The other trick will be getting Ith to do this in the first place. For Rhiow was by no means convinced that he was as yet committed. She remembered when she had thought that all this was going to hinge on Arhu, one way or another. How simple it all looked then.
Urruah approached her as she was making her way down in the lead, and paced alongside her. “How’re you holding up?”
Rhiow sighed. “As well as might be expected, with about a million snakes yelling for my blood.”
“Yeah,” Urruah said. “Charming.”
“How’s our problem child?”
“Which one? The one with the fur or the one with the scales?”
Rhiow had to chuckle. “Both.”
“Arhu’s covering for Ith at the moment… taking good care of him, I’d say.”
“Have they been talking?”
“More like, have they ever stopped? I don’t think Hrau’f the Silent herself could shut them up if she came down and showed them a diagram of what quiet looked like.” He chuckled a little. “Makes you wonder if they’re related somehow.”
“Oh, I’m sure.” Rhiow made a slightly sardonic face.
Urruah echoed it as they walked down what was now an invisible spiral staircase into the final depths: Rhiow had gotten tired of the switchback pattern. “Still,” he said. “Heard a funny story from Ehef, once. Those two could almost make me believe it. Would you believe, Ehef told me that ehhif have a legend that cats were actually made out of snakes—”
And the pain hit Rhiow worse than ever, so that for a moment she had to simply stop and try to get hold of herself again. It was an old, old memory: Hhuha reaching down and pressing Rhiow’s ears right down against her head, not so it hurt, though, and pulling the comers of her eyes back a little so they looked slanty, and saying, “Snake!”
Surprised at the sudden strange handling, Rhiow had hissed. Iaehh had looked over at them and said, “See that, you’re right. Better be glad she’s not a poisonous snake.”
Rhiow had privately decided to go use the hiouh box, come back and coax Iaehh into picking her up—and then jump down, giving him a good scratch or so with the hind legs to let him find out firsthand how nonpoisonous she was. Within minutes she had forgotten, of course: normally Rhiow was too good-natured for that kind of thing.
But now she remembered—and felt the pain again—and thought, Ridiculous idea. People made out of snakes.
Except…
She licked her nose as she walked downward, into the cold and the reflected fire.
Except that there is something to it. Somewhere in the dim past, on the strictly evolutional path, we must have a comman ancestor. No one made cats out of snakes, any more than they made humans out of monkeys. But we’re related.
We’re all related.
“We’re close,” Urruah said quietly.
Rhiow blinked, looking down: she had been running mostly on autopilot. They were indeed very near the bottom of the chasm now, the place where it all came to a point at last. The cold was growing bitter. Maybe a few hundred yards below, all the black basalt walls around them began to lose the ornate carving that had characterized them farther up: the last of the balconies, crowded with the mini-tyrannosauruses screaming abuse, were now perhaps fifty yards above. Below was not so much a river as a pool of blazing light that filled the whole bottom of the chasm to unknown depth. It gave almost no heat and burned the eyes to look at it. But only by looking steadily, tearing and squinting, could Rhiow see the energy-flow, the current of it, like streams of paler lightning in the main body of a river of lightning. The terrible energy was still bound as it would have been in a normally functioning catenary, and to Rhiow’s trained eye, it looked more tightly bound than it would have been—as if something perhaps was a little afraid of it?…
Very tight indeed, Saash said to Rhiow silently, from behind. Something’s pegged it down in this configuration on purpose and is afraid the cinctures holding the energy in catenary configuration will come completely loose if it’s interfered with. There was a certain grim humor in her thought.
And would it?
Almost certainly. In fact, I’m counting on it.
What??
I believe that if I have to, I can release the bonds that hold the catenary together as a controlled flow… and bust the entire energy of the thing loose. Despite the extra safeguards that Someone has tried to put up around it…
The thought of even one of the minor catenaries getting loose in that fashion had been enough to raise the fur on Rhiow’s back. But the thought of the master going—you might as well drop a star into the heart of the Mountain.
Exactly, Saash said, and smiled that grim grin again. Can you imagine even the Lone Power being able to hang on to a physical shape under such circumstances? For to interact with us at all, it has to be at least somewhat physical. If we let the trunk catenary loose, especially in its present deformed state, the combined release and backlash would destroy everything here. And destroy Earth’s worldgating system. Now, that would be a nuisance—
You have a talent for understatement! Urruah said from behind them.
But it will stop all this, Saash said, quite cool, if there’s nothing else we can do. If the Lone One pulls off what It’s planning down here, there’s a lot more than just Earth’s well-being at stake. Thousands, maybe millions of planets, planes, and continua—you want to take responsibility for letting them be overrun by trillions of crazed warrior lizards? If it looks like we’re all going to be taken out of commission before what Rhiow has in mind for Ith happens, I’m going to let the catenary loose… and watch the fireworks. For about a millisecond, she added, wry.
They stood only a few yards above the flow now, and Rhiow looked at it, squinting down until her vision was almost all one after-image, trying to see which way the flow went. It seems to lead out through the stone, Rhiow said.
It may do exactly that, said Saash, but it seems more likely to me that the stone on that side is an illusion. It’s going to be tough for matter to coexist with this energy in the same space. Side by side, yes. But intermingling? Highly unlikely.
Rhiow tended to agree.
“So what do we do?” Urruah said.
Rhiow threw a look over her shoulder at Arhu, who was standing by Ith again, as if caught in mid-conversation. Arhu looked at the stone wall.
Rhiow shrugged her tail. “We follow it,” she said, and headed along in the direction in which the flow through the catenary was going, very close above the surface.
“You don’t want us to get down in it—” Saash said, now sounding actively nervous.