They all kept walking, and when Arhu finally spoke again, it was in a very small voice. “That would be bad,” he said.
“Yes. That would be very bad. Just like coincident portal loci would be bad. If you were anywhere nearby when such a thing happened, it would feel similar. But it would be your whole body … and it would be forever. So wouldn’t you agree that these are both events that, as responsible wizards, we should do all we can to forestall?”
“Yeah. Uh, yes.”
’Track Thirty, team,” said Rhiow. “Right this way, and we’ll check that the Thirty-two gate is where it belongs. Saash, you want to go down first and check the gate’s logs?”
“My pleasure, Rhi.”
They strolled down the platform, empty now under its long line of fluorescent lights. No trains were expected on 30 until the 10:30 from Dover Plains and Brewster North; off to one side, on 25, a Metro-North “push-pull” locomotive sat up against the end-of-track barrier, thundering idly to itself while waiting for the cars for the 11:10 to Stamford and Rye to be pushed down to it and coupled on. Arhu stopped and gave it a long look.
“Loud,” Urruah said, shouting a little.
Arhu flicked his tail “no.” “It’s not that—”
“What is it, exactly?” Rhiow said.
“It roars.”
“Yes. As I said, you get used to the roaring.”
“That’s not what I mean.” He sat down, right where he was, and kept staring at the loco. “It—it knows it’s roaring.” He turned to Urruah, almost pleading. “It can’t—it can’t be alive?”
“You’d be surprised,” Urruah said.
“A lot of wizards can ‘hear’ what we normally consider inanimate things,” Rhiow said. “It’s not an uncommon talent. Talking to things and getting them to respond, the way you saw Urruah talk to the door upstairs, that takes more practice. You’ll find out quickly enough if you have the knack.”
Arhu got up as suddenly as he had sat down, and shook himself all over: it took a moment for Rhiow to realize that he was hiding a shudder. “This is all so strange…”
“The Downside is a strange place,” Urruah said, beginning again to stroll toward the end of the platform, where Saash had disappeared over the edge and down to track level. “Always has been. There are all kinds of odd stories about these tunnels, and the ‘underworld’ in this area. Lost colonies of web-footed mutant ehhif… alligators in the sewers…”
“And are there?”
“Alligators? No,” Urruah said. “Dragons, though…” He smiled.
Arhu stopped again, looked at him oddly. “Dragons…” He turned to Rhiow. “He’s making it up. Isn’t he?”
Arhu desperately wanted to think so, that was for sure. “About the dragons?” Rhiow said. “No, that’s true enough … though not the way you might think. The presence of the worldgates can make odd things happen, things that even wizardry can’t fully explain. These tunnels sometimes reach into places that have little to do with this city. They aren’t a place to wander unless you know them well. Sometimes not even then…”
“But the ehhif—I heard about them. Lots of them live down here, everybody says, and they’re always hungry, and they eat… rats, and, and…”
“People? No, not these ehhif, anyway,” Urruah said. “And while some ehhif do indeed live down in the tunnels and dens under the streets, it’s not as many as their stories, or ours, would make you think. Not as many People, either.”
“Problem is, ehhif don’t see well in the dark,” Saash said, leaping up out of it and walking down the platform toward them. “Either for real or in their minds. When they try to tell stories about what they think they’ve seen down here, they tend to get confused about detail. Even for People, it’s never that easy to be accurate about this darkness. It reaches down too deep, to things that are too old. A story that seemed plain when you started, soon starts drawing darkness about itself even while you think you have it pinned down broken-backed in the daylight.,…”
Arhu was looking unusually thoughtful. “How’s the gate?” Rhiow said.
“Answering interrogations normally,” Saash said. “No resonances from our wayward friend at the end of Twenty-six: it’s sitting over there and behaving itself as if nothing had ever gone wrong.”
“Its logs are all right?”
“They’re recording usage normally again, yes.”
“That’s so strange,” Urruah said. “How are you going to explain it all to Har’lh when he asks for that report?”
“I’m going to tell him the truth, as usual,” Rhiow said, “and in this case, that means we don’t have the slightest idea what went wrong. Come on, Arhu, we’ll show you how a gate looks when it’s working right.” They walked on down to the end of the platform and jumped off. Arhu came last: he was slow about it.
“Before we go on,” Rhiow said. “Arhu, if any of this starts to frighten you, say so. You had a bad day yesterday, and we know it. But we work down here all the time, and if you’re going to be with us, you’re going to need to get used to it. If you think you need time to do that, or if you can’t stay here long, say so.”
Arhu’s tongue came out and licked his nose nervously, twice in a row, before he finally said, “Let’s see what’s so hot down here.”
“One thing, anyway,” Urruah said, his voice full of approval. He headed off into the darkness.
The glitter and sheen of the hyperstrings of the gate was visible even before they were out of the glare of the fluorescents. The locus, a. broad oval hanging some twenty yards along from the end of Track 30, was relaxed but ready for use: its characteristic weave, which to Rhiow always looked a little like the pattern of the Chinese silk rug her ehhif had on the dining-room floor at home, radiated in shimmering patterns of orange, red, and infrared. Arhu stared at it.
“It is alive,” he said.
“Could be,” Rhiow said. “With some kinds of wizardry, especially the older and more powerful ones, it’s hard to tell…”
“Why is it here?”
“For wizards to use for travel, as I said.”
“No, wait, I don’t mean why. How did they get here? This one, and all the others I can feel—”
“I see what he means,” Saash said. “To have so many gates in one place is a little unusual. It may have to do with population pressure. All these millions of minds packed close together, pressing against the structure of reality, trying to get their world to do what they want… and hundreds of years of that kind of pressure, started by people who came here over great distances to found a city where they could live the way they wanted to, have things their way— Sooner or later, even the structure of physical reality will start to bend under such pressure. Or maybe not ‘bend.’ ‘Wear thin,’ so that other realities start showing through. They say that this is the city where you can get anything: in a way, it’s become true… If there’s no gate in so populous and hard-driven a place, the theory says, one will eventually appear. If there was already a naturally occurring gate, it’ll spawn others.”
“But there’s always been at least one gate here,” Urruah said, “since long before the city: the one leading to the true Downside, the Old Downside.”
“Oh, yes. If I had to pick one, I’d bet on the gate over by One-sixteen, myself: it just feels stabler than the others, somehow. But all the gates’ signatures have become so alike, after all this time, that you’d be hard put to prove which was eldest. Not my problem, fortunately…”