It was a single pinpoint locus of darkness, like a micro-black hole. But no innocent singularity ever carried with it such a freight of unreasoning horror as swept over Rhiow with its appearance. Inside the shielded worldgate enclosure, Rhiow saw all her team staring at the tiny thing with loathing and fear. But it did not stay tiny long. Very slowly it started blooming outward into a dark sphere, as incursions from mathematically more complex dimensions tend to do. The sphere was not solid: part of it passed through over and through the black worldgate as it grew, briefly obscuring it, then drifting to one side. Absolutely silently it grew to ten feet in diameter, thirty, fifty, a hundred feet wide. Rhiow noticed, then, how all sound had been fading away with its growth. The realization made her fur stand up even more enthusiastically than it had been.
That was when the black sphere finally stopped growing; and through its surface, on all sides, a writhing shape began to extrude.
At which point the air began to scream.
Right through her shield Rhiow could instantly feel the burning on her fur, the desperate inner shriek of matter outraged by intimate contact with something impossible in normal space, the air burning a brief and horrified violet of instant annihilation where it came into direct contact with what was coming out of the black-burning sphere. Black wasn’t even the right word for it; but it would have to do, for sensory perception in this continuum had few other ways to deal with the concept of something that was the absence of physicality and on which light refused to fall, as if refusing contact with something so alien. Emptiness didn’t workas a description either; both brain and spirit, used to dealing with a universe that had no true emptiness in it though it was full of space, shied away with nature’s own abhorrence to something that by comparison made a vacuum seem packed full. Caught between the contradictions, the eye and the mind both reported emptiness that was full of something peculiarly horrible, that curled out in strangling tendrils that gripped and slid over and around the hyperstrings in space, annihilating even them where touched, and gazed eyelessly at you with a hunger that could never be filled no matter what it devoured –
From down in the city, from nearer on the hillsides, the anguished screams of ehhif began to arise– innocent souls realizing that they without warning they were suddenly damned, and far worse than damned. Rhiow shot a glance at the gating circle. The nothingness was washing up around it, eating at it; she could see thinning in the outer walls of the protective dome over it, places where the splashed-out glow of the LA gate against the forcefield was wearing thin. Inside it, Urruah and Hwaith and Aufwi were all reared up, every one of them with his claws full of hyperstrings that were trying to warp out of shape, but being prevented. For how long? Rhiow thought, shuddering with the pain that beat on her own shield, relentlessly eating through it toward her like acid.
The dreadful shape kept on boiling out of the sphere on all sides, filling the air over the Observatory, and the air kept on screaming in agony as the shadowy manifestation of the Outside One poured into the world, like flood waters from some dark sea, irresistible, infinite. Its dreadful pressure on the soul grew moment by moment, crushing, so that you wanted to do anything to make it stop: flee, even die. But fleeing won’t help, Rhiow thought, and neither will dying. Now’s the time!
She was shivering with terror, and ashamed of it; yet she knew what she had to do… and so did sa’Rraah. You have no choice, the Lone One said in the back of her mind, urgent. I am the only one that our enemy will trust to come into contact with it. It thinks It knows my will. And now it will find out exactly how well it knows me. And then the silence fell in Rhiow’s mind again, waiting.
So will I, Rhiow thought, desperate. For of all the Powers, sa’Rraah cannot enter in except where by commission or omission She is invited. And now we find out whether the word I speak next will kill not only my body, but my soul.
One last look she threw at her team inside the great gating circle: and, inside, gazing back at her in terror, Hwaith. There has to be something else I can do–! he said to her.
At such a moment, she thought, he’s still thinking about me! It pierced her to the heart. But there was nothing he could do, and right now, only one thing left for her.
…Come, Rhiow said to the Lone Power.
And She came.
Whether what followed took a moment or forever, Rhiow couldn’t tell; she was flung down writhing, her bones burning with the entry into her body and soul of something as dark as the moment before the First Light and only a little less than an eternity old. The agelessness of the divine Rhiow had experienced before — but Queen Iau had some regard for thePeople she had made. What vastly burst into Rhiow now was the Queen’s ancient rival, the breeder of all envies and resentments, not overly concerned about the welfare of anything merely mortal except as its being gave Her a chance to drive a claw into Her Mother.
Yet sa’Rraah did not dare damage Rhiow at the moment, for fear she should fail in the work now before them.Slowly Rhiow pushed herself up again as the Lone Power slid into congruence with her. With terror she felt, first the dark and cold drawing around and clothing her, and then an awful restless fire— all angers and frustrations concentrated together at the heart of the darkness, like the core of blasting pressure at the heart of some collapsed star: heat indescribable, an unbreakable inwardness, a fury at the world that almost since the beginning of things had refused to go her way.
Power, though, that She unquestionably had as welclass="underline" and unafraid Rhiow drew on that, knowing that to survive what was coming, she would need everything the Lone One had to offer her. She thought of the possibility of a shield to hold away the pain, and instantly the pain vanished, even in the face of this awful onslaught.
Very well, Rhiow thought, looking up into that darkness that had been so painful to the sight. Now the discomfort at least was gone, set aside by something in its way far worse, that core of jealous rage inside her that burned like an ancient furnace. It had burned so since Aaurh the Mighty cast sa’Rraah out of the Pridelands and away from the Hearth, and it was the proximate cause of all the miseries the Lone One had inflicted on life from then until now. How dare She slight My primacy, sa’Rraah’s heart roared so as to be heard by all Creation: how dare She give you what She will not allow Me! You will suffer for that: suffer for it forever!
Rhiow was conscious of the blatant one-sidedness of the anger, and she held desperately to that consciousness: the last thing she could afford right now was to be swept away into sa’Rraah’s undiluted point of view. But there was nothing in the universe like that anger, and it was something she would use.
That you would use— ! said something from inside her, and strove to crush her down into resistlessness. I am the immortal here, I say how we shall deal with this —
Lone One, Rhiow said, pushing back, shut up or I’ll shred your ears! We have work to do. Mortality you needed? Well, now you’ve got it. So get busy manifesting yourself! They’re buying us the time we and the world need. Don’t waste it on playing hauissh-in-the-head with me: do whatever you have to do!
In a moment–
Rhiow glanced at the Observatory. Over that way the Father of the Saurians stood towering up over the building, even in the face of the Outside One radiating the essence of a settled power that was binding all things together as they were, running up straight up into space and far down into the Earth and into neighboring dimensions. As Rhiow watched, Ith threw down the blinding wizardly construct he was holding in his claws, and Earth and air together kindled from it in a single blaze. That settled to reveal a glowing and intricate network of bindings, involving everything from the subatomic to the macrospatial levels, a network of unbreakable intention that sank into the fabric of things, reinforcing it. But enough?