The Book of Night with Moon fw-1

by Diane Duane

  “ ‘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 wizardry 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.”

  “Oh, sure,” Urruah said. “Let them ‘tree’ us inside the circle, five bodies thick! Then what are we supposed to—”

  “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.

  Urruah lifted his head and roared too, but the sound was almost drowned in the wave of shrieks of hate that followed it. Single sickle-claws three feet long scrabbled against the circle, jaws half the size of one of their bodies tried to slash or bite their way in; and everywhere on your body, though nothing touched you physically, you felt the pressure of the little, cold, furious eyes. There was intelligence there, but it was drowned in hatred, and gladly drowned. The impression of outraged strength, pebbled and mottled greenish- and bluish-hided bodies thro
wing themselves again and again at the circle; the impression of raging speed, and the interminable screaming, a storm of sound in this closed-in place: that was what you had to deal with, rather than any single, rational impression of This is a deinonychus, that is a carnosaur—

  “That’s what it was,” Arhu was moaning, almost helplessly, like a starving kitten. “That’s what it was—”

  Rhiow swallowed. “The circle’s holding?” she said to Urruah.

  “Of course it is. Nothing they can do about it. But how are we going to get out?”

  It was a fair question. He had said “five deep”; possibly he had been optimistic. The cavern was now packed so full of saurians that there was no seeing the far wall, except for the part near the roof, above the tallest heads. Rhiow had a sudden ridiculous vision of what Grand Central would look like at rush hour if it were full of saurians, not people: a whole lot like this. We need shopping bags, though, she thought, pacing around the circle, forcing herself to look into the terrible little eyes, the jaws snapping futilely but with increasing frustration and violence against the immaterial barrier of the circle: and Reeboks and briefcases. Or no, maybe the briefcases wouldn’t be in the best of taste—

  “Done,” Saash said.

  “The whole repair?”

  “Yes. I’m going to bring up the rest of the Grand Central complex again,” Saash said. “Tell our connection to get ready.”

  Heard that. Kit said. We’re set. Rhiow, if you need help, there’s backup waiting.

  Might need it, Rhiow said, but it’s hard to say. Hang on—

  Saash leaned into the catenary again, put out one single claw, inserted it into an insignificant-looking little loop in one string—it looked like a snag in a sweater—and pulled.

  The loop straightened, vanished. The catenary came alive again, the full fire of its power bursting up through the strings that had been offline. Saash stood watching it, her head tilted to one side, listening.

  “Feels right,” she said. “Khi-t?”

  We’ve got the gates back, said another voice: Nita’s. Want us to test the bad one?

  “Please.”

  The screaming and scrabbling and clawing went on all around them, undiminished. Okay, it hyperextended all right—

  “I saw that,” Saash said. “The catenary’s feeding the patched string properly. Shut it again?”

  —Closed.

  Saash sat down and started to scratch again, looking surprisingly satisfied with herself, under the circumstances. “I deserve some milk.”

  “So do we,” Urruah roared at her, “and we also deserve to get out of here with our pelts intact, which seems increasingly unlikely at the moment! What in Iau’s name are we supposed to do now?”

  Saash looked at the catenary, then back at Rhiow, and slowly her whiskers started to go forward.

  “Oh, no, Saash,” Rhiow said. “Oh no.”

  “Why not? Have you got anything better?” Saash said. “You want to try the odds of dropping the circle and having time to hit them with the neural inhibitor? I don’t think so, Rhi! There are so many of them leaning against that spell right now, they’d just squash us to death the second we dropped it, never mind what else they’d do to us. Which they will, as you remember from last time.”

  Rhiow swallowed. Arhu stared at Saash in dumb terror. Urruah said, “Just what are you thinking of?”

  Saash started to smile again, a smile entirely in character with a giant prehistoric predator-cat. “I’m going to push the catenary back out there without its ‘insulating’ spell in place,” Saash said.

  “Your brain has turned to hairballs!” Rhiow shouted. “What if it degrades the circle on the way through?”

  “It won’t.”

  “How sure are you?”

  “Very sure. I’ll leave the ‘insulation’ in place until after I’ve shoved it outside.”

  “Oh, wonderful, just great! And what about when you take the insulation off, have you thought that it might just degrade the circle then, and blast us all to ashes?”

  “It shouldn’t.”

  “Shouldn’t—!”

  “You want to sit here and wait them out?”

  Rhiow looked out at the room full of roaring, shrieking saurians. Those at the far side of the room were already settling down to wait.

  “It won’t work. No matter how long we sit here, they’ll wait,” Saash said. “And sooner or later we’re going to need food and sleep, and as soon as the last one of us goes to sleep, and the circle weakens enough to let them in—”

  Urruah looked from Rhiow to Saash, then back to Rhiow again. “She’s got a point,” he said.

  Rhiow’s tail was lashing. “You think you have a life or so to spare?”

  “You want to find out if it matters,” Urruah said, more gently than necessary, “down here?”

  Rhiow licked her nose again, then looked at Saash. “All right,” she said. “I concur.”

  “Right,” Saash said.

  She looked at the catenary. It drifted toward the edge of the circle; its own protective circles drifted with it.

  Some of the saurians nearest the place where it was about to make contact looked at the catenary with the first indications of concern. Its rainbow fire fell into their big dark eyes, turning them into a parody of People’s eyes—bright slits, dark irises; they blinked, backed away slightly.

  “They’re not wild about the light,” Urruah said.

  Saash nodded. The small circle surrounding the catenary made contact with the larger one: they “budded” together again. As if becoming somewhat uneasy at this, more of the saurians began to back away, and the screaming and roaring started to take on an uncomfortable edge. Some of the saurians nearer the walls stood up again, began to mill around, catching their companions’ unease. Saash closed her eyes then and held quite still.

  In one swift motion the catenary popped back out through the circle. It was now bereft of the smaller, “child” circles that the main protective circles had generated around it, and saurians jostled away from it as it drifted quickly back to its original position in the center of the cavern.

  The saurians parted around it, closing together again nearest the circle, and going back to their raging and scrabbling against its invisible barrier. Saash looked over their heads as best she could, past them, to where the catenary had now settled itself back in place.

  “Ah1 right?” she said. “Mind your eyes, now.”

  Rhiow started to close hers but was caught too late. The catenary suddenly stopped being merely a fiercely bright bundle of rainbows and turned into a raging floor-to-ceiling column of pure white fire. Lightning forked out of it in all directions, at least what would have passed for lightning. The whole cavern whited out in a storm of blinding fire that hissed and gnawed at their circle like a live thing. All Rhiow’s fur stood on end, and her eyes fizzed in their sockets. Behind her, Arhu cried out in fear. The desperate shrieks of the saurians were lost in the shrieking roar of the unleashed catenary.

  Eventually things got quiet again, and Rhoiw scrubbed at her tearing eyes, trying to rub some vision back into them. When she could see again, the catenary was once more sizzling with its normal light. But there was little else left in the cavern that was not reduced to charcoal or ash, and nothing at all left that was alive in the strictest sense… though bits and pieces here and there continued to move with lizardly persistence.

  Saash stood there, looking around her with grim satisfaction. “Definitely,” she said, “not at all wild about the light.”

  Urruah got up and shook himself, making a face at the smell. “I take it I can drop the circle now.”

  “It’s as safe as it’s going to get, I think,” Rhiow said, “and once it’s down, we can use the other spell if we need it.” She went over to the crouching Arhu. “Arhu, come on—we have to go.”

  He looked up and around him, blinking and blinded, but Rhiow somehow got the idea that this blindness had nothing to do with the light �
��Yes,” he said, and got up. Urruah had hardly collapsed the circle before Arhu was making hurriedly for the cavern-entrance through which they had come. “We have to hurry,” he said. “It’s coming—”

  Urruah looked from Arhu to Rhiow. “Now what?”

  “What’s coming?” Saash said.

  “The greater one,” he said. “The father. The son. Quick, quick, it’s coming!” His voice started to shade upward into a panicky roar. “We’ve got to get out before it comes!”

  Rhiow’s tail was lashing with confusion and concern. “I’m willing to take him at his word,” she said. “There’s no reason to linger—we’ve done what we came for. Let’s get back up to the light.”

  * * *

  It took less time than going down had taken. Despite the thought that they might shortly be attacked again, they were all lighter of spirit than they had been—all of them but Arhu. He wouldn’t be quiet: the whole way up through the caverns with him was a litany of “It’s coming” and “That’s what it was…” and “the greater one,” and an odd phrase that Rhiow heard only once: “the sixth claw…” Arhu didn’t grow silent again until they came up into the last cavern, past the great teeth of stone, to see the red-gold light of that world’s sunset, and the green shadows beneath the trees beyond the stony threshold. There he stood for a long time while Saash checked the main matrix for the repaired gate, and he gazed at the declining sun as if he thought he might never see it again.

  The thought had certainly been on Rhiow’s mind earlier; but now that they were up and out, there were other concerns. She glanced through the patent gate to the darkness beneath Grand Central, from which Kit and Nita were looking through, interested. “Many thanks,” she said. “Having you here as backup lent us the confidence to go all out.”