“I’m going to hit you so hard…” Rhiow said to Urruah. “But you’re in line behind sa’Rrahh, right now, and you’ll just have to wait your turn…”
But is this problem just with me? she thought. Is it just that I find offensive the idea that the Last River is actually down at the bottom of a hole in the ground full of lizards?
She sighed at herself then. The Old Downside was a more central reality than her “home” one… and there was no reason, really, why the physical reality of the gates’ main catenary trunk could not itself be a mirror or reflection of the true River elsewhere. Though her own voice, speaking to Arhu, suddenly reminded her: Don’t start getting tangled up in arguments about which reality is more real than the next… And another thought occurred. Often enough, as you worked your way closer to the heart of things, other realities’ myths started to become real around you. This otherworld might be more central than even Ffairh had suspected.
In any case, Saash said, that’s the main catenary trunk: no doubt whatsoever.
With about a million lizards between it and us, Urruah said. Wonderful.
If we’re supposed to be down here to find out what’s the matter with the gates, Saash said, and what’s going wrong with wizardry, I’d say that’s as likely to be a good place to start as any. If we head straight down there and start tracing the branchings outward—sideways, wherever they’re going now—we can start troubleshooting.
Rhiow sighed. Saash had a single-minded practical streak about repair work that sometimes ignored larger issues, like a whole inverted city full of nasty saurians between her and her proposed work area. Or maybe it was just a way to keep from thinking about issues closer to home. Like being on your ninth life… How many of us put off thinking about it until it’s right on top of us? And how do you know if, when you walk through the River the last time, whether you’ve done enough good over the course of your lives to come out on the far bank at all?…
And Rhiow knew perfectly well that the crossing of the River was itself an idiom. She wondered—as Saash had to be wondering—was there time to bid farewell to one’s mortality, one’s felinity? Or did you simply find with your last death that you had drifted to the other side of the divide, and were now marooned in immortality forever, parted from the friends and the world you loved? The Tenth Life, always in the stories a thing yearned-for like the warm-milk-land of which queens sang to their kittens, suddenly now seemed less than desirable—high ground, yes, but barren and cold…
She sighed. “Ith,” she said, turning to him, “we need to get all the way down to the bottom… to where that great fire shines. Do you know a way?”
“Yes,” he said after a moment. But he looked at Arhu when he said it, not at Rhiow.
“Is it a safe way?” Saash said.
“Yes.”
“Is it safe for us?” Urruah said. “Or are your people going to come piling out at us from one of these doorways all of a sudden?”
“In that way,” Ith said, looking from one of them to another, “there are no safe ways into the depths. The deeper you go, the more of my people will begin to fill every hall and stair. There are ways that are less frequented… for a little distance farther.”
Every one of the team had his or her whiskers out, feeling for the sense of a lie; but it was harder to tell with a saurian than it would be with a Person. If not impossible… Rhiow thought, for the “feel” of a lizard’s mind was nothing like a Person’s. We could spellbind him to tell the truth… but it might not help: who knows how truth looks to a saurian? And who wants to waste the energy at the moment? If we fritter away what we’ve brought, and find there’s not enough to do the job we came to do…
She lashed her tail. “Lead on, then,” Rhiow said. She was about to add, “Arhu, watch him,” when she realized that for the past while this had been quite unnecessary. Arhu had been watching Ith very closely indeed, with an expression of which Rhiow could make nothing whatever.
Ith stepped out, with Arhu behind, and the others following: downward they went again, down through long dark galleries, and down still longer stairs.
Ith stopped at the bottom of one stairway, near where it gave out onto yet another balcony. He peered out into the light, then stepped forward boldly. “Nothing funny, now,” Urruah hissed, coming up behind him hurriedly, “or I’ll unzip you, snake.”
Ith looked cooly at Urruah. “What is ‘funny,’ ” he said, “about looking at the Fire? Little enough glimpse we get of it, little enough we feel of it.” He gazed down into the chasm.
“And little enough warmth you get out of it, either,” Saash muttered, putting her head just far enough above the parapet to look down into the dim, buzzing, hissing chasm. “Why is it so cold down here? It’s not normal. You usually get a steady rise in temperature as you head into the deeper crustal regions.”
“My guess?” Urruah said. “It’s being suppressed, somehow … to a purpose. You heard those guys before. If people are comfortable the way they are, you expect them to be good for much inflaming, much striving against another species?” He turned to Ith. “Am I right?”
A pause. “The near sight of the Fire is for the chosen of the Great One, of his Sixth Claw,” Ith said, “as a reward, and a promise of what is to come, when we all stride under the sun again. The cold is a test and makes us stronger to bear what our forefathers could not have borne, and died trying to.”
Arhu was leaning past Saash to gaze down into the teeming depths, toward the terraces and balconies far below them, where life went on, seemingly tiny, unendingly busy. “There’s so many of you,” he said. “What do you— What do you eat?”
Ith looked at him. “The flesh of the sacrificed,” he said, his voice quite flat. “Many are hatched, and caused to be hatched, more and more each year, as the time of the Climacteric draws near. The old words speak of the time when the Promised One shall come and lead us forth; but there can be no going until we first hatch out uncounted numbers to fall in the last battle that will bring us out free, under the sky. The best and the strongest, the Great One’s warriors in their hundreds of thousands, are fed well against that day that is soon to come. The rest of us live to serve them, to bring the day closer; and when our work is done … we find our rest within the warriors, who will carry our flesh to battle within their own, and our spirits with them. So the Great One says.”
Rhiow shuddered. An accelerated breeding program, half a species being raised as food for the other half… It was worse, in its way, than the poor creature she had seen once before, being devoured by its starving comrades. Getting a little extra ration, the same way she might beg Hhuha for some of that smoked salmon…
Hhuha. The pain of her loss hit Rhiow again, hard, so that she had to crouch down and just deal with it for a few seconds. When she felt well enough to stand up once more, she found the others staring at her, and Ith as well.
“What exactly do you want here?” Ith said at last.
Saash threw a look at Rhiow that suggested she didn’t think Rhiow needed to be quizzed by lizards at the moment “There are other worlds besides this one,” Saash said.
A pause. “That much we know,” Ith said. “The Great One has spoken of it And others,” he added, a little thoughtfully; there was not quite the dogmatic sound to the addition that there had been to other such statements.