“We do what we have to,” Rhiow said. “Har’lh has been doing so, and the Queen only knows where he is at the moment. Should I do less? But never mind that. What’s going on?” She glanced over by Track 30, where she could see the weft of the gate showing as usual. “I thought you shut the catenaries down.”
“They were shut down at the source.” Rhiow looked up at him, slightly awestruck, for the source of the gates was the Powers That Be: Aaurh herself, in fact. “However… something has brought them up again.”
“The gates are active,” Urruah said carefully, “but not under your—under ‘our’—control?”
“Yes,” Tom said. Rhiow thought she had never heard anything quite so grim. “We’ve tried to shut the gates down again. They don’t answer.”
Saash’s tail was lashing. “Once it’s shut down, an emplaced wizardry shouldn’t be able to be reactivated except by the one who emplaced it.”
“Shouldn’t. But we’ve seen the rules changing around us, all week. Apparently the earlier malfunctions were a symptom of this one—or else this one is just the biggest symptom yet. Someone has reactivated the gates from the other side.”
“That would take—”
“Wizardry? Yes. And of a very high order.”
Rhiow remembered the gate “saying” to her, “Someone” interfered… She licked her nose. And my light went out, Rhiow thought, and started feeling extremely grim herself.
“It couldn’t be Har’lh, could it?” Urruah said. “Trying to get out?”
“His spells have their own signature, like any wizard’s,” Tom said. “Whoever or whatever is producing this effect … it’s not Carl. But more to the point, if it were him, the gates wouldn’t be resisting what’s happening on the other side: it’s a kind of power that’s alien to them. Something wizardly, but not in the usual sense, appears to be trying to push through.”
“I see it,” Arhu said. “I told Rhiow that I was seeing it, just a little while ago.”
Tom looked at him thoughtfully. “What exactly do you see?”
Arhu’s tail was lashing. “It’s dark… but I can hear something: it’s scratching.”
“Could be Saash,” Urruah muttered.
Rhiow hit him right on the ear, hard. Urruah ducked down a little, but not nearly far enough to please her. “It’s carrying the darkness with it on purpose,” Arhu said, looking down into the darkness where the silver glint of the tracks under the fluorescents faded away, “and it wants to let it out into the sun … but until now the way has always been too small. Now, though, the opening can be made large enough; and there’s reason to make it so. The darkness will run out across the ground under the sun and stain it forever.”
Tom hunkered down by Arhu. “Arhu … who is it?”
Arhu squinted into the dark. “The father,” he said. “The son…”
“He said that before,” Rhiow said. “I couldn’t make much of it then.”
“The problem with this kind of vision,” Tom said, looking over at her, “is that sometimes it makes most sense in retrospect. It’s hardest on the visionary, though, who usually can’t make any sense of it at all.” He ruffled the fur on top of Arhu’s head, which Arhu was too distracted to take much notice of. “One last thing. If we cannot prevent this breakthrough, by whatever force it is which is pushing against the gates from the other side … what else should we do to keep the world as it should be?”
Arhu looked up, but it was not on Tom that his eyes rested at last. The fur fluffed all up and down Rhiow’s back as Arhu’s eyes met hers; there was someone else behind those eyes. “You must claw your way to the heart,” he said, “to the root. I hear the gnawing; too long have I heard it, and the Tree totters…”
In his eyes was the cool look of the stone statue of Iau in the Met. Rhiow wanted to look away but could not: she bent her head down before Arhu, before the One Who looked through him, until the look was gone again, and Arhu was glancing up and around him in mild confusion at everyone’s shocked expressions—for Urruah had his ears flat back in unmistakable fear, and Saash was visibly trembling.
Tom let out a long and unnerved breath. “Okay,” Tom said, getting up. He looked around him at the ever-increasing crowd of wizards. “You four have other business,” he said: “so you should hold yourselves in reserve. There should be enough of us to hold these gates closed… I hope. When the pressure eases up on the other side or drops off entirely, that’ll be your time to run through. Meantime … we’ll do what we can.”
The hours that followed were given over to weary waiting for something that might not happen … if everyone was lucky. Urruah slept through it all. Arhu dozed or stared down at the ehhif down in the main concourse from the vantage point they had chosen, up on the gallery level. Saash sat nearby and scratched, and washed, and scratched again, until Rhiow was amazed that she had any skin left at all. But she could hardly blame her if Saash felt what she felt, the sensation of intolerable and increasing pressure below: something straining, straining to give, like a tire intent on blowing out; and something else leaning hard and steadily against it, trying to prevent the “blowout”—the many wizards who kept coming and going, new ones always arriving to relieve those who had come earlier and used up all their energy pushing back against the dark force at the other side of the gates. The ones who left looked as worn as if they had been out all night courting, or fighting, or both; and there was no look of satisfaction on any face—everyone looked as if the job itself wasn’t done, even though individual parts of the job might be.
Rush hour started, and astonishing numbers of ehhif poured into the terminal and out of it again; the floor went dark with them, an incessant mindless-looking stir of motion, like bugs overrunning a picnic. There were minor flows and eddies in it—periods when the floor was almost empty, then when it filled almost too full for anyone to move; the patterns had a slightly hypnotic fascination. Rhiow wished they were a lot more than just slightly hypnotic; not for the first time, she envied Urruah’s ability to sleep through anything that didn’t require his personal intervention. She could never manage such a performance herself—her own imagination was far too active.
Though I wonder, she thought at one point, a good while later, whether Urruah’s simply decided that this is going to be the easiest way to deal with his disappointment. For now there was no way he would be able to make it to his ehhif-o’hra concert in the Sheep Meadow. Even if the situation down at the track level relaxed, and the gates went back to something approaching normal, they would have to head down in search of Har’lh as quickly as possible. Poor ’Ruah, she thought, glancing up at the Accurist clock: it read one minute to eight.