The Book of Night With Moon (44 page)

Rhiow flinched from her pain. But the simile was apt, and it was too late now to get rid of the image of Hhuha sitting on the couch, completely surrounded by little strange-shaped pieces of cloth with paper pinned to them: hunting among them for one in particular, turning it around and around to find the place where it properly fit, and then slowly stitching it in place, while Rhiow rolled among the fragments and cuttings and threw them in the air, scuffling and scrabbling among the papers and the fabric scraps. The work on the spell had been very like that, except for the scuffling part.

Most wizards learned to keep a workspace in their minds, a place where a piece of information or a spell could be left to gestate, to be worked on or added to slowly over time. Words in the Speech would lie scattered on the floor of her mind, glowing with attention or dim with disuse; long graceful graphic arabesques, hisses or spits of sound, fragments of thought or imagery. You would come and sit in the dimness sometimes, or stroll through the untidy farrago of scents and sensations, peering at a word shattered to syllables, poking them with your paw to see if they could be coaxed or coerced into some more functional shape: pick them up and carry them around, squint at them to see what they did when conjoined— how the joint shape fulfilled or foiled the separated ones, when a phrase suddenly became part of a sentence, or tried to declare its independence and secede from a paragraph or sequence already fitted together. The tattered spell had been in this kind of shape for ever so long, for Rhiow had no idea what it was trying to be. Part of the problem was that it kept falling into impossible shapes, configurations that seemed to lead nowhere, dead-end reasonings.

Its power requirements when she found it were strange— seeming to come to almost nothing: its power output estimates were weird, too, for they seemed to indicate the kind of result that you would expect from, say, a gate's catenary— big, dangerous power, likely to burst out without warning. Rhiow wondered if the spell had gotten its signs reversed somehow when she inherited it, for this indication went right against the rules for wizardry. Every spell had its price, and the bigger the spell, the higher the price: magic was as liable to the laws of thermodynamics and conservation of matter and energy as anything else. She could feel those laws, particularly the last one, in her bones at the moment: there was an empty place where her fifth life had been….

When a spell makes no sense, you normally leave it alone and come back to it later. This Rhiow had been doing for two years, idly, with no significant result; now as she looked again at the spell, lying there in its bits and pieces— though they were larger ones than two years ago— it still said nothing to her, except that you could get almost everything for almost nothing, just by saying that you wanted it. It was a spell for the kitten-minded, for those who would chase a reflected sunbeam across the floor and think they had caught it.

She sighed.
I've done enough of that in my time,
Rhiow thought.
Here with my
ehhif
, I thought I'd caught the sunshine under my paw. Peace, and a happy, busy, exciting life: what could go wrong?…

Now I know.

Rhiow sighed again: she didn't seem able to stop. Slowly she wandered across the broad dark plain of her workspace, making her way to the place where Ffairh's instructions for the route down into the Mountain lay.

He had always been of a surprisingly visual turn of mind, even for one of the People, precise and careful: the diagram he had left her, of the twisting and turnings through the labyrinthine caverns, looked more like it had been designed using some
ehhif
's CAD/CAM program than anything else. Through it all stretched the paths of the catenaries that fed power to the world's gates: those lines of power were shadowy now, reflecting the nonfunctional status of the catenaries. All of the catenary structures branched out in the upper levels of the Mountain, each feeding one complex of gates. Farther down, in the great depths, they began to come together; and in the greatest depth, which Ffairh knew about but to which even he had never gone, all the "stems" of the catenaries fused together into one mighty trunk, the base of the "tree structure" rooted (as far as Rhiow could tell) in the deepest regions of the Earth's crust layer, and in a master gateway or portal to their energy source, whatever that was.
White hole,
Saash had said casually,
or black hole, or quasar, or whatever…

Rhiow suspected that it was more than something so merely physical; or there might indeed be such a physical linkage, but coupled to energy sources of very different kinds, in other continua right outside the local sheaf of universes. That had been Ffairh's suspicion, anyway.
Too far out for me,
Rhiow had said when he'd told her about that; Ffairh had looked at her, slightly cockeyed as he often did, and had said,
You never can tell.

She studied the map again. The way down to the root catenary, the trunk of the "tree," was a long sequence of more caverns like the ones they had traversed earlier. But Ffairh had mentioned that the caverns were densely populated with the saurians.
That I believe,
Rhiow thought, seeing again in mind the thousands of them pouring out into the upper track level of Grand Central, and then into the Sheep Meadow. He had not said much more about what he had found, except to report continued attacks by more and more of the creatures, who howled at him that they would have their revenge on him, and the "sun-world," and anything that dared to come down to them from there: that someday they would come up into the sun themselves, and then all the creatures that lived in the sun, and squandered it, would pay…

He had come away, barely, and lived to tell the tale. At the time Rhiow had wondered whether Ffairh was exaggerating, just a little, to make sure that she didn't indulge herself in casual runs to the Downside for the pleasure of owning a big cat's body. Now, though, she knew much better….

Rhiow looked over the map, marking with one claw the paths that seemed the most straightforward so that Urruah and Saash and Arhu could look at them.
The Powers only know what we'll find, of course,
she thought,
and we don't even know what we're looking for. A wizard of some kind, gone rogue… and intent on the destruction of wizardry as a whole.

The thought chilled her, for it spoke of tremendous power in their adversary.
Worse,
she thought,
the Powers may
not
know what we'll find… or it may very well be one of Them. One in particular…

Rhiow looked Ffairh's map over a last time, then turned her back on it and started back across the plain of her workspace, toward her usual egress point. She would consult with the others, show them the map, and attend to whatever final organization needed to be done; then they'd go find out what was in store for them….

Urruah's question was still echoing in Rhiow's mind:
what kind of 'something'?
She had been reluctant to answer him. It was he who had mentioned the "second Ordeal" that some very few wizards went through. The Whisperer would say only that such Ordeals were not true second ones: only first ordeals that had been somehow arrested or had a component that had not been completely resolved.
Could this really be what's happening? And which of us? Or is it all of us?…

She twitched her tail in frustration.
It may simply be that we are all, together, a weapon crafted specifically to deal with whatever is going on in the deepest Downside. Now all we have to find out is whether we are a weapon that will be destroyed along with the threat we're meant to combat….

Rhiow paused and stood gazing across the bright plain littered with words. Some part of her very much wanted to simply turn around and say,
I refuse to take part. I was not consulted.
And she heard Arhu's voice again:
I didn't ask for this.

But he consented to it when he took the Oath. And so did we. Now Urruah says he's willing. So does poor Saash, frightened as she is. If they're willing…

She growled, briefly angry at her own intense desire to back down from this job.
It's
you,
isn't it,
she said to the Lone One.
You live at the bottom of all hearts, anyway, part and parcel of the little "gift" you sold our people. Well, it won't work with
me,
today. I've seen your "gift" and what it did to my poor Hhuha. Maybe I'm about to claim my own version of it, and "die dead, like a bug or an
ehhif,"
all my lives snuffed out together if I die Downside or if the others do. But you will not get me to walk away from the fight.

The Claw may break. Let it. It'll be in
your
throat that it breaks.

I'm coming.

They met again in Grand Central, down by Track 30. Urruah and Saash greeted her with restraint: Arhu wouldn't say much of anything to Rhiow, but just looked at her as if she had some rare disease and he were afraid to go near her. She couldn't bring herself to care very much, just let him stare, and spent the next ten minutes briefing her partners on the route they would take once Downside.

Tom was there to meet them, looking even more exhausted than he had earlier. First of all, the Track 30 gate was up again, but it looked paler than usual, the light of the usual warp- and weft-strings of the locus duller and fuzzy-seeming. Indeed, to a wizard's trained vision, the whole station had an odd fuzzy look about it— edges and corners not as sharp as they should have been, somehow. The "patched" reality was fretting against the events of the last twenty-four hours, trying to come loose. So far it was holding— but only with constant supervision, Rhiow could see.

"How much longer can you keep all this in place?" Rhiow said.

Tom shook his head. "Your guess is as good as mine. The sooner you get started, the better."

Rhiow looked over at Saash. "This gate doesn't look any too healthy. Is it stable?"

"Oh, it's stable enough. But I wouldn't want to hazard any estimates on how long it will stay that way. Wizardry in general is starting to behave badly around here. If we don't find out what's causing the problem Downside, we may not be able to get back up again before the natural laws governing gating have been completely degraded and replaced with new ones… if they're replaced at all."

"All right," Rhiow said, glancing over at Urruah: he nodded and hopped down beside the gate, sitting up on his haunches to feed power into it if necessary. "Saash, when you're ready."

"Two minutes," Saash said.

Rhiow sat down to wait.

"Rhiow—"

She turned. Arhu was standing beside her. He said, "I can see—" and stopped.

"Well?"

"Your
ehhif
— I mean—"

"If you're going to say that I brought this pain on myself by living with an
ehhif
at all," Rhiow said, "don't bother. There are enough others who'll say it."

"No, I wasn't— I—" He stopped, then simply put his head down by hers, bumped her clumsily, and hurriedly went away to sit beside Urruah.

Rhiow looked up to find Saash standing next to her, looking after Arhu. "You've been coaching him, I see," Rhiow said to Saash.

She looked at Rhiow, slightly wide-eyed. "No, I have not. He's
looking,
Rhiow. Isn't that what you told him he had to do?" And Saash stalked away toward the gate, leaping down beside Urruah, and getting up on her haunches to sink her claws into the control weft.

Rhiow stood up as the usual quick sheen of light, though again duller than normal, ran down the weft. It abruptly blanked out then, showing her the rock ledge at the edge of the Downside gate cavern; the slow sunset of that world was fading away in the west.

She rose and went over to the edge of the platform, pausing there by Tom to glance up at him.

"Go well," he said. "And be careful."

She laughed, a brittle sound. "For what good it's likely to do, we all will."

Rhiow leapt through, felt herself go heavy as she passed through the weft, and landed on the stone. She shook herself, feeling almost relieved to be out of the small powerless body. Behind her, Urruah came through, then Arhu, finally Saash. As she came down, the gate winked closed.

Rhiow looked at that with some concern. So did Saash, but she simply switched her tail and said, "Power conservation measure. If we didn't shut it now, it might collapse between now and the time we get back up."

Whenever that may be,
Rhiow thought.
If ever at all.

And do I really care?

"Come on," she said. "Let's get on with it; and Iau walk with us… for we need Her now, if we ever did."

They wound their way back into the caverns of the Downside by the same route they originally had taken to service the catenary. The sounds around them were different this time, even to the dripping of water, and all of them walked more quietly. The Downside had a listening quality about it that it had not had before… but not the kind of listening that can be described as "brooding." It was charged: a silence following action… or before action begins again.

Their order of march was reversed this time. It was Arhu who led the way, having learned from "looking" inside Urruah how to make the tiny dim light that helped them find their way. Rhiow had shown him how to tie this small wizardry into the map in her mind so that the light led them through the turns and twists of the caverns, and left them free to keep alert and watch for any sign of the saurians. Behind Arhu, Saash was walking, and behind her, Urruah; Rhiow brought up the rear.

Their vigilance might have been for nothing: they heard no one, saw no one, and caught not a whiff of lizard except for what was stale, left over from the previous time… or so Rhiow thought. It was almost an hour later when they came to the catenary cavern and were almost surprised by it, for they had expected to smell it from some distance. When they came to the catenary cavern, though, it was empty, and almost perfectly clean. Even the bloodstains appeared to have been washed off the rock.
Or rather, licked,
Rhiow thought, her whiskers quirking with disgust.