Rhiow consulted the map and stood there lashing her tail for a few moments.My sense of direction normally isn’t so bad,she said,but all these new diggings are confusing me. These creatures have completely changed the layout of the caverns in this area. I think we’re just going to have to try to sense the catenaries directly or do a wizardry to find them.
As to the latter, I’d rather not,Saash said. Ihave a feeling something like that might be sensed pretty quick down here. You saw those tools. Someone down here is basing a technology around wizardly energy sources…
Yes, I saw that.Rhiow hissed very softly to herself.
So what do we do?Arhu said.
Go downward.
They went: there was not much option. The stair reached downward for the better part of half a mile before bottoming out in a platform before a doorway. Cautiously they crept to the doorway, peered through it. The saurians had passed this way not too long before; their scent was fresh, and down the long high hall on the other side of the door, the faint red light glowed.
Arhu stepped through it—then stopped.
What?
It’s not the same light,he said.
What is it, then?
I don’t know.
Slowly he paced forward, through the doorway, turning left again. Another hallway, again trending down, but this one was of grander proportions than the corridors higher up in the delving, and it went down in a curve, not a straight line. Rhiow went behind Arhu, once more feeling the neural-inhibitor spell in her mind, ready for use. Its readiness was wearing at her, but she was not going to give it up for anything, not under these circumstances.
They softly walked down the corridor, in single file. Ahead of them, the red light grew, reflecting against the left wall from a source on the right. This light was not caused by any box carried by a saurian: Arhu had been right about that. It glowed through a doorway some hundred yards ahead of them, a bloom of light in which they could now detect occasional faint shifts and flickerings. The box-light had produced none such.
About twenty yards from the doorway, Saash stopped. Rhiow heard her footfalls cease, and turned to look at her. The faintest gleam of red was caught in her eyes—atiger’s eyes, in this universe, set in a skull with jaws big enough to bite off anehhif’shead; but the eyes had Saash’s nervousness in them, and the tortoiseshell tiger sat down and had a good hard scratch before saying,I amnotgoing through that door unsidled; I don’t carewhatit takes.
Rhiow looked at her, and at Urruah behind her.
Not a bad idea,he said.If I have to go out there visible, I can’t guarantee the behavior of my bladder.
Let’s do it, then,said Rhiow.
It was surprising how hard it was. Normally sidling was a simple matter of slipping yourself among the bunched and bundled hyperstrings, where visible light could not get at you. But here something had the hyperstrings in an iron grip, and they twanged and tried to cut you as you attempted to slide yourself between. It was an unfriendly experience. Ithink the hardboiled eggs in the slicer at the deli around the comer must feel like this,Urruah grunted, after a minute or so.
Trust you to think of this in terms of food,Rhiow said, having just managed to finish sidling. Arhu had done it a little more quickly than she had, though not with his usual ease: he was already padding his way up to the door through which the brighter reddish radiance came, and Saash was following him. Isuppose,Rhiow added for Urruah’s benefit as she came up between Arhu and Saash, and peered through the space between them,we should think ourselves lucky there’s not a MhHonalh’s down here…
And she caught sight of the view out the doorway, and the breath went right out of her. She took a few steps forward, staring. Behind her, Urruah came up and looked past her shoulder, and gulped. Then he grinned, an unusually grim look for him, and said,Are yousurethere’s not?
A long time before, when she had first become enough of a wizard to get down to street level from the apartment Hhuha had before she and Iaehh became a pride, Rhiow had done the“tourist thing” and had gone up the Empire State Building. Not up the elevator, as anehhifwould, of course: she had walked up the side of it, briefly annoying (if not actively defying) gravity and frightening the pigeons. Once there, Rhiow had sat herself down on the parapet, inside the chain-link fence meant to dissuadeehhiffrom throwing themselves off, and had simply reveled in the sense of height, but more, ofdepth,as one looked down into the narrow canyons whereehhifandhouiffwalked, progressing stolidly in two dimensions and robustly ignoring the third. It was wonderful to sit there with the relentless wind of the heights stirring the fur and let one’s perceptions flip: to see the city, not as something that had been built up, but to imagine it as something that had been dugdown,blocks and pinnacles mined out of air and stone: not a promontory, but a canyon, with the river ofehhiflife still running swift at the bottom of it, digging it deeper while she watched.
Now Rhiow looked down into the heart of the Mountain and realized that, even so young and relatively untutored, she had been seeing a truth she would not understand for years: yet another way in which the Downside cast Manhattan as its shadow. The Mountain was hollow.
But not just with caverns, with the caves and dripping galleries that Ffairh had charted. Something else had been going on in these greater depths for—howlong? She and her team looked over the parapet where they stood, and gazed down into a city—not built up, but delved through and tunneled into and cantilevered out over an immense depth of open space as wide as the Hudson River, as deep as Manhattan Island itself: a flipped perception indeed, but one based on someone else’s vision, executed on a splendid and terrible scale. The blackbasalt of the Mountain had been carved out of its heart as if with knives, straight down and sheer, for at least two miles—and very likely more: Rhiow was not much good at judging distances by eye, and (like many other New Yorkers) was one of those people for whom a mile is simply twenty blocks. Reaching away below them, built into those prodigious cliffs of dark stone, were level below level and depth below depth of arcades and galleries and huge halls; “streets” appeared as bridges flung across the abyss, “avenues” as giddy stairways cut down the faces of those cliffs. Hung from the cliffsides, like the hives of wild bees hung from the sides of some wild steep rocks in Central Park that Rhiow knew, were precipitous shapes that Rhiow suspected were skyscrapers turned inside out: possibly dwellings of some kind. There had to be dwellings, for the place was alive with saurians—they choked the bridges and the stairs the way Fifth Avenue was choked at lunch hour, and the whole volume of air beneath Rhiow and her team hummed and hissed with the saurians’ voices, remote as traffic noise for the moment, but just as eloquent to the listening ear. All that sound below them had to do with hurry, and strife—and hunger.
Far down below in that mighty pit, almost at its vanishing point, a point of light burned, eye-hurting despite its distance: the source of the reddish light they stood in now, caught and reflected many times up and up the whole great structure in mirrors of polished obsidian and dark marble. Rhiow stared down at it and shuddered: for in her heart, something saw that light and said, very quietly, without any possibility of error,Death.
They stood there, the four of them, gazing down, for a long time.Look at the carvings down there,Urruah said finally.Someone’s been to Rockefeller Center.
Rhiow lashed her tail in agreement. The walls of the cliffs were not without decoration. Massive-jawed saurian shapes leaned out into the abyss in heroic poses, corded with muscle; others stood erect on mighty hind legs, stately, dark, tails coiled about their bodies or feet, as pillars or the supports of arches or architraves: scaled caryatids bent uncomplaining under the loads that pillars should have borne. Many of the carvings did have that blunt, clean, oversimplified look of the Art Deco carvings around Rockefeller Center—blank eyes, set jaws, nobility suggested rather than detailed. But they were all dinosaurs… except, here and there, where a mammal—feline, orehhif,or cetacean, or canid—was used as pedestal or footstool, crushed or otherwise thoroughly dominated. No birds were represented; perhaps a kinship was being acknowledged… or perhaps there was some other reason. But, on every statue, every saurian had the sixth claw.