Arhu desperately wanted to think so, that was for sure.“About the dragons?” Rhiow said. “No, that’s true enough … though not the way you might think. The presence of the worldgates can make odd things happen, things that even wizardry can’t fully explain. These tunnels sometimes reach into places that have little to do with this city. Theyaren’t a place to wander unless you know them well. Sometimes not even then…”
“But theehhif—I heard about them. Lots of them live down here, everybody says, and they’re always hungry, and they eat… rats, and, and…”
“People? No, not theseehhif,anyway,” Urruah said. “And while someehhifdo indeed live down in the tunnels and dens under the streets, it’s not as many as their stories, or ours, would make you think. Not as many People, either.”
“Problem is,ehhifdon’t see well in the dark,” Saash said, leaping up out of it and walking down the platform toward them. “Either for real or in their minds. When they try to tell stories about what they think they’ve seen down here, they tend to get confused about detail. Even for People, it’s never that easy to be accurate about this darkness. It reaches down too deep, to things that are too old. A story that seemed plain when you started, soon starts drawing darkness about itself even while you think you have it pinned down broken-backed in the daylight.,…”
Arhu was looking unusually thoughtful.“How’s the gate?” Rhiow said.
“Answering interrogations normally,” Saash said. “No resonances from our wayward friend at the end of Twenty-six: it’s sitting over there and behaving itself as if nothing had ever gone wrong.”
“Its logs are all right?”
“They’re recording usage normally again, yes.”
“That’s so strange,” Urruah said. “How are you going to explain it all to Har’lh when he asks for that report?”
“I’m going to tell him the truth, as usual,” Rhiow said, “and in this case, that means we don’t have the slightest idea what went wrong. Come on, Arhu, we’ll show you how a gate looks when it’s working right.” They walked on down to the end of the platform and jumped off. Arhu came last: he was slow about it.
“Before we go on,” Rhiow said. “Arhu, if any of this starts to frighten you, say so. You had a bad day yesterday, and we know it. But we work down here all the time, and if you’re going to be with us, you’re going to need to get used to it. If you think you need time to do that, or if youcan’t stay here long, say so.”
Arhu’s tongue came out and licked his nose nervously, twice in a row, before he finally said, “Let’s see what’s so hot down here.”
“One thing, anyway,” Urruah said, his voice full of approval. He headed off into the darkness.
The glitter and sheen of the hyperstrings of the gate was visible even before they were out of the glare of the fluorescents. The locus,a.broad oval hanging some twenty yards along from the end of Track 30, was relaxed but ready for use: its characteristic weave, which to Rhiow always looked a little like the pattern of the Chinese silk rug herehhifhad on the dining-room floor at home, radiated in shimmering patterns of orange, red, and infrared. Arhu stared at it.
“Itis alive,” he said.
“Could be,” Rhiow said. “With some kinds of wizardry, especially the older and more powerful ones, it’s hard to tell…”
“Why is it here?”
“For wizards to use for travel, as I said.”
“No, wait, I don’t mean why.Howdid they get here? This one, and all the others I can feel—”
“I see what he means,” Saash said. “To have so many gates in one place is a little unusual. It may have to do with population pressure. All these millions of minds packed close together, pressing against the structure of reality, trying to get their world to do what they want… and hundreds of years of that kind of pressure, started by people who came here over great distances to found a city where they could live the way they wanted to, have things their way— Sooner or later, even the structure of physical reality will start to bend under such pressure. Or maybe not ‘bend.’ ‘Wear thin,’ so that other realities start showing through. They say that this is the city where you can get anything: in a way, it’s become true… If there’s no gate in so populous and hard-driven a place, the theory says, one will eventually appear. If there was already a naturally occurring gate, it’ll spawn others.”
“But there’s always been at least one gate here,” Urruah said, “since long before the city: the one leading to the true Downside, the Old Downside.”
“Oh, yes. If I had to pick one, I’d bet on the gate over by One-sixteen, myself: it just feels stabler than the others, somehow. But all the gates’ signatures have become so alike, after all this time, that you’d be hard put toprovewhich was eldest. Not my problem, fortunately…”
Rhiow sat down, looking the gate over.“It does seem to be behaving. You want to run it through the standard patency sequence? We should check that this week’s bout of construction hasn’t affected it.”
“Right.” Saash sat up on her hindquarters, settling herself and reaching up to the glowing weft, spreading her claws out to catch selected strings in them and pull—
She froze, then reached in and through the webbing of the gate once more, feeling for something—
“Rhi,” she said, “we’ve got a problem.”
Rhiow stared as Saash grasped for the strings again—and once more couldn’t get a grip on them. In the midst of this bizarre turn of affairs, the last thing Rhiow would have expected to hear was purring, except she did hear it, then turned in surprise and saw Arhu standing there rigid, looking not at Saash or the gate, but out into the darkness beyond them. The purr was not pleasure or contentment: it was that awful edgy purr that comes with terror or pain, and the sound of it made Rhiow’s hackles rise.
“Arhu—”
He paid no attention to her; just stood there, trembling violently, his eyes wide and dark, his throat rough with the purr of fear.
“Something’s coming,” he said.
They all listened for the telltale tick of rails, for the sound of an unscheduled loco down in the main tunnel past Tower U, where forty tracks narrowed to four. But no such sound could be heard. Neither could what Rhiow half-expected— the squeak of rats—though just the thought made her bristle.
Flashback,Urruah said silently.We’ve brought him down too soon.
“Arhu,” Rhiow said, “maybe you and Urruah should go back out to the concourse.”
“It won’t make any difference,” Arhu said, his voice oddly dry and drained-sounding. “It’s coming all the same. It came before. Once, to see. Once, to taste. Once, to devour—”
“Get him back out there,” Rhiow said to Urruah.
Urruah reached over past her, grabbed Arhu by the scruff of the neck as if he were a much smaller kitten than he was, leapt up onto the platform with him, and hurried off down it, half-dragging Arhu like a lion with a gazelle. Fortunately the youngster was still sidled: allowing any watching station staff to view the spectacle of him being dragged down the platform by something that wasn’t there, Rhiow thought, would have produced some choice remarks from Har’lh later.
Rhiow turned her attention back to Saash, who was hissing softly with consternation and anger.“What’s the matter?”
“Idon’t know. Iinterrogated it not five minutes ago and it was fine! Here—” She pulled her paws out of the gateweave, then carefully put out a single claw and hooked it behind the three-string bundle that led into the interrogation routines. Saash pulled, and the lines of light stretched outward and away from the weft structure, came alive with flickers of dark redfire that ran down the threads like water.
“See? That’s fine. But the gate won’t hyperextend, Rhi! The control functions aren’t answering. It’s simply refusing to open.”
“That can’t happen. Itcan’t.”