Диана Дуэйн - THE BOOK OF NIGHT WITH MOON

The saurian leapt at her, at the air where it had seen the others step—

"Oh, well, I don't follow it… but if a New York team is doing well…"
Rhiow smiled slightly and kept on walking. She was alert for those energy weapons, now. Good thought, Saash, she said, to tempt them a little, see what they had on hand. We'll all have to be ready for that. I don't know what kind of range those things have.
Not terribly long, I think. The wizardly component of them can't be very large, with the people handling the technology not being wizards themselves.
All right. Who's covering Ith, though?
"I'll take care of him for the moment," Urruah said.
"Right." Rhiow turned in midair to "switch back" her stairway, and started on another downward leg.
"Only one thing, Rhi. Don't you think we've, uh, lost the element of surprise?" Urruah was looking at the next course of balconies as they passed them. They were so full of saurians than some of them were in danger of pushing others who watched off into the abyss.
Rhiow had to laugh just slightly. "Did we ever have it, 'Ruah? We've been driven into coming down here in the first place. But in the short term, we haven't had it since Arhu told us those guards were going to be coming. I don't have any trouble with sacrificing it at this point. Let's just have a nice stroll down to where the Fire is … because if we can pull any surprises out down there, that's where we're really going to need them."
They walked down and down the middle of the air, and more and more saurians came crowing to see them. Most of them, Rhiow felt strongly, were not happy about seeing People down there; the buzz of their business, which had been little more than background noise before, now started to scale up into an angry roar. Cries of "Mammals! Kill the mammals!" and "Throw them in the Fire, cleanse our home!" and "Haath, where is Haath?" went up on all sides. Rhiow strolled through it all with as much equanimity as she could manage; but her main concern was for the others, and especially for Ith, as the cries of 'Traitor! Traitor! Kill him!—" went up from the teeming balconies. Urruah was as unmoved as if he were sashaying up some East Side avenue on a weekend. Saash glanced around her nervously once or twice, but as they moved out into the center of the great space, and out of the range of the energy weapons that were fired at them once or twice, she grew less concerned, at least to Rhiow's eye. Arhu was looking more nervous as he went; he seemed to be licking his nose about once a minute. Rhiow had no idea whether this was just general nervousness or due to something the Eye had shown him, and she was unwilling at the moment to make the situation worse by asking. Ith was more of a concern for her, as the cries of rage and betrayal went up all around them; but he stalked along between Arhu and Urruah with his face immobile and his claws at ease—at least Rhiow thought they were at ease. It was going to be a while before she could tell his moods, she thought… if she ever had that much leisure at all.
The cold was now increasing, and the River of Fire was now looking appreciably closer. Once past it, Rhiow thought, once we've dealt with the catenary—assuming it can be dealt with in some way that will return it to its proper functioning—we 're going to have to try to get Ith to do something with whatever power we can make available to him… through the spell, or in whatever other way. If Ith does accept the power to call on the Powers That Be to enforce his Choice, to enact his desire… The chances were good, then, that the new Choice would redeem all these saurians retroactively, enabling them to find some other way of life: the Lone One would be cast out again. The trick after that would be to keep It from destroying the whole Mountain, and all the saurians in it, in a fit of pique.
The other trick will be getting Ith to do this in the first place. For Rhiow was by no means convinced that he was as yet committed. She remembered when she had thought that all this was going to hinge on Arhu, one way or another. How simple it all looked then.
Urruah approached her as she was making her way down in the lead, and paced alongside her. "How're you holding up?"
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 comers 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 comman 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 ofplanets, 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. 1 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 lonization 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 nun 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 bunked 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 influx 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.
It was the Tree: the roots of the Tree, sunk deep in the Mountain … the stone of the Mountain's inmost cavern now rearing up, thrusting up around the separate roots as if trying somehow to bind them. From older trees in the park, Rhiow knew that in any such contest between tree and stone, the tree always won eventually. But here it seemed to have been fought to a draw: the stone seemed to be closing in.
Before it, between them and the Tree, the River of Fire spilled down the last of its steps and out into a broad channel … the final barrier. It looked more like the archetypal River now: inimical, a fire that would burn cold rather than hot, one in which nothing could survive—certainly not memory, maybe not even the passing soul. By the light of that river, Rhiow could make out that something else was wound about the Tree, among the stones, resting on them in some places: a long shining form, dark as everything else was here—but the light of the River caught its scales coldly, glinted black fire back. That form lapped the Tree in coil upon immense coil; the mind wanted to refuse the sight of it. Taking it all in, the trunk of the Tree, the roots of the Tree, the coiled shape, was like trying to take in a whole mountain in a glimpse from up close, as well as the river of fire that wound about its feet, and the other river of darkly glittering light, which wound about it higher up: a river with eyes.
And under the spot where eyes lay brooding in a gigantic skull, where the massive jaw rested, at the top of one mighty root, Rhiow saw a great deep jagged gouge, gnawed into the Tree. The gouge bled pale light, too pale to illumine much. The gouge was deep—perhaps a third of the way through the whole trunk, on that side. And the old, dark, wise, amused eyes looked at them, and smiled.
Rhiow threw an almost panicked glance at Arhu, for it was in his voice that she had first heard the warning. Claw your way to the Root. The Tree totters… And did the trunk have just the slightest leftward slant? As if it were thinking about falling?
What else will fall with it?
They all stood there, in that massive, archaic silence, and looked at those dark eyes. Rhiow felt those eyes on her and felt ineffably ephemeral, helpless, small. Beside her, Saash was staring, silent. Beside her, Arhu looked once, and looked away as if burned. Ith— Ith crouched down to the stony ground in what even to Rhiow was plainly a gesture of reverence.
It was not entirely misplaced, Rhiow knew. She took a step forward, sat down, curled her tail about her feet, looked the Old Serpent in the eye, though she trembled all over, and said as clearly as she could, "Eldest, Fairest, and Fallen… greeting; and defiance."
Things began to shake. A long rumble, a roar, as of many voices, fading away … laughter. A long soft laugh, fading, as if the earthquake laughed.
Rhiow saw Arhu shudder all over at the sound. She was not in much better state herself. She was going to have to cope, though. Off to one side she caught a movement. Urruah, heading for the River—
She opened her mouth to shout at him to stop—and found herself muzzled: those dark eyes were concentrating particularly on her, and the pressure made speech impossible for the moment. But Urruah kept going. He would probably have ignored me anyway. Urruah!!
Straight out over the deadly River he went, as casually as if he were walking across Seventy-eighth Street, heading for his Dumpster. He passed the River, unhurt, though Rhiow thought she caught a scent of scorching fur. Urruah sauntered slowly over to the nearest root of the Tree where it sank among the tumbled stones, a massive gnarled pillar, and looked it over; then reared up on his hind legs, and began, thoughtfully, insolently, to sharpen his claws on it.
Rhiow stared at him open-jawed, filled with disbelief, indignation, and a kind of crooked admiration. She had leisure to indulge herself in the feelings, for Urruah didn't hurry any more than he might have rushed himself while working on some badly fenced-in sapling on a city street. Finally Urruah was done. He dropped to all fours again and strolled back over the river, back to the team: a tom finished marking just one more piece of territory.
Only you would pull a stunt like that, Rhiow said to him as he came.
Possibly that's why I'm here, he said, and smiled, then turned back to face their enemy. But sometimes you can be a little too formal. If we're going to play hauissh … let's play hauissh.
I'm surprised you didn't spray it, Saash said.
Hey, yeah, I forgot. He started to get up, and Rhiow put a big heavy paw down on his tail, without the claws … for the moment. Urruah looked over his shoulder at her, then grinned and sat down again.
Is it the Fight? Arhu said silently. The one you and Yafh were showing me?
If not the original, Urruah said, close enough. Keep your tactics in mind. Find your position and don't be moved off it. Half of a good fight is bluff, so yell as loud as you can, break your throat if you have to: it heals faster than broken claws. Don't waste your time with ears: no one breathes through their ears. Throats are the target—
What is this, the pregame show? Rhiow said silently, annoyed, but still amused. How am I supposed to make a mission statement with this going on? Save it for later.
She stood up. "Well, Lone One," she said, "you've been working on something a little less obvious down here, it seems. Often enough You've tried striking directly at individual wizards, with mixed results at best. But here, now, obviously it's suited You to strike at the Gates by undermining the Tree, and enslaving the poor saurians down here, that You tricked so long ago. Well, the Queen has noticed You… and She and the Powers have a little surprise for You as a result. The first saurian wizard…"
That laughter, like the earthquake, rumbled again. And when it faded to silence, a voice spoke.
"There is another?" It said, amused.
From out of the shadows stepped a tall shape. Arhu looked up and growled in his throat
It was a tyrannosaur: slate-blue, striped gaudily in red. It looked down at them all with an expression that stretched into a mocking grin, and flexed all its twelve claws.
"You again," Arhu said.
"You're a bit older than when I saw you last," said the tyrannosaur … in the Speech. "But you won't get much older than you are now,… never fear."
"This is the one I saw the first night," Arhu said. "After the rats."
"Haath," Rhiow said. "The Great One's 'sixth claw.'"
"Feline mammal," Haath said, and grinned at her in her turn. "I will not say 'well met on the errand'; it will not be so, for you."
Rhiow's heart sank. Surprise, she thought, furious with herself for being so blind, for the Lone Power had been way ahead of her. Here, in the heart of this place where the structure of wizardry itself was being deranged and perverted, It had been able to cause wizardry to present itself to a saurian of Its choice, without involving any of the other Powers That Be. It had taught the wizard everything It wanted him to know, and pushed him through an Ordeal that had probably been a parody of the real thing, but real enough to produce the result: a wizard who walked the entropic side, who killed casually or for pleasure, who changed the life around him without reason, who knew nothing of preservation or slowing down the heat-death … who probably knew nothing but his Master's will. At the mere thought of such perversion of the Art, Rhiow hissed and spat, fluffing up.
"Now now," said Haath, much amused, "bad kitty," and swept a claw at her.
Rhiow said the word that would activate the shield-spell she had been carrying—and the bolt that caught her struck straight through the shield and threw her on her back, burning in her bones so that she could do little but lie on the ground and writhe in pain. "Indeed," Haath said, "you see that my Lord has taught me well. He wrested the power for me from those who would have kept it jealously for themselves and their chosen puppets. I am his chosen one, His Sixth Claw. And as for this—" He looked scornfully at Ith. "He knows his master in me. He has no power. I have passed my Ordeal: he barely knows what his was supposed to be. Not that he will have a chance to find out. I am my People's wizard. There will be no other."
The pain was wearing off enough now for Rhiow to stagger to her feet again, licking her nose. This is why
Ith was sent to us, she thought. And Arhu to him… to prepare him for this competition. This is his opposite number. There's always someone else to argue the opposite side of a Choice, for no Choice would be valid without it.
'This is a kinship of individuals!" Rhiow shouted, putting her shield back in place. "Not a monopoly! Not a tyranny of power! There's always room for more wizards."
"Not in this world," Haath said, "and not in the new world to be, which we will bring. There will shortly be something new under the Sun."
Ith was still crouched on the black floor, head down, fore-claws clenched on the stone, as if unable to stand, even, let alone to make any Choice for his whole people. Do something, Rhiow whispered into his mind. Do something! Try!
But he could not hear her. All he could hear was Haath, that voice curling into his brain and shutting everything else out, shutting him away from his power.
"And why should he hear anything else?" Haath said, stepping closer, leaning over Ith and grinning dreadfully. "I am his Lord, I am his Leader! I would have brought him up into the light, into the Sun, in my good time … but now it is too late. Coming down here in company with you, he has enacted rebellion. It is too late for him: none of our people are allowed to do such a thing. He must suffer the fate that he has brought upon himself, and later, his name and his fate will be used to frighten hatchlings. His hide will be hung from some high spot, to show what happens to those who defy the Great One's will." He bowed to the mountainous shape coiled around the trunk of the Tree.
Rhiow, her tail lashing, looked at Haath, then turned away, turned her attention back toward the freezing cold eyes in that beautiful, gleaming-dark head. "Fairest and Fallen," she said, "Lone Power, Old Serpent, and sa'Rrahh among our People: from the Powers That Be, and from the One, I bring you this word. Leave this place and this universe, or be displaced by force."
It simply looked at her, not even bothering to laugh now. Rhiow stood her ground, and tried not to look as if she were bluffing. She knew of no wizardry sufficient to move the Lone One from a place it had invested in such power.
I know a spell, Saash said.
I would prefer not destroying a whole species if we can avoid it! Rhiow said. If we can avoid it. But there are a couple of other possibilities I want to explore.
You do that. Meanwhile— Ith! Rhiow said silently. Ith! Get off your tail and do something! This is your chance— stand up and tell him so! You have power—try to use it!
He is the Lord of our people, Ith said with great difficulty. Till now, I never saw him, but—now—I thought that perhaps, but—his power—it is too great, I cannot—
Rhiow's hackles rose. I'd hoped Arhu would have him ready for whatever he has to do, she thought. But he's not going to rise to the occasion. I'm just going to have to lead by example.
She took a stride forward, opened her mouth to speak—
"All right," Arhu said, walking forward stifflegged. "That's enough. You think I don't feel you in his head, hurting him? Taking his thoughts away? He can't stop you, but I think I can. Get out of his head, Haath! I remember when you tried to do that to me. I couldn't stop you myself, lizard-face, not the first time; when you found you couldn't completely fry my brains, you sent in the rats to get rid of me the easy way. But it didn't work." He was stalking closer, lips wrinkled back, fangs showing. "And when the gates opened, and you showed up on my turf, I showed you a little something. I've killed you before. I'll do it again, and I'll keep on doing it until I get it right."
"You will never get it right," Haath said, backing just a little, starting to circle. "I can never die. It is my Gift from the Great One."
"Yeah, I bet it is," Arhu said. "He's just full of little presents, isn't He? Let's find out how yours stands up to a little wear and tear."
He launched himself at Haath.
Down they went together, kicking and rolling. Rhiow was surprised to see nothing more wizardly being used at first, but a second later she thought she knew why: there was a spell-damper all around Haath—not quite a shield, but a place where spells would not work… and Haath had not counted on Arhu wanting to go paw-to-claw with him. Arhu, though, had probably known: the Eye had its uses. And he may have seen something else as well: something Rhiow saw only now, when she turned—