Urruah opened his mouth. Rhiow quietly lifted one massive paw and put a razory claw right into that part of his tail that was twitching above the stone. Urruah turned, snarling, and Rhiow made a sorry-it-was-an-accident face at him, which was excuse enough for the moment and caused Urruah to subside for now.
“What others?” Saash said.
“You mean other worlds?” Urruah said.
“Yes, others,” said Ith, and Rhiow sighed, wishing she had put the claw in harder. “A hundred others, a thousand … all ours for the taking.”
“By the gates,” Saash said softly. “Using them not only for transit… but to change the nature of the species itself. Genetic manipulation … wizardry changes to the body and the spirit Permanent shapechange.”
Rhiow shuddered again. Such changes, from the wizardry point of view anyway, were both unethical and illegal; by and large, any given species had good reason to be the way it was, and there was no telling what chaos and destruction could be wrought in it by permanently shifting its mind-body structure.
“We must become strong and hard, the Great One has told us,” Ith said. “We must not allow ourselves to succumb to the same forces that struck down our ancient mothers and fathers. When we are strong beyond any strength known by our kind before, when we no longer need air to breathe, or warmth to live, or even flesh to eat, then we will take everything that is for our own.”
“But I thought what you wanted was the warmth,” Arhu said then, sounding (correctly, Rhiow thought) confused. “And enough to eat…”
Ith stopped and blinked, as if coming up against this contradiction for the first time. Rhiow watched with covert satisfaction, for what she had heard Ith describing, without comprehension, was a favorite tactic of the Lone One— promise a species something better than what it had, then (after It has Its way) strip away whatever It had promised, leaving them with nothing at all. Finally Ith said, “That desire is only for this while: a remnant of the ancient way of life. Afterward … when we have come to our full strength, when we are no longer children, we will put aside the things of childhood and take our place as rulers of otherwhere— striding from reality to reality, making ours the misused territories of others, taking again what should have been ours from the start, had history gone as it should have. Warmer stars than this one will look down on us, strange skies and faraway nights; we will leave our people’s cradle and never find a grave. No cold will be cold enough to freeze the spirit in us again; no night will be dark enough. We will survive.”
More dogma, Rhiow thought, but does he know it is? I doubt it.
“Just who is this ‘Great One’?” Urruah said after a moment.
“The lord of our people,” said Ith, “who came to us in ancient days. The greatest of us all, the strongest and wisest, who is never cold and never hungry: the One who can never die…”
Arhu’s head snapped right around at that. “And he has sent us the sixth claw,” Ith said, “with which to build and make the mighty works he envisions. And more than that: he has sent us his own Claw, his Sixth Claw, Haath the warrior, who does the Great One’s will and teaches us his meaning. It is Haath who will be our savior, the Great One’s champion; he will lead us in the Climacteric, up into the sun, into the battle across the warm worlds that await us. It will be glorious to die in his company: those who do will never lose the warmth, they will bask forever.”
“How nice for you,” Saash murmured. Rhiow glanced at her with slight amusement, but then turned back to Ith and said something that had suddenly occurred to her.
“Why don’t you sound very happy about all this?”
Ith looked at her and for the first time produced an expression that Rhiow was sure she was reading correctly: surprise and fear. “I am… happy,” he said, and Rhiow simply wanted to laugh out loud at the transparency of the lie. “Who of our people would not be, at the great fate that awaits us?”
His voice started to rise. “We will take back what was once ours. Haath the valiant will lead us; and before him in fire and terror will go the Great One, the deathless Lord. We will come out into the sun and walk in the warmth, and all other life will flee before us—”
Arhu, though, was slipping up behind him, watching Ith’s tail lash. For a moment Rhiow thought Arhu was having a flashback to kittenhood (not that he was that far out of it) and was going to jump on the saurian’s tail; she held her breath briefly—Ith was, after all, formidably clawed and about ten feet high at the shoulder… But at the same time Arhu’s eyes met Rhiow’s and indicated something behind her, in the shadows…
The first saurian that leapt out at them met, not a spell, but half a ton of Urruah, claws out, snarling; right for its throat he went, and down they went together in a kicking, squalling heap. The others hesitated a second at the sight of the monster that had gone for their leader; the hesitation killed them, for Saash opened her mouth and hissed. Bang!—
—gore everywhere, chill-smelling and foul, from the second of the saurians. Saash staggered with the backlash from the spell as the third saurian came at her: Rhiow aimed the same spell at it, let it go. The problem with the limited version was that you had to be careful where you aimed—and indeed, at the moment there was reason: Ith was still there, now crowded away against a wall. The other saurians were ignoring him, going for Rhiow and her team, but they would have little chance as long as the spell lasted. That’s the problem, of course, she thought as she used it for the second time, and the third, and the fourth, and as Urruah got up, his jaws running with the pinkish-tinged saurian blood, and launched himself at another saurian, a deinonychus that was in the act of jumping at Saash from behind. Rhiow turned away from that one, which she had targeted, spun—
—something hit her: she went down. A horrible image of jaws twice as long as her head, of the perfectly candy-pink flesh inside that mouth, and set in it, about a hundred teeth of an absolutely snowy white, three times the size of any of hers, and all of those teeth snapping at her face— Rhiow yowled, as much in fury as fear; then ducked under the lower jaw, found the tender throat muscles, and bit, bit hard, to choke rather than to pierce for blood, while lower down she snuggled herself right in between the scrabbling clawed forelimbs—not a deinonychus, thank you, Iau—put her hind legs where they would do the most good, right against the creature’s belly, and began to kick. It was armored there but not enough to do it any good; the plating began to come away, she felt the wetness spill out and heard the scream try to push its way out past her jaws. She wouldn’t let it go and wouldn’t let the air in: she let the rage bubble up in her, just this once, at the world that had been so cruel to her of late, and to which, just this once, she could justifiably be cruel back.
The struggling and jerking against her body began to grow feeble. It took a long time; it would, with lizard meat, Rhiow thought, but all the same she wouldn’t let go. This body’s instincts were in control for the moment and knew better than to let go of prey just because it seemed to have stopped moving. She flopped down over her kill and lay there, biting, biting hard, like a tom “biting for the tenth life” in a fight with another Person; and finally, when there had been no movement for a while, Rhiow opened her eyes, panting through her nose, but still hanging on.
Nothing else moved except with the sporadic twitching of saurian tissue too recently dead to know it yet. She mistrusted it; she hung on a little bit longer. Around Rhiow, the others were getting up, shaking themselves off, and grooming … though mostly for composure, at the moment.