Диана Дуэйн - THE BOOK OF NIGHT WITH MOON

"Where's the gate?" Tom was whispering.
"Not here yet," Saash said. "The locus is still moving—"
A faint sound could be heard now, something different from the susurrus of more than a hundred thousand bodies in one place. It was hard to tell just what it was with this mighty blast of focused sound, both real and amplified, coming from the orchestra. Rhiow glanced at the little round ehhif whom she had seen leading them earlier; now he was in the kind of black-and-white clothes that ehhif males wore for ceremonial these days, and conducting the orchestra as if he heard nothing whatever but bis music. Perhaps he didn't. But there was more sound than music coming from the edges of the meadow. A rustling, a sound like the distant rush of wind—
The three on the stage—a tall, pale, dark-haired tom-ehhif, a shorter tom, more tan but also dark-haired, both in the black-and-white clothes, and a tall, beautiful, dark-skinned queen-ehhif in a dress glittering like starlit night— were no more aware of anything amiss than the conductor. The toms, singing the Lone Power and the doomed wizard, cursed one another melodiously; the queen, ignoring them both, relentlessly declared her own salvation, requiring the aid of the Powers That Be. In a final blast of pure sound, a chord in three perfect notes, all three took up their fates, to the accompaniment of a final, mighty orchestral crash.
The ehhif in the audience roared approval and applauded, a sound like the sea on the shore, rolling from one side of the great space to the other: the tehn'hhirs and the ssoh'pra-oh took their bows and walked off the stage, almost close enough for Rhiow to have reached out with a claw and snagged the ssoh'pra-oh's gown. But out at the edge of that sound, over toward the east side of the park, something was going wrong. The sound leaned up and up in pitch as the queen's voice had. Rhiow, Urruah, Arhu, Tom, all the wizards looked that way, straining to see what was happening—
"It's coming," Arhu said.
"What?" Rhiow hissed, as the third tehn'hhir, the big furry one Urruah had shown her the other day, went up the stairs to the stage past her, and more applause rolled across the meadow at the sight of him. He too was resplendent in the ceremonial black and white now, with a long white scarf around his neck, and he once again held the scrap of cloth he had used to wipe his face in the heat. This he waved at the conductor: once more the music began. There was a further rush of applause just at the sound of it—
He smiled. "Tu pure, o Principessa," he began to sing—
"It can't be coming," Arhu said, furious and afraid. "It's not fair… it can't be coming! I killed it!—"

He stopped and looked up, and saw the dinosaurs coming.
The screaming got worse: thousands of voices now, rather than just hundreds, as the dark shapes plunged through into the humanity in the Sheep Meadow, confused, enraged, hungry, and in many cases half blind —for many of the Children of the Serpent do not see well by night, and hunt by scent. Scent there was, in plenty, and possibly all the picnic food bought some of the ehhif precious time to pick themselves up and run away while furious and hungry saurians threw themselves on whole roast chickens and a great deal of Chinese take-out. But the biggest of the saurians, those with well-developed eyesight, had more than enough light to make do with, and many of them, particularly the biggest, homed in on the brightest source of light they could find— the stage. A great herd of them, maybe twenty or thirty big ones, went wading through the crowds, loping along at terrific speed, trampling anyone not quick enough to get away; and the screams became more intense and drowned out the orchestra's last efforts.
Some of the saurians were beginning to drop now as various of the ehhif wizards who had come with Rhiow's team in the circle did their own short-distance transports, out into the empty areas beginning to open in the tightly packed crowd. Actinic-bright sources of wizardly light began to appear here and there, drawing the light-sensitive saurians away from the surrounding ehhif; once they got within range, the neural-inhibitor spell finished them. But, as before, they just never seemed to stop coming….
Near Rhiow, Saash hissed softly. "I've got to get over there and pull the locus off that last gate," Saash said. "Someone come and run interference for me—"
"I'm with you," Urruah said.
"Good. That spot over there—"
They vanished together. Around them, backstage, ehhif were running in all directions: Rhiow wished fervently that she could do the same.
The big tom-ehhif stared out into the darkness, much more bemused than afraid, if Rhiow was any good at reading ehhif expressions. More of the big saurians waded toward the stage; seeing them perhaps more clearly than the tom-ehhif could, the orchestra fled to right and left in a frantic double wave; though Rhiow noticed, with grim amusement, that very few of them left their instruments behind.
Next to her, Arhu was crouched down, hissing in rage. "See what I meant," Rhiow said, "when I asked you which one you saw—"
"It was one of these," Arhu said, furious. "They're all the same one." "What? Do you mean they're clones?" "No. They're the same one—"
"If that's the case," Rhiow said, watching the vanguard of the saurians coming toward the stage more— tyrannosaurs, indeed, all identical to the one in the waiting room—"then you can kill them the same way."
Arhu's expression became an entirely feral grin. He turned his attention toward the approaching saurians, started getting his spell ready again.
Another sound started to mix with the screams out in the meadow: the bright sharp sound of gunfire, stitching through the night. This is New York, after all… and entirely too many of the crowd will be armed, legally or not. Roars followed, and some unnatural bleats and bellows of rage and pain as bullets went home. Still more screams came as some of the fallen saurians fell on nearby ehhif. Iau grant these ehhif don't get so confused, they start shooting each other—
But there were worse things to think about. Tom reappeared nearby, glanced around to see how they were doing, was gone again in a breath. Almost in the same breath, a saurian came out from the farther backstage area, where the trailers had been parked: it had leapt over or dodged around the security barriers
The saurian loomed over Rhiow, snatched at her with jaws and claws. Rhiow leapt sideways out of the claws' grasp, said the last word of the neural-inhibitor spell; the saurian, along with a companion behind it, came crashing to the ground. Too close, Rhiow thought, jumping out of the way. She was starting to get tired; and "burn-in" was setting in, the wizardry problem that came of doing the same spell too often. The spell's range decreased, and its effectiveness dwindled, until you could get some rest and recharge yourself
Arhu was hissing, hissing again; outside, well beyond the stage, there were horrific noises. "It's—it's not working so great any more—" he gasped. "I don't think I can get all of them—"
Big spell, big burn-in, Rhiow thought, and worse than usual for a young wizard, who doesn't know how to pace himself yet. "Stop it for a moment," she said, "and use something else. Try the neural inhibitor—"
Rhiow felt Arhu rummaging briefly in her head for the complete spell, as he had taken the explosive spell from Saash: a most unnerving sensation. Then he said the last word of the spell—
Another large saurian that had invaded the backstage area died. This was followed by a small clap of air exploding outward, almost lost in the massive sound of a hundred thousand people panicking, and Urruah was there again. "Saash took the gate out," he said. "They've stopped coming—"
Arhu opened his mouth to hiss at the next of the huge shapes loping toward the stage.
Nothing happened.
The big tom-ehhif had been standing and staring in utter astonishment, probably simply unable to believe what he was seeing. Now fear finally won out over disbelief. He turned to flee, heading for the side exit from the stage …
… but he was not nearly fast enough on his feet. A huge scarlet-and-blue-striped head reached down into the blinding stage lights, the little fierce eye holding a horrible humor trapped in it; the jaws opened and swiftly bit.
It took the saurian two bites to get the tehn'hhir down.
Urruah, turning around from dropping a couple more of the saurians, saw this, and swore bitterly. "Oh, great," he said, "we're gonna have fun patching that!"
Across the Sheep Meadow, the last cries of the remaining saurians were fading away. Urruah hissed out the last word of the neural inhibitor, and the saurian now leaping off the stage was hit by it in midair; it crashed into the right-hand speaker tower as it fell, and the tower tottered, sparks jumping and arcing from its broken connections. After a moment the speaker tower steadied again and sat there, sizzling and snapping, the noise fighting with the dwindling seacrash roar of angry and frightened ehhif voices as, en masse, the audience fled the Sheep Meadow.
Rhiow and Urruah and Arhu found Saash after a little while and went in search of Tom. He was out in the center of the meadow, helping many more wizards who had followed them from Grand Central to try to stabilize the situation and get the "patch" of congruent time in place.
"… It's not so much a problem of power as of logistics," Tom said wearily, rubbing his face as he looked around at hundreds, maybe thousands, of saurian bodies left scattered across the great open space, and many hurt or dead humans. "We just need to keep enough wizards in the area to make sure the patch takes. Grand Central's already patched, in fact: the derailments never happened, the tracks are clean. But the price …" He sighed. "A lot of people volunteered a lot of time off their lives tonight. We have a fair number of sick and injured: they're outside the patch because they intervened as wizards … so they're stuck with the results of mat timeline."
"Casualties?" Rhiow said, very softly.
"Four of us," Tom said. "We were very lucky it wasn't a whole lot more. As it is, we're going to have to find ways to cover their deaths in the line of duty …" Rhiow twitched her tail at the sight of the lines of pain deepening in his face. "Fortunately, there's nothing forensics can do about wizardry. There will be no trace of the cause in which they died. But their families …" He shook his head.
"What about the park?" Saash said.
"The patch is being arranged now," Tom said, looking with a sigh at the half-demolished stage, the bodies of saurians festooned all over the skewed and crumpled speaker towers, the orchestra chairs scattered, the heaviest instruments lying overturned. Overhead, police helicopters were starting to circle, directing their bright spotlights down at what must have looked like a most peculiar riot. The streets all around the park on both sides were full of people: not the usual leisurely walk home from a mass concert, but people hurrying to get away from something they couldn't understand and were very much afraid to. That susurrus of their voices, frightened, bemused, echoed in the stone canyons, mingling with the ratchet of the helicopter rotors overhead.
"Can we really heal all of this?" Urruah said, sounding rather desperate. "Even that?" He looked over toward where the last saurian lay, the one who had made a rather high-calorie meal of the third tehn'hhir.
Tom nodded again, with a tired smile. "We're starting work more quickly than we could with Grand Central: the time-graft should take perfectly. The gate will never have come rolling down here; he'll never have become an hors d'oeuvre; all these other people who were hurt or died, won't have been hurt or died… except for our own people, of course." It was the practicing wizard's one weakness where time paradox was involved. If you knew that such patching was possible, you yourself (should you die) could
not be included in it; the unconscious mind, refusing to accept the violation of the paradox, would dissolve the reconnection with its former body as often as such reconnection was attempted.
"You're not going to be able to do much more patching like that, though," Saash said softly. "The Powers won't permit so much of it."
"No," Tom said. "We've got to get busy reweaving the gates so that we can discover the source of all this trouble: it's Downside… far Downside, I'm afraid. Whatever engineered this attack won't take its defeat kindly. A worse breakthrough will already be in the planning stages; it's got to be stopped by more conventional methods … for if you patch time too aggressively in a given area, the presence of so many grafts will start denaturing normal time, so that things that really did happen will start excising themselves. Not good …"
Rhiow shuddered at the thought "I'll speak to the Perm team," she said. "We've got to get at least a little rest tonight, a few hours' worth. After that we'll get at least one access gate up immediately." She looked around at her team. "And we'll get ourselves down there and see what the Queen may show us as regards Har'lh's whereabouts."
Tom nodded.
"He's not dead," Arhu said.
Tom's head snapped around. Everyone stared at Arhu. "What?"
"He's not dead. But they have him."
"Where is he?"
"In the claws of the Eldest," said Arhu.
Rhiow shuddered again, harder this time. Should you meet the Lone Power in battle, the Whispering prescribed the correct form of address: Eldest, Fairest and Fallen… greeting and defiance. It was felt that you, like the Gods, might be about to try to defeat that Power, but there was no need to be rude about it.
"How will we find him?" Tom said.
"By going Downside," said Arhu, with unusual clarity but also a tremulousness in his voice that Rhiow found odd, "and crossing the River of Fire …"
Rhiow blinked at the phrase … then resolutely set that issue aside for later consideration. "Let's all go home and get some sleep," she said. "I'll be along for you all before dawn."
- =O= - *** - =O= -
It was about an hour later when Rhiow slipped through the cat door into a dark apartment.
They're in bed… good.
But they weren't. The bedroom door was open: no one was in there. Still, Rhiow heard breathing—