Right,they all said.
The wizards around them got quiet, watching, except for those still occupied with killing whatever saurians came through the gate.
Four,Saash said.
Three.
Two.
One.
Z—
There was a tremendous rumble that seemed to come from the bowels of the building, working its way upward toward them, shaking. Dust sifted down from the ceiling, light fixtures swung, and fluorescent light tubes snapped and went dark—
And sudden silence felclass="underline" the shaking stopped as if a switch had been thrown.
The gate by Track 30 vanished—simply went away like a blown bubble that pops when a breeze touches it.
Everyone held very still, waiting. But no more saurians came out of the air.
There was a restrained cheer from the wizards standing around, and Tom came over to look at the space where the gate had been.“I don’t feel the catenary,” he said, sounding concerned.
“You wouldn’t be able to,” Saash said, coming over to stand by him. “But I can see it; the hyperstrings leave a traceable pattern in the space they occupy, even without energy flowing. It’s just that the sensory component usually expresses itself through—” She stopped.
“Through what? What’s the matter?”
Saash stood there, gazing into the dark with an expression of increasing horror… then began a low, horribly expressive yowling. To Rhiow it sounded like her tail was caught in a door… except there was no door, and she could feel her friend’s sudden fear and anger.
“What?” Rhiow said. “What—”
Then she felt it, too.
Oh, Iau, no—
Arhu crouched down, looking scared—a more emphatic response than he had revealed even in the face of a ten-ton tyrannosaurus. Urruah stared at him, then at Saash.
“Oh, no,” Rhiow said. “Saash—where’s the Number Three gate?”
Arhu was sinking straight into the concrete.
“It’s come loose before its locus was pulled off,” Saash hissed. “It’s popped out of the matrix—”
There was nothing showing of Arhu now except the tips of his ears, which were rapidly submerging into the floor.
“It’s notyourfault,” Saash yowled, “come out of there, you little idiot! Somebodyboobytrappedit!”
Saash glared at Tom as Arhu clambered up out of the floor again.“Somebodyknewwe were going to do that intervention,” Saash said. “One of the gates was left with a minuscule timing imbalance, hard-wired in and left waiting to go off as soon as the portal locus was tampered with.Ithasn’t been deactivated … and now everything that was coming out of all the gates before is going to come out of justthatone … !”
“My God,” Tom whispered. “Where’s the other gategone?”
Rhiow looked at him in shock.“A loose transit gate,” she said, “normally inheres to the area of the greatest density of thought and anchors there. The place where the most minds are packed the most closely together—”
“Dear Iau up a tree,” Urruah whispered. They all stared at him.
He looked at them, open-eyed with horror.
“Tonight? The biggest concentration of minds?” Urruah said. “It’s in the Sheep Meadow…’ ”
Urruah ran out.“Hurry up and start patching,” Tom said to several of the wizards who had been working with him; and he, and Rhiow, and Saash, and Arhu, and half the rest of the wizards in the place ran after him. *
Urruah was making for the sidewalk, which was well enough away from any of the gates inside to prevent adverse effects. Maybe he didn’t really need to, under the circumstances, but Rhiow, at the moment, thought it was probably better to be safe than sorry. There were enough people sorry already.
Sabotage…Rhiow thought again, as she and Arhu raced, along with the others, past the waiting room. Asif from inside…
Arhu glanced over at the mess that still lay all about in the waiting room as they passed.“That was it,”Arhu said to her, fierce, his panic of a few moments ago now replaced with a rush of angry satisfaction and aliveness the like of which Rhiow had never yet sensed in him.“That was what I saw … the first night.Thatcame out. Even the rats ran away from it. And I—” He winced as they ran out the front doors with the others, and then said, “We’re even now. It wasn’t going to do that to me twice.”
“Arhu,” Rhiow said, while Urruah and Tom paced out a large transit circle—it glowed in the sidewalk behind them as they paced, causing interested looks from the passing pedestrians—“when you work with words the way wizards do, precision is important. Somethinglikethat was what you saw? Or,thatwas what you saw? Which is it?”
He looked at her with utter astonishment.“You mean— you think there’sanother?”
“How would I know? I want to know what you meant.”
“Ready,” Tom said. “Everybody in here—hurry up!”
They jumped into the circle with Tom and Urruah and the other wizards.“You sure of these coordinates?” Tom was saying to Urruah.
“They’re ‘backstage,’ ” Urruah said. “The spot was empty yesterday. No guarantees for tonight—but it’s got better odds of being empty than anywhere else in the meadow tonight. You’ve got a ‘bumper’ on this, to keep us from accidentally coexisting with anybody—”
“Yeah, but who knows what it’s going to do in such a densely populated area? We’ve got to take the chance. Whatever our spell will do if it malfunctions, it won’t be as bad as what’s already happening—”
There was no arguing withthat.Tom said three words and the circle flamed up into life, then a fourth.
Wham!
Ahuge displacement of air as all their masses were subtracted from the space outside Grand Central; andSlam!an explosion of air outward as they all appeared—
—and heard a blast of sound that staggered them all— partly from the amplification, partly from how close they all were to the stage. The orchestra was playing a massive, deliberate accompaniment to three voices—two lower, one high—that wound forcefully and delicately about one another, scaling continually upward through slow changes of key. Rhiow found herself briefly impinging on the outskirts of Urruah’s mind as on those of all the others in the transit circle there—had been no time to install me usual filters— and was drowned in his instant recognition and delight, even in these horrible circumstances, at the perfection of the sound coming from two of the threetehn’hhirs,and a third invited guest, the new youngssoh’pra-ohfrom the Met, in the great finale of a work calledFfauwst.Two of the voices argued—the Lone One and a wizard, in the throes of a struggle for the wizard’s soul—but the third and highest, the voice of a young and invincibly innocent queen, called on the bright Powers for aid: and (said Urruah’s memory) the aid came—
Let it be an omen!Rhiow thought desperately as they broke the circle and looked around them. A few security people and police noticed them, started coming toward them—
The human wizards, prepared, all went sidled in a whisker’s twitch. Rhiow and her team did, too, and they all hurried past the extremely confused policemen and security people to get around to one side of the stage and get a clearer view—
It was hard, but they managed to clamber up among some sound gear, and from that viewpoint stared out into the night. The Sheep Meadow was full, absolutely full ofehhif,only dimly seen in the light from the stage. They sat on blankets and in portable chairs; the smell of food and drink was everywhere, and Rhiow threw a concerned look at Arhu— but for once he had his mind on other things. His ears were twitching; he stared toward one side of the meadow—
“Where’s the gate?”Tom was whispering.
“Not here yet,” Saash said. “The locus is still moving—”
A faint sound could be heard now, something different from the susurrus of more than a hundred thousand bodies in one place. It was hard to tell just what it was with this mighty blast of focused sound, both real and amplified, coming from the orchestra. Rhiow glanced at the little roundehhif whom she had seen leading them earlier; now he was in the kind of black-and-white clothes thatehhifmales wore for ceremonial these days, and conducting the orchestra as if he heard nothing whatever but bis music. Perhaps he didn’t. But there was more sound than music coming from the edges of the meadow. A rustling, a sound like the distant rush of wind—