"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 wizardly 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 that 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-de
molished 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 Penn 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 your 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….
Ten
Much later, very early in the morning, some of Iaehh's friends showed up at the apartment, as red-eyed and upset as he was, and took him away to "see to the arrangements." They made sure that Rhiow had plenty of food and water, and petted her, and spoke banalities about "look at her, she knows there's something wrong…" She was as polite to them as she could bring herself to be; she said goodbye to Iaehh as best she could, though even looking at him was painful at the moment, and she felt guilty because of that. The inevitable thought had already come up several times: why her and not you?!— and when it did, Rhiow fairly turned around in her own skin with self-loathing.
When he was gone, the pain got worse, not better. The silence, the empty apartment… which would never again have Hhuha in it… it all lay on her like lead. The empty place inside Rhiow that would never again resonate to that other, internal purr… it echoed now.
She sat hun
ched up in the early-morning light and stared at the floor, as Iaehh had.
This is not an accident, she thought finally.
Impossible for it to be a coincidence. The Lone Power knew all too well when a blow was about to be struck against It. This time, It had struck the first blow: a preemptive strike, meant to make Rhiow useless for what now had to be done. And who would say a word? she thought. The great love of my life is gone, my ehhif's dead. Of course they can't expect me to perform under these circumstances. Saash is the real expert anyway. They'll do fine without me. The Penn team will take up the slack.
The predictable excuses paraded themselves through her mind. She examined them, dispassionately, to see which one would be best suited to the job.
Ridiculous.
It was almost old Ffairh's tone of voice, except that now it was hers. You trained me too well, you mangy old creature, Rhiow thought bitterly. I don't even run my own mind anymore: I keep hearing you, chiding, growling, telling me what I ought to do.
The problem was… dead or alive, his advice, Rhiow's thought, was right. She could not back away from her work, no matter how much she wanted to. And, thinking about it more, she didn't want to. If she sat here and did nothing, all she would see in her mind would be the cold tile, the cold metal table, and Hhuha….
She flinched, moaned a little. Oh, Powers That Be, haven't I served you well? Couldn't you do me this one favor? Just make it that this didn't happen, and I'll do anything you like, forever…!
Rhiow—!
Saash, she said after a moment.
Rhi, where are you? Are you still at home? We need you down here—
Saash fell silent, catching something of the tone of Rhiow's mind.
Rhi— what in the Powers' names has happened to you?
My ehhif is dead, she said.
Saash was too stunned to reply for a few moments. Finally she said, Oh, Rhiow— how did this happen?
Yesterday evening, early. A traffic accident. A cab hit her when she was crossing a street.
Saash was silent again. Rhiow, I'm so sorry, she said.