Rhiow shuddered. An accelerated breeding program, half a species being raised as food for the other half… It was worse, in its way, than the poor creature she had seen once before, being devoured by its starving comrades. Getting a little extra ration, the same way she might beg Hhuha for some of that smoked salmon…
Hhuha. The pain of her loss hit Rhiow again, hard, so that she had to crouch down and just deal with it for a few seconds. When she felt well enough to stand up once more, she found the others staring at her, and Ith as well.
"What exactly do you want here?" Ith said at last.
Saash threw a look at Rhiow that suggested she didn't think Rhiow needed to be quizzed by lizards at the moment. "There are other worlds besides this one," Saash said.
A pause. "That much we know," Ith said. "The Great One has spoken of it. And others," he added, a little thoughtfully; there was not quite the dogmatic sound to the addition that there had been to other such statements.
Urruah opened his mouth. Rhiow quietly lifted one massive paw and put a razory claw right into that part of his tail that was twitching above the stone. Urruah turned, snarling, and Rhiow made a sorry-it-was-an-accident face at him, which was excuse enough for the moment and caused Urruah to subside for now.
"What others?" Saash said.
"You mean other worlds?" Urruah said.
"Yes, others," said Ith, and Rhiow sighed, wishing she had put the claw in harder. "A hundred others, a thousand… all ours for the taking."
"By the gates," Saash said softly. "Using them not only for transit… but to change the nature of the species itself. Genetic manipulation… wizardly changes to the body and the spirit. Permanent shapechange."
Rhiow shuddered again. Such changes, from the wizardly point of view anyway, were both unethical and illegal; by and large, any given species had good reason to be the way it was, and there was no telling what chaos and destruction could be wrought in it by permanently shifting its mind-body structure.
"We must become strong and hard, the Great One has told us," Ith said. "We must not allow ourselves to succumb to the same forces that struck down our ancient mothers and fathers. When we are strong beyond any strength known by our kind before, when we no longer need air to breathe, or warmth to live, or even flesh to eat, then we will take everything that is for our own."
"But I thought what you wanted was the warmth," Arhu said then, sounding (correctly, Rhiow thought) confused. "And enough to eat…"
Ith stopped and blinked, as if coming up against this contradiction for the first time. Rhiow watched with covert satisfaction, for what she had heard Ith describing, without comprehension, was a favorite tactic of the Lone One— promise a species something better than what it had, then (after It has Its way) strip away whatever It had promised, leaving them with nothing at all. Finally Ith said, "That desire is only for this while: a remnant of the ancient way of life. Afterward… when we have come to our full strength, when we are no longer children, we will put aside the things of childhood and take our place as rulers of otherwhere— striding from reality to reality, making ours the misused territories of others, taking again what should have been ours from the start, had history gone as it should have. Warmer stars than this one will look down on us, strange skies and faraway nights; we will leave our people's cradle and never find a grave. No cold will be cold enough to freeze the spirit in us again; no night will be dark enough. We will survive."
More dogma, Rhiow thought, but does he know it is? I doubt it.
"Just who is this 'Great One'?" Urruah said after a moment.
"The lord of our people," said Ith, "who came to us in ancient days. The greatest of us all, the strongest and wisest, who is never cold and never hungry: the One who can never die…"
Arhu's head snapped right around at that. "And he has sent us the sixth claw," Ith said, "with which to build and make the mighty works he envisions. And more than that: he has sent us his own Claw, his Sixth Claw, Haath the warrior, who does the Great One's will and teaches us his meaning. It is Haath who will be our savior, the Great One's champion; he will lead us in the Climacteric, up into the sun, into the battle across the warm worlds that await us. It will be glorious to die in his company: those who do will never lose the warmth, they will bask forever."
"How nice for you," Saash murmured. Rhiow glanced at her with slight amusement, but then turned back to Ith and said something that had suddenly occurred to her.
"Why don't you sound very happy about all this?"
Ith looked at her and for the first time produced an expression that Rhiow was sure she was reading correctly: surprise and fear. "I am… happy," he said, and Rhiow simply wanted to laugh out loud at the transparency of the lie. "Who of our people would not be, at the great fate that awaits us?"
His voice started to rise. "We will take back what was once ours. Haath the valiant will lead us; and before him in fire and terror will go the Great One, the deathless Lord. We will come out into the sun and walk in the warmth, and all other life will flee before us—"
Arhu, though, was slipping up behind him, watching Ith's tail lash. For a moment Rhiow thought Arhu was having a flashback to kittenhood (not that he was that far out of it) and was going to jump on the saurian's tail; she held her breath briefly— Ith was, after all, formidably clawed and about ten feet high at the shoulder…. But at the same time Arhu's eyes met Rhiow's and indicated something behind her, in the shadows….
The first saurian that leapt out at them met, not a spell, but half a ton of Urruah, claws out, snarling; right for its throat he went, and down they went together in a kicking, squalling heap. The others hesitated a second at the sight of the monster that had gone for their leader; the hesitation killed them, for Saash opened her mouth and hissed.
Bang!—
—gore everywhere, chill-smelling and foul, from the second of the saurians. Saash staggered with the backlash from the spell as the third saurian came at her: Rhiow aimed the same spell at it, let it go. The problem with the limited version was that you had to be careful where you aimed— and indeed, at the moment there was reason: Ith was still there, now crowded away against a wall. The other saurians were ignoring him, going for Rhiow and her team, but they would have little chance as long as the spell lasted. That's the problem, of course, she thought as she used it for the second time, and the third, and the fourth, and as Urruah got up, his jaws running with the pinkish-tinged saurian blood, and launched himself at another saurian, a deinonychus that was in the act of jumping at Saash from behind. Rhiow turned away from that one, which she had targeted, spun—
—something hit her: she went down. A horrible image of jaws twice as long as her head, of the perfectly candy-pink flesh inside that mouth, and set in it, about a hundred teeth of an absolutely snowy white, three times the size of any of hers, and all of those teeth snapping at her face— Rhiow yowled, as much in fury as fear; then ducked under the lower jaw, found the tender throat muscles, and bit, bit hard, to choke rather than to pierce for blood, while lower down she snuggled herself right in between the scrabbling clawed forelimbs— not a deinonychus, thank you, Iau— put her hind legs where they would do the most good, right against the creature's belly, and began to kick. It was armored there but not enough to do it any good; the plating began to come away, she felt the wetness spill out and heard the scream try to push its way out past her jaws. She wouldn't let it go and wouldn't let the air in: she let the rage bubble up in her, just this once, at the world that had been so cruel to her of late, and to which, just this once, she could justifiably be cruel back.
The struggling and jerking against her body began to grow feeble. It took a long time; it would, with lizard meat, Rhiow thought, but all the same she wouldn't let go. This body's instincts were in control for the moment and knew better than to let go of prey just because it seemed to have stopped moving. She flopped down over her kill and lay there, biting, biting hard, like a tom "biting for the tenth life" in a fight with another
Person; and finally, when there had been no movement for a while, Rhiow opened her eyes, panting through her nose, but still hanging on.
Nothing else moved except with the sporadic twitching of saurian tissue too recently dead to know it yet. She mistrusted it; she hung on a little bit longer. Around Rhiow, the others were getting up, shaking themselves off, and grooming… though mostly for composure, at the moment.
"Come on, Rhi," Urruah said from behind her. "It's gone."
She let go, stood up, and shook herself. She was a mess, but so were all the others. It was like the catenary cavern all over again. She and Saash and Arhu and Urruah stood there, panting, recovering. Off to one side, wearing what looked like an expression of slow shock, Ith stood and gazed at the carnage. He looked hungry… but he did not move.
Very slowly, limping a little— Rhiow had strained one of her forelegs a little, hanging on to the saurian she killed— she went over to him, looked up at him. "Ith," she said, "why didn't you run away when you had the chance?"
He simply looked at her. "I have not yet done what I came for," he said.
"And just what might that be?" Urruah said, slowly making his way over to join Rhiow.
Ith looked at Urruah and said nothing. But from behind them both, Arhu said, "He warned me they were coming."
Urruah turned to look at him. "He has to be with us," Arhu said. "I've seen him here before, and farther down too. He knows the way: he's going to take us." He turned to look at Ith.
Ith leaned down a little and turned his head sideways to look at Arhu: a strange birdlike gesture, a Central Park robin eyeing a particularly juicy worm. But the "worm" was eyeing him back, and the look held for a good little while.
"Yes," Ith said finally. Rhiow and Urruah glanced at each other.
"Are you hungry?" Arhu said at last.
Ith looked at the bodies… then looked at Arhu.
"Yes," he said, but he did not move.
Urruah, watching all this, breathed a heavy snort of amusement and disgust down his nose, and turned to Rhiow. "We'd better clean this up and dispose of the scent, as far as possible," he said. "I'd sooner not leave any hints that we're down here; once they suspect us…"
Rhiow waved her tail "yes." "Your preferred method…"
"Right," Urruah said. "You four get ready to go on ahead." He started pacing around the space, laying down a circle to contain whatever spell he had in mind. Off to one side, Ith threw one last look at the remains of the battle… then turned away.
"Why didn't you help your people attack us?" Saash said to him, looking up from a few moments' worth of furious washing.
"I did," Ith said.
Rhiow stared at him. "How do you mean?"
"They heard me. That was why they attacked you."
Rhiow threw a glance over at Saash. Does this make any sense to you?
Rhi, it's a saurian. Do I look like a specialist in their psychology? I can understand his words, but even the Speech can't always guarantee full comprehension when the mindmaps are so different. In any case, I'm not sure this boy isn't a few whiskers short of the full set. Why else would he be hanging around us, instead of joining in when the fight started or running off?
Rhiow breathed out; she had no answers to that. "A few moments more for grooming," she said. "Then we'd better move out quickly. Urruah?"
"Almost set."
A few more moments was all it took. Then the team headed off as quickly as they could down the next long sloping corridor that Arhu indicated; downward again, around a bend and through a long tunnel, with Arhu in the lead for the moment, and Ith behind him. Faint echoes of the distant buzzing of the saurian City could be heard here; they raised Rhiow's hackles. All those voices… all those teeth…
"All right," Urruah said then, and paused, looking over his shoulder. "This should be far enough—"
Rhiow felt him complete his spell in his head. Immediately from behind them came a brilliant flare of white light. It held for two seconds, three… then went out. A faint smell of scorching drifted down to them.
"Let me go check it," Urruah said, and padded back up the way they had come, out of sight.
They waited, tense. Within a few minutes he was padding softly back down to them. "Clean," he said.
"What did you do?" said Rhiow.
"Heated the whole area to about seven hundred degrees Kelvin," he said. "Stone, air, everything. Sterile and clean." He wrinkled his nose a little. "At the moment it smells a little like that toasted smoked-sea-eel thing they do at the sushi restaurant on Seventy-sixth, but that'll pass."
Saash screwed her eyes closed, and Rhiow made a little "huh" of exasperation. "Only you could find a way to bring food into this," she muttered. "Come on."
They all fell in behind Arhu and continued down the long dark corridor. "Where are we going now?" Rhiow said to Arhu.
"Down toward the 'River'… I saw some of the way in his head." He flirted his tail at Ith, who was now pacing nearby, a little off to one side.
Rhiow twitched her tail slowly. "You've been through some changes lately," she said.
I heard Her, Arhu said silently, looking up at Rhiow as they walked, so intently that she almost had to look away: for the expression was entirely too close to that of the stone Iau in the museum. But this expression was living and filled with certainty, though a sheen of plain old mortal, feline doubt remained on the surface. I was Her, Arhu said, and he shivered all over. Now She's gone, but we need Her… and if anyone's going to be Her, it has to be me….
"Playing God," Rhiow had heard her ehhif call it.
And the Oath? she said to him.
He twitched his tail "yes," a subdued gesture. I took it. I think I understand it now. I have to keep it, though I'm not sure how. The Whisperer… has been giving me hints, but I don't know what to make of them all. I'm afraid. I'm afraid I might screw up. I'm not an "old soul" or anything.
It's not "old souls" we need right now, Saash said. Half of them keep making the same mistakes over and over: why do you think they keep coming back? Rhiow shot a look at her: Saash ignored it. We need any soul that'll get the job done, whether its teeth are worn down or not. Stop being self-conscious and just do what's there for you to do.
He twitched his tail "all right," and slowly walked off.
We could let him go his own way now, I suppose, Saash said after a moment, watching him go. He's accepted his Oath. He'll hold by it… poor kitten.
Poor us, Rhiow said, considering where our association with him has led us.
True… Saash paced on a little way, and then said, We're going to start having some trouble with defense shortly, if the number of these things attacking us increases significantly… and I think it will. The "explosion lite" spell is useful enough… but if we keep using it, it's going to "burn in" in short order. And we can't use the neural inhibitor in its full-strength version while our little friend's with us. I almost wish we could lose him… but Arhu says we can't…
Rhiow glanced ahead of her, to where Arhu and Ith were now walking together. Yes, Rhiow said, and that is very odd…. It was peculiar to watch them: it was as if each very much wanted the other's company, though their bodies clearly loathed one another— tails were lashing, teeth were bared on both sides. The saurian was clearly shortening his pace to make it easier for Arhu to keep up with him as he paced along. Arhu, for his own part, was favoring Ith once more with that expression of recognition, unwilling but still fascinated.
"…You said you were told to come," Arhu was saying to Ith. His voice was unusually soft, so much so that Rhiow almost couldn't hear it. "Who told you? Who else spoke?"
"I don't know," said Ith, after a very long pause indeed. "…I heard a voice."
"What did she say to you?"
Rhiow's ears twitched at that, and then at the slow certainty that started to come into Ith's voice, replacing the half-sullen, half-angry tone that had been there even while talking about his people's coming triumphs. "She said, 'The Fire i
s at the heart, and the Fire is the heart; for its sake, all fires whatever are sacred to me. I shall kindle them small and safe where there are none, for the wayfinding of those who come after: I will breathe on those fires about to die in dark places, and in passing, feed those that burn without harm to any; the fire that burns and warms those who gather about it, in no wise shall I meddle with it save that it seems about to consume its confocals, or to die. To these ends, as the Kindling requireth, I shall ever thrust my claw into the flames to shift the darkening ember or feed the failing coal, looking always toward that inmost Hearth from which all flames rise together, and all fires burn undevouring, in and of That Which first set light to the world, and burns in it ever more…' "
Saash, still walking along nearby, was watching Rhiow sidelong, obviously so stunned that she hardly dared to think out loud. Rhiow had hesitated only once over what she'd heard, the word "confocal," but the Speech made sense of it: those who sit about the same Hearth, the same fire. Rhiow licked her nose and swallowed, for all the rest of it she had understood perfectly. The words resonated in her chest and itched in her bones, as if she had known them forever, though she had only now heard them for the first time, in another species' idiom. The Oath, there was never any mistaking the Oath.
Yet at the same time she heard in her mind the words of the Ailurin verse: Iau Hauhai'h was the Fire at the Heart….
Why is this coming in our idiom?
"She said, 'If you desire the fate that awaits you, then go to the heights, go to the forbidden places, the halls of the doors. Through those doors your fate will find you, and lead you to its heart….' "
"She"? Which Power is he talking about? Which Powers deal with saurians, for pity's sake, except for the Lone One, way back when? Rhiow listened… but no answer came.