The Book of Night With Moon (53 page)

Let's not give It the chance, then,
Rhiow said.
We'll go straight down.

But
how,
Rhi? You heard him: the lower halls are full of these things.

I don't propose to go the way
It
wants 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. Even
ehhif
had 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 a
houff
or weep like an
ehhif, 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 an
ehhif
wore: 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'Rráhh, 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 she
is
the 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 is
about,
they say, is slowly winning 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'Rráhh 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 have no 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 spell:
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'Rráhh 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'Rráhh?—
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."

"Fix
what?"

"The battle. The Fight!"

"Now,
wait
a minute!" Urruah said. "Are you seriously talking about some kind of, I don't know, some reconfiguration of saurian mythology? Let alone
feline
mythology? What makes you think you have the right to tell the Gods how things ought to be done?"

"What made Them think
They
had 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't
we?"

All she could do was open her mouth and shut it again.

"It's only legend because it happened so
long
ago!" Arhu said. "But once upon a time, it was
now!
They did the best they could, once upon a time. And
this
is 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 because
They
did 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't
They?"

Urruah, and Saash, well awake now, both stared.

"I mean, if They're any
good
as gods," Arhu said, with the old street-kitten scorn. "If They aren't, They should be
fired."

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
entropy itself
be 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 him. "Then we can fight
Their
way. She was me, for a little while. Why can't it go both ways? Why can't we be
Them?"

"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 to
test…."

But that was all she could say about it… for there was no denying, having looked, that the spell appeared… more
whole.
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, but
more.
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 herself
playing
one 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— play
you?
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 themselves
become
the Powers. Beware the Choice! Beware refusing it!

How much plainer could the hint be?
she wondered. But in either case, the common thread was
Beware.
Whatever happened…
you
were 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 were
ehhif
legends about her, how sa'Rráhh 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 the
ehhif
story) 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.