They ran back through the main concourse. For once Rhiow wasn’t concerned about whether she was sidled or not: the ehhif would have a lot of other things to pay attention to for the next few minutes, anyway, besides a couple of cats. “Wow,” Arhu said, “look at all these dead lizards. What’re the ehhif going to do with them?”
“Nothing, because if we survive this, Tom will get authorization from the Powers That Be for a ‘static’ timeslide, and we’ll patch this whole area over with a congruent piece of nonincidental time from an equivalent universe. The physical damage will simply never have happened… and if we get the patch in place fast enough, none of the ehhif here will remember a thing.”
“Might be fun if they did…”
Rhiow snorted as they headed for the doorways to the gates, from which the roars and snarls and cries of battle were drifting toward them. Saash?
Downstairs.
How’re you holding up?
Killing lizards like it’s going out of style. I don’t like this, Rhi.
You didn’t like the rats either.
I like this a lot less. Rats aren’t self-aware. These creatures are… not that much of the awareness has a chance to get outpost the hate.
They’re trying to kill the ehhif, and the ehhif are defenseless; that defines the situation clearly enough for the moment. ’Ruah?
With T’hom and his people. It’s a good fight, Rhi!
Tell me you’re winning.
More than I could say. We’re killing lots of dinosaurs, though. The trains are helping.
The trams are—
Only one derailed so far, Urruah said cheerfully.
Oh, sweet Dam of everything—! Rhiow ran through the doorway for Track 30—then stopped, realizing that she had lost Arhu. She turned, saw him lingering to stare at one of the fallen saurians.
“Arhu,” she said, “come on, can’t you hear them down there? They need us!”
“I was seeing this before,” he said, looking down at the saurian so oddly that Rhiow ran back to him, wondering if he was about to have some kind of fugue-fit along the lines of the one he had when they were coming back from Downside.
“What?” she said, coming up beside him. “What’s the matter?”
“It changes everything,” he said. “The sixth claw…”
Rhiow blinked, for that had been one of the phrases he had repeated several times as they returned from the caverns. At the time, it had puzzled her, and it did again now, for in Ailurin a “sixth claw” was an extra dewclaw, which polydactyl cats might have; or simply a slang idiom for something useless. Now, though, she looked down at the saurian, another of the splashy-pelted ones done in green and canary yellow, and at the claws that Arhu had been examining.
There were indeed six of them. This by itself was unusual, but not incredibly so. They’ve always come in fives before, but maybe some mutation— Then Rhiow looked more closely at the sixth one.
It looked very much like a thumb.
She licked her nose. “What does it mean?” Rhiow said.
Arhu stared at her, very briefly at a loss. “I don’t know,” he said. “But it’s really important. I couldn’t hear much else in my head almost all the time we came back. It was like someone kept shouting it… or like it was a song—”
His tail was lashing. “Later,” Rhiow said finally. “They’re fighting, down there: they need us. Come on!”
They ran through the door, down the platform for Track 30. The upper track level was hardly recognizable as the familiar, fairly tidy place where Rhiow walked every day. Saurians’ bodies were scattered everywhere. Fortunately there seemed to be few casualties among the wizards, or else they had been taken away already for treatment. There seemed to be no station staff around: Rhiow guessed they were staying locked safely in the towers and workrooms, probably having called the cops … though what they would have told the cops they wanted them for, Rhiow would have given a great deal to hear. At least they seemed to have stopped any further trains from coming in.
Tom and a group of other wizards were gathered nearest the track Thirty worldgate, which seemed to be spewing out saurians like a firehose; as fast as they came out, they died of the neural-inhibitor spell being repeatedly used so that the bodies lay heaped high before the gate, and the new saurians had to clamber over the bodies of their dead or push them aside to leap, screaming, at the wizards. On Tracks 25 and 18, trains were stopped halfway down into the platforms, with saurians caught under their bogies or draped over the fronts of the locomotives; Track 32 had the derailed train, its sideways-skewed front splashed with lizard blood, a heap of dead saurians trapped underneath it, and the faint cries of ehhif coming from inside.
“What kept you?” Tom said as Rhiow arrived, with Arhu in tow.
“A pretty serious reanimation,” Rhiow said. “Some kind of congruency to what’s been trying to push up through here, I suspect. We may find that it resists being patched afterward.”
“We’ll worry about that later. Some of us are busy pulling people out of that wreck, but we’ve got other problems. You’re the gate specialists—what can we do about this? There seem to be thousands more of these creatures waiting to come through, and if we just hang around here doing this all night, people’s memory tracks are going to engrave themselves too deeply to be successfully patched.”
Saash, Rhiow said, can you get some relief? We need you up here.
I’ve got some help already. On my way up.
Urruah—
Heard it. Be right with you.
Saash appeared a few seconds later. “Any ideas how to stop this?” Rhiow said.
Saash shook herself all over and had only the briefest scratch before standing up again, staring at the gate, through which still more saurians were clambering. “How chaotic,” she said to Tom, “are you willing to get?”
“Things are pretty chaotic already at the moment,” he said. “But anything that would put an end to this would be welcome. We’ve got to start patching very soon. If you need to get a little destructive—”
“Not physically.” Saash was getting that same gleam in her eye that Rhiow had seen the other night when she had turned the catenary loose, and Rhiow started to feel wary. “Just think of it this way. The gate might be more like a plant than a tree, though we tend out of habit to refer to a gate’s ‘tree structure.’ A gate has a ‘root’—the anchor-structure of its catenary, way down in the bottom of the Mountain, which fuels itself from whatever power supply Aaurh originally hooked it to: pulsar, white hole, whatever; theoretical distinctions don’t matter just now. A gate has a ‘stalk’—the catenary itself. And then it has a ‘flower’ at the top—the portal locus, where the energy is manipulated through the hyperstring structure, and actual transport takes place.”
“I hadn’t thought of you as having such a horticultural turn of mind,” Tom said, watching with a tight, unhappy look as yet more shrieking saurians climbed through the gate and were snuffed out.