The Book of Night with Moon fw-1

by Diane Duane

  “All right,” Tom said. “I’ll sanction it. I know you have misgivings, Rhi—so do I—but we’ve tried every other way to shut these gates down again, and nothing has worked. And the clock is ticking—we’ve got to start patching right away.”

  He looked at her expectantly. Rhiow sat down, trying to put her composure in place for whatever spell was going to be required of her. The thought, though, of simply—well, not destroying the gates—but maiming them: it rattled her. They were not entirely just spells. They were not sentient beings, either… but there was still something akin to life about them…

  Rhi, Saash said. I hear you. But there’s a lot of life here, too. And our fellow wizards can’t just stand around down here, killing lizards forever: aside from the cost to them in energy, ehhif life is going to be seriously disrupted by the reality of what’s happening if it’s allowed to persist and set in too permanently to be erased. Worse: while this is going on, we can’t go find Har’lh or get any closer to the bottom of what’s been going on…

  You’re right, Rhiow said finally. “So what do we need to do?”

  “Four gates,” Saash said. “Four of us. We don’t need physical contact; what we’re going to do is brutal enough. Rhi, you know Thirty best. Here’s the portal locus’s pattern.” Rhiow’s mind filled with it, not merely a spell-circle but a filigree sphere of light with several more dimensions implied in the diagram, all made of interwoven words in the Speech, intricate and delicate. “Just hang on to that. See that loose thread there?”

  Rhiow did, and she swallowed. She had never noticed any of the gate loci as having loose threads before. “Yes—”

  “Hang on to it. Don’t let go until I tell you. Urruah?”

  “Ready. Got it.”

  “There’s the thread. Bite it in your mind, don’t let go. Arhu?”

  “Uh, yeah.”

  “See that?”

  “Sure.”

  “Bite it.”

  He held very still, his eyes shifting back and forth, but in his mind he did as he was told.

  Saash was quiet for a moment. I’ve got the fourth one, she said at last. I’m going to count backward from four in my head. When I say zero—pull those threads. Not a second before or after.

  Right, they all said.

  The wizards around them got quiet, watching, except for those still occupied with killing whatever saurians came through the gate.

  Four, Saash said.

  Three.

  Two.

  One.

  Z—

  There was a tremendous rumble that seemed to come from the bowels of the building, working its way upward toward them, shaking. Dust sifted down from the ceiling, light fixtures swung, and fluorescent light tubes snapped and went dark—

  And sudden silence fell: the shaking stopped as if a switch had been thrown.

  The gate by Track 30 vanished—simply went away like a blown bubble that pops when a breeze touches it.

  Everyone held very still, waiting. But no more saurians came out of the air.

  There was a restrained cheer from the wizards standing around, and Tom came over to look at the space where the gate had been. “I don’t feel the catenary,” he said, sounding concerned.

  “You wouldn’t be able to,” Saash said, coming over to stand by him. “But I can see it; the hyperstrings leave a traceable pattern in the space they occupy, even without energy flowing. It’s just that the sensory component usually expresses itself through—” She stopped.

  “Through what? What’s the matter?”

  Saash stood there, gazing into the dark with an expression of increasing horror… then began a low, horribly expressive yowling. To Rhiow it sounded like her tail was caught in a door… except there was no door, and she could feel her friend’s sudden fear and anger.

  “What?” Rhiow said. “What—”

  Then she felt it, too.

  Oh, Iau, no—

  Arhu crouched down, looking scared—a more emphatic response than he had revealed even in the face of a ten-ton tyrannosaurus. Urruah stared at him, then at Saash.

  “Oh, no,” Rhiow said. “Saash—where’s the Number Three gate?”

  Arhu was sinking straight into the concrete.

  “It’s come loose before its locus was pulled off,” Saash hissed. “It’s popped out of the matrix—”

  There was nothing showing of Arhu now except the tips of his ears, which were rapidly submerging into the floor.

  “It’s not your fault,” Saash yowled, “come out of there, you little idiot! Somebody boobytrapped it!”

  Saash glared at Tom as Arhu clambered up out of the floor again. “Somebody knew we were going to do that intervention,” Saash said. “One of the gates was left with a minuscule timing imbalance, hard-wired in and left waiting to go off as soon as the portal locus was tampered with. It hasn’t been deactivated … and now everything that was coming out of all the gates before is going to come out of just that one … !”

  “My God,” Tom whispered. “Where’s the other gate gone?”

  Rhiow looked at him in shock. “A loose transit gate,” she said, “normally inheres to the area of the greatest density of thought and anchors there. The place where the most minds are packed the most closely together—”

  “Dear Iau up a tree,” Urruah whispered. They all stared at him.

  He looked at them, open-eyed with horror.

  “Tonight? The biggest concentration of minds?” Urruah said. “It’s in the Sheep Meadow…’ ”

  Urruah ran out. “Hurry up and start patching,” Tom said to several of the wizards who had been working with him; and he, and Rhiow, and Saash, and Arhu, and half the rest of the wizards in the place ran after him.

  * * *

  Urruah was making for the sidewalk, which was well enough away from any of the gates inside to prevent adverse effects. Maybe he didn’t really need to, under the circumstances, but Rhiow, at the moment, thought it was probably better to be safe than sorry. There were enough people sorry already.

  Sabotage… Rhiow thought again, as she and Arhu raced, along with the others, past the waiting room. As if from inside…

  Arhu glanced over at the mess that still lay all about in the waiting room as they passed. “That was it,” Arhu said to her, fierce, his panic of a few moments ago now replaced with a rush of angry satisfaction and aliveness the like of which Rhiow had never yet sensed in him. “That was what I saw … the first night. That came out. Even the rats ran away from it. And I—” He winced as they ran out the front doors with the others, and then said, “We’re even now. It wasn’t going to do that to me twice.”

  “Arhu,” Rhiow said, while Urruah and Tom paced out a large transit circle—it glowed in the sidewalk behind them as they paced, causing interested looks from the passing pedestrians—“when you work with words the way wizards do, precision is important. Something like that was what you saw? Or, that was what you saw? Which is it?”

  He looked at her with utter astonishment. “You mean— you think there’s another?”

  “How would I know? I want to know what you meant.”

  “Ready,” Tom said. “Everybody in here—hurry up!”

  They jumped into the circle with Tom and Urruah and the other wizards. “You sure of these coordinates?” Tom was saying to Urruah.

  “They’re ‘backstage,’ ” Urruah said. “The spot was empty yesterday. No guarantees for tonight—but it’s got better odds of being empty than anywhere else in the meadow tonight. You’ve got a ‘bumper’ on this, to keep us from accidentally coexisting with anybody—”

  “Yeah, but who knows what it’s going to do in such a densely populated area? We’ve got to take the chance. Whatever our spell will do if it malfunctions, it won’t be as bad as what’s already happening—”

  There was no arguing with that. Tom said three words and the circle flamed up into life, then a fourth.

  Wham!

  A huge displacement of air as all their masses w
ere subtracted from the space outside Grand Central; and Slam! an explosion of air outward as they all appeared—

  —and heard a blast of sound that staggered them all— partly from the amplification, partly from how close they all were to the stage. The orchestra was playing a massive, deliberate accompaniment to three voices—two lower, one high—that wound forcefully and delicately about one another, scaling continually upward through slow changes of key. Rhiow found herself briefly impinging on the outskirts of Urruah’s mind as on those of all the others in the transit circle there—had been no time to install me usual filters— and was drowned in his instant recognition and delight, even in these horrible circumstances, at the perfection of the sound coming from two of the three tehn’hhirs, and a third invited guest, the new young ssoh’pra-oh from the Met, in the great finale of a work called Ffauwst. Two of the voices argued—the Lone One and a wizard, in the throes of a struggle for the wizard’s soul—but the third and highest, the voice of a young and invincibly innocent queen, called on the bright Powers for aid: and (said Urruah’s memory) the aid came—

  Let it be an omen! Rhiow thought desperately as they broke the circle and looked around them. A few security people and police noticed them, started coming toward them—

  The human wizards, prepared, all went sidled in a whisker’s twitch. Rhiow and her team did, too, and they all hurried past the extremely confused policemen and security people to get around to one side of the stage and get a clearer view—

  It was hard, but they managed to clamber up among some sound gear, and from that viewpoint stared out into the night. The Sheep Meadow was full, absolutely full of ehhif, only dimly seen in the light from the stage. They sat on blankets and in portable chairs; the smell of food and drink was everywhere, and Rhiow threw a concerned look at Arhu— but for once he had his mind on other things. His ears were twitching; he stared toward one side of the meadow—

  “Where’s the gate?” Tom was whispering.

  “Not here yet,” Saash said. “The locus is still moving—”

  A faint sound could be heard now, something different from the susurrus of more than a hundred thousand bodies in one place. It was hard to tell just what it was with this mighty blast of focused sound, both real and amplified, coming from the orchestra. Rhiow glanced at the little round ehhif whom she had seen leading them earlier; now he was in the kind of black-and-white clothes that ehhif males wore for ceremonial these days, and conducting the orchestra as if he heard nothing whatever but bis music. Perhaps he didn’t. But there was more sound than music coming from the edges of the meadow. A rustling, a sound like the distant rush of wind—

  The three on the stage—a tall, pale, dark-haired tom-ehhif, a shorter tom, more tan but also dark-haired, both in the black-and-white clothes, and a tall, beautiful, dark-skinned queen-ehhif in a dress glittering like starlit night— were no more aware of anything amiss than the conductor. The toms, singing the Lone Power and the doomed wizard, cursed one another melodiously; the queen, ignoring them both, relentlessly declared her own salvation, requiring the aid of the Powers That Be. In a final blast of pure sound, a chord in three perfect notes, all three took up their fates, to the accompaniment of a final, mighty orchestral crash.

  The ehhif in the audience roared approval and applauded, a sound like the sea on the shore, rolling from one side of the great space to the other: the tehn’hhirs and the ssoh’pra-oh took their bows and walked off the stage, almost close enough for Rhiow to have reached out with a claw and snagged the ssoh’pra-oh’s gown. But out at the edge of that sound, over toward the east side of the park, something was going wrong. The sound leaned up and up in pitch as the queen’s voice had. Rhiow, Urruah, Arhu, Tom, all the wizards looked that way, straining to see what was happening—

  “It’s coming,” Arhu said.

  “What?” Rhiow hissed, as the third tehn’hhir, the big furry one Urruah had shown her the other day, went up the stairs to the stage past her, and more applause rolled across the meadow at the sight of him. He too was resplendent in the ceremonial black and white now, with a long white scarf around his neck, and he once again held the scrap of cloth he had used to wipe his face in the heat. This he waved at the conductor: once more the music began. There was a further rush of applause just at the sound of it—

  He smiled. “Tu pure, o Principessa,” he began to sing—

  “It can’t be coming,” Arhu said, furious and afraid. “It’s not fair… it can’t be coming! I killed it!—”

  —The tehn’hhir looked alarmed as now, above even the amplified music, he could hear the strange sound coming from the east side of the meadow …the sound, getting louder by the second, of screaming.

  He stopped and looked up, and saw the dinosaurs coming.

  The screaming got worse: thousands of voices now, rather than just hundreds, as the dark shapes plunged through into the humanity in the Sheep Meadow, confused, enraged, hungry, and in many cases half blind—for many of the Children of the Serpent do not see well by night, and hunt by scent. Scent there was, in plenty, and possibly all the picnic food bought some of the ehhif precious time to pick themselves up and run away while furious and hungry saurians threw themselves on whole roast chickens and a great deal of Chinese take-out. But the biggest of the saurians, those with well-developed eyesight, had more than enough light to make do with, and many of them, particularly the biggest, homed in on the brightest source of light they could find— the stage. A great herd of them, maybe twenty or thirty big ones, went wading through the crowds, loping along at terrific speed, trampling anyone not quick enough to get away; and the screams became more intense and drowned out the orchestra’s last efforts.

  Some of the saurians were beginning to drop now as various of the ehhif wizards who had come with Rhiow’s team in the circle did their own short-distance transports, out into the empty areas beginning to open in the tightly packed crowd. Actinic-bright sources of wizardly light began to appear here and there, drawing the light-sensitive saurians away from the surrounding ehhif; once they got within range, the neural-inhibitor spell finished them. But, as before, they just never seemed to stop coming…

  Near Rhiow, Saash hissed softly. “I’ve got to get over there and pull the locus off that last gate,” Saash said. “Someone come and run interference for me—”

  “I’m with you,” Urruah said.

  “Good. That spot over there—”

  They vanished together. Around them, backstage, ehhif were running in all directions: Rhiow wished fervently that she could do the same.

  The big tom-ehhif stared out into the darkness, much more bemused than afraid, if Rhiow was any good at reading ehhif expressions. More of the big saurians waded toward the stage; seeing them perhaps more clearly than the tom-ehhif could, the orchestra fled to right and left in a frantic double wave; though Rhiow noticed, with grim amusement, that very few of them left their instruments behind.

  Next to her, Arhu was crouched down, hissing in rage. “See what I meant,” Rhiow said, “when I asked you which one you saw—”

  “It was one of these,” Arhu said, furious. “They’re all the same one.”

  “What? Do you mean they’re clones?”

  “No. They’re the same one—”

  “If that’s the case,” Rhiow said, watching the vanguard of the saurians coming toward the stage more—tyrannosaurs, indeed, all identical to the one in the waiting room—“then you can kill them the same way.”

  Arhu’s expression became an entirely feral grin. He turned his attention toward the approaching saurians, started getting his spell ready again.

  Another sound started to mix with the screams out in the meadow: the bright sharp sound of gunfire, stitching through the night. This is New York, after all… and entirely too many of the crowd will be armed, legally or not. Roars followed, and some unnatural bleats and bellows of rage and pain as bullets went home. Still more screams came as some of the fallen saurians fell on nearby ehhif.
Iau grant these ehhif don’t get so confused, they start shooting each other—

  But there were worse things to think about. Tom reappeared nearby, glanced around to see how they were doing, was gone again in a breath. Almost in the same breath, a saurian came out from the farther backstage area, where the trailers had been parked: it had leapt over or dodged around the security barriers—

  The saurian loomed over Rhiow, snatched at her with jaws and claws. Rhiow leapt sideways out of the claws’ grasp, said the last word of the neural-inhibitor spell; the saurian, along with a companion behind it, came crashing to the ground. Too close, Rhiow thought, jumping out of the way. She was starting to get tired; and “burn-in” was setting in, the wizardry problem that came of doing the same spell too often. The spell’s range decreased, and its effectiveness dwindled, until you could get some rest and recharge yourself—

  Arhu was hissing, hissing again; outside, well beyond the stage, there were horrific noises. “It’s—it’s not working so great any more—” he gasped. “I don’t think I can get all of them—”

  Big spell, big burn-in, Rhiow thought, and worse than usual for a young wizard, who doesn’t know how to pace himself yet. “Stop it for a moment,” she said, “and use something else. Try the neural inhibitor—”

  Rhiow felt Arhu rummaging briefly in her head for the complete spell, as he had taken the explosive spell from Saash: a most unnerving sensation. Then he said the last word of the spell—

  Another large saurian that had invaded the backstage area died. This was followed by a small clap of air exploding outward, almost lost in the massive sound of a hundred thousand people panicking, and Urruah was there again. “Saash took the gate out,” he said. “They’ve stopped coming—”

  Arhu opened his mouth to hiss at the next of the huge shapes loping toward the stage.

  Nothing happened.

  The big tom-ehhif had been standing and staring in utter astonishment, probably simply unable to believe what he was seeing. Now fear finally won out over disbelief. He turned to flee, heading for the side exit from the stage…