“I know,” Rhiow said. “If she only—”
“What’s that?” Siffha’h said suddenly from the other side of the platform, pushing herself up again. “Something’s coming—”
Everyone looked up in alarm. Mostly they did it just in time to see the air in the middle of the platform stretch and sheen like pulled plastic wrap, then peel apart.
A dinosaur stepped out.
A casual viewer could have been forgiven for mistaking it for a dinosaur, at any rate. It stood about six feet high at the shoulder, and its long neck arched up another couple of feet to terminate in a long, lean, toothy muzzle: a pair of well-made and delicate forelegs with six claws each were folded decorously in front of the creature’s chest. It stood mostly upright on its long-clawed hind legs, and a tail about five feet long lashed out behind it, helping it keep its balance. The shadowy lighting down here did not show off to best advantage the subtly patterned hide patched in red and orange: but somehow the small golden eye found the light, and kept it.
The London team stared at this apparition in astonishment: the saurian bowed to them gracefully, bobbing forward and back.“I am on errantry,” it said in a soft hissing voice, “and I greet you.”
“You’re well met on the errand,” Huff said, still very wide-eyed. “Rhiow, is this the help you said you were sending for?”
“Indeed so. Ith, let me make you known to the London team.”
She strolled over and took him around, making the introductions. Huff and Auhlae recovered their composure quickly: Fhrio, caught in the middle of doing something technical to the timeslide, simply stood for some moments with his mouth hanging open. Siffha’h gazed at Ith too, and spoke to him politely enough when introduced, but Rhiow couldn’t help noticing her expression … a peculiar look of half-recognition, as if she had seen him before sometime, but couldn’t place where.
Finally she brought Ith over to Artie.“And this is our ‘pet’ehhif,” Rhiow said, with some amusement. “Artie, this is Ith.”
“Oh,rather,” said Artie, very impressed indeed. “Are you a Thunder Lizard?”
Ith dropped his lower jaw and flickered his long blunt tongue slightly in what Rhiow had come to recognize as a smile.“I have not thundered at anything very recently,” he said, “but in the past I have occasionally done so.”
He crouched down on his back legs next to Arhu, who leaned against him companionably.“Your summons was opportune,” Ith said to Rhiow, “for I was thinking of coming to see you anyway. The master gate matrices in the Old Downside, the ones which service Grand Central and many other gating complexes have been showing signs of strain, these last few days. Gatings have not been progressing as they normally do.”
“It’s not just strain,” Arhu said. “Let me show you—”
For a few seconds they were silent together. It was not vision, Rhiow thought, but rather something to do with their old history together: they had been in one another’s minds in extremely harrowing circumstances, involving their jointly completed Ordeals, and there were times when the communication between them seemed so complete and effortless that Rhiow wondered whether some kind of permanent connection between them had been wrought by the anguish and triumph they’d shared.
Ith looked up, then, and said,“Youhavebeen having a busy time.” He clenched his claws together, interlacing them. “And now this business of the Longest Winter. Very interesting indeed.”
He looked up over at the London team.“That was what killed my people in the ancient days,” he said to Huff. “The Lone One, the Old Serpent, brought that fate down on us when we made our first Choice as a species. It said if we accepted Its gift, we would rule the Earth so long as the Sun shone on it. And so we did: until the blow fell burning from the sky, and the dust and the smoke of its impact rose up and hid the sun. It killed all my ancestors except the very few who, by accident or by grace of the Powers, managed to find their way into the Old Downside and take refuge in the caves there, down where the catenaries spring up from their ultimate power source. There we lived for ages, and there the Lone One ruled us, saying that someday It would lead us up into the Sun again, and we would conquer all the puny creatures that lived there and take the Earth for our own once more.” He smiled, showing most of his teeth. “Well, they conquered us instead, to our great good: and my people lost their old false Father, and gained a new one. Mostly due to my brother, my father here.” He glanced down at Arhu. Arhu looked away, and purred.
“But the thought of the Winter has not been far from my mind, or my people’s,” Ith said to Rhiow. “It is a charged subject for us, as charged in its way as humankind’s old story that you told me about the apple and the garden: and there is a serpent in that story too, though I am afraid it is not the Bright one Who is a shape I wear these days sometimes, or Who wears me—whichever. In any case, we are eager that the Winter should not come back, from whatever cause … for if it returns to the upper world, that will eventually affect the Old Downside as well. Since we have no guarantees from the Powers that this fate would never befall us again, I thought that we might seek to put guarantees of our own in place.”
“You could get caught up in that kind of thing to the exclusion of everything else,” Auhlae said, “if you weren’t careful …”
“Oh, indeed. We know well enough that every race dies,” Ith said. “That alone has become obvious enough from studying other species’ history. Entropy is running …” The young-old, wise eyes looked a little tired already. “We cannot stop it. But this does not mean we need instantly to enter into a suicide pact with the Universe. We may forestall the event as long as possible … indeed the Powers would prefer that we do.”
“Getting familiar with Them, are you?” Urruah said.
“No less than you,” Ith said mildly. “Your good friend, Saash of the unending itch, now herself walks the floor of Heaven about the One’s business, and the depths of reality echo to the thumping when she sits down to scratch. And she thought of herself as ‘nothing special’. I am nothingspecial either, but I am also Father of my people now, and so I find myself chatting often enough with my people’s Grandparents as I try to make some sense out of this terrible mass of data They’ve wished on me, and try to claw it into some shape which our new wizards will be able to handle.”
“New wizardsalready?” said Arhu.
“They are hatching out even as we speak,” Ith said. “Some seem to have been trying to be born for a long time … some say they have tried many times, but were always killed in the ongoinghethhhiiihhh.”Rhiow blinked at the word: the Speech saidholocaustin her ear, but there were even more terrible implications in the word, speaking of a people who for many generations had simply been born to be killed, almost all new hatchlings being destined to feed the chosen warriors of the Lone Power’s planned army.
“Now, though,” Ith said, “there are more than twenty already. Our latency period is fairly short, and besides, there is the time difference between the Upworld and the Downside to consider. We are, in any case, making up for much lost time, which is a good thing, considering the importance ofthe gates we guard. The Downside will be alive with wizardry before very long, and all the better for it: it is not good for a world to go unmanaged. But our ‘wizard’s manual’ is still in its early stages, and I have been kept very busy trying to codify it.”
“I would have thought it would have just appeared,” Urruah said. “As if it had always been there, now that your people’s Choice is properly made. I mean, the information’s all in the Speech after all … so your people won’t have trouble understanding it—”