by Diane Duane
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 there…. 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 Arhu 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 hyperstring 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.
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 strai
n 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 corner, 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?<
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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 out past 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 trains 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.
