The Big Meow

“Rhiow,” Urruah said.

It wasn’t a tone she heard from him often. So she had no choice but to tell him what she had been up to, and how and where Hwaith had found her.

Various shocked looks were exchanged among her team while she was getting through the tale. Rhiow did her best to ignore them. Finally Urruah, who had sat quiet by the food bowl during the whole recital, gave her an annoyed look and said,“Did you think to ask any of us along on this little jaunt??”

Rhiow sighed.“Ruah, everyone was out, and the moment presented itself, and I took that moment. Like you’ve never misjudged a wizardry in your life. Do I have to remind you again about the Oyster Bar incident?”

Urruah’s tail twitched. “All right,” he said. “Point taken.”

“And that didn’t even involve anyone else’s quality-of-life issues – so keep your sense of proportion about you.”

“Yes, O Queen.”

Sarcasm, Rhiow thought: that’s better. “All right. Does anyone else care to take me to task for my night’s work? Last chance.”

Arhu and Siffha’h looked away from each other and began examining the ceiling. Aufwi washed his face. Helen started braiding her hair.

“Fine,” Rhiow said. “So, you two. About Dolores and Ray – “

“A boring night,” Arhu said.

“All this ehhif moaning and boning and rolling around,” Siffha’h said, rolling her eyes. “Urruah, you’d have loved it.”

Urruah put his ears back.

“But finally they finished up with that and our tom started working again on convincing his weak-minded little queen that he knew what was best for her,” Arhu said. “I’m sorry, Rhi, don’t look at me like that, but this one was not bred for brains, whatever else she might be good for. Otherwise she’d see that all this tom wants her for is her sshi’fth.”

It was slang again, and Rhiow once more started feeling grateful that she didn’t understand some of what the kits were saying. “Or maybe something else,” said Siffha’h.

“Such as?” Aufwi said.

Sif was bristling a little.“I don’t know,” she said. “But when they were talking after they finished, she kept trying to get him to discuss what life would be like for the two of them after she got her career running again…”

“And he didn’t want to talk about that very much,” Arhu said. “It wasn’t like he was avoiding the subject on purpose. It was more like he didn’t believe it was ever going to happen. Like something impossible. I Looked at him — ” Arhu’s tail lashed. “And whatever I could get fromhis images of his future life – which were pretty murky except for pictures of having lots of things – one thing’s for sure: she wasn’t there.”

Siffha’h gave him a look. “So when they started doing it again — ”

“I got bored and I left,” Arhu said, in the tone of voice of someone telling on himself so another party wouldn’t have the pleasure of doing it first. “And what I found!”

“What?” Urruah said. “Where’d you go?”

“Back to the house where all the ehhif were partying.”

“Why in the Queen’s name?”

“Because that’s where their meeting is tonight,” Siffha’h said. “They’re going somewhere more important after that, but he wouldn’t say where. Wouldn’t even think about it.”

“Really,” Hwaith said.

“And because Ray was thinking about that house all the time, even in the middle of the most physical stuff,” Arhu said. “And about the little guy.”

“Who,” Helen said, “Elwin Dagenham?”

“Him,” Arhu said. “As if he’s really important somehow.”

“Indeed,” Rhiow thought. Suddenly her thoughts about the party’s host were falling into many new shapes, some of them most unusual.

“But not important in the public relations sense,” said Aufwi.

“Absolutely not. In Ray’s mind, he’s this big dark shape. Dangerous.”

Rhiow’s tail twitched slowly. It was hard to imagine the inoffensive, almost shy figure she’d seen last night as any kind of dangerous. “And you couldn’t See why.”

Arhu sighed.“Not then,” he said. “He was way too full of ehhif sex-think for me to See anything else right then. Which is why I left.”

Rhiow caught the set of growing annoyance in Siffha’h’s ears. “It was wise of you to stay behind,” she said. “Thanks for that.”

Sif’s ears went forward. “So you went back to the house–” Rhiow said.

“They were plenty of them still partying,” Arhu said. “So I just got sidled and walked around poking my nose into things. I wanted to see if I could figure out where the group was going after they met.”

“Are you absolutely sure you weren’t noticed?”

“Of course I wasn’t,” Arhu said. “The ones that weren’t trying to get into each other’s clothes were mostly busy wrapping themselves around as much alcohol as they could find. And not just alcohol, either.”

Helen looked alert.“Drugs?”

“Just hhash,” Arhu said. “There was a little room back in the wing of the building that runs along the hillside. The inside was furnished sort of the same way as the library we saw: and it had a fireplace. Everyone was gathered around that and blowing their smoke into it.”

“Smart enough, I guess,” Urruah said. “That way any smell would vent out up the chimney rather than out into the hallway.”

“Not that one of us couldn’t smell it,” Arhu said. “That’s what brought me down there first. But then I thought, ‘Who knows, maybe the ehhif who owns this place has some other little secrets stashed down here as well.” And sure enough, down that hall a little way is a doorway that looks just like more wall paneling until you Look at it really hard.”

“Show us,” Rhiow said.

A blink later they were no longer in the Silent Man’s living room, but looking at the wall paneling in the hallway of Elwin Dagenham’s house. To the normal visual sense, there was no break in the expensive hardwood paneling at all. But Rhiow and the others now saw what Arhu had seen when he bent the Eye on the paneling. A faint fizz of power described a door-shape in the wood, hiding the actual razor-thin space between door and jamb.

“Wizardry,” Aufwi said, looking shocked.

“Too underpowered,” said Helen, peering at it through Arhu’s eyes. “It’s a charm.”

Auwfi looked confused.“You haven’t run into this kind of thing before?” Helen said. “Granted, you don’t see these a whole lot in urbanized societies. There are some Speech-words for simple things, like the states of visibility or cohesion, that are so powerful they don’t need to be built into a spell by a wizard to work: you can attach them to some physical object and get a fairly good result, though it’s usually pretty low-powered. Even nonwizardly humans can use charms – if they can find the word they need, and learn how to tether it to the right kind of object. People in rural cultures, or lifestyles with strong verbal transmission traditions – and a lot of superstition – tend to hang onto them longest.”

Rhiow’s fur stood up a little. That someone in that house would have the knowledge to use such a thing, combined with what they already knew about the place, disturbed her. “Anyway, as soon as I saw that,” Arhu said, “I went in – “

With him they slipped through the wood of the door as Rhiow had done with the Silent Man’s door that morning. Here was another room like the library and the smoking room, but this one was windowless. More wood paneling lined the walls, there was thick dark red carpeting, and two big comfortable chairs stood in the near corners of the room. The far end of it was dominated by a desk on which lay several very large manila folders.

The viewpoint changed abruptly as Arhu leapt up onto the desk to look more closely at what it held.“You didn’t open them, did you – “ Urruah said.

Arhu hissed in adolescent annoyance.“Why would I need to?” he said. He Looked down at the bigger of the two folders on the desk.

From his point of view, its cover simply melted away, leaving Arhu looking at the top page of the contents. The page was covered with fuzzy black markings that it took Rhiow a moment to recognize as rubbings of some kind. This page had been laid down on some carved surface and rubbed with some soft dark substance, leaving a positive print.

Rhiow squinted at them a little. The designs that covered the page were almost all squarish, each one a little different from the others. There were strong-featured ehhif faces adorned with feathery headdresses, as well as birds and animals crammed into the square shapes: even a few that were feline– big-cat faces, perhaps pumas. All the rest of the designs on the top rubbing were round shapes, intricately carved with smaller designs she had trouble making out. “These are all from the central part of this continent, aren’t they?” Rhiow said. “The part that’s south of here.”

“Mayan,” Helen said immediately, leaning forward to look at them more closely. “Yet with some Azteca features. Strange: those two cultures were pretty clearly separated from one another in time – it’s odd to see the symbologies combined. Arhu?”

“The next one?” he said. Arhu’s view shifted to the page underneath the first. It was similar to the one on top: densely packed symbols, pretty clearly transferred to the paper. But there were spots on this sheet where the images underneath hadn’t transferred correctly to the rubbings. “Some missing stuff here…” Aufwi said.

Rhiow was looking narrowly at the images, waiting to see what the the Whisperer would make of them. In her mind they slowly gained context.“Numbers,” she said. “This is… some kind of calendar?”

“Not so much that,” Arhu said, “as a date book… I think. A schedule for things to happen.”

“Or of when things are supposed to happen,” Siffha’h said.

“They were great ones for calendars,” said Helen, “both of those peoples. But seeing their two writings together like this – “ She shook her head. “Next page?”

Arhu’s view of the contents of the folder shifted, shifted again. There was another page of pictures-that-were-dates, just a list of them as far as Rhiow could tell. Here, too, there were some gaps in the data. Rhiow blinked as she looked at them, for she kept getting the impression that other nearbycharacters were moving a little, trying to squirm out of their own boundaries and squeeze their way into the gaps. “It’s strange,” she said. “Is anyone else seeing these moving?”

Though she couldn’t see him while looking through Arhu’s Eye, Rhiow could feel Urruah tilting his head to one side, gazing at the page. “I am,” he said, “and I don’t like it.”

There was no question in Rhiow’s mind that there was something faintly unwholesome about the way the images on the pages were behaving. “And it’s worse,” Hwaith said, “because just when you think you’ve caught them doing it, that they’re actually about to slide over into the next gap, that then they hold still.”

“Like they know you’re watching,” Auwfi said under his breath.

“The next page?” Rhiow said.

The view shifted. The second-to-last rubbing in the folder was not of more of the squarish ideographs. It was a single image that was so tangled that Rhiow at first had trouble sorting out what was going on in it. But finally she could make out two figures. One was a gigantic serpent with wings, wearing a peculiar headdress. It was wrapped around another similarly adorned animal figure that struggled and slashed with huge taloned paws. Its ears were small and rounded, the muzzle blunt and wrinkled, exposing terrible fangs: behind it a long sinuous tail lashed in rage.

This time all the fur on Rhiow’s back that hadn’t stood up on sight of the charm-effect finished the job. “Now here,” Rhiow said softly, “I think we’re on familiar ground.”

“It looks like this was from a different source than the first few pages,” Helen said. She peered at the image. “Maybe from a later period than the first few. But the Feathered Serpent is known all through the Mesoamerican cultures. Kukulcan, Quetzalcoatl, the Nine-Wind God: he has so many names.”

“One of the Powers that Be — ” Aufwi said.

“That’s right,” Helen said. “He’s a cognate of the one that Western tradition calls the Michael Power, and the One’s Champion – though as usual the correspondence isn’t exact. There are legends all through the Mesoamerican lands of how he lived for a while in one or another of the civilizations, teaching the ehhif the arts of peace. But he attracted the Lone Power’s enmity under one of Its many names – Texcatlipoca maybe is the best known. So rather than enter into a battle that would destroy the surrounding civilizations, the Serpent moved on and made his home elsewhere. That was how he came to the Mayans, the story says, after leaving the Toltec lands.” She shook her head. “In the old stories, the Serpent never stays long — just for enough time to bring his gifts to mortals and make sure they’ve mastered them. After that he’s always on the move, always eager to get back to the homeland of the Gods. He doesn’t fight unless he’s forced to it, because in this particular manifestation he’s too powerful. An all-out battle could have destroyed everything he was trying to save.”

“Well, he has another name in our time,” Rhiow said. “And I have a feeling we may need to introduce you. But that’ll wait for the moment. The Serpent’s enemy– That’s one of our bigger cousins, surely.”

“A jaguar,” Helen said, looking more closely at the rubbing. “Normally there would be spots in the drawing, but there aren’t, which can mean a couple of things.” She sounded uneasy. “But the headdress makes the identification easier. It’s a god called Tepeyollotl.”

Suddenly everyone was exchanging glances.“There’s a name we’ve heard recently…” Rhiow said.

“From the Lady in Black?” Helen said. “Yes. I remember the epithets she was attaching to the name. The Devourer of Worlds…” She shook her head. “But they’re not the usual descriptions attached to the Black Leopard. Originally Tepeyollotl was the personification of the Dark at the Heart of the Mountains. He ruled caves and deep places, and the Mayan eighth hour of night, when they felt that darkness had completely fallen.” Helen paused, swallowed. “But most importantly, he was the lord of echoes and earthquakes.”

That last word brought everyone’s heads up. “Earthquakes…” Aufwi said.

“Yes,” Rhiow said, her fur rising again at the memory of that awful moment in the tree. “There do seem to be a lot of those going around, don’t there…”

“What’s the problem with the lack of spots?” Urruah said.

“It suggests that this image wasn’t of the everyday version of Tepeyollotl,” Helen said. “Earthquakes have their place in the natural order, and the ancient peoples knew that. But they also understood that it wasn’t past the abilities of the Lone Power to cause them when It had reason. The dark pelt would mean that this is also an avatar of Tezcatlipoca, of the Mesoamerican version of the Lone Power: the Lord of the Smoking Mirror.” She rubbed her face. “But he has other names that were supposed to belong to a power even above him: an older one. Ilhuicahua Tlalticpaque, the One who wants to own Heaven and Earth: and Chalchihuihtotolin, the Master of the Sorceries from Outside.”

“Meaning outside our universe,” said Rhiow, feeling as distressed as the Whisperer had earlier sounded.

Once again here was the issue that Hwaith had originally brought to them– slightly better defined, but with no sense of where they were supposed to look for a solution. For a wizard on the One’s and the Powers’ business, there was a tendency to consider Them the rulers or managers of pretty much everything in the known universe-bundle, and the Lone Power the mainsource of trouble. But it was rare for one’s business to require a wizard to deal with issues that reached outside the Powers’ sheaf of universes, or were sourced outside them.

“Arhu,” Helen said, “were there any more pages in that folder?”

“That’s all I saw,” he said.

“All right,” Rhiow said. “Let the Eye go for now…”

The room came back.

“So first we have the poor soulsplit Lady in Black,” said Urruah after a moment, “with her talk of her friend the Devourer shredding up whole universes, ours very much included. And now a concrete connection between her and the group that’s meeting and doing Iau knows what at Dagenham’s… but something that’s helping her nasty universe-devouring friend: very likely at the very least a string of serial killings. Those are bad enough, but what they’re up to is going to destroy their entire world. Are these vhai’d ehhif completely out of their minds??”

It was almost a yowl. Everyone froze in place for a second, and Rhiow threw a glance at the Silent Man’s bedroom door, half expecting him to emerge and demand to know what the problem was. But nothing happened.

“Sorry,” Urruah said then, and tucked himself down against the floor. His tail was still twice its normal thickness. “I don’t know about everybody else, but I am finding this… disturbing.”

Helen sat back on the sofa and started unbraiding the hair she’s braided earlier. “You wouldn’t be alone,” she said. “But let’s take this piece by piece. Somebody in that house – probably Dagenham – has been studying these images hard enough to want to keep copies where he can get at them easily.”

“That’s causing about half of my freak,” Urruah said. “The ehhif in these particular cultures were big on spilling blood, weren’t they? Lots of it.”

“Not at the beginning of their histories,” Helen said. “But they got that way.”

“That being the connection, you’re thinking, to the serial killings,” Aufwi said to Urruah.

“And at the same time,” said Hwaith, “somebody in that house… maybe Dagenham… has been dabbling in charms.”

Everyone was quiet for a few seconds, considering what this new complication might mean.“What’s bothering me,” Helen said, “is that information that we might need is missing from those pages.”

“The gaps…” Aufwi said.

“We need to see the tablets or whatever that those rubbings were taken from,” Helen said. “If there are just gaps in the originals, we need to know that. But there may be remnants of data that didn’t transfer properly.” She looked thoughtfully at Arhu. “We’re going to have to find outwhere the original carvings are.”

“Unfortunately there’s no way to tell that by just looking,” Urruah said. “One of the only weaknesses of using the Eye for research…”

Arhu bristled a little.“Calm down,” Urruah said. “I just mean that we’re going to have to go physically touch those documents to find out where they came from.”

“That’s a project for a little later,” Rhiow said. “Helen, you said the two peoples who did this writing were apart from each other in time – “

“The Mayans abandoned their cities in the ninth century,” Helen said. “The Aztecatl, the People from Aztlan as they called themselves, dominated the Mexican region later – the fifteenth, sixteenth centuries as modern Western ehhif culture reckons it. But they started a great migration from the south, so Azteca legends say, a hundred years after the Mayans vanished.”

“Strange, then, to find the two sets of characters together. We need to sit down and clarify what they mean, what relationship they have to one another – “

So abruptly that the noise made everyone in the room jump, a brassy she-ehhif’s voice burst out singing: “There’s no business… like show business… like no business I know – “

“Sorry, sorry!” Helen said as everyone, particularly Hwaith, stared at her. “That’s my room – “ She pulled her phone out of her bathrobe pocket, and the singing stopped. “Hello? Yes, good morning! No, not at all. – Well, this wouldn’t be the best moment. An hour from now would be better.” She glanced over at Rhiow: Rhiow waved her tail in assent. “…Yes, I needed to sleep in this morning a little, I don’t normally do such late nights! Not at parties, anyway.” That wicked smile popped out again, as if she was imagining the effect of the last line on whoever was on the other end of the phone. “…Really? That’s a lovely thought. Well, assuming they’re willing to back it up with some nice numbers in the contract. …Yes, that would be fine. …How about in the lobby? Perfect. In an hour, then. Thanks so much! Goodbye…”

Helen hung up.“I’m sorry,” Hwaith said, staring at the phone, “but that’s… unusual.”

“There are moments in our time when we wish it was unusual,” Rhiow said. “Enjoy the relative telephonic peace and quiet of your era while it lasts.”

“Paramount and MGM have been after Freddie already this morning,” Helen said. “I have two meetings before lunch… after which I’ll have some leisure to pump him, so very casually, for more information about Dagenham.”

“That sounds fine to me,” Rhiow said. “But the other thing that’s bothering me now is that Arhu found a charm working in that house this morning when we missed it last night. Assuming we did miss it.”

“I would have smelled anything like that a mile away,” Siffha’h said, and now it was her turn to bristle. “It’s something new.”

“Sif, please,” Rhiow said. “It’s just that its presence changes the context a little. An ehhif might stumble onto the mechanics of a charm by itself. But it also might have been given such a thing to use by a wizard.”

Everyone stared, particularly Aufwi.“What kind of wizard would–”

“An overshadowed one,” Arhu said with a growl.

Rhiow waved her tail in agreement.“We might be about to find ourselves dealing with something of the sort,” she said. “Which is why I want to make sure we’re careful about covering our own tracks when we go back there: leaving no traces of wizardry that we can’t avoid. And let’s take the idea a little further. That weird spot you found in the library…” She glanced at Hwaith and Urruah. “Cousins, could what we were seeing there not have been just some old remnant of a gate’s casual presence? Could it have been a portal that was purposely emplaced there by a wizard with minimal gate management experience, then later purposely removed again — and then someone attempted to cover up that it had ever been there at all?”

“Hence the weird way the residue looked,” Urruah said. His tail was lashing. “Could be. I wasn’t thinking that way at the time–” His tail lashed harder. “And you know what? I’m an idiot. I want another look at that right now –”

“Ruah –”

“Saash would have seen that right away –”

Rhiow reached up and cuffed him upside the nearest ear, though with the claws in.“Maybe she would, but she’s not here to ask. You are!” she said. “And I’m betting you’d have thought of that yourself pretty soon. So stop chastising yourself! And we’ll all go have a look… but not right this second.” She waited a few moments for Urruah to settle down again.

“So this list of dates,” Hwaith said. “If this is somebody’s appointment calendar we’re looking at – “

“I suspect it is,” Helen said, “though thinking about the kind of appointments that may be involved frankly gives me the creeps.” She pulled her phone out, put it on silent, and pocketed it again. “We need to decipher the dates and see what they point to. The Dark Lady seemed to be hinting at something that was supposed to happen soon, and my money says the dates on those pages are going to be germane.”

“’Ruah will work on it,” Rhiow said. “He’s best at working with ehhif symbology.”

“The Whisperer will be able to guide you in regards to how the Mayan and Azteca calendars were structured,” Helen said. “But just so you know: one way they organized dates was to group them in thirteen-day segments called trecena, and Tepeyollotl ruled one of those in particular. It was mazatl, the time of hunting one’s prey. If you see any references to that — ”

“Noted,” Urruah said. “I’ll see what I find.”

“You know a lot about this,” Siffha’h said.

Helen smiled.“I came late to my heritage,” she said, “but I made up for lost time when I got there. Meanwhile…” She stretched. “I’d better go get my meetings dealt with, and see what I can find out about Mr. Dagenham along the way. Where shall we meet later?”

“Back here makes most sense,” Rhiow said.

Off to one side a door opened, and a moment later Sheba and the Silent Man came through it. Sheba waved her tail in greeting at everyone and headed for the food dishes, but the Silent Man paused in the doorway, looking around at everybody a little oddly.

Did I hear music out here? Someone singing? It wasn’t the radio, either.

“I’m sorry,” Rhiow said, “yes, you did. That was Helen’s phone.”

Her phone. He looked at Helen. You have a telephone that you carry around?

She smiled and held it out to him. The Silent Man took it, turned it over in his hands, shook his head.“It’s fairly common where we come from,” she said.

And they can all play music like that?

“They can do all kinds of sounds,” Helen said.

The Silent Man raised his eyebrows. Amazing, he said, handing Helen back the phone. Merman just premiered in that show on Broadway. I thought it might have some staying power—

“You’d be right,” Urruah said. “That song pretty much became the national anthem of Hollywood.”

The Silent Man nodded, then turned toward Rhiow and gave her a strange look. I had some weird dreams last night, he said, looking from her to Hwaith.

“I can understand that you might have,” Rhiow said. “How are you feeling?”

He looked thoughtful. Better than usual. You had something to do with that, did you?

“I did,” Rhiow said. “I’m sorry to have interfered.”

The Silent Man stretched experimentally, then grinned– a most unusual expression to see on him, for there was no emotion associated with it besides pure pleasure. Blackie, he said, you interfere as much as you want.

Rhiow bowed her head to him, while wondering when and how she would be able to tell him what she’d found and what she had not been able to do. Meanwhile, he said, what’s our order of business for today?

‘Our,’ Urruah said silently to Rhiow. I like this ehhif more and more. Though I also keep getting more scared for him…

“I’ll fill you in, cousin,” Hwaith said.

“But in short, we’ll be going back to Dagenham’s this evening,” Urruah said. “There’s dirty work going on up there, and we’re going to get to the bottom of it.”

The Silent Man nodded. I have some business to take care of today. In the meantime, my house is your house… and when you’re ready to move, let me know how I can help.

He headed back toward the kitchen, probably to start the first of the endless pots of coffee, and Hwaith went with him.“Cousins, I’m away,” Helen said. “Call me if you need me. I’ll be back after lunch with whatever news I can find.”

“Dai,” the People in the room said to her. Helen vanished.

“Let’s finish eating and be about our business,” Rhiow said. “Aufwi, I was going to ask you about the gate – “

“It’s acting up again,” he said, sounding almost resigned. “It jumped a quarter mile from its last location… and maybe with reason. Did you feel the little earthquake this morning?”

Rhiow shivered.“No. And maybe that troubles me more than feeling it would have. The thought that I might actually get used to such a thing — !” She licked her nose. “No matter – you and Hwaith and I should go look at it, since ‘Ruah is going to be busy with the data Arhu brought back.”

“What about us?” Siffha’h and Arhu said in ragged unison.

Rhiow spent a few moments considering her options before she answered… but they were limited. “Back to Dagenham’s,” she said. “But not both of you. Sif, your power levels make you stand out too much, and I’m starting to feel paranoid about our comings and goings there attracting too much attention…especially when we have to return tonight. And besides,I have something for which I’ll need you here. Arhu, go back to that room, get in touch with those documents and find out where they originated – then come straight back. And while you’re there, do me a favor. Refrain from the Eye at all costs.”

He stared at her.“Why? Why shouldn’t I – “

“I don’t know,” Rhiow said. “No one whispered it to me, if that’s what you’re asking. I simply have a feeling that it’d be wise for you to avoid using it any further today.”

Arhu looked at her oddly, and Rhiow prayed briefly that he wasn’t going to start up another of his trademark power struggles. But, “All right,” he said after a moment, and without any further ado he strolled out through the French doors and vanished.

“You’re thinking that if an overshadowed wizard is somehow involved with these ehhif who’re meeting secretly at Dagenham’s,” Urruah said, “that he or she might pick up on Arhu – “

Rhiow flicked an ear and wandered over to the French doors, looking out into the back yard.“Best to be safe,” she said. “There was no wizard there last night, I’m certain. A mind that uses the Speech regularly leaves an impress on its surroundings that lasts a little while: we didn’t note anything of the kind. And we’d have picked up on any use of wizardry around us at the party that wasn’t to do with our own group. But if that person plans to be there tonight – who knows, they might be ready to stop in early to prepare something for the evening.” Rhiow glanced up at the sky, rapidly lightening into dawn. “The earlier Arhu gets in there and out again with the information we need, the happier I’ll be.”

She turned away from the window.“Now,” she said. “Siffha’h.”

Sif sat down, her ears erect. She looked a little unnerved, for Rhiow didn’t often call her by her whole name.

Rhiow sat down with her.“There’s likely to be trouble tonight, but not just at Dagenham’s or wherever. After we finish our business, whether in that house or elsewhere, we may have to escape in a hurry: and the spot we escape to will undoubtedly be noticed. Aufwi’s gone off to check on the gate again, but in a while I’m going to consult with him and Hwaith about where else we might securely and secretly den up for a short time. But for the time being, we have to protect the Silent Man and Sheba and the other People who come here. We need to set in a barrier that won’t need further attention, that won’tbe immediately obvious even to a wizard looking for it, and that will hold even if we’re under attack or have to escape uptime. You know what powering that kind of spell is going to take.”

Siffha’h licked her nose. “Lifeslice,” she said. “A few weeks’ worth of my life, at least.”

“Are you willing?”

“Are you kidding? I can do it upside down with my feet in the air.”

“I’m not asking how easily you could do it,” Rhiow said. “You know that paying the price can’t be deferred if you’re going to be returning uptime soon, which all of us will be. You’ll have to start paying it here and now, and it’ll decrease your power for the remainder of whatever time we spend back here. If you’re willing to make this expenditure, I need you to consult with the Whisperer and start structuring the spell immediately. You’ll need to leave it part-built in your mind and then finish and execute it when the situation demands. How about it?”

“I can do it,” Siffha’h said. “I’ll start now.”

“You are a queen among queens,” Rhiow said, and licked the kit’s ear. “Let me know when you’re done and I’ll look the structure over.”

Siffha’h headed off toward one of the spare rooms down the hall from the Silent Man’s bedroom. Rhiow glanced over at Urruah. “Shall we step out for a few minutes?”

They slipped outside into the back yard, where a few of the local felines were already starting to show up for the morning buffet. Rhiow and Urruah greeted them, then headed off into the shrubbery nearest the wall.

“Leaving no unnecessary traces of wizardry behind us, you said.” Urruah gave her a look as he sat down on the pine needles that had fallen under the shrubs on that side. “What exactly are you thinking?”

Rhiow tucked herself down on the needles and breathed in the clean dry scent for a few moments.“Well. If Arhu was right – and there’s another wizard involved in this, one who’s overshadowed – “

“We wouldn’t want them to catch sight of us and know we were in play.”

Rhiow had to drop her jaw a little.“It’s always hauissh with you, isn’t it.”

“What else is life,” Urruah said grandly, “but the Game?”

She gave him an ironic look.“Well, surely sex must fit into that worldview somewhere for you.”

Urruah put his whiskers forward.“But you told me to stop discussing the Sex-As-Hauissh paradigm, oh, moons ago now.”

There is no way I can win this, Rhiow thought.“Anyway, yes, I prefer that we stay well out of sight as long as we can. I’m just starting to fear now that we’ve already been seen and lost that advantage. I wish we’d detected that charm sooner.”

“If it wasn’t there, there’s nothing we could have done differently,” Urruah said. “And if it was there, then either it was very subtly done – which warns us of the caliber of opposition we’re dealing with – or it was very underpowered: which suggests that the charm might have been incorrectly built by someone who didn’t understand what they were doing, or ill-handled by someone who was badly instructed.” He paused to wash down the back of his shoulder for a moment, and then gazed off into space. “Either situation might be diagnostic. In any case, I want to look at the thing myself, and I also want to get out there and have another look at that former gate emplacement – if that’s in fact what it is.” Then he looked over at Rhiow again. “But somehow I think that’s not all of what you’re worried about.”

Rhiow’s tail was twitching, and not just at his perceptiveness. “’Ruah,” she said, “if this is the Game, then we’re playing it far deeper than any wizard has before. Deeper than maybe even the Powers have – otherwise why would the Whisperer’s fur be as ruffled as it is? We’re dealing with things from outside the normal physical and spiritual order of our worlds. The Lone One is trouble enough. But at least She’s our trouble. Who knows how power is constituted outside the One’s sheaf of universes? What goes on in other sheaves? Who rules them? Are they even ruled? Is there wizardry there? If so, how does it work?” She shivered. “And can ours compete?”

Urruah’s tail too was twitching now. “You’re thinking we might find ourselves up against some other sheaf’s version of a wizard,” he said. “Or worse: some other sheaf’s version of a Power.”

Rhiow flicked an ear in agreement.“Not a prospect I’m excited about, I assure you! But being prepared is half the battle. If someone contaminated by another continuum’s version of wizardry, or some Power from outside, is working here – then just knowing that’s what’s going on gives us an advantage of sorts. If they expect us to have been taken completely by surprise, then that’s an advantage they’ve lost. It’s hauissh all right, my kit! And we’re caught in the game of our lives.”

“Of everyone’s lives,” Urruah said softly. “Everywhere.”

“So we’d best play hard,” Rhiow said. “Here more than usual, knowledge will be power. We need to know everything that the other players here know – and more than they know. And in a hurry!” Her tail lashed. “Arhu is going to get more of a workout than he’s going to like. And we’regoing to catch grief from Siffha’h because of it. Can’t be helped…”

Urruah sighed.“So here we are having to break new ground one more time,” he said. “You’d think that maybe by now some ehhif wizards somewhere might have run up against something similar, and taken a little of the edge off the problem…”

Rhiow had to laugh at him.“’Ruah, as if we’re not perfectly capable of handling what errands the Powers send us without having ehhif help us out! That’s not a sentiment I’d expect to hear from you.”

Urruah gave her a dry look.“But Rhi,” he said, “it still brings up the question. Why us? Why now? Why haven’t other wizards in our worlds had this problem before?”

“I’m not sure they haven’t,” Rhiow said. “We have to find out if they have, and fast. If this has ever come up before, we have to find out what was done to stop it. I imagine that the other side, whoever they were, believe the data to have been lost. Perhaps it has. Time…” She sighed.“It’s such a solvent. Even wizardly knowledge isn’t proof against it. News gets forgotten, the Speech itself loses recensions, worlds are lost and words get worn down…” She paused to wash a paw and try to calm herself a little. “But regardless, for the moment we have to assume that we’re where we are, and when we are, for the usual reasons: because we’re the best tools the Powers have for the job.”

“Oh,” Urruah said. “No pressure, then…”

Rhiow got up enough to take a swipe at his ear, missing on purpose.“Go on back in there and eat some more breakfast,” she said. “I have to make a call.”

*

Arhu was back in less than half an hour. When Rhiow came back inside after all too brief a time spent meditating and handling necessary physical matters, she found Arhu sitting by himself in the middle of the living room floor, using some of the Silent Man’s spare typing paper to make hard copies of the images he’d Seen earlier. “Well?” she said.

Arhu didn’t answer for a moment. On the piece of paper in front of him, a set of the squarish Mayan characters were forming to cover the paper, with the exception of some of those troublesome gaps. When the figures had darkened down fully, he opened his eyes and started panting a little. A few seconds later he looked up at Rhiow. “There were a couple more pages in the folder when I went this time,” Arhu said.

“Interesting,” Rhiow said. “Someone in that house was looking at them last night, or this morning – perhaps in some other room?”

“I think in another room,” Arhu said, glancing around him at the various pieces of paper. “But the originals don’t like where they are very much; it’s like they’re trying not to notice what they’re used for or who’s looking at them. The house makes them nervous. They really prefer thinking about the past than dealing at all with the present…”

Rhiow’s tail twitched as she thought about that. Inanimate objects couldn’t always be depended on to give one data in much depth, but when they were afraid, it was worth noticing. “Did they know where they came from?”

“Absolutely,” Arhu said. “A museum. I could see their pictures of it.”

“You didn’t use – “

“No I did not use the Eye!” Arhu hissed. And then he quieted down and looked a little concerned. “Not that I would have felt real happy about using it, or staying there very much longer, even if you hadn’t said anything. I was starting to wonder if something was watching me. After just a little while I wanted to get out.” He paused to scratch behind one ear, then looked over at the empty desk. “Where’s our ehhif gone?”

“He’s having a shower,” Hwaith said, wandering in from the kitchen. “So where was this museum?”

“Here,” Arhu said, and put a paw down on a piece of paper that was still blank. It quickly filled with a map of central Los Angeles, and a spot where, within a square of roads, various smaller streets curved toward a meeting-place at the square’s heart. The curves were in marked contrast to the severity of the angles and smaller squares made by the streets all around.

“That’s the Museum of History, Science and Art,” Hwaith said. “It’s down in Exposition Park, where the big rose garden is.”

“You know your way around there?” Rhiow said.

“Fairly well,” Hwaith said. “Errantry occasionally takes me down that way. Getting in won’t be a problem.”

“Let’s go, then,” Rhiow said. It was as if the Whisperer was leaning over her shoulder, looking intently at the map, and bristling with a barely-managed fear that something might not happen in time.

“I’ll do a transit circle out in the back,” Hwaith said. “Give me a moment.” He went out to take care of it.

Rhiow glanced back at Arhu, who was once more looking over the images on the paper. His ears were laid back.“What’s the matter?” she said.

His eyes met hers, and the look in them was genuinely distressed: a reaction he hadn’t been willing to display while Hwaith was there. “Rhi,” he said. “There really was something looking… watching. It felt like what was leaning against the timeslide when we gated in.”

Rhiow hissed softly.“Sa’Rraah….”

“No!” Arhu said. “Not Her. I know what She feels like by now!” His fur didn’t rouse, but Rhiow thought that was only because he was absolutely commanding it to lie still, as a tom not of his pride was in the area and he didn’t want his reaction to show. “She always wants to make you look stupid,” Arhu said. “I mean, She wants you dead too — but the Lone One mostly wants you to think that you were an idiot to even try to fight Her: that She was always going to win. It’s personal, with Her. This, though – “ He turned away from Rhiow as he got up and with a small wizardry swept the papers into a neat pile. “This just wants you dead.”

Rhiow wasn’t sure what to say.

“But we’re the answer, aren’t we?” Arhu said, vanishing the papers into an otherspace pocket. “Iau and the Powers wouldn’t have sent us back here if we weren’t supposed to fix this. If we didn’t have at least a chance.”

Rhiow waved her tail in quiet agreement.“That’s how Urruah and I are seeing it at the moment,” she said.

Arhu hissed as Rhiow had: a small personal sound of frustration and nervousness.“That’s what I thought,” he said. “But I hate this.” His eyes met hers again. “Is it wrong to hate this?”

Rhiow sighed.“Not at all, my kit,” she said. “As long as while we hate it, we just keep on doing what we have to.”

She headed for the doors, trying to look calm for him, and Arhu followed.

*

The museum was surprisingly beautiful for something buried so deep in the heart of a busy ehhif city, and both the building and its surroundings had a spaciousness and grace about them that Rhiow found it possibly to enjoy even in these unnerving circumstances. Down in this part of the city, well away from the hills, there was still some mist clinging in the wake of dawn— though it seemed unlikely to Rhiow that this would last long. From the mist rose a building that featured a big central dome between two smaller ones, and an arched and pillared porch that looked down into the aisles and graveled paths of the huge surrounding rose gardens. The mist softened thetraffic noises drifting in from all sides as the surrounding city surged to life in the brightening morning.

They all sidled before they made their way through the mist and up the steps of the front entrance.“The place doesn’t open for a few hours yet,” Hwaith said. “It should be nice and quiet for us.”

They spoke the Mason’s Word and passed through the bronze-bound doors under the porch, into the huge airy space under the rotunda of the central dome. Had there been any sound, it would have echoed: but the silence here was total, the outside traffic sounds sealed completely away.

Rhiow and Urruah and Arhu paused there on the shining marble floor while Hwaith got his bearings.“Right,” he said. “The last time I was here, all the Mesoamerican stuff was one floor up. The stairs are over here –“

He led them over to the right, where a stairway came down between the lesser right-hand dome and the main one and switched back to follow the circle of the building up and around to the level over the front entrance. There they passed through an arch in the outer wall into a long hall that ran along the front of the building.

Inside it was an unbroken stretch of glass cases on the dome side, and more cases between the windows that looked down on the main entrance. To Rhiow, the sense of profound age that suddenly descended on her as she glanced around was astonishing. It’s strange, she thought, that I don’t get this feeling when we have reason to go to the museums in the City in our hometime. But possibly I’m just getting jaded about those, having seen them so often.

Or maybe it was just the difference in the kinds of things that were here, the more intimate scale of the displays— not the massive statuary of ehhif tombs and effigies, and their bulky-graceful take on the way People saw the Powers that Be, but instead a lavish collection of the things ancient ehhif in a very different part of the world had used in their day to day lives in this part of the world. There were incense burners and effigies of ehhif and beasts, and all kinds of pots and ceramic baskets and three-or four-footed drinking and eating vessels, some of them in animal shapes or looking like human heads. There was delicate jewelry of silver and turquoise and carved translucent shell, and massive pieces – necklets and gold-bound collars in carved jade and polished stone. There were rows and rows of small round-featured ehhif figures made of clay or other baked ceramics, some simply dressed and some ornately; some still painted after centuries, some worn down by time to the red-brown of theoriginal clay. And off to one side stood a great wall of glass, behind which, on many shelves, stood row after row of tablets that had once been square or rectangular or round, but were now well worn by time into less regular shapes.

“This is it!” Arhu said, sounding excited. “I can feel it. This is where the original rubbings came from – “ He started down the long wall of glass, pausing to look carefully at each group of tablets.

Urruah strolled along in tandem with him, looking over the artifacts on the other side.“I never get tired of how old all these things feel,” Hwaith said to Rhiow as the two of them brought up the rear, watching watched Arhu work his way down the line of cases. “It’s not as if ehhif have been here that much longer than People have – they haven’t, of course.” He looked around him, waving his tail gently. “Maybe it’s just that slight sense of alienness… that there’s this other species sharing the planet with us, and their lives are so complex in so many ways that we’ll never really have time to understand. You might go out on the High Road and meet other species that are physically so different, so strange. But ehhif just seem stranger far because they’re right here alongside us, and we just don’t know them…”

Then he trailed off.“I’m sorry,” Hwaith said. “That must sound awfully facile. Or shallow. You’re in close company with ehhif, you said. The situation probably looks a lot different to you…”

“Oh, no,” Rhiow said. She might feel distracted right now by her concern and unease, but Hwaith’s thought was one that had occurred to her more than once. “In fact, if you ever get really close to one,” she said, “it feels more true, not less. At least that’s been my experience.”

“I wonder what it would be like, sometimes,” Hwaith said. “To be someone’s ‘pet’, to let them build that relationship around you. It must be strange to try to balance something as vital as a Person’s independence against the emotional needs of someone from another species…”

Rhiow laughed just a little sadly, thinking of Hhuha.— For the first time in, dear Iau, it’s days now. I’ve been far too busy this last little while… “It’s nowhere near so clinical,” she said. “What does seem strange at first is to find yourself becoming friends with someone you can’t even talk to. Though if things go well, after a while it starts to seem like the most natural thing in the world…”

“Rhiow!” Arhu said. “Look down here!”

“What?” She trotted down to him, and Hwaith followed. “Is it one of the carvings with the gaps?”

“No,” Arhu said. Just briefly, his voice sounded as if he’d found something funny. Rhiow came up behind him, and alongside Urruah she peered into the case. On its bottommost shelf was a tall fired-clay tablet with some of its paint intact though it was more than five hundred years old. It featured an image in the Mayan style of something that could have been mistaken for a crocodile standing on its hind legs. But the “crocodile’s” muzzle was unusually heavy and blunt and short, and its hind legs were much heavier than any croc’s, and its front legs far too short and delicate. Inaddition, no crocodile ever had teeth like the ones drawn in this creature’s jaws: and crocs didn’t normally come patched in yellow and red. They didn’t normally have wings, either, or wear collars ornamented with little cats’ heads.

“That must have given the archaeologists and translators a fun time,” Urruah said, as amused as Arhu. “Let’s see who they think he is —” He peered at the label mounted on the floor of the enclosure. “’Atypical Feathered Serpent motif, Teotihaucan region circa 1500, with ocelocoatl features. Possibly represents the K’iche Maya deity Q’uq’umatz, Creator, Patron of Civilization and Devourer of Darkness.’”

“More like Auto’matz the Devourer of Pastrami,” Arhu muttered, smiling.

“A colleague of ours back uptime,” Rhiow said to Hwaith, who was possibly understandably looking a little bewildered. “A surprisingly senior colleague for someone so new at the job, too. He’s Arhu’s big brother.”

Hwaith gave Rhiow a look that suggested he thought he was having his tail pulled. Rhiow had to chuckle.“It’s a long story…”

“Looks like the locals knew Ith way back when,” Urruah said to Arhu. “Or rather, they know what he’s become since you and Ith started rewriting thte Great Serpent’s story…”

Arhu moved on to the next case.“Here,” he said. “Here’s one that we have a copy of.” He paused in front of a fired clay tablet that had been broken into a number of pieces and carefully mended. Some of the gaps in the rubbing were not merely places where the characters were missing, but where they’d been actively obliterated by some ehhif with a sharp object. In other spots two or three of them were missing because the tablet itself had been broken there, and the material between either pulverized or otherwise lost.

“Okay,” Arhu said, and reared up on his hind legs to pat the glass with one paw. It went misty and indistinct, responding to yet another variant of the Mason’s Word that he’d apparently had ready. Arhu reared back on his hindquarters a little, then jumped up straight through the glass and into the case. He put a paw on the tablet and started talking quietly to it in the Speech. “It must have been awful to be hurt like that, after somebody went to all that trouble to make you. And then getting all busted up! Remember how it was when you were brand new and all in one piece? I’ll help you remember – “

Every wizard has a working style, and once more Rhiow found herself appreciating Arhu’s. What he might lack in structural sophistication when constructing a spell, he more than made up for in youthful enthusiasm and a kind of raw empathy that came across as very touching. It was no wonder that the tablet responded almost immediately. The resin binder that the museum’s restorershad used to replace the worst gaps in the tablet started fading out of sight, replaced by a clay-colored light that started settling gently into the gaps like water with silt in it. The memory of clay fired a thousand years past began rebuilding itself in the actual material: the tablet’s edges sharpened, the shapes of the carvings crisped all across the surface. Finally the effect began trembling in the pits and depressions where characters had been obliterated –

There was resistance. Arhu had stopped speaking out loud, now, and was using the Speech silently, impressing his desire on the tablet. It took more time than the general restoration had, but at last those final characters started filling themselves in. Arhu was breathing hard by the time the work was finished and the tablet sat whole and new-looking in the case.

As she and the others moved in for a closer look, though, Rhiow noticed that the reconstituted symbols seemed to be jittering a little in their places, as if they were having trouble staying restored.“Arhu,” she said —

“Yeah, I see it,” Arhu said, his voice sounding a little strained. “Whoever dug them out really wanted them gone. But I’ve copied this image to the paperwork in case the restitution gives way.”

“Nice technique there,” Hwaith said to Arhu. “Do you know which of these is next? I’ll get it ready for you.”

“Sure,” Arhu said. “It’s that one.” He indicated the first tablet, a round one, on a shelf in the next case. “And that one underneath it, next shelf down.”

“Right.”

Arhu looked back to the tablet he’d just restored. “Rhi, I really think this this is going to need a little of the Eye– “

“Do as much as you can without it,” Rhiow said.

He flicked an ear in agreement, and narrowed his eyes to see the tablet better. For some moments, though, he didn’t say anything, and Rhiow started to worry. “They’re not in some kind of code, are they?” she said, concerned. Normally for codes to be made intelligible to a wizard, at least the cultural context for them had to still be available in some living mind, or recorded in the general knowledge base of some living culture. But if it isn’t –

“No, nothing like that,” Arhu said after a moment. “It’s complicated. But the Whisperer’s helping me. These people’s calendars were really accurate, but so weird in terms of how they divided the months and stuff! They had everything from those thirteen-day cycles Helen mentioned to onesthat went on for two hundred sixty days… and then much longer ones based on Venus’s orbit and Iau knows what else.” His tail twitched idly as he worked out what he was looking at. “But there’s one really long sequence called the Long Count… and this stuff has to do with that. There wereshorter cycles buried in it: hundreds of years instead of hundreds of days or months. And the dates make sense now that the missing stuff’s in place.”

Arhu paused, studying the tablet.“So what we’ve got here are three sets of dates. There are these three long recurring cycles – one that’s three hundred ninety-four years, that’s a b’ak’tun, and one that’s fifty-four, and one that’s eleven. And there are three short cycles of days or months, and three that are very short, just hours or minutes. At very long intervals, all nine cycles coincide. Looks like someone way back when made a list of when the cycles were scheduled to intersect next…”

Urruah looked over at Rhiow.“The Lady in Black did mention ‘three times three times three’…”

She waved her tail at him in agreement. Arhu meanwhile sat there squinting at the characters for a few seconds more, while his off ear flicked again a couple of times as if someone was whispering in it.“Getting it now,” he said. “The years don’t just have numbers, but animal names. All of these are Years of the Black Jaguar.”

The fur stood up all over Rhiow.

“You don’t seem to get a whole lot of those,” Arhu said, laying a paw on one or another symbol to get a clearer reading. “But when you do get a Great Coincidence, it comes in a double pair with another one that’s fairly close: then they don’t repeat again for a good while. The places onthe tablet where somebody came in and chipped out the characters – that’s the last time the cycles coincided.” His far ear flickered again as the Whisperer said something in it. “The way ehhif reckon time, the first coincidence started on June twelfth, nine thirty-one A.D. and ran through till that June fourteenth. Then there was another one that ran from April fifth, nine ninety-four A.D. until April seventh–“

“And the time after that?” Urruah said, his voice completely steady and unconcerned.

Arhu peered at it.“From July twenty-first to July twenty-third, nineteen forty-six…”

Rhiow gulped. From last night until tomorrow night…

“And the rest of that pair is June seventh and June ninth – “

“Of this year,” Urruah said almost inaudibly. “Our this year, uptime.”

“Yeah,” Arhu said… and only then realized what he’d said, and licked his nose several times in rapid succession.

The terror took Rhiow by the throat and squeezed. We’re too late, she thought. Whatever’s going to happen has already started happening! Yet she forced herself to calm down, for there was no proof that they were too late. In fact, the Powers prefer to intervene at the last minute. It gives the Lone One less warning of what They’re about to do,and less chance to find a defense…

“All right,” Rhiow said, working to keep her voice under control. “The question now becomes one of what exactly is supposed to happen.”

“These are ready for you,” Hwaith said from inside the next case.

Arhu paced past the tablets in the case where he’d been working and jumped across into the next one as Hwaith stepped back to make room for him. “Thanks,” he said, looking at the next tablet, which though square had a circular design in the middle and various other pictographs and signs in the corners. “Yeah, this is about the Coincidence too. ‘In this time and only this time may the Dark One become the Shadow of the great and deadly Silence that comes from outside all that is, the Devourer of Worlds: and the greater makes the lesser Its own for that time.” Arhu turned his head to follow the symbols around the curve of the circle. “Yet only by beings within the world may this identity come to be so forged, when they shed blood in rivers, denying their kinship with their own kind, willingly driving out life for death’s and power’s sake.” Now he was standing with his head practically upside down. “Then at such a time if such beings so seek their freedom as to bring about the fulfillment of their desires at the utmost price, they shall have their will, and pay that price; for even the God of gods, in wisdom or folly, has not denied them this freedom, either to preserve their worlds or destroy them…”

Arhu straightened up, and spent a moment wiggling his head around to try to get a kink out of it.“Anything more on that one?” Urruah said.

“No,” Arhu said, jumping down to the second tablet that Hwaith had reconstructed. “Those are just decorations.”

“Good,” Urruah said. He sounded terribly calm, but Rhiow could feel him managing himself as rigorously as she was doing. The last thing either of them dared to do right now was upset Arhu and possibly interfere with his ability to read clearly what he was seeing. “Got that copied too?”

“Did that first thing,” Arhu said. He now sat down in front of the third tablet, which was densely packed with the squarish pictographs, written very small.

“Wow,” he said after a moment.

Hwaith gave him a look.“Wow?”

Arhu’s tail twitched back and forth as he tried to work out what he was looking at. “Whoever wrote this didn’t believe in putting things in order,” he said. And his face wrinkled a little in distaste, like that of a Person smelling something bad. “It’s all scrambled up. The first part is something about ‘The Dark Rift’. And something comes out of it, and it’s really angry. ‘For long has it been confined in the dark, and kept from its home.’And then there’s stuff about blood, too much blood being shed…”

“I hear a theme starting to develop,” Rhiow said, not at all happy about it, and still working to keep her reaction from interfering with Arhu’s work.

Arhu was silent for a moment, his tail stil twitching.“After that it mentions the stars a few times,” he said, sounding confused. “The stars coming out. But ‘after the devouring, the stars are dark…’ Then there are some more date references: to our own time – that last set of dates. And something about the Jaguar again. ‘In the Black Jaguar’s mouth’ – that’s the dark rift again — ‘the Serpent shall be seen, and again they shall struggle. But the struggle shall not go again as it has.’”

The Serpent again, Urruah said privately to Rhiow. Are you starting to think that someone who’s not here really ought to be along on this party?

I was thinking that this morning, Rhiow said. Wait a little–

“Then,” Arhu said, “it says – “ And he stopped. “Rhi, I’ve been really good so far… but this thing’s resisting me. I have to use the Eye.”

“You’ve done brilliantly to get so much out of these as you have without it,” Rhiow said. “Go ahead.”

He leaned close to the tablet and held quite still for a few moments. Rhiow held her breath. Around them all the feel of the room altered subtly as Arhu’s vision of the tablet briefly superseded theirs. Everything else went shadowy compared to the ancient carved designs, which grew deep with uncomfortable meaning. “Now comes the Roar that bursts the earth and lets in the bitter seas, that breaks the dark and frees its dwellers to do battle with the light…”

They could see it as Arhu did– the vast shattering crash of inimical power that waited to wash across the planet, to set the crust cracking and the outraged oceans rushing into new beds as magma broke up through the old ones. The Earth tore itself apart in growing darkness, the sun vanishing in an atmosphere full of the dustand ash thrown up from the broken surface and the thousands of volcanic eruptions along the fragmenting continental plates. Soon there was no light anywhere but the smothering fire breaking up from the planet’s outraged mantle. Then even that faded.The reek of death filled heaven and earth as alllife that had not already died in fire or water now began to do so in ice and darkness…

And it would not stop there, of course. The destruction would spread unimaginably far, the outflooding darkness killing every living world and smothering the stars.“Yet if the Roar is not heard,” Arhu said, as everything went dark, “then shall life be spared until the day, and the hour of the day, shall come again, and life shall again be offered the choice to live or to die forever…”

…and the Earth turned bright again under the sun, unharmed, placid.

The vision faded. Arhu took his paws away from the tablet, shaking his head, and paused to catch his breath. The others looked at each other, unnerved.“Boy,” Urruah said, “you’d really rather be somewhere else when Tepeyollotl lets out with that big meow.”

“But the runup to these events has happened at least once,” Rhiow said. “And the world’s still here. Why?”

“Something must have averted the worst of it,” Hwaith said.

“But that doesn’t mean that there weren’t still serious effects. Remember when Helen said the Mayans abandoned their cities?”

“The tenth century…” Urruah said, and licked his nose. The suggestion fit the dates too well.

Rhiow shivered all over.“We’re going to have to make sense of this as quickly as we can,” she said. In the case, Arhu was making his way down two cases to one of the remaining objects from which rubbings had been made. It was neither clay nor ceramic, but a plain smooth slab, maybe an ehhif foot wide and two feet long, of carved white jade. Temporarily restored to its pristine condition by Hwaith’s wizardry, it was extremely beautiful, even in its mended state. But it had been most comprehensively broken – shattered into six large pieces and numerous smaller fragments.

“Somebody,” Hwaith said, looking up at it, “meant for any reader to understand that this was important. In that culture, gold was all over the place… but jade was precious.”

Urruah was looking at it with great interest.“Yeah,” he said. “This isn’t just someone’s ‘keep off the grass’ sign. What I’d like to know, though, is why someone tried to hard to destroy it. Anyway — Arhu?”

“Yeah,” Arhu said, and sat down in front of the slab, once again bracing himself against it with his forepaws as he Looked at it.

If the last tablet had immediately been eloquent of utmost disaster when viewed with the Eye, this one was less instantly forthcoming– yet it also had a disquieting feel to it, as if it held hidden some secret that might be even more difficult to deal with than a universe’s destruction. “It says the Rift is the key,” Arhu said. “Xibalba Be, the Black Rift, the Dark Mouth…” Rhiow’s vision, like Arhu’s, filled with the image of a huge irregular band of darkness stretching across the otherwise bright streak of the Galaxy.

The Rift grew, or grew closer: it was hard to tell which. But it’s not frightening, Rhiow thought, bemused. Why isn’t this as upsetting as what we just saw? “But then,” Arhu said, “it skips. It says, ‘The old suns will be eaten. The dark and the light will merge and both be destroyed.’ And a little further on, ‘Call upon the Destroyer, do not forget Its name. It will betray – ‘”

He stopped.“Betray what?” Urruah said.

“I don’t know,” Arhu said. “Don’t you see it? I’m losing it. I can’t See – “

Rhiow shivered. For that short time they had all been able to feel with Arhu the equivocal meaning that trembled in the very structure of the stone. But now it was fading, the hidden message of the carving and draining away even while they watched, untl the piece of white jade was just a stone again, carved with strange signs, beautiful but mute.

“I don’t understand it,” Rhiow said, looking up at the tablets. “Why is the context so troublesome all of a sudden — ?”

It’s being interfered with, the Whisperer said.

Rhiow blinked. The thought of the kind of power that could interfere with the functioning of wizardry itself, the very basic use of the Speech to make the normally unintelligible intelligible– But this is the problem. We’re dealing with powers and forces from outside.

“It’s a good thing you did as much as you did without the Eye,” Urruah said. “If you’d used it to start with, we wouldn’t have anything like as much to work with as we have now.”

“Yeah,” Arhu said. But he sounded dispirited as he sat down again, and Rhiow knew what he was thinking without having to overhear it. This was the most important piece, the key to stopping what’s trying to happen — What can be done?? Rhiow said to the Whisperer.

Here and now, that voice said, nothing.

Rhiow held still and considered. Then perhaps we need to look elsewhere for answers than here or now.

The Whisperer paused… and Rhiow felt the other’s whiskers go forward.

“I think we need to do an end run,” she said. “And I’m not going to let myself get too desperate about the Devourer of Worlds until I have a talk with the Devourer of Darkness.”

The others stared at her.

Or Pastrami, said the large calm voice inside all their heads.

*

“Ith!” Arhu shouted, and sat up straight.

Rhiow’s tail waved in satisfaction and relief that Ith had been able to follow the proceedings after she had alerted him earlier. And the connection was surprisingly strong for one reaching so far uptime, and without a specific wizardry having been built to conduct it. “Cousin,” Rhiow said, “we have business in hand here, but it’s being hindered.”

I know, he said.

Hwaith’s ears twitched. “How?”

What my brother sees, I also see. They could all feel through the connection the scratching and rubbing together of saurian claws, Ith’s typical gesture when he was concerned about something. And today I see that I can be of help.

“Indeed you can,” Rhiow said. “Having seen what your brother was looking at – “

I will go to that place in our time and complete what has been begun. And I hear your concern, he said privately to Rhiow; indeed I share it. Forgive my brevity. I will go about this business now, and call you before you depart for your errand tonight.

“Ith,” Rhiow said, “you’re a star.”

She could feel that distant jaw drop in one of the gestures that felines and saurian shared. So it would seem, Ith said, and dropped out of the link.

Arhu came down out of the case and stood looking around him for a moment.“Rhi,” he said, “I’m sorry…”

“You have nothing to be sorry for!” she said. “You did brilliantly. Come on… let’s head out. We need to get back to the Silent Man’s and get some rest before this evening.”

“Though we might,” Hwaith said, “if you liked, stop and smell the roses…”

She chuckled, glanced at the others.“Please,” Urruah said. “I have to confess, the smog has been getting to me a little.”

They headed down the marble stairs and out through that high arched portico once more, wandering down the gravel walks and inhaling air strongly scented with something besides internal combustion. White roses, red ones, gold ones and pink ones, fat rosebushes and thin plants with showy single blossoms, heavy scents and sharp light ones, they were all there.

But there was all too little time to enjoy them. Rhiow was sitting by a white rosebush with huge lemony-smelling flowers when Ith spoke in her ear again: and the sound of alarm in his voice brought her up on her feet in a second. Rhiow, we have a problem.

What?

I have gone to the museum: to the very place I saw with the rest of you. And then to all other parts of it.

Oh, Ith, don’t tell me –

The tablets have not been here for many years. They’re gone…

The Big Meow: Chapter Ten

“Is there any trace – “ Rhiow said.

I can certainly feel their shadows here, Ith said. But after so much time, those are so faint as to be almost impossible to read. I can feel the tablets being wrapped and crated up, and then taken away. But to where…. Rhiow could feel his claws clicking together. Discovering that will take longer.

“This is all wrong,” Arhu muttered, sounding stricken. “Why can’t I See where they went?”

Rhiow licked her nose, intent on not letting her growing exasperation show.“Arhu, take a breath and try to let some of the tension go – “

“Why should I not be tense? We needed what was on that last tablet, it’s really important, I know it is!”

“You should try to stay calm because you’re not going to be able to See your own tail otherwise!” Rhiow said. “You should know by now that vision’s at its least effective when the seer is giving in to stress and trying to pressure the view into happening. Even visionaries with years and years of experience have trouble with — ”

“At this rate I’m not gonna have a chance to acquire years and years of experience,” Arhu hissed, “because we are all going to be dead real soon. In fact we’re going to die before any of us were even born, and I don’t know about the rest of you, but I find that really frustrating!!”

My brother, Ith said, that estimation seems premature, since both of us still exist: and as I would not be here if not for you–

“Oh no you don’t,” Arhu said. “Don’t start with the big cheerful take on the time paradox stuff, because I understand it as well as you do, and the principle of temporal linearity means that – “

Among other things, Ith said, sounding a little dry now, it means I must now become very busy finding the tablets by other means. And from here on in I dare not dip into your timestream too often for the sake of giving you progress reports. Doing so might denature the local timestream enough to make it impossible to reach you when I do discover something useful. Or it might so alert our old enemy to our business that even more attention is brought to bear on you. And there seems to have been enough of that as it is…

“Ith,” Rhiow said, “your caution’s commendable. But we need something more concrete to work with within a few hours than the hints and riddles we’ve got so far. Otherwise we won’t have time to prepare a response by the time Dagenham’s group meets this evening–“

I hear you, Ith said. I will contact you as soon as I have something worth breaking silence for. Dai–

His end of the connection went silent.

Rhiow was unable to restrain herself from letting out a hiss of frustration. Arhu, meanwhile, had begun swearing under his breath again.“ – don’t care, I’m going to get back in there and stare at that thing for as long as it takes until I See what we came here for! And if sa’Rraah Herself shows up and tries to give me grief, She can just –”

Oh, Queen Iau, no more of this right now! Rhiow thought, and stood up to turn around and clout him until he saw a little sense. But to her great surprise Hwaith slipped past her and the increasingly concerned-looking Aufwi, moved gently over to Arhu’s side, whipped one forepaw up and hooked its foreclaw right into the soft middle of Arhu’s ear.

Arhu broke off, his mouth hanging open as he stared at Hwaith in shock, but he wisely didn’t move otherwise: that claw was well set in place to go deep if he so much as twitched. “Listen, young tom,” Hwaith said. “You have to watch what you ask for in circumstances like this. Right now I’m more than happy to answer you on sa’Rraah’s behalf and tell you that this claw righthere is what she’s waiting to stick into every wizard who gets careless or foolish about how they work with others in the Art, especially when everyone’s under pressure. If your team leader is telling you to get a grip and be quiet, then that’s what you need to be doing.”

Arhu didn’t move a whisker even to narrow his eyes, as that would have meant moving his ears… an experiment he looked unwilling to try. All the same, when he spoke, his voice was just a whisker away from a yowl. “You think you know so much?” Arhu said. “You may think you’re a big deal gate tech in this day and age, but you’re not so hot that you didn’t have to come yelling to us uptime for help. And here or there, you are not the boss of me – “

“In the normal flow of events, actually I am,” Hwaith said, “since I’ve been a wizard a lot longer than you have, and the Powers expect you to defer to my judgment when there’s good reason, and to treat me with due respect. But since you’re not paying your team leader the respect she’s due either, then let’s move a tail’s width outside the normal management structure, shall we? Let’s see if you’re willing to move that pretty little not-yet-shredded ear of yours far enough to get loose and find out who’s really the boss of who.”

Arhu’s tail lashed furiously, but he didn’t move otherwise, and kept his mouth shut. “So then,” Hwaith said, and unhooked the claw –

Arhu lashed out at Hwaith fast with a forepaw. But this swept through air which Hwaith was simply no longer occupying, and from the formerly empty air behind Arhu both of Hwaith’s paws shot out and dealt him a one-two slap that left Arhu flat on the gravel of the garden path. He rolled and came right side up in a hurry, crouching down with his ears now well flattened back out of harm’s way, his tail wagging with fury like that of some demented houiff. Then he leapt atHwaith, every claw bared. But once again Hwaith was no longer occupying the same volume of space when Arhu arrived there. The youngster sailed straight through it, coming down hard on the path, and when he tried to turn and spring again, once more Hwaith silently appeared behind Arhu, reared up andknocked him flat.

Arhu rolled and came up crouching again, panting a little now— but this time he didn’t move, just glared. Hwaith sat down in front of him, quite casually, and cocked his head a little, waiting to see what Arhu would do.

Rhiow blinked, astounded by the suddenness of what had just happened. Nonplussed, she glanced at Aufwi, who looked as bemused as she felt, and then over at Urruah. Far from intervening, he was presently smelling a large downhanging red rose on a nearby bush and acting as if his thoughts were entirely elsewhere. Is this some tom-style intervention you two cooked up? Rhiow said to him privately.

Not at all, Urruah said, taking a last breath of the rose’s fragrance. Kind of wish I’d thought of it. But we’ve been so busy with work here that disciplinary issues kind of got shoved to the back of my mind. Now, though –

He strolled over to where Arhu was crouching, and leaned down to peer at the ear by which Hwaith had briefly held Arhu still. Just a drop of blood marked the spot.“That could’ve been interesting,” he said to Hwaith.

Hwaith gave him a casual sidewise look.“No point in half measures,” he said. “If you’re thinking about pulling someone’s ear off, make sure you’re in the right place to pull it all off…”

Urruah merely flirted his tail in agreement. Seeing this, Arhu’s eyes went a bit less outraged and furious, a little more scared.

Urruah bent lower.“Just because you’re useful,” Urruah said, “don’t get the idea that you’re so indispensable that you can be rude to those of us who outweigh you – in seniority, or otherwise.” The way he was looming over Arhu, in a more massive manner than the slighter Hwaith could manage, suggestedthat the always-loaded issues of relative weight and size were now on Urruah’s mind… or at least that he wanted Arhu to think they were. “Because if you let your hormones start talking for you, believe me, we’re going to talk back.”

“And as for Hwaith having come to us for help,” Rhiow said, coming up beside Urruah, “you of all People have no business complaining about where errantry’s needs might lead a cousin in the Art! Or, for that matter, anyone’s ability to handle a problem with or without assistance from others. You had plenty from us, as I recall.”

The three of them stood looking down at Arhu for a few moments more. He kept still, but Rhiow could see that some of the tension was going out of him, if only to be displaced for the moment by embarrassment. Not entirely a bad alternative under the circumstances, Rhiow thought.

“All right,” she said at last. “For the time being, it might be smart if you busied yourself with something concrete while we start setting up our plans for this evening. Go on back to the Silent Man’s, tell Sif to take a break, and go over the structure she’s setting up for us. I’ll want a report on its strengths and weaknesses from you when we get back.”

Arhu stood up as they all backed off to give him transport space.“It’s just makework…” he said under his breath.

All three of them just looked at Arhu and didn’t say a word.

Arhu looked away, the ear Hwaith had put a claw into twitching a couple of times, and he vanished.

Rhiow and Hwaith and Urruah all looked at each other, and then practically in unison sat down to wash— as Aufwi was already doing off to one side, in the polite not-noticing mode of a Person not closely involved in a disagreement. All their whiskers were well forward in amusement, though– not just at Arhu’s discomfiture, but their own.

“Hwaith,” Rhiow said as she licked one paw, “…thank you for saving me the trouble.”

“Not a problem,” he said, scrubbing one of his ears vigorously: the same one in which he’d hooked Arhu, she noticed.

“I feel for our two kits, though,” Rhiow said. “They’ve been caught up in such serious events since we all came together… yet they’ve always produced the result. Which makes me wonder if we’ve come to depend on them too much while they’re still so young.” She glanced at Urruah.

He merely flicked his ears back and forth in a don’t-know gesture and kept on washing his face.

“In any case, it can’t be easy having the Eye so young,” Hwaith said. “Not that the Ear’s exactly a nap on a sunny rock either…”

“But what you said before…” Rhiow paused in mid-face scrub. “Is it hormones? Or just stress?”

“Stress has a hormone,” Urruah said as he finished his wash. “But Rhi, it occurs to me that there may be entirely different hormonal business on Arhu’s mind.” He exchanged a glance with Hwaith.

Rhiow blinked, as the thought genuinely hadn’t occurred to her. “Well, yes…” she said after a moment. There was no specific prohibition against sibling-Persons mating with one another when the blood or the heart moved them to it. There were even versions of the Sehau and Aifheh story in which the Lovers were occasionally born as littermates. Of course People were taught by their dams that there could be too much of a good thing in this regard if it continued over a number of generations, and this opinion was reinforced by the high mortality in the litters and dams of prides that inbred too closely or failed to insource enough new blood. Yes, this situation’s different, Rhiow thought. But there are other problems. When wizardly teammates also start thinking about becoming heatmates, a whole new level of complexity adds itself to every spell and every transaction. And if Sif should actually go into heat…

Suddenly it all seemed just too much for Rhiow to bear. She stood up, her tail wagging as uncontrollably as Arhu’s had, even while the words of the meditation went through her head. Today I shall meet the circumstance it seems impossible to manage, the events that seem willingly to conspire against me as I do my work. These, and my own fear that I cannot manage them, I must recognize as the claws in sa’Rraah’s paw, modeled on my own for the purpose of slashing me more deeply — But the sentiment seemed far less useful today than it normally did. And here I am doing nothing –

“I should get back,” Rhiow said. “I need to have a look and see what Sif’s set up for us – “

“In the state you’re in?” Urruah said, sparing her tail no more than a moment’s glance and going back to scrubbing his ear. “I wouldn’t advise it.”

Rhiow was instantly tempted to tell him what she thought of his advice… and then caught herself, somewhat in shock. I’ve been telling him he needs to start acting more like a team leader, she thought. And when he does, what’s my first impulse?…

Rhiow didn’t move until she succeeded in quieting her tail down: and as usual, doing so paradoxically made her feel calmer. “All right,” she said, “you may have a point. Do you want to go back and look in on her first? And Arhu, naturally.”

Urruah got up and stretched fore and aft.“I’ll do that,” he said. “Rhi, there’s no rush about anything until Ith gets back to us. Take a little self time.”

“I’ll go too,” Aufwi said, and stood up, shaking himself once. “The Silent Man can probably use a more detailed explanation of what’s been going on.” He flirted his tail, a resigned gesture. “And why he probably shouldn’t come along tonight to help us…”

Without more ado, they were gone. Rhiow stood there for a moment listening to the mutter of the traffic off beyond the edges of the Park, then glanced over at Hwaith. She sighed.“I begin to think,” she said, “that I’m the one who needs a dose of the treatment you just handed Arhu.”

He flicked an ear and headed down the path away from the museum: Rhiow fell in beside him.“I doubt that,” Hwaith said. “Just think of the pressure you’ve been under! I get a sense you’re harder on yourself than you’d ever be on your teammates.”

Rhiow laughed under her breath as they made their way along between the rose bushes.“I guess,” she said. “But it’s hard to strike a balance, you know? Even just in normal times…” And she had to laugh again. “I’m having trouble at the moment even remembering what that feels like. Some lovely faraway time when all I had to worry about was the Grand Central gates malfunctioning again… and always in some new and interesting way that I took oh so seriously, as if the Lone One Herself was designing every malfunction just for me.” Rhiow rolled her eyes at herself. “May Queen Iau start sending me lovely problems like that again, instead of the one we’ve got at the moment!”

Hwaith chuckled, though the sound had a dark edge to it.“Tell me about it,” he said. “Everything in my practice was going so smoothly…”

“Until we turned up?” Rhiow said. “Well, don’t forget, it was you who came looking for us…”

The glance he gave her at first seemed a little strange to Rhiow: but then the bronzy eyes flickered away, and Rhiow was left wondering exactly what it was that had struck her as odd.“Yes,” Hwaith said in a tone that struck Rhiow as ironic, “I suppose I’ve no one but myself to blame…”

“For what?” Rhiow said, a touch amused. “The unfolding of causality?”

Hwaith didn’t answer immediately, looking across the great garden toward where the traffic could just be seen moving on the park’s south side. “Well,” he said after a moment, “it’s always annoying when one’s actions disrupt others’ personal schedules.”

That made Rhiow laugh.“It’d be novel to think that the Queen and Her daughters were overly concerned with the details of my schedule,” she said. “Mostly when you agree to wizardry, your schedule becomes something the Powers rewrite as needed.”

“But it’s hardly a one-way agreement,” Hwaith said. “They have a responsibility to us as well. There has to be some reciprocity, some service done in return for the service we do the world….”

“Well, of course, that’s understood,” Rhiow said, watching the spiderling land on a scrap of bark and pause there to get its bearings. It looked about it with eyes almost too small for even a sharp-eyed Person to see, then moved off under another bit of bark. “It’s not as if they ask you to go out on errantry when you’re in heat, for example, or rutting, or kittening.”

“It wasn’t the strictly physical situations I was thinking of,” Hwaith said. “More the personal ones.”

Rhiow flicked an ear at that as she paused in mid-stroll, having caught a flicker of motion out of the corner of one eye. From a bud-tipped stem of one of the nearby rose bushes, a minuscule grey fleck was dropping toward the rough bark-mulch covering the ground. Rhiow leaned close and saw a tiny baby spider, hardly out of the egg, busily spinning its first thread as it made its way out into the great world.“Well,” she said, “you know how it’s supposed to be. No wizardly mission is ever commissioned by Them in strict isolation, we’re told. Every intervention in the Queen’s world is meant to affect not just the problem it’s specifically devised to solve, but every ongoing situation, from the most central to the most peripheral. The ripples spread…”

Down the spiderling went, spinning down on its delicate thread and intent on its business, apparently quite oblivious to Rhiow and her issues and the potential destruction of this world and possibly others.“And even the most broadbased missions,” Rhiow said as she watched, “are meant as much toserve the wizards enacting them as the beings or situations that need our help.‘All is done for each…’”

Hwaith slipped up beside her and peered at the spiderling as it spun gently down.“Even in the situation we’re in now?” Hwaith said.

“I think we have to believe so,” Rhiow said. “The reciprocity ought to get more profound as the stakes rise, don’t you think? If They’re just. Which I think They are.”

The tiny spider came down on a shred of bark and paused there, looking around it with eyes almost too tiny for even a Person with good eyesight to make out. After a second it shook off the thread and started out across the bit of mulch, climbing up the first of a number of shred-marks on the brown, uneven surface like a climber assailing a hill.“Yes,” Hwaith said. “I’d agree with you there. I think that’s why we’ve met now.”

Rhiow continued watching the spiderling as it paused at a“hillcrest” and then started its descent into a valley-crease about an eighth of an inch deep. “You mean in terms of you and Helen and the Silent Man and our team all coming together to do this work –”

“Not exactly,” Hwaith said, and licked his nose. “Rhiow, I suppose there’s never really a perfect time to broach such a subject…”

The spiderling started climbing another“hill”. “Why,” Rhiow said, “what’s the matter? Do you have some kind of personal –”

She had been about to say“problem”, but the look in Hwaith’s eyes, vulnerable and yet peculiarly valiant, abruptly silenced her. “Yes I do,” he said. “Well, not that way exactly.” And he licked his nose again. “Rhiow, back where you come from – when you come from – is there someone for you?”

She completely lost interest in the tiny spider, and turned to stare at Hwaith.

“Well then,” he said. “I just want – no, what I mean is, perhaps you should know that –” He stopped and swore under his breath, and even through her complete shock Rhiow found herself thinking how very like Arhu Hwaith looked in this mode: the same helpless embarrassment, the same uncertainty about how to handle it, whether to be angry or abashed . “Whether you would be able to consider me for that role.”

“Hwaith,” Rhiow said. “Wait. Me?” Her ears were going back and forth in the immemorial gesture of a Person who can’t believe what she’s hearing — one which Rhiow desperately hoped didn’t make her look too much like a confused houff. “Hwaith, indeed I’m flattered, you have no idea, but, but why me?”

He looked abashed.“I don’t know that I’d be much good at explaining the reasons for this,” Hwaith said. “Don’t know that I could explain them to the Queen Herself right now if she showed up and started demanding details.” He seemed more able to look at Rhiow now, and those bronzy eyes locked on hers. “But then She doesn’t, usually. Except in shapes that we’re already familiar with…”

Rhiow sat down again, mostly in shock. Over the next few moments a previously unconnected set of conjectures began to fall into place in her mind, slotting together into one another in almost the way the parts of a spell did when you had all the necessary elements assembled together and were ready to proceed. The speed with which Urruah and Aufwi had taken themselves away. The thought that the“tom business” they had been executing might not have had anything to do with Arhu after all. A whole series of times when she and Hwaith had found themselves off by themselves for one reason or another. Come to think of it, his sudden appearance inside the Silent Man’s mind. Not just anotherwizard helping out with an intervention that was going wrong, she thought. Rather more than that –

She couldn’t help licking her own nose. Dear Queen, this is terrible. What am I going to do about this?

“Please don’t think I’m expecting you to give me any kind of answer,” Hwaith said hurriedly. “Naturally it’s taken you by surprise. Iau knew it took me by surprise. And we’ve got a lot to handle right now, important things to deal with, of course. But when they are handled – “

The question of what that eventuality would even look like left Rhiow utterly dumbfounded. Assuming that we do get everything handled…! She wanted to laugh out loud at the pat way Hwaith had put it. A lot of things to handle. Yes indeed! See off a vast horrible threat from right outside our sheaf of worlds, save the Universe, probably also save a batch of other universes as well: nothing too complicated. And after we get that all tidied up, let’s take some time and talk about having a relationship —

“I, ah,” Rhiow said. “Hwaith, I –” She scrambled to her feet again. “I’m sorry, we really need to get back to the Silent Man’s, I have to have time to look over that spell that Sif’s working on, and there are plans still to be made, we have to work out what to do if Ith doesn’t find those tablets before it’s time to go to Dagenham’s –”

She was babbling, and she knew it. She had rarely ever wanted more to disappear in a hurry, but she was having trouble putting the spell together in her head. And when did that last happen? Rhiow thought.“Forgive me, I’ve got to go –” she said, having trouble even looking at Hwaith now. She finally managed to remember how to assemble the transit spell, practically begging the universe to get out of her way and put her down where she needed to be, most desperately wanted to be, absolutely anywhere but here —

Rhiow vanished– but not without catching a last glimpse of those bronze eyes, resting in hers, unnerved yet at the same time looking strangely relieved. As the rose garden vanished around her, Rhiow recognized Hwaith’s look as the expression of someone who’s finally managed to ask the most important question in his world, and now waits courteously and patiently for the answer that another simply cannot give…

*

A second later, when she appeared in the back yard of the Silent Man’s house, the complete quiet of the place struck Rhiow as most peculiar when compared to the tumult in her mind. She trotted hurriedly into the house and found everything almost bizarrely calm. Sheba was lying on her back in the middle of the living room couch, snoozing while the Silent Man and Helen Walks Softly sat at opposite ends with Aufwi up on the couch’s back, discussing the details of what was likely to happen that evening. They glanced at her as she came in.

“Nothing from Ith…?” Rhiow said.

Aufwi glanced at her in faint surprise.“No. You’d have heard, surely. The backtime connection’s through you, after all…”

“Yes, of course –”

“Where’s Hwaith?” Helen said.

“Still back at the museum,” Rhiow said. “He had some questions –” Which was true.

A few seconds later Urruah came strolling down the hallway from the room where Siffha’h had been working. “Oh, you’re back,” he said. “Sif’s just about done. Arhu’s checking her work.” He waved his tail. “A nice job.”

“Good,” Rhiow said. “’Ruah, come on out and you can bring me up to date on the schedule for this evening…”

They headed out together through the French doors.“I’ve had Sif tailor her spell for around seven ehhif time,” Urruah said. “The group who’re meeting Dagenham will start gathering at his house around seven thirty, so this will give us a chance to start the spell running here and be sure it’s functioning correctly before we go up.” Heglanced back over his shoulder at the man and woman sitting inside on the couch. “Our silent friend knows we don’t want him along tonight, but when he offered to drive us up, I agreed. You were a little insistent about us keeping our profile low today. Being driven to some spot nearby will attract less attention than gating in would…”

“That sounds fine,” Rhiow said as she glanced around the back yard. She kept expecting to see a thin dark shape appear out of thin air absolutely silently…

After a few seconds she became aware that Urruah was looking at her oddly.“Are you all right? You’re looking unusually rattled.”

She opened her mouth to tell him to mind his own business, and once again was shocked at what she’d been about to say. “’Ruah,” she said. “…Hwaith…”

Urruah waved his tail gently.“So he got around to speaking his mind at last, did he,” he said. “I wondered.”

Rhiow sat down.“How long have you known this was in the wind?”

Urruah looked thoughtful.“Since he first turned up in Olvera Street?” he said. “The kits certainly saw how he was looking at you. I imagine even Aufwi may have noticed. Can you have been the only one who hasn’t seen this coming?”

Rhiow wanted to crouch down and simply hide her face: and this reaction too was so unlike her that it embarrassed her.“This is terrible,” she said under her breath. “There’s no way this can be happening. It’s all wrong –”

“In what way?” Urruah said.

She gave him an annoyed look, not sure she much cared for his amused tone.“Well, for one thing, we’re from different times, ‘Ruah! This presents certain problems, wouldn’t you say? And besides, I’m not – you know –”

“I don’t know.”

“I don’t exactly have all the necessary equipment!” she hissed. “I haven’t had it since just before I took the Oath!”

“I think he may have noticed that,” Urruah said.

“Will you stop being so calm about this?!” Rhiow nearly shouted at him, and then was mortified at the way it had come out, practically in a howl of pain.

“I don’t mind holding the calm for both of us,” Urruah said, “until you find yours again.”

Rhiow shut up and concentrated on doing just that.“I don’t know, Rhi,” Urruah said, “ but it occurs to me that he may be interested in you for other reasons besides the straightforwardly physical. What do you think?” And there was a bit of a twinkle in his eye. “I would have thought that a Person of a certain age might actually prefer that kind of approach. You know – after the the need for the ‘kittenish excesses’ of which you keep warning Siffha’h has tapered off a bit.”

There was something profoundly annoying about Urruah using her own sentiments against her in circumstances like this.“Sorry,” Rhiow said. “It’s just that it’s a little, I don’t know, embarrassing to think that the people around you think you need somebody…”

“You know, Rhi,” Urruah said, “I could swear you’ve been talking about the same kind of thing about your Iaehh. Wondering if it’s good for him to be alone, muttering about how he really ought to start looking for someone to share his life…”

Rhiow was strongly tempted to whack Urruah soundly enough to reposition his ears. But at the same time… she thought. “Damn it, ‘Ruah,” she said, “you have a point.”

He scrubbed behind one ear for a moment without looking at her.“Glad to see that you’ve noticed.”

“But why me?” she said under her breath. “And, ‘Ruah, there’s no way it could work. What it seems he has for me, I don’t have for him. And even if I did –”

“Rhi,” Urruah said. “Let it alone. It’s not as if we’re not going to be busy enough, this evening –“

“That’s been worrying me too,” Rhiow said. “How can we work together with this going on –”

“You were doing it earlier in the day,” Urruah said, “and it didn’t seem to affect his performance. If it’s your performance you’re concerned about –” He flirted his tail at her. “You’ve got a few hours to settle yourself, so if you need to meditate, I suggest you get on with it. Or go look over Sif’s power layout, or help brief the Silent Man…”

“Or just get a grip,” Rhiow said, flicking an ear at him in agreement. “I hear you. … I supposed this was just one thing too many to take at that particular moment. What I really want to be hearing is Ith’s voice telling me what those other tablets say. Because if we don’t find out before we go…”

“I know,” Urruah said. “But meantime let’s go finish doing the work we can do. Not even the Powers can do more than that.”

Rhiow did indeed spend a little time with the Silent Man, and most of that in convincing him that he shouldn’t come with them that night. The others had attempted to explain to him that what they were doing was too dangerous, but when Rhiow saw that taking this tack was getting them nowhere – indeed possibly having the opposite effect – she moved immediately to a different tack.

“Naturally we’d want you with us,” she said, “if there were a simple way to keep you from being seen. All we have to do is be invisible is sidle…but for an ehhif it takes more work. If you accompanied us, someone would have to hold that spell in place for you – and that someone wouldn’t be free for other wizardry should there be need. But what’s more to the point is that while we’re working up at Elwin’s place, the best place for you to be is following up on matters that we can’t effectively pursue. There are some loose ends…”

“That studio fire, for one,” Helen said, sounding thoughtful. “The police connection is still a little murky. They didn’t do the kind of follow-up you would usually expect. And the local fire chief doesn’t seem to have been inclined to dig into causes, either. Almost as if somebody or other told him to just accept the studio fire department’s story and walk away…”

The Silent Man looked from Helen to Rhiow. Not that we don’t have our share of crooked cops, he said. The take goes way up the chain: has for years, now. And the fire departments are always squabbling over jurisdiction — famous for it. So I take your point. However – He gave Rhiow a look. Don’t think I don’t know a misdirect when I hear one, Blackie.

Rhiow’s tail started lashing with her exasperation. After a moment, embarrassed, she got it to hold still again – only to find the Silent Man soundlessly laughing at her as he cocked an eye at Helen. And you’re just as bad. Now, don’t start batting those big dark lashes of yours at me, sister! He gave Helen a mock-severe look. But all right… I know better than to push in somewhere I’d be more of a liability than an asset. I’ll sit this one out. How’ll I know what’s going on with you, though?

“We’ll find a way to get you word,” Rhiow said. “In fact, we have a silent partner working up the timestream from us who’d be perfect for the job. Assuming we hear from him before we have to go…”

She threw a glance at the windows. That eternal sunshine was already beginning to slant into afternoon; soon enough it would be early evening, and whether or not Ith had come through, they would have to go.“In the meantime,” Rhiow said, “if you’d like to drive us over within walking distance when it’s time, that’d be useful.”

The Silent Man nodded.“You don’t even like the idea of doing personal transports over that way?” Urruah said.

“No,” Rhiow said. “The less attention of any kind we draw to ourselves, the better I’m going to like it. Anyway, for now let’s get everyone together for a prebrief so that our silent partner will know the order of business. Who knows, he may come across something of use for him to look into…”

Urruah went off to gather everyone together. Shortly the whole team was gathered in the living room except for Hwaith and Aufwi.“Hwaith said he had something personal to attend to: he’ll meet us at Dagenham’s,” Urruah said. “Aufwi had to go deal with something gate-based… he’ll be along shortly.”

“All right,” Rhiow said. “So here’s the situation. As far as we can tell, there aren’t any overshadowed wizards involved in this operation. Judging from what we’ve found so far – especially the charm that secured the room where Arhu found the tablet drawings — Dagenham and his cronies have found and have been employing some fragments of wizardry, probably long phrases in the Speech, that are powerful enough for nonwizards to use as standalone operators.”

“Normally only a wizard can do spells,” Urruah said to the Silent Man. “Wizards in active practice are invested by the Powers that Be with a property called ‘enacture’. Without enacture in place, spells don’t run. But the Speech is the language that built the Universe… and some words and phrases in it are so powerful that even without enacture, they have the ability to change the world.”

Magic words… the Silent Man said. It’s like something out of a fairy tale.

“Lots of fairy tales have truth in them,” Rhiow said. “That’s one reason they last so long. But these fragments of the Speech can be found scattered around the landscape of human history like ancient relics or weapons. Some are worn down by long burial, almost unrecognizable. Some are clearto see for what they are, and can be still be used. We think it likely that Dagenham’s people have been using such fragmentary spells to try to control or command some of the minor dark powers associated with the Lone One: the idea being that the scavenger-powers have more energy to lend to the ehhifs’ intent.”

Leverage, the Silent Man said.

“Exactly. That’s something we can put a permanent stop to, and we’re going in tonight prepared to do that. But something worse is going on as well. My guess is that Dagenham or someone connected with him is preparing to enact another sacrificial murder, the latest in the sequence that this group of people, wittingly or unwittingly, has been facilitating. If they succeed, the Earth will move, and the sky will break, and powers from outside our sheaf of worlds will push in through the crack and try to establish a permanent presence here.”

Sounds bad, the Silent Man said.

His dry understatement was surprisingly calming, considering the way the mere description of the work that awaited them had made Rhiow’s stomach roil. It settled now, a little, though the reaction might be irrational. It’s like something the Great Tom would say, Rhiow thought. And why wouldn’t He speak through an ehhif if it suited him? The whole point is to speak and be heard…

“It would be bad,” Rhiow said. “In the aftermath of the quakes associated with the arrival of the power the ancient ehhif called Tepeyollotl, Los Angeles would certainly be destroyed in fire and water: and that’s just the least of the expected effects. I’m sure the poor dupes involved in this business somehow think they’ll be spared if they succeed… but they’re crazy.”

The Silent Man sat quietly for a moment. Knowing that you people have all kinds of amazing abilities, he said, I’m noting that you’re not making any offer to send me and the local feline population to safety.

“Because if we fail,” Helen said, “nowhere we could send you, in the short run, would be any safer in the long run than where you are right now. If this is the last day for all of us, better that you and the local People should go about your business, and their business, with dignity.”

And hope you succeed.

“I like our chances,” Urruah said, sounding a whole lot calmer than Rhiow felt. “Pity there’s no one to take the bet.”

Through his concern, the Silent Man got a glint of amusement in his eye: but over to one side Rhiow caught a glimpse of Arhu and Siffha’h exchanging a glance, and she could feel some private thought passing between them. Must ask about that later, if there’s time…

The French door on the backyard side of the room pushed open a little, and Aufwi slipped in.“Sorry,” he said, “I had a couple of local gate issues. It’s acting up again…”

“Why wouldn’t it,” Urruah muttered. “It has to feel how everything’s hanging in the balance right now…”

“And we’ve been doing that as long as we dare,” Rhiow said, “but we must get moving and get over there now. I could wish we had the last tranche of information that we need… but no matter: we’ll have to do without it.” She stood up. “Iau be with us in its absence, for we’ll need Her.” Her tail lashed with unease.

“Wait, what?” Aufwi said. “What’s still missing?”

“Ith can’t find the carvings uptime,” Rhiow said. “They’re not in the museum any more!”

Aufwi looked surprised.“What, at Exposition Park?”

“Of course, what else would she be talking about!” Urruah said.

Aufwi blinked at him.“But of course the carvings wouldn’t be there. They moved them.”

Rhiow stared.“What?”

“The pre-Columbian art was only in the old Museum until the Sixties,” Aufwi said. “But they ran out of room up there with all the other stuff they kept cramming into the same little space. So they built a new place, the LA County Museum of Art, down on Wilshire, by the Miracle Mile. ‘MuseumRow,’ they call it now: there’s a whole bunch of them down there – the Page Museum over by the Tar Pits and a few others.”

Rhiow sagged with relief.“So it’s just all been moved across town –?!”

“Only five miles or so,” Aufwi said. “Just tell your friend–”

Rhiow sat down again, reached down into her mind and poured everything she’d just heard down the until-now dormant link to Ith’s mind uptime. “I’ve told him,” Rhiow said. “Aufwi, I don’t know whether to pull your ears right off because you didn’t think to tell us this earlier, or to thank you and beg to have your kittens.” She caught Urruah giving her aslightly peculiar sideways look, and laughed. “Though in my present state that would take a lot of work. Never mind! Ith — ?”

I will go there straightaway, Ith said. As soon as I’ve seen the tablets, I will speak to you.

Rhiow stood up and shook herself.“Let’s get ourselves ready, then,” she said. “Last snacks and other personal business…”

All the People in the group dispersed and left Rhiow standing all by herself in the middle of the living room, feeling suddenly very alone and frightened, and wishing she could show it to someone, anyone. The Silent Man and Helen were talking quietly together, but Rhiow could see from their body language that it was something intimate in the ehhif mode, and interrupting them seemed rude. This is all so strange, Rhiow thought, and shivered. I want a lap to curl up on. Why do I feel so insufficient, all of a sudden?What’s the matter with me?

Slowly she turned toward the French doors and walked out into the back yard. What‘Ruah said may have something to it, she thought. Some meditation time is what I need. Let’s get on with it.

She just wished she could make herself believe it would make a difference….

The sound of the motor of the Silent Man’s big car purring away down the empty, narrow hillside road where he left them seemed very loud to Rhiow as she watched her People and Helen melt into the underbrush at the roadside. She stood there watching the big gleaming thing cruise slowly round the curve and pass out of sight. I wonder if he really understands what he’s gotten into… she thought.

Siffha’h, pausing beside Rhiow for a moment, looked past her at the vanishing car. “Rhi,” she said, “you have no idea how much energy I pumped into the wizardry around his house. It’d take a nuke to get through it.” As Rhiow opened her mouth, Siffha’h added, “And it’s not a conditional,either, so don’t give me that look. Whether we’re dead or alive after midnight, he’ll be as safe as anything can make him while he stays on this planet. Or in this continuum.”

Rhiow immediately felt guilty for treating Sif like a kitten.“I wasn’t –”

“You were,” Sif said. “You can’t see what your ears are doing.” Her tail was lashing, but it didn’t seem to be annoyance with Rhiow: rather with the whole situation they were stuck in. “Let it go.”

Rhiow put her tail over Sif’s back as the two of them stood for a last moment looking out at the strengthening glitter of the LA city lights, all a-tremble as the day’s heat rose into a sky gone dark umber with twilight. “I just want you to know,” she said, “that you’ve proven yourself a wizard to be reckoned with a hundred times over in the last year.”

Further down the hillside, the lights of the Silent Man’s car rounded another curve, briefly gold on the dark road, and vanished again. “Well, you’ve been a pretty good team leader, too,” Siffha’h said. “I’d say I can speak for us both on that, though getting my dimwit brother to say as much…”

“He has his ways of saying it,” Rhiow said. “Don’t worry on his part. Meanwhile, the others are waiting…”

The two of them slipped into the hillside brush after the others. There were no houses along here: the hillside was too steep even for the most ambitious ehhif builders to risk putting houses on it. Up at the top of the hill, though, where Dagenham’s house was perched, was another story.

Rhiow caught up with the rest of the team where they waited in the brush. Helen, now wearing dark sweats and sneakers and with her hair tied back tight, was crouching down under a gnarled Manzanita bush and digging her hands into the dry crumblyleaf-mould mulch. Under it the ground still had a touch of dampness left over from the soaked-in morning dewfall: Helen rubbed her hands in it an then rubbed her face to get rid of any shine and go darker and more patchy.

“You could just sidle,” Arhu said.

“Sooner not,” Helen said. “Right now I have this feeling that something up there is watching, watching… The less wizardry, the better.” She looked over at Rhiow.

“We’re thinking inside the same skin, cousin,” Rhiow said. “I’d sooner get in there without sidling if I could…”

“There might be a way,” said a voice from the shadows.

Hwaith came slipping out from under another of the manzanitas, half-invisible in the deepening twilight to even a Person’s eye until he moved. “Would you believe,” he said, “that this place has a wine cellar?”

“Not sure how it could avoid having one,” Urruah said, “having seen how the party crowds here soak the stuff up.”

“So right,” Hwaith said. “Natural cooling from the hillside. Locked on the inside, obviously. A nice iron gate to let the visitors see down the length of the tunnel. But you know…” He waved his tail. “There must be a lot of condensation when the temperatures on the hillside get really hot.”

“Which in this climate would be mostly…” Aufwi said.

“Because there’s a drain channel down the middle of the tunnel, and the condensation runs down it into a little pipe that lets out, oh…” He turned and wandered over to another bush a few yards away. “Right about here.”

And of course once you were looking for it, or right at it, it was impossible not to see the terra-cotta drainpipe all covered with detritus from the brush all around, and dully moss-colored from the parched moss that was growing in the only place it could manage to. The runoff hadn’t managed to dig too deep a gully on its way down the road: mostly it soaked into the ground and fed an unusually green and well-grown patch of brush.

Rhiow slipped over to the pipe and looked at it, then bent down to measure the width with her whiskers.“Kind of a tight fit…”

“Not for those of us who’ve been watching our intake,” Hwaith said, glancing in an idle manner toward Urruah.

Arhu and Siffha’h collapsed briefly into muffled adolescent snickering. Aufwi hunted more or less desperately for some other direction to look in. Urruah gave Hwaith a glance that might have been avuncular if fewer of his claws had been retracted at that moment. “Child,” he said, “watch and learn.”

Urruah bent down and gradually vanished into the pipe, though it was educational to watch what he had to do with his hindquarters to manage it. Rhiow slipped up beside Hwaith and said under her breath,“How can you joke at a time like this?”

“Now or never,” Hwaith said, giving her one of those sidewise looks. “I’d say this is the time for making use of last chances.” And in he went after Urruah.

Rhiow stood there feeling for a moment as if a claw had been very purposefully stuck into some previously unidentified tender spot on her hide. No one else had a look for her; Arhu slipped into the pipe after Urruah, and Sif and Aufwi after him.

Helen simply vanished… though not completely. Rhiow looked around her and saw nothing but a little shiny green beetle sitting on the ground where an ehhif surely no shorter than five foot eleven had been squatting. Where have you put your mass?? she said silently. And that wasn’t even a wizardry. How did you —

Elsewhere, Helen said. It’s a bit of a talent. She scurried up Rhiow’s tail onto her back. Quickly now, cousin, I’m compressed down pretty tight here –

Shortly, so was Rhiow. The kits had made light work of the pipe, and even Urruah had maneuvered himself in here somehow, but Rhiow found herself wondering whether Iaehh’s description of her as “plumptious” might actually have some foundation in fact. If anything’s left of the fabric of reality after I get back, she thought, I’ll have to look into it… She crawled along paw over paw, her back scraping the top of the pipe, though she was trying to keep it flat for Helen’s sake. Where the aueh are you?

Between your shoulderblades.

Rhiow hissed as she pulled herself along. It’s not even as if I drink that much cream.

How much is that much?

You’re not helping. Way down at the end of the pipe she could see a dim light. I’m a wizard, Rhiow said silently, and in considerable annoyance. In the course of my Art I will be thrust into embarrassing positions and situations that I may consider unbefitting to my dignity. I must remember that no dignity of mine matches that of Those who conferred my office upon me –

I’m betting you won’t catch Aaurh the Mighty stuffing Herself into something like this, Helen said.

The light was closer. Rhiow found it hard not to laugh, despite the weight and press of events. Cousin, she said, if we’re spared and come back to our own time and place, most seriously I desire your better acquaintance: because for an ehhif you’ve a very Personish sense of humor.

I take that as high praise, Helen said, and may the Queen take the mouse straight from your mouth and so claim it for her own that only the tail hangs out when She’s done. Here we are now –

Maybe a yard ahead the pipe widened out into a tiny tunnel with a grille at one end, perhaps a foot wide. The grille, though, was thin wire stuff susceptible of being bent to one side by a Person approaching with enough intent from the far side: and whatever intent Hwaith might have earlier imparted to it, Urruah had added a whole lot more. The grille was well bent askew from the bottom up, and Rhiow peered out under the bent-upwards part into a long dimly-lit space with an old tiled floor and brick walls.

Rhiow slipped through the opening and paused, looking around at the others, who were checking the space out. Helen scuttled down off Rhiow’s shoulder, down her leg and onto the floor, and beetled well off to one side near the closest of a series of dusty wood-and-wire wine racks stacked up high against the walls. A second later she was in ehhif shape again, down on one knee on the bricks and glancing around. “I’ll bet this isn’t the only space under this house that’s dug into the hillside like this…” Helen said.

“We don’t need to search the place,” Rhiow said. “The guests are going to be arriving pretty soon. All we need to do is position ourselves here and there inside the house and close to it, hidden, and wait to see where they go.”

“Not being seen is going to be the issue,” Siffha’h said. She was bristling.

So was Arhu. He was staring into the shadows behind the wine racks nearest him as if he thought the dusty bottles were likely to come at him. But it wasn’t just dust he was seeing. “The place is full of sthahheh,” he said, hardly above a whisper.

Rhiow glanced at Helen, not sure if she knew the Ailurin word. But Helen nodded.“Amrakyumara,” she said, a word of her own language, and “behind” this Rhiow immediately heard the Speech-word ukfasht. It was the blanket term for the dark beings that were not quite ghosts and not quite demons, never-embodied minor energies of darkness that gathered and clung around sa’Rraah and Her minions, battening on the power of Her hatred and Her desire for unlife.

“Where were they when we were here?” Urruah said under his breath.

“Probably penned up somewhere,” Arhu said. “But the shadows are all boiling with sa’Rraah’s nasty little pets. Like rats, rustling.” The fur was standing up all over him. “This place is one big garbage can to them, just waiting to be tipped over…”

“Penned up,” Rhiow said, thoughtful. The suggestion made her bristle. It was possible that Dagenham and whoever was working with him hadn’t wanted to take the chance that some of the ehhif visitors might be sensitive to such manifestations. She liked that possibility a lot better than the idea that the shadow-imps had been locked up because the conspirators thought that a few wizards might find a way to sneak themselves onto the guest list. And because I like the other possibility better, that means that this one is far more likely…

“Exactly how well can they see us, I wonder?” Aufwi said.

“For now, the way we see them,” Rhiow said. “As shadows: more sensed than truly seen. They need intention – evil intention – and concentration, to make them more than vaguely aware.” She started up toward the far end of the tunnel, which was barred by an elaborate iron gate, all curves and whorls of black metal. “Anyway, they’re not going to get that from us. What we need to concentrate on is finding where the ehhif meeting with Dagenham are going – “

That was when they heard a door open down the hallway past the iron gate, and the sound of footsteps down the hall.

All heads came up.“Arhu!” Rhiow said. “You’ve been in here most. Drop some out-of-the-way hiding places into our minds. We’ll all transit quickly in a lot of directions – attracting less attention or at least creating more confusion if anyone who understands what transits look like is watching. Keep the noise of it down, everybody! We’ll keep our heads down while Arhu goes to ground and Sees for a little. Arhu, find where the shadows are thickest – I’m betting that’s where tonight’s meeting will be. Don’t speak for a quarter of an hour ehhif time. Then just a burst to me. All of you, get ready to go!”

Helen vanished again, and the People swiftly melted into the shadows, waiting for the iron gate down at the other end to open. It would be only a matter of a few moments before before an ehhif or two walked in here, and their attention as usual would be on trying to make out where they were going, not what was going on behind them. Their eyes are always bad coming in out of light into dark, Rhiow thought, putting herself backwards into the dusty spot between two wine racks. Cobwebs plastered themselves all over her fur, and behind her a crowd of spiders cursed her out in tiny voices.

It wasn’t their voices she was intent on, thuough. “ – wasting the good stuff on them – “ said someone.

“I wouldn’t worry about that,” said a second, more familiar voice. “After the big one goes down, we’ll have enough of this stuff to swim in if we want it.”

Silhouettes stepped up to the gate: one tall, one smaller, slighter, both male.“Hard to imagine what that’s going to be like…” said the taller one.

Here, Arhu said to Rhiow, and showed her the spot he intended for her. She started to flick her tail in acknowledgement, and then stopped it to keep from discommoding any more spiders as the location manifested itself in her mind: a level up and down a hallway, tucked away underneath a tall cylindrical shape that Rhiow recognized as an old-fashioned hot water heater. She hooked the location’s coordinates up to the fast-transit spell she kept ready in her thought-workspace, but her mind wasn’t really on it. She was concentrating on the clatter of the big key in the lock, the casual laughter of the smaller of the forms. Dagenham, Rhiow thought.

The gate swung in with a creak: he stepped in, the other ehhif behind him. Rhiow kept perfectly still and concentrated on being as small and black as she could, while the two shapes came down the middle of the wine cellar-tunnel.“Haven’t had much time to spend on that,” he said to his companion. “Last-minute logistics are such a bitch. But it’s all coming together tonight at last…”

It amazed her, even in this dimness, to see how very differently Dagenham carried himself from the way he had at the party. No diffidence now, none of that unease of a functionary among persons far more important than himself. All that was cast away. At the moment Dagenham was wearing only casual dark trousers, a white shirt, suspenders; but now he was clothed in much more. From endless hours spent in New York streets watching every kind of ehhif, Rhiow knew the look and body language of success, of certainty, of arrogance among their kind, and Dagenham was wearing them all.

The two came closer, most of them out of sight from her point of view now except for their shoes. One pair of them, the other ehhif’s shoes – a pair of brown wingtips — stopped as he looked at something in the wine rack above Rhiow. She held her breath. “How many of them even understand what’s going to happen?” the ehhif said. “Or what’s going to be asked of them?”

The second pair of shoes kept going. Down low, Rhiow felt a breath of air– one of her People transporting out with maximum caution. Oh please let them mistake it for a draft, she thought. Better to do that from behind them rather than in front of them, they’d be more likely to believe a draft was coming that way – For the thought of the crowding shadows that Arhu had Seen was much with her. Too easy for them to alert this man or someone working with him if they get really conscious of us —

“If they haven’t figured it out by now, then we don’t need them,” Dagenham said. “It’s been spelled out again and again. Now that the last package has arrived, we’re in the endgame. If they make the offer, it goes easier with them. If they try to hedge their bets by not offering…”His footsteps kept on going down the wine cellar, paused at last.

Clink, clink, went one bottle against another. Across the way, behind one of the opposite wine racks, Rhiow saw a white-and-black patched form sliding along the wall toward the door, paying no mind to any spiders’ complaints. A second later the shape was gone, with even less wind this time. Sif. Good.

“Maybe they’re just not sure,” said the second ehhif’s voice. Rhiow cocked an ear. All of a sudden he was sounding familiar somehow. Was he at the party? Could have been — There had been such a press of ehhif there, so much noise…

Another breath of wind, even more slight this time. Aufwi, she thought. Or Urruah. I shouldn’t wait, I should go… “There’s no time left for that,” Dagenham said, against more clinking. “You of all people should know. You’ve got all your choices made, even this last-minute one – “

“Well, why not?” said the second ehhif, and Rhiow could hear the shrug in his voice. “If They want her, fine. If not, I’ll have the use of her for a while…” He paused: clink, clink. “Red or white?”

Wait, Rhiow thought. Wait, I do know him–

“For this?” Dagenham chuckled. “Red. Don’t want to dilute the color scheme…”

They started back toward her. No more time: she had to go. Rhiow activated the transit spell with the greatest care—

Darkness, and a space small for her, as Rhiow could tell by the feeling she got from her whiskers even without moving to check the impression. In front of her, a crack-defined square with faint light coming through it. Warmth from above: that would be the water heater Arhu had shown her. And partly between her and the light, something was swiftly fading into solidity—

Images of possible lurking shadow-imps flooded over her. Rhiow fumbled hastily in her mind for a spell as the dark thing came darker, came real…

It dropped its jaw at her, and bronze eyes glinted in the light from the crack around the door. It was Hwaith.

Rhiow sagged with relief, but also annoyance.“How does this keep happening?” she said. “You’re just stalking me, that’s all…”

“I promise you, it was an accident,” Hwaith said, and Rhiow was surprised to hear that he sounded as testy as she felt, at least for the moment. “Took the coordinates our young cousin gave me and never gave it a second thought. So blame him. Or blame it on sa’Rraah if you feel the need, andwe’ll take it out of Her hide later.”

Rhiow crouched there and tried to manage her annoyance.“All right,” she said, and for the next few moments sat quiet and listened.

She could hear a faint buzzing at the edge of hearing. She glanced up at the water heater, wondering if the noise had something to do with its electrical system. But that didn’t seem to be the source. “Hwaith,” she said, “you have the Ear…”

“It’s them, all right,” he said. “What Arhu heard.” His ears were flicking with his own annoyance. “They’re like rats in the walls here. Disgusting things…”

Rhiow tried to calm herself down a little, concentrating on her breathing, which sounded loud to her. Nothing to do now but wait until Arhu reports in… Yet at the same time she was quite aware of how not so much as a hair of Hwaith’s fur was touching hers, despite how small this space was. Without looking as if he was crowding away from her, nonetheless he was; and after that first glance he wouldn’t now look at her.

Rhiow stayed crouched down and breathed for a while, waiting to see if the tension would relax at all. It didn’t. And there’s spellwork coming, she thought. This isn’t good. It could interfere with the way the team operates, and most especially now that can’t be allowed…

“Hwaith,” she said.

He turned one ear in her direction, didn’t move otherwise, didn’t speak.

“About before…”

The ear flicked, but that was all.

Rhiow sighed.“Hwaith…” She wasn’t quite sure where to begin. “And what you said. It’s not that I’m not honored…indeed, flattered…”

He finally flicked a lazy glance at her. She eyed Hwaith’s whiskers carefully in that darkness, judging how far forward they were set. Hwaith’s look was entirely neutral.

“But you have to know it’s impossible,” Rhiow said, as gently as she could. “Leaving aside the issue of our separate times – it’s just not a thing that can happen….”

“’Impossible,’” Hwaith said, giving Rhiow a challenging look. “If we were younger wizards, it’s not a word either of us would be using.”

“Of course that’s where the youngest of us get their advantage,” Rhiow said. “But we’re both well past that stage now: not just lives along, but years. Wizards our age have to rely on expertise rather than mere blunt power.”

“And always run the risk of forgetting how our own definitions of possibility limit what we can do,” Hwaith said. The tone wasn’t accusatory: he might have been discussing the weather. “And as for the lives: that’s exactly the point. Neither of us is in a place in our travels where we canafford to just say ‘Maybe next time will work out better.’ Are we?”

For some seconds Rhiow was silent. Her soul was suddenly full of the echoes of her shock at discovering, not so long ago, that Saash— Saash who she thought she’d known so well — was nine lives along and nearing that final threshold that no wise Person approached without some unease. No one had any way to know whether he or she was one of those whose lives had brought them so closely into tune with the Powers’ way of being that they would inherit the gift that Aifheh and Sehau had won in sa’Rraah’s despite. Many People made light of that gift, saying that nine lives should be enough for anybody, and that an eternity of service afterwards was more than even the Gods had a right to demand. But Rhiow wasn’t one of these.

The issue of the number of one’s lives behind and the number yet to come was one not lightly discussed by any Person, wizard or not. Rhiow noticed that Hwaith had not volunteered any specific data. But he’s smart enough to read the signs, she thought, being familiar with them in himself… “Hwaith,” Rhiow said at last. “Why me? It can’t be … mere physical issues…”

Hwaith did put his whiskers forward then.“You have a bit of a blind spot,” he said, “for the physical issues.”

Then he hurriedly ducked away from the swipe she aimed at him.“So,” Hwaith said, though good-humoredly, “that prey was well spotted. Rhiow, what would be wrong with someone finding you beautiful? And I’m not talking about just the way you move. Or the wise way you handle your team. Why would it make me an idiot to say that I like your eyes? And what looks out of them.”

She was warmed, and embarrassed, both at once.“You are an idiot,” she said. “And by that measure we’re well matched, because so am I for letting you go on like this! Sweet Iau, Hwaith, consider the circumstances! Ehhif sacrifice, earthquakes, the Lone Power being wooed by some bigger darker power trying to use Her as a tool to destroy the world, and the Queen only knows how many other worlds too – this is not a time to be thinking about romance!”

“If you may never have another chance, it is,” Hwaith said. “Especially when you haven’t seen anybody in this life that you think it might work with, and suddenly they come along. What, am I supposed to bury my Personhood in a hole until circumstances improve? And in a universe where Entropy’s running, when’s that likely to happen, do you think? It’s who I am that makes me of use to the Powers. Or so They keep telling us.”

Rhiow had no immediate answer to that, and had to fall back on a different angle of approach, one that she was a lot less comfortable with.“Hwaith, that’s not the real problem here,” she said. “It’s just that…” She suddenly felt ashamed to say it, and had no idea why. “It’s just not returned,” Rhiow finally said, very low. “It means a lot to me, that you feel so kindly toward me, but I just…”

He looked full at her, and Rhiow was peculiarly relieved to see that Hwaith didn’t look hurt. But the expression in his eyes was strange in other ways. “Kindness has nothing to do with it,” Hwaith said. “The heart spoke, is all. It knew something I didn’t. Knew it the moment I laid eyes on you.” He looked away. “I could almost say I’m sorry. Except wizards don’t lie, and I’m not sorry –”

Rhi, Arhu said.

She licked her nose, looked away too. Ehhif are arriving, Arhu said. Some in groups. And I’ve seen where the first few went as soon as they came in. Down on the level where the wine cellar is, but right on the other side of the house, up against the big hill: there’s a door at the back of another of these little rooms. I can’t see in there very well: it’s heaving with sa’Rraah’s little jackals.

All right, Rhiow said. Pass the news to the others. She thought for a moment about whether it would be wiser to wait until all the ehhif were in, or go early. Early won. Arhu, I need you to go in first, she said. Hide and look around. Then pass us coordinates and we’ll slip into some quiet spot that you recommend.

Fine.

And remind Sif to keep her power-presence low and quiet! Rhiow said. The jackals are going to be twitchy enough at the feel of her just being in the space. The less reason they might have to crystallize their attention out, the better.

She knows that, Arhu said.

Good. Where’s Helen?

Aufwi says she’s sitting on his head. Arhu sounded bemused. Is anybody going to tell me exactly how that works?

If we see the dawn, I’m hoping she’ll tell me, Rhiow said. And ‘Ruah –

He’s closest to the door into the hill. Down the hall and outside. He’ll come in right after me.

Fine. Choose your moment, then send along the coordinates. And if you should hear Dagenham nearby, be very sure not to be seen. There’s something about him – Rhiow bristled a little.

All right. In-mind silence fell again.

The silence outside her mind was far less comfortable to deal with. Rhiow licked her nose again: she couldn’t help it. “Hwaith — ” she said.

“Rhiow, don’t,” Hwaith said. “Let it lie. If dawn comes and we see it, there’s time to take this further. And maybe no need to.”

His tone wasn’t flat or neutral: he genuinely wasn’t upset. Rhiow couldn’t understand it, because she certainly was.

She got busy calming herself down again. I seem to be doing so much of that, she thought. It has to be due to spending such a while in the wrong time…. It was a well-known side effect of prolonged timesliding. A day or so wouldn’t do much harm: the soul fairly quickly forgave you the injury of being briefly decoupled from its proper temporospatial alignment. But the longer the decoupling lasted, the worse the effects, and if you –

I’m in, Arhu said.

His tone of mind was unnerved. What? Rhiow said silently.

A long moment’s silence. Rhiow’s fur started standing up. Are you all right…?

You should see this–

Don’t show me! Just wait till ‘Ruah gets in. Then give us the mark to hit.

A few seconds later the coordinates appeared in their minds. Rhiow’s eyes met Hwaith’s. Let’s go –

The Big Meow: Chapter Eleven

They came out in shadow nearly as deep as the little cupboard they’d left. But the feel of the space on Rhiow’s fur and whiskers was instantly different: high, wide, deep. The air was unnaturally cool, unnaturally damp, and utterly still; and except for one faint light away off to Rhiow’s right, everything was nearly as dark as night.

They were in a natural cave that reached up above them into the upper reaches of the hillside behind the house. But the cold rammed-earth floor where Rhiow and Hwaith now crouched, with Arhu and Sif and Urruah and Aufwi behind them, was well below the level of the wine cellar. The hard dirt under their feet felt surprisingly damp, considering how hot and dry everything was just a matter of forty or fifty feet above them on the surface.

With the others, deep in shadow near one of the cavern walls, Rhiow held absolutely still and looked around. The wall behind them was just raw earth mixed with haphazardly buried stone– rocks and boulders that looked like they might have been washed down into pressure-hardened mud many years ago by some flash flood in one of the surrounding ravines. Roots stuck through the raw earth of the walls here and there: in places the wall had crumbled away, leaving little piles of unregarded dirt. Holes in the cavern walls suggested that small creatures had tunneled in or out over time. It was hard to imagine rabbits coming down this deep: the immediate assumption had to be rats.

The space enclosed by the damp earth walls was roughly circular, though the ceiling was higher down toward one end than at the other. In the dimness, maybe fifty feet up, Rhiow could just see some roots hanging down through that ceiling, possibly the roots of one or more trees up on the hillside, all shriveled and dried out from not having found water. Beyond that, the cavern had no unusual characteristics except for what lay in its center.

At first she thought it was just a single circle of rough stones, maybe thirty feet across. They were not carved as far as Rhiow could tell, maybe not even shaped: lumpy, rounded boulders, longer than they were wide, more or less stuck in the ground. Inside them, and outside them, were two matching rings of smaller stones. There were perhaps twenty of the big ones, and maybe thirty of the smaller stones in the outer circle. The inner one was harder to judge, partly because as Rhiow looked at the stones, she found herself having trouble getting a count. There was something about the stones that made her dislike looking at them.

Hunting circle, Helen said silently. Or it started out that way….

This is something to do with your people? Siffha’h said.

It might have been once… a very, very long time ago. But then someone started using the ring for some other purpose. A pause. And then it looks as if at some point a hillside fell on it… which suggests the other purpose might not have been very wholesome.

Did the Azteca ehhif ever come up this far? Aufwi said.

I don’t know, Helen said. It doesn’t have to have been them. Just someone who perhaps had been down into their lands, heard from them about the powerful being they were beginning to worship… then brought the news up north.

Rhiow’s tail lashed. She looked rightward toward the source of the faint light, sniffed the air. Something’s burning –

It’s one of those little camp lanterns ehhif use, Arhu said. It burns one of those petroleum liquids they use. I saw one bring it in a while ago through the door they’re using down there… then he went away. A few others came in too, looked around, then left again. They were talking about the others coming here, getting ready to come in here very soon and do something…

Probably best we should scatter around before they start coming in here in numbers, Rhiow said. Stay by the walls. Their eyes aren’t anything like as good as ours under these conditions: they won’t be able to see much even if they bring more lights in here.

Her team split up and took off in both directions. Off to one side, Arhu was lingering. How many have you seen coming into the house so far? Rhiow said.

Twenty or so.

All right. Go on. And Arhu– He paused. Watch Sif’s back. She’s likely to make the difference between us being able to stop what starts happening here or not making any difference at all.

Don’t worry… I’ll be right with her. He faded off into the darkness.

Rhiow looked at the stones again, trying to force herself to concentrate on the nearest of the large ones. It was hard: she felt her eyes burning as something made her want more and more to look away. Nasty, she said. Come on, Hwaith, no point in lurking there and hoping I won’t notice you. If you’re going to be with me, be with me.

She headed off toward the nearest of the big stones, being careful to keep it between her and that dim light down by the doorway. Are you seeing what I’m seeing? Hwaith said.

I’m not seeing much of anything, Rhiow said as they got closer to the stone: her eyes were bothering her more and more as she tried to focus on the thing.

Not that, Rhiow. Look at the strings!

Unusually for a gate technician, she had been paying little attention to the hyperstring structure in the area. Now Rhiow made the little mental shift necessary to alter the way she was seeing the physical world, and the hyperstrings in the area sprang into view. But she didn’t see the normal relatively straight warp and weft of brilliant lines that grossly marked the structure on which the physical universe was hung. Here the lines of force invisibly filling the air were all warped out of shape, unnaturally bundled together around the circle, as if they were writhing away from the stones in the circle.

It wasn’t the stones themselves that were the major force disrupting the string structures, however. It was the hard-to-see diagram dug into the rammed clay in the circle’s center. All right, Rhiow said silently, we knew something like this would probably be here… She moved forward cautiously, avoiding the chance of touching any of the stones, and watching where she put her feet to make sure she didn’t come in contact with any of the figure inscribed into the ground. Even if the thing was composed entirely of fragments of charms, it was entirely capable of containing “tripwires” that would alert whoever had drawn it.

From way down the cavern, near the wall, she caught a flash of Urruah’s eyes as he paused near the kerosene lamp to look back her way. This is so un-Hollywood, he said. There should be all kinds of evil carved figures, a big dais, a sacrificial altar…

We’ve got more than enough nasty stuff here without starting to complain about the aesthetics, Rhiow said, pausing at the edge of the diagram and looking it over. Behind her, Hwaith was circling past one of the stones to her left to get another angle on it.

Rhiow had been half expecting either a clumsy aggregation of mangled Speech-symbols or one of the peculiar but nonfunctional spell diagrams that had percolated down through ehhif popular culture from medieval times, some farrago of alchemical symbols, ancient languages and confused numerology. But this was neither. Scratched in the ground the diagram might be, no polished work, but all the essential elements of a spell circle were here. Inside a series of nested envelopment circles and intersecting power management rhomboids were many long and intricately interconnected statements in the Speech. Rhiow knew she could spend a good while teasing out the fine details, but the overall structure made the spell’s purpose clear. It was meant to contain and trap power funneled into it from outside, and it was full of symbols and contractions that had to do with the confinement of extracted life force. The means of extraction were obvious enough: the broad bloodstains were still in place, the color plain even though the clotted blood had been scraped away. With the blood, soaked into the ground under the spell circle, she could feel the remnants of many previous ehhif attempts to contact dark forces and twist their power to the ehhifs’ will. Blood had been spilled then too, though with far less focused purpose than most recently. Rhiow looked away from the biggest pool and saw something that in its way troubled her more: the eight stones dropped here and there on focus points of the circle’s inner diagrams. At least they looked like stones at first. But if they were stones, then someone had gone to a great deal of trouble to carve each one into the likeness of an ehhif’s torn-out or cut-out heart…

Rhiow shook her head at the low, angry, hungry buzzing noise that was getting louder every minute while she stood inside the stone circle. Here one could clearly hear sa’Rraah’s little minions, and sense them thronging thickly around, just as Arhu said. You could feel them in the air but most especially in the ground, through your feet, as if yellowjackets had buried nests everywhere under the floor. The shadow-imps were reacting, not just to the presence of wizards here, but to the greedy and ambitious ehhif who had once again been stirring up that old pool of darkness with their desire to control it. And more so than usual, Rhiow thought, because this time the stakes are so much higher. This time sa’Rraah has so much more to gain if the ehhif’s endeavor succeeds…

Out at the edge of the circle of stones, Aufwi had slipped out of the shadows to examine the circle more closely. There was definitely a gate here, Rhiow, he said. You can see where the ambient string structure’s deformed by the material memory in the floor of the previous gate anchoring, and there are some temporary mooring receptacles still sunk underneath this circle. But some time in the recent past the gate was moved to that temporary anchorage we found upstairs… maybe while somebody was workingon it who didn’t want to be down here all the time.

I can understand that, Rhiow said, for that dark buzzing at the edge of things was getting more and more unbearable. And something else was troubling her: an increasing sense of being buried, buried alive, buried in ground that nonetheless was thinking about moving, moving the first chance it got, killing everything… She shook herself, told herself to stay focused. Anyway, it’s not up there now. And it’s not down here. Where’ve they got it stowed? Because whatever gate was operating here was extremely powerful, on a par with a hardwired permanent gate. It has to have deranged everything else for milesaround whenever it went operational. No wonder the formally emplaced gates in the area have been acting so badly….

She glanced over at Hwaith, whose tail was fluffed out to about three times its size as he stared at the spell diagram. Gating issues were plainly far from his mind right now. Rhiow, this is very bad, he said. This isn’t just some clueless ehhif dabbling. This is professional stuff.

Her tail lashed in agreement. It’s unquestionably the Speech, Rhiow said. Unquestionably a spell. But now we’re left with the question: how could it possibly ever enact? No wizard in the Powers’ service would ever build a spell like this. Or expect anything to come of it —

Yet then Rhiow had to stop, for at least once now she’d seen a wizard working in a Power’s service because it knew no other source of power… and his spells had enacted. But that was in another universe, a whole pocket world in the Downside that the Lone One had subverted to its own intentions. This is the Powers’ world. This kind of thing can’t work here –

It can if the wizard’s physical tie to Them has been completely severed, Hwaith said, his voice full of pity and dread. And all that remains is a soul-shell that walks and speaks and hates…

Her eyes met his in the dark, widening in realization. And down at the end of the cavern, the door opened and ehhif started filing in.

Swiftly and silently Rhiow and Hwaith fled for the walls, staying in the shadows. Those writhed and darkened now in the light of the tall torches some of the ehhif were bearing in with them. In and in they came, making for the circle of stones, the line of approaching ehhif parting around it as they came near: one to the left, the next to the right, left, right… They were all dressed in long dark blood-colored garments, and the embroidery on these caught the torchlight here and there with brief glints of gold and silver as the ehhif moved to surround the rings of stones.

Robes, Urruah said softly. They’re wearing robes with ‘arcane’ symbols on them. Do you believe this?

You were the one who was wanting this situation to get more filmic! Rhiow said. But I wouldn’t mock. Anything that makes it easier for whichever of them is really behind this sordid business isn’t to be ridiculed, much though we might feel like it. And these people live in Drama Central, by definition. Her tail lashed. But Ruah, feel for yourself! Not one of these people is a wizard —

A last shape came in through the door at the cavern’s end, himself carrying something in his hands that Rhiow couldn’t make out, something small and dark and hard to make out against his clothes. Slowly he came, like the person in whose honor the first part of the procession had been staged. He too was wearing a robe, but it was dead black, without any arcana embroidered on it. Elwin Dagenham’s pale hands and his white face, in this dark place, seemed almost to float along by themselves, bodiless, a most peculiar effect.

He took up the one position in the circle that had been left open for him, and stood there a moment, looking around in the torchlit dimness with an expression of supreme satisfaction. Rhiow was astonished again at the difference in Dagenham, for he was now completely unlike the diffident little figure from the party; he was holding himself more erect, looking more prideful, far more in control. Robes or no robes, Dagenham looked like he had a purpose in which he believed implicitly and which made him far greater than he allowed others in the daylight world to believe.

“Friends,” he said, “tonight is the night.” And that pallid little voice that Rhiow had only before heard cajoling, pleading, flattering, now was also completely changed. It filled the place, even in that space where the raw earth of the walls should have deadened sound. “We’ve drunk the cup and welcomed our new member to the society of the friends of the Great Old One.” He nodded in the direction of one small robed figure.

Rhiow looked at her pale face and recognized a woman who she’d last seen being walked out of the upstairs toilet in Dagenham’s: Dorothy, who nodded to all the others, wearing a smile that Rhiow suspected was just this side of going small and scared. Beside her, a taller figure, that handsome face showing above the robes: the man who had been kissing her. Rhiow looked down and thought she saw brown wingtips.

“And now we get down to business,” Dagenham said. “The other friends of the Great Old One, the Strong Ones, have done us many favors in past months. Careers have been rescued, personal harms have been avenged, wealth and influence have been showered on us. And the Strong Ones ask so little ofus in return! This month they ask for more than usual… but this week they will give us far more than usual, more than we’ve ever dared to dream. Let’s honor them!”

Everyone in the circle bowed, but it was Dagenham they bowed to. He stood there, his head high, receiving their homage as if he was actually entitled to it. There was something so histrionic, so theatrical, about the gesture, that Rhiow suddenly suspected she understood him as fully as she needed to. The Lone One’s little friends, or sa’Rraah herself, had offered him the one thing that would be sweetest to him: to be a leader, for a change, instead of the one who was forced to follow the rich and powerful and beautiful, arranging their contacts with the news media and picking up what crumbs of gratitude they dropped. Here, among these people, he was more: still a facilitator and a conduit, but one who now stood on the brink of power unimaginable to the people he’d been forced until now to serve.

“This is the night of nights,” Dagenham said. “Now at last the final piece of the puzzle falls into place, and we come into our own…” Under what he was saying, the dark buzzing had fallen into step with the rhythm of his words, reinforcing them, pulsing in time with them, so that the group circled around the stones seemed to start to sway a little in time with the buzzing.

He’s sold, body and soul, Rhiow thought, caught between pity and disgust. Sa’Rraah has him under her paw. Worse: Tepeyollotl the Eater has him. Dagenham already sees himself as King of the World. Yet he hasn’t thought it through. He really must not understand that the position won’t last him past the time when the sky tears open and the darkness floods in. Or he’s convinced himself otherwise. He’s too used to a world where every contract can be renegotiated if your lawyer’s just good enough…

“The Great Old One is with us now,” Dagenham said, his eyes catching the light of the torches as he turned, “here in His strong place: the one who’s lived forever in the old darkness under the hills and behind time. And His friends the Strong Ones are with us, all around us. Can’t you hear them, singing the song of power as they have before? But this time, they sing it differently – this time, more strongly than ever before. Because after what we’ve done for them in these last weeks, and these last few days in particular, they’re finally about to start coming into their own. Because of how we’ve helped them, they will rule the world. We, their friends, we will soon be princes of the Earth, and all the people who’ve been running things forever, telling us what to do forever, will soon find that the old order has changed. We are the new order. The old night has come toput an end to the new day we were promised, the day that hasn’t turned out to be worth having! The great and the powerful have spent four years and endless lives squabbling over something that at the end of the day just doesn’t matter. Now it’s time to turn to other powers, older powers. And one that has the power to truly change the world – “

You have no idea! Rhiow thought. But now we get to the meat of it–

“And now they send their servant – “

From the darkness out at the edge of the shadows came a dark form. Not robed, but all cloaked in a shadow that moved heavily as if she wore one, the Dark Lady came. She was as tall and beautiful and cold as she’d been in Arhu’s revisioning. Her face was half obscured by the darkness around her as if by a veil, strangely recalling the veil she’d worn as the Silent Man and his friends had seen her on that rainy night.

As she slowly came closer, in utter silence, Rhiow and everyone else in her team could immediately feel the spell circle pulse once, awakening, the way a persona-keyed wizardry will pulse in confirmation as the one who designed it comes near. Outside the outermost ring of stones, she stopped, and simply stood there still as a statue.

“Here she is,” Dagenham was saying in a great voice, “the Great Old One’s messenger to us, she who taught us the Rite of the Eater and showed us what to do to make him our friend. She is the one who will open the way for him now, and rest in His darkness forever after! All do her honor, forshe is the one who will free Him, and us, and give us the world!”

All the robed figures bowed, and from one of them came a delighted laugh: a little tinkly voice that brought Rhiow’s ears right around, for she knew it all too well. It instantly brought back to her the feeling of being helpless and upside down, clutched against a bosom all doused in a mixture of cheap perfumes. She was tempted to hiss. But she was distracted from that as she caught a movement in the darkness: a glint of light, the slightest movement. Eyes, eyes under the veil, narrowing at the sound of the laugh. Just a flash of anger, of terror.

And at the same moment, Rhiow heard one word Whispered in her ear. She took the hint.

She fixed all her attention on the Dark Lady, all her intention. Laurel! Rhiow said to her, silently, as forcefully as she could.

All around them the shadows suddenly buzzed and roiled. The ehhif were still bowing, still listening to more of Dagenham’s promises of what the Dark Lady was about to do for them. But she herself stood still, and nothing about her moved but those eyes. They went wide in the dimness, and flickered toward Rhiow: then, hurriedly, away again.

Cousin, said the mind behind the look. Help me!!

The thought was almost a scream, and it was choked off immediately thereafter. The eyes went veiled again. But now Rhiow knew what she needed to know– what she wouldn’t otherwise have dared to think. She’s not as soulsplit as we thought, Rhiow said to the others in shock. The split was why we didn’t read her as a wizard when Arhu revisioned her. But she is one, and she’s trying to come back! Trying to reforge the broken bond, to take her proper being back! Who knew, after all, what desperation in her life had made her try to sever the connection to it in the first place? Who knew what the Lone One had inflicted on her in the attempt to turn her into a weapon? And so very nearly It had succeeded.

But the claw slices both ways, Rhiow thought. The split wasn’t clean! Though the body was gone – suicide, murder, who knew which? – there was still some scrap of willingness to have a body tangled in the estranged soul: enough to allow enacture. So one of sa’Rraah’s little friends whispered in Dagenham’s ear and told him how to find her and use her: the kind of tool you couldn’t make out a whole wizard, alive or dead. She’s what Dagenham’s been using to do Tepeyollotl’s work, with the coaching of his dark Mistress’s pets.

Yet the soul itself hasn’t given up its connection! It’s been trying to come back, to heal the wound, to remake the agreement with the Powers broken after it gave up life and forsook its Oath.

Yet the claw really did slice both ways, and not necessarily in their favor. Until she fully remakes the bond to the Powers, she’s still the Lone One’s claw, not Iau’s. And it came to Rhiow in that moment that seeing this wizard remade, even if she should die in the next moment, was more important than the errand that they originally thought they’d come on.

People, at all costs, we have to keep her from enacting that spell! Rhiow said. She may have a trigger for that wizardry stored in her mind, but it won’t be one she built or put there. Dagenham, or one of these others – they’re the key. The Dark Lady’s just –

A cat’s paw? Helen said. It was a joke, but her mind’s voice was grim.

It’s in one of their minds, Rhiow said. But it needs to be jostled loose. We have one who can See – She caught Arhu’s eyes across the circle, where they glinted ever so faintly in the torchlight – and one who can Hear —

I understand you, Hwaith said.

Let’s see how this unfolds for a few moments more, Rhiow said, watching Dagenham. As soon as they make any move that looks like the activation of this spell –

I think we can find a way to disrupt them a little, Helen said.

“And now comes the time of gifts,” Dagenham was saying to his circle. “As we give to the Strong Ones, and through them to the Great Old One, so He gives to us. Now, at this final moment, commitment means most, and will be most rewarded. Who will give himself to the Great Old One so that the world can be changed?”

And suddenly everyone in the circle was looking at Dolores.

“Or herself,” Dagenham said.

“…Give?” Dolores said, looking around her in confusion. “What do you mean? I mean, I promised to let them into my life, you showed me the words to say – “ She looked over at Ray.

“Yes, I did,” Ray said. “And here’s your chance to achieve greatness of a kind you’d never have had a chance to achieve in your career, which frankly wouldn’t have had that long to run anyway… considering what’s going to happen tonight.”

Her mouth dropped open: she glanced around her, now, like someone realizing for the first time that she had been led into a trap, and by someone she’d made the mistake of trusting. “Ray, what do you mean, I thought that you and I – “

“Yes, you did,” Ray said. His voice was astonishingly casual. “I tried to explain to you earlier that plans had changed and that we were discussing an entirely different kind of immortality now. Something much better than just the silver screen… something a whole lot more permanent. Anyone who gives herself to the Great Old One now will live forever in ways that no one alive can understand. You’ll be worshipped, and adored… through Him… by whatever beings remain alive after tonight.”

Dolores’s eyes went wide. “You do it yourself then, if you’re so hot on the idea!” she cried, and whirled to run for the door. But before she could move, the two robed figures on either side of her had her by the arms and were restraining her where she was.

Her screams fell with surprisingly little effect into the dead weight of the air, as if something was pressing down on the space, smothering them. Here we go… Rhiow thought. Sif? Hold yourself ready – I’m going to have to construct something on the fly.

Say the word.

From across the circle, Helen said, It’s all right, Aufwi, let me down —

I’d nearly forgotten you were up there. Where have you been keeping your mass?

It’s no big deal, I’ll show you later. Give us the high sign when you’re ready, Rhi —

“No! Ray, no, why are you, what are you doing, why are you just standing there, help me, I don’t want to do this!” She was screaming now. Most of the people standing around the circle simply looked at her. And Dagenham moved the thing he was holding two-handed into one of his hands, and reached into his robe with another, and came out with something that was just as black, but glinted in the torchlight.

It was a short sharp slice of obsidian, razory-keen. He passed it to the robed figure standing next to him: and the figure reached out a shapely hand to take it from Dagenham, and turned toward Dolores, and laughed… that tinkly little laugh.

Rhiow fluffed up in rage and horror as Anya Harte advanced slowly on Dolores. All sharp edges, that voice had been at the restaurant and the party, always looking for someplace to put the knife in. And now she had a place. It’s as we thought: she was behind what happened to Dolores at the party. And what she realized she hadn’t finished there, now she’ll finish here, as a sideshow to the main event… and a sop to her jealousy. Well, we’ll see about that —

“How blind did you have to be,” Anya said as she came closer and closer to the struggling Dolores, “not to see that Ray and I weren’t going to stop being an item just because some fan magazine said we were? You really shouldn’t believe everything you read. You have to know that the studiocame down on him after some rumors got around about here…” She laughed again. “But Ray’s too much his own man to toe the line. Of course he was going to pretend to be doing it at a party full of industry types. But off the record…. nothing has changed.”

She was almost within arm’s length now, and the torchlight glinted redly off the hair-thin edge of the obsidian knife. “And if you think a dim little piece like you is going to distract Ray from me for a minute, even if the world is about to end or whatever tomorrow, then you… think…wrong.”

She lifted the knife. Dolores, gasping in shock, watched its upward arc as Anya lifted it with a dreadful smile on her face. Rhiow glanced over at Sif, caught the answering glint of fire in her eyes, reached back into her mind for the shieldspell she’d been readying to lay the groundwork for what would follow —

And from the darkness came a sound that brought all heads around, even Dagenham’s. It was a low, moaning, rumbling sound that scaled slowly up into a roar, and then past that into a long, furious, bubbling scream. And out of the darkness, into the horrified silence that fell, into the torchlight, came slowly stepping something earth-colored, four-legged, long and low, with slowly twitching tail and eyes that unnaturally concentrated the torches’ light. Every ehhif in the circle stared, frozen in shock, as the biggest California mountain lion they had ever seen – a massive dun shape with dark muzzle and paws — stalked out of the darkness and into the ring of stones, and stood there, just shy of the spell circle, with eyes of green fire locked on Anya Harte.

The lion screamed again. The sound was matched by more ehhif screams, male and female, as the huge tan-and-dark shape leapt clear over the spell-circle and came down hard on the far side, between the rings of stones.

Rhiow stared in wonder, caught a flicker of those eyes. Rhi, their owner said, laughing grimly, what’s the matter? Don’t you recognize me when I’m not wearing Elie Saab? And Helen Walks Softly pushed herself up from her landing crouch and made for Anya Harte and Dolores.

The circle broke, ehhif fleeing into the dark in all directions, one torch falling over. One of the ehhif holding Dolores let go of her and fled. The other pulled her out of the circle a short distance, followed by Anya Harte in a flurry of swirling robes, a brief, violent tangle. Arhu, Hwaith, Rhiow cried silently, look for the word, listen for it— !

All the minds around her were in turmoil, ready for rummaging. Rhiow looked around for Dagenham. When things started to happen, he’d stepped back hastily into the darkness: now she spotted him heading for the door —

There already, Urruah said from the shadows down that way. One of the robed figures who’d made it to the door ahead of the others was yanking on it fruitlessly, unable to budge it: Urruah had spoken to the door and its frame and convinced them to be one piece for the moment.

The lion-scream behind them broke up the brief struggle between Anya, Dolores and the acolyte who’d been holding Dolores still. Anya and the other robed figure now fled into the darkness in two different directions: Dolores fell. Helen leapt past her, after Anya, batted at her with one huge paw, missed –

Hwaith! Rhiow called. Arhu! What have you got, there has to be something–

Nothing, Rhiow! It’s not a word –

Can’t See anything, Arhu said, sounding distressed. Wait, Rhiow, look out, Dagenham — !

Helen skidded, turned, leapt toward him, but not quite fast enough. Dagenham was running back toward the circle, with that small dark object in his hand. He threw it—

The dark thing flew across the circle and came down on the last spot, the one still-empty receptor site, drawn there as certainly and immediately as steel to the magnet. It looked like it had been a heart once. Now it was a stone. It hit the spell diagram and the stone cracked open lke an egg. Sluggish black blood gushed out—

Rhi. The strings— !

As quickly as if a switch had been thrown, the hyperstrings all around them were bending inward, writhing toward the stones as they’d seemed to have been writhing away from them before. This is it! Hwaith said. This is when the one from outside’s supposed to come through –

He flung himself at the strings. Not on my watch! Aufwi!

Aufwi threw himself into the tangle of strings on the opposite side of the circle, and, like Hwaith, began grabbing clawfuls of every nearby string and pulling them out of their present configurations. The purpose wasn’t so much manipulation toward a specific effect as wholesale disruption, the kind meant to result in a gatecrash. Rhiow watched them with astonishment and fear, for what they were doing was beyond dangerous, as they tried to force the kind of result that a worldgate technician normally went to all possible lengths to avoid. But these two were the ones best suited to attempt a gate shutdown under circumstances like these: both expert in the LA area gates and the local conditions, though they might be looking at the problem from six decades apart.

But it wasn’t working. The hyperstrings continued to writhe together, weaving into a gate structure as fast as Hwaith and Aufwi ripped them apart. Despite everything they could do, the spell that the Dark Lady had built was enacting. The night-swathed shell of her soul stood like a pillar, unable to move, the power flowing out of it, driving the spell that could not work without her —

Dagenham watched it happen, laughing. A second later he went down hard just outside the outer ring of stones as Helen came down on top of him and with one huge paw batted him unconscious. But his unconsciousness made no difference whatsoever. The spell kept working. The hyperstrings were knitting together into a gate with a structure like nothing Rhiow had ever seen before, and down all the strings of it, an ugly throbbing darkness was running…

Helen, forget them! Rhiow said. She’s the key. She’s got to get into a body and remake her connection with the Powers — take her wizardry back. Then this will fail —

One of us could share bodies with her, Aufwi said silently as he kept ripping at the forming gate. It’s not easy to do in a hurry — but if one of us slipped out of body and into someone else’s for a few moments, it would leave a body untenanted, and she could remake the Oath –

Rhiow’s tail lashed. The shock of finding herself in a Person’s body might leave her unable to do what needed doing —

Forget it. She needs a human body, Helen said. Mine won’t work for her: it’s too different. And though I can think right now of a way to give her one – she looked over her shoulder toward Anya Harte, who was struggling with the door like all the others — it’d would play straight into the Lone One’s hands. We need another way —

As Rhiow looked desperately around her, over her shoulder she saw something that briefly froze her heart…until she realized what else it might mean. Sprawled on the ground lay Dolores, blood seeping out from under her – none of it, fortunately, spilled anywhere near the spell circle: Iau only knew what that would have done. Rhiow ran over to the ehhif, touched her pulse point with a paw.

Tell me she’s not dead! Urruah said, running over to join Rhiow. .

She’s in shock, Rhiow said. Not stabbed too deeply: I think we can save her. But first she can save the Dark Lady, and us. Quick, get her over there!

A premade levitation spell picked Dolores up bodily and whisked her through the air to deposit her at the Dark Lady’s feet. She did not stir, did not look down, but she was trembling. Whatever had locked her soul-shell into obedience to Dagenham’s wishes was getting stronger as the black gate started to materialize in the center of the stone circles.

All we need’s a soul-conduit, Rhiow said, setting up the basic spell in her mind and starting to weave the words in the Speech into a mockup of the “silver cord” that expressed the connection between an ehhif’s body and its spirit. She had had to do this occasionally in her work down in the subway tunnels, when she’d found an ehhif dying and needed to buy him or her time until more appropriate help could be summoned. It wasn’t an involved wizardry, but she’d never envisioned using it this way before. Never mind. First implant the body end – It was difficult work, convincing a body whose own soul hadn’t quite left that it needed to host another: but Dolores was safely unconscious and in no condition to argue the point. Reluctantly the cord rooted. Now the other end – Rhiow took hold of the other end of the cord with her mind, reached up to the Dark Lady with it –

The second it touched Laurel, Rhiow felt as if she’d been hit by lightning: transfixed, in terrible pain, unable to move. The Dark Lady had been surrounded with a shell meant to prevent this very possibility. And behind Rhiow, the dark gate kept forming. The dirt of the floor inside the stones started to fade, go dark, opening a window into something else, a fathomless empty space of cold — Aufwi was blasted back from the almost-formed gate structure as if it was some living thing that had shaken him off its black hide. Hwaith was hanging on –

Sif!

Here, Siffha’h said, and a moment later Rhiow was struck by lightning again: but this time it was lightning she understood and sympathized with, a blast of sheer wizardly power that ran through her, down the cord to Dolores’s body, up the cord to the Dark Lady. All around her a skin of white fire formed, eating its way inward. She screamed –

Then vanished. Rhiow, released by the forces Siffha’h had channeled through her, fell over, unable to move.

Beside her, Dolores moaned.

“Come on,” Urruah said, the first time any of them had spoken aloud in so long. “Come on!”

Behind them, the dark gate was nearly complete. Hwaith was hanging on to the last normal hyperstring strands, trying to keep the interface from forming, yowling in pain and effort. But he couldn’t hold it. A second later he was knocked away from the gate and hurled through the air to smash into one of the larger stones. Limp, he fell at the foot of it, didn’t move.

Rhiow struggled to get to her feet, fell back again, unable. The darkness from the gate was spreading all through the cavern, now. And as the darkness started to flood out of the circle toward them, something else began to stir in the ground under their feet. A rumbling… a shaking…

The earth began to quake.

The screams of the ehhif by the door suggested that they were no longer quite so eager to linger here to meet the Great Old One. The torches fixed in the ground fell over, one by one, as the shaking got worse. Dislodged clods of earth began falling from the roof. There was no light, now, but the burning dark forming and spreading from inside the gate locus, and across the cavern, a white fire in the shape of a black and white Person, sitting still, concentrating, pouring out power.“Come on, Laurel!” Urruah was shouting in the Speech. “You know what you need to do, what you want to do!”

The noise was starting to build up in the cave as the shaking got worse, as bigger chunks of the ceiling started to fall, as the ehhif screamed and beat on the door, trapped and in terror of their lives. The earth was starting to roar as Helen had roared, the low sound of a great cat, hungry, bending over its prey, jaws opening. Rhiow, dazed and deafened, kept working to push herself to her feet. Hwaith, who’s looking after him, and what about Arhu, and Aufwi, and Helen, Urruah, you have to get them out —

But the voice that answered her was not Urruah, or Hwaith.

“In – Life’s – Name,” it said, slowly and with great effort, “and for Life’s sake – I say that I will use the Art – for nothing but – the service of that Life…”

She trailed off. The hill roared around them.“Come on,” Urruah said, and “Come on,” said Helen, “come on, cousin, you can do it, come on — !”

Dolores’s body with Laurel’s spirit in it was gasping for air. “Come on, Sif, push it,” Urruah was saying, “Helen, quick, her oxygen levels, I’ll hold that bleeding – “

“I will guard growth – and ease – ease pain – I will fight to preserve – what grows – lives well in its own – own way…”

She trailed off again. The ground under them all shook. The dark from the gate was getting closer, and Rhiow could feel it, a cold that burned worse than vacuum, because at least vacuum was in the real world and had a temperature, and this had nothing, was nothing, Nothing Itself, coming for them as it had wanted to forever–

Rhiow pushed herself up onto her forefeet, all she could manage.“Laurel! Come on!”

“Change no – no object or – creature unless its growth and life – or – or – “

“ – the system!”

“The system of which it is part – are threatened – “ A long, long pause. And then a last gasp.

“Laurel!”

The ceiling was starting to come apart above them, now. The shimmer of a forcefield that Urruah had erected was holding the downfalling chunks away for the moment, but it wouldn’t last: the cold blackness from the gate was eating at the edges of it. Not until I’m on my feet, Rhiow thought, and hauled her hind legs under her, and pushed herself up, and wobbled, and fell down, and pushed herself up again. I am a Person, and if I die here I’ll do it standing up before the Queen as befits one of Her children –

“ – To these ends – in the practice of my Art – I will put aside fear for courage – “ Another gasp, a long pause. “—And death for Life – “

The ceiling came down on them, stopping the ehhifs’ screams. The forcefield held, but it was buckling. Sif’s light was going out. Around them, the walls of the cavern were flowing like water, running downhill toward them –

“ – when it is right to do so – “

Something pushed itself against Rhiow, supporting her in the dark. She leaned on it, pushing herself straighter. Across the circle, Sif’s light was dimming, going out. Rhiow glanced to see what she was leaning on: caught a last glimpse of bronze eyes before the light went out and the earth’s roaring all around them drowned out everything else.

“Until Universe’s end — !”

It was almost a cry of triumph.

And then everything happened at once.

A great rent of light tore down the middle of the black gate, and something like lightning came lashing out of it, lighting the whole cavern in frozen strobe-flashes, long-seeming moments full of slabs of earth and stone held still in mid-fall. The black wizardry in the center of the ring of stones went up in an eye-hurting pulse of fire and deconstructed itself in a breath’s space, lines of light eating themselves away into darkness, finally the outermost containing circle erasing itself until there was no light left in the cavern anywhere but the faint shimmer of the forcefield that was still keeping the ceiling off them, but wouldn’t for much longer. “Out,” Rhiow yowled, “everybody out!!”

Her own transit spell was lying ready in her mind as always, but with someone leaning against her and no more likely than she was to be able to move in a hurry, Rhiow spoke her transit locus to twice its normal size and turned the spell loose, hoping Hwaith’s tail was close to his body. In a roar of downplunging pressure, the roof’s final collapse, everything went dark –

…And after what seemed forever, light again. At least, normal night seemed bright compared to where they had been, and the far more awful darkness they’d just seen. Rhiow looked up from under some trees on the slope they’d climbed what seemed a lifetime earlier, glimpsing through the branchesof the shaking pine trees the dusty, dirty, blessedly light-polluted sky above Los Angeles, all aglow with grimy white streetlight-glow.

Rhiow staggered to her feet, wobbling. Her nerves didn’t seem to be working right, but after what she’d just been through, that was understandable. “Hwaith – “

He was sitting just by her again, a little hunched.“I’m all right,” he said. “Well, not the shoulder. I hit that stone pretty hard. Later we’ll fix it – “

The two of them staggered and limped three-legged partway up the hill, where they saw a faint light glowing. It was a wizardlight, and under it Urruah and Aufwi were sitting, and Arhu was bent down licking Siffha’h’s head urgently. Beside them, Helen Walks Softly was bending over the unconscious form of Dolores, putting pressure on her chest wound. Rhiow went up to them, and her eyes met Helen’s.

“Laurel – “

Helen shook her head, smoothing the dirty hair away from Dolores’s face. “The minute she was a wizard again and in her right mind,” she said, “she finished what she’d come for and then died properly to go settle matters with the Powers.” She sighed. “The cord’s broken. We’ll sing her home later. But first we’ll get this poor lady down to thehospital.”

Hwaith, for his part, had gone on past Rhiow up the hill, limping up to where it stopped very suddenly.“Wow,” he said.

Rhiow went up to join him. The cavern had fallen in completely, and taken most of Elwin Dagenham’s house with it: only the front porch and the driveway remained, and behind the house, a cracked swimming pool tilted over on its side, from which water was pouring into the crater where the hill and its cavern had been. Every few breaths, little cascades of dirt fell down into the crater from what remained of the hillside around, for the ground under them was still trembling slightly: doubtless there would be aftershocks later.

“None of this is going to be very stable,” Rhiow said. “We should get off this, and get back to the Silent Man’s… see how he’s doing there.”

She turned away from the newly-formed crater and looked down the hill again. Aufwi was sitting by Urruah, looking a little dazed, but otherwise all right. Arhu was still licking the prone Siffha’h’s head… until he stopped.

“What??” he said.

The others all looked at him. Arhu didn’t sound afraid: just puzzled. Then he sat bolt upright. “What??”

He looked down at Sif, who opened her eyes.“What?” she said to Arhu after after a moment.

Arhu simply vanished.

Rhiow and Hwaith looked at each other.“Don’t ask me,” Rhiow said. “I want a drink. And a bath. Let’s go: he’ll explain himself to us soon enough.”

One after another, the People and Helen vanished from the shattered hillside; where, after a decent interval, now that the cats were gone, the evening birds recovered their voices and their composure and began to sing.

Down in the flatter part of Los Angeles, in the residential neighborhoods just off Wilshire, the earthquake had initially been received with the usual combination of terror and resigned annoyance. In the stores that ran up and down Wilshire and the apartments in the side streets, when things started walking off shelves and windows started jittering and shattering in their frames, people ran out into the street or stood in streetside doorways, waiting to see how bad it would get and how far they needed to run.

The quake would later be referred to in some parts of the neighborhood as“that really long one”, as its severity had increased slowly over several minutes, and it had reached a point where people started getting really frightened and the screaming broke out from those who’d run into the streets. Some of those who weren’t entirely focused on the ugly and insistent way the earth was moving also noticed a strange cold that settled over the evening, and more than the usual amount of dust kicked up, so that everything got very dim for a while.

But then suddenly something broke, something changed– a shift in the whole atmosphere, the way a thunderstorm changes the whole feel of the air when it finally breaks and lets loose with the lightning. This effect was particularly noticeable down by the corner of Wilshire and South Curzon, where a lot of people who’d run into the park were sitting out on the open ground waiting for the shaking to stop. And it did – but not before something else happened.

Some of them thought lightning actually did strike the small Page Museum facility across the street, and the little fenced-off patch of open ground next to it. Lightning wasn’t unheard of during earthquakes… but what followed struck even the seasoned Angelenos watching as unusual.

The open ground had a low wooden palisade around it, just enough to keep people from falling into the sticky ooze inside. Though there was no light or fire or anything that could normally have been associated with an explosion, nonetheless an explosion happened, throwing mud and water and other noisome-smelling muck for many yards out onto the streets. As usual, the curiosity of a few people overcame their concern over any possible danger, and they ran across Curson Avenue to see what had happened.

The sight of a huge reptilian form shouldering its way up out of the very disturbed contents of the La Brea Tar Pits made most of these people stop right where they were and stand very still to watch… for even the least scientifically-minded of them understood that this was absolutely the reverse of the way things could normally be expected to go. The massive creature was plainly a tyrannosaurus of some kind – an impression reinforced by the fact that they couldn’t see its striking orange, red and yellow stripes, these being almost completely covered by tar.

The man who’d ventured closest to this apparition while it was still standing in the pit and trying fruitlessly to scrape the tar off itself was absolutely sure about the tyrannosaurus part, especially when – while looking around itself as if trying to figure out where it was — it noticed him noticing it, and bent down over him. For a terrible moment the man thought his curiosity was about to be the end of him. As he found himself staring into huge toothy jaws nearly the length of his upper body, the man – a gas station attendant from Pasadena who’d taken the Red Car into town for a night out at the local bars – wondered if he was finally going to find fame and fortune in a manner he’d never contemplated.

The tyrannosaurus, bent down even closer and fixed him with one golden eye.“This is most unfortunate,” it said in a gentle and cultured voice, “most unfortunate. I seem to have disrupted something, but it seems also to have disrupted me. Could you kindly point me, sir, in the direction of Hollywood?”

The man pointed.

“My thanks,” said the tyrannosaurus, walked away up Curson for a few strides, then said something under its breath that the man didn’t understand, and vanished.

The gas station attendant stood there for a moment, flummoxed. Then he muttered to himself,“Typical. Everybody wants to be a star…”

In the Silent Man’s house, it was as if nothing whatsoever had happened: not so much as a glass had walked off the shelves in the kitchen pantry. When Rhiow and the group returned, they found the Silent Man rather more disturbed than this than they’d expected. The neighbors’ places all have cracks in the sidewalks and the walls, he said. You should do something about the sidewalk, anyway… treat it the same. Otherwise people are going to think I’m even weirder than they think I am already…

Urruah laughed at that.“We’ll take care of it.”

So what happened?

“That’s going to take a night’s worth of telling,” Rhiow said. “We didn’t exactly get out without a scratch… but our problems are small compared to what we stopped from happening.” She flopped down on the floor, glad to take the weight off her hind legs: they were still bothering her. “And we’ve brought you another house guest, though only temporarily. After her injury has a little time to stabilize, we’ll need to install some false memories in her to match what the authorities will find once they start cleaning up the site at Dagenham’s.”

“It’ll make sensational reading,” Urruah said, “we can tell you that much. The scandal rags will have a field day with it… at least, the parts they can figure out…”

A sudden chorus of shocked yowling went up from outside, from some guest-People who were visiting the buffet. The Silent Man rolled his eyes. They’ve been doing that ever since the excitement started, he said. Everybody’s nerves are on edge. I’ll go see what the problem is now…

He went out the French doors. Rhiow, now that she had a moment to do so, gave Helen an amused look.“You might have mentioned that Helen Walks Softly wasn’t just a tribal name…!”

Helen smiled.“No name without a reason…”

“But this is why mass isn’t an issue for you,” Urruah said, “at least not in the wizardly sense. You’re a shapewalker; it’s a whole different level of matter management, and it comes to you naturally…”

Helen nodded.“There’s a question among the elders in my band,” she said. “Am I a were-puma, or a puma-woman?” She shrugged. “I’ll take it up with the Powers some day. Right now there’s too much going on…”

The Silent Man came back inside and stood by his desk for a moment, looking rattled: the first time Rhiow could remember seeing him wearing such an expression. I’m sorry, he said, rubbing his face. But there appears to be a dinosaur in the back yard. I assume he’s something to do with you?

Urruah and Hwaith and Aufwi and Helen and Rhiow all looked at each other. A moment later, a huge saurian face was looking in one of the French doors, and Arhu jumped down off his head and slipped inside, shouldering the door open so that Ith could get at least his head in.

“I found him on Hollywood Boulevard, asking directions,” Arhu said, “and got him out of there before too much damage was done.” He shrugged his tail. “He was right over by the Chinese. They’ll probably think he was some kind of promotion.”

Rhiow got up again and went over to the door, gazing up at Ith.“What on Earth brought you all the way back here?” she said.

“It was the tablets,” Ith said, sounding very somber.

“What about them? You could just have mind-spoken me, Ith, told me what you’ve found, you didn’t have to come all the way back here – “

“I did,” he said. “I did not dare even whisper what I’ve found: I didn’t dare take the chance that a word or two might leak out into the space between times and worlds. But whatever has been done tonight, Rhiow, it has not been enough. You are not finished. There is one thing yet to be done.”

“What??”

He pushed his head in the door and put it right down by Rhiow’s.

“Join forces with the Lone Power,” he whispered. “And end the world.”

The Big Meow: Chapter Twelve

Everyone looked at Ith in profound concern, not least the Silent Man.

You’re going to have to forgive me, he said, glancing over at Rhiow, but I thought things were pretty much handled.

“Well,” Rhiow said, unnerved. “We were about to start dealing with that issue. What we saw tonight suggests that there’s still considerable unfinished business. We stopped the initial incursion… or rather, it was stopped.” She looked over at Ith. “I think you may have had more to do with that than any of us expected. But the timings laid out in the tablets we saw suggested that the worst is yet to come. And what happened tonight – “

“Wasn’t quite bad enough?” Arhu said as he clambered up onto Ith’s back and walked up to sit on top of his head.

The Silent Man watched this performance with a slightly cockeyed look. You’ve got to forgive me, but I had the idea that cats and lizards didn’t usually like each other much.

“They’re twins,” Urruah said. “Separated at birth.”

The Silent Man blinked.

“He means that mostly in the spiritual sense,” Rhiow said. “Someone will explain it to you eventually, as far as we understand it, anyway. But what Arhu’s saying is that, despite everything we went through, we got off rather easily… which confirms that the worst is still to be dealt with.Ith, I take it after Aufwi told us where to look, you did find the remaining tablets – “