The Book Of Night With Moon

Chapter Eleven

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’ll 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!