Диана Дуэйн - THE BOOK OF NIGHT WITH MOON

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Her tail lashed slowly as Rhiow went padding along, looking down at the dark smooth stone and trying to pull her thoughts together. She was still very tired . .. but now, maybe more than ever before in her life, she had to think clearly.
The spell…
She had long assumed that the old tales of the Flyting under the Tree and the Battle of the Claw were symbolic at root: simplistic story-pictures of the interrelationships among the Powers That Be, mere concrete representations of the abstract truth, of the continuing battle against entropy in general, and its author and personification, the Lone Power. It had never occurred to her that as you ventured farther from
the fringe-worlds of mere physical reality into the more central and senior kinds of existence, the legends could become not less true, but more. This universe would plainly support that theory, however, to judge by the status of the spell.
Worse—it had not occurred to Rhiow in her moments of wildest reverie that a living Person might find herself playing one of those parts, enacting the Tearer, or the Destroyer-by-Fire. But that was what this spell now seemed to be pointing toward. And would it feel like "playing" to the unfortunate cat cast in the part? Did the part, ancient and powerful as it was—and moreover, closer to the Heart of things—play you? What if you were left with no choice?
Rhiow shook herself. There was always choice: that much she knew. Those who deny the Powers nonetheless serve the Powers, the Whisperer had often enough breathed in her ear. Those who serve the Powers themselves become the Powers. Beware the Choice! Beware refusing it!
How much plainer could the hint be? she wondered. But in either case, the common thread was Beware. Whatever happened … you were no longer the same. And fear stalked that idea, for the stories also told often enough of cats who had dared to be more than they were, had climbed too high, fell, and did not come down on their feet—or came down on them much too hard for it to matter. How could you tell which you were?
Yet at the same time, there might be a hint of hope lurking under this idea. If People could successfully ascend to the gods' level, even for short periods, they could possibly interact with them on equal terms. Rhiow thought about the Devastatrix. There were ehhif legends about her, how sa'Rrahh once misread her mandate—to eradicate the wickedness in the world—and almost destroyed the whole world and all life by fire, so mercilessly that (in the ehhif story) the other gods had to get her falling-down drunk on blood-beer before she would stop. Rhiow had always thought this was more symbolism for something: some meteoric bombardment or solar flare. Now, though, Drunkenness? Rhiow thought. A complete change of perceptions artificially imposed on one of the Powers That Be? But a temporary one … and to a purpose.
Tamper with the perceptions of sa'Rrahh herself, of the Old Serpent? Fool the Lone One?
Grief-worn and weary as she was, Rhiow was tempted to snicker. There would be a choice irony to that, for the Lone Power had certainly fooled the saurians. A certain poetic justice, there. Well, the Powers don't mind justice being poetic, as long as the structure's otherwise sound.
But if we screw this up.. .forget death being a problem. Forget our souls just passing out into nowhere, with no rebirth. I don't think we'd be so lucky.
… Arhu's right, though. The rules are being changed. That's what all this is about, from the malfunctioning of the Grand Central gates on down. A major reconfiguration is happening. The structure of space is being changed so that the structure of wizardry, maybe of science, maybe of life itself, can be changed.
And if the Lone One can change the rules… so can we.
She stood there in the silence for a few moments more, her tail still twitching; and her whiskers went forward in a slow smile. There was nothing particularly merry about it… but she saw her chance. All she could do now was take it and go forward in the best possible heart.
Rhiow turned and walked back to the others.
"All right," she said as they looked at her. "I'll need some time, yet, to work on the spell… but we can't wait here: those guards will be along. Let's get out into the open and give them something to think about. Ready?"
Urruah snarled softly; Saash made a sound half-growl, half-purr in her throat; Arhu simply looked at Rhiow, silent. Behind him, Ith towered up as silently, watching Rhiow, as Arhu did: with eyes that saw … she couldn't tell what.
"Let's go," she said, and led them down toward the faint light that indicated the next balcony.
Chapter Thirteen
There they come," Urruah said quietly, as they walked out on the balcony and looked down into the abyss.
Rhiow looked across to the nearest visible corridor, off to their right and down one level. Under a mighty carving of rampant saurians, their six-clawed forelimbs stretched out into the emptiness, a wider-than– usual balcony reared out. It was full of mini-tyrannosauruses, and some of them that were much bigger than usual—twins to the scarlet-and-blue-striped dinosaur that Arhu had exploded in Grand Central.
"He keeps being reborn," Arhu hissed. "You kill him and he keeps coming back. It's not fair!"
"It's not life," Rhiow muttered; what defined life, after all, was that sooner or later it ended. "Never mind… we'll deal with him soon enough, I think."
As the team looked from their own balcony, the saurians looked up, saw them, and let out a mighty hiss of rage; the saurians dashed out of sight, making for a rampway upward.
"Well, Rhi?" Urruah said. "Which spell do you like better? The short version of the neural inhibitor—" "We can't take a chance that it might go askew and hit Ith," she said. "Here's the one I like at the moment." She leapt up onto the parapet, and then straight out onto the empty air.
For a horrible moment she missed her footing and was afraid the spell wouldn't take—that gravitic and intra-atomic forces were being interfered with, as well as string structure. But the difference was due only to a slight difference in the gravitic constant here: she could feel it, after a second, and amended her spell to reflect it. The air went hard. She stood on it and looked down in genial scorn at the few remaining saurians, who stared at her and pointed every claw they had available and hissed in amazement.
"Come on, everybody," she said. "Let's not be more of a target than necessary." She stared down into the abyss. Perhaps only three-quarters of a mile down now, that point of light shone up through the cold dark air. Amazing, despite how bright it seemed, how little light it gave to their surroundings.
"I'll switch the stairs back for every hundred vertical feet or so," Rhiow said, throwing a glance behind her at the balcony where Ith and Arhu still stood, and on the parapet of which Saash and Urruah now teetered. "Ith, can you see the stairs I've made?"
A long pause. "No."
"Then stay between Saash and Arhu, and step where Arhu steps. Come on, hurry up, they're coming!"
She headed down the stairway in the air, defining it as she went. She was sorry that she couldn't make the steps deeper, for Ith's sake, but he was just going to have to cope. Hard enough to be stepping down on the air, keeping the air solid before her, solid behind her, holding her concentration, while at the same time trying to poke at bright fragments of words on the floor of the workspace in her mind, trying to chivvy that spell into getting finished. It would help if the power parameters made more sense. It would help if I didn't think the stairstep spell was likely to "burn in" halfway down. It would help if…
Urruah jumped down behind her and began to make his way down the air. Arhu came next. Gingerly, Ith followed, tiptoeing delicately in Arhu's wake and looking now rather nervous, with all twelve of his front claws clenched tight Saash came down after—