by Diane Duane
Rhiow chuckled. “You’ve got a point.”
“Dai stiho,” Kit said, the wizard’s casual greeting and goodbye in the Speech to another one: go well.
“Thanks,” Rhiow said. She jumped through the gate: Saash let go the control strings, took aim, and followed her.
* * *
There was the usual moment’s worth of disorientation as Rhiow felt her body adjust to its new status; then her vision cleared, and everything was fine again. Rhiow shook herself all over, settling the pelt—it was so close and short, compared to her usual fur, that she always felt slightly naked for the first few seconds. Saash, true to form, was sitting down and having a good scratch, watching Arhu with amusement.
“—Look at me! Look at me! I’m huge!” Arhu was going around and around in a circle, trying to get a good look at himself, but mostly looking as if he were chasing his tail. It was an amusing sight: the white patch at the tail’s end was now nearly as long by itself as the whole tail had been. Rhiow thought privately that, if he survived to come here to hunt later, he was going to have to do it by speed, for camouflage wasn’t going to be one of his strong points, not splashed all over with black and white the way he was. Though, then again, she thought, on moonlit nights, in broken country, it might work… “And look at you!” Arhu said, staring at Saash. She smiled a little crookedly, and Rhiow put her whiskers forward in amusement. Saash was certainly worth looking at: a tortoiseshell lioness, almost a ton of muscle. “And you!” Arhu said to Rhiow. “And, oh wow,” he said, seeing Urruah, whose tabby patterning had kept its color but gone much more tigerish, to suit his shape and size; he was nearly a taxicab high at the shoulder.
“What happened? Can we do this at home?”
“No,” Urruah said. “Cats’ bodies are the same size as their souls, here. Your soul remembers our ancient history, even if your body doesn’t…”
“Look at all this! Where are we?”
“IAh’hah.” Saash used the Ailurin slang that was as close as the average cat could come to pronouncing “New York.”
He stared at Saash. “You’re crazy!”
“This is New York, all right,” Urruah said. “Five hundred thousand years ago, maybe… and ten or twenty worlds over.”
“But this isn’t our world,” Arhu said, not entirely as a question.
“No,” Rhiow said, looking up and around through the golden air. “Ours is related to it… but this one is older… or it’s simply still the way ours was, long ago. Hard to tell: time differs, from world to world.”
“And things that happen here… happen at home too?”
“Yes. Often in different shapes, ones you might not expect at first. Know how when you look in a puddle, you see yourself? But the image is twisted: the wind touches it, it wrinkles…”
“Yeah.”
“Like that. Except this world would be the real you… and our world would be the image in the puddle, the mirror.”
Arhu opened his mouth, shut it again. “You mean … this is the real world? This is the way we’re supposed to look?”
“I didn’t say that.” Now it was getting tricky. It had taken Rhiow a good couple of years’ study to fully understand the implications of interdimensional relations between worlds. “This world is… in some ways… realer than ours. Closer to the center of things. But, Arhu, there are other worlds a lot more central than this one … and you can go sshai-sau trying to define reality merely in terms of centrality. I wouldn’t suggest you start working on a definition at this early stage. Let’s just say that this is a place where you can be different… but you take care not to do it for too long.”
“Why not? I like this! It would be great to be this way all the time!”
The paw came down on him, heavy, from behind, and pushed Arhu down flat. Arhu twisted his head around to gaze up into the huge, silver-gray face that loomed over him, narrow-eyed, fangs showing just a little. Though Urruah’s markings always went tigerish when he was Downside, he always looked, to Rhiow, more leopardlike. But in this form he was also still the biggest of them: and for all the lions’ fearful reputation, leopards are known even by ehhif to be the more dangerous and terrible hunters, wily and fearfully powerful.
“You wouldn’t like it,” Urruah said, “if you didn’t have a mind.”
Arhu just lay there and looked at him.
“Oh, sure,” Urruah said, “hunt big game, conquer a territory miles long, be big, be strong, eat anything you like, have trees fall over at the sound of your roar: sounds great, doesn’t it? But there’s a price, because none of us are supposed to stay out of our proper worlds for very long. Little by little you start to forget who you are. You forget your other lives if you’ve had any. You lose your wizardry, assuming you’ve achieved it. You lose your history. Finally you lose your name. And then it’s as if you never existed at all, since when you die and Iau calls your name to issue you with your next life, no one answers…” Urruah shrugged.
Arhu lay there looking rather stunned. “Okay, okay,” he said, “I guess I see your point. I like being me.”
Urruah stood back and let him up. Arhu shook himself off, sat down, and took a moment’s he’ihh to correct his slightly rumpled head fur. “But that stuff only happens if you stay here a long time?” he said.
“As far as we know, yes,” Rhiow said.
He looked rather sharply at her. “So what happens if you die Downside before you forget?”
It was the crucial question, the one that had made it harder than usual for Rhiow to get to sleep last night. “I don’t know,” she said.
“You mean … even if you have more lives … you still might not come back.” He was wide-eyed. “You mean you just die dead… like a bug or an ehhif?”
“Maybe,” Rhiow said. The Whisperer was silent about this possibility … and the concept that Hrau’f the Silent herself had no information on this subject was not one that filled Rhiow with joy. Moreover, she had absolutely no desire to be one of those who would supply the information.…
Arhu shook his head until his ears rattled, then craned his neck to look up, gazing at the rank above rank of gigantic trees, vanishing above them into the mist of a passing cloud. “It’s a mountain…” he said.
“It’s the Mountain,” Saash said. “This is the center of everything.”
“What’s that tall thing up at the top…” His voice trailed off, his ears twitching, as the Whisperer had a word with him.
“Oh,” he said then, and sat down with a thump.
“Yes,” Rhiow said. “And down among the Tree’s roots, into the caverns, is where we’re going.”
“What, in the dark? I don’t want to go down there! I want to go over there!” He was staring at the narrow flicker of sunny veldtland showing westward, past the forests. A faint plume of dust hung above it, golden in the late sun: distant herds of game on the move. But then he threw a look over his shoulder at Urruah, who had resolutely turned his back on the vista.
“I just bet you do. Later,” Rhiow said. “Business first.” She looked around them, caught Urruah’s eye, and nodded toward the cave entrance, in which hung the main control matrices for all the Grand Central and Penn gates, all shimmering and alive with the fiery patterns of normal function. Rhiow glanced back at the still-open gate through which they had come, and flirted her tail at Kit, who was standing there watching on the other side. He sketched her a small salute in return.
Can you hear me all right? she said inwardly.
No problems, Kit said, the same way. It was a little odd: his thought to her sounded like one of her own—the way inward speech between her teammates did. But this was Speech-based telepathy rather than thought grounded in Ailurin, and Kit’s thought had a pronounced ehhif accent. Am I clear?
Just fine. “I feel a lot better with them there,” Rhiow said, turning away and making her way sideways along the “threshold” stone, to where Saash already had her claws into the weave of the malfunctioning gate.
; “Those were ehhif wizards?” Arhu said, padding along beside her.
“Yes.”
“Very nice people,” Urruah said. “Very professional.”
“Hmf,” Arhu said. “They don’t look like much to me.”
“That they were here to meet us,” Rhiow said, “indicates that Carl thinks they’re two of the most powerful wizards available in this area. The younger the wizard, the more powerful…” She carefully did not say why, in case the Whisperer had not yet mentioned it to Arhu: because the young don’t know what’s impossible yet, and do it anyway. “The only wizards better at being powerful for a long time while young are the ones who’re whales. They stay children longest. Our latency period isn’t that long, relatively … so we have to make up in extreme cleverness and adaptability what we lose early on in sheer power.”
She was gazing past the gates’ control matrices, toward the back of the cavern, and the darkness. “You don’t want to go down here, really, do you…” Arhu said.
“No.”
“You’re nervous. I mean, I heard you being… I mean, you didn’t say, I just thought…”
“You’re beginning to be able to ‘hear’ some of what goes on in people’s minds,” Rhiow said, wondering how she was going to hide her discomfort at this realization. “Some wizards are better at it than others.” She threw him a look. “You want to keep what you hear to yourself, by and large.”
“Oh? Why?”
“Because,” she said, phrasing it very carefully, “we’re likely to start hearing you, too … and if you start saying out in the open what you hear other People thinking, they’re likely to do the same for you…”
His eyes widened a little at that, and he stared somewhat guiltily at Urruah. Good, Rhiow thought, amused, and turned her attention to Saash.
“How is it?” she said.
Saash was balancing on her haunches again, eyeing the web of the master locus for the malfunctioning gate. She reached out a paw, slipped it into the shining weft, hooked a claw behind a carefully selected bundle of strings, and pulled. They stretched out toward her correctly, but the gate still refused to hyperextend.
“No good,” she said to Rhiow. “There’s a blockage of some kind between this gate and the power source, the catenary. We’re going to have to go down and troubleshoot the linkage from the bottom up.”
Her voice was unusually flat and matter-of-fact. Rhiow, though, noticed Arhu watching her, and said, “I’m not wild about mis, either. But we’re all adequately armed…”
“We thought so last time too,” Saash said.
Urruah had already slipped behind the gates and was looking down into the darkness of the caverns, listening hard. As Rhiow came up to him, he turned his head and said, “Quiet today.”
“Not ‘too quiet’?”
“No,” Urruah said, falling silent again, and Rhiow listened and saw what he meant. The water that had tunneled out of these caverns, however many millennia ago, was still doing the same work, and you could usually faintly hear the dripping of it, echoing up from below. The sound was not entirely gone, today, but was somewhat more subdued than Rhiow was used to.
“It might have been a little droughty here, lately,” Rhiow said.
“It might not mean anything at all,” said Saash, coming up to join them, with Arhu behind her.
Rhiow lashed her tail “maybe,” a touch nervously. “Well,” she said. “The sooner we catch this rat, the sooner its back’ll be broken. Arhu—stay with us. Don’t go exploring. There are miles of these caverns: no one knows all their branchings, and some of the smaller ones aren’t stable. You could seal yourself in if you meddled with the wrong pile of rocks… and we wouldn’t be able to get you out.”
“But we can go through things,” Arhu said. “I did it in your big den, the station. A wizard who was stuck could go through the rock—”
Saash and Rhiow exchanged a look. Too smart, this one.,. “Yes,” Urruah said, “but if you try it so close to the main control structures of the gates, you could have real trouble. You’re halfway through a tunnel wall, say, and a nearby gate activates; the power running up to it from the catenary below makes some very minor shifts in the elementary structure of the stone… and all of a sudden, the stone you described in your spell, when you started your little walk, isn’t the same stone anymore. Your spell doesn’t work on that changed stone because the initial description’s no longer accurate. The spell structure unravels, and you get stuck half in the wall and half out of it. In an argument like that… the stone’s older than you are: it wins.”
Arhu’s eyes went so round that Rhiow thought they looked ready to pop out of their sockets. “So keep close,” she said. “And Arhu—keep alert. There are creatures who live down in these caves who don’t like us.”
Urruah sniffed down his nose, an oh-what-an-understatement kind of noise. “Come on,” Rhiow said. “Let’s get this over with.”
She led them down into the dark.
* * *
She remembered the way well enough from their last intervention here, though even if she had not, the Whisperer knew the main routes perfectly well—the explorations and interventions of other wizards, like Rhiow’s old master Ffairh in his time, would have been preserved in the Whispering for anyone who might later need the information. As it was, it was a shame that the context of where they were going and what they might meet tended to keep them from enjoying this place on its own merits: in their upper regions, at least, the caverns in the Mountain were beautiful enough.
The water had been a long time doing its work. As the main cavern narrowed and began to slope downward, Rhiow picked her way along among the upward-poking spines of pale stone, wondering a little at the lacy structure of some of them: each had its cousin-spike hanging down from the ceiling above. All these were dry now, the areas of active cavern formation having receded farther down into the Mountain. But up here, Rhiow would have welcomed the occasional drip or tinkle of water; it would have distracted her from the image that always struck her, when they were forced to come this way, that they were walking into a particularly fangy set of jaws, backed by a dark and hungry gullet of stone. If you weren’t careful, you could imagine the jaws closing—
Cut that out, she thought. The “gullet” narrowed and sloped down before them until it was only a few feet wide, and the light from outside the main cavern opening failed in the darkness beyond it. This was the only place in the Old Downside where Rhiow found herself wishing she had a proper Person’s body rather than this ancient and attractive, but oversized, persona. The walls here always brushed against her shoulders as she slipped through, yet there was no corresponding feeling of her whiskers being anywhere near the walls, as there would have been were she in her own body. The resultant sensation was disconcerting, disorienting.
The walls squeezed down closer: the tunnel kinked, kinked again. Rhiow slipped forward absolutely silently, listening hard. When she had nightmares about being attacked here, the nightmares always involved this spot: hemmed in by stone, no room to turn around, something bad behind her, something worse waiting in front. She knew that attack so high up, so close to the light and the day, was wildly unlikely. But still, it was the unlikely things that would kill you—
Sudden relief, as the feeling of stone touching her sides fell away, and the sound changed, even though it was only the nearly inaudible little dry sound that Rhiow’s paw-pads made on the stone. She activated one of the spells she had brought with her, saying the last word of it, and well ahead of her a tiny spark of faint green light came into being, floating high up in the air. The color was carefully chosen: the Wise Ones did not see in this frequency.
Behind her, first Saash, then Arhu, and finally Urruah slipped into the larger cavern, looking around. In the faint light a vast array of more stalactites—whole glittering white or cream or rust-banded chandeliers of them—could be seen hanging from the ceiling. There were fewer standing stalagmites here; gaps in the spiky ceiling and
the shattered rubble on the floor showed where the occasional groundshake or mere structural weakness had wrought much damage over many years.
“It’s pretty,” Arhu said, sounding rather befuddled.
“It is,” Saash said. “Sometimes I wish we could make a proper light when we come down here…” She shrugged her tail.
Rhiow shrugged back, and said, “Come on. We’ve got at least an hour’s walk ahead of us…” Assuming we don’t run into anything that makes us need to go another way. Oh, please, Queen Iau, just this once, let it be easy for us…
Rhiow had her doubts, though, as she led them downward through that cavern and into the next one, as to whether this prayer was at all likely to be answered. When you were in the company of a wizard on Ordeal, anything could happen, probably would. The odds against a quiet intervention were fairly high.
Behind her, as she padded through the wide entry into the next cavern, Arhu was saying to Saash, “Why are you so nervous?”
Saash breathed out. “We were down here before, about a sun’s-round ago. Not a good trip.”
“What happened?”
“Bad things,” Urruah said from behind Arhu, his voice plainly suggesting that one might happen right now if Arhu didn’t shut up.
He shut up. They walked a long way: down, always down, through galleries and arcades of stone, mighty halls as big as the concourse in Grand Central, twisting hallways as broad as the Hyatt passage. Sometimes the links between caverns squeezed to tunnels as narrow as the first one, or narrower: once the ceiling of one of these tunnels dropped so low that Rhiow had to get down on her belly and crawl forward, a few inches at a time, pushing herself along with an effort. Behind them she could hear the others doing the same, Urruah last and suffering most because of his size— grunting and swearing very softly under his breath. It was at such times, her own breath sounding intolerably loud to her, the others’, behind her, sounding even louder, that Rhiow always got the feeling that the Mountain was listening: that the stone itself was alive—though impassive—and watching them, though without any feeling of interest as a living being would understand it… without anything but a sense of weight. Hostility she could have coped with: benign neglect would have been fine. But this gave her the creeps, the sense of the stone piled up above her, the Mountain pressing down on her back, on her head…