The argument which life seemed lately to have been becoming, now broke out again with unusual vehemence in the next few minutes: and it would have gone on for much longer, Rhiow thought, had there not been a young ehhif gazing in astonishment at the sight of five cats all apparently staring silently at one another with their tails lashing.
Auhlae was not very pleased with Urruah. “You didn’t make the timeslide exclusive!”
“Why should I have made it exclusive?!” Urruah said, aggrieved. “No one was going to be able to see us, and the spell was told to sort for transit times which wouldn’t endanger any being which came along—”
“Vhai,” Rhiow said. “Urruah, the language was pretty vague. You know how literal spells are!”
“Rhi, what was the point when no one should have been able to see we were there, or the spell—” He hissed softly. “Sorry. Sorry. But Rhi—” He looked over at the young ehhif. “Ehhif can’t see wizardry, as a rule. What is he? Is he a wizard? If so, why does he look so panicked? Or is he someone who’s about to be called to the Art, but hasn’t been given the Oath yet? Are we supposed to induct him somehow?”
“The Powers forfend,” Rhiow muttered. “That’s hardly our job. We had enough trouble that way with Arhu.” But then she smiled slightly. “And a certain other party …”
“Was that who you were thinking of going to for help with the mummy problem?” Urruah said.
“The very same. It’ll have to wait a little longer now.”
“You may as well go take care of it,” Urruah said, “because whatever else we might have had planned for this timeslide, this business has ruined it.” He flirted his tail at the young ehhif. The slide’s half-deranged: it’s going to take another half-day at least to put it back the way it ought to be.”
“Well, all right. But meantime we can’t sit here ignoring him. And lend Auhlae a paw, for Iau’s sake: she looks terrible. And call Huff: he’d better know about this sooner rather than later.”
“Right.”
Rhiow walked over to the boy and sat down in front of him, tucking her tail in around her feet and trying to radiate calm instead of what she felt, which was complete confusion and terror. “Young human,” she said to him in the Speech, “please don’t be afraid.”
“I’m not,” he said. He had a narrow, intelligent face, and he was holding it very still, despite what was going on inside him, and how young he was. He could hardly be more than fifteen.
“Good. There’s no need to be, though you’re in a strange place, and something which must seem very odd has just happened to you. What’s your name?”
“Artie,” he said.
“Artie. I’m Rhiow. These others lying and sitting around here are friends of mine: we’ll get you introduced to them shortly. Would you tell me what you think just happened to you?”
“I saw a circle of light in the street,” he said. “A circle of fire. But it didn’t look like fire.”
“It wasn’t,” Rhiow said. “It was wizardry.”
“You mean magic?” the boy said, his eyes widening.
“You could call it that. But not the kind of magic which is just one of your people making it look like something has vanished. True magic: wizardry.”
“Then it is real,” he whispered. “My uncle said it might be.”
“Your uncle’s wise,” Rhiow said, wondering in the meantime if there was yet another wizard about to be involved in this business, and in a way, hoping not: there were already more than enough complications to this intervention. “But, Artie, you should understand that most humans, most ehhif as we call them, can’t see wizardry and don’t know that it exists.”
“I saw it, though …”
“Yes,” Arhu said, coming up beside Rhiow and sitting down to look at the boy. “He’s a key …”
Rhiow glanced over at him. “To what?”
“I don’t know. But They’ve sent him,” Arhu said. The Powers. I saw him, while Odin and I were flying.”
“The Powers? What Powers?” Artie said.
“That’s going to take some explaining,” Rhiow said. “Meanwhile, Artie, we have to get you back where you belong as quickly as we can—”
“I’m not going,” he said. “I want to see where this is first!”
Rhiow and Arhu glanced at each other. “I don’t think we’re going to be able to help it,” Arhu said. “And, Rhi, you can’t just toss him back where he came from. Why would They send him if he wasn’t going to be some use? We’ve got to keep him.”
“Where?” Rhiow said, a little desperately. “Where will he sleep? What will he eat?” She wondered if this was how an ehhif felt when one of their young turned up on the doorstep with a kitten-Person in their arms.
“We’ll work something out,” Arhu said, with a confidence that Rhiow definitely didn’t feel.
He looked over at where Urruah was trying to bump the groggy Auhlae up into something like a sitting position. As he did, Huff and Fhrio came rushing in.
“Auhlae, Auhlae—” Huff cried. He ran to her and began to wash her ear. It was astonishing how fast Huff could move when he wanted to, or how tender and pitiful a sight he made despite his huge size. Rhiow turned away, and found herself looking at Fhrio, who was staring at Urruah as he backed away and let Huff take care of Auhlae. Fhrio was bristling.
Oh dear, Rhiow thought. This is going to bring them to blows sooner or later … “Artie,” she said. “Will you be all right here for a little while? No other ehhif will come here: this is a secret place, for reasons I’ll explain to you in a while. But right now there are some things I need to attend to.”
“All right,” Artie said. “What’s your name, puss?”
“Rhiow.”
“Reeoooowww,” Artie said.
“Not too bad,” she said. “It’s a Scots accent, isn’t it? We’ll work on that. It’s one of the better ones for Ailurin.”
Rhiow walked off a little way, then sat down again and put her ears forward, listening. Whisperer…
She heard the purr that told her the Silent One was listening.
We need help of a specific kind. There’s no time for me to visit the Old Downside just now. Will you tell the Serpent’s Child that his “father’s” friends need to talk to him? And will you guide him to us?
A purr of agreement: then silence.
Rhiow got up and headed over to Urruah, who was already walking toward her. “Ruah,” she said, “do me a favor. Let me see the spell that Hwallis showed you.”
He half-closed his eyes. “Here.”
Rhiow half-closed hers as well, and let her whiskers brush close to Urruah’s. A second or so later she could see what he saw, the Egyptian characters strung out in a line, but with gaps here and there where Hwallis had inferred that material was missing. Rhiow looked at the characters in her mind with a wizard’s eye, letting them rearrange themselves into a long broken pattern in the graphical version of the Speech.
“It’s a spell all right,” she said, opening her eyes. “What an odd one, though. A lot of missing pieces. None of the power parameters are all that large, either … what there are of them.”
“If there were meant to be thousands of these spells in the same place, all acting together,” Urruah said, “they wouldn’t have to be all that strong, individually.”
“No,” Rhiow said, “but still … If a lot of little spells are gathered together to be used for some purpose, there still does have to be a master spell, one which invokes the whole aggregate of power and nominates specifically what it’s supposed to be used for. Otherwise all the little “packets” of power just fire off any old way, or seep away uncontrolled. No, I think Hwallis is right. We’ll get busy on finding this, if there’s any way it can be found here and now. Meanwhile, Ruah, do what you can about the timeslide: we’ve got to get at that “contaminated” timeline and get a date for the assassination that we can trust. Get Fhrio to help you if you can.”
“I’d sooner be helped by a—”
“Urruah,” Rhiow said. “He is not just a fellow wizard, but a gate technician of some skill. He might see something that you miss, under the pressure of speed. We can’t afford to forego his help … or alienate him by not asking for that help in an area where he’s gifted. Just you handle it.”
He glared at her … then waved his tail, reluctantly acknowledging the necessity, and walked off.
Rhiow breathed out and watched him go. This kind of thing was difficult for him, but they had no choice right now. Fhrio was a problem as well, but one that Rhiow couldn’t settle. The kind of behavior he routinely exhibited toward his own team would have caused Rhiow to box one of her own team members’ ears to ribbons, if they had tried it. However, Huff’s management style was clearly a lot less assertive than Rhiow’s … and she had no right to try to impose her own style on his team. But oh, the inclination…
She sighed and just closed her eyes for a moment, wishing there were time to lie down and have a nap. When she opened her eyes again, Huff was heading over toward her. “She’s all right,” he said to Rhiow, very relieved.
“Of course I’m all right,” Auhlae said, sounding just slightly cross as she came up behind him. “The shock of the transit just hit me hard for a moment, that’s all. I’m not made of fluff.”
“No, I never said you were …” He head-bumped her, and Auhlae threw him an affectionate look, though the bump bade fair to knock her over again.
“Well,” Huff said, when he had straightened up again, “what’s the situation?”
“Our young ehhif is in fairly good shape,” Rhiow said, casting a glance over at where Artie still sat up against the platform wall, now with his legs stretched out in front of him, watching Urruah talking to Fhrio, and the two of them poking at various parts of the timeslide. “But we’re going to have to keep him with us for a while. Arhu says he’s required somehow for the solution of our problem.”
Auhlae blinked at that. “Is he sure?”
“Yes. Apparently he got a glimpse of him while he and Odin were off on their jaunt.”
“Now there’s a new one,” Huff said. “Well, we’ll have to work out somewhere to keep him.”
“Arhu is confident that that’ll be handled,” Rhiow said dryly. “So we’ll refer all inquiries to him. Meanwhile, have a closer look at this—”
She put one paw down on the floor and began pulling it along, so that a tracery of pale fire followed it, “writing out” the partial spell which Urruah had shown her. Huff and Auhlae bent their heads down, looking at it.
“Look at this name that keeps popping up,” Huff said after a moment. “In a few places. Different forms—but it’s the same personality that’s meant. The ‘Bright Serpent’.”
“It’s not the ‘Old Serpent’, though,” Auhlae said, looking curiously down the length of the spell. “That would be written differently, wouldn’t it.”
“Yes,” said Huff. “And here, the ‘Great Shining Lizard’. And another name still. ‘Sebek’.”
“ ‘The one who binds together’?” Auhlae said. “Would that be it?”
“I think so.” Huff sat down to look at it a little more closely. “Well, it’s interesting, but as spells go it’s long on nouns and short on verbs. Or more specific routines like power-expenditure instructions …”
“Power,” Rhiow said, “yes …” She glanced back over toward the timeslide. Siffha’h had stood up just long enough to drag herself out of the pattern, while Urruah was starting work on it: then she had flopped down again, and was lying on her side. “Is she all right?”
“Oh, I think so.” Auhlae looked over her shoulder.
“I’ll check,” Huff said, and got up to head over that way.
“I just … Don’t think I’m trying to intrude, please, but I worry about her a little,” Rhiow said. “She seems to push herself very hard.”
“Yes,” Auhlae said, “she does.” She sighed. “She came to us very young. Just after her Ordeal, it was. She never said much about the details: well, as you know, that’s not information one asks about—it’s offered, or not, the way you would treat the question of how many lives along someone is. Finally she decided she wanted to work with us, and she settled in. But she was always …” Auhlae broke off for a moment, thinking, her tail twitching. Then she said, “There was always a sense that there was something still unfinished, Ordeal or not. Something she was still looking for … and it drove her. It drives her still … and all this unfocused energy of hers jumps out and ‘bites’ people, sometimes. Or makes her bite them herself …”
Rhiow sighed. “The ‘unfinished business’ theme turns up often enough,” she said. “It happened to me, for example.”
“And did you find what you were looking for?”
“I think so,” Rhiow said, “though, Auhlae, to tell you the truth, sometimes even when you have what you were looking for, you can get confused because it doesn’t look anything like the images you got yourself used to when you were still looking.” She put her whiskers forward. “Well, that’s another day’s problem … we have enough of our own at the moment.”
“You’re right there, cousin,” Auhlae said, and sighed once more. “Let me go see if the child needs anything. She tends to give off her power in these big bursts, and then needs a lot of time to recuperate. I keep telling her she should pace herself, but does she listen … ?”
“I know the problem,” Rhiow said.
Auhlae went off to tend to Siffha’h, and Rhiow stood up and had a good stretch and went to the young ehhif: Arhu came along behind her, and behind him, Urruah. “Are you all right, Artie?” Rhiow said.
“I’m rather hungry,” he said, very woefully. “I was on my way to get a bun for lunch when I saw you.”
“Well, I’ll get you something,” Rhiow said.
“Where?” Arhu said. “You’re going to have to steal.”
“No. Well, not exactly.” Rhiow sighed. “Artie, would you like a sandwich?”
“A what?”
“Never mind,” Rhiow said. “Do you like cheese?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll get you a pizza.”
“From where?” Arhu said.
“Hey, bring me one too,” Urruah said.
Rhiow gave him a look. “Get your own pizza. I have enough problems. Are you and Fhrio in agreement about the timeslide?”
“He’s looking at it for the moment,” Urruah said. “The idea of him catching something in the spelling that I missed seems to appeal to him.”
She put her whiskers forward at him. “Now who says you’re all good looks and no brain?” she said. “I’ll be back in a little.”
Rhiow trotted over to where Auhlae was lying by Siffha’h. “Auhlae, where’s one of the gates that is functioning? I need to run an errand.”
“Back up the stairs the way we came,” Auhlae said, “down the hallway and turn left to the access for the northbound Circle Line train. It’s down off the left-hand end of the platform.”
“Great. Right back,” said Rhiow.
Sidled, she followed Auhlae’s instructions and made her way up to the Circle Line platform, past the unnoticing travelers waiting for the Tube train, and down the stairs at the very end of the platform. The gate’s tracery was very visible: some other wizard passing through had just used it, she saw from the status-and-log weft, for a transit to Vladivostok via Chur. She reached into the control weave, got her claws into the spatial location webbing, and wove its hyperstrings together until they matched the string-coordinate qualities of the roof of her apartment building.
Normally Rhiow preferred not to do gatings of this kind: they were wasteful of energy, when you could walk. But at the moment, walking was out of the question, and everything seemed to be happening at once, and she couldn’t spare the time. Rhiow pulled the control weave taut, watching as the scene within its oval boundaries snapped into place. Gray gravel, ventilators sticking up…
Rhiow locked the gate coordinates in place, set it for selective nonpatency except for her own return, and jumped through: came down on the gravel. Hurriedly she sidled, then trotted over to the square shape which was the outlet for the building’s fire stairs. The door was locked from the inside.
She walked through it, feeding the atoms of her body past the atoms of the door, and ran down the stairs a couple of flights: then walked through a second door, the one which led to the hallway where her apartment’s front door was. Rhiow galloped down the hall, and walked through one last door, her own.
There was no sign of Iaehh, which was just as well. Rhiow ran over to the refrigerator, did a very small-scale skywalk up to the handle of the freezer, and put one paw through it, pulling hard. No good. She sat up on her haunches, put both forefeet through, and pulled again. This time the freezer door came open, almost knocking her down. She ducked sideways out of the reach of the swinging door and looked inside. Thank you, Iau, she thought, for there were about five pizzas stacked up in there. Hmm. Pepperoni … not for a first-timer. Meatball … no. Pieces might fall off in transit. Plain with extra cheese…
Her mouth was watering as she levitated the pizza out of the freezer down onto the counter. It’s been too long since I had pizza, Rhiow thought; but the hunger in Artie’s eyes suggested to Rhiow that it was going to be a while longer. She first did a small wizardry which would release the catch of the microwave oven and push the door back: then, while that was working, she spoke to the coefficient of friction at the end of the pizza box where the glue was, then levitated the box up on its side and shook. The pizza slid neatly out onto the rotating tray in the oven.
Rhiow ran her wizardry backwards and shut the microwave door: then jumped down to the counter and stared at the controls. You have to be a rocket scientist to run these things, she thought, annoyed, trying to work out which control pad to push. Finally she succeeded in programming in five minutes’ run on “high”, and started the microwave going: then took a moment to take the empty pizza box and push it down into a briefly opened pocket in spacetime, off in a corner of the kitchen. She would empty the pocket out and get rid of the box later.
The air started to fill with a very appetizing smell indeed. Rhiow’s mouth watered more earnestly. The only bad thing about this, she thought, is that he’s going to notice it’s gone. I think. Iaehh could be slightly vague about the contents of the freezer: he and Hhuha had had some pretty heated discussions on the subject. Either way … I’m going to have to replace it with one of the same kind as soon as I can. One more thing to think about…
The oven dinged. Rhiow ran her wizardry again, forward this time, and levitated the pizza out into the air again. It was tricky: the thing was no longer solid, but kept trying to flop over in one direction or another.
Rhiow stood there for a moment considering her options. She might be sidled, but the pizza could not be, not while she was handling it either directly or with a wizardry. She was not going to walk back down the apartment’s hall, invisible, with a visible pizza floating along behind her. Logistics … she thought.
Oh vhai. She walked through the air over to the glass doors that opened on the terrace, the pizza trailing along obediently behind her, and straight out into the air to one side of the apartment. Let the neighbors think they saw a levitating pizza, she thought rebelliously … If any of them are even looking. With the pizza in tow, Rhiow skywalked up to the roof of the building, and back through the worldgate, which she shut down behind her and left in standby configuration.
That only left the Tube station to deal with. Rhiow went down the stairs, then hung an immediate left and walked straight through the wall, trying to keep the directions back to the abandoned platform straight in her head. She took a few false turns, but finally found where she wanted to be: and had the satisfaction of seeing young Artie’s mouth drop open as she walked straight through a wall not far from him, the pizza floating along behind her.
She put it carefully down on the floor. “It’s fairly clean here,” she said: “sorry I couldn’t bring a plate. Here, just pull it apart with your hands. Watch out, it’s still hot.”
Artie pulled his first slice off, bit it tentatively: finished it immediately and pulled off another. “Good,” Rhiow said, and went over to Urruah, who was lying nearby. “Now then. What’s next?”
He looked at the pizza.
“Don’t even think about it,” Rhiow said. “I went to a lot of trouble over that. How’s he doing?” She glanced over toward Fhrio and the timeslide.
“How would I know? I’ll wait until he tells me. He might genuinely be in the middle of something I don’t want to disturb.” Or I might just not want to get my head bitten off.
Rhiow put one ear forward and one back, a wry expression. “Is Siffha’h all right, did Auhlae say?”
“Recovering,” Urruah said. “She’s just exhausted after doing two big power feeds close together—and apparently the fact that something knocked us ‘sideways’ affected her too: she tried to force us through anyway, and so she took the brunt of what hit us.” His tail thumped on the concrete. “She tries real hard. It’s not like she has to prove anything to anyone …”
“I know,” Rhiow said. “If she only—”
“What’s that?” Siffha’h said suddenly from the other side of the platform, pushing herself up again. “Something’s coming—”
Everyone looked up in alarm. Mostly they did it just in time to see the air in the middle of the platform stretch and sheen like pulled plastic wrap, then peel apart.
A dinosaur stepped out.
A casual viewer could have been forgiven for mistaking it for a dinosaur, at any rate. It stood about six feet high at the shoulder, and its long neck arched up another couple of feet to terminate in a long, lean, toothy muzzle: a pair of well-made and delicate forelegs with six claws each were folded decorously in front of the creature’s chest. It stood mostly upright on its long-clawed hind legs, and a tail about five feet long lashed out behind it, helping it keep its balance. The shadowy lighting down here did not show off to best advantage the subtly patterned hide patched in red and orange: but somehow the small golden eye found the light, and kept it.
The London team stared at this apparition in astonishment: the saurian bowed to them gracefully, bobbing forward and back. “I am on errantry,” it said in a soft hissing voice, “and I greet you.”
“You’re well met on the errand,” Huff said, still very wide-eyed. “Rhiow, is this the help you said you were sending for?”
“Indeed so. Ith, let me make you known to the London team.”
She strolled over and took him around, making the introductions. Huff and Auhlae recovered their composure quickly: Fhrio, caught in the middle of doing something technical to the timeslide, simply stood for some moments with his mouth hanging open. Siffha’h gazed at Ith too, and spoke to him politely enough when introduced, but Rhiow couldn’t help noticing her expression … a peculiar look of half-recognition, as if she had seen him before sometime, but couldn’t place where.
Finally she brought Ith over to Artie. “And this is our ‘pet’ ehhif,” Rhiow said, with some amusement. “Artie, this is Ith.”
“Oh, rather,” said Artie, very impressed indeed. “Are you a Thunder Lizard?”
Ith dropped his lower jaw and flickered his long blunt tongue slightly in what Rhiow had come to recognize as a smile. “I have not thundered at anything very recently,” he said, “but in the past I have occasionally done so.”
He crouched down on his back legs next to Arhu, who leaned against him companionably. “Your summons was opportune,” Ith said to Rhiow, “for I was thinking of coming to see you anyway. The master gate matrices in the Old Downside, the ones which service Grand Central and many other gating complexes have been showing signs of strain, these last few days. Gatings have not been progressing as they normally do.”
“It’s not just strain,” Arhu said. “Let me show you—”
For a few seconds they were silent together. It was not vision, Rhiow thought, but rather something to do with their old history together: they had been in one another’s minds in extremely harrowing circumstances, involving their jointly completed Ordeals, and there were times when the communication between them seemed so complete and effortless that Rhiow wondered whether some kind of permanent connection between them had been wrought by the anguish and triumph they’d shared.
Ith looked up, then, and said, “You have been having a busy time.” He clenched his claws together, interlacing them. “And now this business of the Longest Winter. Very interesting indeed.”
He looked up over at the London team. “That was what killed my people in the ancient days,” he said to Huff. “The Lone One, the Old Serpent, brought that fate down on us when we made our first Choice as a species. It said if we accepted Its gift, we would rule the Earth so long as the Sun shone on it. And so we did: until the blow fell burning from the sky, and the dust and the smoke of its impact rose up and hid the sun. It killed all my ancestors except the very few who, by accident or by grace of the Powers, managed to find their way into the Old Downside and take refuge in the caves there, down where the catenaries spring up from their ultimate power source. There we lived for ages, and there the Lone One ruled us, saying that someday It would lead us up into the Sun again, and we would conquer all the puny creatures that lived there and take the Earth for our own once more.” He smiled, showing most of his teeth. “Well, they conquered us instead, to our great good: and my people lost their old false Father, and gained a new one. Mostly due to my brother, my father here.” He glanced down at Arhu. Arhu looked away, and purred.
“But the thought of the Winter has not been far from my mind, or my people’s,” Ith said to Rhiow. “It is a charged subject for us, as charged in its way as humankind’s old story that you told me about the apple and the garden: and there is a serpent in that story too, though I am afraid it is not the Bright one Who is a shape I wear these days sometimes, or Who wears me—whichever. In any case, we are eager that the Winter should not come back, from whatever cause … for if it returns to the upper world, that will eventually affect the Old Downside as well. Since we have no guarantees from the Powers that this fate would never befall us again, I thought that we might seek to put guarantees of our own in place.”
“You could get caught up in that kind of thing to the exclusion of everything else,” Auhlae said, “if you weren’t careful …”
“Oh, indeed. We know well enough that every race dies,” Ith said. “That alone has become obvious enough from studying other species’ history. Entropy is running …” The young-old, wise eyes looked a little tired already. “We cannot stop it. But this does not mean we need instantly to enter into a suicide pact with the Universe. We may forestall the event as long as possible … indeed the Powers would prefer that we do.”
“Getting familiar with Them, are you?” Urruah said.
“No less than you,” Ith said mildly. “Your good friend, Saash of the unending itch, now herself walks the floor of Heaven about the One’s business, and the depths of reality echo to the thumping when she sits down to scratch. And she thought of herself as ‘nothing special’. I am nothing special either, but I am also Father of my people now, and so I find myself chatting often enough with my people’s Grandparents as I try to make some sense out of this terrible mass of data They’ve wished on me, and try to claw it into some shape which our new wizards will be able to handle.”
“New wizards already?” said Arhu.
“They are hatching out even as we speak,” Ith said. “Some seem to have been trying to be born for a long time … some say they have tried many times, but were always killed in the ongoing hethhhiiihhh.” Rhiow blinked at the word: the Speech said holocaust in her ear, but there were even more terrible implications in the word, speaking of a people who for many generations had simply been born to be killed, almost all new hatchlings being destined to feed the chosen warriors of the Lone Power’s planned army.
“Now, though,” Ith said, “there are more than twenty already. Our latency period is fairly short, and besides, there is the time difference between the Upworld and the Downside to consider. We are, in any case, making up for much lost time, which is a good thing, considering the importance of the gates we guard. The Downside will be alive with wizardry before very long, and all the better for it: it is not good for a world to go unmanaged. But our ‘wizard’s manual’ is still in its early stages, and I have been kept very busy trying to codify it.”
“I would have thought it would have just appeared,” Urruah said. “As if it had always been there, now that your people’s Choice is properly made. I mean, the information’s all in the Speech after all … so your people won’t have trouble understanding it—”
“Yes, but first there’s the question of what information a wizard of our People will routinely have access to,” Ith said, “and what they’ll have to ask for authorization from Higher Up to get—”
“I would have thought the Powers would make that distinction themselves.”
“No,” Ith said. “We—upper-level field operatives—are given more autonomy than you might suspect. Surprising amounts of it.” He opened his mouth to grin slightly, the amiable saurian smile that showed all those teeth. “The Powers’ attitude is plainly, ‘You’re living in this universe: why would you be so dumb as to pull down the ceiling of the cavern on yourself? Be cautious running the place—but take what risks you think need to be taken.’ And does it not say in the Estivations, ‘I shall walk Your worlds as You do, as if they are mine … for so indeed they are’?—So I find I must make these decisions—the Powers apparently feeling that one from inside a native ‘psychology’ will be best fitted to understand wizardry’s best implementation for that psychology. Then there’s the matter of how Seniors and Advisories will be chosen, and a very basic one, how the wizardry itself will manifest to my people. We’ve had all kinds of different modalities—voices heard, visions seen—but they’ve been haphazard, and I’ve been told that we should try to keep it to one or two modalities for the whole species, so that legend and tradition regarding their handling will have time to build up around them. At least we don’t have to try to keep wizardry secret, the way the poor ehhif do. My wizardly children will lead normal lives … as far as any wizard’s life can be considered normal.”
“You’re getting pretty organized,” Arhu said.
“Order is a wonderful thing,” Ith said, “when it flows from the roots of a matter rather than being imposed from the top down. And organization usually follows, yes … but not so much so that I can’t slip out for a pastrami sandwich every now and then.” He grinned at Arhu. “And we should try to meet soon in that regard: I’ve found a good place up on Eighty-Sixth between First and Second. Meanwhile, though, I have other business in hand. They tell me you need me,” he said to Rhiow. “And to my people’s Stepmother, I can only say, “Tell me what you need, and it’s yours.” ”
Rhiow put her whiskers forward.
“Meanwhile,” Ith said, turning his head sideways and giving Artie one of those peculiar looks of his, like a very large bird eyeing a very large worm, “is there any more of that pizza?”
Rhiow laughed. “No! Get your own. There’s probably a fairly decent pizza place not too close from where you’re getting your pastrami.”
“No,” Ith said, “I would say Eighty-Sixth is something of a desert as regards pizza. Now if you go a little further uptown—”
“Don’t!” Rhiow said. He and Arhu looked at her, startled. “Just don’t,” she said wearily. “Later. Later I will go and look for pizza with you. If there’s still a reality left on Earth that involves pizza.”
“All right,” Ith said. “Back to the subject. While involved in the codification, I have been eagerly searching for a spell which would prevent a second Winter’s fall. Now I see and hear from your interview with Hwallis that there is, or was such a thing. The Whisperer does not know of it, though: or if She did, it is lost.”
“How would She lose anything?” Siffha’h said.
“I do not know. But let us see the spell again, what you have of it.”
Rhiow showed it to Ith where she had it laid out on the floor. He looked at it for a few moments, and then chuckled, a deep clicking noise in his throat. “Yes,” he said, “there is a piece of my name, and another piece. And the Bright Serpent’s name, which I would have thought was a new thing: but now it seems it is old, and existed from ancient times. Another piece of information lost, or submerged under formerly more aggressive archetypes. And see here—” he put one claw down on one symbol of the spell, which flared briefly brighter in response. “Yes, this is the Ophidian Word in one of its new variants: my people are certainly involved—either the memory of our old tragedy, or the prophecy of our later intervention against repetitions of it. And here is the symbol for the Winter, and the indicator for the conditional branches of the target designation spell. There are definitely pieces missing: and this—” he tapped another symbol—“seems to indicate how many. Five other major parts. The master structure is hexagonal.” He sat back, looking satisfied. “That makes perfect sense, for the Universe has a broadly hexagonal bent: things tend to come in sixes.” He flexed his claws, giving a little extra wiggle to the sixth claw on each forelimb. “Particle arrays, hyperstring structures—”
Arhu looked accusingly at Rhiow. “I thought you told me everything came in fives.”
“Not everything,” Rhiow said, in slight desperation. “Things to do with gates.”
Ith looked at her with a cockeyed expression, a sidewise look that had reminded Rhiow more than once of a robin looking at a worm. “Possibly we have a paired underlying symmetry here,” he said. “Dual symmetries of sixes and fives, conjoined at the functional level as elevens? The even and the odd …”
“Or the like and the unlike,” Urruah said, interested. “But together, they make a prime …”
Rhiow rolled her eyes. Since coming into his own, Ith sometimes went off into mathematical conjectures which completely lost her—a side-effect, she thought, of coming of a species which was only now discovering abstract reasoning for its own sake, after having spent so many millennia in the darkness, thinking about nothing but survival and food. It was perhaps some side-gift of his wizardry: or, like Urruah’s never-ending fondness for food and oh’ra, it might just be a hobby. Either way, it tended to make her head hurt.
“Ith, you’re going to have to take it up with the Powers that Be,” Rhiow said, “because I haven’t the faintest idea. Right now we need someone to help us look for that spell, for the other parts of it, and to get them welded together. We may need it very badly in a very short time.”
“Then I will come and do that for you,” Ith said. “I will search everywhere I can think of. The Museum here first, as you say: and then the Museum in New York as well, and elsewhere, if I must.”
Arhu glanced up, looking a little uneasy. “I don’t know if I like the idea of taking the Father of his People away from them just now,” he said. “This could be a dangerous time …”
Ith looked at him with mild surprise. “Do fathers not go out to find food and protect their young, sometimes? The important thing is to come back afterwards … Besides, events in one universe spread to others, sooner or later. By acting now, perhaps I save myself the need to act more desperately later …”
“That may or may not be,” Huff said, “but in any case, it’s still very good of you to come and help us. I mean …” He sounded slightly flustered. “We are, after all, People … and you are, after all …”
“A snake?” Ith dropped his jaw amiably. “Well, People have in the past taken a certain amount of interest in the welfare of another people’s universe: mine. We could have been left to die in the dark, or to live out our lives as slaves, under the Lone Power’s influence. But others risked themselves for us. Perhaps there is no ‘payback’: but paying forward is certainly an option open to us … So let us not speak of it any more.”
He rocked a little on his haunches, reaching back in mind again to the interview with Wallis which Arhu had shown him, and looking down at the fragmentary spell again. “ ‘A person of Power’,” said Ith, “must enact the spell. Does that mean, perhaps, a Person? One of your People? Or could it be just any wizard?”
“It depends if they call themselves persons or not, I suppose,” Rhiow said. “Ith, your guess is as good as mine … But I think we’re going to need the rest of the spell before we can draw any conclusions about that.”
“Well enough, then: I will go.”
“I want to go too!” Artie said suddenly, jumping up. “I haven’t seen any magic practically since I got here. I want to see some more!”
Rhiow glanced at Ith, about to object: then she stopped herself. Cousin, if you can take charge of him for a while, it would take a worry off our minds. He’s at the wrong end of time, and it’s not good for an ehhif to know too much about its own future without preparation … for which we’ve had no time. The Museum will be a controllable environment, one not too strange to him…
Consider it done.
“Well, Ith,” Rhiow said out loud, “if you take Artie with you, he can help you look for the spell, while you keep him invisible. You should have fun with that,” Rhiow said to Artie.
“You’re going to keep walking into things, though … so be warned.”
“I will bring him gladly,” said Ith. “Artie, are you willing?”
“I should say so!”
“All right, Artie,” Rhiow said, “who are you staying with in London?”
“My uncle and aunt,” he said, suddenly looking rather concerned. “They were expecting me back for teatime …”
“Well,” Urruah said, “if we can get the timeslide to work properly, there’ll be no problem returning him to just a few seconds before or after we found him, or he found us.” And if we can’t get the slide to work properly … then shortly it won’t matter one way or the other…
Rhiow made a face at the thought. And what happens to us then? she thought. We become refugees to some other timeline that hasn’t been ruined. If we can find any such. And Artie will share the same fate…
No, she thought. No need to give up just yet. There’s a lot more work to be done…
“Very well,” Ith said, and stood up. “Artie, prepare yourself: we will go to the British Museum, and walk invisible among the displays. Or perhaps—” and that little golden eye glinted—“late tonight, when none but the night watchmen are about, perhaps one of them will look into the Prehistoric Saloon and wonder if he saw one of the displays move, and wink its eye …”
He winked, and Artie burst out laughing as he dusted himself off, which was about all the preparation he could do. “Ith, you wouldn’t,” Rhiow said, trying to sound severe. Ith seemed to have picked up some of Arhu’s taste for mischief along with the taste for deli food. Unfortunately it was difficult to scold someone who was so old and grave, and at the same time so young, and whose wickednesses were of such a small and genteel sort.
“Perhaps I would not,” Ith said, bowing to Rhiow. She put her whiskers forward at the phrasing. “In any case, I will take care of him,” Ith said. “If nothing else, when he needs to rest, I can take him to the Old Downside, where he will see all the ‘thunder lizards’ his heart desires.”
“How are your people doing?” Urruah said. “Settling in nicely?”
“They love the life under the sky,” Ith said. “For some of them, it is as if the old life in the caves never happened. And truly, for some of them, it is better that way. For others … they remember, and they look up at the Sun and rejoice.”
“Have there been any problems with our own People?” Rhiow said. The only other intelligent species populating that ancient ancestor-dimension of Earth were the Great Cats of whom Felis domesticus and its many cousins were the descendants: sabertooths and dire-lions, who had taken refuge in that paradisial otherworld many ages before.
“Oh, no,” Ith said mildly, and flexed his claws. “None that have been serious. They were unsure whether we were predators or prey, at first. They are sure now.” He grinned, showing all those very sharp teeth.
Rhiow chuckled. “Get out of here,” she said. “And go well. Artie, be nice to him. He bites.”
“He wouldn’t bite me,” said Artie.
“No, I would not,” Ith said. “Artie, come stand by me. Now watch, and take care; when the air tears, it does so raggedly, and the boundaries between here and there are sharp—”
They stepped into the air together and were gone: the tear in it healed up behind them.
Huff stared after them. “How does he do that?” he said. “There wasn’t even any noise from the displacement of the air.”
Rhiow shook her head. “In some ways, he’s become a gate himself,” she said. “Otherwise … I don’t understand it. Ask Her. Meanwhile—what about that timeslide?”
It took several more hours to get it working to both Urruah’s and Fhrio’s liking. Rhiow tried to catch a nap while this was going on, but her anxiety kept waking her up, so that when Urruah finally came to rouse her, she was awake anyway.
“Is the slide ready?” Rhiow said, stretching fore and aft.
“As far as I can tell. For all Fhrio’s rotten temper,” he added very softly, “he’s a good gating tech, and there’s nothing wrong with his understanding of timeslide spells. He rearranged some subroutines I’d thought looked pretty good, and I have to admit that now they look better.”
“Annoyed?” Rhiow said.
“Me? Nothing wrong with me that a pizza won’t cure,” Urruah said. ” … And the end of this job. We can jump again in fifteen or twenty minutes. Fhrio is doing the last fine-tuning: Siffha’h says she’s ready to go again, and Auhlae concurs.”
“Good.” She glanced around. “Where are they?”
“They’ve gone off to relieve themselves first. Huff went off too, just for a snack of something.”
“Right.”
They went over together to look at the timeslide. Rhiow walked around it thoughtfully, trying to see what Fhrio had done. He was sitting, gazing at the whole structure with his eyes half-shut, a little unfocused: a technique Rhiow used herself, sometimes, to see the one bit of a spell or a routine that was out of place.
She stopped at one point and looked to see where a whole group of subroutines had been added, a thick tangle of interwoven branchings in the “hedge”. There were numerous calls on spatial locations which were not far from this one, as far as Rhiow could tell, and all of which were in this time. “What are these?” Rhiow said curiously.
Fhrio glanced up. “I found myself wondering,” he said, “whether we were sending a lion to kill a mouse … I mean, by looking for our pastlings one at a time by tracing specific accesses one at a time. I thought, since the ehhif here have support systems that are supposed to be picking up their lost and sick people from the City area, at least … why don’t we let it work for us? So this set of routines visits every ehhif-hospital in the Greater London area, and scans it for a few seconds for anyone in that facility who wasn’t born within the last hundred years. If it finds anyone like that, it picks them up and brings them along with us, in stasis. Then we get back here and analyze their temporal tendencies in situ, with the gate to help, if we can get the online gate logs to cooperate.”
Rhiow looked the construction over. It was elegant, compact, and looked like it ought to work … but many constructs of this kind looked like they should, and the only way you could find out was by testing them live. “Fhrio,” she said, “It is handsome-looking, and beautifully made. Let’s run it and see what it does.” She paced around to the other side of the timeslide, checked her name in passing, then leapt into the circle and looked thoughtfully at the other sets of coordinates stacked up in the routines to be examined: mostly derived from microtransits of the malfunctioning gate. “If Siffha’h can push us through to all of these,” Rhiow said, “we’re going to be in great shape.”
“I hoped you’d think so,” Fhrio said. And he looked over at Urruah, and bared his teeth in amusement. “Pity you weren’t smart enough to manage something like this, ‘oh expert one’. Even your own team leader admits it.”
Urruah blinked and opened his mouth.
“Urruah,” Rhiow said softly, “would you excuse us?”
His eyes went wide. “Uh, sure,” he said.
He went away with great speed, Rhiow didn’t know where: nor did she care at the moment. “All right, Fhrio,” Rhiow said. “I’m tired of hearing it in the background, or unsaid. Get on with it and say what you have to say.”
He stared at her, his ears back. “I don’t like him around here,” Fhrio said after a moment. “Or the other one. There are too many toms around here as it is. Huff and I have about worked things out. We’re all right together, if not precisely in-pride. But those two! Him, with his big balls hanging out, leering at Auhlae. And him, with his little balls hanging out, just a furry little bundle of drool and hope and hormones, leering at Siffha’h. They both give me the pip … and the sooner they’re out of here the better I’ll like it.”
“Well,” Rhiow said, and nearly bit her tongue, she could think of so many things to say, and so few of them appropriate. “Thank you for letting me know. In Urruah’s case, he’s always been one for appreciating the queens, though in Auhlae’s case, he knows she’s mated and happily so, and you’re completely mistaken about his intentions toward her. If you don’t believe another wizard telling you so, then you’ll have to go have it out with him … after I finish with you. For the second time, that is, after I extract from your hide the price of calling the competence of one of my teammates into question, and for suggesting that I might agree with you in your assessment. And as for Arhu, whatever business he has with Siffha’h is theirs to determine, not yours or mine: she’s her own queen now, no matter what your opinions on the matter may be. What you think of that stance is your business … but if you meddle with a young wizard under my protection, I will shred your hide myself, and see if you have the nerve to do anything about it. So beware how you conduct yourself.”
Fhrio stared at her as if she had suddenly appeared out of the air from another planet. “Meanwhile,” Rhiow said, “I intend to do my job to the best of my ability, no matter how pointlessly annoying I find you. You seem to be doing your job … marginally. But if you can’t manage your reactions to my team a little more completely, I’ll require Huff to remove you from this intervention … which is within my rights as leader of a senior gating team sent on consultation. Then we’ll bring in as a replacement someone less talented, perhaps, but a little more committed to not damaging the other wizards whom the Powers have sent to save this situation … and, entirely incidentally, you. Now take yourself away until Huff comes back, and be glad I’ve left your ears where Iau put them, instead of so far down your throat they’ll make bumps in your tail.”
He stared at her without a word, and after a long moment he turned away.
Rhiow sat down and licked her nose four times in a row, feeling hot under her fur: furious with herself, furious with Fhrio, and just generally very upset. She was bristling, and her claws itched, and she was mortified. I hate being this way, she thought. I hate having to be this way. I hate having to pull rank. Oh, Iau, did I do wrong?
The Queen was silent on this subject, as on so many others. Rhiow breathed out and tried to get control of herself again. She was so busy concentrating on this that she didn’t notice when Siffha’h came in and jumped into the circle beside her.
“I said, are you all right?” Siffha’h said.
“Oh. I will be shortly,” Rhiow said. “Thanks for checking.” Siffha’h had straightened up and was now staring across the platform. Rhiow glanced that way to see what was there. It was Arhu. He was staring back. For a long few moments it held: then, to Rhiow’s surprise, it was Arhu who lowered his eyes first and looked away.
Rhiow jumped out of the circle and meandered over to where Arhu was, and sat down by him, and started composure-washing with a vengeance. Under cover of this, she said very quietly to Arhu, a little exasperated, “What is it with you two?”
“She hates me,” Arhu said.
Urruah reappeared, sat down beside them, and started to wash as well. “But she has no reason to,” Rhiow said.
“She seems to think she does.”
Rhiow blinked at that. “How do you know?”
“I see it.”
Urruah glanced up briefly at that. “This is new,” he said.
“I’m seeing a lot of things since I went flying with Odin,” Arhu said. “It’s as if seeing a new way to See has made some kind of difference. It’s happening more often, for one thing.”
“So what did you See about her?”
“It’s nothing specific. In fact, once I tried to See, on purpose, and—” He shrugged his tail. “Just nothing. Like she was blocking me somehow.”
“How would she do that?” Urruah said, mystified. “I wouldn’t have thought there was any way to block vision.”
“I wonder if she’d discuss it,” Rhiow said.
“Oh, try that by all means,” Urruah said. “But bring a new pair of ears.”
Rhiow sighed. It would have to wait. Auhlae jumped back up onto the platform, followed by Huff. “Are we ready?” Huff said.
“Absolutely,” said Rhiow, and got up to meet him by the timeslide. “I take it our first priority is the pastlings—sweeping them up, if we can, and confining them all safe in one place.”
“That’s Fhrio’s plan,” said Huff. “Where is he?”
“Here, Huff,” said Fhrio, and came up from the end of the platform to join them.
“Arhu? Urruah? Let’s go,” said Huff.
They paced over and leapt into the timeslide-circle, taking their positions. Siffha’h put herself down on the power point and glanced up at Fhrio.
He hooked a claw into the spell-tracery which would handle the “sweep” routine. “Half a breath,” he said. And then: “It’s ready. Standing by—”
“Now,” said Siffha’h, and reared up, and put her forepaws down hard.
Rhiow blinked … or thought she had. Then she realized it was the spell doing it for her. There was no physical sensation to this transit any more than there usually was from crossing through a gate: but the view flickered and flickered again, showing brief vistas of fluorescent-lit rooms, shocked ehhif faces, and assorted machinery scattered about. Every now and then, the spell would pause a little longer as it tried to determine whether some particularly ancient ehhif fit the criteria for which it had been instructed to search; then it would move on, almost hurriedly, as if to make up for lost time. Blink, blink, blink, the vistas of people in white came and went—
—And suddenly, there was someone with them in the circle. He was a sorry-looking ehhif indeed, with longish black hair and a hospital gown, and he was looking at them all with dopy astonishment while he rubbed the wrists which were suddenly no longer restrained. He opened his mouth, possibly to shout for help at the sight of seven cats in a circle of light, but Fhrio slipped one paw under one of the control lines of the spell, and the ehhif froze just that way, staring, with his mouth open.
“It’s going to start getting crowded in here,” Rhiow said, unable to resist being at least a little amused. Blink, blink, blink, blink, went the spell, and she had to start keeping her eyes closed; the effect was rather disturbing, for it was starting to go faster and faster. How many hospitals does this city have, anyway? Rhiow thought.
It had quite a few, and they got to visit about eight more of them before yet another ehhif, a tall handsome woman in a borrowed nightshirt, found herself standing in the circle. Rhiow could tell that the nightgown was borrowed, since no one from the last century was really that likely to own a nightshirt featuring a picture of a famous gorilla climbing up the Empire State Building. The woman took one look at the cats in the circle, and opened her mouth to scream.
She too froze, and outside the timeslide, the blink blink blink started again. The center of the circle began filling with ehhif, all still as statuary by some eccentric artist, some dressed, some not very, all looking like people who have been through a great deal in a short time.
And on and on the blinking went, until Rhiow had to squeeze her eyes shut again, and even when they were shut, she could still sense the timeslide flickering from place to place, until the mere thought of it made her queasy. Then there came a surprised shout, and suddenly Artie was standing in the circle with them, looking in astonishment at the other ehhif who were already there.
“No,” Huff said quickly, “not him.”
Artie vanished again and the flickering went on. Rhiow was slightly reassured by this proof of the spell’s ability to sort for the right people. But meantime she closed her eyes again and just concentrated on standing where she was and not falling over.
After a few moments, someone poked her. She opened her eyes again, swallowing, and trying to command her stomach not to do anything rash. Auhlae patted her again with the paw, and said, “Are you all right?”
“If we’re done with the hospital sweep,” Rhiow said, “then yes.”
“Is that all of them?” Arhu said.
Huff looked at Fhrio, and Fhrio waved his tail in acknowledgment. “That’s all the spell could find,” Fhrio said. “It’s more than we had ten minutes ago, anyway.”
Rhiow gulped. “Fhrio, a beautiful job. Can we leave them here safely a while? We still have one more thing to try to do. We’ve got to get at the contaminated timeline and get that assassination date.”
“No problem,” Fhrio said. He reached into the glowing hedge of the timeslide, and hooked out another line of light; the whole timeslide slipped sideways, with the people in it, but leaving the ehhif off by themselves at one side of the platform. “I’ve thrown a nonpermeable shield around them. No one will be able to see them, hear them, or get at them.”
“Then let’s go. One more time—!”
—and once more the pressure built and built, and Rhiow closed her eyes against it, sure it was going to push them straight back in through their sockets. She waited for the release of pressure that would let them all know that the slide had been successful; but it didn’t come. It just built, and built, and got worse and worse—
—Can’t, said Siffha’h. On the other side of the circle was a terrible feeling of strain, counterbalanced with the sense of some massive force planted in their way, not to be moved.
Don’t bother, said someone’s voice, Huff’s voice, from inside the spell. Let it go, we’ll try again later!
I—will not—let It—Siffha’h gasped. There may not be a chance later. We’re wizards—what else are we for?
Not for killing ourselves! Rhiow cried. Siffha’h, let it go!
Silence, and that unbearable strain, getting worse every moment. It won’t give, Siffha’h said, between straining breaths, almost in a grunt. It won’t give. It won’t—
Let it go! Siffha’h, let it go! That was Fhrio, now. Don’t try—
Yes—it will—
And silence for a moment … and then the cry.
Everything fell apart. Once again Rhiow caught that odd and terrible sound, like a roar of some frustrated beast at the very edge of things: then it was gone.
Everything was black. Rhiow lay in the blackness, content to let it be that way. I’m so tired … just let me rest a little…
She slowly became aware that Huff was standing over her. “Rhiow, are you all right? Rhiow!”
She tried to struggle to her feet, almost made it, fell down again.
“No, lie still,” Huff said, and started to wash her ear.
It was such a sweet gesture, and so completely useless at the moment, that Rhiow could have moaned out loud. But she held her peace. Just for a flash the thought went through her mind: How lucky Auhlae is. How wonderful it would be to have a tom like this to be with … not just in friendship, but that way as well…
But she put it aside. “That way” was no longer a possibility for her: and Huff was spoken for.
Rhiow was conscious of wanting to lie there and let the kindly washing continue, but at the same time it made her profoundly uncomfortable, and she could think of no way to get it to stop but to produce evidence that she was all right: so she pushed herself to her feet, no matter how wobbly she felt, and bumped Huff in the shoulder with her head in a friendly way. “Come on, cousin, it’s not that bad,” she said. “I’ll do well enough. What about the others … ?”
The others were by and large in no worse shape, though Siffha’h could not get up yet no matter what she did, and had to be content to lie there on the concrete while the others sat around her. “Well,” Huff said, “there’s no question now that eighteen seventy-four is the right year. The Lone One is actively blocking that year, and not even bothering to hide what It’s doing any more …”
“Which suggests that It’s getting more certain that there’s nothing we can do to keep the two universes from achieving congruency,” Auhlae said.
Siffha’h was trying to sit up again: Auhlae pushed her down, forcefully, with one paw. “We have to try again,” she said weakly.
“You will try nothing whatever,” Auhlae said sternly. “You are going to your den and you are going to lie there and sleep until you’ve recovered yourself.”
“But we can’t just leave it like this,” Siffha’h pleaded. “We can’t wait. The Lone One is going to block the access even more thoroughly if we don’t try again right away. We won’t ever be able to get through. And then It will kill the Queen, and everything … everything will die …” She had to put her head down on the concrete again: she couldn’t hold it up any longer.
“We have to wait,” Fhrio said to her. “We don’t have any chance of getting through at all, with you in your present state. You’ve got to rest. There’s a chance …” He looked over at Urruah, unwillingly. “If you and Urruah tried it together, tomorrow morning: powering the slide …”
“That’s going to be our best chance,” Huff said, looking over at Urruah to see if he was willing: Urruah waved his tail “yes’. “It’s not like we need to be idle in the meantime. Some of these ehhif don’t come from the blocked year: we can concentrate on getting as many of them back to their proper times as we can. But as for eighteen seventy-four … we’ll have to try again tomorrow.” He looked over at Rhiow. “Do you concur?”
“It seems the best plan,” Rhiow said. “We’ll head back to our home ground and make sure things are secure there … then be back in the morning.”
And there was nothing much more they could do about it than that. Home Rhiow and her team went, not in the best of moods, despite the recovery of the ehhif pastlings. Rhiow was feeling emotionally and physically bruised, and still guilty and upset over what she had said to Fhrio … especially in view of how successful his strategy to pick up the time-stranded ehhif had proven. Urruah was silent as only a tom can be who secretly feels he’s been upstaged, and is determined not to acknowledge it since the realization would be below him. Arhu looked abstracted and grim, his thoughts turned inward, possibly to thoughts of what he had Seen or might yet See … but Rhiow was more willing to bet that his attention was bent mostly on Siffha’h at the moment. And she seriously doubted that tomorrow would turn out any better.
More: when they parted company and she finally got home, Iaehh was nowhere to be found, though he had filled Rhiow’s bowls for her again. It was unusual for him to be out late at night by himself. Though perhaps he’s not by himself, Rhiow thought. And why would that be so terrible a thing? It’s not like he doesn’t need the company of other ehhif. Even, perhaps, one to be close to the way he was close to Hhuha…
Yet at the same time she shied away from the idea. They had been so very close. There was no question of Hhuha ever being replaced in Iaehh’s affections. Rhiow thought he would always love her, even though she was gone. Though why should that mean that he should have no new mate to draw close to? It’s not as if he had been spayed or anything, she thought: and for the first time, Rhiow actually found herself feeling slightly bitter about it. It’s not as if there was an option which he might have had, which is now forever closed to him…
She sat in the dark kitchen and stared at the food bowl and the water bowl. Listen to me, Rhiow thought. My blood sugar must be in a terrible state. Dutifully she went over to the food bowl and tried to eat: but she had no appetite, and the food tasted like mud.
She sighed and walked into the bedroom, and jumped on the bed: curled up on the pillow and got as comfortable as she could when there was no one else in the bed to snuggle up to. Sleep came quickly, but not quickly enough for Rhiow to escape the images of Siffha’h’s fear and Arhu’s pain, Fhrio’s anger, Urruah’s discomfort: and for the first time in a long while, she had no taste for the Meditations, but simply put her head down and waited for oblivion to descend, however briefly…
Come the morning, or the early afternoon, rather, she woke ravenous and lively again. Iaehh had been and gone, once more filling her bowls: though she was glad of the convenience, Rhiow wished that her schedule would stabilize enough to let her spend an evening with him. For the time being, though, work was going to have to take precedence … so that there would, hopefully, be evenings enough to spend after it all was over.
After “breakfast” at two in the afternoon, and her toilet, she made her way leisurely down to Grand Central and made the rounds of the gates. They seemed to be running normally: but Rhiow remembered Ith’s remark about the main gate matrices misbehaving, and could only hope that things would remain stable for the time being—stable enough, at least, for the Perm gating team to handle any minor difficulties that might arise.
Meanwhile, she had one other piece of business to attend to, and she was fairly sure where she might find it. She went down to the train platforms and made her way over to Track Twenty-Four, where the third and most frequently used of the Grand Central gates was positioned, invisible as usual to all but the wizards who used it. Sidled, Rhiow sat up on her haunches and reached into the control weave, caught the appropriate hyperstrings in her claws, and wove them together: then let the configuration snap back into the weft. The transit oval of the gate responded immediately, showing her a view as if from the mouth of a cave: outside the cave’s mouth, golden light streamed by in broad rays, through the branches of trees that could not be seen.
Rhiow braced herself, tensed, and leapt through the gate. She came down on stone on the far side, but “down” was not as far down as usual. She lifted one paw to look at it—an old habit. It was not her usual small trim paw, but nearly five inches across. Rhiow put her whiskers forward, glad as usual that her color at least remained the same when she visited here. The Old Downside was the place where a cat’s body was the size of its soul, in confirmation of the ancient privilege of feline wizards, whose ancestors had once been leonine in body, and had given up that size and power for a different kind of power—one less physical but, to Rhiow’s mind, much greater.
The stone shelf where she stood reared out from the side of the Mountain and gave a dazzling view across the plains of the Old Downside, tawny in the afternoon sunlight of a summer that never seemed to go away. Above her and behind her the Mountain’s huge flanks were hidden by the forests of great and ancient trees which had been there since her People first realized what this place would mean to them down the ages: and at the top of the Mountain speared further upward yet the highest trunk and branches of the Tree whose top rose into heaven and whose roots went down to the center of things. Rhiow looked at it in awe, as she had before, wondering when she would finally have time to go up the Mountain to sit under those great branches and hear the whispers of those who sat in them, murmuring wisdom. Not today, she thought, a little sadly. Maybe later…
Rhiow headed for the path that led down off the stone shelf, down toward the nearest patch of grassland: for already she had seen what she had suspected she would—creatures running on two legs rather than four, one of them quite small, and the others all six or eight feet tall. They appeared to be racing through the long grass, and one of them tumbled and got up to race again: faintly she caught the sound of ehhif laughter.
Rhiow put her whiskers forward and made her way down into the long grass of the plateau, actually just one of several stepped plateaus leading gradually down to where the River poured itself toward the half-seen reaches of what would someday be the Atlantic Ocean. Across the sea of grass she could see brown-golden shapes running, muscles working under shining scaled hide: and one of them, catching sight of what might have been mistaken for a jet-black lioness, turned and loped in a leisurely way toward her.
She trotted along to meet him. “Well, Ith,” Rhiow said, “I thought you might be here at this point.”
“Indeed yes,” Ith said, and slowed to stand beside her: together they stared out across the grass, where a small white-shirted figure was tearing through the grass with several small saurians in friendly pursuit. “He began to weary, ten hours or so ago: so I left him here to sleep with a few of my people for guardians, and continued the work a while.”
“But you stopped,” Rhiow said.
“For the time being. I have found at least some of what you sent me for,” Ith said. “Some, but not all, of the master spell against the Winter. Many a mummy of your People I unwound last night—” He flexed his claws. “It is delicate work, even with wizardry to help: and they all had to be put back the way I found them. Artie,” he said, looking after the boy, “is good at that. He has a sharp eye for detail, and a certain morbid fascination for dead bodies.”
Rhiow snorted amusement. “It’s a typical trait of young ehhif, I believe.”
“Well, it has stood him in good stead. We have found something indeed. That spell is no mere injunction against the Winter, whether meteoric or nuclear. Even by the two missing fragments we have found, I can tell it is one of those spells which invoke the Powers that Be, not indirectly through their servants the elements or mortal beings, but directly and by Their names. Not a force to be toyed with … and likely to be dangerous enough even when used in a good cause.”
Rhiow sat down, watching Artie run. “Is it too dangerous to use?”
“Perhaps,” Ith said, “but I would not think we dare let that stop us. There is a word in the old Egyptian: ba-neter, the world-soul, the “god-soul of the world”. That is what this spell invokes. One of the Powers that Be, certainly: and I think perhaps the one which anciently both created the substance of the Earth, under the One’s direction, and later Itself became it. What the ehhif I think would call the ‘tutelary angel’ of the Earth, or of its power for life.”
“Gaia,” Rhiow murmured.
“Yes, that would be another of the ehhif names. I would be much concerned if, in working this spell, we indeed saved the Earth from the Winter … but if at the same time, we awakened that Power, the Earth Herself.”
Rhiow’s tail lashed: she licked her nose. “I see your point,” she said. “What if we wake up the Earth … and she doesn’t like what’s living on her?”
Ith bowed in agreement. The grass not too far away from them began to hiss more loudly, and after a moment Artie came bursting out of it. “Come on, Ith,” he said, “it’s your turn to race!”
“I’ll race with you again later,” Ith said, “but in the meantime, Rhiow has stopped by to find out how we did last night.”
Artie looked at her in astonishment. “You’re much bigger!” he said.
“Yes,” she said, “I am, here. But it won’t last: I must get back to work. Are you having a good time here?”
“Oh, yes! It’s wonderful … it’s like a little lost world.”
“So it is … though not so much lost as hidden. It’s more like a lost one that we have to try to get into today: the Earth of eighteen seventy-four again. Not the one you come from, but the dark one …”
“Ith told me about it,” Artie said. “Rhiow, please let me come too! I want to see the world where the Moon’s blown up!”
Rhiow shuddered. “I can’t say that I recommend it,” she said. “We’re going to be moving very fast today … there won’t be time for sightseeing.”
“Oh, Rhiow!”
“Now don’t plague her,” Ith said. “She has had a hard time of it. She will take you worldgating when things are a little less busy.”
That’s right,” Rhiow said, putting her whiskers forward at the way Ith was acquiring the sound of a Father. “Ith, I’ll be in touch with you later to let you know how we’re doing. Meanwhile, keep at the work with the mummies. We need that spell …”
“I will see to it. Go well—”
Unable to resist, Artie put out a hand, stroked Rhiow’s head. She purred and bumped against him, and then headed back toward the path that would lead up to the shelf, and the worldgate back to Grand Central, and onward to London…
Her own team met her on the platform on the Underground, both looking somewhat better than they had before: and the London team, too, looked much improved for a night’s sleep. The exception was Fhrio, who hadn’t had any sleep, but didn’t seem to care. He had spent the evening analyzing the ehhif pastlings, with freestanding wizardries and evidence from the gate logs, and had been returning them to their proper times.
“We got every one of them back where they belong,” Fhrio said, and he looked positively jolly, even though he had been up since they’d seen him last. “Every single one! At least now we know that when we get the Queen’s problem handled, the gates won’t be misbehaving any more …”
“When”, Rhiow thought. From your mouth to Her ear … “It’s good news,” Rhiow said, and sat down to have a wash: having been a “big cat” always left her feeling oddly unkempt for a few hours—something to do with the coarser texture of the fur. “Is the timeslide ready to try the eighteen seventy-four run again?”
“Yes it is. We’re just waiting for Siffha’h now: she felt she needed a nap after her last “pastling” transit, to make sure she was sharp for this big one.”
Right on cue, Siffha’h turned up, carefully greeting everyone but Arhu, who turned his back as soon as she came in, and didn’t give her the chance to reject him first. Rhiow sighed at this, but said nothing about it, and only glanced sympathy at Arhu. He said nothing either, simply waiting for the action to begin.
It didn’t take long, for Siffha’h was eager to get started, and so was Fhrio. They leaped into their places inside the timeslide, and Huff and Auhlae followed: hard behind them came Urruah and Arhu, and Rhiow last of all.
“Ready?” Siffha’h said, rearing up on her haunches and shaking her shoulders a little as she prepared herself.
Fhrio hooked a claw into the timeslide wizardry. “Now—”
Siffha’h came down on the power-feed point, and the world whited out. The pressure came back. Rhiow had hoped that it might possibly be a little more bearable this time: the hope was in vain. If possible, it was worse. The sense of the power which Siffha’h was pouring into the transit was staggering … but so was the resistance. It was as if she slammed them all, repeatedly, into a wall of stone. She’s stubborn, you have to give her that. Rhiow thought: but whatever was ranged against them was immune to stubbornness.
Siffha’h kept hammering, fruitlessly. The pressure bore and bore on Rhiow until she wanted to moan out loud … and suddenly it simply broke, lifted all at once, a relief so great that she felt like fainting.
She was still standing, but only just. She looked around at the others, all swaying on their feet, and at Siffha’h, who was lying prostrate, panting.
“Blocked,” she gasped. “Blocked …”
“It’s no use,” Fhrio said. “We’re not going to be able to get it, the information we need. We were so close … but we’re locked out …”
“You could try using the key the Powers sent us,” Arhu said, very pointedly.
Huff and Auhlae and the others looked at each other, bemused. Rhiow closed her eyes for a moment, and called up her memories of this morning, until she stood again in the grassland of the Downside, under the sun of an endless summer. Ith!
Arhu has already called me, the answer came back. Artie and I will be with you shortly.
Urruah’s tail was lashing thoughtfully. “It would make sense,” he said. “The Law of Isostatic Origin says that nothing can prevent your return to your home time if you’re attempting to reach it, and you have the proper spell, and the spell’s working. There’s simply no way that anything can stop you: you and your home time have too great an affinity. That should mean that even the Lone Power can’t stop you … shouldn’t it?”
Huff blinked. “It’ll be interesting finding out,” he said.
“Even if he’s only present in the spell as an “outrider”, it should work,” Arhu said. “And if you tie him into the spell, it’ll work better yet.”
The air pulled open in front of them, and Artie and Ith stepped out. Artie’s shirt was torn by someone’s claw, and he was slightly sunburned, and had begun to freckle. To Rhiow, he looked extremely happy.
“Here is the one whom the Powers have sent you,” Ith said. “I will leave him with you for the time being: I must go to continue my work. Even though there are ehhif in the Museum today, I believe I can work around them: and anyway, I feel that I must. Time seems to be getting very short …”
He flirted his tail in farewell at Artie, and stepped back through his “hole into the air”, into nothingness.
Artie looked around at the People and the timeslide. “Wonderful,” he said, “more magic! What do I do?”
“Come over here, young ehhif,” said Fhrio, “and tell me about yourself.”
Fhrio spent about ten minutes asking Artie the usual pointless-seeming questions about his age and his tastes and his birthday and his favorite colors: all the things that went into the most basic “sketch” of a wizard’s name. It took no longer than that for Fhrio to add the string of symbols to the timeslide.
“Now step in here,” Huff said to Artie. “We’re going to try to move ourselves back into that other eighteen seventy-four. You’re going to feel the spell pressing on you: it might make you faint.”
“I’ll sit down,” Artie said, and did so.
The members of both teams arranged themselves. Siffha’h got up on her haunches. “Ready?” Fhrio said.
“Ready,” said everyone.
Siffha’h came down. And so did the pressure—
It was different, this time. Last time it had been as if Siffha’h was throwing them against a wall. This time it was as if something was behind them, pushing, pushing harder and harder against that wall the longer the timeslide was in operation. Instead of being squeezed from all sides, Rhiow felt as if she was being smashed flat in one direction only. Frankly, she thought, clenching her teeth, there’s not much to choose between the two sensations—
It went on for quite a long time, Siffha’h’s stubbornness still very much something one could feel in the air all around one. But nothing happened…
The pressure relaxed again. Once more Siffha’h flopped down, panting, and all the People looked at each other in despair.
“What are we doing wrong?!” Auhlae said.
Huff’s tail lashed. “Absolutely nothing.”
“There’s no physical access,” Fhrio said. “None at all …”
A long silence fell.
“Then we’re going to have to try one that’s not physical,” Arhu said.
Everyone looked at him.
“I think I could See what we need to know,” he said, “if I had help. I kept thinking that this was something you had to do alone. Well, maybe it’s not. Maybe I’m just sort of a walking spell. Maybe I can be fueled from outside, too. If she does what she can—” He refused to look at Siffha’h. “And Urruah, if you help—and if Artie is here too—then I think maybe I can do it. If you take most of the timeslide functions out of the circuit, all except for the coordinates—”
Fhrio waved his tail helplessly. “Why not?” he said. “It’s worth a try—”
“Try it with just Urruah first,” Siffha’h said. And there was a note there in her voice that Rhiow had not heard before. She was afraid.
Of what?
“All right,” Urruah said. “Let me take it.” He moved over to the power-point position as Siffha’h pulled herself away, and planted his paws on it. “Ready, Fhrio?”
“Ready—”
Power, growing quickly, increasing to a blaze, a blast. Rhiow blinked, finding herself becoming lost in it. The pressure from behind, which is Artie: the pressure forward, which is Urruah: the impetus in the center, which is Arhu. All go forward a very little way … and then stop, blocked.
Blocked, yes (says a voice that sounds oddly like Hardy’s). But only for actually going. Seeing cannot be blocked: vision is ubiquitous. It is one of the chief functions of Her nature: She sees everything … though in Her mercy, she does not always look. Looking makes it so…
Arhu looks. For a while all he can see is that scarred and leering Moon, the promise of destruction. It is meant to distract him. When he realizes this, he turns his attention away. Show me what happens to her, he says to the listening world. Show me the ones who kill the Queen.
The darkness swirls and does not quite dissolve…
There is little enough to see of them. They fear the daylight. In the room where they sit, talking in whispers, the curtains are drawn against the possibility of anyone seeing in. Sight they may defeat, but not vision. “The time has come. Our people can suffer this unjust rule no longer. We must go forward with the plan.”
“Are the conditions all correct? Are we sure?”
“As certain as we can be. The relationship with Germany could hardly be expected to worsen, excepting that they declare war … which they dare not do. Any more than the French. But both have been saber-rattling: and France has made several statements in the past few weeks that seem to threaten the monarchy. There is no point in waiting any further.”
More whispers, hard even for a Person’s ears to pick up. “The Mouse is in place.”
“Well, then let the Mouse run,” says another voice, and it chuckles.
The voices fade. Resistance rears itself against Arhu. Something knows he is watching and listening. Something is trying to push him away, back where he belongs.
The feeling of Arhu pressing back, pushing against the resistance, fighting it.
…To no effect. It pushes back harder. It is winning.
A deep breath … and then a different tack. The raven’s way.
Don’t push against it. Rise above it. Don’t fight with the vision: let it bear you. The wings and the wind are a dialog…
Arhu lets go and soars: and the Eye opens fully…
The letter came. The small ehhif picked it up, without any particular fanfare, from the kitchen of one of the wings of the castle: a letter from his sister in Edinburgh, he said to the cook, and carried it away whistling. Still whistling, he headed for the potting shed where most of his day’s work took place these days—and then stepped into a thick bed of rhododendrons near the shed. Concealed there, he stood stock-still and silently tore the letter open.
He knew what it meant: he did not have to read it. All he had to do was make sure that the contents said what he had been told to expect. Dearest John, I hope you are well. I write to tell you that I have received the ten shillings you sent, and thank you very much. If you—
It was correct: it was all correct. The man folded the letter and put it back in the envelope, unaware with what fierce interest a Seer’s eyes looked through his, and puzzled out the postmark. July 9, 1874.
“Tonight,” the man whispered.
The vision whirled aside, shifted.
…And the resistance came back. Pressing him away. Not to see the next part…
Come on, he said. Help me.
No answer.
Siffha’h, come on! This is what will make the difference!
No—do it yourself!
You said it, Arhu said—not angrily, but pleading. I’ll take you anywhere you need to go. This is where we need to go!
A long, long silence, while the pressure increases.
…All right…
A shuffling of paws on the power-point, to make room for another. She rears up. Terrified, terrified, she comes down—
A blast of power runs down through the linkages, runs into Arhu. The pressure before him fails, melts away: the wind blows him past it—
Arhu whirls along with the wind, lets it bear him. Darkness now: not the darkness among the rhododendrons, but black night. In the silence, the man creeps along, under the cosseted trees of the Orangery, along the North Terrace. There are many doors into the silent castle, most locked, but few guarded: after all, the walls are guarded, and no one is inside the walls by night except trusted retainers of the household. There are no lights outside, on the inside of the wall: there is no need for such.
The man stops by a door just east of George the Fourth’s Tower, on the bottom level: the servants’ quarters and the kitchens. This is a door which is rarely ever locked—a little secret: even servants like to be able to escape now and then. The man waits for a few minutes outside it to make sure that no candle is burning inside, harbinger of some servant girl having a tryst in the midnight kitchen by the slacked-down coal fire of the biggest stove. But no light comes: and he needs none. He knows how many steps wide the kitchen is, how many stairs lead up from it to the first floor, and then how many steps, in the darkness, lead along the hallway to the second landing and the small winding stair which leads up into the eastern end of the State Apartments. It is a path he has walked five or six times now by night, and has memorized with the skill that used to let him ransack complex commercial premises in the City, in the dark, after just one walkthrough by daylight.
He unlatches the door with one gloved hand, slips in through it, shuts it gently behind him. Stands still in the darkness, and listens. A faint hiss from the hot-water boiler behind the coal stove: no other sound.
Twelve steps across the kitchen: his outstretched hand finds the shut door. He eases its latch open, slips through this door too, pulls it gently to behind him. No need to leave it open: he will not be coming back this way. Six stairs up to the hallway. Two steps out into the middle of the carpet in the hall: turn left. Sixty steps down to the second landing. The carpet muffles his footsteps effectively, though he would go silently even without it: he is wearing crepe-soled shoes which his employers would have judged most eccentric for a gardener. Well, they will have little chance to judge him further, in any regard. Others will be going to judgment tonight.
Fifty-nine steps, and he hears the change in the sound. Sixty. His toe bumps against the bottom step. Five stairs up to the landing: turn right: three steps. He puts his hand out, and feels the door.
Gently, gently he pulls it open. From up the winding stair comes a faint light: it seems astonishingly bright to him after the dead blackness. Softly he goes up the stairs, taking them near the outer side of the steps: the inner sides creak. One makes a tiny sound, crack: he freezes in place. A minute, two minutes, he stands there. No one has noticed. A great old house like this has a thousand creaks and moans, the sound of compressed wood relaxing itself overnight, and no one pays them any mind.
Up the remaining fifteen steps. They are steep, but he is careful. At the door at the top he halts and looks out of the crack in it where it has been left open. In the hallway onto which this stairway gives, next to a door with a gilded frame, a footman is sitting in a chair under a single candle-sconce with a dim electric bulb burning in it. The chair is tilted back against the wall. The footman is snoring.
Down the hallway, now, in utmost silence.
Half a minute later, the footman has stopped snoring … not to mention breathing.
Swiftly now, but also silently. Reach up and undo the bulb from its socket. Wait a few seconds for night vision to return. Then, silently, lift the doorlatch. The door swings open. This is the only part of his night’s work, other than the hallway outside, which he has not been able to pace out in advance. Here sight alone must guide him, and the description he has been given of the layout of the room.
The outer room is where the lady-in-waiting has a bed. She is in it, sleeping sweetly, breathing tiny small breaths into the night.
Half a minute later, her sleep has become much deeper, and the sound of breathing has stopped. The nightwalker makes his way toward what he cannot see yet in this more total darkness, the inner door. He feels for the handle: finds it.
Turns the handle. The door swings inward.
Darkness and silence. Not quite silence: a faint rustle of bedlinens, off to his left, and ahead.
Now, only now, the excitement strikes him, and his heart begins to pound. Ten steps, they told him. A rather wide bed. Her maids say she still favors the left side of it, leaving the right side open for someone who sleeps there no more.
Ten steps. He takes them. He listens for the sound of breathing…
…then reaches for the left side.
One muffled cry of surprise, under his hand … and no more. He holds her until she stops struggling, for fear an arm or leg should flail and knock something down. He wipes the wetness off on the bedclothes, unseen, and pauses by the end of the massive bed to tie the slim silken rope around one leg. Then he makes for the windows.
Quietly he slips behind the drapes: softly he pushes the window up in its sash, wider than need be—no need to give anyone the idea that he is a small man. He goes down the rope like a spider, rotating gently as he goes. Without a sound he comes down on the North Terrace again and makes straight off across the Home Park in the direction of the Datchet Road. Where the little road crosses the Broad Water, a brougham is waiting for him. He will be in it in five minutes, and in Calais by morning.
A quiet night’s work … and the pay is good. He will never need to see the inside of a potting shed again … or a merchant bank or a high-class jeweler’s after dark. That part is over. The new part of his life begins.
And at least she’s happy now. She’s with Albert…
—and then the vision snapped back. A moment’s confusion—
—and the vision was centering, bizarrely, on Siffha’h. Herself, she moaned and sank down, covering her eyes with her paws, and Rhiow could understand why: the mirroring must be disorienting in the extreme, self seeming to look at self seeming to look at self, infinitely reflected—
Except that it was not Siffha’h moaning that Rhiow heard. It was Arhu. Crying in a small frightened voice: crying like a kitten. “Oh, no,” he moaned. “It’s you. I didn’t know … I couldn’t help it … How could I help it?”
—an image of blackness. The rustling of a plastic bag as small frightened bodies thrashed and scrabbled for purchase, for any way to stay above what inexorably rose around them. Cold water, black as death. Underneath him, all around him, the sound of water bubbling in … of breath bubbling out…
Arhu fled from the platform, up the hallway: he was gone.
Both the teams and Artie looked after him in astonishment—all but Siffha’h. In her eyes was nothing but implacable hatred.
“I won’t have anything further to do with him,” she said. “Don’t ask me to. I will kill him if he touches my mind again. And why shouldn’t I?” she said. “Since he killed me first …”