“I’m going to finish the diagnostic,” Saash said. “Two minutes.”
They seemed long to Rhiow, although nothing bad was happening. Her forearms were aching a little with the strain of holding the hyperstrings at just the angle Saash had given them to her; and meanwhile her eyes kept dropping to that symbol, almost lost in the fire of the circle but not quite. It was simple: two curves, a slanted straight line bisecting them—in its way, rather like the symbol that even the ehhif had known to carve on the Queen’s breast.
The Eye—
She looked up suddenly and found Arhu sitting there with his claws clenched full of hyperstrings and gazing down at it, too, while Saash, oblivious, pulled out several bright strings in her claws and began to knit them together. Arhu’s expression was peculiar, in its way as meditative as Saash’s look had been earlier.
“They have a word for it, don’t they?” he said.
“For what?” Rhiow said. “And who?”
“For this,” Arhu said, glancing up again at his paws full of dulled fire. “Ehhif.”
“Cat’s-cradle,” she said. “For them it’s just play they do with normal string, a kitten’s game.”
“They must have seen us.”
“So I think, sometimes,” Rhiow said.
Arhu’s glance fell again to the symbol, to the Eye. “So has someone else,” he said.
Rhiow licked her nose and swallowed, nervous.
“All right,” Saash said after a minute. “That ought to be the main conduit of the bad gate repaired. I’ll just do the second here, and we’ll be finished.”
“Hurry,” Rhiow said.
“Can’t hurry quality work, Rhi,” Saash said, intent on what she was doing. “How’s the circle holding up?”
Urruah examined it critically. “Running a little low on charge at the moment. How much longer is this going to take you?”
“Oh … five minutes. Ten at the outside.”
“I’ll give it another jolt.” Urruah bent down: the circle dimmed slightly, then brightened.
Arhu looked up from the circle then. Not at the catenary, not at Saash: up into the empty air.
“They’re coming,” he said.
Rhiow looked at him with alarm. “Who?”
But she was afraid she knew perfectly well.
“He didn’t lie,” Arhu said, looking at Urruah with rather skewed intensity. “They are here.”
“Uh oh,” Urruah said. “You don’t mean—”
“The dragons—!”
And then the roaring began. It was not very near yet—but it was entirely too near, echoing down through one of those openings … or all of them.
Rhiow rapidly went through the spells she was carrying in her head, looking for the one that would have the most rapid results against the attackers she was expecting. One of them was particularly effective: it ran down the adversary’s nerves and rendered them permanently unresponsive to chemical stimulus—the wizardry equivalent of nerve gas, and tailored specifically to the problem at hand. But it wouldn’t be able to get out of a protective circle; you would have to drop the circle to use it. And those who were coming were fast. If you miscalculated, if one of them jumped at you and put a big long claw through your brain before you could get the last word out—
“Rhiow? Rhiow!”
Her head snapped around. Arhu was still sitting there with his claws full of strings, but now they were trembling because he was. “What’s that noise?” he said.
“What you said was coming,” she said.
“What I said—” He looked confused.
“This is what he did before, Rhi,” Urruah said, looking grim. “Saash?”
“Not right now,” Saash said, her voice desperately level. “If I don’t finish this other patch, the whole job’ll have to be done again. Let them come.”
“Oh, sure,” Urruah said. “Let them ‘tree’ us inside the circle, five bodies thick! Then what are we supposed to—”
“No,” Arhu said, and the word started as a hiss of protest, scaled up to a yowl. “No—!”
The Children of the Serpent burst in.
Rhiow knew that ehhif had somewhat rediscovered dinosaurs in recent years. Or rather, rediscovered them again, only more visually than usual this time. She had once heard Iaehh and Hhuha idly discussing this tendency for each new generation of their kind to become fascinated with the long names, the huge sizes and terrible shapes. But in Rhiow’s opinion, the fascination had to do with the ehhif perception that such creatures were a long time ago and far away. And the most recent resurrection of the fascination, in that movie and its sequel, were rooted in a variant on the same perception: that long ago and far away was where and when such creatures belonged.
But this too had become one of the places where they belonged. They did not take kindly to intruders. And they certainly would not let any leave alive…
Arhu started to crouch down, trembling, at the sight of them, as if he had forgotten what he was holding. “Saash!” Rhiow hissed, and without missing a beat, Saash let go of the strings she had been working on—they snapped back into place in the catenary—and took hold of the ones Rhiow had held. Rhiow bent down before Arhu could finish collapsing, and snatched the strings out of his paws. He was wide-eyed, crouching right down into a ball of terror a pitiful and incongruous sight with him in this body, which would have been large and powerful enough to bring down the biggest wildebeest. But the hunt was in the heart, as the saying went: Rhiow couldn’t entirely blame him for not having the heart for this one as the Children of the Serpent poured into the cavern and hit the circle, claws out, roaring hunger and rage.
Urruah lifted his head and roared too, but the sound was almost drowned in the wave of shrieks of hate that followed it. Single sickle-claws three feet long scrabbled against the circle, jaws half the size of one of their bodies tried to slash or bite their way in; and everywhere on your body, though nothing touched you physically, you felt the pressure of the little, cold, furious eyes. There was intelligence there, but it was drowned in hatred, and gladly drowned. The impression of outraged strength, pebbled and mottled greenish- and bluish-hided bodies throwing themselves again and again at the circle; the impression of raging speed, and the interminable screaming, a storm of sound in this closed-in place: that was what you had to deal with, rather than any single, rational impression of This is a deinonychus, that is a carnosaur—
“That’s what it was,” Arhu was moaning, almost helplessly, like a starving kitten. “That’s what it was—”
Rhiow swallowed. “The circle’s holding?” she said to Urruah.
“Of course it is. Nothing they can do about it. But how are we going to get out?”
It was a fair question. He had said “five deep”; possibly he had been optimistic. The cavern was now packed so full of saurians that there was no seeing the far wall, except for the part near the roof, above the tallest heads. Rhiow had a sudden ridiculous vision of what Grand Central would look like at rush hour if it were full of saurians, not people: a whole lot like this. We need shopping bags, though, she thought, pacing around the circle, forcing herself to look into the terrible little eyes, the jaws snapping futilely but with increasing frustration and violence against the immaterial barrier of the circle: and Reeboks and briefcases. Or no, maybe the briefcases wouldn’t be in the best of taste—
“Done,” Saash said.
“The whole repair?”