“Ha!” she said at one point.
“What?”
“Shh.” And she kept reading.
Finally she looked up. “They are expecting calamities on a specific date and time. The magistrate has been ordered to stockpile food because his city may suffer an earthquake and fires of an unusual nature soon after moonrise on the last day of the seventh moon. He has been ordered to remain in the city, but is advised to remove his family to their country estate.”
Rule stiffened. “Earthquakes and fires—that’s what you said would happen if a gate were opened between Dragonhome and Earth.”
“Yes.”
“That construct, the magical construct on Dis—Reno used it—”
“It is not a gate. He used it as one, but he said it is not a gate. I agree, although . . .” She shook her head. “I have never sensed anything like it. I had no time to study it. I do not know what it is, but it lies mostly in Dis, though with a terminus in this realm. But even if Reno is wrong about its nature, a gate between Dis and Dragonhome would not cause calamities.”
He licked dry lips, checked with the sense that had no name. “Moonrise will occur about an hour after sunset today.”
“That is good to know.”
“The date—if they go by the lunar calendar here—”
“It refers to the seventh full moon of the year.”
“Then . . .”
“Tomorrow. Yes.”
? ? ?
LILY leaned against the rebuilt wall in her cell and whispered, “Tomorrow?”
Yes, Rule replied. At moonrise, which will be about an hour after the sun sets.
Lily was alone in the cell. Cynna was attending the ballet.
At least, that’s what Cynna insisted on calling it. “Ballet” wasn’t a good translation, as the dancing wouldn’t have much in common with a style of dance born in the Italian Renaissance. “Beast dances” came closer. According to Alice, the performance would feature stylized dances representing both earthly beasts and those in this realm. Cynna thought that watching this ritualized performance would help her translate that spell. Lily didn’t really understand why, except that it was all about the symbology. Alice had agreed that it was worth trying and arranged for Cynna to go, suitably guarded, of course. She’d wanted to send Lily along to translate as needed, but Kongqi had nixed that. He’d wanted to talk to Lily about ism’s—nihilism, determinism, Buddhism—as well as the deal the dragons had made with the U.S. government, aka the Dragon Accords. He’d kept Lily with him until well after supper.
She’d never thought she’d long to be back in her cell, but she had, because she couldn’t contact Rule until she was alone. “That fits with what’s happening with the time rate difference,” she said in a whisper so soft she barely heard herself. Rule had begun using under-the-tongue speech—a type of subvocalization—when they mindspoke. It worked great for him. Not for her. She could feel the pulses going awry when she tried it, could tell that sometimes she didn’t make pulses for the words at all, but she didn’t know why. Her mind just didn’t seem to believe she was speaking when she subvocalized. “The way it’s dropping made me think things would happen soon even if I didn’t know what things. It’s been going down ever since Alice started telling us about it.”
Let me pass that on to Grandmother. A longish pause. She agrees. It’s very difficult to open a gate when the realms aren’t time-congruent. It can be done, but it’s much harder. She wonders if there is a predictable cycle for the difference in time rates that they are taking advantage of.
“I don’t know. I guess that would explain the timing of everything that’s happened—they needed to sync it all with the time when the two realms are nearly synchronized. But why? Why would it be so important for them to open a gate between Earth and Dragonhome? Do you think it has something to do with the magical construct on Dis?”
We don’t know for certain that they’re opening a gate—it just fits what we do know. How that might connect to the magical construct, I have no idea. Ah . . . Grandmother wishes me to emphasize that the construct is not a gate, but partakes of certain elements of gates. I don’t know what that means.
She didn’t, either. “Cynna might. Dammit, I wish she was here. She called up that memory, by the way. The one about gate building.”
Good. Lily, several magistrates seem to have received the same or a similar warning from the spawn. Maybe all of them. Grandmother says that if fires and earthquakes are expected in cities all along the river, it may mean the spawn—or the Great Bitch—intend to open multiple gates to Earth. The effects from a single gate located in Lang Xin wouldn’t reach all the way down the river.
“But why?” she repeated. “What good would that do them?”
I suspect it’s intended to benefit the Great Bitch, not the spawn. This would be part of their deal with her. Perhaps the main part. The amount of chaos and destruction multiple gates would cause could destroy the Chinese economy.
“The Chinese . . . oh, yeah. Right. I guess they’d be gates to China, wouldn’t they? Dragonhome’s nodes don’t correlate to U.S. nodes.”
That was my first thought, given that fall-throughs seem to all be from China, but we can’t assume that. There may be some nodes here that touch American nodes but haven’t resulted in fall-throughs.
“Huh.” Lily considered that a moment. “Maybe they have, though. Alice’s grandmother was a Westerner. I originally thought that the woman must have been traveling in China when she accidentally fell into Dragonhome, but maybe not. Maybe there have been a few láis from the West. So we don’t know whether or not the U.S. would be affected by these gates.”
Oh, we’d be affected, even if none of the nodes here connect to nodes in North America. China has a tremendous effect on the U.S. economy. On the world economy. If their economy truly collapsed, we’d likely see a worldwide recession, possibly a depression. As to how that helps her . . . our Enemy might want chaos, turmoil, and confusion in general, or she might be steering things towards a specific cascade of events. She is a patterner.
Right. Lily contemplated that, decided that she couldn’t read patterns, so maybe she shouldn’t try to predict what the Great Bitch was trying to accomplish. Other than taking over the world, that is.
A thought occurred to her. “What if some of these dragons—the mind-blind dragons here—flew through the gates? How would our dragons react?”