The Book of Night With Moon (48 page)

Any scent or touch of Har'lh?

Nothing. I just hope this spell's not interfering…

The spell that Urruah had quickly cobbled together to mask all their scents seemed to be working well enough. Saash had thought it might be worthwhile trying to smell like saurians rather than felines, and working a full shapechange to go with it, but Rhiow had disliked the idea. Besides the possibility of getting the saurian scent wrong and attracting attention that way, it seemed like too much expenditure of energy at a time when they were very likely to need it for something else much more important. So they went in their own shapes, as silently as they knew how, though there was some inward muttering.
I can't
smell
myself,
Saash said, pausing to scratch.
It's like being sidled, but worse….

Please. We've got other problems. We're running blind here: we have no real idea where our little friend is taking us.

I'm not sure we have any alternative but to keep working our way downward and seeing what we feel,
Saash said.
It's almost impossible to sense the lesser catenary branches directly, with all this stone between us and them; you have to get close first. And even when you sense them, there's no way to tell how to get at them. There's no wall-walking down here, with the interference from the catenaries scattered all around; it's so fierce you might not even be able to initiate the state, let alone finish a wall-walk once you'd started.
One
of them, though, I can sense with no trouble.
Saash paused to scratch and wash again briefly, then indicated the point of light far down in the chasm.
The "River of Fire" down there… that's the trunk catenary, the main conduit.

Rhiow stared at it. "It can't be. It was erect, and so were the branches, according to Ffairh's map! They would have run straight up through the Mountain. And as for it being the River of Fire, the
real
River—"

"I wouldn't know about that… except for what Arhu was saying. He said we'd have to cross it… and that certainly looks like one, down there, doesn't it?… even from way up here you can see the structure, it looks a little wavy…"

Rhiow lashed her tail. The true River of Fire, in the tales of the Fight between Iau and her litter and the Old Serpent, was formed by the Serpent's poured-out blood: it was the border between life and death, or rather between life and life. The pains and unneeded memories of a cat's last life were burned away in its crossing… "There's no way
that
can be the River," Rhiow said.

"Rhi, the ceiling of Grand Central—" Saash said.

"It's backward," Rhiow snapped, "thank you very much, I know all about it."

"
Is
it?" Saash said. "Which direction are you coming at it from?"

Rhiow closed her mouth and thought about that.

Saash gave her a look. "If the 'Song of the Passing Through the Fire'
does
speak of the River, it doesn't say anything about which angle you come at it from! In space
or
time! A legend can just as well be founded in the future as in the past."

"It's called a 'prophecy,' " Urruah said, with a sideways glance at Arhu. "You may have heard of the concept."

"I'm going to hit you so hard…" Rhiow said to Urruah. "But you're in line behind sa'Rráhh, right now, and you'll just have to wait your turn…."

But is this problem just with me?
she thought.
Is it just that I find offensive the idea that the Last River is actually down at the bottom of a hole in the ground full of lizards?

She sighed at herself then. The Old Downside
was
a more central reality than her "home" one… and there was no reason, really, why the physical reality of the gates' main catenary trunk could not itself be a mirror or reflection of the true River elsewhere. Though her own voice, speaking to Arhu, suddenly reminded her:
Don't start getting tangled up in arguments about which reality is more real than the next…
And another thought occurred. Often enough, as you worked your way closer to the heart of things, other realities' myths started to become real around you. This otherworld might be more central than even Ffairh had suspected.

In any case,
Saash said,
that's the main catenary trunk: no doubt whatsoever.

With about a million lizards between it and us,
Urruah said.
Wonderful.

If we're supposed to be down here to find out what's the matter with the gates,
Saash said,
and what's going wrong with wizardry, I'd say that's as likely to be a good place to start as any. If we head straight down there and start tracing the branchings outward— sideways, wherever they're going now— we can start troubleshooting.

Rhiow sighed. Saash had a single-minded practical streak about repair work that sometimes ignored larger issues, like a whole inverted city full of nasty saurians between her and her proposed work area. Or maybe it was just a way to keep from thinking about issues closer to home.
Like being on your ninth life… How many of us put off thinking about it until it's right on top of us? And how do you know if, when you walk through the River the last time, whether you've done enough good over the course of your lives to come out on the far bank at all?…

And Rhiow knew perfectly well that the crossing of the River was itself an idiom. She wondered— as Saash had to be wondering— was there time to bid farewell to one's mortality, one's felinity? Or did you simply find with your last death that you had drifted to the other side of the divide, and were now marooned in immortality forever, parted from the friends and the world you loved? The Tenth Life, always in the stories a thing yearned-for like the warm-milk-land of which queens sang to their kittens, suddenly now seemed less than desirable— high ground, yes, but barren and cold….

She sighed. "Ith," she said, turning to him, "we need to get all the way down to the bottom… to where that great fire shines. Do you know a way?"

"Yes," he said after a moment. But he looked at Arhu when he said it, not at Rhiow.

"Is it a safe way?" Saash said.

"Yes."

"Is it safe for
us?"
Urruah said. "Or are your people going to come piling out at us from one of these doorways all of a sudden?"

"In that way," Ith said, looking from one of them to another, "there
are
no safe ways into the depths. The deeper you go, the more of my people will begin to fill every hall and stair. There are ways that are less frequented… for a little distance farther."

Every one of the team had his or her whiskers out, feeling for the sense of a lie; but it was harder to tell with a saurian than it would be with a Person.
If not impossible…
Rhiow thought, for the "feel" of a lizard's mind was nothing like a Person's.
We could spellbind him to tell the truth… but it might not help: who knows how truth looks to a saurian? And who wants to waste the energy at the moment? If we fritter away what we've brought, and find there's not enough to do the job we came to do…

She lashed her tail. "Lead on, then," Rhiow said. She was about to add, "Arhu, watch him," when she realized that for the past while this had been quite unnecessary. Arhu had been watching Ith very closely indeed, with an expression of which Rhiow could make nothing whatever.

Ith stepped out, with Arhu behind, and the others following: downward they went again, down through long dark galleries, and down still longer stairs.

Ith stopped at the bottom of one stairway, near where it gave out onto yet another balcony. He peered out into the light, then stepped forward boldly. "Nothing funny, now," Urruah hissed, coming up behind him hurriedly, "or I'll unzip you, snake."

Ith looked cooly at Urruah. "What is 'funny,' " he said, "about looking at the Fire? Little enough glimpse we get of it, little enough we feel of it." He gazed down into the chasm.

"And little enough warmth you get out of it, either," Saash muttered, putting her head just far enough above the parapet to look down into the dim, buzzing, hissing chasm. "Why is it so
cold
down here? It's not normal. You usually get a steady rise in temperature as you head into the deeper crustal regions."

"My guess?" Urruah said. "It's being suppressed, somehow… to a purpose. You heard those guys before. If people are comfortable the way they are, you expect them to be good for much inflaming, much striving against another species?" He turned to Ith. "Am I right?"

A pause. "The near sight of the Fire is for the chosen of the Great One, of his Sixth Claw," Ith said, "as a reward, and a promise of what is to come, when we all stride under the sun again. The cold is a test and makes us stronger to bear what our forefathers could not have borne, and died trying to."

Arhu was leaning past Saash to gaze down into the teeming depths, toward the terraces and balconies far below them, where life went on, seemingly tiny, unendingly busy. "There's so many of you," he said. "What do you— What do you
eat?"

Ith looked at him. "The flesh of the sacrificed," he said, his voice quite flat. "Many are hatched, and caused to be hatched, more and more each year, as the time of the Climacteric draws near. The old words speak of the time when the Promised One shall come and lead us forth; but there can be no going until we first hatch out uncounted numbers to fall in the last battle that will bring us out free, under the sky. The best and the strongest, the Great One's warriors in their hundreds of thousands, are fed well against that day that is soon to come. The rest of us live to serve them, to bring the day closer; and when our work is done… we find our rest within the warriors, who will carry our flesh to battle within their own, and our spirits with them. So the Great One says."

Rhiow shuddered.
An accelerated breeding program, half a species being raised as food for the other half…
It was worse, in its way, than the poor creature she had seen once before, being devoured by its starving comrades. Getting a little extra ration, the same way she might beg Hhuha for some of that smoked salmon…

Hhuha.
The pain of her loss hit Rhiow again, hard, so that she had to crouch down and just deal with it for a few seconds. When she felt well enough to stand up once more, she found the others staring at her, and Ith as well.

"What exactly do you want here?" Ith said at last.

Saash threw a look at Rhiow that suggested she didn't think Rhiow needed to be quizzed by lizards at the moment. "There are other worlds besides this one," Saash said.

A pause. "That much we know," Ith said. "The Great One has spoken of it. And others," he added, a little thoughtfully; there was not quite the dogmatic sound to the addition that there had been to other such statements.

Urruah opened his mouth. Rhiow quietly lifted one massive paw and put a razory claw right into that part of his tail that was twitching above the stone. Urruah turned, snarling, and Rhiow made a sorry-it-was-an-accident face at him, which was excuse enough for the moment and caused Urruah to subside for now.

"What others?" Saash said.

"You mean other worlds?" Urruah said.

"Yes, others," said Ith, and Rhiow sighed, wishing she had put the claw in harder. "A hundred others, a thousand… all ours for the taking."

"By the gates," Saash said softly. "Using them not only for transit… but to change the nature of the species itself. Genetic manipulation… wizardly changes to the body and the spirit. Permanent shapechange."

Rhiow shuddered again. Such changes, from the wizardly point of view anyway, were both unethical and illegal; by and large, any given species had good reason to be the way it was, and there was no telling what chaos and destruction could be wrought in it by permanently shifting its mind-body structure.

"We must become strong and hard, the Great One has told us," Ith said. "We must not allow ourselves to succumb to the same forces that struck down our ancient mothers and fathers. When we are strong beyond any strength known by our kind before, when we no longer need air to breathe, or warmth to live, or even flesh to eat, then we will take everything that is for our own."

"But I thought what you
wanted
was the warmth," Arhu said then, sounding (correctly, Rhiow thought) confused. "And enough to eat…"

Ith stopped and blinked, as if coming up against this contradiction for the first time. Rhiow watched with covert satisfaction, for what she had heard Ith describing, without comprehension, was a favorite tactic of the Lone One— promise a species something better than what it had, then (after It has Its way) strip away whatever It had promised, leaving them with nothing at all. Finally Ith said, "That desire is only for this while: a remnant of the ancient way of life. Afterward… when we have come to our full strength, when we are no longer children, we will put aside the things of childhood and take our place as rulers of otherwhere— striding from reality to reality, making ours the misused territories of others, taking again what should have been ours from the start, had history gone as it should have. Warmer stars than this one will look down on us, strange skies and faraway nights; we will leave our people's cradle and never find a grave. No cold will be cold enough to freeze the spirit in us again; no night will be dark enough. We will survive."

More dogma,
Rhiow thought,
but does he know it is? I doubt it.

"Just who is this 'Great One'?" Urruah said after a moment.

"The lord of our people," said Ith, "who came to us in ancient days. The greatest of us all, the strongest and wisest, who is never cold and never hungry: the One who can never die…"

Arhu's head snapped right around at that. "And he has sent us the sixth claw," Ith said, "with which to build and make the mighty works he envisions. And more than that: he has sent us his own Claw,
his
Sixth Claw, Haath the warrior, who does the Great One's will and teaches us his meaning. It is Haath who will be our savior, the Great One's champion; he will lead us in the Climacteric, up into the sun, into the battle across the warm worlds that await us. It will be glorious to die in his company: those who do will never lose the warmth, they will bask forever."