by Diane Duane
Another of the spherical chambers lay around the corner of the passage. Or at least it had been spherical to start with. One side of it had been carved out into a perfectly smooth rectangular doorway, breaking through into another chamber off to Rhiow's left as she looked through the opening. In that chamber, lying curled, or sitting hunched, were five saurians: two deinonychi and three smaller ones that looked like some kind of miniature tyrannosaur. Their hides were patterned, though with what colors it was impossible to tell in this lighting. On the floor in front of them lay… Rhiow stared at them, wondering just what they were. They were made of metal: three of them looked like long bundles of rods, some of the rods polished, some of them brushed to a matte finish. A fourth device was a small box that was the source of the red light, without it being apparent in any way exactly how the light was getting out of it— the surface of the box was dark, but brightness lay around it.
The mini-tyrannosaurus nearest the carven door had been looking through the doorway into the darkness. Now it turned away and picked up one of the bundles of rods in its claws. As it did, the bundle came alive with a stuttering, glittering light, dull red like that which came from the box, though in a sharper mode: sparks of it ran up and down the metal rods. The saurian clutched the rods in one claw, ran its other claw down one of the sills of the door. More of that red light followed the stroke, as if it had flowed unseen through the body of the tyrannosaur and up to the stone; from the stone, a fine powder sifted down, remnants of some slight polishing of the surface. The other saurians watched, keeping very still but looking intent. From the rods came a soft, tiny sound: Tink. Tink. Tink. Tink…
The sixth claw… Arhu said silently. Rhiow looked where he did, and saw that other claw, the "thumb," bracing the bundle of rods exactly as a human's thumb would have. Her tail twitched at the sight of a saurian using a tool, something half-mechanical and, from the look of it, possibly half-wizardly. If an ehhif came in and found his houff using the computer, she thought, I bet he would feel like this…. At the same time, she found herself thinking of many a pothole crew she had seen on the New York streets in her time— one ehhif working, four of them standing around and watching him work— and suspected that she might have stumbled upon a very minor way in which her home universe echoed this one….
"There is nothing more to do here," said one of the saurians who sat and watched.
"Yes. Let's go back to where the others are and wait for them," said another.
The mini-tyrannosaur, though, kept polishing the doorsill for a few more strokes. "This work gives me joy," it said. "When it is done, the gates will all be ours and will be turned to the Master's plan. When all is ready, he will lead us up out of the chill and wet and darkness, as he has done with others in the not-long-ago, up into the warmth and the light, and we will take back what was taken from us. The sundwellers may take our places down here, if they like. But none of them will; the Great One says they will all die, and there will be such a feasting for our people as has not been seen since the ancient days. I do not want to wait for that. I want it to come soon."
The others sighed. "The Leader, the Great One, he will know the way, he will show us…" they hissed, agreeing, but none of them got up to do anything further. Finally the mini-tyrannosaur lowered the bundle of rods, and the light of them went out.
"Let us go back, then," it said. "We will come back after sleep and begin the next work."
The saurians who had been relaxing on the floor got up, and picked up the other bundles of rods and the light box. The deinonychus with the box went first, and the others followed behind, hissing softly as they went. Slowly the light faded away.
What do we do? Arhu said.
Follow! Rhiow said. But be careful. It's very hard to sidle down here, as Saash said: better not to waste your energy trying.
Should I make the light again? They didn't see it before.
Rhiow thought about that. Not if we have their light ahead of us. But otherwise, yes, as long as we can't be seen from any side passages, she said. Normally they shouldn't be able to see in our little light's frequencies… but things aren't normal around here, as you've noticed.
Arhu twitched his tail in agreement, then waited a few breaths before following the way the saurians had gone, out the opening in the far side of the spherical chamber, and farther down into the dark. Close behind, silent, using the warm lizard-scent to make sure they didn't stray from the proper trail, Rhiow and Saash and Urruah followed.
Far ahead of them, over the next hour or so, they would occasionally catch a glimpse of that red light, bobbing through long colonnades and tunnels, always trending down and down. At such times Arhu would stop, waiting for the direct sight of the light to vanish, before starting forward and downward again. At one point, near the end of that hour, he took a step— and fell out of sight.
Arhu!
No, it's all right, he said after a moment, sounding pained but not hurt. It's what we went down the other day, in the Terminal—
?? Rhiow said silently, not sure what he meant.
When we went to see Rosie.
Stairs. Stairs? Here??
They're bigger, Arhu said. Indeed they were: built for bipedal creatures, yes, but those with legs far longer than an ehhif 's. From the bottom of the tread to the top, each step measured some three feet. A long, long line of them reached far downward, past their little light's ability to illumine.
Where are we in terms of the map? Saash said to Rhiow. I'm trying to keep track of where the catenaries are going to start bunching together.
Rhiow consulted the map and stood there lashing her tail for a few moments. My sense of direction normally isn't so bad, she said, but all these new diggings are confusing me. These creatures have completely changed the layout of the caverns in this area. I think we're just going to have to try to sense the catenaries directly or do a wizardry to find them.
As to the latter, I'd rather not, Saash said. I have a feeling something like that might be sensed pretty quick down here. You saw those tools. Someone down here is basing a technology around wizardly energy sources….
Yes, I saw that. Rhiow hissed very softly to herself.
So what do we do? Arhu said.
Go downward.
They went: there was not much option. The stair reached downward for the better part of half a mile before bottoming out in a platform before a doorway. Cautiously they crept to the doorway, peered through it. The saurians had passed this way not too long before; their scent was fresh, and down the long high hall on the other side of the door, the faint red light glowed.
Arhu stepped through it— then stopped.
What?
It's not the same light, he said.
What is it, then?
I don't know.
Slowly he paced forward, through the doorway, turning left again. Another hallway, again trending down, but this one was of grander proportions than the corridors higher up in the delving, and it went down in a curve, not a straight line. Rhiow went behind Arhu, once more feeling the neural-inhibitor spell in her mind, ready for use. Its readiness was wearing at her, but she was not going to give it up for anything, not under these circumstances.
They softly walked down the corridor, in single file. Ahead of them, the red light grew, reflecting against the left wall from a source on the right. This light was not caused by any box carried by a saurian: Arhu had been right about that. It glowed through a doorway some hundred yards ahead of them, a bloom of light in which they could now detect occasional faint shifts and flickerings. The box-light had produced none such.
About twenty yards from the doorway, Saash stopped. Rhiow heard her footfalls cease, and turned to look at her. The faintest gleam of red was caught in her eyes— a tiger's eyes, in this universe, set in a skull with jaws big enough to bite off an ehhif's head; but the eyes had Saash's nervousness in them, and the tortoiseshell tiger sat down and had a good hard scratch before saying, I am not going through that do
or unsidled; I don't care what it takes.
Rhiow looked at her, and at Urruah behind her.
Not a bad idea, he said. If I have to go out there visible, I can't guarantee the behavior of my bladder.
Let's do it, then, said Rhiow.
It was surprising how hard it was. Normally sidling was a simple matter of slipping yourself among the bunched and bundled hyperstrings, where visible light could not get at you. But here something had the hyperstrings in an iron grip, and they twanged and tried to cut you as you attempted to slide yourself between. It was an unfriendly experience. I think the hardboiled eggs in the slicer at the deli around the corner must feel like this, Urruah grunted, after a minute or so.
Trust you to think of this in terms of food, Rhiow said, having just managed to finish sidling. Arhu had done it a little more quickly than she had, though not with his usual ease: he was already padding his way up to the door through which the brighter reddish radiance came, and Saash was following him. I suppose, Rhiow added for Urruah's benefit as she came up between Arhu and Saash, and peered through the space between them, we should think ourselves lucky there's not a MhHonalh's down here….
And she caught sight of the view out the doorway, and the breath went right out of her. She took a few steps forward, staring. Behind her, Urruah came up and looked past her shoulder, and gulped. Then he grinned, an unusually grim look for him, and said, Are you sure there's not?
A long time before, when she had first become enough of a wizard to get down to street level from the apartment Hhuha had before she and Iaehh became a pride, Rhiow had done the "tourist thing" and had gone up the Empire State Building. Not up the elevator, as an ehhif would, of course: she had walked up the side of it, briefly annoying (if not actively defying) gravity and frightening the pigeons. Once there, Rhiow had sat herself down on the parapet, inside the chain-link fence meant to dissuade ehhif from throwing themselves off, and had simply reveled in the sense of height, but more, of depth, as one looked down into the narrow canyons where ehhif and houiff walked, progressing stolidly in two dimensions and robustly ignoring the third. It was wonderful to sit there with the relentless wind of the heights stirring the fur and let one's perceptions flip: to see the city, not as something that had been built up, but to imagine it as something that had been dug down, blocks and pinnacles mined out of air and stone: not a promontory, but a canyon, with the river of ehhif life still running swift at the bottom of it, digging it deeper while she watched.
Now Rhiow looked down into the heart of the Mountain and realized that, even so young and relatively untutored, she had been seeing a truth she would not understand for years: yet another way in which the Downside cast Manhattan as its shadow. The Mountain was hollow.
But not just with caverns, with the caves and dripping galleries that Ffairh had charted. Something else had been going on in these greater depths for— how long? She and her team looked over the parapet where they stood, and gazed down into a city— not built up, but delved through and tunneled into and cantilevered out over an immense depth of open space as wide as the Hudson River, as deep as Manhattan Island itself: a flipped perception indeed, but one based on someone else's vision, executed on a splendid and terrible scale. The black basalt of the Mountain had been carved out of its heart as if with knives, straight down and sheer, for at least two miles— and very likely more: Rhiow was not much good at judging distances by eye, and (like many other New Yorkers) was one of those people for whom a mile is simply twenty blocks. Reaching away below them, built into those prodigious cliffs of dark stone, were level below level and depth below depth of arcades and galleries and huge halls; "streets" appeared as bridges flung across the abyss, "avenues" as giddy stairways cut down the faces of those cliffs. Hung from the cliffsides, like the hives of wild bees hung from the sides of some wild steep rocks in Central Park that Rhiow knew, were precipitous shapes that Rhiow suspected were skyscrapers turned inside out: possibly dwellings of some kind. There had to be dwellings, for the place was alive with saurians— they choked the bridges and the stairs the way Fifth Avenue was choked at lunch hour, and the whole volume of air beneath Rhiow and her team hummed and hissed with the saurians' voices, remote as traffic noise for the moment, but just as eloquent to the listening ear. All that sound below them had to do with hurry, and strife— and hunger.
Far down below in that mighty pit, almost at its vanishing point, a point of light burned, eye-hurting despite its distance: the source of the reddish light they stood in now, caught and reflected many times up and up the whole great structure in mirrors of polished obsidian and dark marble. Rhiow stared down at it and shuddered: for in her heart, something saw that light and said, very quietly, without any possibility of error, Death.
They stood there, the four of them, gazing down, for a long time. Look at the carvings down there, Urruah said finally. Someone's been to Rockefeller Center.
Rhiow lashed her tail in agreement. The walls of the cliffs were not without decoration. Massive-jawed saurian shapes leaned out into the abyss in heroic poses, corded with muscle; others stood erect on mighty hind legs, stately, dark, tails coiled about their bodies or feet, as pillars or the supports of arches or architraves: scaled caryatids bent uncomplaining under the loads that pillars should have borne. Many of the carvings did have that blunt, clean, oversimplified look of the Art Deco carvings around Rockefeller Center— blank eyes, set jaws, nobility suggested rather than detailed. But they were all dinosaurs… except, here and there, where a mammal— feline, or ehhif, or cetacean, or canid— was used as pedestal or footstool, crushed or otherwise thoroughly dominated. No birds were represented; perhaps a kinship was being acknowledged… or perhaps there was some other reason. But, on every statue, every saurian had the sixth claw.
All right, Rhi, Saash said finally. How many years has this been going on, would you say?
I wouldn't dare guess. Saash—'Ruah— whoever even heard of saurians using tools?
It's news to me, Saash said. But I wasn't thinking developmentally. How are we supposed to find the catenary "trunks" down in that? And you heard what's-his-face back there: they've been moving the catenaries around. Our map is no good anymore.
And what about Har'lh? Urruah said. If he's down here somewhere— how in the Queen's name are we supposed to find him?
The sixth claw… Arhu said.
Yes, Rhiow said, I'd say this is what that's for. And he said they were given it.
She stood silent for a moment, looking into the depths. We're going to have to try to feel for the trunk of the "tree," Rhiow said at last. I know the feel of Har'lh's mind probably better than any of us: I'll do the best I can to pick up any trace of him. But range is going to be a problem. Especially with her mind growing wearier by the moment of carrying the neural-inhibitor spell…
Behind her, Arhu was gazing down into the abyss, toward the spark of fire at its bottom. Rhiow looked at him, wondering what was going on in that edgy young mind. Perhaps he caught the thought: he turned to her, eyes that had been slitted down now dilating again in the dimmer light of the level where they stood. And then, very suddenly, dilating farther. Arhu's face wrinkled into a silent snarl: he lifted a huge black-and-white-patched paw and slapped at Rhiow, every claw out—
Completely astounded, Rhiow ducked aside— and so missed, and was missed by, the far longer claws that went hissing past her ear, and the bulk that blurred by her. Arhu did not make a sound, but he leapt and hit the shape that had leapt at Rhiow, and together they went down in a tangle, furred and scaled limbs kicking.
Urruah was the first to react, though Rhiow heard rather than saw the reaction: six words in the Speech, and a seventh one that always reminded her of the sound of someone's stomach growling. But at the seventh word, one of the shapes kicking at each other on the stone froze still; the other one got up, and picked his way away from the first, shaking each paw as he stepped aside. I could have taken him! Arhu said.
Bets? Urruah said. Per
haps the comment was fair, for the saurian was twice Arhu's size and possibly two and a half times his weight: lithe, heavily muscled, and with a long narrow, many-toothed muzzle that could probably have bitten him in two, given opportunity. Rhiow stood there thinking that the opportunity might have fallen to her instead. She leaned over to Arhu, breathed breaths with him, caught the taste of fear but also a sharp flavor of satisfaction.
Thank you, she said. I owe you one.
No, Arhu said, I've paid you back the one I owe you. Now we're even.
Rhiow was taken aback— but also pleased: by so much this wayward kitten had grown in just a few days. Whether he'll live much longer to enjoy the threshold of his adulthood, she thought, is another question. But then there was no telling whether there was much left of hers.
She turned, as he did, to have a look at the saurian, lying there struck stiff as a branch of wood on the stones. It's a variant of the neural inhibitor, Urruah said. Lower energy requirement, easier to carry: it's not instantly fatal. Say the word, and I'll make it so.
No, Rhiow said. I'll thank you for a copy of your variant, though. You always were the lazy creature.
Urruah made a slow smile at her. Rhiow stood over the saurian, studied it. Compared to many they'd seen recently, it was of a slightly soberer mode: dark reds and oranges, melded together as if lizards were trying to evolve the tortoiseshell coloration.
We've got places to be, Rhi, Urruah said, and we don't know where they are yet. Kill it and let's move on.
No, Arhu said suddenly.
Urruah stared at him. So did Saash. Are you nuts? she hissed. Leave it alive and it'll run to all its friends, tell them right where we are… and so much for— She declined to say more.
Arhu stared at the saurian; Rhiow saw the look and got a chill that raised her fur. Let his lungs go, Arhu said to Urruah. He's choking.
