The Book of Night with Moon fw-1

by Diane Duane

  Cut it out, she told herself, annoyed, and pushed forward.…

  They went onward, and downward. The sound of water faded away to nothing or grew again, by turns. The little green light bobbed ahead of them into places where water was now actively dripping so that they were rained on under the earth, and Saash muttered and hissed under her breath, having to stop every twenty paces or so to shake water out of her eyes or smooth back into place some patch of fur that she simply could not leave alone any longer. Generally Saash was pretty good about controlling her fur fixation when she was on errantry, but down here she had problems, and Rhiow was in no mood to call her on them: she had problems of her own. The weight of the stone, the silence of it… watching…

  She thought of the cool stony regard of the statue of Queen Iau in the Met and broke away from the other imagery with pleasure. The comfortable, dusky blue light of that space: it would be a pleasure to be back up there again, strolling among the ancient things. Rhiow thought of the clay chicken pot there, with a very realistic chicken carved on the upper side of it, and how she had laughed once to see an almost exact duplicate of the thing in the window of a kitchen shop in the upper Eighties, off First Avenue. Down in this darkness, it was all too easy to stop believing in sunlight, and museums, and traffic noise, and taxi horns blaring, and all the rest of normal life in the city. Yet all those things—the buildings, the ehhif, the noise, and the hurry— had their roots here, in the roots of the Mountain, in this darkness, this silence. Without this, none of those could exist.

  They went onward, and downward. Several times Rhiow stopped, and the others—perhaps looking elsewhere—ran into her from behind, or into each other, so that soft hisses were exchanged, or the occasional cuff. Once Arhu—who had been uncharacteristically silent, catching the others’ mood, or perhaps himself unnerved at the way he was starting to hear the waiting, listening stone—crowded too close to Saash. She stopped suddenly, perhaps hearing something: Arhu bumped into her, Urruah bumped into Arhu, and Arhu turned around and actually hit Urruah in the head. Rhiow turned just in time to see the pale green spark of surprise in Urruah’s eyes, the flicker of anger, and then the sudden and very welcome return of humor. He said rrrrrrr under his breath, and Arhu backed into Saash, who promptly smacked nun.

  Arhu started to say rrrrrr on his own behalf, but Rhiow shouldered between him and Saash. “All right,” she said, “come on. Tension. All our nerves are shredded like the Great Tom’s ears at the moment: why try to pretend they’re not? We don’t have much farther to go. Arhu, how are you holding up?”

  “It reminds me of, of—” His tail was lashing. “Never mind. Let’s go.”

  They went on again: still downward. The sound of dripping water had faded away again; there was nothing now to be heard but their own breaths, and the faint sound of their paw-pads on the dry, rough stone—sometimes a tchk as one of them kicked or shifted a bit of stone, and the sound fell flat and loud into the surrounding stillness. The little green light was starting to make Rhiow’s eyes water, and sometimes her concentration on it faltered, so that it flickered slightly in the dark, like a candle guttering out. It would be nice, she thought, if there were wizardries you could just start and ignore afterwards…But there were no such things. A wizardry needed attention at regular intervals, re-description of its basic tenets, of the space you intended to affect, and the effect you were trying to have; otherwise it lapsed—

  —the light went out—

  Rhiow stopped short. I didn’t do that—

  Utter stillness behind her. The others were holding their breaths. Then Arhu whispered, “Is that a light up there?”

  Her eyes were relaxing back to handling complete darkness again, or trying to—in night this total, even the keenest-eyed feline was helpless. But there was indeed a faint, faint glow coming from up ahead—

  It’s the catenary, she thought. Thank you, Iau.

  But why did my light go out?…

  “It’s the power source,” she whispered back to Arhu. “We’re almost where we’re going. Saash?”

  The dim, dim light started to seem brighter with time; as she turned, Rhiow could actually see Saash’s face, and her ears working. She had the best hearing of any of them.

  “Nothing,” she said very softly. “Let’s do what we have to, Rhi, and get ourselves out of here again. We’ve been lucky.”

  So far, Rhiow heard her add.

  Silently Rhiow agreed. “The next chamber is very big,” she said to Arhu. “It has to be: the catenary structure is what feeds power up to the gate loci, and its inwoven wizardry very carefully controls a large clear space around it. We’ll have to deactivate that wizardry before we start working, and before that we’ll be laying down a protective circle. You must stay inside that circle at all costs, no matter what happens to any of us: if you venture outside it while the catenary’s control wizardry is down, and accidentally come in direct contact with the energy of the catenary—you’ll be dead, that’s all. Clear about that?”

  “Uh huh,” Arhu said, and Rhiow heard him gulp.

  “Good. Come on, crew.”

  She led the way toward the faint glow. The tunnel narrowed and kinked again, then opened out into the next chamber.

  Here the stone was more gray than pale. The chamber had numerous openings, and a floor that was flattish and devoid of stalagmites, dropping to a shallow depression in its middle. From that depression, right out of the solid stone of the floor, almost straight up to the ceiling and apparently into and through it, a tightly coiled and interwoven bundle of hyperstrings stretched. Up and down it, in many colors, ran a fierce, bitter light, much more dangerous-looking than the weft of the gates above. The whole structure jittered and sizzled with power, all the while wavering slightly in the air as if it were a plant swaying in some breeze. The effect was actually caused by the hyperstrings’ bundled structure being more than usually affected by changes in gravitic stresses and the local magnetic field, and, for all Rhiow knew, by neutrino flow.

  “Wow,” Arhu said from behind her. “How are you going to fix this?”

  “By shutting it down and taking it apart,” Rhiow said. “Urruah?”

  “I’ll make a circle,” he said, and started pacing out, to one side of the cavern, the protected area from which they would operate. As he paced, looking intently at the floor and occasionally pushing a bit of cracked stone or rubble out of the way, the sigils and symbols of the Speech started to appear glowing on the stone, a long flowing sentence-equation. All their names, and descriptions of them all, were woven into it as well: otherwise the spell would have no way to know who it was protecting. All the rest of the written circle, looking more and more as Urruah worked like a glowing vinework of words in the Speech, was in the most technical of its dialects, mostly involving the control and redirection of energy flows, and based on words that had originally been Ailurin. Of all wizards working on Earth, the People knew most about energy—being able to clearly perceive aspects of it that ehhif and other species’ wizards couldn’t. Even nonwizardly People had an affinity with warmth, a link to fire and the Sun, which other species had noticed: it was traceable back to this native talent for seeing and managing energy flows.

  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 sub-atomics. He was paying less attention, for this spell’s purposes, to efviauw, the electrom
agnetic 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 II 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’II 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 leane
d 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.