Probably best we should scatter around before they start coming in here in numbers, Rhiow said. Stay by the walls. Their eyes aren’t anything like as good as ours under these conditions: they won’t be able to see much even if they bring more lights in here.
Her team split up and took off in both directions. Off to one side, Arhu was lingering. How many have you seen coming into the house so far? Rhiow said.
Twenty or so.
All right. Go on. And Arhu– He paused. Watch Sif’s back. She’s likely to make the difference between us being able to stop what starts happening here or not making any difference at all.
Don’t worry… I’ll be right with her. He faded off into the darkness.
Rhiow looked at the stones again, trying to force herself to concentrate on the nearest of the large ones. It was hard: she felt her eyes burning as something made her want more and more to look away. Nasty, she said. Come on, Hwaith, no point in lurking there and hoping I won’t notice you. If you’re going to be with me, be with me.
She headed off toward the nearest of the big stones, being careful to keep it between her and that dim light down by the doorway. Are you seeing what I’m seeing? Hwaith said.
I’m not seeing much of anything, Rhiow said as they got closer to the stone: her eyes were bothering her more and more as she tried to focus on the thing.
Not that, Rhiow. Look at the strings!
Unusually for a gate technician, she had been paying little attention to the hyperstring structure in the area. Now Rhiow made the little mental shift necessary to alter the way she was seeing the physical world, and the hyperstrings in the area sprang into view. But she didn’t see the normal relatively straight warp and weft of brilliant lines that grossly marked the structure on which the physical universe was hung. Here the lines of force invisibly filling the air were all warped out of shape, unnaturally bundled together around the circle, as if they were writhing away from the stones in the circle.
It wasn’t the stones themselves that were the major force disrupting the string structures, however. It was the hard-to-see diagram dug into the rammed clay in the circle’s center. All right, Rhiow said silently, we knew something like this would probably be here… She moved forward cautiously, avoiding the chance of touching any of the stones, and watching where she put her feet to make sure she didn’t come in contact with any of the figure inscribed into the ground. Even if the thing was composed entirely of fragments of charms, it was entirely capable of containing “tripwires” that would alert whoever had drawn it.
From way down the cavern, near the wall, she caught a flash of Urruah’s eyes as he paused near the kerosene lamp to look back her way. This is so un-Hollywood, he said. There should be all kinds of evil carved figures, a big dais, a sacrificial altar…
We’ve got more than enough nasty stuff here without starting to complain about the aesthetics, Rhiow said, pausing at the edge of the diagram and looking it over. Behind her, Hwaith was circling past one of the stones to her left to get another angle on it.
Rhiow had been half expecting either a clumsy aggregation of mangled Speech-symbols or one of the peculiar but nonfunctional spell diagrams that had percolated down through ehhif popular culture from medieval times, some farrago of alchemical symbols, ancient languages and confused numerology. But this was neither. Scratched in the ground the diagram might be, no polished work, but all the essential elements of a spell circle were here. Inside a series of nested envelopment circles and intersecting power management rhomboids were many long and intricately interconnected statements in the Speech. Rhiow knew she could spend a good while teasing out the fine details, but the overall structure made the spell’s purpose clear. It was meant to contain and trap power funneled into it from outside, and it was full of symbols and contractions that had to do with the confinement of extracted life force. The means of extraction were obvious enough: the broad bloodstains were still in place, the color plain even though the clotted blood had been scraped away. With the blood, soaked into the ground under the spell circle, she could feel the remnants of many previous ehhif attempts to contact dark forces and twist their power to the ehhifs’ will. Blood had been spilled then too, though with far less focused purpose than most recently. Rhiow looked away from the biggest pool and saw something that in its way troubled her more: the eight stones dropped here and there on focus points of the circle’s inner diagrams. At least they looked like stones at first. But if they were stones, then someone had gone to a great deal of trouble to carve each one into the likeness of an ehhif’s torn-out or cut-out heart…
Rhiow shook her head at the low, angry, hungry buzzing noise that was getting louder every minute while she stood inside the stone circle. Here one could clearly hear sa’Rraah’s little minions, and sense them thronging thickly around, just as Arhu said. You could feel them in the air but most especially in the ground, through your feet, as if yellowjackets had buried nests everywhere under the floor. The shadow-imps were reacting, not just to the presence of wizards here, but to the greedy and ambitious ehhif who had once again been stirring up that old pool of darkness with their desire to control it. And more so than usual, Rhiow thought, because this time the stakes are so much higher. This time sa’Rraah has so much more to gain if the ehhif’s endeavor succeeds…
Out at the edge of the circle of stones, Aufwi had slipped out of the shadows to examine the circle more closely. There was definitely a gate here, Rhiow, he said. You can see where the ambient string structure’s deformed by the material memory in the floor of the previous gate anchoring, and there are some temporary mooring receptacles still sunk underneath this circle. But some time in the recent past the gate was moved to that temporary anchorage we found upstairs… maybe while somebody was workingon it who didn’t want to be down here all the time.
I can understand that, Rhiow said, for that dark buzzing at the edge of things was getting more and more unbearable. And something else was troubling her: an increasing sense of being buried, buried alive, buried in ground that nonetheless was thinking about moving, moving the first chance it got, killing everything… She shook herself, told herself to stay focused. Anyway, it’s not up there now. And it’s not down here. Where’ve they got it stowed? Because whatever gate was operating here was extremely powerful, on a par with a hardwired permanent gate. It has to have deranged everything else for milesaround whenever it went operational. No wonder the formally emplaced gates in the area have been acting so badly….
She glanced over at Hwaith, whose tail was fluffed out to about three times its size as he stared at the spell diagram. Gating issues were plainly far from his mind right now. Rhiow, this is very bad, he said. This isn’t just some clueless ehhif dabbling. This is professional stuff.
Her tail lashed in agreement. It’s unquestionably the Speech, Rhiow said. Unquestionably a spell. But now we’re left with the question: how could it possibly ever enact? No wizard in the Powers’ service would ever build a spell like this. Or expect anything to come of it —
Yet then Rhiow had to stop, for at least once now she’d seen a wizard working in a Power’s service because it knew no other source of power… and his spells had enacted. But that was in another universe, a whole pocket world in the Downside that the Lone One had subverted to its own intentions. This is the Powers’ world. This kind of thing can’t work here –
It can if the wizard’s physical tie to Them has been completely severed, Hwaith said, his voice full of pity and dread. And all that remains is a soul-shell that walks and speaks and hates…
Her eyes met his in the dark, widening in realization. And down at the end of the cavern, the door opened and ehhif started filing in.