The Book Of Night With Moon

Chapter Thirteen

There they come,” Urruah said quietly, as they walked out on the balcony and looked down into the abyss.

Rhiow looked across to the nearest visible corridor, off to their right and down one level. Under a mighty carving of rampant saurians, their six-clawed forelimbs stretched out into the emptiness, a wider-than-usual balcony reared out. It was full of mini-tyrannosauruses, and some of them that were much bigger than usual—twins to the scarlet-and-blue-striped dinosaur that Arhu had exploded in Grand Central.

“He keeps being reborn,” Arhu hissed. “You kill him and he keeps coming back. It’s not fair!”

“It’s not life,” Rhiow muttered; what defined life, after all, was that sooner or later it ended. “Never mind… we’ll deal with him soon enough, I think.”

As the team looked from their own balcony, the saurians looked up, saw them, and let out a mighty hiss of rage; the saurians dashed out of sight, making for a rampway upward.

“Well, Rhi?” Urruah said. “Which spell do you like better? The short version of the neural inhibitor—”

“We can’t take a chance that it might go askew and hit Ith,” she said. “Here’s the one I like at the moment.”

She leapt up onto the parapet, and then straight out onto the empty air.

For a horrible moment she missed her footing and was afraid the spell wouldn’t take—that gravitic and intra-atomic forces were being interfered with, as well as string structure. But the difference was due only to a slight difference in the gravitic constant here: she could feel it, after a second, and amended her spell to reflect it. The air went hard. She stood on it and looked down in genial scorn at the few remaining saurians, who stared at her and pointed every claw they had available and hissed in amazement.

“Come on, everybody,” she said. “Let’s not be more of a target than necessary.” She stared down into the abyss. Perhaps only three-quarters of a mile down now, that point of light shone up through the cold dark air. Amazing, despite how bright it seemed, how little light it gave to their surroundings.

“I’ll switch the stairs back for every hundred vertical feet or so,” Rhiow said, throwing a glance behind her at the balcony where Ith and Arhu still stood, and on the parapet of which Saash and Urruah now teetered. “Ith, can you see the stairs I’ve made?”

A long pause. “No.”

“Then stay between Saash and Arhu, and step where Arhu steps. Come on, hurry up, they’re coming!”

She headed down the stairway in the air, defining it as she went. She was sorry that she couldn’t make the steps deeper, for Ith’s sake, but he was just going to have to cope. Hard enough to be stepping down on the air, keeping the air solid before her, solid behind her, holding her concentration, while at the same time trying to poke at bright fragments of words on the floor of the workspace in her mind, trying to chivvy that spell into getting finished. It would help if the power parameters made more sense. It would help if I didn’t think the stairstep spell was likely to “burn in” halfway down. It would help if…

Urruah jumped down behind her and began to make his way down the air. Arhu came next. Gingerly, Ith followed, tiptoeing delicately in Arhu’s wake and looking now rather nervous, with all twelve of his front claws clenched tight Saash came down after—

—and right up on the balcony behind her jumped the first of the saurians, reaching for her.

She turned, hissed.

Nothing happened.

The saurian lashed out at her sidewise with its tail, trying to knock her off whatever she was standing on. Saash skipped hurriedly down a step or two, knocking into Ith, who half-turned to see what was happening, lost his balance, knocked into Arhu—

Arhu leaned so hard against him that Rhiow, looking over her shoulder, was sure they were both going to fall. Then she realized that Arhu had anticipated the fall, had perhaps seen it with the Eye, and had started reacting to it almost before it happened. His vision is clear now Rhiow thought, almost with pity. The one thing he didn’t dare see was what was clouding it.

The two of them steadied each other, recovered, and headed on down the steps. Saash recovered her own balance and stopped, looked over her shoulder, and said sweetly to the saurian who was balancing precariously on the parapet, “Scared?”

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

—and fell through it, and down: a long, long way down. It was out of sight a long time before it would have hit bottom.

Other saurians that had been climbing up on the parapet as their leader took his first step now paused there, looking down and down into the dark air through which he had fallen. None of them looked particularly eager to try to follow him, though there were hisses and screams of rage enough from them. Saash sat down on the air, lifted a hind leg, and began ostentatiously to wash behind it.

—until a line of red-hot light went by her ear. Her head snapped up as she saw one of the saurians leveling something like the bundle-of-rods-and-box at her again, for a better shot: an energy weapon of some kind. “Oh well,” she said, “hygiene can wait…” She stood up, pausing just long enough for one quick scratch before the saurian managed to fire again. It hit her, squarely—

—and the bolt splashed off like water: she had had a shield-spell ready. Saash flirted her tail, grinned at the saurians, and then loped down the invisible stairs after the others.

Back up on the parapet, the frustrated saurians were dancing and screaming with fury behind them. “Nice idea, Rhi,” Urruah said, as they made their way downward past balconies and platforms that were beginning to fill with staring, astonished saurians of all kinds and sizes. “And a lot easier than working our way through all those corridors full of, uh, spectators…” He glanced at the filling balconies. “Looks like Shea Stadium during a ‘subway series.’ ”

“Now, I didn’t think you were that much of a sports fan,” Rhiow said, padding steadily downward. “With you so crazy for o’hra and all…”

“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 of planets, 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—

—Saash crouching down by the catenary, leaning down over the “bank” … and dabbling one paw down into the ravening white fire.

What in Iau’s name are you—!

Don’t ask, It’ll hear, Saash said. Here goes nothing—

Abruptly the white flame running in the conduit streaked up her paw and downreaching foreleg, up around her—not quite running over her hide, but a scant inch above it. Saash was shielded, but the kind of shield she was generating at the moment made Rhiow’s look like wet tissue paper by comparison; to judge by the behavior of that white fire, now flowing up and around her more and more quickly, she had a second shield above it, holding it in place, holding it in. Swiftly, almost between one breath and the next, Saash became a shape completely sheathed in burning white: a statue, a library lion with her head up, watching, with one paw hanging down into the catenary, the whiteness of the fire around her growing more intense with every breath. A conduit, Rhiow thought in mixed admiration and horror— and fear. Or a storage battery… or both. How long can she—oh, Saash, don’t—

Saash stood up and began slowly, silently, to walk toward where Arhu and Haath were fighting; very carefully she went, like an ehhif carrying a full cup or bucket, intent on not spilling any of the contents. Haath and Arhu were up on their hind legs now, boxing at one another; as Saash paused, Arhu threw himself at Haath again, hard, and took him down, going for the throat, missing. Behind them, very quickly, Saash moved forward in one smooth rush—

“Saash, no!” Arhu screamed. Haath rolled out from underneath Arhu, scrambled to his hind legs, and made a flinging motion at Saash with one claw.

The spell he threw hit her, and her shields collapsed.

“Saash!” Rhiow roared. The white-burning form writhed, leapt in the air, shrieked terribly once—

—and fell. The fire went out, except for small blue tongues of it that danced over what remained for a few seconds. What remained was no longer tortoiseshell, but black, thin, twisted, charred: legs and head burnt to stumps, the head—

Urruah ran to her. Haath straightened, smiled slowly at Rhiow, and then at Arhu. “Nothing,” Haath said, “literally.”

At the sight of what had become of Saash, Arhu roared, a roar that was almost a scream, and threw himself at the saurian again. He was big and strong in this form, and he had the advantage of knowing what his enemy was about to do before he did it. But every time Arhu tore Haash, the tear healed: every bite sealed over. The best Arhu could achieve was a stalemate, while trying to keep his enemy’s teeth out of his own flesh. He was not always succeeding.

Nearby, Urruah bent over Saash’s body, touched it with a paw, then left it and began circling toward Arhu and Haath. Half-crippled with rage and a new grief, with the memory of the last look in Saash’s eyes, seen through the fire as she leapt up, Rhiow joined Urruah and started to circle in from the other side. The thought of wizardry was not much with her at the moment. Blood was what she wanted to taste: that foul thin pinkish stuff that saurians used. One of them might not be enough to take Haath down, but weren’t they a pride? Three may be enough—

Haath, though, was laughing. With one eye he was watching Arhu, keeping him at bay with those slashing claws; and he too circled, watching first Rhiow, then Urruah as they came.

“Don’t you see that it won’t matter?” Haath said softly, grinning. “You have killed me before, cat, and nothing has come of it except that now I shall kill you … and that will end it.”

“It’s not enough,” Arhu yowled at Rhiow. “I know what I need to do this, but I can’t get at it! Rhiow!”

She opened her mouth—

Slash. Haath straightened up, and Arhu went down, thrown fifteen feet away, staggering another ten or so with the force of the throw, with his rear right leg hanging by a string, the big groin artery pumping bright blood onto the dark stone. Rhiow started to hurry to him as Arhu fell over and tried to get up again, squalling with pain.

“No,” Arhu yelled at her, “the Whisperer’s telling me what to do, I can hold the blood inside me for a while, I’m wizard enough for that. Don’t waste time with me!”

“Waste some,” he growled. “Haath, you and I are going to polka.”

“What is a polka?” Haath asked, mocking.

“You may be sorry you asked,” Rhiow said softly, watching to see what Urruah had in mind.

It was a slower stalk… less the scream-and-leap technique that Arhu had used, and all the while he stalked around Haath, Rhiow could feel Urruah weaving a spell, fastening words together in his head, one after another, in a chainlike pattern she couldn’t make much of. Haath turned as Urruah circled him, his head moving slightly from one side to the other, as if somehow watching what Urruah was doing—

“Rhiow,” Arhu cried from where he lay, “none of this is going to be good enough! What are you waiting for? Use the spell! Use the spell!”

“I can’t, it’s not—” But it was. It was ready. It lay shining, complete and deadly in her mind, and Rhiow wondered that she had never perceived the sheer unbalanced dangerousness of it, even earlier when it had first started to come together. A spell is like an equation: on either side of the equal sign, both sides must balance. This one, though, was weighted almost all one way … toward output. The power and parity configurations, the strange output projections, they were all complete now … and all of them violated natural law.

Except that the natural law Rhiow knew was not the one operating down here.

I don’t know how natural law operates down here! It could backfire! It could—

Sometimes you can be too reasonable, Urruah had said: or something very like that. But sometimes, maybe reason wasn’t enough.

Sometimes you might need to be unreasonable. Then miracles could happen.

It worked for the younger wizards, didn’t it?

But I haven’t been young for a while, Rhiow thought desperately. She was a team leader. She had to be responsible, methodical, make sure she was right: others’ lives depended upon it. And even now, all that method hadn’t helped her team: they were all going to “die dead,” and she felt old— old, failed, and useless.

Don’t listen to It, Rhiow! Arhu yelled into her mind, writhing, trying to get up. I’ve got enough young for all of us! But I can’t do this for you. You have to do it. Let go, Rhiow, just do it, do the spell!

It could destroy everything—

Big deal, Saash was going to do that! And we all agreed she should! Now she can’t! Do—

Urruah leapt at Haath. turning loose whatever spell he had been working on. Haath slashed at him, and Rhiow felt that spell abruptly come to pieces as Urruah went down, kicking, then froze, held pinioned on the stone, spell-still. Rhiow launched her mind against the wizardry that held him, trying to feel what it was, to pry it off Urruah … but there was no time, she couldn’t detect the structure—

Haath leaned over him, lifted his claws, and slashed Urruah open as casually as an ehhif would slash open a garbage bag with a razor.

Everything spilled out…

Haath reached in one more time, hooked one long claw behind Urruah’s heart, pulled. It came out, as if on a hook, still beating; beating out its blood, until none was left. Smiling, Haath released the spell. Urruah rolled over in Rhiow’s direction, squirming; he cried out only once. His eyes started to glaze.

Just let it go, he said. Just do the spell. Rhi—

And then silence.

Haath looked at her and grinned.

Rhiow held very, very still, and the rage and horror grew in her…

…for it was almost exactly what she had been saying to everyone else: Arhu and Ith in particular.

Sometimes we do not hear the Whisperer even at her loudest because she speaks in our own voice, the one we most often discount.

Rhiow took a long breath…

…and started to use the spell.

It was not the kind you could hold “ready-for-release” and then turn loose with a word: within minutes you would be staggering under the weight of its frustrated desire to be let go. It had weight, this spell. You had to shoulder into it, boost it up to get at the underside where the words of activation were. The weight of it pushed down your neck and shoulders, your eyes watered with the strain of seeing the symbols, and then you had to get the words out: big hefty polysyllabic things, heavy with meaning. Rhiow fought with the spell, pushed past and through its inertia and got out the first two words, three, five—

—when something seized her by the throat and struck her dumb.

She gagged, clawed at her face … but there was nothing there. Trickery, she thought, but her throat would still not work. The Lone One. And, Aha, she thought. It must be worth something after all—

She fled inward, into her workspace, where the spell lay on the floor of her mind, and hurriedly started to finish it there. Spells can be worked swiftly inside the practiced mind, even when working through the graphical construct of a spell diagram; Rhiow, terrified and intent, was too swift, this once, for even the Lone One to follow her in and stop her. Power flashed around the spell-circle. The whole thing flared up, bunding. Its status here inside her was as far along toward release as it had been when her outward voice was choked. Only a few words left to complete the activation: but here they were not words but thoughts, and took almost no tune at all. One word to make all complete, knotting the circle together, setting the power free—

Rhiow said the word.

The spell went blasting out of her like a wind that swept her clean inside, threw her down on the stone, left her empty, mindless, half-dead.

There Rhiow lay, waiting for something to happen.

Silence… darkness.

Nothing happened.

It didn’t work, Rhiow thought in complete shock, and started to stagger to her feet again. How can it not have worked?

A spell always works!

But the nature of wizardry is changed, said that thick, slow, soft, satisfied voice in her mind. It only works if I want it to.

Slowly, slowly, Rhiow sat down.

Beaten.

Beaten at last.

She hung her head…

…and then something said, No.

Liar, it said.

Liar! You’ve always lied!

It lied the last time. It’s lying now.

She had trouble recognizing the voice.

It’s live! Activate it!

Arhu?

Call them! They have to come! Like in the park—

She staggered, blinked, unable to think what on Earth he meant.

Wait a minute. The park. The o’hra—the ehhif-queen in the song who demanded that the Powers That Be come to her aid, on her terms—

—and They did—

—but to require the Powers to descend, to demand Their presence: it was not something that was possible, They would laugh at you—

No, Rhiow thought. That was someone else’s idea, some-thing else’s idea. Yours! she said to the Old Serpent. Yours! As it was your idea what happened to my Hhuha. As it was your idea what happened to Arhu’s littermates and almost happened to him. No more of your ideas! You have had only one, and I’ve had enough of it for today.

Reconfiguration, Rhiow thought. To change the Lone One’s perception… it would take this kind of power. And others’ perceptions could as easily be changed.

Rhiow staggered to her feet again, opened her mouth, looking for the right words … Let it come, she said, let it come to me: I will command!

Instantly the huge power blasted into her, as the activated spell had blasted out, leaving room for her to work. She tottered with the influx of wild power, staggered like someone gone distempered, unable to see or hear or speak, unable to feel anything but the fire raging inside her, striving to get out, get up, do something. It did not know what it wanted to do, though. This is always the problem, said the Voice inside her. It must be disciplined, or it will ruin everything. Hold it still, keep it until the right words come.

But with that power in her, she knew the right words.

“what has become of MY children?” Rhiow cried. She knew the voice that shouted; it was her own—but Someone else’s too: the sun burned inside her, and fire from beyond the sun readied itself to leap out. She could not believe the rage within her, the fury, but there was a core of massive calm to it, the knowledge that all could yet be well, and the two balanced one another as the sides of the spell had not. “Where is Aaurh the warrior, and sa’Rrahh the Tearer, wayward but dear to Me? And what has become of My Consort and the light of his eye, without which My own is dark?”

The ground shook: the Tree shook: the Mountain trembled under her. “Old Serpent, turn You and face Us, for the fight is not done—!”

She could not believe her own strength. It filled her, making the initial release of the spell from her seem about as worldshattering by comparison as a stomach-growl. And she could not believe that the Old Serpent, the Lone One Itself, now looked at her from the Tree with eyes suddenly full of fear. Rage, yes, and frustration … but fear first. Is that all it takes? she thought, astonished. One sentence—one word, one command? “Let there be light—”

Here and now … the answer seemed to be “yes.”

It was “yes” before too, said Queen Iau. But the voice was Rhiow’s own.

The Serpent began, very slowly, to uncoil Itself from around the Tree. As it did, the huge gouge that It had bitten in the Tree’s trunk began to bleed light afresh.

Oh no You don’t, Rhiow thought furiously, stepping forward. Where do you think You’re going?

She was immediately distracted by the way the ground shook under her when she moved. Rhiow would have been frightened by it except that inside her, acting with her—part of her, as if from a long time before—was One Who was not afraid of Her own power in the slightest.

Rhiow was abashed beyond belief. Not in her wildest expectations had she anticipated the spell might have this kind of result: she would hardly have dated to think of herself and the One in the same sentence. Oh, my Queen, I’m sorry—I mean, I—

Don’t apologize, came the thought of Iau Hauhai’h, and it was humorous, if momentarily grim. Usually gods don’t. Not in front of that One, anyway. Say what It needs to hear! We’ve got a lot of work to do.

Rhiow stood there, feeling the majesty cohabiting with her… and then held her head up, thinking of that statue in the Met, poor cold copy that it was. “Am I not the One,” She cried, “to make power against death strong, and power for life stronger still? Shall I allow the darkness to prevail against My own? Their life is in Me, and of Me: save that You destroy Me as well, never shall they be wholly gone; and Me You cannot destroy, nor My power in Them. Rise up then, Aaurh My daughter, and be healed of Your dying; the dark dream is over, and awakening is comer.

Off to one side, where a shape lay dark and charred on the stone, there was movement—and then a flash of fire. If a form can burn backward, this one did. Flame leapt from nowhere to it, filled it, wrapped it round—not the cold white fire of the catenary, but flame with a hint of gold, the sun’s light concentrated, made personal and intense. Substance came with the fire: the shape filled out, rolled to its feet, shook itself, and stood, looking proud, and angry, and amused. It was a lioness, but one in whose pelt every hair was a line of golden fire, and the Sun rode above her like a crown—though it was not as bright as her eyes, or as fierce. “I am here, my Dam and Queen,” said the voice of Aaurh the Warrior, the Queen’s Champion, the Mighty, the Destroyer-by-Fire; but it was Saash’s voice as well, and Rhiow could have laughed out loud for joy at the sound of that voice, itself nearly shaking with laughter under the stern words.

Oh Iau, Saash— I mean, oh— And Rhiow did laugh then: it was amazing how your vocabulary could be lessened by realizing you suddenly had the One inside you, and that it sounded surpassingly silly to be swearing at, or by, Yourself. Saash, are you all right?

A snicker. Are you kidding? I’m dead. Or I was. But live by the fire, die by the fire. And she chuckled. It’s an occupational hazard.

“Rise up then, sa’Rrahh My daughter, and be healed of Your sore wounding; stand with Us against the Old Serpent that would have worked Your bane!”

The prone form that lay clutching painfully with its fore-claws at the stone now lifted its head and slowly began to glow both dark and bright, like its fur—night-and-moon-light, the pale fire and the dark one mingling, starfire and the darkness behind the stars: the essence of conflict and ambivalence. But neither fire burned less intensely for the other’s presence; and as the tigerish shape rose up to stand with its Dam, the eyes that looked out of its mighty head were terrible with knowledge of past and future, decisions well made and ill made, and action and passivity held in dangerous balance. Those awful, thoughtful eyes looked down at the body they inhabited … and suddenly went wide.

“Look at me! Just look at me! I’m a queen!”

Iau Kindler of Stars let out a long sigh. “Son,” She said, “shut up. It happens to the best of us.”

Rhiow put her radiant whiskers right forward in amusement It had not occurred to Rhiow that Arhu might manifest as sa’Rrahh, but the Tearer had always been as ambivalent about gender as anything else. “Oh all right,” said the Dark One. “I am here, my Dam and Queen. Now let me at that ragged-eared— ”

“In a moment. Rise up then, My consort, Urrua Lightning-Claw; be risen up, thou Old Tom, O Great Cat, O Cat Who stood under the Tree on the night the enemies of Life were destroyed. Urrua, My beloved, My Consort, rise up now, and stand with Us, to slay the One Who slew You!”

Off on the black stone, where blood lay pooled around a tom, silver-striped shape, darkness now pooled as well. It gathered together about that shape and began to weave brilliance into itself, the tabby coloration shading pale, to moondust grays and silvers and a brilliant white like the Moon at full, a light as pitiless in its way as the Moon looking down from a clear sky on those who would wish to hide, and can find no hiding place from what stalks them silently. That shape stood up, and was a panther’s shape, heavy-jowled and white-fanged, with unsheathed claws that burned and left molten spots on any stone they touched. The mighty shape shook itself, shedding silver light about it, then padded over to join the others, looking at them with one eye that was dark and terrible, knowing secrets; and the other that burned almost too bright to look upon, for battle was in it, and the joy of battle. “I am here, My Dam and Queen, My Consort,” he said, and then added, “ ‘My consort,’ huh?”

“Don’t get any ideas, you… the post is purely ceremonial. —Lone Power, Old Serpent, for these murders, now We pronounce your fate—”

“No, wait a minute, lam first,” said sa’Rrahh suddenly.

Slowly, very slowly, Haath had begun backing away as he first caught sight of his Lord and Master beginning to unwrap Itself from the Tree. By the time Queen Iau had begun to raise Her dead, Haath was already running away across that great dark expanse at the best speed a tyrannosaur could manage, which was considerable. Now, though, the Queen looked after him… and suddenly Haath appeared directly in front of them again, and fell on his face with the suddenness of his translocation.

“Haath, Child of the Serpent,” said Rhiow and the Queen as he struggled to his feet, “you have brought your fate upon you: but still it lieth with you to save yourself, if you will. Renounce your false Master, and you may rejoin your kind, though your wizardry, not coming from the One, is confiscate. ”

Haath crouched, his head low, and looked from the blazing, terrible forms before him to the dark radiance still in the process of slowly, slowly slipping from around the Tree. “I…” he said. “My Master … perhaps I was deluded in thinking…”

Allow Me to save you this crisis of conscience, said a huge, soft voice, by first renouncing you.

Haath looked up in horror, already feeling the changes in his body. Rhiow knew, as Iau knew, that the Lone One had not told Haath the whole truth about his immortality: that even for the gods, death comes eventually, and mortals who try repeatedly to put it off may succeed for a while, but not forever. With his master’s renunciation, all of Haath’s deaths simply caught up with him at once. All that could be seen of the process was the look of shock and rage and betrayal on his face, those twelve claws lifted for one last wizardry … but there was no time for anything else, either action or reaction. Suddenly, he simply was not there; and if there was even a little dust left, the wind blowing through the darkness swept it unregarded into the River of Fire.

The Serpent’s cool eyes dwelt on this, unmoved. And then another voice spoke. “Great One,” it said, “Lord—”

The Four turned their attention to the source of the voice. It was Ith. He stood now, gazing at the Serpent with an odd intensity.

Ah, my son, said the Old Serpent’s voice. Now that the other is gone, we may speak freely, you and I.

This should be fun, said Aaurh silently to the others.

Pay no heed to the strange violence you have seen done here, said the Old Serpent softly. These creatures are our ancient enemies, and need have nothing further to do with our kind or our power. Our kind have different needs, different desires.

“Lord,” Ith said, “the Sun. The world above…”

None of our kind can live in that light without My help, said the Old Serpent, slow, persuasive, reasonable. It is fair, but it kills. Nor would they, would you, be able to find food enough for all. You will die there unless you are ruled by one who is wise, who knows time and the worlds. Long I have ruled you, to your advantage. It shall be so again. And you shall be My Sixth Claw, this time. You have won the right. You have proven Haath flawed, and that flaw would sooner or later have done your people, My people, great harm. Now you shall rule in his stead, and order all things for Me.

Ith swayed, looking up into the great, dark, wise, forgiving eyes. The others watched him.

They will bow before you like a god, a true god… not like these upstarts. But you must in turn surrender yourself to Me, to be filled with the power. This you must see and do.

A pause.

“… No.”

The Lone One’s eyes suddenly went much darker. “But this I do see,” Ith said, and paced slowly over to stand straight and still beside sa’Rrahh, or Arhu in her shape, now flowing with fire both dark and bright. “Our kinship with these others is greater than You claim. He came into my heart, the one You say is my enemy, and tried to save me. And I saw into his heart, and his mind. He had pain like mine, loneliness like mine, and anger. But he rose up again, through them, and tried. Death and hunger came to him, but he did not give in to them, did not cast himself in the fire. His clutchmates all died, but he lived, and kept living, though the pain pierced like a claw. And when we met, he felt pain for me, and did not run away, but bore it This is his Gift. To try again. We tried once and failed… and never tried again, for You told us that trying was no use. But gifts can be passed on to others who need them, even when the others are old enemies; and choices can be remade. They can be remade!”

It was a roar, and slowly the Mountain began to shake with it, a huge sympathetic tremor, like fear in a heart finally decided.

“I choose!” Ith said. “7 choose for my people! We will walk with the light, in the sun, in the free sun that You cannot control; we will walk with these others who struck us down only when there was need, rather than for pleasure or for power. And if we die of the light, of our own hunger freely found, then that was still worthwhile. For we would have owned ourselves for that little time, and an hour’s freedom in our own bodies, our own lives, under the sun, is worth a thousand years as slaves, even pampered slaves, in the dark under the ground, or killing other beings under strange stars!”

The Old Serpent was hissing softly to Itself now, while still slowly unwrapping Itself from around the Tree. Fool, it said—again that soft voice, the anger never overt—fool of a race of fools: too true it is that you have overstayed your time in this world. You shall not overstay it much longer—

“Too late for that, Old Serpent,” said Rhiow, said Iau. “The Choice is made.”

And already things were shifting. The landscape looked less rocky; the catenary looked less like a restlessly bound energy flow, but more than ever like a river, and one in which fire flowed like water. Rhiow, within Iau, rejoiced at the sight of it, for now she saw that this was where the River of Fire belonged—at the roots of the Tree: at the scene of the battle, where the souls of all felinity would at one time or another pass through the place of Choice, of the Fight, the gaming-ground that was the mother of all bouts of hauissh. All would see it and remember, or be reminded between lives, of the incomplete Choice, of the business still to be attended to, not in the depths of time behind them, but in the depths of time yet to come. Except that time was not as deep as it had been, anymore…

“The Change is upon them now,” said Aaurh, moving slowly forward. “You might destroy this whole race, and still they would find possibilities they would never have known otherwise because of this their Son, their Father, Who Chose them a different path. They will go their own way now.”

They will die! the Old Serpent hissed.

“And whose fault is that? They will pass,” said sa’Rrahh, “but to what, You will not know for aeons yet. And meantime You have a passage of Your own to deal with.”

“Old Serpent,” cried Iau then, “stand You to battle; this is Your last day… until we fight again!”

The Serpent reared away from the Tree, and Rhiow realized belatedly that Its withdrawal had been strategic only. Now It threw Itself at them, Its whole terrible mass coming down at them like a falling tree, lightnings flailing about it—

What started to happen after that, Rhiow had a great deal of trouble grasping. All the Four threw themselves upon the Old Serpent; claws and fangs blazed, and blinding tracks of plasma burned and tore where Urrua’s claws fell; fire spouted and gouted from Aaurh and sa’Rrahh, blasting at the Lone Power. As Haath had, It healed itself. The Four kept attacking, with energies that Rhiow was vaguely certain would have been sufficient to level whole continents, if not to devastate the surfaces of some small planets. Rhiow fought as she might have in her own body, clutching and biting, feeling fangs slash at her and find their mark: But the terrible pains she suffered still had triumph at the bottom of them, like blood welling up in a wound; and the violence she did, and sensed all around her, had a stately quality to it. They had done this many times before, and would do it again—though this time there had been minor changes in the ritual.

But then came one change that was not so minor; it particularly attracted her notice. Suddenly there was a Fifth among them; and sa’Rrahh laughed for joy and plunged anew into the battle beside that Fifth one; and the others cried out in amazement. For it was another Serpent, a bright one, as great as the Old Serpent, and its scales glittering like diamond in the light of their own fires. It thrust its mighty head forward and sank fangs like splinters of star-core into the great barrel of the Old Serpent’s body, just behind the head; and the bright Serpent wrapped its coils around the Old Serpent’s coils, and they began to strive together—

Rhiow suddenly thought of the twined serpents on the staff of the ehhif god above Grand Central. Haw did they know, she thought, how did even the ehhif suspect, and we never—

—and in their battle, the bright Serpent began to get the better of the Old Serpent, and started to crush the life out of It, so that It writhed and thrashed and made the world shake. And the Tree began, ever so slightly, to lean.

“Quick,” cried the bright Serpent, “the wound, it must be healed!”

“Once more the Serpent’s blood must flow,” said Urrua, and Rhiow in Iau looked, and saw him rearing up on his hind legs and holding, in his huge paw, the sword. At least an ehhif a long time ago, seeing it or hearing it described, might have taken it for a sword. It was a hyperstring construct, blindingly bright to look at, but a hundred times narrower than a hair. “Just hold It there, Ith,” he said, “this won’t take long. Yeah, right there—”

The Old Serpent shrieked as Its head was chopped from Its body and rolled down the trunk of the Tree to lie bleeding over the roots. Its blood ran down into the River of Fire, and tinged its flames, as had happened many times before…

…while above, from the thrashing, headless trunk, the blood ran flaming into the wound in the Tree. The whole Tree shuddered and moaned, and heaven and earth together seemed to cry out with it.

Then the moaning stopped. Slowly, as they watched, the wound began to close. As slowly, the body of the Old Serpent began to fade into the darkness, the last of its blood running into the River of Fire. Soon nothing was left but a scatter of glittering scales among the stones; and the Tree stood whole—

Silence fell, and the Five looked around at one another.

“Are we alone again?” Arhu said, looking around him with some bemusement, for his form had not changed back to his normal one, nor had those forms of the rest of the team.

Rhiow listened to the back of her mind and heard only herself… she thought. “After that,” she said, “I’m not sure we can ever, any of us, be sure we’re alone … but it’s quieter than it was.”

Saash smiled. “A lot. Ith, that was a nice job.”

The Bright Serpent blinked. A moment later, he was back in his true form, though there was an odd look to his eyes, a light that seemed not to want to go completely away.

“I’m told,” he said, “that I have passed my Ordeal.” His tail lashed. “I’m also told that it is not unusual to find the details … obscure.”

Rhiow chuckled at that. “What happened to us all,” she said, “had something to do with mine, something I’d been putting off. Obscure? I’ll be working on the details of this one for years. But I think we’ve got our job about done.”

“One thing left,” said Saash. “Let’s get back upstairs—”

Rhiow blinked. They were back upstairs, near the “pool” created by the binding down of the main catenary trunk.

Urruah looked around him with his “good” eye and swore softly. “I told you this place was malleable.”

“I may have done that,” Ith said. “I do not yet understand the nature of space down here. This was where you wanted to be?”

“Just the spot,” Saash said. She paused to look up at the balconies, which were much less crowded than they had been earlier. “I think I can keep this from jumping right out and destroying everything.” She leaned down and got ready to put a paw down into the pool.

“Is that safe??” Arhu said.

She smiled at him. “This time it is. Watch—”

Saash reached down, dabbled in the cold bright flow of light—then stood up, stood back. Slowly the light in the “pool” reared up, bulging like a seedling pushing itself up out of the ground, then, more quickly, began to straighten, pulling branches and sub-branches of light up out of the depths of the stone beneath the bottom of the abyss. Still more quickly it started to reach upward, a tree of fire branching upward and branching again. Then all in one swift movement it straightened itself, shaking slightly as if a wind was in its branches. The separate branchings started to drift into their proper configurations again, the bemused saurians getting hurriedly out of the way of the slowly moving lines of energy as they passed through walls and carvings like so much cheesewire through cheese.

The saurians stared down at them.

“Well,” Arhu said, staring up at the reconstructed catenary tree, “that’s handled. Now what?”

Ith looked up at the balconies, at the many curious faces looking down. The feeling of hostility that had been there before now seemed, for the moment at least, to be gone. He looked over at Arhu then and smiled.

“Now,” he said, “we bring my people home.”