The Book Of Night With Moon

Chapter Ten

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.

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.”

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’ll 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.

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.”

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.