Rhiow blinked and suddenly heard Ehef saying, in memory,It’s not like the old times anymore, no more “jobs for life” …The thought occurred to her sudden as a tourist’s flashbulb popping in front of the library:can times change even for the gods? Could the process of entropyitselfbe sped up? Can old solutions no longer be sufficient to the present simply because of a shift in natural law…
…such as the Lone One may be trying to provoke, by using the power tied up in the master Gate catenary…
“And if they won’t do the job—” Arhu took a big breath, as if this scared even nun. “Then we can fightTheirway. She was me, for a little while. Why can’t it go both ways? Why can’t we beThem?”
“That’s real easy to say,” Urruah drawled. “How are you suggesting we manage this?”
Arhu turned and looked at Rhiow.
Her eyes went wide.
“You’re crazy,” she said.
“The spell,” said Arhu.
“You’re out of your tiny mind. It’s in a hundred pieces—” She had a quick look into her workspace, and then added hurriedly, “I don’t understand the theory; it’s never been constructed enough even totest…”
But that was all she could say about it… for there was no denying, having looked, that the spell appeared … morewhole.Big pieces of it had come together that had never been associated before. Its circle was closing, its gaps filling in.
As a result of the extra power I demanded?She wondered.Or as a result of being so far Downside?
Was this assembly something she could have done long ago and had been distracted from—
—Or simply had chosen not to do… ?
Spells did not lie, any more than wizards did. If one implied it might work now, when before it had refused to … then it might work. No question of it.If it completed itself, then…
“I have to go think for a moment,” she said to the others. “And then I think we have to leave, isn’t that right, Arhu?”
“A guard party will stumble on us soon if we don’t,” he said, and looked over at Ith.
Ith lashed his tail in what might have been“yes.”
“Get yourselves ready, then,” she said, and walked off down the hallway, toward the distant light at its lower end. *
Her tail lashed slowly as Rhiow went padding along, looking down at the dark smooth stone and trying to pull her thoughts together. She was still very tired …but now, maybe more than ever before in her life, she had to think clearly.
The spell…
She had long assumed that the old tales of the Flyting under the Tree and the Battle of the Claw were symbolic at root: simplistic story-pictures of the interrelationships among the Powers That Be, mere concrete representations of the abstract truth, of the continuing battle against entropy in general, and its author and personification, the Lone Power. It had never occurred to her that as you ventured farther from the fringe-worlds of mere physical reality into the more central and senior kinds of existence, the legends could become not less true, butmore.This universe would plainly support that theory, however, to judge by the status of the spell.
Worse—it had not occurred to Rhiow in her moments of wildest reverie that a living Person might find herselfplayingone of those parts, enacting the Tearer, or the Destroyer-by-Fire. But that was what this spell now seemed to be pointing toward. And would it feel like“playing” to the unfortunate cat cast in the part? Did the part, ancient and powerful as it was—and moreover, closer to the Heart of things—playyou?What if you were left with no choice?
Rhiow shook herself. There was always choice: that much she knew.Those who deny the Powers nonetheless serve the Powers,the Whisperer had often enough breathed in her ear.Those who serve the Powers themselvesbecomethe Powers. Beware the Choice! Beware refusing it!
How much plainer could the hint be?she wondered. But in either case, the common thread wasBeware.Whatever happened …youwere no longer the same. And fear stalked that idea, for the stories also told often enough of cats who had dared to be more than they were, had climbed too high, fell, and did not come down on their feet—or came down on them much too hard for it to matter.How could you tell which you were?
Yet at the same time, there might be a hint of hope lurking under this idea. If People could successfully ascend to the gods’ level, even for short periods, they could possibly interact with them on equal terms. Rhiow thought about the Devastatrix. There wereehhiflegends about her, how sa’Rrahh once misread her mandate—to eradicate the wickedness in the world—and almost destroyed the whole world and all life by fire, so mercilessly that (in theehhifstory) the other gods had to get her falling-down drunk on blood-beer before she would stop. Rhiow had always thought this was more symbolism for something: some meteoric bombardment or solar flare. Now, though,Drunkenness?Rhiow thought.A complete change of perceptions artificially imposed on one of the Powers That Be? But a temporary one … and to a purpose.
Tamper with the perceptions of sa’Rrahh herself, of the Old Serpent? Fool theLone One?
Grief-worn and weary as she was, Rhiow was tempted to snicker. There would be a choice irony to that, for the Lone Power had certainly fooled the saurians.A certain poetic justice, there. Well, the Powers don’t mind justice being poetic, as long as the structure’s otherwise sound.
But if we screw this up…forgetdeathbeing a problem. Forget our souls just passing out into nowhere, with no rebirth. I don’t think we’d be solucky.
…Arhu’s right, though. The rules are being changed. That’s what all this is about, from the malfunctioning of the Grand Central gates on down. A major reconfiguration is happening. The structure of space is being changed so that the structure of wizardry, maybe of science, maybe of life itself, can be changed.
And if the Lone One can change the rules… so can we.
She stood there in the silence for a few moments more, her tail still twitching; and her whiskers went forward in a slow smile. There was nothing particularly merry about it… but she saw her chance. All she could do now was take it and go forward in the best possible heart.
Rhiow turned and walked back to the others.
“All right,” she said as they looked at her. “I’ll need some time, yet, to work on the spell… but we can’t wait here: those guards will be along. Let’s get out into the open and give them something to think about. Ready?”
Urruah snarled softly; Saash made a sound half-growl, half-purr in her throat; Arhu simply looked at Rhiow, silent. Behind him, Ith towered up as silently, watching Rhiow, as Arhu did: with eyes that saw … she couldn’t tell what.
“Let’s go,” she said, and led them down toward the faint light that indicated the next balcony.
Chapter Thirteen
There they come,” Urruah said quietly, as they walked out on the balcony and looked down into the abyss.
Rhiow looked across to the nearest visible corridor, off to their right and down one level. Under a mighty carving of rampant saurians, their six-clawed forelimbs stretched out into the emptiness, a wider-than-usual balcony reared out. It was full of mini-tyrannosauruses, and some of them that were much bigger than usual—twins to the scarlet-and-blue-striped dinosaur that Arhu had exploded in Grand Central.
“He keeps being reborn,” Arhu hissed. “You kill him and he keeps coming back. It’snot fair!”
“It’s notlife,”Rhiow muttered; what defined life, after all, was that sooner or later it ended.“Never mind… we’ll deal with him soon enough, I think.”
As the team looked from their own balcony, the saurians looked up, saw them, and let out a mighty hiss of rage; the saurians dashed out of sight, making for a rampway upward.
“Well, Rhi?” Urruah said. “Which spell do you like better? The short version of the neural inhibitor—”
“We can’t take a chance that it might go askew and hit Ith,” she said. “Here’s the one I like at the moment.”