Rhiow looked at him in shock. “A loose transit gate,” she said, “normally inheres to the area of the greatest density of thought and anchors there. The place where the most minds are packed the most closely together—”
“Dear Iau up a tree,” Urruah whispered. They all stared at him.
He looked at them, open-eyed with horror.
“Tonight? The biggest concentration of minds?” Urruah said. “It’s in the Sheep Meadow…’ ”
Urruah ran out. “Hurry up and start patching,” Tom said to several of the wizards who had been working with him; and he, and Rhiow, and Saash, and Arhu, and half the rest of the wizards in the place ran after him.
Urruah was making for the sidewalk, which was well enough away from any of the gates inside to prevent adverse effects. Maybe he didn’t really need to, under the circumstances, but Rhiow, at the moment, thought it was probably better to be safe than sorry. There were enough people sorry already.
Sabotage… Rhiow thought again, as she and Arhu raced, along with the others, past the waiting room. As if from inside…
Arhu glanced over at the mess that still lay all about in the waiting room as they passed. “That was it,” Arhu said to her, fierce, his panic of a few moments ago now replaced with a rush of angry satisfaction and aliveness the like of which Rhiow had never yet sensed in him. “That was what I saw … the first night. That came out. Even the rats ran away from it. And I—” He winced as they ran out the front doors with the others, and then said, “We’re even now. It wasn’t going to do that to me twice.”
“Arhu,” Rhiow said, while Urruah and Tom paced out a large transit circle—it glowed in the sidewalk behind them as they paced, causing interested looks from the passing pedestrians—“when you work with words the way wizards do, precision is important. Something like that was what you saw? Or, that was what you saw? Which is it?”
He looked at her with utter astonishment. “You mean— you think there’s another?”
“How would I know? I want to know what you meant.”
“Ready,” Tom said. “Everybody in here—hurry up!”
They jumped into the circle with Tom and Urruah and the other wizards. “You sure of these coordinates?” Tom was saying to Urruah.
“They’re ‘backstage,’ ” Urruah said. “The spot was empty yesterday. No guarantees for tonight—but it’s got better odds of being empty than anywhere else in the meadow tonight. You’ve got a ‘bumper’ on this, to keep us from accidentally coexisting with anybody—”
“Yeah, but who knows what it’s going to do in such a densely populated area? We’ve got to take the chance. Whatever our spell will do if it malfunctions, it won’t be as bad as what’s already happening—”
There was no arguing with that. Tom said three words and the circle flamed up into life, then a fourth.
Wham!
A huge displacement of air as all their masses were subtracted from the space outside Grand Central; and Slam! an explosion of air outward as they all appeared—
—and heard a blast of sound that staggered them all— partly from the amplification, partly from how close they all were to the stage. The orchestra was playing a massive, deliberate accompaniment to three voices—two lower, one high—that wound forcefully and delicately about one another, scaling continually upward through slow changes of key. Rhiow found herself briefly impinging on the outskirts of Urruah’s mind as on those of all the others in the transit circle there—had been no time to install me usual filters— and was drowned in his instant recognition and delight, even in these horrible circumstances, at the perfection of the sound coming from two of the three tehn’hhirs, and a third invited guest, the new young ssoh’pra-oh from the Met, in the great finale of a work called Ffauwst. Two of the voices argued—the Lone One and a wizard, in the throes of a struggle for the wizard’s soul—but the third and highest, the voice of a young and invincibly innocent queen, called on the bright Powers for aid: and (said Urruah’s memory) the aid came—
Let it be an omen! Rhiow thought desperately as they broke the circle and looked around them. A few security people and police noticed them, started coming toward them—
The human wizards, prepared, all went sidled in a whisker’s twitch. Rhiow and her team did, too, and they all hurried past the extremely confused policemen and security people to get around to one side of the stage and get a clearer view—
It was hard, but they managed to clamber up among some sound gear, and from that viewpoint stared out into the night. The Sheep Meadow was full, absolutely full of ehhif, only dimly seen in the light from the stage. They sat on blankets and in portable chairs; the smell of food and drink was everywhere, and Rhiow threw a concerned look at Arhu— but for once he had his mind on other things. His ears were twitching; he stared toward one side of the meadow—
“Where’s the gate?” Tom was whispering.
“Not here yet,” Saash said. “The locus is still moving—”
A faint sound could be heard now, something different from the susurrus of more than a hundred thousand bodies in one place. It was hard to tell just what it was with this mighty blast of focused sound, both real and amplified, coming from the orchestra. Rhiow glanced at the little round ehhif whom she had seen leading them earlier; now he was in the kind of black-and-white clothes that ehhif males wore for ceremonial these days, and conducting the orchestra as if he heard nothing whatever but bis music. Perhaps he didn’t. But there was more sound than music coming from the edges of the meadow. A rustling, a sound like the distant rush of wind—
The three on the stage—a tall, pale, dark-haired tom-ehhif, a shorter tom, more tan but also dark-haired, both in the black-and-white clothes, and a tall, beautiful, dark-skinned queen-ehhif in a dress glittering like starlit night— were no more aware of anything amiss than the conductor. The toms, singing the Lone Power and the doomed wizard, cursed one another melodiously; the queen, ignoring them both, relentlessly declared her own salvation, requiring the aid of the Powers That Be. In a final blast of pure sound, a chord in three perfect notes, all three took up their fates, to the accompaniment of a final, mighty orchestral crash.
The ehhif in the audience roared approval and applauded, a sound like the sea on the shore, rolling from one side of the great space to the other: the tehn’hhirs and the ssoh’pra-oh took their bows and walked off the stage, almost close enough for Rhiow to have reached out with a claw and snagged the ssoh’pra-oh’s gown. But out at the edge of that sound, over toward the east side of the park, something was going wrong. The sound leaned up and up in pitch as the queen’s voice had. Rhiow, Urruah, Arhu, Tom, all the wizards looked that way, straining to see what was happening—
“It’s coming,” Arhu said.
“What?” Rhiow hissed, as the third tehn’hhir, the big furry one Urruah had shown her the other day, went up the stairs to the stage past her, and more applause rolled across the meadow at the sight of him. He too was resplendent in the ceremonial black and white now, with a long white scarf around his neck, and he once again held the scrap of cloth he had used to wipe his face in the heat. This he waved at the conductor: once more the music began. There was a further rush of applause just at the sound of it—