The Book of Night With Moon (42 page)

It took the saurian two bites to get the
tehn'hhir
down.

Urruah, turning around from dropping a couple more of the saurians, saw this, and swore bitterly. "Oh, great," he said, "we're gonna have fun patching
that!
"

Across the Sheep Meadow, the last cries of the remaining saurians were fading away. Urruah hissed out the last word of the neural inhibitor, and the saurian now leaping off the stage was hit by it in midair; it crashed into the right-hand speaker tower as it fell, and the tower tottered, sparks jumping and arcing from its broken connections. After a moment the speaker tower steadied again and sat there, sizzling and snapping, the noise fighting with the dwindling seacrash roar of angry and frightened
ehhif
voices as, en masse, the audience fled the Sheep Meadow.

Rhiow and Urruah and Arhu found Saash after a little while and went in search of Tom. He was out in the center of the meadow, helping many more wizards who had followed them from Grand Central to try to stabilize the situation and get the "patch" of congruent time in place.

"…It's not so much a problem of power as of logistics," Tom said wearily, rubbing his face as he looked around at hundreds, maybe thousands, of saurian bodies left scattered across the great open space, and many hurt or dead humans. "We just need to keep enough wizards in the area to make sure the patch takes. Grand Central's already patched, in fact: the derailments never happened, the tracks are clean. But the price…" He sighed. "A lot of people volunteered a lot of time off their lives tonight. We have a fair number of sick and injured: they're outside the patch because they intervened as wizards… so they're stuck with the results of that timeline."

"Casualties?" Rhiow said, very softly.

"Four of us," Tom said. "We were very lucky it wasn't a whole lot more. As it is, we're going to have to find ways to cover their deaths in the line of duty…" Rhiow twitched her tail at the sight of the lines of pain deepening in his face. "Fortunately, there's nothing forensics can do about wizardry. There will be no trace of the cause in which they died. But their families…" He shook his head.

"What about the park?" Saash said.

"The patch is being arranged now," Tom said, looking with a sigh at the half-demolished stage, the bodies of saurians festooned all over the skewed and crumpled speaker towers, the orchestra chairs scattered, the heaviest instruments lying overturned. Overhead, police helicopters were starting to circle, directing their bright spotlights down at what must have looked like a most peculiar riot. The streets all around the park on both sides were full of people: not the usual leisurely walk home from a mass concert, but people hurrying to get away from something they couldn't understand and were very much afraid to. That susurrus of their voices, frightened, bemused, echoed in the stone canyons, mingling with the ratchet of the helicopter rotors overhead.

"Can we really heal all of this?" Urruah said, sounding rather desperate. "Even
that?"
He looked over toward where the last saurian lay, the one who had made a rather high-calorie meal of the third
tehn'hhir.

Tom nodded again, with a tired smile. "We're starting work more quickly than we could with Grand Central: the time-graft should take perfectly. The gate will never have come rolling down here;
he'll
never have become an hors d'oeuvre; all these other people who were hurt or died, won't have been hurt or died… except for our own people, of course." It was the practicing wizard's one weakness where time paradox was involved. If you knew that such patching was possible, you yourself (should you die) could not be included in it; the unconscious mind, refusing to accept the violation of the paradox, would dissolve the reconnection with its former body as often as such reconnection was attempted.

"You're not going to be able to do much more patching like that, though," Saash said softly. "The Powers won't permit so much of it."

"No," Tom said. "We've got to get busy reweaving the gates so that we can discover the source of all this trouble: it's Downside… far Downside, I'm afraid. Whatever engineered this attack won't take its defeat kindly. A worse breakthrough will already be in the planning stages; it's got to be stopped by more conventional methods… for if you patch time too aggressively in a given area, the presence of so many grafts will start denaturing normal time, so that things that really
did
happen will start excising themselves. Not good…"

Rhiow shuddered at the thought. "I'll speak to the Penn team," she said. "We've got to get at least a little rest tonight, a few hours' worth. After that we'll get at least one access gate up immediately." She looked around at her team. "And we'll get ourselves down there and see what the Queen may show us as regards Har'lh's whereabouts."

Tom nodded.

"He's not dead," Arhu said.

Tom's head snapped around. Everyone stared at Arhu.

"What?"

"He's not dead. But they have him."

"Where is he?"

"In the claws of the Eldest," said Arhu.

Rhiow shuddered again, harder this time. Should you meet the Lone Power in battle, the Whispering prescribed the correct form of address:
Eldest, Fairest and Fallen… greeting and defiance.
It was felt that you, like the Gods, might be about to try to defeat that Power, but there was no need to be rude about it.

"How will we find him?" Tom said.

"By going Downside," said Arhu, with unusual clarity but also a tremulousness in his voice that Rhiow found odd, "and crossing the River of Fire…"

Rhiow blinked at the phrase… then resolutely set that issue aside for later consideration. "Let's all go home and get some sleep," she said. "I'll be along for you all before dawn."

It was about an hour later when Rhiow slipped through the cat door into a dark apartment.

They're in bed… good.

But they weren't. The bedroom door was open: no one was in there. Still, Rhiow heard breathing—

—Iaehh, sitting in a chair, in the dark.

This is odd,
Rhiow thought.
Can't he sleep? When he can't sleep, he sits up and reads till all hours. And where's Hhuha? Did she have to go away on this business thing?

She went to him, wove around his legs briefly. He didn't move.

Rhiow reared up, patted his leg with a paw.

Very slowly, Iaehh looked at her….

There was something about the set of his face that frightened Rhiow: it had stopped moving, seeming almost frozen into a mask. For someone whose face was normally so mobile, the effect was bizarre. Rhiow crouched back a little, then jumped up into Iaehh's lap, the better to be in contact with him.

It was not something she would normally do, but her fear spurred Rhiow on, and very carefully, she slipped her consciousness into the upper levels of Iaehh's mind. It wasn't hard; it never was with
ehhif
— their thoughts tended to be all on the surface, though the imagery was sometimes strange, and the colors could hurt your eyes.

—not much color in the imagery here, though. White tile, on the walls and the floor, and—

—cold, on a cold steel table, Hhuha. And her
face—

"No!!"
Rhiow yowled, and leapt out of Iaehh's lap so violently that she scratched him.

He didn't even bother swearing at her, as he usually did when she forgot her claws. He just sat there, staring down at the floor, and then put his face down in his hands, and started to cry.

"No," he moaned, "no, no, no, no…"

Rhiow sat there in the dimness, looking at him, starting to go numb.

Hhuha. Dead…

It didn't matter how.
Gone.
Arhu's artless question started ringing in her head:
You mean die
dead?
Like a bug, or an
ehhif?

Of course you never think of it happening to one of
your
ehhif
, something in the back of her mind said heartlessly.
They're young yet, they're in their prime; they've got years ahead of them. Until something unexpected comes along— a heart attack, or a stroke, or just a taxi that turns a corner too fast because someone in the backseat is trying to stick up the driver—

But,
you think,
there'll be plenty of time with them, plenty of time to sort out the possible answers to the question: where do
ehhif
go when they die? For there has to be
somewhere,
even though they've got only one life.

Doesn't there?…

Iaehh was crying bitterly now, one long tearing sob after another. Rhiow looked up at him, simply shocked numb, unable to accept the reality of what had happened… but the image was real, it
had
happened. Iaehh had now known the truth for too long to avoid accepting what had happened. It was too soon yet for Rhiow to feel that way… but that would soon change.

Very slowly she crept toward him again; silently, carefully, jumped up beside him on the chair; inched her way into his lap. "Ohh…" he moaned, and put his arms around Rhiow and hugged her close, and began crying into her fur. The image in his mind was pitifully plain, and the thought perfectly audible.
All I have left of her. All I have left… Oh,
Susan!
Oh,
Sue…!

Rhiow huddled down in his arms and didn't move, though her fur was getting wetter by the second, and the pressure of his grip hurt her. Inside, she moaned, too.

Oh, if only I could tell you how sorry I am! If only I were allowed to
speak
to you, just this once! But not even now. Not even now…

Sinking into an abyss of dumb grief, Rhiow crouched in Iaehh's arms, and wished to the Powers That Be that she too could cry….

M
uch later, very early in the morning, some of Iaehh's friends showed up at the apartment, as red-eyed and upset as he was, and took him away to "see to the arrangements." They made sure that Rhiow had plenty of food and water, and petted her, and spoke banalities about "look at her, she knows there's something wrong…" She was as polite to them as she could bring herself to be; she said goodbye to Iaehh as best she could, though even looking at him was painful at the moment, and she felt guilty because of that. The inevitable thought had already come up several times:
why her and not
you?!— and when it did, Rhiow fairly turned around in her own skin with self-loathing.

When he was gone, the pain got worse, not better. The silence, the empty apartment… which would never again have Hhuha in it… it all lay on her like lead. The empty place inside Rhiow that would never again resonate to that other, internal purr… it echoed now.

She sat hunched up in the early-morning light and stared at the floor, as Iaehh had.

This is not an accident,
she thought finally.

Impossible for it to be a coincidence. The Lone Power knew all too well when a blow was about to be struck against It. This time, It had struck the first blow: a preemptive strike, meant to make Rhiow useless for what now had to be done.
And who would say a word?
she thought.
The great love of my life is gone, my
ehhif
's dead. Of course they can't expect me to perform under these circumstances. Saash is the real expert anyway. They'll do fine without me. The Penn team will take up the slack.

The predictable excuses paraded themselves through her mind. She examined them, dispassionately, to see which one would be best suited to the job.

Ridiculous.

It was almost old Ffairh's tone of voice, except that now it was hers.
You trained me too well, you mangy old creature,
Rhiow thought bitterly.
I don't even run my own mind anymore: I keep hearing you, chiding, growling, telling me what I ought to do.

The problem was… dead or alive, his advice, Rhiow's thought, was right. She could not back away from her work, no matter how much she wanted to. And, thinking about it more, she didn't want to. If she sat here and did nothing, all she would see in her mind would be the cold tile, the cold metal table, and Hhuha….