“Wow,” Arhu said from behind her. “How are you going to fixthis?”
“By shutting it down and taking it apart,” Rhiow said. “Urruah?”
“I’ll make a circle,” he said, and started pacing out, to one side of the cavern, the protected area from which they would operate. As he paced, looking intently at the floor and occasionally pushing a bit of cracked stone or rubble out of the way, the sigils and symbols of the Speech startedto appear glowing on the stone, a long flowing sentence-equation. All their names, and descriptions of them all, were woven into it as welclass="underline" otherwise the spell would have no way to know who it was protecting. All the rest of the written circle, looking more and more as Urruah worked like a glowingvinework of words in the Speech, was in the most technical of its dialects, mostly involving the control and redirection of energy flows, and based on words that had originally been Ailurin. Of all wizards working on Earth, the People knew most about energy—being able to clearly perceive aspects of it thatehhifand other species’ wizards couldn’t. Even nonwizardly People had an affinity with warmth, a link to fire and the Sun, which other species had noticed: it was traceable back to this native talent for seeing and managing energy flows.
Rhiow glanced at Saash: she was watching the openings into the cave, listening, on guard. Rhiow strolled over to have a look at Urruah’s work—it was routine, in a group wizardry, to check your teammates’ work, as a failsafe to catch errors. Urruah was making a third pass around the circle, its design growing more and more complex. Again and again the symbol for the wordauw,“energy,” appeared in numerous compound forms. Most of the terms that Urruah was using here were specialist terminologies relating toauwsshui’f,the term for the“lower electromagnetic spectrum,” which besides describing “sub-matter” relationships such as string and hyperstring function also took in quantum particles, faster-than-light particles, wavicles, and sub-atomics. He was paying less attention, for this spell’s purposes, toefviauw,the electromagnetic spectrum, oriofviauw,the“upper electromagnetic spectrum,” involving straightforward plasma functions, fission, fusion, and gravitic force: gating energies were by and large subtler and more dangerous than any of these.
The circle completed, Urruah stopped after a few moments and actually panted a little, looking back at his handiwork.
“You all right?”
“Yes,” he said. “It just takes it out of you a little, dumping it all out at once like that.”
“I know. Nice job, though.” Rhiow paced around the circle, looking at it. “Seems complete. Saash? Come check your parameters. Arhu, look at this—”
The other two came over. Rhiow pointed at one gappy sequence of symbols.“See that?” she said to Arhu. “That’s your name—or the version of it we use for spelling. Look at the version of your name that the the Whisperer shows you inside your head—check it against this version, make sure this one’s right. A spell is nothing but descriptions of things, and people, and something you want to happen. When you trigger the spell, the description it containswill change what you’ve described.Describeyourselfwrong, and you’ll change … whether you like it or not.”
He squinted at the glowing network of symbols.“Yeah. Uh, right.”
’Take your time over it. Be sure. Saash?”
“It’s fine. He knows me well enough by now.” She glanced up at Urruah, amused. “Though I’m not sure I scratchthatmuch.”
“If you don’t now,” Urruah said, with some amusement, “you will later.”
Saash hissed, a sound of affectionate annoyance. Arhu looked up then and said,“I think—” He put a paw out, hesitated. “Can I touch it?”
“Sure,” Urruah said, “it’s not active yet.”
“There’s a piece missing here—” He put a paw on one spot where there was a “place-holding” gap with several graceful curves stitched over it, indicating, to a wizard’s eye,To be continued…All their names had such gaps, here and there, but Arhu’s had whole chains of them. “She—” he said, and sounded embarrassed. “She says—”
“Go ahead, put it in,” Urruah said. “The matrix will pick it up from you. Make a picture of it in your head.”
Arhu frowned and thought, while he did so jutting his chin out in a way that made Rhiow smile slightly, thinking of Yafh around the corner from her: he got a similar“concentrating” look while pondering imponderables, endearing because of how witless it made him look. After a second, a pair of symbols appeared in the place-holding area, and the to-be-continued sigil relocated itself farther along in the diagram. Rhiow looked thoughtfully at the new symbols.They looked familiar, but she couldn’t place them…
The Whisperer spoke briefly in her ear, just a word or two.
Rhiow froze.Oh, no,she thought.Not really. No…
She straightened hurriedly.“All right,” she said, “we’re in order. Saash, are you ready? Anything that needs to be done to the catenary before we get inside?”
“Not a thing. Let’s start.”
“Arhu, jump in,” Rhiow said, and did so herself.
Saash followed; Urruah was last in. He planted his paws, claws out, in the“trigger” area of the spell, and said the word that would initiate the circle.
It blazed, the vinework that had been distinguishable part by part and in detail when dimmer now bloomed into a blur of white-golden fire, shimmering and alive. Urruah looked vacant-eyed for a moment, then said to Rhiow,“It’s powered up for the next twenty minutes or so.”
“Good. Let’s go. Saash?”
She was sitting in the circle, scratching. Rhiow said nothing; Urruah glanced at her, his whiskers forward, and looked back down at the circle.
“Do you have a skin problem or something?” Arhu said.
Rhiow hissed at him and cuffed him, not too hard.“If she did, it would still be preferable to your tact problem,” she said. “You just be still and watch.”
Saash sat up then and looked over at the catenary.
It began, slowly, to drift toward them: a pillar of structured, high-tension fire, like a rainbow pulled out into hair-fine strands and plugged into much too high a current, ready to blow something out: itself or you.
Arhu watched it come, wide-eyed.“Is this safe?” he said.
“Not at all,” Rhiow said calmly. “If that power came undone and we weren’t in here, we’d be ash. If that. The power bound up in that could melt the whole island of the city into a bowl of slag half a mile deep if it was given enough time. The only thing that’s going to control it, when it gets in here with us, is Saash. Got any more comments on the condition of her fur?”
He stared, watched the catenary drift closer.“Nice color,” Arhu said, and his tongue went in and out twice, very quickly.
He II have a sore nose before the day’s done, at this rate,Rhiow thought; but at the same time, she was less interested in the catenary than in that symbol in Arhu’s name, now lost in the bloom of fire of the activated circle.
The catenary drifted up against the boundary of the circle, touched it. Light flared at the contact, and the catenary bounced away, drifted back again: another flare, a smell of something singeing, not here but somehow somewhereelse.Rhiow’s nostrils flared. It was the scent of the kind of magic they worked with, in combination with the gate-forces, as inimitable and unmistakable a scent as the cinder-iron-ozone reek of the Grand Central tracks. Subatomic-particle annihilations, hyperstring stress, who knew what caused the smell, or whether it was even real? It meant that things were working … for the moment.