Rhiow and the others stood still and stared as the stars began to fall.
At least they looked like stars at first. There had been none in the impenetrable darkness. But all around the struggling, roaring shape of sa'Rrahh, bright fires started to fall from far above. They fell in pairs. As they came to the ground, they started to acquire shapes of their own: bodies formed around them. Hundreds of bodies, thousands of bodies, tens of thousands of them, all shining each like its own small sun.
Rhiow stared in wonder. They were the People of the ancient days: the hundreds of thousands of cats of the Egyptians, who had mummified them and laid them to rest. Their souls had been in the Tree, or about the One's business, for all these thousands of years: their bodies had lain in the sand for a long long time. Now they were in the gardens of Essex and Sussex, they were under the lawns of the Home Counties, they were in flowerpots outside old townhouses and scattered among the roots of the trees in Green Park: they were all over the City of London, and all around it, for miles and miles in every direction. It did not matter that the mummies of the cats of Egypt had been ground to powder along with the bandages and the amulets which held each its fragment of the protective spell. They had been in contact with them too long, in their long rest in Egypt, not to have become indelibly contaminated by the wizardry. The Great Cemetery of the city of Bubastis was now in England. And its inhabitants remembered the ehhif they loved, who had fed them fish and milk, and stroked them, and loved them in return. They would not let these ehhif perish simply because they were not the same ones.
The Lone Power struggled in Her cage, while around Her, for what seemed great distances, stars fell thick from the sky, and became People, all burning with glory. The fire of the Sun persisted in their eyes, which they turned on the Lone One where she roared and crashed about in the cage. Softly, a huge and concerted yowl began to go up from the hundreds and thousands assembled. It built until Rhiow had to crouch down again from the sheer weight and rage of the sound
… and the People of the ancient world leapt in fury into the cage with sa'Rrahh, filling it until the Lone One could no longer be seen: and the cat fight to end all cat fights broke out under the streets of London. The noise soon became like the crash of ocean or of thunder, impossible to hear as anything but a vibration, something that got into the bones and shook the listener into submission. Rhiow lay flat, prostrate with anger, but also with wonder. And the yowl, the roar, the noise, went on and on …
She could not really tell when it stopped. What Rhiow did notice, though, was the gradual lightening of the scene. Slowly the People of the ancient days were streaming out of the icosahedron, now: they pooled around it for a while, and then slowly began to fade, like a promising dawn fading into a gray and cloudy morning. The physical surroundings began to come back, and Rhiow pushed herself to her feet. The hexaract, finally, was empty. The last few sparks of divine fire in the eyes of the ancient People faded away, taking them with them. And in the middle of it all, on what was left of the platform, stood Ith, his foreclaws neatly folded together, and looking thoughtful as usual.
Rhiow staggered over toward him: but someone else was ahead of her. "What took you so long?" Arhu was saying to Ith, rather loudly: he was as deaf as Rhiow at the moment. He clouted the saurian one in the head, a gesture of affectionate annoyance. "I thought you were never going to get here."
"At least you were able to See, on however short notice, what was coming," Ith said calmly. "I did not want to arrive with the spell half-set. Our Enemy would have denatured it in a second if it had not arrived already running. Also, I would have found it hard to do so until the Lone One was distracted. And moving such a spell from one place to another while it is active is no small matter." He looked
