“Yes. I’m going to bring up the rest of the Grand Central complex again,” Saash said. “Tell our connection to get ready.”
Heard that. Kit said. We’re set. Rhiow, if you need help, there’s backup waiting.
Might need it, Rhiow said, but it’s hard to say. Hang on—
Saash leaned into the catenary again, put out one single claw, inserted it into an insignificant-looking little loop in one string—it looked like a snag in a sweater—and pulled.
The loop straightened, vanished. The catenary came alive again, the full fire of its power bursting up through the strings that had been offline. Saash stood watching it, her head tilted to one side, listening.
“Feels right,” she said. “Khi-t?”
We’ve got the gates back, said another voice: Nita’s. Want us to test the bad one?
“Please.”
The screaming and scrabbling and clawing went on all around them, undiminished. Okay, it hyperextended all right—
“I saw that,” Saash said. “The catenary’s feeding the patched string properly. Shut it again?”
—Closed.
Saash sat down and started to scratch again, looking surprisingly satisfied with herself, under the circumstances. “I deserve some milk.”
“So do we,” Urruah roared at her, “and we also deserve to get out of here with our pelts intact, which seems increasingly unlikely at the moment! What in Iau’s name are we supposed to do now?”
Saash looked at the catenary, then back at Rhiow, and slowly her whiskers started to go forward.
“Oh, no, Saash,” Rhiow said. “Oh no.”
“Why not? Have you got anything better?” Saash said. “You want to try the odds of dropping the circle and having time to hit them with the neural inhibitor? I don’t think so, Rhi! There are so many of them leaning against that spell right now, they’d just squash us to death the second we dropped it, never mind what else they’d do to us. Which they will, as you remember from last time.”
Rhiow swallowed. Arhu stared at Saash in dumb terror. Urruah said, “Just what are you thinking of?”
Saash started to smile again, a smile entirely in character with a giant prehistoric predator-cat. “I’m going to push the catenary back out there without its ‘insulating’ spell in place,” Saash said.
“Your brain has turned to hairballs!” Rhiow shouted. “What if it degrades the circle on the way through?”
“It won’t.”
“How sure are you?”
“Very sure. I’ll leave the ‘insulation’ in place until after I’ve shoved it outside.”
“Oh, wonderful, just great! And what about when you take the insulation off, have you thought that it might just degrade the circle then, and blast us all to ashes?”
“It shouldn’t.”
“Shouldn’t—!”
“You want to sit here and wait them out?”
Rhiow looked out at the room full of roaring, shrieking saurians. Those at the far side of the room were already settling down to wait.
“It won’t work. No matter how long we sit here, they’ll wait,” Saash said. “And sooner or later we’re going to need food and sleep, and as soon as the last one of us goes to sleep, and the circle weakens enough to let them in—”
Urruah looked from Rhiow to Saash, then back to Rhiow again. “She’s got a point,” he said.
Rhiow’s tail was lashing. “You think you have a life or so to spare?”
“You want to find out if it matters,” Urruah said, more gently than necessary, “down here?”
Rhiow licked her nose again, then looked at Saash. “All right,” she said. “I concur.”
“Right,” Saash said.
She looked at the catenary. It drifted toward the edge of the circle; its own protective circles drifted with it.
Some of the saurians nearest the place where it was about to make contact looked at the catenary with the first indications of concern. Its rainbow fire fell into their big dark eyes, turning them into a parody of People’s eyes—bright slits, dark irises; they blinked, backed away slightly.
“They’re not wild about the light,” Urruah said.
Saash nodded. The small circle surrounding the catenary made contact with the larger one: they “budded” together again. As if becoming somewhat uneasy at this, more of the saurians began to back away, and the screaming and roaring started to take on an uncomfortable edge. Some of the saurians nearer the walls stood up again, began to mill around, catching their companions’ unease. Saash closed her eyes then and held quite still.
In one swift motion the catenary popped back out through the circle. It was now bereft of the smaller, “child” circles that the main protective circles had generated around it, and saurians jostled away from it as it drifted quickly back to its original position in the center of the cavern.
The saurians parted around it, closing together again nearest the circle, and going back to their raging and scrabbling against its invisible barrier. Saash looked over their heads as best she could, past them, to where the catenary had now settled itself back in place.
“Ah1 right?” she said. “Mind your eyes, now.”
Rhiow started to close hers but was caught too late. The catenary suddenly stopped being merely a fiercely bright bundle of rainbows and turned into a raging floor-to-ceiling column of pure white fire. Lightning forked out of it in all directions, at least what would have passed for lightning. The whole cavern whited out in a storm of blinding fire that hissed and gnawed at their circle like a live thing. All Rhiow’s fur stood on end, and her eyes fizzed in their sockets. Behind her, Arhu cried out in fear. The desperate shrieks of the saurians were lost in the shrieking roar of the unleashed catenary.
Eventually things got quiet again, and Rhoiw scrubbed at her tearing eyes, trying to rub some vision back into them. When she could see again, the catenary was once more sizzling with its normal light. But there was little else left in the cavern that was not reduced to charcoal or ash, and nothing at all left that was alive in the strictest sense… though bits and pieces here and there continued to move with lizardly persistence.
Saash stood there, looking around her with grim satisfaction. “Definitely,” she said, “not at all wild about the light.”
Urruah got up and shook himself, making a face at the smell. “I take it I can drop the circle now.”
“It’s as safe as it’s going to get, I think,” Rhiow said, “and once it’s down, we can use the other spell if we need it.” She went over to the crouching Arhu. “Arhu, come on—we have to go.”
He looked up and around him, blinking and blinded, but Rhiow somehow got the idea that this blindness had nothing to do with the light “Yes,” he said, and got up. Urruah had hardly collapsed the circle before Arhu was making hurriedly for the cavern-entrance through which they had come. “We have to hurry,” he said. “It’s coming—”
Urruah looked from Arhu to Rhiow. “Now what?”
“What’s coming?” Saash said.
“The greater one,” he said. “The father. The son. Quick, quick, it’s coming!” His voice started to shade upward into a panicky roar. “We’ve got to get out before it comes!”
Rhiow’s tail was lashing with confusion and concern. “I’m willing to take him at his word,” she said. “There’s no reason to linger—we’ve done what we came for. Let’s get back up to the light.”
It took less time than going down had taken. Despite the thought that they might shortly be attacked again, they were all lighter of spirit than they had been—all of them but Arhu. He wouldn’t be quiet: the whole way up through the caverns with him was a litany of “It’s coming” and “That’s what it was…” and “the greater one,” and an odd phrase that Rhiow heard only once: “the sixth claw…” Arhu didn’t grow silent again until they came up into the last cavern, past the great teeth of stone, to see the red-gold light of that world’s sunset, and the green shadows beneath the trees beyond the stony threshold. There he stood for a long time while Saash checked the main matrix for the repaired gate, and he gazed at the declining sun as if he thought he might never see it again.