“Casualties?” Rhiow said, very softly.
“Four of us,” Tom said. “We were very lucky it wasn’t a whole lot more. As it is, we’re going to have to find ways to cover their deaths in the line of duty…” Rhiow twitched her tail at the sight of the lines of pain deepening in his face. “Fortunately, there’s nothing forensics can do about wizardry. There will be no trace of the cause in which they died. But their families…” He shook his head.
“What about the park?” Saash said.
“The patch is being arranged now,” Tom said, looking with a sigh at the half-demolished stage, the bodies of saurians festooned all over the skewed and crumpled speaker towers, the orchestra chairs scattered, the heaviest instruments lying overturned. Overhead, police helicopters were starting to circle, directing their bright spotlights down at what must have looked like a most peculiar riot. The streets all around the park on both sides were full of people: not the usual leisurely walk home from a mass concert, but people hurrying to get away from something they couldn’t understand and were very much afraid to. That susurrus of their voices, frightened, bemused, echoed in the stone canyons, mingling with the ratchet of the helicopter rotors overhead.
“Can we really heal all of this?” Urruah said, sounding rather desperate. “Even that?” He looked over toward where the last saurian lay, the one who had made a rather high-calorie meal of the third tehn’hhir.
Tom nodded again, with a tired smile. “We’re starting work more quickly than we could with Grand Centraclass="underline" the time-graft should take perfectly. The gate will never have come rolling down here; he’ll never have become an hors d’oeuvre; all these other people who were hurt or died, won’t have been hurt or died… except for our own people, of course.” It was the practicing wizard’s one weakness where time paradox was involved. If you knew that such patching was possible, you yourself (should you die) could not be included in it; the unconscious mind, refusing to accept the violation of the paradox, would dissolve the reconnection with its former body as often as such reconnection was attempted.
“You’re not going to be able to do much more patching like that, though,” Saash said softly. “The Powers won’t permit so much of it.”
“No,” Tom said. “We’ve got to get busy reweaving the gates so that we can discover the source of all this trouble: it’s Downside… far Downside, I’m afraid. Whatever engineered this attack won’t take its defeat kindly. A worse breakthrough will already be in the planning stages; it’s got to be stopped by more conventional methods … for if you patch time too aggressively in a given area, the presence of so many grafts will start denaturing normal time, so that things that really did happen will start excising themselves. Not good…”
Rhiow shuddered at the thought “I’ll speak to the Perm team,” she said. “We’ve got to get at least a little rest tonight, a few hours’ worth. After that we’ll get at least one access gate up immediately.” She looked around at her team. “And we’ll get ourselves down there and see what the Queen may show us as regards Har’lh’s whereabouts.”
Tom nodded.
“He’s not dead,” Arhu said.
Tom’s head snapped around. Everyone stared at Arhu.
“What?”
“He’s not dead. But they have him.”
“Where is he?”
“In the claws of the Eldest,” said Arhu.
Rhiow shuddered again, harder this time. Should you meet the Lone Power in battle, the Whispering prescribed the correct form of address: Eldest, Fairest and Fallen… greeting and defiance. It was felt that you, like the Gods, might be about to try to defeat that Power, but there was no need to be rude about it.
“How will we find him?” Tom said.
“By going Downside,” said Arhu, with unusual clarity but also a tremulousness in his voice that Rhiow found odd, “and crossing the River of Fire…”
Rhiow blinked at the phrase … then resolutely set that issue aside for later consideration. “Let’s all go home and get some sleep,” she said. “I’ll be along for you all before dawn.”
It was about an hour later when Rhiow slipped through the cat door into a dark apartment.
They’re in bed… good.
But they weren’t. The bedroom door was open: no one was in there. Still, Rhiow heard breathing—
—Iaehh, sitting in a chair, in the dark.
This is odd, Rhiow thought. Can’t he sleep? When he can’t sleep, he sits up and reads till all hours. And where’s Hhuha? Did she have to go away on this business thing?
She went to him, wove around his legs briefly. He didn’t move.
Rhiow reared up, patted his leg with a paw.
Very slowly, Iaehh looked at her…
There was something about the set of his face that frightened Rhiow: it had stopped moving, seeming almost frozen into a mask. For someone whose face was normally so mobile, the effect was bizarre. Rhiow crouched back a little, then jumped up into Iaehh’s lap, the better to be in contact with him.
It was not something she would normally do, but her fear spurred Rhiow on, and very carefully, she slipped her consciousness into the upper levels of Iaehh’s mind. It wasn’t hard; it never was with ehhif—their thoughts tended to be all on the surface, though the imagery was sometimes strange, and the colors could hurt your eyes.
—not much color in the imagery here, though. White tile, on the walls and the floor, and—
— cold, on a cold steel table, Hhuha. And her face—
“No!!” Rhiow yowled, and leapt out of Iaehh’s lap so violently that she scratched him.
He didn’t even bother swearing at her, as he usually did when she forgot her claws. He just sat there, staring down at the floor, and then put his face down in his hands, and started to cry.
“No,” he moaned, “no, no, no, no…”
Rhiow sat there in the dimness, looking at him, starting to go numb.
Hhuha. Dead…
It didn’t matter how. Gone. Arhu’s artless question started ringing in her head: You mean die dead? Like a bug, or an ehhif?
Of course you never think of it happening to one of yaw ehhif, something in the back of her mind said heartlessly. They’re young yet, they’re in their prime; they’ve got years ahead of them. Until something unexpected comes along—a heart attack, or a stroke, or just a taxi that turns a corner too fast because someone in the backseat is trying to stick up the driver—
But, you think, there’ll be plenty of time with them, plenty of time to sort out the possible answers to the question: where do ehhif go when they die? For there has to be somewhere, even though they’ve got only one life.
Doesn’t there?…