by Diane Duane
"What, in the dark? I don't want to go down there! I want to go over there!" He was staring at the narrow flicker of sunny veldtland showing westward, past the forests. A faint plume of dust hung above it, golden in the late sun: distant herds of game on the move. But then he threw a look over his shoulder at Urruah, who had resolutely turned his back on the vista.
"I just bet you do. Later," Rhiow said. "Business first." She looked around them, caught Urruah's eye, and nodded toward the cave entrance, in which hung the main control matrices for all the Grand Central and Penn gates, all shimmering and alive with the fiery patterns of normal function. Rhiow glanced back at the still-open gate through which they had come, and flirted her tail at Kit, who was standing there watching on the other side. He sketched her a small salute in return.
Can you hear me all right? she said inwardly.
No problems, Kit said, the same way. It was a little odd: his thought to her sounded like one of her own— the way inward speech between her teammates did. But this was Speech-based telepathy rather than thought grounded in Ailurin, and Kit's thought had a pronounced ehhif accent. Am I clear?
Just fine. "I feel a lot better with them there," Rhiow said, turning away and making her way sideways along the "threshold" stone, to where Saash already had her claws into the weave of the malfunctioning gate.
"Those were ehhif wizards?" Arhu said, padding along beside her.
"Yes."
"Very nice people," Urruah said. "Very professional."
"Hmf," Arhu said. "They don't look like much to me."
"That they were here to meet us," Rhiow said, "indicates that Carl thinks they're two of the most powerful wizards available in this area. The younger the wizard, the more powerful…" She carefully did not say why, in case the Whisperer had not yet mentioned it to Arhu: because the young don't know what's impossible yet, and do it anyway. "The only wizards better at being powerful for a long time while young are the ones who're whales. They stay children longest. Our latency period isn't that long, relatively… so we have to make up in extreme cleverness and adaptability what we lose early on in sheer power."
She was gazing past the gates' control matrices, toward the back of the cavern, and the darkness. "You don't want to go down here, really, do you…" Arhu said.
"No."
"You're nervous. I mean, I heard you being… I mean, you didn't say, I just thought…"
"You're beginning to be able to 'hear' some of what goes on in people's minds," Rhiow said, wondering how she was going to hide her discomfort at this realization. "Some wizards are better at it than others." She threw him a look. "You want to keep what you hear to yourself, by and large."
"Oh? Why?"
"Because," she said, phrasing it very carefully, "we're likely to start hearing you, too… and if you start saying out in the open what you hear other People thinking, they're likely to do the same for you…"
His eyes widened a little at that, and he stared somewhat guiltily at Urruah. Good, Rhiow thought, amused, and turned her attention to Saash.
"How is it?" she said.
Saash was balancing on her haunches again, eyeing the web of the master locus for the malfunctioning gate. She reached out a paw, slipped it into the shining weft, hooked a claw behind a carefully selected bundle of strings, and pulled. They stretched out toward her correctly, but the gate still refused to hyperextend.
"No good," she said to Rhiow. "There's a blockage of some kind between this gate and the power source, the catenary. We're going to have to go down and troubleshoot the linkage from the bottom up."
Her voice was unusually flat and matter-of-fact. Rhiow, though, noticed Arhu watching her, and said, "I'm not wild about this, either. But we're all adequately armed…."
"We thought so last time too," Saash said.
Urruah had already slipped behind the gates and was looking down into the darkness of the caverns, listening hard. As Rhiow came up to him, he turned his head and said, "Quiet today."
"Not 'too quiet'?"
"No," Urruah said, falling silent again, and Rhiow listened and saw what he meant. The water that had tunneled out of these caverns, however many millennia ago, was still doing the same work, and you could usually faintly hear the dripping of it, echoing up from below. The sound was not entirely gone, today, but was somewhat more subdued than Rhiow was used to.
"It might have been a little droughty here, lately," Rhiow said.
"It might not mean anything at all," said Saash, coming up to join them, with Arhu behind her.
Rhiow lashed her tail "maybe," a touch nervously. "Well," she said. "The sooner we catch this rat, the sooner its back'll be broken. Arhu— stay with us. Don't go exploring. There are miles of these caverns: no one knows all their branchings, and some of the smaller ones aren't stable. You could seal yourself in if you meddled with the wrong pile of rocks… and we wouldn't be able to get you out."
"But we can go through things," Arhu said. "I did it in your big den, the station. A wizard who was stuck could go through the rock—"
Saash and Rhiow exchanged a look. Too smart, this one… "Yes," Urruah said, "but if you try it so close to the main control structures of the gates, you could have real trouble. You're halfway through a tunnel wall, say, and a nearby gate activates; the power running up to it from the catenary below makes some very minor shifts in the elementary structure of the stone… and all of a sudden, the stone you described in your spell, when you started your little walk, isn't the same stone anymore. Your spell doesn't work on that changed stone because the initial description's no longer accurate. The spell structure unravels, and you get stuck half in the wall and half out of it. In an argument like that… the stone's older than you are: it wins."
Arhu's eyes went so round that Rhiow thought they looked ready to pop out of their sockets. "So keep close," she said. "And Arhu— keep alert. There are creatures who live down in these caves who don't like us."
Urruah sniffed down his nose, an oh-what-an-understatement kind of noise. "Come on," Rhiow said. "Let's get this over with."
She led them down into the dark.
* * *
She remembered the way well enough from their last intervention here, though even if she had not, the Whisperer knew the main routes perfectly well— the explorations and interventions of other wizards, like Rhiow's old master Ffairh in his time, would have been preserved in the Whispering for anyone who might later need the information. As it was, it was a shame that the context of where they were going and what they might meet tended to keep them from enjoying this place on its own merits: in their upper regions, at least, the caverns in the Mountain were beautiful enough.
The water had been a long time doing its work. As the main cavern narrowed and began to slope downward, Rhiow picked her way along among the upward-poking spines of pale stone, wondering a little at the lacy structure of some of them: each had its cousin-spike hanging down from the ceiling above. All these were dry now, the areas of active cavern formation having receded farther down into the Mountain. But up here, Rhiow would have welcomed the occasional drip or tinkle of water; it would have distracted her from the image that always struck her, when they were forced to come this way, that they were walking into a particularly fangy set of jaws, backed by a dark and hungry gullet of stone. If you weren't careful, you could imagine the jaws closing—
Cut that out, she thought. The "gullet" narrowed and sloped down before them until it was only a few feet wide, and the light from outside the main cavern opening failed in the darkness beyond it. This was the only place in the Old Downside where Rhiow found herself wishing she had a proper Person's body rather than this ancient and attractive, but oversized, persona. The walls here always brushed against her shoulders as she slipped through, yet there was no corresponding feeling of her whiskers being anywhere near the walls, as there would have been were she in her own body. The resultant sensation was disconcerting, disorienting.
The walls squeezed down
closer: the tunnel kinked, kinked again. Rhiow slipped forward absolutely silently, listening hard. When she had nightmares about being attacked here, the nightmares always involved this spot: hemmed in by stone, no room to turn around, something bad behind her, something worse waiting in front. She knew that attack so high up, so close to the light and the day, was wildly unlikely. But still, it was the unlikely things that would kill you—
Sudden relief, as the feeling of stone touching her sides fell away, and the sound changed, even though it was only the nearly inaudible little dry sound that Rhiow's paw-pads made on the stone. She activated one of the spells she had brought with her, saying the last word of it, and well ahead of her a tiny spark of faint green light came into being, floating high up in the air. The color was carefully chosen: the Wise Ones did not see in this frequency.
Behind her, first Saash, then Arhu, and finally Urruah slipped into the larger cavern, looking around. In the faint light a vast array of more stalactites— whole glittering white or cream or rust-banded chandeliers of them— could be seen hanging from the ceiling. There were fewer standing stalagmites here; gaps in the spiky ceiling and the shattered rubble on the floor showed where the occasional groundshake or mere structural weakness had wrought much damage over many years.
"It's pretty," Arhu said, sounding rather befuddled.
"It is," Saash said. "Sometimes I wish we could make a proper light when we come down here…." She shrugged her tail.
Rhiow shrugged back, and said, "Come on. We've got at least an hour's walk ahead of us…." Assuming we don't run into anything that makes us need to go another way. Oh, please, Queen Iau, just this once, let it be easy for us….
Rhiow had her doubts, though, as she led them downward through that cavern and into the next one, as to whether this prayer was at all likely to be answered. When you were in the company of a wizard on Ordeal, anything could happen, probably would. The odds against a quiet intervention were fairly high.
Behind her, as she padded through the wide entry into the next cavern, Arhu was saying to Saash, "Why are you so nervous?"
Saash breathed out. "We were down here before, about a sun's-round ago. Not a good trip."
"What happened?"
"Bad things," Urruah said from behind Arhu, his voice plainly suggesting that one might happen right now if Arhu didn't shut up.
He shut up. They walked a long way: down, always down, through galleries and arcades of stone, mighty halls as big as the concourse in Grand Central, twisting hallways as broad as the Hyatt passage. Sometimes the links between caverns squeezed to tunnels as narrow as the first one, or narrower: once the ceiling of one of these tunnels dropped so low that Rhiow had to get down on her belly and crawl forward, a few inches at a time, pushing herself along with an effort. Behind them she could hear the others doing the same, Urruah last and suffering most because of his size— grunting and swearing very softly under his breath. It was at such times, her own breath sounding intolerably loud to her, the others', behind her, sounding even louder, that Rhiow always got the feeling that the Mountain was listening: that the stone itself was alive— though impassive— and watching them, though without any feeling of interest as a living being would understand it… without anything but a sense of weight. Hostility she could have coped with: benign neglect would have been fine. But this gave her the creeps, the sense of the stone piled up above her, the Mountain pressing down on her back, on her head….
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 him.
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, redescription 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 car
efully 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.
