box, the grimy, hairy face, and the eyes, bizarrely blue.
From under the cardboard, a hand reached out and stroked Rhiow's head.
"Hunt's luck, Rosie," Rhiow said, and sat
down beside him.
"Luck Reeoow you, got no luck today," Rosie
said. Except that he didn't say it in ehhif. He said, "Aihhah
ueeur Rieeeow hanh ur-t hah hah'iih eeiaie...."
Arhu, who had slowly come up beside her, stared in
complete astonishment. "He speaks our language!"
"Yes," Rhiow said, taking a moment to scrub
a bit of fallen soot out of her eye: solid particulates from the train exhausts
tended to cling to the ceiling over here because of the steam. "And his
accent's pretty fair, if you give him a little credit for the mangled vowels,
the way he shortens the aspirants, and the 'shouting.' The syntax needs work,
though. Rosie, excuse me for talking about you to your face. This is
Arhu."
"Hunt's luck, Arhu," Rosie said, and reached
out a grubby hand.
Arhu sat down just out of range, looking even more
shocked than he had when the Children of the Serpent burst through into the
catenary cavern the night before.
"I don't know if Arhu is much for being petted,
Rosie," Rhiow said, and tucked herself down into a comfortable meatloaf
shape. "He's new around here. Say hello, Arhu."
"Uh, hunt's luck, Rosie," Arhu said, still
staring.
"Luck food not great stomach noise scary,"
Rosie said sadly, settling back into his nest of cardboard and old clothes. All
around him, under the cardboard, were piled plastic shopping bags stuffed full
of more clothes, and rags, and empty fast food containers; he nestled among
them, arms wrapped around his knees, sitting content, if a little
mournful-looking, against the purring warmth of the compressor-pump that would
service the fire hose coiled above him.
Arhu couldn't take his eyes off the ehhif. "Why
is he down here?" he whispered.
"Alalal neihuri mejhruieha lahei
fenahawaha," Rosie said, in a
resigned tone of voice. Arhu looked at Rhiow, stuck about halfway between fear
and complete confusion.
"Rosie speaks a lot of languages, sometimes mixed
together," Rhiow said, "and I have to confess that some of them don't
make any sense even when I listen to them with a wizard's ear, in the Speech;
so some of what he says may be nonsense. But not all. Rosie," she said,
"I missed that one, would you try it again?"
Rosie spent a moment's concentration, his eyes
narrowing with the effort, and then said, "Short den full hai'hauissh police
clean up."
"Ah," Rhiow said. "There was a big
meeting of important people in town, a 'convention,'" she said to Arhu,
"and the cops have stuffed all the shelters, the temporary dens, full of
homeless people, so they won't make the streets look bad. Rosie must have got
to the shelter too late to get a place, huh Rosie?"
"Uh huh."
'"Homeless—"' Arhu said.
"We'd say 'denless.' It's not like 'nonaligned,'
though; most ehhif don't like to wander, though there are exceptions.
Rosie, what have you had to eat since you came down here? Have you had
water?"
"Hot cloud lailihe ruhaith memeze pan airindagha."
"He's sshai-sau," Arhu said.
"Maybe, but he can speak cat, too," Rhiow
said, "which makes him saner than most ehhif from the first pounce.
You've got a pan down there in the steam tunnel, is that it, Rosie? You're
catching the condensation from the pipes?"
"Yeah."
"What about food? Have you eaten today?"
Rosie looked at Rhiow sadly, then shook his head. "Shihh,"
he said.
"Rats," said Rhiow, and hissed very softly
under her breath. "He knows the smell of food would bring them. Rosie, I'm
going to bring you some food later. I can't bring much: they'll have to see me,
upstairs, when I take it."
There was a brief pause, and then Rosie said, with
profound affection: "Nice kitty."
Arhu turned away. "So this is one of the the
People-eating ehhif I heard so much about," he said. There was no
deciphering his tone. Embarrassment? Loathing?
"He's one of many who come and go through these
tunnels," Rhiow said. "Some of them are sick, or can't get food, or
don't have anywhere to live, or else they're running away, hiding from someone
who hurt them. They come and stay awhile, until the transit police or the
Terminal people make them go somewhere else. There are People too, who drift in
and out of here ... many fewer of them than there used to be. This place isn't
very safe for our kind anymore ... partly because of the Terminal people being
a lot tougher about who stays down here. But partly because of the rats.
They're bigger than they used to be, and meaner, and a lot smarter.
Rosie," Rhiow said, "how much have the rats been bothering you?"
Rosie shook his head, and cardboard rustled all around
him. "Nicht nacht night I go up gotta friend rat dog, dog, dog, bit me
good, no more, not at night..."
"Rats bad at night," Arhu said suddenly.
Rhiow gave him an approving look, but also bent near
him and said, too softly for an ehhif to hear, "Speak normally to
him. You're doing him no kindness by speaking kitten."
"Yes bad, heard them bad, loud, not two nights
ago, three," Rosie said, his voice flat, but his face betrayed the alarm
he had felt. "Smelled them, smelled the cold things—" There was a
sudden, rather alarming sniffing noise from under the cardboard, and Rosie's
eyes abruptly vanished under the awning of cardboard, huddled against a sleeve
that appeared to have about twenty more sleeves layered underneath it,
alternately with layers of ancient newspaper. Rhiow caught a glimpse of a
familiar movement under the bottom-most layer that made her itch as if she had
suddenly inherited Saash's skin.
The sniffing continued, and Arhu stared at Rosie and
actually stepped a little closer, wide-eyed. The cardboard spasmed up and down,
and a little sound, huh, huh, huh, came from inside it "Is he
sick?" Arhu said.
"Of course he's sick," Rhiow muttered. "Ehhif aren't supposed to
live this way. He's hungry, he's got bugs, he keeps getting diseases. But mat's
not the problem. He's sod. Or maybe afraid. That's 'crying,' that's what
they do instead of yowl. Water comes out of their eyes. It makes them ashamed
when they do that. Don't ask me why."
She turned away and started to wash, waiting for Rosie
to master himself. When the sobbing stopped, Rhiow turned back to him and said,
"Did you see them come through here? Did they hurt you? I can't tell by
smell, Rosie: it's your clothes."
The cardboard moved from side to side: underneath it,
eyes gleamed. "They went by," he said, very softly, after a little
while.
"Did you see where they came from?" Rhiow
said.
The head shook again.
"Which 'cold things,' Rosie?" Rhiow said.
"They roar ... in the dark..."
Rhiow sighed. This was a familiar theme with Rosie:
though he would keep coming down here to hide, trains frightened him
badly, and he seemed to have a delusion that if they could, they would get off
the tracks and come after him. When life occasionally seemed to ratify this
belief—as when a train derailed near enough for him to see, on Track 110—Rosie
vanished for weeks at a time, and Rhiow worried about him even more than she
did usually.
"All right, Rosie," she said. "You stay
here a little while. I'll come back with something for you, and I'll have a
word with the rats ... they won't come while you eat. Will you go back to the
shelter after the convention's done?"
Rosie muttered a little under his breath, and then
said, "Airaha nuzusesei lazeira."
"Once more, please?"
'Try to. No purr not long tired lie down not get
up."
Rhiow licked her nose; she caught all too clearly the ehhif's
sense of weariness and fear. "We have got to get you some more
verbs," she said, "or adjectives, or something. Never mind. I'll be
back soon, Rosie."
She turned and hurried away, thinking hard about
Rosie's clothes, and putting together a familiar short description of them in
her head, in the Speech, and of what she wanted to happen to them, and what was
inside them. "Come on, Arhu. You don't want to be too close to him in the
next few seconds."
"Why? What's the matter? What's he going
to—"
Well down the hallway, Rhiow paused and looked back.
In this lighting, it would have taken a cat's eyes to see what she and Arhu
could: the revolting little multiple-branched river of body lice making their
way in haste out of Rosie's clothes, and pouring themselves very hurriedly out
every available opening, out from under the cardboard and out across the floor,
where they pitched themselves down a drain and went looking for other prey.
"I wonder if they like rat?" Rhiow said, and
smiled, showing her teeth.
She loped back out of the corridor, with Arhu coming
close behind her, and together they made their way back to the fire exit.
"But that," she said softly to Arhu,
turning to look at him just before she slipped ahead of him through the metal
of the door, "was entropy."
-=O=-***-=O=-
Out in the concourse again, the air seemed much
fresher than it had a right to in an enclosed space where diesel fumes so often
came drifting out of the track areas; and the sunlight pouring through the
windows was doubly welcome. Rhiow paced along up the staircase to the
Vanderbilt Avenue entrance; sidled again, she and Arhu jumped up on the cream
marble colonnade railing and walked along it to where they could perch directly
over the big escalators going up into the MetLife building. There Rhiow started
a brief wash, a real one this time.
"That was completely disgusting," Arhu said,
staring out and down at the shining brass of the information kiosk in the
middle of the concourse floor.
"What? The lice? I guess so. But I always do that
when I see him. It's a little thing. Can't you imagine how he must have
felt?"
"I can imagine it right now," Arhu said with
revulsion, sat down, and started scratching as if he too had had Saash's pelt
wished on him.
"He's a sad case," Rhiow said. "One of
many. The ehhif would say that he fell through the safety net." She
stopped washing, sighed again: Rosie's sadness was sometimes contagious.
"When we're not minding the gates ... we try to spread our own net to
cushion the fall for a few of those who fall through. People ... ehhif... whoever.
We take care of this place, and since they're part of it for a while ... we
take care of them too."
"Why bother?" Arhu burst out. "It won't
make a difference! It won't stop the way things are!"
"It will," Rhiow said. "Someday ...
though no one knows when. This is the Fight, the battle under the Tree:
don't you see that? The Old Tom fought it once, and died fighting, and came
back with the Queen's help and won it after he'd already lost. All these
fights are the Fight. Stand back, do nothing, and you are the Old
Serpent. And it's easy to do that here." She looked around at the place
full of hurrying people, most of them studiously ignoring one another.
"Here especially. Ehhif kill each other in the street every day for
money, or food, or just for fun, and others of them don't lift a paw to help,
just keep walking when it happens. People do it, too. Hauissh goes
deadly, toms murder kittens for fun rather than just because their bodies tell
them to.... The habit of doing nothing or of cruelty, believing the worst about
ourselves, gets hard to break. You meet People like that every day. It's in the
Meditation: ask the Whisperer. But you don't have to be the way they are.
Wizards are for the purpose of breaking the habit... or not having it in the
first place. It's disgusting, sometimes, yes. You should have tasted yourself
when we found you."
Arhu turned away from Rhiow. "It's sick to be so
worried about everybody else," he said, refusing to look at her.
"Peopie should care about themselves first. That's the way we're
built."
"You've bought into the myth too, have you,"
Rhiow said, rather dryly. "Sometimes I wonder if the houiff started
that one, but I'm not sure they're that subtle. I suspect the concept's older,
and goes back further, to our own people's version of the Choice." She
looked at him, though, saw the set, angry look of his face, and fluted her tail
sideways, a why-am-I-bothering? gesture. "I think your stomach is
making you cranky," she said. "Let's go down and see about a bite
more of that cheese— Oh. Wait a moment—"
An ehhif in a suit, and carrying a
briefcase, was coming along the colonnade. Arhu stared at him with alarm, for
the ehhif plainly saw them and was making directly for them. He got
ready to jump—
"Not that way!" Rhiow said three hurried words in the Speech, and
hardened the air behind Arhu just before he launched himself straight out into
the main concourse. "It's all right, sit still!"
Arhu sat back down, shocked, digging his claws into
the marble. The approaching ehhif paused, glanced around him casually,
put the briefcase down, then turned around and leaned on his elbows on the
railing, and stared out across the concourse himself.
"Nice to see you, Har'lh," Rhiow said.
"Thanks for the backup yesterday."
"Don't mention it. I would have come myself, but
I was otherwise occupied." He glanced sideways, only very briefly.
"Good to meet you, Arhu," he said. "Go well. An excellent job
you folks did. Nice going with that, Rhiow."
"Thanks, Har'lh. I could have done without the
last part of it, but at least we brought our skins home whole. Going down to
inspect the catenary?"
"I doubt I'll need to go down that far... I just
want a look at the main matrices up top."
"All right. But Saash thinks the whole thing
needs to be rewoven."
"So she said. When she makes her full report,
I'll look into it in more detail and have a word with the Supervisory Wizard
for the North American region," Har'lh said. "It's not a job I'd care
for, though. Logistically it would be something of a nightmare. Not to mention
unsafe for Saash if the job started to get more complicated than she
thought."
"Don't things usually?" Rhiow said. Then, a
little mischievously, she added, "I'm curious, though, Har'lh. You don't
seem much bothered by these inspection runs. What happens to your physicality,
Downside?"
"Well now, I would think some people might
consider that a personal question," Har'lh said, giving her an amused
look. "But let's just say I won't be able to stop going to the gym any
time soon. My looks don't change down there the way People's do. Pity."
Rhiow put her whiskers forward at him. "Is Tom
back from Geneva yet?"
"Later tonight. I'm glad he'll be getting
back.... Between work and Work, I've been getting short of sleep."
Rhiow had figured that out already: Har'lh's rugged
good looks had acquired a rather brittle edge over the past few days. "The
way you keep pouring cappuccino down yourself, are you surprised?" she
said, and whisked her tail back and forth in a tsk, tsk gesture.
"Your body isn't going to thank you, Har'lh."
"All right, now, you wait just a minute, Miss
Cream Junkie," Har'lh said, smiling slightly. "You're lecturing me
about my body?"
Rhiow put one ear back in the mildest annoyance. Hhuha
had discovered that Rhiow was very partial to whipping cream... and Rhiow had
not exactly talked her out of it It was a couple of weeks after that time that
Rhiow had first heard the bizarre adjective "plumptious." Shortly
thereafter Hhuha had stopped bringing cream home and had subjected Rhiow to a
very annoying withdrawal ("Is it smart to just do this 'cold
turkey'?" Iaehh had asked, and Rhiow had practically shouted, "Cold
turkey would be very nice in these circumstances, yes, give me some!"—to
no avail). There had followed a course of what purported to be diet cat food,
but which Rhiow firmly believed to be textured, compressed sawdust in a shiny
gravy consisting mostly of lacquer. Next to it, the foul disgusting tuna of
recent days could actually have been considered an improvement, though that was
not something that Rhiow was ever going to let Hhuha know. "Life around ehhif
can be a little too fat-free sometimes," she said. "I'm just
grateful she didn't try to turn me vegetarian." She shuddered, knowing
cats whose well-meaning but very confused ehhif had tried this tack.
Mostly the People involved had found themselves short a life very quickly,
unless they managed to get away and start over elsewhere.
"Completely the wrong lifestyle for you
guys," Har'lh said, and glanced down. "I wish my kind wouldn't keep
trying that crap. —Hey, Urruah, how they shakin'?"
"In all directions, as usual," Urruah said,
and jumped up on the railing next to Rhiow. '"Luck, you two." He
leaned over toward Arhu, breathed breaths with him. "Is that mozzarella I
taste? Rhi, you spoil this kit."
Arhu looked at Urruah, and said, "Half a quarter
pounder with cheese and bacon. You ate the lettuce?" He
grimaced. "What a big bunny!"
"Oh yeah? So how do you know what lettuce
tastes like?"
"I'm going Downside," Har'lh said,
"before something gets out of hand here. Give Saash my best, Rhiow. I'll
talk to her as soon as I get topside again."
'"Luck," Rhiow said, and Har'lh strode away
toward the stairway, swinging his briefcase idly.
Urruah was looking at Arhu a little oddly. "Haifa
quarter pounder?" he said. "How do you know?"
"I see you eating it," Arhu said.
"Saw," Urruah said pointedly.
"No. I see you eating it now," Arhu
said. He was looking at the blank marble wall as if there was far more there to
see. "The MhHonalh's down in the subway, at Madison and Fifty-first. A
tom-ehhif and a queen-ehhif are eating outside it, and talking.
Then talking louder. Real loud. All of a sudden they start fighting—"
Arhu's look was blank but bewildered. "He hits her, and tries to hit her
again but she ducks back, and then he comes at her again, now he's feeling
around in his jacket for something, but all of a sudden he trips over something
he can't see and falls down, and he's getting up and feels in his jacket
again—and then the transit cops come around the corner: he gets up and runs
away, and the queen is standing there—'crying'—"
Urruah's eyes were very round as he looked over at
Rhiow. "It really is the Eye, isn't it?" Urruah said softly.
"The ehhif's dropped his quarter pounder
on the floor there," Arhu said, as if he hadn't heard. "I see you
pick it up and take it away behind the garbage can. No one else sees, they're
all looking at the ehhif-queen and the cops—"
Rhiow looked at Urruah, her tail twitching
thoughtfully. "That was a nice move," she said.
"I might have done it only for the burger,"
Urruah said, looking elsewhere.
Rhiow put her whiskers right forward at the phrasing,
for the one thing wizards dare not do with words is lie. "Of course it's
the Eye," she said. "The symbol for it was in the spell. We worked
the spell... and spells always work. I think he may have had this talent in
latent form, before ... but the presence of the symbol in the spell reaffirmed
it, and now it's really starting to focus."
Arhu was looking at Rhiow again. "I see you
now," he ( said, a little desperately. "But I see that, too.
And other things. A lot of them at once..."
"It's the 'eternal present,'" Rhiow said.
"I heard about it once from Ffairh: if you ever get stuck in a gate, in an
artificially prolonged transit, you can start seeing things that way. Not a
good sign, normally ..."
"But I'm not normal," Arhu said, suddenly
sounding very weary.
"No," Rhiow said wearily. "And neither
are we. We are all weirdoes together... but the 'together' is the important
part."
She sighed then. "'Look, I could use a small dose
of normalcy myself. Let's all go back to my neighborhood; they're starting the
day's bout of hauissh, and we can sit and just kibitz for a while. You
two skywalk over: Arhu can use the practice. No birds," she said to
Arhu, at the sight of that gleam starting to creep back into his eye. "I
have a little something to take care of here; I'll meet you there in half an
hour or so. Yarn's stoop, maybe?"
"Sounds like a plan. Come on, youngster, let's
you and the Big Bunny show them how we do it uptown."
And Urruah turned and strolled straight out onto the
air over the main concourse, forty feet up, heading for the front doors.
Eyes wide, suddenly delighted, Arhu scampered out
across the air after him. Rhiow stood there, absolutely transfixed with horror
lest they be seen. But no one looked up. No one in the city ever looks up.
She watched them go, unnoticed; then let out a long breath
at the lunacy of toms and headed back toward the Italian deli.
-=O=-***-=O=-
When Rhiow got home, she found that her ehhif had
been out as well, to dinner and a movie, and apparently had been back only
a little while: Iaehh was going through the freezer, apparently hunting a
frozen pizza. Rhiow walked over into the little kitchen and found her food bowl
empty. She looked meaningfully at Iaehh, and said loudly, "I wouldn't keep
you waiting for your dinner."
Iaehh shut the ffrihh and started going through
the cupboards. "Sue?"
No answer. "Sue?"
"Oh, sorry, honey ..." came the voice from
the bedroom. "My mind was elsewhere."
"I was looking for that tuna stuff."
"Oh, there isn't any ... the store was out of
it"
"Thank you,
Queen of us all," Rhiow said, heartfelt, and put her face down in the
bowl. It was a nice hearty mixture, beef and something else: rabbit? Turkey? Who
cares? Delightful.
"I'll pick up some of it tomorrow."
"I'll enjoy this while it lasts," Rhiow
muttered.
"She seems to like this all right, though."
"Good..." Hhuha said, as she came back into
the living room.
"You sound tired."
"I am tired. Another day of fighting with
the damn system, and the damn network, and the damn air conditioner ..."
He came over to her and held her. "I wish you
could find a way to get out of there."
Hhuha sighed. "Yeah, well, I've been thinking
about that, too. It's making you as unhappy as it's making me."
"I wouldn't put it that strongly."
"I would. So, listen... I've got an appointment
in a couple of days."
"Oh? Who with?"
"A headhunter."
"You didn't tell me about this!"
"I'm telling you now. The guy's been on the phone
to me a couple of times over the last year. At first I didn't want to do
anything; you know, I thought things at the office might improve."
"Yeah, sure."
"Well, I did. But the other day I thought,
'Okay.'" She snickered. "You should have seen me sneaking out to a
pay phone at lunchtime, like some kind of crook."
"Well, it wouldn't be great for you if they heard
you talking about it in the early stages of the negotiations, I admit."
"In any stages. Someone else in the
company was that dumb, last year. They were pink-slipped within minutes of the
word getting out. I don't plan to have that happen, believe me."
"So who's he headhunting for?"
"A couple of different companies, apparently.
He's willing to arrange interviews with both if my resume holds up. We'll be
talking about that day after next. Lunchtime appointment."
"Hey, wow. Good luck!"
A brief silence while they nuzzled each other.
"It's a little scary," Hhuha said after a little while. "Jumping
before I'm pushed..."
"You were always the brave one."
"No. I just hate being taken advantage of... and
I've been starting to get that feeling..."
Another small silence. "Want to be taken
advantage of now?"
"I thought
you'd never ask."
They went into the bedroom, chuckling. Rhiow lifted
her head to watch them go, then put her whiskers forward and went out her
little door, softly, so that they would not think they had scared the cat.
-=O=-***-=O=-
On the rooftop, she lay comfortably sprawled in the
still warmth. Air conditioners thundered around her, a basso rumble and rattle
through the night, the fans of the cooling towers showing as gleaming disks in
the light of the nearly full Moon that was sliding, golden, up the eastern sky.
Rhiow looked up at it thoughtfully. Rhoua's Eye, its
glory hidden behind the world, glanced past it (as legend had it) into the
Great Tom's eye, which reflected its light; growing from slit to eye half-open
to eye round and staring, and then shrinking down to slitted eye and full-dark
invisibility again, as the month went round. There were People who believed, in
the face of ubiquitous evidence to the contrary, that the feline eye mirrored
the Moon's phase. Rhiow had been amazed, and very amused, to find that some ehhif
had the same story.
There were wizardry connections as well. Apparently
the ehhif version of The Gaze of Rhoua's Eye, the defining
document that contained descriptions of all beings and all wizardry in this
particular part of the universe, originally took the form of an actual book
that could be read only by moonlight: hence its ehhif name, The Book of
Night with Moon. Supposedly the Book had to be read from, at
intervals, to keep all existence in place, and everything correctly defined. I wouldn't
care to be the one who does the reading, Rhiow thought, looking out over
the city as the Moon went quietly up the sky. Too much exposure to such
power, such knowledge, and you could lose yourself as surely as you might lose
yourself Downside if you stayed too long...
But mat was the danger all over wizardry: there were
so many different kinds of existence, alien and fascinating, to lose your
nature in.... Though was this perhaps some kind of obscure bint from the
Powers, Rhiow wondered, that you might be expected to lose your nature
eventually? ... A hint of the way things would be, someday, when the world was
finally set right, and all the kinds of existence were united in timelessness,
perfected and made whole, as the Oath intimated they would be?
... Maybe. But she wasn't ready.
The question of the danger was always there, though,
for a practicing wizard. When you were on the universe's business all the time,
with a wizard's multifarious worries on your mind, were you likely to start
losing your felinity? I wonder, she thought, if the ehhif wizards
have this problem ... if they fear losing their "humanity" as a
result of having to cope with the larger worldview, the bigger maid-set,
in which no language or way of life is superior to any other, and each must be
valued on its own terms? I can understand why it must look crazy to Arhu that I
spend so much time worrying about houiff and ehhif and whatnot.
...
But then, she
thought, I have ehhif of my own to think about, after all. The
habit's hard to break....
All the same... the worry niggled at her,
occasionally, and was doing so again. It was something she had occasionally
felt she should talk to Ehef about. But then she would get busy with some
assignment....
Maybe that's not good, Rhiow thought after a while. How many years have I
been at this, now? And when did I last have a vacation from the Art? A real
one, when I wouldn't be on call, and could stay home, and eat that terrible cat
food, and lie in the sun, and purr at Hhuha... and just be People...
The problem was, of course, that she knew perfectly
well how much tune and energy the Powers That Be had invested in her. Go on
vacation... and that invested energy would be lost, even for that little while:
as in hauissh, any move which is not an attack means lost ground. The
heat death of the universe doesn't speed up... but it doesn't slow down as much
as it might have. Lie basking in the sun... and know that the power that runs
the sun is running out at its usual speed, trickling away like blood from a
wound... and you're not doing anything to make sure the world keeps going that
little bit longer to enjoy that warmth and light
She sighed. I will know doubt, she thought,
slipping into the Meditation, and fear: I will suspect myself of folly and
impracticality in this seemingly hard-edged world, where things clouded or
obscure are so often discounted as unimportant, and mystery is derided, and
uncertainty is seen as a sign of an inability to cope. But my commission comes
from Those Who move in the shadows, indistinct and unseen for Their own
purpose: Those Whom we never see face to face except in the faces of those we
meet from day to day. In Them is my trust, until I am relieved of Their trust
in me. I will learn to live with uncertainty, for it is the earnest of Their
promise that all things may yet be well; and when, in the shadows, the doubts
arise, I will close my eyes and say, This is no shade to Them; for my
part, I will bide here and wait for the dawn....
She closed her eyes and dozed.
-=O=-***-=O=-
Rhi, Saash's
voice came suddenly.
Rhiow opened her eyes, surprised. The Moon was much
farther across the sky, westering now. "What is it?" she said.
"Are you all right?"
I'm fine. But Rhiow, have you heard anything from
Har'lh?
"He said he was going to talk to you after he
came back from Downside," Rhiow said.
Well, he hasn't.
"Maybe something else came up," Rhiow said.
"He's a Senior, for Iau's sake. It's not like he hasn't got ten million
people to keep an eye on."
Rhi, you're not listening. He hasn't come back from Downside. The gate logs
show his access... but not his egress.
Rhiow sat up, shaking her head. "He could have
come back by another gate. And he did say he might take a look at the catenary
if he had to—"
He's not there. I called him. There's no answer and no
trace of any other gating. Rhi, he's gone!
She headed for Grand Central at her best speed, which
(this time of night) meant skywalking; but her concerns over this were fewer
than usual. There were not that many people likely to spot a black cat in the
dim predawn air, fifty stories up, and all the birds of prey were asleep.
Rhiow came down to ground level again at Forty-second
and Lexington, and got herself sidled. She trotted past the Grand Hyatt, past a
few drunks sitting against the walls, waiting for the station (or the nearby
liquor store) to open; passed through the locked front doors, and hurried up
past the waiting room ...
... and stopped, looking around her suspiciously.
There was something different...
The lights in the display area were mostly out, of
course, with the station in closed-down mode.
No... that's not it.
Rhiow walked past the biggest of the mounted
skeletons, strolling toward the back of the room. No one hiding here... That
had been the first impression: something concealing itself, hugging the
shadows, waiting ... Nothing. You're nervous. Let's get on with business.
Rhiow started to walk out again ... and then paused,
looked up at the biggest skeleton.
Its position was different.
Impossible. The thing weighs tons; it's wired together
much too securely to sag out of shape.
An illusion, then ... born of the darkness, her
nerves. The way the head hung down, the empty eyes looking at her, was creepy
in this subdued lighting, seeming somehow more concentrated and immediate than
they had yesterday. The nasty little front claws were held out in what might
almost have been a gesture of surprise—in an ehhif, at least. Iau only
knew what such a gesture might once have meant in a saurian. If there was
threat in these poor dead bones, it was in the huge jaws, the serried ranks of
fangs ...
Rhiow thought suddenly of the back of the cavern that
led into the deep Downside: the spikes of stone, the jaws ready to close ...
She flirted her tail in annoyance at herself—there
were much more important things to think about at the moment. She turned and
galloped up into the brighter lighting of the main concourse, down to the
platform for Track 30 and the gate....
-=O=-***-=O=-
Saash was there. So was another figure, an ehhif, sidled
as well: Tom Swale, Har'lh's partner-Advisory. He was a little shorter than
Har'lh, a little broader in the shoulder, higher-cheekboned, and with
silver-shot hair: if anything he looked more like an Area Advisory than his
partner did, though he wore the same kind of informal clothes this time of day,
shirt and jeans and sneakers. His easygoing face, though, was wearing an
unusual expression of strain and concern.
"It's nice to see you, Rhiow," Tom said,
hunkering down to talk to her, "but I wish to die Powers that it was under
other circumstances. Saash has filled you in?"
"Yes." Rhiow looked over at Saash, who said,
"I've checked all the logs of all the gates here, and the Penn team has
fed me all their gates' logs as well. No sign of any access by Har'lh except to
this gate: no sign of his egress from any other gate in New York, and no sign
of any private gating, either."
Almost behind her, Urruah came trotting down the
platform, and greeted Tom. "You still here? There's no sign of him
yet?—"
"None. Wizards all over are looking for him. But
no one's found him... which is pretty unusual. Wizards almost always find what
they're looking for, especially when this many of them are concentrated on the
task."
"They're looking offplanet as well?" Rhiow
said.
Tom nodded. "An Area Advisory going missing is
usually a fairly serious sign," Tom said. "There's concern at fairly
high levels."
"He wouldn't be—dead—would he?" Saash said,
with the greatest reluctance.
"I don't think so," Tom said. "I'm
pretty sure I would know."
"Oh, come on, Saash," Urruah said,
"you're nuts. Have you ever heard of a Advisory dying in the line of
duty?"
Tom looked at Urruah fairly gently.
"Urruah," he said, "all Advisories die in the line of
duty. Any exceptions are accidents or misperceptions on the part of the living.
It's within the job description: we accept it."
"That said," Rhiow said, "Advisories
are also tough and smart. Maybe not as powerful as they would be if they were
younger; but who is? Could it be that Har'lh's still Downside, but held somehow
in a pocket of influence of some other Power"—she was not going to name
names at this point—"that is making it seem that he's not there?"
"It's a possibility. But I'm surprised you're
eager to suggest it, since you know what it would mean."
"I'm not eager, believe me," Rhiow said; and
a glance at the others confirmed to her that they were in agreement.
"Well." Tom breathed out, a harassed sound.
"The only good thing about all this is that it's been a slow night; there
haven't been any other accesses down here. We don't know for sure that this
particular occurrence was aimed specifically at Carl... but we also can't take
the chance that other wizards on errantry might fall foul of it. Were these
other gates, I might be concerned; but this is the master system— all the
world's gates are sourced out of me 'tree' structure that arises in the roots
of the Mountain. That being the case, I think I'm going to have to get a little
drastic, and insist that the gating system worldwide be shut down until we find
Carl and get all this sorted out. It may be nothing serious at all..."
"But you doubt it," Rhiow said.
"I doubt it. The shutdown obviously isn't going
to apply to accredited repair teams: naturally that's going to mean you. I'm
sorry to put you through this again, Rhi... but you did the most recent
intervention, and the way the Powers work, that suggests you're going to be the
ones who can produce the result. How soon can you go down again?"
Rhiow looked at Saash and Urruah. Urruah was carefully
studying a crack in the concrete: Saash was scratching.
Come on, you two.
This does not
work for me, Urruah growled silently.
I hate this, Saash hissed. You heard what I
told you before.
Yes, I did. Well?
They both looked up at her.
She turned to look up at Tom. "Dawn would be the
soonest," Rhiow said. "I would prefer noon, though, since that way we
can bring our newest member along. He's likely to be extremely useful, but not
unless he's rested."
Tom too examined the concrete for a few breaths.
"I hate to let the trail get cold."
"If there is a trail," Urruah said.
"I'd sooner take a little extra time in preparation, and get the job
right, if we have to go down there again."
"You're right, of course," Tom said. He
stood up. "Let's say noon, then. I'll mind your upper gate for you this
time: Carl and I have been working together long enough now that I may be able
to help you somehow. Otherwise I'll be in a position to get you backup in a
hurry should you need it."
Rhiow flirted her tail "yes," though
privately she was unsure how fast any backup was going to be able to reach
them, if they were going to have to go as far down the "tree"
structure as she feared they would. "I want an override," she said,
"on the number and power of wizardries we can bring down with us. I feel
we're going to need to be unusually well armed this time, and while I know the
Powers are chary of letting people throw spells around like water, I think our
workload the last few days, and the resistance we met last time, are going to
justify it."
Tom looked at her thoughtfully, then nodded. "All
right," he said, "I'll take it up with the North American
Supervisor."
"Don't just take it up, T'hom. I want it done.
Otherwise—"
She didn't finish the sentence, but she was somewhat
fluffed up, and didn't try to disguise it.
"You're willing to pay the price?" Tom said.
Rhiow licked her nose. Such exceptions did not come
cheap. Of course, not even the smallest wizardry was without its price: usually
you paid in your own stamina, in the work and pains you took over the construction
of the spell, the personal energy required to perform it, and the energy you
spent in dealing with the consequences. But for extra services, you paid
extra... and the coin was usually time off your lifespan. Days, months: a
dangerous equation, when you didn't know for sure how much time you might have
left... but sometimes necessary.
She licked her nose again. "Yes," she said.
Tom looked at her, and sighed. "I'll talk to you
at noontime," he said. "Saash, the catenaries will go down in half an
hour—that'll give everyone worldwide who might be transiting plenty of time to
finish their transits or change their plans."
"Fine," Saash said. "We'll use the
Thirty gate again for the access: having just worked on it, I'm happiest with
its function. If you'll see to it that power is running to that one gate for
noon—"
"Consider it done." Tom stood up again.
"Listen, you three... I'm sorry this is going to be so rough on you. I
appreciate what you're doing."
Do you, I wonder, Rhiow thought, but then she felt guilty, for the thought was unworthy. Of
course he does. It's his job. AH we can do is do ours.
"Let's go, you two," she said. "We've
got a lot of preparation to do. T'hom—go well."
"So may we all," he said, and vanished.
-=O=-***-=O=-
The three of them repaired to Rhiow's rooftop and
spent the next few hours discussing what spells they might possibly bring with
them that would do any good against a force much bigger and more dangerous than
the saurians they had met the other day. It was certain that they would meet
such force, since they had defeated the saurians so bloodily last time, and
(worse) because Har'lh's disappearance was almost certainly a provocation to
draw them, or others like them, down again.
"My guess is that they're going to try something
more spectacular than the last time," Urruah said. "If you're right,
and they managed to sabotage the catenary ... then worse is coming. We've got
to get down there and have enough power to stop whatever we find."
"If T'hom gets us that override," Saash
said, looking out over the rooftops as the sun came up, "it's going to
make our jobs a lot easier."
"Plan for it," Rhiow said, "but also
plan without it I for one am going to be prepared to survive this intervention:
I'm not going to plan to get stuck in circle again, either. I know the Oath
says we have to let these creatures survive if at all possible—but not at the
cost of our own lives or our mission. I'm going to use that neural degenerator
as liberally as I need."
"So will I," Urruah said, "but Rhi...
even an override may not be enough to save us, if the kind of numbers turn up
that you're expecting."
"What are you suggesting we do about it?"
"Conjunct coupling," Urruah said, and licked
his nose.
So did Rhiow. Saash just stared at him, round-eyed,
then turned around and started to wash her back.
"I've been thinking about what Arhu was
saying," Urruah said. " 'He's coming. The father ... the son.'
Something bigger than the rest of the lizards. Something much more dangerous
... that was the impression I got, anyway."
Rhiow switched her tail in reluctant agreement.
"You're saying you think conjunct is the only way we're going to be able
to maintain power levels high enough to handle something like ... that."
Whatever that was: she was becoming afraid to follow that line of
reasoning to its rational conclusion, even here in the burgeoning light of day.
"It means," Urruah said, "that no
matter whether one or another of us has a lapse, the others' combined power
will be able to feed the wizardry they're doing, and keep it going."
Saash sat up and glared at him. "It also means
that if we go down there hooked up in conjunct, we all have to come back
that way ... or none of us can come back up again at all! If any of us
die down there, the others will be stranded—!"
There was a pause. "Yes," Urruah said,
"it would mean that. But think about the alternative, even with the
override that T'hom may or may not be able to get us. You're doing a wizardry.
Your concentration, or your power flow, fails. You blow the wizardry ... and
you die ... and then the others are put at risk trying to keep you from dying,
and their wizardries fail." He would not look away from Saash. She
stared back at him; the tension stretched itself across the air between them.
"Everyone dies. The whole job goes straight to sa'Rrahh. And not just our
lives ... whatever happens to them when you die down there. A whole lot of
other lives. All those that depend on the gates working. Har'lh's, too, for all
we know. —At least this way we would have a better chance of supporting one
another's wizardries. I'm no hero ... but it's all about getting the job done,
isn't it? Rhi?" He turned to her.
Rhiow looked down at the gravel where she sat, her
tail twitching. Finally she glanced up again. "If it were just me,"
she said at last, "I would sanction it. But it's not just me. There
are two other team members who must agree to be bound in this manner... and
this isn't something I can decide for the others involved."
Saash would not look at her. "I'm not going to ask
for a decision now," Rhiow said. "Noon will be soon enough. Between
now and then I'm going to have to go explain it all to Arhu anyway, which
should be interesting." She looked east, at Rhoua's Eye, rising
nonchalantly in the sky as if this were just another day; and from the streets
came the early hoots and tire-screeches of the beginning of rush-hour traffic,
reinforcing the feeling of normalcy, spurious though it was.
"It's all in the Queen's womb anyway," she
said. "All we can do is wait and see how the litter comes out... and
meantime, make sure our claws are sharp. Saash, wait awhile before you head
back to the garage."
She walked off to her usual stairway in the air,
leaving Saash and Urruah pointedly not looking at each other. Please, Iau,
let them sort it out, she thought.
But she couldn't help but wonder how effective prayer
was likely to be today, of all days....
-=O=-***-=O=-
The garage was deep in its morning business, cars
going in and out at a great rate, and Rhiow questioned whether the ehhif working
there would have seen her whether she had been sidled or not As it was, she
was, and she walked up the air again to the high ledge in the back, where Arhu
was sleeping.
She sat down on the concrete and simply looked at him
for a moment. He was sleeping a little more easily, if nothing else: stretched
out long and leggy, rather than hunched up in the little ball of previous days.
He's beginning to fill out a little, Rhiow thought, even after just a
few days. A few months of this and he's going to start looking like a proper
young tom.
If we survive that long...
She was aware, suddenly, of eyes half-open and looking
at her.
"I heard you," Arhu said, not moving, just
watching her with a sleepy look, but one that was nonetheless unusually
knowing.
Rhiow stuck out a leg and began to wash it in a casual
manner.
"Something bad's happening, isn't it?" Arhu
said.
"Much worse than usual," Rhiow said.
"Har'lh is missing."
"I know," Arhu said, rolling over to lie
upright. "I see that. Or, at least, I know it's happened... but I don't
know how or why."
He paused, as if looking at something else; then said,
"You can't go after him now. Something's coming ,.. trying to break
through."
"What?" Rhiow said.
"The one who chooses," Arhu said, gazing out
into the fumy air of the garage. "And the one who didn't choose. There's a
darkness pushing against the gate; I see it bending outward, and there are
eyes, they're staring, they want—" Suddenly Arhu scrabbled to bis feet and
pushed himself right back against the concrete wall, as if he had forgotten how
to melt through it, and he started to pant as if he had been running.
"It's coming," he gasped, "they're coming, all the
choices, all the eyes ... coming upward ..."
"Sit down, Arhu," Rhiow said, and went over
to him, leaning to wash behind his ear briefly. He sat, but he was still
staring out into the dimness, his eyes flickering wildly from side to side as
he watched what Rhiow couldn't see.
'This one's scary," Arhu said softly, his
breathing beginning to slow a little; but his eyes were still wide, fixed on
some spot out of Rhiow's vision, or anyone else's. 'This one really wants to be
real, this choice. It's going to do it soon." He quieted a little more,
but a few seconds later, he said, "They can't use the gates."
"I know," Rhiow said. "Tom has had them
shut down."
"That's not the problem," Arhu said. He
looked at her, with some confusion, Rhiow thought, and said, "All these
choices ... .How did we choose?"
Her first temptation was to tell him to look himself
at the ancient memories the Whisperer would show him; but then it occurred to
Rhiow that he was already seeing enough at the moment—he seemed to be caught in
some kind of visionary fugue—and adding more imagery on top of it might make
him even more confused or cloud some perception that might be of more
importance.
Rhiow nudged Arhu down into the "sphinx"
position he had been lying in earlier, and hunched next to him, tucking her
forepaws in. "I suppose all the Choices are odd," she said, "but
ours, well, it had its own quirks. We were made before the ehhif, supposedly,
but well after the cetaceans and the saurians, of course. The saurians had
passed by then; their failed Choice had killed all of them. There were a very
few saurians, you know," she said, settling her front paws more
comfortably, "who had rejected that image of world-ruling power than the
Lone Power offered them. They took the vegetarian option to use less life, more
sparingly—but there were not enough of them in the Choice to turn it aside, and
they died under the fangs of the others. The Lone One's long black winter
killed the rest
"Then, much later, after the winter was gone and
the world was warm and green again, our foremothers came. There wasn't any
differentiation among the various kinds of feline families yet: just one kind,
who didn't look so much different from us, although they were bigger, more houff-sized.
They all ran in prides, and so when they grew into mind, the First Queens made
the Choice for them, as queens decide what their prides will do today."
"What did It—what did she say?"
"Well, sa'Rrahh came and said to them that the
way of life that Iau had held out to them—to kill responsibly, to take only
what they needed—was just Her plot to keep them small and weak, living on
subsistence, on sufferance, and eventually to make slaves of them. The
Destroyer held out to them the promise of rule over the world, the land the
saurians had wielded: power and terror, domination, all other life fleeing
before them. And the Queen-mothers of the First Prides, wizards and nonwizards
both—because there are always wizards in a Choice, at least a few—considered
the Choice; but, being People after all, they disagreed on what to do, just as
the saurians had."
"So some took sa'Rrahh's offer—"
Arhu had that faraway look again: Rhiow had no idea
what he might be seeing, and continued as she had been doing. "Most did,
and their Choice ruled the others. The Hungry, those who made that Choice, grew
great and terrible in body, killing for power and success, but like the
carnivorous saurians, they hadn't paid enough attention to the wording and
intention of the Lone One's offer. They had their time to rule, but it was
short—soon enough the ice crept down from the poles and buried the forests
where they hunted, killing their game, and then most of them as well. There was
a second group of the Eldest Kindred who rejected power and rule over the
Earth, and elected to kill what they needed, only. They were the Mindful. They
stayed small, for the most part, but grew wise, enough so to survive the ice
when it came."
She fell silent for a moment, wondering what to make
of the look on Arhu's face. "But there were more—" he said.
Rhiow switched her tail "yes." "They
weren't very many, that last group: the Failed. They recognized as potentially
deadly the Choice the Lone Power was offering, and they attacked her and died.
But they're reborn, again and again, in one or another of our sundered
Kindreds."
"They're wizards," Arhu said suddenly, and
looked up at Rhiow.
"Yes," she said. "Still we die: there's
no escaping the fate of the rest of our kind. But we're set apart; and we alone
of all felinity may come again to that time and place where cats' bodies are
once again the size of their souls.... Other confusions between size and
Kindred have come about over time. The Hungry are born among the smaller
kindreds, and the Mindful among the great; the savage and the kindly mingle.
You never know which sort you'll find yourself dealing with. Yet every feline,
great or small, carries all of them within herself; we all have to make the
Choice again and again, a hundred times in a life, or a thousand. Sum up all
the choices, over nine lives, and your fate's decided, they say. If you fail,
then there's nothing at the end of it all but silence, and the night. Pass
through that last summing-up, though, under Iau's eye, and there's the last
life, which doesn't end—"
"—the Tenth Life and the truest," Arhu said
slowly, "of those whose spirits outwear and overmaster their bodies,
untiring of the chase, the Choice, the battle, and go on in the world and
beyond it; immortal, dangerous and fair, cats-become-Powers, who move in and
out of physicality on the One's business—"
He looked at Rhiow, his eyes clearing. "They
can't help us," Arhu said. "Something is breaking through: everything
is bending, changing ... so that there's nowhere solid for them to step. There
isn't any help but what we already have."
Wonderful, Rhiow
thought. "If you see anything that can be of use to us in what we're going
to have to do," she said, "this would be a good time to let me
know."
He looked at her with a kind of helpless expression.
"You're carrying all the wrong spells," he said. "You don't want
to open the gates. You need to shut them."
That perplexed her. "But they're shut
already."
"Not for long," Arhu said, and very suddenly
squeezed his eyes shut as if seeing something that frightened him badly.
"What?" Rhiow said.
"No ..." He wouldn't look at her.
I wish I could push him. But I don't dare. "All
right," she said. "Arhu, we have another problem. Whatever you may
say about opening or shutting gates, we are going to have to go Downside
again, very soon, to look for Har'lh. It's going to be much more dangerous than
last time, and if our spells are to protect us so that we can do the job, we're
going to have to link ourselves together in a particular way. It means we'll be
stronger: each of us will have all our strengths to draw on. But it also means
that, if one of us dies down there, all the others will be trapped; there'll be
no return."
"I know," Arhu said, painfully. "I see
that."
Rhiow shuddered. "I'm not going to tell you that
you have to do that. You have to decide."
He didn't say anything for a long time. And then,
abruptly, he looked up at Rhiow again. "... What does Saash say?"
Rhiow looked curiously at him. Arhu looked at the
floor. "Well," he said, "she washed me. I must have tasted
horrible. And she held me, even when I kicked, and called her names."
So it's going to come down to her, Rhiow thought Why can I not surprised? "She's
angry," Rhiow said. "She doesn't want to go down there again, and she
hasn't made her mind up."
He switched his tail indecisively. "She'll be
here in a little while," Rhiow said. "You can ask her then. When
you've decided, speak to me in your head, or ask Saash to. We can't wait very
long to go."
"All right." He turned his face to the wall.
Rhiow sighed, and stepped out onto the air, sidled
again. "But you do have mostly the wrong spells," Arhu said.
This is so reassuring. "Which ones should we have, then?"
Rhiow said.
"The ones the Whisperer's still working on
..."
That made
Rhiow blink.
"I'll be at my den," she said. "Go
well."
-=O=-***-=O=-
When she got in, Rhiow was surprised to find Hhuha
still at home so far into the day. She was stalking around the apartment
restlessly, dressed for work, but plainly not going there: paperwork was still
lying scattered here and there, her briefcase sat open on the table. Something
unusual was happening, and Hhuha was tense about it. Possibly that meeting
she was planning has been rescheduled? Rhiow thought. In any case, she knew
better than to interfere with Hhuha when she was in such a mood, though at the moment
Rhiow's stomach was growling nearly as loud as her purr could get under better
conditions. She went and jumped on the sofa, and curled up there.
Hhuha stopped by the window, looked out, sighed, then
went over to Rhiow and picked her up. "I hate calling in sick when I'm
not," Hhuha muttered into her fur. "It makes me feel duplicitous and
foul. Come here, puss, and tell me I'm not duplicitous and foul."
"You're no more duplicitous than most cats
are," Rhiow said, purring as loudly as she could and bumping her head
against Hhuha's ear, "so why should you complain? As ehhif go, you're
a model of good behavior. And you're not foul. The tuna is foul. —Oh,
come on, my Hhuha, calm down." She put her nose against Hhuha's neck.
"This is no good. You're not calm, Iau knows I'm not calm, neither
of us can do anything for each other."
"My kitty," Hhuha said, rubbing her behind
the ears. "I wish I knew where you were half the time. You make me
worry."
"I wish I could just tell you! It would be
so much easier. I swear, I'm going to start teaching you Ailurin when all this
quiets down. If Rosie can learn it, so can you."
"At least I know you're not out getting knocked
up."
Rhiow had to laugh. "With the example of the
Himalayans down the street before my eyes? I'd sooner pull out my own ovaries
with my teeth. Fortunately that's not a requirement."
"Boy, you're talky today. You hungry? Want some
tuna? Sure."
"I don't want the gods '-damned tuna! " Rhiow
practically shouted as Hhuha put her down and went to the ffrihh. "I
want to lie on the rug and be a house pet! I want to sit on the sofa and
have you rub my fur backward so I can grab you and pretend to bite! I want to
sit on Iaehh's chest and nuke him feed me pepperoni! I want... oh. You
didn't say you had sushi last night!"
"Here, it's maguro. You like maguro. Come on.
Would you stand up for it?"
Rhiow stood right up on her hind legs and snatched at
the sushi with both paws. "You'd be surprised what I'd do for it, except
I'm not allowed. Did you take the horseradish off it? I hate that stuff, it
makes my nose run. Oh, good..."
Hhuha sat down, and together they ate tuna sushi, very
companionably, on the sofa. "He made a big fuss about not liking
maguro last night," Hhuha said, "so he doesn't get any. You
and I will eat it all. No, you don't want this one, it's sea urchin."
"Try me!"
"Hey, get your face out of there. You had three
pieces, that's enough."
"There is no such thing as too much sushi."
"Oh, gosh, it is awful the day after. Here, you
have it."
"I thought you'd see sense eventually. —Oh, gods,
it's disgusting!"
"Hey, don't drop that on my rug! I thought you
wanted it!"
"I changed my mind."
The phone rang. Hhuha leapt up off the couch like a
Person going up a tree with a houff after her, and answered the phone
before the machine could pick up. "Hello—yes, this is she—yes, I'll hold—
Yes, good morning, Mr. Levenson. —Certainly. —No problem—when? That's fine.
I'll see you there. Yes. Goodbye—"
She hung up and threw away the rejected piece of
sushi, then dashed across the room to pick up the jacket that went with the
business skirt she was wearing, shut the briefcase and snatched it from the
table, and looked scornfully at the pile of papers near it. "May be the
last day I have to mess with that stuff," Hhuha said. "Wish me luck,
puss!"
"Hunt's luck, Hhuha mine," Rhiow said. Hhuha
headed out the door and closed it, starting to lock locks on the outside.
Rhiow sat there when the noise had finished, and
listened to Hhuha's steps going off down the hallway, then had a brief wash.
She was in the middle of it when she heard the voice in her head.
Rhiow?
T'hom—
You're needed. Hurry up: get the team together and get
them all down here. We've got big trouble.
She had never heard such a tone from him before. She
went out the door at a run.
-=O=-***-=O=-
It took about twenty minutes to get everyone together
at the garage; after that it was a minute's worth of work to do a small-scale
"personal" transit of the kind that Rhiow and the team had first used
to bring Arhu in. The garage staff mistook the slam of air into the space where
they had been for something mechanical, as Rhiow had suspected they would; when
they popped out into existence on the platform for Track 30, the bang! of
hot, displaced air was drowned out there too by the diesel thunder of trains
arriving on one track and leaving on another.
There were a lot of people waiting on the empty
platform. They looked like commuters ... those of them who were visible,
anyway. But visible or not, they had business in the station other than
catching trains. In a city the size of New York, with a population of as many as
ten million, there may be (depending on local conditions) as many as a hundred
thousand wizards in the area; and New York, packed as full as it is with
insistent minds and lives, populated as it is by an extravagant number of
worldgates, tends to run higher than that. Obviously many wizards would be
based in boroughs other than Manhattan, or would be engaged in other errantry
that wouldn't leave them free to drop what they were doing. But many would be
ready and able to answer an emergency call, and these were arriving and being
briefed, either by other wizards or by their Manuals, on what was going to be
required of them.
Tom saw Rhiow and the team immediately, and headed
over to them through a crowd of other ehhif wizards. "I got you
your override," he said to Rhiow when they had moved a little over to one
side, where they could talk. "I'm afraid it wasn't cheap."
She knew it wasn't. The Whisperer had breathed a word
in Rhiow's ear while they were setting up the circle for their short
transit—confirmation that her demand had been accepted, and the price set—and
the news had made her lick her nose several times in rapid succession. A
whole life— She could have backed out, of course. But Rhiow had put her
tongue back in where it belonged, taken a deep breath, and agreed. Now it was
done. If everything worked out for them, of course, the price would be more
than fair. It was simply something of a shock to have spent the last four or
five years thinking of yourself as still only a four-lifer, not yet in middle
age—and suddenly, between one breath and the next, to realize that you were
already into your fifth life, and now on the downhill side.
"We do what we have to," Rhiow said.
"Har'lh has been doing so, and the Queen only knows where he is at the
moment. Should I do less? But never mind that. What's going on?" She
glanced over by Track 30, where she could see the weft of the gate showing as
usual. "I thought you shut the catenaries down."
"They were shut down at the source." Rhiow
looked up at him, slightly awestruck, for the source of the gates was the
Powers That Be: Aaurh herself, in fact. "However... something has brought
them up again."
"The gates are active," Urruah said
carefully, "but not under your—under 'our'—control?"
"Yes," Tom said. Rhiow thought she had never
heard anything quite so grim. "We've tried to shut the gates down again.
They don't answer."
Saash's tail was lashing. "Once it's shut down,
an emplaced wizardry shouldn't be able to be reactivated except by the one who
emplaced it."
"Shouldn't. But we've seen the rules changing
around us, all week. Apparently the earlier malfunctions were a symptom of this
one—or else this one is just the biggest symptom yet. Someone has reactivated
the gates from the other side."
"That would take—" *
"Wizardry? Yes. And of a very high order."
Rhiow remembered the gate "saying" to her, "Someone"
interfered... She licked her nose. And my light went out, Rhiow
thought, and started feeling extremely grim herself.
"It couldn't be Har'lh, could it?" Urruah
said. 'Trying to get out?"
"His spells have their own signature, like any
wizard's," Tom said. "Whoever or whatever is producing this effect
... it's not Carl. But more to the point, if it were him, the gates
wouldn't be resisting what's happening on the other side: it's a kind of power
that's alien to them. Something wizardly, but not in the usual sense, appears
to be trying to push through."
"I see it," Arhu said. "I told Rhiow
that I was seeing it, just a little while ago."
Tom looked at him thoughtfully. "What exactly do
you see?"
Arhu's tail was lashing. "It's dark... but I can
hear something: it's scratching."
"Could be Saash," Urruah muttered.
Rhiow hit him right on the ear, hard. Urruah ducked
down a little, but not nearly far enough to please her. "It's carrying the
darkness with it on purpose," Arhu said, looking down into the darkness
where the silver glint of the tracks under the fluorescents faded away,
"and it wants to let it out into the sun ... but until now the way has
always been too small. Now, though, the opening can be made large enough; and
there's reason to make it so. The darkness will run out across the ground under
the sun and stain it forever."
Tom hunkered down by Arhu. "Arhu ... who is
it?"
Arhu squinted into the dark. "The father,"
he said. "The son..."
"He said that before," Rhiow said. "I
couldn't make much of it then."
"The problem with this kind of vision," Tom
said, looking over at her, "is that sometimes it makes most sense in
retrospect. It's hardest on the visionary, though, who usually can't make any
sense of it at all." He ruffled the fur on top of Arhu's head, which Arhu
was too distracted to take much notice of. "One last thing. If we cannot
prevent this breakthrough, by whatever force it is which is pushing against the
gates from the other side ... what else should we do to keep the world as it
should be?"
Arhu looked up, but it was not on Tom that his eyes
rested at last. The fur fluffed all up and down Rhiow's back as Arhu's eyes met
hers; there was someone else behind those eyes. "You must claw your way to
the heart," he said, "to the root. I hear the gnawing; too long have
I heard it, and the Tree totters ..."
In his eyes was the cool look of the stone statue of
Iau in the Met. Rhiow wanted to look away but could not: she bent her head down
before Arhu, before the One Who looked through him, until the look was gone
again, and Arhu was glancing up and around him in mild confusion at everyone's
shocked expressions—for Urruah had his ears flat back in unmistakable fear, and
Saash was visibly trembling.
Tom let out a long and unnerved breath.
"Okay," Tom said, getting up. He looked around him at the
ever-increasing crowd of wizards. "You four have other business," he
said: "so you should hold yourselves in reserve. There should be enough of
us to hold these gates closed... I hope. When the pressure eases up on the
other side or drops off entirely, that'll be your time to run through. Meantime
... we'll do what we can."
-=O=-***-=O=-
The hours that followed were given over to weary
waiting for something that might not happen ... if everyone was lucky. Urruah
slept through it all. Arhu dozed or stared down at the ehhif down in
the main concourse from the vantage point they had chosen, up on the gallery
level. Saash sat nearby and scratched, and washed, and scratched again, until
Rhiow was amazed that she had any skin left at all. But she could hardly blame
her if Saash felt what she felt, the sensation of intolerable and increasing
pressure below: something straining, straining to give, like a tire intent on
blowing out; and something else leaning hard and steadily against it, trying to
prevent the "blowout"—the many wizards who kept coming and going, new
ones always arriving to relieve those who had come earlier and used up all
their energy pushing back against the dark force at the other side of the
gates. The ones who left looked as worn as if they had been out all night
courting, or fighting, or both; and there was no look of satisfaction on any
face—everyone looked as if the job itself wasn't done, even though individual parts
of the job might be.
Rush hour started, and astonishing numbers of ehhif
poured into the terminal and out of it again; the floor went dark with
them, an incessant mindless-looking stir of motion, like bugs overrunning a
picnic. There were minor flows and eddies in it—periods when the floor was
almost empty, then when it filled almost too full for anyone to move; the
patterns had a slightly hypnotic fascination. Rhiow wished they were a lot more
than just slightly hypnotic; not for the first time, she envied Urruah's
ability to sleep through anything that didn't require his personal
intervention. She could never manage such a performance herself—her own
imagination was far too active.
Though I wonder, she thought at one point, a good while later, whether Urruah's
simply decided that this is going to be the easiest way to deal with his
disappointment. For now there was no way he would be able to make it to his
ehhif-o'hra concert in the Sheep Meadow. Even if the situation down at
the track level relaxed, and the gates went back to something approaching
normal, they would have to head down in search of Har'lh as quickly as
possible. Poor 'Ruah, she thought, glancing up at the Accurist clock: it
read one minute to eight.
T'hom? she
said silently. Any news?
There was a pause. Tom had been spending most of his
time in "link" with the wizards who were holding the gates shut—an ehhif
version of the conjoint linkage that Urruah had insisted they would need.
As a result, when you called him, the answer you got was likely to have
anywhere from five to fifty other sets of thoughts, of other internal voices,
wound around it as he directed the ehhif-wizards to apply their
pressure to one area of the multiple gate matrix or another. It made private
conversation impossible and required you to shout nearly at the top of your
mind to get his attention.
Sorry, I missed that.
How are you doing? Rhiow said.
The pressure from the other side's been steadily
increasing ... but not by nearly as much, minute to minute, as it was earlier.
We may be winning.
All right. Call if we're needed.
You've done a lot today already, Rhi.
Maybe. But don't hesitate.
She felt his tired breath as if it were her own as Tom
went back to coordinating the other wizards. Rhiow breathed out, too, glanced
over at Arhu: he was tucked down by Urruah, staring at the ehhif walking
in the Concourse. Deep-voiced, the clock began to speak eight o'clock; neither
Arhu or Urruah moved. Rhiow turned and saw that Saash had moved over toward the
escalators, where she was simply sitting still now, looking down into the
Concourse as well, but not washing: this by itself was unusual enough that
Rhiow got up quietly, so as not to bother either Urruah or Arhu, and went to
where Saash sat.
Saash didn't say anything as Rhiow came over. Rhiow
sat, and the two of them just spent a while looking at the comings and goings
of ehhif who had no idea of what was going on down the train
platforms.
'Tired?" Rhiow said after a while.
"Well, it wears on you..." Saash said,
flicking an ear back toward the tracks. "They're working so hard down
mere.... I feel guilty, not helping."
Rhiow twitched her tail in agreement. "We've got
specialist work to do, though," she said. "We wear ourselves out on
what they're up to... we won't be any good at what we have to do."
"I suppose." They watched as a mother with
several small noisy children in tow made her way across the nearly empty
concourse. The children were all pulling shiny helium-filled balloons along
behind them, tugging on the strings and laughing at the way the balloons bobbed
up and down. They paused by the Italian deli, where their mother leaned across
the counter and apparently started chatting with the deli guy about the
construction of a sandwich.
"It's not that, though," Rhiow said after a
moment, "is it? We've known each other long enough now ... you know my
moods, I know yours. What's on your mind?"
Saash watched the mother with her children vanish into
the Graybar passage. "It's just... this job ..."
Rhiow waited.
"Well, you know," Saash said, turning her
golden eyes on Rhiow at last, "I'm a lot of lives along."
Rhiow looked at her with some surprise and misgiving.
"No, I didn't know." She paused, and then when Saash kept silent,
"Well, you brought it up, so: how many?"
"Almost all of them," Saash said.
Rhiow stared at her, astounded. "Eighth?"
she whispered. "Ninth?"
"Ninth."
Rhiow was struck silent for some moments. "Oh,
gods," she said finally, "why didn't you tell me this earlier?"
"We've never really had to do anything that
dangerous, until the last couple of times. Besides, would it have made a
difference? To what we have to do, I mean?"
"Well, no, but... yes, of course it would!"
"Oh, sure, Rhi. Come on. Would you really have
done anything differently the past few days? Just for my sake? You know
you couldn't have. We have our job to do; that's why we're still wizards—why we
didn't give up the power as soon as we realized it cost something."
Saash looked down at the concourse again: more ehhif were filtering in.
"Rhi, we've just got to cope with it. If even Arhu is doing that,
who am I to turn aside from this just because I'm on my last life?"
"But—" Rhiow started to say something, then
shut herself up.
"I had to tell you, though," Saash said.
"It seemed to me—when we finally get down there again, if something
happens to me there, or later, and I fall over all of a sudden and it's plain
that that's the end of everything for me—I didn't want you to think it was
somehow your fault."
Rhiow was quiet for a few breaths. "Saash,"
she said, briefly leaning close to rub her cheek against her friend's,
"it's just like you to think of me first, of the others in the team. But
look, you." She pulled back a little, stared Saash in the eye.
"Haven't you forgotten something? We're going down in conjunct. If you
don't come back up with us, none of us will come back up."
"Don't think that hasn't occurred to me."
"So don't consider not coming back, that's all. I
won't hear of it."
"Yes, Queen Iau," Saash said, dryly,
"whatever you say, Queen Iau. I'll tell Aaurh and Hrau'f the Silent that
you said so."
"You do that," Rhiow said, and tucked
herself down with a sigh—
Something screamed nearby. Rhiow leapt to her feet,
and so did Saash; both of them looked around wildly. Arhu was running to them:
Urruah was staggering to his feet, shaking his head as if he had been struck a
blow.
"What was that?" Saash hissed.
"I don't—" Rhiow started to say. But then she
did, for the screaming was not in the air: it was in her mind. Ehhif voices,
shocked, in pain; and in the back of her mind, that sense of pressure, suddenly
gone. Something blown out. Something running in through the blown place:
something dark—
"Come on!" she said, and headed for the
stairs.
The others followed. Rhiow nearly fell once or twice
as she ran; the images of what wizards were seeing, down at the track level,
kept overlaying themselves on her own vision of the terminal: The gate
hyperextending, its curvature bending inward toward the wizards watching at the
platform, but also seeming bizarrely to curve away; the hyper-string structure
warping out of shape, twisting into a configuration Rhiow had never seen
before, unnatural, damaged-looking ... and in the darkness, roaring shapes that
poured seemingly more from around the gate rather than through it.
They're all going, came Tom's thought, all the gates— look out!
Rhiow and Saash hit the bottom of the stairs first and
were about to run leftward toward the gates to the tracks— but a screaming,
roaring wave of green and blue and pale cream-colored shapes came plunging
through the gates first, spilling out into the main concourse. Ehhif
screamed and ran in all directions—out into the Graybar and Hyatt passages, out
onto Forty-second Street, up the stairs to the Vanderbilt Avenue exit—as the
saurians charged across the marble floor, and their shrieks of rage and hunger
echoed under the high blue sky. The chilly scent of dinosaur flesh was suddenly
everywhere. The cold things, Rosie had said. They went by. I heard
them roaring...
Panic was spreading in the terminal; ehhif were
struck still with shock and disbelief, staring at the impossible invasion
from their distant past. Rhiow caught sight of one saurian racing across the
concourse toward the Italian deli, and toward the mother, half-turned in the
act of accepting her sandwich from the guy behind the counter; and toward the
children, frozen, mouths open, staring, their bright balloons forgotten at the sight
of the sharp claws stretched out toward them—
She thought about her Oath, to preserve life whenever
possible—
Rhiow said the last word of the spell... a relief, for
carrying a spell almost completely executed is an increasing strain that gets
worse the longer you hold it in check. The unleashed power practically clawed
its way up out of her, leaping away toward its targets and leaving Rhiow weak
and staggery for the space of a breath or so.
All over the concourse, in a circle with Rhiow at its
center, saurians crashed to the floor and lay immobile. But the range of the
spell was limited; and more would be coming soon. Urruah came down behind her
and Saash; to him Rhiow said, "You have that spell loaded?"
"You better believe it!"
"Get back there to the gates and keep them from
getting up here! And pass it to as many of the other wizards as you can. If you
push the saurians back fast enough and get close enough to the gates, you can
knock them down almost as they come out. Saash, go down a level; do the same. I
heard Tom say something about 'all the gates.' It may not just be the one at
Thirty that's popped. Arhu, come on, some of them went up toward the main
doors—"
Saash and Urruah tore off through the doorways that
led to the tracks. Rhiow ran toward the Forty-second Street doors, up the ramp,
with Arhu galloping behind her. Ehhif screams were coming from near the
brass doors; Rhiow saw two saurians, a pair of deinonychi, kicking at something
low. Rhiow gulped as she ran, half certain there was a ehhif body under
those deadly hind claws; but as they got closer, she saw that they were kicking
actually the glass and brass of the doors in frustration, possibly unable to
understand the glass—and on the other side of the door was no slashed-up body,
but a furious houff with its leash dangling, barking its head off
and scrabbling wildly at the glass to get through, while shouting in its own
language, "Lemme at 'em! Lemme at 'em! I can take "em!"
"Good dog," Rhiow muttered, a rare sentiment
for her, and once again spoke the last word of the neural-inhibitor spell. The
power leapt out of her, and the deinonychi fell, clutching at the glass as they
went down, their claws making a ghastly screeching against the metal and glass
as they collapsed.
Rhiow stopped and looked back toward the concourse.
"I don't think any of them got any farther than this," she said to
Arhu, looking around the waiting room. "If we—"
Any further words got stuck in Rhiow's throat for the
moment as her glance fell on the mounted tyrannosaur in the waiting room. The
few ehhif who had stopped on their way through the terminal to
look at the skeleton were now all clustered together in the farthest comer,
holding on to one another with an intensity not usually seen in New Yorkers who
until a moment or so ago had been perfect strangers. The air was filled with a
peculiar groaning sound, like metal being twisted out of shape....
Which it was, for Rhiow saw that slowly, with deadly
deliberation, the skeleton was moving. Its front claws reached out and grasped
at the air, clutching at nothing; its head lifted from the position of low
menace in which it had been fixed, stretching upward, the jaws working—then
twisted around to look, hungry, at the ehhif in the corner.
Rhiow's mind flashed back to what she had done to the
metal track a couple of nights before. But you needed physical contact for that
spell, and she wasn't very sanguine about her chances of maintaining contact
for long enough to do the job without herself being ripped to shreds or bitten
in two.
The tyrannosaurus skeleton leaned down to scratch and
pull at the pedestal, then straightened and began trying to pull its hind legs
free, first one leg, then the other. There was a crack! like a gunshot
as one of the weaker bolts holding the bones of its left foot to the pedestal
came free, ricocheting off the travertine wall and peppering the poor ehhif crowded
in the corner with stone splinters. The tyrannosaurus skeleton writhed and
struggled to get free; it threw its head up in rage. An echo of a roar... Then
it started working on the second leg more scientifically, not just thrashing
around, and it was bent over so that the clever little front claws could help,
too. Pull—pull—pull, and another bolt popped—
Rhiow shook her head at the sight of something
beginning to cloud about the bones, building on them like shadowy cord, layer
on reddish layer, strung with white: muscle, ligament... flesh. Damnation, Rhiow
thought, whatever's going on downstairs is calling to its dead cousin
here... and pretty soon we're going to have one of these loose in the
terminal? —She shuddered. The deinonychi and smaller breeds of the
present-day saurians—if it really was the present day, under the
Mountain—were bad enough, but nothing like their terrible forefathers, like
this desiccated old relic. The relic, however, was becoming less desiccated by
the second; the muscle was almost all there now, organs curdling slick and wet
into being, skin starting to sheet and stretch over everything, but only
slowly: it was, after all, the biggest organ. For a horrible moment the skull
was almost bare of everything but the red cording of the jaw muscles; then one
abruptly coagulating eye, small, piggy, and entirely too intelligent, was
looking down out of the wet red socket at Rhiow. The tyrannosaur stretched its
head up as gaudy crimson-and blue-striped skin wrapped itself around skull and
shoulders, and heaved mightily, one last time; the second leg came free. It
whirled on its pedestal, graceful and quick as a dancer, leapt down, and went
for the ehhif—
You're lizard enough to die now, Rhiow thought, and opened her mouth to speak the last
word of her spell—
Arhu, however, took a step forward and yowled a single
word in the Speech.
The tyrannosaurus blew up. Flesh, ligament, all those
organs and whatever had been inside them, blood and bone: one moment they were
there, the next they were gone to splatters and splinters, flying through the
air. The ehhif fell to the floor and covered their heads, certain that a
bomb had gone off. The cream travertine walls were now a most unhealthy color
of patchy, seeping pink; and the ceiling, just newly painted, appeared to have
been redone in an entirely more pointillist style, and rained scraps and shards
of flesh and other tissue down on the empty pedestal.
Rhiow looked at Arhu in amazement.
He grinned at her. "I saw it in Saash's
head," he said. "She did it to the rats."
"Yes, but how did you adapt that spell to—"
"Adapt it? I just did it."
And to think I was complaining that he wasn't doing
enough of his own wizardry, Rhiow
thought. But this was more like a young wizard's behavior, more like her own
when she was new, just after Ordeal, and didn't know what you couldn't pull
off. "You're getting the hang of it, Arhu," she said. "Come
on—"
He paused first, and ran back to the other skeleton,
reared up against it.
Its metal went molten and ran out from inside the
bones like water. The bones rained down in a mighty clattering and shattering
on the floor.
"Where did you get that?" she
demanded as he ran back toward her.
"I saw it in your head."
Why, you little peeping tom— "You didn't need to do that! It wasn't doing
anything!"
"It might have been about to."
Rhiow looked at the stegosaurus skeleton and found
herself willing to admit that under the present circumstances, she wasn't too
sure what its dietary habits or temperament might be should it wake up just
now... and they both had other things to think about. "All right, come
on," she said. "You want to blow things up? Plenty of opportunity
downstairs."
They ran back through the main concourse. For once
Rhiow wasn't concerned about whether she was sidled or not: the ehhif would
have a lot of other things to pay attention to for the next few minutes,
anyway, besides a couple of cats. "Wow," Arhu said, "look at all
these dead lizards. What're the ehhif going to do with them?"
"Nothing, because if we survive this, Tom will
get authorization from the Powers That Be for a 'static' timeslide, and we'll
patch this whole area over with a congruent piece of nonincidental time from an
equivalent universe. The physical damage will simply never have happened... and
if we get the patch in place fast enough, none of the ehhif here will
remember a thing."
"Might be fun if they did ..."
Rhiow snorted as they headed for the doorways to the
gates, from which the roars and snarls and cries of battle were drifting toward
them. Saash?
Downstairs.
How're you holding up?
Killing lizards like it's going out of style. I don't
like this, Rhi.
You didn't like the rats either.
I like this a lot less. Rats aren't self-aware. These
creatures are... not that much of the awareness has a chance to get outpost the
hate.
They're trying to kill the ehhif, and the ehhif are defenseless; that
defines the situation clearly enough for the moment. 'Ruah?
With T'hom and his people. It's a good fight, Rhi!
Tell me you're winning.
More than I could say. We're killing lots of
dinosaurs, though. The trains are helping.
The trams are—
Only one derailed so far, Urruah said cheerfully.
Oh, sweet Dam of everything—! Rhiow ran through the doorway for Track 30—then stopped,
realizing that she had lost Arhu. She turned, saw him lingering to stare at one
of the fallen saurians.
"Arhu," she said, "come on, can't you
hear them down there? They need us!"
"I was seeing this before," he said, looking
down at the saurian so oddly that Rhiow ran back to him, wondering if he was
about to have some kind of fugue-fit along the lines of the one he had when
they were coming back from Downside.
"What?" she said, coming up beside him.
"What's the matter?"
"It changes everything," he said. "The
sixth claw..."
Rhiow blinked, for that had been one of the phrases he
had repeated several times as they returned from the caverns. At the time, it
had puzzled her, and it did again now, for in Ailurin a "sixth claw"
was an extra dewclaw, which polydactyl cats might have; or simply a slang idiom
for something useless. Now, though, she looked down at the saurian, another of
the splashy-pelted ones done in green and canary yellow, and at the claws that
Arhu had been examining.
There were indeed six of them. This by itself was
unusual, but not incredibly so. They've always come in fives before, but
maybe some mutation— Then Rhiow looked more closely at the sixth one.
It looked very much like a thumb.
She licked her nose. "What does it mean?"
Rhiow said.
Arhu stared at her, very briefly at a loss. "I
don't know," he said. "But it's really important. I couldn't hear
much else in my head almost all the time we came back. It was like someone kept
shouting it... or like it was a song—"
His tail was lashing. "Later," Rhiow said
finally. "They're fighting, down there: they need us. Come on!"
They ran through the door, down the platform for Track
30. The upper track level was hardly recognizable as the familiar, fairly tidy
place where Rhiow walked every day. Saurians' bodies were scattered everywhere.
Fortunately there seemed to be few casualties among the wizards, or else they
had been taken away already for treatment. There seemed to be no station staff
around: Rhiow guessed they were staying locked safely in the towers and
workrooms, probably having called the cops ... though what they would have told
the cops they wanted them for, Rhiow would have given a great deal to
hear. At least they seemed to have stopped any further trains from coming in.
Tom and a group of other wizards were gathered nearest
the track Thirty worldgate, which seemed to be spewing out saurians like a
firehose; as fast as they came out, they died of the neural-inhibitor spell
being repeatedly used so that the bodies lay heaped high before the gate, and
the new saurians had to clamber over the bodies of their dead or push them
aside to leap, screaming, at the wizards. On Tracks 25 and 18, trains were
stopped halfway down into the platforms, with saurians caught under their
bogies or draped over the fronts of the locomotives; Track 32 had the derailed
train, its sideways-skewed front splashed with lizard blood, a heap of dead
saurians trapped underneath it, and the faint cries of ehhif coming from
inside.
"What kept you?" Tom said as Rhiow arrived,
with Arhu in tow.
"A pretty serious reanimation," Rhiow said.
"Some kind of congruency to what's been trying to push up through here, I
suspect. We may find that it resists being patched afterward."
"We'll worry about that later. Some of us are
busy pulling people out of that wreck, but we've got other problems. You're the
gate specialists—what can we do about this? There seem to be thousands
more of these creatures waiting to come through, and if we just hang around
here doing this all night, people's memory tracks are going to engrave
themselves too deeply to be successfully patched."
Saash, Rhiow
said, can you get some relief? We need you up here.
I've got some help already. On my way up.
Urruah—
Heard it. Be right with you.
Saash appeared a few seconds later. "Any ideas
how to stop this?" Rhiow said.
Saash shook herself all over and had only the briefest
scratch before standing up again, staring at the gate, through which still more
saurians were clambering. "How chaotic," she said to Tom, "are
you willing to get?"
"Things are pretty chaotic already at the
moment," he said. "But anything that would put an end to this
would be welcome. We've got to start patching very soon. If you need to get a
little destructive—"
"Not physically." Saash was getting that
same gleam in her eye that Rhiow had seen the other night when she had turned
the catenary loose, and Rhiow started to feel wary. "Just think of it this
way. The gate might be more like a plant than a tree, though we tend out of
habit to refer to a gate's 'tree structure.' A gate has a 'root'—the
anchor-structure of its catenary, way down in the bottom of the Mountain, which
fuels itself from whatever power supply Aaurh originally hooked it to: pulsar,
white hole, whatever; theoretical distinctions don't matter just now. A gate
has a 'stalk'—the catenary itself. And then it has a 'flower' at the top—the
portal locus, where the energy is manipulated through the hyperstring
structure, and actual transport takes place."
"I hadn't thought of you as having such a
horticultural turn of mind," Tom said, watching with a tight, unhappy look
as yet more shrieking saurians climbed through the gate and were snuffed out.
"Yes. Well... what happens if you pull the portal
locus off the gate?"
Tom stared at her. "Like pulling the head off a
daisy. — What does happen?"
"It should shut the gate right down, no matter
who or what reactivated the other end."
"Should—!" Rhiow said.
"Until a new portal locus can be woven and
installed, nothing can use it for transport."
Tom was silent for a moment. Then he said, "These
gates are very old... and were put in place by, well..."
"Gods," Saash said, twitching her tail in
agreement. "Fortunately, they are gods who left us, in the Whispering, and
The Book of Night with Moon, very complete instructions on how these
gates were constructed in the first place... on the grounds that someday they
might need serious repair or reconstruction."
"Which they will," Rhiow said, "if you
go pulling the portal loci off them! Do you know what kind of energy you're
talking about releasing here? And if you don't do it in exact synchronization,
every one of them at just the same time, one or more of the gates could pull
free of its anchors to this universe and just go rolling off across the
landscape wherever it liked, and only Iau knows where it would wind up, and in
what condition! For all you know it would invert function and start eating
anything that the portal locus came in contact with—"
"So we'll be careful about the
synchronization," Saash said.
Rhiow just stared at her.
"How long would it take to get the gates going
again after this?" Tom said.
"With all the available gating experts working
together to do the reweave? A day or so."
"If it's so easy, why hasn't it ever been done
before?" Rhiow said.
"Because no one ever needed to, since nothing has
ever made the gates malfunction this way before," Saash said, sweetly,
"and because there's never been a problem quite like this! " She
gestured with her tail at the fresh wave of dinosaurs clambering over the heap
of already-dead ones.
Tom looked at this, and also at the image of the plan
that Saash held in her mind. Rhiow was examining that same image with great
disquiet. Theoretically it was sound. Practically, it could be done. But—
"All right," Tom said. "I'll sanction
it. I know you have misgivings, Rhi—so do I—but we've tried every other way to
shut these gates down again, and nothing has worked. And the clock is
ticking—we've got to start patching right away."
He looked at her expectantly. Rhiow sat down, trying
to put her composure in place for whatever spell was going to be required of
her. The thought, though, of simply—well, not destroying the gates—but maiming
them: it rattled her. They were not entirely just spells. They were not
sentient beings, either... but there was still something akin to life about
them....
Rhi, Saash
said. I hear you. But there's a lot of life here, too. And our fellow
wizards can't just stand around down here, killing lizards forever: aside from
the cost to them in energy, ehhif life is going to be seriously
disrupted by the reality of what's happening if it's allowed to persist and set
in too permanently to be erased. Worse: while this is going on, we can't go
find Har'lh or get any closer to the bottom of what's been going on....
You're right, Rhiow
said finally. "So what do we need to do?"
"Four gates," Saash said. "Four of us.
We don't need physical contact; what we're going to do is brutal enough. Rhi,
you know Thirty best. Here's the portal locus's pattern." Rhiow's mind
filled with it, not merely a spell-circle but a filigree sphere of light with
several more dimensions implied in the diagram, all made of interwoven words in
the Speech, intricate and delicate. "Just hang on to that. See that loose
thread there?"
Rhiow did, and she swallowed. She had never noticed
any of the gate loci as having loose threads before. "Yes—"
"Hang on to it. Don't let go until I tell you.
Urruah?"
"Ready. Got it."
"There's the thread. Bite it in your mind, don't
let go. Arhu?"
"Uh, yeah."
"See that?"
"Sure."
"Bite it."
He held very still, his eyes shifting back and forth,
but in his mind he did as he was told.
Saash was quiet for a moment. I've got the fourth
one, she said at last. I'm going to count backward from four in my head.
When I say zero—pull those threads. Not a second before or after.
Right, they
all said.
The wizards around them got quiet, watching, except
for those still occupied with killing whatever saurians came through the gate.
Four, Saash
said.
Three.
Two.
One.
Z-
There was a tremendous rumble that seemed to come from
the bowels of the building, working its way upward toward them, shaking. Dust
sifted down from the ceiling, light fixtures swung, and fluorescent light tubes
snapped and went dark—
And sudden silence fell: the shaking stopped as if a
switch had been thrown.
The gate by Track 30 vanished—simply went away like a
blown bubble that pops when a breeze touches it.
Everyone held very still, waiting. But no more
saurians came out of the air.
There was a restrained cheer from the wizards standing
around, and Tom came over to look at the space where the gate had been. "I
don't feel the catenary," he said, sounding concerned.
"You wouldn't be able to," Saash said,
coming over to stand by him. "But I can see it; the hyperstrings leave a
traceable pattern in the space they occupy, even without energy flowing. It's
just that the sensory component usually expresses itself through—" She
stopped.
"Through what? What's the matter?"
Saash stood there, gazing into the dark with an
expression of increasing horror... then began a low, horribly expressive
yowling. To Rhiow it sounded like her tail was caught in a door... except there
was no door, and she could feel her friend's sudden fear and anger.
"What?" Rhiow said. "What—"
Then she felt it, too.
Oh, Iau, no—
Arhu crouched down, looking scared—a more emphatic
response than he had revealed even in the face of a ten-ton tyrannosaurus. Urruah
stared at him, then at Saash.
"Oh, no," Rhiow said. "Saash—where's
the Number Three gate?"
Arhu was sinking straight into the concrete.
"It's come loose before its locus was pulled
off," Saash hissed. "It's popped out of the matrix—"
There was nothing showing of Arhu now except the tips
of his ears, which were rapidly submerging into the floor.
"It's not your fault," Saash yowled,
"come out of there, you little idiot! Somebody boobytrapped it!"
Saash glared at Tom as Arhu clambered up out of the
floor again. "Somebody knew we were going to do that
intervention," Saash said. "One of the gates was left with a
minuscule timing imbalance, hard-wired in and left waiting to go off as soon as
the portal locus was tampered with. It hasn't been deactivated ... and
now everything that was coming out of all the gates before is going to come out
of just that one ... !"
"My God," Tom whispered. "Where's the
other gate gone?"
Rhiow looked at him in shock. "A loose transit
gate," she said, "normally inheres to the area of the greatest
density of thought and anchors there. The place where the most minds are packed
the most closely together—"
"Dear Iau up a tree," Urruah whispered. They
all stared at him.
He looked at them, open-eyed with horror.
"Tonight? The biggest concentration of
minds?" Urruah said. "It's in the Sheep Meadow....'"
Urruah ran out. "Hurry up and start
patching," Tom said to several of the wizards who had been working with
him; and he, and Rhiow, and Saash, and Arhu, and half the rest of the wizards
in the place ran after him.
-=O=-***-=O=-
Urruah was making for the sidewalk, which was well
enough away from any of the gates inside to prevent adverse effects. Maybe he
didn't really need to, under the circumstances, but Rhiow, at the moment,
thought it was probably better to be safe than sorry. There were enough people
sorry already.
Sabotage... Rhiow
thought again, as she and Arhu raced, along with the others, past the waiting
room. As if from inside...
Arhu glanced over at the mess that still lay all about
in the waiting room as they passed. "That was it," Arhu said
to her, fierce, his panic of a few moments ago now replaced with a rush of
angry satisfaction and aliveness the like of which Rhiow had never yet sensed
in him. "That was what I saw ... the first night. That came out.
Even the rats ran away from it. And I—" He winced as they ran out the
front doors with the others, and then said, "We're even now. It wasn't
going to do that to me twice."
"Arhu," Rhiow said, while Urruah and Tom
paced out a large transit circle—it glowed in the sidewalk behind them as they
paced, causing interested looks from the passing pedestrians—"when you
work with words the way wizards do, precision is important. Something like that
was what you saw? Or, that was what you saw? Which is it?"
He looked at her with utter astonishment. "You
mean— you think there's another?"
"How would I know? I want to know what you
meant."
"Ready," Tom said. "Everybody in
here—hurry up!"
They jumped into the circle with Tom and Urruah and
the other wizards. "You sure of these coordinates?" Tom was saying to
Urruah.
"They're 'backstage,'" Urruah said.
"The spot was empty yesterday. No guarantees for tonight—but it's got
better odds of being empty than anywhere else in the meadow tonight. You've got
a 'bumper' on this, to keep us from accidentally coexisting with anybody—"
"Yeah, but who knows what it's going to do in
such a densely populated area? We've got to take the chance. Whatever our spell
will do if it malfunctions, it won't be as bad as what's already
happening—"
There was no arguing with that. Tom said three
words and the circle flamed up into life, then a fourth.
Wham!
A huge
displacement of air as all their masses were subtracted from the space outside
Grand Central; and Slam! an explosion of air outward as they all
appeared—
—and heard a blast of sound that staggered them all—
partly from the amplification, partly from how close they all were to the
stage. The orchestra was playing a massive, deliberate accompaniment to three
voices—two lower, one high—that wound forcefully and delicately about one
another, scaling continually upward through slow changes of key. Rhiow found
herself briefly impinging on the outskirts of Urruah's mind as on those of all
the others in the transit circle there—had been no time to install me usual
filters— and was drowned in his instant recognition and delight, even in these
horrible circumstances, at the perfection of the sound coming from two of the
three tehn'hhirs, and a third invited guest, the new young ssoh'pra-oh
from the Met, in the great finale of a work called Ffauwst. Two of
the voices argued—the Lone One and a wizard, in the throes of a struggle for
the wizard's soul—but the third and highest, the voice of a young and
invincibly innocent queen, called on the bright Powers for aid: and (said
Urruah's memory) the aid came—
Let it be an omen! Rhiow thought desperately as they broke the circle and looked around
them. A few security people and police noticed them, started coming toward
them—
The human wizards, prepared, all went sidled in a
whisker's twitch. Rhiow and her team did, too, and they all hurried past the
extremely confused policemen and security people to get around to one side of
the stage and get a clearer view—
It was hard, but they managed to clamber up among some
sound gear, and from that viewpoint stared out into the night. The Sheep Meadow
was full, absolutely full of ehhif, only dimly seen in the light from
the stage. They sat on blankets and in portable chairs; the smell of food and
drink was everywhere, and Rhiow threw a concerned look at Arhu— but for once he
had his mind on other things. His ears were twitching; he stared toward one
side of the meadow—
"Where's the gate?" Tom was whispering.
"Not here yet," Saash said. "The locus
is still moving—"
A faint sound could be heard now, something different
from the susurrus of more than a hundred thousand bodies in one place. It was
hard to tell just what it was with this mighty blast of focused sound, both
real and amplified, coming from the orchestra. Rhiow glanced at the little
round ehhif whom she had seen leading them earlier; now he was in the
kind of black-and-white clothes that ehhif males wore for ceremonial
these days, and conducting the orchestra as if he heard nothing whatever but
bis music. Perhaps he didn't. But there was more sound than music coming from
the edges of the meadow. A rustling, a sound like the distant rush of wind—
The three on the stage—a tall, pale, dark-haired tom-ehhif,
a shorter tom, more tan but also dark-haired, both in the black-and-white
clothes, and a tall, beautiful, dark-skinned queen-ehhif in a dress
glittering like starlit night— were no more aware of anything amiss than the
conductor. The toms, singing the Lone Power and the doomed wizard, cursed one
another melodiously; the queen, ignoring them both, relentlessly declared her
own salvation, requiring the aid of the Powers That Be. In a final blast of
pure sound, a chord in three perfect notes, all three took up their fates, to
the accompaniment of a final, mighty orchestral crash.
The ehhif in the audience roared approval and
applauded, a sound like the sea on the shore, rolling from one side of the
great space to the other: the tehn'hhirs and the ssoh'pra-oh took
their bows and walked off the stage, almost close enough for Rhiow to have
reached out with a claw and snagged the ssoh'pra-oh's gown. But out at
the edge of that sound, over toward the east side of the park, something was
going wrong. The sound leaned up and up in pitch as the queen's voice had.
Rhiow, Urruah, Arhu, Tom, all the wizards looked that way, straining to see
what was happening—
"It's coming," Arhu said.
"What?" Rhiow hissed, as the third tehn'hhir,
the big furry one Urruah had shown her the other day, went up the stairs to
the stage past her, and more applause rolled across the meadow at the sight of
him. He too was resplendent in the ceremonial black and white now, with a long
white scarf around his neck, and he once again held the scrap of cloth he had
used to wipe his face in the heat. This he waved at the conductor: once more
the music began. There was a further rush of applause just at the sound of it—
He smiled. "Tu pure, o Principessa," he
began to sing—
"It can't be coming," Arhu said, furious and
afraid. "It's not fair... it can't be coming! I killed
it!—"
—The tehn'hhir looked
alarmed as now, above even the amplified music, he could hear the strange sound
coming from the east side of the meadow . .. the sound, getting louder by the
second, of screaming.
He stopped and looked up, and saw the dinosaurs
coming.
The screaming got worse: thousands of voices now,
rather than just hundreds, as the dark shapes plunged through into the humanity
in the Sheep Meadow, confused, enraged, hungry, and in many cases half
blind—for many of the Children of the Serpent do not see well by night, and
hunt by scent. Scent there was, in plenty, and possibly all the picnic food
bought some of the ehhif precious time to pick themselves up and run
away while furious and hungry saurians threw themselves on whole roast chickens
and a great deal of Chinese take-out. But the biggest of the saurians, those
with well-developed eyesight, had more than enough light to make do with, and
many of them, particularly the biggest, homed in on the brightest source of
light they could find— the stage. A great herd of them, maybe twenty or thirty
big ones, went wading through the crowds, loping along at terrific speed,
trampling anyone not quick enough to get away; and the screams became more
intense and drowned out the orchestra's last efforts.
Some of the saurians were beginning to drop now as
various of the ehhif wizards who had come with Rhiow's team in the
circle did their own short-distance transports, out into the empty areas
beginning to open in the tightly packed crowd. Actinic-bright sources of
wizardly light began to appear here and there, drawing the light-sensitive
saurians away from the surrounding ehhif; once they got within range,
the neural-inhibitor spell finished them. But, as before, they just never
seemed to stop coming....
Near Rhiow, Saash hissed softly. "I've got to get
over there and pull the locus off that last gate," Saash said.
"Someone come and run interference for me—"
"I'm with you," Urruah said.
"Good. That spot over there—"
They vanished together. Around them, backstage, ehhif
were running in all directions: Rhiow wished fervently that she could do
the same.
The big tom-ehhif stared out into the darkness,
much more bemused than afraid, if Rhiow was any good at reading ehhif expressions.
More of the big saurians waded toward the stage; seeing them perhaps more
clearly than the tom-ehhif could, the orchestra fled to right and left
in a frantic double wave; though Rhiow noticed, with grim amusement, that very
few of them left their instruments behind.
Next to her, Arhu was crouched down, hissing in rage.
"See what I meant," Rhiow said, "when I asked you which one you
saw—"
"It was one of these," Arhu said, furious.
"They're all the same one."
"What? Do you mean they're clones?"
"No. They're the same one—"
"If that's the case," Rhiow said, watching
the vanguard of the saurians coming toward the stage more—tyrannosaurs, indeed,
all identical to the one in the waiting room—"then you can kill them the
same way."
Arhu's expression became an entirely feral grin. He
turned his attention toward the approaching saurians, started getting his spell
ready again.
Another sound started to mix with the screams out in
the meadow: the bright sharp sound of gunfire, stitching through the night. This
is New York, after all... and entirely too many of the crowd will be armed,
legally or not. Roars followed, and some unnatural bleats and bellows of
rage and pain as bullets went home. Still more screams came as some of the
fallen saurians fell on nearby ehhif. Iau grant these ehhif don't get
so confused, they start shooting each other—
But there were worse things to think about. Tom
reappeared nearby, glanced around to see how they were doing, was gone again in
a breath. Almost in the same breath, a saurian came out from the farther
backstage area, where the trailers had been parked: it had leapt over or dodged
around the security barriers—
The saurian loomed over Rhiow, snatched at her with
jaws and claws. Rhiow leapt sideways out of the claws' grasp, said the last
word of the neural-inhibitor spell; the saurian, along with a companion behind
it, came crashing to the ground. Too close, Rhiow thought, jumping out
of the way. She was starting to get tired; and "burn-in" was setting
in, the wizardry problem that came of doing the same spell too often. The
spell's range decreased, and its effectiveness dwindled, until you could get
some rest and recharge yourself—
Arhu was hissing, hissing again; outside, well beyond
the stage, there were horrific noises. "It's—it's not working so great any
more—" he gasped. "I don't think I can get all of them—"
Big spell, big burn-in, Rhiow thought, and worse than usual for a young
wizard, who doesn't know how to pace himself yet. "Stop it for a
moment," she said, "and use something else. Try the neural
inhibitor—"
Rhiow felt Arhu rummaging briefly in her head for the
complete spell, as he had taken the explosive spell from Saash: a most
unnerving sensation. Then he said the last word of the spell—
Another large saurian that had invaded the backstage
area died. This was followed by a small clap of air exploding outward, almost
lost in the massive sound of a hundred thousand people panicking, and Urruah
was there again. "Saash took the gate out," he said. "They've
stopped coming—"
Arhu opened his mouth to hiss at the next of the huge
shapes loping toward the stage.
Nothing happened.
The big tom-ehhif had been standing and
staring in utter astonishment, probably simply unable to believe what he was
seeing. Now fear finally won out over disbelief. He turned to flee, heading for
the side exit from the stage ...
... but he was not nearly fast enough on his feet. A
huge scarlet-and-blue-striped head reached down into the blinding stage lights,
the little fierce eye holding a horrible humor trapped in it; the jaws opened
and swiftly bit.
It took the saurian two bites to get the tehn'hhir down.
Urruah, turning around from dropping a couple more of
the saurians, saw this, and swore bitterly. "Oh, great," he said,
"we're gonna have fun patching that!"
Across the Sheep Meadow, the last cries of the
remaining saurians were fading away. Urruah hissed out the last word of the
neural inhibitor, and the saurian now leaping off the stage was hit by it in
midair; it crashed into the right-hand speaker tower as it fell, and the tower
tottered, sparks jumping and arcing from its broken connections. After a moment
the speaker tower steadied again and sat there, sizzling and snapping, the
noise fighting with the dwindling seacrash roar of angry and frightened ehhif
voices as, en masse, the audience fled the Sheep Meadow.
Rhiow and Urruah and Arhu found Saash after a little
while and went in search of Tom. He was out in the center of the meadow,
helping many more wizards who had followed them from Grand Central to try to
stabilize the situation and get the "patch" of congruent time in
place.
"... It's not so much a problem of power as of
logistics," Tom said wearily, rubbing his face as he looked around at
hundreds, maybe thousands, of saurian bodies left scattered across the great
open space, and many hurt or dead humans. "We just need to keep enough
wizards in the area to make sure the patch takes. Grand Central's already
patched, in fact: the derailments never happened, the tracks are clean. But the
price ..." He sighed. "A lot of people volunteered a lot of time off
their lives tonight. We have a fair number of sick and injured: they're outside
the patch because they intervened as wizards ... so they're stuck with the
results of mat timeline."
"Casualties?" Rhiow said, very softly.
"Four of us," Tom said. "We were very
lucky it wasn't a whole lot more. As it is, we're going to have to find ways to
cover their deaths in the line of duty ..." Rhiow twitched her tail at the
sight of the lines of pain deepening in his face. "Fortunately, there's
nothing forensics can do about wizardry. There will be no trace of the cause in
which they died. But their families ..." He shook his head.
"What about the park?" Saash said.
"The patch is being arranged now," Tom said,
looking with a sigh at the half-demolished stage, the bodies of saurians
festooned all over the skewed and crumpled speaker towers, the orchestra chairs
scattered, the heaviest instruments lying overturned. Overhead, police
helicopters were starting to circle, directing their bright spotlights down at
what must have looked like a most peculiar riot. The streets all around the park
on both sides were full of people: not the usual leisurely walk home from a
mass concert, but people hurrying to get away from something they couldn't
understand and were very much afraid to. That susurrus of their voices,
frightened, bemused, echoed in the stone canyons, mingling with the ratchet of
the helicopter rotors overhead.
"Can we really heal all of this?" Urruah
said, sounding rather desperate. "Even that?" He looked over
toward where the last saurian lay, the one who had made a rather high-calorie
meal of the third tehn'hhir.
Tom nodded again, with a tired smile. "We're
starting work more quickly than we could with Grand Central: the time-graft
should take perfectly. The gate will never have come rolling down here; he'll
never have become an hors d'oeuvre; all these other people who were hurt or
died, won't have been hurt or died... except for our own people, of
course." It was the practicing wizard's one weakness where time paradox
was involved. If you knew that such patching was possible, you yourself (should
you die) could not be included in it; the unconscious mind, refusing to accept
the violation of the paradox, would dissolve the reconnection with its former
body as often as such reconnection was attempted.
"You're not going to be able to do much more
patching like that, though," Saash said softly. "The Powers won't
permit so much of it."
"No," Tom said. "We've got to get busy
reweaving the gates so that we can discover the source of all this trouble:
it's Downside... far Downside, I'm afraid. Whatever engineered this attack
won't take its defeat kindly. A worse breakthrough will already be in the
planning stages; it's got to be stopped by more conventional methods ... for if
you patch time too aggressively in a given area, the presence of so many grafts
will start denaturing normal time, so that things that really did happen
will start excising themselves. Not good ..."
Rhiow shuddered at the thought "I'll speak to the
Perm team," she said. "We've got to get at least a little rest
tonight, a few hours' worth. After that we'll get at least one access gate up
immediately." She looked around at her team. "And we'll get ourselves
down there and see what the Queen may show us as regards Har'lh's
whereabouts."
Tom nodded.
"He's not dead," Arhu said.
Tom's head snapped around. Everyone stared at Arhu.
"What?"
"He's not dead. But they have him."
"Where is he?"
"In the claws of the Eldest," said Arhu.
Rhiow shuddered again, harder this time. Should you
meet the Lone Power in battle, the Whispering prescribed the correct form of
address: Eldest, Fairest and Fallen... greeting and defiance. It was
felt that you, like the Gods, might be about to try to defeat that Power, but
there was no need to be rude about it.
"How will we find him?" Tom said.
"By going Downside," said Arhu, with unusual
clarity but also a tremulousness in his voice that Rhiow found odd, "and
crossing the River of Fire ..."
Rhiow blinked at the phrase ... then resolutely set
that issue aside for later consideration. "Let's all go home and get some
sleep," she said. "I'll be along for you all before dawn."
-=O=-***-=O=-
It was about an hour later when Rhiow slipped through
the cat door into a dark apartment.
They're in bed... good.
But they weren't. The bedroom door was open: no one
was in there. Still, Rhiow heard breathing—
—Iaehh, sitting in a chair, in the dark.
This is odd, Rhiow
thought. Can't he sleep? When he can't sleep, he sits up and reads till all
hours. And where's Hhuha? Did she have to go away on this business thing?
She went to him, wove around his legs briefly. He
didn't move.
Rhiow reared up, patted his leg with a paw.
Very slowly, Iaehh looked at her....
There was something about the set of his face that
frightened Rhiow: it had stopped moving, seeming almost frozen into a mask. For
someone whose face was normally so mobile, the effect was bizarre. Rhiow
crouched back a little, then jumped up into Iaehh's lap, the better to be in
contact with him.
It was not something she would normally do, but her
fear spurred Rhiow on, and very carefully, she slipped her consciousness into
the upper levels of Iaehh's mind. It wasn't hard; it never was with ehhif—their
thoughts tended to be all on the surface, though the imagery was sometimes
strange, and the colors could hurt your eyes.
—not much color in the imagery here, though. White
tile, on the walls and the floor, and—
-cold, on a cold steel table, Hhuha. And her face—
"No!!" Rhiow yowled, and leapt out of Iaehh's lap so violently that she
scratched him.
He didn't even bother swearing at her, as he usually
did when she forgot her claws. He just sat there, staring down at the floor,
and then put his face down in his hands, and started to cry.
"No," he moaned, "no, no, no,
no..."
Rhiow sat there in the dimness, looking at him,
starting to go numb.
Hhuha. Dead...
It didn't matter how. Gone. Arhu's artless
question started ringing in her head: You mean die dead? Like a bug,
or an ehhif?
Of course you never think of it happening to one of
yaw ehhif, something in the back of
her mind said heartlessly. They're young yet, they're in their prime;
they've got years ahead of them. Until something unexpected comes along—a heart
attack, or a stroke, or just a taxi that turns a corner too fast because
someone in the backseat is trying to stick up the driver—
But, you
think, there'll be plenty of time with them, plenty of time to sort out the
possible answers to the question: where do ehhif go when they die? For
there has to be somewhere, even though they've got only one life.
Doesn't there?...
Iaehh was crying bitterly now, one long tearing sob
after another. Rhiow looked up at him, simply shocked numb, unable to accept
the reality of what had happened ... but the image was real, it had happened.
Iaehh had now known the truth for too long to avoid accepting what had
happened. It was too soon yet for Rhiow to feel that way ... but that would
soon change.
Very slowly she crept toward him again; silently,
carefully, jumped up beside him on the chair; inched her way into his lap.
"Ohh..." he moaned, and put his arms around Rhiow and hugged her
close, and began crying into her fur. The image in his mind was pitifully
plain, and the thought perfectly audible. All I have left of her. All I have
left... Oh, Susan! Oh, Sue...!
Rhiow huddled down in his arms and didn't move, though
her fur was getting wetter by the second, and the pressure of his grip hurt
her. Inside, she moaned, too.
Oh, if only I could tell you how sorry I am! If only I
were allowed to speak to you, just
this once! But not even now. Not even now...
Sinking into an abyss of dumb grief, Rhiow crouched in
Iaehh's arms, and wished to the Powers That Be that she too could cry....
Much later, very early in the morning, some of Iaehh's
friends showed up at the apartment, as red-eyed and upset as he was, and took
him away to "see to the arrangements." They made sure that Rhiow had
plenty of food and water, and petted her, and spoke banalities about "look
at her, she knows there's something wrong . . ." She was as polite to them
as she could bring herself to be; she said goodbye to Iaehh as best she could,
though even looking at him was painful at the moment, and she felt guilty
because of that. The inevitable thought had already come up several times: why
her and not you?! — and when it did, Rhiow fairly turned around in her own
skin with self-loathing.
When he was gone, the pain got worse, not better. The
silence, the empty apartment . . . which would never again have Hhuha in it ...
it all lay on her like lead. The empty place inside Rhiow that would never
again resonate to that other, internal purr ... it echoed now.
She sat hunched up in the early-morning light and
stared at the floor, as Iaehh had.
This is not an accident, she thought finally.
Impossible for it to be a coincidence. The Lone Power
knew all too well when a blow was about to be struck against It. This time, It
had struck the first blow: a preemptive strike, meant to make Rhiow useless for
what now had to be done. And who would say a word? she thought. The
great love of my life is gone, my ehhif's dead. Of course they can't
expect me to perform under these circumstances. Saash is the real expert
anyway. They'll do fine without me. The Perm team will take up the slack.
The predictable excuses paraded themselves through her
mind. She examined them, dispassionately, to see which one would be best suited
to the job.
Ridiculous.
It was almost old Ffairh's tone of voice, except that
now it was hers. You trained me too well, you mangy old creature, Rhiow
thought bitterly. I don't even run my own mind anymore: I keep hearing you,
chiding, growling, telling me what I ought to do.
The problem was ... dead or alive, his advice, Rhiow's
thought, was right. She could not back away from her work, no matter how much
she wanted to. And, thinking about it more, she didn't want to. If she sat here
and did nothing, all she would see in her mind would be the cold tile, the cold
metal table, and Hhuha....
She flinched, moaned a little. Oh, Powers That Be,
haven't I served you well? Couldn't you do me this one favor? Just make it that
this didn't happen, and I'll do anything you like, forever... !
Rhiow—!
Saash, she
said after a moment.
Rhi, where are you? Are you still at home? We need you
down here—
Saash fell silent, catching something of the tone of
Rhiow's mind.
Rhi—what in the Powers' names has happened to you?
My ehhif is dead,
she said.
Saash was too stunned to reply for a few moments.
Finally she said, Oh, Rhiow—how did this happen?
Yesterday evening, early. A traffic accident. A cab
hit her when she was crossing a street.
Saash was silent again. Rhiow, I'm so sorry, she
said.
Yes. I know.
A long silence. Very sorry. But, Rhi, we do need
you. T'hom has been asking for you.
I'll come, Rhiow
said after a moment. . . though it seemed to take about an hour to force the
words out. Give me a little time.
All right.
Saash's presence withdrew from her mind, carefully,
almost on tiptoe. Rhiow wanted to spit. This is what you have ahead of you, she
thought to herself. Days and months when your friends will treat you like an
open wound... assuming you don't all die first.
Maybe dying would be better.
She winced at that thought too.
Rhiow got up, made herself stretch, made herself wash,
even very briefly, then went over to the food bowl.
Iaehh had left her the tuna cat food that Hhuha had
thought so highly of.
Rhiow turned and ran out her door.
-=O=-***-=O=-
They all met in Grand Central, upstairs at the coffee
bar where Rhiow had watched Har'lh drink his cappuccino, about a hundred years
ago, it seemed. Tom was there, with several of his more Senior wizards, two
young queens and a tom a little older than they; all of them had coffee so that
the staff wouldn't bother them. All of them looked as if they had had far too much
coffee over the past several hours. Rhiow and her team, sidled, sat up on
the railing near them.
"The patches aren't taking," Tom was saying.
"We've been able to hold them in place only by main force, by sheer weight
of will, all night and all morning ... and we cannot keep doing this.
It's as if the nature of wizardry is being changed, from
underneath."
"We had our first hint of this earlier in the
week, didn't we?" Urruah said. "That timeslide that didn't take, out
in the Pacific. That seemed weird enough. But now we're seeing the failure of
something as simple and straightforward as a patch with congruent time. If it does
fail... then we're going to have real trouble. This is going to become a
New York where two or three thousand people were hurt or killed in the Sheep
Meadow and Grand Central, and where Luciano Pavarotti has been eaten by a
dinosaur!"
"We can't have that," Saash said, under
her breath.
"Except it wasn't a dinosaur," said Arhu.
Everyone looked at him. "Oh, sure," Urruah
said, hearing the uncertain tone in Arhu's voice. But Rhiow turned, the
dullness broken for just that moment, and said, "No—let him explain. You
were saying something about this yesterday. Something about all these big ones,
these tyrannosaurs, being all the same one—"
"They are," Arhu insisted. "Their heads
feel exactly the same inside. These big ones aren't the same as the saurians,
who're all different. These big ones are all someone else ... who doesn't mind
getting killed. Getting killed doesn't take for him."
They all sat silent, dunking about that
"Immune to death," Saash muttered. "A
nice trick."
"It's going to be interesting to look into,"
Tom said, "but it's a symptom, not the main problem. Wizardry in this
world is being changed. The change has to be at least arrested ... preferably
reversed. For anything that can change the nature of wizardry can also change
various other basic natures... like science. That is not something the
modern world would survive; and from our own planet, the change could spread...
to other parts of the galaxy, to other galaxies, possibly even into other
universes."
That was obviously not something that could be permitted...
though to Rhiow, it all seemed faraway and somewhat unimportant, next to the
pain inside her. "We will, then, be doing another reconnaissance,"
Rhiow said. "Much deeper, I would think. All the way down ..."
Tom nodded. "We'll be assembling a force to come
down after you. But we must know exactly what the danger is and equip ourselves
properly ... because the odds of being able to send a second expeditionary
force down, should the first one fail, seem nonexistent. Once you get word back
to us how to intervene successfully, we'll follow immediately."
"Very well," Rhiow said. "We'll advise
you when we're ready."
She and her team left, Arhu bringing up the rear.
Rhiow walked on up to the waiting room, which was quiet now: no ehhif walked
among the bones, which stood as they had stood the day before, dry and
seemingly dead.
Off in one corner, Rhiow sat down and looked at the
skeletons. The others sat down with her, Arhu again a little off to one side,
watching the older wizards.
"Now what?" Saash said.
"We wait till the gate's ready. Then we go down
again. How are you about that?" Rhiow said.
A long silence. "Scared," Saash said simply.
"You know why. But I don't see what else we can do. I'm with you."
Rhiow switched her tail "yes." "
'Ruah?"
"You know I'm ready to go where you lead."
She gave him the slightest smile. He might be unduly
hormonal and odd in the head about ehhif singing, but Urruah could
always be relied upon.
"Arhu—"
He looked up at her. "I don't know about
this—" he said.
"You're too damn uncertain about most
things," Urruah said. "Your particular talent, especially. I for one
want you to start doing your share of the hunting in this pride—pushing this
gift of yours a little more aggressively. If you'd been actively using it for
what it's for—looking ahead to see what's going to affect us in our
work—you might have seen what happened to Rhiow's ehhif, and she might
have been able to stop it—"
"Oh, yeah?" Arhu was bristling. "You're
not running this team. And what're you going to do if I don't roll
right over and do what you say?"
Urruah leaned at him, reared up, shoulders high,
beginning to fluff. "Some of mis, maybe," he said, lifting a paw
slowly, putting his ears down. "Come to think of it, maybe I should have
done this a while ago—"
Arhu's growl answered his: they began to scale up
together.
"Stop it!" Rhiow said. "Urruah, cut
it out. You can't force vision." But her anger wasn't directed so much
at him as at herself. It was embarrassing enough for Rhiow to hear Urruah say,
out loud, something she had been thinking ... another of those loathsome
selfish thoughts that made her so furious with herself. The thought of begging
Tom for a scrap of congruent time, just a little of what had been used to patch
Grand Central and the Sheep Meadow, to keep a cab from turning a particular
corner at a particular moment ... The Powers will never notice.... She
had actually caught herself thinking that. Leaving aside the thought that all
patches were an iffy proposition at the moment—and what point was there in
patching that bit of time, then having it come undone, so that Hhuha would have
to die twice—thoughts like that were a poor kind of memorial for her ehhif,
who had always had a short temper for other people's selfishness.
How long have I been a wizard now, and not learned?
Use your gifts for things for yourself... and they'll shut down. They're not
designed for it. But Rhiow did have
one thing that was lawful for her to use ... her anger. Lone One, sa'Rrahh,
Tearer and Destroyer, Devastatrix—we are going to have words, you and I.
"He sees what he has to," Rhiow said.
"That's the nature of his gift. He's already doing better at that than he
has previously. He'll learn to see more completely as time goes on."
Arhu had been crouched down on the floor, ears flat,
through all this. But now he looked up, and he was as angry at Rhiow, who
thought she had been defending him, as at any of the others. "Why should
I?" he growled. "I didn't ask for this gift, as you call it. And
I hate it! It never shows me anything good! All I see is fighting in the past,
and dying in the present, and in the future—" He licked his nose,
shook his head hard. "This seeing doesn't do anything for me but hurt me,
make me feel bad. If I ever run across one of these Powers That Be, I'm going to
shove it down Their throats—"
He hunched himself up again.
"I'd give a meal on a hungry day to see that,"
Saash said mildly. "But right now we have other troubles." She
sat up, sighed, and started scratching. "We're going to have to go down
again, as soon as the other gate teams have finished work. I am going. Urruah
is going. Rhiow—"
They looked at her. "I have to go," Rhiow
said. "I don't feel like moving or speaking or doing anything but crawling
into a hole... but I've blown one life of nine on the spelling dispensation
we're going to need: damned if I'm going to waste that. And I have a grudge
against the Lone One. I intend to take it out on It any way I can. All of this
is plainly sa'Rrahh's work... and I'm going to take a few bloody strips out of
her hide, and pull out a few pawfuls of fur, before all this is over."
Saash, in particular, was staring at her, possibly
unused to hearing such bitterness, such sheer hate. Rhiow didn't care; the
emotion was a tool, and she would use it while it lasted. It was better than
the dullness that kept threatening to descend.
Arhu was staring, too. Finally, he said, "I have
to go do hiouh, excuse me...." He got up and hurried out.
Rhiow breathed down her nose, scornfully amused at his
discomfiture. Urruah looked at her, and said, "Not your usual line,
Rhi."
"But this hasn't exactly been a usual week,
'Ruah. We are being pushed into something . .. some big change. The Powers That
Be are on our cases, directly. And it's all Arhu's fault."
"I'll buy that," Urruah said immediately.
But he sounded less certain than usual and gave Rhiow an uneasy look.
"What kind of 'something,' Rhi?" Saash said.
"I don't know. But it's plain we are a weapon at
the moment ... and I can't get rid of the idea that Arhu is meant to be the
claw in the paw that strikes. We're just his reinforcement, the bone to which
the claw is attached: his bodyguards, as an ehhif would put it. I think
he is going to be subjected to an Ordeal so extreme that he wouldn't be likely
to survive it... and so important that he mustn't be allowed to fall. Which is
why we're being sent along."
"Wonderful," Urruah said, looking slit-eyed
at the door through which Arhu had left. "I just love being
expendable."
"I don't think we are," Rhiow said slowly.
"I think something severe is intended for us too. And the Lone Power is
stepping up Its resistance." She looked over at Saash. "Better keep
an eye on your ehhif," she said. "Though yours is probably
safe: I don't think you two were as ... emotionally attached ... as, as Hhuha
..."
She had to stop. Just the mention of her name brought
the whole complex of scents and sensations that had been associated with her ehhif:
the warmth, the silent purr...
The others watched Rhiow, silent, as she crouched
there and did her best to master herself. It was hard. Finally she lifted her
head again and said, "When will one of the gates be ready?"
"This evening. It'll be our friend beside
Thirty."
"All right. Load yourselves up with every spell
you think you can possibly use ... I've bought us the right to
over-carry." She licked her nose, swallowed. "Ffairh went right down
into the Roots, once upon a time. Not all the way down: there wasn't need. But
he knew at least part of the way and left me directions. At the time, I just
thought he was being obsessional about cleaning his mind out before he died.
Now I'm not so sure."
-=O=-***-=O=-
The time when they would have to leave for Downside
was approaching. Rhiow had returned to the apartment, hoping to see Iaehh
before she left, but he seemed not to have come back, and Rhiow could
understand entirely why not The emptiness of the place without Hhuha, the
silence, must have been as unbearable for him as for her. But it was all Rhiow
had left of her. She sat on the sofa, in Hhuha's spot, staring at the pile of
papers she had left there, saying, "Maybe never again ..."
The memory hurt. Nearly all memories hurt, for Rhiow
had been with Hhuha since kittenhood, and not until she was offered wizardry,
went on her Ordeal, and achieved the power to have more autonomy did she ever
begin to contemplate a life without her ehhif. She had started to be
very active then, in the way of young wizards everywhere: going out on
errantry, sometimes even offplanet; meeting and socializing with other wizards;
doing research on gating in general, and specifically on the spell that had
come with her Ordeal.
Well, not precisely with it, as if in a
package. But not too long before she had gone on the errand that made a wizard
of her, there she had found it, like something left on the bottom of her brain,
in rags and tatters: bits and pieces of a spell, half-assembled or badly
assembled, like someone's leftovers. She had gone straight into the difficult
part of her Ordeal then and had forgotten about this spell until much later:
when she found she was fully confirmed in her power as a wizard, still alive
after the challenges that had faced her, and not yet on assignment—left with a
little time of her own to recover, and look at the world through new eyes.
Little by little, she had started piecing the thing together, or trying to,
anyway, the way Hhuha would piece together a quilt—
Rhiow flinched from her pain. But the simile was apt,
and it was too late now to get rid of the image of Hhuha sitting on the couch,
completely surrounded by little strange-shaped pieces of cloth with paper
pinned to them: hunting among them for one in particular, turning it around and
around to find the place where it properly fit, and then slowly stitching it in
place, while Rhiow rolled among the fragments and cuttings and threw them in
the air, scuffling and scrabbling among the papers and the fabric scraps. The
work on the spell had been very like that, except for the scuffling part.
Most wizards learned to keep a workspace in their
minds, a place where a piece of information or a spell could be left to
gestate, to be worked on or added to slowly over time. Words in the Speech
would lie scattered on the floor of her mind, glowing with attention or dim
with disuse; long graceful graphic arabesques, hisses or spits of sound,
fragments of thought or imagery. You would come and sit in the dimness
sometimes, or stroll through the untidy farrago of scents and sensations,
peering at a word shattered to syllables, poking them with your paw to see if
they could be coaxed or coerced into some more functional shape: pick them up and
carry them around, squint at them to see what they did when conjoined—how the
joint shape fulfilled or foiled the separated ones, when a phrase suddenly
became part of a sentence, or tried to declare its independence and secede from
a paragraph or sequence already fitted together. The tattered spell had been in
this kind of shape for ever so long, for Rhiow had no idea what it was trying
to be. Part of the problem was that it kept falling into impossible shapes,
configurations that seemed to lead nowhere, dead-end reasonings.
Its power requirements when she found it were strange—
seeming to come to almost nothing: its power output estimates were weird, too,
for they seemed to indicate the kind of result that you would expect from, say,
a gate's catenary—big, dangerous power, likely to burst out without warning.
Rhiow wondered if the spell had gotten its signs reversed somehow when she
inherited it, for this indication went right against the rules for wizardry.
Every spell had its price, and the bigger the spell, the higher the price:
magic was as liable to the laws of thermodynamics and conservation of matter
and energy as anything else. She could feel those laws, particularly the last
one, in her bones at the moment: there was an empty place where her fifth life
had been....
When a spell makes no sense, you normally leave it
alone and come back to it later. This Rhiow had been doing for two years, idly,
with no significant result; now as she looked again at the spell, lying there
in its bits and pieces—though they were larger ones than two years ago—it still
said nothing to her, except that you could get almost everything for almost
nothing, just by saying that you wanted it. It was a spell for the
kitten-minded, for those who would chase a reflected sunbeam across the floor
and think they had caught it.
She sighed. I've done enough of that in my time, Rhiow
thought. Here with my ehhif, I thought I'd caught the sunshine under
my paw. Peace, and a happy, busy, exciting life: what could go wrong?...
Now I know.
Rhiow sighed again: she didn't seem able to stop.
Slowly she wandered across the broad dark plain of her workspace, making her
way to the place where Ffairh's instructions for the route down into the
Mountain lay.
He had always been of a surprisingly visual turn of
mind, even for one of the People, precise and careful: the diagram he had left
her, of the twisting and turnings through the labyrinthine caverns, looked more
like it had been designed using some ehhif's CAD/CAM program than
anything else. Through it all stretched the paths of the catenaries that fed
power to the world's gates: those lines of power were shadowy now, reflecting
the nonfunctional status of the catenaries. All of the catenary structures
branched out in the upper levels of the Mountain, each feeding one complex of
gates. Farther down, in the great depths, they began to come together; and in
the greatest depth, which Ffairh knew about but to which even he had never
gone, all the "stems" of the catenaries fused together into one
mighty trunk, the base of the "tree structure" rooted (as far as
Rhiow could tell) in the deepest regions of the Earth's crust layer, and in a
master gateway or portal to their energy source, whatever that was. White
hole, Saash had said casually, or black hole, or quasar, or whatever...
Rhiow suspected that it was more than something so
merely physical; or there might indeed be such a physical linkage, but coupled
to energy sources of very different kinds, in other continua right outside the
local sheaf of universes. That had been Ffairh's suspicion, anyway. Too far
out for me, Rhiow had said when he'd told her about that; Ffairh had looked
at her, slightly cockeyed as he often did, and had said, You never can tell.
She studied the map again. The way down to the root
catenary, the trunk of the "tree," was a long sequence of more
caverns like the ones they had traversed earlier. But Ffairh had mentioned that
the caverns were densely populated with the saurians. That I believe, Rhiow
thought, seeing again in mind the thousands of them pouring out into the upper
track level of Grand Central, and then into the Sheep Meadow. He had not said
much more about what he had found, except to report continued attacks by more
and more of the creatures, who howled at him that they would have their revenge
on him, and the "sun-world," and anything that dared to come down to
them from there: that someday they would come up into the sun themselves, and
then all the creatures that lived in the sun, and squandered it, would pay...
He had come away, barely, and lived to tell the tale.
At the time Rhiow had wondered whether Ffairh was exaggerating, just a little,
to make sure that she didn't indulge herself in casual runs to the Downside for
the pleasure of owning a big cat's body. Now, though, she knew much better....
Rhiow looked over the map, marking with one claw the
paths that seemed the most straightforward so that Urruah and Saash and Arhu
could look at them. The Powers only know what we'll find, of course, she
thought, and we don't even know what we're looking for. A wizard of some
kind, gone rogue... and intent on the destruction of wizardry as a whole.
The thought chilled her, for it spoke of tremendous
power in their adversary. Worse, she thought, the Powers may not know
what we 'II find... or it may very well be one of Them. One in
particular...
Rhiow looked Ffairh's map over a last time, then
turned her back on it and started back across the plain of her workspace,
toward her usual egress point. She would consult with the others, show them the
map, and attend to whatever final organization needed to be done; then they'd
go find out what was in store for them....
Urruah's question was still echoing in Rhiow's mind: what
kind of 'something'? She had been reluctant to answer him. It was he who
had mentioned the "second Ordeal" that some very few wizards went
through. The Whisperer would say only that such Ordeals were not true second
ones: only first ordeals that had been somehow arrested or had a component that
had not been completely resolved. Could this really be what's happening? And
which of us? Or is it all of us?...
She twitched her tail in frustration. It may
simply be that we are all, together, a weapon crafted specifically to deal with
whatever is going on in the deepest Downside. Now all we have to find out is
whether we are a weapon that will be destroyed along with the threat we're
meant to.combat....
Rhiow paused and stood gazing across the bright plain
Uttered with words. Some part of her very much wanted to simply turn around and
say, I refuse to take pan. I was not consulted. And she heard Arhu's
voice again: I didn't ask for this.
But he consented to it when he took the Oath. And so
did we. Now Urruah says he's willing. So does poor Saash, frightened as she is.
If they're willing...
She growled, briefly angry at her own intense desire
to back down from this job. It's you, isn't it, she said to the
Lone One. You live at the bottom of all hearts, anyway, part and parcel of
the little "gift" you sold our people. Well, it won't work with me,
today. I've seen your "gift" and what it did to my poor Hhuha.
Maybe I'm about to claim my own version of it, and "die dead, like a bug
or an ehhif," all my lives snuffed out together if I die Downside
or if the others do. But you will not get me to walk away from the fight.
The Claw may break. Let it. It'll be in your throat that it breaks.
I'm coming.
-=O=-***-=O=-
They met again in Grand Central, down by Track 30.
Urruah and Saash greeted her with restraint: Arhu wouldn't say much of anything
to Rhiow, but just looked at her as if she had some rare disease and he were
afraid to go near her. She couldn't bring herself to care very much, just let
him stare, and spent the next ten minutes briefing her partners on the route
they would take once Downside.
Tom was there to meet them, looking even more
exhausted than he had earlier. First of all, the Track 30 gate was up again,
but it looked paler than usual, the light of the usual warp- and weft-strings
of the locus duller and fuzzy-seeming. Indeed, to a wizard's trained vision,
the whole station had an odd fuzzy look about it—edges and corners not as sharp
as they should have been, somehow. The "patched" reality was fretting
against the events of the last twenty-four hours, trying to come loose. So far
it was holding—but only with constant supervision, Rhiow could see.
"How much longer can you keep all this in
place?" Rhiow said.
Tom shook his head. "Your guess is as good as
mine. The sooner you get started, the better."
Rhiow looked over at Saash. "This gate doesn't
look any too healthy. Is it stable?"
"Oh, it's stable enough. But I wouldn't want to
hazard any estimates on how long it will stay that way. Wizardry in general is
starting to behave badly around here. If we don't find out what's causing the
problem Downside, we may not be able to get back up again before the natural
laws governing gating have been completely degraded and replaced with new ones
... if they're replaced at all."
"All right," Rhiow said, glancing over at
Urruah: he nodded and hopped down beside the gate, sitting up on his haunches
to feed power into it if necessary. "Saash, when you're ready."
'Two minutes," Saash said.
Rhiow sat down to wait.
"Rhiow—"
She turned. Arhu was standing beside her. He said,
"I can see—" and stopped.
"Well?"
"Your ehhif—I mean—"
"If you're going to say that I brought this pain
on myself by living with an ehhif at all," Rhiow said, "don't
bother. There are enough others who'll say it."
"No, I wasn't—I—" He stopped, then simply
put his head down by hers, bumped her clumsily, and hurriedly went away to sit
beside Urruah.
Rhiow looked up to find Saash standing next to her,
looking after Arhu. "You've been coaching him, I see," Rhiow said to
Saash.
She looked at Rhiow, slightly wide-eyed. "No, I
have not. He's looking, Rhiow. Isn't that what you told him he had to
do?" And Saash stalked away toward the gate, leaping down beside Urruah,
and getting up on her haunches to sink her claws into the control weft.
Rhiow stood up as the usual quick sheen of light,
though again duller than normal, ran down the weft. It abruptly blanked out
then, showing her the rock ledge at the edge of the Downside gate cavern; the
slow sunset of that world was fading away in the west.
She rose and went over to the edge of the platform,
pausing there by Tom to glance up at him.
"Go well," he said. "And be
careful."
She laughed, a brittle sound. "For what good it's
likely to do, we all will."
Rhiow leapt through, felt herself go heavy as she
passed through the weft, and landed on the stone. She shook herself, feeling
almost relieved to be out of the small powerless body. Behind her, Urruah came
through, then Arhu, finally Saash. As she came down, the gate winked closed.
Rhiow looked at that with some concern. So did Saash,
but she simply switched her tail and said, "Power conservation measure. If
we didn't shut it now, it might collapse between now and the time we get back
up."
Whenever that may be, Rhiow thought. If ever at all.
And do I really care?
"Come on," she said. "Let's get on with
it; and Iau walk with us ... for we need Her now, if we ever did."
-=O=-***-=O=-
They wound their way back into the caverns of the
Downside by the same route they originally had taken to service the catenary.
The sounds around them were different this time, even to the dripping of water,
and all of them walked more quietly. The Downside had a listening quality about
it that it had not had before ... but not the kind of listening that can be described
as "brooding." It was charged: a silence following action ... or
before action begins again.
Their order of march was reversed this time. It was
Arhu who led the way, having learned from "looking" inside Urruah how
to make the tiny dim light that helped them find their way. Rhiow had shown him
how to tie this small wizardry into the map in her mind so that the light led
them through the turns and twists of the caverns, and left them free to keep
alert and watch for any sign of the saurians. Behind Arhu, Saash was walking,
and behind her, Urruah; Rhiow brought up the rear.
Their vigilance might have been for nothing: they
heard no one, saw no one, and caught not a whiff of lizard except for what was
stale, left over from the previous time ... or so Rhiow thought. It was almost
an hour later when they came to the catenary cavern and were almost surprised
by it, for they had expected to smell it from some distance. When they came to
the catenary cavern, though, it was empty, and almost perfectly clean. Even the
bloodstains appeared to have been washed off the rock. Or rather, licked, Rhiow
thought, her whiskers quirking with disgust.
Of the catenary nothing could be seen but a faint
wavering in the air, like weed in water: only the barest maintenance-trickle of
power was running up it, not nearly enough to produce any light. Saash went to
it and looked it over while Arhu gazed around him in confusion. "Who
cleaned everything up in here?"
"Who do you think?" Rhiow said.
Arhu stared at her, completely bemused.
"They eat each other," said Urruah.
Arhu's jaw actually dropped. Then he laid his ears
flat back and scratched the floor several times with one huge paw, the gesture
of revulsion that many People make when presented with something too foul to
ingest, either a meal or a concept. "They deserve what we did to them,
then!" Arhu said. "They would have done that to us—"
"Almost certainly," Saash said. "But as
to whether they deserve to be killed, I wouldn't care to judge: the Oath
doesn't encourage us to make such assessments."
"Why not? They're just animals! They come running
and screaming out in big herds, and try to kill you—"
"We have responsibilities to animals too,"
Saash said, "the lower ones as well as the higher ones who can think or
even have emotional lives. But leaving that aside, you haven't been in their
minds enough to make that assessment." Saash wrinkled her nose. "It's
not an enjoyable experience, listening to them think and feel. But they're
sentient, Arhu, never doubt it. They have a language, but not much culture, I
think—not since their people were tricked by the Lone One. There are
memories." She looked thoughtful. "Anyone can be delusional or
believe lies that are told. But almost all the minds of theirs you might touch
will have heard stories of how things were before the Lone One came—how their
people really had a right to be called what we still call them as a
courtesy-name, the Wise Ones; how they were great thinkers, though the thoughts
would seem strange to us now ... maybe even then. All very long ago, of course
... but nonetheless, the Whispering seems to confirm the rumors. Now they have
nothing left but a life in the dark ... nothing to eat except each other,
except at times when so many of them die off that they're forced to go up into
the sun to try to hunt; and not being adapted to the present conditions here,
those who try that mostly die, too. If the saurians hate us, they may
have reason."
"I don't want to know about that," Arhu
said. "We're going to have to kill a lot more of them if we're supposed to
do whatever it is you have in mind. Knowing stuff like that will only make it
harder." He stalked ahead of them, the epitome of the hunter: head down
for the scent, padding slowly and heavily, eyes up, wide and dark in the darkness.
The other three went silently along behind him as they
continued downward through the caverns, now slipping through unfamiliar
territory and moving a little more slowly. Rhiow was still thinking of how she
had seen the saurians eating one another, down there in the dark, with a ready
appetite that suggested this kind of diet was nothing new at all. They would be
seeing much more of that kind of thing, she was sure. I should be grateful,
maybe, she thought, that my emotions are so dulled at the moment, that
everything seems so remote....
"So where are all the lizards that came out of
the gates the other day?" Urruah said softly, behind Rhiow now.
"Maybe they all came out," Saash said, in an
oh-yes-I-believe-this voice, "and they all died."
"I doubt that very much," Rhiow said.
"Never mind. How was the catenary itself?"
"Structurally sound. But something is starving it
of power, from underneath."
"Could it be reactivated later?"
"Probably," Saash said, "but I've got
no idea whether the rules for reactivating it will be the same as they were
yesterday."
Arhu had gone down and around a corner, ahead of them,
out of sight, and Urruah paused for a moment, looking up.
"Interesting," he said, coming over to Rhiow. "Look at the
ceiling here."
Rhiow and Saash gazed up. "Very round, isn't
it?" Saash said.
"One of those bubble structures you get down
here," Rhiow said. "The water comes in through a little aperture and
then rolls loose stones around and around inside the larger one. It hollows the
chamber right out, as if someone blew a bubble in the stone. There are a few
chains of them down here; they show on old Ffairh's map. He seemed to be
interested in them."
They walked on down through the spherical chamber, up
and out the other side, and went after Arhu. There was indeed another such
chamber on the far side, and they went through it as well, down into the
depression at the center and up again to the exit. Past this was a long,
high-ceilinged corridor devoid of the usual stalactites and stalagmites, trending
very steeply downward so that they all had to slow and pick their way as if
they were coming down one side of a peaked roof.
At the bottom of the corridor, the tiny point of
greenish light that they had been following vanished; then their vision caught
its glow, diminished, coming from off to the left, and reflecting on the
shadowy shape of Arhu heading around the corner and leftward as well. The sound
of water could be heard again, soft at first, then getting somewhat louder: an
insistent tink, tink, tink sound, almost metallic in the silence.
"Are we still going to be following that catenary down the tree,"
Urruah said, "or is it another one?"
"Another. We pick it up"— Saash looked at
her own mental "copy" of Rhiow's map— "another five or six caverns
down, and a little to the east. Maybe a hundred feet below where we are
now."
"I hate this," Urruah muttered, as ahead of
them the light got dimmer, and they followed it doggedly. "All this stone
on top of us—"
"Please," Rhiow said. She had been trying
not to think about that Now, abruptly, she could feel all the weight of it
pressing on her head again. As if I need this now! This isn't fair—
Urruah looked up and suddenly stopped. Rhiow plowed
into him and hissed; Saash ran into her but held very still, following Urruah's
glance. Rhiow looked up, too.
"Is it just me," Urruah said, "... or
does that look like a perfectly straight line, carved from the top of this
tunnel all the way down?"
Rhiow stared at it—
The light ahead of them went out.
They all stood stock still, not daring to move, hardly
daring to breathe.
No sound came from above but the steady link, link,
tink, tink...
And there were stumps of the stalagmites and
stalactites back there, Saash said
suddenly, but where were the leftover pieces? They should have been all over
the place. And what about your stone bubbles? Where were the little stones that
should have been left lying around?...
Rhiow licked her nose, licked it again. They stood
there blind in the dark; even People must have some light to see, and the
darkness was now absolute.
Arhu! Rhiow
said inwardly.
No answer.
Arhu!!
I'm trying to sidle, he said silently, and I can't.
But what for? Rhiow
said.
It's going to cause you tremendous trouble to try to
sidle down here; there's too much interference from the catenaries, even when
they're down, Saash said. Stay
still. What is it?
There was a silence, and then Arhu said, They're
down here. I put the light out. They didn't see me.
In absolute silence, Rhiow and the others inched their
way forward, going by memory of what the corridor had been like before the
light failed. Rhiow's heart was hammering, but at least this time the light had
gone out for a reason she didn't mind.
"They?"
I hear five of them breathing, Arhu said. They're not faraway.
Rhiow and Saash and Urruah crept forward. Then
something tickled Rhiow's nose, and she almost sneezed. It was Arhu's tail,
whipping from side to side.
Which way? Rhiow
said, as soon as she got control of her nose again.
Straightforward. Then right. See that? It's faint--
It was:
Rhiow could hardly see it at all. From ahead and to the right, and sharply
downward, came the reflection of a diffuse light, reddish, seeming as faint as
their own had. It leached the color out of everything: there was nothing to be
seen by it but furry contours in dull red and black. In utter silence, they
crept closer; and in her mind, Rhiow felt the familiar contours of the
neural-inhibitor spell, felt for its trigger, that last word. She licked her
nose.
Tink. Tink. Tink. Tink...
A pause, then a peculiar hissing sound, followed by
the sound of stone falling on stone, breaking. And then the hissing voice, like
another version of the sound they had heard first.
"Done..."
"Done. We have finished what we were told we must
do in this work time."
"I'm hungry."
"There will be no food now."
"But we will eat later."
"How much later..."
"The Master will give us something in time. He
gave us food not-long-ago."
"That was good."
"It was. And there'll be much more."
"There will be. When the work is done, there will
be as much to eat as anyone wants."
There was a kind of sigh from all of the speakers
after this. Arhu moved a little forward, during it, and Rhiow cautiously went
after him, slinking low, knowing that behind her the others were doing the
same. The source of the light was getting stronger, rightward and downward:
Rhiow could now clearly see Arhu silhouetted against it He was bristling.
"How much farther must we drive this
tunnel?"
A silence, then sss, sss, sss, as if someone
was counting. "Three lengths. Perhaps as many as four: there's another
chamber to meet, upward, and another baffle to put in place. Then the
power-guide that supplies that gate will be cut off, and the guide can be
redirected to meet the others, below."
"Good, good," the others breathed.
"That will be the last one for a little while.
All the others have been damaged by the sundwellers. The Master must restore
them. Then we may begin work again, and finish the new tunnels, and wall up the
old ones. It's for this we were given the Claw. The sundwellers will not come here
again."
There was much nasty hissing laughter at that. Arhu took
the opportunity to move forward, very quickly, so quickly that Rhiow was afraid
he was slipping on the steep downward slope. But he was well braced, so that
when Rhiow came up against him, he didn't move, and made no sound. Behind her,
Saash and Urruah came up against Rhiow as well: she braced herself so as to put
no further pressure on Arhu. The four of them looked around the corner, into
the red light.
Another of the spherical chambers lay around the comer
of the passage. Or at least it had been spherical to start with. One side of it
had been carved out into a perfectly smooth rectangular doorway, breaking
through into another chamber off to Rhiow's left as she looked through the
opening. In that chamber, lying curled, or sitting hunched, were five saurians:
two deinonychi and three smaller ones that looked like some kind of miniature
tyrannosaur. Their hides were patterned, though with what colors it was
impossible to tell in this lighting. On the floor in front of them
lay... Rhiow stared at them, wondering just what they were. They were
made of metal: three of them looked like long bundles of rods, some of the rods
polished, some of them brushed to a matte finish. A fourth device was a small
box that was the source of the red light, without it being apparent in any way
exactly how the light was getting out of it—the surface of the box was dark,
but brightness lay around it
The mini-tyrannosaurus nearest the carven door had
been looking through the doorway into the darkness. Now it turned away and
picked up one of the bundles of rods in its claws. As it did, the bundle came
alive with a stuttering, glittering light, dull red like that which came from
the box, though in a sharper mode: sparks of it ran up and down the metal rods.
The saurian clutched the rods in one claw, ran its other claw down one of the
sills of the door. More of that red light followed the stroke, as if it had
flowed unseen through the body of the tyrannosaur and up to the stone; from the
stone, a fine powder sifted down, remnants of some slight polishing of the
surface. The other saurians watched, keeping very still but looking intent.
From the rods came a soft, tiny sound: Tink. Tink. Tink. Tink...
The sixth claw.. . Arhu said silently. Rhiow looked where he did, and saw that other claw,
the "thumb," bracing the bundle of rods exactly as a human's thumb
would have. Her tail twitched at the sight of a saurian using a tool, something
half-mechanical and, from the look of it, possibly half-wizardly. If an ehhif
came in and found his houff using the computer, she thought, I bet
he would feel like this.... At the same time, she found herself thinking of
many a pothole crew she had seen on the New York streets in her time—one ehhif
working, four of them standing around and watching him work—and suspected
that she might have stumbled upon a very minor way in which her home universe
echoed this one....
"There is nothing more to do here," said one
of the saurians who sat and watched.
"Yes. Let's go back to where the others are and
wait for them," said another.
The mini-tyrannosaur, though, kept polishing the
doorsill for a few more strokes. "This work gives me joy," it said.
"When it is done, the gates will all be ours and will be turned to the
Master's plan. When all is ready, he will lead us up out of the chill and wet
and darkness, as he has done with others in the not-long-ago, up into the
warmth and the light, and we will take back what was taken from us. The
sundwellers may take our places down here, if they like. But none of them will;
the Great One says they will all die, and there will be such a feasting for our
people as has not been seen since the ancient days. I do not want to wait for
that I want it to come soon."
The others sighed. "The Leader, the Great One, he
will know the way, he will show us..." they hissed, agreeing, but none of
them got up to do anything further. Finally the mini-tyrannosaur lowered the
bundle of rods, and the light of them went out.
"Let us go back, then," it said. "We
will come back after sleep and begin the next work."
The saurians who had been relaxing on the floor got
up, and picked up the other bundles of rods and the light box. The deinonychus
with the box went first, and the others followed behind, hissing softly as they
went. Slowly the light faded away.
What do we do? Arhu
said.
Follow! Rhiow
said. But be careful. It's very hard to sidle down here, as Saash said:
better not to waste your energy trying.
Should I make the light again ? They didn't see it
before.
Rhiow thought about that. Not if we have their
light ahead of us. But otherwise, yes, as long as we can't be seen from any
side passages, she said. Normally they shouldn't be able to see in our
little light's frequencies... but things aren't normal around here, as you've
noticed.
Arhu twitched his tail in agreement, then waited a few
breaths before following the way the saurians had gone, out the opening in the
far side of the spherical chamber, and farther down into the dark. Close
behind, silent, using the warm lizard-scent to make sure they didn't stray from
the proper trail, Rhiow and Saash and Urruah followed.
Far ahead of them, over the next hour or so, they
would occasionally catch a glimpse of that red light, bobbing through long
colonnades and tunnels, always trending down and down. At such times Arhu would
stop, waiting for the direct sight of the light to vanish, before starting
forward and downward again. At one point, near the end of that hour, he took a
step—and fell out of sight.
Arhu!
No, it's all right, he said after a moment, sounding pained but not hurt. It's what we
went down the other day, in the Terminal—
?? Rhiow
said silently, not sure what he meant.
When we went to see Rosie.
Stairs. Stairs?
Here??
They're bigger, Arhu said. Indeed they were: built for bipedal creatures, yes, but
those with legs far longer than an ehhif's. From the bottom of the tread
to the top, each step measured some three feet. A long, long line of them
reached far downward, past their little light's ability to illumine.
Where are we in terms of the map? Saash said to Rhiow. I'm trying to keep track of
where the catenaries are going to start bunching together.
Rhiow consulted the map and stood there lashing her
tail for a few moments. My sense of direction normally isn't so bad, she
said, but all these new diggings are confusing me. These creatures have
completely changed the layout of the caverns in this area. I think we're just
going to have to try to sense the catenaries directly or do a wizardry to find
them.
As to the latter, I'd rather not, Saash said. I have a feeling something like that
might be sensed pretty quick down here. You saw those tools. Someone down here
is basing a technology around wizardly energy sources....
Yes, I saw that. Rhiow hissed very softly to herself.
So what do we do? Arhu said.
Go downward.
They went: there was not much option. The stair
reached downward for the better part of half a mile before bottoming out in a
platform before a doorway. Cautiously they crept to the doorway, peered through
it. The saurians had passed this way not too long before; their scent was
fresh, and down the long high hall on the other side of the door, the faint red
light glowed.
Arhu stepped through it—then stopped.
What?
It's not the same light, he said.
What is it, then?
I don't know.
Slowly he paced forward, through the doorway, turning
left again. Another hallway, again trending down, but this one was of grander
proportions than the corridors higher up in the delving, and it went down in a
curve, not a straight line. Rhiow went behind Arhu, once more feeling the
neural-inhibitor spell in her mind, ready for use. Its readiness was wearing at
her, but she was not going to give it up for anything, not under these
circumstances.
They softly walked down the corridor, in single file.
Ahead of them, the red light grew, reflecting against the left wall from a
source on the right. This light was not caused by any box carried by a saurian:
Arhu had been right about that. It glowed through a doorway some hundred yards
ahead of them, a bloom of light in which they could now detect occasional faint
shifts and flickerings. The box-light had produced none such.
About twenty yards from the doorway, Saash stopped.
Rhiow heard her footfalls cease, and turned to look at her. The faintest gleam
of red was caught in her eyes—a tiger's eyes, in this universe, set in a
skull with jaws big enough to bite off an ehhif's head; but the eyes had
Saash's nervousness in them, and the tortoiseshell tiger sat down and had a
good hard scratch before saying, I am not going through that door
unsidled; I don't care what it takes.
Rhiow looked at her, and at Urruah behind her.
Not a bad idea, he said. If I have to go out there visible, I can't guarantee the
behavior of my bladder.
Let's do it, then, said Rhiow.
It was surprising how hard it was. Normally sidling
was a simple matter of slipping yourself among the bunched and bundled
hyperstrings, where visible light could not get at you. But here something had
the hyperstrings in an iron grip, and they twanged and tried to cut you as you
attempted to slide yourself between. It was an unfriendly experience. I think
the hardboiled eggs in the slicer at the deli around the comer must feel like
this, Urruah grunted, after a minute or so.
Trust you to think of this in terms of food, Rhiow said, having just managed to finish sidling.
Arhu had done it a little more quickly than she had, though not with his usual
ease: he was already padding his way up to the door through which the brighter
reddish radiance came, and Saash was following him. I suppose, Rhiow
added for Urruah's benefit as she came up between Arhu and Saash, and peered
through the space between them, we should think ourselves lucky there's not
a MhHonalh's down here....
And she caught sight of the view out the doorway, and
the breath went right out of her. She took a few steps forward, staring. Behind
her, Urruah came up and looked past her shoulder, and gulped. Then he grinned,
an unusually grim look for him, and said, Are you sure there's not?
A long time before, when she had first become enough
of a wizard to get down to street level from the apartment Hhuha had before she
and Iaehh became a pride, Rhiow had done the "tourist thing" and had
gone up the Empire State Building. Not up the elevator, as an ehhif would,
of course: she had walked up the side of it, briefly annoying (if not actively
defying) gravity and frightening the pigeons. Once there, Rhiow had sat herself
down on the parapet, inside the chain-link fence meant to dissuade ehhif from
throwing themselves off, and had simply reveled in the sense of height, but
more, of depth, as one looked down into the narrow canyons where ehhif
and houiff walked, progressing stolidly in two dimensions and
robustly ignoring the third. It was wonderful to sit there with the relentless
wind of the heights stirring the fur and let one's perceptions flip: to see the
city, not as something that had been built up, but to imagine it as something
that had been dug down, blocks and pinnacles mined out of air and stone:
not a promontory, but a canyon, with the river of ehhif life still
running swift at the bottom of it, digging it deeper while she watched.
Now Rhiow looked down into the heart of the Mountain
and realized that, even so young and relatively untutored, she had been seeing
a truth she would not understand for years: yet another way in which the
Downside cast Manhattan as its shadow. The Mountain was hollow.
But not just with caverns, with the caves and dripping
galleries that Ffairh had charted. Something else had been going on in these
greater depths for—how long? She and her team looked over the parapet
where they stood, and gazed down into a city—not built up, but delved through
and tunneled into and cantilevered out over an immense depth of open space as
wide as the Hudson River, as deep as Manhattan Island itself: a flipped
perception indeed, but one based on someone else's vision, executed on a
splendid and terrible scale. The black basalt of the Mountain had been carved
out of its heart as if with knives, straight down and sheer, for at least two
miles—and very likely more: Rhiow was not much good at judging distances by
eye, and (like many other New Yorkers) was one of those people for whom a mile
is simply twenty blocks. Reaching away below them, built into those prodigious
cliffs of dark stone, were level below level and depth below depth of arcades
and galleries and huge halls; "streets" appeared as bridges flung
across the abyss, "avenues" as giddy stairways cut down the faces of
those cliffs. Hung from the cliffsides, like the hives of wild bees hung from
the sides of some wild steep rocks in Central Park that Rhiow knew, were
precipitous shapes that Rhiow suspected were skyscrapers turned inside out:
possibly dwellings of some kind. There had to be dwellings, for the place was
alive with saurians—they choked the bridges and the stairs the way Fifth Avenue
was choked at lunch hour, and the whole volume of air beneath Rhiow and her
team hummed and hissed with the saurians' voices, remote as traffic noise for
the moment, but just as eloquent to the listening ear. All that sound below
them had to do with hurry, and strife—and hunger.
Far down below in that mighty pit, almost at its
vanishing point, a point of light burned, eye-hurting despite its distance: the
source of the reddish light they stood in now, caught and reflected many times
up and up the whole great structure in mirrors of polished obsidian and dark
marble. Rhiow stared down at it and shuddered: for in her heart, something saw
that light and said, very quietly, without any possibility of error, Death.
They stood there, the four of them, gazing down, for a
long time. Look at the carvings down there, Urruah said finally. Someone's
been to Rockefeller Center.
Rhiow lashed her tail in agreement. The walls of the
cliffs were not without decoration. Massive-jawed saurian shapes leaned out
into the abyss in heroic poses, corded with muscle; others stood erect on
mighty hind legs, stately, dark, tails coiled about their bodies or feet, as
pillars or the supports of arches or architraves: scaled caryatids bent
uncomplaining under the loads that pillars should have borne. Many of the
carvings did have that blunt, clean, oversimplified look of the Art Deco
carvings around Rockefeller Center—blank eyes, set jaws, nobility suggested
rather than detailed. But they were all dinosaurs... except, here and there,
where a mammal—feline, or ehhif, or cetacean, or canid—was used as
pedestal or footstool, crushed or otherwise thoroughly dominated. No birds were
represented; perhaps a kinship was being acknowledged... or perhaps there was
some other reason. But, on every statue, every saurian had the sixth claw.
All right, Rhi, Saash said finally. How many years has this been going on, would you
say?
I wouldn't dare guess. Saash—'Ruah—whoever even heard
of saurians using tools?
It's news to me, Saash said. But I wasn't thinking developmentally. How are we
supposed to find the catenary "trunks" down in that? And you
heard what's-his-face back there: they've been moving the catenaries around.
Our map is no good anymore.
And what about Har'lh? Urruah said. If he's down here somewhere—how in the
Queen's name are we supposed to find him?
The sixth claw... Arhu said.
Yes, Rhiow
said, I'd say this is what that's for. And he said they were given
it.
She stood silent for a moment, looking into the
depths. We're going to have to try to feel for the trunk of the
"tree," Rhiow said at last. I know the feel of Har'lh's mind
probably better than any of us: I'll do the best I can to pick up any trace of
him. But range is going to be a problem. Especially with her mind growing
wearier by the moment of carrying the neural-inhibitor spell...
Behind her, Arhu was gazing down into the abyss,
toward the spark of fire at its bottom. Rhiow looked at him, wondering what was
going on in that edgy young mind. Perhaps he caught the thought: he turned to
her, eyes that had been slitted down now dilating again in the dimmer light of
the level where they stood. And then, very suddenly, dilating farther. Arhu's
face wrinkled into a silent snarl: he lifted a huge black-and-white-patched paw
and slapped at Rhiow, every claw out—
Completely astounded, Rhiow ducked aside—and so
missed, and was missed by, the far longer claws that went hissing past her ear,
and the bulk that blurred by her. Arhu did not make a sound, but he leapt and
hit the shape that had leapt at Rhiow, and together they went down in a tangle,
furred and scaled limbs kicking.
Urruah was the first to react, though Rhiow heard
rather than saw the reaction: six words in the Speech, and a seventh one that
always reminded her of the sound of someone's stomach growling. But at the
seventh word, one of the shapes kicking at each other on the stone froze still;
the other one got up, and picked his way away from the first, shaking each paw
as he stepped aside. I could have taken him! Arhu said.
Bets? Urruah
said. Perhaps the comment was fair, for the saurian was twice Arhu's size and
possibly two and a half times his weight: lithe, heavily muscled, and with a
long narrow, many-toothed muzzle that could probably have bitten him in two,
given opportunity. Rhiow stood there thinking that the opportunity might have
fallen to her instead. She leaned over to Arhu, breathed breaths with him,
caught the taste of fear but also a sharp flavor of satisfaction.
Thank you, she
said. I owe you one.
No, Arhu
said, I've paid you back the one I owe you. Now we're even.
Rhiow was taken aback—but also pleased: by so much
this wayward kitten had grown in just a few days. Whether he'll live much
longer to enjoy the threshold of his adulthood, she thought, is another
question. But then there was no telling whether there was much left of hers.
She turned, as he did, to have a look at the saurian,
lying there struck stiff as a branch of wood on the stones. It's a variant
of the neural inhibitor, Urruah said. Lower energy requirement, easier
to carry: it's not instantly fatal. Say the word, and I'll make it so.
No, Rhiow
said. I'll thank you for a copy of your variant, though. You always
were the lazy creature.
Urruah made a slow smile at her. Rhiow stood over the
saurian, studied it. Compared to many they'd seen recently, it was of a
slightly soberer mode: dark reds and oranges, melded together as if lizards
were trying to evolve the tortoiseshell coloration.
We've got places to be, Rhi, Urruah said, and we don't know where they are yet.
Kill it and let's move on.
No, Arhu
said suddenly.
Urruah stared at him. So did Saash. Are you nuts?
she hissed. Leave it alive and it'll run to all its friends, tell them right
where we are... and so much for— She declined to say more.
Arhu stared at the saurian; Rhiow saw the look and got
a chill that raised her fur. Let his lungs go, Arhu said to Urruah. He's
choking.
Urruah threw a glance at Rhiow. She looked down at the
saurian, then up at Arhu. His expression was, in its way, as fixed as that of
the lizard—but it was one she had never seen on him before: not quite in this
combination, anyway. Loathing was there. So was something else. Longing... ?
Who is he?
she said to Arhu.
He switched his tail "I don't know." The
father, he said. My son. —He's got to come along. Urruah, let him go—!
Rhiow had heard all kinds of tones in Arhu's voice
before now, but never before this one: authority. It astonished her. She
glanced over at Urruah. Go on—
He blinked: the wizardry came undone. Immediately the
saurian began to roll around, choking and wheezing for air; Arhu backed away
from him, watched him. So did all the others.
After a few moments he lay still, then slowly gathered
his long hind legs under nun and got back up on his feet. He was another of the
mini-tyrannosaur breed, bigger than the last one they had seen. He turned
slowly now in a circle, looking at each of them from his small, chilly eyes.
His claws clenched, unclenched, clenched again. Each forelimb had six.
"Why am I still alive?" he said. It was a
hissing, breathy voice, harsh in its upper register.
"That's the
question of the week," Urruah said, throwing an annoyed glance at Arhu.
"Why did you attack us?" Rhiow said.
"I smelled you," it said, and glared at her.
"You should not be here."
"Well, we are," Rhiow said. "Now, what
will you do?"
"Why have you come down out of the sunlight into
the dark?" said the saurian.
Glances were exchanged. Tell him? Certainly not— Then,
suddenly, Arhu spoke.
"We are on errantry," he said, "and we
greet you."
The saurian stared at him.
"You are not," he said, "the one who
was foretold."
"No," Arhu said, in a tone of absolute
certainty.
Rhiow looked at Urruah, then at Saash. What is this?
"What, then, will you do?" said the saurian,
looking around at them.
Be extremely confused? Saash said. I'll start chasing my tail right
now if it'll help.
Lacking any other obvious course of action, Rhiow
decided to assert herself. "We have business below," she said: that
at least was true as far as she knew. "We can't leave you here, now that
you've seen us. You must come with us, at least part of the way. If you agree,
we'll do you no harm, and we'll free you when we're done. If you disagree, or
try to trick or elude us, we'll bring you by force; if you try to betray us,
we'll kill you. Do you understand that?"
The saurian gave Rhiow a cool look. "We may be
slow, trapped down in this cold place," it said, "but we are not
stupid."
Rhiow licked her nose.
"Lead us down, then," Urruah said. "We
don't wish any of your people to see us. But we must make our way well down
there." He gestured with his tail over the parapet.
The saurian looked in the direction of the gesture.
Rhiow wished desperately that there was some way to read expression in these
creatures' faces, but even if there was, it was not a subject she had ever
studied.
"Very well," the saurian said, and turned
toward another passageway that led from the parapet, the one from which it had
leapt at Rhiow.
"Wait a minute," Arhu said. The saurian
paused, looked over its shoulder at him: an oddly graceful position, tail
poised in midair behind it, strong lithe neck supporting the long toothy head
as it glanced around at Arhu.
"What's your name?" he said.
"Sehhjfhhihhnei'ithhhssshweihh," it said: a long breath, a hiss, a breath again.
Urruah screwed his eyes shut in annoyance. Rhiow
almost smiled: here was a creature who could sing o'hra in six different
ehhif dialects but who also claimed to hate languages. Only new ones,
and not for long, Rhiow thought. "Well?" she said.
"Ith," Urruah said. "We'll call you
Ith. Come on, Ith, walk in front of me."
Ith stepped forward and through the doorway, making
his way downward on the path that led from it. Urruah went close behind him;
after him went Arhu. Rhiow looked closely at Arhu's expression as he passed
her. It was peculiar. There was scorn there, distaste, but also an intent look,
an expression of near-relief, as if something that was supposed to happen was
now happening. And almost some kind of longing— She would have given a
great deal to slip into Arhu's mind and see more closely what was going on. The
thought of sabotage, of wizardries being undone as if from the inside, was
still on Rhiow's mind. But in the back of her thoughts, a voice whispered, Don't
disturb him now. Let what happens happen. It may make no difference—or all the
difference in the worlds.
Saash gave Rhiow a glance as she passed her. Rhiow
stood still for a moment, licking her nose nervously; the Whisperer was rarely
so uncertain. But ignoring her advice is rarely wise.
Rhiow slipped through the doorway after Saash and
followed her down into the darkness.
The way led along more dark stairs and corridors, all
winding downward. Deep narrow openings pierced some of the walls: they might
have been windows, except that no face could ever be seen looking through any
of them. Others resembled doors, but they led nowhere except into small rooms
that held only more darkness. "Why isn't anybody up here?" Urruah
muttered, as they passed yet another of those deep windows and looked at it
nervously. "There are enough of your people down that way."
"This is not a place where we are allowed to
go," Ith said, and gave Urruah a look that to Rhiow seemed slightly
peculiar.
"Oh, really?" Urruah said. "Then what
were you doing up there?"
Ith paced along, his tail lashing, and made no answer.
Waiting for us, Saash said. A spy, probably.
"I was told to come," Ith said then.
"Why aren't you allowed to go up there?"
Saash said.
A few more paces, toward the end of a colonnade, where
Saash paused and looked through an empty doorway. "The upper levels are
only for those on the Great One's errands to the world above," Ith said.
"Others must stay in the depths until the time is right. It will not be
long, we are told."
Saash threw Rhiow a look on hearing that: Rhiow
twitched her tail to one side, a feline shrug. She was noticing that there was
always a pause between a question to Ith and its answer. Rhiow found herself
wondering whether this was because the creature was having comprehension
problems—unlikely, they were working in the Speech—or whether it was simply
deciding how it would best tell them as little as possible before it led them
to where others of its kind, in greater numbers, could deal with them.
The situation was uncomfortable enough as it was.
Rhiow now knew that Saash was right; Ffairh's map was useless in the present
situation. The temptation to withdraw to safer territory above, and try to make
another plan, with better intelligence, was very strong—but at the same time
Rhiow was sure there was no time for this, that they would probably not make it
back up, and even if they did, the only way to get better intelligence would be
to keep on going downward, into the heart of this terror. Either Ffairh
never got down quite this far, Rhiow thought, or else this whole delving
was still completely sealed off from the tunnels and passages he was exploring.
Which suggested another nasty possibility: that the saurians had been completely
aware of where Ffairh had been doing his exploring, and had purposely
avoided breaking through into any area where he might have discovered what was
going on down here. Then, during some period when everything was running
smoothly and there was no reason to expect an intrusion, the catenaries were
relocated....
Wizardry again, Rhiow thought. There's no other way to do it. Some other wizard, or
wizards...
Her head was still going around and around regarding
that problem. There were no saurian wizards. Which meant that either a renegade
wizard of some other species was involved, maybe more man one; or (horrible
concept) even one of the Powers That Be... with strong odds that Rhiow knew which
one. The Lone Power did not often reveal Itself openly or work directly:
that way It risked failure. But there had been exceptions to the rule, and
doubtless would be again....
The idea of renegades itself was controversial enough.
Accepted wisdom was that the Lone Power could not "take over" a
wizard, or influence him or her directly. But It could certainly try to turn
the wizard's deeds dark in other ways: by trickery, propaganda... or sheer
pain. And there were always whispers of wizards who had gone entropic, slowly
but willingly going over to the broad, easy, downward path.... Rhiow remembered
Har'lh's uneasy look as they discussed it. No one liked to think of the Oath
abused—of that power, once given, turned against the Powers bestowing it.
The team walked on, passing down another long stair
leading to yet another dimly lit doorway. The way they went, the way they had
to go, unsidled, seemed all too exposed to Rhiow, but they had little other
option now. At least they had remedied their oversight of scent. Rhiow was
still cursing herself inwardly for missing this detail: it could have been
fatal to them all.
Except it wasn't, Saash said to her privately. Something has preserved us this far.
You know what Ehef would say about it: this meeting was meant to happen this
way....
Ehef's not here, Rhiow said as they made their way down a long deserted stair. I wish
to Iau he were.
Any scent or touch of Har'lh?
Nothing. I just hope this spell's not interfering...
The spell that Urruah had quickly cobbled together to
mask all their scents seemed to be working well enough. Saash had thought it
might be worthwhile trying to smell like saurians rather than felines, and
working a full shapechange to go with it, but Rhiow had disliked the idea.
Besides the possibility of getting the saurian scent wrong and attracting
attention that way, it seemed like too much expenditure of energy at a time
when they were very likely to need it for something else much more important.
So they went in their own shapes, as silently as they knew how, though there
was some inward muttering. I can't smell myself, Saash said,
pausing to scratch. It's like being sidled, but worse....
Please. We've got other problems. We're running blind
here: we have no real idea where our little friend is taking us.
I'm not sure we have any alternative but to keep
working our way downward and seeing what we feel, Saash said. It's almost impossible to sense the
lesser catenary branches directly, with all this stone between us and them; you
have to get close first. And even when you sense them, there's no way to tell
how to get at them. There's no wall-walking down here, with the interference
from the catenaries scattered all around; it's so fierce you might not even be
able to initiate the state, let alone finish a wall-walk once you'd started. One
of them, though, I can sense with no trouble. Saash paused to scratch
and wash again briefly, then indicated the point of light far down in the
chasm. The "River of Fire" down there... that's the trunk
catenary, the main conduit.
Rhiow stared at it. "It can't be. It was erect,
and so were the branches, according to Ffairh's map! They would have run
straight up through the Mountain. And as for it being the River of Fire, the real
River—"
"I wouldn't know about that... except for what
Arhu was saying. He said we'd have to cross it... and that certainly looks like
one, down there, doesn't it? ... even from way up here you can see the
structure, it looks a little wavy..."
Rhiow lashed her tail. The true River of Fire, in the
tales of the Fight between Iau and her litter and the Old Serpent, was formed
by the Serpent's poured-out blood: it was the border between life and death, or
rather between life and life. The pains and unneeded memories of a cat's last
life were burned away in its crossing... "There's no way that can
be the River," Rhiow said.
"Rhi, the ceiling of Grand Central—" Saash
said.
"It's backward," Rhiow snapped, "thank
you very much, I know all about it."
"Is it?"
Saash said. "Which direction are you coming at it from?"
Rhiow closed her mouth and thought about that.
Saash gave her a look. "If the 'Song of the
Passing Through the Fire' does speak of the River, it doesn't say
anything about which angle you come at it from! In space or time! A
legend can just as well be founded in the future as in the past."
"It's called a 'prophecy,'" Urruah said,
with a sideways glance at Arhu. "You may have heard of the concept."
"I'm going to hit you so hard..." Rhiow said
to Urruah. "But you're in line behind sa'Rrahh, right now, and you'll just
have to wait your turn...."
But is this problem just with me? she thought. Is it just that I find offensive the
idea that the Last River is actually down at the bottom of a hole in the ground
full of lizards?
She sighed at herself then. The Old Downside was a
more central reality than her "home" one... and there was no reason,
really, why the physical reality of the gates' main catenary trunk could not
itself be a mirror or reflection of the true River elsewhere. Though her own
voice, speaking to Arhu, suddenly reminded her: Don't start getting tangled
up in arguments about which reality is more real than the next... And
another thought occurred. Often enough, as you worked your way closer to the
heart of things, other realities' myths started to become real around you. This
otherworld might be more central than even Ffairh had suspected.
In any case, Saash
said, that's the main catenary trunk: no doubt whatsoever.
With about a million lizards between it and us, Urruah said. Wonderful.
If we're supposed to be down here to find out what's
the matter with the gates, Saash
said, and what's going wrong with wizardry, I'd say that's as likely to be a
good place to start as any. If we head straight down there and start tracing
the branchings outward—sideways, wherever they're going now—we can start
troubleshooting.
Rhiow sighed. Saash had a single-minded practical
streak about repair work that sometimes ignored larger issues, like a whole
inverted city full of nasty saurians between her and her proposed work area. Or
maybe it was just a way to keep from thinking about issues closer to home. Like
being on your ninth life... How many of us put off thinking about it until it's
right on top of us? And how do you know if, when you walk through the River the
last time, whether you've done enough good over the course of your lives to
come out on the far bank at all?...
And Rhiow knew perfectly well that the crossing of the
River was itself an idiom. She wondered—as Saash had to be wondering—was there
time to bid farewell to one's mortality, one's felinity? Or did you simply find
with your last death that you had drifted to the other side of the divide, and
were now marooned in immortality forever, parted from the friends and the world
you loved? The Tenth Life, always in the stories a thing yearned-for like the
warm-milk-land of which queens sang to their kittens, suddenly now seemed less
than desirable—high ground, yes, but barren and cold....
She sighed. "Ith," she said, turning to him,
"we need to get all the way down to the bottom... to where that great fire
shines. Do you know a way?"
"Yes," he said after a moment. But he looked
at Arhu when he said it, not at Rhiow.
"Is it a safe way?" Saash said.
"Yes."
"Is it safe for us?" Urruah said.
"Or are your people going to come piling out at us from one of these
doorways all of a sudden?"
"In that way," Ith said, looking from one of
them to another, "there are no safe ways into the depths. The
deeper you go, the more of my people will begin to fill every hall and stair.
There are ways that are less frequented... for a little distance farther."
Every one of the team had his or her whiskers out,
feeling for the sense of a lie; but it was harder to tell with a saurian than
it would be with a Person. If not impossible... Rhiow thought, for the
"feel" of a lizard's mind was nothing like a Person's. We could
spellbind him to tell the truth... but it might not help: who knows how truth
looks to a saurian? And who wants to waste the energy at the moment? If we
fritter away what we've brought, and find there's not enough to do the job we
came to do...
She lashed her tail. "Lead on, then," Rhiow
said. She was about to add, "Arhu, watch him," when she realized that
for the past while this had been quite unnecessary. Arhu had been watching Ith
very closely indeed, with an expression of which Rhiow could make nothing
whatever.
Ith stepped out, with Arhu behind, and the others
following: downward they went again, down through long dark galleries, and down
still longer stairs.
Ith stopped at the bottom of one stairway, near where
it gave out onto yet another balcony. He peered out into the light, then
stepped forward boldly. "Nothing funny, now," Urruah hissed, coming
up behind him hurriedly, "or I'll unzip you, snake."
Ith looked cooly at Urruah. "What is
'funny,'" he said, "about looking at the Fire? Little enough glimpse
we get of it, little enough we feel of it." He gazed down into the chasm.
"And little enough warmth you get out of it,
either," Saash muttered, putting her head just far enough above the
parapet to look down into the dim, buzzing, hissing chasm. "Why is it so cold
down here? It's not normal. You usually get a steady rise in temperature as
you head into the deeper crustal regions."
"My guess?" Urruah said. "It's being
suppressed, somehow ... to a purpose. You heard those guys before. If people
are comfortable the way they are, you expect them to be good for much
inflaming, much striving against another species?" He turned to Ith.
"Am I right?"
A pause. "The near sight of the Fire is for the
chosen of the Great One, of his Sixth Claw," Ith said, "as a reward,
and a promise of what is to come, when we all stride under the sun again. The
cold is a test and makes us stronger to bear what our forefathers could not
have borne, and died trying to."
Arhu was leaning past Saash to gaze down into the
teeming depths, toward the terraces and balconies far below them, where life
went on, seemingly tiny, unendingly busy. "There's so many of you,"
he said. "What do you— What do you eat?"
Ith looked at him. "The flesh of the
sacrificed," he said, his voice quite flat. "Many are hatched, and
caused to be hatched, more and more each year, as the time of the Climacteric
draws near. The old words speak of the time when the Promised One shall come
and lead us forth; but there can be no going until we first hatch out uncounted
numbers to fall in the last battle that will bring us out free, under the sky.
The best and the strongest, the Great One's warriors in their hundreds of
thousands, are fed well against that day that is soon to come. The rest of us
live to serve them, to bring the day closer; and when our work is done ... we
find our rest within the warriors, who will carry our flesh to battle within
their own, and our spirits with them. So the Great One says."
Rhiow shuddered. An accelerated breeding program,
half a species being raised as food for the other half... It was worse, in
its way, than the poor creature she had seen once before, being devoured by its
starving comrades. Getting a little extra ration, the same way she might beg
Hhuha for some of that smoked salmon...
Hhuha. The
pain of her loss hit Rhiow again, hard, so that she had to crouch down and just
deal with it for a few seconds. When she felt well enough to stand up once
more, she found the others staring at her, and Ith as well.
"What exactly do you want here?" Ith said at
last.
Saash threw a look at Rhiow that suggested she didn't
think Rhiow needed to be quizzed by lizards at the moment "There are other
worlds besides this one," Saash said.
A pause. "That much we know," Ith said.
"The Great One has spoken of it And others," he added, a little
thoughtfully; there was not quite the dogmatic sound to the addition that there
had been to other such statements.
Urruah opened his mouth. Rhiow quietly lifted one
massive paw and put a razory claw right into that part of his tail that was twitching
above the stone. Urruah turned, snarling, and Rhiow made a
sorry-it-was-an-accident face at him, which was excuse enough for the moment
and caused Urruah to subside for now.
"What others?" Saash said.
"You mean other worlds?" Urruah said.
"Yes, others," said Ith, and Rhiow sighed,
wishing she had put the claw in harder. "A hundred others, a thousand ...
all ours for the taking."
"By the gates," Saash said softly.
"Using them not only for transit... but to change the nature of the
species itself. Genetic manipulation ... wizardry changes to the body and the
spirit Permanent shapechange."
Rhiow shuddered again. Such changes, from the wizardry
point of view anyway, were both unethical and illegal; by and large, any given
species had good reason to be the way it was, and there was no telling what
chaos and destruction could be wrought in it by permanently shifting its
mind-body structure.
"We must become strong and hard, the Great One
has told us," Ith said. "We must not allow ourselves to succumb to
the same forces that struck down our ancient mothers and fathers. When we are
strong beyond any strength known by our kind before, when we no longer need air
to breathe, or warmth to live, or even flesh to eat, then we will take
everything that is for our own."
"But I thought what you wanted was the
warmth," Arhu said then, sounding (correctly, Rhiow thought) confused.
"And enough to eat..."
Ith stopped and blinked, as if coming up against this
contradiction for the first time. Rhiow watched with covert satisfaction, for
what she had heard Ith describing, without comprehension, was a favorite tactic
of the Lone One— promise a species something better than what it had, then
(after It has Its way) strip away whatever It had promised, leaving them with nothing
at all. Finally Ith said, "That desire is only for this while: a remnant
of the ancient way of life. Afterward ... when we have come to our full
strength, when we are no longer children, we will put aside the things of
childhood and take our place as rulers of otherwhere— striding from reality to
reality, making ours the misused territories of others, taking again what
should have been ours from the start, had history gone as it should have.
Warmer stars than this one will look down on us, strange skies and faraway
nights; we will leave our people's cradle and never find a grave. No cold will
be cold enough to freeze the spirit in us again; no night will be dark enough.
We will survive."
More dogma, Rhiow
thought, but does he know it is? I doubt it.
"Just who is this 'Great One'?" Urruah said
after a moment.
"The lord of our people," said Ith,
"who came to us in ancient days. The greatest of us all, the strongest and
wisest, who is never cold and never hungry: the One who can never die..."
Arhu's head snapped right around at that. "And he
has sent us the sixth claw," Ith said, "with which to build and make
the mighty works he envisions. And more than that: he has sent us his own Claw,
his Sixth Claw, Haath the warrior, who does the Great One's will and teaches
us his meaning. It is Haath who will be our savior, the Great One's champion;
he will lead us in the Climacteric, up into the sun, into the battle across the
warm worlds that await us. It will be glorious to die in his company: those who
do will never lose the warmth, they will bask forever."
"How nice for you," Saash murmured. Rhiow
glanced at her with slight amusement, but then turned back to Ith and said
something that had suddenly occurred to her.
"Why don't you sound very happy about all
this?"
Ith looked at her and for the first time produced an
expression that Rhiow was sure she was reading correctly: surprise and fear.
"I am... happy," he said, and Rhiow simply wanted to laugh out loud
at the transparency of the lie. "Who of our people would not be, at the
great fate that awaits us?"
His voice started to rise. "We will take back
what was once ours. Haath the valiant will lead us; and before him in fire and
terror will go the Great One, the deathless Lord. We will come out into the sun
and walk in the warmth, and all other life will flee before us—"
Arhu, though, was slipping up behind him, watching
Ith's tail lash. For a moment Rhiow thought Arhu was having a flashback to
kittenhood (not that he was that far out of it) and was going to jump on the
saurian's tail; she held her breath briefly—Ith was, after all, formidably
clawed and about ten feet high at the shoulder.... But at the same time Arhu's
eyes met Rhiow's and indicated something behind her, in the shadows....
The first saurian that leapt out at them met, not a
spell, but half a ton of Urruah, claws out, snarling; right for its throat he
went, and down they went together in a kicking, squalling heap. The others
hesitated a second at the sight of the monster that had gone for their leader; the
hesitation killed them, for Saash opened her mouth and hissed. Bang!—
—gore
everywhere, chill-smelling and foul, from the second of the saurians. Saash
staggered with the backlash from the spell as the third saurian came at her:
Rhiow aimed the same spell at it, let it go. The problem with the limited
version was that you had to be careful where you aimed—and indeed, at the
moment there was reason: Ith was still there, now crowded away against a wall.
The other saurians were ignoring him, going for Rhiow and her team, but they
would have little chance as long as the spell lasted. That's the problem, of
course, she thought as she used it for the second time, and the third, and
the fourth, and as Urruah got up, his jaws running with the pinkish-tinged saurian
blood, and launched himself at another saurian, a deinonychus that was in the
act of jumping at Saash from behind. Rhiow turned away from that one, which she
had targeted, spun—
—something hit her: she went down. A horrible image of
jaws twice as long as her head, of the perfectly candy-pink flesh inside that
mouth, and set in it, about a hundred teeth of an absolutely snowy white, three
times the size of any of hers, and all of those teeth snapping at her face—
Rhiow yowled, as much in fury as fear; then ducked under the lower jaw, found
the tender throat muscles, and bit, bit hard, to choke rather than to pierce
for blood, while lower down she snuggled herself right in between the
scrabbling clawed forelimbs—not a deinonychus, thank you, Iau—put her hind
legs where they would do the most good, right against the creature's belly, and
began to kick. It was armored there but not enough to do it any good; the
plating began to come away, she felt the wetness spill out and heard the scream
try to push its way out past her jaws. She wouldn't let it go and wouldn't let
the air in: she let the rage bubble up in her, just this once, at the world
that had been so cruel to her of late, and to which, just this once, she could
justifiably be cruel back.
The struggling and jerking against her body began to
grow feeble. It took a long time; it would, with lizard meat, Rhiow
thought, but all the same she wouldn't let go. This body's instincts were in
control for the moment and knew better than to let go of prey just because it
seemed to have stopped moving. She flopped down over her kill and lay there,
biting, biting hard, like a tom "biting for the tenth life" in a
fight with another Person; and finally, when there had been no movement for a
while, Rhiow opened her eyes, panting through her nose, but still hanging on.
Nothing else moved except with the sporadic twitching
of saurian tissue too recently dead to know it yet. She mistrusted it; she hung
on a little bit longer. Around Rhiow, the others were getting up, shaking
themselves off, and grooming ... though mostly for composure, at the moment.
"Come on, Rhi," Urruah said from behind her.
"It's gone."
She let go, stood up, and shook herself. She was a
mess, but so were all the others. It was like the catenary cavern all over
again. She and Saash and Arhu and Urruah stood there, panting, recovering. Off
to one side, wearing what looked like an expression of slow shock, Ith stood
and gazed at the carnage. He looked hungry ... but he did not move.
Very slowly, limping a little—Rhiow had strained one
of her forelegs a little, hanging on to the saurian she killed— she went over
to him, looked up at him. "Ith," she said, "why didn't you run
away when you had the chance?"
He simply looked at her. "I have not yet done
what I came for," he said.
"And just what might that be?" Urruah
said, slowly making his way over to join Rhiow.
Ith looked at Urruah and said nothing. But from behind
them both, Arhu said, "He warned me they were coming."
Urruah turned to look at him. "He has to be with
us," Arhu said. "I've seen him here before, and farther down too. He
knows the way: he's going to take us." He turned to look at Ith.
Ith leaned down a little and turned his head sideways
to look at Arhu: a strange birdlike gesture, a Central Park robin eyeing a
particularly juicy worm. But the "worm" was eyeing him back, and the
look held for a good little while.
"Yes," Ith said finally. Rhiow and Urruah
glanced at each other.
"Are you hungry?" Arhu said at last.
Ith looked at the bodies ... then looked at Arhu.
"Yes," he said, but he did not move.
Urruah, watching all this, breathed a heavy snort of amusement
and disgust down his nose, and turned to Rhiow. "We'd better clean this up
and dispose of the scent, as far as possible," he said. "I'd sooner
not leave any hints that we're down here; once they suspect us ..."
Rhiow waved her tail "yes." "Your preferred
method..."
"Right," Urruah said. "You four get
ready to go on ahead." He started pacing around the space, laying down a
circle to contain whatever spell he had in mind. Off to one side, Ith threw one
last look at the remains of the battle... then turned away.
"Why didn't you help your people attack us?"
Saash said to him, looking up from a few moments' worth of furious washing.
"I did," Ith said.
Rhiow stared at him. "How do you mean?"
"They heard me. That was why they attacked
you."
Rhiow threw a glance over at Saash. Does this make
any sense to you?
Rhi, it's a saurian.
Do I look like a specialist in their psychology? I can understand his words,
but even the Speech can't always guarantee full comprehension when the
mind-maps are so different. In any case, I'm not sure this boy isn't a few
whiskers short of the full set. Why else would he be hanging around us,
instead of joining in when the fight started or running off?
Rhiow breathed out; she had no answers to that.
"A few moments more for grooming," she said. "Then we'd better
move out quickly. Urruah?"
"Almost set."
A few more moments was all it took. Then the team
headed off as quickly as they could down the next long sloping corridor that
Arhu indicated; downward again, around a bend and through a long tunnel, with
Arhu in the lead for the moment, and Ith behind him. Faint echoes of the
distant buzzing of the saurian City could be heard here; they raised Rhiow's
hackles. All those voices... all those teeth...
"All right," Urruah said then, and paused,
looking over his shoulder. "This should be far enough—"
Rhiow felt him complete his spell in his head.
Immediately from behind them came a brilliant flare of white light. It held for
two seconds, three . .. then went out. A faint smell of scorching drifted down
to them.
"Let me go check it," Urruah said, and
padded back up the way they had come, out of sight.
They waited, tense. Within a few minutes he was
padding softly back down to them. "Clean," he said.
"What did you do?" said Rhiow.
"Heated the whole area to about seven hundred
degrees Kelvin," he said. "Stone, air, everything. Sterile and
clean." He wrinkled his nose a little. "At the moment it smells a
little like that toasted smoked-sea-eel thing they do at the sushi restaurant
on Seventy-sixth, but that'll pass."
Saash screwed her eyes closed, and Rhiow made a little
"huh" of exasperation. "Only you could find a way to
bring food into this," she muttered. "Come on."
They all fell in behind Arhu and continued down the
long dark corridor. "Where are we going now?" Rhiow said to Arhu.
"Down toward the 'River' ... I saw some of the
way in his head." He flirted his tail at Ith, who was now pacing nearby, a
little off to one side.
Rhiow twitched her tail slowly. "You've been
through some changes lately," she said.
I heard Her, Arhu said silently, looking up at
Rhiow as they walked, so intently that she almost had to look away: for the
expression was entirely too close to that of the stone Iau in the museum. But
this expression was living and filled with certainty, though a sheen of plain
old mortal, feline doubt remained on the surface. I was Her, Arhu said,
and he shivered all over. Now She's gone, but we need Her... and if anyone's
going to be Her, it has to be me....
"Playing God," Rhiow had heard her ehhif call
it
And the Oath? she
said to him.
He twitched his tail "yes," a subdued
gesture. I took it. I think I understand it now. I have to keep it, though
I'm not sure how. The Whisperer... has been giving me hints, but I don't know
what to make of them all. I'm afraid. I'm afraid I might screw up. I'm not an
"old soul" or anything.
It's not "old souls" we need right now, Saash said. Half of them keep making the same
mistakes over and over: why do you think they keep coming back? Rhiow shot
a look at her: Saash ignored it. We need any soul that'll get the job done,
whether its teeth are worn down or not. Stop being self-conscious and just do
what's therefor you to do.
He twitched his tail "all right," and slowly
walked off.
We could let him go his own way now, I suppose, Saash said after a moment, watching him go. He's
accepted his Oath. He 'II hold by it... poor kitten.
Poor us, Rhiow
said, considering where our association with him has led us.
True... Saash
paced on a little way, and then said, We 're going to start having some
trouble with defense shortly, if the number of these things attacking us
increases significantly ... and I think it will The "explosion lite"
spell is useful enough... but if we keep using it, it's going to "burn
in" in short order. And we can't use the neural inhibitor in its
full-strength version while our little friend's with us. I almost wish we could
lose him... but Arhu says we can't...
Rhiow glanced ahead of her, to where Arhu and Ith were
now walking together. Yes, Rhiow said, and that is very odd....
It was peculiar to watch them: it was as if each very much wanted the other's
company, though their bodies clearly loathed one another—tails were lashing, teeth
were bared on both sides. The saurian was clearly shortening his pace to make
it easier for Arhu to keep up with him as he paced along. Arhu, for his own
part, was favoring Ith once more with that expression of recognition, unwilling
but still fascinated.
"... You said you were told to come," Arhu
was saying to Ith. His voice was unusually soft, so much so that Rhiow almost
couldn't hear it. "Who told you? Who else spoke?"
"I don't know," said Ith, after a very long
pause indeed. "... I heard a voice."
"What did she say to you?"
Rhiow's ears twitched at that, and then at the slow
certainty that started to come into Ith's voice, replacing the half-sullen,
half-angry tone that had been there even while talking about his people's
coming triumphs. "She said, 'The Fire is at the heart, and the Fire is the
heart; for its sake, all fires whatever are sacred to me. I shall kindle them
small and safe where there are none, for the wayfinding of those who come
after: I will breathe on those fires about to die in dark places, and in
passing, feed those that burn without harm to any; the fire that burns and
warms those who gather about it, in no wise shall I meddle with it save that it
seems about to consume its confocals, or to die. To these ends, as the Kindling
requireth, I shall ever thrust my claw into the flames to shift the darkening
ember or feed the failing coal, looking always toward that inmost Hearth from
which all flames rise together, and all fires burn undevouring, in and of That
Which first set light to the world, and burns in it ever more ...'"
Saash, still walking along nearby, was watching Rhiow
sidelong, obviously so stunned that she hardly dared to think out loud. Rhiow
had hesitated only once over what she'd heard, the word "confocal,"
but the Speech made sense of it: those who sit about the same Hearth, the
same fire. Rhiow licked her nose and swallowed, for all the rest of it she
had understood perfectly. The words resonated in her chest and itched in her
bones, as if she had known them forever, though she had only now heard them for
the first time, in another species' idiom. The Oath, there was never any
mistaking the Oath.
Yet at the same time she heard in her mind the words
of the Ailurin verse: Iau Hauhai'h was the Fire at the Heart....
Why is this coming in our idiom?
"She said, 'If you desire the fate that awaits
you, then go to the heights, go to the forbidden places, the halls of the
doors. Through those doors your fate will find you, and lead you to its
heart....'"
"She"? Which Power is he talking about?
Which Powers deal with saurians,
for pity's sake, except for the Lone One, way back when? Rhiow listened ...
but no answer came.
She licked her nose. But, oh dear Iau... another
wizard. A saurian wizard.
The first saurian
wizard?
And carrying his species' version of the Oath: an Oath
in force. On Ordeal. Another wizard on Ordeal—
Great Queen of Everything, we're all going to die down here!
The walk went on, and on, and on, always downward, and
the air got slowly more chill. Memory of past minutes started to dull for Rhiow
in the wake of the repetition of stair after long stair, endless tunnels and
dark galleries. The adrenaline jangle of the earlier hours had passed now,
leaving only a kind of worn feeling, a state in which moving cost much more
energy than usual. Light was at a premium down here, everywhere but near the
central chasm: and Ith kept leading them farther and farther into tunnels in
the living rock, away from the central delving.
Maybe "living" was a bad choice of words, Rhiow found herself thinking, for once again she was
starting to get that feeling that the stone was leaning in and listening to
her, or as if she were trapped in some huge dark lung, the walls pressing in on
the exhalation, out as the mountain breathed.
Every now and then their path would take them out
again toward the edge of the abyss. All of them went with great caution then:
Ith himself began to creep along like a cat, taking a step, pausing, listening,
taking another step ... sometimes crouching hurriedly back into the dark with
the rest of them as, some ways ahead, a muttering party of other saurians would
pass. The occasional narrow window would give them a brief glimpse down into
the abyss, but as they went deeper, Rhiow was finding these looks out into the
open less of a relief from the claustrophobic "breathing" feeling
than they had been at first The buildings, the terrible dark sculptures, the
scale of the place itself were beginning to weigh on her spirit. Rhiow had
heard that there had been ehhif in times not too long past who had meant
to build in this idiom: vast belittling architectures, meant to make the
creatures using them feel small and impotent, minuscule parts of some mighty
scheme instead of free creatures all walking in the air under Rhoua's Eye
together. The Sun, Rhiow thought, wouldn't I give a great deal for a
sight of Her now? Real Sun, through real air... even New York air as brown as
one of Urruah's hamburgers and full of ozone ...
But there was no hope of that now ... and maybe never
again. All Rhiow's life, it seemed, was being gradually drowned out in this
darkness, with the occasional punctuation of glimpses of that faraway fire down
at the bottom of the abyss. The city streets, sunrises and moonsets, the sound
of honking horns, wind in the trees of the Park, all of it was being slowly
dissolved in still black air, humming sometimes loudly, sometimes softly, with
the buzz and hiss of saurian voices in their hundreds of thousands. Maybe
their millions. It seems likely enough.... And as they crept very slowly
closer to the fire at the bottom of things, paradoxically the cold increased:
they couldn't yet see their breaths, but that would come soon, Rhiow thought.
She shuddered. She hated the cold, but she hated more, at the moment, what it
stood for—the One Who doubtless awaited them down at the bottom.
"These long walks," Saash said somewhat
wearily, coming up beside Rhiow, "they really take it out of you. Remember
that time on Mars?"
"Oh, please," Rhiow muttered. Early in their
work together, she and Saash had been involved in the rescue of an Andorrin
climbing expedition that had come hundreds of thousands of lightyears to scale
Olympus Mons ... not in present time, but while it was erupting, in a previous
geological era. The rescue had involved a timeslide that Rhiow and Saash had
had to pay for, long walks through endless caves looking for the lost climbing
party, much hot lava, and a lot of screeching from the expedition leader when
the climbers were spirited out of the mountain just before it blew its top in
the final eruption that made it the biggest shield volcano in this or any other
known solar system. After days of trekking through those caves, hunting the
lost ones by scent and lifesigns, and not a word of thanks for their rescue out
of any of the Andorrins' multiple mouths, Rhiow had come away from the
experience certain that wizardry and its affiliated technologies should be
confined to the Art's certified practitioners. But there were large areas in
this universe where (in the words of a talented and perceptive ehhif) science
had become truly indistinguishable from magic, mostly because they were
recognized as merely being different regions of the same spectrum of power, both
routinely manipulated side by side by species among whom wizardry was no more
covert than electricity or nuclear fusion.
Rhiow glanced ahead at Arhu, half-expecting some
reaction along the lines of "You've been to Mars?"—but he was
paying no attention. He and Ith were still walking together, talking quietly.
The temptation to eavesdrop was almost irresistible. Two wizards on Ordeal, one
of them almost certainly the first of his species ... what was going on? Impossible
to tell, but their body language had not warmed in the slightest. The brains
holding this discussion might belong to wizards, both part of the same
kinship—but the bodies were those of cat and serpent, distrusting one another
profoundly. Arhu was stiff-legged and bristling, and looked like he wished he
were anywhere else. As for Ith—Rhiow was uncertain what his kinesics indicated,
except that his body was leaning away from Arhu while his head and neck curved
toward him as they talked. At the very least, the message was mixed.
Saash was watching them, too. After a while she
glanced over at Rhiow and said silently, We're all going to die down
here, aren't we? It's not just me.
No, Rhiow
said, I'd say not. Odd, how when it could have been just her, she would
almost have welcomed it. But no, Rhiow thought to herself, that's
never really been an opportunity. We're in conjoint power at this point,
"roped together" as the ehhif idiom would have it: what
happens to one of us on this job, we've always known would happen to all of
us.... She wanted to laugh a little at herself, except that she felt so
dead inside. And here I was so worried about being shy an extra life. It's
going to be a lot more than that, soon.
Urruah, pacing along with them, looked ahead at Arhu
and Ith, and lashed his tail in a meditative sort of way. He wouldn't eat, he
said.
No. That was interesting. He didn't sound very happy,
either ... not like that other saurian we heard talking about their "Great
One."
Saash looked thoughtful. Neither did the saurians
who were watching that one work, she said. They are individuals,
Rhi. .. not everyone has to be completely enthusiastic about whatever's going
on down here.
All right, I know what you mean. It's just... it's
hard to think of him as one of us. But he is ... he wouldn't have been given the Oath, otherwise. And he
definitely has a troubled sound.
They walked a little way more. Rhiow was still
worrying in mind at the tone of Ith's voice. Sweet Iau, she thought, I'm
so tired.
"Ith," she said suddenly.
He looked at her, as if surprised anyone besides Arhu
would speak to him: and Arhu looked, too. 'This way," he said. "A
long way yet."
"No, that's not what I meant." Rhiow glanced
at the others. "Let's stop and rest a little. I'd like to get the rest of
this mess off me; the scent is potentially dangerous. And we can all use a
breather...."
I was wondering when you were going to suggest it, Urruah
said, somewhat caustically, as he glanced around them, and then flopped down
right where he was. We don't all have your iron constitution.
We don't all constantly load ourselves up with stuff
from MhHonalh's, either. You should try cat food sometime. I know a good
dietetic one....
Urruah made an emphatic suggestion as to what Rhiow
could do with diet cat food. Rhiow thought his idea unlikely to be of any
lasting nutritive value. But she grinned slightly, and then turned back to Ith,
who had hunkered down next to Arhu, by the wall of the long corridor where they
sat. Arhu looked once up and down the corridor with a listening expression,
then started washing.
"Arhu?" Rhiow said. "Anything
coming?"
"Not for a while yet," he said, not looking
up from washing his white shirtfront, now mostly pink.
"All right." Rhiow looked over at Ith.
"You are hungry, aren't you?" Rhiow said.
Pause. "Yes."
"Then why didn't you eat, back there?"
A much longer pause. Arhu, in the middle of a moment's
worth of washing, glanced up, watching thoughtfully.
"Because there was no one to force me," Ith
said. "Workers are not given food often ... but when it is given them,
they must eat; if they are reluctant, they are forced... or killed. Warriors,
also, are forced ... or killed. If one will not eat and do one's work, whatever
that might be ... one becomes food."
"And you were about to ..."
A very long pause, this time. "I looked about
me," Ith said, very softly, "and realized I did not wish to be
food." He stopped, and actually suited action to words, glancing around
him guiltily as if afraid someone would hear; the sentiment was apparently heretical.
"It seemed to me that there should be another way for us to survive. But
if ever one spoke of such possibilities, one was found mad ... and immediately
sacrificed. People would say, "The flesh tastes better when the mind is
strange ...' And they would laugh while they ate."
Rhiow looked at Saash, who shuddered, and Urruah, who
simply made a face. "But I wanted to live my own life," said Ith,
"not merely exist as meat in some warrior's belly." Another look
around him, guilty and afraid. Rhiow found herself forced to look away in
embarrassment. "A long time I kept my silence ... and looked for ways to
come away from the depths, some way that would not be forbidden. There were no
such ways; all roads are guarded now, or sealed.... Finally I thought I would
even try to go to the Fire and end myself there, rather than be food. I was
going to go ... I knew the ways; like many others I have gone out to gaze at
the Fire, never daring to creep close.... Then the voice spoke to me."
'"All roads are guarded,'" Urruah said.
"How did you get out, then?"
"I—" Ith hesitated. "I stepped—between
things, I went—"
"You sidled," Arhu said. "Like
this." And did it where he sat, though with difficulty.
Ith's jaw dropped. Then he said, "Even here, it
is hard."
A second's look of concentration, and he had done it,
too: though, as with many beginners, his eyes were last to vanish, and lingered
only half-seen in the air, a creepy effect for anyone who didn't know what was
causing it. Then he came back, breathing harder, and folded his claws together,
possibly a gesture of satisfaction.
"Down here, yes, it's tough," Rhiow said.
"It's the presence of the Fire down below us, and of other lesser ones
like it. They interfere. It will become impossible, as we go deeper."
"But I did it there," Ith said,
looking at her suspiciously. "My work is down deep; I fetch and carry for
the warriors who are housed in the delvings some levels above that Fire. To
come away I had to come by the guards who watch the ways up out of the greatest
depths. It... was hard, it hurt..."
"The cheesewire effect," Urruah muttered.
'Too well we know. But you got out anyway."
"I passed many guards," Ith said, looking
sidewise at Urruah. "None of them saw me. Finally I came up here, where no
one comes except workers who are sent under guard; they all passed me by. And I
went where the voice told me to wait... and you came."
"Great," Urruah muttered. "He can sidle
where we won't be able to. This is so useful to us."
"It might be," Rhiow said softly.
"Don't laugh." But she looked at Ith uneasily. If we needed proof,
we've got it now. A saurian wizard...
Saash looked at Ith, then glanced at Rhiow. You're
thinking he's responsible for what's been going on with the gates? It's
crazy, Rhi. Ith hardly knows anything. He barely seems to know as much about
wizardry at this point as Arhu did when we found him.
If that's possible, Urruah muttered.
No, Rhiow
said. The problem's not just Ith. I want to find out more about this
"Great One."
I don't, Saash said. I'm sure I know exactly
Who it is.
Me too, said
Urruah, growling softly.
I wouldn't be too sure, Rhiow said. Our own
certainties may trip us up, down here.... After all, how certain were we that
there were no such things as saurian wizards? And now look...
"What will you do with me now?" Ith said.
Rhiow sighed, wishing she had the slightest idea. She
could feel the weariness coming down on her more swiftly every second.
"Look," she said to the team, "if we stay still too much longer,
we're going to need to sleep, I think. I could certainly use some. Arhu, you're
sure nothing's coming for a while?"
He got a faraway look. "A couple of hours."
"We'll sleep a little, then," Rhiow said to
Ith, "and try to work out what to do later."
"Who'll sit guard?" Saash said, lying down
with a look of unutterable relief, and not even bothering to scratch. Rhiow
felt extremely sorry for her; she was not really built for this kind of stress.
"I'll take it," Urruah said. "I'm in
pretty good shape at the moment... and I'm not hungry. Unlike some." He
looked thoughtfully at Ith and settled himself upright against the wall,
leaning a little on one shoulder, gazing down the long dark gallery.
Rhiow lay down and tried to relax. At least a rest,
if not sleep, she thought; but neither seemed terribly likely. Her thoughts
were going around in small tight circles, trying to avoid the image of
Hhuha.... From off to one side, already, came the sound of Saash's tiny snore. She
never has trouble sleeping, Rhiow thought with a touch of envy. She
confines her anxieties and neuroses strictly to her waking hours. I wish I could
manage that.
Over Saash's little snore came the sound of Arhu and
Ith talking. It got loud sometimes.
"I was hungry, too," Arhu said. "All
the time. Until I met them. Then things got better. They gave me
fh'astrramhi."
This is all we're going to need, Urruah said. A dinosaur with a pastrami craving...
Don't think I don't hear your stomach growling. You 'd go for it just as
fast as he would, and five minutes later you'd be telling him where to find the
best pastrami on the Upper West Side.
"Come on, you two," Urruah said, "half
the lizards in the place are going to come down on us if you don't shut up.
Sorry, Ith, no offense."
They paid no particular attention. Urruah had to shush
them several more times, and finally Arhu started staring at Ith in the fixed
way that suggested he was trying to teach the saurian to speak silently. Rhiow
wished him luck and put her head down on the stone, in the dark, and courted
sleep....
It declined to be courted. She kept hearing, in her
head, one part or another of the saurian version of the Oath. The Fire is at
the heart: and the Fire is the heart: for its sake, all fires whatever are
sacred to me.... I shall ever thrust my claw into the flames.
Rhiow sighed and rolled over. It really is our
idiom... and the language is very like what's in the "Hymn to Iau,"
and the "First Song." All the references to fire and flame used
the Ailurin "power" words, the auw-stems and compounds, which
had passed into the Speech as specialist terminology.
But why should this child be using our words?... For any species' Oath always has to do with the form
of it originally taken by the wizards among the Mothers and Fathers of a
species, after Choice. Its form is set in their bones and blood, so that
wizards of that species find it impossible to forget, and it is most specific
to their own kind and mode of existence, as it should be. Even nonwizards of
many species know parts of their own species' Oath in one form or another,
often restated in religious or philosophical idiom.
Rhiow smiled a little at herself then. What do I
mean, "this child"? Who knew just how old Ith was? Rhiow
got a general feeling that he wasn't out of latency yet, but who knew how long
these saurians' latency period was? Though there were supposedly some
dinosaurs who mothered their hatchlings for years at a time. Long
latency-to-lifespan ratio makes for the best wizards, Ffairh would always say.
But I still don't get it. Why Ailurin?
She rolled over again, disturbed by the puzzle. The
connection between the feline world and the reptilian world was an ancient one,
easily summed up in a single word: enmity—the Great Cat with the sword in his
paw, sa'Rrahh the Tearer with her fangs in the Serpent's neck. Now Rhiow found
herself thinking: Is there something else to this connection?
Something that got lost? Do we have some old history together?
And how could that be? The saurians passed away long
before felinity evolved into even its most archaic forms or became sentient.
Time, though, was a dangerously inconstant medium...
and it was always unwise for a wizard to automatically assume mat any two
events were unconnected. The structure of time was as full of holes and slides
and unexpected infracausal linkages as the structure of space was full of
strings and hyper-strings and wormholes—
"But why not?" Arhu suddenly said aloud.
"I can see you looking at me," Ith said.
"Of course I'm looking at you—"
"Not that way. With the other eye."
Rhiow flicked an ear in mild surprise.
"What's wrong with that?"
"It sees too much. It makes me see... you."
No question about it: Ith's voice sounded actively afraid. "Your
kind."
"You scared?" Arhu's voice was louder.
"I do not wish to see this," Ith said.
"The things—the pain my kind have, that I have, it is enough. Your pain
as well—"
"I told you, do it in your heads," Urruah
said, "or I'm going to come over there and bang those heads together. You
two understand me?"
Arhu and Ith—half a ton of moon-and-midnight panther,
a ton and a half of patterned hide—glared at Urruah together, and then turned
away with an identical eye-rolling teenagers' look, and locked eyes again.
Rhiow sighed and lay back again, thinking with slight
amusement of Arhu saying, just the other day, I don't want to know this
about them; it'll only make it harder to kill them when the time comes.
So now you hear it from the other side. Well, probably
do you good to see things from his point of view. Do us all good, I suppose, if
there were more of that...
She sought back along the interrupted train of
thought. The nature of the old saurian Choice ... she wondered if it was less
simple than the Whisperer might initially have indicated. Not just a
straightforward choice between good and evil, or obedience to the Powers and
disobedience ... but something more difficult: perhaps multipartite. And
prophecy and the serpentine kind had long been associated in various species'
myths. Did they look ahead then, Rhiow thought, during the Choice,
and see their possible futures? The meteoric winter would have been part of
what they saw; the Powers would have looked ahead in time and known it to be an
inevitable consequence of the Lone One's involvement with this species. And at
least a couple of the fates springing from it were easy enough to imagine. One
would be the fate of the saurians in Rhiow's universe—almost all their species
killed, except for a few of the most rugged survivors, who would forget their
former greatness and dwindle into the modern reptilia; mere animals, shadows of
what was ... Another would have been this scenario: the saurians retreating
down here into the darkness to save themselves, remembering what they once
were, but also longing eternally for what once had been, and hating what they
had become, and the Choice they had been forced to make ... I wonder, Rhiow
thought, whether the saurians in our universe got the better of the deal.
Better to be animal than to live like this.
But it wasn't my Choice. It's theirs... they're stuck with it.
It's a shame you can't trade in a Choice after a test
run, though, and say to the Powers
That Be, "Sorry, the Lone One fooled us, this Choice is defective, we want
another chance."
The silence that fell in Rhiow's mind in the wake of
the idle thought was so profound that it practically rang. It was familiar,
that silence: the Whisperer suggesting that you might just have stumbled onto
something....
Rhiow's eyes widened as she reexamined the thought.
The Choice offered to the forefathers and foremothers
of the Wise Ones ... could it be that it was defective? Flawed, somehow? Incomplete?
Ridiculous. Whoever heard of an incomplete Choice
before? There's a pattern. The Lone One turns up ... says, "Would you like
to live as the Powers have told you you must, or take a gamble on another way
that might work out better?" And you gamble, and fall: or refuse...
And then Rhiow stopped.
But the saurian Choice had to be incomplete. There
had been no wizards there. And there had to be wizards: the whole
spectrum of a species' life, both natural and supranatural, had to be represented
for the Choice to be valid.
Or... She stared at the stone between her paws. No.
A species' Choice is its own,
Or was it? If the species was linked to another...
... did the other have to be there, taking part, as
well?
Taken together with Ith's Oath, with the Ailurin words
in it...
... the thought shook Rhiow. The People were their own.
They were utterly independent. That some other species would have been
involved in their Choice was unthinkable ... a challenge to their
sovereignty over themselves. That they should be ancillary to some other
species' Choice...
That was simply intolerable.
But Rhiow got the cold, no-nonsense feeling in her
gut, when she turned to the Whisperer, which suggested that this might indeed
be the case.
If this Choice was incomplete. . . it can be completed
now. By a saurian wizard... and those intended to help him complete it, to
judge by the language in it. His assistants: his people's supplanters...
Us!
She writhed a little, then cursed, and went over the
Whisperer's head.
Ian, why are you dumping this on me?
You were there, came the answer, definite and instantaneous, its Source unmistakable. Or
rather: You were not there. You are there now.
Choose.
And the choice was plain. Choose one way, refuse your
species' help, and drive the serpents out into the cold and the dark, and damn
them all. Let life be as it is, unchanged and stable, to be relied upon.
Choose another way and lose your species' autonomy
forever, or whatever illusion of it you have had until now. The People's whole
proud history becomes merely a footnote, a preliminary to the advent of these
newborns, unable to make their own way without help; midwives to a race that
had its chance and lost it, a million years ago. Nature killed them. Let nature
be the arbiter: their time is over for good.
Yet nature is not innocent when the Lone One drives it
Or, rather: it remains innocent, not knowing who holds the wheel and uses it as
a weapon. Is the storm to blame, or the Lone Power, when the lightning strikes
and kills some noble soul about the business of saving life? Do you blame
nature or sa'Rrahh when a cab comes too fast around the corner and—
Rhiow's tail lashed. Devastatrix, Rhiow said
inside her, I know your work. You will not fool me twice.
Yet it was not a question of anyone being fooled,
anymore. Here was a Choice that had not been completed at the beginning of
things. The Lone One—illegally?? Rhiow thought, shuddering at the
concept—had convinced another species that its Choice had been made. They had
suffered, had died in their millions (billions?) for the Lone Power's
amusement, for the sake of a technicality, an injustice done that the
victim-species was incapable of perceiving.
Now someone had come along and perceived the
injustice, the incomplete Choice. What do you do?
Pass by on the other side? Rhiow was a New Yorker, she had seen her share of
this. Make a stink? Get yourself killed as a result? She had seen this
too.
And getting yourself killed would be the least of it
You were interfering in the business of gods and demigods, here. What happens,
in the human idiom, when you take the Lone Power to court and try to convict It
of malfeasance? A slippery business, at best. But the destruction of much more
than your body would be fair to expect if you failed.
Oh well, Rhiow
thought, what do I need all these lives for, anyway? The thought was
bitter. Memories of Hhuha, unbidden, definitely unwanted at the moment, kept
shocking through her like static on a rug in winter every minute or so, and the
pain they caused Rhiow was beginning to tell. Anything that would stop that
pain was beginning to look welcome.
Your hands on the wheel, though, she said
inwardly to sa'Rrahh, fluffing up slightly. Not an accident. There are no
such things.
Unfair, that at the time when I would most like to
die, I must now fight hardest to live longest. And for the sake of these
miserable, bad-smelling, cold-skinned snakes. She hissed in fury, causing Urruah to open his eyes a
little wider and stare at her. Iau, you rag-eared kitten-eater, I hate this,
I hate You, why me?
No answer, but then, when someone was yowling abuse at
you, a dignified silence was the preferred response. Rhiow thought of the two
Himalayans down the block and growled at herself, at her own bad manners, at
life in general. Unfair...
You found it. You fix it.
The universe's eternal principle. Repair yourself if
you can. Spend the least possible energy doing it If you can't manage it...
tough. And Ehef's succinct comment on Rhiow's observation long ago that this
seemed mean-spirited of the Powers, and hard on Their creation: What do you
think this is, a charity?
She sighed. I was right, Rhiow thought, we
are certainly all going to die. For during Choice, some of the participants
always die: no Choice is valid without that most final commitment. And if even
one of the team died, all would be trapped below: all would die together.
The only thing we can do, I suppose, is make sure we
make it work... make it all worthwhile.
Yet the other side of the paradox was that, for the
Choice to take, some must also survive; otherwise there will be no one to
implement it.
That'll be Ith, I suppose.
But who even knows if Ith will cooperate? For everything would turn on him, at last. It was all
very well to think about him taking the part of the saurian wizard who should
have been present at his People's choice, and remaking it, or rather making it
for the first time—becoming, as it were, his People's Father. But his ambivalences
were likely enough to destroy any such chance: he was as angry and uncertain in
his own way as Arhu had been.
But if we don't get him to cooperate somehow... Those empty doorways in the upper corridors ... they
would not be empty for long. Rhiow thought of places like the great Crossroads
worldgating facility on the sixth planet of Rirhath B: many permanently
emplaced gates, leading into thousands of otherwheres, and used freely for
travel by species accustomed to such technologies, part science and part
wizardry. The Old Downside would become such a place if the Lone One had its
way with the saurians. Those doors would be filled with vistas of other worlds,
forced open in places previously innocent of such travel—and out through them
would pour armies of warrior lizards, intent on killing whatever they found.
"Misused territories": that had been the line from the catechism
taught to Ith by die Great One. Ith fortunately seemed to have renounced it,
but millions of others of his kind, it seemed, would not. They would take other
worlds gladly: the lost race would become masters of an interstellar
empire—even an intercontinual one.
Still... Arhu had said it when asked who Ith was: The
father. My son. You've got to bring him along....
She glanced up at them and found them nearly nose to
nose now, against the wall and glaring at each other again.
You can't just sit around when this is what happened
to your people, Arhu was saying
loudly to Ith. You have to do something. You saw. You were tricked! His
tone was just a touch uncertain; he was new to this kind of advocacy... but he
was doing his best.
Then Rhiow blinked. "Why, you little
monster," she muttered, "you were in my head again!.' Urruah,
did you know that he—"
"Rhi, you're loud sometimes when you muse,"
Urruah said, with slightly malicious amusement. "Sorry, I know it's
probably to do with—Sorry," he said abruptly, and sat down and started to
wash.
Rhiow felt the pain bite her again. She swallowed,
licked her nose a couple of times, tried to put it out of her mind.
The Great One would have His reasons, Ith said, very slowly.
Yeah! Killing the whole bunch of you, and everything
else It can get Its hands on! Can't you see?
I see too much. You see too much. There is blood everywhere; it runs across the world's
face, and nothing we do will stop it.
Arhu licked his nose. That's not right. It's to
stop that kind of thing that we've come.
You cannot stop it or even change it. Much less can I change it. Ith bowed his head down to Arhu
again, locked eyes with him. This is typical mammal-thought: quick
questions, quick answers, the hope that everything will be all right with
action taken now and done in a moment. Perhaps matters would improve for a
year, or two, or ten. But in fifty? Two hundred? Five hundred? All will be
again as it was. More will have died. The pain will go on, the blood will run.
You're wrong, Arhu
said. You have to help us with what we've come to do. It's not just for us.
It's for everything!
Everything, Ith
said, is foul.
Arhu couldn't find anything much to say for a second.
All there is here is death, Ith said. Those who will kill eat those who must
die so that others can kill. When we come up into the sun, we will kill again.
How many lives must pass before it all ends? Here, under this so-warm sun, and
on other worlds, and in places where there are not even stars to shine, places
completely strange to us: how many more of every kind will die? Each of those
places has its own life: we will come into each one and destroy it. The
image, which had run vaguely through Rhiow's mind, ran clear through his
own—his gift, or Arhu's Eye, could see it all: endless planes and planets,
devastated. The immense distances between galaxies, between continua, would not
be enough to stop a race of saurians made immortal by combined technology and
wizardry. And finally, That Which has used us to destroy everything will
destroy us as well... laughing that we were fools enough to be Its
instruments. I hear Its laughter even now, for the process is well begun.
... And you know all this to be true, Ith said, leaning down more closely to Arhu; and
suddenly the air itched with wizardry, spelling done without diagrams, but in
the mind... if it was spelling, and not some saurian congener to the
Whispering. I see it in you, as you have seen it, though you have
denied the sight. I see you too have heard the laughter. Forward in time: and
back.
Arhu looked up into Ith's eyes, an expression of
horror growing on his face, his eyes going wide, slowly going almost totally to
dark. He crouched down, still gazing up into Ith's eyes, his claws starting to
dig into the stone, scrabbling at it. Arhu seemed unaware of what he was doing.
"They were crying, first," he said softly.
"Not laughing. Ehhif have such weird sounds, you can't tell them
apart half the time... But it was warm. Our dam was there, so we weren't afraid
of the noises they made. The little ones, the ehhif-kits, they were
crying, but they did that a lot if you scratched them, or when they scratched
each other. I didn't know the words then. Now I know them. 'Daddy, please,
Daddy, let us keep them, let us keep just one, just one, Daddy
Rhiow rolled quietly upright, glanced over at Urruah.
He was still sitting leaning against the wall, his eyes closed down to slits,
but he was awake, watching and listening. Saash had her back to Rhiow, but
Rhiow saw an ear flick, just once.
Arhu lay still gazing up into Ith's eyes, his claws
working, working on the stone. "He said, 'We can't keep them, the landlord
won't let us have more than one, I told your mother not to let her out
until we got her spayed, well, it's her fault, you take it up with
her....' He picked us up. He wasn't bad about it, he was always careful when he
picked us up. He put us in a dark place. It rustled. He closed it up. We
couldn't smell our mother anymore. We heard her crying then, we tried to get to
her, but we couldn't see, it was dark, we were all jammed together in the dark,
and then the noise started."
Rhiow swallowed, watching the convulsive, obsessive
movement of Arhu's claws on the stone. "It was loud. We didn't know what
it was. A bus, I think now. We couldn't smell anything but each other, and some
of us got scared and made hiouh or siss in the bag, it got all
over us and smelled terrible, we could hardly smell each other anymore. The
noise stopped; we were crying, but no one would let us out, we didn't know
where our dam was— Then something pushed us hard against one side of the bag.
It felt strange, we were falling, we tried to come down on our feet. Then there
was another big noise, we came down hard, it hurt...."
Arhu swallowed. The fear in his voice was growing. "It
was cold. We were crying and trying to get out, but the black stuff
wouldn't give no matter how we clawed at it, our claws weren't any good. And
then we hit something, and after that it started to get wet inside, not just
from our siss. Wetter and wetter. A lot of water. The bag was getting
full. There wasn't air. We kept falling in the water, and it got in our faces,
we couldn't breathe. We tried to stay up... but the only way we could stay up
was by climbing on each, climbing on each other..."
Saash had slowly come to her feet now and was slipping
close to Arhu, but he paid her no attention, only gazing up at Ith. It was as
if he saw, in those reptilian eyes, the one vision he had been steadfastly
denying himself, or saw it mirrored, as the other saw ...
"They bubbled," Arhu said, his voice
dropping to a whisper. "They bubbled when they breathed the water. They
stopped moving. Their smells went away. They died. And the rest of us had to
climb on them, on their bodies, and put our heads up and try to breathe, and there
was less and less room, less and less air, and it was so cold."
Barely even a whisper, now; even that faded. "So
cold. Nowhere to breathe. Sif died last. She was my twin almost, she had my
same spots. She bubbled underneath me. I felt the breath go out, I smelled her
scent go away...." I was the last one. I was the strongest. I climbed
best. Then the last air went away. I started to bubble. It was cold
inside me. It got black. I said, Good, I want to be with my littermates. But I
couldn't. Something grabbed the thing, the bag we were in, and pulled us
out, and broke the bag open. It was an ehhif. It saved me, it dumped me
out on the ground. Incredible bitterness at that. It dried me off, it
took me to a bright place, they fed me, they put me in a warm room. Later
another ehhif came and took me away. She fed me, she kept me in her den.
She gave me a hiouh box, but every time I made siss or hiouh in
it, it would smell of them, and I would remember my brothers and sisters, how they
smelled finally, and how they started to bubble, and I couldn't go back to
the box. I had to make the hiouh somewhere else in the ehhif's
den. And then she took me out of her den and put me in a shoulder-bag and took
me in another loud thing, a bus, and she put me down in the street, and she
went away fast, in another bus. I couldn't find her den again. I went to live
behind the Gristede's.
His claws were starting to splinter. Saash, behind
him, began slowly to wash his ear. Arhu was still looking up at Ith, into the
saurian's eyes.
I heard the laughing, Arhu said, over the soft
grating of his claws on the stone. When the ehhif threw us in the
water. And while we were drowning: that laughing. It knows nothing can
stop It, or what It does. It can do it whenever It wants. It was the Lone One
at the bottom of the ehhif's heart that made it do that. It's always at
the bottom. I see It now. And It's at the bottom here. I see...
You also see, Ith
said, how there is nothing but the pain, no matter what we do against It.
There was a long, long pause: almost one of Ith's own.
I don't know, Arhu said.
He said nothing more. Saash washed him, her purr of
pain and compassion rumbling and echoing loud in the long dark hallway. The
flexing of Arhu's claws was slowly stopping; his head dropped so that he was no
longer staring at Ith. Arhu lay there gazing down at the barren black stone of
the floor, and did not move or think, at least for any of them to hear.
Rhiow slowly got up and paced over to where Urruah
leaned against the wall. What now? Urruah said to her.
Let him alone for a while, Rhiow said. He needs time to recover, after that.
And frankly, after hearing it, so do I. Arhu's pain had shaken Rhiow, in
some ways, worse than her own had been doing.
They went away and sat down together, leaving Saash
with Arhu, while Ith leaned down over them both as Saash washed, a peculiar
kind of company.
So, Urruah
said. The Lone One tried with you, and failed... I think. Now It's tried
with him... and there's no way to tell how It's done. Who's next?
I think, Rhiow
said, It may have tried with him once already. And it failed then. I'm not
sure... but It may have tried one time too many.
But It's getting desperate, Urruah said. If these attempts on our effectiveness
fail, It's just going to try brute force, a hundred thousand saurians or more,
the way it dumped them out into Central Park. It'll wear us down, and kill us
without us doing anything useful.
Let's not give It the chance, then, Rhiow said. We'll go straight down.
But how, Rhi?
You heard him: the lower halls are full of these things.
I don't propose to go the way It wants us to go, Rhiow said. Look, I'll
watch now: I couldn't sleep now no matter what. You try at least to get some
rest... an hour's worth, even. Ffairh always said that a rest was better than
no sleep.
I'd give a lot to have Ffairh here.
You 're not the only one. Go on, 'Ruah, take a nap.
He lay down, and shortly afterward, he was snoring,
too.
-=O=-***-=O=-
Rhiow sat in the darkness and watched over them. Saash
had nodded off again, a little while after Arhu did, so that only Rhiow and Ith
were awake. Ith was looking down at Arhu. For a while she gazed at him,-
wondering what went on inside that mind. His face was hard to read. Even ehhif
had been easier, at first; and there was always the one who had become
easiest to read after their association....
The thought of Hhuha, of the cold white tiles and the
metal table, bit her in the throat again. Rhiow shook her head till her ears
rattled, looked away, tried to find her composure again. Oh, to be able to
howl like a houff or weep like an ehhif, she thought; why can't
we somehow let the pain issue forth, by some outward sign? Dignity is worth a
great deal, Queen of us all, but is it worth the way this pain stays stuck
inside?
She looked up and saw Ith looking at her, silent and
thoughtful.
You too know the pain, he said inwardly. Rhiow shivered a little, for there
was warm blood about his thought, but no fur, not even as much as an ehhif wore:
the effect was strange.
Yes, she
said.
But still you will do this. And die. I saw that in
him, and in my own vision as well.
Rhiow licked her nose.
Yes.
He says... this fight has happened before.
Rhiow wondered just how to put this. Our kind, she
said, or rather, the Great Ones of our kind, have fought—this deadly power,
the Lone Power—before.
And lost.
They defeated the Old Serpent, as we call that avatar
of the Lone One, Rhiow said.
But it made no difference. It lives on, though your
gods themselves died killing It.
"Evil," said a small and very tired voice,
"just keeps on going." Arhu was sitting up again, but hunched and
huddled. He glanced at Ith. "He's seen it. So have I. And it'll still just
keep happening, no matter what we do here. Even if we win. Which we
can't..."
Rhiow swallowed. "It's not that simple," she
said. "Evil isn't something the One made, Arhu. It's a broken image— a
perversion of the way things should work, purposely skewed toward pain and
failure. Sa'Rrahh, our own image of the Lone One, and of the evil inside us,
it's the same way with her. She invented death, yes, and now tries to impose it
on the worlds. But her ambivalence is a recent development, as the Gods reckon
time... and They think the evil is something she can be weaned of. For when the
Three went to war against the Serpent, didn't she go to the Fight with Them,
and fall with Them, at the dawn of time? That's a way of saying how divided her
loyalties are, for she is the Old Serpent as well."
"It's confusing," Arhu said. Ith merely
looked thoughtful.
"It's mystery," Rhiow said, and had to smile
slightly despite her pain, for old Ffairh had said the same thing to her, when
she said the same thing to him. "Sometimes mystery is confusing. Don't
fear that; just let it be.... But what time is about, they say, is
slowly whining the Lone One back to the right side. When that happens, the
Whisperer says— when a billion years' worth of wizards' victories finally wear
sa'Rrahh down enough to show her what possibilities can lie beyond her own
furious blindness and fixity—then death and entropy will begin to work
backward, undoing themselves; evil will transform its own nature and will have
no defense against that final transformation, coming as it will from within.
The universe will be remade, as if it had been made right from the
beginning." And she had to gulp a little herself then, at the sudden memory
of the words the Whisperer had sent her to find, the fragment of the old spell:
he inflicteth with the knife wounds upon Aapep, whose place is in heaven—
The look on Arhu's face was strange. "So,"
he said after a long pause, "the Lone Power isn't Itself completely
evil."
"No. Profoundly destructive, yes, and filled with
hate for life. But even the evils It tries hardest to do sometimes backfire
because of Its own nature, which is 'flawed' with the memory of Its earliest
history, the time before It went dark. That flaw can be a weapon against It...
and has been, in many battles between the First Time and now. But we have to be
guided by Iau's own actions in our actions against the Lone One. For even She
never tried to destroy the Lone Power, though She could have. She merely drove
sa'Rrahh out, 'until she should learn better,' the song says. If the Queen
Herself believes that the Lone One can be redeemed, who are we to argue the
point?"
Arhu looked off into the distance, that million-mile
stare again. It was a long, long look ... and when he turned back to Rhiow, his
expression was incredulous. "It's started to happen already. Hasn't
it?"
"That's what the Whisperer says," Rhiow
said. "When you look around the world, it's impossible to believe. All the
death, all the cruelty and pain .. ." She went silent, thinking of white
tile, a steel table, and a shattered body, and Iaehh's inward cry of grief.
"But mere belief doesn't matter. Every time one of us stands up knowingly
to the Devastatrix, she loses a little ground. Every time one of us wins, she
loses a little more. And the Whisperer says that the effect is cumulative. No
wizard knows whether his or her act today, this minute or the next, might not
be the one that will finally make the Lone Power say, 'I give up: joy is
easier.' And then the long fall upward into the light, and the rebirth of the
worlds, will start..."
She sighed, looked over at Arhu wearily. "Is it
worth fighting for, do you think?"
He didn't answer.
"You have said the word I waited to hear,"
Ith said. "The feline Lone Power—sa'Rrahh?—is the Old Serpent. Our peoples
are one at the Root..."
Rhiow blinked.
"You're right," Arhu said, getting up.
Suddenly he looked excited, and the transformation in him was a little bizarre,
so that Rhiow sat back, concerned, wondering whether the shock of his traumatic
memory had unsettled him, kicked him into euphoria. "And we can fix
everything."
"I thought you said we were all going to
die," Urruah said abruptly.
Couldn't sleep either, huh? Rhiow said.
There was a sardonic taste to Urruah's thought. I'll
sleep tomorrow... if ever.
"Oh, die, well," Arhu said, and
actually shrugged his tail. Urruah looked incredulously at Rhiow. "Okay,
yeah, die. But we can fix it."
"Fix what?"
"The battle. The Fight!"
"Now, wait a minute!" Urruah said.
"Are you seriously talking about some kind of, I don't know, some
reconfiguration of saurian mythology? Let alone feline mythology? What
makes you think you have the right to tell the Gods how things ought to be
done?"
"What made Them think They had the
right?" Arhu said.
Rhiow stared at him. Arhu turned to her. "Look,
Rhiow, the Gods were making it up as they went along," Arhu said.
"Why shouldn't we?"
All she could do was open her mouth and shut it again.
"It's only legend because it happened so long ago!"
Arhu said. "But once upon a time, it was now! They did the best
they could, once upon a time. And this is now, too! Why shouldn't we
change the myths for ones that work better? What kind of gods would make you
keep making the same mistakes that They made, just because They did it
that way once? They'd be crazy! Or cruel! If things have changed, and new
problems need new solutions, why shouldn't we enact them? If They're good gods,
wouldn't They?"
Urruah, and Saash, well awake now, both stared.
"I mean, if They're any good as
gods," Arhu said, with the old street-kitten scorn. "If They aren't,
They should be fired."
Rhiow blinked and suddenly heard Ehef saying, in
memory, It's not like the old times anymore, no more "jobs for
life" ... The thought occurred to her sudden as a tourist's flashbulb
popping in front of the library: can times change even for the gods? Could
the process of entropy itself be sped up? Can old solutions no longer be
sufficient to the present simply because of a shift in natural law...
... such as the Lone One may be trying to provoke, by
using the power tied up in the master Gate catenary...
"And if they won't do the job—" Arhu took a
big breath, as if this scared even nun. "Then we can fight Their way.
She was me, for a little while. Why can't it go both ways? Why can't we be Them?"
"That's real easy to say," Urruah drawled.
"How are you suggesting we manage this?"
Arhu turned and looked at Rhiow.
Her eyes went wide.
"You're crazy," she said.
"The spell," said Arhu.
"You're out of your tiny mind. It's in a hundred
pieces—" She had a quick look into her workspace, and then added
hurriedly, "I don't understand the theory; it's never been constructed
enough even to test...."
But that was all she could say about it... for there
was no denying, having looked, that the spell appeared ... more whole. Big
pieces of it had come together that had never been associated before. Its
circle was closing, its gaps filling in.
As a result of the extra power I demanded? She wondered. Or as a result of being so far
Downside?
Was this assembly something she could have done long
ago and had been distracted from—
—Or simply had chosen not to do... ?
Spells did not lie, any more than wizards did. If one
implied it might work now, when before it had refused to ... then it might
work. No question of it. If it completed itself, then...
"I have to go think for a moment," she said
to the others. "And then I think we have to leave, isn't that right,
Arhu?"
"A guard party will stumble on us soon if we
don't," he said, and looked over at Ith.
Ith lashed his tail in what might have been
"yes."
"Get yourselves ready, then," she said, and
walked off down the hallway, toward the distant light at its lower end.
-=O=-***-=O=-
Her tail lashed slowly as Rhiow went padding along,
looking down at the dark smooth stone and trying to pull her thoughts together.
She was still very tired . .. but now, maybe more than ever before in her life,
she had to think clearly.
The spell...
She had long assumed that the old tales of the Flyting
under the Tree and the Battle of the Claw were symbolic at root: simplistic
story-pictures of the interrelationships among the Powers That Be, mere
concrete representations of the abstract truth, of the continuing battle
against entropy in general, and its author and personification, the Lone Power.
It had never occurred to her that as you ventured farther from the
fringe-worlds of mere physical reality into the more central and senior kinds
of existence, the legends could become not less true, but more. This
universe would plainly support that theory, however, to judge by the status of
the spell.
Worse—it had not occurred to Rhiow in her moments of
wildest reverie that a living Person might find herself playing one of
those parts, enacting the Tearer, or the Destroyer-by-Fire. But that was what
this spell now seemed to be pointing toward. And would it feel like
"playing" to the unfortunate cat cast in the part? Did the part,
ancient and powerful as it was—and moreover, closer to the Heart of things—play
you? What if you were left with no choice?
Rhiow shook herself. There was always choice: that
much she knew. Those who deny the Powers nonetheless serve the Powers, the
Whisperer had often enough breathed in her ear. Those who serve the Powers
themselves become the Powers. Beware the Choice! Beware refusing it!
How much plainer could the hint be? she wondered. But in either case, the common thread
was Beware. Whatever happened ... you were no longer the same.
And fear stalked that idea, for the stories also told often enough of cats who
had dared to be more than they were, had climbed too high, fell, and did not come
down on their feet—or came down on them much too hard for it to matter. How
could you tell which you were?
Yet at the same time, there might be a hint of hope
lurking under this idea. If People could successfully ascend to the gods'
level, even for short periods, they could possibly interact with them on equal
terms. Rhiow thought about the Devastatrix. There were ehhif legends
about her, how sa'Rrahh once misread her mandate—to eradicate the wickedness in
the world—and almost destroyed the whole world and all life by fire, so
mercilessly that (in the ehhif story) the other gods had to get her
falling-down drunk on blood-beer before she would stop. Rhiow had always
thought this was more symbolism for something: some meteoric bombardment or
solar flare. Now, though, Drunkenness? Rhiow thought. A complete
change of perceptions artificially imposed on one of the Powers That Be? But a
temporary one ... and to a purpose.
Tamper with the perceptions of sa'Rrahh herself, of
the Old Serpent? Fool the Lone One?
Grief-worn and weary as she was, Rhiow was tempted to
snicker. There would be a choice irony to that, for the Lone Power had
certainly fooled the saurians. A certain poetic justice, there. Well,
the Powers don't mind justice being poetic, as long as the structure's
otherwise sound.
But if we screw this up.. .forget death being a problem. Forget our souls just
passing out into nowhere, with no rebirth. I don't think we'd be so lucky.
... Arhu's right, though. The rules are being
changed. That's what all this is about, from the malfunctioning of the Grand
Central gates on down. A major reconfiguration is happening. The structure of
space is being changed so that the structure of wizardry, maybe of science,
maybe of life itself, can be changed.
And if the Lone One can change the rules... so can we.
She stood there in the silence for a few moments more,
her tail still twitching; and her whiskers went forward in a slow smile. There
was nothing particularly merry about it... but she saw her chance. All she
could do now was take it and go forward in the best possible heart.
Rhiow turned and walked back to the others.
"All right," she said as they looked at her.
"I'll need some time, yet, to work on the spell... but we can't wait here:
those guards will be along. Let's get out into the open and give them something
to think about. Ready?"
Urruah snarled softly; Saash made a sound half-growl,
half-purr in her throat; Arhu simply looked at Rhiow, silent. Behind him, Ith
towered up as silently, watching Rhiow, as Arhu did: with eyes that saw ... she
couldn't tell what.
"Let's go," she said, and led them down
toward the faint light that indicated the next balcony.
There they come," Urruah said quietly, as they
walked out on the balcony and looked down into the abyss.
Rhiow looked across to the nearest visible corridor,
off to their right and down one level. Under a mighty carving of rampant
saurians, their six-clawed forelimbs stretched out into the emptiness, a
wider-than-usual balcony reared out. It was full of mini-tyrannosauruses, and
some of them that were much bigger than usual—twins to the
scarlet-and-blue-striped dinosaur that Arhu had exploded in Grand Central.
"He keeps being reborn," Arhu hissed.
"You kill him and he keeps coming back. It's not fair!"
"It's not life," Rhiow muttered; what
defined life, after all, was that sooner or later it ended. "Never mind...
we'll deal with him soon enough, I think."
As the team looked from their own balcony, the
saurians looked up, saw them, and let out a mighty hiss of rage; the saurians
dashed out of sight, making for a rampway upward.
"Well, Rhi?" Urruah said. "Which spell
do you like better? The short version of the neural inhibitor—"
"We can't take a chance that it might go askew
and hit Ith," she said. "Here's the one I like at the moment."
She leapt up onto the parapet, and then straight out
onto the empty air.
For a horrible moment she missed her footing and was
afraid the spell wouldn't take—that gravitic and intra-atomic forces were being
interfered with, as well as string structure. But the difference was due only
to a slight difference in the gravitic constant here: she could feel it, after
a second, and amended her spell to reflect it. The air went hard. She stood on
it and looked down in genial scorn at the few remaining saurians, who stared at
her and pointed every claw they had available and hissed in amazement.
"Come on, everybody," she said. "Let's
not be more of a target than necessary." She stared down into the abyss.
Perhaps only three-quarters of a mile down now, that point of light shone up
through the cold dark air. Amazing, despite how bright it seemed, how little
light it gave to their surroundings.
"I'll switch the stairs back for every hundred
vertical feet or so," Rhiow said, throwing a glance behind her at the
balcony where Ith and Arhu still stood, and on the parapet of which Saash and
Urruah now teetered. "Ith, can you see the stairs I've made?"
A long pause. "No."
"Then stay between Saash and Arhu, and step where
Arhu steps. Come on, hurry up, they're coming!"
She headed down the stairway in the air, defining it
as she went. She was sorry that she couldn't make the steps deeper, for Ith's
sake, but he was just going to have to cope. Hard enough to be stepping down on
the air, keeping the air solid before her, solid behind her, holding her
concentration, while at the same time trying to poke at bright fragments of
words on the floor of the workspace in her mind, trying to chivvy that spell
into getting finished. It would help if the power parameters made more
sense. It would help if I didn't think the stairstep spell was likely to
"burn in" halfway down. It would help if...
Urruah jumped down behind her and began to make his
way down the air. Arhu came next. Gingerly, Ith followed, tiptoeing delicately
in Arhu's wake and looking now rather nervous, with all twelve of his front
claws clenched tight Saash came down after—
—and right up on the balcony behind her jumped the
first of the saurians, reaching for her.
She turned, hissed.
Nothing happened.
The saurian lashed out at her sidewise with its tail,
trying to knock her off whatever she was standing on. Saash skipped hurriedly
down a step or two, knocking into Ith, who half-turned to see what was
happening, lost his balance, knocked into Arhu—
Arhu leaned so hard against him that Rhiow, looking
over her shoulder, was sure they were both going to fall. Then she realized
that Arhu had anticipated the fall, had perhaps seen it with the Eye, and had
started reacting to it almost before it happened. His vision is clear now Rhiow
thought, almost with pity. The one thing he didn't dare see was what was
clouding it.
The two of them steadied each other, recovered, and
headed on down the steps. Saash recovered her own balance and stopped, looked
over her shoulder, and said sweetly to the saurian who was balancing
precariously on the parapet, "Scared?"
The saurian leapt at her, at the air where it had seen
the others step—
—and fell through it, and down: a long, long way down.
It was out of sight a long time before it would have hit bottom.
Other saurians that had been climbing up on the
parapet as their leader took his first step now paused there, looking down and
down into the dark air through which he had fallen. None of them looked
particularly eager to try to follow him, though there were hisses and screams
of rage enough from them. Saash sat down on the air, lifted a hind leg, and
began ostentatiously to wash behind it.
—until a line of red-hot light went by her ear. Her
head snapped up as she saw one of the saurians leveling something like the
bundle-of-rods-and-box at her again, for a better shot: an energy weapon of
some kind. "Oh well," she said, "hygiene can wait..." She
stood up, pausing just long enough for one quick scratch before the saurian
managed to fire again. It hit her, squarely—
—and the bolt splashed off like water: she had had a
shield-spell ready. Saash flirted her tail, grinned at the saurians, and then
loped down the invisible stairs after the others.
Back up on the parapet, the frustrated saurians were
dancing and screaming with fury behind them. "Nice idea, Rhi," Urruah
said, as they made their way downward past balconies and platforms that were
beginning to fill with staring, astonished saurians of all kinds and sizes.
"And a lot easier than working our way through all those corridors full
of, uh, spectators ..." He glanced at the filling balconies. "Looks
like Shea Stadium during a 'subway series.'"
"Now, I didn't think you were that much of a
sports fan," Rhiow said, padding steadily downward. "With you so
crazy for o'hra and all..."
"Oh, well, I don't follow it... but if a New York
team is doing well..."
Rhiow smiled slightly and kept on walking. She was
alert for those energy weapons, now. Good thought, Saash, she said, to
tempt them a little, see what they had on hand. We'll all have to be ready for
that. I don't know what kind of range those things have.
Not terribly long, I think. The wizardly component of
them can't be very large, with the people handling the technology not being
wizards themselves.
All right. Who's covering Ith, though?
"I'll take care of him for the moment,"
Urruah said.
"Right." Rhiow turned in midair to
"switch back" her stairway, and started on another downward leg.
"Only one thing, Rhi. Don't you think we've, uh,
lost the element of surprise?" Urruah was looking at the next course of
balconies as they passed them. They were so full of saurians than some of them
were in danger of pushing others who watched off into the abyss.
Rhiow had to laugh just slightly. "Did we ever have
it, 'Ruah? We've been driven into coming down here in the first place. But
in the short term, we haven't had it since Arhu told us those guards were going
to be coming. I don't have any trouble with sacrificing it at this point. Let's
just have a nice stroll down to where the Fire is ... because if we can pull
any surprises out down there, that's where we're really going to need
them."
They walked down and down the middle of the air, and
more and more saurians came crowing to see them. Most of them, Rhiow felt
strongly, were not happy about seeing People down there; the buzz of their
business, which had been little more than background noise before, now started
to scale up into an angry roar. Cries of "Mammals! Kill the mammals!"
and "Throw them in the Fire, cleanse our home!" and "Haath,
where is Haath?" went up on all sides. Rhiow strolled through it all with
as much equanimity as she could manage; but her main concern was for the
others, and especially for Ith, as the cries of 'Traitor! Traitor! Kill
him!—" went up from the teeming balconies. Urruah was as unmoved as if he
were sashaying up some East Side avenue on a weekend. Saash glanced around her
nervously once or twice, but as they moved out into the center of the great space,
and out of the range of the energy weapons that were fired at them once or
twice, she grew less concerned, at least to Rhiow's eye. Arhu was looking more
nervous as he went; he seemed to be licking his nose about once a minute. Rhiow
had no idea whether this was just general nervousness or due to something the
Eye had shown him, and she was unwilling at the moment to make the situation
worse by asking. Ith was more of a concern for her, as the cries of rage and
betrayal went up all around them; but he stalked along between Arhu and Urruah
with his face immobile and his claws at ease—at least Rhiow thought they were
at ease. It was going to be a while before she could tell his moods, she
thought... if she ever had that much leisure at all.
The cold was now increasing, and the River of Fire was
now looking appreciably closer. Once past it, Rhiow thought, once
we've dealt with the catenary—assuming it can be dealt with in some way
that will return it to its proper functioning—we 're going to have to try to get
Ith to do something with whatever power we can make available to him... through
the spell, or in whatever other way. If Ith does accept the power to call on
the Powers That Be to enforce his Choice, to enact his desire... The
chances were good, then, that the new Choice would redeem all these saurians
retroactively, enabling them to find some other way of life: the Lone One would
be cast out again. The trick after that would be to keep It from destroying the
whole Mountain, and all the saurians in it, in a fit of pique.
The other trick will be getting Ith to do this in the
first place. For Rhiow was by no
means convinced that he was as yet committed. She remembered when she had
thought that all this was going to hinge on Arhu, one way or another. How
simple it all looked then.
Urruah approached her as she was making her way down
in the lead, and paced alongside her. "How're you holding up?"
Rhiow sighed. "As well as might be expected, with
about a million snakes yelling for my blood."
"Yeah," Urruah said. "Charming."
"How's our problem child?"
"Which one? The one with the fur or the one with
the scales?"
Rhiow had to chuckle. "Both."
"Arhu's covering for Ith at the moment... taking
good care of him, I'd say."
"Have they been talking?"
"More like, have they ever stopped? I
don't think Hrau'f the Silent herself could shut them up if she came down and
showed them a diagram of what quiet looked like." He chuckled a little.
"Makes you wonder if they're related somehow."
"Oh, I'm sure." Rhiow made a slightly sardonic
face.
Urruah echoed it as they walked down what was now an
invisible spiral staircase into the final depths: Rhiow had gotten tired of the
switchback pattern. "Still," he said. "Heard a funny story from
Ehef, once. Those two could almost make me believe it. Would you believe, Ehef
told me that ehhif have a legend that cats were actually made out of snakes—"
And the pain hit Rhiow worse than ever, so that for a
moment she had to simply stop and try to get hold of herself again. It was an
old, old memory: Hhuha reaching down and pressing Rhiow's ears right down
against her head, not so it hurt, though, and pulling the comers of her eyes
back a little so they looked slanty, and saying, "Snake!"
Surprised at the sudden strange handling, Rhiow had
hissed. Iaehh had looked over at them and said, "See that, you're right.
Better be glad she's not a poisonous snake."
Rhiow had privately decided to go use the hiouh box,
come back and coax Iaehh into picking her up—and then jump down, giving him a
good scratch or so with the hind legs to let him find out firsthand how nonpoisonous
she was. Within minutes she had forgotten, of course: normally Rhiow was too
good-natured for that kind of thing.
But now she remembered—and felt the pain again—and
thought, Ridiculous idea. People made out of snakes.
Except...
She licked her nose as she walked downward, into the
cold and the reflected fire.
Except that there is something to it. Somewhere in the dim past, on the strictly
evolutional path, we must have a comman ancestor. No one made cats out of
snakes, any more than they made humans out of monkeys. But we're related.
We're all related.
"We're close," Urruah said quietly.
Rhiow blinked, looking down: she had been running
mostly on autopilot. They were indeed very near the bottom of the chasm now,
the place where it all came to a point at last. The cold was growing bitter.
Maybe a few hundred yards below, all the black basalt walls around them began
to lose the ornate carving that had characterized them farther up: the last of
the balconies, crowded with the mini-tyrannosauruses screaming abuse, were now
perhaps fifty yards above. Below was not so much a river as a pool of blazing
light that filled the whole bottom of the chasm to unknown depth. It gave
almost no heat and burned the eyes to look at it. But only by looking steadily,
tearing and squinting, could Rhiow see the energy-flow, the current of it, like
streams of paler lightning in the main body of a river of lightning. The
terrible energy was still bound as it would have been in a normally functioning
catenary, and to Rhiow's trained eye, it looked more tightly bound than
it would have been—as if something perhaps was a little afraid of it?...
Very tight indeed, Saash said to Rhiow silently, from behind. Something's pegged it
down in this configuration on purpose and is afraid the cinctures holding the
energy in catenary configuration will come completely loose if it's interfered
with. There was a certain grim humor in her thought.
And would it?
Almost certainly. In fact, I'm counting on it.
What??
I believe that if I have to, I can release the bonds
that hold the catenary together as a controlled flow... and bust the entire
energy of the thing loose. Despite the extra safeguards that Someone has tried
to put up around it...
The thought of even one of the minor catenaries
getting loose in that fashion had been enough to raise the fur on Rhiow's back.
But the thought of the master going—you might as well drop a star into
the heart of the Mountain.
Exactly, Saash
said, and smiled that grim grin again. Can you imagine even the Lone Power
being able to hang on to a physical shape under such circumstances? For to
interact with us at all, it has to be at least somewhat physical. If we
let the trunk catenary loose, especially in its present deformed state, the
combined release and backlash would destroy everything here. And destroy
Earth's worldgating system. Now, that would be a nuisance—
You have a talent for understatement! Urruah said from behind them.
But it will stop
all this, Saash said, quite cool, if there's nothing else we can do.
If the Lone One pulls off what It's planning down here, there's a lot more than
just Earth's well-being at stake. Thousands, maybe millions of planets, planes,
and continua—you want to take responsibility for letting them be overrun by
trillions of crazed warrior lizards? If it looks like we're all going to be
taken out of commission before what Rhiow has in mind for Ith happens, I'm
going to let the catenary loose... and watch the fireworks. For about a
millisecond, she added, wry.
They stood only a few yards above the flow now, and
Rhiow looked at it, squinting down until her vision was almost all one
after-image, trying to see which way the flow went. It seems to lead out
through the stone, Rhiow said.
It may do exactly that, said Saash, but it seems more likely to me that the
stone on that side is an illusion. It's going to be tough for matter to coexist
with this energy in the same space. Side by side, yes. But intermingling?
Highly unlikely.
Rhiow tended to agree.
"So what do we do?" Urruah said.
Rhiow threw a look over her shoulder at Arhu, who was
standing by Ith again, as if caught in mid-conversation. Arhu looked at the
stone wall.
Rhiow shrugged her tail. "We follow it," she
said, and headed along in the direction in which the flow through the catenary
was going, very close above the surface.
"You don't want us to get down in it—"
Saash said, now sounding actively nervous.
"Unless it's unavoidable, no," Rhiow said,
making her way slowly toward the black stone wall. "We'll just walk on
it." She glanced at Arhu.
He shrugged his tail back. "All I know is that we
have to cross it," he said. "Nobody told me we had to go through.
1 think that's later."
"Oh, wonderful," Urruah said.
Rhiow stepped down, and down, those last few steps ...
and hesitatingly put one paw down on the surface of the bound catenary, with
her skywalk spell laid just over the surface. The sensation was most unpleasant.
The spell, applied to the surface of the catenary, felt not solid, but full of
holes, like chicken wire; through it, the dreadful forces of the catenary
sizzled and prickled under Rhiow's paws, leaving her with the sense that it
would simply love to dissolve her, like sugar in coffee. All her fur stood on
end, though that was no surprise: the lonization of the air around the catenary
was fierce, and the ozone smell reminded her of the Grand Central upper level,
some days ... almost a homely smell, after the last few hours. She looked over
her shoulder at Saash and the others. "It works," she said, "but
you won't like it. Let's get it over with."
Rhiow led the way toward the wall; the others
followed, Arhu making the path for himself and Ith. As Ith stepped down onto
the fire, he teetered in surprise, and Arhu braced him. "How does this
feel to you?" Arhu said.
He stood quite still for a moment. "This is not
as it should be," he said flatly. "There should be true Fire
here." And he looked down at the catenary. "This is so bound and
changed from how it was once." He looked up. "As are my people. I
suppose I should not be surprised."
Rhiow looked at him, then turned again. "Come
on," she said, and went up to the black stone wall. She paused, put up a
paw.
The paw went through it. Rhiow glanced over her
shoulder at Saash. "You were right," she said. "It's tampered
with everything else It can get Its paws on, but It hasn't been able to change
science that much ... not yet."
"Not until It makes some other, more basic
changes first," Saash said, looking down into the catenary.
Rhiow lashed her tail. "Let's see that It doesn't
get the chance."
They passed through the wall. It didn't feel the way
wall-walking usually did. The structure of the wall seemed to buzz and hum
around them with the violent energy of the catenary so nearby. It was a long
walk through it, though; it felt to Rhiow like a long slog through a thick bank
of black smoke that was trying to resist her as she came—smoke that hummed like
bees. She found herself trying to hold her breath, trying not to breathe the
stuff, lest that humming should get inside her, drown her thoughts. Don't
worry about it. One step at a time, one paw in front of the next...
Slowly the air before her began to clear. She came out
into another open space, looked up and around it... and her jaw dropped in
surprise. Behind her, Saash came out of the cloud-wall, paused.
It was the main concourse from Grand Central. But huge
... ten times its normal size; so that, despite the fact that all their
bodies were those of People of the ancient world, once again Rhiow and her team
were reduced to the scale of People in New York. Four cats and a toy dinosaur
came slowly out into the great dark space, illuminated only by the bound-down
catenary that ran through it, flowing down a chasm carved straight through the
floor, from the Forty-second Street doors to where the escalators to the
Met-Life building would normally have headed upward. The architecture of the
genuine Terminal was perfectly mimicked, but all in black—matte black or black
that gleamed. In the center of the concourse, the round information booth with
its spherical clock was duplicated, but all in blind black stone: no bell
tolled, no voice spoke. Above, over blind windows that admitted no light, the
great arched ceiling rose all dark, and never a star gleamed in it. Rhiow,
looking at it, got the feeling that stars might once have gleamed there
... until something ate them. It was more a tomb than a terminal.
Rhiow looked down at the catenary's flow through the
concourse. There were no escalators at the far side: only a great double
stairway reaching downward, and the catenary flowed down between them,
cascading out of sight. In Rhiow's world, stairs that led in this direction
would have taken you to the Metro-North commissary and the lower-level
workshops. She doubted that here they went anywhere so mundane.
"Down?" Saash said, her voice falling small
in that great silence.
Rhiow glanced at Arhu. He said, "Follow the
Fire."
They went to the stairways, stood at the top of them,
and Rhiow realized that these were the originals of many stairs copied farther
up in the structure of this dark Manhattan. The steps were tall, suited to
saurians, but to no other life forms. "Looks like a long way down,"
Saash said.
"I'm sure it's meant to be. Let's go."
They went down the stairs, taking them as quickly as
was comfortable ... which wasn't very. A long way, they went. On their left,
since they had taken the right-hand stair, the River of Fire flowed down in
cascade after cascade, its power seeming to burn more deadly and more bright
the farther down they went: there was no point in looking toward it for
consolation in the darkness—it hurt. And the cold grew and grew. There were no
other landmarks to judge by—only, when they turned around to look, the stair
seeming to go up to vanishing point behind them, and down to vanishing point
ahead. For Rhiow this became another of those periods that seemed to go on
forever ... and it's meant to, she thought. "This is meant to
disorient us," she said to the others. "Don't let it. Do what you
have to do to stay alert. Sing, tell stories—" She wished then that she
hadn't said "sing," for Urruah started.
Saash promptly hit him.
"Thank you," Rhiow said softly, and kept
walking.
"Oh. Well, can I tell the one about the—"
"No," Rhiow said.
Arhu watched this with some bemusement; so did Ith.
"Don't get nun started," Saash said. "He makes puns. Terrible
ones."
"Oh, no," Arhu said. "I wish we were
down ..."
"But we are" Ith said, sounding a
little bemused.
Arhu stared. "He's right."
And so it was. All of them bunked as Arhu ran on down
past them and to what seemed, mercifully, a flat area.
Did you see that? Saash said. He wished... and it was so. This place may be a
lot more malleable than we thought. But it makes sense. If the laws of wizardry
are being changed, if things are influx down here ...
Rhiow swallowed at that thought, and as she came down
the last of the steps into the flat area, looked quickly into the workspace in
the back of her mind.
A great circle lay there, almost complete—dark patches
filling themselves in almost as she watched.
The spell the Whisperer's still working on, she thought That's what Arhu said.
She stopped, breathed in and out, tried to center
herself, and looked around her. They stood at the edge of a broad, dark plain,
not smooth; here for the first time there was some sense of texture. Great
outcroppings and stanchions of stone, blocks upthrust from the floor, stood all
about: a little stone forest. And thrusting up out of the middle of it...
Rhiow had to simply sit down and look from one side to
the other, to try to take it all in. Roots ... huge roots, each one of which
was the size of a skyscraper, an Empire State Building ... spreading
practically from one side of vision to the other: gnarled, tremendous,
brown-barked, reaching up into a single mighty column that towered up and up
out of sight. This is what it's like when you try to perceive an archetype, Rhiow
thought, looking left toward what would have been a horizon in the real world,
and right... and seeing nothing but the massive union of roots, reaching
upward, lost in the vast darkness.
It was the Tree: the roots of the Tree, sunk deep in
the Mountain ... the stone of the Mountain's inmost cavern now rearing up,
thrusting up around the separate roots as if trying somehow to bind them. From
older trees in the park, Rhiow knew that in any such contest between tree and
stone, the tree always won eventually. But here it seemed to have been fought
to a draw: the stone seemed to be closing in.
Before it, between them and the Tree, the River of
Fire spilled down the last of its steps and out into a broad channel ... the
final barrier. It looked more like the archetypal River now: inimical, a fire
that would burn cold rather than hot, one in which nothing could
survive—certainly not memory, maybe not even the passing soul. By the light of
that river, Rhiow could make out that something else was wound about the Tree,
among the stones, resting on them in some places: a long shining form, dark as
everything else was here—but the light of the River caught its scales coldly,
glinted black fire back. That form lapped the Tree in coil upon immense coil;
the mind wanted to refuse the sight of it. Taking it all in, the trunk of the
Tree, the roots of the Tree, the coiled shape, was like trying to take in a
whole mountain in a glimpse from up close, as well as the river of fire that
wound about its feet, and the other river of darkly glittering light, which
wound about it higher up: a river with eyes.
And under the spot where eyes lay brooding in a
gigantic skull, where the massive jaw rested, at the top of one mighty root,
Rhiow saw a great deep jagged gouge, gnawed into the Tree. The gouge bled pale
light, too pale to illumine much. The gouge was deep—perhaps a third of the way
through the whole trunk, on that side. And the old, dark, wise, amused eyes
looked at them, and smiled.
Rhiow threw an almost panicked glance at Arhu, for it
was in his voice that she had first heard the warning. Claw your way to the
Root. The Tree totters... And did the trunk have just the slightest
leftward slant? As if it were thinking about falling?
What else will fall with it?
They all stood there, in that massive, archaic
silence, and looked at those dark eyes. Rhiow felt those eyes on her and felt
ineffably ephemeral, helpless, small. Beside her, Saash was staring,
silent. Beside her, Arhu looked once, and looked away as if burned. Ith— Ith
crouched down to the stony ground in what even to Rhiow was plainly a gesture
of reverence.
It was not entirely misplaced, Rhiow knew. She took a
step forward, sat down, curled her tail about her feet, looked the Old Serpent
in the eye, though she trembled all over, and said as clearly as she could,
"Eldest, Fairest, and Fallen... greeting; and defiance."
Things began to shake. A long rumble, a roar, as of
many voices, fading away ... laughter. A long soft laugh, fading, as if the
earthquake laughed.
Rhiow saw Arhu shudder all over at the sound. She was
not in much better state herself. She was going to have to cope, though. Off to
one side she caught a movement. Urruah, heading for the River—
She opened her mouth to shout at him to stop—and found
herself muzzled: those dark eyes were concentrating particularly on her, and
the pressure made speech impossible for the moment. But Urruah kept going. He
would probably have ignored me anyway. Urruah!!
Straight out over the deadly River he went, as
casually as if he were walking across Seventy-eighth Street, heading for his
Dumpster. He passed the River, unhurt, though Rhiow thought she caught a scent
of scorching fur. Urruah sauntered slowly over to the nearest root of the Tree
where it sank among the tumbled stones, a massive gnarled pillar, and looked it
over; then reared up on his hind legs, and began, thoughtfully, insolently, to
sharpen his claws on it.
Rhiow stared at him open-jawed, filled with disbelief,
indignation, and a kind of crooked admiration. She had leisure to indulge
herself in the feelings, for Urruah didn't hurry any more than he might have
rushed himself while working on some badly fenced-in sapling on a city street.
Finally Urruah was done. He dropped to all fours again and strolled back over
the river, back to the team: a tom finished marking just one more piece of
territory.
Only you would
pull a stunt like that, Rhiow said to him as he came.
Possibly that's why I'm here, he said, and smiled, then turned back to face their
enemy. But sometimes you can be a little too formal. If we're going to play hauissh
... let's play hauissh.
I'm surprised you didn't spray it, Saash said.
Hey, yeah, I forgot. He started to get up, and Rhiow put a big heavy paw
down on his tail, without the claws ... for the moment. Urruah looked over his
shoulder at her, then grinned and sat down again.
Is it the Fight? Arhu said silently. The one
you and Yafh were showing me?
If not the original, Urruah said, close enough. Keep your tactics in
mind. Find your position and don't be moved off it. Half of a good fight is
bluff, so yell as loud as you can, break your throat if you have to: it heals
faster than broken claws. Don't waste your time with ears: no one
breathes through their ears. Throats are the target—
What is this, the pregame show? Rhiow said silently, annoyed, but still amused. How
am I supposed to make a mission statement with this going on? Save it for
later.
She stood up. "Well, Lone One," she said,
"you've been working on something a little less obvious down here, it
seems. Often enough You've tried striking directly at individual wizards, with
mixed results at best. But here, now, obviously it's suited You to strike at
the Gates by undermining the Tree, and enslaving the poor saurians down here,
that You tricked so long ago. Well, the Queen has noticed You... and She and
the Powers have a little surprise for You as a result. The first saurian
wizard..."
That laughter, like the earthquake, rumbled again. And
when it faded to silence, a voice spoke.
"There is another?" It said, amused.
From out of the shadows stepped a tall shape. Arhu
looked up and growled in his throat
It was a tyrannosaur: slate-blue, striped gaudily in
red. It looked down at them all with an expression that stretched into a
mocking grin, and flexed all its twelve claws.
"You again,"
Arhu said.
"You're a bit older than when I saw you
last," said the tyrannosaur ... in the Speech. "But you won't get
much older than you are now,... never fear."
"This is the one I saw the first night,"
Arhu said. "After the rats."
"Haath," Rhiow said. "The Great One's
'sixth claw.'"
"Feline mammal," Haath said, and grinned at
her in her turn. "I will not say 'well met on the errand'; it will not be
so, for you."
Rhiow's heart sank. Surprise, she thought,
furious with herself for being so blind, for the Lone Power had been way ahead
of her. Here, in the heart of this place where the structure of wizardry itself
was being deranged and perverted, It had been able to cause wizardry to present
itself to a saurian of Its choice, without involving any of the other Powers
That Be. It had taught the wizard everything It wanted him to know, and pushed
him through an Ordeal that had probably been a parody of the real thing, but
real enough to produce the result: a wizard who walked the entropic side, who
killed casually or for pleasure, who changed the life around him without
reason, who knew nothing of preservation or slowing down the heat-death ... who
probably knew nothing but his Master's will. At the mere thought of such
perversion of the Art, Rhiow hissed and spat, fluffing up.
"Now now," said Haath, much amused, "bad
kitty," and swept a claw at her.
Rhiow said the word that would activate the
shield-spell she had been carrying—and the bolt that caught her struck straight
through the shield and threw her on her back, burning in her bones so that she
could do little but lie on the ground and writhe in pain. "Indeed,"
Haath said, "you see that my Lord has taught me well. He wrested the power
for me from those who would have kept it jealously for themselves and their
chosen puppets. I am his chosen one, His Sixth Claw. And as for this—" He
looked scornfully at Ith. "He knows his master in me. He has no
power. I have passed my Ordeal: he barely knows what his was supposed to be.
Not that he will have a chance to find out. I am my People's wizard. There will
be no other."
The pain was wearing off enough now for Rhiow to
stagger to her feet again, licking her nose. This is why Ith was sent to us,
she thought. And Arhu to him... to prepare him for this competition.
This is his opposite number. There's always someone else to argue the opposite
side of a Choice, for no Choice would be valid without it.
'This is a kinship of individuals!" Rhiow
shouted, putting her shield back in place. "Not a monopoly! Not a
tyranny of power! There's always room for more wizards."
"Not in this world," Haath said, "and
not in the new world to be, which we will bring. There will shortly be
something new under the Sun."
Ith was still crouched on the black floor, head down,
fore-claws clenched on the stone, as if unable to stand, even, let alone to
make any Choice for his whole people. Do something, Rhiow whispered into
his mind. Do something! Try!
But he could not hear her. All he could hear was
Haath, that voice curling into his brain and shutting everything else out,
shutting him away from his power.
"And why should he hear anything
else?" Haath said, stepping closer, leaning over Ith and grinning
dreadfully. "I am his Lord, I am his Leader! I would have brought him up
into the light, into the Sun, in my good time ... but now it is too late.
Coming down here in company with you, he has enacted rebellion. It is too late
for him: none of our people are allowed to do such a thing. He must suffer the
fate that he has brought upon himself, and later, his name and his fate will be
used to frighten hatchlings. His hide will be hung from some high spot, to show
what happens to those who defy the Great One's will." He bowed to the
mountainous shape coiled around the trunk of the Tree.
Rhiow, her tail lashing, looked at Haath, then turned
away, turned her attention back toward the freezing cold eyes in that
beautiful, gleaming-dark head. "Fairest and Fallen," she said,
"Lone Power, Old Serpent, and sa'Rrahh among our People: from the Powers
That Be, and from the One, I bring you this word. Leave this place and this
universe, or be displaced by force."
It simply looked at her, not even bothering to laugh
now. Rhiow stood her ground, and tried not to look as if she were bluffing. She
knew of no wizardry sufficient to move the Lone One from a place it had
invested in such power.
I know a spell, Saash said.
I would prefer not destroying a whole species if we
can avoid it! Rhiow said.
If we can avoid it. But there are a couple of other
possibilities I want to explore.
You do that. Meanwhile—
Ith! Rhiow said silently. Ith! Get off your tail and do something!
This is your chance— stand up and tell him so! You have power—try to use it!
He is the Lord of our people, Ith said with great difficulty. Till now, I never
saw him, but—now—I thought that perhaps, but—his power—it is too great,
I cannot—
Rhiow's hackles rose. I'd hoped Arhu would have him
ready for whatever he has to do, she thought. But he's not going to rise
to the occasion. I'm just going to have to lead by example.
She took a stride forward, opened her mouth to speak—
"All right," Arhu said, walking forward
stifflegged. "That's enough. You think I don't feel you in his head,
hurting him? Taking his thoughts away? He can't stop you, but I think I can. Get
out of his head, Haath! I remember when you tried to do that to me. I
couldn't stop you myself, lizard-face, not the first time; when you found you
couldn't completely fry my brains, you sent in the rats to get rid of me the
easy way. But it didn't work." He was stalking closer, lips wrinkled back,
fangs showing. "And when the gates opened, and you showed up on my turf, I
showed you a little something. I've killed you before. I'll do it again, and
I'll keep on doing it until I get it right."
"You will never get it right," Haath
said, backing just a little, starting to circle. "I can never die. It is
my Gift from the Great One."
"Yeah, I bet it is," Arhu said. "He's
just full of little presents, isn't He? Let's find out how yours stands
up to a little wear and tear."
He launched himself at Haath.
Down they went together, kicking and rolling. Rhiow
was surprised to see nothing more wizardly being used at first, but a second
later she thought she knew why: there was a spell-damper all around Haath—not
quite a shield, but a place where spells would not work... and Haath had not
counted on Arhu wanting to go paw-to-claw with him. Arhu, though, had probably
known: the Eye had its uses. And he may have seen something else as well: something
Rhiow saw only now, when she turned—
—Saash crouching down by the catenary, leaning down
over the "bank" ... and dabbling one paw down into the ravening white
fire.
What in Iau's name are you—!
Don't ask, It'll hear, Saash said. Here goes nothing—
Abruptly the white flame running in the conduit
streaked up her paw and downreaching foreleg, up around her—not quite running
over her hide, but a scant inch above it. Saash was shielded, but the kind of
shield she was generating at the moment made Rhiow's look like wet tissue paper
by comparison; to judge by the behavior of that white fire, now flowing up and
around her more and more quickly, she had a second shield above it, holding it
in place, holding it in. Swiftly, almost between one breath and the next, Saash
became a shape completely sheathed in burning white: a statue, a library lion
with her head up, watching, with one paw hanging down into the catenary, the
whiteness of the fire around her growing more intense with every breath. A
conduit, Rhiow thought in mixed admiration and horror— and fear. Or a
storage battery... or both. How long can she—oh, Saash, don't—
Saash stood up and began slowly, silently, to walk
toward where Arhu and Haath were fighting; very carefully she went, like an ehhif
carrying a full cup or bucket, intent on not spilling any of the contents.
Haath and Arhu were up on their hind legs now, boxing at one another; as Saash
paused, Arhu threw himself at Haath again, hard, and took him down, going for
the throat, missing. Behind them, very quickly, Saash moved forward in one
smooth rush—
"Saash, no!" Arhu screamed. Haath rolled out from underneath Arhu,
scrambled to his hind legs, and made a flinging motion at Saash with one claw.
The spell he threw hit her, and her shields collapsed.
"Saash!" Rhiow roared. The white-burning form writhed, leapt in the air,
shrieked terribly once—
—and fell. The fire went out, except for small blue
tongues of it that danced over what remained for a few seconds. What remained
was no longer tortoiseshell, but black, thin, twisted, charred: legs and head
burnt to stumps, the head—
Urruah ran to her. Haath straightened, smiled slowly
at Rhiow, and then at Arhu. "Nothing," Haath said,
"literally."
At the sight of what had become of Saash, Arhu roared,
a roar that was almost a scream, and threw himself at the saurian again. He was
big and strong in this form, and he had the advantage of knowing what his enemy
was about to do before he did it. But every time Arhu tore Haash, the tear
healed: every bite sealed over. The best Arhu could achieve was a stalemate,
while trying to keep his enemy's teeth out of his own flesh. He was not always
succeeding.
Nearby, Urruah bent over Saash's body, touched it with
a paw, then left it and began circling toward Arhu and Haath. Half-crippled
with rage and a new grief, with the memory of the last look in Saash's eyes,
seen through the fire as she leapt up, Rhiow joined Urruah and started to
circle in from the other side. The thought of wizardry was not much with her at
the moment. Blood was what she wanted to taste: that foul thin pinkish stuff
that saurians used. One of them might not be enough to take Haath down, but
weren't they a pride? Three may be enough—
Haath, though, was laughing. With one eye he was
watching Arhu, keeping him at bay with those slashing claws; and he too
circled, watching first Rhiow, then Urruah as they came.
"Don't you see that it won't matter?" Haath
said softly, grinning. "You have killed me before, cat, and nothing has
come of it except that now I shall kill you ... and that will end
it."
"It's not enough," Arhu yowled at Rhiow.
"I know what I need to do this, but I can't get at it! Rhiow!"
She opened her mouth—
Slash. Haath
straightened up, and Arhu went down, thrown fifteen feet away, staggering
another ten or so with the force of the throw, with his rear right leg hanging
by a string, the big groin artery pumping bright blood onto the dark stone.
Rhiow started to hurry to him as Arhu fell over and tried to get up again,
squalling with pain.
"No," Arhu yelled at her, "the
Whisperer's telling me what to do, I can hold the blood inside me for a while,
I'm wizard enough for that. Don't waste time with me!"
"Waste some," he growled. "Haath, you
and I are going to polka."
"What is
a polka?" Haath asked, mocking.
"You may be sorry you asked," Rhiow said
softly, watching to see what Urruah had in mind.
It was a slower stalk... less the scream-and-leap
technique that Arhu had used, and all the while he stalked around Haath, Rhiow
could feel Urruah weaving a spell, fastening words together in his head, one
after another, in a chainlike pattern she couldn't make much of. Haath turned
as Urruah circled him, his head moving slightly from one side to the other, as
if somehow watching what Urruah was doing—
"Rhiow," Arhu cried from where he lay,
"none of this is going to be good enough! What are you waiting for? Use
the spell! Use the spell!"
"I can't, it's not—" But it was. It
was ready. It lay shining, complete and deadly in her mind, and Rhiow wondered
that she had never perceived the sheer unbalanced dangerousness of it, even
earlier when it had first started to come together. A spell is like an
equation: on either side of the equal sign, both sides must balance. This one,
though, was weighted almost all one way ... toward output. The power and parity
configurations, the strange output projections, they were all complete now ...
and all of them violated natural law.
Except that the natural law Rhiow knew was not the
one operating down here.
I don't know how natural law operates down here! It
could backfire! It could—
Sometimes you can be too reasonable, Urruah had said: or something very like that. But
sometimes, maybe reason wasn't enough.
Sometimes you might need to be unreasonable. Then
miracles could happen.
It worked for the younger wizards, didn't it?
But I haven't been young for a while, Rhiow thought desperately. She was a team leader. She
had to be responsible, methodical, make sure she was right: others' lives
depended upon it. And even now, all that method hadn't helped her team: they
were all going to "die dead," and she felt old— old, failed, and useless.
Don't listen to It, Rhiow! Arhu yelled into her mind, writhing, trying to get up.
I've got enough young for all of us! But I can't do this for you. You
have to do it. Let go, Rhiow, just do it, do the spell!
It could destroy everything—
Big deal, Saash was going to do that! And we all agreed she should! Now she can't! Do—
Urruah leapt at Haath. turning loose whatever spell he
had been working on. Haath slashed at him, and Rhiow felt that spell abruptly
come to pieces as Urruah went down, kicking, then froze, held pinioned on the
stone, spell-still. Rhiow launched her mind against the wizardry that held him,
trying to feel what it was, to pry it off Urruah ... but there was no time, she
couldn't detect the structure—
Haath leaned over him, lifted his claws, and slashed
Urruah open as casually as an ehhif would slash open a garbage bag with
a razor.
Everything spilled out....
Haath reached in one more time, hooked one long claw
behind Urruah's heart, pulled. It came out, as if on a hook, still beating; beating
out its blood, until none was left. Smiling, Haath released the spell. Urruah
rolled over in Rhiow's direction, squirming; he cried out only once. His eyes
started to glaze.
Just let it go, he said. Just do the spell. Rhi—
And then silence.
Haath looked at her and grinned.
Rhiow held very, very still, and the rage and horror
grew in her...
... for it was almost exactly what she had been saying
to everyone else: Arhu and Ith in particular.
Sometimes we do not hear the Whisperer even at her
loudest because she speaks in our own voice, the one we most often discount.
Rhiow took a long breath ...
... and started to use the spell.
It was not the kind you could hold
"ready-for-release" and then turn loose with a word: within minutes
you would be staggering under the weight of its frustrated desire to be let go.
It had weight, this spell. You had to shoulder into it, boost it up to get at
the underside where the words of activation were. The weight of it pushed down
your neck and shoulders, your eyes watered with the strain of seeing the
symbols, and then you had to get the words out: big hefty polysyllabic things,
heavy with meaning. Rhiow fought with the spell, pushed past and through its
inertia and got out the first two words, three, five—
—when something seized her by the throat and struck
her dumb.
She gagged, clawed at her face ... but there was
nothing there. Trickery, she thought, but her throat would still not
work. The Lone One. And, Aha, she thought. It must be worth
something after all—
She fled inward, into her workspace, where the spell
lay on the floor of her mind, and hurriedly started to finish it there. Spells
can be worked swiftly inside the practiced mind, even when working through the
graphical construct of a spell diagram; Rhiow, terrified and intent, was too
swift, this once, for even the Lone One to follow her in and stop her. Power
flashed around the spell-circle. The whole thing flared up, bunding. Its status
here inside her was as far along toward release as it had been when her outward
voice was choked. Only a few words left to complete the activation: but here
they were not words but thoughts, and took almost no tune at all. One word to
make all complete, knotting the circle together, setting the power free—
Rhiow said the word.
The spell went blasting out of her like a wind that
swept her clean inside, threw her down on the stone, left her empty, mindless,
half-dead.
There Rhiow lay, waiting for something to happen.
Silence... darkness.
Nothing happened.
It didn't work, Rhiow thought in complete shock, and started to stagger to her feet
again. How can it not have worked?
A spell always
works!
But the nature of wizardry is changed, said that thick, slow, soft, satisfied voice in her
mind. It only works if I want it to.
Slowly, slowly, Rhiow sat down.
Beaten.
Beaten at last.
She hung her head...
... and then something said, No.
Liar, it
said.
Liar! You've always
lied!
It lied the last time. It's lying now.
She had trouble recognizing the voice.
It's live! Activate it!
Arhu?
Call them! They have to come! Like in the park—
She staggered, blinked, unable to think what on Earth
he meant.
Wait a minute. The
park. The o'hra—the ehhif-queen in the song who demanded
that the Powers That Be come to her aid, on her terms—
—and They did—
—but to require
the Powers to descend, to demand Their presence: it was not something that
was possible, They would laugh at you—
No, Rhiow
thought. That was someone else's idea, some-thing else's idea. Yours!
she said to the Old Serpent. Yours! As it was your idea what happened to
my Hhuha. As it was your idea what happened to Arhu's littermates and almost
happened to him. No more of your ideas! You have had only one, and I've had
enough of it for today.
Reconfiguration, Rhiow thought. To change the Lone One's perception... it would take
this kind of power. And others' perceptions could as easily be changed.
Rhiow staggered to her feet again, opened her mouth,
looking for the right words ... Let it come, she said, let it come to
me: I will command!
Instantly the huge power blasted into her, as the
activated spell had blasted out, leaving room for her to work. She tottered
with the influx of wild power, staggered like someone gone distempered, unable
to see or hear or speak, unable to feel anything but the fire raging inside
her, striving to get out, get up, do something. It did not know what it
wanted to do, though. This is always the problem, said the Voice inside
her. It must be disciplined, or it will ruin everything. Hold it still, keep
it until the right words come.
But with that power in her, she knew the right
words.
"what has become of MY children?" Rhiow cried. She knew the voice that shouted; it was
her own—but Someone else's too: the sun burned inside her, and fire from beyond
the sun readied itself to leap out. She could not believe the rage within her,
the fury, but there was a core of massive calm to it, the knowledge that all
could yet be well, and the two balanced one another as the sides of the spell
had not. "Where is Aaurh the warrior, and sa'Rrahh the Tearer, wayward
but dear to Me? And what has become of My Consort and the light of his eye,
without which My own is dark?"
The ground shook: the Tree shook: the Mountain
trembled under her. "Old Serpent, turn You and face Us, for the fight
is not done—!"
She could not believe her own strength. It filled her,
making the initial release of the spell from her seem about as worldshattering
by comparison as a stomach-growl. And she could not believe that the Old
Serpent, the Lone One Itself, now looked at her from the Tree with eyes
suddenly full of fear. Rage, yes, and frustration ... but fear first. Is
that all it takes? she thought, astonished. One sentence—one
word, one command? "Let there be light—"
Here and now ... the answer seemed to be
"yes."
It was "yes" before too, said Queen Iau. But the voice was Rhiow's own.
The Serpent began, very slowly, to uncoil Itself from
around the Tree. As it did, the huge gouge that It had bitten in the Tree's
trunk began to bleed light afresh.
Oh no You don't, Rhiow thought furiously,
stepping forward. Where do you think You're going?
She was immediately distracted by the way the ground
shook under her when she moved. Rhiow would have been frightened by it except
that inside her, acting with her—part of her, as if from a long time before—was
One Who was not afraid of Her own power in the slightest.
Rhiow was abashed beyond belief. Not in her wildest
expectations had she anticipated the spell might have this kind of result: she
would hardly have dated to think of herself and the One in the same sentence. Oh,
my Queen, I'm sorry—I mean, I—
Don't apologize, came the thought of Iau Hauhai'h, and it was humorous, if momentarily
grim. Usually gods don't. Not in front of that One, anyway. Say what
It needs to hear! We've got a lot of work to do.
Rhiow stood there, feeling the majesty cohabiting with
her... and then held her head up, thinking of that statue in the Met, poor cold
copy that it was. "Am I not the One," She cried, "to make
power against death strong, and power for life stronger still? Shall I allow
the darkness to prevail against My own? Their life is in Me, and of Me: save
that You destroy Me as well, never shall they be wholly gone; and Me You cannot
destroy, nor My power in Them. Rise up then, Aaurh My daughter, and be healed
of Your dying; the dark dream is over, and awakening is comer
Off to one side, where a shape lay dark and charred on
the stone, there was movement—and then a flash of fire. If a form can burn
backward, this one did. Flame leapt from nowhere to it, filled it, wrapped it
round—not the cold white fire of the catenary, but flame with a hint of gold,
the sun's light concentrated, made personal and intense. Substance came with
the fire: the shape filled out, rolled to its feet, shook itself, and stood,
looking proud, and angry, and amused. It was a lioness, but one in whose pelt
every hair was a line of golden fire, and the Sun rode above her like a
crown—though it was not as bright as her eyes, or as fierce. "I am
here, my Dam and Queen," said the voice of Aaurh the Warrior, the
Queen's Champion, the Mighty, the Destroyer-by-Fire; but it was Saash's voice
as well, and Rhiow could have laughed out loud for joy at the sound of that
voice, itself nearly shaking with laughter under the stern words.
Oh Iau, Saash— I mean, oh— And Rhiow did laugh then: it was amazing
how your vocabulary could be lessened by realizing you suddenly had the One
inside you, and that it sounded surpassingly silly to be swearing at, or by,
Yourself. Saash, are you all right?
A snicker. Are
you kidding? I'm dead. Or I was. But live by the fire, die by the fire. And
she chuckled. It's an occupational hazard.
"Rise up then, sa'Rrahh My daughter, and be
healed of Your sore wounding; stand with Us against the Old Serpent that would
have worked Your bane!"
The prone form that lay clutching painfully with its
fore-claws at the stone now lifted its head and slowly began to glow both dark
and bright, like its fur—night-and-moon-light, the pale fire and the dark one
mingling, starfire and the darkness behind the stars: the essence of conflict
and ambivalence. But neither fire burned less intensely for the other's
presence; and as the tigerish shape rose up to stand with its Dam, the eyes
that looked out of its mighty head were terrible with knowledge of past and
future, decisions well made and ill made, and action and passivity held in
dangerous balance. Those awful, thoughtful eyes looked down at the body they
inhabited .. . and suddenly went wide.
"Look at me! Just look at me! I'm a queen!"
Iau Kindler of Stars let out a long sigh. "Son,"
She said, "shut up. It happens to the best of us."
Rhiow put her radiant whiskers right forward in
amusement It had not occurred to Rhiow that Arhu might manifest as
sa'Rrahh, but the Tearer had always been as ambivalent about gender as anything
else. "Oh all right," said the Dark One. "I am here,
my Dam and Queen. Now let me at that ragged-eared— "
"In a moment. Rise up then, My consort, Urrua
Lightning-Claw; be risen up, thou Old Tom, O Great Cat, O Cat Who stood under
the Tree on the night the enemies of Life were destroyed. Urrua, My beloved, My Consort, rise up
now, and stand with Us, to slay the One Who slew You!"
Off on the black stone, where blood lay pooled around
a tom, silver-striped shape, darkness now pooled as well. It gathered together
about that shape and began to weave brilliance into itself, the tabby
coloration shading pale, to moondust grays and silvers and a brilliant white
like the Moon at full, a light as pitiless in its way as the Moon looking down
from a clear sky on those who would wish to hide, and can find no hiding place
from what stalks them silently. That shape stood up, and was a panther's shape,
heavy-jowled and white-fanged, with unsheathed claws that burned and left
molten spots on any stone they touched. The mighty shape shook itself, shedding
silver light about it, then padded over to join the others, looking at them
with one eye that was dark and terrible, knowing secrets; and the other that
burned almost too bright to look upon, for battle was in it, and the joy of
battle. "I am here, My Dam and Queen, My Consort," he said,
and then added, " 'My consort,' huh?"
"Don't get any ideas, you... the post is purely
ceremonial. —Lone Power, Old Serpent, for these murders, now We pronounce your
fate—"
"No, wait a minute, lam first," said sa'Rrahh suddenly.
Slowly, very slowly, Haath had begun backing away as
he first caught sight of his Lord and Master beginning to unwrap Itself from
the Tree. By the time Queen Iau had begun to raise Her dead, Haath was already
running away across that great dark expanse at the best speed a tyrannosaur
could manage, which was considerable. Now, though, the Queen looked after
him... and suddenly Haath appeared directly in front of them again, and fell on
his face with the suddenness of his translocation.
"Haath, Child of the Serpent," said Rhiow and the Queen as he struggled to his feet, "you
have brought your fate upon you: but still it lieth with you to save yourself,
if you will. Renounce your false Master, and you may rejoin your kind, though
your wizardry, not coming from the One, is confiscate. "
Haath crouched, his head low, and looked from the
blazing, terrible forms before him to the dark radiance still in the process of
slowly, slowly slipping from around the Tree. "I..." he said.
"My Master ... perhaps I was deluded in thinking..."
Allow Me to save you this crisis of conscience, said a huge, soft voice, by first renouncing you.
Haath looked up in horror, already feeling the changes
in his body. Rhiow knew, as Iau knew, that the Lone One had not told Haath the
whole truth about his immortality: that even for the gods, death comes
eventually, and mortals who try repeatedly to put it off may succeed for a
while, but not forever. With his master's renunciation, all of Haath's deaths
simply caught up with him at once. All that could be seen of the process was
the look of shock and rage and betrayal on his face, those twelve claws lifted
for one last wizardry .. . but there was no time for anything else, either
action or reaction. Suddenly, he simply was not there; and if there was even a
little dust left, the wind blowing through the darkness swept it unregarded
into the River of Fire.
The Serpent's cool eyes dwelt on this, unmoved. And
then another voice spoke. "Great One," it said, "Lord—"
The Four turned their attention to the source of the
voice. It was Ith. He stood now, gazing at the Serpent with an odd intensity.
Ah, my son, said
the Old Serpent's voice. Now that the other is gone, we may speak freely,
you and I.
This should be fun, said Aaurh silently to the
others.
Pay no heed to the strange violence you have seen done
here, said the Old Serpent softly. These
creatures are our ancient enemies, and need have nothing further to do with our
kind or our power. Our kind have different needs, different desires.
"Lord," Ith said, "the Sun. The world
above..."
None of our kind can live in that light without My help,
said the Old Serpent, slow,
persuasive, reasonable. It is fair, but it kills. Nor would they, would you,
be able to find food enough for all. You will die there unless you are ruled by
one who is wise, who knows time and the worlds. Long I have ruled you, to your
advantage. It shall be so again. And you shall be My Sixth Claw, this
time. You have won the right. You have proven Haath flawed, and that flaw would
sooner or later have done your people, My people, great harm. Now you shall
rule in his stead, and order all things for Me.
Ith swayed, looking up into the great, dark, wise,
forgiving eyes. The others watched him.
They will bow before you like a god, a true god... not
like these upstarts. But you must in turn surrender yourself to Me, to be
filled with the power. This you must see and do.
A pause.
"... No."
The Lone One's eyes suddenly went much darker.
"But this I do see," Ith said, and paced slowly over to stand
straight and still beside sa'Rrahh, or Arhu in her shape, now flowing with fire
both dark and bright. "Our kinship with these others is greater than You
claim. He came into my heart, the one You say is my enemy, and tried to save
me. And I saw into his heart, and his mind. He had pain like mine,
loneliness like mine, and anger. But he rose up again, through them, and tried.
Death and hunger came to him, but he did not give in to them, did not cast
himself in the fire. His clutchmates all died, but he lived, and kept living,
though the pain pierced like a claw. And when we met, he felt pain for me, and
did not run away, but bore it This is his Gift. To try again. We tried
once and failed... and never tried again, for You told us that trying was no
use. But gifts can be passed on to others who need them, even when the others
are old enemies; and choices can be remade. They can be remade!"
It was a roar, and slowly the Mountain began to shake
with it, a huge sympathetic tremor, like fear in a heart finally decided.
"I choose!" Ith said. "7 choose for my
people! We will walk with the light, in the sun, in the free sun that You
cannot control; we will walk with these others who struck us down only when
there was need, rather than for pleasure or for power. And if we die of the
light, of our own hunger freely found, then that was still worthwhile. For we
would have owned ourselves for that little time, and an hour's freedom in our
own bodies, our own lives, under the sun, is worth a thousand years as slaves,
even pampered slaves, in the dark under the ground, or killing other beings
under strange stars!"
The Old Serpent was hissing softly to Itself now,
while still slowly unwrapping Itself from around the Tree. Fool, it
said—again that soft voice, the anger never overt—fool of a race of fools:
too true it is that you have overstayed your time in this world. You shall not
overstay it much longer—
"Too late for that, Old Serpent," said Rhiow, said Iau. "The Choice is
made."
And already things were shifting. The landscape looked
less rocky; the catenary looked less like a restlessly bound energy flow, but
more than ever like a river, and one in which fire flowed like water. Rhiow,
within Iau, rejoiced at the sight of it, for now she saw that this was where
the River of Fire belonged—at the roots of the Tree: at the scene of the
battle, where the souls of all felinity would at one time or another pass
through the place of Choice, of the Fight, the gaming-ground that was the
mother of all bouts of hauissh. All would see it and remember, or be
reminded between lives, of the incomplete Choice, of the business still to be
attended to, not in the depths of time behind them, but in the depths of time
yet to come. Except that time was not as deep as it had been, anymore...
"The Change is upon them now," said Aaurh, moving slowly forward. "You might
destroy this whole race, and still they would find possibilities they would
never have known otherwise because of this their Son, their Father, Who Chose
them a different path. They will go their own way now."
They will die! the
Old Serpent hissed.
"And whose fault is that? They will pass," said sa'Rrahh, "but
to what, You will not know for aeons yet. And meantime You have a passage of
Your own to deal with."
"Old Serpent," cried Iau then, "stand You to battle; this is
Your last day... until we fight again!"
The Serpent reared away from the Tree, and Rhiow
realized belatedly that Its withdrawal had been strategic only. Now It threw
Itself at them, Its whole terrible mass coming down at them like a falling
tree, lightnings flailing about it—
What started to happen after that, Rhiow had a great
deal of trouble grasping. All the Four threw themselves upon the Old Serpent;
claws and fangs blazed, and blinding tracks of plasma burned and tore where
Urrua's claws fell; fire spouted and gouted from Aaurh and sa'Rrahh, blasting
at the Lone Power. As Haath had, It healed itself. The Four kept attacking,
with energies that Rhiow was vaguely certain would have been sufficient to
level whole continents, if not to devastate the surfaces of some small planets.
Rhiow fought as she might have in her own body, clutching and biting, feeling
fangs slash at her and find their mark: But the terrible pains she suffered
still had triumph at the bottom of them, like blood welling up in a wound; and
the violence she did, and sensed all around her, had a stately quality to it.
They had done this many times before, and would do it again—though this time
there had been minor changes in the ritual.
But then came one change that was not so minor; it
particularly attracted her notice. Suddenly there was a Fifth among them; and
sa'Rrahh laughed for joy and plunged anew into the battle beside that Fifth
one; and the others cried out in amazement. For it was another Serpent, a
bright one, as great as the Old Serpent, and its scales glittering like diamond
in the light of their own fires. It thrust its mighty head forward and sank
fangs like splinters of star-core into the great barrel of the Old Serpent's
body, just behind the head; and the bright Serpent wrapped its coils around the
Old Serpent's coils, and they began to strive together—
Rhiow suddenly thought of the twined serpents on the
staff of the ehhif god above Grand Central. Haw did they know, she
thought, how did even the ehhif suspect, and we never—
—and in
their battle, the bright Serpent began to get the better of the Old Serpent,
and started to crush the life out of It, so that It writhed and thrashed and
made the world shake. And the Tree began, ever so slightly, to lean.
"Quick," cried the bright Serpent, "the wound, it must be healed!"
"Once more the Serpent's blood must flow," said Urrua, and Rhiow in Iau looked, and saw him
rearing up on his hind legs and holding, in his huge paw, the sword. At least
an ehhif a long time ago, seeing it or hearing it described, might have
taken it for a sword. It was a hyperstring construct, blindingly bright to look
at, but a hundred times narrower than a hair. "Just hold It there,
Ith," he said, "this won't take long. Yeah, right there—"
The Old Serpent shrieked as Its head was chopped from
Its body and rolled down the trunk of the Tree to lie bleeding over the roots.
Its blood ran down into the River of Fire, and tinged its flames, as had
happened many times before ...
... while above, from the thrashing, headless trunk,
the blood ran flaming into the wound in the Tree. The whole Tree shuddered and
moaned, and heaven and earth together seemed to cry out with it.
Then the moaning stopped. Slowly, as they watched, the
wound began to close. As slowly, the body of the Old Serpent began to fade into
the darkness, the last of its blood running into the River of Fire. Soon
nothing was left but a scatter of glittering scales among the stones; and the
Tree stood whole—
Silence fell, and the Five looked around at one
another.
"Are we alone again?" Arhu said, looking
around him with some bemusement, for his form had not changed back to his
normal one, nor had those forms of the rest of the team.
Rhiow listened to the back of her mind and heard only
herself... she thought. "After that," she said, "I'm not sure we
can ever, any of us, be sure we're alone ... but it's quieter than it
was."
Saash smiled. "A lot. Ith, that was a nice
job."
The Bright Serpent blinked. A moment later, he was
back in his true form, though there was an odd look to his eyes, a light that
seemed not to want to go completely away.
"I'm told," he said, "that I have
passed my Ordeal." His tail lashed. "I'm also told that it is not
unusual to find the details ... obscure."
Rhiow chuckled at that. "What happened to us
all," she said, "had something to do with mine, something I'd been
putting off. Obscure? I'll be working on the details of this one for years. But
I think we've got our job about done."
"One thing left," said Saash. "Let's
get back upstairs—"
Rhiow blinked. They were back upstairs, near
the "pool" created by the binding down of the main catenary trunk.
Urruah looked around him with his "good" eye
and swore softly. "I told you this place was malleable."
"I may have done that," Ith said. "I do
not yet understand the nature of space down here. This was where you wanted to
be?"
"Just the spot," Saash said. She paused to
look up at the balconies, which were much less crowded than they had been
earlier. "I think I can keep this from jumping right out and destroying
everything." She leaned down and got ready to put a paw down into the
pool.
"Is that safe??" Arhu said.
She smiled at him. "This time it is. Watch—"
Saash reached down, dabbled in the cold bright flow of
light—then stood up, stood back. Slowly the light in the "pool"
reared up, bulging like a seedling pushing itself up out of the ground, then,
more quickly, began to straighten, pulling branches and sub-branches of light
up out of the depths of the stone beneath the bottom of the abyss. Still more
quickly it started to reach upward, a tree of fire branching upward and
branching again. Then all in one swift movement it straightened itself, shaking
slightly as if a wind was in its branches. The separate branchings started to
drift into their proper configurations again, the bemused saurians getting
hurriedly out of the way of the slowly moving lines of energy as they passed
through walls and carvings like so much cheesewire through cheese.
The saurians stared down at them.
"Well," Arhu said, staring up at the
reconstructed catenary tree, "that's handled. Now what?"
Ith looked up at the balconies, at the many curious
faces looking down. The feeling of hostility that had been there before now
seemed, for the moment at least, to be gone. He looked over at Arhu then and
smiled.
"Now," he said, "we bring my people
home."
They started the walk upward through the tunnels and
balconies wondering how much explaining they would need to do ... and found
that little was needed: for every saurian who saw Ith immediately seemed to
recognize him and to be willing to listen to him, if not specifically to obey
him.
"Well," Rhiow said, "he's their father.
Why not?"
Arhu, walking close behind Ith, found this funny, and
after all the difficulties associated with getting down into the abyss, it
amused him even more that the team was regarded with some suspicion, but no
overt hostility. As far as the saurians were concerned, if Ith vouched for the
felines, that was all right with them: and soon they were near the head of a
huge parade of the creatures, all eagerly climbing upward into the heights
where none but workers were normally permitted.
"They really will be able to live up there, won't
they?" Arhu said to Rhiow, worried.
"Oh, of course. Much of what you were hearing
down there was the Lone One's lies to them, to keep them enslaved. They'll
spread out over the surface of this world and find plenty, once they're used to
hunting in the open. The other carnivores may be a little annoyed at the
competition, but they'll manage. There'll be plenty of prey for
everybody."
"And meantime ..." Urruah said to Rhiow,
from behind. "What about us?"
"What about us?"
"Well, we've been dead."
Rhiow sighed, for that had been on her mind, and it
had struck her that this cheerful walk up to the surface was likely to be their
last. She looked over at Saash.
She had done this several times and kept having to
smile, for now she thought she knew why Saash's skin had always been giving her
trouble. It was not until she saw her friend suddenly manifest after her death
as Aaurh the Mighty, the One's Champion, that Rhiow realized that Saash's soul,
after nine lives, had simply become too big for that body; and that her Tenth
Life was not merely a possibility, but a given. It was an added source of
amusement that someone who could so perfectly meld into the persona of the
irresistible Huntress, the Destroyer-by-Fire, could nonetheless be so hopeless
at catching something as simple as mice. But then maybe the body was just
resisting the role it knew was coming.
"Not that I'm going to need to catch things to
eat for much longer," Saash said, and sighed.
"That was really it, was it?" Rhiow said
sadly.
"That was my ninth death, yes," Saash said.
"And now ... well, after I cross through the gate back home, we'll see
what happens."
"But the rest of us ..." Rhiow looked at
Urruah, who was chatting with Arhu at the moment. "He was as dead as you
were."
"He may be short a life when we get home. I'm not
sure: he'll have to take it up with the Queen. I mean, Rhi," Saash said,
"we've been gods, and some of us rose from the dead while we were gods.
And if you're a god and you rise from the dead, I think you stay risen.
For the time being, anyway ..."
"But what about you?" Urruah said. "Look
at you!"
"Look," Arhu said, "it's the upper
caverns." He loped on ahead.
The saurians were hurrying out after him at the first
glimpse of some light that was not the cool, restrained light of the catenary
tree. Rhiow and Saash and Urruah hurried to keep up with Arhu and Ith, partly
to keep from being trampled by the eager crowd behind them. The light ahead,
pale though it was, grew: spread—
—and there was the opening. Rhiow, though, wondered
what had happened to the downhanging teeth of stone, and found out; many had
fallen in the shaking of the Mountain. No surprise, she thought, many
things almost fell today.
But not that, she
thought, as she came out of the cave, onto the wide ledge looking over the
world, and turned.
The weather was cuttingly clear. It was just a little
while before dawn; high up the brightest stars were still shining through the
last indigo shadows of night, and to the east, the sky was peach-colored,
burning more vividly orange every moment. Rhiow looked at the Mountain, which
lay still in shadow: but far up, on the highest peak, a spear of light was
lifted to the sky, bunding—the topmost branches of the great Tree, catching the
light of the Sun before it cleared the horizon for those lower down. The
saurians piled out of the cave, as many of them as could, and stared... stared.
Some of them were looking westward and gaped
open-mouthed in wonder at the round silver Eye gazing at them from the farthest
western horizon: the full Moon setting as the Sun rose. Rhiow watched their
wonder, and smiled. "Night with Moon" indeed, she thought: the
ehhif Book was better named than maybe even the ehhif wizards
knew. How many other hints had been scattered through Earth's mythologies,
hinting at this eventual reconfiguration?
"Is that the Sun?" one of the saurians said.
Rhiow laughed softly and looked eastward again, where
the sky was swiftly brightening. "Turn around," she said, "and
just wait...."
They waited. The shifting and rustling of scales died
to a profound silence. Only the wind breathed through the nearer trees, rising
a little with the oncoming day. Rhiow looked up at the Tree again, wondering: Are
there really eyes up there, the eyes of those gone before, who look down and
watch what passes in the worlds? I wonder what they make of this, if they are
there indeed?
Someday I must sit under those branches, and listen,
and find out....
A great breath of sound went up, a hiss, a gasp—and
the sunlight broke over the edge of the world and sheened off all the saurians'
hides, and caught in all their eyes. Rhiow had to look away, near-blinded by
the brilliance.
She leaned over to Urruah. "Let's get out of here
and leave them their world," Rhiow said. "They've suffered enough for
it. Time for the joy ..."
-=O=-***-=O=-
The team made their way over to the gates, which were
all in place, warp and weft sheening with power as usual: the reconfiguration
below and the release of the catenary tree had completely restored them to
their default settings. Through the central gate, Track 30's platform was now
visible: they could see T'hom, looking back at them and seeming extremely
relieved. He was sidled, which was just as well, for the place was full of ehhif
going about their business, and he was doing the usual shuffle to keep from
being knocked off the platform.
Urruah looked at the gate with some concern and turned
to Rhiow. "Well?" he said.
She looked at him, shook her head, then rubbed cheeks
with him.
"Consort," he said. "I liked the sound
of that."
"You would," Rhiow said. "Sex maniac.
Go on... and good luck. Get yourself sidled when you go through. But otherwise,
if worst comes to worst, look us up again, next life. It wouldn't be the same
without you."
Urruah snorted, meaning to sound sardonic, but his
eyes said otherwise. He leaped through the gate—
—came down on the other side, a silver tabby, back to
normal size, quite alive; Rhiow could see the scars. She put her whiskers
forward, well pleased.
Arhu, less worried, came over to the gate next. He
looked up at Ith, who walked with him and peered through curiously. "Your
world ... Is it like this one?"
Arhu cracked up laughing. "Oh, yes, exactly. Not
a whisker's difference."
Ith looked at him sidewise.
"Yeah, right. Look, Ith, come on through and have
some pastrami," Arhu said.
Ith bent down toward him, gave him the
bird-eyeing-the-worm look, but it was absolutely cordial, the salute of one
member of the great Kinship to another . .. even though there was still a glint
of appetite there.
"I believe you would say, 'You're on,'" Ith
said. "I will come shortly. Meanwhile, my brother, my father ... go
well."
Arhu slipped through ... and was small and black and
white again.
Rhiow and Saash looked at each other. Then Rhiow
slowly leaned forward and rubbed cheeks with her friend: first one side, then
the other.
"Stay in touch," she said, "if you
can."
"Hey," Saash said softly, "it's not
like I'm going to be dead or anything. Just busy ..."
Rhiow took a long breath, gazed around her, then
stepped through onto the platform on Track 30—
—and came down light on her paws. She lifted one to
look at it. Small again: the central pad unusually large: normal for this world
...
Rhiow turned and looked through the gate. Saash was
standing there in her Old Downside guise, a tortoiseshell tigress momentarily
glancing over her shoulder at the ancient world, the dawn coming up, its
glitter and sheen on the hides of the saurians watching it for the first time.
Then she turned, locked eyes with Rhiow, leapt through the gate—
The Downside body stripped away as she came, and Saash
was surrounded and hidden in a swirl of—not light as such, but reconfiguration,
self and soul shifting into some new shape. Not vanishing, please, Iau—
That swirling, shifting, faded. Saash stood there ...
but not in her old body, which seemed to have declined to continue any further.
This new shape was one that no nonwizardly ehhif could have seen, and
even an ehhif wizard might have had to work at it if the body's owner
didn't wish to be seen. To Rhiow's eyes, she was still looking at Saash .,. but
something subtle had happened to her; her physicality seemed to have been
refined away, leaving her standing in the familiar delicate form, but now
filled with forces that made Rhiow blink to look at them steadily. They were
the forces with which Saash had always worked so well... and it was now obvious
why, for they filled her the way light fills a window.
Saash shook herself, looked down at her flanks, and
dulled down the glow by an effort of will. She turned then and smiled at Rhiow.
Sorry, she said.
"For what?" Rhiow said softly.
Well... yeah. Oh, Rhi, there's a lot to do, I have to
get going!
"Go on, then. Go well, Tenth-lifer—and give the
Powers our best when you see Them."
Saash smiled, rubbed past Urruah, trailed her tail
briefly over bis back, took a friendly swipe at Arhu with one shining paw as
she passed; saluted T'hom and Har'lh with a flirt of her tail; and walked off
down the platform, glowing more faintly as she passed on—a wizard still, but
one now in possession of much enhanced equipment, now reassigned to some more
central and senior catchment area. Only once she paused. Rhiow stared,
wondering—
Saash sat down on the platform and had one last good
scratch. Then she washed the scratched-up fur down again, flirted her tail one
last time, walked off into the darkness, and was gone....
-=O=-***-=O=-
T'hom came over to them then and hunkered down to
greet them: Har'lh was with him. As she trotted over to them, it occurred to
Rhiow that there was something odd about the track area: it looked cleaner,
brighter, than usual. However, for the moment she put that aside.
"Har'lh!" she said, and rubbed against him: possibly unprofessional
behavior toward one's Advisory, but she was extremely glad to see him.
"Where in Iau's name have you been?"
"About half a million lightyears away,"
Har'lh said with annoyance, "freezing my butt off on a planet covered a
thousand miles deep with liquid methane. Somebody wanted me way out of the way
while something happened here, that was plain. Met some nice people, though:
they needed help with some local problems... I did a little troubleshooting. No
point in wasting the trip." He looked at them all. "Now what's been
going on here??"
"That'll take some telling," Rhiow said.
"Let's walk, then," T'hom said.
They headed out of the track areas, up into the main
concourse. Arhu and Urruah looked up and around them as they went, and Urruah's
tail was lashing in surprise. The Terminal looked satisfyingly solid and
hard-edged again, much improved over the last time they had seen it, with
multiple time-patches threatening to slide off the fabric of reality like a wet
Band-Aid. Ehhif were going about their business as usual.
"Have they cleaned this place again in the last
day or so?" Urruah said. "It looks so... bright, it's... no. It's not
just the sun. I know this place always looks good in the morning, with the sun
coming in the windows like that, but..."
T'hom smiled a little as they walked up past the
waiting room and toward the Forty-second Street doors. "It won't often
look this good, I think," he said. 'This is how we knew you'd succeeded,
down there, in some big way. All the manuals went crazy for a while, and all
they would say was reconfiguration, reconfiguration, all over them. But then
everything steadied down, and all the time-patching we'd been holding in place
by force just hauled off and took, hard. Something of a relief."
They stepped out into the street, and Rhiow saw in
more detail what T'hom meant, for the brilliance in the streets was more than
sunlight. This was a city in unusual splendor: skyscrapers all around seemed
consciously clothed in the fire of day, their glass molten or jeweled in the
early sun; and down at the end of the block, the silver spear of the Chrysler
Building upheld itself in the dawn like an emblem of victory, blinding.
Everything hummed with the usual city sounds—traffic noise, oddly content with
its lot for once, very little horn-honking going on. There was a peculiar sense
of ehhif all about them being abruptly, and rather bemusedly, at
peace with one another ... for a little while. "The city's risen,"
Rhiow said, "as some of us rose. But it won't last."
"No. It's understandable that you would get some
resonances from more central realities," Har'lh said, "some
spillover... possibly even from Timeheart itself. You can't do that big a
reconfiguration without some reflection in neighboring worlds: any of them
directly connected by the catenary structure, anyway."
"It'll fade back to normal after a while,"
Arhu said. "It can't stay like this for long: you can conquer entropy only
temporarily, on a local scale, She says ... It never lasts. But while it lasts,
enjoy it."
They walked down Forty-second Street, heading toward
the river and the view of the Delacorte Fountain, a great silver plume of water
rising up from the southernmost tip of Riker's Island in the morning sun. Rhiow
started her debrief, knowing it was going to take a good while and might as
well start now when everything was fresh in her mind. The only thing she knew
she would have trouble explaining was how it had felt to have the One inside
you. That knowledge, that power, had started to fade almost as soon as the
experience proper was over. Just as well, I suppose, she thought. You
can't pour the ocean into one water bowl....
The team and the two Advisories finally came up
against the railing that looked down at FDR Drive and the East River. There the
People sat down, and the Seniors leaned on the railing, and they went on
talking for what Rhiow normally thought might have been hours: the sun didn't
seem to be moving at its usual rate today ... morning just kept lasting,
shining down on a river that, more than usually, ran with light. In the middle of
a technical discussion about what Saash had done to the catenary, T'hom
suddenly looked up and said, "Well, they couldn't keep you down on
the farm long, could they?"
"What is a 'farm'?" Ith said innocently, and
leaned on the railing beside them, folding his claws and staring out over the
shining water.
"Ahem," Rhiow said. "Har'lh, have you
met our new wizard? Ith, this is Har'lh, he's the other Advisory for this
area."
"I am on errantry, and I greet you," Ith
said courteously, and bowed, sweeping his tail. Arhu ducked to let it go over
his head.
'This is an errand?" T'hom said, with humor.
"This is a junket."
"It is 'Research,'" Ith said cheerfully,
glancing at Arhu with the conspiratorial expression of a youngster who's
borrowed a friend's excuse. Arhu rolled his eyes, working to look innocent.
Rhiow wanted to snicker. It was a delightful change in
Ith from the morose and somber individual they had first met; she suspected
Arhu had had a lot to do with it, and would have much more.
"At any rate," Rhiow said to the two
Advisories, "the worldgates are all fully functional again, and I don't
think we need to fear any further interference from the Lone Power in that
department. The Tree and the gate-tree, the master catenary structures, now
have guardians who will never let the Lone One near them again. Some of them
may not yet be plain about what It had in mind for them, but Ith will soon set
them straight."
Ith turned his attention away from a passing barge and
toward Rhiow and the team. "I am hearing more and more in my mind,"
Ith said, "of what the Powers will ask of us by way of guardianship. The
requirements are not extreme. And little explanation will be needed as to why
their present life is more desirable for my people than their former one.
Hunger is something they are used to: until we distribute ourselves more
widely, we will help one another cope with it... by more wholesome means than
formerly. Meantime," and he glanced over at Rhiow, "I will need some
help tailoring spells that will function on a large scale, with little
maintenance, as sunblock." He grinned. "We have been down in the dark
a long time."
They all looked out at the glowing water. "The
dark..." Arhu said, looking down into water in which, for once, no trash
bobbed. "I could never look at this before," he said to Rhiow.
"But I can now. I won't mind seeing the river, even when it's back to
normal. I could never stand going near it before: I was stuck on the Rock. But
I don't think I have to be stuck here anymore."
"Of course not," Har'lh said. "Be
plenty of demand for a hot young visionary-wizard all over the place. In other
realities"—he glanced at Ith—"and offplanet as well. You're going to
be busy for a while."
"I am," Arhu said. "Getting used to
being in a team..." He glanced over at Rhiow.
Rhiow looked over at him affectionately and put her
whiskers forward, smiling. "You're well met on the errand," she said.
They fell silent for a while, looking out at the
light. The sense of power and potential beating around them in the air was as tangible
as a pulse; for this little while, in mis New York, anything was possible.
Rhiow looked out into the glory of the transfigured morning—not quite that of
Tune-heart, but close enough—and said softly, only a little sadly, I had to
tell you. The tuna wasn't all that bad....
She did not really expect an answer. But the walls
between realities were thin this morning. From elsewhere came just the
slightest hint of a purr... and somewhere, Hhuha smiled.
Rhiow blinked, then washed a little, for composure's
sake.
She would head home soon. She would have to start
drawing close to Iaehh now. He would be needing her, for there was no way Rhiow
could tell him about anything she had seen or experienced... except by being
who she now was.
Whoever that is... And if in the doing Rhiow brought with her a little of the sense of
Hhuha—not as she was, of course, but Hhuha moved on into something more—that
would possibly be some help.
It was so nice to know mat ehhif had somewhere
to go when they died.
For Rhiow's own part, she had had enough dying for one
day.
-=O=-***-=O=-
The talk went on for a while more. Only slowly did
Rhiow notice that the interior light was seeping out of things, leaving New
York looking entirely more normal: the horns began to hoot in the distance
again, and a few hundred yards down FDR Drive, there was a tinkle of glass as a
car changing lanes sideswiped another one and broke off one of its wing
mirrors. Tires screeched, voices yelled.
"Normalcy," Har'lh said, looking with amused
irony at T'hom. "What we work for, I suppose. Speaking of work... I'm
going to have to go make some phone calls. My boss is going to be annoyed that
I took this time off without warning."
"Wizard's burden," Urruah said. "I feel
sorry for you poor ehhif. Wouldn't it just be easier to tell him you
were off adjusting somebody's gas giant?"
Har'lh gave Urruah a look, then grinned. "Might
make an interesting change. Come on—"He looked over at T'hom. "Let's
go catch a train."
The team walked the Advisories and Ith back to Grand
Central, as far as the entrance to the subway station: it was not a place Rhiow
chose to plunge into during rush hour while sidled, as you were likely to
become subway-station pizza in short order. "Go well," she said to
T'hom and Har'lh, as they went through the turnstiles.
We will, Har'lh
said silently. You did....
Rhiow strolled back up to the main concourse level and
put herself against a wall, where she could look out across the great expanse. Working
properly again, she thought. With time, everything would. Someday, if
things went right, the New York they had spent this long morning in would be
the real one, and this one just a grubby, shabby memory. But meantime you
make it work the best you can.
And meantime the scent in the air caught her
attention.
Pizza...
The others came up out of the entrance to the subway,
glanced across the concourse, and down at Rhiow. Ith in particular looked
across at the Italian deli.
'Wow, about that pastrami..." he said to
Arhu.
Arhu grinned. "Let me show you a trick somebody
taught me," he said, glancing over at Rhiow. "I had a feeling you'd
be sorry you showed him that one," Urruah said. "Ith, don't let him
talk you into trying it. You'll make the papers."
"Tapers'?"
Rhiow gave Urruah a look. "Come on, 'Ruah, let's
leave them to it, and go do the rounds."
Rhiow and Urruah strolled off across their territory,
weaving casually among the ehhif, up the cream marble of the Vanderbilt
Avenue stairs, and out of the sight of wizards, and People, and anyone else who
could see. No one noticed them, which was just as it should have been; and life
in the city went on....
on hauissh
This occupation of the People, described only briefly
in the literature by ehhif writers (the most reliable and perceptive is
Pratchett*) has occasionally been called a pastime— but such a characterization
is similar to calling soccer, baseball, and American-style football
"pastimes"—for which human beings have sometimes wagered and won or
lost fortunes, ignored almost all the other important aspects of their lives,
and occasionally died under circumstances both comic and tragic.
An exhaustive analysis of hauissh would be far
beyond the scope of this work, but it seems useful to include at least a
summary explanation.
its origins
Hauissh is
of such antiquity that it almost certainly predates the time at which felinity
became self-aware. Its most basic structure implies a conflict over hunting
territory between two prides, and most authorities agree that it evolved from
this strictly survival-oriented behavior to a more structured but still violent
dominance game between individual members of a single pride or (later) extended
pride-community, with the loser usually being run off the pride's territory, or
killed. (Even now the biggest predators tend to play hauissh in this
mode, considering the refinements of later millennia to be oversophisticated or
effete).
*in The Unadulterated Cat (Gollancz, 1989)
It would be as difficult to determine exactly when
feline self-awareness arose as it would to fix a time at which hauissh began
to develop beyond concerns of food, territory, and power into the more
intellectual and entertainment-oriented version now played by cats the world
over. All the families of the People seem to have at least some knowledge of
the basic concepts of the game on an instinctive level. But the demands and
challenges of the modern form of hauissh require a great deal more of
the player than instinct alone will provide.
the rules
There is no mandated maximum number of players of hauissh,
though games involving more than thirty or so players in one session are
likely to be considered "inelegant." Most play involves no more than
ten or twelve players, though, since some level of personal relationship is
considered desirable among a majority of those playing.
Hauissh started
out as a rough-and-ready, territorial-control game among the big cats, with the
loser usually being run off the territory or killed.
Hauissh involves
controlling a space—yard, sidewalk, field—with one's presence. This presence,
called aahfaui, is not a constant, but is in turn affected by the space
one is trying to control.
"Control" is defined by eius'hss, "being
alone." The minute a player can see another cat, the control is diminished
slightly, but not in such a way as to lower one's score. Control is diminished
more if the other cat can in turn see the first player, and the first player's
score suffers.
A successful position is one in which a cat can see
several others, without himself being seen. The beginner would immediately
think that this could be easily achieved by being down a hole but able to see
several other cats, but such concealment is not considered gameplay in the
rules, and a cat retreating to such a position, having previously been in play,
is then considered out of it until once again exposed.
There are many other variables that affect play. Most
important of these is eiu'heff, a variable expressing a combination of
the nature and size of the space being controlled. Nearly as important is hruiss'aessa,
the location of the "center" of the game, the (usually invisible)
spot around which the game revolves, representing (in more abstruse thought
about hauissh) the Tree under which the Great Cat took his stance
against the Serpent on the night of the Battle for the World, the battle by the
River of Fire. The ultimate point of the game is not necessarily to reach or
occupy this spot, but to dominate or master it, while also dominating as many
of the other players as possible. Feline nature being what it is, individual
People tend to resist domination, even for the best of reasons; so it can
easily be seen that any given bout of the Game will be prolonged and fairly
stressful. Most play in hauissh is individual, "team" play
being considered too difficult to maintain for long periods, and likely to
cause what People call, in Ailurin, laeu'rh-sseihhah, an unhealthy shift
in one's nature toward a "foreign" style of being (cf. the
German word uberfremdung, "overalienation")—"teamwork"
being conceived as a distasteful land of "pack" behavior better left
to other less advanced species, such as houiff.
Play begins when a quorum of players are determined to
have arrived and to be ready to start. It ends when one player is deemed to
have successfully "dominated" the hruiss'aessa and a majority
of other players. A single such sequence is a "passage," roughly
equal to an inning in baseball. Passages are grouped together in larger groups
called "sequences," but there are no fixed numbers of
passages-per-sequence, or sequences-per-game. Consensus usually determines when
another passage is required to fill out a sequence (and it almost always is).
A detailed or exact description of how scoring is done
is beyond the scope of this work. Scoring hauissh fairly and to all
players' satisfaction is difficult work, filled with imponderables, and much
more an art than a science. It is nowhere near as clearcut as scoring in any
sport with which humans are familiar (and frankly, if it were, cats would
probably lose interest in the game almost immediately). There are so many rules
and variables influencing score—for example, weather, local conditions such as
traffic or the passage of ehhif or other species through play,
physical condition of the players, and total time of play compared against time
actually spent making moves, to name just a very few—and so many of the
variables and requirements are mutually contradictory that scoring a bout at
the end of a round or "passage" closely resembles a discussion among
Talmudic scholars than an umpire yelling "Yer out!"
To speak of how one "wins" at hauissh is
probably a misnomer born of looking at the pastime through the human mindset:
it is nearly as erroneous as speaking of "winning" at cricket—the
human game that comes closest to hauissh in its (unspoken) expression of
the idea that gameplay for its own sake is much more important than a result,
of whatever kind. Like cricket, a bout of hauissh can go on for days or
weeks, can be called on account of bad light (i.e., atmospheric conditions so
bad that not even cats can see each other: rare), will often stop (repeatedly)
for meals, and can run up extravagant scores that sound really impressive when
you talk about them afterward, but which are actually indicative of neither
group really being able to get the better of the other, no matter how long the
process continues. The record duration for a single bout of hauissh was
set in 1716 (the actual date being either in January or February, but uncertainty
involved with the Gregorian calendar shift and its coordination with the
People's timekeeping makes a definite date unavailable). Six cats located in
the town of Albstadt-Ebingen, then in the ducky of Wurttemberg and now in
southern Germany, began a bout that lasted until 1738, and was completed by
five of their great-grandchildren. The bout was forced to end in a draw because
of a local outbreak of the plague, which killed what was judged a
"threshold" number of the competitors.
The game (to People interested in it) naturally has
profound philosophical and even mystical meaning. One saying is that
"Rhoua plays best," the indication being that the Queen, in Her
aspect of "Winking" Rhoua, can by definition see all People without
being seen Herself, and that the Game is therefore a metaphor for life ...
which is (come to think of it) exactly what ehhif say about
baseball, and soccer, and nearly every other sport down to tiddledywinks.
on other matters
The nonwizardly aspects of the New York Public
Library's CATNYP online cataloguing system can be found on the World Wide Web
at http://catnyp.nypl.org/
Please do not query the librarians about the Online
"MoonBook" Project, as all but a few of the staff have no knowledge
that it exists, and those staff who do know are required to deny its
existence.
Readers interested in more information about wizardry
might like to look at the following books by the same author:
So You Want to Be a Wizard
Deep Wizardry
High Wizardry
A Wizard Abroad
And for more information about new developments in the
"Wizards'" universe, as well as for pictures of cats who looks
suspiciously like some of the principals in this book, curious readers with Web
access may wish to visit the following site: http://www.ibmpcug.co.uk/~owls/homeward.html
A
aahfaui (n)
the "presence" quality in hauissh
Aaurh (pr n) another of the feline pantheon: the
"Michael" power, the Warrior; female
aavhy (adj)
used; also a proper name when upper case
ahou'ffrvw (n)
the Canine Word; key, or "activating," word for spells intended for
use on dogs and other canids
Auhw-t (n)
"the Hearth": the Ailurin/wizardly term for what humans refer to as
"Timeheart"—the most senior/central reality, of which all others are
mirrors or variations
Auo (pr n) I
auuh (n)
stray (perjorative)
auw (n)
energy (as a generic term); appears in many compounds having to do with
wizardry and cats' affinity for fire, warmth, and energy flows
auwsshui'f (n) the
"lower electromagnetic" spectrum, involving quantum particles,
faster-than-light particles and wavicles, subatomics, fission, fusion, and
"submatter" relationships such as string and hyperstring function D
D does not appear by itself as a consonant in Ailurin,
only as a diphthong, dh.
E
efviauw (n)
the electromagnetic spectrum as perceived by cats
ehhif (n)
human being, (adj) human
eiuev (n)
veldt: a large open space. As a proper noun, Eiuev, "the
Veldt" means the Sheep Meadow in Central Park
eius'hss (n)
the "control" quality in hauissh
F
ffrihh (n)
refrigerator (cat slang: approximation)
fouarhweh (n)
a position in hauissh, described as "classic" by commentators
fvais a
medium-high voice among cats; equates with "tenor"
fwau (ex)
heck, hell, crap
H
Hauhai (n) the Speech
hauissh (n)
the Game
he'ihh (n)
composure-grooming
hhau'fih (n)
group relationships in general
hhouehhu (v)
desire/want
Hhu'au (pr n) The Lion-"God" of Today;
nickname for ehhif "Patience," one of the carved stone lions
outside the New York Public Library main branch
hihhhh (excl)
damn, bloody (stronger than vhai)
hiouh (n)
excreta (including both urine and feces)
hlah'feihre (adj)
tortoiseshell (fur)
houff (s n)
dog
houiff (pl
n) dogs
Hrau'f (pr n) daughter of Iau, the member of the
feline pantheon most concerned with creation and ordering it; known as
"the Silent"
hruiss (n)
fight, in compounds with words for "tom-fight," etc.
hu (n) day
hu-rhiw (id)
"day-and-night"; idiom for a black-and-white cat
hwaa (n)
drink
hwiojviauw (adj)
the "upper electromagnetic," meaning plasma functions, gravitic
force, etc.; "upward"
I
iAh'hah (n) New York: possibly an approximation of the
English name
Iau (pr n) the One; the most senior member of the feline
pantheon; female
Irh (pr n) one of the feline pantheon; male (Urruah
refers to his balls)
O
o'hra (n)
opera (approximation)
R
ra'hio "radio";
A feline neologism
Reh-t (n,
abstract) the future; also, the name for the Lion-Power guarding it, the
Invisible One of the Three guarding the steps to the New York Public Library
main branch
rhiw (n)
night. Many compounds are derived from this favorite word, including the name Rhiow
(the actual orthography would be rhiw'aow, "nightdark,"
but the spelling has been simplified for the purposes of this narrative).
rich (n)
horse (but in the countryside, also ox, or any other animal that works for
humans by carrying or pulling things; "beast of burden"). A cat with
a sense of humor might use this word as readily for a taxicab, shopping cart,
or wheelbarrow. rrai'fih (n) pride relationship implying possible blood
ties ruah (adj) flat
S
sa'Rrahh (pr n) the ambivalent feline Power, analogous
(roughly) to the Lone Power
Sef (pr n) the Lion-"God" of Yesterday;
nickname for "Fortitude," one of the lions outside the New York
Public Library main branch
sh'heih (n)
"queen," unspayed female
siss (n)
urine; a "baby word" similar to ehhif English "pee
pee," and other similar formations
sshai-sau (adj)
crazy
sswiass a
pejorative: "sonofabitch," bastard, brat, etc.
sth'heih (n)
"tom," unneutered male
U
uae (n) milk
ur (n) nose
Urrua (pr n) the Great Tom, son and lover of Iau the
Queen (from the older word urra, "scarred")
urruah (id)
"flat nose" (compound: from ur'ruah)
V
vefessh (n)
water, also (adj) the term cats use to indicate the fur color humans call
"blue" vhai (adj) damn, bloody
DlANE DUANE was
born in Manhattan in 1952, a Year of the Dragon, and she was raised on Long
Island, NY. She has been writing for her own entertainment ever since she could
read and her first novel, The Door Into Fire, was published by Dell Books in
1979. Since then she has published twenty-seven novels, numerous short stories,
and various comics and computer games here and there, garnering the occasional
award.
Diane lives with her husband, (and frequent
collaborator) Peter Morwood, near the Irish town of Baltinglass, along with
four cats and several seriously overworked computers, in a hundred-year-old
renovated cottage—an odd but congenial environment for the staging of space
battles and the leisurely pursuit of total galactic domination.
The "Middle Kingdoms" Quartet:
The Door into Fire
The Door into Shadow
The Door into Sunset
The Door into Starlight*
The "Young Wizards" Series:
So You Want to Be a Wizard
Deep Wizardry
High Wizardry
A Wizard Abroad
Novels Set in the Star Trek™ Universe:
The Wounded Sky
My Enemy, My Ally
The Romulan Way**
Spock's World
Doctor's Orders
Dark Mirror
Intellivore
Novels Set in the Marvel Comics™ Universe:
Spider-Man: The Venom Factor
Spider-Man: The Lizard Sanction
Spider-Man: The Octopus Agenda
X-Men: Empire's End*
Other Novels:
Keeper of the City**
X-Com/UFO Defense
Seaquest DSV**
Space Cops: Mindblast**
Space Cops: Kill Station**
Space Cops: High Moon**
Raetian Tales: A Wind from the South
*FORTHCOMING
**With Peter Morwood