Buthow,Rhi? You heard him: the lower halls are full of these things.
I don’t propose to go the wayItwants us to go,Rhiow said.Look, I’ll watch now: I couldn’t sleep now no matter what. You try at least to get some rest… an hour’s worth, even. Ffairh always said that a rest was better than no sleep.
I’d give a lot to have Ffairh here.
You’re not the only one. Go on, ’Ruah, take a nap.
He lay down, and shortly afterward, he was snoring, too. *
Rhiow sat in the darkness and watched over them. Saash had nodded off again, a little while after Arhu did, so that only Rhiow and Ith were awake. Ith was looking down at Arhu. For a while she gazed at him,- wondering what went on inside that mind. His face was hard to read. Evenehhifhad been easier, at first; and there was always the one who had become easiest to read after their association…
The thought of Hhuha, of the cold white tiles and the metal table, bit her in the throat again. Rhiow shook her head till her ears rattled, looked away, tried to find her composure again.Oh, to be able to howl like ahouffor weep like anehhif, she thought;why can’t we somehow let the pain issue forth, by some outward sign? Dignity is worth a great deal, Queen of us all, but is it worth the way this pain stays stuck inside?
She looked up and saw Ith looking at her, silent and thoughtful.
You too know the pain,he said inwardly. Rhiow shivered a little, for there was warm blood about his thought, but no fur, not even as much as anehhifwore: the effect was strange.
Yes,she said.
But still you will do this. And die. I saw that in him, and in my own vision as well.
Rhiow licked her nose.
Yes.
He says… this fight has happened before.
Rhiow wondered just how to put this.Our kind,she said,or rather, the Great Ones of our kind, have fought—this deadly power, the Lone Power—before.
And lost.
They defeated the Old Serpent, as we call that avatar of the Lone One,Rhiow said.
But it made no difference. It lives on, though your gods themselves died killing It.
“Evil,” said a small and very tired voice, “just keeps on going.” Arhu was sitting up again, but hunched and huddled. He glanced at Ith. “He’s seen it. So have I. And it’ll still just keep happening, no matter what we do here. Even if we win. Which we can’t…”
Rhiow swallowed.“It’s not that simple,” she said. “Evil isn’t something the One made, Arhu. It’s a broken image— a perversion of the way things should work, purposely skewed toward pain and failure. Sa’Rrahh, our own image of the Lone One, and of the evil inside us, it’s the same way with her. She invented death, yes, and now tries to impose it on the worlds. But her ambivalence is a recent development, as the Gods reckon time… and They think the evil is something she can be weaned of. For when the Three went to war against the Serpent, didn’t she go to the Fight with Them, and fall with Them, at the dawn of time? That’s a way of saying how divided her loyalties are, for sheisthe Old Serpent as well.”
“It’s confusing,” Arhu said. Ith merely looked thoughtful.
“It’s mystery,” Rhiow said, and had to smile slightly despite her pain, for old Ffairh had said the same thing to her, when she said the same thing to him. “Sometimes mystery is confusing. Don’t fear that; just let it be… But what time isabout,they say, is slowly whining the Lone One back to the right side. When that happens, the Whisperer says— when a billion years’ worth of wizards’ victories finally wear sa’Rrahh down enough to show her what possibilities can lie beyond her own furious blindness and fixity—then death and entropy will begin to work backward, undoing themselves; evil will transform its own nature and will haveno defense against that final transformation, coming as it will from within. The universe will be remade, as if it had been made right from the beginning.” And she had to gulp a little herself then, at the sudden memory of the words the Whisperer had sent her to find, the fragment of the old spelclass="underline" he inflicteth with the knife wounds upon Aapep, whose place is in heaven—
The look on Arhu’s face was strange. “So,” he said after a long pause, “the Lone Power isn’t Itself completely evil.”
“No. Profoundly destructive, yes, and filled with hate for life. But even the evils It tries hardest to do sometimes backfire because of Its own nature, which is ‘flawed’ with the memory of Its earliest history, the time before It went dark. That flaw can be a weapon against It… and has been, in many battles between the First Time and now. But we have to be guided by Iau’s own actions in our actions against the Lone One. For even She never tried to destroy the Lone Power, though She could have. She merely drove sa’Rrahh out, ‘until she should learn better,’ the song says. If the Queen Herself believes that the Lone One can be redeemed, who are we to argue the point?”
Arhu looked off into the distance, that million-mile stare again. It was a long, long look … and when he turned back to Rhiow, his expression was incredulous. “It’s started to happen already. Hasn’t it?”
“That’s what the Whisperer says,” Rhiow said. “When you look around the world, it’s impossible to believe. All the death, all the cruelty and pain…” She went silent, thinking of white tile, a steel table, and a shattered body, and Iaehh’s inward cry of grief. “But mere belief doesn’t matter. Every time one of us stands up knowingly to the Devastatrix, she loses a little ground. Every time one of us wins, she loses a little more. And the Whisperer says that the effect is cumulative. No wizard knows whether his or her act today, this minute or the next, might not be the one that will finally make the Lone Power say, ‘I give up: joy is easier.’ And then the long fall upward into the light, and the rebirth of the worlds, will start…”
She sighed, looked over at Arhu wearily.“Is it worth fighting for, do you think?”
He didn’t answer.
“You have said the word I waited to hear,” Ith said. “The feline Lone Power—sa’Rrahh?—is the Old Serpent. Our peoples are one at the Root…”
Rhiow blinked.
“You’re right,” Arhu said, getting up. Suddenly he looked excited, and the transformation in him was a little bizarre, so that Rhiow sat back, concerned, wondering whether the shock of his traumatic memory had unsettled him, kicked him into euphoria. “And we can fix everything.”
“I thought you said we were all going to die,” Urruah said abruptly.
Couldn’t sleep either, huh?Rhiow said.
There was a sardonic taste to Urruah’s thought.I’ll sleep tomorrow… if ever.
“Oh, die,well,”Arhu said, and actually shrugged his tail. Urruah looked incredulously at Rhiow.“Okay, yeah, die. But we can fix it.”
“Fixwhat?”
“The battle. The Fight!”
“Now,waita minute!” Urruah said. “Are you seriously talking about some kind of, I don’t know, some reconfiguration of saurian mythology? Let alonefelinemythology? What makes you think you have the right to tell the Gods how things ought to be done?”
“What made Them thinkTheyhad the right?” Arhu said.
Rhiow stared at him. Arhu turned to her.“Look, Rhiow, the Gods were making it up as they went along,” Arhu said. “Why shouldn’twe?”
All she could do was open her mouth and shut it again.
“It’s only legend because it happened solongago!” Arhu said. “But once upon a time, it wasnow!They did the best they could, once upon a time. Andthisis now, too! Why shouldn’t we change the myths for ones that work better? What kind of gods would make you keep making the same mistakes that They made, just becauseTheydid it that way once? They’d be crazy! Or cruel! If things have changed, and new problems need new solutions, why shouldn’t we enact them? If They’re good gods, wouldn’tThey?”
Urruah, and Saash, well awake now, both stared.
“I mean, if They’re anygoodas gods,” Arhu said, with the old street-kitten scorn. “If They aren’t, They should befired.”