“It’s pretty,” Arhu said, sounding rather befuddled.
“It is,” Saash said. “Sometimes I wish we could make a proper light when we come down here…” She shrugged her tail.
Rhiow shrugged back, and said, “Come on. We’ve got at least an hour’s walk ahead of us…” Assuming we don’t run into anything that makes us need to go another way. Oh, please, Queen Iau, just this once, let it be easy for us…
Rhiow had her doubts, though, as she led them downward through that cavern and into the next one, as to whether this prayer was at all likely to be answered. When you were in the company of a wizard on Ordeal, anything could happen, probably would. The odds against a quiet intervention were fairly high.
Behind her, as she padded through the wide entry into the next cavern, Arhu was saying to Saash, “Why are you so nervous?”
Saash breathed out. “We were down here before, about a sun’s-round ago. Not a good trip.”
“What happened?”
“Bad things,” Urruah said from behind Arhu, his voice plainly suggesting that one might happen right now if Arhu didn’t shut up.
He shut up. They walked a long way: down, always down, through galleries and arcades of stone, mighty halls as big as the concourse in Grand Central, twisting hallways as broad as the Hyatt passage. Sometimes the links between caverns squeezed to tunnels as narrow as the first one, or narrower: once the ceiling of one of these tunnels dropped so low that Rhiow had to get down on her belly and crawl forward, a few inches at a time, pushing herself along with an effort. Behind them she could hear the others doing the same, Urruah last and suffering most because of his size— grunting and swearing very softly under his breath. It was at such times, her own breath sounding intolerably loud to her, the others’, behind her, sounding even louder, that Rhiow always got the feeling that the Mountain was listening: that the stone itself was alive—though impassive—and watching them, though without any feeling of interest as a living being would understand it… without anything but a sense of weight. Hostility she could have coped with: benign neglect would have been fine. But this gave her the creeps, the sense of the stone piled up above her, the Mountain pressing down on her back, on her head…
Cut it out, she told herself, annoyed, and pushed forward.…
They went onward, and downward. The sound of water faded away to nothing or grew again, by turns. The little green light bobbed ahead of them into places where water was now actively dripping so that they were rained on under the earth, and Saash muttered and hissed under her breath, having to stop every twenty paces or so to shake water out of her eyes or smooth back into place some patch of fur that she simply could not leave alone any longer. Generally Saash was pretty good about controlling her fur fixation when she was on errantry, but down here she had problems, and Rhiow was in no mood to call her on them: she had problems of her own. The weight of the stone, the silence of it… watching…
She thought of the cool stony regard of the statue of Queen Iau in the Met and broke away from the other imagery with pleasure. The comfortable, dusky blue light of that space: it would be a pleasure to be back up there again, strolling among the ancient things. Rhiow thought of the clay chicken pot there, with a very realistic chicken carved on the upper side of it, and how she had laughed once to see an almost exact duplicate of the thing in the window of a kitchen shop in the upper Eighties, off First Avenue. Down in this darkness, it was all too easy to stop believing in sunlight, and museums, and traffic noise, and taxi horns blaring, and all the rest of normal life in the city. Yet all those things—the buildings, the ehhif, the noise, and the hurry— had their roots here, in the roots of the Mountain, in this darkness, this silence. Without this, none of those could exist.
They went onward, and downward. Several times Rhiow stopped, and the others—perhaps looking elsewhere—ran into her from behind, or into each other, so that soft hisses were exchanged, or the occasional cuff. Once Arhu—who had been uncharacteristically silent, catching the others’ mood, or perhaps himself unnerved at the way he was starting to hear the waiting, listening stone—crowded too close to Saash. She stopped suddenly, perhaps hearing something: Arhu bumped into her, Urruah bumped into Arhu, and Arhu turned around and actually hit Urruah in the head. Rhiow turned just in time to see the pale green spark of surprise in Urruah’s eyes, the flicker of anger, and then the sudden and very welcome return of humor. He said rrrrrrr under his breath, and Arhu backed into Saash, who promptly smacked nun.
Arhu started to say rrrrrr on his own behalf, but Rhiow shouldered between him and Saash. “All right,” she said, “come on. Tension. All our nerves are shredded like the Great Tom’s ears at the moment: why try to pretend they’re not? We don’t have much farther to go. Arhu, how are you holding up?”
“It reminds me of, of—” His tail was lashing. “Never mind. Let’s go.”
They went on again: still downward. The sound of dripping water had faded away again; there was nothing now to be heard but their own breaths, and the faint sound of their paw-pads on the dry, rough stone—sometimes a tchk as one of them kicked or shifted a bit of stone, and the sound fell flat and loud into the surrounding stillness. The little green light was starting to make Rhiow’s eyes water, and sometimes her concentration on it faltered, so that it flickered slightly in the dark, like a candle guttering out. It would be nice, she thought, if there were wizardries you could just start and ignore afterwards…But there were no such things. A wizardry needed attention at regular intervals, re-description of its basic tenets, of the space you intended to affect, and the effect you were trying to have; otherwise it lapsed—
—the light went out—
Rhiow stopped short. I didn’t do that—
Utter stillness behind her. The others were holding their breaths. Then Arhu whispered, “Is that a light up there?”
Her eyes were relaxing back to handling complete darkness again, or trying to—in night this total, even the keenest-eyed feline was helpless. But there was indeed a faint, faint glow coming from up ahead—
It’s the catenary, she thought. Thank you, Iau.
But why did my light go out?…
“It’s the power source,” she whispered back to Arhu. “We’re almost where we’re going. Saash?”
The dim, dim light started to seem brighter with time; as she turned, Rhiow could actually see Saash’s face, and her ears working. She had the best hearing of any of them.
“Nothing,” she said very softly. “Let’s do what we have to, Rhi, and get ourselves out of here again. We’ve been lucky.”
So far, Rhiow heard her add.
Silently Rhiow agreed. “The next chamber is very big,” she said to Arhu. “It has to be: the catenary structure is what feeds power up to the gate loci, and its inwoven wizardry very carefully controls a large clear space around it. We’ll have to deactivate that wizardry before we start working, and before that we’ll be laying down a protective circle. You must stay inside that circle at all costs, no matter what happens to any of us: if you venture outside it while the catenary’s control wizardry is down, and accidentally come in direct contact with the energy of the catenary—you’ll be dead, that’s all. Clear about that?”