The Book of Night With Moon (54 page)

Tamper with the perceptions of sa'Rráhh herself, of the Old Serpent? Fool the
Lone One?

Grief-worn and weary as she was, Rhiow was tempted to snicker. There would be a choice irony to that, for the Lone Power had certainly fooled the saurians.
A certain poetic justice, there. Well, the Powers don't mind justice being poetic, as long as the structure's otherwise sound.

But if we screw this up… forget
death
being a problem. Forget our souls just passing out into nowhere, with no rebirth. I don't think we'd be so
lucky.

…Arhu's right, though. The rules are being changed. That's what all this is about, from the malfunctioning of the Grand Central gates on down. A major reconfiguration is happening. The structure of space is being changed so that the structure of wizardry, maybe of science, maybe of life itself, can be changed.

And if the Lone One can change the rules…
so can we.

She stood there in the silence for a few moments more, her tail still twitching; and her whiskers went forward in a slow smile. There was nothing particularly merry about it… but she saw her chance. All she could do now was take it and go forward in the best possible heart.

Rhiow turned and walked back to the others.

"All right," she said as they looked at her. "I'll need some time, yet, to work on the spell… but we can't wait here: those guards will be along. Let's get out into the open and give them something to think about. Ready?"

Urruah snarled softly; Saash made a sound half-growl, half-purr in her throat; Arhu simply looked at Rhiow, silent. Behind him, Ith towered up as silently, watching Rhiow, as Arhu did: with eyes that saw… she couldn't tell what.

"Let's go," she said, and led them down toward the faint light that indicated the next balcony.

T
here they come," Urruah said quietly, as they walked out on the balcony and looked down into the abyss.

Rhiow looked across to the nearest visible corridor, off to their right and down one level. Under a mighty carving of rampant saurians, their six-clawed forelimbs stretched out into the emptiness, a wider-than-usual balcony reared out. It was full of mini-tyrannosauruses, and some of them that were much bigger than usual— twins to the scarlet-and-blue-striped dinosaur that Arhu had exploded in Grand Central.

"He keeps being reborn," Arhu hissed. "You kill him and he keeps coming back. It's not
fair!
"

"It's not
life,
" Rhiow muttered; what defined life, after all, was that sooner or later it ended. "Never mind… we'll deal with him soon enough, I think."

As the team looked from their own balcony, the saurians looked up, saw them, and let out a mighty hiss of rage; the saurians dashed out of sight, making for a rampway upward.

"Well, Rhi?" Urruah said. "Which spell do you like better? The short version of the neural inhibitor—"

"We can't take a chance that it might go askew and hit Ith," she said. "Here's the one I like at the moment."

She leapt up onto the parapet, and then straight out onto the empty air.

For a horrible moment she missed her footing and was afraid the spell wouldn't take— that gravitic and intra-atomic forces were being interfered with, as well as string structure. But the difference was due only to a slight difference in the gravitic constant here: she could feel it, after a second, and amended her spell to reflect it. The air went hard. She stood on it and looked down in genial scorn at the few remaining saurians, who stared at her and pointed every claw they had available and hissed in amazement.

"Come on, everybody," she said. "Let's not be more of a target than necessary." She stared down into the abyss. Perhaps only three-quarters of a mile down now, that point of light shone up through the cold dark air. Amazing, despite how bright it seemed, how little light it gave to their surroundings.

"I'll switch the stairs back for every hundred vertical feet or so," Rhiow said, throwing a glance behind her at the balcony where Ith and Arhu still stood, and on the parapet of which Saash and Urruah now teetered. "Ith, can you see the stairs I've made?"

A long pause. "No."

"Then stay between Saash and Arhu, and step where Arhu steps. Come on, hurry up, they're coming!"

She headed down the stairway in the air, defining it as she went. She was sorry that she couldn't make the steps deeper, for Ith's sake, but he was just going to have to cope. Hard enough to be stepping down on the air, keeping the air solid before her, solid behind her, holding her concentration, while at the same time trying to poke at bright fragments of words on the floor of the workspace in her mind, trying to chivvy that spell into getting finished.
It would help if the power parameters made more sense. It would help if I didn't think the stairstep spell was likely to "burn in" halfway down. It would help if…

Urruah jumped down behind her and began to make his way down the air. Arhu came next. Gingerly, Ith followed, tiptoeing delicately in Arhu's wake and looking now rather nervous, with all twelve of his front claws clenched tight. Saash came down after—

—and right up on the balcony behind her jumped the first of the saurians, reaching for her.

She turned, hissed.

Nothing happened.

The saurian lashed out at her sidewise with its tail, trying to knock her off whatever she was standing on. Saash skipped hurriedly down a step or two, knocking into Ith, who half-turned to see what was happening, lost his balance, knocked into Arhu—

Arhu leaned so hard against him that Rhiow, looking over her shoulder, was sure they were both going to fall. Then she realized that Arhu had anticipated the fall, had perhaps seen it with the Eye, and had started reacting to it almost before it happened.
His vision is clear now
Rhiow thought, almost with pity.
The one thing he didn't dare see was what was clouding it.

The two of them steadied each other, recovered, and headed on down the steps. Saash recovered her own balance and stopped, looked over her shoulder, and said sweetly to the saurian who was balancing precariously on the parapet, "Scared?"

The saurian leapt at her, at the air where it had seen the others step—

—and fell through it, and down: a long, long way down. It was out of sight a long time before it would have hit bottom.

Other saurians that had been climbing up on the parapet as their leader took his first step now paused there, looking down and down into the dark air through which he had fallen. None of them looked particularly eager to try to follow him, though there were hisses and screams of rage enough from them. Saash sat down on the air, lifted a hind leg, and began ostentatiously to wash behind it.

—until a line of red-hot light went by her ear. Her head snapped up as she saw one of the saurians leveling something like the bundle-of-rods-and-box at her again, for a better shot: an energy weapon of some kind. "Oh well," she said, "hygiene can wait…" She stood up, pausing just long enough for one quick scratch before the saurian managed to fire again. It hit her, squarely—

—and the bolt splashed off like water: she had had a shield-spell ready. Saash flirted her tail, grinned at the saurians, and then loped down the invisible stairs after the others.

Back up on the parapet, the frustrated saurians were dancing and screaming with fury behind them. "Nice idea, Rhi," Urruah said, as they made their way downward past balconies and platforms that were beginning to fill with staring, astonished saurians of all kinds and sizes. "And a lot easier than working our way through all those corridors full of, uh, spectators…" He glanced at the filling balconies. "Looks like Shea Stadium during a 'subway series.' "

"Now, I didn't think you were that much of a sports fan," Rhiow said, padding steadily downward. "With you so crazy for
o'hra
and all…"

"Oh, well, I don't follow it… but if a New York team is doing
well
…"

Rhiow smiled slightly and kept on walking. She was alert for those energy weapons, now.
Good thought, Saash,
she said,
to tempt them a little, see what they had on hand. We'll all have to be ready for that. I don't know what kind of range those things have.

Not terribly long, I think. The wizardly component of them can't be very large, with the people handling the technology not being wizards themselves.

All right. Who's covering Ith, though?

"I'll take care of him for the moment," Urruah said.

"Right." Rhiow turned in midair to "switch back" her stairway, and started on another downward leg.

"Only one thing, Rhi. Don't you think we've, uh, lost the element of surprise?" Urruah was looking at the next course of balconies as they passed them. They were so full of saurians than some of them were in danger of pushing others who watched off into the abyss.

Rhiow had to laugh just slightly. "Did we ever
have
it, 'Ruah? We've been driven into coming down here in the first place. But in the short term, we haven't had it since Arhu told us those guards were going to be coming. I don't have any trouble with sacrificing it at this point. Let's just have a nice stroll down to where the Fire is… because if we can pull any surprises out down there, that's where we're really going to need them."

They walked down and down the middle of the air, and more and more saurians came crowing to see them. Most of them, Rhiow felt strongly, were not happy about seeing People down there; the buzz of their business, which had been little more than background noise before, now started to scale up into an angry roar. Cries of "Mammals! Kill the mammals!" and "Throw them in the Fire, cleanse our home!" and "Haath, where is Haath?" went up on all sides. Rhiow strolled through it all with as much equanimity as she could manage; but her main concern was for the others, and especially for Ith, as the cries of "Traitor! Traitor! Kill him!—" went up from the teeming balconies. Urruah was as unmoved as if he were sashaying up some East Side avenue on a weekend. Saash glanced around her nervously once or twice, but as they moved out into the center of the great space, and out of the range of the energy weapons that were fired at them once or twice, she grew less concerned, at least to Rhiow's eye. Arhu was looking more nervous as he went; he seemed to be licking his nose about once a minute. Rhiow had no idea whether this was just general nervousness or due to something the Eye had shown him, and she was unwilling at the moment to make the situation worse by asking. Ith was more of a concern for her, as the cries of rage and betrayal went up all around them; but he stalked along between Arhu and Urruah with his face immobile and his claws at ease— at least Rhiow thought they were at ease.
It was going to be a while before she could tell his moods,
she thought… if she ever had that much leisure at all.

The cold was now increasing, and the River of Fire was now looking appreciably closer.
Once past it,
Rhiow thought,
once we've dealt with the catenary— assuming it
can
be dealt with in some way that will return it to its proper functioning— we're going to have to try to get Ith to do something with whatever power we can make available to him… through the spell, or in whatever other way. If Ith does accept the power to call on the Powers That Be to enforce his Choice, to enact his desire…
The chances were good, then, that the new Choice would redeem all these saurians retroactively, enabling them to find some other way of life: the Lone One would be cast out again. The trick after that would be to keep It from destroying the whole Mountain, and all the saurians in it, in a fit of pique.

The other trick will be getting Ith to do this in the first place.
For Rhiow was by no means convinced that he was as yet committed. She remembered when she had thought that all this was going to hinge on Arhu, one way or another.
How simple it all looked then.

Urruah approached her as she was making her way down in the lead, and paced alongside her. "How're you holding up?"