The Book Of Night With Moon

Chapter Seven

The lunch rush was just beginning out in the streets, but there wasn’t much the team could do about that except hug the building side of the sidewalk, all the way down, and try to keep from being trampled. It was a relief to get into Grand Central, where few people hugged the walls: the crush was in the middle, a river of legs and briefcases and shopping bags, flowing faster in the center of the stream than by the banks.

Rhiow and her team made their way down to Track 30. She was relieved, on passing the Italian deli, to find it so completely thronged with ehhif that not even the most reckless lading could have gotten near it without doing violence to the crowd. Even so, Arhu threw a longing glance at it as they passed, then looked guiltily at Rhiow.

“Maybe later,” she said, “if you’re good.” And we’re all still in one piece…

A train from Rye had just come in, and the last of its passengers were filtering off. Far down the platform, off to one side, stood two ehhif watching the others get off the train: a boy and a girl. They were young; Rhiow was no expert on ages, but she thought perhaps the young queen-ehhif was fourteenish, the tom a year or so younger. They looked like anyone else who might have come off the train—both wearing shorts and oversized T-shirts and beat-up running shoes, the queen wearing a fanny pack: a couple of suburban kids, apparently fresh in from up Westchester for a good day’s hanging out. But these two had something none of the other commuters had—the shift and tangle of hyperstrings about them, which meant that they too were sidled.

“Prompt,” Saash said, as they walked down the platform toward the two.

“Har’lh’s plainly been keeping an eye on things,” Rhiow said. Good. Because if we need help, I’d prefer it to be the kind that an Advisory would send…

As the team came up to them, the two young ehhif hunkered down to a level more comfortable for conversation. “We’re on errantry,” said the young queen, “and we greet you.”

“You’re well met on the errand,” Rhiow said. “We can definitely use some help on this one.”

“Yeah, that’s what Carl said. I’m Nita; this is Kit.”

“Rhiow; and Urruah there, and Saash; and Arhu—”

The young queen-ehhif looked at Arhu with interest. “You’re new to this, aren’t you,” she said.

He gave her a look. “So what?”

“Hey, take it easy,” she said. “You just reminded me a little of my sister, that’s all.”

“The day I look like any ehhif’s sister—”

Nita smiled, a little crookedly. “Sounds like her, too,” she said, under her breath, to her partner.

“She meant only,” said the young tom-ehhif, “that her sister just passed Ordeal a little while ago.”

Arhu blinked at that. Rhiow said to him, “It happens sometimes that you get littermates who’re wizards. Not so often as it used to: the tendency is for the trait to skip a couple of generations between occurrences in a family.”

“Yeah,” Kit said. “My dad says he thinks it’s so your parents won’t be too scared to have more kids… and so that you won’t, either.”

“I thought ehhif wizards usually kept their business secret from nonwizards,” Saash said, curious. “Supposedly humans don’t believe in wizardry … is that right?”

“Mostly they don’t. Oh, we keep it private from everybody but family. It’s the wizard’s choice, in our species. Hide it or spill it, you can get in nearly as much trouble either way. But I guess we’re lucky … our parents coped pretty well after the initial shock, though we still have a little trouble with them every now and then.” Kit looked around him. “It’s been pretty noisy down here this mom-ing—they were pulling up a piece of track down there. Had to have jackhammers used on it: the guys said it had been melted right into the concrete. I take it that means this gate is the busted one.”

Rhiow flirted her tail in agreement. “Yes. We’ll be using a different one for our access, though: the Lexington Avenue local gate—it’s had the least use lately. Har’lh tells me you’ve worked with it before?”

“Yeah,” Nita said, “when its locus was still anchored upstairs. We used it for a rapid-transit jump when it was dislocated, some years ago. It was the usual thing—someone was digging up the potholes on Forty-second and messing with the high-tension power cables during a sunspot maximum. The combined structural and electromagnetic disruptions made the gate’s stabilizer strings pop out of the anchor stratum, and the portal locus came loose and jumped sixty stories straight up.” She smiled a small, dry smile. “Tom and Carl said that getting it back where it belonged, afterward, was interesting. That was you, was it?”

“Not me,” Rhiow said, “my predecessor, Ffairh. He told me about it, though.”

“And then after all that, you had to move it over to Lex, didn’t you? But they’d moved the deli it was in back of when the construction started here.”

“That’s right, when they started renovating the Hyatt passageway. Everything’s been pretty ripped up lately…” Rhiow looked around bet. “Well, your expertise will be welcome … we’re going a long way down on this run, and keeping the gate anchored and patent is going to be important.”

“Shouldn’t be a problem,” Kit said. “Carl says you took a lot of care last time to fasten the gate down good and tight. We’ll make sure it stays stuck open for you while you’re down there. There shouldn’t be any way a patent gate can be dislocated or interfered with.”

Rhiow had her doubts this week. “That’s what conventional wisdom would say,” she said, “but the gates’ behavior lately hasn’t been conventional.”

Nita shook her head. “We’ll do the best we can for you,” she said. “If we need help, we’ll yell for Carl.”

“Right. Let’s get started,” Saash said, and headed over for the gate.

It was as they had left it the other day: hanging there, the warp and weft of the hyperstrings glowing a slightly duller red than before, token of a lack of extension in the last day. Once more Saash sat up on her haunches, reached in, and plucked at the gate’s diagnostic strings: they followed her claw outward, and light sheened down them, violet in the darkness. “Same as yesterday,” she said to the two young wizards.

“Looks perfectly normal,” Kit said.

“Yes, well, watch.” Saash reached in again for the activation strings, pulled, and again came out with a double pawful of nothing.

Nita whistled softly. “Weird.”

“Yes. I was kind of hoping it might have corrected itself,” Saash said, sounding wry and slightly amused, “but fat chance.”

Rhiow looked at her and was silently impressed, not for the first time, at the way Saash could hold such a casual tone when she was shivering inside. But that was her way, at work. Later, after this was done—assuming everything went all right—she would complain neurotically about her terror for days. But at the moment, she sounded like she was going for a nice sleep in the sun, followed by cream. I wish I could sound that confident…

Saash let go of the strings, settled back to all fours again, and glanced around. “So here’s what we’ll do,” she said. “I’m going to pull the Lexington Avenue local gate’s locus out of its present location and tether it over here temporarily so that you can keep an eye on both the bum gate and the one we’ve used. Theoretically we should be able to use the broken one to come back after we’ve fixed it; then the Lex gate can have the temporary tethers broken and it’ll just snap back into place.”

“Sounds sensible,” Nita said. “One of us can stay over by Lex and redirect any wizards who turn up there to use it before the change in the gate’s location shows up in then: manuals.”

“Fine,” Saash said, “let’s go, then.” She trotted off, and the young queen-ehhif went after her, looking carefully down-track as she followed.

Arhu looked after the two of them, while the young tom-ehhif sat down on the edge of the platform, looking at the gate. “It must be an interesting line of work,” Kit said. “I bet you get to travel a lot.”

Rhiow laughed softly. “I wish! No, we’re here mostly. The New York gates get nearly as much use as the ones at Tower Bridge or Alexandria. Not as much usage as the complex at Tokyo, maybe … but those would be the only ones to beat us. As a result, we’re always having to fix something that’s busted.” She put her whiskers forward, slightly amused at a memory. “Last time I was scheduled for a weekend off, I got all the way to the big Crossings worldgating facility on Rirhath B before one of their gates broke, and I found myself helping them service it…” She made the extra-large smile that an ehhif would understand. “ ‘Wizard’s holiday.’ ”

The young tom chuckled. “Yeah,” he said, “I’ve had a couple of those myself—”

The darkness in front of them suddenly had another gate hanging in it: more oval than the first one, hanging closer to the cinders and concrete of the floor, almost in contact with the rails. It hyperextended as they watched, the bright lines of its curvature pulling inward and apparently away to vanishing-point eternity before disappearing altogether, replaced by the oval image of the end of the Lexington Avenue local platform, and Nita standing there, looking through the aperture with an interested expression. Saash leaped neatly through, and the image vanished in lines of bright fire as the curvature snapped back flat again behind her. Numerous unnaturally bright “tether” lines could be seen stretching from equidistant points around the edges of the gate-weave, up into “empty” air or down into the ground, radiating outward in an array corresponding roughly (as it would have to, in a space with one dimension too few) to the vertices of a tesseract.

“Everything’s set,” Saash said. “Khi-t, I would strongly recommend that you put a general-warding circle around both of these when we’re out of your way and down there working. I don’t know that anything from that side might try to come through a patent gate, if it should stumble across one; but there are creatures in that part of Downside that, though they’re just animals by both our standards, could cause a lot of trouble if they got loose in here.”

“I’ll take care of it,” the young ehhif-tom said. He opened the book he was carrying, leafed through it for a moment and ran his finger down one page. “These personal-description parameters look right to you?”

Saash and Rhiow both looked down at the wizard’s manual, which obligingly shifted the color of its printing so that they could more easily read the graceful curves of the printed version of the Speech; and Rhiow cocked her head to one side, hearing at the same time the Whisperer’s translation of the printed material. “That’s fine,” she said. “Just one thing—” She put a paw out to the small block of print containing the symbols that, in wizardly shorthand, described Arhu. There were a lot of blank spaces in the equation that summed him up for spelling purposes. “That configuration,” she said, “is changing rapidly. And in unexpected ways. Keep an eye on it…”

“Will do,” Kit said.

“Let’s go,” said Saash. She reared up, slipped her paws into the weave of the second gate, and pulled the lines of light outward, wove them together—

The gate hyperextended again, this time the lines of its intraspatial contours seeming to be pulled to a much farther-out infinity than last time—impossible, but so it seemed, regardless. The lines stretched and stretched outward, and there was almost a feeling of the watcher being pulled outward as well, drawn thin, almost to nonexistence. Odd, Rhiow thought. Possibly something to do with this locus being so close to one that’s malfunctioning—

—then snap, the feeling was gone: and through the gate came the golden light of somewhere else’s summer afternoon…

Urruah leapt through without apparent hesitation, though Rhiow knew he had gone first so that no one should know how nervous he had been. “Just jump through,” Rhiow said to Arhu. “At all costs, stay clear of the edges: even though there are safeties on the locus boundaries, if one of them goes wrong somehow, you could lose a tail, or leg, or something you’d miss more. You’ll feel heavy on the other side. Be prepared for it…”

She purposely hadn’t told him what else he was going to need to be prepared for, as Ffairh hadn’t told her, all that time ago. Better not to create impressions about the desirability of one’s state Downside … there would be enough temptations later. Arhu swallowed, crouched and tensed, and jumped through, almost as neatly as Urruah had.

There was a thump on the other side, and a yowl… but much deeper than a cat’s yowl would have been. Kit craned his neck to see through, looking slightly concerned. “He okay?”

Rhiow laughed softly. “That’s the question of the week. He’s not hurt, anyway.”

More yowling, this time tinged with surprise, was coming through the open gate. “Rhi,” Saash said, “let’s go, shall we, before our wonder child restarts those legends about giant demon cats in the tunnels … ?”

Rhiow chuckled. “You’ve got a point.”

“Dai stiho,” Kit said, the wizard’s casual greeting and goodbye in the Speech to another one: go well.

“Thanks,” Rhiow said. She jumped through the gate: Saash let go the control strings, took aim, and followed her.

There was the usual moment’s worth of disorientation as Rhiow felt her body adjust to its new status; then her vision cleared, and everything was fine again. Rhiow shook herself all over, settling the pelt—it was so close and short, compared to her usual fur, that she always felt slightly naked for the first few seconds. Saash, true to form, was sitting down and having a good scratch, watching Arhu with amusement.

“—Look at me! Look at me! I’m huge!” Arhu was going around and around in a circle, trying to get a good look at himself, but mostly looking as if he were chasing his tail. It was an amusing sight: the white patch at the tail’s end was now nearly as long by itself as the whole tail had been. Rhiow thought privately that, if he survived to come here to hunt later, he was going to have to do it by speed, for camouflage wasn’t going to be one of his strong points, not splashed all over with black and white the way he was. Though, then again, she thought, on moonlit nights, in broken country, it might work… “And look at you!” Arhu said, staring at Saash. She smiled a little crookedly, and Rhiow put her whiskers forward in amusement. Saash was certainly worth looking at: a tortoiseshell lioness, almost a ton of muscle. “And you!” Arhu said to Rhiow. “And, oh wow,” he said, seeing Urruah, whose tabby patterning had kept its color but gone much more tigerish, to suit his shape and size; he was nearly a taxicab high at the shoulder.

“What happened? Can we do this at home?”

“No,” Urruah said. “Cats’ bodies are the same size as their souls, here. Your soul remembers our ancient history, even if your body doesn’t…”

“Look at all this! Where are we?”

“IAh’hah.” Saash used the Ailurin slang that was as close as the average cat could come to pronouncing “New York.”

He stared at Saash. “You’re crazy!”

“This is New York, all right,” Urruah said. “Five hundred thousand years ago, maybe… and ten or twenty worlds over.”

“But this isn’t our world,” Arhu said, not entirely as a question.

“No,” Rhiow said, looking up and around through the golden air. “Ours is related to it… but this one is older… or it’s simply still the way ours was, long ago. Hard to tell: time differs, from world to world.”

“And things that happen here… happen at home too?”

“Yes. Often in different shapes, ones you might not expect at first. Know how when you look in a puddle, you see yourself? But the image is twisted: the wind touches it, it wrinkles…”

“Yeah.”

“Like that. Except this world would be the real you… and our world would be the image in the puddle, the mirror.”

Arhu opened his mouth, shut it again. “You mean … this is the real world? This is the way we’re supposed to look?”

“I didn’t say that.” Now it was getting tricky. It had taken Rhiow a good couple of years’ study to fully understand the implications of interdimensional relations between worlds. “This world is… in some ways… realer than ours. Closer to the center of things. But, Arhu, there are other worlds a lot more central than this one … and you can go sshai-sau trying to define reality merely in terms of centrality. I wouldn’t suggest you start working on a definition at this early stage. Let’s just say that this is a place where you can be different… but you take care not to do it for too long.”

“Why not? I like this! It would be great to be this way all the time!”

The paw came down on him, heavy, from behind, and pushed Arhu down flat. Arhu twisted his head around to gaze up into the huge, silver-gray face that loomed over him, narrow-eyed, fangs showing just a little. Though Urruah’s markings always went tigerish when he was Downside, he always looked, to Rhiow, more leopardlike. But in this form he was also still the biggest of them: and for all the lions’ fearful reputation, leopards are known even by ehhif to be the more dangerous and terrible hunters, wily and fearfully powerful.

“You wouldn’t like it,” Urruah said, “if you didn’t have a mind.”

Arhu just lay there and looked at him.

“Oh, sure,” Urruah said, “hunt big game, conquer a territory miles long, be big, be strong, eat anything you like, have trees fall over at the sound of your roar: sounds great, doesn’t it? But there’s a price, because none of us are supposed to stay out of our proper worlds for very long. Little by little you start to forget who you are. You forget your other lives if you’ve had any. You lose your wizardry, assuming you’ve achieved it. You lose your history. Finally you lose your name. And then it’s as if you never existed at all, since when you die and Iau calls your name to issue you with your next life, no one answers…” Urruah shrugged.

Arhu lay there looking rather stunned. “Okay, okay,” he said, “I guess I see your point. I like being me.”

Urruah stood back and let him up. Arhu shook himself off, sat down, and took a moment’s he’ihh to correct his slightly rumpled head fur. “But that stuff only happens if you stay here a long time?” he said.

“As far as we know, yes,” Rhiow said.

He looked rather sharply at her. “So what happens if you die Downside before you forget?”

It was the crucial question, the one that had made it harder than usual for Rhiow to get to sleep last night. “I don’t know,” she said.

“You mean … even if you have more lives … you still might not come back.” He was wide-eyed. “You mean you just die dead… like a bug or an ehhif?”

“Maybe,” Rhiow said. The Whisperer was silent about this possibility … and the concept that Hrau’f the Silent herself had no information on this subject was not one that filled Rhiow with joy. Moreover, she had absolutely no desire to be one of those who would supply the information.…

Arhu shook his head until his ears rattled, then craned his neck to look up, gazing at the rank above rank of gigantic trees, vanishing above them into the mist of a passing cloud. “It’s a mountain…” he said.

“It’s the Mountain,” Saash said. “This is the center of everything.”

“What’s that tall thing up at the top…” His voice trailed off, his ears twitching, as the Whisperer had a word with him.

“Oh,” he said then, and sat down with a thump.

“Yes,” Rhiow said. “And down among the Tree’s roots, into the caverns, is where we’re going.”

“What, in the dark? I don’t want to go down there! I want to go over there!” He was staring at the narrow flicker of sunny veldtland showing westward, past the forests. A faint plume of dust hung above it, golden in the late sun: distant herds of game on the move. But then he threw a look over his shoulder at Urruah, who had resolutely turned his back on the vista.

“I just bet you do. Later,” Rhiow said. “Business first.” She looked around them, caught Urruah’s eye, and nodded toward the cave entrance, in which hung the main control matrices for all the Grand Central and Penn gates, all shimmering and alive with the fiery patterns of normal function. Rhiow glanced back at the still-open gate through which they had come, and flirted her tail at Kit, who was standing there watching on the other side. He sketched her a small salute in return.

Can you hear me all right? she said inwardly.

No problems, Kit said, the same way. It was a little odd: his thought to her sounded like one of her own—the way inward speech between her teammates did. But this was Speech-based telepathy rather than thought grounded in Ailurin, and Kit’s thought had a pronounced ehhif accent. Am I clear?

Just fine. “I feel a lot better with them there,” Rhiow said, turning away and making her way sideways along the “threshold” stone, to where Saash already had her claws into the weave of the malfunctioning gate.

“Those were ehhif wizards?” Arhu said, padding along beside her.

“Yes.”

“Very nice people,” Urruah said. “Very professional.”

“Hmf,” Arhu said. “They don’t look like much to me.”

“That they were here to meet us,” Rhiow said, “indicates that Carl thinks they’re two of the most powerful wizards available in this area. The younger the wizard, the more powerful…” She carefully did not say why, in case the Whisperer had not yet mentioned it to Arhu: because the young don’t know what’s impossible yet, and do it anyway. “The only wizards better at being powerful for a long time while young are the ones who’re whales. They stay children longest. Our latency period isn’t that long, relatively … so we have to make up in extreme cleverness and adaptability what we lose early on in sheer power.”

She was gazing past the gates’ control matrices, toward the back of the cavern, and the darkness. “You don’t want to go down here, really, do you…” Arhu said.

“No.”

“You’re nervous. I mean, I heard you being… I mean, you didn’t say, I just thought…”

“You’re beginning to be able to ‘hear’ some of what goes on in people’s minds,” Rhiow said, wondering how she was going to hide her discomfort at this realization. “Some wizards are better at it than others.” She threw him a look. “You want to keep what you hear to yourself, by and large.”

“Oh? Why?”

“Because,” she said, phrasing it very carefully, “we’re likely to start hearing you, too … and if you start saying out in the open what you hear other People thinking, they’re likely to do the same for you…”

His eyes widened a little at that, and he stared somewhat guiltily at Urruah. Good, Rhiow thought, amused, and turned her attention to Saash.

“How is it?” she said.

Saash was balancing on her haunches again, eyeing the web of the master locus for the malfunctioning gate. She reached out a paw, slipped it into the shining weft, hooked a claw behind a carefully selected bundle of strings, and pulled. They stretched out toward her correctly, but the gate still refused to hyperextend.

“No good,” she said to Rhiow. “There’s a blockage of some kind between this gate and the power source, the catenary. We’re going to have to go down and troubleshoot the linkage from the bottom up.”

Her voice was unusually flat and matter-of-fact. Rhiow, though, noticed Arhu watching her, and said, “I’m not wild about mis, either. But we’re all adequately armed…”

“We thought so last time too,” Saash said.

Urruah had already slipped behind the gates and was looking down into the darkness of the caverns, listening hard. As Rhiow came up to him, he turned his head and said, “Quiet today.”

“Not ‘too quiet’?”

“No,” Urruah said, falling silent again, and Rhiow listened and saw what he meant. The water that had tunneled out of these caverns, however many millennia ago, was still doing the same work, and you could usually faintly hear the dripping of it, echoing up from below. The sound was not entirely gone, today, but was somewhat more subdued than Rhiow was used to.

“It might have been a little droughty here, lately,” Rhiow said.

“It might not mean anything at all,” said Saash, coming up to join them, with Arhu behind her.

Rhiow lashed her tail “maybe,” a touch nervously. “Well,” she said. “The sooner we catch this rat, the sooner its back’ll be broken. Arhu—stay with us. Don’t go exploring. There are miles of these caverns: no one knows all their branchings, and some of the smaller ones aren’t stable. You could seal yourself in if you meddled with the wrong pile of rocks… and we wouldn’t be able to get you out.”

“But we can go through things,” Arhu said. “I did it in your big den, the station. A wizard who was stuck could go through the rock—”

Saash and Rhiow exchanged a look. Too smart, this one.,. “Yes,” Urruah said, “but if you try it so close to the main control structures of the gates, you could have real trouble. You’re halfway through a tunnel wall, say, and a nearby gate activates; the power running up to it from the catenary below makes some very minor shifts in the elementary structure of the stone… and all of a sudden, the stone you described in your spell, when you started your little walk, isn’t the same stone anymore. Your spell doesn’t work on that changed stone because the initial description’s no longer accurate. The spell structure unravels, and you get stuck half in the wall and half out of it. In an argument like that… the stone’s older than you are: it wins.”

Arhu’s eyes went so round that Rhiow thought they looked ready to pop out of their sockets. “So keep close,” she said. “And Arhu—keep alert. There are creatures who live down in these caves who don’t like us.”

Urruah sniffed down his nose, an oh-what-an-understatement kind of noise. “Come on,” Rhiow said. “Let’s get this over with.”

She led them down into the dark.

She remembered the way well enough from their last intervention here, though even if she had not, the Whisperer knew the main routes perfectly well—the explorations and interventions of other wizards, like Rhiow’s old master Ffairh in his time, would have been preserved in the Whispering for anyone who might later need the information. As it was, it was a shame that the context of where they were going and what they might meet tended to keep them from enjoying this place on its own merits: in their upper regions, at least, the caverns in the Mountain were beautiful enough.

The water had been a long time doing its work. As the main cavern narrowed and began to slope downward, Rhiow picked her way along among the upward-poking spines of pale stone, wondering a little at the lacy structure of some of them: each had its cousin-spike hanging down from the ceiling above. All these were dry now, the areas of active cavern formation having receded farther down into the Mountain. But up here, Rhiow would have welcomed the occasional drip or tinkle of water; it would have distracted her from the image that always struck her, when they were forced to come this way, that they were walking into a particularly fangy set of jaws, backed by a dark and hungry gullet of stone. If you weren’t careful, you could imagine the jaws closing—

Cut that out, she thought. The “gullet” narrowed and sloped down before them until it was only a few feet wide, and the light from outside the main cavern opening failed in the darkness beyond it. This was the only place in the Old Downside where Rhiow found herself wishing she had a proper Person’s body rather than this ancient and attractive, but oversized, persona. The walls here always brushed against her shoulders as she slipped through, yet there was no corresponding feeling of her whiskers being anywhere near the walls, as there would have been were she in her own body. The resultant sensation was disconcerting, disorienting.

The walls squeezed down closer: the tunnel kinked, kinked again. Rhiow slipped forward absolutely silently, listening hard. When she had nightmares about being attacked here, the nightmares always involved this spot: hemmed in by stone, no room to turn around, something bad behind her, something worse waiting in front. She knew that attack so high up, so close to the light and the day, was wildly unlikely. But still, it was the unlikely things that would kill you—

Sudden relief, as the feeling of stone touching her sides fell away, and the sound changed, even though it was only the nearly inaudible little dry sound that Rhiow’s paw-pads made on the stone. She activated one of the spells she had brought with her, saying the last word of it, and well ahead of her a tiny spark of faint green light came into being, floating high up in the air. The color was carefully chosen: the Wise Ones did not see in this frequency.

Behind her, first Saash, then Arhu, and finally Urruah slipped into the larger cavern, looking around. In the faint light a vast array of more stalactites—whole glittering white or cream or rust-banded chandeliers of them—could be seen hanging from the ceiling. There were fewer standing stalagmites here; gaps in the spiky ceiling and the shattered rubble on the floor showed where the occasional groundshake or mere structural weakness had wrought much damage over many years.

“It’s pretty,” Arhu said, sounding rather befuddled.

“It is,” Saash said. “Sometimes I wish we could make a proper light when we come down here…” She shrugged her tail.

Rhiow shrugged back, and said, “Come on. We’ve got at least an hour’s walk ahead of us…” Assuming we don’t run into anything that makes us need to go another way. Oh, please, Queen Iau, just this once, let it be easy for us…

Rhiow had her doubts, though, as she led them downward through that cavern and into the next one, as to whether this prayer was at all likely to be answered. When you were in the company of a wizard on Ordeal, anything could happen, probably would. The odds against a quiet intervention were fairly high.

Behind her, as she padded through the wide entry into the next cavern, Arhu was saying to Saash, “Why are you so nervous?”

Saash breathed out. “We were down here before, about a sun’s-round ago. Not a good trip.”

“What happened?”

“Bad things,” Urruah said from behind Arhu, his voice plainly suggesting that one might happen right now if Arhu didn’t shut up.

He shut up. They walked a long way: down, always down, through galleries and arcades of stone, mighty halls as big as the concourse in Grand Central, twisting hallways as broad as the Hyatt passage. Sometimes the links between caverns squeezed to tunnels as narrow as the first one, or narrower: once the ceiling of one of these tunnels dropped so low that Rhiow had to get down on her belly and crawl forward, a few inches at a time, pushing herself along with an effort. Behind them she could hear the others doing the same, Urruah last and suffering most because of his size— grunting and swearing very softly under his breath. It was at such times, her own breath sounding intolerably loud to her, the others’, behind her, sounding even louder, that Rhiow always got the feeling that the Mountain was listening: that the stone itself was alive—though impassive—and watching them, though without any feeling of interest as a living being would understand it… without anything but a sense of weight. Hostility she could have coped with: benign neglect would have been fine. But this gave her the creeps, the sense of the stone piled up above her, the Mountain pressing down on her back, on her head…

Cut it out, she told herself, annoyed, and pushed forward.…

They went onward, and downward. The sound of water faded away to nothing or grew again, by turns. The little green light bobbed ahead of them into places where water was now actively dripping so that they were rained on under the earth, and Saash muttered and hissed under her breath, having to stop every twenty paces or so to shake water out of her eyes or smooth back into place some patch of fur that she simply could not leave alone any longer. Generally Saash was pretty good about controlling her fur fixation when she was on errantry, but down here she had problems, and Rhiow was in no mood to call her on them: she had problems of her own. The weight of the stone, the silence of it… watching…

She thought of the cool stony regard of the statue of Queen Iau in the Met and broke away from the other imagery with pleasure. The comfortable, dusky blue light of that space: it would be a pleasure to be back up there again, strolling among the ancient things. Rhiow thought of the clay chicken pot there, with a very realistic chicken carved on the upper side of it, and how she had laughed once to see an almost exact duplicate of the thing in the window of a kitchen shop in the upper Eighties, off First Avenue. Down in this darkness, it was all too easy to stop believing in sunlight, and museums, and traffic noise, and taxi horns blaring, and all the rest of normal life in the city. Yet all those things—the buildings, the ehhif, the noise, and the hurry— had their roots here, in the roots of the Mountain, in this darkness, this silence. Without this, none of those could exist.

They went onward, and downward. Several times Rhiow stopped, and the others—perhaps looking elsewhere—ran into her from behind, or into each other, so that soft hisses were exchanged, or the occasional cuff. Once Arhu—who had been uncharacteristically silent, catching the others’ mood, or perhaps himself unnerved at the way he was starting to hear the waiting, listening stone—crowded too close to Saash. She stopped suddenly, perhaps hearing something: Arhu bumped into her, Urruah bumped into Arhu, and Arhu turned around and actually hit Urruah in the head. Rhiow turned just in time to see the pale green spark of surprise in Urruah’s eyes, the flicker of anger, and then the sudden and very welcome return of humor. He said rrrrrrr under his breath, and Arhu backed into Saash, who promptly smacked nun.

Arhu started to say rrrrrr on his own behalf, but Rhiow shouldered between him and Saash. “All right,” she said, “come on. Tension. All our nerves are shredded like the Great Tom’s ears at the moment: why try to pretend they’re not? We don’t have much farther to go. Arhu, how are you holding up?”

“It reminds me of, of—” His tail was lashing. “Never mind. Let’s go.”

They went on again: still downward. The sound of dripping water had faded away again; there was nothing now to be heard but their own breaths, and the faint sound of their paw-pads on the dry, rough stone—sometimes a tchk as one of them kicked or shifted a bit of stone, and the sound fell flat and loud into the surrounding stillness. The little green light was starting to make Rhiow’s eyes water, and sometimes her concentration on it faltered, so that it flickered slightly in the dark, like a candle guttering out. It would be nice, she thought, if there were wizardries you could just start and ignore afterwards…But there were no such things. A wizardry needed attention at regular intervals, re-description of its basic tenets, of the space you intended to affect, and the effect you were trying to have; otherwise it lapsed—

—the light went out—

Rhiow stopped short. I didn’t do that—

Utter stillness behind her. The others were holding their breaths. Then Arhu whispered, “Is that a light up there?”

Her eyes were relaxing back to handling complete darkness again, or trying to—in night this total, even the keenest-eyed feline was helpless. But there was indeed a faint, faint glow coming from up ahead—

It’s the catenary, she thought. Thank you, Iau.

But why did my light go out?…

“It’s the power source,” she whispered back to Arhu. “We’re almost where we’re going. Saash?”

The dim, dim light started to seem brighter with time; as she turned, Rhiow could actually see Saash’s face, and her ears working. She had the best hearing of any of them.

“Nothing,” she said very softly. “Let’s do what we have to, Rhi, and get ourselves out of here again. We’ve been lucky.”

So far, Rhiow heard her add.

Silently Rhiow agreed. “The next chamber is very big,” she said to Arhu. “It has to be: the catenary structure is what feeds power up to the gate loci, and its inwoven wizardry very carefully controls a large clear space around it. We’ll have to deactivate that wizardry before we start working, and before that we’ll be laying down a protective circle. You must stay inside that circle at all costs, no matter what happens to any of us: if you venture outside it while the catenary’s control wizardry is down, and accidentally come in direct contact with the energy of the catenary—you’ll be dead, that’s all. Clear about that?”

“Uh huh,” Arhu said, and Rhiow heard him gulp.

“Good. Come on, crew.”

She led the way toward the faint glow. The tunnel narrowed and kinked again, then opened out into the next chamber.

Here the stone was more gray than pale. The chamber had numerous openings, and a floor that was flattish and devoid of stalagmites, dropping to a shallow depression in its middle. From that depression, right out of the solid stone of the floor, almost straight up to the ceiling and apparently into and through it, a tightly coiled and interwoven bundle of hyperstrings stretched. Up and down it, in many colors, ran a fierce, bitter light, much more dangerous-looking than the weft of the gates above. The whole structure jittered and sizzled with power, all the while wavering slightly in the air as if it were a plant swaying in some breeze. The effect was actually caused by the hyperstrings’ bundled structure being more than usually affected by changes in gravitic stresses and the local magnetic field, and, for all Rhiow knew, by neutrino flow.

“Wow,” Arhu said from behind her. “How are you going to fix this?”

“By shutting it down and taking it apart,” Rhiow said. “Urruah?”

“I’ll make a circle,” he said, and started pacing out, to one side of the cavern, the protected area from which they would operate. As he paced, looking intently at the floor and occasionally pushing a bit of cracked stone or rubble out of the way, the sigils and symbols of the Speech started to appear glowing on the stone, a long flowing sentence-equation. All their names, and descriptions of them all, were woven into it as well: otherwise the spell would have no way to know who it was protecting. All the rest of the written circle, looking more and more as Urruah worked like a glowing vinework of words in the Speech, was in the most technical of its dialects, mostly involving the control and redirection of energy flows, and based on words that had originally been Ailurin. Of all wizards working on Earth, the People knew most about energy—being able to clearly perceive aspects of it that ehhif and other species’ wizards couldn’t. Even nonwizardly People had an affinity with warmth, a link to fire and the Sun, which other species had noticed: it was traceable back to this native talent for seeing and managing energy flows.

Rhiow glanced at Saash: she was watching the openings into the cave, listening, on guard. Rhiow strolled over to have a look at Urruah’s work—it was routine, in a group wizardry, to check your teammates’ work, as a failsafe to catch errors. Urruah was making a third pass around the circle, its design growing more and more complex. Again and again the symbol for the word auw, “energy,” appeared in numerous compound forms. Most of the terms that Urruah was using here were specialist terminologies relating to auwsshui’f, the term for the “lower electromagnetic spectrum,” which besides describing “sub-matter” relationships such as string and hyperstring function also took in quantum particles, faster-than-light particles, wavicles, and sub-atomics. He was paying less attention, for this spell’s purposes, to efviauw, the electromagnetic spectrum, or iofviauw, the “upper electromagnetic spectrum,” involving straightforward plasma functions, fission, fusion, and gravitic force: gating energies were by and large subtler and more dangerous than any of these.

The circle completed, Urruah stopped after a few moments and actually panted a little, looking back at his handiwork.

“You all right?”

“Yes,” he said. “It just takes it out of you a little, dumping it all out at once like that.”

“I know. Nice job, though.” Rhiow paced around the circle, looking at it. “Seems complete. Saash? Come check your parameters. Arhu, look at this—”

The other two came over. Rhiow pointed at one gappy sequence of symbols. “See that?” she said to Arhu. “That’s your name—or the version of it we use for spelling. Look at the version of your name that the the Whisperer shows you inside your head—check it against this version, make sure this one’s right. A spell is nothing but descriptions of things, and people, and something you want to happen. When you trigger the spell, the description it contains will change what you’ve described. Describe yourself wrong, and you’ll change … whether you like it or not.”

He squinted at the glowing network of symbols. “Yeah. Uh, right.”

’Take your time over it. Be sure. Saash?”

“It’s fine. He knows me well enough by now.” She glanced up at Urruah, amused. “Though I’m not sure I scratch that much.”

“If you don’t now,” Urruah said, with some amusement, “you will later.”

Saash hissed, a sound of affectionate annoyance. Arhu looked up then and said, “I think—” He put a paw out, hesitated. “Can I touch it?”

“Sure,” Urruah said, “it’s not active yet.”

“There’s a piece missing here—” He put a paw on one spot where there was a “place-holding” gap with several graceful curves stitched over it, indicating, to a wizard’s eye, To be continued… All their names had such gaps, here and there, but Arhu’s had whole chains of them. “She—” he said, and sounded embarrassed. “She says—”

“Go ahead, put it in,” Urruah said. “The matrix will pick it up from you. Make a picture of it in your head.”

Arhu frowned and thought, while he did so jutting his chin out in a way that made Rhiow smile slightly, thinking of Yafh around the corner from her: he got a similar “concentrating” look while pondering imponderables, endearing because of how witless it made him look. After a second, a pair of symbols appeared in the place-holding area, and the to-be-continued sigil relocated itself farther along in the diagram. Rhiow looked thoughtfully at the new symbols. They looked familiar, but she couldn’t place them…

The Whisperer spoke briefly in her ear, just a word or two.

Rhiow froze. Oh, no, she thought. Not really. No…

She straightened hurriedly. “All right,” she said, “we’re in order. Saash, are you ready? Anything that needs to be done to the catenary before we get inside?”

“Not a thing. Let’s start.”

“Arhu, jump in,” Rhiow said, and did so herself.

Saash followed; Urruah was last in. He planted his paws, claws out, in the “trigger” area of the spell, and said the word that would initiate the circle.

It blazed, the vinework that had been distinguishable part by part and in detail when dimmer now bloomed into a blur of white-golden fire, shimmering and alive. Urruah looked vacant-eyed for a moment, then said to Rhiow, “It’s powered up for the next twenty minutes or so.”

“Good. Let’s go. Saash?”

She was sitting in the circle, scratching. Rhiow said nothing; Urruah glanced at her, his whiskers forward, and looked back down at the circle.

“Do you have a skin problem or something?” Arhu said.

Rhiow hissed at him and cuffed him, not too hard. “If she did, it would still be preferable to your tact problem,” she said. “You just be still and watch.”

Saash sat up then and looked over at the catenary.

It began, slowly, to drift toward them: a pillar of structured, high-tension fire, like a rainbow pulled out into hair-fine strands and plugged into much too high a current, ready to blow something out: itself or you.

Arhu watched it come, wide-eyed. “Is this safe?” he said.

“Not at all,” Rhiow said calmly. “If that power came undone and we weren’t in here, we’d be ash. If that. The power bound up in that could melt the whole island of the city into a bowl of slag half a mile deep if it was given enough time. The only thing that’s going to control it, when it gets in here with us, is Saash. Got any more comments on the condition of her fur?”

He stared, watched the catenary drift closer. “Nice color,” Arhu said, and his tongue went in and out twice, very quickly.

He II have a sore nose before the day’s done, at this rate, Rhiow thought; but at the same time, she was less interested in the catenary than in that symbol in Arhu’s name, now lost in the bloom of fire of the activated circle.

The catenary drifted up against the boundary of the circle, touched it. Light flared at the contact, and the catenary bounced away, drifted back again: another flare, a smell of something singeing, not here but somehow somewhere else. Rhiow’s nostrils flared. It was the scent of the kind of magic they worked with, in combination with the gate-forces, as inimitable and unmistakable a scent as the cinder-iron-ozone reek of the Grand Central tracks. Subatomic-particle annihilations, hyperstring stress, who knew what caused the smell, or whether it was even real? It meant that things were working … for the moment.

The burning, twisting column of the catenary pushed against the circle, bowing it inward in one spot Saash’s eyes were fixed on it, rainbowed with its fires as she guided the catenary in by force of will toward the spell that would catch it and hold it still for operation. “It’s going to pop through in a second,” she said to Urruah, her voice calm enough, but strained a little higher than usual. “Got the pocket ready for it?”

“Ready.” He slid his left paw over to another part of the circle, sank his claws into the fire.

The catenary pushed farther into the circle, the stream and sheen of light down its length getting brighter and fiercer, the smell getting stronger. The circle bent inward to accommodate its passage, a curve-bud of light pushing inward around the contour of the column of fire. Abruptly, with a jerk, the catenary broke free of the circle, broke through—

A smaller circle, the completed “bud,” now surrounded the base of the column, where it erupted from the stone: another one encircled it higher up. Rhiow saw Arhu’s nervous glance upward. “The spell’s spherical,” she said. “You need to extend at least one extra dimension along when you’re working with these things.”

Arhu backed away from the catenary as it drifted into the center of the circle, stopped there. “All right,” Saash said, pacing around it once and looking it over. “See that bundle there? The one that looks mostly blue. That’s the one for the gate that’s giving us trouble.”

“How do you want to handle this?”

Saash sat down and had another scratch, looking oddly meditative and calm for someone who was nose to nose with a concentration of power in which a small nuclear explosion might be drowned out, if not entirely missed. “I’m going to shut down everything but Penn, and the one Grand Central gate that Khi-t’s holding patent,” she said. “The Penn power linkages are right over on the other side of the bundle … no need to involve them, and it’ll give anyone who needs to do a transit somewhere to divert to for a little while.”

“Right.” Kit, Rhiow said inwardly, we’re taking all the Grand Central gates down but yours.

Right—we’II divert anyone who shows up. Let us know when you’re done.

Saash got up, finished with her scratch, then paced once more around the catenary, looking it up and down. One spot she leaned in to look at with great care, a braided cord of blue and blue-white fires as thick as the wrist of her forepaw. With great care and delicacy, she leaned closer, then shut her eyes—and bit it.

Sparks flew, the light grew blinding; the singeing smell got stronger. Arhu stared.

More than half the catenary went dark, or nearly so.

Saash straightened, looked the pillar of fire up and down. “All right,” she said. “That’s better.” The “dark” bundles and strands weren’t completely dead, but now shone only as brightly as the weft of one of the gate matrices up at the surface. She sat up on her haunches in her preferred operating position and reached into the dark bundles, pulling out a hefty double clawful of them.

“Here,” she said suddenly to Arhu, “come on over here.” He did, looking dubious. “Right. Now hold these for me. Don’t be scared, they won’t hurt you. Much,” she added, her whiskers going forward just a little as she shoved the pulled-out strings at him, and Arhu, more from reflex than anything else, grabbed them and hung on. His eyes went wide with shock as he felt the sizzle of the catenary’s power in his paws—the ravening fire of it just barely leashed, and as anxious to get at him as a guard dog on a chain.

“Good,” Saash said, not even looking at him as she pulled out another of the bundles of hyperstrings and handed them off to Rhiow. Rhiow settled herself on her haunches as well, hanging onto the strings, and Saash looked over the bundle, slipped a careful claw behind three or four of the strings, and slashed them. They leapt free, glowing and hissing softly, and lashing like angry tails. “Don’t let those hit you,” she said conversationally to Arhu, “they’ll sting. Rhi, remember last time, when that whole bundle came loose at once?”

“Please,” Rhiow muttered. “I’d rather be attacked by bees. At least they can sting you only once.”

Saash was elbow-deep in the catenary now, slowing down a little in her work. “Hmm,” she said. “I wonder…” She leaned in again, pulled forward one particular minor bundle of strings, glowing a pale gold, and took it behind her front fangs, closed her mouth; then looked unfocused for a moment, an expression like the “tasting” look she made when breathing breaths with someone. After a few seconds, Saash’s eyes flicked sideways toward Rhiow. “Aha,” she said.

“ ‘Aha,’ ” said Rhiow, slightly edgy. Her mind was on those openings all around them, but more on Arhu. “Care to give us an explanation of what that means in the technical sense?”

“String fatigue,” Saash said.

Rhiow blinked. You came across it, occasionally, but more usually in the gate matrices, higher up. Usually a hyperstring had to be most unusually stressed by some repetitive local phenomenon to degrade to the point where it stopped holding matter and energy together correctly.

“There’s a bad strand here,” Saash said. “It’s not conducting correctly. Tastes ‘sick.’ ”

“What would have caused that?” Urruah said.

Saash shrugged her tail. “Sunspots?”

“Oh please.”

“No, seriously. You get more neutrinos at a maximum. Add that to the flare weather we’ve been having recently— get a good dose of high-energy stuff through a weak area in a hyperstring, it’s likely enough to unravel. In any case, it’s not passing power up the line to the gate.”

“I thought the power conduits were all redundant, though,” Urruah said.

“They are. That’s the cause of the problem here. The ‘sick’ strand’s energy states have contaminated the redundant backup as well because they’re identical and right against each other in the bundle.” Saash looked rather critically at the catenary. “Someone may have to come down here and rebraid the whole thing to prevent it happening again.”

“Please don’t say that,” Rhiow said. “Can you fix it now?”

“Oh, I can cut out the sick part and patch it with material from another string,” said Saash. “They’re pretty flexible. I’d just like to know a little more about the conditions that produced this effect.”

“Well,” Rhiow said, “better get patching. Are the other strings all right?”

“I’m going to finish the diagnostic,” Saash said. “Two minutes.”

They seemed long to Rhiow, although nothing bad was happening. Her forearms were aching a little with the strain of holding the hyperstrings at just the angle Saash had given them to her; and meanwhile her eyes kept dropping to that symbol, almost lost in the fire of the circle but not quite. It was simple: two curves, a slanted straight line bisecting them—in its way, rather like the symbol that even the ehhif had known to carve on the Queen’s breast.

The Eye—

She looked up suddenly and found Arhu sitting there with his claws clenched full of hyperstrings and gazing down at it, too, while Saash, oblivious, pulled out several bright strings in her claws and began to knit them together. Arhu’s expression was peculiar, in its way as meditative as Saash’s look had been earlier.

“They have a word for it, don’t they?” he said.

“For what?” Rhiow said. “And who?”

“For this,” Arhu said, glancing up again at his paws full of dulled fire. “Ehhif.”

“Cat’s-cradle,” she said. “For them it’s just play they do with normal string, a kitten’s game.”

“They must have seen us.”

“So I think, sometimes,” Rhiow said.

Arhu’s glance fell again to the symbol, to the Eye. “So has someone else,” he said.

Rhiow licked her nose and swallowed, nervous.

“All right,” Saash said after a minute. “That ought to be the main conduit of the bad gate repaired. I’ll just do the second here, and we’ll be finished.”

“Hurry,” Rhiow said.

“Can’t hurry quality work, Rhi,” Saash said, intent on what she was doing. “How’s the circle holding up?”

Urruah examined it critically. “Running a little low on charge at the moment. How much longer is this going to take you?”

“Oh … five minutes. Ten at the outside.”

“I’ll give it another jolt.” Urruah bent down: the circle dimmed slightly, then brightened.

Arhu looked up from the circle then. Not at the catenary, not at Saash: up into the empty air.

“They’re coming,” he said.

Rhiow looked at him with alarm. “Who?”

But she was afraid she knew perfectly well.

“He didn’t lie,” Arhu said, looking at Urruah with rather skewed intensity. “They are here.”

“Uh oh,” Urruah said. “You don’t mean—”

“The dragons—!”

And then the roaring began. It was not very near yet—but it was entirely too near, echoing down through one of those openings … or all of them.

Rhiow rapidly went through the spells she was carrying in her head, looking for the one that would have the most rapid results against the attackers she was expecting. One of them was particularly effective: it ran down the adversary’s nerves and rendered them permanently unresponsive to chemical stimulus—the wizardry equivalent of nerve gas, and tailored specifically to the problem at hand. But it wouldn’t be able to get out of a protective circle; you would have to drop the circle to use it. And those who were coming were fast. If you miscalculated, if one of them jumped at you and put a big long claw through your brain before you could get the last word out—

“Rhiow? Rhiow!”

Her head snapped around. Arhu was still sitting there with his claws full of strings, but now they were trembling because he was. “What’s that noise?” he said.

“What you said was coming,” she said.

“What I said—” He looked confused.

“This is what he did before, Rhi,” Urruah said, looking grim. “Saash?”

“Not right now,” Saash said, her voice desperately level. “If I don’t finish this other patch, the whole job’ll have to be done again. Let them come.”

“Oh, sure,” Urruah said. “Let them ‘tree’ us inside the circle, five bodies thick! Then what are we supposed to—”

“No,” Arhu said, and the word started as a hiss of protest, scaled up to a yowl. “No—!”

The Children of the Serpent burst in.

Rhiow knew that ehhif had somewhat rediscovered dinosaurs in recent years. Or rather, rediscovered them again, only more visually than usual this time. She had once heard Iaehh and Hhuha idly discussing this tendency for each new generation of their kind to become fascinated with the long names, the huge sizes and terrible shapes. But in Rhiow’s opinion, the fascination had to do with the ehhif perception that such creatures were a long time ago and far away. And the most recent resurrection of the fascination, in that movie and its sequel, were rooted in a variant on the same perception: that long ago and far away was where and when such creatures belonged.

But this too had become one of the places where they belonged. They did not take kindly to intruders. And they certainly would not let any leave alive…

Arhu started to crouch down, trembling, at the sight of them, as if he had forgotten what he was holding. “Saash!” Rhiow hissed, and without missing a beat, Saash let go of the strings she had been working on—they snapped back into place in the catenary—and took hold of the ones Rhiow had held. Rhiow bent down before Arhu could finish collapsing, and snatched the strings out of his paws. He was wide-eyed, crouching right down into a ball of terror a pitiful and incongruous sight with him in this body, which would have been large and powerful enough to bring down the biggest wildebeest. But the hunt was in the heart, as the saying went: Rhiow couldn’t entirely blame him for not having the heart for this one as the Children of the Serpent poured into the cavern and hit the circle, claws out, roaring hunger and rage.

Urruah lifted his head and roared too, but the sound was almost drowned in the wave of shrieks of hate that followed it. Single sickle-claws three feet long scrabbled against the circle, jaws half the size of one of their bodies tried to slash or bite their way in; and everywhere on your body, though nothing touched you physically, you felt the pressure of the little, cold, furious eyes. There was intelligence there, but it was drowned in hatred, and gladly drowned. The impression of outraged strength, pebbled and mottled greenish- and bluish-hided bodies throwing themselves again and again at the circle; the impression of raging speed, and the interminable screaming, a storm of sound in this closed-in place: that was what you had to deal with, rather than any single, rational impression of This is a deinonychus, that is a carnosaur—

“That’s what it was,” Arhu was moaning, almost helplessly, like a starving kitten. “That’s what it was—”

Rhiow swallowed. “The circle’s holding?” she said to Urruah.

“Of course it is. Nothing they can do about it. But how are we going to get out?”

It was a fair question. He had said “five deep”; possibly he had been optimistic. The cavern was now packed so full of saurians that there was no seeing the far wall, except for the part near the roof, above the tallest heads. Rhiow had a sudden ridiculous vision of what Grand Central would look like at rush hour if it were full of saurians, not people: a whole lot like this. We need shopping bags, though, she thought, pacing around the circle, forcing herself to look into the terrible little eyes, the jaws snapping futilely but with increasing frustration and violence against the immaterial barrier of the circle: and Reeboks and briefcases. Or no, maybe the briefcases wouldn’t be in the best of taste—

“Done,” Saash said.

“The whole repair?”

“Yes. I’m going to bring up the rest of the Grand Central complex again,” Saash said. “Tell our connection to get ready.”

Heard that. Kit said. We’re set. Rhiow, if you need help, there’s backup waiting.

Might need it, Rhiow said, but it’s hard to say. Hang on—

Saash leaned into the catenary again, put out one single claw, inserted it into an insignificant-looking little loop in one string—it looked like a snag in a sweater—and pulled.

The loop straightened, vanished. The catenary came alive again, the full fire of its power bursting up through the strings that had been offline. Saash stood watching it, her head tilted to one side, listening.

“Feels right,” she said. “Khi-t?”

We’ve got the gates back, said another voice: Nita’s. Want us to test the bad one?

“Please.”

The screaming and scrabbling and clawing went on all around them, undiminished. Okay, it hyperextended all right—

“I saw that,” Saash said. “The catenary’s feeding the patched string properly. Shut it again?”

—Closed.

Saash sat down and started to scratch again, looking surprisingly satisfied with herself, under the circumstances. “I deserve some milk.”

“So do we,” Urruah roared at her, “and we also deserve to get out of here with our pelts intact, which seems increasingly unlikely at the moment! What in Iau’s name are we supposed to do now?”

Saash looked at the catenary, then back at Rhiow, and slowly her whiskers started to go forward.

“Oh, no, Saash,” Rhiow said. “Oh no.”

“Why not? Have you got anything better?” Saash said. “You want to try the odds of dropping the circle and having time to hit them with the neural inhibitor? I don’t think so, Rhi! There are so many of them leaning against that spell right now, they’d just squash us to death the second we dropped it, never mind what else they’d do to us. Which they will, as you remember from last time.”

Rhiow swallowed. Arhu stared at Saash in dumb terror. Urruah said, “Just what are you thinking of?”

Saash started to smile again, a smile entirely in character with a giant prehistoric predator-cat. “I’m going to push the catenary back out there without its ‘insulating’ spell in place,” Saash said.

“Your brain has turned to hairballs!” Rhiow shouted. “What if it degrades the circle on the way through?”

“It won’t.”

“How sure are you?”

“Very sure. I’ll leave the ‘insulation’ in place until after I’ve shoved it outside.”

“Oh, wonderful, just great! And what about when you take the insulation off, have you thought that it might just degrade the circle then, and blast us all to ashes?”

“It shouldn’t.”

“Shouldn’t—!”

“You want to sit here and wait them out?”

Rhiow looked out at the room full of roaring, shrieking saurians. Those at the far side of the room were already settling down to wait.

“It won’t work. No matter how long we sit here, they’ll wait,” Saash said. “And sooner or later we’re going to need food and sleep, and as soon as the last one of us goes to sleep, and the circle weakens enough to let them in—”

Urruah looked from Rhiow to Saash, then back to Rhiow again. “She’s got a point,” he said.

Rhiow’s tail was lashing. “You think you have a life or so to spare?”

“You want to find out if it matters,” Urruah said, more gently than necessary, “down here?”

Rhiow licked her nose again, then looked at Saash. “All right,” she said. “I concur.”

“Right,” Saash said.

She looked at the catenary. It drifted toward the edge of the circle; its own protective circles drifted with it.

Some of the saurians nearest the place where it was about to make contact looked at the catenary with the first indications of concern. Its rainbow fire fell into their big dark eyes, turning them into a parody of People’s eyes—bright slits, dark irises; they blinked, backed away slightly.

“They’re not wild about the light,” Urruah said.

Saash nodded. The small circle surrounding the catenary made contact with the larger one: they “budded” together again. As if becoming somewhat uneasy at this, more of the saurians began to back away, and the screaming and roaring started to take on an uncomfortable edge. Some of the saurians nearer the walls stood up again, began to mill around, catching their companions’ unease. Saash closed her eyes then and held quite still.

In one swift motion the catenary popped back out through the circle. It was now bereft of the smaller, “child” circles that the main protective circles had generated around it, and saurians jostled away from it as it drifted quickly back to its original position in the center of the cavern.

The saurians parted around it, closing together again nearest the circle, and going back to their raging and scrabbling against its invisible barrier. Saash looked over their heads as best she could, past them, to where the catenary had now settled itself back in place.

“Ah1 right?” she said. “Mind your eyes, now.”

Rhiow started to close hers but was caught too late. The catenary suddenly stopped being merely a fiercely bright bundle of rainbows and turned into a raging floor-to-ceiling column of pure white fire. Lightning forked out of it in all directions, at least what would have passed for lightning. The whole cavern whited out in a storm of blinding fire that hissed and gnawed at their circle like a live thing. All Rhiow’s fur stood on end, and her eyes fizzed in their sockets. Behind her, Arhu cried out in fear. The desperate shrieks of the saurians were lost in the shrieking roar of the unleashed catenary.

Eventually things got quiet again, and Rhoiw scrubbed at her tearing eyes, trying to rub some vision back into them. When she could see again, the catenary was once more sizzling with its normal light. But there was little else left in the cavern that was not reduced to charcoal or ash, and nothing at all left that was alive in the strictest sense… though bits and pieces here and there continued to move with lizardly persistence.

Saash stood there, looking around her with grim satisfaction. “Definitely,” she said, “not at all wild about the light.”

Urruah got up and shook himself, making a face at the smell. “I take it I can drop the circle now.”

“It’s as safe as it’s going to get, I think,” Rhiow said, “and once it’s down, we can use the other spell if we need it.” She went over to the crouching Arhu. “Arhu, come on—we have to go.”

He looked up and around him, blinking and blinded, but Rhiow somehow got the idea that this blindness had nothing to do with the light “Yes,” he said, and got up. Urruah had hardly collapsed the circle before Arhu was making hurriedly for the cavern-entrance through which they had come. “We have to hurry,” he said. “It’s coming—”

Urruah looked from Arhu to Rhiow. “Now what?”

“What’s coming?” Saash said.

“The greater one,” he said. “The father. The son. Quick, quick, it’s coming!” His voice started to shade upward into a panicky roar. “We’ve got to get out before it comes!”

Rhiow’s tail was lashing with confusion and concern. “I’m willing to take him at his word,” she said. “There’s no reason to linger—we’ve done what we came for. Let’s get back up to the light.”

It took less time than going down had taken. Despite the thought that they might shortly be attacked again, they were all lighter of spirit than they had been—all of them but Arhu. He wouldn’t be quiet: the whole way up through the caverns with him was a litany of “It’s coming” and “That’s what it was…” and “the greater one,” and an odd phrase that Rhiow heard only once: “the sixth claw…” Arhu didn’t grow silent again until they came up into the last cavern, past the great teeth of stone, to see the red-gold light of that world’s sunset, and the green shadows beneath the trees beyond the stony threshold. There he stood for a long time while Saash checked the main matrix for the repaired gate, and he gazed at the declining sun as if he thought he might never see it again.

The thought had certainly been on Rhiow’s mind earlier; but now that they were up and out, there were other concerns. She glanced through the patent gate to the darkness beneath Grand Central, from which Kit and Nita were looking through, interested. “Many thanks,” she said. “Having you here as backup lent us the confidence to go all out.”

Kit made a small, only fractionally mocking bow: Nita grinned. “Our pleasure,” she said. “We’re all in the same business, after all. Want us to leave this open for you?”

Rhiow looked over at Saash. “No,” Saash said, turning away from the matrix she was checking. “I want to check its open-close cycle a couple more times. But nicely done, my wizards. Go well, and let’s meet well again.”

“Dai,” the two said; and the gate snapped from its view of the Grand Central tracks to the usual shining warp/weft pattern.

Rhiow turned to Saash, who said, “The matrix is just fine now. That design flaw in the braiding of the catenary is going to have to be looked at, at some point. But not just now…”

“No,” Rhiow said. “I’ll talk to Har’lh about it; I’ll have to report to him this evening anyway. But, Saash … what a job. And you did wonderfully, too,” she said to Urruah. “Not many circles could have taken that punishment.”

She went over to where Arhu was standing. He looked at Rhiow with an expression equally composed of embarrassment and fear.

“I screwed up,” he said.

She breathed in, breathed out. “No,” she said, and gave him a quick lick behind one ear. He stared at her, shocked. “You started your Ordeal. Now at least we have some kind of hint of what your problems are going to be.”

He looked at her, and away again, toward the sunset: the sun was gone now, the darkness falling fast.

“Yes,” he said, in a voice of complete despair. “So do I.”