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 corners 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 common 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. I 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 ionization 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 wer
e 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.