Which it was, for Rhiow saw that slowly, with deadly deliberation, the skeleton was moving. Its front claws reached out and grasped at the air, clutching at nothing; its head lifted from the position of low menace in which it had been fixed, stretching upward, the jaws working—then twisted around to look, hungry, at theehhifin the corner.
Rhiow’s mind flashed back to what she had done to the metal track a couple of nights before. But you needed physical contact for that spell, and she wasn’t very sanguine about her chances of maintaining contact for long enough to do the job without herself being ripped to shreds or bitten in two.
The tyrannosaurus skeleton leaned down to scratch and pull at the pedestal, then straightened and began trying to pull its hind legs free, first one leg, then the other. There was acrack!like a gunshot as one of the weaker bolts holding the bones of its left foot to the pedestal came free, ricocheting off the travertine wall and peppering the poorehhifcrowded in the corner with stone splinters. The tyrannosaurus skeleton writhed and struggled to get free; it threw its head up in rage. An echo of a roar… Then it started working on the second leg more scientifically, not just thrashing around, and it was bent over so that the clever little front claws could help, too. Pull—pull—pull,and another bolt popped—
Rhiow shook her head at the sight of something beginning to cloud about the bones, building on them like shadowy cord, layer on reddish layer, strung with white: muscle, ligament… flesh.Damnation,Rhiow thought,whatever’s going on downstairs is calling to its dead cousin here… and pretty soon we’re going to have one oftheseloose in the terminal?—She shuddered. The deinonychi and smaller breeds of the present-day saurians—if it reallywasthe present day, under the Mountain—were bad enough, but nothing like their terrible forefathers, like this desiccated old relic. The relic, however, was becoming less desiccated by the second; the muscle was almost all there now, organs curdling slick and wet into being, skin starting to sheet and stretch over everything, but only slowly: it was, after all, the biggest organ. For a horrible moment the skull was almost bare of everything but the red cording of the jaw muscles; then one abruptly coagulating eye, small, piggy, and entirely too intelligent, was looking down out of the wet red socket at Rhiow. The tyrannosaur stretched its head up as gaudy crimson-and blue-striped skin wrapped itself around skull and shoulders, and heaved mightily, one last time; the second leg came free. It whirled on its pedestal, graceful and quick as a dancer, leapt down, and went for theehhif—
You’re lizard enough to die now,Rhiow thought, and opened her mouth to speak the last word of her spell—
Arhu, however, took a step forward and yowled a single word in the Speech.
The tyrannosaurus blew up. Flesh, ligament, all those organs and whatever had been inside them, blood and bone: one moment they were there, the next they were gone to splatters and splinters, flying through the air. Theehhiffell to the floor and covered their heads, certain that a bomb had gone off. The cream travertine walls were now a most unhealthy color of patchy, seeping pink; and the ceiling, just newly painted, appeared to have been redone in an entirely more pointillist style, and rained scraps and shards of flesh and other tissue down on the empty pedestal.
Rhiow looked at Arhu in amazement.
He grinned at her.“I saw it in Saash’s head,” he said. “She did it to the rats.”
“Yes, but how did you adapt that spell to—”
“Adapt it? I justdidit.”
And to think I was complaining that he wasn’t doing enough of his own wizardry,Rhiow thought. But this was more like a young wizard’s behavior, more like her own when she was new, just after Ordeal, and didn’t know what you couldn’t pull off. “You’re getting the hang of it, Arhu,” she said. “Come on—”
He paused first, and ran back to the other skeleton, reared up against it.
Its metal went molten and ran out from inside the bones like water. The bones rained down in a mighty clattering and shattering on the floor.
“Where did you getthat?”she demanded as he ran back toward her.
“I saw it inyourhead.”
Why, you little peeping tom— “You didn’t need to do that! It wasn’t doing anything!”
“It might have been about to.”
Rhiow looked at the stegosaurus skeleton and found herself willing to admit that under the present circumstances, she wasn’t too sure what its dietary habits or temperament might be should it wake up just now… and they both had other things to think about. “All right, come on,” she said. “You want to blow things up? Plenty of opportunity downstairs.”
They ran back through the main concourse. For once Rhiow wasn’t concerned about whether she was sidled or not: theehhifwould have a lot of other things to pay attention to for the next few minutes, anyway, besides a couple of cats.“Wow,” Arhu said, “look at all these dead lizards. What’re theehhif goingto do with them?”
“Nothing, because if we survive this, Tom will get authorization from the Powers That Be for a ‘static’ timeslide, and we’ll patch this whole area over with a congruent piece of nonincidental time from an equivalent universe. The physical damage will simply never have happened… and if we get the patch in place fast enough, none of theehhif herewill remember a thing.”
“Might be fun if they did…”
Rhiow snorted as they headed for the doorways to the gates, from which the roars and snarls and cries of battle were drifting toward them.Saash?
Downstairs.
How’re you holding up?
Killing lizards like it’s going out of style. I don’t like this, Rhi.
You didn’t like the rats either.
I like this a lot less. Rats aren’t self-aware. These creatures are… not that much of the awareness has a chance to get outpost the hate.
They’re trying to kill theehhif,and theehhifare defenseless; that defines the situation clearly enough for the moment.’Ruah?
With T’hom and his people. It’s a good fight, Rhi!
Tell me you’re winning.
More than I could say. We’re killing lots of dinosaurs, though. The trains are helping.
Thetramsare—
Only one derailed so far,Urruah said cheerfully.
Oh, sweet Dam of everything—!Rhiow ran through the doorway for Track 30—then stopped, realizing that she had lost Arhu. She turned, saw him lingering to stare at one of the fallen saurians.
“Arhu,” she said, “come on, can’t you hear them down there? They need us!”
“I was seeing this before,” he said, looking down at the saurian so oddly that Rhiow ran back to him, wondering if he was about to have some kind of fugue-fit along the lines of the one he had when they were coming back from Downside.
“What?” she said, coming up beside him. “What’s the matter?”
“It changes everything,” he said. “The sixth claw…”
Rhiow blinked, for that had been one of the phrases he had repeated several times as they returned from the caverns. At the time, it had puzzled her, and it did again now, for in Ailurin a“sixth claw” was an extra dewclaw, which polydactyl cats might have; or simply a slang idiom for something useless. Now, though, she looked down at the saurian, another of the splashy-pelted ones done in green and canary yellow, and at the claws that Arhu had been examining.
There were indeed six of them. This by itself was unusual, but not incredibly so.They’ve always come in fives before, but maybe some mutation—Then Rhiow looked more closely at the sixth one.
It looked very much like a thumb.
She licked her nose.“What does it mean?” Rhiow said.
Arhu stared at her, very briefly at a loss.“I don’t know,” he said. “But it’s really important. I couldn’t hear much else in my head almost all the time we came back. It was like someone kept shouting it… or like it was a song—”
His tail was lashing.“Later,” Rhiow said finally. “They’re fighting, down there: they need us. Come on!”