“Come on, everybody,” she said. “Let’s not be more of a target than necessary.” She stared down into the abyss. Perhaps only three-quarters of a mile down now, that point of light shone up through the cold dark air. Amazing, despite how bright it seemed, how little light it gave to their surroundings.
“I’ll switch the stairs back for every hundred vertical feet or so,” Rhiow said, throwing a glance behind her at the balcony where Ith and Arhu still stood, and on the parapet of which Saash and Urruah now teetered. “Ith, can you see the stairs I’ve made?”
A long pause. “No.”
“Then stay between Saash and Arhu, and step where Arhu steps. Come on, hurry up, they’re coming!”
She headed down the stairway in the air, defining it as she went. She was sorry that she couldn’t make the steps deeper, for Ith’s sake, but he was just going to have to cope. Hard enough to be stepping down on the air, keeping the air solid before her, solid behind her, holding her concentration, while at the same time trying to poke at bright fragments of words on the floor of the workspace in her mind, trying to chivvy that spell into getting finished. It would help if the power parameters made more sense. It would help if I didn’t think the stairstep spell was likely to “burn in” halfway down. It would help if…
Urruah jumped down behind her and began to make his way down the air. Arhu came next. Gingerly, Ith followed, tiptoeing delicately in Arhu’s wake and looking now rather nervous, with all twelve of his front claws clenched tight Saash came down after—
—and right up on the balcony behind her jumped the first of the saurians, reaching for her.
She turned, hissed.
Nothing happened.
The saurian lashed out at her sidewise with its tail, trying to knock her off whatever she was standing on. Saash skipped hurriedly down a step or two, knocking into Ith, who half-turned to see what was happening, lost his balance, knocked into Arhu—
Arhu leaned so hard against him that Rhiow, looking over her shoulder, was sure they were both going to fall. Then she realized that Arhu had anticipated the fall, had perhaps seen it with the Eye, and had started reacting to it almost before it happened. His vision is clear now Rhiow thought, almost with pity. The one thing he didn’t dare see was what was clouding it.
The two of them steadied each other, recovered, and headed on down the steps. Saash recovered her own balance and stopped, looked over her shoulder, and said sweetly to the saurian who was balancing precariously on the parapet, “Scared?”
The saurian leapt at her, at the air where it had seen the others step—
—and fell through it, and down: a long, long way down. It was out of sight a long time before it would have hit bottom.
Other saurians that had been climbing up on the parapet as their leader took his first step now paused there, looking down and down into the dark air through which he had fallen. None of them looked particularly eager to try to follow him, though there were hisses and screams of rage enough from them. Saash sat down on the air, lifted a hind leg, and began ostentatiously to wash behind it.
—until a line of red-hot light went by her ear. Her head snapped up as she saw one of the saurians leveling something like the bundle-of-rods-and-box at her again, for a better shot: an energy weapon of some kind. “Oh well,” she said, “hygiene can wait…” She stood up, pausing just long enough for one quick scratch before the saurian managed to fire again. It hit her, squarely—
—and the bolt splashed off like water: she had had a shield-spell ready. Saash flirted her tail, grinned at the saurians, and then loped down the invisible stairs after the others.
Back up on the parapet, the frustrated saurians were dancing and screaming with fury behind them. “Nice idea, Rhi,” Urruah said, as they made their way downward past balconies and platforms that were beginning to fill with staring, astonished saurians of all kinds and sizes. “And a lot easier than working our way through all those corridors full of, uh, spectators…” He glanced at the filling balconies. “Looks like Shea Stadium during a ‘subway series.’ ”
“Now, I didn’t think you were that much of a sports fan,” Rhiow said, padding steadily downward. “With you so crazy for o’hra and all…”
“Oh, well, I don’t follow it… but if a New York team is doing well….”
Rhiow smiled slightly and kept on walking. She was alert for those energy weapons, now. Good thought, Saash, she said, to tempt them a little, see what they had on hand. We’ll all have to be ready for that. I don’t know what kind of range those things have.
Not terribly long, I think. The wizardly component of them can’t be very large, with the people handling the technology not being wizards themselves.
All right. Who’s covering Ith, though?
“I’ll take care of him for the moment,” Urruah said.
“Right.” Rhiow turned in midair to “switch back” her stairway, and started on another downward leg.
“Only one thing, Rhi. Don’t you think we’ve, uh, lost the element of surprise?” Urruah was looking at the next course of balconies as they passed them. They were so full of saurians than some of them were in danger of pushing others who watched off into the abyss.
Rhiow had to laugh just slightly. “Did we ever have it, ’Ruah? We’ve been driven into coming down here in the first place. But in the short term, we haven’t had it since Arhu told us those guards were going to be coming. I don’t have any trouble with sacrificing it at this point. Let’s just have a nice stroll down to where the Fire is … because if we can pull any surprises out down there, that’s where we’re really going to need them.”
They walked down and down the middle of the air, and more and more saurians came crowing to see them. Most of them, Rhiow felt strongly, were not happy about seeing People down there; the buzz of their business, which had been little more than background noise before, now started to scale up into an angry roar. Cries of “Mammals! Kill the mammals!” and “Throw them in the Fire, cleanse our home!” and “Haath, where is Haath?” went up on all sides. Rhiow strolled through it all with as much equanimity as she could manage; but her main concern was for the others, and especially for Ith, as the cries of “Traitor! Traitor! Kill him!—” went up from the teeming balconies. Urruah was as unmoved as if he were sashaying up some East Side avenue on a weekend. Saash glanced around her nervously once or twice, but as they moved out into the center of the great space, and out of the range of the energy weapons that were fired at them once or twice, she grew less concerned, at least to Rhiow’s eye. Arhu was looking more nervous as he went; he seemed to be licking his nose about once a minute. Rhiow had no idea whether this was just general nervousness or due to something the Eye had shown him, and she was unwilling at the moment to make the situation worse by asking. Ith was more of a concern for her, as the cries of rage and betrayal went up all around them; but he stalked along between Arhu and Urruah with his face immobile and his claws at ease—at least Rhiow thought they were at ease. It was going to be a while before she could tell his moods, she thought… if she ever had that much leisure at all.
The cold was now increasing, and the River of Fire was now looking appreciably closer. Once past it, Rhiow thought, once we’ve dealt with the catenary—assuming it can be dealt with in some way that will return it to its proper functioning—we’re going to have to try to get Ith to do something with whatever power we can make available to him… through the spell, or in whatever other way. If Ith does accept the power to call on the Powers That Be to enforce his Choice, to enact his desire… The chances were good, then, that the new Choice would redeem all these saurians retroactively, enabling them to find some other way of life: the Lone One would be cast out again. The trick after that would be to keep It from destroying the whole Mountain, and all the saurians in it, in a fit of pique.