Rhiow looked over the map, marking with one claw the paths that seemed the most straightforward so that Urruah and Saash and Arhu could look at them. The Powers only know what we'll find, of course, she thought, and we don't even know what we're looking for. A wizard of some kind, gone rogue… and intent on the destruction of wizardry as a whole.
The thought chilled her, for it spoke of tremendous power in their adversary. Worse, she thought, the Powers may not know what we'll find… or it may very well be one of Them. One in particular…
Rhiow looked Ffairh's map over a last time, then turned her back on it and started back across the plain of her workspace, toward her usual egress point. She would consult with the others, show them the map, and attend to whatever final organization needed to be done; then they'd go find out what was in store for them….
Urruah's question was still echoing in Rhiow's mind: what kind of 'something'? She had been reluctant to answer him. It was he who had mentioned the "second Ordeal" that some very few wizards went through. The Whisperer would say only that such Ordeals were not true second ones: only first ordeals that had been somehow arrested or had a component that had not been completely resolved. Could this really be what's happening? And which of us? Or is it all of us?…
She twitched her tail in frustration. It may simply be that we are all, together, a weapon crafted specifically to deal with whatever is going on in the deepest Downside. Now all we have to find out is whether we are a weapon that will be destroyed along with the threat we're meant to combat….
Rhiow paused and stood gazing across the bright plain littered with words. Some part of her very much wanted to simply turn around and say, I refuse to take part. I was not consulted. And she heard Arhu's voice again: I didn't ask for this.
But he consented to it when he took the Oath. And so did we. Now Urruah says he's willing. So does poor Saash, frightened as she is. If they're willing…
She growled, briefly angry at her own intense desire to back down from this job. It's you, isn't it, she said to the Lone One. You live at the bottom of all hearts, anyway, part and parcel of the little "gift" you sold our people. Well, it won't work with me, today. I've seen your "gift" and what it did to my poor Hhuha. Maybe I'm about to claim my own version of it, and "die dead, like a bug or an ehhif," all my lives snuffed out together if I die Downside or if the others do. But you will not get me to walk away from the fight.
The Claw may break. Let it. It'll be in your throat that it breaks.
I'm coming.
* * *
They met again in Grand Central, down by Track 30. Urruah and Saash greeted her with restraint: Arhu wouldn't say much of anything to Rhiow, but just looked at her as if she had some rare disease and he were afraid to go near her. She couldn't bring herself to care very much, just let him stare, and spent the next ten minutes briefing her partners on the route they would take once Downside.
Tom was there to meet them, looking even more exhausted than he had earlier. First of all, the Track 30 gate was up again, but it looked paler than usual, the light of the usual warp- and weft-strings of the locus duller and fuzzy-seeming. Indeed, to a wizard's trained vision, the whole station had an odd fuzzy look about it— edges and corners not as sharp as they should have been, somehow. The "patched" reality was fretting against the events of the last twenty-four hours, trying to come loose. So far it was holding— but only with constant supervision, Rhiow could see.
"How much longer can you keep all this in place?" Rhiow said.
Tom shook his head. "Your guess is as good as mine. The sooner you get started, the better."
Rhiow looked over at Saash. "This gate doesn't look any too healthy. Is it stable?"
"Oh, it's stable enough. But I wouldn't want to hazard any estimates on how long it will stay that way. Wizardry in general is starting to behave badly around here. If we don't find out what's causing the problem Downside, we may not be able to get back up again before the natural laws governing gating have been completely degraded and replaced with new ones… if they're replaced at all."
"All right," Rhiow said, glancing over at Urruah: he nodded and hopped down beside the gate, sitting up on his haunches to feed power into it if necessary. "Saash, when you're ready."
"Two minutes," Saash said.
Rhiow sat down to wait.
"Rhiow—"
She turned. Arhu was standing beside her. He said, "I can see—" and stopped.
"Well?"
"Your ehhif— I mean—"
"If you're going to say that I brought this pain on myself by living with an ehhif at all," Rhiow said, "don't bother. There are enough others who'll say it."
"No, I wasn't— I—" He stopped, then simply put his head down by hers, bumped her clumsily, and hurriedly went away to sit beside Urruah.
Rhiow looked up to find Saash standing next to her, looking after Arhu. "You've been coaching him, I see," Rhiow said to Saash.
She looked at Rhiow, slightly wide-eyed. "No, I have not. He's looking, Rhiow. Isn't that what you told him he had to do?" And Saash stalked away toward the gate, leaping down beside Urruah, and getting up on her haunches to sink her claws into the control weft.
Rhiow stood up as the usual quick sheen of light, though again duller than normal, ran down the weft. It abruptly blanked out then, showing her the rock ledge at the edge of the Downside gate cavern; the slow sunset of that world was fading away in the west.
She rose and went over to the edge of the platform, pausing there by Tom to glance up at him.
"Go well," he said. "And be careful."
She laughed, a brittle sound. "For what good it's likely to do, we all will."
Rhiow leapt through, felt herself go heavy as she passed through the weft, and landed on the stone. She shook herself, feeling almost relieved to be out of the small powerless body. Behind her, Urruah came through, then Arhu, finally Saash. As she came down, the gate winked closed.
Rhiow looked at that with some concern. So did Saash, but she simply switched her tail and said, "Power conservation measure. If we didn't shut it now, it might collapse between now and the time we get back up."
Whenever that may be, Rhiow thought. If ever at all.
And do I really care?
"Come on," she said. "Let's get on with it; and Iau walk with us… for we need Her now, if we ever did."
* * *
They wound their way back into the caverns of the Downside by the same route they originally had taken to service the catenary. The sounds around them were different this time, even to the dripping of water, and all of them walked more quietly. The Downside had a listening quality about it that it had not had before… but not the kind of listening that can be described as "brooding." It was charged: a silence following action… or before action begins again.
Their order of march was reversed this time. It was Arhu who led the way, having learned from "looking" inside Urruah how to make the tiny dim light that helped them find their way. Rhiow had shown him how to tie this small wizardry into the map in her mind so that the light led them through the turns and twists of the caverns, and left them free to keep alert and watch for any sign of the saurians. Behind Arhu, Saash was walking, and behind her, Urruah; Rhiow brought up the rear.
Their vigilance might have been for nothing: they heard no one, saw no one, and caught not a whiff of lizard except for what was stale, left over from the previous time… or so Rhiow thought. It was almost an hour later when they came to the catenary cavern and were almost surprised by it, for they had expected to smell it from some distance. When they came to the catenary cavern, though, it was empty, and almost perfectly clean. Even the bloodstains appeared to have been washed off the rock. Or rather, licked, Rhiow thought, her whiskers quirking with disgust.
Of the catenary nothing could be seen but a faint wavering in the air, like weed in water: only the barest maintenance-trickle of power was running up it, not nearly enough to produce any light. Saash went to it and loo
ked it over while Arhu gazed around him in confusion. "Who cleaned everything up in here?"
"Who do you think?" Rhiow said.
Arhu stared at her, completely bemused.
"They eat each other," said Urruah.
Arhu's jaw actually dropped. Then he laid his ears flat back and scratched the floor several times with one huge paw, the gesture of revulsion that many People make when presented with something too foul to ingest, either a meal or a concept. "They deserve what we did to them, then!" Arhu said. "They would have done that to us—"
"Almost certainly," Saash said. "But as to whether they deserve to be killed, I wouldn't care to judge: the Oath doesn't encourage us to make such assessments."
"Why not? They're just animals! They come running and screaming out in big herds, and try to kill you—"
"We have responsibilities to animals too," Saash said, "the lower ones as well as the higher ones who can think or even have emotional lives. But leaving that aside, you haven't been in their minds enough to make that assessment." Saash wrinkled her nose. "It's not an enjoyable experience, listening to them think and feel. But they're sentient, Arhu, never doubt it. They have a language, but not much culture, I think— not since their people were tricked by the Lone One. There are memories." She looked thoughtful. "Anyone can be delusional or believe lies that are told. But almost all the minds of theirs you might touch will have heard stories of how things were before the Lone One came— how their people really had a right to be called what we still call them as a courtesy-name, the Wise Ones; how they were great thinkers, though the thoughts would seem strange to us now… maybe even then. All very long ago, of course… but nonetheless, the Whispering seems to confirm the rumors. Now they have nothing left but a life in the dark… nothing to eat except each other, except at times when so many of them die off that they're forced to go up into the sun to try to hunt; and not being adapted to the present conditions here, those who try that mostly die, too. If the saurians hate us, they may have reason."
"I don't want to know about that," Arhu said. "We're going to have to kill a lot more of them if we're supposed to do whatever it is you have in mind. Knowing stuff like that will only make it harder." He stalked ahead of them, the epitome of the hunter: head down for the scent, padding slowly and heavily, eyes up, wide and dark in the darkness.
The other three went silently along behind him as they continued downward through the caverns, now slipping through unfamiliar territory and moving a little more slowly. Rhiow was still thinking of how she had seen the saurians eating one another, down there in the dark, with a ready appetite that suggested this kind of diet was nothing new at all. They would be seeing much more of that kind of thing, she was sure. I should be grateful, maybe, she thought, that my emotions are so dulled at the moment, that everything seems so remote….
"So where are all the lizards that came out of the gates the other day?" Urruah said softly, behind Rhiow now.
"Maybe they all came out," Saash said, in an oh-yes-I-believe-this voice, "and they all died."
"I doubt that very much," Rhiow said. "Never mind. How was the catenary itself?"
"Structurally sound. But something is starving it of power, from underneath."
"Could it be reactivated later?"
"Probably," Saash said, "but I've got no idea whether the rules for reactivating it will be the same as they were yesterday."
Arhu had gone down and around a corner, ahead of them, out of sight, and Urruah paused for a moment, looking up. "Interesting," he said, coming over to Rhiow. "Look at the ceiling here."
Rhiow and Saash gazed up. "Very round, isn't it?" Saash said.
"One of those bubble structures you get down here," Rhiow said. "The water comes in through a little aperture and then rolls loose stones around and around inside the larger one. It hollows the chamber right out, as if someone blew a bubble in the stone. There are a few chains of them down here; they show on old Ffairh's map. He seemed to be interested in them."
They walked on down through the spherical chamber, up and out the other side, and went after Arhu. There was indeed another such chamber on the far side, and they went through it as well, down into the depression at the center and up again to the exit. Past this was a long, high-ceilinged corridor devoid of the usual stalactites and stalagmites, trending very steeply downward so that they all had to slow and pick their way as if they were coming down one side of a peaked roof.
At the bottom of the corridor, the tiny point of greenish light that they had been following vanished; then their vision caught its glow, diminished, coming from off to the left, and reflecting on the shadowy shape of Arhu heading around the corner and leftward as well. The sound of water could be heard again, soft at first, then getting somewhat louder: an insistent tink, tink, tink sound, almost metallic in the silence. "Are we still going to be following that catenary down the tree," Urruah said, "or is it another one?"
"Another. We pick it up"— Saash looked at her own mental "copy" of Rhiow's map— "another five or six caverns down, and a little to the east. Maybe a hundred feet below where we are now."
"I hate this," Urruah muttered, as ahead of them the light got dimmer, and they followed it doggedly. "All this stone on top of us—"
"Please," Rhiow said. She had been trying not to think about that. Now, abruptly, she could feel all the weight of it pressing on her head again. As if I need this now! This isn't fair—
Urruah looked up and suddenly stopped. Rhiow plowed into him and hissed; Saash ran into her but held very still, following Urruah's glance. Rhiow looked up, too.
"Is it just me," Urruah said, "…or does that look like a perfectly straight line, carved from the top of this tunnel all the way down?"
Rhiow stared at it—
The light ahead of them went out.
They all stood stock still, not daring to move, hardly daring to breathe.
No sound came from above but the steady tink, tink, tink, tink…
And there were stumps of the stalagmites and stalactites back there, Saash said suddenly, but where were the leftover pieces? They should have been all over the place. And what about your stone bubbles? Where were the little stones that should have been left lying around?…
Rhiow licked her nose, licked it again. They stood there blind in the dark; even People must have some light to see, and the darkness was now absolute.
Arhu! Rhiow said inwardly.
No answer.
Arhu!!
I'm trying to sidle, he said silently, and I can't.
But what for? Rhiow said.
It's going to cause you tremendous trouble to try to sidle down here; there's too much interference from the catenaries, even when they're down, Saash said. Stay still. What is it?
There was a silence, and then Arhu said, They're down here. I put the light out. They didn't see me.
In absolute silence, Rhiow and the others inched their way forward, going by memory of what the corridor had been like before the light failed. Rhiow's heart was hammering, but at least this time the light had gone out for a reason she didn't mind.
"They?"
I hear five of them breathing, Arhu said. They're not far away.
Rhiow and Saash and Urruah crept forward. Then something tickled Rhiow's nose, and she almost sneezed. It was Arhu's tail, whipping from side to side.
Which way? Rhiow said, as soon as she got control of her nose again.
Straight forward. Then right. See that? It's faint—
It was: Rhiow could hardly see it at all. From ahead and to the right, and sharply downward, came the reflection of a diffuse light, reddish, seeming as faint as their own had. It leached the color out of everything: there was nothing to be seen by it but furry contours in dull red and black. In utter silence, they crept closer; and in her mind, Rhiow felt the familiar contours of the neural-inhibitor spell, felt for its trigger, that last word. She licked her nose.
Tink. Tink. Tink. Tink…
A pau
se, then a peculiar hissing sound, followed by the sound of stone falling on stone, breaking. And then the hissing voice, like another version of the sound they had heard first.
"Done…"
"Done. We have finished what we were told we must do in this work time."
"I'm hungry."
"There will be no food now."
"But we will eat later."
"How much later…"
"The Master will give us something in time. He gave us food not-long-ago."
"That was good."
"It was. And there'll be much more."
"There will be. When the work is done, there will be as much to eat as anyone wants."
There was a kind of sigh from all of the speakers after this. Arhu moved a little forward, during it, and Rhiow cautiously went after him, slinking low, knowing that behind her the others were doing the same. The source of the light was getting stronger, rightward and downward: Rhiow could now clearly see Arhu silhouetted against it. He was bristling.
"How much farther must we drive this tunnel?"
A silence, then sss, sss, sss, as if someone was counting. "Three lengths. Perhaps as many as four: there's another chamber to meet, upward, and another baffle to put in place. Then the power-guide that supplies that gate will be cut off, and the guide can be redirected to meet the others, below."
"Good, good," the others breathed.
"That will be the last one for a little while. All the others have been damaged by the sundwellers. The Master must restore them. Then we may begin work again, and finish the new tunnels, and wall up the old ones. It's for this we were given the Claw. The sundwellers will not come here again."
There was much nasty hissing laughter at that. Arhu took the opportunity to move forward, very quickly, so quickly that Rhiow was afraid he was slipping on the steep downward slope. But he was well braced, so that when Rhiow came up against him, he didn't move, and made no sound. Behind her, Saash and Urruah came up against Rhiow as well: she braced herself so as to put no further pressure on Arhu. The four of them looked around the corner, into the red light.