She was gazing past the gates’ control matrices, toward the back of the cavern, and the darkness. “You don’t want to go down here, really, do you…” Arhu said.
“No.”
“You’re nervous. I mean, I heard you being… I mean, you didn’t say, I just thought…”
“You’re beginning to be able to ‘hear’ some of what goes on in people’s minds,” Rhiow said, wondering how she was going to hide her discomfort at this realization. “Some wizards are better at it than others.” She threw him a look. “You want to keep what you hear to yourself, by and large.”
“Oh? Why?”
“Because,” she said, phrasing it very carefully, “we’re likely to start hearing you, too … and if you start saying out in the open what you hear other People thinking, they’re likely to do the same for you…”
His eyes widened a little at that, and he stared somewhat guiltily at Urruah. Good, Rhiow thought, amused, and turned her attention to Saash.
“How is it?” she said.
Saash was balancing on her haunches again, eyeing the web of the master locus for the malfunctioning gate. She reached out a paw, slipped it into the shining weft, hooked a claw behind a carefully selected bundle of strings, and pulled. They stretched out toward her correctly, but the gate still refused to hyperextend.
“No good,” she said to Rhiow. “There’s a blockage of some kind between this gate and the power source, the catenary. We’re going to have to go down and troubleshoot the linkage from the bottom up.”
Her voice was unusually flat and matter-of-fact. Rhiow, though, noticed Arhu watching her, and said, “I’m not wild about mis, either. But we’re all adequately armed…”
“We thought so last time too,” Saash said.
Urruah had already slipped behind the gates and was looking down into the darkness of the caverns, listening hard. As Rhiow came up to him, he turned his head and said, “Quiet today.”
“Not ‘too quiet’?”
“No,” Urruah said, falling silent again, and Rhiow listened and saw what he meant. The water that had tunneled out of these caverns, however many millennia ago, was still doing the same work, and you could usually faintly hear the dripping of it, echoing up from below. The sound was not entirely gone, today, but was somewhat more subdued than Rhiow was used to.
“It might have been a little droughty here, lately,” Rhiow said.
“It might not mean anything at all,” said Saash, coming up to join them, with Arhu behind her.
Rhiow lashed her tail “maybe,” a touch nervously. “Well,” she said. “The sooner we catch this rat, the sooner its back’ll be broken. Arhu—stay with us. Don’t go exploring. There are miles of these caverns: no one knows all their branchings, and some of the smaller ones aren’t stable. You could seal yourself in if you meddled with the wrong pile of rocks… and we wouldn’t be able to get you out.”
“But we can go through things,” Arhu said. “I did it in your big den, the station. A wizard who was stuck could go through the rock—”
Saash and Rhiow exchanged a look. Too smart, this one.,. “Yes,” Urruah said, “but if you try it so close to the main control structures of the gates, you could have real trouble. You’re halfway through a tunnel wall, say, and a nearby gate activates; the power running up to it from the catenary below makes some very minor shifts in the elementary structure of the stone… and all of a sudden, the stone you described in your spell, when you started your little walk, isn’t the same stone anymore. Your spell doesn’t work on that changed stone because the initial description’s no longer accurate. The spell structure unravels, and you get stuck half in the wall and half out of it. In an argument like that… the stone’s older than you are: it wins.”
Arhu’s eyes went so round that Rhiow thought they looked ready to pop out of their sockets. “So keep close,” she said. “And Arhu—keep alert. There are creatures who live down in these caves who don’t like us.”
Urruah sniffed down his nose, an oh-what-an-understatement kind of noise. “Come on,” Rhiow said. “Let’s get this over with.”
She led them down into the dark.
She remembered the way well enough from their last intervention here, though even if she had not, the Whisperer knew the main routes perfectly well—the explorations and interventions of other wizards, like Rhiow’s old master Ffairh in his time, would have been preserved in the Whispering for anyone who might later need the information. As it was, it was a shame that the context of where they were going and what they might meet tended to keep them from enjoying this place on its own merits: in their upper regions, at least, the caverns in the Mountain were beautiful enough.
The water had been a long time doing its work. As the main cavern narrowed and began to slope downward, Rhiow picked her way along among the upward-poking spines of pale stone, wondering a little at the lacy structure of some of them: each had its cousin-spike hanging down from the ceiling above. All these were dry now, the areas of active cavern formation having receded farther down into the Mountain. But up here, Rhiow would have welcomed the occasional drip or tinkle of water; it would have distracted her from the image that always struck her, when they were forced to come this way, that they were walking into a particularly fangy set of jaws, backed by a dark and hungry gullet of stone. If you weren’t careful, you could imagine the jaws closing—
Cut that out, she thought. The “gullet” narrowed and sloped down before them until it was only a few feet wide, and the light from outside the main cavern opening failed in the darkness beyond it. This was the only place in the Old Downside where Rhiow found herself wishing she had a proper Person’s body rather than this ancient and attractive, but oversized, persona. The walls here always brushed against her shoulders as she slipped through, yet there was no corresponding feeling of her whiskers being anywhere near the walls, as there would have been were she in her own body. The resultant sensation was disconcerting, disorienting.
The walls squeezed down closer: the tunnel kinked, kinked again. Rhiow slipped forward absolutely silently, listening hard. When she had nightmares about being attacked here, the nightmares always involved this spot: hemmed in by stone, no room to turn around, something bad behind her, something worse waiting in front. She knew that attack so high up, so close to the light and the day, was wildly unlikely. But still, it was the unlikely things that would kill you—
Sudden relief, as the feeling of stone touching her sides fell away, and the sound changed, even though it was only the nearly inaudible little dry sound that Rhiow’s paw-pads made on the stone. She activated one of the spells she had brought with her, saying the last word of it, and well ahead of her a tiny spark of faint green light came into being, floating high up in the air. The color was carefully chosen: the Wise Ones did not see in this frequency.
Behind her, first Saash, then Arhu, and finally Urruah slipped into the larger cavern, looking around. In the faint light a vast array of more stalactites—whole glittering white or cream or rust-banded chandeliers of them—could be seen hanging from the ceiling. There were fewer standing stalagmites here; gaps in the spiky ceiling and the shattered rubble on the floor showed where the occasional groundshake or mere structural weakness had wrought much damage over many years.