by Diane Duane
They’re all going, came Tom’s thought, all the gates— look out!
Rhiow and Saash hit the bottom of the stairs first and were about to run leftward toward the gates to the tracks— but a screaming, roaring wave of green and blue and pale cream-colored shapes came plunging through the gates first, spilling out into the main concourse. Ehhif screamed and ran in all directions—out into the Graybar and Hyatt passages, out onto Forty-second Street, up the stairs to the Vanderbilt Avenue exit—as the saurians charged across the marble floor, and their shrieks of rage and hunger echoed under the high blue sky. The chilly scent of dinosaur flesh was suddenly everywhere. The cold things, Rosie had said. They went by. I heard them roaring…
Panic was spreading in the terminal; ehhif were struck still with shock and disbelief, staring at the impossible invasion from their distant past. Rhiow caught sight of one saurian racing across the concourse toward the Italian deli, and toward the mother, half-turned in the act of accepting her sandwich from the guy behind the counter; and toward the children, frozen, mouths open, staring, their bright balloons forgotten at the sight of the sharp claws stretched out toward them—
She thought about her Oath, to preserve life whenever possible—
Rhiow said the last word of the spell… a relief, for carrying a spell almost completely executed is an increasing strain that gets worse the longer you hold it in check. The unleashed power practically clawed its way up out of her, leaping away toward its targets and leaving Rhiow weak and staggery for the space of a breath or so.
All over the concourse, in a circle with Rhiow at its center, saurians crashed to the floor and lay immobile. But the range of the spell was limited; and more would be coming soon. Urruah came down behind her and Saash; to him Rhiow said, “You have that spell loaded?”
“You better believe it!”
“Get back there to the gates and keep them from getting up here! And pass it to as many of the other wizards as you can. If you push the saurians back fast enough and get close enough to the gates, you can knock them down almost as they come out. Saash, go down a level; do the same. I heard Tom say something about ‘all the gates.’ It may not just be the one at Thirty that’s popped. Arhu, come on, some of them went up toward the main doors—”
Saash and Urruah tore off through the doorways that led to the tracks. Rhiow ran toward the Forty-second Street doors, up the ramp, with Arhu galloping behind her. Ehhif screams were coming from near the brass doors; Rhiow saw two saurians, a pair of deinonychi, kicking at something low. Rhiow gulped as she ran, half certain there was a ehhif body under those deadly hind claws; but as they got closer, she saw that they were kicking actually the glass and brass of the doors in frustration, possibly unable to understand the glass—and on the other side of the door was no slashed-up body, but a furious houff with its leash dangling, barking its head off and scrabbling wildly at the glass to get through, while shouting in its own language, “Lemme at ’em! Lemme at ’em! I can take “em!”
“Good dog,” Rhiow muttered, a rare sentiment for her, and once again spoke the last word of the neural-inhibitor spell. The power leapt out of her, and the deinonychi fell, clutching at the glass as they went down, their claws making a ghastly screeching against the metal and glass as they collapsed.
Rhiow stopped and looked back toward the concourse. “I don’t think any of them got any farther than this,” she said to Arhu, looking around the waiting room. “If we—”
Any further words got stuck in Rhiow’s throat for the moment as her glance fell on the mounted tyrannosaur in the waiting room. The few ehhif who had stopped on their way through the terminal to look at the skeleton were now all clustered together in the farthest comer, holding on to one another with an intensity not usually seen in New Yorkers who until a moment or so ago had been perfect strangers. The air was filled with a peculiar groaning sound, like metal being twisted out of shape…
Which it was, for Rhiow saw that slowly, with deadly deliberation, the skeleton was moving. Its front claws reached out and grasped at the air, clutching at nothing; its head lifted from the position of low menace in which it had been fixed, stretching upward, the jaws working—then twisted around to look, hungry, at the ehhif in the corner.
Rhiow’s mind flashed back to what she had done to the metal track a couple of nights before. But you needed physical contact for that spell, and she wasn’t very sanguine about her chances of maintaining contact for long enough to do the job without herself being ripped to shreds or bitten in two.
The tyrannosaurus skeleton leaned down to scratch and pull at the pedestal, then straightened and began trying to pull its hind legs free, first one leg, then the other. There was a crack! like a gunshot as one of the weaker bolts holding the bones of its left foot to the pedestal came free, ricocheting off the travertine wall and peppering the poor ehhif crowded in the corner with stone splinters. The tyrannosaurus skeleton writhed and struggled to get free; it threw its head up in rage. An echo of a roar… Then it started working on the second leg more scientifically, not just thrashing around, and it was bent over so that the clever little front claws could help, too. Pull—pull—pull, and another bolt popped—
Rhiow shook her head at the sight of something beginning to cloud about the bones, building on them like shadowy cord, layer on reddish layer, strung with white: muscle, ligament… flesh. Damnation, Rhiow thought, whatever’s going on downstairs is calling to its dead cousin here… and pretty soon we’re going to have one of these loose in the terminal? —She shuddered. The deinonychi and smaller breeds of the present-day saurians—if it really was the present day, under the Mountain—were bad enough, but nothing like their terrible forefathers, like this desiccated old relic. The relic, however, was becoming less desiccated by the second; the muscle was almost all there now, organs curdling slick and wet into being, skin starting to sheet and stretch over everything, but only slowly: it was, after all, the biggest organ. For a horrible moment the skull was almost bare of everything but the red cording of the jaw muscles; then one abruptly coagulating eye, small, piggy, and entirely too intelligent, was looking down out of the wet red socket at Rhiow. The tyrannosaur stretched its head up as gaudy crimson-and blue-striped skin wrapped itself around skull and shoulders, and heaved mightily, one last time; the second leg came free. It whirled on its pedestal, graceful and quick as a dancer, leapt down, and went for the ehhif—
You’re lizard enough to die now, Rhiow thought, and opened her mouth to speak the last word of her spell—
Arhu, however, took a step forward and yowled a single word in the Speech.
The tyrannosaurus blew up. Flesh, ligament, all those organs and whatever had been inside them, blood and bone: one moment they were there, the next they were gone to splatters and splinters, flying through the air. The ehhif fell to the floor and covered their heads, certain that a bomb had gone off. The cream travertine walls were now a most unhealthy color of patchy, seeping pink; and the ceiling, just newly painted, appeared to have been redone in an entirely more pointillist style, and rained scraps and shards of flesh and other tissue down on the empty pedestal.
Rhiow looked at Arhu in amazement.
He grinned at her. “I saw it in Saash’s head,” he said. “She did it to the rats.”
“Yes, but how did you adapt that spell to—”
“Adapt it? I just did it.”
And to think I was complaining that he wasn’t doing enough of his own wizardry, Rhiow thought. But this was more like a young wizard’s behavior, more like her own when she was new, just after Ordeal, and didn’t know what you couldn’t pull off. “You’re getting the hang of it, Arhu,” she said. “Come on—”
He paused first, and ran back to the other skeleton, reared up against it.
Its metal went molten and ran out from inside the bones like water. The bones rained down in a mighty clattering and shattering on the floor.
“Where did you get that?” she demanded as he ran back toward
her.
“I saw it in your head.”
Why, you little peeping tom— “You didn’t need to do that! It wasn’t doing anything!”
“It might have been about to.”
Rhiow looked at the stegosaurus skeleton and found herself willing to admit that under the present circumstances, she wasn’t too sure what its dietary habits or temperament might be should it wake up just now… and they both had other things to think about. “All right, come on,” she said. “You want to blow things up? Plenty of opportunity downstairs.”
They ran back through the main concourse. For once Rhiow wasn’t concerned about whether she was sidled or not: the ehhif would have a lot of other things to pay attention to for the next few minutes, anyway, besides a couple of cats. “Wow,” Arhu said, “look at all these dead lizards. What’re the ehhif going to do with them?”
“Nothing, because if we survive this, Tom will get authorization from the Powers That Be for a ‘static’ timeslide, and we’ll patch this whole area over with a congruent piece of nonincidental time from an equivalent universe. The physical damage will simply never have happened… and if we get the patch in place fast enough, none of the ehhif here will remember a thing.”
“Might be fun if they did…”
Rhiow snorted as they headed for the doorways to the gates, from which the roars and snarls and cries of battle were drifting toward them. Saash?
Downstairs.
How’re you holding up?
Killing lizards like it’s going out of style. I don’t like this, Rhi.
You didn’t like the rats either.
I like this a lot less. Rats aren’t self-aware. These creatures are… not that much of the awareness has a chance to get outpost the hate.
They’re trying to kill the ehhif, and the ehhif are defenseless; that defines the situation clearly enough for the moment. ’Ruah?
With T’hom and his people. It’s a good fight, Rhi!
Tell me you’re winning.
More than I could say. We’re killing lots of dinosaurs, though. The trains are helping.
The trams are—
Only one derailed so far, Urruah said cheerfully.
Oh, sweet Dam of everything—! Rhiow ran through the doorway for Track 30—then stopped, realizing that she had lost Arhu. She turned, saw him lingering to stare at one of the fallen saurians.
“Arhu,” she said, “come on, can’t you hear them down there? They need us!”
“I was seeing this before,” he said, looking down at the saurian so oddly that Rhiow ran back to him, wondering if he was about to have some kind of fugue-fit along the lines of the one he had when they were coming back from Downside.
“What?” she said, coming up beside him. “What’s the matter?”
“It changes everything,” he said. “The sixth claw…”
Rhiow blinked, for that had been one of the phrases he had repeated several times as they returned from the caverns. At the time, it had puzzled her, and it did again now, for in Ailurin a “sixth claw” was an extra dewclaw, which polydactyl cats might have; or simply a slang idiom for something useless. Now, though, she looked down at the saurian, another of the splashy-pelted ones done in green and canary yellow, and at the claws that Arhu had been examining.
There were indeed six of them. This by itself was unusual, but not incredibly so. They’ve always come in fives before, but maybe some mutation— Then Rhiow looked more closely at the sixth one.
It looked very much like a thumb.
She licked her nose. “What does it mean?” Rhiow said.
Arhu stared at her, very briefly at a loss. “I don’t know,” he said. “But it’s really important. I couldn’t hear much else in my head almost all the time we came back. It was like someone kept shouting it… or like it was a song—”
His tail was lashing. “Later,” Rhiow said finally. “They’re fighting, down there: they need us. Come on!”
They ran through the door, down the platform for Track 30. The upper track level was hardly recognizable as the familiar, fairly tidy place where Rhiow walked every day. Saurians’ bodies were scattered everywhere. Fortunately there seemed to be few casualties among the wizards, or else they had been taken away already for treatment. There seemed to be no station staff around: Rhiow guessed they were staying locked safely in the towers and workrooms, probably having called the cops … though what they would have told the cops they wanted them for, Rhiow would have given a great deal to hear. At least they seemed to have stopped any further trains from coming in.
Tom and a group of other wizards were gathered nearest the track Thirty worldgate, which seemed to be spewing out saurians like a firehose; as fast as they came out, they died of the neural-inhibitor spell being repeatedly used so that the bodies lay heaped high before the gate, and the new saurians had to clamber over the bodies of their dead or push them aside to leap, screaming, at the wizards. On Tracks 25 and 18, trains were stopped halfway down into the platforms, with saurians caught under their bogies or draped over the fronts of the locomotives; Track 32 had the derailed train, its sideways-skewed front splashed with lizard blood, a heap of dead saurians trapped underneath it, and the faint cries of ehhif coming from inside.
“What kept you?” Tom said as Rhiow arrived, with Arhu in tow.
“A pretty serious reanimation,” Rhiow said. “Some kind of congruency to what’s been trying to push up through here, I suspect. We may find that it resists being patched afterward.”
“We’ll worry about that later. Some of us are busy pulling people out of that wreck, but we’ve got other problems. You’re the gate specialists—what can we do about this? There seem to be thousands more of these creatures waiting to come through, and if we just hang around here doing this all night, people’s memory tracks are going to engrave themselves too deeply to be successfully patched.”
Saash, Rhiow said, can you get some relief? We need you up here.
I’ve got some help already. On my way up.
Urruah—
Heard it. Be right with you.
Saash appeared a few seconds later. “Any ideas how to stop this?” Rhiow said.
Saash shook herself all over and had only the briefest scratch before standing up again, staring at the gate, through which still more saurians were clambering. “How chaotic,” she said to Tom, “are you willing to get?”
“Things are pretty chaotic already at the moment,” he said. “But anything that would put an end to this would be welcome. We’ve got to start patching very soon. If you need to get a little destructive—”
“Not physically.” Saash was getting that same gleam in her eye that Rhiow had seen the other night when she had turned the catenary loose, and Rhiow started to feel wary. “Just think of it this way. The gate might be more like a plant than a tree, though we tend out of habit to refer to a gate’s ‘tree structure.’ A gate has a ‘root’—the anchor-structure of its catenary, way down in the bottom of the Mountain, which fuels itself from whatever power supply Aaurh originally hooked it to: pulsar, white hole, whatever; theoretical distinctions don’t matter just now. A gate has a ‘stalk’—the catenary itself. And then it has a ‘flower’ at the top—the portal locus, where the energy is manipulated through the hyperstring structure, and actual transport takes place.”
“I hadn’t thought of you as having such a horticultural turn of mind,” Tom said, watching with a tight, unhappy look as yet more shrieking saurians climbed through the gate and were snuffed out.
“Yes. Well… what happens if you pull the portal locus off the gate?”
Tom stared at her. “Like pulling the head off a daisy. — What does happen?”
“It should shut the gate right down, no matter who or what reactivated the other end.”
“Should—!” Rhiow said.
“Until a new portal locus can be woven and installed, nothing can use it for transport.”
Tom was silent for a moment. Then he said, “These gat
es are very old… and were put in place by, well…”
“Gods,” Saash said, twitching her tail in agreement. “Fortunately, they are gods who left us, in the Whispering, and The Book of Night with Moon, very complete instructions on how these gates were constructed in the first place… on the grounds that someday they might need serious repair or reconstruction.”
“Which they will,” Rhiow said, “if you go pulling the portal loci off them! Do you know what kind of energy you’re talking about releasing here? And if you don’t do it in exact synchronization, every one of them at just the same time, one or more of the gates could pull free of its anchors to this universe and just go rolling off across the landscape wherever it liked, and only Iau knows where it would wind up, and in what condition! For all you know it would invert function and start eating anything that the portal locus came in contact with—”
“So we’ll be careful about the synchronization,” Saash said.
Rhiow just stared at her.
“How long would it take to get the gates going again after this?” Tom said.
“With all the available gating experts working together to do the reweave? A day or so.”
“If it’s so easy, why hasn’t it ever been done before?” Rhiow said.
“Because no one ever needed to, since nothing has ever made the gates malfunction this way before,” Saash said, sweetly, “and because there’s never been a problem quite like this! ” She gestured with her tail at the fresh wave of dinosaurs clambering over the heap of already-dead ones.
Tom looked at this, and also at the image of the plan that Saash held in her mind. Rhiow was examining that same image with great disquiet. Theoretically it was sound. Practically, it could be done. But—