The Book Of Night With Moon

Chapter Fourteen

They started the walk upward through the tunnels and balconies wondering how much explaining they would need to do … and found that little was needed: for every saurian who saw Ith immediately seemed to recognize him and to be willing to listen to him, if not specifically to obey him.

“Well,” Rhiow said, “he’s their father. Why not?”

Arhu, walking close behind Ith, found this funny, and after all the difficulties associated with getting down into the abyss, it amused him even more that the team was regarded with some suspicion, but no overt hostility. As far as the saurians were concerned, if Ith vouched for the felines, that was all right with them: and soon they were near the head of a huge parade of the creatures, all eagerly climbing upward into the heights where none but workers were normally permitted.

“They really will be able to live up there, won’t they?” Arhu said to Rhiow, worried.

“Oh, of course. Much of what you were hearing down there was the Lone One’s lies to them, to keep them enslaved. They’ll spread out over the surface of this world and find plenty, once they’re used to hunting in the open. The other carnivores may be a little annoyed at the competition, but they’ll manage. There’ll be plenty of prey for everybody.”

“And meantime…” Urruah said to Rhiow, from behind. “What about us?”

“What about us?”

“Well, we’ve been dead.”

Rhiow sighed, for that had been on her mind, and it had struck her that this cheerful walk up to the surface was likely to be their last. She looked over at Saash.

She had done this several times and kept having to smile, for now she thought she knew why Saash’s skin had always been giving her trouble. It was not until she saw her friend suddenly manifest after her death as Aaurh the Mighty, the One’s Champion, that Rhiow realized that Saash’s soul, after nine lives, had simply become too big for that body; and that her Tenth Life was not merely a possibility, but a given. It was an added source of amusement that someone who could so perfectly meld into the persona of the irresistible Huntress, the Destroyer-by-Fire, could nonetheless be so hopeless at catching something as simple as mice. But then maybe the body was just resisting the role it knew was coming.

“Not that I’m going to need to catch things to eat for much longer,” Saash said, and sighed.

“That was really it, was it?” Rhiow said sadly.

“That was my ninth death, yes,” Saash said. “And now … well, after I cross through the gate back home, we’ll see what happens.”

“But the rest of us…” Rhiow looked at Urruah, who was chatting with Arhu at the moment. “He was as dead as you were.”

“He may be short a life when we get home. I’m not sure: he’ll have to take it up with the Queen. I mean, Rhi,” Saash said, “we’ve been gods, and some of us rose from the dead while we were gods. And if you’re a god and you rise from the dead, I think you stay risen. For the time being, anyway…”

“But what about you?” Urruah said. “Look at you!”

“Look,” Arhu said, “it’s the upper caverns.” He loped on ahead.

The saurians were hurrying out after him at the first glimpse of some light that was not the cool, restrained light of the catenary tree. Rhiow and Saash and Urruah hurried to keep up with Arhu and Ith, partly to keep from being trampled by the eager crowd behind them. The light ahead, pale though it was, grew: spread—

—and there was the opening. Rhiow, though, wondered what had happened to the downhanging teeth of stone, and found out; many had fallen in the shaking of the Mountain. No surprise, she thought, many things almost fell today.

But not that, she thought, as she came out of the cave, onto the wide ledge looking over the world, and turned.

The weather was cuttingly clear. It was just a little while before dawn; high up the brightest stars were still shining through the last indigo shadows of night, and to the east, the sky was peach-colored, burning more vividly orange every moment. Rhiow looked at the Mountain, which lay still in shadow: but far up, on the highest peak, a spear of light was lifted to the sky, bunding—the topmost branches of the great Tree, catching the light of the Sun before it cleared the horizon for those lower down. The saurians piled out of the cave, as many of them as could, and stared… stared.

Some of them were looking westward and gaped open-mouthed in wonder at the round silver Eye gazing at them from the farthest western horizon: the full Moon setting as the Sun rose. Rhiow watched their wonder, and smiled. “Night with Moon” indeed, she thought: the ehhif Book was better named than maybe even the ehhif wizards knew. How many other hints had been scattered through Earth’s mythologies, hinting at this eventual reconfiguration?

“Is that the Sun?” one of the saurians said.

Rhiow laughed softly and looked eastward again, where the sky was swiftly brightening. “Turn around,” she said, “and just wait…”

They waited. The shifting and rustling of scales died to a profound silence. Only the wind breathed through the nearer trees, rising a little with the oncoming day. Rhiow looked up at the Tree again, wondering: Are there really eyes up there, the eyes of those gone before, who look down and watch what passes in the worlds? I wonder what they make of this, if they are there indeed?

Someday I must sit under those branches, and listen, and find out…

A great breath of sound went up, a hiss, a gasp—and the sunlight broke over the edge of the world and sheened off all the saurians’ hides, and caught in all their eyes. Rhiow had to look away, near-blinded by the brilliance.

She leaned over to Urruah. “Let’s get out of here and leave them their world,” Rhiow said. “They’ve suffered enough for it. Time for the joy…”

The team made their way over to the gates, which were all in place, warp and weft sheening with power as usual: the reconfiguration below and the release of the catenary tree had completely restored them to their default settings. Through the central gate, Track 30’s platform was now visible: they could see T’hom, looking back at them and seeming extremely relieved. He was sidled, which was just as well, for the place was full of ehhif going about their business, and he was doing the usual shuffle to keep from being knocked off the platform.

Urruah looked at the gate with some concern and turned to Rhiow. “Well?” he said.

She looked at him, shook her head, then rubbed cheeks with him.

“Consort,” he said. “I liked the sound of that.”

“You would,” Rhiow said. “Sex maniac. Go on… and good luck. Get yourself sidled when you go through. But otherwise, if worst comes to worst, look us up again, next life. It wouldn’t be the same without you.”

Urruah snorted, meaning to sound sardonic, but his eyes said otherwise. He leaped through the gate—

—came down on the other side, a silver tabby, back to normal size, quite alive; Rhiow could see the scars. She put her whiskers forward, well pleased.

Arhu, less worried, came over to the gate next. He looked up at Ith, who walked with him and peered through curiously. “Your world … Is it like this one?”

Arhu cracked up laughing. “Oh, yes, exactly. Not a whisker’s difference.”

Ith looked at him sidewise.

“Yeah, right. Look, Ith, come on through and have some pastrami,” Arhu said.

Ith bent down toward him, gave him the bird-eyeing-the-worm look, but it was absolutely cordial, the salute of one member of the great Kinship to another …even though there was still a glint of appetite there.

“I believe you would say, ‘You’re on,’ ” Ith said. “I will come shortly. Meanwhile, my brother, my father … go well.”

Arhu slipped through … and was small and black and white again.

Rhiow and Saash looked at each other. Then Rhiow slowly leaned forward and rubbed cheeks with her friend: first one side, then the other.

“Stay in touch,” she said, “if you can.”

“Hey,” Saash said softly, “it’s not like I’m going to be dead or anything. Just busy…”

Rhiow took a long breath, gazed around her, then stepped through onto the platform on Track 30—

—and came down light on her paws. She lifted one to look at it. Small again: the central pad unusually large: normal for this world…

Rhiow turned and looked through the gate. Saash was standing there in her Old Downside guise, a tortoiseshell tigress momentarily glancing over her shoulder at the ancient world, the dawn coming up, its glitter and sheen on the hides of the saurians watching it for the first time. Then she turned, locked eyes with Rhiow, leapt through the gate—

The Downside body stripped away as she came, and Saash was surrounded and hidden in a swirl of—not light as such, but reconfiguration, self and soul shifting into some new shape. Not vanishing, please, Iau—

That swirling, shifting, faded. Saash stood there … but not in her old body, which seemed to have declined to continue any further. This new shape was one that no nonwizardly ehhif could have seen, and even an ehhif wizard might have had to work at it if the body’s owner didn’t wish to be seen. To Rhiow’s eyes, she was still looking at Saash .,. but something subtle had happened to her; her physicality seemed to have been refined away, leaving her standing in the familiar delicate form, but now filled with forces that made Rhiow blink to look at them steadily. They were the forces with which Saash had always worked so well… and it was now obvious why, for they filled her the way light fills a window.

Saash shook herself, looked down at her flanks, and dulled down the glow by an effort of will. She turned then and smiled at Rhiow. Sorry, she said.

“For what?” Rhiow said softly.

Well… yeah. Oh, Rhi, there’s a lot to do, I have to get going!

“Go on, then. Go well, Tenth-lifer—and give the Powers our best when you see Them.”

Saash smiled, rubbed past Urruah, trailed her tail briefly over bis back, took a friendly swipe at Arhu with one shining paw as she passed; saluted T’hom and Har’lh with a flirt of her tail; and walked off down the platform, glowing more faintly as she passed on—a wizard still, but one now in possession of much enhanced equipment, now reassigned to some more central and senior catchment area. Only once she paused. Rhiow stared, wondering—

Saash sat down on the platform and had one last good scratch. Then she washed the scratched-up fur down again, flirted her tail one last time, walked off into the darkness, and was gone…

T’hom came over to them then and hunkered down to greet them: Har’lh was with him. As she trotted over to them, it occurred to Rhiow that there was something odd about the track area: it looked cleaner, brighter, than usual. However, for the moment she put that aside. “Har’lh!” she said, and rubbed against him: possibly unprofessional behavior toward one’s Advisory, but she was extremely glad to see him. “Where in Iau’s name have you been?”

“About half a million lightyears away,” Har’lh said with annoyance, “freezing my butt off on a planet covered a thousand miles deep with liquid methane. Somebody wanted me way out of the way while something happened here, that was plain. Met some nice people, though: they needed help with some local problems… I did a little troubleshooting. No point in wasting the trip.” He looked at them all. “Now what’s been going on here??”

“That’ll take some telling,” Rhiow said.

“Let’s walk, then,” T’hom said.

They headed out of the track areas, up into the main concourse. Arhu and Urruah looked up and around them as they went, and Urruah’s tail was lashing in surprise. The Terminal looked satisfyingly solid and hard-edged again, much improved over the last time they had seen it, with multiple time-patches threatening to slide off the fabric of reality like a wet Band-Aid. Ehhif were going about their business as usual.

“Have they cleaned this place again in the last day or so?” Urruah said. “It looks so… bright, it’s… no. It’s not just the sun. I know this place always looks good in the morning, with the sun coming in the windows like that, but…”

T’hom smiled a little as they walked up past the waiting room and toward the Forty-second Street doors. “It won’t often look this good, I think,” he said. “This is how we knew you’d succeeded, down there, in some big way. All the manuals went crazy for a while, and all they would say was reconfiguration, reconfiguration, all over them. But then everything steadied down, and all the time-patching we’d been holding in place by force just hauled off and took, hard. Something of a relief.”

They stepped out into the street, and Rhiow saw in more detail what T’hom meant, for the brilliance in the streets was more than sunlight. This was a city in unusual splendor: skyscrapers all around seemed consciously clothed in the fire of day, their glass molten or jeweled in the early sun; and down at the end of the block, the silver spear of the Chrysler Building upheld itself in the dawn like an emblem of victory, blinding. Everything hummed with the usual city sounds—traffic noise, oddly content with its lot for once, very little horn-honking going on. There was a peculiar sense of ehhif all about them being abruptly, and rather bemusedly, at peace with one another … for a little while. “The city’s risen,” Rhiow said, “as some of us rose. But it won’t last.”

“No. It’s understandable that you would get some resonances from more central realities,” Har’lh said, “some spillover… possibly even from Timeheart itself. You can’t do that big a reconfiguration without some reflection in neighboring worlds: any of them directly connected by the catenary structure, anyway.”

“It’ll fade back to normal after a while,” Arhu said. “It can’t stay like this for long: you can conquer entropy only temporarily, on a local scale, She says … It never lasts. But while it lasts, enjoy it.”

They walked down Forty-second Street, heading toward the river and the view of the Delacorte Fountain, a great silver plume of water rising up from the southernmost tip of Riker’s Island in the morning sun. Rhiow started her debrief, knowing it was going to take a good while and might as well start now when everything was fresh in her mind. The only thing she knew she would have trouble explaining was how it had felt to have the One inside you. That knowledge, that power, had started to fade almost as soon as the experience proper was over. Just as well, I suppose, she thought. You can’t pour the ocean into one water bowl…

The team and the two Advisories finally came up against the railing that looked down at FDR Drive and the East River. There the People sat down, and the Seniors leaned on the railing, and they went on talking for what Rhiow normally thought might have been hours: the sun didn’t seem to be moving at its usual rate today … morning just kept lasting, shining down on a river that, more than usually, ran with light. In the middle of a technical discussion about what Saash had done to the catenary, T’hom suddenly looked up and said, “Well, they couldn’t keep you down on the farm long, could they?”

“What is a ‘farm’?” Ith said innocently, and leaned on the railing beside them, folding his claws and staring out over the shining water.

“Ahem,” Rhiow said. “Har’lh, have you met our new wizard? Ith, this is Har’lh, he’s the other Advisory for this area.”

“I am on errantry, and I greet you,” Ith said courteously, and bowed, sweeping his tail. Arhu ducked to let it go over his head.

’This is an errand?” T’hom said, with humor. “This is a junket.”

“It is ‘Research,’ ” Ith said cheerfully, glancing at Arhu with the conspiratorial expression of a youngster who’s borrowed a friend’s excuse. Arhu rolled his eyes, working to look innocent.

Rhiow wanted to snicker. It was a delightful change in Ith from the morose and somber individual they had first met; she suspected Arhu had had a lot to do with it, and would have much more.

“At any rate,” Rhiow said to the two Advisories, “the worldgates are all fully functional again, and I don’t think we need to fear any further interference from the Lone Power in that department. The Tree and the gate-tree, the master catenary structures, now have guardians who will never let the Lone One near them again. Some of them may not yet be plain about what It had in mind for them, but Ith will soon set them straight.”

Ith turned his attention away from a passing barge and toward Rhiow and the team. “I am hearing more and more in my mind,” Ith said, “of what the Powers will ask of us by way of guardianship. The requirements are not extreme. And little explanation will be needed as to why their present life is more desirable for my people than their former one. Hunger is something they are used to: until we distribute ourselves more widely, we will help one another cope with it… by more wholesome means than formerly. Meantime,” and he glanced over at Rhiow, “I will need some help tailoring spells that will function on a large scale, with little maintenance, as sunblock.” He grinned. “We have been down in the dark a long time.”

They all looked out at the glowing water. “The dark…” Arhu said, looking down into water in which, for once, no trash bobbed. “I could never look at this before,” he said to Rhiow. “But I can now. I won’t mind seeing the river, even when it’s back to normal. I could never stand going near it before: I was stuck on the Rock. But I don’t think I have to be stuck here anymore.”

“Of course not,” Har’lh said. “Be plenty of demand for a hot young visionary-wizard all over the place. In other realities”—he glanced at Ith—“and offplanet as well. You’re going to be busy for a while.”

“I am,” Arhu said. “Getting used to being in a team…” He glanced over at Rhiow.

Rhiow looked over at him affectionately and put her whiskers forward, smiling. “You’re well met on the errand,” she said.

They fell silent for a while, looking out at the light. The sense of power and potential beating around them in the air was as tangible as a pulse; for this little while, in mis New York, anything was possible. Rhiow looked out into the glory of the transfigured morning—not quite that of Tune-heart, but close enough—and said softly, only a little sadly, I had to tell you. The tuna wasn’t all that bad…

She did not really expect an answer. But the walls between realities were thin this morning. From elsewhere came just the slightest hint of a purr… and somewhere, Hhuha smiled.

Rhiow blinked, then washed a little, for composure’s sake.

She would head home soon. She would have to start drawing close to Iaehh now. He would be needing her, for there was no way Rhiow could tell him about anything she had seen or experienced… except by being who she now was.

Whoever that is… And if in the doing Rhiow brought with her a little of the sense of Hhuha—not as she was, of course, but Hhuha moved on into something more—that would possibly be some help.

It was so nice to know mat ehhif had somewhere to go when they died.

For Rhiow’s own part, she had had enough dying for one day.

The talk went on for a while more. Only slowly did Rhiow notice that the interior light was seeping out of things, leaving New York looking entirely more normal: the horns began to hoot in the distance again, and a few hundred yards down FDR Drive, there was a tinkle of glass as a car changing lanes sideswiped another one and broke off one of its wing mirrors. Tires screeched, voices yelled.

“Normalcy,” Har’lh said, looking with amused irony at T’hom. “What we work for, I suppose. Speaking of work… I’m going to have to go make some phone calls. My boss is going to be annoyed that I took this time off without warning.”

“Wizard’s burden,” Urruah said. “I feel sorry for you poor ehhif. Wouldn’t it just be easier to tell him you were off adjusting somebody’s gas giant?”

Har’lh gave Urruah a look, then grinned. “Might make an interesting change. Come on—“He looked over at T’hom. “Let’s go catch a train.”

The team walked the Advisories and Ith back to Grand Central, as far as the entrance to the subway station: it was not a place Rhiow chose to plunge into during rush hour while sidled, as you were likely to become subway-station pizza in short order. “Go well,” she said to T’hom and Har’lh, as they went through the turnstiles.

We will, Har’lh said silently. You did…

Rhiow strolled back up to the main concourse level and put herself against a wall, where she could look out across the great expanse. Working properly again, she thought. With time, everything would. Someday, if things went right, the New York they had spent this long morning in would be the real one, and this one just a grubby, shabby memory. But meantime you make it work the best you can.

And meantime the scent in the air caught her attention.

Pizza…

The others came up out of the entrance to the subway, glanced across the concourse, and down at Rhiow. Ith in particular looked across at the Italian deli.

’Wow, about that pastrami…” he said to Arhu.

Arhu grinned. “Let me show you a trick somebody taught me,” he said, glancing over at Rhiow. “I had a feeling you’d be sorry you showed him that one,” Urruah said. “Ith, don’t let him talk you into trying it. You’ll make the papers.”

“Tapers’?”

Rhiow gave Urruah a look. “Come on, ’Ruah, let’s leave them to it, and go do the rounds.”

Rhiow and Urruah strolled off across their territory, weaving casually among the ehhif, up the cream marble of the Vanderbilt Avenue stairs, and out of the sight of wizards, and People, and anyone else who could see. No one noticed them, which was just as it should have been; and life in the city went on…