“Yes. Well… what happens if you pull the portal locus off the gate?”
Tom stared at her. “Like pulling the head off a daisy. — What does happen?”
“It should shut the gate right down, no matter who or what reactivated the other end.”
“Should—!” Rhiow said.
“Until a new portal locus can be woven and installed, nothing can use it for transport.”
Tom was silent for a moment. Then he said, “These gates are very old… and were put in place by, well…”
“Gods,” Saash said, twitching her tail in agreement. “Fortunately, they are gods who left us, in the Whispering, and The Book of Night with Moon, very complete instructions on how these gates were constructed in the first place… on the grounds that someday they might need serious repair or reconstruction.”
“Which they will,” Rhiow said, “if you go pulling the portal loci off them! Do you know what kind of energy you’re talking about releasing here? And if you don’t do it in exact synchronization, every one of them at just the same time, one or more of the gates could pull free of its anchors to this universe and just go rolling off across the landscape wherever it liked, and only Iau knows where it would wind up, and in what condition! For all you know it would invert function and start eating anything that the portal locus came in contact with—”
“So we’ll be careful about the synchronization,” Saash said.
Rhiow just stared at her.
“How long would it take to get the gates going again after this?” Tom said.
“With all the available gating experts working together to do the reweave? A day or so.”
“If it’s so easy, why hasn’t it ever been done before?” Rhiow said.
“Because no one ever needed to, since nothing has ever made the gates malfunction this way before,” Saash said, sweetly, “and because there’s never been a problem quite like this! ” She gestured with her tail at the fresh wave of dinosaurs clambering over the heap of already-dead ones.
Tom looked at this, and also at the image of the plan that Saash held in her mind. Rhiow was examining that same image with great disquiet. Theoretically it was sound. Practically, it could be done. But—
“All right,” Tom said. “I’ll sanction it. I know you have misgivings, Rhi—so do I—but we’ve tried every other way to shut these gates down again, and nothing has worked. And the clock is ticking—we’ve got to start patching right away.”
He looked at her expectantly. Rhiow sat down, trying to put her composure in place for whatever spell was going to be required of her. The thought, though, of simply—well, not destroying the gates—but maiming them: it rattled her. They were not entirely just spells. They were not sentient beings, either… but there was still something akin to life about them…
Rhi, Saash said. I hear you. But there’s a lot of life here, too. And our fellow wizards can’t just stand around down here, killing lizards forever: aside from the cost to them in energy, ehhif life is going to be seriously disrupted by the reality of what’s happening if it’s allowed to persist and set in too permanently to be erased. Worse: while this is going on, we can’t go find Har’lh or get any closer to the bottom of what’s been going on…
You’re right, Rhiow said finally. “So what do we need to do?”
“Four gates,” Saash said. “Four of us. We don’t need physical contact; what we’re going to do is brutal enough. Rhi, you know Thirty best. Here’s the portal locus’s pattern.” Rhiow’s mind filled with it, not merely a spell-circle but a filigree sphere of light with several more dimensions implied in the diagram, all made of interwoven words in the Speech, intricate and delicate. “Just hang on to that. See that loose thread there?”
Rhiow did, and she swallowed. She had never noticed any of the gate loci as having loose threads before. “Yes—”
“Hang on to it. Don’t let go until I tell you. Urruah?”
“Ready. Got it.”
“There’s the thread. Bite it in your mind, don’t let go. Arhu?”
“Uh, yeah.”
“See that?”
“Sure.”
“Bite it.”
He held very still, his eyes shifting back and forth, but in his mind he did as he was told.
Saash was quiet for a moment. I’ve got the fourth one, she said at last. I’m going to count backward from four in my head. When I say zero—pull those threads. Not a second before or after.
Right, they all said.
The wizards around them got quiet, watching, except for those still occupied with killing whatever saurians came through the gate.
Four, Saash said.
Three.
Two.
One.
Z—
There was a tremendous rumble that seemed to come from the bowels of the building, working its way upward toward them, shaking. Dust sifted down from the ceiling, light fixtures swung, and fluorescent light tubes snapped and went dark—
And sudden silence felclass="underline" the shaking stopped as if a switch had been thrown.
The gate by Track 30 vanished—simply went away like a blown bubble that pops when a breeze touches it.
Everyone held very still, waiting. But no more saurians came out of the air.
There was a restrained cheer from the wizards standing around, and Tom came over to look at the space where the gate had been. “I don’t feel the catenary,” he said, sounding concerned.
“You wouldn’t be able to,” Saash said, coming over to stand by him. “But I can see it; the hyperstrings leave a traceable pattern in the space they occupy, even without energy flowing. It’s just that the sensory component usually expresses itself through—” She stopped.
“Through what? What’s the matter?”
Saash stood there, gazing into the dark with an expression of increasing horror… then began a low, horribly expressive yowling. To Rhiow it sounded like her tail was caught in a door… except there was no door, and she could feel her friend’s sudden fear and anger.
“What?” Rhiow said. “What—”
Then she felt it, too.
Oh, Iau, no—
Arhu crouched down, looking scared—a more emphatic response than he had revealed even in the face of a ten-ton tyrannosaurus. Urruah stared at him, then at Saash.
“Oh, no,” Rhiow said. “Saash—where’s the Number Three gate?”
Arhu was sinking straight into the concrete.
“It’s come loose before its locus was pulled off,” Saash hissed. “It’s popped out of the matrix—”
There was nothing showing of Arhu now except the tips of his ears, which were rapidly submerging into the floor.
“It’s not your fault,” Saash yowled, “come out of there, you little idiot! Somebody boobytrapped it!”
Saash glared at Tom as Arhu clambered up out of the floor again. “Somebody knew we were going to do that intervention,” Saash said. “One of the gates was left with a minuscule timing imbalance, hard-wired in and left waiting to go off as soon as the portal locus was tampered with. It hasn’t been deactivated … and now everything that was coming out of all the gates before is going to come out of just that one … !”
“My God,” Tom whispered. “Where’s the other gate gone?”