“Please,” Rhiow said. She had been trying not to think about that Now, abruptly, she could feel all the weight of it pressing on her head again. As if I need this now! This isn’t fair—
Urruah looked up and suddenly stopped. Rhiow plowed into him and hissed; Saash ran into her but held very still, following Urruah’s glance. Rhiow looked up, too.
“Is it just me,” Urruah said, “… or does that look like a perfectly straight line, carved from the top of this tunnel all the way down?”
Rhiow stared at it—
The light ahead of them went out.
They all stood stock still, not daring to move, hardly daring to breathe.
No sound came from above but the steady link, link, tink, tink…
And there were stumps of the stalagmites and stalactites back there, Saash said suddenly, but where were the leftover pieces? They should have been all over the place. And what about your stone bubbles? Where were the little stones that should have been left lying around?…
Rhiow licked her nose, licked it again. They stood there blind in the dark; even People must have some light to see, and the darkness was now absolute.
Arhu! Rhiow said inwardly.
No answer.
Arhu!!
I’m trying to sidle, he said silently, and I can’t.
But what for? Rhiow said.
It’s going to cause you tremendous trouble to try to sidle down here; there’s too much interference from the catenaries, even when they’re down, Saash said. Stay still. What is it?
There was a silence, and then Arhu said, They’re down here. I put the light out. They didn’t see me.
In absolute silence, Rhiow and the others inched their way forward, going by memory of what the corridor had been like before the light failed. Rhiow’s heart was hammering, but at least this time the light had gone out for a reason she didn’t mind.
“They?”
I hear five of them breathing, Arhu said. They’re not faraway.
Rhiow and Saash and Urruah crept forward. Then something tickled Rhiow’s nose, and she almost sneezed. It was Arhu’s tail, whipping from side to side.
Which way? Rhiow said, as soon as she got control of her nose again.
Straightforward. Then right. See that? It’s faint—
It was: Rhiow could hardly see it at all. From ahead and to the right, and sharply downward, came the reflection of a diffuse light, reddish, seeming as faint as their own had. It leached the color out of everything: there was nothing to be seen by it but furry contours in dull red and black. In utter silence, they crept closer; and in her mind, Rhiow felt the familiar contours of the neural-inhibitor spell, felt for its trigger, that last word. She licked her nose.
Tink. Tink. Tink. Tink…
A pause, then a peculiar hissing sound, followed by the sound of stone falling on stone, breaking. And then the hissing voice, like another version of the sound they had heard first.
“Done…”
“Done. We have finished what we were told we must do in this work time.”
“I’m hungry.”
“There will be no food now.”
“But we will eat later.”
“How much later…”
“The Master will give us something in time. He gave us food not-long-ago.”
“That was good.”
“It was. And there’ll be much more.”
“There will be. When the work is done, there will be as much to eat as anyone wants.”
There was a kind of sigh from all of the speakers after this. Arhu moved a little forward, during it, and Rhiow cautiously went after him, slinking low, knowing that behind her the others were doing the same. The source of the light was getting stronger, rightward and downward: Rhiow could now clearly see Arhu silhouetted against it He was bristling.
“How much farther must we drive this tunnel?”
A silence, then sss, sss, sss, as if someone was counting. “Three lengths. Perhaps as many as four: there’s another chamber to meet, upward, and another baffle to put in place. Then the power-guide that supplies that gate will be cut off, and the guide can be redirected to meet the others, below.”
“Good, good,” the others breathed.
“That will be the last one for a little while. All the others have been damaged by the sundwellers. The Master must restore them. Then we may begin work again, and finish the new tunnels, and wall up the old ones. It’s for this we were given the Claw. The sundwellers will not come here again.”
There was much nasty hissing laughter at that. Arhu took the opportunity to move forward, very quickly, so quickly that Rhiow was afraid he was slipping on the steep downward slope. But he was well braced, so that when Rhiow came up against him, he didn’t move, and made no sound. Behind her, Saash and Urruah came up against Rhiow as welclass="underline" she braced herself so as to put no further pressure on Arhu. The four of them looked around the corner, into the red light.
Another of the spherical chambers lay around the comer of the passage. Or at least it had been spherical to start with. One side of it had been carved out into a perfectly smooth rectangular doorway, breaking through into another chamber off to Rhiow’s left as she looked through the opening. In that chamber, lying curled, or sitting hunched, were five saurians: two deinonychi and three smaller ones that looked like some kind of miniature tyrannosaur. Their hides were patterned, though with what colors it was impossible to tell in this lighting. On the floor in front of them lay… Rhiow stared at them, wondering just what they were. They were made of metaclass="underline" three of them looked like long bundles of rods, some of the rods polished, some of them brushed to a matte finish. A fourth device was a small box that was the source of the red light, without it being apparent in any way exactly how the light was getting out of it—the surface of the box was dark, but brightness lay around it.
The mini-tyrannosaurus nearest the carven door had been looking through the doorway into the darkness. Now it turned away and picked up one of the bundles of rods in its claws. As it did, the bundle came alive with a stuttering, glittering light, dull red like that which came from the box, though in a sharper mode: sparks of it ran up and down the metal rods. The saurian clutched the rods in one claw, ran its other claw down one of the sills of the door. More of that red light followed the stroke, as if it had flowed unseen through the body of the tyrannosaur and up to the stone; from the stone, a fine powder sifted down, remnants of some slight polishing of the surface. The other saurians watched, keeping very still but looking intent. From the rods came a soft, tiny sound: Tink. Tink. Tink. Tink…
The sixth claw… Arhu said silently. Rhiow looked where he did, and saw that other claw, the “thumb,” bracing the bundle of rods exactly as a human’s thumb would have. Her tail twitched at the sight of a saurian using a tool, something half-mechanical and, from the look of it, possibly half-wizardly. If an ehhif came in and found his houff using the computer, she thought, I bet he would feel like this.… At the same time, she found herself thinking of many a pothole crew she had seen on the New York streets in her time—one ehhif working, four of them standing around and watching him work—and suspected that she might have stumbled upon a very minor way in which her home universe echoed this one…