by Diane Duane
“At least I know you’re not out getting knocked up.”
Rhiow had to laugh. “With the example of the Himalayans down the street before my eyes? I’d sooner pull out my own ovaries with my teeth. Fortunately that’s not a requirement.”
“Boy, you’re talky today. You hungry? Want some tuna? Sure.”
“I don’t want the gods’-damned tuna!” Rhiow practically shouted as Hhuha put her down and went to the ffrihh. “I want to lie on the rug and be a house pet! I want to sit on the sofa and have you rub my fur backward so I can grab you and pretend to bite! I want to sit on Iaehh’s chest and nuke him feed me pepperoni! I want… oh. You didn’t say you had sushi last night!”
“Here, it’s maguro. You like maguro. Come on. Would you stand up for it?”
Rhiow stood right up on her hind legs and snatched at the sushi with both paws. “You’d be surprised what I’d do for it, except I’m not allowed. Did you take the horseradish off it? I hate that stuff, it makes my nose run. Oh, good…”
Hhuha sat down, and together they ate tuna sushi, very companionably, on the sofa. “He made a big fuss about not liking maguro last night,” Hhuha said, “so he doesn’t get any. You and I will eat it all. No, you don’t want this one, it’s sea urchin.”
“Try me!”
“Hey, get your face out of there. You had three pieces, that’s enough.”
“There is no such thing as too much sushi.”
“Oh, gosh, it is awful the day after. Here, you have it.”
“I thought you’d see sense eventually. —Oh, gods, it’s disgusting!”
“Hey, don’t drop that on my rug! I thought you wanted it!”
“I changed my mind.”
The phone rang. Hhuha leapt up off the couch like a Person going up a tree with a houff after her, and answered the phone before the machine could pick up. “Hello—yes, this is she—yes, I’ll hold— Yes, good morning, Mr. Levenson. —Certainly. —No problem—when? That’s fine. I’ll see you there. Yes. Goodbye—”
She hung up and threw away the rejected piece of sushi, then dashed across the room to pick up the jacket that went with the business skirt she was wearing, shut the briefcase and snatched it from the table, and looked scornfully at the pile of papers near it. “May be the last day I have to mess with that stuff,” Hhuha said. “Wish me luck, puss!”
“Hunt’s luck, Hhuha mine,” Rhiow said. Hhuha headed out the door and closed it, starting to lock locks on the outside.
Rhiow sat there when the noise had finished, and listened to Hhuha’s steps going off down the hallway, then had a brief wash. She was in the middle of it when she heard the voice in her head.
Rhiow?
T’hom—
You’re needed. Hurry up: get the team together and get them all down here. We’ve got big trouble.
She had never heard such a tone from him before. She went out the door at a run.
* * *
It took about twenty minutes to get everyone together at the garage; after that it was a minute’s worth of work to do a small-scale “personal” transit of the kind that Rhiow and the team had first used to bring Arhu in. The garage staff mistook the slam of air into the space where they had been for something mechanical, as Rhiow had suspected they would; when they popped out into existence on the platform for Track 30, the bang! of hot, displaced air was drowned out there too by the diesel thunder of trains arriving on one track and leaving on another.
There were a lot of people waiting on the empty platform. They looked like commuters … those of them who were visible, anyway. But visible or not, they had business in the station other than catching trains. In a city the size of New York, with a population of as many as ten million, there may be (depending on local conditions) as many as a hundred thousand wizards in the area; and New York, packed as full as it is with insistent minds and lives, populated as it is by an extravagant number of worldgates, tends to run higher than that. Obviously many wizards would be based in boroughs other than Manhattan, or would be engaged in other errantry that wouldn’t leave them free to drop what they were doing. But many would be ready and able to answer an emergency call, and these were arriving and being briefed, either by other wizards or by their Manuals, on what was going to be required of them.
Tom saw Rhiow and the team immediately, and headed over to them through a crowd of other ehhif wizards. “I got you your override,” he said to Rhiow when they had moved a little over to one side, where they could talk. “I’m afraid it wasn’t cheap.”
She knew it wasn’t. The Whisperer had breathed a word in Rhiow’s ear while they were setting up the circle for their short transit—confirmation that her demand had been accepted, and the price set—and the news had made her lick her nose several times in rapid succession. A whole life— She could have backed out, of course. But Rhiow had put her tongue back in where it belonged, taken a deep breath, and agreed. Now it was done. If everything worked out for them, of course, the price would be more than fair. It was simply something of a shock to have spent the last four or five years thinking of yourself as still only a four-lifer, not yet in middle age—and suddenly, between one breath and the next, to realize that you were already into your fifth life, and now on the downhill side.
“We do what we have to,” Rhiow said. “Har’lh has been doing so, and the Queen only knows where he is at the moment. Should I do less? But never mind that. What’s going on?” She glanced over by Track 30, where she could see the weft of the gate showing as usual. “I thought you shut the catenaries down.”
“They were shut down at the source.” Rhiow looked up at him, slightly awestruck, for the source of the gates was the Powers That Be: Aaurh herself, in fact. “However… something has brought them up again.”
“The gates are active,” Urruah said carefully, “but not under your—under ‘our’—control?”
“Yes,” Tom said. Rhiow thought she had never heard anything quite so grim. “We’ve tried to shut the gates down again. They don’t answer.”
Saash’s tail was lashing. “Once it’s shut down, an emplaced wizardry shouldn’t be able to be reactivated except by the one who emplaced it.”
“Shouldn’t. But we’ve seen the rules changing around us, all week. Apparently the earlier malfunctions were a symptom of this one—or else this one is just the biggest symptom yet. Someone has reactivated the gates from the other side.”
“That would take—”
“Wizardry? Yes. And of a very high order.”
Rhiow remembered the gate “saying” to her, “Someone” interfered… She licked her nose. And my light went out, Rhiow thought, and started feeling extremely grim herself.
“It couldn’t be Har’lh, could it?” Urruah said. “Trying to get out?”
“His spells have their own signature, like any wizard’s,” Tom said. “Whoever or whatever is producing this effect … it’s not Carl. But more to the point, if it were him, the gates wouldn’t be resisting what’s happening on the other side: it’s a kind of power that’s alien to them. Something wizardly, but not in the usual sense, appears to be trying to push through.”
“I see it,” Arhu said. “I told Rhiow that I was seeing it, just a little while ago.”
Tom looked at him thoughtfully. “What exactly do you see?”
Arhu’s tail was lashing. “It’s dark… but I can hear something: it’s scratching.”
“Could be Saash,” Urruah muttered.
Rhiow hit him right on the ear, hard. Urruah ducked down a little, but not nearly far enough to please her. “It’s carrying the darkness with it on purpose,” Arhu said, looking down into the darkness where the silver glint of the tracks under the fluorescents faded away, “and it wants to let it out into the sun … but until now the way has always been too small. Now, though, the opening can be made large enough; and there’s reason to make it so. The darkness will run out across the ground under the sun and stain it forever.”
Tom hunkered dow
n by Arhu. “Arhu … who is it?”
Arhu squinted into the dark. “The father,” he said. “The son…”
“He said that before,” Rhiow said. “I couldn’t make much of it then.”
“The problem with this kind of vision,” Tom said, looking over at her, “is that sometimes it makes most sense in retrospect. It’s hardest on the visionary, though, who usually can’t make any sense of it at all.” He ruffled the fur on top of Arhu’s head, which Arhu was too distracted to take much notice of. “One last thing. If we cannot prevent this breakthrough, by whatever force it is which is pushing against the gates from the other side … what else should we do to keep the world as it should be?”
Arhu looked up, but it was not on Tom that his eyes rested at last. The fur fluffed all up and down Rhiow’s back as Arhu’s eyes met hers; there was someone else behind those eyes. “You must claw your way to the heart,” he said, “to the root. I hear the gnawing; too long have I heard it, and the Tree totters…”
In his eyes was the cool look of the stone statue of Iau in the Met. Rhiow wanted to look away but could not: she bent her head down before Arhu, before the One Who looked through him, until the look was gone again, and Arhu was glancing up and around him in mild confusion at everyone’s shocked expressions—for Urruah had his ears flat back in unmistakable fear, and Saash was visibly trembling.
Tom let out a long and unnerved breath. “Okay,” Tom said, getting up. He looked around him at the ever-increasing crowd of wizards. “You four have other business,” he said: “so you should hold yourselves in reserve. There should be enough of us to hold these gates closed… I hope. When the pressure eases up on the other side or drops off entirely, that’ll be your time to run through. Meantime … we’ll do what we can.”
* * *
The hours that followed were given over to weary waiting for something that might not happen … if everyone was lucky. Urruah slept through it all. Arhu dozed or stared down at the ehhif down in the main concourse from the vantage point they had chosen, up on the gallery level. Saash sat nearby and scratched, and washed, and scratched again, until Rhiow was amazed that she had any skin left at all. But she could hardly blame her if Saash felt what she felt, the sensation of intolerable and increasing pressure below: something straining, straining to give, like a tire intent on blowing out; and something else leaning hard and steadily against it, trying to prevent the “blowout”—the many wizards who kept coming and going, new ones always arriving to relieve those who had come earlier and used up all their energy pushing back against the dark force at the other side of the gates. The ones who left looked as worn as if they had been out all night courting, or fighting, or both; and there was no look of satisfaction on any face—everyone looked as if the job itself wasn’t done, even though individual parts of the job might be.
Rush hour started, and astonishing numbers of ehhif poured into the terminal and out of it again; the floor went dark with them, an incessant mindless-looking stir of motion, like bugs overrunning a picnic. There were minor flows and eddies in it—periods when the floor was almost empty, then when it filled almost too full for anyone to move; the patterns had a slightly hypnotic fascination. Rhiow wished they were a lot more than just slightly hypnotic; not for the first time, she envied Urruah’s ability to sleep through anything that didn’t require his personal intervention. She could never manage such a performance herself—her own imagination was far too active.
Though I wonder, she thought at one point, a good while later, whether Urruah’s simply decided that this is going to be the easiest way to deal with his disappointment. For now there was no way he would be able to make it to his ehhif-o’hra concert in the Sheep Meadow. Even if the situation down at the track level relaxed, and the gates went back to something approaching normal, they would have to head down in search of Har’lh as quickly as possible. Poor ’Ruah, she thought, glancing up at the Accurist clock: it read one minute to eight.
T’hom? she said silently. Any news?
There was a pause. Tom had been spending most of his time in “link” with the wizards who were holding the gates shut—an ehhif version of the conjoint linkage that Urruah had insisted they would need. As a result, when you called him, the answer you got was likely to have anywhere from five to fifty other sets of thoughts, of other internal voices, wound around it as he directed the ehhif-wizards to apply their pressure to one area of the multiple gate matrix or another. It made private conversation impossible and required you to shout nearly at the top of your mind to get his attention.
Sorry, I missed that.
How are you doing? Rhiow said.
The pressure from the other side’s been steadily increasing … but not by nearly as much, minute to minute, as it was earlier. We may be winning.
All right. Call if we’re needed.
You’ve done a lot today already, Rhi.
Maybe. But don’t hesitate.
She felt his tired breath as if it were her own as Tom went back to coordinating the other wizards. Rhiow breathed out, too, glanced over at Arhu: he was tucked down by Urruah, staring at the ehhif walking in the Concourse. Deep-voiced, the clock began to speak eight o’clock; neither Arhu or Urruah moved. Rhiow turned and saw that Saash had moved over toward the escalators, where she was simply sitting still now, looking down into the Concourse as well, but not washing: this by itself was unusual enough that Rhiow got up quietly, so as not to bother either Urruah or Arhu, and went to where Saash sat.
Saash didn’t say anything as Rhiow came over. Rhiow sat, and the two of them just spent a while looking at the comings and goings of ehhif who had no idea of what was going on down the train platforms.
’Tired?” Rhiow said after a while.
“Well, it wears on you…” Saash said, flicking an ear back toward the tracks. “They’re working so hard down mere… I feel guilty, not helping.”
Rhiow twitched her tail in agreement. “We’ve got specialist work to do, though,” she said. “We wear ourselves out on what they’re up to… we won’t be any good at what we have to do.”
“I suppose.” They watched as a mother with several small noisy children in tow made her way across the nearly empty concourse. The children were all pulling shiny helium-filled balloons along behind them, tugging on the strings and laughing at the way the balloons bobbed up and down. They paused by the Italian deli, where their mother leaned across the counter and apparently started chatting with the deli guy about the construction of a sandwich.
“It’s not that, though,” Rhiow said after a moment, “is it? We’ve known each other long enough now … you know my moods, I know yours. What’s on your mind?”
Saash watched the mother with her children vanish into the Graybar passage. “It’s just… this job…”
Rhiow waited.
“Well, you know,” Saash said, turning her golden eyes on Rhiow at last, “I’m a lot of lives along.”
Rhiow looked at her with some surprise and misgiving. “No, I didn’t know.” She paused, and then when Saash kept silent, “Well, you brought it up, so: how many?”
“Almost all of them,” Saash said.
Rhiow stared at her, astounded. “Eighth?” she whispered. “Ninth?”
“Ninth.”
Rhiow was struck silent for some moments. “Oh, gods,” she said finally, “why didn’t you tell me this earlier?”
“We’ve never really had to do anything that dangerous, until the last couple of times. Besides, would it have made a difference? To what we have to do, I mean?”
“Well, no, but… yes, of course it would!”
“Oh, sure, Rhi. Come on. Would you really have done anything differently the past few days? Just for my sake? You know you couldn’t have. We have our job to do; that’s why we’re still wizards—why we didn’t give up the power as soon as we realized it cost something.” Saash looked down at the concourse again: more ehhif were filtering in. “Rhi, we’ve just got to cope with it. If even A
rhu is doing that, who am I to turn aside from this just because I’m on my last life?”
“But—” Rhiow started to say something, then shut herself up.
“I had to tell you, though,” Saash said. “It seemed to me—when we finally get down there again, if something happens to me there, or later, and I fall over all of a sudden and it’s plain that that’s the end of everything for me—I didn’t want you to think it was somehow your fault.”
Rhiow was quiet for a few breaths. “Saash,” she said, briefly leaning close to rub her cheek against her friend’s, “it’s just like you to think of me first, of the others in the team. But look, you.” She pulled back a little, stared Saash in the eye. “Haven’t you forgotten something? We’re going down in conjunct. If you don’t come back up with us, none of us will come back up.”
“Don’t think that hasn’t occurred to me.”
“So don’t consider not coming back, that’s all. I won’t hear of it.”
“Yes, Queen Iau,” Saash said, dryly, “whatever you say, Queen Iau. I’ll tell Aaurh and Hrau’f the Silent that you said so.”
“You do that,” Rhiow said, and tucked herself down with a sigh—
Something screamed nearby. Rhiow leapt to her feet, and so did Saash; both of them looked around wildly. Arhu was running to them: Urruah was staggering to his feet, shaking his head as if he had been struck a blow.
“What was that?” Saash hissed.
“I don’t—” Rhiow started to say. But then she did, for the screaming was not in the air: it was in her mind. Ehhif voices, shocked, in pain; and in the back of her mind, that sense of pressure, suddenly gone. Something blown out. Something running in through the blown place: something dark—
“Come on!” she said, and headed for the stairs.
The others followed. Rhiow nearly fell once or twice as she ran; the images of what wizards were seeing, down at the track level, kept overlaying themselves on her own vision of the terminal: The gate hyperextending, its curvature bending inward toward the wizards watching at the platform, but also seeming bizarrely to curve away; the hyper-string structure warping out of shape, twisting into a configuration Rhiow had never seen before, unnatural, damaged-looking … and in the darkness, roaring shapes that poured seemingly more from around the gate rather than through it.