by Diane Duane
He found it, fumbled, staggered— Rhiow caught her breath and got ready to say the word that would harden the air below. But somehow Arhu managed to recover himself, and turned and writhed or fell through the hole. A scrabbling noise followed, and a thump.
Rhiow and Saash looked at each other, waiting, but mercifully there was no sound of laughter from Urruah. They went down after Arhu.
Inside the hole, they found Arhu sitting on the rough plank flooring that ran to the roofs edge underneath the peak, and washing his face in a very sincere bout of composure-grooming. A line of narrow horizontal windows, faintly orange-yellow with upward-reflected light from the street, ran down both sides of the roof, about six feet below its peak, and northward toward Lexington. From below those windows, thick metal supporting beams ran up to the peak and across the width of the room, and a long plank-floored gallery ran along one side, made for ehhif to walk on.
Cats needed no such conveniences. Urruah was already strolling away down the long supporting beam at just below window-level, the golden light turning his silver-gray markings to an unaccustomed marmalade shade.
Arhu finished his he’ihh and looked down the length of the huge attic. “See the planks under the beams and joists there?” Rhiow said. “On the other side of them is the sky-painting that the ehhif artist did all those years ago, to look like the summer sky above a sea a long way from here. The painting’s trapped, though: when they renovated the station some years back, they glued another surface all over the original painting, bored new holes for the stars, and did the whole thing over again.”
Arhu looked at Rhiow oddly. “But they had one there already!”
“It faded,” Saash said, shrugging her tail. “Seems like that bothered them, even though the real sky fades every day. Ehhif… go figure them.”
“Come on,” Rhiow said. They walked along the planks, ducking under the metal joists and beams every now and then, and Arhu looked with interest at the corded wires and cables reaching across the inside of the roof. “For the light bulbs,” Saash said. “The walking-gallery is so that, when one of the brighter stars burns out, the ehhif can come up here and replace it.”
Arhu flirted his tail in amusement and went on. “Here’s our way down,” Rhiow said as they came to the far side of the floor. “It’s all easy from here.”
A small doorway stood before them, let into the bare bricks of the wall: the door was shut. Urruah had leaped down beside it and was leaning against it, head to one side as if listening.
“Locked?” Rhiow said.
“Not this time, for a change. I think the new office staff are finally learning.” He looked thoughtfully at the doorknob.
The doorknob turned: the door clicked and swung open, inward. Beyond it was a curtain: Urruah peered through it “Clear,” he said a moment later, and slipped through.
Rhiow and Saash went after him, Arhu followed them. The little office had several desks in it, very standard-issue, banged-up gray metal desks, all littered with paperwork and manuals and computer terminals and piles of computer-printed documentation. More golden light came in from larger windows set at the same height as those out in the roof space.
“Some ehhif who help run the station work here during the ‘weekdays,’ ” Rhiow said to Arhu as they headed for the office’s outer door, “but this is a ‘weekend,’ so there’s no fear we’ll run into them now. We’re seven ‘stories,’ or ehhif-levels, over the main concourse; there’s a stepping-tree, a ‘stairway’ they call it, down to that level. That’s where we’re headed.”
Urruah reared up to touch the outer door with one paw, spoke in a low yowl to the workings in its lock: the door obligingly clicked open with a soft squeal of hinges, letting them out into the top of a narrow cylindrical stairwell lit from above by a single bare bulb set in the white-painted ceiling. The staircase before them was a spiral one, of openwork cast iron, and the spiral was tight. While Saash pushed the door shut again and spoke it locked, Urruah ran on down the stairs two or three at a time, as he usually did, and Rhiow found herself half-hoping (for Arhu’s benefit) that he would take at least one spill down the stairs, as he also usually did. But the Tom was apparently watching over Urruah this evening. Urruah vanished into the dimness below them without incident, leaving Rhiow and Saash pacing behind at a more sedate speed, while behind them came Arhu, cautiously picking his way.
Faint street sounds came to them through the walls as they went, but slowly another complex of sounds became more assertive: rushing, echoing sounds, and soft rumbles more felt than genuinely heard. At one point near the bottom of the stairs, Rhiow paused to look over her shoulder and saw Arhu standing still about hah7 a turn of the stairs above her, his ears twitching; bis tail lashed once, hard, an unsettled gesture.
“It’s like roaring,” he said quietly. “A long way down…”
He’s nervous about getting so close to where he almost came to grief, Rhiow thought. Well, if he’s going to be working with us, he’s just going to have to get used to it… “It does sound that way at first,” she said, “but you’d be surprised how fast you get used to it. And at how many things there are to distract you. Come on…”
He looked down at her, then experimentally jumped a couple of steps down, Urruah-style, caught up with her, and passed her by, bouncing downward from step to step with what looked like a little more confidence.
She followed him. In the dimness below them, she could see a wedge of light spilling across the floor: Urruah had already cracked open the bottom door. Through it, the echoes of the footfalls and voices of ehhif came more strongly.
“Now get sidled,” Saash was saying, “and keep your wits about you: this isn’t like running around under the cars in the garage. Ehhif can move pretty fast, especially when they’re late for a train, and you haven’t lived until you’ve tripped someone and had them drop a few loaded Bloomie’s bags on you.”
Arhu merely looked amused. He had sidled himself between one breath and the next. “I don’t see why we should hide,” he said. “If you take care of this place, like you say, then we have as much right to be here as all of them do.”
’The right, yes,” Rhiow said. “In our law. But not in theirs. And in wizardry, where one species is more vulnerable than the other to having its effectiveness damaged by the conflict of their two cultures, the more powerful or advanced culture gives way graciously. That’s us.”
“That’s not the way People should do it,” Arhu growled as they stepped cautiously out into the Graybar passage, one of the two hallways leading from Lexington Avenue to the concourse. “I don’t know a lot about hauissh yet, but I do know you have to fight to get a good position, or take it, and keep it.”
“Sometimes,” Urruah said. “In the cruder forms of the game … yes. But when you start playing hauissh for real someday, you’ll learn that some of the greatest players win by doing least. I know one master who dominates a whole square block in the West Eighties and never even so much as shows himself through a window: the other People there know his strength so well, they resign every day at the start of play.”
“What land of hauissh is that?” Arhu said, disgusted. “No blood, no glory—”
“No scars,” Urruah said, with a broad smile, looking hard at Arhu.
Arhu looked away, his ears down.
“Last time they counted his descendants,” Urruah added, “there were two hundred prides of them scattered all over the Upper West Side. Don’t take subdued or elegant play as a sign that someone can’t attract the queens.”
They came out into the concourse and paused by the east gallery, looking across the great echoing space glinting with polished beige marble and limestone, and golden with the brass of rails and light fixtures and the great round information desk and clock in the middle. The sound of ehhif footsteps was muted at the moment; there were perhaps only a hundred of them in the Terminal at any given moment now, coming and going from the Sunday evening trains at a leisurely rate. Then eve
n the footstep-clatter was briefly lost in the massive bass note of the Accurist clock.
Arhu looked up and around nervously. “Just a time-message,” Saash said. “Nine hours past high-Eye.”
“Oh. All right. What are all those metal tubes stuck all over everything? And why are all the walls covered with that cloth stuff?”
“They’re renovating,” said Saash. “Putting back old parts of the building that were built over, years ago … getting rid of things that weren’t in the original plans. It should look lovely when they’re done. Right now it just means that the place is going to be noisier than usual for the next couple of years…”
“The worldgates have occasionally gotten misaligned due to the construction work,” Rhiow said. “It means we’ve had to keep an extra close eye on them. Sometimes we have to move a gate’s ‘opening’ end, its portal locus, closer to one platform or away from another. It was the gate by Track Thirty-two, last time: they were installing some kind of air-conditioning equipment on Thirty-two, and we had to move the locus far enough away to keep the ehhif workmen from seeing wizards passing through it, but not so close to any of the other gates’ loci to interfere with them…”
“What would happen if they did interfere?” Arhu said, with just a little too much interest for Rhiow’s liking.
Urruah sped up his pace just enough for Arhu to suddenly look right next to him and see a tom two and a half times his size, and maybe three times his weight. “What would happen if I pushed those big ears of yours down their earholes, and then put my claws far enough down your throat to pull them out that way?” Urruah said in a conversational tone. “I mean, what would be your opinion of that?”
They all kept walking, and when Arhu finally spoke again, it was in a very small voice. “That would be bad,” he said.
“Yes. That would be very bad. Just like coincident portal loci would be bad. If you were anywhere nearby when such a thing happened, it would feel similar. But it would be your whole body … and it would be forever. So wouldn’t you agree that these are both events that, as responsible wizards, we should do all we can to forestall?”
“Yeah. Uh, yes.”
’Track Thirty, team,” said Rhiow. “Right this way, and we’ll check that the Thirty-two gate is where it belongs. Saash, you want to go down first and check the gate’s logs?”
“My pleasure, Rhi.”
They strolled down the platform, empty now under its long line of fluorescent lights. No trains were expected on 30 until the 10:30 from Dover Plains and Brewster North; off to one side, on 25, a Metro-North “push-pull” locomotive sat up against the end-of-track barrier, thundering idly to itself while waiting for the cars for the 11:10 to Stamford and Rye to be pushed down to it and coupled on. Arhu stopped and gave it a long look.
“Loud,” Urruah said, shouting a little.
Arhu flicked his tail “no.” “It’s not that—”
“What is it, exactly?” Rhiow said.
“It roars.”
“Yes. As I said, you get used to the roaring.”
“That’s not what I mean.” He sat down, right where he was, and kept staring at the loco. “It—it knows it’s roaring.” He turned to Urruah, almost pleading. “It can’t—it can’t be alive?”
“You’d be surprised,” Urruah said.
“A lot of wizards can ‘hear’ what we normally consider inanimate things,” Rhiow said. “It’s not an uncommon talent. Talking to things and getting them to respond, the way you saw Urruah talk to the door upstairs, that takes more practice. You’ll find out quickly enough if you have the knack.”
Arhu got up as suddenly as he had sat down, and shook himself all over: it took a moment for Rhiow to realize that he was hiding a shudder. “This is all so strange…”
“The Downside is a strange place,” Urruah said, beginning again to stroll toward the end of the platform, where Saash had disappeared over the edge and down to track level. “Always has been. There are all kinds of odd stories about these tunnels, and the ‘underworld’ in this area. Lost colonies of web-footed mutant ehhif… alligators in the sewers…”
“And are there?”
“Alligators? No,” Urruah said. “Dragons, though…” He smiled.
Arhu stopped again, looked at him oddly. “Dragons…” He turned to Rhiow. “He’s making it up. Isn’t he?”
Arhu desperately wanted to think so, that was for sure. “About the dragons?” Rhiow said. “No, that’s true enough … though not the way you might think. The presence of the worldgates can make odd things happen, things that even wizardry can’t fully explain. These tunnels sometimes reach into places that have little to do with this city. They aren’t a place to wander unless you know them well. Sometimes not even then…”
“But the ehhif—I heard about them. Lots of them live down here, everybody says, and they’re always hungry, and they eat… rats, and, and…”
“People? No, not these ehhif, anyway,” Urruah said. “And while some ehhif do indeed live down in the tunnels and dens under the streets, it’s not as many as their stories, or ours, would make you think. Not as many People, either.”
“Problem is, ehhif don’t see well in the dark,” Saash said, leaping up out of it and walking down the platform toward them. “Either for real or in their minds. When they try to tell stories about what they think they’ve seen down here, they tend to get confused about detail. Even for People, it’s never that easy to be accurate about this darkness. It reaches down too deep, to things that are too old. A story that seemed plain when you started, soon starts drawing darkness about itself even while you think you have it pinned down broken-backed in the daylight.,…”
Arhu was looking unusually thoughtful. “How’s the gate?” Rhiow said.
“Answering interrogations normally,” Saash said. “No resonances from our wayward friend at the end of Twenty-six: it’s sitting over there and behaving itself as if nothing had ever gone wrong.”
“Its logs are all right?”
“They’re recording usage normally again, yes.”
“That’s so strange,” Urruah said. “How are you going to explain it all to Har’lh when he asks for that report?”
“I’m going to tell him the truth, as usual,” Rhiow said, “and in this case, that means we don’t have the slightest idea what went wrong. Come on, Arhu, we’ll show you how a gate looks when it’s working right.” They walked on down to the end of the platform and jumped off. Arhu came last: he was slow about it.
“Before we go on,” Rhiow said. “Arhu, if any of this starts to frighten you, say so. You had a bad day yesterday, and we know it. But we work down here all the time, and if you’re going to be with us, you’re going to need to get used to it. If you think you need time to do that, or if you can’t stay here long, say so.”
Arhu’s tongue came out and licked his nose nervously, twice in a row, before he finally said, “Let’s see what’s so hot down here.”
“One thing, anyway,” Urruah said, his voice full of approval. He headed off into the darkness.
The glitter and sheen of the hyperstrings of the gate was visible even before they were out of the glare of the fluorescents. The locus, a. broad oval hanging some twenty yards along from the end of Track 30, was relaxed but ready for use: its characteristic weave, which to Rhiow always looked a little like the pattern of the Chinese silk rug her ehhif had on the dining-room floor at home, radiated in shimmering patterns of orange, red, and infrared. Arhu stared at it.
“It is alive,” he said.
“Could be,” Rhiow said. “With some kinds of wizardry, especially the older and more powerful ones, it’s hard to tell…”
“Why is it here?”
“For wizards to use for travel, as I said.”
“No, wait, I don’t mean why. How did they get here? This one, and all the others I can feel—”
“I see what he means,” Saash said. “To have so many gates in one place is a little unusual. It may have
to do with population pressure. All these millions of minds packed close together, pressing against the structure of reality, trying to get their world to do what they want… and hundreds of years of that kind of pressure, started by people who came here over great distances to found a city where they could live the way they wanted to, have things their way— Sooner or later, even the structure of physical reality will start to bend under such pressure. Or maybe not ‘bend.’ ‘Wear thin,’ so that other realities start showing through. They say that this is the city where you can get anything: in a way, it’s become true… If there’s no gate in so populous and hard-driven a place, the theory says, one will eventually appear. If there was already a naturally occurring gate, it’ll spawn others.”
“But there’s always been at least one gate here,” Urruah said, “since long before the city: the one leading to the true Downside, the Old Downside.”
“Oh, yes. If I had to pick one, I’d bet on the gate over by One-sixteen, myself: it just feels stabler than the others, somehow. But all the gates’ signatures have become so alike, after all this time, that you’d be hard put to prove which was eldest. Not my problem, fortunately…”
Rhiow sat down, looking the gate over. “It does seem to be behaving. You want to run it through the standard patency sequence? We should check that this week’s bout of construction hasn’t affected it.”
“Right.” Saash sat up on her hindquarters, settling herself and reaching up to the glowing weft, spreading her claws out to catch selected strings in them and pull—
She froze, then reached in and through the webbing of the gate once more, feeling for something—
“Rhi,” she said, “we’ve got a problem.”
Rhiow stared as Saash grasped for the strings again—and once more couldn’t get a grip on them. In the midst of this bizarre turn of affairs, the last thing Rhiow would have expected to hear was purring, except she did hear it, then turned in surprise and saw Arhu standing there rigid, looking not at Saash or the gate, but out into the darkness beyond them. The purr was not pleasure or contentment: it was that awful edgy purr that comes with terror or pain, and the sound of it made Rhiow’s hackles rise.