by Diane Duane
Rhiow glanced at Saash: she was watching the openings into the cave, listening, on guard. Rhiow strolled over to have a look at Urruah's work— it was routine, in a group wizardry, to check your teammates' work, as a failsafe to catch errors. Urruah was making a third pass around the circle, its design growing more and more complex. Again and again the symbol for the word auw, "energy," appeared in numerous compound forms. Most of the terms that Urruah was using here were specialist terminologies relating to auwsshui'f, the term for the "lower electromagnetic spectrum," which besides describing "sub-matter" relationships such as string and hyperstring function also took in quantum particles, faster-than-light particles, wavicles, and subatomics. He was paying less attention, for this spell's purposes, to efviauw, the electromagnetic spectrum, or iofviauw, the "upper electromagnetic spectrum," involving straightforward plasma functions, fission, fusion, and gravitic force: gating energies were by and large subtler and more dangerous than any of these.
The circle completed, Urruah stopped after a few moments and actually panted a little, looking back at his handiwork.
"You all right?"
"Yes," he said. "It just takes it out of you a little, dumping it all out at once like that."
"I know. Nice job, though." Rhiow paced around the circle, looking at it. "Seems complete. Saash? Come check your parameters. Arhu, look at this—"
The other two came over. Rhiow pointed at one gappy sequence of symbols. "See that?" she said to Arhu. "That's your name— or the version of it we use for spelling. Look at the version of your name that the the Whisperer shows you inside your head— check it against this version, make sure this one's right. A spell is nothing but descriptions of things, and people, and something you want to happen. When you trigger the spell, the description it contains will change what you've described. Describe yourself wrong, and you'll change… whether you like it or not."
He squinted at the glowing network of symbols. "Yeah. Uh, right."
"Take your time over it. Be sure. Saash?"
"It's fine. He knows me well enough by now." She glanced up at Urruah, amused. "Though I'm not sure I scratch that much."
"If you don't now," Urruah said, with some amusement, "you will later."
Saash hissed, a sound of affectionate annoyance. Arhu looked up then and said, "I think—" He put a paw out, hesitated. "Can I touch it?"
"Sure," Urruah said, "it's not active yet."
"There's a piece missing here—" He put a paw on one spot where there was a "place-holding" gap with several graceful curves stitched over it, indicating, to a wizard's eye, To be continued… All their names had such gaps, here and there, but Arhu's had whole chains of them. "She—" he said, and sounded embarrassed. "She says—"
"Go ahead, put it in," Urruah said. "The matrix will pick it up from you. Make a picture of it in your head."
Arhu frowned and thought, while he did so jutting his chin out in a way that made Rhiow smile slightly, thinking of Yafh around the corner from her: he got a similar "concentrating" look while pondering imponderables, endearing because of how witless it made him look. After a second, a pair of symbols appeared in the place-holding area, and the to-be-continued sigil relocated itself farther along in the diagram. Rhiow looked thoughtfully at the new symbols. They looked familiar, but she couldn't place them….
The Whisperer spoke briefly in her ear, just a word or two.
Rhiow froze. Oh, no, she thought. Not really. No…
She straightened hurriedly. "All right," she said, "we're in order. Saash, are you ready? Anything that needs to be done to the catenary before we get inside?"
"Not a thing. Let's start."
"Arhu, jump in," Rhiow said, and did so herself.
Saash followed; Urruah was last in. He planted his paws, claws out, in the "trigger" area of the spell, and said the word that would initiate the circle.
It blazed, the vinework that had been distinguishable part by part and in detail when dimmer now bloomed into a blur of white-golden fire, shimmering and alive. Urruah looked vacant-eyed for a moment, then said to Rhiow, "It's powered up for the next twenty minutes or so."
"Good. Let's go. Saash?"
She was sitting in the circle, scratching. Rhiow said nothing; Urruah glanced at her, his whiskers forward, and looked back down at the circle.
"Do you have a skin problem or something?" Arhu said.
Rhiow hissed at him and cuffed him, not too hard. "If she did, it would still be preferable to your tact problem," she said. "You just be still and watch."
Saash sat up then and looked over at the catenary.
It began, slowly, to drift toward them: a pillar of structured, high-tension fire, like a rainbow pulled out into hair-fine strands and plugged into much too high a current, ready to blow something out: itself or you.
Arhu watched it come, wide-eyed. "Is this safe?" he said.
"Not at all," Rhiow said calmly. "If that power came undone and we weren't in here, we'd be ash. If that. The power bound up in that could melt the whole island of the city into a bowl of slag half a mile deep if it was given enough time. The only thing that's going to control it, when it gets in here with us, is Saash. Got any more comments on the condition of her fur?"
He stared, watched the catenary drift closer. "Nice color," Arhu said, and his tongue went in and out twice, very quickly.
He'll have a sore nose before the day's done, at this rate, Rhiow thought; but at the same time, she was less interested in the catenary than in that symbol in Arhu's name, now lost in the bloom of fire of the activated circle.
The catenary drifted up against the boundary of the circle, touched it. Light flared at the contact, and the catenary bounced away, drifted back again: another flare, a smell of something singeing, not here but somehow somewhere else. Rhiow's nostrils flared. It was the scent of the kind of magic they worked with, in combination with the gate-forces, as inimitable and unmistakable a scent as the cinder-iron-ozone reek of the Grand Central tracks. Subatomic-particle annihilations, hyperstring stress, who knew what caused the smell, or whether it was even real? It meant that things were working… for the moment.
The burning, twisting column of the catenary pushed against the circle, bowing it inward in one spot. Saash's eyes were fixed on it, rainbowed with its fires as she guided the catenary in by force of will toward the spell that would catch it and hold it still for operation. "It's going to pop through in a second," she said to Urruah, her voice calm enough, but strained a little higher than usual. "Got the pocket ready for it?"
"Ready." He slid his left paw over to another part of the circle, sank his claws into the fire.
The catenary pushed farther into the circle, the stream and sheen of light down its length getting brighter and fiercer, the smell getting stronger. The circle bent inward to accommodate its passage, a curve-bud of light pushing inward around the contour of the column of fire. Abruptly, with a jerk, the catenary broke free of the circle, broke through—
A smaller circle, the completed "bud," now surrounded the base of the column, where it erupted from the stone: another one encircled it higher up. Rhiow saw Arhu's nervous glance upward. "The spell's spherical," she said. "You need to extend at least one extra dimension along when you're working with these things."
Arhu backed away from the catenary as it drifted into the center of the circle, stopped there. "All right," Saash said, pacing around it once and looking it over. "See that bundle there? The one that looks mostly blue. That's the one for the gate that's giving us trouble."
"How do you want to handle this?"
Saash sat down and had another scratch, looking oddly meditative and calm for someone who was nose to nose with a concentration of power in which a small nuclear explosion might be drowned out, if not entirely missed. "I'm going to shut down everything but Penn, and the one Grand Central gate that Khi-t's holding patent," she said. "The Penn power linkages are right over on the other side of the bundle… no need to involve them, and it'
ll give anyone who needs to do a transit somewhere to divert to for a little while."
"Right." Kit, Rhiow said inwardly, we're taking all the Grand Central gates down but yours.
Right— we'll divert anyone who shows up. Let us know when you're done.
Saash got up, finished with her scratch, then paced once more around the catenary, looking it up and down. One spot she leaned in to look at with great care, a braided cord of blue and blue-white fires as thick as the wrist of her forepaw. With great care and delicacy, she leaned closer, then shut her eyes— and bit it.
Sparks flew, the light grew blinding; the singeing smell got stronger. Arhu stared.
More than half the catenary went dark, or nearly so.
Saash straightened, looked the pillar of fire up and down. "All right," she said. "That's better." The "dark" bundles and strands weren't completely dead, but now shone only as brightly as the weft of one of the gate matrices up at the surface. She sat up on her haunches in her preferred operating position and reached into the dark bundles, pulling out a hefty double clawful of them.
"Here," she said suddenly to Arhu, "come on over here." He did, looking dubious. "Right. Now hold these for me. Don't be scared, they won't hurt you. Much," she added, her whiskers going forward just a little as she shoved the pulled-out strings at him, and Arhu, more from reflex than anything else, grabbed them and hung on. His eyes went wide with shock as he felt the sizzle of the catenary's power in his paws— the ravening fire of it just barely leashed, and as anxious to get at him as a guard dog on a chain.
"Good," Saash said, not even looking at him as she pulled out another of the bundles of hyperstrings and handed them off to Rhiow. Rhiow settled herself on her haunches as well, hanging onto the strings, and Saash looked over the bundle, slipped a careful claw behind three or four of the strings, and slashed them. They leapt free, glowing and hissing softly, and lashing like angry tails. "Don't let those hit you," she said conversationally to Arhu, "they'll sting. Rhi, remember last time, when that whole bundle came loose at once?"
"Please," Rhiow muttered. "I'd rather be attacked by bees. At least they can sting you only once."
Saash was elbow-deep in the catenary now, slowing down a little in her work. "Hmm," she said. "I wonder…" She leaned in again, pulled forward one particular minor bundle of strings, glowing a pale gold, and took it behind her front fangs, closed her mouth; then looked unfocused for a moment, an expression like the "tasting" look she made when breathing breaths with someone. After a few seconds, Saash's eyes flicked sideways toward Rhiow. "Aha," she said.
" 'Aha,' " said Rhiow, slightly edgy. Her mind was on those openings all around them, but more on Arhu. "Care to give us an explanation of what that means in the technical sense?"
"String fatigue," Saash said.
Rhiow blinked. You came across it, occasionally, but more usually in the gate matrices, higher up. Usually a hyperstring had to be most unusually stressed by some repetitive local phenomenon to degrade to the point where it stopped holding matter and energy together correctly.
"There's a bad strand here," Saash said. "It's not conducting correctly. Tastes 'sick.' "
"What would have caused that?" Urruah said.
Saash shrugged her tail. "Sunspots?"
"Oh please."
"No, seriously. You get more neutrinos at a maximum. Add that to the flare weather we've been having recently— get a good dose of high-energy stuff through a weak area in a hyperstring, it's likely enough to unravel. In any case, it's not passing power up the line to the gate."
"I thought the power conduits were all redundant, though," Urruah said.
"They are. That's the cause of the problem here. The 'sick' strand's energy states have contaminated the redundant backup as well because they're identical and right against each other in the bundle." Saash looked rather critically at the catenary. "Someone may have to come down here and rebraid the whole thing to prevent it happening again."
"Please don't say that," Rhiow said. "Can you fix it now?"
"Oh, I can cut out the sick part and patch it with material from another string," said Saash. "They're pretty flexible. I'd just like to know a little more about the conditions that produced this effect."
"Well," Rhiow said, "better get patching. Are the other strings all right?"
"I'm going to finish the diagnostic," Saash said. "Two minutes."
They seemed long to Rhiow, although nothing bad was happening. Her forearms were aching a little with the strain of holding the hyperstrings at just the angle Saash had given them to her; and meanwhile her eyes kept dropping to that symbol, almost lost in the fire of the circle but not quite. It was simple: two curves, a slanted straight line bisecting them— in its way, rather like the symbol that even the ehhif had known to carve on the Queen's breast.
The Eye—
She looked up suddenly and found Arhu sitting there with his claws clenched full of hyperstrings and gazing down at it, too, while Saash, oblivious, pulled out several bright strings in her claws and began to knit them together. Arhu's expression was peculiar, in its way as meditative as Saash's look had been earlier.
"They have a word for it, don't they?" he said.
"For what?" Rhiow said. "And who?"
"For this," Arhu said, glancing up again at his paws full of dulled fire. "Ehhif."
"Cat's-cradle," she said. "For them it's just play they do with normal string, a kitten's game."
"They must have seen us."
"So I think, sometimes," Rhiow said.
Arhu's glance fell again to the symbol, to the Eye. "So has someone else," he said.
Rhiow licked her nose and swallowed, nervous.
"All right," Saash said after a minute. "That ought to be the main conduit of the bad gate repaired. I'll just do the second here, and we'll be finished."
"Hurry," Rhiow said.
"Can't hurry quality work, Rhi," Saash said, intent on what she was doing. "How's the circle holding up?"
Urruah examined it critically. "Running a little low on charge at the moment. How much longer is this going to take you?"
"Oh… five minutes. Ten at the outside."
"I'll give it another jolt." Urruah bent down: the circle dimmed slightly, then brightened.
Arhu looked up from the circle then. Not at the catenary, not at Saash: up into the empty air.
"They're coming," he said.
Rhiow looked at him with alarm. "Who?"
But she was afraid she knew perfectly well.
"He didn't lie," Arhu said, looking at Urruah with rather skewed intensity. "They are here."
"Uh oh," Urruah said. "You don't mean—"
"The dragons—!"
And then the roaring began. It was not very near yet— but it was entirely too near, echoing down through one of those openings… or all of them.
Rhiow rapidly went through the spells she was carrying in her head, looking for the one that would have the most rapid results against the attackers she was expecting. One of them was particularly effective: it ran down the adversary's nerves and rendered them permanently unresponsive to chemical stimulus— the wizardly equivalent of nerve gas, and tailored specifically to the problem at hand. But it wouldn't be able to get out of a protective circle; you would have to drop the circle to use it. And those who were coming were fast. If you miscalculated, if one of them jumped at you and put a big long claw through your brain before you could get the last word out—
"Rhiow? Rhiow!"
Her head snapped around. Arhu was still sitting there with his claws full of strings, but now they were trembling because he was. "What's that noise?" he said.
"What you said was coming," she said.
"What I said—" He looked confused.
"This is what he did before, Rhi," Urruah said, looking grim. "Saash?"
"Not right now," Saash said, her voice desperately level. "If I don't finish this other patch, the whole job'll have to be done again. Let them come."
"No," Arhu said, and the word started as a hiss of protest, scaled up to a yowl. "No—!"
The Children of the Serpent burst in.
Rhiow knew that ehhif had somewhat rediscovered dinosaurs in recent years. Or rather, rediscovered them again, only more visually than usual this time. She had once heard Iaehh and Hhuha idly discussing this tendency for each new generation of their kind to become fascinated with the long names, the huge sizes and terrible shapes. But in Rhiow's opinion, the fascination had to do with the ehhif perception that such creatures were a long time ago and far away. And the most recent resurrection of the fascination, in that movie and its sequel, were rooted in a variant on the same perception: that long ago and far away was where and when such creatures belonged.
But this too had become one of the places where they belonged. They did not take kindly to intruders. And they certainly would not let any leave alive….
Arhu started to crouch down, trembling, at the sight of them, as if he had forgotten what he was holding. "Saash!" Rhiow hissed, and without missing a beat, Saash let go of the strings she had been working on— they snapped back into place in the catenary— and took hold of the ones Rhiow had held. Rhiow bent down before Arhu could finish collapsing, and snatched the strings out of his paws. He was wide-eyed, crouching right down into a ball of terror: a pitiful and incongruous sight with him in this body, which would have been large and powerful enough to bring down the biggest wildebeest. But the hunt was in the heart, as the saying went: Rhiow couldn't entirely blame him for not having the heart for this one as the Children of the Serpent poured into the cavern and hit the circle, claws out, roaring hunger and rage.