The Book Of Night With Moon

Chapter Nine

She headed for Grand Central at her best speed, which (this time of night) meant skywalking; but her concerns over this were fewer than usual. There were not that many people likely to spot a black cat in the dim predawn air, fifty stories up, and all the birds of prey were asleep.

Rhiow came down to ground level again at Forty-second and Lexington, and got herself sidled. She trotted past the Grand Hyatt, past a few drunks sitting against the walls, waiting for the station (or the nearby liquor store) to open; passed through the locked front doors, and hurried up past the waiting room…

…and stopped, looking around her suspiciously. There was something different…

The lights in the display area were mostly out, of course, with the station in closed-down mode.

No… that’s not it.

Rhiow walked past the biggest of the mounted skeletons, strolling toward the back of the room. No one hiding here… That had been the first impression: something concealing itself, hugging the shadows, waiting … Nothing. You’re nervous. Let’s get on with business.

Rhiow started to walk out again … and then paused, looked up at the biggest skeleton.

Its position was different.

Impossible. The thing weighs tons; it’s wired together much too securely to sag out of shape.

An illusion, then … born of the darkness, her nerves. The way the head hung down, the empty eyes looking at her, was creepy in this subdued lighting, seeming somehow more concentrated and immediate than they had yesterday. The nasty little front claws were held out in what might almost have been a gesture of surprise—in an ehhif, at least. Iau only knew what such a gesture might once have meant in a saurian. If there was threat in these poor dead bones, it was in the huge jaws, the serried ranks of fangs…

Rhiow thought suddenly of the back of the cavern that led into the deep Downside: the spikes of stone, the jaws ready to close…

She flirted her tail in annoyance at herself—there were much more important things to think about at the moment. She turned and galloped up into the brighter lighting of the main concourse, down to the platform for Track 30 and the gate…

Saash was there. So was another figure, an ehhif, sidled as well: Tom Swale, Har’lh’s partner-Advisory. He was a little shorter than Har’lh, a little broader in the shoulder, higher-cheekboned, and with silver-shot hair: if anything he looked more like an Area Advisory than his partner did, though he wore the same kind of informal clothes this time of day, shirt and jeans and sneakers. His easygoing face, though, was wearing an unusual expression of strain and concern.

“It’s nice to see you, Rhiow,” Tom said, hunkering down to talk to her, “but I wish to die Powers that it was under other circumstances. Saash has filled you in?”

“Yes.” Rhiow looked over at Saash, who said, “I’ve checked all the logs of all the gates here, and the Penn team has fed me all their gates’ logs as well. No sign of any access by Har’lh except to this gate: no sign of his egress from any other gate in New York, and no sign of any private gating, either.”

Almost behind her, Urruah came trotting down the platform, and greeted Tom. “You still here? There’s no sign of him yet?—”

“None. Wizards all over are looking for him. But no one’s found him… which is pretty unusual. Wizards almost always find what they’re looking for, especially when this many of them are concentrated on the task.”

“They’re looking offplanet as well?” Rhiow said.

Tom nodded. “An Area Advisory going missing is usually a fairly serious sign,” Tom said. “There’s concern at fairly high levels.”

“He wouldn’t be—dead—would he?” Saash said, with the greatest reluctance.

“I don’t think so,” Tom said. “I’m pretty sure I would know.”

“Oh, come on, Saash,” Urruah said, “you’re nuts. Have you ever heard of a Advisory dying in the line of duty?”

Tom looked at Urruah fairly gently. “Urruah,” he said, “all Advisories die in the line of duty. Any exceptions are accidents or misperceptions on the part of the living. It’s within the job description: we accept it.”

“That said,” Rhiow said, “Advisories are also tough and smart. Maybe not as powerful as they would be if they were younger; but who is? Could it be that Har’lh’s still Downside, but held somehow in a pocket of influence of some other Power”—she was not going to name names at this point—“that is making it seem that he’s not there?”

“It’s a possibility. But I’m surprised you’re eager to suggest it, since you know what it would mean.”

“I’m not eager, believe me,” Rhiow said; and a glance at the others confirmed to her that they were in agreement.

“Well.” Tom breathed out, a harassed sound. “The only good thing about all this is that it’s been a slow night; there haven’t been any other accesses down here. We don’t know for sure that this particular occurrence was aimed specifically at Carl… but we also can’t take the chance that other wizards on errantry might fall foul of it. Were these other gates, I might be concerned; but this is the master system— all the world’s gates are sourced out of me ‘tree’ structure that arises in the roots of the Mountain. That being the case, I think I’m going to have to get a little drastic, and insist that the gating system worldwide be shut down until we find Carl and get all this sorted out. It may be nothing serious at all…”

“But you doubt it,” Rhiow said.

“I doubt it. The shutdown obviously isn’t going to apply to accredited repair teams: naturally that’s going to mean you. I’m sorry to put you through this again, Rhi… but you did the most recent intervention, and the way the Powers work, that suggests you’re going to be the ones who can produce the result. How soon can you go down again?”

Rhiow looked at Saash and Urruah. Urruah was carefully studying a crack in the concrete: Saash was scratching.

Come on, you two.

This does not work for me, Urruah growled silently.

I hate this, Saash hissed. You heard what I told you before.

Yes, I did. Well?

They both looked up at her.

She turned to look up at Tom. “Dawn would be the soonest,” Rhiow said. “I would prefer noon, though, since that way we can bring our newest member along. He’s likely to be extremely useful, but not unless he’s rested.”

Tom too examined the concrete for a few breaths. “I hate to let the trail get cold.”

“If there is a trail,” Urruah said. “I’d sooner take a little extra time in preparation, and get the job right, if we have to go down there again.”

“You’re right, of course,” Tom said. He stood up. “Let’s say noon, then. I’ll mind your upper gate for you this time: Carl and I have been working together long enough now that I may be able to help you somehow. Otherwise I’ll be in a position to get you backup in a hurry should you need it.”

Rhiow flirted her tail “yes,” though privately she was unsure how fast any backup was going to be able to reach them, if they were going to have to go as far down the “tree” structure as she feared they would. “I want an override,” she said, “on the number and power of wizardries we can bring down with us. I feel we’re going to need to be unusually well armed this time, and while I know the Powers are chary of letting people throw spells around like water, I think our workload the last few days, and the resistance we met last time, are going to justify it.”

Tom looked at her thoughtfully, then nodded. “All right,” he said, “I’ll take it up with the North American Supervisor.”

“Don’t just take it up, T’hom. I want it done. Otherwise—”

She didn’t finish the sentence, but she was somewhat fluffed up, and didn’t try to disguise it.

“You’re willing to pay the price?” Tom said.

Rhiow licked her nose. Such exceptions did not come cheap. Of course, not even the smallest wizardry was without its price: usually you paid in your own stamina, in the work and pains you took over the construction of the spell, the personal energy required to perform it, and the energy you spent in dealing with the consequences. But for extra services, you paid extra… and the coin was usually time off your lifespan. Days, months: a dangerous equation, when you didn’t know for sure how much time you might have left… but sometimes necessary.

She licked her nose again. “Yes,” she said.

Tom looked at her, and sighed. “I’ll talk to you at noontime,” he said. “Saash, the catenaries will go down in half an hour—that’ll give everyone worldwide who might be transiting plenty of time to finish their transits or change their plans.”

“Fine,” Saash said. “We’ll use the Thirty gate again for the access: having just worked on it, I’m happiest with its function. If you’ll see to it that power is running to that one gate for noon—”

“Consider it done.” Tom stood up again. “Listen, you three… I’m sorry this is going to be so rough on you. I appreciate what you’re doing.”

Do you, I wonder, Rhiow thought, but then she felt guilty, for the thought was unworthy. Of course he does. It’s his job. AH we can do is do ours.

“Let’s go, you two,” she said. “We’ve got a lot of preparation to do. T’hom—go well.”

“So may we all,” he said, and vanished.

The three of them repaired to Rhiow’s rooftop and spent the next few hours discussing what spells they might possibly bring with them that would do any good against a force much bigger and more dangerous than the saurians they had met the other day. It was certain that they would meet such force, since they had defeated the saurians so bloodily last time, and (worse) because Har’lh’s disappearance was almost certainly a provocation to draw them, or others like them, down again.

“My guess is that they’re going to try something more spectacular than the last time,” Urruah said. “If you’re right, and they managed to sabotage the catenary … then worse is coming. We’ve got to get down there and have enough power to stop whatever we find.”

“If T’hom gets us that override,” Saash said, looking out over the rooftops as the sun came up, “it’s going to make our jobs a lot easier.”

“Plan for it,” Rhiow said, “but also plan without it I for one am going to be prepared to survive this intervention: I’m not going to plan to get stuck in circle again, either. I know the Oath says we have to let these creatures survive if at all possible—but not at the cost of our own lives or our mission. I’m going to use that neural degenerator as liberally as I need.”

“So will I,” Urruah said, “but Rhi… even an override may not be enough to save us, if the kind of numbers turn up that you’re expecting.”

“What are you suggesting we do about it?”

“Conjunct coupling,” Urruah said, and licked his nose.

So did Rhiow. Saash just stared at him, round-eyed, then turned around and started to wash her back.

“I’ve been thinking about what Arhu was saying,” Urruah said. “ ‘He’s coming. The father … the son.’ Something bigger than the rest of the lizards. Something much more dangerous … that was the impression I got, anyway.”

Rhiow switched her tail in reluctant agreement. “You’re saying you think conjunct is the only way we’re going to be able to maintain power levels high enough to handle something like … that.” Whatever that was: she was becoming afraid to follow that line of reasoning to its rational conclusion, even here in the burgeoning light of day.

“It means,” Urruah said, “that no matter whether one or another of us has a lapse, the others’ combined power will be able to feed the wizardry they’re doing, and keep it going.”

Saash sat up and glared at him. “It also means that if we go down there hooked up in conjunct, we all have to come back that way … or none of us can come back up again at all! If any of us die down there, the others will be stranded—!”

There was a pause. “Yes,” Urruah said, “it would mean that. But think about the alternative, even with the override that T’hom may or may not be able to get us. You’re doing a wizardry. Your concentration, or your power flow, fails. You blow the wizardry … and you die … and then the others are put at risk trying to keep you from dying, and their wizardries fail.” He would not look away from Saash. She stared back at him; the tension stretched itself across the air between them. “Everyone dies. The whole job goes straight to sa’Rrahh. And not just our lives … whatever happens to them when you die down there. A whole lot of other lives. All those that depend on the gates working. Har’lh’s, too, for all we know. —At least this way we would have a better chance of supporting one another’s wizardries. I’m no hero … but it’s all about getting the job done, isn’t it? Rhi?” He turned to her.

Rhiow looked down at the gravel where she sat, her tail twitching. Finally she glanced up again. “If it were just me,” she said at last, “I would sanction it. But it’s not just me. There are two other team members who must agree to be bound in this manner… and this isn’t something I can decide for the others involved.”

Saash would not look at her. “I’m not going to ask for a decision now,” Rhiow said. “Noon will be soon enough. Between now and then I’m going to have to go explain it all to Arhu anyway, which should be interesting.” She looked east, at Rhoua’s Eye, rising nonchalantly in the sky as if this were just another day; and from the streets came the early hoots and tire-screeches of the beginning of rush-hour traffic, reinforcing the feeling of normalcy, spurious though it was.

“It’s all in the Queen’s womb anyway,” she said. “All we can do is wait and see how the litter comes out… and meantime, make sure our claws are sharp. Saash, wait awhile before you head back to the garage.”

She walked off to her usual stairway in the air, leaving Saash and Urruah pointedly not looking at each other. Please, Iau, let them sort it out, she thought.

But she couldn’t help but wonder how effective prayer was likely to be today, of all days…

The garage was deep in its morning business, cars going in and out at a great rate, and Rhiow questioned whether the ehhif working there would have seen her whether she had been sidled or not As it was, she was, and she walked up the air again to the high ledge in the back, where Arhu was sleeping.

She sat down on the concrete and simply looked at him for a moment. He was sleeping a little more easily, if nothing else: stretched out long and leggy, rather than hunched up in the little ball of previous days. He’s beginning to fill out a little, Rhiow thought, even after just a few days. A few months of this and he’s going to start looking like a proper young tom.

If we survive that long…

She was aware, suddenly, of eyes half-open and looking at her.

“I heard you,” Arhu said, not moving, just watching her with a sleepy look, but one that was nonetheless unusually knowing.

Rhiow stuck out a leg and began to wash it in a casual manner.

“Something bad’s happening, isn’t it?” Arhu said.

“Much worse than usual,” Rhiow said. “Har’lh is missing.”

“I know,” Arhu said, rolling over to lie upright. “I see that. Or, at least, I know it’s happened… but I don’t know how or why.”

He paused, as if looking at something else; then said, “You can’t go after him now. Something’s coming ,… trying to break through.”

“What?” Rhiow said.

“The one who chooses,” Arhu said, gazing out into the fumy air of the garage. “And the one who didn’t choose. There’s a darkness pushing against the gate; I see it bending outward, and there are eyes, they’re staring, they want—” Suddenly Arhu scrabbled to bis feet and pushed himself right back against the concrete wall, as if he had forgotten how to melt through it, and he started to pant as if he had been running. “It’s coming,” he gasped, “they’re coming, all the choices, all the eyes … coming upward…”

“Sit down, Arhu,” Rhiow said, and went over to him, leaning to wash behind his ear briefly. He sat, but he was still staring out into the dimness, his eyes flickering wildly from side to side as he watched what Rhiow couldn’t see.

’This one’s scary,” Arhu said softly, his breathing beginning to slow a little; but his eyes were still wide, fixed on some spot out of Rhiow’s vision, or anyone else’s. “This one really wants to be real, this choice. It’s going to do it soon.” He quieted a little more, but a few seconds later, he said, “They can’t use the gates.”

“I know,” Rhiow said. “Tom has had them shut down.”

“That’s not the problem,” Arhu said. He looked at her, with some confusion, Rhiow thought, and said, “All these choices …How did we choose?”

Her first temptation was to tell him to look himself at the ancient memories the Whisperer would show him; but then it occurred to Rhiow that he was already seeing enough at the moment—he seemed to be caught in some kind of visionary fugue—and adding more imagery on top of it might make him even more confused or cloud some perception that might be of more importance.

Rhiow nudged Arhu down into the “sphinx” position he had been lying in earlier, and hunched next to him, tucking her forepaws in. “I suppose all the Choices are odd,” she said, “but ours, well, it had its own quirks. We were made before the ehhif, supposedly, but well after the cetaceans and the saurians, of course. The saurians had passed by then; their failed Choice had killed all of them. There were a very few saurians, you know,” she said, settling her front paws more comfortably, “who had rejected that image of world-ruling power than the Lone Power offered them. They took the vegetarian option to use less life, more sparingly—but there were not enough of them in the Choice to turn it aside, and they died under the fangs of the others. The Lone One’s long black winter killed the rest.

“Then, much later, after the winter was gone and the world was warm and green again, our foremothers came. There wasn’t any differentiation among the various kinds of feline families yet: just one kind, who didn’t look so much different from us, although they were bigger, more houff-sized. They all ran in prides, and so when they grew into mind, the First Queens made the Choice for them, as queens decide what their prides will do today.”

“What did It—what did she say?”

“Well, sa’Rrahh came and said to them that the way of life that Iau had held out to them—to kill responsibly, to take only what they needed—was just Her plot to keep them small and weak, living on subsistence, on sufferance, and eventually to make slaves of them. The Destroyer held out to them the promise of rule over the world, the land the saurians had wielded: power and terror, domination, all other life fleeing before them. And the Queen-mothers of the First Prides, wizards and nonwizards both—because there are always wizards in a Choice, at least a few—considered the Choice; but, being People after all, they disagreed on what to do, just as the saurians had.”

“So some took sa’Rrahh’s offer—”

Arhu had that faraway look again: Rhiow had no idea what he might be seeing, and continued as she had been doing. “Most did, and their Choice ruled the others. The Hungry, those who made that Choice, grew great and terrible in body, killing for power and success, but like the carnivorous saurians, they hadn’t paid enough attention to the wording and intention of the Lone One’s offer. They had their time to rule, but it was short—soon enough the ice crept down from the poles and buried the forests where they hunted, killing their game, and then most of them as well. There was a second group of the Eldest Kindred who rejected power and rule over the Earth, and elected to kill what they needed, only. They were the Mindful. They stayed small, for the most part, but grew wise, enough so to survive the ice when it came.”

She fell silent for a moment, wondering what to make of the look on Arhu’s face. “But there were more—” he said.

Rhiow switched her tail “yes.” “They weren’t very many, that last group: the Failed. They recognized as potentially deadly the Choice the Lone Power was offering, and they attacked her and died. But they’re reborn, again and again, in one or another of our sundered Kindreds.”

“They’re wizards,” Arhu said suddenly, and looked up at Rhiow.

“Yes,” she said. “Still we die: there’s no escaping the fate of the rest of our kind. But we’re set apart; and we alone of all felinity may come again to that time and place where cats’ bodies are once again the size of their souls… Other confusions between size and Kindred have come about over time. The Hungry are born among the smaller kindreds, and the Mindful among the great; the savage and the kindly mingle. You never know which sort you’ll find yourself dealing with. Yet every feline, great or small, carries all of them within herself; we all have to make the Choice again and again, a hundred times in a life, or a thousand. Sum up all the choices, over nine lives, and your fate’s decided, they say. If you fail, then there’s nothing at the end of it all but silence, and the night. Pass through that last summing-up, though, under Iau’s eye, and there’s the last life, which doesn’t end—”

“—the Tenth Life and the truest,” Arhu said slowly, “of those whose spirits outwear and overmaster their bodies, untiring of the chase, the Choice, the battle, and go on in the world and beyond it; immortal, dangerous and fair, cats-become-Powers, who move in and out of physicality on the One’s business—”

He looked at Rhiow, his eyes clearing. “They can’t help us,” Arhu said. “Something is breaking through: everything is bending, changing … so that there’s nowhere solid for them to step. There isn’t any help but what we already have.”

Wonderful, Rhiow thought. “If you see anything that can be of use to us in what we’re going to have to do,” she said, “this would be a good time to let me know.”

He looked at her with a kind of helpless expression. “You’re carrying all the wrong spells,” he said. “You don’t want to open the gates. You need to shut them.”

That perplexed her. “But they’re shut already.”

“Not for long,” Arhu said, and very suddenly squeezed his eyes shut as if seeing something that frightened him badly.

“What?” Rhiow said.

“No…” He wouldn’t look at her.

I wish I could push him. But I don’t dare. “All right,” she said. “Arhu, we have another problem. Whatever you may say about opening or shutting gates, we are going to have to go Downside again, very soon, to look for Har’lh. It’s going to be much more dangerous than last time, and if our spells are to protect us so that we can do the job, we’re going to have to link ourselves together in a particular way. It means we’ll be stronger: each of us will have all our strengths to draw on. But it also means that, if one of us dies down there, all the others will be trapped; there’ll be no return.”

“I know,” Arhu said, painfully. “I see that.”

Rhiow shuddered. “I’m not going to tell you that you have to do that. You have to decide.”

He didn’t say anything for a long time. And then, abruptly, he looked up at Rhiow again. “… What does Saash say?”

Rhiow looked curiously at him. Arhu looked at the floor. “Well,” he said, “she washed me. I must have tasted horrible. And she held me, even when I kicked, and called her names.”

So it’s going to come down to her, Rhiow thought Why can I not surprised? “She’s angry,” Rhiow said. “She doesn’t want to go down there again, and she hasn’t made her mind up.”

He switched his tail indecisively. “She’ll be here in a little while,” Rhiow said. “You can ask her then. When you’ve decided, speak to me in your head, or ask Saash to. We can’t wait very long to go.”

“All right.” He turned his face to the wall.

Rhiow sighed, and stepped out onto the air, sidled again. “But you do have mostly the wrong spells,” Arhu said.

This is so reassuring. “Which ones should we have, then?” Rhiow said.

“The ones the Whisperer’s still working on…”

That made Rhiow blink.

“I’ll be at my den,” she said. “Go well.”

When she got in, Rhiow was surprised to find Hhuha still at home so far into the day. She was stalking around the apartment restlessly, dressed for work, but plainly not going there: paperwork was still lying scattered here and there, her briefcase sat open on the table. Something unusual was happening, and Hhuha was tense about it. Possibly that meeting she was planning has been rescheduled? Rhiow thought. In any case, she knew better than to interfere with Hhuha when she was in such a mood, though at the moment Rhiow’s stomach was growling nearly as loud as her purr could get under better conditions. She went and jumped on the sofa, and curled up there.

Hhuha stopped by the window, looked out, sighed, then went over to Rhiow and picked her up. “I hate calling in sick when I’m not,” Hhuha muttered into her fur. “It makes me feel duplicitous and foul. Come here, puss, and tell me I’m not duplicitous and foul.”

“You’re no more duplicitous than most cats are,” Rhiow said, purring as loudly as she could and bumping her head against Hhuha’s ear, “so why should you complain? As ehhif go, you’re a model of good behavior. And you’re not foul. The tuna is foul. —Oh, come on, my Hhuha, calm down.” She put her nose against Hhuha’s neck. “This is no good. You’re not calm, Iau knows I’m not calm, neither of us can do anything for each other.”

“My kitty,” Hhuha said, rubbing her behind the ears. “I wish I knew where you were half the time. You make me worry.”

“I wish I could just tell you! It would be so much easier. I swear, I’m going to start teaching you Ailurin when all this quiets down. If Rosie can learn it, so can you.”

“At least I know you’re not out getting knocked up.”

Rhiow had to laugh. “With the example of the Himalayans down the street before my eyes? I’d sooner pull out my own ovaries with my teeth. Fortunately that’s not a requirement.”

“Boy, you’re talky today. You hungry? Want some tuna? Sure.”

“I don’t want the gods’-damned tuna!” Rhiow practically shouted as Hhuha put her down and went to the ffrihh. “I want to lie on the rug and be a house pet! I want to sit on the sofa and have you rub my fur backward so I can grab you and pretend to bite! I want to sit on Iaehh’s chest and nuke him feed me pepperoni! I want… oh. You didn’t say you had sushi last night!”

“Here, it’s maguro. You like maguro. Come on. Would you stand up for it?”

Rhiow stood right up on her hind legs and snatched at the sushi with both paws. “You’d be surprised what I’d do for it, except I’m not allowed. Did you take the horseradish off it? I hate that stuff, it makes my nose run. Oh, good…”

Hhuha sat down, and together they ate tuna sushi, very companionably, on the sofa. “He made a big fuss about not liking maguro last night,” Hhuha said, “so he doesn’t get any. You and I will eat it all. No, you don’t want this one, it’s sea urchin.”

“Try me!”

“Hey, get your face out of there. You had three pieces, that’s enough.”

“There is no such thing as too much sushi.”

“Oh, gosh, it is awful the day after. Here, you have it.”

“I thought you’d see sense eventually. —Oh, gods, it’s disgusting!”

“Hey, don’t drop that on my rug! I thought you wanted it!”

“I changed my mind.”

The phone rang. Hhuha leapt up off the couch like a Person going up a tree with a houff after her, and answered the phone before the machine could pick up. “Hello—yes, this is she—yes, I’ll hold— Yes, good morning, Mr. Levenson. —Certainly. —No problem—when? That’s fine. I’ll see you there. Yes. Goodbye—”

She hung up and threw away the rejected piece of sushi, then dashed across the room to pick up the jacket that went with the business skirt she was wearing, shut the briefcase and snatched it from the table, and looked scornfully at the pile of papers near it. “May be the last day I have to mess with that stuff,” Hhuha said. “Wish me luck, puss!”

“Hunt’s luck, Hhuha mine,” Rhiow said. Hhuha headed out the door and closed it, starting to lock locks on the outside.

Rhiow sat there when the noise had finished, and listened to Hhuha’s steps going off down the hallway, then had a brief wash. She was in the middle of it when she heard the voice in her head.

Rhiow?

T’hom—

You’re needed. Hurry up: get the team together and get them all down here. We’ve got big trouble.

She had never heard such a tone from him before. She went out the door at a run.

It took about twenty minutes to get everyone together at the garage; after that it was a minute’s worth of work to do a small-scale “personal” transit of the kind that Rhiow and the team had first used to bring Arhu in. The garage staff mistook the slam of air into the space where they had been for something mechanical, as Rhiow had suspected they would; when they popped out into existence on the platform for Track 30, the bang! of hot, displaced air was drowned out there too by the diesel thunder of trains arriving on one track and leaving on another.

There were a lot of people waiting on the empty platform. They looked like commuters … those of them who were visible, anyway. But visible or not, they had business in the station other than catching trains. In a city the size of New York, with a population of as many as ten million, there may be (depending on local conditions) as many as a hundred thousand wizards in the area; and New York, packed as full as it is with insistent minds and lives, populated as it is by an extravagant number of worldgates, tends to run higher than that. Obviously many wizards would be based in boroughs other than Manhattan, or would be engaged in other errantry that wouldn’t leave them free to drop what they were doing. But many would be ready and able to answer an emergency call, and these were arriving and being briefed, either by other wizards or by their Manuals, on what was going to be required of them.

Tom saw Rhiow and the team immediately, and headed over to them through a crowd of other ehhif wizards. “I got you your override,” he said to Rhiow when they had moved a little over to one side, where they could talk. “I’m afraid it wasn’t cheap.”

She knew it wasn’t. The Whisperer had breathed a word in Rhiow’s ear while they were setting up the circle for their short transit—confirmation that her demand had been accepted, and the price set—and the news had made her lick her nose several times in rapid succession. A whole life— She could have backed out, of course. But Rhiow had put her tongue back in where it belonged, taken a deep breath, and agreed. Now it was done. If everything worked out for them, of course, the price would be more than fair. It was simply something of a shock to have spent the last four or five years thinking of yourself as still only a four-lifer, not yet in middle age—and suddenly, between one breath and the next, to realize that you were already into your fifth life, and now on the downhill side.

“We do what we have to,” Rhiow said. “Har’lh has been doing so, and the Queen only knows where he is at the moment. Should I do less? But never mind that. What’s going on?” She glanced over by Track 30, where she could see the weft of the gate showing as usual. “I thought you shut the catenaries down.”

“They were shut down at the source.” Rhiow looked up at him, slightly awestruck, for the source of the gates was the Powers That Be: Aaurh herself, in fact. “However… something has brought them up again.”

“The gates are active,” Urruah said carefully, “but not under your—under ‘our’—control?”

“Yes,” Tom said. Rhiow thought she had never heard anything quite so grim. “We’ve tried to shut the gates down again. They don’t answer.”

Saash’s tail was lashing. “Once it’s shut down, an emplaced wizardry shouldn’t be able to be reactivated except by the one who emplaced it.”

“Shouldn’t. But we’ve seen the rules changing around us, all week. Apparently the earlier malfunctions were a symptom of this one—or else this one is just the biggest symptom yet. Someone has reactivated the gates from the other side.”

“That would take—”

“Wizardry? Yes. And of a very high order.”

Rhiow remembered the gate “saying” to her, “Someone” interfered… She licked her nose. And my light went out, Rhiow thought, and started feeling extremely grim herself.

“It couldn’t be Har’lh, could it?” Urruah said. “Trying to get out?”

“His spells have their own signature, like any wizard’s,” Tom said. “Whoever or whatever is producing this effect … it’s not Carl. But more to the point, if it were him, the gates wouldn’t be resisting what’s happening on the other side: it’s a kind of power that’s alien to them. Something wizardly, but not in the usual sense, appears to be trying to push through.”

“I see it,” Arhu said. “I told Rhiow that I was seeing it, just a little while ago.”

Tom looked at him thoughtfully. “What exactly do you see?”

Arhu’s tail was lashing. “It’s dark… but I can hear something: it’s scratching.”

“Could be Saash,” Urruah muttered.

Rhiow hit him right on the ear, hard. Urruah ducked down a little, but not nearly far enough to please her. “It’s carrying the darkness with it on purpose,” Arhu said, looking down into the darkness where the silver glint of the tracks under the fluorescents faded away, “and it wants to let it out into the sun … but until now the way has always been too small. Now, though, the opening can be made large enough; and there’s reason to make it so. The darkness will run out across the ground under the sun and stain it forever.”

Tom hunkered down by Arhu. “Arhu … who is it?”

Arhu squinted into the dark. “The father,” he said. “The son…”

“He said that before,” Rhiow said. “I couldn’t make much of it then.”

“The problem with this kind of vision,” Tom said, looking over at her, “is that sometimes it makes most sense in retrospect. It’s hardest on the visionary, though, who usually can’t make any sense of it at all.” He ruffled the fur on top of Arhu’s head, which Arhu was too distracted to take much notice of. “One last thing. If we cannot prevent this breakthrough, by whatever force it is which is pushing against the gates from the other side … what else should we do to keep the world as it should be?”

Arhu looked up, but it was not on Tom that his eyes rested at last. The fur fluffed all up and down Rhiow’s back as Arhu’s eyes met hers; there was someone else behind those eyes. “You must claw your way to the heart,” he said, “to the root. I hear the gnawing; too long have I heard it, and the Tree totters…”

In his eyes was the cool look of the stone statue of Iau in the Met. Rhiow wanted to look away but could not: she bent her head down before Arhu, before the One Who looked through him, until the look was gone again, and Arhu was glancing up and around him in mild confusion at everyone’s shocked expressions—for Urruah had his ears flat back in unmistakable fear, and Saash was visibly trembling.

Tom let out a long and unnerved breath. “Okay,” Tom said, getting up. He looked around him at the ever-increasing crowd of wizards. “You four have other business,” he said: “so you should hold yourselves in reserve. There should be enough of us to hold these gates closed… I hope. When the pressure eases up on the other side or drops off entirely, that’ll be your time to run through. Meantime … we’ll do what we can.”

The hours that followed were given over to weary waiting for something that might not happen … if everyone was lucky. Urruah slept through it all. Arhu dozed or stared down at the ehhif down in the main concourse from the vantage point they had chosen, up on the gallery level. Saash sat nearby and scratched, and washed, and scratched again, until Rhiow was amazed that she had any skin left at all. But she could hardly blame her if Saash felt what she felt, the sensation of intolerable and increasing pressure below: something straining, straining to give, like a tire intent on blowing out; and something else leaning hard and steadily against it, trying to prevent the “blowout”—the many wizards who kept coming and going, new ones always arriving to relieve those who had come earlier and used up all their energy pushing back against the dark force at the other side of the gates. The ones who left looked as worn as if they had been out all night courting, or fighting, or both; and there was no look of satisfaction on any face—everyone looked as if the job itself wasn’t done, even though individual parts of the job might be.

Rush hour started, and astonishing numbers of ehhif poured into the terminal and out of it again; the floor went dark with them, an incessant mindless-looking stir of motion, like bugs overrunning a picnic. There were minor flows and eddies in it—periods when the floor was almost empty, then when it filled almost too full for anyone to move; the patterns had a slightly hypnotic fascination. Rhiow wished they were a lot more than just slightly hypnotic; not for the first time, she envied Urruah’s ability to sleep through anything that didn’t require his personal intervention. She could never manage such a performance herself—her own imagination was far too active.

Though I wonder, she thought at one point, a good while later, whether Urruah’s simply decided that this is going to be the easiest way to deal with his disappointment. For now there was no way he would be able to make it to his ehhif-o’hra concert in the Sheep Meadow. Even if the situation down at the track level relaxed, and the gates went back to something approaching normal, they would have to head down in search of Har’lh as quickly as possible. Poor ’Ruah, she thought, glancing up at the Accurist clock: it read one minute to eight.

T’hom? she said silently. Any news?

There was a pause. Tom had been spending most of his time in “link” with the wizards who were holding the gates shut—an ehhif version of the conjoint linkage that Urruah had insisted they would need. As a result, when you called him, the answer you got was likely to have anywhere from five to fifty other sets of thoughts, of other internal voices, wound around it as he directed the ehhif-wizards to apply their pressure to one area of the multiple gate matrix or another. It made private conversation impossible and required you to shout nearly at the top of your mind to get his attention.

Sorry, I missed that.

How are you doing? Rhiow said.

The pressure from the other side’s been steadily increasing … but not by nearly as much, minute to minute, as it was earlier. We may be winning.

All right. Call if we’re needed.

You’ve done a lot today already, Rhi.

Maybe. But don’t hesitate.

She felt his tired breath as if it were her own as Tom went back to coordinating the other wizards. Rhiow breathed out, too, glanced over at Arhu: he was tucked down by Urruah, staring at the ehhif walking in the Concourse. Deep-voiced, the clock began to speak eight o’clock; neither Arhu or Urruah moved. Rhiow turned and saw that Saash had moved over toward the escalators, where she was simply sitting still now, looking down into the Concourse as well, but not washing: this by itself was unusual enough that Rhiow got up quietly, so as not to bother either Urruah or Arhu, and went to where Saash sat.

Saash didn’t say anything as Rhiow came over. Rhiow sat, and the two of them just spent a while looking at the comings and goings of ehhif who had no idea of what was going on down the train platforms.

’Tired?” Rhiow said after a while.

“Well, it wears on you…” Saash said, flicking an ear back toward the tracks. “They’re working so hard down mere… I feel guilty, not helping.”

Rhiow twitched her tail in agreement. “We’ve got specialist work to do, though,” she said. “We wear ourselves out on what they’re up to… we won’t be any good at what we have to do.”

“I suppose.” They watched as a mother with several small noisy children in tow made her way across the nearly empty concourse. The children were all pulling shiny helium-filled balloons along behind them, tugging on the strings and laughing at the way the balloons bobbed up and down. They paused by the Italian deli, where their mother leaned across the counter and apparently started chatting with the deli guy about the construction of a sandwich.

“It’s not that, though,” Rhiow said after a moment, “is it? We’ve known each other long enough now … you know my moods, I know yours. What’s on your mind?”

Saash watched the mother with her children vanish into the Graybar passage. “It’s just… this job…”

Rhiow waited.

“Well, you know,” Saash said, turning her golden eyes on Rhiow at last, “I’m a lot of lives along.”

Rhiow looked at her with some surprise and misgiving. “No, I didn’t know.” She paused, and then when Saash kept silent, “Well, you brought it up, so: how many?”

“Almost all of them,” Saash said.

Rhiow stared at her, astounded. “Eighth?” she whispered. “Ninth?”

“Ninth.”

Rhiow was struck silent for some moments. “Oh, gods,” she said finally, “why didn’t you tell me this earlier?”

“We’ve never really had to do anything that dangerous, until the last couple of times. Besides, would it have made a difference? To what we have to do, I mean?”

“Well, no, but… yes, of course it would!”

“Oh, sure, Rhi. Come on. Would you really have done anything differently the past few days? Just for my sake? You know you couldn’t have. We have our job to do; that’s why we’re still wizards—why we didn’t give up the power as soon as we realized it cost something.” Saash looked down at the concourse again: more ehhif were filtering in. “Rhi, we’ve just got to cope with it. If even Arhu is doing that, who am I to turn aside from this just because I’m on my last life?”

“But—” Rhiow started to say something, then shut herself up.

“I had to tell you, though,” Saash said. “It seemed to me—when we finally get down there again, if something happens to me there, or later, and I fall over all of a sudden and it’s plain that that’s the end of everything for me—I didn’t want you to think it was somehow your fault.”

Rhiow was quiet for a few breaths. “Saash,” she said, briefly leaning close to rub her cheek against her friend’s, “it’s just like you to think of me first, of the others in the team. But look, you.” She pulled back a little, stared Saash in the eye. “Haven’t you forgotten something? We’re going down in conjunct. If you don’t come back up with us, none of us will come back up.”

“Don’t think that hasn’t occurred to me.”

“So don’t consider not coming back, that’s all. I won’t hear of it.”

“Yes, Queen Iau,” Saash said, dryly, “whatever you say, Queen Iau. I’ll tell Aaurh and Hrau’f the Silent that you said so.”

“You do that,” Rhiow said, and tucked herself down with a sigh—

Something screamed nearby. Rhiow leapt to her feet, and so did Saash; both of them looked around wildly. Arhu was running to them: Urruah was staggering to his feet, shaking his head as if he had been struck a blow.

“What was that?” Saash hissed.

“I don’t—” Rhiow started to say. But then she did, for the screaming was not in the air: it was in her mind. Ehhif voices, shocked, in pain; and in the back of her mind, that sense of pressure, suddenly gone. Something blown out. Something running in through the blown place: something dark—

“Come on!” she said, and headed for the stairs.

The others followed. Rhiow nearly fell once or twice as she ran; the images of what wizards were seeing, down at the track level, kept overlaying themselves on her own vision of the terminal: The gate hyperextending, its curvature bending inward toward the wizards watching at the platform, but also seeming bizarrely to curve away; the hyper-string structure warping out of shape, twisting into a configuration Rhiow had never seen before, unnatural, damaged-looking … and in the darkness, roaring shapes that poured seemingly more from around the gate rather than through it.

They’re all going, came Tom’s thought, all the gates— look out!

Rhiow and Saash hit the bottom of the stairs first and were about to run leftward toward the gates to the tracks— but a screaming, roaring wave of green and blue and pale cream-colored shapes came plunging through the gates first, spilling out into the main concourse. Ehhif screamed and ran in all directions—out into the Graybar and Hyatt passages, out onto Forty-second Street, up the stairs to the Vanderbilt Avenue exit—as the saurians charged across the marble floor, and their shrieks of rage and hunger echoed under the high blue sky. The chilly scent of dinosaur flesh was suddenly everywhere. The cold things, Rosie had said. They went by. I heard them roaring…

Panic was spreading in the terminal; ehhif were struck still with shock and disbelief, staring at the impossible invasion from their distant past. Rhiow caught sight of one saurian racing across the concourse toward the Italian deli, and toward the mother, half-turned in the act of accepting her sandwich from the guy behind the counter; and toward the children, frozen, mouths open, staring, their bright balloons forgotten at the sight of the sharp claws stretched out toward them—

She thought about her Oath, to preserve life whenever possible—

Rhiow said the last word of the spell… a relief, for carrying a spell almost completely executed is an increasing strain that gets worse the longer you hold it in check. The unleashed power practically clawed its way up out of her, leaping away toward its targets and leaving Rhiow weak and staggery for the space of a breath or so.

All over the concourse, in a circle with Rhiow at its center, saurians crashed to the floor and lay immobile. But the range of the spell was limited; and more would be coming soon. Urruah came down behind her and Saash; to him Rhiow said, “You have that spell loaded?”

“You better believe it!”

“Get back there to the gates and keep them from getting up here! And pass it to as many of the other wizards as you can. If you push the saurians back fast enough and get close enough to the gates, you can knock them down almost as they come out. Saash, go down a level; do the same. I heard Tom say something about ‘all the gates.’ It may not just be the one at Thirty that’s popped. Arhu, come on, some of them went up toward the main doors—”

Saash and Urruah tore off through the doorways that led to the tracks. Rhiow ran toward the Forty-second Street doors, up the ramp, with Arhu galloping behind her. Ehhif screams were coming from near the brass doors; Rhiow saw two saurians, a pair of deinonychi, kicking at something low. Rhiow gulped as she ran, half certain there was a ehhif body under those deadly hind claws; but as they got closer, she saw that they were kicking actually the glass and brass of the doors in frustration, possibly unable to understand the glass—and on the other side of the door was no slashed-up body, but a furious houff with its leash dangling, barking its head off and scrabbling wildly at the glass to get through, while shouting in its own language, “Lemme at ’em! Lemme at ’em! I can take “em!”

“Good dog,” Rhiow muttered, a rare sentiment for her, and once again spoke the last word of the neural-inhibitor spell. The power leapt out of her, and the deinonychi fell, clutching at the glass as they went down, their claws making a ghastly screeching against the metal and glass as they collapsed.

Rhiow stopped and looked back toward the concourse. “I don’t think any of them got any farther than this,” she said to Arhu, looking around the waiting room. “If we—”

Any further words got stuck in Rhiow’s throat for the moment as her glance fell on the mounted tyrannosaur in the waiting room. The few ehhif who had stopped on their way through the terminal to look at the skeleton were now all clustered together in the farthest comer, holding on to one another with an intensity not usually seen in New Yorkers who until a moment or so ago had been perfect strangers. The air was filled with a peculiar groaning sound, like metal being twisted out of shape…

Which it was, for Rhiow saw that slowly, with deadly deliberation, the skeleton was moving. Its front claws reached out and grasped at the air, clutching at nothing; its head lifted from the position of low menace in which it had been fixed, stretching upward, the jaws working—then twisted around to look, hungry, at the ehhif in the corner.

Rhiow’s mind flashed back to what she had done to the metal track a couple of nights before. But you needed physical contact for that spell, and she wasn’t very sanguine about her chances of maintaining contact for long enough to do the job without herself being ripped to shreds or bitten in two.

The tyrannosaurus skeleton leaned down to scratch and pull at the pedestal, then straightened and began trying to pull its hind legs free, first one leg, then the other. There was a crack! like a gunshot as one of the weaker bolts holding the bones of its left foot to the pedestal came free, ricocheting off the travertine wall and peppering the poor ehhif crowded in the corner with stone splinters. The tyrannosaurus skeleton writhed and struggled to get free; it threw its head up in rage. An echo of a roar… Then it started working on the second leg more scientifically, not just thrashing around, and it was bent over so that the clever little front claws could help, too. Pull—pull—pull, and another bolt popped—

Rhiow shook her head at the sight of something beginning to cloud about the bones, building on them like shadowy cord, layer on reddish layer, strung with white: muscle, ligament… flesh. Damnation, Rhiow thought, whatever’s going on downstairs is calling to its dead cousin here… and pretty soon we’re going to have one of these loose in the terminal? —She shuddered. The deinonychi and smaller breeds of the present-day saurians—if it really was the present day, under the Mountain—were bad enough, but nothing like their terrible forefathers, like this desiccated old relic. The relic, however, was becoming less desiccated by the second; the muscle was almost all there now, organs curdling slick and wet into being, skin starting to sheet and stretch over everything, but only slowly: it was, after all, the biggest organ. For a horrible moment the skull was almost bare of everything but the red cording of the jaw muscles; then one abruptly coagulating eye, small, piggy, and entirely too intelligent, was looking down out of the wet red socket at Rhiow. The tyrannosaur stretched its head up as gaudy crimson-and blue-striped skin wrapped itself around skull and shoulders, and heaved mightily, one last time; the second leg came free. It whirled on its pedestal, graceful and quick as a dancer, leapt down, and went for the ehhif—

You’re lizard enough to die now, Rhiow thought, and opened her mouth to speak the last word of her spell—

Arhu, however, took a step forward and yowled a single word in the Speech.

The tyrannosaurus blew up. Flesh, ligament, all those organs and whatever had been inside them, blood and bone: one moment they were there, the next they were gone to splatters and splinters, flying through the air. The ehhif fell to the floor and covered their heads, certain that a bomb had gone off. The cream travertine walls were now a most unhealthy color of patchy, seeping pink; and the ceiling, just newly painted, appeared to have been redone in an entirely more pointillist style, and rained scraps and shards of flesh and other tissue down on the empty pedestal.

Rhiow looked at Arhu in amazement.

He grinned at her. “I saw it in Saash’s head,” he said. “She did it to the rats.”

“Yes, but how did you adapt that spell to—”

“Adapt it? I just did it.”

And to think I was complaining that he wasn’t doing enough of his own wizardry, Rhiow thought. But this was more like a young wizard’s behavior, more like her own when she was new, just after Ordeal, and didn’t know what you couldn’t pull off. “You’re getting the hang of it, Arhu,” she said. “Come on—”

He paused first, and ran back to the other skeleton, reared up against it.

Its metal went molten and ran out from inside the bones like water. The bones rained down in a mighty clattering and shattering on the floor.

“Where did you get that?” she demanded as he ran back toward her.

“I saw it in your head.”

Why, you little peeping tom— “You didn’t need to do that! It wasn’t doing anything!”

“It might have been about to.”

Rhiow looked at the stegosaurus skeleton and found herself willing to admit that under the present circumstances, she wasn’t too sure what its dietary habits or temperament might be should it wake up just now… and they both had other things to think about. “All right, come on,” she said. “You want to blow things up? Plenty of opportunity downstairs.”

They ran back through the main concourse. For once Rhiow wasn’t concerned about whether she was sidled or not: the ehhif would have a lot of other things to pay attention to for the next few minutes, anyway, besides a couple of cats. “Wow,” Arhu said, “look at all these dead lizards. What’re the ehhif going to do with them?”

“Nothing, because if we survive this, Tom will get authorization from the Powers That Be for a ‘static’ timeslide, and we’ll patch this whole area over with a congruent piece of nonincidental time from an equivalent universe. The physical damage will simply never have happened… and if we get the patch in place fast enough, none of the ehhif here will remember a thing.”

“Might be fun if they did…”

Rhiow snorted as they headed for the doorways to the gates, from which the roars and snarls and cries of battle were drifting toward them. Saash?

Downstairs.

How’re you holding up?

Killing lizards like it’s going out of style. I don’t like this, Rhi.

You didn’t like the rats either.

I like this a lot less. Rats aren’t self-aware. These creatures are… not that much of the awareness has a chance to get outpost the hate.

They’re trying to kill the ehhif, and the ehhif are defenseless; that defines the situation clearly enough for the moment. ’Ruah?

With T’hom and his people. It’s a good fight, Rhi!

Tell me you’re winning.

More than I could say. We’re killing lots of dinosaurs, though. The trains are helping.

The trams are—

Only one derailed so far, Urruah said cheerfully.

Oh, sweet Dam of everything—! Rhiow ran through the doorway for Track 30—then stopped, realizing that she had lost Arhu. She turned, saw him lingering to stare at one of the fallen saurians.

“Arhu,” she said, “come on, can’t you hear them down there? They need us!”

“I was seeing this before,” he said, looking down at the saurian so oddly that Rhiow ran back to him, wondering if he was about to have some kind of fugue-fit along the lines of the one he had when they were coming back from Downside.

“What?” she said, coming up beside him. “What’s the matter?”

“It changes everything,” he said. “The sixth claw…”

Rhiow blinked, for that had been one of the phrases he had repeated several times as they returned from the caverns. At the time, it had puzzled her, and it did again now, for in Ailurin a “sixth claw” was an extra dewclaw, which polydactyl cats might have; or simply a slang idiom for something useless. Now, though, she looked down at the saurian, another of the splashy-pelted ones done in green and canary yellow, and at the claws that Arhu had been examining.

There were indeed six of them. This by itself was unusual, but not incredibly so. They’ve always come in fives before, but maybe some mutation— Then Rhiow looked more closely at the sixth one.

It looked very much like a thumb.

She licked her nose. “What does it mean?” Rhiow said.

Arhu stared at her, very briefly at a loss. “I don’t know,” he said. “But it’s really important. I couldn’t hear much else in my head almost all the time we came back. It was like someone kept shouting it… or like it was a song—”

His tail was lashing. “Later,” Rhiow said finally. “They’re fighting, down there: they need us. Come on!”

They ran through the door, down the platform for Track 30. The upper track level was hardly recognizable as the familiar, fairly tidy place where Rhiow walked every day. Saurians’ bodies were scattered everywhere. Fortunately there seemed to be few casualties among the wizards, or else they had been taken away already for treatment. There seemed to be no station staff around: Rhiow guessed they were staying locked safely in the towers and workrooms, probably having called the cops … though what they would have told the cops they wanted them for, Rhiow would have given a great deal to hear. At least they seemed to have stopped any further trains from coming in.

Tom and a group of other wizards were gathered nearest the track Thirty worldgate, which seemed to be spewing out saurians like a firehose; as fast as they came out, they died of the neural-inhibitor spell being repeatedly used so that the bodies lay heaped high before the gate, and the new saurians had to clamber over the bodies of their dead or push them aside to leap, screaming, at the wizards. On Tracks 25 and 18, trains were stopped halfway down into the platforms, with saurians caught under their bogies or draped over the fronts of the locomotives; Track 32 had the derailed train, its sideways-skewed front splashed with lizard blood, a heap of dead saurians trapped underneath it, and the faint cries of ehhif coming from inside.

“What kept you?” Tom said as Rhiow arrived, with Arhu in tow.

“A pretty serious reanimation,” Rhiow said. “Some kind of congruency to what’s been trying to push up through here, I suspect. We may find that it resists being patched afterward.”

“We’ll worry about that later. Some of us are busy pulling people out of that wreck, but we’ve got other problems. You’re the gate specialists—what can we do about this? There seem to be thousands more of these creatures waiting to come through, and if we just hang around here doing this all night, people’s memory tracks are going to engrave themselves too deeply to be successfully patched.”

Saash, Rhiow said, can you get some relief? We need you up here.

I’ve got some help already. On my way up.

Urruah—

Heard it. Be right with you.

Saash appeared a few seconds later. “Any ideas how to stop this?” Rhiow said.

Saash shook herself all over and had only the briefest scratch before standing up again, staring at the gate, through which still more saurians were clambering. “How chaotic,” she said to Tom, “are you willing to get?”

“Things are pretty chaotic already at the moment,” he said. “But anything that would put an end to this would be welcome. We’ve got to start patching very soon. If you need to get a little destructive—”

“Not physically.” Saash was getting that same gleam in her eye that Rhiow had seen the other night when she had turned the catenary loose, and Rhiow started to feel wary. “Just think of it this way. The gate might be more like a plant than a tree, though we tend out of habit to refer to a gate’s ‘tree structure.’ A gate has a ‘root’—the anchor-structure of its catenary, way down in the bottom of the Mountain, which fuels itself from whatever power supply Aaurh originally hooked it to: pulsar, white hole, whatever; theoretical distinctions don’t matter just now. A gate has a ‘stalk’—the catenary itself. And then it has a ‘flower’ at the top—the portal locus, where the energy is manipulated through the hyperstring structure, and actual transport takes place.”

“I hadn’t thought of you as having such a horticultural turn of mind,” Tom said, watching with a tight, unhappy look as yet more shrieking saurians climbed through the gate and were snuffed out.

“Yes. Well… what happens if you pull the portal locus off the gate?”

Tom stared at her. “Like pulling the head off a daisy. — What does happen?”

“It should shut the gate right down, no matter who or what reactivated the other end.”

“Should—!” Rhiow said.

“Until a new portal locus can be woven and installed, nothing can use it for transport.”

Tom was silent for a moment. Then he said, “These gates are very old… and were put in place by, well…”

“Gods,” Saash said, twitching her tail in agreement. “Fortunately, they are gods who left us, in the Whispering, and The Book of Night with Moon, very complete instructions on how these gates were constructed in the first place… on the grounds that someday they might need serious repair or reconstruction.”

“Which they will,” Rhiow said, “if you go pulling the portal loci off them! Do you know what kind of energy you’re talking about releasing here? And if you don’t do it in exact synchronization, every one of them at just the same time, one or more of the gates could pull free of its anchors to this universe and just go rolling off across the landscape wherever it liked, and only Iau knows where it would wind up, and in what condition! For all you know it would invert function and start eating anything that the portal locus came in contact with—”

“So we’ll be careful about the synchronization,” Saash said.

Rhiow just stared at her.

“How long would it take to get the gates going again after this?” Tom said.

“With all the available gating experts working together to do the reweave? A day or so.”

“If it’s so easy, why hasn’t it ever been done before?” Rhiow said.

“Because no one ever needed to, since nothing has ever made the gates malfunction this way before,” Saash said, sweetly, “and because there’s never been a problem quite like this! ” She gestured with her tail at the fresh wave of dinosaurs clambering over the heap of already-dead ones.

Tom looked at this, and also at the image of the plan that Saash held in her mind. Rhiow was examining that same image with great disquiet. Theoretically it was sound. Practically, it could be done. But—

“All right,” Tom said. “I’ll sanction it. I know you have misgivings, Rhi—so do I—but we’ve tried every other way to shut these gates down again, and nothing has worked. And the clock is ticking—we’ve got to start patching right away.”

He looked at her expectantly. Rhiow sat down, trying to put her composure in place for whatever spell was going to be required of her. The thought, though, of simply—well, not destroying the gates—but maiming them: it rattled her. They were not entirely just spells. They were not sentient beings, either… but there was still something akin to life about them…

Rhi, Saash said. I hear you. But there’s a lot of life here, too. And our fellow wizards can’t just stand around down here, killing lizards forever: aside from the cost to them in energy, ehhif life is going to be seriously disrupted by the reality of what’s happening if it’s allowed to persist and set in too permanently to be erased. Worse: while this is going on, we can’t go find Har’lh or get any closer to the bottom of what’s been going on…

You’re right, Rhiow said finally. “So what do we need to do?”

“Four gates,” Saash said. “Four of us. We don’t need physical contact; what we’re going to do is brutal enough. Rhi, you know Thirty best. Here’s the portal locus’s pattern.” Rhiow’s mind filled with it, not merely a spell-circle but a filigree sphere of light with several more dimensions implied in the diagram, all made of interwoven words in the Speech, intricate and delicate. “Just hang on to that. See that loose thread there?”

Rhiow did, and she swallowed. She had never noticed any of the gate loci as having loose threads before. “Yes—”

“Hang on to it. Don’t let go until I tell you. Urruah?”

“Ready. Got it.”

“There’s the thread. Bite it in your mind, don’t let go. Arhu?”

“Uh, yeah.”

“See that?”

“Sure.”

“Bite it.”

He held very still, his eyes shifting back and forth, but in his mind he did as he was told.

Saash was quiet for a moment. I’ve got the fourth one, she said at last. I’m going to count backward from four in my head. When I say zero—pull those threads. Not a second before or after.

Right, they all said.

The wizards around them got quiet, watching, except for those still occupied with killing whatever saurians came through the gate.

Four, Saash said.

Three.

Two.

One.

Z—

There was a tremendous rumble that seemed to come from the bowels of the building, working its way upward toward them, shaking. Dust sifted down from the ceiling, light fixtures swung, and fluorescent light tubes snapped and went dark—

And sudden silence fell: the shaking stopped as if a switch had been thrown.

The gate by Track 30 vanished—simply went away like a blown bubble that pops when a breeze touches it.

Everyone held very still, waiting. But no more saurians came out of the air.

There was a restrained cheer from the wizards standing around, and Tom came over to look at the space where the gate had been. “I don’t feel the catenary,” he said, sounding concerned.

“You wouldn’t be able to,” Saash said, coming over to stand by him. “But I can see it; the hyperstrings leave a traceable pattern in the space they occupy, even without energy flowing. It’s just that the sensory component usually expresses itself through—” She stopped.

“Through what? What’s the matter?”

Saash stood there, gazing into the dark with an expression of increasing horror… then began a low, horribly expressive yowling. To Rhiow it sounded like her tail was caught in a door… except there was no door, and she could feel her friend’s sudden fear and anger.

“What?” Rhiow said. “What—”

Then she felt it, too.

Oh, Iau, no—

Arhu crouched down, looking scared—a more emphatic response than he had revealed even in the face of a ten-ton tyrannosaurus. Urruah stared at him, then at Saash.

“Oh, no,” Rhiow said. “Saash—where’s the Number Three gate?”

Arhu was sinking straight into the concrete.

“It’s come loose before its locus was pulled off,” Saash hissed. “It’s popped out of the matrix—”

There was nothing showing of Arhu now except the tips of his ears, which were rapidly submerging into the floor.

“It’s not your fault,” Saash yowled, “come out of there, you little idiot! Somebody boobytrapped it!”

Saash glared at Tom as Arhu clambered up out of the floor again. “Somebody knew we were going to do that intervention,” Saash said. “One of the gates was left with a minuscule timing imbalance, hard-wired in and left waiting to go off as soon as the portal locus was tampered with. It hasn’t been deactivated … and now everything that was coming out of all the gates before is going to come out of just that one … !”

“My God,” Tom whispered. “Where’s the other gate gone?”

Rhiow looked at him in shock. “A loose transit gate,” she said, “normally inheres to the area of the greatest density of thought and anchors there. The place where the most minds are packed the most closely together—”

“Dear Iau up a tree,” Urruah whispered. They all stared at him.

He looked at them, open-eyed with horror.

“Tonight? The biggest concentration of minds?” Urruah said. “It’s in the Sheep Meadow…’ ”

Urruah ran out. “Hurry up and start patching,” Tom said to several of the wizards who had been working with him; and he, and Rhiow, and Saash, and Arhu, and half the rest of the wizards in the place ran after him.

Urruah was making for the sidewalk, which was well enough away from any of the gates inside to prevent adverse effects. Maybe he didn’t really need to, under the circumstances, but Rhiow, at the moment, thought it was probably better to be safe than sorry. There were enough people sorry already.

Sabotage… Rhiow thought again, as she and Arhu raced, along with the others, past the waiting room. As if from inside…

Arhu glanced over at the mess that still lay all about in the waiting room as they passed. “That was it,” Arhu said to her, fierce, his panic of a few moments ago now replaced with a rush of angry satisfaction and aliveness the like of which Rhiow had never yet sensed in him. “That was what I saw … the first night. That came out. Even the rats ran away from it. And I—” He winced as they ran out the front doors with the others, and then said, “We’re even now. It wasn’t going to do that to me twice.”

“Arhu,” Rhiow said, while Urruah and Tom paced out a large transit circle—it glowed in the sidewalk behind them as they paced, causing interested looks from the passing pedestrians—“when you work with words the way wizards do, precision is important. Something like that was what you saw? Or, that was what you saw? Which is it?”

He looked at her with utter astonishment. “You mean— you think there’s another?”

“How would I know? I want to know what you meant.”

“Ready,” Tom said. “Everybody in here—hurry up!”

They jumped into the circle with Tom and Urruah and the other wizards. “You sure of these coordinates?” Tom was saying to Urruah.

“They’re ‘backstage,’ ” Urruah said. “The spot was empty yesterday. No guarantees for tonight—but it’s got better odds of being empty than anywhere else in the meadow tonight. You’ve got a ‘bumper’ on this, to keep us from accidentally coexisting with anybody—”

“Yeah, but who knows what it’s going to do in such a densely populated area? We’ve got to take the chance. Whatever our spell will do if it malfunctions, it won’t be as bad as what’s already happening—”

There was no arguing with that. Tom said three words and the circle flamed up into life, then a fourth.

Wham!

A huge displacement of air as all their masses were subtracted from the space outside Grand Central; and Slam! an explosion of air outward as they all appeared—

—and heard a blast of sound that staggered them all— partly from the amplification, partly from how close they all were to the stage. The orchestra was playing a massive, deliberate accompaniment to three voices—two lower, one high—that wound forcefully and delicately about one another, scaling continually upward through slow changes of key. Rhiow found herself briefly impinging on the outskirts of Urruah’s mind as on those of all the others in the transit circle there—had been no time to install me usual filters— and was drowned in his instant recognition and delight, even in these horrible circumstances, at the perfection of the sound coming from two of the three tehn’hhirs, and a third invited guest, the new young ssoh’pra-oh from the Met, in the great finale of a work called Ffauwst. Two of the voices argued—the Lone One and a wizard, in the throes of a struggle for the wizard’s soul—but the third and highest, the voice of a young and invincibly innocent queen, called on the bright Powers for aid: and (said Urruah’s memory) the aid came—

Let it be an omen! Rhiow thought desperately as they broke the circle and looked around them. A few security people and police noticed them, started coming toward them—

The human wizards, prepared, all went sidled in a whisker’s twitch. Rhiow and her team did, too, and they all hurried past the extremely confused policemen and security people to get around to one side of the stage and get a clearer view—

It was hard, but they managed to clamber up among some sound gear, and from that viewpoint stared out into the night. The Sheep Meadow was full, absolutely full of ehhif, only dimly seen in the light from the stage. They sat on blankets and in portable chairs; the smell of food and drink was everywhere, and Rhiow threw a concerned look at Arhu— but for once he had his mind on other things. His ears were twitching; he stared toward one side of the meadow—

“Where’s the gate?” Tom was whispering.

“Not here yet,” Saash said. “The locus is still moving—”

A faint sound could be heard now, something different from the susurrus of more than a hundred thousand bodies in one place. It was hard to tell just what it was with this mighty blast of focused sound, both real and amplified, coming from the orchestra. Rhiow glanced at the little round ehhif whom she had seen leading them earlier; now he was in the kind of black-and-white clothes that ehhif males wore for ceremonial these days, and conducting the orchestra as if he heard nothing whatever but bis music. Perhaps he didn’t. But there was more sound than music coming from the edges of the meadow. A rustling, a sound like the distant rush of wind—

The three on the stage—a tall, pale, dark-haired tom-ehhif, a shorter tom, more tan but also dark-haired, both in the black-and-white clothes, and a tall, beautiful, dark-skinned queen-ehhif in a dress glittering like starlit night— were no more aware of anything amiss than the conductor. The toms, singing the Lone Power and the doomed wizard, cursed one another melodiously; the queen, ignoring them both, relentlessly declared her own salvation, requiring the aid of the Powers That Be. In a final blast of pure sound, a chord in three perfect notes, all three took up their fates, to the accompaniment of a final, mighty orchestral crash.

The ehhif in the audience roared approval and applauded, a sound like the sea on the shore, rolling from one side of the great space to the other: the tehn’hhirs and the ssoh’pra-oh took their bows and walked off the stage, almost close enough for Rhiow to have reached out with a claw and snagged the ssoh’pra-oh’s gown. But out at the edge of that sound, over toward the east side of the park, something was going wrong. The sound leaned up and up in pitch as the queen’s voice had. Rhiow, Urruah, Arhu, Tom, all the wizards looked that way, straining to see what was happening—

“It’s coming,” Arhu said.

“What?” Rhiow hissed, as the third tehn’hhir, the big furry one Urruah had shown her the other day, went up the stairs to the stage past her, and more applause rolled across the meadow at the sight of him. He too was resplendent in the ceremonial black and white now, with a long white scarf around his neck, and he once again held the scrap of cloth he had used to wipe his face in the heat. This he waved at the conductor: once more the music began. There was a further rush of applause just at the sound of it—

He smiled. “Tu pure, o Principessa,” he began to sing—

“It can’t be coming,” Arhu said, furious and afraid. “It’s not fair… it can’t be coming! I killed it!—”

—The tehn’hhir looked alarmed as now, above even the amplified music, he could hear the strange sound coming from the east side of the meadow …the sound, getting louder by the second, of screaming.

He stopped and looked up, and saw the dinosaurs coming.

The screaming got worse: thousands of voices now, rather than just hundreds, as the dark shapes plunged through into the humanity in the Sheep Meadow, confused, enraged, hungry, and in many cases half blind—for many of the Children of the Serpent do not see well by night, and hunt by scent. Scent there was, in plenty, and possibly all the picnic food bought some of the ehhif precious time to pick themselves up and run away while furious and hungry saurians threw themselves on whole roast chickens and a great deal of Chinese take-out. But the biggest of the saurians, those with well-developed eyesight, had more than enough light to make do with, and many of them, particularly the biggest, homed in on the brightest source of light they could find— the stage. A great herd of them, maybe twenty or thirty big ones, went wading through the crowds, loping along at terrific speed, trampling anyone not quick enough to get away; and the screams became more intense and drowned out the orchestra’s last efforts.

Some of the saurians were beginning to drop now as various of the ehhif wizards who had come with Rhiow’s team in the circle did their own short-distance transports, out into the empty areas beginning to open in the tightly packed crowd. Actinic-bright sources of wizardly light began to appear here and there, drawing the light-sensitive saurians away from the surrounding ehhif; once they got within range, the neural-inhibitor spell finished them. But, as before, they just never seemed to stop coming…

Near Rhiow, Saash hissed softly. “I’ve got to get over there and pull the locus off that last gate,” Saash said. “Someone come and run interference for me—”

“I’m with you,” Urruah said.

“Good. That spot over there—”

They vanished together. Around them, backstage, ehhif were running in all directions: Rhiow wished fervently that she could do the same.

The big tom-ehhif stared out into the darkness, much more bemused than afraid, if Rhiow was any good at reading ehhif expressions. More of the big saurians waded toward the stage; seeing them perhaps more clearly than the tom-ehhif could, the orchestra fled to right and left in a frantic double wave; though Rhiow noticed, with grim amusement, that very few of them left their instruments behind.

Next to her, Arhu was crouched down, hissing in rage. “See what I meant,” Rhiow said, “when I asked you which one you saw—”

“It was one of these,” Arhu said, furious. “They’re all the same one.”

“What? Do you mean they’re clones?”

“No. They’re the same one—”

“If that’s the case,” Rhiow said, watching the vanguard of the saurians coming toward the stage more—tyrannosaurs, indeed, all identical to the one in the waiting room—“then you can kill them the same way.”

Arhu’s expression became an entirely feral grin. He turned his attention toward the approaching saurians, started getting his spell ready again.

Another sound started to mix with the screams out in the meadow: the bright sharp sound of gunfire, stitching through the night. This is New York, after all… and entirely too many of the crowd will be armed, legally or not. Roars followed, and some unnatural bleats and bellows of rage and pain as bullets went home. Still more screams came as some of the fallen saurians fell on nearby ehhif. Iau grant these ehhif don’t get so confused, they start shooting each other—

But there were worse things to think about. Tom reappeared nearby, glanced around to see how they were doing, was gone again in a breath. Almost in the same breath, a saurian came out from the farther backstage area, where the trailers had been parked: it had leapt over or dodged around the security barriers—

The saurian loomed over Rhiow, snatched at her with jaws and claws. Rhiow leapt sideways out of the claws’ grasp, said the last word of the neural-inhibitor spell; the saurian, along with a companion behind it, came crashing to the ground. Too close, Rhiow thought, jumping out of the way. She was starting to get tired; and “burn-in” was setting in, the wizardry problem that came of doing the same spell too often. The spell’s range decreased, and its effectiveness dwindled, until you could get some rest and recharge yourself—

Arhu was hissing, hissing again; outside, well beyond the stage, there were horrific noises. “It’s—it’s not working so great any more—” he gasped. “I don’t think I can get all of them—”

Big spell, big burn-in, Rhiow thought, and worse than usual for a young wizard, who doesn’t know how to pace himself yet. “Stop it for a moment,” she said, “and use something else. Try the neural inhibitor—”

Rhiow felt Arhu rummaging briefly in her head for the complete spell, as he had taken the explosive spell from Saash: a most unnerving sensation. Then he said the last word of the spell—

Another large saurian that had invaded the backstage area died. This was followed by a small clap of air exploding outward, almost lost in the massive sound of a hundred thousand people panicking, and Urruah was there again. “Saash took the gate out,” he said. “They’ve stopped coming—”

Arhu opened his mouth to hiss at the next of the huge shapes loping toward the stage.

Nothing happened.

The big tom-ehhif had been standing and staring in utter astonishment, probably simply unable to believe what he was seeing. Now fear finally won out over disbelief. He turned to flee, heading for the side exit from the stage…

…but he was not nearly fast enough on his feet. A huge scarlet-and-blue-striped head reached down into the blinding stage lights, the little fierce eye holding a horrible humor trapped in it; the jaws opened and swiftly bit.

It took the saurian two bites to get the tehn’hhir down.

Urruah, turning around from dropping a couple more of the saurians, saw this, and swore bitterly. “Oh, great,” he said, “we’re gonna have fun patching that!”

Across the Sheep Meadow, the last cries of the remaining saurians were fading away. Urruah hissed out the last word of the neural inhibitor, and the saurian now leaping off the stage was hit by it in midair; it crashed into the right-hand speaker tower as it fell, and the tower tottered, sparks jumping and arcing from its broken connections. After a moment the speaker tower steadied again and sat there, sizzling and snapping, the noise fighting with the dwindling seacrash roar of angry and frightened ehhif voices as, en masse, the audience fled the Sheep Meadow.

Rhiow and Urruah and Arhu found Saash after a little while and went in search of Tom. He was out in the center of the meadow, helping many more wizards who had followed them from Grand Central to try to stabilize the situation and get the “patch” of congruent time in place.

“… It’s not so much a problem of power as of logistics,” Tom said wearily, rubbing his face as he looked around at hundreds, maybe thousands, of saurian bodies left scattered across the great open space, and many hurt or dead humans. “We just need to keep enough wizards in the area to make sure the patch takes. Grand Central’s already patched, in fact: the derailments never happened, the tracks are clean. But the price…” He sighed. “A lot of people volunteered a lot of time off their lives tonight. We have a fair number of sick and injured: they’re outside the patch because they intervened as wizards … so they’re stuck with the results of mat timeline.”

“Casualties?” Rhiow said, very softly.

“Four of us,” Tom said. “We were very lucky it wasn’t a whole lot more. As it is, we’re going to have to find ways to cover their deaths in the line of duty…” Rhiow twitched her tail at the sight of the lines of pain deepening in his face. “Fortunately, there’s nothing forensics can do about wizardry. There will be no trace of the cause in which they died. But their families…” He shook his head.

“What about the park?” Saash said.

“The patch is being arranged now,” Tom said, looking with a sigh at the half-demolished stage, the bodies of saurians festooned all over the skewed and crumpled speaker towers, the orchestra chairs scattered, the heaviest instruments lying overturned. Overhead, police helicopters were starting to circle, directing their bright spotlights down at what must have looked like a most peculiar riot. The streets all around the park on both sides were full of people: not the usual leisurely walk home from a mass concert, but people hurrying to get away from something they couldn’t understand and were very much afraid to. That susurrus of their voices, frightened, bemused, echoed in the stone canyons, mingling with the ratchet of the helicopter rotors overhead.

“Can we really heal all of this?” Urruah said, sounding rather desperate. “Even that?” He looked over toward where the last saurian lay, the one who had made a rather high-calorie meal of the third tehn’hhir.

Tom nodded again, with a tired smile. “We’re starting work more quickly than we could with Grand Central: the time-graft should take perfectly. The gate will never have come rolling down here; he’ll never have become an hors d’oeuvre; all these other people who were hurt or died, won’t have been hurt or died… except for our own people, of course.” It was the practicing wizard’s one weakness where time paradox was involved. If you knew that such patching was possible, you yourself (should you die) could not be included in it; the unconscious mind, refusing to accept the violation of the paradox, would dissolve the reconnection with its former body as often as such reconnection was attempted.

“You’re not going to be able to do much more patching like that, though,” Saash said softly. “The Powers won’t permit so much of it.”

“No,” Tom said. “We’ve got to get busy reweaving the gates so that we can discover the source of all this trouble: it’s Downside… far Downside, I’m afraid. Whatever engineered this attack won’t take its defeat kindly. A worse breakthrough will already be in the planning stages; it’s got to be stopped by more conventional methods … for if you patch time too aggressively in a given area, the presence of so many grafts will start denaturing normal time, so that things that really did happen will start excising themselves. Not good…”

Rhiow shuddered at the thought “I’ll speak to the Perm team,” she said. “We’ve got to get at least a little rest tonight, a few hours’ worth. After that we’ll get at least one access gate up immediately.” She looked around at her team. “And we’ll get ourselves down there and see what the Queen may show us as regards Har’lh’s whereabouts.”

Tom nodded.

“He’s not dead,” Arhu said.

Tom’s head snapped around. Everyone stared at Arhu.

“What?”

“He’s not dead. But they have him.”

“Where is he?”

“In the claws of the Eldest,” said Arhu.

Rhiow shuddered again, harder this time. Should you meet the Lone Power in battle, the Whispering prescribed the correct form of address: Eldest, Fairest and Fallen… greeting and defiance. It was felt that you, like the Gods, might be about to try to defeat that Power, but there was no need to be rude about it.

“How will we find him?” Tom said.

“By going Downside,” said Arhu, with unusual clarity but also a tremulousness in his voice that Rhiow found odd, “and crossing the River of Fire…”

Rhiow blinked at the phrase … then resolutely set that issue aside for later consideration. “Let’s all go home and get some sleep,” she said. “I’ll be along for you all before dawn.”

It was about an hour later when Rhiow slipped through the cat door into a dark apartment.

They’re in bed… good.

But they weren’t. The bedroom door was open: no one was in there. Still, Rhiow heard breathing—

—Iaehh, sitting in a chair, in the dark.

This is odd, Rhiow thought. Can’t he sleep? When he can’t sleep, he sits up and reads till all hours. And where’s Hhuha? Did she have to go away on this business thing?

She went to him, wove around his legs briefly. He didn’t move.

Rhiow reared up, patted his leg with a paw.

Very slowly, Iaehh looked at her…

There was something about the set of his face that frightened Rhiow: it had stopped moving, seeming almost frozen into a mask. For someone whose face was normally so mobile, the effect was bizarre. Rhiow crouched back a little, then jumped up into Iaehh’s lap, the better to be in contact with him.

It was not something she would normally do, but her fear spurred Rhiow on, and very carefully, she slipped her consciousness into the upper levels of Iaehh’s mind. It wasn’t hard; it never was with ehhif—their thoughts tended to be all on the surface, though the imagery was sometimes strange, and the colors could hurt your eyes.

—not much color in the imagery here, though. White tile, on the walls and the floor, and—

— cold, on a cold steel table, Hhuha. And her face—

“No!!” Rhiow yowled, and leapt out of Iaehh’s lap so violently that she scratched him.

He didn’t even bother swearing at her, as he usually did when she forgot her claws. He just sat there, staring down at the floor, and then put his face down in his hands, and started to cry.

“No,” he moaned, “no, no, no, no…”

Rhiow sat there in the dimness, looking at him, starting to go numb.

Hhuha. Dead…

It didn’t matter how. Gone. Arhu’s artless question started ringing in her head: You mean die dead? Like a bug, or an ehhif?

Of course you never think of it happening to one of yaw ehhif, something in the back of her mind said heartlessly. They’re young yet, they’re in their prime; they’ve got years ahead of them. Until something unexpected comes along—a heart attack, or a stroke, or just a taxi that turns a corner too fast because someone in the backseat is trying to stick up the driver—

But, you think, there’ll be plenty of time with them, plenty of time to sort out the possible answers to the question: where do ehhif go when they die? For there has to be somewhere, even though they’ve got only one life.

Doesn’t there?…

Iaehh was crying bitterly now, one long tearing sob after another. Rhiow looked up at him, simply shocked numb, unable to accept the reality of what had happened … but the image was real, it had happened. Iaehh had now known the truth for too long to avoid accepting what had happened. It was too soon yet for Rhiow to feel that way … but that would soon change.

Very slowly she crept toward him again; silently, carefully, jumped up beside him on the chair; inched her way into his lap. “Ohh…” he moaned, and put his arms around Rhiow and hugged her close, and began crying into her fur. The image in his mind was pitifully plain, and the thought perfectly audible. All I have left of her. All I have left… Oh, Susan! Oh, Sue…!

Rhiow huddled down in his arms and didn’t move, though her fur was getting wetter by the second, and the pressure of his grip hurt her. Inside, she moaned, too.

Oh, if only I could tell you how sorry I am! If only I were allowed to speak to you, just this once! But not even now. Not even now…

Sinking into an abyss of dumb grief, Rhiow crouched in Iaehh’s arms, and wished to the Powers That Be that she too could cry…