Their intervention Downside had been bad the last time: bad. She had not been able to eat for days afterward: the mere feeling of food in her mouth made her retch and choke, so that her ehhif took her to the vet, where she endured indignities she couldn’t prevent for the sake of explanations she couldn’t make. Finally they had brought her home again, defeated by finding nothing physically wrong, and Rhiow had eventually found her appetite once more. But it had taken her a good while to gain back the lost weight, and all that time her food had tasted like dust, no matter what choice delicacies Iaehh and Hhuha had tempted her with.
She had seen the Ones Below, the Old Ones, the Wise Ones, the Children of the Serpent… and what they were doing to each other.
They were intelligent: that had been the worst of it. They had been the lords of the world, once. But something had gone very wrong.
…Like any wizard of every species from here to the galaxy’s rim, Rhiow knew the generalities. The Powers That Be had made the worlds, under the One’s instruction. Each Power had gone Its way, making the things that seemed to It most likely to forward the business of Creation as a whole. Abruptly, then, matters changed as one of the Powers, without warning, brought forth something that none of the others had expected or desired. It invented entropy: it created death.
War broke out in heaven. When the conflict died down, that one Power, furious with the others for the rejection of Its gift, was cast out into the darkness. But there was no getting rid of It so simply: the Lone Power (as various species called it) had been part of creation from the first, and It was part of it still.
There was relative quiet for a while after the battle as worlds formed, seas cooled, atmospheres condensed. Slowly life awakened in the worlds, ascended through each environment’s necessary stages of physical complexity, and became intelligent. The Powers relaxed, at first: it now seemed as if Creation was going well.
But each species that became intelligent found itself being offered a chance, a Choice, by an often beautiful form that appeared to its first members early in its history. The Choice, after other issues were stripped away, was usually fairly simple. Take the path that the Powers seemed to have put before it—or turn aside into a path destined to make the species that trod it wiser, more powerful and blessed … more like gods.
The Choice took countless forms, each cunningly tailored to the species to which it was offered. But under its many guises, no matter how fair, it always spelled Death. The Lone Power went from sentient race to race, intent on tricking them into it: offering, again and again, the poisoned apple, the casket that must not be opened. Many species believed the fair promises and accepted the gift, condemning themselves to entropy and death forever after. Some species accepted it only partially, came to understand their error, and rejected it with greater or lesser levels of success, often involving terrible sacrifices that resonated back to earlier battles and sacrifices deep in time. Some species, by wisdom, or luck, or the unwinding of complex circumstance, never accepted the poisoned Gift at all… with results that various other creatures find hard to accept: but even on Earth, there are species that are never seen to die.
Rhiow shifted uncomfortably on the chair. The People had been offered the Choice just as everyone else had: like so many other species on Earth, they had not done well. They had been lucky, though, compared to the Wise Ones. Once upon a time, that had been a mighty people, coming to their dominance of the planet long before the primates or other mammals. Offered the Choice—and the Lone Power’s gift, disguised as the assurance that their dominion would never fail while the sun shone—the reptilian forefathers of the Wise Ones chose what the great dark-scaled shape offered them. For a while, Its words were true: the great lizards strode the world and devoured what they would. But it was little more than an eyeblink in terms of geological time before, without warning, the hammerblow fell from the sky. The skies darkened with the massive amounts of dust thrown up by the initial meteoric impact and the earthquakes and volcanic eruptions that followed. The sun no longer shone. The winds rose and stripped the lands bare: the great lizards, almost all of them, starved and died, lamenting the ill-made Choice … and hearing, in the howl of the bitter wind and the endless storms of dust and snow, the cruel laughter of the One who had tricked them.
Not all of them had died, of course. Some had found refuge in other worlds, places more central. One of those worlds was the one where the Old Downside lay. Down under the roots of the Mountain, the descendants of the survivors of the Wise Ones had found their last refuge. There they nursed their slow cold anger at the changes that had come over the world they ruled. They were no friends toward mammals, which they considered upstarts—degenerate inheritors of their own lost greatness. And to a mammal, the alien reptilian mindset that (at the beginning of things) had made the great lizards the exponents of an oblique and unusual wisdom now merely made them almost impossible to understand—treacherous, dangerous. Even some of the older ehhif stories had apparently come to reflect a few shattered fragments of the truth: tales of a tree, of a serpent that spoke, of an ancient enmity between mammals and serpents.
The enmity certainly remained. It hardly seemed to Rhiow as long as a year ago when she and Urruah and Saash had gone down into the caves under the Mountain for the first time, in search of the cause of a recurrent malfunction plaguing the gate that normally resided over by the platform for the Lexington Avenue line. They had inspected the “mirror” gates up at the top of the caves and had found that intervention there would not be sufficient Slowly they had made their way down into the caverns—a night and a day it had taken them to reach the place; they had even had to sleep there, uneasy nightmare-ridden sleep that it had been. Finally they had found the secondary, “catenary” gate matrix, the place where the immaterial power “conduits” of the upper gates came up through the living stone.
They had also found the Wise Ones, waiting for them just before the cavern where the catenary matrix lay.
There had been a battle. Its outcome had not been a foregone conclusion, even though the three of them were wizards. Rhiow and her team, driven to it, much regretting it (except possibly for Urruah, Rhiow thought), had killed the lizards who’d attacked them, and then began repairs on the gate. It had been clumsily sabotaged, apparently by the lizards interfering with the hyperstrings that led the catenary’s energy conduit up through the stone: nonphysical though those “tethers” were, active tunneling under the right circumstances could displace them… and the Old Ones, by accident or other means, had gotten it right. Fortunately the damage had not been too serious. Rhiow and her team had rooted the gate-conduit more securely, caused new molten stone to flow in and reinforce its pathway through the stone, and had started to make their retreat.
That was when they found more of the lizards, furtive and hasty, devouring the bodies of those Rhiow and the others had killed. Urruah had charged them, scattering them: and the three of them had made their way hurriedly back to the surface and to the gateway to their own world. But Rhiow had not been able to forget the sight of an intelligent being, tearing the flesh of one of its own kind for food. What kind of life is that for any creature? Down there in the dark… with nothing to eat but…
She shivered again, then started breathing strong and slow to calm herself. Whisperer, she said silently, I have work to do. Tell me what I need to hear.