“Unless it’s unavoidable, no,” Rhiow said, making her way slowly toward the black stone wall. “We’ll just walk on it.” She glanced at Arhu.
He shrugged his tail back. “All I know is that we have to cross it,” he said. “Nobody told me we had to go through. 1 think that’s later.”
“Oh, wonderful,” Urruah said.
Rhiow stepped down, and down, those last few steps … and hesitatingly put one paw down on the surface of the bound catenary, with her skywalk spell laid just over the surface. The sensation was most unpleasant. The spell, applied to the surface of the catenary, felt not solid, but full of holes, like chicken wire; through it, the dreadful forces of the catenary sizzled and prickled under Rhiow’s paws, leaving her with the sense that it would simply love to dissolve her, like sugar in coffee. All her fur stood on end, though that was no surprise: the lonization of the air around the catenary was fierce, and the ozone smell reminded her of the Grand Central upper level, some days … almost a homely smell, after the last few hours. She looked over her shoulder at Saash and the others. “It works,” she said, “but you won’t like it. Let’s get it over with.”
Rhiow led the way toward the wall; the others followed, Arhu making the path for himself and Ith. As Ith stepped down onto the fire, he teetered in surprise, and Arhu braced him. “How does this feel to you?” Arhu said.
He stood quite still for a moment. “This is not as it should be,” he said flatly. “There should be true Fire here.” And he looked down at the catenary. “This is so bound and changed from how it was once.” He looked up. “As are my people. I suppose I should not be surprised.”
Rhiow looked at him, then turned again. “Come on,” she said, and went up to the black stone wall. She paused, put up a paw.
The paw went through it. Rhiow glanced over her shoulder at Saash. “You were right,” she said. “It’s tampered with everything else It can get Its paws on, but It hasn’t been able to change science that much … not yet.”
“Not until It makes some other, more basic changes first,” Saash said, looking down into the catenary.
Rhiow lashed her tail. “Let’s see that It doesn’t get the chance.”
They passed through the wall. It didn’t feel the way wall-walking usually did. The structure of the wall seemed to buzz and hum around them with the violent energy of the catenary so nearby. It was a long walk through it, though; it felt to Rhiow like a long slog through a thick bank of black smoke that was trying to resist her as she came—smoke that hummed like bees. She found herself trying to hold her breath, trying not to breathe the stuff, lest that humming should get inside her, drown her thoughts. Don’t worry about it. One step at a time, one paw in front of the next…
Slowly the air before her began to clear. She came out into another open space, looked up and around it… and her jaw dropped in surprise. Behind her, Saash came out of the cloud-wall, paused.
It was the main concourse from Grand Central. But huge … ten times its normal size; so that, despite the fact that all their bodies were those of People of the ancient world, once again Rhiow and her team were reduced to the scale of People in New York. Four cats and a toy dinosaur came slowly out into the great dark space, illuminated only by the bound-down catenary that ran through it, flowing down a chasm carved straight through the floor, from the Forty-second Street doors to where the escalators to the Met-Life building would normally have headed upward. The architecture of the genuine Terminal was perfectly mimicked, but all in black—matte black or black that gleamed. In the center of the concourse, the round information booth with its spherical clock was duplicated, but all in blind black stone: no bell tolled, no voice spoke. Above, over blind windows that admitted no light, the great arched ceiling rose all dark, and never a star gleamed in it. Rhiow, looking at it, got the feeling that stars might once have gleamed there … until something ate them. It was more a tomb than a terminal.
Rhiow looked down at the catenary’s flow through the concourse. There were no escalators at the far side: only a great double stairway reaching downward, and the catenary flowed down between them, cascading out of sight. In Rhiow’s world, stairs that led in this direction would have taken you to the Metro-North commissary and the lower-level workshops. She doubted that here they went anywhere so mundane.
“Down?” Saash said, her voice falling small in that great silence.
Rhiow glanced at Arhu. He said, “Follow the Fire.”
They went to the stairways, stood at the top of them, and Rhiow realized that these were the originals of many stairs copied farther up in the structure of this dark Manhattan. The steps were tall, suited to saurians, but to no other life forms. “Looks like a long way down,” Saash said.
“I’m sure it’s meant to be. Let’s go.”
They went down the stairs, taking them as quickly as was comfortable … which wasn’t very. A long way, they went. On their left, since they had taken the right-hand stair, the River of Fire flowed down in cascade after cascade, its power seeming to burn more deadly and more bright the farther down they went: there was no point in looking toward it for consolation in the darkness—it hurt. And the cold grew and grew. There were no other landmarks to judge by—only, when they turned around to look, the stair seeming to go up to vanishing point behind them, and down to vanishing point ahead. For Rhiow this became another of those periods that seemed to go on forever … and it’s meant to, she thought. “This is meant to disorient us,” she said to the others. “Don’t let it. Do what you have to do to stay alert. Sing, tell stories—” She wished then that she hadn’t said “sing,” for Urruah started.
Saash promptly hit him.
“Thank you,” Rhiow said softly, and kept walking.
“Oh. Well, can I tell the one about the—”
“No,” Rhiow said.
Arhu watched this with some bemusement; so did Ith. “Don’t get nun started,” Saash said. “He makes puns. Terrible ones.”
“Oh, no,” Arhu said. “I wish we were down…”
“But we are” Ith said, sounding a little bemused.
Arhu stared. “He’s right.”
And so it was. All of them bunked as Arhu ran on down past them and to what seemed, mercifully, a flat area.
Did you see that? Saash said. He wished… and it was so. This place may be a lot more malleable than we thought. But it makes sense. If the laws of wizardry are being changed, if things are influx down here…
Rhiow swallowed at that thought, and as she came down the last of the steps into the flat area, looked quickly into the workspace in the back of her mind.
A great circle lay there, almost complete—dark patches filling themselves in almost as she watched.
The spell the Whisperer’s still working on, she thought That’s what Arhu said.
She stopped, breathed in and out, tried to center herself, and looked around her. They stood at the edge of a broad, dark plain, not smooth; here for the first time there was some sense of texture. Great outcroppings and stanchions of stone, blocks upthrust from the floor, stood all about: a little stone forest. And thrusting up out of the middle of it…
Rhiow had to simply sit down and look from one side to the other, to try to take it all in. Roots … huge roots, each one of which was the size of a skyscraper, an Empire State Building … spreading practically from one side of vision to the other: gnarled, tremendous, brown-barked, reaching up into a single mighty column that towered up and up out of sight. This is what it’s like when you try to perceive an archetype, Rhiow thought, looking left toward what would have been a horizon in the real world, and right… and seeing nothing but the massive union of roots, reaching upward, lost in the vast darkness.