And the island— Rhiow looked behind her, northward: looked up. Lands would change in times to come. Continents would drift apart or be torn asunder. Countries would be raised up, thrown down, drowned, or buried. But through the geological ages, one mountain of this coastland would persist. The indomitable foundation of it, a solid block of basalt some ten miles square, would be fragmented by earthquakes, half-sunk with the settling of what would become North America; the land around it would be raised hundreds of feet by glacier-dumped silt and stone, and the water of the massive, melted icecaps would nearly submerge what remained, coming right up to what endured of its ancient, battered, flattened peak. But that had not happened yet. And even when it did, New Yorkers would remember—not knowing the memory’s source—and call the place the Rock.
Rhiow looked up. Far higher than she could see, standing so close to its base, the Mountain reared up to high heaven. There was no judging its height. Its slopes, towering above and to either side like a wall built against the northern sky, were clothed in forest. The trees were mighty pale-barked pillars, primeval seed-parents of the darker, younger trees among which the gate had left her, some of the parent-trees now hundreds of feet in circumference. In rank after rank they speared upward, diminishing, finally becoming hidden among their own branches, merely a green cloud against the farthest heights. Amid the cloud, though, where the great peak began (even from this aspect) to narrow, one slender arrowy shape, distinct even at this distance, speared higher than all the others: one tree,theTree—the most ancient of them, and, legend said, the first.
Rhiow gazed at it, mute with awe. Maybe someday she would have leisure to climb the Mountain and look up into those branches, to sit in the shadow of the Tree and listen to the voices that spoke, so legend said, from that immense green silence. Not now: perhaps not in this life: perhaps not until after the ninth one, if luck and her fate led her that far. It was dangerous enough for her just to be here—as dangerous as it was for any being to remain, for a prolonged period, out of its own time or space.
Meantime, though, she might briefly enjoy the sight of me true and ancient Manhattan, the living reality of which the steel-and concrete-clad island was a shadowy and mechanistic restatement.Ehhifbuilt“skyscrapers” half in ambition, half in longing—uncertain why the ambition never satisfied them no matter how they achieved it, and not remembering what they longed for. They had been latecomers, theehhif:they had not been here very long before the world changed, and this warm, still wilderness went chill and cruel. It was the Lone One’s fault, of course. That fact theehhifdimly remembered in their own legends, just as they vaguely remembered the Tree, and an ancient choice ill-made, and the sorrow of something irrevocably lost.
Rhiow sighed, and turned her back on the lulling vista of the Old World, padding back among the trees. Better get on with what she had come here to do, before being here too long did her harm.
Rhiow made her way silently through the dimness beneath the trees toward the great cliff-outcroppings on this side of the Mountain’s foot. Thinking of the Lone One brought Arhu to mind again.No question who he heard speaking to him,Rhiow thought,the first time, at least.She knew well enough the voice that had awakened her this morning, and which spoke to all feline wizards on behalf of the Powers That Be: the wisdom that first whispered in your ear to offer you the Art and the promise of your Ordeal, and then, assuming you survived, taught you the details of wizardry from day to day and passed on your assignments. Tradition said the one Who actually spoke was Iau’s daughter, Hrau’f the Silent, Whose task was to order creation, making rules and setting them in place. The tradition seemed likely enough to Rhiow: the voice you “heard” had a she-ish sense about it and a tinge of humor that agreed with the old stories’ accounts of Hrau’f’s quiet delight in bringing order from chaos.
But the question remained: whose voice had spoken second? For Queen Iau had other daughters. There was another“she” involved with wizardry, one whose methods were subtle, whose intentions were ambivalent—and rarely good for the wizard…
Rhiow came to the bottom of the scree-slope that ran up to the base of the cliff-face. Here the trees bore the scars of old stonefalls: boulders lay among the pine needles, and the brown soft carpet grew thinner toward the sheer bare cliff. At the top of the scree-slope, jagged, silent, and dark, yawned the entrance to the caves.
She padded up the stones, paused on the flat rubble-strewn slab that served for a threshold, and gazed in. It was not totally dark inside, not this near to the opening—and not where the master anchor-structures for the New York gates all hung, a blazing complex of shifting, rippling webs and wefts, burning in the still, cool air of the outer cave.
Rhiow sat down and just looked at them, as she always did when she made this trip. Learning the way these patterns looked had been one of her first tasks as a young wizard. Her Ordeal had revealed that she had an aptitude for this kind of work, and afterward the Powers had assigned Rhiow to old Ffairh to develop her talent. She remembered sitting here with him for the first time, her haunches shifting with impatience, both with delight at her splendidly big new body, and with the desire to get up and do something about the patterns that hung before her, singing and streaming with power. Or rather, to do somethingwiththem.
Ffairh had stared at her, eyes gleaming, and Rhiow had stopped her fidgeting and sat very still under his regard. Ffairh had been nothing much to look at in their homeworld—a scruffy black-and-white tom without even the rough distinction of scars, crooked in the hind leg and tail from where the cab hit him. Here, though, where the soul ruled the body, Ffairh stood nearly five feet high at the shaggy, brindled shoulder, and the sabers of bis fangs were nearly as long as Rhiow’s whole body back home. The weight and majesty of his presence was immense, and the amused annoyance in those amber eyes, which down by Track 116 had seemed merely funny, now took on a more dangerous quality.
“Don’t be so quick to want to tamper,” Ffairh had said. “No one exploring this world has been able to find a time when these wizardriesweren’there… and exocausal spell-workings like that always mean the Powers are involved. No one knows for sure which One wove them. Aaurh herself, maybe: they’re strong enough for it. They’re old and strong enough to be a little alive. They have to be, to take care of themselves and protect themselves from misuse: for wizards can’t watch them all the time.Mostof the time, though … and you’ll find that’s what you’ll spend these next few lives doing, unless They retire you, or you slip up…”
He had been right about that, as about most things. Ffairh was two years gone now: where, Rhiow had no idea. He had let his sixth life go peacefully, in extreme old age, and if he’d since come back, Rhiow had yet to meet him. But he had refused to go before completely training his replacement. Now, as she sat and examined the gate-wefts for abnormalities, Rhiow smiled at the memory of her head ringing from yet another of the old curmudgeon’s ferocious cuffs and Ffairh’s often-repeated shout, “Will you hurry up and learn this stuff so I candie?!”
She had learned. She came here more often than need strictly required, though not so often for repeated exposure to endanger her: about that issue, Rhiow was most scrupulous. She was just as scrupulous, though, about knowing the gates well, and knowing this part of them—the root of the installation—best of all. The wizardries that manifested as the string structures of the four Grand Central gates were only extensions: branches, as it were, of the Tree. The “trunk” of the spells, the master control structure for each of them, was here, in the Old World—the upper levels of the true Downside, of which Grand Central’s and Penn’s “downsides” were mere sketchy restatements. The “roots” of the spell structure, of course, went farther down … much farther, into the endless, tangled caverns, down to the roots of the Mountain, the heart of this world. But that wasn’t somewhere Rhiow would go unless the Powers That Be specifically ordered it They never had, during her management of these gates, and Rhiow hoped they never would. Ffairh had gone once and had described that intervention to her, in a quiet, dry fifteen-minute monologue that had given her nightmares for weeks.