The Book of Night With Moon (51 page)

"Great," Urruah muttered. "He can sidle where
we
won't be able to. This is
so
useful to us."

"It might be," Rhiow said softly. "Don't laugh." But she looked at Ith uneasily.
If we needed proof, we've got it now. A saurian wizard…

Saash looked at Ith, then glanced at Rhiow.
You're thinking
he's
responsible for what's been going on with the gates? It's crazy, Rhi. Ith hardly knows anything. He barely seems to know as much about wizardry at this point as
Arhu
did when we found him.

If that's possible,
Urruah muttered.

No,
Rhiow said.
The problem's not just Ith. I want to find out more about this "Great One."

I
don't,
Saash said.
I'm sure I know
exactly
Who it is.

Me too,
said Urruah, growling softly.

I wouldn't be too sure,
Rhiow said.
Our own certainties may trip us up, down here…. After all, how certain were we that there were no such things as saurian wizards? And
now
look…

"What will you do with me now?" Ith said.

Rhiow sighed, wishing she had the slightest idea. She could feel the weariness coming down on her more swiftly every second. "Look," she said to the team, "if we stay still too much longer, we're going to need to sleep, I think. I could certainly use some. Arhu, you're sure nothing's coming for a while?"

He got a faraway look. "A couple of hours."

"We'll sleep a little, then," Rhiow said to Ith, "and try to work out what to do later."

"Who'll sit guard?" Saash said, lying down with a look of unutterable relief, and not even bothering to scratch. Rhiow felt extremely sorry for her; she was not really built for this kind of stress.

"I'll take it," Urruah said. "I'm in pretty good shape at the moment… and I'm not hungry. Unlike some." He looked thoughtfully at Ith and settled himself upright against the wall, leaning a little on one shoulder, gazing down the long dark gallery.

Rhiow lay down and tried to relax.
At least a rest, if not sleep,
she thought; but neither seemed terribly likely. Her thoughts were going around in small tight circles, trying to avoid the image of Hhuha…. From off to one side, already, came the sound of Saash's tiny snore.
She never has trouble sleeping,
Rhiow thought with a touch of envy.
She confines her anxieties and neuroses strictly to her waking hours. I wish
I
could manage that.

Over Saash's little snore came the sound of Arhu and Ith talking. It got loud sometimes.

"I was hungry, too," Arhu said. "All the time. Until I met them. Then things got better. They gave me
fh'astrramhi."

This is all we're going to need,
Urruah said.
A dinosaur with a pastrami craving…

Don't think I don't hear
your
stomach growling. You'd go for it just as fast as he would, and five minutes later you'd be telling him where to find the best pastrami on the Upper West Side.

"Come on, you two," Urruah said, "half the lizards in the place are going to come down on us if you don't shut up. Sorry, Ith, no offense."

They paid no particular attention. Urruah had to shush them several more times, and finally Arhu started staring at Ith in the fixed way that suggested he was trying to teach the saurian to speak silently. Rhiow wished him luck and put her head down on the stone, in the dark, and courted sleep….

It declined to be courted. She kept hearing, in her head, one part or another of the saurian version of the Oath.
The Fire is at the heart: and the Fire is the heart: for its sake, all fires whatever are sacred to me…. I shall ever thrust my claw into the flames.

Rhiow sighed and rolled over.
It really
is
our idiom… and the language is very like what's in the "Hymn to Iau," and the "First Song." All
the references to fire and flame used the Ailurin "power" words, the
auw
-stems and compounds, which had passed into the Speech as specialist terminology.

But why should this child be using our words?…
For any species' Oath always has to do with the form of it originally taken by the wizards among the Mothers and Fathers of a species, after Choice. Its form is set in their bones and blood, so that wizards of that species find it impossible to forget, and it is most specific to their own kind and mode of existence, as it should be. Even nonwizards of many species know parts of their own species' Oath in one form or another, often restated in religious or philosophical idiom.

Rhiow smiled a little at herself then.
What do I mean, "this child"?
Who knew just
how
old Ith was? Rhiow got a general feeling that he wasn't out of latency yet, but who knew how long these saurians' latency period was?
Though there were supposedly some dinosaurs who mothered their hatchlings for years at a time. Long latency-to-lifespan ratio makes for the best wizards, Ffairh would always say.

But I still don't get it. Why Ailurin?

She rolled over again, disturbed by the puzzle. The connection between the feline world and the reptilian world was an ancient one, easily summed up in a single word: enmity— the Great Cat with the sword in his paw, sa'Rráhh the Tearer with her fangs in the Serpent's neck. Now Rhiow found herself thinking:
Is there something
else
to this connection? Something that got lost? Do we have some old history together?

And how could that be? The saurians passed away long before felinity evolved into even its most archaic forms or became sentient.

Time, though, was a dangerously inconstant medium… and it was always unwise for a wizard to automatically assume that any two events were unconnected. The structure of time was as full of holes and slides and unexpected infracausal linkages as the structure of space was full of strings and hyperstrings and wormholes—

"But why not?" Arhu suddenly said aloud.

"I can see you looking at me," Ith said.

"Of course I'm looking at you—"

"Not that way. With the
other
eye."

Rhiow flicked an ear in mild surprise.

"What's wrong with that?"

"It sees too much. It makes me see… you." No question about it: Ith's voice sounded actively afraid. "Your kind."

"You scared?" Arhu's voice was louder.

"I do not wish to see this," Ith said. "The things— the pain my kind have, that I have, it is enough.
Your
pain as well—"

"I told you,
do it in your heads,"
Urruah said, "or I'm going to come over there and bang those heads together. You two understand me?"

Arhu and Ith— half a ton of moon-and-midnight panther, a ton and a half of patterned hide— glared at Urruah together, and then turned away with an identical eye-rolling teenagers' look, and locked eyes again.

Rhiow sighed and lay back again, thinking with slight amusement of Arhu saying, just the other day,
I don't want to know this about them; it'll only make it harder to kill them when the time comes.

So now you hear it from the other side. Well, probably do you good to see things from his point of view. Do us all good, I suppose, if there were more of that…

She sought back along the interrupted train of thought. The nature of the old saurian Choice… she wondered if it was less simple than the Whisperer might initially have indicated. Not just a straightforward choice between good and evil, or obedience to the Powers and disobedience… but something more difficult: perhaps multipartite. And prophecy and the serpentine kind had long been associated in various species' myths.
Did they look ahead then,
Rhiow thought,
during the Choice, and see their possible futures?
The meteoric winter would have been part of what they saw; the Powers would have looked ahead in time and known it to be an inevitable consequence of the Lone One's involvement with this species. And at least a couple of the fates springing from it were easy enough to imagine. One would be the fate of the saurians in Rhiow's universe— almost all their species killed, except for a few of the most rugged survivors, who would forget their former greatness and dwindle into the modern reptilia; mere animals, shadows of what was… Another would have been this scenario: the saurians retreating down here into the darkness to save themselves, remembering what they once were, but also longing eternally for what once had been, and hating what they had become, and the Choice they had been forced to make…
I wonder,
Rhiow thought,
whether the saurians in our universe got the better of the deal. Better to be animal than to live like this.

But it wasn't my Choice. It's
theirs
… they're stuck with it.

It's a shame you can't trade in a Choice after a test run, though, and say to the Powers That Be, "Sorry, the Lone One fooled us, this Choice is defective, we want another chance."

The silence that fell in Rhiow's mind in the wake of the idle thought was so profound that it practically rang. It was familiar, that silence: the Whisperer suggesting that you might just have stumbled onto something….

Rhiow's eyes widened as she reexamined the thought.

The Choice offered to the forefathers and foremothers of the Wise Ones… could it be that it was defective? Flawed, somehow?
Incomplete?

Ridiculous. Whoever heard of an incomplete Choice before? There's a pattern. The Lone One turns up… says, "Would you like to live as the Powers have told you you must, or take a gamble on another way that might work out better?" And you gamble, and fall: or refuse…

And then Rhiow stopped.

But the saurian Choice
had
to be incomplete.
There had been no wizards there.
And there
had
to be wizards: the whole spectrum of a species' life, both natural and supranatural, had to be represented for the Choice to be valid.

Or…
She stared at the stone between her paws.
No. A species' Choice is its own.

Or was it?
If the species was linked to another…

…did the other have to be there, taking part, as well?
Taken together with Ith's Oath, with the Ailurin words in it…

…the thought shook Rhiow. The People were their
own.
They were utterly independent. That some other species would have been involved in
their
Choice was unthinkable… a challenge to their sovereignty over themselves. That they should be
ancillary
to some other species' Choice…

That was simply intolerable.

But Rhiow got the cold, no-nonsense feeling in her gut, when she turned to the Whisperer, which suggested that this might indeed be the case.

If this Choice was incomplete… it can be completed now. By a saurian wizard… and those intended to help him complete it, to judge by the language in it. His assistants: his people's supplanters…

Us!

She writhed a little, then cursed, and went over the Whisperer's head.

Iau, why are you dumping this on me?

You were there,
came the answer, definite and instantaneous, its Source unmistakable.
Or rather: You were
not
there. You are there now.

Choose.

And the choice was plain. Choose one way, refuse your species' help, and drive the serpents out into the cold and the dark, and damn them all. Let life be as it is, unchanged and stable, to be relied upon.

Choose another way and lose your species' autonomy forever, or whatever illusion of it you have had until now. The People's whole proud history becomes merely a footnote, a preliminary to the advent of these newborns, unable to make their own way without help; midwives to a race that had its chance and lost it, a million years ago. Nature killed them. Let nature be the arbiter: their time is over for good.

Yet nature is not innocent when the Lone One drives it. Or, rather: it remains innocent, not knowing who holds the wheel and uses it as a weapon. Is the storm to blame, or the Lone Power, when the lightning strikes and kills some noble soul about the business of saving life? Do you blame nature or sa'Rráhh when a cab comes too fast around the corner and—

Rhiow's tail lashed.
Devastatrix,
Rhiow said inside her,
I know your work. You will not fool me twice.

Yet it was not a question of anyone being fooled, anymore. Here was a Choice that had not been completed at the beginning of things. The Lone One—
illegally??
Rhiow thought, shuddering at the concept— had convinced another species that its Choice had been made. They had suffered, had died in their millions (billions?) for the Lone Power's amusement, for the sake of a technicality, an injustice done that the victim-species was incapable of perceiving.

Now someone had come along and perceived the injustice, the incomplete Choice.
What do you do?

Pass by on the other side?
Rhiow was a New Yorker; she had seen her share of this.
Make a stink? Get yourself killed as a result?
She had seen this too.

And getting yourself killed would be the least of it. You were interfering in the business of gods and demigods, here. What happens, in the human idiom, when you take the Lone Power to court and try to convict It of malfeasance? A slippery business, at best. But the destruction of much more than your body would be fair to expect if you failed.

Oh well,
Rhiow thought,
what do I need all these lives for, anyway?
The thought was bitter. Memories of Hhuha, unbidden, definitely unwanted at the moment, kept shocking through her like static on a rug in winter every minute or so, and the pain they caused Rhiow was beginning to tell. Anything that would stop that pain was beginning to look welcome.