The Book of Night With Moon (55 page)

Rhiow sighed. "As well as might be expected, with about a million snakes yelling for my blood."

"Yeah," Urruah said. "Charming."

"How's our problem child?"

"Which one? The one with the fur or the one with the scales?"

Rhiow had to chuckle. "Both."

"Arhu's covering for Ith at the moment… taking good care of him, I'd say."

"Have they been talking?"

"More like, have they ever
stopped?
I don't think Hrau'f the Silent herself could shut them up if she came down and showed them a diagram of what quiet looked like." He chuckled a little. "Makes you wonder if they're related somehow."

"Oh, I'm sure." Rhiow made a slightly sardonic face.

Urruah echoed it as they walked down what was now an invisible spiral staircase into the final depths: Rhiow had gotten tired of the switchback pattern. "Still," he said. "Heard a funny story from Ehef, once. Those two could almost make me believe it. Would you believe, Ehef told me that
ehhif
have a legend that cats were actually
made out of
snakes—"

And the pain hit Rhiow worse than ever, so that for a moment she had to simply stop and try to get hold of herself again. It was an old, old memory: Hhuha reaching down and pressing Rhiow's ears right down against her head, not so it hurt, though, and pulling the corners of her eyes back a little so they looked slanty, and saying, "Snake!"

Surprised at the sudden strange handling, Rhiow had hissed. Iaehh had looked over at them and said, "See that, you're right. Better be glad she's not a
poisonous
snake."

Rhiow had privately decided to go use the
hiouh
box, come back and coax Iaehh into picking her up— and then jump down, giving him a good scratch or so with the hind legs to let him find out firsthand
how
nonpoisonous she was. Within minutes she had forgotten, of course: normally Rhiow was too good-natured for that kind of thing.

But now she remembered— and felt the pain again— and thought,
Ridiculous idea. People made out of snakes.

Except…

She licked her nose as she walked downward, into the cold and the reflected fire.

Except that there
is
something to it. Somewhere in the dim past, on the strictly evolutional path, we must have a common ancestor. No one made cats out of snakes, any more than they made humans out of monkeys. But we're related.

We're
all
related.

"We're close," Urruah said quietly.

Rhiow blinked, looking down: she had been running mostly on autopilot. They were indeed very near the bottom of the chasm now, the place where it all came to a point at last. The cold was growing bitter. Maybe a few hundred yards below, all the black basalt walls around them began to lose the ornate carving that had characterized them farther up: the last of the balconies, crowded with the mini-tyrannosauruses screaming abuse, were now perhaps fifty yards above. Below was not so much a river as a pool of blazing light that filled the whole bottom of the chasm to unknown depth. It gave almost no heat and burned the eyes to look at it. But only by looking steadily, tearing and squinting, could Rhiow see the energy-flow, the current of it, like streams of paler lightning in the main body of a river of lightning. The terrible energy was still bound as it would have been in a normally functioning catenary, and to Rhiow's trained eye, it looked more
tightly
bound than it would have been— as if something perhaps was a little afraid of it?…

Very tight indeed,
Saash said to Rhiow silently, from behind.
Something's pegged it down in this configuration on purpose and is afraid the cinctures holding the energy in catenary configuration will come completely loose if it's interfered with.
There was a certain grim humor in her thought.

And would it?

Almost certainly. In fact, I'm counting on it.

What??

I believe that if I have to, I can release the bonds that hold the catenary together as a controlled flow… and bust the entire energy of the thing loose. Despite the extra safeguards that Someone has tried to put up around it…

The thought of even one of the minor catenaries getting loose in that fashion had been enough to raise the fur on Rhiow's back. But the thought of the
master
going— you might as well drop a star into the heart of the Mountain.

Exactly,
Saash said, and smiled that grim grin again.
Can you imagine even the Lone Power being able to hang on to a physical shape under such circumstances? For to interact with us at all, it has to be at least
somewhat
physical. If we let the trunk catenary loose, especially in its present deformed state, the combined release and backlash would destroy everything here.
And
destroy Earth's worldgating system. Now, that would be a nuisance—

You have a talent for understatement!
Urruah said from behind them.

But it will
stop
all this,
Saash said, quite cool,
if there's nothing else we can do. If the Lone One pulls off what It's planning down here, there's a lot more than just Earth's well-being at stake. Thousands, maybe millions of planets, planes, and continua— you want to take responsibility for letting them be overrun by trillions of crazed warrior lizards? If it looks like we're all going to be taken out of commission before what Rhiow has in mind for Ith happens, I'm going to let the catenary loose… and watch the fireworks. For about a millisecond,
she added, wry.

They stood only a few yards above the flow now, and Rhiow looked at it, squinting down until her vision was almost all one after-image, trying to see which way the flow went.
It seems to lead out through the stone,
Rhiow said.

It may do exactly that,
said Saash,
but it seems more likely to me that the stone on that side is an illusion. It's going to be tough for matter to coexist with this energy in the same space. Side by side, yes. But intermingling? Highly unlikely.

Rhiow tended to agree.

"So what do we do?" Urruah said.

Rhiow threw a look over her shoulder at Arhu, who was standing by Ith again, as if caught in mid-conversation. Arhu looked at the stone wall.

Rhiow shrugged her tail. "We follow it," she said, and headed along in the direction in which the flow through the catenary was going, very close above the surface.

"You don't want us to get down
in
it—" Saash said, now sounding actively nervous.

"Unless it's unavoidable, no," Rhiow said, making her way slowly toward the black stone wall. "We'll just walk on it." She glanced at Arhu.

He shrugged his tail back. "All I know is that we have to cross it," he said. "Nobody told me we had to go
through.
I think that's later."

"Oh, wonderful," Urruah said.

Rhiow stepped down, and down, those last few steps… and hesitatingly put one paw down on the surface of the bound catenary, with her skywalk spell laid just over the surface. The sensation was most unpleasant. The spell, applied to the surface of the catenary, felt not solid, but full of holes, like chicken wire; through it, the dreadful forces of the catenary sizzled and prickled under Rhiow's paws, leaving her with the sense that it would simply love to dissolve her, like sugar in coffee. All her fur stood on end, though that was no surprise: the ionization of the air around the catenary was fierce, and the ozone smell reminded her of the Grand Central upper level, some days… almost a homely smell, after the last few hours. She looked over her shoulder at Saash and the others. "It works," she said, "but you won't like it. Let's get it over with."

Rhiow led the way toward the wall; the others followed, Arhu making the path for himself and Ith. As Ith stepped down onto the fire, he teetered in surprise, and Arhu braced him. "How does this feel to you?" Arhu said.

He stood quite still for a moment. "This is not as it should be," he said flatly. "There should be true Fire here." And he looked down at the catenary. "This is so bound and changed from how it was once." He looked up. "As are my people. I suppose I should not be surprised."

Rhiow looked at him, then turned again. "Come on," she said, and went up to the black stone wall. She paused, put up a paw.

The paw went through it. Rhiow glanced over her shoulder at Saash. "You were right," she said. "It's tampered with everything else It can get Its paws on, but It hasn't been able to change science that much… not yet."

"Not until It makes some other, more basic changes first," Saash said, looking down into the catenary.

Rhiow lashed her tail. "Let's see that It doesn't get the chance."

They passed through the wall. It didn't feel the way wall-walking usually did. The structure of the wall seemed to buzz and hum around them with the violent energy of the catenary so nearby. It was a long walk through it, though; it felt to Rhiow like a long slog through a thick bank of black smoke that was trying to resist her as she came— smoke that hummed like bees. She found herself trying to hold her breath, trying not to breathe the stuff, lest that humming should get inside her, drown her thoughts.
Don't worry about it. One step at a time, one paw in front of the next…

Slowly the air before her began to clear. She came out into another open space, looked up and around it… and her jaw dropped in surprise. Behind her, Saash came out of the cloud-wall, paused.

It was the main concourse from Grand Central. But
huge
… ten times its normal size; so that, despite the fact that all their bodies were those of People of the ancient world, once again Rhiow and her team were reduced to the scale of People in New York. Four cats and a toy dinosaur came slowly out into the great dark space, illuminated only by the bound-down catenary that ran through it, flowing down a chasm carved straight through the floor, from the Forty-second Street doors to where the escalators to the Met-Life building would normally have headed upward. The architecture of the genuine Terminal was perfectly mimicked, but all in black— matte black or black that gleamed. In the center of the concourse, the round information booth with its spherical clock was duplicated, but all in blind black stone: no bell tolled, no voice spoke. Above, over blind windows that admitted no light, the great arched ceiling rose all dark, and never a star gleamed in it. Rhiow, looking at it, got the feeling that stars might
once
have gleamed there… until something ate them. It was more a tomb than a terminal.

Rhiow looked down at the catenary's flow through the concourse. There were no escalators at the far side: only a great double stairway reaching downward, and the catenary flowed down between them, cascading out of sight. In Rhiow's world, stairs that led in this direction would have taken you to the Metro-North commissary and the lower-level workshops. She doubted that here they went anywhere so mundane.

"Down?" Saash said, her voice falling small in that great silence.

Rhiow glanced at Arhu. He said, "Follow the Fire."

They went to the stairways, stood at the top of them, and Rhiow realized that these were the originals of many stairs copied farther up in the structure of this dark Manhattan. The steps were tall, suited to saurians, but to no other life forms. "Looks like a long way down," Saash said.

"I'm sure it's meant to be. Let's go."

They went down the stairs, taking them as quickly as was comfortable… which wasn't very. A long way, they went. On their left, since they had taken the right-hand stair, the River of Fire flowed down in cascade after cascade, its power seeming to burn more deadly and more bright the farther down they went: there was no point in looking toward it for consolation in the darkness— it hurt. And the cold grew and grew. There were no other landmarks to judge by— only, when they turned around to look, the stair seeming to go up to vanishing point behind them, and down to vanishing point ahead. For Rhiow this became another of those periods that seemed to go on forever…
and it's meant to,
she thought. "This is meant to disorient us," she said to the others. "Don't let it. Do what you have to do to stay alert. Sing, tell stories—" She wished then that she hadn't said "sing," for Urruah started.

Saash promptly hit him.

"Thank you," Rhiow said softly, and kept walking.

"Oh. Well, can I tell the one about the—"

" No,"
Rhiow said.

Arhu watched this with some bemusement; so did Ith. "Don't get him started," Saash said. "He makes
puns.
Terrible ones."

"Oh, no," Arhu said. "I wish we were down…"

"But we
are,
" Ith said, sounding a little bemused.

Arhu stared. "He's right."

And so it was. All of them blinked as Arhu ran on down past them and to what seemed, mercifully, a flat area.

Did you see that?
Saash said.
He wished… and it was
so.
This place may be a lot more malleable than we thought. But it makes sense. If the laws of wizardry are being changed, if things are in flux down here…

Rhiow swallowed at that thought, and as she came down the last of the steps into the flat area, looked quickly into the workspace in the back of her mind.

A great circle lay there, almost complete— dark patches filling themselves in almost as she watched.

The spell the Whisperer's still working on,
she thought.
That's what Arhu said.

She stopped, breathed in and out, tried to center herself, and looked around her. They stood at the edge of a broad, dark plain, not smooth; here for the first time there was some sense of texture. Great outcroppings and stanchions of stone, blocks upthrust from the floor, stood all about: a little stone forest. And thrusting up out of the middle of it…

Rhiow had to simply sit down and look from one side to the other, to try to take it all in. Roots… huge roots, each one of which was the size of a skyscraper, an Empire State Building… spreading practically from one side of vision to the other: gnarled, tremendous, brown-barked, reaching up into a single mighty column that towered up and up out of sight.
This is what it's like when you try to perceive an archetype,
Rhiow thought, looking left toward what would have been a horizon in the real world, and right… and seeing nothing but the massive union of roots, reaching upward, lost in the vast darkness.