She thought about her Oath, to preserve life whenever possible—
Rhiow said the last word of the spell… a relief, for carrying a spell almost completely executed is an increasing strain that gets worse the longer you hold it in check. The unleashed power practically clawed its way up out of her, leaping away toward its targets and leaving Rhiow weak and staggery for the space of a breath or so.
All over the concourse, in a circle with Rhiow at its center, saurians crashed to the floor and lay immobile. But the range of the spell was limited; and more would be coming soon. Urruah came down behind her and Saash; to him Rhiow said, “You have that spell loaded?”
“You better believe it!”
“Get back there to the gates and keep them from getting up here! And pass it to as many of the other wizards as you can. If you push the saurians back fast enough and get close enough to the gates, you can knock them down almost as they come out. Saash, go down a level; do the same. I heard Tom say something about ‘all the gates.’ It may not just be the one at Thirty that’s popped. Arhu, come on, some of them went up toward the main doors—”
Saash and Urruah tore off through the doorways that led to the tracks. Rhiow ran toward the Forty-second Street doors, up the ramp, with Arhu galloping behind her. Ehhif screams were coming from near the brass doors; Rhiow saw two saurians, a pair of deinonychi, kicking at something low. Rhiow gulped as she ran, half certain there was a ehhif body under those deadly hind claws; but as they got closer, she saw that they were kicking actually the glass and brass of the doors in frustration, possibly unable to understand the glass—and on the other side of the door was no slashed-up body, but a furious houff with its leash dangling, barking its head off and scrabbling wildly at the glass to get through, while shouting in its own language, “Lemme at ’em! Lemme at ’em! I can take “em!”
“Good dog,” Rhiow muttered, a rare sentiment for her, and once again spoke the last word of the neural-inhibitor spell. The power leapt out of her, and the deinonychi fell, clutching at the glass as they went down, their claws making a ghastly screeching against the metal and glass as they collapsed.
Rhiow stopped and looked back toward the concourse. “I don’t think any of them got any farther than this,” she said to Arhu, looking around the waiting room. “If we—”
Any further words got stuck in Rhiow’s throat for the moment as her glance fell on the mounted tyrannosaur in the waiting room. The few ehhif who had stopped on their way through the terminal to look at the skeleton were now all clustered together in the farthest comer, holding on to one another with an intensity not usually seen in New Yorkers who until a moment or so ago had been perfect strangers. The air was filled with a peculiar groaning sound, like metal being twisted out of shape…
Which it was, for Rhiow saw that slowly, with deadly deliberation, the skeleton was moving. Its front claws reached out and grasped at the air, clutching at nothing; its head lifted from the position of low menace in which it had been fixed, stretching upward, the jaws working—then twisted around to look, hungry, at the ehhif in the corner.
Rhiow’s mind flashed back to what she had done to the metal track a couple of nights before. But you needed physical contact for that spell, and she wasn’t very sanguine about her chances of maintaining contact for long enough to do the job without herself being ripped to shreds or bitten in two.
The tyrannosaurus skeleton leaned down to scratch and pull at the pedestal, then straightened and began trying to pull its hind legs free, first one leg, then the other. There was a crack! like a gunshot as one of the weaker bolts holding the bones of its left foot to the pedestal came free, ricocheting off the travertine wall and peppering the poor ehhif crowded in the corner with stone splinters. The tyrannosaurus skeleton writhed and struggled to get free; it threw its head up in rage. An echo of a roar… Then it started working on the second leg more scientifically, not just thrashing around, and it was bent over so that the clever little front claws could help, too. Pull—pull—pull, and another bolt popped—
Rhiow shook her head at the sight of something beginning to cloud about the bones, building on them like shadowy cord, layer on reddish layer, strung with white: muscle, ligament… flesh. Damnation, Rhiow thought, whatever’s going on downstairs is calling to its dead cousin here… and pretty soon we’re going to have one of these loose in the terminal? —She shuddered. The deinonychi and smaller breeds of the present-day saurians—if it really was the present day, under the Mountain—were bad enough, but nothing like their terrible forefathers, like this desiccated old relic. The relic, however, was becoming less desiccated by the second; the muscle was almost all there now, organs curdling slick and wet into being, skin starting to sheet and stretch over everything, but only slowly: it was, after all, the biggest organ. For a horrible moment the skull was almost bare of everything but the red cording of the jaw muscles; then one abruptly coagulating eye, small, piggy, and entirely too intelligent, was looking down out of the wet red socket at Rhiow. The tyrannosaur stretched its head up as gaudy crimson-and blue-striped skin wrapped itself around skull and shoulders, and heaved mightily, one last time; the second leg came free. It whirled on its pedestal, graceful and quick as a dancer, leapt down, and went for the ehhif—
You’re lizard enough to die now, Rhiow thought, and opened her mouth to speak the last word of her spell—
Arhu, however, took a step forward and yowled a single word in the Speech.
The tyrannosaurus blew up. Flesh, ligament, all those organs and whatever had been inside them, blood and bone: one moment they were there, the next they were gone to splatters and splinters, flying through the air. The ehhif fell to the floor and covered their heads, certain that a bomb had gone off. The cream travertine walls were now a most unhealthy color of patchy, seeping pink; and the ceiling, just newly painted, appeared to have been redone in an entirely more pointillist style, and rained scraps and shards of flesh and other tissue down on the empty pedestal.
Rhiow looked at Arhu in amazement.
He grinned at her. “I saw it in Saash’s head,” he said. “She did it to the rats.”
“Yes, but how did you adapt that spell to—”
“Adapt it? I just did it.”
And to think I was complaining that he wasn’t doing enough of his own wizardry, Rhiow thought. But this was more like a young wizard’s behavior, more like her own when she was new, just after Ordeal, and didn’t know what you couldn’t pull off. “You’re getting the hang of it, Arhu,” she said. “Come on—”
He paused first, and ran back to the other skeleton, reared up against it.
Its metal went molten and ran out from inside the bones like water. The bones rained down in a mighty clattering and shattering on the floor.
“Where did you get that?” she demanded as he ran back toward her.
“I saw it in your head.”
Why, you little peeping tom— “You didn’t need to do that! It wasn’t doing anything!”
“It might have been about to.”
Rhiow looked at the stegosaurus skeleton and found herself willing to admit that under the present circumstances, she wasn’t too sure what its dietary habits or temperament might be should it wake up just now… and they both had other things to think about. “All right, come on,” she said. “You want to blow things up? Plenty of opportunity downstairs.”