“I don’t think we are,” Rhiow said slowly. “I think something severe is intended for us too. And the Lone Power is stepping up Its resistance.” She looked over at Saash. “Better keep an eye on your ehhif,” she said. “Though yours is probably safe: I don’t think you two were as … emotionally attached … as, as Hhuha…”
She had to stop. Just the mention of her name brought the whole complex of scents and sensations that had been associated with her ehhif: the warmth, the silent purr…
The others watched Rhiow, silent, as she crouched there and did her best to master herself. It was hard. Finally she lifted her head again and said, “When will one of the gates be ready?”
“This evening. It’ll be our friend beside Thirty.”
“All right. Load yourselves up with every spell you think you can possibly use … I’ve bought us the right to over-carry.” She licked her nose, swallowed. “Ffairh went right down into the Roots, once upon a time. Not all the way down: there wasn’t need. But he knew at least part of the way and left me directions. At the time, I just thought he was being obsessional about cleaning his mind out before he died. Now I’m not so sure.”
The time when they would have to leave for Downside was approaching. Rhiow had returned to the apartment, hoping to see Iaehh before she left, but he seemed not to have come back, and Rhiow could understand entirely why not The emptiness of the place without Hhuha, the silence, must have been as unbearable for him as for her. But it was all Rhiow had left of her. She sat on the sofa, in Hhuha’s spot, staring at the pile of papers she had left there, saying, “Maybe never again…”
The memory hurt. Nearly all memories hurt, for Rhiow had been with Hhuha since kittenhood, and not until she was offered wizardry, went on her Ordeal, and achieved the power to have more autonomy did she ever begin to contemplate a life without her ehhif. She had started to be very active then, in the way of young wizards everywhere: going out on errantry, sometimes even offplanet; meeting and socializing with other wizards; doing research on gating in general, and specifically on the spell that had come with her Ordeal.
Well, not precisely with it, as if in a package. But not too long before she had gone on the errand that made a wizard of her, there she had found it, like something left on the bottom of her brain, in rags and tatters: bits and pieces of a spell, half-assembled or badly assembled, like someone’s leftovers. She had gone straight into the difficult part of her Ordeal then and had forgotten about this spell until much later: when she found she was fully confirmed in her power as a wizard, still alive after the challenges that had faced her, and not yet on assignment—left with a little time of her own to recover, and look at the world through new eyes. Little by little, she had started piecing the thing together, or trying to, anyway, the way Hhuha would piece together a quilt—
Rhiow flinched from her pain. But the simile was apt, and it was too late now to get rid of the image of Hhuha sitting on the couch, completely surrounded by little strange-shaped pieces of cloth with paper pinned to them: hunting among them for one in particular, turning it around and around to find the place where it properly fit, and then slowly stitching it in place, while Rhiow rolled among the fragments and cuttings and threw them in the air, scuffling and scrabbling among the papers and the fabric scraps. The work on the spell had been very like that, except for the scuffling part.
Most wizards learned to keep a workspace in their minds, a place where a piece of information or a spell could be left to gestate, to be worked on or added to slowly over time. Words in the Speech would lie scattered on the floor of her mind, glowing with attention or dim with disuse; long graceful graphic arabesques, hisses or spits of sound, fragments of thought or imagery. You would come and sit in the dimness sometimes, or stroll through the untidy farrago of scents and sensations, peering at a word shattered to syllables, poking them with your paw to see if they could be coaxed or coerced into some more functional shape: pick them up and carry them around, squint at them to see what they did when conjoined—how the joint shape fulfilled or foiled the separated ones, when a phrase suddenly became part of a sentence, or tried to declare its independence and secede from a paragraph or sequence already fitted together. The tattered spell had been in this kind of shape for ever so long, for Rhiow had no idea what it was trying to be. Part of the problem was that it kept falling into impossible shapes, configurations that seemed to lead nowhere, dead-end reasonings.
Its power requirements when she found it were strange— seeming to come to almost nothing: its power output estimates were weird, too, for they seemed to indicate the kind of result that you would expect from, say, a gate’s catenary—big, dangerous power, likely to burst out without warning. Rhiow wondered if the spell had gotten its signs reversed somehow when she inherited it, for this indication went right against the rules for wizardry. Every spell had its price, and the bigger the spell, the higher the price: magic was as liable to the laws of thermodynamics and conservation of matter and energy as anything else. She could feel those laws, particularly the last one, in her bones at the moment: there was an empty place where her fifth life had been…
When a spell makes no sense, you normally leave it alone and come back to it later. This Rhiow had been doing for two years, idly, with no significant result; now as she looked again at the spell, lying there in its bits and pieces—though they were larger ones than two years ago—it still said nothing to her, except that you could get almost everything for almost nothing, just by saying that you wanted it. It was a spell for the kitten-minded, for those who would chase a reflected sunbeam across the floor and think they had caught it.
She sighed. I’ve done enough of that in my time, Rhiow thought. Here with my ehhif, I thought I’d caught the sunshine under my paw. Peace, and a happy, busy, exciting life: what could go wrong?…
Now I know.
Rhiow sighed again: she didn’t seem able to stop. Slowly she wandered across the broad dark plain of her workspace, making her way to the place where Ffairh’s instructions for the route down into the Mountain lay.
He had always been of a surprisingly visual turn of mind, even for one of the People, precise and carefuclass="underline" the diagram he had left her, of the twisting and turnings through the labyrinthine caverns, looked more like it had been designed using some ehhif’s CAD/CAM program than anything else. Through it all stretched the paths of the catenaries that fed power to the world’s gates: those lines of power were shadowy now, reflecting the nonfunctional status of the catenaries. All of the catenary structures branched out in the upper levels of the Mountain, each feeding one complex of gates. Farther down, in the great depths, they began to come together; and in the greatest depth, which Ffairh knew about but to which even he had never gone, all the “stems” of the catenaries fused together into one mighty trunk, the base of the “tree structure” rooted (as far as Rhiow could tell) in the deepest regions of the Earth’s crust layer, and in a master gateway or portal to their energy source, whatever that was. White hole, Saash had said casually, or black hole, or quasar, or whatever…
Rhiow suspected that it was more than something so merely physical; or there might indeed be such a physical linkage, but coupled to energy sources of very different kinds, in other continua right outside the local sheaf of universes. That had been Ffairh’s suspicion, anyway. Too far out for me, Rhiow had said when he’d told her about that; Ffairh had looked at her, slightly cockeyed as he often did, and had said, You never can tell.