Диана Дуэйн - THE BOOK OF NIGHT WITH MOON

"Come on, Rhi," Urruah said from behind her. "It's gone."
She let go, stood up, and shook herself. She was a mess, but so were all the others. It was like the catenary cavern all over again. She and Saash and Arhu and Urruah stood there, panting, recovering. Off to one side, wearing what looked like an expression of slow shock, Ith stood and gazed at the carnage. He looked hungry … but he did not move.
Very slowly, limping a little—Rhiow had strained one of her forelegs a little, hanging on to the saurian she killed— she went over to him, looked up at him. "Ith," she said, "why didn't you run away when you had the chance?"
He simply looked at her. "I have not yet done what I came for," he said.
"And just what might that be?" Urruah said, slowly making his way over to join Rhiow.
Ith looked at Urruah and said nothing. But from behind them both, Arhu said, "He warned me they were coming."
Urruah turned to look at him. "He has to be with us," Arhu said. "I've seen him here before, and farther down too. He knows the way: he's going to take us." He turned to look at Ith.
Ith leaned down a little and turned his head sideways to look at Arhu: a strange birdlike gesture, a Central Park robin eyeing a particularly juicy worm. But the "worm" was eyeing him back, and the look held for a good little while.
"Yes," Ith said finally. Rhiow and Urruah glanced at each other.
"Are you hungry?" Arhu said at last.
Ith looked at the bodies … then looked at Arhu.
"Yes," he said, but he did not move.
Urruah, watching all this, breathed a heavy snort of amusement and disgust down his nose, and turned to Rhiow. "We'd better clean this up and dispose of the scent, as far as possible," he said. "I'd sooner not leave any hints that we're down here; once they suspect us …"
Rhiow waved her tail "yes." "Your preferred method…"
"Right," Urruah said. "You four get ready to go on ahead." He started pacing around the space, laying down a circle to contain whatever spell he had in mind. Off to one side, Ith threw one last look at the remains of the battle… then turned away.
"Why didn't you help your people attack us?" Saash said to him, looking up from a few moments' worth of furious washing.
"I did," Ith said.
Rhiow stared at him. "How do you mean?"
"They heard me. That was why they attacked you."
Rhiow threw a glance over at Saash. Does this make any sense to you?
Rhi, it's a saurian. Do I look like a specialist in their psychology? I can understand his words, but even the Speech can't always guarantee full comprehension when the mind-maps are so different. In any case, I'm not sure this boy isn't a few whiskers short of the full set. Why else would he be hanging around us, instead ofjoining in when the fight started or running off?
Rhiow breathed out; she had no answers to that. "A few moments more for grooming," she said. "Then we'd better move out quickly. Urruah?"
"Almost set."
A few more moments was all it took. Then the team headed off as quickly as they could down the next long sloping corridor that Arhu indicated; downward again, around a bend and through a long tunnel, with Arhu in the lead for the moment, and Ith behind him. Faint echoes of the distant buzzing of the saurian City could be heard here; they raised Rhiow's hackles. All those voices… all those teeth…
"All right," Urruah said then, and paused, looking over his shoulder. "This should be far enough—"
Rhiow felt him complete his spell in his head. Immediately from behind them came a brilliant flare of white light. It held for two seconds, three . .. then went out. A faint smell of scorching drifted down to them.
"Let me go check it," Urruah said, and padded back up the way they had come, out of sight.
They waited, tense. Within a few minutes he was padding softly back down to them. "Clean," he said.
"What did you do?" said Rhiow.
"Heated the whole area to about seven hundred degrees Kelvin," he said. "Stone, air, everything. Sterile and clean." He wrinkled his nose a little. "At the moment it smells a little like that toasted smoked-sea-eel thing they do at the sushi restaurant on Seventy-sixth, but that'll pass."
Saash screwed her eyes closed, and Rhiow made a little "huh" of exasperation. "Only you could find a way to bring food into this," she muttered. "Come on."
They all fell in behind Arhu and continued down the long dark corridor. "Where are we going now?" Rhiow said to Arhu.
"Down toward the 'River' … I saw some of the way in his head." He flirted his tail at Ith, who was now pacing nearby, a little off to one side.
Rhiow twitched her tail slowly. "You've been through some changes lately," she said.
I heard Her, Arhu said silently, looking up at Rhiow as they walked, so intently that she almost had to look away: for the expression was entirely too close to that of the stone Iau in the museum. But this expression was living and filled with certainty, though a sheen of plain old mortal, feline doubt remained on the surface. I was Her, Arhu said, and he shivered all over. Now She's gone, but we need Her… and if anyone's going to be Her, it has to be me….
"Playing God," Rhiow had heard her ehhif call it
And the Oath? she said to him.
He twitched his tail "yes," a subdued gesture. I took it. I think I understand it now. I have to keep it, though I'm not sure how. The Whisperer… has been giving me hints, but I don't know what to make of them all. I'm afraid. I'm afraid I might screw up. I'm not an "old soul" or anything.
It's not "old souls" we need right now, Saash said. Half of them keep making the same mistakes over and over: why do you think they keep coming back? Rhiow shot a look at her: Saash ignored it. We need any soul that'll get the job done, whether its teeth are worn down or not. Stop being self-conscious and just do what's therefor you to do.
He twitched his tail "all right," and slowly walked off.
We could let him go his own way now, I suppose, Saash said after a moment, watching him go. He's accepted his Oath. He 'II hold by it… poor kitten.
Poor us, Rhiow said, considering where our association with him has led us.
True… Saash paced on a little way, and then said, We 're going to start having some trouble with defense shortly, if the number of these things attacking us increases significantly … and I think it will The "explosion lite" spell is useful enough… but if we keep using it, it's going to "burn in" in short order. And we can't use the neural inhibitor in its full-strength version while our little friend's with us. I almost wish we could lose him… but Arhu says we can't…
Rhiow glanced ahead of her, to where Arhu and Ith were now walking together. Yes, Rhiow said, and that is very odd…. It was peculiar to watch them: it was as if each very much wanted the other's company, though their bodies clearly loathed one another—tails were lashing, teeth were bared on both sides. The saurian was clearly shortening his pace to make it easier for Arhu to keep up with him as he paced along. Arhu, for his own part, was favoring Ith once more with that expression of recognition, unwilling but still fascinated.
"… You said you were told to come," Arhu was saying to Ith. His voice was unusually soft, so much so that Rhiow almost couldn't hear it. "Who told you? Who else spoke?"
"I don't know," said Ith, after a very long pause indeed. "… I heard a voice."
"What did she say to you?"
Rhiow's ears twitched at that, and then at the slow certainty that started to come into Ith's voice, replacing the half-sullen, half-angry tone that had been there even while talking about his people's coming triumphs. "She said, 'The Fire is at the heart, and the Fire is the heart; for its sake, all fires whatever are sacred to me.
I shall kindle them small and safe where there are none, for the wayfinding of those who come after: I will breathe on those fires about to die in dark places, and in passing, feed those that burn without harm to any; the fire that burns and warms those who gather about it, in no wise shall I meddle with it save that it seems about to consume its confocals, or to die. To these ends, as the Kindling requireth, I shall ever thrust my claw into the flames to shift the darkening ember or feed the failing coal, looking always toward that inmost Hearth from which all flames rise together, and all fires burn undevouring, in and of That Which first set light to the world, and burns in it ever more …'"
Saash, still walking along nearby, was watching Rhiow sidelong, obviously so stunned that she hardly dared to think out loud. Rhiow had hesitated only once over what she'd heard, the word "confocal," but the Speech made sense of it: those who sit about the same Hearth, the same fire. Rhiow licked her nose and swallowed, for all the rest of it she had understood perfectly. The words resonated in her chest and itched in her bones, as if she had known them forever, though she had only now heard them for the first time, in another species' idiom. The Oath, there was never any mistaking the Oath.
Yet at the same time she heard in her mind the words of the Ailurin verse: Iau Hauhai'h was the Fire at the Heart……….
Why is this coming in our idiom?
"She said, 'If you desire the fate that awaits you, then go to the heights, go to the forbidden places, the halls of the doors. Through those doors your fate will find you, and lead you to its heart….'"
"She"? Which Power is he talking about? Which Powers deal with saurians, for pity's sake, except for the Lone One, way back when? Rhiow listened … but no answer came.
She licked her nose. But, oh dear Iau… another wizard. A saurian wizard.
The first saurian wizard?
And carrying his species' version of the Oath: an Oath in force. On Ordeal. Another wizard on Ordeal— Great Queen of Everything, we're all going to die down here!
Chapter Twelve
The walk went on, and on, and on, always downward, and the air got slowly more chill. Memory of past minutes started to dull for Rhiow in the wake of the repetition of stair after long stair, endless tunnels and dark galleries. The adrenaline jangle of the earlier hours had passed now, leaving only a kind of worn feeling, a state in which moving cost much more energy than usual. Light was at a premium down here, everywhere but near the central chasm: and Ith kept leading them farther and farther into tunnels in the living rock, away from the central delving.
Maybe "living" was a bad choice of words, Rhiow found herself thinking, for once again she was starting to get that feeling that the stone was leaning in and listening to her, or as if she were trapped in some huge dark lung, the walls pressing in on the exhalation, out as the mountain breathed.
Every now and then their path would take them out again toward the edge of the abyss. All of them went with great caution then: Ith himself began to creep along like a cat, taking a step, pausing, listening, taking another step … sometimes crouching hurriedly back into the dark with the rest of them as, some ways ahead, a muttering party of other saurians would pass. The occasional narrow window would give them a brief glimpse down into the abyss, but as they went deeper, Rhiow was finding these looks out into the open less of a relief from the claustrophobic "breathing" feeling than they had been at first The buildings, the terrible dark sculptures, the scale of the place itself were beginning to weigh on her spirit. Rhiow had heard that there had been ehhif in times not too long past who had meant to build in this idiom: vast belittling architectures, meant to make the creatures using them feel small and impotent, minuscule parts of some mighty scheme instead of free creatures all walking in the air under Rhoua's Eye together. The Sun, Rhiow thought, wouldn't I give a great deal for a sight of Her now? Real Sun, through real air… even New York air as brown as one of Urruah's hamburgers and full of ozone …
But there was no hope of that now … and maybe never again. All Rhiow's life, it seemed, was being gradually drowned out in this darkness, with the occasional punctuation of glimpses of that faraway fire down at the bottom of the abyss. The city streets, sunrises and moonsets, the sound of honking horns, wind in the trees of the Park, all of it was being slowly dissolved in still black air, humming sometimes loudly, sometimes softly, with the buzz and hiss of saurian voices in their hundreds of thousands. Maybe their millions. It seems likely enough…. And as they crept very slowly closer to the fire at the bottom of things, paradoxically the cold increased: they couldn't yet see their breaths, but that would come soon, Rhiow thought. She shuddered. She hated the cold, but she hated more, at the moment, what it stood for—the One Who doubtless awaited them down at the bottom.
"These long walks," Saash said somewhat wearily, coming up beside Rhiow, "they really take it out of you. Remember that time on Mars?"
"Oh, please," Rhiow muttered. Early in their work together, she and Saash had been involved in the rescue of an Andorrin climbing expedition that had come hundreds of thousands of lightyears to scale Olympus Mons … not in present time, but while it was erupting, in a previous geological era. The rescue had involved a timeslide that Rhiow and Saash had had to pay for, long walks through endless caves looking for the lost climbing party, much hot lava, and a lot of screeching from the expedition leader when the climbers were spirited out of the mountain just before it blew its top in the final eruption that made it the biggest shield volcano in this or any other known solar system. After days of trekking through those caves, hunting the lost ones by scent and lifesigns, and not a word of thanks for their rescue out of any of the Andorrins' multiple mouths, Rhiow had come away from the experience certain that wizardry and its affiliated technologies should be confined to the Art's certified practitioners. But there were large areas in this universe where (in the words of a talented and perceptive ehhif) science had become truly indistinguishable from magic, mostly because they were recognized as merely being different regions of the same spectrum of power, both routinely manipulated side by side by species among whom wizardry was no more covert than electricity or nuclear fusion.
Rhiow glanced ahead at Arhu, half-expecting some reaction along the lines of "You've been to Mars?"— but he was paying no attention. He and Ith were still walking together, talking quietly. The temptation to eavesdrop was almost irresistible. Two wizards on Ordeal, one of them almost certainly the first of his species … what was going on? Impossible to tell, but their body language had not warmed in the slightest.
The brains holding this discussion might belong to wizards, both part of the same kinship—but the bodies were those of cat and serpent, distrusting one another profoundly. Arhu was stiff-legged and bristling, and looked like he wished he were anywhere else. As for Ith—Rhiow was uncertain what his kinesics indicated, except that his body was leaning away from Arhu while his head and neck curved toward him as they talked. At the very least, the message was mixed.
Saash was watching them, too. After a while she glanced over at Rhiow and said silently, We're all going to die down here, aren't we? It's not just me.
No, Rhiow said, I'd say not. Odd, how when it could have been just her, she would almost have welcomed it. But no, Rhiow thought to herself, that's never really been an opportunity. We're in conjoint power at this point, "roped together" as the ehhif idiom would have it: what happens to one of us on this job, we've always known would happen to all of us…. She wanted to laugh a little at herself, except that she felt so dead inside. And here I was so worried about being shy an extra life. It's going to be a lot more than that, soon.
Urruah, pacing along with them, looked ahead at Arhu and Ith, and lashed his tail in a meditative sort of way. He wouldn't eat, he said.
No. That was interesting. He didn't sound very happy, either … not like that other saurian we heard talking about their "Great One."
Saash looked thoughtful. Neither did the saurians who were watching that one work, she said. They are individuals, Rhi. .. not everyone has to be completely enthusiastic about whatever's going on down here.
All right, I know what you mean. It's just… it's hard to think of him as one of us. But he is … he wouldn't have been given the Oath, otherwise. And he definitely has a troubled sound.
They walked a little way more. Rhiow was still worrying in mind at the tone of Ith's voice. Sweet Iau, she thought, I'm so tired.
"Ith," she said suddenly.
He looked at her, as if surprised anyone besides Arhu would speak to him: and Arhu looked, too. 'This way," he said. "A long way yet."
"No, that's not what I meant." Rhiow glanced at the others. "Let's stop and rest a little. I'd like to get the rest of this mess off me; the scent is potentially dangerous. And we can all use a breather…."
I was wondering when you were going to suggest it, Urruah said, somewhat caustically, as he glanced around them, and then flopped down right where he was. We don't all have your iron constitution.
We don't all constantly load ourselves up with stufffrom MhHonalh's, either. You should try cat food sometime. I know a good dietetic one….
Urruah made an emphatic suggestion as to what Rhiow could do with diet cat food. Rhiow thought his idea unlikely to be of any lasting nutritive value. But she grinned slightly, and then turned back to Ith, who had hunkered down next to Arhu, by the wall of the long corridor where they sat. Arhu looked once up and down the corridor with a listening expression, then started washing.
"Arhu?" Rhiow said. "Anything coming?"
"Not for a while yet," he said, not looking up from washing his white shirtfront, now mostly pink. "All right." Rhiow looked over at Ith. "You are hungry, aren't you?" Rhiow said. Pause. "Yes."
"Then why didn't you eat, back there?"
A much longer pause. Arhu, in the middle of a moment's worth of washing, glanced up, watching thoughtfully.
"Because there was no one to force me," Ith said. "Workers are not given food often … but when it is given them, they must eat; if they are reluctant, they are forced… or killed. Warriors, also, are forced … or killed. If one will not eat and do one's work, whatever that might be … one becomes food."
"And you were about to …"
A very long pause, this time. "I looked about me," Ith said, very softly, "and realized I did not wish to be food." He stopped, and actually suited action to words, glancing around him guiltily as if afraid someone would hear; the sentiment was apparently heretical. "It seemed to me that there should be another way for us to survive. But if ever one spoke of such possibilities, one was found mad … and immediately sacrificed. People would say, "The flesh tastes better when the mind is strange …' And they would laugh while they ate."
Rhiow looked at Saash, who shuddered, and Urruah, who simply made a face. "But I wanted to live my own life," said Ith, "not merely exist as meat in some warrior's belly." Another look around him, guilty and afraid. Rhiow found herself forced to look away in embarrassment. "A long time I kept my silence … and looked for ways to come away from the depths, some way that would not be forbidden. There were no such ways; all roads are guarded now, or sealed…. Finally I thought I would even try to go to the Fire and end myself there, rather than be food. I was going to go … I knew the ways; like many others I have gone out to gaze at the Fire, never daring to creep close…. Then the voice spoke to me."
'"All roads are guarded,'" Urruah said. "How did you get out, then?"
"I—" Ith hesitated. "I stepped—between things, I went—"
"You sidled," Arhu said. "Like this." And did it where he sat, though with difficulty. Ith's jaw dropped. Then he said, "Even here, it is hard."
A second's look of concentration, and he had done it, too: though, as with many beginners, his eyes were last to vanish, and lingered only half-seen in the air, a creepy effect for anyone who didn't know what was causing it. Then he came back, breathing harder, and folded his claws together, possibly a gesture of satisfaction.
"Down here, yes, it's tough," Rhiow said. "It's the presence of the Fire down below us, and of other lesser ones like it. They interfere. It will become impossible, as we go deeper."
"But I did it there," Ith said, looking at her suspiciously. "My work is down deep; I fetch and carry for the warriors who are housed in the delvings some levels above that Fire. To come away I had to come by the guards who watch the ways up out of the greatest depths. It… was hard, it hurt…"
"The cheesewire effect," Urruah muttered. 'Too well we know. But you got out anyway."
"I passed many guards," Ith said, looking sidewise at Urruah. "None of them saw me. Finally I came up here, where no one comes except workers who are sent under guard; they all passed me by. And I went where the voice told me to wait… and you came."
"Great," Urruah muttered. "He can sidle where we won't be able to. This is so useful to us."
"It might be," Rhiow said softly. "Don't laugh." But she looked at Ith uneasily. If we needed proof, we've got it now. A saurian wizard…
Saash looked at Ith, then glanced at Rhiow. You're thinking he's responsible for what's been going on with the gates? It's crazy, Rhi. Ith hardly knows anything. He barely seems to know as much about wizardry at this point as Arhu did when we found him.
If that's possible, Urruah muttered.
No, Rhiow said. The problem's not just Ith. I want to find out more about this "Great One." I don't, Saash said. I'm sure I know exactly Who it is. Me too, said Urruah, growling softly.
I wouldn't be too sure, Rhiow said. Our own certainties may trip us up, down here…. After all, how certain were we that there were no such things as saurian wizards? And now look…
"What will you do with me now?" Ith said.
Rhiow sighed, wishing she had the slightest idea. She could feel the weariness coming down on her more swiftly every second. "Look," she said to the team, "if we stay still too much longer, we're going to need to sleep, I think. I could certainly use some. Arhu, you're sure nothing's coming for a while?"
He got a faraway look. "A couple of hours."
"We'll sleep a little, then," Rhiow said to Ith, "and try to work out what to do later."
"Who'll sit guard?" Saash said, lying down with a look of unutterable relief, and not even bothering to scratch. Rhiow felt extremely sorry for her; she was not really built for this kind of stress.
"I'll take it," Urruah said. "I'm in pretty good shape at the moment… and I'm not hungry. Unlike some." He looked thoughtfully at Ith and settled himself upright against the wall, leaning a little on one shoulder, gazing down the long dark gallery.
Rhiow lay down and tried to relax. At least a rest, if not sleep, she thought; but neither seemed terribly likely. Her thoughts were going around in small tight circles, trying to avoid the image of Hhuha…. From off to one side, already, came the sound of Saash's tiny snore. She never has trouble sleeping, Rhiow thought with a touch of envy. She confines her anxieties and neuroses strictly to her waking hours. I wish I
could manage that.
Over Saash's little snore came the sound of Arhu and Ith talking. It got loud sometimes.
"I was hungry, too," Arhu said. "All the time. Until I met them. Then things got better. They gave me fh'astrramhi."
This is all we're going to need, Urruah said. A dinosaur with a pastrami craving…
Don't think I don't hear your stomach growling. You'd go for it just as fast as he would, and five minutes later you'd be telling him where to find the best pastrami on the Upper West Side.
"Come on, you two," Urruah said, "half the lizards in the place are going to come down on us if you don't shut up. Sorry, Ith, no offense."
They paid no particular attention. Urruah had to shush them several more times, and finally Arhu started staring at Ith in the fixed way that suggested he was trying to teach the saurian to speak silently. Rhiow wished him luck and put her head down on the stone, in the dark, and courted sleep….
It declined to be courted. She kept hearing, in her head, one part or another of the saurian version of the Oath. The Fire is at the heart: and the Fire is the heart: for its sake, all fires whatever are sacred to me…. I shall ever thrust my claw into the flames.
Rhiow sighed and rolled over. It really is our idiom… and the language is very like what's in the "Hymn to Iau," and the "First Song." All the references to fire and flame used the Ailurin "power" words, the auw– stems and compounds, which had passed into the Speech as specialist terminology.
But why should this child be using our words?… For any species' Oath always has to do with the form of it originally taken by the wizards among the Mothers and Fathers of a species, after Choice. Its form is set in their bones and blood, so that wizards of that species find it impossible to forget, and it is most specific to their own kind and mode of existence, as it should be. Even nonwizards of many species know parts of their own species' Oath in one form or another, often restated in religious or philosophical idiom.
Rhiow smiled a little at herself then. What do I mean, "this child"? Who knew just how old Ith was? Rhiow got a general feeling that he wasn't out of latency yet, but who knew how long these saurians' latency period was? Though there were supposedly some dinosaurs who mothered their hatchlings for years at a time. Long latency-to-lifespan ratio makes for the best wizards, Ffairh would always say.
But I still don't get it. Why Ailurin?
She rolled over again, disturbed by the puzzle. The connection between the feline world and the reptilian world was an ancient one, easily summed up in a single word: enmity—the Great Cat with the sword in his paw, sa'Rrahh the Tearer with her fangs in the Serpent's neck. Now Rhiow found herself thinking: Is
there something else to this connection? Something that got lost? Do we have some old history together?
And how could that be? The saurians passed away long before felinity evolved into even its most archaic forms or became sentient.
Time, though, was a dangerously inconstant medium… and it was always unwise for a wizard to
automatically assume mat any two events were unconnected. The structure of time was as full of holes and slides and unexpected infracausal linkages as the structure of space was full of strings and hyper-strings and wormholes—
"But why not?" Arhu suddenly said aloud. "I can see you looking at me," Ith said. "Of course I'm looking at you—" "Not that way. With the other eye." Rhiow flicked an ear in mild surprise. "What's wrong with that?"
"It sees too much. It makes me see… you." No question about it: Ith's voice sounded actively afraid. "Your kind."
"You scared?" Arhu's voice was louder.
"I do not wish to see this," Ith said. "The things—the pain my kind have, that I have, it is enough. Your pain as well—"
"I told you, do it in your heads," Urruah said, "or I'm going to come over there and bang those heads together. You two understand me?"
Arhu and Ith—half a ton of moon-and-midnight panther, a ton and a half of patterned hide—glared at Urruah together, and then turned away with an identical eye-rolling teenagers' look, and locked eyes again.
Rhiow sighed and lay back again, thinking with slight amusement of Arhu saying, just the other day, I don't want to know this about them; it'll only make it harder to kill them when the time comes.
So now you hear it from the other side. Well, probably do you good to see things from his point of view. Do us all good, I suppose, if there were more of that…
She sought back along the interrupted train of thought. The nature of the old saurian Choice … she wondered if it was less simple than the Whisperer might initially have indicated. Not just a straightforward choice between good and evil, or obedience to the Powers and disobedience … but something more difficult: perhaps multipartite. And prophecy and the serpentine kind had long been associated in various species' myths. Did they look ahead then, Rhiow thought, during the Choice, and see their possible futures? The meteoric winter would have been part of what they saw; the Powers would have looked ahead in time and known it to be an inevitable consequence of the Lone One's involvement with this species. And at least a couple of the fates springing from it were easy enough to imagine. One would be the fate of the saurians in Rhiow's universe—almost all their species killed, except for a few of the most rugged survivors, who would forget their former greatness and dwindle into the modern reptilia; mere animals, shadows of what was … Another would have been this scenario: the saurians retreating down here into the darkness to save themselves, remembering what they once were, but also longing eternally for what once had been, and hating what they had become, and the Choice they had been forced to make … I
wonder, Rhiow thought, whether the saurians in our universe got the better of the deal. Better to be animal than to live like this.
But it wasn't my Choice. It's theirs… they're stuck with it.
It's a shame you can't trade in a Choice after a test run, though, and say to the Powers That Be, "Sorry, the Lone One fooled us, this Choice is defective, we want another chance."
The silence that fell in Rhiow's mind in the wake of the idle thought was so profound that it practically rang. It was familiar, that silence: the Whisperer suggesting that you might just have stumbled onto something….
Rhiow's eyes widened as she reexamined the thought.
The Choice offered to the forefathers and foremothers of the Wise Ones … could it be that it was defective? Flawed, somehow? Incomplete?
Ridiculous. Whoever heard of an incomplete Choice before? There's a pattern. The Lone One turns up … says, "Would you like to live as the Powers have told you you must, or take a gamble on another way that might work out better?" And you gamble, and fall: or refuse…
And then Rhiow stopped.
But the saurian Choice had to be incomplete. There had been no wizards there. And there had to be wizards: the whole spectrum of a species' life, both natural and supranatural, had to be represented for the Choice to be valid.
Or… She stared at the stone between her paws. No. A species' Choice is its own,
Or was it? If the species was linked to another…
… did the other have to be there, taking part, as well?
Taken together with Ith's Oath, with the Ailurin words in it…
… the thought shook Rhiow. The People were their own. They were utterly independent. That some other species would have been involved in their Choice was unthinkable … a challenge to their sovereignty over themselves. That they should be ancillary to some other species' Choice…
That was simply intolerable.
But Rhiow got the cold, no-nonsense feeling in her gut, when she turned to the Whisperer, which suggested that this might indeed be the case.
If this Choice was incomplete. . . it can be completed now. By a saurian wizard… and those intended to help him complete it, to judge by the language in it. His assistants: his people's supplanters…
Us!
She writhed a little, then cursed, and went over the Whisperer's head.
Ian, why are you dumping this on me?
You were there, came the answer, definite and instantaneous, its Source unmistakable. Or rather: You were not there. You are there now.
Choose.
And the choice was plain. Choose one way, refuse your species' help, and drive the serpents out into the cold and the dark, and damn them all. Let life be as it is, unchanged and stable, to be relied upon.
Choose another way and lose your species' autonomy forever, or whatever illusion of it you have had until now. The People's whole proud history becomes merely a footnote, a preliminary to the advent of these newborns, unable to make their own way without help; midwives to a race that had its chance and lost it, a million years ago. Nature killed them. Let nature be the arbiter: their time is over for good.
Yet nature is not innocent when the Lone One drives it Or, rather: it remains innocent, not knowing who holds the wheel and uses it as a weapon. Is the storm to blame, or the Lone Power, when the lightning strikes and kills some noble soul about the business of saving life? Do you blame nature or sa'Rrahh when a cab comes too fast around the corner and—
Rhiow's tail lashed. Devastatrix, Rhiow said inside her, I know your work. You will not fool me twice.
Yet it was not a question of anyone being fooled, anymore. Here was a Choice that had not been completed at the beginning of things. The Lone One—illegally?? Rhiow thought, shuddering at the concept—had convinced another species that its Choice had been made. They had suffered, had died in their millions (billions?) for the Lone Power's amusement, for the sake of a technicality, an injustice done that the victim-species was incapable of perceiving.
Now someone had come along and perceived the injustice, the incomplete Choice. What do you do?
Pass by on the other side? Rhiow was a New Yorker, she had seen her share of this. Make a stink? Get yourself killed as a result? She had seen this too.
And getting yourself killed would be the least of it You were interfering in the business of gods and demigods, here. What happens, in the human idiom, when you take the Lone Power to court and try to convict It of malfeasance? A slippery business, at best. But the destruction of much more than your body would be fair to expect if you failed.
Oh well, Rhiow thought, what do I need all these lives for, anyway? The thought was bitter. Memories of Hhuha, unbidden, definitely unwanted at the moment, kept shocking through her like static on a rug in winter every minute or so, and the pain they caused Rhiow was beginning to tell. Anything that would stop that pain was beginning to look welcome.
Your hands on the wheel, though, she said inwardly to sa'Rrahh, fluffing up slightly. Not an accident. There are no such things.
Unfair, that at the time when I would most like to die, I must now fight hardest to live longest. And for the sake of these miserable, bad-smelling, cold-skinned snakes. She hissed in fury, causing Urruah to open his eyes a little wider and stare at her. Iau, you rag-eared kitten-eater, I hate this, I hate You, why me?
No answer, but then, when someone was yowling abuse at you, a dignified silence was the preferred response. Rhiow thought of the two Himalayans down the block and growled at herself, at her own bad manners, at life in general. Unfair…
You found it. You fix it.
The universe's eternal principle. Repair yourself if you can. Spend the least possible energy doing it If you can't manage it… tough. And Ehefs succinct comment on Rhiow's observation long ago that this seemed mean-spirited of the Powers, and hard on Their creation: What do you think this is, a charity?
She sighed. I was right, Rhiow thought, we are certainly all going to die. For during Choice, some of the participants always die: no Choice is valid without that most final commitment. And if even one of the team died, all would be trapped below: all would die together.
The only thing we can do, I suppose, is make sure we make it work… make it all worthwhile.
Yet the other side of the paradox was that, for the Choice to take, some must also survive; otherwise there will be no one to implement it.
That'll be Ith, I suppose.
But who even knows if Ith will cooperate? For everything would turn on him, at last. It was all very well to think about him taking the part of the saurian wizard who should have been present at his People's choice, and remaking it, or rather making it for the first time—becoming, as it were, his People's Father. But his ambivalences were likely enough to destroy any such chance: he was as angry and uncertain in his own way as Arhu had been.
But if we don't get him to cooperate somehow… Those empty doorways in the upper corridors … they would not be empty for long. Rhiow thought of places like the great Crossroads worldgating facility on the sixth planet of Rirhath B: many permanently emplaced gates, leading into thousands of otherwheres, and used freely for travel by species accustomed to such technologies, part science and part wizardry. The Old Downside would become such a place if the Lone One had its way with the saurians. Those doors would be filled with vistas of other worlds, forced open in places previously innocent of such travel—and out through them would pour armies of warrior lizards, intent on killing whatever they found. "Misused territories": that had been the line from the catechism taught to Ith by die Great One. Ith fortunately seemed to have renounced it, but millions of others of his kind, it seemed, would not. They would take other worlds gladly: the lost race would become masters of an interstellar empire—even an intercontinual one.
Still… Arhu had said it when asked who Ith was: The father. My son. You've got to bring him along….
She glanced up at them and found them nearly nose to nose now, against the wall and glaring at each other again.
You can't just sit around when this is what happened to your people, Arhu was saying loudly to Ith. You have to do something. You saw. You were tricked! His tone was just a touch uncertain; he was new to this kind of advocacy… but he was doing his best.
Then Rhiow blinked. "Why, you little monster," she muttered, "you were in my head again!.' Urruah, did you know that he—"
"Rhi, you're loud sometimes when you muse," Urruah said, with slightly malicious amusement. "Sorry, I know it's probably to do with—Sorry," he said abruptly, and sat down and started to wash.
Rhiow felt the pain bite her again. She swallowed, licked her nose a couple of times, tried to put it out of her mind.
The Great One would have His reasons, Ith said, very slowly.
Yeah! Killing the whole bunch of you, and everything else It can get Its hands on! Can't you see?
I see too much. You see too much. There is blood everywhere; it runs across the world's face, and nothing we do will stop it.
Arhu licked his nose. That's not right. It's to stop that kind of thing that we've come.
You cannot stop it or even change it. Much less can I change it. Ith bowed his head down to Arhu again, locked eyes with him. This is typical mammal-thought: quick questions, quick answers, the hope that everything will be all right with action taken now and done in a moment. Perhaps matters would improve for a year, or two, or ten. But in fifty? Two hundred? Five hundred? All will be again as it was. More will have died. The pain will go on, the blood will run.
You're wrong, Arhu said. You have to help us with what we've come to do. It's not just for us. It's for everything!
Everything, Ith said, is foul.
Arhu couldn't find anything much to say for a second.
All there is here is death, Ith said. Those who will kill eat those who must die so that others can kill. When we come up into the sun, we will kill again. How many lives must pass before it all ends? Here, under this so-warm sun, and on other worlds, and in places where there are not even stars to shine, places completely strange to us: how many more of every kind will die? Each of those places has its own life: we will come into each one and destroy it. The image, which had run vaguely through Rhiow's mind, ran clear through his own—his gift, or Arhu's Eye, could see it all: endless planes and planets, devastated. The immense distances between galaxies, between continua, would not be enough to stop a race of saurians made immortal by combined technology and wizardry. And finally, That Which has used us to destroy everything will destroy us as well… laughing that we were fools enough to be Its instruments. I hear Its laughter even now, for the process is well begun.
… And you know all this to be true, Ith said, leaning down more closely to Arhu; and suddenly the air itched with wizardry, spelling done without diagrams, but in the mind… if it was spelling, and not some saurian congener to the Whispering. I see it in you, as you have seen it, though you have denied the sight. I see you too have heard the laughter. Forward in time: and back.
Arhu looked up into Ith's eyes, an expression of horror growing on his face, his eyes going wide, slowly going almost totally to dark. He crouched down, still gazing up into Ith's eyes, his claws starting to dig
into the stone, scrabbling at it. Arhu seemed unaware of what he was doing.
"They were crying, first," he said softly. "Not laughing. Ehhif have such weird sounds, you can't tell them apart half the time… But it was warm. Our dam was there, so we weren't afraid of the noises they made. The little ones, the ehhf-kits, they were crying, but they did that a lot if you scratched them, or when they scratched each other. I didn't know the words then. Now I know them. 'Daddy, please, Daddy, let us keep them, let us keep just one, just one, Daddy
Rhiow rolled quietly upright, glanced over at Urruah. He was still sitting leaning against the wall, his eyes closed down to slits, but he was awake, watching and listening. Saash had her back to Rhiow, but Rhiow saw an ear flick, just once.
Arhu lay still gazing up into Ith's eyes, his claws working, working on the stone. "He said, 'We can't keep them, the landlord won't let us have more than one, I told your mother not to let her out until we got her spayed, well, it's her fault, you take it up with her….' He picked us up. He wasn't bad about it, he was always careful when he picked us up. He put us in a dark place. It rustled. He closed it up. We couldn't smell our mother anymore. We heard her crying then, we tried to get to her, but we couldn't see, it was dark, we were all jammed together in the dark, and then the noise started."
Rhiow swallowed, watching the convulsive, obsessive movement of Arhu's claws on the stone. "It was loud. We didn't know what it was. A bus, I think now. We couldn't smell anything but each other, and some of us got scared and made hiouh or siss in the bag, it got all over us and smelled terrible, we could hardly smell each other anymore. The noise stopped; we were crying, but no one would let us out, we didn't know where our dam was— Then something pushed us hard against one side of the bag. It felt strange, we were falling, we tried to come down on our feet. Then there was another big noise, we came down hard, it hurt…."
Arhu swallowed. The fear in his voice was growing. "It was cold. We were crying and trying to get out, but the black stuff wouldn't give no matter how we clawed at it, our claws weren't any good. And then we hit something, and after that it started to get wet inside, not just from our siss. Wetter and wetter. A lot of water. The bag was getting full. There wasn't air. We kept falling in the water, and it got in our faces, we couldn't breathe. We tried to stay up… but the only way we could stay up was by climbing on each, climbing on each other…"
Saash had slowly come to her feet now and was slipping close to Arhu, but he paid her no attention, only gazing up at Ith. It was as if he saw, in those reptilian eyes, the one vision he had been steadfastly denying himself, or saw it mirrored, as the other saw …
"They bubbled," Arhu said, his voice dropping to a whisper. "They bubbled when they breathed the water. They stopped moving. Their smells went away. They died. And the rest of us had to climb on them, on their bodies, and put our heads up and try to breathe, and there was less and less room, less and less air, and it was so cold."
Barely even a whisper, now; even that faded. "So cold. Nowhere to breathe. Sif died last. She was my twin almost, she had my same spots. She bubbled underneath me. I felt the breath go out, I smelled her scent go away…." I was the last one. I was the strongest. I climbed best. Then the last air went away. I started to bubble. It was cold inside me. It got black. I said, Good, I want to be with my littermates. But I couldn't.
Something grabbed the thing, the bag we were in, and pulled us out, and broke the bag open. It was an ehhif. It saved me, it dumped me out on the ground. Incredible bitterness at that. It dried me off, it took me to a bright place, they fed me, they put me in a warm room. Later another ehhif came and took me away. She fed me, she kept me in her den. She gave me a hiouh box, but every time I made siss or hiouh in it, it would smell of them, and I would remember my brothers and sisters, how they smelled finally, and how they started to bubble, and I couldn't go back to the box. I had to make the hiouh somewhere else in the ehhifs den. And then she took me out of her den and put me in a shoulder-bag and took me in another loud thing, a bus, and she put me down in the street, and she went away fast, in another bus. I couldn't find her den again. I went to live behind the Gristede's.
His claws were starting to splinter. Saash, behind him, began slowly to wash his ear. Arhu was still looking up at Ith, into the saurian's eyes.
I heard the laughing, Arhu said, over the soft grating of his claws on the stone. When the ehhif threw us in the water. And while we were drowning: that laughing. It knows nothing can stop It, or what It does. It can do it whenever It wants. It was the Lone One at the bottom of the ehhifs heart that made it do that. It's always at the bottom. I see It now. And It's at the bottom here. I see…
You also see, Ith said, how there is nothing but the pain, no matter what we do against It.
There was a long, long pause: almost one of Ith's own.
I don't know, Arhu said.
He said nothing more. Saash washed him, her purr of pain and compassion rumbling and echoing loud in the long dark hallway. The flexing of Arhu's claws was slowly stopping; his head dropped so that he was no longer staring at Ith. Arhu lay there gazing down at the barren black stone of the floor, and did not move or think, at least for any of them to hear.
Rhiow slowly got up and paced over to where Urruah leaned against the wall. What now? Urruah said to her.
Let him alone for a while, Rhiow said. He needs time to recover, after that. And frankly, after hearing it, so do I. Arhu's pain had shaken Rhiow, in some ways, worse than her own had been doing.
They went away and sat down together, leaving Saash with Arhu, while Ith leaned down over them both as Saash washed, a peculiar kind of company.
So, Urruah said. The Lone One tried with you, and failed… I think. Now It's tried with him… and there's no way to tell how It's done. Who's next?
I think, Rhiow said, It may have tried with him once already. And it failed then. I'm not sure… but It may have tried one time too many.
But It's getting desperate, Urruah said. If these attempts on our effectiveness fail, It's just going to try brute force, a hundred thousand saurians or more, the way it dumped them out into Central Park. It'll wear us down, and kill us without us doing anything useful.
Let's not give It the chance, then, Rhiow said. We'll go straight down.
But how, Rhi? You heard him: the lower halls are full of these things.
I don't propose to go the way It wants us to go, Rhiow said. Look, I'll watch now: I couldn't sleep now no matter what. You try at least to get some rest… an hour's worth, even. Ffairh always said that a rest was better than no sleep.
I'd give a lot to have Ffairh here.
You 're not the only one. Go on, 'Ruah, take a nap.
He lay down, and shortly afterward, he was snoring, too.
- =O= - *** - =O= -
Rhiow sat in the darkness and watched over them. Saash had nodded off again, a little while after Arhu did, so that only Rhiow and Ith were awake. Ith was looking down at Arhu. For a while she gazed at him,– wondering what went on inside that mind. His face was hard to read. Even ehhif had been easier, at first; and there was always the one who had become easiest to read after their association….
The thought of Hhuha, of the cold white tiles and the metal table, bit her in the throat again. Rhiow shook her head till her ears rattled, looked away, tried to find her composure again. Oh, to be able to howl like a houff or weep like an ehhif, she thought; why can't we somehow let the pain issue forth, by some outward sign? Dignity is worth a great deal, Queen of us all, but is it worth the way this pain stays stuck inside?
She looked up and saw Ith looking at her, silent and thoughtful.
You too know the pain, he said inwardly. Rhiow shivered a little, for there was warm blood about his thought, but no fur, not even as much as an ehhif wore: the effect was strange.
Yes, she said.
But still you will do this. And die. I saw that in him, and in my own vision as well. Rhiow licked her nose.
Yes.
He says… this fight has happened before.
Rhiow wondered just how to put this. Our kind, she said, or rather, the Great Ones of our kind, have fought—this deadly power, the Lone Power—before.
And lost.
They defeated the Old Serpent, as we call that avatar of the Lone One, Rhiow said.
But it made no difference. It lives on, though your gods themselves died killing It.
"Evil," said a small and very tired voice, "just keeps on going." Arhu was sitting up again, but hunched and huddled. He glanced at Ith. "He's seen it. So have I. And it'll still just keep happening, no matter what we do here. Even if we win. Which we can't…"
Rhiow swallowed. "It's not that simple," she said. "Evil isn't something the One made, Arhu. It's a broken image— a perversion of the way things should work, purposely skewed toward pain and failure. Sa'Rrahh, our own image of the Lone One, and of the evil inside us, it's the same way with her. She invented death, yes, and now tries to impose it on the worlds. But her ambivalence is a recent development, as the Gods reckon time… and They think the evil is something she can be weaned of. For when the Three went to war against the Serpent, didn't she go to the Fight with Them, and fall with Them, at the dawn of time? That's a way of saying how divided her loyalties are, for she is the Old Serpent as well."
"It's confusing," Arhu said. Ith merely looked thoughtful.
"It's mystery," Rhiow said, and had to smile slightly despite her pain, for old Ffairh had said the same thing to her, when she said the same thing to him. "Sometimes mystery is confusing. Don't fear that; just let it be…. But what time is about, they say, is slowly whining the Lone One back to the right side. When that happens, the Whisperer says— when a billion years' worth of wizards' victories finally wear sa'Rrahh down enough to show her what possibilities can lie beyond her own furious blindness and fixity—then death and entropy will begin to work backward, undoing themselves; evil will transform its own nature and will have no defense against that final transformation, coming as it will from within. The universe will be remade, as if it had been made right from the beginning." And she had to gulp a little herself then, at the sudden memory of the words the Whisperer had sent her to find, the fragment of the old spell: he inflicteth with the knife wounds upon Aapep, whose place is in heaven—
The look on Arhu's face was strange. "So," he said after a long pause, "the Lone Power isn't Itself completely evil."
"No. Profoundly destructive, yes, and filled with hate for life. But even the evils It tries hardest to do sometimes backfire because of Its own nature, which is 'flawed' with the memory of Its earliest history, the time before It went dark. That flaw can be a weapon against It… and has been, in many battles between the First Time and now. But we have to be guided by Iau's own actions in our actions against the Lone One. For even She never tried to destroy the Lone Power, though She could have. She merely drove sa'Rrahh out, 'until she should learn better,' the song says. If the Queen Herself believes that the Lone One can be redeemed, who are we to argue the point?"
Arhu looked off into the distance, that million-mile stare again. It was a long, long look … and when he turned back to Rhiow, his expression was incredulous. "It's started to happen already. Hasn't it?"
"That's what the Whisperer says," Rhiow said. "When you look around the world, it's impossible to believe. All the death, all the cruelty and pain .. ." She went silent, thinking of white tile, a steel table, and a shattered body, and Iaehh's inward cry of grief. "But mere belief doesn't matter. Every time one of us stands up knowingly to the Devastatrix, she loses a little ground. Every time one of us wins, she loses a little more. And the Whisperer says that the effect is cumulative. No wizard knows whether his or her act today, this minute or the next, might not be the one that will finally make the Lone Power say, 'I give up: joy is easier.' And then the long fall upward into the light, and the rebirth of the worlds, will start…"
She sighed, looked over at Arhu wearily. "Is it worth fighting for, do you think?"
He didn't answer.
"You have said the word I waited to hear," Ith said. "The feline Lone Power—sa'Rrahh?—is the Old Serpent. Our peoples are one at the Root…"
Rhiow blinked.
"You're right," Arhu said, getting up. Suddenly he looked excited, and the transformation in him was a little bizarre, so that Rhiow sat back, concerned, wondering whether the shock of his traumatic memory had unsettled him, kicked him into euphoria. "And we can fix everything."
"I thought you said we were all going to die," Urruah said abruptly.
Couldn't sleep either, huh? Rhiow said.
There was a sardonic taste to Urruah's thought. I'll sleep tomorrow… if ever.
"Oh, die, well," Arhu said, and actually shrugged his tail. Urruah looked incredulously at Rhiow. "Okay, yeah, die. But we can fix it."
"Fix what?"
"The battle. The Fight!"
"Now, wait a minute!" Urruah said. "Are you seriously talking about some kind of, I don't know, some reconfiguration of saurian mythology? Let alone feline mythology? What makes you think you have the right to tell the Gods how things ought to be done?"
"What made Them think They had the right?" Arhu said.
Rhiow stared at him. Arhu turned to her. "Look, Rhiow, the Gods were making it up as they went along," Arhu said. "Why shouldn't we?"
All she could do was open her mouth and shut it again.
"It's only legend because it happened so long ago!" Arhu said. "But once upon a time, it was now! They did the best they could, once upon a time. And this is now, too! Why shouldn't we change the myths for ones that work better? What kind of gods would make you keep making the same mistakes that They made, just because They did it that way once? They'd be crazy! Or cruel! If things have changed, and new problems need new solutions, why shouldn't we enact them? If They're good gods, wouldn't They?"
Urruah, and Saash, well awake now, both stared.
"I mean, if They're any good as gods," Arhu said, with the old street-kitten scorn. "If They aren't, They should be fired."
Rhiow blinked and suddenly heard Ehef saying, in memory, It's not like the old times anymore, no more "jobsfor life"… The thought occurred to her sudden as a tourist's flashbulb popping in front of the library:
can times change even for the gods? Could the process of entropy itself be sped up? Can old solutions no longer be sufficient to the present simply because of a shift in natural law…
… such as the Lone One may be trying to provoke, by using the power tied up in the master Gate catenary…
"And if they won't do the job—" Arhu took a big breath, as if this scared even nun. "Then we can fight Their way. She was me, for a little while. Why can't it go both ways? Why can't we be Them?"
"That's real easy to say," Urruah drawled. "How are you suggesting we manage this?"
Arhu turned and looked at Rhiow.
Her eyes went wide.
"You're crazy," she said.
"The spell," said Arhu.
"You're out of your tiny mind. It's in a hundred pieces—" She had a quick look into her workspace, and then added hurriedly, "I don't understand the theory; it's never been constructed enough even to test…."
But that was all she could say about it… for there was no denying, having looked, that the spell appeared … more whole. Big pieces of it had come together that had never been associated before. Its circle was closing, its gaps filling in.
As a result of the extra power I demanded? She wondered. Or as a result of being so far Downside? Was this assembly something she could have done long ago and had been distracted from—