To Visit the Queen - читать онлайн бесплатно полную версию книги . Страница 2
The raven perches for a moment on a folding board which is set up outside the shopfront. The shop itself is dark and its door is shut. But outside, the piece of paper pasted to the board says, in large black letters, HER MAJESTY'S FUNERAL. It is the front page of The Times of London, and it has no other words on it except the newspaper's masthead, and the date: JULY 14, 1874.
The raven takes wing again before anyone should see it; vaults up into the safety of the silvery twilight again. That is the core which you sought, Odin says. We have just time to see the beginning, and the end.
The tense changed once more: now became then again, at least while Odin and Arhu were in transit. They saw more, much more, as the raven flashed in and out through the cloud that always seemed about to break into day. Rhiow could not make sense of most of what she was sensing, and hoped Arhu would be able to do better, or that perhaps the raven Odin could: for occasionally, like a sudden ray of light through the cloud, there would come an image so overladen with context that it was as if a thousand ehhif stood around her, every one of them shouting some piece of information that it was important for her to hear. A group of ehhif, ranged in a big room, facing each other in rows: and all shouting at one another, a terrible noise of rage and confusion, while one ehhif at the front of one group, in the bottom row of the benches, cried out, "Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord: I will repay – !" and all the others shouted him down in a crescendo of fury, as another one leapt up and shouted, "Mr. Speaker, they say the Devil can quote Scripture to his purpose. I can do the same: and I say, 'They have sown the storm, and they shall reap the whirlwind – !' " A roar of approval – and from that, abruptly, to a white-walled room where a broad, squat machine of some kind was being built by ehhif wearing protective suits. Then a bright, blue-skied day, and a missile or rocket leaping up on a tongue of fire from a launch pad bizarrely adorned in the curlicues of the Victorian decorative style. Then a huge aircraft passing over a city landscape, so big that it shadowed the ground, and ehhif looked up and pointed. Then –
– the images were gone again. The twilight returned … and went sinister. It was not silvery any more: it was leaden. The sun could not come through it. Arhu and Odin spun up together on raven's wings, catching an updraft, or what passed for one in vision. This was no normal wind: the air was too thin for wind as high as they were going, as the Earth yielded up her curvature below them. Far down, away in the blue sea, Arhu could see the plume of darkness wafting up from one small point. A volcano, a mother of volcanoes, belching out great clouds of ash and dust into the upper atmosphere: a thin line which became a plume, a plume which became a pall, thin and dark and gloomy, right around the globe of the world. What was bright, and normally gleamed like polished metal where the Sun touched it, now was dull and tarnished: and clouds that should have burned white, were all filmed gray. 1816, said Odin's voice, dry, noticing rather than reacting. He had seen it before: he had seen all this before. The difference, he said, is that I never had to look. Looking is what makes the difference, in vision. Looking makes it so …
They dived again, were briefly lost in the silvery twilight, the billow of possibility. When they came out, they looked down into a muddy street and saw a young dark-complexioned man in casual clothing of the late twentieth century come lurching out of the middle of the air, carrying something heavy in a bag. He came staggering through the darkness, out into the street: another ehhif came along and frightened him. He dropped the bag, turned and fled once more into the darkness. A few moments later, other ehhif came along and picked up the bag, peeled it away from what it contained. A book, a very large book. The ehhif stared at the cover. Another one took the book from the one who held it: opened it, turned the pages, looking at the equations and the delicately drawn diagrams, and the dense small print.
One of them glanced up into the cloudy sky, with that thin layer of darkness streaming along above everything, as a brief welcome ray of sun shot down through the dull day. The light fell on the book. Arhu looked at the silver ehhif letters on the book's cover. It said Van Nostrand's Scientific Encyclopedia.
Arhu looked down at the ehhif and heard, very softly, all about them, the laughter: the quiet amusement of Something which had given the world, just now, a brief foretaste of what was waiting for it later, in far greater intensity, when the seed it had just planted finally came to fruit. This darkness would fall again, but many times magnified: this cold would come … but would be permanent. By the time it passed, and the planet warmed again, all its intelligent life would be long dead.
Arhu had heard that laughter before. Once upon a time, when he was a kitten, he had found himself in a garbage bag in the East River, one which slowly filled with water, while he and his brothers and sisters clawed and scrabbled desperately on top of each other, trying to stay above the terrible cold stuff that was slowly climbing high enough around them that they would have no choice but to breathe it, and die. Only Arhu lived, saved by chance – some ehhif coming along and seeing the sinking bag in the water, and hearing the last faint cries of despair from inside, had fished it out, torn it open, and dumped the sodden bodies of the kittens out onto the bike path. All the while he had been in that bag, and even afterwards, all the while the ehhif warmed him in his coat while taking the last small survivor to the local animal shelter, Arhu had sensed that laughter all around him. It was Entropy in Its personified form, the One Who invented death, sa'Rrahh as the People knew Her, the disaffected and ambivalent Power which wizards called "Lone": and It had laughed at the prospect of his one small death as It was now laughing at this far greater one. The fury Arhu had felt when first he recognized that laughter's source, he felt now, and it roared up in him like the voice of one of the Old Cats from the Downside, a blast of pure rage that sent Odin tumbling through the silvery twilight as if blown off course by a gust of wind.
They were not off course, though. They came out of the twilight more quickly than even Odin had expected, so that for a moment he almost lost control, dropping some hundreds of feet before he could get his wings under him again. As they tumbled, Arhu had a brief confusion of which way was up and which was down. They were high above the Earth again, but as they tumbled the lights blurred, and there seemed to be stars in the dark side of the Earth as well as in the sky –Odin fought for stability, found it. Arhu looked down, through the raven's Eye, and saw that there were lights on the dark side of the Earth, indeed, but they were not stars.
Europe was in shadow. London was dark. But on the Continent, from north to south, eye-hurtingly bright lights had broken out, a rash of points of fire. Paris, Berlin, Rome, Madrid, Moscow, every one was a point of light. Others blossomed as Arhu watched – Hanover, Lyon, Geneva, Lisbon, Vienna, Budapest, Warsaw, and many more: seeds of fire growing, paling, each one with its tiny pale growth above it. Arhu did not need to dive any closer to see the mushroom clouds. The seeds were planted. It would be no spring that came with their growth, but a winter that would last an age …
Arhu closed his eyes in pain. When he opened them again, he was crouched down on the ground, on the green grass near the bush in the Ravens' Enclosure, and beside him, Odin was standing up and shaking his feathers into place. Hardy was sitting down on the nearby tree, now, near Hugin.
"The beginning and the end," Arhu breathed, and had to stop and try to catch his breath, for he was finding it hard just to be here and now again.
"It will pass," said Hardy. "Meanwhile, be assured: you did a good job. You see strangely, but your way might be something that we could learn in time, if you could teach us."
"Me teach you?" Arhu said, and gulped for air again. "Uh – I'll have to ask."
"Ask Her by all means," said Hardy. "In the meantime, I see the nature of your problem. She was the core of that whole time, the old Queen, Victoria: the events of that whole period crystallized out around her personality, and the qualities which her people projected onto her. Any universe in which she was successfully assassinated would be a threat to all the others anywhere near it in its probability sheaf. And I would suggest to you," Hardy said, bending down a little closer to Arhu, "that if the Lone One wished to make doubly sure of your universe's demise, that it would see to it that she died in your universe as well."
Arhu stared at him. "By making the ehhif here assassinate this Queen Victoria?"
"Indeed. It might well happen anyway, for as the two universes begin the process of exchanging energy and achieving homeostasis, that 'core event' will be one of the first things that will try to happen in your universe." Hardy blinked and looked thoughtful. "If I were in your position, I would be sure that this world's Victoria is protected from the fate you have seen befall her counterpart. Otherwise, with two universes with dead Queens, the alternate universe will gain a great entropy advantage over the other. Should both Queens die, I doubt very much whether this world would long survive … "
"Oh, great, another problem," Arhu said, rather bitterly. "And how can you be so calm about it?" "Well, for one thing, it has already happened," said Hardy mildly. "For another thing, you are the ones who will cause it not to happen … if indeed you do. How should I not be calm, when I know I am giving my advice to the right person?"
Arhu blinked and turned to Odin. "Can you translate that for me?" he said, rather helplessly.
Odin blinked too. "It made perfect sense to me," he said. "Which part of it specifically did you need translated?"
Arhu hissed softly. "Never mind.""When I say 'it has already happened'," Hardy said, "I speak of the entire chain of events from first to last: from your arrival here to work on the gates, to your final departure. Not that I know the details of that: you will soon know them better than we ever could. But I think that, in this timeline, this universe, Queen Victoria has 'not yet' been assassinated. I would suspect that fact of being what has so far kept this timeline in place, and as yet largely undamaged … and it may also be that the difficulty you were experiencing with the oscillation of the far end of your colleague's timeslide also has to do with the unusual stability, under the circumstances, of this one. You must complete whatever consultations you have planned with speed. And at all times, the Queens must be your great care. Whatever happens, protect them."Arhu waved his tail in agreement, and stood up. He was surprisingly wobbly on his feet. "Look … I want to thank you. I've got to get back to the others and tell them about this: as much as I can, anyway.""Do so. Go well, young wizard: and come back again.""He will anyway," Odin said, and poked Arhu in a friendly way with his beak, at the back of his neck.Arhu took a swipe at him, with the claws out, and missed on purpose. It seemed wise. He liked Odin: and anyway, that beak was awfully big. "Dai," he said. "Later — "He headed off out the gateway under the Bloody Tower with as much dignity as he could muster, while desperately wanting to fall down somewhere and go straight to sleep: and as he went out, all the stones around him were quiet … for the moment.Rhiow opened her eyes and looked at Arhu. He had fallen asleep. With some slight difficulty, for she was stiff, she got up and stretched, and then went over to Urruah."We'd better call the others in," she said. "The problem's gotten much worse … "FIVEThe whole group met again late that night in the Mint. Urruah was the last to arrive: he had been doing work on the timeslide until the last minute, having taken a while to look at Arhu's "record' in the Whispering of his flight with Odin. All the others, one by one, took time to do the same, and also to look at Rhiow's discussion with Hhumh'hri: and then, predictably, the argument began.Fhrio, in particular, was skeptical about the ravens' suggestion regarding the version of Queen Victoria in their home timeline. "It's just more work for nothing," he said. "If she's the only thing keeping this timeline in place – and the two are congruent, mostly, in terms of timeflow – then why hasn't she been assassinated already?"Urruah's tail was lashing already. "Because someone's prevented it already," he said, politely enough. "Probably us, or someone working with us. Either the timelines have been taken out of congruence somehow – difficult – or the attempt on the Queen's life has already failed. Again, probably because of us. We're going to have to consider timesliding someone back far enough to guard her – and then block any further slides to positions before our guard is in place, so that we can deal with the assassination attempt proper."Fhrio spat. "It's a waste of time. One, I doubt the Powers will let us. There's too much temporal gating going on at the moment anyway. Too many ways to screw up past timelines. And secondly, it makes a lot more sense to concentrate on the Victoria who's in the 'nuclear' timeline. It's that universe that's the real threat, anyway.""I don't know," Auhlae said. "I think Hardy might have had a point. If we – ""Are you crazy?" Fhrio said. "We've got enough trouble already. Let's concentrate on one thing at a time.""We may not be able to," Auhlae said. "We still have to find all the 'pastlings' and get them back into their right times: otherwise the instability of the gates is going to continue and increase all through this. We can't just drop one problem because the other seems more important all of a sudden.""I think you're wrong," Fhrio said. "I think we have to. Even the Victoria problem will go away if we keep the first contamination, the technological one, from happening. If we could just catch that first guy with the book as he's going through the gate … ""If you catch him," Huff said, "you'll probably catch what caused the slide in the first place. The Lone Power … in whatever form It's wearing this time out. Or you'll catch whatever poor stooge It's using … and even the stooges are likely to be trouble enough.""Not as much trouble as the Earth dying of nuclear winter in 1888 or whenever!""If we could even just get the book, and keep it from crossing over … " Huff said.Urruah lashed his tail in agreement. "I'd say there's no question that that's the point of contamination," he said. "I've checked in the Whispering. It's a very detailed volume, full of basic information on every possible kind of science. And possibly worst of all, it's full of materials science, and technical information on how to make almost everything it discusses. Manufacturing processes, temperatures, specific chemical reactions, locations of ores and chemical elements – you name it.""That time was full of great scientific minds," Rhiow said. "They were not stupid people. Once they believed what was in that book –which they quickly would have done, once they'd tested a few of the equations in it to see what happened – they would have run wild with it. As we see they've done.""Again, they seem to have done it somewhat selectively," Urruah said."But the worst thing they could have started messing with, atomics, they must have started with right away, in the late 'teens of the century, to have got as far along as they are now. It must have seemed like magic to them, that. Until they started building the necessary centrifuges and separators for the heavy-metal ores … and found that the metals did what was advertised." He sighed."The details are going to prove fascinating enough, I'm sure," Huff said. "But now we have to find out exactly when that incursion with the young man and the book happened, and stop it.""How?" Arhu said."Backtiming, stupid," said Siffha'h.Arhu glared at her. "Look, before you start calling names," he said, "think about it. Do you really think the Lone Power's going to just let us undo what It went to so much trouble to set up? Just like that? If you do, you're even stupider than you think I am.""That would be fairly difficult," Siffha'h retorted, "since — ""Stop it, Siffha'h," Auhlae said sternly. "There's enough entropy loose around here at the moment without increasing it.""Those accesses are going to be blocked," Arhu said. "Trust me.""Is that a seeing?" Urruah said."No, it's common sense," Arhu snapped, "which seems to be in short supply around here at the moment." He threw Siffha'h another annoyed look."Anyway," Urruah said loudly, "at the moment, there is a problem with the idea of stopping the book transfer. It is that we don't yet have a definite timing or a proper set of coordinates for that transit, even with what Odin was able to show Arhu. Until we can get a timing, we can't stop the book getting back into the Victorian era: and it will take some time and work yet for us to generate a timing that we can use … even an educated guess at one. So for the time being we should concentrate on what we presently do have a chance to stop, which is the assassination.""How close have you been able to get to that timing?" Huff said.Urruah glanced over at Auhlae. "Eighteen sixteen," Auhlae said. "That's when the Whisperer says the volcano happened. It produced something called 'The Year Without a Summer'." The usual kind of thing: the volcano spat out a lot of high-altitude ash that produced unusually rapid cooling of the atmosphere. There were places in northern Europe where it snowed in June and July, that year. Harvests failed everywhere.""If there was a perfect time to drop a book full of information on high technology into the pre-Victorian culture," Huff said, "I'd say that would have been it. The scientifically-oriented ehhif would have tried everything in it that they then had the materials technology for, with an eye to solving their problem … and then, when it eventually passed, they would swiftly have started constructing everything else they could, from the 'instructions'." He sighed. "I could wish they hadn't been half so clever … "Rhiow was in agreement with him about that. "Arhu, as regards the timing of the book's arrival … could you do anything more with the ravens, do you think?"Arhu lashed his tail "no". "Rhiow, one of the things I gathered from Odin was that they can't spend that much time during a given period in any one timeline or alternate universe. They're messengers, all right, but they have to do their work at high speed specifically because they do so much out-of-timeline work. Other universes spit them out like a mouse's gallbladder if they try to stay away from "home" too long."She nodded. "What about vision?""Theirs is a little more predictable than mine," Arhu said, "but it's so different … " He shrugged his tail. "I'll go and ask them tomorrow, but I wouldn't bet on them being able to help us that much more."Rhiow waved her tail in agreement, though reluctantly. She was still bemused by the ravens' version of vision, and wondered exactly how they were getting it. Wizards and wizardry talent among birdkind tended to vest in the predators, for some reason: possibly because they were the top of their local food chains … or possibly it was something to do with their level of intelligence. This was not something about which Rhiow had ever queried the Whisperer. She had been bemused enough, when she first became a wizard, to find that there were wizards among the houiff too, and that some of them could be as sagacious as any feline. Afterwards she stopped wondering why wizardry turned up in one species or another, and simply said Dai stiho to another wizard when she met one, whether it had wings, or fins, or two legs or four. Now, though, she started to wonder why she had never heard of raven-wizards. Or is it that I just never went looking that hard for the information? There's so much to know, and so little time …Never mind. "All right," she said to Huff. "At least we now have a much better idea of the exact time of the assassination. We have to narrow it down further still, though."Huff nodded. "Urruah," he said, "that's one of the other time– coordinates you're going to be trying to access when you use the timeslide next?""Absolutely. But there are a few other things we need to look into as well," Urruah said. "Like the small matter of the logs on the nonfunctioning gate."Fhrio looked at Urruah sharply. "What's the matter with them?""They're not the way they were when we disconnected the gate from the catenary," Urruah said. The coordinates for the Illingworth access have been changed, and I don't know how, or why. Any ideas?"Fhrio stared at Urruah as if he was out of his mind. "They can't change. You're crazy."Urruah glanced over at Huff: Huff looked back at him, bemused. "All right then," Urruah said, "I'm crazy." Rhiow looked with great care at his tail. It was quite still. She licked her nose, twice, very fast. "But I think you should lock that gate in a stasis, Huff, and make sure no one gets at it again. If it can manage to alter itself again while it's got a stasis on it, then obviously no cause based here is at fault."Huff stared at the floor for a moment, then looked up and said, "I'll take care of it. Rhiow – "She looked over at him. "Our next move?" Huff said.She was not used to being so obviously deferred to: it made her a little uncomfortable. After a moment's pause, she said, "Overall, I think at the moment that I have to agree with Fhrio. While I agree it's important to make sure that our home-timeline's Victoria is safe, the other one is in greater danger at the moment … or so it seems to me … and her assassination is what seems likeliest to trigger the derangement of our own timeline. I think we must therefore try to get into the 'altered eighteen seventy-four' timeline as quickly as we can: tomorrow, I think, since a lot of us are short on sleep at the moment. We'll try to find out exactly when the assassination was, and find out what we need to do to stop it. After that we can worry about the book, and last of all, about the stranded pastlings in our own time. Huff?"He put his ears forward in agreement. "That makes sense to me. Let's do so.""I am going to fuel Urruah's timeslide tomorrow," Siffha'h said, as if expecting an argument."Fine," said Huff. "Urruah had some questions about the catenary's behavior as a power source: this will resolve them. Auhlae and I will be doing general gate duty tomorrow, but we'll be on call if something else comes up. When should we all meet?""About this time?" Urruah said."Good enough."The group broke up. Fhrio threw a very annoyed look at Urruah as he went out, and Urruah sat down and started washing, while the others, glancing at him, left.Rhiow touched cheeks with Auhlae and Huff as they went out, then sat down by Urruah while he scrubbed his face. "Well, you seem to have managed to attract a lot of someone's annoyance today," she said softly, when the others, except for Arhu, were gone. "What was all that about?""Well, I spent a late night working with Auhlae a couple of nights ago," Urruah said, "and he seems to have taken issue with that.""Fhrio? What business is that of his?""I'm not sure."Rhiow sighed. "It doesn't take much to get him going in any case," she said. "Probably it means nothing. Are you all right, though?""Oh, I'm fine. It's just that – " He shrugged his tail, started washing his ears. Rhi, usually there's a certain level of good humor about these joint jobs. It seems to be missing in this one.It's the level of stress, I'd imagine, Rhiow said. This is not your usual "joint job"."No," he said, "I suppose not." He stopped washing, and sighed, putting his ears forward as Huff came back in. "Huff," he said, "do you want any help with that stasis?""No," Huff said, "I'll manage it." He sat down and looked around him a little disconsolately."All right then," Urruah said. "Rhi, I'll see you in the morning. Go well, Huff – " He headed out toward the cat-door in the back of the pub.Rhiow looked at Huff for a moment, then got up and went to sit by him. "Are you all right?" she said."Oh – yes, I suppose so," he said, sounding a little distracted. "It's just that … I don't know … I'm not used to coping with these stress levels, and everyone around me seems to be losing their temper half the time. My team's unhappy and I don't know why, and there doesn't seem to be much I can do about it … "Rhiow put one ear back: it was a feeling she'd had occasionally. "Oh, Huff, it'll sort itself out … you'll see. It is the stress, truly: this problem isn't the kind of thing any of us would normally have to handle in the course of work. And to be suddenly thrown together with strangers, no matter how well-intentioned they are, and then try to deal with something like this … it isn't going to be easy for anyone." She put her whiskers forward a little. "You're such an easygoing type anyway," Rhiow said, "that it must be difficult for you to deal with the frictions: they must seem kind of foolish to you."He gave her a rueful look. "Sometimes," he said, "yes. Yes, you're right … " He sighed. "Stranger or not," he said, "it's nice to have someone around who understands. But then you're not exactly a stranger any more.""No, of course not. When we get all this solved, Huff, you should come visit us in New York. We'll show you and your team around the gates at Grand Central … 'do the town' a little. Urruah knows some extremely good places to eat.""I know," Huff said, sounding a little more amused. "I keep hearing about them." His whiskers were right forward now."I bet," Rhiow said, resigned. "Look … we've got a long day ahead of us tomorrow. I should get home. You try to get some rest, Huff, and we'll see you later on."He waved his tail in agreement. "Go well," he said. They touched cheeks: and Rhiow went out the back, through the cat door, and down the alley, heading for the Tower Hill Underground station … thinking, a little absently, how nice it was that it no longer felt strange to rub cheeks with Huff at all …She got home very late, by New York time, and found Iaehh in bed and snoring. As quietly as she could, Rhiow curled up with him, too tired even to care whether he would roll over on top of her in the middle of the night, as he often did while feeling for someone else who should have been in the bed, but wasn't. She sighed at the thought of what now seemed about a hundred years ago: a time when both her ehhif were here and happy, and her life managing a gating team had been relatively simple and uncomplicated … or had seemed so.About a second later, she woke up. Oh, unfair, she thought. It was typical that, on a night when you most needed the sense of being asleep for a long time, you instead got that "cheated" feeling of having been asleep almost no time at all.It was, however, nearly six in the evening. Iaehh wasn't back fromwork yet, but he would be soon, and if she didn't get out fairly quickly, he would turn up and delay her. Rhiow sighed and got right up, stretching hard fore and aft: ate (finding the bowls washed and filled again), then washed and used the box, and headed out for Grand Central. Half an hour later Rhiow was in London, on the platform in the Underground station, watching Urruah reconstructing his timeslide. Auhlae was there, and Siffha'h: Arhu was sitting off to one side, ostensibly watching Urruah fine-tuning his spell, but (to Rhiow's eye) actually staying rather pointedly out of Siffha'h's way."Perfect timing," Urruah said, looking up. "I'm just about set here.""You have all those extra coordinate-sets that you wanted to test laid in as well?" Rhiow said, strolling over to the "hedge" of burning lines which was the spell diagram. It looked taller than it had been before."Yes indeed," Urruah said. "We'll take them in order after we check out the main one, the 'scarred' timeline. Everybody, come and check your names. We're ready to rock and roll … "Rhiow jumped into the circle to re-examine her name. Auhlae jumped in after her, remarking, "I would have thought you were more interested in the classical line of things, Urruah … "His whiskers went forward. "Always. But I believe one's interest in music should be balanced.""If it's ehhif music you're talking about," Siffha'h said as she jumped into the circle as well, "you're too balanced by half. All that screeching."Urruah chuckled. "Wait till you're older and you have more leisure to develop your tastes."" 'Older'!' Siffha'h said. "I'm sick of hearing about it. And I'm getting older right now waiting for you People to get your acts together!" She glared at Arhu.Arhu, taking no apparent notice, made a small elegant jump which landed him precisely on the spot which Urruah had laid out for him inside the circle. He bent down, checked his name, and then turned his back to Siffha'h, yawning, and sat down with his tail wrapped around his toes."Huh," said Siffha'h, glancing at Arhu and planting her forepaws in the power-feed area of the spell. She looked over at Urruah."Everybody sidled?" he said. "Good. First set of coordinates are ready," he said. "The spell's on standby. Feed it!""Consider it fed," Siffha'h said.The world vanished in a blast of light and power so vehement that Rhiow was glad she had been sitting down: otherwise she would have fallen over. This was not anything like Urruah's style of power-feed, decorous and smooth like a limo starting and stopping. This was a crash of power and pressure, happening all at once from all around, like being at the center of a lightning strike. In the middle of it all she thought she heard something like a yowl of frustration, but she couldn't be sure. When the light cleared away again, Rhiow half– expected to smell ozone: she had to sit there for a moment or so and shake her head, waiting for her eyes to work again. After a few moments they did, but she still saw a residual blur of green light at the edges of vision for a little while, the remnant of the image of the first flash of the spell-circle as it came up to power.She looked around and saw that they were all once more sitting in a muddy street: and Rhiow sighed at the thought of what getting clean again was likely to taste like. The sky above them was that of early morning, clear and blue: a surprising contrast to the last time. "All right," Urruah said, "there's the tripwire. I've closed the gate." Then Urruah looked up and around, and said suddenly, "And we've got a problem.""What?" said Rhiow.He was looking up at the Moon, which stood high in the southern sky at third quarter. They all looked too.The Moon was white, with only the faintest blue shadows."Oh, vhai," Auhlae said, "this isn't the contaminated timeline!" She turned to Urruah. "This is the predecessor to our London! Our world! For pity's sake, Urruah, how did that happen?"Urruah was dumbfounded. "Auhlae, you saw the settings, we worked on them together – you tell me!""I'll tell you how it happened," Siffha'h said, staggering to her feet. "We were being blocked. Couldn't you feel it? Urruah?""I'm not sure – ""Nice excuse," Arhu muttered."Oh, go swallow your tail!' Siffha'h spat. "Who asked you for anything like an opinion? As if you could produce one out your front end instead of your rear for a change. We were being blocked! Something knocked us sideways. Something vhai'd well doesn't want us in the alternate timeline! Like the Lone One!"She was bristling with fury, as much from winding up in the wrong place, Rhiow thought, as for having her competence called into question. But there was another possibility which had occurred to Rhiow: that the other timeline was becoming stronger, strong enough now to begin interfering with any temporal gating. But there's no evidence of that … yet."It could happen," Rhiow said. "For the meantime, we shouldn't stand here arguing." She glanced over at Urruah. "It's not a wasted trip, Ruah. We still have some things to check on, and some sources who would be helpful to talk to here. Among other things, would you say this is at least the right year?"Urruah blinked. "Let's send Arhu to steal a newspaper.""There's no need to steal anything," Arhu muttered. "These ehhif drop their newspapers all over the place, besides pasting them up on boards near the newsagents."They walked out into George Street, sidled, and glanced around them with a little more sense of leisure than they had felt the last time, for this was after all their home universe: there was no reason to rush away from it. Rhiow looked across the street and saw that the Tower Underground station did not exist as yet. She listened, and the Whisperer told her that the worldgate complex was, at this point in its development, housed a little behind them, somewhere under theFenchurch Street railway station."Maybe we should try to look up the local gating team," Siffha'h said, glancing around her."Much as I wouldn't mind being social with them," Rhiow said, "I think we have other things to concentrate on at the moment. Is that one of your 'newsagents' down there, Arhu?""Yeah. Come on — "He led them eastward as far as the oval of Trinity Square. "The mud's sure the same," Urruah said, with resignation."Yes, but at least there aren't any crazed car drivers here," Rhiow said. "Not that it's that much of a consolation. They'll come soon enough."In Trinity Square they paused by a little shop that had a board outside with many newspapers pinned up to it and ready to be torn off, like pages of a calendar. "Try that with the New York Times," Urruah murmured.Rhiow put her whiskers forward at the thought. The group hung back, out of the way of the ehhif making their way up and down the sidewalk, while Arhu went up to have a look at the newspaper.He came trotting back with a satisfied expression. "April eighteenth, eighteen seventy-four.""All right," Rhiow said. "A little early, but at least it's the right year. Let's go up to the British Museum and see 'Black Jack'."It was a long walk, nearly a mile and a half. All of them were footsore and extremely dirty by the time they got there, for no one felt it wise to expend the wizardry needed for skywalking when there might be much more important business to be handled without notice. So they went as City cats would, though sidled: down Great Tower Hill into Great Tower Street and over into Eastcheap: down Cannon Street into the street called St Paul's Churchyard, under the shadow of the massive dome of St Paul's: up Ludgate Hill to Fleet Street, and then up Chancery Lane, northward to High Holborn and finally Bloomsbury Row. By the time they got to Museum Street, they were all hungry, and Auhlae looked at the mud on her beautiful fur, and made a despairing face."I can't wash like this," she said, "I just can't. There's no time, and – " She sighed, and said a few words under her breath in the Speech. The mud dried and went straight to powdery dust. She shook herself hard, and for a moment was in the center of a small chocolate-colored cloud. Then the dust settled, leaving her more or less the color she should have been."Now there's a thought," Rhiow said. "Auhlae, you're a genius."A few moments later there were several chocolate-colored clouds, and somewhat cleaner People emerging from them. "Now I feel better," Auhlae said, smoothing down the fur behind her ears. "I wouldn't like to meet a Person of note looking like I just crawled out of a sewerкThey walked in through the iron gates of the Museum, toward the noble main facade with its columns and Greek-style portico, all carved with what one might have taken at first for ehhif gods until a better lookrevealed them to be allegorical figures discreetly labeled DRAMA and POETRY and PROGRESS OF THE HUMAN RACE. They walked up the stairs and waited for some ehhif to open the doors for them, a matter of a few seconds only: then they went through into the main entrance hall, and glanced up at the huge statue of an ehhif which leaned there, looking out thoughtfully at the world."Who's that?" Arhu said. "Another fake god?""It's a great taleteller, dear," Auhlae said, "one who told his stories a couple of hundred sunrounds ago, from this time anyway. Hsshah' spheare, his name was.""Whether he's that great," said someone off to one side in the great echoing hall, "when the best-known mention he makes of our People is to suggest turning one of them in a frying pan, is a question yet to be resolved. But never mind that at the moment."They all turned to see a big, big black-and-white cat come pacing along the marble floor toward them. With his white bib and white feet, he gave the general impression of wearing ehhif formal wear. "Welcome," he said. "I'm glad to see you!""We're on errantry, as you've guessed, having seen us sidled," Rhiow said, "and we greet you very well: we've come some way to see you. Do I have the honor of addressing 'Black Jack'?"The big handsome Person put his whiskers forward. "That's how the ehhif know me: I suppose the name has got about by now. But you might more properly call me Ouhish, though, if you will. And I'm very glad to see you so soon: I hadn't thought you could possibly turn up with such speed."Rhiow looked at Urruah and the others, then back at Ouhish. "I'm sorry. You say you sent for some wizards?""Yes," Ouhish said."Well," Urruah said, "we're confused, now. We thought we came on business of our own. But we'll be glad to help you in any way we can.""You're saying you weren't sent?" Ouhish said.Rhiow paused for a moment, then laughed. "Oh, no. Wizards are always sent … one way or another. It's just that the Powers that Be don't always tell us that They're doing it. Tell us your trouble, and we'll do our best to assist you.""Well," Ouhish said, "let's go somewhere quiet where we can make introductions and get things sorted out. Will you follow me?" And he led them in through the pillared vestibule, and into the depths of the Museum.It was a splendid place by any calculation, ehhif or feline. Rhiow had to keep reminding herself that much of the wonderful statuary and carving here was regarded as stolen or looted, though an earlier period's ehhif had thought of what they were doing as "collection": and violent arguments were still going on, she knew, about the proper home for some of the more beautiful and ancient artwork like the Elgin Marbles. But in the meantime, the stuff was here, and Rhiow told herself that it seemed poor-spirited not to enjoy looking at it if she had the chance.There was little enough statuary to start with, for Ouhish led them on through the Inner Vestibule and the Room of Inscriptions, its walls all covered with writings from the ehhif peoples of old Greece and Rome, and straight into the Reading Room. In Rhiow's time the British Museum's library functions had all been moved to another building, bigger and some said better suited for the huge size of the collection as the twenty-first century approached: but many lamented the loss of the noble old domed Reading Room, still preserved, but no longer used for the purpose for which it had been intended. They walked through, now, into this place where for once ehhif walked as quietly as cats, and Ouhish led them off to one of the corners of the room, what was called the "New Library", a beautiful wood-paneled area stacked high with laddered bookcases and card catalogues.They sat down under a quiet table in one corner, touched noses and breathed breaths, and introduced themselves. "Now tell us what your trouble is, and we'll try to help you," Rhiow said: but Ouhish would have none of it, and insisted that they tell their story first.Urruah lifted his eyebrows. "This is going to be complicated," he said, but he began to lay out their business for Ouhish as clearly as he could. There was no prohibition against telling other People, in the line of errantry, that you were time-traveling: but naturally you would work hard to keep from telling them anything inappropriate, anything that would hurt them in their own lives, or tempt them to hurt others. Urruah spoke for about ten minutes, choosing his details with care, and at the end of it, Ouhish tucked himself down and looked at them all with astonishment."More than a hundred years in the future," he said. "The questions I could ask you … ""It might take us a while to work out which ones we could safely answer," Rhiow said. "But maybe you'd let us ask first, since then we'll have more leisure to deal with your problem. Have there been any attempts on the life of the Queen of late?"Ouhish looked surprised. "You mean the ehhif-Queen? Nothing recent. Someone tried a couple of years ago.""Did they try shooting her?" Arhu said."That's right. She was out driving – a madman came out and took a shot at her with a pistol. He missed, thank Iau. It's happened before, too, a few times: usually where there are crowds.""Do the ehhif here not like her, then?" Siffha'h said, sounding intrigued."Oh, she's been greatly loved, in the past. But things change." Ouhish looked a little uncomfortable. "You know that her mate died some while back? They were very much attached. She was miserable, poor thing, and she withdrew almost entirely from public life after her mate's death. That's not something a Queen of ehhif can do, you understand. She has duties she must perform. And the ehhif she rules saw that she wasn't doing those duties, or only doing them marginally: and those ehhif who've been saying for a long time that there should be no Queens any more, but just the pride-toms to lead everything, and decide everything – their way of thinking has been gaining ground." Ouhish looked embarrassed. "I wouldn't like to give offense, cousin," he said to Rhiow, "but I think I know your accent – and it's a government like your ehhif's at home that some of these people want, and the Queen got rid of as well. A lot of the ehhif seem to think that it will happen in the next ten years or so: or atleast by the turn of the century. It's no matter to them that the Queen has been showing signs of breaking out of her withdrawal, at last. It may be too late for her now."Rhiow's tail twitched slowly while she thought that Ouhish's turn of phrase was unfortunate."Well," Rhiow said. "That's all rather sad. There are other dangers lying in wait for her as well: perhaps another assassination attempt … we don't know for sure. One of the things we came for was to try to find out a date on which the attempt might happen, so that we might prevent it."Ouhish looked shocked. "Do you have any clues at all?""We saw them burying her on the fourteenth of July," said Arhu, "in a universe close to this one. We don't know how long might have elapsed between her funeral and whatever happened to her … ""I would doubt it would have been as far back as the first of the month, if they were burying her on the fourteenth," Ouhish said. "But it could be almost any time between, say, the fifth and the eleventh. For surely they would let her lie in state for a little time – " His tail was lashing. "Cousins, this is terrible news!""If you can spread it where it will do some good," Rhiow said, "you may be able to help prevent the attempt from succeeding. We may be able to help as well, but we also have other business to attend to, which, believe it or not, may be even more important. One thing I have to ask you: have there been any strange occurrences in London lately?""Strange occurrences?"He looked confused, but Rhiow was unwilling to help him, and possibly lead him in a direction that wouldn't be fruitful. Ouhish thought for a moment, then said, "You know … there have been a lot of madmen about.""Madmen?" Siffha'h said."Ehhif roaming the streets and raving," Ouhish said. "I remember one of our ehhif here in the museum mentioning a story in one of the newspapers. One of the story-writers attributed it to the full of the Moon just being past … ""I wonder if some of those might be ehhif who stumbled through our gate and into this time," Urruah said softly. "That's something that's going to have to be looked into.""One more problem," Arhu muttered."Yes," Rhiow said.Ouhish's tail was lashing. "It's all hard to believe," he said. "But you are wizards … But still, what could be more important than the Queen dying?""What might follow it," Arhu said, "in another universe. A war, fought with weapons you can't imagine … one which would cause a terrible winter to fall over the whole world. A winter that might never end … "Ouhish's head snapped up: he stared at Arhu. "You were sent," hesaid. "You are the wizards I sent for!""We are?" Arhu said. "Why?""Come on," Ouhish said, and jumped up. "Come on, quickly. It's not me you need to be talking to: it's Hwallis.""Hwallis?" Rhiow said, now completely bemused."That's right. He's an ehhif. Come on, I'll take you upstairs and introduce you. He won't have gone off for his midday feed yet. Not that it's ever easy to get him to go. He hates leaving this place –Ouhish practically ran out of the New Library: they all had to trot to keep up with him. Hurriedly Ouhish led them back out the way they had come into the Vestibule, then off to the right and up the main staircase to the second floor. They came out into a splendid great space roofed over with glass and with a high gallery or balcony around it, all filled with ancient bas-reliefs of winged ehhif with high crowns, beautifully carved lions, and big-shouldered bulls."Down this way," Ouhish said, and led them down a long wide hallway to the right, skylit by more glass roofing above. Both sides of this hall were lined with statues and sarcophagi of the first ehhif who had really conversed easily with People, the Egyptians: artwork and carving and papyrus were everywhere, in astonishing profusion, so that even Urruah, who wasn't much of a fan of the plastic arts, stopped to stare at some of the jewelry, gems and gold glinting, in that subdued light, like a Person's eyes in the dark.Despite her curiosity to find out what Ouhish was carrying on about, Rhiow herself had to stop and admire what was simply a most splendid statuary group of Queen Iau and her daughters, only slightly marred by the tendency of ehhif of the period to put human bodies under the feline faces, as a symbol for human-like intelligence but feline nature. Aaurh the Mighty stood there, the Destroyer by Flame, the Queen's champion, wearing the horned sun, the terrible fire with which she warred on the Queen's enemies: and Hrau'f the Silent beside her, the Whisperer, with a roll of papyrus to show that she kept the records of the universe, and passed them on to those who needed them. By them was her brother, the Queen's lover, the Old Tom, Urrau-who– Scars, Urrau Lightning-Claw: and a little separate from the others, her body turned from them but her face toward them, ambivalent as always, sa'Rrahh, mistress of the Unmastered Fire, lioness-headed lady of the stillbirth and the birth that kills the queen in labor, but also mistress of the Tenth Life: the Lone Power in Its feline recension, deadly, but never to be scorned, for some day she would be forgiven and rejoin the Pride. Paramount among them all stood Queen Iau, a Person's head set rather incongruously on the human shoulders, but wearing a look of indomitable wisdom, power and compassion: and Rhiow put her whiskers forward. "Ehhif the artist might have been," she said, "but whoever made this, he or she knew Them. Blessings on him or her, wherever that one might be in the worlds … "Ouhish had stopped to let them catch up: he put his whiskers forward at Rhiow. "Interesting," he said, "but Hwallis says something very like that. Come on: I want you to meet."He hurried down the hallway nearly to its end: then turned left suddenly and showed them a wood-panelled side door, which was open a crack. Ouhish put his paw into it and pulled it open. "In here," he said.He led them into what turned out to be a warren of little offices and storage spaces behind the exhibition halls. It was a strangely homely place after the grandeur and silence of the outer halls. Other statues were here, pushed carefully up against the walls, some being repaired for cracks or broken noses: near one doorway a bucket and some mops and brooms stood handy: another small room had a sink and some cleaning rags and solvents, and buckets of different kinds of grout for polishing stone. Other rooms were stacked and piled high with books: one was filled with crates that held piles of papyrus rolls and books.And in one room which they came to, there was an ehhif bent over a long table. The table was covered with something that might have been dust, and he was working, slowly and carefully, to unwrap something that lay in the midst of the dust. As they came in behind him, he sneezed."Hwallis," said Ouhish in Ailurin, very loudly so that the ehhif would be able to hear him, "there are guests here."The ehhif turned. He was young: maybe no more than eighteen, Rhiow thought – a tall, dark-haired, long-faced young man, dressed in a shirt with its sleeves rolled up, and long dark pants with suspenders. He looked at the doorway, and at Ouhish: and he said, in Ailurin, "Where?"The People glanced at each other, surprised. "It's all right," Ouhish said, "you can unsidle."They did. The young ehhif looked at them with some surprise, and said to Ouhish, with very passable intonation, "Are these the People you asked to come?"Rhiow was very impressed. She said, in the Speech rather than in Ailurin, "Young sir, since you plainly know that our kind exists, then I tell you that we're wizards on errantry, and we greet you. I'm Rhiow: here are my colleagues Urruah, Auhlae, Arhu, and Siffha'h. Ouhish says he sent for us, and though we came on other business originally, he thinks you have need of our services. So tell us what your problem is, and we'll help if we can. But speak your own language, if you like: we'll understand you well enough, and we can help Ouhish to do so too if there's need. We have complicated matters to discuss, I think, and there's no need for any of us to guess at what we mean. Even if you do have a good accent."The young ehhif opened and closed his mouth, and then said, "Good heavens. Well, allow me to introduce myself. I'm Edward Wallis Budge."The others waved their tails at him in greeting. Urruah sat down, looking around him. "What exactly do you do here?" he said.Wallis smiled slightly. "I have the honor to hold the position of Honorary Assistant to the Keeper of the Mummied Cats."Urruah put his whiskers forward. "Boy," he said, "they don't make job titles like that any more." He peered up at the table. "I suppose that if the museum needs a keeper for mummied cats, there must be a lot of them.""Hundreds of thousands," Wallis said."Sweet Iau in a basket," Auhlae murmured, "what would anyone want hundreds of thousands of mummied cats for?" "Please make yourself comfortable, and I'll explain," said Wallis, and he pulled out a creaky-looking ladderback chair and sat down in it. The People sat or sprawled as they pleased, and Wallis indicated the shelves and racks all around the room, all full of boxes with numbers and letters scrawled on the ends of them. "I expect you know something about the civilization of ancient Egypt," he said.Rhiow put her whiskers forward. "They knew something about our civilization," she said, "which is why so many of their carvings feature our 'gods'.""The neter-teh," Wallis said, and nodded, "the Powers that Be. Yes. Well, you'll understand that the Egyptians were very partial to cats, considering them at least partially divine, since they looked like the gods which the cats had described to my people, the ehhif."And suddenly he burst out laughing."I'm sorry," Rhiow said, "have we missed a joke?""No, no … " The young ehhif wiped his eyes, still trying to get control of his laughter. "It's just this situation. You here, and me explaining this, and … oh my." He wiped his eyes again. "I'm sorry. Anyway, the Egyptian ehhif back then loved their cats very much, even before someone got the idea that the cats' semi-divine status might mean they would make good intercessors for humans. To the gods, the Great Gods, I mean: to the One, and the Powers. So when their cats would die, the Egyptians would have their bodies mummified, with amulets and words of power wrapped in among the bandages, the intention being to give the cats power in the Next World." He turned to the table, and lifted from it one of the strips of bandage that he had been removing from the cat-mummy he had been working on. Faintly, on the linen, in a brownish ink, were written the pictogram-letters of the "hieratic" writing of old Egypt. "Then they would send the mummies to the great cat-burial ground at the city of the Queen-Cat, Bubastis.""Some of this we knew," Auhlae said, "though I was always a little vague about the whys and wherefores.""The idea was that the cats would tell the Gods how well their ehhif had treated them," Wallis said, leaning back and folding his arms, "and the Gods would be nice to the ehhif in return. Well, this went nicely for some centuries. The mummies got more elaborate – see, this is a fairly late one: the mummy cases had become quite ornate." He turned to the table again and lifted down the case which had enclosed the mummy on which he had been working. It was in the small shape of a Person, but with its forefeet crossed together over its chest, the way a human mummy would have had its arms crossed: its hind legs were stretched out straight, and the whole business stood upright on a little pedestal, which was gilded, so that the Person's image stood upright as well, the way an ehhif would have. The image of the cat's face was inlaid with lapis lazuli whiskers, and around the cat's neck was a tracery of gold, a collar, jeweled with shining bits of colored glass."It's beautiful workmanship, isn't it?" Wallis said. "They took a lot of trouble over some of these. Equally, the spells and amulets buried with the People became very involved indeed: and the cemeteries at Bubastis got fuller and fuller. There were at least three hundred thousand cat-mummies at the cemetery at Beni-Hassan alone: probably there were many more … But then the Egyptian ehhif's religion changed, or was supplanted by others, and the cat-mummies and thecemeteries were forgotten."Wallis leaned back further in the chair, uncrossed his legs, crossed them again. "Well. Their language became lost over time, and it has taken us a long time to start getting it back again. My old teacher was one of those who became involved with trying to recover it, and I went with him to Egypt, a couple of years ago, to start trying to translate some of the texts in the Pyramids. Some of those texts were very peculiar, and my teacher could make very little of them: but I came at the translation from a slightly different angle … and realized what some of those wall carvings meant.""Spells," Urruah said. "They were wizardry.""Yes," Wallis said. "Some of them. It was knowledge I kept to myself. I am no wizard, not as I understand the term is usually meant. But I know a little of the language – Hauhai, the 'Great Speech'? – some words of it were carved inside the Pyramids. And from other such carvings, and a great many of the papyruses we recovered, I know a fair amount of Ailurin, which was well known by the priestly class in the Old Kingdoms period. This has helped me with some of the mummies, since I've been able to tell genuine spells of protection from simple prayers, or lists of things to have the cat ask the Gods for when it gets to Heaven."He smiled slightly: but after a breath or so, the smile turned grim. "The matter which has been troubling me," he said, "is that over the past couple of years, someone seems to have been going to great trouble to destroy as many cat-mummies as possible – especially at the old burial grounds at Bubastis, near the modern city of Alexandria in the northern river delta. No one has made any attempt on our collection here – we have several thousand cat-mummies – but the cemeteries at Bubastis are being systematically destroyed.""By whom?" Rhiow said. "And why?""By British nitrate wholesalers," said Wallis, "for fertilizer." "What?" Auhlae said.Wallis looked uncomfortable. "You'll understand that, even as dry as Egypt is," he said, "sooner or later, if you simply bury things in the sand, they'll decay: and if you mummify them and bury them in the sand, they decay in a very controlled manner, so that finally very little is left but material which is very high in nitrites. Some bright lad got the idea of bringing huge cargo ships down there, digging up the mummies, or what was left of them, and shipping them home to England to be sold as fertilizer for ehhif gardens and farmland.""Dear Iau," Auhlae said, "how … " She broke off, apparently unable to think of a word strong enough to describe her feelings."Now as I understand feline thought from the writings of the old priests," Wallis said, "once you leave the body, there's no great concern for it: you've another life waiting, and you go to it and get on with it. So in that regard, whether one ends as fertilizer or food for some scavenger is probably moot. But what troubles me is how many of those mummies were buried with a specific kind of protection. Most of my fellow translators have rendered it as a charm against extreme heat and cold. But I'm not sure they're right in this. I read it as a spell, a piece of wizardry intended to protect against the Great Fire and the Great Cold that the spell insists will follow it. Some kind of destruction, 'like the sun falling', that's the usual phrase – and then 'a winter without end'.""Iau," Rhiow said softly."And now," Wallis said, "suddenly all these mummies, many of them with one version or another of this spell in place, are being taken away and destroyed. Ground up and thrown on people's gardens," Wallis said, with a grimace of distaste. "Whatever else we know about the Egyptians of that period, we know they were not foolish people. Their priests in particular. I am sure some of them were wizards –possibly wizards of great accomplishment. I don't believe that anyone would be so careful, over a space nearly fifteen hundred years, to make sure that all these cat-mummies had one version or another of this particular spell written in their bandages. And there are some disturbing hints in the carvings in the great tombs that suggest removing these massed spells would be dangerous. There are mentions of some great destruction that would come. First fire, a terrible fire that will devastate the world. And then ice, ice forever … "Urruah looked at Rhiow: the others all exchanges glances. "There were visionaries among those ehhif," Arhu said, "and they worked with the wizards of other species who lived then. Almost certainly with our people too. What did they see?" He looked at Rhiow. "What we came to try to prevent?""It's not beyond probability," Rhiow said softly. "They might not have understood the science behind the idea of a nuclear winter … but they might have foreseen it, all right, and devised a defense. It wouldn't surprise me that it would involve our people, either: ehhif always connected us with warmth and the sun … with reason. We told them often enough about Aaurh the Mighty, and how she warred the world free of the cold at the beginning of things … something for which sa'Rrahh always hated her." She looked up at the young ehhif. "Hwallis," Rhiow said, "how much of this spell against the Great Fire do you know?""Most of it," he said, "but not all. The whole thing, the 'master' version of the spell, was only rarely written out because it was so long and complicated. Most often it was sketched on the bandages in an abbreviated form. Even in the earliest days of the mass mummy burials, few mummies contained it, or the carved version of it on an amulet, again because of the complexity. I had hoped to lead another expedition this year to go back to Bubastis and hunt specifically for the full form of the spell, which the carvings in the Pyramids suggested could reconfirm its protection of the world if it was pronounced by a 'person of Power' in the right time and place. But now the cemeteries are almost empty: their contents are in the holds of cargo ships, ground to powder. Even if I went now, I wouldn't likely find what I'm looking for. What I fear is that protection against this Great Fire, this Great Ice, whatever they may be, is being lost … and that the way is being opened for something terrible to happen. So I asked Ouhish to see if he could get in touch with some wizards, people who might know what to do." He shrugged. "And here you are … ""It sounds like the Lone One has been purposely dismantling this protection," Urruah said. "Using pawns, as usual, to do Its work. Ehhif, and their innocent greed … " He glanced up at Wallis. "Sorry. Nothing personal.""No offense taken," Wallis said."So what do we do?" Siffha'h said."I would imagine try to find the whole spell," Rhiow said, "and reinstate the protection. It could very well help with other matters." She glanced at the others. "It might even make those other occurrences impossible … ""Might," said Auhlae."I take your point," Rhiow said. "Hwallis – would it help if we were able to look for your full version of the spell, the master spell of which these others are fragments, in other museums?""I don't know," he said. "Our collection of cat-mummies here is the biggest in the world.""Not in a hundred years, it won't be," Urruah said.Wallis looked perplexed. "I beg your pardon?""He means," Arhu said, "that we're from the future. And the collection of that British Museum is a lot bigger than this one.""My God," the ehhif said. He fell silent for a moment, then said, "I can give you a description of what to look for, both in the written and the carved forms. Will that help?""Very much indeed," Rhiow said. "Ruah?""Show me what you have in mind," Urruah said. "No, I don't need a drawing: do it in your head. While we're both working in the Speech, I can see what you're thinking, a little. Don't rush, just make pictures … "They spent a few minutes about it, until Urruah was satisfied. "That'll do," he said. "I should have no trouble passing it on.""And I think I know someone who might be able to help us," Rhiow said. "Come on – let's get on with our other business for the day. When we get back home, we can start making some inquiries."They all got up. Wallis rose as well. "This has been most extraordinary," he said. "When can I expect to see you again?""I really don't know," Rhiow said. "We're in the middle of a fairly complex business at the moment … but I think you may have helped us with it, for which we thank you very much. Ouhish, we don't have a lot of time to linger: will you tell Hwallis about what we were discussing with you earlier?""Gladly. I hope we see you again soon," Ouhish said, "for this problem has us both frightened … ""We'll be in touch as soon as we can," Auhlae said. And she waved her tail, amused. "It's been charming to speak with an ehhif who knows our language."Wallis bowed. "Dai stiho," he said."Thank you," Rhiow said. "I hope we may go well on this business of yours … and others."Ouhish saw them out, down to the great flight of stairs reaching down to the Great Russell Street entrance. The walk back to the street where the timeslide spell was sited went a little more swiftly than the walk to the Museum had, partly because of familiarity and partlybecause all of them were getting bolder in dealing with the traffic: though it hardly moved much faster than the fifteen miles an hour at which London motor traffic moved in their native time, the vehicles were a good deal less lethal. They found the street conveniently empty, and Urruah found his "tripwire" under the mud and activated the spell-circle. It rose up in an instantaneous, blazing hedge of fire around him, and hard behind him came Siffha'h, straight onto her power point, and the others all close behind."All right," Urruah said. "Next coordinates. The Illingworth incursion. The slide's in standby – ""Ready. Now," Siffha'h said, reared up a little, and came down with her front paws directly on the power point.The blast of fire rose up around them, pressing in."Hello," said a high clear voice, "what's this?"All the People's heads jerked up. He could plainly see them, and had waded halfway into the circle already, waist-high in the "hedge' of fire – a young ehhif, in shorts and a white shirt and a short dark coat, and he was looking at them, and the circle, in astonishment. What's he doing in here, how can he be in here, get him out!! was Rhiow's first thought. But there was no time. The spell was already blazing with Siffha'h's blast of power, and they were all vanishing together, the People, the spell-circle, the ehhif boy –There was no way to stop it, any more than an ehhif would have been able to get out of a moving vehicle at high speed. The pressure built. There was a cry from the boy, lost in a roar of sound which Rhiow couldn't understand. Then everything began to shake – and that she understood too well. Unauthorized ingress into a timeslide or worldgating, she thought, the whole spell comes apart and flings everyone in it into not-time or not-space. Iau, not like this, why must it end like this – !The pressure increased unbearably: Rhiow lost all sense of herself. So much for this life, was her last thought.But it was not. What seemed a long time later, Rhiow found herself lying on the concrete floor of the unused platform beneath Tower Hill Underground station: and near her was the boundary of the timeslide spell, all the virtue drained out of it. The others lay about in the positions they had held in the spell – and sitting down by them, his knees drawn up against his chest, trembling, was the young ehhif, looking at his surroundings, and the People, in terror.Rhiow got up, slowly, feeling as if one of the big draft horses of the 1874 streets had been jumping all over her. Next to her, Urruah was pushing himself up onto his feet, where he just managed to stand, wobbling, and look at the ehhif boy.The boy wet his lips and croaked, "Kitty kitty?"Urruah looked at Arhu, who was awake as well, and getting up. "Another problem," Urruah said.Rhiow was forced to agree …SIXThe argument which life seemed lately to have been becoming, now broke out again with unusual vehemence in the next few minutes: andit 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. "Noone was going to be able to see us, and the spell was told to sortfor transit times which wouldn't endanger any being which came along ii"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 ii"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 alittle 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 tothe 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 farfrom 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 fromancient 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 otherRhiow 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 fateNo, 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: wewill 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 himShe 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 laterRhiow 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 – " Heflexed 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 moreк"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 dowas 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 havereceived the ten shillings you sent, and thank you very much. If youIt 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 … "SEVENRhiow went out after Arhu at a run, and found him gone. He had done a private transit, not bothering to take long enough to get to one of the gates: she could smell the spell of it in the air of the hallway, and she thought she knew where Arhu had gone, within about ten feet.Rhiow turned once, quickly, where she stood, and drew the circle with her tail, tying the wizard's knot with one last flirt of it. Then sheinstructed the wizardry to lay in identical coordinates to the last transit from this spot, and to execute them. And don't forget the air! she added hurriedly.There was a loud clap as she displaced a considerable cubic volume of air from the tunnel, taking it with her. The sound of the clap had barely faded from her ears before she was standing on the cold white pumice-dust of the Moon, looking around.He was no more than ten feet away.Arhu looked at Rhiow and opened his mouth to speak the words of another spell, ready to run again."Don't do it," she said.Arhu sagged and let the breath go out of him, standing there looking cold and scared and very alone. It was an expression Rhiow had not seen on him since he first came to her and the other members of the team: and she had forgotten how much it hurt to see it.Tell me what's happening," Rhiow said. "Arhu, please.""I can't.""You can," Rhiow said, "or I'll pull your ears off and wear them as collar jinglies."Arhu stared at her in complete misery. "Who needs ears?""Arhu," Rhiow said, "this isn't the time for self-indulgence. If you've seen something that threatens the team, or you – ""The team?" he said, and laughed bitterly. "It's a little more personal this time.""It's not – you didn't see anything like your own death, did you?" "Oh, no, not mine. Someone else's.""Well, for Iau's sake, tell me! Maybe we can do something to stop it</emphasis> ii"You don't understand," Arhu said. "It's already happened," He laughed again, that bitter sound. "Listen to me, I'm sounding like the ravens already."Rhiow shook her head in frustration. "What in Iau's name are you talking about?"Arhu flopped down on the powdery moondust. "Rhiow," he said very softly, "Siffha'h is my sister.""What?""I saw her," he said. "I saw her in the bag … with me and the others, when the ehhif threw us in to drown. And she saw it too, through me, just now. She saw it all … But dying didn't stop her, then. She came straight back. She must have been reincarnated within days of when she died. Maybe hours. And it took me this long to see it. She was my twin, Rhiow, she had my same spots! And she was the one I climbed on top of to keep breathing … "He was utterly devastated. For her own part, Rhiow could only stand there and look at him in complete astonishment. There always had been that resemblance between Siffha'h and Arhu … it really had been fairly striking. And the way Arhu had been drawn to Siffha'h. And then, Rhiow thought, with the suddenness of a blow, there was the simple matter of her name. Why didn't I ever think to take it apart, Rhiow thought. But then, who thinks to take "Rhiow" apart for "dark– as-night" … ? For in Ailurin, Siffha'h simply meant "Sif-again", or, by a pun in Ailurin, "one more time … " the end of a feline phrase similar to the ehhif "if at first you don't succeed, try, try again.""What do I do now?" Arhu said hopelessly. "How can I go back? And … I thought it was an accident. Did I maybe kill her on purpose? My own twin? And more importantly … does she think I killed her on purpose?" He laughed again bitterly. "I couldn't figure out why she didn't like me. Now it makes perfect sense. How else would you treat the brother who climbed on top of your body, possibly even pushed you further down into the water, to keep on breathing?"His despair and grief was awful to hear: the sound of it made it difficult for her to think how best to help him. Rhiow was also acutely aware that, to some extent, Arhu's was the most unusual talent of the team, and the one which the Lone Power was most likely to attempt to directly undermine. In some ways, she and Urruah were simply support for Arhu … the youngest of them, and therefore the most powerful.But Siffha'h was even younger, and her power might potentially be greater still. Was the Lone One working to impair her effectiveness as well? And why did she reincarnate so quickly? Was it specifically for this job, to do something that had to be done for wizardry's sake … or was it for revenge?She had no answers … and she didn't think she was going to get them by sitting here. Certainly Arhu wasn't. "Well," Rhiow said, "what will you do about all this? Are you going to stay here on the Moon? You won't be making your team responsibilities any easier to fulfill.""You're not taking this very seriously," Arhu snarled."On the contrary," Rhiow said, "I'm taking it more seriously then you are. There's a small matter of our home reality being chucked out of the scheme of things like litter-box cleanings if we don't do something to stop it. You are a key to the solution of this problem, just as Artie is, in his way; just as Siffha'h is in hers. We need to get back down there and handle it." She glanced up at the gibbous earth hanging above the pristine white surface. "Otherwise, that is going to wind up looking like that other Moon."He looked at Rhiow pitifully. "I can't face her.""You already have faced her," Rhiow said. "It just didn't last long enough. Come back and have another try."Arhu looked up at the glowing blue earth. He breathed in, breathed out."Besides," Rhiow said, "now we know how the assassination takes place. We've got to lay our plans for how to stop it. We'll need you for that as well. And then we've got to execute those plans … and without you, that's impossible."Arhu sighed and looked at Rhiow again. "You can be a real pain in the tail sometimes," he said. He was shivering all over, as if someone had thrown him in water.Rhiow put her whiskers forward and walked over to the boundaries of his spell: let his spell and hers get familiar, and then walked through into his bubble of air. He looked at her fearfully.She went gently up to him and began to wash his ear. "Come on," she said between licks. "You've had it out with the Lone One before. You thought it had done the worst to you that It could manage: It tried to kill your spirit, and It failed. Now It's having another try … and It's trying to steal your sister from you as well, if it can. It would love nothing better to alienate you from one another at this time when, if you can work together, you can defeat It one more time … and It's depending on your pain doing Its work for it." She stopped washing for a moment and bent down and around to look Arhu in the eye. "Are you listening to me?"He looked back at her, still full of grief, and a pang struck through her again, for his pain looked much like hers must have looked when Hhuha died."It was so awful," he whispered."Of course it was awful," Rhiow whispered back. "Its wretched gift, death, that It tricked our People into accepting: how should it not be an awful thing? That was never what the Powers had in mind for us when they built the worlds. Now we have to deal with it as a matter of course. But at least in your case you've got a second chance. How many of us get a chance to meet a friend again in another life, let alone a relative? It happens, but not that often. Don't let It trick you into throwing that away as well!"Arhu was silent for a little, staring at the ground. Rhiow sat beside him, waiting." … All right," he said at last. He lifted a face to Rhiow that was full of fear. "But she said she was going to kill me.""I think that would take some doing," Rhiow said. "But that small matter aside, no one kills one of my team without coming through me first. Power source she may be, but she's not the only one with a claw to her name. Let's go back."Ten minutes later they were back on the derelict platform under Tower Hill station. Huff stood looking forlorn as they came: Arhu looking a little defiant, Rhiow trying to keep her composure in the face of the storm of fury she expected from Siffha'h.But Siffha'h was not there."She ran off," Huff said, "just after Arhu did … " Huff looked profoundly disturbed, and Rhiow for one knew how he felt, and was sorry for him. It was unnerving to see so steady and stolid a personality suddenly at loose ends, embarrassed by the behavior of one of his team, upset by what he had glimpsed through Arhu's vision: and there was something else going on with him as well, Rhiow thought, though she couldn't easily tell what it was."She'll be back," Rhiow said, profoundly hoping that this would prove true. "Meanwhile we must start laying our plans … "Everyone gathered together and sprawled out comfortably on the platform, including Artie, who was acquiring a grimy look, but becoming more cheerful all the time at all the exposure to "magic". When he understood what the two teams were discussing, he immediately cried, "I want to come with you!"The People glanced at one another, concerned. "I don't know," Huff said. "If something happened to you, Artie, and we weren't able to return you to the time where you belong after all this – ""Huff, if the timeslide's to be powered successfully," Rhiow said, "as it was the last time, he may have to come with us on the intervention run. We may very well have no choice in the matter.""If it can be powered successfully," Fhrio muttered, "with Siffha'h missing … ""We'll deal with that issue a little later," Huff said. To take care of any uncertainty about the dates, we must have someone guarding the Queen from at least a couple of nights before the date of the attack. I'm concerned that the Lone One might somehow get wind of what we're trying to do, and attempt to forestall us by striking earlier. But meanwhile, for planning purposes, let's assume that the slide goes well, and those of us not on guard duty find ourselves in the grounds of Windsor Castle on the evening of the ninth of July.""What time was the attack?" Auhlae said. "I couldn't tell.""I saw the Moon," said Rhiow. For her, that was the one image that haunted her most persistently about that whole year: every time she looked at the sky, she searched for the Moon to see what it looked like. "It was waning, and just rising then, which would have made the time about midnight, as ehhif reckon it, or at most half an hour past that. The Whispering can help us pin down the exact timing.""Now, as for the murderer … ""The Mouse," Fhrio said, and his jaw chattered. "Appropriate name, considering what's going to happen to him.""It's not going to happen to him," Huff said forcefully. "Murdering a murderer will do nothing but play straight into the Lone Power's paws. The action would rebound in Iau only knows what kind of horrible way. Whatever else happens to him, his life has to be spared.""At the same time," Rhiow said, "when he disappears – I assume that's something like what will happen to him, one way or another –that disappearance should be such that it raises as few questions as possible. An elegant intervention is one which leaves sa'Rrahh scratching her fleas and wondering what in the worlds happened.""I'd be less concerned about elegance and more concerned about simply making sure the assassination doesn't happen," Fhrio growled."Yes," Rhiow agreed, "if necessary. No argument there. But the less wizardry is obvious about whatever goes on, the better.""What started it all," Auhlae said, "was the Mouse getting that letter."Arhu shook his head. "No. There was another one." Rhiow looked at him in surprise. "What? Another letter?""You didn't see it?" She shook her head. Arhu tucked himself downinto "thinking" position and said, "There's another letter, sent the day before. I see the desk it's being written on, all shiny wood and leather: and the design on top of the paper. It's a kind of gateway, and on top of it there's a picture of what the ehhif-Queen wears on her head."Auhlae looked shocked. "The crowned portcullis," she said. That's the stationery used by the ehhif in the House of Commons. You're telling me that the person starting this plot off is a Member of Parliament?!"Arhu squinted. "The House of Commons. Is that one of the buildings in that big spiky place by the river? The one with the big clock?""Yes," Huff said. "The whole thing together is the Palace of Westminster.""That's it, then. I see the river out his window as he's writing," Arhu said, still squinting slightly, and rocking back and forth a little, an odd motion, as if he was on wings. "It's getting late … the Sun is going down. He folds the letter up and puts it in an envelope, and he takes a pen and starts writing something up in the corner … No, he stopped. He's just writing in the middle of the envelope now.""The address," Rhiow said."I guess.""What does it say?""His handwriting's hard to read." Arhu was silent for a moment. " 'Edinburgh'? Where's that?""In the north of the country," Fhrio said."Then he looks around in his desk drawer for something," Arhu said, still rocking slightly. "A little piece of paper. He sticks it onto the letter, in the corner.""Stamping it rather than 'franking' it," Auhlae said. That way it won't look any different from other ehhif's letters, at least on the outside.""I see. All right. Then he puts the letter in a box on a bookcase by the door, and goes out," Arhu says. "He goes down to the big room where we saw the people shouting, before." He blinked. There are already a lot of ehhif there, all shouting and waving papers around. They're loud, down there.""They do that," Huff said. "Don't ask me why. It's traditional.""And these are the people who run the country?" Rhiow said. "Why do the ehhif here let them carry on like that?""Maybe they like to watch a good fight?" Urruah said."They're not allowed actually to fight with each other," Huff said. The two sides are kept a sword's length and three feet apart on purpose.""So all they do is yell at each other all night? All those toms?" Urruah twitched his tail in bemusement. "No singing?""Not in there," Huff said. "What can I tell you … they're ehhif." He put his whiskers forward. "But the letter?""I don't see it go out," Arhu said, "but I could hear him thinking that that's what would happen to it. That would be the evening of the seventh, for a letter to get up north and an answer to come back on the ninth.""If we were to steal that letter," Auhlae said, "while he was downstairs in the House shouting at the other MPs, when he came back, he would think that whoever picks up the post had already come to take it away. Then he would think that everything was going according to plan, and he wouldn't do anything which would stop the plan until it was already too late: we would have stopped it. The Mouse wouldn't run … ""And in the meantime, we can do something about him," Huff said. "The ehhif plotting this must have planted him in the Queen's household a good while before, for him to be able to get out when he wanted and sneak around like that. They would have come to trust him … ""Then let's ruin that trust," Rhiow said. "Let's transit him to somewhere in that great castle that he has absolutely no business being, and leave him trapped there. When the staff find him, they'll throw him out of the place themselves, and never let him back in again.""It's not a bad idea," Auhlae said, waving her tail approvingly. There are plenty of such places – " Then she stopped and put her whiskers so far forward that Rhiow thought they might take leave of her face. "Let's lock him up in the Albert Chapel," Auhlae said. "It's old, with lots of gates and bars: Henry the Seventh built it as a tomb for himself. But the Queen turned the place into a memorial for her poor mate when he died, and now it's all full of gold and jewels and precious things that she had put there in his memory. Let the Mouse sit in there all one night, with no way to get out, and let the castle staff find him in the morning … "There was general laughter and approval at the idea, and Artie clapped his hands. "One thing, Arhu," said Huff. "Who was it that wrote the first letter … the one which caused the second one to be sent?"Arhu squinted again. "Let me watch him for a moment," he said. "There was something on his door. When he goes out again … "There was a little silence while everyone let him work. Artie looked up, then, and said, "Who's going to do guard duty on the Queen?"Rhiow glanced at Huff. They both turned and looked at Arhu.He went wide-eyed. "Oh no!" he said."It's the best bet," Huff said. "She was known to have a soft spot for little kittens.""I'll 'little kitten' you, you big — ""Arhu," Rhiow said, slightly exasperated. "It's useful being cute. Exploit it a little. You can take the poor ehhif's mind off her troubles for a while.""What am I supposed to do? Play with string?" Arhu looked scornful."If necessary, yes," Huff said. "Make sure you ingratiate yourself sufficiently with her, and she won't want to let you out of her sight … which, for our purposes, would be absolutely perfect."Arhu was opening his mouth to disagree again. "You will also probably eat like royalty," Urruah said.Arhu shut his mouth and looked thoughtful."I hate to mention it," Rhiow said, "but the other one who is probably going to be perfect for this job is Siffha'h. Another 'cute' one."Arhu straightened up again. "No way!""We'll discuss it later," Rhiow said, in a tone of voice meant to suggest that the discussion would have only one possible ending. "What about that door, Arhu? What's on it?"He breathed out in annoyance and squinted at nothing again. "It's not coming.""The vhai it's not," Urruah said, and gave him a look.Arhu made the disgusted face again, then went slightly vague in the eyes, as if trying harder."McClaren," he said suddenly. "Does that make sense?" "Is that what's on the door?" Fhrio said. Arhu twitched his tail "yes'."Bad," Fhrio said. "The only ones who get their names on their doors are Government ministers … "Auhlae and Huff looked grim. "Rhi, who was he?" Urruah said."From what Hhuhm'hri told me, probably the Chanceller of the Exchequer," she said, listening anew to the material she had read into the Whispering. "They changed these jobs around every now and then, though not as often as they do now. I would probably need to talk to Ouhish to get a more accurate date.""I'm not sure we need it," Huff said. "We know he's involved. I would love to find some way to betray his part in the conspiracy as well … but it may not be possible. Almost certainly the letter he writes to the third party in Edinburgh isn't going to contain anything which would incriminate him: he wouldn't be so stupid, even in those less investigative days, as to commit something of that kind to House stationery. He probably used that more as a guaranteed form of identification to his contact than anything else."They all lay and thought for a moment. "No," Huff said, "unless someone comes up with a brilliant idea on how to reveal him, we're going to have to be satisfied with stopping the attempt itself and removing the assassin permanently from the Queen's ambit. Any other thoughts?"If there were any, they were briefly derailed as the air down at the end of the platform tore softly, and a taloned shape stepped through."Ith!" Artie cried, jumped up and ran to him, and shook Ith's claw in a manner so suddenly and incongruously ehhif-adult that Rhiow burst out laughing, and had immediately to pretend to have a hairball. While this was going on, Ith greeted Artie and came pacing over to the teams. He crouched down on those long back legs, the great-claw of each foot grating on the stone."How did you do?""Ith hissed, a most satisfied sound. The spell is complete," he said. "I did not stop with the Museum in London. New York and Berlin, also, I visited, and the new Egyptian wing of the museum in Munchen, apparently the biggest such collection in the world now. I am afraid a security camera might have caught me in Berlin: I was in a hurry." That toothed jaw dropped in a slight smile. "I will be interested to see how they explain what the videotape may show. But first tell me how you fare."They told him: and Arhu, finally, looked at Ith for a long moment in which he seemed to say nothing. Ith listened, with his head on one side, and then knitted his foreclaws together in that gesture which could mean contemplation or distress – in Rhiow's experience, Ith's claws were more to be trusted as an indicator than his face or his eyes, which did not work like a Person's."So our old Enemy puts Its fang into your heart again, brother," Ith said, working the claws together so that they scraped softly against one another. "It is folly. The same venom will not work twice – you will begin to develop an immunity.""I'm glad you think so," Arhu said bleakly."Gladness is far from you just now," Ith said, "but we will see. Meanwhile, Huff, Rhiow, tell me what we must now do to save the Queen."They outlined the plan to him, and Ith listened to it all, his foreclaws working gently at each other the while. At last, when they were done, he bowed agreement to what they had said."It all sounds well," said Ith. "But there is another possibility for which you must also prepare. Your plan, no matter how well laid, may nonetheless fail. If you do not get it right the first time, there is little chance that the Lone Power will let you into that timeline again. It will erect such barriers against you that half the world's wizards brought to bear against them at once would not prevail. Then the Queen will die, and the consequences will begin … "The People, and Artie, all looked at one another. "That possibility must be prepared for," Ith said. "If nothing else, the Winter must be prevented. That at least. No matter if our timelines die, and all of us, and all the ehhif and all the People, and even all my people –if we can only keep the Winter from happening, then there will be survivors, and the world will eventually grow green again.""He's right," Huff said, looking over at Auhlae. She waved her tail in agreement."Well, you have the complete spell," Urruah said. "So we're all right in that regard … " He caught the look in Ith's eye. "Aren't we?""The spell is indeed complete," Ith said. "But I am less certain than I was when I started that it will function.""What?" Rhiow said. "Why?" "Here," Ith said, and moved a little aside to make a clear space on the floor.He constructed the spell for them as Urruah had constructed the timeslide, as a three-dimensional diagram in the Speech. It was more than just six-parted as he had suggested. It was a fourth-dimensional expression of a truncated icosahedron; a near-spherical array of hexagons, each one surrounded by five pentagons. Arhu was not the only one squinting, now: everyone was having trouble grasping the spatial relationships of the thing."Iau, it makes my head hurt just looking at it," Fhrio said, though with a certain amount of admiration."To achieve this construct," Ith said, "I unwrapped four hundred and thirty-eight mummies, and extracted spell fragments from some sixty or seventy amulets. It is a great help to be able to use one's wizardry to see into the mummy first before you must unwrap it: otherwise I would be claw-deep in bandages yet." He tilted his head this way and that, bird-like, admiring his handiwork. "It is, as you see, something of a power-trap. Fives and sixes … That structure traps wizardly energy within it, confining and concentrating it for use. But there is a problem." The claws began to fret gently at one another again. "The recitation parameters of the spell – you see them there, reflected in each 'wing' of the construct – require the physical presence of a threshold number of mummies: a massive, strictly physical reinforcement. Originally, that would have been the main cat-mummy burial site at Bubastis. But that is now gone, as we know.""Are you saying that this won't work?" Fhrio said, peering at the spell."No. I am saying that it may work, but if it does, I will not understand how. And you may be right: it may not function at all … in which case there is no protection against the Winter. And in that case, you must succeed."Silence fell among the gathered People. Arhu kept studying the spell– construct, and his gaze went vague … but Rhiow, looking over at him, became less sure that it was the construct on which he had his eye, or Eye.He turned to her all of a sudden. "Eight hundred thousand People, you said, was the threshold number for gating to start in an area," Arhu said. "How big an area? And do those eight hundred thousand People have to be alive … ?"Rhiow didn't know what to make of that one. But, Three hundred thousand cat-mummies at Beni-Hassan alone, Budge had said. And there were probably many more …"I don't know," Rhiow said at last. "Normally, you would think so. But the Egyptians" relationship with their cats plainly didn't stop when the cats were dead. Indeed, they didn't think they were dead, not in the sense that ehhif use the word now: the whole idea of preserving the body itself indicates that someone thinks you might need it again,"Rhiow fell silent and thought about that for a moment. Until now she had been holding this particular ehhif belief as somewhat barbaric, almost funny, the result of a misunderstanding – for indeed People had told the ehhif of those long-past days how their own lives went: nine lives, nine deaths, and if you had done more good in your lifethan evil, there followed a tenth life in a body immune to the more crass aspects of physicality, like injury, decay and age – the fully-realized Life of which the previous nine had been rough sketches. The ehhif, as so often happened, had gotten some of the details of this story muddled, and thought "their" cats were telling them about immortality after life in a physical body. With this understanding, the ehhif of Egypt, an endlessly practical people, had started working on ways to preserve the bodies of the dead – human as well as feline – with an eye to making sure those bodies would last until they were needed again. Over nearly a millennium of practice, mummification had become a science (as these ehhif regarded such things), elaborate, involved … and here and there, with a touch of wizardry about it.Now, though, this set of circumstances seemed less silly to Rhiow … and much more intriguing. The One, and Her daughters the Powers that Be, rarely did anything without a purpose. Could it be that all the magnificent sarcophagi and paintings, all the riches piled and buried in all the tombs, the folly and the glory of it, were all a blind … a distraction, meant for the one Power which was less than kindly disposed toward life? A feint, a misdirection, a behavior which externally seemed humorously typical of the stupidities of ehhif … but one concealing something far more important? The mummified bodies of hundreds of thousands of People, lying in the sand, forgotten: a resource, a well of potential …… a weapon.Rhiow did not have the kind of confusion about bodies which ehhif all too often had. Once you were out of it for good, a body was meat: whatever happened to it, you didn't care, and those around you were expected to do no more (if it was convenient) than try to drag it off somewhere a little private, where the elements of the world would dispose of it in their own fashion. Rhiow knew that the People who had once inhabited those now-mummified bodies would be far beyond caring what happened to their mortal remains. Either they would have run their nine lives' term and ended so, subsumed back into the endless purr which lay behind the merely physical Universe, as was the way of most of the People; or they would be ten lives along now, in bodies so much better suited to their needs that they would laugh at the mere thought of the old ones. If their two-thousand-year-old remains had to be used somehow as a weapon against the Lone One, not one of them would object.But those bodies were ground up, now, and spread over half the counties of this island. Certainly they were too far scattered for the kind of intervention which this spell construct would require.Rhiow looked at the construct. Well, she said to the Whisperer, … will it work?A long, long pause.Maybe …She got up and stretched. "The only thing we haven't decided," she said to Huff, "is when we're going to do this.""It's been rather a long day," Huff said, and glanced over at Auhlae, who was giving him a thoughtful look. To this particular piece of work, I'd like to come well rested. Tomorrow night?"The others all nodded."Shall I come with you?" Ith said.Rhiow looked at him with some unease. The concern about the Father of his People risking himself comes up again," she said. "You'd better take it up with Them. But I for one would value your company."She glanced at Huff. He twitched his tail "yes". "See where your responsibilities lie, cousin," he said to Ith, "and then join us if you can. But this work alone, I think, is likely to be of great use." He glanced at the hexaract.Ith got up. "I will go to my own, then," he said, "and consult with the Powers." He bowed to the group, and laid his tail over Arhu's for a moment: then he stepped into the air again, and was gone."What about Siffha'h?" Arhu said."What about her?" said Fhrio. The growl was missing … just."Nothing," Arhu said, and sighed, and got up. "Absolutely nothing at all.""Come on, Ruah," Rhiow said. "Let's get home and take a look around. Huff, Auhlae … " She touched cheeks with them: after doing so with Huff, she paused a second, seeing something in his eyes that she couldn't quite classify."It'll be all right," Rhiow said."Of course it will," Huff said: and his whiskers went forward ever so slightly. "Till tomorrow night, cousin: dai stiho."They made their way home together, Rhiow and Urruah and Arhu, and stepped out with some relief from the long station platforms, out into the echo and bustle of the Main Concourse. Sidled, they walked through it without too much concern for the ehhif. It was getting late on a Saturday evening, and growing quiet. Above them, the "stars" burned backwards in the zodiac of a feigned Mediterranean sky: but the breezes that blew by under the great arched ceiling bore mostly the scents of the last fresh-ground coffee of the day, and a lingering aroma of pizza and cold cuts.Urruah breathed deeply. "You know," he said, "their gating complex is very historic and all, all those old buildings and castles and whatnot … but I like ours better.""You just prefer the food," Rhiow said."Yeah, well, I intend to have a seriously big dinner tonight," Urruah said, "and then a whole night's sleep in my dumpster. Who knows if I'll ever see it again?"Rhiow glanced over at him. "You're really worried, aren't you," she said."I think I have reason. Don't you?"There was little evidence to suggest otherwise. There was no question that the situation was dangerous. But having granted that, Rhiow saw no advantage in dwelling on it. "If worrying would help," she said, "I'd be right in there with you. But I've no evidence that it makes any difference.""Optimist," Urruah said."Pessimist," Rhiow said."And which side do you come down on?" Urruah said to Arhu, who was walking between them, silent."Neither," Arhu said. "I'd sooner wait to see which way to jump."He looked a little dubious. "But you know, Rhiow, Ruah, it's all just probabilities. I see things … but there's always that little warning hovering at the edge of them. "It may not turn out this way"." He sighed. "Very annoying … ""I don't know," Rhiow said. "I'd think it might be worse if what you saw always happened, and there was no escape. That would be depressing. As well as boring: nothing would ever surprise you … ""Give me no surprises," Urruah said definitely. "Give me certainty over uncertainty any time. I'll take the boredom and be grateful."Rhiow laughed at him … but the laughter was slightly hollow. "So let's postulate best case for a moment," she said. "Say the Queen is assassinated. Is there any slightest chance, do you think, that the war might not happen, despite what Arhu Saw? As he says, it's still only probability … "Urruah flirted his tail sideways in a gesture of complete uncertainty as they walked past the shining brass central information booth. "Even in our own world," he said, "the only reason ehhif managed to keep the Winter from falling for so long was that there were two great powers that had atomic weapons … and everyone was sure that, no matter which one of them started the fight, everyone's throat would be ripped out before it was finished. And even then there were close calls. That one ehhif President who got lucky, for example … because spies and wizards were in the right places at the right time, to help him covertly or tell him what he needed to know to maneuver properly in that nasty little game of hauissh that he and his enemy were playing. Luck, yes, and the Powers' intervention … and not much else … that saved them. But in that alternate eighteen seventy-four, there's just one power that has the bomb. There is no great counterbalance against the British power to keep them from using it. The only thing that could save them is if their great politicians suddenly became cautious … and what do you think the odds are on that?""With the ehhif Disraeli as the Queen's main minister at that point?" Rhiow shook her head. "From what Hhuhm'hri told me, the chances are slim and none. If the Queen dies, he'll use the excuse to sweep all the lesser 'troublemaking' nations away before him. He's been looking for an excuse to do that, I'd say, for a long time: certainly in our own world he was not exactly a cautious ehhif, or one to back down when provoked. At this time-period, in our own world, he was busy trying to get the Queen to take another title, as a kind of over-Queen of another prides'-pride of ehhif. 'Empress', they called it. She finally let him talk her into it, or flatter her, rather. Granted, that turned out to be a less destructive act of aggression … but the act was dam to a litter of results, later on, that cost many ehhif their lives. It's still doing so, in fact." Rhiow twitched her tail, troubled."In other words," Urruah said, "if given the excuse, he'll bomb the rebellious prides right back into the Stone Age.""And his own pride as well," Arhu said. "Just what the Lone One wants.""The warning is written on the Moon," Rhiow said, "as we saw. That's what It intends the Earth to look like after It's done.""And the situation might get still worse," Urruah said. "It seems that these ehhif lose their positions, or change them, without warning and at short notice. What if someone comes in as Prime Minister who's less tolerant than the ehhif holding the position now?""Please," Rhiow said. It was an uncomfortable enough situation as it was. "Our problem is that, whoever rules that world, the period is not one that likes to refrain from technology, once it gets its hands on it. The Victorians like technology, the more aggressive the better. They like mastering and dominating their world … and each other. They have done some great works that have lasted into our own time, it's true … but they also did a great deal of evil. They routinely acted without due consideration of the effects.""I Saw a lot of things that looked like that," Arhu said, "with Odin. The ehhif took what they got from the book and mostly kept it for themselves. There are a lot of ehhif on this planet, in that time, but the ones with the technology weren't in a sharing mood. They wanted to keep themselves the top of the 'prides-of-prides'. Every now and then they would give a little of the information to some of the other prides, the 'countries', as a present. A way to prove how powerful they were. But the best of it, the parts that really mattered, or were really dangerous, they kept to themselves." His ears were flat back. "It's like caching food. I don't understand how they can do that.""It would probably be pretty foolish of us to expect them not to treat nuclear technology the way they treated all the others … " Urruah said. "So … does that answer your question?"Rhiow sighed. "I just hope Ith can get that spell working," she said.They walked to the Forty-Second Street entrance and looked out through the brass doors. Forty-Second was in full flower, streams of traffic flowing by in both directions, and ehhif walking past, running, chatting, shouting, taking their time in the soft evening air. Rhiow glanced up leftward, a little over her shoulder, to see the light-accented, graceful curves of the Chrysler Building rearing up shinning into the evening sky, the city-light gilding it from underneath. Even at the best of times, she thought, even when life seems normal, who among us can say with certainty that we'll see this world again tomorrow? Entropy stalks the world in all its usual shapes, and some less usual than others. I'll meet them, the strange and the deadly, but I don't need to crouch in fear or bristle at them in show of defiance. I know my job. My commission comes from Those Who Are. We stand together, They and I, in protection of the world They made and I keep. We may lose: there is always that chance. But meanwhile We keep watch at the borders, and contest the Lone One's passage. We will not let it be easy. We will not fall without selling ourselves dearly. And when in the worlds' evening we fall at last, and finally come home, We will find that we have brought with us what we love, bound to us forever by blood and intention: and the Lone One will stand with Its claws empty, and howl Her anger at the night. Then we will say, That was a good fight that we won: and come the dawn, We will make another world, and play the play again …She swallowed, and glanced around her. Urruah was looking at her thoughtfully. He leaned over, bumped noses with her, and said, "See you tomorrow evening … "Urruah walked off down Forty-Second to the corner of Vanderbilt, and dodged around it and out of sight. Rhiow looked away from him, over to Arhu, and said, "And what about you?""I think I have an appointment," he said, and bumped noses with her too, laying his tail briefly over his back. "See you later … "He walked off toward the corner of Lexington, slipped around it, and was gone.Rhiow stood there by the doors and watched her city go by: then, sidled, she lifted her head high, stepped up into the air, and skywalked home.Iaehh was there, and in quiet mood, when she got in. He fed her, and afterwards sat in the reading chair, and Rhiow made herself comfortable in his lap and tried to doze.She couldn't manage it for a while. He wasn't reading for a change tonight, and he didn't even turn on the TV: he just sat in the dimness and stroked her, and Rhiow just sat and let him. It was strangely like the days when Hhuha had been here, and she would simply sit with Rhiow in her lap, not doing anything but being there.Slowly Iaehh began to fall asleep that way. She looked up at him and saw how tired he looked: his face was more drawn than it had used to be, and he was losing weight. What are we going to do about you, Rhiow thought. Hhuha would not like to see you this way. You are so unhappy.We've got to find you somebody.Then she felt like laughing at herself. The world may start to stop existing next week, or the week after that, if we fail, Rhiow thought, and here I am thinking about matchmaking for my ehhif. Yet there was no question that he did need somebody, and she was going to have to do something about it.And what about me? she thought. There would be no mates for her, and no kittens. Huff might be a good acquaintance now, might be a friend later. Yet Rhiow was feeling the need for something more. I must go looking, she thought, and see what's available for a wizard who's been spending too much time in work, and not enough in having a social life.Assuming the universe doesn't end later this month …She sighed and lay back in Iaehh's lap. The end of the universe would have to take care of itself. Right now she was home with her ehhif, and had had a good dinner. Just this once, she would lie still, and let it all pass her by: and tomorrow evening, no matter what happened, she would be able to look the Powers in the face and say, I have been a Person: and after that, what matters?Much later, in the darkness, Rhiow realized that she was having a vision. It shouldn't have surprised her, in retrospect, she thought: the ravens had already shown her that vision was transferable. It hadn't immediately occurred to her that others might learn that trick: but it seemed that at least one had.You made me do it, he said. So you had to see what happened. It was your act … even though I enacted it.In the vision he was walking down the bike path next to the East River. There had been a time when he had been unable to go anywhere near that body of water: the mere sound of it had been a horror to him. Now, though, he walked down the path and listened to the water chuckling underneath the walkway, listened to it slapping against the concrete piers, and didn't mind a bit. The voices in it were friendly now.He was looking for someone, and waiting for something: and because this was his vision, he knew he would shortly find both.Ith had given him the hint, as often happened these days. The same venom will not work twice – you will begin to develop an immunity.At first he had rejected this idea. But Ith was wise, in his way. The more you looked at something that frightened you, or horrified you, the easier it got. This was probably how ehhif became conditioned to killing. In their case, it was a fatal flaw. But in this case, the function was different. Become used to your own death, to the point where it no longer hurts you – and your Enemy is suddenly without a weapon.He had done it twice tonight already. He was becoming an expert at dying.The third time would pay for all.It was not that long until he saw the pale shape of the slender young Person walking nervously down the bike path. Indeed it shouldn't have been very long: you would be a poor kind of Seer if you couldn't tell when people were going to turn up for appointments, so you didn't have to stand around waiting. As she came, he stepped out and got in her way.She spat at the sight of him. "You – ! Get out of my way.""No," he said. "If you want me to move, you're going to have to fight.""Then I'll fight. You think I'd have trouble with that? I hate you! You killed me!""No, I didn't. But you know Who did." "You're crazy. Get out of my way!""No," he said. "Not till you admit what you are.""Oh?" She sneered. "And what am I?""A twin. Half of a pair.""Not any more. You put an end to that.""Nothing can put an end to it," he said. "Roles may change temporarily. But this time they haven't. I'm a Seer. But you –you're something else. Or you will be.""No!""Yes. The other side of Seeing, the same way our colors are sort of reversed now. Doing … that's what you're for.""No!""Yes. You're the power source, after all. Since when are queens power sources? Mostly queens think it's too boring.""I'm not just some queen!""No. You're not. And you can prove it.""How?""Look."They looked up the river, in the predawn dimness.The bag came floating toward them … if "floating" was the right word. Water was seeping into it rapidly, and it was beginning to submerge.Siffha'h saw it and shrank back. "No!""What are you afraid of?" Arhu said. "It's all over." "Yes — but — " Still she shrank back."But," Arhu said. "There's still a sound you haven't let yourself hear.""I don't want to hear it!""Neither did I. But once I did, everything changed. I couldn't hear until I heard that sound: I couldn't See until I Saw what was making it.""No – !""You know what's happening in there," Arhu said."I don't want to think about it – !"She tried to run, but Arhu got in front of her."If you don't think about it," he said, "that's all you'll think about for the rest of your life. You've already spent all your life thinking about it. All the things you do, all the spells you power, all the time you spend inside that big blast of force you like so much – it's all about being deaf and blind. You pour so much power into what you're doing, of course, that everyone around you is deaf and blind too, for the duration, and no one else notices that you can't see or hear most of the time.""You're crazy, what are you talking about – ?!"He could see her glance over his shoulder. The bag was floating nearer. "You don't dare be quiet," he said. "You don't dare be still. If you do, you'll hear what's happening in there."She took a swipe at him, a good one. It hit him across the nose. He bled, but he wouldn't give back. "You owed me that," Arhu said. "My claws must have dug into you, while I was trying to keep my head above the water – ""Shut up!"She launched herself at him, every claw bared. Arhu went down, and together they tumbled across the sparse flat grass by the bike path, spitting and clawing. She got her claws into him, hard. He gave as good as he got. Fur flew."Why did you do it – " she panted. "You were my favorite, I loved you, I slept with you, I ate with you, why – ""I wanted to live! I wanted to breathe! So did you! You stepped on my head a lot of times, you clawed me, I loved you too, I ate with you, I slept with my head on your tummy, I washed you, you washed me, but there came a time when the washing wouldn't help, the loving wouldn't help, we both wanted to live and we couldn't – "The bag floated closer. There was a slight movement inside it, as of some tiny struggle. The smallest sound from inside: a tiny mewling"It saw us coming," Arhu panted. "It saw the Seer, it saw the Doer, It knew that together we would be a danger to It, It tried to kill us both. Still, It couldn't kill both of us. Help was already coming: It knew one would survive. So It killed the one It thought was more of a threat, more of a power. It knew you would come back, but It counted on you being so tangled up with anger and so confused that you wouldn't know what to do with yourself, and wouldn't put your half back with the other half to make a whole again: you'd waste the power you had on things that weren't all that important, and finally die frustrated and incomplete and useless. And you can still do that. Or you can frustrate It – ""What are you talking about?""Don't do. See. Just this once – "And she opened her eyes, which were squeezed shut against Arhu's clawing, and looked at him: and Saw.Saw what happened inside the bag.Not from her point of view: from his.The grief. Tired. The pain. They're all dead. The resignation. I don't want to live any more, they're all dead. The anguish. Sif, she had my same spots. She's dead. I don't want to live, let it end now. The water bubbling in …And, abruptly, astonishingly, the rage built, and built, and burst up and out of her. To her amazement, it was not rage at what had happened to her: it was fury at what had happened to him. It had never been directed at anything outside her before, not really: not in all her short life. But now it leapt out … and found its target. Now she knew what it was that she had to do, what she had come back for, what business she had to finish.Something that hung all about them in the air, something that laughed, that had been laughing forever, suddenly stopped laughing as force such as even It had not often experienced came blasting out at It. Not some unfocused curse at a generalized cruel fate, but a specific, narrow, furious line of righteous anger, a rage like a laser, aimed, directed, and tuned. The anger lanced out and found its mark.WHAT DID YOU DO TO HIM! YOU KILLED HIM! I'M GOING TO —The air in the vision, the air outside it, shuddered with a soundless scream from something which had not been dealt so painful a blow in some time. That influence, for just a little while, fled …… leaving Arhu crouching and squeezing his eyes shut against what his vision showed him, a shape like a Person made out of lightning, radiating fury and purpose and the ability to do anything, anything … for this little while.The lightning looked at him."You were right," she said. "There's no spell I couldn't power, now. Nothing I couldn't do. Nowhere we can't go."" … We," he said.Very slowly, she put her whiskers forward."Come on," she said. "Let's go practice … " She passed, a long time – four breaths, five – then said it: " … brother. We're going to have a busy night."And the vision faded … and in her sleep, Rhiow put her whiskers forward, and knew that a tide had turned.EIGHTIt was the morning of 6 June 1874: sunny and hot, one more baking hot day in the middle of one of the most prolonged hot spells to manifest itself in the British Isles for nearly fifty years. Temperatures had been in the eighties every day for the past two weeks. The Times reported that a stationary high was in place over the Isles and showed no signs of moving in the immediate future.A small stout woman on horseback came riding sedately up through Windsor Home Park at an easy canter. She wore a long black riding dress, and rode sidesaddle with some grace and ease. She rode around the path that skirted the East Terrace Garden, and came up to the George the Sixth Gateway, clattering through under the archway and into the wide, graveled space of the Upper Ward. Grooms ran forward to take her horse as she stopped near the little circular tower which marked the entrance to the State Apartments. One groom bent down to offer his back as a step to the woman dismounting: another took her by the hand and helped her down."He is breathing better this morning, Rackham," she said to one of the grooms. "Perhaps he will not need the mash any more this week.""Yes, your Majesty."She swept in through the entrance to the State Apartments and up the stairs, then bustled down along the hallway which ran down the length of the first floor, making for the day room attached to her own apartments there. Maids curtsied low and footmen bowed as she passed: one of them rose to open the door to the day room for her.The Queen stepped into the room, and then stopped, very surprised. Tumbling about on the carpet were two small cats, one mostly white with black patches, one more black with white patches, wrestling with each other. As the Queen looked at them, they rolled over and gazed at her with big innocent golden eyes."Meow," said one of them.The Queen's mouth dropped open, and she clapped her hands for delight. One of the maids appeared immediately. "Siddons," said Queen Victoria, "wherever did these darling kittens come from?""Please, your Majesty, I don't know," said Siddons, a beautifully dressed young woman who immediately began to wonder if she was going to get in trouble for this. "Maybe they came in from outside, your Majesty.""Well, we must make inquiries and see if we can discover to whom they belong," said the Queen, "but they are certainly very welcome here."She went over to them, knelt down on one knee and stroked one of them, the kitten with more black than white. They were really a little larger than kittens, but were not yet full grown cats. The one she was stroking caught her hand in soft paws and gave it a little lick, then looked up at her with big eyes again."Darling thing!" said the Queen, and picked the little cat up in her arms, holding it so that it lay on its back. The small cat patted her face gently with one paw and gazed up at her adoringly."What was that you said? 'Meow'?" said Siffha'h, still rolling and stretching on the floor. "Look at you, squirming around like you've still got your milk teeth. How shameless can you get?""Well, it says here that a cat may look at a King," Arhu said. "So I'm looking.""Well, this is a Queen. And it doesn't say anything about being truly sickeningly sweet to the point where Iau Herself will come down from broad Heaven and tell you you're overdoing it. You're going to do bad things to my blood sugar.""You're a wizard: adjust it. Meanwhile, at least she smells nice. Some of the ehhif around here could use a scrub.""Tell me about it.""Well, come on, don't just lie there. We've got to get ourselves well settled in. Find something to be cute with."Siffha'h got up and headed for a thick velvet bell-pull with tassels. "All right, but I'm not sure this isn't going to stunt my growth." She started to play with the tassels.The Queen burst out laughing and put Arhu down. "Oh, my dear little kitties," said the Queen, "would you like something to eat?" She turned to look over her shoulder, toward the butler standing in the doorway. "Fownes, bring some milk. And some cold chicken from the buffet.""Yes, your Majesty.""Now for once Urruah was right about something," Arhu said. "Milk and cold chicken. I don't suppose they've invented pastrami yet … "Siffha'h inclined her head slightly to listen to the Whispering. "You're on the wrong side of the Atlantic. They do have it in New York … ""Dear Mr. Disraeli is coming to see me before lunch," she said to the cats. "You must be kind to him and not scratch his legs. Mr. Disraeli is not a cat person.""Uh oh," Arhu said."I wish she hadn't said that," Siffha'h said. "I won't be able to resist, now … ""Don't do it," Arhu said. "He might nuke something.""Please," Siffha'h said. However pleasant the surroundings, none of them had been able to stop looking up at the sky for that quiet reminder of which Power seemed to be busiest in this universe at the moment."Have you been in the bedroom yet?" Arhu said. "No.""Better take a look, then." "OK.""Hey! Don't walk – scamper."Siffha'h scampered, producing another trill of laughter from the Queen. Arhu went after her the same way. A door opened out of the day room into the anteroom, and from the anteroom, to the right, into the royal bedroom. The bed was quite large, and beautifully covered all in white linen.Siffha'h looked it over critically, walking around it. "It's a good size," she said to Arhu. "But not so big that we can't put a forcefield over it that would stop a raging elephant, not to mention a guy with a knife.""We'll have to be careful how we trigger it, though. If she gets up for something in the middle of the night, she'll bang herself on it and get upset.""Wouldn't want that," Siffha'h said. She walked around to look at the elaborately carved headboard. "Hey, look at the nibble marks. She's had mice in here.""Yeah, well, we need to make sure she doesn't have another one," Arhu said. "With much bigger teeth.""Your Majesty," said a servant who appeared at the day-room door and bowed, "the Prime Minister has arrived.""Very good. Bring his usual tea. Where is the cats' chicken?" "Coming, your Majesty.""Here, kitties," the Queen called, "come and have some milk!"They glanced at each other. "I am not used to this kind of thing," said Siffha'h. "Let her wait a few minutes.""Why? You're hungry.""If we come when she calls us, she's going to get the idea that we'll do that all the time. We're People, for Iau's sake.""Well, she's a Queen, and she's used to people coming when she calls. All kinds of people. Come on, Sif, humor her a little.""Oh, all right." They trotted into the day room together. The Queen was holding a bowl of milk, which she put down for them.They drank. "Oh, sweet Iau, where are they getting this stuff?" Arhu muttered, and practically submerged his face in the bowl."Real cows," said Siffha'h. "Not pasteurized. Full fat. They may know what cholesterol is here, but it doesn't bother them … "Footsteps came from down the hall. A few moments later, the man who had his finger on the Victorian nuclear trigger came in and sat down. He was long and rangy and had the abundant beard that seemed so popular at this point in time. Arhu looked up at him from the bowl and got an immediate sense of thoughtfulness, subtlety, an almost completely artificial sense of humor, and dangerous intelligence. At the same time, behind the sleek and well-behaved facade lurked emotions which, though carefully controlled, were not at all mastered. This was the kind of man who could hold a grudge, teach it to think it was a carefully thought through opinion, and then turn it loose to savage his enemies."I wouldn't shed on him if I were you," Arhu said softly. "I think you might pull back a bloody stump.""Mr. Disraeli," said the Queen, "have you seen my two lovely young guests? I am hoping they will stay with me and enliven my sad days a little.""Ma'am, anything which brings joy to your days is a joy to your humble servant," said Disraeli, and bowed.Siffha'h gave him an amused look. "Pull the other three," she said, "they've got bells on.""He can't help it," Arhu said. "He has to say things like that to her all the time now, or she wonders what's wrong with him." He put his whiskers forward."Sit, please," said the Queen, and Disraeli did so and started chatting with her informally about the state of affairs in the Empire, particularly in India. Here, as in their own universe, he was trying to convince her to accept the title of Queen-Empress, and she was presently in the stage of coyly refusing it."But, ma'am, the nations over which our benevolent influence is extended wish only to have you assume this title as a token of their esteem … ""If esteem is to be discussed," said the Queen, reaching for a piece of chicken, "then I would sooner discuss the sort which France is expressing at the moment.""Ah, Majesty, their inflammatory republican comments are intended for their own people and their own politicians" ears. They have no import here.""They do when the French suggest that the British monarchy is superannuated and without merit," the Queen said mildly, while this time giving Siffha'h the piece of chicken she was holding, and reaching for another one for Arhu. "No, don't grab, my darling, there is plenty for you both. And when they threaten my cousins on the various thrones of Germany. I have no desire to seem as if we wish to expand our Empire – which is broad enough at the moment – at the expense of others.""If those others will not comport themselves wisely, those of them who live on the Empire's doorstep," Disraeli said gently, "surely it is in our interest to explain to them the likely results of their destabilization of the nations of Europe. We have no desire to seem threatening, of course – ""Indeed we do not," said the Queen, looking up rather sharply from the distribution of the next piece of chicken. "And I require you to see that we do not. My diplomatic boxes have been full of disturbing material of late: complaints from neighbors who feel that our purpose is to destabilize them. I will not leave Europe in a worse state than I found it, Mr. Disraeli.""Indeed, ma'am," Disraeli said, "the general opinion is that it would be left in much better state if more of it were British."The Queen sniffed. "A state of which my royal father would never have approved. We are the most powerful nation on the globe: all respect us, and those who do not respect us, at least fear us, which unfortunate situation at least keeps my subjects safe. Let France provoke as it please, let Italy rattle her spears. They are too short to fly far. As for France, the English Channel is now a tie that binds us, not a protective barrier. She will do nothing but harm to her own trade by cocking a snook at us across the water.""Ma'am," Disraeli said, "these direct attacks on the monarchy are being taken, by some, as direct threats to your royal person. There are those in Parliament who have begun calling for war.""They do that every year around tax time," the Queen said mildly. "Some distractions are worth more than others, especially in a year which presents the possibility of a general election. As for my people's opinion, they love to talk about conquering Europe, but they are not eager to do it themselves.""They would be if you asked them to," Disraeli said softly.The Queen gave him a cool look. "I have no interest in spending their blood," she said, "for no better reason than a few vague threats. I am a mother too, and I know what the blood of sons is worth."Disraeli bowed at that. "Yet it brings us to another matter, ma'am," he said. "You are a mother not only of princes and princesses, but of a people. And those people greatly desire to see you take up your public role with more enthusiasm. We have spoken of this before – ""And doubtless will again," said the Queen, turning away from him. "Mr. Disraeli, I know your concerns. But I cannot make a show of myself when my heart would be insincere, no matter what public opinion would make of it. You cannot possibly know the pain I suffer for the lack of my dear Albert … how I long for him … how that longing makes so many things, the splendors, the pleasures, as nothing but ashes in my mouth. I will not pretend to be what I cannot be … and my people, who love me, will understand."He bowed again, slowly, reluctantly: and gradually their talk passed to other things. Arhu, meanwhile, rubbed against the Queen's skirts, then headed back into the bedroom.Siffha'h followed him in. "Well?" she said. "I didn't follow all of that." "It gets complicated. But that was the lead-up, all right," Arhu said. "The circumstances are lining up as predicted.""You're looking smug.""Smug?" Arhu shook his head until his ears rattled. "No. I like a high accuracy rating: it makes me a lot less nervous … especially when I hear the words 'necessary expansion' from someone who has nuclear weapons when no one else does. Nope," Arhu said, "we're in the right place at the right time. Now all we have to do is wait …The timeslide gatings which first transported the London and New York teams to 1874, and then had dropped Siffha'h and Arhu in the Queen's rooms, had both run into trouble, as Ith had predicted. The resistance to them had been staggering, an order of magnitude greater than the last time it was tried. But Whoever was handling the resistance had not been prepared for a power source which for the first time, simply ran into it, and through it, as if it was not there. The timeslide had first aligned itself with the time and place where Artie had stumbled upon them: they left him off in time for tea with his Uncle Richard, and making their farewells, they gated once more and popped directly out into Old Jewry in the late evening of July the eighth. There, under the scarred and tarnished Moon, the teams made themselves at home, as best they could, in the Mark Lane Tube station.Rhiow found its trains surprisingly modern: the station was clean and safe, and more handsomely decorated than its contemporary counterpart. The worldgates were not there, though. As Rhiow had suspected, they were presently up in the Fenchurch Street mainline rail station, and Rhiow and Huff had both been unwilling to tamper with them or to try to contact any London-based gating team which might be supervising the gates at this time. There were already enough complications to deal with.They waited, and saw the City as best they could, and became very expert of ridding themselves of mud in short order. In particular, they spent a fair amount of time visiting with Ouhish and Hwallis at the British Museum. Hwallis had been delighted to hear about the recovery of the full spell for protection against the Winter: but the news about what was required to activate it had come as a blow.The intervention, however, was Rhiow's and Huff's main care, and they made their preparations slowly, despite the impatience of some members of the team. Look, it's been two days now, Arhu said, late on the eighth, and I don't know how much more petting we can stand. If it's not Herself, then it's the princes and princesses. And all the servants are trying to make friends with us too.I should think you could do very well out of this … Urruah said. Like the others, he was down on the twin of their 'derelict' platform, where the timeslide spell was 'stabled' until they would need it again.Do you mean food? Please! Don't even mention it, Siffha'h said. I'm so stuffed I'm losing the ability to scamper.Huff smiled at that. A historical moment, he said.Have you heard from Auhlae?Yes. Nothing unusual as yet. So far the gates are behaving themselves.Rhiow put her whiskers forward, glad to hear it. She had also been glad when Auhlae volunteered to mind the gates during the intervention. It had taken a weight off Huff's mind: he had been very nervous indeed of the prospect of bringing her here.Just hold on the best you can, you two, she said. It's only a couple of days more. Have you seen the Mouse?Yes. A very inoffensive-looking little ehhif, Arhu said. It's no wonder he was so good at the second-story work before McClaren hired him for this job: he's pretty small. He works in the gardens every day, putting plants in pots and taking them out again, and no one gives him a second look.Well, you're ready for him …There are more protections waiting to be activated around that bed than any ehhif needs, Siffha'h said. And we're there too: she insists on us sleeping with her. But he's not going to have a chance to make it this far, anyway. Come tomorrow afternoon, he's going to find himself locked in the Albert Tower with no way out … and the morning after, the police will take him away.They'll probably charge him with suspicion of theft when they find out what kind of work he used to do, Arhu said. I won't mind. I see the way his little eyes look at things. It's not a mouse he reminds me of: it's a rat.Rhiow shivered a little. The image of a rat's mind in a man's body bothered her. Well, she said, keep an eye on things. Urruah has gone to the House to see about that letter.Good, Arhu said. This is a nice place … but I'll be glad when this lady is safe. She's got her problems, but none that deserve being killed for.There's also the slight problem of what would happen after she was killed …Don't remind me. Well, keep us up to date, Siffha'h said. It really will be kind of a relief to get out of here. She cries about Albert every night, like it's a ritual, and the pillows get all wet. I'm amazed she doesn't catch cold.Rhiow's tail twitched. "Do what you can for her," she said. "A purr at the right time can do wonders."We will.Rhiow sighed and lay back on the concrete. She was missing Iaehh already, and she was beginning to get that twitchy, uncomfortable feeling that comes of staying out of one's home time too long. In addition, she was beginning to feel peculiarly … exposed. I just wish I knew to what. But the feeling of something watching them, with bad intent, was getting very strong.No matter. It won't take very long now. Urruah will sort that letter out … and then we can frame the Mouse and go home.But something kept suggesting to Rhiow that it would not be that simple …The morning of the ninth of July came up, hot and still, with crickets creaking in the crevices of stone walls and under the foundations of houses. It was hot everywhere, from Land's End to John O'Groats.Nearer the John O'Groats end of things, just after the time when the milk arrives after dawn, the postman came up the walk of a small neat semidetached home in Edinburgh city. Before he could knock, the latch was lifted, and a small dapper man came out. The postman handed him several letters, which the man went through swiftly. One of these he opened: then, as the postman was on the way down the walk to the street, the small man called him and stepped back inside the door of the house for a moment. When he emerged, he handed the postman another letter. The postie took it and went his way.In the Palace of Westminster, unseen, a gray-striped tabby cat walked calmly down the Commons' Corridor, looking at the paintings that adorned the walls there: the last sleep of the Duke of Argyll, the acquittal of the Seven Bishops in the reign of James II, Jane Lane helping Charles II to escape.Marvelous stuff, Urruah thought to himself, but is it art? Most of it, he thought, was the kind of painting which a partisan of a subject does to try to convince other people that it's of as much historical or cultural value as he thinks it is. Figures of old-time ehhif gestured heroically or stood in stoic silence, and all of them, to Urruah's educated eye, had 'Establishment' written all over them. Urruah walked among them with amusement, heading for the House of Commons, and restraining his urge to sharpen his claws on the more bombastic of the murals.He was sidled, naturally, and therefore had to sidestep to miss the occasional ehhif parliamentarian making for the House. They seemed to hold their meetings very late. It was nearly midnight: even bouts of hauissh, the feline pastime which most nearly includes politics, did not usually take place quite this late. Whatever, Urruah wasn't terribly concerned about what hours they kept, except as it involved one man: McClaren.He paused by the doors to the House, a little off to one side, and listened before going in." … because the expense would be so great," an ehhif was saying in a great deep rolling voice; "whilst perhaps in the next parish there might be a clergyman who turns to the east when he celebrated the Holy Communion. If a parishioner called upon the bishop to prosecute in that case, then there would be no difficulty, it would be easy to prosecute for the posture … but by no means easy to prosecute for the doctrine. Is it not a monstrous proposition that when unsound doctrine is preached, one must proceed by the old, slow, cumbersome ecclesiastical law, and yet there should be a rapid prosecution for gestures … "Urruah stood there trying to make head or tail of this for some minutes. It seemed that the ehhif was talking about communicating with the One, which was certainly a courtesy and a good idea generally: but these ideas of ehhif as to how the One liked to be communicated with seemed amazingly confused, and also seemed to be very hung up on obscure symbology which had to be exactly observed and duplicated, or else there would be no communication. If they really think this, Urruah thought, maybe it's no wonder they're so asocial. The Universe must seem to them like a place run by ants. Rude, illiterate ants …" … among the leading churchmen I have found extreme distaste anddissatisfaction with the bill. It is said that the bishop, in the ninth clause, must appear 'in a fatherly character', but before the canons come in, he must practically have pronounced that some offense had been committed which ought to be proceeded against. Thus the power of the bishop as arbitrator can never commence until he has pronounced and sanctioned the prosecution – "Urruah reared up and peered through the glass of the doors. His view was largely blocked by frock-coated men standing between him and the floor of the House, and talking nonstop.Well, vhai'd if I'm going to stand here all night, he thought. Very carefully Urruah slipped through the wood paneling of the lower half of the door, slowly, so as not to upset the grain of the wood, and being careful not to become strictly solid again until he knew exactly where the legs of the ehhif on the other side were. Fortunately none of them were too close.Once in, Urruah stood there at the back of the House and listened for a few more minutes … finally wondering why in Iau's name anyone would come here late at night to hear this kind of thing … unless indeed they were all insomniacs in search of treatment. Up in the stranger's gallery, various visiting ehhif were either asleep or on their way to being so: on the other side, journalists were scribbling frantically in notebooks, trying to keep up with what the ehhif who spoke was saying. Urruah wondered why anyone would bother. The man had the most soporific style imaginable, and in this hot, still room, made hotter yet by the primitive electrical lights, the effect produced put the best sleep-spells Urruah knew to shame.Urruah peered about him again, looking for any sign of McClaren. The ehhif was tall and had a big beard, but unfortunately that described about half the ehhif in here: this was a very hairy period for ehhif males in this part of the world. McClaren also had a long hawkish nose and very blue eyes, but again Urruah's view was somewhat blocked.He's probably not here, Urruah thought. Still … I'll take a look around. And the impish impulse struck him.He unsidled.At first no one noticed him. It was late, and he was walking softly down the carpeted floor of the gangway on the Opposition side. He knew where he was headed: toward the center of the room, the "aisle", where he could get a good view of both front benches. McClaren was a government minister, and would normally have been sitting there on the left-hand side of the Speaker as Urruah was facing the Speaker's Chair.He looked around him at the weary, complacent faces as he came down the gangway … and they began to look at him. Urruah put his whiskers forward as the laughter started. That'll wake them up, he thought: this'll probably make the papers tomorrow … He came down to the aisle, took a long leisurely look across at the Government benches … and saw McClaren there.Urruah stopped short, with the laughter scaling up all around him. What's he doing here?!For he was not supposed to be here. He should have been up in his office – writing a letter –Sa'Rrdhh in a five-gallon bucket, Urruah thought, no –He bolted toward the Government benches, ignoring the surprised or shocked faces turned toward him, and jumped up on the back of the first front bench, almost getting into the beard of the surprised minister sitting nearest. Urruah jumped with great speed from there to the first of the back benches, and to the next and the next, going up them like steps in a staircase and not particularly caring whose leg, shoulder or head he stepped on in the process. The laughter became deafening. There was a door at the back of the last of the benches, at the very top. Urruah jumped down and went straight through it, this time without the slightest concern for the grain of the wood.He raced out through the West Division lobby, through it into the little hallway at the corner of the Lobby and up the staircase two floors. He knew well enough where McClaren's office was. Through that wooden door, too, he went, sidled again this time.There was no one in the office.Urruah stood very still for a moment and licked his nose three times in rapid succession. Then he glanced around him, and looked up into the box on the bookcase.No letter.He jumped up onto the desk, covered with the same leather and paper blotter that Arhu had seen. There were no writings on it, but there were faint depressions as of writing.Urruah looked across to the small narrow fireplace at the other side of the office. Perfect, he thought.He did a very small wizardry in his mind and put his paws down on the blotter, electrostatically charging it. Then he glanced over at the fireplace, and spoke courteously in the Speech to the soot up in the chimney.Tidily, in a thin stream, it made its way across the room to him. Urruah guided it down onto the blotter, then levitated the blotter a little way up on its edge to let the soot slide down it.It adhered here and there on the blotter, mostly to signatures. But one recent piece of writing showed up most clearly where the soot clung.MR JAMES FLEMING14 KENNISHEAD AVENUEEDINBURGHDear Mr. Fleming,Thank you for yours inst. the 6th of July regarding passes to the Speaker's gallery. Such may only be granted by the Speaker after introduction by the applicant's own member of Parliament. In your case this would –Oh, no, Urruah thought.It's gone. It's gone already. How can it be gone?He ran out of the office again, through the door, his heart pounding and his mouth dry with terror.Everybody! Everybody! Windsor, now, hurry, now!… 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: the tick of cinders shifting in the box: no other sound.He takes his twelve steps across the kitchen, reaches out his hand … finds the shut door. He eases its latch open, slips through this door too, pulls it gently to behind him. 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, and out onto the carpet. In the darkness he passes by the doorways he knows are there, to the Picture Gallery, the Queen's Ball Room, the Queen's Audience Chamber. Silently past the Guard Chamber: no guards are there any more – the place is full of suits of armor, some of them those of children, and silken banners and old swords and shields, the gifts of kings. No more kings after tonight, he thinks, with the slightest smile in the dark. No more queens …Fifty-nine steps, and there is 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.Something brushes against his leg. A gasp catches in his throat: he freezes in place. A minute, two minutes, he stands there.Nothing. A cobweb. Even a place like this, with a hundred servants, can't keep all the stairwells free of the little toilers, the spinners of webs. Softly he goes on up again, one step at a time, at the edges, with care.The remaining fifteen steps 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, is a chair under a single candle sconce with a dim electric bulb burning in it. There should be a footman in it, but there's no sign of him. The chair is tilted back against the wall, and down by the foot of the chair is a stoneware mug: empty. The footman has gone to relieve himself. And the door in the gilded frame is slightly open.Perfect. Down the hallway, now, in utmost silence.Swiftly now, but also silently. Reach up and undo the bulb from its socket. No one will think a thing of it: these newfangled things burn out without warning all the time. Wait a few seconds for night vision to return. Then, silently, push the door open and step in.The outer room is where the lady-in-waiting has a bed. She is not in it. Now the footman's absence suddenly completely makes sense, and in the darkness, he smiles. 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. A little rasp of noise, soft. A snore? She will sleep more quietly in a moment …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, as the knives pierce his hand, and other knives catch him from behind, on the neck and the back of the head, a flurry of abrupt, terrible, slicing pain. He staggers back, his arms windmilling, the knife trying to find a target in the darkness. Only the training of many years, the usual number of accidents – broken glass, banged shins – keeps him quiet now as he stumbles back to find his balance again. For just a moment his hand is free of the pain, but now the front of his neck is pierced by furious jaws that bite him in the throat, claws that seize and kick. He fumbles at his throat to grab something furry and throw it away with all his might– and suddenly he simply can't move: he's frozen, as if he were a stick of wood or one of the carved statues downstairs. Like a statue with its pedestal pulled out from under it, he topples, unable even to catch himself, or to turn so that he falls face down and not on his back.
Yet at the last minute he doesn't fall. Some force far stronger than he is stops him, holds him suspended in air. He can't breathe, can't move, can only lie here gripped by something he can't begin to understand, and by the terror that follows.
The pain, at least, drops away from the back of his head. But suddenly there is a pressure on his chest. His eyes, wide already in the dark, go as wide as they can with shock as a face, grinning, like the face of a demon, becomes just barely visible before him.
It is the face of a black-and-white cat. From the very end of its tail, held up behind it, comes the faintest glimmer of light, like a will-'o'-the-wisp. It looks at him with a face of unutterable evil, a devil come to claim him: and, impossibly, in a whisper, it speaks.
"Boy," it says, "have you ever picked the wrong bedroom."It sits there on his chest while invisible hands lift him. A brief whirl of that ever-so-faint light surrounds him, going around the back of his field of vision, coming up to the front again, tying itself in a tidy bow-knot. For a second or so that light fills everything.Then it is gone again, and he falls again, coming down on the floor with a thump. His head cracks down hard, and he almost swears, but restrains himself.But there's no carpet on this floor. This is hard stone. Slowly, when he discovers that he can sit up again, he feels the floor around him. Marble, and old smooth tile – Hesitantly he gets to his feet, begins to feel his way around.What he feels makes no sense. A stone figure, lying on its back, raised above the floor – Much other carving reveals itself under his hands, but nothing else. He would swear out loud, except that he may still be able to get out, and someone might hear him.It is a long while before the tarnished, waning Moon rises enough for its light to stream through the stained-glass windows surrounding him with their illustrations of Biblical texts, and for him to realize whose the reclining figure is. There, entombed in marble, Prince Albert lies in the moonlight, hands folded, at rest, on his face a slight grave smile which, in this lighting, takes on an unbearably sinister aspect.The memory of the demon face comes back to him. He swallows, feels for his knife. It's gone. Dropped upstairs in the bedroom. There's nothing he can use on the locked, barred ornamental gate to get out. There's no way he can get rid of the silken rope. They will find it on him in the morning, when they call the police. There is a specific name for the charge of being found with tools which might be used for burglary: it's called "going forth equipped". It's good for about twenty years, these days, on a second offense.This is his fifth.He sits down on the green marble bench under the scriptural bas– reliefs with their thirty kinds of inlaid marble, and begins, very quietly, to weep.Just outside the bars, the darkness smiles and walks away on little cat feet.Out in the Home Park, a black brougham waits until two a.m. precisely: then, slowly, quietly, moves off into the night.There was a tremendous fuss the next morning when the burglar was found downstairs. There was less certainty about his status as a burglar when the lady-in-waiting found, dropped next to the Queen's bed, a switchblade knife of terrible length and keenness. The police came, and the police commissioner with them: he questioned the Queen with the utmost respect. No, she had seen nothing, heard nothing. Her dear little kitties had been sleeping with her all night: she woke up and went to her toilette … and then all these horrible discoveries began to make themselves plain. The policemen took time to stroke the cats, which lay about on the white linen coverlet with the greatest possible ease and indolence, and a fairly smug look on their faces. The cat scratches present on the burglar's face and head made it fairly plain where he had been, and (probably) what he had been up to. As a result, all that morning, the cats were petted and fussed and made much of. Instead of running away, as anyone might have expected with such young creatures, they stood it with astonishing stolidity.It was nearly ten in the morning before the Queen finally saw the final visitors out of her apartment, sent her lady-in-waiting away, and shut the door to have a few moments' peace. She slipped back into her bedroom, where the two young black-and-white cats had been asleep on the bed. One of them was lying on her back with her feet in the air, utterly indolent: the other had rolled over on his side and was watching her come with an air of tremendous intelligence."Ah, my dears," she said, and sat down on the bed beside them. "How I wish you could speak and tell me what it is that happened last night."The slightly larger one, the male, gave her that unutterably wise look. The Queen turned her head to look out at the bright summer morning, which she might not have lived to see. The other cat rolled off her back and blinked at her lazily."Madam," she said, "do you think this life is a rehearsal? It's not." The Queen's mouth dropped right open."She's right, Queen," Arhu said, getting up and sauntering toward her. "You're acting like you've got as many lives as we have … and you don't. Don't you think it's time you stopped hiding in here –time you got out there and started making some use of yourself? Honestly, I'm sorry you lost your big tom with all the fur on his face. He sounds like he was nicer than the usual run of ehhif. But as far as I know, he's with the One now, Who'll certainly know how to treat him right: and if what I hear is anything to go by, he wouldn't like you sitting here grieving for him while you have all this work to do.""But – " the Queen finally managed to say. "But, oh, my dear little puss, how can you possibly know anything of the kind of pain I suffer when I think of – ""I'll tell you what I know," Arhu said. "Sif, let's show her."They showed her … the pain they knew all too well, and shared.The Queen sank back into the chair beside the bed, a few seconds later, staggered. Tears began to roll down her face."Beat that, if you can," said Siffha'h at last.The Queen hid her face in her hands."So don't think you have a corner on the suffering market," said Arhu. "Or on being lonely. Or that other people 'can't know'. When the sun comes up at last, we're all stuck in our own heads by ourselves. Everyone around you feels the pain of it, sooner or later – the Lone One's claw in their heart. Some feel it a lot worse than you, even if you are the dam to a pride of millions. So stop acting as if you're so special."Even through the Queen's tears, her jaw dropped open again at that. "And stop shirking your work," said Siffha'h. "Bad things will happen to your pride if you don't come out and do the things you were reared to do. They've started happening already. If you act now, you can stop the process.""Oh," Arhu added. "And by the way, lay off the nuclear weapons. I know Dizzy likes them … but this is what will happen if you don't."He showed her.The Queen went ashen at the sight of the Winter.For several long minutes she was speechless: possibly a record. At the end of it, all she could whisper was, "You are little angels of God.""Please, madam," Arhu said, "don't get confused. We're cats. If you mean we're messengers of the One, well, so is everybody: it's hardly an exclusive position. But this is the word. No nukes. You really ought to get rid of them, lest someone later be tempted to use them who isn't as morally upright as you are."Flatterer.She's susceptible. A good wizard uses the tools which are available. "And make sure you don't let them get out of control while you're having them destroyed," Siffha'h said. "Some people might be tempted to get light-fingered … try to sell a few to somebody else on the grounds that no one will notice since they're being destroyed anyway."The Queen looked suddenly determined. "I have never liked them," she said softly. "I will begin work at once, if you say so.""It would be a project," Arhu said, "which would probably be productive of some good."The Queen looked around with some surprise, for suddenly the bedroom seemed to have a lot more cats in it, and she had no idea where they might have come from. A huge gray tabby: a small neat black cat with golden-green eyes: a massive gray-and-tan tabby with astonishing fluffy fur: a small tidy marmalade cat with a slightly sardonic expression. All of them looked at her with interest."Our colleagues," said Arhu. "We have been here on errantry on your behalf: the errand's over. They just wanted to look at you before we all left." Arhu smiled slightly. "It's in the job description.""But, but my dear kitties," the Queen said, "you cannot go now, you must stay!" Perhaps she already read the answer in their eyes. "I command it!""Majesty," said the black cat, with a nod of what might have been respect, "our People have their own Queen, to whom we answer: a higher authority, I believe, than even yours. We cannot stay: we have other errands to perform for Her. But She wishes you well, by us. Do well by your people: and farewell."And then they were all gone.The Queen wept a little, as was her habit, and then started to put herself right after the events of the morning. She did not get around to reading The Times until almost bedtime. When she did, it took her a while to get to the parliamentary report, which she was about to skip, since for some days it had contained an interminable report about the Public Worship Regulation Bill. But suddenly, in the middle of the dry, dry text, she began to smile.The right Honorable Gentleman was at this moment startled by a burst of laughter from the crowded house, caused by the appearance of a large gray tabby cat, which, after descending the Opposition gangway, proceeded leisurely to cross the floor. Being frightened by the noise, the cat made a sudden spring from the floor over the shoulder of the members sitting on the front Ministerial bench below the gangway, and, amid shouts of laughter, bounded over the heads of members on the back benches until it reached a side door, when it vanished. This sudden apparition, the cat's still more sudden disappearance, and the astonishment of the members who found it vaulting so close to their faces and beards, almost convulsed the House.The Queen folded up the newspaper, put it aside, and went to sleep … determined to start making some changes the next day."The only thing about this that still bothers me," Urruah was saying, "is where that letter went. I can't imagine how he got it out of there so fast.""But that's the problem," said Hwallis to the London and New York teams, earlier that afternoon. "A day for a letter to get to and from Edinburgh? A whole day? You must be joking."The New York team looked at each other. "It's easy for us to forget," Huff said, "that once upon a time, when this country had a rail network it could be proud of, and before there were telephones, the mail could come seven times a day – in London, in some parts, as many as twelve times a day. And pickups were much more frequent than they are now.""The Houses of Parliament have a pickup for members at midnight," Ouhish said. "That letter would have been on the train to Scotland half an hour later. It would have been in Edinburgh, and delivered, with the first post … some time after five in the morning. No later than seven, anyway. If a reply was passed directly back to the postman, that letter would also have gone on a train within an hour or so, and the reply would have been in London – Windsor, in this case – by the two o'clock post at the latest."Rhiow shook her head. "And we think our ehhif have technology," she said softly. "Sometimes retrotech has its points."They spent the afternoon at the Museum, and said their farewells to Ouhish and Hwallis around four: then went for one last meeting, in Green Park. Artie was out for one last afternoon in London: the next morning he was due to catch the train back to Edinburgh, and after that he would be heading off to a school on the Continent. He was sorrowful, but his basic good cheer would not let the affair be entirely a sad one."But will I never see you again," Artie said, "or Ith?""For out own part, it seems unlikely," Rhiow said. "Mostly wizards don't do time-work without permission from the Powers. There are too many things that can go wrong. But you will remember us for a long time."Probably not forever … she thought, but didn't say. One of the factors which protected wizardry from revelation was the tendency of humans minds to censor themselves over time, forgetting the "impossible", recasting the improbable into more acceptable forms. Childhood memories, in particular, were liable to this kind of editing, as the adult mind decided retroactively what things could have happened in the "real world", and which were dreams. Yet Artie was a little unusual. There was something about him which suggested that he would not easily let go of a memory, and that no matter how impossible something was, if it was true, he would cope with it … and hang on."But Ith is another story," Urruah said. "His time isn't precisely our time: the universe where he lives is closer to the heart of things … and so a little easier to get in and out of, for him. Also, he outranks us." Urruah smiled. "He's a Senior now … and Seniors have more latitude.""No matter what else happens," Fhrio said, "remember that you helped save the Queen, and many millions of people you'll never know. You'll never be able to prove it to anybody. But without you, we would not have been guaranteed entry into this timeline … and we couldn'thave been sure to save the others. You did that. It might have been an accident at first … but afterwards, you did it willingly. We won't forget that, or you … and neither will the Powers."Artie smiled at that. "I guess it's better than nothing.""Immeasurably," Rhiow said.They parted as sunset drew on, and made their way back to the Mark Lane Underground, where they had lodged the timeslide. As they went underground for the last time in this period, Rhiow looked up into the dirty sky. There was no Moon there, tarnished or otherwise. Depending on whether or not they managed to track back the "seed" event of this chain, it might always wear those terrible scars. But at least now there was a good chance that the world would not."So what's next?" she said to Huff, as they made their way down to the "derelict" platform."That book," he said. "Fhrio, think we'll be able to wring what we need out of the gate logs when we get back?""I feel certain of it," he said. "And with Siffha'h to power the gating, the way she's doing now, there shouldn't be anything that can interfere."He sounded positively cheerful, Rhiow thought. She found herself wondering, a little ironically, whether this was because of how well the mission had gone, or whether it was because soon Urruah and Arhu would be leaving.An unworthy thought. Never mind. It's all worked out nicely. How good it's going to be to get home to Iaehh, and let life go back to normal: our own gates to take care of, no commuting …And Rhiow smiled at herself then. Entropy was not about to stop running. Almost certainly something would go wrong with one of their own gates as soon as they got home, something finicky and pointless that would take weeks to put right …To her horror, the thought was delightful.They came down to the dark and quiet of the platform, and Urruah woke up the timeslide: its wizardry blazed up into the familiar "hedge" around them as everyone took their appointed places. Rhiow looked around her as Siffha'h stepped into the power point and Fhrio hooked one claw into the wizardry. "Ready?" he said. "Anybody forget anything? Now's your last chance."Tails were flirted "no" all around. "All right, Siffha'h," he said. "On standby – ""Now!" she said: reared up, and came down.The pressure came. Rhiow surrendered herself to it for a change, familiar as it was. For home was on the other side …NINEThey came out into darkness: darkness so black that not even a Person's eyes could make anything of it.For a few moments there was nothing but silence. Then Urruah said, "What in the Queen's name – ?"The timeslide wizardry collapsed around them, as if something had stomped it flat. All of them looked around them in shock."What is it?" said Arhu. "Where's the light? What's gone wrong down here?""Nothing," said a soft voice from away off in the darkness. "But something is finally about to go right.""Uh oh," Arhu said, and fell very abruptly silent."Auhlae?" Huff said. He stepped forward carefully out of the circle: Rhiow could feel him brush past her. "Are you all right? What's happened down here?""Nothing that hasn't been promised for a long time," came the soft voice. Rhiow strained to hear it better. It was Auhlae … but it wasn't."What's the matter?" Huff said. "Has something gone wrong with the gates?"Laughter came out of the dark. "That's always your first question, isn't it? No, of course not. The gates are fine.""Oh … good." Huff stopped, unable to see where he was going. "Then maybe you can help us find our way out of here, it's kind of dark …"Yes," Auhlae said … or something using Auhlae's voice. "A refreshing change, isn't it? This is the way it should always have been from the beginning. No garish stars, no dirty little life– infested planets, nothing but the cold and the night." And indeed it was feeling rather cold down here: much more so than it should have even in London in September. "And shortly this is what it will be like on Earth as well. Perhaps not this dark. But no Sun, no heat. Peace and quiet on this worthless little mudball at last."A faint spark of light came up from behind them: Arhu making a light. Before them, away off in the darkness, they could see two blue eyes looking at them, gleaming green in the light Arhu made. Those eyes were further away than it should have been possible for them to be, in a direction that should have been solid wall. And the sound of the place had gone all wrong. The close, underground feeling of it was gone: or rather, pushed back a long way … much further than should have been possible, as if someone had scooped out a great cavern here to replace the tunnels."Auhlae," Rhiow said, feeling the fur stand up all over her at the look in those eyes. "Are you sure you're all right?""You," said the voice. "That you should ask. How very glad I am that you made it back. We have business to settle.""What are you talking about?"There was bitter laughter in the darkness. "You think I haven't noticed you trying to steal him from me? Poor simple Huff. He never was able to tell when someone was making a play for him."Arhu's light was still dim, though Rhiow could feel him trying, vainly, to make it brighter. She could not see Huff clearly, or the look in his eyes. "Auhlae," Rhiow said, "you're completely mistaken.No one has ever had a better mate than Huff is to you, or a more faithful one. And as for me, what possible good would he do me even if I did want him? I'm spayed!"The laughter again. "As if that matters," Auhlae snarled. "Do you think I'm such a fool as to think someone's affections can't be stolen without a uterus? How coy you were about it. Oh so sweet and noble and intelligent, and then when that starts to work, then the weak little queen act, oh-dear-I've-fallen-and-I-can't-get-up … and all of a sudden Huff is washing your ears and whispering sweet nothings in them. There'll be precious little left of them to whisper in when I'm through."Rhiow actually took a step backwards in the blast of raw jealousy: it burned like a winter wind howling down Park Avenue.You, she thought. The Lone Power always hated love, in whatever form. It would try to destroy it whenever It could, as sa'Rrahh had rebelled against her divine Dam's love in the beginning of things. That love was still waiting: but sa'Rrahh, for the most part, was unconcerned."It was you then," Rhiow said. "You were the one who let the first few microgatings through. You saw them, and you didn't do anything to stop them.""I didn't see them!" the enraged voice yowled. "What kind of obsessive would read gating logs so carefully? Do you think I'm the kind of sad case you and your team are: do you think I don't have a life? By the time I noticed them, there had already been three or four. And I didn't think much of it. All gates have these sporadic faults; they go away if you don't try to micromanage them. But then it started happening regularly. The problem went chronic. Even then it still wouldn't really have been a problem: I could have explained it, we could have cleared it up. But then the Ravens noticed – what business was it of theirs? – and they told the Powers, and the Powers called you in. As if it was any of your business either! And after that, how could I let Huff see the gate logs, or let him know I knew anything about what had been going on? He wouldn't have understood why I didn't do anything sooner. You have no idea the kind of fuss he would make. And I couldn't let him know that I'd seen the earlier ones – "Huff was still standing there silent and astonished at all this. "So you tampered with the logs," Urruah said. "Right down to the end. And I thought I was an expert." He put his whiskers forward, ironic. "My compliments.""You think you're such a great one, you," Auhlae sneered. The voice in the darkness was getting softer, more venemous: but the eyes seemed larger, somehow. "Urruah, the conqueror of every heart. I didn't want you!""I didn't want you," he said, rather mildly.There was a breath's pause of sheer disbelief, and then a scream. "You did! You did!! How could you not want me, when Huff did!""Auhlae," Rhiow said softly, "Huff didn't care whether other toms wanted you or not. He wanted you. That was more than enough for him. Don't you see that even now?""As if you know anything about him, or me," Auhlae hissed. "I know why you came. One failure and that's it, isn't it? And They were glad enough to give you an excuse to move in. No forgiveness from Their high and mighty quarter, oh no! They were all too glad for you to lever me out of my place with my team, and take my spot. And take Huff. Well, it's not going to happen. I found help where I least expected it."The eyes were larger. He will never find out, the voice said now, Auhlae's voice … but not quite so much so any more. Everything will be the way it was again. When all of you are dead, or gone, or lost in backtime … everything will be fine here."For a while, Auhlae," said Rhiow desperately. There may still be a chance to call her back, just a chance … "Only for a while. All you can imagine is you and Huff, happy together … no matter what the price. But sa'Rrahh will brook no rivals. Her only love is destruction … like the one she's planning now. You can still oust her if you try: she cannot live in the unwilling heart, any more than wizardry can – "The laughter from away down in the darkness was deafening.Rhiow stood up straight, though she was shaking. "Fairest and Fallen," she said, "greeting and defiance, now and always!" It was the language which the protocol required: there was no need to be rude to the Lone One, no matter what might follow. "State your intentions: and then beware, for we are on the Queen's errantry, and you meddle with Her worlds at your peril!"The laughter came again. I meddle with them as I please, said the Lone Power, said sa'Rrahh, out of the middle of the darkness and Auhlae's surrendered body. It is when others meddle that the peril begins. You have deprived Me of My darkness, long planned, and of the cold that would have fallen a hundred years ago. Very well: you have chosen. Instead that darkness shall fall now.It was not so much that the blackness around them began to break: it was more that something was advancing toward the gating teams, slowly and pleasurably, which made the darkness look horribly less dark by comparison. There was fire in it, but not the kind that gave any light: and many sorts of night which had at one time or another fallen over London, but not the kind with stars. The smoke of the Great Fire was there, and the blackness of the Plague: the fire-shot smoke of the destruction which had fallen from the sky in the second World War, and the eye-smarting thick gray smoke from the burning thatch of the most ancient settlement by the already-oxbowed river. But most of all Rhiow was reminded of the billowing blackness in the uprising mushroom cloud of an atomic explosion … and it occurred to her that, even now, there were atomic weapons stationed in a few places within the ring of the M25 in London. They were supposed to be safe at defense establishments … but when the Lone Power Itself was walking, how safe could anything be?Slowly the dark shape stalked toward them. It was feline: it was sa'Rrahh indeed, in the fullness of Her fury, the Mistress of the Unmastered Fire, intent on their destruction. And they were totally unprepared. Defiance indeed, Rhiow thought. What now?The light from behind her was at least getting a little stronger. The Lone One's influence was damping down every other wizardly power but Its own as It advanced slowly on them: but Siffha'h's new-found strength had not yet settled into channels where even sa'Rrahh could easily muzzle them. She was feeding Arhu power, and Arhu was making light, if nothing else: and in that light, Rhiow looked over at Huff, and said, It's now or never, cousin. Do what you can –He looked at Rhiow, and stepped forward. "Auhlae," Huff cried, "I don't want her! Do you hear me? I never wanted her. You're all I want. This is all for nothing. Cast it out, or everything we've worked for all this time will be destroyed!"Rhiow was desperately trying to assemble wizardry after wizardry in her mind, but it was no use: they were all being damped, every structure collapsing as she began to build it – and sa'Rrahh drew closer, the terrible feline shape towering over them in the darkness now, the size of a house, growing seemingly bigger by the second, filling the whole field of vision with that deadly dark burning. "We've worked for? Laughter again.It hasn't been worth anything anyway. When this is all over, the gates will be destroyed, and we won't have to do that kind of work any more. We can settle down and just be wizards again –Huff took a long breath. "I will not be the kind of wizard that serves what you serve," he cried: "and I will not be the mate to that kind of wizard either!"And he launched himself straight at sa'Rrahh's throat.One great paw lifted and slapped him aside as if he were nothing. Rhiow, flinching, heard the bones crack: saw the body fly past her to come down hard on the seamed concrete which was all that was left of the real world.Sa'Rrahh looked down at Huff's body, put her whiskers forward, and smiled …… and the smile twisted strangely. The lips wrinkled. From inside the burning eyes above them, just for a moment, something that might have been Auhlae once looked out: enraged … betrayed. She screamed, a yowling roar that drove Rhiow crouching down to try to escape it: a terrible squall of betrayal and loss –– and then the light broke through.
All around the huge terrible form, like a cage, a four-dimensional figure appeared, a massive four-dimensional truncated icosahedron, its "extra" sides and volumes unfolding out all around it. The Lone Power looked around it in first astonishment and then growing rage, and began to throw itself against the "bars" of the cage. The cage shook, but it held.
Sa'Rrahh roared. It will not benefit you! The fire comes now, and then the Winter –There will be no Winter, came another great voice – one which was, bizarrely, not one voice, but a union of many. This is the land of the Sun. We are the People of the Sun, and of our Mother Whose sigil the Sun is. By this spell worked, and this summons wrought, we ban the Winter, we ban the Unmastered Fire: we ban the One Who bears it!
Rhiow and the others stood still and stared as the stars began to fall.At least they looked like stars at first. There had been none in the impenetrable darkness. But all around the struggling, roaring shape of sa'Rrahh, bright fires started to fall from far above. They fell in pairs. As they came to the ground, they started to acquire shapes of their own: bodies formed around them. Hundreds of bodies, thousands of bodies, tens of thousands of them, all shining each like its own small sun.Rhiow stared in wonder. They were the People of the ancient days: the hundreds of thousands of cats of the Egyptians, who had mummified them and laid them to rest. Their souls had been in the Tree, or about the One's business, for all these thousands of years: their bodies had lain in the sand for a long long time. Now they were in the gardens of Essex and Sussex, they were under the lawns of the Home Counties, they were in flowerpots outside old townhouses and scattered among the roots of the trees in Green Park: they were all over the City of London, and all around it, for miles and miles in every direction. It did not matter that the mummies of the cats of Egypt had been ground to powder along with the bandages and the amulets which held each its fragment of the protective spell. They had been in contact with them too long, in their long rest in Egypt, not to have become indelibly contaminated by the wizardry. The Great Cemetery of the city of Bubastis was now in England. And its inhabitants remembered the ehhif they loved, who had fed them fish and milk, and stroked them, and loved them in return. They would not let these ehhif perish simply because they were not the same ones.The Lone Power struggled in Her cage, while around Her, for what seemed great distances, stars fell thick from the sky, and became People, all burning with glory. The fire of the Sun persisted in their eyes, which they turned on the Lone One where she roared and crashed about in the cage. Softly, a huge and concerted yowl began to go up from the hundreds and thousands assembled. It built until Rhiow had to crouch down again from the sheer weight and rage of the sound… and the People of the ancient world leapt in fury into the cage with sa'Rrahh, filling it until the Lone One could no longer be seen: and the cat fight to end all cat fights broke out under the streets of London. The noise soon became like the crash of ocean or of thunder, impossible to hear as anything but a vibration, something that got into the bones and shook the listener into submission. Rhiow lay flat, prostrate with anger, but also with wonder. And the yowl, the roar, the noise, went on and on …She could not really tell when it stopped. What Rhiow did notice, though, was the gradual lightening of the scene. Slowly the People of the ancient days were streaming out of the icosahedron, now: they pooled around it for a while, and then slowly began to fade, like a promising dawn fading into a gray and cloudy morning. The physical surroundings began to come back, and Rhiow pushed herself to her feet. The hexaract, finally, was empty. The last few sparks of divine fire in the eyes of the ancient People faded away, taking them with them. And in the middle of it all, on what was left of the platform, stood Ith, his foreclaws neatly folded together, and looking thoughtful as usual.Rhiow staggered over toward him: but someone else was ahead of her. "What took you so long?" Arhu was saying to Ith, rather loudly: he was as deaf as Rhiow at the moment. He clouted the saurian one in the head, a gesture of affectionate annoyance. "I thought you were never going to get here.""At least you were able to See, on however short notice, what was coming," Ith said calmly. "I did not want to arrive with the spell half-set. Our Enemy would have denatured it in a second if it had not arrived already running. Also, I would have found it hard to do so until the Lone One was distracted. And moving such a spell from one place to another while it is active is no small matter." He lookedaround at where the sea of radiant eyes had surrounded them. "But I must say the effect was most impressive … "Rhiow breathed out in immense relief. Her ears were ringing so badly that she could hardly hear: she and her team would be near-deaf for a day or so, she thought. But we got away easy, Rhiow thought sadly, looking down at Huff's body."Look at this mess!" Fhrio said, or shouted, as he came along to join her, slowly, with Urruah behind him. "What in the world are the ehhif going to make of this?" For a huge scoop of tunnel and brick and earth had simply been blasted out of the whole area."They'll probably think it's some kind of terrorist bomb or something," Rhiow said, looking around her at the destruction, the torn-up track and tangled jutting rods of reinforcement metal sticking out of the concrete. She sighed wearily and looked down at Huff again. "And what will we do with him?""I can bring him somewhere where that body may lie easy," Ith said. "Auhlae … " He looked around. "There is no trace. She will have surrended herself willingly … ""Yes," Rhiow said. "Though by the Queen's mercy, who knows where her soul may be? She and Huff might yet be together sometime, somewhere … And he saved us." She looked one more time, sadly, at his body, as Ith picked it up."And that worked, too," Urruah said, looking at the icosahedron. "Nice job.""The time was right. The place was right. The rest of it – " Ith shrugged. "A spell always works … ""Come on," Rhiow said. "Fhrio, let's check your gates … and then go home."It was some hours before that happened. The London team was going to need restructuring: Fhrio agreed readily enough, as its de facto team leader, that Rhiow and her team would come in occasionally to assist until new placements were arranged by the Powers. "I think it would have to be that way anyway," he said, glancing over at Arhu and Siffha'h. "I don't think they're going to be apart much for a whileк"No, I think they've got some exploring of roles to do," Rhiow said. "Meanwhile, we'll have your 'bad' gate up and running again within a couple of days. But before we go … there's one more thing we have to do."Fhrio actually put his whiskers forward at Rhiow. "With pleasure," he said, and went off to bring up the timeslide again so that they could take care of it.Urruah was standing talking to Ith. Rhiow wandered over to him, and as she came he turned to her and said, " 'Artie' … Don't ehhif usually have more than one name?""Some places," Rhiow said."So what was his? Did we ever find out?""Doyle," Arhu said. "Actually he had two last names … unusual. Arthur Conan Doyle." "A very nice boy," Urruah said. "I wonder what he'll make of himself in the world.""Hard to say," Rhiow said, "but he certainly likes dinosaurs … " "Rhiow?" said Fhrio. "Ready."Patel was standing on the District Line Tube platform, looking around him with astonishment. His trainers were covered with mud … but there was no mud anywhere in sight: nothing but the platform in front of him, and a light bulb high in the ceiling.He clearly heard a voice say, from somewhere down low, "Sir? You've dropped your book … "He looked for the voice … but saw no one. Only his copy of Van Nostrand's Scientific Encyclopedia sat in its plastic bag on the floor nearby."Uh," Patel said. "Uh, thanks … " He picked it up, staring again at his trainers: spent a fruitless moment or so trying to scrape the stinking mud off them: and then went on down the Tube platform.Behind him, whiskers went forward: and Rhiow went back to fetch her team, with its new part-time member, and go home.AFTERWORDIn the preceeding narrative, only one liberty has been taken with "genuine" history – the history of our own present timeline, at least. There is no evidence that E. A. Wallis Budge was yet working at the British Museum at the age of nineteen (which he was in 1874): but it's at least possible – he had finished university and was resident in London at the time, where he was a constant visitor to the museum, working closely with the Oriental Studies department, and Disraeli was his patron. Otherwise, all dates, locations and actions attributed to nonfictional persons are genuine. A.C. Doyle, in particular, was in London in 1874 at the age of fifteen, visiting his uncle, the famous children's book artist.The appearance of a gray tabby in Parliament on 9 July 1874 is not mentioned in Hansard, the official Parliamentary publication, but is covered in some detail in The Times of London for the next day. Chris Pond at the Public Information Office of the Palace of Westminster says, "In the nineteenth century there were eleven private residences in the building, and I imagine the residents of some of these may have kept a cat, if for no reason other than to control mice numbers." However, there is no clear explanation of how a cat would have got all the way down from the residences into the Commons chamber, unobserved … unless it was not quite an ordinary cat.
Feline Wizards 02
03 oct 2002 – scanned and proofed for #bookz