by Diane Duane
I think, Rhiow said, It may have tried with him once already. And it failed then. I'm not sure… but It may have tried one time too many.
But It's getting desperate, Urruah said. If these attempts on our effectiveness fail, It's just going to try brute force, a hundred thousand saurians or more, the way it dumped them out into Central Park. It'll wear us down, and kill us without us doing anything useful.
Let's not give It the chance, then, Rhiow said. We'll go straight down.
But how, Rhi? You heard him: the lower halls are full of these things.
I don't propose to go the way It wants us to go, Rhiow said. Look. I'll watch now: I couldn't sleep now no matter what. You try at least to get some rest… an hour's worth, even. Ffairh always said that a rest was better than no sleep.
I'd give a lot to have Ffairh here.
You're not the only one. Go on, 'Ruah, take a nap.
He lay down, and shortly afterward, he was snoring, too.
* * *
Rhiow sat in the darkness and watched over them. Saash had nodded off again, a little while after Arhu did, so that only Rhiow and Ith were awake. Ith was looking down at Arhu. For a while she gazed at him, wondering what went on inside that mind. His face was hard to read. Even ehhif had been easier, at first; and there was always the one who had become easiest to read after their association….
The thought of Hhuha, of the cold white tiles and the metal table, bit her in the throat again. Rhiow shook her head till her ears rattled, looked away, tried to find her composure again. Oh, to be able to howl like a houff or weep like an ehhif, she thought; why can't we somehow let the pain issue forth, by some outward sign? Dignity is worth a great deal, Queen of us all, but is it worth the way this pain stays stuck inside?
She looked up and saw Ith looking at her, silent and thoughtful.
You too know the pain, he said inwardly. Rhiow shivered a little, for there was warm blood about his thought, but no fur, not even as much as an ehhif wore: the effect was strange.
Yes, she said.
But still you will do this. And die. I saw that in him, and in my own vision as well.
Rhiow licked her nose.
Yes.
He says… this fight has happened before.
Rhiow wondered just how to put this. Our kind, she said, or rather, the Great Ones of our kind, have fought— this deadly power, the Lone Power— before.
And lost.
They defeated the Old Serpent, as we call that avatar of the Lone One, Rhiow said.
But it made no difference. It lives on, though your gods themselves died killing It.
"Evil," said a small and very tired voice, "just keeps on going." Arhu was sitting up again, but hunched and huddled. He glanced at Ith. "He's seen it. So have I. And it'll still just keep happening, no matter what we do here. Even if we win. Which we can't…"
Rhiow swallowed. "It's not that simple," she said. "Evil isn't something the One made, Arhu. It's a broken image— a perversion of the way things should work, purposely skewed toward pain and failure. Sa'Rráhh, our own image of the Lone One, and of the evil inside us, it's the same way with her. She invented death, yes, and now tries to impose it on the worlds. But her ambivalence is a recent development, as the Gods reckon time… and They think the evil is something she can be weaned of. For when the Three went to war against the Serpent, didn't she go to the Fight with Them, and fall with Them, at the dawn of time? That's a way of saying how divided her loyalties are, for she is the Old Serpent as well."
"It's confusing," Arhu said. Ith merely looked thoughtful.
"It's mystery," Rhiow said, and had to smile slightly despite her pain, for old Ffairh had said the same thing to her, when she said the same thing to him. "Sometimes mystery is confusing. Don't fear that; just let it be…. But what time is about, they say, is slowly winning the Lone One back to the right side. When that happens, the Whisperer says— when a billion years' worth of wizards' victories finally wear sa'Rráhh down enough to show her what possibilities can lie beyond her own furious blindness and fixity— then death and entropy will begin to work backward, undoing themselves; evil will transform its own nature and will have no defense against that final transformation, coming as it will from within. The universe will be remade, as if it had been made right from the beginning." And she had to gulp a little herself then, at the sudden memory of the words the Whisperer had sent her to find, the fragment of the old spell: he inflicteth with the knife wounds upon Aapep, whose place is in heaven—
The look on Arhu's face was strange. "So," he said after a long pause, "the Lone Power isn't Itself completely evil."
"No. Profoundly destructive, yes, and filled with hate for life. But even the evils It tries hardest to do sometimes backfire because of Its own nature, which is 'flawed' with the memory of Its earliest history, the time before It went dark. That flaw can be a weapon against It… and has been, in many battles between the First Time and now. But we have to be guided by Iau's own actions in our actions against the Lone One. For even She never tried to destroy the Lone Power, though She could have. She merely drove sa'Rráhh out, 'until she should learn better,' the song says. If the Queen Herself believes that the Lone One can be redeemed, who are we to argue the point?"
Arhu looked off into the distance, that million-mile stare again. It was a long, long look… and when he turned back to Rhiow, his expression was incredulous. "It's started to happen already. Hasn't it?"
"That's what the Whisperer says," Rhiow said. "When you look around the world, it's impossible to believe. All the death, all the cruelty and pain…" She went silent, thinking of white tile, a steel table, and a shattered body, and Iaehh's inward cry of grief. "But mere belief doesn't matter. Every time one of us stands up knowingly to the Devastatrix, she loses a little ground. Every time one of us wins, she loses a little more. And the Whisperer says that the effect is cumulative. No wizard knows whether his or her act today, this minute or the next, might not be the one that will finally make the Lone Power say, 'I give up: joy is easier.' And then the long fall upward into the light, and the rebirth of the worlds, will start…"
She sighed, looked over at Arhu wearily. "Is it worth fighting for, do you think?"
He didn't answer.
"You have said the word I waited to hear," Ith said. "The feline Lone Power— sa'Rráhh?— is the Old Serpent. Our peoples are one at the Root…"
Rhiow blinked.
"You're right," Arhu said, getting up. Suddenly he looked excited, and the transformation in him was a little bizarre, so that Rhiow sat back, concerned, wondering whether the shock of his traumatic memory had unsettled him, kicked him into euphoria. "And we can fix everything."
"I thought you said we were all going to die," Urruah said abruptly.
Couldn't sleep either, huh? Rhiow said.
There was a sardonic taste to Urruah's thought. I'll sleep tomorrow… if ever.
"Oh, die, well," Arhu said, and actually shrugged his tail. Urruah looked incredulously at Rhiow. "Okay, yeah, die. But we can fix it."
"Fix what?"
"The battle. The Fight!"
"Now, wait a minute!" Urruah said. "Are you seriously talking about some kind of, I don't know, some reconfiguration of saurian mythology? Let alone feline mythology? What makes you think you have the right to tell the Gods how things ought to be done?"
"What made Them think They had the right?" Arhu said.
Rhiow stared at him. Arhu turned to her. "Look, Rhiow, the Gods were making it up as they went along," Arhu said. "Why shouldn't we?"
All she could do was open her mouth and shut it again.
"It's only legend because it happened so long ago!" Arhu said. "But once upon a time, it was now! They did the best they could, once upon a time. And this is now, too! Why shouldn't we change the myths for ones that work better? What kind of gods would make you keep making the same mistakes that They made, just because They did it that way once? They'd be crazy! Or cruel! If things hav
e changed, and new problems need new solutions, why shouldn't we enact them? If They're good gods, wouldn't They?"
Urruah, and Saash, well awake now, both stared.
"I mean, if They're any good as gods," Arhu said, with the old street-kitten scorn. "If They aren't, They should be fired."
Rhiow blinked and suddenly heard Ehef saying, in memory, It's not like the old times anymore, no more "jobs for life"… The thought occurred to her sudden as a tourist's flashbulb popping in front of the library: can times change even for the gods? Could the process of entropy itself be sped up? Can old solutions no longer be sufficient to the present simply because of a shift in natural law…
…such as the Lone One may be trying to provoke, by using the power tied up in the master Gate catenary…
"And if they won't do the job—" Arhu took a big breath, as if this scared even him. "Then we can fight Their way. She was me, for a little while. Why can't it go both ways? Why can't we be Them?"
"That's real easy to say," Urruah drawled. "How are you suggesting we manage this?"
Arhu turned and looked at Rhiow.
Her eyes went wide.
"You're crazy," she said.
"The spell," said Arhu.
"You're out of your tiny mind. It's in a hundred pieces—" She had a quick look into her workspace, and then added hurriedly, "I don't understand the theory; it's never been constructed enough even to test…."
But that was all she could say about it… for there was no denying, having looked, that the spell appeared… more whole. Big pieces of it had come together that had never been associated before. Its circle was closing, its gaps filling in.
As a result of the extra power I demanded? She wondered. Or as a result of being so far Downside?
Was this assembly something she could have done long ago and had been distracted from—
—Or simply had chosen not to do…?
Spells did not lie, any more than wizards did. If one implied it might work now, when before it had refused to… then it might work. No question of it. If it completed itself, then…
"I have to go think for a moment," she said to the others. "And then I think we have to leave, isn't that right, Arhu?"
"A guard party will stumble on us soon if we don't," he said, and looked over at Ith.
Ith lashed his tail in what might have been "yes."
"Get yourselves ready, then," she said, and walked off down the hallway, toward the distant light at its lower end.
* * *
Her tail lashed slowly as Rhiow went padding along, looking down at the dark smooth stone and trying to pull her thoughts together. She was still very tired… but now, maybe more than ever before in her life, she had to think clearly.
The spell…
She had long assumed that the old tales of the Flyting under the Tree and the Battle of the Claw were symbolic at root: simplistic story-pictures of the interrelationships among the Powers That Be, mere concrete representations of the abstract truth, of the continuing battle against entropy in general, and its author and personification, the Lone Power. It had never occurred to her that as you ventured farther from the fringe-worlds of mere physical reality into the more central and senior kinds of existence, the legends could become not less true, but more. This universe would plainly support that theory, however, to judge by the status of the spell.
Worse— it had not occurred to Rhiow in her moments of wildest reverie that a living Person might find herself playing one of those parts, enacting the Tearer, or the Destroyer-by-Fire. But that was what this spell now seemed to be pointing toward. And would it feel like "playing" to the unfortunate cat cast in the part? Did the part, ancient and powerful as it was— and moreover, closer to the Heart of things— play you? What if you were left with no choice?
Rhiow shook herself. There was always choice: that much she knew. Those who deny the Powers nonetheless serve the Powers, the Whisperer had often enough breathed in her ear. Those who serve the Powers themselves become the Powers. Beware the Choice! Beware refusing it!
How much plainer could the hint be? she wondered. But in either case, the common thread was Beware. Whatever happened… you were no longer the same. And fear stalked that idea, for the stories also told often enough of cats who had dared to be more than they were, had climbed too high, fell, and did not come down on their feet— or came down on them much too hard for it to matter. How could you tell which you were?
Yet at the same time, there might be a hint of hope lurking under this idea. If People could successfully ascend to the gods' level, even for short periods, they could possibly interact with them on equal terms. Rhiow thought about the Devastatrix. There were ehhif legends about her, how sa'Rráhh once misread her mandate— to eradicate the wickedness in the world— and almost destroyed the whole world and all life by fire, so mercilessly that (in the ehhif story) the other gods had to get her falling-down drunk on blood-beer before she would stop. Rhiow had always thought this was more symbolism for something: some meteoric bombardment or solar flare. Now, though, Drunkenness? Rhiow thought. A complete change of perceptions artificially imposed on one of the Powers That Be? But a temporary one… and to a purpose.
Tamper with the perceptions of sa'Rráhh herself, of the Old Serpent? Fool the Lone One?
Grief-worn and weary as she was, Rhiow was tempted to snicker. There would be a choice irony to that, for the Lone Power had certainly fooled the saurians. A certain poetic justice, there. Well, the Powers don't mind justice being poetic, as long as the structure's otherwise sound.
But if we screw this up… forget death being a problem. Forget our souls just passing out into nowhere, with no rebirth. I don't think we'd be so lucky.
…Arhu's right, though. The rules are being changed. That's what all this is about, from the malfunctioning of the Grand Central gates on down. A major reconfiguration is happening. The structure of space is being changed so that the structure of wizardry, maybe of science, maybe of life itself, can be changed.
And if the Lone One can change the rules… so can we.
She stood there in the silence for a few moments more, her tail still twitching; and her whiskers went forward in a slow smile. There was nothing particularly merry about it… but she saw her chance. All she could do now was take it and go forward in the best possible heart.
Rhiow turned and walked back to the others.
"All right," she said as they looked at her. "I'll need some time, yet, to work on the spell… but we can't wait here: those guards will be along. Let's get out into the open and give them something to think about. Ready?"
Urruah snarled softly; Saash made a sound half-growl, half-purr in her throat; Arhu simply looked at Rhiow, silent. Behind him, Ith towered up as silently, watching Rhiow, as Arhu did: with eyes that saw… she couldn't tell what.
"Let's go," she said, and led them down toward the faint light that indicated the next balcony.
Thirteen
There they come," Urruah said quietly, as they walked out on the balcony and looked down into the abyss.
Rhiow looked across to the nearest visible corridor, off to their right and down one level. Under a mighty carving of rampant saurians, their six-clawed forelimbs stretched out into the emptiness, a wider-than-usual balcony reared out. It was full of mini-tyrannosauruses, and some of them that were much bigger than usual— twins to the scarlet-and-blue-striped dinosaur that Arhu had exploded in Grand Central.
"He keeps being reborn," Arhu hissed. "You kill him and he keeps coming back. It's not fair!"
"It's not life," Rhiow muttered; what defined life, after all, was that sooner or later it ended. "Never mind… we'll deal with him soon enough, I think."
As the team looked from their own balcony, the saurians looked up, saw them, and let out a mighty hiss of rage; the saurians dashed out of sight, making for a rampway upward.
"Well, Rhi?" Urruah said. "Which spell do you like better? The short version of the neural inhibitor—"
"We can't take a chance that it might go askew and hit Ith," she said. "Here's the one I like at the moment."
She leapt up onto the parapet, and then straight out onto the empty air.
For a horrible moment she missed her footing and was afraid the spell wouldn't take— that gravitic and intra-atomic forces were being interfered with, as well as string structure. But the difference was due only to a slight difference in the gravitic constant here: she could feel it, after a second, and amended her spell to reflect it. The air went hard. She stood on it and looked down in genial scorn at the few remaining saurians, who stared at her and pointed every claw they had available and hissed in amazement.
"Come on, everybody," she said. "Let's not be more of a target than necessary." She stared down into the abyss. Perhaps only three-quarters of a mile down now, that point of light shone up through the cold dark air. Amazing, despite how bright it seemed, how little light it gave to their surroundings.
"I'll switch the stairs back for every hundred vertical feet or so," Rhiow said, throwing a glance behind her at the balcony where Ith and Arhu still stood, and on the parapet of which Saash and Urruah now teetered. "Ith, can you see the stairs I've made?"
A long pause. "No."
"Then stay between Saash and Arhu, and step where Arhu steps. Come on, hurry up, they're coming!"
She headed down the stairway in the air, defining it as she went. She was sorry that she couldn't make the steps deeper, for Ith's sake, but he was just going to have to cope. Hard enough to be stepping down on the air, keeping the air solid before her, solid behind her, holding her concentration, while at the same time trying to poke at bright fragments of words on the floor of the workspace in her mind, trying to chivvy that spell into getting finished. It would help if the power parameters made more sense. It would help if I didn't think the stairstep spell was likely to "burn in" halfway down. It would help if…
