Rhiow led the way toward the wall; the others followed, Arhu making the path for himself and Ith. As Ith stepped down onto the fire, he teetered in surprise, and Arhu braced him.“How does this feel to you?” Arhu said.
He stood quite still for a moment.“This is not as it should be,” he said flatly. “There should be true Fire here.” And he looked down at the catenary. “This is so bound and changed from how it was once.” He looked up. “As are my people. I suppose I should not be surprised.”
Rhiow looked at him, then turned again.“Come on,” she said, and went up to the black stone wall. She paused, put up a paw.
The paw went through it. Rhiow glanced over her shoulder at Saash.“You were right,” she said. “It’s tampered with everything else It can get Its paws on, but It hasn’t been able to change science that much … not yet.”
“Not until It makes some other, more basic changes first,” Saash said, looking down into the catenary.
Rhiow lashed her tail.“Let’s see that It doesn’t get the chance.”
They passed through the wall. It didn’t feel the way wall-walking usually did. The structure of the wall seemed to buzz and hum around them with the violent energy of the catenary so nearby. It was a long walk through it, though; it felt to Rhiow like a long slog through a thick bank of black smoke that was trying to resist her as she came—smoke that hummed like bees. She found herself trying to hold her breath, trying not to breathe the stuff, lest that humming should get inside her, drown her thoughts.Don’t worry about it. One step at a time, one paw in front of the next…
Slowly the air before her began to clear. She came out into another open space, looked up and around it… and her jaw dropped in surprise. Behind her, Saash came out of the cloud-wall, paused.
It was the main concourse from Grand Central. Buthuge … ten times its normal size; so that, despite the fact that all their bodies were those of People of the ancient world, once again Rhiow and her team were reduced to the scale of People in New York. Four cats and a toy dinosaur came slowly out into the great dark space, illuminated only by the bound-down catenary that ran through it, flowing down a chasm carved straight through the floor, from the Forty-second Street doors to where the escalators to the MetLife building would normally have headed upward. The architecture of the genuine Terminal was perfectly mimicked, but all in black—matte black or black that gleamed. In the center of the concourse, the round information booth with its spherical clock was duplicated, but all in blind black stone: no bell tolled, no voice spoke. Above, over blind windows that admitted no light, the great arched ceiling rose all dark, and never a star gleamed in it. Rhiow, looking at it, got the feeling that stars mightoncehave gleamed there … until something ate them. It was more a tomb than a terminal.
Rhiow looked down at the catenary’s flow through the concourse. There were no escalators at the far side: only a great double stairway reaching downward, and the catenary flowed down between them, cascading out of sight. In Rhiow’s world, stairs that led in this direction would have taken you to the Metro-North commissary and the lower-level workshops. She doubted that here they went anywhere so mundane.
“Down?” Saash said, her voice falling small in that great silence.
Rhiow glanced at Arhu. He said,“Follow the Fire.”
They went to the stairways, stood at the top of them, and Rhiow realized that these were the originals of many stairs copied farther up in the structure of this dark Manhattan. The steps were tall, suited to saurians, but to no other life forms.“Looks like a long way down,” Saash said.
“I’m sure it’s meant to be. Let’s go.”
They went down the stairs, taking them as quickly as was comfortable … which wasn’t very. A long way, they went. On their left, since they had taken the right-hand stair, the River of Fire flowed down in cascade after cascade, its power seeming to burn more deadly and more bright the farther down they went: there was no point in looking toward it for consolation in the darkness—it hurt. And the cold grew and grew. There were no other landmarks to judge by—only, when they turned around to look, the stair seeming to go up to vanishing point behind them, and down to vanishing point ahead. For Rhiow this became another of those periods that seemed to go on forever …and it’s meant to,she thought.“This is meant to disorient us,” she said to the others. “Don’t let it. Do what you have to do to stay alert. Sing, tell stories—” She wished then that she hadn’t said “sing,” for Urruah started.
Saash promptly hit him.
“Thank you,” Rhiow said softly, and kept walking.
“Oh. Well, can I tell the one about the—”
“No,”Rhiow said.
Arhu watched this with some bemusement; so did Ith.“Don’t get nun started,” Saash said. “He makespuns.Terrible ones.”
“Oh, no,” Arhu said. “I wish we were down…”
“But weare”Ith said, sounding a little bemused.
Arhu stared.“He’s right.”
And so it was. All of them bunked as Arhu ran on down past them and to what seemed, mercifully, a flat area.
Did you see that?Saash said.He wished… and it wasso.This place may be a lot more malleable than we thought. But it makes sense. If the laws of wizardry are being changed, if things are influx down here…
Rhiow swallowed at that thought, and as she came down the last of the steps into the flat area, looked quickly into the workspace in the back of her mind.
A great circle lay there, almost complete—dark patches filling themselves in almost as she watched.
The spell the Whisperer’s still working on,she thoughtThat’s what Arhu said.
She stopped, breathed in and out, tried to center herself, and looked around her. They stood at the edge of a broad, dark plain, not smooth; here for the first time there was some sense of texture. Great outcroppings and stanchions of stone, blocks upthrust from the floor, stood all about: a little stone forest. And thrusting up out of the middle of it…
Rhiow had to simply sit down and look from one side to the other, to try to take it all in. Roots … huge roots, each one of which was the size of a skyscraper, an Empire State Building … spreading practically from one sideof vision tothe other: gnarled, tremendous, brown-barked, reaching up into a single mighty column that towered up and up out of sight.This is what it’s like when you try to perceive an archetype,Rhiow thought, looking left toward what would have been a horizon in the real world, and right… and seeing nothing but the massive union of roots, reaching upward, lost in the vast darkness.
It was the Tree: the roots of the Tree, sunk deep in the Mountain … the stone of the Mountain’s inmost cavern now rearing up, thrusting up around the separate roots as if trying somehow to bind them. From older trees in the park, Rhiow knew that in any such contest between tree and stone, the tree always won eventually. But here it seemed to have been fought to a draw: the stone seemed to be closing in.
Before it, between them and the Tree, the River of Fire spilled down the last of its steps and out into a broad channel … the final barrier. It looked more like the archetypal River now: inimical, a fire that would burn cold rather than hot, one in which nothing could survive—certainly not memory, maybe not even the passing soul. By the light of that river, Rhiow could make out that something else was wound about the Tree, among the stones, resting on them in some places: a long shining form, dark as everything else was here—but the light of the River caught its scales coldly, glinted black fire back. That form lapped the Tree in coil upon immense coil; the mind wanted to refuse the sight of it. Takingit all in, the trunk of the Tree, the roots of the Tree, the coiled shape, was like trying to take in a whole mountain in a glimpse from up close, as well as the river of fire that wound about its feet, and the other river of darkly glittering light, which wound about it higher up: a river with eyes.