Diane Duane - The Book of Night with Moon

What started to happen after that, Rhiow had a great deal of trouble grasping. All the Four threw themselves upon the Old Serpent; claws and fangs blazed, and blinding tracks of plasma burned and tore where Urrua’s claws fell; fire spouted and gouted from Aaurh and sa’Rrahh, blasting at the Lone Power. As Haath had, It healed itself. The Four kept attacking, with energies that Rhiow was vaguely certain would have been sufficient to level whole continents, if not to devastate the surfaces of some small planets. Rhiow fought as she might have in her own body, clutching and biting, feeling fangs slash at her and find their mark: But the terrible pains she suffered still had triumph at the bottom of them, like blood welling up in a wound; and the violence she did, and sensed all around her, had a stately quality to it. They had done this many times before, and would do it again—though this time there had been minor changes in the ritual.

But then came one change that was not so minor; it particularly attracted her notice. Suddenly there was a Fifth among them; and sa’Rrahh laughed for joy and plunged anew into the battle beside that Fifth one; and the others cried out in amazement. For it was another Serpent, a bright one, as great as the Old Serpent, and its scales glittering like diamond in the light of their own fires. It thrust its mighty head forward and sank fangs like splinters of star-core into the great barrel of the Old Serpent’s body, just behind the head; and the bright Serpent wrapped its coils around the Old Serpent’s coils, and they began to strive together—

Rhiow suddenly thought of the twined serpents on the staff of the ehhif god above Grand Central. Haw did they know, she thought, how did even the ehhif suspect, and we never—

— and in their battle, the bright Serpent began to get the better of the Old Serpent, and started to crush the life out of It, so that It writhed and thrashed and made the world shake. And the Tree began, ever so slightly, to lean.

“Quick,” cried the bright Serpent, “ the wound, it must be healed!”

“Once more the Serpent’s blood must flow,” said Urrua, and Rhiow in Iau looked, and saw him rearing up on his hind legs and holding, in his huge paw, the sword. At least an ehhif a long time ago, seeing it or hearing it described, might have taken it for a sword. It was a hyperstring construct, blindingly bright to look at, but a hundred times narrower than a hair. “ Just hold It there, Ith,” he said, “ this won’t take long. Yeah, right there—”

The Old Serpent shrieked as Its head was chopped from Its body and rolled down the trunk of the Tree to lie bleeding over the roots. Its blood ran down into the River of Fire, and tinged its flames, as had happened many times before…

…while above, from the thrashing, headless trunk, the blood ran flaming into the wound in the Tree. The whole Tree shuddered and moaned, and heaven and earth together seemed to cry out with it.

Then the moaning stopped. Slowly, as they watched, the wound began to close. As slowly, the body of the Old Serpent began to fade into the darkness, the last of its blood running into the River of Fire. Soon nothing was left but a scatter of glittering scales among the stones; and the Tree stood whole—

Silence fell, and the Five looked around at one another.

“Are we alone again?” Arhu said, looking around him with some bemusement, for his form had not changed back to his normal one, nor had those forms of the rest of the team.

Rhiow listened to the back of her mind and heard only herself… she thought. “After that,” she said, “I’m not sure we can ever, any of us, be sure we’re alone … but it’s quieter than it was.”

Saash smiled. “A lot. Ith, that was a nice job.”

The Bright Serpent blinked. A moment later, he was back in his true form, though there was an odd look to his eyes, a light that seemed not to want to go completely away.

“I’m told,” he said, “that I have passed my Ordeal.” His tail lashed. “I’m also told that it is not unusual to find the details … obscure.”

Rhiow chuckled at that. “What happened to us all,” she said, “had something to do with mine, something I’d been putting off. Obscure? I’ll be working on the details of this one for years. But I think we’ve got our job about done.”

“One thing left,” said Saash. “Let’s get back upstairs—”

Rhiow blinked. They were back upstairs, near the “pool” created by the binding down of the main catenary trunk.

Urruah looked around him with his “good” eye and swore softly. “I told you this place was malleable.”

“I may have done that,” Ith said. “I do not yet understand the nature of space down here. This was where you wanted to be?”

“Just the spot,” Saash said. She paused to look up at the balconies, which were much less crowded than they had been earlier. “I think I can keep this from jumping right out and destroying everything.” She leaned down and got ready to put a paw down into the pool.

“Is that safe??” Arhu said.

She smiled at him. “This time it is. Watch—”

Saash reached down, dabbled in the cold bright flow of light—then stood up, stood back. Slowly the light in the “pool” reared up, bulging like a seedling pushing itself up out of the ground, then, more quickly, began to straighten, pulling branches and sub-branches of light up out of the depths of the stone beneath the bottom of the abyss. Still more quickly it started to reach upward, a tree of fire branching upward and branching again. Then all in one swift movement it straightened itself, shaking slightly as if a wind was in its branches. The separate branchings started to drift into their proper configurations again, the bemused saurians getting hurriedly out of the way of the slowly moving lines of energy as they passed through walls and carvings like so much cheesewire through cheese.

The saurians stared down at them.

“Well,” Arhu said, staring up at the reconstructed catenary tree, “ that’s handled. Now what?”

Ith looked up at the balconies, at the many curious faces looking down. The feeling of hostility that had been there before now seemed, for the moment at least, to be gone. He looked over at Arhu then and smiled.

“Now,” he said, “we bring my people home.”

They started the walk upward through the tunnels and balconies wondering how much explaining they would need to do … and found that little was needed: for every saurian who saw Ith immediately seemed to recognize him and to be willing to listen to him, if not specifically to obey him.

“Well,” Rhiow said, “he’s their father. Why not?”

Arhu, walking close behind Ith, found this funny, and after all the difficulties associated with getting down into the abyss, it amused him even more that the team was regarded with some suspicion, but no overt hostility. As far as the saurians were concerned, if Ith vouched for the felines, that was all right with them: and soon they were near the head of a huge parade of the creatures, all eagerly climbing upward into the heights where none but workers were normally permitted.

“They really will be able to live up there, won’t they?” Arhu said to Rhiow, worried.

“Oh, of course. Much of what you were hearing down there was the Lone One’s lies to them, to keep them enslaved. They’ll spread out over the surface of this world and find plenty, once they’re used to hunting in the open. The other carnivores may be a little annoyed at the competition, but they’ll manage. There’ll be plenty of prey for everybody.”