Urruah saw it, too. “I could give it a power failure,” he gasped as they ran. “No one would suspect a thing.”
“It wouldn’t stop the train before it ran through the gate.”
“I could stop it—”
“You’ve swapped brains with your smallest flea,” Rhiow hissed. The dreadful mass and kinetic energy bound up in a whole train were well beyond even Urruah’s exaggerated idea of his own ability to handle. “It’ll derail, and Iau only knows how many of those poor ehhif will get hurt or killed. Come on—!”
They ran after Saash. She stood in front of the gate, tail lashing violently as she looked the tangle of strings up and down, eyes half-closed to see them better. As Rhiow and Urruah came up with her, she turned.
“It’s still viable,” she said. “Much better than I feared. The configuration that we left it in yesterday afternoon is still saved in the strings—see that knot? And that one.”
Rhiow peered at them. “Can you get them to retie?”
“Should be able to. We can reweave later: no time for it now. This’ll at least shut the thing. Urruah?”
“Ready,” he said. He was panting, but eager as always. “Where do you want it?”
“Just general at first. Then the substrate. Rhiow?”
“Ready,” she said.
First Saash, then Urruah, and at last Rhiow, reared up and hooked claws through the bright web of strings, and began to pull. Saash leaned in deep, set her teeth into another knotted set of burning stringfire, closed her eyes and started work. The fizz and itch in the air started to get worse, while Saash’s power and intention ran down the strings through the gate substrate, and the strings obediently writhed and began reweaving themselves over the gaping portal. Through the physical gate itself, not the orderly circle or sphere Rhiow was used to but just a jagged rent in the dark air, nothing could be seen: not the train, not anything else. The gate had been left open on some void or empty place. Cold dark wind breathed from it, mixing peculiarly with the hot metallic breath of the train trundling along through the dimness toward them. Oh, hurry up! Rhiow thought desperately, for she couldn’t get rid of the image of the train plunging into that jagged darkness and being lost—where? No way of telling. After a catastrophic incursion by such a huge mass, certainly the gate would derange, maybe irreparably. And what would happen to the train and its passengers, irretrievably lost into some hole in existence?
Rhiow pulled forcibly away from such thoughts: they wouldn’t help the work. Saash was deep in it, drowned in the concentration that made her so good at this work—claws snagged deep in the substrate as she drew strings out with paws and mind, knitted them together, released them to pull in others. Urruah, his face a mask of strained but joyous snarl like the one he had worn while killing rats, fed her power, a blast of sheer intention as irresistible as the stream from a fire hose, so that the strings blazed, kindling to Saash’s requirements and knitting faster every moment. This was what made Urruah the second heart of the team, despite all his bragging and bad temper: the blatant energy of a young tom in his prime, harnessed however briefly and worth any amount of skill.
Rhiow fed her energy down the weave, too, but mostly concentrated on watching the overall progress of the reweave. There, she said down the strings to the others, watch that patch there— Saash was on it, digging her forelegs into the tangle practically to the shoulders. A moment while she fished around deep inside the weave, as if feeling for a mouse inside a hole in a walclass="underline" then she snagged the string she wanted and pulled it into place, and the part of the weave that had threatened to come undone suddenly went seamless, a patch of light rather than a webwork. The tear in the darkness was healing itself. Peering around its right edge, Rhiow saw the train coining, very close now, certainly no more than a hundred yards down the track. It’s going to be all right, she thought, it’ll be all right, oh, come on, Saash, come on, Urruah—!
The gate substrate looked less like a bottomless hole now, and more like a flapping, flattening tapestry woven of light on a weft of blackness. The gap was narrowing to a tear, the tear to a fissure of black above the tracks. The train was fifty yards away. Still Saash stood reared up against the glowing weave of substrate, pulling some last few burning strings into order. Rhi, she thought, hold this last bit—
Half deafened, Rhiow reached in and bit the indicated strings to hold them in place while Saash worked in a final furious flurry of haste, pulling threads in and out, interweaving them. Not for the first time, Rhiow wondered what human had once upon a time seen a gate-technician of the People about her business, and later had named a human children’s game with string “cat’s-cradle”—
Done! Saash shouted into the weave. It snapped completely flat, a dazzling tapestry along which many-colored fires rolled outward to the borders, bounced, rippled in again. The dark crack in the air slammed shut. Behind it, the blind white eye of the 6:23’s locomotive slid ponderously at them in a roar of diesel thunder. Rhiow and Urruah threw themselves to the right of the track, under the platform; Saash leapt to the left. The loco roared straight through the rewoven and now-harmless gate substrate, stirring it not in the slightest, and brakes screeched as the train gradually slid down to the end of its platform and gently stopped.
The train sat there ticking and hissing gently to itself, the huge wheels of one car not two inches from Rhiow’s and Urruah’s noses. “A little close,” Urruah said from where he crouched, wide-eyed, a few feet away.
“A little,” Saash said, from the far side. “Rhiow? I want to do some low-level diagnosis on this gate before we leave. The other three I can check from here; but I want to look into this one’s log weave and see who left it in this state.”
“Absolutely,” Rhiow said. “Wait till they move this thing.”
It usually took fifteen or twenty minutes for the train to empty out and for the crew to finish checking it. Urruah rose after getting his breath back. “I need to stretch,” he said, and walked off to the end of the platform. Rhiow went after him.
Down the track they met Saash, who had had the same idea. At the sight of her, Urruah made a face, his nose twitching. “Aaurh up a tree, look at you! And you stink!”
Saash made a matching face, for once unwilling to sit down and wash. But then she grinned. “Your delicate sensibilities?” Saash said sweetly.
Urruah had the grace to look sheepish. He wandered away through the carnage. “Not a trick you’d want to use every day. But effective … !”
“It saved us,” Rhiow said softly. “And them. Nice work, Saash.”
Saash looked wry. “I know what I’m good for. Fighting isn’t it.”
’Technical expertise, though…” Rhiow said.
“Rats,” said Saash, “make a specific shape in space. There’s a way they affect strings in their area, one that no other species duplicates. There’s a way to exploit that.” She shrugged her tail; but she smiled.
“Keep that spell loaded,” Rhiow said, heartfelt. “We may need it again.”
From down the track came a rumble and groan of wheels as the train started backing out into the tunnel where all the upper-level tracks merged. Rhiow and the team moved a couple of tracks eastward to avoid it, Urruah wandering ahead. “So what will we do after this?” he said.
“Get cleaned up,” Rhiow said, with longing.
“I mean after mat… We could go down to the Oyster Bar and romance the window lady.”
Rhiow flicked an ear in mild exasperation, wondering how Urruah could think of any food, even oysters, when surrounded by a smell like this. But they were a passion of his. Occasionally Rhiow had secretly followed Urruah down to the restaurant’s pedestrian-service window after finishing work, and had seen him stand there in line with the other commuters—provoking much amused comment—and then wheedle bluepoints out of one of the window staff, a big broad blond lady, by force of purr alone. For her own part, Rhiow would never have done something so high-profile in the terminal itself. But Urruah had no shame, and Rhiow had long since given up trying to teach him any.