And up on the street, something unusual began to occur. A fizzle and stutter of a new light, like lightning, painted the buildings further up Eighth Avenue with a sudden multicolored glare. A great rumble, like an incoming subway train, but much, much bigger, shook the whole area.
There were not many people who actually lived in this neighborhood, which was probably as well. Rhiow looked up around her and was clear that any of the residents, if they were even conscious right now, would simply think that the one of the many subway lines under Penn was making an unusual amount of noise this morning…probably something to do with the construction in the new Penn building, which had been going on for months and was famously noisy. It was a mistake that Rhiow would have been happy to encourage. But after the rumble came something that even on quite a bad day could not have been attributed to subway trouble.
Down Eighth Avenue, several storeys above the sidewalk, a huge head peered around the corner of Thirty-fourth Street. Only a very alert observer would have been able to see that the terrible face– fanged, scaled, dramatically striped in blood-crimson and gold, the wicked eye glinting with a burning gold of its own — somehow looked a little uncertain. But then the face recovered its composure. Down in the street, several of the waiting cameras pushed in on it.
The huge jaws opened, revealing fangs like mighty knives. A roar issued forth from that gigantic maw, belling an awful challenge. Windows rattled for blocks up and down Eighth. The cops standing around the“director” goggled, impressed against their will, as the dinosaur – bigger than any Godzilla or Gorgo, impossibly large – came striding out into the intersection of Eighth and Thirty-fourth, its clawed forelegs working, its long tail swept out behind it for balance.
Behind the“dinosaur” came a herd of his people – all smaller far than he: but then the Father of his People could afford the power to manifest himself in a variation of the form that had once destroyed the Lone Power that was gnawing at the roots of the feline world. Now that outrageous and gigantic form, and about fifty smaller “dinosaurs”, came rampaging down Eighth. The ground shook as they came. The cops stood there shaking their heads, impressed: the Film Board lady, in the middle of texting somebody on her mobile, stopped to stare, her mouth hanging open. The greatest dinosaur stopped about halfway down the block, directly between the Felt Forum and Madison Square Garden and the Post Office building, then put his tail briefly down and let out one magnificent roar that once again rattled all the plateglass for hundreds of meters around like a Space Shuttle landing – a histrionic and ferocious ophidian shout of defiance.
And slowly, up through the street, the Sun rose.
Or at least it seemed to. One of the many wizards managing secondary support for this operation had spoken the Mason’s Word to the street, adding one of the Word’s subroutines that affected metals as well as stone and stone derivatives. So, untroubled by the tangle of cable and piping that underlay every New York street, through the concrete and the much-patched asphalt, the sheen and burn of tightly wrappedhyperstrings rode up into the still predawn air. The biggest dinosaur, reacting to the growing light and the new shadow cast from his tremendous bulk, looked over his shoulder at the rising, burning fury, turned, roared his own defiance, and made toward the ball of fire.
He reached out claws to it, sank them in deep, grappled with the great burning shape, and staggered back, striving and wrestling with the burden of it…lurching and stumbling with it backwards, down Eighth, toward Rhiow…and toward exactly the spot where they wanted it to go. Rhiow’s tail began to lash, for this was not a moment for Ith, or Urruah, or Arhu or Siff’hah, to lose their grip on the worldgates. Yet for the moment everything seemed to be working, and things could have gone so much worse if they’d tried to conduct this business underground. The complications of pushing this great deadly ball of energy along an entirely underground route, through meter after meter of ehhif high-tension power conduits and cable guides and pipes and tubes and steam ducts, would have been huge. But it had all become completely unnecessary, one afternoon, when in the midst of yet another too-contentious meeting down underneath Penn, Urruah’s voice spoke up and said, entirely reasonably, “Why should we drive ourselves insane? Why bother hiding the move from the ehhif at all? Hide it in plain sight.”
It had seemed like such an insane concept at first. But even Jath, hard though he’d resisted it, had been won around to the quirky logic of it. And then the other wizards with whom the plan had had to be cleared had accepted it enthusiastically. Is it just that it’s so odd? Rhiow had thought at the time. Whatever the reason, here they all were, ehhif-wizards and People-wizards all together: and here was the whole Penn worldgate complex wrapped into one tightly-wound package. It was trying to unravel itself, but being prevented from doing so by Siff’hah as the spell’s power source, floating along invisibly beside it so as not to have to be distracted by the need towaste concentration on walking. The whole ball of yarn, as it were, was now apparently rolling down toward Rhiow, dominating the street and getting bigger by the moment, bearing down on the dinosaurs clustered around their gigantic chief, who looked to be losing his wrestling match. And right down at the bottom of it all, invisible to all eyes except feline ones, there was a single tiny, tabby-striped figure with his back to Rhiow, pulling the worldgate complex down Eighth Avenue….with his teeth.
The fur stood up all over Rhiow as she watched him, hearing Urruah babbling at her again, late one morning two months ago, as he walked home with her.“I would never have thought of it! I saw it on this ehhif thing on cable late one night, and the image just wouldn’t let me be, and I – ”
“Cable?” Rhiow had shaken her head as if all the fleas apparently living inside Urruah’s head were now trying to roost in her ears. “Your Dumpster has cable, all of a sudden?”
He gave her a look that said most eloquently how he was ignoring her attempts to derail his train of thought.“It was one of those big bull ehhif, all teeth and no brains, and he was pulling along one of those big trucks, they call them semih’s, and he was doing it with his teeth – ”
He was all teeth and no brains? Rhiow wanted to shout. She restrained herself for the moment, and paused in front of a dry-cleaners’ shop to wash an ear that didn’t need it. “Urruah,” Rhiow said, “if you saw an ehhif jump off a bridge, would you do that too? You and your ‘popular culture,’ whatever that is, I swear, because it changes every time you try to define it – ”
“It’s something you don’t get enough of, that’s for sure. Otherwise you would have had this great idea first. Anyway, the cable’s backstage at the Met; the scene guys have to have something to watch while the oh’ra singers are actually singing. So here he is, this ehhif, in one of thesestrong-ehhif contests they have, where they lift rocks and throw trees around and Iau knows what all else, it’s hysterical to watch them.”
Hysterical, that’s going to be me in a minute, Rhiow thought, as Urruah went on to describe the strange pulling device which had been built for this ehhif to use – something to sink his teeth into and pull this semih’ the necessary distance. Yet all against her will she’d begun to see how similar his idea was to some of the handling constructions that a gate tech might build to deal with the most recalcitrant gating structures, old ones that were getting likely to shred themselves to bits if you moved them. All right, this was a brute-force kind of solution, completely unlike the more elegant and finicky kind of strategy that her old colleague Saash would have come up with. But Saash was somewhere else at the moment, helping Iau steer the stars in their courses, no doubt; and who knew whether, if you handed her a whole star or a whole gating complex to manhandle around, even she mightn’t havesaid “the hell with the claws” and used her teeth instead? Maybe it’s time I got past my preconceptions about Urruah’s potential as a gate tech, Rhiow thought. All right, it’s just such a tom-sounding way to deal with something, but if it works…